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WBraun
climber
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Jun 24, 2016 - 11:59am PT
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Relax Mark.
We love you, and you're too sensitive at times.
Tons of sh!t goes over my head too, whatever stoopid head I have anyways.
Some daze we should BASE ... I'll jump with my butt bag as canopy and you with your rigg.
We'll see who gets to the ground first.
and DMT is just a rascal, he's good people though, he rascals me all time too, lol.
Relax duuuudddde ....... ;-)
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Jun 24, 2016 - 12:23pm PT
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Base " No-thing is a very personal project. Is it selfish? Answer that."
This statement/question exposes you as a speculator; no problem, it just exposes that ie if you were a climber you would be confusing what an off-width was and face climbing.
"No-thing" is "no small craving greedy I"; "no selfish I" only "big I" the one that is not distracted and not afraid of the poor and the sick and the unknown. So it is the opposite of selfish.
I often notice how many times you use I in your posts; "I believe this, I think this" etc. "I help the poor, I interpret wells logs" etc.. a lot of information about I. You are very open that way. But is that really you? or just a narrative or story about you, a definition of you, an interpretation. Are we our jobs and or our beliefs?
In the "no-thing" experience all those identities fall way into the back ground and you become one with the moment. It is like the TV is suddenly turned off and you hear the birds outside and you are present. Not distracted by your beliefs and definitions of your self.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 24, 2016 - 12:50pm PT
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However, all that is a distraction to my original point, which was that the meaning of the story comes from the arrangement of those physical symbols on the physical pages of the book. The story comes from that physical representation as interpreted by the reader, independent of how they were written, for instance, by a human author or a machine author.
The argument here is how does this undeniably physical medium produce the story? Is the story physical, or is it unphysical?
Ed, I have never seen someone struggle so hard to warp reality into a form that is consistent with your philosophical position asking, "What isn't physical?" It's like fashioning the universe so the Earth is in the middle - you can do it, but the process sure is wonky.
Meaning, in literature, is not derived from the physical arrangement of marks on a page. Those marks don't mean anything without a mind to process them, and all that working is still only machine data till a consciousness becomes aware of same.
The story is the experiential interface between the marks on the page and a conscious observer. Not till a conscious observer chooses to read a story does it become anymore more than physical marks on a page. And that "more" is an experience. Is that more a physical object?
You're trying to posit the story as a mind-independent property or object belonging entirely to the physical marks on the page. Alone, they have no meaning, no story content or reality. They are totally undifferentiated, neither wave nor particle, so to speak. Only a conscious observer can produce a story, and that process happens not to the marks on the page, but to the observer. I think the turd in the punchbowl, so to speak, is this compulsion to try and consider parts of the process as mind-independent.
An interesting thought experiment would be to imagine what kind of literary (experiential) stories AI machines would tell themselves, if instructed to refrain from imparting data about externals so far as they could, and to concentrate on their internal experience, since we all know that experience only comes in the first person form.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 24, 2016 - 01:56pm PT
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An interesting thought experiment would be to imagine what kind of literary (experiential) stories AI machines would tell themselves, if instructed to refrain from imparting data about externals so far as they could, and to concentrate on their internal experience, since we all know that experience only comes in the first person form.
go to the Utilities folder on your Mac and click "Console"
you have an equally insistent point of view which is that the paper means nothing...
perhaps you should think again, without your books, you haven't written anything.
Now how is it that a machine can take those words and craft a story from them?
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 24, 2016 - 02:07pm PT
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Just how curious are you? (MikeL)
Not very. I left teaching behind sixteen years ago. Regarding calculus, over twenty years ago my department attempted to integrate computers with the subject, but the software at the time was not user-friendly. I don't know if computer work is integrated into calculus courses these days - I haven't stayed abreast. Actually, the programming would have been of value to illustrate the concepts, but if computers are used now all that has been done for the student.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 24, 2016 - 03:14pm PT
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DMT, there appears to be more than a few things about which you and I resonate. Cheers.
Werner and PSP: +1
Base:
I mean to be friendly. We’re just talking, but I understand how certain ideas or points of view might be offensive. (It’s almost always somewhat of a rough crowd in here.)
(Jgill, thanks.)
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 24, 2016 - 05:48pm PT
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As much as I respect your point of view and vast knowledge in science etc, I almost feel sorry for you on this one, Ed. And no disrespect intended. Actually, nothing could be more in my wheelhouse then contrasting literature with mind.
You quoted me saying:
An interesting thought experiment would be to imagine what kind of literary (experiential) stories AI machines would tell themselves, if instructed to refrain from imparting data about externals so far as they could, and to concentrate on their internal experience, since we all know that experience only comes in the first person form.
