RestoringGuy

Good points. I agree there is a sense a moving ruler has "actually shrunk", there is also a sense a stationary ruler has shrunk because it could be witnessed from the moving frame. Like the spaceship time dilation scenario, neither ruler has really officially shrunk (in standard sense of making "a < b" comparison) until we decide which frame is "the one" in which the shrinkage comparison ought to take place.Yes, the speed limit thing has baffled me at times, and I have pointed a laser pointer on a distant wall and thought man if I swing the pointer really fast, that dot ought to move faster than c. Anyway, without quantum mechanics, yes it might seem everything in our information cone (our timelike event horizon, or whatever) constitutes all of our reality. On the other hand, with quantum entanglement we are almost forced to deal with information flowing at faster than c. But it's information between remote objects we must inspect after the fact. That is, as I understand QM, the superluminal information cannot be environmentally exposed or utilized except by its wavefunction carriers, and those wavefunctions we are forbidden to inspect in way that gives transmittable data at a rate faster than c.The entangled particles themselves seem to have no trouble breaking this limit, as if their indeterminacy and uncertain momentum grants small particles a different frame. Perhaps its a little bit like why light "slows down" through water and glass. It doesn't slow in a technical sense, but we observe that light slows because the light can not travel in a microscopically straight line (it is scattered and re-emitted off all the transparent matter, giving us an illusion of slower than c). My theory is it's possible the reverse is true, that light travels much faster than c, but empty space (without any entanglement at work) acts as an obstacle, taking light on a journey that is not perfectly straight. Entanglement is a shortcut, but it is a fragile shortcut that can't be leveraged by heavy matter or near a strong gravitational field.

I am meaning "observational" differently than you are. I do not mean an illusion or trick like doppler. Your explanation makes perfect sense except this idea about dilation being called real. Until the traveller turns around, both parties witness the other as slowed down. What I mean by "not real" is until the traveller turns around, there is no absolute reality to the claim of "who is slowed down" and "who is sped up" by the dilation. To me, real dilation can be measured without question as to which clock was time-dilated. Consider if there are two ships, a "faster ship" is not real but only "observational" (by my definition) because there is always a frame where that particular ship is the slower one. They still have different objective vectors in 4d, but the word "faster" is an observational result decided by the observer's frame. You will agree I hope that calling one clock "faster" is not real in an absolute sense before the turnaround of spaceship that uniformly leaves Earth (ignoring the GR effect on the Earthbound clock). It seems the objective idea that "time passes at different rates" is totally bogus before the traveller turns around, because in order to be different rates, one rate must be faster and one must be slower. And how do you evaluate this before the turnaround? In that sense, time dilation is not real, but only observational -- not in the dopper-sense (where there is absolute meaning to what is faster), but in a new sense that both parties can have apparatus inside their frame and with their own apparatus they can rightly disagree who is slower. There is no real answer who is in the time-dilated frame. With your graph you cannot reconcile the ambiguity of who is slowed down until somebody changes their velocity, and you allow people like the twins to meet up in some fashion and compare their clocks. If we use the word real to apply to time dilation before the turnaround, the graph can be transformed by Lorentz equations and the guy on the ship can say slowed-down time dilation on Earth is also real. Whatever. We are in material and equational agreement, just vocabulary disagreement.

I know you're essentially right, but that oversimplification can confuse people. Please consider maybe this can clarify some of the misconceptions some other people have (I used to have this misconception). As you move away from Earth, we both see the other go slow on the way out. The velocity is relative and both are moving away from each other (who really "is moving"?). Then on the return trip we both see each other go fast (light waves pile up doppler-style). The situation is symmetric during all of the uniform motion. I always wondered why, if the situation is symmetric, why does only one side "lose time"?!? Relativity should be bogus because the traveller sees the earth move away and back in the same fashion. The answer I have learned is that the space traveller is the only one who changes inertial frames (and it's much like changing gravitational frames). So you not only have to travel at 0.866c to witness a mismatch, but only one side, the traveller, must shift from one uniform motion to another (or do so in a series of thrusts,etc.). Only then can the inequality in clocks be measured as real, seen as more than just an observational quirk. Without shift in frames both sides can just say the other is equally "slow". The flight of aircraft around the world does this inertial dance by changing its vector of motion little by little as it follows the curvature of the earth. That's why the aircraft "loses" a small bit of time compared to the stationary clock, not just because the plane is moving. If you could hold the plane still and fly the earth around it, the opposite should happen, because earth would be experiencing the centripetal forces needed to vary its frame. Things like the "twin paradox" do not work if neither (or both) twins change their frame in a symmetric way. This used to confuse me, but now I know it's not just the speed that causes measurable relativistic time dilation. It's the change in inertial frame that matters.

