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Posts by Obbe
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2016-09-07 at 3:26 PM UTC in I'm slowly turning into obbeIn this TEDx talk John Reid, a senior research fellow at the University of Canterbury's Ngai Tahu Research Centre, takes us into the world of animism and explains it's not about belief but experience. John explores the way in which indigenous and western cultures shape their identity and the identity of the world around them.
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2016-09-07 at 3:21 PM UTC in How often do you do drugs? Would you say you're an addict?I smoke or vaporize weed a few times a day. Sometimes I will add a few beers to that. I used to do more drugs.
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2016-09-07 at 3:09 PM UTC in I'm slowly turning into obbe
Why does life exist?
Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.â€
From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.
“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,†England said.
England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,†he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.â€
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Self-replication (or reproduction, in biological terms), the process that drives the evolution of life on Earth, is one such mechanism by which a system might dissipate an increasing amount of energy over time. As England put it, “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.â€
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This principle would apply to inanimate matter as well. “It is very tempting to speculate about what phenomena in nature we can now fit under this big tent of dissipation-driven adaptive organization,†England said. “Many examples could just be right under our nose, but because we haven’t been looking for them we haven’t noticed them.â€
Scientists have already observed self-replication in nonliving systems. According to new research led by Philip Marcus of the University of California, Berkeley, and reported in Physical Review Letters in August, vortices in turbulent fluids spontaneously replicate themselves by drawing energy from shear in the surrounding fluid. And in a paper appearing online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Michael Brenner, a professor of applied mathematics and physics at Harvard, and his collaborators present theoretical models and simulations of microstructures that self-replicate. These clusters of specially coated microspheres dissipate energy by roping nearby spheres into forming identical clusters. “This connects very much to what Jeremy is saying,†Brenner said.
Besides self-replication, greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. A plant, for example, is much better at capturing and routing solar energy through itself than an unstructured heap of carbon atoms. Thus, England argues that under certain conditions, matter will spontaneously self-organize. This tendency could account for the internal order of living things and of many inanimate structures as well. “Snowflakes, sand dunes and turbulent vortices all have in common that they are strikingly patterned structures that emerge in many-particle systems driven by some dissipative process,†he said. Condensation, wind and viscous drag are the relevant processes in these particular cases.
“He is making me think that the distinction between living and nonliving matter is not sharp,†said Carl Franck, a biological physicist at Cornell University, in an email. “I’m particularly impressed by this notion when one considers systems as small as chemical circuits involving a few biomolecules.â€
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140...heory-of-life/
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2016-09-06 at 4:52 PM UTC in I'm slowly turning into obbe[h=1]WHO IS IT WHO KNOWS THERE IS NO SELF ?[/h]
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2016-09-04 at 10:57 PM UTC in This community would work better in virtual reality.Survival would be more fun imo
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2016-09-04 at 10:42 PM UTC in This community would work better in virtual reality.I've suggested we all play minecraft together but nobody takes me seriously
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2016-09-04 at 7:23 PM UTC in I am the most prolific personality this website has ever seen.You're too needy.
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2016-09-04 at 7:17 PM UTC in I am the most prolific personality this website has ever seen.Let's keep it that way ;)
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2016-09-04 at 7:15 PM UTC in this website is terribleWhat is triggering?
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2016-09-04 at 7:13 PM UTC in I am the most prolific personality this website has ever seen."I'm significant," screamed the dust speck.
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2016-09-04 at 7:10 PM UTC in this website is terrible
Did I trigger you too, bitch?
Didn't read. -
2016-09-04 at 7:07 PM UTC in Ask an Indian person anythingOr else what?
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2016-09-04 at 7:05 PM UTC in this website is terrible
Didnt read again. You seem triggered, bitch.
You don't have anything better to do then tell him you're not reading his posts. -
2016-09-04 at 6:58 PM UTC in Ask an Indian person anything
Yeah, well if you're white prepared to be gang raped. You will stand out and get squashed so fast.
