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Old 10-07-2018, 09:34 AM
 
Location: Suburb of Chicago
31,848 posts, read 17,504,350 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DorianRo View Post
What do you think?
Eleven pages in with several of us having answered your question.

It's your thread. What do YOU think?
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Old 10-07-2018, 09:46 AM
 
Location: Texas
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I think therefore I exist.
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Old 10-07-2018, 10:03 AM
 
Location: Swiftwater, PA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by VeeGer View Post
That would prove that intelligence only exists in living things. This is what confuses me about reincarnation. Those under study claimed past lives but how was the memories retained?

As a life force we must be more than just energy if we have memories. We must have tremendous memories if we lived for eons. Maybe most is forgotten after so much time. Just like we don't remember everything about our childhood. Maybe our memories is limited for eternity.

Seems that we are a spirit, something that you cannot see, taste, hear or feel until we occupy a physical being such as a cell. It is always a living being and not a rock.

ETA:

I just had a thought. Could we become a tree? Does trees have intelligence? I would say no even though they are alive. I just realized that we are the intelligence and we can occupy any living creature including an ant.

What separate us from others is that we are constantly learning.

Some trees can 'walk' towards sunlight and better soil: BBC - Travel - Trees that can walk up to 20m per year. Do they 'think' or simply respond to the environment? Does the ant think or is only lead by the central intelligence of the queen (does she think)? Regardless they have living cells that permit them to 'decide' or make 'decisions' on the stimulus.

If you pick up a handful of dirt there is a very good chance that some of it was from a living organism. Of course it is only one very small piece of that organism; just a speck. Does that speck of dirt, that could have been a human, think? Think of what happens after death, does the jelly inside our skulls, still think?

Also think of the physical and mental condition of our loved ones in the last moments of their lives. Many have lost all cognitive ability; not to mention physical capabilities. If the moment of death is they way one would continue; do you want to live in pain without a fully functional brain?

Humans cherish life and always want more. We also are not great at taking NO for an answer. So we like to believe in an afterlife or reincarnation - but believing does not prove it's existence. Nobody has truly come back from the dead.
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Old 10-07-2018, 04:10 PM
 
Location: Texas
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An ant has to be an intelligent creature because it fights and it plays as well as work. Decision making could be intelligence but AI proved it otherwise by being learned behavior and stored in memory. The advantage they have is infinite memory.

You don't see robots fight or play football right?

What makes us unique is arts and music. Robots could give a rats ass about it.
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Old 10-07-2018, 05:59 PM
 
Location: Swiftwater, PA
18,755 posts, read 18,018,041 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by VeeGer View Post
An ant has to be an intelligent creature because it fights and it plays as well as work. Decision making could be intelligence but AI proved it otherwise by being learned behavior and stored in memory. The advantage they have is infinite memory.

You don't see robots fight or play football right?

What makes us unique is arts and music. Robots could give a rats ass about it.

Ants have a 'hive' mentality. They do not play; other than the young of some playing dead when attacked.

I was just watching robots fight the other night. For now they have human controllers. But that could easily change in the future. As a matter of fact the small swarming drones our military is working on are programed for the mission even when communications are lost (if I remember correctly).

As far as art and music; who better is better than a robot? It's all about programing and flexibility. There is a tremendous amount of money driving robotics to the next level. At the same time computer are closing in on equaling our human intelligence. Humans are loosing their "uniqueness".

I have one question for you: If you loose all mental ability in your last year of life; would you want to be reincarnated as a vegetable? See; many humans think that the after life will bring them back as somebody they have not been for 30, 40, 50, years or more. They do not picture being brought back as a drooling vegetable or a incapacitated senior in pain. Many feel they will start off fresh as a baby with no recollection of the past life; but how could that happen? In other words, if you are you, are you not the person that died?
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Old 10-07-2018, 07:15 PM
 
Location: Suburb of Chicago
31,848 posts, read 17,504,350 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by fisheye View Post
Ants have a 'hive' mentality. They do not play; other than the young of some playing dead when attacked.

I was just watching robots fight the other night. For now they have human controllers. But that could easily change in the future. As a matter of fact the small swarming drones our military is working on are programed for the mission even when communications are lost (if I remember correctly).

