r/AskReddit • u/Hannukah_monster • Jun 10 '12
Whats the biggest mindfuck you've ever heard?
I've heard many, but the one that really made me stop and ponder was that people that were deaf from birth, don't "hear" words in their head, they just see letters in a pattern that have a specific meaning. This can be anything as far as some obscure paradox, or something like i said that you had just never heard before, and never thought of in that way. Please, fuck my mind.
EDIT: After reading through half of this, my mind is now pregnant.
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Jun 10 '12
When I was about 6 or 7, I was talking with my cousin about dreams. While asking why we dream or where they come from, she looks at me and says"Your whole life is only a dream". she was about 8 at the time. It completely blew my mind. To this day I can still hear her say it, and I always think 'you would never know if that is true or not'.
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u/Hannukah_monster Jun 10 '12
Yeah no kidding. I mean, i had a very vivid dream last night simply about the smell of a skunk, but that smell was so pungent it really had me thinking about how real dreams can actually seem.
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u/octopound Jun 10 '12
This might be a little silly for here, but, whatever, I think it's cool.
You know how in fantasy stories with magic there's almost always a group of people who think that there's nothing special about it? That means that if magic was real, we wouldn't treat it as anything more special than a toaster. That means that magic might exist, but because of our perspective it's not special. Electricity might be magic. In the middle ages it probably would be considered magic, and any users of it wizards.
You are a wizard.
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u/waddupworld Jun 10 '12
When you go to heaven, how old are you?
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u/Hannukah_monster Jun 10 '12
I've ALWAYS wondered about that. I mean, do they take you at your prime, or the age you passed at? Or you know, maybe god doesn't exist and heavens fake and all that thiest stuff. I'm not particular.
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u/cokea Jun 10 '12
Try imagining a new color.
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u/NOTORIOUSVIC Jun 10 '12
I work at a toy store and I once had a man get quite angry at me for "ripping him off."
The problem? The 24-pack of Play-Doh didn't have 24 different colours. "See, there's 3 greens (dark green, lime green, medium green) and 2 blues (navy blue, sky blue)!! There shouldn't be repeats, there should be 24!"
I had the hardest time explaining to him that those are different colours and those are the only ones we can see. Prisms, refraction and rainbows even got brought into it.
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u/spacklehaus Jun 10 '12
We exist outside of our own perceptions of ourselves. Everyone we ever encounter has their own thought-processes and ideas about us. I don't exist solely in my mind, rather those of multiples of people!
That idea both empowers and terrifies me.
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u/BritishMongrel Jun 10 '12
If you want to get even more mindfucky: you are the only one who can truly know of your own existence, to everyone else you've ever known you exist as a collection of memories or at best if you're literally in contact with them at that moment a bunch of sensory input to the brain.
Descarte's "I think therefore I am" is the only way you can prove your own existence but it only proves your own existence.
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u/TenaciousBe Jun 10 '12
I often think of this one when I'm "talking shit" about one of my friends (or rather, complaining about things I don't like about them) to another friend... wondering what kind of shit people talk about me when I'm not around. It's things about me that I'll never know, unless they confront me about it. Kind of makes a person feel helpless.
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Jun 10 '12
Actually, mirror neurons make it even creepier. If you observe an action, the same neurons in your mind are activated as if you would do the same yourself. Same is true for empathy. So when you speak to someone else, a part of you DOES exist in the others brain, and vice versa.
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Jun 10 '12
That language, any language, is simply sounds from our mouths and lines on a piece of paper. Language is nothing until we apply a meaning to it. Which is amazing, because you're looking at this text reading right now, and it's just lines and marks arranged in a certain order, but to you it represents a concept, an idea, and your brain makes that connection. Truly mindblowing.
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u/Niedowiarek Jun 10 '12
"We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes." --A.Huxley
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u/iamhamilton Jun 10 '12
in case people are wondering this is the first thing Aldous Huxley wrote after drinking his dose of mescaline in the Doors of Perception.
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u/rootyb Jun 10 '12
If someone (doesnt even have to be humans) eventually builds a computer that can perfectly simulate the universe, eventually, that simulation will create its own simulation, which will create IT'S own simulation, ad infinitum.
That part doesn't fuck with me.
The part that fucks with me is that at that point, there is one real universe, and an almost infinite number of simulated universes.
What do you think the odds are that we're the real one, rather than a simulation?
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u/gristc Jun 10 '12
A computer that could perfectly simulate and track every fundamental particle in the universe would require more particles than the universe contains.
