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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Aug 20, 2014 - 10:07am PT
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Ed is certainly a quibbler who gets easily sidetracked when he perceives his intellectual authority is being challenged, but attempting to constrain another person's true nature is probably a lost cause. After all, it's probably a childhood thing.
Best to glide over his cut and past textbook pages and return to the no-matter at hand.
Which isn't ohm's law.
It probably is the fundamental nature of free will at this point, however.
BTW, I watched two fine young adults summit their first peak - one of our most scenic, on Monday in spectacular weather. Peaking wildflowers, ripe blueberries, an extraterrestrial cloudscape, ice avalanches thundering down Johannesberg, hell, even the fire smoke cleared to reveal a sea of mountains - the Cascades really pulled out all the stops for these kids.
THAT was cool.
Our week out was shortened to 3 days due to fire smoke and weather, but it was quality, not quantity.
I may also have saved a life. I convinced a guy on the summit not to lower himself off on parachute cord - the really thin stuff, and just downclimb instead. He was busy tying some kind of homemade rope ladder with the stuff when I topped out. Lots of sharp edged rock, too. I figure he was looking at a max rating of 40-50 lbs there with the knot factor. *shiver*
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 20, 2014 - 11:27am PT
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just to be clear, the definition of impedance is not a "law"...
you could call it quibbling, ducking and dodging and all that, and it may well be true that all those engineers and technicians would refer to it as "Ohm's Law," it doesn't make it so.
the quibble has a lot to do with how HFCS argues in this thread... essentially he is defining life as a physical process...
I agree that life should be describable as a physical process, my interest isn't in defining it to be so but explaining how it is so. I appreciate that that might sound like a quibble. I also have to say that I can't do that, nor do I think anyone else has, identified how life is a physical process. Just to be clear, this has to do with understanding non-equilibrium systems, which is still a work in progress.
As far as authority, well, if you make an argument and are challenged you can interpret it as the boot of authority coming down on your neck, or you can just respond to the criticism with an explanation.
I expect to be criticized, and I try to respond to that criticism with explanation, not an appeal to my authority. If you are making a scientific statement, you should be able to support it with a scientific explanation. If you're speculating, you should be up front about it.
Both Tvash and HFCS would rather discuss my personality flaws than address the points... ok, they think the points are quibbles, ducking and dodging, cut and paste and a display of ego...
probably truths to ever one of those complaints. But it's easier to whine about that than answer the question, particularly when the answer is "I don't know" something neither has seemed to be able to bring themselves to say. It is probably the most important thing a scientist learns.
(I didn't cut and paste that... but you can read the famous quote in Newton's Optiks regarding his own views).
anyway, I'm glad I passed the electronics technician test... perhaps it wasn't as over my head as was implied... except I guess that Tvash thought I cut and pasted the solution from the web (it's true I didn't generate the I-V curve in my workshop from scratch, but I would have looked it up on the spec sheet for the device I was designing in any case).
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Aug 20, 2014 - 11:33am PT
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it's easier to whine about that than answer the question
It's been answered...
I=V/R is a scientific truth, I=VV/R is not.
990/1000 scientifically literally folk would get this and see its meaning w/o quibbles.
Indeed, it was "answered" in fact to such a degree the interesting points in the original discussion (re: "truth" in science; or "design" or "purpose" in evolved living things) were long ago lost.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Aug 20, 2014 - 11:39am PT
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I'd wager that few to nobody cares, Ed.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Aug 20, 2014 - 11:50am PT
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he is defining life as a physical process...
Yes.
When it's not a beach... rock climbing... or birding.
he is defining life as a physical process...
Yes, which is "just" the basis of all modern biology!!
he is defining life as a physical process...
Thanks for the laughs, Ed.
It's clear now, no wonder we quibbled (iow, distracted ourselves) over "Ohm's Law."
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Aug 20, 2014 - 11:53am PT
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""I may also have saved a life. I convinced a guy on the summit not to lower himself off on parachute cord""
so much for free will?
Why'd you do that?
Why'd he listen?"
That's actually an interesting question that probably has a lot to do with basic evolved needs.
My guess is that the guy had the need to be seen as an 'adventurer' - prepared (in a Walmart kinda way) for anything, willing to 'wing it' without much prior research. Status, autonomy, fun - all these basic needs probably played into his being there as well as his rope ladder idea. He claimed that he'd done a lot of Sierra backcountry travel but the Cascades were new to him - but I'm guessing his experience down south wasn't as deep or extensive as he, himself, believed. A bit of narcissism there, perhaps.
