Given some recent interaction, I feel like I need to take it from the top and lay out my ideas yet again. Of course, I keep working on refining my words and welcome all challenges.
From Steve Daut’s Buddha Science
Chapter 9, Conclusion, Pooling our thoughts.¶b1 “So where do we go from here? If our goal is to understand what Reality is, as we stated at the beginning of this book, it may seem like a fool’s errand. …”
I don’t think it’s a fool’s errand. It begins with a one, two punch.
Appreciating the Human Mind ~ Physical Reality divide, and gathering a better awareness of yourself via an evolutionary understanding of where your consciousness comes from, namely your own body.
Consider your legs and feet, arms and hands, like no other creature, carrying a superb skull. Your body is populated with sensing organs and topped with the most complex organ in all of known creation. Your brain orchestrates the show, that is your body interacting with the world and itself, with your consciousness being the internal chatter you hear and more that you don’t hear.
Consciousness is no cosmic gift to Earth, it’s endless generations of biological change in reaction to what was happening here on Earth. How do I know? From getting to know the evolutionary record, it becomes self-evident with time.
Then comes our mind, your thoughts, your me, myself and I, the thing called consciousness, or soul, it is produced by your living biological body/brain, and the better you understand that, the healthier and content you are apt to be.
Consciousness is your Evolutionary heritage. For any creature to function it needed to communicate with itself and also to command its various components to do the correct job, at the correct moments, or it wouldn’t have ever survived to begin with. That’s the bottomline, philosophical pronouncements not withstanding, we have consciousness because we could have never evolved without it!
I mean neuroscientists are filming consciousness in action and it’s still not enough to satisfied philosopher’s impossibly “hard problem’ contrivance. For me, that’s an example of self-absorbed and expecting Nature to prove itself to us. I prefer pragmatic interpretation of the evidence at hand while remaining ready to incorporate new information as it becomes available.
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Who are you? . . . . . . . Who am I?
I am an evolved biological thinking machine, the product of Earth’s Evolutionary processes.
Consciousness is a product of my biology
Consciousness is the inside reflection of my body communicating with itself, as it goes about its tasks.
Consciousness is like a cloak draped over my physical body, linked in a choreography until death.
Biology creating consciousness, is no more fantastical, than iron and a magnet producing electricity. Meta-physical skyhooks not needed. Humility and continued scientific studying is doing just fine in describing biological mental connections. (Deep thinking philosophers with their rhetorical logic games not withstanding).
Recognizing, then appreciating the, Human Mindscape ~ Physical Reality divide.
Recognizing that for us to exist at all, means that the universe and Earth flowed down one specific reality, regardless of what we humans want to think. (Our’s is to observe, not assume.)
Are science and religion simply belief systems of a different flavor?
Religion is all about the human mindscape itself, with its wonderful struggles, fears, spiritual undercurrents, needs and stories we create to give our live’s meaning and make it worth living, or at least bearable.
Science seeks to objectively learn about our physical world, but we should still recognize all our understanding is embedded within and constrained by our mindscape.
The scientific process is basically a set of rules for gathering and assessing our observations in an honest, open and disciplined manner - that all who understand science can participate in and trust because it is a community of skeptical experts who are always looking over each others shoulders.
Science is predicated on the notion of fidelity to honesty & truth matters !
Religion is predicated on human wants & needs & insecurities.
What’s the point?
Religions, Science, political beliefs, heaven, hell, art, even God they are all products of the human mindscape, generations of imaginings built upon previous generations of imaginings, all the way down.
That’s not to say they are the same thing, they are not! Though I do think both are equally valid human endeavors, but fundamentally qualitatively different.
Religion deals with the inside of our minds, hearts and souls, Science does its best to objectively understand the physical world beyond all that, doing its best to quarantine ego out of the deliberations.
Physical Reality is the physical world of atoms, molecules, universal laws of physics and Earth’s laws of nature. It is Earth’s dance between geology and biology and time and Earth’s evolving creatures, (and one in particular that learned to contemplate the universe and its short life), along with everything else around us.
Human Mindscape is all that goes on inside of our minds. The landscape of your thoughts and desires and impulses and those various voices and personalities who inhabit our thoughts. The ineffable ideas that our hands can turn into physical creations, that changed our planet.
