Emotional responses are the problem? Um.. no. It takes a hardening of the heart to be able to chop somebody's head off. The vileness actually starts with a lack of natural emotion. — Mongrel

I think you might completely misunderstand the mindset of those who behead, immolate, rape, disembowel, and castrate in the name of their religion. These are people who genuinely believe they are doing good. They are filled with joy at finally being able to fulfill the will of their god. It is probably addictive.

There are many stories, related by escaped Yazidi sex-slaves, of ISIS members praying before and after their heinous act. And of course, the Quran and Hadith do in fact justify these behaviours.

What 'rules of the Universe' are you referring to? Scientific law? And 'being moral' requires deliberation, to the extent one 'obeys instinctual programming' then you're no different to animals, and there's no morality involved. Indeed the fact tha we can reflect on and amend our course of action, is one of the fundamental ways we differ from animals. — Wayfarer

Yes, I find it odd that even those who super-anthropomorphise animals to the extent that they regard them as a sort of nobler human (thinking of many pet owners here, and even some scientists) rarely, if ever, admonish them for immoral behaviour, or for eating meat.

And it's disingenuous to say that the Westboro Baptist Church, or Christians that bomb abortion clinics, or murder dozens of young Norwegians, have no connection to Christian tradition. — andrewk

Do you remember the name of the person who murdered 77 young Norwegians?

Of course you do.

Can you name any of these perpetrators?

Murderer of 86 and injured 434 by mowing them down with a cargo lorry in Nice.
Murderer of 49, injured 53 in Florida, for being gay.
Either of the murderers of 14 plus 22 injured in San Bernardino.
Any of the perpetrators of the Bataclan massacre, in which people were disembowelled and castrated before being murdered. 89 deaths.

Of course you can't, despite these atrocities being more recent than the one in Norway. I wonder why you think that is?

And just to correct you, Anders Breivik declared that he has never identified as a Christian. He calls his religion Odinism, but then he does have a personality disorder.

If you ever feel inclined to draw an equivalence between the Westboro Baptist church and the problem of Islamic terrorism again, please consult this Wikipedia page first.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_attacks

And spare a thought for the plight of the Yazidi sex-slaves.

As you no doubt know, no one--priest, pastor, minister, rabbi, boat captain, airline pilot, or Chief Justice--is required to marry anybody. When a denomination, such as the Lutheran Church decides that it will allow gay marriages to be performed by clergy, that doesn't mean that any Lutheran pastor is required to perform a gay marriage. — Bitter Crank

That is precisely the problem in Saudi Arabia.

Oh, one more time you don't address the point made. That is to say, your distortion of the paper you posted. Since now I'm not even sure if you've read it, here's another passage... — Πετροκότσυφας

So in addition to the 1,400 white, underage victims of Muslim gang-rape in Rotherham, there were some Muslim victims of sexual abuse. It is a tragedy that, in the end, Political Correctness fails everyone.

Shall we move on to Rochdale? Take your pick:

http://pmclauth.com/PMCLAUTH/sentenced/Grooming-Gang-Statistics/Gangs-Jailed?widget=BASIC&start=101&limit=100

Well, that can be ruled out as it conflicts with our knowledge of reality. Plus, your "coincidental" popping in and out of reality is non-explanatory, so can't qualify as a theory of reality.

Also, it can't be a metaphysical theory, because it is a theory of how reality behaves.

Re "independently of observers," yes, that's exactly what I mean--I specified that as plainly as I could. — Terrapin Station

If the popping in and out of existence is independent of observation, then why don't we see it?

Note how Tom has distorted every single thing he quoted from the paper; — Πετροκότσυφας

And I'm in favour of Quran burning apparently.

Now, you are either innumerate of callous not to appreciate the industrial scale gang-rape of white, mostly underage girls by predominately Asian men. Rotherham is not unique in this matter, and as you so rightly point out,

In Rotherham, the majority of known perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage including the five men convicted in 2010

It is worth noting at this point that the Asian population of Rotherham is only 3%, which means that only ~1% of the population is Asian and of raping age. 11 people have been sent to prison for these crimes, 2 of them non-Muslim women.

