It all comes back to homeostasis

We spoke about homeostasis today in Addictions class. It was interesting. Not the subject, it was all very basic overview of a much more complicated topic I’d learned in greater detail in a previous Biology class. Balance, counterbalance… I think I’ve written before that in the end, everything comes back to homeostasis. Eating… digestion… a homeostatic function. The parasympathetic nervous system (what reacts to the fight or flight reaction) regulates digestion.

When an addict gets off drugs, let’s say cocaine, depression will often set in. What is happening is that dopamine, the chemical that makes you feel pleasure, has been replaced by the cocaine, so the body slowly stops producing it. Once the addict removes the drug, he has no dopamine (or applicable replacement) to keep a proper emotional homeostasis. Eventually the body adapts, and some sort of homeostasis is established. Our chemistry changes.

I’ve been feeling better as of late. I’m dealing with a lot of stress, a lot of challenges in my life regarding school and work. However, I’m feeling better. I don’t get constantly triggered by things. I still feel pain a lot, but I’m usually not crippled by it. I don’t feel depressed anymore. I’ve lost a heaviness I think. We’re all addicts, addicted to our chemistry. I want to describe myself and my story as an addict to my old life, as going through depression when I abstained from my old chemistry, with all of the behaviors and thought processes that were tied to it. My chemistry has changed, is changing.

What an odd feeling to become aware of such a change. I’m a new person in some way. I’m establishing a new sort of mental homeostasis. I’m usually not one to be considered one who puts much hope into anything. But for this… I think I do have real hope.

Do we have free will? No. If I had free will I would have chosen hope years ago, but I could not. But did my behaviors, goals, and attitudes affect the position I’m in today? Yes. If I were the man I am, I would not be in the place I am. That’s what I mean when I quote “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul”.

Derren Brown – Miracles For Sale

A thought about “out of body experiences”

They don’t happen. And if they do happen, no one has ever told you about a real one. Studying how memory works has been a really interesting. Do we know exactly how memory works? Hell no… much of it is a mystery. However, there is a lot we do know. There are certain areas of the brain that are involved in certain types of memory storage and memory function. We can record the action of memory activation. If this activation does not occur, no memory is recalled.
When someone is recounting an experience they had where Jesus sent them to hell to see what it was like, to warn those of us still living, or someone “dies” and goes to heaven, they tell you that they have left their body. If this is the case, which it is not, their brains would not have ever encoded and stored any memory of this experience, and would have no idea at all that it ever happened once returned to their body. As nice as it would be to believe in things like people dying and getting raised from the dead, I cannot.

My professor brought in a detective to talk to us about how they use cognitive interviewing in their work, which is centered around the human process of memory recall. On a side note, he mentioned that when they arrive at a crime scene, and they do an initial 1 on 1 interview with multiple witnesses, and they all have a very similar story, that these people have without a doubt collaborated and came up with what to say before the cops arrived… they’re lying. No real witness account is ever the same as another. That’s how memory works. Our memories aren’t little movie reels where we store every second, every frame, or a “whole picture”. Memory is the triggering of a familiar stimulus, which evokes a node or clump of similar or related images. Memory is much more arbitrary than linear. And what do people always say about out of body experiences? They are all so similar that they MUST be true, and that they remember the entire thing so vividly that it must be true. Both of these things, while you might think would show that these people actually had these things happen to them, actually show the exact opposite.

Another platitude (because a sentence is all you need to stop thinking)

1 Faith

2 Facts

3 Feelings

Behold, the order in which all things must be considered!  This is how my old pastor told us to view every situation.  Faith was held superior (and separate) to all other forms of knowledge.  And feelings or emotions… well, what were they good for anyway?  I could go into the intricacies of the platitude, and all of the fallacy in it, but I’ve gone far enough for what I want to talk about.

I remember so many different situations, we were all struggling to “just keep going” (a platitude for another entry ;P), most of us just wouldn’t admit it to ourselves.  On a very consistent basis, someone would be going through a hard time.  Instead of helping this person through it or giving them any real advice, the candid answer was “remember: faith, facts, THEN feelings.”  Always with the emphasis on the “THEN feelings,” to subtly suggest to the one struggling: “quit being such an unspiritual, emotional person”.  It’s so ridiculous.

Faith, facts, feelings.  We can’t separate these.

This is my warning to anyone, wherever you are, whatever you’re involved in… if the only help an organization can give you is advocating stricter adherence to that organization, just get out.

Refuting an argument from someone much more intellegent than myself

First of all, let me say that I love Christopher Hitchens, and I think he is a great writer and thinker.

When Hitchens says religion spoils everything, he’s referring to the barbaric practices and ignorant metaphysical claims that are cited in the bible. And yes, if we were to follow those practices and beliefs today it would be utterly wicked of us (kill disobedient children etc). No decent (non-fundie) religious person is denying that. However, that doesn’t make the bible useless. There are non-factually related elements to the bible that are very relevant to us today. In the contexts that the bible was written, it was a progressive document… not barbaric at all… quite revolutionary. Taken within its context gives a better understanding of what it is saying, and what meaning it could have for us today.

