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RE: Black Hole eats sun
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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 RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to marrow3)
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quote:
So if consciousness is in the heart what happens during a heart transplant, same goes for any other part of the body ? I've heard it said that the number of neurons in the gut amount to something like a second brain. Maybe there's a little bit of consciousness in each organ. If people have a shared consciousness that involves some kind of subatomic particle exchange, if it was electromagentic then if someone was in a metallic box would they fall dead on the spot ? I don't know, many things are possible for all I know. Maybe somethings more plausible than others.
I forgot I was involved in this. Whew! I thought I was off the hook.
What a weird idea, consciousness. One of the interlocutors on this thread was saying that in a matter of time it could be trackable, quantifiable by science. Maybe parts of it, maybe the mechanical parts.
I have to think about this.
In the mean time as counterpoint to scientifically tracking the nuts & bolts of electrical impulses firing, I often think of the concept of karma as a way of thinking about consciousness.
What is karma exactly? I don't know. I know what it is not. It is not a legalistic system of spiritual law based on an 'eye for an eye' type of justice. When people say Oh your karma is going to be bad for doing that. That's karma you deserved that for what you did. It is more complicated, in the same way the electrical impulses don't carry anything but messages from somewhere to somewhere. The electricity makes the machine go, the interface between the soul and the body.
At least that is what they told me last time I was abducted. But I want my money back. I want every last cent I spent on that spaceship ride. Aliens are big rip off. They told me on the third abduction I would gain access to another level of guitar making, and paid good money, and I stood in the corn field at the appointed time, I blinked into the headlamps of the saucer.
I think they took some of my vital juices without giving back the promised knowledge. I swear on the script Dr. Strangelove I have been duped.
I'll get back to you on this.
Meanwhile all existence is about vibration. Not the Beach Boys kind. It's lower in frequency, way lower. So low that non solid shiet passes through solid shiet because at some point everything vibrates so widely it all fits through anything else.
That is what I know about consciousness. Not much.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Jan. 16 2013 23:20:11
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Ricardo
Posts: 14801
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to estebanana)
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quote:
What is karma exactly? I don't know. I know what it is not. It is not a legalistic system of spiritual law based on an 'eye for an eye' type of justice. When people say Oh your karma is going to be bad for doing that. That's karma you deserved that for what you did. It is more complicated, in the same way the electrical impulses don't carry anything but messages from somewhere to somewhere. The electricity makes the machine go, the interface between the soul and the body.
The brain tends to create lines to connect the dots so to speak. Perceval Lowell thought he saw canals on Mars in his weak telescope. I am sure other people looked and "saw" the same thing or he would have been labeled nuts right away. Later, refined optics revealed no lines, but dark and light patches that scientists thought could be vegetation. (I have an Atlas at my parents house from the 50's and the fuzzy pic of Mars with that caption is quite amusing).
Anyway, Karma is just the way we connect lines to events. Oh, I did this bad thing, then this totally unrelated bad thing happened over here. But I did this GOOD thing, and later this good fortune happened to me. No body would reverse time and say, Oh, a good thing happened to me, now I will be good person, or this bad thing happened to me now I will do evil...although that is more like what happens. Unlike voodoo where the bad **** happens right away.  Voodoo and quantum entanglement are very closely linked, it's so obvious.
My 10 year old and I did his homework, out of "junior great books" was a short story by Ray Bradburry about these hypothetical kids living on Venus where it rains all the time (cloud cover) and a girl from Earth visits and says the sun is so cool and these kids hate her. Sun comes out only 2 hrs a year or something. Well, literally since the morning we read that story, we have not seen the sun since (several days ago) which is weird for this area. In fact as I drove him to school that morning we watch the eery cloud rolling in. Voodoo.
_____________________________
CD's and transcriptions available here:
www.ricardomarlow.com
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Date Jan. 17 2013 12:51:10
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pundi64
Posts: 234
Joined: Jul. 29 2016
From: Thailand
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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to estebanana)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: estebanana
quote:
So if consciousness is in the heart what happens during a heart transplant, same goes for any other part of the body ? I've heard it said that the number of neurons in the gut amount to something like a second brain. Maybe there's a little bit of consciousness in each organ. If people have a shared consciousness that involves some kind of subatomic particle exchange, if it was electromagentic then if someone was in a metallic box would they fall dead on the spot ? I don't know, many things are possible for all I know. Maybe somethings more plausible than others.
