Just go drive in your nice car and pollute my fresh air! Have a nice trip!

Wait, I didn't think you got to use that argument? Everything causes death and injury. — James Riley

Yeah, so why bother about non-vaxing?

mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna don’t use a piece of virus DNA. — Michael

Yeah, well, mRNA then. Big difference. The both contain the same message. Strings of 4 bases. Leading to protein. It's gonna be a knowledge battle now?

Yes, but driving cars has a legitimate purpose. Not being vaccinated doesn’t have a legitimate purpose. Except in cases where there is a medical reason to not get vaccinated, not being vaccinated is just stubbornness.
6m — Michael

I just don't wanna be vaxed. That's all. Cars have a legitimate purpose because the law is man-made. Just holding on to them is selfish and stubborn.

And still they cause death and injury.

False equivalence. Read the thread. This argument has already been trashed, soundly. — James Riley

I think it's a sound argument. If people don't drive cars, the number of casualties will be reduced. Besides, your constant use of words like trash, filthy or sound will not help you. It's a mere signal of you being part of a propaganda machine. If I must vax, you should stop driving a car. Non-vaxing is a way of life, like driving a car.

My tax dollars helped to pay for the roads you use, traffic law enforcement, etc., but you would deny me an ICU bed because you’ve gotten too many DUI convictions? — praxis

I don't wanna deny you everything. I just say cars are the cause of many accidents, Mortal ones included. So all cars should be banned, including the roads they travel on. Like all no vaxing should be banned in your eyes.

Why does that matter, you travel on roads, — praxis

But not in a car.

Because they are concerned, not just about themselves (like you), but about their loved ones, friends, acquaintances; and access to hospital beds if they might need them for some other reason. Guys like me just want to see who we can count on in a pinch. You know, like when the "big one" comes along. — James Riley

You are the one who is only concerned for yourself and your loved ones. As simply as that. All your talk about caring for loved ones is just part of your persuasion technique to make others follow the road as fixed in your mind. My mind ain't fixed. Yours is. So go caring for yourself and your loved ones by raging and preaching the gospel to others or by converting them to the just way. It doesn"t work for me. I have better means than a vaccine. You should learn them if you care about others. But probably these methods won't work for you as you are vax-fixed and a priori putting your thumb down. And even a simple "I hope you had a good sleep" is already a sign of treason in your eyes. So continue happily in your just way for salvation by the vaccine. i won't take it. I, me, myself, and I. How selfish I am...

Other than keeping your filthy disease to yourself, that is all anyone asks. Thank you. — James Riley

You're welcome!

You should get vaccinated — Michael

I know. I don't go for small pieces of virus DNA though. I want it all... My cells have better things to do than produce spikes. Even that is asked from you. To produce your own piece of virus. For my fellow men...

Not true. The TV takes information from outside and then processes it to form the image and sound we see as the images — T Clark

Exactly. A medium, like I wrote. You tele see. A far away image or one from the past. Of course that needs more than aether or air. The image is not formed inside the TV but merely transmitted by it.

It's my duty, as a scientist, being loyal to the imperative of the Sciences, to correct you. Others may take your false image of reality for granted...The Truth must be told...

Hope you had a good sleep! There is no raging against the machine on my part. That raging exists i your eyes only.

If people wanna vax, why not? It's up to them. I just analyzed the workings of the machine that tries to push vaccination.

It's you who rages against me, together with the machine that tries to arrive at 70% vaccination to reach group immunity (what has happened in Germany now is exactly the situation I asked about on a political forum after which my question got closed almost instantly; 70% is not reached and next year the needle will be driven into you by law; just a small pragmatic measure taken...).

Rage against the human being, by the machine. By means of painting a picture of being an amoral monster ìf not vaxed. Whý do the vaccinated care that I don't vax? Because the 70% of group immunity is not reached if you don't.

There are more ways to fight the disease though, and the appeal to "moral responsibility" is just a means of the established way of thinking and constructing a society which gave rise to a global spread of the virus in the first place.

I have my own means to fight the disease. And now I wear a mask when vaxed people are around not to protect myself but to prevent them from getting infected! Well, of course they are right insofar the working of the vaccine is concerned, as it's not as effective as thought, as was to be expected with a a vaccine based on a small piece of viral DNA, to be proteinized into a single virus spike. Injecting that stuff is not my way of preventing disease, and I just don't want it to be injected in me. That's all!

