Your opinion on existence with this perspective.

[arkain101]

Do you think that there is something responsible for the universe, but not only that, also the process in which you see it in your mind through sight perception?

 

You see, I think how we see is just as mysterious and hard to understand than the how the entire universe came to be.

 

Such a comman response is that its perception, evolved over time. This does not even touch on the mysteriousness of it.

 

For example. When an animal evolves to become red for example, it's molecular structures are such that they evolved to absorb other frequencies and result in reflecting/emitting the frequency that life calls red. If we consider that red is the same perception for all color seeing life, what could possibly be responsible for this almost magical design and phenomina?

 

Being blind from birth you may not ever know what it means to have a universe around you, other than how you percieve it with your other remaining senses.

 

However, when you see it, the colors that you see, they are what make the earth that you observe and say that is out there, and the universe that is out there.

 

What is responsible for those specific colors, and if its shades, then those shades? Color exists in one place only, in a place that does not exist in respect to the universe, your invisible being, awareness, consciousness. Yet somewhere along the line it was invented by natural or greater causes.

 

 

I added an image here to kind of show the blending. The world that is inside our minds and the world that is outside our minds in speculation. Basically what the matrix goes on about but.. What I kind of wanted to show was the world with color that is inside the head of a person, and the world of unknown possibility that is outside of a persons head. That is, invisible electro magnetics, made into reality through the design of the minds abilities.

 

 

 

I find that in this perspective, you can see reason and understanding of a source of pre-existing knowledge. What one would term god. Or being above all.

[Lancaster]

I'm a teeny bit confused. Are you saying that the unlikeliness of all life perceiving the spectrum of light in the same way is proof a God or intelligent designer? I can only say that there are many creatures (even color blind people) who interpret colors differently than the average person.

 

Or is it that you find it unlikely that evolution might have the ability to change the color, which only exists on our consciousness, of a physical animal? If you're going to look at it that way, remember that that animal only exists to you because you perceive it. It's not just color that is susceptible to perception.

 

But why couldn't evolution produce a change in color? A frog mutates to a green color, this helps it hide from predators, it passes it's genes along, the old frogs become green. The predator's perception directly influenced a physical change. I do not see how this is evidence for an intelligent creator/higher power/almighty deity/whatever.

 

Am I understanding correctly?

[arkain101]

I think you tackled the examples well. Although they were meerly just examples, talking about perception where I focused on color.

 

No I am talking about how perception/awareness/consciousness seems just as hard explain where it came from as is the universe. They are seperate things to me in a way. I use color (sight) to focus on because of its importance for describing the universe.

 

Let me add some physics to this.

 

1)Take away perception from the equation of describing the universe. I speculate that what we have left behind is a bit of a canundrum. That is, as we try to imagine everything made of the same thing, such as electrodynamics, or perpendicular field lines, it is like everything interacting with itself, and no relative comparisons. A comman analogy to elaborate on this is to weigh a cup of water, while you are under the water.

 

Here is the universe without our perception.

~It is invisible

~It has no properties related to a thing as you know things. things like a grain of sand.

for example. Take two magnets and bring them together. Describe the thing that is existing between them that is causing a force. To do so is to explain something that is in all relativeness not there.

 

So with all else removed from the equation. Geometry, perception, and analogies, we have the stuff that is the stuff of all the stuff.

 

 

2)Perform the same thought experiment. This time, remove all things physics related from the equation, and leave behind perception and the mind. Things like thoughts, colors, feelings, knowledge....

 

Try to describe what these things are made of and where they come from..

 

 

 

So with this perpsective is it not just as strange to ponder either thing when each of them appear to have no material form?

 

Together they form as one, and this one is a world we see around us, but this macro world is a design formed by colors and reason working with energy and mass.

 

So in this perspective I personally see god, but this conclusion was reached on many many avenues. The more I learned, the more I realised I should humble myself to see a creator at work. After all, what part did "I" have in this? I am just a child in a sandbox when I start saying I know how it happened.

 

If you click on the image you can see what I mean. The visual 'people' in the hall way is the world in the mind. The world outside the mind is invisible, but I just made it look all matrix like so we could pretend we see it.

