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Well, to put it simply, I think consciousness itself may be able to affect reality. I think the act of conscious observation may be able to make wave functions become discreet values. I think once consciouness is fully understood we will realise that our discoveries in quantum physics are actually shaped by our consciousness. Conciousness may actually have the power to create form out of randomness at the quantum level - create reality in effect! One analogy is this: I have a solid block of marble and I say to you, there is a perfect bust of you within this. "Rubbish" you reply. So I then start chipping away at the block and a month later there is a perfect bust of you and I say "told you so!". I think this is what may be happening in particle physics/quantum physics. For example, we know that he Bohr model of the atom is actually just a a way of thinking about atoms but isn't really that accurate, because electrons do not actually ever have a definite position, just a fuzzy area where thay can potentially exist. Well, even this idea is probably just as false! Conciousness is a really wierd thing. Did you know, for example, that general anaesthetics work on the sub-atomic level and that nobody really understands how they work? I would bet that reality and conciousness are fundamentally linked and one day we will find out just how much and it will alter the way we look at, well, everything! I suggest you read stuff by Penrose and Hammeroff for more about this kinda stuff!

Just the plain old 2nd Law of Thermodynamics doin' its stuff: Please see below: by SCOTT SAMPSON Chief Curator, Utah Museum of Natural History; Associate Professor Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Utah; The truly dangerous ideas in science tend to be those that threaten the collective ego of humanity and knock us further off our pedestal of centrality. The Copernican Revolution abruptly dislodged humans from the center of the universe. The Darwinian Revolution yanked Homo sapiens from the pinnacle of life. Today another menacing revolution sits at the horizon of knowledge, patiently awaiting broad realization by the same egotistical species. The dangerous idea is this: the purpose of life is to disperse energy. Many of us are at least somewhat familiar with the second law of thermodynamics, the unwavering propensity of energy to disperse and, in doing so, transition from high quality to low quality forms. More generally, as stated by ecologist Eric Schneider, "nature abhors a gradient," where a gradient is simply a difference over a distance — for example, in temperature or pressure. Open physical systems — including those of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere — all embody this law, being driven by the dispersal of energy, particularly the flow of heat, continually attempting to achieve equilibrium. Phenomena as diverse as lithospheric plate motions, the northward flow of the Gulf Stream, and occurrence of deadly hurricanes are all examples of second law manifestations. There is growing evidence that life, the biosphere, is no different. It has often been said the life's complexity contravenes the second law, indicating the work either of a deity or some unknown natural process, depending on one's bias. Yet the evolution of life and the dynamics of ecosystems obey the second law mandate, functioning in large part to dissipate energy. They do so not by burning brightly and disappearing, like a fire torching a forest, but through stable metabolic cycles that store chemical energy and continually reduce the solar gradient. Photosynthetic plants, bacteria, and algae capture energy from the sun and form the core of all food webs. Virtually all organisms, including humans, are, in a real sense, sunlight transmogrified, temporary waypoints in the flow of energy. Ecological succession, viewed from a thermodynamic perspective, is a process that maximizes the capture and degradation of energy. Similarly, the tendency for life to become more complex over the past 3.5 billion years (as well as the overall increase in biomass and organismal diversity through time) is not due simply to natural selection, as most evolutionists still argue, but also to nature's "efforts" to grab more and more of the sun's flow. The slow burn that characterizes life enables ecological systems to persist over deep time, changing in response to external and internal perturbations. Ecology has been summarized by the pithy statement, "energy flows, matter cycles. " Yet this maxim applies equally to complex systems in the non-living world; indeed it literally unites the biosphere with the physical realm. More and more, it appears that complex, cycling, swirling systems of matter have a natural tendency to emerge in the face of energy gradients. This recurrent phenomenon may even have been the driving force behind life's origins. This idea is not new, and is certainly not mine. Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger was one of the first to articulate the hypothesis, as part of his famous "What is Life" lectures in Dublin in 1943. More recently, Jeffrey Wicken, Harold Morowitz, Eric Schneider and others have taken this concept considerably further, buoyed by results from a range of studies, particularly within ecology. Schneider and Dorian Sagan provide an excellent summary of this hypothesis in their recent book, "Into the Cool". The concept of life as energy flow, once fully digested, is profound. Just as Darwin fundamentally connected humans to the non-human world, a thermodynamic perspective connects life inextricably to the non-living world. This dangerous idea, once broadly distributed and understood, is likely to provoke reaction from many sectors, including religion and science. The wondrous diversity and complexity of life through time, far from being the product of intelligent design, is a natural phenomenon intimately linked to the physical realm of energy flow. Moreover, evolution is not driven by the machinations of selfish genes propagating themselves through countless millennia. Rather, ecology and evolution together operate as a highly successful, extremely persistent means of reducing the gradient generated by our nearest star. In my view, evolutionary theory (the process, not the fact of evolution!) and biology generally are headed for a major overhaul once investigators fully comprehend the notion that the complex systems of earth, air, water, and life are not only interconnected, but interdependent, cycling matter in order to maintain the flow of energy. Although this statement addresses only naturalistic function and is mute with regard to spiritual meaning, it is likely to have deep effects outside of science. In particular, broad understanding of life's role in dispersing energy has great potential to help humans reconnect both to nature and to planet's physical systems at a key moment in our species' history.

