I was merely comparing unsubstantiated positive claims (“open”) with unsubstatiated negative claims (“closed”)
unsubstantiated being the key factor
I thought T. gondii was that parasite from cat crap that infects rats and changes their behaviour so that they hang around cats more, which is in the parasite’s favor in completing its life cycle. So this junk infects people and changes their behavoior too?
This explains cat people.
I never knew why people would actually like cats, they are unpredictable wild animal trash. It this parasite that is making them like the cats more. When my gf yells at me to not ignore the cat, talking about me being mean to it and whatnot; its that dmn parasite talking, trying to get me as another host
i knew something was up
cats are garbage
how do I know if im infected? I just let the cat lay on me earlier tonight. I was feeling soryfor it.
this is sht
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against the idea that there is a higher plane of consciousness. My beliefs are a little different from yours (or maybe I misunderstand you and we share the same hippy beliefs). I believe that it is the universe’s destiny to achieve this higher plane of consciousness. If you think about it, everything in the universe is information. After the big bang it was basically a void. Then we basically started off with atoms, one of the most basic building blocks of information. These combined to form molecules. These “replicated” to form structures such as galaxies, planets, and so on. Certain structures were better at replicating than others, giving rise eventually to RNA (and yeah it sounds crazy, but Dawkins proposed an idea such as this in the Blind Watchmaker, talking about how nonorganic materials were able to “replicate” themselves and eventually achieve abiogenesis). RNA is just more replication of information. DNA became a more efficient form of that information replication. Now humans have invented technology, and technology is rapidly accelerating and improving increasing the amount of information it can store, the amount of bandwidth with which to transmit this information, the speed with which it can process it, and the size and interconnectedness of the network that stores all this information (the interwebz). Information is replicating even faster. .
At some point, it is conceivable we will be able to build intelligent robots, which would then be able to produce even more robots, essentially giving form to a new form of self replicating information. They will spread throughout the universe, and with it their intelligence and information.
ESSENTIALLY… i believe life in the universe is just the way of the universe to understand itself. and at the end of the day the higher plane of consciousness will be the universe becoming “conscious”. Some believe that the universe is a hologram or a computer automaton or some kind of program, so yeah, that would be the higher plane of reality.
and yes it sounds hippy. the author of The Singularity is Near believes something like this, however I disagree with his optimism, I’m almost certain the robots are gonna wipe us all out, but that’s just our destiny so its ok.
We can think of life (and intelligent life in particular) as the outcome of the fact that everything in the universe is an expression of information, combined with the tendency for elementary particles to coalesce into more complex systems. The human brain is a complex system and intelligence is the expression of information as electrical impulses. To me, that’s as far as it goes when considering intelligence purely as a physical phenomenon.
That the universe is striving to achieve something higher or develop some kind of self-knowledge kind of implies that there is an ideal/actualized state that everything is building towards. It’s a big assumption. It also verges on anthropomorphizing nature, which is a useful metaphor in some cases, but I’m not sure how useful it is when we’re describing a process that doesn’t travel upward so much as in the direction of least resistance.
That isn’t to say that life down here on the medium scale of things is pointless or irrelevant, but we do have our own point of view from down here that isn’t necessarily reflected in the chaotic randomness up there. At the end of the day, it’s just stuff banging into other stuff until all the stuff runs out of energy and everything gets really cold.
It also isn’t to say that this stuff isn’t interesting or even useful to think about… because it’s both of those things.
Well I mean obviously everything I wrote is just hippy religious speculation. There’s no way to prove it (after all it could turn out that some things are un knowable and there is a limit to how much science can glean) but it’s fun to think about when smoking weed. Like whoa double fucking rainbow man!!!
If I’m going to go with anybody’s gay shit, I’m going with Grant Morrison’s gay shit, in which the universe is an infinite fractal expression of itself all the way up and down through the dimensions, and that each individual person is just a third-dimensional slice of a single giant higher-dimensional organism in its larval state.
