I've Been Here Before...Pivotal Moments in My Journey

This will serve as the hub and first entry for a new series, where anyone who wishes can follow along and encounter the major moments that impacted the way I think about reality, and what is true.

My Testimony: Era of Uncertainty

I took a philosophy class in 2009 and chose to do some independent reading in the book I had had to buy for it, covering two chapters that were not focused on in the course. These concerned Neuroscience and Determinism. Determinism is simply the view that everything that happens is directly attributable to the immediately preceding state of the universe, and so on and so on. Reality is a complex machine that runs on physical laws and that's it. Technically, that's materialistic determinism. Determinism that allows for a supernatural aspect to the universe would hold that spiritual beings control your destiny and so whereas it's not all mechanically produced, you nevertheless do not have much of a choice in how your future unfolds. And neuroscience, from an atheist perspective, is often presented as a scientific argument against the soul, i.e. that all of your thoughts, emotions, desires, will, decisions etc are produced by neurochemical electrical interactions between the cells of your brain.

Take these two thoughts together, and what do you get? The idea that I couldn't trust my thoughts to be accurate, because my beliefs might just be deterministic phenomena, artifacts of physical processes in the brain, with nothing to connect them to truth or to give them meaningful significance. What if I only believed what I did because I was organically predisposed to believe it, and chance life experiences influenced my thoughts to produce that result? That there was no choice involved, and no transcendent truth.

Once the thought was comprehended, I couldn't ignore it. I had to deal with it.

What a Week!

Wow, that was a lot of work. And I still have assignments to do over the weekend! Suffice it to say that between three classes, I had 4 exams, and two writing assignments for yet another.

As a side note, I have in mind to write a post talking about procrastination at some point in the future.

I just want to make this post right now so that no one gets the impression that the blog is stagnating, already. 

I'd also like to put out a "warning" of sorts: because I have anonymity with this blog (unlike Facebook), I see a niche and opportunity for me to talk about very sensitive subjects -- deeply personal sins, or if not outright sins, very intimate thoughts -- because I'm assuming others have had a similar experience, namely wanting to find something on line that talks about something that matters to you but it's either obscure or sensitive enough that it's unlikely to be easily found in articles anywhere. Topics like masturbation, for example. It's something that most of us are intimately familiar with, but it isn't talked about much. I've done a lot of thinking on that subject, and I think a future article, or series of articles, about that subject may do a lot to provide answers--or at least sympathy--for young people who are wondering about this issue.

This is the first of a few notices I'll give, before suddenly launching into a post on the topic. I wouldn't want someone to be surprised by TMI (too much information). But this is something you can look forward to reading about, if it's something that matters to you or someone you know. I won't be shy in tackling this topic.

Anyone want to stake claims on whether this North Korea situation will fizzle out or turn into the 5th war of this Presidency?

~ Rak Chazak