joigus

(My emphasis.) You've given no answer to any of my points. I've provided you with references and reasons why many of the things you hold as true about the past simply cannot be correct. Then you engage in an argument about bricks by using 16/17th-century language. The fact that you desperately try to attack the man, "you're a cynic", while fleeing from the argument tells me I must be doing something right. People always do that when they're logically cornered. "Debating is always cynical" is the bit that I've decided to leave uncommented because it needs no further comments from me. I don't know what to say. You might as well say "reason is always cynical". Maybe you simply don't know what "cynical" means.

It's not about being suspicious of files. The reason is more to do with protocols of discussion rather than security.

A message from the Bronze Age from an invisible being, compiled by people from the Iron Age, written in English from the 16th century. Not very illuminating to me, I'm sorry. If I want to be understood, I use 21st-century English. That's why safety warnings, for example, are not written in 16th-century language: Being understood could be a matter of life and death in that case.

I stand by every word here. There are many sources of possible mistakes. A very common one is forgetting that \( g^{\mu \nu} \) is the inverse of \( g_{\mu \nu} \). It is always the best idea to go over the calculation again, instead of believing you've found a shortcut to the Nobel Prize. It's a natural rite of passage. You do it in the abstract, with indices; you do it with polar coordinates on the plane, you do it with hyperbolic polar coordinates. You convince yourself that it's correct. You turn on and off the contravariant to covariant "switch". It still works... Oh my. It must be true. That's the path.

Muons orbiting nuclei? Lifetime of a muon is 2.2 ms. That's a mighty ephemeral magma.

I'm glad nobody's time was harmed in the making of this movie. Good work. You might wanna change the spin of hadrons to 1/2. Just saying.

You just saying barter is not trade does not imply you're right, of course. And actually you're wrong. You don't have to have money to have trade. Plus the concept of money is very old nonetheless: Seashells, salt, and other goods too were accepted currency in the past. Fixing the exchange rate, if you will, for any good that's scarce enough does the trick. If you are sitting next door to an extremely valuable resource that's in high demand, there's your profit. It is trade, subject to all the constrictions of supply and demand, upturns and downturns in value, availability, etc. That may be why anthropologists call it trade. Trade in some societies is present in more recent myths, as e.g., the Nabateans. But not necessarily, and not tipically, even though it's been there for millenia. You should support what you say with some facts. I've given you the example of the Beaker people. They are known to have been traders, of Indo-European origin, and trading is not exactly unequivocally present in their myths. We do not know what those myths were about, assuming they existed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_migrations#Uralic,_Caucasian_and_Semitic_borrowings For obvious reasons, trade is not an element that easily plays a central role in myths. It's too domestic, familiar, too routine, and not an element of the transcendental side of existence. Can you support anything you say with arguments, data, quotations, instead of just a tacky image and repeating "I'm right; you're wrong"?

Physical four velocities are not made of arbitrary numbers. As Markus said, in just a bit more explicit notation and rephrasing what he said, although I think it was clear enough, \[ \left( v_t, v_x, v_y, v_z \right ) \] but constrained to, \[ \left( \frac{c}{\sqrt{1-v^2/c^2}}, \frac{v_x}{\sqrt{1-v^2/c^2}}, \frac{v_y}{\sqrt{1-v^2/c^2}}, \frac{v_z}{\sqrt{1-v^2/c^2}} \right) \] Same with 4-momenta. 4-momentum is the product of \( u^{\mu} \) --the 4-velocity-- times the mass. So it doesn't do to fill arbitrary numbers in the slots, so to speak.

\[ \left( \frac{1}{\sqrt{1-v^2/c^2}}, \frac{v_x}{\sqrt{1-v^2/c^2}}, \frac{v_y}{\sqrt{1-v^2/c^2}}, \frac{v_z}{\sqrt{1-v^2/c^2}} \right) \]

Yes, there were. The Beaker people were traders. They brought beer and artifacts. They travelled alone or in small groups across Europe and were buried with their artifacts. A famous example is the Amesbury Archer. Of course he had weapons, because many people had weapons in the Bronce Age. And travelling traders were not an exception, for very good reasons. There is no culture without traders. Trade has been a part of human culture for millenia. Prehistoric trading routes of obsidian have been found in Africa.

