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Korean Job Discussion Forums "The Internet's Meeting Place for ESL/EFL Teachers from Around the World!"
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Ody

Joined: 27 Jan 2003 Location: over here
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Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 5:03 pm Post subject: |
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| ED209 wrote: |
| What happens if you ask the tarot reader to redeal the cards?Do they come out in the same order? |
tarot cards are fun.
i have re-dealt cards (shuffled them, cut the deck, and had the subject pick one of 3 piles) and yes, the cards dealt were 80% the same. |
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trubadour
Joined: 03 Nov 2006
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Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 6:09 pm Post subject: |
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[quote="mindmetoo"]
| trubadour wrote: |
| A 'sixth sense' is the power to know what you can't explain by merely physical. |
There are many things that are known which aren't merely physical, these are perhaps the most important things - e.g. love. One can love anything physically corporeal or not. The whole realm of the imagination, stories, personalities, ideas, etc. These things are not merely physical, or not even fundamentally physical at all, although they might sometimes appear in certain physical forms
Thought is not merely electrons shooting about in our brains, although it is tempting to accept certain scientific explanations which point to brain scans (etc) and declare that they 'prove' thought is 'just' the physical activity of the brain. This is simultaneously true while incredibly missing the point. Thought is the reality of human life, yet the physical activity observed 'in the brain' may be caused by thought.
My sentence was truncated, it should have read: 'A 'sixth sense' is the power to know what you can't explain by merely physical explanations'
The point is - although you can try to explain away the 'sixth sense' or even thought itself as better understood by the other senses or through explanations such as those given by nonscientific models - the mind, ideas and thoughts and not entirely reducible to them and so may operate according to different principles. |
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ED209
Joined: 17 Oct 2006
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Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 6:56 pm Post subject: |
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Wow. And I'm sure you are never selective in your reasoning. 80% that's good, now test conditions baby, test conditions!
Another problem is that each cards can have different meanings. So really it a lot comes down to cold reading. Watched a TV show once(will try to find it again) that used an actor wearing three different disguises (high profile businessman, loving family husband and down on his luck unemployed man) guess what the tarot readers said about each of those! |
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mindmetoo
Joined: 02 Feb 2004
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Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 9:21 pm Post subject: |
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| trubadour wrote: |
My sentence was truncated, it should have read: 'A 'sixth sense' is the power to know what you can't explain by merely physical explanations' |
So you claim love cannot be explained as a product of brain chemistry? |
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igotthisguitar

Joined: 08 Apr 2003 Location: South Korea (Permanent Vacation)
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Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 9:29 pm Post subject: |
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| oneofthesarahs wrote: |
| She gave me a reading, and promptly began crying, because there was "so much emotion in my life." |
Shame they laughed behind her back. Some people  |
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JongnoGuru

