₦airaland Forum

Congratulations on the good job

To say that medical research and genetic engineering is unacceptable across the board because of its potential for creating some ethical dilemmas is the most unethical stance of all. It's to basically say, here is a powerful approach which could alleviate human suffering, but we're not going to do it because we're worried about the misuses that might occur, I find that completely unacceptable from every possible point of view. Most profoundly, the utilitarian one.

What it does do is to require us to assume some responsibility for deciding which kinds of genetic engineering and medical research are, in fact, consistent with healing the sick, and which kinds are putting us in a troubling direction where we'd best not go. And that is obviously where the debates begin to get underway.

There are wonderful opportunities, to take a cell of some sort and convince it to sort of go back in time, and then back forward to become a different kind of tissue for transplantation, for instance. This may be a very significant advance. I obviously feel there's a real need for lots of people to be better informed about these scientific issues.

medical research eh. I agree with it

Singer proposes that anyone able to help the poor should donate at least 10% of their income to aid poverty and similar efforts. Of course there is a religeous attitude in him especially considering he is Jewish. I don't like that sort of thing.

Peter singer? Singer is a founding member of the Great Ape Project, which seeks to persuade the United Nations to adopt a Declaration on Great Apes awarding personhood to non-human great apes.

Lots of people think the wealth and food distribution is a problem because the western world have taken that from African countries. What loads of nonsense. It,s because of the new methods in the western world in food production, genetic engineering, modyfying crops and western technology that have contributed.

Don't tell me about animal liberation.

I mean all these personal philosophies, all of them have been corrupted.

Why then bring in Adam Smith? What you mean? Organizations are based on Adam Smith Theory right, of course right.

Why do you use the individual as your only unit of analysis? happines, as a result of actions should rather be be looked at at the level of society or community.

Result of actions should rather be be looked at at the level of society or community. I talked about that, but I started from the individual first and is very easy to project iot to some group of people. Trivial really.

You assume that there is something objectively good. How do you determine that?

Of course I assume that there is something objectively good. Look at all the human made pain in the world, think of the concentration camps or Bosnia, Yugoslavia, the gulags in Russia. I think we can do much better.

That's why some churches make it very difficult for people in the congregation. A church in London stopped a couple from marrying because they belonged to different denomoination. I suppose it was because one of the churches (the pastor) would loose that tithe (MONEY). The interesting thing about the church finances is that the pastor's wife manages them and consider it a gift. Good if you want to avoid any responsibilities from the law if it was like a commercial establishment. We can call it Ministry of Money

Well, it depends. Suppose your spouse does not agree. What do you do then?

That brings us back to the question of necessity. What does the God concept add to all of this?

Nothing really. I don't like the idea of God as necessity.

If you go to the moral teachings of Christianity, you will indeed find a lot of things that are highly comendable, but, what then sets it apart from a secular ethic? Why would Christian morality be superior to e.g. Peter Singer's utilitarianism?

[quote][/quote]There are some aspects of utilitarianism that I have problems with.

There has been the continuous shift that

Adam Smith: The best results come from doing what's best for myself.
So our role is: The maximization of pleasure with the minimization of pain.
or The maximization of pleasure for a sector or group of people with the minimization of discomfort to the same group.

Utilitarianism puts the emphasis on the usefulness (or otherwise) of any and every human activity.
The useful is whatever gives pleasure and excludes its opposite, for pleasure is the essential ingredient of human happiness.
Utilitarianism's real mistake is the recognition of pleasure in itself as the sole or at any rate the greatest good.
For me pleasure is essentially incidental, contingent, something which may occur in the course of action.

Pleasure (as opposed to pain) cannot be the only factor affecting my decision to act or not to act.
Quite obviously, that which is truly good, that which morality and conscience bid me do, often involves some measure of pain and requires the renunciation of some pleasure.

Others try to obtain the maximum benefit for someone else and not just for themselves, which would be blatant egoism, then they put a value on the good of other persons only in so far as it gives benefit to them. If, however, they cease to experience that, or it does not tally with their calculus of happiness then that good to the other person ceases to be my obligation.

A person must not be merely the means to an end for another person. Anyone who treats a person as the means to an end does violence to the very essence of the other. Freedom is embraced by society, and quickly allies itself with varied forms of human weakness, it soon proves a systematic and permanent threat to persons.

The point is that we must strive to what is objectively good. And sometimes what is objectively good involves the acceptance of some pain.
Although it is easy to draw up a set of rules in the social sector, the need to validate these rules makes itself felt at every step. For the rules often run up against greater difficulties in practice than in theory, and we should be concerned above all with the practical, must seek ways of justifying them.

For the task is not only to command or forbid but to justify, to interpret, to explain, relying on the most elementary and incontrovertible truths and the most fundamental goods.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any." He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind." I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing-- and if they don't support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.

One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish BOTH kinds of results.

We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.

A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject.

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.

But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves--of having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis

No not God of the Gaps really and further analysis will not solve the problem.

What I meant by that was that some aspects of experimental results it distorts our notions of philosophy, that things either are or are not. It's all chaos out there. So if someone will try to show God exist or does not exist shall fail. We cannot have that type of certainty. What is important for me is some of the things christianity teaches. And mystic revelations are not part of that ok

So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science.

