It cannot be destroyed. Or can it?

From my understanding it can be changed from one form into another. But is ever present.

Our bodies being made from matter returns to the earth when we die and takes new form in some other shape and substance.

One thing science has neither been able to prove or disprove is whether the soul ie, spirit is made of matter. Or whether it even exists other than what our notions believe it is, or isn't.

I believe spirit to be ethereal. Not of this world. Which is why we haven't been able to capture it in a test tube or place it under a magnifying glass. It's beyond the scope of the parameters we are conscribed to as mere mortals.

Half of the atoms in our bodies came from galaxies far, far away.

We are, each of us, built from "stardust."

Okay, that is some of the coolest science I have ever heard!

My daughter came home from school one day sharing we are made from stardust. And I was literally in awe. But to think even half of our atoms came from faraway galaxies? Well that is literally out of this world! Although it does beg the question how on earth is it possible? (Unless we come from faraway places ourselves? to begin with?)

:D



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/21/2018 11:52AM by Amyjo.

Tevai Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Half of the atoms in our bodies came from galaxies
> far, far away.

Yes, but also consider that *all* matter and energy derived from the Big Bang, which included what is now all the points in the universe, and so originated at every point, including right where we're at now.

Aren't you describing existentialism rather than the Big Bang theory?

Are you saying we're each at the center of the Universe? But how would that be possible?

The universe has never had anything that wasn't present at the beginning of the universe. At the beginning everything that ever was and ever will be was in one place. Right now everything that ever was is still in the same place since the universe has never become more than it ever was. So nothing has moved, it has just changed form.

existentialism

a philosophical theory or approach that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.



Big Bang Theory

The theory states that about 13.7 billion years ago all the matter in the Universe was concentrated into a single incredibly tiny point. This began to enlarge rapidly in a hot explosion, and it is still expanding today.


I get them confused all the time

Sorry old dog. You didn't answer my question for xxMMooo.

Not even close.

Question?, as in one question?

I counted three.

Maybe if you ranked them in order of importance it would help! Or from my perspective, in order of impertinance...

I hope someone is able to help you.

Amyjo Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Aren't you describing existentialism rather than
> the Big Bang theory?
>
> Are you saying we're each at the center of the
> Universe? But how would that be possible?


Not philosophy, this is literally part of the Big Bang physics. All spacetime "originated" (originates?) at one point without any external space or time. It is logically obvious & necessary based on the theory.

That doesn't seem plausible to me, although I'm not a quantum physicist. Each atom is the center of its own universe. They're not however, a concentric whole. If the Big Bang occurred then it was a massive explosion, moving mass and inertia to points that previously didn't inhabit space or time, no?

:)

I named an Arabian/Mustang (mother was a wild Mustang from the Salmon range in Idaho ...,) Moonshadow. His father was a show horse. Beautiful colt. He had his mother's high spirit, and pranced like his papa.

:)

It can't be quantified or tested. IOW, it's not a scientific idea.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/21/2018 11:50AM by Beth.

Exactly right. Because it is unquantifiable. At least thus far.

It isn't that science doesn't wonder. It asks the questions. Just hasn't discovered rock solid evidence other than people's personal and mystical experiences and observations some people have had and shared.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/21/2018 11:55AM by Amyjo.

Conservation of mass and conservation of energy have been replaced by mass-energy equivalence.

So, you're starting from an old scientific concept that has been overruled and does not bear on the existence of a soul

Scientists - A little help, please? My physics isn't strong.

Beth Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> It can't be quantified or tested. IOW, it's not a
> scientific idea.


Google: half the atoms in our bodies came from galaxies far away

We are stardust
We are golden
We are billion year old carbon

I'm not going to argue with Joni

Entropy increases: everything rots. Including God.

The only spirit in which to sink your trust is a heavenly single malt.

Sorry.

Have you solved the proton decay (baryon number conservation density) question?

It was only a Tasmanian beer atom.

Whenever the weight of the world hangs heavy I watch this:

https://youtu.be/wupToqz1e2g

There is no greater example of the humility and morality which come from the objective pursuit of truth than this.

HH =)

Thank you. It is humbling to hear Carl Sagan tell us of the 'pale blue dot,' 22 years after his death.

