Dear DNC Fundraisers, take a break.

Please realize your relentless deluge of fund raising texts - filled with melodramatic to hysterical messaging - is counter-productive.   

If the Democratic Party isn't changing minds, we are losing!  

DNC needs to inform, engage, and motive us!  These constant texts do nothing but irritate and worse - they drive people away because we are tapped out.  Instead, why not help us regular grassroots people network with likeminded Democrats to raise awareness.  Let's recapture the sense of the community spirit that once fueled our democracy.

We need substantive helpful information and connection building. 

A suggestion: Why not a private Democratic online discussion forum.  

To every thing, turn, turn. Who am I?

After more than six years of chewing on it, I’m looking forward to demoting my “Who Am I?” project to the way back burner and starting in on another one who's time has come. 

This Stephen Gould’s Missing Key, morphed into Is Belief In God Rational?, morphed into Who Am I? project was edifying and humbling, and yeah, I’m afraid disappointing.  I’m a born and bred child of the intellectual enlightenment, with engaged discussion in my DNA.  Seems that I may belong in a different world and time and with goals that make no sense to the current implosion into that MAGA, me, me, me, dog eat dog reality making the rounds.  

Thing is, I grew up in a home with table talk, and magazines like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, National Geographic, two encyclopedia sets, the big Webster Dictionary that needed it’s own stand, plus …, all that in a narrow ground level Chicago apartment with eclectic parents who were curious about the world, plus two sisters, an older brother with an engineer’s mind, turned jet engine mechanic and ultimately retiring as 737 pilot.  But, I digress.  

After my latest frustrating round with the philosophy club, I’m sharing an email I sent to an eminent neuroscientist that I swapped some emails with a couple years back.  I’m sharing his response followed by some more explanatory notes.  

The Democratic Party online Forum. To help inform and build community. It's worth a try.

Democratic Party leaders how will you start reconnecting with alienated voters whose budgets won’t allow for constant political donations?

Oh if wishes were horses and I had tons of money, then someone at Democratic headquarters would listen to this suggestion.  We could talk it around until a big wig decides to take the idea for themself and make it happen. Politics at its best.
Now it’s the proverbial, … never mind.  Now, if you think it's a good idea, pass it along.

DNC’s never ending assault of political donation demands have become counter productive. We need ideas and community and encouragement.

What’s worse is the melodrama, rarely do those Democrat texts communicate any constructive information or reason to engage.

We need substantive helpful information. We need something with teeth that engages. 

One suggestion, why not a private Democratic online discussion forum.  The DNC could communicate directly with interested voters; create a platform to inform, engage, motivate and help us network directly with likeminded.

Give us something to help build a little tangible feelings of solidarity.

"I Am, Therefore I Think" - A scientific reality. What does it mean? (a dialogue)

 

I received the following constructive response to some of my thoughts and have decided to share this latest effort to clarify my Earth Centrist perspective. 

Hi, Peter,

Many theists believe in evolution, viewing it as god’s means of creating humans, so evolution is a bit of a red herring in this debate.  We do have the concept of god in our minds, but that tells us nothing about whether there is a god or not.  We have the concepts of trees and unicorns; the former exist, the latter don’t.  We need further argumentation to make a case for or against god’s existence.

Regards,

Thank you for responding and engaging with my ideas.  

Your note invites some clarification.

This isn’t about lip service to evolution.

This is about our relationship with the thoughts we possess.

This is about taking Descartes' (pre-scientific) reduction of what we can known about the human condition, which he boiled down to: "I Think, Therefore I Am” - to a modern scientifically informed reduction of our actual human condition: "I Am, Therefore I Think."

We are evolved biological sensing creatures, product of a half billion years of Earth’s evolution - what that tells us is that our mind is produced by our body/brain interacting with the world.  (Solms, Damasio, Sapolsky, etc.)

This brings us to a realization that it isn't a question of whether Gods are real or not. 

It is about appreciating that God's are the product of our own human thoughts.

Meta-physical figments within our minds - outside the realm of physical world.

You write: "We do have the concept of god in our minds" - but that is exactly what begs the question: "How does an assumption of God become a Being of God?"

Philosophy Club - Is Belief in God Rational?

 It seems pointless for me to be writing about climate science anymore. Our runway is receding as we rush forward peddle-to-the-metal.  We are entering the free fall zone - we've put extreme destructive weather roulette in charge of how our future unfolds.  

Rather than get consumed by the dark side, my focus has pulled in to a more personal, introspective place.  With four grandchildren entering my life over the past five years, I'm more into reminiscing about past times and lessons learned during my 69 adventurous years, and counting.  Of course, I will continue striving to explain my apparently rather unique Earth Centrist perspective.  

I also participate in a Philosophy Club and after a recent meeting I was inspired to write the following for our local weekly paper.

Dear Editor,

I should be going to bed, but my head is full of dancing memories from this evening’s panel discussion that had four FLC professors debating the question: “Is belief in God rational?”  Excellent stories told and arguments offered, claims made and responded to with counterclaims and more questions, as words upon words cascaded over each other.  

