Strange

There is nowhere in the laws of physics or the rules of chemical bonding where you will find the six-pointed star of a snowflake. There is nothing in the four rules of Conway's "Game of Life" about creating complex self-replicating and interacting structures. There is not a gene (or even a set of genes) that encode the shape of a hand or an eye. These structures emerge, implicitly, from the underlying instructions. Where do you think the signalling pathways come from? The signals are proteins created from the genetic information. The signalling chemicals that each cell produces will depend on its neighbours (and the signalling chemicals they produce) and the environment. They differential into different cell types because of the different environment they developed in - surrounded by other heart cells or other bone cells; prior to that because they were adjacent to cells that would become other tissue types at that location in the body. The genetic instructions that are followed are in the genes. So a cell is surrounded by other cells. It gets signals from those cells. Those signals cause particular genes to be expressed or not expressed (the mechanism that causes expression to be turned on or off is, of course, encoded in the genes). So one cell will turn into muscle, another into bone and a third into hair. This horribly complex and messy system is what you get when there is no intelligent design behind the system. If we were to design self-replicating organisms that were capable of evolving to meet different environments, they would be much simpler. And what is the evidence for this alternative mechanism? Other than your incredulity.

Gosh. Cogito ergo sum? That argument was torn to shreds a long time ago. (And don't forget that it was really about producing a proof of god.) If the 4% refers to the "non-dark" sector then we can't see much of that, either. And if you include the universe beyond the observable, then there may be an infinite amount of visible matter that we can't see. And we are aware of the "invisible" parts (I assume this means dark matter and dark energy) because we can see their effects. You really need to tighten up your definitions of "see" and "visible". So it does come down to semantics after all.

While it is true that there is more to the universe than matter (if we assume that means baryonic matter - stuff made of fermions) I don't think there is any evidence that consciousness doesn't;t arise from matter (the brain). The only arguments against this I have seen are arguments from incredulity. Enough to know that he is a typical pseudoscientist.

Please define what you mean by materialism and provide some evidence it has been discarded.

The trouble is, there isn't a known mechanism for this to happen. However, people have looked for the possibility that there are, for example, some galaxies made of anti matter. So far there is no good evidence for this. And if, as you suggest, the anti matter could be so far away that we can never see it, then its hard to see how we could get any evidence of it.

I'm not sure what that means. They are not "workers". They are the processes by which structure appears without an explicit plan. Like the structure of snowflakes or the emergence of a phenotype from the genetic instructions. Just like biology, then. Not at all. They are one of the mechanisms that drives self organisation. Your snap rejection of this mechanism by which cells communicate their position in the developing organism perhaps explains why you haven't been able to find an explanation: you have rejected those that disagree with your beliefs, despite the fact that there is a large amount of evidence for them. Not at all. Tour may well be an excellent chemist. I haven't looked at his work in that area. It isn't relevant. There are a few creationists who are good scientists in their own fields; it is just when it comes to evolution that they reject it unscientifically. (And sadly, use pseudo scientific arguments to defend their beliefs.) And this is a another typically dishonest (or ignorant? I don't know) creationist argument. Nope. Another straw man. You don't have to extol the scientific validity of the theory. But it is a scientific theory. With mountains of evidence and well understood mechanisms. (And, of course, some open questions.) As such, the correct way to challenge it is with scientific evidence that it is wrong, not by statements of incredulity (especially from people who admit not to understand the field). No it is completely different. That is just a matter of opinion.Science doesn't work that way. (Something that creationists don't seem to understand - they seem to think that scientists are like them and only "believe" in the theory of evolution as a matter of faith.) Oh yeah, terrified. Pretty much everyone who is interested in science is excited by the possibility of new science - wether that changes our view of the universe or the nature of life. There have been several major paradigm shifts in various aspects of science in my lifetime from the big bang to plate tectonics. No one has been frightened by these. The trouble is, the only people who throw doubt on the validity of the theory of evolution are not scientific. They are creationists. Of course it isn't. The genes create the biochemical gradients. They then respond to them so that they are expressed differently. Which may cause them to create yet more signals to other cells, which may change how genes are expressed.

OK. I just wanted to confirm your "reality exists" statement is a matter of faith, rather than fact. Thanks. So you have no rational basis for that. it could be 0% to 100%. We can perceive more than the 4%. Otherwise we wouldn't know it was 4%, would we.

What happened to you? Exactly?

How do you know that? What evidence would you use to convince me of that? (Bear in mind that solipsism, which your brought up before, cannot be falsified, by definition.) Where does that 4% come from? And how is it consistent with your 1% to 99% range?

