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Mike, Well, perhaps one black box at a time is the way to go. Impossible really, for me to keep up with all the advances in all the areas which human endevour has succeeded in unraveling mysteries. Hoola, with the quasar lensing, brought in a little stronger in my mind, I thought I had with the bubbles and the "channels" between the ping pong balls. Might not the areas of the universe, that are inhabited by "normal" matter and energy, be tubes of opportunity for photons? Straight lines, after all, are hard to come by with the gravitational lensing that goes on out there. Its hard, on two levels to point to a distant object and say "that's where it is". In the one sense the photons could be put off a straight path by the gravity of dark matter, other shiny matter, the heliopause and the Earths atmosphere and magnetic field. On another level, the thing we see is by virtue of its distance, arguably, NOT where and how it was when the photons left it, on their way here. So it would be a little difficult to say with certainty, as one points to a distant object, that there is not a ping pong ball of non photon friendly stuff, between here and there, which the light has simply been channeled around. Analogy wise, I am thinking of a large ball of tangled (and merged at the intersectiions) glass threads embedded in an opaque material. Light could get through and reveal an image on the other side, with the photons NOT traveling exactly in a direction whose path tracked exactly backward would point you to the actual object that emitted the light. Regards, TAR Or perhaps water flowing around a rock in a stream.

Mike, Well perhaps, but that would make the TOE only a 5% theory. Shouldn't it attempt to explain everything? While I am all for black box thinking, and grain shifts of all varieties, it's important that everything adds back nicely. That is, you can take an overall perspective or a perspective from here or there, or then or now or later, but when something does not add up, from a single perspective its probably because you have not carried your multiplier or divisor consistently through to the other perspective you are considering. Things that are true, make sense in more than one way. That is more or less my litmus test. If it doesn't fit, it doesn't belong in the model. If it does fit, its likely to fit in a multitude of ways, and have consequences on many different levels and from many different perspectives. Long ago, or at least earlier on in my life, I began to consider things as entities. Each entity was both a component of a larger entity, and was made up of smaller entities. This calls into question one of your concepts "if left to their own devices", when considering the actions or disposition of a thing. It seems if my enitiy concept is to be true, that any enitity is somewhat beholding to the components that make it up, as well as to the entities that it is a component of, for any "devices" it may have. When considering the smaller entities one can feel a kind of mastery, that quickly moderates, when considering the larger entities which would command the same mastery of you, if mastery was in play. So, in the tubes of opportunity realm, I am thinking that there is always a reciprocity, between the tube, and the tuber. And dark energy and dark matter are not "strangers" to the universe, just because we have just noticed they have been around the whole time. Regards, TAR2

Well we might have to rethink the whole thing, since we have to throw twenty times the stuff we thought we had, into the mix. The areas that have the photon emitting and absorbing type matter, might work on different principles than the areas that don't. Much of the formulae for special relativity and the like are built off of Maxwell's equations based around magnetic and electric fields and even quantum mechanics is based on the amount of energy that it takes to make a photon or absorb one. If we are talking about some stuff that does not seem to trade with the currency of a photon, the equations built around a photon, might not be appropriate to describe it. But, the idea of channels, or tubes of opportunity betwixt and between the stuff still seems to work. And like you say surface tension and other characterisics of a substance, make each entity partially something that is being acted on, and partially something that is acting back. Like the question of how much dirt is in a hole in the ground three foot in diameter, perfectly cylindrical and three foot deep, the answer is NONE. Regards, TAR2 AND it does not have to be a simple answer. After all hydrogen, a simple normal matter and normal energy thing was able to evolve into heavier elements in several generations of star development and explosions over the 13.6 billion years the universe has had to evolve. There is nothing against giving dark matter and energy the same latitude and expecting it to be somewhat complex in nature, with "entities" and identities that could be cataloged in a "table of elements" of matter of a different sort than we previously have limited the universe to. Things we could name on different scales, with different characteristics and properties, once we get to know the stuff. I know this is not a dark matter thread, but it seems required that even very mildly interacting things that have been around each other for 13.6 billion years, MUST have something to do with each other. Whether the one is the by product of the other, or the one is formed by the other, pushed or pulled, squeezed or squeezing, attracted or repulsed...still in terms of the lingual theory of everything, it is easier, more pleasant, and more likely for the child to run down the hall than into the wall.

