The Darwinian Mob

[Greylorn Ell]

Wow, you couldn't have thought of a word besides "beon"? How typical. And your notions of the magical beon mind are ridiculous. I will say no more. Are you one of those fools who believes in free will, too?

Not a crack-pot, but crack-head, run-of-the-mill backwoods bigot with delusional personality disorder. You couldn't pay me money to read your drivel, after hearing about your beon theory I have made up my mind, for good or for ill. You want to cut, I can cut deeper, far deeper than you're willing to bend. I enjoy pain, whereas you enjoy your silly little superbowl games, you crave and need the respect and admiration of your fellows, don't you? It must really hurt when we say mean things to you...doesn't it? Especially when you spent 50 years of your life into one little book, us calling it rubbish...ouch! And what's the deal with putting your name at the end of every post? How old-fashioned is that? This is the internet, there's already built in username linking attached to each post. I guess over in Arizona there's a lot of fetal alcohol syndrome resurfacing from the ages, rearing it's ugly head for all to see.

Based on that recommendation, I think i'll see if I can find a copy of the book to read.

No skin off my back. When you're done, let us know if it's as rubbish as we suspect it is, cuz I'm not wasting any time and money on the matter. Also, I suspect the positive 5 star reviews are just alt accounts of his, so fair warning (I could sense his trademark pent up frustration and anger bleeding from the fake reviews). Truth is, I wanted to read his book until he threw a tantrum at me for no reason, in addition with posting stupid things all over my threads, so good riddance, honestly. I doubt someone who doesn't know what the word "framerate" means has the answers of the universe, but if you want to do our dirty homework for us, who am I to intervene?

"Trixie,"

I do believe in free will, but not for everyone. Most people have only the option to react according to their brain's programs, which are entirely driven by emotion. Free will is not an option for any machine, such as the brain. That option is only available to a non-created self-aware entity, as beon is defined.

No, I could not come up with a better word. The word "beon" expresses existence (the "be" component) and a fundamentally primitive nature (the "-on" suffix, applied to fundamental atomic particles like proton, electron, meson, gluon, etc.). As such, beon is the perfect word to name the fundamental component of self-awareness and conscious thought.

I may not be quite the bigot you think. One of my friends is gay, and I'll be meeting him this Sunday when he flies in from NYC. Given my paucity of friends, one represents a large percentage. I'm firmly heterosexual, of course.

I have no issues with transsexuals, although I think that taxpayer funded gender manipulations for incarcerated felons is a ridiculous thing. Until encountering and outing you as "not a female," I figured that "trannies" were merely average, and therefore non-interesting people. You've confirmed my opinion. I've had several gay and lesbian friends back when I lived in the city, and on the occasions where we discussed sexual proclivities, their universal opinion is to stick with the body you have and adjust your tastes and actions accordingly. I've also been told that men with an ersatz pussy still smell like a guy.

Whatever, now that we know what closet you came out of, welcome to the forum. Do let us know how the pussy and stuff is working out for you.

I looked up framerate and discovered that the word is French. I completely failed to recognize it. Je ne sais pas pourquoi. Google thoughtfully brought up another option, "frame rate," words that I've never seen concatenated. Perhaps that's what you meant. I don't really give a shit, so perhaps we can drop this irrelevant point.

Finally, I have not written any of the Amazon reviews, not even the bad ones. That would be cheating, and I dislike winning that way, having tried it successfully once. I prefer knowing my real score, however low it is. I once frequented a big-city dance hall and would always arrive at opening time, so that I could dance before the floor became cluttered with drunks. When I saw the bartender's tip jar half full of bills before he'd poured a single drink, I declined to contribute. When it was honestly (but rarely) empty, I helped fill it.

Two of the 5-star reviews were written by a pharmacist on the east coast who likes physics, and a mathematician in Seattle. I now have frequent conversations with the mathematician, who is teaching me some principles of abstract math. The other was written by a personal friend, at my behest, because the book changed his life. It contains instructions about how to read the book from an old email of mine, probably verbatim, so those will be my words, my style. He had difficulty with the material at first, and following those instructions he was able to understand it easily. He felt that it was important to include those instructions for potential readers.

The other reviews were not mine either, and it was from those that I developed the reading instructions. The one-star review was clearly from someone who had not read the book at all. I agree with all the reviewers, and readers who have given me personal feedback, that my political opinions detracted from the material.

You would find the theories a useful perspective from which to examine your personal proclivities and choices, but I honestly do not think that you are ready to comprehend advanced metaphysical ideas at this point in your life. Someday, perhaps.

