(March 8, 2014 at 10:05 pm)MysticKnight Wrote: Well if it's just a concept created in the brain, it has no essence, it's purely conceptual.This seems like something we do all the time, as a way of motivating ourselves to accomplish goals. Call it visualization or affirmation or self-hypnosis, it works the same way. We conceptualize the things we want and then we go out and try to make them real. Unfortunately, the human brain isn't so easy to de-program, and much of who we are is defined by people and environments that we have little control over. So we wind up not only trying to accomplish things we want, but we waste a lot of time trying to accomplish things we don't reasonably want.
If creating the concept of a spiritual and metaphysical "reality" gets you through the day, then there's at least some good to it. But there are lots of things you could replace it with, if you were so inclined, and still find meaning and purpose in life.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
