Well, I noted the metaphysical assumptions of falsifiability and consistency. Your #1-4 are different kinds of consistency: #1 in time; #2 in space; #3 in law; #4 in observation. I don't think that science assumes #5; indeed most applications of the method rely on actions to extend and to validate our sensory experience, and indeed science has demonstrated and dispelled many sensory illusions.
And indeed the proposition that we're discussing could dispel all of those assumptions. If the universe is a simulation generated by a reality outside the universe, then its possible the universe's consistency (and even falsifiability) is just an arbitrarily generated property of the simulation. And therefore possibly subject to change, arbitrarily. Though the degree of possibility would require another step of verifying the simulation's framework: whether other, equally convincing, simulations are also possible.
Ah - my mistake. That was some AC with the unsupported attack on physics. I guess that collapses my reply to you into more of a contradiction than an argument, though not a valid one:).
But they're relevant to your anecdote. The AC evidently has some science literacy, implying the Columbus discoveries myth is false, in light of earlier Viking arrivals. But indeed there were earlier arrivals, and some evidence not yet well (scientifically) explained of even earlier ones. Literacy is relative.
As for relativism, I don't know that the physics PhD candidate was saying that the inability of some people to accept an experiment proving air's mass was equivalent to other people's ability to accept such an experiment, or (I'd extend) to the candidate's ability to arrange the experiment. It sounds to me more like they're saying that to those scientific illiterates, especially if they've been educated with some anti-intellectualism, the experiment would prove nothing. That doesn't mean that the experiment proves nothing. It simply means that some people are so stupid that they not only don't know they're stupid, they think they're smart. It's like how Newt Gingrich is a stupid person's idea of what a smart person sounds like.
It's true that there are some accredited higher schools, like "bible colleges", where people are taught that fallacies are equivalent to actual truths. I don't think that's generally true in colleges. I do think that generally colleges do teach that there are other ways of knowing that aren't the canonical European/American methods, but not that they're all equally reliable. Also that people are equally valuable regardless of their culture, and that different cultures that might even contradict are (at least more or less) equally valuable - which is different from the eurosupremacy taught for centuries, including by luminaries such as Voltaire. And I do think that the vast growth in quantity of education has diluted quite a lot of its quality (though the highest quality I think today is far higher).
Ultimately all intellectual exercises can be measured by how well they create an accurate mental model of their subject. That is an objective measure. But I do agree that objective measures have been devalued by a lot of people in favor of a more convenient (to both the lazy and to the powerful) relativism. I just don't think it's convinced physics PhDs that the Earth is also flat just because some fools think it is.
Again: what metaphysical assumptions is modern physics replete with? Just because lots of people are aggressively stupid, even many with college degrees, doesn't reflect on physics. Unless you're referring to physicists like those who are also avid Creationists, which also doesn't reflect on physics - it reflects on the limits of physics to reach the rest of a person's mind when it's lost to the cancer you refer to.
Philosophers also perform experiments that are not constrained by logic. Logic is just one way of thinking, and philosophy deals in more of them than that. Religion for example, and other learned sequences of ideas.
Or we're all just a simulation for a being/beings who don't have that kind of "sinner's guilt", and want to understand it, so they created our universe to play that out while they observed. It's what we do with our simulations.
The relationship between simulation and simulator isn't necessarily arbitrary, but it's probably not understandable by the simulation. That is in effect (among) what Goedel's incompleteness theorems say.
It seems more likely to me that the entire guilt/redemption pattern is an artifact of our simulation, not the more fundamental reality of the simulator. Because it seems pretty arbitrary on anything but a relatively modern political economics level.
How do we let our own creations out of their high-tech ant colonies? Like our online game characters - they can't exist outside it, except in some other equivalent created simulation.
Why couldn't it be a spontaneous simulation? Like the kind of art known as found object.
The visual images in our heads are simulations, not the real reality we act as if we're in. Those simulations are natural organizations of our brains interacting with themselves and the sense organs they're connected to interacting with matter they're near.
Their hypothesis rests on the idea that if the universe's fundamental characteristics have a smallest unit, then it's possible the universe is a phenomenon whose behavior is arbitrarily created by something that's not in the universe. I don't see why that makes it possible. We've believed for about a century that the universe is composed of quanta, fundamental characteristics with smallest units. There is an entire Planck scale, the smallest possible lengths (in space or time) and other sizes of space and what's in it. I don't see why it's necessary that "the real universe" is continuous rather than granular, and our granular universe isn't the real one. Or even how granularity even implies anything "outside" the universe exists.
