French food was always overrated :P

I was in Venice recently and tourism has made it not a great place at all. I love Rome but honestly first time I'd be stuck in traffic I'd be attacking someone's windshield with a golf club. And every time I go to Napoli it's full of uncollected garbage and kind of stinks, though not as much as Berlin. Oh and the Mafia. And Berlusconi.

Always wanted to retire to Florence though. If the place was permanently on fire, it'd be worth it to walk past the Duomo campanile every day.

Where are you btw?

I was actually just thinking how much I'd like to see 180 debating something serious with someone serious. Two magic-stuff-is-real debates with people unable or unwilling to defend the proposition they've volunteered to defend until they've seen 180's attack of the same, descending into "well, define it and then I know what I'm defending" pointlessness. *shrug*

The pattern is willful, petulant misunderstanding. — Olivier5

That sounds like you're assigning a motive...

Sorry you've probably told me that and I've forgotten. I love Italy but it's madness!

Judge the quality of a civilisation by it's kitchen. — Banno

Have you been to Italy? ;)

you can't repair a human being — Wayfarer

No one was prepared for a denial of the advent of medicine. Curveball!

When the doubting has exhausted, one will decide either to keep doubting or become an atheist? Reasoning itself alone, will not cause someone to decide or act, but it will be the basis of the decision or action depending on their will. All it can do is, "realising". — Corvus

I think most things should remain in doubt. I feel 99.999999999999% confident that no intelligent deity created mankind or the universe (but 100% confident that the previous percentage I wrote was just made up). This is good enough for action. Action is predicated on certainty: confidence is sufficient.

possible options available is either jumping into the abyss of faith, or be atheist — Corvus

doesn't logically follow from

Once reason understands the limitation of its own capability — Corvus

In fact, the opposite follows: if you understand the limitations of reason, you have good reason to doubt.

I think the recent activity in this thread should be the model of Sundays final. Even I would watch it if everyone kept moving the goalposts.

It's a clause in a Playboy bunny's contract

I would much rather have the number of posts displayed under the member name than the number of likes. It's a more obvious and useful metric. — SophistiCat

I agree.

P.S. I also agree with you, so it's not just a pity like.

There you go.

That's just bad psychology. If someone expends a lot of effort defending a view it is more likely due to the fact they sincerely think it worth defending — Bartricks

Top reading skills there, fella.

Has an actual, real live physicist posted on this thread? There have been a lot of assumptions about physics, interesting opinions, but I wonder what people in the profession have to say about the number systems they employ. fishfry provided a link to a novel paper on constructivism in physics that shows there is some degree of interest in the subject in the physics community. Kenosha Kid is a quantum researcher. :chin: — jgill

Hello. Was, not is. Sold my soul for a bag of gold and sick guitar skills.

I haven't followed the thread, sorry, and responding to the OP 19 pages in seems weird. But I'll chuck a thought in and you can just pretend I wasn't here if I'm off-track.

I feel loathe to claim that physicists "believe" much. Physics is grounded on curiosity; if you're chock full of beliefs, why go and ruin it by learning things? I'm probably particularly minimalist when it comes to beliefs though. I don't "believe" in quarks and Higgs bosons and even quantum theory in the way I "believe" in electrons, protons, evolution and the special theory of relativity.

When we endorse a theory, what we're saying is "whatever is actually going on, it's got to be something like _this_". Sometimes the theory is compelling enough to base an actual belief upon, but really it's all a work in progress.

In terms of the boundary of the universe, I'm intrigued but uncertain. My intuition is that the universe is temporally bounded and from relativistic considerations, that being so, we should expect space to be bounded also. But that's unjustified and falls short of a belief.

I'd be a bit more confident about saying that the universe is either infinite or has periodic boundary conditions, i.e. some surface of a finite hyper-object. I don't think when you get to the end there's a wall, like in The Truman Show. :)

Infinity crops up in mathematical physics all the time but it's usually a mathematical artefact not a physical one. It could be a trick, like in integration, where you integrate over infinity knowing that the thing you're integrating attenuates to zero. Or it could be a consequence of representing something difficult as a power series or some other kind of expansion, like Feynman diagrams. Speaking of, quantum field theories a rife with infinities, requiring a renormalization procedure to get rid of them. Feynman invented renormalization and refered to it as a trick. As the fourth greatest physicist of all time, we should take him seriously, not renormalization.

The most overt infinity is probably the singularity: a point of finite energy but infinite energy density. It's perfectly feasible there's no such thing, that black holes are tiny but finite, but there'd be an intriguing question of what's holding it up since, by that point, even the strongest known pseudo-force in existence -- statistics (Pauli exclusion) has given up the ghost! But there's no shortage of theories in which black holes do all manner of crazy things (like birthing new universes).

Thing is, if there's infinity out there, we're not likely to encounter it. Infinity is either a limit we can't reach or a sign that something's broken. The visible universe is large but finite. The effects of black holes that we can observe are large but finite. If it is out there, either it or old age will kill you before you find it.