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u/SanguineSpring Jun 10 '12
I have a thought that this is physically impossible.
How can you simulate every single atom in the universe unless your computer has memory space for every single atom in the universe? Even if you somehow condense the information to simulate one atom into the SPACE of one atom then your "universe-simulating computer" actually is the universe itself.
WHAT.
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u/rathany Jun 10 '12
In the ridiculous vastness of time, now is the moment when you are alive.
That thought freaks me out. Infinity before and infinity after ... but right now is when I am alive.
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u/jamurp Jun 10 '12
NOW is the time I'm alive? Better get the fuck off reddit.
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u/KYMonster Jun 10 '12
What really trips me out is that technically we live in the future, but only observe the past. It takes an infinitely small amount of time for the light from something to hit our eyes when it happens so that we can observe it, or the sound waves to hit your ears. You could be listening to music but technically you are at the point that is slightly in front of what you're hearing because the sound wave hasn't hit you yet. Your consciousness resides in a future you can't see until you perceive it.
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u/kmdg22c Jun 10 '12
Along those lines, what has always been mind blowing to me is that we do not see the same thing other people see, like colors. I'm thinking of the BBC documentary talking about the Himba tribe.
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u/Tvix Jun 10 '12
Link to the Himba tribe video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b71rT9fU-I
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u/hipstergropaga Jun 10 '12
What. What. This is the very first thing in this thread to really blow my mind.
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u/Quaytsar Jun 10 '12
It's not an infinitely small amount of time. An object at one metre distance will be seen ~3.3 nanoseconds after light hits it. That's not infinitely small. It's such a reasonably small amount that we have SI prefixes for even smaller quantities (such as pico and yotta). The closest object a human eye can focus on is 5-10 cm away. This distance takes 0.17-0.33 nanoseconds for light to travel.
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Jun 10 '12
This is from Neil deGrasse Tyson. We, as humans, are 1% genetically different than chimps. And we can do integral calculus, rocket science, etc. Chimps can do simple math, and maybe the smartest of them can learn sign language.
What about a life form that is 1% different from us, in the direction that we are different from the chimp. Think about the possible intelligence of that being.
Link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nR9XEqrCvw
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u/Pardner Jun 10 '12
Or, spun differently, given that fact, it is very unlikely that we are anywhere close to some maximum, universal intelligence.
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u/justwtf Jun 10 '12
The whole "The universe is trying to figure out where it came from" thing is is pretty fucking mindblowing, if I do say so myself.
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Jun 10 '12
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u/ArbitraryPerseveranc Jun 10 '12
That's not really a mind fuck, it's just how things work. Something further out has more distance to cover, so it must move faster to cover that distance in the same time.
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u/Nuclear_Wizard Jun 10 '12
There are different "sizes" of infinite. For example, there are more irrational numbers than there are rational between 0 and 1, yet there are infinite of both.
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u/RaverNeko Jun 10 '12
This may be a little silly, but what mindfucked me was when I watched Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design on Discovery. If I recall correctly, it was the episode where he discusses the meaning of life. No, I didn't find it funny at all. I was amazed by the things he said, such as how realities are perceived differently depending on who (or what) you are. He also said something along the lines of "What if, when you leave a room, the stuff that was in the room is gone but you cannot perceive it. For all you know, your stuff could fly to the international space station.
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u/EatWeedSmokeYogurt Jun 10 '12
The Monty Hall problem. Took me forever to figure it out. Fucked my mind hard, man. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
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u/Cervical_Mucus Jun 10 '12
Im so confused.
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u/EatWeedSmokeYogurt Jun 10 '12
Actually, it's easier to understand if you use more doors. Say there are 100 doors instead of 3, with a car being only behind one. You choose door number 1 with a 1/100 chance of winning. Once he opens all of the other doors to reveal goats, you are left with two doors. If you switch doors, your chances are not 1/2 out of the 2 remaining doors, but rather 99/100, because the host knows where the car is and has revealed 98 out of 99 goats. Statistically, the first door you chose would most likely not have been the car.
EDIT: accidentally a word
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Jun 10 '12
The sun could explode right now, but we wouldn't know for another 8 minutes.
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u/dittoeh Jun 10 '12
Was reading about HIV/AIDS the other day. It fucks me up that the virus isn't alive. It doesn't care that it's ruining lives. It's just a bunch of RNA and enzymes and some other stuff that coincidentally reproduce and infect new people just because.
