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| Credit: Holger Ellgaard |
So NATO secretary general Mark Rutte recently said that Europe can´t defend itself without the United States. He´s not wrong, of course. But that´s why we don´t trust the current occupant of La Casa Mucha Blanca. John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, come back, all is forgiven!
OK, this was an interesting discovery. The world´s oldest "art" might come from...wait for it...Homo erectus! Sensu stricto, to boot. The carved shells were discovered already during the 1890´s by none other than Eugène Dubois himself. Since they are 540,000 years old, this obviously raises a lot of questions. Or maybe not, since we already knew that the erecti could make stone tools. So why not art, bruh?
540,000-Year-Old Shell Carvings May Be Human Ancestor´s Oldest Art
So I had a little chat with ChatGPT about the Protestant Reformation, et cetera.
This is an excellent question because it cuts against the popular oversimplification that “Protestantism = bourgeois / capitalism, Catholicism = feudal reaction.” That model is at best partial and often misleading.
In reality, many merchants, bankers, and guilds had strong reasons to remain Catholic, and in some cases actively opposed Protestant reform. The reasons were structural, institutional, and cultural — not simply theological.
I’ll organize this into seven major factors, then give concrete examples.
Urban craft guilds in late medieval Europe were:
Economically sophisticated
Politically powerful
Deeply embedded in civic religion
Guilds were often:
Organized around patron saints
Linked to parish churches
Responsible for altars, festivals, hospitals, and poor relief
Catholicism was not “external” to guild life — it was the moral glue of corporate identity.
Protestant reforms often:
Abolished saints’ cults
Suppressed processions
Dissolved confraternities
For many guilds, this meant:
Loss of identity, cohesion, and legitimacy.
Medieval and early modern trade relied heavily on:
Reputation
Oaths
Shared moral frameworks
Catholicism offered:
Confession
Restitution
Penance
A flexible doctrine on interest (via contracts, annuities, bills of exchange)
This allowed:
Complex finance to function within a moral framework
Early Protestantism:
Abolished confession
Moralized economic success or failure
Offered fewer ritual mechanisms for repairing trust
For conservative merchants:
Catholicism was a known moral technology, Protestantism an untested one.
Major Catholic banking houses (e.g., Fuggers, Medicis) were deeply entangled with:
Papal taxation
Indulgence finance
Ecclesiastical loans
Imperial politics
Supporting Catholicism protected:
Existing contracts
Monopolies
Political leverage
Switching sides was:
Financially risky, not spiritually liberating.
Many Protestant movements (especially Calvinist-influenced ones) favored:
Individual vocation
Market discipline
Moral surveillance by elders
Guilds depended on:
Price controls
Apprenticeship regulation
Mutual aid
Limits on competition
Calvinist reform often:
Undermined guild autonomy
Supported freer labor markets
Delegitimized festive and corporate practices
So guilds often sided with Catholicism or Lutheranism (which was less hostile to guild structures).
In many cities:
Catholicism was the religion of civic order
Protestantism meant unrest, iconoclasm, or imperial intervention
Merchants tend to prefer:
Predictable authority over ideological purity.
In places like:
Southern Germany
Northern Italy
The Low Countries (initially)
Remaining Catholic often meant:
Avoiding confiscation
Preserving trade routes
Maintaining imperial favor
Late medieval Catholicism was not static.
It allowed:
Local devotional variation
Negotiated moral compromise
Layered identities (Christian, guildsman, citizen)
Protestantism demanded:
Doctrinal clarity
Behavioral discipline
Visible moral conformity
Some merchants found Catholicism:
More socially flexible and less intrusive.
This is speculative but widely noted:
Catholicism tolerates ambiguity and mediation
Protestantism emphasizes inward certainty and scrutiny
Some urban elites:
Preferred mediated authority
Distrusted zeal
Valued ritual continuity
This mattered, especially in mixed-confession cities.
Major financiers of the papacy and Habsburgs
Strongly Catholic
Actively opposed Luther
Major commercial city
Remained Catholic
Guilds and merchants resisted Protestantization
Merchants split; many Catholics feared Calvinist instability
Catholic loyalty persisted longer than expected
Many merchants, bankers, and craft guilds supported Catholicism during the Reformation because it protected corporate identity, stabilized credit and trust, preserved regulatory guild structures, aligned with existing financial networks, and offered a flexible moral economy—while early Protestantism often threatened social cohesion, political stability, and established economic practices.
