I love how people use their own preconceptions to claim another thinks that way, when nothing that other said includes those conceptions. I do realize I used zygote, too, which likely caused your leap.

Caps won’t prove or improve your argument as I don’t believe it is a human being at conception though at some stage it does become a life. At some further stage it becomes a human being. Currently, we really use viability as perhaps the point of “humanness” since it can survive outside the womb through technology. I think it’s just as silly to say it isn’t a human being through full-term as it is to say it is at the moment of fertilization or first cell division.

That’s a value judgment that goes beyond the words used by the medical profession.

I’m less pissy now.

To whom did you address your comment? This blog doesn’t allow sub-threads: so, really, to address the issue that so many other idiots raise, the idiots who don’t address a particular person, or quote anyone. to whom are you writing?

It’s been a bad month and I’m pissy.

In law we do dehumanize people by calling them bodies, as in habeus corpus,. That you don’t use terms like fetus in everyday speech does NOT make a fetus a baby to medical doctors who DO use medical terms as do lawyers and others who MUST use precise speech and terms.

As for making law, we’d be doing better if it was colloquial speech.

“Child” isn’t colloquial just because it wasn’t used in science class, it’s formal in all other areas. And “collateral damage” doesn’t humanize (but is an example of dehumanizing speech).

In order, at my best guess, you rank 1st in verbosity, I second, and Gene H. pulls at the rear.

If you had brought up Eskimo as imprecise, I’d know where to go with your comment. Hell, Gene H. would know where to go. As it is, I’m at a loss.

I’m troubled because a change in terms has meaning of view. We dehumanize by changing terms, and in this case it wasn’t to be more scientifically correct.

“The republicans are known these days to be the anti-science party.” Yeah, but anti-vaxers are mostly left, by far, anti-pharma are too (please don’t bring up Christian Scientists). It just depends on what science you want to emphasize. Republicans have a large anti-evolution (may that stupidity go away) and anti-AGW crowd (Climate Change is a political term, it ignores we have fireplaces because of CC), but embrace science when it suits them. Democrats do similar, depending on the science.

It is vexing and frustrating I have to admit.

But let’ s go back those “few” decades and look at how ideas have evolved. In 1910, no “Special Relativity”, no “Quantum Mechanics”, no “Galaxies”, no “Red-shift”, no “antibiotics”, but as each was uncovered it took decades to understand and reveal what they meant, put them into use, and the revelation continues. You mistake the meaning of dogma.

The ultimate sense is pain. It’s PETA’s main argument regarding “humane treatment”. At 37 weeks pain is a likely, human gestation being 38 to 42 weeks roughly. How could anyone believe the ability to experience pain starts with breathe?

I don’t see this tied to religion whatsoever.

Beware ***Snark Alert*** It is amazing, that this God germ almost always seem to be the one the Parents (or environment) is infected with.
The womb does not allow this germ to cross into it. ….. Substrate is smart. )

I’m sure all the purveyors and spreaders of ignorance will never use this false example of scientific “creationist justification” again. …. right after they finish their documentary on pigs flying.

The hypocrisy of the “truth seeking” creationist is stunning,…. or purposeful ignorance.

In putting together my thesis committee, I sought out university and college professors who were able to serve on my committee, and among those professors, those who seemed to me to be the most likely to be able to tear my thesis and dissertation to shreds.

For example, one such professor repeatedly insisted that I had not “done an experiment,” and could not claim to have done one. Finally, I met with that professor, in the professor’s home, for a long evening (perhaps about five hours). I described the experimental method in detail, and, step by step, communicated with said professor why I had rejected classical laboratory experimental methods because such methods are vastly too biased to allow finding what my method brought forth.

I did the research during, and only during, the ordinary course of my life, and I used longitudinal controls in which each individual person (research subject) was the person’s own control; the experiment being the change in understanding about the nature of learning and the making of mistakes that happened during the time the research subject and I were talking. All the research was done “in vivo,” and none of it was done “in vitro.”

At the end of the about-five-hours of talking with said professor, the professor (who taught research methods among other subjects) said to me, and this is verbatim, “You could not have gotten the data any other way.”

The experimental method through which I got my research data cannot be replicated; it is of the nature, as the saying has it, “a one-off.” That might, at first, seem to toss my thesis work into the scrap heap of pseudo-science. Not so, however…

In the process of doing the field work research, I developed a readily repeatable laboratory-type experiment which effectively generates the same data and which is profoundly refutable-if-false (meaning that it meets the falsifiability criterion of science of which Chief Justice Rehnquist, in his Daubert partial dissent, stated:

{begin Chief Justice Rehnquist Daubert excerpt}

But even if it were desirable to make “general observations” not necessary to decide the questions presented, I cannot subscribe to some of the observations made by the Court. In Part II–B, the Court concludes that reliability and relevancy are the touchstones of the admissibility of expert testimony. Ante, at 9. Federal Rule of Evidence 402 provides, as the Court points out, that “[e]vidence which is not relevant is not admissible.” But there is no similar reference in the Rule to “reliability.” The Court constructs its argument by parsing the language “[i]f scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue . . . an expert . . . may testify thereto . . . .” Fed. Rule Evid. 702. It stresses that the subject of the expert’s testimony must be “scientific . . . knowledge,” and points out that “scientific” “implies a grounding in the methods and procedures of science,” and that the word “knowledge” “connotes more than subjective belief or unsupported speculation.” Ante, at 9. From this it concludes that “scientific knowledge” must be “derived by the scientific method.” Ante, at 10. Proposed testimony, we are told, must be supported by “appropriate validation.” Ante, at 10. Indeed, in footnote 9, the Court decides that “[i]n a case involving scientific evidence, evidentiary reliability will be based upon scientific validity.” Ante, at 10, n. 9 (emphasis in original).
Questions arise simply from reading this part of the Court’s opinion, and countless more questions will surely arise when hundreds of district judges try to apply its teaching to particular offers of expert testimony. Does all of this dicta apply to an expert seeking to testify on the basis of “technical or other specialized knowledge”—the other types of expert knowledge to which Rule 702 applies—or are the “general observations” limited only to “scientific knowledge”? What is the difference between scientific knowledge and technical knowledge; does Rule 702 actually contemplate that the phrase “scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge” be broken down into numerous subspecies of expertise, or did its authors simply pick general descriptive language covering the sort of expert testimony which courts have customarily received? The Court speaks of its confidence that federal judges can make a “preliminary assessment of whether the reasoning or methodology underlying the testimony is scientifically valid and of whether that reasoning or methodology properly can be applied to the facts in issue.” Ante, at 12. The Court then states that a “key question” to be answered in deciding whether something is “scientific knowledge” “will be whether it can be (and has been) tested.” Ante, at 12. Following this sentence are three quotations from treatises, which speak not only of empirical testing, but one of which states that “the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability,” ante, pp. 12–13.
I defer to no one in my confidence in federal judges; but I am at a loss to know what is meant when it is said that the scientific status of a theory depends on its “falsifiability,” and I suspect some of them will be, too.
I do not doubt that Rule 702 confides to the judge some gatekeeping responsibility in deciding questions of the admissibility of proffered expert testimony. But I do not think it imposes on them either the obligation or the authority to become amateur scientists in order to perform that role. I think the Court would be far better advised in this case to decide only the questions presented, and to leave the further development of this important area of the law to future cases.

{end Chief Justice Rehnquist Daubert excerpt}

The key words for me in Chief Justice Rehnquist’s partial dissent are:

I am at a loss to know what is meant when it is said that the scientific status of a theory depends on its “falsifiability,”

Galileo falsified Aristotelian physics, as the story has it, by dropping two objects of differing weights “simultaneously” from the top of the Pisa cathedral campanile, whence the two objects hit the ground “simultaneously,” and the long-standing ignorance of Aristotelian physics died a timely death.

Much as Galileo took the Aristotelian premise that a heavier object will fall faster than a lighter one proportionately to the ratio of the weights of the two objects to be a “testable, and refutable-if-false, hypothesis”, I took the classical legalism that people can make avoidable mistakes to be a “testable, and refutable-if-false hypothesis,” and set about, as best my somewhat eidetic memory informs me, testing it before I learned to speak a two-word English-language sentence.

Not once in my whole life (I was born in 1939) have I ever believed that any event which actually happened, having actually happened, could have happened other than as it happened. Perhaps I can restate that, for enhanced clarity:

I have never, never ever, not even once, believed that any avoidable accident can actually occur, I have never observed the occurrence of so much as one avoidable accident; I have always lived my life according to the simple principle whereby I lived my life in utero, before I was born in 1939, that principle being, as I can now state it in words, “Whatever happens, as it happens, is necessary and sufficient,” and I live that way simply because what happens is what happens,and what does not happen is what does not happen.

To me, the notion that people make avoidable mistakes is a form of “testable and refutable-if-false hypothesis,” such that, as I have always found it impossible for me to accept that hypothesis as being true, spent most of my life effort testing whether or not I was simply too immensely stupid (i.e. autistic) to be able to internalize a very simple social construct.

It appears to me that my never having been able to learn to “think in words” (which may be of the essence of my being language-delayed-autistic?) has ruled out my accepting the validity of the notion of people actually making actually avoidable mistakes in the absence of an actually tangible demonstration of someone making an actually avoidable mistake; such that the avoidable mistake was made because it was unavoided, and the avoidable mistake having actually tangibly made, the avoidability of the mistake demonstrated through it being tangibly demonstrated that the avoidable mistake actually made was actually avoidable because it did not happen when it had been demonstrated to have been happening.

The notion of the making of an avoidable mistake (or accident) runs afoul of my grasp of the law of identity and its corollaries (such as the law of contradiction or non-contradiction, the law of the excluded middle for dichotomies, the law of the included middle for continua, and the law of rational inference).

In the form of reality that is compatible with my lived experience as I am able to remember it, if an accident was avoidable, the evidence of its being avoidable is simply that it was avoided; therefore it did not happen, and there is no way to know, be familiar with, or understand what it was because it never was. Also, in the form of reality that is compatible with my lived experience as I am able to remember it, all accidents that actually have happened were actually unavoidable when they were actually not avoided; all accidents which actually happen are unavoidable when they happen, which is why they happen as they do.