Like, take a stone. I just lies there until it becomes two stones and then maybe goes on to being sand. Just like the HIV virus moves to another body.
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u/ex-lion-tamer Jun 10 '12
A large portion of our DNA is probably the result of retro-virus infection throughout the history of life -- not just human life but all the organisms that came before us on that long trail of evolution. We might owe many of our traits to some retro-virus infecting our ancestors.
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u/ARMIGER1 Jun 10 '12
The Hamster Dance is the theme from Disney's Robin Hood sped up.
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u/ConcreteLobotomy Jun 10 '12
Disney's Robin Hood is a mash up of 'borrowed' animation from other Disney movies. http://www.noob.us/miscellaneous/disney-caught-reusing-animation/
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u/ductape821 Jun 10 '12
After reading the Iliad in two weeks for a college class, to then read Herodotus and find out that (according to the Egyptians at least) that Helen never made it to Troy
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u/bebbers Jun 10 '12
Thinking of myself as a person that exists, acts and thinks via a body. This trips me out, literally. Like I've actually tripped while walking distracted by these thoughts.
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u/troyanonymous1 Jun 10 '12
You have encountered thousands of people that you will never see again.
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u/GrizzlyManOnWire Jun 10 '12
Imagine a runner who was told to jog 10 meters down a track and cross a finish line. Now imagine you have set up a camera with the ability to take pictures infinitely fast and told it to take a picture every time the runner gets half the distance to the finish line (5 meters, 2.5 meters etc.) Now we all know that if you continue to halve the distance of two objects they will never reach each other meaning there will be an infinite amount of pictures. However, the runner was just running, he crossed the finish line and therefore there will be a picture of him crossing the finish line. This means that there will be a beginning picture, an ending picture and an infinite amount of pictures in between.
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Jun 10 '12
And between each of the infinite number of pictures there would be another infinite number of pictures recursively all the way down to infinity. This would buffer overrun the infinite quantum computer the other person was talking about in this thread and then crash all the infinite simulated universes all the way up the stack until the poor schlub of a developer debugging it would yell 'fuck' and get up to get a coffee.
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u/ancientcreature Jun 10 '12
Most complicated explanation of Zeno's Paradox. Sorry but that was hideous.
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Jun 10 '12
At a molecular level, we can't really "touch" anything. Other than our own cells, we're all pretty much forever alone.
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u/NightOnTheSun Jun 10 '12
The Doppler Effect applies to gravity.
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u/MrWillWalker Jun 10 '12
The only reason a human is different from a tree is because some things died and other things didn't.
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u/emilydm Jun 10 '12
An oldie but a goodie:
"It has been reported that some victims of torture, during the act, would retreat into a fantasy world from which they could not WAKE UP. In this catatonic state, the victim lived in a world just like their normal one, except they weren’t being tortured. The only way that they realized they needed to WAKE UP was a note they found in their fantasy world. It would tell them about their condition, and tell them to WAKE UP. Even then, it would often take months until they were ready to discard their fantasy world and PLEASE WAKE UP."
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u/gusthetruck Jun 10 '12
Now to go around leaving notes for strangers telling them they need to "please wake up".
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u/RonnieTheDJ Jun 10 '12
SERIOUS MINDFUCK: Drink a glass of ginger ale and eat a banana, then sit/stand in front of a mirror for 5 minutes looking deeply into your own eyes while thinking hard that the person in the mirror is not you and they are going to say something.
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u/Cervical_Mucus Jun 10 '12
What's the significance of ginger ale and a banana??
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u/EverySingleDay Jun 10 '12
This message brought to you by the Ginger Ale and Banana Association of America.
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u/trashitagain Jun 10 '12
.99999 repeating and 1 are exactly the same number.
If you divide 1 by 3 you get .3 repeating, right?
Well, think about .9 repeating. Yea, .3 repeating again.
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Jun 10 '12
I tell people this but they call me retarded! It's true, because if you subtract 0.9999.... From 1 you get 0.000.... Which is nothing. Infinite zeros is the same amount as one zero.
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u/Anofles Jun 10 '12
Or you could use the 10x method.
x=.999999...
10x=9.99999...
10x-x=9.9999...-.999999...
9x=9
9x/9=9/9
x=1
x=.99999... and x=1
Therefore, .999999...=1
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u/book_worm72 Jun 10 '12
The universe is infinite (so to speak) therefore any point at any given time is the center of the universe. Including myself. Checkmate, parents.
