Please don't take this as a troll as it is a genuine question. Do you really believe all of this self-improvement crap that you've read?
Crap? As in what? Not worth considering? Irrelvant to the pursuit of truth? How can you be sure about this? Have you seen truth? Because that'll what you'll need to do in order to be able to rule out what I say as not productive toward that purpose. In the meantime, you haven't secured solid a solid basis for your conclusion. Keep going.
Esoterics is not a matter of belief, it's more a pursuit of understanding. All the postulations, theorizations, suppositions and reasonings are the intermediary steps to a possible destination. And besides, the agnostic in me wouldn't allow let me blindly believe in anything anyway, no matter how airtight its logic may seem. It's all just a collection of buzzwords and pyramid marketing speel that preys on human weakness and the desire to conform to an outside authority.
No, it addresses something at a much lower level than that. And technically there is no outside authority. When somone proves to me there is a sentient being that created this universe, and even still the most I could do is reserve judgement on that matter pending the facts, I say the only authority is man. His conscious self creates the universe, is the universe, and is the universe bringing to fruition its sole purpose -- complete understanding or unity of itself. Mankind does have a desire to understand the world, but not through as process as pretentious as self-actualisation.
Perhaps there's a misunderstanding of the terminology. Self-actualization, the so-called "buzzword", is a compact way of describing the process of something trying to understand itself. If a computer were conscious, and intelligent enough to want to verify its own reason for being it could be said to be attempting to actualize itself -- prove and understand its own identity.
When Godel turned the rules of mathematics back upon its own rules, one could also say he was attempting to actualize mathematics -- prove its own reason for being. And the most powerful method for actualization is self-reference. Man and mathematics observing their own "conscious streams", if you will. Religion, and later science are attempts to perform this understanding.
You assert that science was meant to pick up where religion leaves off? How do you arrive at this conclusion? What is your basis? Could it not be the other way around? If not, then why do you believe so?
The thing that I think you are missing is the filter - you can imagine anything, but you have to then separate the useful hypotheses from the not so useful. How do you do that? Science! Science is all about letting multiple ideas duke it out to find out which is the "best" according to the principles of logic.
What constitutes "best" and "useful" and why do you believe science is the only reliable vehicle for making those determinations? Logic cannot determine best, and matter of factly neither can our reasoning because "best" and "useful" aren't relevant in objective reality. Why aren't they? Because "best" and "useful" conceptually speaking are cleaved well apart from the infinite. "Best" is limiting; it sets aside "worse." "Useful" is equally limiting, it sets aside "useless."
You want something does a better job of expressing the reality of, let's say, a McDonald's Big Mac? Try rolling "good" and "bad" up into one non-dual package and that will address the reality of the Big Mac. But here's the kicker, "goodbad" can't be thought about because thought, even language depends upon dualism to make them work. Bear in mind, "good" can't exist without bad, so when you say a hamburger tastes "good", precisely what are you stating outside of our conditioning that equates the word "good" to mean something nearing "delicious" or "filling" or "pleasant"?
Limitation is the greatest enemy of truth in its infinity, indivisibility. If we learn to see past that, I'm confident we'll get to the bottom of the true essence of ourselves, and things. So you're saying that if I understood consciousness I would understand the rest of the universe?
I firmly believe that. You would probably be able to fill in the gaps that science can't address -- the why and the how. Figure out what you are and it may completely redefine what everything else is. In fact, I'm absolutely positive that would happen.
On this truth tip, I won't hesitate to say that perhaps one of the most greatest, if not the greatest treatises on truth and the personal struggle for it is none other than the epic Moby Dick. The book wasn't about a main character named Ahab. It wasn't about the author, Herman Melleville. I'm absolutely convinced he was an enlightened man. Everything in his book were metaphors for more essential truths; the book wasn't about the whale, Ahab, the sea or any of that -- it was about Melleville himself. And I'm certain he found truth. How does that make any sense?
Most people belive atoms are the universe's most elementary particle, but what are atoms made of? I firmly belive they're made of awareness, consciousness, and they are positively indestructible and have an infinte memory (collective consciousness). Not even death can eliminate them. Depending on the esoteric you speak to, they may call those primordial particles "monads", units of consciousness. I would say that one who "understands" consciousness has a well tested theory that explains consciousness. This doesn't automatically bring a person the "full gamut of the universe's wisdom."
Counter questions. What is consciousness? Where is consciousness? Does it exist in the head, heart, abdomen or big toe? Does it exist in the rocks and trees, clouds and moon? Assuming consciousness exists in the head near the brain, can one conclusively say that by cutting off the head they have narrowed and proved its location? If we were to sever a head and subsequently kill a human being, can we say with complete certainty that the cause of his death was something within or outside of awareness? That one I could answer reasonably accurately -- the human was killed within and possibly by awareness, but to take this questioning further we ask more questions that would open up the next layer of truths. What makes us human? Universal truths may exist, but they're logically unreachable and therefore a waste of time to pursue.
That is not the primordial truth, YOUR primordial truth. You are not a name. It's up to you to keep digging until you strike paydirt. Why is it that despite all the wealth, opportunity and success certain people are blessed with, they invariably wonder what it's really all worth when the novelty of having a million bucks in the bank and a fast car on the lot of their twenty-bedroom Beverly Hills homes wears off? That's because they're doing what comes automatically to a consciousness-driven being -- returning to the source through asking themselves life's most important questions. The universe attempting to understand itself, unify itself.
Despite all the ills in the world, more than ever humanity has the tools, the curiosity and the intellect to help them bound up the ladder of human development, of conscious development, and every facet of our need to know, no matter how seemingly irrelevant what we're trying to know seems, is directed squarely toward that purpose.
Self-actualization.
That is the main, the only, the most relevant and most important purpose of human existence.
This is why they have progressed where-as the mystical approach has remained in the same backwater that it has been for several thousand years. An obsolete method of trying to understand the universe.
I revert. When science and mathematics can answer the fundamental question that spawns from humanity's single most important purpose in life, understanding itself, then I'll take back everything I've said.
You started out making sense, but then you ended up talking crazy talk.
Spoken like a true scientist. Put into perspective, we're all crazy from someone else's point of view. But at the same time, what constitutes "crazy" is a simple variation of only question that matters -- who am I? Where does crazy end and sane begin? Can you point that out for me? You cannot, because those categories don't exist in reality. You created them. Science is a tool whereby we can make useful generalizations about that which we perceive. Can you think of anything more powerful than that? I can't.
Can't or don't want to? That's part of the overall problem, man. If people would learn to stretch their imaginations, not to readily limit themselves and write off whole portions of potential truths as rubbish or insanity, they may very well surprise themselves. There is probably an infinite figurative examples of the world being round where we believe it's flat, and like then, we curse ourselves after the fact for not even considering otherwise. That's the number one problem. Nobody questions anything. Sorry about the "crazy talk" accusation, but that stuff you got into at the end just makes no sense.
Free your mind. Set aside that scientific judgement of yours, read a bit of Ken Wilber, Henry T. Laurency and perhaps a bit of Lao Tzu and you too might change your stance on matters. Not that I'm forcing you to. If a savant has a photographic memory or can make calculations very quickly, what has that got to do with science explaining the universe?
It has plenty to do with how our belief systems limit us and keep us from finding deeper wisdom about life's phenomenae. Why do we find it unusual that man can mentally calculate large numbers in his head to insane precision? There are two things in this -- expectation and fact. The assumption (expectation) is that we expect humans to be X-capable of doing Y, but when man is suddenly X^10 capable of doing Y, far beyond what we consider "normal", why are we surprised?
Ultimately there's a simple message here. We need to free ourselves from our thinking and expectations, because it's precisely that which limits us. Think about it - brains are powered by the laws of physics.
And the laws of physics are powered by our awareness! No universe exists without consciousness. They are the same.
Ask yourself the following. Which is more true? That certain brain states brought upon by chemical reactions in the body affect consciousness or do various states of consciousness affect brainstates? It's a chicken or the egg scenario, and you mister scientist appear to have your mind all made up. Bottom line, all the objects of your awareness -- your thoughts, your observations.. everything are dependent on one thing. Consciousness. Understand consciousness and you will understand "you." Once you've done that, the full gamut of the universe's wisdom -- independent of time and space -- may become yours in an instant. A. Science cannot prove all truths about the universe. B. Science is the most powerful (if not the only) tool that we have for discovering possible truths about the universe. C. Anybody who is out to discover absolute truth is wasting their time.
The first point, you and I somewhat agree on, but the fact remains we haven't or possibly cannot prove that to finality. As for point B), it's far too declarative to be taken seriously as as fact. It amounts to outright domatism. For you to declare this so finally, confidently and dogmatically, you might know something the rest of us don't. Said another way, you must know reality! Is there something you're keeping from us?
Point C is equally definite. You implicity assume that there is no absolute truth. At least that's what I gather from your statement. For you to make such a claim, again, you must know something the rest of us don't. Please, as a scientist, you know better than to issue conclusions without having seen all the facts, including reality. Or will you agree that the most of what you say, everything you say are mere theories?
This is personal; I've had a close friend ripped from the world at a young age by a cruel disease. Scientists did every damn thing they could to keep here alive, and failed. Where the fuck were your "higher order human beings" then?
Your problem is that truth will never dawn on you when you are unwilling to operate outside the parameters of all that limits us -- stubbornness, culture, sociology, thought and opinions to name a few. You say your friend was "ripped" from the world. You haven't proven this to finality. Exactly what about your friend what ripped from this world? His mind? His body? His name?
Who was your friend? Who are you? You have to ask yourself these fundamental questions to get the fundamental answers. And when you get your preliminary answers, keep going! When you die, exactly what dies? Where does it go? Does it come back? Does "it" disappear or remain?
What is anger and why does the death of your friend motivate certain emotions in you? What causes emotion? Why is it that when a friend asks me to do them a favour, they are pleased when I agree and disappointed when I refuse? There is a cause, a single cause, for all of life's phenomenon and if you want real wisdom, you'll look for it.