Mike, Well how about if the dark matter and energy is the ping pong balls. When I built the model I pictured a few posts back, a central ball touches 12 other balls. Six around the equator, three above and three oppositely below. So the threads of the galaxies would be in the areas between the balls. Now in your first picture above the halo of dark matter was concave around the visable matter. Could it be instead convex, and visible matter is squeezed out from where neighboring areas of dark matter are close into the areas where they are not so close? It seems in some sense, that such a squeezing would "look" like additional gravity, and being as it was not "in" the galaxies it was affecting, it could add to motion, from the outside. It could still be that dark matter and energy make up 95 percent of the universe. I dont know the math, but I wonder how much of the volume of my ping pong balls consists of air inside of balls as opposed to air outside the balls. Do you think it could be anywhere close to 95 percent? Regards, TAR2 I guess I could force it under water and see how much it displaces...but that might loosen the glue Might be interesting to study the evolution of the shape and size of the areas between galaxies 6 billion years ago, 5 billion years ago, 4 billion years ago, 3 billion years ago, 2 billion years ago, one billion years ago and a million years ago, "locally", and see how the stuff has evolved. I suppose areas of dark matter wouldn't have to be of a consistent shape and size, even during a particular epoch and densed packed ping pong balls would be like expecting grains of sand on a beach to be all of the same size and shape and nicely lined up. Hey Mike, I was inspecting the areas between the ping pong balls, and noticed, if I held it to the light, I could see 6 points of light, THROUGH the figure. Channels of opportunity. And I could see the same 6 points from 12 different angles, putting each of the balls around the center ball directly infront of the center ball. I have additional balls attached from the original 13 ball starting figure to extend the lattice. But I figured if I had something thin and straight I could put it through the "tubes" of opportunity. 6 parralel tubes, 6 times (being semetrical I was looking at the opposite end of each parcel of six tubes around each of the twelve balls) But 36 strands of spagetti are all touching the center ball on their way through. It got a little crowded at some of the "galaxy" points so the last group of 6 coming in from the left, I did not push all the way through their channels, so you see them hanging out the left, and not hanging out the right.

Mike, Interesting. Illuminated by quasar light Not backlit by quasar light, or considered a survey of quasar light. Interesting as well is the "void" focus way of looking at the picture. One can almost imagine a 3D geometry of balls, looking at the black "circles" that seem to repeat regularly. Like the bubbles in a foam and the galaxies are where the voids meet. The galaxies being similar to the air between a densed packed collection of ping pong balls. Regards, TAR2

Lightmeow, I think you have it a little backward. It is not that scientists can not get anywhere discussing it, it is that you can not get anywhere not discussing it scientifically. For instance, consider the difference between simile, metaphor and actual identity. Scientist have found, through careful study, experimentation and logic, that correlation does not mean causation. It is one thing to say something is like something else. It is another thing to say something is something else, as a partial comparison of some of the things characteristics with another different things characteristics. And a third thing entirely to state that something is truely something else, based on either simile or metaphor. What you can put together in your mind does not have to follow the consequencial rules of the outside world. A monk reaching nirvana, does not get physically absorbed into the soul of the universe. He thinks he has joined up...but nothing of the sort actually happens. Nothing that can be experienced and measured and understood as actually happening, by an outside party. or observer. Regards, TAR2

Logical problem discerned in this wiki article on cosmological constant: In cosmology, the cosmological constant (usually denoted by the Greek capital letter lambda: Λ) is the value of the energy density of the vacuum of space. It was introduced by Albert Einstein as an addition to his theory of general relativity to "hold back gravity" and achieve a static universe, which was the accepted view at the time. Einstein abandoned the concept as his "greatest blunder" after Hubble's 1928 discovery that the distant galaxies are expanding away from each other, implying an overall expanding Universe (which is only detectable on the largest of scales). Surprisingly, the discovery of cosmic acceleration in 1998 has revived the need for a non-zero cosmological constant, this time to add a small acceleration to the ongoing expansion. As physicist Tony Rothman notes, "Einstein's equations do not specify the universe; rather they may be considered a general framework within which you can construct many different model universes." If the distant galaxies are observed to be expanding away from each other, that should not imply an acceleration of the expansion of the universe, because that was what the universe was doing before, not now. If there is a difference between the observed rate of expansion of a distant group of galaxies, as oppossed to a more local group of galaxies, the observed rate of the local observations would be indicative of the current rate of expansion of the universe, and observations of distant galaxies indicative of a previous rate of expansion. If a known expansion rate at BB 6 billion is faster then a known expansion rate at BB 13.6 billion, then the universe's expansion is observably slowing. Regards, TAR2 Such observations would be consistent with the idea that we had an inflation which slowed to an expansion, which is slowing still and we are currently in more of a statis state with some galaxies moving toward us, and some away. Mixing it up, in quite a coherent fashion. the functions may be correct but the direction of the function is important to consider looking deeper into space is not telling us what the universe will look like, its telling us what it did look like if we are to extraplolate, we should start from here and carry the apparent functions foward perhaps my basic complaint is that we have no way to observe the universe from an implied position, other than with our third eye, and our third eye alternately takes positions in the past, present and future, and alternately takes positions here and there and overviewing both, and although the functions might be correct, knowing which combination of here, there and overview and before, now and later is being utilized to design the function, makes a big difference in the application and direction of the function...and not always does one know from which perspective the other is speaking and not always is one convinced that the other has made all the proper transformations that should be made, while switching perspectives. An ideal gas law for instance is hard to logically comprehend, if there is no container walls for the molecules to expend their kinetic energy on. And once the size of the system being comprehended exceeds the local scale we have grown accostom to, the system can no longer be comprehended as happening "at once", and allowances have to be made for travel time between places in reality that are not required for getting from one place and time in the model to another.

