I think it is a lot easier than that to find good locations. There are mountains all up and down the Appalachians that are pretty much nothing but trees on a slope. The Rockies, the Sangre de Christos, the Sierras. Easily hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of more or less fallow, south facing slope with order of a kilometer of vertical rise. The main difficulty is just picking >>a
The idea is old enough (1926 according to wikipedia, although I had it independently) -- there are several prototype projects (including a 200 MW facility in China) of the tall chimney variety, but AFAIK no hillside prototypes out there.
Windows is the only platform for which one can reliably download binaries directly from software authors.
Sure, if you don't mind taking the risk of your system being eaten by worms. Also, you might acknowledge the difference in numbers -- there are how many applications and packages accessible by yum or apt in e.g. Fedora or Debian current? Would that be order of 10^4? It would. How many can you find for Windows, assuming you don't mind downloading them from wherever you find them (probably a site RUNNING Windows, wouldn't you think, and hence just as vulnerable as Windows itself for being hacked and trojanned)? I'd be surprised if you could find 10^3. And Windows applications aren't really free from DLL dependency hell -- far from it. Indeed, you can break the hell out of Windows to where you may have to do a clean reinstall if you actually do install a lot of packages from unknown authors off of the internet. Or worse.
With that said, sure, if you only use a handful of open source programs -- your list, for example -- it's six of one half a dozen of the other. In fact, since that list is most of what I use for anything -- firefox, thunderbird etc are available and a click install away on ANY of the main distros, and most of them are actually not all that unstable. Fedora, for example, can be run for years solid as a rock and with a huge list of programs, including virtualbox that lets you run a windows application for all practical purposes as a linux subtask.
The last time I used Windows as my primary desktop at work OR at home was maybe 1995. Somewhere ballpark then I installed first SLS, then Slackware (bigger/more complete, off of a huge stack of 3.5" FLOPPIES) on my home system (had already moved to using SunOS/Unix exclusively at work as of perhaps 1986 or 1987). Sun OS from the 386 on, Linux from the 486 on, although I didn't run it long on a 486 system before moving to a 586 clone (AMD? I can't remember).
That said, I've often maintained some systems that CAN run Windows as dual boot to a) run games; b) run games, I said; c) run the RARE applications that I needed to use professionally that wouldn't run under Linux. Time spent booted in Windows even including playing games on the order of 1-2% of total time spent sitting at computer console. Maybe not even that -- played a lot of the games under e.g. Cedega.
As of maybe five or six years ago I stopped even installing it dual boot and instead have a Win XP image (and plenty of old license keys, it's all legal) that I have installed in a VM -- first under vmware and then when they started charging money to academia under virtualbox (where it is now). I sometimes boot it up and run e.g. DII under it -- it isn't fast/smooth enough for WoW -- or use it to help my wife (who uses the same basic setup) to cope with her #!$@* Windows-based EMR, running on HER virtual box VM under linux. But that doesn't really count as running Windows -- Windows is in that case a very complicated Linux application designed to help you load and run a particular Windows-based program.
As far as the Windows interface itself is concerned, or the core OS -- don't make me laugh. They still haven't figured out multiple desktops. How long have most of the Linux WMs had multiple desktops? 12, 13 years? Longer? They still haven't figured out how to manage updates -- to bring a pristine Win XP install up to current requires hours and a thousand layers of overlays because they can only update it one delta at a time. No yum, no apt, only "Windows Update" (from stupidity-hell). Speed? Absent. Ease of use? Nonexistent. I Under Lin I hardly ever use my mouse to swap desktops or applications in a desktop, and I can tap a key to turn off my mouse when I'm typing in a window to prevent the dread mouse warp disease of most laptops where the palm of your hand manages to select and delete a block of text in three keystrokes. Try doing either one in Windows -- oh, wait, sorry, no multiple desktops. Viruses. Memory leaks (not so much in XP, but over the years). Bloat. Pre-installed advertising crap. Expensive applications. Having to constantly mess with copyright and DRM and software keys.
What I don't understand is why anybody still uses Windows. Well, I do understand that -- because Microsoft has a serious monopoly and uses every trick in the book to defend and preserve it, the most important one being a price lock on nearly every major hardware vendor that makes it impossible for them to offer a free choice of operating systems and still compete unless they exclusively only offer Windows as a preinstall. That and the fact that they own or have a similar exclusive relationship with many hardware vendors and have difficult hardware installs debugged by the vendor as part of the preload process so that it's still easier to be sure that your video and network are supported (by the hardware vendor's install if nothing else) with a preinstalled Win than with an after-the-fact installation of Lin. There is still a bit of the expert-friendly about Lin as well, although a lot of that is smoke and mirrors associated with the fact that the poor end-market vendors provide the hidden labor to manage the expert-friendly aspects of Win. Most dumb users could no more manage a reinstall of Win from media than they could an install of Lin from media, and honestly at this point the Lin install -- IF it works straight up because of good driver juju -- is probably easier. It's what happens if good hardware fortune is not obtained that is the difference; with Lin you then must know what you are doing; with Win you MIGHT be able to muddle along on through it, using vendor-supplied CDs or driver downloads, perhaps with a bit less expertise.
No real arguments. The right place to resolve these questions is in mid-scale prototypes where you can measure and quantify and the cost/benefit of alternatives. I've got a really good location for one. Now if I just had a few million dollars...:-)
No, if you want to make it complementary you have first to consider the union of him, reality, and the possibly empty set of spiritual things (that I included in reality because they can be indirectly experienced).
The you can say that the transcendent is complementary in this union to reality. But it is a definition with no whatsoever value.
Perhaps because the spiritual things you have defined are thus unreal or they aren't in the union of reality with something else. You really need to think over the problem associated with the disjoint sets you are proposing. Not to mention your claim of the "indirect" experience of "spiritual" things. What does this mean? What exactly is indirect experience? Listening to and believing in the direct experiences of others is what I would usually interpret this as meaning, but then there exists the direct experience (however dubious). Alternatively one might use it to describe a process of inference based on direct experience, observing jets in high energy collisions and inferring that you are seeing quarks being knocked out of nucleons and paired with new quarks pulled from the Dirac sea. The first is really a special case of the second anyway -- my experience is that when I spot check the laws of physics I get general agreement, so eventually I come to provisionally trust reports of physicists that seem consistent and well-verified without needing to personally verify each one.
The Universe is all that is objectively real, that which has the existential property. This definition avoids all sorts of sloppy thinking, like the eternal debate between idealism and materialism that you are attempting to resurrect in the guise of a transcendent "ideal" reality of Platonic forms. Plato was a smart guy, but he was smart 2500 odd years ago. We really have made an advance or two since then. In particular, we have discovered/invented information theory, something you would do well to study not just because it is critical to epistemology and metaphysics but because it, combined with the simple definition of the Universe as being everything that really exists, completely eliminates the idealism vs materialism debate as well as your tired reworking of it. I don't know or care if the Universe is really material or really ideal -- either way to me it is self-encoded information. If the world of my experience and the self-consistent informational linkages that enable my perception is concretely real and material, that's just super. If it is completely ideal, and I'm some sort of dreamer in a sea of ideas and all of my experiences are complex immaterial superficially self-consistent dreams, that's grand. The information content of my experiences is the same either way! Also, the best thing to believe is completely obvious -- the former is enormously more productive than the latter, at least if I want to imagine those experiences to be "dreams" that are in any way akin to the dreams I appear to have within the dream of reality I'm having.
This is why solipsism (a form of extreme idealism) is stupid. It isn't logically inconsistent -- it is logically irrefutable and experientially irrefutable! In fact, it is a non-falsifiable proposition because no matter what you think up to test it, you'll just make your world come out so the test appears to fail. It's why your assertion of a transcendent reality is silly. It is logically irrefutable and experientially irrefutable -- non-falsifiable. You've made it experientially irrefutable by definition, although then you have to weasel on the definition by claiming "indirect" experience of "spirituality" above. Logically irrefutable is trivial -- logic alone itself can never say anything meaningful about the Universe other than the fact that it cannot be logically inconsistent. It is perfectly obvious that for any hypothetical model of reality other than the infinite permutation model (where everything tha
Ah, yes, well, hmmm divide all answers by ten, hmm -- look, over there! Are those ponies?
(Ducks and runs away...)
Although I suck at arithmetic, the point is still the same. There is a point where the marginal return of the coating makes it a break-even proposition, and it isn't so low as to be completely unreasonable at $10-20 per m^2 -- a large-scale production facility serving a world market devoted to producing rooftop solar house/water heaters/coolers (e.g. buffered by underground water-coupled geothermal reservoirs) and panels for solar updraft facilities could create a window of marginal profit there. Also, there may be some further added value to using the coating that would increase its marginal advantage in ways other than just the difference in absorption/reradiation efficiency. For example, "just" a cheap coat of black paint or tar on concrete might not have the ability to withstand the thermal temperature swings associated with heating at 700 W/m^2 during the day to a high temperature followed by radiative cooling at night to a relatively low temperature across a range of humidities with a powerful updraft wind pulling across it eight or nine hours a day. Many coatings might well dry, crack, peel, or melt and be sticky enough that they gradually coat with enough dust to degrade performance another 10%. Even these "cheap" coats aren't free, especially if they require running maintenance or mid-cycle replacement -- one might well end up comparing the cost of a baked-on ceramic paint on panels to the cost of this similarly factory produced panel.
None of which is a proof, of course -- it is simply pointing out that I'm still not certain that you are correct. At this point the cost of producing the coating is undoubtedly prohibitive, and there is a very high end market that justifies a high price. That doesn't necessarily mean that the coating is so intrinsically expensive to produce in a production facility that is engineered to provide economy of scale sufficient to supply millions of panels and pipes and to fulfill other possible niche markets for the stuff that it could never make economic sense to use it instead of "just" black paint.
Yes (to Australia and Spain -- in Spain a small prototype has already been built -- I think it is 50 kW or thereabouts -- Spain is a GW IIRC. They've been proposed for the US southwest too, but not yet successfully. Building on a hillside would halve the cost and potentially double the yield.