In the epigenetic chart of psychosocial developmental crises of Erik H. Erikson, the first stage of psychosocial development is the resolution of trust v. mistrust, with trust being associated with a valid temporal sense and mistrust being associated with time-confusion.

Time confusion, as I am able to understand it as an abstraction (time-confusion has no tangible reality for me), results from a child being successfully taught to believe that being told about something is equivalent to having done the something. Time-confusion is, to me, as a notion I cannot actually understand, but can hypothetically model, results from the socialization process that constitutes both the process and the effect of the infant-child transition of typically around the age of 18 months.

I never went through the infant-child transition, therefore, I never internalized the belief structure that is the necessary consequence of going through the infant-child transition.

It seems to me that, until someone actually avoids going through the infant-child transition, and becomes able to communicate the effect on said someone’s life from having not gone through the infant-child transition, the possibility of an ordinary person (like me) living for more than seven decades as a usefully-socially-connected person without having gone through the infant-child transition might wisely be deemed a ridiculous fairy-tale of nonsense.

However, the notion that a person living for more than seven decades as a usefully-socially-connected person being an impossibility has been rendered utterly moot by the mere, readily demonstrable fact that I am actually here and I have lived for more than seven decades without ever believing that any actually avoidable accident can ever happen.

The remark of Paul MacCready (see http://www.grannysnotes.com/Human-powered_airplane_flew_with_local_invention ) about “the right amount of flimsy” may apply to me, in a contrasting way. Perhaps by mere chance, I happened to arrive as a baby with “just the right amount of autism” for doing the bioengineering research of my doctorate.

In contrast with a scientist, such as Galileo, who could properly demolish Aristotelian physics and leave to society the job of cleaning up the resulting mess, I happen to be licensed as a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer, and find that I need to work in compliance with the Code of Ethics of the National Society of Professional Engineers, which Code requires of me that I hold paramount the public safety.

Undermining the structure of human society without having an adequately tested and validated alternative fully ready would contravene that NSPE Code of Ethics. So, during the 15 years since I wrote and defended my thesis and dissertation, I have been at work developing and testing the remedy for what, in my dissertation, is named, “the fundamental error of social reality.”

The fundamental error of social reality is time-confusion and its associated mistrust, as in the epigenetic chart of psychosocial developmental crises of Erik H. Erikson. Time-confusion is the method,the means, the process, and the result, of the infant-child transition. In my research work and findings, the infant-child transition is typically so shatteringly traumatic, from a neurological view, as to apparently result in a majority of people who go through the infant-child transition in culturally normative ways having some form of starkly dissociative amnesia for life prior to the transition. I have no such amnesia, because my life has had no such transition.

That my life is an impossibility has been rendered moot by my living my life. It is manifestly possible to live “as a little child” as I have done that for the whole of my life.

What characterizes the way “a little child” lives? Little children have not yet learned the social traditions of self-deception, those traditions being the core of the lesson of the infant-child transition.

What I have studied of cultural anthropology suggests to me that the fundamental error of social reality (the belief that people make avoidable mistakes) arose something like 50,000 years ago. Originally,this error had scant effect in pre-aboriginal people who had not yet developed shame-based, authoritarian-rule-based socially enforced traditions.

Back some 50,000 years ago, there had been no biology research demonstrating the all-or-none law of synaptic transmission, Walter Elsasser had not proposed that sufficient complexity is creativity, no one had figured out the complexity of human brain neuron connectivity, no one had figured out how to do electronic digital computer based neural network modeling (perhaps because there were no electronic digital computers?), no one had done the first computerized axial tomography study, and a host of scientific findings of the “twentieth century” were some five hundred centuries in a future that did not then exist.

I have posted fragments of my research on the Turley blog because I regard a society bereft of law to be unconscionably dangerous. Yet I also regard a society based on laws which no one successfully can choose to fully obey to also be unconscionably dangerous.

Some time ago, I mentioned a field work experiment that I did, albeit without intending to do it. That unintended experiment had the result of demonstrating that no one is capable of knowing the law, thereby rendering moot the notion that ignorance of the law is no excuse.

There is a simple remedy for the present state of ignorance of the law, ignorance grounded in the impossibility of knowing far enough in advance of doing anything that might lead to a judge rendering a judicial decision about said “doing anything” in a court system in which “the law is what the judge says it is,” such that the judge only says what the law is long after the “doing anything” was done. That, in my most nearly reasonable-person moments, gives rise in my thoughts to the sad notion that all such law as is what the judge says it is long after the “doing anything” has long ago been done, renders all such decisions being of ex-post-facto form and function. And the constitutionality of that is, for me a flummox.

And yet, I find the remedy so astonishingly simple that I have, as best I can now discern, lived it for real for the whole of my life. After the manner of Robert Benson, “The Interpretation Game: How Judges and Lawyers Make the Law,” Carolina Academic Press, 2008, removing time-confusion from the Interpretation of the Laws will make the Law and Humans no longer adversaries and will make the Law no longer Adversarial.