To answer your earlier question, imagine an enlightened being takes up medicine or even psychology. If enlighenment is in fact real, and I'll always take the only realistic stance -- the agnostic stance -- imagine how much more effective in understanding the basic things that pain us, injure us, please us and upset us he'll be able to apply to his discipline.
Look, you may consider what I saw farfetched, but you have a purpose on this planet, and as a conscious being, acquiring a home and family and living "happily ever after" isn't the most fundamental of your purposes. All you need to do is think a bit, and it will all begin to unravel itself.
How exactly does mathematics assert that science could never explore reality fully..
Well, I lost a massive post due to a temporamental Slashdot website. Seems it doesn't want me sticking around composing posts longer than it cares to babsysit me, so I'll paraphrase.
Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. It opens the possibility that within logical systems, when all truths can't be proved, no truth can be considered reliable. And that's precisely what it does -- proves that the "truths" that mathematics finds can't be unequivocably proven true, no matter what the means. The very logical bedrock of math is flawed, and anything math asserts is missing an essential something. The problem with math and science in general is, it can prove a lot of things, but when it attempts to examine its own logical foundations using its own basic axioms, big fatal error. That ought to be an indicator right there. Firstly, mathematics does not assert facts about reality..
Not correct. Mathematics explains the finite. "Finite" and "infinite" are not opposites, but the finite is a subset of the infinite. Mathematics asserts facts about part of reality, but it is not well-equipped to assert facts about all of it. So says mathematics itself. Mathematics operates within an abstract platonic domain indepent of reality
Not correct! There is nothing independent of reality. Reality is infinite, and infinity by definition does not exclude and nothing stands apart from it. There's a subtle assertion of set theory logic in this very idea, and with a bit of thought applied to it, it makes perfect sense. The underlying purpose of mathematics, like all sciences, is the aquisition of truth. Nothing more, nothing less and no matter how irrelevant you believe it may be. Science and religion are united in their highest aim. Perhaps one may do it more thoroughly than the other. Your last point seems to be based on an implicit assumption a) that the physical sciences cannot accurately describe reality and that b) experiences by the 'enlightened' are valid in any sense.
At the far end of the physical sciences there are two things -- Uncertainty and Incompleteness. I didn't apply those terms to either. That's Godel and Heisenberg's doing. I base my belief on the existence of truth outside of science due to science demonstrating its own unreliability in being able to accurately acertain truth with one hundred percent infallibility. Whilst it is true that these people come up with wild fantastic explanations for reality, there is no verification that anything they say is correct.
Truth, real truth, is self-verifying. It's the scientists and their stubborn dogmatism that want the concrete evidence. To scientists, anything outside the visible, observable universe isn't worth pursuing and it's exactly this willingness to exclude that serves to cut them off from the most important truths in life.
If I were to ask you who you are, how would you answer? You'd probably tell me your name, but are you a name? How about a body? Are you a body? If so, why do we say we "have" a body and precisely what is it within us that has this body? Why is it that when I the subject look at life's objects -- the trees, the clouds and rocks -- I say they are not me, yet when I observe my own arm or breathing as an object they belong to me? How do you account for these inconsistencies? You cannot be the seer and the seen all at once, and with a bit of quesioning you too will recognize the incongruity of all these things we take as fact.
As far as I'm concerned, there is only one real purpose in life -- self-actualization. It's the conscious universe doing what it was meant to do, understand itself. And when you understand you, you understand everything. That's what I believe.
I've heard a lot of criticism of [Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher and Bach"] from mathematicians and musicians..
Of course mathematicians and musicians will criticize the book. It challenges the very logical foundations upon which their theories are based. Perhaps the most dogmatic disciplines outside of Christian fundamentalism are the sciences. It's the age old case of man believing his logic is impenetrable, where in reality it amounts to nothing more than the finger pointing to the moon. The sciences may have theory-this and theory-that, but they will never in an infinite amount of lifetimes be able to run the full course of reality with their tools. And that's a fact that mathematics itself asserts.
I once ran into an old friend of mine I knew back in middle school. He has a twin brother that, over ten years since he left highschool is still in university plugging away at some mathematics doctorate. I silently asked myself. What are his aims, his purpose? To solve the universe? It was clear he was always a brilliant student; I'm sure his I.Q. is off the chart, but ambitious mathematicians have to learn to let go. All their combined knowledge amounts to one drop in the Pacific ocean of reality.
If you take a liking to esoterics and esoteric knowledge, you will notice there's a smooth transition between scientists and esoterics; that is, there is the complete scientist who deems it worthless to search for truth in the unseen and the non-constant -- that the only universe worth pursuing is the visible and measurable universe. Then you have the transition scientists (Godel, Heisenberg) who through experiments of their own come to the realization that the sciences are not adequately equipped to be able to completely ascertain truth and that there must be more -- another form of reasoning perhaps outside the realm of postulation and thought where paradox becomes perfectly logical, but they may at the same time reserve making any definite statement about one or the other, effectively taking up the agnostic position.
