Delta1212

The topic, for all the misunderstanding of the subject, is still pretty clearly about biological evolution.

Being in a different environment certainly changes the selection pressures operating on a population, but going into space isn't evidence that evolution is happening. Evolution would be taking place whether we were flying to Mars or stuck living in mud huts. You listed a bunch of examples of human progress, but human progress and human evolution aren't the same thing and don't require one another to exist.

You can certainly divide people into groups based on genetics, but where precisely those lines are drawn is fairly arbitrary and any significance assigned to them is socially constructed.

The problem is that our brains are very good at creating a particular conception of the universe, but that conception is heavily rooted in this narrow band of the universal scale. Our brains understand how things work at certain sizes, certain speeds, and certain energy levels, but when you venture outside those bounds, you start encountering things that our brains weren't really developed to intuit because they never had to deal with them in any meaningful way during the course of human history. Imagine trying to describe a liquid to someone who has only ever encountered solids. You might draw an analogy with the way sand sort of flows, but if such a person attempts to imagine what the ocean looks like, they're going to wind up picturing a desert of semi-transparent blue sand. There's nothing in their experience that will allow them to picture the ocean as it actually is, only very rough approximations that will be very off in some respect. And it's even worse trying to picture an electron because the very things we use to sense the world around us: light, vibration, temperature, etc, all behave differently on the scale of an electron. So it's like someone who has never seen liquids trying to imagine what an ocean would look like to a blind person. There's nothing wrong with trying to do it, and it's philosophically interesting, but don't expect to come up with an answer that is both accurate and satisfying.

Ah, I see. I understood (and was familiar with) the two hypotheses, but hadn't seen the connection you were making between them.

Since ethnicity is a social and not a biological property, whether a given percentage of a person's genetic material descending from a particular population is relevant to their racial or ethnic identity depends entirely on whether people think having that genetic material is relevant or not.

That doesn't really have anything to do with biological evolution, though.

Unless we start cloning ourselves as our exclusive means of reproduction, and nobody ever dies without a clone made from their DNA replacing them, then evolution is still taking place. Well, or if we stop reproducing altogether and just die out. I suppose we'd stop evolving then, too.

This is not technically true. All massless particles travel at c and, as I alluded to earlier, gravity does as well. We first came across c through studying light, which is why it's called the speed of light, but that's not the last place we've encountered it. They are not the same thing.

It does, actually. Because there is no difference between starlight and laser light, if you were to travel to one of those stars and point your laser in our direction, that laser would wind up curving around the sun. That curvature must be introduced by a curvature in the geometry of the space that the light is traveling through.

It becomes maladaptive at the point where fewer children ultimately survive to reproduce. This number will vary between species based on how much care the parent is capable of providing overall, and how much care the offspring require to have a reasonable chance of survival. I'm not really clear on how this relates to homosexuality, however.

