lemur

I guess that is somewhat accurate. But my reading of the bible suggested to me that homosexuality is regarded along the same lines of all other sexual practices that aren't directly reproductive, including heterosexual fornication. I.e. Jesus says it's better to abstain completely (eunich is the ideal state according to him), but then he says that not everyone can and so marriage is the best. I think this would apply to homosexuality as well as heterosexuality, personally. My point, though, is that I don't see the bible itself (regardless of how people apply/interpret it) as regarding sexuality as natural or unnatural and therefore good or bad. It's more that all sexuality is natural, but it is advisable to resist it as much as possible for spiritual purposes. I think the idea that homosexuality is bad because it's 'unnatural' comes from a secular culture of homophobia. I think true Christianity would not want to "convert" people to heterosexuality. It would probably just tell people to attempt to resist sexual desire in favor of higher spirituality, and if that's not possible to marry and be faithful and attempt to cultivate a marital relationship focused as much as possible on "higher love" and "higher spiritual pursuits" than carnal pleasure. In other words, I don't think carnal pleasure is viewed as any more legitimate within heterosexual relationships; it's just an inevitable evil to be minimized. If you think carnal pleasure is the purpose of life and should never be resisted or sublimated in any way, probably some form of hedonism would suit you better than Christianity, I think.

examples: Q:"should I have another child?" A: a) coin toss b) educated guess c) seek advise of a wise person and accept and act on it without reflecting on it d) seeking "divine inspiration/revelation" about which advice or educated guess makes you feel the best, like you at least had complete confidence/faith in your choice at the moment you made it, regardless of what may happen later on to change your perspective. I keep trying to explain that God can be viewed as just another method of coming to the best possible decision at a given moment in a given situation. It just happens to be the method that follows all other methods, since it is the principle that all authority-interactions end in an ultimate moment of decision-making. The question is whose authority that ultimate decision to accept, reject, and/or modify consulted-authorities is. According to theology, God gave people the ability to choose their own actions, so they are always ultimately the ones who choose what to do. However, they have the choice to listen to what others suggest, listen to what they selfishly want, or they can seek a higher authority that wants the best for everyone involved, including themselves. This is all I think it means to "consult the will of God," i.e. seek a will/interest that goes beyond yourself or any other authority you've consulted. You don't have to view it as mutually exclusive of rational forms of authority. E.g. let's say you weigh yourself on a scale. You may think you have used an objective instrument to provide objective data, but what do you call the faith that you have in all the possible discrepancies that could be caused by instrument malfuction, you making a mistake reading the display, etc.? You could say that you have faith in your own authority to use and read the scale correctly at that moment, which could also be called faith in God. You could even attribute the whole ability of science to pursue and reveal truth to be divine, in the sense that God is personified as the ability to distinguish between light and darkness and, thus, metaphorically truth and falsity. These things all start sounding lofty when discussed like this, but you could also just see "God" as a very old logic used to describe things in terms of distinctions between good/bad, clarity/obfuscation, light/darkness, truth/falsity, faith/doubt, sincerity/deceit, etc. etc.

But how can objects move relative to other objects without moving relative to the photon streams between them? Maybe I am mistaken, but my general understanding of the logic of special relativity is that all things move relative to the speed of light. So that means that nothing can travel faster than light/photons in its own frame. So no matter how fast two objects are moving toward each other, the only effect can be for the light waves between them to compress (i.e. blue shift) until they merge or pass each other. So I think a reasonable extrapolation of this is that objects' motion is always relative to light and particles as they enter into direct contact with them, and every other frame in which objects are construed as moving relative to each other's position is more of an abstraction that ultimately rests on the direct interaction between them. I.e. speed is not really measurable in abstract distance but only in rate of blueshift/redshift of the light connecting two objects. Ok, your point about SR not being relevant for relatively slow-moving objects is valid from the point of view of applying analytical frameworks appropriately, but aren't all objects, however fast or slow, always moving relative to the photons they are absorbing and emitting and isn't this the deeper point of SR (or am I making too much out of it?) I tried to be as conservative as possible in what I said about dark matter, since I don't know the specific details of various discussions. I just wanted to make the point that there's an issue of incongruence between the observed rotational speed and estimated mass of one or more galaxies. I don't know the details, and I hope I'm not perverting them. I just wanted to point out that we may not really know how fast a galaxy is rotating or what speed even means at that scale. In other words, dark matter/energy like any other matter/energy acts to shape the contours of spacetime. So speeds, shapes, etc. are all subject to variability from what is observed from a given vantage point, correct? In other words, how much can we really know about the extent to which spacetime curvature is dynamic by observing celestial motion as it appears?

