what do you believe is true but cannot prove?

[Celebration]

Oh I have been having fun with what lots of scientists do with this question from the World Question Center 2005--

http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_4.html

Strangely, I believe that cockroaches are conscious. That is probably an unappealing thought to anyone who switches on a kitchen light in the middle of the night and finds a family of roaches running for cover. But it's really shorthand for saying that I believe that many quite simple animals are conscious, including more attractive beasts like bees and butterflies.

I can't prove that they are, but I think in principle it will be provable one day and there's a lot to be gained about thinking about the worlds of these relatively simple creatures, both intellectually—and even poetically. I don't mean that they are conscious in even remotely the same way as humans are; if that we were true the world would be a boring place. Rather the world is full of many overlapping alien consciousnesses.

The above is from Alun Anderson, editor of New Scientist

Lots of interesting answers here.

From a Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist (I particularly like this)

The world of our daily experience—the world of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds—is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm. Indeed the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not. For the point of an interface, such as the windows interface on a computer, is simplification and ease of use. We click icons because this is quicker and less prone to error than editing megabytes of software or toggling voltages in circuits. Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival.

If this is right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant of minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory of consciousness, no theory that explains how mindless matter or energy or fields could be, or cause, conscious experience. There are, of course, many proposals for where to find such a theory—perhaps in information, complexity, neurobiology, neural darwinism, discriminative mechanisms, quantum effects, or functional organization. But no proposal remotely approaches the minimal standards for a scientific theory: quantitative precision and novel prediction. If matter is but one of the humbler products of consciousness, then we should expect that consciousness itself cannot be theoretically derived from matter. The mind-body problem will be to physicalist ontology what black-body radiation was to classical mechanics: first a goad to its heroic defense, later the provenance of its final supersession.

But there is something here for everyone!!

[Frederik]

1. Thanks for the link

I bookmarked it for later reading.

[pretzel4gore]

2. marijuana cures seasickness (motion)

the MAN knew that, yet allowed hundreds/thousands of soldiers sailors to suffer seasickness while shipping overseas during war 2....because marijuana grows like weed, it cannot be controlled and the alcohol, drug industry and textile industry all pressed to have pot made illegal....

[DemExpat]

3. Thanks for this link......some great reading

of fascinating ideas.


Thanks,

DemEx

[Jim Sagle]

4. 911 was an inside job. So was anthrax.

[Swede]

5. Thank you for the great post.

Lots of interesting stuff that I will be reading for the next while.

[Celebration]

6. not the post, but the site

It is really fascinating. It just gives an idea on how people's minds work.

A couple of short answers

"I believe nothing to be true (clearly real) if it cannot be proved."

Maria Spurupulu, physicist

"True love."

David Buss psychologist

Numbers that are exact powers of two are 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 and so on. Numbers that are exact powers of five are 5, 25, 125, 625 and so on. Given any number such as 131072 (which happens to be a power of two), the reverse of it is 270131, with the same digits taken in the opposite order. Now my statement is: it never happens that the reverse of a power of two is a power of five.

The digits in a big power of two seem to occur in a random way without any regular pattern. If it ever happened that the reverse of a power of two was a power of five, this would be an unlikely accident, and the chance of it happening grows rapidly smaller as the numbers grow bigger. If we assume that the digits occur at random, then the chance of the accident happening for any power of two greater than a billion is less than one in a billion. It is easy to check that it does not happen for powers of two smaller than a billion. So the chance that it ever happens at all is less than one in a billion. That is why I believe the statement is true.

Freeman Dyson, physicist

Morphogenetic fields are not fixed forever, but evolve. The fields of Afghan hounds and poodles have become different from those of their common ancestors, wolves. How are these fields inherited? I believe, but cannot prove, that they are transmitted by a kind of non-local resonance, and I have suggested the term morphic resonance for this process.

The fields organizing the activity of the nervous system are likewise inherited through morphic resonance, conveying a collective, instinctive memory. The resonance of a brain with its own past states also helps to explain the memories of individual animals and humans.

