A really big question

[Randyvine]

But i could not produce stable chemistry or life as we know it.

That just blows my mind into little diamond shards of broken tempered glass.

[andy06shake]

That just blows my mind into little diamond shards of broken tempered glass.

Given our current place in the universe.

With all our eggs in one basket.

At the arse end of the star's gravity well.

I think it's supposed to puggle our mere minds... 

[BeyondKnowledge]

Pretty much suggests that if the laws or constants of nature were even slightly different.

Complex structures like as atoms, stars, planets, chemistry....ultimately life, could not exist.

I don't know if the universe would necessarily collapse.

But it could not produce stable chemistry or life as we know it.

Any small changes in fundamental laws for the way things work would change everything. Life might not have been possible or been unrecognisable as we know it. 

Did the universe get board and make us to observe and understand it simply because it wanted to see if we could? We can see parts of it, does it even notice us? 

In a way, it does behave as a single organism. Cells (star systems) grow, mature, and die only to be reformed and start over. And galaxies do this on a larger scale.

[Astyanax]

The size difference between the elephant and bacteria is much less than the universe to the distance between stars but that is just as un-noticable to the universe. 

Not noticeable to the Universe? But I thought you just said...
 

‘...this very discussion is the universe trying to understand itself better’?

The distance between bacteria on an elephant’s hide and the distance between stars are both perfectly noticeable to a human being (part of the Universe) equipped with the appropriate instruments. They are therefore noticeable to the Universe considered as a unified entity.

The idea that our perceptions and understanding of the material world can be imagined as the Universe perceiving and understanding itself is perfectly logical. It is also, I’m afraid, old, old hat. There is an ancient school of Hinduism, Advaita Vedanta, which teaches it. Classical pantheism and Neoplatonism incorporate it. In the modern West, both Spinoza’s pantheistic philosophy and Liebniz’s opposing theory of monads are predicated on it, though in very different ways. In Buddhism, the ‘seats of perception’ (or viewpoints) are the only things that can be safely said to exist; they are called skandha and it is they and only they – not the physical sensations, mental attributes, thoughts or feelings they contain – that pass from birth to birth and ultimately, perhaps, lose the last traces of physical existence and experience extinction, or nirvana.
 

God is just a label put on the universe and how it works by some hairless apes that needed a way to explain what they could not properly understand.

That is only an opinion, and an unprovable one at that: a cynical dismissal of the Divine as mere superstition. It is comfortable for some of us to believe in: simple annihilation sounds a lot less unpleasant than Hell, Purgatory (which is just like being dead except you’re conscious), or even Heaven (‘prostrate before Thy throne to lie/and gaze and gaze on Thee’ – good grief, what a bore). I heartily agree: eternal death in a Godless Universe would suit me just fine.

But it is still only a belief. Persuasive as it sounds, we cannot rely on it being true. Literally anything could happen to us after death – the possibilities are infinite, certainly not limited to the Christian or any other conception of afterlife, or reincarnation. In the Many Worlds hypothesis of quantum mechanics, one possibility is that at the moment of your death a new timeline is created in which you don’t die but survive and continue to suffer, only in slightly worse condition – until that version of you dies, and another new timeline is created with an even worse-off version of you left alive, to die and live again... and again, and again and again, always in more pain and suffering than you were before. What do you think of that possibility? One hundred percent scientific and logical, I assure you...

Surely you remember why Hamlet decided against suicide?
 

To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause...

If we were sure that death really was the end, suicide would be a lot more popular than it is.

Having a scientific-materialist philosophical outlook (as I do) doesn’t mean insisting that only what can be explained in empirical, material terms exists. It works well for physical, tangible reality, but not so well for mental phenomena. What use are the analysis of pulse rates, EEG traces, hormonal flows and other symptoms in understanding what it means to be in love? And can either anthropology or biology explain in a meaningful way how we discriminate between right and wrong, and why we have such fierce differences of opinion about this?
 

*      *     *

You seem to me like a person with a philosophical mind, but not a very well-read one. May I suggest to you that you would profit from reading some real philosophers? Philosophy is not nearly so difficult as it can seem, and you’d be done with all this kindergarten stuff and could start thinking originally, or at least in a more advanced way.

