@Krumple,
Krumple;135103 wrote:Well how about diving right into neuroscience? Some experiments were conducted on the brain. I want to mention the split hemisphere tests specifically. The left side of the brain controls speech, where the right side has no speech ability at all. However the right side controls a majority of activity and knows why it does what it is doing, but the left side can not process why the right side is doing what it is doing. However the right side can read simple words and symbols. What they did was, they took several patients who had their hemispheres of their brain severed and ran some simple logical experiments. What they would do is coordinate very simple questions focused directly to each hemisphere. What happened was remarkable. The right hemisphere was asked, do you believe in god and the answer was no, but then asked the same question to the left hemisphere and the answer was yes.
What they determined is that the left side of the brain is constantly trying to make sense of reality, by splitting the data into categories and further deducing it to make sense of what is going on. A bunch of guess work basically. Where as the right side of the brain doesn't bother to struggle to comprehend the experiences at all, it just lets the data be what it is. What this means is, the self is only an illusion, and the thoughts of the self are only important to the left side of the brain. This is also found to be the only location that the idea of god arises. The left side is trying to interpret reality and so it makes a bunch of guesses to try and make sense of the data streaming in.
If anyone is the closest, it would be Kant. I don't think reality is pure reason but I know it is not some mysterious disembodied mind. There is no need for there to be an outside source. In my opinion people invent these ideas to try and make themselves feel better about reality.
The two sides of the brain seems to match the transcendentals.
Brilliant post!
Just for the record, Hegel doesn't think that reality is pure reason. He just says the real is rational. That doesn't mean that the reality man is
grounded in is rational. Yes, Kant is as important as Hegel in this regard. Kant made us consciousness of the way that we perceive space. Hegel just figured out that time was made of concept.
Of course we want to feel better about reality! Hegel is an atheist who expects no afterlife. He is merely comforted by the beauty of the mind's inherent structure. Is that
bad? That's all it is. A fundamental ontology not of the world, which is unknowable, but only of
human perception.
This is why Hegel is not a mystic like Plato. He doesn't think that our projections are the essence of the world, but only of human perception. You've got to realize that Hegel considered himself a stone cold scientist. He mocked his good friend Schelling publicly, in his first book, for making claims he could not back up.
My "religion" is
science. And this is only manageable because science happens to be beautiful, or numinous. Kant believed in God. Hegel did not. So Hegel was more on the pure science angle. He wanted to reflect reality like a mirror. He wrote this down, that the philosopher must be stone cold. (Something like that in German. )
Hegel loved Spinoza, and Spinoza is an alien, he's so cold. Hegel is not as cold except he fixed Spinoza's misunderstanding of time. German Idealism is only possible as a historical development. So Hegel had to figure out how such a development was possible. The answer is that language is evolutionary in its very nature. Thus the Hegelian dialectic.
Reality is not pure reason, according to Hegel, but man can only think reality in left-brain terms, by chopping it into bits. Niether he nor Kant makes claims as to where this reality comes from. I don't know and it just doesn't bother. Science is absorbing enough to justify my life aesthetically, and that's all that the numinous is, the beauty of logical thought, or true science. And perfect science is limited to the most fundamental structure of the human mind, for this is universal, a characteristic of the species, not some mystic crap.
regards: recon (that triangle may look mystical, but it is a scientific diagram of the mind's basic structure. the left brain meets the right brain at the top. the self is a fantasy of the left brain. Do you see what I mean?
And our spoken language is a combination of the two brain halves, so to speak, because words, unlike number, is metaphorical.....thus man as man and not animal is word, the meeting of his brain halves & the creation of his science which is either superstition or more or less accurate....
