GENIUS FORUMS

Any dude who's ever lit a few candles to romance a lady knows that ambiance is important, but the article in question goes beyond that, and seems to suggest that ambiance has an unconscious effect on us. Does the information given in the article really demonstrate that though? Were the dudes who hel...

I have a theory that if we ignore the moral implications of abortion they'll go away. I'm currently in the process of testing this theory and as such cannot comment on any suggestions that I may be wrong. Nevertheless, I will engage in light banter about scones. I feel that scone-inspired revelry--o...

Faust, What's absurd about your position is that you don't deny causality exists, but you think that we can never know what these causal links are, holding these two positions is quite contradictory I think. This is the reason I told you to go back and read the thread. In my very first post I say q...

Matt,

I don't think that's true unless the car was moving faster than the speed of light. The speed of the light would overtake the speeds of all the slower objects.

The light would disperse prior to reaching the finish line if it were far enough away from the car.

Faust,

You lose at reading comprehension. Go back to the start of the thread and try again.

Faust, So you mean to say, 'all matter comes into existence at the same time'? No. What I'm saying is a simple truism. If an apple comes into existence, everything that that apple is comes into existence. Otherwise, we wouldn't say that an apple came into existence. An apple can be thought of as a ...

If you're interested, here's a 3d animation of how an STM works.

That's cool as hell. I suppose shooting electrons at atoms is about the trick. Now what are we going to shoot at electrons? Tiny things can be so evasive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a15KgyXB ... ed&search=

"Dance, monkey, dance" indeed. On that note... yet another optimistic view of humanity. In song this time!

Kevin, the light from the headlights is travelling faster than C relative to the car's starting point, A fella who was standing on the starting point would measure the speed of light to be exactly the same relative to himself as the dude in the car would relative to himself. Light always moves at t...

I became interested in philosophy due to the mind/body problem. Or, as it is now called, the 'hard problem of consciousness'. Cartesian skepticism also blew my mind, and I think I can blame my interest in philosophy on Descartes, who did a fine job of pegging the honestly infuriating problems, even ...

Insofar as things moving faster than the speed of light is concerned, the limit is only on the travel of information. If I set a bunch of timers to go off at around the same time (maybe with an unimaginably small delay between them) and they were in a straight line, we could say that the progression...

Let's say you are travelling in a car at the speed of light, and then turn on your headlights. The light from the headlights is travelling away from the car at a speed that is measured to be the speed of light. How is speed calculated? It's simply a number given to the distance traveled in a given ...

The speed of light will always be measured to be the same regardless of how fast one is moving relative to it. It's from this that we infer that you'd never be able to catch up to a beam of light, as if you were able to catch it in a foot race, at some point you'd be able to measure it to be going s...

I wasn't even sure that an atom had a theoretically perceivable physical correlate. I thought the idea was more-or-less an assumption based around the notion that if there were no space between things, then nothing could move (that's how the Greeks came up with the idea). From there it makes sense t...

David, Nonetheless, the Universe, and time and space (or change, if you want to call it that) are all logically necessary for the apple to come into existence. Nah. Space, the universe, time, color, apple seeds, and whatnot, just necessarily come into existence with the apple. What happens in the f...

I was an ENTP the last time I took the test (some years back). I have taken it before and gotten different results (wavering between INTP and ENTP). Nevertheless, the below description has me exactly pegged: "ENTPs are usually verbally as well as cerebrally quick, and generally love to argue--b...

David, Time and space are logically necessary for the existence of the apple, as is the existence of the Universe itself. Yet we don't normally think of these things as being part of the apple. The universe is only what occurs within it, and divides into that which occurs within it. Time is a fancy...

David, Being unthinking and uncritically accepting what other people say is a perfect recipe for ethical disaster. I'm speaking of the formation of core values here. Reason can only help us see the path to actualize what we desire, but there is nothing reasonable to be said about what we should des...

I'm of the opinion that a fella doesn't have to do much thinking to develop desirable ethical stances. If religion doesn't impart them on us, we'll get them from interaction with others, the media, and a plethora of other sources. Add to that the fact that humans have a natural tendency towards a de...

Trevor, If causality is a true transcendent feature of reality, then if something exists, it has causes and consequences. 'Transcendent' as in existing outside of the world? I don't consider anything to be transcendent as we exist within the world, and have no means to determine what might be outsi...

David Quinn, They are all critical to the occurrance of the person's death. For example, if there was no time and space, then there would be no person to begin with and therefore no possibility of his death. So there is no question that time and space play an essential role in the death. The same g...

Faust, what the hell IS tautological reasoning? Any reasoning which arrives at a conclusion that can't be otherwise based upon the premise. I did screw up my explanation a bit in my previous post. A tautology is never false, but a theory which makes them seem substantial is always false. An example...

David Quinn, All of these conditions are essential to the occurrence of his death Many of the things you listed are hardly part of what death is at all, and we would only say are essential due to inductive inference. Given this, the idea of his death happening without any cause at all doesn't mean ...

Faust, He never spoke of the "ego" and he was a terrible psychologist. He wasn't at all a psychologist. If you read him hoping to find a theory about how womanish Jews are running around being slaves to sexual desire (or whatever), I can see how you would be terribly disappointed. Wittgen...

Faust, Btw Hume was an extremely boring philosopher. he had no conception of the Infinite and his stuff is utterly tedious to read. Weininger called him superflous. You think so? I've always found Hume to be a joy to read compared to many others who dealt with similar subject manner. Oh well, diffe...