As far as improving the efficiency -- 9% of 100 MW is 90 MW. 90 MW times (say) 2000 hours in a year is 180 GW-hours. A KW-hour is worth (say) a dime. Dividing by 10^4 to obtain dollars, using 99% instead of 90% (all things being equal) is worth 18 million dollars a year, for a mythical 1 km^2 collector. Given 1 million square meters to cover, if the marginal cost of using 99% vs 90% coating is less than (say) $100, it is break even to win a bit on the amortized cost of the investment.
So I'm not certain you're correct about it not being worth using. 10% higher yield over a very long time is a lot of money, and honestly, it might be worth it at a longer amortization than 5 or 6 years (assumed). Even at $200/m^2 it might be worth it if the plant could last for 20 years (that's $360 million dollars higher pure marginal return over that time frame).
>Are you aware of infinite regress being used as an argument for disproving god?
It isn't an argument that disproves god, it is an argument that reduces some of the assertions about god to absurdity. In particular, the proposal that God is necessary because of causality -- if everything must have a cause (that isn't itself) the Universe must have a cause. This cause, being outside of the Universe, doesn't need a cause, it is the "uncaused cause" that causes the Universe, that is, GOD.
This is an argument that is fallacious in so very many ways, and has been a constant base of your own argument as you insist that the Universe requires a cause (while misusing the term -- you should be asserting that the VISIBLE Universe -- our local space-time continuum -- requires a cause).
As I've been very patiently trying to explain, the Universe is the set of all things with the objective property of existence (which includes all spaces, all times, all hidden dimensions, all disjoint dimensions, and all of the objectively real contents of the above). We can set a probable/plausible lower bound on the dimensionality and contents of the Universe on the basis of what we can see in this apparent space-time continuum, although we could of course be completely mistaken if our sensory data is all a complex lie, as it might be for your beloved cellular automata, a "Matrix" hypothesis for reality. The simplest hypothesis, however, and one that is psychologically very compelling, is that our experiential reality is, in fact, closely correspondent with objective reality and there is clearly no particular advantage in acting as if there is not only an alternate/higher order reality but metaphorically planning what wallpaper we are going to use on the house we will eventually build there when there are literally an infinite number of possible ways that which we observe could be embedded in a higher dimensional Universe and there is no evidence that we are so embedded at all, let alone evidence that might permit us to determine properties of those hidden dimensions, so far.
Correctly stating your particular God hypothesis, then:
Space-time and mass-energy require a cause, an answer to the question "why". The cause cannot exist within space-time. The answer to the question "Why is there a space-time continuum?" is thus: There is a transcendent space complementary to our space-time continuum in the Universe. God is a self-sufficient sentient being that exists within this complement, which is then necessarily sufficiently complex (from the point of view of information theory) that it can support sentience and temporally ordered action (like our own, although it may accomplish the details differently) and therein, as an act of will enabled by the structure of the domain, created our space-time continuum.
Objections abound. First, there is no reason to think space-time or mass-energy require a cause. Rather, the evidence states the opposite. The correct statement of empirical physical law is that mass-energy is conserved and is never created or destroyed, it just changes form. We have never seen one, single instance of "creation" ex nihilo -- all we ever observe is stuff moving around. In fact, you are misusing the verb "to create" -- there is not one single instance of its use in human affairs outside of this hypothesis where the word does not implicitly mean "to rearrange pre-existing stuff into a particular shape". I don't "create" a house ex nihilo, I build it out of wood. The wood is not "created", it is assembled out of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen. The energy used to build it isn't "created", it is redirected from pre-existing energy in flow. We don't even create "ideas" out of nothing -- try staring at an empty bit of vacuum and see how many "ideas" pop out, try to imagine how they might be represented if they did. There is no particularly good reason to think that the Big Bang itself was
... solar collectors. One could make a hell of a hot water heater from a base that absorbed 99% of the (visible part of the) spectrum. One could make a fairly impressive collector for the generation of electricity as well. Imagine a 1 km^2 south-facing hillside covered with flat black panels under a transparent insulated airtight roof, leading up to a hilltop tower filled with turbines (top of tower some km or so above the air intake at the base of the hill). 700 megawatts (or so) peak absorption, even allowing for inefficiencies should allow for 100-200 MW peak electrical production. Ten such hills/towers is a GW of production that works best at just the time of day that demand for electricity peaks in hot climates. And running the collector up a hillside is such an obvious improvement over e.g. the Australian model of a solar updraft tower poking straight up out of a plain covered with the collector. Why engineer a kilometer plus high tower straight up in the middle of a flat when nature provides you with all or most of that kilometer for free, at the top of a slope conveniently tipped to optimize the reception of solar flux? Not to mention the fact that many such hillsides are "wasted space" as far as utility is concerned, good for nothing but a view and located where nobody can even appreciate the view.
Sadly, all that they will do with this new material, I'm sure, is use it to build better stealth aircraft or the like. I'm surprised it isn't classified.
Sure, also because logic does not necessarily apply there. I didn't talk about proof for the transcendent. I have proof for the existence of a world, this one, that is transcendent for another (the abstraction defined by the POV of cellular automata), and not transcendent yet unreachable for the immanent implementations of it (the implementations of cellular auomata worlds)
So in some cases a transcendent and unreachable world is prime cause for another. It tells nothing about our situation but it nullify the atheist theorem that: a transcendent creator cannot be proved (which is true) therefore it doesn't exist (true as the mere reformulation of the definition of transcendent) then, with a semantic trick, using this conclusion as if the transcendent creator cannot meta-exist. Since it meta exists for a cellular automata it COULD meta exist for us too.
You are missing a very important point -- I have not ever said that a creator cannot exist. I have said that there is no reason to think that one does. If you build a simulated world with internal rules and sufficient complexity that "life" emerges that is capable of making observations and inferring those consistent rules, and they never ever observe a violation of those rules and those rules fully explain everything that they see without gaps, while they could speculate about whether or not their "cosmos" is all that there is or if the Universe is larger it would be a capital mistake to conclude that it must be without evidence. While you are meditating upon this, think about how silly it would be for them to not only conclude that it must be larger, but to worship you -- its programmer, and petition you for favors (all with no evidence that the favors are ever granted), fight wars over your appearance, your gender, your name, whether or not some random accident is some kind of occult message from you, and use open extortion -- the claim that if they aren't "good" automatons and accept all of these baseless claims "on faith" that you their Programmer will one day pull the "bad" ones from a backup tape and place them in a simulation in an infinite loop where simulated fire burns their simulated asses so that their non-simulated self-awareness can experience simulated agony forever -- to gain a following that hands over simulated money and simulated power to simulated individuals... surely you see the problem. Santa Claus might exist in an alternate reality as well, but it is silly to speculate about whether or not he has cardiovascular disease or eats naughty children, and honestly, it is pretty much a waste of time to speculate that he exists in such a way at all.
You are attacking a straw man, in other words, not my actual arguments. I don't care if a God "could" exist. I note that there is no evidence that one does! Note how very simple it would be for you to communicate with your cellular automaton creatures, to let them know of your existence, to actually interact with them. Instead of doing so, you leave them particularly carefully alone -- so very carefully that they cannot find any trace of your existence no matter how carefully they look. In fact, they never see the smallest deviation from the rules of the cellular automaton you created that might "break the transcendence barrier". In such a case one really doesn't care that God exists, right? It's precisely like worrying about whether or not Santa Claus exists, but only in a part of the physical space-time cosmos 22 billion light years away. Even if he exists and could come here and visit to let us know that he exists, he doesn't. He stays home. Why, exactly, should we conclude that he exists (quite aside from the nearly infinite improbability)?
Another straw man: You persist in failing to recognize that the term Universe does not refer to our particular space-time in any of my responses -- I fully acknowledge that it could be larger and even have mentioned creditable efforts that propose
So we should reply instead with something like "A physicist, asked by a student to compute the gravitational field produced by a large bovine standing in a nearby field, replied with `First, assuming a spherical cow...'"?
Sorry, at 56 (hardly prime, but 57 is just around the corner) I'm reduced to making bad jokes as there will be no prizes for me this year. Besides, I just assigned the spherical cow problem (seriously) in my intro physics class. It makes a great homework assignment...;-)
So why are we speculating about the details of something unknowable, by definition?
Because every time one tells something about unknowable things he must be aware of it.
There is an uncountable infinity of possible unknowable things, so in fact, one cannot possibly be aware of it. Furthermore one cannot even be certain of the truth of things one knows very well and are almost certainly true -- note the "almost". So no, every time one speaks of something unknowable one does not have to be aware of it. If this were true, one wouldn't be able to say anything but "I don't know", ever, which may be technically true (see David Hume, works of) but is pointless and useless.
Piffle. You're just using "dimension" in that way so you can...
No it was equivalent to domain, not a dimension in the physical sense, I'd violate what I have been criticizing up to this point.
Most unclear in the context of your discussion. When you refer to unknowable dimensions from which God did all sorts of transcendent magical stuff, once I get past the obvious oxymoron of the entire discussion what stands out is that they are dimensions, not psychological domains or aspects of the mapping between language and experience. This is made even worse by your assigning human moral qualities to the "God dimension", as I seem to recall you doing before, and insisting that they existed there a priori to humans capable of having such qualities or a society where morality is possible or relevant. All of which I object to in countless ways, but throwing them into transcendent dimensions there is just another way of saying you don't want to actually discuss what morality is and where it comes from. You've announced that it comes from nowhere. It's transcendent.
It is also impossible to prove or disprove the invisible pink unicorn, but since this world and the abstractions defined by the point of view of cellular automata define a situation in which our reality is the ultimate reason for an abstraction, yet that abstraction is a closed system that can't prove our reality, which for atheist would automatically disprove it, discussing a transcendent creator makes more sense than discussing the invisible pink unicorn. The form of the transcendent creator is irrelevant, the FSM is ok.