 

Inside the mind and outside the mind.

[max4236]

Sometimes I wonder, since we don't really know the total mechanics of conscious thought, if perhaps there are more things in the universe which have this quality than we are aware of. We're made of the same stuff as rocks, water, air, and light. We exist as emotional beings, maybe they do too at some level, the rocks, water, air, and light. Perhaps the notion of color is hard wired into the fabric of existence itself. If everything is actually a form of energy then we're made of the same stuff as rainbows. Maybe we know what blue or red is because we are part blue or red, whatever the essence of that stuff is.

 

It's interesting that we perceive more colors than are present in a rainbow though. Like purple and brown. There is no single wavelength for purple or brown, it's a combination of frequencies yet we see them in our minds eye as a single distinct color. Maybe it's because I'm used to picking out blue crayons & purple crayons. Could my perception of color be a cultural thing like language? It's the same way with sounds, a distinct voice, the sound of an instrument, notes of a tune. It's so intricate the way it all works, billions upon billions of overlapping complex matter-energy waves constantly sorting themselves out. A certain collection of cells and somehow you've got a mind. Are cells really the basic unit of life or does it continue down beyond into smaller and smaller scales? Does it work the same with information, thoughts, ideas?

 

You'd think there would have to be levels of consciousness more complex than human thought. Maybe the whole universe has some meta awareness. Bunch of neurochemicals slosh around in our brain and somehow that makes us feel emotions. How is that different from my Sims having some variable changed so they're now in the happy state? Those variables could be represented by arrangements of galaxy superclusters. Thoughts hidden in patterns, simple arrangements of molecules and energy. If a mind is just an arrangement of patterns could a supercomputer be made into a mind? I think it might be possible one day to transfer consciousness into a machine. Maybe it's already happened. Are we really here or in some other realm merely interacting with a sophisticated computer simulation of a physical world which doesn't really exist? Maybe the real universe is 75 levels up from this one. Every time we discover a scientific principle are we hacking into the universe's operating system? What if the universe is self-adapting and changes every time we try to hack into it, adds another layer to the rules? Yeah it could change our perception of reality. To keep us immersed in it. Maybe the Heisenberg uncertainty principle didn't exist until 1927.

 

I really don't know if this place was deliberately designed like a watch, or if it's more like the grand canyon where the water & wind just flowed a certain way by chance and kind of made itself, the random ripple from a supernova 7 billion years ago. Sometimes I wonder if humans are the closest thing to a god this universe has seen. Or if there's a god up there I should apologize to for saying that. Maybe it's just been running on autopilot for 15 billion years until we got here, like baking a cookie. Are humans omnipotent aliens on vacation from another reality with deliberate amnesia? There's just so many posibilities. If it is designed I'd like to know who designed the designer. I used to think I had a clue about this stuff..

[Racoon]

You're a lump of cells amongst trillions of others, spinning at unfathomable speeds, on a hunk of rock, around an ordinary star amongst billions, on the outskirts of a galaxy that barely registers in this Universe..

 

Thats my perspective sometimes.. :confused:

[Boerseun]

I don't completely understand the question posted here, but as far as light's concerned, the colour is simply a specific frequency of electromagnetic radiation striking the cones and rods of your eyeball. Red to you might look like green to the next guy, but everything you perceive as red, he'll perceive as green, because the frequency stays constant.

 

Coming to the more metaphysical part of your post:

 

Take a bag of carbon, a shovel full of calcium, a cup full of nitrogen, two teaspoons of magnesium, five buckets of water, and a list of trace elements as long as my arm (which I will supply at the discount price of $3.99) and stir. Wait three billion years. Voila! Out comes a seventy-litre bag of mostly carbon, which can perceive the universe around it! It has radio receivers that receives a narrow band of electromagnetic emission, from the furthest reaches of the universe. It can simply look up and be aware of stars hundreds of lightyears away. How cool is that? It can manipulate its environment. Imagine a pile of crap contemplating its own existence. Imagine a pile of crap able to contemplate anything at all! This might sound awesome, and might sound as if it cries out for a 'Designer' or a 'God'. Yet, it seems, it is simply one of the magical things carbon does.

