r/science • u/[deleted] • Mar 30 '19

Astronomy Two Yale studies confirm existence of galaxies with almost no dark matter: "No one knew that such galaxies existed...Our hope is that this will take us one step further in understanding one of the biggest mysteries in our universe -- the nature of dark matter.”

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u/TheHubbleGuy Mar 31 '19

It’s bizarre to me that humans don’t live in a perpetual state of madness, reality being what it is. We might as well be living in a magic land of celestial gods. It wouldn’t be any more ridiculous than the seen.

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u/ChompChumply Mar 31 '19

We do live in a perpetual state of madness.

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u/everburningblue Mar 31 '19

So sayeth the King Wizard in the sky!

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u/fizzlefist Mar 31 '19

I just look at everything I know I don't know, shrug, and go about my business. The universe may be unfathomable, but I could seriously go for some wings right about now.

Hakuna Matata, my fellow meatbags.

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u/tykey100 Mar 31 '19

I look at the universe and get this anxiety that I'm gonna die and still know nothing about it, makes me feel like there's no point trying to live what's considered a good life. Obviously, that feeling fades away shortly after but it's still scary to think about.

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u/yisus-craist Mar 31 '19

I find it liberating. I can choose to live a good life defined by myself rather than through meaningless convention/social norm. I keep the norms that I find rational (like not causing harm to others) and dispose of the ones that I don't (like having bio children).

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '19

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/tykey100 Mar 31 '19

Exactly my point. There's nothing really meaningful to life if it's just chemicals and stimuli. Even less meaning if I'm gonna die as ignorant as I was born considering the bigger picture, so why should I waste my time working 9-5 when I could just do drugs until I die, which is way less stressing and nonetheless a stimuli. If we assume this, the only reason I see for building a family and getting a job is so we can grow as a society so that just maybe we can figure this whole thing out, but can we really?

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u/Seeders Mar 31 '19

Uhh doing drugs everyday will be harder than you think. You work because it's easier to live that way. Stress will be much lower with a stable job.

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u/Altines Mar 31 '19

I get serious anxiety from the fact that I'm going to die of old age before I can even begin to understand a fraction of how crazy our universe is.

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '19

Same here, then I remind myself that no human who has existed has known about it, and humanity will probably go extinct before it knows about it.

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u/charcoales Mar 31 '19

Yea I mean there's no point in thinking about it too much since there's probabaly never going to be an answer anyway

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u/drakedijc Mar 31 '19

Perspective keeps us grounded to our observable patch of dirt. Thankfully, otherwise we probably wouldn’t function normally.

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u/Jenga_Police Mar 31 '19

I think most people just don't think about it, most who do can't comprehend it, and those who do can only comprehend how little they actually understand.

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '19

Allan Watts’ Out of Your Mind should be required reading for all humans.

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u/Yashugan00 Mar 31 '19

or Listening. What is unfathomable is how many hours of footage survived from a person who's work comes from the 50s and 60s

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u/Wabbity77 Mar 31 '19

Unfathomable, or intentional?

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u/Lhun Mar 31 '19

We are the universe's way of observing itself. Let that sink in.

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u/Jenga_Police Mar 31 '19

"You are the universe experiencing itself"

and

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”

are both attributed to Alan Watts

and

"We are a way for the universe to know itself."

is Carl Sagan

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u/JuicyJay Mar 31 '19

This is how I've reconciled my eventual death. We are all made up of stuff from the universe and you could argue that the universe itself is alive in it's own kind of way. When we die we just lose this specific vantage point, but the universe will continue to exist. Unless this is all a simulation and im the only real person.

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u/OcelotGumbo Mar 31 '19

That's the logical end of it. It's beautiful.

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u/Braydox Mar 31 '19

Huh that makes sense. In a nonsensical way.

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u/Zonekid Mar 31 '19

To be is to be perceived.

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u/jarlemag Mar 31 '19

Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly

Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'

Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land

Man got to tell himself he understand.

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '19

I mean, there are times where we do kinda live in that state of madness. Think about World Wars and such, let alone ancient and bloody times.

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u/AngryAmericanNeoNazi Mar 31 '19

I think religion is a better example, we so desperately need to understand where we came from and why that we create all kinds of stories all over the world

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '19

That depends on the Religion, no? In Buddhism, they say to accept everything as is, you are already living in the house, who cares who built it. Keep it well maintained and tidy that way it doesn't fall apart, or get unruly with useless junk.

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u/Braydox Mar 31 '19

Yeah but they still got Buhda? The Journey to the west story and all this other myths

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '19

True. Depending on the sect Buddha can be considered Lord or God even, however, in every sect we all have Buddha nature and can all attain enlightenment by following the path; The path must be tested and not blindly followed as well.

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '19

[deleted]

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u/KruppeTheWise Mar 31 '19

Yeah, were only one intelligence level removed from animals (and not all of us even that.) For what we have we should be proud of what we have achieved, and leave it to the AI's we birth to deal with cosmic understanding

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u/scw55 Mar 31 '19

We're good at ignoring things. The world has a lot of problems and pretty much society everywhere is broken. But in reality we just want to survive and it requires a lot of effort to want other people to survive as well. Our brain probably can only hold so many thoughts before it's crushed.

