questionposter

Now that I think about it, a mirror really isn't that good of a test at all. It's just the recognition of a pattern: The pattern that the image in the mirror does whatever you do, and based on psychopathy in living things, it seems possible to be "smart" but not be "sentient" or have a lot of "consciousness" or at least not use it. Whether or not another animal consciously recognizes "that is my existence" in some way is probably beyond our capability to know for certain right now.

Free will is pretty hard to define, but many people like to think of it as the ability to consciously choose. That video is basically saying only subconscious chemical reactions make up your thought processes and all your thoughts are pre-determined by other exact processes, but that doesn't make sense in every situation. You can even view your own consciousness in an imaginary mirror if you do it right. I forgot how, but I think Oprah brought up how to do it at some point. The actual cause for consciousness is also something that isn't really known, but many scientists think of it as information itself being processed.

Regardless of any contradictions you find in any religion, there will still be people to believe in them at least for a long time as they still provide an explanation for things.

Can't both science and other said religions explain the natural world and the super natural, or at least both explain reality? We can explain ghosts as place memory or spirits, or we can explain rocks as the remnants of material from the Earth's mantle, or that God simply wanted there or even that god created the mantle to create rocks.

Here's the thing though: Even if someone provides evidence of a new understanding, you can still chose to believe an old theory. You have to believe that an explanation is correct, and you have to believe that the right equations are being developed to describe reality and the unseeable. That's it. There's only 99.999% probability it's correct if there's a lot of evidence but you have to believe that it's 100% accurate in order to base other understanding off of it. It's like an assumption, which is a belief.

God is just a term used to describe a being beyond comprehension.

I've seen that type of research too, but at the same time there's hundreds of situations in a day that your brain hasn't thought of in which you can choose to do something, or if someone puts you on the spot in some way like out of 1000 people or just a crowd. I would agree that sometimes you aren't using your free will and some times you are.

It doesn't matter if you consciously decide for yourself that something isn't violent, your subconscious views it differently.

Many people who like science would like to think that science is not a religion because they view being superior to others simply because of that assumption. However, it is wrong to assume beliefs are not heavily involved in science. How do I know that you fall to Earth at a rate of 9.8 meters per second? I don't see the number 9.8 floating around anywhere, the numbers don't even exist. We base some science on observation but we base the explanation merely on our own thought processes and continue to base things off of those. I'm not saying science isn't unique, but if I get a result, I don't know how everything works, so the only thing I can do is come up with what I believe to be correct. Dalton believed there was a smallest unit of an atom and that it can't be broken down, and since he didn't know anything other than what he thought, to him the model was correct. You have to believe that things are 100%, true, though I suppose if you accept the fact that we can't be 100% sure of any of it, then you could get around this. I don't think I'm wasting my time studying physics, because I'm pretty confident that the scientists who came up with all the info were correctly assuming the explanations and writing the correct patterns and interpreting those patterns correctly, but there's still a chance they were wrong, and that's because it is a belief that they are 100% correct, not a fact.

Honestly just as there are humans who are smarter than others, there animals of other species that are smarter than others of their kind. The only difference with humans is that there is a higher standard of "normal" to deviate from, so if you deviate from a normal human capacity by even 50%, you'd still be smart enough to see in a mirror and know it's you. Though, I think many mammals and some birds and those smart reptiles like alligators and monitor lizards can know they are looking at themselves in mirrors, I find it unlikely that they wouldn't eventually notice it.

The only way there would be a loss of consciousness in this situation is if there were a loss of cells, your assumptions makes no sense. Your individual cells can have consciousness regardless of whether or not your awake, just like I don't lose my own total consciousness just because I fall asleep. How do individual cells even sleep? Also, don't atoms process whether or not they are perceived or whether or not they are reacting? There's random atoms reacting in chemicals right now and I don't know at all what's going on with them, yet there's still all of this happening. Does reality disappear when I go to sleep? Well, doesn't seem like it, and that's because I'm not the only consciousness to occupy the universe. And then when you perceive atoms, they somehow know whether or not your looking at them.

So again, the reason for not generalizing them is there isn't a process that will generate an exact answer all the time since some times the roots are irrational transcendentals which go on infinitely and therefore can't have 100% accuracy just as you cannot calculate the exact diameter of a circle because you must use pi which is an irrational transcendental?

So there's an extreme concentration of gravity, which is a black hole, but are there extreme concentrations of other forces like the EM force or weak force? Where's my super-magnetic hole?

I think the best theory so far is that smaller black holes merge to form bigger ones, but I think people like Stephen Hawking may have also theorized some kind of large concentration of matter and energy event during the early stages of the universe when micro black holes were present which sucked up a lot of that matter and even more matter over all that time, but so far there is no proof of "micro" black holes, especially since we can't even create them by sending particles to hit each other at 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 percent the speed of light.

I've thought a lot about how intelligence would work in a complex robot, and I just can't see a difference between what it's doing and what many living things do. While it may have the ability to chose, how it chose is the same of how the subconscious of other living things make decisions based on how it plays out in my mind. It may be that "artificial" intelligence has been invented 4.5 billion years ago.

