Delta1212

Are you not capable of doing your own research? If a professor had to provide every possible caveat and alternative perspective on everything they said, they'd never get any teaching done, and it's unrealistic to expect them to just focus on providing expanded information on the specific areas most if interest to you. By the time you're in college/university, you should be able to take what you learn in the classroom and extend your study into any areas of particular interest to you yourself. There are unprecedented resources for learning available to most of the population of the First World today, and that is especially true for anyone currently enrolled in an institution of higher learning. There's really no reason you can't study a subject on your own time, and expecting a lecture to cover every facet of a particular subject in the full depth of all current knowledge is unrealistic and a good way to set yourself up for disappointment.

There are only two kinds of dichotomies: true dichotomies and false ones.

I think omniscience is only incompatible with free will if the definition of free will presumes an actor that is somehow separated from the mechanics of reality making the choice. i.e. My brain runs in a very complex but theoretically predictable way. Given enough information on the current state of my brain and the sensory inputs, my brain's reaction would be predictable. However, because the decision is being made by my brain, and because I am my brain, I am still making the decision. There may only be one decision that I can make in that scenario, but it is still my decision because it was arrived at by processing the situation through my brain. Making a different choice would have required a different brain configuration and, consequently, a different person making the decision. There is only a difficulty with calling this free will if we're insisting on defining free will as a choice made by some entity that rides in the brain but isn't directly affected by its processes. I don't really believe in a "soul" as such, so this doesn't really present me with any difficulty. I just don't think that being predictable in your choices means that you didn't make them. Someone who knows me quite well can predict what I'm going to order at a particular restaurant with near certainty. Someone who knows me better than anyone alive currently does and keeps careful track of my moods and general mental states while making decisions could probably predict what I was going to order off any many at any given restaurant given the full circumstances surrounding that order. That doesn't mean I didn't actually pick what I wanted. Now, I'm arguing from the perspective that our choices could be pre-destined based on who we are without violating our free will (because of who I am, this is the choice I would always make in this circumstance, etc). You could conceivably argue that we don't get to choose who we are, which in this scenario is the determining factor in our choices, but since if you were someone else, you would obviously not be you and we'd then just be discussing somebody else, I personally treat that line of discussion as a bit of a non sequitur. Keep in mind, I don't think that omniscience is actually possible, nor do I know how closely reality actually hews to the "clockwork brain" since we don't know enough about how the brain works and do know enough about how reality works to say that it's entirely possible that there's a bit of randomness in there. I just don't think that omniscience and free will are logically mutually exclusive in all cases as generally gets argued, and actually find most of the arguments trying to get around what I feel is a non-existent problem tend to wind up weakening free will in order to make it mutually exclusive with predictability.

Two points: One, life is not an objective category that exists in nature the way that, say, a photon is an objectively distinct category of "thing." The boundaries of life are somewhat arbitrarily defined and they can be fuzzy, which means there are going to be exceptions (more on this in a bit, before you get too excited about the implications of that for this topic). Two, reproduction entails making a copy of the original. A good copy of the original means that it can do all the stuff the original can do, including reproduce. If you're not making a copy of the original, it is not reproduction, by definition. Now, as far as the fuzziness goes: Some people/animals are sterile. They can't reproduce or, if they do, they can't produce children which are themselves capable of reproducing. It's true that we don't label these cases as being "not alive." However, they are all of a category that, in general, retains the ability to reproduce. Most cows are capable of producing more cows. A cow that cannot is a damaged cow, not a form of non-life. There is no train that is capable of building a new train. It cannot reproduce either individually or as a category of things. It is not alive. The Earth is a planet. It cannot make more planets. It certainly cannot make more planets of the same or similar size and structure to itself. Furthermore, there aren't any other planets that can do this. It's not a typical function of planets, so we can't just describe the Earth as a living but sterile planet, as that implies that there are some other planets that are alive but not sterile. Now, how does the arbitrariness of life's definition impact this debate? Well, for starters, it's scientifically impossible to prove that something which doesn't meet the definition as laid out is alive. You can argue that maybe we should use a different definition, but that's going to come down to a consensus as to what a useful definition is, because "life" is really a utility label in science. It only exists as a category for the sake of usefulness in organizing our studies, not because of anything fundamental to the nature of reality. That means that science can very narrowly define what life and the categories that are used to define life mean, and you cannot prove them wrong because there is no objective metric of what life actually is. Right now, life, as defined scientifically, has a number of criteria that it must meet that the Earth does not. The Earth does not reproduce as defined in the life sciences. You can argue that a mountain is a type of reproduction if you'd like, but it's not the type of reproduction that we're talking about when we define life. A liver cell that reproduces makes a copy of itself. If a cell in an organism makes a copy of itself, that is the cell reproducing, not the whole organism. The new cell may not leave the organism, or be able to produce whole copies of said organism, but it certainly separates from the cell that divided to create it. And it is certainly capable of producing new cells of the same type. The Earth does not produce new Earths. That's the requirement for reproducing as defined for the purposes of categorizing life. Full stop. The Earth is also not a cell or made up of cells. That is currently used to define life. Right there, it fails. No way to argue out of that one. It's made up of rocks. If you want to describe the Earth as alive, go ahead, but you cannot describe it as being alive by the scientific definition of life, and you cannot, by the nature of the definition, prove that the scientific definition is wrong because it's a category of convenience. There is no objective measure of what life is. It's a consensus based definition and the consensus in the scientific community is that the Earth does not meet the criteria for life according to the qualities that are most useful for creating a distinction between living and non-living things.

