Agreed. It's no coincidence that back when men walked around with canes or swords, people were a lot more civil to each other. The threat of corrective violence is seriously lacking today.
In science, you don't assume something is right until it is proven wrong. Rather, scientific validity is based solely on verifiability. Therefore it is illegitimate to treat any scientific theory as infinitely precise. Within the realm of science they can only be treated as approximations of reality.
This sounds really great but unless they have a comprehensive theory of animal intelligence to work with, this is one more AI project that will likely fail. Sorry. No amount of computing power is going to help. If you had a good theory of intelligence, you would be able to prove its correctness and scalability on a regular desktop computer.
Spot on. Moreover, if you talk to any neurologist, human or animal, evolutionary or practical, you find that all those systems of thinking are built upon more fundamental systems of emotion. That is counter-intuitive to nerds like us who go into AI. But you don't solve the problem of thinking in a biological way, without first having solved the problem of feeling emotion. Our fallacy likes in thinking, because we have put logic into machines, that we are close to putting thought into machines. But logic is trivial by comparison. There IS NO THEORY, by any stretch of the imagination, for putting emotion into an electrical circuit, logical circuit, or anything else. We know that parts of the brain are involved with it, but we don't even have any guesses as to what it actually is.
In the USA, we are supposedly innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Thus, you can claim you are falsely accused up to the point where a judge banks the gavel and declares you guilty.
At least, that is what my elementary school teacher taught me back in the 70's.
This is incorrect. The state cannot presume you to be guilty until you are found to be so in court, and if found to be not guilty in court, it must presume you to be not guilty. (5th and 6th amendments) However, you can claim you have been falsely accused just as long as you like, regardless of what the court finds. (1st amendment)
Newtonian Mechanics is wrong at any speed. Just the error becomes more noticeable near light speed.
That is a scientifically meaningless statement. Newtonian Mechanics is correct at non-relativistic speeds, because it is correct within the possible precision of measurement. If "right" means EXACTLY right, then ALL scientific theories are wrong, including SR, as no experiment can ever verify them to infinite precision. Moreover, as relativity contains singularities, the reasonable assumption should be that relativity becomes wrong at the extremes near it which it produces singularities. The belief that any theory is perfect can be nothing but delusional, in my opinion.
Tell that to the american indians. They had a pretty harmonious culture.
You mean the 1,000 nations with cultures based on perpetual warfare with one another, the largest of which established the largest-scale assembly-line operation of human sacrifice in recorded history, and who as a group hunted to extinction almost not only the American species of Mammoths, but nearly all the indigenous mega-fauna in the Americas? Those American Indians?
Or we make it trendy for celebrities -- forget adopting babies from Africa, the new trend is adopting and recreating extinct species! Get Angelina on board and everyone else will follow.
Nah, forget extinct species. Those Egyptian pharohs didn't preserver their bodies for nothing! We need to get Angelina and Madonna adopting baby cloned Queen Nefertitis or King Khufus or Rhamses. Just make sure the's born in the US, so that later we can vote for them for president.
All that has been compared so far is the mitochondrial DNA. OF COURSE we have no mitochondrial DNA. I don't know what they were thinking studying that. How excited is a h. sapiens male going to get over an insanely massive woman (and not necessarily short) who could crush him like a bird with one hand? A h. sapiens female on the other hand, would likely find a Neanderthal male quite irresistible... possibly in more ways than one, as "consent" may or may not have been as highly valued as it is now.
When I think of Neanderthals males and H. sapiens females, I can't help but be reminded of the place in Genesis where it says, "the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose." There's also an account in one of the Jewish pseudepigraphical books, of Lamech, the father of Noah, seeing that the baby Noah was all white and red, and freaking out, and running to the prophet, his grandfather Enoch to find out what to do, and if it was really his child. Enoch said it was, that this was because of the aforementioned "sons of God taking wives from the daughters of men" in the time of Jared (Enoch's father). This can be interpreted many ways, but especially in light of the scientific evidence in favor of light skin and red freckles coming from Neanderthals, I'm inclined to think that Adam through Jared were Neanderthals, Jared's generation mixed with dark-skinned H. sapiens females, and became progressively dark-skinned in the generations down to Lamech, but for whatever reason some recessive white-skin-and-freckles genes re-expressed themselves in Moses. Of course, this could be completely wrong, but it fits together too well for me to dismiss.
Regardless, I have little doubt that we have some neanderthal DNA. There are many examples of apparent hybrids in the archeological record, especially in the Levant, which the two species shared for a very long time, and also in extinct races of South America. You can see a beautiful museum example of a hybrid, although it's not discussed in terms of being a hybrid, just in terms of having extremely dense and large bones and unusually large brow ridges, in the Digging for the Truth episode on the Giants of Patagonia.
