Do you believe that the human mind exists?
Look at all the incredible things that have been conceived by the human mind. Exploring the earth, then challenging the oceans to find other parts of the world. Later challenging the solar system, the distant galaxies, and even the universe. The wheel, fire, husbandry, agriculture, the written word, numbers. Germ theory. Engineering, mining, manufacturing, physics, electronics, medicine. Philosophy, monetary systems, arts, locomotion. All ideas conceived by the human mind.
How could the mind not exist? But have you ever seen the human mind? There are no photos of the mind, there are no jars containing the mind in laboratories and medical schools. Nor are there anatomical drawings or dissections of the mind. We accept on faith that the mind exists because we see evidence of it's existence.
Let's go to the store and buy a jar of gravity. Or maybe a small beaker or a test tube full. We aren't really out of gravity, but it would be nice to keep and emergency supply. We know that gravity is a thing, but we have never seen it. What is proposed in the first sentence can't be done; there are not containers of gravity in the store, or anywhere else. No one has ever seen it, but we have faith that gravity exists and is omnipresent.
I was thinking that I need a jar of fresh Higgs' bosuns. Maybe I can order one from Amazon via the portal here on Lem's. They exist, we are told, and proof of their existence lies at the end of massively complicated mathematics. Physicists and mathematicians confirm their existence, even though they have never seen them.
It's interesting how some people claim that God cannot not exist because they can't see God, can at the same time believe that the human mind, gravity, the Higgs bosun, and a whole plethora of other things that they have never seen can exist.
Palm Sunday musings. Carry on.
23 comments:
Confession was the most important part of my Catholic indoctrination, I think. The sacrament seems to mean all sorts of things to people who know nothing about it. Here's what it means to me.
Confession is the vehicle for gaining introspective knowledge of self. We examine our actions and our consciences because we believe that we have the ability to perfect our selves.
This sacrament teaches children, not just to be responsible for their own actions, but also to believe that they are the agents of their own happiness or lack thereof. We are taught that bettering one's life isn't dependent on murky, unknowable forces outside our selves.
Control of one's own life is possible. Blaming others is a waste of time. If you want your life to be better, do what is necessary to better yourself. Look inside, not outside.
The most astounding thing about the mind is its buoyancy. All the facts on the ground are grim. The mind, the adult mind, knows this...and yet...and yet pessimism does not ring true:
"To be born in helplessness and dependence, with pain and cries; to be the plaything of ignorance, error, need, sickness, of vileness and the passions; step by step from the moment when one begins to stammer to the moment of departure, when one raves; to live among rogues and charlatans of every kind; to pass away between one who feels our pulse and another who confounds us, not knowing whence one comes, why one has come, whither one is going--this is what is called the most precious gift we receive from our parents and from Nature: life."
--Diderot
There you have the case for pessimism. In every particular it rings true...and yet...and yet the mind does not buy it. There well may be a counter case, though the case for optimism is never as convincing for the simple reason that the facts don't support optimism, they support pessimism. Means naught. We are constituted, our minds are constituted to apprehend existence as good. Amazing. But there you are.
What you say is very true Shouting. You are responsible for your own actions. You must ask for forgiveness and offer forgiveness in return.
It is just that we are all weak and born into original sin. So it is a struggle for anyone who truly has faith.
The Stapler
by Ron Padgett
When my mother died
she left very little: old clothes,
modest furniture, dishes, some
change, and that was about it.
Except for the stapler. I found it
in a drawer stuffed with old bills
and bank statements. Right off
I noticed how easily it penetrated
stacks of paper, leaving no bruise
on the heel of my hand.
It worked so well I brought it home,
along with a box of staples, from
which only a few of the original 5000
were missing. The trick is remembering
how to load it—it takes me several minutes
to figure it out each time, but I persist until
Oh yes, that’s it! Somewhere in all this
my mother is spread out and floating
like a mist so fine it can’t be seen,
an idea of wafting, the opposite of stapler.
When it comes to matters of the mind, neither wafting nor stapling release the essence or capture the fullness, yet the mind itself celebrates both experiences in expression.
