Well, me and MY friends aren't out there looking for sperm brains. They would be too small to find anyway. It might be possible, however, to engage a nanoagent or a nanobot to find a sperm brain, but we might never know....BTW, is it possible for robots to have a soul?

That's an interesting question, Fiery. According to Ray Kurzweil, the answer is yes. My instinct is no, but I think I might change my mind if we were closer to being able to create a robot that even approaches the complexity of a living being.

And you could see a sperm cell's brain with nothing more complicated than a regular optical microscope if it had one. Trust me, they don't have brains. I came up with that as reductio ad absurdum for Key, who knows beyond a doubt that I'm a dreaded inside-the-box thinker for not understanding that jellyfish so obviously have a different kind of brain.

...What's a soul?

That's not rhetorical--really, what is it? Define it. Anyone. I bet we'll all have different definitions, and I'd love to hear them.

Just to throw it out there, I may as well say that I think the concept of the soul is superstition, and is unnecessary because the mind, housed in the brain, is all that I am. My memories are there, I make my decisions there, and I imagine things there. Where's my soul?

It's another example, in my opinion, of humans thinking they're the super-special chosen ones. Do animals have a soul? Plants? Microbes?

I understand the desire to be a part of something infinite, everlasting, and undying. We are--and I call that thing consciousness, not soul. What do you all think?

I don't know if it's everlasting - I doubt it, actually - but to me it's that spark you see in everyone, the life force that's larger than just our bodies - even though that's where it's housed. Animals have it too, just less of it (and some animals have more than others).

If you see someone really powerful like Miles Davis (if there's anyone else like that), you know in an instant that it's not superstition at all. But we all have some of that.

Plants and microbes, well, I don't think they have a soul in the same sense. But I could be wrong. Consciousness is something else.

Consciousness is an instinctive movement(unconcieces behavior).Instinct is a Learned unknowen, (Loren Isely(Star Thrower). Therfore Small animals have a brain that tells them how to avoid danger, how ever small it is. Was Emerson a fool or a pure simpleton?

Well here's the deal, science can only explaij the phenominal world, what we can see, observe, measure. Religion attempts to step beyond that to go to a deeper level of what life really is.

becuse without a doubt, there is a deeper level to our live other than sight, hearing , taste , touch , smell, our consinous that intergrates these sensory imputs, and on a deeper level, uncounsisouness. (How's that for spelling, f -it.)

In eastern thought, it goes deeper than un uncounsious level, to the Alya onsiness, were karma is sytored, another wise our actions, both good and bad, like a bank account of credtis and debits.

Then below that is the essence of univeral life, with we all are apart of. The deepest level of life. Pure, energy.

The question is, how do we tap into this energy that we posses? I believe I have encountered what that is, do to extreme good fortune.

There is no god in control of my life, I am, and I am responsible for my circumstances due to my past action, karma. It only makes perfect sense. Our lives are energy, which originated form the universe itself. I'd love to share with you what I have found to be what that energy to be. But i'm not going to use this forum to "push" my religous beliefs. Anyhoo, peace, we all need some.

you sound like budda. nothing wrong with that. I agree, you make your own luck, but I wouldn't call it karma, just good fortune.

I'm not trying to be a smart alec here and would be the first to admit my knowledge of evolution is probably the least of all the others on this forum but since we're talking so much about it I have a couple of perplexing issues. At least to me.
If we supposedly came from one certain line of apes, why are there so many variations in people? Like blacks, whites, yellow, brown etc. and all with distinct features to go with their ethnic background. Also, what about midgets and or dwarfs. What; did they come from chimps? There is a whole race of smaller people with again very distinct and simular features. I mean a plum tree can have several types of plums on the same same tree but they have to be grafted in on purpose by the farmer, they just don't appear differently on the same tree naturally. If you look at nature, any fruit tree has been bearing the same fruit for ever as far as we know. Grass has always been grass and a fig has always been a fig. It hasn't mutated into an orange. Why is it only people and animals are the only thing on the planet that supposedly has mutated into completly different species? I mean, mud didn't used to be silver or gold, right? Water didn't used to be sulfuric acid? I mean to me, in some respects the idea of evolution is as rediculous as some of you smarter guys among us claim the idea of God is. As far as the big bang goes, what, was there just one big huge dirt clod lodged somewhere in space that one day blew up and ended up creating all the planets and the whole universe? and by the way, there was no time before that, it just was, and it didn't come from anywhere, it just was and there was no space for it to blow into it just did? Talk about far fetched easy to explain because we have no better idea's and far be it for us to consider there is some encredible master genious behind all this. All science is reduced to precise mathematics and not just random chance. All nature operates on a beautiful balance of harmony with itself that at the bottom of it is a very complex string of mathematicl formulas. To me, to accept that all we see and all the complexities and beauty of life not only here but in the whole universe is by some random chance cooked up by some random ingredients in an ancient primordial soup is the fairy tail and the hard nut to swallow. We tend to see and judge this life from a very shallow viewpoint from a very small field of vision based on this very small speck of dirt in the universe within our limited span of years and blather on and on about how much we think we know. I don't believe any of us know much of anything and suspect the reality of all this is much much bigger than we in our finite minds can imagine.

So evolution and the primordial soup is the fairy tale, and not the earth being created in 6 days? A god placing all life and every possible creature in that time? Adam and Eve, biting into an appple condeming the entire human race to original sin, Jesus being sent here and killed, and you are responsible for that, that's not the fairy tale?

Mixandburn, you have a lot of misconceptions about the theories in there. All life has evolved and continues to evolve, including plants and other species of animals.

Humans migrated to different areas of the globe from our origins as great apes in Africa. We look different due to genetics!

As to the Big Bang, no, there wasn't a clump of dirt that suddenly exploded. You can't even say something "was" there, because there was no "was" before about 15 billion years ago!

But the Big Bang did happen - the universe started enlarging very rapidly, first to the size of a baseball, etc. etc. etc. It's still expanding, of course, and there is no "other side" where there's no space - space itself is curved.

Nobody knows why it started, whether a previous universe collapsed the way black holes do and started again, whether there are other universes, and so on. We do know that the details have to be exactly the way they are for us to be here, which defies the odds.

By the way, small stars that burn themselves out collapse into black holes that become a single point with no size, so the idea of "nothing" with incredible mass isn't only the pre-universe. Nobody has seen one (or its event horizon) directly, but there's evidence that they exist.