Start of the new cycle

[Eric the Green]

(10-22-2018, 07:29 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

(10-16-2018, 12:27 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Yes, better living through chemistry. A favorite slogan of LSD partakers in the Haight-Asbury sixties.

The brain is not the source of morality, however, but the soul is. So only soul work can provide morality in the long run. Drugs, genetics and invasive machinery of various and sundry kinds may only have temporary benefits. Morality does require the exercize of free will, which only exists in the soul. We need to better understand the soul and the spirit. "The soul is that faculty which we all call self-moving" -- Plato

" Nothing exists, save atoms and their combinations. There is no atom, which wouldn't periodically take part in life." -- Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

A 21st century addition: The "soul" is a program, running on the hardware called brain. Better hardware allows more complex programs, including moral ones. Our moral and emotional instincts are stuck on the level of hunter gatherers, so we should adjust them to civilized conditions. For example, eliminating brain circuits related to tribalism or desire for revenge.

Plato was right; Konstantin wrong. Break down an atom, and you have quarks and sons of various kinds about the size of electrons, and electrons, in the new standard model of the atom. It is almost entirely space, and the rest is just energy. An "elementary particle" is now nothing but a blip on a computer screen in a particle accelerator. It is nothing but an energy charge of some kind. There is no such thing as an elementary particle, which reason tells us anyway. Any supposedly solid ultimate particle that occupies space and has mass, can be broken up. There is no limit; reducio ad absurdum. "Matter" is more of a superstition that "soul." "Matter" is nothing but a physical sensation of something blocking our bodies. Einstein already showed that matter can be changed into energy. So there is no such thing as absolute matter, energy, space OR time, according to Einstein. It's all relative.

So, it's your choice. Go with your immediate, absolute experience that you are a conscious soul, like Descartes did ("I can't doubt that I am doubting; therefore I exist"). Or go with the superstition that there is such a thing as an absolute solid particle, and that combinations of absolute particles can explain your consciousness.

The soul programs the brain, not the other way around. Brain circuits adjust themselves to compensate for losses anywhere in the brain. Intelligence is not in the brain; it only uses the brain. Only reprogramming our souls can lead to any moral improvement whatsoever. Outsourcing our abilities to physical equipment results in moral decay.