Not for the first time. I found myself wondering, if philosophy’s goal is to help us understand, why the love for adding layers upon layers of creative complexity and hairsplitting that often obscures the fundamentals?  After all, it is the simple fundamentals that make a coherent understanding possible? 

Please understand I come at this God question from a different, and apparently somewhat unique Earth Centrist, science respecting, bottom up, evolutionary perspective that I’d like to share with you.

Is Belief in God Rational?

To me, that framing feels like a trick question of sorts

God is a belief in itself.

God is not a Thing.

Regarding people’s faith in a God - I ask, how does an assumption of God get transmuted into a Thing?

Is a belief in a belief rational?  ( Is faith rational? )

I’d say sure, from an evolutionary and pragmatic societal perspective, there are a host of reasons faith in meta-physical beliefs could and does bring benefits to believers. 

Regarding what God is, that needs to start with resolving the ageless question, “Who Am I?”  

Fact is, I, we, are evolved biological animals, the product of half a billion unbroken years of Earth’s processes.  

From the beginning all creatures have required a degree of awareness, processing and action abilities, each according to their individual biological complexity and kind.  Ours is simply the most advanced mind, thanks to our incredible evolved body and its experiences.

Still, our thoughts are the interior reflection of our body communicating with itself as it processes incoming information from within and outside. (See Drs. Solms, Damasio, Sapolski, etc. for details.)  It is our body and brain interacting with physical reality that produces our mind, our sense of self, all our thoughts - collectively our Mindscape.  

The inevitable conclusion from the full scope of relevant biological/physical sciences is that consciousness is not a thing, it is an interaction.  Our Consciousness is produced in the living moment by our living body.

As with the dynamo that stops producing electricity when it stops spinning - so too when our body stops living, our mind/consciousness ceases to be produced, after that, we become memories within those we leave behind.

It seems to me self-evident from the above that our God’s must be a product of our thoughts, which in turn, are driven by personal biological imperatives, needs, ego, bias, etc.  

The Hard Problem is figuring out why such a straightforward observation - that our body/brain interacting with the world produces our mind - is so assiduously avoided.

Our Gods are very real, still we should be very clear, our Gods belong to the meta-physical realm.  

Gods are not part of this physical reality that makes up the biology of our bodies, nor the substance of this miracle planet Earth that created us to begin with, along with the rules all of Earth’s nature operates under.

Key concepts:  Appreciating the ‘Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide.’

Appreciating that our living body produces our thoughts, and that our Gods are born from within our own ego-centric thoughts. 

***

The other question discussed was: “Does Morality Require God?”  

How can it, if we create our own Gods? 

For me, that realization puts the responsibility right back upon us humans, collectively and individually.

 

 

John F. Kennedy, Reflecting on Nov 22,1963 some 61 years later

 On this day in 1963, at about the time I’m typing this, recess was over for the younger kids at John J. Audubon elementary school. I found myself climbing back up the stairs to my third grade classroom when I overheard an older boy coming down the stairs for their recess time. He was telling his friend, “did you hear, they shot the president.”

My parents being civic and interested in the politics and world affairs, plus proud Democrats, we knew all about our President. For my sibs, along with millions of other Americans back then, the Kennedy’s were like distant relatives, meaning it was personal - and the words were like a punch in the belly. Reinforced by our sad struggling teacher explaining what was being broadcast on the news and informed us school was over for that day and that we should go home to our families. We left school and all of us walked back home to be with our parents.

Dear Sabine Hossenfelder, why blame climate scientists for the politicization?

 

Dear Sabina Hossenfelder, 

I’ve been watching your YouTube videos for a while and for the most part, I enjoy them, because I love the topics, your informative sharp style, and you were refreshingly free of red flags. As I became a fan, I’ll admit I got some weird vicarious kick at discovering you were born in Frankfurt am Main during the time I was living there, during my 3 years in BRD & CH.

Then you started talking about climate scientists, people I’ve enthusiastically followed and learned from since my high school science classes (grad of ’73), and a topic I have closely followed for over a half century since.  Now, listening to you harp on climate scientists, I do see red flags cropping up, which I feel obligated to share as far and wide as my meager efforts will afford, via an email and posting at my blogs.

Your July 20th, “Fossil Fuels Don’t Come From Fossils? Tucker Carlson Fact Check” brought my feelings to a boil.  Now I want to do a little fact checking of your attitude and words, along with their unfortunate implications, in a society where determined willful ignorance runs rampant.

Fossil Fuels Don’t Come From Fossils? Tucker Carlson Fact Check

Sabine Hossenfelder - July 20, 2024 

5:44

“The world is full of untruth and half truth, right that's the whole problem right.”

8:14

"… Dr. Soon then goes on to complain about how climate scientists reacted to the opening statement from Al Jaber at the COP meeting earlier this year.

In the beginning of this cop 28 meeting,  the chairman, …  was saying that ‘there's no scientific reasoning to say that we should phase out fossil fuels.’ “

“He’s right. But then he backed off because of all this, baa-baa. …”

“There's no scientific reasoning to say that we should phase out fossil fuel.”

This isn’t an academic argument.  This is the stuff of rhetorical gamesmanship.    

No parameters, no nuances.  Give it a think Sabina.