OMG, Dr. Carrier! We talked about this in April! THE myth (the so called “monomyth” or “hero’s journey”) is simply for the ego to plumb the depths of the subconscious and return to the surface in a new form! If you pay attention, you can see that you’ve had opportunities to do this in your own life! Maybe (lol) there was a time when you centered the ego, you sought external validation, and you projected your insecurities onto the other! Maybe there was a time when you were called out for this! Maybe there was a time you recognized the “judgment” as true, but maybe there was a time when you didn’t! Maybe there was a time when you were presented with the opportunity to allow your ego to die! How many times did you let it die? How many times did you refuse? How many times did you rationalize the actions of your ego? How many times did you “detach” yourself from your ego and look at your own ego from a different perspective? Just think about it!

Keith: the deer print is only “information” in the mind of the hunter. It has to be “interpreted.” The hunter has to “interpret” it in the light of “purposes” for which he set out! Obviously purpose is metaphysical (even though it comes from the physical) and interpretation involves abstraction, which is also metaphysical.

None of that is historically correct (per Keith’s and my other comments).

Nor is it analytically correct.

Escape from a self-centered mindset is not “consciousness” (self-centered people are also conscious). You can instead call it higher or more or broader or better consciousness (or something), but what distinguishes those two states of mind is not mere consciousness itself.

The crucifixion-resurrection metaphor for this process is a bit weak and misleading and thus not very useful psychotherapeutically or psychoanalytically.

And though habituation is indeed as important as mere information precisely because most of the human mind is not analytically rational, that doesn’t have any relevance to the present article. What is true and what it takes to persuade someone to believe it is true are completely different subjects of discourse.

Finally, the word metaphysics means “after physics” and was coined by Aristotle or his editors to refer to what you do to fill gaps left by empirical physics. Metaphysics therefore always still refers to physics; it is simply a more speculative or less certain physics. And bad metaphysics is meta-physics that is not following the laws of probability or the actual established findings of physics. Good metaphysics is the reverse (see You Know They’re a [Good|Lousy] Philosopher If…).

Information is a physical, not a metaphysical, category because the science of information is well developed empirically and has well established that information cannot even exist (much less be transmitted or comprehended, i.e. have any causal effect on the world at all) without existing in physical form (even potential information must exist physically, in the medium that can be shaped or assembled into actual information). Information is just a new word for what Aristotle called formal causes: the shape or pattern or arrangement of a substance that informationally distinguishes it from any other.

So the only confusion here is yours, inexplicably confusing a distinction between the metaphysical (what a thing is) and epistemological (how do we know what thing it is) with a metaphysical distinction between physical (realized in a substance, which on scientific naturalism means space-time or matter-energy in space-time) and nonphysical (not realized in a substance, and on scientific naturalism, no such things exist), and a completely different distinction, between the physical (as the substance composing a thing) and nonphysical (as the structure of the thing, realized in its substance), i.e. abstractions, concepts, patterns, etc.

Whether abstractions, concepts, patterns, etc. are only ever realized physically is a metaphysical question. But it is not in contradistinction to their only ever being realized physically; that is, rather, one possible metaphysics of them (and on physicalism, is the metaphysics of them).

In scientific terms, you never in your life have ever received any information except physically, and you have never comprehended any information except physically, and you have thus never ever been changed by information except physically.

Your mind is reductively nothing but a physical process of a physical organ (the brain), its comprehensions are nothing but physical computations (with an informational input and output), and information is only ever input physically (sensory signals, usually electrical, linked from a sensory cell to a perceiving neural network) and only ever output physically: your perceptions and comprehensions are physically realized in synaptic activity in the brain, without which those perceptions and comprehensions would not exist and you would not experience them, and nothing else is needed for that to be the case (so there is no role for anything metaphysically nonphysical to play in all this; hence such things don’t exist, only metaphysically physical things do).

Per Keith, that you “can” completely reinterpret a myth to suit some message is not evidence it was ever intended that way. To ascertain what the original intent was, you have to look at all the relevant contextual and causal evidence (a task for historians, with skills emphasized in literary studies).

And generally, reinterpretation is a bad strategy anyway, because the myth will never fit the new interpretation, requiring an elaborate process of ignoring and altering all the information in the original myth. And it is inefficient to do all that work. If you want a new myth, just write a new myth, for the purpose. Then you won’t be stuck with all the elaborate baggage of the old one, and you won’t be supporting excessive reverence for an obsolete or toxic mythology.

