lemur

Doesn't that contradict what you said before? So you might not believe what you're saying but you could still be saying it out of choice, and you would expect people to respect your words as being meant sincerely, in good faith?

Since (intuitive) classical mechanics no longer seems to apply at the sub-atomic level, what would you say the smallest scale is at which phenomena can be described and analyzed in terms of classical mechanics?

But what happens when you encounter an individual or situations where you don't have sufficient information about any group-status or stereotype content? In that case, you would regard them according to known stereotypes of a classification that you could identify them with, right? So if you didn't have any "other group" identities and stereotypes, you would only have self-knowledge to go by, wouldn't you? So, for example, you would just try to speak with them in whatever language(s) you can speak and you would assume they feel similarly and do things similarly to the way you would. Only once you develop other-knowledge can you attribute difference to categorical otherness, right?

That's interesting. Is there some way that stress could influence metabolism in a way that would result in less clean metabolism? I could only relate this to some other combusting system whose ratios of fuel, oxygen, temperature, exhaust flow, burn-chamber dynamics, etc. would be drastically altered resulting in unburned fuel and other impurities that would unduly tax any cleaning/filtering systems that keep it clean.

So you would say that a person who loses control in a fit of emotion and injures someone else is more developed than someone who can rationalize their emotion and act in a reasonable manner despite their feelings? So you're saying humans develop from having a sense of distinction between truth and lies to having the ability to re-prioritize memories to render anything they want as truth as they please?

I don't know how universal it may be or not, but there is another way of thinking that involves treating individuals as unique expressions of various general characteristics. So, for example, you might look at a pine for its unique expression of "treeness" or view individuals of various species in terms of any number of categories they engender. For example, a dog may express "carnivoreness" when it hunts, "petness" when it plays with humans, "mammalness" when it nurses puppies, etc. Thus, each individual can be viewed as having similar traits as various others depending on what trait is chosen and how that trait is framed. In fact, I believe that any specimen can be attributed to multiple, non-hierarchical classifications. What is really interesting, imo, is when you relativize mutual exclusionary classification since it has been so propagated and normalized to be nearly completely taken for granted. There's a song in one of the Veggie Tales movies that goes, "if it hasn't got a tail it's not a monkey, it's an ape," which is followed by lines like, "well, a kite's got a tail, is that a monkey?" Anyway, the point is that for some reason it is immensely satisfying for the human mind to realize all-encompassing classificatory schemes that contain all possible elements with no categorical overlaps; i.e. mutual exclusion, but that doesn't mean it's the only possible way to think or that it's necessarily the best or most useful way to think for any purpose.

I've never heard that but I would guess that plate tectonic motion is driven by interaction between the plate's weight (distribution) and the shifting of magma underneath (these are just guesses - I haven't read much on plate tectonics). But since mountains are supposedly formed with plates collide, the force of the collisions would be logically limited by gravity, I think.

What would you say about the belief that animals are completely ruled by emotions and humans use reason and free will to transcend being completely driven by emotion? Interesting. So what are people doing when they're lying, scamming, and otherwise being insincere? Are you saying they must believe in what they're saying at some level?

I think the whole our/their government language leads to the false conclusion that intergovernmental dissent regarding democracy and freedom would be tolerated. What you hear today, that the U.S. shouldn't impose its culture/values/system on "other sovereign people's" was the voice of dissent during the Bush war on terror. Bush made it very clear (unpopularly so) that there were many different ways to govern freedom and democracy but ultimately the conflict between democracy and terrorism was as important as the conflict between democracy and Nazism (he said this in a speech to congress). This is why he also said that other governments were either "with or against" those who love and support democracy. In essence, he viewed all governments as cooperative in maintaining a democratic world order. I.e., he did not want to tolerate anti-democratic dissent although he was willing to accept wide variety within global democracy and free economics. I still find this reasonable and I question the argument for cultural relativism where freedom and democracy is challenged. After all, how can you support anyone's sovereign right to oppress others? I think this comparison falsely attributes social-economic activities to the religions viewed as dominant in the respect territories. I think Bush would have said that if you dislike the fact that there is no synagogue somewhere, you should work democratically to achieve it and where you encounter barriers to democracy, you would find an ally with him (that's what I THINK he would say, anyway). I think the idea of having a war on terror was to separate terror from its attribution to certain religions or nationalities/ethnicities by those who seek to demonize people in that way and stimulate fear and aggression toward people on those bases. I think, however, that this ideological aspect of the war on terror couldn't be totally successful because too many sources continued to propagate the logic of fearing and (promoting) attack of 'the Other.' Still, you could say that there's more talk and less direct aggression (maybe), which could indicate some ground gained for democracy. Still, it's always a tense balance when people are using democracy to spread information that stimulates fear and aggression (and of course when people indeed react with that fear and aggression).

