What If....

What if...

Quote:

... we find ourselves in the midst of the ascent of a figure right out of Petronius: an orange-colored vulgarian of meretricious display, right down to the trophy wives from Far Elsewhere—with an ambition to dominate, a cunning out of proportion to his wisdom, a contempt for truth coupled with a readiness to manipulate, and a personal arrogance combined with, and indifferent to, a universal understanding that he is utterly unfit to govern. Now that we are in possession of an honest-to-God demagogue of the classical model, old portents of doom seem pertinent.

yes, what if.

What if...

What if they find a supernatural belief defect that is treatable? Should we treat them, or put them into treatment facilities to turn them around and become like us normal people. What if other people could catch it. Should we make sure children are adopted into rational believer families even if the believer defect probably can't be spread. Maybe we should not allow them to marry.

Should we treat them as normal if their defect proves to be harmless? Should we keep suggesting they are not normal, but we care for them anyway. Is that humane? What if they just want to leave regular lives with the same rights? Should we let them?

Since the early days of the hunt for dark matter, two possibilities were quickly rejected. One was there may be a great deal of undetected, and hard to detect, regular matter. The other was that perhaps gravity behaves differently on large scales.

The first one is being reconsidered, in light of the LIGO readings of gravity waves coming from black hole collisions. It seems possible all or much dark matter might be accounted by undetected black holes.

To my knowledge there's no second look at refining gravitational theory as yet. But I had a thought:

What if black holes colliding allow gravity in from parallel universes?

What if...

Rather than individual "souls" being born and occupying a brain and body as some people think -- all 5 billion people actually have developed slightly different physical brains.

No two develop as an exact copy, because biology and growth is not so perfect. So, personality develops from each "irregular" brain, not a individual soul being assigned to a body.

I was reminded of this movie where Shirley Temple is in a pre-mortal place.

Quote: rxwine

Rather than individual "souls" being born and occupying a brain and body as some people think -- all 5 billion people actually have developed slightly different physical brains.

Then we'd live in a world exactly like the one we know because that's exactly what we know goes on :)

Quote:

No two develop as an exact copy, because biology and growth is not so perfect. So, personality develops from each "irregular" brain, not a individual soul being assigned to a body.

Studies with identical twins (and triplets), especially those raised apart from each other, suggests some idiosyncrasies could be genetic. But aside from identical twins, no two people have the same genome. Therefore no two people have the same brain.

Quote: rxwine

What if...

Rather than individual "souls" being born and occupying a brain and body as some people think -

Emerson wrote Oversoul in 1841 and
he talked about something like this.
It's considered his best work.

I think twins and triplets actually confirms that the more your brain is identical to another, the more your so-called "souls" are actually based on brain differences not "spirit" occupations of the flesh.

Quote: rxwine

I think twins and triplets actually confirms that the more your brain is identical to another, the more your so-called "souls" are actually based on brain differences not "spirit" occupations of the flesh.

There's ample corroboration of that without resorting to twins. People with certain types of brain injuries recover with changed personalities or temperaments. Henry VIII is a prominent example, but there are others more recent in time and well-documented.

The young boy in that clip looks a lot like Dustin from Stranger Things:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTgzMjYzMzQ3NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMjY0ODE0OTE@._V1_SX1777_CR0,0,1777,888_AL_.jpg

What if...

in the future we develop new technology that enables us to create an enormous lens in space made of energy, not material which will enable us to view many exoplanets as if they were as close as the Moon?

Yeah, I have no idea how this would work -- that's why it is in the future!