lemur
Senior Members-
Posts
2838 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Everything posted by lemur
-
How much of the lower ocean level is due to precipitation freezing before it runs back into the ocean and how much is due to plate tectonics?
-
Maybe the main interest in validating grouping-logics is the feeling of cultural superiority that comes with being able to explain individuals in terms of their group-identities. It doesn't sound as superior to say that someone's height helps them play basketball as it does to attribute it to the person's group-identity. It's like a way of giving yourself the status of being able to understand and explain all people by knowing the group-composition of all human-kind. I.e. it gives people a sense of oversight and superiority as overseers of others. Possible?
-
The atmosphere filters x-rays and microwaves, which penetrate some materials that other forms of light don't. I don't know if there are materials that are totally visually impenetrable from outer space, though. If you say what are you trying to hide from satellite view, maybe someone tell you if I can think of a way to detect it:) Just kidding, I know you probably aren't trying to hide anything but if you gave examples, people could give more specific opinions, I think.
-
I think the real problem with racial or other kinds of groupism is the precarious positions it puts people in vis-a-vis their ascribed group-status and presence "within cultural difference." So, for example, recently someone said something about me not sounding prudish and that not being plausible because I live in America, which according to him is "a prudish country." So now, instead of just dealing with whether or not I was being prudish or whether prudishness is culturally promoted, there comes a whole complex series of identity-distinctions where people take sides and claim belonging/normalcy vis-a-vis various group statuses/relations. It becomes a complex game of positions/structuring that makes it very difficult to simply express yourself as an individual. This is why you frequently hear feminists boil when someone compliments them and then qualified it, "for a woman." It's probably not so much that that person is defending her solidarity with other women as much as it is just annoying complex to interpret all the implications of such a qualifying condition. Does it mean that you're good for a woman but that you're not that good by male standards, and they're trying not to insult you by patronizing you? Does it mean that this person is sexist and they see you as "just a woman" regardless of what value you might have as an individual? For these kinds of reasons, I think it would be preferable to just drop thinking in terms of humans as groupings generally and just look at individual characteristics and treat individual group-identification as a cognitive behavior and nothing more. That's a very good point. I think this is exactly what the cultural critics of raciology have tried so hard to expose is that the scientific approaches taken to race were not value-free at all. They were strongly rooted in political and economic interests of people who wanted to promote themselves by promoting their racial identity over others. So, morally, you could say scientists had/have a duty to separate their personal feelings of the linkage between race, culture, collectivism, innate superiority/inferiority, etc. but what do you do when they fail to control for those biases and then perform rigorous scientific research that, while applying valid scientific methods in many cases, still ends up propagating the personal assumptions, beliefs, worldview, etc. of the people designing and doing the research?
-
Maybe they should be called "ionecules" or perhaps "molions." edit: my preference is for "ionecules" just based on the sound of the word.
-
Why would I privilege some other interpretation over the one that I think is more correct just because it has a high public profile or broad following? Would you argue the same thing if leading popular scientists promoted interpretations of scientific knowledge that were incorrect? Sorry for the snippy tone. I was just curious if you were really that personally interested in scripture or if you had some kind of publication you had read that cited all those quotes. It was an impressive compilation of pertinent citations - not exactly the most friendly to sexual diversity but certainly relevant to it. Why should theological discussion be any different than any other discussion? The only thing I take offense to is when you say I should subordinate my interpretive argumentation to popular opinion. I respect your reading and argumentation of the bible and I wouldn't tell you that you have to drop it because some church is more influential than you are in your humble "Jewishness." (edit: please don't be insulted by me saying "humble Jewishness." It was just in response to your comment - I can see how it might sound like some kind of sarcastic jab, but it's not meant to be). If you want to talk about people who use religion to promote homophobia, that's your prerogative. I just entered this thread to express my opinion that homophobia is something that is brought into theology from secular homophobia. You have shown evidence that such homophobia can be directly supported by biblical quotes. My response was that the new testament's approach to sexuality and marriage explicitly questions the "hard heartedness" of old-testament men. Now if you want to discuss how many modern day people are on the homophobia bandwagon, that's a different discussion to me. I know what opinions people have and what they do with them. I think the difference between you and I is that when lots of them organize, you view that as reason to elevate their opinion over other people's. I'm an individualist. When multiple individuals harmonize their opinions and express them in terms of collective solidarity, all I want to know is how many of them are actually thinking for themselves independently and how many are just conforming to what they hear from others because there's some form of social validation in it for them. Why is it surprising when people use religion to give weight to their secular opinions? People aren't stupid. They know that it carries more weight if they attribute their opinion to religious truth than if they use other kinds of reasoning. If people truly believe in good faith that their opinion on homosexuality is