I forgot I was involved in this. Whew! I thought I was off the hook.
What a weird idea, consciousness. One of the interlocutors on this thread was saying that in a matter of time it could be trackable, quantifiable by science. Maybe parts of it, maybe the mechanical parts.
I have to think about this.
In the mean time as counterpoint to scientifically tracking the nuts & bolts of electrical impulses firing, I often think of the concept of karma as a way of thinking about consciousness.
What is karma exactly? I don't know. I know what it is not. It is not a legalistic system of spiritual law based on an 'eye for an eye' type of justice. When people say Oh your karma is going to be bad for doing that. That's karma you deserved that for what you did. It is more complicated, in the same way the electrical impulses don't carry anything but messages from somewhere to somewhere. The electricity makes the machine go, the interface between the soul and the body.
At least that is what they told me last time I was abducted. But I want my money back. I want every last cent I spent on that spaceship ride. Aliens are big rip off. They told me on the third abduction I would gain access to another level of guitar making, and paid good money, and I stood in the corn field at the appointed time, I blinked into the headlamps of the saucer.
I think they took some of my vital juices without giving back the promised knowledge. I swear on the script Dr. Strangelove I have been duped.
I'll get back to you on this.
Meanwhile all existence is about vibration. Not the Beach Boys kind. It's lower in frequency, way lower. So low that non solid shiet passes through solid shiet because at some point everything vibrates so widely it all fits through anything else.
That is what I know about consciousness. Not much.
In this world or beyond, anything is possible.
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Date May 17 2017 21:51:58
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to estebanana)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: estebanana
Then the satellite was deployed and the engineers began to work with it and the satellite was unresponsive. It looks like it had a malfunction in its navigation control system. The control system detected the satellite was in a spin greater than it's structural integrity was able to handle and the self guidance system took over and made a false correction which did send the craft into dangerous spin. The craft was actually spinning much more slowly than it's onboard instruments detected. As it spun to fast it pulled itself apart mechanically.
The U.S. JSPOC (Joint Space Operations Center) data was no doubt definitive in the decision to give up on the satellite.
Since this thread has been all over the place up to now, maybe a tale of space operations will be tolerated.
One weekend evening I was about to go to bed where I lived on Roi Namur, at the north end of Kwajalein Atoll where the big radars are, when the phone rang.
Against the background noise of a lively party, the M.I.T. Lincoln Lab Sensor Leader of my radar asked whether I could assemble a crew and collect data on a satellite.
Two of the radars are capable of producing movie-like images of objects in low earth orbit--things that complete several full orbits per day. Ceres was a satellite that tested a new development process. Its mission was to travel to the moon, collect data in several spectral bands, and return to earth orbit. The novel part was the short development timeline, and resulting low cost.
Ceres had been launched into low earth orbit, but communication with it was lost. It was believed to be in some non-nominal motion, it was unknown whether the solar panels had deployed to provide power, and whether the communication antennas were properly deployed. One of our movies could answer all these questions, and could be a big help to efforts to reestablish control.
I assured the Sensor Leader that we were up to the task. The reason there was any question was that in those days the normal operating crew of the radar consisted of a mix of degreed engineers and experienced but non-degreed technicians and field engineers. I was the only degreed engineer for our radar who lived on Roi-Namur. The rest lived on Kwajalein Island fifty miles away. No flight crew could be assembled that night to bring people up to Roi. Having the next day off, the pilots were all at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall, drinking.
I called a set of people I was confident could do the job, including processing the radar data to make a movie. One of the guys bicycled over to the motor pool, and came around in a van to take us to the radar.
My regular dive buddy was an experienced tracker, but did not ordinarily take the lead operator position. I said, "Don, how about you be Tracker 1 and run the radar, I'll be Tracker 2 and get the broadband data to do the imaging." The transmitter operator, a crucial position operating and monitoring very powerful extremely high-voltage equipment, was experienced at running it by himself during routine operations, other positions were filled by people who ordinarily were backup.
We linked up with the JSPOC trajectory database, and soon we were in track, collected data, processed it to make a movie, and transmitted the movie to JSPOC, along with our assessment of Ceres's condition. The party was still going on at Kwajalein when I called to let people know we had performed as requested.