I have recently been reading Nate Silver, “The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail–But Some Don’t,” The Penguin Press, New York, 2012. Silver noted, in said book, that people have a proclivity for recognizing patterns as an aspect of human survival strategies, and that people can “see” patterns in what may merely be random noise.

In my view, as far as it has developed to date, the notion of people making avoidable mistakes is of the nature of noise and not of signal, in the sense of signal and noise as used by Silver.

Until someone actually demonstrates the making of an avoidable mistake (or accident) by demonstrating the occurrence of the accident and subsequently demonstrating that the accident that demonstrably occurred was avoidable by demonstrating that, after the accident happened, it subsequently did not happen, thereby demonstrating that the accident that actually happened was actually avoided after it was actually not avoided.

Teaching a child that the child understood something the child did not do, and understood it only by being told about it without doing it was the sort of experience I observed in children somewhat older than I was as i approached the age of 18 months, so, when it came to be my turn to be taught that social convention lesson, I politely, firmly, and gently declined to learn it because my conscience intransigently objected to being taught to become time-confused, and, through becoming time-confused, become deceived as to how procedural learning actually functions.

I have also been re-reading some of Henry Petroski, “Success through Failure: the Paradox of Design,” Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2006. Petroski, a Duke University civil engineering professor, has written extensively about engineering and how engineering contrasts with science as a methodology for understanding existential reality. It makes sense to me to understand the Adversarial System as a successful method for developing clearly understandable ways of realizing that life is not an adversarial process, and therefore, no system of law or laws that is adversarial can be else than an adversary of life itself.

The Turley blog is, replete with instances of people who have as-though messed up, including lawyers as well as their clients. I find that the cause of such messing up is regarding life as somehow adverse to life, such that adversarial law tends to produce forms of reciprocal retaliation, and the late psychiatrist, Martin Cooperman, observed (very accurately, so I find) that reciprocal retaliation is an intrinsically defeating process.

I hold to the notion that the creative evolution and the evolutionary creativity of human society has only recently developed sufficiently for anyone to have the slightest chance of testing the validity of the notion of adversarial law in terms of its consequences for public safety.

I have inquired of professional engineers as to whether there is another professional engineer who may have solved the problem of human destructiveness all the way to its apparently-practicable remedy, without, so far, any indication that I remain, for now, the only engineer to ever find a way to do the work I am doing the way I am doing it.

Because my work is effectively that of forensic engineering, I am setting about the seeking of membership in the National Academy of Forensic Engineers, as i apparently already do have the required courtroom experiences. It is my plan to apply for membership as soon as the University of Illinois at Chicago has published my dissertation.

I structured the writing of my dissertation based on my understanding of Daubert, such that it would plausibly meet the Daubert standard unambiguously.

Will not the life and work of lawyers be much more beneficial to people after the law is interpreted without the corruption of time-confusion? The effect of removing time-confusion corruption from the interpretation of the laws will have a singular effect, so I surmise. It will become impossible for anyone to be in violation of any valid law, just as it is impossible for an electrical engineer to design a circuit in violation of Ohm’s law.

The law, as adversarial in form and function, is adversarial to itself and to people, so I have observed without exception for more than 70 years.

It was not all that long ago that serious physical scientists (natural philosophers may be a better term?) were busily studying phlogiston and the luminiferous aether; it was not all that long ago that Galileo Galelei was put under a form of house arrest for being truthful about his observations that challenged the authoritarianism of not-to-be-questioned religious dogma and doctrine.

For myself, I find no fault with anything or with anyone, this being the result of my never having observed any event which, had it happened other than as it happened, any demonstration that anything would ever be better would be achievable.

So, for myself, I live in a world, or in a universe, in which whatever happens is always perfectly necessary and perfectly sufficient.

How does that differ from the Tao Te Ching, or from Nirvana, or from a genuine Heaven on Earth? How does the way I have lived for the whole of my life differ from living in a world the process of which, as evolving creativity, is everywhere, in every way, at the absolute limit of what the evolution of creativity has made no less necessary than possible than sufficient?

Yes, I heard the story that, to know the kingdom, one had to be as a llittle child, and I heard it as a little child who had yet to learn to talk in words, and I took that story to be a testable hypothesis, one I have tested with the whole of my life thus far.

The test results to date? Living as a little child has led me to never find fault with anything or anyone whatsoever. In my inner life, the only life I actually have, I live in accord with absolute and unconditional amnesty regardless of what happens in my life, or how it happens.

If a life such as mine was impossible at the beginning of 1938, I had become aware prior to January 1, 1939; therefore, since the beginning of 1939, it has been possible for a person to experience the whole of existence as being the nature of a perfect process, so perfect that it has contained the refutation of its imperfection through exploring how existence might differ from what it actually is if adversarial processes were actually present in tangible form.

What about those in prison? Is not the whole of humanity in a prison of misunderstanding? Is not misunderstanding a bridge to understanding when misunderstanding is affirmed and embraced as of the way to remedy misunderstanding?

