lodestar

OK... one last try... You don't realize that what you are calling 'definitions' are actually reductions, because they don't define the phenomena other than within the scope of the field you're interested in. I defined sound as the phenomenon we experience when we hear, in order to explain how when we reduce a phenomenon to its quantifiable properties, we're leaving precisely the essence of it behind, the part which can't be reduced without compromising the phenomenon itself. You say that's wrong, but your argument is precisely to assert the same reduction again, not realizing the tautology of your response. When I point that, you even go one step further and ask me to state the issue within the same limited scope, but the whole problem is precisely that it doesn't exist within that scope. What you're asking simply doesn't make sense, and you'd realize that if you understood the problem. If I give you the reduced definitions you're asking, I'm not talking about the same thing anymore and the problem no longer exists. For me to move into your epistemic closure won't continue the discussion, will just turn it into a discussion about something else. Anyway, I give up. As I already said, you can't reason your way out of this. Either you get it or you don't.

Oh no! Wikipedia says I'm wrong... my life is ruined. Seriously now, as I said before, one can't just reason his way out of an epistemic closure, and that's the issue here. Again, you're committing the exact same error, answering the problem tautologically, and if you don't realize that from the explanation above, there's nothing else I can do. As I also said before, from my own personal experience the only way out of an epistemic closure is through some sort of cathartic experience. There's no way for this discussion to become meaningful, because we're just not talking about the same thing. The issue here are the metaphysical and epistemological premises of modern science, and you confuse those premises with reality itself, that's why you always revert to that tautology without realizing. Now you even required me to do the same, realizing correctly that's the only way for this to continue. Indeed, that's the only way for this to continue, but that would be reducing reality to the particular set of premises you use to increase your grasp on the phenomenon. Instead of me getting you out of the epistemic closure, you want me to join you inside it. This is like someone who left Plato's cave trying to explain to someone inside how the outside world is, and I don't say that to demean you in any way. No hard feelings.

Man... do you realize how you're actually trying to answer the issue with the exact same problem it's trying to address? I'm saying the whole problem is in treating the mathematically reducible parts of a particular phenomenon as the phenomenon itself. Since they are a reduction, they are obviously not the entirety of the phenomenon, so it's obvious there's something left behind. You answer by again reducing the phenomenon to its quantifiable properties as if it were the entirety of it, without even realizing the tautology? Reality isn't divided in realms. That's something we do, maybe in order to improve our knowledge within an specific scope, maybe to follow some bureaucratic division in academia, whatever. There's isn't one thing called 'sound' in physics and another thing called 'perception of sound' in neurology, or psychology. Sound is something we hear. Period. You can't describe what sound is to someone who never heard it, no matter how much you try, hence my example above. What you call 'sound' in physics are the quantifiable properties related to that phenomenon that can be described physically, but obviously you leave behind a lot of other properties not relevant to understand the phenomenon within the scope of physics. What you call 'sound' in neurology are the quantifiable properties related to that phenomenon that can be observed by instruments attached to our nervous system when we hear something, leaving aside a lot of other properties that can't be measured by the instruments, or not relevant to understand the phenomenon within the scope of neurology. The way you try to answer the issue tautologically by restating the problem itself is what I called 'epistemic closure'. You're letting the process of closure that allows you to increase the grasp of the phenomenon by reducing it to a stripped down concept to define the phenomenon itself.

Yes, it is. Not at all. I have an issue with presenting a metaphysics as physics, which is what Hawking does, and very poorly, by the way.

Not so fast: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/13/jade-rabbit-lunar-rover-alive-after-all-says-china

How is that different at all from what I'm saying? I'm saying the exact same thing, I'm just not using the same rhetorical tricks Hawking used. Recommended reading: http://perennialphilosophyreadings.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/response-to-stephen-hawkings-physics-as-philosophy-by-wolfgang-smith/

It's not just like different axioms, because the cartesian ontology doesn't end in reality, but in a flawed thought experiment made by Descartes. That's the root of the whole problem. If you attempt to trace the origin of your ideas, you'll eventually end up in the same place. We can talk about that in more detail if you want. It's not a claim. That's not in dispute. Changes in quantity can't effect ontological change. You don't reach the subatomic world by just dividing the atomic world quantitatively. At some point, you effect some qualitative change. Actually, the cheaters are those who claim sound is nothing else but its quantifiable properties, since they are simply ignoring the binding problem. Just think about this: how would you explain what sound is to someone who was born deaf? No matter how detailed and precise is your description of the quantifiable properties of the phenomenon, they simply never experienced the phenomenon itself. They may learn very well what the physical phenomena associated with sound are and what they can cause, they may even feel the vibration of a low frequency sound, they may even learn music theory and be able to read and write musical scores, but they just don't know what sound is. Not quite, but that's good enough. Precisely. For practical purposes, indeed, there's no problem, but then you're saying you're only concerned with utility, not truth. That's how science works, not philosophy. Sure. Frankly, if you're genuinely interested, I think you should just read the book I mentioned, Sungenis' Galileo Was Wrong. That's my starting point on the subject, and since you know the physics much better than I do, you may even figure out some sensible objections on that aspect.

Send that Wikipedia article to a person who was born deaf. Will that description fill all the gaps for him?