Sheer madness. It isn't possible to logically prove anything useful without unprovable assumptions that effectively beg the question. Surely you've read Hume, although it isn't just Hume. Read Morris Kline's Mathematics, The Loss of Certainty which, in addition to being a truly excellent book, will walk you through the reasons that even mathematicians no longer believe that mathematical conclusions can in any meaningful sense be considered unconditionally "true". Minimally they are axiomatic and hence contingent truth, but Godel has taught us that it is really much worse than that. This is before -- a priori, if you will -- you tackle the really serious problem of trying to infer truths about a presumed Universe external to your self awareness, known only through your sensory stream.
I will repeat -- the only sane thing to consider knowledge in the latter domain is probable truth, and probable truth can only be discerned by using a mix of empiricism and consistent -- not complete -- mathematics and logic as the basis of reason. Using that one can easily prove that pink unicorns probably do not exist, very probably indeed if you restrict the question to relevant existence rather than existence in that "transcendent" part of the Universe 200 billion light years away (outside of our light cone, hence by your narrow definition transcendent). The relevant part of the Universe is effectively here, on Earth, now or in the past. There we have no evidence of pink unicorns. We have a lot of evidence about many things that did or do exist. It is not unreasonable, statistically, to expect that if there were any around we would have found them by now, a
I hopefully always said "transcendent", not transcendental which then is to be considered the same word. I defined it All that can't be directly or indirectly experienced, that is the complement of reality defined as all that can be directly or indirectly experienced.
To define something in term of the complement is not a problem for somebody that uses logic, I guess.
Not at all, but you didn't define it previously. By the way, transcendent and transcendental are the same as complement and complementary. So it doesn't really matter what you (or I) said here, the meaning is the same.
What is that meaning? Would that be "unknowable"? It would. Unknowable by definition.
So why are we speculating about the details of something unknowable, by definition?
As for claiming that color perception lives in a "different dimension" -- in an abstract sense sure. In a concrete sense, piffle. Unless and until you can prove this statement in some mathematically and empirically consistent way. Personally I would have used taste -- the salt dimension, sweet dimension, umami dimension. So, do they form a linear vector space? Is there a basis? Are these flavors orthogonal? What's the angle between sweet and umami in roasted peppers?
Piffle. You're just using "dimension" in that way so you can claim that there is transcendent dimension in which color or taste live, even though we experience color and taste so even if true the dimensions are not trascendent, or transcendental, or complementary to experienced reality. It's like claiming that mathematics lives in its own dimension or that mathematical truths are really true, only worse.
You then proceed to briefly paint the universe in term of rules, us in terms of dust (as the genesis says, "pulvis eris..."), but I am not disputing that. Not even, when reasoning as Christian, that there are billions of stars (some heretics told that about multiple worlds before galileo put the matter in the realm of science), that homo has been for millions years while Adam seems to come later, he probably is the first man not morphologically, he's the first man because he does whatever eating the fruit means (I dunno but it entails a different vision of self, as it's written but I badly digress).
Ah, you really should read my book -- The Book of Lilith. I do think you'd actually like it. It makes all of these points in far more detail than you are, as a mythopoeic work. And it's funny. The difference between us, of course, is that I can tell the difference between fantasy (as in improbable to be true, not impossible) and reality (as it probably true, based on what we know, not certainly true).
Yes, and even if you could explain it all, if we keep asking why, the last answer is, because the rules say so. Then we discuss if no other rule is logically possible, if logic derived from observing a world will always validate it...
No, no, no. You don't get the point. One cannot ever answer the super-ultimate why question in a way that could be considered knowledge. You can assert God is the reason for everything, but that is meaningless, because there is no evidence suggesting that God is the reason for everything, and because if God is the reason for everything, what is the reason for God? What is the reason for that reason?
A causal chain can only be explored in time, and even there one has to carefully distinguish between a high level semantic "cause" -- I was sad today "because somebody broke my dolly" and microscopic causality and deterministic causal chains. The only answer to the question "Why does the Universe exist" is "Given that the Universe exists, why not?"
If you assert God is that which needs no cause, the uncaused cause, then prove it! Show me evidence! Otherwise you are just writing symbols down on a page that I can understand, but they are hardly "logically nec
You can use 900-dimensional vectors but can you visualize 4 space dimensional data easily? How do the synapses fire in 3d? we are 4d.
Make up your mind. Either I am 4d and can easily visualize 4d or I'm 3d and can visualize 4d or I'm 4d but can't visualize 4d let alone 900d. Or whatever. But quite aside from that, "comprehend" and "visualize" do not mean the same thing. I can easily comprehend a 900 dimensional Euclidean space or (for that matter) an infinite-dimensional space. I can't visualize all of the dimensions of an infinite dimensional space because, well, there are an infinite number of them. So your somewhat confused objection is completely irrelevant to what I actually said.
I say that if no transcendent creator exists this is the scenario. You say that since no transcendent creator exists this is the scenario. The funny thing, even if you formalized and experimentally replicated the conditions under which a conscience emerge, you still haven't said if it belongs into other dimensions, like or unlike ours and you are unable to. To be more clear, a cellular automaton whose behaviour i control (within the limits imposed by the simulation) is indistinguishable from all the others. That doesn't prove I don't really control it.
You seem to constantly refer to simulations and computer models, so I'm guessing that you must be a computer scientist. You also keep using the word "assume" to mean something that it does not really mean -- as my wife is fond of saying "assume" makes an ass out of u and me. You say "no transcendental creator" -- which I still assert is an utterly meaningless statement unless and until you suitably define what a transcendental anything is, let along a "creator" -- equates to an assumption that self awareness will emerge from some automata. I did not say anything about whether or not a transcendental creator exists, and certainly didn't posit it as a condition of my statement. I said that there is empirical evidence that self awareness in fact emerged from the laws of nature with not one single shred of evidence of a "guiding hand", transcendental or otherwise.
Whether you want to consider the laws of nature rules for some of cellular automaton or not (personally I think that this is bending the correct description more than a bit, although I appreciate what you mean well enough to not care) I am not making an assumption that begs the question -- you, my friend, are doing that. What I'm doing is putting the cart firmly where it belongs, behind the horse. Even the most cursory study of the night sky reveals that the Universe is vast and complex and very, very old. We are made of second generation stardust, matter forged in the hearts of stars that were born, lived and died billions of years ago. As we look at the heavens, at the earth, from the microcosm to the macrocosm all that we see is matter and energy doing a dance without mind, following rules that appear to be both mathematically rigorous and rather amazing in the way their very simplicity leads to complexity. We can use these rules (the ones we have been able to infer so far) and understand almost everything we see. If we look at the rocks of the earth, the fossil record embedded in those rocks, and our own DNA and the DNA of other living things we can see the direct evidence of a process of evolution from beginnings so humble they might as well be cellular automata in a remarkably simple chemical game of Life. We can simulate these early beginnings. We can study and understand and simulate nearly every step in the process, and there is no good reason to think that the ones we cannot yet demonstrate will turn out to be "impossible" to occur in exactly the same mechanical, mindless way everything we can see has happened. We can and do make evolution happen in the lab, and we can see evolution happening in the wild, in many cases far faster than we'd like.
You are reasoning under the bold, if not irrational assumption that this world's logic and concepts can be translated 1:1 to the creator's domain.
I am indeed, my friend. Because they aren't "this world's logic and concepts", as you implicitly if oxymoronically imply by accusing me of being irrational because I use logic. The law of contradiction is the basis of logic and contradictory things are impossible in all domains; reason itself relies on logic in so many ways. In fact the very meaning of the word "senseless" describes your arguemnt perfectly when you begin by asserting that sense (logical consistency) has no meaning when applied to god. When you begin a logical argument by denying the utility of logic and common sense, you become, quite literally, senseless.
For the creatures of a 2d cellular automata simulations, the concept of height is beyond comprehension. Plato's cave.
Piffle. We live in a "three dimensional" world. I'm a physicist and mathematician. I can, and do, work in and with infinite dimensional vector spaces all the time -- they are difficult the first time you encounter them but hardly "beyond comprehension". Oh yeah, and let's not forget that "time" thing. Another dimension, as we managed to conceive with our three dimensional brains. So I'm not sure what your point is, stating something that is patently false. I also don't know why you assert Plato's Cave; on the one hand it is very relevant indeed, but on the other hand, not the way you think it is. The prisoners within the cave may well be mistaken in the conclusions they draw from their senses, sir, but that does not justify them engaging in wild flights of fancy as they try to infer the structure that casts the shadows upon the walls of their cave. Ultimately, their inferences have to be reasonable and consistent with their experience -- see remarks above about logic and common sense, their imaginings of the causes of those shadows cannot be self contradictory and correct, and if they have no predictive value on the behavior of the shadows they are fantasy, they violate mere common sense.
Little OT For sufficiently complex cellular automata simulations you have to assume self conscience will eventually emerge for some automata, else it breaks the atheist model and all those with immanent-only gods.
Not off topic at all -- in our discussion -- but false. This isn't assumed at all. You can empirically observe that you yourself are conscious, and also observe that your consciousness is strictly and reproducibly tied to the function of a collection of matter with a good deal of organization, and infer from more empirical evidence that your hardware, that absolutely obeys physical laws that make it, if you like, a "cellular automaton", emerged from a process of natural selection and evolution. No "assumptions" at all, at least that are not well-supported by both reason and evidence, which means that they are not assumptions, they are probable truths.
So, to be precise, I should have said: "If you believe in a creator belonging to a transcendent dimension with a property comparable to our will..."
