I'd LOVE to believe in a deity...but....

reply to post by Raelsatu

I don't think so. On the contrary, as we evolve technologically and spiritually/culturally, we will begin to co-relate science with the "supernatural". It's already beginning to happen. I'm not saying you have to believe in the Judaeo-Christian God, Allah, or any specific one. But to make a general statement that you find the notion of any supreme creator as "ludacris", is a very small-minded statement. Please give me your sound logic on why you think a idea of a God is ludacris; I bet you won't be able to.

Because it defies logic,it is impossible, its the stuff of fairytales and legends,a deity created to instill fear into man so they follow certain rules,no different than your parents telling you that santa claus is real(be good or you will get no presents/be good or you will go to hell and rot in the lake of fire for eternity) like a child grows out of that legend, as the human race continues to evolve, we will surely grow out of the biggest con in mans history.
Religion was probably a usefull thing hundreds of years ago, without modern medicines,people needed something to believe in, with death everywhere but now in the first world countries there is no need for it anymore as you can already see more and more people are waking up and dismissing the idea!!!

Lets say for a second God is real,for what reason would he create us,WHY? why would he create murderers/paedos/rapists/disease/earthquakes/floods/starvation etc,what would be the point,if he is real, is this a being we should waste our entire lifes worshiping,i would rather live my life exactly how i want to live it,respect your fellow man,respect all creatures,obey your laws(not all of them),and thats it, you dont need religion!!!!

reply to post by adjensen


I think you limit the options a bit. There could have been a deity that no longer exists. There could have been a deity that was not omnipotent but incredibly powerful. It might not be sheer chance but the only possible way for a universe to form.

I actually grew up in a background of mathematics and physics as my father is a physicist and wanted to go into astrophysics most of my life (odd thing to say when you're 8 and they ask you what you want to be when you grow up). I ended up settling on film because...well, I love it. Anyway, that aside...

I think there are a plethora of options for this universe, some that we have yet to or are currently unable to think of.

I do respect your input and politeness as always. It's good to have a reasoned tone amongst the screaming.

Originally posted by AQuestion
reply to post by adjensen

 

Dear Adjensen,

There is a person who posted a thread titled, "What is reality, a new documentary..." He watched a video on quantum physics and had some questions. I tried as best I could to explain it; but, your understanding of physics may assist him. Please consider finding his thread and giving your perspective. Be well.

I found it, and I think you replied to him rather well. I didn't watch the documentary, for lack of time, I'll try to get to it later, but I'm familiar with the "holographic universe" notion, and my take away from that is that it requires a radically different perspective, entirely, and once you've adopted that, it kind of no longer matters what is being proposed, because it can all work, it can all be "proven", and there's no way to differentiate between competing proposals. At this point, for me anyway, it seems more a matter of philosophy than physics.

Sorry to hijack the thread there, Madness, back to business.

reply to post by SimonPeter


As ridiculously off-topic as this is...I guess I'm going to have to respond because it's not being taken down as off-topic. It's also a ridiculously easy post to answer to, the whole thing is a massive straw man.

Originally posted by SimonPeter
reply to post by madness mysoul

 

Surely this question should haunt you . How did life ever start when a single celled amoeba has more DNA information than your cells .

Well, it's probably because a single celled amoeba (are there any other kinds of amoeba?) wasn't the first life form.

RNA DNA has not even been theorised to assimilate itself on some sterile rock

You're right, it's been theorized to have formed in the oceans.

and then insert itself in a living cell that doesn't exist either

...nobody is saying that it was inserting itself into living cells...

and then multiply and these cells become nerve cells , muscle cells etc. and stay together and learn to function as an organism , survive harsh environments and then branch off into different mutations to become you .

You're acting like things have to go from non-life to life to complex life to human life all in one go. It's a lot more gradual than that.

The question is not how you were created but how was life began on a rock that was red hot and sterile .

No...not at all. Anyone studying abiogenesis would know that it would have taken place in the seas not 'on a rock that was red hot and sterile'.

If you say that a spore came through space or an alien set up life on earth, how did he come to exist .

I'm opposed to the idea of panspermia as it does beg the question of where the alien life came from.

