AEON
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
and really, what the hell do I know?
LOL - what do any of us really know about these things? But it's fun as hell to think about.
and really, what the hell do I know?
But the expansion isn't really an expansion in the way we would normally think about it. The space itself isn't moving. More space is being added. It's more of an inflation...
Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.
Sam Harris has a nice short book/essay on free will
It goes deeper than that though. We - our conscious we - are not in control at all. Our conscious control of our bodies and thoughts is an illusion. And when you think about it, our choice of words, decisions we make, ideas we get to make a decision about something, etc are all obviously not created consciously. They come from deeper in our brains and we are conscious of their manifestation, but we really had no control over their coming into being. Blurt out the first word that comes to your mind. You can't say for certain where that word came from. Why did you say refrigerator instead of muffin top? (and where did those come from in my brain?). It emerged from the darkness of your mind. This goes for everything you've ever done and ever thought. I can't remember if it was in the Harris book or Dennet book, but experiments have been done where the subject was placed in front of two buttons - left and right - and had electrodes stuck to their heads. A screen in front of them would flash a random sequence of numbers. The subjects were asked to push either the left or right button and record what number was on screen at the moment they made their decision. The brain activity indicated their decisions were made several seconds before they were conscious of the decision being made. Sometimes as much as 10 seconds prior. Your decisions aren't coming from your consciousness. It's kind of spooky, but really, what difference does it make? You as a system are still making these choices, it's just that you have no conscious free will over them.
To me, this shouldn't come as a surprise, though. Consciousness seems to be nothing more than a byproduct of memory. I usually use blackout drunkenness as an example, but this past UFC main event provided a great example. The challenger, Junior Dos Santos, took a bit of a beating in the 3rd round. He was nearly knocked out but managed to 'recover' enough to finish and lose the 5 round bout. He doesn't remember conducting the post fight interview nor does he remember finishing the fight. He thought he got knocked out in the 3rd round. For all intents and purposes he wasn't there, but he was still making decisions and functioning as a normal human being. He wasn't conscious of it. He made no conscious choices. But his memory was impeded.
I find this fascinating, especially when you consider Alzheimer's patients - when they lose their memory they lose their personality. However, my instincts or "faith" tell me there is more to us than memories. I think that memories are a tool the spirit uses while engaging with this universe ("reality") - but the spirit exists both in and beyond this universe at the same time. When one decreases - the other eventually increases.
That's my Deepak idea of the day! Prove me wrong!!!
Originally Posted by Kieran McConville
Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.
Anyone check the flux capacitor?
Very good. Now is someone going to start a thread about History and Mathematics? How about Linguistics and Geography?
A team of physicists has provided some of the clearest evidence yet that our Universe could be just one big projection...
The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity....
“They have numerically confirmed, perhaps for the first time, something we were fairly sure had to be true, but was still a conjecture—namely that the thermodynamics of certain black holes can be reproduced from a lower-dimensional universe,” says Leonard Susskind, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University in California who was among the first theoreticians to explore the idea of holographic universes.
The idea that science and religion can be complimentary still seems misplaced to me. Obviously people can be religious and accept scientific explanations about the world but it seems that religious thinking is not a hinderance at best because people are great at compartmentalising their thoughts (which we all do). This is all well and good until there are subjects where the a priori religious belief requires something that the science doesn't provide evidence and bad assumptions are made.
Theistic evolution is a nice example of this. The processes that drive evolution which have been uncovered through scientific investigation appear to be unguided (at the level of mutation it looks random and selection itself is without any goals). Theistic evolution (or evolutionary creationism) wants to salvage the idea of a creator with us in mind by asserting an imperceptible God of the Gaps. When Ken Miller starts introducing a God that jigs with mutations over the course of natural history to ultimately lead to humans he's making a pseudoscientific claim. Having an intelligent designer that's intervening in a way that's indistinguishable from explicable natural processes just adds a layer of untestable complication for no good reason. It also reopens the questions of natural evil that come along with an interventionist God. I think these are bad assumptions (made by smart people) and I don't think they would be made without an earlier commitment to the idea of a creator.
/Wandering into town post
To me, theology/philosophy and science live on a sliding scale. If one end of the scale is white (science) and the other end is black (theology/philosophy) the slider sometimes (especially in quantum mechanics and astrophysics) enters into a very grey area. And I love that place!
Science is like Ivory soap, it is 99% pure.
Religion is 99% nonsense (crap)
if one wants to get clean and have good hygiene
to say that both are not 100 pure, therefore, one is not better is a poor argument.
Yes, some believe science has the absolute answers and some would say their version of theology is the absolute truth. .