Which means what, exactly? What is a "transcendent dimension"? What is "a dimensional property comparable to our will"? These are meaningless terms. When you speak of "believing" in a creator that belongs to such a thing, you are basically saying "I have no idea where God is, or how he came to be there" because you have no evidence that other dimensions exist at all, let alone dimensions with the property of being "transcendent" (which means nothing at all as far as I can tell in any context I've ever heard it used in, it is a term usually used when somebody is about to engage in bullshit philosophy and make an absolutely indefensible argument, which they defend by asserting that it is "transcendental" even though in math, logic, reason, e
Perfectly said, sir grcumb. It also forces one to confront the dazzling vector of "God Hypotheses" and models, which is quite literally infinitely long. Should we be worshipping Zeus? Yahweh? Mumbo Jumbo? Baron Saturday? The Flying Spaghetti Monster? J. R. "Bob" Dobbs? Odin? Krishna? Osiris? Is God a bodiless spirit, a being that is embodied and sort of like us only magic, living in this dimension with other Gods, living in alternate dimensions alone, a female principle, a male principle a quadrigendered principle? Is God a "Standard Model of God" deity (omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent) or is God limited, creating the best of all possible worlds (which turns out not to be all that great) as the solution to the problem of theodicy? Is the cosmos this deity created real and material, real and ideal, or are we spirits in a vat and the world just "the Matrix", a vast simulation embedded in a completely different reality? And can we be safe limiting our imaginations of God to just the human myths we've come up with so far? Probably not, right? So we have to include not only the gods and mythos of existing religions, we have to worry about the possible Gods of all conceivable religions as all names go into the same hat in the lack of evidence, we just may not yet have thought up the right model or arrangement without any experience or evidence to guide us. Fictional Gods -- Cthulhu, Marduk, Elbereth, the nameless Gods of books yet unwritten -- any model or structuring of data that isn't self-contradictory is possible, and without evidence they are all equally possible and hence by dilution nearly infinitely improbable in a maximum ignorance statement of probability theory.
The amazing thing is that the most rabid mouth-foaming theists are quite skilled at this argument themselves. They have no difficulty whatsoever rejecting nearly all the names/models on the infinite, mostly unwritten list above. A Christian finds Hinduism laughably wrong. A Hindu has no difficulty whatsoever in seeing the flaws in and improbability of Islam. A Muslim can easily see that Joseph Smith (Dum Dum Dum) pretty much made up The Book of Mormon and that there were no golden plates, no angel Moron, that there were no pre-Columbian steel swords or magnetic compasses or old world plants or animals in the new world, and that God doesn't whiten the faces of people who are pure and darken the faces of those that are impure (making skin color into litmus that tests how much God loves you). Heck, everybody on the planet but a moron can see that.
Might as well roll dice to figure out what to worship without evidence, and by evidence I mean the real thing, pure quill, not ancient mythologies written by our superstitious and ignorant Bronze Age cultural ancestors...
I understand the point -- it is indeed "until now", but there is a vast preponderance of data in prior existence where it appears to be quite constant. Also, as noted above, their results have been presented before and challenged in the literature on what appear to be sound grounds, including a certain statistical weakness that is often the signature of bad science. The rules of science mean that new, extraordinary results and their attendant claims are false until proven otherwise by a wealth of new data -- extraordinary evidence, in other words, not marginal evidence that might yet be explained by something as mundane as a light switch being turned on and off (like one of the "magnetic monopole" discoveries turned out to be, for example). That isn't to say that monopoles may not exists, somewhere -- possibly in those same distant quasars -- or that the fine structure constant really isn't a variable, only that even if the observations themselves are accurate, this may not be the only explanation (and there is a rather good chance that the observations are not accurate).
Note well; I got no dog in this fight, no pony in the race. If I teach quantum theory, it's all the same to me to teach it with the addendum "\alpha is the fine structure parameter" instead of "constant". I am, therefore, perfectly happy for those claims to eventually be validated, but in the meantime I remain skeptical and I do have to say that if I were them, I wouldn't be purchasing my tickets to Stockholm quite yet...;-)
Sigh. And what are those "hands" made of, what are the controls used, what are the even more fundamental constants of the Universe in which those hands and controls are constructs?
I know, I know. They are "magic", right? Or you will say something like "I don't know" as if the very impossibility of imagining a model meta-Universe containing God (and then a meta-meta-Universe and so on as needed) is some sort of excuse for claiming that this one requires an outside explanation (God) but God's Universe does not. Not to mention the fact that the word Universe means everything that has ever existed, exists, or will exist, not "the particular space-time continuum in which we appear to reside", making all of these metas logically inconsistent.
It is, in other words, logically impossible -- self-contradictory -- for the statement "God created the Universe" to be true. This is an ontological impossibility, not just "it's too difficult", or "it's unlikely", or "there is no evidence that it happened" (all of which are separately true but on the basis very different lines of reasoning). God cannot create a Universe without existing, and if God exists God is at least part of if not all of the Universe, in which case God didn't create the Universe either. Indeed the only logically consistent way to imagine God is for God to be the Universe; at least this is ontologically consistent (even with Anselm's silly "proof"). If God is the Universe, then quite literally nothing could be greater because the Universe is everything, the Universal set. In all other cases the Universe contains God and something else that is not-God, and is literally greater in the mathematically ordinal sense than God.
So if God exists, God is the Universe (or is not God, just a very powerful natural being). We can then ask the empirical question: is there evidence to support the suggestion that the Universe has free will, can think, can observe, can change, can experience time's entropy-driven arrow, and thus or still be God. The answer there is totally obvious. There is no evidence for a single one of these claims. There is no model that supports the idea that it is possible that they could be true. There are further inconsistencies buried within these claims -- the Universe contains all space(s) and all time(s) that have the property of objective existence, and hence it is difficult to understand how it could be anything but geometrically static. It contains all the information that exists, and hence it is very difficult to imagine a source of entropy (missing information) for it, or a mechanism whereby "reasoned action in time" becomes possible. There is no "meta time" in which the Universe can evolve that is not a part of the Universe and hence Universally stationary.
We exist, we live, on the cusp between a partially known past and an unknown future. Our experiencing of time is a differential thing that requires entropy, a lack of knowledge of outcomes, a series of ongoing free energy changes as we interact with and exchange information with the not-me part of all things. There is no not-me for a possible standard model God, no missing information (or else God is not omniscient, for example). God as the Universe has no more free will than a burned CD, because as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be is static, unchanging, not alive and responsive.
Your God, sir, is a God of the gaps, as it ever was. You are ignorant of the possible causes and arrangements of certain things (part of that entropy) and assert God to fill in the missing bits. Yet whenever we actually look for missing bits, we often find the missing bits but not God. 2000 years ago, God caused disease, devils caused mental illness, God hung the stars on the solid bowl of the sky. Now we look and know that disease has many causes, and God is not visible in any of them. Mental illness
Sir, you are a gentleman and a scholar, and should be revered by your peers and worshipped openly by your many, many inferiors.
I sincerely regret the abuse that I'm certain will be heaped upon you for having the temerity to state the obvious and worse, actually back it up with references. Be thankful that at least it is difficult to reach you with pitchforks and torches.
Ah, well, you tried. I guess I'll continue to skim down and glance at the abuse.
Explanation: a) "Because it works, pretty much, to explain all or nearly all of the observational data, including things like the fact that spectral lines from very distant suns are recognizably correspondent with the lines as measured in a laboratory on Earth. Note that (for example) those lines are predicted, in part, by the fine structure constant, which is why there is rather enormous opposition to the notion that it isn't constant. It is visibly constant almost anywhere we look, or the entire field of spectroscopy would be inconsistent and inexplicable observations would exist in abundance; b) See a). The problem is that there is a lot of data that is perfectly consistent with \alpha being constant. There is a nearly complete lack of data suggesting otherwise. That doesn't mean that it is constant -- \alpha could easily be a quantity that follows from a far more general physics in higher dimensions that isn't homogeneous -- and belief that it is isn't religious belief. It is that one would rather have expected spectroscopy to have egregiously failed long before this if it were not a constant, and it hasn't. Or if it has, this is the first announcement that may or may not prove to be a reliable observation of an exception.
The point is, it is best to believe the things that best fit the data (and satisfy a few other requirements, such as consistency, parsimony, and so on) all the time, but not unreasonably best belief moves around as we obtain more data and discover and resolve inconsistencies. It moves around slowly because we have learned from experience to doubt observations unless/until a certain standard of consistency, parsimony, observational reproducibility, and so on has been reached. New physics is always great fun, skepticism is better than unreasoning belief, but reasoned, evidence-based conditional belief, believing the most in those things one can doubt the least (when one tries to doubt very hard), is a lot better than jumping on and believing every half-assed claim that is made on the basis of possibly flawed methodology and revelling in it just because it proves that "we don't know everything" and that therefore, very smart people aren't as smart as they think they are (closing the gap mentally between yourself, so quick to see the truth of it all, and them, the fools).
Does that pretty much sum up much of the discussion above, so far?
A sound result will prove to be reproducible and even a sound result (as far as the observation is concerned) may have many possible explanations, including (quite possibly) ones that don't mess with the fine structure constant. For example, the precession of the orbit of mercury could be viewed as a violation of the law of gravitation, and in one sense it is, but in a deeper sense it is not -- gravity is all right but it needs to be formulated in a relativistically curved spacetime -- the real error is in assumptions made about space and time itself, not "gravity".
Is this the latest version of the creationist argument? I'm just curious. We've gone from "we were handmade out of clay" to "conditions were set (by a vast entity with enormous amounts of organized structure that surely must be emergent temporal order arising from a set of internal rules governing the parts from which it is composed) so that we (humans) would randomly evolve"? Isn't the oxymoron in their apparent? The whole, vast range of oxymorons?
If you believe, a god can fine tune whatever he wants from the very beginning, if you don't nothing is tuned because there is not the tuner.
Not quite correctly stated. The conclusion has nothing to do with what you believe, it is a belief. The correct statement would be something like: "If a god exists and has sufficient complexity to be considered `alive' and `sentient' and sufficient entropy to be able to experience something like `desire' -- all necessary to "want something", and if there is such a thing as a `beginning' (implying a rather deep broken symmetry in one spatiotemporal variable) -- all of which seem somewhat implausible if not downright self-contradictory a priori, or rather `from the beginning', since it seems as though things would have to be fairly amazingly tuned without any tuner for any one of these conditions to be true, given the scale of and any plausible model for the structure of `god' -- then god and the universe would a) be the same thing, as the universe is everything that exists and god (if god exists) is as great as everything that exists Q.E.D.; b) would be hellaciously tuned to produce whatever else is tuned as an impossible act of will by that god, without a meta-god tuner."
