Just to chime in a bit on the graphing calculators for exams issue, if the exams in your class can be trivially passed by somebody who just wrote a few notes down on a calculator, then what the hell is the point of that class in the first place? It might as well not exist at all. Furthermore, in the real world, you will pretty much always have access to a graphing calculator (or something vastly more capable), so what is the point in hobbling students for such artificial reasons?
The answer, it seems to me, is to do one of two things:
1. Force students to show all of their work. This way they might be able to use a calculator's equation solver to check the answer, but they actually have to know how to do it to get any credit.
2. Focus on understanding instead of memorization. If you force your students to actually think, no amount of written-down formulas or equation solvers will give them the answer. In fact, better to assume that many of the students will have access to this sort of technology, and craft the exams so that it makes no difference whatsoever.
Again, in the real world, the students will have access to tables and whatnot to find whatever you might otherwise want them to memorize in a test. All they need to know is how to look things up quickly, and with practice they'll memorize anything and everything that they actually make use of frequently. The stuff they don't make use of frequently they'll forget anyway, so what's the point?
Anyway, all that said, graphing calculators are still quite useful to me from time to time. I obviously won't do any serious calculation on them, but my trusty old TI-89 is very useful for checking my work (e.g. ensuring that a program I wrote to compute some numerical result works as advertised). It's also very useful for getting quick answers to simple calculations that are just a bit too complex for the Google calculator. Sure, it'd be nice if it had a faster processor, but for the most part I'm limited by inputting the formulas, not the processing time.
This largely might just be an aspect of white blood cells themselves. Immune cells have ways to circumvent the normal safeguards that ensure high-fidelity copying of DNA, in order to evolve quickly in response to disease (specifically, to produce new antibodies, the B-cells go into a stage of cell division, somatic hypermutation, where they average about one mutation per gene per cell division). Since this is a study within white blood cells, it wouldn't at all surprise me that this low-fidelity copying was either another aspect of this same function, or a side effect of it.
There's also the possibility that this rapid evolution of the B-cells used has messed up their measurements, but surely the experimental team would have taken this into account. I hope.
A reasonable evaluation was already pointed out in the summary to the article, by Max Tegmark, who is a practicing physicist, and who pointed out that he would need more evidence to be convinced it's not just systematic errors. I would personally go even further and say it's almost certainly systematic errors. Just looking at the abstract makes this patently clear, as they find the opposite effect claimed in previous studies. They claim large statistical significance, of course, but when your result changes so dramatically from previous results, well, that sounds more like they're not properly estimating their errors.
While I still hold that the particular god which Plantinga pointed out cannot possibly exist, it isn't necessary. This is because there are not two options, but three:
1. Assume that this god can exist.
2. Assume that this god cannot exist.
3. Leave open the question of whether this god can or cannot exist.
One need only take the third position to demonstrate that Plantinga's argument boils down to assuming that this god exists.
Yes -- but no more so than the assumption that such a god is not possible.
It doesn't matter. It's still an assumption in the argument, one that isn't necessarily the case, and thus the argument cannot possibly be a proof of the existence of a god.
It all just boils down to one single assumption: god is possible. But by this modal logic, anything that is possible is necessarily true. Thus in modal S5, the assumption that a god is possible is the assumption that a god exists.
The rest of the argument is just window dressing, an attempt to deceive the reader into thinking that they've actually proven something, when in reality they're just assuming the conclusion from the start.
Not quite right. That's true of classical logic, but modal logics contain some assumptions about reality (specifically concerning possibility and necessity), so within a modal logic it is possible to demonstrate something about the "reality" that the logic describes. The issue is whether that "reality" is the one in which we live -- my point of disagreement with Plantinga -- but that's undecidable by observation.
But that's passing the buck from the logical argument to the logical system. It still leaves open the question as to whether or not the logical system applies to reality, in which case it is still up to observation to determine whether or not the premises (or conclusions) are true.
As for the "meaningless statement" issue with regard to omnipotence, if we take the classic one, "Can God make a rock so heavy he can't lift it?" this is far from a meaningless statement, because I can make a rock so heavy I can't lift it (granted, I can't create it from scratch, but I can form it from existing rocks). The statement only becomes ridiculous when you apply the attribute of omnipotence to the god. For instance, we can imagine a god that can create all the rocks he wants, of whatever size he wants, but isn't able to actually pick them up, in which case the answer would be yes. Or we might imagine a god that is stupendously strong (rather like a strong person) but can't create rocks, and thus the answer would be no.
Anyway, even if you don't accept the argument from evil, you still can't demonstrate that a god is actually possible, because to do that you'd have to show how such a god is consistent with the fundamental rules that underly reality, which we don't know. So the assumption that such a god is possible at all is still an unfounded assumption.
