https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7t2U_K-ZKDo
That’s Michelangelo’s famous Sistine Chapel representation. There’s some cool things about this. I mean, you’ve got to wonder… This is a side, and I don’t know if it’s a credible side, but it’s an interesting side. So that’s a form of credible. What the hell is God doing in this thing? You know, I mean, what is this exactly? And so, there’s been some interesting answers to that, and this is one of them. So there was a group of scientists about 20 years ago that were remarked on the precise… The precise analogy between this structure and the brain bisected down the middle. And of course, Michelangelo was one of the first people who did detailed dissections, and so… They felt that Michelangelo had put God inside the brain for some reason. And that seems to me to be associated with the notion that there’s… You know, there’s an analogy, or a metaphorical identity, between the notion of whatever God is and the structures that give rise to consciousness. And… I think we really underestimate the degree to which consciousness is both, say, miraculous and not understood. I mean, you know, you have what appears to be an entirely material substrate, yet here you are, aware and self-aware. Able to generate the world merely in some sense by looking at it. It really is remarkable, and that consciousness is dependent on… On something that wells up from deep within that material substrate that we don’t understand at all. It’s really a crazily remarkable thing. You know, and… You hear a lot about scientific reductionism, but I’ll tell you something that’s kind of interesting, and it’s a tangent, too. You know, the guy that discovered DNA… I think it was Watson… And it’s Watson and Crick, but I don’t remember who wrote this book. One of them. I don’t remember which one. He believed that DNA was so complicated that it had to come from space. He didn’t believe it could have possibly evolved on Earth. And so, like, a lot of these people who are used as exemplars of scientific reductionism aren’t like that at all, when you actually read what they had to say, right? They were very aware of the limits of their own knowledge, and… I mean, DNA is something really quite spectacularly remarkable. It’s an eternal substance. It’s been around for a very long time, and the idea that we understand it is a very stupid idea. And I would say that… I would say that the same thing applies to the brain. Like, we’re scratching away at the surface of something we don’t understand at all. And so it’s quite interesting, I think, that… And maybe Michelangelo had enough gall to do that. It’s certainly possible. I mean, he had enough gall to do dissections when the cost of that was death. You know, he had to rob corpses, essentially, to go and do it. So he was… I would say not particularly politically correct. So… So that’s kind of interesting, and there’s another representation of the same thing. And that’s a funny one. I had to throw that in. I don’t know how many of you know this, but there’s… There’s this joke in the atheistic-atheist community. I think it might have been started by Richard Dawkins, but that might be wrong. That it was just as reasonable to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster as it was to believe in Gott. And that’s the Flying Spaghetti Monster, by the way. And… And so that’s… That’s called touched by his noodly appendage. Anyways. It’s not very sophisticated, but it is funny.