Sisyphus

Ignosticism and apatheism are different but not mutually exclusive positions. It's apatheism that considers it an unimportant question, ignosticism that considers it meaningless (at least without clarification). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignosticism

It hovers.

It's just an urban legend. "Mysterious" stuff happens there no more often than anywhere else.

Computing capacity, for the time being. I don't know whether there are other reasons. Do you have some reason to believe otherwise (other than an appeal to ridicule)?

Everyone is already immortal in the sense that our existence will leave echoes of causality rippling across the universe possibly forever, and at least until this universe ends. It's not very searchable, though...

That's a problem. The definition will affect my answer. I do believe in an order and consistency to the universe. I don't call that "God," but some people would. Many of the things that people call "God" are things which I don't believe are real. I'm as certain about some of them as I am about anything, but I know that ultimately nothing is provable with absolute rigor. Some are falsified with as much certainty as science can give, some are unfalsified, many are unfalsifiable. And some aren't even cognitively meaningful concepts, just empty words. So does that make me a theist, an atheist, or an agnostic? People who think as I do don't generally use those labels except in convenience. I've heard the term "ignostic" tossed around, which seems to describe me pretty well, even if it is kind of a neologism. Oh, and btw: As a moderator, I should say that if this thread becomes a religious argument, I will close it down. It might be closed down anyway, but for now I'm allowing statements of opinion and polite requests for clarification.

I would say there's probably nothing (or at least very little) unique about human emotion. It just seems to me that if you're going to claim that the basic experiences of humans are so radically different from those of their closest relatives (like chimps), the burden of proof is definitely on you. They would have emotions for the same reasons we do. Other animals, though, are trickier. For example, do dogs have emotions? I'm sure they do - they're intelligent, social mammals, just like us, and their behaviors obviously indicate something. The question for me is not whether they have emotions, but how closely analogous their emotions are to ours. My guess, based on little more than vast anecdotal evidence, is that they have a lot of similarities but that most dog owners are still guilty of a lot of excessive anthropomorphism. Of course, dogs are also usually guilty of canimorphism of their owners, so I guess in a way it's a mutual relationship...

Suppose, though, you put them in the most pampering, inactive environment possible, so you could more or less exclude external effects (assuming that's even possible). They would still decay eventually, but it would have to be due to stuff like molecular instability, right? I wonder how long that would take for the most tenacious viruses. What's the natural half life of your average rhinovirus?

They can't. But yes.

Inasmuch as a virus outside of a cell is more like an inanimate, giant molecule than a living thing, wouldn't there really be no set lifespan, as long as there is nothing actively destroying it?

I haven't looked at your design (I'm supposed to be working right now), but with "perpetual motion machines," remember the rule that every step of the way, you always get less energy out of a process than you put in. Whatever step(s) it is that you think will generate more energy than you need to activate it, that's the one that won't work. For example, with those rubber balls you mention, when they "unsquish" they will do less work than it took to squish them in the first place, always, no matter what.

Haven't you mathematicians figured out yet that Euler was just messing with you guys? Anyway, as enraging as an answer of -1/12 is, that's just that specific series, right? If you calculate it differently, can you get different results? Also, there wouldn't be anything analogous if you were trying to, say, sum all rational numbers? It seems more clear that you could get any answer you wanted in that case, right? (These are non-rhetorical questions.)

And the reason you don't feel gravity is because it acts on all parts of you equally (well, in direct proportion to those parts' inertia), so there is no internal tension or compression. That is, unless the strength of the gravitational field is significantly different from one end of you to the other, in which case you'll have a "tide." But unless you're the size of a planet or right next to a black hole, that's not going to happen.

It's just how "natural number" is defined. If you want some rationale, it's because natural numbers come from counting and ordering. In ordering, "first" comes first, clearly. Counting is less clear, since you can have zero of something, but you still wouldn't normally say that. In a list of the things you see, you wouldn't start listing the infinite categories of things you don't see. "I have 3 apples, zero unicorns, zero two-headed clowns, zero flying spaghetti monsters...."

You can't multiply infinity by anything, inasmuch as it is not a number.