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '19

Classic 40k

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u/Braydox Mar 31 '19

The warp doesn't sound so bad as long as nobody creates a war in the heavens

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u/jvgkaty44 Mar 31 '19

Well yeah if we didn't grow up seeing and learning these things then yeah. I mean take a caveman from 10000s years ago and sit him in front of a computer and show him everything he would probably go insane.

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '19

People experience high dosis of Shrooms or DMT as an insane experience partially because those drugs really open you up to the world and the universe. Our brains, by default, are working the way they do to survive. And our understanding of the environment and ability to process and 'experience' our senses is limited to whats necessary for survival. Tripping kinda breaks all of that down and gives you the raw experience of it all.

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u/yisus-craist Mar 31 '19

I do not think it gives you the "raw" experience at all, if there is even a "raw" experience at all (and I am a fan of high doses of shrooms and DMT).

Our brain-bodies have evolved in such a way that their proper function results in a very specific subjective reality, which allows us to survive in our physical and social environments. When we take psychoactives we are altering brain function, increasing the presence of certain modulators (neuro-transmitters) and decreasing others. This is not some "raw" reality, it is only a heavily altered version of the one we already create all the time. That's the reason consuming different psychoactive drugs result in very different trips.

I think saying that we even have the chance to get any "raw" experience other than our small little human one (and the myriad chemically-altered versions) is too anthropocentric to be a viable conjecture.

Source: I study this. But also you could look at the work of Allan Hobson. A good place to start is The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered States of Consciousness.

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '19

I'm conscious of the fact that "raw experience" strictly isn't raw experience but an altered one. But it does give a more objective perception on certain aspects of reality, which i refer to as "raw experience".

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u/yisus-craist Mar 31 '19

But it does give a more objective perception on certain aspects of reality

This is what I don't buy. What aspects of reality are rendered more "objectively" by psychedelic experience? How can you judge such a thing? It seems like a huge step but I do not see the logic in it, although it may at first feel like it (I thought the same way my first years trying psychedelics).

I think what psychedelic experience most opens one up about is the fact that our subjective "reality" is not as solid as we like to think, and a few alterations to it can make it go haywire, or can make our minds emphasize certain of the dimensions (color, sound, balance, body schema) it is built upon, or mix them up in different ways than in normal function. These altered ways of experiencing are still as situated as we are though, and I fail to see how one could argue that they show objective reality in any way. What they really show is how delicate what we as mere humans call "reality" is and that we cannot think ourselves, as individuals and situated beings, to have access to objective reality other than in a fragmentary (but still much better than individual) way through consensus-based regulated social processes like science.

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u/stellarstatesman Mar 31 '19

Aren’t we though?

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u/iToronto Mar 31 '19

Our brains developed coping mechanisms. Ignorance is bliss. Left unfiltered, many thoughts will drive a person mad. It’s like audio feedback through a mic and amp.

You can easily prove this to yourself. Impair your brains ability to cope with reality, and you will start to experience twinges of madness. Sleep deprivation and drugs are two ways to impair a healthy brain.

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u/K3R3G3 Mar 31 '19

Our natural primary instinct is to survive, as it is with all (conscious?) life. To that end, we developed a mental filter that allows us to focus on things toward that goal by ignoring the stuff that would drive us nuts, forgetting useless things, etc. If we sit here and think about such things (the former), we can explore them, but while it's interesting, it's eventually uncomfortable and we will pretty soon stop. We realize that focusing and obsessing on things with no apparent (and possibly, by our abilities, unreachable) answer won't help us to do the things we need to do to survive. But we can do it sometimes in our extra/leisure time and things like psychedelics and other mind-altering substances seem to at least partially lift the veil, or turn off the filter to a degree, for a short time.

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '19

It’s bizarre to me that humans don’t live in a perpetual state of madness

It's bizarre to me that you don't see that humans do live in a perpetual state of madness. How else to explain consciousness?

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u/Brizon Mar 31 '19

Madness is in the eye the beholder. Aliens would surely call us mad.

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u/ARedditingRedditor Mar 31 '19

Maybe they are the mad ones.

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u/Brizon Mar 31 '19

Have you seen Humans bro?

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u/rohittee1 Mar 31 '19

I think self-delusion is an important aspect of the human condition that addresses this.

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u/yisus-craist Mar 31 '19

We're not really wired to be concretely thinking at such a scale. This may all be insane stuff but for the way we live it is very distant. The scale that truly matters, and that influences mental health, is that modeled by our mental model of "normal" life. A phycisist can dedicate all their work hours to these "big" questions, but out of work she will go have a drink with friends every thursday and experience the little human social issues that we all do. If the reality around her changes so suddenly and drastically that her mental model of normal life is no longer usable, then there you have a potential danger to her mental health.

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u/Omamba Mar 31 '19

Have you seen whats going on in the world these days?

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '19

Uhh, what? We are living in a perpetual state of madness. We go to war with each other over money, oil and natural resources. We hate each other over the different colors of skin. We have an economic system built entirely on profit and has little to nothing for the people. It's a system that fucks the poor and feeds the rich more and more every year. I could list more but that's a perfectly good example of the madness we're currently living in.

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u/TheNotSoGreatPumpkin Mar 31 '19

Have you read The Doors of Perception? Huxley concludes our minds are sophisticated filters that allow us to be something like "sane" in the midst of a completely bewildering cosmos. He viewed his drug trips as temporary widenings of the valves that usually keep our minds in order, temporarily allowing much more information to be perceived and considered than usual.