The issue here is that in many cases we can, and actually do, use a lot more of this stuff that seems like weird hypothetical fantasy than most people realize. The average person may not be able to see and touch this stuff during the course of the day, but that doesn't mean no one is using it. For instance, and this is a common example, we have GPS satellites and time dilation. I've seen this cited a lot, and it's a good citation, but I know that because it gets used so frequently, a lot of people mention it without really giving an understandable explanation for what is going on and why the two actually relate other than insisting that they do. GPS satellites work using very, very precise timing. If you send a signal from a satellite to a car's GPS and back again, and you know exactly how fast that signal is travelling, you can time it, see how long it takes, and you will then know how far away that car is from the GPS satellite. If you do this with a number of GPS satellites in different locations, you'll be able to determine what point on the earth is 5 miles from satellite A, 10 miltes from satellite B and 17 miles from satellite C. However, because the signal is traveling very fast, and the distances are, in comparison to cosmic scales, very small, the timers that the satellites use need to be extremely precise. If the time you measure is off by 1/100th of a second, your location is going to be off by close to 2,000 miles. That's not a very accurate positioning system. That means that the satellite clocks have to be very precisely calibrated on scales that, in most human contexts, would be meaningless and certainly would otherwise be completely imperceptible. I can't tell the difference between 1 second and 1.01 seconds, but it makes a huge difference to a GPS satellite. Now, a GPS satellite needs two things to stay in orbit. It needs to maintain a specific height and a specific speed. Special Relativity predicts that an object moving at the speed of the satellite will experience time at a very, very slightly slower rate than if it wasn't moving. Not enough that a human being would even come close to noticing it, but enough to make a big difference to the satellite. It also predicts that, because the gravity field is stronger at the surface of the Earth, we will experience time at a slower rate than something farther away from the surface, so the satellite's clock will run slightly faster than it would otherwise. So you have one affect causing the satellite to run fast and another causing it to run slow. Now, the important thing to realize here is that they don't change the rate of the satellite's clock by the same amount, which means that there is still a difference between the rate of a clock running on a satellite in orbit and a stationary clock located on the ground. Now, I've heard some arguments that there could be numerous reasons for this right on down to simple mechanical issues or design flaws. The problem there is that it would be a remarkable coincidence that every clock loaded onto a satellite experience the exact same failure, by the exact same amount, in the exact same direction every time it was shot into space, and that that error coincidentally coincided exactly with the difference in run times predicted by relativity when the effects of time dilation are taken into account. Now, whether you describe time as slowing down, or objects at high speeds taking more energy to move, or whatever your explanation for why this effect is happening, it doesn't change the fact that it has been observed happening and that there are situations where we need to take it into account in order to get things to work. It's also important to recognize that how you describe the reasons for the effect doesn't really change the fundamentals of relativity, because it is a description of behavior, and the behaviors it predicts have been tested and confirmed. It doesn't require that you believe that time is another spatial dimension that you're traveling through and that you slow down in that dimension as your speed increases in others, or whatever other analogy you prefer, but it does demonstrate that any measurement of time (be it subjective experience, decay rate, the ticking of a clock, whatever) is highly dependent upon relative speed. Now, does this relate to higher dimensions? In some sense, yes. When Einstein formulated relativity, we didn't have GPS satellites. Many aspects of the theory didn't become testable until later on, and didn't become useful until even further on than that. We don't yet have the mechanisms available to thoroughly prove or disprove the existence of higher dimensions. Based on how they are formulated, we certainly wouldn't be expected to notice them in our daily lives. Eventually, we'll reach a point where we can adequately test for them, and if they're there, we'll probably find some case where we'll need to work around them when our technology starts bumping into them, the way it has with relativity. If we reach the point where we should be bumping into them and we don't, then we'll do what we've done with most theories that have cropped up throughout history and discard it in favor of something that holds up to what we actually experience. The key here is to draw a distinction between things that we've already measured, and things that are possible explanations or consequences of what we know. In the former case, it's certainly true that these things happen, even if it seems counter-intuitive. In the latter case, these things may be true, but we don't know yet. We can't rule them out, which makes dismissing them because they seem weird a less than fruitful idea if they bring something to the table, but they should be treated as an avenue of investigation rather than an accepted fact.

Siblings are 0-100% "you" but tend to be very close to the average of 50%. Offspring are 50% of "you". Essentially, in terms of who to prioritize saving, offspring are the new car and siblings are what's behind door number 2.

