Is science at war with religion? In some sense science is a lot like America. America is a superpower that is limited by their own beliefs in tolerance and freedom. To say you're an American is almost a generic term because it's an individualistic and multiracial society. Likewise science is a metaphysical superpower that has to some extent won a Renaissance-era Cold War against religion when it comes to living in a shared physical world. Nowadays religions argue with science over spiritual interpretations rather than materialistic evidence. However science is limited by their own open-mindedness. Scientists vie with each other about different theories much like the competitive ethos of capitalism. The technology inspired by science is a core part of American capitalism. Yet science doesn't offer its adherents a consistent spiritual outlook and instead lets them make up their own minds from the evidence. Science isn't strictly wedded to materialism when it comes to force fields and quantum physics. Thus science isn't a form of spirituality in and of itself but a multidisciplinary and multi-metaphysical worldview.

Is it possible to change the genetics of future children? According to natural selection this is impossible and only the periphery of our genetics is capable of being changed. These epigenetic changes are said to occur passively and in response to environmental cues like nutrition and climate. Yet there is another way parents could affect the genetic expression of their future children. In acknowledgement that this is likely to be interpreted demonically I will only use euphemisms. Surely our own body is familiar with what the environmental demands are by way of "romance". For example if there's a food shortage then not only will your metabolism be impacted but your romantic attraction will also be towards thinner people. Can children inherit the traits that previous generations found attractive? Sexuality is the means by which children are created but this activates multiple systems in the body like the brain. The nervous system affects the power and proportions of the rest of the body. Consequently any change in the nervous system of future progeny would affect their epigenetics. Saying that epigenetics can only change passively would imply that people should be more attracted to those from the same environment and ethnicity which doesn't always hold true. I'm just going to leave it at that!


T-800 CSM 101 Arrival | Terminator 2: Judgment Day

T-X Arrival | Terminator 3

When we look around are we seeing light or electricity? If what we are seeing is electricity inside the brain then electromagnetic radiation would be colourless in and of itself.

MGMT - Electric Feel

I'd a dream not too long ago where I was explaining to an interviewer about my theories. He was asking me about how we'd know if the light we see is different for each conscious being. I replied that if we moved places and I sat where he is sitting then I wouldn't absorb his consciousness. So consciousness wouldn't be just a spatial phenomenon.

I don't sing and so listening to more music won't turn me into a great singer or musician. Perhaps the brain enjoys music because the more we listen to it the better our music interpretation becomes. With so many songs freely available on the internet it's easy to see when we pick two drastically different songs to listen to that their temporal natures are also different. Musical patterns are chaotic and so the brain often interprets a song a bit chaotically. The brain has to make sense of the random neurons being activated by a song. When I listen to the song below I don't feel a smooth transition of mental imagery as if it were a dramatic movie. For me it evokes a concoction of contrasting vibes and memories. The idealised and relaxed nature of the beats almost makes it feel futuristic in how technology and societal progress will make life easier for future generations. One of the last times I listened to the song intensely was when I was in a city and so it subjectively reminds me of metropolitanism in a way that it likely wouldn't for others. The song also feels very outgoing and meditative over and above what I'm accustomed to. The song's contrast with my ordinary mindset can create a slightly sentimental quality. This tension helps me to decide whether I should flow in my own emotions more often or stay a bit aloof and objective!



Paul Oakenfold - Starry Eyed Surprise

They say never to judge people by appearence yet a divine being would likely be far more accurate in their preception than us. Sometimes people can report feeling creeped out by someone as if it were a sixth sense. We can't tell what someone is like by specific features of their facial appearence and any inference is more holistic in nature. Despite all the psychology articles there isn't any biological factor in particular that means someone is definitely evil. After all speaking in a strange accent isn't creepy when the person is from a foreign country. Moreover in our individualistic culture it's acceptable to be eccentric these days. Eating the legs of frogs isn't a weird pastime for a French person! We need a preponderance of evidence to convict someone for a crime. Although we don't need the same level of scrutiny to decide whether we should passively avoid someone. Unless someone is shown to be deceitful then I'd tend to give them the benefit of the doubt even if they could be dubbed creepy. The only exception might be if I had to be alone with them. Anyway I'd never verbally accuse anyone of a negative trait simply by their first impression. There is far too much room for error in our judgements when we know nothing of their background. Overall with regards to divine judgement my point is that a God with an infinite amount of knowledge and experience could likely tell the emotional state and ethical beliefs of a person just by looking at them.


