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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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Science shows no mercy...
Jesus does!
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Dell Cross wrote: "Largo, I just meant that those quotes weren't in quotes. They weren't blocked off in any way that made it clear they weren't your words. I started reading them as if you wrote them. Perhaps it was obvious to everybody else."
No, you're entirely correct here. I'll make a point to be more careful. Thanks for pointing that out. I'm lazy here - bad habit, for sure.
JL
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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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I ordered the Stonemaster book!
To see the Neanderthals!
Sweet!!!
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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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Where do I put my wallet and keys?
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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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If it smells, looks, and tastes like... just don't step in it!
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MH2
climber
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Dunno if I could handle the Vedic text but WBraun always has something interesting to say:
The truth and full absolute knowledge is always present in full in the past present and the future. It always remains the truth eternally.
I like this as a description of mathematics, in which I take a certain consolation since I think it has, does, and will exist even if time itself quits on us.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Living in Japan our days and nights are reversed so I was amazed at all the contributions to read through when I woke up this morning. So many things to think about, so many things to laugh at. I haven't been this challenged or entertained in a long time.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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radical-
It's interesting how no one has responded to your grandmother story and is indicative of how our society handles that which does not fit into the materialist mode - by ignoring it. I too have had many experiences of the type you describe. I am also interested in the stories of near death experiences where people who were brain wave dead were resuscitated and came back with information they could not have known even in normal waking consciousness. The blind person who can describe in color what the doctors and nurses in the ER look like, the person who can repeat the frantic conversation between doctors and nurses during the 15 minutes they were brain wave dead, the person who meets a twin on the other side whom their parents never told them about and so on. These along with my own experiences of precognition and what I have seen of Tibetan and Indian yogis seem pretty compelling evidence to me at least, that there is a non material component to the human experience.
Part of this will probably be explained in the future with the use of better measuring tools. When the instruments for measuring brain waves become more sophisticated, we may find that what seemed brain wave dead today, was just not a subtle enough measurement and that will explain things like conversations that can be repeated after one is brain wave dead by current standards. I am reminded of the yogis who claimed to stop their heart beat which enabled them to be buried underground for months at a time to no ill effect. When checked with a stethoscope, they had no measurable heart beat but when an EKG was applied, a small periodic flutter of the heart was observable. Until all such experiences can be measured however, I take the view that there is a non material component to the universe. It seems to me to be the simplest explanation of what I have experienced and observed until proved otherwise.
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GOclimb
Trad climber
Boston, MA
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But some of us don't stop at GO
Hey, that's fine with me - you all have my permission to continue. Except those of you being mean to poor Lynne. You guys can stop.
Cheers!
GO
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Trad climber
Will know soon
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GO, I appreciate your concern, friend....but no one's being mean to lynnie.
Jess discussing.
I'm only speaking about what I personally know and have experienced.....what has worked for me for over 30 years.
To paraphrase Jan, she said I have stuck with my "root guru". I like that and if that helps some of you understand better so be it. But I call him, jesus.
Peace to all on a beautiful TGIF.
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survival
Big Wall climber
A Token of My Extreme
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holy cow
wow
too much
mind blower
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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JL - I think you can always erect a strawman to knock down.
I believe part of what I'm getting at is that our definition of consciousness, awareness, etc, do not describe the actual thing itself. It is possible to construct a theory of consciousness that is not physical. I think it is possible to construct one that is physical.
As you know there are any number of exercises you can do to show that there are misconceptions regarding our theories of consciousness. However, this is a part of understanding what consciousness is and what it is not.
And while consciousness is seated in each individual, there are extended aspects of it, genetic and social, which extend our descriptions. It's not a simple thing to unfold all this, of course, but I do not despair of difficult things to understand, maybe that is my religion.
Now on the separate topic of "the wavefunction" I would say that Hilbert vector spaces are a good description of the universe, but to say the universe is a Hilbert vector space is probably pushing it. If and when we understand things better we might describe the universe differently, appropriating quantum mechanics into the larger description and showing how to move between that new description and the old description, as we have done with classical mechanics and quantum mechanics.