Do we really want to do this to a sentient and intelligent species?
For a start, the Neanderthal will be a circus freak for all his life. Whatever his other achievements or shortcomings would be, he'll still be that reconstructed Neanderthal. I doubt that he could have a normal job or relationship or interact normally with new people, without getting back to that aspect that he's the only Neanderthal in the world. Even assuming that all people he'll meet are nice and tactful, it's still that curiosity aspect. It sounds like a recipe for getting depressed later.
But the more realistic aspect is that most people just aren't that nice. There are plenty of people for which it's nearly impossible to say "black" without an "N", if you know what I mean, and for whom it's a human rights issue if you even ask them to be nice. Can you imagine what these guys would be like, to a different _species_.
I think the Neanderthals can take care of themselves. With a significantly larger brain capacity, significantly denser bones and utterly massive muscles, I think it will be the tactless h. sapiens who will be finding our sympathy after such a run-in.
But if this were done, I would think/hope they would produce a number of them in a controlled environment, so they could develop and learn, and be studied together in a controlled environment. Perhaps they could form as adults a Neanderthal think-tank, where they use their massive brains to solve the world's problems... if they could resist the insane offers coming in from the NFL trying to recruit them as defensive linemen.
I have no idea what their psychology would be like. All we know in terms of that is that they were more loners, in small family groups, as opposed to the larger communities of h. sapiens, and that their tents appeared disorganized, as opposed to the neat and tidy tents of h. sapiens. But as we already have a fairly good idea of their physicality, I think that the aspects of their psychology would hold the biggest surprises.
That doesn't help either, because then the question becomes, "well if there is some creator of our universe, then who or what created the creator?" Something must have come before this, and something before that, and something before that, ad infinitum. I think it's just one of those questions that will remain unanswered.
It wasn't unanswerable to the Greek philosophers (or of course for the Christian philosophers who followed them). The universe needs a cause because it is changeable and finite, and progresses in time. Since there cannot be infinite regress of such causes, all causes must be traceable back to a cause that is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable (and so, uncausable). The early Greeks associated that cause with virtue and goodness, and called it "Theos", and starting with Heraclitus, "Logos". 500 years later, writing the New Testament, the early Christians called it by the exact same terms. (And then in Latin, those terms became "Deus" and "Verbum", and in English "God" and "the Word".)
Once something has happened, however improbable it was, its probability of happening turned out to be 100.0%.
Probability isn't about "luck". It's about the unknown certainty that something will have happened once it did, even if many other things could have happened instead.
We do indeed live in a universe that is improbable because it's one of the very few, of all that could exist, that can and does make sense to us. That's because we evolved in it, as part of it. We were selected by the universe's laws and materials to have bodies that include organs which can hold information modeling the universe. But that doesn't mean anything miraculous occurred to us. It just means that we're the parts of the universe that generated the mechanisms to have the model.
But you see, the opposite is actually the case. Given the laws of physics, without specifying the constants, 99.99999% of the "possible" universes are exceedingly easy for our minds to grasp. They are very simple universes. Many are even singularities. The rest don't contain solids, liquids, or atoms larger than helium. All that complicated chemistry is just done away with. We live in the what appears to be the extremely "unlikely" case, where the universe is complicated. So it would seem that the options are to either say, 1) There's one universe and it just happened to have the constants necessary to be complicated; 2) There are a bajillion universes, so one of them had to be complicated, or 3) there's one universe and it is complicated by design. The first two options further beg the question of how these constants are "set" in the first place, as they presume some sort of randomizing mechanism assigning physical constants.
I'm personally a big fan of relative gravity, but touching einsteins theory of relativity seems to be anathema. A ridiculous notion since relativity itself debunked newton's theories, theories come and go as our ability to observe grows. Scientists shouldn't be afraid of it.
I'm a fan of General Relativity too. But any theory that has singularities has weaknesses that I believe must eventually be fixed. I think a reworking of the framework of GR is an inevitability. That said, I think the String Theory reworking of it won't be the one (though some of their thinking may carry over). When we eventually get it right (i.e. get it better), it will be by proceeding from evidence, not just cooking up numbers.
I've wondered myself why the definition for a planet capable of sustaining life had to be so narrow. One should consider that leading theories about how life started here involve the Earth having had much more extreme conditions and an environment that would be caustic to the majority of life as we know it. Yet we see within our own Solar System a variety of less volatile environs that we assume could never be valid hosts.