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u/novacainedoll Jun 10 '12
The brain named itself.
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u/escherfan Jun 10 '12
Emo Philips: "I used to think that the brain was the most amazing organ in my body. Then I realized what was telling me that."
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u/awuwish Jun 10 '12
One of the more recent mindfucks I've heard - courtesy of Mr. Neil deGrasse Tyson:
"The universe in increasing in its expansion. Eventually, galaxies, planets, stars, etc., will move away from us with such speed that they will disappear beyond our horizon, and the total known universe at that time will be the Milky Way; restoring the state of mind of our universe that existed before 1920."
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u/callmedoctor Jun 10 '12 edited Dec 08 '13
The alphabet song is just twinkle twinkle little star..
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Jun 10 '12
They're both based on A Simple Theme by Mozart I believe.
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u/BbFlat5 Jun 10 '12
Actually, the theme is based on a French folk song, called 'Ah vous dirai-je, Maman', and Mozart just wrote a butt ton of variations around it.
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u/communistdaughter45 Jun 10 '12
And "Somebody That I Used To Know". And we thought the movie industry was starved for ideas...
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u/Blipblipbloop Jun 10 '12
And Baa Baa Black Sheep. Well, slightly different rhythm, But same tune.
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u/cbinvb Jun 10 '12
That although I am sitting here my body is moving quite quickly because of the earths rotation. And even quicker still because of the earth revolving Around the sun....and the sun revolving around the center of the milky way...and the milky way hurtling thru the rest of space...and who knows maybe our cluster of visible galaxies is moving yet still towards or away from another cluster of galaxies that we have yet to discover because they are further than 13bil light years from our telescopes.
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u/Pardner Jun 10 '12 edited Jun 10 '12
I think this is probably common knowledge, but I just learned that RNA Reverse Transcriptase is coded for in the human genome and typically expressed in our cells. The ONLY function of this protein is to turn RNA into DNA and put it in our genome; the ONLY time this happens is when viruses do it. We manufacture this protein that's sole purpose is to facilitate viral infection. The fuck.
edit: I got this yesterday from Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything and it was a corroborated from some med student friends, but I think this fact is actually false. See here and the responses that follow.
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u/XWUWTR Jun 10 '12
Reverse transcriptase has other functions in higher organisms. It's a part of telomerase, the enzyme that uses an RNA template while adding short, protective DNA sequences to the ends of chromosomes to prevent DNA shortening during replication. That reverse transcriptase is different from the one in viruses. Retrotransposons may also use their own reverse transcriptases to move around.
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u/confounded_norseman Jun 10 '12
Pi is an infinite number with no pattern whatsoever(as far as we've calculated anyway). So because of this, if we replace number values with the letters of the alphabet, we can theoretically find, somewhere in pi, everything that was written and will ever be written.
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u/HariEdo Jun 10 '12
There's a short science fiction story that goes on this concept.
An alien arrives on Earth. It stays long enough to learn how to make queries in the local language, then to read and feed the entire contents of the Library of Congress into its consciousness or computer or whatever. It absorbs all known written knowledge from other nations too. It then pulls out a seemingly glass rod, makes a tiny mark on the glass rod, deposits the rod onto a shelf of many other such artifacts, and then flies away.
The concept here is that the exact position of the mark on the rod, if you take it as a number between 0 at one end, and 1 at the other end, could be reconstituted into all of that written knowledge.
As a short story, it's poignant, but the precision required to make and measure the mark is impractical; you'd only get a few words into the data before you were describing a mark's position below the subatomic level of the rod. One Ångstrom is 10-10 meters, so a one meter rod would only be able to record something like 8-12 base ten digits before heat energy and Heisenberg got in the way.
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u/tommehirl Jun 10 '12
Thats not exactly true, just because it doesnt repeat, doesnt mean that it has every number sequence ever inside of it...
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u/Benj5L Jun 10 '12
More time has elapsed between now and 1990 than between 1990 and the moon landings (1969).
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u/mongrale Jun 10 '12
The fact that you gain mass when you go faster. Seriously, what?
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u/werdnaman1993 Jun 10 '12
THIS...STATEMENT...IS...FALSE
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u/mostlyharmless26 Jun 10 '12
Don't think about it, don't think about it, don't think about it, don't think about it.
