Phi for All

I hope you'll take this the right way. It's not about you, it's about your methods. You start out in this thread talking about how you dropped out of school and know little about science. You then tell us you're interested in a fringe concept that's been sidelined because there are models that anyone with a science background can see are better. You have a LOT of misconceptions, but each time they're corrected ("I can't think of a reason why male human testicles are on the outside!" "It's because sperm require a lower temperature than the main body provides."), you take that data on board, but your method fails to turn it into useful information, like "Perhaps I should study what everyone else thinks is correct before becoming convinced of something I really know little about". We show you there's a whole bunch you don't know, yet you still insist that you have a "gut" feeling the geocentric model is correct. Your biases are being confirmed emotionally, because you don't understand the science intellectually. You insist a creator is necessary, but can't explain intellectually why. Again, a "gut" feeling, more akin to faith than to trust. Why believe something so strongly when it has NOTHING to back it up, to support it? I feel your methods here are leading you to make very emotional decisions at a point in your life when you're having a difficult emotional time. You want something to be true rather than wanting to find out what's real. Emotion vs intellect. Both are very important, both have their place in our lives, but when it comes to science, and explanations of various phenomena, intellect is the better tool to use.

And as dimreepr alludes to with the Douglas Adams quote, it's a mistake to view phenomena backwards from the perspective of how nicely it works out for us. Start with how the water cycle works, how it does what it does and how that developed. It's a bit easier to see it wasn't designed for us, we and other species merely take advantage of it as an adaptive measure.

Spoken like someone who misquoted a famous man. Oh goody, a flaming generality. Can you please show how EVERYBODY that doesn't want to create or choose a government is lazy and cowardly? Seriously, where do you get off making a statement like that? Do you know EVERYBODY and their motivations?!

Most of these systems have emergent properties, wondrously fantastic events like fire and lighting, that only happen when the right amount of oxygen, combustibles, and heat occur. Small things and processes that combine to make something much bigger happen. These types of system don't need a designer. They're inevitable when the right conditions exist. It's the nature of water to do what it does in the presence of other materials and conditions. Raise the heat and it evaporates, lower it and it freezes. Mix it with dirt and you make mud. Add heat and the mud dries back to dirt in the shape you formed it in.These systems don't need to be designed, they just behave predictably when you subject them to various pressures. Life is also an emergent property. Take away any of the conditions and materials necessary for a specific life form to support life, and it dies. Not enough oxygen, an imbalance in electrolytes, improper blood flow/containment, anything that jeopardizes one of the myriad systems within our body can threaten our life cycle. Btw, it's one thing to talk about a creator who designed everything, and another to mention Intelligent Design. ID is specifically the movement fostered by creationists to teach religion in public schools. If you keep calling it that, you're going to get some automatic pushback on political grounds. The US, at least, separates Church and State.

We're much more enlightened than humans a thousand years ago. How far do we need to go in your lifetime before you think we're doing it right? There's a lot more cooperation than there was a thousand years ago. One of the definitions of nice is being agreeable, so I think we're improving there as well. It's hard to imagine that. Are you talking about taking our minds and putting them in a machine or something? If you ever figure out what "it" is, this superior-to-biology approach that makes us nicer and more enlightened, you should write it down. I still don't get it, or why it has anything to do with hunting mountain lions. Again, it sounds like you have this nebulous hate for human society, but you're also down on all biological systems as well, and don't think the whole world works right. But you really don't know how you'd change it or fix it or adapt to it. From someone who is trying to reduce the stress and brain damage in his own life, I think this is an unhealthy rant. It's like claiming you won't be happy until all the green M&Ms are destroyed, or that you'll never use your telescope again until NASA moves an asteroid in another solar system. If you thought the other way, that humans are too technological, you could join the Amish and live without electricity. But you want something only possible in the future, if at all, and you're annoyed we don't already have it, but can't tell us what it is. How would you go about making your criticism constructive and productive? How does it relate to hunting?

Yes, discussion.

I think this is the kind of research that ends in tragic brake failure, or a mysterious and fatal fall down the stairs.

The OP postulates that thoughts start outside the box, and may possibly be placed inside if desired. Perhaps the speculators have spectacularly bad aim. Or all their ideas are circular, and won't fit in a cube.

Are you saying that a Mexican drug lord can build a poorly lit and ventilated, one-off tunnel that he can escape prison from, whereas if he were white he would have built it to better standards? That makes no sense. Is this just a racist dig? I don't get it. Why would white prisoners be able to get all that stuff? Isn't the whole point that the Mexican drug lord was wealthy enough to get all that equipment smuggled in? That spanky feeling you have is probably just the aftershocks of a joke that fell on its face.

Not THAT one, that's where I keep my hope fireworks!

Check out this visualization of all the known space debris and their orbits, based on Space Track data from the US military. Satellites are in there too.

Aren't all thoughts already in a box?

