Llamas and tigers have different behaviors despite having the same brain functions [amygdala function, visual cortex function]. — aporiap

This is a good point but...

First things first, tigers behave quite differently from llamas. This seems to bespeak a correlation between brain and behavior especially in terms of fine structure: the differences between a llama and a tiger are due to differences in fine structure of their brains. Your theory explains interspecies differences. So far, so good.

However, how would you explain interspecies similarities? I mean both tigers and llamas walk, eat, mate, etc. If it all depended on fine structure of brains, and given that they're not the same in these two species of animals, tigers and llamas should have nothing in common and yet they do in the aforementioned ways.

Perhaps, unless there is a next step (enlightenment?) were you realize fairness was a false concept all along. It's difficult to decide one way or another — Gregory

Possible, sir! Possible!

you will never get to the point where life becomes free of suffering — khaled

Why?

:up:

Even simple neural networks are chaotic systems — debd

What this means is that very small differences in the initial state of the network will give rise to significant unpredictable differences in the final state — debd

Do you see people behaving chaotically?

it is as different between individuals as are fingerprints. Individual gait is different and you can identify a person by his/her gait only. — debd

You're focusing on minor differences and ignoring major similarities. What you're doing here is like taking two humans and concluding that one of them isn't human because fae has a differently shaped nose.

My argument is simple, if the brain is a chaotic system there should be zero similarities between people which is clearly false.

What makes them different in behavior is the microstructure. The difference in microstructure doesn't need to imply different functions — aporiap

:chin: You're contradicting yourself.

Are you implying every part of two different brains, respond in similar ways to a stimulus? — aporiap

Each gross anatomical structure of the brain has a function that's different from other gross anatomical structures but each one of them has a function that's identical to all brains.

I totally agree with you, and I also agree that we might not even be far enough along to be able to grasp the clues, if any, that may have been left for us. But its fun to think about and I don't think it rules them out -- maybe we'll come to decipher a code left in our DNA, like the article suggests. — ChrisM

Excellent detective work! Where better to plant the clues than on the detective's own person. The DNA code is quaternary (base four) - the four dimensions of spacetime? I wonder what special/general relativity has to say about the Big Bang singularity? Gravity seems to be the "force" that initiates nuclear fusion in stars, it causes planet formation, it's also behind galaxy formation. To add there are four fundamental forces: 1. Gravity, 2. Strong Interaction, 3. Weak Interaction, and 4. Electromagnetism. I wonder... :chin:

The greatest difficulty in loving God is that we mistake Him for any power superior to our strengths - be it social, natural, cosmic or preternatural - whose overwhelming weight falls on us. — ThePhilosopher1

The above statement is damning evidence of what I just said. No matter what god does or doesn't do, people will always find an excuse to love faer. It's as if we're under a witch's love spell.

Did you read the article? That very topic is talked about. — ChrisM

If I were part of the team that recycled the universe in the sense managed to reset the entropy level back to a lower level like in a Big Bang singularity, I would've asked for clues to be revealed once intelligence in the universe evolved to a level capable of handling the probably complex science involved in making some headway, some real progress, toward stabilizing the universe to prevent ensuant heat death. Is the 21st century, 13.8 billion years from the Big Bang singularity, the best time to look for cosmic clues to the riddle of entropy? Your guess is as good as mine.

Reminds me of god. Everyone, including the devout, the faithful, the ones with unshakable faith, knows that any way you cut it, the problem of evil will not go away and there's hellfire too to add to our list of worries. Yet, despite the aforementioned, let's just say, "inconvenient" truth and threat, the religious take great "pains" to proclaim their love for god in extravagant, ostentatious displays. What could make people love someone like god, a being that's defined to be more than capable of intervening in the lives of the suffering but doesn't and still gets to keep the title of being all-good? It seems then that a good technique to make people love you is to make hollow promises to do something about their fears and hopes.