I had absolutely zero religious training and I'm not even slightly inclined to atheism. My sense of incredulity at the magnificent complexity of the universe only reduces that further. — Pantagruel

"usually", not "you, silly".

I think the Atheist has specific reasons for disbelieving in god. — Pantagruel

Not being brainwashed as a child, usually.

How many people have reported them to the mods. :scream:

It used to be post count. When it reset to zero I assumed it was an error but now I don't know.

Yes. Virtual particles are theoretical objects that are used to make logical, not yet factual, predictions. — Gnomon

They're used to make empirical predictions. How much more factual do you want?

Both the particles, and the prophesied future are imaginary until actualized in the real world — Gnomon

Well then why pick on virtual particles? That's all of science. If you can't predict something with it, it ain't science.

The expected result is a logical consequence of assuming that the hypothesis (or theory) being tested is correct. — Gnomon

Look up falsification instead. One assumes the theory is wrong. You cannot confirm a theory, only disprove it empirically.

According to Einstein, the potential energy of a rock (uranium for example) can be converted into actual energy by deconstructing (disintegrating) its atoms. :nerd: — Gnomon

Potential energy is still energy. You can weigh it, for instance. Again, the distinction is potential and mechanical, not potential and actual. The latter is your ideosyncratic terminology.

I kind of feel bad for him. He took a lot of crap in good spirit. Problem was, it was all deserved. One of those posters you just couldn't reason with at all.

And remember, I'm the drooling idiot here, so you have to explain it to me, not just ask me questions or insist that it's explained already when I clearly didn't get it. — Kenosha Kid

Now I think that throughout this thread your reasoning has been malfunctioning badly and I can fix it. To do that, first tell me what's the answer to this simple question: — Bartricks

There is nothing someone with a stupid argument expends more energy on than avoiding defending it. At least it shows you know it's a stupid argument.

My "it's not as simple as that" reply would be that everyone who answers that question is a product, one way or another, of the society they were born into. We shouldn't assume that people's ideas of a perfect society are unanchored from their own society.

That said, I'd say the following:

1. Communities: we are social animals and, while there's obviously always exceptions, I think that individualism is a prime example of how our culture has worked against us for the benefit of the few. Investment in local resources and shared utilities would help this. It might sound horrifying to our individualist selves, but I think people raised in that environment would be happier, less stressed, and more socially conscious.
2. Universal Basic Income: I think this is owed. You cannot walk into a field and hunt an animal to eat. You instead have to pay a guy to give it to you. Money equal to a living wage is therefore an essential, not a perk, and all because of nothing less than a historic great theft of lands from the people who lived on them to a minority of (let's be honest) slave owners. UBI seems like a good way of compensating people for that crime. It would appeal to our egalitarianism (once other counter-empathetic measures are eliminated), eliminate poverty, make welfare administration much less costly, reduce crime significantly, etc;
3. Modernised democracy: It strikes me as odd that we have social media rife with outrage monkeys spitting about one political story or another, but absolutely no systematic means of overseeing government on our phones. Someone needs to get on this. In most cases, voters are better people than politicians, and now we're technologically in a good place, I think more democracy is a good idea. (However there are some things, like climate change, which should not be in the hands of voters.)
4. Integrated recruitment: Get rid of redundancy payouts and jobseekers' allowances, instead make recruitment the joint responsibility of the individual, their employer, and the state. When you leave school/college/university, the state would have a duty to find you good employment and, if it cannot do so in the private sector, it should do so in the public sector. For people with disabilities, or carers or parents, or people close to retirement age, this should be entirely optional on the individual's part. Once in employment, if the individual wishes to leave for something other than e.g. parenthood or caregiving, they have to have another job to go to to revert back to UBI. If an employer wishes to let someone go, they have to pay their wages until they, along with the state, have found the employee equivalent employment elsewhere. Education should be considered as good as employment.
5. Scientific justice: The current system, wherein two people tell contradicting, misleading stories to a bunch of randomers who then, on the basis of those stories being backed up by contradictory, misleading witnesses and experts picked by the two storytellers, have to decide which story is true, is rubbish. We need to excise outdated practices and embrace scientific approaches.
6. Therapeutic custodial sentences: Prisons don't work. Most of the people in them have mental health problems. Throw it away and replace it with a system designed around therapy, with the inmate's access to society dictated by their ability to cope with it, not by their crime or a sentence.

That's enough to be getting along with.

Virtual Particles are imaginary objects created from logical reasoning to explain otherwise puzzling empirical observations. — Gnomon

Or predict future empirical observations, such as the decay chains of the Higgs boson involving W bosons (which are virtual particles).

You seem like you like to start with surety and dismiss the contrary. — Kenosha Kid

You say curiosity,it's really fear.

I smell virtue signalling and a fear of the confidence of others. — Protagoras

You can drink to that glib one! — Protagoras

Are you deaf? I'm rocking a hangover, dummy. Although a mojito maybe...

Paycheck is your motivation is it not? — Protagoras

It'd be an odd way to go if it were. Do you know how much the financial sector pays for physicists? Curiosity is the name of the game. You seem like you like to start with surety and dismiss the contrary. It might be difficult to explain it to you.

