This right here, could be a controversial question, but im just asking to all of you UM memebers "what do you think life is?" im sure there will be sarcastic people out there, and realistic ones.. but im just askin., to see what you all think..

What's the biological definition these days? Metabolism, locomotion, respiration, reproduction? That's life, not conscious life (necessarily).

no, ur to indepth... im just asking more along the lines of.. "why are we here"? what is life? what purpose do we serve.. i no many people have asked this within the years.. but im just asking the broad question... "why are we here"? what is life?

Is it opinions you're after? Here's mine.

What we call life is a chemical process resulting from the chance coming together of chemicals, approximately 3.7 billion years ago on this planet, in such a way that those chemicals were able to attract like chemicals to themselves, creating self-replicas which themselves went on to replicate.

Over the billions of years, these replicator molecules have become more sophisticated through a process of natural selection, to the extent of building survival machines around themselves which aid with the replication process. We call these survival machines organisms, and they are used to effect replication of their own replicator molecules (genes).

This is essentially Richard Dawkins' Selfish Gene interpretation of the data on natural selection. I don't see much beyond that by way of 'meaning of life' or 'why are we here', other than what we humans invent to decorate that fairly harsh reality with.

However, the decorations we humans have invented are pretty much everything we have, and are important - human cultures and identities are not endowed to us by external reality, but created and agreed between us (partly as a way to aid with the replication process I described above), yet this doesn't remove any of their significance or importance, in my view. We don't serve non-human, superhuman or formerly-human beings, we serve our own purposes. As a rider to that, I believe that the sooner we all acknowledge that, the more effectively those purposes can be served.

That is the big question, isn't it. It is the question I go to sleep with and wake up with. I've had more than 30 years to try and come up with answer to the question and I have yet to find it. After all this time the best I can offer is I don't know. Maybe the answer to the question is something you can only find within yourself. My answer to the question, while perfectly satisfactory for me, might not be the answer for you.

I'm with Nucular on this one Life is just something that eventuated from a freak accident!

And as human beings we've decorated our "origins" with as many frills possible: especially through religion.

The four Fs: Food, Fight, Flight, and Reproduction ...hehehe

We're here to die.

Think about it, no life = no death.

I would describe it as a manifestation of matter which arises when possible. Of course there is more detailed chemical explanation for it, but that's the essence of it as I understand it.

I believe Life is ~ to gain experience, to teach each other about love, and to expand our consciousness ~ and to just BE.

I love these type of questions

In my view life is there for a greater purpose of cosmos which we may only know after we die. There must be some evolutionary reason, wy do we store memories and have subconscious mind and have dreams. Also I believe that consciousness is energy which makes objects "animate", provided right set of physical bodily conditions are achieved. It is conscious energy that makes a cell "live"


Nucular, can you explain to me when sperm meets egg, is it a chance that baby or live cell is born? Also the chemicals you are talking about, are these stored in egg and sperm, if not then where are these chemicals coming from?

I believe this is Hell on Earth and it is up from here.

Your life has purpose I can tell~

As for the OP: Some people are getting closer to death while others are gaining more life. Are you living or dying? That is the question...

+ i wonder how many experience points i have now? i am ready to lvl woot!

Really? That's rather depressing, especially considering that there is no evidence to suggest that there is any other life but this.

My view is the exact opposite.

Hi vikstar, no, the production of an embryo following the meeting of sperm and egg isn't chance, it's a biological process like any other.

The chance I mentioned related to the ultimate origin of life on Earth billions of years ago - there are a few ways we know the replicating chemical could have been formed, and each scientific model has chance operating in the right conditions over a probably quite long period of time.

The chemicals I'm talking about were the chemicals which first began to replicate. We, and all life on Earth, are the distant descendents of these replicators. Over time, as evolution by natural selection took place over the epochs, these chemicals became increasingly complex and good at their job (i.e. replicating). The equivalent 'stuff' inside us is the DNA which is contained in every cell in our bodies. This is a chemical which still replicates itself inside of our bodies, and transmits half of those replicas into the sex cells (sperm or egg) for 'mixing' at conception. It's the chemical blueprint for the person in whose cells the DNA is contained, and the genetic information it carries is what gets passed onto babies by the parents.

As soon as the egg is fertilised (i.e. sperm meets egg), the half of the genetic information from the father meets with half the mother's genetic information, and the process of gestation begins, where that new blueprint is worked up into a baby, using biochemical material supplied by the mother.

Did that address your question?

^ thanks mate, it does make your viewpoint clearer.

Life is just one half of the experience.

i'd say to "learn"

we got these supposed 'lower' life forms such as cats and dogs.. who do not develop technology and fiddle with nature.. then as we go up this supposed hierachy we get apes using sticks to root out termites (the begining of a technology so to speak) and humans, who make atom bombs, DDT and brittany spears CD's..

the (cough) higher these life forms develop, the more we see them interacting with the environment and for lack of a better word 'manipulating' it...

etc..

razer


was an excellent reply i think.. seems to also indicate the process of learning

Life is hugging my daughter and hear her call me mom . Real Life .

