YouTube - VERY SCARY pumpkin.

Can the neural computer interface be far behind?

Electronic chip connects with brain to control movement

The Neurochip creates a brain-computer interface that records every movement sent from the motor cortex to the rest of the animal’s body.

I should think meaning must be agreed to, even if that meaning depends ultimately on a discussion of what is not, in order to at least form a coherent, if not mutually acceptable proposition.

In other words, can one really prove or disprove a position regarding the nature of what actually constitutes meaningfullness?

It seems to me that the quality of having meaning is a requirement of a proposition. If this is so, anything that does not have meaning also is not, in fact, a position, or at least is one rendered incapable of positive, objective statement.

Sometimes we engage in laughably futile attempts to talk about ‘things’ that are incapable of being conceptualized. They are futile simply because these ‘things’ do not exist as ‘things’ at all, laughable, because we really should know better.

To illustrate further:

If you speak to me in a language foreign to me, I simply do not understand. But I correctly guess your utterances have meaning.
Even the random babble of a child inarguably has meaning.
A chair has meaning, as does the word, ‘chair’ we use to label the ‘thing’ we call a chair. A rose by any other name, and so on.
It is the verbal or non-verbal neural process of labelling, abstracting, symbolizing, which ascribes meaning to things, which otherwise have none.

At the most basic level, all which appears to exist in the universe of our experience has at least the base characteristic of meaning, defined as whatever it is which characterizes, or sets that ‘thing’ apart — as far as our cause/effect, subject/object conceptualizing brain is concerned.

This is what is meant by ‘limits’ bestowing meaning. Without limits, a thing has no objective, conceptual meaning, because it cannot be defined as a thing.

There is, naturally, that which exists without limit. We call ‘it’ the universe, or transcendence, as if we were somehow separate from ‘it’, and can therefore be experienced subjectively as object. No matter how we try, we cannot positively define transcendence, quite simply because it is limitless.

All experience is objective.  That is, mind is composed of experience-ing.  Transcendence, which is limitless, and all inclusive,  must remain incapable of being ‘experienced’ objectively, because thought is contained within ‘it’.

Transcendence unquestionably exists, and may even be alluded to as, for example, ‘all that is’, or ‘universe’, but its inclusive, limitless nature precludes a coherent definition.

This is one of the reasons why it is quite meaningless to personalize transcendence.

Lesser gods there may be, but there cannot be an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent ’supreme being’

We exist not as separate entities.

Although we appear to do so, we are not persons moving through time/space. Rather we are expressions of the multiplicity of process that is the universe, and define ourselves as distinct solely due to the abstracting neural functioning which characterizes our particular mode of energy/matter.

This is the basis for unbelief in a universe composed of ‘things’.

Despite the apparent perception of a multiplicity of objects, I must inevitably recognize all objects depend ultimately on ultimate subject. Therefore ‘I’ cannot be object. Since subject cannot exist in the absence of object, nor object in the absence of subject, it follows neither exists apart from the convenient illusion invented by the neural process of perception/thought.

I do not, therefore, believe in my ’self’ as a being, and I certainly don’t believe in a God-being.

Reason is Cast Aside
Lady Science Has Fled
Faith and Superstition
Fill The Believer’s Head
Teaching Pigs to Sing (Skeptical Inquirer July/August 2006)

It was the beginning of an odyssey that introduced me to a strange race of people who believed in angels but not in germs. I can only compare it to visiting a carnival freak show of intellectual, rather than physical, anomalies. I observed how the average nonskeptic member of the public reacts to these anomalies. It almost destroyed my faith in human reason.

Yeah, Elio. Try reading the bloody history of your ‘moral’ religion sometime. Include your oh-so- ‘holy’ bible in your studies.

Edit: Oh, and lest we forget.

Hey, Elio, how about you preach your morality to those abused by your holy men, and the thousands infected with aids due to your moral teachings about condom use.  You don’t even need to crack open a history book for that stuff.

Ethical stem cells still horrify Vatican

But the head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, Bishop Elio Sgreccia, told Reuters in an interview that the new method by Advanced Cell Technology Inc failed to overcome the church’s many moral concerns.

I almost missed this…

YouTube - Sam Harris at Idea CIty ‘05

Sadly eloquent…

One Thousand Reasons

Their willful refusal to employ the power the United States clearly has to enforce an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon provides yet another overt example of Neocon moral bankruptcy. The United States has deliberately stymied UN intervention efforts to give Israel time to finish destroying Lebanon with funding and equipment we furnished. Israel has displaced a million people, killed over 600 innocent civilians, and destroyed over $2 billion worth of infrastructure through its invasion of a sovereign nation. This in retaliation for the capture of two of its soldiers by Hezbollah, a powerful group of militants over which Lebanon has virtually no control. In contrast, Israel has suffered the loss of 26 of its civilians. While tragic, these losses pale in comparison to the devastating horror the Israeli war machine has inflicted upon Lebanon

Superstition is killing us.

Belief in a ‘Supreme Being’ is not the problem — it’s the brainwashing which results from the process of organized religion.

If so-called religious leaders really believed in what they spout, they would be the ones blowing themselves up, ‘for the cause’

Religious indoctrination is dangerously insidious because it engenders a schizoid manner of thought.

Religious Belief and Violence in the Middle East

The practice of people believing (or not believing) whatever they want constitutes an inalienable freedom. However, respecting one’s personal expression of belief doesn’t necessarily mean that we should respect the beliefs themselves or the violent actions that result from them. Who says we shouldn’t confront and question beliefs that trigger or cause violence action? It describes one thing to say that people have a right to exist, but since when do beliefs in-themselves have that right? Instead of respecting the beliefs over the lives of people, how about respecting people over beliefs? Respect people, not their beliefs. Many freethinkers have submitted the idea that if we inoculate against dangerous beliefs, then the violence resulting from those beliefs will diminish.

Truthdig - Israel’s Barrier to Peace

We react to the manifestation of rage rather than the cause of rage. We are as morally compromised as those we condemn, as incomprehensible to them as they are to us.