<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 12:17 AM, Tara Maya <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:tara@taramayastales.com" target="_blank">tara@taramayastales.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div>I would eliminate superstitions, or our very bad ability to just statistics intuitively, which I believe is related to being superstitious. </div><div><br></div><div>I would not eliminate religious feelings…IF, as I suspect, it is linked to our ability to understand other minds. You may be familiar with the theory that autism is a kind of mindblindness. A theory of mine (which may be incorrect), is that the human need to address inanimate forces as spirits or gods (or patterns in the will of one all-powerful God) is a kind inverse mindblindness. If autistic people tend to treat other people as inanimate objects, the religious person is inclined to treat inanimate objects as if they were people. (Martin Buber celebrates this very tendency.) </div><div><br></div><div>But I believe that the ability to write fiction is also directly related to this capacity. Creativity of this kind, storytelling specifically, is a like overdetermined mind sightedness. But, being a writer myself, I should hate to eliminate this ability in my children, or in the human race. I think some people also call this Emotional Intelligence.</div><div><br></div><div>Interestingly, when I did my genealogy, I was struck by the high percentage of clergymen there were in the earlier generations. (One of them had a daughter accused of witchcraft at Salem! She wasn’t killed because he put in a word for her.) Later generations had less clergy… but more fiction writers. </div><div><br></div><div>Of course, if there were a way to untangle the ability to imagine other mind form the tendency to distrust science, that would be nice. I’m not really sure that’s a genetic issue, but maybe it is. Certainly I’ve noticed that even academics in the liberal arts who are atheists but still very “mind sighted” also seem to share an antipathy to science shared by the most uneducated and fanatical folk who otherwise have nothing in common with them. Odd! But maybe it’s just because people who are very story-wise are not often good at math and science. If you could boost one without losing the other, that would be my preference.</div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br></font></span><div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
<div>Tara Maya</div></font></span></div></div></blockquote><div><br><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0);display:inline">That's very interesting. I have never heard creativity and emotional intelligence conflated. I tend to disagree with it, but then our understanding of creativity (C) is very poor. In a general way, we can say that C is something people like or find useful, but in certain fields, like classical music or the visual arts, there is tremendous disagreement on C.<br><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0);display:inline">What do you think of Alexander McCall Smith? He surely can spin stories, but I'll bet the literati hold their noses when he is mentioned.<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0);display:inline"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0);display:inline">I do hope that we can eliminate our race's tendency to worship things like trees or ancestors or farm animals. That may be different from superstition. I suspect we will need a few hundred years of research to tease these things out (once we have reached some agreed-upon definitions, which we certainly do not have now - and may never have if philosophers keep dithering).<br><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0);display:inline">Those in academia who distrust science may be those who still believe in the blank slate and deny the role of genes (not just sociologists), like those who would deny the role of gender in the differences in math scores at the high end, despite the overwhelming evidence. ("My theory is correct. Never mind what the data say." - the tail wagging the dog). I very much doubt that they deny findings in physics or chemistry. They don't know enough to do that. Of course they don't know enough psychology either.<br><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0);display:inline">Re clergy: the first son inherits. The second and thereafter go into academia or the ministry, in British history and some others.<br><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0);display:inline">bill w<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0);display:inline"><br></div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div><span class=""><div><a href="http://taramayastales.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Blog</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/taramayastales" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Unfinished-Song-Epic-Fantasy/310271375658211?ref=hl" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tara-Maya/e/B004HAI038/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1349796143&sr=8-2-ent" target="_blank">Amazon</a> | <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2951879.Tara_Maya" target="_blank">Goodreads</a></div><div><br></div><br>
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<br><div><blockquote type="cite"><div>On Nov 23, 2015, at 5:32 PM, William Flynn Wallace <<a href="mailto:foozler83@gmail.com" target="_blank">foozler83@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br><div><div style="font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:normal;line-height:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;font-family:'comic sans ms',sans-serif;font-size:small;display:inline">I assume that at some point in the future, every single human characteristic will be found to be determined, at least in part, by genes, perhaps quite a few of them.</div><span style="font-family:Optima-Regular;font-size:12px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:normal;line-height:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;float:none;display:inline!important"> </span><br style="font-family:Optima-Regular;font-size:12px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:normal;line-height:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px"><br style="font-family:Optima-Regular;font-size:12px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:normal;line-height:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px"><div style="font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:normal;line-height:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;font-family:'comic sans ms',sans-serif;font-size:small">Yes to your question. If they don't like immortality they have options. Perhaps if there were a way to eliminate certain memories it would be easier to live longer.<br><br></div><div style="font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:normal;line-height:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;font-family:'comic sans ms',sans-serif;font-size:small">Here's one for you all: if you could eliminate religious feelings, tendencies to worship gods or even people, superstitions, would you?</div></div></blockquote></div><br></span></div><br>_______________________________________________<br>
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