lemur

Is staring really needed to notice that someone is attractive? Isn't it just apparent from surveying people around you during daily activities? Is this building up to an argument for the burka?

The more you square off against people who seem to think differently than you, the more likely the conflict is to escalate in the direction of more personal and/or physical forms of conflict. This is NOT the direction anyone should want to take conflict in. Science cannot be so unscientific to assume its own righteousness against competing views. Instead, science should do what it does best, subjecting alternative perspectives to critical scientific dissection. The problem is that an impasse occurs when people get stuck in petty paradigmatic battles over axiomatic assumptions. For example, when religious people claim God exists and scientists claim it's not possible, they are essentially battling over materialism. Religious materialists want God's existence to be a material fact and scientists want to elevate materialism to a level that renders theism sub-valid. Imo, scientists should admit that they are subjective embodied humans and not purely omniscient, objective science in and of themselves. Science can seek to transcend pure subjectivity and bias without denying the importance of subjective knowledge/beliefs to human psychology. In other words, they could recognize that God's existence has concrete subjective/psychological function and thus stop trying to pester religion into relinquishing belief in the supernatural just because it isn't supported by materialist science. Furthermore, it is not legitimate to use scientific findings as a philosophical basis for politics. Scientific knowledge can be taken into account in politics, but technocracy is no substitute for democratic discourse among competing belief systems. You cannot just expect people to lay down and accept anything you say is good politics because you are a scientist. You have to reason your case and if people are obstinate, it is their responsibility to reason their case to you as well. At what point to you simply give up and shift to a race to destruction of the other because you believe the impasse is hopeless? Obviously people do this all the time, but does it ever end conflicts and impasses? Do you really ever expect a technocracy to evolve in which people chant "heil science" the way they chanted, "heil Hilter" during the third reich? If not, you have to have some patience that science has to make its case in democratic discourse with religion and other ideologies. I do my best on a regular basis to extend scientific ideas to believers in homeopathy and other 'pseudosciences.' I do this not with the goal of undermining their beliefs but rather I try to get them to show interest in the scientific basis for what they believe their magical remedy is doing. For example, if someone is using a homeopathic remedy you can explore with them what the ingredients are and why they've been told it works. This way, if it is in fact snake oil as you suspect, at least you're not assuming so and pushing your assumption uncritically on someone who has clearly devoted enough interest in it to want to invest money and potentially prolonged sickness in this remedy. Why do I deserve rudeness?

Why are you thinking in terms of inter-regime command-control authoritarianism? Do you prefer that to democracy for some reason? Do you think it will be accepted as democracy if "the US" is attributed responsibility for it? Maybe you are trying to make a subtle point that people look the other way when "the US" is the party to which authoritarian power is attributed? If so, you are right that US patriotism/nationalism/jingoism is as corrupting an emotionalism as any other nationalist-feelings toward any collective identity. They all promote fascist support for authoritarianism to some degree. But is that part of what you're trying to say on some level or not? Again, your language is confusing. You frame ideological conflict as the suppression or liberation of terrorist propaganda and the popular response to it? My impression is that as democracy progresses, the message of al-Quida or other popular ideologies will be brought up and discussed reasonably in public discourse with decreasing tension. To give a personal example, I can read a news story about Osama Bin Ladin suggesting that Americans convert to Islam as an antidote to terrorism and think reasonably about how that might work and what it could mean; yet other people would simply react in terror to the idea of even giving reasonable consideration to any statement attributed to Osama Bin Ladin because they would see that as "giving in to terrorism." Imo, democracy requires being free from the fear of giving reasonable consideration to any opinion/ideology. The only ideologies that shouldn't be reasonably considered are those whose only purpose is to obfuscate or instill fear for the purpose of instilling fear - but how do you assess which messages those are without listening/reading them? Is it possible that the reason wars are confined to relatively unpopulated areas is to reduce the possibility of using urban populations as strategic pawns in war tactics? It would be sad to see war escalate to levels that affect more civilians, as was the case with WWII, for example, but what can be done to prevent such escalation? Who has to concede to what and at what cost? Would any war authority ever concede to "surrender," and if so why?

