Introduction and allegro

This is an open invitation to anyone who might have an interest in joining me as I finalize a sequel to a previously published paper on our future (our futures, actually).X  In this blog, I would like to explore a number of the main issues that found their way into the first version of the current paper, and to hear what you have to say on these issues, or about my ruminations, and your suggestions, since I am sure that there are still other perspectives and considerations that need to be represented in the paper.  I do hope that this will be a two-way street.  In return, I will be glad to acknowledge any additions or adjustments to the paper gained in this partnership.  (In that spirit, my first acknowledgement is to my daughter Dorian, in Boston, who first encouraged me to start a blog, and effectively left me with no excuse not to.)

As usual, I have chosen to tackle a very broad topic, so to give you a brief introduction to where my mind is about it, the following is a quote that is now in the draft, and following that is a quote that I am considering adding to the paper:

 

                   Only he who can see the invisible can do the impossible.

                                      Frank Gaines, Coach

 

                    Man has survived hitherto 

                     because he was too ignorant to know

                    how to realize his wishes.

                    Now that he can realize them,

                    he must either change them

                    or perish. 

                                       William Carlos Williams 

 

As difficult as the problems that we face may be, I nevertheless believe that if we could see ourselves more clearly – if we could see the invisible – then some of these problems might become a little less difficult to deal with (I had started to write “easier” instead of “less difficult”, but I’m not quite ready to go that far, at this point).  If you would like to follow along with me and participate in a journey of uncovering and explicating at least some of the invisible, I would be glad to have your company.

 

First Assignments (you thought I was kidding about participating, didn’t you...)

1.  Please let me know what you think about these quotes, or if you have others to   suggest.

2.  Also, rummage around in your memory, or your filing system, or your library, for your favorite aphorisms, insights, proverbs, lessons from kindergarten, or what have you, that might be along the lines of  the following words attributed to Atisha, an obscure Buddhist of around the turn of the first millennium, and which I am including here primarily as a possible mental stimulus (provocation?) for your thinking, and them in particular because, being obscure, you may not have run across them before. They do not appear as such in the paper, though some of the germs of the thoughts that they contain might:

 

         The greatest achievement is selflessness. 

         The greatest worth is self-mastery. 

         The greatest quality is seeking to serve others. 

         The greatest precept is continual awareness. 

         The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything.

         The greatest action is not conforming with the world’s ways. 

         The greatest magic is transmuting the passions.

         The greatest effort is not concerned with results. 

         The greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances.

 

I would like to hear what some of your reactions are to these thoughts, and what some of your favorite insights or observations are.

 - - - - - - - -

The paper itself will be on the lines of a professional journal paper, with carefully reasoned (at least that is the intent) arguments and citations to peer-reviewed or published sources, as appropriate.

 As for the next “edition” of this blog, I am planning to wait a good week before the next entry, to give whoever may wish to some time to respond to this invitation. 

 Thank you, and do let me know what you think.  Hope to hear from you!

---

X “Human Nature, the Future(s) of Humans, and the Humanist,” Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism, Vol. 17 (1), 2009; the American Humanist Association, Washington, D.C.

 

Comments

[Dr. T. Lindsay Moore]

I agree with Voltair - and that makes the key question why it was necessary to invent god. May this have something to do with Jack's initial comments about optimism? The future is unknowable - and the unknown can be scarry. Is god a way of characterizing the future in an optimistic way? It seems god has a way of provding us with what we want, if not today then tomorrow (after death?). All we have to do is obey "his" rules - and if we don't we can ask forgiveness and receive it (in most cases - there are mortal sins). Thus, knowing god's rules is key. That sets up people who "know" in a position of power - whether priests or the king or a particular interest group seeking power. So, god has an "existence." The question is where. Is it in the mind or is there a "place" called heaven?
Quen sabe?

[Jack Rose]

Amen!

I was also reminded that Voltaire said that if God did not exist, we would have to invent him. I would like to think that we could get along with a belief in our common humanity, but history doesn't yield much hope with that, either.

My greatest objections to the belief in God is how much mayhem is caused by people who think that only they have the correct or true belief, and that "God" authorizes them (the ones with the true beliefs) to punish the ones with untrue beliefs. Do we really want to believe in a god that would let that continue? The answer, unfortunately, seems to be that that is exactly what many of us do want.