Time isn't a dimension of space, it's a dimension of spacetime. It's a temporal dimension and shouldn't be thought of as behaving the same exact way as a spacial dimension. It's good to be incredulous and it definitely helps to form a better understand a subject if you continuously question parts of a subject that don't make sense to you until you figure out either how they work or why exactly they're broken. I would raise two points to keep in mind, however. First, day to day experience is a very bad predictor of how things actually work on levels that we don't experience day to day, and since much of our instinct and intuition about how the world works on a fundamental level were build from experiences rooted entirely in a narrow band of universal experience in terms of speeds, sizes and energies, they're not necessarily going to operate very well when we start probing elements outside of that band (i.e. very small things, very fast things, very hot things, and very cold things). It's important to remain skeptical if you want to understand things, but it's equally important to remain open to the idea that things which don't seem to make sense might nevertheless be true. Second, and possibly more important, is the fact that much of the "conceptual" element of physics is couched in analogies and language that is either imprecise or precisely means something very different than it does in a normal context because we haven't had enough experience with a lot of the concepts being described for us to have developed a day-to-day vocabulary capable of properly describing them. Imagine a zookeeper trying to describe an elephant to someone who has never seen an animal other than a dog. The zookeeper's options are limited to either saying he cares for elephants, which will be exactly accurate but entirely meaningless to the person in question, or else he has to talk about caring for very large dogs with huge ears and long noses, which is a lot more meaningful to the person in question but significantly less accurate and still quite unlikely to communicate exactly what is going on. My point here is that it's important to realize that there are actually a number of ways to conceptualize a lot of the high concept physics in a way that is consistent with what is observed, and in a few cases in ways that may not even be distinguishable in any way, but that most of these conceptions are flawed in some way because they are attempts to describe phenomena that we have no real experience with in familiar, or at least somewhat familiar, terms. This means it's important to try to understand what is actually being described without getting to hung up on the idea that a dog with a ten foot nose is a ridiculous notion that doesn't make sense. The best way to do this is to understand the math involved, but not everyone has the time, inclination or aptitude to do that for all areas of science that they're interested in. Where that's the case, we need to take into account that we're often speaking to people who have actually seen the elephant, and that if what they're saying doesn't make sense, it's as likely to be an issue in communicating the concept to someone who hasn't as it is to be an issue with the idea itself.

This is not, strictly speaking, true. Light isn't used. The speed 'c' is. We happen to call that 'the speed of light' but we could equally call it 'the speed of gravity' or any number of other names that have nothing to do with light. The reason that we cannot determine a frame for light is that it travels at c, and anything traveling at c does not experience time or distance within its "frame". We're not talking about trying to measure the precise length of a yard using a yardstick. We're talking about a fundamental property of the universe that was derived from measurements obtained by experiment and observation. Nothing traveling at c will experience time or distance in the way that we think of those things, and if there's no time and no distance, you can't measure speeds from such a frame. Let's say we're somehow riding on one of these two separating photons. We look back and attempt to measure the relative speed of the other. Well, we can't actually look back because in this impossible hypothetical, we'd be frozen in time, but let's say we can somehow move anyway. What would we be measuring? You'd need to measure how far the other photon is. Then wait a set amount of time and measure how far away it is again. Then divide the distance traveled by the elapsed time. But traveling at c we don't have any measurement of how far the other photon has traveled, and we don't have any time elapsing in order to mark of the distance even if we did. There is no frame from the perspective of light not because light is defined as the measuring stick, but because the properties being measured don't exist for anything traveling at that speed.

That would be correct.

Yes. There are some fundamental differences between the way "movement" from universal expansion and normal movement work. The biggest one is that expanding space doesn't have to obey the universal speed limit of lightspeed. If all movement was somehow from space expanding and contracting between masses, faster than light travel wouldn't be impossible.

Only that matter directs consciousness or that consciousness directs matter?

It's important to keep in mind that c is not a velocity that you reach at which point acceleration stops. It's more the case that the faster you are going, the more energy it takes to increase your speed by the same amount. Let's say you have a spaceship that runs by burning wood. Throw in a log and you'll accelerate to a faster speed. Still traveling at that speed, if you throw in a log of equal size, you'll wind up increasing your speed by just a little bit less than the first log did. If 100 logs would accelerate you to 90% of the speed of light, that's so fast that adding energy to the rocket will only be one tenth as effective as if you were at rest. That means that the energy in the next 100 logs will only get you an additional 9% of the speed of light, so you're at 99% of c. At that point, you're moving so fast that additional energy is only one hundredth as effective as it is at rest, so an additional 100 logs will only get you 0.% of the speed of light, leaving you at 99.9% of c. c isn't the speed at which acceleration stops so much as it is the speed that you can't reach because the diminishing returns at higher speeds make it impossible to pump in enough energy to reach that speed. You can keep accelerating forever, but it will be by smaller and smaller amount that never quite allow you to reach the speed of light.

