Eureko

And don´t forget the accumulation of dioxins and free radicals that might cause natural deaths of organisms...

But, if we take an organism, and hypothetic one, I wonder (also at molecular level) what´s the difference in the just two consecutive moments that differ from the living to the dead organism...

Eureko,

what are you asking about? What is it you want to know?

The main topic of this thread---the question raised in the first post---is about expansion speeds. Relativity requires that some distances can expand faster than the speed of light (this is not a violation of relativity but is in fact required by (general) relativity to be possible.

I don't know if your question is about this or about something else.

 

So please say a little more, to explain what you are asking

Yes, I know the topic of this discussion. I saw it and it called my attention cause I have been wondering so much time if the universe could expand faster than light, even thought I never looked for the answer.

I haven´t read all the comments thought. And I don´t know any about relativity but I will read it all and if I still having doubts I will ask them.

Maybe could we say that living matter suffer process by itself and dead one does not? That´s it: reproduces, grows, gets feed... etc. Well, I just don´t know.

I don´t know the answer but I´d like us to discuss about it so let´s see what could we find.

I have always wondered what´s exactly the difference between a dead body (I think about a human one) and a living one, if, in both cases they have exactly the same structure... what´s the key to differ between the one living and the other dead, what makes it one to be one way and the other the opposite...

Reading the posts will show you the side of opinion, Martin and Swansont's posts are probably the ones to pay particular attention to.

Oh, thank you so much, man!

I just had to get through my lazyness, haha... My interest is bigger.

I have no clue about it. I just voted for a finite space from what I know from reading Hawking.

If there was a beginning, and it started there and continued growing, how could it become now infinite? It should have grown over everything growable! Weird to imagine. I think it must be finite.

Me declino a pensar que también tiene una masa finita.

Why there´s only British and American Universities? Why there´s no one from other countries?

I guess we are much under all these... This stinks.

Hell. I have always wondered about this!

Somebody with the answer?

20.M.Madrid, Spain.

Then how do we account for all the problems that have been solved but then spawned new problems? Is the ‘solved’ problem still considered intelligent? Eg. Automobiles solved mobility problems but created more - air pollution, serious collisions, laziness and health problems, excessive fossil fuel consumption, etc.

So then intelligence might be defined as the ability to solve problems that create more problems to solve?

I´d define intelligende as Mr Skeptic did at first time. The hability to solve problems, it is just this. If you solve a problem but create a new one it means that you´re very intelligent in solving the kind of problems you already solved (as he explained, a subtipe). And, solving every kind of problem and not creating new ones it is not just intelligence, in my opinion that´d be something like wisdom, a very balanced intelligence.

I voted for this (integ(uv) = uv - integ(v du))one cause in Spanish (I am Spaniard) we memorice it with a funny phrase:

S(uv) = uv-S(v du). S(uv) = Un Viejo-Salido(Viola Dos Universitarias).

And this means: A green old man raped two universitarian girls.

Funny?

I do think we can create knowledge, but the way we function seems to require that the knowledge be linked to something. However, this would bring up quite a conundrum, as to do that we need to start with some knowledge.

No, no, so we can´t create, we can GET knowledge, and order it, discover it and formulate it. But never create. Maybe it is a vice of the lenguage that we say it so many times, I believe.

Why not? Eureko sounds like eureka!, an exclamation of discovery. Discovery is related to knowledge, and knowledge is strength (or at least can prevent people from making a fool of themselves :doh: ). Strength in German is Kraft, which is the name of a cheesy food company. So now I linked your name to cheese

Oh, yes, haha, I know. I was just joking. So, you don´t think we can get knowledge from anywhere, right? We can´t create knowledge. It sounds like Thermodynamic First Law: Knowledge can´t be created (destroyed?) only can be transformed. Sounds good.

Don´t use me as an example, please!

Define "better". One person's paradise is another person's hell.

That´s true, despite I have my moral convinctions, I don´t believe in a single morality system so I am a moral relativist in this way. So, I can´t define better since it has a different meaning for each one, but I said that "I think" it would be better, and this is cause we don´t need religion no more, it was a very usefull tool in the past (to explain natural events, to base the social system, to build a morality...), nowadays we have other tools that work much better than religion, and by my experience it only produces friction in the society and make people blind of the real world.