There's a final problem with this sort of logical argument that makes the whole thing just plain stupid instead of subtle: the whole thing boils down to, "The most amazing thing I can imagine must exist, therefore god exists." And no, that's patently absurd, because there is absolutely no guarantee that just because we can imagine it, it must be possible. This sort of logical argument, in other words, boils down to a play on words to disguise just how ridiculous it is.
Doesn't work that way. Expressing absolute certainty on some claim about the nature of reality, of course, requires faith (unless it's absolute certainty that a nonsensical claim cannot be true, of course, because no nonsensical claim can be true...it's nonsensical!).
But it requires no faith whatsoever to consider a creator god to be extremely unlikely, based on the complete lack of evidence, and the complexity of the proposed entity. One way to look at it is this: either we have a universe, or we have a universe + complex god. If we have no evidence whatsoever to distinguish between the two, the first (just a universe) is far more likely to be correct, because it proposes fewer hypothetical entities.
Of course, some apologists have attempted to claim that their god is actually simple, but they don't actually argue this, they simply define their god as simple and pretend that solves the problem. The second they start tacking on other god-like attributes besides simplicity, though, this simplicity is utterly destroyed (e.g. omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, or even the ability to think at all).
This view always leaves open the possibility that a god will someday be discovered, but it requires that strong evidence be presented.
Evidence? That Jesus rose from the dead? Seriously? The only evidence of that is in the Bible itself, and even those accounts disagree on a number of crucial points! There is zero, repeat zero secular historical evidence of Jesus even being crucified, let alone rising from the dead. Hell, we don't even know where he was supposed to have been buried.
To add to this, the extra-biblical evidence for Jesus even existing in the first place is questionable at best. All of the evidence that does exist can be trivially interpreted as the historians of the day reporting on the beliefs/statements of the Christians of the day.
If you want to think that, "Hey, a bunch of people saw it, so it must be true!" counts as evidence, then you have to believe a lot of stupid crap.
Sorry, but logic doesn't work this way. A logical proof only guarantees that if the premises of the argument are true, then the conclusions must also be true. Because of this, it is fundamentally impossible for a logical proof to demonstrate anything about the nature of reality. You must have at least one input assumption no matter what. This is why all results in science are necessarily contingent upon observation/experiment. Ontological attempts at proving a god (or anything else) are guaranteed to fail before they even begin.
One problem with Plantinga's argument is that he assumes it is possible for an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent entity to exist, but this is exactly the kind of god we know cannot exist because of the problem of evil (never mind the logical self-inconsistency of omnipotence). Because of this, Plantinga's "maximal greatness" is a malformed statement that has no meaning, and the whole proof crashes in on itself.
As for Stephen Hawking's argument, I'd have to read the book, but in principle it is completely accurate that there is simply no reason to believe in one.
No, the Cassini observation of no measurable change in the radioactive decay rate, would completely and utterly destroy the hypothesis that changes in neutrino flux from the Sun is causing this, provided their observations aren't many of orders of magnitude more precise than those measuring the decay rate on Cassini.
The problem is the fact that the neutrino flux from the Sun varies only by a few percent (3% change in distance with season would lead to about a 6% change in the neutrino flux), but in its travels to Saturn, which is 9.5 times as far away from the Sun as the Earth, the neutrino flux would have dropped by a factor of 90. If it's a small, but detectable effect here on Earth, then, it would be a huge effect on Cassini by comparison.
Also remember that the supposed variation from the rotation of the Sun is much smaller than the seasonal variation.
There isn't any reasonable possibility that this could be caused by any sort of electromagnetic field variation or charged particle. The problem is that we're protected from such things by our atmosphere and the magnetic field of our planet. Yes, it is true that strong electromagnetic fields can cause variations in decay rates, but the changes in electromagnetic fields we get on the ground as a result of solar flares (even the largest of them) are very small by comparison.
Neutrinos, however, only interact through the weak force, having no electric charge, and have no problem passing right through the Earth. As a result, they are plausible mechanism by which the Sun's activity could effect radioactive decay rates (which operate by the weak force).
Plants grow by reproduction of their constituent parts. This isn't exactly an argument for a capacity limited to intelligences. So I fail to see the relevance. I may just be obtuse; please explain.
The point is that reproduction is fundamentally a different process from construction. Perhaps a way to see this is to consider that nowhere in the DNA is a blueprint for a body. The majority of the function of DNA can be reduced to coding for proteins. This basically means that a strand of DNA within a cell codes for a set of proteins to be produced which alter the behavior of that cell. Bodies are not built based upon any sort of blueprint (like a machine is built), but instead by local components operating on local rules.
Complex shapes in bodies are grown by different clumps of cells growing faster than other clumps of cells. Different tissues are produced by turning on and off different genes.
This is fundamentally different from a construction process because the end product is not contained in the DNA. Instead, the end product is a result of complex interactions between the DNA, the cell, and the environment in which the cell resides. This means, for instance, that some of the same bits of DNA that are used to build a hand are also used to build a foot. Some of the same bits to build parts of an ear are also used to build parts of the jaw.