But Save As and storing bookmarks and so forth provide evidence the computer has learned from previous sensory input (clicks, etc.). The key factor I would include here is probability or fuzzy thinking. If a human learns to react in a quick and surefire way to an input (by swinging a fist in their face or whatever), that seems more like training and conditioning like telling a computer to save a bookmark or to optimize its disk cache. If a human has an unsure response, and is slightly puzzled about the optimal action to take, that is what I would classify as emotional. The analogy would be a computer trying random numbers to choose an encryption key, to balance workload on a flash drive, or to carry out some process such as OCR that gives unreliable results. That is how I see emotions, as a being highly fallible rather than something learned. Reason seems less fallible because there is less worry about failure. I do not know what it means to learn by yourself in an emotional sense of learning. It is all based on stimuli. The computer does not learn by itself any new conditioned responses, but neither do I. Perhaps you can say I come to a new emotional realization while dreaming, but on the surface how is that different than a computer working differently after running overnight defragmentation? It would seem there are maybe two dimensions to this discussion.

The violation of personhood argument works more irrevocably for circumcision. I could forgive spanking and groping. When institutionalized and joked about, people just harm children more. Afterwards, we hear about how bad school bullying is.

Most of the time, responses from a computer (click File Close,etc) are simple pre-programmed reactions meant to work faster, rather than the work of analytical decision algorithms involving deductive proofs. So most of the time, computers are emotional?

Good one. I like it. More seriously, while relativity is basically solid, it seems impossible to mathematically disconnect it from some uncertainty at small scales. General relativity tensors describe the curvature of space based on where mass is located and its speed. But the joint location and momentum is uncertain based on quantum mechanics, so the curvature must become similarly uncertain.This is where I think objective reduction theories come into play. Suppose there is entanglement that leads to bifurcation in curvature of space. The need for other wavefunctions to follow that curvature implies they carry out a basic act of measurement. Increasingly heavy objects curve space more, making their outside environment a faster and more accurate measuring tool. Consequently there is no absolute need to pick between objective reality and statistical physics. You can have both, if you credit general relativity as the hidden cause of collapse instead of crediting human perception. This idea also has not been proven, but if it turns out to work, it completely stops the loopholes and constant annoyance of relativistic reality being called fake and/or bound by the limits of human perception.

You should study quantum mechanics, because that is where the idea of "objective reality" is questioned. Relativity does not deny objective reality. Einstein defended objective reality. I think Orch-OR or something remotely like it, will allow quantum theory and relativity to co-exist while preserving objective reality. It is a difficult task to scientifically have it all. But unless you are a cosmologist, worries about relativity are the least of our concerns. Although I really like your idea about expanding mass and lack of any need for gravitons.

That is good analysis. But why must you wait until a child can make the case? Are unconscious adults expected to make their case, or should you wait until they are able to before deciding whether NAP applies?For plants, the seed is usually not the majority of the energy input. Crop ownership I think is usually a result of land ownership, which is entirely outside NAP because the land boundaries are conjured up as fiction to influence some people who did not agree to boundary placement. While the sleeping farmer has the crops taken, often no contract with the taker exists, so none has been violated under NAP. Perhaps plants grown hydroponically under artificial light, maybe that works because the sole source of the plant is the farmer's effort. But ordinary crop ownership seems to have a large subjective component tied to land ownership. My idea is that ownership is a mixed result of three totally different things: Non-aggression, genetic/metabolic autonomy, and mutual contract. I do not believe "aggression" in the case of NAP automatically includes protecting every clump of dirt and region of spacetime that you want it to, or that some authority decides is an abstract legal extension of you, but only actual interpersonal aggression. So as you describe, when people compete for a young child, it is not ownership being argued for, but a weaker concept. It's responsibility, not ownership, much as who should decide what to do with an unconscious adult lying on the sidewalk.

