lemur

Thanks. It does actually make me feel a little dumb and confused because my physics learning has not been academic the way other people's has been. Of course I want to know when I've misinterpreted some concept by taking it out of context, but I think of "wavelength" and "frequency" as very empirically tangible terms. The length of a wave is another name for its frequency, if it is traveling at a fixed speed. "Frequency" literally means how frequent (how often) a wave passes and if more waves pass in the same period, their length has to necessarily be shorter. The redshifting/blueshifting/dilation/contraction stuff throws off intuition and complicates the math (I assume because I don't follow the exact math that closely); but the logic seems to be pretty clear that if you speed up relative to a star and the light-waves always reach you at C, then the fact that you're intercepting the waves more frequently means that their frequency has increased. Likewise, since time is measured the same vis-a-vis light in all situations, that also means that a second's worth of what you measure as x-rays emitted from the star are going to equal a longer time-period of, say, infrared rays from the perspective of an observer in orbit around the star. So while you are measuring your movement toward the star in the quantity of x-ray radiation received per minute at your time rate, the observer at the star would be measuring your movement as quantity of infrared waves emitted between your departure and arrival. You would both count the same number of waves emitted, only the wavelength of the waves and amount of time measured by each of you would be different. I suppose you could calculate the rate of gap-closing between any two objects by measuring the distance in number of light-waves received at two different moments and then giving the speed as the difference per amount of time you measured on your clock between the two wave-counts. Now I'm getting confused, though, because I'm wondering when you would start and stop counting waves. If you start at the moment the image of the departing ship arrives, when do you stop? All you have is a constant stream of light that appears to you as a continuous image of the approaching ship. I think this should be another thread, though, because it is far from why nature forms spheres in certain cases.

What I'm saying, concretely, is that if you are on land, distance travelled is fairly easy to measure in relation to the fixed ground and fixed objects you pass, etc. My bike speedometer measures trip-distance by counting the number of full rotations of the tire and multiplying this by the known circumference of the outer tread. If I was sailing transoceanic, how would I measure distance? I would have no way of knowing when the water is standing still and when it is moving as a current. Unless I have some fixed objects to use to triangulate and compare their observed distances to some empirically-measured distance, how would I know how far I had travelled (or not) at any given moment? Now take motion in outer space: what basis is there for measuring distance-travelled? Sure, you can estimate based on assumptions about the relationship between the scale/brightness of Earth; or maybe you could use relative positions of objects to gage relative changes in position, but beyond interpreting abstract observations, there's no real way to directly observe your motion in your surroundings the way you can with trees, etc. on land or your relationship to a fixed map of the heavens while at sea, is there?

If women didn't exist, would (artificially gestated) children get nurtured and raised? sorry, I know people complain that I challenge the premises of thread, etc. but I just wanted to throw in a similar question to point out that gender-associated culture doesn't necessarily mean that the culture is a response to a need caused by the associated gendered individuals. Put another way, I wouldn't assume that war is caused by men as much as it is caused by social/cultural/economic conflicts that emerge from peaceful everyday life patterns. Would women attempt to deal with these conflicts differently than men? Maybe. Would they perpetually peacefully accept it whenever they felt abused by other people and never become aggressive/violent in response? I doubt it, but if they did it would still result in power abuses and conflicts, imo, that would constitute a form of warfare, however little that warfare may resemble the stereotypical image of war as you would imagine it.

I'm not sure how you would even know how much "true" distance was between two points if you had no fixed reference points. The only thing I'm pretty sure about is that if you stopped exerting force in any direction in a vacuum, you would continue along some geodesic path determined by your momentum and the gravity that influences your trajectory. You could plan a "shortcut" based on spacetime-topographical projections you had created from observing patterns of gravity-wells, but I don't know how you could guarantee that your shortcut would work until you actually reached your predicted target. Actually, relationships between people are not evident in their bodies (unless their are physical traces of contact but that still doesn't tell you what kind of relationship they have). It is evident in their actions, thoughts, feelings, etc. Spacetime is not a body in the material sense. It is patterns of relations among energetic matter. I guess I should qualify this as my opinion since others may disagree. To me, the mass of the sun and the various bodies of matter in the solar system interact gravitationally and these interactions are the basis for smaller objects/particles/light to move in the ways that it is possible for them to move in. I don't think it makes sense to compare the gravitational relations of bodies to some fictional 'empty space' that would supposedly exist in their place if they were absent. E.g. if the sun was suddenly absent, then there wouldn't be any straight-line path from Earth to Mars that wasn't related to their motion vis-a-vis one another and gravitation relative to whatever it was traveling between them, right? So mass-topography directly causes spacetime topography via direct gravitational force relations between all matter vis-a-vis all other matter for any affected point? So you want to avoid the whole "frame" concept as unifying the dis-gregate interactions among constituent particles and their forces?

