Strange

That is often a problem with people posting their personal theories: even if they are not irredeemable cranks (i.e. the ones who will never be convinced they are wrong) they often don't take the time (or don't have the knowledge / skills) to do a basic sanity check. A lot of ideas are posted where it is quite easy to do a rough calculation and show it is totally implausible (or maybe, even, that it is plausible). <cough>space based power generation<cough> I'm sure scientists (and engineers) must often come up with ideas that they have to discard after some small amount of work.

As the scientific method is a way of testing whether an idea is correct or not (and scientists are not omniscient beings able to come up with the correct hypothesis first time) I guess that must be true.

I agree. When I was on a glacier surrounded by ice, it was stunning how blue everything was. But I'm not sure blue is "associated" with water - think of adverts for pure,clear spring water and mountain streams. (Or grey English rain!)

1. What color is light? It depends on the source. 2. What color does a star mostly resemble? It depends on the type and age of the star. 3. What color is one of our most abundant minerals, salt? No colour 4. What color would be first to have evolved, in life? Who knows. 5. What is the one color that most all living creatures share? Pink? 6. What color is associated with bones and teeth and the outer part of an eyeball? Greyish pink 7. What color is associated with Brains? Greyish pink 8. What color is Space? No colour 9. What is the second most common color most all living creatures share? Blue? 10. What color is the inner part of an eyeball? Transparent/no colour 11. What color is associated with a Tongue, Heart, Blood, Dirt, Lava, Fire? Red and black 12. What color is associated with Plants and most Reptiles? Green and grey respectively. 13. What color is associated with the Sky and Water? Blue and none, respectively. 14. What could the answers of these questions have to do with how life evolves, from the very beginning? Very little. Although, plants on a planet round a red dwarf, probably wouldn't be green as there wouldn't be much short-wavelength light. They would probably be nearly black.

I think the main purpose of philosophy is to ask better questions. Science and maths (and maybe art) can provide answers. Life doesn't "want" to survive. The appearance of this apparent wish to survive is simply a result of evolution: those organisms that have better mechanisms to survive (a grass that can put off grazing cattle or cattle that can ignore the smell) will be more successful and that variant will increase in number. This make it look as if they "want" to survive. But all they are doing is trying random things. Some succeed and some don't. We just see the successful results and can be led to read too much into it.

So that answers half (or less) of the question: they disapprove of some forms of birth control. Do they have a position on stem cell research?

There seem to be two questions: 1. Was the universe created? (Don't know) 2. Is there only one universe? (Don't know) And which answer is more irrational? The one that is not based on evidence: which would be either "yes" or "no". The only rational answer is "don't know".

If you make up your own meanings for words, then you will not be conveying information. Or at least, not the information you think you are. If you say to someone, "I am a philosopher" they will not think, "ah, yes, a lover of wisdom". They will assume you are one of those academics who worry about the meaning of "knowledge" or the nature of reality. There is nothing derogatory about the statement "Then you are condemned to be misunderstood." Even though I used the word "explosion" to mean "condemned" and the word "trumpet" to mean "misunderstood", etc. So it seems that by making up my own meanings for words I failed to clearly communicate what I meant. Which is not surprising.

Why would you say that? Is it? Then banana are explosion to be trumpet. (By which I mean, of course: Then you are condemned to be misunderstood.)

You won't find that meaning in the dictionary though. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/philosophy So using your own personal definition may lead to misunderstandings.

That is an example of the etymological fallacy. (In other words, that is not what it means.)

Everything? Did philosophy learn of the quantization of energy before science knew about it? Did philosophy learn that gravity was the curvature of space-time before science determined this? You have proof of this, of course?

I have absolutely no idea what that is supposed to mean. I will give up at this point. Maybe someone else can make sense of this.

An "effect" doesn't say who or what made it; so the "mystery" is : "What really made that "effect"? Yes. That is exactly what I said. Although "dark matter" could require a change to the way gravity works, more and more evidence is pointing to it being matter. As in many examples in the past, we haven't yet detected the particle. You are the one who mentioned faith. As you choose to ignore evidence, this is obviously a religious thing, not science. I'm simply pointing out that you don't have a model and therefore can't make testable predictions. Therefore you are not doing science. You are claiming that theories are wrong because you don't believe in them. That is not science. Don't be so childish. Newton developed mathematical models for his theories. You haven't. You seem more interested in beliefs than science. That doesn't make much sense. And it doesn't change the fact that the paragraph in question doesn't say what you claim it does.

I think that is part of it. But also, just being able to trust others, which means you must be (at least partly) trustworthy yourself. Evolution has probably worked like game theory to reach a Nash Equlibrium. At one extreme we have psychopaths who have no conscience at all. There is a genetic basis for that, which suggests that not only has morality/conscience evolved but perhaps that psychopathy can sometimes be useful and so it hasn't been eliminated completely...

