Fanghur

The other day I had all four of my wisdom teeth removed (two and a half were still under the gums, and I noticed afterward that my speech seemed to be slightly improved. What I mean by this is that for a while now I noticed that I had some slight difficulty making the 'roo' sound within a word, for example, the word 'truth' ended up sounding more like simply 'true', but now I no longer seem to be having that 'problem' quite as much, at least I don't think I am. Is there any reason that my wisdom teeth would be affecting my pronunciation like that? Or am I just 'hearing things', as it were?

Does anyone know whether the common fundamentalist claim of something existing 'outside of space and time' has any meaning whatsoever given what we now know about the universe? I mean, to me, saying that essentially reduces to 'existing outside of existence' since existence is necessarily spacial and temporal. It seems to me like a clear violation of the Laws of Identity and Non-contradiction, which of course is logically impossible, but I'm not a physicist so I don't know for sure.

Let's say that we eventually progress to the point where we are able to (somehow) produce huge amounts of antimatter, at least by today's standards, and we build an interstellar spacecraft to travel to Proxima Centauri. Let's say that using antimatter propulsion, along with several other propulsion types, we are able to propel the spacecraft up to a significant percent of the speed of light, say 50%. If I'm not mistaken, at those speeds it would take approximately 9 years for the ship to travel to Alpha Centauri from the point of view of those left on Earth, and ~2.5 years from the perspective of those inside the ship travelling at 50% the speed of light due to the time dilation effect. *Note that these numbers are not taking into account the deceleration period. Would I be correct in saying that when travelling at such speeds, hitting anything along the way, even something as tiny as a speck of dust smaller than the width of a human hair, would spell disaster for the entire ship? I'm not certain of the mathematics involved, but I would imagine that at those speeds the relativistic mass of that speck of dust, and its resulting kinetic energy, would dwarf any atomic bomb we have ever created. Would that be a fair assessment?

Does anyone know whether the state of brain death is reversible? In other words, can a person who is brain dead ever be revived, and by 'revived' I mean up and walking around as if nothing ever happened? I ask because I am having a discussion with someone who is making the, as far as I am concerned, absolutely absurd claim that near-death experiences are proof that consciousness survives the death of the brain because there have been cases where people who were literally brain dead have reported experiencing near-death experiences. Is this guy just being obstinate, or is he correct? Because as I understand it, brain death is characterized by the complete necrosis of the brain neuronal tissue due to oxygen deprivation or other similar catastrophic conditions. And if this were true then there would be zero chance of recovery, and even if the body were kept alive, the person would be left in a permanent vegetative state. Am I correct here or is he?

I am currently having a discussion with someone regarding whether or not our consciousness is able to survive after death. Personally, I do not believe that it can or even that that is a logically coherent concept. However, as an intellectually consistent skeptic, I never completely rule anything out. Does anyone know whether there is a single shred of valid evidence, whether anecdotal or not, that consciousness is able to survive the complete destruction of the brain? Now, many people cite near-death experiences as evidence; I do not. In fact I would go so far as to say that I know for a fact that NDEs cannot be considered evidence for an afterlife for one very important reason: the brain is still intact and at least partially active during them. The way I see it, in order to actually have evidence for consciousness surviving death, you would need to have someone whose brain was completely destroyed to the point where we could be absolutely sure that no vestige of their neural network remained intact, and then put their brain back together to see if they experienced anything. Obviously that has not and cannot happen. Anything short of that, however, I do not see as evidence for any kind of afterlife. What are everyone's thoughts?

I am extremely perplexed about something. I recently watched a fascinating video on YouTube comparing the sizes of the Earth, Sun, Rigel and VY Canis Majoris: And I was curious what the actual mass of VY Canis Majoris was, and wherever I looked it was listed as only about 30 times as massive as the Sun! If the video is anything to judge by, Canis Majoris dwarfs the Sun the way the Sun dwarfs your average asteroid, so I can't fathom that this is an accurate assessment of the mass of this star. Am I overlooking some elementary factor here?

