I started writing the Deist Miasma series with high hopes, but little else. I was missing something, a crucial piece of evidence (as opposed to suspicion) that may have finally surfaced. It's a preliminary study that requires some expansion, but it reinforced the niggling thoughts that started this series enough to motivate me to finish it. (
Onward, interested parties! )
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We are the universe's way of understanding itself.
The only thing I'd add would be the words 'one of'- after 'we are'- because we can't be the only conscious element around. We just don't have the finely tuned scientific equipment yet to demonstrate this fact.
I'd rather be a tiny bit a self-aware universe than some 'disgraced pale shadow' of a god-dropping.
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Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, anyone? ;-)
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More than that, I think story-telling is a fundamental part of consciousness. And on every level, from vision (human eyes only have good resolution on a tiny part of the visual field at one time, but the brain translates visual data into a representation that seems to occupy the entire visual field and change smoothly over time) to memory (which tells a coherent story of one's life, despite intermittent storage and inadequate recall and the fact that even the best memories are patched together with so much confabulation that they're mostly fictional) to decision-making and problem solving (what-if stories) to social psychology (interactions with other people real and imagined). We tell stories just to be.
In my opinion, narrative continuity is also the only concept that adequately explains continuity of the self without requiring bizarre and unmeasured supernatural entities.
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tacit also pretty much just paraphrased Carl Sagan in his Cosmos series, but since I hadn't seen it since it aired I didn't recognize it.
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But I don't have much experience with how other deconverts got to where they are. My reaction to the tactic might be uncommon.
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But that doesn't wash with the unwashed faithful. They need comfort as they stare into that void the future will bring. Believing the void to be filled with manna for dinner and gold like glass and fluffy clouds on which to recline with their lutes while they play for their long-dead grandparents helps them cope.
In the movie Flight from Death, the producers included some fascinating research. The control group was given a questionaire filled with banal questions. The test group's questionaire was subtly laced with references to the fact that someday, we all die. The two groups were then let alone in a room with just a few objects and given a mundane task. One task involved hanging a picture; the ( ... )
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