6:45pm Stephen Smith Remember the dogs on state street? Hi Holmer, I found the following quote: As physiology came to be understood more and more in terms of physical mechanisms, vitalistic explanations for the functioning of the body were refuted one by one. The last holdout for vitalism was the kidney, but it fell into total disrepute after the elegant experiments of Homer Smith in the 1930s demonstrated clearly the filtration and secretory mechanisms of that organ. It came from this website: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Vitalism But I am thinking that these attacks on vitalism are misplaced, and brought to us by "meat heads." Did your father (quoted above) understand this conflict as well as yourself? The fallacy of excluded middle must be in place here, is my quess. My view is that the vital is supported by the physical, rather than being defined by the physical. The vital gave birth the volition, emotion, and spirit, all of which are self-evident and all have transcended the kidney function that they depend on. A trinitarian logic gets beyond the fallacy of excluded middle, where vitalism is discovered again. Vitalism: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article www.absoluteastronomy.com Today 11:13pm Homer Wilson Smith Read the very last chapter of "Man and His Gods", it may be on line. My father's idea of God had been poisoned by Christianity and the other inanities of Earth to a point where he had little patience for it rightly so. God is not a God of BEHAVIOR, God is a God of CREATION. Occam's Razor says take the simplest theory to your bean counters, as the simplest theory that explains all the facts is the one you should spend money on. But who has all the facts? That vitalism, or God or Spirit, or consciousness is not necessary to explain the extant observable facts of the time, hardly proves they do not exist, and my father knew it, he merely found little reason to complicate things by bringing God or Spirit into it. Does a watch need a spirit to run it? Does a brain? To him they were both machines, and machines are mathematical mass and force in motion contraptions that have no need for PAIN SHAME PLEASURE LOVE etc. Notice that a car is a mechanical contraption also, but its DRIVER is a spirit. Now we know that love and pain can not of force and mass be made. So they missed that one. Recent results about the nature of consciousness rather conclusively puts to rest the idea that consciousness is a process in machinery, space time gizmos, of any complexity. This is athttp://www.lightlink.com/theproof. A machine can not be certain of itself, space or time because a machine learns by being an effect of distant causes, no matter how close, and the relationship between effect and cause is one of THEORY, not PERFECT CERTAINTY. No part of any machine can be perfectly certain of any other part! But consciousness is self aware, worse it is self aware of how it is NOW, not how it WAS a nano second ago, which is the best a machine can do about learning about its own self. And its still a theory about a nano ago! This is easy to prove, if there is time between the cause and the effect, then the cause is GONE by the time the effect is created, and thus the effect can never bea direct perception of the cause as it IS NOW, but only a symbolic messenger of how the cause might have been when the effect was generated. Thus the effect can never see the cause period. Time between causes blindness and only conjecture to remain. Consciousness however can SEE itself SEEING, and thus this must be an instantaneous process in the now, where the being is not learning about itself by looking at a later effect but by looking directly at the cause itself in the NOW. Space time gizmo physics can not wrap its wits around that one at all, as all physics understands is space time processes, but consciousness is a spaceless timeless 'process' where learning about cause is gleaned by directly looking at cause and not at some alleged effect a while in time later. The time between cause and effect in the PU demands that the learning about the cause via the effect is dated learning out of the gate. Anyhow one out of the body experience that is verifiable and all of physics gets thrown out. THERE IS NO WAY THEY WILL EVERY EXPLAIN AWAY CONSCIOUSNESS WITH THE 4 FUNDAMENTAL FORCES OF NATURE, no matter how unified they get it. That's because perfect certainy and love and shame can not of force and mass be made. They may explain the physical projection and thus reduce everyone to a space time gizmo, but never the consciousness experiencing itself with perfect certainty. The unified science of the all that is then is saved in this way: The physical universe does not exist at all, its a rendition in the dreaming mind of consciousness. Consciousness is co eternal with all other consciousness units and lives above space and time as the static co-dreaming the kinetic. The static is a MULTI BEING, and each being incarnates as it wishes in a dreamtime body called an avatar. It can be a quark or a star or a molecule or a human body. Thus the PU is a hallucination pure and simple, correct down to the last quark, but none the less a co shared virtual reality. Consciousness is not virtual, it is actual, as is the I-AM being that has that consciousness, and consciousness is not a process in a virtual reality! So no, my father did not have that understanding, that would have been like expecting a dreamer to know he was dreaming. He like Newton and the rest of the meatballs thought that space and time are actual, just as most dreamers don't know they are dreaming, but he mentions 'what is this thing we call consciousness?' in that last chapter of Man and His Gods, leaving it I suppose to another life which he didn't know for sure he would have, and frankly probably thought he didn't have and after 10 years with my mother, probably didn't want. Most meatballs have a sense that conscioussness is 'different' or special, but as far as I know they have NEVER put their finger on just what it is that makes consciousness special. What can consciousness do that a machine can't? PERFECT CERTAINTY OF ITSELF AND ITS EXPERIENCES IN THE NOW. Since I am the only one saying that in present time and have no footnotes or references to support it, I shall be considered a crack pot until such time a that changes. :) The Proof www.lightlink.com Learning Certainty and Causality in Consciousness 11:14pm Homer Wilson Smith And with all that said, the angels and the aliens have been tinkering with the genetic strains and the kidney for a long time to make it evolve properly ------=_NextPart_000_0003_01CE7AA0.B105DAB0-- Mon Jul 8 13:06:46 EDT 2013