But how many cells are initiated directly by parents? I think just one. The hidden assumption is transitivity, or basically you require that "the product of your product is also yours". This has absurd consequences if applied to everything we touch, eat, and breathe. I think your products only include your direct stuff.

That is a good point, many people believe probability is high. I think that is because the universe expresses a surprising amount of complexity and some elegant behaviors. Without understanding of dynamical systems, relativity, quantum mechanics and the magic of complex numbers, all acting without devine purpose, it seems necessary to estimate god at some higher chance. On the other hand, with such understanding, god appears to have less choice in the matter, and god seems bound up in mathematics. Complex behavior can emerge from a simple system, and god becomes entirely optional. That is, god has no effect one way or the other, so probability zero becomes an optimal estimate given all the other (infinitely many) nonexistent things that also have no effect. I think that is roughly why Hawking says god is "not necessary" for the universe to exist, but that is not the same as a strong atheist position declaring it impossible.

Thank you for your insight. It only makes sense to me to answer the question of "objective or subjective?" after answering the question of ethical origin "discovered or invented?". The reason is that if ethics is invented, "objective or subjective" also seems to be an invented result. I make this point in contrast to the scientific method, because choosing such a method is, as you suggest, the best. But "better" is a determination made by choosing some metric, or yet another invention. Perhaps even an ethical invention, telling you it is wrong to reject this better alternative. I have no problem with inventions, but like the telescope, the ultimate goal of invention is to discover what is already there. Observational inventions are calibrated by testing on already known objects. Do we have naturally-occuring ethical objects? It seems difficult to me to say UPB and ethics generally are inventions, yet without absolutes, there is not a single conclusion against which to calibrate them which does not originate from yet another human act of invention. The alternative I envision is partly a system of barter to fill in the subjective gaps, and partly a system of computer algorithms that shamelessly accept certain absolutes and search for contradictions. I do not recommend Platonism in the ideal sense, but rather I want to use empiricism as its proof (in the sense you describe) instead of believing empiricism has somehow become proven.

When I learned probability, I didn't believe it either. Technically 0% does not mean "impossible". There are two kinds of 0%: possible and impossible, distinguished only whether an event can happen in principle. Almost never is not some tiny probability bigger than zero, because there would still be room for an even smaller chance. Imagine being fairly dealt a royal flush over and over without end, no law of physics forbids it. Yet probability is zero that it will truly go forever, and you can say "impossible" but physically it is not ruled out. Think of it like throwing an infinitely narrow dart at an infinitely small target (radius=0), what is the probability you will hit the target? I just felt if we discuss probability, it is worthwhile to discuss possibility and certainty. Sorry to distract. I think the actual probability enters the discussion somehow, sort of like genetics. Nobody ever asked "what is your personal assignment to probability of a twenty leaf clover?". If you ask about god and probability, I want to answer with how likely will there actually be some dude transcending time and space.

I am not smart enough to know for sure. I suppose nihilism or Platonism -- at least if one has the idea that some "methodology" exists to seek out a pre-existing truth with regard to ethics. It seems to me either our imperfect ethics is an invention, and remains subject to our individual tolerance for design, or else it is a universal discovery with errors caused only by our mental inability to reliably derive an ethical truth that already exists. I cannot think of more alternatives. I tend to think of IP and related things in the first category, and non-aggression in the second. The problem is if ethics is invented, then all such methodology to "derive" is ultimately just a shorthand way to remember what was invented. Even if we "ought to" believe ethics is made stronger or better than some shorthand data compression, that too is an invented rule. There is little objective sense invented ethics is "right", just whether the recall method is mentally efficient and elegantly stated. On the other hand, if ethics is discovered, then methodology is self-referential, and that matters because there is a right method to go along with the right conclusions, and one of those conclusions is that the correctness of the method is also a valid conclusion. That seems more coherent to me than ethics being invented and the principles we derive springing into existence (or some state of validity) at the moment some caveman ponders the question. Caveman invention of rights leaves me wondering "what gives caveman the right?".

If you adhere to it, sure it is a principle dictating how certain to be of the null hypothesis. Rule, method, principle, framework; they all are mechanisms intended to produce mental conclusions. Other than sheer complexity and attitude, what is the difference? It makes no sense. How can a principle be "foundational", yet also be derived as a conclusion? A framework is disproven when a contradiction can be derived, correct? If I accept certain truths as fundamental, those might also be disproven in some cases. So far a framework seems a lot like a principle that by chance happens to contain an internal flowchart.