I'm all about sacrifice and teamwork. I'll lay off the vodka martinis as encouragement for you to ease off on the wild BS. My liver and your argumentation shall prosper together. Deal?

No, hungover. It necessarily alternates.

The naivety of the petty low grade scientist who thinks he works for some kind of "truth" and service to mankind.

Check your complacent egos boys! — Protagoras

Who are you even railing at?

On the bus home from work this evening, the guy in front and to the left of me, who was sat alone, stood up and pulled his trousers down. I mention him because, at the time, he was the most crazy-seeming person I'd encountered today.

After you've sacrificed your third virgin though it all gets a bit work-a-day... — Isaac

The Kanban board is just depressing...

Yet the Bronze Age collapse didn't mean that humans became extinct. The wording which many here use of an "existential" threat in my view shouldn't taken literally as an extinction event of the human race. — ssu

Tbf an infrastructural collapse would be somewhat more impactful. I agree, it wouldn't likely wipe out every human. We're omnivores: even if the bees die out, we'll find something to eat and we'll have a lot more time to fuck when there's no on-demand TV. I think the fear is more end-of-civilisation.

Although there will be ample beef in the early days. If we stockpile on pinto beans, rice, salsa verde and Monterey Jack cheese we'll have some good living for a few years before the cannibal apocalypse I reckon.

No not majority rules. More like: if “what of all the people that experienced X” is an argument that X is not a hallucination, then the fact that the majority who tried have not experienced X should be a stronger argument that X is a hallucination. — khaled

The great example being The Miracle of the Sun. Miracles tend to be their own method of execution.

Yeah, I don't know whether it's the lapsed academic in me, but most of my OPs are there to invite criticism, look for holes, find the weakest points and, if possible, help me fix them. And perhaps it's the scientist in me that is okay with rejecting my own hypotheses. That's quite an exciting thing to do. In fact, my first or second thread was over really quickly when the consistently helpful @Pfhorrest sunk the hypothesis in about three posts flat. I liked that. Saves wasting time believing in things erroneously.

I HATE THIS!!!

That is a fact. THIS IS TERRIBLE!!! is an opinion. The distinction is mere pedantry in my op- ah fuck it.

Mass is indeed a property of matter. But, in that stable form it is no longer the same as dynamic Energy. — Gnomon

I think the distinction you're after is potential energy, which it has by virtue of its position in spacetime, and its mechanical energy, such as momentum and spin.

Shirley you're joking! But, yes, the OP attests to the fact that you don't need to be a genius to post here ;)

Is non-physical energy the ability to do non-physical work? I have lots of that. White collar til I die.

What is the obsession over feeling like we NEED to distinguish human sex? (Other than knowledge of anatomy for medical purposes) — GTTRPNK

Ask your mother.

It was a simple IQ test, and you couldn't answer it. If your IQ was higher, you'd understand the OP. — Bartricks

Oh no, not the Bartricks IQ test, I need that! (I need that, right?)

Okay so let's say your a genius and I'm a dribbling idiot. I clearly didn't understand the OP and I couldn't answer your super-relevant question. So your job now as a clearly sterling pedagogue and all-round decent chap is to explain it to me in a way I can understand, right?

So I get that you think omniscience allows for false beliefs in addition to justified true beliefs but, like I said, even if God errs, be it through becoming less than God or by acting on a false belief, he still must know prior to his erring a) that he will err, b) what his error will be, c) why he would err in this way, right?

Adding false beliefs is going to add more true beliefs about those false beliefs: God can't be ignorant of the falseness of his beliefs.

And remember, I'm the drooling idiot here, so you have to explain it to me, not just ask me questions or insist that it's explained already when I clearly didn't get it.

Who funds scientific research and who decides what avenues get funded? — Protagoras

Probably communists or some sect of paedophile cannibals.

But what about inference? If a given subsystem only has the data that it has read the state of a prior system which itself had previously read a prior system, would it's Bayesian prior not be that it itself was in such a chain, having no cause to infer anything else? I guess I'm still not clear on why a system can't have inferences about itself. It can't confirm them, obviously, but I don't see anything intrinsically stopping it's own function and identity being the subject of one of it's algorithms, it would just have to infer the answer from outside data. — Isaac

If I understand you right, that's basically what explainable AI is supposed to do: use Bayesian inference to give a likely cause of your output. Which is fine, because at no point is the system actually giving a description of its own state. Funnily enough I was chatting to my new boss about doing exactly this.

I worked primarily with belief formation. You can imagine how well that goes down sometimes. — Isaac

Haha yeah! Reminded me of Brideshead Revisited: "Show me your marvelous artworks. Let me explain them to you!"

I have a subjective feeling my consciousness is really special, consistent and impenetrable to investigation. Scientists tell me it's actually just neurons firing. All hell breaks loose.

That's the matter I find interesting. — Isaac

Yeah, this. I'm fascinated by it. There's these no-go areas with no obvious reason to not go there, in fact really compelling reasons to go there. Life is short, why die not knowing what you even were, let alone about the universe you existed in?