I had a spooky occurrence happen to both me and a friend of mine in front of us. At the time, we thought it was a ghost (I was only 11 at the time). Looking back at it now though, I simply say that I don't know what it was. It could have been both of us hallucinating the same thing if there's a...
99% of DNA is junk DNA, as in, it doesn't code for anything. Even still, all life has similar junk DNA. It gets even more similar with similarly related groups, like humans and other apes.
Exactly. You're unable to tell. You have insufficient information. Why do you want a conclusion so badly? You don't know what you saw. Leave it at that.
Saying it could be a ghost is a bit more logical and fair. Saying it is a ghost is making an unfounded assumption.
You don't need to be...
The article, for the most part, clearly indicates that the author is very ignorant of the Theory of Evolution. But I do think it points out one important issue, and it's that people do have a degree of blind faith in what scientists say. It's true that a lot of laymen believe evolution to be...
I use to believe in ghosts, and I have had experiences that, at the time, I thought were ghosts.
The thing is, people make the mistake of seeing a spooky phenomenon and making the assumption that it's a ghost. "Ghost" has a very specific definition. You can't confirm something is a ghost just...
That's not an interpretation. It's an assumption. Attributing microevolution to intentional design is an assumption. Unfounded at that. You should learn to employ Occam's Razor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
Second, what The Sum of Awe described above involves unfavorable...
What would that mean exactly? What would a conscious universe "on it's own" be like?
In one of your other posts, you said the universe factually doesn't have a brain. Meaning what exactly? What hypothetical condition would you consider the universe as possessing a brain? Some giant conscious...
Okay fair enough. As long as your perspective is consistent, then I think it's a valid enough perspective. I don't think either perspective is more valid than the other though. Both seem like they would be useful perspectives which is often how I determine the validity of a perspective.
We have to agree that the brain is part of our overall being to say that. We define parts to a whole arbitrarily. The brain is basically where our consciousness is housed. Without it, we're not conscious. So in a sense, we could say that our brains are conscious, but the rest of us isn't.
So...
It's just that humans are just as much a natural phenomenon as anything else in the universe, including stars and planets.
Think of it another way. If stars were conscious entities, would you say the Universe is partially conscious, or that the Universe is unconscious but has conscious stars in...
That's not entirely true. Fairies didn't start out as fictional. They're mythological creatures. People use to (and possibly still do) believe they exist. Likewise, there are plenty of fictional monotheistic gods that parallel the God of Abraham. The One-Above-All from Marvel Comics, The...
It depends on timescale. On the timescale of half a billion years, the Cambrian Explosion seems like a sudden jump.
Many would describe the change of Latin into Italian to be gradient, which is on the timescale of a few centuries. Compared to the Cambrian Explosion, which spans the time of...
I never used the word good and bad. Pleasure and pain are simply two different emotions.
Point out where that analogy fails? God granting high-speed locomotion to two competing animals, where one has to chase the other, is precisely the same as a country funding and supporting two sides of the...
Good and bad are relative terms. Pleasure and pain aren't. They're emotions.
You can find similarities and differences in almost anything. It doesn't mean you can make an analogy between the two as a valid argument.
Hot and cold are not abstract. They're physical properties of physical...
To be fair, can't we say that we humans are a part of the universe being conscious of it self? As well as saying that some part of it (us) is mammalian?
They have feelings and respond to stimuli, and have a nervous system. Their nervous system just doesn't have a central processor (brain).
In a way, their whole body is a brain it self. Ours is too, in some sense. It's very difficult to think of how our brain functions on its own because it's...
Why would anyone be under that "illusion" when the five senses, as well as the appropriate technological equipment used by neurologists, is more than adequate for reading emotions?
Certain cues like facial expressions, tone of voice, body language, touch, can be used to infer the emotions of...