In that connection, I would like to point out that, contrary to popular opinion, the Koran explicitly tells believers to leave the punishment of unbelievers to Allah, perhaps something similar to the Biblical "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; I will repay." But still, the idea that unbelievers and wrong-believers should not just be left alone, as long as they do no harm, but should have punishment or vengeance visited upon them, is "in the air". That, I'm pretty sure, is Us talking.

As for "positive atheists", my personal conclusion is that their objection to theists may at least in part be a doctrinal one--that they (the atheists) are convinced that they are right, and theists should therefore believe as they believe, which would make their issue not unlike the issues between and within particular religions. At least they don't talk about believers as needing to be punished.

Another frustration that I experience with believers is a tendency on their part to accept the "will of God" even for situations that we ourselves have created and that we could and should do something about, ourselves. I have an idea that we're going to be needing almost everyone's help in the coming decades.

[Guido Perez]

I agree that God is a human concept that probably developed because our ancestors needed to give agency to unknown or mysterious things.It has the evolutionary benefits of diminishing our stress level, thus protecting our immune system, and increasing group cohesion.In agricultural societies the concept of God was incorporated into organized religion. Each culture has developed its own system of belief which has been used to exclude other groups and as a means for political and social control.
Most rational arguments for the existence of God used by theists have been found to be invalid. The ontological argument and the fine tunning argument have some merit but they fail to prove that God exists.There is a striking lack of supporting evidence, however,abscence of evidence is not evidence of abscence(my warning to positive atheists).God may be unknowable or may have set up the laws of nature, leaving them to do the work.In summary, I believe that the existence of God neither can be proved nor disproved.

[Jack Rose]

Just to be clear, I completely agree that thinking that we are somehow set apart from, and possibly even above, nature is an act of hubris that could very easily end up bringing us "back into" nature in a very harsh way. That is what I meant when I wrote that:

"What makes consciousness" unnatural" in another, possibly more meaningful, sense is that it allowed us to think of ourselves as somehow being apart from nature, and to not only not take cognizance of the effects that we were having on it by our very numbers and the scope of our activities, but to think that we could with purpose and intent mold it to our wishes with impunity. In that respect, I think I agree that if we continue to think in those ways [that we are apart from and possibly above nature], then nature will probably have the last word."

And when I wrote that "I would say that managing to live within the constraints of nature, given our propensities to act as if we are separate from it, is what would prove that we are "exceptional", not our (probably) narcissistic claim that we are exceptional because we can appear to be independent of, or the masters of, nature in what we do," I wanted to highlight that what we need to master is ourselves, not nature, if we want to prove that we are "exceptional".

[Dr. T. Lindsay Moore]

That, my friend, is the nature of language. You send a song into the air (Ellington) and it takes on a life of its own. We don’t “own” what we say, we can only take responsibility for having said it. After that it is no long a statement but part of a conversation. In short, language has a context – even when we are just talking to ourselves.
I am not at all sure how being “unpredictable” renders something “a little ‘unnatural’.” What a mutation might produce is, I would agree, unpredictable; that it would produce ‘something’ is, I would argue, quite predictable. What a baby grows into is probably unpredictable, but that it would grow into something is quite predictable. To say what it grows into is unpredictable and therefore “a little ‘unnatural’ is to suggest that growth itself is unnatural. The analogous statement would be to say that mutation is “a little ‘unnatural’.” Mutation as growth, perhaps as change, is an inherent property of the universe – so it would seem – and if regarded as unnatural would render the universe itself unnatural. Not an unreasonable idea but one I could not understand without stepping outside the universe itself – which I have not yet learned how to do any more than I have learned how to step outside myself. When I “reflect on me” I am not stepping outside myself but maybe stepping outside myself into a meta-self – which is still a part of self.

The idea that by thinking of ourselves as distinct from nature allows us to mold it with impunity is precisely why I am so dead set against thinking in the terms of “natural” and “unnatural.” I suspect the notion comes from the Bible where god endowed Adam with the right to rule over the domain of the Natural. It is certainly inherent in the proposition – unless we also understand that that means we also have dominion over ourselves. Knowing that would allows us to rule in ways that do not destroy "us" (meaning humans and their environment). If we do not understand “dominion” in that way, then we think we can do with impunity anything we wish and “nature” will simply have to bend to our will. How dare nature allow our air to become poisoned just because we spew carbon into it. We have the right to spew thusly and nature must accommodate us. Well, she is doing just that. She is treating us like a germ and is making the effort to remove us from the body. We can only take cognizant of the impact we are having on nature if we understand ourselves to be a part of nature – not apart from. Our unwillingness to take dominion over and rule ourselves seems to me simply an expression of a misunderstanding of freedom.

