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felix dakat wrote:I make it a point to revisit my brain from time to time. McLean thought that reptiles were totally drive ridden. Seems to me that he may have given them a bum rap. The more we find out about our animal kindred the more intelligent they seem to be but our anthropocentrism prevented us from seeing it.
lordoflight wrote:So which part of the brain is Jesus, God, and the Holy Ghost?
Carleas wrote:How universal is the trinity in myths globally? It's an important part of some flavors of Christianity, but e.g. Judaism, polytheistic religions, Traditional Asian belief systems like Taoism or Confucianism, etc. to my knowledge don't have the same kind of structure. If it's derived from the human universal of our complex brains, we should expect to find it in all human cultures. And human-like brains (at least to the extent they are triune in the way you describe) are present in non-human primates. It's tough to test for chimps' reverence for the number three, but at least it suggests that any influence that had on our mythology should be present long before the advent of Christianity (or rather, the Catholic dogma of the trinity, which developed much later as far as I'm aware).
I also think the number three is special in ways that can be appreciated by any intelligent being, regardless of the number of layers in their information processing system. In fact, I would hypothesize that the causal arrow runs the other direction: the number of brain layers we have is due to the specialness of the number three. A three-body system has a particular set of complex dynamics, and it's possible that it's the simplest system that permits a certain kind of high-level infromation processing. Indeed, see a similar dynamic arises in computer design:
I admit it's hard to trace causality here; other diagrams omit hardware and show kernel, libraries, and applications as the three layers, so it could well be that we make three-layered computer architecture diagrams because we like the number three, rather than because there's an inherent three-ness to information processing.
felix dakat wrote:MacLean's tripartite brain can be seen to correspond to Freud's theory of the the structure of the psyche as consisting of the id, the ego and the super-ego. The super-ego performs the role of the internalized parent symbolized Christian theology as the Father. The ego is the agent of the reality principle. This corresponds to the Christian notion of the incarnation , the concretization of God in humanity. The reptilian brain corresponds with the id the source of the basic drives to life. The Holy Spirit is an idealization of the instinctual energy and will to live which unites everything.
How wide-spread is the worship of tripartite divinities? How many religions since Paleolithic times have worshiped the father divinity a mother divinity and a child divinity? The Hindu god Brahma is united with Shiva and Vishnu in a Divine Triad. The yin and yang of Taoism unite in the Tao thus reiterating a tri-une structure of reality. The tripartite structure of Islam consists of Allah, Muhammad and the Koran. In Judaism there is Yahweh, the Law and the Prophets. Theologically trinity's are the result of the need to unite the ultimate with the concrete which requires a mediator. The mythological inner relations between these trinitarian entities as represented in myths and rituals are analogous to the psychological integration of Id, ego and super-ego through the processes of maturation and individuation.
Carleas wrote:Thanks for your reply Felix. I was also reminded of the id, ego, and superego, and it is noteworthy how closely the layers of the brain fit to that model. But Freud may well have been influenced by the structure of the brain in developing that model; he studied medicine, which surely included the anatomy of the brian, he was also a pioneer in the study of neurology, particularly in the comparison of human and non-human brain tissues. The relationship between the brain and the mind was understood during his time. I don't know for sure that the gross morphology of the brain informed his model of the mind, but I don't think it's a given that we can take his model out of the context of his own training and research.
For the tripartite divinities, I'm not sure how to evaluate your claims. There are certainly many examples of trinities, but they are by no means universal, and I question whether they even account for the majority of religious belief. And even the claims that certain trinities are the divine trinity for a given religion are not easy to answer. For example, the Hindu deities you mention are viewed as a trinity by some Hindus, but not by all. And it's been theorized that the Hindu and Western trinities are derived from the same pre-Indo-European culture, where a three-way divides can be found in religion, culture, and politics.
But I think your examples of Taoism, Islam, and Judaism point to a central issue in the project of identifying divine trinities. Take Taosim: the way you're counting yin, yang, and yin+yang as three should entail that you count father, son, holy spirit, and father+son+holy spirit as four instead of three. There are trinities in Taosim, but important divisions are dualities (yin and yang, tao and te), and the trinities are not always so central (e.g. the eight trigrams, which falls out of two possible states of three attributes (2^3=8) . For Islam and Judaism, the choice of three central things seems arbitrary. Both religions are predominantly unitary, focusing on a unitary god above all else. Counting Allah, Muhammad, and the Koran seems arbitrary: why not the Hadith? If we say that the Hadith just is Muhammad, then shouldn't the Koran just be Allah? And what of the other great prophets recognized Islam, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus? What of the Five Pillars of Islam? So too with Judaism: again we can arbitrarily cut it off with Yahweh, the Law, and the Prophets, but what of the Messiah whose coming is prophesied? Why count the law and the prophets separately, where both are often considered part of the Torah? And if we're OK separating the Torah, why not separate it all the way down to the five books of the Pentateuch, and the many other chapters of the Tanakh? Judaism is rich in numerology, but three doesn't seem particularly emphasized; we can find trinities, but we can also find many other division of the world that aren't triune. To say that Judaism is tripartite seems ad hoc.
I guess this is all just to say that three has some properties that make it stand out without needing to appeal to brain structure. Any time we have two things, we can get to three by counting, "thing one, thing two, the relationship between them". That doesn't seem to depend on the shape of our brains.
felix dakat wrote:Yeah, CG Jung thought that the Trinity could be represented as a mandela that is imbalanced which suggests a repressed fourth element that if acknowledged would more accurately represent God as a quaternity. He said the orthodox Christian formula was not complete because the evil principal is absent and that that led to the "awkward existence of the devil on his own".
Tripartite conceptualization
The tripartite conceptualization (Thrash and Elliot, 2003) specifies the three core characteristics of the state of inspiration:evocation,
transcendence, and
approach motivation.
Evocation refers to the fact that inspiration is evoked rather than initiated volitionally by the individual. In other words, one does not feel directly responsible for becoming inspired; rather, a stimulus object, such as a person, an idea, or a work of art, evokes and sustains the inspiration episode. During an episode of inspiration, the individual gains awareness of new possibilities that transcend ordinary or mundane concerns. The new awareness is vivid and concrete, and it surpasses the ordinary constraints of willfully generated ideas. Once inspired, the individual experiences a compelling approach motivation totransmit,
actualize, or
express the new vision.
This set of three characteristics is intended to be minimally sufficient to distinguish the state of inspiration from other states.
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