"Researchers have identified many things — like unpredictable laughter, pale skin, unkempt hair — that people tend to find unsettling in others. But they’ve also realized this: We humans are pretty poor judges of who we should trust, says psychologist Julia Shaw."
https://ideas.ted.com/what-makes-a-person-creepy-and-what-purpose-do-our-creep-detectors-serve-a-psychologist-explains/

"Stranger danger is the idea or warning that all strangers can potentially be dangerous."

The Simpsons - Marger is a Witch Part 1

Talking to yourself or imagining your inner voice as being projected out loud can be a symptom of a mental illness. But such a thought experiment could also serve as a reference for keeping your thoughts clean. After all you wouldn't curse under your breath if you thought everyone could hear you! Purifying your thoughts are often a religious ideal. The random nature of the thoughts that pop into our head might make it difficult to fully achieve though.

The scary thing about reincarnation is not only embodying a new person but also being "adopted" into a new family. In a metaphorical sense you'd be floating away into the unknown:

The Prince of Egypt - River Lullaby

We know the immediate past exists because it takes time to form coherent thoughts and to retrieve memories. Perhaps one difference between Alzheimer's disease and amnesia is that Alzheimic patients might have an even worse recall of the last few seconds such that they can't always speak logically. By contrast an amnesiac patient can often organise their thoughts even if they're not fully self-aware. So we can trust our long-term memories simply because our thought processes on other present-day matters are rational. The past doesn't have to physically exist for it to mentally exist.

Who said the ghost in the machine had to be white!

Tomb of Anck Su Namun

It might be tempting to think that because animals are less self-aware than humans that this must mean their experience of time is less complex. Yet when we think about the amazing sensory adaptations of such creatures it's possible to come up with the opposite conclusion. We could view their experience of life as being so extreme that it actually transcends and overwhelms their conscious awareness. For example the many eyes of a spider might produce such extreme psychedelic imagery that it knocks out the development of consciousness and locks them in a passive state.


BBC Planet Earth - Birds of Paradise mating dance

An animal isn't rational but for the sake of argument let's imagine that a deer had the same IQ as a person. We'll ignore the ethical implications of such an act and focus only on the mind-body problem. The temporal experience and proprioception of such a being would be so bizarre that we'd be left to conclude that their mentality is more complex then their physicality. Their mind would be in a hidden realm so to speak. A deer seems like an ordinary creature but a human-like deer might be uber meditative or appear as mystical as a unicorn!


Shrek - A Flying Talking Donkey

So we're all descended from fish and pass through a fish phase in the embryo phase! The first life forms were fish and so that would mean we're all descended from creatures that existed well before the dinosaur era. Who knows then if genetic re-engineering will unleash a human T-rex! Fish don't endure much physical and mental stress and so their timelines could represent a planetary blank slate of time. We could almost interpret these fishy ancestors through the Gaia hypothesis of mother nature.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-13278255
"(The) human face is actually formed of three main sections which rotate and come together in an unborn foetus.
The way this happens only really makes sense when you realise that, strange though it may sound, we are actually descended from fish.
The early human embryo looks very similar to the embryo of any other mammal, bird or amphibian - all of which have evolved from fish."

In an infinite universe there simply isn't enough room for there to be two fundamentally distinct souls! Otherwise we'd need to duel!

God is described as omnibenevolent, omniscient and omnipotent but not necessarily omni-professional. Life isn't the same as a package holiday or a trip on a cruise ship. If we were to die and meet God we can't ask for our money back and seek to switch to a different tour guide! I don't recall signing a contract to have been born into a life with such inclement weather! One reason historical generations were far more religious than our era is that they were less accustomed to capitalism and free trade. The royal hierarchies of feudalism allowed them to conceptualise God as being regal in appearance. By contrast a request to worship contradicts our modern sense of entitlement. The problem is that a loving relationship isn't always the same as a professional or business relationship.

The only thing worse than ethnic charity is no charity at all.

