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Lynne Leichtfuss
Social climber
valley center, ca
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Eloquently spoken RV. I appreciate all you articulated and agree with most. Thanks for your time in setting forth an understandable platform. Dan loved science and math and he was a gifted teacher to this gal.
I guess the bottom line concern I have, and as I am not as articulate as you, it may not have come across clearly....while the right and the left, "Christian" and non Christian argue about a number 6,000, 600,000, 60 million or billion years, there are people who one could not even describe as living their lives, even survival is a word that does not even begin to describe the hell of each day. Debate, help, or both.....?
Several people I've lost in life over the past two years have really made me ponder much..... It's changed my life and my priorities. Life above all is precious.
imho, lynne
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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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I love all you guy's, I used think there IS no God myself, but I know you don't need to be a cook to tell if the food tastes good, or know how a car works to drive, how a TV works to watch a show, how a Friend is made to use it in a crack, or how God made everything? If that's your thing cool, but I think the body looks better without seeing all the parts on the inside!
If a person loses a arm or a leg they are still a whole being on the inside, in fact most people with blindness hear way better, etc.!
Our minds are more then the info we put if it, we have reason that can grasp a bigger picture, and a heart that can love and be loved and see beauty. We're way more than seven pounds of matter! God is SOOOO
MUCH BETTER then we can ask or think, or do!!!
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cintune
climber
the Moon and Antarctica
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Lynne, yep, that was a joke. Can't be too serious about this stuff, it really becomes no fun at all.
But to be serious, the age of the earth as an isolated factoid obviously isn't going to save anyone's life or feed the hungry. But as part of a cohesive fabric of scientifically-arrived-at information, it is related to things that actually can and do benefit humanity in vast ways. Science doesn't have all the answers, but it never pretended to in the first place. That's religion's game. "Seek no further, it's all in this here book, and if it isn't it's not important." That just doesn't stand anymore, even though it was all we had for thousands of years.
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Social climber
valley center, ca
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cintune and all, gosh this page alone so illustrates why I love this Taco Stand. Solid answers to questions, thought provoking responses that make me think and rethink and test and examine and look up and explore.
Billy Graham once said, "If two people agree on everything one of them is unneccessary." (he's the only one I know that said something like that, but if you guys know a non Billy G. type that has a similar thought I'd like to hear it.)
Thoughts, knowledge, wisdom, philosophies, are all meant to be shared I think. One big puzzle is life and all that it entails. One small puzzle piece offered up by an obscure thinker might just complete a large part of this fantastic puzzle.
That's why I listen and weigh what you all have to say. What a great day. lynne
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Amazing to me (well, not anymore) the lengths that people will go to to discredit Christianity, Judaism and embrace religions or beliefs of Buddhism and Hinduism. And yet there is no mention of Islam which is very similar to Judaism and Christianity.
It seems the Semitic faiths are the target (except Islam because it's politically incorrect for a liberal to diss Islam).
These attacks on ALL people of faith are really tiresome. On one hand you criticize proselytizers and then, you the irreligious, constantly assualt the faith of others. WTF???
I disagree with proselytizing and I would hope you Atheist f*#ks would shut up.
Has it ever occurred to you that it's not illogical to conclude that evolution AND creation are both possible? That it's not one or the other necessarily?
Bah!!!!
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cintune
climber
the Moon and Antarctica
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Only if you pretend that creation was something different from what religions say it was in their own words.
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pyrosis
Trad climber
Flagstaff, AZ
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Woah, this might be the most interesting thread I've read in a while.
weschrist writes
"Awareness is the perception of an entities interaction with its environment (i.e. OTHER matter). Matter requires an interaction to be "aware" of anything. Two material objects are not "aware" unless they are interacting. A billiard ball isolated in space is "aware" of only distant gravitational forces and electromagnetic radiation."
I was under the impression that matter did not in fact have a concrete existence outside of its interaction with other matter. An electron being the easiest example, exists as a wave function, delocalized in position, until the instant at which it interacts with another particle. After the instant of the interaction, the electron again exists only as a wave function. The electron is nothing but the probability of an interaction occurring with another electron, which is also nothing but the probability of an interaction.
All matter behaves in this manner.
Or do I misunderstand quantum mechanics?
I still have the hunch that physics holds the answer, somewhere, to consciousness itself.
-Tavis
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Cintune, this is a complex subject. My only point is that to conclude all people who believe in a God are somehow stupid because they're religious AND reject science AND evolution is ridiculous. It's a gross generalization.
There is no doubt that evolution occurs in God's creation. Maybe it's an 'inherent intelligence' in the DNA to adapt. A perfect design that overcomes and adapts.
The problem I have is with the people who assume if you're religious, you reject science overall. You reject evolution.
It's bullshit and it's a weak argument.
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Social climber
valley center, ca
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Good thoughts Bluering. Peace, Lynnie
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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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I don't want to put words in God's mouth but He said how he did it in the Bible, if it said something else I would believe that!
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Hey Tavis-
I also think qauantum mechanics tells us a lot about consciousness and attention and so forth.
When I say that awareness is a "no-thing" that inherently has no content ("thingness" or material), I'm refering to awarness as a wave function. When I say that the opposite is true, that that awareness also IS a thing, I'm saying that when awareness latches onto content, onto sensations, feelings, thoughts and so forth, awareness becomes a "concrete" thing just as a wave becomes concrete when it encounters (fill in the blank).
The problem with rigid materialists is that they don't want to factor in the wave function part of the equation, or if they have to, the wave or pure energy aspect will be posited as an aspect or trait of concrete matter. They are forced into this position by a reductionism that claims everything, including the wave forms themselves, are created or produced by concrete material.
The one thing you will never hear a materialist say is that material and reality as we know it is created by non-local,immaterial wave functions. Even the non-local, immaterial wave function will be posited in terms of inherent potentiality with concrete and defineable (measurable) charicteristics. Language is not structured to discuss what is not "there" in a material sense - i.e., pure energy, wave functions, bare awareness or "emptiness." These will always be taken up as actual potentialities, or "things."
JL
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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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Then why get mad if other people steal or hurt you? Survival of the...
Because it's wrong! If you do that to others you did it to God, and God commanded us not to do those things and more.
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GOclimb
Trad climber
Boston, MA
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I was simply stating that we only have one short life on this planet and we need to prioritize ...... death and famine, carbon dating all important, but some are a bit higher on the scale of importance, imho.
Yes and no and it depends.
Yes, life and death questions are more important than a silly internet argument. But there's more to it than that.
To start with, it's the growth of knowledge, of an understanding of the world we live in which is, to me, the primary thing that makes humans special among all species on Earth. That each generation learns from the previous one. That we have a better and better understanding of reality, a growing consciousness, you might say. Without that, we, as humans, are nothing special, IMO.
Some people put significant energy in their lives into helping others in one way or another - doctors, philanthropists, volunteers. Without a doubt, they're doing something important and worthwhile.
But IMO (and, as always, YMMV) those who forward the growing understanding of our universe - those who devote their energy to learn what we know, refine it, add their own insight and observations, and write it down in detail so that it may be passed on to the next generation - those people are also doing very great and important work. It's the great unending work of our species.
But that work is painstaking, and requires as much precision as possible. It's like putting a jigsaw puzzle together - if the pieces are not shaped quite right, they just won't fit. So, from my perspective, does it matter very much if a sediment layer a fossil is found in is 3.6 million or 3.7 million years old? Of course not! And surely for a person dying of malaria, they couldn't care less!
And yet, from a larger perspective, it's vitally important. Because the work marches forward in infinitesmal increments. In on little detail after another. And in order for the researcher to learn anything useful, they need to get it right. And that's import, IMO, for all of us.
GO
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GOclimb
Trad climber
Boston, MA
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If I read the reports of Ardi correctly (not a given) it seems the idea is being advanced that both the apes and man descended from Ardi. Then if you say Ardi is more human than ape, you come away saying the apes descended from man.
Previously it was thought we descended from a common ancestor which is quite different.
JStan - I'm pretty sure you have somewhat misunderstood the articles. It is still thought that there was a common ancestor to humans and our closest living cousins (the other great apes - gorillas, chimps, and bonobos) lived around 7 million years ago. So Ardi is very solidly after the big schism, and on our side of the tree. But she's the closest we've seen on our side to the most recent common ancestor.
Sadly, our cousins on the other side of the divide seem to have managed to avoid drowning and getting embedded in river sediments - so very few fossils on their side. Too bad.
GO
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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I think some of these issues having to do with mind seen pardoxical if you do not separate what we perceive from what we actually sense. It comes down to the way the brain functions and the complexity of the "program" that runs to use what we sense.
We can certainly imagine things that are not real. We do not confuse our imagining from what is reality. I can imagine, and write convincingly about super-luminal space travel, I can calculate what it would take to realize such travel and conclude that there is no real way of achieving it, I might conclude it is physically impossible. Similarly, I can imagine the existence of a supernatural being, of god, or gods, or "the force," whatever. My imagining of that does not make it real, the thought of it is real, however.
Similarly, things that I perceive may not actually be sensed. I was taught in junior high school biology that the brain cleverly "fills in" the pattern of a brick wall, so that it "looks" continuous. In fact no such thing happens. Instead we have a mental "model" of the brick wall that tells us it is continuous, the blind spot in our eyes prevents us from actually sensing that continuity, and our brain doesn't do any complicated operation of "filling in" the blind spot.