I disagree. If it were a loop then those who engineered the loop would've left clues, hints, on how to stabilize the universe in order to prevent having to go back to square one over and over again unless...that's an impossibility.

What do you think? I do not think pain/suffering is redemptive. — schopenhauer1

What I think isn't important. Your opinion matters.

Moods are just an example of a subtle non-rational brain process that can go on to influence your life in the future. They’re not at all integral to the point I’m making. — Pfhorrest

You lost me. I'm under the impression that you're talking about moods to prove that beliefs depend on them in a very important way, to wit that they're the tiny, almost imperceptible, differences that are part of your chaos theory of mind.

For another example, say you’re on a walk one day and at a fork in the road you have to go left or right, without any real reason for either. One of those choices will lead you to meet a person who will become a short-time acquaintance of yours through whom you will meet someone else who will introduce you to a new circle of friends among whom you will meet your future spouse with whom you will have many deep conversations that will heavily influence your opinions on things like theism or atheism. If you turned the other way on that walk, your future state of mind would have turned out completely differently. And whether you felt inclined to turn left or right is the kind of thing that could be influenced by tiny physical differences, or more likely built up to by an accumulation of consequences of tiny physical differences in the same way that your future beliefs were built up to by an accumulation of differences based on whether you turned left or right. — Pfhorrest

I understand the significance of differences in experience for how we turn out to be down the road but conjoined twins don't have that luxury. They're stuck to each other, remember?

I would say "you" is like x in algebra. "You" could be anybody just as x could be any number.

Is there anyway that every idea of life after death can be correct? — TiredThinker

Given that the details contradict but that there's an overall thematic similarity, I can say that the question is a sensible. Answerable in any satisfactory sense, I don't know. Perhaps this is the correct answer: I/you/we don't know.

Yet, if this question were a game of chance, how would we place our bets? Would we put our money on one possibility and not the other? Considering that there are theists and atheists in significant numbers, it goes without saying that some have made their decision on the matter. Nonetheless, these beliefs are, obviously, giant leaps of faith for both parties involved. It seems then that the truth of the matter is we don't know the truth, as mind-bendingly paradoxical as that sounds. :chin:

Is it okay to risk putting someone in pain because there is a chance they may get pleasure out of your decision without asking for their consent first — khaled

No, of course not. Your argument is in agreement with truths as they stand but these are contingent truths, something you've failed to address in your post. Is it absolutely necessary that life and suffering have to go together? Even as we speak the world is such that suffering is an undeniable truth and yet we have, among us, those who either suffer less or even not at all. Can I, may I, take this as good grounds to infer the contingent nature of suffering?

There is a difference between worth living and worth starting. I don't think schopenhauer1 is saying life isn't worth living because of the pain in it but he's saying that it is not worth starting. — khaled

But what if life is free from suffering? Would you still feel or think it would be not worth starting?

We have agency to prevent pain. Whether the pain is some yin-yang with positive moments, you can make a decision to prevent future people from pain. Just because this up and down is part of the current reality, we do not have to procreate the current situation, just because it is the current situation and can't be anything else. — schopenhauer1

Right! There is no need to perpetuate an agonizing experience. I'm with you on that one. However, don't forget that happiness is something real and that one has to be alive to experience it. This will force us to shift the focus to comparing degrees of happiness and suffering and that, for some, the suffering is far in excess of happiness, so and so forth.

There's truth in this of course? I'm not denying that but, if I were to weigh in on this, the truth of suffering is a contingent truth and not a necessary one. In all honesty, I don't see why we can't decouple suffering from life. I mean red lights turning on in a car's dashboard isn't exactly painful but does the job of warning the driver that something's amiss. I'm speaking from the perspective of pain as a signal mechanism for injury or death.

So what is your point with emotions and pain? Are you trying to say that since it's hard to put some sensations into words, that therefore pain is okay to create for other people? — schopenhauer1

Pain is never ok, it's primary function is to inform the experiencer that something's wrong, that it's not ok.