life is a process of dying

As I understand it, evolution is the random occurance of mutations and the ones that favour the survival of the species will remain in the genetic code. After a series of mutations a new species will come into existence that will not be able to reproduce with the representatives of the original species.
The only thing I don't understand is what kind of genetic modification resulted in the occurance of emotions, sense of beauty, admiration, jealousy, etc. in humans, and why nature favoured this to the extent that all those who didn't have these properties had to become instinct leaving only emotional ones behind. I fail to see how the emotions jealosy, revenge and greed are linked to the survival of our species. All I see these causing is the destruction of our only home, Earth. I also can't quite grasp what kind of genetic mutation could've resulted in the occurance of human consciousness and how these things are inherited. Same with ethics, moral guidelines, values and principles. Are there genes for these? Why did nature give us our brain's infinite memory capacity if we never fill a millionth of it? And I could go on with these questions but I could also pose equally challenging questions to people of any religious beliefs. I do have my own opinion of who we are, where we come from, why we are here and where we are going. But who cares, you'll only believe whatever YOU want to believe anyway.

I don't consider such a thing as life to exist.

There is no magical boundary that says "I am one thing, and everything around me is something else". Our bodies can all be broken down to different atoms, they're just working in a different way to form our bodies. The air is also composed of different atoms. Everything we do, think, or say, is just atoms interacting with each other, it's all cause and effect. Every choice we make has a complete string of events, one causing the other and leading to our decision. "Life" is just a complex form of simple action and reaction. Everything is natural, everything is simple. We give it all meaning because that's the way things happened, and the organisms that are our bodies need tools like that to make sense of a universe that is actually small and simple.

This is the concept of an organism. Everything is composed of smaller bodies of matter that form together and interact in a way that they can form a new object with a different form/purpose/meaning. Even most atoms follow this principle, as they've had protons added to them to create new and more dense elements. Humans are an organism, we are the sum of all our parts. Our parts all act in their own way for specific reasons, forming this "life" we are all so fond of, that is more of an illusion than a real thing.

sorry if i missed something i didnt read the rest of the posts, but im just here to answer your question =) to me life is a mistake, we are all a big mistake, maybe life was not suppose to even exsist see we live and we die so whats the poiint of living, learning things, being rich, poor, disabled, having nothing or having it all if in the end you die and everything you had if u were rich yo ulose it and if you were already nothing then no one cares or remebers you theres no point in doing all that when in the end you die its dumb. a mistake.

Life is what you as an individual think it is.

Hi Rolci - I can have a go at answering some of your questions from the position I outlined earlier in the thread, if that's okay.


To understand why human emotions may have evolved, it is necessary only to ask what differential reproductive advantage they may bring.

Different emotions bring behavioural changes upon individuals, and so if these behavioural changes affect positively, however slightly, the chances of the genetic mutation which has caused them being passed on, then that genetic change - a new gene - will become more common in the gene pool than its alleles which do not confer such an advantage. Human emotions tend to have fairly obvious 'functions' on the evolutionary level: romantic love, for instance, is an emotion which helps to regulate our reproductive behaviour, causing (amongst other things) loyalty to a reproductive partner which helps to protect one's offspring and the copies of one's genes those offspring contain. Familial love tends to correlate (as a rule of thumb) in intensity with the amount of genes the recipient shares with the individual feeling that emotion: the fewer genes shared by two individuals (e.g., the more distant the cousins), the less the familial connection and love tends to be felt (this is less true with adoptive relatives, which is a social phenomenon which probably has its own evolutionary function). Similarly, an aesthetic sense is associated with various phenomena, some with clear evolutionary payoffs (such as the sense of beauty of a healthy, symmetrical, reproductively viable potential sexual partner), others of more cultural, proximal importance and function (such as art).


This is, of course, partly an outcome of those sorts of emotions. But I suspect the key to your misunderstanding comes from what you said before that:


There is debate around what exactly the 'currency' of natural selection is - i.e. at what level things actually evolve at, or to put it another way, what is it that actually does the evolving. The view I outlined earlier posits the gene as the fundamental unit of selection, and I tend to think this is the best way to understand the process; but other contenders for that 'unit' would be the individual, the group, the species or even higher taxonomic levels than these. Few would claim today that natural selection takes place mostly - or at all - at the species level, and so it's not really correct to say that "mutations ... that favour the survival of the species will remain" - it's all about the gene. Genes which confer a survival advantage are passed on; those which do not, are not. Accordingly, there is nothing within the process of natural selection itself which should protect the Earth, since there is no selection occurring at this level. Also, bear in mind that natural selection is blind, or at least short-sighted, and so although it would make long-term sense even at the level of gene selection to protect the planet, there is no mechanism which could build this long-term goal into the process of evolution.

Thus, the payoffs for such emotions or acts as jealousy, revenge and greed are immediate and selfish even to the genetic level, and such ruthless, petty and ugly genes will be selected for regardless. This is because the sorts of immediate advantages such phenomena bring would be exactly the types of things which still make individuals (and therefore the genes they carry) successful - a cut-throat approach to life, a clear concept of what resources or powerful position an individual wishes to have, and the drive to go out and get it, regardless of the consequences to others. These sorts of genes compete with those for different strategies (such as reciprocal altruism, empathy, friendliness to strangers, etc.), and do rather well (we all have a dose of those less pleasant genes, some more than others).