I read philosophy mostly for pleasure, so I prefer the ones who are enjoyable to read: Plato, St Augustine and Nietzsche are my favourites. But the ones who make you sweat (Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant) are equally worth reading – for a philosopher. Good luck!

[BeyondKnowledge]

Not noticeable to the Universe? But I thought you just said...
 

The distance between bacteria on an elephant’s hide and the distance between stars are both perfectly noticeable to a human being (part of the Universe) equipped with the appropriate instruments. They are therefore noticeable to the Universe considered as a unified entity.

The idea that our perceptions and understanding of the material world can be imagined as the Universe perceiving and understanding itself is perfectly logical. It is also, I’m afraid, old, old hat. There is an ancient school of Hinduism, Advaita Vedanta, which teaches it. Classical pantheism and Neoplatonism incorporate it. In the modern West, both Spinoza’s pantheistic philosophy and Liebniz’s opposing theory of monads are predicated on it, though in very different ways. In Buddhism, the ‘seats of perception’ (or viewpoints) are the only things that can be safely said to exist; they are called skandha and it is they and only they – not the physical sensations, mental attributes, thoughts or feelings they contain – that pass from birth to birth and ultimately, perhaps, lose the last traces of physical existence and experience extinction, or nirvana.
 

That is only an opinion, and an unprovable one at that: a cynical dismissal of the Divine as mere superstition. It is comfortable for some of us to believe in: simple annihilation sounds a lot less unpleasant than Hell, Purgatory (which is just like being dead except you’re conscious), or even Heaven (‘prostrate before Thy throne to lie/and gaze and gaze on Thee’ – good grief, what a bore). I heartily agree: eternal death in a Godless Universe would suit me just fine.

But it is still only a belief. Persuasive as it sounds, we cannot rely on it being true. Literally anything could happen to us after death – the possibilities are infinite, certainly not limited to the Christian or any other conception of afterlife, or reincarnation. In the Many Worlds hypothesis of quantum mechanics, one possibility is that at the moment of your death a new timeline is created in which you don’t die but survive and continue to suffer, only in slightly worse condition – until that version of you dies, and another new timeline is created with an even worse-off version of you left alive, to die and live again... and again, and again and again, always in more pain and suffering than you were before. What do you think of that possibility? One hundred percent scientific and logical, I assure you...

Surely you remember why Hamlet decided against suicide?
 

If we were sure that death really was the end, suicide would be a lot more popular than it is.

Having a scientific-materialist philosophical outlook (as I do) doesn’t mean insisting that only what can be explained in empirical, material terms exists. It works well for physical, tangible reality, but not so well for mental phenomena. What use are the analysis of pulse rates, EEG traces, hormonal flows and other symptoms in understanding what it means to be in love? And can either anthropology or biology explain in a meaningful way how we discriminate between right and wrong, and why we have such fierce differences of opinion about this?
 

*      *     *

You seem to me like a person with a philosophical mind, but not a very well-read one. May I suggest to you that you would profit from reading some real philosophers? Philosophy is not nearly so difficult as it can seem, and you’d be done with all this kindergarten stuff and could start thinking originally, or at least in a more advanced way.

I read philosophy mostly for pleasure, so I prefer the ones who are enjoyable to read: Plato, St Augustine and Nietzsche are my favourites. But the ones who make you sweat (Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant) are equally worth reading – for a philosopher. Good luck!

You are correct in that I have a more scientific and engineering background in studies.

I have never said God was not devine, just organized religion stoped after writing their idea down and used religion for power rather than understanding. 

I will look into your suggestions. I primarily went back to the works the Bible is taken from and also mainly European folklore. I do need to study other sources to get a broader picture of the other philosophies.

[andy06shake]

Any small changes in fundamental laws for the way things work would change everything. Life might not have been possible or been unrecognisable as we know it. 

Did the universe get board and make us to observe and understand it simply because it wanted to see if we could? We can see parts of it, does it even notice us? 

In a way, it does behave as a single organism. Cells (star systems) grow, mature, and die only to be reformed and start over. And galaxies do this on a larger scale.

I suppose thats a question that will remain unknowable given our place.

But as you suggest, through conscious minds like our own, it might have found a way to wonder about its own existence. 