Why did he listen? I looked him straight in the eye, and asked him to please consider not doing that with as much gravity as I could muster. I informed him of the dangers involved, and suggested that he consider downclimbing - since he'd already climbed up unroped. I didn't attempt to challenge his apparent self image of being an experienced 'adventurer' or whatever went into such a terrible descent plan. I didn't want him to retreat to his original plan out of defensiveness, ego, or information bias. I did inform him that I was leading a group of climbers up the peak so he could better assess my level of credibility. He saw me set up an anchor and fixed line, so there was at least a little data to support that.
Aside from not wanting a human being to die needlessly, with all the terrible ripple effects, I also didn't want to expose our teenage students to a horrific accident, nor did I want to put our group at risk by becoming involved in a rescue. I don't know what drives empathy or altruism towards strangers, but the latter two were just protection of the young and survival need calls.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Aug 20, 2014 - 12:14pm PT
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E.O. Wilson on "free will" - the latest...
http://harpers.org/archive/2014/09/on-free-will/
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/08/20/e-o-wilson-on-free-will/
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580394,00.html
in general, the article adds little to the debate about free will, which to me seems largely semantic... -Coyne
Hm, "semantic"? Sounds familiar, lol!
The real issue—the one that could substantially affect society—is that of determinism, which most philosophers and scientists agree on (i.e., we can’t make choices outside of those already determined by the laws of physics). -Coyne
Has he talked to EdH? :)
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Aug 20, 2014 - 12:38pm PT
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Pretty broad brush. Such assessments don't really say much about the fundamental nature of free will.
The question is at what point in the neural hierarchy does a conscious decision become a database query or weighted scoring equation? At what point does free will, at the macro level, become a bio machine function at the micro? How, exactly, does that happen? How much does chaos or randomness play into this? What brain structures and neural pathways are involved? How do we arrive at whatever mechanisms we use to compare and select such decisions?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 20, 2014 - 03:36pm PT
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I'm buried with work right now but the "threshold" questions raised by Tvash run through the entire subject of reality and are most evident in the case of before and after the big bang, compression and expansion, inorganic material becoming life, DNA becomeing self-replicating, bio life becoming sentient, mechanical brain processes becoming meta functions no longer beholden to the lower level stirrings - or however you may view it.
These thresholds are places where mechanical reductionism seems to "gap" out, while fundamentalist reductionists insist we need more data.
The fact is I am not at all convinced that a standard linear causal view can ever solve these threshold questions, especially when it is assumed that prior conditions created, in whole or in part, the later person, place, thingn or phenomenon - or that "God" is the only other option.
JL
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Aug 20, 2014 - 03:49pm PT
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Or perhaps we're so advanced that we're now down to some of the really tough problems. Many of the problems we're talking about - the origin of life, the workings of the brain, the big bang, are so complex they require massive computational power to study. We're just getting started there, really.
What we can know has limits - we probably can't see beyond our light horizon. That reality doesn't require the addition of secret sauce, however.
That we project who we are to our external world - God, whatev, is normal. From ventriloquist dummies to dogs, we've evolved to do that.
That the universe really IS like what we intuit it to be seems less likely.
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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Aug 20, 2014 - 06:35pm PT
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The fact is I am not at all convinced that a standard linear causal view can ever solve these threshold questions (JL)
I agree. It would have to be non-linear.
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MH2
climber
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Aug 20, 2014 - 06:43pm PT
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As often is the case, it may be good to look before you leap. When I Google for standard linear causality, it does not seem to rule out threshold effects. When you jump off a cliff there may be only one cause leading to the effect, but you could cross a threshold.
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/smg/Website/UCP/pdfs/SixCausalPatterns.pdf
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 20, 2014 - 06:50pm PT
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When I Google for standard linear causality, it does not seem to rule out threshold effects.
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Nor does it tell you how they may be achieved via any of the listed causal modalities - cyclical, domino, etc.
My sense of it is that linear causality, while it is certainly a given in material reality, says as much about the nature of our discursive, conditioned minds as it does about things "out there."
JL
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MH2
climber
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Aug 20, 2014 - 07:02pm PT
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I have stoned two birds with one kill. What kind of causality is that?
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Aug 20, 2014 - 07:06pm PT
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Damn you, Descartes!
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MisterE
climber
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Aug 20, 2014 - 07:21pm PT
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I see you Tvash - long time...
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Aug 20, 2014 - 07:24pm PT
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We can equate linear causality to vegetation life.
Animals and humans in a big degree have linear causality instilled, but with our emotions we can put a halt to it at anytime.
i can raise or stop my heartbeat right now depending how i feel..
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Aug 20, 2014 - 08:13pm PT
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I am the Pope of Discursive Linearity!
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Aug 20, 2014 - 08:18pm PT
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I need to get invited to join the PubMed commons so I can read about neural murmurations. I was thinking about birds while running today and wondered if some of the same principles might apply to building enough signal strength to cross our attention threshold and other neural processes.
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