lemur

I was watching a documentary on student loans and there was a middle-class girl saying that she knew she was taking on a lot of debt but that she wasn't worried about it because she had chosen a career field she loved and she believed everything would work out. I think this type of mentality affects people's behavior in numerous ways. The idea that you have a good future waiting for you if you can avoid messing it up can motivate people to be more careful, protect themselves against various risks, etc. When you feel like no matter what you do, something will destroy your life one way or another, I think people can more easily fall into an attitude of living for the moment regardless of the consequences.

Republicans claim that progressive cuts in spending will result in more jobs and a better economy. What kinds of jobs could be expected to emerge from tax-cuts, though? Is it that businesses and prosperous individuals are going to hire more people to do more things? What kind of things would you expect people to do with additional income if they had less taxes to pay? Also, is there a way for already successful businesses and workers to take on new work and money without having to hire others? As such, is it maybe possible that the gap between employed and unemployed income and spending could actually grow due to tax and spending cuts?

Why is it bad for something to be an abstraction? Why do people have to confound truth with concreteness? It can be true to say that it is 100m from one end of a field to the other without distance being a concrete entity in physical reality? Yet it would be confounding to say that "100m" is as concrete as saying there are "one million blades of grass" on the same field. 100m might be more useful for various purposes, but it is still abstract whereas "one million blades of grass" could be less abstract but not as useful.

What are the ethics of dealing with income deficiency? Does it harm people to lend them money and thus lure them into debt obligations so that they may avoid losing possessions and privileges during periods of reduced income? Does lending facilitate spending, which sustains income for many people thus promoting the idea that unemployment is a choice? What would happen if governments prohibited money-lending and/or any other forms of income to unemployed people? Would economies crash completely, with all jobs and businesses being lost or would certain businesses and workers be able to maintain income? What would everyone else do to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps?" Would it actually be possible to rescue yourself economically if there was no such thing as student loans or other personal finance possible? Are there any other means to dealing with income deficiency except either borrowing money or working for those who borrow and spend money?

I think the point is that length/distance involves comparing things. To say that the distance between you and your broken down car is "two counties" requires an abstract process of comparing the size of a county to other indexes of distance. You can say the car exists, the road exists, that they're made up of matter with mass, etc. and those are all direct descriptions of actual physical things. But things like time and distance are generalized abstractions that describe something conceptual that you can't directly describe by empirical observation. - From dictionary.reference.com #2 most directly explains why distance and time are abstractions.

All buckets are filled with a constant stream of photons since the molecules comprising the bucket are always emitting some amount of energy, right?

Marat, if you had social power that didn't require you to be "kind, courteous, intelligent, or sophisticated," would you want to give it up and risk having less or no social power? Also, as far as sexual scarcity being a problem, do you think that people would ever be equally interested in having sex with someone they don't find attractive as they are with doing it with someone they do find attractive? Monogamy could become a taboo and people would still exclude others because of attractiveness/interest, I think.

Having two eyes allows most people to triangulate distance automatically in terms of perceived depth, which makes it seem less abstract. In a sense, the ability to store information as memory provides a subjective way of triangulating durations, but the fact you can remember things of many different time-spans would be comparable to having variable distance between your eyes for interpreting depth. Plus, you can remember something long ago without going through all memories of events between that one and the present, which is different from seeing depth where you must look beyond everything between you and the distant object and integrate everything into the same visual-field image. edit: as for time being a thing with the possibility of anti-time etc., why is it so hard to reduce physics to interactions of the four basic forces and then look at everything that emerges from those interactions as patterns that don't include any other entities than the forces themselves and their various configurations?

Ok, so the idea is that some nations are "immigrant nations" and therefore would not have sufficient genetic markers to correlate with only citizens, which would also exclude all non-citizens? But there would be other national citizenries or ethnic groups for whom specific genetic markers could be identified and which would could be used to determine membership in an ethnic category? If so, would there be some benefit to keeping track of genetic ethnicity among people with multiple citizenship statuses? E.g. to have a global diaspora of Welsh ethnicity that isn't limited by British citizenship?

Is this a tribute to female reproduction for mother's day?

