lemur

If humans are fallible, then God's perfection would be unknowable to them, no? They/we can know the idea of perfection as an ideal, but in practice we would have no way to recognize it because it never has, nor can it, occur in our lives. I think this is why false idolatry is condemned, i.e. because if we can't ever achieve perfection in practice, we shouldn't pretend to. We can only keep pursuing the ideals of perfection we create without the expectation of ever being able to reach them (i.e. reach perfection), imo.

It's odd to hear this after hearing so often that the basis for quantum physics and the notion that light is a particle as well as a wave is the discovery, made by Planck I think, that light-energy was always emitted and absorbed in whole 'packets' and that they could never emit or absorb partial packets. Now what you're saying is that this is not an essential characteristic of EM energy itself but of a given system that is absorbing/emitting it. Does this mean that systems are only absorption/emission compatible with other systems with precisely the same allowable frequencies? Are there not more common allowed frequencies that result in materials being more likely to absorb/emit than to be transparent or reflect? Also, how strict are the allowable frequencies of a given system then? Can a system allow a certain frequency of red light yet completely disallow a similar frequency only slightly higher or lower in frequency, say red-orange?

But isn't intuition often misleading in physics?

They had freedom and responsibility for their own lives. If someone uses their freedom to take poison, it it your fault for not preventing them? You can warn them about it, which God did, but it's their responsibility. Besides, the point is that they got tricked by confusion, probably because they didn't have knowledge of good and evil to help them know that the serpent was tricking them. I get so tired of people talking about responsibility and consequences in terms of social sanctions. "Responsible" means that you are the cause of something. That's different than "accountable," which means you may be held to account for your actions. Consequences are results directly caused by actions, e.g. the consequence of heating water to 100C is that it boils. Sanctions are when someone else responds to your actions, e.g. the chef saw the cook boiling water and fired him. Getting fired isn't a consequences for boiling water, it's a sanction. Water boiling from heating it is a consequence. Regardless of whose fault it was, the consequences would be the same. And yet it was a consequence of eating the fruit, which God had explicitly told/warned them about. Deception involves false knowledge. The result of deception is different than true knowledge. That's a slave mentality. First, God told them they could go forth and multiply and it was good. Then, he told them that now that they had knowledge of good and evil, work and childbirth would be painful. Obviously something got twisted and deceptive. If the creation was/is a realm of total possibilities, death was as much a natural part of it as evil. That's why I don't think it would make sense for God to eliminate death and evil - but if he doesn't eliminate them, what can he do about them? The answer is to shed light, i.e. help people see their way to making choices that pursue good and avoid evil. Some parents try to hide things from their children instead of explaining the consequences to them. Like I said, I don't think it was arbitrary. I think God simply knew the consequences of different actions and warned them. Here's the quote from genesis:

I think the government just has to fold and tell the people that private capital has total control over revenue and income and the only means they have to survive is to appease some private money source, if they can find one. It would be nice if the government could provide some source of self-sustainment for people in the mean-time, but what happens if they don't?

Hydroelectric dams may provide energy seemingly from gravity, but in reality is it gravity that is the ultimate source or the solar energy that evaporates the water into the clouds that rain water into the rivers that propel the dams as they flow to the ocean? Gravity may be the mechanism/medium, but the sun is the source.

I agree. It makes more sense for wealthy individuals to save rather than increase spending. HOWEVER, corporate taxes will also decrease, I think, so the question will be whether they will expand with the extra money and, if so, will such expansion result in more jobs or just more hours for existing employees?

Is there a discrete number of photons possible and if not, what determines the range of discreet photons possible in a given system?

I don't know how to assess how much heat transfer would be due to conduction and how much to radiation. Are you saying that the absorption/emission of the floor is negligible compared to conduction, or just less?

I wonder how much heat-exchange with the ground would occur if you built a house on top of a black cement slab or other foundation. Wouldn't the foundation act as a black-body absorbing heat from the warmer side and radiating it into the cooler side?

