"And as the civil engineering joke goes, no God in their right mind would put a recreational facility beside a waste disposal site. (if you don't know what i'm talking about wait a few years)"

I find this joke discriminatory. Some have those two facilities joined into one! And I'm not talking about birds and reptiles...

@ora - I'm lost? When did we get declared perfect? It's because of our *imperfections* that we have free will. If we were perfect, we'd have no need for free will because our thoughts and desires would be at one with the universe/creator/FSM(his noodliness).

@draug: "Do you have an answer for this?
Think about how perfect we are made. We can see, hear, touch, smell. We can eat and drink. We have a brain."

We have been perfect since about 12 seconds ago when the world was created.... if some posters are to be believed.

How would you define perfection? For me, perfection is additive. Imagine it as a hamburger. You have a bun and then you add the singular perfections like onion and mustard until you arrive at even greater perfection. It's a perfection driven synergy.

Did you hear that? Our "reality" has been altered again. I wish I didn't notice it every time, it's distracting.

@ora - My answer is that if we were perfectly made, there wouldn't be genetic diseases. We'd be able to see in total darkness and hear dog whisles and breathe underwatewr and fly. there is no perfection in life. there is variety and some forms do some things better than others. But there is no perfection in our physical form. But even if there were, that doesn't require mental perfection. Hell, physical perfection could result in no mind at all.

@Uly - Damn it! You weren't supposed to hear me flip that switch that turned us into oxygen breathers instead of methane.

My dear Draug, you are but a small fry in the whole process. Who made you think you flipped that switch. Hehe...

Physical perfection violates physics. Different shapes are suitable for different activities. Hence my Additive Theory of Onions and Mustard Perfecting the Hamburger, where different entities, each perfect in its own unique way to serve its purpose (think Onion and Mustard), form an ultrahyperperfect supertransentity - the Hamburger.

But we all know that shaved ribeye is perfect and the hamburger a mere shadow of the cheesesteak.

There are many paths to perfection, my friend.

The eartH is over 9000 years old. That I know for sure. As for the exact date, I do not know but I am thinking in the billions.

To anyone who said thousands...

Well done--

You've officially failed to join the 21st century (or even the 20th, for that matter.)

@draug : 'there is no perfection in our physical form. But even if there were, that doesn't require mental perfection.'

This seems like a really weird statement to me because i assume our minds are a function of our physical forms; thus perfection of our physical forms would imply perfection of our minds aswell.

But without getting into a rather difficult conversation about mind/body duality, i think we're agreed at least the we are not perfect. And this will do me. (i'm sure we've discussed previously my belief that free will is an illusion, and thus i suggest we leave such conversation in the past or future threads :)

@diplomat, please provide a youtu.be link to the origin of the meme or i will lose all respect for your internet cred.

@ora - Yeah, I had thought about the whole "mind=brain=part of body" but decided to risk it anyhow. And yes, we are very much in agreement that we aren't perfect. And I would agree that "free will" is mere illusion as our decisions are based on prior experience and chemical/biological makeup that would make them 100% predictable to someone if they had truly all the information available (i.e. a supreme being). But the key is a supreme being could alter the biology and environment at any given time (assuming all powerful) such that he could make that decision be what he desired. If he doens't do that and let's it stand then that is our "free will" because he didn't force us to make a decision. He allowed our experience to deceive us into making it.

That said, we'd have no way of knowing if he let it happen or forcibly change dit anyhow. so it's merely an illusion.

Despite the enormous advances in technology, bio-science and so on, not one single one of us is ever going to know the answers to these heavy questions until . . . dudududum!
"Hi, God. Always said you were the main man. High five!"
"Hi, Satan. You really exist? Oh sh*t!"
"Oh, I'm coming back? Hope it's as the prince of a prosperous nation. Oh no, an orphan in UK again. Double sh*t."
"Nothingness. Well at least that's something I can handle."

What always confuses me about the YEC position is that, if Jehovah really did create the Earth (and indeed the entire universe) 6000 years ago, He went to an awful lot of bother to make it look like the universe is ~13.7 billion years old, and the Earth is ~4.5 billion. And done such a good job that it has fooled the greatest minds of modern times.

@Timur - I don't think anyone will experience the last because that would imply there is something after death but that something is floating in nothingness. True nothing ness would be...

@Pete - Having known some YEC folks, they used to argue that dinosaur fossils and carbon dating and such are the tools of Satan to confuse and deceive us. Now, of course, some of the more extreme think man lived alongside dinosaurs and that the chemistry of carbon's decay has changed. Still a whack job theory and I'm not really sure which is worse. :-)

Yeah, ok with you entirely, i think. With the one exception that one of the major qualities/features of an illusion is that it can be broken...

Is an unbreakable illusion not in fact a reality? We really behave as if we have free will. It is like an emergent feature of the comppex systems that make up our brain.

The thing we refer to as free will is a feature of our behaviour. oir behaviour seems free to us because we can imagine multiple options which we then 'choose' between them. That we can imagine or predict possible futures makes our behaviour more difficult to predict (without first knowing how we model the universe and thus what choices we can see) psychologists may be able to make limited predictions based on physical cues, but longer term prediction is much harder for complex systems (like weather patterns, 3day prediction is pretty easy, longer term is much harder)

Sorry, that was @draug

@Draug: 12 years ago, was told that's where I'm heading. Took it to mean you don't float around; you're just zapped. Bits and pieces will become part of the biosphere, but your essential 'soul' is gone gone gone. That's nothingness.

*17 years ago - just to get the records straight.