Yes, you essentially are hurting yourself by being unethical in a pantheistic universe. — Shawn

There are different kinds of evil. Angry violence is one kind and the fake love of perverts is another type. Both are very wrong and exploitative for somewhat distinct reasons. Viewing yourself as actually being another person in real time might be vulnerable to megalomania or fetishising. Yet viewing yourself as being existentially cut off from the other person could also be distorted into perhaps aggression or apathy. So no metaphysical point of view is incorruptible.

One could metaphorically interpret perspective to be absent if we consider distant objects to remain the same size when they move even further back. Far away objects block out proportionately less of the background when they blend into it. The size of closer objects would still appear magnified by occulting lots of the background.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Vincent_van_Gogh_-_The_Bedroom_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

Let's analyse the photo in the context of philosophical idealism and conscious absorption. The furthest chair in the painting looks slightly smaller than how it'd appear in a photograph. This technique exaggerates perspective and the diminishing of far away objects. Overall it creates an impression of having internalised the visual stimuli. The floor is also inclined at slightly higher angle than expected. The footboard of the bed occults and blocks out a disproportionately larger amount of the headboard and side wall.


https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/VanGogh-starry_night_ballance1.jpg

Here the dark blue of the night could be reinterpreted as daytime where the stars would be visible through the blue sky. The largest star with the crescent moon is like the Sun. It's easier to feel a sense of unreality at night time where it's too dark to see far into the distance. Yet the way the background is at an equally low acutance to the foreground creates a surreal vibe. I feel like the guy who laughs at his own jokes by being impressed by my own analogies!

Acutance: "the sharpness of a photographic or printed image."

Asians and Europeans have a very similar physique even though the people from either continent are facially very different to each other. Do the millennea of differing climates, geographies and nutritions account for the evolutionary difference? Or could thousands of years worth of differing metaphysical outlooks between western and eastern religions also leave an imprint on our epigenetics?


Racist Father Ted

It took hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of scientists and millions of reciprocating civilians in different nations to collectively work out a self-consistent materialistic worldview. It also took thousands of years to mentally assimilate an unconscious moral framework from theism. An analogy would be as if our shared reality were sculpted down by the constant prayers of historical people. Did the first people to pray to God thousands of years ago do so for solely religious and ethical reasons or was there also an inherent element of derealisation that further incentivised them to pray? Perhaps with anti-realism there can be many valid conceptions of reality that are nonetheless so alien to our current society that they can't be reconciled together by a single individual. In other words some apparently psychotic beliefs might actually be workable if only they had been developed over multiple generations.

For some of my anti-realism thread I work backwards from a terrible panic attack I had in late 2017. I try to interpret it through the realism of other minds rather than the realism of the physical environment. So I must add a caveat that I don't want to unsettle anyone with disorienting analogies. Mental illness is one of those things where if you perfectly described it to someone then they themselves would become mentally ill! I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you! In the same way we can't describe a conscious emotion in scientific terms with 100% accuracy, so too can we not convey the exact sensation of certain forms of anxiety.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Landscape_from_Saint-R%C3%A9my_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

One anti-realist interpretation of Gogh's wavy technique is that it creates an illusion of time much like a very short GIF clip or a time-lapse video. For example the wavy low sharpness of many of his landscape paintings could be reinterpreted as motion blurs and light streaks. The more we know about direction the less we know about location as per the uncertainty principle. Thus the passage of time is being prioritised over the accuracy of the present moment. Sometimes we can become desensitised to our local scenery. Then it's only when we come back home after a trip abroad that we notice the novelty of the environment. For example I appreciate the lushness of the green fields of Ireland the most when I'm on a return flight and look out the window before landing. Likewise Gogh forces us to take note of an agrarian sight by applying an extreme art technique to an already extreme and diverse geography of the Netherlands.

"Van Gogh is well known for his brushstokes of thickly laid-on paint. This technique is called Impasto. An artist lays a thick layer of paint on canvas, brushstrokes get more noticeable, adding a special texture to the painting. Vincent liked to use a thick, undiluted flat color with a brush or a palette knife. Sometimes he painted his colored swirls, smearing the paint on canvas with his finger. The works of Van Gogh have a relief, almost three-dimensional surface. They look different, depending on the light source."
https://arthive.com/publications/1934~The_search_of_Vincent_Van_Goghs_style_and_technique

"In urban night photography, light trails add motion and emphasize the feel of a living city." -fstoppers

If we did see someone like Jesus when we died, depending on your religion, then he'd be over 2000 years old. We often use the BC and AD reference points for the current year without always realising that this would literally translate to His current age in heaven. This isn't quite eternal but it'd still be an impressive age for mortals like ourselves to witness.

