Posted on 12/07/2005 3:31:28 AM PST by snarks_when_bored
Thank you so much, Alamo-Girl, for your kind words of encouragement! I'm glad you liked my pieces; plenty of time to discuss them later, when you feel rested. I am really floored by the import of Lascaux! What magnificent art! And what it says about "primitive" man!
Try arguing with your wife :-)
In fact, she doesn't even have to be present to win:
If a man speaks in a forest, and there's no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?
Off the top of my head, no. I think there is always "implicitly" at least a logical frame work, even if it is as simple as A != non-A. But the framework, or the working assumptions, may happen to be tacitly ignored, or completely forgotten about, in some situations. As in the above joke.
Cheers!
Well, someone needs to post a picture of that T-shirt:
And God said,
[Maxwell's equations]
...and there was light!
Or we could tweak RightWingProfessor by talking of ladder operators to create photons...
Cheers!
I don't remember quoting Dawkins, as I've never read him.
In fact I agreed with a way-earlier poster that he is such an arrogant jerk, he might be the late Carl Sagan's separated-at-birth twin.
Full Disclosure: And he doesn't even have Isaac Asimov's insights into sociology and love of puns, either...
LOL! Glad to see you don't let the fact you've never read him prevent you from forming an opinion, anyway!
That would be the last question. As we are considering the nature of the ergod, we ought to realize we look for relevance, not relation. Geometry is metaphorical, as is the rest of mathematics. We need to agree that the ergod is the inverse of the void and then discover to nature of the inversion.
On the black hole, Hawking discovered that information can emerge from a black hole, thereby confusing thermodynamics with information theory through confusing entropy with entropy, two words with entirely different meaning, but spelled and pronounced the same and with the same mathematical form but different content: abstracting and mixing metaphors leads to bad science and worse morality.
Thanks so much for writing, a NYCguy. Still, the fact that an elephant is aware of dead things, and can distinguish between the bones of elephants and other animals, does not show anything about whether it is aware of its own mortality. It takes a self-reflective consciousness to have such an awareness.
The artist(s) at Lascaux demonstrably possessed such a consciousness. There is only one human figure depicted at Lascaux; it is an image of a dead man. To me the fact that this figure was painted with an erect phallus is of extraordinary interest -- and significance. The dead man has apparently just been taken out by a raging bull; we are looking at the instant of his death. Why the phallus -- except to denote the idea that death and life were even then understood to be intimately, inseparably intertwined? I had thought that particular insight dated back only so far as the pre-Socratic Greeks; e.g., Heraclitus, and made thematic in Plato. I am simply amazed at the incredible antiquity of this understanding, rendered recognizably in the great art at Lascaux.
Well, I haven't read entire books, but it looked like his attitude shown through even in the mere excerpts I have been exposed to.
Kind of like some unnamed disputants on Crevo threads. :-)
Cheers!
Predicted or discovered? I thought Hawking was a theoretician...?
I agree it might have that significance, but I quite literally--and no humor intended for once--have figured out how the discoverers of these sorts of things have ruled out subsequent vandalism, practical jokes, or "teenagers" within the culture or society which made the paintings...
(What are later "electro-archaeologists" or extraterrestrial aliens doing their own SETI going to make of the juxtaposition of ABC's Nightline with ads for Oprah or Britney Spears?)
Cheers!
That was when WW I destroyed the nascent philosophy of scientific societal evolution.
As Mortimer Adler describes him, a cosmologist.
The treatment began with analyzing why time and space look the way they did after the A. Graham Bell Michelson-Morley experiment returned a null result. The description of appearances is the point of relativity, which amounts to saying the description of the illusion.
Don't be shy, whiskers. Tell us how much the primitive elephant lived to see the far side.
Experiments occupy our time and keep [most] physicists off the street and out of dingy afterhours private clubs where who knows what nonlinear events might distract their finely honed minds. Mathematical proofs link theorems, and some theorems are useful as metaphors for our illusions.
Really? Isn't the mind of the observer of "spiritual revelation" as limited as any other human mind? Consider Joseph Smith, Mohammed, Baha'ullah, at al; "there will be many false prophets"
I am not at all sure which (if any) of these prophets was a conscious fraud; my own take is that most of them had some sort of epilepsy or schizophrenia. I am fairly sure, however, that not all of them were receiving prophecies.
If one accepts the hypothesis that there are spiritual beings, it's possible some of them were actually channeling demons or devils or some such. But there is really no way to know.
"Look at the fruits". Does this make Mormonism true?! It's fruits look pretty good to me.
A friend of mine "hears" the Virgin Mary, except when he's on anti-psychotic medication. I take the fact that the thorazine stops the voices as evidence thy're not really the BVM's.
If something like "spiritual revelation" ever happened to me, I'd make an appointment with a neurologist to see if I had epilepsy or a brain tumor or such like.
I don't know whether Hawking proved an information theory theorem from his mathematical model of the black hole, but the gist of what I got from the layman's explanation is that matter cannot emerge from a black hole, while information can. A grad student trapped inside a black hole might be able to send his report to his doctoral committee via Morse code, although he would never be able to show up in tassel to receive his diploma.
The problem with your (one-sided) characterization is that you can't build a civilization from thorazine and epileptics.
Hawking radiation is matter. And it escapes.
Is that the bet-losing effect Hawking found in his equations last year? I had heard it was information rather than matter, but I know only what I heard, or misheard.
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