The fact that we all die sometime in the future needs to be analyzed more closely and perhaps a distinction needs to be made between “future” and “meta-future” as well as a distinction between the “idea” of a future and the “quality” of the future. To know that all those currently alive are going to die sometime in the future but that time goes on beyond on own demise is to believe in a meta-future and would constitute one kind of optimism. To believe that I as an individual will live beyond the moment but will nevertheless die sometime in the future is another kind of optimism – that is, to believe in an individual future. It strikes me that both of those are optimistic stances. We speak of yet a third kind of optimism when we allow as how those futures will be positive (bring “good” things) or negative (bring “bad” things); optimism/pessimism sometimes refers to that stance.. Again, language shows itself to be contextual and the primary context of “optimism/pessimism” is that of time.
Growing toward the past in the way that Mr. Rose suggests seems to me pregnant with possibilities – a metaphor suggesting that I am optimistic about the study of history (that it is worth while, not that we will do it and do it better than we have so far.) I think that I will reserve my remarks about this idea until I finish a book I started yesterday. The book is A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich by Christopher Krebs. This has started a stirring in my thinking that I need to allow time to play out. My initial thoughts are two: (1) history may be a myth in the same way the gods of Romans and Greeks were myths (this is not the same as saying we read back into history in terms of our own age but has, I think, a far more profound meaning); (2) each “age” produces a tome that allows itself to be set apart from everything else and in so doing offer a subtle critique of our own age. Plutarck’s Sparta may have done for Athens what Tacitus’s Germania did for Rome; is there one that did it for the United States? (Billy Budd?) You can pick up a good flavor of the book from a review in the most recent NY Review of Books.

[Jack Rose]

Let me catch my breath here. Dr. Moore has found more in my posting, I think, than what I had had in my mind when I wrote it!

I don't think that I could have stated one of my main concerns any better than he did when he said "If we want to survive/have a future - that is, be optimistic - we had better understand better how nature reacts to what we do." I was set to quibble just a little with his statement that "It is all natural," because I see consciousness as qualitatively different from what there was before it 'emerged', just as life was qualitatively different from inanimacy, and, possibly, atoms and molecules were qualitatively different from what was before they emerged; it is true enough to state that their emergence must have been an inherent possibility in what was "natural", but, still, they probably could not have been predicted to arise (if only because beings like us with minds weren't around when they did). In other words, their emergence, though "natural", was also unpredictable, and therefore a little 'unnatural'.

What makes consciousness "unnatural"in another, possibly more meaningful, sense is that it allowed us to think of ourselves as somehow being apart from nature, and to not only not take cognizance of the effects that we were having on it by our very numbers and the scope of our activities, but to think that we could with purpose and intent mold it to our wishes with impunity. In that respect, I think I agree that if we continue to think in those ways, then nature will probably have the last word. My main case for having some optimism is that there are some of us who do not think that way. Whether there are enough in that latter category to make a real difference is the operative question.

Having gotten the serious part of my response out of the way, I have two little additional comments, one in the form of a quibble, and the other, as I think about it here, also in the form of a quibble. In his earlier comment on optimism and pessimism, Dr. Moore suggested that if someone believed that there was a human future, then (s)he was an optimist; my only quibble on that is that I have known people who although they did believe that there was a human future, thought that it didn't matter for them because they were going to die. As if there were any other alternative. I would basically turn that around and say to someone who thought that way that the way to look at it is that it doesn't really matter what happens to the human race because we ourselves are mortal, so that means, ipso facto, that so is the human race! What matters to us and to our descendants is how we live our lives while we have them. Following up on Dr. Moore's recent comment, then, I would say that managing to live within the constraints of nature, given our propensities to act as if we are separate from it, is what would prove that we are "exceptional", not our (probably) narcissistic claim that we are exceptional because we can appear to be independent of, or the masters of, nature in what we do.