Slashdot Mirror
I think it is a lot easier than that to find good locations. There are mountains all up and down the Appalachians that are pretty much nothing but trees on a slope. The Rockies, the Sangre de Christos, the Sierras. Easily hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of more or less fallow, south facing slope with order of a kilometer of vertical rise. The main difficulty is just picking >>a
The idea is old enough (1926 according to wikipedia, although I had it independently) -- there are several prototype projects (including a 200 MW facility in China) of the tall chimney variety, but AFAIK no hillside prototypes out there.
Windows is the only platform for which one can reliably download binaries directly from software authors.
Sure, if you don't mind taking the risk of your system being eaten by worms. Also, you might acknowledge the difference in numbers -- there are how many applications and packages accessible by yum or apt in e.g. Fedora or Debian current? Would that be order of 10^4? It would. How many can you find for Windows, assuming you don't mind downloading them from wherever you find them (probably a site RUNNING Windows, wouldn't you think, and hence just as vulnerable as Windows itself for being hacked and trojanned)? I'd be surprised if you could find 10^3. And Windows applications aren't really free from DLL dependency hell -- far from it. Indeed, you can break the hell out of Windows to where you may have to do a clean reinstall if you actually do install a lot of packages from unknown authors off of the internet. Or worse.
With that said, sure, if you only use a handful of open source programs -- your list, for example -- it's six of one half a dozen of the other. In fact, since that list is most of what I use for anything -- firefox, thunderbird etc are available and a click install away on ANY of the main distros, and most of them are actually not all that unstable. Fedora, for example, can be run for years solid as a rock and with a huge list of programs, including virtualbox that lets you run a windows application for all practical purposes as a linux subtask.
rgb
The last time I used Windows as my primary desktop at work OR at home was maybe 1995. Somewhere ballpark then I installed first SLS, then Slackware (bigger/more complete, off of a huge stack of 3.5" FLOPPIES) on my home system (had already moved to using SunOS/Unix exclusively at work as of perhaps 1986 or 1987). Sun OS from the 386 on, Linux from the 486 on, although I didn't run it long on a 486 system before moving to a 586 clone (AMD? I can't remember).
That said, I've often maintained some systems that CAN run Windows as dual boot to a) run games; b) run games, I said; c) run the RARE applications that I needed to use professionally that wouldn't run under Linux. Time spent booted in Windows even including playing games on the order of 1-2% of total time spent sitting at computer console. Maybe not even that -- played a lot of the games under e.g. Cedega.
As of maybe five or six years ago I stopped even installing it dual boot and instead have a Win XP image (and plenty of old license keys, it's all legal) that I have installed in a VM -- first under vmware and then when they started charging money to academia under virtualbox (where it is now). I sometimes boot it up and run e.g. DII under it -- it isn't fast/smooth enough for WoW -- or use it to help my wife (who uses the same basic setup) to cope with her #!$@* Windows-based EMR, running on HER virtual box VM under linux. But that doesn't really count as running Windows -- Windows is in that case a very complicated Linux application designed to help you load and run a particular Windows-based program.
As far as the Windows interface itself is concerned, or the core OS -- don't make me laugh. They still haven't figured out multiple desktops. How long have most of the Linux WMs had multiple desktops? 12, 13 years? Longer? They still haven't figured out how to manage updates -- to bring a pristine Win XP install up to current requires hours and a thousand layers of overlays because they can only update it one delta at a time. No yum, no apt, only "Windows Update" (from stupidity-hell). Speed? Absent. Ease of use? Nonexistent. I Under Lin I hardly ever use my mouse to swap desktops or applications in a desktop, and I can tap a key to turn off my mouse when I'm typing in a window to prevent the dread mouse warp disease of most laptops where the palm of your hand manages to select and delete a block of text in three keystrokes. Try doing either one in Windows -- oh, wait, sorry, no multiple desktops. Viruses. Memory leaks (not so much in XP, but over the years). Bloat. Pre-installed advertising crap. Expensive applications. Having to constantly mess with copyright and DRM and software keys.
What I don't understand is why anybody still uses Windows. Well, I do understand that -- because Microsoft has a serious monopoly and uses every trick in the book to defend and preserve it, the most important one being a price lock on nearly every major hardware vendor that makes it impossible for them to offer a free choice of operating systems and still compete unless they exclusively only offer Windows as a preinstall. That and the fact that they own or have a similar exclusive relationship with many hardware vendors and have difficult hardware installs debugged by the vendor as part of the preload process so that it's still easier to be sure that your video and network are supported (by the hardware vendor's install if nothing else) with a preinstalled Win than with an after-the-fact installation of Lin. There is still a bit of the expert-friendly about Lin as well, although a lot of that is smoke and mirrors associated with the fact that the poor end-market vendors provide the hidden labor to manage the expert-friendly aspects of Win. Most dumb users could no more manage a reinstall of Win from media than they could an install of Lin from media, and honestly at this point the Lin install -- IF it works straight up because of good driver juju -- is probably easier. It's what happens if good hardware fortune is not obtained that is the difference; with Lin you then must know what you are doing; with Win you MIGHT be able to muddle along on through it, using vendor-supplied CDs or driver downloads, perhaps with a bit less expertise.
rgb
No real arguments. The right place to resolve these questions is in mid-scale prototypes where you can measure and quantify and the cost/benefit of alternatives. I've got a really good location for one. Now if I just had a few million dollars...:-)
No, if you want to make it complementary you have first to consider the union of him, reality, and the possibly empty set of spiritual things (that I included in reality because they can be indirectly experienced). The you can say that the transcendent is complementary in this union to reality. But it is a definition with no whatsoever value.
Perhaps because the spiritual things you have defined are thus unreal or they aren't in the union of reality with something else. You really need to think over the problem associated with the disjoint sets you are proposing. Not to mention your claim of the "indirect" experience of "spiritual" things. What does this mean? What exactly is indirect experience? Listening to and believing in the direct experiences of others is what I would usually interpret this as meaning, but then there exists the direct experience (however dubious). Alternatively one might use it to describe a process of inference based on direct experience, observing jets in high energy collisions and inferring that you are seeing quarks being knocked out of nucleons and paired with new quarks pulled from the Dirac sea. The first is really a special case of the second anyway -- my experience is that when I spot check the laws of physics I get general agreement, so eventually I come to provisionally trust reports of physicists that seem consistent and well-verified without needing to personally verify each one.
The Universe is all that is objectively real, that which has the existential property. This definition avoids all sorts of sloppy thinking, like the eternal debate between idealism and materialism that you are attempting to resurrect in the guise of a transcendent "ideal" reality of Platonic forms. Plato was a smart guy, but he was smart 2500 odd years ago. We really have made an advance or two since then. In particular, we have discovered/invented information theory, something you would do well to study not just because it is critical to epistemology and metaphysics but because it, combined with the simple definition of the Universe as being everything that really exists, completely eliminates the idealism vs materialism debate as well as your tired reworking of it. I don't know or care if the Universe is really material or really ideal -- either way to me it is self-encoded information. If the world of my experience and the self-consistent informational linkages that enable my perception is concretely real and material, that's just super. If it is completely ideal, and I'm some sort of dreamer in a sea of ideas and all of my experiences are complex immaterial superficially self-consistent dreams, that's grand. The information content of my experiences is the same either way! Also, the best thing to believe is completely obvious -- the former is enormously more productive than the latter, at least if I want to imagine those experiences to be "dreams" that are in any way akin to the dreams I appear to have within the dream of reality I'm having.
This is why solipsism (a form of extreme idealism) is stupid. It isn't logically inconsistent -- it is logically irrefutable and experientially irrefutable! In fact, it is a non-falsifiable proposition because no matter what you think up to test it, you'll just make your world come out so the test appears to fail. It's why your assertion of a transcendent reality is silly. It is logically irrefutable and experientially irrefutable -- non-falsifiable. You've made it experientially irrefutable by definition, although then you have to weasel on the definition by claiming "indirect" experience of "spirituality" above. Logically irrefutable is trivial -- logic alone itself can never say anything meaningful about the Universe other than the fact that it cannot be logically inconsistent. It is perfectly obvious that for any hypothetical model of reality other than the infinite permutation model (where everything tha
Ah, yes, well, hmmm divide all answers by ten, hmm -- look, over there! Are those ponies?
(Ducks and runs away...)
Although I suck at arithmetic, the point is still the same. There is a point where the marginal return of the coating makes it a break-even proposition, and it isn't so low as to be completely unreasonable at $10-20 per m^2 -- a large-scale production facility serving a world market devoted to producing rooftop solar house/water heaters/coolers (e.g. buffered by underground water-coupled geothermal reservoirs) and panels for solar updraft facilities could create a window of marginal profit there. Also, there may be some further added value to using the coating that would increase its marginal advantage in ways other than just the difference in absorption/reradiation efficiency. For example, "just" a cheap coat of black paint or tar on concrete might not have the ability to withstand the thermal temperature swings associated with heating at 700 W/m^2 during the day to a high temperature followed by radiative cooling at night to a relatively low temperature across a range of humidities with a powerful updraft wind pulling across it eight or nine hours a day. Many coatings might well dry, crack, peel, or melt and be sticky enough that they gradually coat with enough dust to degrade performance another 10%. Even these "cheap" coats aren't free, especially if they require running maintenance or mid-cycle replacement -- one might well end up comparing the cost of a baked-on ceramic paint on panels to the cost of this similarly factory produced panel.
None of which is a proof, of course -- it is simply pointing out that I'm still not certain that you are correct. At this point the cost of producing the coating is undoubtedly prohibitive, and there is a very high end market that justifies a high price. That doesn't necessarily mean that the coating is so intrinsically expensive to produce in a production facility that is engineered to provide economy of scale sufficient to supply millions of panels and pipes and to fulfill other possible niche markets for the stuff that it could never make economic sense to use it instead of "just" black paint.
rgb
Yes (to Australia and Spain -- in Spain a small prototype has already been built -- I think it is 50 kW or thereabouts -- Spain is a GW IIRC. They've been proposed for the US southwest too, but not yet successfully. Building on a hillside would halve the cost and potentially double the yield.
