If you believe in God, refute this! - Page 83

Originally posted by: _Angie_

Are we going into definition of life and a chicken first or egg kind of discussion?

Dang !

What came first ..The chicken or the egg ...and WHY? ..Why did the SUN rise many hours before the dawn ..the time when I first read your posts? 😆 ..These are same sort of puzzles ..So baffling ..Yet so indulging 😛

On a serious note again: True that ..That kinda argument would lead us nowhere .So we better move on with something more palatable ...And many here I believe are capable of doing so 😛

Vintu 😛

Originally posted by: return_to_hades

When a person dies does data stored in the brain like memories, self identity etc get wiped out. Does death mean that our hard disk gets fried beyond repair.

Or does the data still remain. And if it does, what if we electrically hook up a brain? The brain communicates by electric impulses right. Could we potentially hook it up like a computer and access its data?

And suppose we find a way to do that. Can we live forever through our brains. Makes me wonder, if we transplant brains into a computer, into another human being, into a robot - is it still us or will it take a new life and identity.

If it is just us - can we be immortal? How essential is life.Does death become meaningless if our brain and identity can live forever.

If it is not us - then where is the essence of us?

All great questions so let's see if we could do justice to them with whatever we know. I guess it's the profound that you are looking for here and not the superficial but let's get the latter off of our plates first.

The brain cells need oxygen and nutrients to stay alive and once the heart stops pumping, the cells are damaged beyond repair. My guess is, whatever exists after this point is in a "corrupted" state. If this were electronics, there are any number of techniques to recover damaged, corrupted data, depending upon whether the type of damage is hardware (physical) or software (logical) related. For instance, if there are any readable bits, we could do disk imaging and save the data to another medium. I suppose neuroimaging such as fMRI is the parallel here that could be done on the brain. This stuff is cutting-edge and one day we would have made such advances that it might be possible to read minds in their entirety. So, on paper everything you said is possible and is already happening.

If the "contents" of the brain were transferred, would it still be us in the new medium? Tough question. Delves into the "Who Am I" realm.

We can keep copying/transferring information but at any given point, there should be a decoder to decode whatever was encoded. Even in the case of a DNA, to read and process instructions, the creation of RNA is necessary. If everyone's dead, all there would be is raw data. As good as any other electronic media.

The essence of us is a question for the sages. Wrong crowd, wrong forum :)

Originally posted by: K.Universe.

If the "contents" of the brain were transferred, would it still be us in the new medium? Tough question. Delves into the "Who Am I" realm.

It is a tough question, and it totally confounds me. I honestly don't even know where to begin. And I don't think science can ever answer the question. But I think the answer to "Who Am I" is a fundamental part of truth.

Originally posted by: K.Universe.

The essence of us is a question for the sages. Wrong crowd, wrong forum :)

Perhaps essence is to sage like, but the question is more towards what makes a human a human or even, a dog a dog or a shark a shark. We like to believe that we are our beliefs, memories, identities etc. But the thought of all that in a machine or another body is unappealing. Almost like there is something more to us than who we are.

This is fiction and out of your realm. But Sheldon Cooper never would want to use Star Trek's Transporter for teleportation because it doesn't transport you. It destroys you in one place and rebuilds you in another. And once you are destroyed, you are not you anymore but a replica of you. At least it makes me ponder.

Originally posted by: BirdieNumNum

from what i read ages ago, I think Einstein himself could not fathom how his grand theory could allow something as ridiculous as time travel. But he went along with folks like Godel who claimed that spacetime of GR allowed time travel through CTL. He was damned if he agreed and he was damned if he did not. If he did not agree, he would have undermined the geometrical interpretation of gravity that his own theory was built on, with possible loss of credibility.

i think GR is great math but where people have gone astray is in giving it a physical interpretation. We can now keep debating this, but the fact remains- for something to travel in spacetime, it has to also be able to travel in the time dimension and that's a self-referential dimensionless quantity. Ability to view things like "starbucks" and the napoleonic wars is great, but it doesn't lead to time travel. There's no physical reality that corresponds to "spacetime" which would imply a time dimension. It is just math which unfortunately a lot of great minds have taken literally as having a physical counterpart leading them to ridiculous science-fiction type conclusions.

Yes, GR is a theoretical construct. How testable is it depends on what kind of technological breakthroughs we have made. Sadly, we didn't as of today. That doesn't invalidate the theory but I know that's precisely your point. That, people should consider valid math models instead of dismissing them because they lack "testability". I concur. But again, the math should be there at the least. Otherwise, there is no difference between a valid hypothesis and pure speculation, is there?

Originally posted by: BirdieNumNum

sad, na? 😆

with the kind of science we now accept as gospel, we should be able to go back to the past, get to re-live our lives all over again, avoid mistakes we know we had made, and make a fortune because we'd know what would come later (take stock prices for example). And we could hit the reset button just before we know we were going to die, making sure we never had to experience the misfortune of first having to die before getting to heaven. Awesome. But i wonder why no one asks for "testable hypothesis" when it comes to this kind of "science".😆

Alright, stop pouting now!

