Tomasz Rola wrote on 1/19/20 12:35 PM January 19, 2020:
On Thu, Jan 09, 2020 at 09:32:10AM +0530, Udhay Shankar N wrote:
I guess that the thing of the year 2019 was, in my case, realisation
that reason is not a king on this planet,
Although I majored in mathematics, I took too much biology to believe
that reason can ever take the driver's seat in evolved biological
systems. Most of our brain is pre-rational. It has its own logic, and
its own purposes. Every one of them is grimly policed by survival.
For me, that's okay, because reason, like fear, is a good servant but a
bad master. Reason needs to be grounded in our mucky animal natures,
directed and focused by our messy emotions. Reason can't make value
judgments or decisions. In studies, people without emotional affect
can't make the simplest decisions.
And the king's name is procreation.
Procreation is certainly one of the motivating forces in the human
animal, but it's not the only one.
Our reason seems to make us particularly susceptible to reductionism,
even in programmers, who ought to know that independent variables
proliferate in any non-trivial problem.
Reductionism, however, is rarely right. At times, I would have agreed
with you that procreation (and keeping our big-brained, immature
offspring alive long enough that they can themselves procreate) is
paramount. Now, however, although I believe that procreation is
essential, it's just part of the team of variables that drive human
existence.
Many people would point to money or power as being the king. A physics
professor I know says that the king is collisions. Biologists might
point to genetics or chemistry. Recently, I keep bumping up against the
omnipresent force called "war." It could be food or fear or survival itself.
We are animals. We can kludge things on top of our animal natures, but
we can't escape the ground on which we stand.
And the thing of the year 2018 (or 2017, maybe) was when I decided
that if there is God (it may be singular or plural, but it is easier
for me to keep It singular) and there is free will (which we may
posess), than God cannot know the future. Because Its knowledge is
absolute, so when It knows I will send this email, then I will send
it, and nothing can change it, thus I would have no free will. Whether
humans actually do have free will, I am not sure. But I hope so, it
certainly makes things more interesting (for us) and maybe gives
humanity a bit of hope. There is also a small question about why a
free will would be needed at all - so far I decided it is here just to
entertain God. Come to think of it, you made the whole Universe and
you know everything about its past and present. If there was no free
will, you would also know everything about its future. This would have
been infinitely boring, as far as I can say.
If you're going to invent a god (or a pantheon), you might want to make
it more interesting than that!
My own peace with religion came when I decided that religion is
abstract, not concrete, and invented by human beings for very human reasons.
With that perspective, I'm able to start taking apart the elements of
religion (gods, ritual, prayer, contemplation, comfort, forgiveness,
moral imperatives, etc) and try to figure out what they're for.
Since I believe that the tools of religion are as imaginary as the tools
of mathematics, I can use them freely for any purpose for which they're
useful. I don't need to believe in anything in order to do so, any more
than I have to believe in anything in order to use arithmetic or logic.
--hmm
