3.06.2009

brain(mind); heart(love?)

Above all, the last weeks have taught me to be humble. I pride myself on being inquisitive, yet I found out that I don't ask very good questions or the right sorts of questions. I like to think I'm intellectual, but now I see it's just the glasses that make me look that way. I was proud of my top of the key standing three-pointer, but I have a long way to go, pardon the pun. I believe my piano was decent in its day, but I barely even glazed the surface.

The more I learn, the more I realize how much there is I don't know and might never know. Questions like: Who is God? Why don't I know more about pop art? How come I know nothing about history, and am content to keep it that way? Ditto for geography; I couldn't point out New Zealand on a map if my life depended on it. What would it be like to have a summer project of building a car from scratch? Am I lying to myself for not wanting to go to med? Am I actually a loser, but don't realize it because losers don't realize they're losers because only cool kids know who the losers are?

I believe mind is emergent from brain, but not thoroughly from the brain. I am a dualistic interactionalist, that is I believe that "consciousness and other aspects of the mind, which can influence neural events, can occur independently of the brain". I do not think therefore I am, but I think therefore I am that which I am, I think? As always, I feel pressured from eliminative materialists and fervent Cartesian dualists alike, a sordid side effect that accompanies straddling the fine line between two specific identities. I don't want to be what I am not, yet I am parts of what I am not.

If only it were so easy to choose, like choices were flavours of ice cream. Or perhaps it is true: Blessed is he who is ignorant, for he is blissfully unaware.

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Question: If the mind can be emergent from the brain, can love be emergent from the heart? Is love a referred sensation? Perhaps I should pay more attention to cardiovascular, maybe it has a mystery all to its own.

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