On February 13, 2007, I started writing texts driven by a deep existential anguish that arose from the fact that I had (apparently) lost faith in anything. Searching, reasoning, writing, jotting down things I saw or heard, I created something that could perhaps be called a diary. The name I give it stems from my current condition of recently self-included among the ranks of atheism. For the religious, I warn that my blog will not be pleasant, and my (in)decision will hardly be reversed. For atheists as well, I cannot promise intellectual satisfaction, as my condition is likely too transient to consider myself among them for long. I will begin transcribing texts from February 2007, in addition to writing new ones.

February 13th

…and then I wrote the first words. Here I am, it’s almost midnight, lying down, starting for the first time a ‘diary’. Why a diary? Why not a blog? Why not a file on my computer? Why, because… it’s precisely to explain the WHYS that I started this diary. And I imagined it for the first time with these pages, this black ink, and this messy handwriting. Writing has a magic that will hardly ever be rivaled by typing. And everyone types today… I’m not a writer, this is not a book, nor a work of art of any kind. It’s just reflection, materialized in this specific form of white lined pages and black ink. That’s all. Although I only superficially understand WHY a written diary, I know very well WHY to write it. The fundamental question is that I have finally become fully and truly ATHEIST. In Nietzsche’s words, ‘I have killed God’. I cannot accept or believe in the general religious concepts of an afterlife, deus ex machina, judgment, heaven, hell, etc. This deeply disturbs me. However, at the moment, I am too sleepy, and my source of light (the cellphone) is running out of battery. Tomorrow I will continue from where we left off…

February 14th

I wake up at 6:00 AM. The night wasn’t great. My wife woke up in the early hours with a severe migraine. My daughter woke up coughing a lot. The news talks about violence and shows a body wrapped in a sheet. I wanted to spare my daughters from these things, but they’re present all the time!

It’s almost 10:00 PM, and I’m at the hospital on duty. The same thoughts haunt me. Are we just clocks that will one day lose their winding and stop marking time? I think so, and I can no longer convince myself otherwise. This morning, my youngest daughter cried for me to stay with her. I told her to join the group while I observed from a distance. After an impromptu ‘funeral’ for a dead insect organized by the teacher, she separated from the group and walked back to the classroom with a sad face, obviously looking for me. I called her. Instantly, she became calm, and our goodbye was without tears or trauma. That’s why I never lie to them. That’s why I never threaten to abandon them, jokingly or to gain obedience. That’s why I believe all she needs from us is security and patience. That’s why I think these moments are and will be the closest I’ll ever get to happiness and eternity.

February 16th

Today, I hurriedly left the infirmary, letting the troupe of philosophers and therapists of my unconscious/conscious mind (currently consisting of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud) take charge, and went to my daughters’ daycare carnival.

The best part was jumping around with them and then running to the sand barefoot. Always Lacan… I was with my wife, and we were doing well. She was happy, feeling good, enjoying herself. It was worth forgetting about the hospital and the patients. Well, after getting home, I couldn’t resist and still called the infirmary and the pediatrician from the neurosurgery department, under the disapproving gaze of Freud, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer.

Well, someday I’ll get there.

“Become who you are.”

• Nietzsche

I am still haunted by thoughts of the annihilation of death. A popular magazine featured an article on magical thinking. It says that the men who survived the Ice Age were only those who developed faith and religion. Religare - the communication not with a god, but with oneself. So, my “little angel” is a Neanderthal who fears his gods and respects his ancestors. And he is angry!

“We love more the desire than the desired being.”

• Nietzsche

Saint Patrick - Triad

Tabhair dom ghrása,

Fíormhac Dé.

Tabhair dom do neartsa,

An ghrair  gheal glé.

(Give me grace,

True Son of God.

Give me your strength,

The very bright beauty.)

• Unknown author, recorded by Eithne Patricia Ní Bhraonáin (Enya)

February 18th

Day off, except for going to the zoo in the afternoon. We almost didn’t get in. The girls loved it, of course.