 

The chemistry of carbon is so amazingly weird and complex, and forms so many strange bindings and molecular chains that a whole field of study has been dedicated solely to it. Organic chemistry is the study of carbon, and what it can do. There are literally millions of carbon configurations already known, with no end in sight to new mixes. The study goes on, making breakthroughs every single day. Included in the magic of carbon is daily things like petrol, oil, diesel, plastic, etc.

 

Carbon is an incredibly versatile thing. And, as it turns out, if you chuck a heap of it together with a lot of other stuff, and you wait a few billion years, carbon is so absolutely amazing that it can become aware not only of itself, but of the entire universe. Life turns out to be nothing more than just another item in the incredible repertoire of carbon's magic show.

 

Carbon rocks. :confused:

[pgrmdave]

The trick is in the self-modifying self-referential patterns. The more I learn about consciousness, the more I come to believe that it is the shifting pattern of our brains that forms our minds, and that any highly ordered feedback system can have an 'intelligence' of a sort. It may not be self-aware, but it can 'act' 'intelligently' if viewed externally. Consider evolution. Animals have evolved to be able to survive well. The evolution of a species is a feedbacy system - the successes are fed back into the system and the failures are not. Shifting environments provide shifting successes and failures. But in the end (which can be any given 'present'), the species seems to be the product of an intelligent process.

[REASON]

I like your carbon analysis Bo, and I find it equally amazing, but I think the question Arkain is pondering has more to do with understanding consciousness and the importance factor of light energy in the creation of our awarness and perception. I tend to think that because of our incredibly complex ability to contemplate (at least some of us), we may find ourselves over-analyzing the situation without realizing it. But it's fun to do.

 

If I understand correctly Arkain, it's as if you are essentially saying that the universe exists as it does because we are able to perceive it. And we generally perceive it through light energy, which gives it form, color, texture, and so on. Without the conscious ability to perceive it, it would therefore have none of those attributes. In a nutshell, the attributes of the universe are only revealed by a conscious perceiver through energy transmission.

 

I've thought a lot about this notion, and it has lended a smidgen of credence to the idea of a purpose to the universe. What good is a universe of matter and energy if there is nothing to perceive it, or contemplate it's existance? Does it really even exist? It's almost as if the only real purpose to the universe is to create consciousness. Matter and energy, with physics to govern it's interactions, will yeild this result over time. We are proof of it. But a purpose driven universe harkens back to the idea of a supreme creator with a plan, and I'm not buying it.

 

The answer to the question of whether something exists if there is nothing to percieve it is yes, of course. I have never been to Luxembourg. I've Never even seen a picture of it. It does not come into existance at the moment I arrive and am able to experience it. Maybe for me it does, but in reality, it was already there long before I was born. This is self evident.

 

Our ability to see has developed out of a process by which early organisms that were better able to sense their environment were able to survive. Over time, through genetic mutation and natural selection, the sensors became more and more advanced. The development of eyes occurred in direct relation to the nature of light energy and it's effect on the environment. They naturally work together. The ability to see visible light as opposed to x-rays or infrared, is simply because visible light is more important to a species' ability to sense it's environment. It's really not any more dramatic than that. Perception though, is relative to a brains' ability to process information. Ours is the most advanced known.

 

Our complex consciousness is the product of a tremendous amount of natural, biological experimentation and time, in which our brains have developed the ability to process vast amounts of information, particularly in our cerebrum. Our consciousness is actually increasing as we gain more and more knowledge about the nature of the universe. Science has been a key in that process. Science expands consciousness. As you trace backwards, the brain gets smaller and less complex, and consciousness dwindles as perception and understanding is lost. Consciousness is a product of cosmological law. It is a beautiful and wonderful thing that we are fortunate enough to have. But had consciousness not developed, as it doesn't on many other worlds, the cosmos wouldn't care.

