Question for everyone

[Impalaplaya]

Do you think everything has a purpose???

[K6-III]

....if you figure out how to use it....

[timeshifter]

maybe.
some things may seem to have no purpose, but that may not necessarily be true. take humans for example. studies show that humans use only fifteen percent of our brains on a good day.
if saying not everything has a purpose, that could imply that we have 85 percent of our brains for nothing.

what could lie in that other 85 percent?
psycic abilities?
the ability to control matter with your mind?
the ability to see the future?
to calculate the most complex formulas which would require a modern computer 15 seconds in less than one?

there is no end to the list of things that do not serve any immediate purpose.
like the planets of our solar system.
are they ther merely for exploration?
are they there for any reason at all?
could they house extra-terrestrials inside them that we cannot see?

do you see what i mean? everything serves a purpose, be it in this galaxy or any of the other billions of them out there.

[Impalaplaya]

thank you that was a great answer and opened up my eyes

[Buzzwang2003]

I can't think of a thing that doesn't have a purpose. Even a rat is food for a predator.
Buzzwang

[Buzzwang2003]

I can't think of a thing that doesn't have a purpose. Even a rat is food for a predator.
Buzzwang

[timeshifter]

I can't think of a thing that doesn't have a purpose. Even a rat is food for a predator.

So, let us continue this pattern.

Cat eats mouse.
Dog eats cat.
Lion eats dog.
Man eats lion.
????? eats man?!?!?

You see? It just stops with us, but without us the food chain would be incomplete.

Our brain is the one thing we should concentrate on understanding first. If that ever happens, I firmly believe that we will discover new powers that our brains posess that we formerly could not begin to comprehend.

[Tac-Tics]

Purpose.... a very human word indeed. Not only inquiring a cause but a justification implying a meaning in the action in question.

A man carries a Bible with him at all times. We ask what its purpose is. He says it makes him feel secure in his life.

A positron is created at FermiLab. What is its purpose? We ask the scientists there. They say they are testing the existence of other subatomic particles created along side the positron. The positron is only there because its creation was inevitable for the actual experiment. Does it have a purpose? Not really.

A photon is sucked into a black hole. It is lost for eternity. We would ask someone its purpose, but who would know if it even had one? No one. No entity capable of giving purpose to the single photon could possibly exist near the black hole. It would be unlikely such a person could even distinguish the one photon from the google others that fell along side it.

Purpose is a human concept. Is there such thing as purpose? Yes, but it is assigned by humans and it only exists because humans exist to reaffirm its existence.

[iseason]

If science is correct,and energy cannot be destroyed or created then you are a legacy which has played a part in every event that ever occurred or ever will. your position is as assured and even more so than death and taxes.
why wonder what your energy is doing in the here and now . rather , ponder whose energy you are borrowing and are you doing it justice with the time you are allowed freedom of action over it .

Cheers
Iseason

[thomasantony]

maybe.
...........
studies show that humans use only fifteen percent of our brains on a good day.
......

That is not right. This is a popular misconception caused to due to misinterpreting results of some research conducted in the 1800s to 1900s which found that only 10% of the neurons are firing at any given time.

If all of a person's neurons began firing at once, that person would not become smarter, but would instead suffer a seizure.

Well .. that would mean half your argument is based on nothing ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain#Popular_misconceptions

~
Thomas

[timeshifter]

Four years later, I realize this. As for the "smarter" part of it, definition plays a key role. Personally, I view the following:
Intelligence is the ability to learn, the ability to grasp new concepts, and the speed at which said concept is grasped, and the speed at which information is absorbed and analyzed. High IQ does not imply "smart", it implies "fast". My last IQ test told me I had an IQ of 146. Sometimes I've wondered if people shake in their boots when they hear that. I don't feel any smarter for it, because I'm not. It simply means that my brain operates on a faster level than most peoples'. I analyze problems very quickly, and I sift through possible solutions with equal speed. I'd be willing to bet every great chess player has had a high IQ, simply because of the way they think.