This is the most difficult question to answer from an evolutionary perspective; there is no definitive answer to this, but there must be very important payoffs to such a resource-intensive adaptation as consciousness (it takes a lot of brain, which is an expensive commodity). I think the valuable function of consciousness would almost certainly be some sort of executive function, like suddenly introducing a managing director to improve the efficiency of previously unmanaged workers, as well as the ability to model and predict the environment. A bit of consciousness probably goes quite a long way in terms of efficiency and imagination. To consciously model aspects of our world in our minds, to conduct thought experiments constantly as we all do, must be advantageous, as it alows us to anticipate and affect the world in new ways, and even to guess the thoughts of others (and thereby be able to fool them better).


I would say there are genes for certain ethics and morals, and other genes more generally for being ethical and moral. Many principles and values are culturally relative, whilst others seem to be universal. The reciprocal altruism and co-operation with mutual benefit which evolves in social species like humans can be seen as being helped to work by the morals and ethics current in those groups, or common to all species members.


It is highly unlikely that memory capacity is infinite; for most people, in practice, the efficiency and capacity of memory processes just about meets their needs. We all forget stuff; we all struggle to remember other things we know are in there somewhere; sometimes data compression seems to damage the memories we have stored; sometimes related cognitive systems such as emotion, or belief, or attention, distort, delete and rewrite our memories. Rather than 'never filling a millionth' of our memory capacity, it seems likely we use all of it to varying degrees of efficiency. My own memory is rather like a big, cluttered room, with overflowing drawers and things I've put down temporarily and forgotten to put away, and very few labels and shelves. I'm using the whole room, but if I'd tidied it properly and made an effort to put things in the right place to start with, I'd probably be functioning at a much higher level! We've evolved the ability to store experiences for a long time, and some types of information can be stored for a lifetime; and like most evolved mechanisms, it's 'good enough', not perfect, because there comes a point where the resource cost of improvement ceases to give a proportional functional payoff impacting reproductive viability, and so the genes 'spending' more on a particular system won't spread through a population as readily as those which are more frugal.


Well, that's what we've evolved to do (or maybe the beliefs have evolved to do that to us!).

I nearly fell off my chair reading that. Thas the first time I've seen such a reply to that question. It does seem to be a big mistake in case of my life but maybe not many other ppl.

But one thing I do want to discuss in context of this discussion is Suicide. We all have this natural ability of inhibiting the suicide feelings, we are all scared of death. I think Unit's argument stands up in this case, as until we learn what we are supposed to learn, we shall not die.

In case of chance, it hard to figure out why we should be scared of death, i.e. thinking about it, death shouldn't matter in a chance scenrio,

Also in terms of chance: its hard to figure out free will. You have no free will before you are born (not even in how you are born as) and after you die, and then you have some free will in between that 70 odd years period.!

Hi Nucular,

Thanks for the detail-filled reaction, a nice, organized and intelligent reply. Quite a few obvious truths in it. However, I reserve the right to stay in the belief of the "infinite memory capacity" theory. Hard to explain why. I am well aware that we do have a finite, limited number of neurons, and (however phenomenally and mind-bogglingly high,) a finite number of possible meaningful and practically functional connections among them. But I struggle with the idea that if we had the same memory capacity but lived significantly longer - say 500 years or more as some of our ancient ancestors mentioned in the Bible allegedly did - then after a while our memory would become full and if we had to memorise something new, something less important piece of data would have to be further compressed or - when this is not possible to any further degree - deleted. What if we lived 5000 years? 50.000? What is the upper limit? A simple example. What if all we had to memorise would be people's names and there were an infinite number of people all with different names, or even some with the same, doesn't really matter does it. So the task would be to associate names with faces or voices or personalities, whatever. After how many memorised units would we have to forget somebody's name in order to remember one more? What would it feel like to have a brain filled with info "to the brim"? I know I don't have a sound basis to believe that memory capacity is infinite and that me simply not wanting to accept it can be full is not good enough of an argument. But I am willing to listen to contrary arguments or any scientific facts I might be unaware of.
A bit more esoteric question, or you could consider it religious, new age or whatever you fancy. However consciousness appeared in our species all of a sudden resulting in an evolutionary jump unprecedented in its nature and significance, is it absolutely impossible that we are on the verge of a paradigm shift, a leap in the nature of human consciousness, an outburst in collective human spiritual evolution of some sort, as it is believed by some as one of the theories as regards what 2012 might bring if anything at all? Why would it be logical to believe that after life becoming more and more complex throughout billions of years accelerating towards the end with mankind emerging approximately 2 million years ago with human consciousness popping out of nothing, now all of a sudden all this has come to a halt? I'm sure we can all agree that this would be an illogical view. As would be it to believe that any further evolution would be of physical nature like smaller nose and bigger eyes, whatever. If I look at the past 2 million years only, at human evolution, I, again, see an accelerated rate of "evolution". Evolution in intelligence and spiritualism, the emergence AND sophistication of emotions, culture, intelligence, creativity, taste, etc. My point is that considering that physical evolution has taken billions of years to get to the level of humans, intellectual evolution taken millions of years, social and cultural evolution thousands of years and technological development rocketing in the past few decades, is it impossible that IF a next step in human evolution can be predicted it be within a few years? Might be bullsh*t, but I'm simply asking people: do you think it is impossible in the light of all the above-said? If you think it is, then why?
Lost souls, I loved your post. KBA, excellent approach. Moonlight, how about "Life is what you make it to be"? Lucid Element, thanks for the topic.

well who knows if this is life, maybe its just an illusion, maybe life is just one dream that everybody thinks is actually real. its confusing because if life is a dream, and we have a dream within a dream, we know that the dream within a dream is not real. but we do not know that life is a dream, and this is were people don't think it is true, which is possibly right. so no one knows what life is yet, because there are so many possibility's, and only some, or none, are bound to be right.

