Ooh, this is just getting more and more fascinating! And thank you very much for the compliment.

As for the scientific method and academics with critical minds:

True, but when analyzing literature and language, you're dealing with a lot less tangible types of "fact", so there is almost never a "right" answer. Yes, languages work through rules, but those rules change based on context, rather than based on facts. In any case, I was replying to your statement that having human perception as a specialty meant that you had pretty instant access to research on the subject. I was lamenting my lack of such. Which, interestingly, is not really underestimating myself, since it means I'm doing alright without it .

I've never studied aesthetics, either, but that also sounds fascinating, and I think it might be related to my thoughts on this subject, since a good description of what I'd call "divine" is Beauty.

And actually, I have no problems whatsoever with the flying spaghetti monster. I think it exists as an idea. Now, what that means in regard to the tea in China, I don't know, but it does exist as an idea. Where did that idea come from? Well, obviously, we're in agreement, that it came from inside of someone's head. I believe more strongly in scientific theories than random ideas like that, and I believe more strongly in my own experiences/experiments and my own logic than things that have been done by other people. The fact that I am not a physical scientist in any way limits what sorts of experiments/experiences I have done. The fact that a number of my experiences are things that have to do with coincidence and thus, *seem* connected rather than *be provably* connected is another drawback. In other words, I will probably continue to believe what I do unless *I* prove myself wrong, and I'm not trying to do that right now. I'm not trying to prove myself right either, I'm simply acting on the knowledge and experience I have. This may prove to be wrong, but so far, it hasn't been harmful, which is the main thing. If someone thought it was harmful, I'd evaluate their reason for doing so (i.e. I have done this with Christianity, obviously) and whether it was valid. Well, as I said, if the Christian God in the sense of sending all non-believers to Hell is the Truth, I'm out of luck, because I refuse to worship a God that vastly unjust until/unless I'm given the perspective that it really is just (i.e. I die and suddenly have True Knowledge of Life and it happens to show me that it really is just -- which I highly doubt). It may be harmful in that I might be wasting my life on a delusion, but on the other hand, it's a mostly benign delusion, hurts no one else (unless they want it *evil grin*) and adds meaning and purpose, whether real or not, to my life. So, I don't have any strong motivation to poke at it and see if it stands up to all the latest scientific processes of determining reality. I also don't know, after 5 years in grad school, and looking at another 5, whether I want to enter a whole new area of study just so that I can know for sure when I really don't think that's possible.

Because in truth, you cannot say for certain that the flying spaghetti monster is false. You can say it is unlikely, but not impossible. So, there's a hierarchy in my head of most likely to least likely scenarios. I like to occasionally indulge the least likely and see what I can come up with and stretch my brain a bit. The whole, I woke up this morning and had all these "memories" implanted in my brain, and maybe I really didn't start existing until Right Now is one that I like to entertain every once in awhile.

And not only is there a hierarchy in my head, but as I said in one of my other posts, I think there are levels of reality as well. I think there is physical reality, which is what science studies, but there is also cultural reality (which the social sciences study), internal reality (things like the way an emotion feels to a certain person, or the way they perceive a particular color), metaphorical reality (the sun rises), and ... If there are all these levels of reality, why not a metaphysical reality? And where do ideas fit in this? Ideas can become cultural reality. Any idea. It doesn't have to be a religious idea: look at all the stuff we put into the different genders, and half that stuff came from logical scientist people. Of course, they in turn, were informed by their own culture, but the reason men and women are as different as they are today has a lot less (in my honest opinion) to do with physical differences (including hormones) and a lot more to do with the history of our cultures and what things over the years have been added to those basic visual differences. For example, the whole sissy-maid male sub fantasy. Why isn't there a corresponding female cross-dressing fetish? Because women are still viewed as essentially lower on the scale: animal - woman - man - God. In other words, the corresponding fantasy would probably be the pony-girl one. So women who dress/act as men may be stigmatized for acting out of what's right by some people, but it's not a humiliation. This is a reality that has been created in our society, and perhaps it's effected genes, I don't know, but it's just as real even if it's not measurable by traditional methods. This kind of reality is more easily changed than physical reality, and it isn't as obligatory: just because the idea exists in culture doesn't mean that all have to believe IN it (in the sense of believing that other possibilities are wrong). On the other hand, women do all have vaginas.

