I don't recall ever mentioning anything about the shape of the Earth. I'm concerned with deep philosophical notions of what might constitute the true essence of reality. You seem to be looking at the superficial stuff, and in a very petty way I might even add.

For someone who claims to know a lot about chemistry and biology you sure seem to have an extremely simplistic view of life.

Can you explain why electrons are 720-degree objects?

Or is that part of the 0.001% of knowledge you don't yet possess?

I understand your point. I'm not sure you understand mine, which is that I think attempting to count is unreasonable in itself. I don't see puppies on my board,(though there is one in the living room). Nothing appears on my puzzle but vague shapes without images.

Oddly, whether it it be delusional or not, It's only from a spiritual perspective that all questions seem answered.

Sorry for straying Mod and OP.

I take it that some have concluded that evidence has no independent existence without a relationship to something else. I would point out that, in my mind, nothing has an independent existence without relationship to something else. Existence itself would have no meaning for us if we had no concept of nothingness.

However, I don't believe that a *conscious* relationship need be made. I believe that our brains are constantly using the self-evident nature of what we perceive to identify things as what the are in themselves, at a level somewhere below conscious thought.

I'm not saying I know everything, just that you're describing what humanity knows in a misleading fashion.

720 degrees is 360*2 meaning that they cycle through their quantum state .5 times per revolution.
But that's the boring how it works explanation. The why is because you've got two electrons per orbital on an atom and they need to be in different quantum states to be in the same orbital. It's like how you wouldn't be able to park two cars in the same parking space but if you "phased" one a bit they could easily overlap. I'm pulling that comparison from popular media though as quantum effects generally don't have normal scale equivalents.

I'm glad to see that you haven't run out of tricks though. If you pull a few more like that one out of your hat you'll actually stump me pretty soon. I don't really care though because I'm not God or anything like that so I shouldn't know everything, it's just that you don't seem to recognize that science has marched on while you've been retired so I guess you never update your list of current mysteries.

Oh, and do you ever plan on sharing what those lectures you attended were about? Sitting in on those things doesn't count for much if you don't understand what they were saying.

I used that Earth example to show that it's not so much about counting. How do you count flat? How do you count spherical?

For practical purposes the best way is to go measuring how far away from perfectly flat or spherical something is but that gives you a percent rather than some number of things.

The way of measuring this I'm talking about is completely different from counting stars or hairs on someone's head. It's like pointing a digital camera and taking a picture.

The picture shows you basically everything that's there but maybe it doesn't have as many pixels as you'd like- you can go get some other camera that will give you twice as many pixels and now maybe you can see, say, some of the wrinkles on somebody's face but in the first picture you could still tell it was a face. You don't suddenly realize that instead of some people at a picnic you were really looking at a picture of a gingerbread house just by doubling the pixels.

Maybe if your picture started out really blurry you might only be able to tell something was some kind of house and then with ten times as many pixels you'd be able to tell if it was gingerbread or an actual house or maybe a shack of some sort. With ten times more pixels than that you might be able to see some shapes in the windows and with 1000 times as many pixels you might be able to see the wrinkles on someone's head in the window-

but do the wrinkles on someone's face really matter as much as whether it's a regular house or a gingerbread one? Surely you can understand how recognizing what kind of house it is tells you more about the picture than some specs of dandruff on the shoulder of someone in the house. Maybe the dandruff is even an important detail somehow but to see dandruff on the shoulder of someone inside of a gingerbread house has an entirely different meaning than seeing it in a normal house while just seeing dandruff or not is basically such a small detail there are only a few reasons you could even have to care about it. I wouldn't want to count them but they're nothing compared to the number of reasons the type of house could be relevant.

Suddenly it is all wrong.



Great couple of posts Shoku!

I'm a bit annoyed that I had to write them really. I've already presented the ideas on several occasions but it looks like I've got to treat abra like a child and walk him through everything in baby steps.

I really didn't want to because he's said he has all this great life experience and wisdom but he just fights anything I say for no apparent reason instead of carrying a train of thought at least one step forward.

So here I am walking him through it in baby steps that nobody thinks should have been necessary.

Ah, but from the perspective that some hold - that being that science does not prove anything for sure - one must show what has been proven(to the best that it can be). The doubting Thomases of this world would like to believe that the fact that science learns new things which contradict old ones means that science has had it all wrong from the beginning.

Categorical judgment errors also run rampant through much of the thought presented in these threads.

Other people cling to fallacy and call it logical and/or reasonable. Some claim plausible without acknowledging the fact that there are plausible lies. In other words, plausibility lends no support whatsoever to being necessarily true.