The assumption is that if someone is desperate enough in poverty to sell an organ, that they lack access to more constructive opportunities to economically sustain themselves. E.g. if a person can choose to sell their labor to a non-exploitative buyer, or if they can use it to sustain themselves directly through economically productive activities, why would they choose to subject themselves to surgery that has no health benefit to themselves? If the issue is seeking a more privileged economic position, the question is why someone would be so desperate as to deplete their body to do so. It's sort of like the issue of exploitation in selling your body for prostitution - if you're doing it because you like your work or your client, that's one thing, but if you're doing it despite hating the work and the client(s), that signals other problems going on, no? But doesn't losing a kidney have the potential to result in health complications later on or shorten life expectancy? Isn't giving up a kidney more of a sacrifice than giving blood, which is regenerated constantly? If frequent giving of blood was associated with any kind of health depletion, wouldn't it be unethical for blood banks to allow people to donate more often than is good for them? First of all, why is it necessary to clone anencephalic bodies? Why not just modify ivf zygotes? Would that be less ethical than cloning them when they occur naturally? Second, your reasoning about chattel status and rights is an interesting one - and it reminds me of the old testament ethics regarding the treatment of slaves, who could be disciplined but not in an ultimately destructive way. I don't see the right of abortion as liberation from unwanted pregnancies so much as it is meant to localize authority over the fetus with the person whose body is required to sustain that fetus until the point of independent viability. Actually, it's not even a good example since it's been emotionally politicized far beyond any reasonable political debate - since people simply want the freedom to make autonomous decisions independently of any moral reasoning or rationality other than their own prerogative. If the same logic as abortion was extended to cloning, chattel-management, etc. then property owners would become absolute sovereigns free to create and destroy life at will. I don't think it is currently legal to kill animals for any reason whatsoever. I think there are usually ethical procedures established for when and how euthanasia processes may be undertaken. The biggest problem with using anencephalic bodies exploitatively is that how can you ultimately be sure they feel absolutely nothing? I mean, they may not be able to communicate and their brains may resemble more a lizard's or some other animal's, but how can you be certain enough that they don't have feelings to subject them to potential torture for the sake of organ-harvesting? I also think it would be unethical to solicit women to carry and give birth purely for the sake of producing organ-donors. I have a feeling, btw, that like paid kidney-donation, it would not be people in stable economic situations who would be volunteering to do this work. Also, let's say some woman decided that she wanted to give birth to her own anencephalic clone at age 20 to use as a potential organ donor for herself, later on, AND she would not be able to sell the clone's organs; would she then choose to not only carry and birth the clone, but also care for it through its whole life for in the event she needed its organs? I don't think most people would take on all this work and sacrifice on themselves, so this raises the question of how ethical it is for them to pay other people to do this work for their benefit.

I guess I sort of assumed that the sun was most of the sky, or a large portion of it anyway. If it isn't, then what you said makes sense. Good point.

I think that according to relativity, all objects move relative to the photons/light and other particles they interact with directly. For Earth to be moving at some speed relative to something outside the Milky Way, you would have to consider the trajectory of photons/light between the two, which could be red/blue shifted or length-contracted depending on their speeds relative to each other and in the direction perpendicular to the line connecting them (I hope I am getting relativity right). I believe there's also the problem, associated with the dark matter/energy hypothesis, that galaxies do not appear to be rotating at a speed that would conform to their estimated mass and size. So my question becomes what are the actual speeds of things relative to each other and are they really relative to each other or to other factors such as spacetime variabilities.

