Who Knows?

Like I said before, fairness is a human concept. What God thinks about it is a matter of conjecture. The laws of Moses represent one of the earliest human attempts to establish the rule of law among men. It's mostly about obedience, you do it because God says so. Nevertheless, there are lots of examples in there of what we would call fairness today. Those are the parts that Christians and Jews like to quote. There are also examples of what we would call barbaric cruelty today, those are the parts that Muslim extremists like to quote. Well, some Christian extremists like to quote them too. Truth be known, the Muslim extremists of today are a lot like the Israelites were in the time of Moses, and the Christians were in the Middle Ages.

The Bible is not very clear about what Heaven and Hell are supposed to be like. Some references on the subject seem to contradict other references, which is not surprising since they were written in different centuries by different people. The idea that the body and soul separate at the time of death, with the body rotting in the ground and the soul floating up to heaven, did not come from the Bible, I think it came from the ancient Greeks. Up to the time of Jesus, many Jews didn't even believe in an afterlife, and I think some of them still don't. When Jesus was alive on Earth, the Jewish clergy were divided into two schools of thought about what they called "The Resurrection". The Pharisees believed in it, and the Sadducees didn't. Those who believed in it believed in the physical resurrection of the body. How that could be accomplished with somebody whose body was in an advanced state of decomposition is not made clear. By some accounts, the vast majority of the resurrected ones would remain in God's kingdom on Earth, only a select few would actually make it to Heaven. This resurrection, by the way, was supposed to happen sometime in the future. Until then, the dead would remain as if asleep. Jesus made a few statements which could be interpreted as meaning something different but, last I heard, theologians were still arguing about that. Many Christians today do not believe any of that, they believe that their body is just a shell, which will be abandoned by the soul when it floats up to Heaven immediately after death, but they would be hard pressed to find Biblical support for their belief.

If everybody was born with the same intelligence, the same healthiness, the same good looks or, for that matter, the same amount of material wealth, we probably wouldn't understand the concept of "better" or "worse" in those regards. If it weren't for inequality, humans would not have needed to strive for equality all these years. I'm not sure what they would have done with all the time and energy that they have expended in the search for equality, justice, and fairness. Maybe that's why there is unfairness in the world, to give us something to do to justify our human existence. Cats don't care about fairness, but they are just cats after all. We're supposed to smarter and more virtuous than cats, although I doubt that the cats recognize that.

Our local Indians usually call themselves "Indians" when they're talking to White people. In their traditional language, they called themselves "Anishnabe", which translates as "The Real People" in English. (Our spell checker claims that I'm spelling it wrong but, since the Anishnabe didn't have a written language, I have seen it spelled different ways, and I don't know if there even is a right way.)

The Indians had a culture and life style that was well adapted to their environment before the White man arrived on the scene. As their environment changed, some of them adapted to it better than  others. They didn't do so bad when you consider that, pre-contact, they were living in the Stone Age. They didn't have metal tools or weapons, the wheel, or horses. The only animals they had domesticated were dogs. None of this was their fault, it was caused by their geographic isolation from Europe and Asia. It's a long walk from Mesopotamia to Western Europe, and a long swim from there to the Americas.

I'm not sure what you mean about those ideas that pop into your head. If you want to talk some more about it, you'll have to explain some more about it.

is god fair?

You remember your high school biology? I remember that cutesy Miss (It was Miss wasn’t it?) Tichy called one-celled animals wee beasties. And I guess I remembered blastula, though I may have had that reinforced through college zoology. But speaking of one celled animals, I always assumed that they were alive, and I always assumed that they kept their own little lives when they became parts of our body, and that’s why I thought a sperm and an egg were also alive even though they have half the chromosomes.

Well this all comes up in the abortion argument where people aren’t really interested in the science unless it helps their side, and we have been away from politics for maybe a week now, and I don’t want to go there now.

It’s none of my business since I am not religious, but I always wondered if you died of senility and went to heaven would you be senile there? Do They just pick the you at the height of your abilities? And you run across these peoples who have had these terrible strokes and are just babbling or whatever and don’t even realize they can’t walk, and I think if I had a stroke like that would that still be me, how could it be?

There is that story by Kurt Vonnegut where the physically fit have to wear shoes with weights on them and the good looking have to wear masks, and the really smart have to, I don’t remember, drink a bottle of vodka a day. What if God (and you know I don’t really mean God) let us take a vote, should people all be born equally strong, smart, and good-looking? Would we all be just average? Maybe we would all be very strong, smart, and good-looking, but wouldn’t that be average then?