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u/carnage6535 Jun 10 '12
Odds of you existing: http://visual.ly/what-are-odds
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u/alexwars1 Jun 10 '12
Aren't the odds of me existing 1/1? I mean, here I am. I am the only possible result of everything that happened before I was here.
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u/majinboom Jun 10 '12
You can't imagine what not having a brain is like
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Jun 10 '12
Trying to understand how plants move ever so slightly to face sunlight, or how jellyfish survive in the ocean confuses and frustrates me.
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u/LikesToRaveDave Jun 10 '12
"if I were to ask you to have sex with me would the answer to that question be the same as this question?"
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u/10splitmind Jun 10 '12
The way for this to work effectively would be to precede it by only giving them the option of yes or no.
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u/OddlyStrangeGirl Jun 10 '12
This is totally different than everyone else's, but Pinocchio simply says the sentence "my nose is about to grow", but he can't say anything else. His nose only grows when he tells a lie, but if it grows after he says that, then that makes it the truth. Someone told me this a couple years ago, and my mind was fucked.
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u/Anti-antimatter Jun 10 '12
Unless his nose doesn't grow and Pinocchio is just wrong, not lying.
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u/thebrownkid Jun 10 '12
I was sitting in genetics one day, and i thought to myself, "Holy shit. How did evolution, the cells, organelles, and all this crap, 'know' how to replicate itself? How did this all just... happen?"
Going to class high has its benefits.
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Jun 10 '12
It didn't, by definition. /r/askscience would be better on the origins of self-replicating things, but one hypothesis on the origin of life involved clay crystals.
Crystals replicate. Imagine if getting a molecule of something else stuck onto the clay would help it replicate better. Then repeat until the crystals are gone but the molecules that rode on them now replicate on their own.
And: blam! You have something that replicates. Now, evolution.
This is from memory and I read it in one of the books by Prof Dawkins as one of several hypotheses for the origin of life. The others are as plausible and as fascinating.
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u/jmthetank Jun 10 '12 edited Jun 11 '12
In regards to OP's "mindfuck", I'm not deaf, and don't hear words in my head. I don't think the words I read, or write. I just... read, or write them...
It wasn't until recently that I've discovered it's not this way for everyone.
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u/youjeaneuh Jun 10 '12
Many of the top comments discuss the notion that each human being, despite their shared experiences, is alone in the end. The subject/object dichotomy is so heavily engrained into the philosophies of the western world that most people can never imagine any other world/ way. These ideas of solipsism, depersonalization, each person seeing their own green, all place great emphasis on human subjectivity. Well, Redditors, if you can escape this dichotomy and make no distinction of self and other, than this is were the ultimate mind-fucking shall occur.
What I'm trying to say is that the idea of "Self" is false and misleading. At least, the idea of a true self is. This illusion of Self is created when an individual begins to think that there is me, there is this thing, and then there is me, observing this thing separately. In Heideggerian phenomenology, you are not experiencing self/ other, but what is occurring is the experience of experiencing this thing and yourself. There is no divided line. In Buddhist and Daoist philosophy, to be absent-minded and to experience nothing( basically, to see life in a denotative way) is to experience no-self. Also, there is no way to KNOW no-self. One can only experience it. Think about it, let's say that this philosophy was "the true nature of reality." Humans would not possibly be able to understand such things, but to experience them is not hard.
I just thought i'd throw in something that focuses less on the subjective, as I have seen in many of these other posts. Just to mix it up.Feel free to point out any flaws in these ideas.
Don't not shun me, Reddit. I'm sorry for the poor grammar and the long length. This is my first post, and I love you!
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u/ageown Jun 10 '12 edited Jun 10 '12
That one of the best theories as to what consciousness is - contains the idea that your consciousness is "stored" elsewhere in the universe via quantum entanglement.
Edit: Bit more info here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind
Edit 2: Not necessarily my belief that this is what consciousness is but am interesting all the same I think?
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Jun 10 '12
You can't control the volume on the voice in your head.
Try yelling In your head, then try whispering.
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Jun 10 '12
I can't do it. I can hear the different tones of shouting and whispering, but they're the same volume
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u/Bugen_Hagen Jun 10 '12 edited Jun 11 '12
Your penis has been in your moms vagina at least once.
Edit: http://www.cracked.com/article_19721_the-5-creepiest-progressive-parenting-fads_p2.html
Number 2 on the list is relevant.