Be well, be real, find happiness.

Greylorn

[GreatandWiseTrixie]

Greylorn

Still as daft and obtuse as always I'll see. Thanks for wasting my time, yet again, but I feel compelled to correct ignorance when I see it.

First of all, your theory of magical beon is one of the most ridiculous pieces of fairy tale nonsense I've heard in a while, even putting the Bible to shame in terms of sheer fairy tail ability. I suggest you lay off the alcohol for a very long while.

You seem like a very worldy man, obsessed with trite pleasures of the flesh, with your incessant talk of vaginoplasty and other materialistic things. If there's one thing I can guess, is that your book offers a very materialistic worldview with little to no truth or wisdom in-between the lines.

Your concerns of transsexuals are no consequence to me. You seem preoccupied with smells and other ridiculous nonsense that has no bearing on anything worthwhile. You did a poor job of convincing me you aren't a bigot, in fact your words add more insult to injury, there is no doubt in my mind just how much of a bigot you are. It's plain to see, and having a token gay friend you brag about here and there doesn't make you "cool" in my book. You are still an uncivilized, backwoods america creton to me, with a fairy tale explanation of the universe, even outdoing religion in terms of sheer absurdity, you are nothing more than this to me. As for "outing" me, you can think whatever deluded beliefs you want, because you still hold on to your notion that the voice clip in my video was my own, when I already stated it was not. I suggest staying away from whatever drugs you're taking and trying some other method to get rid of your own senile delusions. If you can't parse the word "framerate" without resorting to google, perhaps a retirement home is where you belong. I doubt your book about fairy tale nonsense has any metaphysical value, but just to see your reaction I'd like to hear Richard Dawkins rip it apart, on live TV, for my own amusement.

[Greylorn Ell]

Greylorn

...I doubt your book about fairy tale nonsense has any metaphysical value, but just to see your reaction I'd like to hear Richard Dawkins rip it apart, on live TV, for my own amusement.

"Trixie,"

I'm sure that Dawkins could do that-- but only if I was not personally invited to the debate. He won't have the balls for such a confrontation, which I would welcome. It would cost him his reputation.

Surely you meant "cretin" rather than creton? Perhaps you meant "crouton," but that wouldn't have made sense either. So you don't look up words highlighted by the spell-checker, and you certainly do not bother to understand ideas you criticize. That makes you typical, average, ordinary, plus sexually confused and mean-spirited. In a word, not interesting. Goodbye.

Greylorn

[GreatandWiseTrixie]

Greylorn

...I doubt your book about fairy tale nonsense has any metaphysical value, but just to see your reaction I'd like to hear Richard Dawkins rip it apart, on live TV, for my own amusement.

"Trixie,"

I'm sure that Dawkins could do that-- but only if I was not personally invited to the debate. He won't have the balls for such a confrontation, which I would welcome. It would cost him his reputation.

Surely you meant "cretin" rather than creton? Perhaps you meant "crouton," but that wouldn't have made sense either. So you don't look up words highlighted by the spell-checker, and you certainly do not bother to understand ideas you criticize. That makes you typical, average, ordinary, plus sexually confused and mean-spirited. In a word, not interesting. Goodbye.

Greylorn

As fem as Dawkins appears to be, I'd say his balls dwarf yours in comparison. Woohoo, you found a typo of mine. What a dweeb, correcting minor typos makes you some average online dweeby grammarprick. I am not at all any of the things you say. Average - that's you, you watch superbowls. Ordinary - it's ordinary to be a dumb bigot in Arizona. I'm not sexually confused, - that's you, you don't even know anything about gender sexuality, and you're just confused, period, about a great many things. In a moment, I'll explain exactly what you are confused about, but first, I have to point how stupid you are, for not knowing the meaning of the acronym "GFY" I used to degrade you earlier. I'll have to blame than on extreme autism, and by autism I mean something on the far low end of the spectrum.

As for the other things, you don't seem to have a basic understanding of how the human body or mind works. Like the inner machinations of the Universe would ever come from some football watching, grammar policing, typo watching anal retentive, sex obsessed, senile old bigot from backwoods Arizona, wow.

You don't know how the human body works. If you did, you wouldn't have made the stupid remark about how transsexuals smell like men. The body changes it's smell based on hormones. This is basic stuff.

About the mind, how it works. More basic stuff. There is no "mystical force" of creative thought. How utterly ridiculous. The mind assimilates various material. Some things are embedded into DNA patterns, other things are learned. Show me any artist with a mystical force of creativity that somehow has magical "beons" and I'll show you the door.
Seriously. I don't even know how you made it 50 years writing something so stupid. True american, hard-headed, everything or nothing, chips on the table, no going back, "stick to your guns no matter how wrong" dedication, I guess.