Sorry for taking so long. I was away during the weekend and trying to stay away from a computer for at least two days. Well... that's precisely what "thinking in terms of res extensae" means. Really, you nailed it. I think I couldn't come up with a more concise definition if I tried. That's the hidden premise that causes the whole mess. You can't prove that empirically because you can't separate a cognizable object from the cogniscent subject, yet, you carry that separation all the time. When you face a phenomena where you actually have to consider the mind having separate existence and the act of knowing as an union between the cognizable object and the cogniscent subject, you're doomed to fail. Frankly, I don't know how else to explain it to you. Unfortunately, most people with a scientific education lack the same degree of philosophical training, and they learn the materialistic metaphysics more by osmosis, than by being formally exposed to it, which would also teach its shortcomings. From my own personal experience (I used to think like that too), you only get out of that through some sort of cathartic experience. You can't just reason your way out, because you tend to reason in those terms, like you're doing here. We call that an epistemic closure. A simplification, but maybe it helps. Consider the classic dilemma, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Your answer probably would be that it does, because the tree will still disturb the air in the same way and produce the same waves in the atmosphere, regardless of anyone being there to hear, right? But disturbances in the air in the form of waves arent't sound! They are the quantifiable and measurable properties of the phenomena a conscious entity experiences and calls sound, but they are not sound itself. They are completely different things and there's a chasm between the two that can't be easily transposed. In the same way, is an apple still red when nobody is watching? Again, you'd probably say yes, because regardless of anyone watching, the apple would still reflect light in the same wavelength, but again, color is one thing, photons of a particular wavelength being reflected are another entirely different thing. At this point I guess you'd probably thinking of telling me that sound and color are just illusions, that they don't really exist, and guess what? I'd have to tell you again that this is precisely what thinking in terms of res extensae means. Maybe you'd ask me to give scientific evidence that they are not just illusions, but in order to provide scientific evidence, I have to reduce the phenomena to their quantifiable properties, and once I do that, it's obvious the phenomena we're really interested is outside the scope of science. Once someone begins to think that if something is outside the scope of science then it simply doesn't exist, that's what we call scientism. Again, this is a simplification, but in a sense, the whole problem with QM is that you're expecting the tree to fall and make a sound also when no one is around to hear it, but that obviously doesn't make sense. When no one is around to hear, the sound only exists in terms of res extensa, in terms of its quantifiable properties, and QM already follows that. The dilemma isn't really a dilemma at all, because it's self-contradictory. Sound only exists when someone is around to hear it, color only exists when someone is watching it and forms only exist when someone is acknowledging them. Yes, but things don't exist separately like that in reality. Since forms only exist for an observer, they only exist within the res cogitans, but obviously, there's no such distinction in reality, because there's no knowledge without the cogniscent subject. That's just an abstraction we use since Descartes to make the examinations simpler. There are substantial and accidental forms, but in the context of this discussion, the distinction is irrelevant. I just used the term by reflex. I haven't given a direct answer to the 'why' because that's not possible within the limited scope of science, but I can answer that whatever it is, it's not different ontologicaly from the falling tree dilemma above. I hate to be repetitive, but again, you're thinking of it solely in terms of res extensae. The probability distribution is just how you reduce the state into its quantifiable properties, it's not the state itself. It's not something I'm describing for "my" philosophy, it's the reality. An apple still falls from a tree in the same way, no matter how you are trying to predict its trajectory. The Schödinger's cat is dead or alive with a certain probability, he's not dead and alive at the same time. As I just said above, it does help understand QM because it's no longer treated as a different category of problems. To understand why the collapse happens is no more or less complicated than understanding that an apple only has color when someone is looking at it. For Science it doesn't matter, but for Philosophy it obviously does, since there can be no free-will if reality is deterministic. I just don't think of Science, Philosophy and Religion as separate and anthitetical things, but complementary methods to understand one thing we call reality. That argument just doesn't make sense. First of all, nobody at the time was interested in a model with an stationary Earth, they were trying to get rid of it, so the lack of models at the time isn't an argument against it. Second, all the models back then needed to get Earth moving because observations have shown it wasn't, and they did that by assuming the ether had some additional property. If you remove that additional property, you're just fine back with an stationary Earth. From Bradley to Stokes and even Lorentz, you can do that with all of them. Third, we're not talking about the late 19th or early 20th century. We're talking about the issue today, and modern geocentrists do have a valid model. You're splitting hairs. The particularities of each one are irrelevant to make my point that ultimately GR conceptualizes space as a medium, while the original premise was that no such medium existed. Ops... for some reason I said 'finite' when I actually meant 'constant'. My fault. Zero? What are we talking about then? In the very least, I gave you two. A newtonian universe with a stationary Earth, and a relativistic anisotropic universe with Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi metrics and Earth in the center. This is not my original research, I'm not here presenting it to you. I'm just answering your questions to the better of my knowledge. If you have any genuine interest in the alternative explanations, the best approach is probably to go after them. Where is the proof for Dark Matter? Where is the proof that redshifts are doppler effects? Where is the proof that Earth is moving? Where is the proof that physical dimensions are affected by movement? Where is the proof that time itself is affected by movement? Come on... if there was any conclusive prove to one model over the other, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You're just applying double standards, taking the convention you accept as proof. Frankly, if you were scrutinizing everything with the same dedication and requiring the same degree of proof you're requiring from me, you'd probably be at a loss. I never said it's self-contradictory. I said it can be used as a reductio ad absurdum. It's not quite the same thing. All self-contradictory arguments can be used as a reductio ad absurdum, but not all reductio ad absurdum arguments are self-contradictions. A valid reductio ad absurdum may also lead to ridiculous or implausible conclusions. Where it bears on the conversation, the assumption that redshifts are velocity shifts leads to expansion, which demands curvature to keep isotropy, which ultimately demands 95% more mass than we actually observe, with the special condition that this mass and the energy propelling it are also undetectable directly. While that itself isn't absurd, it's quite implausible and ridiculous. And you should be familiar with the terms 'post hoc' and 'ad hoc'. Come on... there's no reason to start patronizing each other at this point. That's an idealization of a post hoc hypothesis. It's not the case with Dark Matter theory at all, since it was idealized to prevent other theories and assumptions from being falsified by those observations. When before formulating an hypothesis you already decided which results you won't accept when you test it, you're not doing science. First, the fact that it can be used as a reductio ad absurdum argument should be compelling enough for anyone concerned more with logic than with preserving a dogma. Second, I'm not dismissing it outright, and you already admitted that my skepticism is reasonable. Third, whether a reason is compelling enough is something strictly personal. For me, the whole conundrum in 20th century astrophysics and cosmology that eventually lead to Dark Matter is more than compelling, even if it was a logically valid argument. Unfortunately, that's how science evolves. If one can use that argument in here it's me, I don't do it because, as I already said, Occam's razor is a methodological heuristic. It increases the probability that you'll find a working solution sooner, but it says nothing regarding the truth of that solution. Of course not, with ether as an absolute rest frame. There's no relative spacetime. Now you're just guessing. Not only I can do that and get correct and meaningful results, that's exactly how Thirring did it. In order to find a model for centrifugal and coriolis force, he decided to start from a model of an spheric hollow universe spinning with the Earth at the center, and see what forces would appear in a purely newtonian universe. When he did it, he realized, with surprise, that the centrifugal force does have an axial component. As a matter of act, he realized that's what was missing in order to explain centrifugal force from a newtonian point of view: to consider the mass of the whole universe acting on the spinning object. That's why Newton couldn't explain centrifugal and coriolis force, because he always considered only isolated systems. It only appears when you add the mass of the universe revolving around, and it appears with an axial component. The conclusion is on page 721 of his paper. http://www.itp.kit.edu/~ertl/Hauptseminar/papers/lense-thierring-papers-translated.pdf After realizing that, Thirring tried to fit the discovery in General Relativity, concluding that if the equator of the sphere is spinning faster, it has more relativistic mass and adds some pull towards it. Curiously, Thirring himself tries to explain the previous undetectability of this axial component by saying his model is certainly not physical, but obviously, that's precisely the model defended by geocentrists. No, I just realized that since you presented this objection, you're thinking of redshifts as function of velocity, but that obviously can't be the case in an Earth-centered Newtonian universe. But there's no centrifugal force in a Newtonian universe without the fix from Thirring I mentioned above, which involves having Earth in the center and the universe spinning around. How do you explain the radial pressure an object suffers in a centrifuge or the tug on a rope with a weight spinning on one end in a Newtonian system isolated from the universe? Since it was thought that General Relativity would fill all the gaps from newton's laws, Thirring himself thought he would find a relativistic explanation, and he did, but not realizing that to reach it, he also found a newtonian explanation in an Earth-centered universe. That's why I said Thirring inadvertently created a valid geocentric model. Contradicting the intent and contradicting the theory are very different thngs. I can contradict the intent of any theory as much as I want. If the author didn't realize the theory could also be used for something else than what he intended and even against it, well... too bad for him. Hopefully, he's already dead when that happens. Not really. First of all, that's a problem at the cosmogonical level, and no matter how complicated the mechanics of the result are, they are completely irrelevant when you consider the problem of how the ontological change of nothing to something happens. It's like finding a monolyth on the Moon and argue about its composition, when the existence of the monolyth itself presents a much more complicated problem. Second, since cosmogonical issues are beyond the scope of science, by their very nature, all arguments against the complexity of their initial conditions can be used against all of them. Big Bang itself was frowned upon by everyone who insisted on an infinite universe, until the choice Big Bang vs an Earth-centered universe became a dilemma. Under that, the cosmogonical issues that appear when you assume the universe had a beginning are much more acceptable than the metaphysical issues that appear when you assume Earth is in the center. I get it. I don't have the knowledge to object to that in good conscience, but I can see three conceptual problems with your argument. First, you say the big problem is that the data is not normalized against anything, but that's false, the data is normalized in many different ways in the three studies I mentioned, and that's even pointed as the source of the issue by some. Second, if the periodicity is an effect of the analysis method, why it doesn't also appear in studies that claim there's no periodicity but use the same method, like the Schneider et al. study? Third, that seems too fundamental to be overlooked by people who were looking for a solution to the problem for decades. If the problem is a fundamental error in the analysis method, I'd expect most studies to agree on the results, and then some study reveal that embarrassing error. That's not what happens. While there's disagreement on the normalization and filtering, there's no disagreement on the method. Can you point me to any study with the same conclusion you present here, that the whole issue for decades is just the result of bad statistics?

