If you enlarge a mouse then the cells would break down as you would be enlarging the cells too.
If you enlarge the mouse you would be enlarging the capillaries too, making it impossible for the healthy exchange of nutrients and gasses.

If you are suggesting that in this hypothetical machine you could proportionately increase the number of cells, you would also have to change the entire architecture of the microscopic level, and macroscopic level to accommodate this change.
But that is not on the table. If it were then you would simply be fudging the hypothetical.
Which goes back to a point I made earlier.
Which ever way to care to take it. How ever much you care to fudge the hypothetical to preserve your vision there is one conclusion that is inevitable.
A mouse the size of an elephant is a big dead mouse.

It would not be optimal, but it wouldn't be ridiculous — Agustino

Not ridiculous but you are. The cells of a mouse the size of an elephant would be too big. The number, size and distribution of capillaries too few; for the elephant the size of a mouse the complete opposite would occur. You simply have not thought this out.

"Should the intent and personal opinions of a philosopher be considered when interpreting his work?"
On the face of it this is the most obvious question.
How can you possibly consider a person's philosophy without. His philosophy IS his intent and personal opinion. How could it be otherwise?

A mouse the size of an elephant would be stranded with those tiny legs, unable to move as it overheats, incapable of cooling its bulk as it heart beats its body to death at ten times the rate of an elephant.

In fact, to prove the absurdity of the mouse exploding or of the elephant freezing, — Agustino

To you basic science is absurd, we already know that.
Whilst it might be possible for a mouse to reduce the number of its mitochondria, it is likely that this would have to be achieved over a period of weeks and months. There is a good reason why there are no life-forms the size of elephants that are huge fur-balls with hear rates of a minimum of 300 bpm. Elephants beat at 30bpm
You really need to pay more attention.

irrelevant

Mammoths do not have a moral code, yet humans' moral codes ofter are said to include considerations as to the health of the ecosystems and environments.
When humans colonise, areas as yet uninhabited by humans their impact of other creatures as a moral element.
Even if Mammoths do have a moral code does not change this consideration.

NOT "inherently" bad - obviously !!

Always fresh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNkWac-Nm0A

So, doesn't that mean that people are inherently bad? — TheMadFool

No it means that what humans do, YOU think is bad.
Good and Evil are just value judgements.

Is there any difference between the world existing and God imagining that the world exists? — T Clark

Is there any difference between the universe existing, and a universe in which a few humans think there is a god in the existing universe?

Not quite sure that is the latest chronology, but humans did migrate in the past into places where there were no humans, not genociding or displacing other humans, because there were none there. — tom

Human migration displaced millions of species habitats, rendered countless species extinct, and destroyed native and natural environments.

Moral???
Are you kidding?
We are ALL migrants.

That's the problem with all hypotheticals.
If they are possible, knowing the causes answers the hypothetical, offering no new information.
In matters of science and natural history you have to in some way alter the nature of reality to perform the trick in the first place.
In alternative history scenarios, you have to alter necessity or the conditions of history in the first place, negating any value to your query.

There can be no case for state assisted suicide..
Suicide is not a decision or act that any state can be trusted to assist.
The best we can hope for is that the state refuses to intervene should an individual wish to make that decision for his or herself

I can have the same discussion about logic, and hence reason, being antithetical to believe too if you want. I can also have a discussion about the realms of morality and natural science too if you want.

For example "I believe that we are all equal", does not mean that I know we are equal, or that we are equal. This is a moral value that I hold as an aspiration. A aspiration that we deserve to all be treated equally before the law.
The clumsy use of the term "belief" here above is not tantamount to knowledge in any sense.
Am I getting through?

:)
Yes I was always puzzled by the Incredible Shrinking Man. How the hell did he manage to break surface tension of water to have a drink? What was happening inside his body? Was everything shrinking? Surely to keep looking like a man his atoms would have to shrink too? This would make it impossible to sustain his health. But if his cells stayed the same then this would lead to his appearance and internal architecture having to change.
I would imagine it would be possible for a body to acclimatise to reduce the number of mitochondria, but what happens when the size of a capillary would have to be smaller than the cells of which it was comprised? How would memories be preserved as brain cells were inevitably lost?

