joigus

Dear @Holmes, Previously you said that the universe must have an initial cause. How do you know the causal connections --whenever they occur-- do not respond to a pattern like a looping structure, with no beginning, and no end? About causeless things, an example: Hurricanes happen. But there is no way you can trace back the cause of the hurricane, or any significant cluster of causes. There just isn't a enunciable --let alone predictable-- series of events that caused it. I hope that helps.

I think this is clear based on the manifest whataboutism of the main argument. You see them as just creepy; I see them as an ancient lineage of animals that have been on this planet for hundreds of millions of years. So that's subjective. But in any case, how creepy something is should have no bearing on whether knowingly destroying it is justifiable. Phoenician tombs or Aztec monuments are creepy --they contain the rests of sacrificed people--, but they're invaluable; some people are creepy --e.g., people with bad hairpieces--, but they have the right to live, etc. As to the argument, I don't think this provides a solid basis for assessing whether an action is or is not justified or proportionate. It may be an argument for judging the degree of premeditation assuming the action has already been judged unethical, or unjustified, or disproportionate, or maybe just idle, on some other basis. It doesn't tell us anything about whether it's laudable or not. And pointing out that other actions are more culpable than the one we're defending doesn't make a good case. My personal opinion is that you should kill an animal only if it's a threat to your life, well being, etc. But maybe that's just me.

Duly noted.

"Nothing" is not a good semantic placeholder. Example: 1) Nothing is real (Nothingness is possible) 2) Nothing is real (no thing is real) (Completely different meanings) You have to mind your every step if you don't wanna fall into the use-mention fallacy. and other linguistic pitfalls. I didn't know this one. Even though I love American comedy. The nineties is my all-time favourite period. Especially: "This is the show, and we're not gonna change it." "Nothing happens on the show" --George Costanza

Thinking about nothing is good for nothing. Think nothing of it.

Dark energy is uniform by its very definition. The inverse square law is only valid for local clustering of energy-momentum, and it's an approximation. When you get close to sources of gravity, it's no longer valid. Example: Mercury's orbit around the Sun, for which the inverse-cube term's effects are sizeable at the time scale of centuries. No gravitational source that I know of has field exponentially-varying with distance. Systems dominated by gravity (all stars and black holes) are fundamentally out-of-equilibrium, due to negative heat capacities: They heat up when they lose energy into space, so they're thermally unstable. They don't "thermally die". The concept of heat death of the universe is a theoretical extrapolation that would apply to models of the universe other than the one we presently accept --and never to a standalone star, in any case. It doesn't apply to the present picture of the universe that emerges from cosmological observations AFAIK.

Australia plays in a different league when it comes to bugs. Most insects and arachnids won't harm you if you don't mess with them. I think it's gratuitously violent to kill animals just because it makes you feel more comfy. Take your picnic somewhere else is my advice. Similar reason why I oppose bullfighting, and hunting and fishing just for sport. We do enough damage as it is by destroying habitats at the rate we are. It's also a matter of growing up, IMO. Last time I killed a small animal at a place that's not in my home I was like ten. Stamping on an ant's nest would make me feel ridiculous today. The last time I stepped on a spider to feel manly in front of a girl I must have been something like that age too. But if I haven't convinced you, I suggest you extend your strategy to grizzly bears. Those can really disturb your picnic.

[sic] Here's how: Apparently you missed it the first time.

Please, get back in the box.

No. Counterexample: The Kardashians

I sympathise with your position, for many years it's been my own position, but influential scientists like Lawrence Krauss insist on claiming the concept of the physical vacuum as a substitute for "nothing" (A Universe from Nothing), so (for better or worse) it has permeated to the general culture. And you need to take that into account if you want to dispel some confusion in people who strive to understand these concepts.

This is very much along the lines of what I wanted to say. How can you cut "nothing" in disjoint pieces and tell them apart, keeping track of the one that's inside your box and the one that's outside? Some questions make no sense. And what's more; some concepts (even with no predicate) make no sense. Examples: The position of unanimity The sympathy of the rock etc. If you want to make sense of an idea of "nothing", you need to go back to physics. And the salient idea from physics that's closest to "nothing" is the vacuum. And the physical idea of the vacuum looks nothing like that naive no-thing. For starters, it looks more like the box is sitting on the vacuum (it gets its mass from it, through the Higgs mechanism), rather than that the vacuum is a substance that can be trapped in the box. It also changes through cosmological evolution, it expands, etc. It's seamless, pretty much featureless, but not completely devoid of attributes. Science edits some of our ages-old philosophical ideas and completely revamps them.

Very interested in the answer to this question.

