THE TWILIGHT ZONE

Sill just uses what we think for her own purposes.

A preacher spreading the 'true word'.

But I am not much of a convert.

Preachers tasted very nice, according to the Papuans.

_________________
Zoom! What was that? That was your life, Mate! That was quick, do I get another? Sorry, Mate. Back to the world of dreams. Yes, dear? ...

Right, that was Plato’s cave that I was referring to. He liked puppet shows too – just like CC – Carlitos Crow that is. …and Zen is a kind of Buddhism not a person.

I appreciate all this profound thought on the nature of reality, and the direct comments of ZZZZZ are not at all lost on me.

I've been around the block a few times with this sort of thought too, but at the end of it all I have never found better role models of how to act, react, and interact than is expressed in the original Addams Family TV show.

Here is season 1, episode 1. Note the very loving, tolerant, and flexible attitude within the members of the family. There is something here that has served me better in certain ways than church or CC.

It's in three parts. You have to click on the second image at the end of each part to see the next.



Last words-
Gomez - "You may be right. We may have saved the world."
Mortica - "Do you think we did the right thing?"

I always did prefer the intellectual Adams Family sitcom to those lowbrow deadbeats The Munsters. But for really instructive allegories of life there was nothing like Gilligan’s Island. Leave it to Beaver was good too and Sidarther is actually Mohammed (who is actually Eddie Haskel)(those religious fanatics really need to get a sense of humor).

Aw, you're all wrong about Gilligans Island. You are just enamored of the sway of the knowledge of the professor, on a group of people in almost total isolation. If you took away the professor there would be almost no show left to any of the plots,... and still in isolation.

The Addams Family on the other hand was the first real positive representation of an important social-psychological balance, the good-willed gothic spirit.

The Addams Family never had anyone like Mary Ann who really made the show. I look just like Lurch by the way.

People with Asperger's less likely to see purpose behind the events in their lives
By Karen Schrock

BOSTON—Why do we often attribute events in our lives to a higher power or supernatural force? Some psychologists believe this kind of thinking, called teleological thinking, is a byproduct of social cognition. As our ancestors evolved, we developed the ability to understand one anothers’ ideas and intentions. As a result of this “theory of mind,” some experts figure, we also tend to see intention or purpose—a conscious mind—behind random or naturally occurring events. A new study presented here in a poster at the 22nd annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science supports this idea, showing that people who may have an impaired theory of mind are less likely to think in a teleological way.
Bethany T. Heywood, a graduate student at Queens University Belfast, asked 27 people with Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild type of autism that involves impaired social cognition, about significant events in their lives. Working with experimental psychologist Jesse M. Bering (author of the Bering in Mind blog and a frequent contributor to Scientific American Mind), she asked them to speculate about why these important events happened—for instance, why they had gone through an illness or why they met a significant other. As compared with 34 neurotypical people, those with Asperger’s syndrome were significantly less likely to invoke a teleological response—for example, saying the event was meant to unfold in a particular way or explaining that God had a hand in it. They were more likely to invoke a natural cause (such as blaming an illness on a virus they thought they were exposed to) or to give a descriptive response, explaining the event again in a different way.
In a second experiment, Heywood and Bering compared 27 people with Asperger’s with 34 neurotypical people who are atheists. The atheists, as expected, often invoked anti-teleological responses such as “there is no reason why; things just happen.” The people with Asperger’s were significantly less likely to offer such anti-teleological explanations than the atheists, indicating they were not engaged in teleological thinking at all. (The atheists, in contrast, revealed themselves to be reasoning teleologically, but then they rejected those thoughts.)
These results support the idea that seeing purpose behind life events is a result of our mind’s focus on social thinking. People whose social cognition is impaired—those with Asperger’s, in this case—are less likely to see the events in their lives as having happened for a reason. Heywood would like to test the hypothesis further by working with people who have schizophrenia or schizoid personalities. Some experts theorize that certain schizophrenia symptoms (for instance, paranoia) arise in part from a hyperactive sense of social reasoning. “I’d guess that they’d give lots of teleological answers; more than neurotypical people, and certainly far more than people with Asperger’s,” Heywood says.