Are you asking for a way to somehow neutralize current within a closed-circuit? Or are you asking for a way to break the circuit without having to deal with a fixed-location switch? I don't see how it would be possible to neutralize current unless someone knows something about creating counter-waves in the conductor that cancel out the waves of electricity, but this seems implausible and, if it was possible, could it be practically used in everyday applications like lights? Also, why would you want to cancel out current with counter-current since it would waste energy - plus I don't think it's possible anyway because energy cannot be created or destroyed, so any current that is flowing through a conductor has to go somewhere.

It's not failing in quantitative rigor. It is shirking qualitative rigor because, as you have said, qualitative modeling is harder to test and harder to get right, which makes it seem like a waste of time. It really doesn't matter to me where coherent mechanical modeling comes from (i.e. 'inside' or 'outside' "the system"). I don't care if some crackpot posts a viable qualitative model of electron behavior as long as it doesn't require tons of reading and thought to understand and then immediately fails the most obvious validity testing. I think your attitude in this post is generally too defensive. You're taking what I am saying as an attack on a system, which you apparently view as a fortress designed to hold out barbarians. You started by demanding that I had sufficient credentials for my opinion to even be heard. Basically, you're reacting to my explanation of why qualitative theorizing has value and my analysis of why it is unpopular by putting up systems-defenses. That's silly because I'm not criticizing any system - only making points about the knowledge generally. Please answer one question for me: why is it that whenever qualitative modeling is mentioned, people begin getting defensive and never do they reflect on the forms of qualitative modeling that they do value? Is it that people are so engrossed in the mathematics that follow the qualitative modeling that they no longer recognize the qualitative part of the work as qualitative in the first place?

I think it is the History of Sexuality where Foucault notes that sex tends to occur most easily in the most culturally conservative situations. I'm not explaining this exactly right, but basically he was saying that when people are highly integrated in some form of cultural dogma that they don't question, this creates social conditions that favor sex. The reason I mention this is that it puts western sexual liberation in a somewhat contradictory position of being progressive in relation to religious prudishness but at the same time, it tends to be people who are very securely anchored within their cultural institutions who are embracing sexual freedom. Plus sexual desire is a strong driving force behind politics, which combined with the cultural conservatism/reactionism results in a strong will-to-power when it comes to repressing religion and any other culture that suggests sexual control of any kind. The question it evokes for me is when is the goal of sexual liberation sufficiently achieved where people will be totally satisfied with their sexual choices? When no one dares to express a religious or other non-affirmative view of total sexual freedom? Is it possible to have freedom of religion combined with sexual freedom or does one culture have to completely win and re-socialize the other so everyone has the same cultural views? Obviously, but that also means that obviously anyone who has an interest in some form of authoritarian power is going to repackage it and sell it as democratic in some way in order to avoid conflict with active pro-democracy. Then the flip-side of that, which convolutes things even more, is that others will witch-hunt true democracy as being authoritarianism in disguise just to promote authoritarian power. The will to authoritarian power is strong and it naturally lends itself to strawmanning and other deceptive approaches to asserting dominance while averting critical evaluation.

So what? Humans create institutions and then regard them as if they existed externally to human power. That's even more general a statement than yours. You shouldn't make general statement with vague unspoken implications. You should explicate your argument by stating clearly your reasons for saying what you say.

You need to do the soul-searching it takes to figure out what decision you will ultimately be most self-assured of. You need to develop a moral/ethical position regarding down-syndrome so that you can make a confident choice where you'll be able to say for the rest of your life that you did the best thing in retrospect. 1 in 149 is lower than you think, though. If you were at a casino, you would most likely lose your money with those odds. Still, you can take this as an opportunity to realize that you need to have a more established ethical/moral perspective in your life so that you won't be caught off guard to such an extent next time you are confronted with such a hard issue. Remember, you can almost always live with any choice if it is made in good faith with the best intentions you can muster at a given moment.

