You do see how it applies. You went right to it saying that murder is more severe than discrimination but you haven't explained how severe something has to be before it's ok to take the choice away.

I'll just type out the real question (that I thought you would recognize) plain to see: why isn't discrimination severe enough?

There's no c in my name D:<

They're definitely not equivalent- I said that with the full intention that you'd think about how they were different. You're supposed to now explain where the line fits between murder and discrimination.

With what you've said so far I know that some things less extreme than murder are ok and some things more extreme than discrimination are not ok but the reason you think discrimination is petty enough to be allowed is totally shrouded.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/opinion/24lipman.html

Then why's it a crime to kill people? Doesn't that take away a lot of my choices?

Status quo for "spiritualists" is just preaching how full of holes mainstream science is, isn't it?

Let's actually think outside the box for a minute and discuss what it means for there to be a hole though. I don't want to put word in your mouth so you start.

Man I'm getting tired of going back over this.

The Earth is flat. 90% accurate because it is pretty flat.
The Earth is spherical. 90% MORE accurate because, as we know, that little deviation from flat eventually wraps around.
The Earth is a squashed sphere. 90% more accurate because the rotation makes the middle bulge out.

It's not wrong to say the Earth is flat. It's actually very correct on a small, human scale. It takes a lot of seeing pictures taken from the air to even give people s vague sense of how big the Earth is- we've probably all seen the numbers at some point but they don't convey anything except maybe "that's too big for me to really understand."

So on a really huge scale we can see that the very tiny deviation from flat makes the Earth a sphere. This is totally different from the Earth being a rhombus or a torus and we are never going to wake up one day and throw out sphere so we can start saying the Earth is one of those shapes. We haven't even thrown out flat, we just stop using it after we get to a large enough scale.


But I want to say something new here too.
I've actually been being generous when I just say 90% each step. The curvature of a sphere the size of Earth is 0.000126 per mile. It doesn't drop away at a tenth of a mile, a one hundredth, or even a thousandth of a mile but one and a quarter ten thousandths of a mile. Yet even so people figured it out long before we were able to travel all the way around it (measuring the time between when the sun shone on the bottom of two distant wells is the first example I know about.) Way past 99% here.

You know that bulge I mention each time I type this? The Earth is 7927 miles wide in that direction and 7900 through the poles. That's almost one third of one percent difference. Again we were more than 99% correct calling it a sphere.

Now what's really important is that at this point you recognize that we're talking about changing what we thought by 1%. We did that back at the change from flat the round. Now we're changing 1% of that 1%. Like I said, the scales these things matter at are way out of what humans can normally comprehend. We have to use these numbers instead.

If you don't like how I say that calling the Earth flat is right and prefer to keep calling it wrong then we at least know that the squashed sphere is less wrong than just a sphere which is less wrong than flat. Very very slightly less wrong.

Just saying... over and over -_-;

Edit: It doesn't take a big jump in thought to understand how this easy to see example applies to a lot of other "changes" we've made to what we think about the universe right?

In a roundabout way that's my point: women were throwing away everything assigned to the female role so that there would be no distinction left. Cooking, knitting, wearing bras and so on aren't really the things that cause the situation and they've been made so devoid of power that throwing them away is not even significant as a symbolic action.

Doing different things is not the issue. The issue comes from how we evaluate the things females do. Cooking, wrangling children, and home economics aren't things of inherently low value- we call them nothing because women do them. If they were the tasks of men we would take them seriously.


It is now that we can see this. We have a front row seat where we can watch as women in new roles are cast into the margins yet again and those roles that were once valued now amount to trivial efforts in the public eye.

The elusive name of this game has now come into focus and that name is respect. Feminism needs to become a fight for respect if we ever want this devaluation to end.

I'm a bit annoyed that I had to write them really. I've already presented the ideas on several occasions but it looks like I've got to treat abra like a child and walk him through everything in baby steps.

I really didn't want to because he's said he has all this great life experience and wisdom but he just fights anything I say for no apparent reason instead of carrying a train of thought at least one step forward.

So here I am walking him through it in baby steps that nobody thinks should have been necessary.

They thought they could just get that and then the differences would fade away once they made as much money. Most of the significant ones probably would if we no longer had any bias for whether men or women supported household bank accounts but the equal pay thing turns out to be something you'd have to flat out enforce for a few generations to keep it from sliding back.

I used that Earth example to show that it's not so much about counting. How do you count flat? How do you count spherical?

For practical purposes the best way is to go measuring how far away from perfectly flat or spherical something is but that gives you a percent rather than some number of things.