I just learned he was born to Reform Jews. His mother was deeply religious. His father was not. The combination of both his parents outlook helped to shape what would become his scientific mind.

"My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing about science. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.[10]"

He was buried in Ithaca, New York (home to Cornell.) He didn't go to university there, so I wonder why the connection to Ithaca? Maybe it's personal like maybe where his third wife was from?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/21/2018 12:14PM by Amyjo.

Sagan spent 30 years as a professor at Cornell, up until the time of his death. That's why he's buried in Ithaca.

The video is great, but I felt like I was watching one of those old freeze frame videos from the church. Particularly, I remember one about some mexican kid named Miguel, getting stuck under some unfinished construction or something and dying, "Ahhh Miguel". All primary in tears.

It should be noted that this "law" of nature applies only in a closed or isolated system.

A closed or isolated system is not something that has ever been observed or proven.

We don't really have any known substance/matter in the Universe which is eternal. Some matter may be, but so far, we haven't observed anything which is eternal.

We have an approximate start-time for the Universe itself. Chances are that anything which has a beginning will also have an end.

We actually know rather a lot about those mystical experiences, and how consciousness works. Those who go on about how the spirit is unknowable and unquantifiable simply don't like the answers we are getting, so they kick up all the FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) they can.

Francis Crick wrote The Astonishing Hypothesis back in 1995. The hypothesis is that there is no ghost in the machine. Consciousness is an artifact of the operation of the brain, and when the brain stops operating, consciousness stops too. To illustrate the point, he goes into a detailed explanation of how nerve impulses triggered by light hitting retinal nerves gets converted into our mental image of what the world looks like and what is happening "out there" in the world.

Do we understand everything about consciousness? Not hardly. That does not mean we know nothing. I read two books last year on the sinking of the Titanic, and the Lusitania. In both books, there was mention of prominent mediums who were either on the ocean liners, or had been "inspired" to skip the voyage. It is interesting that spiritism was all the rage in the US and Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century. Contacting the spirits of the departed was booming business, and books were written on how to do it, and who was good at it.

the topic still fascinates a certain class of people, some of whom are on RFM, but there are no longer "prominent mediums" that the general public could name in contemporary society. Can you think of any other scientific endeavor that we as a culture were "good at" 150 years ago, but seem to have lost all that skill today? My hypothesis is that we were never good at it, and most of society has figured that out. Mediums and spirit possession have been replaced by schizophrenia and other mental processes, and alien adbuction, for the more credulous. The Devil, [edit} or God, or disembodied spirits have fallen out of favor as an explanation.

BTW, the current movie Hereditary is based on spiritism, a "philosophy" still widely accepted in Brazil (though it is nowhere near a majoritarian view, even there). Good for a scare, but not much good at explaining how the world actually works.

If you do an Amazon search on The Astonishing Hypothesis, it will provide a list of other books on the same subject.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/21/2018 01:29PM by Brother Of Jerry.

BTW, the knowledge that all the heavier elements were not present at the beginning of the universe, but were created by exploding stars as they burned out, is not particularly new science. I believe the knowledge goes back to at least the 1950s, if not before. It was a recurring refrain in Joni Mitchel's Woodstock song, 1969 (verse 3 below)

By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Matter, energy, and mind are different expressions of the same underlying phenomenon. (Mind being a certain arrangement of matter/energy, as seen in the various ions needed to flow between synapses.)

See Bertrand Russell's "Analysis of Matter" and "Analysis of Mind."

There is some controversy over whether protons have a set lifespan or whether they can decay over a long period of time. Their suggested half-life may be 10^32 years, quite longer than the current age of the known universe (10^10 years.)

Of course, defining "mass"/matter itself is not a straightforward proposition. The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass) seems to dance around the issue but is not an easy read.

Wolfram's view of the cosmos as a wholly computational structure (where every interaction constitutes a computation) can be read to view the entirety as "mind."

Spirit is somewhat beside the point here, as being a definitional problem. You can't "capture" it because you're looking out from it.

I think time is the definitional problem. Matter and energy move forward in time like a shock wave, from the moment of the Big Bang. For mind, there is no time except for its entanglement with the Universe, which arises from our mortality. It is this entanglement that causes our subjective experience of separateness.