This model is a part of evolutionary adaptation, it is a part of our behavior that has a positive selection outcome. When you learn that a polar bear hunts seals in ice caves formed by heaves in the sea ice it seems remarkable, but actually the bear also has a model of reality, it is "aware" of certain behaviors of its prey and can act on a rather abstract concept.
Another feature is the way it's all patched together, different parts of the brain, and the development of the model of reality have come at different times, and interact in a discontinuous manner. This leads to various perceptual "irregularities" that can be interpreted as being much more than they are... dreaming for instance. Another interesting one is the sensation of deja vu, which is really nothing more, I believe, than the sensation that time is discontinuous, our internal model tells us that time is continuous. But our sensation of time is different than the reality of time. Oliver Sachs describes an interesting account with a patient in his book Awakening in which the almost motionless person rubs his nose, but taking the entire day... sorta in "slow motion." While recovering a sense of normality through the administration of dopamine, the patient is asked by Sachs about it, the patient did not perceive that the act of rubbing his nose was any different than any of us experience.
I have learned to be very wary of my senses and my world model as a physicist. I know that we perceive things very different than what they actually are... the mind, consciousness, all that, is marvelous and complex, but it does not, in my opinion, require any special explanation. There is a mechanistic explanation of it, but understanding it is the same as trying to understand how a computer works by looking at the program results...
As I have mentioned before, the idea of god is a real thing independent of the actual existence of god. It is somewhat a moot point to argue if god actually exists, physically exists, as long as the idea of god exists and can motivate action. These mental constructions are no less powerful than the real thing, and in some ways they are more powerful because they transcend the need to adhere to physical law. I don't find it at all odd that these thoughts could be produced by a material object, the brain... there is nothing which precludes this possibility, and it is totally consistent with what we know about physical reality.
Its all in your mind.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Ed wrote:
"The mind, consciousness, all that, is marvelous and complex, but it does not, in my opinion, require any special explanation. There is a mechanistic explanation of it, but understanding it is the same as trying to understand how a computer works by looking at the program results..."
This strikes me as remarkable, Ed. By "special explanation" I take it you mean anything that is not stricly mechanical or materialistic.
And yet are we to understand mater and quantum mechanics with no reference to non-local wave function, or should we just stick with measurable datum (material)and call it good?
JL
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jstan
climber
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GoClimb:
When I read the article I came away with the impression, subjective though it may be, that Ardi was more human than ape. Jan has not finished researching the publications but when I read her post on the matter, correct or not, it at least seems she comes down on the same side.
It will take years to sort out where Ardi falls in the lineage. I made the conditional statement I did simply to point out the potential is there for a drastic change in the way we view things. That kind of excitement will drive research for decades or until we find a definitive fossil.
EDIT:
Actually on second thought, I need to be more realistic. It is an error to think that "Progress" proceeds monatonically. In fact what probably happens is one kind of creature steps into a black box, there is a long period of two mixed populations including what can be seen as both improvement and degradation, until two different creatures step out of the black box. Finding a fossil is an discrete event. Evolution is not nearly so pretty.
EDIT2:
If I may be so bold as to suggest the change of a word in Ed's post below.
IS
I believe in the understandability of the universe because of the success so far.
Might be:
I am comfortable as to understandability of the universe because of the success so far.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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the "non locality" of quantum mechanics is completely testable and understandable
it might seem strange to you, but it is not strange, it is observed and calculable.
I don't understand everything, but I believe that these things are understandable without evoking non-physical processes. I believe in the understandability of the universe because of the success so far.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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the "non locality" of quantum mechanics is completely testable and understandable it might seem strange to you, but it is not strange, it is observed and calculable.
I'm not following this, Ed. My understanding, poor as it may be, is that when you refer to "it" as in "it is observed and calculable," you are refering to some form of material manifistation, some basic stuff that is measurable. But what is the actual nature of this stuff?
Tavis mentioned that "matter does not in fact have a concrete existence outside of its interaction with other matter. An electron being the easiest example, exists as a wave function, delocalized in position, until the instant at which it interacts with another particle. After the instant of the interaction, the electron again exists only as a wave function. The electron is nothing but the probability of an interaction occurring with another electron, which is also nothing but the probability of an interaction."
Now "observed and calculable" surely refers to the concrete form of matter, but what about the flip side, re the wave function? What "is" the wave function?
What I'm driving at here is that you can never understand consciouness without understanding that all content has no independent existence, that every "thing" is as much "there" (matter, measurable, predictable, "completely testable") as not there (emptiness). Awareness is itself totally devoid of content (matter, forms, measurable stuff), but without experientially getting this it all sound like bullshhit.
Althogh I never do this, to those interested, perhaps a short bit from Ken Wilber, and another by Gempo (a Zen Roshi and former All American Water Polo player) will stir your curiosity. I'm not a huge Wilber fan but his points are well taken.
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoID=802205265#
http://www.livestream.com/bigmindtv?referrer=mogulus
JL
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