Religous debates and questions [2]

Interesting Petty.
thinking about what you said about the infant brain culling unused brain connections I wonder if that could account for some children having invisible friends, it seems to be quite common. children perceive the world very differently not just because their brains are immature but because they can imagine things so much more acutely than adults. Some childhood experiences seem to etch themselves vividly into our brains, sights and smells from childhood have a profound effect on our adult selves. its not just nostalgia. Being a biological computer is pretty weird, I mean what purpose could humour have in evolution? how could finding jokes funny save our ancestors from being eaten by lions? you could substitute any kind of coping mechanism such as stoic or pragmatic aptitudes, but why would having a sense of humour make evolutionary sense?

This is where my 'mysticism' comes in. I have no mystical tendencies in the traditional sense, but feel the attempts of a 'biological computer' (great phrase) to cope with the world brings out some weird and wonderful things: art, humor, and feelings of the mystical. These are to be enjoyed and marvelled at. They are our contributions to an otherwise cold and inhuman universe.

I think they are the natural opposite to being terrified and having a release from that kind of stress. Also, they help promote co-operation by giving a means for a common ground... especially finding things funny. I think as the human mind has become more complicated and stressed, so have the release mechanisms.

You can look it as a cold evaluation or as a great by product of the other things that we spend most of our time stressing about.

And the whole perception of reality thing is interesting in itself. We have evolved to perceive in this way, but I guess the true nature of what we are perceiving may just be a mystery until we somehow manage to experience in different ways. And let's leave the quantum mechanics part of reality to that thread!!

Interesting Petty.- Figg

{{{Thanks Figg- I thought my post had perhaps just got me bug-eyed looks and people keeping their distance!
Regards imaginary friends there was tree at the end of my road over a small stream that I used to sit in for hours as a very young child, and we talked, it used to make me laugh a lot that old tree.
The question I now wonder was if that was pure imagination on my part, or was it that I was interpreting the information I was getting from the tree differently to how I later came to do so as an adult. Given subsequent experiences in my days of perceptional experimentation I can certainly say the ways in which we are capable of interpreting the sensory information are far wider than the everyday way we tend to do so.}}}

Lance, I agree humour is a release mechanism, but humans had other forms of stress release available to them such as a propensity to dance, story telling, play, sex, and sleep, there are other pleasure hormone releasing mechanisms such as sunlight and certain foods too. these are all evolutionary stress busters, why would we need humour too? I don't know the answer to this question but it makes me wonder what purpose it serves other than purely for pleasure. I know some animals have a form of laughter too when they are tickled, but why blonde jokes?

halfwise wrote:This is where my 'mysticism' comes in.  I have no mystical tendencies in the traditional sense, but feel the attempts of a 'biological computer' (great phrase) to cope with the world brings out some weird and wonderful things: art, humor, and feelings of the mystical.  These are to be enjoyed and marvelled at.  They are our contributions to an otherwise cold and inhuman universe.

I suppose this is why we all love the Kirk Spock relationship, Kirk tries to explain the human condition to the incarnation of the cold inhuman universe.

{{{Further to my previous comments about my trip experiences, and how that has effected what for better word you call my spiritual views, the Imperial College London have been running a study of the effects of LSD and what its doing by putting people who are tripping into a brain scan. The results are interesting-

'Scientists found the drug broke down barriers between parts of the brain which usually control separate functions like vision, hearing and movement.
The findings also suggest the drug can lead to a better sense of wellbeing as the effects wear off, meaning LSD could be possibly used in some treatments.
As the volunteers in the study started to "trip out" with hallucinations, scans showed they received information from many parts of the brain.
Regions that were once separate sometimes "spoke with each other".
David Nutt, a senior researcher on the study, said: "This is to neuroscience what the Higgs boson was to particle physics.
Often people have instantaneous insight into certain things about the world, themselves, or others.'
mages of the brain under a hallucinogenic state showed almost the entire organ lit up with activity.
"We see this explosion of communication," said Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, from the Department of Medicine at Imperial, who led the study.
The visual cortex became much more active with the rest of the brain, and blood flow to visual regions also increased, which the researchers believe correlates with the hallucinations reported by volunteers.
"Our results suggest that this effect underlies the profound altered state of consciousness that people often describe during an LSD experience," Carhart-Harris added.
"It is also related to what people sometimes call 'ego-dissolution,' which means the normal sense of self is broken down and replaced by a sense of reconnection with themselves, others and the natural world. This experience is sometimes framed in a religious or spiritual way -- and seems to be associated with improvements in well-being after the drug's effects have subsided."