The Anthropic Principle, as I've read it, is about the question of why the laws of the universe are pigeon-holed in such a narrow and seemingly incredibly unlikely way that allows for stars, for elements heavier than helium, and for solids and liquids. It goes further than that as well, such as to allowing for the stability of the proton... But just coming up with a way that life could emerge in a universe containing only hydrogen and helium gas, and no possibility of fusion, would be fairly tricky.
Question: Why is the universe the way it is? Answer: Because if it were any other way, we wouldn't be here to observe it and pose the question.
That kind of logic is the same as:
Question: What made Grampa fall in love with Grandma? Answer: Because if it were any other way, you wouldn't be here to pose the question.
That's no answer. The future effects to not cause their own causes.
There are something like 15 (IIRC) physical constants, which all are within very narrow bands required for elements heavier than Helium to exist. WHY? It's not because elements heavier than Helium exist. That's the effect, not the cause. It's not because we're asking the question. There's a reason why the constants are what they are, and we are not that reason. Yes, I realize that we would not be asking the question if the constants were anything different. But they are not anything different. The surprising part isn't the fact that the Universe can support life. We've obviously known that much for a couple hundred thousand years. The surprising part the laws of the universe that we've discovered are themselves heavily biased towards an extremely featureless and sterile universe. A complex universe can only exist given parameters within a very tiny range within a very highly-dimensioned solution space. It's like we discovered that the universe is a sphere perfectly balanced on the tip of a long needle holding safely above a vat of universe-dissolving acid. This begs certain questions. No one is being forced against their will to answer these questions with theology, but it does beg certain difficult questions. That is the significance of the Anthropic Principle.
Universe is eternal Universe is not eternal (eternal something else exists "outside" the universe that caused our universe)
Out of those two, you have a few options:
1) Universe is eternal, the universe is godless a) Universe is eternal, the universe is god (i.e. reality/god = same thing)
2) Universe is not eternal, the universe is godless a) Universe is not eternal, the universe has a god "outside" the universe (which is a misnomer, technically the universe would be 'inside' god, or made out of god, god being the substance of all existence, in this case).
Right. And the Greek philosophers, from Thales and Pythagoras on, with a few exceptions, further added that
3) The Universe changes, therefore is changeable, and therefore it is not eternal. 4) Without an eternal cause, nothing can exist. And so therefore, a transcendent eternal unchangeable God must exist as a logical necessity.
It's extremely disingenuous to call a hypothesis a principle, especially when the hypothesis is as controversial as this one.
Seems that it would be more disingenuous to call it a hypothesis. A hypothesis should be predictive and testable. The Anthropic Principle is not. The Anthropic Principles, assigns commonality or meaning to a large set of laws -- or one could say parameters of those laws. By my understanding, that is right in line with the dictionary definition of a principle.
Yes, we desperately need some sensitivity training in our armed forces. Instead of "bad guy", they should be trained to say, "innocent victim of my criminal bloodlust."
First, I'm not sure I agree that the universe seems perfectly tailored for life. 99.99% of the universe is empty space in which no life as we know it can survive. It seems to me that "perfectly tailored" would mean something other than "99.99% unusable".
The universe is "perfectly tailored" to allow for the existence of large atoms. And not only to allow for their existence, but to actually spontaneously construct them. That's mind-boggling enough for me. All the "empty" space is a further requirement of life -- without it, there would be no way to transmit and scale down the energy from stars to planets.
So why is camcording a movie a criminal offense publishable by jail but fraud isn't? and in the US why is fraud only ever settled in civil courts without the threat of jail?
Fraud is a criminal offense, punishable by prison time in both the U.S. and Canada.
Yeah, society is sick when so many people are thinking, "But he shouldn't have been..." instead of "Why can't the theatre just confiscate the tape, eject him from the theatre, and bar him from coming back?
How is that going to discourage him from doing the same thing at another theater? The punishment is reasonable. What is sick is that we live in a society where people are dishonorable enough to behave this way. In a reasonably honorable society, all it should take is a sign that says, "Please bring no recording devices into the theater" and it wouldn't happen. In an honorable society, people would stop thinking so much about their rights and start thinking about their duties as human beings.
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Agreed. It's no coincidence that back when men walked around with canes or swords, people were a lot more civil to each other. The threat of corrective violence is seriously lacking today.
In science, you don't assume something is right until it is proven wrong. Rather, scientific validity is based solely on verifiability. Therefore it is illegitimate to treat any scientific theory as infinitely precise. Within the realm of science they can only be treated as approximations of reality.