It was only then that I told the guys on Roi that just before the phone rang I had taken the last swig of a full bottle of good red wine, and was feeling, shall we say, rather "elevated."
A couple of hours later the phone rang again, saying that our movie enabled Jet Propulsion Lab to regain control of Ceres and launch it into its moon trajectory. A couple of weeks later we received a letter from JPL thanking us for our heroic efforts, bragging on their meeting all mission objectives, and giving us a nice plaque to put in our trophy case.
A couple of the other guys confessed at that point, saying they too had been drunker than hoot owls.
RNJ
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Date May 19 2017 4:08:36
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to estebanana)
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My mother had a friend who insisted that the moon landings were faked, even after my mother introduced her to my brother, who described watching the reentries or launchings of several of the flights, and being intimately acquainted with all the astronauts as the Head of the Flight Medicine Branch of the NASA Manned Spaceflight Center.
She wasn't confrontational with my brother. She just said, "I'm sorry young man, but I'm afraid you are mistaken."
A few months ago Larisa was stalked on Facebook for several weeks by an ex-Marine in his forties who belongs to a Flat Earth group. He persisted in repeating stuff from a book written in the 19th century by some kook who presented a number of fallacious arguments.
When shown the "Earth rising" photo from Apollo 8, of course he insisted it was fake. When shown the photo of my brother with Nixon and the Apollo 11 crew on the deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet, he said it was all part of the hoax. When asked whether he had ever seen a ship come up over the horizon, first the top of the mast, then successively lower parts, he insisted that with a good enough telescope you would always see the whole ship. When challenged to go to the nearby Atlantic coast and offered a pair a binoculars, he declined, citing his 19th century book.
Eventually he grew frustrated, and asked Larisa why she wasn't angry at being challenged.
One of my favorites was a guy I interviewed for an engineering position. He had a decent resume, had worked for Boeing in Wichita, Kansas as a weight and balance engineer in aircraft design and development. One of my pals appeared at my office door, and beckoned to me. I got up and walked over to him. My pal whispered, "Ask him about his patent application."
I did: it was for an anti-gravity machine, all mechanical. The guy grumbled that the Patent Office would not accept his application without a working model, and he couldn't afford the machine shop work to build one. He pulled out a stack of drawings and explained in detail the operation of his invention. Though his conceptual error was glaringly obvious, I kept quiet, listened politely and wished him luck in finding financing.
He wasn't the only engineer I knew who believed stuff like this. One of the best radar receiver designers I ever met worked at Kwjalein. He came up with an innovative approach to implementing the planned upgrade of one of the radars, which saved a lot of money. We spent a fair amount of time going over his ideas, working through some fairly complex and lengthy calculations, trying to make sure we weren't overlooking something, since no one had ever seen anything like what he proposed. I was impressed, and had a lot of fun. His design worked like a charm. Other people told me he thought Einstein's theory of relativity was all wrong, but I carefully avoided the subject.
...and so on, and on, and on with a number of different people over the years...
But more often it went like this: One of my good friends, with a PhD in physics from Rice, challenged my analysis of a mechanical design. We discussed it off and on for several days, until he quoted a famous theorem. I responded that the theorem only held in an inertial coordinate system, and the system where he was applying it was not inertial. The light dawned, and he thanked me for pointing it out.
I kept three panels of the blackboards in my office covered with line after line of calculus, in fairly good handwriting. Once in a while a new young engineer would take the bait, saying something like, "I would love to learn how to do stuff like that."
I would reply that I explained my conclusion to a couple of the best guys. It had a practical implication. One of the radar receivers (14 man-size cabinets of microwave and digital electronics) was being modernized. Part of the re-build process involved laboriously trimming cables to precisely match time delays for a number of channels through a critical part of the circuitry. My conclusion was that some of the signal paths didn't need to be matched.
The guys didn't contradict me, I was the boss. They just showed up the next day with test data, and walked me out to the equipment room to show me the test setup. The test data refuted my conclusion beyond any doubt. I would invite the new kid to find the error in my calculation, since neither I nor anyone else had found it so far.
RNJ
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Date May 20 2017 0:46:12
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to estebanana)
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quote:
I don't why it bothers me so much that there are science negation people in the world, but it does.