But aren't you projecting assumptions based on your human-eye perspective onto what you imagine to be a god's eye perspective in terms you are familiar with?

For some people, that is the best way to understand concepts written about by Kant. Do you think it is any different when someone gets a concept by reading a second or third hand version of it then when they read the original author? I understood the logic of the double-slit experiment before watching Feynman's 1960s lecture this morning, yet I have the feeling that you would have said that I couldn't really get it until I understood Feynman himself. Really I don't insist on anything. If I ask questions in qualitative terms that people find impossible to discuss without reference to math, they can either post their math if they want or decide not to bother because it might be wasted on me (though someone else might read their post and get it - and it's also not impossible that I will). What I don't get is the attitude that people decide once they're bona fide physicists that they have total insight over every possible descriptive possibility for physical phenomena. Surely there are as many ways to describe physicalities are there are physicalities themselves. Mathematics expresses the things it expresses perfectly. How could mathematics do otherwise? It is designed to be perfect in its own right, no? Thank you for acknowledging that there is goodness in the attempt to understand physicalities, regardless of method chosen.

Let's assume I don't. Does that mean that I have to abandon the pursuit of intuitive/qualitative knowledge until I master reading math? If someone told you you couldn't philosophize until you learned to read Kant, would you stop and dedicate your life to Kant? Or would you maybe try to read what others have written about Kant's work in language that you could more easily grasp? Then, once you understood various aspects of Kant's philosophy in a way that moved your own philosophy along a bit, would you accept it if professional philosophers told you that you can't really philosophize until you read Kant in the original text and write in the same style? Personally, I think people should explore knowledge, scientific or otherwise, to the best of their ability according to their talents, and express what they find to others for critical review and exchange. They might come up with some valid thoughts in their process and be a benefit to others around them. I'm getting a little frustrated with this topic because the more I defend intuitive/qualitative approaches, the more responses I get defending the institutionalized anti-intuitive approaches. Why can't people just see how qualitative aspects of science are an important part of it instead of always arguing for how essential math is? Yes, the math makes it more accurate, but even when you don't get the math it's still useful to know that, e.g., phase transitions consume energy without resulting in temperature increase. That can be intuitively/qualitatively explained in terms of energy-conservation and thus the fact that energy has to do SOMETHING, it can't just disappear.

The following map depicts Earth as having a topography of variable gravity: http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-12911806 1) Why does gravity not correspond with altitude? It is weaker in the Himalayas and the oceans than many other places on land. 2) Could Earth or another planet be non-spherical and still appear to be because of gravity? E.g. if Earth was potato-shaped, wouldn't water still disperse across the surface in a way that the surface would appear flat to a sea-bound observer? At what altitude, then, would the odd-shape begin to become apparent or would it at all? edit: Could an odd-shaped mass have a gravitational field with the same shape such that a satellite "free-falling" through its orbital geodesics would always maintain more or less equal distance from the surface, or rather from the same level of gravitation?