It wasn't the guy who I was arguing with who said it, what he was trying to argue was that the Borde-Vilenkin-Guth theorem proved that the universe had an absolute beginning, therefore god must exist. Obviously that is a complete non sequitur, and the Borde-Vilenkin-Guth theorem only proves that the expansion of the universe had a beginning, so I checked up on it and it turns out the some of the people who derived the theorem don't even agree with my opponent's (or William Lane Craig's, who he is basically parroting) position regarding the theorem, and one of them had said something along the lines of "there may be some (infinitely rare) particles whose histories are infinitely long." This was after he had clarified that the theorem doesn't mean that the universe had an absolute beginning, which was the only point I had been trying to make, but my opponent decided to latch onto the 'infinitely rare' thing, most likely because he knew that I had defeated his argument some just started flailing.

Here is the link to the entire debate, if someone want to see it to better understand where I am coming from. If anyone wants to comment on whether they think this guy is just trolling or whether he is being serious, I would be interested in knowing that as well. http://www.sodahead.com/entertainment/who-is-the-greatest-youtube-atheist/question-3595819/comment-106038411/

Lately I have been having a quite vitriolic debate with someone on Sodahead about whether William Lane Craig's 'Kalam Cosmological Argument' is sound. I don't think that it is, and I think that it has been debunked on numerous occasions, but I digress. He continually cites the so-called 'BVG theorem', claiming that it absolutely proves that the universe had an absolute beginning; I am well aware that this is not the case and that the BVG theorem merely proves that the expansion of the universe had a beginning, as Vilenkin and Guth have both gone on record to clarify. Can anyone tell me what this means exactly; this is a quote from Vilenkin that my opponent is continuing to throw at me because Vilenkin is speaking of 'infinitely rare' particles, which he then claims is equivalent to saying that they have zero probability of actually existing. Can someone please try and clarify this issue? "I would say this is basically correct, except the words “absolute beginning” do raise some red flags. The theorem says that if the universe is everywhere expanding (on average), then the histories of most particles cannot be extended to the infinite past. In other words, if we follow the trajectory of some particle to the past, we inevitably come to a point where the assumption of the theorem breaks down—that is, where the universe is no longer expanding. This is true for all particles, except perhaps a set of measure zero. In other words, there may be some (infinitely rare) particles whose histories are infinitely long." I don't think that Vilenkin would have bothered mentioning it if that literally meant that there is zero probability of them actually existing, but I don't know what he means by it.

Does anyone know whether nuclear pulse propulsion, that is, using atomic bombs to propel a starship through space, would be anything approaching being practical? I mean, I've heard it said that we could theoretically build such a space ship with current technology, but I recently saw a documentary that said that in order to get up to speed using nuclear pulse propulsion, you would have to detonate a nuclear bomb behind the ship once every 3 seconds for days at a time. That works out to hundreds of thousands of nuclear bombs, which seems ridiculously impractical to me. Where the heck would you store them? Am I overlooking something here? Or is nuclear pulse propulsion really as impractical as I now think it is?

I recently watched a Discovery Channel documentary called 'Evacuate Earth' in which a neutron star is discovered to be on a collision course with Earth and we have to build a massive star ship to escape destruction. Anyway, in the documentary the neutron star is depicted as one might expect with the media, as a red-coloured star with a eerie-looking aura surrounding it. That got me wondering though, do we have any idea what a neutron star would actually look like? Would it emit light or would it be completely dark?

But it is meaningful to say that a rock is a rock, it is not NOT a rock, and it is not neither or both at the same time in the same sense. Am I right?

Fine, thank you for correcting me on the solipsism issue. And if you are going to define 'truth' as something that is necessarily subjective and/or conceptual, then fine, there is no objective truth. But I don't view truth like that. I have always defined 'truth' and 'reality' in synonymous ways and as being not contingent on whether or not anyone is there to assess it.

Solipsism is the philosophical view that everything except your own mind is necessarily subjective; therefore if you say there is no objective reality, you are essentially arguing solipsism. And I did not say that I order to be objective, minds must be unable to perceive and conceptualize it. It is objectively true, at least as far as we have been able to tell, that in our universe nothing can exceed the speed of light. That is an objective truth about the nature of our universe, and it would be true whether or not there were any minds there to assess the truth of it.

Let's not get into solipsism again, it is an intellectually vapid exercise of futility. And 'absolute certainty' is a great big red herring fallacy.

I'm not defining it that way, that is the definition of objective.