Those who deny science bother me for two reasons: First, because they delight in their ignorance in the face of all evidence to the contrary; and second, because their ignorance has real-world consequences. The anti-vaxxer crowd is a case in point. The anti-vaxxers can point to no sound scientific, statistical, or historical evidence to support their position. Their arguments are always anecdotal which, at best, may suggest a correlation, say, between vaccines and autism (e.g., "My friend has an autistic child who was vaccinated.") They fail to distinguish between correlation and causation and commit the logical fallacy "Post hoc ergo prompter hoc," i.e., since event A was followed by event B, event A must have caused event B. Their argument makes as much sense as noting that the cock crows every morning followed by the sun's rise. Therefore, the cock's crow must cause the sun to rise.
The anti-vaxxers' case is not helped by the fact that there are a significant number of conspiracy theorists among them who believe the U.S. Government and "Big Pharma" are conspiring to "peddle" vaccines at the expense of children. This, too, is nonsense. Of course pharmaceutical companies make money off vaccines. But vaccines go through a rigorous testing regime before they are put on the market. Most people are capable of detecting a conspiracy theorist's argument as lacking credibility. Ironically, it was Andrew Wakefield, the thoroughly discredited physician whose fraudulent study started the whole anti-vaxxer movement, who accepted a considerable amount of money from a law firm who had planned to sue pharmaceutical companies over vaccines using Wakefield's now discredited study. Yet there are people who desperately want to believe that vaccines cause autism. Among the most fervent of the true believers are a significant number who live in upscale Marin County, across the bridge from San Francisco. these are so-called "educated" people, yet they deny the science that has conclusively demonstrated there is no connection between vaccines and autism. As a result, there have been outbreaks of measles among unvaccinated children, the latest in a Somali immigrant community in Minnesota.
Another example of the ignorami denying science having real world consequences is that of school boards (Topeka, Kansas, for example) who mandate that "creationism" be taught along with evolution. They argue that evolution is just another "theory," thereby demonstrating they cannot distinguish between a "theory" and a "hypothesis," further demonstrating ignorance piled upon ignorance. And school children who are forced to absorb this pablum are the poorer for it.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date May 20 2017 17:40:07
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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quote:
One weekend evening I was about to go to bed where I lived on Roi Namur, at the north end of Kwajalein Atoll where the big radars are, when the phone rang.
During 1991-1993, I was assigned to the U.S. State Department's Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, to the office that was responsible for our relations with the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau. I traveled to Kwajalein on several occasions, since one of our primary responsibilities was to protect the U.S. interest in maintaining Kwajalein.
In 1993, a vessel that was bound for Hawaii to off-load 525 Chinese illegally into the U.S. was diverted to Kwajalein by a U.S. Coast Guard cutter. I spent a month on Kwajalein as the State Department Liaison Officer, working with a Brigadier General and his staff from CINCPAC out of Hawaii, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) representative, the RMI government, and others to determine if any of the Chinese had a valid claim to refugee status and to keep all of them together in the temporary camp that was set up. After a month, we determined that none of the Chinese had a valid claim to refugee status. We chartered four C-130 aircraft from the Indonesian Air Force, and the 525 chinese were all flown back to Xian, China.
During that month on Kwajalein our Ambassador in Majuro had arranged with the Colonel, who was the Commander of USAKA, to put me up in decent quarters, and I became a habitue of the club every evening, along with my colleagues, both military and civilian, with whom I was working to end the Chinese crisis and get them back to China. The club had the unappetizing name of "The Yokwe Yuk Club." We drank many a beer in that club. And the presence of so many new faces working the Chinese issue caused quite a stir among the community, particularly the ladies who viewed us as new partners to join them in "line dancing" of all things. Since then, I have returned to Majuro several times in retirement as a State Department consultant, filling in as Charge' d'Affaires in the Ambassador's absence, occasionally liaising with the military authorities on Kwajalein. Nothing in the Marshalls, however, will top that experience of spending a month on Kwajalein, both in terms of the mission and in just the day-to-day off-duty life. Interesting piece of real estate.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date May 20 2017 18:37:39
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to BarkellWH)
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The Yuk Club followed a downward spiral familiar to those of us who have seen a bit of time go by.
("Yokwe Yuk" is the standard Marshallese greeting. I vaguely remember it means something like, "You are good looking.")
When I first visited Kwaj in the early 1970s you had to wear long pants, shoes (no flip-flops=slippers=zoris=go-aheads) and a shirt with a collar to get into the Yuk. Service was great. You could get a pretty good steak. Shermie and his excellent amateur band sometimes provided live music that didn't drown out conversation.