[HydrogenBond]

There are at least two layers of perception. The first is what enters the eyes and the second other how it is interpretted in the imagination. For example, if we could wire our eyes-visual-rendering part of our brain to a moniter, sort of like a TV camera outputting on a screen,, we would record reality as it is seen. There is no judgement, expectation, logic, theory, before the output reaches the screen, just raw visual data.

 

Next, lets place our output device after the imagination massages the raw data. The raw data will be alterred. The imagination and memory acts like a filter to convert this raw data into what we actually perceive. If one lives in a rational universe and another lives in an empirical universe, the raw data will be processed differently since these are two very different filters. Science and religion creates two diffferent filters for processing raw data. The filter is also dependant on the memory density associated with like and similar data. For example, a child sees a dog, while a breeder sees an AKC German Shepherd with a certain lineage. The raw data is the same, but the filter is different to create a different output.

 

Animals will see the same raw data but will have a different filter for interpretting it. In other words, if we wire their eyes to the monitor, we can use it as a camera to picks out objects. It may be in black and white or have spherical abberations, but we could use this sensory device to see similar raw data. When humans project their feelings into animals they are working under the assumption of similar filters, such that the animal is processing same raw datam in the very same way. That is out of touch with reality since their filter does not have the language capability to define many human concepts. The human filter of imagination will see what it wants to see to make it appear so.

 

Science is on the right track, in that many of its claims are based on data that can be generated independanly so one will see the same result without having to take someone's elses word for it. Such a universal filter allows everyone to be on the same page. But on the other hand, empiricsm, which is widely used in science, creates a fuzziness to the filter that makes clarity difficult. Fuzzy filters give one more liberty for a distorted perception of the raw data.

 

For example, picture a person behind a glass door. If the glass is clear and therefore the image sharp, we can tell who it is. If we fog the glass with statistical uncertainty, we may still tell it is a female. She has what appears to be long brown hair. Her eyes color is inclusive but she appears to have two of them. She is not big but it hard to tell if she is skinny. We can all see this much, but after that clarity becomes a guessing game with the loudest voice winning the game. This allows the filter of politics to becomes a part of the science filter to settle the uncertainty. With a clear glass filter, politics has a harder time merging into the science filter since any fog will distort clarity. But one may not notice a foggy filter trying to superimpose onto another foggy filter if doesn't change the basic stuff everyone can see.

 

The political filter is interesting. It is similar to something one see at a carnival. You stand in front of the mirror and either you look taller, shorter, wider, etc. A good polititian tries to install a carnival filter in your mind so he looks bigger than life. If we add the carnival-filter to the fuzzy filter glass of empiricsm, this can alter the proportions of the raw data so it looks like some data means more than other. Global warming is a good example of how this fuzzy weakness in science can be manipulated.

[arkain101]

Those are all some really interesting replies.

 

Here is why I arrive at this contemplation. Prepose Special and General Relativity are correct.

 

This means that what EMR (space-time) shows you is your reality. Therefore, if the space-time (EMR) shows you something change, that change becomes your reality. This is, when velocity is the culprit responsible for creating a change.

 

If we base our worldy interpratation on this foundation, I find we arrive at some strange propositions, ones like 3 versions of reality to make one.

 

For example.

 

If an object is able to

(i) observe space shrink with length contraction as it progresses towards the speed of light.

(ii)slow down in time relative to all other frames, while its own frame remains consistent with the same physics it has a rest.(that is, time passes normally for the fast moving frame, but looks slower to external observers)

(iii)relative to an observer at rest, the moving object can be observed to contract and physically contract in the direction of travel. Yet, the observer frame in motion experiences no change.

 

If we begin structuralizing a framework of reality built upon these possibilities. We find there are some strange results.

 

We find that all frames are independent in space and time. This is, a frame can experience effects that no other frame experiences. Such as, the universe distorting around you. Things infront of you getting closer relative to your speed.

 

This possibility I find supports the fact that what you observe is not really there. It is like magnetic fields. Invisible potentials. So the observable universe and its matter is made of potential. Only the mental construct creates a solidity of this potential of mass.

 

What is there is, Light (Energy), which is the ultimate independent frame, that is, if it is true it experiences no time. So observerable energy IS your foundation. But this energy is able to be in infinite forms at the same time, depending on how an observer is experiencing it. (fast or slow, strong gravity or not).

