god versus the brain...

brain versus god...

How to deal with the complexities of modern life?

Some people get their knickers in a knot trying to understand something or on how to perform a task. There is point where confusion and stress become overwhelming.

In the olden days, a good kick up the butt from someone close-by, such as a king's soldier, would spur either submission and resentment with no other consequence that a field of potatoes would have been plowed for king and country, without further a-do.

But there are better incentives to make us perform.

Minimalisation of timing in the repeat of the task can lead to "expertise" in screwing nuts as well as going nuts.

I have noted some nasty "experts" will define expertise by reducing the stats to how difficult the task is. For example How many "experts" can you find in the field of quantum mechanics? The answer generally accepted is two. How many professional "experts" can you find in screwing nuts to bolts? The answer is six hundred fifty six point two zero five millions and increasing.

So according to "experts" — in order to corner the "expertise" market — there is an obvious degree of difficulty in being a human "expert" and at some stage we feel inadequate facing some problems.

Gus is an expert on confronting such. Some people will say that it's a bullshit expertise but in fact it's an expertise in bullshit. You're welcome.

There are two major solutions to deal with feeling inadequate. God and the brain.

On the CP (Christian Post website) someone female posted a neat way to deal with "overthinking": SUBMIT... (You're not really worth the love of god but He (god is a male) will love you anyway if you SUBMIT)...

Here she goes, first with your psychological screwed up personality points that are perfectly legitimate, like "perfectionism" (Hey! it's not a problemo, you idiot), then comes the SUBMIT to god solution. He (god is male) will give you the way to stop asking yourself any more questions, since He (god is a male) gives you the comfortable eternal answer:

Does your thinking tend to drift into an eternal cycle of the why’s, the how’s, and the what if’s? Welcome to the club my friend. I am by nature an over-thinker. I have a PhD in overthinking. I’ve mastered it just about all my life. I’ve been guilty of overthinking about my overthinking. After a while it sounds like the mind of a crazy person and that’s how you feel just about half of the time. Nothing just is what it is- there are deeper levels to everything and you have got to figure out how far that iceberg goes beneath the surface.

It’s a blessing and a curse right? You can help others think through their problems, give insight at angles that aren’t the norm, it makes for a great writer and for a Psychology major like myself it works out perfectly as I enter the why’s and how’s of human behavior (because I’m questioning my own about ninety percent of the time). The curse? Living in the moment is the struggle, your mind runs late at night and sometimes it’s nothing but anxiety in disguise.

What are some of the tell-tale signs of overthinking? Well I’ve thought about it (pun-intended):

Second guessing yourself (or triple or quadruple guessing)
Lack of sleep at night from racing thoughts or insomnia
Struggling to live in the moment from analyzing everything, especially things unrelated to the present moment
Overly analytical
Having a hard time letting things go
Perfectionism
Self criticism
Thinking the worst and catastrophizing things before they even exist
Feeling like you can’t turn your brain off
Never feeling 100% sure
Anxiety and other correlating symptoms from that such as loss of appetite, depression, nausea, headaches etc

http://blogs.christianpost.com/a-generation-after-god/how-to-stop-overthinking-and-live-in-the-moment-27227/

Philippians 4:6-9New Living Translation (NLT)

6 Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. 7 Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.

8 And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. 9 Keep putting into practice all you learned and received from me—everything you heard from me and saw me doing. Then the God of peace will be with you.

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When dealing with your critical uncertainty with prayer and faith, you submit to a preconceived fake solution that is highly uncreative. Let's call this a safe fall-back position. Let's call it "you decide to become delude by the god deception which has been an invention of professional 'expert' illusionists". It's a commodity for sale.

It's uninventive but helps you to tighten more nuts without thinking further about it, except you know you're slaving for god — and with god on your side, your king and country should feel proud of you. You're allowed to be chuffed. Your previous sufferance about tightening nuts has now regained a glorious meaning. According to the deception, god is your nut expert and you are His (god is a male of course) sheep.

