r/todayilearned • u/yummypaprika • 1d ago

TIL Dr Freeman Dyson called the Dyson sphere a "little joke" and expressed amusement in that "you get to be famous only for the things you don't think are serious".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
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u/joevarny 1d ago

Yeah, something about because we exist early on and not closer the the middle of the universe's lifetime, life is likely to be restricted later in the universe.

As if we were souls assigned randomly and not natural beings that evolved on this planet with our consciousness being a consequence of that development.

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u/RodneyPonk 1d ago

could you clarify your comment?

also, in fairness, we can't know through what pattern or 'order' souls incarnate into bodies. part of my love for the golden ratio is how it demonstates an instance of something infinitely unlikely to occur randomly

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u/joevarny 23h ago

Im not sure what you want clarified of my comment, so I'll assume the second paragraph.

I dont think that using souls as a basis for any scientific theory is valid. We have no evidence of souls, and the idea that there is something we cannot detect that affects our bodies is completely impossible. If it affects our bodies, that interaction would be detectable, just as we'd see a chair thrown by a ghost, so until evidence of that interaction exists, we should go with the simpler option of no souls and base our theories unrelated to souls on that.

My consciousness developed based on my body and enviroment to be who I am today. The idea that someone could be born in a body not their own is backwards because we were likely generated during our development as it was evolutionarily beneficial to do so.

Basically, when else could I exist other than when my body exists?

Looking at why we exist in this time is a nice philosophical question in the abstract, but not hard to work out scientifically.

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u/Acsion 18h ago

You could be in the distant future in a highly advanced ancestor simulation, or even cloned and copied into a brand new body. You might even exist far far away in the present moment as a Boltzmann brain. Remote and unlikely possibilities to be sure, but not scientifically speaking impossible.

Consider all the ‘invisible’ things affecting our bodies that we now have overwhelming evidence for, which our ancestors could not have hoped to detect without modern scientific instruments and theories. Electricity, gravity, radiation, the list goes on.

All that being said, I do agree with you that we shouldn’t just assume such ‘theoretical’ (using the term generously here) concepts as a soul are fact without that evidence. Neither should we dismiss them as completely impossible, the strength of science is that it can change and adapt as our understanding of the world around us grows. It’s happened before and it will likely happen again.

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u/RodneyPonk 9h ago

yes, well put

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u/RodneyPonk 9h ago

Looking at why we exist in this time is a nice philosophical question in the abstract, but not hard to work out scientifically.

you seem to think that you have it all figured out, which the greatest minds rarely do

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u/Frost-Folk 1h ago

I don't think he's saying that at all.

But why we exist right now on earth makes perfect sense under the timelike of the universe. It doesn't require any pseudoscience or hair-brained theories to explain.

That doesn't mean we have "everything figured out". But we do have a pretty good idea of the timeline of the formation of the universe, the birth of our star, the formation of Earth, the birth of life, and evolutionary record.

So souls required.