Apparently nobody here has read or heard about the latest report at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-warming-must-not-exceed- which gives us about twelve years to become vigorously active to reverse the response to the total disaster of warming which will destroy human civilization and much of life on the planet, There will be no trees to return to and fusion power is still a fantasy. Human governments are doing nothing near enough to counter the disaster and there is small likelihood that response will be effective in time. It seems humans are quite bright but not bright enough to survive. Perhaps. after a million years or so, evolution will give dinosaurs another chance.

That was not an Irishman, it was Voltaire

For Pascal's conclusion to have any value certain assumptions must be accepted. One must assume a God can be fooled by a human mind making an assertion with the Cod having no means of verification but the assertion itself. The God must be stupider than the person making the statement and that seems rather unlikely. The second concept is that there is life after death and that, to me as an atheist, seems more unlikely than the existence of a supreme being.

There is no implication in my description of the mechanics of evolution favoring the creation of any species but successful ones in regard to the environment, whatever that may be. No doubt humans are rather clever but it seems to me they have a ways to go before they grasp the essentials of social success.

The process of environmental selection and automatic elimination of creatures who cannot survive is an undeniable design process.When successful survivors are exposed to successive variations of environments further selection and elimination develops successful creatures in a wider range of environments. As this automatic procedure continues the combined operation of variations of preceding successes and elimination is an undeniable design process for creating highly adaptable successful living creatures. Evolution thereby is an undeniable design process.

Something designed is put together with intent to serve a purpose. Evolution is an automatic process with a purpose to survive and proliferate. If an artist uses somewhat random processes to create an object,that randomness is purposeful. Jackson Pollock paintings are not random,they just use different methods for applying pigment and if they were not pleasing, Pollock rejected them and tried again.That is not random.

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People who describe God do it in terms wherein its powers and intellect are unlimited, On that basis it is not possible to prove or disprove its existence. Investigations on reality can only be based on observation and possibilities that can be confirmed. So far these indications indicate that there is no necessity to posit the existence of a god.We have to settle for that.

The automatic processes of trial and error and building on successes typical of the dynamics of natural evolution where the only agendas are survival in the current ecology to reproduce and elimination out of inability to adapt and survive under natural pressures were modified by directed variation of goals under human influence of human breeders of animals and plants which accelerated evolution in desired directions. Animals such as dogs and cattle and various fowls changed far more rapidly in their features in selective breeding than the much slower processes of natural evolution permitted. It should not be viewed as unnatural since humans also are a product of nature but might be considered that evolution itself had evolved. Nevertheless, the tools of this process change remained rather primitive until modern genetic engineering gained basic understanding of the mechanics of reproduction which can radically modify fundamental forms that can be inherited.

This is a far more radical evolution of evolution and although huge understandings have been achieved, humanity is just at the beginning of gaining the tools for these efforts. The human mind which has achieved ways of modeling successes and failures in this enterprise before moving on to actually creating new species now has in its power to transfer innovative characteristics of totally unrelated living creatures and the vast library of living beings from which these accomplishments can be utilized indicates that immense possibilities have been opened. Humanity itself is likely to change to adapt itself to completely different environments in space and on other possible planets so that the future may hold humans that are not recognizable as human except from their ancestry and the world will become much stranger than we now know.

As someone trained and professionally operative as a designer I am aware what the word means. It means to produce something that functions properly in an environment. Life probably started as a random accumulation of chemical/physical substances waving up and down on the surface of the sea or a large puddle. It needed to utilize energy to multiply and sustain. As time passed it grew in slightly different ways as it encountered slightly different environments and the more efficient of those ways was more successful so there was more of it to fool around in adjacent environment. It no doubt tried many different ways to grow and some of them were total failures and they died.That growing and trying and dying is what any design process is all about. It didn't need a designer, it was just an automatic process and there were lots of failures and enough successes to keep the process going. That's the essence of design and it doesn't need cups of hot coffee to keep it going.

One of the puzzles about the nature of reality as presented by an Einsteinian view of this universe of three space dimensions and one of time was the lack of nailing down the most important aspect of existence which we all experience which is the sense of the present time where everything seems to happen. In general, most people describe this as a flow of time where we each are fixed in temporal dimension and time flows past. Einstein indicated that our sense should be that we move forward in a fixed dimension of time. I have questioned scientific sources as to the sense of the present time and how we feel we move towards the future and the uniform response I have gotten is that it is an illusion, that the sense of existing in the present time is an illusion. Since the present is the most real thing I know, this explanation is most unsatisfactory. But this discussion is primarily about awareness and if nothing else, awareness is primarily concerned with present time.

In my previous comments I have noted that the self is a mechanism of the brain which exists within the artificial construction that the brain has assembled out of inputs from the sense apparatus doctored to be simplified to meet the needs of survival. The brain continuously updates this construction to match the new material from the sense apparatus but it is this instrument of the self which seems to generate the illusive present time which has puzzled me. Awareness, then, is the vital illusion of present time.

Although I have indicated in a general sense how I structure my understanding of my consciousness and how it relates to what I call external reality and the artificial simplified internal reality manufactured by the central nervous system to deal with the pressures and dangers of surviving in the real world, it’s important to comprehend the fundamental nature of the total creature I call myself.

The entirety is quite complex. My inherited DNA deals with living cells and as I developed from a single cell the various varieties of different kinds of cells were produced to manufacture a cooperative community that could deal with basic necessities to process food for structure and nourishment and produce the nervous system to relate to outside demands on survival. The brain is intimately connected to all parts of the body and has automatic functional relationships with everything. It has established patterns out of its genetic inheritance which generally is below the level of consciousness although signals, such as hunger, thirst, pain etc. do prompt the consciousness to react. Beyond this the body welcomes very large numbers of non-human cells which have been domesticated to aid in basic functions known as the microbiome which also can influence the emotional and other basic reactions of the central nervous system. Although all parts contribute their necessary functions to the whole, people in general accept the false premise that the consciousness is the central controlling focus of the totality whereas it is just one small aspect of brain function which is designed to operate within the immensely simple model of the outer world . This does not denigrate its importance, which is great, but places it properly in its relationship to the whole.

