That's okay, I hate going on dates where all the girl does is talk about food.

thanks for the history lesson



Course that's not the only theory but it's a pretty sound one. Much better than the fruitcakes that want to trace tarot all the way back to the first roman card game.

People would be amazed if they knew half of the stuff that occult practitioners brought to this country. I laugh my but off when I see earwax candles in beauty stores.

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I don't hang out in beauty stores, I mean..
....
um.

I like going somewhere I can draw, like coffee shops, parks, or anywhere scenic. This way I can get them to talk and find out what kind of loser I'm dating this week, muahahahahahaha... Plus if I get stood up I got my drawing/writing supplies in the car so I can spend some time with my hobbies instead :)

am i bad?

Nothing at all!?!

Oh man, I'm not even touching that one.


I'd rather be drinking.

http://www.hero.ac.uk/uk/business/archives/2003/sticking_with_gecko_glue5188.cfm

Geckos are cool!!!

JB, good call. Been so muddled in theory around this topic that I guess I lost sight of the other side of it.

I wanted to share also a story I was once told. Sorry I don't have a reference but it is from a scholarly friend who usually does his homework on such things.

Some monkeys living on an island somehow had their environment tainted by interference from humans, and rather than letting them die off, every so often a drop is made on the island as a large package of oranges to give the apes food. The oranges land on the beach and get covered with sand. Researchers on the island noticed that a single female would take her oranges to a nearby stream to rinse the sand off and was ostricised by the other apes for doing it. Later she had offspring and taught them to do the same, and the other young apes were also learning to do it from her offspring. When enough apes had adopted the behaviour, something strange happened. All of the apes on the island started washing their fruit one morning and had accepted the habbit. Now for the weird part...

That same day, on a nearby island with no direct contact to the first whatsoever, and too far away to swim or communicate, apes started washing their fruit as well. It seems that something happened in that species that has not been explained scientifically yet and remains a mystery.

It is called the theory of the 100th monkey. Story is probably a little varied now from oral communication, but there should be some documentation out there if you do a google search. Weird.


Just looked into it,,, from wiki :

An analysis of the appropriate literature by Ron Amundson, published by the Skeptics Society, revealed several key points that demystified the supposed effect.

Unsubstantiated claims that there was a sudden and remarkable increase in the proportion of washers in the first population were exaggerations of a much slower, more mundane effect. Rather than all monkeys mysteriously learning the skill it was noted that it was predominantly younger monkeys that learned the skill from the older monkeys through the usual means of imitation; older monkeys who did not know how to wash tended not to learn. As the older monkeys died and younger monkeys were born the proportion of washers naturally increased. The time span between observations were in the order of years.

Claims that the practice spread suddenly to other isolated populations of monkeys ignore the fact that at least one washing monkey swam to another population and spent about four years there.[citation needed] It is also to be noted that the sweet potato was not available to the monkeys prior to human intervention: it is not at all surprising that isolated populations of monkeys started to wash potatoes in a similar time frame once they were made available.



Still pretty neat though about how a new idea spreads. The original story is from 1975 though so everyone has had a chance to make their own spin on it.

Memory is a little hazy, thinking about that day. I was going on about that Einstein-Rosen paper and what a load of crap it was that day after reading it several times. It was probably more my snide comments about the paper jumping to conclusions and comming up with fairytale theories about what a negative sqare root means that Dr. Swami was trying to shut me up about, and he had a good point. For the purpose of this discussion though same difference, paper written by famous guy is wrong, and you're not supposed to correct his conclusion jumping habbit.

Just realized that there was some confusion on this line...

loopholes in scientific theory are rarely attacked with the same tenacity as religious texts.


I'm talking about in debate forums by people who are discussing from a distance, rather than being part of the research problem. Average Joe Schmoes who like bashing the opposing viewpoint. When someone props a religious viewpoint on a topic, it gets torn apart down to the syntax. "scientific" viewpoints tend to just be accepted by the masses. I had no right to rant, I didn't read your point clearly enough.

As for scientists tending to bury new ideas, it happens all the time. Physics tends to have the least of it but occassionally it will still rear its ugly head in QM and Astro- especially. Also in astronomy. Most people would probably be thrown off if they actually knew how vaugue most astronomy numbers are. Numbers are good in astronomy if they are within a few powers of 10 of the actual value. Not exactly precision measurements, this is why there is so much disagreement over the age of the universe.

All in all though, physics isn't bad, Biology gets very opinionated and noticing that a species is in the wrong place (genus, family, etc) can take years and decades to resolve and is not really an approved behaviour.