Maybe I would, seems like it would only be fair. If God, was pulling souls out of that egg carton and he put one in a sickly, ugly, stupid body, and another in a strong, good-looking, smart body, does that seem fair? What if He switches them? What if He shuffles them so that random chance determines which soul goes in which body? But wait a minute, He is God, how can there be any random?

I don’t think we ever examined that concept of fairness enough. If I had two sons and I sent one to college and made the other work in the fields, that guy would think it is unfair. Of course I don’t have two sons, but I do have two cats, and Buddy is bigger than Sweetie and when he chooses to shove his weight around and get the best perch or first spot at the food dish, she doesn’t make a fuss. Well he’s bigger, that’s just the way it is. What is it about humans that makes us concerned with fairness?

Of course it’s very politically incorrect for a liberal like me to say anything bad about Indians. Actually I’m not even supposed to call them Indians, but I saw in a movie made by Indians that they would rather be called Indians then Native Americans, which is such an awkward, artificial name. But I don’t know near as many as you do. Do your local Indians have a preference as to what they are called?

Anyway whenever the white man wants to take away one of their sacred lands to build a golf course or whatever, and they mount some campaign to save their sacred land, my first thought it is what good has that sacred land ever done you? If you had spent your time figuring out physics instead of dancing around some poles, maybe you would have had a better chance of fighting off the white man.

Déjà vu is when you do something and feel like you have done it before. I was thinking more of where something just pops into your head which has nothing to do with what you are doing and you can’t tell whether it’s true or not.  

Deja Vu All Over Again

If I remember my high school biology correctly, sperms and unfertilized eggs are not exactly alive, they are "viable", which means capable of producing life. When the egg and the sperm unite, that's when life begins. Of course the Supreme Court rewrote that book when they ruled that an unborn baby is not viable until it's capable of surviving outside the mother, and it's not legally alive until it's born. Since then, premature babies have been surviving earlier and earlier, which kind of complicates matters. I seem to remember that, in the original "Roe versus Wade" decision, the court designated a certain number of weeks after gestation as being the point at which a fetus becomes viable. I don't remember how many weeks that was, but I think it's been pushed back some since then. Then there's those awful partial birth abortions where they kill the baby as soon as its head pokes out. Last I heard some people were trying to make that illegal, but I'm not sure if they ever got it passed or not.

One problem with the concept that you are the same person all of your life, and maybe even beyond that, is: What about people who experience brain damage or Alzheimer's? Their personalities are substantially changed, and they may have lost most of their memories. I suppose they are legally the same person, but what about spiritually or even biologically?

Also, what about the fact that some people are genetically smarter, healthier, or prettier than others?   Does that seem fair to you? Shouldn't the government do something about that? No matter how much help they give the dumber, sicker, or uglier people, they are not likely to ever catch up to the people who got a better deal at birth, unless those people are just plain lazy. It seems to me the only way to make this fair is to surgically bring the smarter, healthier, and prettier people down to the same level as the less genetically fortunate. Would you vote for that? Okay, I might have gotten a little carried away there. A more humane alternative would be to encourage the smarter, healthier and prettier people to squander their birthright by eating, drinking, and smoking to excess, and maybe blowing off their algebra homework once in awhile. I might vote for that, providing it was proposed by a Republican and not a Democrat.

You may be right about the supernatural world getting bigger with all the "pop spirituality" that's going on nowadays. I like that term "pop spirituality", it neatly sums it all up, doesn't it. Although most of that stuff has been around for a long time, it certainly has been undergoing a renaissance lately. I wonder, though, if the Native Americans didn't have the right idea all along. According to conversations I have had with several of our local Indians, they didn't distinguish between the natural and the supernatural, or the sacred and the secular, it was all part of he same universe to them. Of course they lost the war, but they eventually ended up with casino gambling and free hunting and fishing, so they didn't come out too bad after all.

I believe that thing you talked about in your last paragraph is called "deja vu". I've experienced it a few times myself, but never about anything important. It was always just some little thing like walking down a stretch of road or sitting around a table talking to some people about nothing in particular. Sometimes I dreamt about it before it happened, but I had forgotten the dream until it repeated itself later in real life. There is probably a logical explanation for it, but I don't know what it is. That's okay though, life is more interesting with a little mystery in it, don't you think?

wild speculation and dreams

I’m not comfortable calling it a soul because the word has so much other baggage, but there is something that begins with the doctor’s slap, maybe before that, I think there is some evidence of awareness inside the womb, probably not when we are like a blastula. But then there is something people don’t talk much about. The sperm and the egg are both alive, I think they have some kind of awareness because I think everything alive has some kind of awareness which gradually dims the lower down the animal kingdom you go, but that’s just me.