But what basis do you have to say this except your current knowledge of mother nature based on how physicists have described experiments they have conducted? Because depth of insight can stimulate innovative insights. How would Planck have been able to compare electrons in a conductor with gas purely based on comparisons of quantitative models of current with quantitative models of sound waves? How would heat have been revealed to be rooted in molecular motion instead of a substance in and of itself? How would heat and pressure and energy have been related in a general way? How can any really meaningful scientific discovery be conceived of or expressed without qualitative mechanism of some kind? Knowledge of truth always brings with it a relative "god-like cognitive state" so that's not an issue. The goal of science has always been to describe, explain, and conceptualize, as much as to predict, no? Well, different languages and even different understandings among different individuals using the same language can result in nuances that raise critical conflicts of meaning that can result in enlightenment from resolving the conflict/confusion. As for what good it would do to have a intuitive descriptive understanding of QM, it would allow you to model various empirical situations at a more complex level by sacrificing a certain amount of accuracy. It would allow you to understand in a deep concrete way the connection between observed phenomena and what's going on at the (sub)atomic level. It would allow you to explore numerous potential further implications, extensions, and developments of known concepts and issues. Try using a descriptive equation as a 1-to-1 correspondence with empirically observable phenomena. I can rarely even begin to see the connection between the parts of an equation and the thing purported to be described or explained. Something is always being squared or square-rooted to ensure non-negative results or something like that. They are designed to calculate, not explain or describe (really). Granted, it is handy and neat when you can plot a line and have the area under the line represent something related, etc. It's just not a direct dissection of empirical observabilities. Don't get me wrong, I am far from giving up on using equations to enhance my knowledge of something I'm interested in. I can just tell you that I am fairly often disappointed in the enlightenment-effects I get from studying them.

But you're still missing mine, that the marriage as a marriage never existed prior to the divorce either. The only thing that ever existed was the actual material relations between the individuals deemed "spouses" by the marital institution. This is the same for spacetime where the material relations are things like motion and force among entities and "spacetime" is just a summary concept for them, i.e. an institutionalization of a general pattern observed among material relations. If matter and energy don't cause the relations that take place among them, then what would? Space can't precede or exist externally to something that it isn't independent of, can it? That would contradict the whole fact that it is dependent on them. Nothing? Could it be that there is absolutely nothing between particles of matter and energy and so they have to interact directly? What I wonder is, epistemologically, why is there such a strong need/desire that things should interact with each other beyond defined boundaries? Are there empirical reasons or is it just a convenience for certain methods of thinking to regard force-fields as bounded? Just because it's painful or even impossible to describe a photon as extending from but not transcending the electron that emitted it, does that make it an impossibility? What exists? The ability for two electrons to exchange photons between them? The ability for physical events to occur non-simultaneously? The ability for force-strengths to change relative to each other? Of course the awkwardness of all this tempts me to just invoke space(time) but isn't the whole issue whether that's an epistemological convention or a physical fixture alongside (i.e. transcendent of) matter and energy? Electrostatic repulsion among electrons is the only reason I can think of that mass is distinguished from gravitational field-force. If you are in orbit, isn't the big blue, white, and green ball you see just the electron-portion of the Earth? You are still within its gravitational field, correct, just as it is in yours (albeit to a far weaker extent)? So you could say that mass attract mass, but why couldn't you say that gravitational field-force simply tends toward homogenization/condensation? After all, if any two gravitational fields intersect, then they would have to have some amount of "merging force" that causes them to integrate in a certain way with the corresponding effect on attached electrostatic and nuclear fields, wouldn't they? Isn't it possible to think of gravitational fields as big blobs that endlessly stretch out from each other until they eventually separate, at which point nothing more can go from one to the other, not even light? If empirical description is literal description, how can it fail when taken too literally? Doesn't this just refer to comparing different material interactions between objects in different ways? Isn't Earth already engaged in a "high-speed fly by" of Mars and wouldn't a laser-shot move the same as visible light between the same two points? What would the "cosmic overview" be based on except empirical observations and points of reference extrapolated from them and logically applied using taken-for-granted assumptions?