The way of measuring this I'm talking about is completely different from counting stars or hairs on someone's head. It's like pointing a digital camera and taking a picture.

The picture shows you basically everything that's there but maybe it doesn't have as many pixels as you'd like- you can go get some other camera that will give you twice as many pixels and now maybe you can see, say, some of the wrinkles on somebody's face but in the first picture you could still tell it was a face. You don't suddenly realize that instead of some people at a picnic you were really looking at a picture of a gingerbread house just by doubling the pixels.

Maybe if your picture started out really blurry you might only be able to tell something was some kind of house and then with ten times as many pixels you'd be able to tell if it was gingerbread or an actual house or maybe a shack of some sort. With ten times more pixels than that you might be able to see some shapes in the windows and with 1000 times as many pixels you might be able to see the wrinkles on someone's head in the window-

but do the wrinkles on someone's face really matter as much as whether it's a regular house or a gingerbread one? Surely you can understand how recognizing what kind of house it is tells you more about the picture than some specs of dandruff on the shoulder of someone in the house. Maybe the dandruff is even an important detail somehow but to see dandruff on the shoulder of someone inside of a gingerbread house has an entirely different meaning than seeing it in a normal house while just seeing dandruff or not is basically such a small detail there are only a few reasons you could even have to care about it. I wouldn't want to count them but they're nothing compared to the number of reasons the type of house could be relevant.

I'm not saying I know everything, just that you're describing what humanity knows in a misleading fashion.

720 degrees is 360*2 meaning that they cycle through their quantum state .5 times per revolution.
But that's the boring how it works explanation. The why is because you've got two electrons per orbital on an atom and they need to be in different quantum states to be in the same orbital. It's like how you wouldn't be able to park two cars in the same parking space but if you "phased" one a bit they could easily overlap. I'm pulling that comparison from popular media though as quantum effects generally don't have normal scale equivalents.

I'm glad to see that you haven't run out of tricks though. If you pull a few more like that one out of your hat you'll actually stump me pretty soon. I don't really care though because I'm not God or anything like that so I shouldn't know everything, it's just that you don't seem to recognize that science has marched on while you've been retired so I guess you never update your list of current mysteries.

Oh, and do you ever plan on sharing what those lectures you attended were about? Sitting in on those things doesn't count for much if you don't understand what they were saying.

Read the rest of the freaking post.

Math. You want to classify our knowledge linearly while I'm using inverse logarithms. How can you miss that reading what I just wrote?

We work on scales. Newton's equations describe most of what we see and work very well until you get to the very large or the very small. You can use them 90% of the time just fine. It's not a single piece of the puzzle, it's the majority of it. We've got a lot more than that now though so the upper size where we start running into problems is bigger than the observable universe and the only place where the lower size shows up to pose problems is inside of black holes or billions of years ago at the start of the universe.

Nobody with much comprehension of scale is going to say that looks like 5%. Bigger than the universe is by default not something that has any current impact on us so this really just simplifies down to the beginning of our universe and inside of black holes. Both of those are tiny so we've got 99.999% of the puzzle put together. There are and may always be lots of little details left to fill in but we know what it looks like.

We know that the Earth is roughly spherical. Your 5% talk sounds exactly like you think we're going to wake up tomorrow and throw away what we knew and call it a pyramid. That's unmistakably bullcrap.


It's quite simple. If you have a 5% of the puzzle pieces on the board can you tell if you're looking at a picture of puppies or if it's flowers? Maybe but you could very easily be mistaken. If you have 99% of the pieces places and the puzzle looks like puppies do you think you will reasonably find out later that it was actually a donkey-pinata?

It's all about recognizing what way is reasonable to count.

I agree except for one thing:
"Feminism was never about “Equality” "

That's exactly what it was about when women were burning their bras and such. It was a huge mistake but hopefully people have learned from it.

Aww, too tuckered out to handle my questions?

The notion that science was frequently totally flipped on it's head can basically be said to have been amputated when we started with the scientific method. That simple process of making predictions and checking them was a real revolution and the beginning of real understanding.

As I've said (and apparently been ignored,) we know something like 99.999% of how our universe works. The Earth being flat is 90% correct. The Earth being a sphere is 90% more correct. The Earth being a squashed sphere 90% more and having a wider southern hemisphere 90% more still.

You act as if saying the Earth is a squashed sphere is as different from just a sphere as saying that it is a pyramid and that another step down the road and we will think it is starfish shaped.

Last time you backpedaled into quantum mechanics. Got a plan for actually confronting this this time?

I just gave you a lecture about being redundant. Given the context I would think you could tell I was complaining about your writing.

Show me that you understand what non-local behavior means.