It is a popular idea that residential energy users can install solar panels and feed their unused energy back into the grid. But doesn't the voltage have to be at a certain level to effectively traverse the grid? Does the transformer that intermediates power between the lines and residences allow weak voltage charge to flow backward? I wouldn't think the current would be strong enough to add anything to the grid, but if it does, how does that work?

You're arguing for worldly authority over divine revelation. This was part of the big conflict that emerged between Jesus and the Pharisees, who argued that he had to submit to their authority and he replied "before Abraham was, I am." If you succeed in getting people to submit to definitions of words that fail in the context of their usage, you will have succeeded in obfuscating much of the mythological meanings. Why would you want to do that? I don't claim to have the absolute definition of words. I'm just giving you an interpretation that WORKS if you want to interpret the mythologies meaningfully. What is the point of insisting on using narrow definitions when doing so obfuscates their meaning in use? What is confusing is confounding "matters of flesh" with "matters of spirit." I.e. it's confusing to subject metaphysical language to materialist interpretations, etc. It also makes it more confusing that use this universalizing tone that obfuscates the fact that you're propagating a fairly narrow materialist view as if it was naturally universal. You keep trying to distinguish between faith-based belief and materialist discrimination between different levels of belief. To you there's a difference between believing in Greek gods as actual entities or "poetic adornment." For some people, part of the poetic adornment of mythological beliefs is to afford them the same level of faith as material knowledge. These people are in control of their ability to attribute real status to things. They can experience mythology at the same level of realism as they can experience faith in the existence of materiality. They will say things like, "God is as real as any mountain." because they desire their faith to be as strong as the physical materiality of a mountain is. I'm getting tired of discussing this topic because all you seem to want to do is find some philosophical basis to necessitate rejecting various approaches to faith/religion, including mine. I don't care if you reject it for yourself, but I don't understand why you are seeking to deprive people of subjective/spiritual power? What kind of power/authority do you wish to elevate to dominance and why?

If human flesh was sacred, then it would be considered unethical to perform surgery at all, wouldn't it? I'm getting sort of tired of this topic as the politics of human sacrifice are sickening. I guess I'll have to side with Bush's famous reasoning regarding stem cells that he would never sign a bill that advocated promoting life by the destruction of other life. He said if congress would send him a bill where life was promoted without any life-destruction involved, he would support it. That makes sense to me. Although sacrifice sometimes occurs voluntarily, it's never an ethical happy ending.

But then whose authority will you use to choose which of the 5 doctors you obey? If the authority is your own, what legitimates your authority? What authority is powerful and trustworthy enough to entrust your life to? Whatever you call it, it must be an authority as high as you value your own life, which I assume is highly. Ok, what authority validates your avoidance of these things? Sure, you have reasons to believe they're silly or bad ideas - but what causes you not to question and rebel against them and attempt to prove them wrong? I would call that faith, whatever evidence, reason, or logic you base that faith on. You don't have to use the word, "God" if you don't like the sound of it but it's the same thing, imo. I'm tired of explaining it. It's just a different discourse of authority than any other. If it works for you to make rodent sacrifices to imaginary unicorns, maybe you should stick with that and avoid the bible. I can only recommend the bible or even non-biblical explorations of the meanings and practices of divinity because I've had positive experiences with it. Why would that mean your experience would be the same? I'm just trying to explain it because you seem so fascinated with it. Now I'm starting to think the only reason you engage me on it is to prove that your rejection is objectively valid. How can you prove something subjective is valid, whether its God or the rejection thereof? Sure, anything is valid within the reasoning of the validator. I don't think either of us are convincing each other of anything, though, so why are we trying? Is religion and divinity really that important? It is to me because it does something for me, but why should it be for you if it is completely impotent in your experience? As far as you're concerned, you might as well be arguing about the validity of believing in Donald Duck so why bother?

