seeds wrote: ↑Sun Sep 30, 2018 6:49 pmAh, very funny miss buzzkill
(though I’m having difficulty recognizing the tease in what appeared to be a valid question).
Basically asking you for the impossible. How on Earth could you provide extraordinary evidence for the universe to seemingly be made out of a "mind-like substance"?
Wouldn't it be more strange if minds were made from something different to the stuff of everything else? It's all atoms and quantum wavicles.
1. We are chatting. You have thoughts that exist as dynamic patterning of neural activity. The dynamic pattern would basically be a 4-D shape (or a dynamic 3-D one).
2. The pattern is converted into a form that can be carried down the nerves of your arms to your fingers, which is a 4D branching pattern
3. Your fingers describe another dynamic geometric pattern when pressing the keys.
4. The thoughts have now transformed into shapes "sketched" on a screen in the form of black markings on a white background
5 etc. After you press the button, the data goes down the line ... various further transformations, blah blah.
The result is that readers' brains will approximately echo the dynamic neural patterns in #1. Patterns etched into the atomic and subatomic bases of our reality. Ditto dreams. It is all the same stuff, as you say, but I don't see it as profound, rather expected.
The interesting thing about dreams is they are a compressed form of consciousness. I love that dreams are never boring or pointless. If there is a sense of boredom or pointlessness in a dream, it points to such issues in one's life. So you never have a dream where you go out the back door, walk down the steps, go pick up a bucket, fill it with water, attend some thirsty plants, walk back, replace the bucket etc.
No, more likely you will suddenly appear in the backyard with the bucket and next moment you'll be at an aunty's place who you haven't seen for decades, but she will be a large white rabbit holding the bucket and telling you that it contains all of the secrets of the world
All boring bits are conveniently trimmed out, and that is the reason for what was thought to be time dilation during sleep. It turns out that events in dreams occur in synch with "outside time" and it is that compression - the omission of what is deemed the least important information - behind the sense that hours of dreaming occurred in ten minutes.
seeds wrote:Nevertheless, in light of the implications of point #3...
(or even point #2, for that matter – which is every bit as extraordinary as point #3)
...are rocks really “just rocks” and nothing else?
Greta wrote: ↑Sun Sep 30, 2018 8:45 am
I'm a big fan of unheralded geology and plasma which, aside from space, make up almost all of our reality. The stuff has done some interesting things in the last 13.8b years so far, obviously enough.
Again, you are fixating on the features of the “façade.”
Doesn’t the fact that everything you are referring to above appears to be created out of a “mind-like” substance that seems to resemble the substance from which our dreams are created, pique your sense of curiosity?
As per above. I guess this points to a difference in what we guess to be the nature of the universe. You seem to lean towards panpsychism whereas I lean towards panvitalism. I see the universe as a living system and consider it blindingly obvious that biology is only one kind of living system amongst multiple, both on Earth and "out there".
But do these objects have mentality? It would seem that mentality is precisely the point of being an intelligent mammal and, especially, a human one. That's what
we do.
Other entities don't think. They do other impressive things that we can't do, eg. persist for millions of years, explode as supernovae, be gigantic, etc. What I see in the cosmos are simply uncontrolled reflexes and reactions, but we can't rule out the possibility that we are part of a larger universe or reality. For all we know, our universe could a subatomic particle in a larger reality a la Dead Poets Society but it would be a tad tricky to prove.
