This thread has been created for discussion on themes relevant to Reason and Science for which there are not currently any dedicated threads.
Please note that our Comment Policy applies as usual. There is a link to this at the foot of the page.
If you would like to refer back to previous open discussion threads, the most recent ones can be accessed via the links below (but please continue any discussions from them here rather than on the original threads):
OPEN DISCUSSION DECEMBER 2024
Dec 1, 2024 · 351This thread has been created for thoughtful, rational discussion on subjects for which there are not currently any dedicated threads. Please note that our Comment Policy applies as usual. There is a link to this at the foot of the page. DISCLAIMER: All comments posted throughout this website are the personal views of users and …
OPEN DISCUSSION NOVEMBER 2024
Nov 1, 2024 · 395This thread has been created for thoughtful, rational discussion on subjects for which there are not currently any dedicated threads. Please note that our Comment Policy applies as usual. There is a link to this at the foot of the page. DISCLAIMER: All comments posted throughout this website are the personal views of users and …
BOOK CLUB 2024
Jan 1, 2024 · 152This is the 2024 follow-on from the 2023 BOOK CLUB thread, which is now closed, though you can easily refer back to earlier discussions by clicking on the link. BOOK CLUB 2024 has been created to provide a dedicated space for the discussion of books. Pretty much any kind of book – it doesn’t have …
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Oct 29, 2021 · 535This thread has been created as a central point for discussion about anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change so that as much information as possible can be held in one, easily accessible place. There will of course sometimes also be other climate change threads on specific new developments, and we’d encourage you to post on those too. …
24 comments on “OPEN DISCUSSION NOVEMBER 2021”
Welcome to the November 2021 open discussion thread.
If you wish to continue any of the discussions from earlier Open Discussion threads, please do so here rather than there, unless your comments are about a book or the climate crisis, in which case the dedicated threads should be used (see above).
Thank you.
The mods
Olli. #54 Climate thread
Ow! Kidney and gall bladder stones are the pits. Sorry to hear this. It would put a sour edge on anything.
I don’t know if it helps to disagree on people’s behaviours now? I fail to notice any negative response to my continued wearing of masks when shopping or visiting companies. Most older folk seem to do likewise. A lot of people have lost friends and relatives and an emerging understanding that this is a coronavirus like many another to which immunity is partial and fading, but unlike others with far greater lethality or life affecting consequences.
Thanks Phil. Maybe it’s just me or an Essex thing? 😉
It could be an Essex thing. Though I live close by I spend more time away (in Wales and down south) so it could be that Essex right of centre mind-set. My immediate neighbours seem more ethnically mixed than up the hill in Iain Duncan Smithland. I love them to bits. All just tolerant and helpful and understanding.
While I’m here I must say I’m planning a review of Squid Game in the Film thread later. Again I think it exactly does not show folk are innately selfish. I maintain they have been manipulated into defensive selfishness.
Maybe I am too much glass half full? But even in these horrid times I am gobsmacked that together we have come this far out of the slime. Mutualism seems built in to the physics.
Phil
Is it too reductionist to say it’s all about reproduction and survival? Even with all our human complications. That Attenborough program where a lower ranked monkey manages to become the queens baby sitter so it can have its time in the hot springs. Chasing to satisfy its mental health, to live longer?
olli #5
Yep.
I think it is both even simpler than that (physics before biology) and more complicated. I promise to come back to this after a book review in a week or two.
Hi. I read a lot. Rationality-SP. Good as always from SP but nothing new. Bayesian is how most sane people think ie if the facts change I change my opinion. But where is the tipping point? I have been Darwinian for 50 years. How many facts would change that?
Which segues into Flights of Fancy by RD. I’ve read everything he published and found this a good read but a tail-off (sorry). His logic is normally impeccable but I’m not sure of his description of aerofoil lift. Some descriptions simply put it as high pressure below and low pressure above. RD says that the Newtonian pressure below is more important than the Bernoulli reduced pressure above. Otherwise how could aircraft fly upside down? However all my aeronautic reading suggests the Bernoulli effect is more important and angle of attack in inverted flight could overcome the problem. A minor technical point I guess.
A less minor point is to wonder why RD did not progress to become a radical idealist (my position). If God does not exist than neither does objective reality (whatever the high utility of the concept). It then follows that we define our environment as much as the environment defines us. Yet a basic tenet of Dawinianism (my religion) is that the environment is quite separate from the thing that evolves! I have wrestled with this for 20 years so answers on a postcard to ……………………….
James de Malchar (Box 47)
James Cornhill #7: I was with you until you wrote, “If God does not exist than neither does objective reality…” and referred to “Dawinianism” as a religion.
If, as you say, you have read Prof. Dawkins’ books, you can anticipate why your two statements are wrong, or at least why you might find disagreement here. For now, I’ll just say objective reality does not depend on an invisible, mythical being for which there is no evidence. Second, there is nothing about Darwinism that resembles a religion. Because the hour is late, I’ll leave it at that for now. If I misunderstood what you are trying to say, please be so kind as to elaborate.
James #2
For me Radical Idealism is a distinctly un-useful concept that fetishises consciousness, the which arrives in multiple forms from differing neural processes, including cultural.
Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism are profound staging posts in our understanding of how complexity can emerge and be maintained (albeit briefly) in unidirectional, entropic, time. Other modes exist that are akin. Epigenetics allowing a Lamarckian element in to buttress adaptions which have time to become genetically rooted sometimes. Horizontal gene transfer between cellular organisms, including the stunningly important (more so than abiogenesis I propose) “invagination” of one prokaryote by another another ultimately spawning the diverse eukaryotes with differing organelles offering diverse functioning and permitting multicelled organisms with internal diversities of function.
