Religion, easy as ... (workbook #a)

Think about it, aren't the Abrahamic religions all about self-centeredness - ours as well as God’s? Worse is their contempt and disregard for the sovereignty of our Earth’s biosphere, her other inhabitants and the reality of our Evolutionary origins. 

August 30th, 2020, an update on my 

Hoffman Playing Basketball in Zero-gravity project

I’ve one last assignment before I can put the bow on my Hoffman Playing Basketball in Zero-gravity project.  But it’s a challenging topic, easy to avoid and procrastinate, plus I’ve had a very busy summer, still do. 

On the other hand, time and experience has been clarifying these fundamental questions most others have also pondered, so of course I want to enunciate and share my perspective, while I'm still around. 

I want my final installment to Hoffman's project to be a sharp essay, so have decided to go slow, share the introduction, and basically conduct a personal workshop and hopefully by doing it online, it'll push me to completing the final details in style.   

It would be wonderful if some others would chime in, and in fact, I have a thread started over at CFI's CenterForInquiryForum and invite you to share any comments or general thoughts over there.

This isn’t for everyone, but if concepts such as Earth Centrism, Evolution, deep time and Earth as a physical geo-biological entity, resonates, you may find this fascinating.  

Introduction

I’ll wager that if you took some time to think about it, you’d acknowledge that on a fundamental level the Abrahamic religions are all about self-centeredness - ours as well as God’s.

These religions were founded on the basis of self-interest, they were focused on selected kernels of knowledge, born of an aggressive insecurity, and supported by a passionate sense of self-important certitude. Usually with empire building in mind while reeking with hostility towards outsiders, other teachers and learning.  They did achieve results.

All the while pretty much ignoring the sovereignty of our Earth’s biosphere, her other inhabitants and the reality of our Evolutionary origins.

Consider, within the Abrahamic tradition our planet’s life support system and her inhabitants never rise above something to exploit until we suck it dry, then we move on to the next bonanza.

Whereas for me, Earth, her creatures and biosphere, her Evolution, these are my touchstones with physical reality. I feel time flowing through me as I travel through my days. I live within a mindscape that’s filled with an awareness of time in its entire spectrum, from microseconds, to my heart beat, to the days, seasons, years and decades, on to the eons of Evolution.

 

It’s Not A “Body-Mind Problem” - It’s An “Ego-God Problem.”

(updated January 1, 2022)

Among the lessons I’ve taken away from my Hoffman adventure is that as I’ve followed the philosophical roots of “dualism” back through Descartes (1600s) and on past Anselm (1000s), one thing has become clear. the entire philosophical edifice of this Mind-Body “Problem” was formed from within that Abrahamic God-fearing mindset that gave us the three major religions, with their self-serving patriarchal mentality, heaven and hell, along with branding dualism’s hard boundaries and need for a sense of certitude into our imagination and onto our expectations.

The Abrahamic worldview perceives people as isolated objects, not only from this planet, but each other, even from ourselves.  The creatures we live with and the landscapes we exist within are treated with contempt and wanton waste.

Regarding the “Mind-Body Problem.”  

Dr. Solms makes a wonderful analogy that highlights the error being made:

Question:  Was it lightning or thunder that killed the man?

It’s a meaningless question.

Lightning and thunder are simply different aspects of the same phenomena.

Our Mind and consciousness is the interior reflection of our living body (both its interior housekeeping and external interaction with the environment).  We simply cannot have one without the other.

We are embedded within an interconnected web of life and are the direct products of Earth’s Pageant of Evolution.

Why isn’t that reflected in modern philosophical discourse? 

Learning to appreciate the deep-time pageant of Evolution puts an entirely different richer light upon our interior existence.  An awareness that encompasses the whole of time and this planet that created us.

It also gives us a deep appreciation for the continuity of life.  Life is good, life is precious, but death is no enemy, painful though it may be.  Death is part of the cycle that brings forth new life.  Revel in the pageant you are blessed enough to be witnessing.  While you can. 

As for God?  

Who is “God,” but a creation of our unique complex human minds dealing with our day to days?   

Where did God come from?  

What is “Earth Centrism”?

edited November 5, 2021

The Earth Centrist’s perspective acknowledges that Earth; her material constituents and physical processes, unfolding one day at a time, are our fundamental touchstone with reality.  We acknowledge Earth and glory in understanding her pageant of Evolution and appreciating how that pageant is reflected within our own bodies. 

We find justification in the physical fact that humans were created out of Earth's processes. 

Science shows us that we belong to the mammalian branch of one of Earth’s amazing animal kingdoms.  Yet, it’s undeniable that something quite unique happened around six million years ago when certain apes took a wild improbable evolutionary turn.

By and by, besides the marvel of our two hands, we developed two feet and legs that could stand tall or run for hours and a growing brain that learned rapidly and remembered. 

During this period our brain physically morphed in some significant ways that enabled it to host a profound leap in cognitive information processing, storage and retrieval ability. 

On the outside hominids learned to make tools, hunt, fish, and select plants, plus they mastered fire for cooking and better living.

On the inside our brains were growing and benefiting from the new super nourishment while human curiosity and adventures started filling and stretching our Mindscapes with experiences and knowledge beyond anything the "natural" physical Earth ever knew.

