Delta1212

Light is the only thing you can see.

Science concerns it itself with, and only with, those things on which empirical data can be gathered. If you have evidence regarding something (for or against), you can deal with it scientifically, and if you want to deal with something scientifically, you need evidence (for or against it). Philosophy as a broad subject doesn't have that restriction. There are a multitude of subjects that can be dealt with philosophically without requiring you to go out and test them against what happens in the real world. This is why you can have philosophical thought experiments like the Trolley Problem that help to illustrate and discuss certain ideas, but you don't need to go out and actually crash a trolley into a group of people in order to have a valid philosophical discussion about the issue. You can similarly have thought experiments about scientific theories, but if you want it to actually be science, you need to go collect some real-world numbers and see how well they hold up to your thoughts. Pointing out that being evidence-based is the distinguishing characteristic of science is not necessarily a criticism of philosophy and is certainly not the same thing as saying that philosophy is just "making things up."

I think it's also important to define the scope of "wrongness." The more science has advanced, and the more rigorous it has become over the last century or two, the less "wrong" the things that have been overturned are. People are matching theory to observable results rather than just coming up with ideas about how things might work. If Newton said that the color of a bucket of paint was red, Einstein didn't later come along and say "No, it's blue." It would be more like he said "No, it's burgundy." Science doesn't often overturn ideas, so much as determine their limits, increase their specificity and improve their accuracy. That might result in a wildly different "story" about what is going on, but people have a bad habit of confusing the story about the theory with the actual theory itself. All scientific theories have an implied limit of "within the range for which we have data." And the solidly backed up theories of today are not likely to be overturned within that range. We may, however, discover that they are not generalizable in their current form beyond those limits if we run into data that doesn't fit with a simple extension of what we presently know once we begin probing those unexplored areas.

Sorry. I can read Swedish a bit, but I don't speak it at all, so I can't really respond. The best I could manage is et lille dansk, but even then not to the extent that I can carry on a real conversation in it.

But "God did it" posits the existence of an intifintely powerful and complex being in addition to all of the stuff that is observable, whereas evolution cuts that very complex assumption out and simply leaves you with the basics of observable reality. And that's really the trouble with the way Occam's Razor is generally viewed. It's perhaps better to conceptualize it as being more along the lines of "The theory that requires the fewest assumptions is probably the correct one." "God did it" is only a simpler explanation if you use it as a barrier to stop drilling down into details. But if we're not going to bother to explain how, then I can also just say "Evolution did it. Trust me, the details don't matter" and suddenly that is equally as "simple."

So only the government knows the identity of the person you're voting for? That seems like a good recipe for a regime to pick who they want to win an election and then after the voting tell everyone "This is totally who you voted for."

It's impossible to disprove a conspiracy theory if the person in question is willing to cast the conspiracy net wide enough. Any evidence can be faked. We deal with this by having independent confirmation of results so that the only options become extremely unlikely coincidence, an implausibly large conspiracy or the results are valid. Proving absolutely that it is "really" the final option of the three is impossible. All we can do is continue decreasing the likelihood of it being either of those first two until it's unreasonable to believe either of them are probable. But if someone is willing to commit to an unreasonable belief in either, there's no way to absolutely demonstrate that they are wrong beyond all imaginative possibility, only that they are wrong beyond all reasonable doubt. For many, that is more than enough wiggle room to avoid confronting reality.

Could we get a definition of "universally wrong" because without one, I'm not even sure what it is we're supposed to be discussing.

Everyone who has ever pushed a eugenics program has thought they were conducting "positive eugenics." That's one of the major problems with the idea of eugenics.

Yeah, but that kid might be the next Albert Einstein. After all, he was also a kid at one point, so you never know!

I believe I remember seeing a study (which I will try to find later if I have time), that involved teaching apes (I forget what kind, unfortunately) and human children a series of steps to open a box containing a prize of some sort. Some of the steps were entirely superfluous to opening the box. They then gave a clear version of the box to each group so that you could see that certain things were completely disconnected from opening the box. The apes quickly figured this out and skipped steps they didn't need to perform in order to get straight to the prize. The human children rigidly stuck to the process they'd been taught even though there was apparently no reason for doing some of it. I wonder if there's a bit of ingrained dogmatism in the way we learn things and if this might not actually be a bit of a learning advantage, in that it would allow us to mimic some fairly complex behaviors without fully understanding the reasons why we're doing everything. Someone eats shellfish and gets sick. Everyone teaches their children that it's bad to eat shellfish. Ten thousand years later, the behavior still persists being passed down from generation to generation even if the original reason has been lost. I could see learning of complex behaviors by rote as being both a contributor to the development of religion as we know it as well as a reason that humans are successfully able to adapt to such a wide variety of environments where there may not be a particularly safe way for every member of the next generation to relearn the lessons that led to the development of each survival strategy the group has picked up.

So I guess the question then is, why does this apply specifically to sex and not all of the many other, very often complicated things we do in public, or at least do not actively hide from children? Cemeteries and funeral processions, taxes and political protests, war and all sorts of violent behavior in general. There are a whole lot of very complicated subjects that sill be confusing for children and that their parents may not want to explain in full at various stages of development, but at least in US culture, it's sex that gets most of the attention to make sure that there is nothing in the public space that might accidentally expose a child to sexual references "before they are ready." So what is special about sex that makes it so much more damaging to children to learn about 'early' than all the other aspects of adult life?

Just to Devil's Advocate this point: Why is that desirable?