This is life. So go and have a ball. Because the world don't move to the beat of just one drum.What might be right for you may not be right for some. You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have...my opening statement. Sit, Ubu, sit. Good dog.

very nice.

Life is what you make it, so make it good

Nucular,
Was expecting a reply to my last one, to see what you make of it. Anyway, this article seems interesting...

MY TOUGHTS EXACTLY

Something worth living.

Hi Rolci,
My apologies, I read your post, wanted to give it some thought, and then lost track of this thread with the forum reshuffle (seems to have reset my topic subscriptions).

Bear with me!

Well I can follow suit in evolution but not on the origin of life sorry, freak accident maybe but until someone comes up with a more convincing way then "SOMEHOW" or so and so "MADE IT SO" I'll leave that in the unknown or more along the lines of life always existed in one form or another. Beside there is truly only one thing in my opinion that seems to be undeniable about life for any living organism especially when speaking of some sort of reason or purpose. It happens all the time wether your sleeping awake dying being born, dreaming, feeling pain, that something that one never has to read a book to find out or being given the "WORD" to know about or even know how to speak or be conscious as we see it...it's call EXPERIENCE and all life form has it. More along the lines of, as result of...rather then a reason or purpose but it suits us all just fine.

the whynsos

What I feel, I can't say
But my love is there for you anytime of day
But if it's not love that you need
Then I'll try my best to make everything succeed...

Rolci,
Apologies again for letting the conversation slip! You made an interesting post, and I decided to give it some thought - and then forgot to come back to it!


I found your views interesting, I have been ticking them over - I also saw that article you linked to with the 'woman who can't forget', and immediately thought of this thread.

There have been attempts to estimate the memory capacity of the human brain, and these have all (as far as I know) taken one of two approaches, neither of which is perfect. The first sort attempts to extrapolate actual physical memory capacity based on e.g. number of neurons or synapses, and attempts to calculate maximum capacity based on the number of 'bits' of information each would be able to handle; estimates here have ranged between about one and 10 terabytes. The problem, of course, is that this would be an absolute top-end estimate, if the entire storage capacity of the brain was used to its fullest extent (100% efficiency is extremely rare in biology), and if those synapses aren't being used for other things (which, of course, they are). The second sort tries to measure how much information we actually take in and store, and argued that in our entire lives we were likely to remember around 120 megabytes of information. The problem here would be that this measures the amount of information we probably do take in, rather than can take in.

Overall, though, neither estimate is that high, considering both are possible to obtain on a computer (the very top end, just about). A general problem, of course, is that the encoding principles of memory just aren't understood; indeed, the mechanisms of consciousness generally in the brain are so little understood that Roger Penrose can argue that unknown laws of physics are at work in our brains, and that neurons are not the most important mechanism, and the academic world has to entertain the possibility. So all we can do is make a best guess, really.

But maybe we could think about what memory is like - such introspection isn't exactly scientific, but we might find a rule of thumb. Consider a random, fairly neutral, memory from childhood. I've got one of my own. I'm picturing where I was, what I was doing; the colours are quite washed out, the details hazy. All in all, a pretty crappy recording. I can ask myself questions - who else was there? What shoes was I wearing? And I can't answer them. The information just isn't there. More emotional memories tend to be somewhat sharper, but as Neisser found, even these 'flashbulb' memories aren't particularly reliable for that extra information. I would say that, although I have perhaps thousands of such memories, each one might be equivalent in terms of the information stored to a 2 minute YouTube video. More recent memories of course contain more detail, but they too will fade over time. Not very pleasant to admit that everything I am, my entire ego, is stored in such a shoddy way (and I don't even have back ups in case I break or get stolen!), but there we are.

So how to explain the 'woman who never forgets'? I can't, obviously. Some people's brains do seem to be wired up in an extraordinary ways - consider also the autistic savant, who may be able to pluck eight-digit prime numbers from the air, or play note-perfectly a piano concerto heared once twenty years ago. But to look a little more closely at Mrs Price's story, clearly she has a disorder; but is it really a perfect memory? It certainly seems to her that it is; but the only way it's been tested (as mentioned in the Times article) was by comparing her recall to her diary entries. Now, perfect recall of diary entries is incredible, especially years afterwards, but the recorded information they tested her against can't amount to more than a few megabytes (the amount of memory it would take to type those entries and save them in, say, Notepad). I think it would take a video camera study to test her memory 'problem' more thoroughly. But I don't mean to overdo the scepticism there! It may be as it appears, I can't say. But still this wouldn't indicate 'infinite', just 'larger or more efficient than normal', if we're dealing with 'normal' memories of between 100Mb and 10Tb.