rooted in scripture and good will toward people and life in the creation, then I would be willing to listen to their reasoning. I just don't think that most people are capable of relinquishing their psychological need to make themselves feel superior by putting other people down. When I see documentaries on conversion therapy, I watch with interest because I'm curious if there is actually good-will involved with converting people to heterosexuality. When there is, it doesn't matter to me whether I personally agree with the idea of converting people's sexuality or not - I still find it interesting that someone has the good will to help others in a way that, at least for them, is truly a form of help. However, most of the homophobia I see expressed under religious pretense usually appears to be homophobia dressed up with artificial religious legitimacy. It might be prejudice on my part, but I often feel like I can tell the difference between when people are pursuing a cause or expressing something in true good faith or if they're just saying whatever they think they need to say to manipulate the discourse in their favor. Still, I have to admit that I cannot see their souls directly, only their words and expressions.
-
Why isn't sea level just determined by how much or little land erodes into the oceans compared to how much is forced above sea level my mountain/land-generating plate movements?
-
As much as I don't feel like having this discussion again, I'll go ahead and put in two-cents. Could it be that the problem with race as a concept is that it presumes some sort of natural social-cohesion among individuals on the basis of similar physical appearance or other cultural identification? I mean, if you would just look at people's medical-biological nuances separately from their skin-color or other racializing cues, would it really be necessary to conceptualize such indications as being culturally meaningful? E.g. let's say you would find out that balding correlates statistically with diabetes. Then you might want to make it a special point to teach balding people about precautions they can take. But then to go a step further and create an ideology that bald people are a separate and distinct sub-species of humans and identify them as a group separate from hair-loss-less people is taking it too far, don't you think? edit: then the real underlying problem doesn't have so much to do with race specifically as with the human culture of collectivizing individuals into factions and demonizing Others for the sake of creating solidarity among people who see their personal attributes as worthy of inclusion in an elite/exclusive club. If there was a more absolute and therefore effective way to accomplish this social function, I don't think racial classification would have developed into the elaborate ideology that it did.
-
I suppose it would depend on what you see as the ultimate goals of economic structuring and how you want people to live in the long run. The economic effects of distributing money through jobs in government, corporations, contracts, grants, etc. can be analyzed and evaluated. I usually find it a bit short-sighted to act as if most jobs are really a question of qualifications, since they are often relatively meaningless functionary positions. Ideally, everyone would have access to the means to economically self-sustain and do so but since this doesn't occur in many cases, you're stuck with the dilemma of how to intervene and how not to and why.
-
The other approach is to start with historiographical assumptions and critically analyze them to subject them to rigor. E.g. so when people talk about "the growth of the nation-state," "rise of wages," "enhancement of royal authority," "war," etc., you can critically interrogate what kind of microphysics at the individual level would constitute such general forms. You do this by asking questions like, "in what sense(s) was the nation-state growing and what does that mean in an extra-institutional sense, i.e. was nation-state construction and growth really something new or just a continuation of older patterns of cultural activities?" or "whose wages were rising and how, and how did the plague influence the cause(s)" or "what is royal authority exactly and for whom was it being enhanced and how?" or "when is interhuman conflict defined as war and when not and what are the material causes and consequences of various forms of conflict regardless of whether they are ascribed 'war' as a label or some other container-concept?" By asking these kinds of questions, you begin to dissect sweeping historical summary-concepts to the level of actual material interactions. Good points, and btw ones that have been made by critical historians. The problem with history is that the scale of its scope includes so many micro-events that it seeks ways to summarize these to render them into a narrative with balance and flow. Historiography is an art of seamlessly integrating radically different types of characters from institutions, to macro-social bodies, to individuals, and as you put it, uteruses. So to go from saying in one sentence that the German economy was failing to recover from WWI and in the next that Clara Hitler's uterus was healthy and her family supportive (or insistent) of her having children works as a coherent narrative because we're used to reading and thinking in such terms, but really this is shifting from radically different levels like saying that a warm front and a cold front are meeting and then a single free electron jumped from one molecule to another setting of a chain reaction that resulted in a lightning bolt that zapped some birds in a tree providing easy-meat for a disabled cat who, because of the meat, managed to survive and kill a mouse that carried a disease that would have killed a woman as a child who grew up to enthrall Napoleon only to turn down his advances sparking the inferiority complex that drove him to manipulate others into elevating him to Emperor status, which made it possible for a number of other lower-level bureaucrats to organize their activities in a way that institutionalized a certain approach to regulatory activities in European culture. History writing is ultimately an art because it comes down to selecting which events to include in the story, how to describe those events and ascribe interconnectedness among them, and what assumptions to make about scaling and (the mechanics of) human psychology/sociology/culture.