Alien life could be extremely rare, and may not exist anywhere else in the universe. This could be it, the only island of life in all the black immensity of space... For life of our kind to occur on earth the following was required: 1. A sun of the right size and type 2 A planet of the right distance from that sun 3. A planet of the right size 4. A planet that had been hit by a similar sized object at just the right point in its formation causing it to melt and allowing the core, mantle and crust layers to precipitate out (this is a really, really, really rare thing you know!) 5. A planet that has a single moon of the right size orbiting at the right speed and at the right distance. 6. A planet that spins at the right speed. 7. A planet that wobbles slightly on its axis. 8. A planet that has a slightly tilted axis. 9. A planet that has a magnetic field strong enough to deflect harmful solar radiation. 10. Volcanic activity and moving plates. 11. Liquid water. All these things enabled life to exist (alledgedly). Venus and Mars are both almost OK for life, but are missing some of the above and so appear to be lifeless (but maybe we'll get a nice surprise someday?). As for aliens visiting us - any society capable of interstellar travel would have probably destroyed itself long before by wasting all its resouces on cars, televisions, mobile phones, fashionable clothes, cleaning products, singing plastic wall mountable fish, and all the rest - and finished off by destroying their planet's life sustaining environment!

Hey, I got one - is reality just a relativistic effect?

Hah! The thing is, maybe those 'glitches' and 'anomalous behaviours' are already known but just ignored! Take Quantum Physics for example - it's absolute nonsense, but it is correct (else we woudn't be typing this on a computer which relies on quantum mechanical engineering). The reason I mentioned the double slit experiment, the fundamental problems with conciousness (and whether free will is just an illusion etc), dark matter, even relativity is because all these observed phenomena just don't seem to make any sense! The double slit experiment defies all logic! The planck constant is described by some as the grainyness of the universe - should that read the pixel resolution of the universe? In a computer simulation who needs logic!? I think particle physicists, scientists analysing conciousness, neurologists, computer scientists and scientists investigating psi should start talking to each other a lot more. I would even venture that the next major step in science (the grand unifying theory and all that) will NOT come from the fields of particle physics, but from psychology, or a related area. Oh, and when we die do we then see the Blue Screen Of Death? Maybe we just go to the next level...

I have read quite a bit about quantum physics, conciousness (including quantum conciousness), relativity, the double slit experiment, schrodingers cat, the planck constant, dark matter etc etc etc You must have heard about the idea that we could be living in a computer simulation, (see the paper by Nick Bostrum).. Is there a way a sim could prove that s/he is indeed a sim and not 'real'? Is the planck constant the pixel size of our host computer's capability?

Elephants had a semi-aquatic ancestor, which is perhaps why they have little hair today. Rhinos also have a semi-aquatic ancestor, and Hippos are still semi-aquatic. In fact, the case of elephants and these other pachyderms is very interesting and may have parallels with humans. They were land dwelling, then spent a period of time closely associated with water (semi-aquatic) and then came back on to the land 9for the most part). They still retain many of the watery traits though, and the elephants trunk may be one of them. They also still love spending time in water! Maybe humans went through a similar process !

Oh can we now! I think that rather depends on what you consider to be a calculation. Robots, even those connected to supercomputers, have major difficulties performing what we consider to be simple tasks such as walking, or bending down to pick up an object without falling over let alone anything truly athletic. Surely the calculations brains perform to enable us to do these tasks would outstrip any computer? I think there is a football match planned for 2050 pitching robots against humans. I think the humans will win!

Well, I will search around for references, but three I have 'seen' were where volunteers sit in front of a computer which generates dots every second or so which form a line that eventually runs from one side of the screen to the other. Also on the screen is a straight line. If the computer generates a +1 the line being drawn rises and if it generates -1 the line falls. The straight line gives a 'baseline' so if the computer generates an equal number of +1s and -1s the drawn line will follow the baseline. Volunteers use their willpower to 'make' the line go up (or down). The study concluded that the rate at which volunteers were able to influence the line could not be accounted for by chance alone. Another one (which actually made the national news) involved pets running to the door to wait at the exact moment when their owners decided to come home from destinations miles away. This was randomised and, well, just couldn't be explained by conventional science. Most recently (again it made the news) was an experiment where someone had to guess who out of four people was phoning them before they picked up the phone. They got it right way over what chance would predict. These studies were not done by cranks, but by established British Universities. I'd love to find the references myself. If I can find them I'll post them up.