[Randyvine]

Not noticeable to the Universe? But I thought you just said...
 

The distance between bacteria on an elephant’s hide and the distance between stars are both perfectly noticeable to a human being (part of the Universe) equipped with the appropriate instruments. They are therefore noticeable to the Universe considered as a unified entity.

The idea that our perceptions and understanding of the material world can be imagined as the Universe perceiving and understanding itself is perfectly logical. It is also, I’m afraid, old, old hat. There is an ancient school of Hinduism, Advaita Vedanta, which teaches it. Classical pantheism and Neoplatonism incorporate it. In the modern West, both Spinoza’s pantheistic philosophy and Liebniz’s opposing theory of monads are predicated on it, though in very different ways. In Buddhism, the ‘seats of perception’ (or viewpoints) are the only things that can be safely said to exist; they are called skandha and it is they and only they – not the physical sensations, mental attributes, thoughts or feelings they contain – that pass from birth to birth and ultimately, perhaps, lose the last traces of physical existence and experience extinction, or nirvana.
 

That is only an opinion, and an unprovable one at that: a cynical dismissal of the Divine as mere superstition. It is comfortable for some of us to believe in: simple annihilation sounds a lot less unpleasant than Hell, Purgatory (which is just like being dead except you’re conscious), or even Heaven (‘prostrate before Thy throne to lie/and gaze and gaze on Thee’ – good grief, what a bore). I heartily agree: eternal death in a Godless Universe would suit me just fine.

But it is still only a belief. Persuasive as it sounds, we cannot rely on it being true. Literally anything could happen to us after death – the possibilities are infinite, certainly not limited to the Christian or any other conception of afterlife, or reincarnation. In the Many Worlds hypothesis of quantum mechanics, one possibility is that at the moment of your death a new timeline is created in which you don’t die but survive and continue to suffer, only in slightly worse condition – until that version of you dies, and another new timeline is created with an even worse-off version of you left alive, to die and live again... and again, and again and again, always in more pain and suffering than you were before. What do you think of that possibility? One hundred percent scientific and logical, I assure you...

Surely you remember why Hamlet decided against suicide?
 

If we were sure that death really was the end, suicide would be a lot more popular than it is.

Having a scientific-materialist philosophical outlook (as I do) doesn’t mean insisting that only what can be explained in empirical, material terms exists. It works well for physical, tangible reality, but not so well for mental phenomena. What use are the analysis of pulse rates, EEG traces, hormonal flows and other symptoms in understanding what it means to be in love? And can either anthropology or biology explain in a meaningful way how we discriminate between right and wrong, and why we have such fierce differences of opinion about this?
 

*      *     *

You seem to me like a person with a philosophical mind, but not a very well-read one. May I suggest to you that you would profit from reading some real philosophers? Philosophy is not nearly so difficult as it can seem, and you’d be done with all this kindergarten stuff and could start thinking originally, or at least in a more advanced way.

I read philosophy mostly for pleasure, so I prefer the ones who are enjoyable to read: Plato, St Augustine and Nietzsche are my favourites. But the ones who make you sweat (Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant) are equally worth reading – for a philosopher. Good luck!

How does your spinal column even support the load? Over the years at ATS I
had the balls to challenge you guys all the time because it was helping me
learn a great deal. Even with a very low retention percentage. But this is another 
way I found recently of engaging some of you great thinkers. Not to kiss your
asses but I do try to read as much as I can of what you guys write. Good to
be in touch again and much appreciated.

[Astyanax]

How does your spinal column 

I am very happy to see you back. May the road go on for ever, like it said on the Allman Brothers live greatest hits album.

[MONAD Ops]

If everything inside the energy containment device, construct (or Universe to human conscious development) is entangled.  Entangled like fractals with primordial influences, properties or particles with what is outside of the energy containment device or construct, then yes it is possible what Exist outside can perceive and understand time-space and the matter within it more than those within.  Regardless of its size...



 

[Randyvine]

I am very happy to see you back. May the road go on for ever, like it said on the Allman Brothers live greatest hits album.

Ha ha! Asty thank you and you wouldn't believe how BIG the universe gets
when one day you're locked out of the space time continuum you know so well
it's like being Across the Universe..