Perhaps the problem is that you are coming at this as an architect, where you expect the final result to exist in a plan before work starts. That isn't how self-organisation and emergent phenomena work, though. Take an even simpler example: a snowflake. They are all different but they all have six-fold symmetry. How does a water molecule attaching itself on one side of the growing snow flake, know where to put itself so that it will match the six other water molecules that may have already or are yet to attach themselves to the corresponding sides of the structure? Can physics explain that or is it divine intervention? (Hint: it's physics.) As an organism develops, there are biochemical gradients that develop between cells that tell them if they are nearer the front or the back, on the inside or the outside, etc. These then control which genes are expressed and how those cells develop further (and which chemical signals they then generate to tell the other cells around them how to develop). This process starts as soon as the first cell division occurs. You say you haven't been able to find any explanation of these processes after 8 years of "research". I find that surprising (to say the least). Biology and evolution are not subjects I have studied since I was at college (and have worked in engineering for the 5 decades since then) and yet I have been exposed to these ideas almost continuously ever since. I don't wish to appear rude, but maybe you should spend less time watching videos (especially those by creationists) and more time actually studying the subject (you know, books and things; maybe even take some courses). BTW I haven't watched the video. I find videos to be possibly the worst medium for communicating serious information. I'm not going to watch even a 5 minute video on creationism and certainly not an hour or more. Tour tries to fudge the issue by saying he doesn't know anything about the theory of evolution and therefore isn't in a position to criticise it. And then goes on to criticise it. In his own way, he is just as dishonest as every other creationist. Tour signed a creationist document which concluded "Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged." This is a typically dishonest creationist trick. It sounds entirely reasonable (because it is) but is only stated in order to imply that the evidence for evolution is not being examined. Which is obviously untrue. Because, you know, science.

But surely, what we know about the Earth and its rotation on its axis is purely a mental model based on the vision (and sound and touch) experiences that our brains create? We have no way of knowing what the relationship of this brain-created models is to the outside world. Your jet pilots don't know if the dots on the screen are other aeroplanes, birds, alien space craft or just a malfunction of the hardware. Your statements about the nature of vision seem to imply that the only conclusion we can draw is that our mental models appear to represent the Sun rising and setting due to the rotation of the Earth. We have no objective way of confirming that. Anything we do to test it results in experiences created by the brain. We don't even know that there is a thing called light that our eyes detect. That is just what our brains tell us is happening. Does that mean it is something we invent? Based on what our brains tell us?

True. I have read that many parts of the world, Africa for example, have gone directly to wireless communications and mobile phones completely bypassing copper and probably fibre. (One challenge for copper in many places has been that as soon as it is installed, it is stolen!)

This is partly cost and partly just a matter of scale. It is already available to most cities. And I have seen engineers installing fibre-optic cables in the towns around where I live. I have no idea when they might go live. And how many more years before it reaches all the smaller towns and villages in between.

In your view, then, is idealism agnostic on the nature of reality? In other words, it just says we can't know anything about it, beyond our mental models.

I haven't come across the term "indirect realism" before. Is the difference between this and idealism (which says that the mental construct is all that exists) that in indirect realism, you acknowledge the external reality exists and, to some extent, matches our mental model? It sounds similar to what I have heard described as "naive realism" (the view that what we see, even though it is entirely a construct of the brain, maps pretty closely on to the external reality). So, to take your analogy a step further, idealism would say that the dots on the radar are all that exists. The thing they represent may not exist or could just be a simulation.

This is why it is important to have clear and commonly understood definitions of terms (semantics) so that everyone is using the word "vision" or "see" to mean the same thing. And the eyes do slightly more than detect light (and decode it into colours). The retina also plays a role in detecting motion, including speed and direction (which isn't surprising, from an evolutionary point of view). So I think the entire visual system has to be taken as a whole, rather than saying it is just the brain. (I agree completely with your main point, though, that our only conception of reality is what exists in our brain.)

There has been, as far as I know, no significant evolution of mental capacities from the Bronze Age, and probably not much from late Stone Age Homo sapiens.

So we are left with "longest" and "most insane". Having read the timecube website, I have to say it probably fails those as well.

This is why it is (also) a question of semantics. Light is (probably) a matter of physics. Vision is (mainly) a matter of neurological process (plus some physics). So to properly answer the question depends on both, and on precisely defining the tiers involved. He said that the reality they perceive exists inside their heads, which I would have thought was self-evidently true.

You got me.

Another paper by the same authors suggests they are talking about the use of tunnel diodes: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7379815/

Is Captain Kirk spinning when teleported onto a planet?

It is a normal dimension in GR (but maybe that depends on what you mean by "normal"). It is just different in some ways from spatial dimensions.

Because science is evidence based. It is not a theory. (I won't argue with the rest of the description.) Maybe you should ask the moderators to move this to the right place (Speculations or Trash).

A wormhole. But as wormholes appear to be impossible, there is no reason to think that white holes exist. Not really. They are just a possible solution to the equations of general relativity. There is no known way for them to form and no evidence they exist. (There is no universal principle of complementarity.) Sounds like you are trying to apply your intuition to things that can only be described by GR. This is bound to fail! Three is a simple description of ring singularities in rotating black holes here: http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/K/Kerr_black_hole.html No one knows. Or even if such a thing is possible. Singularities almost certainly have no physical existence; they are just an indication that our theory no longer works under those conditions. We probably need a theory of quantum gravity to explain what happens inside black holes. (This will probably also explain why wormholes and white holes do not exist.)