"Oh, come on, just vax, what do you care? Do it for other people's sake..." Moral respnsibility, yeah yeah. Well fuck that! Now I'm indeed raging against the machine! If it rages to me, I rage back.

In a truly free society all ways of being and living should be allowed, and not only a scientifically based approach, involving mostly abstract knowledge concerning the virus and the world we live in.

It's not that I just wanna be contrary and it's all about me. I care for my loved ones, who doesn't? I don't want them to get sick either. By vaxing or not. It's up to them.

A state-connected approach, shaping modern society, with devastsating effects on the world we live in (when the raging starts...). Giving rise to abstract entities like group immunity, the collective, an real entities offering a means for the virus to go global. You might say I let others do the vaxing for me, but they wanna be vaxed themselves. Good for them! Let those who wanna get vaxed be vaxed! Let those who don't want not be! I think the comparisons with Nazi-Germany are way over the top though.

Don't worry, I will not use your hospital bed when I get ill, nor that of your loved ones. But if you or your loved one get injured in a car incident, she should not occupy my bed or that of my loved one, as we don't drive cars.

And by the way, I have no fear of needles. Why do you think that? I guess it's part of the collective machine puffing its steam...

If human activity on the planet causes the temperature to increase, which causes the sea-level to rise and storms and fires to increase both in quantity and force, then human activity is the cause for a lot of misery.

Why should what is false cannot be known? It can just as well be known as what is true.

The man and his ID with his name and his photograph probably correspond in all fairness. But there is a chance he is wearing a fake face, or his ID is falsified.

Likewise, seeing a dog shape in the mist can be a person wearing a dog costume. A leaf floating in the wind can be taken for a weird bird. If I see giant horses in clouds jumping from behind a forrest, I will soon become aware that it are clouds. Unless I reject their physical status altogether and give them a place in a magical approach to reality.

It's still permissible to mandate less than safe medications, under the proviso that the situation is so dire that it warrants such a measure. — baker

What's the dire situation in this case? The vaccinated are protected. Why should they care? They only care about their beds being occupied in the hospital by the non-vaxed. Or that they are infected again by them. So the call to consciousness ("you're selfish if you don't vax") is just a cry of fear coming out of vaxed mouths. It's the vaxed who are selfish. Believing that vaxing is the only solution to the problem. This propagandized thought and necessary action according to a few people proclaiming themselves the experts and who represent the established culture (scientific thinking, which is the cause of the global outbreak in the first place), is overtaken by the people, and this is subsequently called the reaction of "the collective", which is no more than the selfish thought of the majority who fear. If acupuncture were the state-approved medicine, and acupuncture treatment was made mandatory, I wonder if the vaxers caĺling for mandate would want to let them be treated with acupuncture needles. It's up to the citizens of a free society to decide if they want a needle or not. Be it a vax needle or accu needles. Any claim to moral responsibility is false and misleading.

At the back it has to expand. But how can this be? How can space be distorted near mass? How can space expand? You can simply state that the metric is changing, but that begs the question. What Einstein offered no explanation for was how mass curved spacetime. It merely stated that it accompanies mass. The how of the metric change remains unclear, and even gravitons fail.

In 2D and higher dimensions, space is less problematic as the boundaries of any given area/volume are not points but either lines/faces. — TheMadFool

This is just as problematic. How do you put an infinity of lines together to get a 2d whole? The problem lies in the decomposition itself. When you cut a line, a plane, a volume up, it will cost you an infinite amount of time before the cutting is done. After the cutting you have taken away an èssential part. The connection. If the cut is symmetrc, theCan one bring back the connection by simply putting the two pieces back together? Will they magically form a whole again? Can the cut be reversed? No. Every time you cut, be it a line, a plane, or a volume, you take away a point, a line, or a plane, and if you do that an infinite number of times you take away an infinity of points (which are the boundaries of closed pieces of lines, ĺike a line lies at the boundary of a 2d structure; the point is the only one in the family that has itself as a boundary). So if you cut a line than by definition the connection point is lost. It doesn"t belong anymore to the two pieces by symmetry. It can't belong to both so it belongs to neither. so it belongs to neither. So if you cut up a ĺine, you basicaly cut it away. You can add a point after each cut. But the cut isn't undone by that. It's permanent. Two pieces of line can't form a whole anymore. You need glue that doesn't exist. If it existed you would see the point where you fixed the whole. A point is the only dimension you can't cut up.