That doesn't matter right now. We can see whether it is or not later. I have avoided looking in detail at what happens with 0 for the moment. I am just trying to understand how you can make multiplication of non-zero values work. You always have two (identical) numbers in the parentheses: either X = (x1,x2) (or A = (a,a) if you prefer to write it that way) or 0 = (0, 1). I don't know what q and r mean in this context.

That appears to be a nice clear definition. Unfortunately, it contradicts what you wrote in post #133: So if we want to multiply 3 x 4, then we have X=(3,3) and Y = (4,4). According to the above, Z = (3,4) or (4,3) whereas it should equal (12,12). Which is why I suggested the correct representation is something like: X * Y = (x1,x2) * (y1,y2) = (x1*y2, x2*y1) = Z

We can observe and measure the effects of dark matter. The only mystery is what it is made of. (cf Neptune and neutrinos, the dark matter of their day) Which also has no place in science. You should follow the evidence, rather than your personal beliefs. These are not predictions, they are guesses. (Unless you would like to show us the calculations, and the quantitative, testable predictions.) Not understanding/believeing an existing theory does not falsify that theory. If you have an alternative mathematical model, why not present it? OK. So the problem is that you cannot understand what you read. That explains a lot. That passage says NOTHING about the relative speed of left and right handed neutrinos. It is about their chirality.

Another appeal to incredulity? As you don't have a theory that predicts it, no you shouldn't say it. Because you are just making stuff up for no reason. Note that "making stuff up" is not a theory. A mathematical model that makes testable predictions is required. Where does that say: "It's the left handed helicity that makes it slower" ? Nonsense.

Good grief. With this staggering depth of understanding, no wonder your "friend" has managed to convince you. How tilted should they look? And in which direction? (And please show your working.)

Such as? (It looks like this has backfired and your "friend" has persuaded you. You will be able to drop the pretence soon.) What measurements can you (or your "friend") make that show the Earth to be flat? I imagine the response would be "but that's what they want you to think!!1!". These sort of delusions can only make sense to the person suffering from them.

I'm afraid that doesn't really make much sense. For example: "A = (q,r) = (Aq,Ar)" The whole point of introducing "q" and "r" was to try and understand how you represent numbers as multiple values. I have no idea what "Aq" and "Ar" are supposed to mean, when the expression was intended to define A. For example, I thought that 12 = (q,r); where q=12 and r=12. But now it seems that 12 = (q,r); where q=2 and r = 6; or q = 3 and r = 4 or q = 12 and r = 1. (How does that work for non-integer values? Can we say that 12 = (q,r) where q=5 and r=2.4?) And it seems we can even say that 12 = (x0, x1, ... xi ... xn); where [math]\prod_{i=0}^{n} x_i = 12[/math] Except when the value is 0, when it maps on to the unique tuple (0,1). When I have time, I will see if I can write down a general description of how (I think) your system works - and then see if you agree with it. (Although, if you keep bringing this "space and value" nonsense into it, I might not bother.) I am not a mathematician, so I am approaching it from the perspective of defining a new type in a language such as C++. At the moment it still looks a little ad-hoc. It isn't clear how to define even the basic operations operations on these variable-sized tuples in a consistent way. Probably by always mapping them back to the simplest representation. Which is, potentially, going to make it a very inefficient way of doing simple arithmetic. And I still see no real benefit.

You seem to have moved away from your "colour is unique and will identify the species" to "after you have narrowed it down to a type of rodent that lives in the desert then colour might help you say which species it is". So how does this differ from any other method of identifying species by observation? Especially when "there's an app for that": http://www.gardenista.com/posts/diy-identify-leaves-and-flowers-theres-an-app-for-that (That's just the first thing on the search results, there appear to be many others) Or this one, where (you will be pleased to see) the first two questions are about colour: http://www.insectidentification.org/

You are probably right. Although, I believe the official Flat Earth Society's model is that the Earth is accelerating through space - this is what causes gravity. (I'm not sure how they account for tides.) But if sunshaker's "friend" thinks that this is all a conspiracy to hide the fact that we live in a simulation, then there is no evidence that can convince him: anything can be added to the simulation to make us believe the myth of the spherical Earth. Including books from the ancient world claiming that Eratosthenes measured the circumference, time zones, gravity, tides ... They are all just arbitrary parameters added to the simulation.

Well, now I am totally confused because earlier, you said: And In other words A = (z1=A, z2=A). Which is what led me to the attempt to formalise your scheme in terms of ... let's call them tuples, rather than vectors as you seem to have a problem with that. So, previously I understood you to say that any non-zero number, n, is represented by the tuple N = (n,n). Now you seem to be saying that a non-zero number, n, is represented by the tuple N = (q,r), where q and r are factors of n. Either I have totally misunderstood one (or both) of these explanations, or you haven't really thought this thing through. (I am quite happy to admit it may be the former!)