mitchellmckain

You know, if there is a correlation between homosexuality and a genetic factor, I would bet that it derives from a gene that plays a completely opposite role. I think it possible that there is a gene which is responsible for a negative physiological reaction to homosexual activity. The existence of a gene like this makes perfect sense in the context of evolution. The result would be two populations. One with a strong bias towards heterosexuality and the other with a greater freedom of choice. But personally, I think any such genetic factor cannot begin to compare to the power of psychology and experience. Bad experiences (single traumatic event or long term adversity) are quite capable of conditioning an adverse physiological response in sexuality. And of course, good experiences in non-sexual relationships or in sexual experimentation can condition positive physiological response. This phenomena is what I have been calling habit, and so I said that homosexuality is primarily a matter of choice and habit. As for Christianity, the laws about what is or is not acceptible to God is not the most important thing. The point is supposed to be that the laws are for all intent and purpose, impossible to live up to, sufficient to avoid condemnation. The Bible is available to all to read and understand for themselves. So you can come to your own conclusion about what is acceptable. That understanding will surely be flawed, but there is an even greater dillemna. The fact is that you will find yourself failing to live up to the standards that even you agree with, as long as you don't keep adjusting what you think is right to make what every you do acceptable. Ultimately, it is this fundamental flaw in human nature, which the christian message is really aimed at.

Here is another thought on the matter. If a so called homosexuality gene is found then a very large number of people would call it a genetic defect and treat it like an illness that ought to be cured. So I think that such a genetic predisposition is more likely to put homosexuality on an equal footing with the handicapped rather than with race or sex. I also think that this will do even more harm to our society, not to mention the horrors of parental attempts to cure homosexuality which could never succeed, because as I said before, there is no way that genetics is the determining factor in homosexuality.

Not really. Wouldn't it be a hoot if they isolated the gene responsible for a tendency to believe in God? Very nearly every aspect of human life has some genetic component, but that really isn't the question. The question is what is the determining factor. And it will never be proven that genetics is the determining factor in homosexuality because it simply isn't true. It is a fact of human existence that the human brain or mind is a many times more powerful influence in human behavior than anything genetic. However, I think a genetic predisposition for homosexuality is impossible. It runs counter to the process of evolution. Such genetics could never evolve and in fact evolutionary pressure would be entirely in the other direction. But then as I said before, genetics does not play a deternining role in human behavior. Which explains perfectly why some human beings behave in a way that is completely contrary to our genetics and evolution.

Hmmm.... This is sure getting way off topic. But this topic of the imortality of the soul is sure interesting to me. I thought I had found a big flaw in fundamentalist thinking about there being no immortal soul, when I realized that those who are not saved would have to be resurrected in order to be sent to hell. So I asked my pastor (Calvary Chapel) about this and he gave me the chapter and verse which confirms that yes people will indeed be resurrected in order to be sent to hell. Golly, I guess I will never be a fundamentalist no matter how hard I try. The complete lack of logic in this position baffles me. I can understand the extreme caution that lies behind this attitude that, if it isn't in the bible then it isn't true, and I can certainly appreciate the fear of following the doctrines of men. But I could never believe that the Bible hold all the truth there is. I certainly do not think that it gives a detailed description of the creation of the world or even comes close to explaining how God created the world. I tend toward thinking that this issue of the immortal soul is another area where the Bible is incomplete. 2nd Corintians 15 describes the the Spiritual body which certainly sounds like an immortal soul to me, although I suppose fundamentalists would say that this is the resurrected body. But I think their conclusion is driven by an exessive obsession with making everything in the Bible perfectly consistent. The perfect simplicity of the idea of the immortal soul or Spiritual body which is subject to certain natural laws that govern its existence, nature and fate, adds a tremendous amount of rationality to the Christian world view. I don't think it an issue worth doctrinal conflict and division but in the privacy of my own mind, I at least require this idea to keep hold of my own reason. If you will allow me to plunge into the world of my own opinion, I think that all living things have an immortal spiritual aspect that derives from the process of life itself, and is built stone by stone from the choices each living thing makes as a part of this process. But the question of whether this immortal spirit or soul exists and whether it is alive are two different things. Life for the soul must assuredly come from God alone, and thus a separation from God is spiritual death which is another name for hell. I find this much more rational than the idea of resurrecting people for the sole purpose of eternal suffering. I also fail to see any reasonable objection to my point of view other that the fact that it cannot be found in the Bible. Do you?

