Do I belive that if you do good in life good things will happen to you? Absolutely! It’s pretty clear that if you’re sound to people then they’re likely to do you favours in the future, and if you go through life being a twat then no-one will give you the time of day.

Do I believe in some mystical force that maintains the balance of right and wrong in the universe? No, that’s a load of hippie arsewash that has no empirical evidence to support it and no rational theory to explain it, and makes as much sense as believing in God or the tooth fairy.

@Clusterfrog 468921 wrote:

What goes around comes around

As to a supernatural force? There’s no objective reason to think it exists. If you believe in it for religious reasons or whatever thats totally fine but there’s no proof. Shit happens and it’s common to try pull patterns from it and try to attribute it to supernatural powers but it’s still effectively superstition about events with no statistical significance

Karma is about retribution outside of this life anyway, i.e. what your next phase of life would be, its not supposed to be about instant repercussions for your actions in this world.

It’s natural for people to want justice in the world, people think it should exist when it doesn’t. It’s the same reason people came up with heaven and hell, they see people get away with shit and they want the universe to punish them where man has failed but I think ultimately there is no such thing as justice, and even if there is a God he would not apply justice to the world because justiced and morals and right and wrong are all entirely subjective

I think you put it more eloquently than I did!

Absolutely things balance out I think there’s a lot of truth to e.g. hindu understanding of the world in the subject of things like balance but I just think it’s all performed through natural processes and not a supernatural ‘thing’ that wants things to be balanced. Balance is a fact of nature itself it doesn’t need an invisible whooshy thing going around causing bad people to loose their keys.

@ShaftInvader 468925 wrote:

There is however reason to believe that things balance out to some extent, as so many things need to be equal and not over powered from one side or another, electrons around a nucleus , higher and lower pressure (every force has an equal and opposite force ect.). Not sure how this applies to human behaviour though.

It’s one thing to talk about equilibrium when dealing with measurable physical properties like pressure, but to apply the same thinking to something as completely abstract and man-made as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ makes no sense.

I think it’s a weakness of the human mind to take our knowledge of the world around us (we know that two gases of different pressures will equalise when mixed together) and apply it to other aspects of the world (therefore good and evil should balance each other out). Why should they?

It was only a few decades ago that ecologists believed the environment has a natural steady state that it should return to if left to it’s own devices. It somehow ‘seemed nice’ and fitted with our understanding of simple physical systems. In its time, the theory was backed up by ‘evidence’ from highly oversimplified models of ecosystems made by early computers. It’s now widely accepted that this isn’t the case at all and our ecosystem is actually a highy chaotic system (unfortunately a fact that is regularly misused by climate-change sceptics). It goes to show that ‘intuition’ is generally a pretty poor way to go about understanding the world.

@cheeseweasel 468931 wrote:

I think it’s a weakness of the human mind to take our knowledge of the world around us (we know that two gases of different pressures will equalise when mixed together) and apply it to other aspects of the world (therefore good and evil should balance each other out). Why should they?

I think the idea of good and evil balancing them selves out came about way b4 we knew about the balancing of pressure (at least as far as we discovered it in modern day science, there was a lot of knowledge lost in the crusades from ancient civilizations)

@ShaftInvader 468930 wrote:

The population of rabbits gets so big, there for the fox population booms as there’s more food for them, the rabbits population then starts dieing as they have to share the same amount of lettuce between more rabbits, lettuce becomes scarse, then as the population of rabbits starts to thin even more get wiped out by the larger amount of fox’s about. Then the fox’s start to run out of food cos the rabbit population (there main food) is dwindling, lettuce starts to grow more abundantly cos there’s less rabits and the fox population gets smaller … rabbits are on the rise …

That’s exactly what you’d expect to happen, you would expect the two populations to oscillate and eventually reach a steady state, much like the behaviour of a damped pendulum (or a speaker cone). This was the accepted view of how nature works until someone came along and actually decided to measure an ecosystem for themself. In actual fact, nature doesn’t work like this at all and the researchers found that real-world animal populations fluctuate in a very erratic, chaotic way. This is the basis of chaos theory – that a simple deterministic system can produce a seemingly random output, and chaotic systems like this are present everywhere in the world around us. They are counter-intuitive though, and almost all the research into chaos theory happened as recently as the second half of the 20th century, despite the fact that these systems have always been around for us to observe.

@ShaftInvader 468930 wrote:

I think the idea of good and evil balancing them selves out came about way b4 we knew about the balancing of pressure (at least as far as we discovered it in modern day science, there was a lot of knowledge lost in the crusades from ancient civilizations)

Ok, well pressure is maybe not the best example to use. But there are plenty of other instances of balance in nature that are obvious to us all, although maybe in a more unconscious way – day and night, winter and summer, sun and moon, male and female. And most of the things we observe in our lives do lead towards a steady state – throw something, it stops; drop a stone in a pond, the ripples stop eventually. So it’s understable that out intuition would have us believe that the weather/stock market/karma behave in a similar way.

@cheeseweasel 468937 wrote:

That’s exactly what you’d expect to happen, you would expect the two populations to oscillate and eventually reach a steady state, much like the behaviour of a damped pendulum (or a speaker cone). This was the accepted view of how nature works until someone came along and actually decided to measure an ecosystem for themself. In actual fact, nature doesn’t work like this at all and the researchers found that real-world animal populations fluctuate in a very erratic, chaotic way. This is the basis of chaos theory – that a simple deterministic system can produce a seemingly random output, and chaotic systems like this are present everywhere in the world around us. They are counter-intuitive though, and almost all the research into chaos theory happened as recently as the second half of the 20th century, despite the fact that these systems have always been around for us to observe.

IMO the only reason the eco system appears chaotic is because there are sooo many factors that are involved it’d be almost imposable to work out the cause and effect of every outcome possible. You clap you’re hand in the uk and a tsunami happens in china, then if you could factor in the most likely small changes in wind pressure and obstacles the chain would come across then, although we can’t account for an infinity of possibilities, we could narrow it down to more likely outcomes. We just don’t have the calculation power or intelligence to do however many calculations would be involved, we wouldn’t come out with a 100% accurate answer because of infinity, but if you use rational to determine what are more likely to have effect then you could get a prediction of the outcome what would be less then totally random or chaotic, but as I say we can’t work out things on such a small detailed level. It appears chaotic, but we just don’t have the intelligence to factor in the most likely events at such small intergas. Just because we can’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s not there.

For example if we could work out that 100000000000 different chains of events wouldn’t lead to and earth quake but 100 would and none of them hunderad would be effected by another event, that would be one event away from chaos right?

The fact is though just because we can’t factor in infinity properly to calculations (it’s just been rammed in as best it can fit) we’ll never be able to work out every single eventuality, but every single eventuality is out there. It’s our inability to calculate it what makes it chaos.

@cheeseweasel 468938 wrote:

Chaos is not the same as randomness though. Chaotic systems are still dependent upon initial conditions and obey a rule or formula (which can be extremely simple). Fractal patterns are generated by representing chaotic systems graphically. So it’s not to say that chaotic systems do whatever they want – there are still rules governing them and they definitely contain patterns, but it’s a very different type of system to that of the Newtonian worldview which we are taught in high-school science.

yeah I think I’m getting two things mixed up here.

Neuton’s theory’s kinda vanish when you get small enough. TBH I stopped looking into quantum physics when i found out about there being a ton full of different string theories none of which were 100% correct.

load of old bollocks. IMHO