do you control your brain? or does it control you...
schizophrenia is the sort of thing one can learn to master, if it doesn't master you first. all i ever really get is thoughts. hallucinations are pretty rare... sometimes a little visual distortiong... but it's mostly the thoughts. little seeds of paranoid delusion that i can choose to nurture or not. and i choose not to. but they are weird. it's ( Read more... )
So being a science major has (in some ways) turned me into a hardcore materialist, and I don't like it. It's made the world incredibly mundane, but I have no desire to delude myself with fantasies about spirits and magic and the like, if they are indeed fantasies. Truth is always better, I keep telling myself. It's noble, but it sucks sometimes. It has helped to keep some of my irrational fears in check, though, about everything bad that happens to me having some spiritual cause.
But anyway, the hardcore materialist in me says that your brain developed to perceive reality correctly, event-for-event, because evolutionarily speaking, this is beneficial. That's not to say that it isn't infallible. Perception is composed entirely of molecules doing one thing or the other, and because of one tiny problem with one receptor or the other in one pathway, you perceive differently. That's the how. All that's left to wonder about for me is the why... And what meaning it has.
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