Whatever Santa Claus gets you, it usually gets broken when you're a kid. It gets broken within a day. But with God, we're talking about everlasting life. I don't know whether you notice a difference between the two of them, but ever after is a very long time. Do you ever as kid, you're lying there thinking What is ever after life like? What is it like? I mean I used to look forward to my dad coming home from work. And there would be a chair. And I would kneel on that chair looking out the window. And if he was like five or ten minutes late it was like forever. That's the only time frame that I had. But it would be longer than waiting for ten minutes for my Dad. It would be forever. Whoa. If you ever never thought of that, please do at some point. Try to think about forever and ever and ever. So based on God's observations, knowledge and wisdom, He or one of his emissaries. This is what many of us are taught, angels. In many instances or other sorts of emissaries will determine the ever eternal, everlasting fate of your soul. Now we're really talking about survival. Now this is heavy duty survival. You hear this as a kid. It's pretty scary. It's pretty scary that God is in charge of life ever after and it could be a good life or could be a bad life. It was shocking! Once it dawned on me that God was keeping track of everything you said, every thought that you had. How much I wish I had called my cousin a donkey instead of an ass because I heard that ass was not a good word. And I prayed and prayed and prayed for God to forgive me, and I was told he probably wouldn't. Very frightening. Hope things have changed. Stories like this, stories about God and what He desires largely told us through His prophets And taught early enough, and reinforced, you don't hear these stories just once. You hear them reinforced time and again in various ways. Stories are added to the stories, and plugged in, and you get to a point of, yeah, I suppose so. Why would you say, yeah, I suppose so? Well because we're born stupid! We gotta learn things. And this might be the right thing. I'm not saying that this is a wrong thing, but it's offering you some guidance, and eventually it becomes not to be questioned facts. They become fixed beliefs. And they become unconscious, automatic, beliefs. Can be. Not always. But can. But there's another story in town. You've heard it. It's a theory of evolution, or descent by modification. Natural variation of traits. It's materialistic. And species there is, not every individual in a species is the same, there is lots of variation. Let's say there is a gradual change in something in the environment and some traits are more adapted to environmental pressures. And those people, those carriers and those creatures that are carriers of those traits tend to survive and the other ones die off. And the ones that survive are able to replicate. It's a very simple story and Dennit said it's a dangerous story because it's so easy to grasp. This is not difficult. This is not heavy duty algorithms. It's simple and straight forward. Natural selection based on adaptability to environmental pressures. Here's a question. So, we got two stories. We got a religious story about creation, intelligent design, about how we got to be here, and we got another story, a supernatural story. What I just said. And then the other one has to do with the Descent by Modification. Now this second story has a lot of empirical support at this point, testing hypotheses. The first story, the story of creation and the soul and its afterlife. Real tough to test. You just can't derive hypotheses from that. And maybe it's beyond that. Maybe it's a different dimension that's not, you just can't apply our scientific methods to that. In the meantime there is a fair amount of support for descent by modification. Now we have various efforts to debunk religion. I won't spend much time on this because you're already familiar with it. It's Harris, Dawkins, Bennett just a couple quick quotes from them. Children are instructed to disregard the facts of this world out of deference to the God who lurks in his mother's and father's imaginations. That's a pretty broadside against religion. Dawkins. There will be a selective advantage to child brains that possess the rule of thumb. Believe without question what you're told by authority figures. Believe without question even if somebody else says something different you've gotta to believe that because you've got trust your tribal elders, especially when they adopt a solemn minatory tone. Trust your elders. Without question. Solemn, monitory tone. I probably told this story one time, so I'll be brief. I had questions. About what I was being taught in the church I went to regularly, dragged there by my parents. And I thought, my really cool uncle, did I tell you about my really cool uncle? Yeah, I did. Okay. So I'll tell you really briefly. I said, I got a question about. And he just looked at me, straight in the eye and said, son you've got to have faith. Scared the bejesus out of me. It was like, woah. I had questioned the wrong dude. We got Daniel Dennett. But how in the face of so much striking confirmation, so much striking confirmation and massive scientific evidence, could so many Americans disbelieve in evolution? Yet some do in this class. I mean, it's fine. This is not about getting you to believe something else. It's forcing you into a corner where you say, oh man, I give up, no. All this is about is to raise some issues that are usually dormant, that guide our lives, to take a look at them, and see if they still work. If whatever you believe still works, believe it. But I would add to that, don't try to force it down other people's throats because that gets into nasty relations and potentially, very dangerous. Christopher Hitchens, the person who is certain, who claims divine warranty for his certainty belong to the infancy of our species. Religion comes from a period of human history where nobody had the smallest idea what was going on. That was his view. We looked at this before. This is an old one. This is where, two lectures ago, I had talked about this. This is important to review this, because we're getting to the point where I'm justifying why I have this on here. Remember Damasio. I was showing Damasio and Marvin who had this stroke. And you notice that when emotions are aroused, emotions send signals to the body. Sends signals to the body. Remember, we've got a body sending signals. And then, immediately the signals will