Joined: 25 May 2004 Location: peeing on your doorstep
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Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 9:31 pm Post subject: |
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Love? Who the hell cares if THAT can/can't be explained by science!?! I wanna see some ghostly manifestations or clever card tricks or bending spoons, damn it!
And what self-respecting Korean fortune-teller has anything to do with a pack of stupid Tarot cards in the first place??!! They're supposed to ask your birthdate and then consult the T'ojung Bigyeo!!l And even if somebody believed in this nonsense, why would they hire a KOREAN do a Tarot reading?? May as well ask a Swede how to make kimchee or a Chinaman how to design a car. Koreans with Tarot cards... whatever next, whatEVER next.  |
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ED209
Joined: 17 Oct 2006
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Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 10:39 pm Post subject: |
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Heaven to betsy trubadour!
We are going to need to send all those neurologists back to school now.
What ever those electrons are doing in your brain they need to slow down. I can stick some crude electrodes in your brain and make you feel or not feel what ever I like. Despite a certain ambiguity over its definition 'Love' is in the brain, damage a certain part and its gone. This to me suggests it is physical, adding things like "the mind, ideas and thoughts and not entirely reducible to them and so may operate according to different principles" without any evidence is meaningless wishful thinking. |
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trubadour
Joined: 03 Nov 2006
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Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 4:51 am Post subject: |
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Yes, and if you cover your ears the sound really goes away...
For a start, someone (ED209 or anyone else) can't put electrodes in my brain and make me feel anything they so wish. Hasn't happened. And if it did it would only be a private and personal illusion all of my own.
The type of studies to which you refer (the ones with patients from random accidents who just happened to have lost a chunk of brain...) may suggest to you, that when a part of the brain is removed, if a previously real sensation ceases to be a lived experience for the same person therefore the experience COMES FROM the brain.
However, and this will not be a shock to neurologists or others who understand the limits of scientific research, the fact that the experience stops only shows that that person isn't able to recognise or feel it anymore. Big deal. The world doesn't vanish because someone looses their sight.
While things can be understood as connected to the activity of the brain or as having an effect on the brain, to say that the brain is in fact what caused them is going too far. When using scientific evidence or arguments to support ideas we must be careful not to generalise too far beyond the premise or experiment. No experiment can conclusively prove anything, and never will.
So yes, I am saying that love, for example, can not be explained as a product of brain chemistry. I'm saying it causes chemical activity in the brain.
you can't conclusively prove or disprove the existence of perception that goes beyond physical boundaries (a sixth sense) on the basis of hearsay about experiments. The phenomena of mind and thought and perception can not be entirely reduced to physicalist explanations. It is as if these immaterial things are independent of the physical!
Last edited by trubadour on Tue Apr 17, 2007 6:00 am; edited 2 times in total |
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JMO

Joined: 18 Jul 2006 Location: Daegu
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Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 5:38 am Post subject: |
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Can love not be explained by evolution? I thought it was an advantage to love and be willing to sacrifice yourself to protect your genetic heritage. Thats rather simplistic, however. If I can find a link to a better explanation, I'll post it.
Everything related to our minds is directly caused by the wiring in our brains? I thought that was te consensus thinking, but I may be wrong. Anyone have the answer? |
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ED209
Joined: 17 Oct 2006
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Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 7:16 am Post subject: |
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| trubadour wrote: |
| The phenomena of mind and thought and perception can not be entirely reduced to physicalist explanations. |
Yet you reduce them to wild speculation and assumptions.
A blind person may not see but they know the world is out there they can feel it is real. How do you feel the non 'physicalist'?
Yes emotions cause chemical reactions but they are also caused by chemical reactions.
from Emoticat
| Quote: |
| By measuring electrical impulses and levels of certain chemicals, and by interfering with these, researchers investigate how the brain works. Electrodes placed in certain locations in the brain to can be used to trigger specific emotions. Continual stimulation of part of the amygdala to induce terror eventually results in the animal's death. |
Would post more but my brain wants to sleep. And yes JMO it's all thanks to Evolution |
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mindmetoo
Joined: 02 Feb 2004
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Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 3:58 pm Post subject: |
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| trubadour wrote: |
So yes, I am saying that love, for example, can not be explained as a product of brain chemistry. I'm saying it causes chemical activity in the brain.
you can't conclusively prove or disprove the existence of perception that goes beyond physical boundaries (a sixth sense) on the basis of hearsay about experiments. The phenomena of mind and thought and perception can not be entirely reduced to physicalist explanations. It is as if these immaterial things are independent of the physical! |
It seems to me love is an emotion. Emotions are fairly well understood biological phenomena. They have a physical underpinning. Because you can't explain love and you doubt love has a physical explanation doesn't mean you can just plug a "sixth sense" into the gap. Fallacy: argument from personal incredulity. Indeed your notion violates Occam's razor. Do not multiply entities needlessly. Why invent another sense when there is no good evidence to doubt already existing entities can eventually adequately explain "love".
You're going to have to offer more than simply waving your hands around and stating some premise justified by two logical fallacies.
No one understood lightening and assumed it was caused by gods. "Everything in science used to be the domain of the gods."
There is not one aspect of human perception and cognition that hasn't been mapped to corresponding areas or processes in the brain. We don't understand many of those processes, mind you. But if your claim were true, we'd find something that doesn't correspond to some process in the brain, no?
So yes, I can't disprove your claim. But that's not my job. If you make a claim, you should provide the evidence to support it. Disprove the idea that invisible blue fairies cause love.
So what is your evidence that love or something else humans report is "independent of the physical"? |
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trubadour
Joined: 03 Nov 2006
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Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 5:50 am Post subject: |
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The brain is a massive concentration of nerve endings, is it not? Similar in a way to the nerves are concentrated at the tips of our fingers. The fingers, surely, are instruments of the sense of touch, in that they are able to feel things.
But do we say that the fingers cause the world to be hard or hot or sharp? If I said that I can make you feel something that is not really there (say silk which was really nylon), and did so, would you then be prepared to accept that all your sensations of touch are unreal, or worse - created by the sense organs themselves?
I would suggest that the brain is indeed the instrument of a sense - not a 'sixth sense' in the normal usage of the term, but what we properly call intelligence. I maintain that by intelligence we are able to experience and recognise love, the toilet, the truth, a flower, the past and sometimes, perhaps, the future. These things are sometimes physical sometimes not, as previously explained.
I'm a realist. I believe that before there was ears there were vibrations and after there were ears we had sound. The ears did not cause the sound, they were only able to sense it. Of course I do not think we ever had ears that heard without the brains of things that could hear. But that's another story..
I may need to be cautious in what I assert the brain is capable of sensing but this quite a different problem to saying that it is the brain causes all things. |
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JMO