Not really. Looking for how complex the interactions are doesn't really signal life. What we determine as alive is preservation of entropy at some degree. For an example, look at how James Lovelock figured this back in the 1960's and proposed many physical methods for life detection in other planets that were very successful when applied to the known atmosphere of Mars back in the time, when many were enthusiastic about the possibility of life in there. You're taking one of the premises as conclusion. Actually, we have no clue how sentience starts, nor we can say for sure it's related at all to a developed neural system or organism complexity. For all we know, even plants may be sentient. The problem is a lot more complicated than that. That depends a lot on what you call advanced. The principles of science, formal logic and engineering are essentially unchanged for millenia, in recent centuries you just have changed epistemological and metaphysical premises to allow a separation between knowing subject and object the study, simplifying things a lot, but also sacrificing knowledge of the essences of things. In the words of René Guénon, we traded truth for utility. If you want to say science and engineering became a lot more useful in recent centuries, I think one can't disagree with that. That doesn't make sense. The first caveman who realized a stick was a better way to beat a boar to death was developing technology, and I think that happened at least a few millennia before Aristotle's analytics and anything that we can call formal logic. Technology doesn't start with engineering and formal logic. Technology starts with experimentation, then it's exchanged dialectically. Eventually, with luck, it might be formally defined, but it's not necessary, and doesn't always happen. Whether they are alive in the sense of feeding on negative entropy is something we can be sure of, but there's no way we can be sure an AI is sentient. As a matter of fact, there's no way you or I can be sure that the other one is sentient. The only consciousness you have any proof of is your own. While your paragraph makes sense, I think you're using 'emotion' too loosely here. Emotion is not really the issue. First of all, if the machine is fully logic-driven, then you have no way out of the Lucas-Penrose argument on Gödel's Incompletenes Theorem and the machine necessarily can't be an strong AI. It will always be missing something the human mind has. While it will evaluate propositions faster and more precisely than any human could, it couldn't evaluate premises, so it's ultimately limited to the input given by humans, as any ordinary computer. Computers already have an "analytical way of thinking", as a matter of fact, that's all they do. They evaluate logical propositions. A purely analytical strong AI would have to be able to evaluate the premises of a proposition by itself, without depending on human input, and that's just not possible, because for that machine, truth is synonym with proof, so the only valid premises are those it can already prove or were already programmed as truth. What an strong AI would actually need is a "dialectical way of thinking", it would need the human capability to separate truth from proof, taking some truths as purely personal and validate with communication with other beings. In other words, a strong AI wouldn't be a better artificial engineer than an ordinary computer with the same processing power would, but it would be a very good philosopher. Not really, because the socialization problem some scientists and engineers have is precisely when they take the mind/body duality they assume as a fact in a lab to their outside lives. I think we'd have two options of this point, neither one is particularly appealing. If that strong AI is indeed capable of dialectizing, the understanding between it and the engineers and scientists would be pretty much like the one among engineers and scientists themselves. The machine would necessarily have personal convictions, dictated by its own personal history, pretty much like an human. If the strong AI isn't capable of dialectizing, in other words, it's just an incredibly powerful analytical computer, then the understanding between this AI and scientists and engineers would be terrible, and it would probably end up being shut down, because the machine wouldn't have the same preconceived notions the scientists have, so it would act in strict accordance with the scientific method all the time, while scientists are human and don't act like that all the time. In other words, the AI would collaborate as much as an equally advanced ordinary computer, or as another very skilled and capable human, both with their flaws. There's no way to combine the two and have at the same time the human ingenuity and avoid the human biases, because they are essentially the same thing. I guess whether you see that as progress or as an anthropological crisis is a matter of point of view. Have you seen Solaris? If I had the power to recreate a person you met from your mental representation of that person, would it be just like the original person, or it would more strongly resemble your strongest memories of that person? In the same way, someone might have been a scientist, but also at the same time a husband, a father, a maratonist, etc. When you manage to get its memories in some hardware capable of that, it remains a scientist because it's still the same person, or because the hardware had the intent of using his scientific skills?

