I think I’ve honed it down pretty well, it’s gone from the I hate this chaotic poop, to flowing nicely, yeah baby, now we talk’n, er. writing.
SEPTEMBER 8, 2021
Evolution Flips Abrahamic God Outside In. (workbook #d)
One of the things I’ve gotten out of my life long enthusiasm for learning about my human body, my mind/spirit, other people, other creatures and landscapes, Earth and her Evolution, is that my understanding of the traditional Abrahamic God has been flipped outside in.
I came to realize “God” isn’t to be found out there in the heavens. Our “Gods” are to be found deep within ourselves and our evolutionary roots, our DNA being testament to the existence of these roots. As is our human ego, with its origins going way back into our mammalian heritage.
This evolutionary ground up perspective has instilled an Earth Centrist attitude because this living planet is my touch stone with reality and her evolutionary historyinforms my day in every way.
Take a moment to consider that we humans, you, me, are actually born out of a parade of generations, before generations. The number of our grandparents is inconceivable. Try imagining where it all began from where we are today. Humanity is a fulfillment of life’s ageless way of striving to improve perceptual, manipulatory and processing abilities, in order to better live a better day.
On a personal level a couple months back I hit on words that helped me grasp specifically what it was in me that made me such a unique individual. I possess a genuine visceral awareness for being an element in the flow of Earth’s Evolution - and that changes everything about how I perceive today and tomorrow. Whether by a Creator, or by loaded dice, is irrelevant, either way we are the product of deep time moving ever forward with determination.
I am deeply grateful for being the eyes of the universe - a creature that can reflect on the wonder that is Earth and my own spark of being here within all that majesty. An appreciation for the Pageant of Evolution that goes well beyond the typical mental post card most possess.
(Write4u, I’m not ignoring you, we’ve has a bit of a crisis at the library district and it’s been meeting after meeting, dealing with poop we shouldn’t have to deal with, plus need to catch up, keep up on the other stuff, both gardens and my blogging - running out of month.)
Who is “God,” but a creation of our unique complex human minds dealing with our day to days?
Think about it, because that really is the most fundamental answer to The Grand Questions of God.
The who, what, where, why, how of God that people have been grappling with since forever.
It’s such a profoundly simple answer, yet people avoid it with amazing alacrity and endless dog-chasing-tail rhetorical gymnastics that never arrive at any conclusion(s).
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It’s not a “Body-Mind problem” it’s an “Ego-God issue.”
Perhaps the most interesting lesson I’ve learned from my Hoffman adventureis that as I’ve followed the philosophical roots of “dualism” back through Descartes (1600s) and on past Anselm (1000s), one thing has become clear, the entire philosophical edifice of this Mind-Body “Problem” was formed out of religious god fearing thinking, (What I’ve come to call the Abrahamic Mindset that gave us the three major religions - to be explained in more detail in a later post.) , with their self-serving patriarchal mentality, heaven and hell, male domination, female subserviency, along with branding Dualism’s hard boundaries and its need for a sense of certitude into our minds and onto our expectations.
A need for certainty that allows for assumption to be paraded as facts, rather than being satisfied with acknowledging our limits and that today’s mysteries will be resolved as future evidence comes to light.
This Abrahamic worldview perceives people as isolated objects, not only from this planet, but each other, even from ourselves. The other creatures we live with and the landscapes we exist within, are treated with contempt and wanton disregard.
Regarding the “Mind-Body Problem,”
Dr. Solms makes a wonderful analogy that highlights the error being made:
Question: Was it the lightning or thunder that killed the golfer?
It’s a meaningless question.
Lightning and thunder are simply different aspects of the same phenomena.
Our Mind and consciousness is the interior reflection of our living body/brain (both its interior happenings and external interaction with the environment). We simply cannot have one without the other. …
We are embedded within an interconnected web of life. We are creatures who are the direct products of Earth’s Pageant of Evolution.Why isn’t that reflected in modern philosophical discourse?
Appreciating the divide between our thoughts and physical reality we live in. Learning to appreciate the Deep-Time happenings during Earth’s Evolution puts an entirely different richer light upon our interior experience. An awareness that encompasses the whole of time, and this planet that created us, and the pageant of creatures that preceded us.
It gives us a deeper (solid) appreciation for our relationship not just with Earth but also the continuity of life on a grand scale. Life is good, life is precious, but death is no enemy, painful though it may be. Death is part of the cycle that brings forth new life.
Revel in the pageant you are blessed enough to be witnessing while you can!
As for God?
Who is “God,” but a creation of our unique complex human minds dealing with our day to days? …
I agree totally, I just never had to deal with it because I never believed in a god to begin with.
The concept is “alien” to me. I believe in a mathematical universe and that is a diametrically opposed but logically defensible concept.