If they hadn't had free will to choose, God wouldn't have had to warn them about the tree. God didn't cause them to fall. He jumped all over them because they chose to be ashamed of their bodies and choose death over life. Their curses were natural consequences of the sin of confusing good and evil. Farming and childbirth (their curses) are not torture. They are the means to be fruitful and multiply. The curse was that they would hate these activities because they no longer saw them as gifts but as curses - i.e. because the tree of knowledge allowed them to twist and manipulate the ideas of good and evil, truth and lies. This is why the serpent confuses Eve by telling her the opposite of God's warning, that she would surely die if she took the fruit. Why can't anyone curse anyone else they want? Isn't anyone free to do this, regardless of relationship, ownership or otherwise? So you think that it was/is possible to create a creation (society) in which people can kill or steal without causing suffering? What goes around comes around. If you could kill someone without consequences, then someone else could kill you without consequences - but then how would there be no consequences for killing, since it would mean that everyone would have to live in fear of killing. Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you - when people don't do this, it makes life hell for others and themselves too. Killing as a response to the belief that people were beyond redemption. "Messing with" is a good description. I usually call it "manipulation." But people control their own actions, so it would be wrong to say that satan or anyone else ultimately controls people beyond their own power to resist. It can be very difficult to resist temptation or manipulation, but it is not impossible. This took me a while to understand too. People are free to do thinks regardless of the consequences. Jumping off a cliff will probably kill you, but you have the freedom to do it. Not having free will would mean that if you tried to jump off a cliff, you couldn't do it because you would faint before you jumped or something non-voluntary like that. I wish you would have pasted that so I didn't have to google it - or at least that the citation would appear as a link. No matter, I don't understand what it has to do with what you say about it. For some reason, I've been getting into discussions lately about whether satan and evil are part of God's creation and therefore servants of God still, albeit ones who abuse their free will by using it to oppose God, pervert creation/goodness, corrupt power, etc. etc. I agree though, that it would make a little more sense if the prayer said something like, "empower us to see and resist temptation." "Lead us not," however sort of makes reference to what satan/evil would do, however, in that it can't control people so instead the technique to manipulate them is to lead them into temptation to make bad choices. The prayer is saying, "please do all you can to spare us from temptation because resisting it is hard and often painful."

Could the wave-function behavior indicate it in some way? Sorry if this is a naive question. I understand nothing about the relationship between "wave functions" and empirical observations/measurements.

True, but I still wouldn't say that corruption and manipulation or domination and exploitation are the purpose of humans. It's just that humans have the power to do whatever they can to pursue whatever they want, which is actually because of how much freedom they have. I think you could say that as freedom grows, the potential for abusing it grows, and as more abuse takes place, the potential to learn from mistakes and suffering grows as a result and this leads to (at least some) people embracing the pursuit and maximization of goodness for themselves and others. But I agree that it is an uphill struggle - though perhaps a rewarding one where progress is always made to some extent in various ways.

I created this thread somewhat cynically. I personally don't think the idea of genetic commonality should be used for inclusion/exclusion generally. It is, however, one type of exclusionary culture applied in the mythologies circulated about ethnic similarity/difference. The interesting thing about using genetic markers to delimit exclusive populations of humans, however, would be that citizenship recognition/privileges could be given without regard to any other aspects of an individual, culturally or otherwise. That would allow people to go, learn, and become whatever they wanted to culturally, and even biologically in terms of having children, without worrying about loss of citizenship. People would probably end up genetically testing their fetuses to ensure adequate identifiers, however, which could prove ugly. On the other hand, if there were ways to petition for recognition of offspring and inclusion of new markers in the "national gene pool," it might not matter. I'm just wondering if it is actually possible to designate markers that would be commonly identifiable in all citizens but not in any non-citizens. You would think it would be if the criteria were completely arbitrary, since there is so much material to search through, but on the other hand it could be like trying to find a set of books that distinguishes one state university from another without overlap.

I knew someone would raise this issue. I thought of it in terms of a flashlight, but no matter. It's not relevant, though, because the issue isn't the level of significance of gravity or light, because that is subjective. Who can say that the light from a given star is sufficient to have a significant effect? It is a good point that luminosity can vary independently of gravity, or vice versa as well I suppose. But the main issue I'm raising here is whether it is possible for either light/energy or gravitation to extend beyond the other? If they diminish in intensity at the same rate, how can one extend beyond the other?

What would the consequences be if governments would perform research to establish genetic markers common to all existing citizens? Would it be possible for them to isolate markers or combinations that would exclude all non-citizens globally thus allowing passport-controls to be replaced with genetic fingerprinting? If this was done, could people genetically engineer those markers into themselves or their pregnancies rendering citizenship uncontrollable? Could computers be built that refuse to divulge the relevant sequences/markers thus preventing "gene counterfeiting?" Could individuals be born whose genes were not sufficiently recognizable to the computers? What would the result be if people with different national citizenships had children? Could the computers be programmed to variously include/exclude such children on the basis of some algorithmic logic or would it confound the system entirely?

I think that as dawn breaks, warming air rises and lowers barometric pressure slightly causing night-air to blow toward the rising sun. If the Earth turned slower, I would think this effect would be more pronounced since the dawning region would heat more in a closer vicinity to the still shaded region. I.e. fast rotation would mean more even heating and cooling so slow(er) rotation would mean more polarized heating and cooling, I think. A slower-turning rotisserie oven allows its contents to roast longer at any given moment than one set to turn fast, right? Heat builds up more and radiates away less on the sunny side of a planet, no? Thus longer night would mean colder morning temperatures and longer days would mean more daytime warming, I think.