Indeed. Not necessarily. That conclusion is also a product of our cultural background, heavily influenced by the cartesian ontology of mind/body duality. If you follow my (long) explanation to Z-Man above, the whole point is precisely that you can simply replace those premises with others. If you replace them with the thomist ontology, then the mechanics of things at quantum scale are exactly the same of those at large scale. Well... accepting the problem as part of reality doesn't really solve the problem. That's what Stephen Hawking proposes we do in his The Grand Design. Just give up, accept that reality itself is confusing, and use whatever incomplete model works for the moment. It doesn't really answer the question. When you reach that point, it's time to re-examine your premises. +1.

My hypothesis is simply that there are many valid interpretations to what we see from the Earth, yet physicists choose one not because it's more scientific, but because it has more appeal with their ideological convictions. Not really. As I answered to a similar objection from Z-Man above, due to the Lense-Thirring effect, the centrifugal force in a purely newtonian universe would in fact have an axial component that pulls all points away from the equatorial plane towards it. Sure, but that still means Earth is on the only quasar free region of space, a Copernican embarrassment anyway. Once you irrevocably break the assumption of isotropy, there isn't much more left to keep Earth outside the center of an absolute frame of reference. Isn't that enough for you?

Yes, you're confusing form and shape, but what is really curious is that you're committing the exact same mistake, trying to reduce everything to the realm of the res extensae. That's the whole point. Yes, you can say a rod is a cylinder with length and radius, but that's precisely stripping the concept you have of the real object to the quantifiable properties. As you said, that's an ideal rod, that's not all that a rod is in reality. I'm not talking of idealization vs. the real object. I'm not just saying that the real object, no matter how perfectly shaped will never be exactly the ideal. I'm talking of essence. Answering what parts a rod is made of doesn't answer what a rod actually is. No matter how much you reduce something into its measurable parts, you're in the end just describing from how many parts its made of, not its essence. That's the distinction made between physical and corporeal object. The physical object is the collection of the measurable properties, that aren't directly perceptible to us, while the corporeal object is the closest thing to the mental concept we form of the real object. Any measurement instrument is doing nothing but translating a particular property from the physical to the corporeal. Yep, we've been talking of pure states only for the sake of simplicity, but it doesn't change things. The problem is you're still thinking of it in terms of res extensae. We're changing the metaphysical premises used from the cartesian to thomist, that's the whole point. You keep talking of the atoms and photons as objects with substantial forms. When you say the atom will be in a mixed state, that's a physical observation, not corporeal. When the system is effectively actualized by observation, you can compute the probability distribution for the final corporeal object in either one, pure or mixed, even if the way you combine probabilities is different. Keep in mind one thing. We're not talking of an alternative to quantum mechanics. This is not trying to answer 'how' the collapse happens, but rather 'why'. No matter how much you try, and we tried a lot, you can't answer that 'why' with the cartesian ontology without bridging the bifurcation gap (and Descartes himself used a very tortuous argument to do that, ultimately resorting to a benevolent God that wouldn't deceive him by mismatching the res extensae and the res cogitans). You can, however, answer the 'why' in terms of thomist ontology, theory of forms, potency and act, etc. If you're really interested in going deeper in the subject, I'd really recommend you to read Wolfgang Smith's The Quantum Enigma. You're confusing things a little, but I think that's my fault. Collapse isn't caused by interacting with any corporeal object, but by interacting with a corporeal object that confers a substantial form. Lenses, mirrors and beamsplitters don't actualize the photons into visible light, or in other words, they don't confer the photons the substantial form of the original image, your retina does. Actually it is, since you're saying only the result of the calculations is non-deterministic, because you take them to be an approximation. You're saying reality itself might be deterministic, we just don't have the tools to determine. Not really. You're trying to eat your cake and have it at the same time. First of all, there's plenty of data in support of the ether, the only problem is that same data implies a motionless Earth and therefore an absolute reference frame too. We did try a lot to find data supporting an ether without a motionless Earth, and that's indeed zero. Second, to solve the problem of absence of relative motion observed in the Michelson-Morley experiment in a way that could get rid of a motionless Earth, Special Relativity had to claim both the absence of ether and the finite speed of light. Einstein knew very well that the whole conundrum could be solved by a motionless Earth, because Lorentz had already made that clear. It was just unacceptable on ideological grounds. To cover accelerated frames, Einstein had to come up with General Relativity, and he not only scrapped the finite speed of light, but also got the ether back by playing semantics on the term 'space', since the relativistic space isn't really a vacuum space but has physical properties in the same way the ether would. Read Ludwik Kostro's, Einstein and The Ether, who traces the whole history of how Einstein got the ether back after dismissing it. Einstein himself admits this at several moments: In 1905 I was of the opinion that it was no longer allowed to speak about the ether in physics. This opinion, however, was too radical, as we will see later when we discuss the general theory of relativity. It does remain allowed, as always, to introduce a medium filling all space and to assume that the electromagnetic fields (and matter as well) are its states…once again “empty†space appears as endowed with physical properties, i.e., no longer as physically empty, as seemed to be the case according to special relativity. One can thus say that the ether is resurrected in the general theory of relativity….Since in the new theory, metric facts can no longer be separated from “true†physical facts, the concepts of “space†and “ether†merge together. So, first nobody wanted to dismiss the ether because it would be almost impossible to explain the electromagnetic phenomena as waves without a medium. Then, between that and a motionless Earth, they prefer to reinvent physics and keep the first option. Then the guy who did that admits the reinvention doesn't work so well and gets the ether back in the picture by playing semantics and disguising it under the name "space". Come on... that's like Lawrence Krauss claiming the universe came from nothing, but when you read the first page, the 'nothing' actually means 'quantum vacuum', not absence of being. Third, not only the ether is present but disguised in the General Relativity, but it's also comparable to the CMB, in that it can be also used as a rest frame, and as a viable ingredient of its composition. Again, it's just playing semantics. Let's not call it ether because that sounds too aristotelian. Let's call it something else. As to candidates for the material composition, I'm sure there are more than adequate ingredients in the sea of particles and subparticles found in the last century. First, every piece of data in support of Dark Matter also supports an universe without Big Bang, expansion, relativity and Dark Matter. It just depends on how you interpret it. If that's the case, by Occam's Razor we should avoid the alternative with unfounded assumptions, but for some reason we don't. Second, to call Dark Matter a solution to several independent problems is really pushing it too far. This is speculation, but I'd say any scientific theory in any field that somehow misses the target for 95% wouldn't be