EnviroLink Forum

Many chuckles and the sense that some can spin cartwheels around me! You two!!!!! .... too.

I would like to join, but have the feeling that you two are not finished spinning cartwheels! So I will unscientifically say that I think I may know where we can find 'it". The idea of God and an afterlife can be found in the brain cells .... maybe, as images. We are, our brains are, capable of forming images through our ability to imagine. We have imagined and thus created God as opposed to God creating us. We have pretty neat brains don't we? But again, when our bodies go, so do our brains. Each and every fantastic idea ends up pushing up daisies, .... just as each and every other organ that once functioned as a vialble life force, operating a viable and complex biological system, returns to the Earth. It all ends. We end. But not without passing on our stories to our children ..... so that they now "know" who our supposed enemies are. Who did what to whom. And they now "know" what our God concepts are, whether Christian of Islamist or .... whatever.

Fabulous ideas and concepts, once created by us, and inherited from our ancestors, are now passed down to and
inherited by our off-spring. But they also die, and with them, their brain matter.

We have become experts in looking for the preconceived idea of both god and afterlife. We've been at it for a very long time. The concepts have become so elaborate and our children spend many hours learning them. Entire educational systems have been devoted to teaching and passing along these elaborate concepts.(Particularly in Islamist society but also in ours). We have given much credence to science, yet how can science, peer-reviewed or otherwise, enter into a conversation about concepts of god and afterlife? Science can look at the functioning of the brain. We can and should look at the functioning of the brain because doing so opens up more questions .....

Who are we, or ARE we without ideas manufactured and stored in the brain? Again, soul is a mental construct .... and is stored in the brain ..... which dies. And if we can see this, then what is left?

i would like to include the idea of time in this conversation ...... but have the feeling that I am crashing a party.

.... but will just interject this iittle idea of time. It is an idea ..... time. Can we spin some cartwheels around the "idea" of time? Is there such a thing? Or does "time" also reside in the brain?

As far as afterlife goes, what is "us" is electrochemical activity in the brain. This is why we can be changed from who we were to someone else through injury or change in the brain. Since matter and energy cannot be destroyed we should "live" on forever ..... just not the proper organization of matter and energy in the proper order to be the "us" we know.

The carbon atoms making up all life as we know it on the planet are interchanged over the vast spans of time. Thus, any of us may have a part of a "reincarnated" dinosaur, a protohuman, or even a more recent homo sapiens. That small part will continue on long after we are gone as an entity either as matter or energy.

As for God, that is anyone's guess. Any technology sufficiently advanced will seem godlike to a very low technology and a very low technology will tend to attribute supernatural aspects to things which cannot be explained at that level of knowledge. Neadnerthal would view a modern man as a god with a flashlight and a handgun. Light without sun or fire and death from a noise .... what other explanation could there be?

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

Time keeps on slipping, slipping into the future ......

It is as a stream whose flow we can measure but never change except in relation to another. The whole realtivity aspect of time appearing to slow to an outside observer is a difficult concept for some. Of course, the concept of travel in a timelike fashion is always interesting, although really useless in reality. Since the universe is moving, any purely timelike travel would result in an apparant movement in space as the planet and solar system are in constant movement. Any travel in time alone would move one miles from their starting point and most likely in to the void of space with any but the shortest trips.

We know it is not possible for us to travel in time as being the humans we are, there would have been some example inadvertently left for us to find as a result of the experimental process. Unless, of course the act creates a separate timeline which neve interects with our own. That only means such travel is impossible for us in this timeline, which may be even more confusing.

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

So....anyone figured out where toe-jam comes from?

Would the fly in the web believe in a God that created the spider that created its predicament? Our brains can 'imagine God' 'create him' if you like but is that enough to stop him/her creating us. Every time a person or animal has diedand I've asked for a sign if they are okay something 'supernatural' has happened or what we deem to be supernatural. In the grand scheme of reality, physics I believe this to be in the natural order of things but we are restricted by our five senses. Alot of Charlatans play on our ignorance and take advantage, but these who bedevil normaly have monetary means as their end. God as the supreme parent of realtys what most crave and believe because there comes a time when ones mind goes beyond ones parents.

As William Blake ' if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.

How many times have you experienced the same journey as a driver then suddenly become a passenger and seen things you never saw? THat is just a very narrow and subtle example what Blake meant.

I bid you goodnight.

Of course a time machine could never travel before the point it was invented.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiS1IcKuG8s

Like two trains that pass on the same parallel track is this guy going on the faster one or slower one?

Sometimes I wonder should we be going backwards to see the clearer picture rather than going forwards.

True. It is what it is. How big or small is the anecdotal, subjective part.



Woo...don't let your wife see that!



We do indeed know what our senses and methods tell us exists at the time, at the place we're looking. That doesn't mean we caught it all however, to my point that we can never know what doesn't actually exist.



In that case, you'd effectively have the tools you need in the first place.



Our perception of what is time, of course, resides in the brain, along with all other thoughts and notions of what we perceive as reality. However, in reality, I have come to the conclusion that all watches lie, especially in the case of my apparent tardiness for supper.

Wayne brought up an interesting point that I've contemplated myself. We, as humans comprised of matter, have indeed been around forever and will be around long after we're dead. The arrangement of atoms won't be the same and thus, the chemistry will be different, but the same matter is still all there. Makes me want to flash freeze my brain just before it dies, so I can be reincarnated in some sort of robot body...my head then made up of my brain and eyeballs floating in a jar atop my shoulders, assuming humanoid forms are still the norm then.

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TANG SOO!

It would not be anecdotal if it were always known to be a possibility. Nor would it be subjective for the same reason. Perhaps variable would be more appropriate.



We will have been married 35 years next week so she has already heard that one several times.



