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Monotheism and Minds: Why Monotheism Is Untenable

Started by QueenThera, December 14, 2014, 01:08:10 AM

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Mesozoic Mister Nigel

I think it's also important to recognize that your temperament, ie. the set of built-in default attitudes to your environment, are persistent (short of significant brain injury/disease) beyond your memories... you can work to modify your behavioral responses, but you're pretty much stuck with your temperament, as well as the unique set of machinery that is the genetic and epigenetic outcome of your DNA making it into a successful (ie. living) organism. So you can play conceptual games and compartmentalize "past, present, and future" self all you want, but it doesn't alter the fact that you are still the same person, with the same basic personality. Continuity IS, whether intellectual exercises say so or not. Call it a barstool, call it whatever you want, but stoned-ass "whoa man, the me of right now is future me's past and everything is right now and it's like I'm infinity people" musings are essentially a shit waste of time that would be better spent in physical masturbation.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


LMNO

I'M AN INFINITELY EXPANDING TIMELESS CONCIOUSNESS!
                       /
:fap2:

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on December 22, 2014, 01:59:06 PM
I'M AN INFINITELY EXPANDING TIMELESS CONCIOUSNESS!
                       /
:fap2:

:lulz: I forgot about that fap emote.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Doktor Howl

Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on December 22, 2014, 01:29:32 PM
Quote from: Doktor Howl on December 22, 2014, 01:17:50 PM
Like I said, I couldn't make heads or tails out of anything after his first sentence.

It was a little disconnected, in a slightly concerning way.

Do you think he stole my drugs?
Molon Lube

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: Doktor Howl on December 22, 2014, 02:24:22 PM
Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on December 22, 2014, 01:29:32 PM
Quote from: Doktor Howl on December 22, 2014, 01:17:50 PM
Like I said, I couldn't make heads or tails out of anything after his first sentence.

It was a little disconnected, in a slightly concerning way.

Do you think he stole my drugs?

If anyone could do it from this distance, it'd be Telarus.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Doktor Howl

Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on December 22, 2014, 02:39:45 PM
Quote from: Doktor Howl on December 22, 2014, 02:24:22 PM
Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on December 22, 2014, 01:29:32 PM
Quote from: Doktor Howl on December 22, 2014, 01:17:50 PM
Like I said, I couldn't make heads or tails out of anything after his first sentence.

It was a little disconnected, in a slightly concerning way.

Do you think he stole my drugs?

If anyone could do it from this distance, it'd be Telarus.

Explains why he asked me to look him up in Portland, but then never answered a single PM afterward.  The pigfucker's done for my drugs, and now he's ON THE LAM.
Molon Lube

Telarus

 :lulz: I love you guys. Really sorry I missed you Rog, they threw mass overtime at us because of the holiday release season. Didn't even get back to the forum to see your message until you had left Portland.

Not drugs, but 12+ hours of testing multiplayer code for the xbox one (and staring at network logs) does have a similar effect.  :lulz: Nailed that infinite loop of network traffic after doing XYZ, tho.

Yah, I wasn't so coherent there. Narrative continuity is most definitely useful, and I don't discard it. I just don't think that it tells the whole story and think that the Narrative is actually the most malleable aspect of your personality. Nigel had interesting points about temperament, environmental & genetic factors, and we have to acknowledge that we exist precisely because of those factors. For example, I love that epigenetics has begun to show that groups like Neanderthal are an eddy in the river of Homo Sapiens, and not a branch that dead-ended.

So I don't consider my now self compartmentalized from the past/future versions, but I also don't carry around certain events in my past as if they were central to my personality. Sometimes this just happens by itself. I was very good at basic music(piano/recorder) when I was very small. Now-days I'm great with math and art, but can't summon those musical skills from my childhood.

For a more extreme example, when my ex-wife left me she was drunk and physically abusive. The only time I have ever had to use violence to defend myself from her was the night she left, she had pinned me down into a corner with intent to hurt me, grabbed one of my feet (which I was using to keep distance) and bit my big toe. HARD. The toenail fell off a week later. I then kicked her hard, twice, in the shoulder, which knocked her off balance and gave me distance to get up and use my training to arm-lock her on the bed, tell her that was a very bad idea and that I was going to sleep in the living room, and not to get up and chase me when I let her up. I could not go back to the callcenter I worked at for a week, because we had both worked there and it reminded me of her, which reminded me of the fight. This was back when I was meditating about once a day, so unraveling the constant narrative in my head around this trauma became a big focus. "I don't hit girls" had been a large part of my narrative since highschool. The cognitive dissonance on top of the violent breakup was a bit heavy.

