You say we which I can only assume means the members of these forums/community and start off on a assumption that members of this community share the same truths that you do. In a other we I presume, there are many public stories that some have been exposed to, perhaps this hasnt been introduced to you guys yet, that go over peoples accounts of past lives and so on.
In other words, I disagree with your premise. If I have to.work.off.of it as a foundation then that changes things and I have a lot of follow up questions for you before I am able to articulate a decent answer. A point that I would like to.raise being that sometimes a answer isnt found through books and external factors, but through a inner journey that belongs to you and you alone. One example being that perhaps you do have these memories, you simply havent unlocked the access yet.
There is that interpretation, that pre-Earth to me is Earth before I was born, but I’m referring to what happened before I was born, in regards to my consciousness.
Some clue or truth about that would solve a lot of questions, and I think my memory is unhealthy because I don’t have this answer.
There’s even some impossible questions that spur due to this ‘gap.’
However I gather you think my memories literally start when I’m born.
Should it be that way? A small extension at birth would solve many problems. Problems that surmount to something serious.
I don’t remember being born. I’d be surprised if you did. Indeed, I’d suppose such a memory to be a confabulation… but all our memories are a confabulation of sorts. You seem to think of memories as if they were infallible. But even if you had what appeared to be memories from prior to your birth, you could not rely on their veracity.
Memories are coterminous with our physical capacity to form memories.
However science and philosophy are not however dependent on experience. We are able to form opinions about evenfs outside oyr ecperiemce and refine them in the light of evidence drawn from variety of sources
Memories and intuition are quite reliable but they have limits. Early Memories or dreams particularly so.
One of the things that interest me is how do we teach people things that are intuitively difficult. We often use metaphors like the big bang. Even though science tells us this oversimplifies the truth. Does that matter?
A second question is how do we deal in our minds with two theories where both may be untestable. Like Many Worlds and Objective collapse or the hot big bang and inflation. Do we have to choose or can we withhold judgement.
We have an account of events up to but not beyond the Big Bang. That’s 13.8 \times 10^9 years of history; all thanks to hard-working scientists.
Ancient people thought only royalty deserved to be remembered. Refer to the Sumerian King list, the pharaohs of Egypt, Chinggiz Khan, etc.. Great works, like the pyramid the mausoleum of Halicarnassus, etc. were commissioned and constructed by thousands of laborers. Some say the workforce was largely slaves, the work-till-you-drop-dead kind of slaves; others disagree. Modern-day slavery is drastically different from its ancient form. We’re all slave or did you think that being well-fed, well-clothed, well-housed, well-paid meant that you weren’t one? Silly Billy!!
The foundational peace that comes with knowing I’m a product of Earth’s evolution with a half a billion years worth of generational improvement under my bellybutton. I lived my life, was able to finished my personal thesis and now I’m back to living my days. Oh, and I don’t begrudge the death that’s stalking me.
Doesn’t make our societal horrors of our day go away, but it sure does make dealing with it a bit easier. Fortunately, I took precautions back in the late 70’s and left California for the Mtns. of Colorado because it was too crowded and I had bad feelings about the future. Then fate (and that magic bus) landed me in a perfect spot down in the SW of the state. For my next decades to unfold within. Sane circumstances around me, sure helps.
I hear you, I feel the same. Though the less challenges we have, the less we might be motivated to philosophy, but maybe not as a rule, what do you think ?
I said sane circumstances, not necessarily easier circumstances.
I was born into a family with parents that were eclectic (if on the poor side), disinterested in religion (thanks to living the horror of WWII, my mom had a bone to pick with god, who’d lost all her respect for the arrogant human-centric notion.), curious and science loving, and constantly schlepping us around the museums and parks, etc. (1960s Chicago area)
Around four, on a sunny afternoon on the living room rug watching dust moots floating around, and thinking about stars and space, when I asked my mom: “What is God?” - and my amazing mom answered with: “A speck of dust that wanted to be more.”
With a rush of epiphany my tender mind’s “God nitch” got filled with a question and a challenge instead. The essence of God being one of curiosity and striving - and not some set of dogmatic rules and notions to satisfy a bunch of old men.
It was all down hill from there (like a beautiful brook heading towards the ocean.) into ever deeper understanding and love of the developing scientific stories that told the amazing unfolding story of Earth’s evolution, along with the where, how, and why of my existence.
Curiosity seems to be one of our greatest driving forces.