OK, we'll go with that. Well wait. There is not complete agreement, among all, as to what the exact nature of the stuff is, or where it came from, or how it interacts with known matter and engergy. It is not yet a coherent picture. That it "must" exist, to explain observations which have no other explanation, is what is commonly held to be the truth. I agree, that should I look at a particular series of observations that all point to the existence of mass that does not seem to put off or absorb any photons, I would more than likely see the logic in it and agree that there must be this stuff. However, there have been calculations made, of the expansion rate of the universe, of the age of the universe, of cosmic constants, and the amount of particles and energy in the observeable universe, that all logically added up, and fit the calculations and each other, WITHOUT 80 percent of the stuff of the universe taken into consideration. How did THAT happen? Regards, TAR2 Reminds me of an intiution I had, that others have had, of an ether in which matter and energy existed. My schooling drummed the thought out of me. Now it turns out there might have been something to the thought, and you are scolding me now, for not accepting what was drummed out of me, in the first place. Seems, given the nature of theory and experiments, what we know, and what we are looking for, that you can give me a little latitude in proposing alternate ways of looking at a thing, without condemning me for insolence and ignorance. Philosophically speaking, at what point does what "we" know happen? Is not a small part of that having to do with my coherence, and yours, working with a common understanding? Too complicated to get a solid handle on something so huge and out of reach as our universe, as to consider we now know what is true, that we never before knew was true, but now its obvious to anybody that looks at the facts? And that it is now coherent to everybody in the know, but me. I simply don't believe the place is coherentable in an ungrounded, non human as focal point and observer, fashion. And for that, I will do, just as well as anybody else. Nobody can take an other than that perspective. Regards, TAR2

Delkan, Well, as per the thread title, my point was, that you need some established reference point, to refer to. A philosopher can not be born, knowing the reference points that have been conventionally established. Take the snowflake thing. You have to all agree upon a snowflake that you are going to use as the one that has to be matched, then find a way to measure and record all the angles and order of crystals on every other snowflake that ever formed, and then determine to what level of matching you will accept. Is one missing H20 molecule at the end of a certain arm, that was there, but sublimed off, before another arm was complete, going to dash the match? Or is the start of a little six molecule arm on a flake that does not appear on the template, going to disallow the flake as a match? Or the computer thing. Certainly one can encode War and Peace into a particular large number, but you need the code to turn it into letters and words, which can then be read, sequencially over time, and be called War and Peace. The number itself, is not War and Peace. So even if you could count to that number, which I don't think you can, reaching that number would not mean that you have counted to War and Peace, it would mean you have counted to a number, which can be decoded into War and Peace. But without the code, you just have an arbitrary immensely difficult to count to, number. And without the code, you would not know when you have reached the number. And that same number would decode into something else, if a different decoding process was used. So without language, you have no codes, no symbols, nothing to interpret, nothing to judge your thoughts against. A philosopher needs other people to both provide a common set of symbols, and provide another mind to hold the same thought. While a babe, dropped in the woods, and raised by wolves, would be able to experience the world and think about it, use logic, and solve problems, their math and logic, and reasoning skills, and the depth of their knowledge would not compare to that of a university professor...ever, much less on the first day. Regards, TAR And they would probably learn to think, much like a wolf.

