This blog is intended to be derivative of my blog "On Morals." Suppose you have the misfortune to be born to wealth, but with no apparent talent for greatness.  If you have good examples to emulate, you may still do ok.  However, as I demonstrated in "On Morals," the crucial impetus for consciousness - what drives it - is feedback of the form of reaffirmation of reality.  It is seeing the abstract made concrete - "the Word made flesh" - that fuels our passions,&n...

I find myself thinking in terms of Les Miserables a lot recently.  Odd the twists and turns of the mind. Imagine, if you will, the following scenario:  Our protagonist suddenly recalls committing a string of unrelated crimes of whim a long time ago - when he was a young precocious sociopath by default, his even younger childhood consisting of a series of betrayals and false accusations that ultimately overwhelm his innocence.   Note that as an adult, he...

This is a work in progress. (At least I hope so...) Notes from a thread on fb:  https://www.facebook.com/DonnaLHaney "As to autism, I suspect a complex brew of factors. There are definite changes or deficits in major neural pathways that explain or correlate to various types of autism. Some people are simply blind to the emotional states of others. Some people are blind to their own emotional states. Some people are very good at reading the emotional state of others, but absolutely do...

Here's the crux of the issue: We know that the universe operates by strict causality. Miracles and other alleged exceptions, such as the Heisenburg Uncertainty Priciple, quantum mechanics, etc. simply extend causality to the "Spiritual" realm, or add additional facets such as extra dimensions whose workings may lie beyond our immediate ability to know. In the case of the Uncertainty Principle, it's not that there isn't strict causality, it's just that we are limited by the nature of our ...

Ok, my beef is with the idiots who torched the library. THE Library. You know, the world library at Alexandria, where the collected wisdom of virtually all mankind West of India and East of the Americas resided. All that lore and history and science and myth and poetry - gone. And who is to blame? Allegedly the Moslem hordes, proclaiming that the only book necessary is the Koran. But wait, it turns out that the library was burned, partially or totally, on several occasions over the c...

This line of thinking did not originate with the meeting of Christian Apologetics which I attended recently, but the arguments presented at the meeting were so cogent as to compel me to rethink my own atheistic positions on this issue, something which I have not tried to do for a lot of years. I did not go into the meeting - my third one so far - with the intention or expectation of discussing or debating causality or free will. In fact, I was specifically invited to present what I con...

Note: (June 25th, 2005) please check the comment section, tenth comment, for Anthony Hargis's response to this article. This link should also take you directly there. Follow-up: January 31st, 2005: Well, now the receiver's office has taken possession of ALH&Co.'s website at Click here , and Anthony and his associates are essentially both under a gag order as to defending their position publically - which the court has already decided constitutes fraudulent behavior, if I understand the...

Ethics & Morality - a Practical Approach A distinquishing characteristic of conscious living things, as opposed to rocks, crystals, etc., is that they act. Action is motion directed towards a goal. Without a purpose, guide or goal we have merely motion. A value, in a purely operationl, observational sense, is that which one acts to gain and or keep. It is the goal and guide to action. Living entities are future-directed, while non-living entities merely extend the past. The purpo...

There are some major discussion and research sites out there on "memetics." This is basically the application of evolutionary/selection theory to ideas. You perhaps do not understand that the same kind of evolutionary selection mechanisms that produce biological speciation, ecosystems, etc. operate universally. Success succeeds. In general, whenever the survival of a type increases the probability of similar types reproducing, the Darwinian process comes in play. The more intelligent a s...