That dot is not nearly hot enough.

Well we've already got some bullets that just make so much noise people in confined spaces fall over disoriented from it. I remember reading about them when the hunt for Osama seemed like they'd eventually get him.

Well psychologists do some tests to assess psychic powers. I've heard about a few that were positive but I haven't heard about any of those that held up. I know it seems kind of pissy to try really hard to find anything else that could have caused the results but if you want to really be sure you've seen astral plane stuff leeching into the rest of reality you have to do that.

Truth be told people try just as hard to disprove every new idea in science. The ones that it seems like nobody questions anymore are the ones that, try as they might, nobody could knock down. Because people tried so hard to discount that evidence but failed we can be that much more certain that we've found something genuine instead of just false positives.

I found something interesting:

I'm going to throw in some clarification to that. The definition of universe is that of a closed system. It is everything that interacts with anything that we interact extending out however many steps.
So if there is basically another Earth with intelligent life on it but all of the stars in their sky don't send out light to anything that could ever be a part of a chain that reaches us then they are not in our universe. If God reaches through some barrier and pokes a rock until it falls over God is part of the universe. If particles of light leave our universe to go into some eye of God then God is also part of our universe that way.

If you had a perfect box that didn't transfer any kind of energy through it's walls and the inner surface of it's walls had no interaction (direct or indirect,) with the outer surface of it's walls (redundant but I want to make sure the concept is clear,) and we were outside of the box and could see it or go up near it or whatever but had no way of having any kind of interaction with things inside the box the things inside that box would not be part of our universe.
You don't see anything like that because it there's no way to stop gravity from reaching into the box.
And even if there were how could you have a box where us pushing on the outside with enough force wouldn't move the whole box including the stuff inside of it?

But still, if you had a box that got around those problems the stuff inside it would be part of a different universe as per the definition.

Well no, I was praisingyou for having some compassion there, though that's on the assumption that you can't dismiss people's agony. Am I assuming correctly?

As I've said the universe is expanding out to heat death. Eventually any new "players" would start with nothing to work with unless they were lucky in which case they might get a single particle.

Says that's not a valid link.

But you're saying it's one that we "get to" play forever? Or do we only go through like four or five lives and that's it?

So you're not alright with looking at someone in the late stages of starving to death and saying this is just a game? Showing some empathy is a good thing. I'd say it's part of being a decent human being n_n

That we're both or that we're not both?



Life has will. Life has consciousness.How would you even know if a computer virus had those things?

Why not? What does life have that it doesn't?

Well ya but only because when I asked if you were saying we were our own designers you told me you weren't saying that.

Which is it? Are we or aren't we?

Awfully cold of you. I don't think I could so heartlessly look such a person in te face and tell them they were just not succeeding at the game.

So if someone saw a picture of an ostrich with a flowing poking out of it's butt and exclaimed "brilliant!" wouldn't it start to become clear that aesthetics are kind of meaningless in this context? If we automatically just look at the range of what we see and label the high end of that range "profoundly aesthetic" won't aesthetic really only mean that people are present?

Nobody likes a game that was an MMO one second and then the next there are a sponge in a fire.

Or at least they don't like if for more than a few minutes off of drugs. Games at least need a consistent rule about what they're doing.

"unlimited supply of raw materials for individuals"
Fix that phrase if you want me to accept that you meant what you just said.

So then you would say Earth is the starting area and after we're kicked out of it the real game starts?

Most games are almost exact copies of other games with a new label slapped on it and some redone artwork. Game design has had very little innovation since the earliest genres were set up.

It was at least as good as your reincarnation being extra lives thing.

"You will eventually get tired of playing with that sand. Roughly about when you know how to control it."

The barriers in a sandbox are understanding the rules. After that you exhaust your ideas quickly by either doing them or seeing that they can't work in that sandbox. Play Scribblenauts and tell me how many words you use throughout the course of the game.

How many people do you know that have dueled anyone for fun?
The random events have to give you something or you get the same reward from experiencing them as you would from imagining them and if you can just imagine it all you don't need the game anymore.

Achieving the same goal over and over would make life like the original Super Mario Brothers. You run around and jump on the evil brown mushrooms while eating the red spotted ones and rescuing the mushroom hats guys and eventually princess from a spiky turtle and it's neat the first time and the second and third but eventually you've got it all memorized. It would turn into a hellish existence if you had to keep doing it over and over.