md65536, I am not saying that everybody is looking at it wrong, I am just saying the current situation is not coherent. I am assuming the universe is already coherent and we just have to catch up our models, to match. Not by throwing anything we know, out, but by adding in new observations in a way that makes sense in more than one way. A while back, maybe last spring, I had several bouts of double vision, where the image from my one eye was not agreeing with the image from the other. I kept trying to get the two images together, and they would not go. The eye doctor sent me to a specialist, who said my one eye focused a little higher than the other, but an MRI and chemical tests revealed no issues that could be causing double vision. Long bouts had only happened a few times, and the "problem" was down to a few minutes of the issue when I woke up, and revealed itself only when I quickly glanced to the right, and it took me a moment to bring the two images together. I thought I was having a problem with my right eye behaving correctly because I had remembered a wood chip hitting right below my right eye while I was using a chainsaw a few days before the first problem I had glancing to the right...then after a visit to the specialist, where he said everything looked OK with the MRI and the blood tests, and mentioned it was my left eye that focused a little low, I began to consider that it was not my right eye I needed to get to agree with my left, but my left I needed to let agree with my right. After work, with the dark glasses off (which I had worn after the visit since they dilated my eyes to examine them), and with the thought that my right eye was fine, and my left was being stubborn, I glanced at the lake on my right and it was instantly CLEAR and coherent. I have not had the issue, since. So coherence is what I am after in this regard. Not that one image is wrong, or another image is wrong, or another image is wrong, but that we might be trying to force the wrong eye to be dominant, rather than trusting the dominant eye. And in this regard, folding back in the existence of a NOW here, and a NOW there, and a NOW then, into one coherent image, is somewhat analogous to my issue. And as the coherence between two "flat" images, gives us the perception of depth, and an intuitive understanding of space, the fact that we can remember an image, gives us a third, or inner eye with which we can percieve time, or consider a thing, over time, or in a sequence... But the sensations from each eye, and each ear are diverse in type and in the particulars, yet when put together into one coherent image of the world, they make "sense", and things "exist" in such a way as to make sense in all the ways, at once. So perhaps if dark matter and dark energy explained more stuff, and made existence MORE coherent, and made one say "oh yeah, that makes sense" I would have a place to put it in my image. As it is, it makes no sense to me. Regards, TAR And even the galaxies we look at from the top are four dimensional still, and the middle of the image is closer, MUCH closer and more recent than the edges. In the two shot gun scenario with the pellets from the one missing all the pellets sent from the other, if you look at the powder for a reason to impart momentum on the pellets, you will find it spent.

md65536, I think it is a timing thing that is not properly added back to make all three images fit together completely. My clue, or what headed me in this direction is when I heard the method used to gather an image of a very far away thing involved pointing a telescope at the thing and gathering one photon at a time together, over a long period of time, and then evaluating the resulting image as if all the photons arrived at once, which they did not. Then on the other end, you are looking at at thing that is not only hundreds of millions of light years away, but is also VERY big, like perhaps 100,000 lys deep. That means that what you see happening at the closer parts of the thing, happened 100,000 years after what you see happening at the farther parts, yet the calculations seem to be done, as if the thing is moving all at once, which it is not. So unless we were to gather the images for 100,000 yrs, and key every star to its position at a particular point in time and overlay all the images in just the right way to simulate the galaxies actual configuation at one moment in time, and run the simulation from there, we would not know the actual "movement" of the thing enough to speculate upon the forces acting on it. Regards, TAR Plus, the assumptions and equations we are using to build the model of the universe we have, those of Newton and Maxwell and Einstein and Rosen, were formulated without any Dark Matter and Dark Energy as a component, it did not need to be accounted for, or present any anomolies before, so why should it now? Its not like the universe was devoid of dark matter and energy before, and now it has it. If it has it now, it had it before, and in either case it was not pertinent to our assumptions and equations then, and is equally impertinent now. Or so I would guess. So why think you are right about being wrong before, when its just as likely you are wrong about being right now? And besides besides, it seems more appropriate to adjust your model to fit the facts, than to add facts to fit your model. Your keys are not where you left them. Did someone else move them, or did you forget where you left them? Who is more likely to be surprisingly wrong. You or the facts? Reality already fits together seemlessly with everything exactly fitting everything else. If anything "looks" wrong, its probably because you are not looking at it right. And besides besides besides if there is dark matter and dark energy, which were NOT built into the inflation expansion story and the detailed accounting for the timing and creation of all the subatomic particles and surface of last scattering and all, the whole script would have to be thrown out and rewritten to account for 5 times as much stuff as we already thought we had to account for. that is like discovering there are really 180 letters in the English language and having to go back to all our words and phrases and books and stories and chronicals and put them all in, where they belong

