Why the universe seems so strange
What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished world, but a model of the world, regulated and adjusted by sense data, but constructed so it's useful for dealing with the real world.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
This well conceived talk illustrates the difference between our intuitive view of reality compared to a far more complex reality per the findings of modern science.
One of several interesting points made by Professor Dawkins:
Steve Grand points out that you and I are, ourselves, more like a wave than a permanent thing. He invites us, the reader, to think of an experience from your childhood, something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else would you remember it?
But here is the bombshell: you weren't there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made.
If that doesn't make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.
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An excerpt from the talk:
While we have different atoms we dont have entirely different forms. If you have a big ol birthmark on your shoulder, it HAS always been there, at least as long as you have been alive. It hasnt dissolved to reappear later on some whim of matter flow.
We change but we remain the same.
Indeed. Scar tissue, for example, remains scar tissue even though every cell in the tissue is eventually replaced.
But there are some incremental changes, the most obvious of which is aging.
The law of conservation of energy and the only thing we know for sure about what happens to humans after they die. We aren't the same atoms that made us, those moved on long ago, transformed into new matter, just as the atoms that make up who we are will be transformed into some other form of energy after we die. We just got to be one of those forms of matter relatively briefly.