Wednesday 29 January 2014
Sunday 12 January 2014
RDFRS: Can we choose what we believe?
RDFRS: Can we choose what we believe?
Yesterday, while debating Dawkins style I presented the point that we can not choose what we believe. This kind of is at the heart of whether you are reason based or faith based in your world view. If you choose to believe you are abandoning reason and entering faith. My freind said he thought we could choose what we believe so I looked it up and, ironically I found this thread of debate which is really good.
There is a point not made, however, that I think is key in this. Choosing to believe suggests the homunculus that regular readers of skreeworld will be familiar with. Much of the language we use presupposes the homunculus or little man inside our heads controlling the vehicle of our bodies. Phrases like 'I thought to myself' to 'you are lieing to yourself' suggest that I and me are two different people. So for me, ha ha, you just believe not choose to believe. There is a language error that confuses this debate.
Yesterday, while debating Dawkins style I presented the point that we can not choose what we believe. This kind of is at the heart of whether you are reason based or faith based in your world view. If you choose to believe you are abandoning reason and entering faith. My freind said he thought we could choose what we believe so I looked it up and, ironically I found this thread of debate which is really good.
There is a point not made, however, that I think is key in this. Choosing to believe suggests the homunculus that regular readers of skreeworld will be familiar with. Much of the language we use presupposes the homunculus or little man inside our heads controlling the vehicle of our bodies. Phrases like 'I thought to myself' to 'you are lieing to yourself' suggest that I and me are two different people. So for me, ha ha, you just believe not choose to believe. There is a language error that confuses this debate.
Thursday 9 January 2014
Tuesday 7 January 2014
Clearing up
I still can't nail it. Something about achieving what we expect. The fulfilment of possibilties individuals disallow themselves. Post Christmas truculence causes me to lash out in an attempt to undermine myself. Guilt is the backdrop. Guilt the feeling that undermines a,ny progress. Expectation affects everyone. Walking through London you see people from all backgrounds from all over the planet. Getting on. Leaving their pasts behind. Disproving my theories of fatalism.
Why should success feel such a betrayal? Everyone wants it for you. When I go home old freinds and family take reflected pride in my career. They all want good for me.
Yet something stutters. Something in me seeks self sabotage. Almost a call of duty to fuck things up. To go out of my way to offend those who hold my progress in their hands. Success becomes failure. Each win feels a loss. You can't take everyone to the party so your hands smash up the plates, throw their food on the carpet a d steal silver cutlery.
Perhaps this is the biggest barrier to achievement. Not class or sex or race. The restraints come from within. I look back at the smouldering aftermath of crash after crash.
I have tried to explain these barriers I see, and I have been told that they are not there. That I see ghosts. Illusions.
We set little alarms. I must remember to... These markers set by pulses of neurotransmitters, adrenalin and others. So you get a feeling of joy or guilt to mark your patterns. Guilt is a powerful marker. It would be too slow to negotiate the world through reasoning each obstacle so every object, every new experience is marked good, bad or whatever, tagged with an emotional marker, labelled with how we feel about it. r. From here we dont need to thignk, we just react to things. Our journey a forest of trees, each inspiring differing emotional reactions. Days are spent dancing amongst these mental markers. I know there is something I really must do but i can't remember what. It is essential that I .... or everything will go wrong. A forest of these guilt markers set out to steer our correct passage but the translation is lost. Only the pulses of neurotransmitters remains, no rational for the feelings. Just a thousand impulses.
And it is our impulsive reactions that define us. Not how we rationalise. A racist may know in the cold steady light of reason that their prejudices are wrong but this is too late, for they have already reacted. No one, hardl, y believes they are raccsist, or sexist, or classist. These traits exist despite their best efforts. This is true for criminal culpability too. No one ought to be blamed for who they are. Once we accept francis cricks Astonishing hypothesis, that all our thoughts, beliefs and dreams are the result of a complex set of electrical and chemical neuronal activities that we are not party to we become free. Free to accept failings in ourselves and in others.
The ghosts are these somatic markers we all set out. The forest I spoke of. The countless mental markers we steer our way by. People die trying to fulfill the right paths they have set, knowing these pulses and imposes were set up by themselves to steer the best path for their own survival. But often, by a certain age in our developement we lose all memory of why we had set up our reasoning for our maps. As a child I remember looking at some adults and the tangled mess they had become. The complex networks they had set up for themselves of right and wrong. And now I am one. A child is still in the process of marking the world out, open to suggestion on whether things are good or bad.
Why should success feel such a betrayal? Everyone wants it for you. When I go home old freinds and family take reflected pride in my career. They all want good for me.
Yet something stutters. Something in me seeks self sabotage. Almost a call of duty to fuck things up. To go out of my way to offend those who hold my progress in their hands. Success becomes failure. Each win feels a loss. You can't take everyone to the party so your hands smash up the plates, throw their food on the carpet a d steal silver cutlery.