The reason for the labels is to distinguish what is possible from what is probable. I do not believe this is a simple matter of gathering observations and now magically there is a fixed probability in mind. To me, probability is a function of physics. I am a weak atheist, so while I am fully convinced belief in god(s) is an incorrect belief, it is in the same way that I do not believe there is currently a living Tyrannosaurus rex. The only distinction I make is that, while Tyrannosaurus rex was once present on Earth, god never was. If you toss a (fair) coin infinitely many times, the probability it will be heads on every toss forever is zero. Yet it is possible in principle, even though probability is zero. This is called "almost never" in mathematics, and is logically different than "never". I am willing to say god almost never exists. That is, the probability is strictly zero. Yet I do not claim god is impossible, and that makes a logical difference. If some guy, let's say using power tools, builds a machine in his garage and the machine has all the power god is supposed to have, I will become a believer and not lose any sleep over it. Until then, I believe god is completely bogus and don't think this is a matter of being sidetracked. It's just a matter of knowing why we believe stuff beyond some numerical estimation.

Sometimes the word antitheism is used.

It is not obvious to me that there is a distinction. UPB would not be worth the effort to describe, unless it was self-referential and thought to be a morally better framework in itself that we ought to accept. Why waste the time to describe UPB, if it only is a systematic way find and label things "valid", and we have no secondary framework against which to compare (as we would with gravitational laws for example)? A good moral framework would I suspect find it wrong to reject the framework, so the framework just validates itself as just another principle. There is the same distinction in mathematics between "axioms" and "systems of axioms". But a system of axioms is really just one axiom, that being a conjunction of all the other axioms. Conversely, all the original axioms can be deduced logically from this one super-axiom. Principle and framework seem indistinguishable in any strictly logical way.

"None" is a consistent description, but perhaps incomplete. A newborn baby, and all cavemen from 50,000 years ago, might also be described by no religion. As atheist myself, I consider atheist a stronger statement than "none". Religious or not, atheist seems to describe having a mental defense to their infectious lies, after having pondered the problem carefully. I still maintain that belief is a shallow and immediate surface property, mainly just a verbal assertion, because we often act opposite to our beliefs. Unlike truth, beliefs do not have to be consistent, but they do seem to have to be verbalized or described in some way and not just acted out like emotions. My proof for this is as follows: As a skeptic I will first disbelieve the following sentence. "The reader of this sentence does not believe this sentence." Now after having read the sentence and doubting it, I come to realize it must be true. Now I have come to believe the sentence. However, now I find conflict between my belief and the very nature of what it says. Unlike truth, I suggest that belief is momentary, and all probability aside, it serves only a momentary purpose.

I only have access to words people tend to say (I call it belief) and what people tend to do (I call it behavior). If there is any behavioral bias, I don't consider it to be belief. People may overeat or drink booze believing fully that it's wrong. If behavior is your test, they must be hiding some alternative belief deep down. Maybe it's true. But sure I can totally entertain the bias idea, and if a person has a tendency to do one thing versus another we might call it "belief" no matter what they consciously know or verbalize. But I wonder what is the distinction now between belief as inferred motivator versus, let's say hunger, fear, anger, etc. that is doing the motivating? Given a particular environment, human A can behave differently than human B. We could call it a difference in belief, based strictly on observing behavioral difference. But it seems now as observers we have free discretion to invent beliefs inside others primarily to explain their behavior. My cat believes stuff, so does my computer, I observed them expose a behavioral bias to me. Their action "speaks to me" in some way. It seems to be a useful tool, but why should it be philosophically accurate? It all seems slightly problematic to me, because now there are two layers (the belief that is inferrred, and the belief the observer holds about what is inferred). Really I should not simply listen is said about the second belief, because well, that could be a lie also! To use my opposing way of thinking, I think if two people both claim to believe in God, I consider them both to be believers. Perhaps you may discover one of them has a hidden atheism exposed consistently on the Implicit Association Test. But I am wondering if that is the kind of thing we are talking about when discussing philosophy? I am thinking you can have one belief and have totally opposite habit, mental routine, discipline, etc., because only humans seem to have these kinds of discussions. I tend to take the nature of belief at face value, otherwise I can't know what anybody believes, and we may as well assume everybody is a closet atheist. If I go with your definition, I observe them all failing to meet up with God, and that is my Implicit Association Test. It is how they act, they do not even leave God a cookie as an overnight snack.

