Iggy

I'm sensing a small amount of bias which I can't share. Iranians aren't brown. The words "Iranian" and "Aryan" are in fact equivalent (you may have noticed they sound the same). The US doesn't need to lie to bomb brown people. It's quite good at doing that for reasons of truth or for no discernible reason at all. If we could return to my question, did all of the countries capable of making fuel cells refuse to make them for Iran? If yes, why are you mentioning the US. If no, why aren't they doing it. I'm honestly trying to get an answer for that question because I'm unfamiliar with the story.

I haven't been keeping up with the story, but I don't follow exactly how that can make sense. The US is certainly the last place that would enrich Iranian uranium for fuel rods or medical purposes. It would be Russia or France or Japan or some other country before the US were even involved in the conversation. Did they all "REFUSE"? More than that, why would Iran be investing so much money in enrichment facilities if they want some other country (much less the US) to enrich their uranium for them? It's like buying a printing press and giving all your copy work to the copy shop down the street. I can't square what you mean at all.

A lone galaxy can't perpetually radiate heat. We can imagine otherwise, but it is exactly like imagining a lone tea cup in the arctic staying perpetually warm. Science predicts otherwise. No, Hawking radiation is black body and explicitly the only information it holds is the mass of the black hole. It's as close as one can get to a dead signal, but that's ok. The sun, after all, doesn't radiate a powerful organized and directed energy source, but it doesn't have to for life. It is enough of a temperature difference for life. With accelerated expansion the last things to radiate a little heat into the rest of the dead galaxy will be black holes. That might be enough for the last remnants of life to hold on -- doing the slowest and most efficient methods of usefully progressing and keeping entropy low for the last lingering bits of time, but even the largest black hole will eventually evaporate and at last the universe extinguishes its last light. Therein written into the laws of physics is the demise of life and the fatal flaw of any deity that wrote those laws with life in mind. Surely this makes Krauss' point. The oldest photons arriving now actually started out moving away from us. Aimed at us and trying to makes their way in this direction as they were -- the expansion of space nevertheless moved these photons further from us. The Hubble horizon (or the 'Hubble distance' as they might more often call it) grew and the photons crossed our side of the horizon and started making progress in this direction and here they've just arrived from that roller coaster journey. With the acceleration of expansion the Hubble distance started moving the other way -- towards us. As it progresses we see a smaller and smaller comoving part of the Universe... where that distance was growing before, it is now shrinking if cosmology is correct. When Krauss said that things will cross the v=c horizon never to be seen again this is surely the horizon about which he was speaking. It is the v=c horizon on the typical spacetime diagram beyond which events are never to be seen in the future.

Krauss is making his point conservatively. If acceleration of expansion is true, not only will future civilizations mistake our big bang universe for a de sitter one, eventually civilizations will simply not exist at all. He says that there will be stars like our sun in 100 billion years and focuses on their conclusions, but the larger point is surely that every star will eventually die. Every black hole will evaporate. Eventually nothing useful will ever be done again in a universe subject to heat death. If he didn't make that point (I didn't watch the rest of the video) I think he missed the larger point.

Blue light would bypass a blue filter, but I don't know if blue light would work for a lens detector. All the ones I see on the first two pages of google search results are red. It is very possible that the blue end of the spectrum doesn't work well for detecting lenses. Maybe because blue light has more diffraction from a glass lens. I don't know.

In relativity the present is not well defined. Not only is it not an invariant (already taking away some of its significance in relativity), the concept of non-local simultaneity breaks down and becomes something less meaningful in the presence of mass. Covering the cosmos with a coordinate system on which a line of simultaneity could be drawn is not possible so it loses its ability to be a well-defined thing.

and I think they want it to be much less trivial, but I'm not sure it is. What I meant to say before, but couldn't find the words, is that I don't see any falsifiable differences between the consequences of the two philosophies, but I guess it does indeed depend on how the philosophies are interpreted.