But most supernatural theories ignore the premises of how the brain works. It's just a chemical computer. There's no magic involved and there's no soul. If it is, it dies when we die. There's nothing that leaves the body when we die. This has all been searched for and measured to eterntity.
Yes. Through the methods we understand today, and of physical properties. How do we know that there isn't something coming in and out that is simply unmeasurable by our methods/equipment. For example, you can't really prove the animal - woman - man - God thing in physical testing, either. Does that mean it doesn't exist and has no effect on the world? I don't think you *can* really know. This goes back to the "why is the sky blue?" question. The typical answer is that the sky is blue because of the various elements in the atmosphere and the way our eyes are set up. But this doesn't really answer the question, because the next question is: why do those elements and the way our eyes are set up cause the sky to look blue and not orange? In the end, I don't think we've got an answer to that question yet. For one thing, we don't even know if we really are seeing the same thing. Can you describe blue without recourse to other colors? We may know the physical properties of "blue", but we don't know why it looks "blue". We can prove that the majority of people will call the same things that have those properties "blue", but what if I'm really seeing orange? You don't know.

And yes, more what if scenarios, but I'm responding to your very strong language of "no magic" "no soul" "nothing". I want to know how you know for sure that that's true. Without that, then clearly you are operating under a belief. Because you've moved away from saying that you're not going to believe something you don't have proof in to saying that you're actually going to believe it *isn't*... And I'm curious as to why.

I understand the philosophical premise where the external and internal are the same. But then you're in a quagmire of definitions. What is you? Is your actions the result of your decisions? If you somehow have power over your body, then we can define the external as being that which is not part of your chemical make-up in the brain. Now we're in a position where we can measure external influence. If there's no border between the internal and external then there's no you, right? If you do a line of coke, it's your brain that gets high, not the person next to you, right?
Ah yes, and here we get back to my paradoxes. I think we're both. But this I'm not sure I can explain. Your coke question is a good one. I've heard stories of people "stealing" highs, but obviously, I have no way of validating those stories, so we'll leave them out.

I think that we are all life. And life just *is*. At the same time, we have personalities, very different personalities, in different bodies. So, how can everything be inside? And when someone died, wouldn't that make the whole universe disappear?

So, what I think is this, and this is something I thought up *before* seeing the movie, and although you said it has no basis in science, well, I don't have basis in science really either. But what I think is that our shared view of the world creates the world. That is, to a certain extent, I live in my world and you live in your world, but when we share space, we live in our world. Part of your reality intermingles with part of my reality and we end up with a new reality. This is something that I thought was a definite weakness of the movie: it didn't say what happens when two observers are both manipulating the world. And so there are as many possible universes as there are creatures with consciousness, and which universe we are currently inhabiting at any given moment is the universe that contains the most things that most people really carry around in their heads. As people die and are born, it changes, so it's changing all the time.

Does that mean that in the Dark Ages people might have fallen off the face of a flat earth? No, I wouldn't say that. But it's unlikely that they would have actually returned home, and saying they fell off would be a metaphorical reality of what really happened. I'm not even sure they would have drowned at sea. Maybe something else will come up about our reality, some 4th dimensional thing and someday we'll be laughing at how stupid we were to think that the Earth was just a sphere. *shrugs*

What I'm saying is that life exists. Physical reality exists. As humans, we discover new things about this physical reality. But I think we also affect and change the direction it might go through our own perception and expectations. One of the problems with the scientific method in this regard is that you have to start the experiment with some sort of hypothesis that will be proven or disproven. I think the hypothesis itself changes the possible results.

Basically it goes like this: I live in the universe. I experience the universe in a certain way, differently from other people. This makes my experience of the universe unique. Which in turn shapes my view, opinion, and expectations of the universe. All of this is happening inside my head. It is all happening to *my* universe. But my universe is also your universe, and yet not your universe. I think all three universes exist simultaneously (mine, yours, ours). And mine happens to exist within me as well as without me. But it's not your universe, so it only affects you when they come into contact, and only in ways we both expect. In other words, if I were to drink a lot of alcohol in your presence while you didn't, we'd both be expecting me to get drunk and for you not to.

To be honest, I'm not sure how firmly I believe this. But I find it very interesting, and a lot more realistic than a notion that we already know all there is to know.

So, in my universe, deities exist and work with me. In yours, they don't. I think we're both right about our own universes. And as for the truly mad: are they mad because they have no sense of reality? Or because they have a clear view and it's too much to take in?