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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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Apr 16, 2017 - 07:35am PT
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1 Corinthians 15:3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures
...Happy Resurrection Day!
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Apr 16, 2017 - 10:22am PT
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Funny thing about the notions of "realism" "realistic" "reality" they become bogged down in the difficulty of definition. Which of the images above if viewed in person could be said to be more realistic, more real?
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Apr 16, 2017 - 10:42am PT
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Happy zombie Jesus day!
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 16, 2017 - 10:56am PT
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I particularly like the mop.... Paul.
Maybe an interesting read...
The Evangelical Roots of Our Post-Truth Society
...a “presuppositionalist evidentialist” — which we might define as someone who accepts evidence when it happens to affirm his nonnegotiable presuppositions.
who said that?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Apr 16, 2017 - 11:01am PT
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Wonder how many people believe spiritual matters are about physical data, physical evidence, predictions, et al, the only other "stuff" being woo.
What might they say when they argue with their significant other? "Just the facts, mame..."
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Apr 16, 2017 - 02:29pm PT
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What are the most common non-negotiable presuppositions held by scientists?
My guess is they have to do with the notion of the absolute necessity of quantification.
How much data is required to make judgements of aesthetic quality? How much data and quantification to understand the effect of consensus on that judgement? And if such judgements are too impossibly subjective, what is the value of anecdotal subjective experience?
It would seem the value of unquantified subjective experience is vital as a manifestation of reality to certain aspects of science: medicine, for instance. A visit to the dentist with a tooth ache rarely results in the dentist asking the patient to define what they mean by pain, or a suggestion that the experience of pain can't really be validated with only anecdotal information.
And it is important to remember that all knowing, whether in science or religion, is ultimately held in the individual subjectivity of the mind it satisfies.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Apr 16, 2017 - 04:04pm PT
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Good points, Paul. In my mind, the challenge is that we humans concurrently work from two platforms - mechanical brain and conscious self (an amorphous term for sure), and the two function in a somewhat unified whole, depending on many factors.
We can look at the lay of the land, so to speak, from either perspective, and be "right" on both counts, but we won't understand the whole that embodies our actual lives, not the ones that are symbolic abstractions, be those abstractions numberical, poetical, or gobs of paint flung onto a canvass that now fetch 100 million dollars. We can look at all of this as brain function because the brain is always on.
One of the values of reading and digesting a bunch of AI material is, IMO, the chance to work out the difference between a syntactic engine, like a super computer, or the rigs now doing "deep learning," and sentient creative process.
The trap of what I call the mechanical trance is that, while there is no reason whatsoever to equate sentience with data processing, people who have not sorted out their own creative process, including the crucial objective brain part of the equation, will start attributing consciousness to anything based strictly on inputs and outputs - the fatal error that did in behavioralism.
It's my understanding that free will works entirely different then most people might think and is only secondarily about randomness, acausal factors, chaos theory, statistics, and so forth. What's more, we are much more beholden to objective, mechanical processing then we can ever imagine.
But we are somewhat free to choose our options, and even work them up in a sense, and in exceptional cases, can entertain entirely new ideas that are neither combinations nor pastiches of the past.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Apr 16, 2017 - 05:32pm PT
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Mine has color, Paul. But lacks the randomness of your image.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 16, 2017 - 05:49pm PT
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What are the most common non-negotiable presuppositions held by scientists?
My guess is they have to do with the notion of the absolute necessity of quantification.
I actually don't think there are any... everything is open to test... which is perhaps one...
but all physical phenomena have physical antecedents may be one, and even that is open to testing...
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Apr 16, 2017 - 06:29pm PT
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but all physical phenomena have physical antecedents may be one, and even that is open to testing..
I'm curious, Ed. The above pretty well describes a classical, determined (by prior physical causes) take on physical reality as it unfolds forward (from past to present and future) in time and space.
In your opinion, how does this square with the talk of some (probably few, I'd imagine) physicists in QM who want to understand the quantum dance sans time and space, and who also talk about acausal happenings?
From a 1st person POV, acausal happenings are especially baffling as a concept, unless you chuck time out the window, which in some sense rids us of past and future. That is, infinity does not have an implicit direction, though in the classical life we physically lead, it seems to, since I keep getting older, meaning I'm aging forward.
Seems like there's a clock with no hands in one sense (timeless) and within that, somehow, is linear time. Seem to remember Hawking taking about a vertical (infinite??) timeline (a term that hardly makes classical sense), and a linear timeline as well, though Steve might have junked that idea later.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 19, 2017 - 08:41pm PT
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I'm curious, Ed. The above pretty well describes a classical, determined (by prior physical causes) take on physical reality as it unfolds forward (from past to present and future) in time and space.