There are plenty of scientists who know a great deal more science than you do, yet they still believe in God. Now, this may be because the more you know of science the more you realize how little we know after all, but I don't think so. I think that no matter how much we learn the question of the existence of God will remain something that we will simply choose to believe or not. However, I think the only people who think that God is as you describe are atheists, for they have simply created this image for the purpose of ridicule. Tradition has it that God is an infinite being and therefore has no need of a creator. Now if you are thinking that as an explanation for the existence of the universe, this is very unsatisfying, then I agree with you. As an explanation for things God does not do a good job at all. But that is not the true role of God in the live of those who believe in him. Ah but matter is created all the time and even energy is not conserved absolutely. All these laws of physics have their exceptions. The current theory of the big bang put forward by the physics community is that this event created all of matter, space and time. Some even think that many of the physical laws of our universe were created at the same time as the result of a symmetry breaking phenomena. Of what science do you speak? The physical sciences are all about the mathematical relationship between measurable quantities. And the other sciences have yet to prove much of anything at all. For the most part they simply observe and record the results.

I just wanted you to know that even though I am a Christian, I agree with you 100%. The reason is probably because I am also a scientist. Creationism and intellegent design are not science, they are representative of a growing number of groups who try to clothe their religous or philosophical beliefs in the terminology and appearance of science. They have done this largely because of atheists or anti-theists who have clothed their religious or philosophical beliefs in science for nearly a century. This practice went unchallenged for too long, but more recent results in science and logic have invalidated this (Quantum mechanics and the unprovability of the consistency of mathematics by Kurt Godel). Science is now neutral on the issue as it should be. However, the damage is already done and true science has lost a great deal of credibility among the large portions of the public. This is why we see this rising pseudo-science, where science has been reduced to rhetoric. Scientist must and do guard the process of scientific discovery just as jealously as the Christians guard the life transforming message of Christianity. It is my dearest hope to heal the widening breach between them, which this issue of evolution versus creationism has become. The only way I can see this happening is for both to give up a little of their misconceptions. Evolution cannot be a deterministic, automatic or random process because it involves living things, which make choices creatively with both intention and purpose, with the input of teachers and caregivers. Creation cannot be design and manufacture when it involves living things, which learn things for themselves and determine what they will become, every step of the way, by means of their own choices. God created the world and everthing in it, but not as a watchmaker. How could anyone in their right mind compare our world to a smoothly running clockworks. God created created the world as the shepherd raises his sheep. The idiot sheep run astray constantly and some are injured despite the best the shepherd can do. Evolution in its simplest terms is just the plain fact that living things learn and make choices as whole population (genetic pool) as well as individually. It is driven by genetic variation which derives from the creative process inherent in all living things, both individually and as groups. The conflict between creation and evolution derives entirely from an inadequate understanding of the nature of living things. And this conflict will eventually fade as we learn more an more about ourselves.

This topic should be under Life Talk -> Religion and Philosophy where you will find the topic "Evolution or Creationism or niether. They believe that all living things have common ancestors but that humans have comon ancestors with primates in a more recent past than with other living creatures. I copy this from my last post in the topic mentioned above. So if you follow up from this point of view, we must ask what it truly means to be human. If all it takes is our bodies and we can behave as we please, then I think we are a bunch of apes and nothing more. But if there is something that God is trying to teach us and our thoughts, feelings and behavior also defines our humanity, then maybe we are a creation of God after all. Generally it is a choice between faith and reason. Evolution make some effort to appeal to reason. So if reason is what you are looking for you are not honestly going to find it in creationism. However the identification of human beings with evolving animals does a great deal of damage to the Christian world view and its faith. It is a matter of choosing which of these is worth more to you. For me faith wins hands down, and yet I stubbornly refuse to let go of reason. Me too, but I am also a scientist and a philospher. I want my cake and I want to eat it too.

My web page finally made it onto google. Thanks for all the help.

So religions are worse than governments. Governments start wars. Where was religion at the start of world war 2? And I suppose that religions are worse than companies. Companies cheat people out of money and profiteer from the suffering of millions of people. Oh, was that because of the religion that these companies subscribed to? What a load of crap. Open your eyes. Look at the world and its problems. There is a persistent cause running through it all the worst of it. It is human beings. Whether they are involved in government, or companies, or religous groups they never live up to their promises, and when you take a closer look you see the same sickness, hypocracy, and selfishness. The truth is that you are human being and you are so apalled by what you see that you want to shift the blame on some convenient scapegoat. The Nazi Germans tried that. Be careful. Denial is an easy way to become what you hate. Wow....... Deja vu...... like really .. Wow!I have heard this before somewhere...... Oh, now I remember. When Tibet welcomed the Chinese representatives after world war II, just before they proceeded to systematically exterminate their culture and everything they valued in their lives. I repect the fact that you have had unpleasant experiences with religious human beings. But tolerance, understanding and acceptance is the only answer.

