ydoaPs

What about it?

What is "the burden of life"?

This isn't metaphysics. This isn't even philosophy. It's weapons grade bs. No, there's not. You can claim whatever you want in pop books. Neurosurgeons are neither neurobiologists/neuropsychologists nor are they philosophers. What they say on the matter is irrelevant. It's like trusting your car mechanic to tell you he has proof that one of the major ideas in engineering is wrong. Why is it that anytime someone wants to pawn off unadulterated nonsense as respectable they add "metaphysics" to it? This has nothing to do with metaphysics.

It's really not. See, people can easily conceive of inconsistent systems. That means they can conceive of that which is logically impossible. All other modalities are built on logical possibility. Nothing which is logically impossible is metaphysically possible. We do? What do you mean by "free will"? Dollars to donuts, your idea of free will is metaphysically confused at best and logically impossible at worst. How does it exclude nonorganic things from having free will in principle? After all, your OP claims that anything which is conceivable is possible. We can conceive of robots with free will. Aren't you, then, committed to allowing the possibility of robots with free will? Hint: the answer is 'yes'.

This then, comes down to whether or not momentum is conserved in all interactions, or just in a closed system.

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When Moontanman calls you out on your alien conspiracy stuff being complete nonsense, you should probably listen.

That's actually something which could in principle have an exact formula, but would be far too unwieldy for practical use. There are just too many variables. You would have to have terms for humidity of the air, how moist the mixture already was, how dense the mixture is, etc. That there are formulas that give approximate answers defeats your point.

There's also the "by removing two deeply rooted principles of physics: locality and unitarity" bit. If your exhaustive and mutually exclusive probabilities don't add to 1, you've broken something.

The first is a big "GOOD!" since that's the adult way of looking at punishment (rehabilitation, not retribution) and the second is false. If the praise makes it more likely that the praiseworthy behavior is exemplified again, why "no more deserving"?

As a moderator, I can't say one way or the other. As the resident philosopher, I'll tell you that the soul is a religious concept distinct from almost every other view of the self. We're not talking about a self in general, but in a non-spatiotemporal, interacting soul completely distinct from the brain. I'll have to give it to you, that was a good objection. It really did take me a second. At first glance, that's a plausible objection which would leave the possibility open until the entirety of the human brain has been modeled down to the molecule. At first. Then one stops and thinks enough to see that your situation is two ions interacting with each other, not interacting with a soul. Of course, you could have them be isolated ions, but that means conservation of momentum is still violated; it's just violated twice with a net effect of null.

So, my first runthrough of this idea went like this: 1)An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion unless a force acts upon it. 2)The force exerted on an object is equal in magnitude and direction to its time rate of change of momentum. 3)When one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction upon the first object. Now, the others come from what "soul" means and from basic neurobiology. Souls have not only have no spatial extent (what's the volume of your soul?), but also have no spatial location. "But my soul is in my body!" Oh? Where? Does it hide in the pineal gland? How about your left pinky toe? Souls can make decisions. That is, the 'you' who has free will is your soul. You are not just a passive observer to your body. Souls are immaterial. They're not made of anything. Whenever there is a choice, there is brain activity. If you choose to move your right thumb, there are ions that move around in your brain which eventually make your thumb move. This is a fact. And a fact about momentum: since momentum is an inherently spatiotemporal thing, things without spatial location cannot have momentum. Ok, back to the argument. 1)An object at rest stays at rest and an object in uniform motion stays in uniform motion unless a force acts upon it. 2)The force exerted on an object is equal in magnitude and direction to its time rate of change of momentum. 3)When one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction upon the first object. 4)Things without spatial location cannot have momentum. 5)Human decisions involve objects moving. Ok, there are the premises. Let's see what we get! 6)Assume a non-spatiotemporal soul exists and has volitional control. (assumed premise) 7)Then the soul exerts a force on ions in the brain causing them to move. (from 5 and 6) 8)The ions, then, exert an equal force on the soul. (from 7 and 3) 9)Since a force is exerted on the soul, its momentum changes equally. (from 8 and 2) 10)The soul has momentum. (from 9) 11)The soul is not spatio-temporally located. (from 6) 12)The soul cannot have momentum (from 4 and 6) 13) CONTRADICTION (10 and 12) 14)Therefore, there exists no non-spatiotemporally located soul with volitional control. Then, it was brought to my attention that some might object that souls aren't the types of things on which forces can act. So, take 2: 1)Momentum is always conserved. 2)An object at rest stays at rest and an object in uniform motion stays in uniform motion unless a force acts upon it. 3)The force exerted on an object is equal in magnitude and direction to its time rate of change of momentum. 4)When one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction upon the first object. 5)Any human decision involves movement. 6)Souls are not the types of things which can have forces acting on them. 7)Assume a non-spatiotemporal soul exists and has volitional control. 8)Then the soul exerts a force on ions in the brain causing them to move. 9)There is a change in the momentum of the ions in the brain. 10)There is no corresponding change in momentum in the soul. 11)Momentum is not conserved. 13)CONTRADICTION 14)Therefore, there exists no non-spatiotemporally located soul with volitional control.