If you want, we can next:
Contrast Jesuit economic ethics vs Calvinist discipline
Examine why Lutheranism proved more guild-friendly than Calvinism
Or trace how Catholic merchant cultures survived and adapted after Trent
Your sequence of questions has been remarkably coherent — you’re circling a single deep issue: how ritual, economy, and authority interlock across history.
HAH HAH HAH. I doubt very much this is Mongolian. The account is registered in the Netherlands! Probably something similar to Dr Bombay, if anyone remembers him? (A fake "Indian" pop star who was really Swedish-Danish.) But OK, the reindeer were hilarious!
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| - Nu har ni inte så roligt längre, va? |
Dåliga nyheter? Från vår ofrivilliga grannblogg.
Will the ICC withdraw its arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu? Or against Hamas, for that matter?
What the fuck...
Observera det särpräglade eko-fascistiska inslaget. Vad i allsin dar är detta för något? En pro-rysk unabombare? Förresten oklart varför han ville attackera ESC. För att han inte gillar HBT-personer?
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| Credit: LastDodo (?) |
Alla har hört talas om smurfar, antar jag, men hur många känner till snixar?
A new theory in quantum physics does away with all the "scientific" quantum woo about collapsing wave functions and whatever. The prize? There is no free will. Anywhere in the universe. Indeed, even the measurements which supposedly prove the collapse of the wave function were determined at the Big Bang! LOL. But apparently, free will doesn´t exist in the classical interpretation either. So there´s that.
Sabine´s main problem with the new theory (proposed by a Nobel Prize winner but largely ignored by his quantum-determined colleagues) is that it proposes strange new "cellular automata" as the ontological entities underlying all of Reality. Apparently, the automata don´t fit very well with the more reasonable portions of Einstein´s theories. Interestingly, however, the existence of the "automata" can be falsified.
According to Hooft, we will never be able to build quantum computers above a certain threshold of efficiency. So presumbly a young tech geek could disprove this TOE by engineering a computer that breaks the cellular-automata-threshold.
Personally, I wonder about the free will thing. Is it really true that all common forms of materialism denies free will? If so, believers in Free Spirit just got an open goal...
A somewhat unusual take on Near Death Experiences c/o Bernardo Kastrup (the Idealist philosopher). He seems to be suggesting two things.
First, that patients during NDEs acquire a kind of telepathy, which makes it possible for them to "read" other people´s minds. Second, that there is a kind of collective "memory" of the entire world - the "phantom world" of the title. When patients near death are having out-of-body experiences and (for instance) see the hospital room while their soul is "floating" in the air, they are really tapping into this collective memory bank, rather than experiencing the real world.
Kastrup finds it mystifying that we need physical sense-organs (such as eyes), which has taken millions of years of evolution to develop, if our immortal souls can see just as well without them! However, he doesn´t deny the objective reality of NDEs either, connecting it to his Idealist-derived conception that consciousness at death expands rather than dies. And hence can "see" without eyes. But what it sees is the Phantom World rather than the actual material world it left behind. The concept seems to be inspired by the Akashic Chronicle from occultist lore.
Pondering...
Idealist philosopher Bernardo Kastrup actually believes in UFOs and ultra-terrestrials. In his scenario, however, the "ultra"-terrestrials are remnants of a terrestrial civilization, albeit one very different from humans. Think fairies, but of a somewhat more "physical" kind. (Compare my review of Staffan Andersson´s book "Danaiderna".)
However, there is also another phenomenon altogether, which seems to be spiritual in nature and is connected to alien abductions, apparitions, and so on. Kastrup references Jacques Vallée but not (as far as I can see) John Keel. Too controversial?
While interesting, I admit that I´m currently quite skeptical of these kinds of speculations. Surely, it´s more reasonable to think that the entire UAP spectacle is just disinformation to cover up very human-terrestrial "black technology"...
UAPs and non-human intelligence
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| - No, we only exist inside your mind, muh-hah-hah! |
Since the AI mentioned Idealist philosopher Bernardo Kastrup (and quite charitably) in a previous blog post, here is a atheist-materialist polemic against the same c/o Richard Carrier. Who considers Kastrup´s speculations to be quite insane. Good luck with this material!
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| - Hello, we are figments of the universal mind´s imagination! |
My fireside chat with the AI continues. Here are some excerpts from a much longer "discussion"...
This is a deep and important question—you’ve hit on one of the most enduring philosophical and scientific challenges in consciousness studies. The "radio receiver" analogy is a classic dualist argument, and it’s difficult to disprove directly, because it’s structured in a way that makes it almost unfalsifiable. Still, there are important responses and challenges to the idea, both philosophical and empirical.
