Left Brain Vs Right Brain

The brain is far from understood, if it were simple enough for us to understand then we would be too dumb to understand it.  However, we do know a lot about it.  Only quite recently the plasticity of the brain has become accepted - it used to be thought that the brain structures were fixed and that they filled up with knowledge and experience, much like a computer.  I remember as a boy being taught that the number of neurons in the brain grew until adulthood and then they just started dying off with no new ones replacing them.  The truth is more complicated - our brains form new connections all the time and can become rewired dramatically through necessity if one area becomes damaged, but generally there are structures in the brain that perform [more-or-less] specific functions.

People sometimes talk about being left or right brained, i.e. more dominant in the left / right hemisphere.

The left hemisphere contains the structures strongly associated with: grammar and vocabulary; logically structured thinking; analysing and controlling feelings; reality.

The right hemisphere contains the structures strongly associated with: intonation of speech; an unstructured approach to tasks (they call it 'multitasking' which has been shown to be less efficient in tests); emotional responses; fantasy.

To summarise, the left brain is rational, and the right brain is a hippy.

No prizes which side I'd be associated with, although actually I'd say I am much better than average at seeing the big picture - the less immediate consequences of actions - which is a right-brain trait.

The 2 hemispheres communicate by little roads called commissures, and one superhighway called the corpus callosum.

For severe epilepsy this superhighway of communication is sometimes severed, leading to some fascinating discoveries.  The two halves of the brain can be thought of as having separate consciousnesses!  Imagine being trapped inside someone else's head, much like in the film 'Being John Malkovic', able to see everything but only able to have a slight influence on his behaviour.  That may be happening inside you right now!  With some subjects who have had their corpus callosum severed, a written command can be flashed up visible only to the eye without the subject being consciously aware of it.  For example, if the word "LEAVE" is flashed up, the subject may get up and start to leave the room - when asked why they are leaving they reply something like "I'm thirsty, I want to go get a soda".  The right brain has invented a story for the the conscious mind that is coherent with the action demanded by the subconscious.

Some of these patients also experience 'alien hand syndrome' in which one arm is under the control of the 2nd hidden consciousness.  Freaky.

I wonder if the religious doctors see these patients as having 2 souls?

Most people invent stories for their lives that fit with their actions.  Most people believe they have rational reasons for their actions, but actually it is just lies told to them by the ultimate manipulating puppet master - their own subconscious.

Life Worth

I've thought about suicide a lot.  Not so much doing it, though I have sometimes felt so bored of life that I've thought I may as well, but about why I or anyone else would do it.  When I've felt particularly bored of life - same ol shit, different day - I've essentially ended up chastising myself for being unimaginative or just downright lazy.  

Once someone contemplates suicide they essentially stop placing value on life, and when that happens the person is liberated to do anything.  A lone suicide means that the person values the life of others - they didn't use the terrible strength and freedom of that decision to go postal on their boss etc - and so from their lonely death arises the realisation of a value that may have justified their existence.

I don't feel that value.  I don't believe there is a god or any sort of afterlife/reincarnation punishment.  I believe that we are animals with instincts and when we die we cease to exist.  I don't believe in morals (right and wrong) but I do believe in a... malleable... sort of ethics - how to live your life.  I may not instinctively find worth in the lives of others but I would not have a better life myself if I showed this to the recurring characters in this drama we call life.

Terrorism

Not allowed: nail-clippers.

Allowed: to go into the shop after security and buy a large glass bottle of flammable liquid (e.g. vodka) that you could take on the plane and break into a formidable weapon and a fire bomb.

Let's be honest – a lot of the security measures at airports are there either as a PR exercise to make people simply feel safer, or because the security managers wanted to increase their staff numbers, and therefore their own importance.

If someone has a modicum of intelligence and is prepared to die, then there is nothing you can do to stop them killing at least some people.  

Why are airplanes targeted anyway?  It would be a lot easier to get a van with a bomb in it onto a ferry, or just parked in Wall St.  Many people would die, there would be just as much publicity, and you could keep your own life.  If public fear and disruption is the objective then I just don't think taking down an airplane is good value for them; these terrorists have no imagination.  No logic behind their actions either - if you asked one of the terrorists how what they do is going to advance their cause, then I doubt they would demonstrate a well thought-through logical connection between the act and their aims.

Headline news in the UK today is a bomb last night in Northern Ireland; some Republicans killed a Catholic policeman.  While I'm sure they viewed him as some kind of traitor, I doubt they would say it was a simple act of punishment - they would claim it advances their cause somehow... but I highly doubt whoever planted it would have a coherent explanation of how it achieves this.

New hobby

I need a new hobby.  Assuming no-one joins my proposed religion, I'll need an outlet for my... more... rule breaking side.  Even though by anyone else's standards my life is exciting, and filled with things to do, I often feel that it is the same shit different day.
I think my new hobby will be stealing stuff from churches.  They are rich and full of woo and the good folk that go to the church will see My act as being part of god's plan - perhaps god will make me do it to test their faith or for some otherwise obscure ineffable purpose.  It really makes me laugh that anything I do to their church will turn out to be an ontological triumph for their faith.  It cracks me up that the religious tell you that you must know god and in the next breath tell you he moves in mysterious unknowable ways.  If everything in the world that can possibly happen can be explained as falling within his will, then you do not know him and have no business worshiping him.