As far as improving the efficiency -- 9% of 100 MW is 90 MW. 90 MW times (say) 2000 hours in a year is 180 GW-hours. A KW-hour is worth (say) a dime. Dividing by 10^4 to obtain dollars, using 99% instead of 90% (all things being equal) is worth 18 million dollars a year, for a mythical 1 km^2 collector. Given 1 million square meters to cover, if the marginal cost of using 99% vs 90% coating is less than (say) $100, it is break even to win a bit on the amortized cost of the investment.
So I'm not certain you're correct about it not being worth using. 10% higher yield over a very long time is a lot of money, and honestly, it might be worth it at a longer amortization than 5 or 6 years (assumed). Even at $200/m^2 it might be worth it if the plant could last for 20 years (that's $360 million dollars higher pure marginal return over that time frame).
rgb
>Are you aware of infinite regress being used as an argument for disproving god?
It isn't an argument that disproves god, it is an argument that reduces some of the assertions about god to absurdity. In particular, the proposal that God is necessary because of causality -- if everything must have a cause (that isn't itself) the Universe must have a cause. This cause, being outside of the Universe, doesn't need a cause, it is the "uncaused cause" that causes the Universe, that is, GOD.
This is an argument that is fallacious in so very many ways, and has been a constant base of your own argument as you insist that the Universe requires a cause (while misusing the term -- you should be asserting that the VISIBLE Universe -- our local space-time continuum -- requires a cause).
As I've been very patiently trying to explain, the Universe is the set of all things with the objective property of existence (which includes all spaces, all times, all hidden dimensions, all disjoint dimensions, and all of the objectively real contents of the above). We can set a probable/plausible lower bound on the dimensionality and contents of the Universe on the basis of what we can see in this apparent space-time continuum, although we could of course be completely mistaken if our sensory data is all a complex lie, as it might be for your beloved cellular automata, a "Matrix" hypothesis for reality. The simplest hypothesis, however, and one that is psychologically very compelling, is that our experiential reality is, in fact, closely correspondent with objective reality and there is clearly no particular advantage in acting as if there is not only an alternate/higher order reality but metaphorically planning what wallpaper we are going to use on the house we will eventually build there when there are literally an infinite number of possible ways that which we observe could be embedded in a higher dimensional Universe and there is no evidence that we are so embedded at all, let alone evidence that might permit us to determine properties of those hidden dimensions, so far.
Correctly stating your particular God hypothesis, then:
Space-time and mass-energy require a cause, an answer to the question "why". The cause cannot exist within space-time. The answer to the question "Why is there a space-time continuum?" is thus: There is a transcendent space complementary to our space-time continuum in the Universe. God is a self-sufficient sentient being that exists within this complement, which is then necessarily sufficiently complex (from the point of view of information theory) that it can support sentience and temporally ordered action (like our own, although it may accomplish the details differently) and therein, as an act of will enabled by the structure of the domain, created our space-time continuum.
Objections abound. First, there is no reason to think space-time or mass-energy require a cause. Rather, the evidence states the opposite. The correct statement of empirical physical law is that mass-energy is conserved and is never created or destroyed, it just changes form. We have never seen one, single instance of "creation" ex nihilo -- all we ever observe is stuff moving around. In fact, you are misusing the verb "to create" -- there is not one single instance of its use in human affairs outside of this hypothesis where the word does not implicitly mean "to rearrange pre-existing stuff into a particular shape". I don't "create" a house ex nihilo, I build it out of wood. The wood is not "created", it is assembled out of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen. The energy used to build it isn't "created", it is redirected from pre-existing energy in flow. We don't even create "ideas" out of nothing -- try staring at an empty bit of vacuum and see how many "ideas" pop out, try to imagine how they might be represented if they did. There is no particularly good reason to think that the Big Bang itself was
... solar collectors. One could make a hell of a hot water heater from a base that absorbed 99% of the (visible part of the) spectrum. One could make a fairly impressive collector for the generation of electricity as well. Imagine a 1 km^2 south-facing hillside covered with flat black panels under a transparent insulated airtight roof, leading up to a hilltop tower filled with turbines (top of tower some km or so above the air intake at the base of the hill). 700 megawatts (or so) peak absorption, even allowing for inefficiencies should allow for 100-200 MW peak electrical production. Ten such hills/towers is a GW of production that works best at just the time of day that demand for electricity peaks in hot climates. And running the collector up a hillside is such an obvious improvement over e.g. the Australian model of a solar updraft tower poking straight up out of a plain covered with the collector. Why engineer a kilometer plus high tower straight up in the middle of a flat when nature provides you with all or most of that kilometer for free, at the top of a slope conveniently tipped to optimize the reception of solar flux? Not to mention the fact that many such hillsides are "wasted space" as far as utility is concerned, good for nothing but a view and located where nobody can even appreciate the view.
Sadly, all that they will do with this new material, I'm sure, is use it to build better stealth aircraft or the like. I'm surprised it isn't classified.
rgb
Sure, also because logic does not necessarily apply there. I didn't talk about proof for the transcendent. I have proof for the existence of a world, this one, that is transcendent for another (the abstraction defined by the POV of cellular automata), and not transcendent yet unreachable for the immanent implementations of it (the implementations of cellular auomata worlds) So in some cases a transcendent and unreachable world is prime cause for another. It tells nothing about our situation but it nullify the atheist theorem that: a transcendent creator cannot be proved (which is true) therefore it doesn't exist (true as the mere reformulation of the definition of transcendent) then, with a semantic trick, using this conclusion as if the transcendent creator cannot meta-exist. Since it meta exists for a cellular automata it COULD meta exist for us too.
You are missing a very important point -- I have not ever said that a creator cannot exist. I have said that there is no reason to think that one does. If you build a simulated world with internal rules and sufficient complexity that "life" emerges that is capable of making observations and inferring those consistent rules, and they never ever observe a violation of those rules and those rules fully explain everything that they see without gaps, while they could speculate about whether or not their "cosmos" is all that there is or if the Universe is larger it would be a capital mistake to conclude that it must be without evidence . While you are meditating upon this, think about how silly it would be for them to not only conclude that it must be larger, but to worship you -- its programmer, and petition you for favors (all with no evidence that the favors are ever granted), fight wars over your appearance, your gender, your name, whether or not some random accident is some kind of occult message from you, and use open extortion -- the claim that if they aren't "good" automatons and accept all of these baseless claims "on faith" that you their Programmer will one day pull the "bad" ones from a backup tape and place them in a simulation in an infinite loop where simulated fire burns their simulated asses so that their non-simulated self-awareness can experience simulated agony forever -- to gain a following that hands over simulated money and simulated power to simulated individuals... surely you see the problem. Santa Claus might exist in an alternate reality as well, but it is silly to speculate about whether or not he has cardiovascular disease or eats naughty children, and honestly, it is pretty much a waste of time to speculate that he exists in such a way at all.
You are attacking a straw man, in other words, not my actual arguments. I don't care if a God "could" exist. I note that there is no evidence that one does! Note how very simple it would be for you to communicate with your cellular automaton creatures, to let them know of your existence, to actually interact with them. Instead of doing so, you leave them particularly carefully alone -- so very carefully that they cannot find any trace of your existence no matter how carefully they look. In fact, they never see the smallest deviation from the rules of the cellular automaton you created that might "break the transcendence barrier". In such a case one really doesn't care that God exists, right? It's precisely like worrying about whether or not Santa Claus exists, but only in a part of the physical space-time cosmos 22 billion light years away. Even if he exists and could come here and visit to let us know that he exists, he doesn't. He stays home. Why, exactly, should we conclude that he exists (quite aside from the nearly infinite improbability)?
Another straw man: You persist in failing to recognize that the term Universe does not refer to our particular space-time in any of my responses -- I fully acknowledge that it could be larger and even have mentioned creditable efforts that propose
So we should reply instead with something like "A physicist, asked by a student to compute the gravitational field produced by a large bovine standing in a nearby field, replied with `First, assuming a spherical cow...'"?
Sorry, at 56 (hardly prime, but 57 is just around the corner) I'm reduced to making bad jokes as there will be no prizes for me this year. Besides, I just assigned the spherical cow problem (seriously) in my intro physics class. It makes a great homework assignment...;-)
rgb
So why are we speculating about the details of something unknowable, by definition? Because every time one tells something about unknowable things he must be aware of it.
There is an uncountable infinity of possible unknowable things, so in fact, one cannot possibly be aware of it. Furthermore one cannot even be certain of the truth of things one knows very well and are almost certainly true -- note the "almost". So no, every time one speaks of something unknowable one does not have to be aware of it. If this were true, one wouldn't be able to say anything but "I don't know", ever, which may be technically true (see David Hume, works of) but is pointless and useless.
Piffle. You're just using "dimension" in that way so you can...
No it was equivalent to domain, not a dimension in the physical sense, I'd violate what I have been criticizing up to this point.
Most unclear in the context of your discussion. When you refer to unknowable dimensions from which God did all sorts of transcendent magical stuff, once I get past the obvious oxymoron of the entire discussion what stands out is that they are dimensions, not psychological domains or aspects of the mapping between language and experience. This is made even worse by your assigning human moral qualities to the "God dimension", as I seem to recall you doing before, and insisting that they existed there a priori to humans capable of having such qualities or a society where morality is possible or relevant. All of which I object to in countless ways, but throwing them into transcendent dimensions there is just another way of saying you don't want to actually discuss what morality is and where it comes from. You've announced that it comes from nowhere. It's transcendent.
It is also impossible to prove or disprove the invisible pink unicorn, but since this world and the abstractions defined by the point of view of cellular automata define a situation in which our reality is the ultimate reason for an abstraction, yet that abstraction is a closed system that can't prove our reality, which for atheist would automatically disprove it, discussing a transcendent creator makes more sense than discussing the invisible pink unicorn. The form of the transcendent creator is irrelevant, the FSM is ok.
Sheer madness. It isn't possible to logically prove anything useful without unprovable assumptions that effectively beg the question. Surely you've read Hume, although it isn't just Hume. Read Morris Kline's Mathematics, The Loss of Certainty which, in addition to being a truly excellent book, will walk you through the reasons that even mathematicians no longer believe that mathematical conclusions can in any meaningful sense be considered unconditionally "true". Minimally they are axiomatic and hence contingent truth, but Godel has taught us that it is really much worse than that. This is before -- a priori, if you will -- you tackle the really serious problem of trying to infer truths about a presumed Universe external to your self awareness, known only through your sensory stream.