This is to be contrasted with a constructed machine, where if we imagine a human-like robot (two legs, two arms, head), I might decide to swap out the arms for a different set, give it longer or shorter legs, or remove the legs entirely for a set of Johnny 5 treads. You can't do this sort of thing with a biological organism.
And this difference makes for one extremely crucial distinction between the two: machines are wholly deterministic entities, where you start with a blueprint and, up to small manufacturing errors, know exactly what you're going to get out the other end. Life forms are a combination of determinism and randomness, and you never know exactly what you're going to get once you start a life form growing. This randomness, as it turns out, is an exceedingly useful quality that allows us to be creative, to be inventive, and to survive where we otherwise might not.
As a final note on reproduction, it turns out that biological organisms are only limited by the food/resource capacity of their environment. They always expand to consume everything that can be consumed, and do so remarkably rapidly. The issue here is that exponential growth is a tremendous thing, and any time an organism is using fewer resources than it otherwise could, it (or some other life form) rapidly grows to fill that void.
Sure, it may look slow on the level of an individual person, where the generation times may be 20-30 years, but it doesn't take long to turn a few million people into a few billion, once they can produce the resources to sustain them.
Machines, by contrast, have the problem that production is linear: in order to produce more machines, you first have to produce the capacity to produce more machines, which takes time. People simply reproduce.
Another point is that while it may at first seem that having to relearn everything is a drawback, I would argue that in aggregate, it actually turns out to be a benefit.
Sure, lots of time and energy may be wasted in re-learning the things the previous generation already learned, but the benefit this provides is really priceless: creativity. Having to re-learn the things the previous generation already knows allows for a fresh perspective. It allows the next generation to escape from old ways of thinking, and approach the same problems in their own ways.
Yes, it is conceivable that a machine civilization could have its own ways of achieving creative insights, but there is no guarantee that this would occur, and I'm somewhat doubtful it can be anywhere near as effective as a biological civilizat
This claim of yours is clearly using a different definition for "machine" than I used. It's a word game, not an argument.
I thought it was pretty clear that I was making use of a colloquial definition of machine. Perhaps the broadest definition one might use of this sort of machine might be a complex device built by assembling pieces. This is as opposed to biological organisms that grow through subsequent reproduction of their constituent parts (that is, cell division).
We're not going to construct any sort of "machine" that reproduces in the same way we do that will be capable of outpacing ourselves, simply because we aren't anywhere near clever enough to outdo some 3+ billion years of evolution. And we're probably not going to produce constructed machines that can build a more efficient society that advances more rapidly than our own, just because I doubt that such a society could even be self-sustaining, given the maintenance requirements alone.
While our popular culture seems to be very keen on the idea that machines will, at some point, surpass people, there really isn't much reason to believe this to be the case. This isn't to say that we're these absurdly amazing beings that can't be surpassed, but rather that we don't have any evidence that machines would constitute a form of life that could be more innovative, more inventive, more creative. One can have all the ability in the world to solve complex mathematical equations, for instance, but applying that to real-world situations requires a fair bit of creativity.
This isn't to say that machines can't possibly exceed our abilities, but I'm going to remain skeptical until I see somebody demonstrate it. Even then, there are maintenance and reproduction issues. We're talking about not just an isolated individual machine being more capable than a human, after all, but building an entire civilization with these machines, which would have all sorts of resource and production requirements just to function. We already know how to build a civilization based upon people, and it is doubtful that machine life could ever take off here without us figuring out how to build for them a working machine civilization.
Based on this, my personal speculation is that we are far more likely to modify and improve ourselves than we are to build our own successors.
As a side comment, however, the SETI work is as likely to work for a machine civilization as a biological one. What they are searching for, after all, is extra-terrestrial technology, not extra terrestrials themselves. There's no reason to believe that a machine civilization, were one to exist, would produce fewer radio waves than a biological one.
I don't think this is a serious criticism. First, if there is no significant difference between the current edition and the previous one, then if you find yourself with the old one when taking a class (e.g. from buying a used copy), you're not losing much. If there are significant differences, then it's not a scam, is it?
But perhaps more to the point, I don't see how there is any significant amount of profit motive for releasing new versions without reason. Consider that if there is no significant difference, then there is very little additional incentive for people to buy the new revision as opposed to the older used one. Essentially zero students will ever have a cause to re-purchase a newer revision of a book they already purchased (because usually they only use the book for a year, maybe two in extreme cases).
So no, I don't think the small profit motive of getting a small boost in new book sales, a boost that might not even be noticeable, once every few years is incentive enough to do this. Seems to me it's more just a matter of the text book authors caring about accuracy and keeping their text up to date.
