Phil Cook wrote:
>> You have a model of the universe in your head, and in that model, you 
>> have a model of yourself. That is your soul. It's what makes you 
>> self-aware, and it's what makes you know the difference between good 
>> and evil.
> 
> But if you have a universe-modal aren't you by definition a part of that 
> model and therefore conscious of your presence in that model?

Well, yes. That's precisely what we're talking about at this very 
moment, isn't it?

> Take that 
> squirrel who worked out how to get to the food table through the ramps 
> jumps and swinging things, could he have done that without a 
> universe-model and more importantly an awareness of himself. Do 
> squirrels thus have souls?

Possibly. They're clearly self-aware.

>> You're self-aware because you can run simulations on yourself to 
>> determine what would happen were you to do something. You don't need 
>> to step off the edge to know you'd bounce painfully on the way down.
> 
> But that's experience, almost Pavlovian;

Not necessarily. It starts out that way, but you don't *ever* need to 
fall out of a tree so that when you see someone else do it,you go 
"that's gotta hurt."

> What you seem to be saying is that self-conciousness equals soul, 
> therefore dolphins and elephants that preen themselves before mirrors 
> are ensouled. Wow that should annoy the 'humans are the best' 
> fundamentalists :-)

Yep. You didn't ask me if it was the same soul the preachers talk about. 
You just wondered if there is such a thing as a soul.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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On Wed, 12 Dec 2007 20:23:48 -0500, nemesis wrote:

> Sabrina Kilian <"ykgp at vtSPAM.edu"> wrote:
>> JHVH never asked anyone to bring their own child up to a mountain top
>> and sacrifice them. No, something that important and sadistic would
>> have been written down.
> 
> JHVH was testing Abraham.  The sacrifice did not occur.

That's where "sadism" comes into play.

Jim

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On Thu, 13 Dec 2007 13:12:12 -0500, nemesis wrote:

> I'm leaving this thread, won't be reading any more messages from it.
> Every Christian have a limit of tolerance for twisted logic shouts and
> verborragic blasphemies against God...

Ah, "Goodbye cruel internets!"

Jim

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On Thu, 13 Dec 2007 18:26:14 -0800, Darren New wrote:

> nemesis wrote:
>> I'm leaving this thread, won't be reading any more messages from it. 
>> Every Christian have a limit of tolerance for twisted logic shouts and
>> verborragic blasphemies against God...
> 
> Wow. Worshiping a God that can't even protect your faith from a
> discussion. Or, apparently, from his own evil creations.

<applause>

I might need to snag that for a sig line for another group I read. :-)

Jim

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On Wed, 12 Dec 2007 16:10:25 -0800, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Wed, 12 Dec 2007 11:02:27 -0800, Darren New wrote:
>> 
>>> Jim Henderson wrote:
>>>> I don't know that it does - is there evidence/proof to suggest that
>>>> it does?
>>> Do you know who Abraham Lincoln was?  George Washington? Adolph
>>> Hitler? Julius Ceaser?
>> 
>> What's that got to do with souls?
> 
> I'll let you think about it first, for a while.  Ask yourself what a
> soul is, and what makes a difference between a live and a dead person.

The last couple of days have provided an opportunity (unfortunately) for 
me to do just that - one of my coworkers' grandsons was killed in a car 
accident yesterday.  He was about 12 years old. :-(

So yesterday was a little crazy, which is why I hadn't replied yet; I was 
there when my coworker got the call from one of her daughters with the 
news.

What it seems you're talking about (reading ahead to your next message) 
is our self-awareness and our ability to learn from others based on a 
model of expectation of how someone would react or behave given a certain 
situation.

My initial thought (before the events yesterday) had been about the 
differences chemically, biologically, and mechanically between a living 
person and a dead person - not entirely unlike the difference between a 
car that works and a car that doesn't work.  Both are machines (a car and 
the human body), but people's self-awareness is the difference between an 
animate object and an inanimate object - a car can't feed itself (unless 
it's Speed Buggy), but under normal circumstances, we can.

I like your idea about immortality/reincarnation.  Going to have to give 
that some more thought now. :-)

Jim

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On Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:36:16 -0800, Darren New wrote:

> Not necessarily. It starts out that way, but you don't *ever* need to
> fall out of a tree so that when you see someone else do it,you go
> "that's gotta hurt."