Ultimately reincarnation as extra lives must eventually become such an experience. Most of us recognize that carnal pleasure is a fundamentally empty experience in forty to sixty years and in about half as many years we recognize that serving a community isn't anything that would keep us happy indefinitely either.

People think about and often wish they could do life over but think about it- how many times would you really want to go through being an awkward teenager? You may look back on it with fond memories but that's looking back; only douchebags were really very well off in high school.

And potty training? It's bad enough going back to diapers at the end of a long life but having to do it infinitely many times would be utterly wretched.

It's mostly the shooters where you fight other players. They kill you and then about ten second later you pop up at a respawn point if it's a mode where you can die multiple times. Usually in those it's a set amount of time and you try to get more points than the other team.

Actually no. We know full well that both are "wrong."

The Earth is flat is wrong. The Earth is pretty close to flat and no matter how far you walked you wouldn't notice the curve but if you're standing at the ocean you can see ships sink below the horizon a certain distance out.
So the Earth is a sphere but that's wrong too. There Earth is spinning and much of it's surface is water so it bulges at the equator.
Naturally you can tell that I'm going to say "sphere that bulges at the center" is wrong as well. The northern hemisphere has a lot more land so the tidal bulge of water is stronger in the south.

At this point we've gone down to a level of detail where almost nobody would care about the now tiny deviations from the general statement but we know that the general statement is just that: general. If you look into smaller and smaller details none of our descriptions tell the whole story. F=ma tells about 90% of the story and relativity tells all of that and about 90% of what was left and quantum gravity will probably tell about 90% of what was left and so on.

But JB says there is order without a God and abra says there could be no order without a God. Abra says there are only 100 atoms and JB says we're part of our designer.

The similarity seems to only be that you all use the word designer.

Spend some time around dolphins. If you still think they're not as capable of self awareness it will have to be by a slim margin.
Evolution is completely blind about anything that comes in the future. We got here by a long series of questions that were all "what works right now?"

If that's just your opinion you're basically holding the opinion that the world is flat and has four corners.

Why produce so few species with humanoid bodies and so many that have clearly gone for the smallest brain that still gets the job of moving their limbs around done?

Where did the smallest consciousness come from?





You obviously wrote that for some reason. It is not an explanation that works, it is either an observation or opinion that does not solve the question of how we evolved from non-conscious and non-intelligence to conscious and intelligent. At what point in our evolution did we suddenly become conscious and intelligent? I contend that it was a gradual process, but one that arose from an very small degree of conscious intelligence. (awareness potential.)A dog is a little bit of both of those. A fish is a smaller bit of both of those. A worm is very slightly intelligent and very slightly conscious. Bacteria are so little of those things it's easier to say they aren't either but depending on what you mean by intelligent and conscious they may have very slight degrees of those.

*Many bacteria basically have a nose they use to steer themselves. Would you say moving towards something that smells like food is intelligent? That smelling it at all is conscious?


Why does it take a designer to make them? Variation and selection are what lead a species to become something else. Variation can't be avoided and selection can't be avoided.

For variation of your genome you only need to be duplicating the strands. For the chemistry reason I went into you get (very stochastic) non-duplicates.

For selection making more babies means you eventually squeeze out the opposition and if there's a disaster more of your offspring will be left around while maybe all of the other guys' will have died. Babies that are more likely to survive in general have the same effect.

So why should trial and error take a designer? We've got everything happening without any guiding force other than that whoever stays alive isn't dead.



Yes, but what's your point??
If they help something stay alive and make babies like themselves where is there room for a designer? Staying alive isn't like auditioning and getting a rose so you go on to the next round; you either get enough food/water and avoid being killed or you don't.

Are you saying without the designer plants and animals wouldn't starve to death or get crushed by rocks or catch on fire?
*trees can starve. Because they are stationary if they managed to sprout and last through their first year they're in a place with enough to "eat" but they definitely don't always get that.

How is it not alive?

Unimaginable cruelty is a good aspect of a game?

Isn't that just telling of our ability to make mundane things aesthetical?

That's not something you want in design at all. A bridge with any important parts that constantly changes through a great deal of variety won't be able to support vehicles traveling over it and basically any program that changes at all levels is going to break almost immediately.

