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So obviously Darwin did not mean that... Did you find the context already in Darwin's work? I offered you the a possible correct context, and I assume this is what Darwin meant. OK, good you retracted this. You cannot create meaningful concepts by just gluing a few words together. I can talk about to the 4th angle of a triangle, but I do not even need to look for triangles that could have a 4th angle, because the reference is empty, in this case the 'concept' is logically contradictory. On the other hand, the concept of 'unicorn' is not empty, but it highly depends if it has a real referent, not just an intentional, on how you define it. If you define it as 'a horse like creature with a silvery skin, and one long white, spirally formed horn that lies its head in the lap of a virgin' it is very clear that you can describe such an animal, but we know there are no real specimen of this animal. If you define it just as 'an animal with one horn on its head', then there are several animals that fit the description, e.g. the Indian rhinoceros. See, here my unicorn: Isn't it a beauty? The concept of a 'perfect thing' is that perfection is relative to some ideal, i.e. it is related to our aims and values. @Strange gave a few examples (I would add that the perfect mosquito also does not buzz...). See e.g. some criticisms on the ontological proof of God's existence of Anselm.

Yes, it is if you try to apply it on a paradoxical situation with perfect gazelles and lions. But if you apply it to the effectivity of animal bodies it makes perfect sense: they could have designed better. So while I follow your argument, it is based on the idea that such things as perfect gazelles and lions make any sense. But they already don't make any sense in themselves, the concepts of perfect gazelles and lions are empty. So you can prove everything. So what the fuzz? What do think you gain by this argument? Show that evolution is conceptually not sound? Maybe you should lookup Darwin's remark in context, to see what he is talking about.

It lies in 'perfect'. Sorry, I just see this as a kind of language joke, like the question if an almighty god can create a stone that he cannot lift. And as I said, Darwin's remark makes only sense to me talking about the 'design' of species, not about 'perfect gazelles' or 'perfect lions'. Introducing meaningless terms to create a paradox seems not very useful to me. In the context of the design of species, the remark of Darwin makes perfectly sense; your context however does not even make sense in itself.

I think you are applying the criterion of 'perfectness' on the wrong level. It is not between different species: in your example of the gazelles and the lions we see a continuous 'arms-race'. But animal bodies, how greatly adapted they might be, have some 'design errors'. E.g. the placement of our trachea and the oesophagus, which has the risk of suffocation when eating. There is an evolutionary explanation for it, but as a design from scratch, it should never have been made like this.

Also a good suggestion. But when Sakura does not react, we will never know.

I do not think this is a philosophical topic, I would say it is psychological. But whatever. This sounds very much like sleep paralysis. I have had such episodes twice. The first time was during a big milestone in my life: moving from the Netherlands to Switzerland, so to speak leave my whole life until then behind. During the night I woke up felt my heart beating, and could not move. I thought I was dying. Then I noticed that I could steer just one thing: my breath. I started to breath consciously and intensively. On doing that, I returned to my 'normal mode'. I could move again, and all the fears blew away. A second time, many years later, I recognised the feelings, and started breathing immediately. And so the bad feelings vanished pretty quickly. Do these things (my experiences and the Wikipedia article) sound familiar? Please let us know.

Only one miss, and I can really not care: "The Large Hadron Collider at CERN uses 1.3 terawatt hours of electricity annually. That’s equivalent to:"

Ups... Yes, of course. Slip of the mind...

I did. But it is not my decision. And you know me. I have driven you to despair at CFI, so that you started deleting your posts about relativity there. Then we agree... I think the OP is a serious question, it needs a serious answer. At least I and Markus tried.

I have no authoritative power on any forum. I am just a member here, as you are. So I have not hidden anything. On this forum your 'Nobelprice winning' posting about an error in special relativity was moved to 'Speculations' (not to trash): Einstein was wrong: My Theory of Relativity (you see, it is still there, it is not hidden at all). I was not even a member of this forum those days. You also presented your 'Einstein was wrong' at CFI, and I took the task of debunking your ideas, because there was no physicist at all there. And then it was you who started deleting your postings. And for the record: I also was just a member there. No 'authoritative power'. But for one thing I have to thank you: I got to learn about this forum because at CFI you referred to it, and after a while I became a member here.