As the Marshallese waiters and waitresses aged, the standard of service from their younger replacements began to decline. Everyone was still polite and friendly, but things slowed down a lot. People got frustrated, but you could still get a pretty good steak.
Then the quality of food began to fall off. In the '70s and '80s the club was still staffed partly by Marshallese who had been trained when the Yuk was a Navy Officers' Club. The younger people weren't as well indoctrinated in the ways of the ri-belle (white people).
When Raytheon won the contract to run the base, they brought in a food service subcontractor to run not only the Yuk, but also the chow halls and the snack bar. Then word went out that dining service would be severely cut back because the Yuk was losing money.
A man who worked for me checked up on the weekly alcohol sales in the bar, and the overhead figures in the budget. He reported that the only way the Yuk could be losing money would be to have five highly paid American managers assigned to it. Guess what? The food service subcontractor had assigned five managers to the Yuk!
The subcontractor was chastised, and eventually fired from the whole base, but the damage was done. The dining room was shut down. Now there was no public place on the atoll to get a civilized sit-down meal.
A Marshallese entrepreneur took advantage of the opportunity and opened Bob's Restaurant at the dock on Ebeye, a three-mile boat ride from the military base on Kwaj. The boat ride was a deterrent, but he got enough customers to stay in business for a few years. Some of my buddies and I made the trip, first to Kwaj then to Ebeye. The food was decent, and the wine (expensive) was flown in, instead of being boiled on the ocean going barge during the long trip from the USA.
A brief cholera epidemic on Ebeye scared off all of Bob's Kwaj customers, though I believe Bob's experienced no problems themselves. Bob's soldiered on for a couple more years before closing when the Kwaj customers failed to return.
The Yuk Club bar continued to be popular, sold lots of drinks, and made money.
What next? The building began to show severe signs of age. More and more parts of it began to be shut down as unsafe. No funds were allocated for an expensive rehabilitation, because, after all, what did the Yuk contribute to the community? The Base Commander's wife in those days was a severe alcoholic, and the Colonel was opposed to alcohol in all its manifestations. He doubled the price of beer at the store, but people began to have it shipped in by the pallet load on air freight.
Eventually the roof of the kitchen began to fall in, and bar food service came to a halt. No more hamburgers and French fries.
Living fifty miles to the north on Roi-Namur I didn't follow the Yuk's further decline in any detail, but the last time I saw it about the time I retired at the end of 2009 it was a moldering ruin, surrounded by yellow tape declaring it off limits.
What had begun as a fine facility, first a Navy Officers' Club, then a well run civilian facility, had been completely run into the ground by a command economy.
I used to say that it would be hard to find a worse way to unfit somebody to be the Proconsul of the almost entirely civilian community at Kwajalein that to train them to be a colonel in the U.S. Army. Despite this we had some excellent commanders at times, intelligent, observant, flexible people.
Roi-Namur both suffered and profited from its remoteness from "downtown." In many respects the Army left us pretty much alone. But when a new Colonel appeared every couple of years, his long resident civil service advisors bombarded him with their pet peeves and personal projects.
People on Roi built various structures at the lagoon beach, scrounging materials, or sometimes outright stealing them. One civil servant on Kwaj inveighed against the beach shacks to a new Colonel.
When the new Colonel came to Roi the first time, I had the usual task of giving him a tour of the technical facilities. On the way back from lunch we drove down the road along the beach. "What are all these VC (Viet Cong) hutches?" the Colonel asked.
By a stroke of luck I saw one of my friends. "Want to ask this guy about it?"
"Yes."
My friend pointed out that on Kwajalein island the Army had spent significant funds to build facilities at Emon and Coral Sands Beaches and to employ lifeguards. There were exactly zero public facilities at the beach on Roi.
"Downtown you have Emon Beach and Coral Sands, and you have your back yards to have private picnics and parties. We're completely on our own up here on Roi, we don't have back yards, and there are no public beach facilities."
The next day the Colonel countermanded the plan to tear down the beach shacks on Roi, and instructed the island manager to provide materials for sale to upgrade them, including cement and re-bar to pour slabs. The Roi Rats turned to and improved the shacks with their own labor. The next time an Army Reserve construction outfit arrived for a couple months of training, one of the things they built on Roi was a nice public pavilion at the beach, with charcoal grills, picnic tables and benches.