"Par excellence" after a noun meaning "a very good example of something": https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/par-excellence_1?q=par+excellence No excellence implied in the literal sense.

I haven't had time to review in detail. The numeric relation seems correct to me. As to the claimed contradiction, I haven't got around to it yet. Contradiction with what exactly? Don't have time to read Markus' comments. Maybe later.

There is no conflict in the operation of taking covariant derivatives of any tensor, at any order of derivation. Again, can you explain here, instead of linking to a document, please?

OK, the fact that you mention Adam and his immediate offspring as factual is enough for me to know this discussion is not leading anywhere useful. Some biblical myths are inclusions from Babylon. Ezra re-edited the Torah, because it had been lost after Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed the Second Temple. The myth of the flood from the Epic of Gilgamesh is very recognizable. Another one is the story of a man whose wife cannot conceive, so that they arrange that it is the slave who is going to play that role --Abraham--. The latter story is foreshadowed in the Nuzi tablets over and over, and over again. Also in Mari --Mesopotamia. It is more than likely that they picked it up by the rivers of Babylon, because they came to know it was a common Babylonian story. Also you say all deities in the Bible stand for God. We already know this cannot be true -beyond any reasonable doubt. There are also inscriptions speaking of Yahweh and his Ashera (his wife). The existence of a pantheon of gods is very clear in the archaeological record. Baal is not, as you seem to suggest, another representation of Yahweh, but the bull god that appears in many places of the Middle East and features prominently in Exodus, different in name and in the statuettes --in the human form, El, sitting and serene; while Baal, aggressive, in smiting position, and using his strength. It's Baal-Zebub, the Lord of the Flies, that in Christian iconography became to be known as Satan. Yahweh, in the Sinaitic depictions, looks nothing like El. Why would he? They are different gods from different regions. Are you going to believe what a book which was copied again and again, recompiled hundreds of years later after its partial destruction, probably recited at some points; or are you going to believe the fragments of script that are dug from the ground and tell us what the Canaanites of that time probably believed? Faith-based religion is not like a message passed down in its pristine form generation after generation; it is more like a game of Chinese whispers played throughout the centuries in which you never know what the message is going to become. That much we already know beyond any reasonable doubt. Understanding the process, rather than the details, makes it very easy to see how you can throw in a new element and make it part of the broth, keeping some words but changing the meaning, etc. Like your kefir. It is the lack of logical strictures which allows to do that. This appears not to be true: https://weareisrael.org/spiritual-seed-2/male-child/betulah-vs-almah/ But, when Eliezer recalls his story to Rebekah’s father (Bethuel), he calls Rebekah a young woman (עלמה, al-mah’), a sexually mature woman at the prime age for work, because he was not privy to her actual sexual status. Helenization of Roman Jews started in the 4th century BCE, but found strong resistance that culminated in the Maccabean revolt during the Seleucid rule. So they were not completely Helenized, especially considering the Maccabeans were successful, unlike the rebels of Masada. It was after the diaspora that most transcriptions of Torah appear only in Greek, at least in Europe. But the sect of Qumran still copied the Bible in Hebrew, and I'm sure the rebels of Masada also did so, at the time of the Jewish revolt. Some of the parchments have been found to appear to have been dropped on the ground of the caves in Qumran as the legions came to arrest them. Those texts range from old copies to contemporary copies --at the time. They are all in Hebrew.

You've got to admit that Christopher Hitchens was spot on when he said "with religious types you never know what you're gonna hear next."

There were many migrations. Some more peaceful, traders, like the Beaker people; others, not so much. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_migrations The ones that really spread and seem to have been quite violent are the Yamnaya. They flooded Europe with their genes. They also brought the plague and big axes: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24132230-200-story-of-most-murderous-people-of-all-time-revealed-in-ancient-dna/

@iNow. Fair enough. "Beyond a reasonable doubt" actually sounds more like me.

