-----Original Message-----
From: Bryan Hyden <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Monday, November 09, 1998 6:00 PM
Subject: Re: gentlemen?
>>If we are "not of this earth," what are we of? "Transcend the physical
>>world"? How? Sorry, but you've really lost me here. Are you talking
>>trascendentalism as in eastern religions or what?
>
>well, we are not our bodies... if you get your hand chopped off, you are
>still the same person... we are not our emotions or our thoughts... we
>are aware of HAVING these things, but we are not these things.... it
isn't
>necessarily eastern religion, but it is very similar to it... (snip a
lot)
My position is that we *are* our bodies. If you get a hand chopped off you a
different person, by a factor of exacly one hand. We evolved on this Earth,
we are of this Earth, we are inseperable from this Earth. Our brain is the
organ of awareness, awareness is not outside of the functioning of the
brain. The existence or not of a God(dess or Gods) is essentially a question
of astrophysics, if they exist, we'll find them some where, some place, some
time.
My dog and I sit outside at night sometimes looking at the stars. I see the
same stars as my dog, but my awareness of the stars is different from the
dog due to different types of brain function, not because I'm "higher" or
"superior" to my dog. The dog smells stuff, not stars, in the yard of which
I'm completely unaware. The dog does this because of different brain
function, not because it's "higher" or "superior." We are just different
inhabitants of the same Earth, different evolutionary histories.
I also think that just as the dog cannot be aware of the nature of stars,
there are probably a lot of things of which I cannot be aware due to the way
my brain functions. But, my brain and my mind are the same thing, or I
suppose, the mind is an invention of the brain.
Steven J. Bissell
http://www.du.edu/~sbissell
http://www.responsivemanagement.com
Our human ecology is that of a rare species of mammal
in a social, omnivorous niche. Our demography is one of
a slow-breeding, large, intelligent primate.
To shatter our population structure, to become abundant
in the way of rodents, not only destroys our ecological
relations with the rest of nature, it sets the stage
for our mass insanity.
Paul Shepard
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