Re: Me against the meme

From: Derek Gatherer (d.gatherer@vir.gla.ac.uk)
Date: Wed 16 Nov 2005 - 08:55:02 GMT

  • Next message: Dace: "Re: Me against the meme"

    At 02:49 16/11/2005, Jon Gilbert wrote: But that acid trip also suggested a lot of other
    >things, as well, such as the existence of Hell; that it is possible
    >to experience time backwards and forwards; that souls always choose
    >to experience Hell by traveling backwards through evolution, slowly
    >reincarnating as less and less complex creatures, until they reach
    >total nothingness, rather than going straight to nothingness; that
    >individual existence is an illusion and in reality each experience is
    >not unique but merely composed of elements of similar experience that
    >are shared in various combinations by all experiencers, and actually
    >link those experiencers to each other, but our minds normally block
    >this link from us to perpetuate the illusion of individuality (this
    >is the thing that's suggestive of a morphogenetic field); the
    >existence of Heaven, in which all Possibility can be experienced
    >penalty-free; and that each person is in reality all of their
    >ancestors simultaneously.

    You wouldn't be the first person to think that. Averroes seems to have thought the same in the 12th century:

    http://cogprints.org/4378/

    but probably no acid trip for him, or indeed any kind of mystical experience. He seems to have got it by heroic application of the limited bits of Aristotle that he had access to. I sometimes wonder how different the history of Europe might have been if the Averroists hadn't received such a battering at the hands of the Thomists.

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