i am posting an outdated reply.
[/quote] You point about "flight and fight" is a little shaky, however. I've seen BUGS run for cover from US...and I don't think it's because they believe they have "unfinished business".[/quote]
no because they cannot think lacking a logically endowed brain. A beetle is a ready-made creature, its behavior is completely programmed by its genes. It cannot learn from the environment. This is true for all insects, and mostly true for amphibians, fishes and reptiles. But the absolutism of preprogrammed genetic control decreases with increasing brain complexity until we come upon certain birds and mammals capable of showing considerable learning skills. needless to say that logical part of the brain with its inherent capability to learn from the environment has attained maximum complexity in humans. So our genes has produced a brain whose responses to external stimuli is not preprogrammed, but learned. But as responses are learned by our powerful logical brain it may be possible under certain circumstances that the learned responses are actually harmful for the existence of the individual. Indeed this is commonly seen in depressed people with suicidal tendencies. So some checks and balances have to be built in within the system so that responses that increase the chances of survival for the individual(or society) are selected by our brain irrespective of the logic behind it. It is here that the feelings of specialty and purpose makes us choose only those courses of action that help us as an individual or as a group survive for one more day. In short it boils down to this- people do not want to die today though they know that death is inevitable because evolution has taken care that such thoughts never enter our minds. Such checks are only there because we can think for ourselves which a beetle cannot do.
My belief is that the Universe is "out to have an Experience"...a real complex one, which includes the lives of Everything It gives rise to. Thus, all "we" need to do is to "have an experience" or two...to "fulfill our purpose".
so you see that your ideas gives humans speciality(by assigning that consciousness felt by us is a fundamental property of the universe and thus in a sense the universe is some sort of conscious life form like us) and also a purpose. So yes the we is all inclusive.
Iacchus...I think he's talking to YOU. Sorry for evesdropping.
no, no. you are welcome.
I'm pretty sure there's consciousness in -- if not OF -- the Universe; as to "spirit"...it's only through deduction than observation
I still not see how you are ‘sure’ about the existence of universal consciousness. Anyway how did you deduce there is a spirit?
[/quote] And whether spirit or consciousness will ever be "proved" by science doesn't "nullify" a thing.[/quote]
or whether existence of an unicorn will ever be proved by science doesn’t nullify a thing. If spirit does exist and can interact with the physical world it must leave its signatures behind that can be picked up by science. If we can find neutrinos, we can find spirits if they exist in our world.
First, I don't think that consciousness "can be explained via simple atomic interactions alone." Aux contraire. But that's another thread
how about “consciousness-defined in science?” thread
[/quote] You're "meshing" the physical and spiritual (and probably conscious) "planes". My view is that spirit and consciousness would be NOT CONFINED to the physical, thus able to "hold together" even if we EXPLODED a human body. I see spirit and consciousness more like TWO DISTINCT -- tho intertwined -- NETWORKS that are parts of LARGER networks.
Thus, the consiousness or spirit of a "table" is/are connected to OTHER similar systems that remain so even after the table is blown to smithereens![/quote]
but a table is made from wood which came from a tree. This tree is made of carbon which was made in nucleosynthesis within a star from hydrogen. This hydrogen came from primordial post big bang soup. So if the changes in form experienced by physical entities are not mirrored in the spirit world then the entities in the spirit dimension must be frozen into the shape it acquired directly after the big bang. There will be no evolution, everything would be static-a drab dimension indeed.
This quote is from iacchus
[/quote] Where does purpose originate? Does the universe have purpose? If not, then why is man endowed with a sense of purpose? How could that be? That would be tantamount to saying the Universe created a sense of purpose outside of itself? ... And yet, who's to say mankind is not the Universe looking back at itself? ...[/quote]
many amongst you seem to believe that purpose and consciousness cannot originate from situ. It had to be there all along. But this is simply not true. Consciousness is an effect of the processes occurring within our complex brain. So it is a form of complexity. Can complexity arise out of simplicity. here we must first define what complexity is. Any system that has a lesser entropy than another system is more complex than the latter. So the question boils down to this- can a system progress from a state of higher to lower entropy. The answer is it can under certain conditions. Such processes are called self-organization and is today a leading field of research. Everyday you see processes of self-organisation. Thus the structure of a hurricane is much more complex than the things from which it arose. Life, consciousness etc. are sophisticated examples of such processes of self-organization.
)