What’s that mean, aren’t we forced to deal with in uncountable ways simply because religion and it’s hangover infuses so much of society and human thinking?
Heck philosophy is still more hung up on the religious questions than actually absorbing and dealing what it means to be creatures created by Earth’s Evolutionary processes.
Some simply substitute math for god and call it profound.
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What’s that mean, aren’t we forced to deal with in uncountable ways simply because religion and its hangover infuses so much of society and human thinking?
It depends on your formative environment. My family were all atheists and god was never mentioned in daily life. It had no place in our home.
The Netherlands is high on the list of atheist countries.
Heck philosophy is still more hung up on the religious questions than actually absorbing and dealing what it means to be creatures created by Earth’s Evolutionary processes.
That is somewhat exaggerated. Religion is purely man-made and passed on by rote and ritual. When you do not belong to a religious social milieu, religion is not part of your life.
It’s true that the fundamental fight or flight instinct is a major part of evolution and that involves the expectation of unseen or unidentified dangers, but to my knowledge the only animals that actually imagine a specific agency are hominids.
This “controlled hallucination” in humans is practiced and exquisitely developed by Tibetan Buddhism, which actually creates spiritual agents called Tulpas, although it’s really a part of the greater human Theosophy, the creation of gods.
Some simply substitute math for god and call it profound.
That does not follow at all.
Mathematics is not a philosophy. It is a form of universal logic (input → function -->output), and I don’t see how religion can be called a form of inherent universal logic. Calculus produces results, prayer doesn’t.
In fact, mathematics is the very opposite of faith.
When religion infuses the legal and power structure of your society it impacts your life - pretending you are above it all is silly.
Take woman’s right to their own self-defense and sovereignty over their own bodies. You can be as atheists, or absolutely disconnected from the god notion, but you’re still stuck obeying their rules and regulation, or having consequences to deal with.
I fully disconnected from the god concept in my mid twenties, and by my thirties I was done with worrying about it. Still I’m part of this society, even if I’ve striven to keep it off-sides and far away from cities.
But still I constantly need to take other’s faith in god into consideration. Yeah being a member of society requires some sacrifices, so I deal with it. Having to deal with it, indicates
Define that.
Great so here’s why I hate Seth falling back on his intellectually oh so lazy “Hallucination” metaphor about how we visualize and conceptualize our physical world.
The world, Earth is solid, it is there, your healthy brain is in a state of constant feedback, mirroring, estimating, comparing, precisely because it knows that the reality our body lives within is solid as hell and needs to be accurately accounted for, or you die. No hallucination there!
The hallucination that comes from chanting, dancing, focus, drugs, now that is an imagined awareness, and that is what the word “hallucination” was invented to define.
Processing our sensory inputs deserves a more enlightened and descriptive coining.
Tru dat.
It’s the people and their rapturous adulation that turns it into just another god.
God’s are always the product of the mind - hallucinations as you say.
Well sure, mathematics is a fantastical mental tool, and a window upon the nature of Nature. But some try to imbue it with more.
Again, not sure if I’m understanding your meaning here. I’m going to put up a link, but it doesn’t deal directly with this issue, but the guy who is speaking has discussed it before. In one of his other lectures, he said that believer and non-believer scholars agree that early religions were related to our hyper-agency detection. This would go back to our pre-hominid roots, when we were surviving by believing some swaying of grass was something that could eat us. I think that goes for most animals with fight or flight instincts.
Also, put this link up to show someone discussing religion starting with a discussion of evolution.
Hmm, there’s a key point. Do we know that? I imagine my thoughts are in my head, but that’s because I was told that’s where they are. We still have “gut” and “heart” feelings in our language, because that’s where it seemed thoughts were coming from. So that mutual “hallucination” (maybe “agreement” is the better word) has changed.
I do think there is some solid reality, although it has relativity of time, and particles that pop in an out of existence, but I have evolved to focus on things like local gravity and types of ground under my feet. But, here’s the thing, I’m not always right, and I think that’s where gods come in, a way to let my mind focus on survival, and not worry about ultimate justice or the uncertain future. Any currently available version of that is not workable for me, but the desire to have it is still there.
… the physical fact that humans were created out of Earth’s evolving biosphere.
Science shows us that we belong to the nurturing mammalian branch of one of Earth’s amazing animal kingdoms. Yet, it’s undeniable that something quite unique happened around six million years ago when certain apes took a wild improbable evolutionary turn.
By and by, besides the marvel of our two hands, we developed two feet and legs, that could stand tall and run for hours, combined with keen eyes and a growing brain that learned rapidly and remembered.
During this period our brain physically morphed in some significant ways that enabled it to host a profound leap in cognitive information processing, storage and retrieval ability. On the outside hominids learned to make tools, hunt, fish, and select plants, plus they mastered fire for cooking and better living.
On the inside our brains were growing and benefiting from the new super nourishment while human curiosity and adventures started filling and stretching our Mindscapes with experiences, questions, and knowledge beyond anything the “natural” physical Earth ever knew.
By Mindscape, I mean the product of all that our body/brain perceives and processes, which of course, evolutionarily speaking, was dependent on our brain’s hardware keeping pace with and driving the ever increasing volume of information and thoughts.
While the human mind and spirit seem ineffable mysteries, they are also of tremendous consequence and real-world physical power. They drove our growing ability to study and manipulate our world; to communicate and record our experiences; and to formulate explanations for a world full of mysteries, threats, wonders and dreams.
People learned to think and gossip and paint pictures upon the canvas of cave walls, and even better, upon the canvas of each other’s imaginations. We’ve been adding to our mind’s awareness and complexity ever since.
Of course, while all this was going on our extraordinary human mind was also beginning to wonder about the ‘Why’ of the world it observed and the difficult, fragile, short lives we were allotted.
In seeking comfort and answers to unknowable questions it seems inevitable that Gods would inhabit our Mindscape. I suspect inspired by buried memories of being coddled within mom’s protective loving bosom those first couple years of life.
No doubt these “Gods” enabled further successes, though not through super-natural interventions, rather through their ability to form, conform, reform & transform the Mindscapes of the people beginning to congregate. Thus, combining pragmatic civil societal needs with universally felt, but keenly personal questions, fears, and dreams.
During the middle ages tribal stories, accepted ancient doctrines, and religious “truths” were no longer enough to satisfy our Mindscape’s growing desire for ever better understanding and power over our destinies and the biosphere that sustains us.
The human mind took another tremendous leap forward in awareness with the Intellectual Enlightenment and the birth of serious disciplined scientific study. Science’s success was dazzling in its ability to learn about, control and manipulate Earth’s physical resources and to transform entire environments.
Science was so successful that today most believe we are the masters of our world and too many have fallen into the hubristic trap of believing our ever fertile Mindscape is reality itself. … (source)
Do we know what, that reality at our macroscopic scale is solid as a hammer smashing your finger. Seems to me that is self evident, since all our experiences reinforce the fundamental fact.
Live does seem to have an innate desire to continue and prosper, we can see that at the microscopic level and everything above.
What kind of “knowing” are you referring to - the philosophers love of mind games and deconstruction and infinity mirrors and endless debate without resolution, or your hands “knowing” as it pulls away from that falling hammer, before it even has a chance to ask itself a single logical question about the rapidly unfolding situation?
That is purely relative to the size of the observer. An atom consist of more space than matter. A neutrino does not recognize a solid at all.
To a water strider water is an elastic solid.
The point is that if you are small enough solidness disappears .
At quantum scale there are no solids. There are only “values” arranging themselves in patterns.
It is the relative density of the atomic and molecular patterns that acquire emergent solidness, fluidness, or gaseousness.
Interestingly, all conditions ending with xxxx-ness are emergent qualities of specific atomic and molecular pattern arrangements.
Yeah, the quantum scale, smaller than atoms. Of course all of us ‘know’ that atoms exist in a realm where it takes ~5,000,000,000,000 of the little suckers to fill the dance floor that one lousy itty bitty head of a pin creates, in our realm.
That is why I keep dismissing it when it comes to understanding anything about humans and our condition. I can’t understand how (or why) so many remain totally fixated on it, and pretend that its weirdness can be easily transferred up to our macroscopic realm.
The gist of the quantum realm is easily understood, we just love complicating it, and infusing it with all sorts contrived mystery, that’s more about human entertainment and selling copy, than justified by a simple assessment of facts. Wonderful mind candy for the intellectually gifted, while the real world has been busy destroying itself.
It’s gone from an intellectual thing to a moral thing with me. I’m more concerned about humans and not unanswerable questions that have actually been answered plenty well enough within current understanding, if only we took the time to absorb all we’ve already learned in a superficial disconnected sort of way.
Guess I’m searching for a way that might help people to reconnect with Earth’s physical reality, …
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I imagine it differently my mind permeates my body, even if the focal point feels like my head, guess eyes, ears, nose, and mouth help that impression along, although guts plays a roll, let’s not forget south of border, that plays a huge role in background mental state with the power to totally dominate the background hum of our mind) who’s moods have a way to dominate everything else going on in your day. It goes way beyond simply sex. Heck, even my general homeostatic situation, all those balances that must be maintained, influences our frame of mind.
Meaning I can’t divorce my mind from my body, sure the brain is the headquarters, so to speak, but it is intimately linked to my body, one can’t exist without the other, the natural mind requires that living body to function. Plus rest of our living body influences our state of mind and even how we process information - so a dissociation is impossible for me to visualize. (Here I disregard products of modern technological magic that can keep isolated tissues alive, since those aren’t actually natural living systems, they are freaks of nature dependent on the manipulation by complex machines and computers - turn the power off and it all dies.)
Oh I still hate the “H” word for these circumstances, there has got to be something more appropriate out there, for how we deal with the actual factual physical reality we must negotiate.
You are talking about the very tiniest edge of matter space and time. It’s a wonderful image and I loved learning about it, but how long can that fascinate? Again that’s the tiniest of realms and yes, it’s fundamental to what we are, but it’s hugely removed.
For instance, I don’t see how Rutherford’s Gold Foil experiment justifies all the silly talk about the secret of stuff of our world, that it’s mostly empty space.
The gold foil Rutherford used in his scattering experiment had a thickness of approximately 4×10^−3 mm. If a single gold atom has a diameter of 2.9 x10^-8cm, and assuming rectangular packing of atoms, the sheet was 410^-3mm / 2.910^-7 mm = 13793 atoms thick.
Okay, so energetic photon going near the speed of light, was able to blast through the space of ~13793 atoms, before being blocked. Thus the nucleus was discovered and a model of the atom created. One that made the atom look like a solar system, with nucleus orbited by every so tiny energetic bundles. With unimaginably empty space in between.
But physicists have also discovered that electrons are spinning so fast that they simply can’t be conceived of a some sort of point source object. Because they move so fast they are smeared out and the orbit of an electron is more like an energetic shell, than empty space.
Meaning that the moment you start scaling up, those a few thousand of those electron shells ( read, force fields )aren’t enough to stop an atom, but a few tens of thousands of electron shells certainly are.
Then consider you need to scale up that atom by 5,000,000,000,000 in order to create the head of pin. Now to discuss the collective empty space of 5,000,000,000,000 atoms make no sense whatsoever, once you appreciate we are actually dealing with the collective force fields of five trillion atom
Although, looking up a grain of sand I see the gross estimate is around 50,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms are required to create a ‘typical’ grain of sand. It’s not empty space being compounded, but energetic force fields. That’s why I say our realm is rock solid, the surface tension of water is an exception that proves the rule, our realm is rock solid. Trying entering that water at, say 60 miles an hours.
The interesting part is that gold at that scale isn’t gold but bright red.
The red in the colored glass windows in old cathedrals is caused by gold molecules.
Scale at which Quantum Effects Dominate Properties of Materials
Nanoscale gold illustrates the unique properties that occur at the nanoscale. Nanoscale gold particles are not the yellow color with which we are familiar; nanoscale gold can appear red or purple. At the nanoscale, the motion of the gold’s electrons is confined. Because this movement is restricted, gold nanoparticles react differently with light compared to larger-scale gold particles.
Their size and optical properties can be put to practical use: nanoscale gold particles selectively accumulate in tumors, where they can enable both precise imaging and targeted laser destruction of the tumor by means that avoid harming healthy cells.
Why nano-scale is infinitely fascinating is because ultimately everything happens at that level.
You mention the body’s interaction with the natural environment at human scale but that is not where any of that happens .
All physics bgin and end at nano-scale. The rest is a matter of pattern densities and prevailing temperatures.
Sure, the nano world is real and we wouldn’t be here if not for it, yet when it comes to our human lives, it’s all a philosophical sort of thing.
Still, the action that we are present to, that is living within the macroscopic realm.
I don’t see why you find that realm so disinteresting, that you always gotta drag it back to the unreachable tiniest that we (living creatures) never actually interact with anyways.
It harkens back to that trapped within our mindscape concept I mention.
Why do you think I find macro reality uninteresting? I live in the macro world, along with about ten times more bacterial symbionts that make up my microbiome! I could not live without these little critters!
Do you think THAT is unimportant?
Would you say a musician cannot be interested in jazz or classical because he studies music theory?
I try to follow Roger Antonsen’s advise to look at things from as many different perspectives as possible. The more you know about a thing the more you will be able to understand and appreciate that thing.
All I know is the direction you keep pulling this dialogue, which is actually supposed to be about our human interior lives and how we deal with the exterior reality, and so on.
I’ll admit, sometimes I’m very confused as to what you think is important or not, based on the responses I hear. I’m simply sharing my impressions.
Okay, well there is that. I remember some philosopher starting his talk with the annoying kind of people who ask what reality real is. His answer was that what he’d like to do is hit them over the head with a chair, to show them reality. He wasn’t the kind of person who would do that, but it was a good point.
I wasn’t trying to do some quantum physics thing. More like just the plain old difference between what we know and what we don’t know. People can weird about that.
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