…
Would that not allow the sentient awareness of existence …
…
Hence, from a holistic and relational view, the entire universe is life itself, and, I also allow, more than life itself.
===========================================
Your mixture of philosophy and science brings up some other interesting questions.

The standard cosmology model indicates that abiotic evolution produced machines billions of years prior to the advent of biotic evolution (e.g. Darwin).

Long prior to the advent of biotic evolution carbon was produced within sophisticated machines that had evolved during the vast abiotic evolutionary process. We now call those sophisticated machines stars. Their production of carbon made future biotic evolution of carbon based “life” a possibility.

That possibility, biotic evolution, did show up on the Earth about 3.54 billion years ago, about 10.21 billion years after the Big Bang.

However, when, where, how, and why that produced what we somewhat loosely call “life” is not a universal scientific consensus:

The definition of life is as enormous a problem as the phenomenon of life itself. One could easily collect from the literature more than 100 different definitions, none satisfactory enough to be broadly accepted. What should the definition contain, to be suitable for all varieties of observable life? Humans, animals, plants, microorganisms. Do viruses also belong to life?

…

“Our cells, and the cells of all organisms, are composed of molecular machines. These machines are built of component parts, each of which contributes a partial function or structural element to the machine. How such sophisticated, multi-component machines could evolve has been somewhat mysterious, and highly controversial.” Professor Lithgow said.

(Did Abiotic Intelligence Precede Biotic Intelligence? ). No question may be greater, it would seem, than the question of abiotic intelligence having preceded biotic intelligence.

Especially with the word “intelligence” getting more and more elastic, and even getting all rogue and mavericky, lately (On The Peak of Intelligence – 2). Perhaps politicians need to learn more about intelligence too.

The age of the universe is estimated at 13.75 ± 0.11 billion years. One of my friends, a physicist, is married to one of the physicists who worked on the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). That project used microwave background radiation measurements to work backward to the estimated time of the origin of the universe.

Hubert,

I’l give you this…..you write well. However, as usual you use logical fallacy to avoid the issue. Ask any fundamentalist believer of the Christian and Jewish persuasion and fully 98% will give you a figure between 10,000 and 6,000 years. Either of those figures is provably nonsensical, unless you believe that God planted “evidence” to test our faith and if you do believe that then you not only demean God, but you’re demented. The logical fallacy is that your real point is that we cannot exactly know the exact date of Earth’s and the Universes beginning, so maybe those who interpret the various biblical accounts are correct. I will state with my own 100% certainty that the story of Genesis does not represent the creation of the Earth and by the lights of such as you I would be damned eternally to Hell. I’ll take the bet and if there is an afterlife I’m fully confident that God will love me, not for my faith, but for my good deeds. You on the other hand may be in some other place because instead of following God’s obvious intention, you have not grown but regressed mentally.

“I must admit moreover that it may not be easy, in every possible case, to trace the line of separation between the rights of religion and the civil authority with such distinctness as to avoid collisions and doubts on unessential points. The tendency to a usurpation on one side or the other or to a corrupting coalition or alliance between them will be best guarded against by entire abstinence of the government from interference in any way whatever, beyond the necessity of preserving public order and protecting each sect against trespasses on its legal rights by others.” – (Letter Rev. Jasper Adams, Spring 1832)

“Having always regarded the practical distinction between Religion and Civil Government as essential to the purity of both, and as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, I could not have otherwise discharged my duty on the occasion which presented itself/” – Letter to Baptist Churches in North Carolina, June 3, 1811

As for waiting for “data and testable provable evidence that severely pokes holes in a billion and billion and billion year old belief.” Wait away. Radio-isometric dating does not lie. It is a scientifically valid method of testing. The approximate age of the Earth is a fact, not a belief.

It’s always amusing that the same people who make a huge issue of those who think the earth is 6000 years old (even though there isn’t any reference in the Bible that says EXACTLY how old the earth is) but cling dogmatically to the current alleged age of the earth that “scientists” have allegedly established today.

If we go back in time a few decades, we will learn that the alleged age of the earth has changed exponentially over several decades. That being said, who is to say the belief that the earth is 4.5 billion years old today is true? Ten years from now, it might end up being 6.5 billion years old.

The truth is – no one knows! Period! There are lengthy studies that poke holes in the theory of a x-billion year old earth but since this would being seriously into question the whole belief in evolutionism, such a notion simply will not receive airtime. Everyone knows how unwelcome it is for anyone to question the theory of evolutionism in general. Instead of people accepting criticism with an open mind, evolutionism is a politically protected sacred cow, sheltered from criticism. Oh of course, we always hear about the “peer reviews”. That of course, begs the question – who are the peers? More people who dogmatically cling to a theory without question? Yep. But I digress…

Scientists will tell you that ice core samples from Greenland show visible rings that indicate annual rings. Many people and scientists accept this without question. The rings are ASSUMED annual rings. Back in 1942, a flight of six P-38s and two B-17 bombers, with a total of 25 crew members on board, took off from Presque Isle Air Base in Maine headed for the U.K. To make a long story short, the plane went down in Greenland because they were running out of fuel and had to return back. Luckily all the crew was rescued but the planes were abandoned and remained where they landed. Years passed, and the planes were covered in snow – like 250 feet of snow. Now if we are to dogmatically believe that the annual rings found in ice cores are strictly annual rings, then this plane has been buried under the snow for SEVERAL THOUSAND YEARS. Now remember, these planes went down back in 1942, but if we believe the “scientists” without question, the planes have been buried under the snow for several thousand years. The Greenland ice cores are supposed to be representing some 110,000 years worth of ice layers.

