Quote:
Originally Posted by maskedmelon
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Intelligence is the ability to reliably predict outcomes ^^Science is a method of learning. The fundamental distinction between faith based claims and scientific claims is that is that scientific claims can be tested while their supernatural counterparts cannot be tested. Both can make predictions, but neither matters if you are unable to test the predictive capacity.
For example, Christianity teaches Christ will return, people who accept Christ will go to heaven and those who do not will go to hell.
Those are all predictions. You cannot test any of them though. That was my point ^^
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When I said religion predicts nothing, I meant it predicts nothing about the phenomenon that it purports to explain.
They guess that when you die that you go to an afterlife (this is the theory), but there are no predictions about that guess that they can make. That is, they cannot make a distinction between what the world would look like if there is an afterlife vs what the world would look like if there isn't an afterlife, so the theory makes no predictions about what you can expect to see if the theory is either true or false [unless you die of course, but without your brain, you're not going to have any expectations, unless you modify the theory to say that when you die, an exact neuron for neuron copy of your brain is sent to wherever this afterlife might be, (and yes I assume that our brains are the seat of our person-hood because every observation mankind has ever made of the human brain supports this idea, as well as watching my grandmother lose her mind over the course of a decade to LBD), but if your theory keeps getting more and more complicated by details, the probability of its accuracy goes down so much that it may as well be impossible. (and when I mean complicated by details, the theory expects me to take as a premise that there is both a mechanism that copies a person's brain in a metaphysical fashion AND that it sends it to somewhere else to be with other metaphysically copied brains AND that these brains can communicate and interact with each other AND that there's not one place, but two places AND that one of the places makes metaphysically copied brains suffer AND that one of the places gives the metaphysically copied brains eternal bliss AND that this is all determined solely on whatever neurological configuration the brains happened to have at the time they were deprived of oxygen. This is a lot to accept even on faith)].
Contrast that to guesses you can make about death with scientific observation: Deprive a brain of oxygen and it stops functioning. Restore oxygen to a brain that has stopped functioning, and if the cells didn't get damaged or degrade for too long, the brain will start functioning again. The brain is where we think and get personality. Cut away one part of a persons brain and you can change their personality. Prod one part of their brain and you can make them smell pickles. From this kind of information we can reasonably guess that the entirety of a person as a sentient being is in their brain, when the brain is gone, they are gone.
I suspect that if technology ever got to the point of recreating a person's brain, neuron for neuron, for all practical purposes, they could be resurrected. As far as what this means in terms of self and person-hood is all just philosophy until we can figure out a way to observe those concepts in an empirical way.
I think fundamentally though, we both agree that Science is not faith.