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Tsiklon

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Posts posted by Tsiklon

  1. That's far from being conclusive. No matter how long you have travelled in a infinite Universe you could never prove that it is infinite since you can only travel a finite distance. Same is true for light and anything else we can measure.

    That's true. However, given what we know about astrophysics and cosmology if the Universe has a Euclidean geometry(and topology)then an infinite Universe is the most reasonable conclusion even though one cannot prove it.

  2. Just wanted to drop off my recent thoughts on infinity:

    Infinity is a number that is greater than any number. (according to wikipedia)

    (You can't say that infinity is a concept, because only concepts that are also numbers can be greater than other numbers)

    so infinity is a number therefore...

    infinity is greater than infinity which means that...

    infinity does not equal infinity and that...

    infinity is not infinity and so ...

    infinity would break the law of identity

    infinity is a bound to boundless concepts, which alone is a contradiction in terms.

    Infinity is a useful term, but it seems to me that it has been used the wrong way.

    Like in the multiverse theory or in Religion...

    One infinity, two infinity, three infinity, four.....

    five infinity, six infinite, seven infinity, more!

    :fool:

  3. When you use a word like "you", conventionally it's helpful to be clear what the referent is. In fact, etymologically it means "unboundedness" or "not-ending-ness". Typical contemporary views of "infinity" derive from a strange mathematical mis-speaking, where people talk of an "infinite number of...". I have had more than one mathematician tell me that I really ought to say something like "the cardinality of the set... is infinite". We know that there can be a billion grains of sand, or a quadrillion electrons. So whever you use the "Number+Noun" structure, that implies at least the possibility of such a thing existing. The problem is that "infinity" is not a number, yet people confuse it with a number.

    Some infinite sets are bigger than others. That is, there is not a 1-to-1 mapping between them. The smaller set can be mapped bijectively into a proper subset of the larger one; with the complement of the smaller sets image being the same cardinality as the larger set. I certainly have heard people say that infinity is not a number, it is a concept. Well not quite true mathematically, it is somewhat accurate physically.

    Now it turns out that recent discoveries in Astronomy suggest that the Universe may very well be Infinite. And by that I mean that it if you travel in 1 direction you will never return to where you started from nor run into any sort of spacetime boundary. This is due to the fact that based on data collected from the WMAP satellite, the Cosmos has as flat(Euclidean)geometry and with no signs of any actual boundaries, the appropriate conclusion is that it is Infinite spatially and has no end and no beginning.

  4. A mans ideas often come to him when his brain is analyzing or calculating something and an idea sneaks of up on him and he's like.........EUREKA! The same is often true when it comes to creative ideas for art, music, and writing. That being said, ideas can come from a deterministic process in the brain but they also arise chaotically without deliberate intent.

    Now if there actually is a higher power that governs us and the rest of the Cosmos, I would wager that this higher power has not bestowed us with true free will but would like us to think we are in control of our thoughts and actions. But one thing is clear: Free will does not apply to emotions. *Feelings* cannot be turned on and off by conscious intent, but they can be manipulated indirectly.

  5. I had never realized that knowledge itself implies the fact that humans possess free will.

    It DOESN'T. A computer can have knowledge in the form of encoded information and modern computers are absolutely deterministic. Furthermore, determinism does not imply predictability nor does it imply chaos. That is a false dichotomy. Nonlinear deterministic systems are not 100% predictable even though they are not truly random. Uncertainy exists due to nonlinearity; and particularly due to heavily nested feedback loops. Determinism means that there are no hidden variables. A good example of non-determinism is radioactive decay which is is totally random because radioactive nuclei cannot exchange information with each other. Uncertainty in a nonlinear system is bounded and its occurence, though not predictable, has measurable constraints.

  6. If there is a Mind-Body problem then there is also a Stomach-DIgestion problem. Digestion is what the Stomach does. Mind(ing) is what the Brain does.

    ruveyn1

    Bad anology, ruveyn. The stomach shows no signs of sentience nor does it have any ability to use the nervous system to control other parts of the body(like the heart for example).

    Now if there is indeed downward causation when it comes to decision making in the brain(And the mind of course), then what that suggests is that there is something else going on in our heads, something very profound, to which current neurology-electrical signals and synaptic chemical mediation-cannot account for and perhaps modern science has yet to discover.