As much as I dislike the overly-zealous copyright predation by groups like the RIAA, it seems to me that there is a clear and distinct line drawn the second a person attempts to profit off of the work of another. I fully expect this person to get sued to hell and back, and for the publisher to get a large settlement for punitive damages. And I think that'd be entirely the right thing to do. That or throw the thieving bastard into jail, one of the two.
I know that some people may be nervous about this sort of tracking information, but it really does sound like a step forward to me. There are only two caveats I would have:
1. Reporting should be voluntary, and made completely clear to the end user (looks to be the case currently, if I'm reading this correctly).
2. Any information collected should be of the anonymous sort. It would make sense, for instance, to send hardware information in order to prioritize driver development, but it would be stepping over the line to send in software usage information, such as videos watched or songs played. So the current information sent obviously fits under this, but they could expand it quite a bit to help end-users' experience.
No, no there really isn't a debate about causation. Increase in CO2 concentrations are most definitely the primary cause here. Beyond that, things get more uncertain, naturally. But there really isn't any question any longer that CO2 is the primary climate forcing that has changed the temperature of the planet since around the 1970's.
Yeah, that's got nothing at all to do with anything that deglr6328 pointed out. Where, in his post, did he mention at all the identity or even qualifications of the author?
In this case, there are a few ways in which the author could have made his paper more credible, all without requiring anything resembling authority:
1. Collaborated with other condensed matter physicists.
2. Submitted paper for publication in prestigious journal (with a high-profile discovery like room-temperature superconductivity, this would be a discovery fit for such a journal).
3. Worked to get more comprehensive data before claiming room-temperature superconductivity.
This is pretty much bullshit. There are two big reasons why scientific groups hold off before releasing all of their results. The first is simple rigor: things that may seem exciting early-on may turn to evaporate once better checks are performed. If every scientific group published their results the second they thought they had something interesting, then the world would be suffused with confusing and incorrect information.
Instead, by allowing scientific groups to act as a first quality check on the data, we get an overall improvement in the quality of the results.
The second reason has to do with secondary conclusions based upon the data. Basically, if the experimental team was going to release their data in full to everybody before the people working on the secondary results had a chance to get started, then nobody in their right mind would work on secondary results with that team.
Why is this a bad thing? Because it is in studying these secondary results that a lot of the errors in the original data analysis come to light. A good experiment really needs a full start-to-finish data analysis pipeline going if they're going to produce high-quality work, and to do that they need to embargo their data until the secondary analysis is finished.
I'd like to mention that though many journals have publication fees, not all do. If you hunt around a bit, or ask somebody in the field, they should be able to point you to a free journal.
As a researcher in Physics, here are what I would suggest.
First, getting your paper out there for other people to see is the easy part: just post it on arxiv.org. Free, open for everybody, and easy to submit to. It also has the bonus of offering the LaTeX source of most papers submitted to it, meaning that you can just download a closely-related paper, and copy their formatting! Often specific journals also have their own LaTeX formatting rules and support files, so if you are able to pick out a specific, look at what they have.
Now, for the paper itself, you primarily need two big things:
1. Clarity.
2. Context.
Clarity is absolutely essential. You need to explain your idea in full, with enough detail that another person can fully replicate your results. Explaining your reasoning for doing it a certain way, and also presenting evidence for why it should be this way instead of some other is also paramount. For this algorithm, for instance, both numerical stability under a wide range of coordinate choices and performance are going to be important metrics with which to judge the work.
Context is also essential. This means that you have to show the reader of your paper where the paper fits within the total body of literature. You need, in short, to start looking through the literature surrounding this sort of algorithm, and discover what has already been written. If you don't do this, the first thing you risk doing is simply replicating what somebody else has already done (in which case nobody will care about your paper). Or perhaps even worse, you risk making obvious mistakes that others have already shown are bad things to do (for one reason or another). There's also the positive that they can give you ideas for things you didn't think about in your own work, ways to make your own algorithm even better.
So, if you really want to write a proper research paper, if I were you I'd first sit down and try to find out what other people have written on this topic. If you can get a hold of a comp sci professional who works in even a related area, they could be a tremendous help for finding you relevant papers and information to get you started. Then, once you've read and understood at least a few related papers, you should have the added bonus of getting a grasp of the overall structure and format to use for your own paper. You can get an idea of the overall context by at least skimming some of the papers they reference, and that should help you build a nice introduction. You might also get an idea of what journals you can submit to, and start trying there.
Anyway, that's what I have to say on the subject. Best of luck to you!
And it's hardly surprising, or unknown. Basically, organisms haven't just evolved to a very specific environment, but have also evolved to manage environments that change with time. The ability to pass on certain very specific acquired characteristics is still an evolved trait.
The point with Lamarck was that he thought that all traits behaved in this way, an idea which was easily disproven. It is only a subset of non-genetic traits which are passed to offspring, and then only because specific mechanisms have been put in place by evolution to do so.
