MIND AND MEANING (WPR)

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http://broadcast.uwex.edu:8080/ramgen/w ... 080921a.rm

I found segment 2, Spiritual Evolution, to be particularly interesting. It contains ideas that I've tried to relate to some of you with limited success.

"George Vaillant is a Harvard psychiatrist on a mission to reclaim spirituality and ground it in hard science. His book is "Spiritual Evolution: A Scientific Defense of Faith." Vaillant tells Steve Paulson that people are innately spiritual and that only recently has the medical profession begun to pay attention to the power of the positive emotions."

I recently watched "What the Bleep - Down the Rabbit Hole" which was an attempt to reconcile religion and science, with an emphasis on quantum physics, meditation, and several other threads. While I'm not sure on some of their ideas, it was well done and interesting.

horrible movie. watched it before. just a bunch of hippie new age gibberish with very little relevancy to the scientific world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_B ... er_critics

Have you made an attempt with what they expound?

I couldn't get the broadcast without a cumbersome ( to me) download so here is a link to his article.

http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/community- ... illant.pdf

Connects up nicely with the thread " Why not Machines?" on PPR at the moment. And suggests that neurophysiology, genetically hardwired neural networks, create the need for faith, hope and charity, amongst other things, in the amazing machines/parts of a machine that we are.

I haven't read all, or even most of it, but I agree with what I so far gathered is the main theme, that our beliefs as are as important to our functioning as our diet. And choosing certain beliefs contributes to better "health" and other beliefs lead to poor health.

What I disagree with is what seems to be a belief in our being free to make those choices, ( of "health-inducing" beliefs) rather than being led/programmed/influenced by our genes, the environment including data we receive from it, and the profound effects of diet on our chemical state, etc.

I don't think we can "choose" to believe only those things which are "good for us"; I think that unless the environment/society "feeds" them to us for at least a little while, ( like a parent concerned for her child's physical health makes sure that they eat enough fresh vegetables) , we are just as likely to "choose" to hold other, less health-giving, beliefs, because of the data we have received.

And I think that it is difficult to "choose" health-giving beliefs if the body ( incl brain) is out of whack as a result of diet which clouds judgement/perception/understanding.

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Our choice of beliefs is probably like our choice of diet. (Interesting enough, I say I'm not religious about anything except my diet, and I'm not very religious about that.) I want to make better choices and eat the right things, but I live in America and I'm surrounded by junk food, and sometimes I succumb to temptation.

I confess that I knew next to zero about quantum physics before watching the movie, and based on the information in that link, may have come out of the movie knowing even less!

Some of the stuff was obviously shaky - the channeling, the ice crystals (how did they measure the effect of intention on crystals). Some of the other stuff (coherence, 2 slit experiment, flat world, their take on the time/space continuum, etc) I am not in a position to assess at the moment.

Thanks for the pointer, skafather.