Yet you will digest theory about anything convenient that man puts forth .

Nope, I'll only accept the ideas that are based in evidence.

Convenient meaning you don't have to answer to a God , when your dead your dead theory .

Nope. I'd accept the idea of a deity were there evidence for it. I simply cannot find enough evidence to bring myself to believe in the idea.

You were dead before you were alive .

Well, I didn't exist. Life proceeds death. You cannot be dead until you have lived.

Science states that you cannot destroy energy only change its state of being .

Ok..and?

Doctors are starting to believe that the conscious goes on even when the brain ceases to function .

Which doctors where? Are you implying that consciousness is a form of energy? It isn't, it's a function of brain matter.

What do we actually know about these matters ?

Quite a bit. There are whole fields of study dedicated to consciousness.

How can we really say God does not exist ?

You're clearly not reading any of my posts. I'm not saying any specific deity doesn't exist, I'm saying I see no evidence to believe such a being exists. You are the one asserting a positive position, that a deity exists. You have not provided any evidence for it.

Originally posted by madnessinmysoul
I think there are a plethora of options for this universe, some that we have yet to or are currently unable to think of.

Absolutely! As I said, I come back to the Christian God because I am a Christian, but as you know, my belief is that we don't know or understand a fraction of what God truly is. Old white guy with a beard in the clouds? Works for Sunday School, I suppose, but it's hardly a reasonable description of something eternal, in existence outside of existence, and incomprehensible.

I woke up this morning with an idea for a thread running through my mind, and I'm still debating whether it merits one or not. But it stems from the basic notion that we seem to be very good at answering the question "how", but just as good at ignoring the question "why", and I think that's a mistake.

As an example, why do living things die from aging? Well, they die from aging because many of their cells die from apoptosis and can only be replicated a set number of times due to the Hayflick Limit, and that is a factor of telomere shrinkage, and there we stop. Biology has provided with a good explanation of the "how", but no "why". It is contrary to natural selection -- an immortal cell, or a complex being made up of immortal cells, would obviously have a tremendous advantage and unlimited opportunity to pass the trait down. And such cells do exist -- cancer, for example, is an immortal cell, and bacteria are cellularly immortal.

So the question becomes "why"? There seems to be a rule in our observed reality that higher beings have limited life spans, and they are pretty short ones. Why? This doesn't have to point to "intelligent design", or really to anything, but one has to ask oneself, "Why?"

Newton's First Law of Thermodynamics is eternal -- it existed before Newton discovered it, it will exist forever. It is the same here on Earth as it is on a planet in a galaxy two billion light years away. That's the "how". But why? Why can energy never be created or destroyed? Why does this law underlie the fabric of the Universe? Why this law, and not some other?

The easy answer, "that's just the way it is, if the laws were different then the Universe would be different" is no answer at all, of course. And I don't know that there is one, but these are the sorts of questions and musings that led me to the conclusion that my hunt for a reality that existed without God inevitably brought me right back to him.

I know that some people sit in a corner and pray fervently that God will send them a message, or a sign, or show himself, and when nothing happens, as it inevitably does not, they give up and determine that there is nothing there. They don't lose faith, because I don't think that they had it in the first place.

I believe that God (whatever he works out to be) reveals himself to us all, Madness. For some, it is in the beauty of a sunrise or a flower's petals. For others, the soft smile of a child or the tears of a loving parent. For me, it was in a mathematical equation, the solution to which had me ask myself, for the first time, "why"?

I do respect your input and politeness as always. It's good to have a reasoned tone amongst the screaming.

Likewise, my friend, likewise.

Originally posted by madnessinmysoul
reply to post by Kailassa

 

The nature of personal opinion is never scientific...well, unless you want me to hook myself up to an MRI. And this isn't an extraordinary claim. I can even point to the sort of deity I'd most not mind: a semi-interventionist deistic deity. By semi-interventionist I mean it interferes in big events like earthquakes and tsunamis, not day-to-day things.

The statements, "I have a certain opinion," and, "I know god exists," are similar in that the existance of god can no more be proven by scientific means than the existance of your opinion can. The truth of these situations can only be known by personally experiencing them.