Oh dear. They didn’t tell you?

Next time, maybe search my blog before commenting?

You know, as in, rather than assume I didn’t already completely destroy the very inept reply you just linked to, try checking first.

P.S. Unless you are being sarcastic. In which case, please flag it as sarcasm. Text has no affect so it is impossible to tell if you are being serious.

“The crucifixion of Jesus narrative is just a metaphor for the crucifixion of the ego on some level!”

This is not how the vast majority of believers (or unbelievers) view the resurrection. It is proposed and reviewed as a historical event. It is highly unlikely the original gospel authors were writing it specifically as a narrative device. One can choose to read such a metaphor into the story, but that’s just the reader reifying their own beliefs.

“When you “crucify” the ego, it “resurrects” in a new form! A form that recognizes that it is not the center of the fkn universe! If you know, you know!”

Well then you can’t be talking about the resurrection of Jesus, who transforms from a human into monotheistic God (literally the center/sustainer/creator of the universe).

“That’s called consciousness! It requires the involvement of the whole self! Not just the ego! Which means it requires practices, not just information!”

I’m not sure what you mean by practices here. Consciousness does require multiple parts of a brain to be working in some concerted way. However, it does not require ALL parts of the brain to be working toward consciousness. Think of your brain stem keeping your lungs breathing and heart pumping.

“By the way! Don’t you think it’s important to distinguish very clearly between the physical and the metaphysical?

That’s a good distinction to make. I think they are different categories. Metaphysics describes the base form of our reality philosophically. Physical is the referent to something with material dimensions. I’m sure Dr. Carrier has more robust distinction, but I think that hits general use.

“I keep watching physics videos and hearing people talking about “information”! Isn’t “information” a metaphysical rather than physical category? Isn’t that the kind of thing that just creates confusion? In sort of the same way you’re talking about with the natural and supernatural as “metaphysical” rather than “epistemological” categories? (or am I mistaken?)”

How do you understand information? Information doesn’t strike me as metaphysical. Indeed, it only seems to make sense (in my world view, obviously) as some interaction with a material world. A deer leaves an imprint of it’s hooves in the mud, providing information to a hunter tracking it. All of this is material, from the deer, to the mud, to the visual cortex of the hunter, to the pattern processing of what a particular direction and depth of the hoof mean for likely movements. None of that really requires the base of reality to be any one way, nor does information need to be the thing everything else is made out of.

Pack it up buddy, ed feser debunked you years ago! https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2018/02/carrier-on-five-proofs.html?m=1

There’s the classic observation that a UFO is just an unidentified flying objects, so if someone asks you if you believe in UFOs you can easily say “Yes, I think there are flying objects that are not at present identified”. The observation works even though it feels pedantic because it’s a reminder that everyone is leaping to the assumption that these are alien vehicles (or, for the Christian fundamentalist, demons sometimes, depending on the internal consistency of their paranormal worldview – plenty of fundies and even YECs also somehow believe in UFOs and holograms that don’t even seem all that demonic).

In practice, people who tend to accept the paranormal in general do not have any naturalistic or probabilistic resistance to the supernatural. There are scant few people who will really insist that they are okay with believing in UFOS, UN black helicopters, cloning, Bigfoot, etc. but not angels, demons, or ghosts. There’s a reason this stuff is always in the same tabloids and in the same sources.

But I do agree that, if people really thought about the distinction, most people would agree that a UFO is paranormal but not supernatural. I just think people use both largely interchangably because it’s all the same sloppy reasoning.

Reading through your definitions, I wonder whether new-age fraudsters (for lack of a better term) actually try to improve the appeal of their “supernatural” cures by depicting them as “natural” ones.
If I claim that I can heal someone by just thinking about them (or asking a purely mental god to do it for me), this clearly conveys to my audience that this is a supernatural ability or effect, which in turn might trigger some form of scepticism by the part of the audience that believe they are rational thinkers.
If I, on the other hand, sell my audience e.g a physical object (e.g. a “quantum” stone), that is supposed to do the trick by means of some causal mechanisms, that is simply ignored by “mainstream science”, I both appeal to the ego of my customers (who might believe they are smarter and more open-minded) and can increase my margin, since it is easier to sell the same overpriced item over and over again (to e.g. “re-clean” my water and such) than selling e.g. one book where I train how to do magic tricks.