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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Klaatu barada nikto
means:
"Klaatu's babe is now Gort's doll."
Meanwhile, Klaatu toils on trying to understand 0!!!!!. (Look closely at the photo of him at the blackboard)
If his intellect fails the task, meditation should work!
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Thanks, Ed, for the reply.
A lot of your post re crossing symmetry goes over my head but I think I get the gist of it. I cited it only because it was an item I wasn't familiar with as part of Carroll's chapter conversation.
I hope I didn't give any impression that crossing symmetry was a major component of Carroll's book. It wasn't. Thanks again.
....
In part, this hints to how easily Carroll - and his "poetic naturalism" approach - can be misinterprettted by the public...
[Click to View YouTube Video]
https://youtu.be/3AMCcYnAsdQ
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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In 1954 I was a high school student taking physics and I wrote a short report on a popularized article I read about positrons being interpreted as electrons going backward in time. Needless to say I hadn't a clue about the details, but the physics teacher liked it!
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Duck: In that case you should kill and hunt humans and eat them just like you slaughter all these animals daily and eat them.
In Southeastern Cherokee literature, the following has been claimed:
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In the old days the members of the brute creation were gifted with speech, and dwelt in amity with the human race. The increase of humanity, however, crowded the animals into the forests and desert places of the earth, and upon the invention of lethal weapons, man commenced the wholesale slaughter of the beasts for the sake of their flesh and skins, and trod upon the lesser animals with contempt. The animals, driven to despair, resolved upon retributive measure. The first to meet where the bears, headed by old White Bear, their chief. After several speakers had denounced mankind for the bloodthirsty behavior, war was unanimously decided upon, and the nature of human weapons was discussed. It was discovered that the bow and arrow were the principal human weapons, and it was resolved to fashion a specimen to see if they could not turn man’s weapons against him. A piece of wood suitable for the purpose was procured, and one of the bears sacrificed himself to provide them with gut for the bowstring. After the bow was completed it was discovered that the claws of the bears spoiled their shooting. One of the bears, however, cut his claws, and succeeded in hitting the mark. But the chief, the old White Bear, interposed with the remark that the claws were necessary to climb trees with, and that all would have to starve if they were to cut them off.
The next council was held by the deer, under their chief, Little Deer. They resolved to inflict rheumatism upon every hunter who should slay one of them unless he asked a pardon in a suitable manner. They gave notice of this decision to the nearest settlement of Indians, and instructed them on how to make propitiation when forced by necessity to kill one of the deer folk. So when a deer is slain by a hunter, the Little Deer runs to the spot, and bending over the blood stains, asks the spirit of the deer if it has heard the prayer of the hunter for pardon. If the reply is yes, all is well, and the Little deer departs; but if the response is in the negative, he tracks the hunter until he is in his cabin and strikes him with rheumatism, so that he becomes a helpless cripple. Sometimes hunters who have not learned the proper formula for pardon attempt to turn aside the Little Deer from his pursuit by building fire behind them in the trail.
The fishes and reptiles then held a joint council, and arranged to haunt those human beings who tormented them, with hideous dreams of serpents twining around them, and of eating fish which had become decayed.
Lastly, the birds and insects, with the smaller animals, gathered together for a similar purpose, the grub worm presiding over the meeting. Each in turn expressed an opinion, and the consensus was against mankind. They devised and named various diseases.
When the plants, which were friendly to man, heard what had been arranged by the animals, they determined to frustrate their evil designs. Each tree, scrub, herb, down even to the grasses and mosses, agreed to furnish a remedy for some of the diseases named. Thus did medicine come into being, and thus the plants came to furnish the antidote to counteract the evil wrought by the revengeful animals.
(. . . cited in Lewis Spence, “Cherokees”, in “Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics,” vol 3, p. 505)
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Interesting and well-executed new series on NBC about time travel:
Timeless
Anyone here watch the SyFy Channel's 12 Monkeys ?
I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff.
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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I'm recordingTimeless but haven't seen 12 Monkeys on TV, but saw the movie, I will now!
You will like Frequency on TV, http://www.cwtv.com/shows/frequency/
Like Timeless if you change one thing in the past it changes the future!
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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A few themes on this thread:
The ordinary world is not what it appears to be.
There are ways to move your mind into different modes of perception.
The ordinary world can seem extraordinary.
(reprise)
The Gostak and the Doshes (1930)
Miles J. Breuer, M.D.
In this classic science fiction story, a mathematical physicist convinces his friend to try to travel into another dimension by merely altering the way he thinks about things.
In many mathematical SF stories, the math does nothing more than serve as a vaguely believable explanation for otherwise fantastical elements. However, I think that in this story it serves one other important purpose. It is also part of an analogy at the end which helps us to understand how the same mathematical object (a conic surface) can look very different depending on how you look at it. In this sense, it adds to the social commentary in a much deeper and more important way that just explaining how he got to the other universe...it allows us to see that it was not another universe at all but only the same one seen differently.
http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf690
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Stanislaw Lem had a theory about the paradoxes of fictional time travel.