My love for pondering also began at childhood. It grew especially in my late twenties.
I also prefer to understand and live some of what you mention simplistic. I don’t mind big questions about any topic, but these days some of those topics I prefer to understand and explain simplistic.
I think God would rather remain a spec of dust than be so much that he’s out of reach in all the ways we’ve made the spec of dust more.
I like for that reason Greek gods, the fact that they made mistakes made them easier to identify with.
I also think God is limited through his creation. The finite may hold more value than a perfect world ?
What keeps me sane is the inexhaustable value and complexisty in the simple, it’s like its divine and eternal by itself. We can find a very rich world in the here and now if we look in the right places. A forum such as this is one example, which I’m grateful for. Then there is my writing and my research, friends and lovedones.
I heard about an experiment where, in a laboratory setting, conditions were recreated “in a test tube” that scientists believe existed on Earth during the origin of life, based on rock analysis.
This was an attempt to create a primordial soup. Various attempts were made: they changed the composition of this soup, passed an electric current through it. In some test tubes, “proto-amino acids” or “proto-proteins” appeared. I don’t know how valid such attempts are, but the spontaneous generation hypothesis seems interesting.
It seems as though the consensus is that we have a suitable historical account of pre-Earth.
I would add that we completed a scientific expedition to find this history.
However there are such questions that aren’t possible to answer, such as ‘how did the universe begin?’ and ‘is this a simulation?’ and more.
I look to the skies for support with answering these questions.
There needs to be a common memory or monument that expresses the necessary information to make answering these questions possible.
I would say the historical account of Earth we have, is beating round the bush; it’s missing a lot of core information- required for healthy intellect.
If you’re overwhelmed, you could consider moving to an authoritarian country. There, you’ll shed that 80 percent of the burden for the same amount of money. And if you learn the local language, you’ll shed a full 95 percent.
The best and most competitive leave these places to compete with other top performers under extreme pressure.
So, you won’t have to revolutionize science to enjoy yourself.
Ah, but I’m talking about the “notion of god” - As for “God” it’s a human imaging. But to find such a God within reality, requires the universe. For me the “supreme being” is the entire universe, or is it god is infused into the entire universe. No matter how we skewer and cook that beast, it remains an human imagining. (IMHO ;-))
I’ll bet your thinking of Robert Hazen, specifically:
… Understanding Life’s details is always more complex than rigid logic run through our human biased mind.
For an excellent example there’s Robert Hazen’s experience with mineral catalyzing experiments. Using all the proper certified lab grade minerals, it was failure after failure. Time after time, the math and chemistry were checked and correct, but results were failures. What was going wrong?
Then his team changed tactics and gathered their minerals from down-to-Earth dirty sources such as hot springs. Using these “impure” mineral samples. Surprise, their chemical reactions started flowing. (See “Story of Earth — Hazen, Chapter 12: “Minerals to the Rescue” (page 155)).
It’s a reminder of how human logic can fail us when it comes to understanding Earth and life. Dismissing biological evidence as trivial and uninteresting, makes X≠Y unavoidable. (source)
Good question.
It’s the same thing I wonder when looking at humanity’s frantic rush into the future on our hobby horse of “progress” that reminds me more of self-cannibalization, than anything else.
Missing? Sure.
Seems to me, we are formed by life’s experiences being processed through our physical bodies, and an assorted set of filters, biologically and environmentally arrived at.
All new experiences are processed through our filters, and help inform and develop those filters, impacting how we process future experiences. Everything we experience through our entire life gets processed through those filters and built upon the existing foundation, be it good or bad.
I (and my sibs) were very fortunate with our parental mix of deep sincere love along with a dedication to old world discipline and work ethic, and their embrace of science and rational thinking over religion’s dogmatic prison. Not that it was perfect. Still, lordie only knows who I would have turned into without them. But, I’m sure I wouldn’t be half the person I am today, without their love an guidance and inspiration (though I probably resented much of that guidance as a kid.).
Our dreams are future scenarios calculated by our subconscious. We usually either don’t hear this process or perceive it as complete thoughts that already take reality into account. These filters don’t work well in dreams, so predictions can seem quite fantastical.
A baby is born with a huge number of connections in its brain. Essentially, it is born into chaos, a cacophony of all sorts of signals, from which it is unable to construct any concepts. Over time, these connections are pruned, and only those supported by experience remain, and then normal development, based on experience, occurs.