Rubert Sheldrake, biologist

[Caution]

7. Off-topic

This topic does not pertain to science. Just because scientists have been (and are routinely) asked this question does not make it a question which relates to the sciences. This topic is better suited to General Discussion. Where one of these items is actually studied using the scientific method then it becomes a viable topic and an item for disucssion. As framed currently this topic is simply an invitation to throw out the wildest conjectures (as evidenced by the post regarding 9/11 which has nothing whatsoever to do with science)

*note that I do not discount the gentleperson's view on 9/11, I just stated that the proper place for that post is the 9/11 forum or general discussion, certainly not Science).

[Ian David]

13. Yeah, maybe we should move it to GD or Skepticism?

Considering this is a thread for un-proven and possibly un-provable ideas, posting something in this thread is acknowledging that an idea is far-fetched and/or unlikely.

At least if it continues in the spirit in which it seems to be intended, I don't see it erupting into a flame war.

[Caution]

27. Oh yeh? I believe that Cat Expressionism is an attempt to

bilk the unsuspecting public into buying more paint and art supplies! The Art supply industry cabal is insidious and evil in their machinations and are secretly attempting to undermine the feline population by giving them dirty paws! These poor felines unwittingly fall into this nefarious plot by attempting to clean their paws! Unfortunately for these poor feline souls, their human companions see this cleansing mechanism as an artist expression (rather than a true expression of "my freakin paws are dirty again dammit!") Thus the cycle continues. Where will it all end I ask? where?

Flame away.!

[Ian David]

30. How convenient. n/t

[htuttle]

8. Interesting read -- I'll throw out one of my own unproved beliefs

I think the biosphere is conscious.

I don't know if the biosphere is sentient. I don't know how I would ever know that, or how to define what it would have to do to be sentient. What I mean by 'conscious' is that it's valid to look at the biosphere as a single being we are merely a part of. Since each 'level' of biological organization (proteins -> cells -> organisms -> biosphere) seems to be more 'conscious' than the one below it, it stands to reason (to me) that the biosphere may be more 'conscious' than we as organisms are. Why would it stop with us?⁽¹⁾

I think we can't see that easily, because we're not only inside of it -- we're a part of it's consciousness. One of your brain neurons, if it possessed sufficient cognitive ability to ask the question, would find it very difficult to formulate a concept for 'you' as a whole. Yet that neuron's apparently meaningless chatter to other neurons ("Hi there! Pass it on!") is a critical part of what makes your thoughts.

I don't think there is anything traditionally 'supernatural' going on -- there's no 'ether' and no 'astral level of existence'. However, I also believe there is a lot of chemical communication going on, both intra and inter-species, that escapes our notice (and our science, to date).

I do think that the main reason we look at life as we do (organism-centric) is that we are organisms. If you look at Earth from space, the life on it it appears to be one very complicated being made up of lots of smaller beings that is capable of altering it's environment for it's own benefit (compare the atmosphere 3 billion years ago to today). You could actually use that same description for human life -- a complicated being made of many smaller 'beings' all cooperating to create a 'person'.

There isn't really a single species on Earth that can survive outside of it's "host" (in the vacuum of space), any more than any one of our individual cells could survive for long outside our bodies. However, since we are organisms ourselves, that's where we draw the line determining 'separate beings' -- at the organism level.

Ultimately, it's a problem of pattern recognition.

But I can't prove it. Yet.


Thanks again for the thought-provoking link.


⁽¹⁾ What is the difference between 'consciousness' and 'sentience'? I'd define 'consciousness' as possessing a library of responses to different stimuli. The size of the library is the degree of consciousness. 'Sentience' is much harder for me to define. I would try to say it's the ability to examine and purposefully modify one's own 'response library'. And yes -- that definition would probably categorize lot of humans as 'conscious but pre-sentient'...Doesn't mean they are not valid persons -- it means they are living in a dream world, so to speak.

[Celebration]

9. Thanks for that!!

I believe, but cannot prove, that the next frontier in science, and the next breakthroughs in science, will be in the field of consciousness-- both individual and collective. Interesting your thoughts on "pattern recognition"--it's how we make sense out of the universe. The challenge is to use the patterns that we recognize and yet also go beyond them. I believe, but cannot prove, the paradox that the patterns that we use to understand the world may simultaneously limit our understanding.

