Delta1212

Unless that intruder turns out to be a police officer conducting a no-knock raid, in which case defending yourself may get you put up on a charge of capital murder, even if they don't find anything in your home and it turns out the warrant was probably based on a bogus tip.

Then are you the same you that you were 20 years ago? You are largely made of none of the same material at that point, just as G2 is not made of the same matter as G1. I guess the question I'm asking, is how are you defining your linear continuity of consciousness?

If you have an axe, and after five years you replace the head and after another five years you replace the handle, and then you make a perfect replica of that axe, which of the two is the original axe?

I think the point that is being made here is that you have pre-transporter Graeme and post-transporter Graeme 1 and Graeme 2. Graeme 1 is made up of the same atoms as pre-transporter Graeme while Graeme 2 is not, but pre-trabsporter Graeme is not made up of the same atoms as 20-years-ago Graeme. What do 20-years-ago Graeme and Graeme 1 have in common that 20-years-ago Graeme and Graeme 2 do not?

I suspect the origin of that particular ideology is found among the countless people throughout history who suffered for most of their lives with no release in sight but death and couldn't believe that God would inflict such misery on them unless it was a necessary part of receiving a big reward in the afterlife. It also has the added benefit of meaning that all those people who lived more luxurious lives and were often the cause of the suffering but never got any real comeuppance in life would get theirs in death when they didn't suffer enough to get into heaven.

Ok, let's say there is a Graeme Prime. Graeme Prime is "I" and is 15 years old. After 45 years, we now have Graeme 1, who steps into the transporter and produces Graeme 2. If Graeme Prime is "I", can either Graeme 1 or Graeme 2 lay claim to being "I" as well, and if so, why? If not, why not?

So we could hypothetically create a Matrix for plants, where they "think" they're out in a sunny field somewhere but are actually in their own individual little bubbles connected to feeding tubes.

But what about A makes a you that B does not have? i.e. If "you" are refreshed every moment, what is the difference between the refresh happening in B's head versus in A's head?

This does explain why there is so much more matter than antimatter. The matter won.

But by the same token, isn't the you from last year just as dead as "A" you? Or the you from 10 years ago? Or five year old you? You aren't the same person you used to be, so what happened to that person? B is made up of a different set of atoms arranged in the same pattern, but you aren't made up of the same matter that you were made of when you were five either? What gives you priority of continuity over B?

The me that steps out of the transporter back on Earth is dying. The me on Mars survives.

If it goes bad, where do you escape to?

I know. I was (apparently unsuccessfully) making a joke about constants that change being variables.

To quote Rainier Wolfcastle, "That's the joke."

Perhaps there are several constants that change like this and no one has realized it yet because we've mistaken them for variables.

The photon is thought to have zero mass, but as we haven't come up with a test for zero mass, the best we can do experimentally is but an upper bound on what it's mass could possibly be, and that upper bound is very, very small, which is not inconsistent with it having zero mass, we just can't experimentally confirm that.

While true, some people apply that argument too broadly. I don't think we're at that point with 'infer' yet where usage as turned it into a synonym for 'imply' but it is a common enough mistake that I could see that happening eventually, yes. As far as difficulty in expressing things, yes, some things become more difficult to express while others become easier. That's natural and very frequently comes down to what people most feel a need to express. If a distinction is important to communicate often, a way of making that distinction consistently will find its way into the language. If a distinction loses its importance to most people, it may be lost. As far as things that are no longer able to be expressed, at one point they would have been, so I'm fine with the previous expression and why it meant something that would be impossible to express now even if he can't explain exactly what that was. Or use another language, that's fine, too. I'm fine with other languages. Edit: And, incidentally, I can see how a hypothetical language could have a name for, eg, the conditional without there being a way to express a conditional statement in that language. Not that such a language would be likely to exist, but just to say that just because a particular idea cannot be expressed in a language doesn't mean that you can't categorize the type of idea that you can't directly express examples of in that language. I don't think that there really is an idea that could have been expressed in English in the past that cannot be expressed now. Expressed differently maybe, but not lost altogether. But if there is, that doesn't necessarily mean that we've lost the ability to talk about the type of concept that has been lost even if the idea itself can't be expressed on a granular level.

Really, it takes more skill to be successful with the "primitive" technology than it does with the advanced stuff. That's why the advanced stuff was usually invented: To make things take less effort. The fact that you can buy a gun and learn how to hunt with it fairly quickly doesn't make you smarter than someone who had to learn to hunt with a spear. Really, it might even make you stupider if those are the only skills either of you have and you both only had the motivation to learn to the minimum necessary level to be successful. Having access to more tools that let you do more things does not by any means make you smarter than someone who doesn't have that access. After all, it's not like you invented those tools yourself, and most of them were created specifically to require less brain-power to operate than whatever came before.

Can you give an example of a thought that English has ceased to be able to express?

While true, I don't think that language is actually capable of being 'damaged' in the way that an environmental system is. Newspeak is an interesting idea, but based on everythinI know about human language acquisition and use, I don't think it would be possible to actually pull off, and even if you could, would require active on-going management to keep the language pared down, a state which would very quickly reverse itself as soon as the oppressive management was lifted. Languages change. They serve the purpose of communicating ideas, and that means they need to be able to fulfill that role. If a language doesn't have the ability to communicate an idea that someone wants to communicate, a way to do it will be swiftly adopted. You don't lose anything without gaining something else. Now, you are right that we are losing languages and some regional variations, and to an extent that is lamentable but English as a language isn't becoming any less expressive. It may lose features some people like and gain some they don't, but that's the way it always goes with languages. Just because we're now capable of sending X to the dogs when we weren't before doesn't mean Y is now really going to the dogs as well.

I used to be concerned about this. Then I learned some linguistics, and now I've come to appreciate the dogs. They're very nice animals. Not sure why anyone gets upset about the idea that they're taking over.

Really, you don't need to reach that far afield. Germany may beat everyone in terms of scale during WWII, but the Japanese got very creative. I've read a lot of things about WWII that would qualify as horrific, but Japan's Unit 731 is the only thing so far that has managed to make me feel physically ill while reading about it. No war is ever clean, but that one was especially dirty on all sides in how civilians were treated, and the only way anyone comes out looking good is by comparison with someone else who did worse.

Assumptions are unavoidable. The trick is making the fewest assumptions possible. Assuming that space is expanding explains everything that we currently see. Assuming that everything is shrinking requires several more assumptions in order to make it work.

I think that depends on how you define significant. There have been a lot of developments, it's just that most of them seem to fall into the category of finding ways to show that the latest "This can't possibly be what is happening" argument is, in fact, wrong, and that that is exactly what is happening.

Well, if everything is shrinking, you also need to proportionately weaken some forces and do things like slow the speed of light in proportion to the rate at which things are shrinking. You might be able to hash it out so that it all works, but it would certainly be a lot more complicated than simply assuming that space is expanding.