Well, it is fun, when you assume those spirits to be friendly. But if they exist and they are not allways friendly - then there would be very practical implications because of that.
Is your bad luck random, or did you anger some god or spirit? Then you would benefit from doing things to calm them. Many, many people believe that.
But yes, the point is, why assume their existence in the first place, when science so far is very good at creating a working model of the universe. But since we do not have a complete model at all and maybe never will, I would not assume it is proven that billions of people on this earth who believe in magic etc. are all wrong. Because if you do that - then you would never find hints that they do exist. There is a theory in the spiritul world, that there is a mind censor in ourself, that is blocking all information on those magic things as we would not be able to focus on the tasks at hand, if we would be distracted by ghosts all the time. So main technics there, are how to control your inner censor and open your eyes to see and do much more.
Well, what I can say for certain, is that the various magic traditions developed very powerful psychological technics to achieve various things with your mind. Whether there is real magic one has to see and decide for themself.
This alone is reason enough to study/practice "magical" concepts, which can range from CBT to various forms of meditation and cue spooky sounds sorcery. Having a hammer with which you can form your own mind is, like, extremely important.
The spookier stuff you can just think of as either A) fun, existential decorations or B) embarrassing accretions to otherwise useful ways of thinking.
Or heaven forbid you fall into the C) camp where you start to believe you're in some kind of spirit war for the aeons.
(schizophrenia) != (dissociative identity disorder == multiple personality disorder)
even though
etymology(schizophrenia) == "split mind"
> Is dissociative identity disorder a subset of schizophrenia?
No.
> Is there a simple way to tell the difference?
Yes. DID is what is colloquially referred to as having a split personality or multiple personalities. The easiest way to remember this is that a person with DID has multiple, alternating streams of experience and affect that do not share memories or volition.
Schizophrenia is more like what we might call "madness". Believing wildly untrue ideas, being out of touch with reality, having hallucinations,... these are some of the symptoms of schizophrenia.
So they're not really related.
I guess some folks with DID could have a personality who is also schizophrenic, and that would make for a difficult diagnosis and treatment, I'm sure.
On one hand everything is material and deterministic (whether you confess to it or not — eg Dan dennet), on the other hand you have the possibility of free will, of human nobility and virtue.
Selfish genes sounds like doublespeak to me. I’m sure it’s true to some extent, but I’m confident that it’s not the whole Truth.
It's the Russell's Teapot thing. It COULD be out there, and there COULD be something more.
But the Selfish Gene -- Evolution -- is reasonably easy to demonstrate. Different verities of viruses, like new strains of COVID, come to mind...
People use the word 'but' all the time to justify beliefs that they worry others will view negatively.
"I think Donald Trump is an asshole but..."
"I'm not racist but..."
"I'm a rational person but..."
I think, deep down, he believes the god stuff but is trying to justify it and soften it so that we don't think he's crazy.
Basically, I'm still working on integrating my experience into a rational worldview. I definitely had the experience of meeting entities and speaking to them, and that's hard to reconcile with our everyday "sober" experience of reality.
There are tons of testimonies of people reporting similar things, so that makes me feel less alone in the potential delusion of thinking it's all "real."
Whether it's real or not actually doesn't matter so much to me. The experience is the same no matter if it's coming from my brain or from elsewhere. The only thing that matters is how I live my life as a result after having these experiences.
I've made peace with not having all the answers. If you asked me "Do I believe in God?" I'd say yes. But my definition of God is probably very different from the usual one. Since I now think of God as being an emergent property of communities of people coming together and forming a social contract through shared stories, morals, and goals. Where they are trying to make sense of a shared mystery of life and capture the ineffable transcendental experience into stories and myths. Personifying that into a "real" thing is useful for some, and experiencing that personification is a very interesting phenomena that I don't really understand, yet I've had the experience myself.
Anyways, I hope that's helpful :)
The only thing I'd refer to as maybe experiencing "God" was when I went into a white light. At that point I have very little recollection of what actually happened. I remember going in, and then everything was white, there was no concept really of time, or of me, or of anything else like that. I wasn't "seeing" anything, it was all just white. Coming out felt extremely "weird," everything felt so full of meaning and "spiritual" for lack of a better word. There was no personification of "God" there, but it was just a feeling. The one thing I do remember when I was there in that light was a deep feeling of peace and one-ness.