That said, if one can't/never goes through pain/suffering then that's only half the story of what reality is.

I want to ask you a question. What if we could anesthetize ourselves completely and live a life free from all suffering/pain? Would you then agree that life is worth living?

Please explain specifically what you mean by function and operate. Like I said, if you mean generalized function of a specific brain tissue like olfactory bulb, amygdala or visual cortex, then this is just a strawman because these things are not relevant-- i.e. it would be like saying the hard disk of computer A functions the same as computer B [i.e. they store memory], thus
the variability of the microstructure [i.e. the orientation of magnets on the hard disk, which is the physical representation of the computer memory] doesn't matter for what the hard disk does. But it does matter. — aporiap

Take your brain and mine for comparison. It's quite obvious that they differ in terms of actual number of neurons, the number and complexity of synapses, the loci of brain cells, etc. Yet, we can both talk, walk, eat, think in, factoring these variations, extremely similar ways. Had these variations any effect on the way our brains operate/function, it would show in the areas of brain function I mentioned. We wouldn't have generic abilities like walking, talking, eating, thinking, etc.

If by function, you mean the specific output of a person's brain tissue, then the function does vary considerably. The output of your visual cortex when viewing a tasty, gushing burger is completely different to the output of my visual cortex when viewing a chair. The output of my amygdala after seeing a picture of Natalie Portman is not the same as the output of my amygdala after discovering a spider crawling up my arm. And those outputs are different in other people. — aporiap

You're comparing apples to oranges. Of course our mental states would differ between a delicious burger and a spider crawling up our arm. However, if both of us were exposed to the same stimulus, we would experience comparable mental states. If my mouth waters in gustatory anticipation when I see a burger, it's highly unlikely that you would retch and vomit in disgust. This similarity in responses to the physical environment and ideas bespeak the reality of what I've referred to as generic brain functions, something that would be impossible if the fine structure of brains mattered to mental states.

Not directly. But they're dependent on previous beliefs, which are dependent on previous experiences, which are dependent on previous choices, which are dependent on previous moods. It's not as simple as you want to make it out, so as to easily refute it. — Pfhorrest

So, is it fair to say that the belief your espousing in this thread is ultimately mood-based? Why are you trying to argue then?

Why would that be important? Even if it was, certainly we wouldn't want to experience all manner of pain just to be "complete" (torture, etc.). — schopenhauer1

As I said @Caldwell, to use a sexual metaphor, one can get some, "adequate"???, idea of what a home run means if you get to first base. Praticals, as part of learning, are controlled environments, carefully designed simulations if you will, with the option, hopefully, to pull out.

To reiterate, emotions can't be conveyed with words, making it impossible to understand what they involve or mean through discourse, written or spoken. This is a major obstacle if one is seeking knowledge of emotions which ultimately narrows our choices down to one viz. actually, directly going through, experiencing in an immediate sense, emotions if we are to ever know/understand them.

That would assume we are all in a scheme of yin-yang with no self-agency. For example, If pain is necessary for pleasure (which I still don't think is proven, so we can go back to that), one can choose not to continue this scheme unto a next generation rather than saying "it is what it is" which would be a false presentation of the choice. There is a choice, it isn't.. "So let's continue forward with more people.". — schopenhauer1

Sorry, I couldn't make head or tail of this.

Fairness might be a concept that is childish — Gregory

I don't think so. Unfairness is the hallmark of being a child. It has to be taught to them, this implying, at some level, that fairness is an adult concept. Assuming adults are better thinkers, it follows that fairness is a notion that makes sense i.e. is a rational belief to hold. :chin:

influenced tremendously by tiny choices you make, tiny variations in your mood — Pfhorrest

You mean to say that beliefs are dependent on one's mood. This turns philosophy on its head. Can you elaborate on this point.

it has some sort of redemptive quality whereby being exposed to it and overcoming it, one becomes "better", more "fulfilled", a more "complete" person, or something along those lines. — schopenhauer1

The general idea behind such a theory is dualistic, the yin-yang. I've always had a hard time understanding yin-yang. The claim is that to understand yin, yang must be understood but the problem is to understand yang, one has to have a grasp of yin and so on in an infinite loop that precludes any understanding at all.

