Philosophical ideas and acting "as though"

[bennyboy]

No, I don't mean thinking.  To compare it to a computer, thinking is the contents of RAM, the function of the CPU and so on.  Meditation I'd describe as rewriting a firmware OS: there's an intent to change the underlying function in a fairly permanent way.  If you still want to call it thinking, I'd say it's thinking with an intent to make that thinking a permanent fixture at a preconscious level.

I think your understanding of the process of meditation is askew.  What makes you think anything is being rewritten in meditation?

Well, I've read quite a lot of books about meditation. A particularly philosophical one (and not particularly religious one) is this: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10856..._Emptiness

I'm also skeptical of this notion that the ramifications of scientific discovery aren't being accounted for in our day to day behavior.  What are the ramifications of hard determinism with regard to our behavior regarding questions of the will?

Our understanding of justice, for example, is almost completely dependent on the idea of free will. How do you vilify (or even blame slightly) a person who acts as he inevitably must act? Acting as though someone has free will if one does not, despite all evidence, is an expression of delusion. And where people already KNOW about brain function and disease, but still continue to act this way (i.e. like 80% of the educated population), then there's a disconnect between what is "known" on paper and what is "known" as part of one's actual world view.

 It's not clear that the ramifications suggest we behave any differently than we do.  In any case, you haven't shown that there is such a case.

Pretty much all moral outrage, from honking horns to demands for execution, show that either people do not KNOW the science of mind of today, or have not adopted it as part of their world view.

 And what of the idea that most of matter is empty space?  It's not.  Matter is filled with various fields which maintain its structural form.  The ramifications of that don't appear to differ from us treating things as solid, particularly when you take into account that our doing so has more to do with the granularity of our perception, rather than any disparity between 'science' and 'act'.  I think you've made up a problem which doesn't exist.

This is just an example of the disconnect between perception and fact. When I look at my desk, all the scientific knowledge I have (and it's admittedly little) about fields and functions serve mainly as trivia. I simply do not / cannot see the world in this way, unless I ponder it constantly. But there are other ideas ("We are all stardust.") that upon deep reflection are likely to help moderate behavior-- lessening the sense of importance of the self, and so on.

Most people will have the occasional "Aha!" moment when they consider this stuff. Then they'll go into a flying rage when someone tries to pull into their lane on the drive home.