Finally you have the esoteric, who acknowledges science as a method for ascertaining some degree of truth, though a limited portion of it, but through experience is assured that complete truth is to be found outside the dualistic disciplines of science and philosophy. Zen masters, enlightened sufis or Christian mystics might fall into that category. Due to their highly honed awareness, they are able to acertain more in a ten minute period about the laws of life than ten scientists could over the course of a hundred years. These, quite rightfully are higher order human beings. I imagine it's the same sort of higher order, perhaps to a somewhat lesser degree, that allows the idiot savant to blast through hundreds of years of perpetual calendars or calculate ridiculously large numbers in their heads almost instantaneously. Savants appear to have a firm, instinctual understanding of computational causality. They may very well be solving our mathematics from some other conscious plane the rest of humanity haven't yet achieved, a plane that allows them to blaze logical trails in parallel and from a figurative bird's eye view, through our "world." The same thing goes for enlightened men. Though we may plug along attempting to understand the unverse with 4-bit effectiveness, they do it from a conscious vantage point that may exceed a figurative 1024-bits or more. They simply know.
Icephreak. If on the otherhand, you're just insulting asian culture and stumbled onto a rather amusing sort of pun, well thats even funnier.
No insult whatsoever. Dualism can only take a person so far. It's fine for science and philosophy, but outside that sphere, "yin" and "yang" don't exist. You may call it 'hishiryo'.
It was some weeks before I noticed I even had spam in my Gmail account. It has thus far filtered spam with one hundred percent precision. Best I've seen anywhere.
I never said I was good... just that nethack isn't fun after ascending a character.
And I responded by saying something along the lines of, "there's far more fun in the game than you believe there is," and "attempt to ascend a character while adhering to certain challenges and you'll find the fun you missed."
If you want to be challenged by Nethack, deny your character something in the name of some sort of moral code. For example, try finishing the game as an atheist, not having prayed to a god once despite all the mess you could get yourself into. Now that would be fun, and difficult as hell, to boot.
I'm interested in switching completely to Linux but the only thing holding me back is the gaming.
Evidently you say this bearing in mind the benefit of an infinitely better and universally-supported Windows enviornment, gaming-wise.
My main question to you is, if you want your cake and eat it too, why the hell are you subjecting yourself to the torture of completely abandoning Windows?
Don't be an idiot, even if it's in the name of some sort of elite geekdom you're attempting to secure for yourself. And in case you want to know from what my opinion issues, let's say I'm a hardcore Slackware supporter, which means I go back some time.
There is practicality and there is stupidity. You want to be a gamer, without the difficulty of an operating system that doesn't adequately support the latest titles as well as Windows, you either dual-boot or forget about Linux completely.
Being able to write well virtually ensures you're dealing with a person who possesses a meticulously organized thought process, or at the most, somebody with a fairly high IQ.
Some may argue that there's no relationship between writing ability and general intelligence, but my reasoning states that in order to produce good writing, one must recognize good writing. And that requires exposure to good writing through reading. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to suggest that the less a person reads, the more likely he is to have an average or below average vocabulary and base of knowledge.
Moral of the story is thus: if you write poorly, chances are you're a poor reader. And if you're a poor reader, chances are you just aren't cut out for the IQ game.
From the IMSmarter website: Give us some example of IM Smarter in action. It's 4pm; you're at work and you remember you were going to meet your buddy for dinner tonight, but you've forgotten where. He's not online, but you had IMmed with him last night from home to discuss where you'd meet up. Without IM Smarter, you'd be screwed - with IM Smarter you just log in to the web site, click on your buddy's name, and see the chat you had last night.
Try turning on logging in your IM client. In MSN Messenger, perhaps other IM clients, you can then dive back as far as you need into your chat history whether or not your friend is online. Thus, this software serves no purpose. For Messenger at least.
But there are those who insist that the Earth was created "with age" 6000 years ago.
If there is anyone that tells you the earth was created at any point other than the immediate moment, they're wrong. Serial time is synonymous with thought. When thought moves, time results. When you sleep, time stops. When your thinking slows, time slows. Given time's interdependence with space and matter, it isn't a stretch to say space and matter are strict variables themselves. Time, movement, distance -- the brightest quantum physicists would all have stories to tell.
The only creative force in the universe is mind. It's where it begins and ends. Outside of awareness, nothing exists.
For those unfamilir with the Third Strike parrying system, it requires inhumanly fast reflexes and a virtual PhD-level knowledge of every character's basic and super combos. Combine that with needing to be perfectly psychic, uncannily lucky and able to bend your fingers into pretzels firing off insane combos -- you get the idea. That's what kind of dexterity and reaction time it takes to succeed at this game. Trust me, I watch the kids work their magic all the time at the local arcade. It's crazy like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Please don't take this as a troll as it is a genuine question. Do you really believe all of this self-improvement crap that you've read?
Crap? As in what? Not worth considering? Irrelvant to the pursuit of truth? How can you be sure about this? Have you seen truth? Because that'll what you'll need to do in order to be able to rule out what I say as not productive toward that purpose. In the meantime, you haven't secured solid a solid basis for your conclusion. Keep going.
Esoterics is not a matter of belief, it's more a pursuit of understanding. All the postulations, theorizations, suppositions and reasonings are the intermediary steps to a possible destination. And besides, the agnostic in me wouldn't allow let me blindly believe in anything anyway, no matter how airtight its logic may seem.