And you instructed: go to the Utilities folder on your Mac and click "Console"
Now Ed, I have a Mac, and I am aware that Console is a log viewer, part of my OS, and it lets me search through stored messages, and signals the machine when certain types of messages are logged. Now what you have done here is shifted attention from externals, as I suggested, and gone to internal content that is logged strictly in the form of data. So you've gone from external to internal, which is half way home, but the next injunction, what Hemmingway said, that a story represses data and relates experience - that part the machine cannot do because it doesn't have experience.
What you are missing here, I believe, is that data and experience are not self-same.
Look at the definition of the noun, data ~ "facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis." So the content is basically facts, figures, statistics, details, etc.
In computing, we have ~ "the quantities, characters, or symbols on which operations are performed by a computer, being stored and transmitted in the form of electrical signals and recorded on magnetic, optical, or mechanical recording media."
In philosophy, your definition per data is ~ things known or assumed as facts, making the basis of reasoning or calculation.
Now Ed, the thing I want to make clear here is that this "data" is exactly the stuff Hemmingway was saying to repress in order to do literature - and the very stuff you need to do science. Instead of relating what any computer can do mechanically per QUANTITIES of objects and things, literature as found in stories is all about the QUALITIES of experience AS experienced from a first person perspective.
While it is true that in some sense we objectify those qualities when we transmute them into story language, but the language, nor yet the marks on the page, are the real story. The story is entirely the result of a magic show known in psychology as "projecting."
When reading a story, we are active participants. We project our experiential life onto the story and in this way the story comes alive in us. More on this in a minute. But it is worth mentioning here that the reason a machine is not capable of grasping the essence or meaning or meat and potatoes of a story is that it doesn't have the requisite internal experience to project onto the marks on the page. It can only crunch qualitative data.
Qualitative phenomenon, including being conscious of having same ("what it is like to BE Ed") - the core of experience - is lost on a machine. Entirely.
Then you said; You an equally insistent point of view which is that the paper means nothing...
perhaps you should think again, without your books, you haven't written anything.
What I actually said was NOT that the paper IS nothing, but rather: "The story is the experiential interface between the marks on the page and a conscious observer."
Now what do I actually mean by that. What I mean is that when a conscious observer reads a story, he or she projects their own conscious experience, real (past) and imagined (present) onto the happenings as described in the story. The deeper experience we have to project, the deeper the story means and is experienced in the reader.
For example, if I am describing being with a beautiful and comely and winsome and randy girl, and the male reader grew up in a closet, the experiential quotient won't be much. But to a properly-formed male who is not drunk or jaded, that girl is almost a live creature if I've done my work right.
Same thing with describing a climb or a work or art or a song or a sunset. The more direct personal, qualitative experience a person has to project on the sunset or the song, the greater the experience and meaning of the story. The reader is not a passive receiver of a story existing on the page.
A common misconception is that the black marks on a page "evoke" a story, as though they, the objects on the page, were the efficient cause. That take couldn't be further from the truth, because it possibly implies that the efficacy of the story is inherent in the black marks. That's like saying music lives inside an electric guitar, when in fact music is what happens when a person PLAYS the guitar - or at least when, say, Stevie Ray Vaughn plays it because the qualitative aspects of his playing are so much different than my own.
In this sense, a story is what a conscious observer does when he plays the black marks on the page with his own capacity for first person experience, projecting same on the imagined scenario. While it is true that the black marks are a crucial part of relating a story in the third person, just as a CD or an MP file is in relating music, these maps, so to speak, are not the qualitative territory that is is covered for the simple reason that an objective representation of experience in the written language is not experience itself.
But even the word "qualitative" presents an erroneous picture here because most definitions simply can't avoid the idea of measuring, i.e. "qualitative: relating to, measuring, or measured by the quality of something rather than its quantity." And "quality" is also described as "the standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind."
Of course we can see that these are inadequate representations of experience because they have to fall back on the quantity or contrasting of what ("quality") they cannot actually objectify, hence the need to self-reference and say nothing other than the qualitative is the degree of the quality inherent in ... blah blah blah. In the world of objects, what a thing does is the end of the story. With experience, it is all about what your life IS in experiential form.
A story then is the act of putting words to what does not exist as a quantity save through analysis. True, we can say, "That girls is a 10," but the metric is subjective. We can work up a criteria per what most people feel are the attributes that constitute a 10, but those will vary culture to culture, and they are based not on a mind-independent objective thing or a quantification of that object, but rather on matters of taste. And as the saying goes: Tastes differ.
Lastly, Ed said: "Now how is it that a machine can take those words and craft a story from them?"
A machine cannot craft a story from those marks because it doesn't have a subjective life to project onto the marks. A machine can only look at the marks as quantitative data. Just hit CONSOLE and ask...
