Delta1212

You can encode information in DNA in the same way that you can tattoo instructions into someone. Just because they are carrying the information doesn't mean that they are going to act on it or, even be able to read it, necessarily.

Tar, let's say you have an experiment that involves cutting you in half lengthwise from top to bottom, and then perfectly cloning the other half and attaching it to each half of you. Who is the original? Both? Neither? Is Tar dead, or are you still there?

Without re-reading the whole thread to remind myself what exactly I posted, I believe this was what I was trying to argue.

I did think of that while typing up my post. Doesn't that presuppose a universe that requires an infinite amount of information to describe a single state of said universe, though? You could, for instance, hypothesize a universe similar to a very large game of Life, where the initial conditions are perfectly defined and all successive iterations follow directly from the previous state. Especially on a very large board, any variation in that initial condition, potentially by even a single cell out of, hypothetically, trillions of cells, could result in very, very different outcomes. But there is still an upper limit on how much information is required to perfectly predict the system out to infinity by running through the iterations in succession.

To be clear, again, I was taking issue with the premise of chaos theory saying that in a deterministic universe. If the universe is deterministic then, in principle, it should be possible to be arbitrarily precise in defining a given state. If there is imprecision "baked in" then there is an element of randomness and the universe is not deterministic. In a deterministic, each successive state would be wholly determined by the previous state of the universe. Saying that chaos theory limits how far ahead you can predict anything even in a deterministic universe, is essentially saying that you can't obtain a precise enough measurement even in a universe in which measurements can be arbitrarily precise. That obviously doesn't apply to this universe, but neither does the premise that we are talking about a deterministic universe apply. And of course, whether you could obtain an arbitrarily precise measurement even in a deterministic universe as a practical matter is another issue altogether, but I did already say that. I do understand that chaos theory results in there being a limit on how far out certain predictions can be accurately made in this universe, but we were already presupposing that we weren't talking about this universe. Edit: I guess my question is, can you have a fully deterministic universe without having precisely determined initial conditions?

Yes, this universe is. Again, though, I was responding to your comment that it presents a limit even in a deterministic universe.

In reality, no. But I was responding to the hypothetical of a purely deterministic universe. We just don't happen to live in one of those.

Chaos theory presents a practical limit, rather than a theoretical one, though. In theory, you could still perfectly predict a deterministic, chaotic system given enough information. There is just less room for error, because any mistakes or missing information will result in a wildly different prediction rather than one that is just "almost right."

A square is always a rectangle, by definition.

I don't think the outlandishness of one's beliefs is necessarily correlated with intelligence, but the complexity of the justification for those outlandish beliefs probably is.

Well, that seems a bit hyperbolic.

People who think that humanity is set to destroy itself are basing that on just about as an emotional response as your optimistic take is. It's certainly not critical thinking. To start with the variables are multitudinous, and we don't even have accurate data for most of the ones that would allow us to make a grand prediction like that. We might have more or less for any given problem that humanity is facing, and we might be more or less likely to solve any one specific problem, but even the problems we are less likely to solve wouldn't result in the end of humanity, at least in the relatively foreseeable future. Even climate change. Failure to act on that is very likely to cause quite a lot of problems, but it's unlikely to wipe out humanity. The things that could potentially kill us off rather than simply killing quite a lot of people and making everyone else less comfortable tend to be out of our direct control. Space rocks, the sun, heat death of the universe. Humanity will die off eventually, but when we go it will either be because of something really big or because of a sustained series of slightly smaller things that make us more and more vulnerable. Neither of those is reasonably predictable at the present time unless you think humanity is going to fail to address every single serious problem it currently faces to the point that they all kill us in tandem. And I don't think a belief that that is likely is especially based in critical thinking. Most likely, we'll screw w bunch of things up before ultimately learning how to fix what we can and live with what we can't.

refer -> referral deny -> denial peruse -> perusal -al has two uses. noun -> adjective and verb -> noun So you were right the first time.

Of course, complicating things further is the fact that criminalizing things that people want tends to drive the market for them underground, where they cannot be regulated and the economy surrounding them is likely to be much more lawless than otherwise. If people had a legal, regulated way of obtaining something, would this outcompete the organizations that use more brutal practices. On the other other hand, there are plenty of companies who produce normal every day goods with the next best thing to slave labor by outsourcing production to areas of the world without much regulation as far as workers' rights to, up to and including child labor laws. So there is no guarantee that legalizing drugs would eliminate the exploitation issue, but then that issue may also be present for the last shirt you bought. The global economy has its benefits but it does also complicate things enormously, doesn't it?

So what's the corporate advantage to an influx of migrants drawing subsidtence benefits from the state and not working? Genuinely curious.

Maybe we should, but we can't. You can't access the internal world of someone else without going through an external medium and that medium is going to affect that communication in some way or other.

I'd do whatever it is I'm predestined to do. I don't think that getting confirmation of absolute determinism would do much to change my behavior, though.

He didn't mean that it creates new photons. He meant that it redirects some photons so they all hit the same point, which increases the number of photons that hit that point (by decreasing the number that hit other points) and therefore increases the amount of energy that that point receives. But the energy is increased because more photons are hitting it. The amount delivered by each photon remains the same.

This entire topic is literally about confusing the issue with English semantics.

