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Lagroht

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  • Birthday 01/01/2009

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  1. Right, but if you want to depict a back-to-nature-environmentalist lifestyle as morally superior it of course helps your case if you depict a fascist-like corporation (a company commanding the army?) as the only alternative. An unprovoked attack on the innocent under a flimsy pretext is sure to provoke universal indignation, so the initiation of force principle violation to me seems the lever used to tilde emotions against large international corporations. In real live the unobtainium is of course oil and the Na'vi are the Iraqi's and the US government is an opaque entity controlled by the oil companies which are the pupped masters sending US soldiers to the attack under a false pretext. hmmm, that doens't exactly fit.....actually he realized Iraqi's aren't that in balance with nature themselves so he replaced them with rainforest Indians who see their forest and lifestyle destroyed by logging companies with large machines.
  2. To me it seems like James Cameron is a 'deep ecology' adherent. These are the tenets of it, by Arne Naess and George Sessions: The eight-point Deep Ecology Platform at present provides the unifying principles of the deep ecology movement. 1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: inherent worth, intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes. 2. Richness and diversity of life-forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves. 3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs. 4. Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening. 5. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease. 6. Policies must therefore be changed. The changes in policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present. 7. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent worth) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great. 8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to participate in the attempt to implement the necessary changes.
  3. Did anybody read this: http://www.amazon.com/Age-Rand-Imagining-O..._pr_product_top is it any good?
  4. You oppose government force to restrict the freedoms of people who follow a doctrine which calls for the restriction of freedoms of others? A lot of the people who vote against the minarets are of a conservative; they want to keep their country the way it is, for some voter this means they want to keep it mostly Christian, for some it means they are afraid for their safety (especially gays and woman) or loss of freedom (everybody) in the future if they let immigration from Muslim countries continue. Note the hypocritical reaction by turkey: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe...,664641,00.html who is a member of the OIC, which tries to ban all criticism of Islam: http://www.internationalfreepresssociety.o...st-free-speech/
  5. you probably live in some village; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_London
  6. It seems the nationalists are gaining in political power about everywhere in Europe: http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/11/29...ndum/index.html
  7. I will stop posting in this topic now. I found this wikipedia page about the philosophy of time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_space_and_time) and I realize this isn't a trivial subject and actually is a much more fundamental topic to physics than I realized. Expanding my insights on the topic enough to be able to see how Newton, Einstein and their buddies relate to my current understanding of time would require serious time consuming study. I probably won't get to that anytime soon.
  8. Ok, that kind of determinism. Don't you find it interesting how the position people hold on the notion of 'free will' is so important to determining their moral judgement?, I even have the impression the whole left-right political divide is roughly based on it (with the left leaning towards 'there is no free will, determinism' and the right to 'free will exists'). In my opinion the only sad thing about the right is that it seems to base its conviction that free will exists on some philosophical idealist grounds, which explains the union of the right with religion. I've posted some thoughts on free will in two other threads http://forum.ObjectivismOnline.com/index.p...mp;#entry165486 http://forum.ObjectivismOnline.com/index.p...mp;#entry189074 ...But I think I am getting off topic, I will stop posting in this thread, thanks for your responses.
  9. On some level you have me convinced; in order to grasp 'simultaneity' you need to grasp 'non-simultaneity', which requires a grasp of sequential and parallel events. While a grasp of the concept of 'event' presupposes recollection of multiple occurrences of matter displacements. Those matter displacements are based on some criteria hold to be separate from from the rest of the matter displacements (because otherwise the whole of the universe would constitute one big event and the concept would be meaningless ) As a side note: the Dutch word for 'Simultaneous' is 'Gelijktijdig'. 'Gelijk' literally means 'Equal'. 'Tijdig' literally means 'Timely'. I now get the suspicion that I might be in the difficult position that I am trying to reason about development of awareness on the pre-conceptual level of awareness while I am forced to do this using concepts, which are obviously not yet acquired by a consciousness which doesn´t (yet) function on that level of awareness. But I do think it is relevant, an eagle for instance can perfectly deal with motion, when it falls out of the sky to the spot it predicted a moving mouse to be within the few second. Obviously an eagle has no concept of time. How can time be conceptual prior to motion if an eagle doesn't need a watch to kill a mouse? You can ignore that eagle stuff if you want, I am not fully serious there. At the moment I am content with the definition from the lexicon: 'Time is a measurement of motion; as such, it is a type of relationship'. I was sort of hang up on the notion that somehow time should be listed as a derived SI entry because I felt that it was a derivate of space and matter, since to my understanding relative motion of matter is what's gives rise to the concept of time. But it is the realization that this is irrelevant to commensurability that made me drop that idea. The units of time and matter are incommensurate and this justifies a separate entry in the SI base units list. I can imagine how you could choke reading that remark, I should have said 'higher level concepts'.