Archaeological evidence proves to the contrary. 900 BCE Jerusalem was a small town, as proven by Israel Finkelstein. The perimeter is well established by the old tombs and the dating of the pottery is ambiguous at best. The gates of Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer, rebuilt by Solomon according to the Bible, are not Solomonic at all. They are probably Iron Age. In the time of David the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were two independent kingdoms. Monumental architecture of the time corresponds to king Omri of Israel, not to Judah. Masonry signatures testify to that. Just after king Josiah accesses the throne of Judah, local temples disappear and Jerusalem stands alone. Careful studies of the archaeology of the countryside have proven that the population wasn't enough for an army. There is no trace of scribal activity or pottery bearing the seal of the king in the Davidic kingdom. We know there was a chieftain named David because of the Tel-Dan stele.But his presence was very thin on the ground. We know Omri was the big king of the time because of the Mesha stele. Also the only to boast monumental architecture in Samaria, as well as abundant excavated luxury goods. LOL. It hasn't for me. Yes, I was referring to the archaeology of the written hearsay. Of course material culture and inconsistencies between the Bible and what's been unearthed are most important.

Well, yes. But Buddhism is not a faith-based religion. It could be argued that it can be practised as a practical philosophy, if you dispose of the ritual part.

I've been wondering about both @Mordred and @Strange for quite a while too.

It is ironic the way in which the persecutors par excellence like to play mentally with the idea of being persecuted. No, not censored. You are just ignorant. "Virgin" in "virgin Mary" (parthenos, in the Septuagint) is a mistranslation from Hebrew almah ("young woman".) As the Dead Sea Scrolls have shown, there is no trace of the Hebrew word bethulah ("virgin") referring to Mary. So for all we know from science (archaeology), Mary was not a virgin, but just a "young woman." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septuagint#Christian_use El and YHWH (probably "Yahweh", archaic Semitic scripts had no vowels) were different deities. One came from Canaan, the other from the outskirts of the Sinai desert. One was a god of the Canaanite hills, the other from the desert. There were many Canaanite deities, like Ashera, or Baal. It was king Josiah who fused together El and Yahweh, decreed a unified place of worship in Jerusalem, and substituted all of them for the common name adonai as a conveniently ambiguous placeholder for "god". It is not Yahweh the name for "the lord" in Hebrew, it is adonai. All for political reasons well understood in terms of the decline of the Assyrian Empire and the political situation that resulted --need for unification of two kingdoms. Some of these points are debatable, and different scholars hold different views, but what seems to emerge clearly from the ground is that the Israelites and Judahites were not de facto monotheists until after the Babilonian takeover. There were many deities among the Nabateans too --the precursors of Islam, which is the reason why Ibn S'ad, Ibn Ishaq ol Al-Tabari mention them in the so-called Satanic Verses, but they were conveniently whitewashed by later traditions. There are still death penalties for those who dare talk about it. Whitewashing, abrogation... very common in faith-based religions. As I imagined, nothing whatsoever on this thread having to do with "the abstract vs not the abstract." You could at least learn a bit about where your book comes from.

Can you summarize it here, please?

Or maybe to some people it's like a flavour of ice cream that grows on you for a while but you finally feel you've had enough of it. Or a proving ground, and after they've run their test, they're done; or a night in a mental institution... I hope Mordred comes back.

I agree. A very good primer to the formalism without historical perspective (requiring thermodynamics) is Gillespie: https://books.google.es/books/about/A_Quantum_Mechanics_Primer.html It concentrates just on the mathematical formalism, but it's very clear and you can read it in no time. The more physical counterpart to me would be Quantum Mechanics of Atoms, Molecules and Photons (by Avery, a chemist): https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Molecules-Photons-European-chemistry/dp/0070941785 A very unorthodox book the latter. Both books can be read very fast and really trick you into believing that the subject is easier than it really is. They remind me of Tony Zee's "in a nutshell" series.

Your concepts, "the screen", "redness", "being there", etc. are just verbal tags for occurrences you assume to exist but for which you have no handle. As you said yourself, you have no theory, which means, among other things, you have no way to infer from your words whether I, or other people, or a stone, or a plant, are conscious. You just repeat like a mantra, "I can see", "I understand", "I fully know and understand". There are many good points here, but I will insist on @Bufofrog's: Do rocks, or running water, or thunderstorms have conscience? If they do, how do you know? And on what grounds? If they don't, why is it, if not because they have nothing in the way of physical connections to their environs that are processed by specialised elements like neurons? You've got nothing. I've read nothing in what you say other than some kind of unsophisticated bluffing manoeuvre.