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What if the only place where intelligent life was ever possible in the universe is being actively made impossible to live in by intelligent beings, which means

by rpigab 2y ago

What if the only place where intelligent life was ever possible in the universe is being actively made impossible to live in by intelligent beings, which means after they're gone extinct, there'll be no intelligent beings to appreciate its beauty?

layer8 2y ago
That seems a quite likely outcome to me. On the positive side, once it happens, there will be no one who would mourn it.
skilled 2y ago
Buddhism is deeply rooted in reincarnation and the progression of a common person to an enlightened being through different ranks over the span of multiple lifetimes. I am pretty sure there is a dimension of life that we have yet to discover and learn about. And for the time being Buddhism is the only “religion” that openly discusses this progression. Hinduism has the same but in my experience it’s a lot more reserved. Bali is a great example of this (which has a strong Hinduism foundation), of how you can create “paradise on Earth” and yet 99.99% of tourist’s don’t ever encounter the root of that paradise. Humans will learn the full extent of life long before they go extinct.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  I think any view of life consistent with its emergence by evolution isn't consistent with reincarnation, or certainly doesn't support it. But given the universe in total may be unimaginably larger than our observable universe, and the total universe may well be an insignificant feature of an unimaginably larger reality, its quite possible that versions of us appear in a fractal-like way, over and over across reality. Also, given the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is the most basic (Occam's razor) interpretation of the equations, we are constantly spinning off a foam of combinatory alternatives of ourselves and everything around us, because the particles that make us up are doing that. So we live many lives, and even when we die in one perceived timeline, other versions of ourselves continue their journey. Both of those are scientifically plausible, especially the second - which many scientists already believe to be true. Although they sensibly tend to focus on interpretation at the particle level, avoiding the hype and wishful mysticism that would tend to crop up around its implications for us as individuals. Too many imaginative people and popularizers have a tendency to jump from actual equations/constraints they don't understand, to non-scientific psychologically motivated "implications" and ideologies. Quantum mechanics has been abused enough that way.
  - skilled 2y ago
    The easiest way to test the theory is to go into the unknown and find out for yourself. You can walk into life situations with a predisposition (which is a useful skill to have) and then see the feedback that you get in return. By and large, to really have success with this is to learn meditation (not master it by any means), because even basic meditation will naturally provide insight that is outside of the scope of the mental framework you are accustomed to as a mind. Even in science, there is a lot of focus on what happens to the person on a physical and a mental level, but little on what happens outside of it, which can only be learned by being quiet/still. I like your reply and it is balanced, and I am not sure that I could reply to it in any other way than I did now. My personal experiences transcend a lot of such discussion, even what I am saying myself, but those are the elements of being human, being bound by something. I think manipulation of elements (for example) will be considered as a very primitive thing in the grand scheme of evolution!
    - Nevermark 2y ago
      I am not exactly sure what you are saying! :) My response is staying with science, which just means staying with evidence and reasoning that avoids our unbounded ability to fool ourselves. I.e. repeatable experiments by others, tested model predictions, mathematical and statistical checks, etc. That is all science and math are. An accumulation of tools and systems that improve the reliability of our thinking. They increasingly help us mitigate our exceptional talent for fooling ourselves. If we find another way to "know", it will get included into science too. I am a big believer that our personal experience and relationship with life is improved by meditation, staring by learning to quiet our minds and focus/refocus on one simple thing at a time (breathing for instance, or nothing). Then use our ability to focus to mindfully listen to our bodies, then our feelings, then our beliefs, our values, our situations, finally what it all means. But our minds/brains don't internally track providence of information. What is real and beyond us, vs. what we imagine or want. It is all mixed up in our heads, thus the ease with which we trick ourselfs, and others. I am a big believer in imagination, to the sky and beyond anything we see. But the very unboundedness of imagination is why just because we can imagine something, and it seems right, fulfills some deep balance, and seems vivid, desirable, and makes clear sense that must be true, ... that doesn't actually make it true, real, or coherent, not even a little bit. > I think manipulation of elements (for example) will be considered as a very primitive thing in the grand scheme of evolution! Evolution created multicellular creatures, nervous systems, and brains, which in turn have created a species/society that is actively searching for knowledge and putting it to work for survival at higher orders of organization. I.e. science, economics, politics, technology, etc. Limited resources (at any given time) continue to drive us to solve new problems and learn more, to continue surviving even as we complicate and expand the environment we survive in. So in that sense, life is already moving past biological chemistry into other substrates, and we are already learning to harness the arrangement of atoms to go further. And eventually, perhaps, harness the fine structure of space-time, and beyond.
- nonethewiser 2y ago
  How does this comment relate to the comment it's replying to?