So what does this tell you? Perhaps the cut-and-dry dating methods used may not be as reliable as many would think. This isn’t the only problem with our “scientific” modern dating methods. We can find petrified trees in abandoned coal mines that have been buried vertically, passing through (alleged) several thousand years of coal layers. People have found items encapsulated in coal seams that are SUPPOSED to be several million years old. Items like spark plugs, shoe soles, antique bells, etc…

What is shocking, saddening, and some might say, embarrassing that so many cling to alleged ages of the earth dogmatically, without question. And these same people childishly poke fun at others who don’t hold such beliefs as fact. Read the comments regarding this post. There are some right here that are laughing at Florida Sen. Marco Rubio for his comment when they are completely clueless to all the problems that surround the belief that the age of the earth is x-billion years old. (I use the term x-billion because scientists are constantly changing the alleged age of the earth, but the age is continually marching in the wrong direction, despite evidence to the contrary). It is an embarrassment that so many dogmatically cling to our recent “scientific discoveries” without question and simply refuse to look at evidence and theories that contradict so many beliefs that so many hold dear.

One of the comments, David Blauw foolishly writes:

“The wall between religion and state is very flawed when the politicians need to profess an incredible level of ignorance to gain votes.
The religious teaching in the bible based on myth, superstition, and fear of eternal damnation, is a sure fired way to get 30% of the vote.
Our constitution is brilliant, our politicians are not.”

Aside from the fact that the “wall between religion and state” was originally defined as keeping the government out of the affairs of the church, but today the definition has been inverted to mean the opposite, this poor soul has blindly accepted propaganda that the Bible is myth. He might want to do some research on Matthew Fontaine Maury that literally took something out of the Bible that God said concerning the “paths of the sea”. Maury took God for His word, and his discovery of the mid oceanic currents validated what was found in scripture. In fact, modern oceanography is indebted for his discovery. So much for that “myth”. Another “myth” that Blauw will have problems with is the writing of some sort of “freshwater springs of the deep”. How did this get written in the Bible hundreds of years before the modern “scientific” discovery of the freshwater vents at the depths of the sea. So much for that “myth” huh. Yet another is very interesting to me. Until recently, scientists thought the sun was at a fixed point in space. However there’s a verse in the Bible that mentions the sun having a “circuit” or pathway, if you will. Well what do you know, scientists discovered that the sun isn’t at a fixed point in space but does indeed have a “circuit” as the Bible says. Well, so much for THAT myth. We could go on and on.

But, let the scoffers reveal how much ignorance they can hold, pertaining to the Bible. Let the scoffers believe the earth is x-billions of years old. But hopefully a growing number of us will allow open skepticism to this belief and listen to data and testable provable evidence that severely pokes holes in a billion and billion and billion year old belief.

Well what do you know, Sen. Marco Rubio is actually quite right that the age of the earth is a mystery.

That is just a not right teaser. They’ve already discussed water, so there’s only one thing it could be that would be historical if it is and if it is, it’s a game changer.

http://www.npr.org/2012/11/20/165513016/big-news-from-mars-rover-scientists-mum-for-now

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has already started the process for running for president in 2016 with an appearance in Iowa.

Which one was Rubio ? My money is on the one on the left, …That one kept picking the pocket of the one on the right.
The one on the right must be one of them teavangelicals. If Rubios around everything must be right with the world. Alleluia.

You and me both.

Forget carbon dating, just use math. Light travels at a 186,000 miles a second which is proven by experiment.Scientists can calculate how long the light from very distant objects in space would get to Earth and that is in the billions of years. You might believe of course that the creator just threw up these illusions to make it difficult for us to follow the path of righteousness. If that is the case you’re too far gone to discuss this with and a blasphemer to boot. Why blasphemer? You demean the creator as a sadistic puppeteer.

Noah: uh-oh!

God: where did all these theologians get so many false stories to mislead the world in so many different religions?

Noah: uh-oh!

God: Noah, where is it written that I will forgive anyone who speaks against God?

Noah: on bill cosby!

God: remember Noah, remember! the elephants get charged for their trunks, they carry to much crap, so don’t forget the dung beetles.

Once again you’ve come up with a clip I had to bookmark for future use.

What establishes the limit boundary for the internal structure of a singularity? Does not the Pauli Exclusion Principle require that there can be only one singularity, if that principle is applicable at all scales of feasible observation?

For those, if any, who wonder about the way I post comments here (and elsewhere) on the Internet, perhaps some sort of explanation may serve the public interest.