My second quibble is about Dr. Moore's observation that we probably can't "grow towards the past". I think that is valid on its face, as it stands. My quibble here is only in the form of a play on words, and that is that if we were to study the past more carefully, being careful to try to see as much as we can about it and how it came to be and how it led to the Present(s) that we are experiencing now, then we might very well learn something valuable about ourselves that way, and, in that sense, "grow towards the past."

[Jack Rose]

I appreciate Dr. Perez's comments; however, I am not sure whether he is agreeing or disagreeing, or perhaps adding to, anything in particular that I wrote.

What I am trying to do is present in an accessible way the summation of a half-century of study (including scientific study), experience, thought, and expression of my own ideas and those of others, with a focus on addressing and providing insight into issues that are central to being human at this point in the history of mankind. I believe that it is incumbent on me, as it is for anyone who is a concerned and knowledgeable human being, to present with the utmost honesty and courage--and clarity--our best thoughts, arguments, and positions on particular important issues, and hope that others do the same. It is, I feel, perhaps a little late in the game to harbor the hope that good conclusions and best thinking will simply coalesce out of general discussions, like stars out of stardust.

I believe that if enough of us do that, it will be for the better, and I therefore look forward to comments and arguments, pro or con or amplifying or clarifying, relating to the thoughts and conclusions that I present.

[Dr. T. Lindsay Moore]

MORE COMMENTS ON “OPTIMISM” AND “PESSIMISM” (PUN INTENDED)

I take the fundamental question to be not “what is optimism/pessimism” but rather “what does it mean to be optimistic/pessimistic”. We already know the answer to the first question; it can be found in Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.” Moreover, we are using language and therefore it is a game in context (Wittgenstein).

I think that all answers (assuming there are any) begin with the context of the question. As I take Jack’s writing, it seems to me he is concerned with the relationship of humans to the future – with emphasis upon the idea of “future” and that the meaning of pessimistic/optimistic has to do with the context in which the individuals conceive a perception of the glass. Let me cite the reasons why I take this to be the case by citing references from his own writing. O cite them in the order in which they appear in Jack’s writing. Jack’s words are in quotes; my paraphrasing is in brackets; my comments are in parentheses.

[The glass example] “is not about pessimism and optimism at all, but about newness, and everything that comes with that.” Newness, to me at least, implies something about the relationship of the past and future.

“. . . more water where that came from” and “that is all the water there was to start with.”
(In these statements Jack provides a good example of why we could reverse the typical way of regarding the glass as either half full/empty and in so doing he introduces the idea of context – that is how the person who has perceived the glass regards the past/future of the liquid in the glass. That suggests to me that Jack is concerned with understanding what it means to be optimistic/pessimistic in a context that includes time as a dimension - past, present, future – though, given contemporary quantum physics I am not at all sure of the proper sequence of those “states.”)

“. . . latent and inherent possibilities that come. . . : . . . has already been tasted from. . . .” (YThis is clearly putting perception of the glass in a context that includes future and a past.)

“. . . latent and inherent possibilities. . . .” (My emphasis upon the future implicit in the statement.

“. . . always-reaching being with new possibilities . . . .” (Here is the future again.)

“. . . includes all the possibilities. . . . (The future rears its head again.)

“. . . we sensed something pregnant in the situation. . . .” (Future)

“. . . looked forward to. . . .”

“. . . anticipation. . . .”
“. . . weren’t realized. . . .” (In the context of possibilities this is one of the few references to the past.)

“. . . the human life as we know it hat it has evolved. . . .” (Past)

“. . . to have some pleasures in life. . . .” (Reference to the future laying in a past state.)

“. . . about what life has promised. . . .” (Promises are realized or shattered in the future.)

“. . . what is possible. . . .” (An obvious reference to the future.)

“. . . growth. . . .” (Must be the future for I know of no way of growing toward the past – but then I don’t know everything – at least no yet – but I’m open to suggestions.)

“. . . what we humans collectively can do about our present and our future.” (This is, I suspect, Jack’s real underlying concern in starting this discussion.)

“. . . preparing for the future are concerned. . . “ (A restatement of Jack’s basic concern.)

“. . . allow for the fulfillment and maintenance of our values. . . . will or will not provide a continuing. . . .” (There is an interesting question here: what will the universe allow us to do. I take this as a fear that the universe may be a constraint on the future and I will have more to say about this below.)

“. . . we should be able to continue. . . .” (Life into the future given a set of ceretas parabae – forgive my spelling of this economic condition – that is, other things being equal.)

