Comment by msiyer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by msiyer | Hacker News Reader

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The building blocks of this universe are "things" vibrating. That is all I know.

Consciousness is a very tricky problem. I often question what happens when a man loses his "mind". Is the being now just a machine with stored memory which responds to stimuli?

What happens when a person loses his memory? What role does consciousness play in this scenario?

How do we let split personality disorder and consciousness to play together?

Also, I look around and see the geometry of flowers and seeds. Geometry that emanates from the universe. Everything that looks chaotic at one level becomes extremely beautiful and organized at another.

Also, I see that everything is terribly interconnected. If we think deeply enough we can easily see that a stone lying outside and us are all the same as far as building blocks are concerned. The stone is not an unnecessary object, but our existence and the stone's existence are inextricable.

The universe, whatever is visible to me, is absolutely too grand and too well engineered to not have some sort of intelligence working behind it.

I do not know.

You could just tie it all back to physics.

Not much intelligent about gravity coalescing matter.

But that had the side effect of releasing atomic energy in the form of stars. The rubble attracted by these stars, orbited till it coalesced itself into planets.

Those planets are bombarded by atomic energy by stars. Chemical reactions happened to break down this energy. Life, aka chemical reactions that are able to persist, started happening as a side effect.

The more robust and more intelligent reactions were able to persist through fluctuations in environment. ie. ice ages, meteors, etc.

We are nothing more than a persistent, stubborn reaction. A fungus on a hot rock. Maybe someday we can send some spores to another hot rock, and continue our fungal infestation. Provided that we don't consume all the resources here before that happens and fizzle out. In any case, I'm sure there is a fungus, perhaps a more evolved one, somewhere else in the universe that will.

The brain is connected to the gut via the vagus nerve. It's possible that humans are just a vehicle for bacteria to more quickly and interact with their environment in a more substantial way in a similar way that human use cars as a vehicle. I feel like I am an individual with my own consciousness, but it's possible it is all one shared consciousness by a super network of bacteria

> humans are just a vehicle for bacteria

The meaning of life, explained (in ten words or less).

these ideas are beautifully demonstrated in the movie “Annihilation” https://youtu.be/89OP78l9oF0

> The universe, whatever is visible to me, is absolutely too grand and too well engineered to not have some sort of intelligence working behind it.

I think everyone can appreciate this viewpoint, but it's an emotional, visceral reaction to size- and timescales that are literally incomprehensible to the human mind. The complexities of nature engage one's sense of awe and strongly suggest the existence of an intelligent agent in some people, but this belief says nothing about whether that's actually true.

> to not have some sort of intelligence working behind it

People used to think that about, say, the origin of a lightning bolt. (Now we know for sure there is no "intelligence" behind it.)

If you do not know why do you assume it exists?

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