I started reading quantum physics again. But this time it’s not calming me down like it used to. Contemplating the multiverse doesn’t bring relief to the Neanderthal poked by philosophers. What good is an immortal and infinite universe? If it really exists, who knows for sure.

February 19th

Beach. Everything is great.

We humans always feel calm and good at the beach, or almost always. It’s a somewhat innate response. Our ancestors knew that the coastline usually meant safety and abundance. Always the Neanderthal. He is behind almost everything we find good and soothing or satisfying, isn’t he?

What in us is biological and what is social? And what is social, exactly? Why do we have consciousness? I searched “proof of life after death” on Google. My obsession continues. The philosophers shook their heads disapprovingly. There’s a website with old photos of “materialized” ectoplasms. If it’s up to these photos, my skepticism is unshakable.

Someone posted their “logical proof” of life after death on the internet. The problem is that this proof relies on at least three a priori dogmas that cannot be proven and our lack of knowledge about the nature of consciousness. In fact, this is the last bastion of the Neanderthal: what is consciousness? When does it begin? When does it end?

February 20th

Lazy day and shopping center.

More research - Parapsychology

Two phenomena seem to have “scientific evidence” in meta-analyses of small studies: Ganzfeld - telepathy experiment and microPK (micropsychokinesis) - psychokinesis experiment with automatic machines or small objects. Critics argue that the data contain biases and are not well analyzed. Even if there is no apparent intentional bias, the effects are relatively subtle, despite being homogeneous. Another thing, one of the main current criticisms is that the small effect apparently observed in Ganzfeld cannot be interpreted as proof of telepathy!

Currently, there are several hundred small Ganzfeld experiments conducted by very few experimental groups included in the meta-analyses. I believe that any small effect shown in this scenario speaks more about the human relationship with statistics and our misuse of it. For an oncologist like me, it is common to see significant effects of new treatments in small studies, which dissipate in larger-scale works.

February 21st

8:00 pm

I’m starting my shift. I begin with quotes:

“Where death is, I am not. Where I am, death is not.”

• Lucretius

“I believe that life is a spark between two identical voids: the darkness before birth and that after death.”

• Irvin D. Yalom (The latter, Yalom must have taken from a thought of Schopenhauer).

I have been listening to a song a lot lately that I first heard over 10 years ago when I was a medical student.

MERCY STREET (Peter Gabriel, Album: So)

looking down on empty streets, all she can see

are the dreams all made solid

are the dreams all made real

all of the buildings, all of those cars

were once just a dream

in somebody’s head

she pictures the broken glass, she pictures the steam

she pictures a soul

with no leak at the sea

let’s take the boat out \ (twice)

wait until darkness comes /

nowhere in the corridors of pale green and gray

nowhere in the suburbs

in the cold light of day

there in the midst of it so alive and alone

words support like bone

dreaming of mercy street

wear your inside out

dreaming of mercy

in your daddy’s arm again

dreaming of mercy street

swear they moved that sign

dreaming of mercy

in your daddy’s arms

pulling out the papers from the

drawers that slide smooth

tugging at the darkness, word upon word

confessing all the secret things in the warm velvet box

to the priest - he’s the doctor

he can handle all the shocks

dreaming of the tenderness - the tremble in the hips

of kissing mary’s lips

dreaming of mercy street

wear your insides out

dreaming of mercy

in your daddy’s arms

mercy, mercy, looking for mercy (twice)

Anne, with her father is out in the boat

riding the water

riding the waves on the sea

I had this record…

Lacan used to say that the best age of a human being is when we were 3 years old.

February 23rd

I am admitting a 6-year-old girl with myasthenia gravis in crisis and pneumonia - I am concerned about her condition.

1:00 am

She experiences a myasthenic crisis with apnea and likely massive bronchoaspiration, beginning her ordeal, of which I will share.