Our universe is made of Plank pixels ("planxels"). That doesn't imply anything about anything except our universe and its granularity.
No, we can improve the system. But your anarchist system where only the richest get education and the opportunities it opens failed for centuries, millennia, to serve anyone but the rich. And it didn't serve them that well either, compared to how well they're served now.
Your arguments are all simply that since our public education system has problems, we should delete it entirely - in favor of a intolerable disaster proven worse for centuries. It's obvious why you hate school: yours failed to teach you to think.
No, it's the scrambling of public education that fails to teach enough critical thinking, plus the fetishization of churches that gives them respect and budget outweigh whatever critical thinking we do have. Swamped by a corporate mass media keeping that mismatch in place, exploiting it for power perpetuation and short term capitalist harvesting.
No, let's not destroy the power of the people to protect us from each other in order to create a power vacuum into which theocrats and warlords always inevitably move. Libertarianism is your religion. Let's not leave the frying pan for the fire.
I bet this psycho wouldn't agree with the equally crazy statement:
You keep telling your self that. It won't make your eternal torture in hell go away. Don't claim you weren't warned. Allah is just. You will suffer for all your infinitely large sins against Allah*. You have broken Allah's commandments and stand guilty before Allah. The perversions you follow as morals won't help you when judgement day comes. How you followed some of them won't cover how you broke Allah's commandments. How Allah isn't following your "morals" isn't relevant as He is judging you, not the other way around. Crying about how we all are Allah's children won't help you. Screaming at me for violating the brotherhood of man by agreeing with Allah on what you deserve is pathetic. You are not His child and I am not your brother*. You are now closer to the day Allah will judge you than you were when you wrote your post. You are therefore closer to Hell*.
* Unless He will make you repent and give you saving faith in how Mohammed payed for your sins in the desert. In that case your sins are payed, Allah has adopted you and heaven awaits. If He give you faith please remember that He had no obligation to do so or to refrain from doing . You are in no position to claim He saved you because of how much better you are than the rest or to complain how He hasn't saved others.
The energy market's derivatives market (itself larger than most entire industries) is not only the most profitable, but also produces the most efficient pricing to the demand.
Wait - it's actually only the most profitable. But don't worry, it's only the market far most essential to all our other economics. Wait - you should worry.
Slashdot Mirror
I eagerly await our duck overlords. Or more to the point: fuck a duck!
Well, I noted the metaphysical assumptions of falsifiability and consistency. Your #1-4 are different kinds of consistency: #1 in time; #2 in space; #3 in law; #4 in observation. I don't think that science assumes #5; indeed most applications of the method rely on actions to extend and to validate our sensory experience, and indeed science has demonstrated and dispelled many sensory illusions.
And indeed the proposition that we're discussing could dispel all of those assumptions. If the universe is a simulation generated by a reality outside the universe, then its possible the universe's consistency (and even falsifiability) is just an arbitrarily generated property of the simulation. And therefore possibly subject to change, arbitrarily. Though the degree of possibility would require another step of verifying the simulation's framework: whether other, equally convincing, simulations are also possible.
Ah - my mistake. That was some AC with the unsupported attack on physics. I guess that collapses my reply to you into more of a contradiction than an argument, though not a valid one :).
But they're relevant to your anecdote. The AC evidently has some science literacy, implying the Columbus discoveries myth is false, in light of earlier Viking arrivals. But indeed there were earlier arrivals, and some evidence not yet well (scientifically) explained of even earlier ones. Literacy is relative.
As for relativism, I don't know that the physics PhD candidate was saying that the inability of some people to accept an experiment proving air's mass was equivalent to other people's ability to accept such an experiment, or (I'd extend) to the candidate's ability to arrange the experiment. It sounds to me more like they're saying that to those scientific illiterates, especially if they've been educated with some anti-intellectualism, the experiment would prove nothing. That doesn't mean that the experiment proves nothing. It simply means that some people are so stupid that they not only don't know they're stupid, they think they're smart. It's like how Newt Gingrich is a stupid person's idea of what a smart person sounds like.
It's true that there are some accredited higher schools, like "bible colleges", where people are taught that fallacies are equivalent to actual truths. I don't think that's generally true in colleges. I do think that generally colleges do teach that there are other ways of knowing that aren't the canonical European/American methods, but not that they're all equally reliable. Also that people are equally valuable regardless of their culture, and that different cultures that might even contradict are (at least more or less) equally valuable - which is different from the eurosupremacy taught for centuries, including by luminaries such as Voltaire. And I do think that the vast growth in quantity of education has diluted quite a lot of its quality (though the highest quality I think today is far higher).