But anyway what happens to them? Do they stop living when they become one, and then that cell when it splits into another, do the two of them get different lives, and when does our life begin which strangely is not the property of any single cell?

Maybe that’s one for the pro and anti abortion people to debate, but at some point, we are who we are, and we continue to be him until we die, and some think we continue on after that, but that’s a place nobody has sent us a postcard from.

But are we really that same person/thing/soul all our earthly lives? We think we are because we can remember our previous life, but what if someone else had our memories, would they be us?

The supernatural world is bigger than ever, with stuff like esp, near-death, astrology, crystals, the space aliens of the History Channel. Skeptical scientists who demand proof stand together in their ivory towers and look on disapprovingly while the masses pursue whatever fad fits their fancy.

The difference between the alternate universe speculations of cosmologists and the phantasmagoria of pop supernatural beliefs, is that the world continues on just the same whether the alternate universes exist or not, but most of the pop beliefs think that they can control the regular universe through them by using the right crystal at the right time or knowing someone’s personality by knowing when they are born.

They say that dream memories are especially tenuous for the reason you said, so that our minds aren’t cluttered with a bunch of dreams. I got into the habit of writing down my dreams some time ago, and what I do is think about them through my morning shower etc. I guess what I end up with is the memory of the memory of the dream like you said. There are some dreams that stay with me, and sometimes there are these free floating thoughts. You were somewhere, you can’t remember where, with some people, you can’t quite remember who, and something happened, and you can’t be sure if it was a dream or something that really happened.

The Soul, the Spirit, and the Supernatural

When people say that something is spiritual, they might mean "supernatural", they might mean "emotional", or they might mean a combination of the two. I think that "soul" and "spirit" mean about the same thing, and they both have more than one definition. You know, like "the soul of darkness" and "the spirit of '76". For our purposes, however, I think we can agree that the soul or spirit is the invisible part of a person that allegedly goes to Heaven or Hell when the person dies. Although people have tried, I don't think that anybody has succeeded in weighing, measuring, or otherwise quantifying the human soul. That means it's still in the realm of the supernatural.

A long time ago, the supernatural realm was really big, but it has gotten smaller each time somebody has discovered the true scientific nature of one of it's phenomena. For instance, thunder and lightning used to be considered supernatural, but now they aren't anymore. Then there are the gray areas about which a general consensus has not yet been reached. Two examples would be ESP and the near death experience. Some people consider them to be totally fictitious, others believe there must be a scientific explanation for them, and others believe that they are supernatural phenomena.

I thought you might be onto something when I mistakenly believed that you said you believed in a soul that was both natural and mortal. I don't know if I would agree with that, but it's something to think about. Long ago I had the idea that even God Himself might not be supernatural. (Notice I said "might not".) Lots of things are invisible, like electrons and oxygen, but nobody questions their existence or considers them to be supernatural. Okay, they are detectable and measurable with instrumentation, but they are invisible to the average guy on the street. Then there's those alternate universes, the existence of which has only been postulated. Are they supernatural?

I don't think we are always conscious of our dreams. Well, to even call it a dream, we would have to be unconscious. If we were conscious at the time, it would more properly be called a vision or a hallucination. Anyway, the experts say that we dream a lot more than we think we do, we just don't remember most of our dreams after we wake up. Did you ever notice how you sometimes vividly remember a dream when you first wake up, but the memory begins to fade almost immediately? If you were to write it down, you would have access to the memory later, but would you be remembering the dream itself or just your written description of it? This is probably for the best, if we remembered all of our dreams, our minds would be so full of dreams that there would be little room for anything else.

can we precede ourselves?

There are four kinds of energy, electrochemical, gravity, and the weak and strong nuclear forces. The weak nuclear (not electric) force is what’s released when atoms break up and the strong nuclear force is what keeps the atoms together. In the beginning of the big bang there was one kind of energy, the ur energy which split into the four shortly afterwards. When scientists run their cyclotrons one of the things they are trying to do is replicate the conditions early in the big bang to determine what this ur energy was like and how the four types of energy relate to each other.

So far they have been able to link the electrochemical, and the weak and strong nuclear forces, but gravity, like the cheese, stands alone. I think that is one of the reasons that they are always searching for gravity waves. It will be a big deal when they find them, but so far, nada. But I am speaking a little beyond my expertise here.