2:00 am

She is dead - I did everything I knew to save her, and during the resuscitation maneuvers, while massaging her precordium in frenzy, all I could think was ‘I won’t lose her, I can’t lose her.’ The worst part was telling the mother right after. I felt miserable throughout the day, and I think I still feel it today.

I can’t believe that there was anything in that girl that could have survived. I can only think of her end and the emptiness that followed. I was afraid of this - the encounter with death after losing my illusions. Why do we live if we die? Why do we die if we live?

Always, always, I remember my wife and the unique and individual opportunity we had to know and love each other, and how that gives value to my entire life, my fleeting and otherwise futile existence.

“Whether or not there is someone accompanying you, a person always dies alone.”

• Irvin D. Yalom

“Amor fati - Love thy fate.”

• Nietzsche

February, 24th

(…) What if god was one of us

Just a slob like one of us

Just a stranger on the bus trying to make his way home?

Like a holy rolling stone

Back up to heaven all alone

Just trying to make his way home

nobody calling on the phone

Except for the pope maybe in rome

• Joan Osborne (One of Us, Relish, lyrics and music by Eric Bazilian)

February 25th

James Cameron will release a documentary and a book tomorrow “proving” that an archaeological site found near Jerusalem 36 years ago contains the remains of Jesus, Mary, Mary Magdalene, as well as Judas, the son of Jesus and Magdalene.

Unlikely evidence aside, when money is involved, all kinds of evidence and counter-evidence emerge. We will likely witness a battle between pseudoscience and religion. The result: dust of nothing!

Note: Almost at Easter? What a coincidence!

February 26th

Make every contact with another human being an occasion worth remembering.

February 27th

Comment on human intelligence and its biological roots: after all, cockroaches also make decisions…

March 4th

You must always be ready to die, not only today, but now! That is the only freedom that is possible for us.

Is there destiny? That is a very interesting discussion. Until recently (let’s say, about 100 years ago), the laws of physics, if applied “to the letter,” could imply that the destiny of any system in this universe is predetermined by the initial conditions. Like that thing with the ball and the inclined plane: knowing all the variables, one could calculate EXACTLY where the ball will be in the future. If the system involves two spheres, knowing all the initial variables and the laws of the system, we can predict with absolute certainty (as absolute as the exact values we have) where each sphere will be at each moment in the future, whether they will meet, etc.

Theoretically, this progression could be repeated, increasing in linear complexity, without altering the accuracy of the predictions, as long as the quantity and precision of the initial data and the ability to calculate the mathematics derived from the laws describing any system also increase. Even in an organism with hundreds of billions of cells, given the initial conditions with precision and sufficient details, along with exhaustively complete laws, we could calculate where EVERY ATOM AND MOLECULE WOULD BE AT ANY MOMENT, that is, everything that would happen to an organism. Since the brain is material, every small action and decision could also be predicted. Like Laplace’s perfect computer, which knew everything in the present, past, and future.

In other words, everything could be predicted, everything is determined, everything is WRITTEN, Maktub! Well, the laws of physics are no longer the same, and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Lorenz’s Butterfly Effect have sabotaged the Laplacian ideal of a deterministic universe.

But what is the practical impact of these new principles on the question of destiny? In truth, no one knows! Risking any answer would be a mixture of literature and cheap spirituality. Perhaps, more than that, our own imperfection sabotages destiny…

March 2nd was my daughter’s birthday party. Another taste of eternity. The best part was seeing her joy. The children loved it. The adults, as always, think it’s just part of it. Adults don’t necessarily have fun at kids’ parties. But I did.

Seeing the sparkle in my daughter’s eyes and her enchantment when they sang “Happy Birthday” was enough. As I write these lines, two days later, I remember that those moments only exist in my memory, and human memory is not a “photograph” or a “recording,” I don’t have precise details “printed” in my brain, but rather a sophisticated virtual “recreation” based on the modifications that hundreds of millions of neurons underwent that day, induced by the experiences I lived. In short: the brain never really remembers anything, it reconstructs “previous” moments in the present. This reconstruction is not always perfect and may change over time. That’s why it’s no use living on memories… that’s an illusion. Carpe diem! Enjoy life TODAY!