No, because if it was contingent on the mind of a deity then it would by definition be subjective rather than objective. Objective means 'irrespective of any minds'.

So would it be more accurate then to say that no transcendent / transcendental morality exists, rather than no objective morality?

There may not be an effective way to put it into words, since I was not even able to effectively explain my position regarding the logical tautologies. MY point is this, if we set the premise that life is generally preferable to death, based on that premise, would it be true to conclude then that murder is generally an objectively immoral thing to do based on that moral premise?

So basically ontology is just the philosophical study of the nature of reality? I guess what my 'opponent' is really looking for is a 'transcendental' basis of objective reality, not a ontological basis? And while I am thinking of it, I have another question regarding this same debate that I want an opinion on. Would it be accurate to say that in order for something to be objectively true, it must be based on at least some underlying premises? For example, I am an atheist, and yet I still believe in objectively moral systems, and these systems are objective based on certain premises such as 'life is generally preferable to death', 'violating someone's free will needlessly is wrong', etc. Am I looking at this the right way?

Can someone please explain exactly what, if anything, this term means? I've been having a debate on Sodahead with a theist (and a troll as well) who keeps on making the claim that if there was no god, there could be no 'ontological grounding' for objective morality. I do not really know how to respond to that because it doesn't even make sense to me. I do believe in objective morality, but whether or not a god exists has nothing whatsoever to do with that so far as I can tell. Is he simply misusing the word 'ontology' to try and throw me off, or am I missing something here?

Not logic. I have made this point several times already. I consider the laws of identity, non-contradiction and excluded middle to be fundamental properties of existence, not conceptual law based on logic, and by my own logic to apply even at the quantum level; an electron, while it exists, is an electron and it is not NOT an electron. Do me a favour, ydoaPs and anyone else, and watch this 5 part debate between Matt Dillahunty and Matt Slick on this issue; my view is identical to Dillahunty's. Maybe that will actually get my point across.

You didn't even answer my question, you're answering some other question. I'm starting to think that you don't believe in an objective reality, because that is certainly the implication which your responses are giving, in which case we may never find common ground. The names of shapes which we have invented are conceptual, but the shapes themselves are not conceptual, they are existential; in a universe with no minds, a grain of salt, or a planet, or an asteroid, etc. would still have whatever shape it has even though there would be no one there to give that shape a title. You just completely dodged my question. In a universe with no minds, could a planet simultaneously be the shape that we in this universe conceptually know of as a sphere and NOT in that shape at the same time in the same sense? No, it could not. It either IS that shape or it is NOT that shape, it can't be both and it can't be neither. That is what I am referring to when I think of the Law of Non-Contradiction and Excluded Middle as being absolute. In a universe with no minds, everything in that universe has a nature, because existence itself IS part of the nature of all that exists. Can something be other than what its essentially is? No, it can't. That is what I mean when I say that the Law of Identity is absolute. It would be nonsensical to suggest otherwise. Equally nonsensical as it would be to suggest that perhaps on some alien planet there is a drawing of a square circle, something is logically impossible because it violates those laws.

Wait a minute, let me get this straight. Are you trying to tell me that if I were to make an absolute statement that, for example, "I know that a square circle or a horizontal vertical line are by their very nature impossibilities because they violate the Laws of Identity and Non-Contradiction", that I would be mistaken because those laws do not always apply? Is that what you are trying to tell me? And I am talking about in an abstract sense here. Whatever quantum mechanics may imply, I still stand by my assertion that everything by definition has a nature, because existence is part of something's nature, therefore whatever exists has a nature.

You're right, there is nothing absolute about LOGIC. What I am talking about, though, is NOT logic. They are fundamental properties of existence itself which the three tautologies I mentioned are our representations of. If those weren't properties of existence, logic would not work, because truth statements would be impossible to make. I have made that point several times already and yet you keep going back to logic and making the same fallacy of division over and over again. Where is the disconnect here? And by the way, just because we are unable to perceive order at the quantum level does not necessarily mean that it truly is completely devoid of a consistent nature. To make an analogy, if you have a repeating sequence of random numbers a googleplex figures long, it does indeed have an underlying order and is not truly random, but it would be impossible for us to perceive the underlying structure of the sequence. I have always felt that quantum mechanics may operate in an analogous way.