On the left normal brain activity- on the right brain activity on LSD




The connecting up of different parts of the brain to function together would explain how I was able to perceive sound as visual colours, and it may even possibly explain how I could see long distances in the dark by combining all the sensory input into a purely visual output.
Doesn't explain the telepathy though or why people who trip together often have shared experiences. }}}}

{{Add to the above- a better picture showing the differences in brain activity between the placebo group in the study and those on LSD}}}

{{{To add further thoughts to this debate, which I um appear to be having with myself, but when has that ever stopped me!- I had some further thoughts concerning the above experiment/results and the idea of self.
Call it will what you will, ego, self, I, whatever you call it its the same thing. Its who you are, its the voice in your head, its your likes and dislikes, its how you perceive the world, process it and react to it- its you.

But you didn't have a you when you came into this world at birth.
Unlike the majority of mammals humans are not born with their brains already wired up for the essentials.
A giraffe for example laid down the crucial brain networks in the final stages in the womb, this means when it is born it is, despite the complexity of those legs, ready to walk very quickly after birth. Unlike a human brain which takes years to learn the same thing with less complicated limbs and weight distribution.
The difference as that other recent study showed- is that humans come out with everything wired up and then cull it back to what they need for their environment and social grouping.

And somewhere during this process we also make ourselves up- we start to form this ego, this sense of individuality.

Now to take this back to my own 'beliefs' on this matter (for wont of a better word) in the Casteneda books the shaman character Don Juan calls this construct, this 'self', a tyrant- a small man trying to fill a big space. Its a sort of filter and gate-keeper.

But and here's the catch- its gone out of control, taken over the show, become a dictator, a tyrant. Once its honed down to what it is, it never wants to relinquish that- and so denies us those wider perceptional experiences the human animal is quite capable of.

The above experiment would seem to indicate something trippers have always known- that under that influence there is no sense of 'I' of being an individual- there is just awareness and experience of awareness. And its far, far, wider than the awareness of everyday conciousness and with, it feels like, infinite more possibilities.

This was also shown in the above experiment, and it is speculated based on that evidence that its down to the neurons which normally work together but in isolation from the rest of the brain, no longer firing in synch and alone, but with the rest of the brain being in use with it- 'self' is dissolved in the wider activity of the whole, like salt in the sea.

The evidence would seem to point towards Don Juan's gatekeeper/filter self- the small man- see the image of a 'normal' functioning brain above with its small areas of activity, as opposed to the true self of the entire larger whole working unfiltered- see the LSD scan.

Or to put it another way- you are not who you think you are- you are just a construct created by a narrowing down of possible perceptions in infancy to a specialised few based on external input through the senses and interacting with the perception positions of others.

But its really just a small bit of you, pretending to be the whole thing. Its a survival tool- to refine down to what is immediate and important- like how to kill and eat and not end up being eaten, but once it got hold of language and could internalise itself in words- that's when it started getting out of control.
To go back to the analogue of self dissolving in the activity of the whole like salt in the sea, human individuality is like taking a grain of the salt and thinking its the sea.

Take a look about you, think about 'you', right now does everything you are feeling and seeing seem complete? Is it not a whole, utter and absolute, with sight, smell, touch, hearing and thought all working together to produce a complete experience with nothing missing?

And yet its not. Its just a bit of the possible ways you could be interpreting those inputs, and maybe its not even all the inputs you are receiving, as your filter/gatekeeper of the self can bar what it wants from your perception as thats part of its evolutionary function- its just gone unchecked is the problem because we don't even realise its doing it- the sense of a total world that it presents is so complete feeling that we have forgotten it could ever be any other way. It doesn't even occur to us that we are not getting the whole picture.

Its also of note that nearly all mystic based religions, from shamanism to Buddhism, put a great stress on getting rid of the ego before any enlightenment can occur. We really are our own worse enemy it seems.

