including holy ghost (?)

[_bomgeography]

It's a classic movie

[_bomgeography]

Nazi is only tied to maksutov.

[_Lemmie]

Nazi is only tied to maksutov.

No.

[bomgeography], you use the writings of "this Frank guy" in your failed attempts to claim evidence for the Book of Mormon. You ignore the writings of actual scientists who speak out against your type of claims. You take the word of a former Nazi child molester over that of credible scholars.... So you don't trust the words of your own apostles but you will use the pseudo nonsense writings of a former Nazi convicted child molester and now you accuse [others] of being a member of the Nazi party. Do you really expect anyone to take anything you say seriously?
viewtopic.php?p=1040004#p1040004

[_moksha]

"I do birthdays, weddings and second anointings."

[_ClarkGoble]

"I would say if there's some kind of substance that's driving our bodies, making my arms move and legs move, then it must interact with the particles out of which our bodies are made," says Cox.

"And seeing as we've made high precision measurements of the ways that particles interact, then my assertion is that there can be no such thing as an energy source that's driving our bodies."

This seems an odd charge to make for a variety of reasons. First I think most western views adopt either a quasi-platonic or Aquinas type of soul with a few adopting a more Cartesian view. But none of those claim anything like that. So it's kind of attacking a strawman in terms of the common western views.

Second give there are undiscovered energy sources (dark matter, dark energy) I don't see how he can even assert absence of material. While of course it's quite possible that dark matter or dark energy turn out to be artifacts rather than real things, the fact is at this point is time we don't know. So you shouldn't really assert that things are falsified.

Finally there's the traditional hard problem of consciousness. While physicalism is dominant there's lots of people who find the reduction of first person perspective to third person perspective problematic. (This is quite independent of religion - there are people who deny the type of physicalism where first person phenomena is an illusion but are atheists) However if this first person perspective is causally active (and again there are people who accept real qualia but deny it causally active) then the above claim is problematic. Of course such things right now aren't really falsifiable beyond perhaps the claim that consciousness is computationally functional. As dubious as that position is, if someone builds a strong A.I. that will falsify or at least problematize many views.

[_Physics Guy]

Cox wasn't attacking all possible theories of ghosts, let alone all theories of consciousness. He was pointing out a problem with substance dualism. I don't really remember exactly what Descartes or Aquinas said about souls, but from the many depictions on screens of spirits and souls as faint glowing stuff, it seems clear that some simple form of substance dualism is an accepted default assumption for a large proportion of people today.

If ghosts are in any sense a substance that is physically there, as opposed to a subjective impression in the mind of the person who thinks they see a ghost, then ghosts are made of something that interacts with light. If human spirits are in any sense substantial, as opposed to being aspects of our patterns of neural connections or something, then human spirits are made of something that interacts with electric charge, in order to initiate nerve impulses to control our bodies.

No ordinary scientific investigations of the brain, with microscopes or scalpels or MRI, have ever revealed any additional material structures that could be a material spirit. No precise measurements have ever revealed the material structure of ghosts. So it seems hard to sustain the theory that spirit is made of the same kinds of matter as ordinary stuff. But in principle one could imagine that ghosts or spirits might be composed of other forms of matter, that do interact enough with ordinary matter to be visible or affect neurotransmitter concentrations, but that do not register on ordinary scientific instruments. This is the last bastion of substance dualism.

Cox's point is that this bastion is actually demolished, because high energy particle colliders are not ordinary instruments. They produce everything that interacts with normal matter. If something interacts very weakly with normal matter, then CERN won't see it very often, but there have been so many zillions of high energy collisions recorded now that anything which interacts with anything like the strength that a visible ghost or an effective soul would need would have been seen by now.

There's still a bunker under the last bastion: you can postulate that your exotic spirit-matter is actively tricky and deliberately turns off its interactions in particle colliders, while cranking them up full blast inside human brains and haunted houses. This bunker is safe, but it's cramped and dark. Living in it means ignoring the whole wonderful scientific discovery that the world makes sense and can be explored empirically. If spirit is a substance within that explorable world, then we should have detected it in particle collision products by now, and we haven't.

