Fred56

Aren't you implying that all creation mythology is based on delusional thinking?

What you need to be able to measure is the entropy of any wiki, or node in the heirarchy, or whatever. It's a library where the books aren't static copies, but there's a record, or audit, of changes. Entropy = change, so higher entropy I guess is a measure of how contentious any article is. Expectation comes into it too, or uncertainty.

Anyone want to give me an opinion on whether I should study Philosophy or Anthropology towards a Phy/Math qual? (I mean based on what you may have seen of any of the drek I've left behind here at'forum...)

Ahem. I'm sorry but I can't see how you got to this conclusion from this premise: Why the assumption that the father's going to cave in because he can see his son being tortured (presumably for real)?

Play it again, Sam It's a challenge, that an organism must meet at all costs... Evolution's matriculation Life, (all forms of life), is the derivative of the evolutionary function. Each organism has only the evolved set of "properties" of life (its phenotype), to "deal with" the current (instantaneous) conditions, to face the challenges of finding a source of food, and being able to exploit it. To take the necessary risks of choosing: to expend energy chasing something, or conserve energy and wait for it to come to you. All organisms are an integral of this same function. Life "presents itself to" the surface it creates (cell walls, etc), between the world's flow (source) of energy, and it's dissipation (entropy) by clinging to the surface tension it creates on that surface. The function is complex. Life is a supervention of its own ergodic space. What does the evolutionary function look like? A complex or complected/symplected 'curve' or topology? Where are the vectors 'measured'? Is the entropy commuted by quantum chaos?

Can you explain this term? Without using QCD as an example?

Checkaroony. So at least two of us agree that the Judaeo-Christian mythology was borrowed from the East. My point being the Genesis account' date=' supposedly can be "fitted" more closely to the current [b']ideas[/b] of planetary and solar system formation, and cosmology, and even the appearance of life (all you need to do, really, is convert or transfer the terminology to a symbolic form that is a more 'modern' idiom). Though the Biblical account as a "compressed" or "concise" algebra is pretty 'lossy'. But it differs significantly from its Eastern parent.

--Nature 450, 402-406 (15 November 2007) | doi:10.1038/nature06230; Received 10 April 2007; Accepted 4 September 2007 -- (see) Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 206804 (2007).

You won't be in the same place, though --because the surface of the planet is in constant motion. Also you would burn up resources walking around --you can't "walk backwards".

Well, Genesis says something about a formless 'void' becoming a planet. Then the solar system is meant to have formed from a cloud of gas and dust, f'rinstance.

Crying, or mewling as in cats and dogs, and most mammals, is innate behaviour. As in, it's fully-functional at birth. A newborn marsupial, like the kangaroo, has to travel some distance to get to its mother's teat; this goal-driven innate function that all newborn kangaroos have, when they're still less than 1/2 in. long, is, like, the first step on the next part of its life, and all mammals appear to be born like this, with a behaviour or innate learning, aimed squarely at survival.

How does using an "intelligent" Machine not require our worldview? Robots don't know what to do unless we tell them. Once they've "got the idea", where does our worldview disconnect, at which point of The Process? Do we leave them to it and show no further interest, even if one of them knocks on the door and wants to tell us something?

How did it make you feel?

Ah, who is refering to which ability or past activity, here though?

Sure, but protecting the profits of pharmaceuticals corporations should be their problem, why is it yours? Or is it a case of a clash of technology, so eventually some new balance between protecting business interests and art IP has to find some new level of exchange. What the point I was aiming at, wasn't so much how it's illegal and why, but what exactly the solution to the apparent ease with which modern tech. allows the "ripping-off" in the first place. Times have changed since the days of the printing press, which arguably is where the notion of ownership of documents or photographs or letters extends to. So the whole entertainment industry and the idea of copy right, i.e. to ownership of of an original version, to which the notion, especially of any copies of this first, original 'copy', are made. Its intended meaning in law extends to this right to copy, to make copies. Unfortunately, this is extremely simple nowadays (it wasn't when printing presses, or even writing tablets were invented), but it used to be much harder, a lot more effort. Today, you could probably scan Michaelangelo's David and reproduce an exact man-size replica for the patio. (I'm not kidding)

Is this where it isn't meant to be going?

