Abandon the philosopical concept of an independent thinking mind capable of evaluating something by itself.
“Decisions” and “Thoughts” don’t exist without the environment, as they’re a succession of neuronal activation cascades in response to the current state of all stimulus, the previous connections formed in your brain, and reinforced patterns.
Leave a human being in an empty void and their thoughts will be built by severely boosting sensitivity and then responding to random sensory noise. Sever all sensory connections and the mind shuts down.
If I remember my cognitive science classes, all decisions even complex are powered by a person’s neural circuits, in which neurons talk to each other chemically using neurotransmitters. Basically, large groups of constantly-rearranging neurons are what turn what you call “chemical laws” into constantly-evolving decisions.
Frankly, the decisions that we make are chemical reactions. The difference is in the complexity of the decisions that we can make. At that point, though, in order to answer your question, we would need to argue about what one would consider to be a decision that’s complex enough and a decision that’s not complex enough, and that leans much more into philosophy and ethics rather than science.
I can only tell you that, from a mechanistic point of view, there’s not really much distinguishing our decision making process from, say, the decision making of a flatworm
All the large moons in the solar system are tidally locked to their planet!
Pluto and Charon are tidally locked to each other!
The earth would eventually be tidally locked to the moon too, but because it’s happening so slowly, it wouldn’t happen before the sun turns into a red giant and engulf both!
There is such a huge difference in the masses of the earth and moon that although the moon is slowing the rotation of the earth, the earth’s rotation is also speeding up the moon’s orbit. The faster orbit is causing the moon to move farther away from the earth.
So, the purveyor of the electromagnetic force is the photon, as in visible light and radiation. If you look into it you find talk of “virtual photons” being the purveyors of magnetic force, but it seems they are more of a mathematical construct, and if you read enough about it, it becomes clear that it’s a whole lot of technical language that boils down to, “we dunno”.
To really blow your mind, the Moon is slowly moving away, but will never escape. Eventually both the Earth and the Moon will become tidally locked to each other at which point the Moon will no longer move further away. This assumes no outside influences and enough time.
Try recreating that spin with a fidget spinner and slowly turn it around like the moon turns to face earth. You’ll find that it wants to turn in a way where it spins around the same axis it’s orbiting.
Since the moon has no hand preventing it from doing that, it aligns its spin with the orbit, so the forces described in the article bring that rotation to a halt.
Basically, the moon acted like a spinning (unbalanced) wheel, and eventually stopped with the “heavy” side pointing “down” towards Earth. I.e. think of the moon as orbiting Earth with the heavy side staying pointed at Earth.
Ask Science
Newest