Deborah Blum on what science can’t tell us about the supernatural on the Op Ed page of today’s New York Times. I’ll keep it up until the Times charges you to read it.
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Waiting for Cassowary 
December 30, 2006 at 9:58 pm |
“Why choose instead to be creatures of chemical impulse and electrical twitch? We would rather gamble on even a tiny, electrical spark of a chance that we are something more.”
I completely believe that I am something more – and that you are, too. If we were nothing more than wires and electrodes and impulses, how is it that we haven’t figured out, given all we know about how electricity works, how to pull off a Victor Frankenstein maneuver? How is it that we can neither create nor prolong life, nor repair that which is broken? And how is it that we can all be created of the same stuff, yet be so very different?
I choose to believe that that which makes us who we are – the master controller of all that electrical activity – continues on after the failure of the machine. Though I’m no scientist, I’ve been told that energy can neither be created nor destroyed – it merely changes form.
All that energy has to come from SOMEWHERE, right?!
January 1, 2007 at 3:06 am |
We are machines, animals, and spirits all in one! If phantoms can be created via psychedelic it would seem to follow that they can be created by wiggling brain wires. It is weird (weird is wired with the letters crossed). But I don’t think ghosts from within rule out ghosts from without just as whatever word you use for the divine is within us as well as without.
January 1, 2007 at 8:19 pm |
I agree with both of the comments above, and with the premises in this very interesting article! Dismantling anything until it’s nothing but a pile of parts is only partially helpful. It creates a better understanding of the parts and processes, but not of the consciousness and subtler interconnections.