In your opinion, how does this square with the talk of some (probably few, I'd imagine) physicists in QM who want to understand the quantum dance sans time and space, and who also talk about acausal happenings?
well it is an interesting question to ask me... and I can't speak for all physicists but I'll give you an idea of what I think about, and the thinking of a few physicists I've read regarding time.
The discussion of time's existence has a long history, some of the philosophical aspects are presented here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/
But as a physicist we can take a more practical view of the issue, and when we look Galileo's exploration of motion the accurate measurement of time becomes important:
"For the measurement of time, we employed a large vessel of water placed in an elevated position; to the bottom of this vessel was soldered a pipe of small diameter giving a thin jet of water, which we collected in a small glass during the time of each descent... the water thus collected was weighed, after each descent, on a very accurate balance; the difference and ratios of these weights gave us the differences and ratios of the times..."
the "flow of time" takes on its literal meaning here. With this device Galileo shows that the ball is accelerating, that is, the the ratio of the distances that a ball rolling down an inclined plane is proportional to the square of the times.
While this might seem like a trivial finding, it lays the foundation for Newton's F=ma.
But it is worth an extended look at the water clock, now with all our modern knowledge, to pursue the concept of time.
We can show that the flow rate of the clock is constant when care is given to building it so that the water undergoes laminar flow. Galileo didn't have the theory but he was a careful experimenter and probably took some time to understand how to build the clock.
Interesting, though, is how the clock works. For instance, if there is no gravity there is no flow. The flow depends on the fact that the end of the pipe from which the water flows is lower than the level of the water. It turns out that all clocks have the same requirement, that is, a change in the energy of the thing that is creating the clock "motion."
Now we also know that water is a molecule of 2 hydrogens and an oxygen atom, so if we "microscope" our gaze at that level we can start to imagine the molecules pouring out of the spout. At room temperature, these molecules are attracted to one another with a very small force, which is why they assemble as a liquid.
Imagine that we reduce the nozel size to a few atoms across, then we would observe a greatly reduced flow rate, but one none the less, measured in atoms. Once again, the average internal energy of the water provides a distribution of water molecule velocities, some of which launch the molecules into the room, and we can count these individual molecules and use them as a clock.
Perhaps following the individual interactions of all the molecules, we can see the process of a molecule being bumped out into the room, and use those individual events as a clock.
But now our time is discrete, and it depends on a causal chain. It is a very different concept of time then the process that Galileo used.
If this abstraction is followed into a fully quantum description, the idea David Finkelstein elaborated from David Bohm generates time, first in a quantum sense as a causal chain, which in the classical limit becomes time.
So Finkelstein's "time" comes from a very different source than our concept of classical time, and I mean the idea in physics, which in turn is very different from our personal experience of time (which probably come from our cerebellum).
Finkelstein developed his ideas in 5 papers, the first being "Space-Time Code" Physical Review 184, 1261 (1969). In the end this program didn't work out, but it created a large industry of thinking about "pre-geometry" seriously, and in this case, as based on the "propositional algebra" of the universe, though not a Boolean instantiation, a quantum logic one... in the beginning is a measure-space, and the proposition relating
two points in that space: p is causally prior to p'. Symmetries of that measure space generate the physicists' space-time, it is not a prior condition.
You can read about quantum logic here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic
our projections on our beloved Hibert-space are then propositions about physical observables.
Back to energy, now interestingly let's run the universe down to a state of "zero energy" say in the distant future as everything recedes from each other. With no energy differences there is nothing "flowing" our clocks stop, there is no time because there is no p causally prior to p' p and p' have "lost contact" with each other. The quantum fluctuations around the "zero point" energy doesn't help, they average out to zero.
This connection is at least somewhat anticipated by the identification of the Hamiltonian as the operator of "time translation" in quantum mechanics. Similarly the Langrangian appears in our path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, which is integrated over time to produce the "action" which is minimized in classical mechanics, in quantum mechanics the different possible paths cause different phases to be generated, and in the coherent sum of all those path amplitudes they mostly cancel out, the surviving ones are the physical path.
If we consider a functional formulation of these mechanics, then the time differential might be replaced by a functional differential that describes how we assemble the various parts of the physical process... this is what happens in quantum field theory (though we retain the space-time parameterization, it is not necessary). The expansion of the scattering matrix (the S-matrix) makes use of this causal propositional logic to calculate scattering probabilities, with some very interesting twists in figuring out what cancels out (a la the phases above).