Cladking, I am afraid, given the random nature of the monkeys' abilities at striking the keyboard, it would be just as likely it would be "War and Pbace" as "War and Peice". You would have to reject them both, as NOT being "War and Peace", as they both have a letter wrong. The fact that one is a synonym does not count, because a monkey does not know what a synonym is, and you would be adding a bit of human bias to your judgement of the exactness of their reproduction. Regards, TAR And you would be suggesting that the monkey knew what he meant, just typed a phoenetic spelling of the word he was thinking, which does not go at all with the assumption that the keys are being hit in a completely unintentional manner. The monkeys would "just as likely" type out the entire thing in Morse code by hitting the space bar in the right rythym for that, and you would have completely missed it, unless you knew Morse code, and were listening for it. After all, people see Jesus' face in the carmelized uncarmelized areas of a toasted cheese sandwhich. What are the odds of THAT? And how many horse shaped clouds have we missed? And what is the total number of coded messages available to a numerologist seeing patterns in the "good book"? I think War and Peace, in the exact form it was written, in the hand it was written in, on the paper it was written on, with the ink that was used, with the words and meaning in the exact form and order in which they were presented by the Author, could only happen the one way, and the one time, that it did. Anything else, would not be that, in one way, or another. Even if attempted intentionally. There is no chance that the exact conditions willl ever be repeated. None at all. The universe can't even get two snowflakes to match exactly.

Janus, Well I get that. But the other implication is that the actual configuration of the universe currently is that it all actually looks (if you were there at some other place currently) something close to how it looks around here, but we will not see that, or have any visual evidence of that, until later...much later. Thus we are caught in this sort of netherland of what the universe currently consists of. We have to hold an area of space in our minds in three ways. One as a way it used to be, but is no longer, another in the way it is currently affecting us and our senses and equipment, and then in a third way, the "real current universe", that we can only imagine and model since we can never "see" it, any other way than in this other "actual" way, that we see it. I was perplexed at a simulation of a super light speed camera flying through strings and walls of clusters of galaxies. The distant strings were white and formed and as you got closer they just got bigger and more detailed. It seems to me a cheat, using facets of all three ways of looking at the universe at once, since you really can't zoom in on distant galaxies like that. You can't fly at a speed greater than C, and if you where to fly at a speed close to C, you would not make very much progress toward increasing the angular size of a distant galaxy you where moving toward, in a minute, in fact if the thing was as close as half a galaxy away, it would take you 50 thousand years to make enough progress toward a star at that distance to make it look as big as our sun. And I am thinking logic would dictate that you would not be experiencing the visible spectrum of light the object you were approaching at that speed was putting off as light in that range, but more like something in the gamma wave range. If you did survive those rays and did see any visible image of the thing you were approaching, it would be likely eminations that where eminated in the infrared range or something, which would have a different "look". Plus if you were to "fast forward" the film it took you 5 billion years to make, you would see an 8.6 billion year old object evolve into a 18.6 billion object before your eyes. So in any case, you can't "get to" any area of space, other than here, that is 13.6 billion years old, because by the time you got there, it wouldn't be 13.6 billion years old, anymore. Regards, TAR I imagine that the areas of space we see as cosmic background radiation, that surface of the last scattering, is currently looking like a 13.6billion year old area of space...if you were there to see it. Just makes me think there is enough possibilty of making an inappropriate shift from one way of looking at it to another, without translating everything properly, that there is a possibilty, not that we have the laws of physics wrong, or that there is dark matter and dark energy at play, but that we just failed to carry everything required over in our transform from one way of looking at it, to the others. After all there is only one instance of a distant galaxy, but an unlimited amount of positions in the universe, from which you can view the area of space that it inhabits. From some positions it may be microwave background radiation. From others it is every age from .1 to 13.6 billion years old, depending only on the distance from that area to the observation point.

Rajnish, Well isn't that what I have been arguing, that you have to learn philosophy? How is your statement disagreeing with my argument? Unless perhaps we each have a different idea of what philosophy is. Several of the women I work with are from India and speak Telegu, if that tells you anything about their area and beliefs. I mentioned philosophy to one in a discussion and the next day there was a paper turned face down on my desk with what was evidently her idea of what philosophy was all about. It was entited Divine theme by Meher Baba May 17, 1943 and pictured the situation we are supposedly in with the gross world and the subtle world and the mental world, with gross consciousness increasing in an "evolution" of souls, in a winding process from stone souls to metal souls to vegetable souls to worm souls to fish souls to bird souls to animal soul and finally human souls which go through various lifes as women/men, germans, english, americans, indians, persian,s mohammedens, christians, and harsers (whatever that is) where as a human you have a chance to burn off your sanskaras in an unwinding process or realization process from the subtle to the mental that takes you to a god state where you are connected to both the Master's soul and the gross world. So now that I learned that, and taught that to everybody reading this, we are now all philosophers. Right? Regards, TAR2 I asked my friend at work if she knew what a metaphor was. She was not familiar with the word.