EVEN THOUGH a circular causal structure may signalize a frivolous type of content, this does not mean that it is necessarily reduced to the construction of comic antinomies for the sake of pure entertainment. The causal circle may be employed not as the goal of the story, but as a means of visualizing certain theses, e.g. from the philosophy of history. Slonimaki's story of the Time Torpedo3 belongs here. It is a bedetristic assertion of the "ergoness" or ergodicity of history: monkeying with events which have had sad consequences does not bring about any improvement of history; instead of one group of disasters and wars there simply comes about another, in no way better set.
A diametrically opposed hypothesis, on the other hand, is incorporated into Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" (1952). In an excellently written short episode, a participant in a "safari for tyrannosaurs" tramples a butterfly and a couple of flowers, and by that microscopic act causes such perturbances of causal chains involving millions of years, that upon his return the English language has a different orthography and a different candidate not-- liberal but rather a kind of dictator-- has won in the presidential election. It is only a pity that Bradbury feels obliged to set in motion complicated and unconvincing explanations to account for the fact that hunting for reptiles, which indeed fall from shots, disturbs nothing in the causal chains, whereas the trampling of a tiny flower does (when a tyrannosaur drops to the ground, the quantity of ruined flowers must be greater than when the safari participant descends from a safety zone to the ground). "A Sound of Thunder" exemplifies an "anti-ergodic" hypothesis of history, as opposed to Slonimski's story. In a way, however, the two are reconcilable: History can as a whole be "ergodic" if not very responsive to local disturbances, and at the same time such exceptional hypersensitive points in the causal chains can exist, the vehement disturbance of which produces more intensive results. In personal affairs such a "hyperallergic point" would be, for example, a situation in which a car attempts to pass a truck at the same time that a second car is approaching from the opposite direction.
This appeared in a magazine some time back.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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The Sound of Thunder was a pretty good movie I thought. And, yes, the Butterfly Effect was in full swing. Lem argued that that effect wasn't necessarily universal. Some time ago I mentioned the rise of Hitler and that even if Hitler had been assassinated early in his career the social atmosphere would have produced another monster equally bad.
There might be a "dampening" process that would ameliorate substantial changes over a period of time, much like the butterfly effect might not exist to any noticeable degree in parts of a dynamical system. Certainly in the vicinity of an attracting fixed point only slight variations might occur.
Yes, no way to predict. We must be very, very careful in our time travel adventures.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Oct 10, 2016 - 03:27pm PT
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Ever since our founder, JL, presented the bait about a mysterious Metamind project I have attempted to track this effort to its source. Unsuccessfully it would appear. There is a commercial learning project, a business, having that moniker, but it does not seem to fit the description.
Here is a Radin line of inquiry:
http://noetic.org/research/projects/markov-chain
But this doesn't seem quite right either. You would think that an effort to recruit 3,000 participants, with little or no written material, would find its way onto the internet in some fashion.
This is a deep issue and we need the Wizard to toss out a few more clues.
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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Oct 10, 2016 - 04:15pm PT
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Oct 10, 2016 - 08:54pm PT
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And try to get a plumber on the weekend.
I owe The Wizard five dollars.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Oct 10, 2016 - 10:18pm PT
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The Wizard has a mind of his own. It's just that he can't decide what it is.
Neither can we.
But one day . . .
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WBraun
climber
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Oct 11, 2016 - 07:49am PT
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The "mind" is Universal.
Every living entity is part parcel of that complete whole "mind".
Every living entity has all the qualities of that complete whole but not the quantity.
According to the living entities developed consciousness determines how much of the quantity of the whole mind it can understand.
That consciousness will also determine the development of its material body/s .....
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Oct 11, 2016 - 08:32am PT
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Looks like we lost Ed (he's taking a hiatus from ST for a month apparently), I was going to ask him to opine on Carroll's idea (Carroll's a fellow physicist), fundamental to his philos of science book (The Big Picture) btw, that different levels of science require / invoke not only different vocabularies but moreover different ways of talking; and (b) Carroll's claims that each of these "ways of talking" have their place and that it's useful/helpful to wider understanding (not to mention less argument and less misunderstanding) both in and out of science and philos of science to be cognizant of this communications phenomenon and to try to hone one's skills in moving/negotiating between these different levels.
I'll try to remember to ask later.
eg areas... (1) choice (the power of choosing); decision-making (2) causality (causation) (3) freedoms (freedom of the will) in a mechanistic, rule-bound universe
I'm not a political junkie. But I am passionate about culture else civilization if not the humanities so this draws me to (pay attention to and to participate in) politics - national, eg, also world - to the extent I have the wherewithal.
I've said it before... I wish more science types (scientists, scienteers) would take part. But maybe it's simply a case of... you can't squeeze blood from a turnip?
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Oct 11, 2016 - 02:47pm PT
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. . . it adds to the social commentary in a much deeper and more important way that just explaining how he got to the other universe...it allows us to see that it was not another universe at all but only the same one seen differently
This sounds similar to Mike's comments.
However, by "seeing" the universe differently can we shift far enough so that physical laws change? Maybe the perceptions of those laws would change and they would appear to be different.
It would seem the Wizard may have given up his efforts to thwart scientism. Too bad we won't get Dr Ed's commentaries on physics. I could attempt to throw a bit of mathematics into the discussions, but the physical world is easier to comprehend than abstract math concepts. And being old and retired I'm not up on those either.
I think this thread - mostly non-political - offers a nice counterbalance to climbing threads. Shame to see it wither.
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