taken seriously. Dark Matter is because the obvious alternative is ideologically unacceptable. Third, as I said before, even on the grounds of pure logic, Dark Matter can be safely dismissed because it can be used ipsis-litteris as a reductio ad absurdum argument. This is the one single argument that can't be refuted. To adopt Dark Matter as a possibility is the most illogical decision, because it can be used as an argument against itself. How do you know? Do you have some in your pocket right now? Come on... of course we say it behaves like ordinary matter, because that's what's needed for the field equations to work. That's like going to buy a house saying "look, I know my bank statement says my account is negative right now, but I have a million dollars of make-believe money that behaves like ordinary money, and you shouldn't have a problem accepting it". Frankly, I find it amusing that so many scientists fancy themselves as enlightened skeptics, yet promptly accept such nonsense. And to say that nobody has a problem with it is a real understatement. Critics of Dark Matter theory aren't few, and aren't tinfoil hat lunatics. Again, you're trying to eat your cake and have it. Ether drag was a theory to preserve the ether with a moving Earth. The Earth drags the inner layer of ether around, that's why we don't detect any relative movement. It's a reasonable theory, that couldn't be tested at the time but can be tested today by performing the Michelson-Morley experiment on the Moon, for instance. If there's an ether drag comparable with the translational velocity, it's evidence the Earth is indeed not moving relative to the ether. If there's the same negligible drag as the Earth, nothing changes. As to be weird, that's cultural. Frankly, it's no weirder than frame-dragging after all. Personally, I don't think that's any weirder than the alternative castle of cards of singularities, spacetime, curved space, action-at-a-distance, no-euclidean geometry, no absolutes, mass distortion, etc. First, I'm not picking anything out. It's not like there's one or two inconsistencies and I'm being obnoxious by clinging to them. There's 95% of inconsistencies. Second, homogeneity already is an assumption, so that's a petitio principii. I don't have to pick inflation, since that's theorized to preserve the assumption of homogeneity. I never said they produce 'wrong' results. I said there are valid interpretations with and without both homogeneity and isotropy. I have a problem with dismissing something on ideological, not scientific grounds. That's all this is about. Precisely that, but the rotation of the ether itself. First, you're considering only the rotation around one axis, leaving aside the movement corresponding to the Earth's rotation tilt. The universe would be more like a gyroscope that wobbles when it begins to tilt than a carousel. Second, you're again trying to eat your cake and keep it. The Lense-Thirring effect translated to a purely newtonian universe would in fact be merely an axial component in the centrifugal force, that pulls toward the equator of the rotating sphere, in addition to the radial component usually associated with centrifugal force. That axial component pivots on the barycenter, the Earth, and keeps coming back to the equatorial plane, just like you'd have orbits precessing around the spin axis or the orbited body. Thirring himself, while inadvertently providing a geocentric model, showed how all the forces unresolved by Newtonian, centrifugal, coriolis, etc, are present in the same way in a rotating universe with a central Earth due to that axial component. Frankly, I think trying to explain the Lense-Thirring effect as frame-dragging is pretty much just another attempt to save face, giving a space-time cause to something that can be explained with a purely physical cause if you admit an absolute frame. Finally, in the context of the discussion here, we're considering the option where General Relativity is completely left out of the picture, since we're saying there's an absolute reference frame. IF there's no absolute reference frame, then who is stationary and who is spinning around is merely a choice of reference frames. I think you're complicating things, because if GR is valid, then that has to be valid too. However, Sungenis claims even geocentrism with an absolute rest frame in the form of an anisotropic center still works even in GR as a mirror image, with the Lemaítre-Tolman-Bondi metric, with Earth in the center of the sphere, obviously. Humm... is that really a problem? Can't I just call them Dark Fluctuations and say they actually exist? Just kidding. Once in motion it keeps rotating by inertia, of course. I think you mean how it was set in motion, but that's no bigger conceptual problem than to know what banged the Big Bang. I think you underestimate the desire of scientists to ignore or circumvent findings that contradict dogma, specially when it has implications as this one. That redshift quantization was a blip in data was claimed since they were found, as the obvious alternative is unacceptable. This issue is certainly much more complicated than it seems. Let's say we can establish a reasonably recent status quaestionis from this 2006 study by Bell and McDiarmid on the SDSS catalog: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0603169 While it concludes some of the peaks are selection effects, it acknowledges they can't account for all of them. Then we have Schneider's study of 2007, claiming all of the peaks in the 2006 study were indeed selection effects. http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0806 And finally, we have Hartnett's study of 2008, claiming that Schneider et al. actually also introduced another selection effect when filtering data, and there's indeed a periodicity in the SDSS quasar redshift data. However, he saw a correlation between that and the zConf parameter in the SDSS tables, and his conclusion is that whatever their cause, they are fundamentally connected, so it's safe to assume that the remaining peaks are indeed another selection effect, to be properly identified, but probably originated in the algorithm used by the SDSS to define the zConf parameter. http://arxiv.org/pdf/0712.3833.pdf That's still far from solving it as a blip. Since I couldn't find any response to Hartnett, I decided to investigate the correlation myself on the SDSS public database. Curiously, the zConf parameter that correlates with the peaks is the redshift estimate confidence. When you plot the fourier frequency for the whole database, the peaks aren't significant, but as you increase the estimate confidence, filtering data out, the peaks become more and more accentuated. At this point, the obvious question is, what's really wrong with that correlation? If there's indeed a redshift uniformity in reality, then it will become more proeminent as you increase the confidence of the data and remove noise. Frankly, I see nothing wrong with that. Obviously, there could be something wrong with the algorithm determining zConf, but it's quite a coincidence. If the confidence factor has a correlation with the result, you don't like the result, you throw doubt on the confidence factor? That's almost like making the universe looking like everywhere is the center when some observations shows you are in the center and you don't like that. I've seen that before. As a side note, it's worth mentioning that Hartnett first submitted his study in 2007 and published it in 2008 with the title “Redshift periodicity in quasar number counts from Sloan Digital Sky Surveyâ€Â, but actually he doesn't mention the conclusion that this is due to a correlation with the zConf parameter anywhere. As a matter of fact, his conclusion is that there's significant periodicity, regardless of the interpretation, the exact opposite conclusion. He changed it in a 2009 revision. The issue seems volatile enough even for a single author. Sungenis quotes the first revision on his book, so I'll even ask him if he's aware Hartnett reversed the conclusion and what he has to say about it. http://xxx.tau.ac.il/pdf/0712.3833v2.pdf Finally, even if quasar redshift quantization is just a blip, you still have similarly geocentrically oriented phenomena in galaxies, in spectroscopic binaries, in globular clusters, in planetary orbits, in the CMB, etc. If everything is a blip, that's quite a blip. I'd call it the Big Blip.

