John Cuthber

Why do you want to crystallise it? Why not just use water?

"If you where God and gave life to the children of the world, then discovered some of those children where disobedient denying that you ever existed " If I were, and I "discovered" anything then I would have to accept that I wasn't omniscient (or I would have seen it coming and done something about it) and so perhaps they had a point. I would be forced to accept that I was not the God I had represented myself as. Njaohnt Now you realise that it's absurd to believe Tres Juicy's book, do you understand why we don't believe yours? If Tres Juicy wrote a book and claimed it was the word of God, it would be absurd if anyone believed it. If I wrote a book and claimed it was the word of God, it would be absurd if anyone believed it. If the council of Nicaea wrote a book and claimed it was the word of God, it would be absurd if anyone believed it. But you do.

One of the rules of QM is that if you swap two electrons over you can't tell the difference because they are identical. Identical entities are quite common.

True, but as the distance approaches infinity the effect of gravity approaches zero. Which happens first? Also, if you built it on top of the north pole would the fact that it's spinning tend to throw you out along it (assuming it had handrails)?

I think I was about 14 when I started learning it and I'm not that good at maths. As I see it, the problem is that calculus on it's own isn't useful or interesting. You need to know other things like trig and algebra first otherwise it's not going to mean anything.

Killing all the people in a flood seems to make some sort of sense, but why kill almost all the animals?

You seem to have missed the difference between my parents (who are real) and god (who is a fairy tale).

Here are some of the un-evinced assertions so far. "There is a lot of difference between a religious person who has seen God from a religous person who hasn't seen him." "Perfect means knowing your true nature of being or existence." "As you can see a perfect being cannot exist perfectly within a humanoid form, if you achieve perfection, i.e when you know your true nature, you'll no longer be confined to a humanoid form, you'll not have awareness of your body, the body will function on its own, it has got enough intelligence on its own, you don't have to be aware of your body, you don't have to remember what your name is, where your house is, how much debt you have, just no worries." "If God is shaped like a human and can be seen by eyes then he is made of the same properties of the universe, like matter and energy" " like this you made a creature out of him, one that is not any distinct than ourselves, and " "in fact this way he can't exist without the universe." "God created this universe" "It means the body doesn't need an energy source what it needs is an information source." "but your body is different from other machines because it has a genome which is an information source . " "Science can only measure information in the form of bits and bytes, it cannot know what information "IS"" " hence it cannot solve the origin of life problem." "Religion can solve the problem " "because it has methods to access and know the quale of information" and so on. If people are permitted to do this and get away with it then the thread isn't going to achieve a lot. Incidentally unicorns whose horns have a left hand thread are purple.

" As you say, she has already experienced it," No she has not. No red light ever met her eyes. "We cannot just change the experiment to avoid the difficult issues. Do you see that this is what you have done? " No. what I did was show that, in principle, it is possible for someone to understand the concept of "redness" without ever having seen anything red. Redness is a physical thing. "Unfortunately the problem is precisely that your argument is is unwinnable. " Feel free to prove the non existence of proof of my argument. For an encore, feel free to prove the non existence of anything (outside of maths). You have stated this as a fact, but offered no proof. That's not science. "Were it winnable then philosophy of mind would be a piece of cake. " If I'm right, then it is a piece of cake. Except for the technological problems. (which make it practically impossible, at least for the moment). BTW, considering Imortal's posts with my emphasis leads me to think this is all bollocks. "This shows that things like sweetness and other properties are only mental qualias, they exist only in our minds seperate from the objects to which they are associated with" "I meant if we had practical knowledge to manipulate and access new qualia i.e manipulate the actual physical world which I think is also made of only qualia then it will give rise to new possibilities and new ways of manipulating the physical nature for the use of our civilization and it will transform us in the process." These qualia seem to cover pretty much everything, but explain nothing. One thing that might be classed as one of these mysterious qualia is "religious awe". Up till fairly recently nobody would say "I had this epiphany the other day- and I can explain it to you so you share my experience." It was pretty much the epitome of a "personal" experience. After all, if you could convey your epiphany to somone else you could convert them to your religion- but that seems at best, rather unreliable. This http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet is based on some 20th c technology and 19th c electromagnetic theory. I really think these "things in the brain" are real (rather complicated) physical things that can be dealt with by science. Do you have any evidence that shows they are not?

"To me qualia are non-physical, they have independent existence " It's all very well defining something as being non physical. The problem is that electrical impulses in the brain 1 are physical and 2 are present whenever sweetness is present and are absent when it is absent. Can you distinguish between the signals that always coincide with sweetness and sweetness itself? Sweetness happens in the brain- the synaesthesia example shows that. But the only thing that happens in the brain is essentially rather complicated electrochemistry. So sweetness must be a part of that electrochemistry. Just because you say it isn't "physical" doesn't make you right. What's wrong with my logic?

OK, lets look at the Mary's room idea. In her room she has lots of stuff, but no colour. Because she never sees "red" she can't imagine it. However she can, in principle, analyse the electrical signals in the brain of some people who are outside the room and can see a red thing. She could do some horribly complicated correlations and find out that "if this bit of the brain is lit up then the person is perceiving red." OK, the "bit of the brain" might be a problem because it has to be mapped with respect to the other bits of, for example, vision, but that's a side issue. OK, so now she builds herself a robot and teaches it to do brain surgery and fits herself with some electrodes. When she sends a current through those electrodes she experiences something new- the colour red. She's still in the room. No red light has ever met her eyes. Yet now, when she goes outside she can "remember" the sensation of red and she can tell you, for example, if you have a red scarf or not. Now,where are these magic "qualia"? I don't think they are really anything but patterns in the brain. If thats' true then they can be studied and copied.

