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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (24699)	6/25/2008 5:37:49 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 149317

OTOTOT Thread, I apologize for going off-topic here, but Koan is leading me down a philosophical path and I find it fun. I won't do this often. Koan, you bring up another thought I had. If the latest mathematical theories are to be believed, we actually live in a multi-verse with multiple dimensions where a new universe is created every nanosecond, branching off from each individual event decision or trigger. Every imaginable eventuality is comprehensible as a potential wave front and only becomes reality when we make a decision or an event transpires that converts the potential universe into the kinetic through the collapse of that wave front. So parallel universes are within the realm of possibility. In short, if we can imagine it, then it must be possible. As such, we may find other intelligent beings exist out there in these other universes, whether they are a representation of ourselves played out against a background universe where we made different decisions in our lives, or whether they are extraterrestrials or man-made Turing graduates. It's all fantastical to me and I don't really understand any of it outside of what I've read in science magazines and science fiction books. However, one thing I take on faith is that what God created for us is far more elaborate and fantastic than any human mind can comprehend. I would bet that the things we will discover in the next 100 years will seem magical to people of our generation and will force us to redefine what we call human and what we believe constitutes self-awareness. I only hope I live long enough to see these things come to pass. On that note, I'll end with a koan, your namesake: "If a being is indistinguishable in every way from a human, but was made by man, then is it human?"