My argument is that it isn’t religion that causes these horrible atrocities throughout history, but it’s the people in those religions. Of course you can look through history and find a good number of terrible people doing terrible things, and they are religiously inclined. However, this is correlational, and can’t properly give us a right to say that religion causes these things. What about the number of people who have done good things? The chances are that there are more religious than non-religious in their ranks as well, because there are simply more religious people. I guess my argument is akin to the old phrase”guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. The tools of humanity: blades, fire, guns, language, the press, religion, science, the internet…. they all are neither good nor evil. They are amoral phenomena that enhance the ability of a human to enact his own will. It is the will of that human being wielding the tool that is either good or evil, not the tool itself.

I would imagine it very difficult to come up with the best arguments against religion if there is no decent counter-argument to challenge oneself with. I think that is the case with atheism vs theism today. Theists are not making good arguments for their beliefs (with a few exceptions… <3 Father Coine). The arguments of atheists don’t have to be that good to defeat the arguments of the theists, and therefore, there may be a good number of arguments from atheists that are weak if really scrutinized… it’s all natural selection

I would like to ask Hitchens this: Do you think that human morality 100 years from now will be just the same as today’s? Do you think that anything from today’s morality should be saved and used, within its context, 100 years in the future or will it all be worthless? Not so that I can prove my point and say “viola!”… I want to ask him because I honestly don’t know what he’d say.

Another reason not to take the bible literally:

1. Spies enter Jericho, Spies enter Rahab’s house.
2. Rahab protects spies and confesses belief in the god of Israel. Spies pledge safety to Rahab if she puts scarlet cloth in the window of her house, and she and her family stay in her house during the siege
3. Spies sneak down the walls of Jericho, because RAHAB’S HOUSE WAS PART OF THE CITY WALL.
4. Spies leave, bring back their homies to Jericho .
5. They scream and stuff and THE WALL FALLS DOWN, so that everyone can run straight in
6. Afterwards: Rahab: “Sup, i’m alive and not dead from my wall-house collapsing, even though i was in it the whole time.” Spies: “k sweet”

Now, for something emotional

I got in the car after class, ready to go home. But I took a right instead of a left… I wasn’t sure where I was going. I think I just needed to get away from everything for a while. I drove down to McMinville, looked for the crazy church for a minute or two, and then diverged westward. I don’t really know where I went, but it was great. I took a road that lead out to the hills, beyond the farm land that surrounds the town.
If you’ll remember, I was prone to taking drives when I was in the net. The whole time, every time, I had this intense aura about me that I was looking for something, that I needed to find something/somewhere. I felt like that in the car today. There was one point during my drive where I could either go right or left, going left would take me to the hills, and going right would take me back into town… usually I would go right. My thinking is that I don’t want to waste gas, and I am less likely to get lost or be stranded in a place that I have no idea how to navigate. I used to have a guilty feeling in the net when I would drive, like “I’m not supposed to be doing this”, which would make every decision to go farther out of the way of anything a miniature damnation of myself. Today I thought that my feeling of being in search of something was a feeling of wanting to find where I belong. We are all on the same system of roads, but we are all on different journeys. Every side street that I pass by in town has a sign at the intersection, and each street is where someone’s journey ends. None of those streets belong to me.
Today I didn’t go right, I went left. The hills were so beautiful. The road was windy. It would plunge into deep forest, and then emerge to show the scenic landscape, the miles of trees, the clouds resting just above the hill tops, the sun shining through the clouds, onto the trees, onto me. There was so much room there, just space to be occupied by peace and beauty. The feeling of searching vanished, and I had forgotten about my conversation with myself about looking for belonging altogether when the words “I belong here” slipped out of my mouth as casually as the wind was blowing across the hills. I had a spiritual moment.
As great as it was up there, I knew that I would have to turn around. I usually don’t like turning around. I almost always try to find a way to make a circular path back to where I started from. The road was beginning to become more hazardous, and there was also no signs of reaching a town or intersection within the next few miles, so I pulled over and retraced my path back. On my way back, I became sorrowful. I didn’t want to come back, I didn’t want to rejoin the madness, the hustle and bustle. I knew I would be coming back to the feeling of searching, and that I must leave the one place that I had been in a long time where I felt belonging.
I was leaving a feeling behind that I used to own. I felt like the first 20 years of my life had been about one thing. I felt like I had accumulated this totally personalized relationship to God and the universe. It was more than “a relationship with God”, it was something that not only would I not share, but could not share. It was something that couldn’t be put into words. It was something that was mine, a part of me, something born out of my life. It was ruined, it was destroyed, it’s gone. That asshole destroyed it. The fact is, that I would not be in college if I hadn’t been involved in the net. I wouldn’t be on my way to becoming a psychologist, I would not marry the woman that I will marry, have the kids that i will have, or work the job that I will work. I would be someone very different if I had not joined the net. I would still have that special thing, there would still be something personal, authored from me in my life.
It didn’t even matter if it was special to anyone else, it could have been a worthless piece of crap to the world, what mattered is that it was special to me, in my world. What do I have now? Now I’m smart. Now I can rip almost any argument to shreds. I can learn anything that can be taught. I am so good at being right. It’s my new special thing, only… it’s not special. Being smart is about adopting the logic and values of the broader context and portraying them more consistently than anyone else. Being smart is about doing well with what other people give you. Smartness can’t be my new special thing, because it is not mine, and it leaves me so empty at the end of the day. I don’t have my old special thing anymore, so what is there? How does anything become special again?
At this point in my experience, the good things don’t replace the bad, the bad things become numbing things, and not feeling anything feels good compared to feeling bad.