What I am not into is anything to do with cockroaches. :o) I am bound by my pattern recognition of the creatures, and I admit it.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

10. Two of my unproven scientific beliefs

1) Automobile exhaust is responsible for the rise in childhood ashtma:

Some of the other theories include general air pollution or lack of early exposure to germs or animals, but here is why I think automobile exhaust is at fault.

a) Countries start to see an abrupt increase in childhood asthma when cars become common middle-class possessions. This happened in Japan forty years ago, and is happening in China and India now.

b) If the culprit were air pollution per se, then Eastern Europe would have higher rates than Western Europe, but the opposite is true. And what type of pollution does Western Europe have more of than Eastern Europe? Automobile exhaust.

c) Children who live along busy highways are more likely to have asthma than those who don't.

d) This also explains the rarity of asthma in rural areas. Rural areas do allow earlier exposure to animals, but they also prevent over-exposure to automobile exhaust.

e) Purely anecdotal evidence: I had no allergies until I was six years old and we moved to a house along a main highway. Within a few months, I had massive respiratory allergies, including a memorable bout that kept me up wheezing all night.

f) More purely anecdotal evidence: Although my allergies are much better than they used to be, I still suffer on days with high levels of auto-produced pollution.

2) My second belief is that the Neanderthals did contribute to the European gene pool and that they had pale skin, blue eyes, and light-colored hair.

Note that Europe and to a lesser extent the Middle East are the only place in the world where these traits occur naturally. (The blond and blue-eyed people currently found in other parts of the world are all descended from European immigrants.) This distribution coincides with the sites where Neanderthal remains have been found.

While they are ideal traits for areas of low sunlight, as Europe is in the winter, they did not evolve in northern Asia or in the extreme northern or southern reaches of the Americas. The Neanderthals were in Europe for longer than modern humans have been there to date (I forget whether it was 100,000 or 200,000 years, compared to about 50,000 years for modern humans), so if anyone would have adapted to low sunlight, they would have.

Those are my two unorthodox scientific theories.

[Celebration]

16. blond hair

That's interesting. Blond hair you think comes from Neanderthals? That does sound unorthodox. I have ALWAYS wondered--what's the deal with blond hair? Why all the Nordics with the blond hair when everyone else in the world has dark hair? I'm not saying that I am buying your Neanderthal theory....but who knows? What do the orthodox theories say about where blond hair comes from?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

19. That it comes along with pale skin

to facilitate absorption of Vitamin D from sunlight.

[Celebration]

21. but like you said

Northern Asians aren't blond or light skinned. So it just doesn't sound quite like a natural selection thing. Could there just happened to have been a few albinos born that were prolific and living fairly near each other? I am even more interested in hair color with red in it. I know that is some sort of mixture. I think I have read somewhere that people with red highlights in their hair are more likely to have ADD than people who don't. If this is true (since this is a speculative thread I am not going to bother looking up the reference) I wonder why?

There are various theories about eating now that say "Eat what your ancestors ate" or different variations of that. In the 1950s a doctor in Vermont wrote an entire book and most of it was about how blonds shouldn't eat wheat.

So, summing this up, I would say that what I believe but cannot prove, is that blonds tend to have more trouble eating wheat than those who are darker. That's kind of the anecdotal evidence in my family. I just have a particular interest in hair color because of the extreme variations of coloring in my immediate family.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

22. Right, North Asians aren't light skinned, which

argues against the pure natural selection theory.

Blue eyes are recessive, and skin color is mixed dominance, so the population of light-skinned people must have been quite large to swamp the dark-skinned arrivals from Africa.

I've heard that red hair is the result of blond hair meeting black hair. You sometimes see half-Asian people who are natural redheads.

I'm originally a blond, and I've noticed that eating large quantities of wheat doesn't agree with me.

[Ian David]

32. Someone told me that red-headed women... uhm... "smell different."

Without going into detail, anyone have any annecdotal evidence either way?

[Ian David]

11. Anything that eats poop can not be conscious

Or if it is, it will not admit it.

[htuttle]

14. Poop is relative

[Ian David]

15. Yeah, relatives can be poopy. n/t

[beam me up scottie]

17. Have you thought about studying poop ?

I'm sure there's some government money available for poopology.