Seriously? Sorry man, but this just turned into a collection of hearsay and confusion, and I won't be dragged into that. If you want to continue the conversation, let's keep it to whatever is really substantial.

And the satellite could be easily shot down, not only defeating the whole purpose of putting the laser on the moon, but also getting George Clooney and Sandra Bullock in serious trouble...

The thing is, why would China do that? I don't think that leads to another space race because the context is very different from the US vs. USSR during the Cold War. Both sides knew a military conflict would be devastating for everyone and nothing would be gained, and that was precisely how to avoid it. They had to keep up militarily with each other, so it wouldn't leave a weakness to be exploited and allows one side to destroy the other without assuring its own destruction, while at the same time pursuing alternative non-military strategies. In a sense, the Space Race was part of an strategy to beat the USSR economically. The US knew the USSR couldn't compete with them economically, so if the financial boundaries of the space program were pushed further and further, eventually whey wouldn't keep up. This was the whole point of the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Star Wars program. It was deemed incredibly expensive and even unrealistic by many, but that didn't matter for the real purpose. It didn't have to be built, the US only needed the soviets to believe it would be built. They would be pressed to do something similar to keep it up, and they knew they couldn't afford it. Eventually, they changed their global strategy with the Glasnost and Perestroika, sacrificing cohesion, but keeping the main objectives alive. Their strategy was political and ideological, using agents of influence and creating multiple cells in the developing world. The situation with China is nothing like that. The current power balance between globalist blocks is nothing like the bipolar balance during the Cold War, it's a consequence of how it ended. As long as the intersection of interests between the three major blocks is above their own particular interests, the situation is kept pretty much as it is, and neither block can break that balance without losing leverage. There's just too much co-dependence, in economy and politics. If China decided to pull a stunt like that, it wouldn't drag the world into a direct military conflict, or another space race. It would simply drag the world into an economic and political crisis where the two blocks left will do everything to constrain China economically and politically, so that whatever military leverage they gain from putting missiles in the moon, or in orbit, won't be worth anything. Sure, there would be localized conflicts since some people wouldn't accept taking orders from someone else to stop doing business with China, but definitely not a global scale conflict. Of course, this also assumes the chinese leaders are reasonably sane and wouldn't do something stupid just to prove something, like North Korea seems to do. As frustrating as that can be to space enthusiasts, I doubt we would ever have another space race with unrestrained funding, fueled by ideology and political conflict. The world really isn't like that anymore. Today it's much cheaper and efficient to change what people think of the world than to change the world they live. Back then, it was thought it would be important as a symbol to be the first in space, the first on the moon, etc. Today it's much simpler to convince people that these things don't matter, or that whoever is first don't matter, etc. Frankly, today if China gets to Mars first, most people won't even care, and some will just be happy that any man did. Some will actually wish it was the US, but it's not that important anymore. The future of space travel, if there's one, definitely lies in commercial space flight, not government funded operations, civil or military.

I think you mean pure potency. Pure form are ideal forms. What's absurd in that? I don't understand your objection. Not at all. Personal knowledge doesn't mean private, incommunicable knowledge. It simply means knowledge that can't be transmitted directly through language. It can only be transmitted as the description of a mental path that the interlocutor has to walk by himself and eventually find the same knowledge. In essence, that's what Philosophy is. There's nothing parsimonious about violating the law of identity. You're saying something can be something and nothing at the same time. If suspending logic itself is parsimonious, then any possible argument is valid for anything, no matter how absurd or nonsensical. Well, whatever is the latest hype-word in the endless battle between militant atheists and crackpot theists really doesn't have much of a role in this conversation and it's not something I care much about. That's not what we are talking about, as I said countless times. If you don't understand that, we should give up on this conversation, since it leads anywhere. Nope, I just accept it as a method, not a dogma. So what? That's not an argument, it's an statement. If you don't know what the term means, and explaining it properly would demand considerable effort and time, there's just no way to have a productive conversation. Do you disagree with that? The forum rules are incredibly lenient on the content, and I'm having a very interesting conversation with other members, so that remark is completely unnecessary. Frankly, I don't understand your argument at all. I mean, if something I just said proves that the universe simply came into being and I don't even realize it, wow... I'm a lot smarter than I thought. At least I'm smarter than Lawrence Krauss, it seems... Not really, because proof is only needed for communicable knowledge. You need proof to transmit knowledge to someone else who requires it, not to acquire knowledge for yourself. Of course, you may require proof even for yourself, but as you already know, that inevitably leads to sollipsism, since you can't prove anything else besides your own mind exists. First of all, logical fallacies don't apply to informal discourse, despite the plagueful proliferation of latin brocards in internet discussions. You employ logical fallacies after the discourse is formalized, and you very rarely need to address them directly since it becomes obvious by the time. Second, despite the Ad Hominem fallacy being popularized in internet debates as synonym with personal attack, insults or something similar, that's not what ad hominem means. Third, what I said isn't an argument, so saying it's Ad Hominem just doesn't make sense. Sure, it could, but it's not necessary.

