>> ^joedirt: Wow.. just wow. Let's just say you shouldn't have started with the electron as an example of deterministic or comparison to Newtonian physics.

Electrons are not quarks, and yes Heisenberg does put serious limits on our ability to catalog their movement, but supercolliders and electronics work because electrons function deterministically. Electrons don't just "decide" what to do, and when to do it. I may not know exactly where they are, or how they are moving, but they produce effects consistent with doing so in an orderly fashion.

The fact that the smallest detectable structures in our universe are chaotic in no way implies that structures made of them are chaotic, there are a number of technological examples of determinism derived from chaos.

For example your computer works deterministically, I can put a scope on it and show you all the noise and interference running through it. I can, through subtle measurement, measure the chaos in the system, but the system is still deterministic, as evidenced by the fact the you are reading this right now.

Yeah, the 'personhood' model and the cognitive machine model are each useful levels of detail for the same thing... the best one to use probably depends on what your application is.

I don't blame people, though, for holding views that I think have big costs for society... I think we're all in the same trap of limited human intelligence - them more so than us - and people will change their minds in the end.

Also, the libertarian in me says that society's lack of intelligence only has a cost on us if we let it (to some degree). Turing, for example, as much as I personally admire him for his genius, chose to take certain risks, and he lost the bet.

In January 1952 Turing picked up 19-year-old Arnold Murray outside a cinema in Manchester. After a lunch date, Turing invited Murray to spend the weekend with him at his house, an invitation which Murray accepted although he did not show up. The pair met again in Manchester the following Monday, when Murray agreed to accompany Turing to the latter's house. A few weeks later Murray visited Turing's house again, and apparently spent the night there.[32]

After Murray helped an accomplice to break into his house, Turing reported the crime to the police. During the investigation Turing acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray. Homosexual acts were illegal in the United Kingdom at that time,[6] and so both were charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, the same crime that Oscar Wilde had been convicted of more than fifty years earlier.[33] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Conviction_for_gross_indecency

You're better informed on the technology so I'm not going to argue your projections, but I wouldn't and haven't bet on them. It's funny, a basic assumption I've made in directing my life is that with a good diet and exercise, risk management and so on I'd make it to around 100, half that if I want to enjoy myself. If I thought I had a good chance (>50%) of surviving to the next millennium, say, that would drastically change almost every dimension of my life. So to that extent I sympathise with your attitude.

I disagree that calling a human a person is less valid than your input-output cognitive machine, which I absolutely accept to be an accurate description, itself no less valid than as a bundle of quarks and electrons, acting on even more fundamental mechanisms. One emerges from the next emerges from the next. Possessing a de facto consciousness I'm not too concerned with whether or why it really exists; illusory or real one seems to function as well as the other. So it's on that principle I interact with what I blindly assume are other similar minds.

In reply to this comment by chilaxe

Refreshness on theoretical physics should be always welcome , however to be technically careful with new proposals is mandatory !
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"Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Published: 6:02PM GMT 14 Nov 2007
Comments 596 | Comment on this article

The E8 pattern (click to enlarge), Garrett Lisi surfing (middle) and out of the water (right)
An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.
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Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).