  7. What I've always wondered is why many of those who approve the use of torture to extract information from enemy combatants and terrorists think that it's wrong to use torture as a punishment against domestic criminals who have committed heinous, violent crimes.

  8. Well, you're right, of course. But there's not much to add, except that, as long as politics dictates space exploration (as long as the government is in charge, or a major source of subsidies, like with SpaceX), it's not gonna happen. It might make all the sense in the world, but it's politically inconvenient.

    The general population will never make a rational, informed decision on rocket science. It just can't happen.

    And, just because Russia is more of a dictatorship and therefor might take this one decision against popular opinion, that doesn't change the fact that it's still a government run operation that's gonna get most of the other decisions involved wrong, and therefor the project will likely end in miserable failure (as most of their projects have done, through history).

    Sometimes the only way to make actual progress is to go ahead with something if you have the money and the power to do it even when the general public is opposed to it due to their irrational beliefs. But its too bad that no corporation is trying to pursue nuclear rocket propulsion since corporations are not accountable to public opinion so long as they generate a profit.

  9. How do you know that what you are describing is a cause in itself, or the effect of another cause?

    Someone on the radio raised an interesting point along this line. What happens when pedophilia, like homosexuality, becomes regarded as a congenital physical condition of the brain? Will there be pedophile rights, pedophile marriages, and whoever is opposed will be labled pedophiliphobic?

    With regards to pedophiles, I honestly think that many pedophiles cannot help themselves. This does not meant they should have legal or social permission to molest children. What it means is they need to be removed from society and subjected to compulsory treatment(if that is possible).

  10. NASA's biggest barrier to progress in spaceflight and space exploration is its refusal to actively engage in R&D for nuclear propulsion. And keep in mind that this does include the use of nuclear driven engines to lift payloads into orbit as well as travel around in interplanetary space(and eventually interstellar space).

    Nuclear rockets, particularly VASIMIR thrusters powered by gascore nuclear reactors(which use magnetic containment and operate at temperatures up to 20,000 degrees Fahrenheit)can produce much larger specific impulses than any chemical reaction and would allow very large payloads to be lifted into orbit while leaving some propellant left over!

    There is a proposal for an unmanned spaceship called Prometheus which uses a solid core reactor to generate electricity for ion propulsion but this thing will be built entirely in space because of the hysteria surrounding anything and everything nuclear which was whipped up by the greenies some 40 years ago. They have enormous influence on policy and have killed the nuclear industry in the US; preventing the construction of new reactors and effectively outlawing nuclear propulsion R&D.

    Russia doesn't have this kind of problem and is already pursuing R&D in nuclear space propulsion. Why the hell should the US do the same thing??? I would go so far as to suggest that the United States withdraw from Partial Test Ban Treaty to completely open the door to nuclear propulsion.

    Any thoughts? Any takers? :smartass:

  11. Not really. Physics is necessary for the functioning processes of a nervous system, but it would be imprecise to say physics creates or dictates the nervous system. I'm not saying there is no causality, I'm saying there is a lot of complexity. You seem to be arguing against what is called the "libertarian" notion of free will, that is, free will operates with a "soul" of sorts that overrides physical causality. This is not the Objectivist position.

    The Objectivist position is basically a form of compatibilism as far as I can tell, which is a the notion that physical causality applies to free will. Yes, it isn't "absolutely" free, but an agent (i.e. yourself) makes choices. Yes, drugs can alter this, but that isn't demonstrating anything about the nature of free will, only that perception requires chemicals to function.

    You ever read Daniel Dennett? He gives a good account of the readiness potential and why it does not eliminate free will.

    Honestly, you should understand a point of view before arguing against it.

    What is remarkable is that the brain, or shall I say certain peoples brains(the brains of many schizophrenics) can create a multiplicity of agents, some of which the person is only partially aware of. There are schizophrenics who speak of some sort of phantom agent that takes over their decision making process and compels them to do things.

    I will say that physics does indeed govern the CNS because it is made of matter and uses energy to which physical law applies. The real mystery is what is responsible for consciousness/self-awareness. I will admit that I do approach this issue from a scientific rather than philosophical angle since science now has the tools to investigate this whereas in time of Leibniz and Aristotle, those tools where entirely unavailable. Too bad Ayn Rand didn't live longer to witness these developments.