 

Then we have the 3rd aspect, the absolute structure in the design of consciousness. For example,

The answer to the question of whether something exists if there is nothing to percieve it is yes, of course. I have never been to Luxembourg. I've Never even seen a picture of it. It does not come into existance at the moment I arrive and am able to experience it. Maybe for me it does, but in reality, it was already there long before I was born. This is self evident.

 

1)Here there is a design of mental concept that always remains the same. The universal Laws, universal reality, but this is only existent relative to a mind and a mind only. So, regardless if I am looking at the sun or not, it is there as a mind knows it is there.

 

2)However, relative to that, that makes up the invisible world with my mind out of the picutre, there is no such thing as a sun > you may postulate there is strings, but it may go smaller than this, even invisible field lines.

 

3)As for the light, there is no sun, and no strings, no space, and no time.

 

 

So to summerize this.

 

a)There is the world of mental construct, that science will claim is there whether we are alive or dead.

But I argue it is there for consciousness' and consciousness' only.

This world does not exist to mass(:lol:, and light ©

 

b)There is the world of material potential mass. Each frame consisted of this is independent from another. One frame(x) might see a frame distort, but the frame (x) itself does not. This is effected by time.

 

c)There is the world of light or information, which always travels the same speed and is also form of potential. No restrictrion by time.

 

 

So this creates relativity for in a way 3 absolute frames. The Being(the spirit) The matter(the sun) and the light(the all).

However within these 3 frames is all kinds of potential realities, independent of eachother.

 

this contruct says to me:

a) The mental construct is a design. It only exists relative to conscious and aware beings that can declare they are aware of it. This world is unchanging and absolute, because it exists in one place and one place only our consciousness and is said to be the purpose or fundamental in life.

 

 

Of course this is the relative perspective constructed on the basis of physics data.

 

That is why it seems weird, but I think even reason must become relative to create a perspective that can comprehend the universe.

[REASON]

Man! That's a lot to try and perceive, Arkain. :shrug:

 

You may want to refer to the quote below from the first paragraph of my previous post.

 

I tend to think that because of our incredibly complex ability to contemplate (at least some of us), we may find ourselves over-analyzing the situation without realizing it.

 

To me there are three glaring problems with your ideas above, and it doesn't require any concepts of physics or mathematical relationships to understand. To me these are just logical errors.

 

1) If reality in the form of matter and energy doesn't really exist, except as perceived by a conscious mind, and a conscious mind is in the form of a brain that is formed of matter and energy, than essentially what you have is nothing perceiving nothing. Now that is definitely a conundrum. I'm instantly reminded of an old song from my childhood; Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'. You gotta have somethin', if you wanna be with me. :eek:

 

2) If reality is based on the perception of a mind, and each of us has our own individual mind, how can individual minds perceive, and therefore create, a collective reality?

 

3) If I take a picture of the Grand Canyon, is that picture my perception, or am I just perceiving the cameras perception? But then a camera can't perceive. Hmmm.

 

The fact of the matter is: The Grand Canyon really is there. Just keep walking toward it and you'll know this is true the moment you fall in. As human beings, we are a part of this existing reality, and we are the recipients, through a natural process, of the ability to observe, analyze, and contemplate our surrounding environment. An environment that existed on its own long before we developed that capability.

 

I agree that at its most rudimentary form, all matter may be nothing more than a vibration; a form of energy. But you don't have to be a Physics Major to understand that these rudimentary forms have natural, interactive properties that occur, and have been occurring, even as there has been no mind to perceive of it.

[arkain101]

You bring forward some good points.

 

But let me be clear. I am saying there is a grand canyon. It has has 3 catagories of absolute so called frames or catagories you can express it in.

 

You can express it as (i) mass-energy-matter (ii) Light-energy (iii) Macroscopic perspective. (illustrated by a living being with sight)

 

Each catagory is there and part of the whole picture.

 

However what it seems to imply is that the living being contains the ability to illustrate a world out of what is rather invisible, yet there.