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In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. "Being poor sucks," Lisi says. "It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month."
Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.
Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.
Although the work of 39 year old Garrett Lisi still has a way to go to convince the establishment, let alone match the achievements of Albert Einstein, the two do have one thing in common: Einstein also began his great adventure in theoretical physics while outside the mainstream scientific establishment, working as a patent officer, though failed to achieve the Holy Grail, an overarching explanation to unite all the particles and forces of the cosmos.
Now Lisi, currently in Nevada, has come up with a proposal to do this. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says.
"Although he cultivates a bit of a surfer-guy image its clear he has put enormous effort and time into working the complexities of this structure out over several years," Prof Smolin tells The Telegraph.
"Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi's theory," adds David Ritz Finkelstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. "This must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound."
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The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.
He has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a "radical new explanation" for the three decade old Standard Model, which weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay.
The reason for the excitement is that Lisi's model also takes account of gravity, a force that has only successfully been included by a rival and highly fashionable idea called string theory, one that proposes particles are made up of minute strings, which is highly complex and elegant but has lacked predictions by which to do experiments to see if it works.
But some are taking a cooler view. Prof Marcus du Sautoy, of Oxford University and author of Finding Moonshine, told the Telegraph: "The proposal in this paper looks a long shot and there seem to be a lot things still to fill in."
And a colleague Eric Weinstein in America added: "Lisi seems like a hell of a guy. I'd love to meet him. But my friend Lee Smolin is betting on a very very long shot."
Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.
E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape."
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What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8.
Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"
What Lisi had realised was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8's 248 points. What remained was 20 gaps which he filled with notional particles, for example those that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity.
Physicists have long puzzled over why elementary particles appear to belong to families, but this arises naturally from the geometry of E8, he says. So far, all the interactions predicted by the complex geometrical relationships inside E8 match with observations in the real world. "How cool is that?" he says.
The crucial test of Lisi's work will come only when he has made testable predictions. Lisi is now calculating the masses that the 20 new particles should have, in the hope that they may be spotted when the Large Hadron Collider starts up.
"The theory is very young, and still in development," he told the Telegraph. "Right now, I'd assign a low (but not tiny) likelyhood to this prediction.
"For comparison, I think the chances are higher that LHC will see some of these particles than it is that the LHC will see superparticles, extra dimensions, or micro black holes as predicted by string theory. I hope to get more (and different) predictions, with more confidence, out of this E8 Theory over the next year, before the LHC comes online."

But when he thinks of those voluptuous Risian females... Quark - get his toothpick and some chilled tubegrubs!

By all means, alert us when it's released.

I see a lot of reactionary viewpoints about spirituality and science that just don't make sense to me. It's as if trying to reach the conclusion of some intricate 100-part formulae when we only know the first three parts.

We know that flowers are made of matter, and matter is made of molecules, and molecules are made of atoms, and atoms are made of protons, and protons are made of quarks, and I don't know if we know what quarks are made of yet, but you better know that there is yet another level beneath that, and the one after that, etc.

To say that there is no connection between spirituality and matter is every bit as ignorant as to say that there is. More so, in my opinion.

this was just A.W.E.S.O.M.E,thanks for contributing to this thread my friend.
and remind me never to engage you in an argument.
till next time..
namaste

In reply to this comment by dannym3141:
>> ^mentality:

Sure we don't know exactly how the bain is intended to work, but we can still know that smashing in your skull with an icepick will damage your brain. Similarly, we know that certain drugs like meth will damage your brain.

Of course, stopping something from functioning is obviously a worse state than having something functioning, but this example is obviously flawed - and in two ways.

Way the first:
If you beat a brain with an icepick until it stops functioning, that is obviously a worse state of affairs than when you began - but we are referring to percieved 'damage' rather than a cessation of function, so either this isn't your point, or it's an invalid point

Way the second:
There are of course cases of head trauma leading to an IMPROVEMENT of brain function - such as a return of senses (hearing, sight). Also operations on the brain resulting in a businessman becoming an accomplished painter virtually overnight. Just because all icepick-head collisions we've ever seen have never resulted in a brain enhancement doesn't mean that it can't occur, as we can see in these examples that the possibility is there. It just takes the RIGHT KIND of icepick blow.

Science gives us accurate models of how things work. Maybe reality is a lie that God crafted to fool our senses, but that kind of metaphysical argument is the realm useless and neverending bullshit.

No, i think you misunderstood my point. My point is nothing to do with God. It's a scientific idea and i know scientists that agree with me. In fact, i don't think there's a scientist that would disagree because .. well, because it's true. I will have to drastically simplify the idea in order to explain it well here.