Show me that- well that you even remember when that happens.

How is this useful?
*A few posts back I explained how it's irrelevant.


"The bible is like a person, if you torture it long enough you can make it say anything you want."- Episcopal bishop
I don't see the Bible here but the spirit you're talking about seems to work just like it, and I'm usually quite discerning when it comes to faith.

Is it plausible or is the evidence pointing AT it?

Big difference pal.

Right now it's not even clear if you actually believe that.

Stop making this about me. I'm asking you if you're saying it's evidence or not.

So in simple words, are you saying it is not evidence?

So in simple words, are you saying it is evidence?

I'm not very typical then am I? I'm asking you when they apply and what reasons you have to think they are relevant to this topic. Stop acting like I'm the someone who's thrown garbage arguments at you for years. This is something different.

You pump fog into the room until you can't see anymore.


What does that mean? Don't you say that all things are possible when you have observed nothing?

So in simple words, are you saying that we don't know anything?

Stop just saying that. Tell me what some of them are. Tell me where you think there is room.
COMMIT TO YOUR CLAIMS.

What dream have I expressed here?


Here's a little reminder of what I just said: "NO. I'm not demanding that"

So im direct terms, are you saying that atheism is inherently immoral and sinister?

Where's the justification in calling that the truth?

Remember, it's other people that said that's "misrepresentative of science," not me.

But just to clarify they're not telling you that those facts are misrepresentations. It's the conclusions that you drawn about them.
Well no, I can't say you draw any conclusions, your language is still incredibly vague and uncommitted. What are you saying those things mean?

Odd that you'd tell me to behave as I have been.

To me it would be disrespectful to make my message easier to swallow by watering it down as if you were children.

Then what are you doing in it?

I thought you said you were retired.

That's a terrible attitude. If we keep science sealed away in our ivory towers it's not just that the public will never understand but that they will grow distrustful of those keeping secrets from them. It's bad enough as it is without you telling me I've got nothing profound enough to be worth sharing.

It's called physics. The most recognizable branch or it in our lives is called chemistry. Move up the scale a bit more and our word for the effects is called biology. Move up the scale quite a ways further and you get government types and chess tactics and yomi and so on.

Like you said earlier all of the attributes of our universe arise from quantum properties. The ones that are non-local have been staring us in the face since long before we knew about the local ones.


Can I explain how the local effects come together to produce these non-local ones? Not any more than I can explain chess strategy in terms of how a pawn can move. How long do I need to continue this explanation of what emergent properties are?

Why does that stop us from knowing this but not stop us from figuring out something like F=ma or the Einstein version of that?


"I lean toward the mystical because this is where I see the evidence pointing."
Once again you find yourself sitting in front of your own quote about science supporting spirituality. It gets worse when you see another recent quote placed next to it: "I'm not claiming to have "evidence" for anything."

Checkmate. You've already flipped the board because you didn't like how it was playing out but here we are with them all laid back out in that same pattern. Are you going to admit fault here or just knock everything over again?

[quote[

If you believe that Biologists know everything there is to know about how neurons work (especially in terms of synchronicity in large arrays, they either you're the one who should cross biology off the list of subjects you could be involved with, or biology has come a very long way since I've retired.
So are you finally saying that you were a Biologist?
Well, I'd prefer not to take your word for it so you can just answer with a trivial question: if you apply curare to a nerve what direction do the potassium ions flow?

We can account for all of the ions moving through the membrane, use simple calculus to measure the resistance down the axon vs the resistance through the membrane to work out how they behave as capacitors to increase the rate of opening channels. We know all about the molecular configurations in charge of the refractory period and all manner on cell junctions other than the generic dendrites around an axon. We know about the constant signal that comes from leaking neuroreceptors and have even identified it beyond the analog level down to where it occurs in precise units much like the quantum effects you bring up so often.

Thanks to things like GFP we can now map out the neuron connectivity of the brain in all the colors of the rainbow (and if I could find it I'd show a picture of a monkey brain that's been done with,)and psychologist haven't exactly been sitting around twiddling their thumbs while biochemistry marched on either.

So tell me a little bit about what those two presentations were about. If you didn't take notes I understand that the details would probably not be easy to recall but you should be able to give a general summary and maybe mention the problems they were working on.