[_Choyo Chagas]

thank you for your participation in a thread about ghosts.

our real world was built by (of?) particles, operate to each other by energy. when we (a bunch of particle...) are apprehending something, the particles and energy appears.

we see: photons flying
we listen: moving air
we smell: detecting some complex molecules
we taste: detecting more complex molecules
we touch: think about your partner...

An allegory of five senses. Still Life by Pieter Claesz, 1623. The painting illustrates the senses through musical instruments, a compass, a book, food and drink, a mirror, incense and an open perfume bottle. The tortoise may be an illustration of touch or an allusion to the opposite (the tortoise isolating in its shell).

fortunately, we have more than that five senses - and they were produced by science

we detect radiation; geiger–müller tube
we measure voltage; voltmeter
we measure current; in english it is not current meter or currentmeter, it is ammeter...

at this time, we can measure many type of particles and many type of energy.

that is, we can measure what does happen around a death.

in my childhood, i've read the invisible man by h g wells
years later, i've read that griffin should be blind
if (when) all of his tissues become translucid, then his eyes don't refracts
wells' novel is an eye opening piece

if ghosts have no interaction, then they are incomprehensible
if ghosts had interaction, then it should be detected

ok, bomgeography (21 of 46 comments above...):
what particle units / energy units make ghosts visible, audible, olfactable, tastable, khm khm touchable... please, answer!!!

bomgeography's pet expression is "you guys"

[_ClarkGoble]

Cox wasn't attacking all possible theories of ghosts, let alone all theories of consciousness. He was pointing out a problem with substance dualism. I don't really remember exactly what Descartes or Aquinas said about souls, but from the many depictions on screens of spirits and souls as faint glowing stuff, it seems clear that some simple form of substance dualism is an accepted default assumption for a large proportion of people today.

Ghosts as material is the opposite of substance dualism. Aquinas' type of substance dualism is basically an Aristotilean form that persists when not forming matter. (If you're familiar with form/matter which for Aristotle are inseparable) Descartes' view was basically a variant on Aquinas' view although a bit more naïve in certain ways. The problem was he couldn't figure out how they could interact (which is the traditional problem with substance dualism). Descartes even postulated (wrongly) that the pineal gland was where this causal interaction took place.

The problem is that Cox's argument really doesn't address substance dualism or even property dualism at all. Rather it addresses ghosts as traditional particles interacting. My point just was that so far as I know no one actually holds the position he's attacking. This is a common problem in these quasi-scientific attacks on traditional religious views - they usually get the religious views wrong. There was a similar one a decade or so ago measuring dying bodies weights highly precisely to argue there was no soul. The only problem being that no one was claiming souls had mass.

If ghosts are in any sense a substance that is physically there, as opposed to a subjective impression in the mind of the person who thinks they see a ghost, then ghosts are made of something that interacts with light.

First off that doesn't follow logically. There's no logical reason why there might not be some type of matter that interacts gravitationally but not electromagnetically even though there's no reason to assume such a particle exists. Second it's a false dichotomy (either something is a substance made up of our known particles or it's subjective) since nearly all the fleshed out theories assume something not in those dichotomies. (Platonic spirits, Aquinas souls, Cartesian minds, substance dualism, emergent properties)

If human spirits are in any sense substantial, as opposed to being aspects of our patterns of neural connections or something, then human spirits are made of something that interacts with electric charge, in order to initiate nerve impulses to control our bodies.

Again the history of thought on the subject (not that I agree with those models) really is far more expansive than you're assuming. There's a great deal of literature on this out there. Most of it isn't even tied to religion. Physicalism is of course the dominant contemporary view but there's a lot of people who disagree with physicalism.

This is the last bastion of substance dualism.

There are lots of solid arguments against substance dualism but this really isn't one of them. I'd suggest checking out the SEP on dualism for a primer as a starting point if you're interested. At best this is an argument against certain types of Interactionalist Substance Dualism.

[_Physics Guy]

The problem is that Cox's argument really doesn't address substance dualism or even property dualism at all. Rather it addresses ghosts as traditional particles interacting. My point just was that so far as I know no one actually holds the position he's attacking. This is a common problem in these quasi-scientific attacks on traditional religious views - they usually get the religious views wrong. There was a similar one a decade or so ago measuring dying bodies weights highly precisely to argue there was no soul. The only problem being that no one was claiming souls had mass.