If they are detected by reflecting red light off the lens then covering the lens with a blue or green color filter would thwart the detector. Let me demonstrate what I mean... ...cover the red dot with the blue side of color 3d glasses and it will go away. The downside would of course be the camera recording in blue.

I think you misunderstand. I was responding to this: If that is a mischaracterization because Eternalism doesn't in fact say that then the mischaracterization isn't mine. However, I don't believe Heritic is mischaracterizing it. Eternalism is often summarized in that way. The source I quoted in the post you responded to says: According to Eternalism, non-present objects like Socrates and future Martian outposts exist right now http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/#PreEteGroUniThe I don't think you read the rest of my post. It gives the same thought experiment, If a universal now is a tenant of presentism, I've never seen it presented that way. Their philosophy seems to follow from the claim "non-present objects don't exist" which is tautologically true for any observer in special relativity. There is no such thing as a non-local present in general relativity so the statement wouldn't be fitting with that theory.

By analogy, you don't have to slice up an office building to say that a certain chair is on one floor rather than the other. "The death of Shakespeare always exists" would make sense if the word "always" were used in the context of a second dimension of time in which the four dimensional event existed. There isn't a second dimension of time so it should not (and self-evidently doesn't) make sense to talk that way. I would enjoy it. You seem to know the issue.

I'm not a historian, but I could summarize what I know. About 2,500 years ago an evil Iraqi king, Nebuchadnezzar, conquered Israel and destroyed their temple and exiled the Jews from Jerusalem. An Iranian king (Cyrus the Great) showed up 70 years later and freed them. The Israelites called him 'messiah' because he was really cool... gave them back their homeland, helped them rebuild their temple, and gave them back the gold and silver that Nebuchadnezzar stole. So... relations started good. Israel loved Iran and Iran was clearly good with Israel. The same thing happened with Rome actually. They took over Israel, destroyed the temple, and exiled the Jews. It lasted hundreds of years that time where no Jew was allowed in Jerusalem until some time in the late 6th or early 7th century (I don't remember exactly) the Iranians showed up again. With the help of the Jewish people they defeated the western Roman empire in Jerusalem and again the Iranians helped set up a Jewish government there, but that only lasted a few years until Rome retook it. Good relations again though. Then there were Islamic Arabs. Both Israel and Iran were conquered and lived as second class citizens under Arab rule and they initially sort of shared a bond, one might say, for that experience. The difference being that the Iranians gave up some (not all) of their ethnic identity (the death, for example, of Zoroastrianism which was an Iranian religion that had its parallels with the Hebrew religion) and they adopted an Islamic faith and an Islamic identity, and the Jewish people did not. After WW2 there was a new Jewish homeland and Iran was an ally. They had good political, military, and economic bonds. They worked jointly developing weapons systems and they traded even while Arab countries made Israel the object of embargoes. In 1979 the Islamic religion took over the political governing of Iran and it became an Islamic republic. Since then relations between Iran and Israel have worsened drastically. We now have Iranians parading the missiles that Israel helped them build through the streets draped with flags that say "Israel must be wiped off the map" in English, and chant "Death to Israel... the little Satan". It's unfortunate. Iran has a unique, and quite liberal, ethnic history of which they should be very proud. It's just controlled right now by a very anti-Jewish time of Islam. Right now countries are worried that they're about to have a nuclear weapon. Iran publicly funds terrorism and pays for political executions. It is scary for them to get the bomb. Becoming a nuclear power drastically elevates.. at the very least... a country's ability to aggressively influence other nations without fear of military reprisal. Scary... especially for Jewish Israelis.

Indeed, but I can't have a discussion with a paper. Is it not an argument you'd be interested in making or discussing? I don't follow the semantics of the OP: I don't understand the semantics of something like "the year 1616 still exists and is real" because it has a grammar problem. Nearly 400 years separate this post and the death of Shakespeare so it only makes sense for this post to say "the year 1616 did exist and was real" otherwise it conflates two different times... 2012 and 1616. If you're considering it in terms of spacetime then I would say that the death of Shakespeare can't be found on the 2012 hyperplane on a spacetime diagram.