Some people who have not experienced god have faith that such experience is possible anyway, some have open minds, and some believe such a thing is impossible. However to one who has had such experience, what we can know in the earthly reality is such a small part of what is, that we are all so near to being blind there is no significant difference between us.

Originally posted by adjensen

As an example, why do living things die from aging? Well, they die from aging because many of their cells die from apoptosis and can only be replicated a set number of times due to the Hayflick Limit, and that is a factor of telomere shrinkage, and there we stop. Biology has provided with a good explanation of the "how", but no "why". It is contrary to natural selection -- an immortal cell, or a complex being made up of immortal cells, would obviously have a tremendous advantage and unlimited opportunity to pass the trait down. And such cells do exist -- cancer, for example, is an immortal cell, and bacteria are cellularly immortal.

So the question becomes "why"? There seems to be a rule in our observed reality that higher beings have limited life spans, and they are pretty short ones. Why? This doesn't have to point to "intelligent design", or really to anything, but one has to ask oneself, "Why?"

The world keeps changing. For a species to survive, it must be able to adapt to the changing world. A bunch of creatures which lived forever could not adapt genetically, and they could not keep reproducing because they would extinguish their food supply.

Having older organisms die off and be continually replaced with new versions, each one unique because of the combination of the mechanics (on our genes) of sexual reproduction and the mutations our genes inevitably undergo means there is a constantly changing pool of new types entering the "survive and reproduce" lottery. So the "fittest" genotypes survive as the basis for the future species pool and this process is repeated over and over, allowing species to change drastically over periods of hundreds of millions of years.

None of this would be possible if we had eternal life as physical beings.

Besides, when you know something is temporary it becomes much more precious.
The moments in my life when it's seemed I was about to die have been the times when I have gained insight into who I am, what I'm capable of, and what unseen strength is there to call on.

Originally posted by Kailassa
The world keeps changing. For a species to survive, it must be able to adapt to the changing world. A bunch of creatures which lived forever could not adapt genetically, and they could not keep reproducing because they would extinguish their food supply.

This is a great argument for why this shouldn't happen, but doesn't explain why it hasn't happened. Natural selection is not intelligent -- it doesn't make decisions about whether something is a good idea or not, or whether it benefits the species or just the individual. If an immortal creature existed, assuming that the trade off wasn't sterility (which would raise another "why"? ) its longevity would clearly result in that trait becoming dominant.

Besides, when you know something is temporary it becomes much more precious.
The moments in my life when it's seemed I was about to die have been the times when I have gained insight into who I am, what I'm capable of, and what unseen strength is there to call on.

I don't disagree, and don't get me wrong -- I'm not arguing the merits of immortality. I'm simply saying that there is a question to be considered in the observation that immortal cells do exist, but not in a way that has resulted in an immortal higher level species (apart from speculation about these guys.) I don't think that one specific area of questioning would have much impact on one's perspective, but it's the overall process of going beyond the "how" that I think has value.

reply to post by sykickvision


The subject is actually how did I come to be ! There is no way with the discovery of DNA that life started from a lifeless steril rock , so there must have been a beginning where life on earth was created on purpose by a super natural being . Accidental life is as hard to rationalize as the existence of God . Scientist try to create a scenario where they believe life could have started and then they throw a billion years in to increase their probability . The problem there is the life extinguishing cataclysms that the earth suffers with some regularity .
Evolution is still a theory . Mutations are a fact . Animals that are in danger of extinction have not been found to have started to evolve to adapt and survive . Mutants are not known to reproduce as far as I know . With the diversity of life early on ,it would be easy to put together a fossil record that would seem to prove evolution . Lets take a fossil of a dwarf , a pigmy from South America , as well as people from Latin America , Africa and Europe . You could develope an idea of man evolved . Yet they all lived at the same time .

If I could say a few words about the Hayflick Limit. While the phenomenon places a true upper bound on the number of replications, it is not necessarily a tight upper bound on the number of viable replications.

It is entirely possible that simple "copying errors" may have crept in long before the Hayflick Limit is reached. Copying error as such is physically inevitable. There is no such thing as an immortal cell; changes will accumulate, some will not be reversed correctly, and eventually the mistakes will kill you.