From what I understand, many biologists are currently hard at work understanding the non-genetic paths of inheritance (called epigenetics), which include a variety of different things.
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Just to chime in a bit on the graphing calculators for exams issue, if the exams in your class can be trivially passed by somebody who just wrote a few notes down on a calculator, then what the hell is the point of that class in the first place? It might as well not exist at all. Furthermore, in the real world, you will pretty much always have access to a graphing calculator (or something vastly more capable), so what is the point in hobbling students for such artificial reasons?
The answer, it seems to me, is to do one of two things:
1. Force students to show all of their work. This way they might be able to use a calculator's equation solver to check the answer, but they actually have to know how to do it to get any credit.
2. Focus on understanding instead of memorization. If you force your students to actually think, no amount of written-down formulas or equation solvers will give them the answer. In fact, better to assume that many of the students will have access to this sort of technology, and craft the exams so that it makes no difference whatsoever.
Again, in the real world, the students will have access to tables and whatnot to find whatever you might otherwise want them to memorize in a test. All they need to know is how to look things up quickly, and with practice they'll memorize anything and everything that they actually make use of frequently. The stuff they don't make use of frequently they'll forget anyway, so what's the point?
Anyway, all that said, graphing calculators are still quite useful to me from time to time. I obviously won't do any serious calculation on them, but my trusty old TI-89 is very useful for checking my work (e.g. ensuring that a program I wrote to compute some numerical result works as advertised). It's also very useful for getting quick answers to simple calculations that are just a bit too complex for the Google calculator. Sure, it'd be nice if it had a faster processor, but for the most part I'm limited by inputting the formulas, not the processing time.
Um, it's called symbiosis. Happens all the time. In fact, symbiosis is the norm, not the exception.
This largely might just be an aspect of white blood cells themselves. Immune cells have ways to circumvent the normal safeguards that ensure high-fidelity copying of DNA, in order to evolve quickly in response to disease (specifically, to produce new antibodies, the B-cells go into a stage of cell division, somatic hypermutation, where they average about one mutation per gene per cell division). Since this is a study within white blood cells, it wouldn't at all surprise me that this low-fidelity copying was either another aspect of this same function, or a side effect of it.
There's also the possibility that this rapid evolution of the B-cells used has messed up their measurements, but surely the experimental team would have taken this into account. I hope.
A reasonable evaluation was already pointed out in the summary to the article, by Max Tegmark, who is a practicing physicist, and who pointed out that he would need more evidence to be convinced it's not just systematic errors. I would personally go even further and say it's almost certainly systematic errors. Just looking at the abstract makes this patently clear, as they find the opposite effect claimed in previous studies. They claim large statistical significance, of course, but when your result changes so dramatically from previous results, well, that sounds more like they're not properly estimating their errors.
While I still hold that the particular god which Plantinga pointed out cannot possibly exist, it isn't necessary. This is because there are not two options, but three:
1. Assume that this god can exist.
2. Assume that this god cannot exist.
3. Leave open the question of whether this god can or cannot exist.
One need only take the third position to demonstrate that Plantinga's argument boils down to assuming that this god exists.
It doesn't matter. It's still an assumption in the argument, one that isn't necessarily the case, and thus the argument cannot possibly be a proof of the existence of a god.
It all just boils down to one single assumption: god is possible. But by this modal logic, anything that is possible is necessarily true. Thus in modal S5, the assumption that a god is possible is the assumption that a god exists.
The rest of the argument is just window dressing, an attempt to deceive the reader into thinking that they've actually proven something, when in reality they're just assuming the conclusion from the start.
But that's passing the buck from the logical argument to the logical system. It still leaves open the question as to whether or not the logical system applies to reality, in which case it is still up to observation to determine whether or not the premises (or conclusions) are true.
As for the "meaningless statement" issue with regard to omnipotence, if we take the classic one, "Can God make a rock so heavy he can't lift it?" this is far from a meaningless statement, because I can make a rock so heavy I can't lift it (granted, I can't create it from scratch, but I can form it from existing rocks). The statement only becomes ridiculous when you apply the attribute of omnipotence to the god. For instance, we can imagine a god that can create all the rocks he wants, of whatever size he wants, but isn't able to actually pick them up, in which case the answer would be yes. Or we might imagine a god that is stupendously strong (rather like a strong person) but can't create rocks, and thus the answer would be no.
Anyway, even if you don't accept the argument from evil, you still can't demonstrate that a god is actually possible, because to do that you'd have to show how such a god is consistent with the fundamental rules that underly reality, which we don't know. So the assumption that such a god is possible at all is still an unfounded assumption.
There's a final problem with this sort of logical argument that makes the whole thing just plain stupid instead of subtle: the whole thing boils down to, "The most amazing thing I can imagine must exist, therefore god exists." And no, that's patently absurd, because there is absolutely no guarantee that just because we can imagine it, it must be possible. This sort of logical argument, in other words, boils down to a play on words to disguise just how ridiculous it is.
