Sisyphus

Since all known life almost certainly shares a common ancestor, you could actually say any combination. You and a potato: family. (Quite distant though!)

What does "capable" mean here? If it is predictable through prior cause, it is deterministic. If it is not and there is no particular reason this "capability" activates in one way over another, then it is random. I should bring up statistical determinism, which resembles that supposed requirement and is in fact how the universe appears to operate. If you flip a 1 billion coins, any combination of heads and tails is technically possible, though you have an extremely high confidence that it will be very close to 50% heads and 50% tails. A decision engine based on statistical determinism could definitely function coherently, but would have the ability to surprise. I'm not sure how that fits in this discussion except perhaps to show a way in which a choice might be based on "you" without being strictly deterministic, contrary to ydoaps' initial claim. I don't believe that randomness is incompatible with free will or with individuality. I think he's saying - as would I - that the common definition of free will is not even coherent. It is an attempt to describe a subjective phenomenon (conscious choice) in terms of objective categories. You could say there there is nothing that exists that corresponds with that "definition," which is a (perhaps pedantic) way of getting around assigning a truth value to a meaningless statement while still getting the point across. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged How about you define "contingency" and "purpose" in the context of this discussion? Right now I'm not following you. This isn't a debate. Are you trying to prove the statement "free will doesn't exist?"

This looks like a merely semantic dispute. ydoaps (as well as I, FWIW) define "free will" to simply mean consciously making choices. If, on the other hand, "free will" is defined as something independent of both determinism and chance, then I would go beyond saying that it doesn't exist and say that the term is meaningless. So, to elaborate my own view, "determinism" and "randomness" are possible descriptions of objective reality, and are a true dichotomy. Either a particular event occurred for a reason, or it did not. "Free will" is a subjective phenomenon that requires no more proof of its existence than the fact that we experience it. Whatever actual mechanism by which it emerges - deterministic or random, materialistic or magic - does nothing to change that.

Generally "evolutionist," like "Darwinist," is a pejorative term used by Creationists for people who believe that Darwinian evolution occurs. It's confusing how you're using it, to refer to yourself in a context that has nothing to do with natural selection. It seems like you just mean that you believe that nothing is completely static, which, if you'll pardon me, is a rather obvious statement. In fact, it's necessary: entropy always increases. Of course, going from that to "every parameter of everything changes significantly over any amount of time" is not really supportable as a philosophical basis for making hypotheses.

The main rule you need to know is that it is impossible to get more energy out of a system than you put in. The fans get their energy from the spinning column. You can only get less energy out of them than that, and they won't keep the column spinning. The whole thing will stop immediately, and you will get less energy out of it than you used to start it spinning in the first place.

You emphasize "measure" as if you think it's an illusion or something. In the Earth's rest frame, the spaceship really is shorter, and it's time really does pass more slowly. And vice versa for the ship's rest frame. This has real physical consequences, not just appearances.

What about it?

It is true that there is never any foreknowledge. Organisms do not evolve traits so that in the future they will be useful, they can only evolve traits that are immediately useful. I don't know much about the specific examples you give. You might want to look at things like lungfish, which are kind of an intermediate step between ocean fish and amphibian-like creatures. Also remember that no environment is static. Organisms evolve alongside the environments they live in, which includes other organisms who are also evolving, and even themselves. It would not be surprising at all if the ancestor of a particular species could not survive in a modern environment, but could in its own.

Nit picking? You said it was a 100% proven fact. So you admit it then? 1) Stop saying "we." You are not a philosopher. You are not philosophizing. You are not studying philosophy. You do not speak for philosophers. What is that you think "philosophy" means? 3) If "you" means scientists, then "just guess" is not even remotely what they do. What is it that you think "science" means?

Meaningless assertion. No, you don't. How do you know that? Have you personally examined every human? Have you done DNA testing on every human? If you have, how do you know you remember correctly? How do you know there are other humans? By that standard of "100% proof," the Earth is 100% proven not to be hollow. Not I. We, as in the human race. We look at it with seismic waves. Like, with my hand? Why is that the standard of proof? If I was touching it with my hand, I would also just be testing its effects: the effect it has on my hand, as far as my senses can tell. A philosopher is one who seeks truth. I see no evidence of that.

We have tested it. We've also tested gravity, which makes a hollow Earth impossible. 1) You are not a philosopher. 2) 100% proof of anything is impossible. 3) The lack of 100% proof does not mean that all options are equally likely or all arguments equally valid (else there would be no point in "considering" anything). 4) Your opinion is demonstrably false, insofar as anything is demonstrably anything.

Let me rephrase. What do you mean by "metaphysical continuum?"

I don't know what a "metaphysical continuum" is.

