What is life?

[Foreigner]

*shrug* I dunno what "close" or "far" is. Science has answered a lot for me, but it doesn't seem to ever answer questions of the spirit.

 

[neversickanymore]

an individual life is a set of experiences (with a convincing delusion of free will) and how we choose to perceive those experiences, The only thing we get, have, and take from it is memories including what we learn.

Life in general is one huge complex organism that sends out probes in every shape form and mutation. The forms regenerate (reproduce) and the material it was made of goes back to life. the individual prob in whatever form was here to change inorganic chemical into organic Then life uses the chemicals to create itself. how do you know if its part of the organism called life, it has DNA.. The earth is round so we can never see to far ahead and can go on for ever. Space is there to keep us from going anywhere else. Life is here to transform and take over the whole planet earth and change as much of it into itself as it can.


Life, the universe that we recognize little groups of anything and everything that we HAVE EVER imagine.. the universe we don't recognize (dark matter) is everything in front of us that we haven't let ourselves imagined yet..

 

[Psyduck]

NSFW:

Un huh....

"spiritual"

Science

One gotta love cheap generalizations

NSFW:

Science: it works bitches.

Technology: it works bitches (... sometimes)

Religion: a drawback of the human power?

Spirituality: ... maybe, but only if we have 2 minutes of free time?

 

[What 23]

Given the distances involved, this cosmic consciousness would be a pretty slow thinker, seeing as it would take at least 4 years for a signal from the Sun to the next nearest star, let alone from one end of the galaxy to the other. It would get also slower with time, cause of the metric expansion of space.

Time is relative. Maybe the universe doesn't experience it like we do.

 

[rangrz]

NSFW:

One gotta love cheap generalizations

NSFW:

Science: it works bitches.

Technology: it works bitches (... sometimes)

Religion: a drawback of the human power?

Spirituality: ... maybe, but only if we have 2 minutes of free time?

Nukes work, bitches. So do oil powered devices and oil exploration. Nukes and oil make the power go on for your computer to post on BL (same tech, different applications) and oil makes the plastics in it too, and nuclear and particle physics is required to make ICs (Ion beam implantment and isotopic fractionation of the silicon and dopants.)

@what_23 you are subject to precisely the same laws of physics as anything in the universe, time works the same for everything.

 

[ebola?]

I think that what_23 is arguing rather that the passage of time for a system is relative to the particular reference frame in question, and that maybe it doesn't make sense to talk about the universe writ large as having a particular 'experience' of time (this begs the question of whether there can be universal consciousness/experience though).
...
There are a few questions bouncing around in here: what is life? what is consciousness? what produces consciousness? What is 'universal consciousness', and if it is something that could be produced, how does it emerge?

I, for one, think that it seems pretty unparsimonious to posit even a barely anthropomorphic 'universal consciousness', as known consciousnesses are already the universe conditioning the emergence of its own (partial and distorted) self-awareness (albeit along with the illusion that these consciousnesses and their underpinnings could be divorced from the sum dynamics of the wider system that produce them (the universe writ large)). There, of course, must be some constellation of conditions for the very possibility of consciousness, but these shouldn't be confused with consciousness itself.

ebola

 

[RobotRipping]

@rangrz: have u ever watched stephen hawking's into the universe? he talks about time and how things unfolded in an almost impossible way to form life. Unless there are an infinite amount of universes then it seems like the game is rigged ie. we are a simulation or there is a God. There's a philosopher who posed the same argument ill dig it up later when i have time but it's really interesting to think about.

 

[ebola?]

Unless there are an infinite amount of universes

This is essentially Hawkings argument against guided creation of the universe, in that he thinks that it's likely that many universes have emerged, each with different physical constants or even mathematical laws. It just so happens that a few of these universes (between one and some small proportion) are hospitable for the development of life, but it's only in those universes that there is the possibility for beings to ponder why the conditions of the universe are hospitable to life in the first place.

ebola

 

[Psyduck]

This is essentially Hawkings argument against guided creation of the universe, in that he thinks that it's likely that many universes have emerged, each with different physical constants or even mathematical laws.

So, in praise of Ockham's razor he removed the god hypothesis but he has no problem positing infinitely many other universes. Very insightful wheel chair pop culture figure.

 

[ebola?]

I think that actually works. Positing a deity is the antithesis of parsimony, as it entails positing a being that is and can do literally anything and everything, and thus one that could explain anything. Positing the existence of multiple universes invokes less expansive a mechanism and explains a couple of loose ends in the ontological interpretation of physics quite well.

ebola

 

[What 23]

Maybe it isn't exactly conscious like we are, but what occurs might follow similar ways. I'm not sure how to say it. What boils up in us as consciousness might have its roots in everything else. Vice versa. This leaves room for "spirits". And maybe it conscious exists this way, different levels.

I don't really understand passage of time. I was kind of gong off of how my clock in my car is slowing down relative to my cell, because I drive 500 mi per day at an average of 50 mph or more. Though I'm not sure how this applies. Just an example of "time" not passing the same. Please lend education if I am missing something. I also know my car example may have other factors. I have read something like this, though.

Maybe relative to its universe being in a multiverse- a universe in a multi verse, "time" might pass differently. This is not to say it thinks or experiences... in any way we can relate to.

But I don't know.

 

[MountEdenDubstep]

First off, I'm atheist. However, I think that life is some kind of test and when you die, you go somewhere else or you are reincarnated as someone else.

I don't believe in heaven or hell. I believe in science. I come from a long line of scientists.

 

[PlurPsyed]

life is what happens when you're busy contemplating it's implications, definition, or trying to establish a higher purpose to it.

 

[akautonomics]

@ psyduck;
the cathedral you posted is pretty much the pinnacle of medieval science/technology/engineering. for that time, despite being so deluded by religion (they still didn't reject mathematics or physics) I think it's pretty impressive. Lol it's not like God built it.

Science; it's ALWAYS worked..
Bitches.

 

[rangrz]

I don't really understand passage of time. I was kind of gong off of how my clock in my car is slowing down relative to my cell, because I drive 500 mi per day at an average of 50 mph or more. Though I'm not sure how this applies. Just an example of "time" not passing the same. Please lend education if I am missing something. I also know my car example may have other factors. I have read something like this, though.

If your cellphone is in your car with you, it's in the same frame of reference and therefore no difference exists. Further, the time dilation from a stationary observer vs one moving at 50 miles per hour is so indescribably tiny the software I use in my studies as a physics M.Sc student won't even calculate it, because the number of "0"s after the decimal place is too long and considered pointless/irrelevant. At .1c, the time dilation effect is that one second in the moving frame is 1.0005 seconds in the rest frame. .1c is 67,100,000 miles per hour by the way (You'll travel one kilometer in 33/1,000,000 of a second at that speed or 18,600 miles per second)and the time dilation is a geometric growth with speed, so if you work backwards, you can get idea how truly meaningless it is at 50mph.