I will repeat -- the only sane thing to consider knowledge in the latter domain is probable truth, and probable truth can only be discerned by using a mix of empiricism and consistent -- not complete -- mathematics and logic as the basis of reason. Using that one can easily prove that pink unicorns probably do not exist, very probably indeed if you restrict the question to relevant existence rather than existence in that "transcendent" part of the Universe 200 billion light years away (outside of our light cone, hence by your narrow definition transcendent). The relevant part of the Universe is effectively here, on Earth, now or in the past. There we have no evidence of pink unicorns. We have a lot of evidence about many things that did or do exist. It is not unreasonable, statistically, to expect that if there were any around we would have found them by now, a
I hopefully always said "transcendent", not transcendental which then is to be considered the same word. I defined it All that can't be directly or indirectly experienced, that is the complement of reality defined as all that can be directly or indirectly experienced. To define something in term of the complement is not a problem for somebody that uses logic, I guess.
Not at all, but you didn't define it previously. By the way, transcendent and transcendental are the same as complement and complementary. So it doesn't really matter what you (or I) said here, the meaning is the same.
What is that meaning? Would that be "unknowable"? It would. Unknowable by definition.
So why are we speculating about the details of something unknowable, by definition?
As for claiming that color perception lives in a "different dimension" -- in an abstract sense sure. In a concrete sense, piffle. Unless and until you can prove this statement in some mathematically and empirically consistent way. Personally I would have used taste -- the salt dimension, sweet dimension, umami dimension. So, do they form a linear vector space? Is there a basis? Are these flavors orthogonal? What's the angle between sweet and umami in roasted peppers?
Piffle. You're just using "dimension" in that way so you can claim that there is transcendent dimension in which color or taste live, even though we experience color and taste so even if true the dimensions are not trascendent, or transcendental, or complementary to experienced reality. It's like claiming that mathematics lives in its own dimension or that mathematical truths are really true, only worse.
You then proceed to briefly paint the universe in term of rules, us in terms of dust (as the genesis says, "pulvis eris..."), but I am not disputing that. Not even, when reasoning as Christian, that there are billions of stars (some heretics told that about multiple worlds before galileo put the matter in the realm of science), that homo has been for millions years while Adam seems to come later, he probably is the first man not morphologically, he's the first man because he does whatever eating the fruit means (I dunno but it entails a different vision of self, as it's written but I badly digress).
Ah, you really should read my book -- The Book of Lilith. I do think you'd actually like it. It makes all of these points in far more detail than you are, as a mythopoeic work. And it's funny. The difference between us, of course, is that I can tell the difference between fantasy (as in improbable to be true, not impossible) and reality (as it probably true, based on what we know, not certainly true).
Yes, and even if you could explain it all, if we keep asking why, the last answer is, because the rules say so. Then we discuss if no other rule is logically possible, if logic derived from observing a world will always validate it...
No, no, no. You don't get the point. One cannot ever answer the super-ultimate why question in a way that could be considered knowledge. You can assert God is the reason for everything, but that is meaningless, because there is no evidence suggesting that God is the reason for everything, and because if God is the reason for everything, what is the reason for God? What is the reason for that reason?
A causal chain can only be explored in time, and even there one has to carefully distinguish between a high level semantic "cause" -- I was sad today "because somebody broke my dolly" and microscopic causality and deterministic causal chains. The only answer to the question "Why does the Universe exist" is "Given that the Universe exists, why not?"
If you assert God is that which needs no cause, the uncaused cause, then prove it! Show me evidence! Otherwise you are just writing symbols down on a page that I can understand, but they are hardly "logically nec
You can use 900-dimensional vectors but can you visualize 4 space dimensional data easily?
How do the synapses fire in 3d? we are 4d.
Make up your mind. Either I am 4d and can easily visualize 4d or I'm 3d and can visualize 4d or I'm 4d but can't visualize 4d let alone 900d. Or whatever. But quite aside from that, "comprehend" and "visualize" do not mean the same thing. I can easily comprehend a 900 dimensional Euclidean space or (for that matter) an infinite-dimensional space. I can't visualize all of the dimensions of an infinite dimensional space because, well, there are an infinite number of them. So your somewhat confused objection is completely irrelevant to what I actually said.
I say that if no transcendent creator exists this is the scenario. You say that since no transcendent creator exists this is the scenario. The funny thing, even if you formalized and experimentally replicated the conditions under which a conscience emerge, you still haven't said if it belongs into other dimensions, like or unlike ours and you are unable to. To be more clear, a cellular automaton whose behaviour i control (within the limits imposed by the simulation) is indistinguishable from all the others. That doesn't prove I don't really control it.
You seem to constantly refer to simulations and computer models, so I'm guessing that you must be a computer scientist. You also keep using the word "assume" to mean something that it does not really mean -- as my wife is fond of saying "assume" makes an ass out of u and me. You say "no transcendental creator" -- which I still assert is an utterly meaningless statement unless and until you suitably define what a transcendental anything is, let along a "creator" -- equates to an assumption that self awareness will emerge from some automata. I did not say anything about whether or not a transcendental creator exists, and certainly didn't posit it as a condition of my statement. I said that there is empirical evidence that self awareness in fact emerged from the laws of nature with not one single shred of evidence of a "guiding hand", transcendental or otherwise.
Whether you want to consider the laws of nature rules for some of cellular automaton or not (personally I think that this is bending the correct description more than a bit, although I appreciate what you mean well enough to not care) I am not making an assumption that begs the question -- you, my friend, are doing that. What I'm doing is putting the cart firmly where it belongs, behind the horse. Even the most cursory study of the night sky reveals that the Universe is vast and complex and very, very old. We are made of second generation stardust, matter forged in the hearts of stars that were born, lived and died billions of years ago. As we look at the heavens, at the earth, from the microcosm to the macrocosm all that we see is matter and energy doing a dance without mind, following rules that appear to be both mathematically rigorous and rather amazing in the way their very simplicity leads to complexity. We can use these rules (the ones we have been able to infer so far) and understand almost everything we see. If we look at the rocks of the earth, the fossil record embedded in those rocks, and our own DNA and the DNA of other living things we can see the direct evidence of a process of evolution from beginnings so humble they might as well be cellular automata in a remarkably simple chemical game of Life. We can simulate these early beginnings. We can study and understand and simulate nearly every step in the process, and there is no good reason to think that the ones we cannot yet demonstrate will turn out to be "impossible" to occur in exactly the same mechanical, mindless way everything we can see has happened. We can and do make evolution happen in the lab, and we can see evolution happening in the wild, in many cases far faster than we'd like.
Evolution, in other words, is as close
Ah, sir, you rise to the challenge.
You are reasoning under the bold, if not irrational assumption that this world's logic and concepts can be translated 1:1 to the creator's domain.
I am indeed, my friend. Because they aren't "this world's logic and concepts", as you implicitly if oxymoronically imply by accusing me of being irrational because I use logic. The law of contradiction is the basis of logic and contradictory things are impossible in all domains; reason itself relies on logic in so many ways. In fact the very meaning of the word "senseless" describes your arguemnt perfectly when you begin by asserting that sense (logical consistency) has no meaning when applied to god. When you begin a logical argument by denying the utility of logic and common sense, you become, quite literally, senseless.
For the creatures of a 2d cellular automata simulations, the concept of height is beyond comprehension. Plato's cave.
Piffle. We live in a "three dimensional" world. I'm a physicist and mathematician. I can, and do, work in and with infinite dimensional vector spaces all the time -- they are difficult the first time you encounter them but hardly "beyond comprehension". Oh yeah, and let's not forget that "time" thing. Another dimension, as we managed to conceive with our three dimensional brains. So I'm not sure what your point is, stating something that is patently false. I also don't know why you assert Plato's Cave; on the one hand it is very relevant indeed, but on the other hand, not the way you think it is. The prisoners within the cave may well be mistaken in the conclusions they draw from their senses, sir, but that does not justify them engaging in wild flights of fancy as they try to infer the structure that casts the shadows upon the walls of their cave. Ultimately, their inferences have to be reasonable and consistent with their experience -- see remarks above about logic and common sense, their imaginings of the causes of those shadows cannot be self contradictory and correct, and if they have no predictive value on the behavior of the shadows they are fantasy, they violate mere common sense.
Little OT For sufficiently complex cellular automata simulations you have to assume self conscience will eventually emerge for some automata, else it breaks the atheist model and all those with immanent-only gods.
Not off topic at all -- in our discussion -- but false. This isn't assumed at all. You can empirically observe that you yourself are conscious, and also observe that your consciousness is strictly and reproducibly tied to the function of a collection of matter with a good deal of organization, and infer from more empirical evidence that your hardware, that absolutely obeys physical laws that make it, if you like, a "cellular automaton", emerged from a process of natural selection and evolution. No "assumptions" at all, at least that are not well-supported by both reason and evidence, which means that they are not assumptions, they are probable truths.
So, to be precise, I should have said: "If you believe in a creator belonging to a transcendent dimension with a property comparable to our will..."