Presuming “religion” is tongue in cheek, may I propose something even more profound to collectively venerate ? Taking a lead from Professor Jeremy England and his physics-take on abiogenesis, might I propose that the second Law of Thermodynamics and the Feynman-feted Principle of Least Action as the creative principle?
In a system out of equilibrium like our current universe with its huge heat fluxes, we expect to see entropy always increase. Remarkably, however it is not disbarred from going down topically in the heat fluxes themselves, provided the net entropy is always up. Local energy flows (normally chaotic in their fine structure, a boiling pan of water bubbles on the hob) can, when circumstances are right, form organised complexity, like hexagonally nested convection cells, where these cells use energy more efficiently than chaotic structures and thereby steal the amount of heat needed to support chaotic (disorganised) flow. More interestingly we can see how this organisational principle can continue to apply up the substrates scale (complexity on complexity in fractal fashion), perhaps particularly in living things where solar energetic flux becomes chemical and then bio-calorific flux.
I was sent a great talk by Professor England regarding physics and abiogenesis. I’ll try and post it here.
A creator consisting of mindless principles of physics can make what we see. Universes make minds, not the reverse. Universes (at least as the “Ding an Sich” the numenon) precede any phenomenon.
Dear James,
The gods are mythological characters. When you mention God, with a capital ‘G’, I take it you are referring to the Hebrew god, whose name is yahweh in the Old Testament and theos in the Greek of the New Testament. This god, whatever name he goes under, is one of many gods from the early history of the human race. Many of them have disappeared or become insignificant as the tribes and nations that created them have disappeared or their culture been erased or absorbed through military conquest and the spread of empires. For example, North Africa is Muslim because conquest and colonisation was by adherents of Islam and areas colonised by European Christians have large Christian populations.
Religions are ideologies and the difference between them and political ideologies is that they belong to a period when magic thinking was prevalent and science had not emerged as the dominant force in human development. The survival of religion is due to the efforts of powerful organisations, acting in their own interests, and their influence in preventing a more widespread ability to distinguish fact from fiction.
To put it in summary terms that you may wish to discuss in more detail.
That Jeremy England lecture video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10cVVHKCRWw
phil
i haven’t watched all of the jeremy england yet
so can minds influence universes in any way?
or is it all a one way street?
and we have no free will?
For me Free Will is a fatuous religious concept that proved useful to Christianity in particular, to lay upon us singular guilt and singular coercion,
Of course it doesn’t make any coherent sense, because we have to expand our identity out and out to our brain nurturing culture, to our antecedents’ genetic bequest, and our early experiences and be happy to own all of this to be entirely happy to own all of our actions, including our unconscious ones, if we are to believe it “free” in any kind of sense.
I never use the term, but rather call it constrained will as a reminder to check if I am happy to own it or was I in some sense coerced to a thing.
Its a pretty poor adjective for a thought, say. The freest thought would be a truly random one. I’d far rather be right than free in my thinking.
Dan Dennett comes to similar conclusions but adds the important view that free will more nearly exists when say you are choosing between many equally good alternatives, so it may have some degree of serendipity to it but the choice is nevertheless good or true. Thus, he says, freedom evolves. What we do for ourselves is construct more and better choices of thoughts and actions for ourselves.
“ The freest thought would be a truly random one”
The more I observe other people, and myself, I tend the think free thought is a unique one. It’s hard not to stick your head out of one pigeon hole or another.
Last post for me guys. Need to get to terms with the real world now.
All the best Olli. I hope you will check back from time to time.
Take care, Olli. Remember, I’m just around the corner if you ever fancy getting a coffee somewhere…
cheers olli
keep that beamer running
An interesting article about a dinosaur discovery in the U.S. State of Missouri appeared in this morning’s edition of my local newspaper. I googled the topic and found this from a better source, dated yesterday.
https://www.newsweek.com/new-species-dinosaur-uncovered-missouri-may-lead-more-fossils-being-found-area-1654254
Here are the opening paragraphs:
“A new species of dinosaur uncovered at a site in southern Missouri may lead to more fossils being discovered in the area.
On Monday, University of Minnesota Paleontologist Peter Makovicky, who aided in leading the dig, said numerous other remains could be found at the site.”
I love anything like that, Michael!
Thank goodness we haven’t yet discovered everything – just think how dull life would be if we had 🙂
Micheal #16 (and all)
Thank you Micheal but I am going to try and resist even looking at the page because then I feel the need to respond but no one seems interested in my plight in these busy confusing days. The Chinese are being accused of wiping out any trace of the Uighurs and is fast becoming the wests pet project but the Turkish being wiped out of the Turkish Cypriots for the last fifty or so years is not sexy enough for Greek and Latin trained peoples.
MODERATOR MESSAGE
THIS THREAD IS NOW CLOSED – PLEASE DO NOT ADD ANY FURTHER COMMENTS HERE.
PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CONTINUE THE DISCUSSIONS, OR START NEW ONES, ON THE DECEMBER THREAD, WHICH CAN BE FOUND AT
https://richarddawkins.net/2021/12/open-discussion-december-2021/
THANK YOU.
Carried on from November’s thread.
Olli, (should you read this) I would love to help, but I am at a complete loss to know how to do that. Usually I have some cunning (fatuous) plan by which we all break free in one mighty bound, but this time, I just come up empty.
I’ve never been a minority. Even as an aspie, bisexual scouser, I took up acting and learned how to hide the lot, and in hiding you forget… most days.
MODERATOR NOTE
ALL NEW COMMENTS ON THE DECEMBER THREAD NOW PLEASE!
Phil, we’ve moved your last post across to the December thread at https://richarddawkins.net/2021/12/open-discussion-december-2021/ and would encourage you and others to continue the discussion of it there, but this thread is now closed.