Strange

Strictly speaking, it does. It is just dominated by the largest nearby mass (the Earth). You will be slightly stretched by the Moon and Sun (like the tides) and everything else in the universe probably has an immeasurably small effect. But no, this is not the reason that gravity appears weak.

I didn't say anything about my beliefs. Presumably you have had an irony bypass.

I have been using Airtable (https://airtable.com) to organise my work. It is somewhere between a smart spreadsheet and a simple relational database. I have set it up so I can track all my projects, invoices and payments. If you have used Excel, it isn't any more complicated to use than that (maybe simpler) but much more flexible (in some ways). There is a free version (which I use). I think the paid version gives access to things like more visualisation tools. I have never thought of a mind mapping tool for project planning, but they way iMindMap integrates with task management looks good. Did you look at DropTask, the tool they use? There is a free version of that if it provides the functionality you need by itself.

Formal logic is a branch of mathematics. We use logic when designing electronic circuits. And then we can use mathematics to prove the properties of those circuits. There is an entire branch of mathematics that deals with first and higher-order logic. This can be used, for example, in automatic theorem provers. The rest of your post was equally ignorant and fallacious. You shouldn’t post this sort of drivel in the first place, and certainly not in someone else’s thread. Did it deserve down-votes? Probably.

Posted two years ago and not been back since. I don't think you are going to get any guidance from them.

I have no idea what you are talking about. (So just as well we can't discuss it.)

That seems to open a whole new can of worms. For example, we can sense infrared but can’t see it. And what, exactly, does “sense” mean?

But that IS consistent with the evidence. There is ZERO evidence for an external source. That is the difference. You need to invoke something for which their is no evidence(*) to make your idea work. Occam's Razor. (*) No scientific evidence. Your "evidence" for this is based purely on your personal beliefs. But that is not a logical fallacy because I am not using it as the basis of my argument. (As highlighted by the words you wisely chose to put in italics.) It is just a hypothetical question. One that, obviously, cannot be answered but can be used to prompt thought.

I don't usually have any time(*) for videos, but that was very good. (*) Excuse the pun

I think it is only the people who believe in a god or gods to define what those things are. It's not like people who don't believe in a god have some specific god in mind. ("I don't believe in Zeus, but I am willing to keep an open mind about Thor, Amaterasu and the god of the Old Testament (except Genesis)")

Which is one of the counter-arguments I suggested earlier. Nope. But if you think that, then it isn't surprising that you think there must be something behind this perceived "purpose". But it is a natural human reaction to see patterns and purpose where there is none. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia That is a perspective, but one unsupported by any evidence at all. Until something purely mechanical is able to reproduce it? Basically, this is a classic example of the fallacy of begging the question: why are we not like machines? Because we have creative intelligence that machines don't have. How do we know that machines don't (can't) have the same intelligence? Because it is uniquely human. I think that is nonsense. Or certainly unsupported guesswork. Some people who believe in some sort of higher power are also in favour of the death penalty, or are mass murderers, or in other ways debase the value of life. Of course, so do some people who don't believe in a higher power. But that's the point: I don't believe it is a factor in how people view the value of life. But then your belief sounds rather like the smug self-satisfaction who thinks their religion is better than others I'm not sure that waffle has any place on a science forum.

I think the answer is no. Unless it is within some weird non-linear medium.

Ooo-er, missus.

I wonder if this is at the heart of the different (scientific vs. magical) approaches to the subject: you see apparent purpose in a spider's web or a murmuration of sparrows or the existence of consciousness; we see emergent behaviours driven by evolution. You may be correct in thinking there is some driving force/entity/whatever producing all these things but as it produces results that are indistinguishable from a world where it doesn't exist, I am going to stick with Occam on this one.

Another example just occurred to me: we can see stars because their light is sufficiently bright, even though they are smaller than the resolving power of the human eye. So it is hard to argue that we can see the star (if it was a dot on the page, we wouldn't be able to see it) we can only see the light.

True. I had only read the article you linked to, not the paper. So it is just another example of slightly exaggerated / sensationalised reporting. The paper just shows a correlation; they do not seem to claim cause and effect, either way. They are more concerned with the structure and organisation of the brain and its functions. They certainly don't say that this is the "purpose" of consciousness. And they certainly don't extend it to increasing entropy outside of the brain (which you appeared to be doing, previously). BTW: very interesting paper. Thanks for bringing it to our attention. If they were duplicate threads, then it wouldn't matter which I responded to. I didn't "choose" one (and certainly not on the basis of which words it had or didn't have in it).

