If Our Brains Were Simple

As Carl Jung Put It, "in Each Of Us There Is Another Whom We Do Not Know." As Pink Floyd Sang, "there's Someone In My Head, But It's Not Me."

Our Ignorance Of The Cosmos Is Too Vast To Commit To Atheism, And Yet We Know Too Much To Commit To A Particular Religion. A Third Position, Agnosticism, Is Often An Uninteresting Stance In Which A Person Simply Questions Whether His Traditional Religious Story (say, A Man With A Beard On A Cloud) Is True Or Not True. But With Possibilianism I’m Hoping To Define A New Position - One That Emphasizes The Exploration Of New, Unconsidered Possibilities. Possibilianism Is Comfortable Holding Multiple Ideas In Mind; It Is Not Interested In Committing To Any Particular Story.

If You Cannot Always Elicit A Straight Answer From The Unconscious Brain, How Can You Access Its Knowledge? Sometimes The Trick Is Merely To Probe What Your Gut Is Telling You. So The Next Time A Friend Laments That She Cannot Decide Between Two Options, Tell Her The Easiest Way To Solve Her Problem: Flip A Coin. She Should Specify Which Option Belongs To Heads And Which To Tails, And Then Let The Coin Fly. The Important Part Is To Assess Her Gut Feeling After The Coin Lands. If She Feels A Subtle Sense Of Relief At Being "told" What To Do By The Coin, That's The Right Choice For Her.

Imbalance Of Reason And Emotion May Explain The Tenacity Of Religion In Societies: World Religions Are Optimized To Tap Into The Emotional Networks, And Great Arguments Of Reason Amount To Little Against Such Magnetic Pull.

Vision Is More Than Looking.