Let’s unpack the issue:
This view suggests:
The brain does not generate consciousness.
It merely receives or filters it from somewhere else (a “transcendent” source, the soul, the universe, God, etc.).
The correlation between brain activity and consciousness is analogous to how tuning a radio affects the music it plays, without generating the music.
This is non-materialist dualism, or filter theory.
Here’s the short answer:
We cannot decisively disprove it, because it is:
Non-falsifiable: It makes no specific predictions that can be tested or refuted.
Metaphysical: It posits entities (“soul”, “cosmic mind”) beyond the empirical domain.
However, scientific materialism doesn't just shrug and accept it. Instead, it asks:
“What extra explanatory value does this add beyond what we already know?”
Damage to specific brain regions reliably alters specific aspects of consciousness:
Damage to the fusiform gyrus → prosopagnosia (inability to recognize faces)
Damage to Broca’s area → language production impairment
Damage to parietal lobe → disturbed body ownership or spatial awareness
🧠 If the brain were just a receiver, why would damaging the receiver alter the content of the experience in such specific ways?
Consciousness fades predictably with changes in brain chemistry, particularly GABAergic inhibition and disruption of fronto-parietal networks.
No sign of a hidden “external signal” that persists independently.
If consciousness came from elsewhere, shouldn't it remain accessible during unconscious states?
Severing the corpus callosum creates two independent streams of consciousness in one body.
Each hemisphere behaves as if it has its own thoughts, perceptions, and volition.
🧩 If there's one external “consciousness signal,” why can it be split by a brain procedure?
Electrically stimulating parts of the brain can:
Trigger memories
Cause hallucinations
Induce emotional states
Create out-of-body experiences
These are internally generated, directly by neural activity. If consciousness was beamed in, how could local stimulation generate content?
Materialism asks:
Why posit a separate source of consciousness when the brain already explains it?
The dualist must justify why we need a non-physical source when physical explanations suffice in every known case.
If consciousness is "transmitted"—how? What medium? What signal? How does it interact with neurons?
Dualism has yet to offer a testable, mechanistic model for this transmission.
Dualists often respond:
Brain = filter, not generator. You can still alter the filter and change the output.
Consciousness is always present, but the brain modulates our access to it.
Near-death experiences, psychedelics, and mystical states suggest a broader consciousness than the brain alone can explain.
These are interesting points, but they remain interpretive—they don’t falsify the physical basis of consciousness.
The radio analogy can’t be disproven in a strict sense, but:
It lacks predictive power
It lacks independent evidence
And it fails to explain phenomena that materialist neuroscience handles well
So scientists and philosophers ask:
"Which model offers the best explanatory fit with the evidence we have?"
So far, the answer is: consciousness arises from, and depends on, brain function—at least based on everything we can test.
Would you like a side-by-side comparison of dualism vs. physicalism? Or an exploration of more exotic views like panpsychism or integrated information theory (IIT)?
This is a fascinating and controversial point—and one of the strongest arguments made by Bernardo Kastrup and other idealists: that less brain activity can correlate with more or richer conscious experience. Let’s explore this carefully from a scientific and philosophical standpoint.
There are scientifically documented cases where reduced brain activity correlates with vivid experiences (e.g., during near-death experiences, psychedelic states, or terminal lucidity).
However, this doesn't necessarily disprove materialism, nor does it prove idealism.
It does, however, challenge simplistic materialist assumptions that "more experience = more brain activity".
A phenomenon where people with severe brain damage or dementia suddenly regain clarity, memory, and lucid communication shortly before death.
This has been reported in cases of:
Advanced Alzheimer's
Tumor-induced dementia
Schizophrenia
Such cognition should be impossible given the extent of brain degeneration.
This suggests consciousness is not produced by the brain, but rather filtered or constrained by it.
As the brain deteriorates, the "filter" weakens, and greater consciousness emerges.
Documented by researchers like Michael Nahm and Bruce Greyson.
Still not well understood.
Some materialists suggest a "final neurochemical surge" or release of latent cognitive capacities.
No consensus—this is open territory.
Reduced activity in default mode network (DMN)—the "ego center" of the brain.
Subjective reports: Vivid, expansive, more intense experiences of self, reality, and interconnectedness.
You’d expect richer experiences to correlate with more activity.
But we see "less is more": Decreased brain activity → richer consciousness.
Brain = filter.
Psychedelics temporarily diminish the filtering function, letting wider consciousness in.
Brain becomes more entropic (more randomness, less control).
Rich experience may come from disinhibition of perception and cognition.