I'm not sure if this is a contribution or a diversion from the thread topic, but I think that a "broken heart" is actually a fight-or-flight adrenaline-impetus response that is especially problematic in that the only thing to fight or flee from is loss, which can only be fought or fled from by regaining the thing lost. So when that thing is either a living thing that died or a person who no longer wants you to "regain" them, it short-circuits the feedback-response mechanism, I think. This could be why people flee into drugs or other addictions, or seek rebound relationships or other surrogate emotional objects. I.e. This gives them a sense that they are combatting the thing that is threatening to harm/destroy them. I know it sounds odd to call loss something "threatening to harm/destroy" someone but if you think about it, that is the way your psyche interprets it because whatever it is you had before you lost it (e.g. relationship) was something you experienced as supportive of your various life activities. This would be as true for losing a job or means of income as for losing a friend, life partner, child as they become more independent, or your car keys (though I don't know how often that one causes heart-break - maybe a different story if the car was stolen). Heart-break can be very intense but I think it's a perfect form of torture because I don't think you can die from it except as a result of your own self-destructive reaction, depending on how far you take it.

I believe you're right, in the same sense that probably most superstitions or snake-oil remedies had some value. In fact, I think stereotyping and collective egoism/animosity promotes solidarity and peace among people that helps to reduce inter-individual conflict that probably often was a lot more destructive in the past. I think Simmel was the first to notice this effect of demonizing a common enemy to bring people together, though it seems like everyone discovers it anew in their time with the epiphany that maybe collectivism, ethnic warfare, and stereotype-based prejudice and hatred are actually good. Of course it can have good effects, the way a forest fire can cause certain seeds to germinate or the way a natural disaster can bring people together - but does that mean the destructive effects of the fire or other disaster are good?

People saying things like that used to make me feel shamefully afraid I might be a "traitor." It took me a long time to realize that people who try to shame other people into lockstepping in any way are actually the ones in conflict with republican democracy. The problem is that those of us who "love freedom and democracy" don't get to use the same manipulative shaming and other anti-democratic ideologies like this to try to push other people into "falling in line" with some form of authoritarianism. Therefore I won't call you a traitor, because you're not - you're just expressing your opinion by right of your own free speech - nevertheless it is also my right to freely say that if anything is traitorous and subversive to democracy, it is motivating people to discriminate against people on the basis of their religion by spreading the belief that freedom of religion is dangerous when it is respected for Islam. I always cite this quote from Bush's speech, but I'll go ahead and post it: http://middleeast.about.com/od/usmideastpolicy/a/bush-war-on-terror-speech_2.htm

That's a central argument against group-based generalizing, but I find that in practice people don't relinquish such generalizing because of that fact. They just keep reforming their group-generalities, hoping to some that finally work. Thus, I find it helps a lot to compare racial-identity to other non-racialized forms of classification based on body characteristics or culture. Baldness or maybe whether the earlobes are attached or unattached are a good example, because it would be possible to do all sorts of correlation studies with those features, since they are probably mostly genetically determined. Still, no one would think of making it a habit to racialize individuals in terms of whether they are bald and/or have attached earlobes. Where culture is concerned, you can find lots of examples of cultural differences and commonalities that don't obey group-classification. Europeans and Asians both eat rice, for example. Some Germans have a culture of exercise (or exercise-avoidance) while some French have the same; so it makes just as much sense to say that some people with culture of exercise also hold racial, national, and other group-identities as do people with a culture of anti-exercise. In other words, ethnic/racial/national identity need not be given primacy just because it so often is in everyday life due to political-economic concerns. It would be especially scientifically valuable to neutralize the assumption of primacy/dominance in social science research, because otherwise such research tends to function to reproduce, and thus propagate, extra-scientific culture.

I'm completely familiar with the pragmatic validation of quantum physics. I'm not saying that it doesn't work or that people who do it are all engaged in some conspiracy to make sure another Einstein never surfaces. If anything, I'm just saying that the nature of anti-intuitive physics is such that it discourages create intuitive reasoning, partly because of its success, and that it would be nice if people wouldn't fear intuitive scientific thought as being a cause of nuclear weapons or something like that. What it really comes down to, imo, is a sense that number-crunching mathematics is more like other forms of bureaucratic work than the kind of intuitive theorizing associated with Einstein, so intuition tends to get demonized for this reason as well. Yes, I know you're going to tell me that is tangential to the facts about QP Feynman discusses, but I just have to point out that there are underlying "intuitive" reasons people favor one approach to science or another. People who are good at math LIKE science that highlights their math skills and downplay their uncertainty where creative intuitive reasoning is concerned. On the other hand, people who are good at intuitive reasoning like science that involves coming up with clever ways to explain and study things. There's no reason that physics should be a dead end where only one type of thought is able to go further.