It's not that at all. I'll try to explain, in the context of this topic. Let's say we don't apprehend reality directly through our senses, we form mental concepts that correspond to the real objects. The purpose of the scientific method is then to strip those concepts of anything that can't be described mathematically, not to know the objects in themselves, beyond our mental concepts (that's the role of philosophy, by the way). For instance, when we conceptualize an electron as a subatomic particle with negative charge, that's not all the electron is in reality, that's just all we need to describe it mathematically to understand a particular phenomenon. For instance, think of a soda can and a piece of curtain rod, both made of aluminum. They may be made of the same atoms, have the same mass, and many other properties, but there's one fundamental difference about them that doesn't actually have physical existence, their form. The ideal form of a soda can and a piece of curtain rod can exist in our minds independently of any matter. So, we could divide reality in things that can be fully described mathematically without a residue, and things that can't be described without their forms, or in other words, without a corresponding mental concept, what Descartes called res extensae and res cogitas. This premise of the cartesian ontology, called bifurcation by some, is one of the basic premises of modern science, although most scientists don't have the philosophical training to recognize it. For modern science, there's only the res extensae, only things that can be described mathematically without any residue, but obviously, on our day to day lives we don't even contemplate that notion. When we see a soda can or a piece or curtain rod, we don't think of them as a bunch of atoms of aluminum, we think of them as their forms. The whole point is that a subatomic particle exists without form, it exists only within the res extensae, and the state vector collapses not when it interacts with the mind, but when it interacts with something within the res cogitans, something that can't be completely described within the res extensae, like a bubble chamber or a double slit cover and wall. This something will determine what's the substantial form the subatomic particle will acquire when one of its many potential states is actualized, something Wolfgang Smith calls vertical causality, to distinguish it from horizontal causality, the physical chain of causality. Pretty much like two vectors, vertical causality can't effect horizontal causality, but it can effect an ontological change that will then effect physical causality. The quantum phenomena are pretty intuitive and clear when you put it under these premises, something Heisenberg himself recognized but nobody paid much attention. It puzzled physicists for decades because they are trying to explain it only within the res extensae, and that's doomed to fail, because quantum phenomena ultimately bridge the gap. In a sense, they are the empirical proof that Descartes was wrong. OK. Crash course in Aristotelian metaphysics. Potency is the potential for some change. For instance, a bunch of clay can be molded into a brick or a vase, it has the potency to that. Act is changing an object to one of its potencies, so when you mold the bunch of clay into a brick, you're actualizing it into a brick. Substantial form is simply how matter is organized when actualized, so the bunch of clay actualized into a brick now has the substantial form of a brick. So, a particle in a state of superposition exists only as potency, without form. The state vector is collapsed when it interacts with the measurement instrument, which has form and transfer act. What stops the superposition from breaking down most of the time is precisely that most of the time it's not being actualized by something. The cat has substantial form, a photon doesn't. Yep, but we are not talking of two pure copies of you who can speak French or German, but a single one who has potential for both, but can actualize only one at a time. Fine, but that strict determinism is a choice. It doesn't really solve the problem. Not only because it's a fudge factor, but because it's a fudge factor adopted for ideological, not scientific reasons. When the ether was scrapped, taking with it simpler explanations for a plethora of electromagnetic phenomena, the main argument was that it was undetected or if it actually existed, it would mean Earth wasn't moving. OK, I could live with that. Years later, you have Dark Matter equally undetected, serving the exact opposite purpose of preserving the theory that solved the initial problem and scrapped the ether, and people act like it's no problem at all. Why the double standard? That's what I call imposture, and that's done for ideological motivations. I wouldn't say I reject isotropy, I just recognize it as a dogma, not as an observable fact. I am free to part with it if I believe it doesn't makes sense, and in many cases it doesn't. As to introducing complexity and reducing verifiability, even though we could argue a little on that, I'd say reality is under no obligation to present itself to us in a simple intelligible way. That's our approach to understand it, assuming those properties. If the universe isn't isotropic then it isn't isotropic, and no matter how complicated it can be, assuming it is will lead to wrong results. If I understand your objection correctly, the problem is that you're not taking the whole package. I wouldn't say odd because that qualifier is merely cultural, but yes, that leaves you with a very small, dense, closed and young universe, but also with the Earth in the center and the universe spinning around. Your symmetrical outbound gravity field that keeps everything from falling apart is nothing but good old centrifugal force. Anyway, even if you interpret redshifts to be Doppler, expansion of the space itself, compton effect, or any other interpretation that escapes the problem of having to put Earth in the center, you're still left with the problem of quasar redshift distribution, that persists no matter what interpretation you choose. Even if we stick with the standard model, you still have 23760 known quasars distributed in uniform concentric shells around the Earth, and currently there's no solution to that other than admitting Earth is in a privileged frame. This is really an unsolved issue. Not at all. Quite the opposite. I'm not saying that we will never predict anything correctly, I'm saying that if we can predict things correctly in many different ways, why some of them are rejected on ideological basis if science is supposed to abstain from that? The moment I realized that is when my interested shift from physics to philosophy and researching scientific imposture became a hobby.