Probably only if you take a god-of-the-gaps stance. Things that currently have no explanation are ascribed to a supreme being. If this is not the reason you use, please explain, because I haven't come across one yet. I would be very interested, though.

I was not saying that. It is not the point that things that currently have no explanation are ascribed to a supreme being, that's not science, that's like a witchdoctor. However some of our understanding of the qualtum worls are like nothing that you have ever seen. People here want certainty, well forget about that. The notion of God does not give answers but some aspects of how things are gives us a specific type of God is the notion exists. That's how we can get at truth. At this moment it points to the type of God mentioned by Catholics and Muslims. The other types are all wrong.

During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas--which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked--or very little of it did.

But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO's, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.

Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how MUCH there was.

At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky slope below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.

One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beatiful girl sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude woman?"

I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, "I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?" "Sure," she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby. I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it," he says. "I feel a kind of dent--is that the pituitary?" I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!" They looked at me, horrified--I had blown my cover--and said, "It's reflexology!" I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.

You should quit your job and do real physics, the ones you cannot read in books. Books are only for students or laymen.
No not God of the Gaps really and further analysis will not solve the problem.

No, the notion of God is not false until proven, it is just and unreasonable and unnecessary notion. It serves no rational purpose.

Science (and philosophy and/or logic) never could give answers that a generic God is bunk, it only gives evidence of the fact that a specific God is bunk. The specific God of the 3 great monotheistic religions, as described in their foundational texts is bunk, not the God concept in it's broadest terms.

Faith is a substitute for thinking.

Is not unreasonable if you are doing Physics. That it is an unnecessary notion I don't know. That it is unnecessary to do things perhaps, but even so we must work with the restrictions and not really understanding how and why. I agree while science in no way disproves God, it does disprove a particular fundamentalist view of religions. In my opinion many people err in that they make the assumption that if the foundational texts are not inerrant then they fall apart. To base everthing on just one old musty book is not the right way to do things. Many people don't understand that.

Beacuse some people say the notion of God is false until proven. Others say science gave us the answer that God is bunk. Never understood that. I admit that some christians are only intertested in their convictions rather than their attitudes, which is a shame. Why should one only because he/she believes in God find any reason to be at best of their energies and skills.

Has a lot to do

Experimental evidence in the early part of this century have led that objects remain in wave-like quantum superposition until observed by a conscious human being--consciousness causes collapse of the wave function! The absurdity of this conclusion, in the 1930's Schroedinger devised his famous thought experiment. Schroedinger's point was that the conscious observer interpretation was incorrect.

The above suggests a quantum mind. While we can determine the probability of certain quantum events, we cannot give an answer as to which particular event will take place, or rather which event will have taken place after the experiment once the path has been recorded. This leaves a window for apparently random events, completely escaping our classical philosophy that tells us everything must be caused by something else.

Other explanations have been developed. David Bohm's theory avoids collapse (but raises other problems), and the "multiple worlds" view holds that each possibility in a superposition evolves into a new and separate universe. Modern physics describes environmental "decoherence," essentially saying that any interaction between a quantum system and the outside world causes loss of the quantum superposition with random choice of particular classical states. However there is no explanation for the fate of quantum superpositions which remain isolated from environment.

We now believe that intermediate between tiny quantum-scale systems and "large" cat-size systems some objective factor disturbs the superposition to cause collapse, or "objective reduction (OR)." For example the GRW theory (after its proponents Ghirardi, Rimini and Weber) suggests that as a quantum superposition grows to a critical number of particles in superposition (~1017), the system spontaneously reduces to classical states. Experimental evidence has not supported GRW. According to Roger Penrose the objective factor causing reduction is an intrinsic feature of space-time itself (quantum gravity).

So for now, we all have personal freedom about God.

Have you heard of Schrodinger's cat in Quantum Mechanics

Some ideas that worked cannot be proved

In physics we have a saying, why do you need to prove it if it works?

And anyway, kids like to feel important so if you give them responsibility and trust them a bit you can get good result. Is like training good dog, you begin when they are very tiny.

I been a swimming instructor and I did control 5 yr olds. You can convince them if you make it fun. Even 3 yr olds try to test you, but if you know how to play your cards well it should not be too difficult.

if u got kids u gotta look all around d corner to search 4 there clothes. oh and would u clean d house too? u gotta bend your back 4 that one.

Who said I will do that, look all around d corner to search 4 kids clothes. If it's not in the washing basket I'm not going to wash it. They will get the message after a week I think especially if they are teenagers. I like discipline in my family.

I am very organized. Most of the time I have to teach women actually.

Stopped talking about that,. Just to give you the complete picture that's all. Did not know why he did that?

yea so would u sincerely volunteer to do d laundry of d whole family?

What's the problem with that. You just put them in the washing machine right, turn a few knobs and there you go? Am not going to break my back or something

Yeah textiles are nice. Very elaborate and colourful I have to say. A pastor in LONDON was Nigerian and I have to say he did not like me very much. He thought I was the devil or something because I'm Italian. What can I do if we are born too hot. God bless my mother.