At least your women aren't getting ravaged.
Really?? I was under the impression that there was no evidence whatsoever of life even existing at all, let alone being abundant, elsewhere in the universe, irrespective of its complexity.
Ah, so you are religious then. My view would be that "current evidence and thought" - provided that the "thought" was based on scientific investigation and not mumbo-jumbo - seems to indicate that the mind is purely a function of activity in the brain, and therefore cannot possibly be "liberated" from this "constraint". No physical brain, no mind at all, seems to me the only likely scenario.
There is no evidence, meaning we have not yet found any. However, I did say "probably": current hypotheses suggest that where the conditons are suitable life (simple) will come into existence. However there is then an enormous and difficult jump to get from simple to complex, and suitable conditions for the jump and for maintenance after the jump are probably vanishingly rare. If you are interested in pursuing this, I suggest Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee's "Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe" (Copernicus, 2000) as a good starting point.
...and some of them are beginning to complain about it.
I'm astonished and saddened to hear this from a fellow home brewer. Isn't this what we drink beer for?
I don’t really know what “god” means, or what one is. I left that open. I have been to places where gods are abundant - every tree has a spirit which is held to be a god. (In Malaysia I stayed for some time with a family, on several occasions. A nearby large uncultivated undeveloped area had tall grass and scrub, and two narrow but paved roads going through it, perpendicular to each other. There was very little traffic on either road, possibly because of which drivers (often of motor-bikes or motor-scooters) drove too fast. At one point the roads crossed. Because of the vegetation, when approaching the cross on either road a driver could not see if there was anything approaching the cross on the other road. At the cross there was a large tree; and at the base of the tree there was a shrine (these are common) which always had fresh fruit offerings on it. I enquired about why there was always a fresh offering. The answer: there are a lot of collisions at that cross-road, and some people have been killed there in collisions. It is obviously because the god of the tree is angry, so the offerings are to placate him. I enquired about the possibility of cutting down a bit of the scrub so that drivers approaching the cross could see if anything was coming along the other road. No-one had thought of that; why should they - the god in the tree was to blame. Nothing was done. The offerings did not work, the god in the tree remained ****** off and continued to orchestrate collisions.)
Have a look at post #34 (mine) in "Should we stop eating fish and chips?"
Ah, yes, possibly a sad situation. If the reason that we drink beer is to feel better, or at least different in mood and outlook, then almost certainly the mechanism that achieves this is chemical changes in the bloodstream that effect chemical changes in the brain, (usually known as intoxication). If our immortal souls, or "non-corporeal minds" were independent of our brains, then this should not work. Presumably the body might become wobbly as the alcohol exerts its influence, but the mind should be totally unimpaired.
Yep, completely agree. But your comment is totally loaded. "meaning that we have not yet found any" implies that you believe that there is evidence, and it will be only a matter of time before we discover it. This is indistinguishable from a religious belief - both are predicated on faith in the unknown.
What a load of tosh! Current hypotheses based upon what?? There is only certain evidence of life beginning once on one planet - ours. It is very far from certain how this occurred. It is therefore impossible to assign probabilities, let alone to assert that life "will" come into existence. Again, this expression of absolute certainty is symptomatic of religious faith, and bears no relation to genuine scientific investigation.
The difference between religious faith and scientific "faith" where we formulate a hypothesis and then doggedly seek to prove or disprove it, is not as great as it first appears. Look at the work the Curies put in until they were able to isolate polonium and then radium, until then it was just speculation nothing was proven until it was proven. Look at the time and money invested in the Cerne particle collider in an attempt to find a particle that gives substance to everything (they won't find it, by the way, as I have it on a bed of cotton wool in a jam jar in my garage next to my lump of the True Cross) the existence of Higg's boson was theoretical and speculative when the Nobel prize was awarded on its account and claims that it has now been found might go the same way tomorrow as the phlogiston theory did 300 years ago. In fact there are certain similarities.
The comment is totally neutral.
Suggest you learn about current hypotheses.
What a very strange question!
Could you point me to a couple sources? A totally honest question, by the way!
I'm glad you found it an interesting speculation.
Again, I'm a little surprised here. In my mind, the scientific method is predicated upon testing whether something is likely (and these days, increasingly, that means assigning a statistical probability) to be true. The scientific method can never really "falsify" anything (I believe that to think so is to misunderstand the meaning of "null hypothesis"). Nor can it "prove" anything. I suppose that my approach to this reflects more that of a biologist than a physicist, but for me the result of any "test" has to have a caveat - how likely is this result to be universally applicable.
Good morning Hoppyland.