Do you know the concept of emergence? That many small, seemingly unrelated things and conditions can all come together, and something much greater emerges? Fire and lightning are emergent events. The right materials and conditions and they happen, every time. Life is like that too. What if nature is a big part of all the little pieces that come together to make something magnificent, like life? Can you share a bit of your vision of what we might be moving on to after we leave nature behind? Is it our destiny to be nice? How much beyond nature do you want to develop? Where do you draw the line between you and nature? You can stop killing animals for food, but not plants. Getting rid of all the bacteria (ack, nature!) would be at the other end of the scale, you probably wouldn't survive without it, so you absolutely have to have SOME nature. Where is the line drawn? Keep the bacteria, eat the plants, let the animals deal with themselves, avoid the rest of nature whenever possible, is that going to make you think we're doing it right?

You should use a single bored, davidelkins.

Shrugging with 10 foot long arms is pretty ornery. If the elbows aren't close to the halfway point, they'd have to.

If it gets in the lungs, it can be fatal.

OK. I get that. Just be careful that your focus may be too broad. Problems seem insurmountable until we break them down to doable steps, with clear resolutions. Specific actions are what will help most here, like banning the hunting of female mountain lions. Does it solve the problem outright? No, but it's a nudge in the right direction. Enough nudges gets the job done, and may even help us deal with the changes more efficiently. But if you insist that all hunting must cease to make things right in your book, then you're doomed to fail, back to facing that insurmountable problem with no solution. I hate to see you do that to yourself, is all. Nudge something tomorrow, see how it feels.

Buy a dog if you don't have one. Call me if he starts barking for no reason.

I don't want to go off-topic here too much, but I wanted to point out this example of what I meant earlier. You've declared what we're doing (or what nature is doing) is WRONG. You've declared further that our methodology, "the way this world works", is also WRONG. You claim we need to "develop out of this mess" as quickly as possible. You don't say what is RIGHT, which leads us to assume it must be the opposite of what we're doing now. This means changing just about everything about us, the way we live, where we live, what we eat. And you give us no boundaries or goals to reach, just this nebulous, impractical, development out of a false dilemma. Using your argument, we have no way to satisfy what YOU think is RIGHT. I've seen this all my life. You're a well-meaning person with a dream for mankind, but you've either over-defined what needs to happen to the point where it will never happen, or you haven't defined RIGHT at all, so you can just keep shifting the goalposts no matter how much good mankind can achieve. The mountain lions need a better plan from you.

I didn't see any mention of how far inland the eastbound tidal wave will travel, just that it will be 700 miles wide. Not to be too doom and gloom here, but could a major quake in the Pacific Northwest like this trigger the Yellowstone supervolano?

If I don't need religion for morality, I don't see why I need it emotionally. Emotions have their place, and it's almost never when I need to be rational. I used to be what some would call religious, but it never helped me emotionally, and always hindered me rationally. I think this boils down, for me at least, to a possibility of an afterlife, a continuation of my consciousness after my body stops supporting the emergence of life. Is there a chance, without jumping through the "Hoops of Sin", that after my brain stops supporting thought, that I'll become aware again, this consciousness in another vessel? Or no vessel, just pure thought? In a case like that, do I need religion, or just a consciousness that can figure out life in a different body?

To get back to the OP, maybe reconciliation isn't the best option. The OP claims that he's disinclined to relinquish his religion, but feels a need to be more rational. This sounds a bit like staying in a bad marriage, hoping something will change, or doing it for the kids. If religion isn't productive, and science is, reconciling a love for both may be a bad thing.

You are misinterpreting what people are replying with. We ask for substance, we ask for evidence to support your idea, and you claim we're "dismissing ideas that [we don't] understand without making a genuine attempt to do so". You make up definitions for words we know by other meanings, and when we ask for more clarity, you once again point to your idea to substantiate itself. Now you're even quoting your past posts, which is just about the worst thing you can do when nobody understood it in the first place. The questions you haven't answered all revolve around supportive evidence and experimental mechanisms. How do we test this? What can you point to as something which verifies what you're saying, other than you just claiming it? And how in blazes are we supposed to make a genuine attempt to understand your idea in a scientific sense when you are redefining science, and then criticizing us for asking why?

We don't do very well with ideas that don't have a lot of science in them. You're assuming you can take a trip through a black hole, and from what we know right now, that's very unlikely. You mention traveling to another dimension. You can't travel to a dimension, a dimension is like length, width, height, time, they give perspective to each other. They aren't other universes. Much of what you're stating is very speculative, and much of it is opinion. We try to stick to concepts we have supportive evidence for. You make a lot of assumptions that aren't necessarily true, yet you phrase them as if they are ("As we know,..."). So we can discuss this, but you're going to get a lot of criticism on the mistakes in science, and the claims you've made but have no evidence for. Do you still want to discuss this?

I can only stomach so much self-loathing. This "man-is-unnatural" argument is lazy and self-fulfilling. With this thinking, no amount of good works or ethical treatment is EVER going to be enough. Frankly, I think arguments like this are horrible. If you think something is wrong, fix it. Why walk around hating yourself based on criteria you've purposely placed out of your own reach?