Right, but what if disbelieving would have a negative spiritual effect on you and your ability to realize the benefits of the mythology? I.e. what if you could achieve a very effective placebo effect by believing in the psychosomatic medicinal value of the placebo. In that case, you would need to find a way for you to legitimately believe in the existence of the story material. In my case, it worked to recognize that subjective things exist within the subjectivity of consciousness, and that this existence is sufficient for having the intended effects. To use a somewhat unrelated example, the news that a probe has been sent to Mercury would have the same inspiring effect on people even if it was a conspiratorial fiction and no probe was actually sent. So if all you were seeking was the inspirational (subjective) effect of the probe, you could just create a fictional probe in your imagination that had the same effect as a real probe would on you. These are just techniques people have invented to make believing that much more effective. Compare it to Star Trek conventions or amusement parks. Why do you have to go to Disney World to experience walking plastic versions of the animated characters that you know are fictional? It just gives some people a greater sense of the magic. Personally, I'm not a fan of dogmatism, ritualism, and iconography but I understand how they work and why people do them. You're assuming that consciousness has to at all times be subjugated to materialist distinctions between physical/material existence and non-existence. You need to realize that things can exist subjectively insofar as your subjectivity exists. When you dream while you're asleep, that dream represents something material that took place in your nervous system - just like the image you view on your monitor represents something going on in your computer. Just because the letters I'm seeing while I type are not photographs of ink letters printed on a piece of paper doesn't make the words any less real, does it? I don't deny being an atheist. It's just that I've learned how to believe in God by believing in God's subjective existence as an artifact of faith. And I have found that believing in God in this way is truer to much of what is written in the bible than insisting on God as an external physical being. "Things of the flesh are flesh and things of the spirit are spirit." There's also the beginning of John that says, "In the beginning there was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God." In other words, God is in the writing and IS the writing itself, the knowledge, the spirit of faith and creative power. I used to hate telling my child about Santa Claus because I saw it as a lie used to trick and manipulate children. Then one day my friend called her child in front of me and asked, "what is Santa Claus?" The child responded, "Santa Claus is the spirit of giving." That's not a lie, is it? Doesn't Santa Claus exist as the spirit of giving in people? Semantics. It doesn't matter how you define it. You believe what you believe and disbelieve what you disbelieve. I was an atheist because I disbelieved the material existence of an external God being. I still don't believe there there is any material being in the universe that is God separate from the rest of "the creation." I think God exists inside people and in their material experiences of things that happen to them. I don't think you have to be able to dissect something and find the presence of God in molecules to recognize material things as having "spirit." A tree that falls across a river when you desperately need a bridge to cross can be an angel even if it fell completely by coincidence at that moment. "Spirit" refers to the meaning of things within people's lives as they experience them; not something objective about their material make-up. I don't know that fallacy, but I know that it is possible to believe in God(s) and not the bible or the reverse. There are endless different approaches to these things. I was just explaining how "God's existence" can refer to existence as a facet of subjectivity and how the works to allow the experience of faith in God and spirituality as real, existing things. This leads to the question of why atheists often attempt to undermine people's ability to exercise faith and get the spiritual effects they are looking for? Why do atheists want to take away the placebo effect? I find it a perversion of the bible to ground cultural relativism in it, but that's because I consider cultural relativism promoting group authority over individuals' authority over their own culture, which I think the bible promotes. This is true of all culture and its artifacts, I think.