In terms of what it would feel like to have a 'full' memory, I doubt we'd notice very easily - I'd suspect that, given the state of some of my longer term memories anyway, a fuller memory would simply degrade them more. What at the moment is a slightly fuzzy and incomplete trip to the zoo with my cousins, with highlights clearer (the gorillas, the gift shop, and the Orthodox Jews), might be reduced to a vague impression that I had first encountered people in unusual religious dress at a young age, and that I have, at some point, seen a gorilla. I don't think this compression/loss would result in a major change to my sense of self, and at any rate would be so gradual that any such change would be unnoticeable anyway.

It's an interesting subject, and I'd love to know what you think to that stream-of-consciousness, Rolci!

The next part of your post, I'm afraid I have to disagree with in rather more certain terms.


Did it? How do you know that? There are arguments that a particular type of consciousness 'awoke' (to use a misleading term) with modern humanity, coinciding with the 'explosion of culture' (e.g. Stephen Mithen's 'cognitive archaeology'), but even proponents of this idea would argue that there are gradients of consciousness, and that it was not a 'critical mass' moment. Evolved faculties very rarely do simply 'turn on', since they usually have to arrive very gradually with each successive adaptation more useful than the last.


Hmmm... not impossible, but I would have to say that there is no reason to think there is. I think that to explain what I mean I have to pick up on what may be a misunderstanding of the nature of human evolution running through your post.


Evolution isn't intrinically a move from 'simple' to 'complex'; it is an adaptation to environment. If a simple organism is better to occupy an ecological niche that a complex one, then that organism will be simple. Take the amoeba: a 'simple', unicellular creature, showing remarkable success in that it exists in many places on Earth, and has done in some form for billions of years. It makes no sense to say that humans - complex creatures - are 'more evolved' than these simple things - simply that one has evolved to occupy one environment, and the other has evolved to suit its own environment.

Evolution will continue apace, but it's not going 'to' anywhere - it's a simple case of, as I outlined in my first post in this thread, genes being more or less likely to survive in the genetic and ecological environment they find themselves in. And although such evolution is blind, it is anything but random - humans will not evolve, to take your example, smaller noses, unless there is a survival advantage to do so - or in other words, the 'small nose' gene(s) confer an advantage upon its/their survival machine which means that they will be proliferated through a population more efficiently than the rival 'big nose' genes. Smaller noses may randomly appear in individuals, but unless they endow an increased ability for the organism sporting the new smaller nose to reproduce, they will not replace enough of their rival genes to become ubiquitous in a species.

Human consciousness is just the same as a smaller nose. It has conferred an advantage to us, probably something to do with 'executive function' over autonomic processes, the ability to simulate events rather than have to use trial and error, and the awareness of past and future events. However, the question of 'where to now' is extremely difficult to answer for a number of reasons.

First, there is the question of possibility. Although it is likely to be advantageous to evolve, say, the ability to affect matter through thought alone, it is unlikely to actually be physically be possible to do so (probably for the main reason that there is no known thought 'substance' which could achieve this - thought is a computational process, not a 'thing' which could physically interact with the environment).

Second, there is the requirement that each step towards a faculty must also confer a survival/reproduction advantage - so for instance, a laser gun to replace the human little finger might be a good survival mechanism - but each step towards that - beginning with, say, the hardening of the little finger, then the hollowing out of its middle, then the evolution of a lens, then a light emitter, then an internal array of mirrors, etc. - must also bring its own cumulative advantages, or else it simply becomes a white elephant and is 'selected out' of the population again.

Third, a evolved characteristic must achieve equilibrium within a population - for example, deception. The ability to deceive another member of one's species brings an advantage, which means that before long, a population is overrun with the 'deception' gene; but a whole population of deceivers is not evolutionarily stable, since the gene for 'deceit detection' soon spreads equally quickly among the population. Ultimately an equilibrium is reached, in that particular case, with an optimum ratio of 'deceit' and 'deceit detection' genes settling into a population. Would a given new characteristic be capable of achieving equilibrium? A 'pacifism' gene, which causes its carrier to always avoid conflict in every case, may initially spread because it causes the carrier to survive by running away a lot; but may never achieve equilibrium because its carriers always have to give up their resources which otherwise would have been defended, thereby losing other survival advantages; and a gene in non-pacifists for 'running after pacifists' may result in their extinction.

Fourth, a cost-benefit ration would also need to be considered - is an adaptation, however useful, too expensive to really be of use? As I mentioned before, consciousness requires increased brain volume, which is quite a resource-intensive thing to run. Would 'more consciousness' (if the concept were not hopelessly crude) be too expensive to allow its carrier to reap the advantages, or would that organism have to eat for 20 hours a day to build and fuel the increased cerebral architecture?

These are all extremely difficult questions to find an answer to for any given case in the real, very complicated, world, making prediction of the 'next step' all but impossible.


I can see why this is what you see; but it may be an illusion based on the fact that we are humans, and so our own evolutionary history seems somehow more important than that of other species which have evolved alongside us - chimpanzees, dogs, viruses. The evolution of all these things is part of human development over the past couple of million years, as you say, but other animals have also evolved different characteristics over that same time period. As seen above, trying to divine 'directionality' in evolutionary development is a non-starter, because it's not going 'to' anywhere. If we have spent ten million years evolving an opposable thumb, it does not follow that we'll spend the next ten million evolving an opposable big toe; similarly, the evolution of empathy does not foreshadow the evolution of telepathy. Straight trend lines only work backwards in evolution, not forwards.


