Humans are the universe looking back at itself?

I quite like the idea.

If you consider consciousness (gazing) the result of some system (a person), there’s no reason the ‘system’ should be considered to stop at the bounds of ‘the person’. You might consider it to include the input and output of ‘the person’, ie ‘the universe’. Hence ‘The universe gazing upon itself’.

Humans are the universe looking back at itself? I don’t like this language either. It implies the universe is thinking through us, which seems to be attributing consciousness to bare matter.

When the Apollo 11 mission sent back that picture of the round blue Earth from space, it created a sense of global consciousness that we hadn’t had before as a species. Sagan, however, went too far … 4 billion miles too far. By viewing Earth from this distance, he reduced it to a speck of dust, and he lost that global consciousness.

The same thing happens when you’re smoking marijuana. One joint and a new world is opened up to you, but if you go that step too far and smoke that extra joint you’ve been saving when you are already stoned, the stone can be lost, and that beautiful world you once had starts shrinking. Sagan smoked one too many joints on that one.

A Merry Christmas to all those that believe, do not believe, think Christmas is humbug, a part of a faith that does not celebrate Christmas and anyone not of any of the above.

There’s a fair bit of talk of arrogance, but when it comes down to the vastness of the universe and the origins no one, however intelligent, truly has the answers, so on that basis it’s just as arrogant to talk of accident rather than design when so much of what we are discovering is deliciously uniform and consistent, and yet uniquely and ingeniously original. I’m sorry to be contrary to you on this, and it’s unlikely I’ll change, or you’ll agree, so I’ll bow out and not add to the tedium.

Devil Drink, it’s been a long time since your name had any power over me! You’ll know that the name of Jesus used well has a far more powerful effect than yours ever will over those who leave your control.

Merry Christmas to those who still believe!

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/12/15/delusional-gods/

Just sayin…

Actually, I generally completely disagree with Devil Drink, and said personage understands this totally, but I have no problem engaging said personage in the spirit of blogdom without trying to fane offence because of the disagreement. A point challenged is either strengthened when it is defended well, or corrected in the right spirit.

I wasn’t aware that tones could be detected on blogs. I can be atonal at times, but nothing condescending or otherwise was intended. By the way, I don’t claim to ‘know better’, I just have an opinion, as do you.

So, PC, Kate, Rebekka, whoever, it’s not on for me to have a different opinion to Shaun and spoil his wonderful contribution by merely pointing out that David had reached exactly the same conclusion as Sagan, but added his wonderment that, despite our smallness, God considered us significant, and that I prefer his version of events?

That’s not it at all. It’s that rather than just disagreeing with Sagan’s version of events, you’re expressing the rather offensive and arrogant view that you feel sorry for him for what you see as missing the truth -
“I’m sad he missed the bigger picture, and guided others into the same void.”

Added to this, I can’t, in your opinion, have the rudeness to make the observation that these marvellous men with their great intellect and observational skills missed the point of the incredible world and worlds they have studied so tenderly, and the connection, not with mere random events, as they espouse, but with an ordered, sophisticated creation, beyond human comprehension.

It’s pretty darn arrogant to assume you and your ilk alone have a grasp of what the “point of the incredible world” is. But as Kate said, it’s the way you’re expressing it – as pity for them for not getting it.

It doesn’t bother me if you think you know better. Lots of people think they know better. It’s just that you can’t say “I respect their views, but I believe this.” Instead, you say, “I know there is more to the universe than this and even though I have no proof I shall pity those men because I believe they are ignorant.”

I guess this rubs my fur the wrong way. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. You don’t need to pity me or Attenborough or Sagan. I don’t feel ignorant or lacking. I don’t mind if you think I am, but it irritates me when you tell me.

Added to this, I can’t, in your opinion, have the rudeness to make the observation that these marvellous men with their great intellect and observational skills missed the point of the incredible world and worlds they have studied so tenderly, and the connection, not with mere random events, as they espouse, but with an ordered, sophisticated creation, beyond human comprehension.

Are we to be in such awe and respect of their great intelligence that we never dare say they may have missed something vital simply because some of us might be lower in the intellectual pecking order? When I watch Attenborough’s programs, I occcassionally have to switch off the sound of his random-order-adoring commentary to appreciate the glory and amazing arrangement and beauty of nature magnificantly displayed by the incredible technology at his disposal. Does this mean I don’t respect his intellect? No! I’ve learned alot from people like him. All I’ve said, hopefully in a nice way, is that I think he’s missed something vital and revealing about our world and the worlds. Mr Sagan wasn’t shy of hinting that Christian intellectuals have missed the point by believing in a Creator, by the way.

I read “Dragons of Eden” as a youngster and thought it brilliant. I haven’t been able to get through all of “The Demon Haunted World” because supernatural booga booga raises my blood pressure.

FaceLift, if you are so certain in your faith why do you feel the need to constantly foist it on others? I suspect supernaturalists who do this obsessively are doing it selfishly: if others can be convinced, their own faith is bolstered.

I think religious people think that nihilism is the only possible response to the idea that your life doesn’t have some predetermined purpose, or that ‘this life’ is all we get. But for me, and what I think Sagan is saying, is that given what we know of the universe and its size and the chances of there being life anywhere else, that what we have is really a gift.

It’s an accidental gift, but it’s still a gift, and we should do our best to treat ourselves and other life with the reverance and awe that it deserves in what is largely a lifeless universe.

This isn’t a void, really, it’s a hugely humbling and profound thought. This is it. This life is all we have. Make it good.

Which leads to the question of what ‘good’ is, and I definitely don’t think ‘good’ is making the earth uninhabitable for our ancestors and doing our best to destroy the majority of other life.

What Sagan is trying to say is that by realizing our place in the cosmos, a humility is achieved that should bring humankind together. Sagan was not diminishing “earthly problems” but pointing out that source of such problems is often petty, localised delusions of importance. Therefore “human kindness and compassion and responsibility” are very significant if all we have is ourselves and this planet.

Compared to the vastness of time and space, my existence is fleeting and of no consequence. But to myself, family friends etc there is great significance in what I and they do.

That make a little more sense?

I have to admit to being unable to follow Carl Sagan’s logic, though the mood of the writing is inspiring. I’m sure it’s my failing not Sagan’s. But I don’t quite get it. Actual space (as opposed to imagined space) doesn’t interest me: that’s part of it. But I sort of think that putting earthly problems (and earthly treasures) into a perspectival relation with the infinite must end up diminishing the earthly, and not just rendering the earthly ego down to a less inflated size, but shrinking it down to nothing. And then that leaves you somewhere breathtaking, but pretty strange.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

This is what really bothers persons who believe that there is some kind of covenant between a deity and humans (or at least a selected group of humans).

What Sagan is saying here is that in the normal course of natural events the speck of space dust we call home will be entirely consumed leaving no evidence at all of our existence, except for a few satellites drifting through interstellar space and re-runs of “I Love Lucy” running in a band that began (our time) in the early 1950s, and ending heaven only knows.

I guess Trifalmadorians across the universe will be able to pick up “I Love Lucy” for the foreseeable future, long after the earth, and eveything that ever lived on it, has been turned into cosmic dust.

And, of course, after this disintegration has happened, the universe will go on as if nothing has happened, which is almost an exactly accurate assumption.

The point is, God won’t close down the universe. The universe will go on.

But if humans really have a covenant with a covenanting God, why would that God bother to keep running the universe after all humans have been pulverised into a floating cloud of their constituent atoms?

So I ask all persons of intelligence: “Would you buy a used covenant from such a God?”

The question answers itself, really.