That works where there are no conflicts among authorities. What if you have two doctors who disagree and you have no logical basis for trusting one over the other? You haven't tried it either though. From personal experience, though, I can tell you that it's not like I consult "God" in a way that would test accuracy. It's more like I use the philosophy to reason choices based on the logic(s) I've discerned from theological study. So, for example, I might resist applying to some job because I don't see the relevance or value of it and then "divine revelation" will suddenly cause a light-bulb to go on and "show me the light" of why the job would be a good thing for me to do. I still might not get the job, but the point is that I suddenly had faith in the goodness of seeking it instead of just applying because someone else told me it was available and I should apply. If you are a true atheist (as I was/am prior to understanding God as a true artifact of subjective faith), you should recognize that anyone consulting God is really just consulting themselves in an elaborate way. So what's the point of getting so elaborate instead of just asking yourself directly? The answer lies in the fact that humans are subjectively complex and they regard themselves in a multitude of ways. For example, I used to work in a situation where people would go around saying, "if you do that, the boss will get mad tomorrow." The boss wasn't there but they had internalized their experience of the boss's perspective, which they could consult as being different than their own personal perspective. So this is what "God" is like. When people consult God, they are actually consulting an imaginary authority inside themselves but the authority they imagine is the absolute highest, most decent, caring, authority with the best interest of "all the children of the creation" in mind. So it is an ideal of absolute benevolence. How many people do you know regard themselves as absolutely benevolent? God may be an internalized ideal, but it is an ideal that people don't usually evoke by consulting themselves in terms of their ego or their identity as they believe other people see them. God is a subjective ideal. Infallibility is faith-inspiring but in practice, you can do things inspired by God that turn out in retrospect to have been fallible. God is more like the hope that you can transcend the feeling of being fallible, even though you are. God is the ideal of infallibility. In the bible, God says he made a mistake after flooding the Earth out of anger for human sin. The point is that God acts in good faith and love and evolves. If he/we cynically threw up his/our hands at the impossibility of hope for improvement, that would constitute a fall from grace - i.e. loss of faith. I'm just trying to explain to you what I think people are doing at a sub-conscious level when they consciously believe in God as an external entity. In they're minds they are thinking of God as external because if they thought about him/her/it as internal/subjective, that would cause them to question God's existence because they can't reconcile spirituality with materialism. In the bible, Jesus actually says that it's a mistake to confuse matters of the spirit with matters of the flesh. That's the part where someone asks him if being born again means returning to your mother's womb physically. Don't assume that all religious people have theology right. They are doing their best, most of the time, but they are struggling with things they don't understand, as everyone is in every disciplined study. The main thing I'm trying to get across to you is that you can't really evaluate the effect of believing in God has on you until you really try it in practice. When I was an atheist, I experienced the idea of God so differently than I do after learning to interpret the ideas in a constructive way. The main thing it does is to "lift your spirits" in things that you do. E.g. I might used to just see "enlightenment" as a political ideology whereas now i can really feel a deep sense that enlightenment and truth are really good and I'm doing good in the world by interacting with others in a way that welcomes enlightenment without fear, suspicion, cynicism, etc. Do you see how that relates to experiencing more faith and less doubt? This doesn't mean I don't question and criticize things, because I think it's good to do that - but I don't doubt that questioning and critique will lead to better knowledge, which I probably would have done before because I would doubt anything in every possible way, second-guess all reasoning etc. You're probably not as much of a mess as I used to be, so you might not benefit as much from faith as I have been able to - but considering how much conflict you seem to have with it, you might overcome a lot of intellectual tension just by understanding religion at the level of a believer instead of endless beating your head against the brick wall of people whose strength lies in their conviction and resolve not to be deterred by reason or anything else. Once you understand how this logic of conviction in faith works, you will wonder why atheists bother arguing with theists because they're just not searching for a reason to doubt God's existence. I actually began studying the belief because I wanted to find out what religious people were thinking and how you could reason with them - and now that I understand it (I think), I realize that arguing with them is like trying to tell someone their self-confidence is unfounded when that confidence is nothing more than something they evoke in themselves to be successful in business. People don't care if God exists because their faith helps them maintain confidence in every aspect of their lives. You should experiment with it and once you get to the point where you feel you understand it as deeply as any believer, try to find a logical way out. I don't think you will be able to, because you will have bought into the spiritual strength of it all. I have, to an extent, but I can separate my first-hand knowledge of religious experience from other approaches to knowledge, like physics for example.