-
Nice list of citations. Did you come up with them all on your own? The only thing I can say is that they're all old testament quotes and, while there's nothing wrong with seeking enlightenment in the old testament, it reminds me of when Jesus says that divorce was allowed in the old testament because men were hard-hearted but that a person who truly understands love and forgiveness would not divorce. He also makes it a point to prescribe marriage as a pragmatic approach to lust, i.e. better to marry than to burn with lust, so why would he say that people should indeed burn with homosexual lust? It seems logical to me that Jesus' point was to temper lust with social/marital responsibility and committed love. I sincerely doubt that he would then turn to homosexuality and say, "burn in hell." I don't know how often I have to say that just because someone claims to be Christian or Jewish that their beliefs/actions speak for other people who claim the same faith. Ultimately, each individual chooses to interpret and apply their faith in their own way. One explanation for this is that north-western EU cultures tend to be strongly post-Christian secular, so much of public policy seems to based on Christian morals combined with redemptive pedagogical approaches to undesirable behaviors (sins). So, it seems like a lot of behavior is allowed to go on as it is seen as "youthful mischief" that people will learn from and change on their own. I think what has changed in recent years is that some people have claimed full legitimacy in behaviors that were once considered deviant, while others are moving toward stronger intolerance because in their opinion, cultural traditionalism is losing ground and needs to be protective. It is all very passive aggressive, imo, but I don't think you should underestimate European homophobia any more than xenophobia. It's just that it gets expressed more covertly out of fear for being labelled paternalistic, since this is associated with the strong right-wingism of nazism. If you look carefully, though, you will see that many people are more concerned with being labelled nazi-like than with actually doing away with the cultural preferences behind nazism, so such people tend to get angry about high profile extreme rightism, but if you examined their feelings closely, the reason they don't like it is because it's like looking in a mirror where they don't like what they see, imo. No, the thing that explains that is the same thing that explains the relationship between terrorism and religion. When someone is seeking power/control over others, they piece together a power-apparatus that includes whatever ideology they think can legitimate their desired results. So if someone dislikes homosexuality because they're homophobic, and they're clever and educated in religion, they can appropriate that ideology for their political purposes and garner lots of public support by others who share their feelings. Just because people claim to do the things they do in the name of Jesus or the bible doesn't automatically make them saints. The rule is actually not to kill, period. Regardless of my personal feelings, I was just explaining what makes sense to me with regards to the reasoning expressed by Jesus with regard to the relationship between sexual desire and marriage as prevention of greater sin. I think this same logic can be extended to every form of sexual sin and probably to other sins as well. The general premise of Jesus' teachings is to continue forgiving people for sin so that they'll become convinced of how great the love of God is and desire to redeem themselves and others out of longing to "spread the good news of salvation." True, there is unwaivering recognition and condemnation of sin for what it is, but that doesn't preclude forgiveness - and supposedly there is no limit to how often you can be forgiven. The reason people seem to dislike this approach is that they want their actions to be declared totally pure and non-sinful in the first place, but I think the logic of sin is what it is and it would be lying to call something that's a sin not a sin. Nevertheless, I think you have to understand the logic of sin as something more than an arbitrary list of punishable acts before you can come to terms with why Jesus is trying to redeem people and change their behavior (for their own good). If you go through the bible in search of contradiction in order to undermine its overall legitimacy, you will succeed. If you go through it in search of wisdom/insight/guidance, you will also find that. "Seek and you shall find," is the line that comes to mind. I think people make too much out of the