The world is classic for good reasons, and at our scale, the size and time and energy and numbers of atoms for which things take place, the quantum effects are averaged out and cease to be explicitly seen. To have a coherent wave function engulfing the entire universe, in our current models of the universe (which are incredibly accurate in describing what is going on) such a thing is not possible. For reference, look at the work going on to make a "quantum computer." Decoherence in a controlled environment takes place over 10s of nanoseconds at best. And these are in nanometer spaces with as few atoms involved as possible (though still many trillions, probably)... one entangles, then the entanglement is lost in the sea of thermal noise, the averaging of all those atoms....
nature is the only authority here, not those great minds you mentioned...
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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According to the video, and other things I've read, the "great leap forward" took place sometime around 35,000 years ago. But at that time, H. Sapiens was pretty much distributed around the globe. If there is a genetic component to it, that suggests that an external forcing created the *same* parallel evolution (albeit a very tiny change) more or less simultaneously in thousands of different populations!
Is that the consensus in paleoanthropology?
Go Climb-
The short answer is no.
Homo sapiens originated in Africa about 190,000 years ago. So far, the oldest known piece of artwork has been found at Blombos Cave in South Africa in the form of two engraved pieces of ochre dated 70,000 and beads at 75,000. Sibudu cave in South Africa has a bone arrowhead and the first bone needle at 61,000 and the use of heat treated mixed compound glue dated at 72,000. The general consensus is that a fully developed language was necessary for these developments.
There is then a 30,000 year gap between the engraved ochre (the world's oldest piece of art) and the cave paintings in France which are the next oldest. The question is whether we just haven't found any more yet or whether there wasn't anything new during that period. Since the cave paintings of France and Spain are the most advanced in the world, I think we can at least say, that they had an artistic breakthrough there early on and art has remained important to both cultures (along with Italy) from that time to the present. However, since we have rock art dating to about 50,000 in Australia which is shortly after humans left Africa, I think we can say that they possessed the ability and interest before they left that continent. They were simply less skillful at it than the Europeans. The video was filmed in France, so naturally the emphasis was on the breakthrough there.
I think your question concerns a variation of the multi-regional versus out of Africa theory, an issue that is fraught with ethnocentric biases. It was originally thought that since Homo erectus, the predessesor of H. sapiens, was found all over the old world (1.9 mil-300,000), that the various races of modern humans were evolved separately in various places from Homo erectus. Homo neanderthal (300,000-27,000) is found inside a circle that includes Europe, the Caucasian populated areas of North Africa, and northern Iraq. Therefore it was assumed that neanderthal was the progenitor of Caucasians. DNA tests of neaderthal material last year however, revealed that they were too different to be our ancestors although the two groups may have mated now and then.
This summer in China at an international conference, I heard similar reasoning from the professor emeritus of physical anthropology in China. Interestingly, he had dozens of slides of fossils dating Homo erectus at 1.7 mill to Homo ? about 100,000 years ago, showing continuous evolution of five characteristics which are not found in other areas of the world, including square shaped eye sockets. He also had three different systems of dating applied to each fossil so they were sure of the dates. From this he argued that Chinese people were unique from others in the world. When questioned however, I felt he condemned his own views by saying that they would not allow DNA testing on any of their fossils as had been done on neanderthal, because the material was "too rare and too precious" despite the fact that they have recovered more fossils from that time period than anyone else in the world. Then when asked if modern Chinese people shared these characteristics, he said no.
Later, a young Chinese DNA specialist who has taken over 100,000 samples in Asia and Oceania gave a talk which was scathing in its rebuttal. All samples he tested showed an African origin within the past 50-60,000 years. As he so well put it, "I know from my DNA that I had ancestors. The paleontologist can only hope that his fossils had descendants".
Puzzling it altogether, I came to the conclusion that H. erectus had evolved into something else in China, but that it was incorrect to call them archaic H. sapiens. Rather, they belong to an extinct category similar to, but different from, H. neanderthal (interestingly both had bony buns at the back of their head). Nobody at the conference mentioned H. floresiensis, the little "Hobbit" fossil found a couple of years ago in Indonesia where H. erectus has also been found. Some have speculated that he was a dwarf H. sapiens, others that he descended from Homo erectus. When I looked at photos of floresiensis after I got home, it seemed to me that the eyes were somewhere between round and square and the other characteristics of the Chinese H.erectus descendants were intermediate as well, so I'm betting that H.e. in Indonesia also produced an extinct descendant. Thus the family tree grows ever more bush like.
