joigus

Yeah, this sounds pretty scientifically and intellectually rigorous. Socialists and feminists, some decades ago, got together and figured out how to keep an army of scientists under their pay to go to Antarctica, take samples, and keep the world under their control so that fossil-fuel consumption suffered a severe cut so that... Sorry, what were we talking about?

Sorry. I suffer from a recapitulating disease.

So nothing happens necessarily? Or maybe some things do but others don't? By things not having to happen necessarily, you mean things that happened didn't have to happen, don't you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene What I said about fear and anxiety is taken from a great series of conferences from CARTA (Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny). The speaker is Joseph LeDoux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmZpfBYbSSA Any series from CARTA is worth taking a look. Thanks a lot for this. +1.

I concur. I should have read this more carefully. Time doesn't react to anything, or travel.

Analogies are sometimes interesting, but very limited. The speed of photons is not really a limiting speed. Photons have a constant speed no matter how you look at them. Your analogy would be more appropriate for massive particles under constant force (hyperbolic motion). But the problem is: What kind drag motion represents photons then? What's more similar to a drag due to vacuum is the resistance due to the vacuum scalar field at inflationary times previous to re-heating (inflaton drag force: google for "inflation as viscous force" or similar). In that case the analogy can be taken to be closer to what you suggest AFAIK.

First religions (hunter-gatherers)... Difficult to say. Expert paleontologists and anthropologists seem to think religion had to do with summoning the big game, while honouring them when they died or they killed one of your hunters. The monument at Gobekli Tepe is very clear that pre-agriculture was all about animals, wild animals. Cave paintings in France (Lascaux) and Spain (Altamira) 10.000 years before, too. Agriculturalists were mostly concerned with the Sun, the seasons and the ancestors (the ones who gained the land). The shift towards considering the ancestors as mythical, stylized, abstract figures in Ain Ghazal is very clear. They started making clay decorations of skulls and ended up depicting very abstract, impossibly stylized individuals. People in the Bronce Age and Iron Age were more concerned with lordship. The overlord was the one who taxed you and killed you if you didn't cough up the money (grain, oil,...). Overlordship was the driving force, so I think it's no wonder that people started thinking in terms of one lord above all other lords. Akhenaton (Tutankhamon's father) was the first to be bold enough to declare one god and see himself as the human image of that god. Others followed the formula. It's not just about fear, IMO, it's about fear and anxiety. Fear is about the past and has to do more with the snake and the wolf, that you're mentioning; anxiety is about the future: death, providing for your offspring, etc. What does the future have in store for us? I can argue and document more about this and give sources, in case anyone's interested. Fear can be handled by the amygdala in your brain. Anxiety is more complex. I agree almost 100 % with this. +1 There are many more things. Probably one of the most important was the risks involved in giving birth. I almost forgot. Again, anxiety, rather than fear. And I almost forgot and went completely off-topic. Evolutionary arguments for religion are not biological, but based on the theory of memes, by Richard Dawkins, and argued for very eloquently by Daniel Dennett. Religions are like viri, or parasites, they evolve because they do well, not because they favour their host. They clearly don't.

Just to add info. The oxygen in photosynthesis comes from the breaking up of water molecules. The possibility that it came from CO2 has been ruled out experimentally by using isotopic tracers. https://www.amazon.com/Life-Science-William-K-Purves/dp/0716798565 (chapter 8: Identifying Photosynthetic Reactants and Products) Water was very abundant in the atmosphere after the late heavy bombardment.

Exactly. In the Copenhagen interpretation, every partial wave, tagged by a potential outcome, keeps evolving until a measurement is made. When such measurement is made, a sudden change in the wave function is produced, called the wave packet reduction, wave function collapse, or normalized projection of the state. This mathematical operation is incompatible with the Schrödinger equation. The partial waves that carried with them other possible results simply stop evolving. In the MWI, on the contrary, every time a measurement is made, a universe implementing that result is set in motion, so to speak.

I don't know what light-resistant means. Do you mean a perfect absorber, like all metals are? Aluminum foil is a very good absorber of light. Cover your mobile phone with it and have someone try to call you. You'll see what I mean.

Dark matter does not interact electromagnetically. It can't be photons. It can't be neutrinos either. It should be "cold."