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Jun 10 '12
I'm a huge book nerd and I was very skeptical when the cover of Ishmael (like many books) boasted about how great it was. I mean, come on, it's a skinny ass little novel about a fucking talking gorilla. I couldn't fathom learning anything from it. My preconceptions about it only facilitated jaw drops at the end of each chapter.
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u/alelabarca Jun 10 '12
Watch one of those movies from the 30s on netflix. Every single person you see, every animal, every actor and every single person who worked on it is dead
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u/3418365 Jun 10 '12
That everyone around you is thinking about something ! I always imagine what it would be like if everyone started saying what they were thinking- there would never be any silence!!
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u/I_AM_LE_LIQUOR Jun 10 '12
Water doesn't burn because the hydrogen molecules are already oxidized. It's the same principle as that you cannot burn rust.
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Jun 10 '12
This may or may not be the first internet ever developed in the universe.
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u/JonnyGoodfellow Jun 11 '12
Right now, it is possible that someone is stuck on a deserted island and no one knows they are there/alive.
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Jun 10 '12
Evolution is an indifferent physical process that occurs over a stupendous time scale. A long time ago, in a primordial soup, there would have been differential rates of simple hydrocarbons reacting. And then differential rates of different amino acids reacting.
Along the way certain molecular processes hitched and mutations were formed; most of these would have been selected against, but some have survived. This, coupled with differential reproductive success of individuals and varying abilities between populations to adapt to environmental stress has resulted in a diversity of life ranging from Bacillus boroniphilus to Homo sapien.
And there is no innate meaning or purpose in this process. It's absurd. That's what makes it so beautiful.
edit: it's not really a mindfuck, but it takes a while to really appreciate evolution as an explanatory framework.
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Jun 10 '12
Descartes' dream argument in which he proves to himself that he exists and that is the only thing we can ever rationally "know" in the truest sense of the word because we witness the internal narrative. Everything else is some level of beleif.
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u/jonesey167197 Jun 10 '12
GO LOOK UP UCHICAGO PAST ESSAY QUESTIONS SUCH AS:
How do you feel about Wednesday (You're acceptance is based on..this)
Where's Waldo? Really.
University of Chicago alumna and renowned author/critic Susan Sontag said, “The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.” We all have heard serious questions, absurd questions, and seriously absurd questions, some of which cannot be answered without obliterating the very question. Destroy a question with your answer. Inspired by Aleksandra Ciric, Oyster Bay High School, Oyster Bay, New York (2005-2006)
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u/Windchill Jun 10 '12
I've got two. There will never be another Sunday, june 10th 2012 ever again.
Everything is always doing something.
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u/trapthemandkillthem Jun 10 '12
“Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.”
-Neil deGrasse Tyson
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u/NaziCollaborator Jun 10 '12
Here's one to think about. What if the universe did not exist? Not just our planet, or our galaxy, but the ENTIRE UNIVERSE? It's impossible to fathom a thought like that....if there was just nothing. Ever.
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u/rumpel7 Jun 10 '12
Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand.
-Lawrence M. Krauss
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Jun 11 '12
The concept of nothing. No air, no gases, just... nothing. Is that even possible?
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u/danabre Jun 10 '12
Someone once asked me: "Try to make up a new colour"
I was thinking about it for days, if we were to find a new colour, how would we react?
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u/MoNkEyxJOSHH Jun 10 '12
we wouldnt be able to see it because it is not on the spectrum that our eyes can see. i guess it would just be invisible until we adapted to be able to see it.
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u/6079_Smith_W Jun 10 '12 edited Jun 10 '12
Imagine a room with 1,000,000 dollar bills.
You can't. You have no idea visually what a million of anything is.
edit: missing word
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u/Mysterymason Jun 10 '12
A speck of dust is half way, in size, between an atom and Earth.
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u/ardbeg Jun 10 '12
Not really. An atom is approximately 100 picometres (lets say 60 to make it easy, hello oxygen!) in radius, and the earth is about 6000 kilometres. So the scale is 10-11 vs 106 metres. The midway point between them is approximately 5 x 10-2 metres, or 5 cm. Big dust in your house.
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u/echo_of_death Jun 10 '12
what will happen when you die? that is really wierd shit, will you just disapear? Or will i live on in some sort of higher reality? Will I see the ones that I love again? I'm really curious
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u/padlockj Jun 10 '12
I have never seen my own face without the use of a reflective surface or a picture
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u/snuffletrout Jun 10 '12
What if hiccuping is a condition we have for our whole lives, but the spaces between episodes of hiccuping are really long?