You're right that this is the official position that non-terrorist Islam is an ally to US freedom/democracy, but there is also a strong undercurrent of cynicism that views Islam as inherently terroristic because of the treatment of women, etc. You are also right about 'Christians' who are more interested in the fact that Muslims don't accept Christ as the son of God and the messiah than they are interested in having a moral ally against various aspects of liberalism. I think a big part of the problem with both is that neither really knows how to combine respect for cultural freedom with the right to exercise their own freedom of speech/religion. When they are caught up in pursuing their own interests, they fail to reflect on how they expect a liberal republic/democracy to function when there are various forms of Christianity and other religions along with feminism, secularism, etc. etc. that all have to interact constructively. Interesting data-pattern observation. Could this be because democracy always begins with grace and quickly becomes a critical mirror for the dark side of popular opinion? My impression is that populism is most gruesome under dictatorship because people feel no accountability for their negativity. Once their opinions become represented in positions of seeming power, they develop a sense of responsibility for what effect those opinions can have when in power. The war on terrorism will never be lost forever. It can't be because it is a fundamental resistance to terrorism that emerges from intimate experience with terrorism itself. The reason democracy developed as a system of checks and balances is because people knew that power can only be checked with power. I often asked myself during the war on terror why so much terrorism was being used against terrorism. Wasn't that fighting fire with fire? Gradually I realized that counterterrorism was not so much about controlling terrorists by fear/intimidation as it was about liberating them from the fear that was already controlling them by exposing them to confrontation with the source of their fear. I don't know if I'm explaining that exactly right, but what I mean is that the propaganda campaign during the war on terror seemed to simultaneously evoke fear and confront deep fears in a way that caused them to dissipate. I don't think people would have lost their post 9-11 fear during the 8 years of Bush if that wasn't the case. To sum up and indescribably complex political process in Marxist terms, power always contains the seeds of its own critique/resistance.

My status doesn't matter. The validity of my position should be ascertainable from its content. If you can invalidate it with your savvy as a practicing scientist, or any other form of valid reason, I'm sure your argument would carry weight to anyone that's not beyond argument by reason, which are precious few people by the way. I'm not. I was talking about the alternative approach I described where the clouds would just be classified into ideal types and statistically correlated and otherwise studied without directly modeling the hows of interactive dynamics/mechanics. If cloud-formation was studied like electron motion, people would say that certain shapes of clouds appear under certain conditions but they would say that it was impossible to theorize about how the shape-changing took place and what the water molecules were doing vis-a-vis other atmospheric molecules and energies.

Part of the problem with democracy is that it's anti-democratic to assign it authoritarian definitions and insist on those against public discussion of what democracy should mean and entail and why. Then, the problem with fighting authoritarian definitions is that an open democratic discourse attracts people who have an interest in seizing power through manipulation of the discourse to ends that favor their domination plan. You can say that US propaganda approach is simplistic, but do you also realize that formulating complex propaganda and policy results in definitional-authoritarianism where players will insist that they have fulfilled the formal criteria for democracy and use that as a basis for building up greater top-down control? Isn't this strategy of averting Sharia law too reactionary? Doesn't US policy need to take a more pro-active approach to supporting approaches to Islam that are sufficiently democratic. Or is the opposition Islam vs. democracy a fundamentally unalterable polarity because Islam rejects all Christian notions of freedom to self-government because it inherently leads to abuses of freedom? US policy gets accused of inconsistency a lot, but again consider what the interest/motives would be of critics who cite inconsistency as a reason to back-off. Basically, it comes down to people wanting to repress US power and global intervention by whatever means possible, so they're never going to take a pro-active approach to critically agreeing or disagreeing with US interventionism on a case-by-case basis, as they should. Instead they're going to consistently apply the logic of "undermine the outsider in total" in order to pursue a purification-approach to autonomous sovereignty within a bounded territory. This, as far as I can tell, is their main approach to global politics - i.e. anti-interventionism. That is a reactionary attitude that should be replaced with recognition that the globe is constituted of numerous interests that can collaborate with each other in various ways to achieve things. Democracy is about indentifying goals and communicating constructively with others about how such goals can be achieved. This requires going beyond undermining others for "meddling" in 'private' regional business.

There are many things that can't be tested precisely. Imagine trying to test hypotheses about how a cloud's shape will change under various conditions. Still, you can start with very general ideas like that the cloud will dissipate in the sun or hot, dry air or that it will condense and rain in cold air. From there you could come up with various cloud-mechanics logics and these could be tested with relative inaccuracy by subjective observation. Yes, the discourse would involve a lot of vagueness, but there is nothing inherently false about thinking that there might be a logic to how clouds change size and shape and how they interact to cause various emergent weather phenomena. Obviously, you could also simply classify clouds into various categories and approximate sizes and then count how many of each are present at certain moments and look for patterns in sky-composition and correlate these with weather conditions, but that would be a more quantitative approach that would miss the interactive dynamics of the clouds themselves and other "climactic objects."

Your argument is well-stated, though I've heard it before. The problem with it is that there really is no modeling, quantitative or qualitative, that doesn't rely on assumptions derived from the visible level of observation. You would assume that quantification and math are totally abstract and universal tools for description and analysis but how can you say that things at the fundamental level are quantifiable just because energy appears to travel in discreet packets in the 'emergent' reality of experimental measurements? So if you're throwing away every concept derived from experiential cognition, you would have to throw away quantification too, I think. If you want to make the argument that math works and is therefore applicable, whereas qualitative modeling doesn't, that is still not a conclusive argument against ALL possible qualitative modeling. The main problem with your attitude (which many people hold, not just you) is that it is defeatist (and even obstructionist) instead of hopeful with regards to modeling. You're basically assuming that (sub)atomic level processes necessarily defy any possible attempt at rationalizing them except in the quantitative ways that they already are. It's fine to consider phenomena as being emergent, but that shouldn't be a barrier to analyzing in what ways they could emerge and why the things from which they emerge behave as they do or don't. If you claim that it is a macro-illusion that solid objects have fixed locations and move in continuous trajectories, then you would have to look for some other form of movement to describe electron dynamics but why would you abandon the very possibility that there is a logic to how electrons tunnel around or whatever it is they do? Why wouldn't anyone work on theorizing the nature of those "wavicles" and what they will and won't do under various conditions and why? Such modeling wouldn't have to make any process more familiar, as you say with the balls example. It just needs to provide some foundation for building up an idea of what the components are actually doing and how that relates to the observational data and the patterns recognized and described in equations, rules, laws, etc..

This is an interesting analysis. It models democracy as regimes that cater to the will of the people, and regimes that don't cater to the will of the people are considered less democratic. The problem with this model is that it ignores the Hitler-referendum paradox; i.e. Hitler was elected by popular majority yet headed a repressive regime. A similar precedent can be found in US slaving-law before the 1860s civil war in which majority voting in any state could be used to allow slavery. These kinds of situations raise the general question of when a centralized regime or other elite power should be used to check and balance the popular will of a majority. Imo, it is quite naive to assume that democracy = majoritarian rule even when the will-of-majority that emerges is repressive of other aspects of civil democracy. So I wouldn't quickly assume that just because US diplomats support an unpopular regime that this is automatically in conflict with the project of promoting democracy and freedom. Face it, there are MANY people who have no interest in democracy or any other politics EXCEPT as it facilitates maximum power and political dominance for their preferred ethno-national identity. They seek maximum power to achieve maximum territorial autonomy/sovereignty and they will use that power to achieve as strong a position in a global economy as possible while maximizing the ability to promote privileges among legitimate citizens while excluding non-citizens to the maximum extent possible. In other words, people are using democracy or any other form of government as nothing more than a tool to achieve collective domination of some over others (i.e. tribalism). Such interests are common among US citizens as much as they are among people with other citizenship, so this is a global struggle for democracy over ethno-national or other collectivist factionalism. Whether or not the US government pursues formal pro-democracy policies, there will always be widespread interest globally for overcoming ethno-national factionalism and subjugation of individuals to collectivist ideologies and exploitative inter-group relations. It's not as if the resistance to authoritarianism and collectivism emerged one day from thin air - it has always been the flip-side of the coin of authoritarian and/or collectivist power.