They do spread out, but while they don't fire off at every possible angle at once, they can fire off at any possible angle. So it's not a bunch of streams of photons firing off single file. Any point in space you pick that has an unobstructed line of sight to the light source with eventually receive a photon from it. How long it takes is just a mater of how bright and how far you are. So the simple answer to your question is that this does happen. It's just that for anything you can see with the naked eye, you aren't far enough away for the gap between photons to register. We do have to account for this for really, really distant objects, though, which require long exposures to gather enough light to get a good image of them.

I would try this for you, but I don't think I have a big enough microwave.

In the nick of time? In a second? In mourning? In front? In denial?

That was the joke, yes.

There seem to be a couple of misconceptions embedded in this. For starters, one species doesn't start morphing into another in quite the way your post seems to be implying. The next "step" in evolution doesn't "have wings" and therefore the species starts growing wings. The line between species is a lot blurrier and how one becomes another (or many others) is rather directionless except insofar as it's guided by who reproduces the best. Essentially, there is never a "useless stem" at any point in the evolutionary process. Every step along the provides some advantage over what came before it, which is how it spread and became a step along the way in the first place. If some creature randomly sprouted half a wing, it wouldn't be an intermediate stage in the evolutionary process. It would be weighed down by a useless appendage and probably die, and that would be the end of that. What actually happens is a bit more subtle. Let's look at a hypothetical example, starting with some small, bipedal dinosaur-looking creatures and see how a wing might evolve. So, we're starting with a creature that has two arms, two legs, probably a tail for balance and I'm imagining a narrow snout with some sharp teeth. How is thins thing going to get some wings? Well, for starters, it's not going to sprout some wing buds. As mentioned above, evolution tends to co-opt existing structures rather than forming them completely from scratch, both because that is less energy intensive and, frankly, it's just far more likely that you're going to see a small change in an existing body part that makes it work better than an entirely new structure sprout fully functional out of nowhere. It's not actually physically impossible, but it is slightly more likely that you would win every nationwide lottery for the rest of your life. Anyway, for the purposes of this example, we're going to use the arm, because that seems to be a pretty popular choice for turning into a wing in real life. So, founder of our new winged species is going to be a little dinosaur creature that is born with what, under the vast majority of circumstances, would be considered a birth defect. It has a little flap of skin under its arms, like someone with webbed toes or feet. Usually, that would either be a disadvantage (that flap provides a potential sources of infection if it gets torn or injured) or just be a bit of useless skin, but in this particular case, because of whether the flap is and the body plan of the creature that has it, it discovers that if it stretches it's arms out, that flap of skin acts as a bit of an extra stabilizer when running. So now it can run just very slightly faster than it could have otherwise without stumbling out of control. That gives it enough of an advantage that it manages to outrun any predators and catch enough food to eat and eventually have children. And all the kids, or maybe not even all of them, but a number of them, being descended from that first creature, have little skin flaps themselves. And they take advantage of them, and the creatures wit skin flaps run faster and survive better than those without. And eventually, over many generations and many, many years, all of the creatures will have either mated with the descendents of that first creature with skin flaps, or they will have been outcompeted, as the ones without them won't have been able to keep up and been eaten or missed out on getting food that the ones with skin flaps caught. So now all of the creatures have skin flaps, and as with any population, they will all vary a little bit. Some of the flaps will be thicker, some thinner, some bigger, some smaller. And these different sizes and shapes will vary in their effectiveness. And the ones with the most effective shapes will be able to reproduce more, in the same way that simply having them allowed the first ones to do better, and so these flaps are run through the filter of natural selection. And as they trend towards allowing faster, and more stable running, eventually it gets to a point that one of them is born with a skin flap that is just the right size and shap that they can glide a little bit. Or maybe it doesn't even qualify as a glide. Maybe it's just a slightly longer jump. But now they can jukp farther, and stay higher for longer than any of the others. And if, for example, some of their food includes flying insects, that could prove useful for catching escaping flies that one of the others would fall just short of reaching. Or it could allow them to get around obstacles or clear gaps that are just a little too difficult for those who can't jump as well. And so this one manages to take advantage of the way their skin flap works and again is a little more successful, and has more kids and that particular size and shape becomes more common in the population over the course of generations. And as the number of long jumpers grows, so does the variation of their own skin flaps. Some are bigger or thicker or different shapes, and some of those shapes are better for jumping than others. And of course, the creatures themselves all come in different sizes or shapes. Some are heavier or lighter. And some of those creatures find that they can take better advantage of their jumping ability than others. So you get the shape of the proto-wing as well as the shape of the creature itself converging toward one that is better and better at jumping as the best jumpers continue having children and the new body plans are all based on those most successful jumpers. Until eventually, one is the right shape and size and weight and everything else that it can legitimately glide. And that opens whole new sources of food and escape from danger that further enhances that gliding ability in the same process described above where the best gliders have the most kids and the variation among the children results in some being slightly worse gliders but some being slightly better, until eventually a body plan has been selected for that allows for longer and longer gliding until a long glide and actual flight are essentially indistinguishable, and now that arm with little skin flaps has become a full fledged wing. Over the course of many, many, many generations. Just look at the bone structure of a bat wing. You can see the arm and fingers of the original furry animal that was its ancestor which have since thinned and lengthed to become the scaffolding for its own skin flaps, allowing it to fly.

I would estimate that this works at least twice as fast with five times the effect.