everything in the world has a purpose, except humans.

if you think about it. for example, if you go up to a turtle, you'll find it doing turtleish matters. clearing grass or trees...if you're a tortoise and doing these things are important to them. it's what they think about.

they think, i don't know why i should do this, but i have this urge to do it. they don't know that it's beneficial to their environment.

go up to a bacteria, and you'll find it doing bacteria matters. like i think i should invade a pig and get it's immune system to be stronger. or a virus and get it's genes to swap around.

everything you see in the world is doing something that has some kind of outcome to the eventual so-called benefit to the environment. suppose ima bat, and im ugly. and i live in caves. and i carry some of the worst diseases ever. but i go around pollinating the world. i was the one that carried bacteria and diseases around and allowed them to create a more diversified ecosystem.

i was a virus once. once upon a time, i was just organic molecules and came together to form RNA and helped start life.

and now i am human. and i don't have any purpose. my only purpose is that i have formed a brain that can think about why i don't seem to have as an important a function as turtles anymore.

if the universe behaves like an organism, why did it build me?

[onejayhawk]

It's one way to look at it. Another way is that humans give everything else purpose.

J

[Gregg]

if the universe behaves like an organism, why did it build me?

Despite not needing us, God chose to create us anyway, out of his great love: "I have loved you with an everlasting love" (Jeremiah 31:3).

God loved us before he even created us. It's impossible to get our heads around that idea, but it's true; that's what "everlasting" love means.

God is love (1 John 4:8), and because of that love and his wonderful creativity, he made us so we can enjoy all that he is and all that he's done.

God created us to fulfill his eternal plan. God, in his infinite wisdom, chose to make us a part of his eternal plan.

What part do we play in this plan? Well, the Bible is full of instructions for how we should live our lives. What would the world look like if we did these 3 perfectly?


1. "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength" (Deuteronomy 6:5).

2. "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 22:39).

3. "We are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do" (Ephesians 2:10).

[nullnor]

it's good replies. i have to look up some stuff again, and think for a few weeks before i can respond.

[onejayhawk]

it's good replies. i have to look up some stuff again, and think for a few weeks before i can respond.

Think on this. What will you take out of this world when you leave your body behind? Is it not your character and experience, especially the relationship moments?

J

[nullnor]

i was just thinking about what Gregg said about God loving us before he even created us. which is like saying you know everything before it happens. and how some theoretical physicists really believe that we literally don't have freewill. which i don't believe. but i was going to go try to understand one of their academic papers about it again.

and then i was going to give a shout to one of my favorite Zeeya Merali articles 2010 Discover Back From the Future

What does God gain by playing dice with the universe? Why must the quantum world always retain a degree of fuzziness when we try to look at it through the time slice of the present? That loophole is needed so that the future can exert an overall pull on the present, without ever being caught in the act of doing it in any particular instance.

“The future can only affect the present if there is room to write its influence off as a mistake,”

Tollaksen sums up this confounding argument with one of his favorite quotes, from the ancient Jewish sage Rabbi Akiva: “All is foreseen; but freedom of choice is given.”

Zeeya Merali has a PhD in cosmology even tho she mostly writes for New Scientist stuff. i like those articles, but the big brains poo-poo them. which is sort of snobby. and not make sense since some want to be pop stars.

i haven't read it but she wrote a book recently A Big Bang in a Little Room: The Quest to Create New Universes

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/
For what I am concerned, the most interesting aspect of Zeeya’s book is that she spoke to various scientists about their creation beliefs: Anthony Zee, Stephen Hsu, Abhay Ashtekar, Joe Polchinski, Alan Guth, Eduardo Guendelman, Alexander Vilenkin, Don Page, Greg Landsberg, and Seth Lloyd are familiar names that appear on the pages. (The majority of these people are FQXi members.)

What we believe to be true is a topic physicists rarely talk about, and I think this is unfortunate. We all believe in something – most scientists, for example believe in an external reality – but fessing up to the limits of our rationality isn’t something we like to get caught with. For this reason I find Zeeya’s book very valuable.

