(no subject)

[sophiaserpentia]

A friend has asked me to write a post about something I said to her in person, though I have been struggling for a long time on how to put this into written word and perhaps tie it in with a number of other things I have been writing about.

Pleasure is sacred. Therefore:

• pleasure is good, and


• each of us has the responsibility to treat pleasure with respect.

It seems silly to me that I have to make a case that pleasure is sacred, but let me demonstrate why I think this is indisputably so. Let me start with this:

Pleasure receptors best known for helping the body respond to morphine and opium may also hold the key to mother-child bonding, scientists reported on Thursday.

Mice pups genetically engineered to lack these receptors -- doorways into cells -- were unable to properly bond to their mothers and did not show the natural distress when separated from her, the researchers said.

from Pleasure Receptor May Hold Key to Mother-Child Bond

These pleasure receptors would also respond to endorphins, the "natural opiates" our bodies produce. Endorphin release corresponds to the feeling of love and the pleasure of sex, and so is a primary mechanism whereby humans are capable of forming bonds with one another.

To come at this from the other end, neurologists investigating the new field of "neurotheology" have demonstrated that the parts of the brain which are responsible for mystical or religious experience are the same parts of the brain that are involved with human sexual response.

If "God is love," then God appears often in the form of pleasure.

It stands to reason, that if pleasure is sacred, that it can be profaned. And it often is; it is unfortunately all too common that pleasure is abused and misused. Addiction is a common form of misuse.

Considering how pervasive sexual abuse is among human beings, the cloud of evil that it casts over the human race is considerable. On many levels, sexual abuse makes it difficult, sometimes impossible, for the abuse survivor to form close or effective bonds with other people. Thus, in addition to the violation that occurs on the level of direct physical abuse, sexual abuse carries the additional violation of profaning one's ability to give and recieve love.

crossposted to my journal and crossposted to the_pain_sutras

Comments

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about Chalmers again lately. I turned to him for reassurance a few years ago when I first encountered and felt threatened by the idea of material reductionism. He makes some excellent points, but as some of his critics have said, it is too early to close the door on a materialistic explanation for consciousness.

Chalmers appears to be a proponent of Strong AI, which is not a position I think is tenable. However, he could well be right that an understanding of consciousness would depend on the discovery of a new property of nature.

I have a loose answer to his Hard Problem that I have been meaning to post about for a few days now. I'll have to go back and check first to see if it is an answer he anticipated.

At the moment I lean towards the Penrose-Hameroff "Orchestrated Objective Reduction" model. Essentially this model proposes that consciousness is a product of certain quantum configurations that exist within the brain. Chalmers did address the idea of "quantum consciousness" with an objection that it still wouldn't explain qualia. In itself, perhaps not, but it's early yet.


It gets very tough to really talk about holism though.

Yes, unfortunately when we make distinctions using language, the human mind tends to want to elaborate upon distinctions and make them "harder" than they may actually be.


I think it takes a careful reading of Gnostic texts to discern if the original darkness indeed has an existence of its own or is rather some derivitive of (ie. or mere absence of) fullness.

Some of the Gnostics were definitely dualists, as were the Manichaeans, Neoplatonists, etc. (and, I would assert, the Christians, too), but dualism is not a necessary component of Gnostic theology and the Valentinians -- with whom I most closely identify -- appear to be monists who consider darkness to be essentially a human cognitive failing and not a "firm" material divide.

[anosognosia.livejournal.com]

Concerning reductionism, Fodor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Fodor) offers an argument called Special Sciences (http://www.uab.edu/philosophy/faculty/ross/PHL%20470%20FODOR.htm) which suggests that each science (eg. physics, chemistry, biology, psychology) is an investigation of certain features of reality which have merit and and of themselves. Analogously, on the question of 'what a tree is', I could have a 'science' of color and a science of texture, and even though the latter is universal to the tree (as physics is to reality), it does not mean that the former is reducible to the latter.

Concerning cosmology, I'm sympathetic to the sorts of radical monistic/holistic theories which seem to begin with Parmenides (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmenides).

Then, I see 'special sciences' as but different investigations by the mind into the holism, and do not grant physicalism any special status among them.

"Chalmers appears to be a proponent of Strong AI..."

Yeah, I part ways with him here as well. Although I agree with him that Orch-OR don't address the hard problem of qualia; but, like you suggested, this doesn't mean it's a fruitless area of research.

"Yes, unfortunately when we make distinctions using language, the human mind tends to..."

Bohm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm) invented a language structure called rheomode (http://130.192.70.9/files/research/exystence/brain/stamenov.pdf) to address this... I understand he had some school classes actually speaking it, and later discovered it had some similarity to certain aboriginal languages.

"Some of the Gnostics were definitely dualists..."

Yeah... I'm learning also that there are added complications in terms of sorting out monist/dualist cosmology versus monist/dualist soteriology, and so on.