[Vulcan]

Originally Posted by photon

Sure, everyone ponders the question at some point to some degree. But that doesn't mean the idea has any actual merit.



But there is no pervasive life force. There's nothing different about the atoms that make up a bunny vs. the atoms that make up a puddle, a rock, the air, etc. The idea of life force arose to try and explain why some things are alive and some aren't. Like the earth being flat, it at first appears like a self-evident truth.

But subsequent observation has made the hypothesis unnecessary, there's no atomic or chemical interaction that has ever been observed that requires the addition of life force to explain.

Just like the hypothesis of a dome above the earth to hold back the waters of the deep is no longer necessary.



I don't think you're being clear here though. The experience is inside of us, meaning eventually our brain. Which operates via chemical reactions and electrical impulses. Again are those things manipulated by this life force to be different than they otherwise would have been had the life force not been involved? Because that's what would be required to feel different; the brain has to be changed.

I'm not recommending this site but it seems in this experiment there were some changes in the brain.

What was startling was that the MRI scans showed that mindfulness groups increased gray matter concentration within the left hippocampus, the posterior cingulate cortex, the temporo-parietal junction, and the cerebellum. Brain regions involved in learning and memory, emotion regulation, sense of self, and perspective taking!

http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-12793...-explains.html


I think you're looking at the brain as the seat of consciousness instead of the heart. In other society's the heart was the important source.

and again I'm not recommending this site but these two quotes get at what I'm saying.

Many other cultures also find the seat of our selves to be not in the brain but in the heart. For example, the ancient Egyptians thought so little of the brain that when mummifying a body to preserve it for the deceased’s use in the afterlife, they tossed the brain away along with all of the other internal organs – with the notable exception of the heart.

And when C.J. Jung worked with people of the Pueblo nations, Hopi elder Ochwiay Biano (Mountain Lake, also a.k.a. Antonio Mirabal) informed him that in his view, white people were not only uneasy and restless, they were crazy mad. Why? Because “they say that they think with their heads. ‘We think here,’ he said, indicating his heart” (Jung 1973, p.247-8). Jung noted ways in which modern culture, construing the gift of knowledge as cognition alone, has deleterious side effects.

http://indigenize.wordpress.com/2013...brain-deposed/

The examples of the flat earth and the dome to keep out the waters of the deep were just fanciful ideas which didn't have any impact on their lives. Going inside did and does have an impact.