What Of Your Essence?

Hey encode,

Let’s see if I can brush off my memories of what we were talking about.

Well, I think we can get away with ordinary logician’s conditional. If C depends on B and B depends on O, then we’re saying: if C then B, and if B then O… which is: C → B, and B → O. Of course, that doesn’t capture everything you might have wanted to say, does it?

I think we sometimes think of the human brain too much like a computer. We design computers on purpose to be totally logical. We want them to be consistent and accurate. We don’t want them to sometimes make mistakes or come up with their own opinions.

We have to remember that our brains evolved through a process of natural selection, it wasn’t designed on purpose. We get things right and we think rationally only to the extent sufficient to get us by. It’s amazing how often we make leaps of logic and lucky guesses. We infer so much by instinct. For example, I’m preparing a barbecue, I ask a friend: can you go out and get burgers? I don’t need to specify that I mean buy burgers from the grocery store, not kill a cow and gut the meat out of him. How is it that the brain automatically knows the right interpretation? It’s just conditioned to make these leaps, and good thing because usually it gets it right. And you’re right about the emotional readings in the things we say–not to mention tone and special accents that fluctuate in our speech, and inferring meaning based on context, and a whole list of other things. Sometimes this is way more efficient than having to deduce everything logically, for if the chances that we’d get it right with a bit of implicit guesswork are high enough, we could save a lot of time and mental energy that would otherwise be used to do a full logical deduction.

I try not to make my spirituality depend on science or conflict with science. My spirituality essentially says that the physical universe that science studies is a material representation of God’s mind. This allows science to uncover anything, and I’m still able to say: well, that is a representation of something in God’s mind. It doesn’t matter what science discovers, or what we read in our science textbooks. I also don’t speculate much on what particular experiences or thoughts (I should say “thoughts” in quotes) go on in God’s mind, which means I don’t put any demands on how such experiences or thoughts must be physically represented, so again, science could uncover anything.

The only area of science that comes into conflict with my spirituality is quantum mechanics–having to do with non-determinism–but even there, a minor tweak to my theory fixes that.

No need to apologize. I was saying that poetry and metaphor, though requiring a bit more penetrating insight to get, also delivers a bigger punch when it succeeds. Sometimes we need to be strict and rigorous when communicating, but sometimes it’s worth using poetry and metaphor.

Hopefully not the last.

Sure, I guess you have to decode your own posts sometimes. That happens to me a lot. I don’t think a person’s words ever lack meaning. Obviously, when we speak, we have something in mind which we’re trying to convey. Sometimes we lose that meaning, we forget or our brains can’t quite capture it as it once could, but it’s very rarely the case that we intentionally decide to utter a bunch of babble.

I guess I “love to be in love,” like Augustine said of himself.

encode_decode,

Loonies?

Are they those who need to be put away for their our safety and our own?

Aside from that, we keep ourselves in check. We regulate our own behavior.

Most of us like to be in love. It’s part of our psyches. We just need to choose carefully who or what that is…whether it is a person or nature or the universe or an algorism.
We need to choose carefully what our passions are.

If the lefties, the loonies, have their way the government will regulate our behaviors down to our very thoughts.

gib,

Name a way in which our origin and our past is capable of changing.

Become an inauthentic being, a liberal leftie, to destroy history and rewrite it, erase our past and the origins of our identities.

Erm, okay Gib…it’s your turn.

Wendy, if that was in response to my post, that is not what I had in mind.

I know, but I’m on a roll with the liberal lefties who are in my sights. If Aaron doesn’t answer your showdown challenge, I’ll defend the aliens (for additional practice).

Erm, okay Wendy… my turn for what?

It’s your turn to answer questions directed at you.

Now who is the teacher, Wendy?

^ This question, huh Wendy? I didn’t see this at first.

Okay, well my point was that our origin and past don’t change, but I suppose if time travel were possible, you could go back and erase your birth from ever taking place getting yourself stuck in a grandfather paradox. But then again, if Doc Brown from Back to the Future is right, this would only result time fissioning onto a separate branch. You’d still be stuck in a grandfather paradox (Marty’s very existence being in jeopardy), but your original origins would still be pinned down to its original position in the grand blueprints of time and space.

Or how 'bout this: if all reality is subjective, then all you’d have to do is erase your memories of your origins and replace them with alternate memories. But subjectively speaking, you wouldn’t look back on this as a change, you’d just forget your original origins ever happened and only remember your replacement origins which would not have changed according to your subjective point of view. Then, on the other hand, from the point of view of someone else who remembers your original origins, they would think you’ve just deluded yourself, and according to them too (from their subjective point of view), your original origins never changed, you’ve just convinced yourself that they have.

^ That’s all I’ve got for now. Maybe I’ll post some more later if I think of anything.

You are getting slightly warmer, slightly, gib.

Sounds like you know the hot spot, Arc. Why don’t you share your thoughts?

No, why make it so easy for you. Figure it out. You are a bit closer but you haven’t eaten the hot tamale yet.
lol

Oh, you tough cookie you!

More like a hard nut to crack. I have been told this very often especially by men.
Perhaps I have yet to meet my squirrel.

Well, in any case, I seriously can’t think of any other way of altering your origins than time travel. I mean, what’s in the past is in the past.

But this thread is about one’s essence, which is a little different from one’s origins, so if you’re asking how does one change one’s essence, you’re asking how does one redefine one’s self. ← I’ll meditate over that one and get back to you.

Well, not to so much reveal anything or perhaps I will but I actually did have my origins altered in a sense, in a great sense.
I was inadvertently told by my grandparents (and not biological ones) that the man who I had actually believed to be my father, who I had loved and worshiped as my father (since I was too young at the time to know otherwise) since that is what my mother told me ~~ was not actually my father. I was absolutely devastated by that. I lost that father not only once but twice. That was revealed to me right after high school graduation. They thought that I knew the truth of my so-called origins. How my origins changed.
But that also explained something which happened between myself and my so-called father when I was around six or seven which also devastated me and which probably affected my life in many ways growing up.
It was one of the most utmost experiences of abandonment that I have ever had in my life.

.

Hmmm…so you think that changing one’s essence is as simple as re-defining one’s self? Giving one’s self a new self-identity in a sense?
I don’t know about that.