Science vs Dualism

How everything is the same thing

If ghosts can walk through walls without disturbing a brick and the ghost is the mind of the living being, how can it lift an arm? Has anyone yet explained how that mind can affect matter when it is impervious to it?

If you push anyone far enough philosophically, they all end up in the same place. If you push politics in similar fashion, the same thing happens. The problem lies in not thinking it through far enough. We all want the same thing, yet hang our hats on intermediate causes and belief.

As science approaches mysticism, we measure finer and finer increments to avoid embarrassing ourselves with woo, infinitely subdividing the process, while religion continues to extend its own goalposts to avoid “fallen” matter and the “spirit” are one process. Nominalism and realism meet full circle, and only beliefs can keep them apart.

If you investigate mind far enough you turn up with matter; if you investigate matter far enough you turn up with mind. If you investigate yourself far enough you discover the external world; if you investigate the external world far enough, you find you. Why would that be?

Finally physicists wanted to know; how are things like when we’re not looking at them? In order to know how electrons behave we have to put them in a process that influences their behavior. So what are they doing when were not looking? It appears knowledge of something is the same thing as action upon it.

The act of knowing changes what you are knowing. Dualism (mind and body) is an illusion of christian mythology and has maintained its rigor only though faith. Because when we explore everything deeply enough, we find its all one process. Now we are at the final point, that life is a bunch of atoms (arranged just right) to form consciousness (not woo) but either way, monism is the final answer, when you push anything to its finality, its all one process.

Knowing is not a passive experience, but all knowing is a measured by its reactions. The illusion is to think you are a separate ego, when in reality you are simply a reaction of various stimuli that creates self identity. And too much of the same stimuli in any given arena, makes one a fanatic—because then, one actually starts to believe it.

Author: jimoeba

Alternatives to big box religions and dogmas

43 thoughts on “Science vs Dualism”

  1. Sigh! What’s with all the recent anti-science deepities, Jim?

    “We all want the same thing, yet hang our hats on intermediate causes and belief.”

    . . . is demonstrably false. Autocrats do no want the same thing as freedom-loving autonomous individuals. Meat eaters don’t want the same thing as vegans. Environmentalists don’t want the same thing as non-environmentalists. The religious don’t want the same thing as the non-religious. etc. etc.

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  2. “ is demonstrably false. Autocrats do no want the same thing as freedom-loving autonomous individuals”. I believe we are not the autocrats but the free loving autonomous individuals.
    I didn’t realize this was an anti-science deepity, but a lean to monism which eliminates abrahamic thought by reason alone. Maybe I’m not very good at this. I don’t think you can deny that science has an monistic-atheistic agenda no matter what the findings.
    Had Einstien not been able to math his observations on relativity, he would be woo. Like Bohm, able to math potentiality got him blackballed because it sounded esoteric. That is where the evidence led and the math sustained it. So what? Whats the harm in exploring it. I have no agenda at all. Does the fact of ideas bother you?

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    1. Science’s (“the state of knowing”) sole agenda is to expand our knowledge and understanding of the universe, so any other agenda falls completely outside the scope of scientific discovery. And that’s the beauty of the scientific method: it provides a means to separate the facts from the BS, and the empiricists from the philosophical rationalists.

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        1. What’s to unpack? Bohm was sidelined for his political views, not his scientific hypothesis. No one is arguing that scientists are free of error or bias. Just that the scientific process is designed to weed out those errors and biases.

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            4. It doesn’t matter who here said it, it is well known he did say it. And It should be noted, however, that the overall reaction to Bohm’s papers in 1950-s was that of dismissal, although many realized that Bohm’s theory was not mathematically flawed.

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            5. The point remains that I didn’t say it. And it’s also well known that both men were considered too hot to handle after there political leanings were made known. So I stand by my assertion that Bohm was sidelined for his politics rather than his academic opinions.

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            7. Because scientists are fallible human beings, just like the rest of us. They ignored it because they disagreed. And since I’m not up to speed on QM, I can’t opine on whether or not it was an actual breakthrough. Perhaps his theory has flaws and their bias was justified.

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  4. “Dualism (mind and body) is an illusion of christian mythology and has maintained its rigor only though faith.”

    I agree with the last part, but the mind/body dualism has been with us since time immemorial. Paul, the convert, grabbed the idea from Plato. And of course you have the desperate ancient Hebrews who lifted handy binaries as male/female, light/dark, good/evil, strong/weak from the literature of stronger nations, e.g., the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Persians.

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    1. It permeates even the way we think casually about ourselves. We typically will think “I have a body”, not that I am a body. It comes from our childhood indoctrinations of our origins, but is at odds with science and many non abrahamic cultures. That you came to earth to have a body vs coming out of her.