    Now here is what the Atlas Society says about free will:

    Objectivism holds that man has free will. In every moment, many courses of action are open to us; whichever action we take, we could equally well have chosen to do something else. Within the sphere of actions that are open to choice, what we do is up to us and is not just the inescapable outcome of causes outside our control. And this capacity for free choice is the foundation of morality. Because we are free to choose, we need moral standards to guide our actions and we can be held morally responsible for what we do.

    Today, people who want to fly from responsibility are greatly aided by a view of man that attributes our actions to factors beyond our control. For example, a recent New York Times Magazine article absolved obese individuals from moral blame by accusing abundant and cheap food of causing people to overeat. But to take such a position seriously, one has to deny free will and accept its contrary, determinism. Determinism is the view that ultimately we don't control our actions, that the causes operating in us and on us compel us to act in one and only one way. You say you choose what to eat? For a determinist, you can't help yourself.

    With regards to eating I would argue that for me at least, what causes me to eat is the feeling of hunger. And to curb overeating in people would best be done by making substances which suppress apetite(and raise metabolic rate) to be readily available. If you wish to get people to control their impulses then you must provide an incentive which is immediate for them to do so rather than simply telling them to control themselves. So yes, I am arguing in favor of determinism. Particularly neurological determinism. We think we have volitional thought and the ability to think whatever we damn well please, but our behavior and the physical causes of it suggests otherwise. And that is why I personally am not a libertarian nor an anarchist: If you give people freedom to do whatever they want then they WILL do things that benefit them at others expense and the chances that this will happen to each of us sooner or later is 100%.

  12. You confuse a necessary condition with an equivalence. A working nervous system is a necessary condition of rational activity (as Branden observed some fifty years ago), and your examples illustrate this, but none of this proves your conclusion that the physical nervous system creates or dictates consciousness.

    Actually it does. Because it has been shown experimentally that the process of volition(conscious choice) has a neurological basis and the fact that drugs can alter and/or suppress consciousness by affecting the physical nervous system.

    Free will has been a philosophical question for thousands of years because science had yet to be developed and even with its advent, to tools needed weren't available until recently(the last 40 years). So it is no longer a philosophical matter but a scientific one. That is my point.

  13. Ayn Rand believed in free will. But the ideas you quoted and are arguing against still have nothing to do with Ayn Rand. They're still just stuff some guy on the Internet told you.

    I look forward to you forgetting all about that guy and what he told you, reading some of the ideas you just linked to , and then trying to refute them without relying on straw man arguments.

    Unfortunately, I am unable to edit my initial post and remove that strawman quote. But the rest of my post was not a rebuttal to that guy as much as it was an argument as to why free will is very much an illusion and there is compelling scientific evidence against it.

  14. Are you familiar with Ayn Rand, or is the extent of your knowledge about her that post you're quoting? I hate to tell you this, but that's not Ayn Rand you were talking to, that's some guy on the Internet. Ayn Rand died a while back.

    I beg your pardon sir, but here are some quotes by Rand herself about volition: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/free_will.html

    But if I am wrong, and Ayn Rand did not believe in free will, please inform me of evidence to the contrary(and no I'm not being sarcastic).

  15. WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The international terror group known as Al Qaeda announced its dissolution today, saying that “our mission of destroying the American economy is now in the capable hands of the U.S. Congress.”

    In an official statement published on the group’s website, the current leader of Al Qaeda said that Congress’s conduct during the so-called “fiscal-cliff” showdown convinced the terrorists that they had been outdone.

    “We’ve been working overtime trying to come up with ways to terrorize the American people and wreck their economy,” said the statement from Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. “But even we couldn’t come up with something like this.”

    Mr. al-Zawhiri said that the idea of holding the entire nation hostage with a clock ticking down to the end of the year “is completely insane and worthy of a Bond villain.”

    “As terrorists, every now and then you have to step back and admire when someone else has beaten you at your own game,” he said. “This is one of those times.”

    The Al Qaeda leader was fulsome in his praise for congressional leaders, saying, “We have made many scary videos in our time but none of them were as terrifying as Mitch McConnell.”

    As for the future of Al Qaeda, the statement said that it would no longer be a terror network but would become “more of a social network,” offering reviews of new music, movies and video games.

    In its first movie review, Al Qaeda gave the film “Zero Dark Thirty” two thumbs down.

    The New Yorker

    ANDY_BOROWITZ_banner_N.gif

    ALLAH SNACKBAR!

