joigus

Agree. Spot-on observation too. +1. As the Dead Sea Scrools seem to reveal Christ-like figures were already starting to appear (the Teacher of Righteousness) near the Dead Sea already 100 years before Christianity. Those were definitely times of distress for the Jews too.

Spot on. +1

It has been pointed out by Daniel Dennett that oral traditions become relatively reliable in preserving the fidelity of the message once the priestly class becomes numerous enough, society is more stable, and the chants and recitations acquire a form similar to what multiplexing is in Von Neumann's architecture of modern computers. The Brahmins playing the role of the neuron or the integrated circuit element. The Vedas have been recited for millennia by many generations of Brahmin after the Arians settled in northern India and Pakistan. IMO this multiplexing, helped by social stability, must contribute to the stability of the message too --whatever the initial amount of nonsense or altered-sense "bits" is in the initial message. But neither form is immune to the possibility of further additions, re-editings, and the like. Interesting case in point, what @Eise mentions: The Bible. It is well known today that the virgin birth of Jesus from Mary is a translation mistake from Hebrew to Greek that got stuck on the Septuagint. After that, the mis-translation was propagated with a high degree of fidelity. (Remember: multi-plexing and relatively high social stability for the priestly class.) But mis-translation it was. "Almah," the word for "young woman" was translated as "parthenos" (Greek for "virgin"), while the Hebrew "betulah" (the real word for "virgin") appears nowhere in the original, as corroborated against the Dead Sea Scrolls by numerous scholars. But the origins of the Vedas are shrouded in mystery. We do know that this kind of culture came from a people in distress, coming from the Andronovo region and in migration, because the course of their main rivers had changed (the Greek-Russian archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi has made extensive excavations of the area.) That is the time when the oldest Vedas could have been more susceptible to change IMO. Following the Vedas we learn that they fought battles against the peoples already living in northern India and Pakistan. Did they lose some of their first documents and decide to re-write them in their minds or in texts? We don't know, or I don't know if we know.

Maybe it's something to do with this: -------------------------------------------- "The most misleading assumptions are the ones you don’t even know you’re making." Douglas Noel Adams Last Chance to See (1990) --------------------------------------------- A round of rep points for @MigL, @md65536, and @Markus Hanke for clarifying many aspects of the OP and the follow-ups.

@Phi for All and @Dord. I agree with your practical POV. @Strange's is, as I understand, very much the same. I would love to drop the distinction and use it in a freer way. It's just that some of my students are going to face Cambridge exams and sometimes I have to curb my offhand ways and try to remind myself of the rigour, which I tend to forget. For example, we're supposed to use either British English or American English, but I can't help mixing some expressions, both in pronunciation and spelling. schedule, figure, route, ... colour/color, etc. It's enough to make you nuts. I love split infinitives. How else could I, boldly go where no man has gone before? I think some language police people are spoiling all the fun in language. They're like chaperones.

If not word by word, this is exactly what I was going to say argument by argument, but in the last moment refrained from doing so. You got epsilon naught and mu naught completely wrong. They don't mean anything in and of themselves. One or the other can be re-absorbed in the system of electric units. The only thing that really has an invariant meaning is their product, \[\epsilon_{0}\mu_{0}=c^{-2}\] You really must go back to basics and learn EM. Pun unintended, but comes in handy.

Actually, \[\alpha\overset{{\scriptstyle \textrm{def}}}{=}\frac{e^{2}}{4\pi\epsilon_{0}\hbar c}\] is a definition, not an equation. Definitions are not equations. Before there was an h bar there was no alpha, and electric charge could not be expressed as a dimensionless number. In the CGS Lorentz-Heaviside system of electric units this is obvious, and it had the dimensions of M1/2L3/2T-1. You might as well "determine" pi from "your equation." You're going in circles. A minimum baggage of history of physics is necessary in order not to say nonsense. There's much more nonsense in what you say, but time is limited.

Yes, you're right. It's not mentioned explicitly on the wiki article. This is what you said. You implied it was only about having a wish and saying it to God. Taoism and Buddhism have no god. But they have moves.

I see. Well, yes, I quite agree with that. But your comments are more about meaning, and refer to the word "believe" as a verb. My problem was with the word "belief" as a noun, and was a rather simple-minded grammatical question. Thank you.

The study seems to be cross-cultural, and it includes T'ai chi and yoga, for example. Some forms of Buddhist practice also involve running, clapping hands, stopping, sitting, etc.

Then your starting position of whether the universe is fair (to us?) is confusing me. Is that meant as a figure of speech? I also think the distinction @zapatos has made about "special" and "preferred" is relevant. +1 I do not believe in mysteries; there's not mystery in science, but I do believe in puzzles in science. The fact that conscience has appeared in this part of the universe when, in cosmological terms, the surface of last scattering is about to disappear behind the kinematical horizon to such DeSitter observers as ourselves (experimental fact) is a puzzle. I can refer you to cosmologists who enjoy the prestige I lack, and share the same puzzlement. Maybe it's not something to be kept on the front burner of cosmology, so to speak, but it's definitely worth thinking about. Whether that is causally related to the appearance of conscience, which has been falteringly suggested, is another matter; but an apparent --repeat, apparent-- element of serendipity I think cannot be denied. Maybe it's some kind of mirage or illusion (mind you: Nature sometimes presents these to us; like the illusion of design in organisms, that's to be dispelled by the theory of evolution.) But in that case, it's well worth some scientific discussion IMO.