I meant because light travels at maximum speed and everything else moves relative to that speed, the number of waves (peak, troughs, pick a reference point on the wave) remains fixed regardless of the motion or observed distance/time either observer. I.e. waves can shift to longer and shorter wavelengths but the number of waves is fixed because the amount of energy is fixed. I mean that frequency refers to #waves/second. For a speedy observer, the frequency increases though the speed of the waves is measured to be C. A really fast observer could measure lots of very high frequency x-rays because those waves are blueshifted radiowaves, while an observer at the source would view them as radiowaves because the source is not moving relative to the waves. Either way, the number of waves traversed during the journey of one to the other is the same, although time and distance may be measured differently for each. The moving traveller would measure the waves as x-rays and thus measure a much shorter journey that the observer viewing the waves as radio-waves, also moving at C relative to that vantage point. Am I getting this wrong?

Why? Why shouldn't light take multiple paths between source and observer and re-integrate to form a coherent image at the point of the observer? Isn't this the way electrons travel, i.e. as lighting bolts? edit: when electricity travels through a consistent conductor, the transmission appears integrated and stable, but if the same current has to flow across a distance of air or other insulating medium, it can fragment and take erratic and multiple paths. I know that. I was assuming a situation where it would somehow be possible to trace the same beam(s) of light identifiable by both source and receiver. E.g. if a constant radio signal was present throughout the entire journey, the number of waves could be counted as the same regardless of how length-shifted they would be by any observer.

In other words, there could be many different paths between any two objects with very different distances and shapes. How can we know that spacetime remains relatively homogenous far away from pronounced gravity-wells? Maybe spacetime only appears integrated in the vicinity of mass because mass functions to organize spacetime into a relatively logical grid. Maybe spacetime consistency starts breaking down and fragmenting in strange ways in between distant masses. Maybe what I should have said is that there isn't a constant stream of oxygen molecules between distant objects the way there is light-waves. Right, but to know the shift, you would have to know the frequency of the original waves, right? Regardless of what the original wavelength was, though, the number of peaks remains constant so that is a neutral unit for amount of (spacetime) separation between two points, no?

The point is on what authority would you define it as an educated guess or not? Do you have a citation for defining what constitutes an "educated guess" and what doesn't? Is it or is it not "because you say so?" If not, there has to be some "higher authority" you are referencing to claim you are right, no? God is not an external entity to cite. S/he/it is a process of faith-based reasoning. It is a method of pursuing reasoning in good faith where objective doubt is present. An expert's body may physically exist, but the person remains human and therefore fallible. ALL human authority can be doubted and question, including your own. Again, ALL humans are human and therefore fallible. Don't think of God as a being or entity. That's just personification/metaphor. Just think of God as the ideal of using every possible means at your disposal to reach the best possible decision. Consider it the total love of goodness that drives people to work as hard as they can for the best possible outcome, regardless of all hinderance. A simpler way to look at it is in terms of the word, "God" being so close to "good." I.e. you could call "God" just the creation of the idea of goodness and the "good faith" pursuit that goodness can be identified and pursued regardless of any amount of confusion. I.e. it's the idea that no matter how lost someone is "in darkness," there is always a "light in the tunnel" to be found.

Well, the other side of that is to say that everything we would assume on the basis of appearance is valid even though we know that spacetime curvature is universal and contradicts what we assume based on what we see. There's no basis for saying that "if we are missing something, it's likely relatively small," because that implies that we know what we don't know, which we can't. Re-formulate our assumptions about celestial spatial relations in terms of space as a network of geodesic paths instead of assuming it to be a homogenous framework that more or less resembles as straight-line 3D grid? I mean that we assume that spacetime reaches maximum "flatness" where it's not curved. Why not assume that it keeps expanding as distance from matter increases? It wasn't so much a question as an issue; i.e. that distance between observer and observed is relative to the motion of light so distance is best expressed in terms of light waves traversed, regardless of how contracted or expanded those waves are for either observer. That's because oxygen molecules don't change size according to the speed of the observer. Light frequency isn't measured in wavelength?