There is no space as a place; the quantum fields exhaust reality. — PoeticUniverse

Fields need space though to express their totality. Even the virtual ones. That's why graviton fields offer problems, as they carry information about the very space they travel in.

It is also my understanding that the universe is hypothesized to be granular at a sub-sub-sub-sub atomic level. The planck length, 1.616255(18)×10−35 m, — T Clark

That's popular science, which is maybe the best suited for this forum.There is indeed a combination of physical constants (h, c, and G) that gives rise to that lengthscale but that doesn't mean space is not continuous beneath that scales. What would it even mean that it is not meaningful? That there are no sub-points? That volòme and surface have an arbitrary relation? Ĺike fixed closed line can contain an infinity of areas, or a fixed area an infinity of containing lines? And what about time? Should that be granular too because of that?

If I watch TV, the TV merely functionss as an intermediary, a sophisticated medium, like air, by means of which information is sent to you. It's in principle the same like the air between you and me if we directly talk to each other. It can pass ĺive events of a plane hitting a twin tower or carry a picture and sound of you and me talking to each other from far away. It needs a camera though to serve as your faraway eye. And there lies your misunderstanding or inability to undestand. You think the TV gives an internal representation, an analogue of the stuff which is put inside it. This doesn't happen though, as it doesn't happen in air, the newspapers, a radio, or a computer.

Phenomenologists realized that in order to get past time as motion and magnitude it was necessary to dig beneath the concept of the object as res extensa. — Joshs

Sò the experience of time? As apposed to t as a magnitude on a clock or moving objects? What lies beneath objects changing, where they the phenomenologists dig?

Even animals experience time. My dog can get very impatient if I let her wait to long. What do philosophers consider as time? Experienced time? Modern science has literally objectivized time. Time is nowadays nailed to the zillionth second, and the big bang approximated to 10exp-36 seconds. Time is the clock. A funny cyclic process we appear give high value. We have such a process on our wrist, it can be seen on thousands of places, and you can fight, save, find, or loose it. What is time as a phenomenon? As used in life?

Somewhere outside Tokyo
Invented time
Someone in a factory
Invented time
If people wanted proof to carry on
They'd like to buy one
Fifth million watches
With a strap to sell
If they should ever sell out
That would be the end of time

Temporal properties don't change, because if you haven't applied time to the different states of the same collection of particles, it aren't yet temporal properties. The particles can have different distances between and it's after comparing these difference that a change can be established. The difference is the change. Keep the change.

On the inside the brain feels like the mind, from the outside it looks like the brain. It gives you a means to see hear, smell, and taste, to have thoughts and emotions or dreams, and it makes you feel pain, heat, pressure, sick, nausea, ecstacy, feel a stick break, makes you press a pill out, walk, move your body, perform an experiment, makes you solve problems, envision God or angels and demons, engage in psychotic worlds, feel depression in an unnatural world, experience space and time, etc.

So the material description is missing an essential part. The part experienced from within. You can make a map from the materialistic description to the the experienced one. Of course. But it doesn't explain consciousness, however necessary for being able to exist in the world.

To the same extent that your TV set is identical to "Gilligan's Island." — T Clark

And I repeat is again too. The brain is no medium through which information flows to show it to the ones watching. If you talk with your girlfriend there isn't some TV show that was once put on video that is passed to you. The TV is just part of the physical world neutrally passing images of that world from faraway times or faraway places. A computer does the same, basically.

Change by itself does not exist. It's a relational property. Irreversible processes constitute change because a process constitutes change. Cyclic, reversable changes constitute a means to assign time to the irreversible changes, which by themselves are timeless changes. A process doesn't involve time. That's what we assign to it later.

You can have a sensation of this change if you become aware of the process. The process is projected into your brain and leaves memory trails. The new projection is felt to be different from that before. You have a sensation of change.

