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MisterSwig last won the day on May 11

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  1. It's only odd because of the association with an inanimate object and the laser. You just said that some gravitational force could cause the rock to move suddenly. Therefore that force might affect the rock at the same moment you point the laser at it. Indeed the force might affect the rock every single time that you point the laser, fooling you into believing that your laser is causing the reaction. All you need to do is eliminate your faith in the rock's ability to sense the laser and move itself out of the way. That might be hard to do, however, due to the extraordinary and repeated associa
  2. That is the question. The objection is that being in the courtroom, or being an actual juror, was some kind of advantage to discovering the truth in this case. I, however, think it was a disadvantage. This is similar to the point Mr. Nelson made about perspective. The jurors were limited to their in-the-moment perspective, particularly regarding witness and expert testimony. The human mind can only take in and retain so much information, which limits its ability to integrate and evaluate a large body of evidence. I, however, was not limited to an in-the-moment perspective. When I became o
  3. The fentanyl was at a possibly lethal level, but the meth was at a low level. One problem is that Floyd might have developed a high tolerance for fentanyl. Also, he was not found at home. There were other known factors. The fentanyl intoxication, however, is substantial grounds for reasonable doubt.
  4. Random in the sense that the lion might have gone left or right. The path he took was not determined by the factors compelling him to move. Let's say he was thirsty after waiting out a storm under some rock. He leaves in search of a puddle and comes to the junction. It's a new area, so he doesn't know where the puddles might be. He happens to be stepping toward the path on the right when he reaches the junction, so he continues in that direction. Now he's on the path to the right, but he didn't choose that path over the other one. It was where his roaming for water took him.
  5. Postmodernism is a placeholder word. It refers to a series of intellectual plagues that will kill off the weakest ideologies and leave a wasteland in which the strongest ideas may flourish and spread out.
  6. Yell at it and see if it turns to face you. Basically test one of its sense organs. If it can't see, hear, smell, taste, or feel you, then it's probably unconscious, likely dead. We can easily test a lion's extrospection, because we can provide stimuli to which it either responds or fails to respond. Testing its introspection is more challenging, because we are not inside the lion's mind, and thus we cannot provide its own mental stimuli to which it responds or not. It must be hard to do, because bacteria are microscopic in size, but I've read that they have some simple sensory abiliti
  7. Could one say that it wants to survive? Or perhaps it acts like it wants to survive. Biologists say there are four phases to a bacterium's life cycle. Within each phase you might say it has a different "goal." In the lag phase the "goal" is to grow. In log, it's to multiply. In stationary, to cease growing and multiplying. And in death, to die. So all four phases amount to a bacterium acting toward its ultimate death. It grows so much and multiplies so rapidly that it consumes all the available nutrients, then the environment can no longer sustain its life. It acts lik
  8. What is the goal of bacterial action? I think it needs to be aware of a simple choice, that's the foundation. Then you can debate whether its selection was voluntary. How do you determine if a lion is aware of a choice, that's the problem.
  9. I remember when Gary Hull and others were butting heads with the postmodernists back in the mid-90s when the buzzword was "multiculturalism."
  10. Yeah, I see another problem with the Everest objection. I doubt they will place the Mars colony on a mountain of rock and ice that gets pummeled by high winds and snowstorms most of the year. They will have to contend with extreme cold though, and of course the oxygen problem. I kind of get how they plan to solve the cold and oxygen problems by transporting needed materials and machines to Mars, but the water problem puzzles me. If they rely on ice in the soil, won't they eventually be forced to travel further and further away from the city to mine for ice? At some point each citizen m
  11. Yep, that might be an issue, depending on how much taxpayer money goes into the mission. I believe SpaceX is a private company that's partnered with NASA and holds contracts to deliver astronauts and equipment to the space station. That's partly how Musk plans to finance and develop his Mars colony idea. He's also got profits from his other companies, and probably some big investors. I think it's an interesting question. If you had a few hundred grand for a ticket to Mars, would you go? Musk means a city on Mars. And I'm not aware of any interest from Russia or China. They hav
  12. Is colonizing Mars a good or bad idea? For whom is it good or bad? Why is it good or bad? Elon Musk thinks it's a good idea for humanity. He says we have a choice: stay on Earth and inevitably perish in a doomsday event or become a spacefaring, multi-planet species. (See about a minute of his speech starting here at 1:44.) On the other hand, Jeff Bezos seems to think that colonizing Mars is not a good idea. Compared to Mars, he says, living on top of Mt. Everest would be a garden paradise. Perhaps Musk should try living on Everest for a year before trying to start a colony on Mars. E
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