I see your point, but I'm having difficulty understanding what side of a certain line your point is. That line being very clear in my mind, I do recognize that I'm having difficulty with your point. Will all due respect, I don't think it is. A straw man is putting words in your mouth that you haven't said, remind vaguely of what you've said, but are much easier to rebut than what you've actually said. Now, what you've said is, You seem to imply (correct me if I'm wrong) that because there's no exchange of energy and momentum between the layers, or because energy/momentum don't play a role in the "upper layers", then the question of determination of actions is something beyond physics (chemistry --> biology). IOW, that physics (chemistry --> biology) has nothing to say about how the "upper layers" work from the smaller parts. What I said is that it's not just energy, momentum and the like the only quantities the determine the motion (I think this is in close correspondence to what you said, and thereby, as honest an answer to it as I can think.) In thermal systems, most of what the variables are doing is completely thermalized, hidden, smoothed out, it you will. In complex self-organizing (living) systems, it's quite different. It's even possible (actually quite plausible) that energy, momentum etc. + entropy (accounting for the lost information) do not suffice, and there be many more variables keeping track of the information. Actually, that's what I think is happening. There must be some other job that the remaining 1024-10 other variables are doing to organize the system. And that other job can be no other than physical (chemical --> biological.) The opposite would be what Daniel Dennett calls skyhooks, instead of cranes. I don't know if I'm being clear, although I must admit that I didn't pay the attention to some of your previous points that they deserved, I'll give you that. Your point of complaint is well taken, and I apologise. You sound to me so similar to a quasi-standard reductionist, determinist like myself (except for QM limitations) etc. that I'm confused. I'm not saying it's a moot point what you say; I'm saying that your point is so subtle to me that it escapes me so far. OK. I see how you thought that. I meant: Why would energy or momentum have to do with free will? Sorry for the misunderstanding.

I don't agree either. And I'm going over your argument, that I didn't completely understand. Here it is: This is a very interesting case that I think goes to illustrate how surprisingly different phenomena of emergence can be, so that to the non-reductionist mind (we all have one, mind you) they might look like almost magic. +1. In the case of the arch action, it's the last piece that does all the others do their job efficiently or not do it at all. Emergence it is, but not from out of the blue. It comes from the pieces, but in a devilishly complex and cooperative way. I said "magic" and, just to be clear, I do not think @Eise is talking about anything like. I do think that he's trying to draw a distinction I don't quite see. But I'll keep working on it. And as a last note for the time being, I never try to be told I'm right; I always try to be proved wrong. It's incredibly more constructive, and always a win-win situation. Yes, I'm still trying to figure this out. Not easy for me. So people act according to their wishes and belief. So then what? Do we stop studying DNA as a major determiner of some behaviours, which it surely is? Tobacco use has been shown to be correlated to Neanderthal genome. Do we deny it? See my point? Emergence is complicated: Neanderthals didn't smoke, of course. Consequences of causal connections may even shown up millennia afterwards they appeared. Every physical process implies an exchange of energy and momentum, and linear momentum, and other integrals of motion, like the Runge-Lenz vector. But overall they're just less than 10. Now, a real physical system has 1024+ determinations. Which combination of the 1024 determines that your sweetheart says "yes" to you when you ask her if she wants to marry you? I don't think it's energy or momentum, or any of the 3 components of the Runge-Lenz vector. It could be something like "every 1017 seconds all your atoms push in one direction (this is just a made-up example.) Energy, momentum, angular momentum, etc., just don't cut it.

I just hope I'm not totally un-right, right? You're a very good bad person. Or maybe a very bad good person. Which one would you rather be? I'll watch my step.

What's going on?

I understand soooo much better what you mean. I do have an answer for that, but I need more time. I want to apologise for the camel example, because it sounded facetious, although it was not. But I felt like I had to call you to task. This question matters to me because I think it's a much better stance to assume that something in the molecules is causing our behaviour (even if it's not coded in energy and momentum, why would it be?: if a system has 1024 determinations and my physics only give me less than 10) than just make big names like "will," "belief," etc. and go on to define people's ways taking that as a basis. The latter leaves you with nothing but the old system of punishment and guilt; the first allows you to conceive of better ways to improve the situation by understanding why some people behave badly. As I said before: early detection of pathological behaviours, monitoring, alleviation of a lot of suffering... But I need to think more about this.