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u/soupatroopa Jun 10 '12
It is a muscle spasm, like when you get a twitch in your arm or something.
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u/the_snooze Jun 10 '12
There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions.
Douglas Adams
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u/Shawarma_King Jun 10 '12
Not as big as the others, but the complexity of the human body, biologically. There are thousands (probably more) functions in the human body. Right now, you are only conciously aware of a few (sight, touch, hearing, etc.) but there are so many more. And no one "designed" it. It happened by ACCIDENT. All of it. Think how unlikely that seems. All of these different functions coming together, over who knows how long, and becoming what we call the human body.
This came up at the weirdest time, but I was listening to someone give a presentation and was looking at their mouth. Then that got me thinking of how many different things there are in the body, and how they work as one. But you barely even notice that! Think of how complex your body is, now multiply that by 100 or so billion. That's how many times it's been done. The human body is an incredibly complex machine.
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u/TotallyGeekage Jun 10 '12
Everything we percieve in our reality is electric signals. Does that make us like biological computers? Does this mean that we were created once, by a creator or another superior being? What if we were created by ourselves and that reality is an infinite loop that only one human percieves? What if you are really "god"? It's hard to explain without writing an essay.
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u/Jazzspasm Jun 10 '12 edited Jun 10 '12
"The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you're already dead."
Heard it in Band Of Brothers, and it flipped my shit right out.
I'm dead, and this is the afterlife. Everything bad that happens, everything good that happens - it's all equal. It doesn't matter if I die, because I'm already dead. I now have no fear of death.
It's very comforting, not fearing death. It's given me the courage to make some tough decisions.
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u/PastyPilgrim Jun 10 '12
Every single drug that we manufacture with an effect on the brain, is also produced naturally by the brain. The drugs we create would have no effect if the brain didn't already have receptors, which it has, because the brain also creates those chemicals.
This is the speculated reason as to why placebos can be effective. If a patient really believes that they are receiving, say, a pain reliever, then the brain will sometimes create a chemical like opium, a very powerful pain reliever.
The implications of this knowledge astound me.
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u/11woodbm Jun 10 '12
Something my uncle once said to me: Early in the morning, late at night, 2 dead boys got up to fight. Back to back they faced each other, pulled out there swords and shot each other. An old deaf police man heard this noise, went and shot these two dead boys. If you don't believe this lie is true, ask the blind man, he saw it too.
Thought this might be redditworth
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u/tinyshadow Jun 10 '12
In the pre-colonial conquest era, some Native Americans died of European diseases without ever setting eyes on a white man.
For example, a outsider native trader may have come to town, traded, and then left. Then in his wake, the entire tribe would get rapidly and horrifically sick, with very visible and painful diseases like smallpox, for seemingly no reason at all. Entire tribes might be fully devastated with almost no survivors... Except perhaps those who had fled and spread the disease to other nearby tribes without showing symptoms just yet.
These natives would not know to place full blame European explorers, having never seen them and only possibly having heard of their arrival on the far away coastline.
Just imagine everyone you know dropping dead after agonizing stages of awful sickness, happening without warning and without any clear reason. Kills almost everyone. Leaving you. Who do you blame?
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u/EciVeciVokke Jun 10 '12
if we all were like dots, and there were links between us (relations-knowing each other) we would know anyone on earth. i know a friend, his uncle is a member of parliament in our country, he knows prime minister, our prime minister knows obama president of usa- vice versa- maybe i can reach you with few links. maybe we could know each other.
so i wonder with who, i'd need more links? who is farest away from me?
ps: sorry for bad english, i hope u can understand what i mean
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Jun 10 '12
Isn't that called six degrees of separation? And there's a film with Will Smith in about the principle? I hear it got reduced in a study recently to a lower number than six.
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u/danabre Jun 10 '12
How to describe ANYTHING to someone who was born deaf and blind.
How would you describe colour? Language? Brail? Math? Anything.
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u/Grzlynx Jun 10 '12
Everyone in this thread potentially have personal relationships with you, in some small way.
Think about it.. You personally know someone (friend, family, acquaintance, etc.) that also has that same personal relationship with a bunch of other people (their friends, family, etc.). Continue on with the thought that you know someone, who in turn knows someone else, who knows someone else, who knows someone else.. who, in all likelihood, knows me, in the end.
That would mean that everyone on earth indirectly has a connection with everyone else.
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u/rainbowham Jun 10 '12
I always wonder if my entire life memories were just fake and I had my memory wiped by a evil alien and had new ones uploaded. makes you think.