I heard some right wing pundits claim that the onus is more on Islamic countries to have accepted Syrian refugees. Needless to say we've an equal responsibility to help people irrespective of their religion. Although if we were to go along with such tribalistic logic, we'd realise that most of mid and southern Africa is Christian. This would mean that Christian first-world countries would bear the most responsibility for helping them. Sometimes African poverty is seen as a global issue even though through colonialial, linguistic and religious affiliations Europe bears the most ethnical resemblence to Africa. Some criticise Saudi Arabia for insufficient help towards refugees even though the Christian world has dozens of wealthy countries that could have helped feed more Africans during the famines of previous decades. Besides, sending food charity is significantly cheaper than welcoming refugees for shelter and assimilation into a first-world nation. Indulging in ethnical reasons for charity would indeed be a slippery slope to racism. Yet Jesus would likely hold his own flock much more stictly for inadequate charity to fellow Christians as opposed to relying on Hindus or Buddhists to act first towards African poverty. When we think of how protective Catholics and Protestants were about members of their faith being harmed during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, should they not have been more aggrieved by the larger number of Christians being killed in the Ethiopan famine of the same period?

"In response to those who consider that the humanitarian relief granted by the governments of Gulf countries is insufficient, they have defended themselves by showing that a considerable amount of financial aid is granted to the Syrian refugees through NGOs and donations from the United Nations. Since 2011, these countries have supplied them with 900 million dollars. A few days ago, a Lebanese newspaper revealed that Saudi Arabia had offered to fund the construction of 200 mosques in Germany to allow the new arrivals from Syria to practice their faith within the country."
https://www.lejournalinternational.fr/Syrian-refugees-why-won-t-the-oil-rich-Gulf-States-take-them-in_a3477.html

If God gave Hitler a choice of being mercilessly killed thousands of times in future of lives or else to endure thousands of years in a hellish dungeon, there might well be a high likelihood that Hitler would choose the latter. So Hell could be viewed as voluntary even if it entails an element of external pressure. We also need to remember that Hitler didn't personally kill anyone; rather he ordered others to carry out the genocide on his behalf. So the idea that only eternal hell would be sufficient as punishment isn't proportionate. To elaborate on the Holocaust analogy there were a lot of other nazis that helped Hitler and in doing so absolved him of total 100% responsibility for the genocide. So if God handed out millions of years of jail then it'd be spread out among all culprits even though Hitler would obviously get the highest number of years.

The Devil is often portrayed as extremely violent which leads some religious people to reject the very existence of hell. It's becoming more common to believe only in heaven where evil souls simply disappear or reincarnate into their next life. Perhaps hell is deemed so abysmal that even a temporary stay would be deemed grossly disproportionate. Imbuing the Devil with one or two redeeming qualities like sarcasm and self-deprecation might make hell more tolerable for those who are punished in a supernatural version of jail! Hell doesn't have to entail torture where secular ideals of confinement as punishment could be thought about! For all we know hell could entail break periods much like how good behaviour is rewarded in modern prisons. Maybe hell could be interpreted as rehabilitation before the evil is cleansed from the penalised person. This might allow them to enter heaven afterwards or reincarnate with a clear conscience. If a criminal freely chose to atone for some of their sins in hell then perhaps they'd be less at risk of bad karma in their next life. Bad souls could be deceived through their own perversion and self-indulgence into choosing hell without requiring the use of force. The separation of powers is a useful concept for divine judgement. Could there be a scientific way to determine whether or not someone goes to hell? For example if we view happiness as a conserved quantity in a person's life, then the hedonism of evil might have the capacity to diminish their happiness reserves for the afterlife.