Originally posted by: return_to_hades

This is fiction and out of your realm. But Sheldon Cooper never would want to use Star Trek's Transporter for teleportation because it doesn't transport you. It destroys you in one place and rebuilds you in another. And once you are destroyed, you are not you anymore but a replica of you. At least it makes me ponder.

😆

Well, I watch The Big Bang Theory so this stuff is not completely out of my realm even though I was never into Star Trek or Star Wars (more a Matrix kind of guy)

Teleportation is not that far fetched (even though Fire Fox seems to think so for some strange reason, because it is trying to run the spell checker on it :) Quantum teleportation was indeed achieved for photons.

If a person is completely destroyed and completely reconstructed without anyone's knowledge other than that of the teleporting team, then what?

Originally posted by: K.Universe.

Yes, GR is a theoretical construct. How testable is it depends on what kind of technological breakthroughs we have made. Sadly, we didn't as of today. That doesn't invalidate the theory but I know that's precisely your point. That, people should consider valid math models instead of dismissing them because they lack "testability". I concur. But again, the math should be there at the least. Otherwise, there is no difference between a valid hypothesis and pure speculation, is there?

Originally posted by: Vintage.Wine

To summarize everything ..I was trying to ask what happens to the Sub atomic particles of the body (which have a huge Half Life) ..after death ..Because such particles must remain constant in number even after the death and they obviously constitute to a great part of the body

The fundamental particles can't be broken down further, which is why they are fundamental, so all of them could be accounted for, depending upon what's being done to the body after death. Some energy is transferred to other systems, some energy is lost in the form of heat but the total energy is conserved.

But again it all depends on what's done to the body. if you drop a nuke on the poor schmuck, then the fundamental particles "decay" in the following sense:

Originally posted by: Vintage.Wine

🤣

Just playing around with my signature ! 😛

Edited by Aya. - 11 years ago

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Originally posted by: BirdieNumNum

great, at least i got that acknowledgement . As for "how testable it is", even before you start talking technological breakthroughs, you have to first define what solution of GR you are trying to test..
To repeat, GR is math and we still dont know what the physical basis for gravity is. Einstein thought his GR had a geometrical interpretation, but that would require one to believe that we have physical counterparts such as spacetime and curved spaces.Do you believe that? Simple question, try answering it.

I am not sure how to interpret the "physical counterparts" phrase in your sentence. Physical as in something that has inertial mass / gravitational mass? Please clarify.

What do I believe is not as important as what's been proven. What's been proven, among other things concerning GR, is the geodetic effect where space-time is warped because of the presence of massive bodies and frame dragging wherein space-time is pulled around by a spinning mass. I don't see a reason for disbelief here. I am not a physicist by profession. I will take their word for it.

As for other predictions of GR which have come true, we have deflection of light by gravity, gravitational redshift, precession of mercury's orbit, gravitational time dilation, etc.

http://casswww.ucsd.edu/archive/public/tutorial/GR.html

I can't limit my knowledge to my perceptions. I have to trust what's been proven and go with it. If they are spending billions of dollars sending space probes and building telescopes to find out the answers and we don't have the resources (mental/financial) to independently verify their findings, what other choice do we have?

Originally posted by: BirdieNumNum

But even that is not my entire point..I am fine with using math. But one cant call it physics when it doesn't coincide with physical reality. GR field equations specifically have a variety of possible solutions with different interpretations. Some of these would allow for time travel. Fine as long as we treat it as math. Wrong if we start believing in retrocausality which would arise from time travel as a possible solution. Time travel as I've been arguing is not only nonsensical in nature, it's also nonsense if our starting premise is we have spacetime.Nothing can move in spacetime- try the math, you'll see it.

Birdie, what do you mean by "nothing can move in space-time"?!

QUOTE=BirdieNumNum]see, all this business about time warps and spacetimes etc is (one of possible) math (solutions), not physics. It's math, not something we expect to find in nature. It's math, not anything we expect to find in our universe. To run down other hypothesis some of us have been making based on this sketchy math is being intellectually dismissive. Those so-called math solutions too are just hypothesis and they too are "untestable". Get the point now?

Well, let's see. If most of science relies on empirical proofs, math relies on deductive logic. Is logic empirical? I believe I asked this question in one of my previous posts in this thread. I also answered that, in my opinion, logic is not empirical so your assertion that everything that is mathematical might not be experimentally provable is correct in my opinion. But, and this is a big one, if "time travel" as a concept is supported by math, I wouldn't dispute the logic behind it. Provable? May be not. Nonsensical? No way!

Originally posted by: BirdieNumNum

but here i'll say that spacetime itself is a mathematical construct that is internally inconsistent. Nothing can move in a time dimension by definition. That would be self-referential. There can be no time dimension because if there was, we should be able to travel through it, and then we should be able to answer questions like what is the velocity of something that travels in the time dimension. We have a self-reference problem there. It is then also a fallacy to think that time changes. We can think of passage of time as just the rate of change etc. Clocks which "measure" time can slow down or speed up. But not time. Time is just an abstract notion that should be used as an evolution parameter. But we have turned it into all kinds of things, to the point that we now even see spacetime or detect spacetime in the physical world.