MD65536, Well thank you for those links. Have a little better understanding of why dark matter needs to be around to explain stuff...but still am not able to feel confident that we are not missing something about the nature of large scale structures, that are understandable only in a positional way, that by the very fact that the one end of the structure is happening at a different time and place than the other forces one to either be wrong about how it is currently configured (because we have not seen that yet), or falsely consider the universe is currently configured in the same way that it used to be. Since one cannot actually see the entire universe in any manner other than the way we do see it, with close stuff soon after it obtains a certain configuration, and far away stuff long after it was in that configuration...evidence of the current configuration is hardly available. Regards, TAR2

And if we are trying to explain the activity of a galaxy and a supernova hundreds of millions of lys away, with the necessary existence of dark matter and dark energy in that far away area of space, are we not also talking about some activity that occured hundreds of millions of years ago? In which case things might have looked like that around here hundreds of millions of years ago...but things changed in the interim. Bignose, Oh. OK. As long as we have it here, it makes sense. So its sort of a mass soup we have always been in, just never noticed since it was ubiquitous. Regards, TAR2 And oh so ever mildly interacting.

wouldn't it logically have to be more or less everywhere in the universe including the Milky Way and the Sun's system and the Earth and in your living room? And if it exists locally, what have we been calling it all these years of investigating the bodies and energies we have so carefully and thoughtfully catalogued and measured and modeled around here? Just wondering if dark energy and dark matter make any sense, if they cannot be found to exist, in some form or another in our Earthly environment. TAR Or does the Heliopause in some way sheild us from them, or does the massive electromagnetic field of the Sun redirect them, or does the Sun somehow metabolize them and turn them into the forms of matter and energy we know?

And I am rather sure that the odds are extremely high, that somewhere long before the last page "pwa roe8 va" would be typed, EVERY time anything even started to look like it might be War and Peace, and any human would have a biased or illogical thought, long before they knew the truths and had the insights and learned enough about the world and human experience, to be called a philosopher. Cladking, I x posted that last little bit. I do think you are right about the natural language. It jives with the Universal Grammar that many linquists suggest is evident in all languages. And secondly it makes sense in another way, that we all have the same world to think about, using a very standardly arranged group of senses and brain folds. But it is not a natural language that has been obscured by dialects, but one that has been enhanced by conventions and standard symbols and such, with which to share experiences and learn about the world through stories and descriptions, verbal and writen. It is the stuff hopes and dreams are made of, to know that others share your thoughts, and you have theirs. I have told this before, but I hear that I used to communicate with my sister, before I could "talk English" in what was "babble" and "gibberish" to my Dad. My sister knew what I meant. She learned to understand TAR babble. I also think that we communicate with ourselves in our own personal language, when we dream. We know what is standing for what, even if the most learned interpreter of dreams can not unravel the code. So yes, we have a natural language, but it is the meaning behind the words and symbols that we converse with ourselves in. And there is this same meaning behind the language we converse with each other in. A cat is still a cat, a ham sandwich is still a ham sandwich, a cloud is still a cloud, a sister is still a sister, hunger is still hunger, joy is still joy, loss is still loss, no matter what language you talk about such in. Regards, TAR2

cladking, (is that opposed to "the emperor has no clothes") The number you give is a very large number, but I am thinking it is not large enough. Because in amoungst the strings of trials before War and peace was successfully accidently reproduced, there might (must) have been one produced with a spelling mistake on page 323. And another almost completely War and Peace missing a word on page 22. Every possible errored War and Peace would need to be counted as well, and every other work of that length or shorter that you can think of, would also have to have been reproduced and so on. I am thinking rather the number would be something like a base 100 number (all the keys on the keyboard shifted and unshifted) the number of digits long that war an peace has characters, symbols, spaces and tabs. And that is a number larger than probably the estimate of atoms in the universe x the number of seconds since the big bang. In other words, I don't think it is possible for a monkey, or any number of monkeys, that don't know a language, or how to use a typewriter to ever write War and Peace. And besides how would we know they had managed the feat? Who is checking the output? And does it count if a monkey would eat a perfect page 64 while he/she was typing a perfect page 234? Does the successful reproduction need to be typed by the same monkey, and all the pages kept in order and carefully stacked? It is just plain impossible for it to happen unintentionally, there are too many varibles that need to be intentionally eliminated. I have a saying..."You can roll a standard set of dice as many times as you want, and you will NEVER get a queen of spades. For that you need a standard set of cards." In reference to the OP, inate language ability and thinking ability does not mean you are born able to speak fluent Chinese. You need someone to teach you Chinese. Regards, TAR2 Gees, A related reincarnation question for you. If your former incarnations included a literate Frenchman and a literate Chinese woman, wouldn't you be able to read and write in French and Chinese, before you learned your native tongue? And a harder question still, would you know the Chinese word for internet? Regards, TAR2

