exchemist

Exactly, it has no meaning except in relation to a proposition, or a collection of propositions judged to be true.

The question you originally asked seems to me to make a category error. "Truth", as @joigus observed back in July last year, is a value applied to a proposition. In other words, truth is not an entity in itself, but "true" or "false" are attributes of a proposition. "Truth" cannot contradict anything, because it is not a verifiable proposition.

Post-apartheid S. Africa and N. Ireland would appear to be useful case studies. Why not take a look at them and consider the common features of their approaches to the problem? I don't know what academic advice their respective governments may have taken, but I feel sure they must have sought out expertise in conflict resolution.

First of all, I note this new crapbot displays the same grovelling servility towards the user as its predecessors. 😁 It gets one thing right, though: wavefunction collapse is nowadays regarded as being caused by interaction, not by "observation" by a conscious entity. The language of QM, at the time it was being developed in the 1920s, spoke in terms of "observable" properties and thus of "observers" and "observations". This was to focus on what could be measured about a QM system, and to avoid "legacy" classical assumptions about what might go on in between observations. Unfortunately this language had the side effect of misleading some people into thinking consciousness, on the part of a conscious "observer", played a fundamental role in physics. Nowadays we speak of the interaction of a QM system with the detection or measurement apparatus as being what causes the wave function to resolve into measured values of physical properties. So to argue machines must be sentient because they can cause wavefunction collapse is to get things backwards. Sentience is neither here nor there when it comes to QM. It is interactions that count and no sentience is implied anywhere.

Interesting. Sounds a little bit like (a very muffled version of) Teilhard de Chardin.

Haha. Well, if you read Jim Baggott’s “Farewell to Reality”, or Peter Woit’s blog, you will see that some people think at least some (drunk?) theoretical physicists have ceased to do science. 😁

One has to be careful with restorations. The Sistine Chapel seems to have been ruined by careless restoration. But I don't know if these paintings you show were originally as dark as they appear today. I suspect they were, as the intent seems to be to "illuminate" the figures portrayed.

OK I suppose there is the issue of whether radiation counts as "matter". I generally think of matter as distinct from radiation, but I suppose as a real physicist you will tell me both are in the end excitations of fields, so there is no substantive difference. As for conservation of energy, it's true that can only be spoken of relation to a physical system of some kind, whether it consists of fields, radiation or matter (in my narrower usage of these terms).

OK I see what you mean. But if the contention is that living matter could have arisen from something other than inanimate matter, I think we are into such realms of fantasy that consideration of Ockham's Razor for even a second would dismiss that.

Well that's rather a nice point. Is E=hν a principle of nature? Or is the conservation of energy a principle of nature in the absence of any matter to apply it to?

One could argue the "laws of physics", perhaps better described as the fundamental order we see in nature which we express through our "laws" , are physical principles that apply whether matter is present or not. And, as we are in the Religion subforum, this order is, I understand, what thinkers like Spinoza and Einstein seem to have identified with "God". Of course this conception of god is far removed from the personal God of the Abrahamic religions. It is just an orderly principle of nature itself.

Agreed on the second part of course. Regarding the first, even if abstract physics were to come up with some new principle that could be shown to play a role, that would still be a natural principle, not a supernatural one. As such it would be a part of a model of abiogenesis, rather than anything beyond it.

It seems to me that since abiogenesis is merely a term for the emergence of life by natural means from prebiotic chemistry, however that may have occurred, the only alternative to abiogenesis would be emergence by non-natural means. In other words by some kind of intervention by a supernatural agency - which would be excluded from science on principle. That is why I asked @Luc Turpin to agree abiogenesis is a fact, something he refused to do.

Ah, but don’t forget, this is not creationism, no indeedy. 🤔

Incidentally, a nice paper was published in Nature Astronomy today, showing the presence of a large array of building blocks for life in samples brought back from the Asteroid Bennu. I've started a separate thread on it: So the progress in abiogenesis research takes another step forward. 😊

I saw a BBC report on this and looked up the paper in Nature Astronomy. It was published today: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-024-02472-9 It seems samples contain not only 14 out of the 21 amino acids (though racemic rather than showing a chiral preference), but also all 5 of the nucleobases found in RNA and DNA. So a lot of nitrogen-rich molecules. The authors suggest this points to reactions occurring in a low temperature regime, possibly one in which ammonia ice was stable, e.g. in the protoplanetary disc from which the planets and asteroids condensed. This supports the hypothesis that many components for life could have arrived from meteorites, rather than necessarily having been formed ab initio on the Earth.

Yup he's getting his placemen into the military, the security agencies and the Dept of "Justice" - and exacting vengeance on people who have crossed him, to make the rest fear retribution if they step out of line. He has also used fear to bring the large media organisations largely to heel, or at least get them to adopt a position of studied - and safe - neutrality. These are the classic steps taken by a dictator who takes power by means of an election - a soft coup. I think he'll now stay in power until he dies or becomes incapacitated. Then we'll see if, as in the USSR, the system will have become well enough entrenched to be self-perpetuating. A lot may depend on how well the Repubicans can gerrymander the electoral arrangements.

This adds nothing indicating any level of understanding on your part, so I have no further comment to make to you, either.

Yes this is one of the Chinese papers.

You are right, I am still adjusting to authoritarian rule. He doesn’t need to worry about votes any more.

But the farmers will be up in arms. And Trump needs the rural vote. I can't see how this can work for him, except in the very short term. It's bound to bite him in the arse eventually, surely? And research will go on in other countries which will become available to the US public, so attempting to control the narrative on things like epidemics is pretty well doomed, I would think. Things have moved on since Stalin.

I've just seen this clip, of a press conference given by Senator Chris Murphy this afternoon, which strikes me as spot-on. Trump is acting like a Stuart era monarch :

Yes, I was referring to your comment about not knowing were in the world this poster is.

I think she's in the land of children's television (click on bottom left where it says watch on YouTube):

The lower explosion limit for hydrogen in air is 4% by volume.