Is anti-matter eternal? In my understanding of the big bang some 14 billion years ago, there was a near equal percentage of matter and anti-matter created. Somehow, matter slightly (and in a very small percentage) out massed anti-matter so we have the universe as it exists today. That is a gross simplification. Matter was created along with anti-matter. Put the two together and all that is left is mostly a release of energy.

Eric K Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Is anti-matter eternal? In my understanding of
> the big bang some 14 billion years ago, there was
> a near equal percentage of matter and anti-matter
> created. Somehow, matter slightly (and in a very
> small percentage) out massed anti-matter so we
> have the universe as it exists today. That is a
> gross simplification. Matter was created along
> with anti-matter. Put the two together and all
> that is left is mostly a release of energy.

Yes that's my reading of the theories too. Like the physicists I also don't understand how matter and anti-matter managed to avoid annihilating each other immediately, I can only assume they must've been forced apart fast enough so that they were at a "safe distance" before interacting with each other.

Then again they claim there's little to no anti-matter detectable in our universe today, so maybe a bunch of the stuff *did* annihilate itself (along with an equal amount of matter) and the matter we have left today is just the residual that somehow managed to avoid interacting with its opposite.

Energy. Not matter. Matter is 'created' and 'destroyed' all the time, largely by turning energy into matter, and matter into energy. Essentially, matter is a "temporarily solid" form of energy...

And as for energy...as far as we know it's 'eternal.' But we don't know much about 'eternal,' all we have to work with is a universe that, from the best evidence we have, isn't 'eternal.' What was before that? Was there even a before that?
We don't know (yet).

"One thing science has neither been able to prove or disprove is whether the soul ie, spirit is made of matter. Or whether it even exists other than what our notions believe it is, or isn't."

Simply because there is no evidence such a thing exists.

"I believe spirit to be ethereal. Not of this world. Which is why we haven't been able to capture it in a test tube or place it under a magnifying glass. It's beyond the scope of the parameters we are conscribed to as mere mortals."

That's possible. But not backed by evidence, either.
It's also possible we can't "capture it in a test tube" because there's no such thing. There are millions of other possibilities. Which possibility is correct? Got me. Until there's evidence the thing exists, we can't test any of them to find out.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/21/2018 02:16PM by ificouldhietokolob.

Some people only 'know' what suits their purpose. Facts, science, evidence, testing, etc., are destained if they don’t support the appropriate beliefs.

It's the opposite of preaching to the choir, it's preaching to the deaf... And dumb.

The thing that always gets me about the whole "we'll never be able to test for a spirit" is that they claim it has an impact on the physical world, but magically, not in a way that's testable.

If something has an impact on the physical world, we should be able to test for it. If nothing else, we could test for it's impact on the physical world. Maybe it's not easy, maybe we don't have the tools to do so yet. But that's not the claim, the claim is that we'll "never" be able to do so, because it's "not of this world".

If something doesn't have any detectable impact on the world around us, why worry about it. It, by the rules defined by those who believe in it, can't have anything to do with us.

It is testable, but very difficult to remove experimenter bias. If you want a negative result, you get a negative result. If you want a positive result, you get a positive result. Double blind doesn’t solve the problem. It’s not magic, it’s mind.

The problem doesn’t get solved, ironically, because of dogmatic belief systems.

Einstine's formula E=MC squared is amazingly easy for any algebra student to solve. You can even use algebra to move the formula around to solve for any element of the formula, given the other values.

I forgot what the units of measure are, but here is how it works. To solve for energy, just multiply the speed of light by itself, and multiply the result of that value by the amount of mass that will be converted to energy. As you can see, a very small amount of mass will yield a lot of energy, when converted.

I once heard that from one moment to the next, that a living human body (the same human body) weighs slightly less after death. Any truth to that?

Not in my personal experience, when we were moving my father's body from his bedroom (where he had died) to the van we had rented (to take his body to the crematory).

;)

I am sure that it would take laboratory conditions to test this. If it could be proven that the average person always loses around even a tenth of one ounce at death, that would be a major finding since one would have to ask what left the body upon death.

azsteve Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I am sure that it would take laboratory conditions
> to test this. If it could be proven that the
> average person always loses around even a tenth of
> one ounce at death, that would be a major finding
> since one would have to ask what left the body
> upon death.