On balance I would say maybe a fourth of the Commanders were good for the community, some were neutral, and at least a third were very bad for morale. But they rotated every two years or so, presenting us with a novel set of challenges.
One of my good friends, H. was Associate Director of M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory, a very influential government research and development lab. As a relatively minor part of its job, the Lab was at first the Scientific Director of the base at Kwaj, later the Scientific Advisor. H's main job at the Lab was liaison with Congress.
I heard several good stories of Congressional activities from H. He was puzzled that I seemed to enjoy life out in the boondocks on Kwaj, after years of moving in sub-Cabinet and international circles. Eventually Herb came to Kwaj--perhaps because his wife would enjoy a couple of weeks in Honolulu.
As we toured the tech facilities on the various islands I regaled H. with stories of lame brained Army stunts, and the stratagems devised to circumvent them. Eventually H. said, "I can finally see how someone could have a good time out here. A lot of interesting technical challenges, and plenty of human folly to observe and enjoy. I like my job, but you get more tech stuff than I do."
RNJ
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Date May 20 2017 21:35:18
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to BarkellWH)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: BarkellWH
They argue that evolution is just another "theory," thereby demonstrating they cannot distinguish between a "theory" and a "hypothesis," further demonstrating ignorance piled upon ignorance. And school children who are forced to absorb this pablum are the poorer for it.
Bill
Of course, part of the problem is that the boundary between hypothesis and theory is a fuzzy one.
Even Newton, whose theory seems supremely intuitive to me, hesitated to publish, unsatisfied that he had enough supporting evidence to make a case. Under urging from Halley, and having calculated the libration of the moon, he finally felt he had enough to challenge--not the existing theories--but in fact the prevailing ignorance.
Darwin's delay in publishing is notorious. He was convinced of evolution's validity two decades before he published "The Origin of Species," laboring to add more and more to a stock of evidence.
It was nearly another century until Watson and Crick published the structure of DNA and its function began to be understood in detail, so that a physical/chemical foundation could be laid for evolution.
Meanwhile evolution was under attack from numerous powerful forces, whose world view was undermined by it.
The acceptance of evolution has suffered under competition from other theories, which their adherents mistake for facts. Most of us conduct our lives according to unexamined assumptions, which are in fact provably false. An argument, that would stand up in a court of law, would be that if I saw event A happen before event B, then so would you.
In fact, special relativity shows that this is not necessarily so. It is backed up by extensive experimental evidence. Without experimental evidence, I would be reluctant to set out to convince you of this, unless I was certain you were confident in the efficacy of mathematical argument.
Even if you were proficient in elementary calculus, we would have to begin by discussing the immensely counter-intuitive postulate that the speed of light is the same for all observers in inertial coordinate systems, no matter what their relative speeds may be. I would not expect you to have puzzled over the Michelson-Morley experiment, nor the myriad subsequent tests where this result stubbornly persists.
Neither would I expect you to take the profoundly audacious step that Einstein did: What if not only this audacious postulate were universally true, but what if its bizarre logical consequences were actually what happened?
The experimental evidence for evolution is not part of the every day experience of an uneducated person. I read with appalling frequency that "Evolution has not been observed in the laboratory." Where do the people who write this think we study the evolution of drug resistance in bacteria?
Most of what is taught in modern education is not part of the every day experience of people in the highlands of New Guinea--and vice versa.
Perhaps the distinction between theory and hypothesis is only likely to be grasped if the student is presented with a theory and a copious supporting set of evidence.
Another major roadblock to reliance upon science is the almost universal ignorance of, and vehement distaste for the scientific attitude: very, very little of what we "know" is unconditionally true. Our theories of reality are couched in terms of human concepts, constantly subject to revision, expansion, or outright abandonment as we learn more about the world.
Most people would rather be certain than right, especially when being right entails confessing ignorance.
RNJ
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Date May 21 2017 19:28:02
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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quote:
Darwin's delay in publishing is notorious. He was convinced of evolution's vailidity two decades before he published "The Origin of Species, laboring to add more and more to a stock of evidence.
