jkellmd

I love the enthusiasm, Rac!

This has made for some interesting reading. Thanks!

Do the community members feel that any great school of thought has been established since the existentialists? Where have we travelled intellectually in the last fifty years? In general, does any particular school of philosophy speak out to you? If so, what does it offer you? Does any single personality command your attention? Please exclude discussions of religion.

Here's some to try out. The Man Who Measured London, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke - not too bad. The Book Nobody Read (about Copernicus, and the search for all extant copies of his masterwork) - Very good. Alan Furst's books, WWII espionage. Great fiction. Hagakure - The Book of the Samurai. Extremely good. In between things, I've been listening to the Feynman Physics lectures on audiotape. Wow.

I've been trying to find a decent online reference to the theory of bulk flow, and the macroscopic behavior of fluids, at an introductory level. No luck yet, can someone help me out?

Headache abated. Sorry.

It is evolutionary theory that allows the masses to finally see beyond humanity, and that we are not the inheritors of the cosmos, destined overlords of the "lesser life forms." Removing man from his pedestal was one of the largest effects of evolutioary theory, an effect which shook 19th century intellectual society to its roots. Darwin's ideas forced a huge reshaping of philosophy and science - only religion has held out. Any scientist would probably discard evloutionary theory, in the unlikely event that any reasonable evidence is found to do so - a fact not shared by any religion. People do not trust in evolution with their hearts, or worship the originators of the idea (at least any more so than they worship Newton or Einstein) - they simply accept the idea based on its elegance and the proponderance of the facts. If you with to convince people focused of the mass of evidence, many of whom see perfect beauty in the idea to boot, you'll need accumulate more evidence to support you.

I read some time back that some of the organisms living in undersea vent environments, considered to be some of the earliest of life forms, made use of sulfur based DNA - suggesting that even the basic structure of DNA has "evolved." Anyone have more recent information, or knowledge of new developments?

The idea is that fat drips down from cooking meat, where it comes into contact with burning coal at moderately high temperature. This inefficiently oxidizes the fats into chemically complex molecules, which happen to be carcingens, which splatter back onto the meat (giving it that great smokey flavor). This accounts for much of the basic problem, but someone with a more recent exposure to organic chemistry should be able to elucidate the details further. Frying or broiling does this to a lesser degree, boiling not at all.

Aristotle's advice to Alexander: Beware the man who carries one book.

Touche, my friend.

I guess I just don't see the justification for this. It is not logically possible to disprove the existence of anything, maybe we haven't found the evidence yet. Nor can one prove the existence of an abstraction. You have found the "crack" in applied logic. Love, greed, value, goodness, truth, god, good taste, reason, joy, despair, morality, etc., only exist within our minds, finding occaisional resonance within others. No physical or purely logical proofs can ever exist for the lives of ideas. We might try to live without considering the abstract; but, isn't our ability to do so what makes us human? Isn't our "personality" mainly born from our view of these abstract ideas (for better or worse)?

Indeed. It wan't meant to. The problem lies in people trying to do just that, and alienating everyone else with fanciful religious explanations of how we came to be here.

Is the third beast Elvis?

What can you do? The world is full of idiots who plan their life around the TV. Don't waste your time with them. A handful of bright friends to share your ideas with are worth all of the rest of humanity, as sad as it sounds. Anyone with a modicum of brains and ambition can rule most people like mice. The paradox is, the smarter you are, the more you want to be left alone, and the less resposibility you seek. Einstein said that nobody who actually thinks is ever really happy. Ignorance is bliss, so to speak. Most people don't even know what real happiness is, or have any semblance of a plan to find it. Rather they're content with working toward occaisional pleasures, like saving up for six months to spend a week in Cancun (where they'll watch TV anyway). Don't get fooled by what you're supposed to want. Move to Cancun and learn some spanish. "Follow your bliss." -Joseph Campbell

Yeah, you betcha. All of the other rules don't matter (almost). St. John (The Beloved) was one of the few apostles to escape martyrdom, and lived to old age. He was carried around on a litter, and was constantly asked "What did the teacher say?" by people who hadn't met JC in the flesh, who were looking for one good rule. His reply, oft repeated, was - "love one another." I've heard it said that JC came to tell us that the law (of Moses) is not enough. It's not enough to honor the sabbath, not steal, not covet, avoid pork, and keep your meat and cheese plates separate, if you still ignore god and hate your fellow man. He was killed for breaking a biblical law (healing on the sabbath), and is quoted as saying that the first two commandmants are all you really need. If you love your fellow man, will you kill/steal from/cuckold/lie to him?

I hope so...planets move rather quickly.

Sorry for being so verbose; I'm having too much fun. I'll do better limiting my threads in the future. By the way, my friend reminds me that the idea of reality being a perceptual construct goes back even further, at least to Zarathustra (1500 bce or something like that).