Depending on being smart leaves you empty, sure, but it sure as hell doesn’t let anyone leave you broken. I hate when people say that they are following their dreams.

Notice a rather large time gap?

Ya… I kind of neglected this thing for oh… about a year and a half. I’m back for now, I guess I stopped because of how I thought it awkward that I am posting a public blog that no one is reading. Oh well, I’ll figure out how to get some blogging friends eventually.

Stardust Keeps Swirling

There is only one shot in this life. Billions and trillions of beings have existed before us, almost all of them enduring extreme suffering. Billions of people are alive today, they have never used a computer, never talked on a phone, drank water from a faucet. I do all of those things every day, many times I see those kinds of activities as annoyances. The privileges that I have are immense. With privileges come opportunities. The billions of people who live so much more poorly than I do don’t have my opportunities. I myself can’t do anything to change the world for the better, but I have the chance to be a part of something greater than I that changes the world for the better.

I’ve been looking for a reason to be alive, and not having a reason has been a big conflict for me, and I think I may have reached catharsis. In the same way that I do not consider myself a completely independent entity that derives meaning and identity from within myself, I also must not consider my motivations to be a cause of a “free” independent soul. My part is to be a cog in the machine of humanity’s self-improvement project. I am to participate in the grappling of human will and law of natural selection. I am to make the world a better place. I am to make myself a better place… these are both the same thing.

I’m encountering the idea that I may not exist after death, which is a new thought for me. I’m thinking that who I am has always been, and for these 25-100 some years, who I am has come together from across the universe to form this body. Who I am, as in, my current form, has been going for about 25 years thus far. Since “I” (not referring to the idea of soul necessarily, but the components that have comprised my being: particles, matter, time, space, etc) have always existed since the beginning, I believe that it is safe to assume that I will always exist afterward, until everything ends. The only part that will be missing is the “soul” or what most of us would consider ourselves, or the real “me”. The soul is something that doesn’t exist except for in a human context (as far as we know, I am assuming that we invented it). There’s a saying about Gestalt psychology: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a very poignant saying regarding the human being. The self, and qualia are things that have not been explained by science currently… it can’t even be addressed really as of yet. So, we die, and who we are is spread across the universe again. Does the soul continue to exist somehow? I obviously don’t know, but nothing exists to tell me that it does. It makes sense that when your brain chemistry is shut down, and your body eventually fades away and is consumed by other organisms, then the factory that has been steadily producing your soul (the brain) is no longer, and therefore your soul is no longer. But does that mean that “we” don’t exist? I don’t think so. Most of who we are and what we do as humans, about 90%, we have no conscious idea that we do and are them.

To exist, must we have a conscience, a self-awareness, or a soul? Are we not just different forms of ourselves every time we learn something new, and the circuitry of our brain is changed? Every time our old cells have been completely replaced by new cells, are we not different versions of this DNA production? We are still ourselves regardless, whether neural activity rises or diminishes… so why not when we die? All of the elements that composed the bodies that we are familiar with still exist, just in a different form. The soul is the most peculiar idea.

Language comes into it again. Really, the common or conventional way that we regard ourselves is inaccurate. We see ourselves as static beings that get bigger, then shrivel up and die. Really, we don’t grow, we accumulate. The whole idea of who we are is based on a labeling system that has nothing to do with how the universe actually works. It’s based simply on a reflexive verbal cue system that natural selection brought out in us not to portray accuracy, but to more immediately communicate and thus survive. Who “I” am isn’t static, it is ever changing, depending on what I have recently accumulated. The case exists that “I” don’t exist at all, except in a form of language.

If you think about it, we are really just the memes of the physical world. That’s a trip.

Purpose is found, the idea of soul is reincarnated and resurrected, and the stardust keeps on swirling.

What the Hell?

Life and death are not opposites. Life is a fundamental characteristic of the universe, and death is the enactment of the universe’s will upon life. Life always is, and death is its vehicle of change. (Keep in mind I’m using life in a very general way, those with a biology inclination may be shaking their head at me.. life could mean “existence”)

Hell is trying to get to heaven. If you must die to experience hell, hell must be a part of life, and not the opposite or the antagonist of it, because no thing that is not alive has experiences, and if we experience hell, we must be alive in order to do so. I do believe you must die to experience hell… I’m not talking about the standard “where will you go when you die?” stuff, I’m talking about, I’m talking about a different death: when a dream dies, when something that was good and cherished is stolen away, that sort of death… like the death of my past life. That’s death, and that’s hell.

I am still wondering whether hell is something that is caused by the individual still holding on to the life that has died, an internal cause, or whether hell is something done to us regardless of our choices, an external.