I would like to discuss probability. But first, a belief is primarily a conscious realization, is it not? What is an unrealized belief? It seems to me, by refering to probabilistic indicators, that means we're partly talking about behavior instead of belief. A person could have religious behavior and lack belief, or vice versa. Same thing with morality, the free market, or nutritional eating. My gut feeling is beliefs are things you have already reflected on and have immediate access to. People I think are more likely to expose their beliefs by speaking words than they are to expose their beliefs by acting them out. There is probabilistic error in both methods of detection. You can make an argument just one of these concepts is a person's "true belief". Which one defines atheism? I think it's the conscious and verbalized one.

We rely on faith to suggest internal and external are categorically different, because the exact placement of a "boundary" between the two is a matter of subjective taste. If belief is internal and that is distinct from verbal and other responses (ie. one can lie and act hypocritically throughout and yet secretly hold an alternate belief) then the problem just moves to another level. Hypothetical assertion: I am a meta-atheist and I hold that, at a deep enough level, nobody believes in God. Religion is more than a hoax, but it's a lie that it exists at all even as a belief. Universally, everybody who claims to believe in God is really just concealing their true internal atheism. The "believer's" external actions are simple denial of their true internal belief that God is absent from reality. Now if it's true that belief is distinct from external behavior, who can prove me wrong? Even if you hook up a lie detector or any neuroscience sensor, you can always say it does not measure the deeper belief that is being concealed. By picking a concept of belief that is "internal" enough, we cannot measure belief at all because the internal/external boundary lies outside our epistemic range almost by definition. By the same reasoning, it seems we cannot deny my meta-atheism either. It is a logical impasse.

Indeed the moral argument is the real concern. Copying is apparently non-violent and adds to the richness of the world, at least momentarily. It is only through identification of long-range consequences that IP is legitimized. To have IP, we weigh economic effect as superior to objective morality. Intuitively, stealing removes from the owner that object that is stolen. So on pure moral grounds, copying is not theft. But if we say economic effect and artistic encouragement trump non-violence, copying is wrong. But then by that standard, technically it should be OK to enslave people to produce art for you. Doing otherwise would reduce the incentive to produce it. The slave enhances the owner, and removal of art-based slavery would reduce future art. In the same way, removal of piracy reduces future profits of the author. The argument is analogous. It would seem to me the potential future economic effects is a pretty weak moral foundation on which to build IP. I think the author of work of art is not a total dictator of the future, and violation of IP is more about rudeness and hostile speech than it is about direct theft.

It does not seem necessary to explicitly include capacity for belief in word definitions, because it's implicit in the nature of belief. An inanimate object is not an atheist just as an unconscious Buddist is not momentarity an atheist. It is about the answer when those answers are given. Words are defined in terms of other words, and ultimately one must rely on examples and artifacts to demonstrate meaning. I think belief and disbelief are demonstrated by how you answer questions. Disbelief is not a default position because a person or thing that fails to express its belief simply has not presented to us one way or the other. We can only know belief or disbelief by hearing an answer to a question "what do you believe". For the same reason inanimate objects are also not agnostic, because "I don't know" is also an answer.

It is only objects you can be "legitmately" deprived of that are labelled property of others. Repossession and compensation are just moral tools. When an item is discovered as stolen property, and you bought it with no knowledge that it was stolen, statists and anarchocapitalists alike will say the item belongs to the original owner and the current possessor has no valid ownership. The socially-constructed right to repossess the item is the defining trait of anyone who believes in property.I think we inherit a tangled mess of war, taxation, state-confiscation, and forced labor and legal compliance, most people will cherry-pick the rationale for legitimacy of force needed as a corrective measure. Nobody, not even Marxists will deny the right to own the fruit of one's own direct labor. But after that fruit has changed hands by force, or built in factories with proxy corporate and absentee-ownership (a social fiction), it seems like fair game to question the legitimacy.There is also the illusion that dead people can "own" things despite demonstrating no conscious action or any real chance of recovering their stuff. At a minimum, inheritance is theft because it embodies the dead with real moral authority just as someone might describe God's Will regarding who deserves what.