“. . . cannot go on forever. . . .” (A limitation of the future.)

Now, I apologize for what must seem like a rather pedantic and unnecessary analysis. But I do have a purpose. I would like to suggest that what Jack is pondering in terms of what it means to be pessimistic or optimistic is whether or not we have a belief in the future. By that I do not mean any particular kind of future but just the idea of a future in and of itself. If we have such a belief we are optimistic; if not pessimistic. This does not entail a judgment on the value of the future as noble or evil but confines itself to a simple statement about the existence of a future. This provides a basis for thinking and perhaps planning for a future of a particular kind. But before we can do that we must believe that we have a future, whether that future be viewed in brilliant sunshine or “through a glass darkly.” Given that interpretation, I find myself in full agreement with Jack’s approach to a consideration of optimism and pessimism.

ON THE MATTER OF TECHN OLOGY

I regard technology as the way in which we human beings interact with our environment. This includes the biochemical interactions of eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin. It also includes such things as walking upright and the opposable thumb. In this sense, technology is simply an enhancement of our senses (telescope, microscope, stethoscope, drugs that enhance the sensitivity of our nose, mouth, and skin, etc.). There is also the enhancement of our muscles (lever). Finally there is the technology of our social relationships (a way of relating to our human environment of people) such as buildings. What we are trying to understand is how our environment relates to us. Relationships are always interactive. If we poison the air or increase global warming nature will not die; we will. Nature will simply react to what is happening “inside” it. Nature will simply not provide the environment that makes human life possible. The planet will go on (unless we develop a technology of planet destruction such as was depicted in the first Star Wars.) We need not be concerned about nature; he/she will do whatever it is he/she does in interaction w\ith what we do. We need to be concerned about ourselves. If we want to survive (have a future – that is be optimistic – we had better understand better how nature reacts to what we do.

Please do not take this to mean a distinction between the natural and the human (unnatural). It is all natural. We AND the planet are an organism. If we begin acting like a disease from our environment’s point of view, nature – the environment - will simply take steps to cure itself just as our bodies do.

[Guido Perez]

Science versus religion.-Philosophers are aware of the limitations of defining knowledge as justified true belief; the Gettier problem includes examples that purport to show that we can have justified beliefs without actual knowledge. Having good evidence of what you believe is true may be an adequate justification. Evidentialism claims that we ought not to accept any belief not well supported by evidence. Critics of this view argue that supporting evidence may require additional evidence and so on ad infinitum leading to an infinite regress. Reliabilism holds that a belief is justified not because we have good evidence for it but, rather, because the process that produced the belief in question is sufficiently reliable.In sciece we take for granted thet our senses or our instruments are reliable. Reliabilism has also been applied to religious experience. For instance, Plantinga has suggested that some of us can know directly and without evidence that God exists. The problem with this view is that many of us don’t have that capability and that human beings are highly prone to delusional religious experiences.
The view from inside.-The issue of what it feels like to be alive is basically the body-mind problem. Physicalists claim that reality, including mental events, depend on and are determined by the physical properties it has. I suspect, but cannot prove that brain events engender mental states; the way some of these states are realized is not well understood. It is difficult for physicalists to reconcile their notions of the physical with phenomenal experiences or qualia. Why should physical events in the brain feel like anything at all? Nonetheless, neuroscientists hope that one day they may be able to understand these experiences by carefully mapping the myriad of synaptic connections in the brain and relating them to its functional organization.

[Guido Perez]