Unless you're Keith Richards, but clearly that's another discussion 
altogether. ;-)

(SCNR)

Jim

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On Wed, 12 Dec 2007 20:38:37 -0700, Patrick Elliott wrote:

> In article <475f8973$1@news.povray.org>, nos### [at] nospamcom says...
>> On Sun, 09 Dec 2007 21:20:00 -0700, Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> 
>> > So, the questions really are: 1. Does it have to be human readable?
>> 
>> That would be a "watch" by definition.  The usage that I have seen this
>> is in the context of the book "The Invisible Watchmaker", and the
>> premise (at least from the debates I've had with people who have read
>> it; I have not) seems to be flawed as the idea is that a watch has to
>> imply a watchmaker because a watch must be made by a maker.  Therefore,
>> there must be a watchmaker or there'd be no watch.
>> 
> Actually, it just implies that a maker can sometimes come up with things
> that "personally" benefit him/her/it-self, which wouldn't otherwise
> result. The reason I said "human readable" is precisely because of that
> basic conceit, that because its useful to them in some fashion, and its
> too complicated for them to bother (not attempt, just bother) to figure
> out, this implies that a maker had to do it. My point was that you could
> decide that some flower, which had the odd tendency of gripping your
> wrist, would look nice to wear, and never realize that it was so synced
> to the 24 hour cycle of the planet that it also did something that made
> it 100% like a watch. Or maybe there could be a leech that when through
> clear 24 hour cycles, which only appear in its *chemistry*, in which
> case you would still be wearing a good watch, you just wouldn't be able
> to read it at all. And so on. The initial presumption is that you would
> *recognize* it as a watch in the first place. I.e., that it would
> display the information in a way that the moron looking for a watch
> would "recognize" as watch like.

My understanding of the book is that it is dealing specifically with a 
mechanical or electronic watch, not with something watch-like or that 
keeps time....

Jim

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On Wed, 12 Dec 2007 20:30:00 -0700, Patrick Elliott wrote:

> I think there is a basic presumption that there are no more material
> explanations for them. 

Yes, and that doesn't jive with Darren's comments (IIRC) that agreed with 
my statements that we don't know all there is to know.

> And I think such things are a joke myself anyway,
> since its a damn site more *miraculous* if say a volcano opened up in
> Las Vegas and began spewing ice, than the silly sort of miracles that
> involve, "God decided to perform a miracle, but was too lazy to do
> something that breaks the laws of physics, or contravenes reasonable
> expectations." One doesn't expect an ice volcano to pop up in the middle
> of a major city. Not even a Hollywood producer would try to pass that
> one off as making sense. But, its almost impossible to find any place on
> the planet that hasn't had a normal volcano on it, at some point.

Actually, there are quite a number of them - volcanoes form over hot 
spots that are in fixed locations on the planet (from what I've read, 
anyways, or learned from watching the Discovery channel) - so, for 
example, in the areas of the Sahara which haven't passed over a hot spot, 
no, there hasn't been a volcano there.  That's not to say there aren't 
parts of it that haven't seen volcanic activity (I've seen footage of 
some really interesting glass formations that pre-date human glassmaking 
by many thousands of years) caused by superheated sand in the Sahara.

> Same with most other things that believers would try to imply meant
> something. 

The thing is that people see what they want to see.  That's why you get 
people claiming to see the Virgin Mary on a cheese sandwich.

This is one of the faults I see with religion - people see what they want 
to, and then follow that by rejecting rational explanations.

> Just as no known case exists of someone having missing limbs
> spontaneously regrow from *any* sort of healing, so to one at least
> expects that real miracles would be of a quality that rises above
> natural phenomena and magic tricks.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

One of my favourite quotes of all time.

Jim

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On Wed, 12 Dec 2007 20:49:29 -0700, Patrick Elliott wrote:

> Not to mention he contradicts himself. It is not ***possible*** for us
> to be blind to a thing, if it can't be seen in the first place. You
> don't get to have it both ways. God cannot be some intangible thing that
> only existing outside the universe, and apparently in the heads of
> people who think this argument makes any sense, and then insist that all
> the people that don't believe it just can't see, or hear, or recognize
> the truth, all words that imply he **must** be tangible to at least some
> sort of sense.