If we see a sequence of numbers 3 5 7 - and we think they are a series of odd numbers increasing. We can see that there may be numbers beyond 7, but at the moment we are incapable of identifying it. Time passes, technology improves, then we get the next number in the sequence and it's an 11 and we realise that it's a sequence of prime numbers. Although our system accurately described what we could observe to begin with, the system failed when we discovered something new.

That's all there is to it. As a practitioner of science, you MUST perform experiments with an open mind. To do otherwise is to taint your observations with your own bias and is poor science. Tomorrow, we may find that all our theories are not necessarily the most accurate theories. Continued below...

Pssst: science never claimed that the earth was the center. We know better now because our claims are based on actual fact and observation. Science: 1, Philosophy: 0.

To carry on from above, this has proven true in the past. Theories that were raised showed us accurate results. Then we found a case where they DID NOT accurately predict the results, and we had to throw the theory away and adopt a new one. If you would like to nitpick examples then i will give you a better one - that of the classical view of atomic structure vs. the modern view.

We used to think that the nucleus of an atom was solid, and now we think that it is made up of protons and neutrons. But wait, those again are made up of quarks. Wait, are the quarks made up of strings!?

It is not the goal of science to look into the nature of being. That is the job for religion and philosophy. Stop dismissing science because it cannot answer the unanswerable.

Firstly, i have never dismissed science for not being able to answer the unanswerable. I think you have an idea in your head that i somehow approached this from a religious standpoint and that is your downfall in your 'debunk'.

Secondly, semantics aside, i think science has a duty to look into the nature of being whenever possible. Check out the anthropic principle - i think that's a little bit to do with the nature of being. You could argue it, and i'll accept that, but i still think it does. If it's possible for science to shed any light on the nature of being, then it will, people won't go "THAT'S NOT OUR REALM BOYS LEAVE IT ALONE!" Philosophy is philosophy, and science is science. If the two can help each other out, of course they will, and of course we don't know that the answers won't be helpful to each other

But, of course, that was never my point, i simply reply to it as you raise it

--- Please don't ask me to cite examples, you can find them for yourself ---

>> ^mentality:

Sure we don't know exactly how the bain is intended to work, but we can still know that smashing in your skull with an icepick will damage your brain. Similarly, we know that certain drugs like meth will damage your brain.

Of course, stopping something from functioning is obviously a worse state than having something functioning, but this example is obviously flawed - and in two ways.

Way the first:
If you beat a brain with an icepick until it stops functioning, that is obviously a worse state of affairs than when you began - but we are referring to percieved 'damage' rather than a cessation of function, so either this isn't your point, or it's an invalid point

Way the second:
There are of course cases of head trauma leading to an IMPROVEMENT of brain function - such as a return of senses (hearing, sight). Also operations on the brain resulting in a businessman becoming an accomplished painter virtually overnight. Just because all icepick-head collisions we've ever seen have never resulted in a brain enhancement doesn't mean that it can't occur, as we can see in these examples that the possibility is there. It just takes the RIGHT KIND of icepick blow.

Science gives us accurate models of how things work. Maybe reality is a lie that God crafted to fool our senses, but that kind of metaphysical argument is the realm useless and neverending bullshit.

No, i think you misunderstood my point. My point is nothing to do with God. It's a scientific idea and i know scientists that agree with me. In fact, i don't think there's a scientist that would disagree because .. well, because it's true. I will have to drastically simplify the idea in order to explain it well here.

If we see a sequence of numbers 3 5 7 - and we think they are a series of odd numbers increasing. We can see that there may be numbers beyond 7, but at the moment we are incapable of identifying it. Time passes, technology improves, then we get the next number in the sequence and it's an 11 and we realise that it's a sequence of prime numbers. Although our system accurately described what we could observe to begin with, the system failed when we discovered something new.

That's all there is to it. As a practitioner of science, you MUST perform experiments with an open mind. To do otherwise is to taint your observations with your own bias and is poor science. Tomorrow, we may find that all our theories are not necessarily the most accurate theories. Continued below...