If Choom was honestly elected, it places the concept of the existence of the human mind in serious jeopardy.
I'm not sure what the source of your confusion is. People find the evidence for the existence of minds and gravity convincing. Whatever evidence you think you have for your god's existence obviously isn't as convincing to many of them.
"It's interesting how some people claim that God cannot not exist because they can't see God"
I don't know if God exists or not, but whatever doubts I have have nothing to do with the fact that I can't "see" Him. I can accept that if there's a God He chooses to remain both invisible and silent to me.
Whether there is a God such as the one depicted in the Old or New Testaments, or the Quran, that taxes my credulity. YMMV, and as always I speak only for myself.
Sometimes I wonder, are these words even working?
Why just today I looked outside and it is snowing. Then really snowing< and I thougth, can this be? I looked about me, reality had turned all gray, the mountains disappeared, it is cold when it should be warm, the trees are all tricked, everthing alive and green is questioning its own judgement about getting its growth one, germinating seeds are stopped in their tracks, reversed some killed when in the colorless gloom by sight was directed to and oddity, a somewhat unusual icy bicicle different from the rest.
Psych! See? These words, are they even working?
I was thinking that I need a jar of fresh Higgs' bosuns.
That's perverted.
Judgey judgey.
To me, the remarkable push (I could think of another word) for there to be more of whatever there is already is amazing to me.
The ability of living things to copy. repro duce make two from one make a new one from nothing.
We inhabit a middling planet in a minor solar system of a small galaxy tucked into the margins of the universe. Truth be told, our universe probably isn't even a particularly significant universe in a cauldron of bubbling universes. How insignificant can you get and still claim to exist. A Higgs boson exists for millisecond in a universe that's 13 billion years old. We exist for seventy or eighty years in that same universe. Our existence is not much longer than that of a Higgs boson. We're not so much more substantial or permanent than a Higgs boson. Yet we've figured out the Pyhtagorean theorem and lots of the occult rules of the chaos that surrounds us. The universe is rational and we are smart enough to understand parts of it. There's something miraculous about that.....A dog gets hungry and that's because food exists. We have spiritual needs and maybe that's because God exists. How could such puny, transient blips such as ourselves develop rational understanding unless there is such a thing as reason. I don't know if you can use reason to prove God's existence, but the existence of reason proves that there are higher powers in the universe.
Yeah, Lem, I know. That's why seeds mystify me, they chang right in front of you.
Biology 101 was scary hard.
Our professor was a bull dyke, with real bull horns and filterless Lucky Strikes cigarettes rolled up in her white t-shirt sleeve, wallet in back pocket with chain to belt loop.
She said, "Now, if you have a question be sure to ask it because there isn't any such thing as a bad question. You see, each unit builds on the previous thing so you must understand each unit as we go. Remember, if something does not make sense, then ask."
The next class an attractive young feminine campus beauty with carefully groomed luxurious hair, manicured nails and expensive wardrobe asked a question that revealed she had not read the text. Not that she didn't understand the text, her question revealed she hadn't bothered reading.
The professor checked herself. Corrected her previoius statement, "When I said there is no such thing as a stupid question I was assuming you'd at least read the textbook before asking. Don't ever ask a question that shows you came here unprepared." The girl was so embarrassed she dropped the class. A lot of people dropped and the class shrunk considerably as we went. She was among the first.
But I did have this question I didn't see in the book, having to do with photosynthesis. I said, this is all very impressive, but how does the plant manage before the first leaf? Before light can hit the leaf and do all this photosynthesis?
She stopped short. Looked straight at me. Sighed. An achingly long moment passed, I thought, "Oh shit, here it comes."
"Young man, the plant in its wisdom endowed the seed with enough energy to explode forth and build the first leaf. It is not just the dna strands itself, the enzymes activated by water and warmth but material packed in used to construct and grab from the environment once conditions are condusive to growth"
"Oh."
I hadn't thought of that.
I was tremendously grateful she understood it a real question not covered in the text and that she did not bite my head off. A question that others might have. She gave a sensible calm answer. And I've been even more imressed witih seeds since.