That is 155 victims per rapist! The only way that is possible is if political correctness gets in the way of justice.

Here is the scale of the problem wrought by Political Correctness:

http://pmclauth.com/PMCLAUTH/sentenced/Grooming-Gang-Statistics/Gangs-Jailed?widget=BASIC&start=101&limit=100

and if something were to pop out of existence independently of observers, it necessarily wouldn't be objective? Also, what would it be if it's not objective? — Terrapin Station

I guess some ideas are just too ridiculous to entertain, but yes, if you claim that objects objectively pop in and out of existence "independently of observers", then you are making an objective claim about reality.

But I'm not sure that is what you mean.

Well if you did not mean to defend it, then I fail to see why you brought it into the discussion. — unenlightened

I'll pass on your condolences to the 1,400 victims of Muslim gang rape and their families. Lives wrecked at the altar of Political Correctness.

It is nevertheless interesting that in UK, it is illegal to burn a Quran if you are non-Muslim, but *legal* to burn a Quran if you *are* Muslim.

Then of course there are the tragic cases of the fathers who were arrested by police for trying to rescue their daughters from rape-gangs in Rotherham, England. The police preferring to leave the girls to be raped.

These cases are detailed in the Independent Inquiry into child exploitation in Rotherham, England by Prof. Alexis Jay OBE. Prof. Jay found that there were at least 1,400 victims of Muslim rape gangs in Rotherham between 1997-2013.

The report is available here:

http://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/1407/independent_inquiry_cse_in_rotherham

Some findings of the report:

"Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so."

"Those who had involvement in CSE were acutely aware of these issues and recalled a general nervousness in the earlier years about discussing them, for fear of being thought racist."

"Agencies should acknowledge the suspected model of localised grooming of young white girls by men of Pakistani heritage, instead of being inhibited by the fear of affecting community relations. People must be able to raise concerns without fear of being labelled racist."


Though, I believe Jay's report was reported in the "Daily Mail", so you may wish to denigrate the 1,400 victims further by ignoring it.

And you are pretty close to theatrical bigotry yourself in defending this behaviour. — unenlightened

Where did I defend any such behaviour?

I'm not about to take your word for any of this, particularly as it is incoherent. — unenlightened

Perhaps you can explain why a British man, born and raised in UK, walked free from Court because the judge accepted his plea that he was unaware that raping a 13 year old girl was illegal?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2268395/Adil-Rashid-Paedophile-claimed-Muslim-upbringing-meant-didnt-know-illegal-sex-girl-13.html

Then there are these cases of arrests for burning a book:

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/12/31/arrested-for-burning-a-koran-19-year-old-bailed-and-moved-away-for-own-safety/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1378172/Andrew-Ryan-jailed-70-days-setting-Koran-What-burning-poppies.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1332877/Girl-arrested-Facebook-footage-Koran-burning-school.html

But of course Sharia law is already part of the British legal system via the Arbitration Act 1996.

I like what Zizek has to say about PC — Cavacava

But Zizek appears to have no clue. PC *is* a traditional authority. Cross it and you could loose everything. Hence German men allowed 1,200 German women to be sexually assaulted in Cologne in a single night.

Show me a legal case, or admit that your complaint is simply that folks call you names when you call them names. — unenlightened

You seem unaware of the Macpherson Report, subsequent to which it has been deemed by the Metropolitan Police, and perhaps all police forces in UK, that "any offence which is perceived to be Islamophobic by the victim or any other person, that is intended to impact upon those known or perceived to be Muslim" will be treated as hate-crime.

This of course leaves the door wide open. If you happen to express the view that the worship of a paedophile is alien to Western civilisation, you may well find yourself numbering among the hate-crime statistics.

I'm not about to trawl through the huge increase of Islamophobic crimes that have occurred recently, particularly since the explosion in them surrounding Brexit, but certain notable crimes serve as a good example. Several people in UK have been arrested and sentenced for burning the Quran. Nobody has been arrested for treating the Bible in the same way. In fact, it is only ever non-Muslims who are prosecuted for burning a Quran, because under British law, Muslims are allowed to do that, because Muslims are allowed to burn the Quran under Sharia.