Spot on. Moreover, if you talk to any neurologist, human or animal, evolutionary or practical, you find that all those systems of thinking are built upon more fundamental systems of emotion. That is counter-intuitive to nerds like us who go into AI. But you don't solve the problem of thinking in a biological way, without first having solved the problem of feeling emotion. Our fallacy likes in thinking, because we have put logic into machines, that we are close to putting thought into machines. But logic is trivial by comparison. There IS NO THEORY, by any stretch of the imagination, for putting emotion into an electrical circuit, logical circuit, or anything else. We know that parts of the brain are involved with it, but we don't even have any guesses as to what it actually is.
This is incorrect. The state cannot presume you to be guilty until you are found to be so in court, and if found to be not guilty in court, it must presume you to be not guilty. (5th and 6th amendments) However, you can claim you have been falsely accused just as long as you like, regardless of what the court finds. (1st amendment)
The vacuum isn't nothing. The vacuum is everything.
That is a scientifically meaningless statement. Newtonian Mechanics is correct at non-relativistic speeds, because it is correct within the possible precision of measurement. If "right" means EXACTLY right, then ALL scientific theories are wrong, including SR, as no experiment can ever verify them to infinite precision. Moreover, as relativity contains singularities, the reasonable assumption should be that relativity becomes wrong at the extremes near it which it produces singularities. The belief that any theory is perfect can be nothing but delusional, in my opinion.
You mean the 1,000 nations with cultures based on perpetual warfare with one another, the largest of which established the largest-scale assembly-line operation of human sacrifice in recorded history, and who as a group hunted to extinction almost not only the American species of Mammoths, but nearly all the indigenous mega-fauna in the Americas? Those American Indians?
Nah, forget extinct species. Those Egyptian pharohs didn't preserver their bodies for nothing! We need to get Angelina and Madonna adopting baby cloned Queen Nefertitis or King Khufus or Rhamses. Just make sure the's born in the US, so that later we can vote for them for president.
I'm pretty sure that's wrong. Google "Neanderthal violence".
But that begs the question of how you would get a Neanderthal woman away from a Neanderthal man... you wouldn't.
It's FAR more likely they smoked meat to preserve it, as that's what their descendants did. And it probably tasted closer to smoked elephant.
All that has been compared so far is the mitochondrial DNA. OF COURSE we have no mitochondrial DNA. I don't know what they were thinking studying that. How excited is a h. sapiens male going to get over an insanely massive woman (and not necessarily short) who could crush him like a bird with one hand? A h. sapiens female on the other hand, would likely find a Neanderthal male quite irresistible... possibly in more ways than one, as "consent" may or may not have been as highly valued as it is now.
When I think of Neanderthals males and H. sapiens females, I can't help but be reminded of the place in Genesis where it says, "the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose." There's also an account in one of the Jewish pseudepigraphical books, of Lamech, the father of Noah, seeing that the baby Noah was all white and red, and freaking out, and running to the prophet, his grandfather Enoch to find out what to do, and if it was really his child. Enoch said it was, that this was because of the aforementioned "sons of God taking wives from the daughters of men" in the time of Jared (Enoch's father). This can be interpreted many ways, but especially in light of the scientific evidence in favor of light skin and red freckles coming from Neanderthals, I'm inclined to think that Adam through Jared were Neanderthals, Jared's generation mixed with dark-skinned H. sapiens females, and became progressively dark-skinned in the generations down to Lamech, but for whatever reason some recessive white-skin-and-freckles genes re-expressed themselves in Moses. Of course, this could be completely wrong, but it fits together too well for me to dismiss.
Regardless, I have little doubt that we have some neanderthal DNA. There are many examples of apparent hybrids in the archeological record, especially in the Levant, which the two species shared for a very long time, and also in extinct races of South America. You can see a beautiful museum example of a hybrid, although it's not discussed in terms of being a hybrid, just in terms of having extremely dense and large bones and unusually large brow ridges, in the Digging for the Truth episode on the Giants of Patagonia.
I think the Neanderthals can take care of themselves. With a significantly larger brain capacity, significantly denser bones and utterly massive muscles, I think it will be the tactless h. sapiens who will be finding our sympathy after such a run-in.
But if this were done, I would think/hope they would produce a number of them in a controlled environment, so they could develop and learn, and be studied together in a controlled environment. Perhaps they could form as adults a Neanderthal think-tank, where they use their massive brains to solve the world's problems... if they could resist the insane offers coming in from the NFL trying to recruit them as defensive linemen.
I have no idea what their psychology would be like. All we know in terms of that is that they were more loners, in small family groups, as opposed to the larger communities of h. sapiens, and that their tents appeared disorganized, as opposed to the neat and tidy tents of h. sapiens. But as we already have a fairly good idea of their physicality, I think that the aspects of their psychology would hold the biggest surprises.
