[atari 2600]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

hahahahah! too funny


dreams...

There is no scientific interpretation for why we dream, Rob, only hodgepodge.

Why do you suppose that is? Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. Countless scientists have studied it, and still, to this day, nothing really conclusive. I hardly think my remarks deserve a laugh of mockery, although you're doing pretty well with earning some big laughs with your posts, you know, since you sound like every piss-ant wannabe anarchist I have ever known; you even read the same hippie burn-out new age charlatan conspiracy theory huckster, Robert Anton Wilson, that they did.
But yes, (going back to your posts) it is all about the mammon...the money. That's why I have developed ideas like a consitutional amendment to end repeat terms of office. Haven't read about any of your ideas about how to fix anything. All I've read from you are complaints and grievances against the human race. As an "Instigator," you're of the penny-ante variety.
click for an illustration

The latest theories on dreams offer that studies have shown the humans tend to repair damaged neuroreceptors and connections in dreaming.

But the real phenomenon goes way beyond that.

In orgasm is the little death, as the French say, "Le mort." In near death experiences, people expose their unconscious contents. In silent meditation, unconscious contents can be somewhat grasped. But in sleep, in deep rem cycles, humans have their waking consciousness completely extinguished for a sustained period of time. We spend around a third of our lives in this state.

Obviously, something profound goes on in our dreams. Hawking wrote of "knowing the mind of God." It seems to me that the logical propostion is that we know the mind of God every single time we dream. Our conscious minds cannot remember what we actually dreamed. Instead the dream is assembled into a symbolic language of vague concepts, ideas and images, and most often, never even remembered at all.

So how you could laugh just belies your own ridiculousness. And the thing is, you're one of the more intelligent people here. I really have to stop wasting my time.

As to your propostion about humans and animals, my thoughts follow. Humans are animals. We are a particular type of animal though ("the human animal") that has developed complex thought, speech, the ability to use complex tools, and lastly but not leastly, language.

a formal scientific paper by David Premack:
Is Language the Key to Human Intelligence?
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/conten...y/303/5656/318
(reminds me of Tokolosh's "How old is language" thread.)


Everyone should already know that we are incredibly similar to primates genetically, so what accounts for the huge leap in intelligence (or more correctly stated the possibility for higher intelligence) in humans?
This is a question that has proved difficult to answer for artists, writers, philosophers, psycholgists, poets, research scientists, and theologians alike.
Many seem to feel we are part divine and part animal. There's something to this. Our ability to ponder our own death (although our ego rarely lets us dwell on it very long) and the fact that we have a will (the degree to which our wills are free, of course, is debatable) seems to point towards the notion that we are part-divine, creative beings.

Simply stated, it seems entirely probable that in human reproduction, mates are chosen by too superficial of a value system and a premium is not placed on intelligence. It seems to be the unwritten law of human history that powers that be seek to control women as much as possible and always have and this is perhaps a key reason we have not evolved to a significantly higher level of consciousness than primates.

Let's continue on this point.

Originally Posted by Rob

I think our brains are much much farther beyond animals than our human understanding is.
I think humans are actively trying to catch up while a LOT of humans are actively trying to keep them from doing so.

I am on the side of the former.

those in power support the status quo.

Rob...still raging against that machine, eh?

In the last section, I related postulates concerning why we are different from primates and animals. Let's look at another aspect of this a bit. And this addresses how we have not caught up with how far advanced beyond animals we should be.

In Waking Life, former Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, Robert Solomon, extemporaneously says many brilliant things. Yes, I realize it is only a movie but bear this out; after all, one cannot deny that the man is an esteemed professor in his field. (He died about a year ago. He was a devotee of Kierkegaard like I am.) In the film, he affirms that the two major reasons why consciousness has not evolved are fear and laziness, and Solomon also remarks that there is a bigger differential gap in the intelligence threshold between a person of average intelligence and a genius person than there is between a person of average intelligence and a chimpanzee. There have actually been studies that tend to indicate that his assertion is correct. Ponder that, simians.