purchase wrote:
Okay. The following will be hard to take seriously but I mean it seriously. I think that the person who believed he was saving the world from destruction by the Large Hadron Collider was doing so - in his mind literally but metaphorically in collectively determined reality. Things are always represented by other things. The curtain I'm looking at is represented by the electrochemical impulses that result in my brain when I touch and feel this thing that is different from the other things around it.
My point being: reality is a creation of the mind... who is to say the Large Hadron Collider is not also one and the same as "Evil" or "Harmful Thing That Ends Consciousness"... I feel like there's no way I'm going to be able to explain this well.
Okay. There's the Large Hadron Collider. To me it's a word that denotes an idea of something potentially mortally harmful. I don't know how it works really. So you could say the schizophrenic person is, by remaining alive and conscious, resisting mortal harm. Schizophrenics just seem to take something and either over or undergeneralize it one way or another so it's a symbol... I do mean something by this but I know I'm not making any sense.
So, you're saying the Large Hadron Collider is a symbol representing the collective conscious's concept of "Evil", and that suggests that the concept of "Evil" itself "really" exists in some 'ultimately true form', existing beyond the neural impulses that is our mind? And this is analogous to the symbolic representation of a trancelike experience's representing something "Good", despite the schizphrenic's symbols being either 'less' or 'more' generalized than what's common?
That sounds probable. Human thinking is largely thematic, and it wouldn't surprise me if the vast majority thought in terms of themes by taking certain experiences and associating it with some concept that's a part of some fundamental theme.
Tangent alert:
Now, this "Good" and "Evil" concept seems to be largely Western. I wonder if there are other themes in other cultures that are fundamentally different and if so, do the schizophrenics there represent their concepts differently? If not, are the concepts of "true" and "evil" really universal? And, IF it's universal, why? It would almost seem that the "Good" and "Evil" concepts are ultimately human/sufficiently-cognitively-advanced representations of the perception of pleasure and pain that exist in all mammals.