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Early Man in Philippines 700000 Years Ago

Discussion in 'News from The Philippines' started by Sanders, May 9, 2018.

  1. Drunken Max
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    Drunken Max Well-Known Member Trusted Member

    thats like religion isn't it? You believe in something you have no evidence to support. The idea of a soul is not a religious one to me, its that idea that consciousness is not based on only physics and chemistry. I've no idea and psychologists would say we are nothing more than stored memories and an ability to use them. One day we will all find out. If there is a god I am in deep ****.
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  2. Sanders
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    Sanders Banned

    I often think of the spinning plate analogy. Somebody set them all (the planets) up in the first place, but I know Oss has a slightly different perspective on it all. :D

    This is a bit tongue in cheek but reflects to some degree, my thinking:




    But then there is a flip side. As if someone did set it all up in the first place in just a few seconds, why did he or she take so long to get to the stage we are at now.

    If we take the lowly trilobite from 500 million years ago during the evolutionary big bang, a prolific but long extinct sea dwelling creature(s) that is clearly to be seen in the fossil record, that had highly developed and sophisticated eyes not unlike insects and crustacea of today. Not just light sensing devices but eyes that could see its prey. These creatures were the first, that we can see, to have developed eyes as we know them today. Why has it taken so long, except to say that it has to be a part of an evolutionary sequence rather than having been created by a Creator. Or did the Creator think well, I have had enough of Trilobites, we will park them to one side and plan on generating the dinosaurs next, themselves to go on the scrap heap some years later! The whole sequence of creation smacks of indecisiveness. :) “Natural selection” provides a worthy explanation.
    Last edited: May 16, 2018
  3. oss
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    oss Somewhere Staff Member

    Not really, I think we have a great deal of evidence that self-awareness is highly dependent on physics and chemistry, it is remarkably easy to alter consciousness through chemistry for instance.

    I have de facto evidence of at least one conscious mind my own, from all the evidence around me it is very clear to me that a mind requires a very complex network in order for self awareness to arise, therefore my statement that I believe that a particle based universe is required to support a self aware mind is pretty much based on evidence, I don't see that as a faith based statement just as I would not expect to require faith to believe that when an apple separates from a tree that it will always fall towards the centre of the earth.

    Now that is a faith based statement, if there is no separate magical soul unbound by physical rules then you won't find out :)

    That assumes a creator that cares about specific outcomes in its creation, and that is one of my problems with religion it ignores the whole scale of the creation that we are a part of, that is the point of my discussion about atoms and events/interactions, the scale is so huge that applying human values to the creator of such a thing as a universe makes no sense.

    As I mentioned I know that there is at least one conscious self aware mind in the universe as I appear to be able to internally confirm my own existence, I also know that it took the entire universe and all of its history to create me for this period of time that the materials I am made of retain self awareness.

    I infer from that that it took the entire universe and all of its history to create you and everyone and everything else.

    In terms of what consciousness is, I said consciousness was hard to explain I didn't say it could not be explained, there are theories with good grounding that can explain consciousness in terms of information processing, many now believe that information is even more fundamental than energy or matter, this is a very complex area and I didn't really want to get into discussing it.

    To close when people talk about the soul and where it might exist I get a picture in my mind of cartoon characters where when you cut them open there are no working parts inside, Tom and Jerry for instance no internal operating bits just magic.

    I think that to be conscious you need a complex operating system and I call that the Universe.

    To talk further about this would involve the introduction of the Multiverse as a punctuated form of the infinite, when you get to that level everything repeats and anything that can happen under any set of physical rules can and will happen in one Universe or the other.

    There are active falsifiable testable theories that are currently being used to look for evidence of other Universes and some signs in the observations that we may well be able to show that there are other Universes, I cannot believe my luck that I am alive at this time when these sort of questions are being asked and answered.
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  4. oss
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    oss Somewhere Staff Member

    It was my friend that was not too keen on Cox, I quite like him although I've not watched anything recently apart from some of the quiz and panel shows he's been on.
  5. Anon04576
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    Anon04576 Well-Known Member

  6. Sanders
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    Sanders Banned

    It certainly seems that way.
  7. Drunken Max
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    Drunken Max Well-Known Member Trusted Member

    Is it not possible to delete a post?
  8. Sanders
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    Sanders Banned

    I thought you said you didn’t like his voice. :)

    “Forces of Nature” is pretty good. But you maybe have a lot of that stuff covered..

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07k8lpv

    And “Wonders of the Universe”

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zdhtg
  9. oss
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    oss Somewhere Staff Member

    Yeah that was my pal that found his voice really irritating :D I'm fine with him :)
  10. Sanders
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    Sanders Banned

    He has a bit of a smarmy smirk about him. But I dont let that bother me. :D
  11. Anon04576
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    Anon04576 Well-Known Member

    You should be able to but they are time limited I think
  12. oss
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    oss Somewhere Staff Member

    It's more accurate to say most of the particles, the atoms are constantly swapping electrons and light is constantly interacting with the electrons surrounding every atom moving some electrons to higher energy and some to lower.

