Eri, sorry I haven't responded. It's not out of lack of interest. I read the article you linked to.

What kept me from responding (besides my life being full and doing very little online writing at the moment) was that it was a topic where I just felt myself thinking that the revelations of the science are something I'd long ago come up with on my own. It thus had a flavor of "been there done that".

Part of my personal philosophy has derived from severe introspection, this huge curiosity I have not just to examine my thoughts but to examine the processes that create them. In every case where my thoughts went to something supernatural, something out of the scope of science and testing, I always uncovered a deep wishful thinking component. Sometimes finding that was difficult. Rationality hides that process rather well. But it was always there and further analysis made me decide that there was indeed some hard wiring in my circuitry that created this "spiritual" side of me, created realism where none existed.

What was more interesting though was once I discovered that programming and understood why it would be within me, it became very easy to spot its influence and shut it down if a new issue came up. My learning skills seemed to increase dramatically especially in math and science. I became a better athlete and musician. Now whether those things would have developed without that discovery is subject to debate. It's not like I had some blind control group to compare against.

There is of course some loss of richness if you shut down those sections completely. Hell, magic is fun and wondrous. However, when you learn to turn off the spiritual neuron pathways you also can turn them back on at will for entertainment. I can suspend my logical side when watching a Harry Potter movie and immerse myself in hocus-pocus without any guilt that I'm betraying science and logic. I can still view a sunset and just be blown away without calculating how much dust must be in the air to produce the vivid colors.

It makes perfect sense to me that humans have developed this god-producing ability in their brains. Without it we could easily go into micro-analysis about every challenge we encounter and never get anything done such as hunting and gathering. Much better to have a trigger that says "God would want us to kill the animal we're about to eat" than to go hungry contemplating its existence in the cosmic realm.

Art