It's a system of beliefs, whether you like it or not, making it a religion. I know a lot of theology majors. Consequently, Atheism believe in a higher being, themeselves.QUOTE]

 

What? Look, I am an atheist, and:

First: do not generalize saying that "atheist believe in a higher being, themselves", do you think is this a good hypotheys?

Second: I don´t believe me or the human kind is any higher being, and I don´t think atheist are either.

Third: I believe there´s a stone in my backyard, so, should I have a religion for that too? Everybody believe in things, what a new! But those are not religions. Your mistake is that you understood that "to believe in something" is the only thing you need to call something a religion.

 

A lack of belief is not a belief....

 

I agree with you, what a fake paradox!

Not being does not mean being.

That was so great. They sound pretty good for me. I already herd about many of these ones (never though about the desert´s sand). I find this a very interesting field to study about from global warming, if we could modelize all this with functions it would be a nice "computer game".

This scares me too, have you herd about Lovelock´s wonderland?

Haha, it is not my homework.

Let´s see if I can explain good:

A feedback process or mechanism is the one that, inside a system, make one of its properties by the same mechanism to grow till the infinite or to decrease a property till cero or another equilibrium. Also there´s the homeostasis, this process makes a one way variable going to its opposite. For example, in the human body, when you have heat your body swets so you get colder and your temperature doesn´t increase till your death, so this helps you. In ecology, for example, the growing population of a predator makes its prey decrease, but this dicrese makes the predators population decrease too, since they depend of their food, and this makes, once again grow the prey population... etc.

This mechanisms are common in Live Sciences, and I´d like to know what examples do you all think about what could happen to the Earth system (feedback occurs in systems) because of the global warming such as, for example, the melting poles will make decrease the albedo effect that they do and this will make temperatures rise even faster.

Could you name a list of feedback process that you think could happen as a product of the global warming?

It could also be interesting if you tell if they have positive or negative consecuences for the system, I mean if it feed it back to grow temperatures or to cold the Earth.

And also, could you link them between each other?

Overall, I agree with your post, but not the point above. Morality is not rooted in religion, it is rooted in society itself. The social interactions and cross cultural code of conduct of our ancestors are what defined morality. It is only later that these morals got refined and woven into the fabric of religious teachings. Religion is not the root of morality, it is just one interpretation and delivery mechanism for it.

Yes, I understand this and I think you are in reason. I got exceded when saying that morality has its roots in religion, maybe I could say it softer, yes. What I ment is that morality has been created through historical process, and it is the product of all our past, and since we have had such a religious influence in the past, our culture, morality, customs, way of being in society... etc has have had a strong religious bases.

Of course I can be wrong, and maybe the morality that religion offers us is the product of the people that created religion and its bases by this time. This sounds much more logical, of course. Is it what you ment?

Depends on what you count as "something" and "previous knowledge". From my knowledge of psychology, what is called priming demonstrates that people form all sorts of random associations with everything they know. Whenever you think of a word, you automatically think of multiple words that sound similar, are spelled similar, are used in sentences together, share some logical connection, etc.

 

If you had a thought but could not associate any previous knowledge with it, you would be unable to remember it or communicate it. Just another bunch of neurons firing and forgotten.

I agree with him.

But also I have always herd it is impossible, and it is a lost of time to try to think anything. This is the way we create knowledge, everything comes from our environment by our relationships with it (ecology) and there´s no way to create something new, as he said, we wouln´t have a way to express it or to understand it since we explain to ourselves everything by comparing new knowledge with older one. For example: the atomic model.

I don´t agree 100% with you. We can not determinate exactly how good or how bad could the world be with no religion, but actually we can experiment and even make models and hypothetizy making predictions, so we could, at least, get a qualitative scenarium of a world with no religion. Even so, I don´t know if this world would be a better one or not with no religion.

Also we should notice that when we say a "better" or "worst" world, we are saying it under the effect of a religious morality since our concept of good and bad (even that if nowadays we could dishtingish it from a pure religious one) is very linked to religion, and it has its rooth in it. So, maybe we could say a world would be better with no religion if we have had a non religious history and education (another morality), who could know in this case?

So, I am not qualified to answer in this case, and maybe nobody could.

But even this, and apart of this discussion I think that NOWADAYS and in WESTERN countries the life would be better with no religious.