Pssst: science never claimed that the earth was the center. We know better now because our claims are based on actual fact and observation. Science: 1, Philosophy: 0.

To carry on from above, this has proven true in the past. Theories that were raised showed us accurate results. Then we found a case where they DID NOT accurately predict the results, and we had to throw the theory away and adopt a new one. If you would like to nitpick examples then i will give you a better one - that of the classical view of atomic structure vs. the modern view.

We used to think that the nucleus of an atom was solid, and now we think that it is made up of protons and neutrons. But wait, those again are made up of quarks. Wait, are the quarks made up of strings!?

It is not the goal of science to look into the nature of being. That is the job for religion and philosophy. Stop dismissing science because it cannot answer the unanswerable.

Firstly, i have never dismissed science for not being able to answer the unanswerable. I think you have an idea in your head that i somehow approached this from a religious standpoint and that is your downfall in your 'debunk'.

Secondly, semantics aside, i think science has a duty to look into the nature of being whenever possible. Check out the anthropic principle - i think that's a little bit to do with the nature of being. You could argue it, and i'll accept that, but i still think it does. If it's possible for science to shed any light on the nature of being, then it will, people won't go "THAT'S NOT OUR REALM BOYS LEAVE IT ALONE!" Philosophy is philosophy, and science is science. If the two can help each other out, of course they will, and of course we don't know that the answers won't be helpful to each other

But, of course, that was never my point, i simply reply to it as you raise it

--- Please don't ask me to cite examples, you can find them for yourself ---

DS9 was slow to start so those who watched and bailed early missed what I feel was the best series. At first I was worried about everything being located on one space station that didn't go anywhere but I think the producers realized it as well.
They did everything they could to jumpstart the series and they succeeded!
Shaving Sisco's head and giving him a new look, Bringing in Worf, Expanding on Odo the Changelings, The defiant (the only federation ship with a cloaking device), Dax was a great Character, even once they had to change symbionts.

DS9 had the deepest character development out of any Star Trek series:
Sisko, Odo, Dax (1&2), Worf, Miles, Quark, Bashir, Kira, Garak and a dynamic supporting cast Gul Dukat, Nog, Rom, Gowron, Lwaxana Troi, Martok, Vash, Leeta, Jake Sisko, the Grand Nagus. The Changelings, Cardasians, Klingons, Bajorans, Humans, Ferengi, the Jem'Hadar...

The ongoing storyline with the war and the occupation gave a great overall setting for the episode stories. It kept serving the characters to us in new ways and let us see into the characters in more depth. I think it was the series with the most mature story line and had the most layers. It was war, intrigue, humor, alliances, secrets, threats, doom, development, exploration and more...

Um, so ya, I voted for DS9

I liked TOS for its campiness, it also had some good classic sci-fi 'man bites dog', almost twilight-zone quality twists and morals.

TNG is my favorite hands down, Patrick Stewart rocks the socks, and over all the series just felt a lot cleaner and focused. Good character development of a large cast. And while TNG didn't have many story arc's there was a consistency to the universe TOS lacked.

DS9 and Voyager had their moments, voyager really picked up after 7 of 9. I'm not saying that just because of her form fitting unitard, the writing and character development really seemed to get better. DS9 seemed really inconstant to me, some of the episodes were great and others were snoozers. Though I did like most of the episodes involving Quark.

Now to really get the nerds really riled up , Enterprise D vs. a Star Destroyer.

SHOW US YOUR QUARKS!

>> ^gwiz665:
Not really the inventor, since quarks weren't invented, more like discoverer. I mean, Newton didn't invent gravity either.


That's why I wrote that he invented the concept of quarks. But that doesn't make a nearly as catching title.

Not really the inventor, since quarks weren't invented, more like discoverer. I mean, Newton didn't invent gravity either.

Pfft that guy is such a quark, why would I listen to him?

^Only quarks, KP? No string level boycotts?