“- Can we talk to you?
– We talked, now it’s time for each of you to listen to your own hearts.”
Misterious Ways, Pure of Heart: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0655359/?ref_=ttep_ep3
Archives for category: Choices we make
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Yesterday I had the opportunity to visit another salt mine, an active one this time,
My mother worked in the mining industry, my father in law was a miner almost all his life, my first job was in a factory building mining equipment, I went down another half a dozen mines before, both active and transformed into touristic attractions. I thought I had a fair imagine about what it means to be a miner.
In the mine I visited yesterday there was a small church, entirely carved in salt of course. On one of its walls the visitors can read:
“Afara-s doar chinuri si nevoi,
Aici, in mina-i Dumnezeu cu noi.”
(Out there, topside, nothing but trouble comes in sight.
Down here, deep into the mine, we have the Lord on our side.)
How deep into our souls do we need to dig in order to find our good nature?
And then I found this picture on Facebook:
Interesting .
Cannot stop wondering how is it to belong to a people/tribe and reach the conclusion that the members of another people/tribe are more trustworthy than your own ‘mates’?!?
More than five years ago a friend introduced me to the work of Humberto Maturana.
I was instantly hooked.
Only I’m not that interested in how consciousness appeared to be as I am in the consequences of us being conscient.
This excerpt perfect illustrates what I have in mind.
First thing after becoming conscious – ‘aware of his own awareness’ in Maturana’s terms – man realized how fragile he is. The best way to assuage that feeling was to find an explanation and a purpose for the whole situation. That’s when our immortal soul came to be. Created by God or simply invented by us, it doesn’t make any practical difference.
In time, as rational knowledge constructed wider and wider inroads into the unknown and currently offers scientific explanations for almost everything, the Creator God became less and less necessary. But ‘soul’ survived and now accompanies our still smart and yet unfulfilled desire to understand the origin of our consciousness. And now that we are no longer satisfied with the ‘divine origin’ of anything but not yet ready to accept that we might indeed be something special – fright again, being special implies extreme fragility/responsibility for one’s own fate – we are constantly searching for a new way to connect our nature/fate to the rest of the known Universe.
Hence the advent of ‘panpsyhism’. Which is not such a new idea as it would seem at first glance. The Buddhist notion of successive reincarnation has been around for more than two millennia.
How about accepting what Maturana teaches us – that consciousness of self is something we have continuously improved by using it synergistically with language and all these could take place simply because of the increased processing power that was accidentally bestowed, evolutionary speaking, upon our brains – and move on? If a better explanation will ever dawn upon us – by feat, by chance or even by divine intervention – we can always come back and reconsider – this is how science works, right?
Remaining stuck in this so called ‘Hard Problem’ – what is the direct link between our anatomy/brain physiology and our thoughts? – won’t take us anywhere, for sure.
http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/pub/hvf/papers/maturana05selfconsciousness.html
Vaccines work.
OK, there are exceptions. Some batches are botched, some people develop allergies, some viruses mutate so fast that in those cases vaccination isn’t very effective.
But as a principle vaccination works as intended.
Despite all that, some people choose to deny their children the protection offered by vaccines, without any specific reason – such as an allergy or something similar. Just because they have heard that vaccination may cause autism. Or other equivalent baloney. Against advice vehemently pressed by most doctors.
As a consequence, people have re-started to die. After contracting perfectly preventable diseases.
I have a rather ambivalent attitude towards Ayn Rand. I admire her razor sharp mind yet I find her a little too callous for my liking.
But sometimes it’s exactly this combination of traits that helps her pin point the essence of a situation:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/the-new-measles/384738/
nicichiarasa 