Remembers me of the bard in Asterix, Cacafonix: he himself thinks his singing is great, all the other greatly appreciate when he keeps his mouth shut. As answers on good questions, like the OP, should be according to established science, I reported your postings to shift them into 'Speculations'.

Oh no, not again, Scott. Yes, theoretical physicists are so stupid... .

12 I was wrong on Q15: The 'M' of 'M87' brought me on the wrong track. Charles Messier himself could never have seen a black hole, so it must be a nebula or a galaxy. So in a certain sense the question is wrong: M87 is a galaxy, not a black hole. On Q9 I did not expect so many planets especially in the Goldilocks zone And Q6, I expected that it had to be farther away, the Lagrange points of the earth orbiting the sun, but obviously they are closer than I thought.

No idea where you have read that time is finite. It seems nonsensical to me. So if you are worrying about it in your real life, just don't. The second part of the idea is interesting. If (huge 'if'!) time could come to a halt, would we notice? Well, I think special relativity gives the answer. If e.g. a spaceship is accelerating and nearing the speed of light from me, I would see that everything on board is slowing down more and more. For the inhabitants of the spaceship however nothing changes. For themselves, they keep their acceleration (which is nice, because they have artificial gravity, they can stand on the ground), and time on board goes on just as the are used to (but not if they look out of the window...). So I think, indeed, nobody would notice time slowing down, simply because time as we experience it is always local: everything moving along with us has the same time. I would say that space 'sec' does not exist, so you are right, we can't formally define movement as a change in position in space. But there are very practical ways to 'define' space. Take two objects in otherwise empty space: at least we can define a distance between these objects. And if this distance changes, we say the objects move in relation to each other. Now you can more and more objects, measure their distances and directions, and you get a kind of coordinate system that can be called 'space'. If most objects move slowly relative to each other the impression of the existence of space in itself becomes very strong. And then of course also the impression of (fast) movements relative to this 'space'. Yes, you should get rid of this image. What you could do is just see them what they, in most pictures of 'space', really are: just coordinates: means of defining positions, nothing more, like meridians on the earth's surface. Time and space are definitely not the same. While the 3 space dimensions are more or less equivalent (you can just change the directions of your coordinate system and what was 'left' before is now 'in front', ie. just turn your body 90o ), you can't do this with time. If you know your Pythagoras: The normal, space distance between two objects in a 3-dimensional coordinate system is: distance = x2 + y2 + z2 Special relativity, when defining distances in spacetime, takes time into it (but multiplies it with c, the velocity of light, so it also becomes 'space-like') however, with a minus sign. spacetime distance = x2 + y2 + z2 - (ct)2 Another (well I assume it is another) aspect of time that there is only one possible direction: we cannot go back in time. We always experience progression of time. Again, as said above, because everything moving along with us, has the same time. No way that the broken egg on the floor makes a travel back in time, and 'unbreaks' and nicely lands on your breakfast table.

<NitPickerMode> Newton was basically an alchemist and theologian. Debatable, one should know how much time and effort he placed in the different disciplines (which I don't know). A difference with Newton is that Leibniz stood fully in the academic disciplines of his day, where Newton, e.g. in his theology would have been seen as a heretic (and therefore Newton decided not to publish his theological writings). In his theological studies Newton e.g. denied the Trinity, based on textual criticism. Modern New Testament scholars agree with his conclusions. </NitPickerMode>

You mother's name is Eva?

'Muddling the water'? Now it seems you are going too fast to conclude that Aristotle had reliable written sources available. I think he hadn't, because he nowhere use literally statements like "Thales wrote: 'The first principle of all being is water' ". He uses indirect speech when discussing Thales: (Made everything small because from "I suppose": obviously Aristotle doesn't really know why Thales said the first principle is water.) None of the Thales-fragments use direct citations. Further we have only this remark of Theophastrus: Such a title does not fit very well to (natural) philosophy. You do not have to be a historian to assume Jesus existed, when you meet one of his companions (Peter) and one of his brothers (James) only about 3 years after Jesus' death. I consider this much better proof than 'he left nothing written', and 200 years between his assumed life and the first traces of him in writing, in Aristotle, Theophastrus, Hippolyte, Plutarch, etc. Well, then at least I have done my task. You said the same of Jesus (50/50), so I have given you an example of the assumed existence of somebody who take historians for granted, even if the basis for that is relative small. I would rather stop the discussion: the differences between us seem to be gradual, not principal. We could go on endlessly. But of course I would like to have your opinion on Ehrman's Did Jesus exist, so if you ever read it, let us know what you think. Anyway, I will be away for a week.