Knowledge: the actual information stored in ones' brain. More specifically, the amount of information on a particular topic that is stored. Take my previous example of my IQ. People hear that and immediately call me a genius. Give me a test in history or biology. I would fail it no matter how hard I tried. I have no mental capacity for these topics, as my brain doesn't operate in a manner that makes remembering pseudo-random facts easy. I latch on to patterns. Mathematics, computer science, even chemistry. Such things are easy for me because my brain finds a pattern to what happens. I may be more knowledgeable than person x in the art of programming, but person x is undoubtedly more knowledgeable than myself in world history.

I completely lost my original focus in response to your post, but I'm leaving that in place because it's pretty good. In short, I realize that my prior post about that was from a bad point of reference.

An increase in neural activity would, according to my definitions, not make one more knowledgeable, but instead make one more intelligent. With more brain activity, the capacity for learning would likely be greatly increased, which in turn could lead to one becoming smarter. I'm not a neurologist, so I'm in no position to speak with authority on this subject. That's just my understanding.

And to the original topic... the photon that is released and immediately sucked into a black hole, that supposedly had no purpose. Suppose its' purpose was to slightly nudge that other photon AWAY from the black hole, to Earth, and gave us a piece of knowledge that we may not have otherwise had?

[ninjashoes]

Four years later, I realize this. As for the "smarter" part of it, definition plays a key role. Personally, I view the following:
Intelligence is the ability to learn, the ability to grasp new concepts, and the speed at which said concept is grasped, and the speed at which information is absorbed and analyzed. High IQ does not imply "smart", it implies "fast". My last IQ test told me I had an IQ of 146. Sometimes I've wondered if people shake in their boots when they hear that. I don't feel any smarter for it, because I'm not. It simply means that my brain operates on a faster level than most peoples'. I analyze problems very quickly, and I sift through possible solutions with equal speed. I'd be willing to bet every great chess player has had a high IQ, simply because of the way they think.

Knowledge: the actual information stored in ones' brain. More specifically, the amount of information on a particular topic that is stored. Take my previous example of my IQ. People hear that and immediately call me a genius. Give me a test in history or biology. I would fail it no matter how hard I tried. I have no mental capacity for these topics, as my brain doesn't operate in a manner that makes remembering pseudo-random facts easy. I latch on to patterns. Mathematics, computer science, even chemistry. Such things are easy for me because my brain finds a pattern to what happens. I may be more knowledgeable than person x in the art of programming, but person x is undoubtedly more knowledgeable than myself in world history.

I completely lost my original focus in response to your post, but I'm leaving that in place because it's pretty good. In short, I realize that my prior post about that was from a bad point of reference.

An increase in neural activity would, according to my definitions, not make one more knowledgeable, but instead make one more intelligent. With more brain activity, the capacity for learning would likely be greatly increased, which in turn could lead to one becoming smarter. I'm not a neurologist, so I'm in no position to speak with authority on this subject. That's just my understanding.

And to the original topic... the photon that is released and immediately sucked into a black hole, that supposedly had no purpose. Suppose its' purpose was to slightly nudge that other photon AWAY from the black hole, to Earth, and gave us a piece of knowledge that we may not have otherwise had?

this is good posting right here I agree 100%

[irizarry]

Does everything have a purpose?

Ovoiding a religious/metaphysical debate I re-state Gell-Mann's Principle, actually paraphrase it:

"If its not absolutely ruled out by nature then its manditory."

Thus my answer is Yep!

Irizarry

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[Chile]

maybe.
studies show that humans use only fifteen percent of our brains on a good day.

I think you should look to this: http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/10percent.asp

[timeshifter]

Perhaps you were only using 10% of your brain to determine that I still held that opinion...

If you had bothered to read the post I made more than five years after the snippet you quoted, you'd understand that my views (as a scientists' should) changed as I was exposed to new information.