Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Vincent Darrell on February 3, 2012 at 6:52pm

I loved the Zuni Indian reference you had in your reply. Don't mind if I use that in my conversations with people :)

I really enjoyed the rest of your reply as well, not just because of the ideas therein contained, but also because you write with great clarity. Thanks!

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Permalink Reply by Atheist Exile on February 3, 2012 at 10:23pm

I'll second Vincent's reply. :-)

In the last 2 days (before joining this conversation, I was reading about Conscious Realism, Donald D. Hoffman), I've read a LOT about consciousness and it's role in physics. The ideas seem alien, if not downright crazy. But they're a whole lot easier to swallow if you're a quantum physicist inured to the picture of the universe painted by quantum theory. I thought Hoffman's theory was hocus-pocus but after reading more about the topic, I found that his theory fits quantum mechanics and that his mathematical proof for spectrum inversion is scientifically rigorous. After finding so many physicists who claim that objective reality is truly quantum, one begins to wonder just how secure one's own grasp of reality is.

The point driven home is that what we see is not real. Seeing is no longer believing once you understand how the brain represents the world according to what we've evolved to process quickly.

But back to the original point. If causality is a law of nature and the conservation of energy is a law of physics, why the roles for information and consciousness in the universe unless there's an intelligence to make use of them? And if they're truly part of physical reality, doesn't that mean the "intelligence" must have preceded the Big Bang (because the laws of nature were fixed very shortly thereafter). And what's to separate that intelligence from a pantheistic God?

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Permalink Reply by Brad Snowder on February 1, 2012 at 1:44pm

1. God is mostly hydrogen. 2. The dense primordial goo of the early Universe was impregnated with something dark and yeasty.

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Permalink Reply by Ben on February 1, 2012 at 3:57pm

myself

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Permalink Reply by John Burke on February 1, 2012 at 4:01pm

I always seem to go back to Guns, Germs, and Steel, the phenomenal Pulitzer Prize winning book by Jared Diamond that puts forth a convincing argument on how geography had such a powerful influence on the development of human culture and civilization over the past 10,000 years or so. From the description:

Until around 11,000 BC, all peoples were still Stone Age hunter/gatherers. At that point, a great divide occurred in the rates that human societies evolved. In Eurasia, parts of the Americas, and Africa, farming became the prevailing mode of existence when indigenous wild plants and animals were domesticated by prehistoric planters and herders. As Jared Diamond vividly reveals, the very people who gained a head start in producing food would collide with preliterate cultures, shaping the modern world through conquest, displacement, and genocide.The paths that lead from scattered centers of food to broad bands of settlement had a great deal to do with climate and geography. But how did differences in societies arise? Why weren't native Australians, Americans, or Africans the ones to colonize Europe? Diamond dismantles pernicious racial theories tracing societal differences to biological differences. He assembles convincing evidence linking germs to domestication of animals, germs that Eurasians then spread in epidemic proportions in their voyages of discovery. In its sweep, Guns, Germs and Steel encompasses the rise of agriculture, technology, writing, government, and religion, providing a unifying theory of human history as intriguing as the histories of dinosaurs and glaciers.

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Permalink Reply by M on February 1, 2012 at 4:16pm

There still so much more to learn and discover scientifically!  Love it.

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Permalink Reply by Doubting Thomas on February 2, 2012 at 4:02am

time travel is possible...

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Permalink Reply by Jimmy Russell on February 22, 2012 at 11:55pm

It would have to be knowing how little we know about how our brains really work and how much potential we have left to access inside them.  Im so excited to be alive while we are unlocking so many secrets and answering so many questions, which often leads to more questions but GOD damn thats exciting hah. 

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