Some defence of substance dualism

I take your point, but if the scientific story - or scientific model, as sbu puts it - only conforms with reality under a very limited range of conditions, then perhaps it can't tell us about the origin of carbon in nuclear reactions in stars (for example). Perhaps in the true model of reality the universe simply began with certain percentages of carbon and the other elements!

I am saying, "What if we know far less about the universe than we think we know?". Maybe life, which obviously needs carbon, can conjure carbon up in some mysterious way. I mean if psi has been around for billions of years, who knows what it might have achieved using its coupling to a spirit world implied by Dualism!

Of course, maybe we should re-label that process as a form of fine tuning!

David

You seem to be proposing that life could have somehow magically created itself, and part of this creative feat has been the creation of a spiritual order involving human souls. It seems to me this doesn't make sense - it is proposing that there is a closed loop in time in which life has always existed without any creative process intelligent or otherwise -  a vast amount of intricately organized functional specified complex information (that we know only comes from conscious intelligent sources) having no origin at all, to use a simple analogy about as likely as a man pulling himself up off the ground by his bootstraps, a magical event of cataclysmic proportions. 

If the claim is that perhaps "Life" somehow always existed in the form of advanced spiritual beings who are the superintelligent and superpowerful agents that created the physical universe, inhabiting a spirit world in which all the mysterious paranormal phenomena we have discovered are native, that's just supplying a non-Divine tentative intelligent source of the evident fine tuning. And the idea again proposes an existence that has always "been" - over an infinity of time and therefore without an origin intelligent or otherwise, surely a magical thing or from the ultimately mysterious, omnipotent and omniscient Divine.

You seem to be proposing that life could have somehow magically created itself, and part of this creative feat has been the creation of a spiritual order involving human souls. It seems to me this doesn't make sense - it is proposing that there is a closed loop in time in which life has always existed without any creative process intelligent or otherwise -  a vast amount of intricately organized functional specified complex information (that we know only comes from conscious intelligent sources) having no origin at all, to use a simple analogy about as likely as a man pulling himself up off the ground by his bootstraps, a magical event of cataclysmic proportions. 

If the claim is that perhaps "Life" somehow always existed in the form of advanced spiritual beings who are the superintelligent and superpowerful agents that created the physical universe, inhabiting a spirit world in which all the mysterious paranormal phenomena we have discovered are native, that's just supplying a non-Divine tentative intelligent source of the evident fine tuning. And the idea again proposes an existence that has always "been" - over an infinity of time and therefore without an origin intelligent or otherwise, surely a magical thing or from the ultimately mysterious, omnipotent and omniscient Divine.

I don't like the concept of a god with infinite powers. I think the idea just collapses into nonsense. I mean an omniscient god knows what it wants, and can just waive its hands and bring that into being. Computing with infinity is decidedly tricky in maths, and I'm damn sure theologians are no better!

Therefore I envisage a time when the spiritual reality was all that existed. Perhaps we all existed as individual spirits back then. After a while, people (spirits) decided that it would be helpful/interesting to invent a material realm (many people talk about worlds at this point, but I think that can be misleading because they don't mean planets). Somehow we designed a material world, and also designed a way in which they could spend time in that realm. The analogy would be someone building a computer plus VR software and then spending time in the game. That very thought has motivated a lot of people - it is very appealing, and this may be the reason.

Many people come back from NDEs with the observation that time isn't the same as it appears while embodied. Nobody knows precisely what that means, but I tend to imagine a realm in which two time axes are available. One axis is our normal time, and the second one allows spirits to view the whole sweep of normal time and tinker with it.

David

I don't like the concept of a god with infinite powers. I think the idea just collapses into nonsense. I mean an omniscient god knows what it wants, and can just waive its hands and bring that into being. Computing with infinity is decidedly tricky in maths, and I'm damn sure theologians are no better!

Therefore I envisage a time when the spiritual reality was all that existed. Perhaps we all existed as individual spirits back then. After a while, people (spirits) decided that it would be helpful/interesting to invent a material realm (many people talk about worlds at this point, but I think that can be misleading because they don't mean planets). Somehow we designed a material world, and also designed a way in which they could spend time in that realm. The analogy would be someone building a computer plus VR software and then spending time in the game. That very thought has motivated a lot of people - it is very appealing, and this may be the reason.

Many people come back from NDEs with the observation that time isn't the same as it appears while embodied. Nobody knows precisely what that means, but I tend to imagine a realm in which two time axes are available. One axis is our normal time, and the second one allows spirits to view the whole sweep of normal time and tinker with it.

David

The problem with this is that it presumes the miraculous existence of a great, extremely highly organized something without any origin whatsoever. Quoting my previous post, this appears to be a closed loop in time in which life has always existed without any creative process intelligent or otherwise -  a vast amount of intricately organized functional specified complex information (that we know only comes from conscious intelligent sources) having no origin at all. Magic. To use an old phrase, there has to be somewhere (figuratively somebody's desk), where the buck stops - that's at the origin, no sooner.

Many people come back from NDEs with the observation that time isn't the same as it appears while embodied. Nobody knows precisely what that means, but I tend to imagine a realm in which two time axes are available. One axis is our normal time, and the second one allows spirits to view the whole sweep of normal time and tinker with it.

Doesn't this mean normal time is illusory and the second axis is the actual passage of time?

Otherwise how can the second axis of time see the "whole sweep of normal time"?

Doesn't this mean normal time is illusory and the second axis is the actual passage of time?

Otherwise how can the second axis of time see the "whole sweep of normal time"?

One could certainly argue that normal time is something entirely arbitrary. If I have a clock and I'm not sure whether it is accurate, then I would compare it with another, different clock or watch. But if they both speed up or slow down by the same amount, we would have no way to tell. Even using the most precise atomic clock, we can only check it against another clock. (Or  compare it to a proxy for a clock such as the movement or activity of some astronomical phenomenon). But unless we can go 'outside' of time, there is no way to tell anything about what is really happening. I suppose what we end up with is not saying anything about time. Instead we say things in the world behave consistently, so we can describe them according to rules or equations.

But does consciousness or our experience also behave consistently and predictably? Given the wide range of human experience including some of my own experience, I'd say not.