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Thursday, June 11, 2015

No one is either good nor evil.  Some do more good in this world and some do more harm, and that eventually works its consequences, but we evolve and learn and become (not necessarily for the better) as time passes.
On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I think mind is a spiritual thing divorced from my body and that goes on after my body dies.  That explains a lot, especially how it is that my mind experiences its existence, such as the terrible itch on the scab on my knee  I got being reckless on a bicycle -- what is an "itch" anyway and how in creation can molecules and electrons moving around generate this experience in my mind?

The rest of the time I realize that if I get Alzheimer's or something like that my mind will dissolve, so it seems a good predictor of what will happen when I die, and even though the experience of "qualia" is a more difficult problem than the typical materialist is capable of understanding, the fact that I see no way to understand it doesn't mean there can't be a way.

Quanta and so on are fascinating but seem irrelevant to all this.  More important is the old criticism of Cartesian Dualism, how does mind move the body?
It enters my mind that if you believe in the Devil or in demons or whatever you admit or presume that "evil" is a real thing, and have the burden of showing that this is so.

Now, lots of bad things happen to all of us.  Typhoons blow, volcanoes erupt, diseases come and we age and die.  None of that, though, is "evil."  It is just what is -- and all have both good and bad aspects to them, depending on viewpoint.

People too do bad things -- they steal and kill and whatever.  Do these things have a good aspect?   I rather think not -- some more subtle perspective is needed -- the harm the criminal does harms the victim and also harms the criminal (in either a karmic way or in the Western sense of accumulating sins).  We know, however, that the criminal is motivated mainly by the same sorts of desires and drives that motivates all of us to do bad things -- they are just less inhibited, perhaps, or less intelligent (they don't get away with it).  I find it hard to say that my impulses -- my ambition, my pride, my libido, my desire to have others like me, and so on.  These are desires derived from the subconscious -- even deeper down -- and evolved as instincts that get modified and made acceptable by our acculturation and morals and so on, and it is hard to say that an instinct evolved for natural reasons (survival of genes) is somehow "evil," even though sometimes it leads to harm.

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

It's really easy -- never believe anything without good reason for believing it, and the more outlandish the thing the stronger the reasons have to be.  The secret to successfully employing this rule to reach any sort of truth is rigid honesty with oneself and complete suppression of what we would like to be the case in favor of what really is the case.