It's all just a collection of buzzwords and pyramid marketing speel that preys on human weakness and the desire to conform to an outside authority.
No, it addresses something at a much lower level than that. And technically there is no outside authority. When somone proves to me there is a sentient being that created this universe, and even still the most I could do is reserve judgement on that matter pending the facts, I say the only authority is man. His conscious self creates the universe, is the universe, and is the universe bringing to fruition its sole purpose -- complete understanding or unity of itself.
Mankind does have a desire to understand the world, but not through as process as pretentious as self-actualisation.
Perhaps there's a misunderstanding of the terminology. Self-actualization, the so-called "buzzword", is a compact way of describing the process of something trying to understand itself. If a computer were conscious, and intelligent enough to want to verify its own reason for being it could be said to be attempting to actualize itself -- prove and understand its own identity.
When Godel turned the rules of mathematics back upon its own rules, one could also say he was attempting to actualize mathematics -- prove its own reason for being. And the most powerful method for actualization is self-reference. Man and mathematics observing their own "conscious streams", if you will.
Religion, and later science are attempts to perform this understanding.
You assert that science was meant to pick up where religion leaves off? How do you arrive at this conclusion? What is your basis? Could it not be the other way around? If not, then why do you believe so?
- IP
The thing that I think you are missing is the filter - you can imagine anything, but you have to then separate the useful hypotheses from the not so useful. How do you do that? Science! Science is all about letting multiple ideas duke it out to find out which is the "best" according to the principles of logic.
What constitutes "best" and "useful" and why do you believe science is the only reliable vehicle for making those determinations? Logic cannot determine best, and matter of factly neither can our reasoning because "best" and "useful" aren't relevant in objective reality. Why aren't they? Because "best" and "useful" conceptually speaking are cleaved well apart from the infinite. "Best" is limiting; it sets aside "worse." "Useful" is equally limiting, it sets aside "useless."
You want something does a better job of expressing the reality of, let's say, a McDonald's Big Mac? Try rolling "good" and "bad" up into one non-dual package and that will address the reality of the Big Mac. But here's the kicker, "goodbad" can't be thought about because thought, even language depends upon dualism to make them work. Bear in mind, "good" can't exist without bad, so when you say a hamburger tastes "good", precisely what are you stating outside of our conditioning that equates the word "good" to mean something nearing "delicious" or "filling" or "pleasant"?
Limitation is the greatest enemy of truth in its infinity, indivisibility. If we learn to see past that, I'm confident we'll get to the bottom of the true essence of ourselves, and things.
So you're saying that if I understood consciousness I would understand the rest of the universe?
I firmly believe that. You would probably be able to fill in the gaps that science can't address -- the why and the how. Figure out what you are and it may completely redefine what everything else is. In fact, I'm absolutely positive that would happen.
On this truth tip, I won't hesitate to say that perhaps one of the most greatest, if not the greatest treatises on truth and the personal struggle for it is none other than the epic Moby Dick. The book wasn't about a main character named Ahab. It wasn't about the author, Herman Melleville. I'm absolutely convinced he was an enlightened man. Everything in his book were metaphors for more essential truths; the book wasn't about the whale, Ahab, the sea or any of that -- it was about Melleville himself. And I'm certain he found truth.
How does that make any sense?
Most people belive atoms are the universe's most elementary particle, but what are atoms made of? I firmly belive they're made of awareness, consciousness, and they are positively indestructible and have an infinte memory (collective consciousness). Not even death can eliminate them. Depending on the esoteric you speak to, they may call those primordial particles "monads", units of consciousness.
I would say that one who "understands" consciousness has a well tested theory that explains consciousness. This doesn't automatically bring a person the "full gamut of the universe's wisdom."
Counter questions. What is consciousness? Where is consciousness? Does it exist in the head, heart, abdomen or big toe? Does it exist in the rocks and trees, clouds and moon? Assuming consciousness exists in the head near the brain, can one conclusively say that by cutting off the head they have narrowed and proved its location? If we were to sever a head and subsequently kill a human being, can we say with complete certainty that the cause of his death was something within or outside of awareness? That one I could answer reasonably accurately -- the human was killed within and possibly by awareness, but to take this questioning further we ask more questions that would open up the next layer of truths. What makes us human?
Universal truths may exist, but they're logically unreachable and therefore a waste of time to pursue.
Perhaps a waste of t
Just a name of course, just a name.
That is not the primordial truth, YOUR primordial truth. You are not a name. It's up to you to keep digging until you strike paydirt. Why is it that despite all the wealth, opportunity and success certain people are blessed with, they invariably wonder what it's really all worth when the novelty of having a million bucks in the bank and a fast car on the lot of their twenty-bedroom Beverly Hills homes wears off? That's because they're doing what comes automatically to a consciousness-driven being -- returning to the source through asking themselves life's most important questions. The universe attempting to understand itself, unify itself.
Despite all the ills in the world, more than ever humanity has the tools, the curiosity and the intellect to help them bound up the ladder of human development, of conscious development, and every facet of our need to know, no matter how seemingly irrelevant what we're trying to know seems, is directed squarely toward that purpose.