Since the advent of the computer which deals with many of the same problems as the living brain, the similarity has led to speculations as to how similar the digital machine is to a thinking brain. Experts in the field have even proposed that a human mind might eventually be transposed into a computer so that it could continue to live within the machine far beyond the life of a normal human. As fascinating as this concept might be it seems to me that it neglects very basic differences between a computer as it is now constructed and a living animal such as ourselves.

I am quite old and my wife died some time ago and almost all of my friends and relatives also have ceased to exist. But all of these people still exist in my memories. And these memories are quite different from the kind of data storage one places in a computer. As an artist and a designer I deal, to a large degree, in various kinds of patterns. And it seems to me that the brain in general seems devoted to pattern recognition, construction, and association. But these patterns are not just visual, they contain input from all the body sense mechanisms plus associations from emotions and past experience. And beyond that there are patterns dealing with time and procedures. The sense patterns are abstracts of reality in color, shape, motion, etc. and the can associate across senses such associating numbers with colors, sounds and other ways to form very complex memories.

The fundamental difference between computer data and living memories is that, in life, each pattern and pattern template is a living cell function and possesses a self- coherence which remains active as a living thing continuously below the level of consciousness. This living data therefore is more like a zoo than a library. In effect, my wife still is quite alive within my brain structure and when I dream of her all the characteristics that I have acquired of her when she was alive reacts with me in my dreams, which is radically different from the way computer data is obtained and stored. And not just people, but all brain data is dynamic and makes associations and changes below my level of consciousness. Thus, a brain is quite different from a computer as they are now constructed. I have no idea as to whether data can be made to come alive in this manner within computer technology. It probably would entail all data to contain active algorithms in rather special ways that probably would make the computer unpredictable in the same way that people are unpredictable and most likely would be an unsatisfactory tool.

I hesitate to poke my nose into this argument but each of us has personal outlooks that may disagree with what billions of others my believe. Sites devoted to interesting individual ways of discerning reality are devoted to many odd ways to view the universe. It is no insult to disagree with common opinions and should not raise problems. Obviously any opinions should be questioned insofar as their validity is concerned but I doubt insult is useful.

Just to give you some idea about my work in the areas I mentioned here is a link to my blog.
https://jansandhere.wordpress.com/

I'm not sure by what you mean as mindless. I see myself as a kind of surface effect of the huge ocean of intellect of the unconsciousness that feeds words to me as I need them to speak and processes to me as I need to drive a car or fly a plane or tie my shoes. It's a continuous resource of ideas and memories and processes that my conscious mind needs to operate. And it thinks on its own about solving problems. When I write poetry I find it manufacturing lines automatically as I write. I sometimes create graphics out of colors spreading on wet paper not by creating images but by recognizing patterns automatically that merely is pulled from memory templates. In my dreams I sometimes visit galleries of paintings I have never done and haven't even the skills to perform. This brain thing that underlies everything I do is far cleverer than the me that I know with immensely more resources than I have.

I just entered this site about half an hour ago and am delighted with the articulate level of the contributions. I have been aware a rather long time and early on in my lifelong confusion has prompted me, even as a young child,to doubt the sustained peculiarity of reality. A few years ago, after I had graduated as an industrial designer from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NYC back in 1959. I got involved with a firm producing an exhibition on brain function and I worked with a neurologist who helped me dissect a couple of human brains to understand the architecture of different brain functions. As an artist and a designer I claim no profound expertise in the matter and, in those early days, brain function was still quite primitive compared to today. Nevertheless, the sense that nerve structure required precise organization physically to produce a thinking aware mind divested me of any illusion that there was any kind of dynamics other than the complex physical matrix of nerves involved.

Even as a child, my dreams were brilliantly colored and, as today, I had several every night. But, beyond this, even when awake,I could close my eyes and watch a kind of inner video that progressed in various unexpected ways that were entertaining. I have been surprised to discover that other people do not experience this. After a good many years of wondering about this and reading about how various thinkers made sense of reality I have come to a general guess about what is going on in my head.

The brain itself has no direct contact with reality. Its only contact is with its several basic sensory systems and these systems send nerve pulses identified by the brain with their origins to differentiate them.The nervous system in humans and in other animals was developed with the basic agenda of life to survive and reproduce so our reality is actually an inner construction of the brain to model the necessary abstracted version of what goes on out there so that we can survive and have kids. There is a great deal going on outside that is of no use to us in the basic agenda so our genetic design and our experience tosses away the huge bulk of stuff that is irrelevant and what we get at end is a matrix of useful abstracts that we call reality. There is a huge dynamic library in our brain that saves all this input to be available on needed demand. But the self, the me that we each believe to be who we are,is an instrument that the brain places in its limited internal construction of the outside world and that is what each of us identifies as reality. We don't see, hear, smell or feel with our nerve inputs.We do all these things with the brain. It puzzled me for years as to how a hypnotized person could actually "see" what thee hypnotist suggests.That's because none of us sees with our eyes. We see what the brain constructs from its impulses.

And the inner brain is continuously constructing all sorts of possible realities we never experience when awake because what we experience is the highest probabilities it can infer from its sense impulses which it continually upgrades. When we sleep with our eyes closed the brain gadget we call ourselves experiences the fantasy reality constructions that the brain is manufacturing all the time as dreams.

At least,that's what I think is going on.