Tristen

It seems difficult to find research on this topic though I'd expect there to be an endless supply of it. Is there evidence whether activities that give people an outlet to express basic drives reinforce the behavior or prevent them from using more damaging ways to meet the urge? (Examples would be paintballing and video games to channel drives of agression into, pornography, etc.) These activites are just like reenactments that we're deriving the satisfaction from but aren't serving their evolutionary function (ie: going to scary movies to get that fight or flight response we don't get enough of as we're not often chased my predators or overeating). Of course innate drives cannot not just be supressed, but it seems clear we're beggining to use this energy in more constructive ways. What sort of ways do you see popular cultural or practical activities of the future satisfying drives like these? (i know I'm adressing a pretty complicated matter here in a very simple way)

by the way, I realise we're unable to transfer data faster than the speed of light so if x were the amt. of years it took for the light from planet earth to reach the telescope it would take at least x years for us earthlings to recieve this image from the telescope, but if we earthlings were not extinct by then, in x years we could recieve the an image of the earth 2x years ago, and so on right? I wouldn't think of this as literal time travel, if all your doing is "catching up" with light waves. The very vague understanding I had of it was that if you reach the maximum on the velocity axis (speed of light) you are at 0 on the time axis. If this were the case you wouldn't merely be seeing light from the past, but be in the presence of all physical things.

I was just thinking about how when someone looks through a powerful telescope into the outer reaches of our universe they are really seeing the uneverse as it was ages ago. So why can't we send a powerful telescope far into space and have it send detailed photographs of the earths surface back to us digitally, revealing our planets past, evolution of life, etc. I know this question sounds very niave but I'm not very knowledgable about science and physics.

this topic may have been discussed already, but I think it should be discussed without dealing with religion or God. can any materialist give sufficient proof mental states are purely material? To me, the fact that they coincide with nueral firing seems irrelevant (can it even be disproved that thoughts cause neural activity rather than vice versa?). I see awareness as the main issue; how can the laws of physics account for awareness/subjective experience? We're no where near understanding how we could contruct a computer with subjective experience and self-awareness. Things like beliefs and motives seem to have no resemblance to anything in physical theory. Obviously if we ever were able to detect and understand mental states, the laws of physics would expand to include them, but it seems just as likely that they are nonmaterial things belonging to a dimension that is undetectable using scientific tools.