Perhaps, if we look at it differently, we can achieve some clarity. Happiness and suffering, the duo we're interested in, are, all said and done, emotions and as far as I know emotions can't be expressed propositionally i.e. we can't convey, or it's notoriously difficult to, convey emotions in declarative sentences.

For instance I can describe with a fair degree of confidence that the intended meaning will be conveyed that the plant I posssess is a rose, like so: This plant is a rose.

However, to my reckoning, I can't, in fact no one can, convey the happiness or sorrow or some other emotion fae feels with a sentence: Happiness is... and Sorrow is... What would replace the three trailing dots?

If I'm correct so far then it implies that happiness, sorrow, and other emotions need to be directly experienced to gain even a modicum of understanding of what they are. Since not experiencing pain/suffering firsthand means that one is completely unaware of a certain aspect of reality, we would, in that sense, be incomplete.

You seem to be thinking of the brain as though it were a gas, with its processes predictably correlating with the things that you list (temperature, humidity, air pressure, etc). That has nothing to do with chaotic things like the butterfly effect; in fact such a correlation is contrary to them. The brain as a chaotic system would be one in which, say, a single sodium ion either does or does not make contact with a neuron because of some small physical difference, and then that neuron does or does not fire in accordance with that, and then all of the neurons that would fire in response to that one firing either do or do not fire in accordance with that, and then all the neurons that they would trigger to fire either do or do not in accordance with that, and pretty soon you've got a vastly different state of which neurons are firing, and so what the brain overall is doing, all because some trivial physical effect either did or didn't inhibit the motion of a single sodium ion. — Pfhorrest

This still doesn't make sense. You mean to say that if someone were to introduce me to atheism/theism, my response to it depends on variations in sodium ion concentration and sodium channel activation. If this were true there should be more shades of these ideas then there actually are; after all at the molecular level of neurochemistry variations are continuous and exist over a wide range of concentrations and activations of sodium ions and ion channels. Basically, the limited output - variations in theism/atheism - doesn't square with the enormous input - variations at molecular levels.

For example, can you try to qualify the below statement -- who says they're more fulfilled or complete after experiencing pain? If a physician must suffer all kinds of cancer, headache, broken bones, shattered limbs, and or cracked skull, then she wouldn't be an excellent doctor, would she? She'd be dead, as in rigor mortis. — Caldwell

Not to contradict you but learning is traditionally divided into theory and practicals. I think @schopenhauer1 is referring to the latter when he says:

one becomes "better", more "fulfilled", a more "complete" person, or something along those lines. — schopenhauer1

Too, practicals in this context don't necessarily involve actually experiencing pain/suffering. It may take the form of snippets, brief glimpses, so to speak of pain/suffering - just enough to get an idea of what it feels like but short of the real McCoy.

Existence = made of atoms. — Hippyhead

:ok:

"Existence" is a human concept which is useful in our everyday lives at human scale — Hippyhead

:ok:

Even though the pencil overwhelmingly consists of non-existence — Hippyhead

A pencil doesn't have atoms?

Space illustrates that a phenomena can be real without meeting our definition of existence. — Hippyhead

Space doesn't have atoms.

God we are reinforcing our built-in bias towards thinking of God as a thing — Hippyhead

So, god isn't made of atoms or is he? If you're going to compare god to space then, it must be that god isn't atom-based and so, as per your definition, god doesn't exist and he's real because you believe space is real. In short, you believe god doesn't exist but god is real. :chin:

think you’re still not understanding the technical meaning of “chaos” being employed here: — Pfhorrest

I understand chaos as the behavior of a system extremely sensitive to tiny differences in initial states.

