Listening: Punk+Statik+Paranoia, Orgy


I really don't have time for a full entry. I hope I find time to get back soon.

Anyhow I just recently finished reading last week's TIME magazine which has a cover article on scientific research into the notion that a person's inclination for faith may be determined in the genes.

I can't get in right now to discuss what I think about a physical existence in some people for the desire for the divine, but I was caught up again as I read the specific studies that observed where the activity in the brain was as the subjects engaged themselves in different levels of meditation, prayer and well...transendance.

The specific issue I get tripped up is that the research keeps getting caught up in seeing what parts of the brain are triggered with someone "feels" something. It's the same issue I have when they do studies on people who seem to be given to being happy versus those of us who are regularly depressed. They really make it sound like the brain chemistry does it's thing and *bam* we feel whatever we feel. I don't know. Maybe I'm not reading the articles correctly, or maybe the journalists aren't sure how to phrase what the researchers are talking about but it really seems like we feel an emotion purely because our brain chemistry directs us to.

This makes no sense. It's like saying the egg desired to become a chicken and that's that. Isn't there the slightest possibility that we feel a certain way and thus our brains produce the appropriate chemistry? It's like how the ocular lens opens and closes in response to the amount of light hitting it.

So yeah. Chicken/egg arguements are pointless and science tries to avoid the pointless (sometimes), but if a specific chemistry is the whole of an emotion (not why we feel something, but the feeling itself) then..I dunno...why even have them? Meh. That's a rhetorical question.

I'm just wondering if scientists really look as as being the sum of our genetic code. It makes me wonder if we are the definition of our DNA. When I studied Biology (all those years ago) I made the assumption that our DNA was the definition of us. A term and a definition are not really interchangeable, but when comprehension for the term is lacking we seek out the definition.

I dunno. It's inverted thought and likely pointless considering how far I am from being a scientist. oh well.