A couple of mornings ago, a couple of "expert" commentators on radio were commentating on their high expectation of Scott Morrison's speech at the Press Club and how they got "disappointed". Geez, I don't how one can be such an "expert" commentator and expect brilliance from ScottMo? Any average Tom, Dick and Harry would "expect" bullshit from ScottMo, especially after having alluded to it with flags, bells and whistles...

Actually, there are several (2) forms of bullshit: brilliant — which needs at least five minutes to decode — and ScottMo's — in which he wades through from the start without gumboots... ScottMo of course relies on God (Himself because god is a male) to perform the most atrocious tasks an "expert" in toenail removal would be proud of.

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The other solution to stop feeling inadequate is iffy. Iffy is creative. 99.9999 per cent of creativity comes from iffiness. The brain. The brain is iffy... How can we manage to bypass all of our annoying quirks, problems and release the hormones of creativity and solutionism? Yes creativity is demanding adrenaline and other pituitary stuff in order for the brain to turn the body into a full creative output.

To unleash the brain, there are various tactics, including my invented Non-Reactive Defocusing (N-RD —a form of non-religious meditation) when stuck in limbo or a bit of Red Ned to unlock creative juices. No gods involved. Anger works well, as well, when managed.

Others do similar tricks, with scientific analysis to boot:

LET GO!

There are two main networks in the brain that are quiet – or “deactivated” – during improvisation: the default mode network and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). The former comprises a group of brain areas that are generally active when you are daydreaming or resting. It is your brain’s so-called “default” system. While you are daydreaming, you are generally thinking about yourself: reliving past events, imagining future ones, thinking about how you feel or have felt. Meanwhile, the DLPFC is involved in “executive function” – it acts as a control centre that helps with planning and conscious self-monitoring of whatever you are doing.

To be really creative, you need to avoid critiquing and controlling your actions, and instead, let yourself go

At first glance, it is puzzling that the default mode network and the DLPFC would be quiet when you are being creative; creativity is the type of behaviour that seems like it would require intensely focusing on yourself, planning and monitoring your actions.

Well, maybe not – research shows that the brain is shutting down your inhibitions during these creative moments. It appears that to be really creative, you need to avoid critiquing and controlling your actions, and instead, let yourself go in order to get into the moment, regardless of any mistakes.

The art of spontaneity

Although there are many areas of the brain that are quiet during improvisation, several key areas are also highly active. Professional jazz musicians and rappers have practised for so many hours that the techniques and skills they need to perform successfully become almost automatic. This expertise is reflected in their brains while they improvise.

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The art of "letting go" is not as easy a it seems.

It often needs a subconscious pattern of knowledge and repeats to be able to let go for a length of time. Imagination is more important than knowledge said the great Einstein, but I am sure he was aware that without knowledge, one cannot have any imagination.

Easy to press one key on a piano and declare oneself creative for making a note. Put two notes together, then ten and there is a time the process crashes when you remember you're not a piano player, never learned how to play piano and can't read music. So it takes a lot of "let go" to be able to inflict something that is not going to be musically enticing to your neighbours as the result feels more like a brimming bub monkey hammering a toy because it makes "funny sounds". So before being able to let go, we need a certain amount of controlled "expertise" in order to make a worthwhile impro, in which a "mistake" or a miss-sound or a "bad" colour on a canvas can be followed by an amazing un-thought (but subconscious) brilliant counterpoint.

It takes years of practice to get there, unless one is a kid.

Learning to become an "expert' can be confronting, demanding, challenging. And there is a point at which this challenge can give us the shits because we suck at trying, despite trying hard.

This is where we need to have a plan B. Not the god (God is a male) lazy plan B, but our ability to accept FOR THE TIME BEING how much more or less we can drive our self into frustration by trying to becoming obsessed with achieving the impossible, yet.

Have a rest. Have a N-RD session.

The impossible will be achieved soon enough. The brain can let you do it, as long as you don't tell the brain how to do it, but teach the brain (yourself) an array of possibilities, even wrong ones, and like on that matchmaking program, let the brain to review the options for free...

And beware, the impossible cannot be achieved all the time... But enjoy the impossible when it happens. You deserve to feel like you've reached the stars.

