The Key

[degraded being]

At the risk of presenting babble......
Basic survival? Making sense of things = being able to predict = being able to kill or gather food or not be killed for food; and being able to deal with nature. Is there a point where thinking, for basic physical survival, changes mode and whatever is conceived of as the thinker -at that point, no longer a physical being, but a mind-object or spiritual being (as people like to think of it), now has IT's survival to consider. How IT is to survive depends on psychological/social predictions. On a personal level IT does not know that IT is a mind object and tries to figure out who or what made it and what ITs creator expects. If IT can do that IT can survive - or so it thinks.

Add on. Of course the Thinker-entity/being relates ITself with physical body in lots of ways; sometimes conflicting ways. Scientologists have a self-as-body denial thing (non integration).

 

[Purple Rain]

Purple, I found your comments about the beautiful trees touching. When I was seventeen my father died suddenly. We had an enormous oak in our back yard that I had climbed throughout my childhood. A week or two after my father's death the tree was struck by lightening and killed. It is rare, at least for me, that the universe provides so vivid, apropos and poetic a metaphor. My father was strong and kind and, like that oak tree, seemingly invulnerable. I have to remind myself that no matter how old I get or how battered I become, the world remains young. I try to look to at the world look through the eyes of my children. I like the Bob Dylan line, "He not busy being born is busy dying."

I love that idea - the Dylan one. I'm really sorry about your dad, though, and your oak tree. When I was little I used to be fascinated by the My Grandfather's Clock song - how the clock was so tied into the life of the grandfather. Your oak tree reminds me of that a little bit. Or like how the tree near where little Caylee was resting was struck by lightning.

 

[guanoloco]

Not that Einstein church quote. He never said it.



He did describe himself at times as a pantheist but otherwise I think you are misrepresenting him.



The fact that he was born to irreligious Swiss Jews doesn't actually tell you anything about his religious beliefs.



While tachyons are not precluded by relativity they are not predicted by either relativity or the standard model as far as I am aware. There is no particular reason to assume they actually exist.

Also, you stated the properties of something with mass that was able to accelerate to light speed and noted that it sounded like the properties you would expect God to have. This may be an interesting way to think about God but it doesn't actually tell you that a) something with mass can be accelerated to lightspeed within the universe (which Einstein says it can't), b) god exists or c) god has those properties. This makes it a metaphor rather than a scientific statement.

There is nothing wrong with this. I find mathematics lends itself extremely well to all kinds of religious metaphor.

As an aside, I'm curious as to what your area of science is?

Looks like we'll never get to know...too bad because our resident scientists, Udarnik and Student of Trinity were here and interested.