claim that the scriptures are authored by God. They are in the sense that people wrote them under inspiration that they truly experienced as direct revelation from God (I assume) but from a materialist standpoint, it makes sense to acknowledge that their "divine revelation" was a spiritual state they were in when receiving their revelations and no one, including they themselves, had any kind of physical evidence/proof that some kind of external being was communicating with them (this is why I say you have to be satisfied with God's existence as an (spiritual) artifact of faith, or you're always going to demand proof that you're not going to get. I know. That's why I think Jesus would have prescribed monogamy and true love and support in the form of marriage. The only thing I think he would have also said is that when homosexuals use someone of the opposite sex as a donor/surrogate to make babies, that person would also be treated as a spouse with the same level of love and responsibility for their well-being. In other words, I think the logic of marriage attributed by Jesus was that it prevents people from washing their hands of each other after they get whatever it is they want from them. And, actually, I think Islam prescribes a slightly higher level of social responsibility in sexuality by requiring men to marry their mistresses and limit the amount of sexual partners they have in a lifetime by marrying them all and not marrying more than 4 times. I think this would also be a reasonable rule to apply to homosexual partners and surrogates/donors. Perhaps each homosexual couple should be married to a heterosexual couple in a family-arrangement that covers all bases. I've heard that homophobia is as strong or stronger among muslims as anyone else, but I have also read that men can become publicly recognized as women in Oman so I don't know how much diversity among muslims the media ignores in favor of demonization and stereotyping.
-
My general impression of this whole post is that it attempts to respond to the idea that "X" is omnipotent enough (how illogical is it to use the phrase "omnipotent enough?") to truly transcend ALL submission to any logic, terms, criteria for evaluation/proof, etc. except the ones 'X' chooses to create and/or apply? Generally, I would think the logic of omnipotence itself is that the power exists to transcend any possible logic, including that of Kant's supremacy of "external existence" or that of omnipotence itself. Theoretically X's omnipotence would give X the power to choose to submit to any logic it wants BUT it would also have the power to do so or not for any reason which would require some kind of ethics of choosing to submit to authority that go beyond the necessitation (by logic or otherwise) of such submission. If there was some logic or social means of requiring X to submit to criteria for evaluation, such as proof, then X would not be omnipotent, correct? So either you have to define omnipotence itself as impossible, or if you accept the reality of subjectivity as the possibility to conceive of possibilities regardless of whether they are empirically observable, then the logic of omnipotence gives people the subjective power to imagine transcendence of necessary submission to every possible logic and authority, including that of E Kant. It might be simpler to just express this by saying that people have the power/ability to go insane by the standards of some authority/logic and yet to create their own authority/logic that confirms their sanity. Or you could just say that omnipotence is the logic that there exists no authority or logic that cannot be transcended.
-
What if you measure cloud cover in terms of its addition to global luminosity as observed from orbiting satellites? Couldn't you then subtract this amount of light from the total amount of light calculated to reach sea-level?
-
more nails in the coffin of hope for intuitive quantum physics?
-
Intuitively, the car example made sense to me but then I wondered if this isn't because of wind and tire resistance increasing at higher speeds. Then I thought about the equation F=MA and it shouldn't matter whether the acceleration is from 0-10 or 10-20, if it's the same amount of mass, the same force is required, but I know that force isn't the same thing as work, power, or energy so now I'm confused about why energy increases proportional to speed - unless you are talking about relativity equations where energy (and mass?) increase with speed increases close to the speed of light, in which case nevermind because I was thinking you meant that this same logic applied to a significant degree at speeds @10mph.