Good posts from you, none-the-less!

Creative saidWell you have to admit that if one is to judge by track record, there is some merit to that argument.

Just sayin.

Abra saidExcellent point.

Only if one attempts to equate what has been changed through knowledge to the term "all". From my vantage point, it certainly has not been "all" wrong.

Well of couse. But being an absolute, I don't think "all wrong from the beginning" was really a valid assesment of anyone's viewpoint. I took it as being meant rhetorically and used it in the same rhetorical sense.

Just clarifying Sky...

The key word in my last response is knowledge. Knowledge changes previously held belief. There are still problems with knowledge, of course. However, it is the closest we can come to drawing dependable conclusions, and it requires the scientific methodology to be put to use in our pursuits of those.

I would rather have unanswered questions, then to hold false beliefs based upon false answers just because an answer is plausible.

Yeah, there are some problems with the concept of "knowledge". But if we use dependable to mean "workable", as in being useful in applying to the problems and issues of life, then I'm in total agreement.

I would not call those two necessarily compatible. Dependable implies able to rely upon the accuracy of it. Workable has no contigency on accuracy, if an entire system is founded upon a false belief, then it cannot be considered dependable but very well may be workable regardless of it's accuracy. Scientific knowledge itself ensures the most accurate measure possible, and therefore the most dependable.

I view logic done right the same way. A workable argument - if that is held as a valid one - does not garauntee truth in it's conclusions, only that they necessarily follow from the premises. However, if one has premises that are necessarily true, and a valid argumentative form, then the conclusions are also necessarily true.

Man I'm getting tired of going back over this.

The Earth is flat. 90% accurate because it is pretty flat.
The Earth is spherical. 90% MORE accurate because, as we know, that little deviation from flat eventually wraps around.
The Earth is a squashed sphere. 90% more accurate because the rotation makes the middle bulge out.

It's not wrong to say the Earth is flat. It's actually very correct on a small, human scale. It takes a lot of seeing pictures taken from the air to even give people s vague sense of how big the Earth is- we've probably all seen the numbers at some point but they don't convey anything except maybe "that's too big for me to really understand."

So on a really huge scale we can see that the very tiny deviation from flat makes the Earth a sphere. This is totally different from the Earth being a rhombus or a torus and we are never going to wake up one day and throw out sphere so we can start saying the Earth is one of those shapes. We haven't even thrown out flat, we just stop using it after we get to a large enough scale.


But I want to say something new here too.
I've actually been being generous when I just say 90% each step. The curvature of a sphere the size of Earth is 0.000126 per mile. It doesn't drop away at a tenth of a mile, a one hundredth, or even a thousandth of a mile but one and a quarter ten thousandths of a mile. Yet even so people figured it out long before we were able to travel all the way around it (measuring the time between when the sun shone on the bottom of two distant wells is the first example I know about.) Way past 99% here.

You know that bulge I mention each time I type this? The Earth is 7927 miles wide in that direction and 7900 through the poles. That's almost one third of one percent difference. Again we were more than 99% correct calling it a sphere.

Now what's really important is that at this point you recognize that we're talking about changing what we thought by 1%. We did that back at the change from flat the round. Now we're changing 1% of that 1%. Like I said, the scales these things matter at are way out of what humans can normally comprehend. We have to use these numbers instead.

If you don't like how I say that calling the Earth flat is right and prefer to keep calling it wrong then we at least know that the squashed sphere is less wrong than just a sphere which is less wrong than flat. Very very slightly less wrong.

Just saying... over and over -_-;

Edit: It doesn't take a big jump in thought to understand how this easy to see example applies to a lot of other "changes" we've made to what we think about the universe right?

All you do is preach the status quo.

That's easy, anyone can do that.

Some people prefer to think outside of the box.

You've just put complete faith in the standardized materialistic picture. You haven't told me anything I don't already know. I've been there and done that fella.

I do give you an A+ for paying attention in class though. You do seem to have the standardized picture down pretty well.

Just realize that that picture is full of holes and doesn't truly deal with the deepest philosophical questions at all. In fact, one of the premises of that whole line of thinking is the idea that if a question is unanswerable, then it's senseless to ask it.

That's the strict materialistic picture. I'm fully aware of that limited line of thought. Just not interested in that anymore.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Yea, its like kids who want to eat the frosting but to heck with the cake, or how to bake a cake. Just give them the frosting.

Something like that...

Status quo for "spiritualists" is just preaching how full of holes mainstream science is, isn't it?

Let's actually think outside the box for a minute and discuss what it means for there to be a hole though. I don't want to put word in your mouth so you start.