Your use of these terms is has no utility. Since you want to use the "rational" definition of "belief" to self justify your silly religious Faith.
This makes you risible.
You are missing the point utterly.

So one can believe in the absence of evidence, or one can believe based on evidence right? — Agustino

No. I am suggesting that if you are indiscriminate in your use of the word, you end up saying NOTHING.
That is why I personally hold that knowledge and belief has to be sundered in order that it is possible to make any sense.
With Knowledge I do not employ Faith. I use previsional trust that my information is correct, until I discover contrary information.
With Belief, as the extreme can you simply employ empty faith and believe what suits your whim.
If you cannot see that there is a difference then you are not saying anything of any value.

The square cube law can be used to explain why shrinking or expanding animals would be disastrous just in terms of mechanics without about of the biological detail.
The 50s sci-fi film THEM proposes giant ants. These would simply collapse under their own weight due to the thinness of their own legs.

Is this thread going to descend into a discussion of Buriden's Ass?
As I have a solution.

Belief is a thing taken to be true regardless of evidence, information or reason.
This, although, can be confused with "knowledge" is not the same thing at all.
Why don't you stop and think for a second. I know you are not completely stupid.
Take the two definitions above as two ends of a spectrum.
You know damn well that some people accept and believe things without a reasonable warrant. But on the other end of the spectrum there is such a thing as rigorous method that leads to near certain knowledge.
If you use belief without any discrimination, in the way you do, and also pretend that faith is the same as trust, then you are never going to make yourself clear.
On the contrary all you are doing is offering muddled thinking.

No, it is literarily impossible to doubt when you have nothing to doubt. Doubting and disbelieving is a learned process that becomes possible only after you've already learned to believe and have come to believe a thousand and one things. — Agustino

This is simply nonsense.
1) You say some shit
2) I doubt that shit, based on knowledge. Faith based belief has nothing to do with it.

Like I told you before you are using poorly developed ideas, where the same words come in for different meanings. Faith is not the same as trust. And belief is not knowledge. If you are incapable of making distinctions you are just making a fool of yourself by switching from one meaning to another.

So you don't care what the other person says they believe — Agustino

Exactly. Belief is useless and unimportant. I'm only interested in knowledge. You make my point for me.

I think you are contradicting yourself here. Do you mean that we can recall at the moment we experience something?

4) If we define experience as interaction with the outside world, then we avoid the confusion of thinking
we are experiencing experience.
— charleton

So you consider memory as external? — bahman

RE- call. Implies memory. Remember last week?
No memory is internal, but recalls experiences we conceive of as external.
I did not think I could be more obvious in the way I wrote that.

Apart from being circular, it would be entirely absurd, since having faith in God isn't the same as that faith being based on God. — Agustino

Specious nonsense. I don't care how religion defines faith. I can tell what it is.

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” — Agustino

And here you encapsulated the double standard, which I mention above.

you must have had faith (in the religious sense) that in following the instructions, — Agustino

Rubbish. Someone showed me how. I did not have to have any faith, since I was able to start the car in any event. For me faith "trust" follows evidence and knowledge. For you Faith is bollocks Because you put your trust in a clearly untrustworthy idea.

You cannot start with doubt — Agustino

Yes you can, and yes you must. This is your failing, and that is why you argue so poorly.

1) we have experiences.
2) we can recall those experiences.
3) Recalling experience is not the same as experiencing a second time.
4) If we define experience as interaction with the outside world, then we avoid the confusion of thinking we are experiencing experience.

No we recall experience. We experience ourselves continually in a way BUT...I think it makes more sense to define experience as as an interaction with the outside world, not with just our memories as such.