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain . Time to die.”

• Roy Batty, character played by Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner (1982), in the final dialogue.

“Like tears in rain…”, a beautiful metaphor for us and our memories. I have never forgotten it.

Today, the documentary by James Cameron and Simcha Jacobovici aired on Discovery Channel: ‘The Lost Tomb of Jesus’. Controversy aside, an interview for TODAY on NBC’s website was quite interesting. He argued that his controversial claim of having found the bones of Jesus does not necessarily undermine the dogma of resurrection but rather sparks another discussion: Did Jesus rise ‘spiritually’ or ‘bodily’? What a gem! It’s clear that they are just having fun at the expense of Catholics! The Jews seem to have enjoyed the novelty…

In the interview, Cameron says: ‘The resurrection itself is not challenged. […] Where you get stuck is the physical ascension to heaven, taking his bones and body with him to heaven, instead of leaving them behind on earth.’

They are really making a mockery of the Catholic Church. But the idea still holds significance for reflection: would it make any sense for a god to ‘die’ (although, according to the Bible, he did die) and instead of physically resurrecting, only reappears in spirit and leaves a body to decay and turn into bones for posterity? Do divine bones possess any special properties? And the alternative, a god who became flesh (according to the doctrine), truly died and resurrected that flesh, and with body and all, ascended to paradise. What happened to the body, the flesh? As we know, living flesh has the unfortunate habit of aging and eventually dying. Did he then become immortal and still remains alive somewhere today (in the spiritual realm?)? Can there be a person of flesh and bone in the afterlife? If he is still alive, can he die again? Can the process that prevented him from aging in the last 2000 years be applied to us?

The notes of past days continue…

March 06th

Fernando Portela Câmara writes, in issue 7, volume 10, of Psychiatry on line Brasil, in July 2005:

“We are the unexpected result of leaps in quality. Throughout nature, especially in the biological domain, we perceive these leaps and their traces in all sorts of combinations of programs, behaviors and forms everywhere. Human society represents one of these leaps and not We would think, plan and maybe not even have the language we have and the means of communication if life in society didn’t push us a little further to the edge of chaos.” Complexity Theory explaining the emergence of consciousness from complex systems? Psychiatrist Eulen Bleuler called “psychoid” all vital manifestations endowed with real analogies with psychic phenomena. For him, the human psyche would be a special “psychoid” case. Tears in the rain…

“The church says the earth is flat, but I know it’s round, because I’ve seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.”

• Ferdinand Magellan

March 07th

“The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. For better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.”

• Carl Sagan

The main argument for our real finitude and absence of continuity after death is the one (in my view) that talks about our desire. WE WOULD REALLY LIKE not to die, so WE WOULD REALLY WANT to see evidence of continuity. Nothing in this climate can be considered objective. Our search for the afterlife, through religion, pseudo-science or whatever, serves primarily to fulfill a deep need, not to seek the truth. The truth is already there: if even the Universe we know will “die” one day, how can we dare to want to be immortal?

Tears in the rain.

More past notes…

March 8th

what are we?

After all, we are capable of being more lecherous and violent than our ancestors and ape cousins ​​themselves, never managing to contemplate the divine nature that we create and try to instill in things, only ourselves, reflected in the mirror of all things, without even being able to guided by our supposed rationality.

What sets us apart, then, really? What makes us unique, if any?

THE DREAM! (Does any animal dream?)

In fact, animals (mammals) also have REM sleep like humans, but as for the content, nothing is known. I believe that, probably, animals dream too, dreams different from ours, just as the dreams of small children are different (simpler). After all, phylogeny shows that no ability comes “ready-made.” It evolves and “improves” over time.