Things are not as deterministic as your making them seem. There's literally infinite variables causing things to be the way they are. Even the gravity of of a grain of dust in a remote galaxy effects us in a very small way. Yeah there's free will and consciousness and all that but we really don't have good explanations or even really good definitions for those. Your question is unanswerable or the answer is undefined (see x/0).

Imaginary number's don't exist as real numbers yet I can still say x^2+25 = 0 at plus or minus the quantity of five times the imaginary number "i" x^2+25 factors to be (x+5i)(x-5i) In fact, even your name is imaginary. It's "Imaginary Now"

While it has been shown that TV effects your subconscious, it depends on how much they watch it. If kids watch a LOT of violent cartoons, it will definitely effect them and make them more dsensatized and violent. The reason for this is because of the fact that our bodies and brains are not completely adapted for modern human society. While we may consciously think that it is just fiction, your brain still sees those violent actions and treats them as if they were real, as if real threats were around causing the violent sounds, as if you needed to be more hostile in order to survive after seeing blood spray everywhere. However, there's also that process that Cornell brought up which is that your brain's memory capability for a specific thing halves over time. So the more time kids take between seeing violent things, the more their brain "forgets" about those violent things.

While I don't condone it as it has a high probability of causing mental and physical damage, if you are truly asking "Is it good or evil to do so?", the answer is whatever you decide for yourself for your perspective and it's also relative. To a kid they may decide it is good or bad, and you may decide the same. Depending on that it is either to either perspective.

While it is possible to let many of your actions be governed just by your subconscious, it is also equally possible to decide things for yourself, so culpability comes with the ability to chose. With things like an animal, as far as we know, they don't have as great of a capability to fight their subconscious instincts. However, it is expected of most people that they do fight those feelings in order to uphold society and not be lazy about it. But, if someone truly lacks the capabilities for a normal person, who are you going to blame? Their DNA? What good would that do anyone? It's not that free-will is an illusion, it's that most of the time people don't want to put the effort into actually thinking or using their consciousness and fighting instincts. Even when your just relying in your subconscious, your free-will is still there, but it's in a sort of "rest mode", doing minimal activity.

Good and evil exist, but they are not mystical forces, they are simply recognition or relative. To one thing, something has a negative impact, and to another, it has a positive. You can save a human, to the human, that is good, but to the living things it would kill, it is evil. This is why "bad things happen to good people" and is essentially why nature works the way it works. There's no good and evil forces that are actually determining anything, but there's still the perspective of things.

The justification for any belief is explanation. The belief can vary individually. How do you explain we got here? "I don't know, we don't know a whole lot...so I guess some greater being made us." "I don't know, we don't know a whole lot...so I guess it was just some random meaningless set of events that made us."

Science is a religion so this argument makes no sense. In science we must put faith that scientists are writing equations correctly and correctly describing the patterns they see and that they are writing the correct equations for them and interpreting those equations and using those equations correctly. This is why science can change so much. Our previous thinking was just a belief, and new evidence suggests another belief.

For some reason there's a lot more matter than anti-matter. Because there's more matter than anti-matter and it is not proven that there was a being in the creation of the universe to tamper with matter, it is the nature of the universe itself to be inherently anti-symmetrical. This is essentially just the hypothesis for the hypothesis. The way I think there is more matter than anti matter is because of how the constituents of matter work together in an absolute value or modular way. Whatever the particle or thing is that creates matter, it adds up in an anti-symmetrical way. Matter and matter are made form the same thing, however it must be easier to add up one amount more than the other. I picture it working sort of like imaginary number's work. Imagine these unknown particles as spinning transparent spheres. When they start out, they are all spinning counterclockwise. When I add two together, it generates another counter-clockwise sphere. But, when I add three sphere's together, it generates a clock-wise spinning sphere and when I add 4 it generates a counterclockwise sphere again, so the reason anti-matter doesn't occur a lot is because it's just harder for the constituents of matter to create, much like how technetium just doesn't naturally form because that's just how nuclei add up when they are fused, they add up in specific ways with a starting process. It takes more energy, more movement, more change, to create anti-matter. So I think if we discover an unknown particle and find that it generates matter and anti-matter at different energy levels, the mathematics of it would be this modular theory. I realize this is a lot less exciting then figuring out how to travel faster than light, but this is more realistic, real science is slow and you need to have many small ideas to make a bigger one. If you don't like to think of it that way, think of it like absolute value. If I add up 2 + 2 I get 4. And, if I add up abs(-2) + abs(-2), I still get 4. Or think of it like squaring. If I square 2, I get 4, and if I square -2, I still get positive 4 even though -2 is a different number than 2.

Idealism is relative of course, this has been discovered already. I'll even give you a situation where it comes in handy. A wolf is chasing a rabbit to eat it. Is the wolf evil for chasing the rabbit? Is the rabbit evil for not feeding the wolf? It depends on the perspective. To the rabbit, the wolf eating it is evil. To the wolf, eating a rabbit is good. Look at how a frame of reference plays in that.