A true agnostic speaks

Posted by $ blarman 5 years, 2 months ago to Philosophy
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I hadn't ever heard of the Socratic Paradox, but it is what I have long advocated.


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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    The Earth's magnetic field is what your body normally sees anyway. A small electric field at the appropriate wavelengths could cause problems, particularly with regard to hearing; cell phone exposure is probably not enough to cause long term effects, but we won't know that for sure for years.
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  • Posted by Lucky 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    Now, does that mean that 4G and 5G could be harmful?

    There is a possible mechanism, the power levels are very very low, so I think- no.
    But has the research been done?

    This thread is getting way off topic - a good thing too.
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  • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    The tides are advancing faster than you can deny them...old school out, new school in...just as it should be.
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  • Posted by CircuitGuy 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    Thank you for posting this summary of the world believe.
    I use "accept" in the case of "believing" in evolution. I don't really think of evolution as a belief.

    Unscientific people's language betrays them. They call it "Darwinism". They can't conceive that accepting science is completely different from starting with a sacred figure. They'll say they don't believe in it because first Darwinists said Lamarkian evolution was one way species changed, then you said it was all natural selection, now they're backtracking in some ways with epigenetics. Darwinists can't even stick to their story.

    To avoid being confused with this anti-scientific view of science, I try to say accept if it's about a scientific theory.
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  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    Please stop promoting this nonsense here. It is not science. You have no understanding of science. You have latched onto some nuts on the internet and believed them with no understanding. It does not belong here.
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  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    How is he trying to use response to magnetic fields to improve artificial tissue?
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    • jbrenner replied 5 years, 1 month ago
    • jbrenner replied 5 years, 1 month ago
  • Posted by $ jbrenner 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    I am not. One of the professors at my institution (Carlos Martino) is. I can't do everything, but that is his specialty.
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  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    How are you trying to use response to magnetic fields to improve artificial tissue?
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  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    If the "motivational speaker" Hamilton and his "manuscripts" for the NeoNoThink "Society" "introduced" him to "the likes of Ayn Rand" then it is no surprise why he shows so little understanding of and interest in Ayn Rand and the purpose of this forum.

    How does he decide which internet crackpots to follow in the name of "science"? He can believe whatever he wants, but this forum is not a place to promote crank internet cult "theories" and his 70 page self-published "ebook" rambling with the same nonsense he posts here.

    But we know he's not responsible. His Nephlimphlams caused it.
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  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    This Robitaille? https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pierre-...

    "In 2000, he was asked to step down from his position as director (though he remains a professor) when he began to promote theories that were outside his actual realm of expertise, specifically related to non-mainstream beliefs in the areas of astronomy and physics: he maintains that satellite measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation, believed by most astronomers to be an afterglow of the Big Bang, are actually observations of a glow from Earth's oceans.[2]

    "He also maintains that the Sun is not a gaseous plasma, but is in fact made of liquid metallic hydrogen. None of his ideas have been accepted by any reputable physics publication.

    "Robitaille has been presented as a physicist, cosmologist and even an astrophysicist, though anyone who has gained actual credentials in these fields would beg to differ. Criticism of his crank ideas range from accusations of cherry picking evidence to a failure to understand even rudimentary thermodynamics.

    "In 2002, Robitaille and his wife paid for a full page ad in the Sunday New York Times,[3] detailing his microwave and Sun hypotheses. Mainstream astronomers reviewed and dismissed Robitaille's claims as 'untenable' and 'completely wrong'.[4]...

    "He has since continued to spam non-crank physicists with his ideas, particularly one email run in 2009 widespread enough for recipients to discuss it amongst themselves.[6] His work has also been latched onto for support from the nuttier global warming denialists.[7] He is also admired by electric universe advocates: he spoke at the 2014 Electric Universe Conference on his microwave and Sun theories.[8]"
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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    It has been demonstrated that birds do respond to electromagnetic fields by their veering off course in response to an artificial field.

    All tissues grow in response to tiny electric fields within certain parts of the body.
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  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    Has it been demonstrated that they follow magnetic fields and not prevailing wind currents (or both)? It would be interesting to see if they veer off course in an artificial field.

    Is tissue engineering trying to make artificial nerves sensitive to the external fields?
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  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    Yes he steals the concept 'purpose'. A human moral purpose requires a self deciding on a course of action for some end. (But lower animals don't necessarily "decide" and there can be a human involuntary purpose to some life-supporting action like breathing or blood flow that serves a biological but not a moral "purpose", or function, serving life).