Gees, Yesterday morning when I got to my cart in the lab, I was perplexed at the fact that where I remembered there being a coffee cup, and two partially consumed Snapples, on the paper towel on the shelf where I always keep such things, there was just a paper towel with the stained ring of where a coffee cup once was. Something about my memory was false. I must have left the coffee cup on the coffee machine. It was not there, and I inspected the kitchen area to see if someone had found it and washed it and put it in the strainer, but it was not there. Was someone playing a joke on me? Maybe, but not likely, but where was my cup, and my Snapples? I began a trek to a meeting room, where I possibly could have taken the cup, but did not remember having the cup at the meeting. On the way, I saw my cup, sitting on a desk where I had never sat, and wondered how it got there. Then I remembered someone had asked to borrow a mouse and I had inspected an unattached mouse at a workmates desk, found it was not the right type for the person in need, and gone back into the lab to search for the right type in a drawer. I must have had the coffee cup in my hand when I said hello to the guy that needed the mouse, and put it down on the desk to inspect the unattached mouse, and never reached for my cup at my cart, for the rest of the day, to miss it. My memory was adjusted, or refreshed, and I logically put back together what had had to have truely happened to fit all the facts. I do not actually remember placing the cup on the desk, but I "figure" it had to have happened, because all the facts fit nicely together that way. Now consider the OP's contention that he "remembered" being a philosopher at birth. In actuality, the first things he saw when he opened his eyes were two images of the world, one from his left eye, and one from his right, and because of the nature of the lens of his eye, everything was actually backward and upside down. He had to learn how to true the sensations from his eyes and his inner ear and his extremities, with each other, to determine such basic philosophical questions as what is up, what is down, what is left, what is right, what is near, what is far. He had to learn how to focus and converge the two images his eyes provided into one sensible image of the world, that corresponded with the sensations from his ears and bottom, fingers and toes, nose and skin. He had to learn about his own body and the world around him. He had not yet ever seen a cat, nor learned the English word for one. He could not possibly remember being a philosopher, at birth, because he could not possibly have read any Kant or Plato, to know what one was. It had to have been a false memory. Regards, TAR2 Could a Muslim, who knows every word of the Koran, remember a time when they did not know every word of the Koran? Are Muslims born with such knowledge? Absolutely NOT. Even if you sat a zillion monkeys down at a zillion typewriters they could not type the Koran ever, accidently, or inately, unless the typewriter was set with Arabic characters. You can true up the world to your image of it, but so can every human. We are all born philosophers by this measure. But we still have to learn what we know, and "make" ourselves into philosophers or scientists or politicians or artist or whatever. And we learn a great deal from each other, and those that have experienced this world and learned about this world, before us. And it is only in reference to other people that you could call one person a philosopher and another person not one. As you would say Gees, its a matter of opinion. So, what happened to the two Snapples, I don't remember drinking? The truth of the matter is I must have drunk them and recycled the bottles. And it would take someone who already knew what the Koran was, to inspect the reams of paper the monkeys generated to determine if indeed the Koran had been identically reproduced.

Gees, If one needs to read two papers on how to argue philosophically, I would think this would argue strongly in favor of having to learn such, rather than be born being able to do such. Regards, TAR

