For millennia, our ideas about extramarital sex, the double standard, and single parenthood have been inflexible moral judgements. All of those have changed rapidly because of modern wealth and technology. So do our morals necessarily address good and evil directly, or are they also responses to on our situation?
We tell ourselves, and others, one reason for why we do things, but our choices often betray other, more convincing reasons. Sometimes the secondary reason helps us see morality as survival. This is a serialization from my book, Happiness: A Physician/Biologist Looks at Life. To see the Table of Contents and the dust jacket blurb, … [Read more…]
So we slog around in our lives, wading through the muck and grime, fighting against the people around us and fighting against ourselves; but sure that we are on the right path, confident that the way will become smooth just around the next corner. What we don’t notice is that every rat in the race is in the same mud-rut we are, some ahead of us, some behind, but in a rut nevertheless. We never notice that none of them have turned the corner, either.
We think of ourselves as logical rational beings, who make purely intellectual decisions. But consider that we think that our minds control our bodies when sometimes, it’s the other way around.
“There is none so blind as he who cannot see.” Sooner or later, this is all of us.
Pain is an illusion, but then, so is pleasure. By understanding our illusions we can modify them, and improve our lives.
Do we feel pain, or imagine we feel pain? It’s the pain illusion.
Colors may be illusions, but they are nevertheless valuable illusions: personally valuable, and economically valuable. There are yet other illusions we experience with our vision, beyond the colors. Do we see in front of us, or in the back? And how do we look ‘out’ in the first place?
Colors may not exist, but that does not mean they are not useful nevertheless. They are highly useful, and colors as shorthand help us process information more quickly.
We are buffeted by illusions, ideas and images served up by our bodies to help us, but sometimes they only confuse us. Colors are a great example of a simple illusion, that can help us to understand some of the more complicated ones.