My problem with this is whether chaos theory is applicable at all to brains? There are two forces acting on the brain, 1. ideas and 2. the physical environment.

I can accept that the physical environment (temperature, humidity, air pressure, etc.) can vary quantitatively in ways that chaos in brains becomes possible a la the classic butterfly effect. However, if the physical environment has such an effect on the mind, we should be seeing a clear gradation in mind-types (gradation in beliefs, attitudes, etc.) with latitude, temperature being the most well-defined variable in physical environment. What I'm saying is the minds of people living in hot places should be different from the minds of people living in cold places. I haven't come across any scientific study that makes such a claim. Perhaps something worth investigating.

Coming to ideas, the notion of small differences in initial states doesn't make sense because ideas aren't quantifiable like temperature or humidity or air pressure. It's nonsensical to say that one person was exposed to 1.002 of atheism and another person to 1.012 of atheism.

All in all, chaos theory doesn't seem applicable to mind and its environment.

A lot of that high school stuff is now very dated. When an organ is transplanted, the nerve supply can not be rejoined, but the organ nevertheless is able to function. So it can not be said that the brain is controlling it. The organ seems to know what to do and how. — Pop

Organ coordination is done not just through nerves. Hormones which trace their origins back to the brain are another control mechanism.

Entropy. Life isn't fair. I wonder though if the concept of entropy is a concept transferrable on to the human condition.

Honestly I'd consider a bet where if anyone who reads this or ever will who has actually met/known/or seen a conjoined twin in person wins/loses $100. For each. It's beyond rare. That's not really a standard for assumption. — Outlander

All I can say as of this moment is that it's more than just a hunch. If the fine structure of the brain - the exact number, location, synaptic connections, of nuerons - mattered to how our brain functions there should be pro-rata variations in minds, minds being equated to brain function in physicalism. In fact, generic brain abilities like walking, grasping, talking, thinking, etc. would be impossible if they depended on the brain's fine structure and not on its gross structure which is identical not only for conjoined twins but for everybody.

How is that different from siblings in strict, if not unrealistic (yet plausible) environments? — Outlander

No different I must admit but so what? I chose conjoined twins to make my case because they're the closest we can get to two brains being physically identical and having similar experiences which, according to the physicalism and nature-nurture theory, should've caused conjoined twins to have similar, if not identical, minds.

I'm confused here. There is no observable experience or phenomenon in human existence that doesn't involve.. the human brain. I mean. It's not some non-existent term I made up based on nothing. — Outlander

Read above.

It's not that bizarre really. Say a few people share a dorm room with the same computer ie. operating system. It's the same base when opened fresh out of the box. Yet, through time, each becomes customized based on the preferences of the individual. — Outlander

Ok but customizing a computer can't be explained in terms of hardware. The mind taking on different characters can't be explained by changes in the brain.

So the 'large structure' argument works for any pair of brains, not just for twins. It doesn't really cut it here, it's not specific to any twins. — Olivier5

That works in my favor. I chose conjoined twins for the reasons that

1) if two brains can be said to be physically identical then it doesn't get more identical than conjoined twins

and

2) I needed to control for variations in experience (nurture) like exposure to different ideas and physical environments

Snowball effect. — Outlander

There are two things to consider here:

1. The brains of conjoined twins are identical in gross structure in the sense both have cerebrums, cerebellums, amygdalas, corpus callosums, etc. As I explained in the OP, brain function isn't determined by fine structure like the positions of the neurons or the number of synapses. If it were there should be extreme variations in mental ability which hasn't been observed. Ergo, it must be that not only conjoined twins but all of us have physically identical brains insofar as function - thoughts - matters.

2. Conjoined twins share the same universe in terms of ideas and the physical environment.

Yet, conjoined twins have very different minds. different personalities.

Were it true that the brain experiences something like the snowball effect, there should be easily observable differences in the minds of different people. Au contraire, there are more similarities between minds of different people than there are dissimilarities. Explain that.

