exchemist

“Another” science expert? 😆

Conflating Jews with Israelis is an old trick of apologists for Israeli policy. I also note Godwin's Law is in operation. The war the IDF is operating in Gaza certainly looks a great deal like ethnic cleansing. - They have herded almost the whole population up against the border with Egypt, in the hope the Egyptians will let them in, having killed over 30,000 of them. - They have tried to get the humanitarian operations of UNWRA stopped, by various means, including disinformation to smear it with complicity in the 7th Oct massacre. - While this is going on, Israeli settlers have been given free rein to take over more land. - There has been silence from the Israeli government about how Gaza should be governed once hostilities cease. - And, far from getting serious about peace negotiations, Israel has actually assassinated the chief negotiator on the other side. So it is a fair inference that Israel seems to want the war to go on until the Palestinians in Gaza either give up and leave, or die.

Suggest reading the thread and addressing the issues raised, specifically the issues of how to make reproducible observations, the degree of confirmed predictive success of the theories, and the use of theories such as Freud’s, which seem to have only shaky empirical support.

Looks like a really impressive piece of cyber warfare, targetting only the fighters equipped with pagers and simultaneously injuring them, knocking out their comms and sowing panic. Very clever. Just wish the bloody IDF would be more targetted in Gaza. But since ethnic cleansing seems to be the unstated aim there, not much hope of that.

If one is a fool, yes. Asking such a question would indicate failure to understand, or to address, why this question is asked of psychology, specifically.

Yes, I think that's the point: the more the idea conflicts with what everyone else considers obvious, the more it becomes inescapable to allege a conspiracy, in order to account for why everyone else is supposedly wrong. This is true of flat earth, 911, Kennedy's assassination, Princess Diana's death (white Fiat Uno/Duke of Edinburgh etc), moon landings, Covid and 5G antennae............ @Night FM, perhaps it would help if you could give an example of a contrarian belief that people call a conspiracy theory but which does not imply a conspiracy. Flat earth is a poor example, for the reasons outlined.

What do you mean by the "volume" of a particle? Such a concept requires objects with sharply defined edges, doesn't it?

They are motivated by profit, but what @CharonY says about shelf life, specifically, has the ring of truth. I worked in the lubricants industry, in which we had to quote shelf lives for packaged lubricants: engine and gear oils and so forth. When a new product is developed, you can’t wait for 5 - 10 years or more before putting it on the market, just so you can determine when it may start to go off. Also, so much depends on storage conditions: temperature, moisture exposure etc. So what a manufacturer - any manufacturer, I suspect - does is come up with a safe “use by” date from the data on life they already have. As it will be an estimate, they will have to err on the conservative side for obvious legal reasons. No need to ascribe malign motives: it’s a purely practical matter, faced by any manufacturer.

The extract you quote seems to be pretty badly written and to be rather a muddle. They criticise science for not accounting for "the subjective experience of life", without clarifying who or what is doing the "experiencing". One might assume they are talking about human experience, but in the next sentence they speak of failing to understand "the various aspects associated with the [sic] biological entities". So actually, they seem to have in mind all organisms, not just human beings. So what, in that case, can they mean by the "subjective experience" in the preceding sentence? Are they suggesting all life, including, say, that of a wasp or a plant, involves some subjective experience that it ought to be the job of science to explain? It seems to me they need to start by justifying the assumption they seem to be making that there has to be some special "subjective experience" that is a universal special feature of living organisms. So that is the first point. The second is that you now seem to be confusing the study of subjective experience, e.g. as recommended by these authors, with a supposed need for science itself to become subjective in its methodology. That would be the kiss of death for science, obviously.

No indeed. About half the country seems to get it.

Why do you think fidelity between sexual partners is valued?

You may get the odd one, but the fact remains it is far harder to bring off than shooting a mass of people with a gun if you feel pissed off. This is why school shootings are virtually exclusively an American phenomenon. In the UK we had the last one in Dunblane in 1996, when someone was able to get hold of....a GUN.....:https://www.businessinsider.com/uk-changed-laws-ended-school-shootings-after-1996-dunblane-massacre-2022-5?op=1 There will be just the same adolescent alienation and resentments occurring all over the world, but without easy access to guns, people don't find it is easy to act on these destructive impulses - and the moment usually passes without serious incident. I'm afraid I now laugh whenever yet another school shooting is reported in the USA. They will go on and on until guns are properly controlled, as they are in other civilised nations. Yet we see Americans contorting themselves and jumping through all manner of logical hoops to avoid the reason that is staring them in the face: the availability of GUNS.