[Ian David]

12. Homosexuality and Religious Fundamentalism are co-dependent genes

Fundamentalists who suppress their homosexuality pass along "gay genes." This would explain the anecdotal evidence that anti-gay people are either repressed gay people themselves or have gay children.

There is also some evidence for a "God Spot" in the brain that some people have and some don't.

If you presume a genetic basis for both homosexuality and extreme religiosity, then it seems possible to me that gay genes and religious genes reinforce one another.

And throw meme-structures into the mix...

[beam me up scottie]

18. A.O.G.

A.O.G.
AMISH OCCUPIED GOVERMENT!!!!

Here is the proof so many asked for when I announced that the Amish, and the UN were in cahoots to establish a Base HQ for the NEW WORLD ORDER INVASION. You can see that the Amish and UN are training at a Secret Base. Note....See the black helicopter that has been seen around the country. Wouldn't black clothes and black helicopters go well with each other? The UN soldier is attempting a mind meld with the Amish horses so that they may be used to block traffic and do their Master's bidding.

Just a little note.... For those of you that have e-mailed me about this photo being fake because there is no shadow coming from the UN Soldier.... It's because Evil UN Soldiers under Amish control don't cast shadows!!! Sheesh.... I gotta explain everything!!

JUST IN.... Now there IS a SHADOW in this pic of the UN Soldier. WHY????....It seems the UN/NWO/Amish are now using SHADOW DRUGS!!!!!!....YES...SHADOW DRUGS!!!!!! They realized that these pics were a dead give away and developed these drugs to give their soldiers a typical shadow as to not draw attention. But we are on to you..... I received this pic from an anonymous patriot, along with the info on these drugs that the UN/NWO/Amish are using. I awarded him the "GOLDEN BEAVER" for his gallant contribution and putting himself in harm's way to bring us this intelligence. Amazing the fact that this patriot was able to get nearly the same pic. This was do to much recon and study of the habits of the soldier and split second timing. Well Done!!!!

http://www.geocities.com/beaver_militia/recon.html

[Igel]

20. (1) All languages are equally complex.

An oft asserted proposition, but there's absolutely no way to operationalize 'complex'.

(2) The word 'repurpose', like 'operationalize', is completely unnecessary.

[HuckleB]

23. I believe "Blah! Blah! Blah!" is a legitimate answer.

Actually, I don't. But I use it anyway.

[HuckleB]

24. I believe the majority of US citizens do not know how to go on holiday.

Anyone gonna argue my premise, however unproven by science?

[beam me up scottie]

25. You are closed-minded unlike those of us who are free-thinking !

according to rule #12 of the Woo Woo Credo:

Always claim that the other guy is "closed-minded" and that you're as free-thinking as a newborn baby. Other woo-woos love the concept of "open-mindedness" and will take you into their inner circle without question. They have no tolerance for those "mean old nasty" types who demand evidence for everything.

[greyl]

26. I'm not dreaming nt

[Caution]

28. That the anti-rationalist crowd are republicans in disguise

infiltrating DU in order to undermine the credibility of what could be a phenomenal tool for the Democratic Party.

Damn Republican Cabal.

[beam me up scottie]

29. I believe that.

No progressive would be that gullible.

[Ian David]

31. I'm afraid some might. People exposed to real conspiracies are more likely

to be receptive to other conspiracy theories-- thus more likely to buy into false ones.

Ex.:

"Wow, I just found out that Nixon was responsible for the Watergate break-in!"

"Hey, did you know that JFK was assassinated by the CIA because the aliens at Roswell were controlling their brains?"

"Wow, after learning about Watergate, nothing surprises me anymore."

"Hey, did you know that the government is covering-up alien abductions? The only ones with the courage to stand-up to the Men in Black and tell the truth is The Discovery Channel!"

Remember: Liberals know we need to mistrust the government. What many also need to learn is when NOT to mistrust the government. They know to mistrust the media, but they need to know WHEN to mistrust the media.

Do they mistrust Fox when they're talking about The War in Iraq? Or do they mistrust Fox when Bryant Gumballs does an "expose" of the Roswell Cover-up?

The same media that lies about the war lies about UFOs, alternative medicine and a host of other shit. When the lying media reports it as an "expose" of things that "THEY don't want you to know," people will buy into it.

Even smart people can believe stupid things.