Michelangelo's secret message in the Sistine Chapel: A juxtaposition of God and the human brain
By R. Douglas Fields

At the age of 17 he began dissecting corpses from the church graveyard. Between the years 1508 and 1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo Buonarroti—known by his first name the world over as the singular artistic genius, sculptor and architect—was also an anatomist, a secret he concealed by destroying almost all of his anatomical sketches and notes. Now, 500 years after he drew them, his hidden anatomical illustrations have been found—painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, cleverly concealed from the eyes of Pope Julius II and countless religious worshipers, historians, and art lovers for centuries—inside the body of God.


This is the conclusion of Ian Suk and Rafael Tamargo, in their paper in the May 2010 issue of the scientific journal Neurosurgery. Suk and Tamargo are experts in neuroanatomy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1990, physician Frank Meshberger published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association deciphering Michelangelo’s imagery with the stunning recognition that the depiction in God Creating Adam in the central panel on the ceiling was a perfect anatomical illustration of the human brain in cross section. Meshberger speculates that Michelangelo surrounded God with a shroud representing the human brain to suggest that God was endowing Adam not only with life, but also with supreme human intelligence. Now in another panel The Separation of Light from Darkness (shown at left), Suk and Tamargo have found more. Leading up the center of God’s chest and forming his throat, the researchers have found a precise depiction of the human spinal cord and brain stem.
Is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel a 500 year-old puzzle that is only now beginning to be solved? What was Michelangelo saying by construction the voice box of God out of the brain stem of man? Is it a sacrilege or homage?
It took Michelangelo four years to complete the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He proceeded from east to west, starting from the entrance of the Chapel to finish above the altar. The last panel he painted depicts God separating light from darkness. This is where the researchers report that Michelangelo hid the human brain stem, eyes and optic nerve of man inside the figure of God directly above the altar.
Art critics and historians have long puzzled over the odd anatomical irregularities in Michelangelo’s depiction of God’s neck in this panel, and by the discordant lighting in the region. The figures in the fresco are illuminated diagonally from the lower left, but God’s neck, highlighted as if in a spotlight, is illuminated straight-on and slightly from the right. How does one reconcile such clumsiness by the world’s master of human anatomy and skilled portrayer of light with bungling the image of God above the altar? Suk and Tamargo propose that the hideous goiter-disfigured neck of God is not a mistake, but rather a hidden message. They argue that nowhere else in any of the other figures did Michelangelo foul up his anatomically correct rendering of the human neck.

They show that if one superimposes a detail of God’s odd lumpy neck in the Separation of Light and Darkness on a photograph of the human brain as seen from below, the lines of God’s neck trace precisely the features of the human brain [see images at right].
There is something else odd about this picture. A role of fabric extends up the center of God’s robe in a peculiar manner. The clothing is bunched up here as is seen nowhere else, and the fold clashes with what would be the natural drape of fabric over God’s torso. In fact, they observe, it is the human spinal cord, ascending to the brain stem in God’s neck. At God’s waist, the robe twists again in a peculiar crumpled manner, revealing the optic nerves from two eyes, precisely as Leonardo Da Vinci had shown them in his illustration of 1487. Da Vinci and Michelangelo were contemporaries and acquainted with each other’s work.
The mystery is whether these neuroanatomical features are hidden messages or whether the Sistine Chapel a Rorshach tests upon which anyone can extract an image that is meaningful to themselves. The authors of the paper are, after all, neuroanatomists. The neuroanatomy they see on the ceiling may be nothing more than the man on the moon.
But Michelangelo also depicted other anatomical features elsewhere in the ceiling, according to other scholars; notably the kidney, which was familiar to Michelangelo and was of special interest to him as he suffered from kidney stones.
If the hidden figures are intentional, what do they mean? The authors resist speculation, but a great artist does not merely reproduce an object in a work of art, he or she evokes meaning through symbolism. Is Separation of Light from Darkness an artistic comment on the enduring clash between science and religion? Recall that this was the age when the monk Copernicus was denounced by the Church for theorizing that the Earth revolved around the sun. It was a period of struggle between scientific observation and the authority of the Church, and a time of intense conflict between Protestants and Catholics.
It is no secret that Michelangelo’s relationship with the Catholic Church became strained. The artist was a simple man, but he grew to detest the opulence and corruption of the Church. In two places in the masterpiece, Michelangelo left self portraits—both of them depicting himself in torture. He gave his own face to Saint Bartholomew’s body martyred by being skinned alive, and to the severed head of Holofernes, who was seduced and beheaded by Judith.
Michelangelo was a devout person, but later in life he developed a belief in Spiritualism, for which he was condemned by Pope Paul IV. The fundamental tenant of Spiritualism is that the path to God can be found not exclusively through the Church, but through direct communication with God. Pope Paul IV interpreted Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, painted on the wall of the Sistine Chapel 20 years after completing the ceiling, as defaming the church by suggesting that Jesus and those around him communicated with God directly without need of Church. He suspended Michelangelo’s pension and had fig leaves painted over the nudes in the fresco. According to the artist’s wishes, Michelangelo’s body is not buried on the grounds of the Vatican, but is instead interred in a tomb in Florence.
Perhaps the meaning in the Sistine Chapel is not of God giving intelligence to Adam, but rather that intelligence and observation and the bodily organ that makes them possible lead without the necessity of Church directly to God. The material is rich for speculation and the new findings will doubtlessly spark endless interpretation. We may never know the truth, but in Separation of Light from Darkness, Michelangelo’s masterpiece combines the worlds of art, religion, science, and faith in a provocative and awe inspiring work of art, which may also be a mirror.



