Showing posts with label Zombies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zombies. Show all posts
Saturday, December 30, 2017
Angels and Zombies
Christian de Quincey, PhD, is dean of consciousness studies at the University of Philosophical Research. He is a faculty member at John F. Kennedy University and Sophia University. He is founder and director of the Wisdom Academy. He is author of Radical Nature: The Soul of Matter, Radical Knowing: Understanding Consciousness Through Relationship, Consciousness From Zombies to Angels: The Shadow and the Light of Knowing Who You Are, Deep Spirit: Cracking the Noetic Code, and Blindspots: 21 Good Reasons to Think Before You Talk.
Here he describes a philosophical thought experiment concerning world of “zombies” that is identical in every physical respect to our normal world of experience – except for the fact that nothing and nobody is conscious. If such a world could exist it would mean that consciousness is not necessarily the product of a human brain. De Quincey also expresses his opinion that it will not ever be possible in the future to build robots that possess feelings and consciousness. “Angels,” in the philosophy of mind represent the opposite of zombies. They are entities that are, theoretically, fully conscious but entirely disembodied. Psychological speaking, the metaphors of angels and zombies represent the highest and lowest of human potentials.
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Stuart Hameroff and Deepak Chopra
Did Stuart Hameroff just explain what is vibrating when spiritualists have spoken of spirits existing on different vibrations? At 18 minutes he discusses the different resonance frequencies of the microtubules of the brain. I've watched this four times now and I don't fully understand it, but the the different frequencies of the microtubules corresponds to something that has to do with quantum gravity, and that makes it possible to have different worlds (physical, etheric, astral, etc.) all superimposed in the same physical space. A mind vibrating at 80 hz would be aware of one world (ours), while a mind vibrating at 8000 hz would be aware of a different world, and a mind at 80,000 hz would be aware of a different world, but they would all be in the same place, just at different frequencies, and an observer in one would not be aware of any others. The smaller the scale, from our scale to the Planck scale, the lower the energy but the greater the information processing capacity. That means the higher planes described in channeled messages are actually microscopic in size!
Also in this dialogue is a discussion of zombies, near death experiences, reincarnation, and quantum holography. Runs 33 minutes.
Also in this dialogue is a discussion of zombies, near death experiences, reincarnation, and quantum holography. Runs 33 minutes.
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Why "The Walking Dead" STILL Can't Happen
In 2012 I wrote about the impossibility of slow moving zombies that have to bite people to spread zombiism. At the end of Season 2 this problem was solved by revealing that everyone is already infected, so no matter how you die you will reanimate (I'm told if you play with the volume on the Blu-ray of Season 1 you can hear Jenner tell Rick that everyone is infected already). This explains how the zombie apocalypse got going, and gets around the issue of slow and ineffective zombies spreading the infection.
There is still another serious problem that would make the scenario in The Walking Dead impossible, and that is the unrealistic portrayal of the process of decay. Real bodies decay in a way that would make Walking Dead type zombies impossible.
Walking Dead zombies decay to the point where they look scary but don't fall apart completely. They also have plot-specific strenght. In "TS-19" Jenner says that the outbreak started 194 days ago. Season 3 begins about 8 months after this, taking into account time spent at the farm, that means that at least 440 days have passed since the first dead person reanimated. Think about it. You try leaving a body out in the heat and rain, totally exposed for over a year and see what's left. The zombies decay to the point where a fireplace shovel can cut through a skull like a chainsaw through pound cake, or you can pull a face off a skull easier than ripping off a band-aid, yet they never collapse under their own weight, bugs don't eat them, and they can bite through limbs like jello. I don't know about you, but if perfectly healthy and alive me were to bite into someone wearing overalls' leg I would not only not take a huge chunk out of his flesh, I would probably lose a couple teeth, yet these aspic soft zombies can bite through denim and muscle with no problem.
Come to think of it, how do they move if their muscles aren't metabolising anything for energy? If they can somehow break down their own bodies for energy, then what is breaking the body down for energy? The human body works as a holarchy of systems. A severed head cannot survive on its own because human cells are specialised and a head has no means of acquiring oxygen (except the cornea), energy, nutrients, and they cannot get rid of waste on their own. And yet somehow a zombie head can (and must) be able to do all of that. How does it do that? If none of the other organs work how do they move?
