Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2001 16:06:12 -0100
From: hbone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: comments on religion and the sublime


Eric and All,

Thanks,

I'll try to avoid wasting keystrokes on the future of M or PM. "It takes 5
years to change a 'willing' mind".  And Mae West supposedly asked when
someone announced they had "changed" their mind -  "Is it better?"

Eric wrote:
>This implies that the self is a novel social fiction
> and, in a crude pragmatic sense, better stories imply a richer life.
> The problem is, as William James pointed out a century ago, if the mind
> sees these stories as purely made-up, the Will-To-Believe will not
> function. How does each one of us begin to tell better stories without
> becoming incredulous? And where is the place from which these stories
> emerge? Is there a self without story or a story without a self

The self seems to be the locus where stories meet, reside in living
tissue.and are transferred to others.  A self is indeed, all an organisim's
consciousness, memory. experience (accumulated memory)  and knowledge
(including communicated memories of others)

Envisioning such a self is like watching the movie of your life.  Whether
cruder, worser, richer, better, than your idea of some other life, you are
unlikely to regard it as "purely made up", although in fits of depression,
or a nervous breakdown, the will to believe may not function.

Taking a positive view of the "petit narratives" each of us have lived, they
seem to be quite compatible with views of Epicurus, with concepts of the
sublime, and with benign aspects of religion.

The perils of grand narratives seem to arise, not with ordinary "selves" of
whatever age and status, but with the political animal seeking the alchemy
of ideology - a special sort of self, a self highly educated and thoroughly
acclimated, indoctrinated, vaccinated, with Capitalism or Globalism or
Religious Fundamentalism, or their fashionable ideo-opposites..

In the nothing new dept.:

"For after all, what do we know of this terrible "matter" except as a name
for the unknown and hypothetical cause of the states of our own
consciousness?  And what do we know of that "spirit", of whose threatened
extinction by matter a great lamentation is arising, like that which was
heard at the death of Pan, except that it is also a name for an unknown and
hypothetical cause, or condition of states of consciousness?  In other
words, matter and spirit are but names for the imaginary substrata of groups
of natural
phenomena."

- a quote from a lecture given in 1868 in Edinburgh by Thos. H. Huxley

After reading countless paragraphs about Descartes and the mind/matter
problem I lean towards the idea of physicalism, expressed  a  decade ago as
follows:

"Physicalism is the claim that (1) There are microphysical entities, (2)
Microphysical entities constitute everything, (3) There are microphysical
regularities, (4) Microphysical regularities govern everything."

The new science of genomics is rapidly pushing into a domain of proteonomics
which is vastly more complex than decoding the human genome.

Studies of what matter and spirit "are" (other than names) and what matter
and spirit "do", may, in a few years or decades, produce better explanations
of  the phenomena, symbols, energies, that have empowered  humans to
communicate thoughts and feelings across generations, centuries, millenia.

Some use the term "memes" for culture transmittal, as opposed to "genes" for
genetic transmittal, but the details are unknown.

Eric Lander, a prominent researcher, describes knowledge of the human genome
by an analogy to the parts list of a 747 transport.  Now we need to find out
how the parts interact with each other, sizes, dimensions, material
properties (form, fit and function) then find out all the electrical
circuitry within each part and connect to all other parts integral to each
system's operation, and finally, how systems interact to fly the plane.  Up,
up, and away!

Regards,
Hugh