That is an under-developed version of the gene that makes people throw coins into fountains, I guess.

I'm not sure I understand that: You think that robots are receivers, like the brain, for consciousness from humans? So the seems to be a statement about hw consciousness came to be, rather than where it comes from (on a day to day basis, so to speak). I see no reason that it shouldn't have arisen as a side effect of the evolution of the brain. Thinking that it must be different from every other aspect of our morphology and our behaviour seems to me to be just an argument from incredulity. (Or, in some cases, from religious belief.) I'm not choosing it so much as following the evidence. And the thing that "programmed" these machines is evolution. To what end? To reproduce their DNA.

It is an assumption consistent with the evidence. The idea of the brain as a TV receiving undetectable signals from an unknown (and undetectable) source is not really consistent with any evidence. It is just wishful thinking. What would falsify this external source of intelligence? If it cannot be falsified, it is not a scientific concept. By this argument, we don't need a Turing test for consciousness. Any sufficiently complex robot is evidence of consciousness being received from an external source. And what is "extremely complex" behaviour? An amoeba hunting food? But we understand the biochemical processes that cause organisms to move towards or away from objects. A plant distributing its seeds by making the fruit attractive to an animal that it "knows" will carry them a long way? Spiders making webs? Ants building nests? There is no reason to think that these behaviours require, or are evidence of consciousness of, any level of intelligence. They are just mechanical processes. If you interrupt them, they will just start again. If you stop a spider from building a web it will just start a new one. You can keep doing this until it dies of starvation. It is not aware that there is something stopping it or that it should do something different. You are just resetting the machine each time. Eventually it runs out of fuel

That is learning (or culture), not genetics. Of course, genetics provides the ability to throw and to learn from others. Some can. For example, spiders ability to make a web is purely genetic. They don't have to be taught. And they can't not make webs; it is a completely automatic process. Arms and hands to throw. Eyes to see. A brain with the ability to process visual inputs and control the throw accurately, and then learn that this is a useful thing to do. So it is stored in many (most? all?) genes. There isn't a single gene for throwing stones, any more than there is a gene for saying the word "stone". It arises from a combination of other abilities.

Why not. We don't know how large the universe is. It could be finite or infinite. But you started off by saying that the universe was infinite. Now you are saying it can't be? No you can't. All we can observe is that it was hot and dense at some time in the past. We don't know what happened before that. And this has absolutely no connection with whether it is infinite or not. If the universe was created (something for which there is zero evidence) then it could have been created infinite in size, just as easily as it could have been created finite in size (neither seem to be very realistic possibilities). No. But those laws say that space and time are measured differently by different observers. Those laws tell us there is no "universal now". I was talking about physics: the energy (or mass, or speed) of an object depends on the observer. It is not a fixed or absolute quantity. This has nothing to do with being "primitive". Yes. The observable universe is a finite volume defined by the time that light takes to reach us (and the expansion of the universe). We haven't yet seen any extra-terrestrial life, so I don't know what the relevance of this is.

No.The universe could be finite or infinite. We have no way of telling which (and I suspect never can). No we don't. The meaning of "now" is dependent on the observer; different observers may disagree about when things happen relative to other things. Energy (and possibly information) is also observer dependent. So it depends who measures these things and how. We can never observe anything outside the observable universe by definition (not because we are "primitive").

Yes. This is described in detail in the theory of general relativity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity Note that is is not just mass but also energy, because they are equivalent.

The point is that the word "theory" is used differently in theoretical physics than in some other branches of science. But theoretical physics is still based on the existing theoretical (in the strict sense) frameworks that are well supported by evidence. The "theories" of theoretical physics are hypothetical extensions of those theories. I'm not sure what the problem is whit that. Everyone knows that string theory, for example, is not tested and therefore not known to be correct (although it is consistent with known science). And mathematical models do not have to be proven to be science. But they do have to be falsifiable, in principle. String theory is capable of being tested (not by any technology we have now) and so it can be falsified and so it is scientific. In other words, hypotheses that have been shown to be wrong are still scientific. The steady state model of the universe was a scientific theory that was shown to be incorrect. Ditto aether and phlogiston. The fact that they were found to be incorrect does not mean they are not scientific. Is that what your misunderstanding is based on? Your faith that you know better than actual physicists (despite not being able to provide any support for your beliefs). I did wonder.

Last time I tried at a local pharmacy it was before Amazon and Ebay existed! (Or maybe when Amazon just sold books and Ebay was a place for individuals to auction off their unwanted items.)