A kidney cell cannot just break down its neighbouring cells to get energy. A human is not a colonial organism, individual cells cannot be removed and act as a new creature. Under ideal conditions a whole kidney can remain viable for 30 hours. Inside a warm body in the Georgia summer, unprotected, it will start to decay and be useless in an hour or maybe less. If standing up (these are walking dead), in the absence of circulation the blood will pool in the legs. After a few days some organs have been completely digested by the bacteria living inside them (pancreas, intestines), the body fills with gas as the bacteria expel waste. Totally exposed to the elements, in a warm wet climate, a body will be completely reduced to a skeleton in a few days*, and the bones are often scattered over a large are by carrion eaters, leaving nothing recognisable as a corpse. In a cold dry environment (like in my zombie story, which has living zombies, but there are still lots of corpses lying around) a dead body will last a lot longer, but it's still not immune to decomposition or being eaten. Since nothing seems to eat zombies even though they are free meat, there is still no escaping the powers of decay at the hands of endogenous bacteria.
Under anaerobic conditions (a body with no blood circulation) at least some cells (like muscle cells, which do store chemicals that can be broken down to get energy) can undergo lactic acid fermentation. This produces far less ATP, which is needed to power calcium pumps which allows muscles to relax. Lactic acid messes up the pH of cells and surrounding fluid, calcium ions move around (as they do), causing the muscles to contract. Unable to pump the calcium ions because of lack of ATP the muscles cannot relax. This is rigor mortis. It begins within hours of death and remains for two or three days, when the muscles begin to decompose. The more vigorous the activity a person was in before death (such as running from zombies) the higher the level of lactic acid and the quicker rigor mortis begins. Even with a functioning brain (which is the only "working" organ) a zombie would not be able to move until rigor mortis ceases, so reanimating within a few minutes or hours after death is biochemically impossible. An immobile, reanimated zombie would be completely defenseless for two or three days no matter how fast it reanimated and by that time should have been completely eaten by animals (unless it's inside something where animals can't get it, not even insects). If by some strange quirk of fate a person dies inside a walk-in freezer so not only can no animals eat it, but the bacteria inside won't decompose it either, the water inside will be completely frozen so the reanimated zombie won't be able to move anyway.
The brain is the most power hungry organ in the body, requiring 1/5 - 1/4 of the body's total energy usage (let's say between 200 and 400 calories a day). Even if only the brain stem were active there is no way anywhere near enough energy would ever reach it, even if it began to consume itself by magic, since there is no digestion and no blood circulation. A reanimated brain would re-die very quickly, maybe within hours, maybe, by some magic slow-down process in a few days.
Unless by "zombie" we mean "dead body being manipulated by some sort of puppeteer parasite that can physically force the limbs to move when movement would normally be impossible" or we mean "shape shifting organism that looks like a human body but instead moves by changing its shape" there is literally no way for zombies like in The Walking Dead to work.
Addendum
I just don't like all the idiots on the Internet who have stupid arguments about what zombies are.
Mike Rotch wrote: "George Romero took I Am Legend, cut out the living vampires, and made the dead ones eat flesh instead of blood and this will forever be what a zombie is even though they're specifically referred to as 'ghouls' in the movie itself, but I am conveniently ignoring this fact!!!!!1"
People who make arguments like that should go back to the basement they only crawl out of at night to buy their crack and RedBull and leave the Internet to sophisticated literati who like to look up cannibal porn. If it looks like a zombie and acts like a zombie it's a duck, okay, whether it's based on vampires or is still alive like in the original meaning.
*Guess what kind of environment Sasquatch lives! Airplanes go down in the forests of the Pacific NW and are never found, what chance is there of finding a dead body in the two or three days before it's rendered unidentifiable. And i̶d̶i̶o̶t̶s̶ ideologues still scoff "where's the body?" You'll never find one. Meanwhile we have DNA from hair samples that's related to but definitely not human, and we have video evidence of a creature with a gait that even gymnasts with decades of experience cannot reproduce, even when in a harness, and dermal ridge patterns that the top expert in the country identifies as being not human and belonging to no other known creature. By this point the only people who say there is not an unknown species of large primate in North America are either 1. ignorant of the data or 2. people who refuse to accept its existence on ideological grounds.