By Mindscape, I mean the product of all that our body/brain perceives and processes, which of course, evolutionarily speaking, was dependent on our brain’s hardware keeping pace with and driving the ever increasing volume of information and thoughts.

While the human mind and spirit seem ineffable mysteries, they are also of tremendous consequence and real-world physical power.  They drove our growing ability to study and manipulate our world; to communicate and record our experiences; and to formulate explanations for a world full of mysteries, threats and wonders.

People learned to think and gossip and paint pictures upon the canvas of cave walls, and even better, upon the canvas of each other’s imaginations.  We’ve been adding to our mind’s awareness and complexity ever since.

Students’ Resource: A representative cross-section of Dr. Mark Solms' scientific publications.

We're now into section five of a larger project that’s intended to be a ‘Student’s Resource for Defending Physical Reality.’  In this third chapter of my introduction to Dr. Mark Solms, Ph.D., ( #1, #2 ), I provide a bibliography of his insightful publications (books & scientific papers) which explain the basis for bringing the study of our human consciousness, and the so-called Mind-Body Problem, into the realm of sober, physical reality respecting, evolution appreciating, science.  (Incidentally, thereby putting the lie to the claim that meta-physical outside agents are needed to explain and understand human consciousness.)

This list is not complete by any stretch, but it is an impressive introductory sampling, and it’s intended to serve as a reference that’s guaranteed to inform, perhaps inspire, the serious student, along with serious enthusiasts of science.  People interested in better understanding how Earth’s evolution made us who we are. 

 …  (Continued at the end of this bibliography)

Dr. Mark Solms, PhD.

Professor of Neuropsychology

CURRICULUM VITAE Mark Leonard Solms

Born district of Lüderitz, Namibia, July 17, 1961

The International Neuropsychoanalysis Society

Co-chairs, Mark Solms with Cristina Alberini

Google Scholar list of Dr. Solms' scientific papers

Solms-Delta Wine Estate

Franschhoek Valley, South Africa

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Dr Mark Solms, Ph.D. (WITS)

University of Cape Town, Department of Psychology

Background and research interests

• Brain mechanisms of dreaming, emotion, motivation.
• Psychological mechanisms of confabulation and anosognosia syndromes.

Teaching responsibilities - Neuropsychology – Research and Clinical.

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Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute  |  Mark Solms PhD

Psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist.

Affiliations:

Dr. Solms holds the position of Chair of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital (Departments of Psychology and Neurology) and is the President of the South African Psychoanalytical Association. He is also Research Chair of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Dr. Solms founded the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society in 2000 and was a Founding Editor (with Ed Nersessian) of the journal Neuropsychoanalysis. He is Director of the Arnold Pfeffer Center for Neuropsychoanalysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, a Trustee of the Neuropsychoanalysis Fund in London, and Director of the Neuropsychoanalysis Trust in Cape Town.

Dr. Solms’ Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis can be viewed here.

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Regarding Mark Solms South African Farm and dealing with a history social injustice

Jill Choder-Goldman interviews Mark Solms, August 2019.

“I started to realise that the first thing is not to impulsively, concretely enact something, but rather just sitting with it and letting it be the ugly thing that it is, until you start to see what the nature of the thing is,” says Mark Solms.

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What is Neuropsychoanalysis?

Turnbull Lab, Prifysgol Bangor University, Wales, U.K.

The term 'neuropsychoanalysis' was first used in the late 1990s by Mark Solms, as the title of the journal Neuropsychoanalysis. 

Diary - Closing Out 2020 Defending Physical Reality

 As 2020 draws to an end the one-hand-clapping finds himself embroiled in a curious effort to defend established “scientific realism.”  Because?  Well, because apparently someone needs too.  

Curious, because the process has inspired me to think in terms of composing a Students Guide In Defense of Reality - Dissecting Hoffman’s Case Against Reality. I want to create a framework for a virtual class to examine the process of scientific deception, and science by rhetoric rather than facts, while pressing home the importance of learning about Evolution from the bottom up.  I’m at chapter 19 with many more in the pipeline before wrapping it up (still at the laying groundwork phase - chapters listed at the bottom).

This mission is about exposing how folks like Donald Hoffman, Templeton Foundation, and many intellectual celebrities are wasting our precious time looking through the wrong end of both telescope and microscope, for fun and profit.  

For instance, Hoffman’s “Conscious Agents” and FBT Theorem are simply the latest rationalization in human’s long tradition of denying responsibility for ourselves, lives and actions.  Now that God has lost its substance, it’s time for math and pseudo-science?  

What's wrong with appreciating ourselves for the incredible biological creatures that we are?   Why not explicitly recognize the divide between physical reality and our Mindscape with something more substantial than flailing at a supposed body-mind "problem.”

This project is forcing me to realize that the younger generations need to escape the shackles of generations old self-indulgent manmade philosophical constructs who’s stilted questions and inscrutable solutions have more to do with human insecurity, egos and turf battles, than in understanding our actual human condition and the biosphere that created and sustains us self-obsessed human beings.

Our answers are limited by the quality of our questions!  

Genuine understanding about our natural world is an emergent property driven by the inflow of honest quality facts and evidence.  All else is dancing within our minds.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  Just stop being blind to the supremacy of physical reality!

Finding answers?