joigus

Long live coffee|

I care not how you define me. Nor would I waste a second's thought in defining you. Nothing you can say about me can move me one way or the other. Although I suspect you will appeal to insult rather easily. I do care about ideas, theories, consistency, rebuttals, compelling arguments, experimental checks, different levels of cross checks, certainty, hidden assumptions... If this site is dead, what are you doing trying to find a place among the dead? There are plenty of places out there where you can find people far more unconcerned about assumptions and logical consistency, and totally obsessed about defining each other and themselves rather than examining their mutual assumptions. You would feel far more at ease.

Now you have You're careening off topic towards discussing your favourite toys at alarming speed.

Please, do give up on me. And stop hijacking other people's posts with your pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo. Nothing you've said so far has been substantiated.

Absolutely science-spectacular. Thank you. +1 Thank you, Studiot. +1 Somewhere I had an answer written for you, but I must have lost it. A bookish answer, as always.

Thanks a lot. +1 I will adjoin the wikipedia link here, for completeness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Prismatic_Spring And a brief explanation of the most outstanding feature:

Mmmm. Yeah, sounds like you guys totally agree. You cut and paste some of your sentences and you can mock up a bitter debate.

I would like to create a little room here for the wonderfully unexpected, beautiful,... (add your adjective) in Nature. Unexpected and/or beautiful could be interpreted as curious/spectacular, or similar. I mean to use these examples in order to keep the kids interested in Nature. The youngest ones get bored very easily. Examples could be: a rare animal, plant or protist, an almost unbelievably beautiful geological phenomenon, an amazingly complicated molecule that looks like a tinker-toy assembly, spectacular phenomena in water eddies and such. You get the idea. My getting-started examples: Glasswinged butterfly A family of butterflies that eat poisonous leaves when they're caterpillars and grow transparent wings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_oto Rainbow Eucalyptus tree A species of tree that looks as if somebody had Photoshop-painted them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_deglupta Maths are also welcome. Things that look paradoxical like 0.9999999... = 1 would be the idea. I'm sure people will enrich this with possibilities I'm not foreseeing.

Totally. +1

Touché.

Sanity is a mental condition. A platitude is an unnecessary (on account of being too obvious to be useful) statement. You really seem to have no clue, neither about what Eise is saying, nor about what you're saying yourself. Your sentences really are a challenge as to how many inconsistencies you can fit into them per word.

If they are well-learned enough in science, maths, logic, linguistics, computer science..., why not?

Thanks a lot. Very useful. +1

I personally don't take offence at the concept of science being wrong, even though I use my leisure time mostly to learn more about it and I've made of it my method to try and understand the world better, like most of us here I would say. I don't think science aims for absolute truth. It's not about being right or wrong beyond any doubt. It's about being more right and certain and less wrong and uncertain, and pushing the limits of doubt and ignorance. Science doesn't provide us with a magic wand to dictate ethics either. It evidences correlations, most of them of statistical nature. It sheds light on plausible causal connections, it refutes previous ill-conceived ideas. If we do that, we are in a better position to take better decisions, diagnose better, tackle evil before it happens. But this can only be achieved by adding to the structure more layers of rational thinking and open discussion. Our understanding is never complete. What kind of philosophy marginalizes individuals? Do you mean something like social Darwinism? It's not a universal trait of philosophy, AFAIK. I'm guessing you've voted that there are good and bad philosophical theories...

You can have a plague, massive wiping out of genes, but the smallest sample get amplified by the founder effect later. And what previously was a Charlemagne differential gene (I suppose Charlemagne had genes for cellular respiration too) get amplified to almost universal proportions. It's kind of a mix, filter, mutate and stretch kind of dynamics.

Agreed. Language of itself can mislead you. Maths too. Experiments without theoretical analysis are devoid of meaning. Sheer observation can be a crook. It's a network of interrelationships, cross checks, that makes it all solid. Narrowing down the chances of being mistaken. Cladking doesn't even seem to know what a cat is. Most people have no problem with this.

The problem with this is that is sounds sooooo much like a particular philosophy... You simply can't escape philosophy. Break down the word into etymological pieces and you'll understand why.

Some days ago I learnt from @Strange that most Europeans are descended from Charlemagne. I've learnt many other things from him. But this one got me thinking (and still is) about the likely regular Jacks and Susans, and Joes and Marys, who were especially successful in the reproductive sense, but not particularly notorious, and got their genes pushed forward in human history.

Wrong paragraph, wrong book. Nothing about categories there; nothing makes much sense there either in today's context. You still sound cathartic.

@cladking Common categories are not Aristotelian (classical) categories. The concept of cat comes from the clustering together by family resemblance of particular instances of what we call cats, not by the definition of closed (mathematical) equivalence classes. There's even a mathematical theory for the concept you're groping towards: fuzzy sets. Overall, your discourse sounds cathartic, more than based on thought out concepts. You sound dissatisfied and you seem to want to voice your dissatisfaction. You should try some common-interest group based on emotions, rather than a scientific / philosophical battleground for your complaints. That's my advice, anyway. Edit: Here's an example of your "cats"

Read some Wittgenstein. And then some modern cognitive scientists. They've already developed the point you're trying to make.

Gross underestimation.

Sorry. You're right. You do make a point. I was under the influence of the last couple of comments I've had to answer to, which were quite pointless. Thank you. +1 You do make a good point here.

Told you. Thinking is hard, and you have opted for a simplified version of it. You've thrown away tens of thousands of years of human knowledge right there. Hardly the point.