    Neutrons for example have limited lifetimes outside of a nucleus, they have a half life of about 10.3 minutes however protons have a seriously long lifespan with a half life of 10^23 years.

    The thing is that one neutron is exactly the same as the next neutron just as all electrons identical, particles are particles everything else emerges from the way they are organised in space and time.

    Funnily Richard Feynman once reported a phone call he had from John Wheeler where Wheeler said that he understood why all electrons had the same mass and charge, the reason was that there was only one electron in the entire Universe and it kept moving backwards and forwards in time so that its world line intersected every point in space time where we could detect an electron :D

    I was tickled by that notion :D
  13. Anon04576
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    Anon04576 Well-Known Member

    Exactly what I was thinking :D but they struggled to fit it in a tweet :D
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  14. oss
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    oss Somewhere Staff Member

    It might be that aspect that riled my pal Norrie or it might have been the Yorkshire accent :D

    From memory I think Norrie has actually met him.
  15. Sanders
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    Sanders Banned

    There seems to be new bits of the jigsaw beng added all the time. Stuff that I covered 40 years ago is being added to or further clarified, with a fair degree of rapidity. It is a good “era” to live in, in that sense.
    Last edited: May 16, 2018
  16. Sanders
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    Sanders Banned

    That’s it. A lot of this stuff cannot be covered in a one liner in a forum post.
  17. aposhark
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    aposhark Well-Known Member Lifetime Member

    I saw a documentary about string theory and the possibility of multiverses, Jim and it was fascinating.
    I am hoping that in the remaining years of my life there will be a breakthrough and news that there are indeed parallel universes in membranes that can sometimes touch each other. Perhaps even theories that are as equally "out there".
    I am not trained in suchlike as you are Jim, but sometimes my interest is piqued and my curiosity bubbles up again from being mostly dormant in the busy world we live in with all the responsibilities that we have to carry out.
    I feel tremendously excited when I show my children something such as the video of the Falcon heavy launch recently. It is purely because I feel the answers to the questions we all have now and will always have, will come from out there.

    I doff my cap at all the people working in space exploration and am sometimes envious that I was not able to be in such amazing fields.
    My lot has mostly been exploring this world we live in and that was my dream right from the start.
    People may eventually see an Earth-rise from further away than the moon and I can't imagine how wonderful that would be.

    The new "Lost in Space" TV series was good to watch because it was set in places we can only imagine.

    I wonder if the clergy in the Philippines ponder such things as multiverses outside of their chosen discipline.

    I doubt it.
    Last edited: May 15, 2018
  18. Sanders
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    Sanders Banned

    I wonder what their response would be to a recalibrated version of the bible i.e. a re-jig of the timeline. :D

    I expect that one day somebody will construct one and publish it.

    I sat with my 5 year old when Falcon Heavy was being launched. We did the countdown together. At school they had been looking at “Space” as a theme that term, and learning to count both forwards and backwards. So it satisfied two areas in one and was a bit of fun too.

    Getting back to the Early Man theme. In June we will visit the primate zoo (rescue centre) in Dorset where they have a mixed range of monkeys. She will be able to see first hand both the similarities and differences between us humans and the zoo inmates. Should also be fun.
    Last edited: May 16, 2018
  19. Sanders
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    Sanders Banned

    @oss We drifted a fair way from Early Man on the one hand and then on to the Multiverse. :D. And then the thread fizzled out.

    I like all this stuff about the origin of the universe and the solar system as it provides the skeleton or framework for the “fleshy bits” that follow. It all neatly allows everything else to fall into place. And both you and Brian Cox explain it so well. I like to focus on the next 4.6 billion years including the developement of early man along the way. And in particular the last 500 million years.

    Since you drew my attention to the detail of some of the other planets in our solar system I watch with interest for what we have yet to discover, going forward and Mars quakes is such an example - I should be around to learn of the outcome of the findings.
  20. oss
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    oss Somewhere Staff Member

    Aye, unfortunately creationism has an inbuilt ability to derail threads :)

    I hope I am around long enough to see some more results from Mars, I really hope we do make an effort to put people there, really hope that Musk's companies succeed long term as he actually doing the things that I could only dream about.

    I am also interested in the last 4.6 billion years but also fascinated as to where the materials came from just before coming together to form these lumps of rock we call home (I think of the solar system as home) particularly elements like gold.

    Basically everything with an atomic number above Iron (26) comes from the collision of two neutron stars and all these elements (66 of them) are created in the blink of an eye when the neutron stars form a black hole in the process ejecting about one percent of the mass of a whole sun sized star as these heavy elements.

    Then you have the question of how we actually get gold and heavier elements at the surface of a planet when they are so heavy that they should have sank beyond our reach during the formation of the planet.

    The source of these elements was only figured out recently it had been a long standing problem but observations of neutron star mergers have shown that this kind of event produces these elements in the right sort of proportions to explain where they come from.

    The discovery of a hominid species in Luzon so long ago is very interesting and of course the Philippines is also a home to Tarsiers a species we are also related to.

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