Because in general you show that your thinking is not very precise. I tried to help you, and obviously I succeeded a little bit. We agree on your last statement: Obviously, with history it is much more difficult to teach you clear thinking. Oh, and physics of course ("scattering", Cooper pairs ("In order to entangle electrons you need to remove the rest mass.")).

Then that was wrong too. You had to add "through experiments/empirical evidence"' to it.

That is not the point. For Aristotle we have lots of historical references. But Aristotle himself lived 200 years after Thales. There is the problem. I don't. The sidetrack we are going here is that we compare the certainty of Jesus with another example, Thales in this case. My point is that the sources we have are 200 years after Thales, where the sources of Jesus are 'only' 3 years (what Paul describes), 30 years (when Paul wrote his letters and Mark his gospel, 60 years (Josephus), and 80 years (Tacitus) after Jesus death. He seemed to have knowledge of what Thales had claimed. But he nowhere says where his information comes from. So this breaks down. Reading Aristotle's remarks about Thales, I do not think he was referring to any primary source, or contemporary source of Thales. No. It is better.

You said: Little reworking (substitute 'they' with its reference): The laws of the universe concern what we say about the universe. Right? Then I corrected: The laws of the universe are what we say about the universe. And now you are saying: The laws of the universe are what we say about the universe through experiments/empirical evidence. But that is exactly what I said. You only added "through experiments/empirical evidence"'. And that is correct of course. Fascinating. Your instinctive reflex to disagree with me let you say that what I said was not correct, where you now repeat exactly what I said.

Of course he was lying: That is the lie. This is what God said: And this the snake: So they would only be like God in this aspect: knowing good and evil. It seems that God did not like that. On a superficial reading it is an interesting story: being able to distinguish good and evil drove us from our paradisaical lives. OTOH, as a first consequence, Adam and Eve shame themselves for their nakedness. But when God already knows about good and evil, why did he create he them naked? Why was he walking in the paradise? Did he want to peep the naked Adam and Eve, knowingly, so doing evil himself?

In writing? Hearing? Citations by other antique philosophers? Who? What was the name of this book? Who thinks so and why? I gave you the link to the fragments of Thales. Please show me why citations (or better, presentations: they are not literal citations) of 200 years after Thales was supposed to live, are more reliable than sources written about 30 years after Jesus death (earliest gospel, with recognisable traces of older sources), a report of events only a few years after the crucifixion (Paul), and a few non-christian sources (Josephus 60 years later, Tacitus 80 years later) would be worse than what we know of Thales.

I've discussed this already with physicists of the 23th century. They said it is nonsense. And I like your self referential statement: Sure you are not working on another proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorem?

Hi TheSim, This is one of the most concise and to the point postings about free will I have ever seen in a forum. Pity that is on 'The Lounge'. It should be pinned in philosophy... But empleat obviously did not understand it. It is my experience that most people who do not believe in free will 'because determinism' are still heavily stuck in out of date ideas (or better, out of date gut feelings), like that free will presupposes some centre in the brain which autonomously, without causal influences, does have causal influence on what we do. In the old days this would have been the soul. Now that we know there is no material equivalent of the soul in the brain they think that 'free will' has no meaning at all. (It would be principally impossible that such a centre exists of course; I never understood why we need neurologists to explain to us 'that we have no free will', i.e. to declare that they did not found the soul in the brain.) In the meantime, in daily life, nearly everybody lives on with this concept, perfectly knows when people are coerced to do something, or do it from free will. (Of course there are grey areas, but principally the idea is clear). Really, @empleat, the problem of free will as an intellectual problem is a pseudo problem. As a personal problem however, it can be very real. Fears for other people or for certain situations, uncertainty in questions about what you really want are serious, and should be taken seriously. It is good that you try to get help. But really, do not think that the the intellectual problem of 'free will' has anything to do with your personal experience of lack of free will. Get the intellectual problem out of the way, don't go there. Try to discover how you can improve your life independent of philosophical discussions. It does not do you any good, believe me.