Problems of Religion (geography)

Why is it that some people believe one religion while others believe a different one? Is it because people look at the different ones and think which one is right and then choose to follow it? Is it that they are all the same so it doesn't matter which one you follow? Not according to those who slaughter others for believing something different. Is it that people just follow what everyone else around them is following?

On the whole and certainly before large scale travel a person believed the religion of the region in which they where born? In historical times it was often socially impossible to not follow the same faith as your peers (they'd either shun or kill you!). However without social pressures, even today, it seems most people will just take the faith of their birth place especially if they stay put. I posit if the same religious person was born and raised somewhere else with a different religion they would believe that instead, especially in the times where other religions where unknown.

If all religions feel that they are mirrors of the other faiths and all stemming from the same source then there should be no question of which is the right one. As there is this question, as religions do feel that they are unique and each one views itself to be then one then why does geographical location represent the strongest factor determining which faith will be followed?

If it does turn out that it is the location that determines religious belief then that debases any one's claim of being the right one. Moreover it calls further into question the validity of each one.

Man; Dogs' Bitch

This came from a discussion I was having this morning about what Aliens would perceive to be the superior life, would it be humans or something else?
They would have some criteria to make their judgment of superiority. They may look at intelligence or size or how things have changed over history and ask if they are in a better state now than its predecessors. Intelligence and size are very human perceptions of superiority. Perhaps a good unbiased metric of which species has advanced the most might be the amount of energy it must output in order to survive and a comparison of how this has changed over the spices development. So the superior species would be the one which has optimized its energy outputs most effectively in order to achieve the same or better than its predecessors.

Humans would like to feel that we hold the leash over our development and the development of many other species but this is our view of things. At some point man found that it was good to have a dog by his side, and we like to feel that we have now domesticated dogs. How about looking at it the other way round.

Some humans where better suited to dogs and the dogs could scavenge from these types of people. These dog friendly people then had an edge over other dogless folk and so began the process of the dog selecting for more and more dog friendly people. This is not where it ends. The dog has now effectively out sourced nearly all of its major energy expending activities to mankind. We provide food, heating and couch.

An alien may judge what we see as our pets to be the masters of us as we still have to do the actual energy outlay.

Mathematical Representation of Understanding

What is understanding? What do we mean when we say that a facet of life is understood? One definition of understanding is a mathematical one.

It can be said of everything that we understand that we create a mathematical representation of it. We are unable to create such models of things we do not understand. By creating models we are able to see if our understanding is correct by comparison with the real and where there are discrepancies we know we must improve our understanding.

Our understanding of solar orbits is such that our models can be used to make accurate predictions of the positions of celestial bodies, we can model a neurone and its electrical and chemical composition and explain how action potentials arise and how they are propagated. Yet we are not able to model emotions but who can claim complete understanding in that field?

It is a very common to hear "its impossible to model emotion". Why? At first we must assume there was no understanding and no maths. As the first levels of understanding emerged so too came the dawn of maths. At which point the notion of calculating distance in n-dimensional space would have been far beyond the level of understanding. Thankfully Pythagoras sorted triangular relationships out and so today this problem is a simple extension of Pythagorean theorem. However I think all of our great math geniuses of old would be baffled by the mathematics of a modern cpu chip or a metabolic pathway. My point is this; understanding continues to swell and what was impossible today is 1st grade school tomorrow. We can't mathematically model emotions now but 100 years ago we barley knew of the existence of neurones let alone their function. It is a matter of time, whether we have the time is another matter entirely.

Whether or not it is believed that something can or can not be mathematically modelled does not detract from the fact that once something is understood we are able to model it. In short understanding is the mathematical dissemination of something such that accurate predictions can be made.

The mind is beautiful complexity, founded on intricate simplicity

There seems to be some resistance in accepting the notion that simple distributed design could produce anything as complex as the human brain. There is however little reason to support such thinking; as yet we have not discovered a significant component in the brain, the network of neurones seems to be the majority of its construction. We are not so blocked when considering the liver, it is an organ of several hundred functions and is largely homogenous. Each cell of the liver can be described yet how overall function is performed is largely unknown, complexity is formed from simplicity in this instance.

Experiments with artificial neural networks as shown that a) A three layer network can approximate ANY mathematical function and b) very simple neural network can produce staggeringly complex behaviours. A single layer, 16 neurone network is sufficient to link 8 optic sensors to two wheels and give the behaviour of object avoidance.
Given that the majority of components in the brain are neurones arranged in networks, that complex behaviour can arise from simple networks and that the brain is a network is of substantial complexity; is it not feasible that ALL of our behaviours and perceptions of consciousness are born out of the intricate interactions of very simple components?

Why the block about the mind. We accept that every other facet of our bodies is comprised of cells and each one is relatively simple and understandable. So why is it so hard for some to accept consciousness as distributed interaction?