Strange

I'm not sure. Imagine you could take a large group of children (damn those ethics committees!) and bring them up in a new environment where there was no trace of any sort of religion or mythology. I am fairly sure that some of those children would invent some sort of spiritual beliefs as they grew up as their way of making sense of the world around them. (We have enough evidence on this forum of people making up their own weird ideas.)

There is no scanner. It is just a static representation of all space and all time. One problem with your attempt to impose some sort of external progress of time (or a scanner) is that it implies there is some sort of "real" time that is universal. You don't need a scanner to understand that a piece of paper is two-dimensional; you don't need to move along one or both of the (spatial) dimensions. They are just there. When you add the temporal dimension, it is just there as well. The sheet of paper extends along that dimension in the same way it extends in x and y.

Not to me it isn't. In fact, I would say it is self-evidently nonsense. (Starting with the fact that chemical reactions cannot be an observer and decide it is alive.) You think that any complex mixture of chemicals (e.g. the atmosphere of Jupiter) will think it is alive? You really need some evidence for this. There is nothing new in your claim that life is just a series of complex chemical reactions. You seem to turn that around and say that any series of complex reactions is therefore living (from its own point of view). This is the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent. http://www.fallacyfiles.org/afthecon.html

Of course not. There are a great many Christians who don't believe the Bible is literal, inerrant truth. It would be interesting to know if Willie71 might have kept (some) faith if he had been told that the Bible was a collection of stories collected, translated, selected and edited by many different people over many years and intended to show some moral lessons, etc. (I suspect not, because I assume that if someone loses (or doesn't have) faith, it is because of something inherent in them, not because of what some book or person says.)

Exactly.

I suspect it is the way it is contested rather than the fact that it is contested. If someone uses good quality evidence to discuss the topic, then no one will object. For some reason, those opposing AGW struggle to find any evidence to support their view (I wonder why?). But making silly comments (like the above) is not very constructive.

There is another thread asking why people think that things that human animals do are unnatural, while things that other animals do are natural. By this argument, we should still be going around naked, living as hunter-gatherers. Because anything else is "unnatural". But you don't know what that reason was. Therefore you don't know if that reason is still relevant in the modern world. You also don't know if hair gel is relevant to that reason, and if it is whether it has a positive or negative effect. If, for example, long hair was a result of sexual selection, then dressing or styling that hair is just a natural extension of its evolved function. For as far back as we have evidence, people have dressed their hair, decorated their bodies, and worn jewellery, etc. So there is nothing modern or unnatural about any of this. How do you know that? They could easily make blades sharp enough to shave with from, e.g. obsidian and other materials. Also, there are other things that can be used as an emollient to ease shaving (vegetable oils, for example). And you really don't know that. I think those Germans would be very offended to be described as "primitive", they were modern humans. (As, of course, were your stone-age shavers.) Probably not.

Imagine a transparent cube which represents 2 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension. You are outside it and looking at what happens. In your model, you would see an object as a point which moves around in both time and space. But in order for you to observe it moving in time would have to pass for you - this is your time outside of the time dimension in the cube. Therefore you require some sort of meta-time or hyper-time to make your model work. In the model used by GR, the cube is static and unchanging. A point that moves through space and time is represented as a (static) line. An object that moves through space and time is represented as a complex 3D (in this simplified model). No extra "external" time dimension is required because nothing changes.

Suddenly, I have a completely different mental image of you... (Couldn't remember his name so just searched for "sam actor moustache"!)

If we are travelling through a 4D world, then it must take time to go from A to B. But time is one of those dimensions. So you need to introduce a 5th (time) dimension. And then you will say you are travelling through a 5D world which means that will take time. So you need to introduce a 6th (time) dimension. And then you will say ... If you look at the 4D sapce-time manifold, it already constains time so you can't have chnage or movement. It is like a lump of hyperdimensional jelly with lines indicating the existence of things in time and space.

Well, "truth" is a philosophical concept and not really within the domain of science. However, there is no harm in observing, evaluating, discussing, and questioning. That is part of the reason for this forum in the first place. All motion or velocity is relative. So that question can only be answered with: "Relative to what?" Our velocity relative to the Sun is one answer. Our velocity relative to our galaxy is another. Our velocity relative to the Earth is yet another.

Exactly. (And, even though I hadn't thought of that final corollary, I agree with it.)

Never! (I did study for a Masters degree in my 40s but somehow managed to avoid getting the qualification despite getting very good marks in all the exams and course work ...)

Not it just says that within any formal system (*) there are some things which are undecidable, i.e. which cannot be proved either true or false. Basically, this means you can develop your mathematics in two ways, depending on which you choose. (What, if anything, this says about reality is another question.) This is still all defined by the logic of mathematics. (*) that is sufficiently ... blah blah blah I'm not sure what that means. You can write a program to model reality only as well as you understand it. Any computer architecture or language (*) is equally capable of this. If your model depends on some undecidable theorem, then you are free to choose either way (and perhaps see which models reality better). (*) That is Turing complete

Why would "pure logical AI" (if such a thing were even possible) not need to test any ideas it came up with?

Maybe. But we don't know which is the correct answer. And it may not be as simple as one or the other.

Does there? Mathematics says otherwise. But as well already pointed out, in your example of virtual particles, you can always have a more energetic particle that lives for a shorter time. Whatever you choose as a maximum energy/minimum time, I can always choose a higher energy and shorter time.

If. But there is no reason to make such a connection. That's my point: your entire argument is based on a poor, possibly false, analogy. And there is no evidence for that so why accept it as a premise. Why did it have to come from anywhere? If it has always existed, then it didn't come from nothing or elsewhere, by definition. Your claim that this is "nonsensicle" (sic) appears to be an argument from incredulity. You seem to be confusing logic and correctness. You can program a computer to spit out all theorems of number theory. That is because math is purely logical. However, not all the theorems that are logically well-formed can be proved true (by a computer or by us).

Yes, they are both described by the Einstein Field Equations of General Relativity.

All the evidence shows it is expanding, so I have no idea what you mean by "both ways". But however much evidence you have, there might always be a "black sheep" out there which causes you to change your mind. That is mathematics, where things can be proved, not science (where they can't). That sounds like a gross simplification due to reading poor science journalism. AI wouldn't make any difference to the way science works.

An average can't be a minimum.

Not only has this been considered, as Ophiolite points out, but it has been (and is being) tested. There have been all sorts of experiments done to test if various fundamental constants have changed over time. For example, some researchers a few years ago, claimed to have found evidence that the fine structure constant varied slightly across the universe. As far as I know this has not been confirmed yet. And the fact that evidence has been found that appears to show that expansion is accelerating (although it is definitely not a "proven fact") nicely demonstrates that scientists are very good at asking these questions, testing them and sometimes coming up with surprising answers. Science never rests on its laurels and assumes that something is "proven", it constantly looks for new ways of testing established ideas.

Almost everywhere, from your misrepresentation of light comes to your model of time.

You. That is how we know you are wrong.

I have no idea what you are talking about. You asked about a single red-shifted photon. Its energy is observer dependent. A distant galaxy is not in our frame. What potential energy?