Nope. In the previous lines you argued they aren't, that they differ in their 'fine structure'. — Olivier5

I also explained that the differences are irrelevant to brain function.

Some twins want to differentiate themselves from their brother/sister. — Olivier5

Exactly my point. Physicalism can't explain this. Kindly read my reply to Outlander.

but given the ridiculous complexity of brains, that seems a safe bet. — Pfhorrest

I think not. The brain is, if you recall your high school biology, the organ that coordinates all the other organs - far removed from a chaotic system.

You are equivocating with the term 'function', using it here to mean what seems like a more generalized anatomical function [e.g. basal ganglia has x function, visual cortex has y function(s)], which is not directly relevant to talk about minds.

What's relevant to any physicalist notion of mind is the function of the microarchitecture, the numbers and strengths of synapses and how that impacts information processing. You are completely side-stepping this in your discussion which I am unsure why. — aporiap

If the brain's fine structure determines brain function, we should observe a proportionate variability in the way brains operate. This isn't true.

There's an infinite list of scenarios where one twin on one side has slightly different experiences than the other. — Outlander

Brains are chaotic physical systems — Pfhorrest

How do you know this?

experiences of the two brains are ever so slightly different — Pfhorrest

To both of you

Granted that there'll be differences, very tiny differences in my humble opinion, between the experiences of each conjoined twin but what's striking, if we must now discuss degrees and not type in re to the experiences of conjoined twins, is the, what seems to me physically inexplicable, relatively enormous dissimilarities in personalities of such twins.

Space. The vast majority of reality. Does not neatly fit in to either the "exists" or "not exists" category.

Explained this now about 100 times in a number of threads across the forum. — Hippyhead

Sorry, I don't follow. I've been trying to wrap my head around the idea of existence for as long as I can remember with nothing to show for it.

That you mentioned about how god could be nothing is pertinent to the problem I'm grappling with because god, majority opinion says, is immaterial and the sticking point here is that existence is defined in material terms.

We say that something exists if and only if it's detectable through our senses and their extensions, instruments but this is also the definition of the material.

In other words, existence = material for all intents and purposes. This is a serious setback for someone who wants to claim that god is both immaterial and that god exists for it's a contradictio in terminis. The same difficulty arises when we say god is nothing.

Perhaps we need to create subcategories for the notion of detectability like so:

1. Detectable by the senses and instruments = material existence

2. Detectable by means other than the senses and instruments = immaterial existence type 1

3. Undetectable by any means whatsoever = immaterial existence type 2

I don't know. What's your take on this?

Furthermore, your view on space is also relevant to my problem. Space, as every schoolboy knows, isn't material in that it has no mass, can't be perceived with our senses and so on but it's something we're very familiar with - from the emptiness of our favorite cup to the vacuum of outer space, we encounter space almost constantly in our lives.

Contrast the above [over]familiarity with space to our complete ignorance of or difficulty understanding what nothing is or means. If you ask me, it points to a difference, real or not I'm not sure, between space and nothing. What do you think?

I don't know. All you have to do is become immersed in nature for a few years and you cant miss the dispersed intentionality of the whole thing. I get why people think in terms of Gaia.

It occurs to me that misanthropy might be what I'm really wondering about.

Is it misanthropy that makes people go for the evil human vs innocent nature theme? Or is it a covert sadism? Maybe both — frank

To begin with, we shouldn't judge the contestants before the contest is over. Humans are only beginning to understand the complexity of nature and ergo, much of the mistakes we've been accused of commiting can be chalked up to ignorance. Misanthropy is justified only if we don't take measures to stall and reverse the damage done to nature in the coming few decades or century which seems unlikely as it's a do-or-die situation any way you look at it. To make the long story short, humans have just been informed of nature's plight- expect some time-lag before we take action and before these actions produce tangible results.

I read a science fiction story once that was from the point of view of a gaia-like organism. It was trippy. — frank

Fact imitating fiction? Possible, very possible.

