My theory is that Hitler would have never gotten into politics if he had only been accepted into art school.
Current evidence shows that the universe will expand forever, although there is a solution…
Similiar to what’s been said already, my theory is that, given all consciousness and thoughts are the movement of atoms, and are ultimately as much a part of the universe as rocks and gas and stars, the evolution of intelligence is the universe’s way of contemplating its own existence.
I’ve got a few more:
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The neurons in your brain are specialized with sort of “animal” functions such as providing instincts and storing memories, but your actual consciousness is something else entirely, that’s only tangentially related to the physical composition of your brain cells. There’s a divine force in the universe called Consciousness that existed in some dormant form before life evolved, and the brain somehow taps into this force and becomes a medium for the free will of God itself.
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I’ve heard at least one person claim that free will is impossible because it violates the laws of thermodynamics, i.e. the only way it can work is if energy is coming from nowhere. From what I know about quantum physics (which is very, very little) it seems like there are certain situations in which a particle can be in two states at once, and as soon as the particle is observed by an external force, it comes out of its quantum state and resolves to one state or the other, in a completely random and unpredictable way. But what if it wasn’t random? What if a conscious energy could “want” the particle to go into either state? What if that’s where consciousness came from? Perhaps your brain is set up in just such a way that it taps into this quantum uncertainty (isn’t it called the “uncertainty principle?”) and effectively alters the course of the universe while still complying with the laws of thermodynamics. Your choices would basically be limited to countless trillions of “yes/no” decisions on the quantum level, but if your brain was evolved to take advantage of this, it could produce something like conscious thought. What if?
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The sum total of every life form on Earth is an organism in and of itself.
:rolleyes:
There is nothing about the laws of thermodynamics that makes free will impossible. This is what happens when people talk about mathematical principles in plain English (or convoluted Latin, for that matter.) In no way does it require energy to come from nowhere, or transcend any normal biochemical processes, or otherwise defeat entropy. The human brain is a very complex biological computer that, from every observation we’ve ever made, works exactly within expected physical processes.
Read Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves for a better philosophical understanding of what free will means and how it works.
Am I the only one finding this thread very frustrating?
Stranger
Unless you’ve been alive since the 1870s or so, I don’t think you’ve quite got the scoop you think you do. Ever since Archaeopteryx was discovered in 1860, paleontologists have been speculating that its ancestors (whether dinosaurian or some other reptilian group) were likewise feathered (i.e., they did not evolve out of whole cloth, so to speak, making their first appearance in Archaeopteryx). It’s only relatively recently that fossils of feathered dinosaurs have actually been discovered.
MMMV, indeed!
On sale this week at Safeway: Strawberries by the pound, Buy one/get one free, half off Roma tomatoes, Apples .99/lb, 5lb bags of potatoes BOGO free, Milk - 2 gal/$4.39, General Mills cereal 3/$6.99 (this would include “healthy” cereals like Cheerios as well as crap like Trix), canned fruit 10/$10, 32oz frozen vegetables BOGO free, canned beans 5/$3, frozen chicken breasts 4lb/$5.99. Every 3 weeks or so they also have ground turkey breast BOGO free.
The cereals are arranged by big name brands in the middle, smaller name brands on top (Quaker, etc) and generics/bulk sizes at the bottom.
While some large companies “own” endcap space (specificly junk like Keebler, Frito-lay, and Coke) for the most part the store puts there whatever it has the most of; this can include toilet paper, canned soup, pasta & sauces or whatever.
And just to be extra annoying, I’ll point out that I don’t like cheesecake AT ALL and have no special love for chocolate.
My theory is that God is the universe, and evolution is God’s act of creating herself.
But I don’t mention my theory at church very often.
Malacandra: SF writer Vernor Vinge wrote A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky that had this idea. Well worth reading.
My theory is that medicine is making us sick. There are many, many people who would not have lived long enough to have children or would be considered completely undesirable as mates if it weren’t for modern medicine. Whether the health problems they have are inherently genetic or only related to the relative effectiveness of their immune systems is beside the point. We’re going to see a lot more people with severe allergies, diabetes, leukemia, asthma, and lots of other problems until and unless we get enough of a handle on genetic engineering to fix things at the source instead of screwing around with the resulting symptoms. It might be that a majority of people will need some level of medical intervention to survive if things get as bad as I think they might.
In the US, maybe in other first-world governments too, your life is not your own. There are laws against suicide in quite a few places. Living wills are often disregarded. You can be imprisoned for trying to harm yourself even if you have done nothing to and shown no indication of harming someone else. This is a new issue separate from older issues that have been around for thousands of years, like being used as slave labor for an infraction as small as getting a ticket (personal experience) or being drafted into the army.
The overuse of computer generated special effects will eventually lead to a backlash in which people will respond extremely positively to movies made in a more old-fashioned way. The movie maker who does this at the right time will have a huge hit that will surprise most people in the industry. Inevitably, this will lead to lots of crappy movies that attempt to copy that well-made practical effects movie. If we’re extremely lucky, an action movie and a science fiction movie with realistic physics will also be made.