Opinions can be wrong.

If I'm reading it correctly, and I assume I am despite only skimming about half of it, you would have an infinitesimal number of Lamborghinis.

That is a very vague question to the point that it sort of describes what your body already does normally. Do you think you could be a bit more specific about what you want to do?

It makes more sense when you realize that the temperature checks are pretty much worthless as far as a counter-measure to Ebola (since an infected person is far more likely to be presymptomatic when leaving a plane than they are to be running a fever) and that it is most likely just an attempt to calm people's fears. You also need to realize that, unless you expect everyone in the airline industry to wear biohazard suits at all times and quarantine all passengers for a month upon disembarking, there isn't a much better system than "check for symptoms and treat as infectious if any show up." It's not a great system, or even really a very good one, but screening people as they get off airplanes isn't exactly a particularly effective measure in this case no matter how you do it.

I'm fairly certain that is wrong.

I knew you were going to say that.

Is that supposed to be the anthropic principle or the argument against which it is generally used? Used properly, I think the anthropic principle goes something more like: If A exists then if there is a bias in the system it is most probably toward A We can only examine systems where A exists, therefore we can only examine system where, if there is a bias, it is most probably toward A Therefore the expected outcome of any bias we discover is that it will probably be toward A This is used to counter the argument that discovering a bias toward A automatically implies a particular cause for the bias, which is not the case because under the parameters we are working with, a bias toward A is the most expected outcome regardless of why there is a bias.

In the sense that biology is a specific complex subset of chemistry which is a subset of physics generally, yes. Otherwise, no, not really. Biology is the study of living systems. Magnets are not alive. Science has a specific, multi-part definition to life, but when you get right down to it, the critical aspect of life is replication. Living things are basically chemical structures that are capable of making copies of themselves. Everything else that defines life is an aspect of life because it improves the system's ability to make more and better copies of itself, and those types of qualities are naturally selected for. And just to cut off any thoughts of intelligence being a driving force behind evolution, because that's a common thought: let's say you have two machines, A and B. They're identical except for one thing: Machine A is capable of making 9 copies of itself per hour (each of which can make 9 copies, etc). Machine B is capable of making 4 copies per hour (each of which can make 4 copies, etc). After 6 hours, there will be 1,000,000 copies of Machine A and less than 16,000 copies of Machine B. The machines didn't know A was a better pattern and decide to become more A-like over time. A was simply better at copying itself and so, obviously, there are more of A. That's all evolution is. Traits that help an organism make copies of itself get passed down more frequently than traits that don't because, by definition, being able to make more copies of yourself means there are more likely to be more copies of you. Mutation, the thing that drives variation, simply throws in new traits completely randomly. Most do absolutely nothing or wind up breaking something which is where we get genetic diseases. Those tend not to be terribly present because a broken machine is worse at making copies of itself and so, again obviously, there will be fewer copies. Once in a while, some random change will actually improve the system, and the organism that has the improvement will make more copies of itself. It's important to remember, though, that any given mutation is not inherently an improvement even if we might think it is. From an evolutionary perspective an 'improvement' (or more correctly, an 'adaptation') is any trait that increases an organism's ability to make copies of itself in the environment in which it exists. So, finally and still obviously, any mutation that results in an organism being better adapted will result in more copies of that organism being made, and the population of organisms will then have a larger number of those with the new adaptation until it has spread throughout the population and anyone without it has died off. Let's say some day a person is born with red eyes. And they are so fabulously attractive that for some reason, given a choice between having children with a red-eyed person and a non-red-eyed person, everyone in the world would choose the red-eyed person. The original red-eyed person successfully has children. All of their red-eyed children have children and so on. The number of red-eyed people keeps growing and everyone wants to pair up with a red-eyed person, spreading that trait around in the population. Given, let's just pull a number out of my rear-end, 1000 generations, everyone on Earth now had red eyes. It's a trait that is fixed in the population the same way that humans having two arms is. It's not because having red eyes is some ultimate goal that evolution had. It's because we're all descended from that one guy who was really, really good at having children. That's how evolution works. (Incidentally, this example would be what is known as sexual selection, where a particular trait is selected for because it makes you more attractive to the opposite sex than those without that trait. There are other ways that a trait can be selected for, such as making you better at being not dead, what with not dead things tending to have more children than dead ones).