A while ago, my primary care physician’s Physician Assistant informed me by telephone that my being autistic is “a proven diagnosis,” so I obtained a copy of my relevant medical records. Sure enough, it is stated that I am of the “high-functioning autistic” bunch of humans. But wait, there’s more. My medical records also label me as “hyperverbal.”

For Kanner-type (language-delay) autistic people who are somewhat like me, it is common, in my experience, for language-delay autistic people to use words by the multiple plethora, For me, the reason for this is simple. Because I have had immense difficulty getting words to work as I tend to expect them to work, I suppose I use words in the typical manner of a male hominid mating with a female hominid, if words are like sperm; send out an immense array of sperm, or words, and hope that one of them will complete the journey.

People who are engaged in labeling autistic spectrum people as an aspect of their work have consistently labeled me as being of the form of autism labeled “autistic savant.” Whatever. I did, alas, score at above college level while in grade school, I did study radio and electronics engineering starting the week after I finished fourth grade, and was doing successful original electronic design and construction work when I started fifth grade, and i did start an electronics business early in sixth grade, in 1950, that is still up and running, now more than 63 years later…

But wait, there’s more. There are two classes of savants, at least as I peruse the relevant literature, There are savants who have one very narrow area of savant skill, and there are savants who are far more versatile than that. Some of the most versatile savants have what has been named, “:Long Term Working Memory,” (LTWM) which allows holding in conscious awareness thousands of “things”; a vastly larger working memory than that of normal people who may be able to hang on to perhaps a dozen things in conscious working memory.

Something more than twenty years ago, a QEEG (Quantitative Electroencephalograph) demonstrated that I have LTWM, and use it regularly in my ordinary daily life.

Savants who have LTWM may be classified as prodigious savants, and the last guess I came upon proposed that there may be about 50 prodigious savants alive now in the world, about half of which are, somewhat like me, prodigious autistic savants.

So what? (Or, is it “sew what?”)

Well before I was 18 months of age, it had come to my attention that, if I had access to the necessary data for solving a supposedly difficult problem, I could, as best I could tell, “out-think” anyone and everyone I had met. That led me to ponder what might be the most difficult problem in the world, based on the notion that the way my thinking worked, I might have a decent chance of making progress on a problem so difficult as to be a hopeless task for anyone else.

The problem that has been the core of my life work is understanding both the cause, and the prevention, of human destructiveness, as it takes the forms of war, murder, prejudice, and their ilk.

It took me until I was about fifty to, as best I can yet discern, solve the problem of the causation of human destructiveness; it took me until I was 58 to write and successfully defend a bioengineering doctoral dissertation in which the causal mechanism was described and the hypothetical remedy also described. It has taken me until now to become ready to share the remedy with the public at large.

The cause of human destructiveness is simply human ignorance, and human ignorance is simply the natural consequence of the incompleteness of human social evolution.

While it is often useful to model “things” as closed systems in the sense of classical thermodynamics (as one engineering professor put the three laws of thermodynamics, “1. You can’t lose. 2. You can’t win. 3. You can’t get out of the game.”)

Alas, while closed system thermodynamics may be useful for improving the efficiency of a steam engine, closed system thermodynamics alone never actually built a steam engine.

The Process of Existence, in order to exist, has to be an open system, else it could never have come into existence in the first place?

When I was born, I had a conscience. I have never found any reason to improve it. My conscience works thus:

If it is right, it is helpful. If it is helpful, it is right. If it is hurtful, it is wrong. If it is wrong, it is hurtful. And, it is helpful to learn what is hurtful, so as to be able to learn how to avoid what is hurtful; therefore, nothing actually wrong or actually hurtful ever actually happens. Whatever happens, as it happens, is necessary and sufficient. Because all the apparent wrongdoing that actually happens is of the learning of what is hurtful and how to avoid it, no actual wrongdoing is ever tangibly achievable.

For those who profess Biblical literalism, I literally suggest actually reading the Bible literally. all of it. Then go back and re-read Genesis 11, and observe that literal reading of the Bible informs us that the only language we have is one of misunderstanding and confusion, and that nowhere whatsoever in the Bible is it stated that we have any language not of misunderstanding and confusion.

Is hypocrisy a useful word to describe claiming to read the Bible literally while not noticing that the Bible literally puts for the notion that reading the Bible literally is impossible because the language, being of misunderstanding and confusion, is anything but literal?

Kind of a contradiction? Like, gravity is something and no something can escape from a Black Hole?

One attorney I knew had what i thought was a sense of humor. Okay. I have Wilson Huhn, “The Five Types of Legal Argument: Second Edition,” which happens to contain Seven Types of Legal Argument.

That attorney, now deceased in old age, put it differently:

“If the truth is on your side, argue the truth. If the truth is not on your side but the facts are on your side, argue the facts. If neither the truth nor the facts are on your side, argue the law. If none of the truth, the facts, or the law, are on your side, lie like Hell and hope to not get caught.”

Can anyone propose a more ridiculous, cynically sarcastic, account for human destructiveness?

I saw that about the oldest galaxy earlier this week. What was especially interesting is that it is a dwarf galaxy, tending to prove the theory that modern galaxies formed from smaller constituent groupings.