About the value of discussing baby universes I’m not so sure. As Zeeya notes towards the end of her book, of the physicists she spoke to, besides Don Page no one seems to have thought about the ethics of creating new universes. Let me offer a simple explanation for this: It’s that besides Page no one believes the idea has scientific merit.

In summary: It’s a great book if you don’t take the idea of universe-creation too seriously.

[nullnor]

it's not what i wanted to say i think. im not sure what i was going to say.

the whole organism thing is just an attempt to try to look at everything from a different angle. whether i would literally believe it or not, in the hopes of gleaming an unexpected insight.

it's compatible with religion in a philosophical sense. God is the universe since He existed before anything else did. and asking if the future influences the past, or that there is a plan, is a logical direction to go. freewill would be a loose end to address.

but the afterlife is where Science and Religion concerning this sort of idea starts to encounter problems. looking at the universe as an organism causes me to start taking a more environmentalist view than even for me. and i realized that the reason religion is less inclined to be environmentalists is because most religions, for example believe they come from outside the universe.

i mean we can agree that our human bodies come from this universe. even if they say we are holograms, heh. but i don't believe that. there has to be a better answer than holography.

the afterlife is a strong belief, whatever type of one you believe. if what you believe conflicts with something else, the afterlife will win. and im not about to tell anyone what they should believe. but i don't mind if they tell me.

i feel like the answers to some of these questions are right in front of us! like when everyone was all confused about space and gravity, and Einstein came along and was like just combine them. im sure the math is a lot more harder than that but.. it almost pisses me off. like the answers are staring at us in the face, but we all just haven't managed to get farther down that road yet.

[nullnor]

or was it when Einstein combined space and time? what the hell did he do again!?

[nullnor]

If Dinosaurs Were Physicists: Thoughts About History and Time
Wilczek's Universe

This Christmas holiday, four generations of my family converged at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. I’d been there just a handful of times since childhood, so it seemed familiar, but fresh. Various parts of the museum juxtapose different species, places or cultures. But I’ve been thinking a lot about time recently, so what especially resonated for me there was experiencing different moments of time simultaneously—natural history, embodied.

Nothing else brings the strangeness and contingency of history home as viscerally as strolling through the dinosaur halls. What might the dinosaurs have become if Earth’s chance collision with an asteroid hadn’t brought them down 66 million years ago? Right to the end, their top species were becoming more complex and capable—while our own mammalian ancestors were a race of quivering, nocturnal proto-mice.

If the great dinosaurs had been spared, would they have produced beings of superhuman intelligence much earlier than human intelligence actually emerged? (Ravens and some other modern birds, all dinosaur descendants, are clever indeed.) What brilliant works of art and technology might they have created by now? The bones, in their silence, echo the poet John Greenleaf Whittier : “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, / The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’”

In my usual scientific stomping grounds, a main theme is the seeming absence of history. In physics (and its offshoot, chemistry) we find the same range of basic substances everywhere, and we find that their properties don’t change with time. It is easy to take that fact for granted. But two of the greatest physicists, Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell, fully realized how singular it is. While neither knew much about atoms and their structure, their basic question was this: How did all the atoms of, say, gold get to be precisely the same, and then stay that way? If they can’t change, how can they have originated?

Both Newton and Maxwell, who were deeply religious men, appealed to God. In an 1873 speech, Maxwell said that because of this strange unchangeability, “we are therefore unable to ascribe either the existence of the molecules or the identity of their properties to any of the causes which we call natural.” Here Maxwell identified a classic, and once convincing, argument for natural religion.
More in Wilczek’s Universe

Within the last hundred years, however, quantum mechanics solved the problem in a different way. To change an atom, generally you must supply a certain minimum quantity of energy. (Natural radioactivity is an exception.) Atomic nuclei can fuse or react when large energies are available, as in the Big Bang, supernova explosions or nuclear reactors, while in calmer conditions their structure is basically fixed and stable. It’s the same principle as digital computer memory: There, we imprint bits using bursts of voltage or current, but between bursts they’re fixed and stable.

