questionposter

Consciousness has not yet been quantified, it does not mean it cannot be quantified... It could be quantified in bits (bits is used for information, consciousness is a type of information)

It could be, but it could also not be, like the existence of god.

But why should we care about everything?

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.

We should not care because we should only care about what can be known positively, we can positively know about our own sentience and bet about the sentience of other humans and even betabout the sentience of other vertebrates, further than that there is no educated guess but mere whimsical bets, it is whimsical to bet other lifeforms or objects have a consciousness so we should not go that far...

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.

said animists not animals... you know what an animist is? check it in wikipedia.

Sorry, I misread. Actually, would would be logical to play it safe like that.

How is that an answer to my post? And why not be efficient? We have a drive to survive the longest time possible and enjoy our existence the longest possible, why should we not follow that drive?

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.

My point is that your example of the comet is not universal... Life is something different than its absence and sentience is something different than its sentience. We can die from fright, without being touched... That is how different we are... You cannot kill a cockroach from fright.

No, you don't die from fright, you die from your heart malfunctioning which can happen to a cockroach as well.

These experiments are done taking into account the animal's ability to perceives themselves reflected, that is my point... I think you are unjustly desestimating ethology.

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?

You know how science works, when it cannot directly observe something it works observing consequences of it... This is a tool every field of science uses, you are just not giving value to ethology and may be biased against it but entomologists have not achieved yet the evidence they have always searched for that their object of study are not mere robots of nature... Exact same behaviour is not what is sought but behaviour that reflects the inner workings... Behaviourism is what is applied.

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

Potentiallity has different levels/percentages/-degree of probability-, a living human has more potential than a zygote, a human zygote has more potential than a sponge or a mosquito. A naive poster asked about humans evolving wings... Look the answers the poster got, now think about sentience, that is much more complex than wings and you would get your answer about other species developing sentience.

Sentience is a pretty loose term.

Emotions are more complex in the way they involve things that are not necessary present, that is not as simple as releasing chemicals into the bloodstream and brain, it involves the advanced sentience we have developed thanks to the higher computing abilities of the vertebra and brain duo... Our spinal cord is why we are smarter, and our high brain-body ratio.

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?

But those are not ethical problems but problems on another field and can be adressed by those involved in genetically tampering with humanity

Your right, the ethical problem is "why should we all automatically adhere to a personal judgement of what actually makes the human race 'better'?"

And you wonder why you got all those negative points?

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.

I would guess either your points are belligerently nonsense, or people think standing up for religion is, in itself, worth throwing a negative vote behind. There are other possibilities.

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.

I will say, and I think I've heard this in the thread before, that religion is both morally and intellectually wrong.

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".

Many people who shoot heroin feel a calmness and deep sense of connection. This is *by no means* an indicator of the morality of the thing or the intellectual honesty of a proposition.

I never said it supported the notion of god's existence, I said that was what religious people often feel.

Nobody said "just broken". People with psychologically-based reasons for doing things can be broken. Schizophrenics are broken and everyone is quite willing to accept "that psychological elements are involved".

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.

Every point you make seems to fall apart with even the mildest inspection.

You haven't actually provided any logical correlation for any of your statements.

It is as if you expect people to answer the original post by saying "the psychological reasons for religion and believing in God are x,y,z"... as if that should answer the original post as far as whether or not they are broken.

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.

And, again, wanting your dead loved ones to enjoy an after life has nothing, at all, to do with the morality or truthfulness of religion or God.

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.

It also has nothing to do with just how broken religious people are. Wanting something does say anything about how broken you are for believing or wanting it.

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.

So how does this relate to religion?

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.

The analogy for this would be an equal to an ER. As the fire station is paid to put out the fire, the ER is paid to keep you from dying. A fire station doesn't rebuild your house, just like an ER doesn't rebuild your body. So we already have the medical equivelant of a fire station. NEXT.

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.

Eh?

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.

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.

If you had an enormously strong casing, it would increase the yield. In reality, you can't. In fiction you can, and nobody minds.

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.

The question is simple: What if Zeus is the REAL god, but we worship the judeo-christian God. That only makes Zeus madder and madder because we worship the wrong god.

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.

You keep dancing AROUND this question, questionposter, but it's very important, especially in light of evidence and its definition -- it really asks what do you use to dismiss some claims as false (like the existence of Zeus) and accept others as true (like the existence of God) when you don't use the methodology of science.

 

How do *you* decide what's true and what isn't, and how do you know for sure that you're right?

 

Lacking a system of judgment about removing bias and measuring evidence in relation to reality, while having quite a number of elaborate stories and myths about different gods, how do YOU judge which God-story is true?

 

Please answer this.

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.

Because we have a way of transforming these quantities from one frame to another.

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.

No. We know the energy of a photon. That doesn't tell us exactly where it will hit. If the photon is visible, the wavelength is around a half a micron. I have a target made up of atoms. Atoms are around 0.1 nm in size, perhaps with bond lengths (if I have a lattice) with a lattice length perhaps a few times that, so let's say 1 atom per nm. A 1 micron x 1 micron area has of order a million atoms it could hit, but it's only going to hit one. How has the probability "collapsed" by knowing the wavelength?

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?

Questionposter.

The issue of "Why not just detonate all of it at the same time without the casing? " is easier said than done. Nukes need very good timing mechanisms already. If one were late by a few tens of nanoseconds it would get smashed before it could detonate.

On the other hand, they do put containers round bombs to increase the yield. They don't rely on the strength of the material- just the mass. If the case is heavy it will take some time to push the case apart. During that time the nuclear reaction can continue. The yield is improved that way.