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Meanwhile, Vaughan Bell writes:

Exactly 20 years ago, Tom Wolfe wrote one of the most influential articles in neuroscience. Titled Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died, the 1996 article explores how ideas from brain science were beginning to transform our understanding of human nature and extend the horizons of our scientific imagination. It was published in a mainstream magazine, written by an outsider, and seemed to throw open the doors to an exhilarating revolution in science and self-understanding. Looking at the state of neuroscience and society two decades later, Wolfe turned out to be an insightful but uneven prophet to the brain’s future.

Not all of his predictions hit the mark; some now seem quaint or even ridiculous. He describes Richard Dawkins as “earnestly, feverishly, politically correct”, allowing us a nostalgic look back to a gentler time, before Twitter revealed that Dawkins’s inner monologue is like listening to Donald Trump on a day out to the mosque. More scientifically, Wolfe’s assertion that brain scanning would have a greater impact on everyday life than the internet is one he has had to recant in many subsequent interviews. Other predictions seem to have been swayed by his conservative politics. In one particularly odd section he talks about an “IQ cap”, which could apparently test your intelligence just by measuring brain waves. Wolfe claims the technology was developed but suppressed because “nobody wanted to believe that human brainpower is … hardwired”. In reality, the technology just didn’t work. Measuring complex human abilities from simple features of brain function has long since been abandoned as a non-starter.

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...Er, I will say that Dawkins recent inner monologues come out of frustration. Seeing idiots with religious hat win the daily lotto of humanity is frustrating for someone like him who knows that god is a trickery of the human social mind.

Donald Trump is a hypocrite. Dawkins is not. I guess the author, the renown clinical psychologist Vaughan Bell is being facetious in regard to comparing Dawkins to Trump. But overall unless one is prepared to take the plunge, it's easy to criticise Wolfe here for fantasising about the future of "the brain". Without people dreaming such, until technology catches up, they will be seen as loonies.

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The conclusion by Bell is more than baffling for the use of one single word, as if he was afraid to state the true meaning of what he is saying in order not to frighten the loony evangelists, which in America would represent about 85 per cent of the population:

In the 20 years since Wolfe wrote about neuroscience it’s perhaps most remarkable that questions about the meaning of life have started to take a back seat as the big developments have shifted towards reading, modifying and extending the brain’s capabilities: controlling brain cells with fibre optics, connecting robots to neural implants, and using electrodes to alter brain circuits. Contrary to what Wolfe predicted, your soul hasn’t died, it’s being transformed, and the fear is that no one knows where the limits are.

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Our concept of the soul is false. The soul never existed, so it cannot die, nor can it be transformed.

That we can manipulate the brain to perform in various ways is not new. This is what we call "education" including inculcating religious bullshit. We also modify the brain everyday by using drugs, some legal, some not — and food. And we can modify the brain's own memory stack by minimising input of information complemented with repeat of limited information, mostly false. This is indoctrination and religious teaching at work. As well some behavioural tricks will also modify the reactivity and creativity of the brain: entertainment and rituals. The input of over-strengthened sensory experiences such as loud music can turn us into zombies. This is where the "science" of psychoanalysis comes in. I say "science" because it's not fool-proof due to our ability to lie to our self and others. We can modify the brain by inflicting pain. Usage of electrodes and lights would appear a bit crude inside a complex bio-chemical unit such as the brain. Targeted chemicals seems to be more the go. Methamphetamines have been used since WWI (and still used) by the military to heighten the state of alertness in soldiers. Sleeping pills are used for critical insomniacs.

As mentioned before on this site, the brain has some "protocols" in resisting new information. These protocols are due to limit confusion. Too much information and the "brain" does not want to know. Conflicting information to our "knowledge" will be resisted until proven right — and even if proven right, the brain will resist the new conflicting information. Often it is too painful to accept that we know shit... It is a hard slog to "reconstruct our ideology" (or stack of beliefs) according to the new information. More often than not, what we see (decide) as important to know or not, is based on what WE DON'T WANT TO KNOW — especially complicated knowledge.

