Never Ending Space?

interesting. well i'd like to see what these scientists you speak of have to say about quantum physics, where did you see their work or theories andrew?
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peace--->chris
***Go big or go home**Just Bodagin'***

Proud Member of the Hobum Posse

Well I must say, this is without a doubt the most intelligent thread on ns.com..seriously. now try this on for size...imagine if all life ceased to exist on earth, and nothing ever came about ever again...and there is just NOTHING at all FOREVER. That's wierd to think about..nothing forever. it would be like the earth never existed...

Yeah, pretty freaky thinking aye. It's like trying to contemplate absolute and total nothingness, just full-on emptiness, it's pretty wacked. So hard to think about.

~~Phunkin Phatt Phreerider~~
#Cut the Jibba Jabb Crazy Fools! Start Skiing!#
*Be greatful, everyday, for snow, mountains, gravity and skiing*
@Talent Is Important, But Image Is God!@

we wouldn't be able to think about it, bacause we wouldn't be here to think.

here's something i've been thinking about a lot lately: given that we all speak a certain language, do we think in that language? in the absence of language, is there also the absence of thought?

I don't think so, a mute, deaf, and blind person probably still thinks. Your mind would still be responding to external stimulation.

Hellen Keller.


-Andy

/.

PPP... yes

'When you say 'I wrote a program that crashed Windows', people just stare at you blankly and say 'Hey, I got those with the system, *for free*'.' -- Linus Torvalds

i'm not disagreeing with what you guys are saying, i'm just wondering how, with the absence of a formal language to gather your thoughts, could one actually have thoughts.. would you think in images?

wow this is a cool thread huh.

I dont know much about such 'deep' topics as 'where does teh universe end' etc. But i do know that in order to begin to ponder such ideas, one has to stop thinking in everyday life terms. You gotta kinda think differently, i dunno. Kinda like on earth, everything stops somewhere, and at it's boundaries is something else, but that doesnt mean that has to apply everywhere.

Its hard to convey what im trying to say, but from teh looks of it alot of you are with it already.

Yea i read an article about gravity's speed. So yea if the sun were to dissappear we wouldn't know anything about it for about 8mins, at which point we would be plunged into darkness, and the earth would start to move off into space in a straight line, just like some other dude said.

I dunno y i just repeated that cuz its alreay been said, oh well. yea well this thread could be cool.
--Joe

sweetcoz, thats a good thing to think about; do we need a language in order to think about shit properly. I think that one could think just as well without a language, just thay couldnt convey their thoughts to others at all. Think about it, when you are thinking about things, you dont actually think it words do u, it just kinda gets thought.

what would go through your mind if you had no sensory input. if you can't hear, touch, smell or see anything what would go through your mind. when I think of something I think sounds or pictures. without that what would be?
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'the world is full of guided missiles, and misguided men'

hmm i guess that is really hard to imagine - like how a blind from birth person doesn't know what colours are perhaps. It would sure be weird, and would result in very different thoughts from that conciousness.

I pretty much believe you think in terms of the best sensory input available to a particular thought process. Which is usually language for us because that's how things are conveyed by others to us. A blind person probably thinks in brail sometimes. When you talk sometimes you picture the words as you're saying them. So basically thinking is just a reaction to experiences with past or present sensations. A blind, deaf, mute, non feeling person, not exactly sure what kind of sensory input is available to them. Maybe there's something that would become more acute in the body that they would understand that they were moving in a direction or something, and they would probably think in terms of that.

This topic is abstraction at its most abstract. Enough said. So ya'll stop sayin stuff; cause its in vain.

''...if one was so inclined.''
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''damn it TAK, you ruined everything''
-witchbaby666
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''Potatoe'' -Dan Quayle
''patatoe'' -NS member

DAMMIT! Some dumb ass mod deleted my first super-styli post. Dammit

''...if one was so inclined.''
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''damn it TAK, you ruined everything''
-witchbaby666
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''Potatoe'' -Dan Quayle
''patatoe'' -NS member

Hobojibber, i think you mean Schrodinger and Hiezenburg. Schrodinger, Hiezenburg and de Broglie were the 'fathers'of Quantum Mechanics (that is all the crap about electrons, sublevels, wave theory, etc.

If anyone is seriously interested in all this quantum thoery talk, you should read THE UNIVERSE IN A NUTSHELL, by accomplished thoerist Stephen Hawkings. That book makes you think twice whenever you look into the night sky.


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Prime Minister Of The Cabinet Of the Erics Penis Fan Club

Would the real Vern Fonk please show up?

I dunno, Rekker, i found Universe in a nutshell to be kinda crappy compared to other books on the subject. I think it is aimed so much at lay-men that the analogies and examples are too far from what he really means. But yea still read it, read everything u can on the topic.

its like salad without the salad...you know?
Taste Death. Live Life.

Well, think about this, guys. Now, space is theoretically endless. And we are here because of a random combination of molecules etc. Now, if the universe is an endless random combination of molecules, then theoretically somewhere in time and space, anything you can imagine exists. But then there becomes the problem of, say you think of a race that dominated the whole universe....why hasn't that happened? maybe it has! who knows....i'm going crosseyed thinking about it. but it'd a damn cool Idea. I mean, somewhere out there we're all the exact same except with webbed feet and way more technologically advanced skis...