Same goes with Archeology. You still have professors and top notch people insisting that Kafre built the Sphynx even though it has been known for a long time that he simply replaced the head of it with his own face after it was already constructed. (Or at least that is the theory for now until it changes again)

Keeping scientific theories up to date is sometimes impossible because there is rarely one theory that is agreed on by all scientists, including evolution. Just because Darwin's survival of the fittest theory for evolution is popular at the moment doesn't make it right. There is one theory that evolution happens quickly and without warning which explains why some of these "missing link" scenarios come up, but the mechanism is not as easy to digest. Another theory is that animals have the ability to change DNA while still living as a matter of will power, and yes there is DNA research to back it up. That leaves open the possibility that Evolution can happen within a few generations to create a new species.


"
Also are you seriously saying that the bacteria flagellum is some kind of unknown? Or an irreducibly complex problem for evolution?
"

Not a complex problem, but a critical problem. A cell is the most basic type of lifeform and the easiest to mutate and "evolve" if you will. But nobody can seem to find a good mechanism that is repeatable, like a cell species evolving to have better transportation. This is just one example from a barrage of such questions. Others are, how do you get from no eyes to eyes, an eye is a complex organ that it would seem would have to evolve over a very long time. Same question, what is the mechanism that makes an eye come into existence? Wings are easy to figure out, eyes, ears, etc are not so easy.
The bigger problem, as I said is going from single celled organisms to multicelled organisms. Science has no answer and for evolution theory to be complete, you need an answer to this question. Another gap is protein soup->living cells. The proteins can be formed chemically, no problem, but arranging them into cells requires something more.


"
If I was you I would have sought out a referee at a reputable paper.

Your story sounds familiar, I think I shall research this story of yours, I seem to remember someone solved that particular knowledge bottleneck.
"

No bottleneck, it's a deductive conclusion from the mathematics. The math predicts it perfectly but most people can't think in time/space very easily or visuallize things like density distributions and their effect on spacetime, and that is where it's hiding. You don't even really need to work the math out, its basic.

The reasons there was no "stir" on my part, other than being a bit surprised, are many but here are the biggies. In physics, if it doesn't offer something useful and measurable, then it's not worth publishing. My little blip does not change the way we need to look for black holes at all b/c in the grand scheme, a nearly collapsed BH looks exactly the same and behaves exactly the same as an all the way collapsed BH. No need to modify the telescopes. The only useful thing it offers is insight and truth and it gets rid of that bloody question about Rosen Bridges, not to mention Poincare (Can't remember if this is how you spell his name) diagrams for space travel. So why criticise approval of said nasty paper by Einstein when all he was trying to do was help some kid get his Ph.D? That is their argument.

I love hearing people talk about scientists as if they are these perfect people that never make mistakes and are free of personal bias. Yea right. Most of them are just a bunch of posers like everyone else. Only a few good ones in the bunch, just as you have in any other field, but people give them nearly godlike qualities. The other bad assumption people make is that Scientists are all on the same page. We aren't. We disagree with eachother all the time. But the disagreements between good scientists with open minds are friendly and they result in new experiments to try and figure out what's right and what's not.

Dude, I don't want to bust your bubble here but that isn't exactly how science works, and every scientific theory or law has loopholes, loose ends, and assumptions built into it. It is the nature of any philosophic argument and a scientific proof is simply and modernized and selected philosophical proof based on an approved standard for sufficient data and a specific logical framework called the scientific method. That does not make it bulletproof.

The professionals, hehehe, I am one. While I was finishing my thesis on Black Hole Theory in college I was hit with the cruel reality of how the "scientific" world thinks. There is a very unique scenario that comes up when a star is about to collapse beyond an event horizon which I called the critical density. It was never investigated in the lifetime of blackhole theory because no other "scientist" ever had the foresight to look at their math and say "something's not right here." This critical density idea stops the collapse of a black hole, so technically, they can never form from a collapsing star, at least not to the point of being a "true", textbook black hole. It's obvious, and my mathematics is very clear and in order and on display at SIUE, but my instructor specifically told me not to publish it and not to make a big deal about it because "you don't smack the work of the worlds legendary physicists"

That's how your "scientists" think. As far as the Nobel Prize, you don't get that for punching holes either. You get it for creating.

Let me stop before I go on a rant about evo. biologists.

Oops,

Went to add a smiley and hit "post reply" instead, my bad.