I will certainly be on the lookout for opportunity to sabotage any bells they ring to cut my sleep short on a Sunday morning.  Inconsiderate fuckers.  Maybe I should blow my atheist vuvuzela every 3am outside the bishop's bedroom window. 

Sin

If there is a god who created us, then it was She who gave our species the divine gifts of reasoning, intelligence, and free will.

Surely the biggest sin against this god would be to not use these gifts and to just have blind faith in superstitious rituals and some old text that is full of contradictions.
If there is a heaven, it is the atheists who get in. 

Scientosophy - A New Religion

What was there before the big bang? God? Then what came before God? This is a major problem for the world's religions and one only my proposed religion - Scientosophy - has the answers to. 

The abiding state of truth in the universe is one of consistency. It is not possible for two statements to contradict each other and for them both to be true. Every explanation for the origin of the universe is either contradictory or incomplete (i.e. you can always ask "and what caused that?"). If an explanation is happened upon that is patently complete and consistent, then surely that must be the truth - Scientosophy.

The basic premise is that in the future, human knowledge and technical know-how evolves to the point where we are able to formulate a way to create a big-bang, a universe. We would be able to position the start point of this universe anywhere within our own space and time. As it was created inside our universe, all the same dimensions and laws of physics would hold in it as do in ours. The key understanding now is that this new big bang gets positioned at the same point as our big bang! It isn't a second universe, it IS our universe. This creates a closed loop in time, thus avoiding any causality problems. We have become our own creators.

A good religion also needs a purpose, and by golly does this one have a purpose. To ensure humans reach the stage of intelligence to pull this feat off we need to encourage selective breeding - smart people should have more kids,and stupid people should have fewer. As the uberintelligent head of the religion I would, of course, have mating privileges with any of the Scientosophy women I choose, and any of them can choose to have AI from my seed. 

The reason it is important to reach the universe creation point as soon as possible, and not just hang around happy that it will happen some time, is due to the question of free will and determinism. Before we create our universe we are stuck in a time loop and so can't be sure of our free will. The sooner we can precipitate the loop point, the sooner we free the whole of humanity (and any aliens out there) from the slavery of determinism and allow us to be truly conscious - individual pioneers in the brave new world.

Of course, some of the Scientosophy rituals involve hallucinogenic drugs; I wouldn't want anyone thinking too clearly about how likely these religious tenets are, even if they are eminently more plausible than those of any religion I can think of!

Failure of existing religions

Why is there something rather than nothing?  By 'something' I include space and time themselves, not just things that exist within them.

I don't know.

Nobody does.

Nobody ever will – any explanation would utilise logic and laws of physics, both of which are 'something' and so the explanation would be bootstrapping.

Positing 'god' doesn't get around the question – the posited god is a 'something', and raises far more questions than it answers.

So get over it – accept that there are unknowable things and don't be scared by it.

Arrogance

Within 24 hours of the challenger space shuttle disaster a psychologist asked over 100 students where they were and what they were doing when they heard what had happened. About 2½ years later he asked them the same questions. Only 10% gave the same answers.

People will readily accept the possibility of someone else's memory being false, and at the same time have absolute faith in their own memory (and beliefs). Arrogance.

So basically my position is that I am capable of questioning my own beliefs (and regularly do!). The opinions and conclusions I come to are therefore better thought out and more likely to be correct than the vast majority of other people's opinions. This is a logical position to take. The arrogant ones are the religious people and the people who don't admit the possibility of their brain playing tricks on them.

I'm often accused of being arrogant in my dismissal of religious beliefs.

I'm sure you will agree that it would be possible to gather together a group (large – over a hundred, anyway) of people, of equal intelligence and education, who all have (equally strong) religious beliefs that are incompatible with the religious beliefs of everyone else in the room.

In this group of equals, religion makes each and every one of them stand up and try to shout over the top of everyone else, “I am right, and everyone else is wrong”.

So, I ask you, who is really the arrogant one – I, who understand that my brain can play tricks, and dispassionately analyse the evidence before coming to my opinion, or the person with religious beliefs?

Or maybe I'm just NPD ;)

Souls

What is a soul?  Perhaps others would define it differently, but I am going to use a loose definition: 'the part of an individual that is not rooted in the physical world, and enables that individual to somehow have a consciousness after physical death'.

If you believe you have a soul, and you believe in evolution, and you don't believe that all life forms have a soul (e.g. a worm, a bacterium...), then you must come to the conclusion that at some point along the evolutionary trail an animal existed that didn't have a soul whereas its offspring did.  This seeming absurdity springs from evolution being a very finely gradiated change, whereas a soul would seem to be something that is either present or not – you can't have half a soul.

Another problem I have with the concept of souls is the whole afterlife thing.  If heaven exists, is it possible to do bad things there?  I don't want to hear any crap about how you won't want to do any bad things because you will be surrounded by god's love – if I didn't want to do something that was slightly morally dubious in heaven (even just to test whether i could) then i wouldn't be me.  If this soul doesn't look like me (physical attributes dead on earth) and doesn't have the same personality and critical faculties as me, then it isn't me and the question of whether this soul lives on after I die is one of complete irrelevance.