I will agree that we can never completely know what exists in a sufficiently large enough
area in relation to the subject. However, the longer and more complete the search without positive evidence of existence the less the possibility of said existence.

For example, I can state for all intents and purposes, there is no intruder in this room (actually four given the open floorplan) because I have no evidence of an intruder after a search of the area. It is not probable that an intruder exists in the upper floors, but I have not suffiently searched to be able to say they do not exist. The fact the security systems both organic and electronic have not indicated such an existence is also a factor in lowering the possibility of said existence, but without a full search I cannot say there is no existence. Should the intruder be a mutant that can become invisible, teleport out of sight, or in some other way prevent detection, my position could be in error. The possibility of such an error approaches zero and the possiblity is even less.

So, while there is always a possibility of existence, the probability is for all intents zero because of the lack of evidence of existence of an intruder in this room after a sufficient search. The probability for an intruder in the house, while higher, is still for all intents zero as well.



True, but I took your initial statement to be more general in nature ... ie without a weapon from which to fire ammo it will be of little use rather than without the ability to fashion a weapon the ammo is useless.



They do. The time on my smart phone doesn not match the time on my alarm clock, which is an "Atomic clock" and supposed to be always reset to the correct time. The difference is always more than what would be expected from rounding of minutes. I must be travelling at speeds approaching that of light during the day to affect the relative time in such a fashion.



Wait, you are not already a brain in a jar typing by remote control?

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

The mind is the best weapon.

Don't blow my cover on the brain in a jar thing!!!

_________________
TANG SOO!

The mind can be a good weapon, but even the best brain in the world in a jar is going to be in trouble if an idiot with a rock decides to target practice on said jar ....

My favorite is "He who has the better ranged weapon usually wins" but all it takes is luck ... good or bad to change that.

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

i s'pose that i, or anyone else, can do some research and find out when the first ideas of afterlife emerged in human culture. I have read about it, but it surely began before any kind of technology even hit the radar. I think it was very soon after the discovery of fire which was in itself a technology .... well before radars. There are different ideas of afterlife, from heaven to reincarnation. All expose a fear of not continuing as individuals. Seems we created these concepts as antidotes to death. But, of course, there is no antidote to death and there could never be life without death. They are the flip side of the same coin.

These concepts of afterlife have become so elaborate ...... as to be readily accepted.

It is true that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and that some atoms in our bodies could very well be the same atoms that were once organized differently in different bodies ..... dinosaurs, trees, etc., etc.

So what, then, are we? We are not our heritage, memories, experiences, gender(s), ...... we are not our thoughts or even our emotions. We identify with our bodies and with our thoughts, ideas and opinions. But we are not that. Those thoughts and emotions and ideas and opinions end with the entropic end of the biological system that we call "me", or "I" or "mine" or even "us". Thoughts come and go, emotions surface like waves and are released if given room to express naturally.

Seems to me that life is doing us rather than us doing life. Yet, we are creative "doers". We cannot help but "do' with our opposable thumbs and whatnots .... we have evolved as some kind of force but cannot t responsibility nor credit for that evolution. Yet creativity is our doing ... in the present tense.

Brings many questions to light .... such as why we teach our children to sing the "national anthem" every morning while they could be out discovering what new kinds of mushrooms are growing due to the rain of autumn, for example.

And .... why do the conflicts of our parents/ancestors need to be drillled into our children, especially when life is constantly newly emerging? We have been taught to identify with certain concepts ... religious or nationalistic, or ....?

If we cannot get ourselves together, we will be spewed from this Earth as she has spewed countless civilizations before us. The Earth will heal and continue, but we will not as long as we hold ourselves separate .... as long as we identify as separate individuals .... who need a roof and clean water, and nutritious food more than the next guy, more than the "other" guy who is other only in belief/concept. The trick and trickiness of thought.

Logic has its rightful place, but EVERY single person on the planet has a brain ..... and EVERY brain is capable of some kind of logic and the logic of beliefs ends up being not so smart afterall. We have all seen many very intelectually logical people advocating separation via war, via the concept of us vs. them, when, in reality, there is no us or them. Even Hitler was 'logical', but only in the sense of a very strong identification of what it meant to be German or of the "master race" which was an idea, an ideology and an idealism. What, afterall, is a German?

This brings religion back into focus ..... or, i mean, may I? If we are all made of matter which will renew itself in one form or another, why the need for religion which ultimately separates one so called 'individual" from another? I am Catholic, but you are Protestent. I am a Shi'ite Muslim while you are the other kind of Mulsim who has the supposed same prophet? i am islamist while you are Buddhist? I am of this country and have this passport and wave this flag while you are of another and wave a different color and design? I am yellow and you are black, white, red.

All the beliefs which place us on the very same precipice that other and older civilizations placed themselves on and were wiped out .... We are on the verge.

Why have any beliefs at all?

So along comes this dude who was known as Jesus, and he says, "Treat thy neighbor as thyself", .... and we take to that saying as a "belief" in Jesus and what jesus said, when it is so obvious that if i hurt you, I am hurting myself regardless of Jesus or what he said or whether he existed at all. Why have beliefs when life is an actuality.

What flag did Jesus wave?

http://green.yahoo.com/blog/guest_blogg ... nimal.html

The turritopsis nutricula species of jellyfish may be the only animal in the world to have truly discovered the fountain of youth.

Since it is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again, there may be no natural limit to its life span. Scientists say the hydrozoan jellyfish is the only known animal that can repeatedly turn back the hands of time and revert to its polyp state (its first stage of life).

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

Flawed logic is still called logic by some. However, true logic leads to better conclusions.

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

Saturday it was the Mexican beer flag, Dos Equis, but there were other flags on the wall.

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein