exchemist

No indeed. About half the country seems to get it.

Why do you think fidelity between sexual partners is valued?

You may get the odd one, but the fact remains it is far harder to bring off than shooting a mass of people with a gun if you feel pissed off. This is why school shootings are virtually exclusively an American phenomenon. In the UK we had the last one in Dunblane in 1996, when someone was able to get hold of....a GUN.....:https://www.businessinsider.com/uk-changed-laws-ended-school-shootings-after-1996-dunblane-massacre-2022-5?op=1 There will be just the same adolescent alienation and resentments occurring all over the world, but without easy access to guns, people don't find it is easy to act on these destructive impulses - and the moment usually passes without serious incident. I'm afraid I now laugh whenever yet another school shooting is reported in the USA. They will go on and on until guns are properly controlled, as they are in other civilised nations. Yet we see Americans contorting themselves and jumping through all manner of logical hoops to avoid the reason that is staring them in the face: the availability of GUNS.

Experience from other countries, where guns are not widely available, is that this is not the case. Mass violence against schoolkids is very hard to bring about without a gun and it almost never occurs.

In other words, you've made it up. I thought as much. I note that you are already shifting the goalposts: from procreation to sex and procreation. That already makes a significant difference, of course. Anyway, since you've posted this in Philosophy, I would simply draw your attention to the distinction between what the biology of the human species as a whole may optimise itself for, and what purpose an individual human being may seek or find in the course of his or her life. I suggest clarifying which of the two you want to talk about.

That's exactly the thought that sprang to my mind. Well, one of two actually. The other was that, when I was a kid, my brothers and I developed the idea that Mr Waverley, the boss in The Man from UNCLE, had his lungs in his buttocks and breathed by shifting from one buttock to the other while seated. Don't ask me why. One of us just thought it would be an amusing thing to keep in mind while watching the show. So I did allow myself a chuckle at the idea someone might breathe through his arse.

Aunt Sally Alert: Who has ever suggested the only purpose of life is procreation?

This illustrates what I suspected: you are confusing lack of precision with lack of objectivity. The Mohs scale has limited precision, since all it can do is rank minerals relative to one another rather than provide a quantitative value. But that does not make it subjective. 2 independent testers will agree on the relative rankings to assign to a group of minerals. (In fact the writer of the blog you quote is rather mis-applying the Mohs scale, since it was never designed for alloys such as steel. It can only be expected to give reliable results for pure substances.)

Quite. What would be the motive? The trip would take thousands of years - and the same to get back again, if return were envisaged, greatly exceeding the lifespan of any conceivable carbon-based life form. Sending a robotic probe might be more effective, as it could be accelerated harder and could beam signals back at c. But even that would be a very long term project, spanning generations. The best method, almost certainly, would be by remote sensing, using good telescopes, spectrometers etc. And why would our planet be of any special interest?

OK, I'll wait for you to find them and present before commenting further, as I suspect you have misinterpreted something about them, whatever they are.

What findings, then, posted where? You have posted 25 pages of posts. I cannot be expected to trawl through all of them in the hope of identifying what you are talking about.

I don't rule out microbial mats for the greenish colour in the foreground of the picture. It is the pale, bluish grey colour that I find interesting, as it seems unusual. There is no tourism office on the peninsula, though I suppose there might be in Helensburgh. When I next go back, I might see if Glasgow University has anything, or anyone, to comment on this. The Dalradian Series is pretty famous (if fiendishly complicated) and well-studied, so I'm sure the answer is there somewhere in the geology community.

OK, you refer to two sets of recent "findings" here, for which you have not provided details. I presume you mean findings of science, but perhaps you could confirm. One, you think, suggests a physicalist interpretation of the world may be inadequate, and the other you think suggests mind is an entity, rather than an activity of the brain. I'm intrigued by this. Perhaps if you can give a reference or a short description it would help me understand what you have in mind. Can you do that?

Well done indeed for digging this out. So it's possible it is after all a metamorphosed igneous rock then! That might more easily explain the flow-like banding, I suppose. (It seems to be called metabasite rather than metabasalt, though). I'm still intrigued by the light grey colour and its comparative softness/solubility, as suggested by the smooth way it has been eroded by sea, compared to the surrounding rocks on the beach which are darker and rougher. Perhaps the metamorphosis involved alteration by water as well as heat. I suspect we've got as far as we can now without a geologist familiar with the area.

Since science is the study of nature, I cannot envisage how it can ever "bring us beyond" space, time, energy and matter, as I can't see how there could be any observations of nature that are "beyond" such things. Even the mathematics we use to model mature is expressed in terms of properties of matter and radiation, as functions of space and time. My personal view of "mind" - and it is only a personal view - is that most people are conditioned by centuries of Cartesian dualism into making a category error: that of thinking that the mind is an entity. It seems to me, by analogy with how computers work, that the mind is not an entity but an activity: an activity of the brain.

OK but be a bit careful here. While science can certainly be done without claiming that we live in a materialist-mechanical world, anyone who does science must always apply the principle of methodological naturalism to any scientific work. Claiming supernatural intervention can never be part of a scientific explanation or description of nature. Scientists may well hold beliefs beyond simple physicalism, but they cannot introduce non-natural ideas into science. Such ideas simply do not belong there.

Yes, eroded by the waves of the Firth of Clyde. It's below the high tide mark, as indicated by the limpets.

Yup that's the place all right. Unfortunately neither reference sheds much light on the rocks on the beach at Cove. Cove is further round the coast to the west from the main subject of the first reference, which is chiefly about a beach walk in the area around Portkil, which is just - by a few hundred metres - on the SE side of the Highland Boundary Fault and thus has geology dominated by Old Red Sandstone. (In fact the map provided of the peninsula shows quite clearly the diagonal valley that marks the fault.) I was intrigued to see the spelling of some names by this writer. He refers to the Gare Loch as Gairloch, which how is a village far to the north, north of Skye, is spelt. Also he refers to Gallow Hill, on the SE side of the fault, as Gala Law Hill. Although he and his bevy of charming girls (grand daughters?) evidently walked round as far as Coulport in Loch Long (which is where you have to stop, at the Dr. No. style prohibited area where the UK's nuclear missile warheads are stored!), and therefore must have passed the location where I took my photo, he does not comment on the geology of the rocks in any detail. But there is one great photo in the reference, which seems to show the actual fault boundary: a crack with sandstone to the left and schist or gneiss on the right. So that must have been taken on the eastern side of the peninsula - a place I have never walked.

Hmm. I'm now a little unclear as to where you are going with your arguments. We've agreed that perfect objectivity in science is not possible in practice. I argue that, imperfect though objectivity in science may well be, it has worked fairly well up to now (i.e. has given us successful predictive models of nature). Please note I do not argue that there is no bad science. There is plenty: more today than ever before in fact, due to the huge numbers of working researchers we have nowadays and the way they are pressured to publish all the time. There is even fraud (made up data and so forth). However this is an issue of quality control, rather than insufficient objectivity. But in this last post of yours you seem to be going in yet another direction: questioning a claim that "we live in a materialist-mechanistic world". This is a metaphysical position that some (many) people take, but is not required by science. I would draw your attention to the distinction between the methodological naturalism of science with physicalism, which is a worldview, i.e.metaphysical, and as such not required by science. Science is the study of nature. Plenty of scientific people think there is more to the world (in the sense of human experience) than nature.

😴ZZzzzzz........... This is too silly for me. I'm out.

What if the sky were made of concrete?

What a silly question. Do you have infinite time at your disposal?

Ah, but you are shifting your ground now. Your opening post was entirely about the philosophical impossibility of achieving total, complete, objectivity. You and I agree on that, evidently. But now you introduce the concept of "control", which I did not mention. All I said was that the evidence is that the degree of objectivity science has achieved has historically been good enough for science to have been enormously successful at accounting for what we observe in nature. (The quote @CharonY provides makes the same point.) But now you say I think objectivity in science "is (i.e. in the present day) under control", whereas you doubt that it is. This seems to be a quite different question, about the efficacy of the means we use today for checking, controlling bias and weeding out bad science. We can move on to discuss that if you like but it has nothing to do with philosophy.

As @MigL says, the idea of a multiverse is far from being "mainstream science". In fact it is not even science at all, but a highly questionable metaphysical idea, as it is completely untestable, having no observational consequences. I must admit I have never understood the Fermi Paradox. As Douglas Adams's character Slartibartfast observes, "In space travel, all the numbers are awful". Therefore if Einstein was right, interstellar travel is inevitably both very costly and utterly pointless. So why would intelligent aliens attempt it? One might even cite the Fermi Paradox as evidence that relativity is very likely correct!

The trouble with these philosophical debates is that they are so often couched in terms of logical absolutes, e.g. “true” vs. “false”, rather than the pragmatic shades of grey that all of us actually deal with in real life, e.g. “mostly true”, “probably false”, and so on. Sure, no human observation can be stated to be completely , 100%, objective, since for a start we apprehend the world as human beings and cannot do otherwise. Cultural and other assumptions can also on occasion colour the way raw data is construed. But the goal of reproducible scientific observation is to eliminate bias as far as possible and this remains a valid objective, even if it cannot be definitively attained. The scrutiny of research for bias is a process that takes up a fair amount of time in the practice of science. Good science is as objective as we can make it, and over the years that has been good enough. We know that because of the tremendous success of modern science since it took shape after the Renaissance.