So calling change a sensation is circular. In the very concept of sensation, change (an irreversible process without time) is involved. Sensations are based on change. You can have a sensation of change. The sensation involves change but by itself it is not a change.

Nietzsche rejects every attempt to construct abstract universal moral systems because the very construction means the posession of universal abstract morals, i.e, applicable to all people. Such a construction, being abstract, reduces life to a fictional entity, while at the same time it pretends to be applicable to all. The modern book of law is such an attempt. Like the bible is.

Any such construction is an attempt to reduce life to abstract categories, abstract definitions of right and wrong, and abstract explanations why these morals exists and why one should cling to them, and abstract ways to make oneself or others a better person.

Now it would be no problem if people want to conduct their life according to these rules, and transform life to conform to the abstract image they have. If only they would apply the system to themselves only. The problem though is that because of the claim of universality it is thought to be applicable to all, like is thought for almost any western systems of thought which are mostly abstract views. Abstraction and universality are concepts that lead away from real life and locality. The same holds for the abstract world of science which claimes to be universally valid. Same problem here.

Where does this desire for abstraction and universality come from? I agree with Nietzsche that the roots lay in ancient Greek. Mathematics (the ultimate form of abstraction), physics, metaphysics, and abstract moral, have origins in the minds of the mathematicians, physicists, metaphysicists, and moralists alive back then. The philosophers, that is. Which made its way to the modern-day world, causing the existential misery it finds itself in.

It seems like we will one day be able to make very intelligent self-aware machines with thoughts and behaviour quite like ours. — GrahamJ

That's the typical attitude of many computer scientists. They forget that life and consciousness are not based on a program anywhere to be found in the brain. In the brain there is no division between a program that is stored somewhere, information stored elsewhere, and an external voltage direction the pattern of ones and zeros (input) step by step on the base of a program also stored as a pattern, and producing another kind of pattern (output). A computer can be turn off and on. The brain can't. All you do with a computer is pushing patterns of 1's and 0's into a different pattern of 1's and 0's. It's us who attach a meaning to these patterns.

They only seem intelligent because of the speed of the computer clock. But seeming is different from being. Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of creating a new kind of cute little life, or a big mean one, but it's just not possible to create conscious life in a lab from microchips (or quantum stuff).

Metaphysics concerns the nature of physical world. What is matter, does it exist independently of us? Is it created by God? It concerns the introduction of (still) non-existent abstract stuff which obeys it's own physics, like strings in string theory, or economical things like product prices.

The metaphysics of dialectical materialism contains the tension between how it is and how it should be, considering the distribution of material property, a tension which inevitably leads to revolution.

The metaphysics of the mind is a physics guiding thoughts, ideas, emotions, etc. Dawkins' selfish memes and memes are a metaphysics of the biology and the mind, insofar it tries to explain behavior in the biological sphere and the human mind. All organisms are creation of selfish genes whose only selfish will it is to stay alive and he projects the same idea to memes, which created the mind to realize their selfish desire to stay alive. One can create a similar idea for altruistic genes and memes though.

The metaphysics of music seeks a theory to explain music and its behavior. Like economics for money. The metaphysics of humor seeks an explaining theory of jokes and funny situations. There is even metaphysics in physics itself. Physics tries to explain physical situations but. It is non-meta in the sense that the stuff to be explain is physical and a similar kind of explanation can be extended to a different subject matter.

One can even talk about the metaphysics of dragons, angels, or God (he can be considered omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnisapient, or just a modest guy with the power of creation and no further intentions to interfere with his creation). I suspect that even the metaphysics of philosophy can be considered.

Change can be defined by pointing at processes. By pointing at different parts of the process and comparing them. If the parts are the same, then no change has occured. Processes are defined to evolve in time. Time is connected with a cyclic process. It is the number times the cyclic process has repeated. Now this might sound circular. How can you define time on a base that needs time in the first place? If a process is defined as a situation evolving in time, how can we use a process in the definition of time?

The answer lies in irreversable and reversable processes. A reversable process is used in the definition to quantify the irreversable processes (or another reversible process). A pendulum is a cyclic reversible process (in the ideal case) and time is defined as the number of times (how appropriate!) the process has shown the same face. This definition of time is not applicable in defining the reversible process itself. You could
compare a reversable process with another reversible process, but what's the use? A sinusoidal, reversible process can be a function of time but that time is again based on another reversible periodic process.