Stargate, because it has the perfect story arc going from discovering something in the sand to building intergalactic battleships over 10 years. That would be the adventure I'd find most compelling. Then again... If I had to visit one it would almost have to be Dark Angel because, you know, genetically engineered Jessica Alba.

Yeah, apparently other people get the same impression, These two authors claim that presentism and eternalism are both essentially either vacuously true when viewed with the proper denition of existence (for instance, to say that the present is the only thing that \exists now" is tautological since \now" is dened in terms of the present) or analytically false when viewed with the improper sense of existence (for instance, to say that the present is the only thing that \exists tenselessly" is to ignore the past and future that are assumed in the phrase \exists tenselessly"). In other words, there is no difference between presentism and eternalism if "the past exists tenselessly" is a meaningless thing to say. I'm quite sure it is. Even if "tenselessly" were a real word it wouldn't be a meaningful statement. edited to add another snippet... In an earlier paper , Dorato[10] brings in various other semantic arguments against eternalism specically in an attempt to show how eternalism is as problematic as presen- tism. The rst contention Dorato raises is against the eternalist perspective that \the past, present, and future are all real at the same time", which he views as meaningless since one cannot say anything about the relationship between the past, present, and future at a given time since all three temporal regions cannot be simultaneous. There must be a temporal separation between the past, present, and future for them to be well dened, so any statement about how the past, present, and future interact at a given time collapses this distinction and thus becomes meaningless. This seems to me like the most obvious objection to any debate I've seen between the two

I think saying that matter expands through space is equivalent to saying that space expands. Here is a popular FAQ that answers: Are galaxies really moving away from us or is space just expanding? This depends on how you measure things, or your choice of coordinates. In one view, the spatial positions of galaxies are changing, and this causes the redshift. In another view, the galaxies are at fixed coordinates, but the distance between fixed points increases with time, and this causes the redshift. General relativity explains how to transform from one view to the other, and the observable effects like the redshift are the same in both views. Part 3 of the tutorial shows space-time diagrams for the Universe drawn in both ways. link But, I don't understand your assumption that only part of a spatially infinite universe can have matter. Homogeneity means that any large area of space you look at will have the same density. General relativity, which breaks down at the singularity like Spyman said, also does not actually describe the topology of the universe. From a 1999 Scientific American: A broader issue, however, is that relativity is a purely local theory. It predicts the curvature of each small volume of space--its geometry--based on the matter and energy it contains. Neither relativity nor standard cosmological observations say anything about how those volumes fit together to give the universe its overall shape--its topology. The three plausible cosmic geometries are consistent with many different topologies. For example, relativity would describe both a torus (a doughnutlike shape) and a plane with the same equations, even though the torus is finite and the plane is infinite. Determining the topology requires some physical understanding beyond relativity. link

