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Originally Posted by Thor
Its neat that we are peering into the mind to get a greater understanding of things like the brain on music, why we love, etc.. But boy there is this part of me and I'm sure most people that wonders if we truly learn down to the minute detail why music works, why we love, how we enjoy/experience love/music; does this not take away some of if not most of the thrill of music and love.
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This has been an interesting discussion, and this is a question I've often thought about as well, but I'd have to say that I'm coming down on the side of rather knowing than not.
For example, that the sex drive originates in genetic programming to perpetuate the species is a scientific concept that is reasonably well understood, but the effect of that knowledge of people's enjoyment of sex seems negligible. I think that is because they are different types of thought; you can use knowledge of the process to understand why it is happening but that still doesn't let you bypass or ignore the process because it is a product of the mind's deep structure, not the consciousness floating on top.
As another example, knowing that the stars are burning globes of gas that swim in unimaginable distance has never managed to short-circuit the wonder I feel when I gaze out at them at night. If anything, knowledge deepens the glory of stargazing as the primitive under-mind and the thinking mind are both engaged by the sight.
I doubt knowing that music is, as I suspect, simply an expression of the human liking for repetitive (yet not TOO repetitive) complex patterns that progress through time would do anything to destroy interest in it, any more than defining physical beauty by mathematical relationships stopped the ancient Greeks from creating great art. Nor would the isolation of love as a chemical process do much, unless somehow you could "cure" love with science, although who would WANT such a cure is another story.
Actually that'd make a decent SF story: the Cure for Love.
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Originally Posted by photon
Hehe, it's not so much I dislike the position of spirituality, I just don't like the word itself. Spiritual, pertaining to the spirit.. but the spirit isn't defined, so the word is nonsense to me. People use it to describe a state of mind, a feeling, a point of view, which to me is a natural thing (since it's in the brain), so the word spiritual is just.. goofy. I just can't think of a better word.
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Spiritual implies the spirit, which implies dualism, which is where I think it becomes a sharp divider between those that accept that there is only a natural world which - in theory - is completely understandable, and those who think that there are "mysteries" forever beyond us. It does describe something that doesn't exist, but much in the same way that if I say "unicorn", you know what I'm talking about, "spirituality" is a useful concept.
I think the great attraction of the word and concept is that it empowers all kinds of experiential "evidence" that supports just about any world-view; once you believe that the spirit exists apart from the body, in a realm inaccessible to the senses, any reality you construct is as equally plausible as it is unprovable. If you claim you are "spiritual" or that you admire "spiritual" people, then, it tells me that you are fundamentally at odds with how I perceive the world.
To me, whether one is an atheist or a deist/theist/pagan/whatever comes down to that question of duality - either there is some kind of spirit in the machine (or some machine, or the universe), or the idea of "God" or "gods" must be discarded. A "God" that does not somehow transcend reality is no god at all, and those who argue for a kind of naturalist deity that acts within the rules of space and time, or think of "God" as another name for nature are redefining the word "God" into something it is not.
As a thought experiment - if the theories that our universe is but one of an infinity are correct, and we learn how to create child or sister universes on our own, does that mean we then are "gods" and are worthy of worship? Would you
want to be worshipped? Would you assume that this would necessarily imply moral perfection for we "creators"? If we could interfere in the affairs of these created universes from outside, would we be justified in doing so if it curtailed the free will of creatures within it? Would we be responsible for evil in our creations?
Now think about the same questions, but applied to a virtual universe created inside sufficiently advanced computing machines - do the same answers apply? And if not, why not?