Self-actualization.
That is the main, the only, the most relevant and most important purpose of human existence.
- IP
This is why they have progressed where-as the mystical approach has remained in the same backwater that it has been for several thousand years. An obsolete method of trying to understand the universe.
I revert. When science and mathematics can answer the fundamental question that spawns from humanity's single most important purpose in life, understanding itself, then I'll take back everything I've said.
So smallfries, who are you?
- IP
Get a clue: "ripped" as used by grandparent is a metaphor.
Plonk.
- IP
You started out making sense, but then you ended up talking crazy talk.
Spoken like a true scientist. Put into perspective, we're all crazy from someone else's point of view. But at the same time, what constitutes "crazy" is a simple variation of only question that matters -- who am I? Where does crazy end and sane begin? Can you point that out for me? You cannot, because those categories don't exist in reality. You created them.
Science is a tool whereby we can make useful generalizations about that which we perceive. Can you think of anything more powerful than that? I can't.
Can't or don't want to? That's part of the overall problem, man. If people would learn to stretch their imaginations, not to readily limit themselves and write off whole portions of potential truths as rubbish or insanity, they may very well surprise themselves. There is probably an infinite figurative examples of the world being round where we believe it's flat, and like then, we curse ourselves after the fact for not even considering otherwise. That's the number one problem. Nobody questions anything.
Sorry about the "crazy talk" accusation, but that stuff you got into at the end just makes no sense.
Free your mind. Set aside that scientific judgement of yours, read a bit of Ken Wilber, Henry T. Laurency and perhaps a bit of Lao Tzu and you too might change your stance on matters. Not that I'm forcing you to.
If a savant has a photographic memory or can make calculations very quickly, what has that got to do with science explaining the universe?
It has plenty to do with how our belief systems limit us and keep us from finding deeper wisdom about life's phenomenae. Why do we find it unusual that man can mentally calculate large numbers in his head to insane precision? There are two things in this -- expectation and fact. The assumption (expectation) is that we expect humans to be X-capable of doing Y, but when man is suddenly X^10 capable of doing Y, far beyond what we consider "normal", why are we surprised?
Ultimately there's a simple message here. We need to free ourselves from our thinking and expectations, because it's precisely that which limits us.
Think about it - brains are powered by the laws of physics.
And the laws of physics are powered by our awareness! No universe exists without consciousness. They are the same.
Ask yourself the following. Which is more true? That certain brain states brought upon by chemical reactions in the body affect consciousness or do various states of consciousness affect brainstates? It's a chicken or the egg scenario, and you mister scientist appear to have your mind all made up. Bottom line, all the objects of your awareness -- your thoughts, your observations.. everything are dependent on one thing. Consciousness. Understand consciousness and you will understand "you." Once you've done that, the full gamut of the universe's wisdom -- independent of time and space -- may become yours in an instant.
A. Science cannot prove all truths about the universe.
B. Science is the most powerful (if not the only) tool that we have for discovering possible truths about the universe.
C. Anybody who is out to discover absolute truth is wasting their time.
The first point, you and I somewhat agree on, but the fact remains we haven't or possibly cannot prove that to finality. As for point B), it's far too declarative to be taken seriously as as fact. It amounts to outright domatism. For you to declare this so finally, confidently and dogmatically, you might know something the rest of us don't. Said another way, you must know reality! Is there something you're keeping from us?
Point C is equally definite. You implicity assume that there is no absolute truth. At least that's what I gather from your statement. For you to make such a claim, again, you must know something the rest of us don't. Please, as a scientist, you know better than to issue conclusions without having seen all the facts, including reality. Or will you agree that the most of what you say, everything you say are mere theories?
- IP
This is personal; I've had a close friend ripped from the world at a young age by a cruel disease. Scientists did every damn thing they could to keep here alive, and failed. Where the fuck were your "higher order human beings" then?
Your problem is that truth will never dawn on you when you are unwilling to operate outside the parameters of all that limits us -- stubbornness, culture, sociology, thought and opinions to name a few. You say your friend was "ripped" from the world. You haven't proven this to finality. Exactly what about your friend what ripped from this world? His mind? His body? His name?
Who was your friend? Who are you? You have to ask yourself these fundamental questions to get the fundamental answers. And when you get your preliminary answers, keep going! When you die, exactly what dies? Where does it go? Does it come back? Does "it" disappear or remain?
What is anger and why does the death of your friend motivate certain emotions in you? What causes emotion? Why is it that when a friend asks me to do them a favour, they are pleased when I agree and disappointed when I refuse? There is a cause, a single cause, for all of life's phenomenon and if you want real wisdom, you'll look for it.
To answer your earlier question, imagine an enlightened being takes up medicine or even psychology. If enlighenment is in fact real, and I'll always take the only realistic stance -- the agnostic stance -- imagine how much more effective in understanding the basic things that pain us, injure us, please us and upset us he'll be able to apply to his discipline.