I've always had the impression that any debate between presentism and eternalism rests on grammatical errors. From the time and place that I'm writing this post it only makes sense to say "Shakespeare existed". It wouldn't make sense to say "Shakespeare, who died some time ago, still exists right now". Rather than being the basis of a philosophy, it looks more like a problem with grammar. The Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy tries to clear it up but just manages to obfuscate it more, It might be objected that there is something odd about attributing to a Non-presentist the claim that Socrates exists right now, since there is a sense in which that claim is clearly false. In order to forestall this objection, let us distinguish between two senses of ‘x exists now’. In one sense, which we can call the temporal location sense, this expression is synonymous with ‘x is present’. The Non-presentist will admit that, in the temporal location sense of ‘x exists now’, it is true that no non-present objects exist right now. But in the other sense of ‘x exists now’, which we can call the ontological sense, to say that x exists now is just to say that x is now in the domain of our most unrestricted quantifiers, whether x happens to be present, like you and me, or non-present, like Socrates. When we attribute to Non-presentists the claim that non-present objects like Socrates exist right now, we commit the Non-presentist only to the claim that these non-present objects exist now in the ontological sense (the one involving the most unrestricted quantifiers). edit: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/#PreEteGroUniThe In other words, "Socrates exists right now" actually means "Socrates doesn't exist right now (in the present), but he does belong to the 'domain of our most unrestricted quantifiers'"... which is a meaningless phrase. Does the color red belong to the domain of our most unrestricted qualifiers? I'm also not sure how presentism's most understandable claim "non-present objects don't exist" disagrees with relativity. Being specific and keeping the grammar straight makes it easy to say, "Socrates exists relative to a spaceship at a great distance from earth moving away from the earth". Relative to that spaceship Socrates exists in the present. Events in the life of Socrates and events on the spaceship are simultaneous relative to the spaceship. That wouldn't make Socrates a "non-present object". It would rather make him present relative to the ship. Relative to me writing this post Socrates is not present and does not exist. The claim "non-present objects don't exist" seems correct in both cases. As long as Presentism isn't saying "non-present objects did not exist".

The US supreme court looked at the issue you raised in 2008 and ruled that the right isn't contingent on the prefatory phrase about a militia. They interpret it as an individual right 'of the people' just as valid now for self protection as it was then for militias protecting state authority from federalists. If the government makes it sufficiently difficult to buy a printing press or to publish things on the internet then there is no right to free speech. A right can't be so limited that one class of people end up capable and another class incapable. The English bill of rights included a right to bear arms because King James II tried to outlaw Protestant firearm ownership while arming Catholics. The point of a constitutional right has to be limiting the government's ability to accomplish something like that even if a majority of the people support it.

Even if your time wasn't completely wasted, you are now over 500 posts almost all of which are boilerplate reproductions of the same idea. It has been whittled down into a bullet point synopsis, You've shown that you can relate liberal education, God, technology, and Nazis to censorship and many other topics, but continuing to press more topics into the same boiler plate won't make your point any more comprehensively. So... I mean as constructively as possible... it has to be a waste of time here and now, or at the very least would be a better use of time elsewhere.

This might help: The idea is to push more of the white dots down than up. Underwater swimming involves a similar undulatory motion by alternatively bending toes, ankles, knees, hips, and good swimmers even get their torso involved and start to look like a dolphin.

As long as the moderators are censorious nazis they might as well make a new rule that members need to use the word "I" less than 7% of the time.

If there is no gravity at 600 km/s then there should be half at 300 km/s and a quarter at 150 and so on. Earth rotates at about .5 km/s so we should notice something like a .1% change in gravity over the course of a day. It looks like people have pointed out that gravimeters could easily detect that if your idea had merit. Because they don't the only possible conclusion is that it doesn't.

Would it help to think about wearing fins on your feet to help you swim when you're entirely submerged? It's more analogous to a snake slithering across the ground than a person jogging.