This is a big, complex area but I'll try to address as much of it as I can. I'm not going to say that we can definitively rule it out, but if you start delving into subjects like emergent complexity, you'd be amazed at the kinds of behaviors that you can get from the application of some very simple mechanical rules without any intelligent input whatsoever. There are a lot of things in nature that seem amazing and completely impossible without some kind of intelligence driving them until you really study the processes by which they work and suddenly, while being no less fascinating, it becomes comprehensible that this thing can be running on completely intuitive mechanical processes. It does seem like it can't doesn't it? But from everything we know after quite a lot of study, it seems that it is. I highly, highly recommend studying how evolution works. It's a subject where, once you really "get" how it works, biology and the life sciences all make a lot more sense, and as long as you don't understand how evolution really works, there are going to be many things that are hard to really grasp on an intuitive level. There's a rather famous essay on the subject that introduced the now-common phrase "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" and this is very true. If you want to understand the whys and hows of all of the absolutely amazing complexity that is life, I highly recommend tackling evolution early in the learning process. I think that's a failure of how you (and a lot of people, frankly) define life. If you mean something special that operates on principles beyond how the rest of the universe works, then yes, there is no such thing as life. That's not how science defines life however, and there most certainly are things that grow, respond to stimuli, maintain homeostasis, reproduce, etc, so from the perspective there certainly is such a thing as life. And yes, it can be hard to believe, but how easy something is to believe and how true it is aren't always related. Well, superficially there are plenty of differences since I don't think anyone is currently working on design robots that are built like humans down to the cellular level, but there's a reason why "biological machine" gets used to describe living things including humans. If you take a stool with three legs and saw one of them off, it will fall over. You can place the leg with the stool, but it still won't stand up because the configuration that allowed it to resist gravity is gone. Death is kind of like that. All the parts are still there, but the pattern that allowed the processes of life to occur has been disrupted. Sometimes the damage is internal, or in some very small but important mechanisms, so it isn't immediately apparent what the physical difference between the living and dead person is except that one is alive and the other isn't. Make no mistake, though, every dead person is dead because somewhere in their body, something is as irreparably damaged as if they had their head chopped off. There isn't a magic "light switch" of life that turns off and causes you to be dead without any other physical change. If you're dead, something is broken, and if nothing is broken, you aren't dead. Theoretically, if you could put everything in a dead person's body back the way it was, they'd be alive again. The problem is that, once the body has broken to the point of being unable to function, a lot of stuff that relies on the way your body works to maintain themselves start breaking as well. It's akin to building a tower of wine glasses and removing a glass on the bottom row. Even if you stick it back where it was, a bunch of glasses will have started falling and shattering and getting it back the way it was gets much, much harder than just fixing the initial problem. This is part of why people have been exposed to the cold are often able to be revived longer after having sustained some serious trauma. The cold slows down the chemical processes in the body, which means it takes longer for as many things to break and you have more time to fix the problem before things have gotten to the point of being unmanageable. It's also why our definition of 'death' has changed over the years as medical technology has developed. The point at which a body had sustained too much damage to be put back the way it was was different 100 years ago from what it was 10 years ago, and different 10 years ago from what it is today. Someone who would have been pronounced dead may now still be savable, and we're capable of sustaining certain bodily functions even when the body has been damaged to the point of being unable to perform them itself. This is a complicated topic even in the context of an already complex subject. The brain is an extremely complex and highly optimized neural network. Neural networks, whether made of brain cells, electrical circuitry, computer code, dominoes or abstract mathematical equations, process information based on how they are configured, and the configuration can be altered based on feedback from experience. This means, in effect, that the neural network can learn. It has proven to be a valuable tool in the field of machine learning and AI, especially as it applies to things like image recognition and language processing software where artificial neural networks have pushed the field leaps and bounds ahead of where it was at before they came into common use. Your experiences, memories, emotion, personality and knowledge are all encoded in the way the network is configured. Right now there is a lot of progress being made on research into how the brain operates, to the point where we are learning to better decode brain activity. We can, to a limited degree and under certain conditions, construct an image of what your eyes are seeing based on your brain activity. There was a recent experiment where they showed subjects a series of images and would ask whether the image made them think of the present or the future. Based on brain scans, after seeing the image but before the subject even knew they were going to be asked to be asked the question, researchers could predict with a high degree of accuracy which answer they would give. We can also induce experiences by directly interfacing with the brain. Electrical pulses to certain areas can induces flashes of light in your peripheral vision. There's even a machine that uses electromagnetism to induce in the subject the feeling of having a profound religious experience. Everything that we've learned so far about living things, including humans, has had them running on exactly the same physical principles as everything else. We're really just a very complex bundle of elements undergoing a sustained series of chemical reactions.

