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Casey Christofaris

Owner, CS3 Inc

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Is evolution/religion/everything a self fulfilling prophecy?

What separates us from the rest of species? Recognition of self right? Some will want to argue that there are other species that can recognize self. But then you need to ask well do they recognize self do to our experiments and what we have defined as self recognition or is it innately in them? So is it that we recognize self because of them through evolution or do they recognize self do to us? A bird called the magpie is self aware using the mirror test. It’s easy now to look in a mirror and say yep that’s me, but it’s a million times harder to say that this is just a visual representation of trillions of moving, living, self-replicating entities.

This is the principles that I would like to use in defining self fulfilling prophecy:
Robert Merton's concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy stems from the Thomas theorem, which states that "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."[2] According to Thomas, people react not only to the situations they are in, but also, and often primarily, to the way they perceive the situations and to the meaning they assign to these perceptions. This causes people to have negative viewpoints. Therefore, their behavior is determined in part by their perception and the meaning they ascribe to the situations they are in, rather than by the situations themselves. Once people convince themselves that a situation really has a certain meaning, regardless of whether it actually does, they will take very real actions in consequence.

So we are just a bunch of self replicating entities that have evolved in to a self recognizing being. Will history keep repeating its "self"?

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  • Dennis Hollinger

    • +1
    Nov 19 2012: At all times in mans history, man makes reference to a God or gods in order to explain or bring an understanding to concepts that he,(man) did not posse. Eventually, given time, science focused on explaining the mystery of the unexplainable. As knowledge increased over time, so did understanding. What was once attributed to God is now known through science. My belief is, religion was the precursor to science. Religion tried to answer questions that man had, and when the answer was not available it was given over to the realm of God. We must have an evolutionary need to have answers, and God was the provider of those answers. I believe that man created God. We created a divine God to be the keeper of answers to mysteries we did not yet have.

    Gods have always existed because the answers to our questions have always existed, we just did not have the understanding at the time.

    God provided or became the answer without needing the understanding.



    Now rip this argument apart... Please

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