Perhaps the best way to answer this would be to differentiate biological evolution from other possibly evolving phenomena such as human culture. Whilst humans have biologically evolved the ability (if that's the right term) to develop culture, that actual cultural development is distinct from the evolution of the ability to have it, if you see what I mean. Whilst evolutionary models of culture have been developed, such as the still-controversial idea of the 'meme', it is not a gene-driven process, and takes place in a very different timescale. As you point out, human culture has developed, in a mostly cumulative fashion, for thousands of years, and the part of culture we now call technology has skyrocketed in hundreds, even tens, of years; but this is not biological evolution, and cannot be assumed even to conform to the same principles. Biological evolution does take a very, very long time, with little progress being detectable over tens of thousands of years. Cultural change takes place much more quickly, but any benefit to humans is in the way we use our biology, rather than in changing that biology itself - a bit like the software/hardware distinction.

The 'next step in human evolution' therefore, though we may indeed be (actually, must be) still evolving, is not going to happen 'in the next few years'. Biological evolution still takes place over geological timescales, and the speed of our cultural transformation is another kettle of fish (with or without legs) entirely. Who knows where culture will go in the next few years - I speculate that it's every bit as unpredictable as biological evolution - but wherever it's going, it's not going to give us new brain parts, super powers or gills. We might invent all of these things, certainly, but they cannot then be said to have evolved.

I do often wonder if we could get any inkling of our evolutionary future, even speculatively; here's all I can come up with, and it is, despite the above observations, tied up with culture and technology, though not in the way you mean. I'm also not sure if I've mentioned it before in this thread, so apologies if I'm repeating myself.

In recent years, human technology has enabled us to divorce sex from reproduction. The invention of contraception is a cultural innovation which impacts on the main driving mechanism of evolution! If this technology survives, along with our present culture which has invented and perpetuated it, there will be effects which come from this, which will affect the evolution of the human race. But how? Well, let's think. Evolution takes place via the principle of the survival of the fittest - the fittest, that is, to reproduce. At present, those who use contraception responsibly are not reproducing, or are only reproducing a bit - one or two children is now the 'norm', and none at all is far from unusual. These are the people whose genes will not be spreading rapidly: the genes for forward-planning, resource gathering, sensible and 'respectable', in current terms, living. Who does reproduce? The same people who are 'irresponsible' with sex and contraception; those people who are more impulsive, less given to considered action, who begin to have sex earlier and less fussily. These and other related characteristics will be those which spread, therefore; and these are, to take our criteria from earlier, possible; confer immediate advantage; not too resource-intensive; and can probably quite quickly reach equilibrium, because so far as I can see the competing characteristics are reproductively inferior.

So perhaps there will be a human evolutionary shift in the next few thousand years; but I somehow doubt it'll be the noble, cerebral, tie-dyed paradise which new agers have in mind!

what about the fact were almost at a stage were we can determine our own biological evolution through technology, gene manipulation, cloning, stem cell research etc.. all these things are allowing us to decide what kind of genes are in place within possible future generations. obviously culturaly this is still considered by the majority to be unaceptable but im sure it will continue apace nontheless.
i think its interesting that we may be able to actually drive evolution conciously rather than just being passive participants within it.
if we are able to decide what kind of genes future generations willl have (better immunity to disease, higher intellect, better physical attributes, even hair color etc) surely this will in a way speed up evolution. i wudnt say im really in favor of such ideas but i do find it interseting to say the least. aside from being able to manipulate genes thers also the question of bio-technology or the combining of technology into our biological systems, nano technology and the like.
dunno if any of this makes sense and its kind of off topic was just kind of in response to the previous post about evolution and such. and i dont even know much about this sort of stuff, wud just be interested to know wot people think about this stuff.
also i know my spelling is awful, too many years using text messaging and msn etc..

I like your advanced views Nucular, even though I find them a little 'too' scientific. To me, 'scientific' does not mean the wrong direction, just maybe 'incomplete'. Science itself, with it' approaches and methodology, and especially what science knows at this point, is far from being 'complete'. There may even be phenomena in this world that, by their nature, can't be investigated in a scientific way with science in its current form.
For the evolution bit I quite liked briks' ideas. You can't separate biological evolution from technology any more, because with technology we can exist almost everywhere - deep under the oceans or in outer space. We could even build underwater settlements or cities on the moon if survival needs dictate so. I am beginning to see that we as a species are beyond the processes of evolution when it comes to adaptation. Sometimes circumstances do not allow millions of years to adapt to a new environment. For example, if we detect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, there is no way we could evolve in a few decades in a suitable manner to survive such an impact. Rather, we would probably build underground and specially shielded survival bunkers on the other side of the planet, or simply concentrate all of humanity's efforts and resources on building space stations and evacuating the planet. As much as we can.
So technology is the way now. One day we may get rid of our vulnerable bodies and link our head to a metallic body made of enduring alloys and body parts like the laser finger you said. A bit like the transformers. Reproduction, of course will be another issue, but I'm sure we can figure out something. I read recently in focus magazine that female-only conception may be possible in humans soon like it is already an existinf form of reproduction in some animal species - in our case, with the use of our technology of course.
As for the memory issue, I must argue with one of your points. You said memories fade and details are lost - what shoes you were wearing, etc. How about when people in a hypnotic state reveal details of a past experience they can't consciously remember - or maybe they can't even remember the whole event. Past life regression must be a different issue, if it is what it seems to be then I think the physical brain is not the storing device of such memories. What is then? Well, whatever you use for mental functions when you are in your astral body. But let's not get that far - it's not too scientific right now, right? So I think if it is physically possible for that woman to remember everything, I think it's not because she is a brain-mutant, I think we all have the same brain structure, it's just what you said - a disorder in her. But I think we all remember all our lives, but there is no need for us to remember them consciously otherwise we'd go crazy like this poor woman - not very advantageous for individual survival. So I think most insignificant details of our lives and experiences are suppressed, buried deep in our subconscious and are accessed sunconsciously only when we need the info in a particular problem situation. But we never realise the details of the event, just use the relevant bit that helps us resolve the situation. We might even think "I wonder where I got that idea from...".
Well, that's all for today, got other stuff to do, but will come again and discuss further if there are willing participants left. Good day.