The practical problem of finding something strong enough is another matter- but it's fiction so nobody cares.

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.

Two complained because the link did not work for them, but next I gave a snapshot from the link.

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?

Read what I wrote, it is so simple like that.

What you wrote is not proper enough English, I don't know what you meant.

But the wavelength is not an unknown if you know it in one frame.

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.

I know Gattaca did not support eugenics, but I claim they made a bad argument to oppose eugenics... And it is not my personal opinion... People everywhere would benefit from Gattaca-like eugenics... You think Stephen Hawking wouldn't rather be a commoner gene-therapy client that the exceptional cripple man he is? And failsafe measurements for machinery failing would be done in advance before leaving them with every menial job possible, and even then menial jobs are not something we would suffer much from if the machines doing them fail unless every machine fails at the same time and that is a stretch... We already trust computers with more dangerous occupations...

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.

that is a non sequitur

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.

That is the point... A meteor would not care... Why should we?

We would care because we're not objects.

Just because we can care?

Why would we not care then? Just because we can not care? It works both ways.

Then why do not we behave like animists and avoid consuming anything because anything can be sentient?

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.

Even air or even a rock? (And people have already died trying to eat only air because they deemed all life sacred). Even inuits that are animists are pragmatic enough to eat animals because it is convenient for their survival (they have a lot ot rituals and taboos involved in their hunting and predation of plants, but they at least end caring about themsevles rather than about lifeforms that are not humans)...

Nature naturally likes to do the most efficient thing, but the most efficient thing isn't the only thing to do.

And about nature recognizing level... I understand electromagnetic blasts affect machines but not humans, so that's somehow against what you said...

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.

Ethology has proven that some species do not recognize themselves in a reflection (species with the ability to perceive reflections), that is an evidence of lower degree of consciousness... Ethology is still young but it has proven a lot about animal sentience.

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.

I say the difference is vertebrates... Science does say it... Many documentals about lifeforms share this view, ethology shares this view.

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.

That is the same argument against abortion and it is flawed logic because any number of things can and should happen before the organism evolves into a sentient organism (just like any number of things must and can happen before a zygote evolves into a sentient human)

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?

None of these are vertebrates I bet ya... And pain is not the issue, sorrow, grief, joy, that's the issue, it lasts longer and is more complex than mere pain.

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.

Otherwise, well..

 

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?

What I say is that the evidence claimed to support the Big Bang is either presumed to be true or proven true by other evidence (with the rule recursively applied of course) as described in the wiki entry.evidence.

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.

I guess what I keep trying to get to, is when does something become evidence?

 

If I present what I call evidence for something, is it not evidence if you don't take it seriously? Or if you haven't accepted my hypothesis?

 

What if you don't like it but someone else does? Is it evidence or not?

 

Do a certain number of people have to agree it is evidence before it is considered evidence?

 

Is it evidence simply because I use it to support my hypothesis?

 

Many scientific theories that are now accepted were not accepted when they were first presented. Does that mean that what the scientist presented as evidence was not really evidence because the theory was not accepted?

 

If the evidence presented for string theory is not considered evidence, then I can accept that miracles as documented by the Vatican are not evidence.

 

If one is considered evidence but the other not, then it looks to me as if we have a double standard.

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.

Not necessarily so. Are you familiar with the Multiverse Theory? It essentially holds that there exist an infinite number of Universes distinct from our own.(If I recollect correctly, Proff. Dawkins outlines the Theory in his book "The God Delusion.") If this is the case, then it is incorrect to say that something that does not exist in the universe (meaning our own) must be non-existant. For all we know, "God" could be operating out of any one of the infinite number of universes proposed by Dawkins.

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.

So you are saying that you disagree with this wiki entry?

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.

Soooo, you do not draw a line anywhere? Anything enough people tell you is probably true? How many people? Two? 100? 10,000? This is a serious question, where do you draw the line? For me the number of people who claim something is meaningless... If I went by numbers of people I would have to say that UFOs absolutely are alien space craft visiting the earth. Literally millions of people have seen them, I view religion the same way, lets see something more than what someone claims, claims are easy, evidence is hard.

I was raised fundamentalist Christian, if i had a nickle for every claim of gods presence i have heard i would be rich for sure... I was told quite recently by someone I know and trust that a during church services they saw an angel walking down the center isle, no i don't mean a pretty girl either, several other people saw it too, interestingly no one saw it until one person claimed to have seen it... then several others "saw" it too....

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?

But then of course, came the proverbial theological dilemma: What then, produced this pre-physical force, this Deity-thing that created it all? In plain English, who made God? Then it occured to me that if indeed there exists a force that predates physical matter, then it would be fallacious to impose physical laws on it. That is, whereas physical matter requires a specific cause, God, if He exists, would, by defintion not be bound by physical laws. So ultimately I came to the conclusion that God most likely exists. Does this mean I reject Scientific concepts like Abiogenesis, Darwinistic Evolution, and the like? Certainly not. I am simply of the opinion that these things probably had some non-physical Intelligence behind them.

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.

That's not logical at all, all we know about is what we can observe, we have no idea of anything other than what we can observe. There are models that postulate that what we see as the universe is really only a small part of something else but these are models and cannot be tested at this time. But to say with any authority that nothing existed before the universe is as nonsensical as saying something exists outside the universe...

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.

So, what is your standard for accepting evidence? The number of people who tell you they've experienced something? Can anyone say alien abduction?

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've heard it's very similar to what your brain looks like when you are having a conversation with yourself...

I can see how that would work.

What is it being created from?