Look, you may consider what I saw farfetched, but you have a purpose on this planet, and as a conscious being, acquiring a home and family and living "happily ever after" isn't the most fundamental of your purposes. All you need to do is think a bit, and it will all begin to unravel itself.
- IP
How exactly does mathematics assert that science could never explore reality fully..
Well, I lost a massive post due to a temporamental Slashdot website. Seems it doesn't want me sticking around composing posts longer than it cares to babsysit me, so I'll paraphrase.
Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. It opens the possibility that within logical systems, when all truths can't be proved, no truth can be considered reliable. And that's precisely what it does -- proves that the "truths" that mathematics finds can't be unequivocably proven true, no matter what the means. The very logical bedrock of math is flawed, and anything math asserts is missing an essential something. The problem with math and science in general is, it can prove a lot of things, but when it attempts to examine its own logical foundations using its own basic axioms, big fatal error. That ought to be an indicator right there.
Firstly, mathematics does not assert facts about reality..
Not correct. Mathematics explains the finite. "Finite" and "infinite" are not opposites, but the finite is a subset of the infinite. Mathematics asserts facts about part of reality, but it is not well-equipped to assert facts about all of it. So says mathematics itself.
Mathematics operates within an abstract platonic domain indepent of reality
Not correct! There is nothing independent of reality. Reality is infinite, and infinity by definition does not exclude and nothing stands apart from it. There's a subtle assertion of set theory logic in this very idea, and with a bit of thought applied to it, it makes perfect sense. The underlying purpose of mathematics, like all sciences, is the aquisition of truth. Nothing more, nothing less and no matter how irrelevant you believe it may be. Science and religion are united in their highest aim. Perhaps one may do it more thoroughly than the other.
Your last point seems to be based on an implicit assumption a) that the physical sciences cannot accurately describe reality and that b) experiences by the 'enlightened' are valid in any sense.
At the far end of the physical sciences there are two things -- Uncertainty and Incompleteness. I didn't apply those terms to either. That's Godel and Heisenberg's doing. I base my belief on the existence of truth outside of science due to science demonstrating its own unreliability in being able to accurately acertain truth with one hundred percent infallibility.
Whilst it is true that these people come up with wild fantastic explanations for reality, there is no verification that anything they say is correct.
Truth, real truth, is self-verifying. It's the scientists and their stubborn dogmatism that want the concrete evidence. To scientists, anything outside the visible, observable universe isn't worth pursuing and it's exactly this willingness to exclude that serves to cut them off from the most important truths in life.
If I were to ask you who you are, how would you answer? You'd probably tell me your name, but are you a name? How about a body? Are you a body? If so, why do we say we "have" a body and precisely what is it within us that has this body? Why is it that when I the subject look at life's objects -- the trees, the clouds and rocks -- I say they are not me, yet when I observe my own arm or breathing as an object they belong to me? How do you account for these inconsistencies? You cannot be the seer and the seen all at once, and with a bit of quesioning you too will recognize the incongruity of all these things we take as fact.
As far as I'm concerned, there is only one real purpose in life -- self-actualization. It's the conscious universe doing what it was meant to do, understand itself. And when you understand you, you understand everything. That's what I believe.
- IP
I've heard a lot of criticism of [Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher and Bach"] from mathematicians and musicians..
Of course mathematicians and musicians will criticize the book. It challenges the very logical foundations upon which their theories are based. Perhaps the most dogmatic disciplines outside of Christian fundamentalism are the sciences. It's the age old case of man believing his logic is impenetrable, where in reality it amounts to nothing more than the finger pointing to the moon. The sciences may have theory-this and theory-that, but they will never in an infinite amount of lifetimes be able to run the full course of reality with their tools. And that's a fact that mathematics itself asserts.
I once ran into an old friend of mine I knew back in middle school. He has a twin brother that, over ten years since he left highschool is still in university plugging away at some mathematics doctorate. I silently asked myself. What are his aims, his purpose? To solve the universe? It was clear he was always a brilliant student; I'm sure his I.Q. is off the chart, but ambitious mathematicians have to learn to let go. All their combined knowledge amounts to one drop in the Pacific ocean of reality.
If you take a liking to esoterics and esoteric knowledge, you will notice there's a smooth transition between scientists and esoterics; that is, there is the complete scientist who deems it worthless to search for truth in the unseen and the non-constant -- that the only universe worth pursuing is the visible and measurable universe. Then you have the transition scientists (Godel, Heisenberg) who through experiments of their own come to the realization that the sciences are not adequately equipped to be able to completely ascertain truth and that there must be more -- another form of reasoning perhaps outside the realm of postulation and thought where paradox becomes perfectly logical, but they may at the same time reserve making any definite statement about one or the other, effectively taking up the agnostic position.