There are few truly reversible processes. The reversable process time refers to is that of an ideal clock and a realization is difficult, if not impossible. Of course there are 60 billion watches with a strap to sell, and an atomic clock is kept in isolation to compare all other clocks to, but an ideal clock is impossible to construct and will always stay an idea. A real clock will always show failure of a constant period, no matter how closely approximated.

It's this ideal clock that serves as the background of theoretical processes, when theoretically described and which are measured by a theoretical observer. Like the distances this theoretical observer measures refer to an ideal unit of distance which can only be approximated in the real world, like a standarized meter kept at constant temperature or a defined as the distance that light travels in a standarized amount of time (which shows the connection between space and time), which only shows that the meter is not an exact realization of the ideal, since the clock that measures the time needed can never be ideal or reversible.

So for change we need different situations which are part of an irreversible process. The parts of a reversible process that repeat themselves are used to compare two situations that are separated in time. Reversible processes induces the notion of time. They exhibit the reversible cyclic behavior relative to which the evolution of irreversible processes (or other reversible processes) is measured.

Irreversible processes are the key to change. They induce the notion of reversible processes, which induce the notion of time to measure the rate with which parts of irreversible processes become different or indicate if processes are reversible. Now you might ask if parts becoming different doesn't beg the question. I think it's clear though. If you define becoming as distances between particles varying, there is no circularity.


If you reverse time, which is the same as reversing all momenta of all particles, the clock will just reverse it cyclic motion, and no difference with the forward clock will be seen, as the clock is based on a reversible cyclic motion. The numbers the clock is attached to though, will be decreasing instead of increasing (it always amazes me why the counting before a rocket's ignition is backwards, though time zero, as well as ground zero, are regarded special; as if it all starts with the ignition of the rocket). This is the solution to the question why time is not reversible. If you reverse time the numbers decrease, counting back to time zero. This implies though that there is a beginning at infinity, which is an impossibility. On top of that the boundary conditions would have to be finely tuned with infinite precision, but since infinity has no boundary, this can't be realized. Locally we can reverse time, but globally this is impossible.

If space, time, and charge are reversed, then according to the TPC theorem in physics, processes look the same, a strong indication that a mirror universe must be there.Around t=0 there obviously was no clock present. But we can look at that state as a clock going forward and backward around time zero.

To experience change we must have a memory of past parts of processes. You compare the perceived situation with a memorized one and change will appear naturally. Of course you can have a change of heart and think that no fundamental change has appeared, which can diverge you to different conceptions of change. Is there a change in general? A change that is valid for everyone? No, there isn't. One man's change is the other's static.

Change is difference. "Keep the change". Becoming different. What is becoming? Turning different. What is different? The other. Change is relational.The play between. The transcendence. The evolving to new states in spacetime. Evolution. Propagation. Interaction. Increasing distances. What is increasing? Is it change? If the increase is not static, yes. Change is the derivative. Differentiating. The opposite of integrating, eliminating all changes into a whole. The second derivative is zero if there is no change in direction. Differentials are changes of variables. Infinitesimals. The mathematical symbol is the delta. The difference, again. Mathematically the change is a function. Differential equations describe changes of state. With boundary conditions. Change is irreversible. That is, it needs irreversibility as a background (not the same as time). Time is just an irreversible aspect of collections of particles. Without change, no progress. Progress is change. Different theories of change all contain an element of differences and their interplay. Differences don't exist on their own. They aquire identity because of each other.

is it being who you really are, which may not be an improvement? — Tom Storm

The real you is an illusion. You are always you. The idea of a person behind the face, the real you, is caused by forces that make you wanna be a person you don't want to. Acting accordingly to these images of other people creates the split. Modern society especially creates an image of people many people don't want to be but have to be (or can't be but want to, which is even worse as it creates shitty feelings). The dichotomy is solved by not thinking about what others think. If you do so you can grow or change continually. Or settle in an image you like.

You can life the most non-mediocre life in each reality. You will have no regret. As long as you take that reality as a joke. Saves a lot of misery.