    Blarman's claim of a "purpose" to human life beyond the life of the individual as a moral value in himself is a mystical teleology. It assumes an intrinsic value in the universe beyond human life and which every life serves. He steals the concepts 'value' and 'purpose'' depending on life of a biological organism for an intrinsic attribute of mankind as such -- as a metaphysical intrinsic (mystical) value. To the extent it is supposed to be moral purpose determined by a god it invokes Primacy of Consciousness along with the rest of his religion.

    He steals more than 'purpose'; he steals the concepts of 'value', 'life', 'morality' and the whole universe. With that kind of grand larceny he's up for the epistemological Big House for a very long time.

    Invoking such contradictory nonsense is not seeking knowledge. It is not grasping facts, which can't done without perception and valid concepts based on reality and used with consistency. It's fantasy in floating abstractions motivated by his feelings, acknowledged to be a phobia over mortality and inventing whatever he wishes to be his "hypothesis" to save his terrified soul.

    I don't know that he was ever trolling usenet forums with his corruption. He may have come across Ayn Rand too recently for that.
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  • Posted by lrshultis 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    Doesn't he steal the concept 'purpose' by not considering that purpose depends upon a self deciding on a course of action. That a purpose is a self made course of action and not something given to one by others or some feeling about a imagined god or by the impossible supernatural. The supernatural being outside of existence, the belief in which is totally irrational.
    Is he actually interested in knowledge or is he one of the trolls who have ruined all the USENET groups dealing with Objectivism?
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  • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    Post Script...I don't know why I should bother, but here, I'll do you a favor...Listen to this one, (just one of many examples and the latest in this series) and you will get an idea of where science is heading and from which I express some of my views.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtT_k...

    And like always, 100 years from now we will be revising this too, I am sure.
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  • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    You know not of what you speak. Now you denigrate the likes of Dr Robitaille, most notable among my readership.
    You really should read the Neothink Manuscripts, they are eye opening; after all, it was Mark Hamilton that introduced me to the likes of Ayn Rand and Julian Jaynes others. (however, I cannot endorse his marketing techniques of the last few years...his readership has topped out at 30mil plus).

    Oh, and Professor Peterson will be accounting for the works of Jaynes in his studies of the Old Testament at my suggestion...he will be reading my book as well.

    I will give you credit for alerting me about Amazon...seems there is an error in their listing of the ISBN#.
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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    The discovery that humans can detect the Earth's magnetic field was not unexpected to me. Think of how birds migrate to the exact same spots over thousands of miles. We can feel the force, but it is not a mystical entity.
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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    ewv's comment regarding your reference to human's sixth sense is correct about the response to the Earth's magnetic field being a physical effect. The best analogy to this effect is how birds know where to migrate to over thousands of miles of distance. My daughter worked last summer with one of the other professors in my department on how we can exploit this response to magnetic fields to do better tissue engineering, particularly with regard to nerves.
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  • Posted by lrshultis 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    If the velocity of light and gravity are finite and measured at c, then because the Universe since the Big Bang is so large from its expansion rate that light and gravity cannot have affects farther than the 13.8 billion light years age of the Universe while the Universe is on the order of 165 billion light years across. The inference is from measured, i.e., observational data and not just an arbitrary guess.
    All science stems from hypothesis based on known, i.e., measured data else how does one even produce an hypothesis? Do you make hypothesis just out of arbitrary thoughts?
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  • Posted by lrshultis 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    So it comes down to whether the mass distributions in the Birkeland Currents is great enough to make the gravitational field of the galaxy able to rotate at a rate observed from observation of the mass of the visible stars. Gravitation is a mass centered phenomenon and not charge or magnetic field centered. If it were not just mass centered it would be measurable in the solar system in the orbits of the planets which agree with General Relativity. The Sun is a huge ball of plasma with strong magnetic fields which do not change its mass. The Birkleland Currents supposedly causing the aurora do not cause a change in mass of either the Sun or the Earth.
    The video seems to imply that the Birkeland Currents between galaxies cause the structure of the Universe's matter rather than the Universe's Matter causing the structure of the Birkeland Currents. Matter is primary, Birkeland Currents secondary.
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  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    There is no identifiable sixth sense organ, only a physical affect that can be discriminated by the brain. But it is physical, not something mysterious like the claimed use of a divining rod or worse.
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