Recent content by The Opiner

Another God said, Whoa! I have been posting questions as to the present-day justification of determinism (of which I am one, still) for over a year now on these forums. The topic keeps coming up over and over again, everywhere from the Math and Statistics forum to Physics, Biology and...

Cows rely on micro-organisms because, unlike "higher organisms", they can digest cellulose (~plant cell walls) and make it available for the cow's metabolic needs. Other herbivores utilize similar systems. I read that cows, like elephants, etc. are large partly because they need to carry around...

I can offer some often stated examples of sub-atomic behaviors said to be truly "uncaused" (no hidden variables at work): the propensity of a particular atom for radioactive decay as vs another, the propensity of one particular atom to "tunnel" through a barrier as vs another; "collapses of...

Would that it were so, but I have pressed this point many times to those accepting the majority view, and the claim is that at least some aspects of subatomic behavior are truly uncaused. I could live (more easily) with thinking along the lines you have just expressed, but I have found no...

I think we are getting off track from SmarterThanGod's main question (paraphrasing): If everything that happens to a rolled die is a function (solely) of universal physical laws, then to what extent is "probability" really in play? I think this is a respectable question and deserving of a...

Yes Mentat, this planet is taking a beating and we are losing so much every day...things we won't get back, habitats and entities that are the endpoints of over 3 billion year old lineages. This has been my lifelong sadness (and perhaps yours). I just don't see a likely good ending here...

Remember that evolutionary processes do not have foresight. Selection operates on the conditions at play here and now. The likelihood of future problems for any species are unseen and unacted upon by selection and adaptation.

Hummm. Well, I am certainly in no position to argue with a professional mathematician but, yeah, it seem likely to me that if you already have more species in group A than group B, then as time moves along, you would see more future species arising out of the A group lineage than the B -...

Duncan, Since nobody else seems interested in playing with this one, I will give it a shot. Yeah, I find this very difficult to believe too. As I understand it, digestion of plant materials takes longer than meat proteins largely due to its cellulose (hard to digest) component. This is...

I was a little surprised by the last sentence in this article: "This would show us immediately that genesis is easy everywhere". To me this seems like a stretch. As far as I understand it, life, especially complex life, is probably rare in the universe – possibly exceedingly so. Its...

Thanks Alexander for trying (once again) to explain this to me. Like I said in a previous post, I just don't follow the math and I don't find it convincing in itself (although I accept the criticism that this is because I am ignorant here). I can follow arguments in words, though. So is there...

Alexander, I can accept that "ultimately" everything is waves. But, don't these waves follow some system of physical laws. Heck, doesn't everything?! I don't care much if we have to describe them in terms of probability functions or whatever. If they follow physical laws then cannot waves...

My thoughts run very close to those of LogicalAtheist. I have posted several messages on the old version of Physics Forum questioning the supposed violation of cause and effect (~determinism) in most of the currently accepted theories about subatomic behavior (~QM). I learned through these...

I take exception to claims that "contemporary, modern science" has relegated necessary cause and effect to the dustbin of history. Surely the vast majority of scientists and educated, non-superstitious people would grant, after some thought, that macroscopic objects, like rolled dice or falling...