  10. I guess a late response is better than never.... I seem to have utterly failed, I introduced the analogy to clarify what I mean with the terms 'unavoidable death' and 'conditional life', not to confuse the matter. I agree with what you say, I would also say 'unavoidable death' is part of just 'life'. how did she direct us?, is that explanation in some other text? I don't think the word 'purpose' applies to the complex self sustaining process called life, for it to have a purpose it would have to been designed for some utility outside itself. I think life is an end in itself. But I guess you are right if you taste a Darwinian favour in my argumentation, I am fully convinced genes matter, if they didn't monkeys would be designing spaceships. you are right about life being primary. It is just that once the first (reproductive) organism has come into being, subsequently you get this causal chain of life-reproduction-life-reproduction-etc... I don't exactly understand what you mean with genetic determinism... If I don't have genes for blue eyes I will not have blue eyes, that sounds like genetic determinism to me, but I suspect you refer to something else.... actually I was getting a little tired of writing that piece of prose when I got to that part, it was my 'you get the picture', wrap it up ending I know real life isn't so clean cut, people sometimes make bad choices, sometimes relationships fall apart, some people are poor, others infertile or have physical limitations that make it hard to find a partner, the list goes on and on. I like to limit moral judgement only to the choices people have concious control over and can reasonably be expected to predict the consequences of. (But I depart from this when ignorant people fail to see their stupid choices hurt others)
  11. sorry, I didn't read you right
  12. I tried to look up time in OPAR and IOE but I couldn´t find an explicit treating of the subject. OPAR doesn't even have an index entry called 'time'! I however found this entry in the Ayn Rand lexicon: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/time.html (also a little bit limited ) 'Time is a measurement of motion', 'The universe is eternal'. My training in physics is strictly limited to Newtonian physics and this seems to fit right in with it with it. But maybe I will run into trouble with it if I try to use it as a starting point for trying to understand Einstein's relativity theory I am not sure I am confusing, but I think you have correctly identified the difference in what we hold to be true ;-) You have me thinking here, because I think what you are saying is true!...I don't yet quite know how to unify this with my own starting point of reasoning about this. I start with for instance a snap-shot picture in my head of what a tabular rasa man would see when he would open his eyes for the first time on for instance a carnival where a roundabout is placed. The first image on his retina will be his starting point, a collection of entities; he has discovered simultaneity , in the next image his brain can identify entities will have changed position. He will have discovered motion. If he waits he will notice the roundabout having rotated a number of times, which he could count. When then some girl buys and eats an ice cream he can say; it took her 15 roundabout rotations to eat that ice cream. He will have discovered the quantification of motion; time. My concept of 'simultaneous' is derived from vision, not from a linguistic definition, when I look into my room I can concurrently, simultaneously see multiple objects, even when they are not moving. This makes the concept of simultaneity for me to be prior to both motion and time. well, just make sure you have fun doing it
  13. Right, actually this is also said by saras. Are you saying you think she is in error with her theory?, I think the fact that she herself isn't an entrepreneur doesn't necessarily invalidates everything she says about the subject since she researched actual entrepreneurs. I also found some videos in which she explains verbally: http://bigthink.com/sarassarasvathy/saras-...eneurial-method
  14. Thanks Jake, you cured me of wanting to change the SI system . I guess incommensurable is indeed the right criteria for the base units. Well actually I guess this is what makes me feel uncomfortable with the second, or time as a 'measurable' quantity for that matter. If you ask 'how does one measure 'change' as such?, I am tempted to answer; by inventing 'time' as a concept to refer to that. Do you agree that time is an human 'invention' that enables us to relate changes among the relative positions of matter more accurately than our unaided memories would allow us. I don't know for a fact what the mainstream opinion in science is on that, but I get the impression that time seems to be treated as more fundamental than that, something more implicit in reality as a given, not as a derivative. Your observation that you need to relate a repetitive event to another repetitive event in order to know that it is periodic is very true (and useful for me), but i don't agree that the concept of simultaneity is based on the concept of time. In order for me to know that 2 events occur simultaneous I only have to be able to observe them, to know that this simultaneous events repeat I only have to remember the previous occurrences (and maybe count). I do not exactly follow how you seem to require time before you can relate the change of the relative positions of entities with motion. I start my thinking about it with the perceptually given. When I see to 2 entities and their relative positions are changing I know this because I remember their previous positions. I call this motion. I only see time come in implicitly because of course a human has some capability to quantify the rate of position change (otherwise nobody could ever run into a field to catch a thrown ball). Now I think of it....maybe the first implicit unit of time is actually determined by something like the speed at which human neuron can discharge and reload or something like that :-)
  15. Hi, It seems to me that time measurement with a clock is nothing else than counting how often a non-accelerating/decelerating object in a circular (or some other) trajectory passes through the same point. It only gives a frame of reference, it is a unit of constant motion. If I ask how fast someone runs, I get an answer back which tells me how many times some other event has occurred concurrently with the traversal of some distance by the runner. But time is included in the SI base units: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_base_unit This seems wrong to me, (intricism?), I would include time in this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_derived_unit Maybe someone with more advanced knowledge of physics can change my perspective...
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