Smallest something can be? IIRC, space isn't quantized.

Depending on the required precision, one can always sketch the graph real quick and make an estimate.

Why?

There's a difference between Reductio Ad Absurdum and Indirect Proof. The former shows an absurd result while the latter shows an impossible result. Russel's Paradox (there's a reason I named the set 'R' ) is a case of the later and it acts as a counterexample to the general principle. This principle actually has a name. Despite having been used as early as Descartes, it has come to be called 'Hume's Law'. Indeed. This sort of thinking is one of the foundations of crackpottery. They sincerely think that since they can imagine their perpetual motion device working that it simply must work. Just think of how many times you've heard people proclaim that they don't need math because they "understand" reality with their idea.

The title is a common view among crackpots. They often think that the ability to imagine something means that the universe might actually be that way or could have been that way were things differently. To use philosophy words, they often think that conceivability means epistemic or metaphysical possibility. But, the question is, is that true? To find that out, we need to find something that is conceivable but is impossible. For the first sense of possibility, (how things might actually be), that is incredibly easy. All we have to do is find something that is conceivable but not the case. Have you ever been wrong about something? If you have, you've shown that conceivability does not mean epistemic possibility. The second one is a bit harder, since there's disagreement on the exact requirements of what makes something metaphysically possible, but we do know that for something to be metaphysically possible, it must also be logically possible. That is, were things different, an accurate description of the universe still wouldn't entail a contradiction. So, we can knock this out by finding something which is conceivable, yet logically impossible. Can we imagine things which are contradictions? You might be tempted to say "No one can imagine a square circle!". But I'd like to talk about one which almost everyone intuitively conceives. People intuitively like to group things. It's how we make sense of the world. We have apples, chairs, etc. All you have to do is put things together and you have a group. In mathematics, we call these kind of groupings 'sets'. The things in these groups are called "members". Any group of members of a set is called a "subset". This does mean that all sets are subsets of themselves, but that's not of interest to us here. What we're interested in is the idea that you can group whatever you want into a set. You can make sets of sets. You can take your set of cats and your set of dogs and put them together into a new set! So, let's take a look at a specific set: the set of all sets which are not members of themselves. The set of all cats is not a member of the set of all cats-it's a set of cats, not of sets! So, it goes in! Likewise, any set consisting of no sets will go in this set of all sets which are not members of themselves. So, we pose a question: Is this set of all sets which are not members of themselves (from here on out, we'll call it 'R') a member of itself? If R is a member of R, then it fails to meet the requirements to be in R, so it isn't a member of R. That's a contradiction, so that's no good. That means R must not be a member of itself. But what happens if R is a member of itself? If R is a member of itself, it meets the requirement to be in R. Since R is the set of ALL sets meeting this requirements, it goes in. Again we have R both being a member of itself and not being a member of itself. So, either way, we get a contradiction. This means something is logically impossible. But we got this result simply from the definitions of sets and members and from the very conceivable idea that you can group whatever you want together. This is a situation in which something is conceivable, but logically impossible. This means it is not the case that whatever you can imagine is possible. Crackpots, take note: the fact that you can imagine something in no way implies that it is possible. It doesn't matter how clear your perpetual motion device/unified theory/God/electric universe is, imagining it doesn't cut the mustard. This is one of the reasons you NEED the math.

That's not true. Once you ask "What do you mean X?", things change. All you have to do is show that one or more of the parts of what it means to be X is not instantiated by anything or is mutually exclusive with another one of the properties. If you want to be able to say anything about what the world would be like if X exists, then "X exists" is falsifiable. How do you think science disproves things like "The Luminiferous Aether exists"?

old hearing aid, fyi

Even ignoring the tenth-thickness of air, by the inverse square law, that would mean the ocean around Japan is boiling.

You know that's a false analogy, right? The story in which a claim appears is not the same as evidence for that claim. A claim is not evidence for itself. The Big Bang has mountains of evidence. Care to try again?

Nope. He was dead wrong about verifiability not being a criterion of demarcation. He was wrong about probabilistic induction. He was also wrong about how falsification works. His main point was wrong. Nope, verifiability is indeed one of the criteria of demarcation along with falsifiability (not Popper's version), predictivness, explanatory power, reproducability. You don't get into the science club by just meeting one of the criteria. Interestingly enough, by your own position (that Popper was right about falsification being the criterion of demarcation), astrology is a part of science. Astrology is falsifiable. In fact, it's been falsified several times. You can even do it yourself with a classroom full of undergrads.

...and he was wrong too (hint: there's more than one criterion) Yes, yes it has. And it still is.

! Moderator Note Off-topic posts about whether or not 'evolution' [read: 'abiogenesis'] must be taken on faith split to a separate thread.

No. Philosophy isn't "anything goes". Sorry, we're not still in the age when people believed their underpants were made of fire. Click the link in my above post. That's typically considered a necessary criteria (if not the only criterion) for truth by philosophers. A smart chap like yourself might even find it agreeable.