Squote="Benkei;627691"]I have similar problems with the so-called 2g policy, which in the Netherlands means you e?can only get access to all sorts of places if you have been vaccinated or recently recovered from Covid. That's oikeffectively indirect coercion on people to get vaccinated[/quote]

Luckily I don't care for access but you are absolutely right. I can't stand de Jong making his propaganda for the vaccine. Dansen na Jansen... The vaccine is quite unnatural stuff (based not on a weakened variant but on a spike of the original), and it appears now that a lot of vaxed people still get sick. Will vaccination truly reduce the number of viruses? Won't the immune system feel fooled by a single spike? Why shouldn't I be able to trust on my own defense system. Okay, the sick people occupy hospital beds. But if the vaccinated are so sure the vaccine protects, why pushing others to be vaccinated too? Vaccines ruin your own defense. At least, the unnatural ones. They might just stimulate it but if you trick it, who knows what happens? Maybe you get less defense for other diseases. On top, even if I get COVID19, I won't ask for a hospital bed.

My preferred definition of consciousness is subjective experience — GrahamJ

That's exactly what I think. Every materialistic approach is doomed, that is, for explaining it. The materialistic approach might say that if you poor with a long needle in your brainy world, some experiences might follow (flashing spaghetti colors maybe, or the unbased drive to move you arm when tickling the motor neurons, making you drop the needle). It can show if consciousness is involved not why (obviously, it has to be involved for making your way in the world; would be hard to cross the road without actually seeing it; you could say that that's the explanation, but that only begs the question(.

Isn't sound equivalent to colour here? Sound involves your eardrums and your brain. — Daemon

Yes, indeed! I had to write the soundwaves. They are there if you don't hear them. The experienced sound is indeed equivalent to color. So the tree was there, but not in sounds and leaves whispering. :smile:

The point here is that you've got to assert faith in something at the end of the day, and even if it's something as basic as realism, such is still faith. — Hanover

Of course. But that doesn't mean truth can be found. Within different frames of believes different truths can be found. There is not one and only reality driving believe. But once the believe is accepted, you can say that it actually drives. Depending on your POV, this truth can be known exactly, or in an approximated way only. A flower is different for different creatures. But the very act of assigning an objective existence to the flower is an "act" of creating a believe, even if you make the flower dependent on what's around it, where there is no flower "as such".

Death is not what equalizes all of us. That's because the very notion of death is not unique. We all die obviously. But it doesn't make us all equal as we all die differently. Not literally in the sense of one being strangled or vaporized in the energy bath of a thermonuclear explosion, but depending on the view of death. Death can wear many masks, wear different clothes, speak many languages, and have different thoughts and emotions. Death is ultimately human.

Indeed! Virus uses my cells to procreate. In a sense, my cells offer a female virus the male virus to inject their genetic load in. My cells the burst and spawn new male v viruses. So they use us to compensate for the missing female viruses.

I'm not sure which sex organs the machines are missing so they use use human ones.

The answer to the question: yes. Each universe that follows up a previous one, and being the cause of the next, will inevitably end up in total potential chaos which will obtain zero temperature at infinity. There will be no matter left for machineries at all. But as this state is the seed for a next universe, in which new machineries can evolve. The overall picture is one in which the energies never change but the distributions of these energies are constantly changing. From totally actual to totally potential, from totally virtual to totally real. Around the spatially 4d wormhole two 3d mirror universes explode into real existence when a previous pair has accelerated away to infinity. They arise from the virtual activity around the throat of the wormhole where entropic time goes to and fro, uo and down, within the Planck interval of time, [-tp, +tp].

Unless entropy is all sent to photons, while all matter has left the scene. Entropy will rise and rise, to infinity. But if there is no matter left to impose their potential energy on (and thus gets real), it doesn't work. A photon gas without matter is as useless as a matter gas without photons.

In glorious unity
They propagate
Oh divine vertex
Connect me
I need to connect
Let's connect
Oh divine connection
Let's propagate
Let's correlate

But if there's nothing to connect to, you get in trouble. Propagation of the potential only can't create vertex factors of the real is absent. Only with virtuallity connections can be made, in that case. The potentiality will not be able to pull the virtual into real existence, so badly needed for true connection. The photon gas has to low an energy and is too wild to realize the real. So all that's left is the means to connect, increasing its entropy untill infinity, like a gas in an ever expanding box).