I was reading some of the fascinating comment in the 21 grams thread and just had to respond with a full out post. I love this stuff. I live and breath this stuff when I’m not conquering the galaxy or making crappy webpages. So after taking my sweet time coming up with an intelligent response I figured I’d do the lazy repost for all of you not following that thread. Be aware that we’re discussing the philosophical nature of souls, so some may not want to tread. 😉
<metanote> First of all I’m hugely impressed with the talent that’s on display in these comments. Obviously I’ve attracted an introspective group willing to explore different thoughts and challenge existing notions. I can’t begin to describe how much enjoyment I’m getting out of blogging. I see a lot email addresses though, I wish some of you guys had blogs of your own that I could read. If nothing else you could join my forums if you wanted to converse with each other in a more communicative format. Trust me on this, forums are da bomb for indepth conversations. There’s nothing like a good long conversation, slowly digested and analyzed over the course of days and weeks. It’s somewhat like these comments except much more organized.
</metanote>
I’ve spent a great deal of my life thinking about the nature of the self. We are all individual creatures, each unique in his or her own way. To me, that infinite uniqueness becomes an almost spiritual sensation, a transcendation of understanding that while One can sometimes be the lonliest number, it can also mean unity of individuals, a system of unique chaotic patterns interfering with each and creating more chaos that passes through some ‘big admittance matrix in the sky’. It keeps raising the bar. That’s why new connections between people are what stimulate and vibrate this living network that we call life. It’s all about individual moments of epiphany and sharing it with others.
What does make it interesting is that I believe science is also throwing out some interesting and fundamentally challenging questions to our perception of the world. Dark energy and dark matter are the ‘premier’ questions of our time from an ‘underlying fundamental unknown’ perspective. As energy that we cannot observe and matter that we cannot measure but comprising the majority of the universe, this presents an incredible dilemma to physicists who are trying to model this new meme into their equations of the universe. it just doesn’t seem to fit with pure objective science.
I think there’s a possibility that dark energy ties into spirituality. I believe that dark energy is attracted to complexity which is a product of the evolution of life. Look at our brains. What has been the long running theme of evolution as time has progressed here on earth? Ever increasing complexity. Complexity is a gateway to consciousness; consciousness leads to awareness of self; awareness of self leads to the awareness of other selfs. When you perceive at a fundamental level that everyone else around you is a completely seperate and unique entity you make stronger connections with them that leads to ever increasing complexity.
The thing is though that dark energy has mass, and it is measurable. I suggest that if there is a loss of mass associated with death of a person, that loss is due to the cessation of activity between the neurons in their brain. This complex activity I believe is the ‘magnet’ for dark energy. As the activity stops, the dark energy leaves the body. Perhaps this dark energy is an individual soul, perhaps it’s some kind of perceptual energy that allows us to observe the universe, I don’t know. But I do like to speculate, and I do love a good discussion.
I’m being picky here, but I’d say that the awareness of others came *before* the awareness of self. The awareness of others seems to be a more intuitive and observable concept.
Some thoughts:
What makes an individual unique?
Well to start, we’re all superficially physically different. But let’s go a bit deeper: Our uniqueness is rooted in our perspective of the world around us.
No two humans will ever build a consciousness based on the same memories and experiences. This uniqueness combined with our physically unique brains defines how we will react to future experiences. It defines our unique perspective of the world: Our soul.
Or at least that’s as deep as I’m willing to go; a person could go crazy thinking about this for too long.
First off, I would like to express my dismay at not having entered this discussion earlier. Forgive me if I’ve missed anything when I make my points.
Now, I think the dark matter theorizing is interesting. No one really knows what it’s for, what it does, or even where it is to a large extent, so there are no bounds on what we can believe its purpose and/or function is. However, without any real ontological or epistemological evidence as to dark matter’s impact on Us (I use capitalization intentionally), I’m not sure I’m willing to venture a guess as yet.
ChefQuix:
To me, that infinite uniqueness becomes an almost spiritual sensation, a transcendation of understanding that while One can sometimes be the lonliest number, it can also mean unity of individuals, a system of unique chaotic patterns interfering with each and creating more chaos that passes through some ‘big admittance matrix in the sky’. It keeps raising the bar. That’s why new connections between people are what stimulate and vibrate this living network that we call life. It’s all about individual moments of epiphany and sharing it with others.