Chaos has to do with local instability plus ergodicity. It's a stronger condition, or set of conditions, than just unpredictability. It involves mixing among different trajectories. Example: A simple 1-dimensional repulsive force has trajectories that are unstable. It would give Liapunov exponents that characterize it as unstable, and thus, unpredictability in the sense of high sensitivity to initial conditions. But such system is not ergodic and, as such, it's not chaotic. Trajectories keep ordered in 1-dimensional foliations for arbitrarily long times. 1-dimensional linear dynamical systems don't display chaotic behaviour. It's a combination of sufficient degrees of freedom and/or non-linearity. Enough DOF is sufficient to bring about chaotic dynamics. Non-linearity is also sufficient. Chaotic systems though, may have regimes that locally restore some kind of ordering: attractors. Some of them have regions of the phase space (space of dynamical states) were families of trajectories seem to converge. In that sense, they are so rich in behaviour as to present some kind of loose ordering, even though they are chaotic. Quantum mechanics does not display chaos, but it does present behaviours reminiscent of their classical chaotic counterparts. These behaviours are in correspondence to chaotic attractors, and are called quantum "scars." It is only in that sense, AFAIK, that people talk about quantum chaos.

+1. I think I speak for most everybody here (although I cannot be sure) if I say that there seems to be a kernel of anthropocentrism in your argument. Am I right? That's what's making me uncomfortable, anyway. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.

No. The "fundamental concept of free will" is what I thought you were thinking. You said you weren't, but it keeps coming back. My apologies. I think I finally dodged the bullet. Eise is more involved in that forum, from what I've seen.

Please, stay away of ad hominem.

+1. I heard zircon microcrystals as favourite to date billion-y.o-range rocks from the origin of the Solar System. There it's U/Pb ratios.

I see. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Editing works only for some minutes. I will limit myself to the contention that your decisions could have been adopted before you were born. I don't think that makes any sense at all. And AAMOF I would not get involved in such nonsense. I recently heard a sentence that made me smile: If something is not worth doing, it's not worth doing well. Decisions before you're born. That makes so little sense to me that it's not worth pursuing, even to argue against it.

+1. I totally agree, without external factors there is "free" but there can be no "will."

I think this is a non-sequitur. I was talking about internal conflicts. The primitive drive to kill is dormant in all of us. What if somebody awakens it? It may take a very cruel, very sadistic action to awake it, e.g., in any of us here talking. But the truth is it could be awakened, if somebody "cared" enough to do it. I wouldn't call that a coercion. A coercion, in my definition would be, If you don't do A, I will do B My example above would be, I've done A, what are you going to do? B, C, D,...? It would be our frontal cortex being inhibited and more basic circuitry in our brain taking over. Are you or aren't you, as a free agent, responsible for shutting off the frontal cortex and letting the limbic system, or more primitive, circuitry take over? I think the concept of free will that you use, as well as Daniel Dennett's, is motivated for the best of reasons in order to avail some working definition of responsibility, that may work in a variety of contexts. But it's not fundamental, and it misses a wide spectrum of possibilities. Not least among them: What happens when an individual who is a responsible one, at some point, whether indefinitely or not, ceases to be one? PTSD and other similar syndromes could happen to anyone. They're not genetic; they're event-induced, and they can't be qualified as plain "coercion." I do agree that enunciating "free will is an illusion" and leaving it there and spreading the message without further qualifications would be socially irresponsible. But the other solution doesn't satisfy me either. Emergent properties are complicated. Suppose "free will is an illusion" is true in some reasonable sense. Then, because it is an illusion, there are bound to be individuals who believe it, as well as individuals who don't, no matter what its value of truth is. Acting irresponsibly just because "free will is an illusion," even if it were true, would be incredibly stupid. The reason, if no other, is that you would eventually meet those individuals who don't believe it to be true (precisely because they act according to complex combinations of internal and external determinations and they can't choose any other option but to believe it's not true!) and you would end up paying for the consequences no matter what you believe or what is ultimately true and, in fact no matter what is true. Thereby, a need to act responsibly would be self-maintained so to speak, as a major conditioning for your actions, so that you don't get in trouble with society. Bootstrap mechanisms can appear when complexity is involved. I would agree, though, that communicating this subtle scientific proposition to general swathes of society, just because ultimately the useful concept of responsibility they know and love vanishes (when you analyze it in more basic terms,) doesn't make it a good idea to just get rid of it socially. That is a delicate question. There are further questions, as the value of the proposition "free will is an illusion" for those individuals that are under strong compulsions. It could have a positive effect in terms of soothing feelings of remorse. I don't know, but more study and discussion is needed. But that's another matter. The point I want to make here is: There are potentially positive uses of the proposition as well as potentially negative ones.

Great post and point! +1 Business class drives the train all human kind is faring by. Could it be more obvious? Their pants are on fire and Nature has blown on them.

That's easy to say for a skeleton wrapped in a tunic with a sickle in one hand. 😭

Is Nature playing fair with hereditary cancer? No. It's not Nature's job to be fair. Nature looks sometimes fair, sometimes unfair to us. It's our job to make up for her misdeeds. Maybe we can trick her. I hope we can. Those are half of the better angels of our nature. The other half is being "humane." Nature's trying to understand herself from the disadvantage point of primates' brains. That's my two cents.

I think it depends as much on the exomoon as on the exoplanet, as well as its location with respect to the star, and the nature of the star itself in the Hertzsprung-Russel diagram. (dwarf, red giant, main sequence and where on it...) The moon would have to have a magnetosphere to protect it from the gas giant's "bully" magnetosphere. I think it would have to either have seismic activity of its own or a powerful energy source from strong tidal forces to the giant planet. IOW, a mechanism that pumps CO2 to the atmosphere. If you want humans to live there, you need oxygen in the atmosphere, so you need something like cyanobacteria. Then there's the problem of surface gravity and atmospheric pressure. My favourite scenario for life is Earth-like planets, really. In what concerns complex life, let alone human life, my drive is to curb my imagination.