And finally back to the issue of art and language. I think the only real controversy in Africa is whether it took place gradually or whether there was a significant mutation which caused a leap forward in the 70,000 time frame.
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kent
Trad climber
SLC, Ut
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Thanks for the excellent summary.
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Trad climber
Will know soon
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Dr. F, remember I met you in person. :D You are not mean. It is about discussion. Your comments are not what I consider abusive. I Enjoy our sharing of thoughts.
The one thing I do not care for is being talked "down to". Guys may not understand this, but there are still men that knowingly or not speak pretty patronizingly to women. Jess sayin' Lynne
Edit: this does not apply to you Dr. F
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GOclimb
Trad climber
Boston, MA
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Jan, thanks for that! As for the chain of which Homo species descends from which, and when, It more or less agrees with the "consensus" view as I understand it. Or, to give a quick synopsis:
H. Habilis is a direct descendant from Australopithecus, around 2.4ma. H. Habilis then lived for roughly a million years.
H Ergaster branched off the line of H. Habilis near the end (say, around 1.7ma).
H. Ergaster basically morphed into H. Erectus around 1.2ma.
H. Erectus lived until something approaching 70,000 years ago. During that time, two important lines branched off of H. Erectus.
First came H Heidelbergensis, around .8ma
Second came H. Sapiens, around 200,000 years ago.
In the meantime, H Rhodesiensus and H Neanderthalis branched off of H. Heidelbergensis (or perhaps the Neanderthals branched off Rhodesiensus - this is neither 100% clear to me, nor important to my question).
So... with that out of the way!
My question is, this. Let's assume, as both you and I say, that H. Sapiens branched off only once for all intents and purposes, from H. Erectus, in Africa, around 200k years ago. Then H. Sapiens migrated all over the world starting around 70-100k years ago. Okay, so far so good?
Now to the meat of it. The video states that from 200k to around 40k years ago, Homo Sapiens was pretty equivalent to the other Homo species around at the time. That there was a very gradual advancement in toolmaking, but that it was slow - taking thousands of years to see much improvement.
And then, suddenly, around 35,000 years ago, something changed. At that point, H. Sapiens started doing things in the same way as what we do today: learning the way things are done, and then building upon that. This allows an explosion of improvements, even within a single generation.
Here's the key - the video doesn't state it explicitly, but it implies that this change happened at roughly the same time, all over the world, in all populations of H. Sapiens. How could this have happened?! I posited the idea of one final evolutionary micro-step, forced all over the world at around the same time. But I'm not particularly married to that idea. Certainly there could be other explanations.
But it seems that what you're saying is that no explanation is required, because the video is mistaken. That this change happened before the migration from Africa. That the "big bang" in brain development actually happened nearly 70,000 years earlier.
If so, then what explains the lack of evidence for it for those 70,000 years?
GO
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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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Think about it, from are perspective the cosmos is so big we don't even know how big it is!
Then when we go into the smallest cells and smaller it keep going and going!
God is all in all, we don't know nothing. God is so amazing, Amazing, AMAZING, Amen!
Praise God from Whom all blessings flow...Jesus is the Key,
Thx U, Jesus***>>>
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monolith
climber
Berkeley, CA
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That's good stuff for Sunday bible school Gobee, but doesn't work to well here.
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Trad climber
Will know soon
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Dr. F, Pay Attention....I'm trying to be nice and give you compliments but yo are not listening. I SAID, you DID NOT talk down to me. Hello, I enjoy our dialogue. :D lynnie
Shesh, this communication gig is tough.
Edit: OMG, I think you got it Craig, God IS Bigger than the universe and Jesus has the capacity to be friends with all, if you want him as a friend.
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atchafalaya
climber
Babylon
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"God is all in all, we don't know nothing. God is so amazing, Amazing, AMAZING, Amen!
Praise God from Whom all blessings flow...Jesus is the Key,
Thx U, Jesus***>>>"
Goddamn that shite is creepy Gobee. Like Jim Jones creepy.
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