Chaos breeds Conflict

So, what is wrong with death? https://aeon.co/essays/we-might-agree-that-death-is-bad-but-why-exactly?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=e1a4a67899-Weekly_Newsletter_22_April_20164_22_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-e1a4a67899-68754401

The brain has become everyone's subject, perhaps because evidence for an afterlife or a godlike creator stubbornly refuses to reveal itself.  (and perhaps Psychoanalysis is another god that failed ) The human brain is now thought to contain the answers we have failed to find elsewhere. Neuroscience will explain our emotional responses as well as our problem solving abilities and our indefatigable curiosity.    Purpose, however, may remain the domain of philosophy. Eagelman emphasises the unconscious functioning which determines most of our actions and decisions, and acknowledges Freud's insight that much of behaviour is a product of unseen mental processes. The concept of extended mind, whereby external stimuli and exchanges with other minds enables broader conceptualising capacity and creativity that an isolated human could not achieve, may in turn be extended by AI into some new more complex form of mind. One can choose to greet this news with optimism, as heralding a leap fo...

  Reading this book, I found myself feeling comfortable, not with the repeated emphasis on inevitable death ( I still don't understand how death makes sense of life, rather than simply ending it ) but with Psychoanalysis as a scientific experiment, using mythology as its analogy, which attempted to comprehend the processes in what is beyond conscious self awareness. As Darwin found evidence for his theory of natural selection, Freud sought evidence for the power of the unknown in each person. Psychoanalysis is a valiant attempt, diminished by its institutionalisation, and likely to be subsumed by neuroscience, but it retains its poetic imagery and pathway to mysteries.

  The brain has become everyone's subject, perhaps because evidence for an afterlife or a godlike creator stubbornly refuses to reveal itself.  (and perhaps Psychoanalysis is another god that failed ) The human brain is now thought to contain the answers we have failed to find elsewhere. Neuroscience will explain our emotional responses as well as our problem solving abilities and our indefatigablecuriosity.    Purpose, however, may remain the domain of philosophy. Eagelman emphasises the unconscious functioning which determines most of our actions and decisions, and acknowledges Freud's insight that much of behaviour is a product of unseen mental processes. The concept of extended mind, whereby external stimuli and exchanges with other minds enables broader conceptualising capacity and creativity that an isolated human could not achieve, may in turn be extended by AI into some new more complex form of mind. One can choose to greet this news with optimism, as heralding a leap f...

Three books that are related and overlap thematically, and of great interest to our blog. http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/477918/capture-a-unified-theory-on-mental-health/ "Capture is how our attention focuses on how one stimuli rather than the thousands of others that are bombarding us."   "'Closure' proposes that we regard the world as open and it is we who close it through our stories." "Human thought is laid out in a continuous spectrum. Every human mind is a spectrum; evert human mind possesses a broad continuous range of different ways in which to think. The way in which a person happens to be thinking at any given moment depends on a characteristic I'll call "mental focus.""