On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 01:37:19PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

Of course Santa Claus exists. I'm not interested in being smug about it though.

There is no guy in red riding a sleigh across the sky delivering presents to
children. Instead the Santa Claus entity exists as millions of copies inside the
minds of humans everywhere. Millions of people running the Santa Claus program
on their brains. We should pay attention to this real entity because it has a
huge effect on the GDP of countries in the western world, every year. To dismiss
Santa Claus as just a silly children's story is to underestimate it.

I'm not being smug. I think it's a mistake that very intelligent people make in
dismissing things that are "just ideas". For some reason people think that ideas
are something independent of the physical world, but they are not. Ideas
physically occupy people's brains and make people change the world.

Of course a rock is different to a brain thinking about a rock, is different to
a brain thinking about a brain thinking about a rock etc. The ways in which
those things occupy the material world is completely different. A rock manifest
in matter does not look anything like a rock manifest in somebody's
brainchemistry. I am not saying that they are the same or that we should treat
them the same.

I don't think human thought takes place in some magic fairy land. I think it
takes place in the same physical reality that we all occupy. I'm not really sure
why this idea is contraversial.

Cheers,

Chris.

------------------- http://mccormick.cx