[Naomi]

Originally Posted by Conniption

Oooh did you see my last post on this thread?

Yeah I just looked.
Gravity is the most amazing force in the universe.
I mean, do you guys realize that a supermassive black hole may exist at the center of every galaxy?

You know what else is really cool? The interactions of galaxies.
How they can collide, eat each other, and what not.
Eventually the milky way and andromeda are going to collide
and our solar system might like end up in another galaxy or just wandering in space.
This is because there is enough space that stars usually just pass each other by, but the gas clouds and other matter, including the gravitational forces of each galaxy will collide and morph into each other, into the bigger one, or into something completely new.

Originally Posted by Derly

I read an article where a proffessor in the philosophy of the matrix (yes he's a legit professor) gave us a 1 in 20 chance that we are lliving in the matrix.

I had gotten into a debate about the validity of the following quote:



Agent Smith: "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization."

One view is that it is in our nature as human beings to find patterns. Discovering patterns evolved as a survival trait to recognize what things are consistently bad for us (such as a poisonous plant which would make us throw up) or what things are consistently good for us (fuck feelings good, leading to reproduction). Eventually we started putting 2 and 2 together to make assumptions like "Oh that blue plant made me sick so all blue plants are going to make me sick" Whether ALL blue plants would make one throw up, is besides the point...the point is that is a survival trait to avoid even the possibility of something that would harm us.
As time goes on, we are no longer (for the most part) in a place where we have to worry about such primitive fears as a large animal attacking us and eating us...but this pattern making habit is still apparent. Have you ever eaten something when you were young, thrown up, and whenever you see, smell, think about that thing you feel like you are going to get sick? Have you ever gotten so drunk that you blacked out, threw up, made a total ass of yourself so for a while even thinking about drinking alcohol gave you chills up your spine? It’s still a defense mechanism.
On the impractical side of pattern making (for the sake of this argument, the following does not essential to our survival), we have come up with things like astrology and numerology. We found these coincidences amongst people and obsessed over them to the fact that we only concentrated on the "hits" and not the "misses".
Here is where complexity comes in: Along with this obsession with pattern making, our species is obsessed with having an explanation for everything. Science developed from a philosophy that had a consistent explanation that fit into all the patterns of what it was trying to explain. I will use early astronomy as an example.
Back when geocentricism was an accepted belief in the philosophy of the celestial sphere, astronomers were coming up with ways to explain how the planets and stars moved. First it was merely that all the planets and stars had their own path around the Earth in the center, and the paths were all perfect circles. But wait, they noticed that Mars did not have a perfect pattern in the cycle. They used such things as epicycles and deferents. This basically said that some planets moved along in a path that was a perfect circle, whose center is on another circle with a separate circle. Yeah, simple enough right? This theory evolved to have over 80 deferents and epicycles, and oh wait all the plants and the sun revolved on another point separate from the Earth but the Earth was still really close to the middle.
When a simple explanation is not sufficient to support ALL the observations, more things must be added to that "equation" to make it all work.
Now, in this drive to explain everything, and assuming that nature operates on a perfect equation, we have come up with very complex explanations from a complex frame of thought. Almost nothing can be easily explained in a simple manner, and if it can be, it is often rejected because it works "too well". We don’t like things when it’s "too easy" because things really aren’t that simple, and we also feel stupid that we didn’t figure it out earlier. Of course stress makes thing complicated and there’s all that stuff,too. We also tend to not think that we deserve simplicity, it has to be more complicated than that!
Come on, have you ever taken a test in symbolic logic and gone through a proof in 4 lines, looked at it, decided it was way too easy and erased it, came up with another proof that took up 15 lines, to only learn that the original answer was correct?

In a psychological sense, the explanation is, of course, that when you are brought up with trauma, you attract trauma. Some one who was told that they were never good enough, beaten up, or had some type of early trauma or stress will continue to unconsciously attract similar situations. Some one who was criticized from an early age will always be hard on themselves. They will always criticize their own work and try to improve and will not find beauty in simplicity. The girl who had Daddy problems will have trouble keeping a relationship with a nice guy because her brain cannot register that a stable person is attractive. The guy who had a crazy girlfriend for 5 years of his teenage life will freak out when he finds a normal girl who doesn’t need him to fix all her problems. If you have ever watched "What the bleep do we know?" (I do have some issues with the film, but it does have a point), there is a physiological reaction in our brains when the brain becomes, what I will say "addicted", to certain situations. It also has to do with desensitization. Remember when just seeing girls’ legs turned you on? Now you need to see 3 girls having a threesome to get horny enough to jack off. It doesn’t excite you anymore, and you could probably not be able to go back to getting THAT turned on when you just see legs. When you are brought up with trauma in your life, a situation where there is no that much chaos or stress is unattractive. It’s like when you took your first philosophy class and you got all hyphy on existentialism, but as you grow, those existential questions get kind of boring and you need a bigger challenge. It’s all part of the brain’s development to more complex things.
So we NEED complexity to keep growing. We have this drive to continue to challenge ourselves or our brain gets bored.

In the art sense, complexity tends to equal talent, moreso than just tolerate. A stick figure is not a genius work of art. Why? Because anyone can do it. Simple hand styles are not profound to many people. Why? Because they think "omg it’s just block letters anyone can do that shit". So people get on this notion that the more "wild" the style is, it must be better, because come on, you have to stare at it for like 5 minutes to see what it even says and it looks like it took a lot of time. The harder something is, the more talent must have gone into it. Otherwise, anyone could have done it, even ourselves, and how is that special anymore? We become in awe over complex literature, art, movies, anything that initially gives us a HUGE fucking headache because it’s seemingly beyond our capabilities. So our brain registers complexity with skill. The more complex the piece of art is, the more talented the artist must be. Th more complex philosophical explanation of why God exists or doesn’t, the better the argument must be. Because, really, if some one wrote THAT many words on it, it MUST have covered all the bases and all the arguments.


Agent Smith: "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization."

We cannot accept a perfect world because we are completely convinced that there is no such thing as perfect. And if something was perfect, our brain would insist that no, it’s not perfect, there is something even better than that. We would go completely haywire if our brains didn’t have any problems to solve because everything was perfect. What would be the point of having them? We need misery to balance out happiness, suffering to balance out victory, because shit that’s just the way life is, isn’t it? Haven’t we been taught that since we were young? There is no heaven without hell, there is no light without dark.

And yes, I know there are philosophical gaps in that movie, but that quote has a lot of fucking meaning behind it.