-
It's not just the contingencies, as you frame them, that detracts from the objectivity of history. It is the very fact of how the framing determines the whole logic of the narrative and therefore the way in which the events and parameters are understood. It would be as if physics was subject to answering questions biased by insistent assumptions about the Earth being flat or the sun going around the Earth. One thing that makes physics more objective is that it has the ability to reframe its objects in different ways to see if that changes the results and compare apparently diverse forms of motion for regularities. History doesn't have this ability because the basic concepts, like power, are skewed to draw attention to some actors and obscure those of others. I mention power because it's the first example I think of and I think Foucault came the closest to making a more scientific approach to power possible by calling for a "microphysics" of power relations. He is famous for criticizing political science for limiting its focus to sovereigns/heads-of-state "long after the king had been beheaded" in government. Yet, it's so analytically tedious to do "microphysical" analyses of social power, that I have not seen many historians incorporate this approach into their work. Instead, they have the tradition of painting events in relatively broad brushstrokes by focussing on high-profile public individuals and large-scale long-term events like wars, cultural epochs/trends, etc. When they focus in on the "microphysics" of individual relations, it usually has to be in the form of historical fiction because there's simply not that much data available as to what went on minute by minute in, say, the interactions between Hitler and other individuals and how those interactions became linked with so many individual thoughts and actions globally. Ultimately, I think that if history would emerge as an objective science with the ability to compare events in terms of general social/individual mechanics and express these according to general law-like behaviors, it would be sociology or psychology instead of history. On the other hand, sociology and psychology (and maybe other sciences) have become so heavy under the weight of institutionalized traditions, that they don't offer much promise of a general physics-like approach to history either - so what else is left?
-
In what situation would locality then be violated? But why should this stop you from formulating ideas about how it got out of the box? Ok, what is then causal about looking for it? How do you know that Feynman wasn't playing with words to convey covert meanings? Regardless, the point is what value there is in quantum physics being incomprehensible and why Feynman would regard himself as "safely" being able to say so. So do you mean to tell me that people who understand physics at this level are just as eager to spark an intuitive revolution as they are to take conservative steps forward that don't "rock the boat?" In every field, there is a "culture of conformity" so what makes you think quantum physics would be any different?
-
Locality of what? What does it mean for force-fields to be distanced from each other? I guess I need a specific example to process this point. Well, if I learned what was irrelevant in responses, I would be able to focus on avoiding irrelevance in future posts, wouldn't I? That seems to me to be part of the problem. If there is a culture of conformity that promises anyone who deviates from anti-intuitivism critical scrutiny and comparison with Einstein, of course people are going to avoid stepping into a spotlight that intense.
-
How so? If I have a pot of boiling water, I might not be able to measure the momentum of any of the molecules directly, but I can model the phase change in a way that explains how momentum results in liberation from a liquid-state and I could thus deduce predictions that would falsify my model if they failed. How do you KNOW for certain it has no definite momentum? How can you control for the possibility that it does have definite momentum but you just can't measure it? Usually my questions are meant to illustrate a certain line of thinking in hopes of stimulating further discussion. It's not my intent to fragment the thread, just to stimulate people's best contribution to the potentially emergent discussion. I understand why people like equations, diagrams, and other non-linguistic representations. They are a breath of fresh air in contrast to all those dusty pages of prosaic writing that seem to get to the point as gradually as possible. But, as someone who has gone from despising classical texts to enjoying at least some immensely, I can tell you that there is value in doing physics in descriptive language. I was particularly surprised when I read a book by Max Planck that it was not that different from reading other political/philosophical texts from before WWII. I thought it would be like reading a textbook or a lot of technical jargon but it was clear and concise to someone with even just a cursory understanding of the subject matter from online discussions and web pages (i.e. me). I suppose it is me reading the word "safely" out of context and the fact that he worked on the Manhattan project. Also, people blame Einstein for nuclear weaponry, as if a conceptual connection between energy and mass is sufficient to develop a nuclear weapon. And they also dislike Einstein because he began with intuition and only subsequently moved to doing rigorous equation-work. Saying that one can "safely assume that no one understand quantum physics" otherwise makes no sense to me. Why would you value a paradigm that impedes understanding? I understand the argument that QP produces tangible results, but it is still a shortcoming that it fails to stimulate at least one avenue of potential scientific progress by engaging human imaginations in theorizing.
-
History is by definition an accounting of events. Thus, even when scientific-type analysis of the mechanics of the stories are included in the narrative, they are still part of its historiography. If you want to do science with history, I would recommend extracting specific questions and formulating those as social-scientific questions. E.g. you example about Hitler's mother having a miscarriage could be honed into a number of specific research questions such as, 1) would/could the effects popularly attributed to Hitler's existence as an individual have been expressed through some other individual(s) and if so, why and how? 2) What post-birth factors affected aspects of Hitler's personality, actions, and the conditions of his popularity and authority? 3) is it methodologically sound to conduct social research about variability within one parameter while treating other parameters as deterministic, or should you then revise your model to include variability and agency for all individuals at all levels, and is there a way to do this analytically without losing any sense of historical continuity? There are probably other examples, but these are three I could come up with off hand.
