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questionposter

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  1. It could be, but it could also not be, like the existence of god. But why shouldn't we? The universe doesn't care about us, we can make a world of total peace if we put enough work into it since the universe doesn't care about us enough to limit us. Science does not "know" what is sentient or conscious and what is not, in science we simply observe how animals react to things. What if dolphins are actually more sentient than us but because we can't communicate with them we don't know and because they don't have fingers they can't build anything to show us? For all we know even the sun could be a living thing: It's very complex, it changes, it has energy, it responds to stuff touching it, and it will eventually "die". In order to actually know for sure if something is sentient or not, you'd have to be that thing if it can't communicate that it is not sentient. Sorry, I misread. Actually, would would be logical to play it safe like that. No, we don't have a drive to survive the longest, evolution is not a law of physics. There is no component of the universe that says we must do so, we do not have to survive to "strive the longest". What would even the point of outliving every other species? The universe could be infinitely large anyway and if we were the last species it must only mean some huge catastrophe has happened. No, you don't die from fright, you die from your heart malfunctioning which can happen to a cockroach as well. All we can do is infer it's possible they do or do not care. What if we said it does look in the mirror and see itself yet in reality it didn't actually think it was seeing itself? Or what if it didn't act like it saw itself because it just didn't care enough that it saw itself in the mirror? Except we don't actually know what consciousness is or even if there are direct consequences to its existence therefore we don't know what exact traits of it to look for Sentience is a pretty loose term. You say it is important that some animals don't have this type thing that is so special to you that you call emotions, but why do those animals act at all then? What is perceiving the compulsion to do something of not some type of perception?
  2. Your right, the ethical problem is "why should we all automatically adhere to a personal judgement of what actually makes the human race 'better'?"
  3. I don't actually get that many, but for the ones I do get, I really do, considering I technically share the same belief as you that people should be able to believe in whatever they want without being interrogated about their beliefs as long as they aren't going around and killing people for it, which most religious people don't actually do, just some extremists. But for all those people, there's probably atheists who would do the same simply because they don't think they are going to actually be ultimately punished for doing so and think they can evade the police indefinitely. Your personal views on religion shouldn't matter in deciding if someone is broken for believing in them. Both religious people and non-religious people consist of humans, and humans are humans, therefore both sides must have the same conditions that make a human a human. This means atheists, Buddhists, agnostics, Christians, etc, are ultimately not better than each other, they are all simply human, and being any of those things is simply human, the proof of which is the fact that humans believe in those things.
  4. Well I personally know religious people and they aren't that bad, so I don't see why it is such a bad thing to stand up for beliefs considering everyone can believe what they want. There's no such thing as right or wrong morals, all system of that type of judgement are relative. It's like saying it's 3 O'Clock in the universe. Not only that, but just because something doesn't exist doesn't mean it can't have logical correlations based off of axioms. Do you think the imaginary number "i" is an observable number? Do you think when you graph how something falls off a building that it is actually infinitely accelerating into the ground? Regardless of if god exists or not, it is a logical statement that "If god can do anything, god can fit every species on a boat". I never said it supported the notion of god's existence, I said that was what religious people often feel. Ok, I know this doesn't sound the best considering the other things I said, but I actually know a Schizophrenic and he isn't that bad. You haven't actually provided any logical correlation for any of your statements. It's to show that the things that can make an atheist and atheist are the things that can make a religious person religious. Surely someone as intelligent as you make yourself out to be wouldn't actually think believing in something makes your DNA different. Where are you getting this notion that I'm saying I believe god exists? I've said multiple times I'm atheist even, but regardless of my personal beliefs, the people that say religion are, are not necessarily the thing they say. Many religious people don't believe in the exact type of original god, but more of a logical god. Why? Because Newton believed in a logical god, and many people think he was a great person, MLK Jr. was a mono-theist but only advocated peace and equality, and he had tons of support, so it is logical to say if they support him, they share similar beliefs to him. I'm not supporting the notion that religious people are broken, I'm showing how they AREN'T broken for beveling in it because it's a normal human experience to want to believe that a loved one isn't dead after they have died.
  5. I wasn't talking about religion, it was a statement I made where I had said many religious people feel a calmness or deep sense of connection to god when they pray properly according to their religion, and no one said it was actually wrong, but they said there wasn't evidence to support it, but I only make that statement because I know a large, diverse group of religious people, but at the same time I haven't heard a religions person not describe formal praying like that. Although that relates to the debate because some people somehow don't think that psychological elements are involved in religion, that peopel are "just broken" and believe in non-sense for no reason. I guess they can try and say I"m wrong, but I'll also say many people would prefer it if their loved ones were living in some kind of better after life too, which is another reason why people may turn to religion. There's also how people's environments can shape them, which is pretty common knowledge in the psychology world, so if you grow up exposed to strong religions institutions, there is a higher chance of you being religious when your older. Now though, there isn't just mono-theistic religions trying to dominate that environment, there's many more points of view now that can spread a lot faster, which is why there's an increasing percentage of non-religious or agnostic people.