I noticed you categorically identified morality as subjective without qualifying it with a corollary statement, but in the present circumstances I can't help but point out that "geometry is objective" is a statement about geometry If you apply the definition of objectivity that I've offered in my last couple posts (objective = divorced from personal sentiment and emotional bias) nothing that comes to mind is more objective than geometry. The steps in a geometry proof (the deductions in the Principia for example) are valid no matter if Newton had an emotional preference for circles or if he preferred pentagons with very slightly rounded edges. I hope I didn't give that impression. and I certainly hope I've distinguished truth and objectivity and demonstrated that neither the latter nor my position regarding the latter relies on the former. If I were arguing moral universality or moral absolutism I might have to lean on moral truths, but as it is I don't Whew -- we've become caught in an incremental loop. You said first that morality is subjective, then said that Sam's postulate for deriving morality is subjective, then that the usefulness of the morality derived from the postulate is subjective, and now that the applicability of the usefulness of the morality derived from the postulate is subjective. Each link in the chain separates us from the issue because even if I grant the truth of what you just said (although I don't) it does *not* follow that morality is subjective, and subjective morality is specifically the claim I'm refuting. An analogy to simplify... a NASA scientist could say, "Classical mechanics should be applied to the problem of landing a rover on Mars because it is the most useful system of laws in that domain.". If I grant that this statement is subjective (again, I don't) it does not make classical mechanics subjective nor does it make mechanics subjective. Bringing the analogy home... a philosopher can likewise say, "Nagel's model of morality should be applied to the problem of judicial punishment because it is the most useful system of laws in that domain", and if I grant that this statement is subjective (you guessed it -- I don't) it doesn't mean that Nagel's model is necessarily subjective or that morality itself is necessarily subjective. So... I see no value in this argument. I notice a misconception that is likely partly my doing. You should not expect a model of morality to describe specific moral actions just like you wouldn't expect thermodynamics to describe specific perpetual motion machines. Thermodynamics is based on 3 postulates... the three laws of thermodynamics. From those three postulates the behavior of nearly any thermodynamic process can be predicted and explained. I wouldn't expect morality to work much differently. Earlier I gave three postulates on which moral behavior could be based: a drive towards solidarity the tendency to value others having compassion for others Evolution decided these for us when natural selection gave them precedent over their inverse. One could deduce the immorality of some specific instance of harming a child by deduction from these postulates... not because a study concludes that a majority of harmed children grow up embracing violence and violence is subjectively bad (that is a strawman), but because they logically derive from our postulates. On the contrary, there would be no such thing as empathy if not for moral actions and their benefit. It is hard for a group to prosper when its members are entirely selfish and cutthroat. A class of behavior, now called morality, was more beneficial to the group's cohesion in ancient times, so evolution selected for an emotional drive towards that behavior. I suspect my idea of "universal" and "absolute" is your idea of "objective". Let me try this thing I've tried before again with a different example... Kepler's laws are not inherent and they cannot be applied definitively. They do not apply exactly to the motion of the solar system, for example, and indeed -- each planetary system in the cosmos would deviate slightly differently from Kepler's laws. This means that Kepler's laws are not universal and not absolute -- but, they *are* objective. Even though they only approximately agree with real world situations, they are scientifically objective. If you understand that then you understand why the objectivity of morality isn't necessarily foiled by different people having different moral codes. Most of your arguments are some variant of this topic, and I'm unsure what more to say. Do you disagree that Euclidean geometry, classical mechanics, Kepler's laws, and whatever other examples I've given are objective? Or, do you think they are not analogous to your point about morality's irresolute nature? No, no, not a bit of that. What you call "energy" may not be what I call "energy". We could disagree firmly on what it means to be "energetic" or what importance energy holds. Do you conclude from this that every theory making use of energy is subjective? Of course not, so what are we talking about This analogy requires there to be some kind of over-arching truth to morality, as in "this concept is good always, even if it takes slightly different forms." No. It requires an objective method of consistently determining morality. The compass doesn't have to point true north for the bird's subjective migratory instinct to lose its monopoly on the direction they migrate. There is no preferred spatial direction in physics, and north could just as easily have pointed to Antarctica had maps been drawn differently in the middle ages. I specifically used an arbitrary example as an analogy to avoid this predictable objection. I have only mentioned moral truth in order to reject its appropriateness to my argument. In his book, The Moral Landscape, he defines two types of objectivity. He explains that the type he refers to is epistemological objectivity and he defines it in the same way that I've defined objectivity in this thread. He says, "it is objectively true to say that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions whether or not we can always answer these questions in practice" -Sam Harris -- The Moral Landscape -- Ch. 1 Moral Truth He takes the argument further than i have (I'm just asserting that morality can be scientifically objective -- he asserts that it can be scientifically objective and absolute). I didn't know any of this until I just now looked it up. Why did you determine that he never made this claim?

