Recent content by Pilot7

Okay, I'll byte. However, I find both its miraculous event-ness and my ignorance of its true nature remain... unchanged. Somewhere under the phenomenology of watching a clock (during, for example, a physical experiment) we have an experience like "clock hand pointing to 2" along with the...

:smile: You can ALSO sing to him... Sooner or later, he will drink! Probably when he forgets himself. Or just gets really thirsty. But in truth, I suspect the trick of it all lies in timing...

Planet physics and planet poetry Surely we have license to live on either, neither or both tho anyways and always turning about the same sun held in check by some mysterious, ineffable oath No doubt, every momentous angle only an allegory and every sun rise purely theoretical yet still do our...

With a name like sophiecentaur, how can you be too down on philosophers? ;-) Unless of course you are one, in which case I quite sympathize <grin>. If not, please forgive the slight :-) The maths analogy is a very interesting one in this context. I have just been over reviewing various blogs...

Yea, I dare say this is definitely the orthodox view. However, this paper is quite weak on several points and arguments, and it fails to reference a number of points even raised in its own bibliography. I will try to offer a critique in more detail when time (!) allows. In a nut shell though...

I am quite convinced by your reasoning here, maybe that explains why no one came and did this to us... A note to Cosmo Novice--Even if we accepted physical theory in a close to complete form (I do not, I think GTR and QT are going to get really smashed up before we are through), biology is...

Hi all-- I wonder if the context of this discussion has been a bit ambiguous. Reading through the posts, it seems folks are sometimes talking passed each other. For example Ryan_m_b is saying very sound things about ecology, whereas PAllen takes a much broader perspective. The context is left...

Well it looks like my response got eaten by the entropy deamons in the void... Such admittedly extreme terms are not intended as straw men, rather the opposite. I am quite open to looking at another term, a more relaxed sort of theoretical proposition of some sort. I ask myself then: How...

Yes, could be... BUT, roughly in the words of Lotze, either we need to explain the nature and origin of an illusion or accept that it is more than illusion. Yes, the raw experience of process and change might well be due to our curious perspectives as human beings, but this remarkable illusion...

Yea, this is the question. But while entropy has a funny relationship with information (I guess the latter has been curiously defined as the inverse of the former in certain engineering circles--a definition with a very ironic origin actually), information is not consciousness, or to be more...

Dimension Just a note on dimension: Dimension, at its deeper roots, is a topological construct, meaning it is an aspect of a set (usually infinite). When we say a "space" has n dimensions, we are really saying something about the space's underlying topology. For those unfamiliar with...

I guess it is true in this age especially that there is such arrogance in many circles to presume all of nature will bow before microscope and telescope, but what still surprises me is that nature does in fact, sometimes at least, let herself be consistently and fairly reliably measured and...

Yea, maybe. My primary thesis in my dissertation work was that, whatever time is, and whatever 'perspective' IS (in the sense of consciousness or awareness or intentionality or a bunch of other similar philosophical notions), and whatever causality is, they are the SAME at root. In other words...

Hi Selraybob I think maybe I did a poor job of making my point. It is just that with a lot of things, we don't conflate the counting of X from the X itself (Aristotle's point actually). With time, there is a view sometimes forwarded that there is nothing as such there beyond the counting...

Suppose we were to analyze the metabolic system of New York's finest and discovered it was all down to counting donuts. Would you be willing to say that it is just counting in that case? Why not? What else is there to donuts besides their number? If there really is nothing besides the count...