It's either leave everything to the vagaries of fortune or have an intelligent organism, who knows the ins and outs of life and living, to manage life on Earth. What would be your choice?

dualistic "exists or not" — Hippyhead

Offer me a third option then.

You've made some very intriguing statements, especially about space. I believe the modern scientific understanding of space is not that it's nothing - it has properties and, according to relativity, it warps around extremely massive objects like stars and black holes.

That aside, I would like to draw your attention to the difference between nothing and space with an illustration. Take the life of your average person on the street. Let's call this person Smith. Say Smith is born in 1930 and dies in 2020 living a full life of 90 years. You can graph Smith's worldline - it'll begin 1900 and end 1990. The question is "where was Smith before 1930 and where will Smith be after 2020?". My personal take on Smith's whereabouts is 1) he doesn't exist, is nothing, before 1930 and after 2020, and 2) he wasn't in space-time pre-1930 and isn't in space-time post-2020. Basically nonexistence, nothingness, is something completey beyond space and time. So, even if it's true that we can't speak of space as existing, it doesn't mean nothing can be equated to space.

Coming to the matter of how our mind operates,

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. — Abraham Maslow

My rejoinder to Maslow would be,

If everything is a nail, might as well have a hammer — TheMadFool

You're saying we're part of Gaia's efforts to engineer herself? — frank

Thereabouts, yes.

I look at it differently. If intentionality could be ascribed to nature, it's pinned all its hopes on humans. Humans are endowed with an intelligence that's, as far as we know, unprecedented in the history of life on Earth. This makes us, among other things, capable of understanding what life is all about - we can find out the basic ingredients to keep the fire of life burning for as long as possible - and since we've discovered, for better of for worse, that we're just another cog in the wheel of nature and that the entire biosphere is a finely balanced system whose overall health depends on everything that's in it, from the lowly microbes that manage waste disposal to the giant blue whales that roam the vast oceans, it becomes obvious what course of action humans should pursue - nature needs to be handled with care. The fundamental realization is that insofar as life is concerned it's not us vs. them but that it's all us.

Given this fact, if there's a sixth mass extinction in progress, it's going to be different this time round because this one will, if all goes well, have a good ending. What am I talking about? Humans, given another couple of decades or maybe a century, will have developed the means to maintain the biosphere at optimal levels in terms of environmental parameters such as biodiversity, population, etc. In essence, nature has decided to suffer a sixth extinction at humanity's hands only because it goes toward ending the phenomenon of extinctions once and for all. We, humans, are the saviors of the planet although it may not look like that at the moment. Wait and watch...

To those interested

As @Coben pointed out for our benefit God, if he exists, didn't employ only the trial and error method in the creation of the universe; after all, there are the laws of nature - fixed patterns in matter-energy interactions - that stand testament to that fact. Perhaps given the laws of nature, the trial and error method is best for life.

Furthermore, from a scientific and mathematical perspective, simplicity, especially one that packs a powerful punch like in our universe, is a mark of genius. Has anyone done any research on whether there are any redundancies in the universe in terms of unnecessary laws, processes, etc. insofar as life is concerned? Basically, could the universe have begun simpler without affecting its existing, or precluding even more, complexity ? If that were not possible then it bespeaks prodigious brainpower. If, on the other hand, the birth of universes can be simplified further it means 1. simplicity wasn't achieved and/or 2. simplicity didn't figure among the priorities and both indicate a dull mind if nothing else.

I do think the Covid_19 situation could be a possible source of transformation. In fact, this is my biggest hope.

I think it could go either way, negatively or positively. We are at a critical juncture and I suppose that is why I raise questions.

I am struggling to grapple with my daily quest, trying to transform the negative into the positive. This same personal alchemical healing quest may be what is needed on a global level.

Perhaps the Covid_19 situation is the wake up call we all needed to question and transform our whole approach to life. — Jack Cummins

:ok: :up: