It’s not a “Body-Mind problem” it’s an “Ego-God issue.”

Religion and Secularism
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Well I’ve been hammering away at it and it feels about done for this stage, gotta find some serious critique, feedback somewhere, before I can go much future.

(7.04) It’s not a “Body-Mind problem” it’s an “Ego-God issue.”

Perhaps the most profound lesson I’ve learned from my Hoffman adventure is 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 from within that Abrahamic God-fearing mindset that gave us the three major religions, with their self-serving patriarchal mentality, heaven and hell, along with branding dualism’s hard boundaries and need for a sense of certitude into our imagination and onto our expectations.

The Abrahamic worldview perceives people as isolated objects, not only from this planet, but each other, even from ourselves. The creatures we live with and the landscapes we exist within are treated with contempt and wanton waste.

Regarding the “Mind-Body Problem.”

Dr. Solms makes a wonderful analogy that highlights the error being made:

Question: Was it 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 ( 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 product of Earth’s Pageant of Evolution. Why isn’t that reflected in modern philosophical discourse?

Learning to appreciate the deep-time of Evolution puts an entirely different richer light upon our interior existence. An awareness that encompasses the whole of time, and this planet that created us, and the pageant of creatures that preceded us.

It also gives us a deeper appreciation for the continuity of life. 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?

Where did God come from?

From human curiosity and wonder. From puzzling over observations, contemplating questions, seeking answers. From love and hunger and fears in the night and glorying in a sunrise. From mourning then contemplating the suddenly dead carcass of a loved one. From buried memories of being coddled within mom’s loving protective bosom and missing those who are gone.

From our need for someone truly personal, who’s always there, never dying, ready to listen to our constant chatter, ideas, complaints, fears, longings, wishes, all of it in complete confidence.

Think about it, our relationship with our god is the most intimate relationship of our lives and reflects our ego in every way. All of it, happening within our mind, or more descriptively, within our Mindscape.

Point being, we are the product of our Earth - and God is the product of our mind. That’s why our conceptions of God always wind up driven by our Ego, not by some outside force.

Nothing wrong with that, if only we could bring ourselves to explicitly recognize as much.

For some people these realities are jarring and resented, but that doesn’t make it any less the reality all of us exist within. For others these ideas may resonate, take comfort, stay true to your gut instinct, do your homework.

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Very interesting !!!
:clap:

Now, i am not enough learned, but µI am not sure that the separation between body and mind cannot be found in the Greek-Latin philosophy. Plato and Aristotle influenced Christian thinkers.

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It does seem that way, but in truth I’m not learned enough either to do too much trumpeting in that direction, at least without more brushing up on the history. Which I hope to do at some point.

Also the entire question of western science growing out of religious thinking and thus shackled by its dualist assumptions and that human need to project certitude - is something I need to research way more, I know enough that there’s a there there. But not enough to have a clear enough overview to write about it yet. But W4U tossed down the gauntlet in another thread and it’s on my long term todo list.

I do know from my half century of being an attentive witness to science news, that many bold claims have been made, when I said to myself, that’s a silly over reaching and simplification, then to find out in time, that indeed said claims were way premature and simplistic and in many cases, go figure, it’s not one factor but a combination of factor’s that are needed to understand this dynamic or that creature.

But, I’ve learned that’s a draw back to allowing the evidence to drive your understanding, when you have incomplete evidence, you’re left with incomplete assumptions. At least until more evidence comes in.

And overlaid on all that is the human habit of jumping to conclusions, especially when they might create a profitable career.
Then there’s blind bias, enter Abraham…

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I was doing a little trawling and came across this very interesting article.

How Did God Get Started?
by Colin Wells - at Arion | A Journal of Humanities and the Classics

… The Greeks took the Phoenician alphabet, and added new letters for vowel sounds, making the whole thing a much more flexible and precise instrument. Here begins, if not the march, then at least the toddle toward string theory and space telescopes.

For writing and thinking go together, and the dawn of this new literary age was simultaneously the dawn of reason. Within a mere couple of hundred years or so, we see a Greek thinker named Thales of Miletus taking the novel step of trying to explain the material world in secular, naturalistic terms, and of publicizing his ideas so that others could critique them.

In other words, Thales (whose name rhymes with “Hailey’s”) invented science, as well as the larger tradition of rationalistic inquiry to which science belongs, and which soon included other disciplines such as history.

This is not to say that no one had ever thought rationally before, of course. …

“… Like the tradition of faith , the tradition of reason was invented only once, although also like its religious counterpart it concentrates and amplifies a corresponding mental faculty that’s common to everyone. …”

“… we see the first appearance of a unitary God not in Jewish scripture, but in the thought of the Greek philosopher Plato, who wrote in the early fourth century bc. …”

Folds, within folds, of harmonic complexity.
I imagine one could even pare it down to some fundamental biological behavior patterns. Inherent in the survival instinct, and drive to keep living that made evolution possible.

Thanks

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About the mistakes of Descartes dualism.

My brother, a scientist, tells me that the dualism has been refuted 30 years ago by the neuro psychiatres.

[Descartes' Error - Wikipedia]

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Descartes dualism: “Body-Mind problem” means that we are
some product of stardust + something more.
Mankind simply cannot exist one without the other.
Question: what was first, ‘‘something’’ or the stardust?
‘‘Something’’ is nothingness, emptiness, Lorentz aether, an absolute 4D,
the cosmic vacuum. This ‘‘emptiness’’ is not empty continuum of 4D.
it is filled with Dirac’s ‘‘negative, virtual particles’’ which can appear as real particles.
The ‘‘something’’ created all kinds of different things.
======strong text

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A speck of dust that wanted to be more.

The land of forever speculation.

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Look toward Spinoza, for him, mind and body are not two independent realities.

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Oh you mean it’s not my original idea. I’m shocked, absolutely shocked!

:wink:

He has written interesting things, some of it helpful for me, some of it fancy dancing, but then that’s what philosophers do, torture words, to wring out all the meaning they can.

I think that’s why some advise that it’s best, to listen to philosopher’s questions, but disregard their answers. :slight_smile:

Anything in there that stands out to you?