Greg Boyles

I believe the model worked at the levels of observational precision at the time. But as observational pecision improved through the ages the earth centred model no longer provided accurate predictions of planetry movement. Hence the drive to find a new model that worked better. The fact that the earth can be regarded as flat, for convenience, for very local events does not make the flat earth theory in any way valid.

Possibly, but then again organisms that show a recognizeable (to us) fear of death must be as conscious and self aware even if they lack the same level of conitive skills as us. A lack of consciousness and self awareness would mean that an entity has no concern about its own destruction, e.g. one of our robots. Consciousness is an evolutionary mechanism for self preservation that in turn makes it more likely that an organism passes on its genes to the next generation. Therefore surely in is inconceivable that evolution would bring about higher animals with little or no consciousness. Perhaps we need to distinguish between lower and higher animals. With lower animals like insects flooding the environment with large numbers is as important or more important than a intense drive for self preservation. But with hgher animals, and their generally higher resource requirements, flooding the environment with large numbers (on the same scale as insects) is not ecologically possible. Then an intense drive for self preservation becomes more important, hence consciousness and self awareness. Perhaps there is a base level of consciousness that all higher animals possess but cognitive skills refine that conciousness to a higher level. Would make sense in terms of evolution. The higher you are in the food chain the fewer individuals and the more important (in terms of evolution) one individual is.

Why does the probability of mass warping spacetime offend your sensibilities so severely???? You sound much like the members of the modern 'Flat Earth Society'who still believe that the Earth is flat beyond all rationality and in their face evidence.

We already tap energy from gravity - hydroelectrcity

Granted but they are not classified in the same kingdom.

That is another problem. Is conscious totally seperate and distinct from cognitive skills or are they linked? If seperate how the hell do you design tests that are not purely testing cognitive skills? The mirror test in my view is a test of cognitive skills, i.e. the ape on the other side of the glass does everything I do therefore it must be me.

Religion has nothing to do with a species being conscious, but it has a great deal to do with people's attitudes towards other species and whether or not they believe them to be conscious. Not many of us these daya are religious but we still bare some of the traditional christian attitudes concerning the dominant position of mankind in nature and the subordinate position of all other species. I specifically meant various forms of language (verbal, body, symbolic,.....) not just our verbal language. For example there is a dog in one of the scandinavian countries that has a huge 'vocabularly' based on digrams of various objects that she can recognize as specific objects that the owner wants her to fetch. Not photos but symbolic diagrams.

IT merely suggests an alternative means of evolution of eukaryotes, i.e. archae engulfing a prokaryote which becomes the mitochondria of a eukaryote, but provides no evidence for how this could have happened. Apparently to account for the fact that archae and eukaryotes are more closely related than they are to prokaryotes. Interesting but.....

I don't think the assumption that other creatures are not conscious like us is made by scientists generally speaking. It is usually made by non-scientists and is no doubt a christian hangup that is still within most people even if they are not overtly religious.

Without reading the paper I find it difficult to understand how they would account for such a fundamental difference between cell membrane structure. As I ubderstand it all Archae have etherlipid membranes and all prokaryotes and eukaryotes have phospholipid membranes. Etherlipids because they are more stable in extreme environmental niches where the archae are always found.

I am not aware of any theories that involve archae forming symbiotic relationships with bacteria to form eukaryotes. As far as I am aware the theory only ever refered to prokaryotes doing this. Remember that archae have ether lipids forming their cell membranes but both eukarytotes and prokaryotes have phospholipids forming their cell and organelle membranes.

This is the delimma isn't it. Brain scientists have not been able to give a precise definition of consciousness and there are therefore no precise tests for it. To a large extent our decision on whether an organism is consciousness or not is based on our perception of and ability to communicate through language (verbal, body, symbolic) with that other species. But scientists have not come up with suitable shared language for most species, we cannot communicate with them in any meaningful way and therefore we inevitably conclude that those species are not conscious. There fore I repeat that any test will likely involve a series of different tests that yields a score of consciousness.

Then I will leave both of you to your delusion of grandeur.

I think you need to clearly delineate consciousness/self awareness from autonomic reaction to environmental stimuli. I mean the advanced Japanese androids and robots react to environmental stimuli in ways more/equally? than an ameoba does. But no one would argue that those androids are conscious and self aware. Consciousness requires an inner life and inner dialog regardless of whether or not we are responding to external stimuli. Can you seriously say that an ameoba has an inner life and an inner dialog? What about a virus particle? I think some forms of life must score 0 on the consciousness scale. And further.....I would argue that the organism must have some form of central nervous system to score above zero on the scale. Clearly it is not going to be enough. An ameoba can do that - go left or right if there is a barrier in front of it. Clearly it is going to involve the language as well. We can give a dog instructions and we can tell from its reponse that it has understood the abstract verbal instruction and is able to convert our language to behaviour that we are seeking. From that we infer that the dog is self aware and conscious. We can do the same with whales and dolphins and many other higher species. I guess the level of sophistaction of the verbal commands MIGHT be a measure of the level of consciousness. Or perhaps we can give the subject organism a series of choices of food or what ever. If each seperate individual make a consistent choice of one particular food(s) then we can infer that it is conscious and self aware. In the end it is going to be determined by total cummulative results of a variety of tests tailored for the the species. . . . . Perhaps consciousness is a light switch and a certain threshold of central nervous system sophistication.