However, when I speak of dreaming, or dreaming, I am not referring to the biological ability to create or construct “virtual” mental content during sleep; it is clear that such a capacity, based on neural networks existing in our brains, did not “appear” in the human being, being the result of evolution. Thus, even if the human being may be capable of dream activity radically different from that of other animals, there must be “precursors” of dream activity, an “omniroid” content even in primitive mammals and, who knows, even in previously placed animals. on the evolutionary scale. In other words, dreaming is biological, and everything that is biological is not our absolute exclusivity, but the result of a long evolution, even our minds.

What I’m talking about is the DREAM, the ability to DREAM with what we desire, want, the human being dreams of his destiny. This, I believe, is unparalleled among other animals. This ability sets us apart more than our supposed “rationality,” which is only apparent. Think, how much of any banal decision we make is actually “rational”! Perhaps the people best able to answer this question today are not psychologists, biologists, physicists, mathematicians, or even mystics, but advertisers!

As a physician, I often have to make decisions that affect the “fate” of patients. But by that word, what do I mean? As criticized as it is, evidence-based medicine helps answer this question. Now, every time we make clinical decisions about a patient, we are, even if unconsciously, choosing one or more “outcomes” of the proposed treatment and setting up, once again mostly unconsciously, a “model” of how to arrive at this one(s). ) outcome(s). In addition, we gather “evidence” (mostly unconscious) that corroborate the “model” assembled and that increase the “chance” of reaching the “outcome(s)”. I put everything in quotation marks because such concepts are scientific, taken from the way evidence-based medicine works. But I believe that such concepts, within certain limits, are useful for understanding our decision-making process. Human beings are clearly not rational (in the scientific sense) in making decisions. The human brain uses its neural networks to choose between several available options or to creatively adapt what is at hand using a heuristic method. Among other things, our brain recognizes and registers patterns of frequently repeating events and compares these patterns with other patterns, categorizing things and patterns and creating hierarchies of events and similarities or differences. An example is the way young children differentiate between “living” and “non-living” things. The first criterion, apparently, is spontaneous movement, then, over time, other characteristics follow (such as having “skin” or “hair”, or “breathing”) that are added to the stored pattern of what is “alive”. " and allow the child to recognize and differentiate between what is alive and what is not with increasing accuracy. That’s why it’s so easy to deceive the human being, if you put before him a set of information that the stored “patterns” cannot adequately define. Detail: this process is far from being “conscious”. It depends on neural networks established from childhood.

This pattern similarity comparison mechanism reminds me of the Homeopaths’ Similarity Principle: similia similibus curantur. Perhaps, the human taste for this and other unscientific practices is related to the human neural pattern recognition mechanism. Like art, they “speak” to us… Coming back to fate and evidence-based medicine, obviously when I talk about your concepts it’s just an analogy. But I believe that when we talk about someone’s “destiny”, we have a very objective idea (a pattern), unconsciously, of what we want for the patient. In other words, our “real” concept of destiny is not at all philosophical, it is very practical, even if we are not aware of it. Destiny is the suffering

March 18th

Whatever we do, say, change, will never change our ultimate destiny, nor will it retain any meaning for us or those we love. One day, sooner or later, everything we are, we do and we dream will no longer make sense to anyone. So why live, if destiny is death?

Amor fati - love thy fate!

Carpe diem! - enjoy now!

Everything we are, accomplished and dreamed of makes sense now! And that’s all that matters! The afterlife - if it existed - would only be a sad solace. And it would deprive us of the sweet irresponsibility of complete deletion in the future.

Spiritualists: when humanity finally ends, what will human souls look like? Will they be upgraded? Or does the spiritist theory demand that humanity never ends?

I don’t believe in paradise, heaven, heavenly reward for the righteous, but I believe in hell: it exists in the head, in the mind of wicked and sick people.

March 26th

We are just ourselves, the only thing we can be, right or not, wrong or not, good or bad, just us.

I’ve always had this feeling of not belonging, of not belonging here, of not being connected, of being apart. Only my daughters made me feel different.

One day I will die and everything I am will disappear without a trace. One day all I’ve done will be forgotten, and my trail will be as anonymous as footprints in the sand. One day humanity itself will disappear forever and I will have no more descendants on Earth. One day the Earth itself will perish within the fire of a giant sun and the universe will never be remembered that there once was humanity. Funny, all these facts are more certain than my fate in 5 minutes. Because?

Blind forces have brought us this far, to the point of contemplating ourselves and the universe in its splendor? A set of equations without consciousness? Is it easier to believe in this than in a god? No, it’s not easier, in fact, it’s just more likely. Why believe what we want simply because it is what we want? Is it not more honest to open your eyes and see the truth, however cruel it may seem to us? And besides, the truth is not cruel, for cruelty is a human characteristic. The truth can be frustrating, but not cruel. However, this frustration comes from our erroneous expectations. WE THINK we want to live forever, but that’s not what we want. Who would really want to age forever…? WE THINK, then, that we want to be young forever, so that old age doesn’t rob us of our vitality, but again that’s not what we want. Imagine life eternally young. We would have children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and from a certain point on, we would no longer be able to take care of our descendants, they would lose their meaning for us. Then we would spend eternity barren, unless we go back to the beginning and have children again, and our eternal life would be an eternal cycle of starting over from the same point and losing everything from a certain point. Imagine what love could REALLY withstand eternity. In romantic stories, the eternity formula “and they lived happily ever after” is invariably followed by “THE END” and then the movie ends. And in spiritist films and novels, the meeting of soulmates, always at the end, just before the “fade out”, takes the form of an ethereal disembodiment in myriads of beautiful lights. No one who admires “happy endings” and hopes for eternal life has ever imagined the ETERNAL ROUTINE, I’m sure. When I was a child (the age at which we are most intelligent) this idea fascinated and challenged me: what does one do during ETERNAL life? The Catholic response of an eternal, static contemplation of God filled me with horror. I think that would fill any child with horror. So we actually THINK we want eternal life, but logically we never imagined its more obvious consequences. Only, I come to the conclusion, we just don’t want to grow old or die. We are mortal beings reluctant to die.

And even then, we will die.

March 28th

Since our existence is fleeting, the annihilation of what we are and what we do right, our nature being selfish, time being irretrievable, is it worth believing in altruism, in any kind of kindness and gratuitousness? For me, the answer is categorically YES!

Within certain limits, because our nature is clearly self-centered, as it would have to be in any animal that seeks self-preservation, I believe that the very fact of being alive is something wonderful, miraculous. Not in the supernatural sense, of the miracle that subverts natural laws at will, but a miracle of the real! Just because there is no such thing as the magical and the supernatural, we shouldn’t belittle the transcendental beauty of reality! The huge cosmos filled with stars and galaxies, the mystery and wonder of dark matter and ethereal dark energy. The newfound quintessence. The subtle emergence of life amidst the turmoil of inorganic matter. The explosion of complexity of increasingly numerous and diverse life forms. The emergence of the miraculous spark of self-awareness at the heart of neural networks that have evolved to mirror the world and know it. Why don’t we talk more about the miracles that surround us? So I think that, in return for the great gift we have received, our life, whether it be from a god or from a profound cosmic force unconscious of what it creates, becomes very little even if we do all the good that we are capable of in this life. It is almost an obligation, certainly an honor and indeed a great pleasure, to spend all the life we have bringing goodness and gratuitousness to this existence, to all beings! It is a tiny retribution in exchange for everything we receive for the fact that we were born one day. Apart from that, it is also concluded that, in addition to the gift of life itself, everything else that we experience or have that is good and pleasant is a bonus, an extra prize for those already awarded. In this way, it is worth leaving our natural selfishness to live like this, for the mere gratitude of living!

From this perspective, the annihilating death loses its strength and becomes pale, as it is itself incapable of reversing and erasing the life we lived before. Death, in fact, is just another part of life, its ending. Like everything that has a beginning, it must necessarily have an end.

December 16th

To die is to return to the beginning of everything…