faetal on 13/2/2015 at 07:23
No, of course not. It's not narrow-minded to define "we don't know" as "we don't know".
It is however fairly nonsensical to define it as "probably god".
Besides, if another universe or many others exist in parallel, then that is also part of nature. If something exists it is natural. Calling something supernatural just seems to be a way of saying "no logic applies therefore it can be anything I want it to be".
zombe on 14/2/2015 at 09:05
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
I find even that a bit narrowminded. For starters, we aren't even sure that this is the only universe.
Wut? How is universe defined for you?
( relevant recent sixty symbols video: (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3TDO1AA1Sw) )
PS. IMNSHO. Multiverses are all bollocks (*) and as long as no clear connection with ours can be shown then they do not have any relevance with anything by definition - and if a connection is found then they will be part of our universe and you do not have a multiverse.
(*) pretty much all of them are incredibly speculative gibberish that only Michio Kaku can say with a straight face (then again, there isn't anything he would not say). Stuff outside the observable range is the most sensible possibility - but outside of relevance range so far (and that might never change as -> space is expanding and expansion has no relativistic speed limit -> the observable range increases but the amount of stuff inside the range decreases -> till only our own galaxy remains [+a few other nearby gravitationally bound ones]).
faetal on 16/2/2015 at 10:48
The notion that thoughts travel faster than light is begging the question.
Flyingfish45 on 18/2/2015 at 14:00
Wow, so much reaction over being bored.
faetal on 18/2/2015 at 14:08
If the internet had a sub-heading, that'd be it.
Tony_Tarantula on 22/2/2015 at 22:37
Quote Posted by demagogue
I think the idea comes from the saying "ontogony recapitulates phylogony", which means you're put together in the womb in the same order that evolution went through, from single cell organism to chordate to fish to lizard to mouse to monkey to human. Then what I said was just the same idea looking at it from the inside of your own experience, since the parts of you put together earlier in the womb give you the more basic, primeval experiences.
Phylogenic time means back in evolutionary history. Your most basic consciousness and fear reflexes come from fish & lizards; your emotions come from small mammals; your social experience comes from primates; and the really highlevel stuff from humans.
In Buddhism, your next life is determined by karma from your actions in this life. So you could come back in your next life as a snake if you sleep too much (which is what my Buddhist girlfriend used to always warn me). And I think it's a problem if you have any memory of a past life at all. So ... I don't think it's all that Buddhist. But Buddhists are into putting aside the distractions of day-to-day experience to focus on the deep stuff in their experience, and that's what meditation and the 8 way path to enlightenment, etc, are mostly about as I understand it. IMO they're talking about basically the same thing. I just don't think a Buddhist would want to admit it's not really nirvana they're after, just the slug part of their brain.
Demagogue:
Are you referring to the way in which grey matter can (supposedly) store information in intuitive form between lifetimes? Which would mean that humans if evolved (or engineered) from fish/lizard intelligences that some of that would have carried forward through time?
demagogue on 23/2/2015 at 04:09
Nope. It just means if you think of your brain as an onion, the outer layers were later evolutionary contributions, and the deeper you go towards the midbrain, the further back in evolutionary time each part was added to the code, so you'll find homologues with an increasing number of species as you go deeper. Just plain vanilla genetics. (Actually it's more complex than that because it's not so linear and tidy, but that's the rough idea.)
faetal on 23/2/2015 at 09:52
Also, unless a specific function in the brain has a genetic determinant, it can't be carried forward since each new brain builds itself from scratch. There's a lot of interesting stuff bubbling to the surface with epigenetics though, so it's no longer thought to be the case that all adaptations are mutation-derived, which allows for faster, more flexible changes. Neuroscience and epigenetics have a huge amount of mystery left in them, so I remain prepared for all manner of weird discoveries about what we can and can't inherit.
