Sense of Mystery

Conversations with God

2010-10-03T03:25:00.000-07:00

It is a huge book containing nearly 3000 pages of material in a sequence of nine books written by Neale Donald Walsch. One of the main ideas presented in "Conversations with God" reveals that at the highest level there is no separation between anything and there is only one of us; there is only God, and everything is God. It is idea taken from Spinoza who argued that God and Nature were two names for the same reality, namely the single substance that underlies the universe and of which all lesser "entities" are actually modes or modifications, that all things are determined by Nature to exist and cause effects, and that the complex chain of cause and effect are only understood in part. That humans presume themselves to have free will, he argues, is a result of their awareness of appetites while being unable to understand the reasons why they want and act as they do. Well do we really want to give up our individuality and possibly our free will? Or is it just convenient for some people to think that we have no free will, hence we can not be accountable for our actions.

Contact the Movie

2007-03-29T16:24:00.000-07:00

Exploring the meaning of human existence through contact with extraterrestrial life is the main theme of this movie. Based on the novel of the same name by Carl Sagan, is the story of a radio astronomer who after many years of research, discovers an intelligent signal broadcast from outer space. She and her fellow scientists are able to decipher the message which consists of detailed instructions for building a machine to travel to other planetary systems.

One of the other themes in Contact is that of science being perceived by some as being in conflict with those who believe in God. Throughout much of the film, both are seen as existing outside of the other's domain. There is initially a very clear stipulation that scientists can try to understand the universe without needing to introduce God into any explanations. Dr. Arroway, the heroine of the tale, when asked if she believes in God replies that there is no evidence for or against the existence of God. Joss, however, is shown as a moderate religious man. In one of their conversations, Joss reminds Dr. Arroway that people can have experiences that make them hold beliefs even if they do not have objectively verifiable evidence to support such beliefs.

Moral Dualism

2006-11-15T22:14:00.000-08:00

Moral dualism is the belief of the conflict as in western religions or coexistence as in eastern religions of two entities the good and the evil or "benign" and the "malign". Most religious systems have some form of moral dualism. In the dual mind, which is the personal ego we're all operating out of, knows by comparison, by differentiation, by distinction and by separation. It's a process of affirmation and denial, the classic Western debate and the smarter person is supposed to win. Dual thinking is good in the world of science, ordinary logic of getting you through the day. But once you approach mystery, infinity, eternity, God, the great concepts like freedom, the dualistic mind falls short. It can't deal with it, it can't know it, it divides the field. The dualistic thinking is inherently a self-cancelling system. It always divides. On the other hand the contemplation is simply my word for non-dual thinking, where you get your own ego and fear out of the way, and you look at things as they are, not as you want them to be, it just is what it is what it is. And you let that confront you. That's always a humiliation for the ego. So that's why people don't like to grow up into the contemplative mind, or non-dual thinking, because it is experienced as a loss of control.

Cosmic Acceleration

2006-04-19T19:59:00.000-07:00

After Hubble has observed redshift of distant galaxies we came to conclusion that the universe is expanding. But can you try to imagine what was it like just after the Big Bang? All the matter in the universe was very close and considering the gravitational forces everything should collapse back in a short time. So, why it continued to expand as it did? Why the universe did not contract on itself in a Big Crunch? It had to be an incredible force to overcome the gravitational pull. That is where dark energy comes in, as hypothetical form of energy which permeates the universe and has strong negative pressure.

Cosmology and Microwave Glow

2006-03-26T19:48:00.000-08:00

From BACK TO THE BEGINNING one hour program on SBS:
Hosted by astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, this program outlines the major discoveries in the science of cosmology, beginning with the most important of them all - the discovery of the microwave glow and the Big Bang in the mid 1960s. Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias were looking for the source of the annoying hiss that interfered with early satellite communications on behalf of the phone company AT&T (who built Telstar, the first satellite to transmit transatlantic phone calls). They picked up a faint microwave signal, apparently coming from empty space. This gave substance to a radical theory explored by a team of Princeton University scientists led by Bob Dickie that the entire universe had actually been born in a tremendous burst of energy billions of years ago - the Big Bang. The microwave glow was the left-over heat from the Big Bang. Further studies showed that there were concentrations of matter in the microwave glow, which confirmed that the universe did indeed evolve from the cataclysm of the Big Bang and today, with advances in technology, scientists can map out the cosmos as it was in its infancy 380,000 years ago.

Religions Timeline

2006-01-13T20:19:00.000-08:00

Looking at timeline and origin of major religions I have a feeling that we are running out of ideas. There was nothing new in many hundreds years.

Are we going to have any new religions in the near future?

See: http://www.sacred-texts.com/time/origtime.htm

Silencium Universi

2006-01-05T20:41:00.000-08:00

Solipsistic brains also seek union with spirits larger than those of other minds and societies. Once embarked in this direction minds encounter no logical barriers to finding spirits in animals, rocks and plants, in the least particles of physics, in Gaia, or in the entire universe. The safest course for a brain may be to act as if there were others "out there", in what mathematicians call "Pascal's wager". If it is mistaken, it suffers mere loneliness, but if it is correct, it gains early warning of opportunities and dangers. The same scenario is played for the same reason on a world-wide scale by cosmologists like Carl Sagan in search of extraterrestrial intelligence. The tenacity with which humans hold to the belief that something out there cares, despite what Stanislav Lem (1983) called the "silencium universi", clearly manifests an important aspect of intentional dynamics.

