Coherence

We live in a mythical invented specialness enshrined with ideas of ensoulment and supremacist human-centric world views. But, we're not really special. We're not even that smart in spite of our larger brains and more dendrites than our chimp cousins.

The doctrine of ensoulment in Christianity, that the soul enters the body at conception and leaves it at death is also the right-wing Christian rationale for opposing abortion, euthanasia, harvesting stem cells from blastocysts and makes these things equivalent to murder. The acceptance of this view is anti-neuroscience, pseudo-science, irrational and counter to what is reasonable in a natural world.

Religious Jews believe the soul is life and it resides in the blood and disappears after death. Where it goes they do not know but it is considered the essence of life. It is indeed the essence that runs the machinery - the organs which rely on oxygen contained in hemoglobin which is carried to the heart which is the pump which perpetuates the molecular machine during youthfulness - through reproduction, the primary directive of ALL life - and then the inevitable slide into rapid metabolic change leading to a more rapid aging and death.

Christianity also believes in the soul, but different, one that is immortal and a soul which is subject to eternal salvation or to eternal damnation. The Greeks and Romans had other ideas about the soul. Aristotle believed it was everywhere in the body, but other philosophers believed it lived in the heart, the liver or elsewhere. Epicurus believe the soul was made of atoms which resided in the chest, replenished with every breath and death came to the body when all those atoms leaked (fled) out. Lucretius writes that death is "nothing to us," and should not concern us at all - the body dies and the soul goes it's own way. Those Greek and Roman origins faded after the fall of Rome in 476 A.D. And Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century theologian gave the soul a Christian stamp of approval, rejecting the atom theory and proffering the official Christian view that everything has a purpose, and everything, he said, was God's plan - as described in the Bible.

The earth, of course, was also at the center of their universe. Only it isn't, not the first or the last thing they have been wrong about it. The Church believed/or so they taught that the earth was the center of everything and celestial orbs (planets) moved around it in perfect circles.

The Polish Nicolaus Copernicus challenged the mediaeval Church view of the cosmos and was excommunicated for it. He had the temerity to suggest the earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around. His book was banned just as the subversive "new physics" of Italian mathematician Galileo would be banned by the church and indexed in the Roman Catholic Index of Forbidden Books - where they would remain banned for over 200 years.

To teach doctrine which defied ancient church positions could result in death but what Copernicus and Galileo taught turned the church on it's head. John Donne in a poem, written in 1621, "The Anatomy of the World," wrote that the "new Philosophy calls all in doubt." And, he declared: "Tis all in peeces, all coherence gone."

Intelligence

Even colonies of bacteria exhibit intelligence and ants and bees are 
pretty good at surviving to reproduce also - so why else would 
"intelligence" matter?

Intelligence is difficult to define. Our social scientists have been 
trying for years. Tests measure ability to remember and associate terms 
and words but what really is intelligence?.

The evolutionary objective of intelligence is to provide a benefit to 
reproduction. Nothing else. Intelligence is an enabler for those of us who 
don't have the physical capability to out-maneuver predators. We evolved a 
larger neo-cortex with more dendrites and neurons in order to outsmart 
predation by other eukaryotes - though we seem to be losing the war with 
proeukaryotes and many other parasitic eukaryotes.

And politics is a mechanism, a cultural memetic to out-wit our predators 
(other nation-states since the time we began to live in groups) - or put 
another way, to enable some of us to out-wit our prey.

Females (humans) when still a foetus, at 5 months have all her eggs (about 
7 million of them) and never manufactures more of them, but continuously 
lose eggs until she is 35-40 years old when she thereupon reaches 
menopause. These females are no longer producing estrogen and progesterone 
in cells around those eggs, the eggs are gone but she continues to live 
another third of her life - perhaps because of medicine which is 
prolonging her life but as far as evolution is concerned, she has lived to 
fruition. There is simply no reason why she should live longer.

As for males, they don't live as long. There is something about 
reproducing females which adds to her ability to survive after 
reproduction. It may be an accumulation of estrogen and its effect on 
organs?

Humans begin senescence - an aging likely due to oxidative stress which is 
the major cause of age related disease in both males and females.

A Person Ceases to Exist

When the brain dies, the person goes out of existence. Steven Pinker said that in The Blank Slate. I always found his books extremely complex. Fascinating, but complex - but I still read them and read them more than once. Don't as me how I find the time; I just do.

In The Blank Slate, he says that every thought and every emotion sends signals which can be seen with instruments we have today to look at those neurons and see them fire. It is the excitations and the flashing as electrical impulses are fired that respond to our every thought or emotion and even to our dreams. It is so precise that we can measure these excitations and someday I imagine we may very well be able to reconstruct exactly what the mind is seeing and look at it as a person dreams or thinks it; I mean at which time we'll be able to actually watch a person's dreams, as-if or just like we are watching television - on a cathode ray tube (man, am I old fashioned). I mean on a plasma screen or whatever it is we have invented by then to look at such things.

It is just that with a microscope when you look at brain tissue it looks so complex - and it is. You don't see the molecular alterations which are triggered with each thought and emotion. And now we make it happen. We can make it possible for someone to learn or even think about something they had not thought about before. If you take a mouse and knock out a certain gene you can stop the mouse from learning. It is the same gene in a human. Now think about this. You can cause a gene to express itself. You turn on the regulating genes which we, not long ago thought was junk DNA, and it causes a person to think. You take "mentally challenged" persons and you cause a gene to regulate, to express, and you have the key to making that person think and learn (what it is they learn) and you can watch it all on a plasma screen. We have come a long way? This is science's "great leap forward."

LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL!