That is the ineffable mystery of being, no? Where did what we call intelligence - consciousness - the ability to choose action based on something other than rote learning or biological instinct, come from? When did human beings first gain it? Are we the only creatures on Earth, or anywhere in...

Okay, so I watched the video peach suggested, then watched another one by the same guy in which he says time is thought of as a sort of not-really-fully-a-dimension kind of dimension. He then illustrates it as a "building," all the 11 dimensions squares stacked one on the other, with the 4th...

First off, I don't feel any need to convince you of anything. You can choose to think and believe whatever you want as well as I can. Which brings me to my definition of free-will...choice, the ability to choose. Yes, we are conditioned from birth (nurture). Yes, we have a set of inborn...

Forgive me for not reading further on before posting before. Not 1 + 1= 2...exactly. Synergism: 1 + 1 = 3...the sum equals more than the parts. Free will = 1 Determinism = 1 Amalgam = 3

Are you actually serious? Isn't "knowing" having free will? As not "knowing" and leaving "knowing" to those who "know" is not having free will? You can't possibly be serious. You said yourself, your username is a joke.

And I am here positing you are mistaken on that lone point. I am here saying space will still exist and be spacey whether we, conscious beings, the only life we know or can conceive of, exist or not. I'm here saying we, those who exist within and are bound by time, the intellectual construct we...

Agreed, in a sense. I would add neither space nor time exist for you until you experience them. My whole point is that space can exist just fine without anyone there to experience it, but that without anyone to experience space there is no time.

As to the question of predestination or free-will, determinism and its opposite, I have a one word answer: amalgam. I think it, everything, is an amalgam of destiny and free-will. I think, no, I know through personal experience, that destiny can be altered by free-will. And we all know where...

No; I'm positing there is no "actual 'act' of time" but rather there is only change, "the indescribable constantly shifting unmeasurable force," as you put it. I'm positing that that time, therefore, does not actually exist outside of consciousness, that time is an intellectual construct...

Defensive? Really? Is that how you read it? If so, this is a mistaken assumption on your part. It's quite common in internet discussions where, lacking non-verbal cues and such, participants read their own inner foibles into the words of others. I wouldn't feel bad about it if I were you. As to...

None of the above. It was like this...I woke once in the middle of the night; the TV was on; Charlie Rose, on PBS; his guest was a strikingly beautiful, fantastically intelligent, amazingly articulate woman; she was speaking about something I'd never had introduced to my consciousness: brane...

Well, you are some dude declaring himself JesusChrist on a druguser website and she is nothing more than an eminent particle physicist, so yeah, I see your point. I mean, you know all there is to know, right? Nothing was not made but for you and all that? I get it. Pardon me for not digging on...

Branes http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... -of-branes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane_cosmology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Membrane_%28M-Theory%29

Nooo, you created a divergence point and split a new timeline off the old one. Eventually, though, at some point further on, all the timelines reconverge back into one.So no worries. :)

Actually, that's why I responded as I did, so you'd know I have a similar frame of reference. Time travel requires a traveler, an observer. Without an observer, there is no time. What's the grandfather paradox? I know what it is. It's a point of divergence.

Exactly. That's what I'm saying. You can't have acceleration without time. "You" being the observer. Conversely, time can't exist without the observer. I once read that Hawking said somewhere that there's no rational reason we can't "remember" the future as well as the past, like it's a choice...

I posit that time does not exist, that time is nothing more than an intellectual construct employed by consciousness to measure change. In a universe lacking consciousness, a conscious being, ie the observer, nothing would be different from the universe we know. There would still be entropy...

I have developed a quasi-scientific theory about consciousness following the model of electromagnetism. The paper is titled What I Think God Is, but don't let the title and use of the G-word throw you off. What I think God Is It starts with one individual consciousness, which has surrounding...

Once I was listening to music, the Grateful Dead, while doing nitrous. I laid my head back while holding my breath and was transported to another place, it was like a concert, and I was on the stage dancing with another being like me, but we were both all light, colored light, deep-blue in the...

Fascinating conversation going on here. My contribution is to say that it struck me some time ago that the idea of some future awakening of humanity en masse may be unrealistic. It seems to me it's happening just as it should, this more and more people turning on sort of thing, and that even if...