It would indeed take laboratory conditions to test this--I agree with you.

The real life situation I experienced, since none of the three of us had ever moved a body before, was far more Laurel & Hardy than we had earlier thought we had reason to anticipate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_grams_experiment

"MacDougall's experiment has been the subject of considerable skepticism, and he has been accused of both flawed methods and outright fraud in obtaining his results.[9] Noting that only one of the six patients measured supported the hypothesis, Karl Kruszelnicki has stated the experiment is a case of selective reporting, as MacDougall ignored the majority of the results. Kruszelnicki also criticized the small sample size, and questioned how MacDougall was able to determine the exact moment when a person had died considering the technology available at the time.[3] Physicist Robert L. Park has written that MacDougall's experiments "are not regarded today as having any scientific merit",[5] and psychologist Bruce Hood wrote that "because the weight loss was not reliable or replicable, his findings were unscientific".[9] Professor Richard Wiseman said that within the scientific community, the experiment is confined to a "large pile of scientific curiosities labelled 'almost certainly not true'"

See also:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/weight-of-the-soul/

"It would take a great deal of credulity to conclude that MacDougall’s experiments demonstrated anything about post-mortem weight loss, much less the quantifiable existence of the human soul. For one thing, his results were far from consistent, varying widely across his half-dozen test cases:

“[S]uddenly coincident with death . . . the loss was ascertained to be three-fourths of an ounce.”
“The weight lost was found to be half an ounce. Then my colleague auscultated the heart and found it stopped. I tried again and the loss was one ounce and a half and fifty grains.”
“My third case showed a weight of half an ounce lost, coincident with death, and an additional loss of one ounce a few minutes later.”
“In the fourth case unfortunately our scales were not finely adjusted and there was a good deal of interference by people opposed to our work . . . I regard this test as of no value.”
“My fifth case showed a distinct drop in the beam requiring about three-eighths of an ounce which could not be accounted for. This occurred exactly simultaneously with death but peculiarly on bringing the beam up again with weights and later removing them, the beam did not sink back to stay for fully fifteen minutes.”
“My sixth and last case was not a fair test. The patient died almost within five minutes after being placed upon the bed and died while I was adjusting the beam.”

So, out of six tests, two had to be discarded, one showed an immediate drop in weight (and nothing more), two showed an immediate drop in weight which increased with the passage of time, and one showed an immediate drop in weight which reversed itself but later recurred. And even these results cannot be accepted at face value as the potential for experimental error was extremely high, especially since MacDougall and his colleagues often had difficulty in determining the precise moment of death, one of the key factors in their experiments. (MacDougall later attempted to explain away the timing discrepancies by concluding that “the soul’s weight is removed from the body virtually at the instant of last breath, though in persons of sluggish temperament it may remain in the body for a full minute.”)

I don't think there's such a thing as a measurable instant of death. Death is a process.

Humans who 'died' falling through the ice into the water beneath have been retrieved 'dead' up to 20 minutes after going under and been revived. The body was clinically 'dead', but because the chill factor inhibited the chemical decompostion of the body's tissues, most notably the brain, revival was possible. So where was the 1/10 of an ounce soul during that time?

Of course those who want to believe in the soul/spirit will provide every manner of answer, from 'playing solitaire' to whatever explanation they think best. I don't really care; believers will believe. But my revulsion is reflexive when it's "preached" here.

"A PAIR of world-renowned quantum scientists say they can prove the existence of the soul.

American Dr Stuart Hameroff and British physicist Sir Roger Penrose developed a quantum theory of consciousness asserting that our souls are contained inside structures called microtubules which live within our brain cells.

Their idea stems from the notion of the brain as a biological computer, "with 100 billion neurons and their axonal firings and synaptic connections acting as information networks".

Dr Hameroff, Professor Emeritus at the Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology and Director of the Centre of Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona, and Sir Roger have been working on the theory since 1996.

They argue that our experience of consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects inside these microtubules - a process they call orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR).

In a near-death experience the microtubules lose their quantum state, but the information within them is not destroyed. Or in layman's terms, the soul does not die but returns to the universe.