You'd essentially have seasonal day-length, wouldn't you? (More so than on Earth, I mean). During the time of year when the poles were aligned with the sun, the entire world would act like the poles on Earth, either being bathed entirely in light or darkness at all times of "day" with each happening to both hemispheres once a year. When the poles are perpendicular with the sun, you'd have a normal day/night cycle as the planet rotated, which would happen twice a year. And of course most of the year would be spent transition between those two states. So it might be a full revolution before the sun was back to being directly overhead, but you'd still get daylight from a normal day/night cycle during a solid chunk of the year between those extremes of light and dark. Edit: Although it wouldn't really be variable day length so much as variable brightness, wouldn't it? If you start in 'permanent' day, you'd start getting slightly dinner periods as the poles moved out of alignment with the start and they'd keep getting simmer until you had true day and night with each rotation. Then the days would start getting dimmer as you moved into the long period of darkness. And then the period of rotation that was previously night would start getting brighter again as the planet moved into position for the second day/night cycle of the year but on the opposite side.

Actually, yes, this is a perfect example. Getting regularly drunk and engaging in risky behaviors makes you both kind of stupid and also much more likely to (accidentally) reproduce. Thus increasing the selective fitness of traits that lead to going out and getting plastered regularly.

How clear is it actually, though, that humans are more self-aware than other animals? As has been discussed, we don't really have a very solid grasp on what self-awareness even is let along good ways to quantify or measure it. I'm not arguing against the position that humans are more self-aware so much as pointing out that you can't just state that it is clearly true as if it's an incontestable fact. We don't really have concrete evidence to back that up.

Survival of the fittest is true, when you realize that the benchmark for fitness is evolutionary terms is number of viable offspring. It has nothing (directly) to do with strength, speed, health etc. Some of those qualities might help you reproduce more, but they also might not depending on the situation, and when they don't, they don't have anything to do with evolutionary fitness.

But true if we're talking about the propagation speed of light in a medium that slows it down rather than its speed in a vacuum.

And I'm in agreement with this. The implication seemed to be that the measure of best was most, but I was attempting to illustrate that there are valid alternatives. I'm certainly not going to claim that being wealthy precludes someone from being a great philanthropist. I think there are many truly great philanthropists who are wealthy. On the other hand, I also don't think dollar amounts are the only measure of the "greatness" of one's philanthropic pursuits.

I think the confusion here is that Eise thinks that a theory of local hidden variables being false means that you can never have a determined state, when in fact the debate was over whether the particles always had a determined state with the apparent indeterminacy being the result of ignorance of the variables that determine the state rather than an intrinsic determinant vs only sometimes being in a determined state with the times that the state is indeterminate being the result of the state actually being undetermined rather than just being the result of ignorance on our part about what the state is. Saying that a property can have a determined state is not the same thing as a local hidden variable theory, which is how I think Eise has been interpreting it, if I'm reading the thread correctly.

Yeah, if you define the best philanthropists as those who give the most, then people who have the most are always going to come out on top because they're capable of giving more than most people have. If you define it as those who sustain the most inconvenience of hardship themselves in order to better the lot of others, the super rich are probably the worst philanthropists. Is the person who feeds a village for a month with the equivalent of pocket change more of a philanthropist than the person who forgoes eating for a day in order to give what little food they have to someone who has even less?

The other theory is that Rey started to receive some training at Luke's academy when she was very young and was either too young to remember but maybe has some residual "Force muscle" memory, or he her mind wiped somehow. This meshes well with her being Luke's daughter, but could also stand on it's own. As far as being "the most powerful Jedi", well, maybe. On the other hand, we only have one other instance of a person beginning on their path to learn to use the force as a young adult: Luke. (Even Anakin was only nine when he started). Luke is constantly plagued by insecurity and self-doubt, and struggles with this for the duration of the original trilogy, especially in the first two movies. His greatest accomplishments using the Force always take place when he manages to calm those inner fears and focus on what he is doing. Yoda even strongly implies that one of the major components of using the Force is having confidence in what you are doing when he raises Luke's X-Wing out of the swamp. By contrast, Rey, while having her own issues and psychological scars, is one of the most confident and resourceful characters in the movie. Once Kylo Ren woke up whatever was inside her, whether it was a suppressed level of basic training or simply a latent connection with the Force, I can absolutely her reaching out to push the boundaries of what she can do in a way that Luke simply didn't, and progressing much more quickly than him as a result, with or without a teacher. And on the whole, she didn't even do anything particularly outrageous. She bent the mind of one Stormtrooper after making multiple false starts (something we've seen other Jedi do almost as an afterthought), and manage to fight off a youthful, untested, badly wounded and clearly unstable Sith/Dark Jedi. The most impressive thing she did was accomplishing anything without a teacher, but I put that down more to personality than just raw ability at this point. Also, I think Adam Driver's character isn't simply a retread of Anakin, but more of what Anakin should have been. I already think he's a more interesting example of a Force user torn between the Dark and the Light than anything they did with Vader's backstory in the prequels.

Found the video that was linked in the article I originally saw: https://youtube.com/watch?v=TpJ7q2gEj6E&feature=youtu.be

I think it was hyperbolic nonsense, but then the article had an embedded combination video of people doing it and... Yeah, it was a dozen+ videos of mostly young guys dowsing their chests (mostly, a few people did just their arms or a hand) in fluid, igniting it and then either jumping in a pool or turning on a shower or smacking themselves until it went out. A couple of them looked like full on human torches.

For a system to fail, it needs a goal. There are no inherent goals in nature, just those we impose with our own interpretations of what things are "supposed" to be like.