It occurred to me after posting this thread that since electrons have mass, the mass-energy equivalency of the mass of 2000 electrons would be the same as a proton. Then, if their electrostatic repulsion was equivalent to the energy of their mass, they would have double the energy of the proton. So the question becomes how would you find an equivalent amount of energy to the energy of 1 proton in electrons at what volume? My idea is that it's possible to compare energy of force-repulsion with energy of mass and that this would provide some clue about the relationship between different forces. Crackpottery?

Yes, that's the engaging critical way of raising the issue. Maybe the more accurate question, though, should be, "what is it that causes a trajectory to be interpreted as straight?" Visually, we see object moving undiverted from their inertial path as traveling in straight lines relative to curved lines that trace a longer distance between two points and generally require force-impulses to change their velocity in the course of their journey. The problem arises, it seems, when the planet is observed as being round since that implies that its surface is curved instead of flat. Then, a trajectory due east can seem like a straight line but turn out to be a longer route than a great circle trajectory that changes directions several times. Do any of these paths involve less inertial disruption than the others? I don't think so, because there are so many forces involved other than the momentum of the vehicle. In space, however, a vehicle/projectile can proceed by its own momentum between points without inertial disruption, which implies true straight-line motion (in Newtonian logic), but we can interpret it as curved relative to lines we deem as straight based on what? If you were drifting through space in a vehicle without propulsion, in what sense would you perceive your path as curved or straight? You would just see you surroundings changing until something collided with you causing you to experience inertial disruption. It's a bad example, because divorce is an institution that relates to another institution, marriage, but the actual material relations that occur outside of the institutions do not exist or disappear because of the institutions. Spacetime, on the other hand, seems to be part of the actual material relations between matter and energy. In fact, I think it could be most simply described as our perception of those relations, the same way you would perceive your marriage as your daily interactions with your spouse even though you could theoretically be interacting in the same way as unmarried people. So you would treat the frame of planet Earth as gravitational relations between the objects that make up the planet and then treat the objects as having separate frame-relations with satellites, for example? But why would any one frame be any truer than any other? Isn't that subjective and objectively all physical relations between entities in contact with each other are possible reference frames for other interactions measured from them?

So if I offered someone $100k to have their genitals surgically removed, that wouldn't be exploitative if they valued the money more than their use of their genitals? What if I offered them $1million? What about $10 million? At what point would it become exploitative to seduce them into self-sacrifice? What if it wasn't just their genitals but their life? What if I offered to pay someone's child a billion dollars if they would commit suicide? Would that be exploitative? What about manipulating someone's wishes to contradict their self-interest voluntarily? But there are rules and conditions for when and how you can kill a pig or a cow. Even livestock meant for slaughter have rights against cruelty and unwarranted exploitation. You can slaughter a cow, but I bet you'd get in trouble if you drove it to the point of collapse every day and someone reported you. Then people should be donating kidneys for free, just for the health benefits, right? I think it's the idea that they are being intentionally kept alive to be used deleteriously. It's also the fact that it is/was a person with a family (at some point). Imagine knowing that your mother gave birth several times but all your "siblings" were just organ-donor bodies sold to pay for your college fund.

That's a great Marxist analysis of religion. The first part about resisting defecating really made me lol! All the things you mention at the end, though, like dietary restrictions, fasting, rituals, bathing, and resisting sex (sexual fasting) are all geared toward heightening spiritual experience. When people are feeling hungry, or sexually frustrated, etc. it can be hard for them to concentrate and experience clarity of consciousness. They keep getting distracted by their bodily drives/urges. You could say, if you're hungry just eat or if you're sexually frustrated just have sex or masturbate, which is what some theologians have suggested. But fasting and celibacy are popular because there is a point where you can somewhat overcome the immediacy of hunger and/or sexual desire, which gives a sense of peace and clarity because you're not caught up and distracted with your next meal or sexual release. My favorite quote about this in the bible is where Jesus meets a woman at a well and tells her that when she drinks the water from the well she'll get thirsty again but when she drinks his (spiritual) water, she'll be satisfied. So, it's just this idea of being liberated from desire, for at least a while. Supposedly there are people who fast for many years by meditating on a mountain or in a cave but most people fast for short periods for either health, spiritual clarity, or both and then go back to eating. The same is probably true about sexual fasting/resistance, though people don't talk about this with me as openly as they do about food-fasting. I do think celibacy is relative, though. I.e. when people say that anything other than total celibacy is not celibacy (e.g. masturbation), I think they're ignoring the fact that someone who reduces the frequency of masturbation and by doing so also reduces the desire to do so as frequently still experiences positive effects in the time when sexual desire is quieted. So the point isn't achieving objective standards of behavior but rather subjective effects of inner-calm, detachment, etc.