So you're making a distinction between "war," which you mention, and "terrorism" which you don't? Why do you start picking bones instead of just saying what you meant and what you don't mean and what your reasoning is? What is this all about? You're telling me not to "try converting an entire nation to one way of thinking" as if either "nations" think as wholes or that I'm trying to convert anyone to anything. If you are so fixated on some way of thinking that you think "the nation" wouldn't care to "change" from, why don't you just propagate that until you've converted me and whoever else to accept your way of thinking? In the mean time, don't be so defensive and just discuss what you think, please. Don't you realize that accusing some person(s) or ideology of attempting to dominate others in under free democracy is basically a call to undermine the accused, by force if necessary? The problem is that Islam is not doing anything to dominate the government, as far as I know. In fact, I don't even think the government is doing anything to dominate the government, so what is all this concern with domination? Are you just really interested in finding some excuse to launch a crusade against some threat to engender military spending or something like that?

I watched the lecture, thanks for posting. It is ironic that he expresses the philosophical conclusion at the end that it is universally incorrect to assume that any knowable preconditions in nature determine experimental outcomes; since that itself would then be a known precondition, and thus undermine its own validity. To my credit, he does talk a lot about bullets and ultimately the possibility of WWIII in the lecture. He also worked on the Manhattan project and I read a book where he describes various aspects of information-security (secret keeping) of the project. I wouldn't, therefore, completely discount the possibility that part of his task as public physicist would be to promote nuclear security. Nevertheless, you're going to continue to tell me that without proof I shouldn't even mention the suggestion; plus I really don't like innuendo games. I just have to leave it at the fact that I find it hard to believe that following the enormous nuclear scare that existed subsequently to WWII and atomic weaponry, that no effort would have been made to systematically obfuscate knowledge that could potentially lead to nuclear developments. I don't see anything wrong with saying this because it is pretty obvious considering that some people have the notion that Einstein's work was foundational for inventing atomic weapons. Since I personally believe that humans have the power to resist destroying each other, I think the only way for them to exercise that power is to have it; plus I just don't like the idea of any knowledge being obfuscated because I find it anti-scientific. That said, there's no objective basis for knowing if Feynman's work (and Heisenberg's) helps clarify or obfuscate the possibility of attempting to theorize physics beyond quantum mechanics. Maybe he's right and there's no possible analogy in anything familiar, even though he goes on to use "analogy and contrast" to describe things in terms of familiar comparisons.

There's no way of proving implicit meanings. That's one of the reason people use them to communicate; i.e. it shift responsibility for the meaning to the receiver. That's why you hear loads of public hearings and statements where people claim never to have said something that someone accused them of saying. People know how to be careful with words yet still convey the meanings they want to. Generally that's true but in light of the context you posted for the Feynman quote, I can see how it refers to avoiding misinterpretation. Maybe I misinterpret it just because I can't stand the defeatism of giving up linguistic description and reasoning altogether to avoid the risk of misinterpretation. That would be as bad, imo, as giving up progress in science and technology altogether because some people use them to make deadly weapons and destructive and oppressive technologies of control. Oh wait, did I just tie it back into the nuclear weaponry issue?

Rigney, the issue is that you should separate Islam from terrorism. Terrorism can be committed in the name of any religion but that doesn't make the religion the cause of the terrorism. You can't say that people who don't commit terrorism are exceptions to the nature of their religion. That would be like saying that people who work for the military and love peace are exceptions to the nature of the military as an institution of war. Please stop propagating the idea that religion is a cause for terrorism unless you are willing to have people attribute terrorism to whatever religion you subscribe to, including atheism, secular nationalism, science, or whatever ideological club you identify with.

?!?! what did I say that suggested that plate tectonics are affected by surface temp?