Doesn't work that way. Expressing absolute certainty on some claim about the nature of reality, of course, requires faith (unless it's absolute certainty that a nonsensical claim cannot be true, of course, because no nonsensical claim can be true...it's nonsensical!).
But it requires no faith whatsoever to consider a creator god to be extremely unlikely, based on the complete lack of evidence, and the complexity of the proposed entity. One way to look at it is this: either we have a universe, or we have a universe + complex god. If we have no evidence whatsoever to distinguish between the two, the first (just a universe) is far more likely to be correct, because it proposes fewer hypothetical entities.
Of course, some apologists have attempted to claim that their god is actually simple, but they don't actually argue this, they simply define their god as simple and pretend that solves the problem. The second they start tacking on other god-like attributes besides simplicity, though, this simplicity is utterly destroyed (e.g. omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, or even the ability to think at all).
This view always leaves open the possibility that a god will someday be discovered, but it requires that strong evidence be presented.
Hahahahaha.
Evidence? That Jesus rose from the dead? Seriously? The only evidence of that is in the Bible itself, and even those accounts disagree on a number of crucial points! There is zero, repeat zero secular historical evidence of Jesus even being crucified, let alone rising from the dead. Hell, we don't even know where he was supposed to have been buried.
To add to this, the extra-biblical evidence for Jesus even existing in the first place is questionable at best. All of the evidence that does exist can be trivially interpreted as the historians of the day reporting on the beliefs/statements of the Christians of the day.
If you want to think that, "Hey, a bunch of people saw it, so it must be true!" counts as evidence, then you have to believe a lot of stupid crap.
Nope. There are many solutions to the Einstein field equations that have no matter in them. Gravitational waves, for instance.
Sorry, but logic doesn't work this way. A logical proof only guarantees that if the premises of the argument are true, then the conclusions must also be true. Because of this, it is fundamentally impossible for a logical proof to demonstrate anything about the nature of reality. You must have at least one input assumption no matter what. This is why all results in science are necessarily contingent upon observation/experiment. Ontological attempts at proving a god (or anything else) are guaranteed to fail before they even begin.
One problem with Plantinga's argument is that he assumes it is possible for an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent entity to exist, but this is exactly the kind of god we know cannot exist because of the problem of evil (never mind the logical self-inconsistency of omnipotence). Because of this, Plantinga's "maximal greatness" is a malformed statement that has no meaning, and the whole proof crashes in on itself.
As for Stephen Hawking's argument, I'd have to read the book, but in principle it is completely accurate that there is simply no reason to believe in one.
No, the Cassini observation of no measurable change in the radioactive decay rate, would completely and utterly destroy the hypothesis that changes in neutrino flux from the Sun is causing this, provided their observations aren't many of orders of magnitude more precise than those measuring the decay rate on Cassini.
The problem is the fact that the neutrino flux from the Sun varies only by a few percent (3% change in distance with season would lead to about a 6% change in the neutrino flux), but in its travels to Saturn, which is 9.5 times as far away from the Sun as the Earth, the neutrino flux would have dropped by a factor of 90. If it's a small, but detectable effect here on Earth, then, it would be a huge effect on Cassini by comparison.
Also remember that the supposed variation from the rotation of the Sun is much smaller than the seasonal variation.
There isn't any reasonable possibility that this could be caused by any sort of electromagnetic field variation or charged particle. The problem is that we're protected from such things by our atmosphere and the magnetic field of our planet. Yes, it is true that strong electromagnetic fields can cause variations in decay rates, but the changes in electromagnetic fields we get on the ground as a result of solar flares (even the largest of them) are very small by comparison.
Neutrinos, however, only interact through the weak force, having no electric charge, and have no problem passing right through the Earth. As a result, they are plausible mechanism by which the Sun's activity could effect radioactive decay rates (which operate by the weak force).
Plants grow by reproduction of their constituent parts. This isn't exactly an argument for a capacity limited to intelligences. So I fail to see the relevance. I may just be obtuse; please explain.
The point is that reproduction is fundamentally a different process from construction. Perhaps a way to see this is to consider that nowhere in the DNA is a blueprint for a body. The majority of the function of DNA can be reduced to coding for proteins. This basically means that a strand of DNA within a cell codes for a set of proteins to be produced which alter the behavior of that cell. Bodies are not built based upon any sort of blueprint (like a machine is built), but instead by local components operating on local rules.
Complex shapes in bodies are grown by different clumps of cells growing faster than other clumps of cells. Different tissues are produced by turning on and off different genes.
This is fundamentally different from a construction process because the end product is not contained in the DNA. Instead, the end product is a result of complex interactions between the DNA, the cell, and the environment in which the cell resides. This means, for instance, that some of the same bits of DNA that are used to build a hand are also used to build a foot. Some of the same bits to build parts of an ear are also used to build parts of the jaw.