What countries? — unenlightened

In UK you stand a good chance of being accused of a hate-crime if you draw a certain character, or point out that a certain religion teaches homophobia, paedophilia, or bigotry.

You need to make up your mind. Do you want "live and let live" or social control?

While "the sun will rise tomorrow because it has risen every day that I can remember" — VagabondSpectre

And prior to the millennium you could guarantee that all years would always begin with the number "19" with the same "logic".

But in order to "confirm" any given hypothesis, scientifically speaking, and thereby make it "an objective scientific fact", what we must do is be able to confirm it through experiment (not being able to prove it wrong essentially) with adequate accuracy, precision and repeatability. — VagabondSpectre

So we can"confirm" that the sun will rise tomorrow *because* it has done so every day that you can remember?

I don't think so!

Just like a religion then.

The point of "public institutions" is above all "live and let live". — Πετροκότσυφας

Why would you need a public institution for that?

Not being allowed to call folks homophobes, racists, misogynists and bigots would be political correctness gone mental health issue. — unenlightened

But you aren't allowed to call certain people these things, and if you do, in several countries in the West, you risk being accused of hate-crime.

Of course that is far better than what will happen to you if you point out those flaws in other countries.

Which is at the same intellectual level as almost all criticism of Trump you will encounter in the media.

But then again, when you factor in that 95% of TV advertisement spending leading up to the election is by Clinton, you've got to suspect 95% bias.

I am genuinely concerned that someone whose Presidential campaign is 20% funded by Saudi Arabia, whose personal charity received huge donations from Saudi, and who claims Islam has nothing to do with terrorism, becomes president.

My next door neighbour's house has a footprint of 3m x 6m. Family with 6 kids lived there previously.

They are called "terrace houses" there, which have been minute since Georgian times.

I charge for reading comprehension and basic physics lessons.

Argue all you want, but there is empirical evidence from more than one science with Quantum Cognition already having established itself. — wuliheron

Please provide links to the peer-reviewed literature substantiating your claim.

Chat rooms and one paper arguing against them are not proof against two experimental results showing empirical evidence of quantum mechanics in the brain. Either you have something that is a serious challenge to the evidence they have already presented or you're just blowing it out the rear. There is also evidence of quantum mechanics at work in more than one type of photosynthesis and bird navigation. Deny it all you want, but the growing body of evidence is that the theorists have been correct for over half a century that quantum mechanics are not confined to the subatomic and its not merely an issue of scale. — wuliheron

They don't have any evidence that brain processes involve quantum coherence.

But yes, quantum mechanics is a universal theory.

His philosophy is related to that of Niels Bohr who famously shouted, "Shut up and calculate!" — wuliheron

Except that Popper completely disagreed with Bohr, and Bohr never said that.

It does not even begin to "prove" that the brain is quantum mechanical, let alone that even incidental quantum processes exist.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571064513001619

2) thinking with the computability in mind, Popper says to be against induction, but also says that you (or others) can go on looking for negative examples for your theory and that the longer your theory lasts, the stronger it is: this is actually again induction! — MadMage

That certainly is not induction, which Popper showed to be a myth. Deducing singular statements from an existing theory for the purpose of testing has nothing to do with induction!

- find a law, in whatever way you prefer, being it induction, dreaming, intuition or other means
- describe the model
- test your model and make other people test it so that your theory become stronger — MadMage

Except, that for Popper, your theory doesn't become "stronger", whatever you might mean by that.

It's a travesty that "induction" is still taught to school kids!

I'm not sure what semi-decidable sets has to do with Popper (don't forget LSD was published in 1934). The asymmetry between verification and falsification that he exploits in his method is the asymmetry between the impossible and useless and the (tentatively) possible and productive.

Roger Penrose's theory of quantum microwave vibrations within the microtubules or axions of the brain was proven twice last year and the brain is not classical, but quantum mechanical — wuliheron

Do you have the references for that?

I think it means that abstractions are real, autonomous, causal, and as much a part of reality as anything else. Mostly, however, we gain knowledge of them by proving our conjectures, rather than testing them.