Experience from other countries, where guns are not widely available, is that this is not the case. Mass violence against schoolkids is very hard to bring about without a gun and it almost never occurs.

In other words, you've made it up. I thought as much. I note that you are already shifting the goalposts: from procreation to sex and procreation. That already makes a significant difference, of course. Anyway, since you've posted this in Philosophy, I would simply draw your attention to the distinction between what the biology of the human species as a whole may optimise itself for, and what purpose an individual human being may seek or find in the course of his or her life. I suggest clarifying which of the two you want to talk about.

That's exactly the thought that sprang to my mind. Well, one of two actually. The other was that, when I was a kid, my brothers and I developed the idea that Mr Waverley, the boss in The Man from UNCLE, had his lungs in his buttocks and breathed by shifting from one buttock to the other while seated. Don't ask me why. One of us just thought it would be an amusing thing to keep in mind while watching the show. So I did allow myself a chuckle at the idea someone might breathe through his arse.

Aunt Sally Alert: Who has ever suggested the only purpose of life is procreation?

This illustrates what I suspected: you are confusing lack of precision with lack of objectivity. The Mohs scale has limited precision, since all it can do is rank minerals relative to one another rather than provide a quantitative value. But that does not make it subjective. 2 independent testers will agree on the relative rankings to assign to a group of minerals. (In fact the writer of the blog you quote is rather mis-applying the Mohs scale, since it was never designed for alloys such as steel. It can only be expected to give reliable results for pure substances.)

Quite. What would be the motive? The trip would take thousands of years - and the same to get back again, if return were envisaged, greatly exceeding the lifespan of any conceivable carbon-based life form. Sending a robotic probe might be more effective, as it could be accelerated harder and could beam signals back at c. But even that would be a very long term project, spanning generations. The best method, almost certainly, would be by remote sensing, using good telescopes, spectrometers etc. And why would our planet be of any special interest?

OK, I'll wait for you to find them and present before commenting further, as I suspect you have misinterpreted something about them, whatever they are.

What findings, then, posted where? You have posted 25 pages of posts. I cannot be expected to trawl through all of them in the hope of identifying what you are talking about.

I don't rule out microbial mats for the greenish colour in the foreground of the picture. It is the pale, bluish grey colour that I find interesting, as it seems unusual. There is no tourism office on the peninsula, though I suppose there might be in Helensburgh. When I next go back, I might see if Glasgow University has anything, or anyone, to comment on this. The Dalradian Series is pretty famous (if fiendishly complicated) and well-studied, so I'm sure the answer is there somewhere in the geology community.

OK, you refer to two sets of recent "findings" here, for which you have not provided details. I presume you mean findings of science, but perhaps you could confirm. One, you think, suggests a physicalist interpretation of the world may be inadequate, and the other you think suggests mind is an entity, rather than an activity of the brain. I'm intrigued by this. Perhaps if you can give a reference or a short description it would help me understand what you have in mind. Can you do that?

Well done indeed for digging this out. So it's possible it is after all a metamorphosed igneous rock then! That might more easily explain the flow-like banding, I suppose. (It seems to be called metabasite rather than metabasalt, though). I'm still intrigued by the light grey colour and its comparative softness/solubility, as suggested by the smooth way it has been eroded by sea, compared to the surrounding rocks on the beach which are darker and rougher. Perhaps the metamorphosis involved alteration by water as well as heat. I suspect we've got as far as we can now without a geologist familiar with the area.

Since science is the study of nature, I cannot envisage how it can ever "bring us beyond" space, time, energy and matter, as I can't see how there could be any observations of nature that are "beyond" such things. Even the mathematics we use to model mature is expressed in terms of properties of matter and radiation, as functions of space and time. My personal view of "mind" - and it is only a personal view - is that most people are conditioned by centuries of Cartesian dualism into making a category error: that of thinking that the mind is an entity. It seems to me, by analogy with how computers work, that the mind is not an entity but an activity: an activity of the brain.

OK but be a bit careful here. While science can certainly be done without claiming that we live in a materialist-mechanical world, anyone who does science must always apply the principle of methodological naturalism to any scientific work. Claiming supernatural intervention can never be part of a scientific explanation or description of nature. Scientists may well hold beliefs beyond simple physicalism, but they cannot introduce non-natural ideas into science. Such ideas simply do not belong there.