As far as me being mean-spirited, and feeding off of negative energy I'm not even going to comment about that. It's so humorous that the joke is completely over your head. You, on the other hand, run around like a a haywire headless machine, bumbling into walls sparking about and on fire, with some deluded notion that acting like a general jackass, calling girls offensive things and reaching conclusions so brainless only the truly braindead would ever attempt, that your senile male american mind thinks we are going to sit back, giggle, and become your loyal associates or something. Oh don't worry, I'm giggling alright, but it's not with you, but at you and how retarded you truly are.

[Systematic]

"Is there a greater gesture of intellectual contempt than the notion that a tweet constitutes an adequate intervention in a serious discussion? But when Thomas Nagel’s formidable book Mind and Cosmos recently appeared, in which he has the impudence to suggest that “the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false,” and to offer thoughtful reasons to believe that the non-material dimensions of life—consciousness, reason, moral value, subjective experience—cannot be reduced to, or explained as having evolved tidily from, its material dimensions, Steven Pinker took to Twitter and haughtily ruled that it was “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker.” Fuck him, he explained."
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/1124 ... hilosopher

I would be interested in reading this book and discussing it in this thread. Will you join me?

OMG. That book must be true. Look how long it is. LOL #longsciencebook

[Systematic]

Still as daft and obtuse as always I'll see. Thanks for wasting my time, yet again, but I feel compelled to correct ignorance when I see it.

That way we can all tell that it is BS.

[Ginkgo]

"Is there a greater gesture of intellectual contempt than the notion that a tweet constitutes an adequate intervention in a serious discussion? But when Thomas Nagel’s formidable book Mind and Cosmos recently appeared, in which he has the impudence to suggest that “the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false,” and to offer thoughtful reasons to believe that the non-material dimensions of life—consciousness, reason, moral value, subjective experience—cannot be reduced to, or explained as having evolved tidily from, its material dimensions, Steven Pinker took to Twitter and haughtily ruled that it was “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker.” Fuck him, he explained."
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/1124 ... hilosopher

I would be interested in reading this book and discussing it in this thread. Will you join me?

OMG. That book must be true. Look how long it is. LOL #longsciencebook

Nagel is more than likely a property dualist. If this were the case then he would be of the opinion that you cannot get consciousness emerging from complex substances. This would be regardless of how complexity arose in the first place. This immediately puts him at odds with both physicalists and materialists.

[Systematic]

Greylorn

If there's one thing I can guess, is that your book offers a very materialistic worldview with little to no truth or wisdom in-between the lines.

Oh come now. Myths always have great truths and wisdom; otherwise people aren't fooled by the lies.

[Systematic]

"Is there a greater gesture of intellectual contempt than the notion that a tweet constitutes an adequate intervention in a serious discussion? But when Thomas Nagel’s formidable book Mind and Cosmos recently appeared, in which he has the impudence to suggest that “the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false,” and to offer thoughtful reasons to believe that the non-material dimensions of life—consciousness, reason, moral value, subjective experience—cannot be reduced to, or explained as having evolved tidily from, its material dimensions, Steven Pinker took to Twitter and haughtily ruled that it was “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker.” Fuck him, he explained."
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/1124 ... hilosopher

I would be interested in reading this book and discussing it in this thread. Will you join me?

OMG. That book must be true. Look how long it is. LOL #longsciencebook

Nagel is more than likely a property dualist. If this were the case then he would be of the opinion that you cannot get consciousness emerging from complex substances. This would be regardless of how complexity arose in the first place. This immediately puts him at odds with both physicalists and materialists.

You mean complex substances like our brains? I'm not going to assume that spirits don't exist, but how do you deny that nearly trillion-celled organ between our ears? Maybe he should check out those people who have been lobotomized by brain injury. S.P.E.C.T. scan and M.R.I. brain scan time. Don't you just love how reality is demonstrable, assuming that you are not an ultra-skeptic.

[Ginkgo]

You mean complex substances like our brains? I'm not going to assume that spirits don't exist, but how do you deny that nearly trillion-celled organ between our ears? Maybe he should check out those people who have been lobotomized by brain injury. S.P.E.C.T. scan and M.R.I. brain scan time. Don't you just love how reality is demonstrable, assuming that you are not an ultra-skeptic.

