(September 24, 2014 at 8:37 pm)Blackrook Wrote: Agree or disagree: the mind is not "real."
A mind is the delusion the brain has that it exists somewhere that is not purely physical.
We are all sacks of meat, with no more inherent value than a side of bacon or a beef patty on a hamburger.
All we have to do to change a mind is pump the brain up with the proper chemicals and neurological impulses.
Even personality can be changed with the right drugs and electrical inputs.
So "we" (our minds) don't exist.
Our emotions aren't real.
Everything we think, feel, love, hate isn't real.
Nothing is real, other than the material world.
And since our experience of the material world is processed through a "mind" that is a delusion, we can't even be sure of that.
I get the impression that the most obvious effect religion has had on you is to thoroughly annihilate your self-esteem.
"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