Darwin finally published his "The Origin of Species," detailing the theory of evolution driven by natural selection, because he had been communicating for some time with that other 19th century proponent of evolution and natural selection Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin wanted to be the first to introduce the theory to the scientific community, and he knew Wallace was closing in. Wallace had put together elements of the theory of evolution even before Darwin had fully fleshed his out. Each made their discoveries independently, although they discussed the evidence via letters.
Alfred Russel Wallace is a fascinating character. He spent years in the Dutch East Indies (today's Indonesia) discovering and classifying flora and fauna. He sent many specimens back to Britain. It was Wallace for whom the "Wallace Line" was named. The Wallace Line runs between Bali and Lombok, and it divides Asian fauna to the west of the line from Austral-Asian fauna to the east of the line.
I highly recommend Alfred Russel Wallace's book, "The Malay Archipelago," first published in 1869, but available in reprints. It is still in print today. It is a combination travel book and scientific record. It is a great read for anyone interested in the 19th century Dutch East Indies, scientific inquiry, and adventure.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date May 21 2017 20:31:55
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Ricardo
Posts: 14801
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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quote:
In fact, special relativity shows that this is not necessarily so. It is backed up by extensive experimental evidence. Without experimental evidence, I would be reluctant to set out to convince you of this, unless I was certain you were confident in the efficacy of mathematical argument.
I have the same difficulty making people believe some of my ideas about flamenco guitar... in order to convince someone about my ideas on compas, music theory or nails or picado I would first have to take them through the basics of dance class and countless experiences of dance shows with cante etc, all that stuff and finally arrive at my present view point in order to convince them.
But there are more fundamental obstacles than pure ignorance that prevent people from embracing new theory. I have been biting my tongue with these off topic things that might send the thread down lock down lane, but.....regarding pseudoscience I think it's scary. Maybe worse than religion as they go on science facts and use them as weapons to further a BS narrative....like this UFO black ops nonsense this group was able to organize a CONGRESSIONAL hearing....3 hours of horse crap by "scientists" educating our congress on secret tech like "zero point energy warp drive" etc....horrifying.
Now about creationism, it's very very very very simple. Any child can see a fossils of their favorite Dino bones and realize what the implications of Darwin's idea lead to. It's a simple logic that every intelligent person has gone through. It goes like this....if evolution is TRUE, then THERE IS NO GOD AND THE BIBLE IS UTTER NONSENSE!!!!!!! It's quite simple yet difficult pill to swallow. Both concepts can not coexist, as hard as some try to force the square shape into the circle hole. So if one accepts natural selection then, on what do you now base the foundation of a moral society on exactly? Why should I NOT go kill my neighbor and rape is wife to pass on my genetic material to further my line and ensure survival of my species? Might as well take some of his stuff while I am at it to provide for my own family and future off springs. The absolute violence of the animal world, and the seeming uniqueness of the human species vs the rest are the driving force to combat and stand against an idea that could wreck the house of cards.
In other words, before ushering in the idea that evolution is TRUTH, you must first reconstruct all of societal laws and morality from a new NATURAL SELECTION basis, instead of a religious one, or you have a fundamental collapse. This is not, of course, the way science operates. It's simply cold and matter of fact observations and conclusions, and so you will have to maintain this awkward duality of pushing and pulling of conflicting ideas until all of the human race can grow up. Two step forward, one step back. Sluggish like evolution itself. Or teaching flamenco guitar.
Ricardo
_____________________________
CD's and transcriptions available here:
www.ricardomarlow.com
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Date May 22 2017 11:45:18
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Piwin
Posts: 3559
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to Ricardo)
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I would tend to disagree that evolution implies the inexistence of "God". It does allow us to dismiss quite a few specifics of certain religion but a deist could incorporate evolution into her belief system and not loose any sleep over it. I'm content with letting believers make the claims (so I don't have to make the positive claim "God does not exist", I just have to watch while they continuously fail to meet their burden of proof). Evolution does show that there is no need for an "external" intervention of any kind for life to develop from a certain starting point, which is probably why not the hot topic for believers seems to be abiogenesis, where science has yet to establish a clear model. God of the gaps I guess. But again, a deist could accept evolution and not lose any sleep over it.