Hell, I'll do so myself to give a example: About a year ago I attended a presentation about plant development. He spent the first forty percent or so giving a rehash about the important chemicals at play that you learn about in introductory courses (stuff like auxin and WUS.) The rest of the presentation was about explaining how his team had created various models for cell division and some tests he had done. The discovery I recall best was that while working with physicists thy noticed a pattern in certain fibers that matched closely with something the physics folks were familiar with. Now recognizing how the cells oriented these they were about to accurately predict cell divisions but being real go-getters they experimented and showed that when they changed the directions of stress they could make the cells organize in patters that still matched the model. Apparently in peer reviewed journals they got a lot of criticism so they went and did it in several different ways to show that their technique was not altering the process in ways other than what they had wanted. Admittedly at this point it started to go over my head and his next two features that really extended the reach of his work have left my memory but he had a lot of video of things like the process in 3d and mentions of how the margin of error got smaller and smaller as they added these things in.

Altogether this stuff accounts for things like those Fibonacci spirals plants generate and how they manage to control their growth. It's really just a bunch of local effects that add up to interesting non-local effects.

*I can go into the basic stuff like what auxin is if anyone wants to know. I just didn't think it was worth explaining to Abra if he's really already educated on biology matters.

This looks more like justifications for yourself.

I've heard you go both ways on how much we know and don't know though so would you like to make a concrete claim about where you stand for that?

If it happens every time wouldn't it seem likely that you're doing something inappropriate? If everybody says so shouldn't you face the issue of how you represent science?

I put up with evangelicals being horribly redundant with what they say to me because I understand that they think anyone who's not fully in agreement with them just doesn't understand and I'm trying to put up with your mirror image of that same thing but I would really appreciate it if you could set that aside and accept that I know what you're talking about.

With that in mind, NO. I'm not demanding that and as patient as I am I'm still getting very tired of repeating this to you. If you were really interested in telling us what we know and we do not I shouldn't have nearly so much trouble getting you to tell me what we know and do not. Here's what we know: not enough to rule out a God of the gaps.

The thing is I am very particular about knowing what I know and what I don't know. You don't seem to really care about this and so everything I hear from you seems to follow this pattern:
"But we don't know everything!"
"What more would we need to know to deal with this particular thing?"
"Everything."

And then I push that a little more telling you that you're wrong and we only need to know some thing but you don't hear it and you even extend your belief that you're undeniably right so far that you start sticking your own arguments in my mouth... and continuing to fight them.
YOU are the one saying that we need to know everything and YOU are the one saying that is ridiculous.

That phrase is getting a bit more refined so I take it you've had to look up a webpage and read it a few times so far?

Tell me what they are already.


"I lean toward the mystical because this is where I see the evidence pointing. "
You're being redundant.

Thanks for stealing my arguments again. How can you be so certain that you understand and that I don't that you can repeat my own explanations to my face?

Maybe you should sit down and tell everyone else what these things are so they'll understand how that's not a violation of non-locality.

Ok, that phrase is deceptive. I want you to demonstrate that you know what these things are because rankly this all sounds like a lot of fluff.

Like my recent "when you don't know perform tests to collect evidence" line of discussion with Sky you seem to understand that it's good to look for some evidence in reality instead of explaining reality with no basis. Bravo.

What do you mean by precise details?

Aren't those "capabilities" "technical details"?

Really though, stop acting like I can't follow what you're saying and show that you can follow what I am. I have been asking you to point out aspects of various things that are unsolvable with the knowledge we have. You no doubt think I'm doing this so that when you don't I can stand triumphant and laugh as I proclaim that we really do know everything but that's dead wrong. Pointing these things out is trivial for anyone who has been involved in science as you can't even begin to do your job without knowing about them so I am really probing to figure out just what the hell field you were involved in and so far it looks like the deepest you've ever been involved with science was PBS specials.

For the love of God (oh wait, you're supposedly agnostic,)just use a technical term that was involved in your job! Anything!

Yet you won't ever engage me in philosophy.

Use simpler terms instead of hiding them. You are saying you have philosophical arguments based on scientific evidence.

It was already clear to me. I want it to be clear to you.

The question was how we can observe things our senses do not directly detect. It is undeniable that first acted as if there was no way and then when I explained the way you stated that you already knew.

So if not testing me or asking questions what is the point of such feigned ignorance?

I keep switching between thinking you're a really spoiled loser and you've got some kind of memory problem.

Well either way I don't have any problem going back and grabbing some quotes.
"Sorry, but modern science has already made a very firm conclusion that we have no choice but to attribute the existence of this universe to what we can never know. "
"Currently this has even been proven mathematically"
"We have every logical reason to believe"
"we do have evidence to the contrary in quantum physics as well as in pure mathematics."
"I lean toward the mystical because this is where I see the evidence pointing. "

If that's not enough how many would you like me to grab?

But you said that emergent properties were nonsense because they had to all come from the very base of existence. That the quantum field has to have all of this in it.

