Hi, welcome, my name is Dan Ogilvy and I'm introducing unit three. Of the sole beliefs that causes inconsequence of soul and afterlife beliefs? And this unit is called How Does It End? I think, how does it all end? And I'm asking, how does what end? I mean, how audacious it would be to give a course on soul and afterlife there's just so many questions, and my colleague and I, Len Hamilton, say, well, this is how it ends. Well, obviously, it hasn't end, and won't end. Oh yes, and here's Professor Hamilton's. There's five lectures in this section, I think. And Professor Hamilton, who calls himself a brain scientist, he gives a very nice lecture, and several lectures, on the evolution of the human brain. And you will at the end of his lecture know quite a bit about the what's it's refered to as a Triune brain, the brain stem, and, the mid-brain, which is primarily the, emotional center of the brain. And then the, neommalian brain, which, what we all see when you, the encasement. What the outside of the brain looks like. Then, I'll talk about the human spark. What's the human spark? Well, it's consciousness, awareness. How did we become able to be conscious of things, talk to each other? Language is a very much part of this talk on human spark. And then he deals quite a bit with the trial, the controversy between Intelligent Design and the Theory of Evolution. That runs pretty much throughout units one and units two of the course. And he brings that together and at the end, and then another video on the continuation of the debate against Intelligent Design and Evolution. And then where do we go from here? That completes the five of lectures in this. Now, I mentioned that there's been ongoing and very serious debate between Intelligent Design and Evolution. Briefly. I hope I can really quickly tell the story. This kid goes to the mother and says, how do we get to be here? And the mother said, God put us here. And that kid then goes to the father and says, well, how did we get to be here? And he said, well, several billion years ago, when the Earth began to cool, and these warm pools were developed, a perfect environment for the emergence of molecules, et cetera. The story of evolution. It all started out in the muck. So, the kid goes to the mother, and said, you know, Dad said, we came from muck! And she said, well, that's true, dear, but he's talking about his side of the family. [LAUGH] But it gets to the issue. I mean, it's pretty funny, I appreciate you laughing, but there's an issue, that, did God put us here? And some people desperately believe that, want to believe it, because it's a segue into afterlife. And all religions want that to be. So, at least all that I know of. So, there's this tension between Intelligent Design and Evolution. And Jay Stephen Gould, a very well known paleontologist, died several years ago. Too young, I think he was only in his 60s. But he was a, made a number of archeological paleontological discoveries that really gained a lot of support for a Theory of Evolution. In fact, she flushed out some of the details. But he proposed, that we leave each other alone. He proposed two non-overlapping Magisteriums, or plural, Magisteria. He said, we've got religion and faith on one side and spirituality. And we've got science on the other side. So folks just leave each other alone. They're non-overlapping. We can be on one side and learn all kinds of things on the other side. We can learn all kinds of things that are scientifically definable. But science lead the realm of religion and spirituality alone and was to other side as well. Well, here's some people who didn't buy that. These are all scientists Daniel Dennett was a philosopher, but he was a pretty good scientist too. He wrote a book, Breaking the Spell, and that's a religious spell. But his biggest argument is that let's, not sit around and talk about this. Let's be reasonable. Richard Dawkins wrote a book The God Delusion. He's a biologist, very well known geneticist. Christopher Hitchens. I don't know, he looks like a drunk there, but he was a, he's a scholar. He died a few years ago of lung cancer, but he was the brute on the side. And he would talk he wrote a book quite well known called God is Not Great. And then Sam Harris who still very active writer, he started it all off by saying the end of faith, that religions are getting us in trouble. Let's just give it up. So here we have scientists intruding into the religious magisteria. And I felt well, that's not good. But there's a comeback here. There's a number of books written about heaven. One of the earliest ones was 90 Minutes in Heaven. By Reverend Don Piper who was in a series accident, went to heaven, came back and I guess made a lot of money. And then, the other one that's really popular, probably sold more copies than any of the others that are there Heaven is for Real, and that's about a kid named Todd Burpo. Written by his father and a ghost writer who does a lot of ghost writing for Christian books. Very popular. In fact, it was recently a movie, made of his life. And so it's not really a comeback, but it's like, hey folks, we still exist. And for Heaven is for Real, millions of copies of that book had been sold. And it's, I guess, comforting to the believers who want to make sure that there is a heaven. And to have people go there and come back and report that, it's very comforting. But then we got this guy, Proof of Heaven, and it's such an engaging topic for many people that it made the front cover of Newsweek. And the cover says, Heaven Is Real. So just relax, folks. Heaven is real. Now what makes proof of heaven such a challenge is, let me give you an anecdote. I was in an airport one time in California, and a woman who I didn't know, but who knew something about me, she said aren't you? Yes, I am. She said, this book proves heaven exists. And why does it prove heaven exists? It's because he's a neurosurgeon. He's a scientist, and we've been trained to believe scientists, and he said that, when he was in a coma, his brain died. He was dead, and he went to heaven and, fortunately, recovered and was able to come back and give his story. So you see what's happening here and that is, since hundreds, tens of thousands of people have had this