Sorry it took so long to get back here for a response. Maybe this post or this conversation should be moved. Sorry for the long post as well. Please feel no rush to respond. I may not be able to get back in quite a while. I was cryptic before. My point is like Poincare said, "no geometry is more true than another, it is only more useful". If usefulness is the only thing that lets us pick one geometry over another it doesn't make geometry subjective (I'm sure we can agree geometry isn't subjective)... and so the same should follow for morality. Having to judge it by usefulness wouldn't be a reason to call it subjective. I'm sure it's fine to disagree with Sam's postulate. You would end up with two versions of your statement, This ethical code is objectively morally good according to Sam's model of morality This ethical code is objectively morally bad according to my model of morality and we've established: even if the only thing offering us a choice between your model and Sam's is their relative usefulness that doesn't make the thing being modeled subjective. Both statements can be true and both models objective. Continuing the planet size analogy, both of these statements could be true: That planet is objectively 2500 km in diameter according to classical mechanics That planet is objectively 2490 km in diameter according to general relativity Both classical mechanics and general relativity are objective -- they are just built on different postulates. You are free to disagree with Sam's postulate or to disagree with the postulates of classical mechanics without making either resulting model subjective. So, again, it appears to me that disagreeing with the core principle of a model wouldn't be a reason to call it subjective. They would know morality without empathy because a person can know something without having an emotional affinity for it. Sociopaths are usually quite good a mimicking normal moral behavior when they want. I'm sure they couldn't do that if morals appeared arbitrary to them. In other words, a sociopath would know that a ponzi scheme is morally wrong even when first learning what a ponzi scheme is... not because they once memorized a list of every conceivable morally wrong action, but because ponzi schemes cause suffering and devalue others. From first principles it is simple to rationally deduce that it is morally wrong. They don't need to flip a coin when confronted with previously unconsidered moral dilemmas as if moral rights and wrongs appear arbitrary... as if randomly picked out of a hat. I'm not saying it would be intuitive. The opposite really -- I'm saying morality makes sense without emotion. It can be reasoned and rationally understood. Empathy is actually a very unreliable way of identifying morals. But none of these are actually objective qualities. I'm not sure about how you're using the term objective. When I say objective I mean that the statement doesn't rely on personal perspective and emotional bias. If we can logically put "a study of cultural and archaeological anthropology determines that..." before those statements then they should be objective. I mean them in the usual sense. As part of a complete and balanced breakfast the national institute of health has determined through exhaustive research that cheerios are of better value and greater benefit than cyanide. Compassion... let's see... sharing the spoils of a hunt with our neighbors rather than hunting our neighbors for their spoils. Thrive... being more and more able to control our own fate while our ancestors were more at fate's mercy. If every word in a statement needs to mean the same thing to everyone for it to be objective then no statement would ever be objective. Indeed so. Even if I imagined no problem with my girlfriend cheating on me (it wouldn't bother me at all) I should still know not to cheat on her because it will cause her great emotional pain. Thick skinned people know that causing emotional harm is morally wrong even if they themselves can't imagine being so harmed. It would be a very different world otherwise. Similarly, a high school jock should know that it is morally wrong to give a nerd a wedgie even if they feel no empathy for the nerd and no remorse for having done it. Empathy is clearly an unreliable push toward morality rather than being the only means of identifying it. It's like a bird's emotional need to migrate north in spring. Each bird could be drawn to fly in a slightly different northerly direction. This doesn't make the concept "north" subjective. Does it follow that it was the wolf's idea to care for old or injured members of the pack? If caring for the old and infirm is a moral action and somebody is responsible for designing morality then who designed the wolf's moral attitude toward its pack?

There is so much in your post I want to reply to, but before I do I have to ask about what looks like a pretty big misunderstanding. Why would you think I believe the bible is moral? Religion's subversion of morality has disgraced us time and again shamefully. I've argued strongly that morals can't be traced to a god or a design.