It’s very popular to declare that it’s doesn’t matter what a person believes, isn’t it?

That somehow there is more validity in “facts” than in “beliefs”? 

Seems so, yes. The facts matter more.

On what basis is that argument made? Do we perceive the facts, honestly?

No. The phrase ‘the truth is the truth’ is also odd.

Neuroscience is revealing some really amazing things about the human mind. Some is just confirming physically what we already understood about human nature. Some is more recent to experience. One of the things is how the human brain responds to facts. The facts of life are very simple, easily apprehended. Some of the facts of science are not so obviously factual, are subject to wide interpretation and are often later revealed to have been first misinterpreted.

We experience pain, this is fact. We also experience pleasure. We experience joy and sorrow. All of these things to differing degrees according to individual nature. For most of us our senses work and science itself is heavily dependent on that assumption. That observation is workable and valid. I think we all rely on that, do we not?

Yes, we do. It’s frightening if we think it’s faulty.

We’d call it hallucinating otherwise.

Let’s look at a life lived according to facts. We experience pleasure, relief or joy in a certain narrow subset of situations, circumstances, and we experience pain in an equally narrow range of conditions now made even more narrow by technology and medicine. If you find modern life especially disturbing, they can help you to cease even being able to care about those issues, and most of us go through our lives doing what we must, what “real life” necessitates we do in order to have yet another day to do the same. According to die hard atheists and materialists, we should be content with this and maybe the promise that life in the future may be a bit more interesting.

They would probably say we’re “determined.” Indeed. Facts are deterministic. They have been able to trace various cognitive functions to different regions of the brain. The right hemisphere develops awareness of things in a holistic sense, views things in a big picture context, and the left hemisphere tracks the particulars of any given situation, the details. Neither side holds any specific information all to itself, nor does either side have a real monopoly on any specific function.

In the case of split hemisphere patients, the two hemisphere have the potential to communicate contrasting awareness of any given situation, even having different opinions or evaluations of it, equally skilled at identifying it, neither side losing any sense of context. The right hemisphere tends to be more inclined to worry and depression. The left hemisphere tends to be more flippant and enthusiastic, even potentially manic. Interesting, no? There are some things that are universal between human beings and even between the twin brains incarnated in any single human being.

If I am depressed, doing precise critical work with objects seems to help bring me back ‘up’ (left-brain stuff). It can indeed.

We can’t escape into global thinking. The escape, the idleness, the devil is in the details. This is also why they warn against ideas that occur in that state of mind. They tend to be devoid of ethical recognition, consideration. Our ancestors were not wrong in this. Where they were mistaken is ascribing immorality to it when it is instead amoral.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~