Which means what, exactly? What is a "transcendent dimension"? What is "a dimensional property comparable to our will"? These are meaningless terms. When you speak of "believing" in a creator that belongs to such a thing, you are basically saying "I have no idea where God is, or how he came to be there" because you have no evidence that other dimensions exist at all, let alone dimensions with the property of being "transcendent" (which means nothing at all as far as I can tell in any context I've ever heard it used in, it is a term usually used when somebody is about to engage in bullshit philosophy and make an absolutely indefensible argument, which they defend by asserting that it is "transcendental" even though in math, logic, reason, e
Perfectly said, sir grcumb. It also forces one to confront the dazzling vector of "God Hypotheses" and models, which is quite literally infinitely long. Should we be worshipping Zeus? Yahweh? Mumbo Jumbo? Baron Saturday? The Flying Spaghetti Monster? J. R. "Bob" Dobbs? Odin? Krishna? Osiris? Is God a bodiless spirit, a being that is embodied and sort of like us only magic, living in this dimension with other Gods, living in alternate dimensions alone, a female principle, a male principle a quadrigendered principle? Is God a "Standard Model of God" deity (omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent) or is God limited, creating the best of all possible worlds (which turns out not to be all that great) as the solution to the problem of theodicy? Is the cosmos this deity created real and material, real and ideal, or are we spirits in a vat and the world just "the Matrix", a vast simulation embedded in a completely different reality? And can we be safe limiting our imaginations of God to just the human myths we've come up with so far? Probably not, right? So we have to include not only the gods and mythos of existing religions, we have to worry about the possible Gods of all conceivable religions as all names go into the same hat in the lack of evidence, we just may not yet have thought up the right model or arrangement without any experience or evidence to guide us. Fictional Gods -- Cthulhu, Marduk, Elbereth, the nameless Gods of books yet unwritten -- any model or structuring of data that isn't self-contradictory is possible, and without evidence they are all equally possible and hence by dilution nearly infinitely improbable in a maximum ignorance statement of probability theory.
The amazing thing is that the most rabid mouth-foaming theists are quite skilled at this argument themselves. They have no difficulty whatsoever rejecting nearly all the names/models on the infinite, mostly unwritten list above. A Christian finds Hinduism laughably wrong. A Hindu has no difficulty whatsoever in seeing the flaws in and improbability of Islam. A Muslim can easily see that Joseph Smith (Dum Dum Dum) pretty much made up The Book of Mormon and that there were no golden plates, no angel Moron, that there were no pre-Columbian steel swords or magnetic compasses or old world plants or animals in the new world, and that God doesn't whiten the faces of people who are pure and darken the faces of those that are impure (making skin color into litmus that tests how much God loves you). Heck, everybody on the planet but a moron can see that.
Might as well roll dice to figure out what to worship without evidence, and by evidence I mean the real thing, pure quill, not ancient mythologies written by our superstitious and ignorant Bronze Age cultural ancestors...
rgb
Yes, I mean "accounting for the red-shift". In fact, two sources of the red shift.
(He gravely bows in your general direction) Thank you, kind sir.
I understand the point -- it is indeed "until now", but there is a vast preponderance of data in prior existence where it appears to be quite constant. Also, as noted above, their results have been presented before and challenged in the literature on what appear to be sound grounds, including a certain statistical weakness that is often the signature of bad science. The rules of science mean that new, extraordinary results and their attendant claims are false until proven otherwise by a wealth of new data -- extraordinary evidence, in other words, not marginal evidence that might yet be explained by something as mundane as a light switch being turned on and off (like one of the "magnetic monopole" discoveries turned out to be, for example). That isn't to say that monopoles may not exists, somewhere -- possibly in those same distant quasars -- or that the fine structure constant really isn't a variable, only that even if the observations themselves are accurate, this may not be the only explanation (and there is a rather good chance that the observations are not accurate).
Note well; I got no dog in this fight, no pony in the race. If I teach quantum theory, it's all the same to me to teach it with the addendum "\alpha is the fine structure parameter" instead of "constant". I am, therefore, perfectly happy for those claims to eventually be validated, but in the meantime I remain skeptical and I do have to say that if I were them, I wouldn't be purchasing my tickets to Stockholm quite yet...;-)
rgb
Sigh. And what are those "hands" made of, what are the controls used, what are the even more fundamental constants of the Universe in which those hands and controls are constructs?
I know, I know. They are "magic", right? Or you will say something like "I don't know" as if the very impossibility of imagining a model meta-Universe containing God (and then a meta-meta-Universe and so on as needed) is some sort of excuse for claiming that this one requires an outside explanation (God) but God's Universe does not. Not to mention the fact that the word Universe means everything that has ever existed, exists, or will exist, not "the particular space-time continuum in which we appear to reside", making all of these metas logically inconsistent.
It is, in other words, logically impossible -- self-contradictory -- for the statement "God created the Universe" to be true. This is an ontological impossibility, not just "it's too difficult", or "it's unlikely", or "there is no evidence that it happened" (all of which are separately true but on the basis very different lines of reasoning). God cannot create a Universe without existing, and if God exists God is at least part of if not all of the Universe, in which case God didn't create the Universe either. Indeed the only logically consistent way to imagine God is for God to be the Universe; at least this is ontologically consistent (even with Anselm's silly "proof"). If God is the Universe, then quite literally nothing could be greater because the Universe is everything, the Universal set. In all other cases the Universe contains God and something else that is not-God, and is literally greater in the mathematically ordinal sense than God.
So if God exists, God is the Universe (or is not God, just a very powerful natural being). We can then ask the empirical question: is there evidence to support the suggestion that the Universe has free will, can think, can observe, can change, can experience time's entropy-driven arrow, and thus or still be God. The answer there is totally obvious. There is no evidence for a single one of these claims. There is no model that supports the idea that it is possible that they could be true. There are further inconsistencies buried within these claims -- the Universe contains all space(s) and all time(s) that have the property of objective existence, and hence it is difficult to understand how it could be anything but geometrically static. It contains all the information that exists, and hence it is very difficult to imagine a source of entropy (missing information) for it, or a mechanism whereby "reasoned action in time" becomes possible. There is no "meta time" in which the Universe can evolve that is not a part of the Universe and hence Universally stationary.
We exist, we live, on the cusp between a partially known past and an unknown future. Our experiencing of time is a differential thing that requires entropy, a lack of knowledge of outcomes, a series of ongoing free energy changes as we interact with and exchange information with the not-me part of all things. There is no not-me for a possible standard model God, no missing information (or else God is not omniscient, for example). God as the Universe has no more free will than a burned CD, because as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be is static, unchanging, not alive and responsive.
Your God, sir, is a God of the gaps, as it ever was. You are ignorant of the possible causes and arrangements of certain things (part of that entropy) and assert God to fill in the missing bits. Yet whenever we actually look for missing bits, we often find the missing bits but not God. 2000 years ago, God caused disease, devils caused mental illness, God hung the stars on the solid bowl of the sky. Now we look and know that disease has many causes, and God is not visible in any of them. Mental illness
Sir, you are a gentleman and a scholar, and should be revered by your peers and worshipped openly by your many, many inferiors.
I sincerely regret the abuse that I'm certain will be heaped upon you for having the temerity to state the obvious and worse, actually back it up with references. Be thankful that at least it is difficult to reach you with pitchforks and torches.
Ah, well, you tried. I guess I'll continue to skim down and glance at the abuse.
rgb
And if you defined pi (incorrectly) as the number of radians in the sum of the angles of a triangle, you'd be right! Good job!
rgb
Explanation: a) "Because it works, pretty much, to explain all or nearly all of the observational data, including things like the fact that spectral lines from very distant suns are recognizably correspondent with the lines as measured in a laboratory on Earth. Note that (for example) those lines are predicted, in part, by the fine structure constant, which is why there is rather enormous opposition to the notion that it isn't constant. It is visibly constant almost anywhere we look, or the entire field of spectroscopy would be inconsistent and inexplicable observations would exist in abundance; b) See a). The problem is that there is a lot of data that is perfectly consistent with \alpha being constant. There is a nearly complete lack of data suggesting otherwise. That doesn't mean that it is constant -- \alpha could easily be a quantity that follows from a far more general physics in higher dimensions that isn't homogeneous -- and belief that it is isn't religious belief. It is that one would rather have expected spectroscopy to have egregiously failed long before this if it were not a constant, and it hasn't. Or if it has, this is the first announcement that may or may not prove to be a reliable observation of an exception.
The point is, it is best to believe the things that best fit the data (and satisfy a few other requirements, such as consistency, parsimony, and so on) all the time, but not unreasonably best belief moves around as we obtain more data and discover and resolve inconsistencies. It moves around slowly because we have learned from experience to doubt observations unless/until a certain standard of consistency, parsimony, observational reproducibility, and so on has been reached. New physics is always great fun, skepticism is better than unreasoning belief, but reasoned, evidence-based conditional belief, believing the most in those things one can doubt the least (when one tries to doubt very hard), is a lot better than jumping on and believing every half-assed claim that is made on the basis of possibly flawed methodology and revelling in it just because it proves that "we don't know everything" and that therefore, very smart people aren't as smart as they think they are (closing the gap mentally between yourself, so quick to see the truth of it all, and them, the fools).
Does that pretty much sum up much of the discussion above, so far?
A sound result will prove to be reproducible and even a sound result (as far as the observation is concerned) may have many possible explanations, including (quite possibly) ones that don't mess with the fine structure constant. For example, the precession of the orbit of mercury could be viewed as a violation of the law of gravitation, and in one sense it is, but in a deeper sense it is not -- gravity is all right but it needs to be formulated in a relativistically curved spacetime -- the real error is in assumptions made about space and time itself, not "gravity".
rgb
Is this the latest version of the creationist argument? I'm just curious. We've gone from "we were handmade out of clay" to "conditions were set (by a vast entity with enormous amounts of organized structure that surely must be emergent temporal order arising from a set of internal rules governing the parts from which it is composed) so that we (humans) would randomly evolve"? Isn't the oxymoron in their apparent? The whole, vast range of oxymorons?
rgb
If you believe, a god can fine tune whatever he wants from the very beginning, if you don't nothing is tuned because there is not the tuner.
Not quite correctly stated. The conclusion has nothing to do with what you believe, it is a belief. The correct statement would be something like: "If a god exists and has sufficient complexity to be considered `alive' and `sentient' and sufficient entropy to be able to experience something like `desire' -- all necessary to "want something", and if there is such a thing as a `beginning' (implying a rather deep broken symmetry in one spatiotemporal variable) -- all of which seem somewhat implausible if not downright self-contradictory a priori, or rather `from the beginning', since it seems as though things would have to be fairly amazingly tuned without any tuner for any one of these conditions to be true, given the scale of and any plausible model for the structure of `god' -- then god and the universe would a) be the same thing, as the universe is everything that exists and god (if god exists) is as great as everything that exists Q.E.D.; b) would be hellaciously tuned to produce whatever else is tuned as an impossible act of will by that god, without a meta-god tuner."
In other words, "Piffle".
rgb