Oh. I guess that's only about 10X solar power on Earth, but without an atmosphere to cool it, I guess the heat has to conduct its way through to an area of the surface that's not facing the sun in order to radiate away into space.

Interesting post. The following part is where I start wondering what the point is: Why does it mean to say that "the construction project only succeed if constructivists antecedently presume the essential commitments of a realist conception of spacetime?" In my understanding of constructivism/realism, antecedent essentialism of realist conceptions are the opposite of constructivism. I.e. how can spacetime emerge from matter-energy if it is viewed from a perspectival commitment to it as an antecedent essence that precedes the matter-energy? Or am I understanding the intended meaning of this language incorrectly? Are you stating it is "less plausible" as a criticism or merely an objective recognition of subjective bias against spacetime as an emergent phenomenon instead of something that precedes and contains matter-energy? Why would a "realist story which explains consensus by the pre-existence of mind-independent real entities" be a matter of physics instead of philosophy? Physics is concerned with mind-independent real entities regardless of whether consensus is explained by them or not, correct? Related question: why does it happen so frequently that people want to make a point of linking objective physicalities to perceptual cognition? Are people so afraid they're hallucinating that they need to persistently establish a link between their perceptions and something else external to them? Is sophism this strong an undercurrent in the human psyche that it has to be rigorously challenged at the expense of ontological neutrality?

Do you know what the wattage per square meter on the sunny side is from solar radiation, by chance? I'd just like to get an idea of how much energy is hitting it.

I said it was internal avalanching as conditions would shift in a way that caused layer-collapse or something like that. I think this is sort of like the cause of a supernova, though I don't know if it could occur on a less explosive scale. Another possibility could be that some material somehow "clumps up" inside the sun and "boils up" to an exceptionally high altitude within the sun. Then, as it collapses back downward, it could "roll" out on the waves of turbulence. I wouldn't know how to begin thinking about fluid dynamics inside the sun, but I would guess it is turbulent enough to eject something if that something could congeal enough to hold together as a "clump." I know it sounds like a stretch, but I'm just trying to figure out something that would work for the OP. Surely there must be something that could cause the sun to deform and pinch off from itself. Maybe the interior of the sun consists of numerous relatively cohesive balls/clouds of iron plasma rolling around like in a hot lava lamp.

I guess as strong as the radiation is on the sunny side, it still isn't enough to make up for the heat-drain of the radiating dark side. I wonder what the gradation of temperature from the hot side to the cool side would be like if you could take samples tunneling through the center.

That is as specific as you can get?

Why would one individual's right to freedom from suffering validate the sacrifice of another individual's right to choose to refuse surgery? Granted, buying a kidney is not the same as taking it by force, but the issue that arises is manipulation/exploitation. Why would someone choose to sacrifice their body/health for money unless they were addicted to money for some purpose(s)? It's not that the body is sacred; it's that the individual's right to control their own individual body trumps the rights of any other individuals to use it to that person's detriment (exploit them) - or at least it should, though it doesn't always work out that way in practice. So the focus isn't the body but the individual person as a being. You're right that normalizing non-clone reproduction is just status-quo reactionism, but that doesn't mean that there may not be other, more substantial ethical issues involved. The problem is determining when a living host is not a person and whether it can be exploited as such. Personally, I don't think it's a very good idea to cultivate anecephalic living corpses and utilize resources to nourish them and keep them healthy only to ensure that individuals can have organ-transplants ready and waiting. Keeping your body healthy prevents the need for organ transplants in many cases and it's not as if you can keep your body alive forever with transplants. As cell-reproduction continues over longer periods of time, the chance of mutations continues to increase as well, so how would cancer ever be less than an eventual inevitability in any medically sustained body? Also, why did the cloned sheep exhibit signs of being the same age as the sheep it was cloned from? Why do cloned DNA not result in a "blank slate?"

If Mercury were made of iron, I would find it hard to believe that 400C on one side would be insulated from the -100C on the other side. What prevents that heat from conducting through the interior? It's not like the energy can radiate away on the sunny side.