That's an interesting observation. Notice the use of scare quotes, because we can't be literally sorrounded by abstractions, as they're not in physical space. Instead they are, indeed, part of the means by which we explain, or make sense of, the impressions and perceptions that constitute reality. — Wayfarer

Some entities are purely abstract, like the set of prime numbers, but many abstractions are physically instantiated, and we are immersed in those. Every cell in our bodies contains abstract information in physical form. Indeed, humans *are* abstractions. Then of course there is our culture, knowledge and technology! If you happen to live in the right place, you might notice that cicadas become noisier every 13 or 17 years *because* these numbers are prime!

While "abstraction" can refer to several things, there are abstract entities that can only be explained in a way that attributes independent existence to them, such as the Natural numbers.

Consider:

1 is a natural number.

Each natural number has precisely one successor.

1 is not the successor of any natural number.

Two natural numbers with the same successor are the same.

Look, no mention of primes, how primes are distributed on very large scales, whether the distribution is "random" or not. Indeed, there is an entire field of mathematics - number theory - devoted to the study of these entities that are so easily defined. I would appear that the natural numbers are complex, autonomous, and therefore real!

I suppose a conundrum is that I (or whomever, doesn't matter) take abstract numbers just as serious as not taking Platonism serious.
Is measuring quantities, counting or physics examples of instantiating abstract numbers? (If yes, then it seems a kind of Platonism.) — jorndoe

We are "surrounded" by abstractions. It is impossible to explain reality without appeal to abstractions. E.g. we can't explain evolution without referring to abstract replicators. Certain entities, like the perfect circle, or the set of all primes are purely abstract, but that does not mean that we are condemned to Platonism.

Plato's claim is that, since we have only access to imperfect circles, we cannot obtain any knowledge of perfect circles. But, we don't have access to planets either; we only have access to images of planets.

I tried to account for abstract numbers by falling back on the concrete world. — jorndoe

Well, you cant account for numbers that way. What you can account for, is what we are able to discover about numbers, which is determined by the laws of physics.

If we speak of just 3, the abstract number, then it becomes more concrete when we speak of 3 Hollywood celebrities, 3 meters across the yard, ...
Kind of analogous to speaking of hypotheticals, if you will. — jorndoe

These aspects of reality permit us to instantiate the number 3, though there are more useful instantiations.

Nevertheless, if we take the fundamental equations of physics as somehow mirroring reality, then the continuum is fundamental, not the integers.

You clearly did not watch the video.

Maybe you should watch this

Are you not able to discuss a simple hypothetical, such as the grains of sand I described? I know it is probably an impossibility in physical reality, but that is not the point. — Punshhh

As I said, hypothetical alien monkeys aren't as well understood as numbers. But you refuse to discuss the odd and even numbers.

I'm interested in these ideas about an existing continuum, is this in the field of mathematics, or astrophysics? — Punshhh

The laws of physics take place in the continuum, what more do you want? You've got literally everything including astrophysics, quantum mechanics and general relativity.

So you are suggesting that number, i.e. Integers are not fundamental. Does this mean that there are places where 1+1 doesn't equal 2? — Punshhh

How does taking the continuum as fundamental entail that nonsense?

Who said it was finite? I am discussing a hypothetical situation, in which there is sufficient space. — Punshhh

Actually, you are not discussing an hypothetical situation, you are discussing a meaningless, impossible, unphysical, imaginary situation, in a different reality with different laws of physics.

Despite your earlier protestation:

Yes, but numbers are ideas, so susceptible to human frailty. An alien, or a monkey, can count the grains of sand and can only come to the same conclusion, because they are not ideas. — Punshhh

I think you will find the idea of "number" better defined and understood than aliens, counting monkeys, and piles of sand so large that they would create infinite black holes by now.

Nice idea, but that is a mathematical form, we are talking about life and existence, where is this continuum? And how does it produce these finite things I see before me? — Punshhh

The laws of physics take place in the continuum: they are differential equations based on the continuum.

And, there is the point of view that the integers are *not* fundamental, but the continuum is.

There is absolutely no way an infinite number of anything of any size can occupy a finite space.

Reality takes place in the continuum, which is Aleph1or 2^(Aleph0) if you have reason to reject the continuum hypothesis.

Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills. — schopenhauer1

Which is of course false.