What if you dye your hair black and go tanning a lot? -
2016-09-04 at 7:57 AM UTC in An open letter to God.Zen Masters are fond of answering disciples asking for wisdom by a question called a koan. Koans are believed to be nonsense intended to confuse one's mind until a critical tension precipitates a mystical insight. Koans are not nonsense; they are a special kind of question to which you already know the answer, but you don't want to know you know because such knowledge is self-knowledge; the most heinous crime of this civilization is to be caught in possession of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge, you see, is the special kind of knowledge that releases a person from the karmic wheel of life and the rule of Satan, however you conceive your devil. As soon as you answer the koan, you are expelled from Plato's cave, and the game of darkness is over. The Laughing Buddha in the heart of your personal Lotus Blossum isn't ready to cash your chips because of Enlightenment until damn good and ready. The mental crisis of the koan is resolved by formulating a plausible answer that satisfies the curiosity without actually taking the terminal gaze into the brilliant Face of God.
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2016-09-02 at 7:11 PM UTC in Want a job in south east Asia?Is the job legal?
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2016-09-02 at 5:55 PM UTC in teach me about love niggasThere are different types of love. Might not be a bad idea to identify which type you are experiencing.
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2016-09-02 at 5:45 PM UTC in I'm slowly turning into obbeOk Lan, you've warmed my heart. I've noticed you seem to be opening up to some things I've talked about, maybe broadening your perspective and expanding your consciousness. Good for you. However I want to say some of the ideas you associate with me aren't really what I would consider to be my ideas, or ideas I believe in or view as truth. Like compatibilism. I enjoy what it brings to the table, but I would not call myself a compatibilist. I do think there are ways of defining "freewill" that make much more sense then the traditional way and that it is acceptable to do so, but at the same time I find the traditional vague sense of freewill most people associate the word with and the apparent impossibility of its existence in our world to be a fascinating topic for discussion.
Let's talk about panpsychism. I don't believe I've ever actually used this word. Let me see what it means
noun: panpsychism- the doctrine or belief that everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness.
So I believe I have brought up ideas kind of like this in the past, saying things like "We are all one" but I tend to mean this in a more vague and mystical, almost spiritual sort of way. This panspychism seems to depend on how we define what individual consciousness is, I believe you and I were recently discussing that subject. Remind me again what you believe the core of consciousness to be? If I remember correctly you said something along the lines that the "kernel of personhood" is basically the whole "I think therefore I am" thing. I believe I replied by questioning whether or not consciousness requires thoughts and whether we should consider our thoughts to be a part of our identity or instead to be events that we experience and are conscious of, to which I believe you replied something like word/thoughts are at least required to make the argument or have the position that someone/something exists. I think that makes sense, in order to claim or exclaim you/your consciousness does exist you would need to have a language/words/thoughts used to express what it is like - but what does that tell us about what consciousness is?
Is it like free will? This vague, difficult to describe sense that we feel must exist but upon closer inspection appears to be more illusory then we once felt? Is conscious mind a creation of words, or is there really something deeper? Maybe "consciousness" as you and I experience it is really just a highly complicated and evolved form of the "awareness" that all living things seem to possess. That seems reasonable. So what is awareness? Being aware of your environment, right? Showing that you are aware that something else exists I suppose. Something like that. So how do we know something is aware? It shows a reaction right? Maybe consciousness as you and I experience it is something like a highly complicated, highly evolved way of reacting to the world around us, similar to the very simple and crude way an amoeba might react to electrical stimulation or something like that. But do only living things have reactions to their environment? Some would say this is where the discussion gets a little silly, but seeing how we are discussing panspychism those people will have to bear with me for a moment. Can we admit the line we draw between living things and non living things to be a little bit hazy? Most people will say stuff like a virus is not alive but a virus is still able to evolve, replicate when placed in the right environment, it still reacts to the environment it is in, would it be too much to say that those reactions are like a crude version of the "awareness" we see in more complicated structures like organisms? Where does this end? Do the elementary particles that make up our reality not react to each other in a way which we could metaphorically relate to our own reactions and behaviors?
I don't know. Tell me what your thoughts are Lanny. -
2016-09-02 at 3:36 PM UTC in I'm slowly turning into obbeNo I don't. You should be able to talk about it with me right here though.
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2016-09-02 at 2:49 PM UTC in I'm slowly turning into obbe
It's cool Lanny made this thread though. He worded exactly what I'm going through. Like, I can "see" now that there's more to life than what meets the eye… but on the other hand, I "know" that there isn't. I don't know what I'm saying. Fuck this.
We can talk about it if that would help.