Evolution, and life in general, is a chemical process. It isn't intelligent. Despite the metaphor inherent in common parlance, your body doesn't "know" to store fat. It stores fat under certain conditions as a natural consequence of its structure in the same way that ice melts under certain conditions (i.e. Heat) without needing to "know" that it should be liquid water. Similarly, the early chemical reactions that lead to the formation of life wouldn't have been the result of atoms "deciding" they needed to form the structures that would develop into life. They would have been molecules that were created naturally and had some degree of ability to replicate themselves in the conditions they were under. Once self-replication starts, evolution occurs and the molecules that were best able to replicate, those that made better copies of themselves more frequently, would have outpaced the rest and eventually developed all of the complex structures that we associate with modern life.

Or God knew you were going to change your mind all along.

We're already doing this experiment. It's called 'California.'

In quantum mechanics, an "observer" is anything that interacts with a particle such that the state its in matters to the interaction. A brick wall could "observe" an experiment where you bounce something off it and affect the outcome. As far as entanglement goes, it's about as mystical as cutting a coin in half, separating the halves over a large distance and then looking to see which half you have. You instantly know which half the other one is regardless of how far away it is from you, but you can no longer affect it in any way and the half your holding has no further relationship to anything that happens to the other one from that point forward.

Yes, but the word 'ramp' itself didn't exist back then. So there you go.

I think he means you stand on top of what has already been built and drag the stones up the side until the reach the current top, then place them, stand on too of those, and repeat. Of course, that's just using the pyramid itself as a ramp, and one with a much steeper incline, so patently more difficult to use than a more graduated incline, which is the entire point of using ramps. I'm going to take a page from Colbert and say that 'visceral knowledge' may more accurately be named knowiness.

I've found that particular thirst to be rather unquenchable personally. The more I feed it, the hotter it burns. That said, and before I mix too many metaphors, this is still a fun place to learn and a useful resource.

Less than high school and generally more interesting.

Who is fighting who? How do we know Canada and Mexico are on our side? What are the circumstances this war is being fought under?

Still, though, shall isn't used as a present tense form of a verb meaning 'owe' any longer, and the form of 'will' under discussion isn't the present tense form of the verb meaning 'to want or to desire.' As used in the future tense, both are auxiliary verbs used pretty much exclusively (especially in American English) to denote tense, although both were derived from their respective aforementioned verb forms. You were correct, however, that neither is the future tense of the verb 'to be' and that they are both derived from other sources, so I'm not going to say it's strictly the etymology fallacy, although technically it's not completely outside the realm of possibility that a word with a different etymological origin could be adopted as the future tense of another word, so simply providing the etymology of the word doesn't strictly prove what its current usage is, which I think is what Strange was getting at.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shall_and_will If you read down, it notes that the Germanic languages didn't retain a future tense from PIE and ended up making use of auxiliary verbs instead. Will and shall are two such verbs, but are not technically, themselves, the future tense of any particular verbs, including 'to be.' "I was correct." "I am correct." "I shall correct?" "I will correct?" The future tense would be "I shall/will be correct" where shall/will is an auxiliary verb modifying the verb 'to be.' Their origins are most visible when comparing with the forms should/would/could. Should: I am hypothetically obligated to do something Would: I hypothetically want to do something Could (from can): I am hypothetically able to do something

Hm, you might be right.