It's more indeterminate than that, actually. You can add them that way, or an infinity of other ways. For example, you can say "for every positive number n, there is a negative number -n/2." It's still a one to one correspondence, but the positive increases twice as fast as the negative, and the "sum" is infinitely large. In other words, it's not just undefined but actually meaningless to talk about the sum of all numbers.

Smooth segue, guy.

Yes, it can, and it does. You don't see how it works because nothing in everyday experience behaves that way and our brains aren't really built for that kind of visualization, but as Klaynos said, that doesn't really matter. It's what observation and the mathematics tells us, and it doesn't care whether we can visualize it. Luckily, you can visualize it, sort of. There are a few imperfect analogies that are commonly used, most often the "surface of the balloon" analogy: imagine the universe is the surface of a balloon. This would be a 2 dimensional universe (just the surface) instead of a 3D one like ours. On the surface are fixed points, representing stars, galaxies, etc. Note that this "universe" has a finite area (possibly but not necessarily the case with ours) but no edges. If you keep going in a straight line you'll only end up back where you started. Now, inflate the balloon farther. The area of the universe increases, and all the fixed points get farther apart, even though they aren't moving. It is space itself which is expanding, and not a collection of objects moving apart within space. The same thing (more or less) is happening with our universe, it just has an extra dimension and so is a lot harder to visualize.

The one in the middle is freaking me out.

Well that's quite a big "if," frankly (I don't think it's nearly that simple, myself), but I don't know what you're really asking. What would happen? Well, if cultural attitudes are still like they are today, I would guess the majority of naturally gay people would "get it fixed" at puberty since who would willingly put up with millions of idiots calling them immoral and whatnot if they could avoid it? People who have been gay adults for a while probably wouldn't. If trends continue and it becomes more generally acceptable, most probably wouldn't both bother. Or maybe lots of people would just make themselves bisexual, cus, hey, more fun for everyone.

What are you talking about? I don't understand how this is a response to the text you quoted from me, nor do I really understand what you're asking me. Do I think we should excuse murdering and eating one's sexual partners on the grounds that Black Widow spiders do it? No. I'm willing to go on record saying that we should not.

The thing with human homosexuality is that pretty much has to have both a nature and a nurture element. For the former, there's the fact that it's probability is closely tied to biological siblings (every older sibling you have, whether or not they have any contact, increases the probability of homosexuality). Plus, you know, common sense. For the latter, there's the fact that it shows up very differently in different cultures (in ancient Greece, almost every male practiced bisexuality, and pure heterosexuals would be deemed effeminate). But whatever the underlying basis, it's obviously not a conscious choice who you're attracted to. I mean, really, does anybody actually believe it is? (And no, the choice on whether to act on it doesn't count.)

I think it's pretty obvious based on his rhetoric and the decisions he's made so far that consensus-building is a fundamental aspect not just of his administrative style, but of his ideology as well. In other words, "it works the best, and it's the right thing to do." So, no, that doesn't surprise me at all. How well he will be able to keep it up is of course another question entirely, but I think (and hope) he'll do pretty well. I disagree with ecoli that "not pleasing anyone" is necessarily the case, though obviously there are examples of that, as well. Not that it's at all the same thing as being President, but he was very popular at the Harvard Law Review among all the various factions, right? Maybe you can never keep everybody happy, but come on, now.

I wouldn't expect it to be intentional, actually. Maybe I'm just not used to having guns around, but it seems like if somebody is drunkenly wandering around in a field with your shotgun, some aspect of the gun safety rules must have broken down somewhere along the way. The whole gun on the nightstand, quickdraw, shoot first and ask questions later attitude seems a little too cowboy to me, too. Seems like if I acted that way I would have ended up killing roommates' girlfriends, etc., but again, I've never even fired a gun, so I'll leave that call to people with more experience. That seems right. As does this.

His descriptions are right there, his patents are on record. If these things worked, then anyone would be free to build working models themselves. (It's a common misconception that inventions have to be demonstrated to actually work before they can be patented. They don't.) Where's the conspiracy?