Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[ChairmanPoo]

It's called positivism

[Shade-o]

Shade-o: It's called a belief. A belief that the world is real, and knowable through empiricism, a belief that there is a God, a belief that your fellow human beings have equal rights to you, those are the things that makes us function.

Somehow I missed this succinct explanation. Though I still don't know how holding all beliefs to be valid could make someone anything more than an extremely conflicted person.

Though this is treading dangerously close to Philosophy, and that can only end in tears.

[Bauglir]

Though this is treading dangerously close to Philosophy, and that can only end in tears.

I'll tear YOU.

[Aklyon]

Though this is treading dangerously close to Philosophy, and that can only end in tears.

I'll tear YOU.

IN HALF!

[Josephus]

Yeah, Chick Publications (in addition to being an actual thing) has been around for a long time. Chick himself is 80-somthing, although most information on him is outdated due to his belief that people are trying to kill him for spreading "the truth".

The thing is, in the one picture of him that exists, he looks so genial and happy.

[Jackrabbit]

He looks like he's made of plasticine. I mean, I don't usually judge but his looks match his attitude - ugly and abrasive.

[Siquo]

Somehow I missed this succinct explanation. Though I still don't know how holding all beliefs to be valid could make someone anything more than an extremely conflicted person.

Only if you take yourself and your beliefs Very Seriously. Which is nigh impossible: if all beliefs are equally true, that means they're all equally nonsense at the same time, making it hard to actually believe it for a long time, and taking it very seriously. For instance, I believe "taking yourself seriously" is the root of a lot of problems in the world. Hard to take that seriously, is it?

Spoiler: Weird Stuff I Believe (click to show/hide)

Yesterday I believed a drainage pipe was actually a metal tree. It reproduces symbiotically, by being useful to its host, the building. The building in turn is reproducing by accomodating humans, so the humans can make more buildings, therefore it procreates, and is alive. I'm not sure about sentience, though.

In that vein: Rocks perform trillions of calculations per second, by all their interacting molecules and particles. Is it possible that of all the rocks in the world/universe, there's one of them with the exact configuration needed to produce intelligence, or even sentience? Or maybe even have the power to convert other rocks to be thinking objects as well? I believe there is. It's just working really slowly, and we're not able to communicate with them. Yet...

Though this is treading dangerously close to Philosophy, and that can only end in tears.

True, but it's the only thing binding atheism to theism. It's also one of the vaguest "sciences" out there, and practicing Philosophy in an argument consists of merely quoting famous philosophers, which is a bore.

[Starver]

Hell if an angel descended form heaven and beat me up I'd probably start believing in God too.

On balance, if that happened to me I'd probably start believing in aliens at first.

(Of the "come to our planet, dissect our cattle" kind.  I already believe in the "sit on their own worlds, looking at our star and dismissing it as having no suitable planet in their alienesque goldilocks-zone" ones.)

[Andir]

In that vein: Rocks perform trillions of calculations per second, by all their interacting molecules and particles.

This I understand...

Is it possible that of all the rocks in the world/universe, there's one of them with the exact configuration needed to produce intelligence, or even sentience? Or maybe even have the power to convert other rocks to be thinking objects as well? I believe there is. It's just working really slowly, and we're not able to communicate with them. Yet...

This is still speculation.  May there be a thinking rock?  Possibly, but only due to random chance.  I still don't think that there's a "God thing" out there telling the rock to think.  Also, what an existence.  I'm sure it's buried in the core of a planet somewhere thinking: "Praise the almighty magma, for it brings us into this world and can so quickly take us out.  It surrounds us with this vast shield of loving long dead rocks."

Also, "thinking" and "speaking" in and of themselves are purely relative.

When you get into saying that living your life where all belief is true though... that's where you lose people.  One can only live a life in their own bounds.  It's rather pointless for us to think about talking to these rock things until we can talk to the more immediate life in our vicinity.  Hell, we haven't even figured out the language of the oceans, and you want humanity to accept the new linguistic skills of our molten brethren?  Thinking that every belief is truth can only lead to humanity spending the remainder of it's existence chasing rainbows as we already do, too much.

[Starver]

This is still speculation.  May there be a thinking rock?  Possibly, but only due to random chance.

I'm betting that in the vastness of the universe, across the whole volume (and especially across all time) there are (/have been/will be) spontaneously created 'living rocks', some form of self-organising crystals arising on a boundary layer of a planet's mantle/core, or wherever else such things might happen.  But of course whether that 'life, but not as we know it' ever develops intelligence is another matter.  Any self-organisation/replication strategy that develops will do quite well (at least until its 'habitat' changes) by definition, but as many living things that we see do well enough without intelligence and society (as we know them), they're probably not a universal 'solution' to keeping life going...