The use of free-wheeling improvisation is also part of the brain development. In all these influences in which we can modify our behaviour performance and desires, the limits of which being at the junction of what society defines as criminal and as to what punishment in form of stress nature can take without extinguishment (destruction of the unit — brain dead).

Gus Leonisky

You local pigeon loft expert

By Gus Leonisky at 22 Feb 2016 - 10:02am
Gus Leonisky's blog
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The potential of a creative mind...

a brilliant academic snow job...

Here comes an avalanche of delusion, illusion and deception. Non-stop... Some people are very good at grand academic bullshit. They get heaps of acknowledgements from other academic bullshitters because they are able to develop an amazing array of circular arguments with a brilliant academe sophistry. Nowhere is this more evident than in the study of theology.

When this deception is used to promote links between sciences, evolution and god, there should be some blood on the floor. But no, the clever art of such theological bullshit is to dog whistle the sheep of knowledge into the corral of godly fiction. The trick works for those who believe. Suddenly the process of e-vo-lu-tion becomes part of the works of god. Hello?

As mentioned before, this adoption of "sciences" and of other pagan beliefs into the churches' theological corners is a neat trick devised by religious people to caress sciences and other myths into their godly domain — so science, and myths, cannot be let to roam the universe without CHRISTIAN morality. A world without RELIGIOUS MORALITY? Woah! Their deception is somewhat despicable and sneaky — though it could be said that they also deceive themselves. One needs to be alert to see the gigantic scaffold of deceit being constructed like a spider web.

The main purpose of all this religious construct has been — and is — to sustain employment. Religion equals cash. Cash equals employment in an industry which is tax free because of the leniency from the secular authorities. But this deception cannot carry on forever in the open, unless there is a constant belief renewal from a new crop of preachers, theology professors and academic chairs to build more complex illusions upon the ORIGINAL simplistic pile of shit — mostly started 4000 years ago.

The original tenet is "believe in god or you shall go to hell".

This is simple, straightforward, easy to apply like a 30 + sun cream. Boom.

But the plebish boffins, out there, are showing resistance. Hell does not have the scariness of times when people were uneducated, before technology and the enlightenment distracted them. There is such thing also as "scientific evidence". So the theological frothers have had to create new dog whistle tunes to push you, half-believers, into their mist. Should less and less people be tricked into going there, the amount of cash (and sanctified religious wars) would diminish greatly towards unsustainability. So they try very hard to corner the market of human motivation, including scientific understanding which to say the least is totally incompatible with religious dogmatic "thinking".

Let's admit it: most people in the Western World come from families where the Christian religion has been like the Sunday roast. A tradition with dedication. It's a habit with fervour and faith. Monday is for envy, Tuesday is for killing... Wednesday is dedicated to have an affair with the neighbour's wife, Thursday is to be greedy, while Sunday is for worshipping. Thus we're mostly cast from this mould of belief, whichever denomination we were "born" into.

For these grand-standing altruistic theologians, of course, their harangue is to "defend the faith" using "philosphical" arguments, not about their sustainable cash, which would be hypocritical.

Here Sarah Coakley is a formidable fighter. She is not afraid of placing her hands in the intestinal cavities of evolutionary science and theology. She is very skilled at the oratory manipulation of ideas. She got degrees and massive recognition for this twisterama. It should not stop anyone though to see that once you understand the trick of the tirade, what she says is quite a lot of shit. She seems to believe in it though. It's her bread and butter. Her Adam Gifford lectures are such an atrocious stack of awfully cleverly manipulated concepts, it gives meaning to nothing. Applause. No-one understood the purpose, but the arguments were well presented like a cube of bricks being delivered to a construction site.

Adam Gifford was a supporter of "natural theology". That's a curly one, isn't it? Gone is the bible and its "revelations", prophecies, fear of god and predictions. Here comes natural complication telling us I am god's work, believe in god. Obviously such a proposition is loosing traction in this day and age, as we discover more of the way things really work.

From wikipedia:

Natural theology, once also termed physico-theology, is a type of theology that provides arguments for the existence of God based on reason and ordinary experience of nature. This distinguishes it from revealed theology, which is based on scripture and/or religious experiences, and also from transcendental theology, which is based on a priori reasoning.