The existence of a universal human nature has been debated for many years. Nevertheless, there is good evidence that certain fundamental human motivations such as survival, affiliation and social status, mating and parenting are shared by most human populations. Life history theory holds that self-preservation and status provide a foundation for mating which, in turn, is necessary for producing offspring. Each motivation is carried out by individual tasks; for example, mating includes strategies to allure partners, to overcome competition and to avoid incest. For many years there has been a controversy regarding which factor, genes or environment, has the greatest impact on human nature.
Genes specify the ground plan for the brain. They are known to influence normal brain development, temperament and personality traits. Genetic factors are also known to contribute to diseases such as schizophrenia, affective disorders, autism spectrum disorders and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorders. On the other hand, environmental factors, such as the child’s attunement with the mother and interaction with the social group, may affect human nature because human brains can alter their phenotype in response to environmental changes
The brain is designed to regulate automatically most basic life-sustaining mechanisms. The basic life-sustaining mechanisms include breathing, hunger, thirst, maintaining body temperature, circulation, respiration, chemical balance and fighting disease and physical agents. In humans most of these regulatory mechanisms are located in the brain stem. Another regulatory site is the hypothalamus, an area where the activity of the endocrine glands and the autonomic nervous system are integrated with inputs from other areas.
Nature has instilled into us a threat-detection system to contend with the type of threats our ancestors faced. We have instincts to separate animate from inanimate objects, to identify faces and to infer the internal states of others. They evolved to help us spot potential prey or predators. The limbic system, or the reptilian brain, is the site of emotions, the state of body systems in response to external or internal stimuli that may be relevant to the well-being of the organism. A typical emotion is fear, it protects the organism by initiating the flight or fight response.
The limbic system includes the amygdala, the posterior cingulate, the precuneus, the superior temporal sulcus and the medial prefrontal cortex. The amygdala assesses the emotional significance of stimuli, rapidly via the thalamus, or more slowly, via the cortex. The amygdala is involved in fear conditioning, the superior temporal sulcus is responsible for decoding social messages and the orbitomedial prefrontal cortex is essential for the cognitive experience of emotion and attribution of traits to self and others.
The relationship between unconscious and automatic emotion, and our conscious and deliberate reason, has attracted much interest and debate. Hume stated that reason is, and ought to be, the slave of emotion, without it there would not be goal-directed behavior. Emotion may be more important in shaping our lives than reason and will. On the other hand, when we engage in emotional regulation we use reason to control our own emotional response. Sometimes raw emotion escapes regulation by our cognitive pathways and we regret the behavioral response that may take place.
Competitive and cooperative behaviors evolved to establish the status of the individual in the group and affiliations with family and friends. Cooperative instincts have been shaped by natural selection because they enhance the survival of the individual and the species, it would have been difficult for our ancestors to survive without a network of family and friends. They are under genetic control but are also be influenced by the environment. In addition to helping us to affiliate with family and friends, they also help us to adapt to group living, and eventually to find and keep mates and to take care of our children. Altruism includes a kin recognition system that helps us forego our selfish behaviors in support of genetically-related individuals. Reciprocal altruism is the exchange of benefits by unrelated individuals that result in mutual gains.
At a basic level, everything an animal does is motivated by the need to promote inclusive fitness, the success of passing its genes to the next generation. Men prefer physical attractiveness like symmetrical faces, smooth skin and a particular waist to hip ration in their potential mates, probably because they may be signs of health and fertility. Women are choosier about potential mates, mainly because they have a relatively higher involvement in raising the offspring. They prefer men with status and resources, humans exhibit the same type of sexual selection that is found in the animal kingdom. We love our children and children seek attachment to caregivers, a motivational system designed to improve their security. The lovable appearance of infants triggers nurturing behavior; it is a crucial adaptation for survival. Neoteny, the preservation of infantile features into adulthood, may explain the popularity of teddy bears and cute cartoon characters.

[Guido Perez]

We can't get into the issue of what objective reality is.We can only say that what is real is what it is reproducible.
Our senses can only detect a limited number of events and many features of the universe may be unknowable. For example, we are unable to detect the movement of earth through space and our visual system is designed to detect electromagnetic radiation only in the 380-750 nanometer range associated with sun light. Our senses capture stimuli that are tansduced into electrical signals and then the brains puts it together as a "coherent" picture of reality.
Words and concepts are problematic. We tend to find patterns in nature, to give agency to unknown things, to create beliefs. We are bound by our culture, it is transmitted to us in a vertical fashion, at a time that we are unable to question it. We are born with a universal human nature that recapitulates the memory of the species and that it is molded by our interaction with the environment.
Our learned behaviors go to the unconscious to free some space in our software. They may control some of our behaviors, eventually we forget all as our neurons die out.
Psychologists tell us that we take what we see at face value, we have perceptual illusions, we impose order on ambiguous data, we see what we expect to see or what is suggested to us and our interpretations are determined by our views about ourselves(the ego) and the world.

[snapper]

Destiny is not a matter of chance – it is a matter of choice.
It is not a thing to wait for – it is a thing
to be achieved.
William Jennings Bryan

The greatest quality is seeking to serve others.
Comment: is this not a prescription for slavery?
snapper