Well... I don't believe an strong AI is possible, so if those hypothetical machines that pass the Turing test turn into some kind of threat, I'd have no hard feelings at all in simply turning them off like I do with my toaster or my vacuum cleaner. On the other hand, there are certainly people who believe an strong AI is possible and that those machines have some kind of consciousness. Obviously, to them, my action would be equivalent to murder. Some countries maybe would create laws protecting AIs, while others would consider them illegal, and others would consider them legal but having no individual rights, and so on. Economical issues would arise, since in places where they are considered just machines their work can be exploited by their owners, while in others they have to be paid for it. Since they could work better and faster than humans in many fields, they could become very wealthy and achieve positions of power. In some places laws could even allow them to vote and be elected for public office and so on. If you never read it, I recommend reading Carrol Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, and pay special attention to his theory on how the order in which technological advancements reach a civilization is a lot more important than the technology in itself. Places that are the pinnacle of technological advancement would probably be a lot more concerned with whether the machines should be treated as individuals or not. Places that still lack technology in sanitation, health care, agriculture, etc, would probably care very little and simply treat them as machines that could help solve the problem. Their role as weapons would probably depend on how difficult it is to build one. If it's easy, they could probably serve a revolution in some of those places, but if it's hard, it would consolidate the existent powers. So, i guess humanity would react in the same way it reacts to other polarizing issues: conflict, conflict and more conflict. Rather than revolutionizing something, they'd become just another token in the geopolitical game.

Buddy... to quote Eddington, there are no observational facts about anything in the universe. None. Zero. All astronomical measurements, without a single exception, are nothing but measurements of the phenomena occurring in an observatory or telescope, and obviously most of them from an Earth-centered frame. All those measurements are translated into other frames and therefore to knowledge of the universe through theories, which depend on assumptions, mainly the isotropy and homogeneity of the cosmological principle, which is precisely that we're not in a privileged frame. Think carefully about what you're saying. Without assumptions on homogeneity and isotropy, you can't even say for sure that we are in a Galaxy! We assume we are in a Galaxy because we observe that stars and planets are organized in galaxies, revolving around their core, so due to those assumptions, we conclude we must be in a galaxy like those too, and some even get pictures of galaxies they believe to be similar to the Millky Way and estimate where the Solar System would be, but that ultimately rests on a set of assumptions that can be parted with easily and other set adopted. The decision is ideological, not scientific. And how do you calculate the mass of the Virgo cluster and compare its mass-to-light ratio to something else without assuming homogeneity and isotropy at some point? I think you're confusing things. First of all, I'm saying parallax is the only yardstick that wouldn't depend on those assumptions, not the opposite. Second, you're the one clinging to stereotypes, assuming that if I disagree with mainstream, I must be clinging to something else. As a matter of fact, I have incredibly few convictions, and whether a particular model is valid is definitely not one of them. Sure, you can do any of these, but it leaves you between a rock and a hard place, since the distribution of many of these is geocentrically oriented. Without solving that problem, you'd have to break isotropy anyway, but then to preserve isotropy you'd appeal to GR and, where it bears on this conversation, you're back to square zero. Everything depends on the assumptions of homogeneity and isotropy, even on our own backyard. Without assuming that you're not in a privileged frame, you can't reach any conclusions from any observation. The game is fixed. Simple as that.

It's amusing how so many posts on this topic are actually saying: "The biggest problem facing humanity is that not everyone agrees with me".

I don't understand how the rest of that paragraph is mostly for me if it doesn't address anything I said directed to you. It even conflicts with it, since the point is that the collapse can't be understood only within the res extensa, because you'll have to reduce the corporeal to the physical. Atoms and molecules aren't corporeal objects, they are just physical objects. They only exist in reality as corporeal objects with some form. If a superposition is merely a description of a collection of potency, it does collapse when it's actualized by a corporeal object. The actualization is a determination, which promotes a de-superposition, with gaining a substantial form. There's no hint of a limit on the size of quantum system because the notion of a delimited quantum system itself is an artifact of the cartesian ontology. Once you scrap it, a superposition of eigenstates is no different of you having the possibilities of speaking french or german superposed and actualizing one of them at a time. That doesn't really solve the problem. Even if you decide to treat the collapse as a mathematical discontinuity of the Schrödinger evolution, the question still stands if it reflects an actual indeterminacy of nature. That's called a dogma: you stabilize an unsolved issue by means of authority, so other related discussions can evolve, at the cost of some precision. Schrödinger's cat is dead or alive, with a given probability, statistically speaking, before you open the hatch, because the cat isn't a subcorporeal object. The cat's state vector doesn't have to be in a corresponding state, since the cat has a substantial form and, in a sense, it collapses its own state vector.

First of all, not a single word I said here isn't part of current theories. Second of all, the forum rules say nothing about being restricted to mainstream scientific theories without any divergence being accepted. Quite the opposite. It says "all things pertaining to science and general geekdom". Third, if I am indeed violating the forum rules and my posts don't belong here, ask for a moderator. That's what they are here for. Finally, if my presence makes you uncomfortable in some way, just say it and we'll try to find a way to work around the problem. Acting like in a treehouse club, making arbitrary rules on the spot in an attempt to ostracize me is just silly.

That only depends on which numbers you plug in the redshift formula, and those numbers are assumptions. Beyond parallax, how fast or how distant stars and galaxies are and how to scale their relative movements depends on the assumption of homogeneity and isotropy and interpreting redshifts as velocity shifts, and there's no other yardstick that doesn't end up in the exact same place. Obviously, if redshifts are not velocity shifts, then the obvious conclusion is that Earth is a privileged frame, there's no expansion, no restrictions in the time-scale, no spacial curvature, and no need for Dark Matter. Yeah, right... and you'll just try to scrap Newton's Laws for the second time, while there's a perfect valid solution that keeps it unchanged, and its only problem is an ideological commitment to something else? Well... that's why I left physics. Yes, but their motion and how much matter they have also depends on the assumptions of homogeneity, isotropy, expansion, age of the universe, etc, etc. Really? Have you been there? Or you just conclude it won't change based on the assumptions of homogeneity, isotropy, expansion, the age of the universe, etc, etc?

I didn't said that. I said that if Earth has a privileged location, it strongly suggests it has some purpose. It doesn't affect the opposite in any way, it just isn't as strong. That's wishful thinking. Whether you see purpose in it or not, it has nothing to do with it actually having. That's an ideological argument, not logical or scientific. That's like Stephen Hawking saying that even though we have no scientific evidence for or against it, we should believe that redshifts are velocity shifts on grounds of modesty. One can easily claim that it makes a lot more sense that in an universe made for us to live and learn, we should be in a privileged position, and there's no way out of this conundrum other than rhetoric, meaning, who is more convincing. When the discussion gets to that ideological ground, one is free to counter that argument with anything ideological too, like religion. You're not disagreeing with the logic, but with one of the premises. That's an entirely different thing.