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Joined: Oct 2004
Posts: 4,134
Netherlands
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I don't believe in a soul/spirit, fully agree on xxguitar here. Well, please correct me if I'm wrong on this one, I'm not a physicist, but this is my view on it: There are two different particles in space as far as I'm aware: matter and energy. A spirit would theoretically only consist of energy. But something needs to hold the energy together and normally this would be the job of the matter. Since a spirit does not consist out of matter there isn't a way to keep the energy in one place, thus a spirit can't exist. Quote:
Believing that all your emotions, thoughts, ideas and stuff are produced by your brain is like believing that car is controlled by the engine.
It's a good argument. Had to think about that for a moment . However if you think this way, you'll end up in a vicious circle. I mean, the guy controlling the brain (the spirit) needs to have a human/thing/spirit as well to be controlled, and so does this human//thing/spirit, and the following, and the following etc. etc. If it wasn't a vicious circle, so the spirit is the only and ultimate thing there is to steer the brain, then why shouldn't the brain be able control itself? If the spirit can do so, then aparantly it's physicaly possible, thus the brain should be able to do it as well. Comeing to this conclussion it's not reasonable to assume that there is a spirit. We have never clearly seen, witnessed and measured one, then why assume there is one?
That aside, is it really that hard to think that a bunch of atoms and electrons being aware of itself is not impossible? Sure it's hard to understand but to me, a spirit or soul is even more weird to understand. Seems like people are just shifting the things that seem hard to understand to something they don't understand at all 
Quote:
So if you think that you are only a piece of material, that after death is lost forever, why do you keep living if you dont have nothing to win with this?
But maybe it's not about you or me and the material we consist of.
It's pretty funny to think about this: It took a while before evolution reached the point of being aware of itself (i'm speaking about us now). We, as a bunch of atoms and electrons, have just started to alter our own genes to improve ourselves in the future. So actually, life started to change itself to evolve. Whereas a while ago (from the beginning of life till around a decade ago) life's evolution was dependend from coincidence factors out of the environment. This way was a slow process of growing/evolving as everything happened coincidentily. But since this coincidence evolution now has ended, and an artificial evolution has been started, evolution will be a lot faster.
Now the point is not you or me as an individual. I don't think there's an explicit individual purpose for everyone. But I do think that it's a natural behaviour of life itself (meaning all living things) to grow, improve, evolve and alter theirself and their environment to stay alive. I don't know why, but that's obviously the purpose if you look around. You can see it everywhere on smaller scales in nature. There is no awareness needed of the lifeform either to try to reach this purpose. If you take a look at the behaviour of a virus, it will try to take over a living being to benefit itself. The virus tries to reach life's main purpose this way; 'survival', or maybe 'perfection' is a better description. The virus in this example is motivated to achieve the purpose because it's beneficial for itself but at the same time it participates in the big picture of life trying to reach 'perfection'.
The reason why we try to achieve this particular purpose has yet to be discovered and, so I think, to find the reason, we'll have to dig very deep into our origins: the tiny particles inside atoms, quarks, muons, luv's and further in. We might see the same 'behaviour' of those particles like we have seen in nature on smaller scales (like the virus). I can't explain this theory properly, but if you have seen the Star Trek Voyager episode "The Omega Directive" with the omega particles, you probably get the idea.  It's still fiction, not (yet) real, but nevertheless the idea is kinda neat. Some information: http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Omega_molecule
I guess we shouldn't whine that much about artificially mutating and altering genes and stuff. Maybe rude to say but I think, in a way, we're ment to do that in order to reach 'perfection'. And not for ourself, but for whole mother life.
Just my thought 
Last edited by Jostie; 06/10/07 01:01.
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