Ah hah, yes, of course, how obvious. Intention, and intent to commit an act. So let's say the act is about as difficult as making a phone call, or getting a computer in the Bahamas to make a phone call. In other words, sure, it was a good idea back when books cost money to publish (still does), whole factories of people. Now you can have a library and you don't need to "put" it anywhere, because it's already there.

"Iuvenes dum dumus": q. What did the philosophy student say to the medical student? a. "I'm sic." Scientists think Philosophers think about things that aren't interesting. Philosophers think about why Scientists think that their science is 'interesting'.

IMO absolutely nothing to do with current materials science and tech. I haven't found any nanomechanics or QM or spintronic or quantum-dot paper that talk about any loops except for current loops. My understanding is it's all higher-dimensional topology, whatever that is. I understand imaginary surfaces, though, and signals, which involve "real" electrons, photons, and so on.

Understand what? That I have an illegal copy? So what? Let's say I'm good at handling any feeling of remorse for my shameful act of ripping some artist off. I make myself feel a lot better when I sell the "original" for $10mil to some rich billionaire (who lives in the Bahamas). IOW how many people do you seriously think are so weighed down by guilt that they would never, ever abuse copyright? Or who never break the "law"? The laws of copyright are becoming increasingly meaningless in today's world. So what should the governments of the world do? What do you think they can do? Why do you believe an inconsequential copyright law is the start and end of the issue?

It's a set of instructions (a method), which should work, according to what we understand. If he followed the instructions, the universe and time would disappear. I'll jump to the conclusion here that you've never read anything about this particular kind of "thought experiment" before.

What about the illegal copy of this work that I have? Or other people have? What's to stop me copying some original artwork or document that you claim exclusive ownership to? What if I go to some art gallery and secretly photograph some artwork? Or send my robot (who looks exactly like an ordinary person, but has the ability to make a holographic 'copy'). I use what the robot brings back or transmits from the art gallery, to make an exact likeness of the original. Who owns it? OK, so there's this law says I'm "not allowed" to do it. But what's stopping me, apart from feelings of guilt, but let's say I overlook them because there's lots of financial profit to look forward to?

You mean, all of this? (slightly expanded): "There was no 'time' before the Big Bang, there was no 'before', either. The "Big Bang" wasn't an "explosion" like a bomb going off in empty space, because there was no 'empty space'. There was absolutely nothing (something we have to give a label, because we're simply unable to conceive 'nothing' -it has to be "something" so we can 'picture' it). There was no 'where', or 'how' either. There's some radiation "out there" (the CMB), which we can't explain other than as the remnant of the condensation of lots of energy into mass, the formation of nucleons and hydrogen atoms, some helium, and a bit of antimatter. These all released lots of photons of energy, which we see as a very "stretched out" form of radiation because the cosmos has been expanding for ~15b yrs." [/me] Sure, all you have to do is reverse the expansion by reversing the direction of time (entropy), and winding the clock back. Wait for ~15b years, and everything should go back to "where" it was before, eventually disappearing (along with time and everything else), up its own spout; and Bob's your uncle (or auntie, as the case may be). Alternatively, you could try a "short-cut" by going to the nearest black hole (the one at the galactic centre should do the job), and flying your spaceship past the event horizon; you will observe the universe shrink to the size of roughly a dinner-plate, and eventually a small dot, just about when the tidal forces from the singularity rip you and your spaceship apart, and time stops altogether. Piece of cake.

Certainly language is something we humans need (we developed this ability to use our "sound-making" into something more abstract than grunts and yelps, perhaps). Possibly because it meant we could co-operate better. By the time most of us are 3yrs old we have acquired a vocabulary of >10k words, with distinct semantics. How is this achieved? We're still looking at this (rapid) process and how a brain does it. But that's a bit OTT, I guess. P.S. The "dodgy" reference was a throw-away...