Ultimately all intellectual exercises can be measured by how well they create an accurate mental model of their subject. That is an objective measure. But I do agree that objective measures have been devalued by a lot of people in favor of a more convenient (to both the lazy and to the powerful) relativism. I just don't think it's convinced physics PhDs that the Earth is also flat just because some fools think it is.
Again: what metaphysical assumptions is modern physics replete with? Just because lots of people are aggressively stupid, even many with college degrees, doesn't reflect on physics. Unless you're referring to physicists like those who are also avid Creationists, which also doesn't reflect on physics - it reflects on the limits of physics to reach the rest of a person's mind when it's lost to the cancer you refer to.
My point exactly.
"Sufficiently"? That's circular logic.
Because you think being a physicist just means saying things you can't understand.
No, it's just the rest of us are drunk.
Yes, physics is a practice refined from "natural philosophy: thinking in an organized way about nature.
But what metaphysical assumptions is modern physics replete with? Other than necessary falsifiability and universal consistency?
Also, Vikings weren't the first people to arrive in America. Not even from across the Atlantic.
Philosophers also perform experiments that are not constrained by logic. Logic is just one way of thinking, and philosophy deals in more of them than that. Religion for example, and other learned sequences of ideas.
Or we're all just a simulation for a being/beings who don't have that kind of "sinner's guilt", and want to understand it, so they created our universe to play that out while they observed. It's what we do with our simulations.
The relationship between simulation and simulator isn't necessarily arbitrary, but it's probably not understandable by the simulation. That is in effect (among) what Goedel's incompleteness theorems say.
It seems more likely to me that the entire guilt/redemption pattern is an artifact of our simulation, not the more fundamental reality of the simulator. Because it seems pretty arbitrary on anything but a relatively modern political economics level.
How do we let our own creations out of their high-tech ant colonies? Like our online game characters - they can't exist outside it, except in some other equivalent created simulation.
Do androids dream of electric sheep?
You personally are proof that neither civilization nor evolution are making us more clever than our forebears.
Why couldn't it be a spontaneous simulation? Like the kind of art known as found object.
The visual images in our heads are simulations, not the real reality we act as if we're in. Those simulations are natural organizations of our brains interacting with themselves and the sense organs they're connected to interacting with matter they're near.
Their hypothesis rests on the idea that if the universe's fundamental characteristics have a smallest unit, then it's possible the universe is a phenomenon whose behavior is arbitrarily created by something that's not in the universe. I don't see why that makes it possible. We've believed for about a century that the universe is composed of quanta, fundamental characteristics with smallest units. There is an entire Planck scale, the smallest possible lengths (in space or time) and other sizes of space and what's in it. I don't see why it's necessary that "the real universe" is continuous rather than granular, and our granular universe isn't the real one. Or even how granularity even implies anything "outside" the universe exists.
Our universe is made of Plank pixels ("planxels"). That doesn't imply anything about anything except our universe and its granularity.
No, we can improve the system. But your anarchist system where only the richest get education and the opportunities it opens failed for centuries, millennia, to serve anyone but the rich. And it didn't serve them that well either, compared to how well they're served now.
Your arguments are all simply that since our public education system has problems, we should delete it entirely - in favor of a intolerable disaster proven worse for centuries. It's obvious why you hate school: yours failed to teach you to think.
Stats? And proof they're not self-selecting.
Evidently your school system failed to teach you even the most basic thinking skills.
No, it's the scrambling of public education that fails to teach enough critical thinking, plus the fetishization of churches that gives them respect and budget outweigh whatever critical thinking we do have. Swamped by a corporate mass media keeping that mismatch in place, exploiting it for power perpetuation and short term capitalist harvesting.
You don't understand that "small enough that theocratic politicians don't matter" is no different from "nonexistent".
No, let's not destroy the power of the people to protect us from each other in order to create a power vacuum into which theocrats and warlords always inevitably move. Libertarianism is your religion. Let's not leave the frying pan for the fire.
Theocrat insists a person who dislikes theocrats should mind their own business.
You Christaliban are so deranged it's a wonder you can type.
I bet this psycho wouldn't agree with the equally crazy statement:
The energy market's derivatives market (itself larger than most entire industries) is not only the most profitable, but also produces the most efficient pricing to the demand.
Wait - it's actually only the most profitable. But don't worry, it's only the market far most essential to all our other economics. Wait - you should worry.