Marcus Terentius Varro (116 BC – 27 BC) established a distinction between political theology (the social functions of religion), natural theology and mythical theology. His terminology became part of the Stoic tradition and then Christianity through St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.

Natural theology is thus a type of philosophy, the object of which is explanation of the nature of the gods, or of one supreme God. For monotheistic religions, this principally involves arguments about the attributes or non-attributes of God, and especially the existence of God, using arguments which do not involve recourse to supernatural revelation.

So there. Where to from here? Well, isn't this an opening for Ms Coakley to butter the toast of science with natural religiosity and add the biblical induction into the mix and try to make us gobble the lot?

It does not make any sense but because the presentation is carefully studied like a Rembrandt dissection class, one does not see that some of the pipes are missing. Many pipes are missing. The relationships DO NOT STACK UP. Let's drop a name and a quote here that sounds good for good measure and sound erudited...

The alarm bells should ring today when se ends up an article (published on the ABC religion and ethics corner) about prayer with this incredibly confused babble:

That's it - that's prayer. You have to ask, but not before you've first adored, before you've first acknowledged your utter dependence and your human creatureliness. This is where it all starts, in this tiny pause, this surrender, this turning of the will to God

So prayer is impossible, but only on the human spectrum. It becomes not only possible, but the galvanizing lifeline of my existence when I realize that I do not come to prayer to remind God about what he might have forgotten, or to tell him something from the evening news that he might perhaps have missed; rather, I come to prayer to prepare myself to receive what he is always already giving me - the gift of Himself.

I do this by handing over my own sense of human incompetence to the Spirit, who "comes to my aid." I do this by acknowledging the deep roots of my own longing, the deep secrets of my poor crooked heart, and by turning them back to their ultimate source. I do this by relaxing into the tired muddle of my distractions and gently deflecting my tangled desires back to God.

In short, I do this by standing with Jesus in the Spirit and facing into the abyss and intimacy of divine "Fatherhood." Everything else is done by him. To want to pray is to pray. It is humanly impossible, precisely because it's done by God.

Sarah Coakley is the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University and Canon of Ely Cathedral. She is the author of God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay on the Trinity, and in 2012 she delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh on the topic "Sacrifice Regained: Evolution, Cooperation and God."

I've seen clowns activate their little car horns with the same dexterity. What is said is bullshit, well crafted. at least the clowns make us laugh... "So prayer is impossible, but only on the human spectrum" is as meaningful as being an atheist who believes in god. I hope Ms Coakley understands what she meant without blowing up a gasket.

The Aberdeen Gifford lectures are introduced as such:

In this opening lecture of the Aberdeen Gifford Lecture Series 2012, Professor Sarah Coakley analyses the current malaise of "natural theology" and its philosophical and theological causes, and invites reflection on a bold reformulation of its task which might contest the cynicism of a culture convinced of primary selfishness.

Forgive my cynicism... my disbelief and for protecting my own existence. We do not live in a culture convinced of primary selfishness. This is a self-serving insult to justify Ms Coakley's academic career.

Gus Leonisky

Your local mad clown with a horn

By Gus Leonisky at 22 Feb 2016 - 1:27pm
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bullshit. science makes sense, religion doesn't...

Both Science and Theology Make Sense - They Just Do it Differently

Joel Hodge

ABC Religion and Ethics

29 Feb 2016

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2016/02/29/4416032.htm

JOHN BOXSELL :

01 Mar 2016 1:03:39pm

Remarkable! There is , beyond our knowledge, a great mystery, says Hodge The unravelling of that mystery has gone a long way due to the scientists in the last 300 years but the more we learn the more we realise there is a long way to go. Bit by bit the frontiers of ignorance get pushed back. Some day, as Greene says, we may get there; or we may not. The religionists are undeterred. Just explain it all away with a kindergarten concept of a singular super being who made it all and who, itself, requires no explanation as to where it came from. Just invent your own epistemology, declare by fiat it cannot be challenged and declare by fiat it is no domain for the scientists. The chutzbah is breathtaking.

By Gus Leonisky at 1 Mar 2016 - 2:57pm
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