First, you really should learn to use the quote-reply correctly so that it's easier to respond to your posts. Where is it written that God would kill them as punishment for taking the fruit? I thought he was just warning them about what would happen if they ate that fruit. Maybe, but could they understand anything that complex before eating the fruit? Maybe all they could understand at that point was "to die or not to die." Maybe so, but what's the point of making the story into a competition for gender-supremacy and inferiority? Isn't the moral that deception leads to mistakes, which lead to better knowledge despite terrible consequences? Some people feel opposed to work (and childbirth) because they view it as painful. It all really depends on whether you are your own master or simply working because someone else says so, I think. I think God's curse was just him informing them of the consequences of their actions. I.e. once they'd learned to twist good and bad (i.e. lie), God knew that they would lie about work and childbirth being joyful. You're changing the subject. You were claiming that free will wasn't free if there are consequences for choices. I gave an example of what it would mean to lack free will to make bad choices completely. I don't think God's will is to persuade people against their own better judgment. It's more like he's trying to show people things that informs their judgment, i.e. truth. Persuasion was what the serpent was doing trying to convince Eve to take the apple. If the serpent had been telling the truth that they wouldn't die, then God would have indeed been the one persuading them to avoid the tree with lies. No, that assumes cultural relativism and arbitrary-ness. I think what the bible is trying to do is describe metaphysics and morality in terms of natural laws. So I think goodness is associated with creation and evil with destruction. There are lots of examples where there are overlaps and contradictions and those are what make the stories interesting, I think. However, I think the point is that the writers were trying to resolve issues of good and evil in terms of creation and destruction.

Well, think about it. If the government funds a road-building project, a lot of people get paid. Then if those people spend their pay, the people they pay it to get paid. Then if those people spend it, more people get paid, etc. GDP is caused by the rate of spending. The problem is making all those spent-dollars result in productivity that actually makes people's lives better and more valuable. You can spend loads of money widening highways and roads and cranking out cars to drive on them and gas to put in the cars, but the question is whether people are going to feel economically satisfied when they're spending all their time driving around everywhere all the time. Anyway, the point of the thread is what people will spend money on if taxes are cut and what kinds of jobs will get created as a result of what the money is being spent on? It's just like asking what kind of jobs will get created when the govt. spends money; only instead of the government doing the spending, it will be corporations and other tax-payers. So the question is what will those tax-payers spend tax-cuts on and what kinds of jobs will it create (or not)?

Good point. But whether love and lust are just an artificial and idealistic distinction, the concept makes sense to people in a common-sense way. For example, I was listening to the song, "You Lost Me," by Christina Aguilera when I posted the OP. In it, CA sings about losing her relationship to lust and yet I couldn't help thinking how many men would want a relationship with CA out of lust. So is the idea that lust grows into love within a committed relationship and then that lusting toward women outside of that relationship is suddenly something different? More importantly, in reference to the OP, do women experience/perceive love and lust differently? I think that they actually may, because they may have a psychological need to deny the idea of themselves as lust objects, since the women who are seen as lust objects are regarded as temptresses and man-stealers. I think also that if women would regard all love as essentially lust-based, they would become cynical and alienated in their relationships but this is mostly just a hunch.

It's a really important question why discussions about the underlying nature of racial classification read like gibberish. I think it is because racial ideologies are designed to appeal to the deepest level of common sense. The basic underlying assumption is that things can be classified into similarity and difference of appearance and that things that are in the same category will be more similar to each other than those classified into different categories. It reads like overly-complex gibberish just to describe this logic in an explicit way because it is implicitly taken-for-granted and understood as a reflex. What would be interesting is if racial consciousness could be brought to a level where individuals would have the same level of detail-awareness among individuals of other racial categories as they do within their own category. For example, many whites distinguish among European ethnicities and between different class-levels with certain features signifying those sub-racial distinctions. The question is whether whites and others could expand this level of fine-differentiation to other racial categories, so that e.g. Asian, African, and Latin American sub-racial distinctions became as salient at the cognitive-emotional level for everyone as for the people who make them salient currently? I think when people learn to distinguish between classes and sub-ethnicities beyond their primary group classifications, they start forming cross-cultural identification - e.g. black American solidarity with Palestinian or European minority nationalities with small-country nationalities of Latin America.