There is still another serious problem that would make the scenario in The Walking Dead impossible, and that is the unrealistic portrayal of the process of decay. Real bodies decay in a way that would make Walking Dead type zombies impossible.
Walking Dead zombies decay to the point where they look scary but don't fall apart completely. They also have plot-specific strenght. In "TS-19" Jenner says that the outbreak started 194 days ago. Season 3 begins about 8 months after this, taking into account time spent at the farm, that means that at least 440 days have passed since the first dead person reanimated. Think about it. You try leaving a body out in the heat and rain, totally exposed for over a year and see what's left. The zombies decay to the point where a fireplace shovel can cut through a skull like a chainsaw through pound cake, or you can pull a face off a skull easier than ripping off a band-aid, yet they never collapse under their own weight, bugs don't eat them, and they can bite through limbs like jello. I don't know about you, but if perfectly healthy and alive me were to bite into someone wearing overalls' leg I would not only not take a huge chunk out of his flesh, I would probably lose a couple teeth, yet these aspic soft zombies can bite through denim and muscle with no problem.
Come to think of it, how do they move if their muscles aren't metabolising anything for energy? If they can somehow break down their own bodies for energy, then what is breaking the body down for energy? The human body works as a holarchy of systems. A severed head cannot survive on its own because human cells are specialised and a head has no means of acquiring oxygen (except the cornea), energy, nutrients, and they cannot get rid of waste on their own. And yet somehow a zombie head can (and must) be able to do all of that. How does it do that? If none of the other organs work how do they move?
A kidney cell cannot just break down its neighbouring cells to get energy. A human is not a colonial organism, individual cells cannot be removed and act as a new creature. Under ideal conditions a whole kidney can remain viable for 30 hours. Inside a warm body in the Georgia summer, unprotected, it will start to decay and be useless in an hour or maybe less. If standing up (these are walking dead), in the absence of circulation the blood will pool in the legs. After a few days some organs have been completely digested by the bacteria living inside them (pancreas, intestines), the body fills with gas as the bacteria expel waste. Totally exposed to the elements, in a warm wet climate, a body will be completely reduced to a skeleton in a few days*, and the bones are often scattered over a large are by carrion eaters, leaving nothing recognisable as a corpse. In a cold dry environment (like in my zombie story, which has living zombies, but there are still lots of corpses lying around) a dead body will last a lot longer, but it's still not immune to decomposition or being eaten. Since nothing seems to eat zombies even though they are free meat, there is still no escaping the powers of decay at the hands of endogenous bacteria.
Under anaerobic conditions (a body with no blood circulation) at least some cells (like muscle cells, which do store chemicals that can be broken down to get energy) can undergo lactic acid fermentation. This produces far less ATP, which is needed to power calcium pumps which allows muscles to relax. Lactic acid messes up the pH of cells and surrounding fluid, calcium ions move around (as they do), causing the muscles to contract. Unable to pump the calcium ions because of lack of ATP the muscles cannot relax. This is rigor mortis. It begins within hours of death and remains for two or three days, when the muscles begin to decompose. The more vigorous the activity a person was in before death (such as running from zombies) the higher the level of lactic acid and the quicker rigor mortis begins. Even with a functioning brain (which is the only "working" organ) a zombie would not be able to move until rigor mortis ceases, so reanimating within a few minutes or hours after death is biochemically impossible. An immobile, reanimated zombie would be completely defenseless for two or three days no matter how fast it reanimated and by that time should have been completely eaten by animals (unless it's inside something where animals can't get it, not even insects). If by some strange quirk of fate a person dies inside a walk-in freezer so not only can no animals eat it, but the bacteria inside won't decompose it either, the water inside will be completely frozen so the reanimated zombie won't be able to move anyway.
The brain is the most power hungry organ in the body, requiring 1/5 - 1/4 of the body's total energy usage (let's say between 200 and 400 calories a day). Even if only the brain stem were active there is no way anywhere near enough energy would ever reach it, even if it began to consume itself by magic, since there is no digestion and no blood circulation. A reanimated brain would re-die very quickly, maybe within hours, maybe, by some magic slow-down process in a few days.