Life is a single elimination tournament. The laws of theromodynamics, which govern all chemical reactions, including DNA copying, bite. You can't win, you can't break even, and you will leave the game.

There is simply no selective pressure to "correct" any "problem" that the individual will probably have died before the problem becomes salient. The DNA copying mechanism has the fidelity it has. No survival or reproductive advantage necessarily accrues to individuals who develop a telomere repair system. There is a considerable reason to think the opposite. Cancer cells often repair their telomeres.

It is possible that the Hayflick Limit is not merely a phenomenon, but a mechanism, that it actually promotes the transmission of genes, by making the youngsters better able to kill their parents to make room for themselves. There is a certain grandeur to that idea, and it may even be true, but it has the look and feel of a "just so" story.

Since the Hayflick Limit phenomenon itself raises no special puzzle within a natural selection regime, it is maybe safest to leave it as a phenomenon, rather than promote it to mechanism, until more evidence arrives.

BTW, if it were a mechanism, then that would summon up image of life as the (quasi-)intentional union of creation and destruction, feeding upon while being fed upon. That is the Dance of Shiva. If the OP would really love to believe in a deity, then believe in that one, because the Dance of Shiva is a documentary.

reply to post by madnessinmysoul


Have you come to a conclusion of what would qualify as "evidence" for you to believe? I speak from a Christian perspective you well know, but even when Christ was doing miracles in front of people most of them refused to believe. Just curious, what is your litmus test?

Good thread Madness.

reply to post by eight bits


Thanks for the more insightful look into Hayflick. As I've said before, I'm not well versed in biology and chemistry -- I think that my Asperger's brain tends towards maths and physics because of all those laws and proofs and stuff. It seems more reliable and less arbitrary

One thing that I'll note is that there are a lot of "whys" buried in there. Copying error is inevitable -- why? The Universe would be a dull place if that were not the case, of course, but that's not a good answer. What if it just happened less often, or more? Does the reason for your answer "why" apply universally? In billions of years of life on Earth, is it utterly impossible that a species could have evolved with this characteristic? Could it be different on another planet?

I'll again point out that I don't think that any "why" necessarily leads to anything, nor need it. This isn't a "God of the Gaps" sort of thing -- my belief about God isn't predicated on whether a question has an answer or not, because I don't think it matters. It just got my mind moving in the direction away from being satisfied in knowing "how", because, as a non-fundamentalist, I don't think that God has a whole lot to do with the "how".

It's sort of like the Drake Equation and Fermi Paradox. Brilliant notions that start with an observation, which seems to be born out, and then leave the "why" out there for you to chew on. One looks at Drake's numbers, and then at Fermi's conclusion and inevitably says "yeah, that is kind of weird. Wonder why?" and that opens up a whole Pandora's Box of musing. Is Drake simply wrong? Do civilizations naturally implode? Are the UFO claimants right? Is the "Rare Earth" hypothesis more reasonable than the "Mediocrity Principal"?

I have no idea, but you don't look up at the night sky quite the same way after you've spent time with that "why".

BTW, if it were a mechanism, then that would summon up image of life as the (quasi-)intentional union of creation and destruction, feeding upon while being fed upon. That is the Dance of Shiva. If the OP would really love to believe in a deity, then believe in that one, because the Dance of Shiva is a documentary.

I'm interested, do you have a link to something about this? Googling "Dance of Shiva" returns a lot of yoga instructors' sites

Never would I suspect you of God-of-the-gaps thinking, Brother Adj.

But why is a bottomless pit, isn't it?

For the gloominess of the laws of thermodynamics, the answer seems to reside at the border of physics and metaphysics. There are more ways to be average than exceptional, often fabulously many more ways. And so there is a tendency for matter to find itself in the average condition among the possible conditions for the temperature it is at. So many more of the open doors lead to the average than lead to anywhere else.

The average condition at room temperature for the material typing this reply is a homogenized mass of moist goo, in which are suspended bits of hair and bone. Every departure from that required an expenditure of energy to attain, and much of it requires an ongoing expenditure of energy to maintain.