It would also be interesting to analyze how efficiently heat transfers into a house at different temperature differentials. This is probably a topic for its own thread, but it's interesting when you're talking about getting heat out of incoming air how much heat is coming into the house directly and how that relates to the amount of degrees difference between inside and outside.

For how many years has politics been approaching the issue of economic recession, rising fuel prices, etc. in terms of how to raise GDP, create jobs, bring down the price of gas, etc.? But assume for a moment that GDP growth won't increase, that more jobs won't be created, and the price of gas/fuel will keep increasing. If that is the case, what kinds of things would make people happier without costing more money? Are there changes that government and/or private individuals and organizations could make to improve quality of life without running into the brick-wall of the discourse on recession and how to fix it?

I used to think a lot about passive air-conditioning methods like this. However, during the same period I kept nudging the thermostat setting higher until I eventually got to the point of turning the air-conditioner completely off. I find that my body adjusts to the average temperature in different situations and then deviations from that feel relatively hot/cold. So, for example, shade makes a giant difference on a hot day. It would be interesting to experiment with underground pipes and tunnels, though, and see what the air coming out of the duct feels like. If it gets cool enough to condense humidity, though, you would have to have a way to drain it.

I would guess your disagreement with that view arises from the assumption that things abstracted from relations among physical objects are more objective than subjective abstractions that blatantly contradict empirical data. Surely, however, you can recognize the difference between directly observable "concrete" entities and abstractions that can only be explained/described through reasoning? Btw, is this a discussion that is going to take away from this thread?

Idk, but what percentage reduction in the weight could they produce?

Female physical attractiveness can cause men to treat women well, etc. It can also cause them to be interested in other women than their partner and cheat. The question is can women distinguish between men loving them and simply treating them well because of physical attraction? If not, does it confuse them when men seem to love/worship them yet at the same time lust after other women?

Marat, my point with this thread wasn't to stimulate criticism of trickle-down economics, which anyone who is familiar with left-economic critique well knows. My point is that when you hear claims that tax-cuts will result in job-creation, you have to wonder what people will suddenly start spending more money on with their increased budgets. Will they take an extra vacation? If so, does that mean more jobs in hospitality, hotel housekeeping, food service, and tourism? Will they buy new furniture and stimulate more jobs in the furniture industry? Whatever the case, I think people should be asking themselves if those are the jobs they want or can get. If not, you have to ask about the second level of trickle-down, i.e. what do people who work in hospitality, restaurants, hotels, the furniture industry, and tourism want to spend THEIR additional income on? I.e. the question is whether people are desperate enough for jobs yet to support fiscal stimulus that creates a job for them that they don't want to do. And perhaps the more pointed question is whether the economy will continue to push people until they are willing to accept such jobs and serve those who have managed to maintain their economic position through recession?

Are there any horizons for chassis-design or other technological innovations that will make it possible for passenger-vehicles to maintain their current size while losing weight but not strength? Are there certain plastics or designs that will make it possible to drastically reduce vehicle weight without losing volume and strength?

It's interesting to imagine how it would look from the perspective of a pilot doing this. Imagine you used a body without atmosphere, like the moon, so you could come very close to the ground without air-friction. You would basically accelerate toward a planned-point just above the horizon and swoop very close to the ground as you fly by and see the planet disappear behind you (assuming I understand this idea right). It would be a dramatic and exciting way to leave orbit.

So without lending and borrowing, capitalism collapses? If that happened, could it be replaced by an economy in which surpluses would be allotted to preferred projects? E.g. could farms maximize food production and then ship food in order of preference for other projects the farmers wished to see done, such as tractor-production for example? This way, basic necessities wouldn't disappear leaving people to suffer and possibly even die of want.

Nice examples of low-gatekeeping social interactions. But what about the post-coital feelings that go along with sex, like thinking about the person, feeling nervous about encountering them again, etc.? Are all those things just byproducts of the current psychological construction of sex? If sex was a casual everyday social interaction without taboos, would there be no sense of longing to encounter the person again and develop a relationship, or to avoid doing so because of the possibility that the other person would regard you in a more intimate way that you want?