Regarding pseudoscience, antivaccers and the like, I think a lot of it is just a by-product of our increased access to information. Science no longer presents itself with a united front, or at least it can be viewed that way. It can seem splintered. The scientific process hasn't changed, but, where in the past the points of disagreement at the frontier of science were a matter for the initiate or at least people who took an active interest in those things, nowadays those disagreements are apparent to everyone and it has been interpreted as meaning that scientists don't really agree on many things. It's really just a misunderstanding of how science works. But this problem can also be seen as an opportunity. Perhaps in the past scientific claims were merely accepted by lay people on authority. And questioning that authority can be an opportunity to educate, to get people to understand the process. Anyways, that's me trying to be optimistic.
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Date May 22 2017 14:23:00
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to Ricardo)
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I have close relatives whom I know quite well, who are in science based professions such as medicine, while at the same time they are deeply religious. I have never had a detailed discussion with them about evolution, since it has never occurred to me that they might not accept the general consensus of evolution through natural selection.
Some of them have a high regard for the Bible, though they do not interpret all of it literally. In fact my nephew-in-law who is a Christian minister is one of my favorite partners in conversation. He has lived in many different countries since childhood, and considers himself a "third culture kid," as I consider myself. I love to talk with him about cultural differences among the places he has lived, and younger family members seem to enjoy listening to us carry on.
Week before last we went to the East Coast wedding of one of his daughters. At age 25 she was a reporter, then National Affairs Producer for the PBS News Hour. She left PBS at age 27 to oversee the BBC America coverage of the U.S. presidential primaries, debates and election.
I saw her questioning Trump on TV several times. Mostly he evaded the questions, though he called her by her first name. I concluded he called on her because she is good looking. I don't think that's the main reason the BBC hired her.
At the rehearsal dinner the groom's grandmother (a Jew) said in her toast that she had wondered how it would be to sit down to dinner a few days before with a Christian minister from Texas--though he now works in Saudi Arabia as a "teacher": the Chaplain for the American workers of one of the oil companies. He also oversees the oil company's charitable spending outside of the Middle East.
The grandmother smiled and said she and her husband (a psychiatrist with a medical degree and a PhD) had one of their most delightful discussions of the Judaic tradition with a very well-informed pair of new relatives, and she looked forward to sharing many a lively dinner in the future.
After dinner one of my nephews, who has a PhD in clinical psychology, and has owned a management consulting business for many years, the psychiatrist grandfather and I had an interesting 3/4 hour of talk about subjects that included the dynamics of organizations, physics and the foundations of mathematics, over a glass or two of wine. My assumption was that my nephew was religious, the psychiatrist may have been, or may not have been--if he was he was Jewish, and that my nephew knew that I am not.
Pardon the personal stories, I'm a fairly literal-minded person. I tend to prefer specific stories to generalizations like, "Religious people can understand and accept the theory of evolution." But they can.
By the way--not all of my extended family are religious, but friction never occurs "in public". There may be a respectful one-on-one discussion once in ten years, but people are careful not to tread on one another's toes in a group.
RNJ
Another cause of mistrust, of science and damn' near anything else, is the fact that the great majority of what we see and hear on TV, social media and elsewhere, is at the very least deeply subject to self-interest, and nowadays consists largely of political distortions by all parties, outright lies, advertising bullsh1t, and insults and ridicule from all sides. People are right to be skeptical.
David Books, the conservative columnist, recently criticized a very prominent Republican politician for "not knowing what it is to know something."
People ought to be skeptical, but they also ought to be taught what science is.
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Date May 22 2017 20:55:08
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Ricardo
Posts: 14801
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to Piwin)
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quote:
but a deist could incorporate evolution into her belief system and not loose any sleep over it.
As I said, a lot of hard work goes into forcing the square idea into the circle hole. I would call that hard work "losing sleep" for sure, and this assumes of course that the individual actually understands natural selection, extinction, speciation, stellar evolution, cosmology, chemistry, etc. A deist would have a hard time fitting their god into a world where he or she is not needed for any reason what so ever..... perhaps you mean agnostics, those wishy washy "I don't really know...." types that, yes they don't lose sleep for sure. 
Back to pseudo science, there is this disturbing documentary I refuse to watch (at least until it's free lol), called "The Principle", where these scientists with a religious agenda are taking the data from the Plank and claiming that it points to a ... a.... this is hard to type while laughing....an EARTH centered universe. Now I researched it and it is an interesting thing about the data, but claiming it refutes Copernicus is where they take it. 
_____________________________
CD's and transcriptions available here:
www.ricardomarlow.com
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Date May 23 2017 1:06:43
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