So to summarize your questions, you're asking how you know you aren't just dreaming reality? You don't. You could be dreaming, or be a brain in a jar hooked up to a computer, or be subject to the whim of some Deceiver God and his army of pixies. But we study the reality we live in and observe, which is all anyone can do. Raising objections on the grounds of possible invisible pixies gets you nowhere.

Certainly not. First of all, the amount of oil in the ground compared with the size of the Earth as a whole is extremely tiny. There is only oil in pockets in the crust, which is itself tiny portion of the whole Earth. Second, things don't just "turn into flames." They burn. Fire is a chemical reaction in which molecules of fuel (like oil) and oxydizer (like oxygen) combine into something else (like carbon dioxide) and give off heat in the process. Flame is just air that that heat has made hot enough to glow. The sun, on the other hand, is not burning. There is no fire on the sun. Its heat comes from a different process, called fusion, in which hydrogen atoms under extreme pressure is forced to combine into helium atoms. So anyway, in order to get all the oil to burn, first you have to get it to the surface. It can't burn underground because there is no oxygen for it to combine with. If you brought it all to the surface and lit it all on fire at once, you would get a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and perhaps a little less oxygen. I don't know whether the fire itself would be big enough to noticeably heat up the whole atmosphere, but it wouldn't have any effect on anything else, definitely not the whole Earth.

Yeah, your description is accurate. At the ends it would be angled downwards, and in the middle it would be level, while being straight the whole time. (The tunnel straight through the center is just a special case of that where the initial angle is straight down.) If the tunnel were frictionless, you could slide down it, gathering speed, then slow down in the second half, and come to rest again exactly at the surface.

What answer are you looking for? I could tell you why it's wrong, but then you'd just say "it just disagrees with science, that doesn't mean it's wrong!" Am I just supposed to make something up? Ok. It's wrong because oil is actually dragon blood. Dragons live underground and we stab them with drills and suck out their blood. We do this because we need the fuel, but we shouldn't because it makes the dragons angry, and when they're angry they bite the giant turtle that the world is resting on, and when the turtle winces in pain it causes earthquakes. Instead, we should use coconut milk, which is the real opposite of oil, and makes things cool instead of hot, which is just as good and doesn't cause earthquakes.

In reverse? The energy that the apple transferred to the ground and dissipated instead converges and transfers to the apple, tossing it up onto the table. Where, you'll notice, it stays. This will look odd, to say the least. But not because gravity is working differently - the tossed apple still follows a parabolic arc and falls back down as normal onto the table. It's odd because it is a spontaneous decrease in entropy, which is not time symmetrical.

Depends what you mean by "physically happens." Nothing changes, but it is true that the distance between origin and destination really is different in two different reference frames. Earth-destination is moving in the ship's rest frame, therefore it is compressed.

That is not consistent with observations recently discussed in other threads. Please don't bring that into this thread. Incidentally, a cosmic event horizon is not the same thing as an "edge."

The universe is definitely expanding. Is that what you mean by growth? What do you mean by "just happened?"

I don't think it would hurt relations, really. It's not a secret that nations spy on one another.

This is not true. The universe does not have edges or a center, and it is certainly much larger than a sphere of radius 13 billion LY. In fact, it might be infinite. Do not think of the big bang as an explosion at a single point, or the expansion of the universe as "outwards." The big bang happened everywhere. It is not a movement of things through space, but rather an expansion of space itself. It is because of this that we can actually see light from objects much farther than 13 billion LY away. The light has taken 13 billion LY to reach us, but while it was traveling the space it was traveling through expanded, meaning that the current distance is much greater. Our limit of observation is the cosmic microwave background radiation. This is not just an accumulation of noise, but a vision of the early universe, which was opaque. It is the farthest we can see because the light emitted from it is from the earliest time that it was possible for light to freely travel.

michel, Instead of unconnected markers at origin and destination, imagine that there is a physical ruler stretching between them. If the ruler is 1LY long in its own reference frame, in the reference frame in which that ruler is moving 0.995C (i.e., the rest frame of the spaceship), it is contracted to 0.1LY. Therefore, observers on the spaceship will say they have traveled 0.1LY, while observers on Earth will say the spaceship has traveled 1LY.

Whether time is moving backwards or forwards, at no point in the apple's free flight is it accelerating upwards. It is accelerating downwards the whole time. It is accelerating upwards while it is contact with the hand, and while it is in contact with Newton's head, whether time is forwards or backwards. It is even easier to see this with complete orbits. (The apple's path is also just a portion of an orbit.) It follows the same path backwards or forwards, just clockwise vs. counterclockwise. And really, even easier to say with static objects. Film an apple sitting on a table. Play the film in reverse. What happens?