Mayor of NS Isle

If you don't make it the first time, you need to go bigger

Here are my answers to some questions and stuff that have come up in the last 2 pages:
It is more or less accepted, that the universe is expanding. Whether that means it's slowing down, or speeding up, who know, the point is that currently, regardless of the rate, it's expanding (measured by red-shift). What it is expanding into is unknown. however, there are alot of convincing arguments that suggest that the universe didn't actually require a big-bang to get to this point, which put the big-bang theory itself into question.
Our world (that we recognize in a day to day sense), has 4 dimensions. The 4th is time. In order to accurately measure something, we need a x,y,z and a 'when' Since nothing is static . Two or more coordinate sets (x,y,z,when) can be used to predict the future locations of objects (planets, quasars, ball rolling on the street, etc.)
About thought, in the absence of a linguistic model: I personally beleive that we would think faster, and more definitively. If we could decode the 'instinct' section of our minds, and re-program it with the knowledge of all history, I think we would then be able to begin to phase out language altogether. Yes, altogether, it wouldn't be an overnight thing, but something that would take thousands of years. I believe that our thought rate is elastically linked to our speech rate (with obvious exceptions). Sometimes it's faster, and sometimes it's slower. But all in all, when we think, we need to choose and place quantifying labels on your thoughts in order to represent them to others and ourselves. If a person didn't know the word for an apple, and had never seen one, never heard of one, they'd be confused, and wouldn't know what to do with it. But what if, over thousands of years, we were to remove certain quantifying labels on things, and replace them with some manner of instinctual comprehension.
Sure people say that a civilization without a method of communication that utilizes quantifiable vocabulary (speech, sign language, brail, whatever), would be teribly limited in it evolutionary progress, unable to 'learn' beyond a certain point. But I think that over the thousands of years it would take to acheive what I stated above, we'd develop a new form of communication, that could come in a variety of forms, chemical, biological, or even... telepathic. But I favor chemical.
Yeah, so that ran on.

Just try and think of a new color, one thats never been scene before, impossible eh?
line-because skiing needs a future

Yes, it is impossible. That's cuz of the way we already see the visible spectrum. Ask a colorblind guy what Topaz looks like, that'd be along the lines you're thinking, I think.

I think Schroeder is essentially correct about linguistic speed. The best comparison I can give that kind of supports this is computers. The processor on your computer only reads a series of 1's and 0's. But when you write computer programs you don't write them in 1's and 0's because it's too confusing. So you either write them in a high or low level computer language. This more resembles a human kind of language. The reason the computer doesn't receive the actual instructions you write in the source code is that this is too slow. That is why a compiler program is needed for that language, to change the source code instructions into 1's and 0's that the computer can compute much more quickly.

Say you want to add to numbers together in a low level langauge like Assembly

ADD var x y, or it might be ADD x y var, I forget... but to a human this most clearly means add to variables and then store this answer in another variable... but to the computer this is actually something like 0110 0110 0111 0000:0001, this is obviously faster cause the computer only needs an instruction set for 1's and 0's, it is faster and saves space on the processor. The problem is that it's not practical to actually hardcode in binary... so is it practical for humans to be able to think in this manner? Computer science and cognitive science are very closely related fields.

doesn't chomsky argue that we as humans all share a collected instinctual knowledge? through this theory, as well as hundreds of years of further evolution, we could arrive at the scenario that was previously brought up.

Yea well chomsky is just a linguistic... which doesn't mean shit about any sort of collective consciousness. If you are going to examine collective consciousness, you need to look in the field of biophysics. Noone better to read than Fritz-Albert Popp. But you probably won't understand it if you haven't had upper level biological science courses, and some kind of chemistry dealing w/ thermochemistry. But basically there is empirical evidence to suggest that the wavelengths of a particular frequency of neurotransmission are able to adapt and become longer. Anyone who knows anything about basic waves in physics knows that a lower frequency longer wavelength wave can travel farther than the other type. The implications of this means that if these wavelengths became long enough that neurotransmission could occur across greater distances, and hence hypothetically to other people. This is all supported by a system based on the second law of thermodynamics and the properties of biophotons (this is all that technical stuff you might not understand at all, but it's how he comes to this conclusion).

Link to Article

I did a critique on this article for my thermodynamics class and I got a high A, and this guy is a respected biophysicist.

so lets say that there are wavelengths that are absorbed or whatever by my brain - wouldn't i have to be able to interpret what they mean before being able to put them to use? or is that the whole point of this thinking, that simply having the knowledge puts it to use?

also, i began to read the article, but my geography-degree-pursuing brain could only handle so much biological rhetoric.

Yea your brain has to interpret them. But from what I'm understanding that if it's a neurotransmission that's being passed along to a brain that can interpret it, this is because the biological makeup of the two are the same. I guess it's saying that the signals sent from like my nerves are the same as sent from yours. I don't know if I like the implications of that... if you're ass gets runover by a car I don't want my brain to even think about interpreting that. I don't really know how much is known in the field and what kind of wavelenghts from an associated thought or sensation are supposed to evolve, or any of that. There are a lot of people who I believe are overzealous and believe in Gaia.. the living universe. They believe that this scientific evidence shows that the world is moving to an ultimate coherence, plants people, blah blah blah, but these are people who aren't scientists and just use the ideas of a paper like the one I posted to support what they believe. Stupid brahaman hippies... but hey it's kind of cool I guess... just not plausible I believe. I'll go read the end of the article again and see what I can fathom about it all.

Actually I am wrong... the article about wavelengths getting longer isn't that one I posted by Popp, I can't find the link to that one. Popp's has a lot to do w/ psychological impact of the coherence of biophoton fields in the body, and their implications on health and organization of the body. I can't remember if the article I read on the increasing wavelengths had empirical evidence... it might have tried but I think they might have jumped some conclusions... so right now we'll just say it is a theory that might not be scientifically substantiated... sorry guys I kinda fucked that one up.