I just forgot to type "almost." It's not my intention to take this discussion even farther off-topic than you already have. The OP was not about continuity almost everywhere anyway. If you don't speak English and are using google translator, it's OK. You just say so or ask for help. The OP has nothing to do with the measure of a set, but with the size of a quantity. You also mistype, right? For example, "terminoogy", "matematics", or my favourite: What are those? If you've got time, take a look at this word in the Oxford dictionary: "disingenuous." That's not even a sentence in English. Here's the proof (and mind you, the parser is only concerned with syntax, we could talk about meaning): No complete linkages found. ++++Time 0.05 seconds (30.83 total) Found 204 linkages (59 with no P.P. violations) at null count 4 Linkage 1, cost vector = (UNUSED=4 DIS=0 AND=2 LEN=43) +------- +------- +---------Wi--------+----------------TOo---------------+ | +-- | +----E---+---Os--+ +--I-+ | | | | | | | | LEFT-WALL presumably want.v something [that] [allow] [us] to make.v any -----------------------MVp-----------------------------+ ----Os-----------+ +---------Jp---- -------Ds--------+ | +-----Dmcn +-----A-----+ | +DD+ +---A | | | | | | physical.a experiment.n or have.v [a] consciousness.n by our 5 sense.n ----+ ----+ N---+ | organs.n +---------Wi--------+----------------TOo---------------+ | +----E---+---Os--+ +------------ | | | | | LEFT-WALL presumably want.v something [that] [allow] [us] to make.v any +---------Jp---- +-----------MVp----------+ +-----Dmcn --------If--------------------+------Os------+ | +DD+ +---A | | | | | | physical.a experiment.n or have.v [a] consciousness.n by our 5 sense.n ----+ ----+ N---+ | organs.n Constituent tree: (S (VP (ADVP presumably) want (NP something) that allow us (S (VP to (VP make (NP (NP any physical experiment) or have a (NP consciousness)) (PP by (NP (QP our 5) sense organs)))))))

You misunderstood me. I meant that the "argument", "this is not such and such, as I said earlier it's so and so" is not a serious argument and you can do much better than that. That's just gainsay followed by a re-definition or definition of a categorical qualification. Categorical limits always carry an arbitrariness with them. I was defining what I understand by reductionism. I have no idea how I could be wrong in what I understand by reductionism! What I understand by reductionism is, I surmise, what I understand by reductionism. Essentially, I said, there is causal connection between what atoms do and what macroscopic systems do. That's what I call "determine." The macroscopic patterns, on the contrary, do not determine (in that sense) what the atoms do. There is a directionality in what Steven Weinberg, e.g., in Dreams of a Final Theory, calls "arrows of implication." You denied the point. What am I supposed to do next? I simply pointed out that denying what something is following by the drawing of an arbitrary line, could be used to say that a camel is not a camel. Having said that, it's entirely possible that my argument is not an argument. All it would require for it not to be is to say: "It's not an argument," and then re-draw the line that defines what an argument is. It is entirely possible, I would say more than likely, that you teach me something I don't know. So yes, I want to learn the difference between causal relationships and emergence. All I'm asking is that, as soon as you have the time, give me something better than "no, that's not it, it's the other."

As everyone has explained it's not about photons interacting with each other. My way of wording it would be that it's about photons being affected by their common 'wave function.' The real problems with the MWI, I think, are the lack of falsifiability and a disastrous non-compliance with the principle of parsimony.

Now I understand what you mean with one of your "hodja." I thought you were talking about an invisible friend. "Continuous everywhere" is another expression intended to be intuitive rather than rigorous, but is more traditional. It's to do with measure (cardinality, number of things,) rather than size.

The only mathematical sense I can think of in which something being "almost infinite" (although that's not the proper way to say it) is asymptotics. This, in mathematics, is what most closely connects with what @studiot is saying: +1. Though you'd be well advised not to use the words "almost zero" or "almost infinite" in those cases. Take, for example, the number 10120 compared with 1. The wrong way to say it is "10120 is almost infinite." A better way to say it is, \[10^{120}+1\sim10^{120}\] Although the proper context is with functions. Example: \[f\left(x\right)\sim e^{x}\] \[g\left(x\right)\sim x\] Which means that f is ginormously bigger than g when x is big. The "almost" operator (\sim in LateX) defines an equivalence class (same limiting behaviour.) And you should never use it in combination with 0 or infinity. I hope that helps.

Fair enough. But let's analyse your argument by means of isomorphism. \[\varphi\left(\textrm{causal relationship}\right)=\textrm{camel}\] \[\varphi\left(\textrm{conceptual relationship}\right)=\textrm{horse}\] Now, this is what I see: And this is what you say: This is not a camel. As I said in my previous posting, it is a horse.

LOL. It's end of the week, @dimreepr. I'm beat. Forgive me. God speaks to me, but I'm never listening when he does.

Yanchilin, Yanshmilin. Haven't we been over this before? c2 or phi. You need more variables!!!

I'm not sure of anything. But the story of Joshua and the Canaanites is pretty unambiguous. You can spin it any way you want, but at the end of the day it's: God tells Joshua "I've promised Moses this land is yours, take it from the Canaanites. The Bible is clearly making things up about Jericho, which was destroyed by an earthquake about 1000 years before, but the story in Hazor seems to be pretty different, according to archaeologists: Internal rebellion. What seems to have happened is that grassroots people killed their own powerful brethren and made it look like a genocide of one people at the hands of another. In any case, the idea of extinguishing a rival culture was already being used. Even if it wasn't true! LOL