Re: Mind's Eye Instinct for survival

I tend to follow Lee on the god stuff. I always make time for the
Jehovas who come to the door and offer tea. I'm not sure I could live
with anyone professing such belief on a day-to-day basis. I think the
stuff is bunk and don't want to go around pretending it isn't - one
can say much the same of many other organisational practices like
appraisal we have to kow-tow to. For me god and after-life concepts
don't work as well as M.Mouse style assumptions like T = 0 and 'it's
not much use believing I am being deceived all the time by an evil
genie I never see'. I'd probably prefer if all the group were
scientists and atheists - but then I've learned I don't really want a
world full of my preferences!

Memory often seems like a scrap-book found after many years - you
reach for scissors to chop it up for fear of the embarrassment should
anyone else find it.

One standard treatment of paradigms or generic frames of reference
proposes your thought above James - and eventually goes too far in
saying different root metaphors create different realities. My own
view is something more violent is at work in a space where biology and
ideology meet. I'm pretty sure morality is earlier in evolution than
our species.

Rigsy seems to have produced an answer relevant to RP's statement. We
make a lot of fuss over our dead - but then scrub jays hold funerals
and chimps are very aware of death (and incest in a way that makes me
question morality as human faculty). Allan is delightfully wrong and
right at the same time -I suspect we don't do enough of this.

Something in life is immortal or quasi-immortal. Do creatures that
replicate by division ever die? Would you take an amoeba's place to
have this quasi-immortality? Your body is replaced every five years -
I can't help wondering why the cranky bits don't get put right. It
may soon be possible to transfer our minds to non-human substrate.
Our selfish genes are at work ensuring their replication and quasi-
immortality and may prefer non-human existence knowing of Gabbys
threat to torture them with stone, lemon and other odious cleaning
apparatus.