Ok, now I see more what you meant. I didn't get it the first time because you didn't explicate any relationship between adding energy and the electron configuration. You just noted that the configuration changes the relationship between atoms and free electrons or atoms and other atoms. So the net conclusion would be that energy can only break particles apart and it takes force to bind them together. I think you overemphasize the inductive aspect of modeling, and it may be a personal bias I have toward deductive/critical testing/research. Granted, the more rigorously inductive the model-building process is, the more likely it will be that the model will hold up longer to critical rigor. But I prefer to see a clear theory asserted and submitted for critical scrutiny than a slow inductive modeling process that builds up to such elaborate description that it resists determinant criticism just by virtue of its breadth and complexity. Global climate change models bother me for this reason. Apart from any political concerns about the political ramifications of the science one way or the other, large scale models that have so much variability in how to select sampling methods, consolodate data, etc. end up spending so much energy on simply describing the model that critical application of logic gets lost in the process. Anyway, that was a tangent. My point is that the Bohr model wasn't just good because it fit existing knowledge and was falsifiable. It was good because it provided a mechanical analogy to a classical mechanical system that made it possible to theorize further implications. So, for example, if the Bohr model would have been maintained, it would be possible to make all sorts of extrapolations and deductions about subatomic processes simply by contemplating the interdynamics of the various parts of the machine. I.e. with a strong qualitative model of a system, you can theorize how it will behave under all sorts of conditions and interactional inputs because you have an idea of why and how the parts function as they do. I know people don't think they're fundamentally incomprehensible at the quantitative level. It's the qualitative modeling that people seem to eschew. It seems like every qualitative model nowadays is just a prop designed to facilitate quantification and math-building, e.g. postulating particles for any and all sorts of interaction to be able to quantify amounts of force/energy carried by the particle and quantify the collective behavior of numerous particles behaving in tandem. How many math-savvy physicists would support a good qualitative model if that model made it difficult or impossible to quantify and do equation-work with the model? I'm not saying that if it turned out that some qualitative model was more representative of how nature works but difficult to use quantitatively, that this would undermine the utility of good math that delivers precise predictions with parsimonious equations, etc. I'm just saying that if there was a way to understand what electrons are really doing in a concrete qualitative way, it would be nice to be able to do so instead of having only snapshots of probability distributions of wave functions, etc. Maybe I just haven't yet understood what the significance of these wave-function shapes is yet and how they influence the force-interactions between the particles. What makes it so hard to formulate models and then look for ways to test them using existing evidence or deducing new kinds of tests/observations?

Can you presume time to exist in the absence of matter/energy? How can "nothing" either be frozen in time or progress very quickly? How can time exist for a duration of "nothing" to elapse? Nothing is simply nothing, with no time or space to measure anything as being absent. Therefore time, the dimension as you recognize it and project it onto everything you perceive without exception, cannot be attributed in the absence of any force/matter/energy, can it? Please also ask yourself if time as you know it can take place with force and/or matter but not energy? Personally, I do not think that time is anything except a function of energetic motion, but I'm not sure how speculative this would be considered by others so I state it with caution.

Probably the discrepancy you mention between childhood and adult friendship is an artifact of the very logic you are conceptualizing as an adult. I.e. adults who feel that adult friendship is less "true" than childhood friendship may seek out childhood companions in the hope of transcending the adulthood they've come to disdain. If the former childhood friend they find shares their romantic view of childhood innocence, the two could bond on this basis. I would still say that the bond is based on an adult emotion of romanticizing childhood in contrast to adulthood seen as corrupt. Without that sense of corruption, childhood would probably not seem that attractive to adults. They would just view it as the period of naive, exploitative self-indulgence that it is. Ultimately, I think this romanticization of childhood is just another example of the corruption of adulthood in that adults who romanticize childhood are revisionists seeking to exploit self-hatred of themselves and others as adults to produce a form of love that transcends the reality. Put simply, they're regressing to a romanticized fictional past in flight from a dark present that is ultimately nothing more than an extension of their true childhood, which was the foundation for their corruption and self-hatred as adults in the first place.

I believe it is Max Planck that is credited with discovering that electromagnetic radiation is only emitted and/or absorbed in discrete amounts, otherwise called "packets" or "quanta." This is, to my knowledge, the reason that light and other EM radiation are described as particles/photons. However, there's a lot about the behavior of light to be understood in terms of wave-properties. Since light travels at fixed speed C, the only way for more energy to be transmitted per unit light is for the frequency to increase, which is the same thing as the wavelength shortening. You would think the amplitude could grow to deliver more energy with the same wavelength, but I can't remember reading anything about that aspect of light waves. In any case, the amount of energy delivered in any emission of EM radiation is supposedly not variable but fixed such that it isn't possible to transmit a partial quantum/packet of EM energy. This logic of discreet amounts of energy translates into electron behavior, with electrons being limited to certain levels/states that they "jump" between. They can't simply keep losing energy until they fall into the nucleus. They get "stuck" at a certain level until they either absorb or emit energy and change levels as a result. This is my understanding, but I am no expert - just trying to learn and make sense of it all like you.

I would think it would depend on the details of what "collapse of civilization" precisely entails. If you knew what level of potentiality would remain to continue constructive cultural dialogue, it would make it easier to communicate with the agents of that dialogue.

Is this lemons and limes we're talking about here? I think lemons can harm the enamel of teeth making them sensitive. I have sort of a vague sense that sour lemons, etc. cause some neural-electrical effects when they give you goosebumps, but I know that is subjective and I wonder if someone else knows the bio-chemistry of what I'm talking about. I think vitamin C is ascorbic acid, but somehow I thought citric acid was the same. I'm really just talking from vague distant impressions, though, so I could be mixing up words, ideas, or who knows what.

So photons raise the energy level of the electrons in the outer shell to further distances from the nucleus - and this allows other atoms to bond with the positive charge that is left unbalanced by the electron moving further away? This sounds similar to the process of photon emission. What causes the atom to emit a photon or not before some other atom bonds with it in its energized state? Is it when the electron energy somehow decreases enough that the EM force of the protons "reel it in" to a lower level/state? Would it then be the proximity of the available electron from another atom being closer to the nucleus than the excited electron that causes it to get "reeled in" instead of its own electron?

That makes sense. I hadn't thought of that, though I probably could have. So then how can energy cause a flourine atom to ionize negatively? Would it then behave as stable because its outer shell was filled yet be attracted to positive ions to stabilize/neutralize its charge?

Why don't you make characters first believe that their perceptions come from supersenses and then have them gradually discover that they are just subconsciously reading body-language and expressions, etc? Then they could be faced with the problem that no one believes that their power is simply due to mindful perception and decides to elevate them to holy status and worship them or persecute them as a witch or something.

Right, but I meant how does energy cause an atom to gain an electron to become negatively ionized? OR, I asked, does it start with a partially filled shell (e.g. three electrons in the second orbit) and then lose one? That wouldn't seem to be possible, though, since I don't see why an atom with a partially-filled shell would be floating around unattached anyway. I think it would already be an ion. I guess it would get that way by energy breaking apart a molecule into components, of which some would be positively charged and others negative. Did I just answer my own question? Is there some other way for an atom to gain an electron by adding energy?

Then how does an atom become negatively ionized? Only when a partially-filled shell loses electrons and becomes even less filled? Getting it right is not as important as being rigorous in the process of model-building and testing through logical comparison of observed data. The Bohr model was good theorizing because it fit the known data and was rigorously critically tested until its weaknesses were found. This made it part of a constructive scientific process. More such mechanical models need to be contructed and subject to critical rigor, imo, in hopes of finding a model that explains and predicts physical behavior at that level in terms of the mechanics of how/why things act as they do. Why should it be simply assumed that sub-atomic particles are simply fundamentally incomprehensible in qualitative terms? Math always wins the battle for accuracy. But I don't understand how people can think that a perfectly accurate equation is an adequate substitute for understanding/modeling how the reality being measured and predicted actually works. What if you explained how an incadescent lightbulb works by giving the equation for resistance of the filament relative to the luminosity of the glow? Yes, you would accurately predict how bring the lightbulb would shine at each level of current passing through the filament, but how would you ask further questions such as whether the type of conductor/resistor used matters, why some lightbulbs produce more heat and less light, etc. You wouldn't even understand HOW the electricity causes the filament to glow. All these kinds of questions require qualitative mechanics beyond the equations, no?