I don't know if that's all helpful, but it's what I experienced, at least.
Then it's not a rational worldview.
I’d encourage you to try the experience for yourself. I may not be able to convince you that these visions are anything more than “scrambling of neurons” with my testimony. If you are intellectually curious enough and open to trying DMT/ayahuasca, then it can only give you more data to base your worldview on. Worth a shot imo.
The evidence of god, or higher dimensional beings is equivalent to the amount of evidence that exists for the cosmic hippo.
Both concepts do not have zero probability of existing but are you really open minded by being agnostic and considering the possibility of the cosmic hippo existing? I just made up the cosmic hippo, like just now. Zero material evidence exist for either concept. But we lend more credit to profound descriptions of god. This is human bias at work. Higher dimensional is a complicated word that is just as absurd as hippo in a tutu.
Agnosticism is not open mindedness it is closed mindedness because the logic behind agnosticism supports consideration of the cosmic hippo as a valid argument for existence.
The key insight is that all descriptions of god are equivalent in absurdity to the cosmic hippo and therefore agnosticism is an an absurd philosophy.
We do not know what created the universe. But because virtually zero evidence exists or hints at what created the universe I can safely say any guess you come up with is completely and utterly wrong. It's like guessing a number between 1 and 9999 trillion trillion. I can safely say if any human on earth made a guess about what this number is... They'd be wrong.
I have a giant box, guess what's in the box. I'm willing to bet 1 million dollars that any guess you make is wrong simply because there are too many possible things that could be in the box. Is that a reasonable bet? Yes.
I have a universe, guess what created it. I'm willing to bet 1 million dollars that any guess you make is wrong simply because there are too many possible things that could have created the universe. Is that a reasonable bet? Yes.
The agnostic makes a different bet. He says he doesn't know what's in the box but there's a 50% chance it's god and a 50% chance it's not.
The real probability is god is but a 1 out of infinite probability where the domain encompasses Bolzman brains and cosmic hippos. The better bet is to say it could be anything BUT god.
Anything but god yields a (infinite - 1)/infinite probability of being correct, aka 100%.
I can't use science to disagree with that opinion because it's religious flame war?
Then logically the article itself is instigating religious flame war.... He argues his side I argue mine.
I don't think your being impartial here. His post attacks my beliefs and I attack his in return who is instigating war here? Your saying he can attack my belief but I can't argue for mine.
Are you saying that if an article shows up on HN supporting logic and science and atheism no religious person can argue against it or offer their opinion?
Grandiose rhetoric on an inflammatory topic makes for low-quality threads and flamewars. We don't want that here.
I'm willing to bet your being biased here and you can't see it. It is very hard to recognize in yourself without asking for personal opinions. I'm willing to bet that you personally highly highly disagree with what I wrote.
If I am right then I think it's quite likely you are completely unaware that your personal opinion influenced you to see what I wrote as grandiose because frankly this entire topic is grandiose. He makes grand claims about the nature of reality citing drug induced experiences as evidence, is that not grandiose?
I think he said something more like I am now open to the possibility that they might be real.
But ... we know there are people who are schizophrenic, who switch from one personality to another. Which of them is "real"? They probably all are. But that does not mean they exist anywhere outside of one's head. If you can experience another you, then it seems not implausible that you would also experience "God" inside your head.
It is fun to think that there might be higher-dimensional conscious beings around us or even within us. But that's all it is, fun. There doesn't seem to be any practical implications of whether there are or not.
Another part of the article considers (quite materialistically) the possibility that "God" is something society creates in our heads. I think Sigmund Freud called that the "Super Ego". It is what makes us better survive as a species. It causes us to co-operate rather than just selfishly abuse others as much as we can. It is clear how such a function could evolve by evolution. We see it in all species, they don't spend their energy trying to kill other individuals of the same species. It's the Selfish Gene.