Nowdays, I swordfight with my current fiance. While we mostly use soft boffers with flexible cores (a spendy birthday present from a MA training company), we've also gone at with bamboo shinai and lacrosse gear. She fights hard and I have definitely fallen back into that basic bio-survival state when taking a bruise while sparring with Liv (which the fight with the ex-wife had also triggered). The past memories don't interfere, tho, neither in the sense that I start hesitating (afraid I might loose control), or over-committing due to memories of the adrenal rush/trauma. That took a lot of work, meditating on the memories of the incident and letting them play out, trying not to inject my own narrative, starting over each time I caught myself.

Bringing this back to the topic of Monotheism & the Mind, I see the narratives that push a monotheistic model of deity also push a mono-narrative model of the mind. Specifically, being eternally judged by the eternal deity. I don't think that's how it works. With state-based memory as an example, we are more apt to remember things we did while were drunk... when we are drunk. I think we have distinct sub-routines in our personality that express when we are at work vs when we are at home. Distinct groups of people bring out different patterns of behavior and thought in us. I don't think we're the "same person" when posting/reading this forum as we are when in a very boring office meeting. I think we use the abstraction "I" in order to access the memories of those other sub-personalities.

Sometimes. This shit's been confusing us monkies for thousands of years, OK?  :lulz:
Telarus, KSC,
.__.  Keeper of the Contradictory Cephalopod, Zenarchist Swordsman,
(0o)  Tender to the Edible Zen Garden, Ratcheting Metallic Sex Doll of The End Times,
/||\   Episkopos of the Amorphous Dreams Cabal

Join the Doll Underground! Experience the Phantasmagorical Safari!

Doktor Howl

I am uncertain as to when I'll get back to Portland.  Everything's gone all weird, here.
Molon Lube

LMNO


Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: Doktor Howl on December 24, 2014, 03:56:48 AM
I am uncertain as to when I'll get back to Portland.  Everything's gone all weird, here.

Oh dear.  :sad:
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Telarus, I think that you in particular would get a lot from the book I'm reading right now, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me). One of the things it talks about is, precisely, about how personality is far more stable than we tend to think it is, how we are not as defined by memory as most of us think we are (partly because memories are extremely malleable and error-prone) and the mental mechanics we go through in order to convince ourselves that we are "different people" at different times, rather than the same person in different contexts.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Mesozoic Mister Nigel

"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Doktor Howl

Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on December 24, 2014, 04:19:32 PM
Quote from: Doktor Howl on December 24, 2014, 03:56:48 AM
I am uncertain as to when I'll get back to Portland.  Everything's gone all weird, here.

Oh dear.  :sad:

They keep scheduling shit and then cancelling it.  I'd just like to know where I'm gonna be on any given week.
Molon Lube

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: Doktor Howl on December 25, 2014, 01:36:37 AM
Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on December 24, 2014, 04:19:32 PM
Quote from: Doktor Howl on December 24, 2014, 03:56:48 AM
I am uncertain as to when I'll get back to Portland.  Everything's gone all weird, here.

Oh dear.  :sad:

They keep scheduling shit and then cancelling it.  I'd just like to know where I'm gonna be on any given week.

That's incredibly lame. How the fuck are you supposed to have a life around that?
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Doktor Howl

Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on December 25, 2014, 01:49:42 AM
Quote from: Doktor Howl on December 25, 2014, 01:36:37 AM
Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on December 24, 2014, 04:19:32 PM
Quote from: Doktor Howl on December 24, 2014, 03:56:48 AM
I am uncertain as to when I'll get back to Portland.  Everything's gone all weird, here.

Oh dear.  :sad:

They keep scheduling shit and then cancelling it.  I'd just like to know where I'm gonna be on any given week.

That's incredibly lame. How the fuck are you supposed to have a life around that?

Having a life is like stealing from the company!
Molon Lube