DB> And truth has a habit of persisting in the mind, and tends 
 DM>   
 DM>      TRUTH ??? ....."same concludin" into myth does NOT translate 
 DM>      into truth, it just translates into "same concluding". Much 
 DM>      of mythic similarity is likely the outgrowth of similar 
 DM>      circumstantial experiences to dream and project from (this 
 DM>      convenience of daydreaming, ENHANCED or natural or even a 
 DM>      mite genetic, has no claim to truth beyond accident)   Also 
 DM>      most myths are NOT the same without a great deal of massage 
 DM>      and bending!  Even Cambell had to admit an oft closure of 
 DM>      one eye to see the similarities. Many myths from around the 
 DM>      world & through time don't match AT ALL! 
To some extent I exaggerate and play devil's advocate here David. 
Our culture has such a perjorative attitude twards altered mental 
states I have a hard time trying to say that there is *some* real 
validity to the experience without implying- that such truth is a
*replacement* for sober, rational analysis. 
 
One of the questions Joseph Campbell posed was whether the mental 
experience is an artifact of the species genome and not as random 
as psychology, anthropology, and sociology have assumed.  What is 
more, is whether these innate concepts carried in the genome are, 
in fact, accurrate truths about the nature of being.  A dog knows 
how to hunt, the man knows how to think- about cosmology, as well 
as many other things, and are these innate ideas wrong?  I am not 
saying that they're right, I'm saying they deserve consideration. 
 
If we live on a holodeck, then there may well be much more to the 
forms that we see than we commonly surmise; forms in such a world 
are, above all, data sets.  And, it turns out, that data sets can 
act like subroutines when properly initiated.  I find it striking 
that the ancient belief- that if you knew the name of the Daemon, 
you could command his will, but without the proper commands, such 
as 'open Sesame', the file remained closed with all it's treasure 
inviolate.  So, despite the limits proposed by Newtonian physics, 
I can see where some deed or word *could* wreak magic because, it 
is an application of *quantum mechanics* which, the more we look, 
the weirder it gets. 
 
Someone asked me *if* we live on a holodeck, to which I ask, what 
other model they had available for me to consider?  I do not say, 
as theorists never do, that this model is the only one. But it is 
the only one I know of that fits the data so well. 
 
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 * OFFLINE 1.58 * we are all avatars on a holodeck. 
--- Maximus 3.01
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