BrainMan

Is light preserved within a black hole? Not that you could get it back out...

Ok, so if we have an expanding reservoir to help prevent the energy disipation at the reflective boundaries, how long can we store light?

Get some extremely hot hot sauce. Whenever you find yourself cracking your knuckles, splash some in your mouth! I don't promise it will work, but I bet it would be funny to watch you try it.

I don't beieve you really have done any of those things. If you think otherwise, then you can claim the $1,000,000 prize money offered by the James Randi Education Foundation: "At JREF, we offer a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event. The prize is in the form of negotiable bonds held in a special investment account. The JREF does not involve itself in the testing procedure, other than helping to design the protocol and approving the conditions under which a test will take place. All tests are designed with the participation and approval of the applicant. In most cases, the applicant will be asked to perform a relatively simple preliminary test of the claim, which if successful, will be followed by the formal test. Preliminary tests are usually conducted by associates of the JREF at the site where the applicant lives. Upon success in the preliminary testing process, the "applicant" becomes a "claimant." To date, no one has ever passed the preliminary tests. " From: http://www.randi.org/research/index.html You can obtain an application on the above page.

It would be quite a coincidence if the ant in a spinning microwave just happened to travel from cold spot to cold spot as it span without entering one of these "hot spots". Or perhaps the outer shell of the ant protected it from the heat in these hot spots, and the ant never remained in them long enough to cook from the inside out.

I don't think so. If I remember correctly, after they showed the video on that program, they pointed out that despite many attempts, no one was ever able to replicate what that video supposedly showed. And as for "thinking the same thing", I have often sat and observed small groups of people in rooms and noticed how converstaion material will "float around" the room, despite the fact that different groups of people are not directly talking to each other. For example, on one side of the room, they will be having a conversation about balloons, and sure enough- minutes later- people on the other side of the room start talking about balloons. It happens because people hear these things but don't pay attention to them (they are processed only unconsciously) which primes the material in peoples minds- making that topic more likely to come to mind and be talked about. These are implicit memory effects. There are all sorts of contexual efects due to being in certain environments that can do similar things. Two people, in the same place at the same time, are likely to be seeing the same thing, so similar ideas are brought to mind more readily. Still, that wont always happen, and I think there is something to be said for coincidence as well.

But how can you still believe in ultimate reality if you accept YT's definition. As I said, it is not easy to establish such a thing. By YT's very definition of objectivity, "ultimate reality" is not objective! Unless you provide a method that can establish the existence of an ultimate reality, such a notion is, by YT's definition, not objective.

The problem is this: Suppose we accept representationalism, and say that there is a represented reality- which amounts to that which we experience. This makes every experience and set of experiences we have a "virtual" reality- a possible reality, but always subject to change, such as touching a stove, jumping thinking you have been burned, and then realizing that you never did experience a burning sensation after all, despite your initial experience (err...maybe experience, or virtual reality). The problem is that you cannot demonstrate that there is a such thing as "ultimate reality" independantly of a set of virtual realities. But such virtual realities are alway subject to reinterpretation and change- that is, they are always virtual realities, and not "reality" proper, as some would like. Yet again, there is no basis, logical or otherwise, for even asserting the existence of a mind independant reality. None. Here is one suggesting that I have heard, that seems close to what YT was getting at. Take the set of all possible experiences- all possible virtual realities- and find out which sets of representations are invariant with respect to transformations between them. Call this invariant set of representations "objective reality". Niffty little idea, but how would you actually go about doing this? It would certainly not be easy, and there is no garauntee that there would be an invariant set- or much of one beyond trivialities. The fact remains that, even with science, any notion of "objectivity" is itself infused with the subjective. Trying to suggest that the world comes chopped up into prearranged catagories independantly of what we ourselves bring to the table is practically impossible, and quite likely wrong.

But why are you making the brain stem privileged? Isn't that just as arbitrary a distinction as conception is? Couldn't I just say "I consider it to be human when cell number 3,453,234 becomes functional" and be making just as good a statement as you?

YT- So do I ake it that you are also against pulling people off machines after they are "brain dead"? The term applies to people that have no functioning cortex, but still have brain activity of some sorts. I believe most gross aspects of brain development are done by the end of the first trimester, and I think that neural activity is presnet the whole time- necessary for guiding proper development of the brain. Im not positive though. There is evidence of memory after birth due to stimuli exposure in the womb in the third trimester. But brain development actually continues into adulthood. You stated a point from when you consider it to be a human, but you didn't say why. Is it just an arbitrary choice? Why should anyone accept that point?