Hercules... James Woods/Hades/Susan Egan/Megara/Pain/

Fruit Art - Web Search

When we buy meat in the shop it becomes tolerable to dissociate the food with the animal that was killed to produce it. Thankfully we don't have to witness the slaughter first hand. Most of us don't have to hunt for our dinner! I'm not vegetarian and never bother to think of the poor chickens. Although the rare time that I order duck at a fancy restaurant I can't help but visualise the poor creatures minding their own business in the lake! Fruit and vegetables aren't alive in a conscious sense and so we never have to worry about the ethics of eating them. However it's not just the ethics but also the vitalistic connotations that are important. I don't pick the potatoes from beneath the earth and so I seldom think of nature and fields when I cook them. Perhaps I might think of gravy or tomato ketchup but not of the mysticism of homeostasis and rebirth in the food of the Earth. Sometimes with extended attention on fruit art it's possible to see how bizarre the food we eat really is in the whole scheme of the environment.

"Whether created to express bountiful harvests, to boast the artist’s talent, or to communicate an opinion, food in art is still very prevalent today. . . and no doubt it will remain so as long as both art and food exist in the world."
https://emptyeasel.com/2009/04/16/the-long-history-of-food-in-art/

Vegetable anthropomorphism:
Mandrake Potting | Harry Potter
Professor Pomona Sprout teaches her second-year Herbology students how to pot young Mandrakes.

"Most sodomy, most anal intercourse takes place between men and women."
"I'm not interested in sodomy and buggery, I am not interested, so forget about it... Under the cloak of caring, you have designated homosexuality to be a vicious, perverted disease."
- Peter Fry

I support the LGBT community and am very libertarian in my outlook towards the personal relationships of others. I'd support gay adoption rights and the whole shebang. Nonetheless I'm also somewhat of a pragmatist when it comes to international affairs. If conservatively religious countries have not yet embraced the LGBT movement then I view it as unlikely that they'd change their stance within the next two or three decades. After all the first Pride Parade was over 50 years ago and yet homosexual welfare has actually declined in certain countries. A possible compromise in extremely strict countries might be allowing public displays of affection like holding hands, hugging and kissing but banning cohabitation. This way there'd be no way homophobic people could distort homosexuality into an obsession about sodomy. Needless to say I wouldn't agree with such a ban but it may be the lesser of two evils when we consider the horrific death penalties that have occurred in countries like Iran.

Pantheism is just an idea, it doesn't seem to be a hypothesis. What's divine about Hitler? — Agent Smith

This reminds me of those time travelling questions about the ethics of killing baby Hitler. It seems like a gruesome question because all babies are born with a speckle of the divine but it's clear that Hitler rejected his capacity to do good. All I can say is if he isn't in hell then he'll suffer karma to the highest extent.

Mostly they mean with omnimpotent more potent than what a single human being could do on his own. — Tomseltje

In physics there is a perennial debate between the quantum mechanics of atoms and the gravity of planets. The two best theories don't interact well with each other in trying to discover quantum gravity. The same could also be said between science and religion. Our two best theories of reality are struggling to reconcile and create religious science. Radical theories are often speculated for quantum gravity given the intensity of the problem. Likewise far out ideas like Pantheism or Deism might help combine science and religion that bit better.

Objectification: "the action of degrading someone to the status of a mere object eg. the objectification of women in popular entertainment."

If determinism is true then to some extent we're all "objectified". Maybe romantic people would find it easier to accept their deterministic nature! Likewise if we love ourselves in our current state of mind then we don't need free will to change our destiny! You're free until you choose to love someone! No wonder people say they met their true love and spouse through fate! PS Hopefully their true love and spouse are the same person!

Vanilla Sky - Intro Scene

I read that it cost a million dollars for the producers to empty Times Square for the recording. So if you wake up to an empty city, maybe someone is simply playing a million dollar prank on you! Otherwise you could walk through a quiet street late at night for a similar juxtaposition of city life and desolation. A risky thoughtline with false awakenings is if this conscious reality is merely a dream, then do you've yet to wake up in the real world? This might lead to reckless behaviour in order to leave the so-called dream and attempt to enter a non-existent real world. Or is the real world itself a communal dream? The latter option forces you to reconcile reality with non-reality!