Yes. The brain is a substance that can have two properties. These properties describe the physical substance. That is to say, physical properties and "spiritual" properties. Obviously, property dualists would be unhappy with the term, "spirit". Instead they talk about such things as "feelings" and/or "emotions". I thought I would keep your analogy going for a bit.

Naturally, materialists would reject this idea and claim that physical substances only have physical properties. When you look at M.I.R imaging you are looking at the mind in action. The mind is the brain, and that's all it is.

Assuming that Nagel is a property dualist of some type this raises an interesting question. Does property dualism show that neo-Darwinism is false?

[GreatandWiseTrixie]

Oh yeah, one more thing I'd like to ask Greylorn.

Dear Greylorn,

I'm not one to worship the folly of academia, or become awe struck at medals or diplomas stating "PhD" hanging on walls.

But, you don't seem to know how the human body works, you don't seem to know how the human mind works, you say you don't know math, and based on your interactions with the forums you don't seem to know basic human psychology. So what exactly, did you get a PhD, in, exactly?

[Greylorn Ell]

You mean complex substances like our brains? I'm not going to assume that spirits don't exist, ...The mind is the brain, and that's all it is.

Ginkgo & Sys...

You two are kicking around an old can that has been up and down the road for centuries, since Descartes. May I offer an alternative perspective?

Consider the old "soul" of religious lore in a modern perspective. If it is something that interacts with the human brain in a meaningful manner, it must be physical by definition. Whatever interacts with something that is physical is itself also physical.

I've renamed soul as "beon" to assist with this distinction.

Next consider the possibility that the soul/beon/whatever is not an entity created by an almighty God for the purpose of fawning worship, but is a non-created entity with the potential for consciousness.

In this context, consider the possibility that the brain was engineered to assist beon in the development of consciousness. This is a difficult process. In most cases, brains rule and beon kind of goes along for the ride. Now and then (in about 3% of the population, if psychological experiments on divergence and mental integrity are close to the mark) some beons will actually acquire a sufficient level of consciousness to take charge of their brains and their lives.

Just stuff to consider should either of you grow weary of batting old, soft philosophical tennis balls back and forth upon a centuries-old court.

Greylorn

[GreatandWiseTrixie]

You mean complex substances like our brains? I'm not going to assume that spirits don't exist, ...The mind is the brain, and that's all it is.

Ginkgo & Sys...

You two are kicking around an old can that has been up and down the road for centuries, since Descartes. May I offer an alternative perspective?

Consider the old "soul" of religious lore in a modern perspective. If it is something that interacts with the human brain in a meaningful manner, it must be physical by definition. Whatever interacts with something that is physical is itself also physical.

I've renamed soul as "beon" to assist with this distinction.

Next consider the possibility that the soul/beon/whatever is not an entity created by an almighty God for the purpose of fawning worship, but is a non-created entity with the potential for consciousness.

In this context, consider the possibility that the brain was engineered to assist beon in the development of consciousness. This is a difficult process. In most cases, brains rule and beon kind of goes along for the ride. Now and then (in about 3% of the population, if psychological experiments on divergence and mental integrity are close to the mark) some beons will actually acquire a sufficient level of consciousness to take charge of their brains and their lives.

Just stuff to consider should either of you grow weary of batting old, soft philosophical tennis balls back and forth upon a centuries-old court.

Greylorn

Hmm, whatever. You might be right about beons, but you're still a moron for other reasons...Also, how on earth did you come up with such a silly name for it.

[uwot]

Isn't the idea that gravitational force on mass and e/m is a form of refraction (with space itself acting as the lens) kind of included in General Relativity? That was a pretty good theory, as you claim.

It's a very good theory, but while it's true that astronomers talk about gravitational lensing, the mechanism that Einstein proposed was a material, spacetime, that is warped by mass; he didn't explain how though.

My view is that if you take a position of realism, ie the universe is made of some 'stuff', combine it with some version of the Big Bang, then the universe is made of Big Bang stuff.
The argument goes that since Big Bang stuff expands/grows/spreads out, then so do fundamental particles.
The reason we don't experience this is that particles are knots/twists/accretions of the Big Bang stuff that act as point sources of Big Bang stuff; the universe is flowing out of them.
The 'energy' we experience, e/m for instance, is waves in Big Bang stuff.
E/m waves demonstrably move slower in denser media.
Big Bang stuff is denser the closer to point sources or collections thereof: fundamental particles, atoms, you, me, planets and stars, and hence waves passing through are refracted.
The way the density of Big Bang stuff falls with distance is consistent with Newton's Inverse Square Law, and if you start moving things around, you get they consequences of the Doppler effect associated with Relativity.
The reason we experience 'weight' is that the fundamental particles we are made of are tumbling over each other; in other words they spend some of their time travelling perpendicular to the main source of Big Bang stuff, in our case the Earth.
For simplicity we can just think in terms of left and right, but in both cases they experience refraction towards the Earth; downwards, if you like.
This implies that gravity is a localised effect and that once the density falls below a particular value, the expansion/growth/spreading out of Big Bang stuff becomes repellent and accelerates the recession of distant objects, a bit like dark energy.
It is nice story, but I have no idea whether it is true. For all I know it was created by beon and as for where consciousness or soul fits in, I haven't a clue. You'd be better off asking Ginkgo, he knows way more about that stuff than me.