Unless by "zombie" we mean "dead body being manipulated by some sort of puppeteer parasite that can physically force the limbs to move when movement would normally be impossible" or we mean "shape shifting organism that looks like a human body but instead moves by changing its shape" there is literally no way for zombies like in The Walking Dead to work.
Addendum
I just don't like all the idiots on the Internet who have stupid arguments about what zombies are.
Mike Rotch wrote: "George Romero took I Am Legend, cut out the living vampires, and made the dead ones eat flesh instead of blood and this will forever be what a zombie is even though they're specifically referred to as 'ghouls' in the movie itself, but I am conveniently ignoring this fact!!!!!1"
People who make arguments like that should go back to the basement they only crawl out of at night to buy their crack and RedBull and leave the Internet to sophisticated literati who like to look up cannibal porn. If it looks like a zombie and acts like a zombie it's a duck, okay, whether it's based on vampires or is still alive like in the original meaning.
*Guess what kind of environment Sasquatch lives! Airplanes go down in the forests of the Pacific NW and are never found, what chance is there of finding a dead body in the two or three days before it's rendered unidentifiable. And i̶d̶i̶o̶t̶s̶ ideologues still scoff "where's the body?" You'll never find one. Meanwhile we have DNA from hair samples that's related to but definitely not human, and we have video evidence of a creature with a gait that even gymnasts with decades of experience cannot reproduce, even when in a harness, and dermal ridge patterns that the top expert in the country identifies as being not human and belonging to no other known creature. By this point the only people who say there is not an unknown species of large primate in North America are either 1. ignorant of the data or 2. people who refuse to accept its existence on ideological grounds.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Why "The Walking Dead" Can't Happen
UPDATE: Everyone's infected! Problem solved. (18 March 2012)
Let's get it out first that this will be dealing only with the television series, not the comic book. The comic book nicely avoids this problem all together by having everyone who dies for any reason except brain injury reanimate.
Aside from the first half of season two being about two episodes stretched out to seven and not getting anywhere for no apparent reason (money?), and the improbable aiming skills the characters have (try making a head-shot every single time while both you and your target are moving top speed - bet you can't!)*, and the glaring inconsistencies with how the zombies work**, the whole business of zombification would render the story completely impossible from the start.
In the TV series "The Walking Dead" the only way someone becomes a zombie is to be bitten by a zombie, escape, die, and then reanimate. It doesn't help to be bitten and then devoured because there's nothing left to reanimate. You have to kill the zombie (kill, they're already dead!) or run away, and then go croak somewhere because a zombie bite is always fatal. Then when you die you have to be far enough away from the zombies to not have your body eaten, because reanimation isn't instantaneous. Dr. Jenner stated that it takes a few minutes to a few hours before the brainstem starts up again, so if you're eaten within that window you won't zombify.
Anyone who dies but is not bitten will not zombify, as the mess of bodies in the traffic pile up attest to. This leads one to wonder if the process of zombification takes so long and requires a bite from a creature that certainly won't say "he's dead, I'll attack a living now and leave his body to zombify," you're going to have a hard time reaching plague proportions. Consider next the fighting abilities of humans and zombies. Zombie to human kills are at least eight to one. Anyone with a gun will kill as many zombies as they have bullets, guaranteed. Unless a minimum of eight zombies attacks any person, no matter how big or strong or fast or smart or well armed, that person will survive. When we combine these two problems there is absolutely no way we can have a global zombie pandemic with only a handful of humans left. The mathematics just doesn't work. If zombies are so damn difficult to make and so damn easy to kill there is absolutely no way to get a zombie apocalypse going. Maybe a couple towns will be caught off guard, but not an entire country, and certainly not the whole planet.
Don't say that maybe one zombie bit ten or twenty people before being put down. They don't do that. A zombie will keep attacking someone until they eat the person or are destroyed. They are not smart enough to sacrifice themselves by biting several people to spread the plague before being killed. Zombiism doesn't spread fast enough for a zombie to bite someone, have them turn, and then move on to someone new. Unless we eliminate one or both of the above facts - the dificulty of zombification or the kill disparity - there is no way "The Walking Dead" can happen. That's what you get when you try to have dead zombies who spread like living zombies.