Where was I, oh yes. I was a die hard atheist until I turned about 20 or 21. Not going to bore you with the details but I found a way to reconcile my scientific framework with several eastern religions and pagan religions and discovered a lot of new things that I never realized about the world before. I also saw and experienced a lot of things that I had previously thought were impossible.

As far as chaos theory goes, I hope that you are speaking from more than that blasted dragon equation in Jurrassic Park. There is a little more to it than that. If you are really interested you may want to start by finding out about Mandelbrot, Pascal, and Newton. There is a particularly good introductory level book for non-Math Minded people by James Gleik. When I was your age I was writing theory in it, and now my philosophical theory uses those preliminary ideas as a foundation for a new worldview. If you truly have an interest it is worth looking into, but with a closed mind you will be biting off more than you can chew.

Evolution has some real scientific problems. Personally I still believe that the gist of it is accurate, but some of the details don't work so good when applied to real ecological systems and there are some holes in it.

Just my two bits.

A twenty year old that actually takes time out to think about crap. That blows my latest thoery to crap. Good sport, good ideas, but keep your mind open dude. You'd be amazed who will eventually poke a solid hole in a theory very quickly, and you need to be ready to revise all of them at a moments notice. Since I was sixteen I have gone through so many paradigm shifts that I lost count, but each one makes my world view that much stronger. A coheasive framework of thought is a really good thing until it snags a nail that tears the whole thing apart.

As far as the religious thing, I would recommend that you broaden your horizons a little bit before you throw everything spiritual under the umbrella of misc. christianity. There are at least 100 religions out there and a lot of them have nothing at all to do with the big 3. And whoever made that snide remark about paganism can kiss my fanny

Creationists and Evolutionists suffer from the same problem. They think that their viewpoint is the only "right" one and that the opposising viewpoint is both "wrong" and stupid.

In a logical discussion, creationists are usually the easiest to stomp on and demonstrate that their arguments are subjective at best. Their entire argument revolves around a few pages in a book that has been translated several times in different ways and different languages over the last 1600 years, and who's original organisation was prepared under a Roman Emperor, who's only goal was to unite his empire under one religion rather than many.

Before that these few pages were part of another book that dates hundreds of years earlier in Egypt, and its inception is surrounded by strikingly similar writings from Egypt and Sumeria. There are so many similarities, in fact, between the Sumerian stories and the Egyptian Book of the Dead (sometimes word for word translations) that some tend to believe the book was copied and modified from these texts.

Creationists dwell on the information that got spat out of this long process and take it as factual and complete, and see no reason to let new information fill in the gaps. This is called a closed mind.


Evolutionists are a bit more clever but can be twice as dimwitted when it comes to their attitude towards science. The main ideology nowadays is that if a scientist says it, then it must be correct, and loopholes in scientific theory are rarely attacked with the same tennacity as religious texts. Scientists say all sorts of things are not possible and are later proven wrong. Ever hear of the four minute mile...?

http://www.sptimes.com/News/121799/Sports/Bannister_stuns_world.shtml

Theres a neat little news article in case you haven't.

Scientists also proposed that the sound barrier could not be broken for seemingly valid reasons. When the trinity bomb went off some of the chemists had started laying bets as to whether or not the bomb would destroy the earth. There are still a lot of unknowns in science, and evolution is not without a few gaps of its own.

Not going to bore you with the whole missing link thing, people always get hung up on that one, but in reality, who cares? There are so many other problems with evolution that it is meerly notable. Here are a few...

From a single celled organism without an appendage to one that has a flagella.
From a single celled organism to a multi-celled organism (this is a BIG question mark in science right now)
Why humans have been breeding dogs and cats to isolate genes for millenia and have never created anything that could be called a new species, though hundreds of breeds have become availible.
Retroviruses that are made specifically to alter DNA do not create new species.
Experimentation with artificial selection and leopard geckos. You can make them any color that you want, but they are still leopard geckos and have never yet formed a new species through breeding.

Geneticists and hobbyists have tried and tried with forced mutations, artificial selection (faster than natural selection), and many other means to produce new species but it doesn't seem to work.


Personally, I like evolution. It fits into my spiritual and scientific pictures of reality very nicely, but to claim that it has to be accurate as prescribed is childish and presumptuous. It has never been verified, even though it has a lot of supporting evidence. Someone adament about wanting to find the truth should look at ALL of the arguments and instead of making final decision on the matter, keep your mind open to other possibilities while favoring one theory at the current time. Saying "evolution has to be right" is no different than saying "the bible has to be right" when it comes down to it. When all encompasing statements like these are made you are no longer keeping your eyes open to other possibilities, just like all the doctors who used to claim that eating oranges and lemons has no effect on scurvey (they ended up being wrong too by the way).