It's not an attack on religious views. It's an attack on an untenable theory of physics, to wit, that there exist material ghosts or souls which interact with ordinary matter in order enough to be visible (in the case of ghosts) or to initiate bodily movements (in the case of souls).

There's no logical reason why there might not be some type of matter that interacts gravitationally but not electromagnetically ...

Sure, and such Weakly Interacting Massive Particles are candidates for dark matter. I was assuming that ghosts can be seen. For that, they have to interact electromagnetically.

Second it's a false dichotomy (either something is a substance made up of our known particles or it's subjective) since nearly all the fleshed out theories assume something not in those dichotomies. (Platonic spirits, Aquinas souls, Cartesian minds, substance dualism, emergent properties)

As I thought I had clearly said twice, Cox is not restricting "substance" to known particles. His whole point is that observations also rule out unknown particles that interact with known particles. As I thought I had also said clearly, he is not attacking all possible theories of spirit, but only theories that spirit is a material substance which interacts with ordinary matter. The theory that spirit is an "emergent property" is only a vague theory, but neither Cox nor I have attacked it.

As I've said, I'm not familiar with exactly what Descartes or anyone older said about spirits. I am willing to grant, however, that they probably did not state their theories in terms that are obviously contradicted by Cox's point. This would have been because by modern standards their theories were mere jumbles of ill-defined words. If I could ask Aristotle how souls could initiate neural impulses, he would no doubt respond, "Huh?" Aristotle's ignorance of most of the relevant issues is not a defense of Artistotle's theory of soul.

Aristotle was surely much brighter than I am, but without the benefit of two thousand years of learning, he is not the subtler thinker whose more general concepts elude my false dichotomies. He simply waffles away from what time has shown to be the crucial point: how does soul interact with ordinary matter? If he (or any latter-day Aristotelian in his name) refuses to face this point, he is just stonewalling. If he does face it, he really does have to face the dichotomy. If soul is a substance, it should have shown up at CERN.

[_ClarkGoble]

It's not an attack on religious views. It's an attack on an untenable theory of physics, to wit, that there exist material ghosts or souls which interact with ordinary matter in order enough to be visible (in the case of ghosts) or to initiate bodily movements (in the case of souls).

Fair enough. I'd just note that few hold to the type of materialism of ghosts he's attacking. After all even those who claim gaseous like ghosts also note they fade out - so they aren't a material gas.

There's no logical reason why there might not be some type of matter that interacts gravitationally but not electromagnetically ...

Sure, and such Weakly Interacting Massive Particles are candidates for dark matter. I was assuming that ghosts can be seen. For that, they have to interact electromagnetically.

Typically even those during the renaissance who held to materialism tended to think one sees these with something analogous to spiritual eyes.

As I thought I had clearly said twice, Cox is not restricting "substance" to known particles. His whole point is that observations also rule out unknown particles that interact with known particles.

OK. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm very skeptical Cox is correct to say that we've falsified any other type of particle. There are reasons to think the standard model is exhaustive but also reasons to be skeptical. As you mentioned there are particle physics models for dark matter that fit with what Cox is saying.

While I may be missing the obvious here I just don't see how the current level of accelerator experiments can say we have all the particles. It would seem to me that if there are undiscovered forces we'd expect undiscovered particles. Likewise we've not seen gravitons in our accelerators. Although as you clarified he's just talking about materially visible ghosts then perhaps that doesn't matter. It does seem like supersymmetry and the postulated other particles tied to that have been falsified though.

If I could ask Aristotle how souls could initiate neural impulses, he would no doubt respond, "Huh?" Aristotle's ignorance of most of the relevant issues is not a defense of Artistotle's theory of soul.

Aristotle was surely much brighter than I am, but without the benefit of two thousand years of learning, he is not the subtler thinker whose more general concepts elude my false dichotomies. He simply waffles away from what time has shown to be the crucial point: how does soul interact with ordinary matter? If he (or any latter-day Aristotelian in his name) refuses to face this point, he is just stonewalling. If he does face it, he really does have to face the dichotomy. If soul is a substance, it should have shown up at CERN.

Well Aristotle was a materialist so he can answer that fairly easily in terms of physics and causation. It's more the other types of materialism that sometimes have problems although of course they aren't writing in terms of contemporary physics.