*Andrea is the only one that has ever missed, and only because missing was relevant to advance the story, and she still very nearly killed Daryl (with a head shot, as if I needed to mention it) at 200+ yards, from an unsupported prone position, facing the sun, with an unknown number of head winds, with five friendlies just feet away from Daryl, on the second time she's ever fired a gun. Damn! Now that's beginner's luck! Her stupidity could easily have killed one or more of six people. Even if there was a zombie there's no way a thinking person would have attempted a shot like that.
**Sometimes they hunt by smell, other times they don't; sometimes loud sounds like gunfire will attract them, other times you can teach people how to shoot all afternoon and attract no attention at all; whatever reanimates them only restartes the brainstem but people can hit them anywhere in the head and still bring them down, going so far as to have Daryl shoot one with his crossbow up through the jaw and hard palate into the nasal cavity and kill it after it started gnawing on his boot even though the bolt would have only gone through the frontal lobes, which were explicitly stated to not restart with zombification.
Let's get it out first that this will be dealing only with the television series, not the comic book. The comic book nicely avoids this problem all together by having everyone who dies for any reason except brain injury reanimate.
Aside from the first half of season two being about two episodes stretched out to seven and not getting anywhere for no apparent reason (money?), and the improbable aiming skills the characters have (try making a head-shot every single time while both you and your target are moving top speed - bet you can't!)*, and the glaring inconsistencies with how the zombies work**, the whole business of zombification would render the story completely impossible from the start.
In the TV series "The Walking Dead" the only way someone becomes a zombie is to be bitten by a zombie, escape, die, and then reanimate. It doesn't help to be bitten and then devoured because there's nothing left to reanimate. You have to kill the zombie (kill, they're already dead!) or run away, and then go croak somewhere because a zombie bite is always fatal. Then when you die you have to be far enough away from the zombies to not have your body eaten, because reanimation isn't instantaneous. Dr. Jenner stated that it takes a few minutes to a few hours before the brainstem starts up again, so if you're eaten within that window you won't zombify.
Anyone who dies but is not bitten will not zombify, as the mess of bodies in the traffic pile up attest to. This leads one to wonder if the process of zombification takes so long and requires a bite from a creature that certainly won't say "he's dead, I'll attack a living now and leave his body to zombify," you're going to have a hard time reaching plague proportions. Consider next the fighting abilities of humans and zombies. Zombie to human kills are at least eight to one. Anyone with a gun will kill as many zombies as they have bullets, guaranteed. Unless a minimum of eight zombies attacks any person, no matter how big or strong or fast or smart or well armed, that person will survive. When we combine these two problems there is absolutely no way we can have a global zombie pandemic with only a handful of humans left. The mathematics just doesn't work. If zombies are so damn difficult to make and so damn easy to kill there is absolutely no way to get a zombie apocalypse going. Maybe a couple towns will be caught off guard, but not an entire country, and certainly not the whole planet.
Don't say that maybe one zombie bit ten or twenty people before being put down. They don't do that. A zombie will keep attacking someone until they eat the person or are destroyed. They are not smart enough to sacrifice themselves by biting several people to spread the plague before being killed. Zombiism doesn't spread fast enough for a zombie to bite someone, have them turn, and then move on to someone new. Unless we eliminate one or both of the above facts - the dificulty of zombification or the kill disparity - there is no way "The Walking Dead" can happen. That's what you get when you try to have dead zombies who spread like living zombies.
*Andrea is the only one that has ever missed, and only because missing was relevant to advance the story, and she still very nearly killed Daryl (with a head shot, as if I needed to mention it) at 200+ yards, from an unsupported prone position, facing the sun, with an unknown number of head winds, with five friendlies just feet away from Daryl, on the second time she's ever fired a gun. Damn! Now that's beginner's luck! Her stupidity could easily have killed one or more of six people. Even if there was a zombie there's no way a thinking person would have attempted a shot like that.
**Sometimes they hunt by smell, other times they don't; sometimes loud sounds like gunfire will attract them, other times you can teach people how to shoot all afternoon and attract no attention at all; whatever reanimates them only restartes the brainstem but people can hit them anywhere in the head and still bring them down, going so far as to have Daryl shoot one with his crossbow up through the jaw and hard palate into the nasal cavity and kill it after it started gnawing on his boot even though the bolt would have only gone through the frontal lobes, which were explicitly stated to not restart with zombification.
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