Chef, I’ve never agreed more with anything, heh. You ask Jonathan. I’ve said more or less the same thing at varying degrees of complexity since we were little kids.
I think what Wally just said, “I’d say that the awareness of others came *before* the awareness of self,” has got some serious weight to it. I just read something in one of your links, Chef, about this, and I agreed wholeheartedly. The argument, and you may know what link I’m talking about once I say this, was basically that consciousness evolved as a necessity from various other forms of hardwired logic systems that relate sensory experience to a sort of “success/failure” rating hardwired into an organism. Since input of other activity would be necessary for such a thing, and competition, mating, all of these things would be necessary at the very moment that there were multiple organisms, I think what Wally said is spot on.
Found it! Here’s the link:
http://www.stungeye.com/archive/2003_11_01_archive.htm#107003706098471148
Jon,
I’m glad to hear that you read my post on the evolution of human consciousness. Since I posted that thought journey I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on the subject. I highly recommend reading this introduction to consciousness and complexity.
Ha! That’s ironic that the link I mentioned was yours. I didn’t make the connection. I greatly enjoyed reading your theory. It just made sense the whole way through. Thanks for the link; I’ve been wanting to look more into this as well.
Although it’s just a theory, I really do believe that there is something inherint in complexity that draws on dark energy. I think this would explain the 21 grams phenomenon, however it is also a bit humbling because presumably if dark energy is drawn to complexity, then greater amounts of dark energy are drawn to greater complexity. If you compare the measly 21 grams that a human draws compared to the staggering amount of dark energy out there then we are just acolytes compared to some universal god. But at least we’re making some headway, because with the prevalence of the internet, the complexity between individuals is increasing, thus adding to the overall complexity of Earth.
Yeah, I freely admit at this point that I’m crazy.
Has dark measure been quantified on a metric scale? In units that small?
Well, all they know is that it exists because it’s affecting the ‘expansion’ of the universe – ie in order for our math to work, there must be some unseen energy accelerating the planets away from each other, thus the term ‘dark energy’. As in not observed energy.
So they’ve only ever observed it in relation to galaxies and clusters of galaxies, so no, it’s never been measured on that small a scale. However that doesn’t mean it can’t exist in that small a scale. 😉
Too true.
But I always thought that galactic migration was just caused by momentum from the explosion that threw it all out there in the first place.
Well this is the thing right, current theory says that the Big Bang caused the universe, that the force of the explosion is responsible for the momentum of the galaxies. However at first they figured that the mass of the visible universe would be enough to slow that momentum down, reverse the trajectory and eventually lead all the galaxies together into ‘the big crunch’. However according to observational data the ‘expansion’ of the universe is accelerating. The only explanation that fits the model is to suppose that 74% of the universe is actually comprised of so called ‘dark energy’ which is causing the accelerated expansion.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m no astro-physicist. This is just from reading various articles on the internet, so who knows how accurate I am.
Iiiiiinteresting. Well, that would make sense, I suppose, but if this force is only theoretical… then perhaps there’s nothing to it and our laws of physics are just wrong! That would be frightening, wouldn’t it?
This is something I’ve thought about a lot over the last couple of months. It seems altogether too fantastic to believe that there is unseen, unmeasurable energy and matter out there when it’s all that much more logical to think that there’s something wrong with out math. It’s a tough call, but a lot of scientists out there have found the math to be solid and robust time and time again in other applications, so at this time it’s hard to answer definatively.
I myself am torn, I have answers for either situation. I would like to know one way or another which one is true.
Hopefully we will, someday. If math is wrong, it may only be at these extremes, and it works well enough for Earthly sciences, so we might as well keep it. It could be that the numbers in speed, distance, and direction that astrophysicists have to deal with when measuring the size of the universe are too large for the computers we’ve invented so far to handle properly, you know?
Yes, but I think that it’s exactly the size and shape of the universe that may be causing our problems… Not so much that it won’t work in our computers but more along the lines of modelling the movement of the galaxies under an incorrect shape of the universe.
True. Most of the theory regarding the shape of the universe has only been supported theoretically and mathmatically, so perhaps we’re just wrong about that. I suppose that would mean that galactic shift could still be momentum driven, but the direction we are assuming is outward is not exactly what it seems.