Here's the problem with the Bible reference. OK, the most conservative Christians like to say that the Genesis account of creation was a "literal 7 days"...meaning that God says "bobbity boobity boop" and everything springs into existence, Adam and Eve are lounging poolside, and then the bitch get's hungry for the apple. CRITICAL MISSING PIECE....How long were Adam and Eve in the garden before fucking up? A day? A week? 15 years? 6.9 billion years? I don't know....but apparently after they were ousted from paradise, there were cities on the earth...so clearly there was a lot of procreating going on for quite a while. So the whole Christian 6,000 years old thing is stupid.

@Timur - right. So nothingness means you can't even think "Nothingness. Well at least that's something I can handle" when you have died because you cease to think in the nothingness example. Basically, there is no soul only electrical-chemical processes we view as thoughts and personalities and that personality ceases to be when the brain dies.

I'm not saying I believe this. I'm jjust carrying it to it's logical extension.

@ora - I've never heard that all illusions can be broken. But as a consultant, I've always lived by the rule that perception is reality. If the client perceives it, there is something triggered it therefore it is reality to them and I must act accordingly. Likewise, illusion/deception is reality to those under it.

But to accurately predict a persons response to a situation, you would have to exist outside the situation and, indeed, the persons entire environment such that you could perceive and understand every singe factor involved from the wya they were brought up thorugh every experience of their life and to what they consumed in the last 3 days that might alter their brain chemistry. Did they just eat a chocolate bar? Are they drunk, high, etc? To dso this would require being outside their entire universe. Hell, stray cosmic radiation may be striking at the moment their brain makes the decision causing that decision to be altered.

But it could be that through some kind of transcendence, we could acheive a state where we exist outside the universe as one with the powert that molds and shapes it, if it exists, and therefore be able to see and predict the decision.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/social-brain-social-mind/201203/free-will-weighing-truth-and-experience

Quotation (excerpt):

"I am a neuroscientist and so 99% of the time I behave like a materialist, acknowledging that the mind is real but fully dependent on the brain. But we don’t actually know this. We really don’t. We assume our sense of will is a causal result of the neurochemical processes in our brain, but this is a leap of faith. Perhaps the brain is something like a complex radio receiver that integrates consciousness signals that float around in some form. Perhaps one part of visual cortex is important for decoding the bandwidth that contains motion consciousness and another part of the brain is critical to decoding the bandwith that contains our will. So damage to brain regions may alter our ability to express certain kinds of conscious experience rather than being the causal source of consciousness itself.

I don’t actually believe the radio metaphor of the brain, but I think something like it could account for all of our findings. Its unfalsifiable which is a big no-no in science. But so is the materialist view—its also unfalsifiable. We simply don’t know how to reverse engineer consciousness. Saying that the complexity of the brain explains why we are conscious is just an article of faith—it doesn’t explain anything. We don’t know why our brains are associated with conscious experience and nothing else in the universe besides brains seems to be. Maybe rocks have consciousness but no way of showing this. I don’t believe this—but again, I can’t prove its false.

If we acknowledge just how much we don’t know about the conscious mind, perhaps we would be a bit more humble. We have so much confidence in our materialist assumptions (which are assumptions, not facts) that something like free will is denied in principle. Maybe it doesn’t exist, but I don’t really know that. "

@Krellin - the other flaw is that man was "created" on a verys specific day at a very specific point in creation - day 5 - which precludes the ability for him to have developed from Homo erectus from a half to a quarter million years ago.

@Draug: This is where we differ:
The body dies and its bits go back into the earth to sustain other forms of life.
The soul is way far away. Connected. It lives on after your present brain dies. Unless some Indian b*st*rd zaps it.
Nothingness is nothingness is nothingness . . .

@draug 'I've never heard that all illusions can be broken. But as a consultant, I've always lived by the rule that perception is reality. If the client perceives it, there is something triggered it therefore it is reality to them and I must act accordingly. Likewise, illusion/deception is reality to those under it.'

ok, but telling someone that they are living under a deception kinda implies that they will be able to see beyond the deception if you provide them with the relevant information - it kinda implies that there is some Truth out there with a capital T. Or at least some truth which is closer to the Truth than what they are currently living under.

I'm sure that convincing someone that free will is an illusion would require showing them the 'workings behind the scenes' as it were, which i suppose they would take to imply adding predictability, even if human minds aren't capable of making accurate predictions... I don't think understanding the underlying rules of the game makes it predictable.

Understanding the rules of weather pressure-temperature systems; water evaporation/condensation; solar energy transmission - does not allow perfect prediction. (and now i fear i'm repeating myself... but i think we're also agreed on this point.)

@semck: 'Saying that the complexity of the brain explains why we are conscious is just an article of faith'

i that what you think i'm saying, i'd rather state that the complex systems can produce results like the qualities we see in consciousness. It's not a proof, nor any other act of faith more so than believing that the world can be explained without invoking the supernatural. (and if explanation is your goal, the invocation of the supernatural adds no explanatory power, thus is not useful - and while i'm not trying to imply that usefulness determines Truth, if Truth is indeterminate usefulness determines usefulness!)

As for the 'radio receiver' model, i believe it has been falsified, (though i'm sure a sufficiently ingenious rationalization could complicate it to be unfalsifiable again) see split brains (something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMLzP1VCANo two consciousness in one brain, unaware of each other... is it two radio receivers which can't communicate except by the material connection in the brain?)

Sorry timur. I misunderstood. I thought your nothingness was the athiest view. Clearly it is a religious one. But that would seem a cruel way to spend eternity, in nothingness. If anything, that would be an afterlife hell. No conversations, no interpersonal relations, no activity, nothing. You say you can deal with it, but imagine being border in a room with bare walls and nothing to do in it for all eternity. Try sitting in an emtpy closet at home with no lights on for a day or two. Talk about the ultimate in sensory deprivation. I think that sould would end up insane if it had consciousness.