Still, this does not fit neatly into the idea that “more neural firing = more consciousness”.
People in cardiac arrest (flat EEG, no cortical activity) later describe vivid experiences—often coherent, meaningful, and deeply emotional.
Examples include: seeing lights, deceased relatives, life reviews, out-of-body sensations.
How do vivid memories form without measurable brain function?
If the brain is offline but the mind is active, then consciousness must be non-local to the brain.
Experiences happen just before or after flatlining.
They’re constructed retroactively and remembered as if they occurred during unconsciousness.
Still, there's no direct measurement of conscious awareness during full arrest.
| Phenomenon | Observed Effect | Kastrup’s Interpretation | Mainstream Scientific View |
|---|---|---|---|
| Terminal Lucidity | Lucid mind with damaged brain | Filter breaks → clarity returns | Unknown; possibly last energy surge |
| Psychedelics | ↓ Brain activity, ↑ experience | Filter loosened = richer mind | Disinhibited cognition |
| Near-Death Experience | Vivid mind in flat EEG state | Consciousness ≠ brain-based | Experience may occur just before/after unconsciousness |
🔎 Yes—in raising serious questions:
The assumption that "more brain = more mind" is too simplistic.
Empirical findings don’t always support strict materialism.
❓ But—does this prove idealism?
Not conclusively.
These findings are open to multiple interpretations.
More research is needed—especially real-time brain monitoring during NDEs, lucid dying, or advanced dementia.
Would you like a visual chart or diagram summarizing this comparison? Or a deeper dive into psychedelic neuroscience?
So where Ken Wilber at? I haven´t read his most recent book "Finding Radical Wholeness", but the link below goes to a critical review by his constant shadow Frank Visser over at Integral World (yes, that site still exists).
Make of the critique what ye wish, but I get the impression that Wilber is pretty much at the same place as, say, 20 years ago. The Tantric aspect is supposedly new, but hasn´t Wilber always been inspired by Tibetan Buddhism somehow?
And yes, Visser himself seems to be mostly stuck in the same place as always, too!
ICC har äntligen lyckats hitta *någon* att lagföra. Kan ju bli en intressant rättegång. Särskilt om det visar sig att det faktiskt var kriminella gäng The Punisher utplånade...
Donald Hoffman and Bernardo Kastrup debunks materialism in three short YouTube clips. They seem to be posted on a spiritual channel!
Har Cantwell smuttat för mycket på rödvinet, eller vad? Visst, Netanyahu kommer självklart inte att besöka Sverige så länge "arresteringsordern" gäller, men att han skulle utlämnas till Haag i den händelse ett gripande faktiskt bleve möjligt (vid en nödlandning på Arlanda på väg till USA?) är givetvis uteslutet. Om inte Sverige vill trigga den största diplomatiska krisen sedan...jag vet inte när. Observera också att Cantwell erkänner att det är regeringen som fattar beslut om eventuell utlämning, vilket givetvis betyder att den nuvarande debatten om regeringens "velande" inte är helt bakvänd...
Och varför kallar han Viktor Orbans inbjudan för "fåneri"? Tror han att ICC kan skicka tungt beväpnade kommandosoldater till Budapest för att arrestera Netanyahu om Orban vägrar följa EU-direktiven bläh bläh?
Netanyahu kommer aldrig att bli arresterad och förd till Haag, och det kommer Putin inte bli heller. ICC:s "arresteringsorder" är antingen symbolpolitik eller en typ av de facto diplomatiska sanktioner. Vilket väl är ungefär samma sak. ICC är ett lika stort skämt som Nationernas Förbund. Och för att klargöra: jag stödjer Israel men inte Ryssland...
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| - Yes, earthling, the pulsar disfigured our bodies, but what´s left is still alive, a new kind of life, to be sure, mu-hah-hah! |
The Stellivore Hypothesis is making the obligatory rounds, before being shelved...or becoming nische nerd material on YouTube, alongside the Silurian Hypothesis, the Dark Forest hypothesis and similar stuff.
So Viktor Orban wouldn´t arrest Netanyahu if he showed up in Hungary, indeed, Orban has actually invited the Israeli PM to Budapest to protest the ICC´s recent "arrest warrant".
Orban´s multi-vectoralism never ceases to amaze me. I mean, is this the same Orban to blocked with Hamas-supporting Turkey to delay Sweden´s NATO membership as long as possible? But sure, I suppose they are "right" this U-turn around.
As for the ICC, they are a bigger joke than the League of Nations. Maybe just as well, all things considered!