There's an ironic factor that contradicts both yours and Marat's position: monogamy and the restrictions/boundaries it creates actually increases the allure of polyamory. In other words, monogamy creates a forbidden-fruit effect that renders "the grass always greener." If monogamy were replaced with polygamy, perhaps grass would still appear greener among other people's relationships or virgins, same-sex relationships, or whatever else was perceived as "off-limits." Maybe the only way to completely release people from sexual tension and titillation is to allow total sexual freedom by eliminating rape laws and taboos. In fact, if sexual advances were considered an imperative social nicety and resistance of such advances was deemed offensively aggressive, people might actually start to fantasize about resisting sex. Of course, this would be quite odd if hierarcy/status was also eliminated as a basis for sexual restriction since that would allow employees to rape managers/owners, children to rape adults, inmates prison guards, suspects police, defendants judges, homosexuals heterosexuals, etc. which could destabilize other patterns of social power and control.

As I understand it, both light and gravity dissipate at the same rate with distance from the source. So I think it would be correct to say that gravity and light fade at the same rate and disappear at the same point relative to distant objects. Does this mean that there is no possibility for either gravity or light to ever be present without the other? Or can light ever extend beyond gravitation in some other way? If not, does this mean that spacetime ends at the hubble horizon for any given point in the universe? Or is there some way that gravity, light, or some other force/phenomenon could extend beyond points where expansion and relative motion have reduced light to total isolation?

That's a good metaphor for entropy. In terms of organic chemistry though, think how complex the "sandcastles" are that are molecules formed by organic processes. You could say that Earth's biosphere is particularly suited to nurture such molecular growth, so maybe there is some other physical situation that nurtures the growth and sustainment of giant atoms?

Is there knowledge about what photons do when they encounter electrons not configured to accept their frequency? May they still be influenced in some way without being absorbed? If so, how?

If the periodic table can be extended to increasingly larger atomic numbers, I was wondering if such heavy atoms could survive longer under certain conditions. If they are subject to very little radiation/energy, could the resulting calm/cold allow them to remain intact longer? Are there absolute conditions that govern the possibility of such large atoms remaining intact anywhere or could there be huge atoms floating around that will only split if triggered in some way? edit: could such atoms form very strong bonds because of their large electron shells, and if so could being more strongly bonded together chemically stabilize them against decay?

Marat, you keep talking about the misery of life as being an end in itself. But isn't misery tied to the urge to progress and grow that is inherent in life? Then you would probably say that the fact that progress and growth never reaches completion that that only adds to the torture, but couldn't you also say that the impossibility of reaching completion of growth and progress provides the possibility of endless possibilities for further trajectories? So by having children, you are just providing access to the possibility of indefinite progress and innovation. Yes, you could argue that destruction and harm are also the result of progress and innovation, but they also result from stagnation and resistance to foreseen change. I think you must be frustrated with the impossibility of controlling negative outcomes in an absolute way, so maybe your argumentation against having children serves as a means of controlling for "unborn others" what for you and all living people escapes absolute control. Sorry if this sounds like I'm psychoanalyzing you - but it's just interesting that your logic in this thread continues to treat life itself as something to be withheld out of ethical concerns for those who could be ethically protected from it. I think this may express to a tee the underlying logic of Freud's death drive; i.e. the desire to repress and control life as opposed to desiring it (libido). It's not a pathological drive, but I think it is usually poorly expressed, if at all, since doing so can be taboo.

Maybe, but do you see how weak it is to resort to ad hominem generalizations instead of explaining why the argument is flawed on the basis of logical reasoning? I think you could just as easily say that fossil fuel has been abused to usurp the decentralized vibrance that was free market capitalism. Fossil fuels were used to drive railroads, ships, and other means of transforming local productivity into mere raw-production facilities for distant sovereigns. Pre-industrial capitalism allowed greater independence of supply and demand since productivity and the supply-chains that facilitated it didn't require such elaborate control and organization. As industrialism evolved, systematic control, organization, and centralization grew to the point of replacing free market capitalism with corporatism and statist (semi) centralism that sacrificed a great deal of freedom and independence in the service of supporting large industrialists and their markets (labor and consumer). Presumably as energy-usage subsides to sustainable levels, so will the counter-productive amounts of busy-work that serve primarily as justification for distributing the means of consumption for mass-produced goods.

Life basically leads and only follows to the extent that it replicates itself. It only gets out of the way to preserve itself long enough to begin leading again. I was reading about photosynthesis recently, specifically chlorophyl, and how it converts CO2 and H2O into some form of simple sugar (sorry, can't remember which now - you can google it). Anyway, the point is that it involves this giant enzyme molecule (whose name I also forget), which made me wonder how/why such an enzyme evolved and/or if there were more primitive enzymes that also used energy from sunlight or otherwise to construct energy-storing molecules. This seems to be the basis for life - although somehow organisms also had to evolve that were able to consume the sugars and convert them into growth and movement. It would be interesting to figure out how spontaneous chemical reactions developed into processes that systematically store energy and consume stored energy. Do any non-living processes do this?