  6. You shouldn't be so quick to dismiss this concept. Would you really want to live in a society like that? ER is obligated to "rebuild" you if it's necessary for keeping you alive when you enter and cure whatever emergency you have, although after that emergency is taken care of, then your on your own, but that's because there isn't more taxes, not because there's too much. If there were more taxes, people wouldn't have to worry about it because those things could be paid for by the government. Generally in places where there's universal healthcare, there's generally less crime, I think people in those places are happier that they do not have to worry about as much.
  7. You know the current model of an atom right? Well even if there's evidence to disprove it, we haven't discovered it, so how can we consider it and know that the model is wrong? So scientists simply say it's what we know based on out current observations.
  8. Those finished equations seem like they were designed after the discovery to fit what was being discovered, but it seems like light isn't just any kind of field, it seems like it is a moving version of the same field it was emitted from, but I don't see why simply oscillating allows a photon to carry consistent values while a static field itself dies out over time, unless photons are an oscillation within a static magnetic/electric field, but then I don't understand what they don't die out over time.
  9. I suppose if I consider that the reaction happens over time, then that type of casing would help, but I was thinking it was more or less an instant process in which case it wouldn't really help. Theoretically, if you could store that much energy over time, the energy it would release in one instant would have a greater concentration than just using a bunch of nukes one at a time, but I always thought the fission reaction was rather quick.
  10. Yeah, except what if some other, less hateful god was the real god? It's not just limited to hateful gods. Maybe people are worshiping the wrong god, but if that god doesn't actually care, it wouldn't punish them, which is why different religions would exist in that scenario. I don't know what people were thinking giving me a minus 3 for standing up for religion when I'm in atheist myself, maybe someone can clarify, but anyway... Based on a previous knowledge of science, at one point we considered the heavens to revolve around the Earth, but it was proven wrong. While maybe the information is out there to provide evidence for me being wrong, I don't see it anywhere, so based on my current knowledge what I said is true, and there is nothing you can do to make that false unless you have actual evidence. As I've said, it's not just random, the religious people I know is pretty diverse, I know everyone from Buddhists to Muslims to Shintos to Native Americans, although Buddhists don't actually have a god they worship. Maybe there's a sect in India that thinks Siddhartha was a god, but that's about it. Also, wtf? I'm an atheist, I'm not saying any god story is completely true, the closest thing I said was that some stories were inspired by real events and real human emotions, which if you look at the fact that the black sea formed rapidly 12,000 years ago as well as similarities in all/most religions, there seems to be evidence for.
  11. Wavelength is relative though, but the 3-dimensional probability coordinates don't seem to be, that's why even if I travel away from a gamma-ray at 99.99% the sped of light, it will still have a small area of atoms it would be likely to hit even if I measure it's wavelength as a radio-wave? Whereas if it started out as a radio wave, it would have very large areas of atoms it could hit. Well doesn't the photon's probability collapse when the atom interacts with a specific wavelength photon? If we know the wavelength, doesn't that mean we're measuring it?
  12. The reaction of a nuclear bomb is what breaks the casing though, and it's not some kind of imaginably strong material like in this video game, it's designed to evaporate in those high of temperatures.
  13. The link where you said it contained the official definition of an electron which was that it was something with 1/2 spin, x mass, etc? You know all of that is used in quantum wave mechanics right? What you wrote is not proper enough English, I don't know what you meant.
  14. What does that have to do with every other frame? And if something like wavelength was "known" or measured wouldn't it collapse the photon's probability anyway? All we really know for sure is that neutrons can decay, and when they decay they tend to emit some kind of gamma-ray. Theoretically if I can know something like that, I should be able to know the DeBroglie "wave-length" of an electron in the double slit experiment and have it still make the pattern on the backboard.
  15. There's a limit to advancing though, before we have to give something important up. You can't keep increasing intelligence indefinitely without consequences. Stephan Hawking is different because he has a deviation from normal that is a lower than normal standard of physical capability. Your talking about increasing everything. Yes, it would be nice to have more muscle mass, but it would require more metabolic energy to keep alive, and as the number of people increase resources become more limited.
