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DancingBear

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Everything posted by DancingBear

  1. Could you reply to that first quote I provided from Wikipedia in the box. It says something along the lines of "atmospheric friction would tear apart objects that reach Earth's escape velocity." I also read something about how Space Shuttles don't achieve escape velocity from the surface, they accelerate as they rise. However, a rock blasted from the surface of a planet couldn't accelerate; all of it's kinetic energy would need to be realized at once in order to reach a speed required to exit the planetary gravity. Meteorites don't go into low-Mars orbit and then accelerate into space.
  2. Dakota: So you're saying people thrive while living under a code of ethics other than the one put forward by Ayn Rand? This is false. People who do not follow basic tenets of Objectivist ethics do not thrive, they survive. Survival is merely staying alive, thriving is the actual act of living, of achieving your full potential. Ayn Rand derived her ethics from principles of reason, not from how she felt. If you want to disagree with her you have to use reason to show why living the way she prescribes is wrong or not the best way to live. Furthermore, a man who squanders his inheritance is not living. A mother who lives off welfare is not living. These people are merely surviving. They are like pets, and the ones who provide for them are their masters, who feed their pets when it pleases them.
  3. The escape velocity for Mars is 5 km/s, or 5000 m/s, according to Wikipedia (hopefully no Liberals are fudging these results!). In fact, most of Mars is Basalt. Basalt melts at about 984° to 1260° and granite at about 1215° to 1260°. See the "Melting Intervals of Rocks" section of that link. The specific heat of Basalt. So the specific heat (the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one kilogram of a substance by one degree) of Basalt is .84 kJ/kg. On discovery, the meteorite's mass was 1.93 kg, or 1930 grams. Because the melting point of Basalt is around 1000 degrees, to melt two kilograms of basalt requires 1680 kJ. The work required to reach 5 km/s from rest for a 1 kg object is 5,000,000 joules. 5000 kJ is greater than 1680 kJ. Therefore any rocks blasted from the Basalt surface of Mars would melt from the event. Furthermore, the rock would experience extreme heating from the Earth's atmosphere when it entered at the same velocity and slammed into the ground. This here says that the Martian surface has no young craters which could account for the meteorite. The only plausible alternative event that could generate the energy necessary to reach that speed (correct me if I'm wrong) is volcanic activity. In this case it would be even more likely that the rock was molten during some portion of it's journey to earth. The final two paragraphs in the article about the meteorite seem to indicate that the evidence was of the presence of water, not bacteria. I'm not sure how carbonate disks and tiny magnetite crystals react under extreme heat.
  4. Good point. So we should be questioning the existence of knowledge. If knowledge exists, then consciousness must exist. So, how do we know knowledge exists? Wait, if we know it exists, then that is knowledge... Am I stumbling on something important? Maybe instead of asking how, I should ask can we know anything? If we know that we can know something, that's also knowledge... Serious responses are desired (i.e. I'm not being an idiot on purpose).
  5. I was originally going to say intuition, which I define as a penchant for abstraction. I make very large leaps from idea to idea, so I need somebody that can keep up. I've decided that independence is more attractive however. I need symbiosis, not parasitism.
  6. Not that differ significantly from other addictions and not that can be applied without context.
  7. Thanks for a definition of concept. Also from Merriam-Webster (online): Definition of VOLITION 1 : an act of making a choice or decision; also : a choice or decision made 2 : the power of choosing or determining : will Does anyone have any evidence of a human (or anything else) making a choice which cannot possibly be determined? Perhaps it's human foresight that is really behind claims of volition. Perhaps the human brain, able to predict the future with higher accuracy has given itself the impression that it's making decisions. The way I see it, the brain is part of an organism that wants to survive. When this organism gets something right, it is rewarded. Wrong, punished. The complexity of the human brain allows for high degrees of analysis and more effective action. You don't 'choose' to do anything that gets you punished on purpose; even if you're masochistic, then punishment is rewarding for you. In other words, you act in line with your values. These values are reinforced in your brain by punishment and reward. Punishment and reward are products of reality, not chosen. Has anyone considered the difficulty scientists have creating machines with volition. If it's so self-evident, why is it so hard to apply to a machine?
  8. Happy Birthday Ayn Rand