Correct. Catholics, as a rule do not "interpret" scripture, and consider the bible to be allegory, not literal history or science. The Vatican was not involved in the Scopes trial, but rather nitpicking, literalist, fundemantalist christians - of the type who demand tithes, clog TV programming, and knock on your door Saturday morning (like our president). A major early proponent of the Big Bang theory was a Vatican doctor of theology. The Jesuits run the best christian education forums in the world, and consider a college degree a requirement to join. Try finding that at Orel Roberts or Bob Jones University. Not to say that the Catholic church is not flawed.

The problem for many is that too many religious people see God as an entity by which we can explain all that we don't know, a way of "filling in the gaps" in our understanding of the unverse. After all, at one time the bible was once used to explain everything; the sun revolved around the earth, and God moved things with his fingers. Some people see God diminished somehow by the ascendancy of the evolutionary paradigm over the ideas of creationism, and so forth. As more of the workings of the universe are explained, the room a God who only "fills in the gaps" becomes less and less, scaring the bejesus (pun intended) out of those who mistake the bible for a history book or scientific abstract. This puts science and God at odds. Why does god have to exist outside of or in-between scientific ideas? The bible doesn't mention microbes, dinosaurs and subatomic particles because the people who wrote it didn't know about them. Does that mean that God doesn't?

My head is going to explode. God did not write the bible, and any rational human (even any respected theologian) can confirm this for you. If you debate this, I encourage you to post a thread on the theology portion of hypography, asking who wrote the bible, if you trust their opinion. The Vatican itself will confirm it, and you can find it in the footnotes of any decent bible. People did write it, with or without divine inspiration - making it flawed, at least as a literal history. Don't hold your God responsible for Moses' mistakes; that would be like saying that it was God who was lost for 40 years in the desert. Does God, if he exists, want you to ignore your senses and powers of observation, rather having you you believe that Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale (a scientific impossibility stipulated in the US Courts)? Wouldn't God rather you understand the meaning behind the bible's allegory, and use it wisely, than blindly take every word in some book for absolute truth? Don't mistake CONNOTATION for DENOTATION.

Intriguing, to say the least. The brevity of your statement belies its propensity to confuse. Denial of "value" obfuscates the very discussion of values. Does the universe care...probably not. Does life itself has value, or indeed, what does? This question is unanswerable; at least no single answer is true for everyone. Unfortunately, we must find our own answer, which leads to errors in proportion to our individual ignorance. It is easy to whittle away our lives in debate over these questions, which, in the end, have no value either. Should we wallow in the knowledge that only the very rare among us ever provides a satisfactory answer to the meaning of existence - and at best, an answer only for themselves or for a small segment of humanity? The debate over the nature of the universe - whether it exists in any tangible form at all, or whether it is purely a product of our mind, has been in circulation since at least the time of Pythagoras, Buddha, Isaiah, and Lao-tse - when such ideas were first written down (400-600 bce). This marks the birth of both philosophy and religion. Basically, every subsequent philosopher and theologian, from Socrates to Camus, dealt with it or assumed that someone else's idea was correct - with the exceptions proving the rule. Humans have this crazy thing called consciousness, allowing them to be self-aware (at least partially). Is it a useless evolutionary adaptation, like male nipples? The problem is, it was our consciousness that allowed us to ask these questions in the first place. It was our consciousness that found value in writing these ideas down, and which continues to find value in revisiting the nature of our preconceptions. What can we do when confronted with an unanswerable question? Answer it once, for ourselves, and move on. Who cares what the neighbors think? We certainly need to listen to the discussion long enough to content ourselves with our ability to answer it competently - this may be our biggest responsibility. To not anwer the question of the existence of meaning, or to say that nobody can, is to paralyze the mind. If our consciousness is the only tool we really have to dissect the universe, to separate the real from the unreal, the useless from the useful, then we had better sharpen that tool and strengthen the arm that uses it. Our mission, then, is to recognize those internal biases, to reduce them as much as possible, and not to be paralyzed with the knowledge that our answers may have no meaning beyond our own mind.

In their efforts to debunk the Shroud of Turin, scientists used one of the capes of Loius XIII (or XV, I forget), which was made from a material known to be of the same age. Unfortunately, we don't have any materials much older than this, at least any that we're willing to destroy in order to provide corroberative dates to every rock and bone that we find. Scientists have to extrapolate beyond those dates. Radiocarbon dating, by itself, is not considered to be accurate beyond 40k years or so, so other systems are used(ice cores, changes in the earth's magnetic field, etc).

I welcome the challenge of proposing an argument. If we have not found compelling evidence of life on other planets, then until we do, we have to consider this planet to be the cradle of all life (as mathematically improbable as that is). With or without humanity, for life as we know it to continue in any form whatsoever, it must continue here or spread from here. No thinking being can evolve again unless we preserve the protoplasm to do so, unless life is found to have flourished somewhere else. Although it is true that no matter what havoc we cause, life in some form will surely continue on earth - that is no guarantee that thinking beings will evolve again. If we can consider the universe to have a finite life, how many failures at reaching higher consciousness can we tolerate? Should we hedge our bets by preserving the earth, or not?