"Wiki says this is pure KOH." Wiki is wrong. and it's not a good idea to mess with batteries in that way. If you want KOH you are better off leaching bonfire ashes and adding slaked lime.

When you write "the scientific community will not overcome their reductionist positivist approach" you imply that there is some problem that needs to be overcome. Once again. What is that problem? In the same way if we are to " investigate on other methods of investigating the nature " you need to tell us plainly what those methods are. It's clearly not my field so I need the "for dummies" version. What, exactly, would you expect us to do? "I mean shouldn't we preserve the knowledge of the great historical civilizations that ruled the earth once upon a time. " Like what? For a start, no civilisation ever ruled the earth. What knowledge do you think we have lost? While I'm asking dumb questions can you expand on "If we have to evolve from a type 1 civilization to a type 2 or type 3 civilization". We are going to get nowhere if you don't explain the term you use.

I know this is off topic but I think it's the responsible thing to do. Is there anyone reading this who does not think that Dovada needs professional help? Religion is all well and good (just about) but telepathy? Seriously: the guy needs help.

You have indeed replied there. But sadly, you have yet to answer me. Either this " God has two properties one is called as Saguna(means having divine qualities) and this may be the one which is called as Allah, Yahweh, Savithru, Abrahamic God and other personal gods and the other one is called as Nirguna(means without having any properties or qualities)" is incorrect or God doesn't exist. Because something "without having any properties or qualities" lacks the quality of "existence" or, indeed, "importance".

"Its not fair to say that it is just fine." What I said was that if someone chooses to call a computer model which predicts what chemicals will taste sweet a "zombie" that's just fine by me. It would seem far less "fair" not to let them. The other thing I said was that it didn't answer my question. "Rene Descartes? He was the first great philosopher who looked into the problem of consciousness." That's the bloke. The one who pointed out that in order for something to know it thinks, it has to exist. Which is more or less the opposite of " Existence is a property and it exists on its own without a body to associate itself with" It doesn't tell you anything about the body (or anything else) but the provability of existence is dependent on the existence of a thought. That (possible abstract) thought is the only "body" we really know about. However the problem with this, is that it gets you precisely nowhere. "This shows that God is beyond reason" Nope, that's begging the question. Since He doesn't exist He isn't beyond anything. "I have clearly shown you that you cannot be certain that you're the one who is thinking on your own and hence it still needs further close introspection showing that the "I" is not refering to your mind or even your body, it is refering to something else which we don't know and hence it is so important to know thyself and once you know yourself you'll know that you can exist seperately from your mind and your body. You're existence itself. You're qualia itself. " Nope, the I that does the thinking is me, by definition. I may be someone else's dream, but I really am that person's dream, it's really me. At the level of abstraction where I logically accept that I may be nothing more than figment of someone else's imagination, all the other issues here are moot. However if we allow ourselves back into the real world of typing on web pages and paying the rent I still don't seem to have heard of anything that is not open to scientific study. So, once again, what is there that science can't tell us and never will?

"then is it possible that we are also seeing that same galaxy in a different location as it was seven billion years ago, and/or three billion years ago? If not, WHY not?" No, because if you could see those 3 images you would need to explain why you can't see the images from 4bn, 5bn, 6bn, 6.5bn 6.002 bn and all the other possible times.

A lot of glassware washing detergents are strongly alkaline. If you don't wash them out with lots of water then the traces left behind can upset your results. The more dilute buffer will be less able to overcome any impurities.

That's very odd. I suspect it is due to some contamination of the glassware somewhere. One important thing about buffers is that they work less well the more you dilute them.

"Can you tell me where the processing of sweetness is being done here? " Certainly, it's roughly here " igniting an action potential which will take the input signal through the neurological pathways for higher processing at synaptic junctions. The input signals are weighted and a new output signal is fired from a neuron " The particular bunch of neurons that fire as a response to "sweetness" could, in principle be mapped out by fMRI or some such. "I am not saying that science should give up investigation, what I am saying is that science should look into the world of qualia rather than smashing atoms in huge particle accelerators, it should shift its scope of investigation. " Why do you think it isn't doing that? They are doing. That's one of the areas of research that fMRI and PET imaging are opening up for us. "There are a lot of things which require a new way of thinking and I have already given you some fair points," Not as far as I can see.

There's a better picture of it here http://cdn.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/sistine.png and, to me, it looks too smooth and too full of other peoples' heads to look like the brain. Incidentally, if the people at the time had thought it looked like a brain then the artist would have been in trouble for attending a dissection. On the other hand, if nobody recognised it at the time, there wouldn't have been much point.

" How is it still holding onto the planets if its consuming itself?" To a fair approximation the sun is converting hydrogen into helium and a lot of energy. The best estimates say this will take something like ten billion years from start to finish The change of mass is small because a helium atom weighs very nearly as much as the 4 hydrogens it's made from. So, over the course of something like 10,000,000,000 years the sun's gravitational attraction will alter by about 0.7%. The planet's orbits will shift a bit, but not much. "Why does the solar wind accelorate?" Who says they do? Some of the hot gas from the surface of the sun diffuses off into space. Some of it gets caught in the magnetic field of turbulent bits and whipped up to a rather higher speed.

Seriously, I don't know where to start with how wrong that lot is. More importantly, if you have that little clue about what you are doing I don't plan to encourage you to play with anything as toxic as nicotine.

I don't know about the others but I'm 46. Perhaps the most interesting facet of that is that it's in my profile where homie12 could have looked if he had the sense. On a related note I wonder if the "12" in his name is his age, shoe size , IQ or what.

"The mind is only about 10% under your conscious control." Speak for yourself. " Do you believe in mental telepathy or other similar activity?" Of course not. " Did not God see you coming here." No.