I bought some more today.
William, the doctrine of infinite tangible universes is so much more improbable than the doctrine of a Creating God that I wonder at supposedly rational atheists that can believe the one and reject the other as superstition and fantasy.
When I was younger and malleable, I could believe in an infinity of myself, all of them shuffling through worlds almost but not precisely like mine, because I was young and unformed and could believe in an infinite present, one without limits or scarcity. The many-worlds fantasy is the anti-economics, where everything is not even possible, but obligatory, simultaneous, and Right Now. As I grow older, and possibilities fall away with each tick of the clock, everything draws away in every direction, a mortal inflation of time and space and the perception of *cost*. When the universe and I were younger and smaller, everything was so near to everything else, and to move from point to point was but a thought, and I raced from thing to thing and thought to thought without effort or consideration, like a child at play among toy-galaxies strung nose-to-tail in tight little clusters in a starlight neighborhood I could traverse in an afternoon.
Now I know the distance between even the nearest sun and I, and that every starry spiral multitude contains within itself a vast killing gravitational tyrant, swallowing its captive shining hostages one by one as deep but finite time ticks away, and the universe stretches vast and empty between isolated, infinitely greedy singularities, each lord of their own inviolable gravity wells, ceaselessly devouring, and yet dying nonetheless by the magic spell of an iron-voiced little man in a wheelchair, who in his metal tones prophesies:
All that is,
Will not be, and
Now and in future,
Things have an end,
And all ends will
Have their end,
World with an end,
Amen.
Ah, but that second-to-last line, it rings false, doesn't it? It may be only the deep impression of childhood religion, but the organ sounds below the choral voice, in my head and my heart, "world without end". Longer than my faith, longer than my beliefs, longer than my reason, "world without end". Because I can't truly believe in death any more than I truly understand birth, beginnings and endings are beyond human emotional understanding, it's why we find them so striking, so resonant, the stone in the pond, the fox among the hens, the hammer to the bell. Death like gravity is a force beyond us, but to disbelieve in either is madness.
Philip K. Dick said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." No-one outside of a fantasy novel has ever lifted off the ground by a tactical use of infidel will. No-one outside of books, fictional or religious (and thus in the dock under accusation of being fiction) has ever driven death from his door by an act of deliberate imagination, not forever, not beyond the scope of placebo and manipulation of the endrocrinal emotions.
Death and gravity are real, but impossible to believe, and both are the limits of the value of belief and disbelief. When you don't believe in them, they don't go away. But God, and other branes, and strings, and even black holes - those are inferences. And we shall see, in the fulness of time, how knowable those things are, and which are things, and which imaginings, and which those forces which are neither things nor imaginings but something which is beyond stuff and beyond will and underlaid under all that which neither goes away from entropic decay nor vanishes before the force of disbelief, but rather Is, now and forever, world without end.
Faith and Science. Two sides of the same coin. Faith simply leap frogs science for people who already know that God created all things and that science and it's methodology is there to uncover all of the creations of God. Uncovering each one that would bring us closer to him and becoming like him.
Death and gravity: I find gravity an increasingly bothersome phenomenon. Instead of declaring war on poverty, Johnson should have declared war on gravity. Death is the next great challenge of my life. If you're looking for a perfected, immutable, eternal state, nothingness is the way to go. The problem with nothingness is that it is impossible to imagine. I can state here, with equal credibility, that I am Napoleon or Napoleon's dog. What I cannot state, with any degree of credibility, is that I do not exist. In like way, I cannot state that I will not exist. Personal immortality may not exist, but it's impossible to believe in the existence of nothingness.
If you believe in the Big Bang, you must believe in the Big Banger. If at a certain point, time was created, then something must have existed outside of time. First there was nothing, and then there was something. That's magic. You can't have magic without a magician. I choose to believe in a creator and that the creator lives outside of time, and can view all time at once. You can believe what you like.
I believe that the human mind is connected, more or less, to the mind of the creator. It's sort of like when all Commodore computers had the same version of Basic computer language. They had a common origin.
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