  9. The American invasion of Iraq may have successfully toppled a dictator and secured oil, but it has now created a vacuum. The government that replaces it will inevitably be weaker than that of surrounding countries due to it's youth. Furthermore, there is a huge struggle between Shiites and Sunnis to take that power. These religious affiliations cross borders in the Middle East and can easily be manipulated to create unrest in neighboring governments. Iraq was Iran's biggest rival and provided a balance of power to an incredibly volatile region. With Iraq essentially out of the picture, Iran is free to develop it's resources and strategy.
  10. Despite not completely adhering to the Objectivist standard, people successful in any respect will agree with some aspects of Objectivism. To the extent that they disagree, they do not achieve their full potential. Utilitarianism as I understand it is simply actions are valuable inasmuch as they create the greatest good for the greatest number of people. What best suits one's particular purpose is not necessarily good for the most people. Furthermore, ends don't justify means. If you would like to have a large family, that's fine. But choosing to marry someone for this sole purpose is unreasonable. If you are not of the same faith, you are likely to sacrifice many other important values in pursuit of that one. I would like to see this data you reference and see whether the statistics include anything on the divorce rates among very religious persons married to very unreligious persons (e.g. atheists).
  11. Good dramatic arc and movement from concrete to abstract. You have a good vocabulary and penchant for concrete imagery that I think would work well as poetry. Keep it up!
  12. No, I'm no physicist. I'm merely speculating. In other news, how has no one made a Spider Man joke yet? Along the same lines, does anyone remember anything from the X-Men movies that could help answer my question? I seem to remember the mutants being ostracized from society but I'm not sure if that was legal action or just a bunch of angry people.
  13. Physical- made of matter, which is a concept referring to particles, sub-particles, atoms, and molecules.
  14. Very interesting information on the uniqueness of life. If other planets are able to support the birth of life they may contain much different forms than are found on Earth. A blast strong enough to propel a rock from Mars to the Earth would most certainly have turned the rock to a semi-liquid molten state. How any life form could survive that is beyond me. If that can be proven, I'll be less skeptical. Back to the original question however, which only the second poster felt was more relevant than there own personal conversational desires, can any rational non-human be tried in an existing judicial system or would a new judicial system need to be created? Maybe one of the abductees would like to weigh in with their first-hand experience.
  15. Great to hear! Hopefully I can make it!
  16. Drawing inspiration from page 73 of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, would rational Martian spiders be held accountable to the same standard of justice that humans are held to? For example, if they crash-landed into my house and proved to be rational, could I sue them for the damages? (I'm sure we could negotiate some sort of payment other than US Dollars).
  17. Good point ZSorenson. I will think about it.
  18. Okay so the choice to live is pre-moral and life is not intrinsically valuable. So can somebody outline how we know that life (all forms) is objectively valuable? After we've made a decision to live, we can then determine the value of other things to us. Should I care if someone is starving in Africa? Or should I care if a certain species of tree frog is about to go extinct?
  19. Okay well I'm going to order OPAR, but until it arrives, anyone care to elaborate on how free will operates in a physical body, yet separated from the causal chains that connect the rest of the universe? Thanks Jacob86. That's the most satisfying answer I've heard thus far. I still can't get beyond the problem that this function of human nature has no physical counterpart. There's not a specific region of the brain where said consciousness takes place?
  20. I didn't "say psychotherapy is the same as having friends, so sex therapy/prostitution is the same as having a lover". I was trying to say that psychotherapy can help one solve problems that may keep them from having friends, like sex therapy/prostitution can help one solve problems that may keep them from having a lover. Are you satisfied with the analogy now? You could look at pornography like other performance. It's art, although not good art, and the porn stars are essentially improv actors. Something still remains unsatisfying with this definition.
  21. Don't forget about "Republic" by Plato as well as the numerous Existential fictions: "The Stranger" by Camus; "No Exit" by Sartre. To that point, "Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value judgments." -Ayn Rand, "Art and Cognition", The Romantic Manifesto, p. 45. So really any art represents a philosophy, implicit or explicit. Sorry for the tangent.
  22. I apparently can't find the button to edit my previous post, so here's the link to some information on sex therapy from WebMD It's an analogy. Psychotherapy:friends::Sex therapy/prostitution:lovers.
  23. I disagree. I think that's one of the major benefits of psychotherapy. If someone doesn't have an adequate social base to fill his psychological needs, then payment to have these needs fulfilled until one can establish a public setting to fulfill them is better than not having them filled at all. The same can be said for prostitution. In fact, I believe that there are serious people (not run-of-the-mill prostitutes) who call themselves sex therapists and may engage in sexual behaviors with their clients when they deem it beneficial to their clients. This behavior could potentially be beneficial to someone with say, a history of sexual abuse, who cannot engage in sexual behaviors normally because of severe psychological disturbances.
  24. Thanks for all the skeptic (for lack of a better word) resources. The only books we have been assigned in my course argue that anthropogenic global warming is occurring. I'm sure Richard Lindzen will be heavily cited in my final paper. Here's something from page 41 of "Science As A Contact Sport" by Stephen H. Schneider: The SST was potentially going to be a government-subsidized American Supersonic Transport, like the Concorde jet. Personally, I think we could use a few more caveats in today's research. Here's my recent paper in case anyone is interested. Feel free to criticize. Oh and any current events related to climate change that may be of interest to this forum are welcome. Analysis 1 revised.doc
  25. That's part of my justification for being determined. Any idea you have is built off of previous ideas. You may choose to arrange them in a unique way, but you've been taught or had the necessary experiences to learn how to do that? For instance, a cook may create a new recipe, but he's only using knowledge gained from what he knows about other recipes, why they work, etc. There's no evidence there that somewhere inside him, the neural connections from his all his perceptions of everything he learned about food to creating something himself that involves a choice. The drive to attempt to create something is probably the result of strong neural connections between trying new things and reward. It's conditioning basically. The answer is A. It has been DETERMINED that the person will press the button. I think that this is hard to conceptualize because of the complexity of the universe compared to the current knowledge of human beings. It is currently impossible to account for every possible variable in the universe and it probably will always be that way. Can you imagine some scientist of the future finally determining exactly how the universe works and being able to predict the rest of the future? He would be stuck and unable to defy his existence. Also, I can confidently guess that most people would try to defy the determined result of button-pushing, so if you set up a blind study, that would probably be pretty easy to show. One last note, is anyone arguing for volition here frightened by the fact that they may not be able to choose? Quite frankly, the notion that my actions are determined really has no effect on me. I have the values I have, so to give up on life because whatever I do is determined is absurd. Whether or not I consciously choose them, achieving my values feels good so that's always what I'm going to try to do. People seem to think that being determined means they can't do anything for themselves.
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