Perhaps this is the biggest barrier to achievement. Not class or sex or race. The restraints come from within. I look back at the smouldering aftermath of crash after crash.
I have tried to explain these barriers I see, and I have been told that they are not there. That I see ghosts. Illusions.
We set little alarms. I must remember to... These markers set by pulses of neurotransmitters, adrenalin and others. So you get a feeling of joy or guilt to mark your patterns. Guilt is a powerful marker. It would be too slow to negotiate the world through reasoning each obstacle so every object, every new experience is marked good, bad or whatever, tagged with an emotional marker, labelled with how we feel about it. r. From here we dont need to thignk, we just react to things. Our journey a forest of trees, each inspiring differing emotional reactions. Days are spent dancing amongst these mental markers. I know there is something I really must do but i can't remember what. It is essential that I .... or everything will go wrong. A forest of these guilt markers set out to steer our correct passage but the translation is lost. Only the pulses of neurotransmitters remains, no rational for the feelings. Just a thousand impulses.
And it is our impulsive reactions that define us. Not how we rationalise. A racist may know in the cold steady light of reason that their prejudices are wrong but this is too late, for they have already reacted. No one, hardl, y believes they are raccsist, or sexist, or classist. These traits exist despite their best efforts. This is true for criminal culpability too. No one ought to be blamed for who they are. Once we accept francis cricks Astonishing hypothesis, that all our thoughts, beliefs and dreams are the result of a complex set of electrical and chemical neuronal activities that we are not party to we become free. Free to accept failings in ourselves and in others.
The ghosts are these somatic markers we all set out. The forest I spoke of. The countless mental markers we steer our way by. People die trying to fulfill the right paths they have set, knowing these pulses and imposes were set up by themselves to steer the best path for their own survival. But often, by a certain age in our developement we lose all memory of why we had set up our reasoning for our maps. As a child I remember looking at some adults and the tangled mess they had become. The complex networks they had set up for themselves of right and wrong. And now I am one. A child is still in the process of marking the world out, open to suggestion on whether things are good or bad.
Monday 6 January 2014
When I saw god
Having a tenuous connection with reality may well be accepting what is the common truth. For most of our history it was believed that human memory was like a video recording. Now we know that memory is a constructive process. Bits of truth mix up with wishes, dreams and perceptions to form a workable story. Whilst working in Portsmouth I was a witness to a fatal accident. I was certain only five people could have seen what happened yet over twenty claimed to be eye witnesses. Several points of what I remembered could not have happened as I remembered them. This event prompted me to look in to what is known about memory. We fill in the gaps to support our story. Lights change colour, vehicles travel at differing speeds, men become w omen, suggestions made by interviewers can be incorporated. It is memory that enables us to construct a self. Our memories define us. One of the most moving scenes in scifi film history must be from blade runner where rachel comes to realise that she is a simulacrum. That her memories are not her own.
If we can't trust our memories then how can we trust who we are? Presented with similar experiences two people will learn differing things. Paul, a close freind of mine underwent a religious experience. This proved to him the existence of god. I underwent a religious experience too but having experienced episodes where my perception of reality turned out to be quite wrong, I chose, or tended toward believing the meeting with god to be a hallucination. For a period I was quite convinced that my mind was connected to some subterranean network. At the time british telecom was laying down its network of fibre opiytc cables. I know now that but at the time it was quite real. So too was my experience of god. We fit our experiences, whatever they are in to our story. Nothing, however extreme changes most people. We are destined to fulfill our expectations. In this sense I honestly wish I had been brought up to believe in god. But for me he just isn't there. I wish it were otherwise.
Knowing you are not a robotic creature with a video recorder for a memory may be something that sets you aside in society. My greatest fears develope when talking to people who believe themselves to be party to a fixed truth. People who believe whole hearted lay in what their scenes are telling them.
If we can't trust our memories then how can we trust who we are? Presented with similar experiences two people will learn differing things. Paul, a close freind of mine underwent a religious experience. This proved to him the existence of god. I underwent a religious experience too but having experienced episodes where my perception of reality turned out to be quite wrong, I chose, or tended toward believing the meeting with god to be a hallucination. For a period I was quite convinced that my mind was connected to some subterranean network. At the time british telecom was laying down its network of fibre opiytc cables. I know now that but at the time it was quite real. So too was my experience of god. We fit our experiences, whatever they are in to our story. Nothing, however extreme changes most people. We are destined to fulfill our expectations. In this sense I honestly wish I had been brought up to believe in god. But for me he just isn't there. I wish it were otherwise.
Knowing you are not a robotic creature with a video recorder for a memory may be something that sets you aside in society. My greatest fears develope when talking to people who believe themselves to be party to a fixed truth. People who believe whole hearted lay in what their scenes are telling them.
Sunday 5 January 2014
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