It wasn't unanswerable to the Greek philosophers (or of course for the Christian philosophers who followed them). The universe needs a cause because it is changeable and finite, and progresses in time. Since there cannot be infinite regress of such causes, all causes must be traceable back to a cause that is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable (and so, uncausable). The early Greeks associated that cause with virtue and goodness, and called it "Theos", and starting with Heraclitus, "Logos". 500 years later, writing the New Testament, the early Christians called it by the exact same terms. (And then in Latin, those terms became "Deus" and "Verbum", and in English "God" and "the Word".)
But you see, the opposite is actually the case. Given the laws of physics, without specifying the constants, 99.99999% of the "possible" universes are exceedingly easy for our minds to grasp. They are very simple universes. Many are even singularities. The rest don't contain solids, liquids, or atoms larger than helium. All that complicated chemistry is just done away with. We live in the what appears to be the extremely "unlikely" case, where the universe is complicated. So it would seem that the options are to either say, 1) There's one universe and it just happened to have the constants necessary to be complicated; 2) There are a bajillion universes, so one of them had to be complicated, or 3) there's one universe and it is complicated by design. The first two options further beg the question of how these constants are "set" in the first place, as they presume some sort of randomizing mechanism assigning physical constants.
I'm a fan of General Relativity too. But any theory that has singularities has weaknesses that I believe must eventually be fixed. I think a reworking of the framework of GR is an inevitability. That said, I think the String Theory reworking of it won't be the one (though some of their thinking may carry over). When we eventually get it right (i.e. get it better), it will be by proceeding from evidence, not just cooking up numbers.
The Anthropic Principle, as I've read it, is about the question of why the laws of the universe are pigeon-holed in such a narrow and seemingly incredibly unlikely way that allows for stars, for elements heavier than helium, and for solids and liquids. It goes further than that as well, such as to allowing for the stability of the proton... But just coming up with a way that life could emerge in a universe containing only hydrogen and helium gas, and no possibility of fusion, would be fairly tricky.
That kind of logic is the same as:
Question: What made Grampa fall in love with Grandma?
Answer: Because if it were any other way, you wouldn't be here to pose the question.
That's no answer. The future effects to not cause their own causes.
There are something like 15 (IIRC) physical constants, which all are within very narrow bands required for elements heavier than Helium to exist. WHY? It's not because elements heavier than Helium exist. That's the effect, not the cause. It's not because we're asking the question. There's a reason why the constants are what they are, and we are not that reason. Yes, I realize that we would not be asking the question if the constants were anything different. But they are not anything different. The surprising part isn't the fact that the Universe can support life. We've obviously known that much for a couple hundred thousand years. The surprising part the laws of the universe that we've discovered are themselves heavily biased towards an extremely featureless and sterile universe. A complex universe can only exist given parameters within a very tiny range within a very highly-dimensioned solution space. It's like we discovered that the universe is a sphere perfectly balanced on the tip of a long needle holding safely above a vat of universe-dissolving acid. This begs certain questions. No one is being forced against their will to answer these questions with theology, but it does beg certain difficult questions. That is the significance of the Anthropic Principle.
Right. And the Greek philosophers, from Thales and Pythagoras on, with a few exceptions, further added that
3) The Universe changes, therefore is changeable, and therefore it is not eternal.
4) Without an eternal cause, nothing can exist.
And so therefore, a transcendent eternal unchangeable God must exist as a logical necessity.
The only religion I've ever heard of that does not seek is atheism.
Seems that it would be more disingenuous to call it a hypothesis. A hypothesis should be predictive and testable. The Anthropic Principle is not. The Anthropic Principles, assigns commonality or meaning to a large set of laws -- or one could say parameters of those laws. By my understanding, that is right in line with the dictionary definition of a principle.
Yes, we desperately need some sensitivity training in our armed forces. Instead of "bad guy", they should be trained to say, "innocent victim of my criminal bloodlust."
The universe is "perfectly tailored" to allow for the existence of large atoms. And not only to allow for their existence, but to actually spontaneously construct them. That's mind-boggling enough for me. All the "empty" space is a further requirement of life -- without it, there would be no way to transmit and scale down the energy from stars to planets.
Fraud is a criminal offense, punishable by prison time in both the U.S. and Canada.
How is that going to discourage him from doing the same thing at another theater? The punishment is reasonable. What is sick is that we live in a society where people are dishonorable enough to behave this way. In a reasonably honorable society, all it should take is a sign that says, "Please bring no recording devices into the theater" and it wouldn't happen. In an honorable society, people would stop thinking so much about their rights and start thinking about their duties as human beings.