Edit: grammatical and spelling mistakes, as usual

i'd agree with rolci about memory. just coz u cant remember everything from your past clearly doesnt mean it isnt stored deep in your subconcious sumwhere, i thikn we probably take in a hell of a lot more than we realise. cant remember where i read it(ironically) but there was this idea about how the human brain is baisically a filter, like we actually take in vast amounts of information but our brain has to reduce this down to an amount that we can deal with and still get on with our everyday lives, i wudnt recomend any sort of substance but things like LSD, peyote, shrooms etc.. are a way of expanding the filter so u start to see information u cant usually. obviously this can be done in other ways too meditation and the like. but yea i guess its all part of evolution and a survival mechanism if we cud remember everysingle detail ofg our lives every second of every day we wud go insane, same as if u had an acid laced perception the whole time, just waaay to much for the brain to handle and still be able to function normally.

Thanks Rolci, I like yours!


I agree. Science is by nature 'incomplete', in that all conclusions await further evidence, and all theories and related constructs are, and can only ever be, 'works in progress'. I see this as a great strength, in contrast to some other systems of thought which will defend conclusions against evidence at all costs.


I'm certain there are. For instance, bigger metaphysical and religious questions tend to be 'unfalsifiable' (that is, we couldn't design any method of investigation which could distinguish between a religious claim and its corresponding null hypothesis). Science only really gets 'involved' when those making unfalsifiable claims (for instance, "there is a God, but He is totally uninvolved in the day-to-day workings of the universe, or is by definition undetectable in His interactions with it") go further and make testable ones ("God endows individuals with the ability to heal people of physical problems"). Another example of questions science can inform and speak to, but definitively not answer would be ethical, moral or sometimes political questions. We can use science to determine at what stage the nervous system of a foetus is able to experience pain, but we cannot use science to determine whether it is therefore right to abort foetuses at any particular stage. (Just for the record, I'm strongly of the opinion that we can't use religion either.)

However, I do not believe biological evolution is one of these sorts of questions, and nor do I believe that there is a better approach than science to be answering these questions or studying these phenomena. If there is an aspect of the issue that scientific investigation of evolution has missed, then that itself can be addressed scientifically. But I'm not sure I see in your post an example of this.


Yes, Briks brought up a very interesting point, and I'd been intending to respond to him also, but hadn't got around to it yet! Sorry, Briks... let me respond here instead. I hope you consider that Rolci has restated your points accurately - if not, I'll respond directly to your post instead!


We have to separate biological evolution from technology, since they are two separate phenomena with a reciprocal influence on one another; they are not synonymous, and nor does one supersede the other. With technology we may indeed be able to exist anywhere; but this will constitute a change in environment, and evolution will continue to work in that new environment.

You have to think, not in terms of evolution determining environment, but in terms of environment determining evolution. Any change in environment - brought about by ourselves or by nature - will create different needs and pressures for survival, and ultimately these different pressures will differentially favour different genes.


No, absolutely. As you rightly point out, we'd need a long time (at least hundreds of thousands of years) to biologically adapt to such a catastrophic change in environment, assuming there were enough left to do the evolving, as it were. Plus of course, no evolution would happen until the environment had changed.


Again - either of those examples would constitute a considerable environmental change, which would differentially alter our biological requirements. It's true that it would be we who, through technology, had altered the environment; but then evolution would continue in the new environment. We can't escape it, it's a part of life. Think about how those changes to the environment we live in might affect us the way we are now, and then you can see what evolutionary changes might occur. For instance, if we live in subterranean survival bunkers, a few obvious effects would be that our food sources will change, and with it our normal diet and nutritional balance; we'll be deprived of sunlight necessary to produce vitamin D; we'd likely be living in extremely cramped conditions (assuming all six billion of us make it down there); and so on. These changes, and millions of others in that scenario, will affect each individual's chances of successfully reproducing, and this is the very platform upon which natural selection works.


Heh, maybe we will! But again, even though we're changing our very bodies - where there is biological reproduction, there is natural selection, and where there is natural selection, there is evolution.


And again, to answer the question as to whether evolution may still take place or is prohibited under such circumstances, all we need to do is ask: does this technology still allow for the differential selection of different genes? If the answer to one is yes, so is the answer to the other. In this case of course, the answer is yes: there is nothing inherent in the idea of same-gender reproduction which would inhibit the process of evolution, although it may impact upon it, and certainly may alter its trajectory.

