--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Share Long <sharelong60@...> wrote: > > Salyavin, I very much enjoy that last paragraph of yours. Are you saying > that the idea of self knowledge, which is supposedly the sine qua non of > being human, is erroneous? And if it is, could it be that such is just > another stepping stone to who knows what?
I guess it depends what you mean by self knowledge, our sense that we are a solid, non-changing person is wrong in just about every way - our memories fool us by changing to suit how we feel now, our reactions to things change without us being aware of it, it's hard to say what the "us" actually is. And our perception of the world is unreliable, it *looks* real to us and we'll all probably swear that what we see is what is happening but it's all filtered subconsciously according to what we value, people and situations are interpreted differently every day but we think we stay constant throughout our lives. A fair summary of it all can be found in here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ego-Trick-Julian-Baggini/dp/1847082734 I like Baggini, he makes a lot of sense (to me anyway) this is based on solid psychological research, there are all sorts of experiments you can do to show that what we think we are and how we see the world are often two completely different things. I think our brains, like everything else, is a cobbled together bodge that works as well as it can under the circumstances, but it evolved and therefore carries with it all the previous uses that it was put, our internal abstract metaphor generating machine (or the endless self concious rabbiting we do) arrived quite late and is the only thing that seperates us from the rest of the beasts. The opinions this mechanism has of itself are amazing, we've invented so many ideas about how our minds are at one with creation or god's will at some fundamental level or part of some destination that the universe has for itself as some sort of ultimate expression of matter. Like most I find these ideas appealing? Why that might be is what interests me and it's all joined up with how consciousness works to create an idea that because something seems profound doesn't mean it's more or less important than a more run-of- the-mill everyday experience. I'm thinking LSD or TM here because perhaps the impressiveness of the experience is down to its freshness, the early TM experiences are best because they are new and wake up a jaded system with their dynamism, but what are they? Spasms of neurotransmitters? Or maybe they are all the brain can manage when it's in certain states and our love of novelty ascribes more to them than they deserve. One thing is for sure and that is that evolution can go both ways, obviously we can become a society like that in the movie "Idiocracy" or perhaps there is a next step but like every one taken so far it's impossible to see what the next one could be or what would actually constitute an improvement. What would we have to lose or gain to be more psychologically evolved? To be like some sort of serene Star Trek superbeings we'd have to lose a lot of our animal instincts and as they underpin how the bits of our minds we like operate, we aren't going to be getting rid of them anytime soon, not without major surgery. Will meditation result in some sort measurably higher being? It hasn't with me yet..... Another book I always recommend is this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicameral-Mind/dp/0618057072 I have no idea if it is true but it's got to be the most original theory on human self - awareness yet. It's not just wild fancy either, Jaynes has a lot of evidence to back it up from ancient literature and neuroscience, what isn't clear is whether it really supports the theory or is coincidental. But it's iconoclastic and changes they way you think about everything so it's worth a read just for the fun of doubting everything anyone ever told you. > > The weirdest thing about brains is the way they can hold ideas > about themselves that contradict what they are. We can believe > we have souls that reincarnate or go to some weird paradise after dying. What > amazing things we are. I've no doubt that it could > all be explained down to the merest protein or synapse, how ideas > are generated and memories formed, how consciousness lets us think > there is a definite "us" inside our heads looking out - eveything > you need to know, and half the world would dismiss it outright > because it wasn't what they wanted to hear. >