by rpigab 2y ago

layer8 2y ago

That seems a quite likely outcome to me. On the positive side, once it happens, there will be no one who would mourn it.

skilled 2y ago

Buddhism is deeply rooted in reincarnation and the progression of a common person to an enlightened being through different ranks over the span of multiple lifetimes. I am pretty sure there is a dimension of life that we have yet to discover and learn about. And for the time being Buddhism is the only “religion” that openly discusses this progression. Hinduism has the same but in my experience it’s a lot more reserved. Bali is a great example of this (which has a strong Hinduism foundation), of how you can create “paradise on Earth” and yet 99.99% of tourist’s don’t ever encounter the root of that paradise. Humans will learn the full extent of life long before they go extinct.

Nevermark 2y ago
I think any view of life consistent with its emergence by evolution isn't consistent with reincarnation, or certainly doesn't support it. But given the universe in total may be unimaginably larger than our observable universe, and the total universe may well be an insignificant feature of an unimaginably larger reality, its quite possible that versions of us appear in a fractal-like way, over and over across reality. Also, given the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is the most basic (Occam's razor) interpretation of the equations, we are constantly spinning off a foam of combinatory alternatives of ourselves and everything around us, because the particles that make us up are doing that. So we live many lives, and even when we die in one perceived timeline, other versions of ourselves continue their journey. Both of those are scientifically plausible, especially the second - which many scientists already believe to be true. Although they sensibly tend to focus on interpretation at the particle level, avoiding the hype and wishful mysticism that would tend to crop up around its implications for us as individuals. Too many imaginative people and popularizers have a tendency to jump from actual equations/constraints they don't understand, to non-scientific psychologically motivated "implications" and ideologies. Quantum mechanics has been abused enough that way.
- skilled 2y ago
  The easiest way to test the theory is to go into the unknown and find out for yourself. You can walk into life situations with a predisposition (which is a useful skill to have) and then see the feedback that you get in return. By and large, to really have success with this is to learn meditation (not master it by any means), because even basic meditation will naturally provide insight that is outside of the scope of the mental framework you are accustomed to as a mind. Even in science, there is a lot of focus on what happens to the person on a physical and a mental level, but little on what happens outside of it, which can only be learned by being quiet/still. I like your reply and it is balanced, and I am not sure that I could reply to it in any other way than I did now. My personal experiences transcend a lot of such discussion, even what I am saying myself, but those are the elements of being human, being bound by something. I think manipulation of elements (for example) will be considered as a very primitive thing in the grand scheme of evolution!
  - Nevermark 2y ago
    I am not exactly sure what you are saying! :) My response is staying with science, which just means staying with evidence and reasoning that avoids our unbounded ability to fool ourselves. I.e. repeatable experiments by others, tested model predictions, mathematical and statistical checks, etc. That is all science and math are. An accumulation of tools and systems that improve the reliability of our thinking. They increasingly help us mitigate our exceptional talent for fooling ourselves. If we find another way to "know", it will get included into science too. I am a big believer that our personal experience and relationship with life is improved by meditation, staring by learning to quiet our minds and focus/refocus on one simple thing at a time (breathing for instance, or nothing). Then use our ability to focus to mindfully listen to our bodies, then our feelings, then our beliefs, our values, our situations, finally what it all means. But our minds/brains don't internally track providence of information. What is real and beyond us, vs. what we imagine or want. It is all mixed up in our heads, thus the ease with which we trick ourselfs, and others. I am a big believer in imagination, to the sky and beyond anything we see. But the very unboundedness of imagination is why just because we can imagine something, and it seems right, fulfills some deep balance, and seems vivid, desirable, and makes clear sense that must be true, ... that doesn't actually make it true, real, or coherent, not even a little bit. > I think manipulation of elements (for example) will be considered as a very primitive thing in the grand scheme of evolution! Evolution created multicellular creatures, nervous systems, and brains, which in turn have created a species/society that is actively searching for knowledge and putting it to work for survival at higher orders of organization. I.e. science, economics, politics, technology, etc. Limited resources (at any given time) continue to drive us to solve new problems and learn more, to continue surviving even as we complicate and expand the environment we survive in. So in that sense, life is already moving past biological chemistry into other substrates, and we are already learning to harness the arrangement of atoms to go further. And eventually, perhaps, harness the fine structure of space-time, and beyond.
nonethewiser 2y ago
How does this comment relate to the comment it's replying to?