On 6 Dec, 03:30, rigs <rigs...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Not sure I can agree as it depends on whether you and your culture are
> rational. Without "right reason" there is less/no chance of morality
> or wisdom. One can call something a word that is essentially false but
> taken as truth/goodness.
>
> On Dec 5, 9:19 pm, James <ashkas...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > I could reference the plot of Enemy Mine but that would only prove two
> > things: my memory is junk, and I'm too trapped in that trivia world Neil
> > mentions. In my view morality resides among human faculties, perhaps
> > next to wisdom. Parallel worlds makes me think of perception trained on
> > divergent and sometimes conflicting narratives, that's just a notion
> > that passed me the other day.
>
> > Now I'm pondering why I sound like an antimonian but think like Jude. :/
>
> > On 12/5/2012 5:49 PM, gabbydott wrote:
>
> > > Oh yes, please, explain the mouse matrix to Neil! :)
>
> > > 2012/12/5 Allan H <allanh1...@gmail.com <mailto:allanh1...@gmail.com>>
>
> > >     Neil even science today is a best guess, as you put it an M Mouse
> > >     the theory of physics is based off an assumption  .. and that
> > >     assumption is so widely accepted as being true  that you no longer
> > >     realize it is an best guess..
>
> > >     Without that best guess you are playing with m mouse.  I am laughing
> > >     as I am wondering if you even know that basic assumption.
> > >     Allan
>
> > >     Matrix  **  th3 beginning light
>
> > >     On Dec 5, 2012 9:58 AM, "archytas" <nwte...@gmail.com
> > >     <mailto:nwte...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> > >         On he unlikeliness of a beginning see Susskind -
> > >        http://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.5385v1.pdf
> > >         - it's free.  There's a 'sort of' answer to your 'centre'
> > >         question in
> > >         it James - sadly not starring M.Mouse so you and I can grasp it.
> > >         Big Bang was not claimed as fact in science and nor was its
> > >         successor
> > >         that has an air of rigs' negative space about it.  Inflation theory
> > >         runs, more or less, like this:
> > >           Inflation starts with a vacuum in an unusually high energy
> > >         state and
> > >         with a negative pressure. Together these give the vacuum repulsive
> > >         gravity that pushes things apart rather than draws them
> > >         together. This
> > >         inflates the vacuum, making it more repulsive, which causes it to
> > >         inflate even faster.
>
> > >         But the inflationary vacuum is quantum in nature, which makes it
> > >         unstable. All over it, and at random, bits decay into a normal,
> > >         everyday vacuum. Imagine the vacuum as a vast ocean of boiling
> > >         water,
> > >         with bubbles forming and expanding across its length and
> > >         breadth. The
> > >         energy of the inflationary vacuum has to go somewhere and it
> > >         goes into
> > >         creating matter and heating it to a ferocious temperature inside
> > >         each
> > >         bubble. It goes into creating big bangs. Our universe is inside one
> > >         such bubble that appeared in a big bang 13.7 billion years ago.  One
> > >         of the striking features of inflation is that it is eternal. New
> > >         high-
> > >         energy vacuum is created far faster than it is eaten away by its
> > >         decay
> > >         into ordinary vacuum, which means that once inflation starts, it
> > >         never
> > >         stops and universes bubble off forever in the future. But because
> > >         eternal inflation avoids the dreaded singularity, it opens up the
> > >         possibility that this has always been the case with universes
> > >         bubbling
> > >         off forever in the past too.
>
> > >         Other models include the "cyclic universe" developed within string
> > >         theory by Neil Turok. Here, our universe is a four-dimensional
> > >         island,
> > >         or "brane", in a higher dimensional space. It collides
> > >         repeatedly with
> > >         a second brane. Think of the two branes as two parallel slices of
> > >         bread, coming together along a fifth dimension, passing through each
> > >         other, pulling apart again, then coming together again. Each
> > >         time the
> > >         branes touch, their tremendous energy of motion along the fifth
> > >         dimension creates matter on each brane and heats it to tremendous
> > >         temperature. To observers on the brane, it looks exactly like a big
> > >         bang and would lead to the same patterns in the cosmic microwave
> > >         background and distributions of galaxies. Yet it is a big bang
> > >         without
> > >         a beginning,because the cycles have been repeating for eternity.
> > >           Some
> > >         say matter on the branes expands more with each cycle and this means
> > >         that if you run it backwards like a movie in reverse, the cyclic
> > >         universe encounters either a singularity or some kind of beginning
> > >         like inflation, In the "emergent universe" it all begins as a small
> > >         static universe, which exists in this state for an infinite
> > >         amount of
> > >         time before suddenly being triggered to inflate. Such scenarios do
> > >         arise in string theory.  Just as Einstein's static universe (that
> > >         preceded Bigly Bangly) was unstable and needed the extra
> > >         ingredient of
> > >         cosmic repulsion, two weird ingredients: a vacuum with negative
> > >         energy, and fault-lines in space-time known as domain walls that
> > >         are a
> > >         feature of some models of particle physics are needed to make this
> > >         model work. Domain walls should leave an imprint on the
> > >         temperature of
> > >         the cosmic microwave background radiation, which has not been seen,
> > >         but this might be explained if they were diluted away by inflation.
>
> > >         None of these models is true - they are just the best good minds in
> > >         the subject area can muster.  We lay people confuse ourselves on the
> > >         certainty and claims made abut these models and are exposed to them
> > >         through idiot media.  Right or wrong we don't get any closer to god
> > >         concepts, though the physics may be limited by our early exposure to
> > >         such myths.  Science may be a religion that admits it is uncertain
> > >         about its god.  Maybe we made our journey to 'now' without past
> > >         information because such information cannot be retained in such
> > >         'travel' as ours.  We might cross a singularity in the future after
> > >         which we can only conceive of what we have done so far as an
> > >         ignorant
> > >         beginning..
>
> > >         On 5 Dec, 04:48, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com
> > >         <mailto:nwte...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> > >          > Amazing how little the group knows of physics.  RP has a
> > >         reasonable
> > >          > definition of creator origin, though it is a 'singularity' in the
> > >          > sense science collapses in and around it.  Nothing wrong with
> > >         that but
> > >          > it doesn't help make radios (etc).  Matter isn't necessarily
> > >         energy -
> > >          > there is just a conservation law that connects them, itself
> > >         connected
> > >          > with momentum.  Big Bang is a construction and losing favour.
> > >          > Multiple universes and mirror worlds are also constructions
> > >         used to
> > >          > explain 'evidence'.
> > >          > I'm not sure how we can explain not being at the centre of a
> > >         universe
> > >          > we can't really define - and our observations of it are known
> > >         to be
> > >          > 'skewed' by living in an area of normal matter and high
> > >         gravity.  If
> > >          > you want to make a magnet you probably need relativity - even to
> > >          > explain how a lead-acid battery works as well as it does.  This
> > >          > doesn't make the theory complete.
>
> > >          > Knowing about science doesn't help much with god or why we
> > >         cling to
> > >          > this rock and want to know why, purpose, lack of it and how
> > >         we should
> > >          > live.  Negative space is an art concept.  Vacuums are thought
> > >         to have
> > >          > energy -  the virtual particles, which are known to be
> > >         particle pairs
> > >          > that blink into existence and then annihilate in a timespan
> > >         too short
> > >          > to measure. They do this everywhere, throughout the Universe ( a
> > >          > postulate as no one has been to look).
>
> > >          > I have never seen any evidence for a spiritual world, but
> > >         think such
> > >          > may be an emergent property of the way we live.
>
> > >          > On 4 Dec, 15:33, Allan H <allanh1...@gmail.com
> > >         <mailto:allanh1...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> > >          > > That is not true  the beginning can be pretty much
> > >         pinpointed ..  as for
> > >          > > parallel universes that is just a wild guess with nothing
> > >         to support the
> > >          > > other than it sounds good.  There is more evidence
> > >         supporting the spiritual
> > >          > > realm than parallel
>
> ...
>
> read more »

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