If Anilkumar theory and the mathematics behind it (is there actually any?) predict the countless experimental results that GR has predicted, and there is a consensus from the physics community that his theory is a valid replacement for GR........then I will take it seriously. Until then I regard Anilkumar as a crack pot.

That's where we differ, because I accept that spacetime is likely to be remeniscent of an elastic fabric and that its geometry can be altered in a way remeniscent of an elastic fabric being puckered by a heavy weight. I think we are flogging a dead horse with this guy folks. We are no more likely to convince him of GR than Copernicus was of convincing the catholic church that the earth orbited the sun. It is an exercise in futility. Let him amuse himself with his self delusions and let us close off this thread.

Are you paying attention Cuthber! Hence my suggestion to up the ammonia concentration and increase the heat! For interest's sake....are you a qualified chemist John Cuthber?

Was replying to the OP. Merely pointing out that archaebacteria are as close as we are likely to get to a seperately evolved lifeform on planet earth. It probably not clear whether it is truly the case given that both use DNA as their genetic medium but I suppose it would also depend on how different the triplicate codes are between archaebacteria and the other kingdoms.

This is pretty close to be a seperately evolved form of life on planet Earth.

I think you have missed the point. Perhaps you do not have an in depth understanding for example of how viruses infect us. It may be the case that they are not always capable of gaining access to our bodies due to differences in antigenicity of our cells, their toxins do not effect us as badly due differences in our biochemistry from that of their normal hosts or that our immune system is better able to destroy them than that of their normal hosts. Viruses generally infect their host cells by first binding with fairly specific proteins embeded in the cell membrane. The specificity can vary substantially from genus or species specific to order or family specific. I suppose the most obvious example is influenza which severely effects both birds and mammals, but not reptiles and amphibians. Mammals and birds are more closely related than bird and reptiles. Another example is foot and mouth disease which only causes severe disease in hoofed animals. It usually causes fairly minor infections in humans and other species I believe. And I believe that most prion diseases are species or genus specific. This is not to say that severe diseases in other species, that currently don't severely effect humans, do not have the potential to adapt to human hosts if there is sufficient interaction between the susceptible species and humans over a long enough period of time. We may be seeing the beginins of this with the Lyssa virus and Hendra virus carried by Australian fruit bats that also cause severe symptoms in horses but that don't seem to be able to be transmitted to humans except under rare and unusual circumstances.

The term 'warping' of spacetime is merely a descriptive analogy anyway. IT is merely a convenient means of allowing laypersons like myself to begin to understand the behaviour of spacetime and light, as described by GR, without understanding the underlying mathematics in detail. To literally believe that spacetime 'warps', in terms of our every day experiences, is rather naive anyway.

Surely it is more likely to be the case that, rather than insects carrying more diseases than rodents, more of the diseases that rodents do carry are likely to also effect us given that we are closer to them on the evolutionary tree than we are to insects.

Well that is a different matter. It is hard to see how consciousness can exist without many layers of complexity, and an amoeba is in the very basement of eukaryotic complexity. I suspect consciousness is better viewed as a spectrum rather than a light switch between humans and the rest of life.

How do you REALLY know that a duck does not have self awareness? Humans and ducks are much further apart on the evolutionary tree and our communincation 'wavelengths' are some what different. So unless you can learn 'duck' communication as we have with whales and dolphins then such an assumption is invalid. Depends what you mean by a deliberate choice. Rockster, my dog, chooses not to eat potato chips with chilli flavouring but he will eat plain or chicken potato chips. That is a deliberate choice exactly the same as we humans make deliberate choices about what foods we will and wont eat.

By the braod based body that serves the same purpose for all science that the medical boards do for medicine in the west. I don't hear you whining and moaning about the 'nazism' of medical boards that determine which GP's are fit and proper to conduct medicine in western countries. If it can work well for GPs etc then it can work well for the broader science community. The only reason that Europe has high population density and growing populations is due to immigration from Africa and other third world countries. Without it Europe's population density and population level would have been declining for the past few decades. Skin colour aside the fact remains that the third world is the major source of unsustainable population growth. So much so that their excess population is spilling over into the west increasing unsustainable consumption there even further. The earth cannot sustain the human race's current consumption level. Please show how it will sustain the entire third world living at western living standards long enough for them to perhaps reduce their fertility. They are suffering and dieing under your failed regime of economic development.......or economic imperilaism for the purpose of self enrichment as many in the third world see it.........why do you think so much or the world, outside America, despise yanks. I want to see their fertility dramatically reduced so that there is less economic fodder available for americans to exploit and perpetuate poverty and suffering for the majority. What you are saying is that your own individual interests are more important than the wider interests of civilisation and its long term stability.