I will try and read your book, but I'm very pressed for time and will struggle to give it the attention you say it needs any time soon.

[Greylorn Ell]

Isn't the idea that gravitational force on mass and e/m is a form of refraction (with space itself acting as the lens) kind of included in General Relativity? That was a pretty good theory, as you claim.

It's a very good theory, but while it's true that astronomers talk about gravitational lensing, the mechanism that Einstein proposed was a material, spacetime, that is warped by mass; he didn't explain how though.

My view is that if you take a position of realism, ie the universe is made of some 'stuff', combine it with some version of the Big Bang, then the universe is made of Big Bang stuff.
The argument goes that since Big Bang stuff expands/grows/spreads out, then so do fundamental particles.
The reason we don't experience this is that particles are knots/twists/accretions of the Big Bang stuff that act as point sources of Big Bang stuff; the universe is flowing out of them.
The 'energy' we experience, e/m for instance, is waves in Big Bang stuff.
E/m waves demonstrably move slower in denser media.
Big Bang stuff is denser the closer to point sources or collections thereof: fundamental particles, atoms, you, me, planets and stars, and hence waves passing through are refracted.
The way the density of Big Bang stuff falls with distance is consistent with Newton's Inverse Square Law, and if you start moving things around, you get they consequences of the Doppler effect associated with Relativity.
The reason we experience 'weight' is that the fundamental particles we are made of are tumbling over each other; in other words they spend some of their time travelling perpendicular to the main source of Big Bang stuff, in our case the Earth.
For simplicity we can just think in terms of left and right, but in both cases they experience refraction towards the Earth; downwards, if you like.
This implies that gravity is a localised effect and that once the density falls below a particular value, the expansion/growth/spreading out of Big Bang stuff becomes repellent and accelerates the recession of distant objects, a bit like dark energy.
It is nice story, but I have no idea whether it is true. For all I know it was created by beon and as for where consciousness or soul fits in, I haven't a clue. You'd be better off asking Ginkgo, he knows way more about that stuff than me.

I will try and read your book, but I'm very pressed for time and will struggle to give it the attention you say it needs any time soon.

Uwot,

You wrote, "My view is that if you take a position of realism, ie the universe is made of some 'stuff', combine it with some version of the Big Bang, then the universe is made of Big Bang stuff. "

I agree absolutely with you that the universe is made of stuff. However, although I am not qualified to trundle through the various mathematical schemes that have tried to model the Big Bang and justify the current cosmological bullshit, it is clear to me, and ought to be clear to anyone with a three-digit IQ, that the plethora of theories attempting to mathematically justify the BB indicates that the theory sucks.

Of course there must be a beginning, but I agree with Roger Penrose that a universe beginning at very low entropy is a troublesome concept. I also find that Big Bang theory is functionally identical to the omnipotent God theory-- both representative of low-entropy beginnings.

Therefore Beon Theory takes an entirely different approach to the beginnings of things, assuming that the initial state of the universe was at Entropy One.

You appear to be well qualified to understand it, provided that you take it slowly and ask questions. The only difficult part will come as you try to deal with the extreme conflict between my ideas and those you've adopted via the science-agreement system.

There is no difficult material anywhere in the book. Even my editor, a word and people person who had not taken a single high school math or science course, made perfect sense of my physics explanations. Perhaps because she had not been programmed to believe in contrary bullshit.

A chapter weekly will make it an easy read, giving you some time to consider the alternative ideas you will find along the way. Except for a few of the later chapters on Darwinism and physics. These should be perused a section or two at a reading, or whatever works for you.

Reading a book that is guaranteed to challenge your fundamental beliefs is a very difficult undertaking. Should you choose to accept the challenge, I'll do my best to assist.

I'm not going to comment on the rest of your post because I'm not interested in conventional physics beliefs. No point in trying to discuss them without an alternative paradigm. Perhaps, you'll come to understand this later. Or not.

Greylorn