Thanks for posting this reference. I googled it and read the Amazon preview pages. There is a nice quote that I'd like to copy and paste but I can't. I don't want to retype it word for word so I can just paraphrase it as basically comparing space to a sentence where if you would take all the words and phrases and subject-predicate-object relationships out of it, you wouldn't be left with an empty sentence - you'd be left with nothing. That's a pretty good (and original) analogy for space, I think.

I think you estimate that based on assumptions about the sender. I agree it is a problem I wonder about, along with you you can estimate distance without relying on shifted light as well. Mine too. That's why I post things tentatively and welcome correction and/or elaboration.

That's not a mutually exclusive answer-choice because it leaves the question of whose authority on what basis is used to analyze, judge, make a decision, and execute that decision. Some people falter when they recognize the absolute authority as their own, because they seek to ground their decisions in some source external to themselves. The idea of God serves the purpose of exercising ultimate authority without deferring to anyone else or one's own ego. The idea of "God" is really just people exercising their own authority, but it lets them do so without making it about their ego. Ok. That just supports my point that people use "God" to transcend doubt. You also wish to transcend doubt, it seems, but you don't have faith in "divine revelation through Holy Spirit" because you would attribute whatever came to you as emanating from your human self, which you view as inherently flawed (because subjective?) and thus an objectively random coin-toss would offer more hope to you than a decision made in good faith that your subjectivity was capable of leading you in the right direction. Yes, that is exactly what I'm trying to point out by explaining God as a subjective process. "God" only exists/works when you believe in good faith, and when you don't, it disappears because there's nothing objective or material about the existence of divinity. People who expect "God" to exist objectively beyond their subjectivity/spirit lose faith when they see that the material things (like miracles) attributed to God can be explained away. There's no objective proof for God. If there was, faith wouldn't be required. God is just a method of using subjective/spiritual power to aid in life decisions and actions. It works for you when you invest in it with faith and it doesn't when you dismiss it out of doubt. I think so. You're just trying to prove that many people don't want to utilize the subjective-technology of "God" so they choose other paths. Do you see mine that "God" is just one possible subjective-technology among others, not a (dis)provable objective being that exists independently of spirit? The whole point of faith is that you can't objectively measure it as being (un)equal to anything else, except by experience. If your experience with use fails you, then it does. If it doesn't, it doesn't. You can't step outside of the process to measure it objectively. Which means 50% doubt if you're objective about it. "God" allows people to overcome doubt, for better or worse. The existence of God beyond subjectivity is irrelevant to whether the technique functions well for people at the subjective level. At best you could say that if people lose faith in God's existence, it would impair their ability to exercise faith. You, however, are focussed on objective certainty. Theology doesn't give you that. "God" doesn't increase your odds of winning; it's just that you feel more assured in your decision-making process because you have faith that the steps you take are good. It's like doing an experiment and having faith that the steps you are taking will produce valid results instead of worrying the whole time that you're screwing up the parameters and your results are going to be tainted as a result. I would say that you're ability to have faith in the fact that things are real in the first place comes from divine revelation. There is no objective proof that anything is real or that you're not hallucinating everything you perceive, or that reality itself isn't an illusion. But the fact that you have clarity in distinguishing between reality and illusion is similar to Moses' claim that God separates light from darkness and recognizes light as good. You are basically replicating this by distinguishing reality from illusion and recognizing reality as good. It's just simple philosophical logic that happened to be expressed 1000s of years ago by a guy who lived near Egypt; and he used "God" as a way of indicating that the logic went beyond himself, his ego, or any other human authority - i.e. that it was super-human authority. Wouldn't you too say that reality is distinguished from illusion by an authority above that of any human? Yes, you get me exactly. Thanks for pointing this out since I think people get upset at me thinking I'm trying to convert them to something.

