On 20 Jan 2015, at 21:43, Kim Jones wrote:
On 20 Jan 2015, at 11:43 pm, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com>
wrote:
These models tend to have something in common: they suggest that we
are not what we appear to be, that we are not mortal or immortal
because time itself is a dream. That there is only one
consciousness and we are all fundamentally the same entity, from
the amoeba on. Quantum immortality. This sort of thing. They start
with consciousness as the brute fact, as you posit.
I have no intellectual reason to reject such ideas, but I
definitely feel a resistance to them.
Do you equally feel a resistance to the mainstream, standard,
canonical, textbook, safe, establishment versions of reality? I only
ask because it appears there are definitely good intellectual
reasons to stand up and challenge some of those.
So it also occurred to me that believing in such things appears
maladaptive. Intuitively, such beliefs may lead you to be less
preoccupied with survival and reproduction.
That is a thought that has crossed my mind, too. People who sit
around pulling bongs and studying shadows on cave walls tend not to
go on and have business empires, large families and lots of
possessions and become captains of industry, no. Survival and
reproduction is indeed the name of the game. I also note that we are
currently surviving and reproducing ourselves straight to oblivion
and catastrophe so, Houston - we have a problem.
So it's not so surprising that we evolved to reject such ideas but
this leads to a terrible doubt: can we trust ourselves to do science?
While the exact and human sciences remain at loggerheads I would say
no. Science is forever a blunt instrument because it wants to say
there are places where science cannot go. So, the Aristotelian
universe seems to run out of steam at a certain point and leaves the
important stuff about the human soul to madmen, criminals,
charlatans and the merely credulous.
Right.
Can we trust ourselves to do science?
Well, should have we trust going out of the ocean? Or of the mother
womb?
The entire idea of having a brain put us in that situation, and that
is even why science by itself is often considered as a dangerous
thing, but it is not more dangerous than life, it is part of life. It
is part of the infinite trip from G to G*, and it can be fatal,
indeed. Welcome to the insecure world of free thinking number, where
absolute security is already the same as death.
That is why we have a left (searching security) and a right (searching
freedom): we want both, but they are incompatible, so we dovetail
between them, infinitely.
Bruno
K
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