Now on to me stuff. Eternal joy is not what it is cracked up to be.
One moment of joy is as eternal as it gets. Joy always is, it is as elusive as eternal pain. I welcome joy and try to be as elusive to pain as it is to me.
When I am fortunate to step on the field of joy it is a familiar territory. I now look around and breath and open my pores to it. For one can not march up and down its’ fields, plant a flag in it claiming it as ours. No the landscape dissapates into the fog of now. And the balancing teeter totter of joy and pain reshapes beneath my feet challenging me again to find the perfect balance, so I can rise up to see the fields of joy again.
It took me a long time to understand I am responsible for my perceptions. I am responsible for acknowledging the various substrates within me. I am still ignorant of almost all, but I now have a new term that is useful for searching.
I am on my way to have a beer. My neurons seem to approve.
J.Brian, you used a fascinating term a few comments ago. Inner consciousness. I have a 12 week old grandson I recently visited. I know his brain is functioning “a million miles an hour” right now. Does he know it ??
Do we adults remember our 12 week old self? Is the adult mind as capable as functioning at the speed of an infants mind that is unimpeded by all the BS think, and daily menial BS details, that adult minds have to put up with?
My grandson exists, he only expresses himself quite rudimentary.
This is where your inner conscious remark grabs me. He must have an inner conscious right now. By extrapolation I certainly do, we all do. Our own inner consciousness were the first guides of ourselves. I now proceed to jump the shark. I believe the unrecognized inner conscious we all MUST have, our first guide, though unknown to our infant selves, is the basis for the God myth that is evolutionary seen in the historical record. ?????
Okay maybe I should have gone for that beer prior to writing this paragraph. ……Usually I write stuff like this AFTER I have a few beers LOL.
Well lets see what happens when I do it in reverse. …BYE BYE.

I agree. Also 1st generation stars and galaxies are starting with only hydrogen is my understanding. So the scale/size of the stars may have been on average much more massive than the current universe, fusing H into He at higher rates, living shorter lives, and going supernova at a much higher frequency than we observe now. Few gravitational interactions leaves the galaxy formless or blob-like, possibly.

“A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping.”

Does “the standard model” have it that, in the manner that light is made of photons and light waves, so gravity is made of gravitons and gravity waves?

If so, and if gravity prevents anything, including light (as photons and light waves) from escaping, and if gravity is anything (like gravitons and gravity waves?), then the external gravitational field of a black hole cannot exist outside the event horizon of the black hole, and black holes, therefore, do not attract matter.

Of course, if gravity is not anything, it would easily escape from a black hole, yes? That anything cannot escape from a black hole says nothing about what is not anything. Only, if gravity is not anything, what is it, or is it not anything at all, such that asking what gravity is, is absolute nonsense?

However, were gravity to be a stability criterion for the persistence of the observability of existence from within existence, gravity might not actually exist save as an aspect of the observability of itself; as in a circular reference dance of the intrinsic self-referential nature of a model of the interior of a singularity such as that named in the title of a book by Paul Tillich, “The Eternal Now.”

If existence is modeled as a singularity, it would be vastly too small to hold anything that is what it isn’t, and that might explain the law of identity. Alas, if existence is a singularity, then it would only contain what the law of identity allows, and would surely be defined by the identity of itself.

Would that not allow the sentient awareness of existence, from which human sentient awareness surely is a natural consequence, to be of an eternal now, because of being the timeless, “I Am.”?

As it may be useful to distinguish the observer from the observation and from the observed, so it may be useful to distinguish the modeler from the model from the modeled?

Why does existence exist? Perhaps because, for something to stop existence from existing, said something would have to exist, and, if said something were to stop existence from existing, it surely would stop itself from stopping existence from existing, therefore, existence may exist because nothing can exist that can completely stop existence from existing.

Infinitely, recursively nested sets of sets which contain themselves as members of empty sets may offer a way out of the existential predicament, if there is a predicament.

If I do not exist, then I cannot realize that I am not typing these words into a computer, and and I cannot realize that am not posting them on the Internet.

If the universe of all parallel and perpendicular and other-oriented universes is the totality of all actual and non-actual existence, is existence itself aught else than unbounded non-existent self-reference?

Perhaps analytical reductionism is insufficient for making viable sense of observable existential reality. Perhaps Jan Christiaan Smuts had some wisdom to offer, Perhaps holistic relationalism is needed for a meaningful modeling of existence after all.

I suppose others here, rather like me, have, and have read, Smuts, “Holism and Evolution,” Macmillan, 1926…

In my work in theoretical biology, I find it useful to regard existence as comprised of organisms and their substrates, since I have never encountered an organism that is totally without any substrate. Indeed, for any particular individual organism, the whole remainder of existence is its substrate.

Hence, from a holistic and relational view, the entire universe is life itself, and, I also allow, more than life itself. For those who enjoy reading theoretical biology, there are the books, Robert Rose, :”Life Itself,” and A. H. Louie, “More Than Life Itself.” Robert Rosen’s “Anticipatory Systems, Second Edition” was readily available from booksellers when I last checked a few weeks ago.