Supporting evidence does not make a proposition True.

"I would be interested in what some of the proponents of a psychic medium think about this idea of global consciousness, or perhaps interconnectedness.

Perhaps just as the article indicates we do not have solid research now . . . maybe someone will find some good evidence, or maybe we will create our own global consciousness with technology.

Is the internet at least not a global interconnectedness on an elementary level? "
Edited by Bushidobillyclub on Wed 02/18/09 07:59 AM


I figured that since nobody else on this thread seems to be on the topic of answering this post, I would give it a shot.

I need a little help though, what do you mean by "proponents of a psychic medium?" You mean like followers of a palm reader or something related, or just people who are interested in occult philosophy? If so, I wonder why you single out such a small group of people for a pool of opinions on a fairly large metaphysical topic like global consciousness. That is your own initiative and I won't knock you for it, but it is rather curious.

I have been studying occult philosophy and science for over 6 years now and done quite a bit of philosophical research in the area over that time. My work is not finished yet, but a large portion of my study has been devoted to this idea of a global or universal unconscious. Different way of wording the same thing, do not get hung up on the conscious/unconscious thing, the difference is pretty insignificant in the scope of this thread.

Definitions:

Interconnectedness is easy, read a book on chaos theory. Everything is connected to everything through action/reaction, electromagnetic radiation and response, etc. If somebody farts in china, it is going to have some tiny effect on the entire world the next day. Can't be avoided. The classic example is the effects of a wind disturbance caused by a mosquitoe in Africa that later contributes to the formation of a hurricane in the Carribean. Everything is interconnected in some way and this isn't much cause for concern unless you try to read too much into it.

Global consciousness on the other hand is a bit more tricky. The basic idea is that we know everything on earth is very easily interconnected, and that the lines which connect everything are complex, dynamic, and self sustaining, just like the arrangement of cells and nerves in our bodies. If our nervous system is responsible for our consciousness, is it possible for other complex systems with the same sort of network setup to also be conscious? That is the question. Personally, I believe that it is not only possible but it happens at every level, meeting with a few other philophers on this point, and that each country may have it's own consciousness. Each species. Each ecosystem. And one for the whole planet, just depends on where you choose to draw the line. Isolating the smaller ones is often difficult because they are connected to others around them, but the global consciousness is easy to visualize, comparatively.

Answers?
So to your first question about the internet forming a consciousness... Definitely plausable, but usually not a lot of credit is given to such systems. I would say that the neccessary elements are there though, so who knows?

Solid research? Hehehehehehe. Scientists are funny sometimes. They said they have some kind of RNGs spread out all over the globe and looking for when they are not being random??? My side is about to start hurting from holding in my laughter. Sounds like someone got carried away with a Douglas Adams book. First point, randomness is impossible. As of right now this is just my opinion because I haven't published the book yet, but I have a rather long proof as to why you can either have logic or alow randomness, but you can't have both, so no serious theory can be made on the basis of randomness to begin with and there is no way to quantify whether datastreams are behaving "randomly" or not. Its not as simple as seeing a bunch of ones pop up in a row and saying "oh look, it's not random anymore." Talking about seeing anomolous data in a random number stream is useless. Its all anomolous.

Next Point, if you want to show evidence of a global consciousness first you have to figure out a way to show evidence of any kind of consciousness. There is no test that I know of or have ever heard about that can tell you if a certain specimen has a conscience. Figure out a way to demonstrate it with a human brain first, then carry your experiment over to the global level.

Just my two coppers

There's always hope.

And that is also the problem...

sorry, in kind of a crappy mood tonight. Welcome to the site and hope that it does you well.

apologies, I never read the book and never saw the movie sober. The first two times I was stoned out of my mind and the third I was drunk. I saw part of it sober.

That reminds me. Need to buy some penguin toys tommorrow for my frige. Long story.

Bon Jovi was always a bit girlish, but I like his music a LOT. Def Leppard just kicks the booty right off the pirate ship. I LUV ROCK!

Pour about 10-15 in my mouth and crush 'em up real good. Then work them around in my mouth until all the chocolate mashes together in a big lump. If it's not a big enough lump I add a few more to boost the size a little. Then I suck all the flavorful, chocolaty essence out and try to make it last for as long as possible.

um...

wow, that is kinda like my sex life

Still very horribly confused,, more beer

After that whole TV sleepover deal, her career is toast. And good riddens, her music was kind of crappy.