James Redford, I have a self imposed rule, to read a thread, before I post to it. Your method of reposting the same arguments over and over again, made me have to skim over yours, because so much was repeated, I had little hope that you had adjusted your thinking to accomodate or refute any arguments made against your stance. If you would, please try and respond to the following thoughts as if you had read them, considered them, and agree with them, or argue against them without repeating the thoughts of the good Dr. and citations of his works, which you have already provided ample times. The characteristics that you describe would be the characteristics of the Omega singularity, might be similar in nature to some of the main characteristics given to the God of the Bible, but they are also the main characteristics given to the universe itself, taken as a whole, or one thing. Thus the fact that the universe started as a singularity, and might well end as a singularity, would be a characteristic of the universe itself, and has nothing whatsoever to do with any outside party, of any sort. So if the singularity at the beginning and the end is the same thing, and everything inbetween is a part of it, then it is not the Omega Singularity that is like God, but the universe which is like a singularity (when taken as one thing, with a beginning and an end). While I am in complete agreement that we are in and of the same thing, which may well have started as one thing, and may eventually return to being one thing, it is not at the moment, one thing, and we are well insulated by immense amounts of time and incredible reaches of space, from personally experiencing either condition. So, if God is the universe, then its perfectly alright to accept the universe as it is, and not seach for an outside influence. Regards, TAR2 Rather stupid actually to propose you have found proof of an outside influence, at the same time you are proposing that there is no such thing as an outside influence, but everything is currently spawned from a singularity, and will return to such a state eventually.

davidivad, Well, true. But if a picture is worth a thousand words, what is worth a thousand equations? There is a meaning behind language, as there is a meaning behind math. The precision of math also adds complexity, and one must always remember what is standing for what. It is possible to perform an operation on a number, that can not be actually performed on the thing the number is representing. And there seems to be a tendency in math, to work with an isolated system, and deal in approximations and simplifications to get a "rough" picture of the thing in question. To take integrals to determine to the desired magnification or precision, the shape of the thing. But its the shape, and extent, and duration of the thing that math is after, and this is analogous to Kant's two starting intuitions, that of space and that of time. Thus language and math both refer to our understanding of the thing. How it is shaped, how big or small it is, whether it is here or there, where it has been, and where it is going and how much time it will take to get there. If there are tubes, which there appear to be, the metaphoric nature of them, does not discount their existence, but hints at their workability. And as a word means a thing, but is not the thing, and an equation describes a thing, but is not the thing, there is still the thing that we mean to describe by language or math. And in this words will do just fine in understanding what it is the other means. Mike, If a thing finds itself in a tube, how does it know in which direction to go? Are tubes always oneway? Regards, TAR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_(Kant) Consider the table of judgements, the categories, and the schema (applying the judgements over time). They are a template, for me, in considering the thing as it is, and what we can say about it. A template for understanding human language and the "meaning" behind it, both. Whether that be math or words we use to come to the same understanding. Mike, In your picture of the valley there are the dried beds of former channels. In a mature valley, like the Mississippi you will find Oxbow lakes as well. Rememberances of former tubes. The "permanance" of a tube is thusly in question, and a relativity question comes to mind as well, in terms of an object following a "straight" path of least resistence, which turns out to be a curve when envisioned from a birds eye view. A curve would indicate that the direction of the straight path of least resistence through the tube changes as you go, which seems to indicate that the tube itself is not static but responsive to the changing forces that impose it. Regards, TAR

Hoola, Oh. Poking fun at Zeno? Perhaps he was poking fun at logic, and we all thought he was serious. Perhaps its another thread, but I don't know what it would be entitled. I do have a bantering deficiency myself, and often take literarly what is meant to be an obvious exageration or false statement, but "I thought you were joking", turns out to be quite an insult, if the other is serious. This is a tough board, especially the speculation section, where individuals often take an insight, or idea or logical assessment very seriously, and nobody else pays any attention, or just laughs it off. I "laughed" at a grammar mistake back in the fall, that the president of my company made. Thought his staff must have been remiss in letting it through. Turns out it was intentional and part of a carefully thought out marketing strategy. A "twist" that could be either considered "clever" and meaningful if you are on the "inside"...or just plain wrong and stupid if you are "not in the know." I thought it was wrong and stupid for my 5th grade teacher to tell me to "look it up" in the dictionary, when I did not know how to spell it, in the first place. (being that you had to know how to spell it, to find it in the dictionary). She evidently was serious and did not see the humor in her instruction. Regards, TAR Knowing the difference between humor and seriousness is as easy as won, to, three. What sensible individual would ever open the dictionary to the O section and start scanning for a word that starts with a W sound. I think us English speaking folk were handicapped from the very beginning with one, two, four. They stuck the w, that should have been at the start of the first number, in the middle of the second number where it has no place, and added a letter in 4 just to throw u off, in case you where inappropriately looking for a pattern to follow. They must have been joking around. To...for...sics...ate..who do we appreciate? Number spellers! Number spellers! Number spellers! YEAH! or is it ait, or aight, I can never remember.

Mike, Concurrent with any tube must be the objects or influences that define or impose the boundries thereof. And the question would then be how did these objects or influences happen? Regards, TAR2 Is any tube established by occurences which also have followed a tube?