Ditto with self-organising plasmas and/or magnetic fields in stars or nebulae...

(Also, I don't rule out the possibility that there is/has been/will be a civilisation, or at least a population, of 'something life-like' at the edge of the Earth's core or in Sol's photosphere, equally as ignorant of us as we are of them.  But I certainly wouldn't say that it's a certainty, and we probably all work at completely different scales of distance and time.)

I still don't think that there's a "God thing" out there telling the rock to think.

I'm with you there.  But that's not to say that the rock (or whatever) thinks there's some ultimate guiding force.  And what would be really funny is if we end up having unknowing interactions with each other, and two intelligences interpret the other's ignorant fumblings as the other.

Watering it down, and into a DF POV, the dwarfs find that...

Spoiler: clownstuff (click to show/hide)

...there are horrible demons living deep down in the lower levels of rock and tend to build up forces to repel them.  What if the demons are equally happy except for pesky creatures from the horribly cold and exposed 'heights' of the world that keep tunnelling into them and unleashing some form of environmental catastrophe, and that's why they build up armies of their own kind, ready to strike at the 'horrors above'.

But that's nowhere close to how I envisage our interactions with alternate-life brethren of our own.  Eyjafjallajökull (yes, I had to look that up) could have been the result (indirect, possibly) of the latest exploration attempt of Earth's very own magma-beings to explore (or exploit) the upper reaches of the cold and inhospitable void of rock-space.  Could, of course.  It's way out there as an idea and worthy only of novelisation[1], not for serious theorising or even (I would hope) the basis of a new belief system.


However, the point is that life (possibly definable as self-replicating, self organising 'structures' with localised entropy-busting effects within some medium or other) is almost certainly going to happen somewhere in any form it can possibly happen.  Thought and consciousness and society and (to pinch a term from Cohen and Stewart) "extelligence" are going to be less likely.  But based upon my general idea of life itself being almost infinitely prevalent, even a small chance of such things arising are going to make them arise any number of times across the entirity of existence.  Ignoring, for now, panspermia and civilisations 'bootstrapped' from prior civilisations with an eye to meddling and moulding...


[1] I'm sure it's been done, but the only book that comes to mind is David Brin's Earth, which doesn't so much have abiogenesis as an actual (unintentional) act of creation of an alternate intelligence.  More or less.

[Andir]

I just have to say I love how Wikipedia put a red triangle on the map where this volcano is...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyjafjallaj%C3%B6kull

[Siquo]

Thinking that every belief is truth can only lead to humanity spending the remainder of it's existence chasing rainbows as we already do, too much.

That's a belief I disagree with.
Rainbows are awesome. So are things like space travel, which was once one of the rainbows you speak of.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

But what about the buildings? Are they the masters and we merely instruments for their reproduction? Are we mere digestion-bacteria living in its bowels? Are our architects not creative but mind-controlled by our buildings without them knowing it? The terror!

If this seems funny to you, yes, I often really truly believe this kind of stuff. If that makes me crazy in your view, realise how crazy you must seem to me

And any belief is speculation, depending on your definition of speculation. Believing the world is an actual place outside of our minds is, in a way, speculation. Or, that's what I believe, according to my definitions of speculation, belief, mind, world, actual, place, belief, the concept of "me" and definition.

[Leafsnail]

There was an interesting article in the New Scientist ages ago about "Boseman Brains" (theoretical intelligences that come into existence spontaneously).  I think the conclusion was "They may exist, but we're almost certainly never gonna find one, so who cares".

Thinking that every belief is truth can only lead to humanity spending the remainder of it's existence chasing rainbows as we already do, too much.

That's a belief I disagree with.

No comment required.

[FuzzyZergling]

This discussion reminds me of a poem I read in high school, about an alien observing cars and wondering if the squishy parts inside were brains or guts.

[Andir]

This discussion reminds me of a poem I read in high school, about an alien observing cars and wondering if the squishy parts inside were brains or guts.

Well, I'm sure at some scale we could be organisms living on an atomic particle in some super-massive creature as well.

But literally anything (like Siquo's building idea) can be interpreted as life... even viewing a city from above and seeing all those cars moving about in some strange ethereal fluid we call air.  Intelligence is another matter though.  Following the predetermined rule sets while driving may look like simple rules from the alien perspective.  They could even think of us like food and waste for vehicles if they didn't look at us close enough to see that we came out the same as we went in.