Heavenly Body

If you believe in an afterlife consisting of a spiritual nature, how will we know that we are still ourselves and that other people are actually who they say they are. Like from the readings from the book, if a friend dies, and you have only recognized that person by the physical appearance, how do you know what their spiritual appearance will look like? What if these two different appearances are the same people but look different from how we remembered them, how will we know if they are telling the truth or not. On earth we have an understanding of who we are, but after we die there is no possible way for those still on earth to conclude that a person still lives on after death, but then again we may not know what spirits look like. For all we know the trees we walk past on campus could be the spirit of great grandparent, just with a different physical appearance.

Steven Lippman

Emotions of the Mind

What controls emotions? My answer the brain, but then what controls the brain? I believe the soul/ mind to be the conductor of the human. When we have emotions it usually deals with a perception of how someone views a situation, therefore we know our brains control our views and how we think, and since the brain is controlled by the mind, our minds are what control the emotions.

Steven Lippman

Who would win in a fight? Mind or Matter

When we think of humans, we think of a body that has brain that tells it what to do. Essentially our body is a car and the brain is the driver. So now what if we think of the body as a separate piece, and the brain as a separate piece. Which one is more valuable or which one has more power. When someone decides to start running, the brain sends signals to the legs to start moving faster and in rhythm. But say you touch your finger to a hot stove, there are signals that are sent from your fingers to your brain that THEN tell your body to remove your finger from the stove. So is it really possible to consider the body and the mind two different objects working on the same project, a project called life? Or are the body and mind the same thing just two components that are combined together to complete the picture.

Steven Lippman

Can people really be lucky?

Section VI Of Probability talks about chance. It goes into the discussion if things really happen by chance or the fact that us as humans do not understand the actual causes of certain particular events. Think of the example, one might think they are lucky if they win the lottery. But why are they lucky, because some machine picked the same numbers as you, therefore that makes you lucky. The question now is, what caused the machine to pick those numbers? If we think that luck or chance picked those numbers that is an ignorant belief in which humans seen to confide in when events happen that have no reasonable explanation. The problem with us understanding the causes of why the numbers are picked though, is because we do not fully comprehend the idea of power. For every cause there is some power that produces the effect. Some of these powers are more reasonable to understand than others. So therefore the understanding of power should ultimately enable us to understand every cause and effect, which should be able to answer a lot of questions that as of now, humans cannot seem to efficiently answer. The biggest problem though is how can humans understand power if we cannot fully measure it in every situation where we know it is present but not easily understood.

Steven Lippman