koti

I got one too: A guy scratches his nails on a chalk board all day long.

Some of the most pronounced artists and scientists were sceptics or at least they havent followed strongly mainstream religion even at times when it could cost them their life. I do agree that the masses were more easilly manouvered over millenia by the more clever to achieve goals and I agree that in hopeless dark times religion is a means of escape and hope for the uneducated and frightened masses. Or the ones who are so screwed that they have to escape into dillusion to bare the pain. I don’t see how this or how food for thought for the simple minds in primitive circumstances have anything to do with my point that we could have had Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, Mozart or any of the other geniuses if religion was not part of our civilisation. Ofcourse the art and science was influenced by religion but I don’t see a reason why it couldn’t have been otherwise. We are not all built the same way, I had my share of suffering in life and in those dark times I never had to lean towards dillusion and I am ready to bet anyone that I never will. I assure you there are more people like me in this world and frankly I don’t give a damn that we’re in the minority.

Ofcourse we are, but that doesn’t change the fact that Shrodingers Cat is only a thought experiment illustrating quantum superposition...of particles not cats.

If all matter and energy were removed from spacetime there would be volume left. The „cat theory” is just an analogy for particle superposition, it doesn’t work with cats, it only works with particles.

I havent read that one by Asimov, sounds like an entertaining utopia. From what you wrote, it assumes a cease in advancement due to reaching perfection which is just as implausible as a science-religion marriage which would I guess be inevitable if something like that did happen.

Absolutely. Just like understanding shows that a bybrid between butter and a tricycle is futile.

I’m willing to admit my irrationality (or rather gullability) in this case. After all, we’re all emotional beings and I’d like to think that hotels will have science books in drawers in the future instead of bibles. My personal view is that it is not needed. Science is such a different concept from religion that I think it would be surreal to assume its possible to merge the two somehow. Its like trying to divide by zero.

That seems reasonable when you assume that religion is never going away which I say is innevitable. Either we kill ourselves or religion is going away, both scenarios are without any religion in the future. I say with the current rate of advancement without any wars in between we need a couple hundred years for religion to be gone completely.

Ofcourse not, that is my whole point.

I say Einstein is a little less controversial than religion and war I too believe that war is a necesity in some cases and I share your upbringing. I just think that we could have easilly had all the good things that came with religion, without having religion ever existing.

Those things could have been without religion ever existing. WWII „gave” us atomic power, vehicle technologies, computer technologies and a dozen other technological breakthroughs. Does that mean that we can assume war is not all that bad?

There might be some time before you can upload an avatar. Theres also a limit of 5 posts I think when you join, its to filter out crackpots, conspiracy theorists, etc.

They make dimmable windows based on some kind of liquid crystal technology which requires electrical current to trigger. There are also these sheet like display systems, all the big mobile phone players are testing these. You’d need to provide more details on what exactly you are looking to build.

I don’t think you could get such fast transition times without an active system like liquid crystal or similar. 8ms is good quality monitor territory so a chemically based technology wouldn’t be capable to do the job. Im not an expert but to get such times you’d have to combine triggering the dimming with electrical current with some kind of a sensor array built into the material.

I think there is some merit (or rather a vicious circle) if you look for the resons behind having such caricature stance. I think it is logical to assume that a two dimensionality which leads to such views comes from cultural conditioning.

I’m a little sceptical as to the anisotropic theories, as I understand it Wheeler, Hawking and others are refering to strong and weak anisotropic principals in a philosophical manner in contexts involving BB and plausible explanations of it. I have to admit that I don’t understand a lot of what Wheeler is/was saying related to this, I read some Wheeler about 20 years ago and it was too much for me, I will have to come back to it. Whenever we observe something on a cosmic scale, we always see the past due to relativity, we never see the present. In this line of thinking which is confirmed by Einsteins relativity, we never have access to the present when dealing with cosmic scales.

Don’t bother too much with my post, its irrelevant to your case - I didn’t catch that the photo was taken with a phone, there aren’t any camera phones with ultrasonic motors, only lenses for SLR/DSLR cameras have these (the big pro lenses for the big pro cameras) Read CharonY’s post again instead, the explanation is there.

I don’t know if this helps but lots of camera lenses use ultrasonic motors. Theorerically it might be possible that a bat might interfere with the lens operation giving artifacts in photos. But CharonY’s banding explanation seems a lot more plausible. I photographed a bunch of bats in Haiti once with my 70-200 f4 L IS which has ultrasonic motors and never saw any artifacts. Hundreds of them were flying in close proximity to me. Edit: It was on a coast of Angola not in Haiti.

Sure, thats a deduction we can make and it makes perfect sense. But we observe it experimentally too, cosmic events which happened hundreds of millions or even billions of years ago which we can observe only now, happened when no minds were present. I also inserted a comma into your post, it changes the context and makes it clear. Its funny how much a little comma can do

Spacetime and causality was, is and will be doing just fine without minds observing it. Spacetime is not just a mathematical abstract, we observe gravity, time dilation and length contraction as very real empirically detectable phenomena. I ron’t think that minds are in any way connected causally with physics, this notion is very troubling to say the least. The implications of this notion being somehow true would be ridiculous...physics did not suddenly change when first consciousness emerged and started observing whats going on around it. Physics was working just fine long before there were any minds observing it.

You confused my comment with a personal attack which it obviously isn’t. You seem to be equally confused as to what is funny and what is not. You need to work on these things.

People behaving „nicely” when it suits them and missbehaving when its suits them otherwise is an idisputable truism which applies to many people. What is ineresting is that you correlate this somehow with the definition of morality. You imply that Nietzshe was an advocate of such a definition of morality, please provide sources. Of the stuff you haven’t read.

That is an interesting definition of morality. Could you elaborate on this and give some sources? Or is this pathology your own invention?

Well, as much as the OP question remains and will remain unanswered due to the fact that we will never know how the world would have evolved without religion, there is one thing for sure... the world would be better off without Mother Teresa:

You surely must admit that what is being discussed in the last posts is not validating the OP statement.