This post is the Rosetta Stone of purposefulness.

So were there images that you could provide us of the art by Michelangelo, and how they support the theory of the researchers?

The post was meant as a copy of articles about teleological thinking. But if you’re interested in the images they can be found at this link http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=michelangelos-secret-message-in-the-2010-05-26 on the Scientific American website.

"the creation of Adam"

it's kind of obvious....
who is doing the creating...

Thanks for the link Z!

So you got this guy who is a natural born artist if there ever was one, who's most memorable moment was when he was young, doing something that he would get burned at the stake, or worse for. He had the drawings which he had to destroy, but his spirit demanded that he present what he saw to the world. His big opportunity was the job he had for the number one boss, to put the stuff that could get him killed, hidden right under everyones noses. The example IS pretty strange taken at face value as "God", I have to admit, but whatever other thing it was that he was embedding into the fresco had to have been something rather uncommon to recognize. Who knows...



People do tend to be theistic, in as much as they keep their behaviour fluid. If that's right or wrong depends on if it works or not. Maybe evolution shows that one should not have their head too much in the clouds, or on the other hand be too grounded, but some happy medium between the two, in order to best react to the unpredictable future. It's a principle which I try to fly by, for good or bad.

The ability to recognize patterns and patterns in patterns etc is a lot of what it means to be human. An artist creates patterns based on what he’s interested in and thinks about. The people that look at art will often see the patterns that the artist created or sometimes what they think about or care about. Sometimes people see patterns in clouds or fires or tealeaves or the ‘snow’ on an untuned television channel. Scientists see mathematical patterns in nature and it would just be an occupation for a minority of nerds except that those patterns are useful in technology. People addicted to alcoholic beverages or tobacco are locked into another kind of pattern that most other people can't see. But those affected often can't or don’t even want to escape. There isn't much difference between brilliance and insanity when it comes to detecting patterns – or living by them. While it depends on the seer it depends just as much on the people around him… or her.

If religion is a side effect of sex, does that mean God doesn't exist?
By John Horgan

In a post on Asperger's syndrome, my fellow blogger Karen Schrock manages to knock both religious believers and nonreligious rationalists in just a few paragraphs. Kudos, Karen! People with Asperger's, a mild form of autism, tend not to attribute events in their lives to a "higher power or supernatural force," Karen reports. Conversely, the tendency of supposedly healthy people to see "intention or purpose" behind random events may stem from an overactive "theory of mind," the innate ability to sense perceptions, emotions and intentions in others. Faith is a pathology, and so is the lack thereof. Basically, we're all nuts. Who could disagree?