Earth is a lot more limited than that and we'd never have the fuel to move people or materials about the observable universe. Add in that as time passes less and less of the universe is within the bounds we could ever reach even going at light speed and you have a scenario of rapidly declining availability of such things.


Not lives like you see in any game I've actually seen produced. That's more akin to selecting "new game" than having extra lives.

Sizable memory card/space though so we could at least conclude that we were more likely a computer game than a console game~

Who's ever changed action and reaction or that objects with mass exert an attractive force on each other?

Sand box games are only fun until you understand the rules behind them. Then they become tedious and you want to find a different game to play unless you're up for grinding out some annoying achievements.

I'd be hapier with the game if they hadn't left out respawn points~

How can contradictions be consistent?

I think it's more the way they describe them than what they're actually describing that you align with.

We're not. Dolphins, cuttlefish, salamanders, sparrows, alpacas, goats, guppies, squid, and so on didn't just get where they were some millions of years ago and stop. They've continued to change and are just as much the "end product" as we are.

At it's source? If we require an intelligent consciousness at our source because we are an intelligent consciousness why doesn't it require one and so on extending back infinitely?

Why can't our complexity arise from simplicity?

Answer to what?


What part of it?
"the things that survive are the ones we see today because they survived."
"it's chemically impossible to prevent mutations in the chemicals we use to store the instructions for how to keep our cells working and dividing."

If you were Abra I'd have to add a third point about chemicals simply being like counting numbers that go up one each time-

But those two things are really all it should take from the point you've placed the designer at. So without a designer guiding the process should we see species around today that died off? Should we never see a chemical process with multiple low energy configurations (*copying DNA takes the least energy but any time things have more energy, such as after having absorbed a photon, they can overcome a larger energy barrier. For things that remain solid or liquid this is usually reversible so at a stable temperature you would get mostly the lowest energy configuration but there's always going to be another photon absorption or similar event that gives some molecules enough energy to go another route.)

Too mechanical? Exactly how mechanical can it be or not be?

Intelligence and consciousness are useful are they not? Having something useful that nobody else has is an advantage is it not?

What's wrong with the old "making copies of yourself that have the same heritable traits" definition?

It still is in big portions of the country. It's nice that some places are more accepting now.

Well of course. If you don't know you need to fight the Devil there's no way you could resist him. Or look at star wars- that one officer guy didn't believe in the Force and then Vader used it to choke him to death!

...

Nobody is arguing that there aren't at least some intelligent humans so you really don't need to keep repeating that part. It's the purpose behind the design part people are picking at.

I say the efficient aspects of our physical forms come from the obvious fact that bodies that work well survive and stick around better than bodies that do not. With the way molecules act these different arrangements of things couldn't possibly be prohibited from taking place (and abra agrees but says God was responsible for making chemistry work that way.)


You haven't convinced me that you've understood my explanation so far.

Understandable. That's why I didn't just flat out tell you to do it.

Well yes, they make useful ammunition against someone else but I was asking if the opinions of others that you disagreed with ever useful for shaping your own world view.

Well even with the random origin stuff we wouldn't technically be precluded from having some god notice that a place had started up and then stepping in with some divine intervention. JB talks about that sort of thing a bit without using the word god.

That's getting pretty far away from the apparent bad design.

I'm really disappointed with how he switches the meanings of his words so much. It's good for poetry and metaphor but not for science or philosophy. It turns into a terrible mess and doesn't support the points he's making.

So basically he's cheating.

Keeping all of the quotes separated into their own posts is showing me my face so much I feel like I'm being narcissistic or something.

Any that you disagreed with?

Are we talking self as in individual humans or would humanity be the self and everything not-human be the other?

I would say other is only what allows you to tell when your subjective does not fit the objective.

But with your definition even if scientists were to focus on being subjective wouldn't that still be objective to you? Or are you saying they need to come knocking on your door personally and focus on your opinion to work out the nature of the universe?

I'm not entirely sure what you've described. Internal/external? Personal/impersonal?

You've been talking about yourself, sky, and abra as a group presenting a certain view. It's mostly because of what you've said that I'm mixing in the things those other two have said when I talk with you (and what you've said when I talk to them.)

Abra's been acting on his own and so I've kept you and sky mostly out of what I say to him. Go back and read to see it if you've got the time and inclination.