"Cameron Crowe struck a deal with the NYPD to close off the area between 5AM and 8AM on a Sunday in November 2000. The result was a spectacular sequence with a spectacular price tag: over $1 million for 30 seconds of footage. Was it worth it? Absolutely. Combining Cruise's enigmatic star power with the desolate backdrop helps to create a poignancy..."
- Looper

Is the brain's visual system like a mirror or a camera? I recently took a target practice video where the camera's menu screen was pointing towards the floor and the lens was facing me. When I watched the recording I was trying to work out which direction was correct. Yet both sides seemed to make sense.

If my right hand was on the rightwards side of the screen, then it would appear that the same hand would be on the left side of the screen if I were to turn my feet around 180°. This interpretation is valid since I'd be facing towards the camera as if the camera were recording horizontally at head-height where the right-left directions are reversed.

If I flipped the recording electronically then my right hand would start out at the left side of the screen. If I visualised myself turning my body around in the video then my right hand would be on the rightwards side of the screen. This works because the back of my head would be directed towards the camera where the right and left directions are preserved.

Thus the direction of the different parts of the ceiling or sky on the recording can be re-ordered top-to-bottom without affecting the left-to-right legitimacy of the video. The camera stores the video in one direction in it's memory where turning the camera upside-down will rotate the presentation of the video. By contrast a mirror passively reflects the light where rotating the surface of a spherical mirror wouldn't affect the viewer's perspective.

Let's imagine your eyes replaced the recording screen as you lay in bed. Then you alternated your lying position from the usual way to where your feet are now at the pillow section. So does the brain interpret this movement like a camera or a mirror? Is it possible to ever imagine your right hand as somehow being on the same side as the left eye? It is if you viewed the bed as being internal to your mind where your eyes don't switch order left-to-right as your body your body rotates 180°. Your eyes would be like two TV screens that don't turn around where only the image turns.

Is there an argument that elements of cosmopolitanism can be non-real? I once heard the Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle joke that the average person in the world speaks Chinese. We're subconsciously biased to view the culture of our own country as most relevant to our lives. This is simplistically true but we shouldn't mix up a personal relevance of domestic affairs with importance in an international context. Even though most first world people can travel abroad on holiday, there are still fierce limitations in whether we can reach another continent. Only rich people can travel all across the world and even then they're still limited by time. It's one thing visting a country on a weekend break and quite another to fully assimilate the ethos of the country over a 6-month stay. The national news is nearly always geared to countries with a similar worldview. This is why European countries tend to hear far more about America than China. A country like Turkey or Japan isn't reliant on your consciousness for their existence! Nonetheless visiting realms that are alien to your own local community can open up your sense of self in the world. After all no country can truly claim to be at the centre of the world map because we can change the order of the continents. For example America could have a map where Europe and Asia are on both sides of it while Europe can place America at the edge of the map. If we took the doctrine of reincarnation to be completely egalitarian then we've as much chance of being reborn in Africa or South America than we do in a wealthier European nation. This might inspire us to give more towards international charity. The way that some countries will be forever hidden from our cultural awareness is almost like they don't fully exist in your life and only in your next life!

What might be some non-real solutions to the arrow paradox? Perhaps the background moves backwards such that a still object would appear to move forwards through relative motion. This would be like the visual scenery behind the arrow would dilate ever so slightly in the mind of the observer. Another way to think about it would be that apparently still objects are actually vibrating back and forth atomically such that everything is always in a state of motion. Then the problem would be reversed in trying to understand the illusion of motionlessness. Or else it could be speculated that only the one moving object in your vision can be said to subjectively exist. This would resemble the background blurring out of existence to some extent during the moments that you're watching the arrow relocate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#:~:text=In%20the%20arrow%20paradox%2C%20Zeno,to%20where%20it%20is%20not.

Does the Hindu belief in karma and a cycle of ribirth require divine intervention to punish the souls of evil individuals? We don't attribute much agency to insects and so their carniverous behaviour isn't interpreted as evil. Yet if we took seriously their habit of killing other species then we'd be left to conclude that many insects have a genocidal mindset. So maybe a human serial killer might inadvertently assimilate the evil desires of non-human species. Thus they might actually get their wish and voluntarily reincarnate themselves in animal form! In other words there might be some sort of post-death justice even if there wasn't a God.