Joined: 18 Jul 2006 Location: Daegu
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Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 6:36 am Post subject: |
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| trubadour wrote: |
The brain is a massive concentration of nerve endings, is it not? Similar in a way to the nerves are concentrated at the tips of our fingers. The fingers, surely, are instruments of the sense of touch, in that they are able to feel things.
But do we say that the fingers cause the world to be hard or hot or sharp? If I said that I can make you feel something that is not really there (say silk which was really nylon), and did so, would you then be prepared to accept that all your sensations of touch are unreal, or worse - created by the sense organs themselves?
I would suggest that the brain is indeed the instrument of a sense - not a 'sixth sense' in the normal usage of the term, but what we properly call intelligence. I maintain that by intelligence we are able to experience and recognise love, the toilet, the truth, a flower, the past and sometimes, perhaps, the future. These things are sometimes physical sometimes not, as previously explained.
I'm a realist. I believe that before there was ears there were vibrations and after there were ears we had sound. The ears did not cause the sound, they were only able to sense it. Of course I do not think we ever had ears that heard without the brains of things that could hear. But that's another story..
I may need to be cautious in what I assert the brain is capable of sensing but this quite a different problem to saying that it is the brain causes all things. |
The brain doesn;t cause all thingsm but it is through it that we interpret all things. I can't see how intelligence can be called a sense. The five we have at the moment adequately explain everything we encounter. I think you can maintain that intelligence enables us to experience love but I don't see the proof. It would be more plausible to me as a mechanism that was selected because it was beneficial. |
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wylies99

Joined: 13 May 2006 Location: I'm one cool cat!
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Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 9:54 pm Post subject: |
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Waste your money, if you choose.
Reminds me of an episode of "Maried with Children" when they had a psychic at the house who said "I feel strange vibrations..."
Al jumped in "Peg, is it one of your toys?"  |
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ChimpumCallao

Joined: 17 May 2005 Location: your mom
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Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 10:03 pm Post subject: |
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oh princess, you lovable flake.
of course its scam-
i tried it on a friend of mine once- friend of a friend- and i absolutely scared the crap out of him. you just read the person, try to get some background story, be intuitive- and say everything in a very cryptic way.
I had a good laugh about the whole thing- especially when i "read" he was down on his luck and unemployed and lack of finances were a big cause of stress, but friendship and music was a great source of support for him. maybe the BO, sh**ty car, pechuli, and wanna be dreads gave it away?
plus, those that want to believe that crap will.
furthermore i doubt if there ever existed a human with actual psychic or hyper-intuitive abilities would be wondering around korea trying to co flakes out of 5,000. |
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