If you want me to think of our brains on a quantum level the least you can do is think of democracy on an atomic level.
But right here it's clear that you see the problem- the mechanics we are talking about loan no sense to things so far from their scale. They do apply everywhere and the properties of atoms and other particles absolutely must include everything that it takes for our government models to exist but we don't deal with things that way. It's no use trying to work out communism on an atomic scale just like it's pointless trying to work out our brains on a quantum scale. It's almost pointless trying to work them out on an atomic scale but we're getting close to where computers would actually be able to do so.

However we'll quickly leave that behind and have the computers switch over to simpler considerations per cell just so we can simulate more of them at once. Eventually we will probably have them simulate whole clusters of cells as the individual units because that is where the phenomena we are concerned with happen and once we understand the base level we can factor it out of the equation. Whether we begin at the level of atoms or quantum field it only matters that we get it right before we are able to find easier ways of doing things.

So if you would still prefer to not concede the argument you need to tell me what aspect of our brains skips over the atomic level going straight from quantum field to consciousness or whatever term you would prefer to describe that aspec of us that most people call free will.

I'm not asking you to explain quantum gravity to me before we understand it. I'm asking you to point out where atomic interactions fail to account for some important part of us. The truth of the matter is that in the way you have described the quantum field atoms are it. So we really already know. It's like atoms and Newtonian mechanics: you don't need to know about atoms to measure and categorize force any more than you need to know about photons to tell if it's daytime or not. Light obviously is all photons but you can still figure out that it goes in straight lines, reflects off of some objects but is absorbed by others, and even how different density mediums alter it's angle.

And I am only asking that you tell me why what you do know is insufficient.

Do you not understand the difference between atomic and quantum?

I could very nearly call this an appropriate answer to my queries but there's a problem with even those atoms popping in and out of existence: if they pop in as atoms and protons they are incompatible with those ion channels and if they pop in as configured atoms then they have no charge and are not ions.

But if you'd like to go grab us the rates at which those particles pop up, about how long they last, and the range of configurations they take we'll get to see that they are nothing compared to ions involved with a single axon. Unlike your misuse of calculus in this case the impact really does approach zero.

Entanglement only has any usable impact if you know that you're dealing with an entangled particle. Are you proposing that our brains not only get a hold on both entangled particles but manage to place them so that they can use them for calculation?

Dear god, you actually were saying that.

Still, what aspect of how a neuron works does this impact?

You've missed the point here and I can tell before you even get very far into it. I'm not asking you philosophical questions here, this topic is specifically about evidence.

But I'm being even looser than that as I'm allowing you to point to the part of our biology where these quantum behaviors could fit in. I've not asked you to speculate about what quantum aspect actually goes there, just to tell me where the things we already understand do not account for something.

It's of interest to you because you've heard we want to make computers that use that and because you know our mind is like a computer but don't know any of the actual behavior of an axon or synapse this seems like a plausible hidden treasure that could be hidden in our heads to you.

May I cross Biology off of the list of subjects you could have been involved with yet?

If you had something like Sky's psychic random number generator group here I would say you had understood what I was asking for...

You need to amend that.
"All I do is suggest plausibility arguments based on what I know about the physical world." would be correct.

That's not what people are mad at you for. It's those times where you're not just making plausibility arguments like when you said that we can't understand how humans make choices and will NEED to understand quantum mechanics or some other uncharted field before we can. That's not speculation, that's telling us that you know some precise shortcoming of current knowledge and then refusing to share it.

Come on, you were involved with science before you retired or whatever so you should know how to handle technical speak and scientific journals. Go dig up something so convoluted and technical that I can barely even follow it aside from the simple sentences where they explain how atomic interactions don't account for all of the behaviors of a neuron. If your claim is justified you know there's got to be mention of it in someone's research.

That's only because you're bouncing photons off of it to get the position. We can work out the velocity just fine if we're not measuring the position.

Oh, and thanks for finally getting to these.


That's not what I asked.
Tell me specifically something we don't know but hope to find out with improved comprehension of quantum mechanics (on a macro scale.)

So why aren't we studying them to figure out quantum mechanics? Surely you're not saying that it's easier to deal with quarks than electrons!?

That's right. I explained that doing something before you have evidence is a good way to test a phenomena. You know, like the scientific method sets out in neat little steps?

Then you said that you didn't think we could understand it because of quantum mechanics.

Were you completely mixed up about what I said back then?

They change the way of thinking but they don't change the measurements. We know the Earth is round(ish) but we still build our houses flat and plan our towns and cities on square grids. We have 365 day years and just throw in an extra day when the measurement gets inaccurate instead of having fractions of a day on our calendars.