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Malevolent T and Leyla, that's what I like about the book, it leads us to generate so many suppositions of our own. I've had a few new thoughts about some things as a result of reading it. I doubt he'd be entirely right about everything but it is interesting, isn't it?
I promise to try very hard to make another post tomorrow so you get a better idea of where he's heading.
It would interesting if it did generate a whole lot of discussion, argument and conjecture.
Ok, I read this and chills went down my spine. I had this dream on thanksgiving 2005, and wrote about it in 2006(fourth post down):Quote:
Originally Posted by Beekeeper
http://forums.astraldynamics.com/viewto ... 18&start=0
Neither am I. Drugs are bad, mmkay? 8) All shortcuts have their prize.Quote:
Originally Posted by Beekeeper
As for the "they created us to play around with and use us" thing, when I was very young, as soon as I was introduced to computer / video games, I formed a theory in my mind that reality as we know it, is just a super advanced "video game" for another, way more developed creature. My argument was something like: "Take a look at our modern video games. They are quite realistic. What if the characters in the games have developed some sort of consciousness, within their 2D world? Take another look at them. Consider that we, against all odds, survive and keep developing, how advanced do you think the video games will be in like three thousand years?" Another theory I had, actually from a very young age, was that we are all super advanced robots.
I can feel it! Here we go! Science and Philosophy are closing in on each other! Soon they are dating, and after a couple of decades or so, they will give birth to their lovechild: Understanding. I am so getting this book beekeeper, thanks a lot for keeping us enlightened and mentally satisfied!
also, another disturbing fact kicks in here... if we were created and are observed by the higher beings, then all our possible thoughts and ideas must have been pre-programmed, or at least the program that would generate them must have been put there by someone else, who already thought of everything, so we are not "discovering" or "coming up" with anything, just trying to keep up with our creators...
I also had a similar projection/lucid dream where I was going through this forest of giant 300 ft tall trees, on the "north" trail. I was following a bear, that ended up flying onto some branches of one of the trees. I flew with it, and it took me to the very top of these giant trees, the tops were cut off like telephone poles, they were all lined up and got taller in an orderly progression. I mentally asked it how high up and mentally received the answer 300 ft. I followed the bear along the tops of these giant trees until I reached this ancient looking dog, it had a gargoyle-like appearance. The sky and landscape from being at seemingly the top of the world was indescribably beautiful, the sky, clouds, moonlight, and surrounding mountains. I had an encounter with huge, mysterious dog, and returned to my body.Quote:
In Siberia there are tribes that state mother spirits appear in animal form and abduct the souls of future shamans, bringing them to a huge tree in the spirit world when they are born. This tree has an odd shape with its top broken off
Amazing about the dreams guys! I was surprised recently to find similar things looking through my dream journals (for other things). This book covers so much, it resonates with a lot of experiences reported here on this site. Anyway, here's a bit more:
Did you know that DMT, serotonin, psilocybin, ibogaine and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) are all of the tryptamine family of molecules? (Of course you did!) Did you know that the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, Francis Crick frequently used LSD (legally, in the 1950s) as a thinking tool, admitting privately to colleagues that he was under its influence when he unravelled the structure of DNA? (What, you knew that too! My you’re knowledgable.) Naturally, this leads Hancock to speculate on whether Crick picked up information on DNA from a recording system in his own DNA but he believes that not just anyone will walk off with such incredible insights as a result of exposure to hallucinogenic substances. What is necessary is “a prepared mind and a cool head to grasp the import of the information received.†(p.572)
According to Hancock, Crick always felt that the big challenge to solve was not “how life perpetuated itself through natural selection after DNA had come on the scene but how it came on the scene in the first place.†(p.572) Crick was so highly respected, he could get away with saying all kinds of things and the scientific community would listen. In 1981, he proposed that DNA could not have arisen on earth by chance and had, in fact, been sent here by an alien civilization in the form of a resilient bacteria on ships programmed to crash into certain sorts of planets at certain stages of development. Reminding us that this is Crick’s hypothesis, Hancock adds, that if it were true, we cannot rule out that such aliens were sufficiently advanced to record meaningful information in the language of DNA,
If they were clever enough, they might even have transcribed the entire accumulated knowledge of their culture into DNA to await the evolution and attention of intelligent species on whichever planets anywhere in the universe the original cargoes of bacteria had happened to land… (p.574)
That touches on the theory of Von Neumann machines - how could a galactic civilisation spread? It could for example send out automated craft to seed life on another planet, then build copies of itself and spread the wave. Billions of years later no trace of the original wave is left - the new probes have been launched, the old one was "used up" and lost.Quote:
Originally Posted by Beekeeper
[EDIT: See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_Probe as well. Von Neumann also devised the some of the principles modern computers are built on, which is called Von-Neumann machine architecture]
Oliver
Hancock discusses in detail a number of convincing reasons that Crick gave for believing that it is impossible that the DNA currently on earth evolved here on earth. I’ll leave that to those of you planning to buy the book to explore.
We’re informed that DNA has four chemical letters and it is the ordering of these letters that determines the organism. With these letters come 64 possible triplets (condons). Sixty-one of these stand for one amino acid and the other three the chain. Living cells use amino acids to construct proteins but there are only 20 amino acids used for this purpose. So, there is ambiguity with most triplets coding for more than one amino acid. There are two exceptions of amino acids that DNA treats as too important for any ambiguity to exist. These are methionine and tryptophan, the source molecule for tryptamine hallucinogens.
Within DNA is what appears to be a high degree of redundancy with the double helix representing an original and a copy, then there’s RNA copying specific segments of code in DNA to initiate protein synthesis. The rest of the DNA, we are told, is off line while these specific segments are activated. Since the genes only make up 3-5% of cells, there is an issue of even greater apparent redundancy when we consider non-coding or “junk†DNA. All we know about this 97-95% of the DNA is that it contains huge amount of information written in the same language as the genetic code but without coding for the construction of proteins. While inquiring into the function of this so-called “junk DNA,†scientists have discovered that it is, of course, very important but they have also made another interesting discovery.
Hancock relates Zipf’s Law (and what follows I found tremendously interesting)
He [Zipf] studied the texts in many different languages and ranked the words in order of frequency. What he found, which has since proved to be true whether the language is English or Inuit, Japanese or Xhosa, Arabic or Urdu, is that a direct, exact, unvarying and utterly counter-intuitive mathematical relationship exists between the rank of a word and the actual frequency of occurrence of that word. No matter which text he selected, when Zipf created a histogram and plotted word frequency against word rank, the surprising result was a straight line “with a slope of -1 for every human language.â€Â
(p 588)
Experimentally, scientists evaluated the coding regions of DNA and, as one would expect, they did not adhere to Zipf’s Law. What was really surprising, however, was that, in every case, the non-coding (junk) regions turned out to demonstrate a perfect Zipf Law linear plot! This obliges us to see to see DNA sequences as containing a structured language that may carry some type of message.
A further test, developed in the 1950s by information theorist Claude Shannon, was subsequently applied, also supporting the likelihood that non-coding DNA functions as a language.
64? 64??Quote:
Originally Posted by Beekeeper
Go, 64 I Ching hexagrams! I knew them Taoists had it all figured out. ;)
Oliver
Actually, now you mention that, I've come across that particular observation before. 8)