Thanks, you've explained this stuff more clearly than I did. Sorry, I really didn't know they weren't related. I haven't read anything interesting enough about either to really learn them as meaningful concepts. I guess my point is that it's not really necessary to assume any congruency between the way we model supergalactic 'space' in terms of something visualizable on Earth and the way spacetime actually behaves "out there." With all the unknown gravitational topography that can't be observed directly, I just think it makes more sense to conceptualize all motion as being relative to the geodesics that connect objects via their photons. That's the reality of the direct relationships between things, no? Like I said, that all makes sense to me in terms of calculating estimates accurately. But what about approximating some grasp of what's really going on between massively distant observables? To do that, doesn't it make sense to acknowledge that spacetime has topography that can't be directly observed? How can we really know how much frames are accelerating and decelerating in areas where only light is traveling and who knows what forces are present to affect that light's path? How can we know, for example, that spacetime curvature has a lower limit and that space doesn't go on expanding, contracting, and bending beyond centers of observable matter? In other words, why assume that spacetime is flat when it's not curved instead of just assuming that light reaches us by some path of undefined topography? I'm not arguing to stop interpreting the sky as representing real objects - just that there may be a lot going on that goes unseen (isn't that basically the same premise as dark matter/energy theories are predicated on?) I'm just being more generic about the underlying premise because I'm not into the specific concepts and theories. I know, but then you're still giving primacy to the motion between the sources without regard to the light-distance between them being absolute in the sense that no moving object can ever "skip over" photons between itself and its target, right? But couldn't you just say that spacetime consists of a certain number of light-waves between you and your target-destination? If you speed up, the waves shorten, but the distance is really just measured in light-waves apprehended, right? I mean, you could accelerate to the point that infrared waves were shorted to x-rays and time would have slowed down for you considerably, but the number of waves would be whatever they were by the time you arrived. The same waves would have appeared much longer from the perspective of their source that for you, because you encountered them as x-rays, but both observers would observe the same number of waves passing between departure and arrival, regardless of the measured distance from either vantage point, right?

I wasn't trying to change the topic. My point wasn't that photons change speed because I know they always move at C. My point was that an object's speed relative to another object is ultimately an amount of redshift/blueshift in the light connecting the two objects. So their distance/speed relative to each other really comes down to the amount the light waves between them are being compressed or expanded. No matter how fast or slow they move toward or away from each other, light will always be traveling at C between them, correct? Looking at the thread title, though, I suppose this is moving off topic, but it was a response to a comment by the OP about relative motion between subatomic particles, the Earth's revolution, and galactic motion all adding up to a massive total speed. That's why I felt it relevant to point out that everything moves relative to light. Is that incorrect or impertinent?

To me, some things are being confounded here. I think constructivism has to be disentangled from subjectivism. Spacetime can be "constructed" to exist as antecedent and independent of matter-energy without the belief that its existence is emergent from subjective perception. But spacetime can also be "constructed" with "recourse to spatiotemporal presumptions." In other words, all "constructivism" refers to, imo, is awareness of the relationship between science and its epistemologies, not to whether these epistemologies are ultimately rooted in object or subject. What's confounding is that Norton is assuming that "consensus by the pre-existence of mind-independent real entities" is less a form of consensus than "theoretical negotiation and consensus." While it is very different to agree with other scientists as it is to agree with reality, I don't think it works to obfuscate the reality-claim itself as being an appeal to (or negotiation of) theoretical consensus. In other words, they're not mutually exclusive descriptions. Usually I think of spacetime as being gravitational field-force, however thin it may be stretched, but lately I've been questioning this because of the idea that it would move along with objects, which would make it like the luminiferous aether idea that was disproven. Maybe that wouldn't be the case, though, if the compound gravitational field of massive bodies behaved as if it was more or less independent of the matter it emerged from. Obviously a magnetic field can move, turn, etc. but can a gravitational field? Does the Earth's gravitation rotate along with the observable planet or does it just extend outward without rotating? I think some physicists would say that these fluctuations are relative to light-energy and the oscillations of electrons, so they are objective. What basis do you have to assume that something being "objectively physical" necessitates that it be dimensionally standardized or fixed?