Quite the contrary, it takes faith to try in the first place — Agustino

There are two meanings to faith which characters like you switch between when it suits you.
1) Trust based on experience and knowledge.
2) Faith with a capital F which is religious faith based on fear of death and "god".

When I place my trust in the doctor or my car starting, it does not mean I absolutely trust that the doctors advice is going to work or that the car will start. It's a matter of convenience so that I get on with my day until I get sick or the car runs out of petrol.
Faith with a capital F means thinking the car will start without putting petrol in it.

I imagine my education on this matter exceeds your own. You have not begun to make your case.

Evolution is as much an explanandum as it is an explanans. — StreetlightX

It's not a cause though is it?

Explain what this magical force "evolution" is and how it is causative! LOL
]

There are no better words than last words.

Are you aware of being able that can experience? — bahman

DO you want to parse that again??

Science can show you brain patterns with a colourful scanner, but has no access to emotional, political and social ideas which simply do not conform to scientific description.

Aristotle et al weren't per se defenders of ID, right? — Akanthinos

Per se, there was nothing else. God was assumed. They did not need "ID" per se.
Aristotle attributed to things a fourth cause or telos.
Naturalism was in its infancy. ID as a conceptper se existed because of an emerging theory of natural design through selection.

these last words

Poor Charleton, who has left both variation and evolvability out of his understanding of evolution. — StreetlightX

Don't be a [****]. If you have something to say, about me, then have the decency to read what I have written.

[**** = Mod edit]

while all with maladaptive traits will fail to flourish and/ or perish. — Janus

No. That's part of the point. Selection is not partial. Any member of a species can survive and maladaptive traits can flourish just so long as it does not too adversely impede reproductive success.

The error as shown by F&P above is ubiquitous throughout evolutionary studies.
The simple act of nominating any trait as adaptive or maladaptive insists that selection works towards adaptive traits. This assumption can be found in almost every work on evolution, even in Darwin.
Partly its a hang over from Victorian Naturalism which assumed design; language has not properly caught up.
When a scientist says trait X "is adapted to.." this intensionalist fallacy is made, and it happens all throughout the literature.

In the quote from Wiki above;

"This slowly effected process results in populations changing to adapt to their environments, and ultimately, these variations accumulate over time — Metaphysician Undercover

Populations do not adapt TO their environment, but FROM it. Variations have to precede selection. You cannot select, by reproductive success if those adaptations are not already present in the variation within the species.
An environmental change leads to the selection of more fitness FROM those existing variations.
To suggest populations adapt TO their environment is to suggest that novel variations emerge because of that change; that is absurd. This is so obviously false since the genome has no way to assess the changing environment and design adaptations to fit them. Such adaptations have to be present in the population BEFORE the environmental change.
The continual changes that precede from that selection process is what we like to call evolution.
There is no force of nature called evolution which is causing this process. Evolution is the effect of environmental change upon living things which show natural variation and mutations.

Seriously. I've not got the patience to teach you guys that you are thinking about Evolution wrongly.
It's a common enough error, and you can't be blamed for absorbing the shite that is all around you.
But when you get this, it will transform your world view and for the first time you shall REALLY understand how evolution comes about.
Consider this quote from "What Darwin Got Wrong"
argument that goes like this: there is at the heart of adaptationist
theories of evolution, a confusion between (1) the claim that evolution
is a process in which creatures with adaptive traits are selected and (2)
the claim that evolution is a process in which creatures are selected
for their adaptive traits. We will argue that: Darwinism is committed
to inferring (2) from (1); that this inference is invalid (in fact it's what
philosophers call an 'intensional fallacy'); and that there is no way to
repair the damage consonant with commitment to naturalism, which
we take to be common ground.
There is no active process for the selection of traits that the false assertion that evolution is causal would suggest. In terms of evolution, selection is passive. Death is the real mover in evolution, as it removes negative traits. But selection is blind. IT has no direction or goal. THAT is why evolution is an effect; the result of change and not a cause.

What
last words