experience of having a coma and hallucinating basically that they've gone to heaven. But it really matters now that we have a scientist who did that. He went into the muck of the universe and then was lifted out of that into a pure white light, music, and on the wings of a butterfly. Went to heaven and came back with a message. You are loved, you've got nothing to fear, there's nothing you can do wrong, and that was his message. Again, sold really millions of copies of that book, and I went to hear him talk one time. I was invited to engage with him, but that was canceled. There was an audience of 300, 350 people. They just didn't come to hear him. They came really to worship him. To say, here's somebody with scientific credentials who now has seen what we all knew was there. All right, so he came back, and I must point out, however, that there's a book that I would very much recommend to people. It's about this phenomenon, of what occurs in the brain. By Kevin Nelson. He talks about these experiences as being a product of the brain in the borderland between consciousness and unconsciousness. Between dream states and wakefulness, the brainstem that sends these messages kind of gets stuck into this really extraordinary part of the brain between consciousness and unconsciousness. It must also involve the visual cortex because these experiences are so colorful. So I had written a book called Fantasies of Flight several years earlier, and I am able to give a psychological account of what's happening. These other people give physiological accounts, but psychologically. He maps right on to what I talk about in this book, including early separation, which is a very important component of this, separation from a parenting figure. And other matters, so that I understand this kind of from both a psychological and the perspective of the body and the physiology. Now, can we ever be certain about something? Well, I'm pretty convinced that he didn't go there. But does that mean that there's nothing like what's been talked about now, in terms of the extension of consciousness, the survival of consciousness. I don't know. We used to think that this was a science in the early 1800s. This phrenology and the shape of the skull, all bumps here and there, would indicate what talents you had. I have a a bump here, and it is related to, where is it? Disagreeableness. Makes sense. >> [LAUGH] >> Makes sense. And extermination, whatever that means. Folks, be careful, but now we think that is so silly, but it was accepted science at that time. I'm sure people questioned it, but it still went down as science. So Professor Kohls was talking about this in his class one time, and what I was thinking was, science is developing so fast, rapidly, development. What in 50 years, or even 25 years, are we going to look back and say, well, that was silly? What assumptions? How come they didn't know that, yeah, there is consciousness out there somewhere? But right now we don't have that. There's another area. I mean this happens all the time in science. What we thought was true turns out not to be true. We used to think that once we had a right amount of or a full package of neurons in our brains, that was it. Maybe even right after birth, you produced no more. And so I've invited Professor here to tell us that that's not true. Yes. As Professor Oglevee just mentioned. We used to think that the brain made all it's neurons through birth or soon after birth. And after that you didn't really generate any new neurons. We now know that that's not true. That the brain does continue to make new neurons throughout the life span. These nodes are very interesting, because they are also very responsive to our experience. So they respond well to changes in our everyday lives, including how we feel, if we're stressed, if we're anxious, if we're happy, if we're exercising and probably most importantly they respond very well to learning. In fact, if you learn something new and challenging, they can be stimulated to survive. So, even though these neurons exist, and everyone of course is very excited about their evidence that they do exist, we still don't really know what they do. Do they have some particular purpose? Moreover, they don't occur everywhere. So I think sometimes when one fallacy gets overturned. So we thought there were no neurons, now we know that there are neurons. Now we want to use them to explain everything. So now they've been used to explain everything from consciousness to schizophrenia to Alzheimer's disease to basically just anything. So I think the important thing is to always keep our minds open, learn new things. So even in the forefront of this research. Does what this mean is that there's more to know about the brain than we actually know? >> [LAUGH] >> Aren't we finished? Now, we really only got started. >> Okay. >> Contrary to popular belief. >> All right. >> [LAUGH] And I think that's because the brain is a four dimensional structure. We know, like a lot, about the three dimensions of the brain. What it looks like, the structure of it, but it how changes across time is very, very difficult to even comprehend, much less define. >> So thank you Professor Shores. So what currently accepted science based beliefs will we be making fun of in 50 years. So I can't say that there is nothing after, I don't think personally, that there's anything that we're going to be left, about me, once I no longer exist. But I'm not certain, not sure. So with every increase in knowledge, occurs a greater increase in our ignorance. And so I want to give you this final thought. For the entire sequence of courses in various units of Sawood's course. My thought, final thought is the time has come for us to rescue soul and afterlife stories from their historical foundations. And become acutely aware of how they have been and are being exploited for the purpose of social manipulation and social control. It's okay with me for you to have your personal beliefs. And they get you through the day. But when we gather together, and say hey, in our tribes, we're right and they're wrong. That can be used for the purpose of social manipulation, social control, and wrongdoing. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this unit of the course.
