Limitions of Linear Thought—

Humans are limited by strictly linear thinking, being able to handle only a few variables of thought at a time. There are thousands of variables to every concern, yet the consciousness of the human brain is primarily a scanning system of a very, narrow focus of attention—and can only catalogue one line at a time by recapping the past (that’s why your basic education takes so long—miles of text must be read on a single line)

Our personality then, is to own the thoughts we think, or have been told to think are the most important thoughts of life, yet defining ourselves with such myopia is to discount every other human that have attended their focus to some other angle, which is equally worth exploration.

When we study physics we are dealing with processes that contain millions of variables we handle using statistics, which works fairly well when using extremely large numbers. But the practical problems of human life, deal in variables (lineal) in only the hundreds of thousands, and here statistical analysis is very poor. Charting it out with figures in this same limited, linear thinking is impossible.

We also try to solve our political and social problems with in the same way with total frustration—and with that same equipment we are now proposing to interfere with our genes? I digress.

The human brain however, is able to handle an enormous number of variables that are not available to our conscious attention. Your brain is now handling your blood chemistry, the secretions from your glands, and millions of cells without thinking about it—without translating what is happening into consciously reviewed words, symbols, or numbers. Translating what is going on in nature into words, numbers, and symbols, we confuse the world as it is, with what it is thought about, talked about, and figured about—while the difference between these two is vast—so we interfere.

Every human instinctively knows how to handle it all, but we then lose it in the language of discussion, primarily due to beliefs held by linear thinking.

It may be too late for solutions, but understanding is the first step. We cannot solve anything by interference. Nature will solve it all though natural selection, while human morality will try to fight it, preserve it, confront it and own it. But it is of no use. The only way to prolong humanity is to stop interfering—and we do this by understanding the founding principles of the game.

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God or Math

I suppose not much is more irritating than a Calvinist evangelical with advanced math, science, and theology degrees—and teaches university New Testament. Enter Vern Poythress..The argument is that mathematical laws, in order to be properly relied upon, must have attributes which indicate an origin in God. They are true everywhere (omnipresent), true always (eternal), cannot be defied or defeated (omnipotent), and are rational and have language characteristics (which makes them personal). Omnipresent, omnipotent, eternal, personal… Sounds like God. Math is an expression of the mind of God”.

I say 7+5=12 irrespective of a god, anywhere, anytime. The idea that we are explaining a completely incomprehensible being that has grown in grandeur to the point the faithful have given up, acquiesced to the level they cannot even comprehend comprehending. It’s a sad state of affairs when a myth overrides the desire to gain knowledge. “We lie when we claim that unexplainable things are in fact explainable. God is transcendent and beyond even the shadowy wisps of imagination in our finite minds. The Trinity, for instance, is not as simple as a metaphor of water (ice, water, steam) or an egg (shell, white, yoke). Sometimes I think we would be better off if we just said, “These ideas are so beyond me that if God did reveal them to me, I am pretty sure my brain would explode.” (1)

The line of reasoning in Christianity is defeat, and here we see the blind assignment of god to the trivial and the true, the obvious and the obscure—just because a unimaginable construct of human minds, that in itself is contradicted the moment we wonder about the nature of god. We disprove this unattainable jargon with imagination, theory, and testing. We have unlimited capacity to learn and understand. They just have no god to actually present. Christian faith promotes self defeatism of knowledge.

“Augustine expressed interest in perfect numbers, which have a curious connection with Mersenne primes. A perfect number has the property that it equals the sum of its proper divisors. For example, the number 6 is perfect because its proper divisors are 1, 2, and 3, and 1 + 2 + 3 = 6.” Therefore, god had to create the earth in six days, not by planning, but because he had to. He had no choice but to be perfect. That is the line of connection faith deludes.

I say 6 is sequentially ordered after five and before seven because it is. Even before the universe came into existence it had “perfect” properties as perfect prime numbers do. There is no magic or god about it.

I can imagine a being so grand he controls billions of light years of space. He travels by mere thought in yonder galaxies checking in from time to time to see see if your burka covers enough or if you cut your hair. He helps when you need to find a contact lens, but turns his back on the hungry. He is deeply concerned if you play with yourself, but condones genocide using “divine command theory” to let his worshippers off the hook. Religion is a huge excuse for the masses to smugly sit back and administer cruelty because god said so. The only math I see that stems from religion is where divisions are multiplied. The mere fact that we can see we have a problem is hope that maybe we can fix it. At least that is on our side.