Well, I can't debate that.  Well, I suppose it could be an SEP field that 
only he can see through, but that would make it his problem. ;-) 
(Obligatory Douglas Adams reference again)

> Hubris doesn't even begin to describe how unbelievably ridiculous this
> is, though, since he is also trying to claim that only pharisee and
> bigots claim to be the ultimate authorities on what God is, yet is doing
> it himself with us.. 

Well, by definition, that's what hubris is:

Presumption, orig. towards the gods; pride, excessive self-confidence. 
(from my OED).

Most people affected by hubris don't see that their excessive self-
confidence contradicts what they're saying.

> One should add Hypocracy to the claim, since he not
> only thinks he knows better than we do about it all, he can't grasp the
> fact that claiming such makes him the same as the people he previously
> agreed where dangerous, delusional and unChristian, for making the same
> exact claims.

Hypocrisy:  The assuming of a false appearance of virtue or goodness, 
with dissimulation of real character or inclinations, esp. in respect of 
religious life or beliefs; hence in general sense, dissimulation, 
pretence, sham. Also, an instance of this.

I don't think that's the word you're looking for.  The phrase "Cognitive 
Dissonance" comes to mind, though, as a possible alternative.

Jim

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On Wed, 12 Dec 2007 22:01:19 -0500, nemesis wrote:

> Sabrina Kilian <"ykgp at vtSPAM.edu"> wrote:
>> Tell me how, in any way shape or form, a 2 year old getting cancer and
>> dying painfully fits into any plan to make the rest of the world a
>> better place.
> 
> A painful departure always creates a change of heart to those who stay. 
> It may also happen to those truly faithful, in which case I see it as
> provation.

That's called "rationalization".  Sometimes senseless acts are just that 
- senseless.

>> Can God stop it if he wanted to?
> 
> yes, He's God Almighty.
> 
>> Why doesn't he?
> 
> Maybe he wants to interfere as little in actions resulted from free will
> as possible.  Who am I to answer?

Ah, so God *won't* stop you stealing that HDTV, PS3, and other stuff you 
mentioned before?

>> Why should I worship some one/thing that wouldn't stop these things
>> from happening?
> 
> Because regardless of evil I have respect for the being that created
> all.

There is no evidence to suggest that God created everything.

>> Show me an actual miracle.
> 
> A miracle is born everyday.  Are you expecting something extraordinaire
> and of a big scale?
> 
> is this good enough?:
> http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap061024.html

That's not a miracle, that's explainable through science.  Just because 
you don't understand the science behind it doesn't mean that science 
doesn't exist.

> thing of how many souls will die and suffer in the collision!  

So miracles that God creates make souls suffer?

> Of
> course, it may be that such events are so slow that the intelligent
> beings there already fled...

Interstellar travel?

>> They were so common in the OT days, and Jesus performed them on street
>> corners.
> 
> Those were the days of the covenant and God was more actively
> influencing the world.  Please, respect Jesus by not comparing him to
> some sort of David Blaine.

Respect is not granted, it is earned.

>> Why, all these years later, are we
>> asked to take it on faith that one book tells the truth and other books
>> tell lies?
> 
> Because it is the Word of God.  Can it be all just a bunch of poems,
> folk tales, outright lies and hopes from schizoids or downright liars? 
> Yes.  How can I be sure it is true?  I can't.
> 
> I don't base my judgement on logic or evidence, but on faith alone.  Why
> do I have faith then?  Because the History of God's people as described
> by the Bible makes sense to me.  Because I've been witness of God's
> subtle way into the world.

God's creation of the heavens and the earth in 7 days makes sense to 
you?  Even though there is scientific evidence that contradicts what's in 
the Bible?

> BTW, it reminded me of a joke:
> A Father and a Rabbi were out to watch some boxing. Before the fight,
> the boxer in blue shorts made the sign of the cross. The Rabbi asked the
> Father:  "What does that mean anyway?" The Father retorted:  "Nothing,
> if he doesn't know how to fight."

Now *that* I like. :-)

>> while I disagree with your belief and simply don't agree with it, the
>> few quirky statements offering to pray for the 'non-believers' shows
>> that you don't really respect those who don't share your belief.
> 
> sorry about the offer for pray.  It clearly generated more evil than
> good. fucked up world...

You keep saying "fucked up world" because people disagree with you.  I 
say the world would be fucked up if everybody agreed all the time.

Jim

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