This is to be contrasted with a constructed machine, where if we imagine a human-like robot (two legs, two arms, head), I might decide to swap out the arms for a different set, give it longer or shorter legs, or remove the legs entirely for a set of Johnny 5 treads. You can't do this sort of thing with a biological organism.
And this difference makes for one extremely crucial distinction between the two: machines are wholly deterministic entities, where you start with a blueprint and, up to small manufacturing errors, know exactly what you're going to get out the other end. Life forms are a combination of determinism and randomness, and you never know exactly what you're going to get once you start a life form growing. This randomness, as it turns out, is an exceedingly useful quality that allows us to be creative, to be inventive, and to survive where we otherwise might not.
As a final note on reproduction, it turns out that biological organisms are only limited by the food/resource capacity of their environment. They always expand to consume everything that can be consumed, and do so remarkably rapidly. The issue here is that exponential growth is a tremendous thing, and any time an organism is using fewer resources than it otherwise could, it (or some other life form) rapidly grows to fill that void.
Sure, it may look slow on the level of an individual person, where the generation times may be 20-30 years, but it doesn't take long to turn a few million people into a few billion, once they can produce the resources to sustain them.
Machines, by contrast, have the problem that production is linear: in order to produce more machines, you first have to produce the capacity to produce more machines, which takes time. People simply reproduce.
Another point is that while it may at first seem that having to relearn everything is a drawback, I would argue that in aggregate, it actually turns out to be a benefit.
Sure, lots of time and energy may be wasted in re-learning the things the previous generation already learned, but the benefit this provides is really priceless: creativity. Having to re-learn the things the previous generation already knows allows for a fresh perspective. It allows the next generation to escape from old ways of thinking, and approach the same problems in their own ways.
Yes, it is conceivable that a machine civilization could have its own ways of achieving creative insights, but there is no guarantee that this would occur, and I'm somewhat doubtful it can be anywhere near as effective as a biological civilizat
This claim of yours is clearly using a different definition for "machine" than I used. It's a word game, not an argument.
I thought it was pretty clear that I was making use of a colloquial definition of machine. Perhaps the broadest definition one might use of this sort of machine might be a complex device built by assembling pieces. This is as opposed to biological organisms that grow through subsequent reproduction of their constituent parts (that is, cell division).
We're not going to construct any sort of "machine" that reproduces in the same way we do that will be capable of outpacing ourselves, simply because we aren't anywhere near clever enough to outdo some 3+ billion years of evolution. And we're probably not going to produce constructed machines that can build a more efficient society that advances more rapidly than our own, just because I doubt that such a society could even be self-sustaining, given the maintenance requirements alone.
While our popular culture seems to be very keen on the idea that machines will, at some point, surpass people, there really isn't much reason to believe this to be the case. This isn't to say that we're these absurdly amazing beings that can't be surpassed, but rather that we don't have any evidence that machines would constitute a form of life that could be more innovative, more inventive, more creative. One can have all the ability in the world to solve complex mathematical equations, for instance, but applying that to real-world situations requires a fair bit of creativity.
This isn't to say that machines can't possibly exceed our abilities, but I'm going to remain skeptical until I see somebody demonstrate it. Even then, there are maintenance and reproduction issues. We're talking about not just an isolated individual machine being more capable than a human, after all, but building an entire civilization with these machines, which would have all sorts of resource and production requirements just to function. We already know how to build a civilization based upon people, and it is doubtful that machine life could ever take off here without us figuring out how to build for them a working machine civilization.
Based on this, my personal speculation is that we are far more likely to modify and improve ourselves than we are to build our own successors.
As a side comment, however, the SETI work is as likely to work for a machine civilization as a biological one. What they are searching for, after all, is extra-terrestrial technology, not extra terrestrials themselves. There's no reason to believe that a machine civilization, were one to exist, would produce fewer radio waves than a biological one.
I don't think this is a serious criticism. First, if there is no significant difference between the current edition and the previous one, then if you find yourself with the old one when taking a class (e.g. from buying a used copy), you're not losing much. If there are significant differences, then it's not a scam, is it? But perhaps more to the point, I don't see how there is any significant amount of profit motive for releasing new versions without reason. Consider that if there is no significant difference, then there is very little additional incentive for people to buy the new revision as opposed to the older used one. Essentially zero students will ever have a cause to re-purchase a newer revision of a book they already purchased (because usually they only use the book for a year, maybe two in extreme cases). So no, I don't think the small profit motive of getting a small boost in new book sales, a boost that might not even be noticeable, once every few years is incentive enough to do this. Seems to me it's more just a matter of the text book authors caring about accuracy and keeping their text up to date.
As much as I dislike the overly-zealous copyright predation by groups like the RIAA, it seems to me that there is a clear and distinct line drawn the second a person attempts to profit off of the work of another. I fully expect this person to get sued to hell and back, and for the publisher to get a large settlement for punitive damages. And I think that'd be entirely the right thing to do. That or throw the thieving bastard into jail, one of the two.
