What is "Mind?"

Even Jesus couldn't open that cockpit door.

Given infinite time and infinite material you get infinite nonsense.

Mar 30, 2015 - 03:55pm PT
Given infinite time and infinite material you get infinite nonsense.

That nature is virtuous and humanity, particularly civilized humanity, is corrupt and arrogant is a philosophical system manifested to fill the vacuum of a discredited Christianity in the 19th C. and is religion no less than Christianity itself.

The inevitability of mind is a sublime consideration as it says something slightly disquieting with regard to the certainty of the atheist.

When you describe the "anthropocentric arrogance" of someone you're articulating the idea that humanity is set apart from nature.

How is it that only humanity is in some way inferior to the rest of nature through its self centered arrogance?

The worship of nature is a religion like any other and it resonates behind what many here call science.

I don't worship nature and science is not religion no matter how many times religious folk attempt to paint it as such.

We 'appreciate' it. That is not religion.

Engrish, Paul! Learn it!

Really, what is it that you appreciate? Its consoling, reconciling quality? Its beauty, the sense of wonder it elicits in you? Or am I describing here the experience of good Catholics at mass?

“Answers,” sure. Thousands of them. Millions of them. An answer for every being.

The rub is there are some aspects of reality that you cannot "look" at and measure in the normal way.

Summary
Although clinical observations suggest that humans with amygdala damage have abnormal fear reactions and a reduced experience of fear [1, 2 and 3], these impressions have not been systematically investigated. To address this gap, we conducted a new study in a rare human patient, SM, who has focal bilateral amygdala lesions [4]. To provoke fear in SM, we exposed her to live snakes and spiders, took her on a tour of a haunted house, and showed her emotionally evocative films. On no occasion did SM exhibit fear, and she never endorsed feeling more than minimal levels of fear. Likewise, across a large battery of self-report questionnaires, 3 months of real-life experience sampling, and a life history replete with traumatic events, SM repeatedly demonstrated an absence of overt fear manifestations and an overall impoverished experience of fear. Despite her lack of fear, SM is able to exhibit other basic emotions and experience the respective feelings. The findings support the conclusion that the human amygdala plays a pivotal role in triggering a state of fear and that the absence of such a state precludes the experience of fear itself.