I am thinking of founding a new religion. The idea is not really to help solve problems, but just to offer an explanation for what goes on. I have mentioned the book by David Eagleman called "Incognito" and the shorter related book by Lisa Feldman Barrett called "Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain". These books are clear about limitations of our minds and human ability to think.
You probably realize that the world is complicated. How complicated? Here are some comparisons. If you have lived to be 80 years old, you have lived 2,522,880,000 seconds. You lived them, they were your seconds, but how many can you remember? How many elementary particles are there? 10 to the 80th power, 10 with eighty zeros behind it. We often hear how complex the brain is. It has many cells but for big numbers, we often read about the number of connections there are between the neurons. Let's say 10 to the 15th power. My favorite book about probability, "The Improbability Principle" by David Hand, says the number of subsets of humans who might be on the internet at once is 10 to 750 billionth power. This is the world we live in. It includes the internet that you use to read this blog.
So, if you are looking for some feeling of security and clarity about all the stuff that goes on, in you, on you, with you, with your friends and the others on this planet, maybe it will help to boil it all down to "It's complicated". Feelings and impulses, memories and urges, deals and delights and sorrows -they are complicated. They are immense and intricate. Lots of them are changing right now and many are unknown. Our ancestors, way back, the slime and the creatures and the primitive life, all the way to here and now, didn't have it all figured out and neither do we. Just salute the complexity of it all and enjoy the good stuff.