This is almost certainly asking you to desimplify that 'in some sense' comment, but how would that work with the constancy of the speed of light? Let's say for the sake of simple numbers that X is 1/2. So for every second on the neutron star, two pass outside. The neutron star observer sees the outside observer conduct an odd test. The outside observer hits a button that fires a small beam of light at a mirror two light seconds away. Five seconds later, he pushes a button that places a mirror in the path of the returning light, however, the light would have only taken four seconds to return and so has already passed the mirror. On the neutron star, the observer would count only 2.5 of his own seconds between the outside observer hitting the light button and hitting the mirror button. For the light to have already passed the point at which the mirror is placed, it would need to have traveled more than four light seconds in 2.5 seconds as counted by the neutron star. If the light had not yet reached the mirror because it had only traveled 2.5 light seconds, then when it reached the mirror, the neutron star observer would see it reflect off despite the fact that the outside observer had already seen it pass by the mirror. I can see how this is resolved if either the speed of light is not constant in an accelerated reference frame or distances outside become shortened to observers in a gravitational field as well as time appearing to speed up, but these both seem vaguely counter-intuitive. I suppose the latter would be my guess if I had to pick one of the two, but I'm not entirely sure how that would work. Anyone up for clarifying?

Go back 300 to 400 years and today's technology sounds like magic. Heck, go back 100 to 200 years and a lot of stuff we have now sounds like magic. Even 10 to 20 years and a lot of people would be shocked at the rate of advance in some fields, even if they would have been much more predictable to people familiar with a particular area of technology than to their centuries-old counterpart. Anyway, I know the primary discussion is from a while back, but I've actually got an EEG headset that I wrote a quick little program for to connect to and control a toy quadricopter, so I'm pretty familiar with the capabilities and limitations of the technology, at least as far as what is commercially available right now.

If there is a god, then maybe, maybe not. If there isn't a god, then definitely yes, because it would have to have existed before there were any observers in order to give rise to them. Unless you're using the definition that has anything which interacts with anything else as an observer, in which case no because the entirety of the known universe is then made up of observes, and nothing can exist without itself existing.

I actually had my moment where it 'clicked' for me while playing with Buckeyballs (those little shiny magnetic balls, not fullerenes). You could arrange them in all sort of configurations: some were just blobs of balls, some were well-ordered blocks, some were single-magnet strands, some were sheets, etc. And different configurations behaved differently. One might fall apart easily, another might hold it's shape very well. One might be floppy and weak in one direction but rigid and strong against force applied in another direction. Some were well suited to being fit together into larger structures like component parts.So it's not that a gold atom is yellow, but that gold atoms form structures which yellow light reflects off of while others are absorbed. Something soft has a structure that is very pliable while something hard and brittle has a more rigid structure that may only break along certain lines. The properties of the atom determine the structures that it can form, and the structures are what determine the properties of the substance. That's why Carbon can form substances as different as coal and diamond.

Let's try a simple experiment. I've got a hose. I'm going to point it up and away from me at a set angle, and turn the water on at a set amount of force. If you can describe a parabola with enough accuracy that, following only your description, I can predict exactly where the water will land and place a cup there to catch it without your resorting to any math, I will concede the point to you.

This is not my best analogy, but think of it like this: Finding an answer to certain problems on a computer is like trying to find the type of coin that fits in an unlabeled coin slot. The best method is really just to try each type of coin in succession until you find the one that fits. With a quantum computer, you'd be able to use a special type of coin that was every type of coin at once. Then when you put it in the coin slot, it would lose all the types that don't fit so you're just left with the correct coin on your first attempt.