That energy has to come from somewhere, and needs to be coverted to maintain my form as me. What converts the energy to maintain my form needs something to convert energy to maintain its form, which needs something to convert energy to maintain its form...

We simply are not getting out of this alive .

Or, as a plumber once remarked to me about washerless faucets, What rubs, wears. And what we are made of are things that rub, and it's things that rub, all the way down.

Dance of Shiva: Although this will probably sound like something by another yoga instructor, these essays were very influential in many academic people's thinking about the subject in the century just past:

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Siva (New York, 1917).

www.archive.org...

Especially, the third dance described in the essay entitled The Dance of Siva, whose description begins on page 57.

Hope that helps.

Originally posted by eight bits
But why is a bottomless pit, isn't it?

Indeed it is, and that's my point. It is one thing to sit about, look at the mechanics of the world, harumph and declare that all is known and what you see is what you get, quite another to open oneself up to the notion that, even when all is explained, if the explanations hold their own mysteries, then nothing has really been resolved.

Thanks for the link, I enjoyed that passage. Ever since I read Paramhansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi, gosh, going on twenty five years ago, I've liked the Hindu view on things. Maybe it was just him, or his descriptions of the various yogis and Sri Yukteswar, but it just seemed... less stuffy and more lighthearted than anything else I'd seen before or since. I determined, ultimately, that it wasn't my path, but I still appreciate it.

Originally posted by adjensen

Originally posted by Kailassa
The world keeps changing. For a species to survive, it must be able to adapt to the changing world. A bunch of creatures which lived forever could not adapt genetically, and they could not keep reproducing because they would extinguish their food supply.

This is a great argument for why this shouldn't happen, but doesn't explain why it hasn't happened. Natural selection is not intelligent -- it doesn't make decisions about whether something is a good idea or not, or whether it benefits the species or just the individual. If an immortal creature existed, assuming that the trade off wasn't sterility (which would raise another "why"?

) its longevity would clearly result in that trait becoming dominant.
. . . .
I'm simply saying that there is a question to be considered in the observation that immortal cells do exist, but not in a way that has resulted in an immortal higher level species (apart from speculation about these guys.) I don't think that one specific area of questioning would have much impact on one's perspective, but it's the overall process of going beyond the "how" that I think has value.

- Turritopsis medusae have gained a type of immortality by periodically reverting to an infantile state. I can't see periodic reversion to the fetal state being a practical measure for humans.
- Stem cells are only immortal until they differentiate.
- The other immortal cells found in higher lifeforms are commonly known of as cancer.

Evolution is driven by natural selection.
The deciding factor in natural selection is the number of copies of a gene sequence which are propagated hrough the community. It's not about the survival of the individual; it's about the survival of the gene sequences. Gene sequences which spread, influence the future characteristics of the group.

The survival of your genetic code not only depends on you passing it on, it also depends on your descendants passing it on. If a group develop extended lifespans, they are likely to put off reproduction until later in life, and not have so many children. (The less likely a woman's children are to survive, the more children she is likely to give birth too.) With fewer children and extended lifespans, the children are likely to be carefully cared for.
So fewer copies of that group's chromosomes will be passed on per year, and the descendants may become genetically inferior thanks to having less harsh lives. Thus the resultant behaviour changes could cause natural selection to select against greatly extended longevity.

Another factor mitigating against selection for longevity is that, during much of the early evolution of the higher species, life has been so filled with violence that few have had the opportunity to experience old age anyway, and nature does not "confer gifts" which are not used.


The main mechanism of aging, the deterioration of the protective telomere strands at the ends of chromosomes, is counteracted to some extent by telomerase, an enzyme which adds repeats of a gene sequence to the ends of the telomere strands. More telomerase means slower aging, but it also means a higher disposition to cancer. One experiment on giving extra telomerase to mice managed to slow aging significantly, but did not enhance survival. It just meant the mice died of cancer instead of old age.

So it could be there is no way to evolve the ability to live longer, and natural selection has already reached the best possible compromise between extended youth and cancer susceptibility.


Remember, there is no way nature can select for a trait which affects the person after they have reproduced unless that trait enhances the ability of the descendants to pass on the genetic code.