Well if that is the case, go for an MD. It is much, MUCH easier to get into a medical school than it is to get into a PhD program- especially for really competitive fields like clinical psychology. But I don't quite understand. It sounds like you weren't going into it because you really wanted to do the clinical psychology work. It sounds like you just had a thing for the Freudian ideas, but no real interest in the work... I don't know.

Have you enjoyed the anthropology?

Based on our current state of knowledge? No. But I voted yes because there is nothing wrong with it in principle, given it is properly understood first what exactly the result will be, the odds of problems arising, ect. and given such knowledge poses no serious ethical delema beyond having a human/chimp hybird.

From the site: lol

You don't know that.

An assumption made at the start, for this theory, is that space is infinite. With infinite space, anything that can happen, will happen- no matter how improbable. But there will be distributions- some universes will be more probable than others. Odds are we live in a probable universe- for universes with self-aware substructures. If, according to our observations, we turn out to live in an improbable universe, then the thoery is not supported. So: Where? In the infinity of space [there would be infinitely many of every possible universe...]. How? By comparing our universe (our observations) with the probability distributions of possible universes to see if ours is probable. Yes, mathematically. Just because we are here does not mean we live in a universe that would be probable given this theory.

The question is if our universe is probable[/i], not if it is possible. [Although if, based upon this, our universe turned out to be "immpossible", that would simply mean that our universe is non-mathematical which means that theory would be wrong. Where are what? The "material" we see would be, "in reality", mathematical structures- or reflections of such from a frog's eye view.

But how are you distinguishing between the reconstruction becoming less acurate over time (due to, say, false information), and the memory actually decaying? Or are you jus identifying the two? Are you basically saying that if a memory is not stored perfectly acurately, then ipso facto the decay theory is true?

Life doesn't "begin" for a person because we don't go from dead to alive. There are two living cells that (continuing to stay alive the entire time) develop into a new baby human. But the question was when we value the human life as a person, not when we should consider it "alive", per se. We all know that "living", by itself, is not sufficient to value the life- else killing a plant would be wrong. [unless you believe in a magical infusion of a soul upon conception, in which case you aren't being scientific so I am going to ignore you... ] I like to think of it like this. We have a unch of thread and we are making a sweater. The question is when we should value it as warm. A small patch of interwoven thread doesn't cut it. A complete sweater obviously does. But where is the line drawn? My first tendancy is to say that it becomes a person when it is capable of the higher functions that characterize humans, and capable of human experiences. But one could easily construe this to mean that infantacide is ok for quite some time after birth. And when exactly does "experience" begin? There are no good answers yet... but I would bet that an understandig of consciousness would play into the abortion debate quite heavily.

Look, if you want to know about evolution and evolutionary history, there is really no substitute to a good text book. Yeah, I know, they are big and require lots of time. That is sort of the point. All these popularized accounts of evolution will do little for you other than making you thjink you know more about evolution than you actually do. Go to the source... break down and buy a dmaned text! Used copies can be had fairly cheap now-a-days.

According to Tegmark, it is testable. It is a matter of looking at all possible structures, and determining if our universe is probable. Actually, it gets a bit more odd... we need to look at all possible structures, and of these, look at all possible structures capable of producing self-aware substructures. Then we look at, among these, the probability of a self-aware substructure observing exactly what we observe in our own universe.

From: http://www.geocities.com/haripaudel/Parallel_Universes.htm Max Tegmark goes on to describe level 1, 2 and 3 multiverses, and then gives his own novel idea: the level 4 multiverse. Basically, he states that the universe we are in is a particular mathematical structure, and every possible mathematical structure that can exist, does exist. That is, there are different universes with different laws of physics... and infinitely many of them. Sounds kinda cool... What do you think?

Here is a niffty article on the subject: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00065A99-90A6-1CD6-B4A8809EC588EEDF Which reminds me...

The idea that a memory "decays", to me, sounds like it implies that an event was accurately recorded (represented) in the first place, and degrades over time. But if memories are bits and pieces in the first place, and are reconstructed later, then how are you trying to support the notion of decaying memory? Does that question make sense? And I just off base here?

Psychology can explain mathematics. Where do you think mathematics comes from?