I tried to come up with reasons to support this hypothesis and this is what I came up with: 1) what if such "births" corresponded to gravitational shifts caused when critical amounts of certain elements are formed within the sun and their position relative to other layers "avalanches" inward, somewhat like supernova but on a less radical scale? 2) If the sun ejected planet-sized balls of matter like this once in while, perhaps it would result in a gravity shift in the solar system that would allow the existing planets to re-orient their orbits at further distances. The process could go something like this: sun stretches causing its gravity field to warp and shift the orbits of the planets at which point the stretched out part breaks away from the rest of the sun and the two gravity wells re-spherize at a distance from each other with the new planetoid redistributing the solar gravitation it brought with it in splitting off. 3) Why would the planets have different compositions? Maybe because the sun is stratified and heterogeneous inside, like marble, and if it would eject a planet-sized ball of matter, that ball would reflect the composition of the part of the sun's interior it was ejected from.

It's just a social-behavioral scenario for how canine teeth could result in some gorillas reproducing and others not. That's how evolution works, in theory anyway (it's natural eugenics).

Doesn't the planetary mass conduct heat from the hot side to everywhere else? If not, it's interesting to imagine what could be possible in terms of solar-energy uses, if there's any use for solar energy on Mercury that is.

This is why applied intelligence instead of marketing should drive decision-making about what methods to choose for which products. If it makes sense for mass grain production to use chemical fertilizer because of scale, then why should marketing promote fish-meal fertilized wheat bread? On the other hand, if fish by-products are being wasted, why not use them for some form of agriculture? The point is that it is possible for people to think more logically in terms of resource-efficiency and less in terms of how to generate the most sales at the highest price to produce the most revenues. The problem is that when people get the idea that other things are more important than money, other people exploit this attitude to make more money off them. Cost-efficiency tends to reflect resource-efficiency except insofar as the high expense of one resource relative to another has the capacity to dwarf the efficiency achieved in the less expensive input. For example, if labor is very expensive relative to fuel, labor-saving practices will make products cheaper even when they use fuel less efficiently. The same happens in food-distribution; i.e. restaurants and other producers/distributors buy ingredients relatively cheaply and resell them for a lot; which means that it makes more business sense to throw away anything that may cause the customer to choose a competitor next time. Food choice and convenience = more waste.

I was reading about that today and trying to generate some intuitive feel for how "electron bounty" results in ductility, malleability, and greater propensity to give up electrons. It's as if the electrons become more fluid when there are less of them in the shell. Is that because they can break away easier and thus "flow" between atoms more? I.e. at room temperature, you mean? So is it just that the hydrogen bonding in the surface temperature of the water creates enough kinetic energy among the particles to ionize the Na and "bump off" one of the hydrogens from the water? I.e. does the charge imbalance of the water result in ionization of the Na? Does the ionized Na then collide with the water at a speed to cause it to fragment into ionized constituents that are attracted to the Na ions for bonding? I'm trying to get a full picture of the mechanics of the process. you tell me. Are the Na-ionization and the water-ionization similar processes because of the amount of energy it takes to break off the relevant parts? Once I get a feel for the mechanical behaviors of the smaller atoms, maybe the "relativistic effects" you mention will be that much more interesting. Currently, I have yet to see regularities in the behaviors vis-a-vis the atomic structures because I don't know the behaviors.

I am trying to understand the relationship between heat and chemical reactions. It seems like higher temperatures would be required to break stronger bonds and ionize particles that are closer to noble elements. Are substances this predictable and is it possible, for example, to make lists of molecules that break down at various temperatures; as well as ions that form? I would think that by making such lists, you could see which molecular re-configurations (is that just a fancy way of saying "chemical reaction?") were possible at specific temperatures?

If sustainable culture was dominant and all individuals utilized minimum resources regardless of their level of wealth or income, why would it matter if people cloned themselves? In fact, downloading into a cloned body could be a way of reducing the resource-waste of prolonging the life of unhealthy bodies, no? Of, course this assumes that it is not a waste of a human life to utilize a body for "uploading" someone else's consciousness into it.

It's fun to watch them regurgitate cud too. This is also the reason I think hunting deer or other forest-fed animals converts otherwise unusable land-cover into nutrition. Of course, you could also have forests of fruit- and nut- yielding trees, but you can't get around the fact that some animals can digest things that humans can't, yet we can digest the animals. Actually, you could maybe get around that by using some form of microbe to break-down the indigestible cellulose to convert it into human-digestable protein. That's basically what the fauna in the cow's stomach is doing when it converts the grass into milk, right? It already is for many people. I read an article that said that global economic growth quickly causes food shortages as people who couldn't previously afford (much) meat suddenly can and thus create greater demand to utilize land-resources for meat-production. So, I'm not sure meat will ever cease to be a rarity for many people. What is it about raising livestock that builds topsoil? Is it the grass, the manure, or both? Either way, I don't see what the difference would be between raising cattle and using a field to grow nitrogen-enriching legumes and fertilizing it with human waste (processed sufficiently to avoid contamination hazards, of course). Agriculture is basically human-grazing.

It takes @2000 electrons to equal the mass of one proton, according to a quick google search. The electrons, however, have 2000 times more electrostatic force than the proton; although the amount of force could be argued to vary, I think, according to the volume of the 2000 electrons. So if you began with some arbitrarily large volume for the 2000 electrons and began compressing them, their expansive force would increase in somewhat the same way a spring's potential energy increases as it is compressed. What I wonder is at what volume would the expansive potential of the 2000 electrons equal the amount of energy contained in the mass of a proton according to E=MC^2? I am wondering about this because I am interested if there is some relationship between volume and different kinds of energy/force. For example, the volume of a H2 molecule may constitute the highest possible stable density for two protons unbonded by strong force. A He atom would be the highest possible density when strong force bonds them. Presumably if the 2000 electrons were floating through a vacuum, their gravity would stabilize the cloud they form at some volume as well. So, I'm trying to look at the relationship between forces, mass, and volume. Thanks for any input.

Thanks for clarifying that. My question now would be what is more resource efficient overall: dairy protein and fat/cholesterol (cholesterol is needed for hormone production) or other sources of protein, such as beans, etc. and using eggs for cholesterol? I also wonder, actually, if livestock isn't an efficient means of converting grass into protein usable by humans. I wonder how the same field and resources used to grow beans would compare with using that field to raise cattle.

Right, this is where you should understand that faith-based belief system take an approach to contending with uncertainty that involves seeking revelation "in good faith." In other words, theists know that life and morality is usually more complex than their minds or scriptures are prepared to deal with, so they reason the best they can with reference to scripture and revelation sought through prayer. Sometimes, despite all good reasoning and clarity, you still can't come to an adequate path forward in your situation and that is when you pray and, hopefully, something will "come to you." You could call that something "divine revelation through Holy Spirit." You might turn out to have misinterpreted your intuition in retrospect but faith entails that you go with it when you get it because you have nothing better to go on. If you did, you wouldn't have ended up in a desperate situation in the first place. Yes, I agree. Theists sometimes regard atheists as missing this insofar as they seem to think that rationality and logic guarantee solutions to all moral problems. In reality, complexity and contradictions can bring people to the limits of rationality and logic and that is where they need to seek other, more subjective paths. You should take inventory of all the different subjective methods of reasoning and making choices. You will find that there are all sorts of "logics" and "ideologies" that claim to be objective but are actually just systematic subjective methods. Right, but the point of the idea of being able to have a direct relationship with God is that sometimes "agreed upon" values may seem wrong and then you seek a higher authority to discover "the truth." What's interesting is that while there are many different approaches to deciding what is good and what is bad, it is a universal that humans experience things in terms of good and bad. It is interesting to experiment with total relativism because if you pay attention, you will find that you continue constantly searching at some level to label things as either good or bad, maybe even just implicitly so. Ok, sorry for making such an issue of it. I'm still glad it came up, though, because I think it's important to distinguish between objective, organized/institutionalized subjectivity, and more independent subjectivity.