Fred56

--Garret Lisi, (sometime) scientist --Lubos (el Lobos) Moti, (sometime) personality

But there's an obvious moral problem with the mechanist view: A life, especially if it's one of ours, is morally on higher ground than a machine that gets built, supposedly because the builder has a higher moral purpose, or because we are 'constructed' differently to a machine that has only a single limited 'purpose'...

Why are you suggesting that I suggested this? I don't think I suggested any such suggestion...

OK -it doesn't seem like you're asking anything.

Why are you asking?

My 'simple' explanation of how there is no such thing as a negative 'force' is how electrons and protons cancel each other's charge, but they don't disappear or annihilate (even though the charge vector is zero, algebraically speaking). Also, two things traveling in opposite directions don't cancel each other's momentum, which is conserved instead (it 'goes' somewhere)

Morals of building something like a car, then stopping and 'deconstructing' it? (when this happens 'normally' -i.e. a miscarriage, or an induced abortion) m8, u opnd it... I'd say we generally allow different definitions. We can't say that a newly breathing infant is equivalent to a 16yr old, say, and we can't say that the 16yr old is equivalent to the other end, a 66yr old. There's a big difference in experience.

"The benefits of 'friendly' bacteria are well known --but now scientists have found some are liars and cheats. New ...research shows bacteria deceive others for their own benefit but will co-operate for the good of their family. Edinburgh and Nottingham Universities have found bacteria can cheat their way out of responsibility and avoid contributing to group efforts ...while saving their own resources and benefiting from the efforts of the group. But the research, in the journal Nature, shows that bacteria, like animals, tend not to cheat ...[their] relatives. This is believed to be because co-operation with kin helps to promote the family DNA. Scientists believe the research will help ...[with] understanding ...infection spread ...and how diseases evolve." --PA source Nov 2007

Duh, maybe we won't be able 2?

There is a bit of discussion about this topic, particularly relative to the start (and end) of a human life. Is human gestation like building a car (or a kind of machine) that gets put together on an assembly line, from a collection of parts, then eventually, it gets rolled somewhere, then it gets started and driven out the door. Is this a valid kind of analogy, so a life starts once the organism is "ready to drive"? Or does it begin when it starts getting constructed? What's your point of view? Considering humans take a bit longer to get "ready to drive" --they need maybe a decade of 'instruction' from older humans, and they need to take a lot of driving lessons too. It's a toughie, we don't generally come in a ready-made way, like some other "simpler" forms of life, we have lots of learning to do before we're ready for the full monte, or whatever.

I'm not sure you don't actually have this the other way around to how I understand it. Mass has energy, and energy is photons. Force is the name we give to the way mass can transfer its energy, directly if there's a big enough collection (a mass) of it, via inertia, maybe as a coupled oscillator, or as (free) energy, photons again -which is 'emitted' when an electron changes its momentum, or it happens the other way, but a photon is a quantum of exchange, and the force involved is EM. This has been observed with great precision and accuracy, so it's kind of hard to gainsay these days...

I read a critic (I'll now be compelled to find this again -and I have to apologise pre-emptively because my pc is mid-mobo upgrade and I have 3 different 64-bit brand new linux (linuces?) I'm giving a tryout -phew): said that Lisi is mistakenly associating a non-transitive (or associative) group with a F8 sub-group that isn't. So he's whistling in the wrong key, according to this dude (I think I might have followed a link from a news feed). Found it:http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/11/exceptionally-simple-theory-of.html --Luboš Motl P.S. Some (I won't say who) are rumbling away about various aspects of recognition and are waiting for Lisi's book... --ROMRIX slashdot.org

How is it 'distinct' though, since we're being careful here? Let's say that some interval of the real number line is the domain of a function called f: how is this domain of f not itself a function or the range of some function (what the hey, call it f')?

Right. So an electron has mass and momentum due to its mass. A photon doesn't so its momentum has to be explained in terms of its rotating vectors --the electric and magnetic moments which also explain charge-- angular momentum. (Also I think I should review or repair my earlier statement about the 2d surface, and the two rotating vectors. The area would not vary, but instead each vector is meant to change orthogonally, I recall, like sine and cosine, so the 'area' is constant -then it's the frequency or the angular momentum that gets transferred... And I think I can remember reading something once about how an electron doesn't change state instantaneously like I was told at Chem. lectures, but takes a few tenths of a nanosecond, maybe, or does that mean we can pin down a photon's escape to this interval even?)

So here we are, processing the film reel as it unwinds, with our own individual cameras recording their own reels, in the reverse sense, as it were, to the one playing on the screen in front of us. The ideas of sampling, framewise, some input from the world might be replaceable (nowadays) with the idea of a solid-state device, but one that has a 2-level cache, and no really permanent storage (as soon as it's switched off, the data is lost). And reality still 'despools' as we 'spool' the visual world into our individual memories. The sample rate is continuous, but still limited by the ability of the system (the solid-state video camera) to process and encode images, and framing seems to be a natural way to do this, as well as salient image processing to extract features, such as outlines, distance (spatial) processing, and colour information. All these are common features on modern video cameras. They all sound a lot like what happens both inside such a modern electronic device, and our own brain: there is capture (of images -in an integrated matrix, or a surface of receptor elements), there is processing and encoding, and there is multilevel storage and representation (abstraction). Partitioning is also a natural mathematical approach, to analysis of the behaviour of such systems (especially the organic one), and in particular of the way information "moves around", or undergoes changes in momentum, and entropy. Information, in a brain, is maintained by, or in a larger sense is the energy needed to maintain it.

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.” ~ Terry Pratchett

It depends which view you take. Cosmologists refer to energy, so do particle physicists. The thing about energy is that it's something mass (particles or matter-waves) can have (due to inertia, let's say), and it can also be something that is a result of matter and charge changing their own moments, and transferring this change to another bit of charged matter. This 'interaction' occurs only between 'charged' bits of matter, and it carries the (quantised) momentum as a kind of wave-packet, with just 2 components (scalars) that rotate (and it has another spin which is independent of the momentum transferred by the particular change in the electron's --atom's-- quantum energy state --the sum of its quantised moments). Ultimately you are able to describe the whole show in terms of this transfer "function": the photons of individual momentum transfer to other bits of matter (which has inertia). It's all to do with harmonic motion and resonance (and allowed and forbidden states). Energy, spin, momentum and charge, are all conserved quantities, and fundamental measurements we have. Round and around the description goes...

Which means something like: it would take a really long time to think about anything by then (or well before then probably), or store up the required energy to do it...

It's a proportionality between two measurable aspects, but which two... (angular) momentum; wavenumber; frequency; spin; charge? What dimensionality (units)?

This coincides with the development of more structured groups of humans and the development of large-scale agriculture and husbandry. But we will. And we will have pruned the evolutionary tree a fair bit, I suppose.

I'm listening right now to the Beeb story about the new surveillance systems that will be able to passively identify any individual (via cctv image, gait analysis, height), and track them, not just locally, but by keeping a profile, that will eventually give "them" (do I really have to say) a vast profile database of anyone who has ever walked through London say, (or wherever else they plan to deploy this). Guess why they think they need it. I guess we all just smile and wave, folks...

Well, if it's true that a function can't be described as having a continuous domain, you have to describe a "connected set" instead is just saying "set terminology is how you 'have' to say it". Which is just being precious with language. Otherwise how can any function have the output (i.e. a function) of something as an input; otherwise is the word "continuous" suddenly only useful in a certain sense, or somesuch (completely meaningless) thing? Consideration: it is more precise to say that the function (i.e. the range) is continuous over a domain, but again, this doesn't mean you can't say that the domain is too, and, there's the obvious objection to "you can't call the domain of a function continuous", that a domain can be, as stated, the range of a function. Especially the function of numbers, Euler's one which is it's own derivative, for a start.

So who's following any recent stuff about condensed matter and radio astronomy these days? All the white dwarf and AGN surveys?

K What's the story with how a lot of earlier Renaissance thought, if you look at some of it, seems to look a lot like what cosmologists are saying too, if you substitute the religious terminology with the cosmological, Spinoza's thinking, for example, seems to be trying to define what the relationship is between the universe and us, if you ignore the conclusions (and substitute the cosmos for God). So he first tries to define both? I think he does an ok job, for his day, and some of it seems kind of prescient. Descartes couldn't get beyond a certain grasp of "imagery" or of experience, and how to conceive of it. (and how come there are 42 'axioms' in Ethics or "on the shore", in the poem)?

Maybe he's referring to our congruence on topics such as those discussed in this here forum, which is a tad convoluted, but maybe he's also a convoluted personality type...