The excerpt from *Societies of Brains* by Walter J. Freeman

Question Time

2005-12-12T15:48:00.000-08:00

Here is the qestion board where you can pose a question.
I am not sure about the quality of the answers yet.
Give it a try: www.einstein.webeden.co.uk
If you have a question, or need some advice, ask Einstein!

Solving the puzzle

2005-12-11T20:14:00.000-08:00

If you think that you figure it out, think again. It may work for some time but it will not not work for everyone all the time.
These days it is hard to be original. Woody Allan has said something similar: Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem. I was only pretending to solve the puzzle, but I need to start somewhere.

Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence

2005-12-08T16:04:00.000-08:00

I was searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence on Google. Much less expensive tool compare to all those radio telescopses. Here what Gabe Weinberg writes about ET search: "all we know today is that outer space is huge and most of its detail remains undiscovered. Outer space may be the home of zero, one, hundreds, millions, or trillions of intelligent species. And so we continue the search because the search will never be over. In the spirit of Copernicus, there's nothing necessarily special about humans or Earth--no terrestrial arguments can rule out extra-terrestrial intelligence."

And Copernicus also said “God, without whom we can do nothing.”

Is God the only extra-terrestrial intelligence out there?

Dark Energy

2005-12-07T22:02:00.000-08:00

In cosmology, dark energy is a hypothetical form of energy which permeates all of space and has strong negative pressure. According to the theory of relativity, the effect of such a negative pressure is qualitatively similar to a force acting in opposition to gravity at large scales. Invoking such an effect is currently the most popular method for explaining the observations of an accelerating universe as well as accounting for a significant portion of the missing mass in the universe.
Two proposed forms for dark energy are the cosmological constant, a constant energy density filling space homogeneously, and quintessence, a dynamic field whose energy density can vary in time and space. Distinguishing between the alternatives requires high-precision measurements of the expansion of the universe to understand how the speed of the expansion changes over time. The rate of expansion is parameterized by the cosmological equation of state. Measuring the equation of state of dark energy is one of the biggest efforts in observational cosmology today.
Adding a cosmological constant to the standard theory of cosmology (i.e. the FLRW metric) has led to a model for cosmology known as the Lambda-CDM model. This model is in very good agreement with established cosmological observations.
The term dark energy was coined by Michael Turner.
Based on Wikipedia

Fuzzy Logic

2005-12-06T20:48:00.000-08:00

One of the theoretical approach is called fuzzy logic, developed by American philosopher Lotfi Zadeh. Fuzzy logic proposes a gradual transition between "perfect falsity", for, for example, the statement "Bill Clinton is bald", to "perfect truth", for, say, "Patrick Stewart is bald". In ordinary logics, there are only two truth-values: "true" and "false". The fuzzy perspective differs by introducing an infinite number of truth-values along a spectrum between perfect truth and perfect falsity. Perfect truth may be represented by "1", and perfect falsity by "0". Borderline cases are thought of as having a "truth-value" anywhere between 0 and 1 (for example, 0.6).

Solipsism belief

2005-12-05T20:51:00.000-08:00

Solipsism (from the Latin ipse = "self" and solus = "alone") is the epistemological belief that one's self is the only thing that can be known with certainty and verified (sometimes called egoism). Solipsism is also commonly understood to encompass the metaphysical belief that only one's self exists, and that "existence" just means being a part of one's own mental states — all objects, people, etc, that one experiences are merely parts of one's own mind. Solipsism is first recorded with the presocratic sophist Gorgias (c. 483-375 BC) who is quoted by Sextus Empiricus as having stated:
1. Nothing exists
2. Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it, and
3. Even if something could be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others.
Solipsism is generally identified with statement 2 and 3 from Gorgias.

A thought-experiment related to solipsis, although in principle distinct, is the Brain in a Vat. The person performing the thought-experiment considers the possibility that they are trapped within some utterly unknowable reality, much like that illustrated in the movie "The Matrix". A mad scientist could be sending the same impulses to a brain in a vat that a brain understood to be in the "real world" could receive, thereby exactly replicating the world as one knows it. Yet, for the brain in the vat, that world would obviously not be real. This raises the possibility that everything one thinks or knows is illusion. Or at the least that one cannot know, with any certainty, whether one's brain is in the "real world" or in a vat receiving impulses that would create an equivalent consciousness.

Thought similar to solipsism is present in much of eastern philosophy. Taoism and several interpretations of Buddhism, especially Zen, teach that drawing a distinction between self and universe is nonsensical and arbitrary, and merely an artifact of language rather than an inherent reality. Giovanni Gentile postulated a form of solipsism with his own brand of Idealism, which maintained that one's dependent view of reality only existed in so far as it related to the world it created itself into.

Another variation is a sort of materialistic agnosticism, stating simply that nothing outside of one's own thoughts can be absolutely proven to exist; it may all simply be the illusion/imagination/whatever of the thinker.
Wikipedia