  16. No, your trying to say that you know one thing is more conscious than another despite the fact that consciousness can't be quantified and therefore can't have values compared. We would care because we're not objects. Why would we not care then? Just because we can not care? It works both ways. We do behave like animals though, it is animal to form large social groups and interact and support each other, and it is animal to have cell-membranes and limbs and a brain and consume food rather than make it like plants. Nature naturally likes to do the most efficient thing, but the most efficient thing isn't the only thing to do. What does an EM wave have to do with a universal view? An air temperature of no more than 130 degrees Fahrenheit would kill us eventually, but not necessarily machines. No, it hasn't proven it, it has provided some limited evidence for it. These types of experiments aren't always the strictest. Have you ever considered that some species don't even see well or don't even see in the visible spectrum? Besides, doesn't really matter anyway. Science does't say anything about it at all, it can't even touch something as complex as consciousness itself at this point, all it can say is how animals respond to certain things, and different animals respond to things in different ways. Just because an animal doesn't do the exact same thing as us doesn't mean it can't have any similarities. It happened with us, why not with other species? Besides, I thought you said every person who died was potentially a genius. And who is to say what a species "must" go through to get to that level? Emotions themselves aren't much more complex. You have this chemical released into the bloodstream and brain, and your brain reads it and has an interaction that tells perception what it is, similar to how pain works even.
  17. But the the god we've chosen is a god that get's mad when we don't worship it, so wouldn't it make logical sense that a different god wouldn't have a problem with that? The real scientific community doesn't assume the big bang is true, they say for certain that based on their current knowledge the universe seems hotter and denser as you go backwards in time, they acknowledge that they don't know everything.
  18. No, evidence is evidence, what your thinking is probability. While there may be evidence to support it, it isn't necessarily a likely scenario with the given knowledge.
  19. It's called "multi"-verse because it's not the "uni"-verse, the universe contains all the sections of the multiverse. If those other big gangs occurred, they are part of the universe but are an extension of the multiverse. By the way, metaphysical beings have not been observed to exist.
  20. Still, all of what we say reality is is based only on our observations which are merely perceptions of electrical impulses, not reality itself. If we actually observed reality, we would see objects occupying multiple positions at once that also seem to teleport randomly and time symmetry and who knows how many dimensions.
  21. Unlike the scriptures of god, it doesn't really have logical contradictions and isn't based solely on faith. Enough scientists say quarks exist, and there's evidence, so I believe there's a high probability they are right, unless your saying those religious people are liars. Enough scientists say dark matter exists, and even if only 100 scientists have actually worked on it, there's enough of them and with that I'll say there's a good chance dark matter does exist. To them, what they saw was in fact an alien space-craft, unless you have knowledge to prove to them otherwise, because you can only work with what information you have. Do you have extra knowledge to prove that those religious people are lying about their experience? If not, I can only work with what I know which is what they tell me, and I can only know about religious people with the knowledge I have, and the knowledge I have is that based on my experience, religious people often describe praying the manner I had previously said. Since I don't have any more knowledge, I cannot know that any other knowledge exists until I have discovered it, which means I cannot say that they are liars or that most religious people do not experience praying in some manner like that. If you have something that suggests religious people don't often describe it in that manner, that's fine, but so far I have seen nothing like that, so how do I know that knowledge exists?
  22. Why is physics the way it is? There is still the potential to answer that scientifically. By definition, everything that exists is in the universe, physics effects that which exists is in the universe, therefore god has to be effected by physics in order to exist in the universe, otherwise god doesn't exist, I suppose, according to our current observations of the universe.
  23. I already said I understand the point of view that there couldn't have been a nothingness to be around before the universe, but mathematically I can still trace it back to that, just like how if I graph falling off of a building with a quadratic equation, I will somehow find locations of accelerating going backwards in time. Logic doesn't have to describe existence. So it is logical, but it may not have actually worked that way because there was no one around to observe if it did or not.
  24. Well, Inow had already said I wasn't necessarily wrong even for him, and he boasts a pretty big knowledge of knowing religious people I guess, and other than psychology discussions as I had mentioned well before these recent posts as well as talking to people which I had also mentioned before these recent posts, I guess I don't know of any actual scientific research, although I think I remember hearing on something like NOVA that religious people describe an experience like that too, and since I know religious people who also describe it in a similar way, and NOVA most likely has a greater holistic knowledge of religious people than anyone here, I may have used their knowledge and assumed it to be true. I know a fairly diverse group of religions people who pray regularly, and they have told me of how they think and what members of their religion have described to them and what is normally expected in their religions activities and so on, so I don't see a reason for the evidence to actually be faulty. As you might expect, someone like me doesn't really make enemies with religious groups. I can see how that would work.
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