I'm not following your analogy here. Are the monkeys individuals, or genetic sequences, or the background chemical processes, in the analogy? Either way: How does the monkey "tell the other monkeys" once that particular sequence works, that it does and they must use it? I think we agree in most everything else and that we have established that evolution is not random. Yes it's true that most phenotypes are multifactorial. A well-known example is size. But when stochastic variables depend on many other independent stochastic variables the central-limit theorem guarantees that they will conform to a Gaussian. Something that in the case of size seems to be satisfied very well. This is a question about what particular probability distribution does the phenotype fit; not really about whether the selection process is random or not. The key question in evolution is that the throwing of the dice is one of a very quick step-by-step change (genetics) against a much, much slower erratic change (climate, competitors, etc.). And I think we all basically agree that the monkey model doesn't fit the bill.

This connects very much with point 3) by @Arete. Point 3), I think, is essential. Point 1) I don't think it's crucial as, in Eukaryotes at least, there's a considerable amount of DNA that's just got rid of by RNA splicing. So in eukaryotes there's a lot of RNA material that goes in the dumpster right away during the phase of transcription. I think what Arete's point is that Nature is much less forgiving to "mistyping" DNA than the monkey theorem suggests. Monkeys that mistype too much are removed (see below). Point 2) give the monkeys a chance to make some typing mistakes, as different codons give rise to same protein. Proofreading processes give the monkeys another shot too. This is equivalent to letting the monkeys disregard certain typographic rules, e.g.: ignore capitals, spell words phonetically, etc. We don't have infinitely many monkeys in our typing bench! "Random" by itself doesn't mean much. When people use the word "random" in such a way, they usually mean something like equal probability for all outcomes. Equal probability is not what governs evolution. Some changes are more likely than others. It's as if, for some reason, the monkeys are more likely to type the sequence "ow" than the sequence "wt". It is also known that some sequences of nucleotides are more prone to mutation than others. Trying to elaborate on @Arete's point 3), while connecting with the OP's analogy of the typing monkeys; it is as if every now and then, when a monkey makes a typing mistake that's too bad to be forgiven, some directing process kicks him off the team of typing monkeys and lets other monkeys take his job. So, again, it's not random. The environment has the final call on which monkeys keep typing an which don't. And internal processes determine which typing mistakes are immaterial, and which aren't.

As @exchemist says, evolution is not random. That's a misrepresentation commonly used by creationists to caricature the mechanism of evolution. If you think deeply about it, everything is random. The key for some kind of adaptation is that: 1) The replicating mechanism is fast 2) The background conditions, though being ultimately random, reshuffle so slowly as compared to the replication process as to provide a sufficiently slow background (and thereby effectively non-random) for the replication mechanism to adapt to them. Almost x-posted with @StringJunky and @studiot and I have to read more carefully the whole thread. X-posted with @Ghideon.

I still don't know what @dimreepr's position on the matter of Sharia in countries which already have a body of law really is. For example: That may be true, but I fail to see any direct connection to the topic of Sharia in the US.

LOL. Got it! What campus is that?

Who? Sorry, I'm lost. 🥴

Sorry. It may have been me who started the language issues. The sentence that, under Sharia, women can be free, left me worried. Then I agree that the thread was diverted into language too heavily. I don't particularly adhere to the fact that the forum is resurrected based on minor linguistic points, and only that. But I do insist that either you are free, or you aren't. Sometimes I point out a language item because it worries me that it hides something or tries to make up for something. In this case, if I said to you: "Don't worry, you can be free any time you want", you would be right to suspect it might reveal an important constriction to your freedom. The fact that "can" is used as diminishing the condition of free, to me, is not to be ignored. And the fact that a person who's presumably receiving instruction on Sharia feels compelled to say that women can be free under Sharia, to me, means something. Why doesn't the OP just say "women are free under Sharia"? See my point? Unfortunately neither the OP, nor anybody else has clarified this point. And I didn't insist on it, as I noticed that it didn't gather much attention.

By those who understand. That's why we say "I understand", and never "I'm understanding". But we always say "I'm learning".

It may take many setbacks to learn a lesson. Understanding, on the other hand, is instantaneous...

It's a matter of terminology, but I don't think "curse of knowledge" is off the mark. The first time you learn something, it's probably more accurate to call it understanding. But not every time the question pops up again do you reproduce the "understanding" part of it. You retrieve the data from your memory, because your really understood it long ago. You may even remember a reasoning, but it's just because memory is playing a role there that the key ideas for that reasoning can be conjured up almost instantly. You may be under the illusion that you're reasoning again, but you're drawing from your memory more heavily than you would like to believe. It happens to all of us, and it's to do with how the hippocampus works.

The motivations, historical background, technologies, etc in the 100-Years War, WWII, the Cold War, etc. are very different. I think we are losing focus; or rather, creating different focuses. One thing is for sure though: @Hans de Vries can rest assured there are many people here willing to discuss war besides him.

If M is "moles", that may be it. Then the number of moles of Cl would have to add up to .6 and the \(V_1\) and \(V_2\) that I mentioned don't enter into it. "M" generally represents moles per liter though... I hate trying to guess what they're asking. 😆 I hesitate to say that must be it.