This is probably why women experience menopause and tend to out-live men. The existence of experienced women in the group who were no longer taken up with courtship and child-rearing meant there was a pool of people to call on who could care for the tribe's babies, and help the young mothers. This would have aided in the survival of the childen, enabling more of the women's descendants and close relatives to survive to pass her genes on.

With an eye on topic-observance, a small explanation: I will use philosophy of science with the aim of 'evidence of evidence'.

Science relates to a structured cosmos by defining its own scientific structure, used for producing 'maps' of cosmos. Furthermore can science calibrate itself according to its growing 'map' of cosmos. Such a recent calibration has led to some fascinating speculations centered round the double split experiment/Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, where the scientific conceptual cornerstones 'causality' and 'subject-object' have become more elastic than formerly.

A kind of unified theory on subject-object has been suggested in the form of a holographic universe; a quite functional idea, but often leading to an extreme of 'anything goes'.

On the lines of causality I'm not aware of any formal approach (except maybe chaos-theory). The causality elasticity often degenerates into extreme claims of 'the miraculous'.

Simplistic theistic argumentation usually claim 'anything goes' and 'the miraculous' in various forms.

But then on the other hand science isn't quite housebroken either. A small detour into cartesian philosophy. "I think, therefore I am". Hmmmm, why not: "I drink, therfore I am"; or just "I ?, therefore I am". Or going to the 'subject-object' uncertainty with no fixed 'I' just: "Am". Existence = existence.

In the holographic universe model 'existence' usually is called awareness/consciousness. Madnessinmysoul has in a post referred to consciousness from a reductionist perspective: It's the outcome of a physical reality. That's ofcourse a quite acceptable way of considering it from the inside of the scientific structure.

Though from the edge of the scientific structure, in a possible holographic universe consciousness/awareness is a basic, autonom phenomenon.

In the meetings between what's well inside the scientific structure/scientific map and that which is at the edge (but I must emphasize, STILL being scientific legitimate, though at the edge) there will be claims of 'burden of proof' in opposite directions.

The above is a Pandora's box, where every step can be debated to greater extent; I'll just use it as a basis for 'evidence of evidence' at the edge, but it does not imply a criticism of science on its own established ground.

Interestingly enough, Buddhism and Hinduism have been obeservant on this situation for a very long time.

reply to post by Kailassa


Thanks, Kailassa, I always appreciate your insights.

The survival of your genetic code not only depends on you passing it on, it also depends on your descendants passing it on. If a group develop extended lifespans, they are likely to put off reproduction until later in life, and not have so many children.

This is true, but it presupposes knowledge of one's immortality and the ability to make decisions based on that knowledge. Even setting such self-awareness or intelligence aside, if such an immortal being came into the gene pool, by sheer longevity, they would logically dominate it, passing down the immortality (if it is hereditary,) until the entire species exhibited it. They wouldn't think about it, because it would just be a curiosity, at first -- this guy doesn't seem to get any older. Hmmm. His kids don't seem to get any older, either. Maybe I should have a kid with him.

In our society, today, yes, I think that you're quite right. But among sharks, canaries, trilobites, Neanderthals, and so forth, I don't think that it would come into play. That it doesn't seemed to have happened, without an apparent reason, that's just an interesting thing to note.

The main mechanism of aging, the deterioration of the protective telomere strands at the ends of chromosomes, is counteracted to some extent by telomerase, an enzyme which adds repeats of a gene sequence to the ends of the telomere strands. More telomerase means slower aging, but it also means a higher disposition to cancer.

See, there's your "why" in this (well, one of them.) Cancer seems a counterbalance to aging. Why? Naked mole rats don't seem to ever get cancer, yet they're not immortal, which seems contradictory. Why?

I don't mean to say that there are not answers for these, and all other questions that one might come up with. There probably are, and even if there is no known answer, as I said before, it doesn't really demonstrate anything other than that there's a lot of stuff that we don't know about, and likely never will.

It's just that, for me, it was the sort of exercise that got me to set aside the blinders of "if it isn't rational, repeatable or measurable, it's not relevant." Once I did that, things changed, and I started to think about God (or maybe, if you don't like the title, "being",) in a different manner, and that's where the connection finally happened.