  16. So I saw a thread about free will over here (http://forums.4aynra...showtopic=13394) about free will and a user on the first page of that thread had this to say and since I cannot post on that forum I thought I'd address his points and then make mine he says:

    First premise to check: the mind is physical. The brain is physical, the mind is not. Second premise to check: actions are caused by entities. Volition is not an entity, it is a process of an attribute of an entity (consciousness). Thus, volition is caused by man. Third premise to check: causality is not determinism. Fourth premise to check: physical things follow physical laws. Which physical laws? Light does not follow Newtonian mechanics; how much does an inch weigh - what is its velocity? Ignorance of the physical laws that give rise to volition does not mean they are reducible to those laws that are known.

    First premise: The mind is not physical. (I'll assume initially that this statement is true)

    Fact: The mind is affected by physical things! Most notably, by chemical compounds that cross the blood brain barrier[i.e. drugs]. There are certain hallucinogens powerful enough to create delusions and illusions indistinguishable from reality. The notorious drug PCP can mimic the effects of schizophrenic psychosis in high enough doses where a person becomes compelled unto action by these delusions. And for millions of people, certain drugs are addictive enough to compel users to continue to consume the drug even though they are aware of its harmful effects(alcohol addiction requires medical intervention because its withdrawal symptoms are potentially fatal).

    Since Ayn Rands death 30 years ago, a myriad of new discoveries about how the human brain thinks have further narrowed the gap between the mind and brain. Rand was WRONG about her theory that we can observer reality directly! In fact, what neuroscientists like David Hubel have shown is that with senses like vision, the light striking the retina is encoded into an electrical signal which the brain processes and constructs a model based on the patterns of light. This may explain how hallucinations works: Feedback from another part of the brain into the visual cortex that the brain interprets(and the mind perceives) as being an object that one is looking at even though it isn't actually there.

    And then there is something that was discovered in the 1960s by 2 German scientists which they called the bereitschiftspotential (http://en.wikipedia....chaftspotential) which as Dr Mark Hallet is the driving force behind the thing we perceive as agency (http://www.ncbi.nlm....les/PMC1950571/) While the mechanism of what we think of as volition have not been completely elucidated, the scientific evidence clearly is telling us that BRAINS MAKE MINDS AND THE ABILITY TO MAKE DECISIONS FREE FROM ANY CONSTRAINTS IS IMPOSSIBLE. Conclusion: free will is an illusion that does not actually exist.

  17. I've implicitly defined "vaporize" in this thread as "reduce to chunks of molecular size," such a size being the size of various vapor molecules. By that definition, a portion of an asteroid can and would be vaporized by a nuke, but not the entire asteroid.

    When I say vaporize in the context of nukes I mean that it transformed solid matter into plasma by knocking EVERY little one of those electrons out of their orbit and sent them flying off into space. Plasma is a gaseous state of matter consisting of atomic nuclei stripped of their electrons.

  18. Anyway, vaporizing a rock a few hundred meters wide is also impossible, at least using a nuke.

    Reediculous Nonsense! :D A nuke in the megaton range could do it in a *flash*. The 15 Megaton IVY MIKE test vaporized an entire islet several thousand feet long. A nuclear explosion on Earth(including an airburst) is mainly a fluid dynamics problem, a nuclear explosion in space is governed by radiation/plasma physics. Keep in mind D'kian that explosion generated shock waves are compressional waves, and so they require a medium to propagate of which outer space is decidedly lacking.

  19. The simple geometry of an omnidirectional explosion up against a surface produces the one half factor. It would only be exactly half if the surface were an infinite plane, and as it will actually be up against an irregular convex shape modeled as being tangent to the surface of a sphere it will be less than half, but close enough.

    Good point. But if the yield were large enough in proportion to the size of the asteroid, there would still be enough energy to vaporize it into a cloud of plasma. For instance, the IVY MIKE device, which was 15 Megatons and detonated on the ground, burned through enough earth to create a crater 1.8 miles wide and 200 feet deep.

    Its true that the momentum of the asteroid would result in a jet of fire. But the cool thing(no pun intended) about plasma is that since it's electrically charged and if the asteroid were vaporized within the Earth's magnetosheath the plasma cloud would be pulled towards the Earth and rain down on the Ionosphere making for a very pretty Aurora display! :o If the asteroid were hit far enough out in space that it was outside of the magnetosheath it would be swept away by the solar wind.

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