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 24, 2016 - 06:25pm PT
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While it is true that the black marks are a crucial part of relating a story in the third person, just as a CD or an MP file is in relating music, these maps, so to speak, are not the qualitative territory that is is covered for the simple reason that an objective representation of experience in the written language is not experience itself.
Not the same experience, but experience nonetheless. In your words:
if I am describing being with a beautiful and comely and winsome and randy girl, and the male reader grew up in a closet, the experiential quotient won't be much. But to a properly-formed male who is not drunk or jaded, that girl is almost a live creature if I've done my work right.
As one would expect, according to the memories, associations, and other biology in the reader. No need for non-physical explanations. How is it different from the dog salivating to a ringing bell after having connected it with food?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 24, 2016 - 07:08pm PT
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Not the same experience, but experience nonetheless. In your words:
if I am describing being with a beautiful and comely and winsome and randy girl, and the male reader grew up in a closet, the experiential quotient won't be much. But to a properly-formed male who is not drunk or jaded, that girl is almost a live creature if I've done my work right.
As one would expect, according to the memories, associations, and other biology in the reader. No need for non-physical explanations. How is it different from the dog salivating to a ringing bell after having connected it with food?
----
You're floundering with this one, MH2, simply by hugging the tree of materialism with all your waning might.
In the first instance quoted about, explain to the world how the map (the CD or marks on a page) is "experience." Who is experiencing what? How is the external top the internal experience of doing the route? Can yo utell the difference?
In the second example you are trying to source the experience to some manner of programming (and also the the CONTENT of consciousness), but you are left in the cul-du-sac of once more leaving out consciousness, or conflating BEING conscious with programming. What's more, you've returned, like an ant to a hole, of looking at the outward or external action of the boy with a hard on or dog salivating with the internal experience going on.
As mentioned, this stubborn insistence to always hark back to the data and the object, and trying your hardest to conceive it all as "mind-independent" is the "turd in the punch bowl."
What's more, an "explanation" can only refer to the mechanistic aspects of an object, or a representational model of experience because explanations are always quantitative and typically in reference to what some thing or some being does. Actions that we can observe. Per the interior life you duffers keep on trying to dodge, understand that these "explanations" or material investigations don't apply to internal reality itself, which is a qualitative, NOT a qualitative phenomenon.
Explanations are about causality, and will only tell you about objective functioning. To dive off the cliff and say that unless you can measure experience, it is not real, presupposes that external and internal phenomenon are selfsame, when in fact you are not even looking at internal phenomenon with that yardstick. You're looking at external phenomenon and projecting your consciousness onto it - so quite naturally will will see "it" exactly where you are looking.
If you want to see many of these issues played out on the big screen, watch The Machine, a fine British production from a few years ago.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 24, 2016 - 09:36pm PT
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What you are missing here, I believe, is that data and experience are not self-same (JL)
This is a point that bears repeating.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 25, 2016 - 08:07am PT
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hugging the tree of materialism
There are many ways to look at a thing, JL. None of them will satisfy everyone.
We on this thread are cheese novices with not much ability to discriminate the flavours.
From a connoisseur:
Simplicus says, "I am enjoying this tree."
Then various philosophers, a Cartesian, an idealist, an idealistic mystic, a realistic mystic, a couple logical positivists, a couple physicists, a christian theologian, a psychiatrist, some epistemologists, a rabbi, three meanys, two moralists, three Zen masters, and a Zen student discuss what is happening as Simplicus is enjoying the tree.
They do not agree.
The realistic mystic:
I start from the premise that reality is purely material. All that exists is the material universe, which for certain purposes might be broken down into material particles and their motions. Simplicus's enjoyment of the tree is therefore indeed an event or set of events in the nervous system of the body of Simplicus. This viewpoint, though correct, seems to me only partial. Simplicus is not a closed physical system. When Simplicus has a thought, the particles of the cerebrum of Simplicus move not only in relation to each other but also in relation to all the other particles of the universe. I therefore wish to look upon the thoughts of Simplicus as an activity of the universe as a whole.
The idealist:
...the evidence for what you call the material counterpart of this mental process is, as I have demonstrated, inconclusive. I don't believe in the existence of this tree. The proper way to phrase it, therefore, is that the mind of Simplicus is enjoying his idea of the tree.
For myself, I do not insist on anyone agreeing with my point of view, even if they were able to figure out what it is.
excerpts from
5,000 B.C.and other Philosophical Fantasies
Raymond Smullyan
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jun 25, 2016 - 10:15am PT
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What you are missing here, I believe, is that data and experience are not self-same (JL)
Yes, and no matter how complex the data recorder or system, experience doesn't come into play unless you define data and a reaction to it as experience. Problem is the big question is exactly that point of experience lying between data and reaction. A point sorely lacking in machines.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Jun 25, 2016 - 01:51pm PT
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I check in every once in a while to see the status of the answer that is a building.
It's interesting that this dialogue is completely limited by language and the conceptual apparatus it provides (I'd include mathematics and computation).
Nothing new under the sun, or above it for that matter?
What is purple? What is purple haze?
Purple is a color, right?
What is color?
Turtles all the way down.
Jimi knows what purple haze is, but he is dead and he is not saying? Or is he?
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cintune
climber
Colorado School of Mimes
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Jun 25, 2016 - 02:52pm PT
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Lately things, they don't seem the same.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 25, 2016 - 03:48pm PT
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MH2:
Raymond Smullyan, . . . a mathematician writing about mysticism.
What do you think “realistic mystic” refers to? (Whitman with a physics degree? Hawkins after a stroke?)
I’m also not sure why an idealist would ever refer to “evidence.” Evidence is a philosophical concept used in materialists’ arguments. To see how things really are, one need only look. Then there are no arguments, so there is no need for evidence.
As this thread might attest, people who go looking for evidence, for data, for proof of this argument versus that argument, aren’t really getting the gist of experience—of consciousness (crazy as that might sound). There is just here and now, and here and now is always shining full force.
There’s no reason to look for anything. There’s no reason to alter one’s thoughts. There is no reason to look for vision. There is no reason to meditate. There is no reason to perform any action. There is no reason to accomplish any goal. Instead look for the viewer, the meditator, the actor, for what you are as the point of any achievement.
Experience can show up as anything . . . anything, at all. And a person can make anything at all what they want of it (an interpretation). As one does so, one will finally come see that every one of those interpretations are inaccurate, incomplete, partial, simply a perspective. (No one has to be enlightened or liberated to see that much.)
As for highly reasoned people writing books on mysticism, I wouldn’t suggest that anyone take any of it too seriously. Those books are meant to be fun to read, right?
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cintune
climber
Colorado School of Mimes
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Jun 25, 2016 - 04:09pm PT
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"In humans and other vertebrates (animals with a backbone and/or spinal column) there is good evidence that the midbrain is responsible for the basic capacity for subjective experience," said Dr Klein.
"The cortex determines much about what we are aware of, but the midbrain is what makes us capable of being aware in the first place. It does so, very crudely, by forming a single integrated picture of the world from a single point of view."
Portions of insect brains work in a similar way to the midbrain in humans, performing the same sort of modelling of the world, said the authors.
Not all living things are thought to have consciousness, though. Plants, for example, do not have the necessary structures for it. Jellyfish and nematodes (certain unsegmented worms, such as roundworms) do not have such hardwiring either.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-19/insects-may-have-evolved-consciousness-during-cambrian-period/7338032
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 25, 2016 - 04:27pm PT
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Not all living things are thought to have consciousness, though.
Plants, for example, do not have the necessary structures for it.
This proves once again 100% the author and those that subscribe to this nonsense are totally clueless to what consciousness really is.
First thing the fool said; "Not all living things"
The absolute standard of consciousness is life itself.
"Not all living things" contradicts.
All living things have consciousness other wise there would be no life at all.
Without consciousness there is absolutely zero life.
There is a degree of developed of consciousness of every living thing.
Not all living things consciousness are developed at the same level.
Even a blade of grass has consciousness.
Consciousness = life .... life = consciousness
and life always comes from life ......
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jun 25, 2016 - 05:11pm PT
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What you are missing here, I believe, is that data and experience are not self-same (JL)
Energy is produced by mitochondria in cells (just to pick one biologic example). The process by which this occurs in living cells is well understood. It can be described as data. Without this flow of data life itself is not possible . This data undergirds human experience. Therefore the above statement is false.
I’m also not sure why an idealist would ever refer to “evidence.” Evidence is a philosophical concept used in materialists’ arguments. To see how things really are, one need only look. Then there are no arguments, so there is no need for evidence.
This comment conveys the same thinking as the quote at the top of this post, only in a different guise, perhaps even more insufferable.( Conditioned as it is by an overabundance of navel orange gazing)
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jun 25, 2016 - 05:35pm PT
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This data undergirds human experience.
Unergrid it may but experience it is not. Therefore....
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jun 25, 2016 - 05:42pm PT
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If the process of energy production in cells does not occur therefore the experience does not occur. How much more " selfsame" do you want to get at this point?
The fact that your daily experience does not include tunneling electrons is yet another example of the beauty of nature. You don't have to worry about it at all and can go on with survival --which is your end of life's bargain. We are like the little kid who only knows parents get up at 5am and trudge off somewhere. The last thing we can comprehend is that they do this so that there is food on the table.
Why do we even know about ATP and electrons at cytochrome 1?
Answer: because science in general ignores MikeL tortured and exhausted view of "evidence" and instead is motivated by curiosity above all -- and perhaps even a bit of passion and wonder when confronted with the mysteries of life and the universe.
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