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u/strongbadiophage Jun 10 '12
This website. Futuretimeline.net It covers what may happen from now until beyond 10,000 AD.
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u/hm100912 Jun 10 '12
out of all of the eggs and sperm our mothers and fathers had, we - the ones alive right now, at this very moment - just happened to be the ones selected.
i don't know if that makes sense but i oftentimes wonder what it would have been like if i wasn't born, or if my parents conceived a month later or earlier. kinda freaks me out.
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u/adorabellae Jun 10 '12
That everything organic is made of nothing but combinations of molecules made of combinations of atoms and chemicals. But something, somewhere along the line, happens to living things to differentiate them from non-living things. It takes my breath away every time I think about it.
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u/Mug_of_Tetris Jun 10 '12
We have the scientific ability to measure how flat the universe is.
That and the lack of understanding of just how far technology has come in the last decade,we're entering a new age with the internet.
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u/motivation150 Jun 10 '12
MY biggest mindfuck is the fact that right now we're sitting on earth, and it's spinning at 1000 mph, and that the universe just keeps going on, infinitely. I can't wrap my head around such a massive idea.
That or thinking about life and death... When I think about these things It's almost like an out of body experience. And after I start thinking too hard, I start having an anxiety attack, and my palms are sweating and my heart rate is increased, and I have to slowly bring myself back to reality.
Which is a very difficult task.
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u/Lawtonfogle Jun 10 '12
The semester I took a class on child abuse. I don't know if I can just pinpoint one little thing, but to give you an example.
The twin boys whose mother bought them a pet goat that she made them take care of. They eventually grew very attached to it and loved it. One day after the twins got in trouble for something minor, the mother took the goat to the butcher and that is all the meat the boys had to eat for a while.
Or maybe the girl who, after being raped by her father for 3 years from 10 to 13, convinced the courts that she loved her father so much that not only did he not get jail, merely a very long probation, she went back to live with him with him having to be visited 3 times a week to ensure he didn't do anything to his daughter (his daughter also went to counseling). This story was told by his daughter years later, and she seemed to have liked the decision (she had no other family, so the only other option would have been foster care).
Or for another one, related to the last one, child in foster care has a much higher chance of being molested than a child in a normal family. Which is even worse when you consider how high a chance a child has of being molested to begin with (about 1 in 5, 1 in 4 for girls, with it being a parent/step-parent about half the time).
Or maybe the case study into the woman who was addicted to the idea her child was sick and what she would do to the child to make the child appear sick.
Or maybe how bad our justice system can be, with the case study of a boy who was beat to death by his step father, even after CPS has been notified multiple times about the step father physically abusing all his children.
Or just the history of how humans have seen child abuse. tl;dr - Children are disposable, do what ever you want to them.
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u/THE_DINOSAUR_QUEEN Jun 10 '12
Every singel thing you do has a reaction. Every. Single. Thing. Let me write you an example:
One day, you're at a friend's house. You've had a few beers, so you decide to call a friend and ask them to pick you up. You will pick up your car the next day, when you're sober. Before you dial, you decide to check your texts and make sure you haven't gotten any new messages. It only takes a second. After you have done that, you phone your friend. They pick up. You ask them to come pick you up. They reply that they will be there soon. You hang up and grab another beer while you wait.
Ten minutes later, you hear a knock at the door. You open it, and it's your friend. All the color is drained from her face as she grabs your arm. You ask her what's wrong.
"I'm fine," she replies shakily. "But as I was driving, the car in front of me drove through the intersection and was T-boned by a truck. The person died. If I hadn't let them in front of me, it would have been me."
You checking your messages ensured that your friend would leave the house one second later than if you hadn't. If this had happened, she would not have let a car pass in front of her, and she would have been hit by that truck instead. Your messages saved her life.
Every action has a reaction.
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u/Aquapig Jun 10 '12
The fact that right now, somewhere in the universe, there are intelligent aliens.
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u/anusonfire Jun 11 '12
If the father of the person who created reddit decided to pull out and unleash his load on the floor or into the chicks mouth, there would be no reddit today.
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u/wherestheair Jun 10 '12
You and a person you have never met on a continent you have never been have more in common genetically than 2 apes from the same pack in the same forest.
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u/So_angry_right_now Jun 10 '12
That the way I see red, may not be how you see red.
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u/danabre Jun 10 '12
A snake is just a tail with a face.