Dr Hameroff explained the theory at length in the Morgan Freeman-narrated documentary Through the Wormhole, which was recently aired in the US by the Science Channel.

The quantum soul theory is now trending worldwide, thanks to stories published this week by The Huffington Post and the Daily Mail, which have generated thousands of readers comments and social media shares.

"Let's say the heart stops beating, the blood stops flowing, the microtubules lose their quantum state," Dr Hameroff said.

"The quantum information within the microtubules is not destroyed, it can't be destroyed, it just distributes and dissipates to the universe at large.

'If the patient is resuscitated, revived, this quantum information can go back into the microtubules and the patient says "I had a near death experience".'

In the event of the patient's death, it was "possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body indefinitely - as a soul".

Dr Hameroff believes new findings about the role quantum physics plays in biological processes, such as the navigation of birds, adds weight to the theory."

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/quantum-scientists-offer-proof-soul-exists/news-story/a02f2d9db939472b1a29d758c54e6a8d

Their claims were soundly refuted.
That was 2012 -- they've since given up their hypothesis.

Proof? The scholarly and scientific articles I've been able to find since 2012 support their theory.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/22/2018 10:03AM by Amyjo.

Don't know where you're looking for "scholarly articles," but scientific support for Penrose/Hameroff is practically non-existent...


Penrose teamed up with Stuart Hameroff, who developed a similar theory about quantum claptrap independently, to further this idea. They developed something called the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) model. Most of it is dependent on Hameroff's assertion that the micro-tubules in neurons could have quantum effects on neuronal behavior, thus allowing the brain to behave as a quantum computer. Max Tegmark then actually did the math and found that any quantum effects within micro-tubules would be subject to decoherence and thus not affect brain activity.* Further falsifications of the Orch-OR model have been performed.** *** Penrose is an atheist and his arguments are usually used to support free will without invoking spirits, making this something like materialist woo.

* Max Tegmark, "The Importance of Quantum Decoherence in Brain Processes," Phys. Rev. E 61 (2000) 4194-4206. Copy at arXiv.

** Reimers et al. Weak, strong, and coherent regimes of Fröhlich condensation and their applications to terahertz medicine and quantum consciousness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online, Feb. 2009

*** Georgiev, Danko (2006). Falsifications of Hameroff-Penrose Orch OR Model of Consciousness and Novel Avenues for Development of Quantum Mind Theory. PhilSci Archive

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind#Penrose_and_Hameroff



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/22/2018 10:13AM by ificouldhietokolob.

"There is 'knowledge' and there may be 'truth', but to her who only cares about being 'right', nothing matters outside of the body of theories that support her cause."
--Judic West, Quantum Caliente el Sol aqui en la Playa

Penrose is an Atheist. All he's trying to do is explain consciousness. Hameroff is the Depaak Chopra fan who wants their theory to explain the 'soul'.

Here's Michael Shermer on this topic:

"Quantum Quackery

"Michael Shermer, Scientific American 292(1):234 2005

"A surprise-hit film has renewed interest in applying quantum mechanics to consciousness, spirituality and human potential

In spring 2004 I appeared on KATU TV's AM Northwest in Portland, Ore.., with the producers of an improbably named film, What the #$*! Do We Know?! Artfully edited and featuring actress Marlee Matlin as a dreamy-eyed photographer trying to make sense of an apparently senseless universe, the film's central tenet is that we create our own reality through consciousness and quantum mechanics. I never imagined that such a film would succeed, but it has grossed millions.

The film's avatars are New Age scientists whose jargonladen sound bites amount to little more than what California Institute of Technology physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann once described as "quantum flapdoodle." University of Oregon quantum physicist Amit Goswami, for example, says in the film: "The material world around us is nothing but possible movements of consciousness. I am choosing moment by moment my experience. Heisenberg said atoms are not things, only tendencies." Okay, Amit, I challenge you to leap out of a 20-story building and consciously choose the experience of passing safely through the ground's tendencies.

"The work of Japanese researcher Masaru Emoto, author of The Hidden Messages in Water, is featured to show how thoughts change the structure of ice crystals--beautiful crystals form in a glass of water with the word "love" taped to it, whereas playing: Elvis's "Heartbreak Hotel" causes other crystals to split in two. Would his "Burnin' Love" boil water?