None of this, of course is to say that we are entirely at the mercy of evolution, that we could not or should not act against evolutionary trends, nor that in principle there could not come a day when evolution may actually be totally mooted or controlled. It is simply to say that that day is certainly not here yet, and that all of the examples you gave take place against the backdrop of continuing evolution. It's my personal opinion that, left to its own devices, nature is raw and brutal, and the principles of evolutionary theory are certainly not good tenets upon which to base social and ethical rules.


Although this is an oft-cited phenomenon, in fact there is little evidence that recall under hypnosis is any more accurate than recall in a relaxed and focused state (in fact, this should be an unsurprising finding, since most evidence points to the fact that this is precisely what the large part of the hypnotic state is). The only difference in fact between recall under simple relaxation and recall under hypnosis is that - probably as a result of conformity to expectation from a perceived authority - is that in the latter case, subjects are more likely to confabulate (i.e. make stuff up to fill in the gaps) than people who are only relaxed (see the ork of e.g. Elizabeth Loftus). A worrying corollary of this is that sometimes subjects can 'wake up' believing their own recent confabulations, which can, especially when joined with leading questions from a shoddy therapist, lead to 'false memory syndrome'. In some cases, it likely leads to a special type of false memory syndrome called 'past-life regression'. In any case, in neither state is there any evidence for perfect recall.


Agreed


Interesting perspective! Let me restate for the record that I can't explain the memory lady's condition, and that it is evidence, of a sort, for your position on 'perfect memory in all of us'. But I would add that it is by no means anything approaching conclusive evidence, and for you to be able to successfully weigh your opinion against the other evidence which would seem to indicate extremely imperfect memory for the majority or the totality of us, you would need to show that the memory lady does have perfect recall (which as I pointed out has not been demonstrated, as described in the Times article you linked to), and additionally that there is good reason to generalise that finding to the population at large.


Againb, you are, of course, perfectly entitled to that opinion; however, it does remain a faith position at odds with most of the evidence, until shown otherwise.


This absolutely does happen; however, it does not require perfect recall to occur, only a slight disparity between the amount of information taken in compared to the amount which can easily be consciously accessed (which current models of memory of course do permit).


I am ever willing (though quite forgetful), and a good day to you too sir!

But, as I hope I showed, we probably do take in more than we realise, but there is no reason to think that this disparity is infinite, and there are plenty of reasons to think it's not.


I believe I first read that opinion in Aldous Huxley's somewhat mind-blowing and totally amazing The Doors of Perception. Mind you, mind-blowing and totally amazing as Huxley's writing was, it doesn't make it totally factually right


Indeed it would be. But you would imagine, if natural selection had 'bothered' to endow us with the ability for perfect recall in the first place, that even if it's not always occurring at the conscious level as it is claimed to be with the memory lady, such perfect recall would still be accessible, at least on some level or under some circumstances. Or else what would be the point of it? Remember, such faculties never arise through natural selection without carrying a differential survival advantage.

Btw, briks, who on earth is that in your avatar? Trying not to be too ironic, but I remember them from somewhere, long ago! Are they children's characters from the '80s, or did they stalk my nightmares? Or both?

First off, kudos to Nucular for some very insightful and well-worded posts! He has done a good job of explaining why, in evolutionary terms, life is the way we find it. The discussion may, however, have veered away somewhat from the intent of the OP's question which seemed to be not so much "Why is life the way it is? as "Why life at all?" And this is, really, a very good question. Given that I agree with just about everything Nucular has said, I still have to wonder why any of what I consider reality exists for me to be conscious of in the first place. I must, likewise, wonder why I exist to be conscious of it. After all, I can imagine a universe just like this one with the single exception that no one and nothing in it is conscious at all or ever has been or ever will be-basically a universe just like this one except that it does not exist. At least I think I can do this. (I can certainly imagine a universe like this one but in which Germany won WWII. I can certainly imagine a "universe" consisting of nothing more than a two-dimensional Euclidean plane. And I don't think either of these "universes" plays host to any conscious experience. Although who knows? I might be wrong about that.)

On the face of it, it almost seems as if plain old non-existence ought to be the simplest and most natural state of affairs. How/why does it happen that anything goes to the trouble of existing at all? Understandably, this question motivates many people to speculate regarding the "meaning" of life. I don't, myself, know whether there is any such "meaning." But it is a very interesting question-one which does not admit of an answer in scientific terms (as far as I can see, anyway).

its a guy called frank sidebottom, he was like a weird freaky northern childrens tv type guy from like the early 90's ish time on british tv.
he's very sinister looking i agree, thats meant to be his son in the picture as well
he wrote/sung proper awful tunes as well i think.
dont really know why i've got him as my avatar just find him weird, and not quite right, bit like myself. altho i can assure you i bear absoloutly no resemblance to him in real life(i hope!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg5Y2zT-C_Y

man.....thats awful.
he will probably haunt your nightmares from now on.

To answer your question in a philosophical sense, we're all heading towards the same destination, but that's irrelevant what's relevant (at least in my opinion) is how you experience your trip.

Life is a connection of a soul (subject composed from many soft-matter cells into a being that we call a soul) with a material body (subject composed from many coarse-matter cells into a figure that we call a body) in one whole and it's existing in coarse-matter worlds that we call living in it, which is life.

What is life? To live. There you go, any more?

life is.....too short