On a macroscopic level, Feynman had an example of time reversal invariance, something that physicists live with but is quite contrary to our real life "experience."
[Click to View YouTube Video]
there is no way to know which way the Ferris Wheel is rotating from this movie... both rotation directions are acceptable solutions to the equations of motion. However, if you could "see" the hub of the Ferris Wheel in infrared the direction of the motion would be determined, it goes in the direction that the hub is heating up. Once again energy plays a role in the time, here in a thermodynamic sense where mechanical energy is converted to heat by the dissipative forces of friction.
The dissipative processes are the key to Prigogines' speculations on the "arrow of time" as a fundamental part of the universe, most physicists keep to the idea that time reversal invariance is an important symmetry, the dissipative processes hypothesized by Prigogines seem less fundamental.
But we can end with Newton, who demurred to define space and time and side stepped the issue, saying (probably as a slight on the philosophical divergences of opinion) that everyone was familiar with what they are, no need to elaborate. However, his abstraction of "mathematical time" as a continuous parameter and the idea that the ratio of two differences one in the numerator of a ratio and one in the denominator, can, in the limit that they both vanish, have a finite ratio, is what physicists mostly use... it, time, has the privilege of being the parameter which urges a particle's position along, and the famous rules, his laws of motion, prescribe the particle's trajectory, all you have to do is let the clock run, time flows.
What the nature of space-time is has been an interesting idle thought from the beginning of my physics career, but it always seemed too big and too ill defined for me to work on directly... so I didn't, but I am inspired by those who did.
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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Apr 19, 2017 - 09:31pm PT
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Psalm 103:11
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;
12 as far as the east is from the west,
so far does he remove our transgressions from us.
...No matter where you are on Earth, the heavens are above. however North will become South and turn back North again, but East will stay East and West will stay West, good thing!
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 20, 2017 - 08:11am PT
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Paul: What are the most common non-negotiable presuppositions held by scientists? My guess is they have to do with the notion of the absolute necessity of quantification.
Ed: I actually don't think there are any... everything is open to test... which is perhaps one...but all physical phenomena have physical antecedents may be one, and even that is open to testing...
Whoa.
First off, one (a scientist) can only answer for him- or herself. (Let’s not generalize to all people as a class.)
Second and more importantly, I’ve had experience with an attempt to argue and publish research that attempted to show my colleagues that some thing that everyone assumed is actually *not there.* It did not fly among my colleagues. Their response? “You must have structured the test incorrectly.”
It would seem that any test presupposes that *some thing* is there to see. At least there must be an alternative “thing” in existence (but that may be entirely irrelevant to the dialogue in process).
(You need to think about the difficulty is showing folks that what they believe is actually not there—with nothing instead to replace it.)
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Apr 20, 2017 - 08:13am PT
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Hey, what's the What is Mind crowd doing over here?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Apr 20, 2017 - 01:20pm PT
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We wander back and forth, depending on our mood.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Apr 21, 2017 - 07:52am PT
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Jerry Coyne plus commentators on internet anonymity...
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/04/21/on-internet-anonymity/
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"The practice of science [like climbing rock] is one of those human activities that elevates our lives a bit above merely surviving from day to day."
Marching for the right to be wrong...
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/04/marching-for-the-right-to-be-wrong/523842/
"The most obvious thing that our government can do, and our society along with it, is to help science to flourish in its own right, and accept what it has to teach us. Sometimes research tells us answers we don’t want to hear—that human activity is warming the planet, that we share a common ancestor with other living beings here on Earth, or that the universe is winding down toward its ultimate heat death. We need the courage to face up to the truth, whatever it turns out to be."
Sean Carroll
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Bushman
climber
The state of quantum flux
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Apr 21, 2017 - 09:55am PT
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A Rhombicuboctahedron
I dreamt about a rhombicuboctahedron
A twenty six sided die shaped sphere
But mistakenly thought it a decahedron
With only twelve sides it was no where near
When I go back to sleep tonight
I'll ponder six sides of a cube
The spheres of this life a world full of strife
And too much for this country rube
-bushman
04/21/2017
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 21, 2017 - 01:43pm PT
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Jan: We wander back and forth, depending on our mood.
And, we're a damned moody bunch.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Apr 21, 2017 - 02:17pm PT
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^^^hahaha. i love you man
So is fruity gonna tell us who he really is?
id be the first to apologize if he did:-)
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