Speaking or expertise, did you notice how I said ur energy. I have been seeing this prefix around lately and it seemed to me to mean something like primal. I thought it came from the ancient city of Ur, but before I ventured to use it on my own I went to the wiki, and it turns out it is a German prefix meaning: ur- (proto-, primitive, original).^[1] So you see, another good thing about the Beaglesonian Institute, it makes us look up things. If I was talking to the drunk on the next barstool, I would have never bothered to do that.

There seem to be a couple schools on whether computers can be like brains. One side says, sure, all we need is bigger, faster, computers all hooked up together. I don’t remember how many synapsis are in the brain, but way more than our biggest computers, but these guys figure eventually we will reach that number and then we will be close to replicating the human brain. Others say no, it is apples and oranges, the computer is nothing like a brain. I am in the latter school, but it is just an opinion.

I have to correct myself here. I was talking about the unconscious mind when I meant subconscious. The prevalent theory is that dreaming has something to do with memory, in that people who are allowed to sleep after studying something remember more than people who weren’t. I always think of it as the little elves in the attic of my brain moving the new boxes onto new shelves and in the process sometimes they bump up against the wall of the subconscious mind and that causes a dream. Well that is scientific isn’t it?

Well here is an odd thing, why are we conscious of our dreams? What purpose does that serve?

Wait a minute, I don’t believe that we have a soul. I don’t even know what soul means, that and spiritual, when people say they are spiritual I have no idea what they are talking about, and frankly, I don’t think they do either, but I’m usually too polite to mention it. That thing about the candle and besmirching the garment was all what I think some people think but not me.

If there was a time before we were conscious, and there will be a time afterwards when we are not conscious, aren’t we getting to something coming out of nothing, and then that something going into nothing? Isn’t that nothing preceding itself?

Had to go back through Beaglesonia to get that quote. Do you ever read our past entries

The Electric Brain

I think you would like Pim's book, possibly better than I did, if you gave it half a chance. It's not written from a religious point of view, although he does bring quantum physics into it, which has as much hocus pocus in it as any religion.

When you think about it, everything runs on electricity, doesn't it. Well, maybe not everything. Electricity doesn't hold atoms together, does it? Seems like the positive protons and the negative electrons would repel each other and everything would fall apart. I seem to remember there is something called the "strong force", and that electricity is called the "weak force". Then there's something called a "covalent bond", which sounds like electricity to me.

Of course they already have man-made electric brains, but they're not the same as organic brains, at least not yet. No matter how smart they make the next generation of computers, they still would need consciousness to be on a level with natural brains. I understand there are people working on that, but I'm not so sure it's a good idea. They keep fooling around with that stuff and, the next thing you know, we've got a whole new race of people demanding civil rights and getting themselves elected President of the United States. Mark my words, no good will come of it!

I don't think that dreams are products of the conscious mind. It's a little confusing because the words "unconscious" and "subconscious" are often used interchangeably. I think that "unconscious" is what you are when you're asleep or in a coma. Your subconscious mind, on the other hand, works both when you are asleep and when you are awake. It controls things like breathing and anything else that works automatically without you thinking about it, and it also controls dreaming. Your subconscious also has something to do with your memory. When you consciously try to remember something, but can't, your subconscious initiates a search of your memory banks, which may take some time. That's why you may wake up hours later in the middle of the night and say, "That's it!"

One theory about dreams is that they represent your subconscious mind trying to make sense of all the stuff your conscious mind feeds into it. Well, I mean subconscious sense, which is different from conscious sense. It's like your subconscious speaks a different language than you conscious mind and has to reformat everything before it can file it away for future reference. The conscious and subconscious must communicate with each other, though, or nothing would work. Maybe they have something like HTTP or HTML code for that. You think?

Interesting that you believe you have a soul, but don't believe that it's immortal. I understand that the old Greek word for "spirit" is the same word for "wind" or "breath". I suppose ancient people noticed that one difference between a living creature and a dead creature is breathing, or lack thereof. When somebody died, they would say something like, "His spirit has left his body". They must have wondered where that spirit went when it left the body, one thing led to another, and before you know it, they had religion. What you seem to be saying is that the spirit was created when the body was created and, when the body dies, the spirit dies with it. I think this is an interesting concept that merits further discussion.

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Silly me! Opposite charges attract each other, it's the like charges that repel each other. I knew that, but I seem to have momentarily forgotten it. Then, when I went out into the garage and lit up a cigarette, it came back to me. This illustrates the point I made about how your subconscious mind interacts with you conscious mind to recall memories, which is probably why my subconscious mind made me forget it in the first place.