Finally you have the esoteric, who acknowledges science as a method for ascertaining some degree of truth, though a limited portion of it, but through experience is assured that complete truth is to be found outside the dualistic disciplines of science and philosophy. Zen masters, enlightened sufis or Christian mystics might fall into that category. Due to their highly honed awareness, they are able to acertain more in a ten minute period about the laws of life than ten scientists could over the course of a hundred years. These, quite rightfully are higher order human beings. I imagine it's the same sort of higher order, perhaps to a somewhat lesser degree, that allows the idiot savant to blast through hundreds of years of perpetual calendars or calculate ridiculously large numbers in their heads almost instantaneously. Savants appear to have a firm, instinctual understanding of computational causality. They may very well be solving our mathematics from some other conscious plane the rest of humanity haven't yet achieved, a plane that allows them to blaze logical trails in parallel and from a figurative bird's eye view, through our "world." The same thing goes for enlightened men. Though we may plug along attempting to understand the unverse with 4-bit effectiveness, they do it from a conscious vantage point that may exceed a figurative 1024-bits or more. They simply know.
- IP
Man, you're so convincingly fake.
- IP
Icephreak. If on the otherhand, you're just insulting asian culture and stumbled onto a rather amusing sort of pun, well thats even funnier.
No insult whatsoever. Dualism can only take a person so far. It's fine for science and philosophy, but outside that sphere, "yin" and "yang" don't exist. You may call it 'hishiryo'.
- IP
It was some weeks before I noticed I even had spam in my Gmail account. It has thus far filtered spam with one hundred percent precision. Best I've seen anywhere.
- IP
The orientals had so much right with their yin and yang idea.
Yin and yang doesn't exist.
- IP
I never said I was good... just that nethack isn't fun after ascending a character.
And I responded by saying something along the lines of, "there's far more fun in the game than you believe there is," and "attempt to ascend a character while adhering to certain challenges and you'll find the fun you missed."
If you want to be challenged by Nethack, deny your character something in the name of some sort of moral code. For example, try finishing the game as an atheist, not having prayed to a god once despite all the mess you could get yourself into. Now that would be fun, and difficult as hell, to boot.
- IP
I'm interested in switching completely to Linux but the only thing holding me back is the gaming.
Evidently you say this bearing in mind the benefit of an infinitely better and universally-supported Windows enviornment, gaming-wise.
My main question to you is, if you want your cake and eat it too, why the hell are you subjecting yourself to the torture of completely abandoning Windows?
Don't be an idiot, even if it's in the name of some sort of elite geekdom you're attempting to secure for yourself. And in case you want to know from what my opinion issues, let's say I'm a hardcore Slackware supporter, which means I go back some time.
There is practicality and there is stupidity. You want to be a gamer, without the difficulty of an operating system that doesn't adequately support the latest titles as well as Windows, you either dual-boot or forget about Linux completely.
Take it for what it's worth.
- IP
When you can ascend a zen samurai vegetarian pacifist, then you're good.
- IP
Best. Game. Ever.
- IP
Can you not show me some basic respect by putting some thought into compsing your email?
Such irony. There's an 'O' missing from "composing."
- IP
Being able to write well virtually ensures you're dealing with a person who possesses a meticulously organized thought process, or at the most, somebody with a fairly high IQ.
Some may argue that there's no relationship between writing ability and general intelligence, but my reasoning states that in order to produce good writing, one must recognize good writing. And that requires exposure to good writing through reading. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to suggest that the less a person reads, the more likely he is to have an average or below average vocabulary and base of knowledge.
Moral of the story is thus: if you write poorly, chances are you're a poor reader. And if you're a poor reader, chances are you just aren't cut out for the IQ game.
- IP
Better results than Google? You know, I can find an awful lot of pr0n and anti-Chinese propaganda through Google. Doubt they can top that.
- IP
Patrick, come to Canada. Best and most innovative healthcare on the planet.
From the IMSmarter website:
Give us some example of IM Smarter in action.
It's 4pm; you're at work and you remember you were going to meet your buddy for dinner tonight, but you've forgotten where. He's not online, but you had IMmed with him last night from home to discuss where you'd meet up. Without IM Smarter, you'd be screwed - with IM Smarter you just log in to the web site, click on your buddy's name, and see the chat you had last night.
Try turning on logging in your IM client. In MSN Messenger, perhaps other IM clients, you can then dive back as far as you need into your chat history whether or not your friend is online. Thus, this software serves no purpose. For Messenger at least.
- IP
But there are those who insist that the Earth was created "with age" 6000 years ago.
If there is anyone that tells you the earth was created at any point other than the immediate moment, they're wrong. Serial time is synonymous with thought. When thought moves, time results. When you sleep, time stops. When your thinking slows, time slows. Given time's interdependence with space and matter, it isn't a stretch to say space and matter are strict variables themselves. Time, movement, distance -- the brightest quantum physicists would all have stories to tell.
The only creative force in the universe is mind. It's where it begins and ends. Outside of awareness, nothing exists.
- IP
Minority Report was far more groundbreaking than Bladerunner. Bladerunner was flat by comparison.
Minority Report is my favourite movie.
- IP
For those unfamilir with the Third Strike parrying system, it requires inhumanly fast reflexes and a virtual PhD-level knowledge of every character's basic and super combos. Combine that with needing to be perfectly psychic, uncannily lucky and able to bend your fingers into pretzels firing off insane combos -- you get the idea. That's what kind of dexterity and reaction time it takes to succeed at this game. Trust me, I watch the kids work their magic all the time at the local arcade. It's crazy like that.