-
Even if you can't directly measure momentum, couldn't you recognize its consequences in observable phenomena? This I don't get, like the dead/alive cat in the box. It sounded like a philosophical issue to me until someone posted that it could be due to the EM effects of the body of the observer. I don't see what's so hard about modeling a system with all possible parameters, including observer effects. Ok, I do see what's hard about it, but I don't see why it should impede progress to the point of giving up on logical (intuitive) modeling. Otherwise, what would physics become except for trial and error in fitting mathematical models to experimental data? I'm at the point where I'm questioning how anything can occur at a distance if all force-fields extend indefinitely with decreasing intensity - but that is because I view a field as a type of object/entity. Does the sun attract the Earth via contact between the two gravitational fields or does the sun's gravitation act directly on the matter that constitutes the Earth? If so, what does "matter" ultimately refer to, the nuclei of atoms and to a less extent because of their small mass, the electrons? This is why I posted this thread. What basis do humans have to make sense of anything except multiple layers of abstraction based on foundations in their everyday experiences? Exactly, so how are people supposed to understand the new building blocks except in comparison/contrast/analogy with familiar concepts in one form or another (or perhaps by hybridizing known forms). I dislike that quote because it always seems to remind me of the link between atomic physics and atomic bombs, which is a political issue, imo, not one of physics.
-
That may be, but if you explain how you came to the idea you did, and it's clever, you will be respected for that even if it turns out to be wrong, I think. Maybe not by the paparazzi/media, but they're just out to humiliate people for the show of it anyway. Someone once said that if you had a cure for AIDS, you would not have to wait on peer review to be published. Generally, however, I think people should skip the peer review process and just publish online. Sure, that would make it more difficult to sell journal subscriptions that provide funding to their host departments and employees, but the popularization of home video playback equipment also made it more difficult to sell cinema seats, but they still do.
-
I just googled Bell's theorem and it was not very clear to me. The introduction of the wiki page says something about either having to violate the principle of locality or counterfactual definiteness. Why is the principle of locality a stumbling block for intuitive modeling? Doesn't gravitational relations between heavenly objects in classical mechanics require planets and stars to influence each other at a distance? And although you may not be able to define things without being able to empirically measure them, you can model them and test the implications of the model against knowable data as well as deduce further implications of the model and test those or evaluate them with respect to known parameters, no? Anyway, this is getting off track. What it seems you're saying is that while it may be possible to develop mathematical intuition, the math doesn't describe anything visualizable. Nevertheless, I think you can develop an intuitive sense of quantification translated through subsequent contexts. E.g. EM emissions are quantized, which makes it logical that electrons are quantized, which may translate into some other aspects of physical behavior being explained by whatever it is the prevents energy from radiating in non-discreet amounts. That would still be intuitive logic, even if it wasn't the same intuitive logic as knowing why a ball decelerates as it goes up and accelerates on the way down.
-
Define "define."
-
Ok, but then you can attempt to critically reform your intuitive understanding with respect to the given parameters. For example, is there some underlying logic in the Pauli exclusion principle or is it just totally arbitrary rules? Also, I don't know why the electron would have to spin faster than C, but it does make intuitive sense that a rotating electron would generate a magnetic fields the same way a moving charge in a conductor does. In that case, you have an intuitive basis for exploring further questions like what the relationship might be between different forces at the sub-atomic level. Without any intuitive sense of anything, all you can really do is calculate outcomes according to different parameters, no? I have been wondering about quantum tunneling. Is that just what electrons do within the probability wave of their location or is it a completely different topic? If it at least describes actual behavior, that would be better, imo, than the statistical procedures that turn methodological questions like whether the data support or reject the hypothesis into a number. That's similar to me as when an election candidate wins with 51% and they call it a majority as if practically the exact same number of votes were cast for the opponent. I like math that directly represents/describes something empirical instead of abstracting something from empirical data and describing that, like a distribution of data points on various axes.