As far as art and music; who better is better than a robot? It's all about programing and flexibility. There is a tremendous amount of money driving robotics to the next level. At the same time computer are closing in on equaling our human intelligence. Humans are loosing their "uniqueness".

I have one question for you: If you loose all mental ability in your last year of life; would you want to be reincarnated as a vegetable? See; many humans think that the after life will bring them back as somebody they have not been for 30, 40, 50, years or more. They do not picture being brought back as a drooling vegetable or a incapacitated senior in pain. Many feel they will start off fresh as a baby with no recollection of the past life; but how could that happen? In other words, if you are you, are you not the person that died?
People who believe in reincarnation, which has now gotten some legitimacy due to research being done at a few universities, know that the real 'you' doesn't die. The real you is your soul (some refer to it as energy). Only the physical vessel used during a physical life dies.

So those of us who believe in reincarnation know that souls do choose to come back as babies and some of them remember that previous life.

I'm simplifying some of this, for the sake of brevity.
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Old 10-07-2018, 08:31 PM
 
Location: Texas
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Right you are and as I said before, you are Joe when alive and when you die, Joe died not you.

What I said about arts and music I meant creativity. Free thinking is what we have, like imaging a castle in the sky. No other creatures can do that.

Now is a human only capable of this? Or is it "me"?
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Old 10-08-2018, 04:32 AM
 
Location: Swiftwater, PA
18,755 posts, read 18,018,041 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MPowering1 View Post
People who believe in reincarnation, which has now gotten some legitimacy due to research being done at a few universities, know that the real 'you' doesn't die. The real you is your soul (some refer to it as energy). Only the physical vessel used during a physical life dies.

So those of us who believe in reincarnation know that souls do choose to come back as babies and some of them remember that previous life.

I'm simplifying some of this, for the sake of brevity.

Do you remember the case of Karen Ann Quinlan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Ann_Quinlan. She was a young woman that was on a crash diet, took Valium and alcohol, went into a coma, and persistent vegetative state for about ten years. As pointed out by Wikipedia: " Quinlan's case continues to raise important questions in moral theology, bioethics, euthanasia, legal guardianship and civil rights." But I feel there is one other point besides all the other very important questions raised by her case: She was a vegetable for one third of her life. Was her "real you" her last ten years of life?

How does a soul "choose" to come back as a baby with no recollection of the past? If a soul grows with the individual; why would it choose to come back as less than what it was a death? But, more than anything, how does a soul think?

My feeling is that many that believe in reincarnation have it confused with genetic memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneti...ry_(psychology). "In psychology, genetic memory is a memory present at birth that exists in the absence of sensory experience, and is incorporated into the genome over long spans of time." It is like watching a group of baby ducks as a bird of prey descends on the group and they all scatter - who taught them to scatter? How did they associate a hawk with danger?
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Old 10-08-2018, 04:35 AM
 
Location: Swiftwater, PA
18,755 posts, read 18,018,041 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by VeeGer View Post
Right you are and as I said before, you are Joe when alive and when you die, Joe died not you.

What I said about arts and music I meant creativity. Free thinking is what we have, like imaging a castle in the sky. No other creatures can do that.

Now is a human only capable of this? Or is it "me"?
We are on the verge of the singularity: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...ing-think.html. What makes us unique today we could share with a machine tomorrow. Or the machine could even be better!
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Old 10-08-2018, 04:49 AM
 
Location: UK
6,908 posts, read 6,818,560 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by VeeGer
Free thinking is what we have, like imaging a castle in the sky. No other creatures can do that.
And you know this...How?

Most of the folks who dont like the idea of reincarnation seem to be missing the points I made in #106 - that the 'evidence' is that some part of us still lives and that Joe or Bill is just a name. We can decide to change our name, so names are just labels for a lifetime which would be a very minute amount of time as far as a lump of energy was concerned.

Some people say that the memory is transfered through the cell and DNA as it is the only physical part but that cannot be so because some kids remember stuff about other families and other races and some even remember lives on other planets too.

It appears from the reported events that some kind of intelligence is available to us outside out physical bodies. Those who do not believe in reincarnation, how do you explain these reports?
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