I know that some people may be nervous about this sort of tracking information, but it really does sound like a step forward to me. There are only two caveats I would have:
1. Reporting should be voluntary, and made completely clear to the end user (looks to be the case currently, if I'm reading this correctly).
2. Any information collected should be of the anonymous sort. It would make sense, for instance, to send hardware information in order to prioritize driver development, but it would be stepping over the line to send in software usage information, such as videos watched or songs played. So the current information sent obviously fits under this, but they could expand it quite a bit to help end-users' experience.
No, no there really isn't a debate about causation. Increase in CO2 concentrations are most definitely the primary cause here. Beyond that, things get more uncertain, naturally. But there really isn't any question any longer that CO2 is the primary climate forcing that has changed the temperature of the planet since around the 1970's.
Yeah, that's got nothing at all to do with anything that deglr6328 pointed out. Where, in his post, did he mention at all the identity or even qualifications of the author?
In this case, there are a few ways in which the author could have made his paper more credible, all without requiring anything resembling authority:
1. Collaborated with other condensed matter physicists.
2. Submitted paper for publication in prestigious journal (with a high-profile discovery like room-temperature superconductivity, this would be a discovery fit for such a journal).
3. Worked to get more comprehensive data before claiming room-temperature superconductivity.
This is pretty much bullshit. There are two big reasons why scientific groups hold off before releasing all of their results. The first is simple rigor: things that may seem exciting early-on may turn to evaporate once better checks are performed. If every scientific group published their results the second they thought they had something interesting, then the world would be suffused with confusing and incorrect information.
Instead, by allowing scientific groups to act as a first quality check on the data, we get an overall improvement in the quality of the results.
The second reason has to do with secondary conclusions based upon the data. Basically, if the experimental team was going to release their data in full to everybody before the people working on the secondary results had a chance to get started, then nobody in their right mind would work on secondary results with that team.
Why is this a bad thing? Because it is in studying these secondary results that a lot of the errors in the original data analysis come to light. A good experiment really needs a full start-to-finish data analysis pipeline going if they're going to produce high-quality work, and to do that they need to embargo their data until the secondary analysis is finished.
I'd like to mention that though many journals have publication fees, not all do. If you hunt around a bit, or ask somebody in the field, they should be able to point you to a free journal.
As a researcher in Physics, here are what I would suggest.
First, getting your paper out there for other people to see is the easy part: just post it on arxiv.org. Free, open for everybody, and easy to submit to. It also has the bonus of offering the LaTeX source of most papers submitted to it, meaning that you can just download a closely-related paper, and copy their formatting! Often specific journals also have their own LaTeX formatting rules and support files, so if you are able to pick out a specific, look at what they have.
Now, for the paper itself, you primarily need two big things:
1. Clarity.
2. Context.
Clarity is absolutely essential. You need to explain your idea in full, with enough detail that another person can fully replicate your results. Explaining your reasoning for doing it a certain way, and also presenting evidence for why it should be this way instead of some other is also paramount. For this algorithm, for instance, both numerical stability under a wide range of coordinate choices and performance are going to be important metrics with which to judge the work.
Context is also essential. This means that you have to show the reader of your paper where the paper fits within the total body of literature. You need, in short, to start looking through the literature surrounding this sort of algorithm, and discover what has already been written. If you don't do this, the first thing you risk doing is simply replicating what somebody else has already done (in which case nobody will care about your paper). Or perhaps even worse, you risk making obvious mistakes that others have already shown are bad things to do (for one reason or another). There's also the positive that they can give you ideas for things you didn't think about in your own work, ways to make your own algorithm even better.
So, if you really want to write a proper research paper, if I were you I'd first sit down and try to find out what other people have written on this topic. If you can get a hold of a comp sci professional who works in even a related area, they could be a tremendous help for finding you relevant papers and information to get you started. Then, once you've read and understood at least a few related papers, you should have the added bonus of getting a grasp of the overall structure and format to use for your own paper. You can get an idea of the overall context by at least skimming some of the papers they reference, and that should help you build a nice introduction. You might also get an idea of what journals you can submit to, and start trying there.
Anyway, that's what I have to say on the subject. Best of luck to you!
And it's hardly surprising, or unknown. Basically, organisms haven't just evolved to a very specific environment, but have also evolved to manage environments that change with time. The ability to pass on certain very specific acquired characteristics is still an evolved trait.
The point with Lamarck was that he thought that all traits behaved in this way, an idea which was easily disproven. It is only a subset of non-genetic traits which are passed to offspring, and then only because specific mechanisms have been put in place by evolution to do so.
From what I understand, many biologists are currently hard at work understanding the non-genetic paths of inheritance (called epigenetics), which include a variety of different things.