Biology feels the long arm of history, which injects chance into its products. Physics appears detached from history. Between those extremes is modern cosmology. In today’s picture, the universe has a history but a remarkably simple and chance-free one. We start with near-perfect uniformity of matter in the Big Bang, and physics takes it from there.

In that picture, the future is a passive receptacle. It’s what results from a simple past. In principle, you can also run the equations of physics backward, from future to past. But we don’t know if the fundamental simplicities that seem to mark the past have any analog in the future.

And what about the here and now? Could both past simplicity and distinctive features of the future have a say in constructing the present? Partly inspired by my visit to the museum, I’ve been working on precisely that issue. It seems consistent with what we know, as a mathematical possibility. But the imprints of the future might be subtle, and we don’t yet know what to look for. Latter-day dinosaurs might have solved the problem already. As for us mammals…time will tell.

it's not a very good article but it says a lot. it tells me that they are still working on whether the future is influencing the past. this is the sort of thing that Neils Bohr was reticent about since he had no way of an idea to test it. that quantum mechanics had a way of playing tricks on us... it would've been better if Frank Wilczek talked about the dinosaur that was supposed to be us. Troodon sapiens?: Thoughts on the "Dinosauroid

Regardless of whether it was gradual or happened in a geologic instant, non-avian dinosaurs went extinct by approximately 65 million years ago, but the question of what they might be like today had they survived makes for some entertaining fiction.

so when you look at a bird in the backyard, i want you to look at them and say, you could've been me. there were probably many Troodon's. creatures with a high encephalization quotient.

i know. i saved a mouse once that befriended me after 1.5 days after saving him. you won't find a thing like that in medical literature.

the real question is, does nature trend toward intelligence? we have one example on earth where the atmosphere changed to favor multi-celled organisms. yet life is adaptive towards survival. what if a mutli-celled organisms world suddenly became only adaptive towards single celled ones? then life would regress. and we would never know that the universe is trying to build something. but we do. because we are here.

[nullnor]

allowing non-avian dinosaurs to survive the end of the Cretaceous would impact life on earth in ways that we cannot account for, and there would be no guarantee that the group would not go extinct sooner or later due to some other cause.

[nullnor]

...a creature with intelligence and self-awareness on a level with our own would surely have evolved–although perhaps not from a tailless, upright ape. Almost any planet with life, in my view, will produce living creatures we would recognize as parallel in form and function to our own biota. But first, life must arise, and we have no idea how rare an event that might be. If we are honest, despite our exciting fancies about extraterrestrials, we must admit the real possibility that life arose but once, and that we are ALONE and unique in the cosmos–with an awesome and, to many, unanticipated role as stewards of all other living things. But were we to let evolution take another route than it did, why not grant that another kind of being would have evolved to fill our special place in nature?

[nullnor]

whats going on with humpback whales is an example.

[nullnor]

It's one way to look at it. Another way is that humans give everything else purpose.

J

im not sure ppl notice but the web links you mentioned over the years are pretty clean and useful. i still goto electoral-vote (you mentioned years ago) almost every day at work just for kicks.. to see how the circus we call government is doing. your links are solid. i don't think ppl noticed that.

[nullnor]

this is Troodon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troodon

he had the highest Encephalization quotient of any dinosaur. and he had finger-like claws. ..in 50 million years what would he have become? Carl Sagan thought he could've been a precursor if he had lived. but he did not.





body size matters because the brain must use more resources the larger the body size. so while a sperm whale has the largest brain on earth. it's brains resources is used more on locomotion. the same is for elephants. unlike a hummingbird, an elephant has to think about where it walks. each step an elephant takes has to be processed in it's brain or it might fall.

[nullnor]

Now, wherever you turn, wherever you go
If you get it wrong, at least you can know
There's miles and miles to put it back together!