send back up to the brain that something has changed. In the internal you, it's like, wake up, Todd! To the brain. Were cause, and this is not just very slow something happened and you feel like, no this is like that maybe even faster than that. Moving along with chemical substances, hormones peptides they are carried back and forth in the blood stream. Or by molecules that can penetrate the brain blood barrier. Were talking, I dont see okay, this is hardly worth it. But it's not just the brain. A brain is just a part of the central nervous system. Information is constantly passing back and forth, the brain and the body, and both are adjusting. We talked about this last time I spoke. This is a famous Drayun brain, first brought to your attention by professor Hamilton. We got the brain stem here. And the limbic system, or often called the mid-brain. Every primate has this guy, brain stem. That's what keeps us alive. And then somewhat higher order primates have this half-eaten bagel around it. That's a limbic system. And these are pre-programmed to keep us alive. Remember I made a distinction between being kept alive physically, physical survival, and psychological survival. Psychological survival is separate almost, it's not really separate, but it's a separate set of things, skills we have to learn. First of all, to know we exist, to know we exist, big deal, to know we exist. And that then snowballs into survival of the psyche. So we have two tests. Other creatures, as far as we know, have the one task and that's physical survival and that's pretty much handled by these guys. But then we have, for human beings and some other primates, this cortex. This, yeah, Neo cortex. It has to do with thinking and feeling, and clearly other creatures have some thinking and feeling, but not nearly to the degree that we do. We have the ability to project ourselves in the future. We have an ability to remember a variety of things that other creatures don't need to remember because their survival doesn't have to do with it. We gotta figure out whether or not whether our survival has to do with thinking or remembering, or being this kind of person or close to that person, that kind of person. We're protecting an image of ourselves. Other creatures probably have images of themselves, but not the extent that we do and not the extent that we are driven to preserve and enhance the image of ourselves. That has to do with psychological survival. I mentioned a rat in the alley the other day. I'm going to talk about it again, real briefly, because you are already somewhat familiar with it. This has to do with speed in which we are wired for physical survival. Remember, a rat's in the alley, and there's a particular aroma in the alley, and da, da, da, da, da, da. It's searching for food. It's scrounging around, scratching this and that, and then all of a sudden, a cat appears in the alley. Within a fraction of a second, or even less than a fraction of a second. The rat freezes, hair stands up, very high squeal, you couldn't hear it because it's beyond your range of hearing. That happens before it even sees the cat. Amazing! Milliseconds before it actually visually processes the image of a cat, it's already let out probably the highest screeches to warn other rats that we got danger here. In the meantime. It's recording everything, all prominent features of what's in the alleyway. The dripping from a drainpipe, the odor, the arrangement of this or that. Why does it do that? Because if it's ever in that situation again or a situation like that, like it, not necessarily that, but if there's a dripping thing and it has the same aroma, [COUGH] it will hesitate to go in. Automatic. It'll hesitate to go in and really check it out very thoroughly before and probably not even go in it. Happens automatically. Recorded. Let me ask you, has anybody here ever been anxious? Oh, only a few. That's really interesting to me. Bullshit, you've all been anxious. Sometimes you know why and sometimes you don't know why. If you smashed your father's car, you know why you're anxious, because you don't want to tell him. You might say well, [SOUND] somebody hit me, Dad. You know, I had nothing to do with it. There, all right. But sometimes you get anxious and we don't even know why. Oftentimes it's because you're in a situation that's reminiscent, without your even knowing it, of another situation that was painful to you. All right, so sometimes we know exactly why we're anxious, and sometimes we think, oh, I don't know. Find out what's going on. We can come up with a reason. There's plenty of reasons to be anxious. We can make them up, but they might not be the reason at all. It had more have to do with recording in this area of the brain a situation in the past and all or a number of its features that will make you anxious again. Okay, so this is a little scattered but I'm easing us into a discussion of the internal milieu and we are talking more about psychological survival than physical survival, but it's kind of both. And it goes back to what I was saying, that information flows from the brain to the body and back to the brain, back and forth, back and forth. Some of the information that comes from the body indicates that the internal milieu of the body has been disturbed. We operate within a rather stringent balance. Homeostasis, we aim for homeostasis, and when it gets thrown off balance and it's no longer homeostasis, we want to get whatever is necessary to get the body back so that the blood won't be rushing too fast or two slow. The heart pumps at a relatively steady rate, and breathing is the same. Damasio says we are feeling machines that think. That's a pretty interesting idea. We are feeling machines that think. I want you to deal with that. Talk to people about that at some point. What does he mean by we're feeling machines that think? Now, there's happenings in the external world that can disturb the internal milieu of the body. You know, you go to your room and you open the door, which you're surprised you didn't need a key because you forgot to lock it or your roommate forgot to lock it. You look over at your desk and your computer is missing. That does something to your internal milieu, doesn't it? If you didn't have feelings, if we weren't wired to have feelings, you would look and the computer's gone. You would say oh, shucks, computer's gone, huh. You're worked up. It's like, I can't believe that. You're churning down here. Something happening in your internal milieu.