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  5. People just have to stop saying “reality is an illusion,” including quoting Einstein. Reality is not an illusion, it is a perception. We know from taking drugs that reality can be distorted in perception, but not physically. So, LSD users who reported colors springing out of ordinary objects did not get those perceptions reinforced by videos taken of the experiment. And then there are optical illusions requiring no drugs whatsoever, etc.

    Why is this so hard to understand. Our perceptions are flawed, don’t impress that upon reality. Sheesh!

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    1. I take it as another way of saying life is not what it appears to be. So Steve, is life and existence exactly what it appears to be? It took a handful of quotable physicists two hundred years to get us to agree on some very illusive observations of “reality”, but you know better? If our perception of reality is flawed and always seems to have been that way, how could evolution be a result of adapting to an illusion?

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  6. Re “We all want the same thing, …” This is actually part of the problem. I want the money in my pocket and so do our current crop of plutocrats and they are working to remove it from mine and transfer it to theirs, stealthily if necessary.

    “We all want the same thing” is a thought that means to bring us together, but it is clear that we do not. I do not want to be a billionaire, a master of the universe, or own a house in the Hamptons.

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    1. I don’t consider government, plutocrats, and extremism to be “we” any more than you do. Yet even we commoners are bickering. Party politics is officially irrelevant (for 30 years) yet you still bite

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    1. Does the behavior (mind) have no thing doing it? If consciousness were not there, how would experiences occur. Its all one process, therefor trying to pin it down as separate things of the same aspect is futile.

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          2. a lil while ago, while sitting down in meditation, i felt this heat rising from the bottom of my spine. it traveled up the spine, and whooosh, it jumped outside from to top of my head. i could not feel the body anymore, but the feeling of beingness was very much there. just awareness.
            it was completely still, but no thought was present. there was not even a heart beat. i stayed ‘frozen’ in the state for a short while, and then allowed it to come down again.
            i shared with one of my friends, he said “yeap. you died for a short while”.

            whoever said you lived inside the body, lied to you😋

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          3. i watched this yesterday. David Bohm’s work, his vision of unity. his influential friendship with Krishnamurti.
            excellent and captivating from first moments. if you want some quality divertissement 😊

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      2. David Bohm seems to show up again and again. found this in my reading, you will find it interesting! on the idea of holographic universe

        “When you are treading the way of totality, you must see the totality in a piece of the totality. Take one part of the universe and see the whole universe existing there.”

        “In the West Michael Talbot and physicist David Bohm have contributed to out understanding of the universe as a hologram. Talbot explains Bohm’s theories saying “…objective reality does not exist… despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.”

        Again Talbot: “Bohm believed the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.”

        Could this ‘fundamental something’ be the Oneness, God consciousness, that sages and seers have been seeing since the beginning of time?

        Talbot: “In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space… would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which past, present and future all exist simultaneously”.

        Even time and space break down, dissolving when the aspirant reaches a level of consciousness in which multiplicity and the “agitation of that differentiated illusion… fades into nothingness.”

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        1. Maybe its time to revisit John Wheeler’s one electron theory as he told Richard Feynman, “I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass” “Why?” “Because, they are all the same electron”. While Feynman dismissed pert of the theory, he did accept portions of it.

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  8. In relation to absolutelhy nothing, these words come to me this day from nowhere:

    Starting somewhere around the 1930s speculative writers took us on trips into the stars and asked their readers, How great can we be? Ninety years and zero parsecs later, those readers look back at the writers and ask, Wherefore are we still unable to call our own siblings people?

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            2. You know where I live, Jim. There’s barely enough toilet paper left to accurately define the forests where toilet paper used to come from. I think it’s now being made from mushroom skins. I just pity the poor little elves they pay to skin them.
              (Sorry, sir, but you best not like or reply to this comment. Every image you send me surpasses the height of the previous delirium. One might think there is a coronavirus pandemic spreading daily across the land.)
              Let’s all sing, sotto voce, “Hands across the water (water)
              Hands across the sky-i-igh” (Don’t wanna upset Nan, she might be in the poo pew in front of you)

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  9. Excellent post one of my favorite subjects. An animal evolved to be able to reflect upon its experiences. “I think therefore I am”. I believe duality and the opposition are human perception. Really enjoy reading your smart and engaging posts. Thanks

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    1. Thank you Heidi. Duality can be reasoned out of the equation pretty easily if you take it all the way. Its all one process. It is incredible how this belief has shaped humanity for a long, long time but can be so easily dismissed. When you can see the polarity of everything, you quickly see events and organisms and environments are one thing. You can’t have this without that. None of it.

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