In order to access wider perceptions available to us, we first have to dismantle the ego and take away its keys. LSD and other hallucinogens do this, but as I have said before they are chaotic (an din my view detrimental long term to mental well being), its very much like dreaming in that sense in that you have no control- its easy to see why evolution refined down, if it were like tripping then the hunter would be constantly distracted by other stimuli- the way time is passing, a pattern of light, what the plants are talking about, the haze of vibrating colours, then get eaten by a sabre-tooth tiger- its a state in which the perceiver simply drifts seemingly on the winds of the universe (of course the shamans would say that the trick is to enlist the tyrant to do your work- get it to work as a filter like its supposed to and turn the chaos into a coherent whole perception, same as it does for everyday awareness, thus having individuality and fluidity of perception at the same time- but thats a whole other trick! }}}}}

{{{Well you bloody well have to discuss with yourself when you are not even actually here! }}}

{{{But I am here- except to Them, not You, I was hiding from you but that when I was illegally posting Who stuff, now I don't have to do that any more the encryption is only for Them, because there is a Reason. Honestly I don't see what's so hard about this! }}}}

whats the bloody reason?

I have always thought that my sense of self is limited and somehow trapped into a narrow confine. Most of my time is spent on 'trivia' like going shopping or feeding lots of cats, (although being fed isnt trivial to the little buggers obviously), I feel bogged down by ordinary day to day stuff, I feel like there is so much more out there to experience and something is missing, but I don't know what it is. Very occasionally in my life I have had what you could call being taken out of my normal range of emotions, into the unfamiliar, tantalising glimpses of what I could be experiencing all the time, if it wasn't being damped down by ordinary life and day to day boring things.

Figgy - you sound ripe for coming on one of my challenges. I think it would be a mini voyage if discovery!

I had to go over your post again Petty & swallow it in bite sized pieces For the most part I agree with what you say. I have often thought how hopeless as a human we all are from birth. Compared to other creatures who are up & out of it in hours. We take years to learn even simple things. We deny ourselves tasks to do because our sense of fear kicks in, ie: Learning to drive, or swim, Yet, other creatures just throw themselves into the water & paddle off ( they dont jump in a Fiat tho & drive off ) I wonder where this little "voice" comes from, my hidden twin, Instinctively I know I can swim, physically I shit a brick going near the sea. I stop myself by my own self. And changes, we all change over our time. What we loved as kids we cringe as adults, we change our looks, we change fashion, we change the front room round Internally Ive never felt like staying still, inside I feel itchy. You could say we have the sense of Fear as a protection system, that thye brain looks after itself & its preservation abouve all else but,...why ? where does this instinct come from ? why should we protect ourselves ? are we not over sized micro-organisms, there's enough of us on this planet, a few bumped off wont hurt ? I am sure we are capable of so much more than we realize. To me the mind is like a stack of Russian dolls or that dam picture of a picture within a picture that just goes on & on.

Lancebloke wrote:Figgy - you sound ripe for coming on one of my challenges. I think it would be a mini voyage if discovery!

unfortunately Lance the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. My back problems limits the amount of adventuring I could probably do, so I couldn't sail the desert on a bumpy camel, or ski down Vesuvius on the seat of my pants. I must admit that I don't like roughing it or too long dusty tiring travelling, and camping is my nemesis. I know that travel does alter the mental state and jolt it out of its comfort zone, seeing new wonders is exciting. I don't need anything very exotic to do that though, just walking alone by the sea or in a forest can help with meditating on so called higher stuff. Saying that though the few times when I have glimpsed parts of my emotions I never knew existed, the landscape was so beautiful it made me cry with happiness, which was while travelling in new countries. It was like I was shocked into a hidden part of my brain, it was temporary but even though it lasted 3 days its better to have felt it once rather than never.

You covered 2 points there.

First is the roughing it.... there isn't much sense of achievement doing something easy. When you have to push yourself past limits you didn't know you could... that is awesome!

Second is the seeing things in new places. As much as I love walking out and about in places I know well, you never get the same rush as when you first discover something new and amazing.

Other thing that is great about the silly stuff I do is having that bond with people, even if only for a week. Sometimes it is just that that pulls you through.

You should try something! You may only do it once but you should do it.

thing is Lance that I have already done the roughing it bit, a lot of it, but when you get to a certain age you kind of think of roughing it with a shudder and go for comfort all the way. Whereas before I was quite content to sleep on floors or camp in muddy fields in a hurricane, or travel round Europe with £5 quid and dirty undies, these days 5 star hotels with dainty cakes and spa treatments seem so much more desirable.

Meh.

I predict one day it will happen, maybe not for 20 years but it will. oldfartdom beckons.

so in 8 billion years when the Red Giant sun has swallowed the Earth, what happens to God?

You think God is tied to earth? He'll be roasting marshmallows.

God doesn't exist.... so nothing.

what happens to God at the end of the Universe?