"The film's nadir is an interview with "Ramtha," a 35,000 year-old spirit channeled by a woman named JZ Knight. I wondered where humans spoke English with an Indian accent 35,000 years ago. Many of the films' participants are members of Ramtha's "School of Enlightenment," where New Age pabulum is dispensed in costly weekend retreats.

"The attempt to link the weirdness of the quantum world to mysteries of the macro world (such as consciousness) is not new. The best candidate to connect the two comes from University of Oxford physicist Roger Penrose and physician Stuart Hameroff of the Arizona Health Sciences Center, whose theory of quantum consciousness has generated much heat but little light. Inside our neurons are tiny hollow microtubules that act like structural scaffolding. Their conjecture (and that's all it is) is that something inside the microtubules may initiate a wave-function collapse that results in the quantum coherence of atoms. The quantum coherence causes neurotransmitters to be released into the synapses between neurons, thus triggering them to fire in a uniform pattern that creates thought and consciousness. Because a wave-function collapse can come about only when an atom is "observed" (that is, affected in any way by something else), the late neuroscientist Sir John Eccles, another proponent of the idea, even suggested that "mind" may be the observer in a recursive loop from atoms to molecules to neurons to thought to consciousness to mind to atoms…

"In reality, the gap between subatomic quantum effects and large-scale macro systems is too large to bridge. In his book The Unconscious Quantum (Prometheus Books, 1995), University of Colorado physicist Victor Stenger demonstrates that for a system to be described quantum-mechanically, its typical mass (m), speed (v) and distance (d) must be on the order of Planck's constant (h). "If mvd is much greater than h, then the system probably can be treated classically." Stenger computes that the mass of neural transmitter molecules and their speed across the distance of the synapse are about two orders of magnitude too large for quantum effects to be influential. There is no micro-macro connection. Then what the #$*! is going on here?

"Physics envy. The lure of reducing complex problems to basic physical principles has dominated the philosophy of science since Descartes's failed attempt some four centuries ago to explain cognition by the actions of swirling vortices of atoms dancing their way to consciousness. Such Cartesian dreams provide a sense of certainty, but they quickly fade in the face of the complexities of biology. We should be exploring consciousness at the neural level and higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles as emergence and self-organization. Biology envy."


I'm looking forward to this afternoon's reading on RfM, when I get home from another perilous day on a golf course a bit over an hour away...

"The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a
star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably
came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the
most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You
couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements -
the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter
for evolution - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They
were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way
they could get into your body is if those stars were kind enough
to explode."

"So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.."
-- Cosmologist Lawrence Krauss

Your next science lesson will be on entropy.

When my kids were babies they were entropy machines.

Dave the Atheist Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> When my kids were babies they were entropy
> machines.

I try to still be one. At least, that's what my wife says :)

Enropy is what humans do best.

It is also possible that regardless of whether or not there is life after death, that our physical brains may lack the capacity to understand certain concepts that support our reality. Several years ago, I had an old dog that one day came over to me and looked at me for a long time in a way that I did not understand what she was saying. Then she laid down and died. After the fact, I realized that she was saying goodbye. I had to wonder what she knew about death that I didn't know. Then again, I wouldn't have wanted to try to teach her calculus, a part of the sciences that partially defined her world while on this earth. Any discussion about death and life after death will doubtlessly be framed from a human reference point. Where that reference point exists with respect to everything else in this large universe we live in seems to be totally unknown.

My geriatric dog has taken to looking at me like that lately. I look back wondering what he's trying to say in dogspeak.

He's on the 'tail end' of his dog years for the life span of his breed. He still seems happy and healthy despite his years, but I know from looking at him he's old.

I don't think of dying so much as nothingness after death, but a rebirth into the unknown beyond. Like the chrysalis who is born from the caterpillar transforms into a butterfly. Somehow I imagine the soul this way. Death may be a sleep and a forgetting perhaps of this life, like where we came from before we were born.

I've known several people in this life whom I had a distinct "deja vu" impression we were friends in a previous lifetime. Each of them are deceased now. I believe we'll meet again in another lifetime.