As an anecdotal observation, I'm currently in Texas for a few weeks. I was having a difficult time with -30F temps in the tundra, so I tossed Oscar in the car and drove down here. This morning, as I was walking him through a nearby park, I suddenly started feeling like Patti was with me, and that started me thinking about where she's at, and how all of that stuff works.

When I got back to the house I'm renting, I sat down to my morning devotional (online here) and was struck by its applicability, given what I'd felt earlier. As I mulled that over, my Macbook Pro, sitting next to my other computer, came out of sleep for some reason, and the screen saver, which is the MacOS "Word of the Day" thing, started up, and almost all of the words had some similar connection -- exogamy (Patti and I were a Catholic/Protestant couple), arian (the early Christian heresy), pontiff (should be obvious), irremissible (something unforgivable). (The fifth word, "bombast", probably applies to me, though not in the same way )

This, of course, doesn't mean anything -- it can be explained away in a lot of different ways, particularly if someone doesn't think that it could mean anything beyond simple chance. But, for me, it's something more than a coincidence or synchronicity, because it's merely another observation in many years of them.

reply to post by adjensen

The bits of your post I'm not replying to are the bits I agree with, but that does not mean I disagree with the rest.

Cancer seems a counterbalance to aging. Why? Naked mole rats don't seem to ever get cancer, yet they're not immortal, which seems contradictory. Why?

Pink turds with teeth, aka Naked Mole Rats, have 2 genes, P16 and P27, which kill off cells when too many grow in too small a space. These are super-effective at eliminating cancers before they can grow large, with P16 kicking in at an earlier stage of tumor growth than P27 does. Humans have just one of these, P27. It could be that primates never evolved P16, or it could be the primate body type is different in a way which would make p16 fatal to us.

I noticed the Naked Mole Rat has a queen bee type breeding mechanism. Only the queen bee rat of the colony is fertile. with a male rat becoming fertile at a time of her choosing. I wonder if P27 has a negative effect on fertility, and would kill off the germ cells in other types of animals. This would explain why we don't have it.

if such an immortal being came into the gene pool, by sheer longevity, they would logically dominate it, passing down the immortality (if it is hereditary,) until the entire species exhibited it. They wouldn't think about it, because it would just be a curiosity, at first -- this guy doesn't seem to get any older. Hmmm. His kids don't seem to get any older, either. Maybe I should have a kid with him.

Within humans there is a lot of variation in both cancer resistance and life-span. My own blood relatives have been exceptionally long lived, mostly active into their nineties, and I know of only one person in my large extended family who has had cancer. This has made me curious about extended longevity, wondering if there are not other families in which much longer lifespans have evolved. Considering the hatred humans seem to have for anyone distinctly out of the ordinary, it could be that such people would never reveal their birthdates, and would periodically "die" and then set themselves up as one of their own descendants. I'm not suggesting this is likely, but there is no way to know it has not happened.

It's just that, for me, it was the sort of exercise that got me to set aside the blinders of "if it isn't rational, repeatable or measurable, it's not relevant." Once I did that, things changed, and I started to think about God (or maybe, if you don't like the title, "being",) in a different manner, and that's where the connection finally happened.

The most important happenings in my life have been very personal experiences, not events which could be recorded and shared. I love science because it's an adventure of discovery, and I've loved adventures of discovery in non-scientific areas too. An "odd" childhood has meant that for me the barrier between this reality and another has always been thin, and I'm quite content to walk with a foot on each side.

I suddenly started feeling like Patti was with me, and that started me thinking about where she's at, and how all of that stuff works.

I know that feeling.
I found a way to test it out, to see if it could be more than pure imagination or longing.

For several years I had a good friend in America, who I never got to meet. We both played the same online game, and developed an intense empathy. Sometimes we would "think" a hug to each other, and we realised we both felt these hugs, almost as though the other person was really there. So we tried not telling each other when we were giving hugs, but writing down when we gave them and when we felt we were receiving them, and emailing these times to each other at the same (world) time. We found our times mostly corresponded.

So I would not be at all surprised if the presence you feel really is Patti.