Fictional physics
Dec. 13th, 2008 07:25 pmQ. What do we know about the afterlife?
For millennia, possibly millions of years, all anyone knew was that when humans died, they disappeared, and other animals didn't. This led to complicated funeral rites, and the general belief in a connection between having intelligence and having a soul, and many people choose to make an arbitrary definition of human according to that line: do you transcend, or do you not?
It's possible it served as an evolutionary advantage. "Hunt humans," it proclaims, "and you won't have any dinner." Which suggests intelligence was necessary, just as the development of most other human-only tricks, like spears, and language, are assumed to be derived from their development of intelligence.
Q. Where does the person go?
( Read more... )
For millennia, possibly millions of years, all anyone knew was that when humans died, they disappeared, and other animals didn't. This led to complicated funeral rites, and the general belief in a connection between having intelligence and having a soul, and many people choose to make an arbitrary definition of human according to that line: do you transcend, or do you not?
It's possible it served as an evolutionary advantage. "Hunt humans," it proclaims, "and you won't have any dinner." Which suggests intelligence was necessary, just as the development of most other human-only tricks, like spears, and language, are assumed to be derived from their development of intelligence.
Q. Where does the person go?
( Read more... )