the Sun, the Moon, the stars
bacteria, plants, animals
more properly the three domains...
Friday, July 30, 2010
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Magical Thinking
Despite finding money under my pillow, I never really believed in the Tooth Fairy. The Easter Bunny and Santa Claus were funny fictional characters for a kid to contemplate, not magical beings.
In my twenties I became a voluntary slave to a belief system utilizing the common dualistic or rather trinary idea that humans are composed of three separate entities -- the body, the mind and what Westerners commonly call the "soul."
I have come to be a monist.
The distinction of mind as separate from brain seems to me artificial or semantic, a matter of definition. We invented a word to describe what we perceive as our own consciousness. The word "mind," and the concept, have their uses. But is consciousness something separate from brain or is it an attribute of a functioning brain? It has been described as an "emergent property," a very interesting concept. The difficulty in examining consciousness, is that consciousness is the very thing that is doing the examining.
Let's move on to the soul, sometimes called immortal soul, just to emphasize its purported indestructibility, and to remind believers that it would be spending eternity in either Heaven or Hell. I gather it is supposed to be some sort of consciousness that can inhabit a body, but is independent of and does not require a body for its existence.
This is a wish fantasy. People don't want to die, don't like the idea of death, so they cling to fantasies of indestructibility.
When I was ten, it was fun to read Superman Comics. No one ever confused it with reality. That lack of confusion did not make Superman less fun. If anything it made it more fun, because if people started believer Superman was real, then the whole subject of Superman would acquire a weird, worrisome aspect.
The Easter Bunny is not controversial because no one takes it seriously. There is no more evidence to support the existence of any consciousness after death, than there is for the Bunny. Yet people cling to the belief in it.
In my twenties I became a voluntary slave to a belief system utilizing the common dualistic or rather trinary idea that humans are composed of three separate entities -- the body, the mind and what Westerners commonly call the "soul."
I have come to be a monist.
The distinction of mind as separate from brain seems to me artificial or semantic, a matter of definition. We invented a word to describe what we perceive as our own consciousness. The word "mind," and the concept, have their uses. But is consciousness something separate from brain or is it an attribute of a functioning brain? It has been described as an "emergent property," a very interesting concept. The difficulty in examining consciousness, is that consciousness is the very thing that is doing the examining.
Let's move on to the soul, sometimes called immortal soul, just to emphasize its purported indestructibility, and to remind believers that it would be spending eternity in either Heaven or Hell. I gather it is supposed to be some sort of consciousness that can inhabit a body, but is independent of and does not require a body for its existence.
This is a wish fantasy. People don't want to die, don't like the idea of death, so they cling to fantasies of indestructibility.
When I was ten, it was fun to read Superman Comics. No one ever confused it with reality. That lack of confusion did not make Superman less fun. If anything it made it more fun, because if people started believer Superman was real, then the whole subject of Superman would acquire a weird, worrisome aspect.
The Easter Bunny is not controversial because no one takes it seriously. There is no more evidence to support the existence of any consciousness after death, than there is for the Bunny. Yet people cling to the belief in it.
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