A Bug's Life Clip: Scene of the secret base of the grasshoppers

"A handful of scientists are testing a controversial practice of using virtual reality to diagnose pedophilia in men in hopes of helping them manage their sexual desires before they act on them."
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/scientists-test-use-virtual-reality-diagnose-pedophilia

Could a possible God know whether we've done good or committed evil in our lives? Would the souls of murder victims stand in a holy court as witnesses? Perhaps divine judges wouldn't be constrained by our earthly ideals of remaining innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. How do we know there wouldn't be sting operations to catch out malevolent souls in the afterlife? Sexual lie detectors are the last thing we'd be expecting at the gates of heaven! Pinocchio!

"In law enforcement, a sting operation is a deceptive operation designed to catch a person attempting to commit a crime. A typical sting will have an undercover law enforcement officer, detective, or co-operative member of the public play a role as criminal partner or potential victim and go along with a suspect's actions to gather evidence of the suspect's wrongdoing." Wiki

I've had temporary and unsettled feelings in my past that were a bit weird. They started off as very mild thought-lines that gradually evolved into unique emotional sensations. At the time I didn't really recognise them as unusual ways of being because my mind was interpreting it more as a bout of stress. The slightly negative feeling meant I didn't dwell on the emotions once they had passed. Yet it's only in hindsight when I can think of the experience without the stress I'd felt at the time that I can recognise the period as a different spiritual outlook. I recently listened to music that I also listened to back then and this reminded me of how alien my state of mind was. The mental tangent began when I was walking around a shopping centre on the outskirts of a city. It was several years ago and the artificial lighting was more noticeable to me than usual. I remember getting a coffee and it was dawning on me that I knew nothing of the mindset or background of the people serving me. Much like the mind-body problem I was focusing on the mysterious consciousness of those around me. We don't think about such philosophical conundrums in our daily interactions because we tend to interpret the questions abstractly rather than socially. We don't generally treat the mind-body problem with the same level of mysticism as life after death even though from a scientific standpoint both are equally unknowable to some extent. My mind however appeared frustrated at the lack of a concrete answer after such a long time musing about it.

The resulting vagueness was preoccupying me and a new stimulus presented itself from my subconscious. I was walking up and down the busy shopping centre and I had a Halloween vibe in the back of my mind. It emphasised just how different other people were from me. It was as if the problem was so insurmountable and my knowledge so inadequate that I might as well have been a young preschool child trying to work it out. It was like I needed to be a complete blank slate to investigate it and somehow this evoked juvenile qualities like I were a child going for trick-or-treat. By the time I got a lift back it was night-time which prolonged the Halloween analogy that was forming inside me. Perhaps it'd be like I was observing people whose timelines had already elapsed and whose bodies were conveying the vestiges of minds. No; I'm not trying to make fun of the vibrancy of Limerick City! If the face is like a mask then the body is like a costume. How do you know the other person hasn't already lived and died within their own experience of consciousness by the time your mind can interact with their body? If we're not experiencing time simultaneously then what limits how divergent each of our temporal perceptions can become? So it was like I was out trick-or-treating where no one was fully knowable. I can't accurately describe the thoughts I was having because it was more of a gut instinct rather than a logical analysis. A lot of young children are much more driven by emotions than by their thoughts in terms of their intentionality which contrasts with many adults. In one sense this makes them more in tune with the irrational and chaotic nature of consciousness. Ironically their immature subconscious minds might be so content with the existence of other minds and mental states that they don't even need to worry about it or name it! After all I was never bogged down with existential angst when I was aged 9 for instance! I comment on it solely because the strangeness of the memory almost makes me feel like I was different person. An economic explanation of my angst might have been that Irish citizens are neither socially collective like Mediterranean countries nor individualistic like America. Hence each county in Ireland can diverge greatly in their vibe as if everyone’s timeline was imaginary to one another.

Saying that the mind moves the body by magic might seem like a perfect non-explanation. We might think of a spell by a wizard's wand to be random. Indeed it is arbitrary in a physical sense but not necessarily a logical sense. That is to say a spell can be deterministic even if it defies materialistic causality. For example flicking a wand to levitate an object will create a temporal relationship between cause and effect despite the lack of a physical mediator. Sorcery wouldn't be like the anarchy of quantum mechanics!