The linkage of religion to theory of mind strikes me as particularly plausible. The anthropologist Stewart Guthrie floats a similar hypothesis in his book Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (Oxford University Press, 1995), which attributes religion to anthropomorphism, "the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things or events." Our anthropomorphism is an inborn, adaptive trait, Guthrie contends, which enhanced our ancestors' chances of survival. "[I]n the face of chronic uncertainty about the nature of the world, guessing that some thing or event is humanlike or has a human cause constitutes a good bet," Guthrie explains.

If a Neandertal mistook a tree creaking outside his cave for an assailant, he suffered no adverse consequences other than a moment's panic, Guthrie argues. If the Neandertal mistook an assailant for a tree, the consequences might have been dire. As natural selection bolstered our anthropomorphic tendencies, Guthrie writes, they extended to all of nature, and we persuaded ourselves that "the entire world of our experience is merely a show staged by some master dramatist"—that is, God.

Another intriguing theory of religion—or, more specifically, religious or mystical experiences—has been proposed by the radiologist Andrew Newberg. Using single-photon emission computed tomography, a variant of the better-known positron emission tomography, or PET, Newberg has scanned the brains of praying Catholic nuns and meditating Buddhist monks, and he has found some overlap between their neural activity and that of sexually aroused subjects (scanned by other researchers). The correlation makes sense, according to Newberg. Just as sex involves a rhythmic activity, so do religious practices such as chanting, dancing and repetition of a mantra. Like orgasms, religious experiences produce sensations of bliss, self-transcendence and unity; that may be why some mystics describe their raptures with romantic or even sexual language.

Consider this description by the 16th-century nun Saint Teresa of Avila of her vision of Christ: "I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God."

The theories of Guthrie and Newberg imply that religion originated as what the biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin call a "spandrel." Spandrel is an architectural term for the space between an arch and its surrounding structure. The spandrel does not, at least initially, serve any function; it is just a by-product of the arch. Gould and Lewontin borrowed the term to refer to accidental by-products of evolution. Perhaps religion is a spandrel piggybacking on adaptations such as the orgasm or theory of mind, both of which serve obvious biological purposes.

Now, just because a trait originated as a spandrel does not mean that it never acquires any value. As William James pointed out in his classic book The Varieties of Religious Experience, the biological origin of religious beliefs has no bearing on their truth and value or lack thereof, because all our perceptions, thoughts and beliefs—including the belief that religion is bunk—are traceable to biology. A 1997 report in The Journal of Neuropsychiatry & Clinical Neurosciences suggests that religious icons such as Saint Teresa, Saint Paul, Joan of Arc and Mohammed may have suffered from epilepsy or other brain disorders. But this diagnosis does not invalidate the faithful's insights, any more than the illness of an artist like Van Gogh or a scientist like John (A Beautiful Mind) Nash detracts from his achievements. As James insisted, religious visions must be judged by their fruits, not their roots.

And of course, if a spandrel is defined as something intrinsically purposeless, then everything is a spandrel, including humanity, life and the entire universe.

What!!! Who are they kidding?!! Could this be the theory that explains everything, not just material existance, but of our intellegent existance and perception of it all?

Interesting that in other universes, where time runs backwards, consciousness, and possibly life itself is not possible. Interesting too that consciousness and life are two things that run contrary to the basic rule of entropy. And what if the velocity of time, let's say of the forward movement of time were differient? How would that affect life, consciousness and perception?

I won't bother to post the whole artical. You can wade through it yourself if you have some 15 or 20 minutes to burn...

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature ... B_Disorder

The above post actually belongs in the Quote thread where it would be a response to my last post there. Here it is just a non sequitur. If I had responded to the post it would have been as follows:

Reality could be thought of as a vinyl phonograph record and the stylus to play it. This would represent our universe of three spatial dimensions. The record would appear to play as a consequence of additional spatial dimensions. The music produced is but an artifact of that arrangement but different music will be produced depending on the perceived speed and direction of the record. Thus entropy and life are only an illusion (i.e. an artifact) and there are potentially an indefinitely large number of them.

This and the preceding post were put here in error. Any attempt to fix them will only make them worse.