Yeh, I saw that. It was a real eye opener. In fact the 'bushmen' didn't need to use any tools or weapons at all. They did chuck a spear into the animal (an elan I think) at the very end, but it was more of a token gesture, it was exhaustion that killed it. The thing is, they were able to do it because they were able to carry water with them, else they would have died from dehydration before the elan. This seems to suggest that hair loss to aid sweating is a great adaptation - but only if you have evolved a brain big enough to carry water around with you. I would suggest that perhaps a semi-naked, semi-aquatic ape, with a nice big brain (due to selection of neotenic features to aid a semi-aquatic lifestyle) was pre-adapted for life on the savannah. Once on the savannah its flipper-like feet were great for walking, its elongated body was great for an upright stance, and its big brain allowed tool use (e.g water carrying). Then it can lose almost all its hair as it's not really needed an in fact becomes an advantage..!

Mainly because we are intelligent enough that age doesn't really discriminate against (useful) knowledge. IE, a first time mother could perform like a many time mother now because we can share information at a MUCH more efficient rate. I don't think intelligence has much to do with it - we feel it in our loins man! We are programmed that way, but other apes aren't. But even if u are correct, it's only 'cos we got bigger brains in the first place, which is (probably) a result of evolutionary neoteny. The thing that set us on that path in the first place may have been adaptation to a semi aquatic lifestyle which favoured neotenic features (i'm not listing them now!).

Mmm... I would ask 'Why did we start to walk upright?'. The thing is, the only other savannah-living primate we know is the Baboon, and rather than becoming more human-like, it has become more dog-like. The only other truly 'upright' animal on earth (apart from man) is a penguin, and guess what, it's a semi aquatic bird! It's adaption for swimming in water has changed its body shape making it upright. Unfortunately for the penguin, it has gone for the short legs approach to swimming (like otters, seals, and ultimately cetaceans) rather than the long leg approach (like frogs) so although it walks upright, it can't exactly peg it when it needs to move fast - unlike the aquatic (nay semi-aquatic) ape!

Bluenoise is correct. Blue eyes are linked to a pale skin which is an adaptation displayed by peoples living in european northerly climates. The reason for it is because northerly latitudes have lower sunlight levels which make the production of vitamin D by the skin from sunlight more difficult. ('Eskimo' type peoples have other adaptations for living in even colder latitudes but probably retain brown eyes because they traditionally have a diet rich in vitamin D and also need dark eyes due to snow and sand glare). The eyes of negroid peoples are not brown in exactly the same way as indo-europeans though, as it also involves pigmentation of a different part of the iris. I don't think the Neanderthal reason is really 'needed' for an explanation, but I wouldn't discount it totally as there may be other peoples who lived in similar conditions to early europeans who never developed blue eyes...

Biologically speaking there is no reason why bigfoot could not exist - it could just be another Pongo or Homo, but as others have said, sshurely it would have been found by now. 1st climber: Have you seen the abominable snowman? 2nd climber: Not yeti! Sorry, couldn't resist that one!

Nematodes have the lowest, according to Penrose and Hameroff. They have the minimum number of neurons to create a level of conciousness.

All these answers are very interesting, but none seem to answer the basic question. I can control my thoughts to a relatively high degree - I can choose what to think about. This is surely not already pre-determined by the firing of neurons at a previous state. That would mean I have no ability to control my thoughts, because my thoughts would all be based on what I was previously thinking! This I hope is not the case as it would mean that 'free will' is actually an illusion and we cannot control our thoughts at all. I mentioned muscles just as an example because we lack any 'mechanical' way of controlling thoughts - so how am I able to control the flow of electrons in my brain? How is this possible without 'mechanical, intervention? It would seem that conciousness is able to affect the flow of electrons without ANY 'mechanical' intervention. Surely this is just not possible?

Great site, great ideas, particularly Scott Sampson (whoa!) and Lee Smolin (as far as I got)... Lee Smolin says "The basic method of science after Einstein seems to be: identify something in your theory that is playing the role of an absolute background, that is needed to define the laws that govern objects in your theory, and understand it more deeply as a contingent property, which itself evolves subject to law." I would argue that with all science (all everything), the background is consciousness, but that's a different thread (Neurology/Quantum Consciousness) well worth visiting.