Well christians are individual and diverse as non-christians. Which of these things you mention that they believe, their reasons for these beliefs and view of the bible all vary greatly. There are of course many who reflect less and simply repeat what they have been told, both christians and non-christians. To respond respond with what my beliefs are personally would a repetition of many other threads. So I will respond to the question, "How are your beliefs constructed?", with this: My beliefs are constructed by exploring the possibilities with all that I have heard from many sources and my own imagination and then judging which of these seems most compatible with reality as I have experienced it. And as I have explained in another thread that process tells me that homosexuality is an activity by choice and habit, not an illness (genetic or otherwise), not a sex like male or female, and not a race. It seems obvious therefore that the fight for gay-right can claim equal status with religious freedom but not with racial equality or woman's rights. Whether homosexulity is a sin or not in some religion or other is only the concern of those who subscribe to them. But, the political battle in this country between the religious and the gay activists has reached the status of war where compromise seems to be a lost cause. The excesses of both sides have created an atmosphere of fear, where few feel comfortable with losing any ground.

Of course the X-men is pure fantasy. But it still represents the old darwinistic thinking that the next stage of human evolution wil be some kind of super human, smarter or stronger than todays humans. It is this thinking that I am attacking, by showing what I consider to be a more likely alternative. This is of course exactly what I am saying. And I am saying that implications are far beyond anything we can possibly imagine. I am saying that the liberation of the handicaped will lead to a kind of supermen that we never imagined, but which could be just as profound and fantastic as those in X-men and The Fantastic Four. I see this possibility from parallelism with what happened in the same kind of shift of evolution from individual to community in our evolutionary past - like from single celled organisms to multicellular organisms. Ann McCaffrey has just tentatively begun to explore the possibilities in books like "The ship who sang" and "The city who fought". There may be others and I would love to hear about them.

Thank you everyone (Hraefn, Houdini, microscopic^earthling, vujsa, spacewaste, dukdalf) for your time, help and comments. Unlike most people on this forum I have never made a great deal of effort to learn html. So I apologize for being such a dunderhead. It looks like there were possibly overlapping reasons for not getting onto google. A misunderstanding of robot.txt function being one of them. But I ran the HTML Kit TIDY and fixed the html code as well according to all of your collective suggestions. And now I will try the Google link again, and I will try Gotlinks.Com as well.Thanks again.

Oh I pretty much agree with everything you say cyborgxxi. I dont think any computer program could ever be anything like intellegent life. But knowing whether intellegent life is possible in machines requires a bit more understanding of what intellegent life really is. As a christian I completely understand and sympathize where you are coming from. But I am a complex person, because I am also a scientist and a philosopher. If you believe that machine life is impossible as a matter of faith, I complete understand, and I don't expect you to answer any of the questions which follow. If you are interested in the rational then consider these questions. I would like to set aside the issue of being created by God, for the sake of those who do not accept this premise, for although this would be a sufficient distinction, those who don't accept the premise would think it begs the question. In the other distinctions you have listed I do not see why uniqueness and the ability to reproduce are out of the realm of possibility for machines. As for instincts, I have compared this to programming and you have not commented on this yet. As for the soul, I need some clarification of what you mean by this or think this is. Do I understand that you are saying that animals have them too? What exactly is a soul? The most interering to me is this free will you are talking about Is this free will something that can only be granted by God like a special exemption from the deterministic physical laws of the universe, or do you think that the physical laws might not be so deterministic as some think. In this second case, is it not possible that perfectly natural phenomena might partake of something like free will, and if so might it be possible for a machine to incorporate this phenomena and thereby have free will?

Sorry to repeat an old topic, but I haven't made any progress.It has been several months and despite several attempts to get my web site on google. Nothing. I am pretty sure if it was hosted at my old university the site would be on google within a week. My old outdated university website which I no longer have any control over is still there on google.In a few days I will be presenting my physics of space flight simulator at a conference of the American Association of Physics Teachers. I would really like to make some progress on this problem. I am now considering registering a domain name. The question is, will that help at all?I would really appreciate someone checking the website html if you think the problem is there. Or any other help? I have already tried submitting it to google and to some other topical listing sites months ago.

This is only one of the object being put forward recently as a 10th planet. 2003VB12 or Sedna is another one Sedna And here is another one called Quaoar. Quaoar No doubt as Mike Brown and his collegues continue to survey the Kuiper belt more such objects will be found. The search for planets around other stars which turned up these water bearing planets may be more interesting to some people. new planets

Well, cyborgxii I agree with your conclusion (and those of others here like kenjvalip and Jeiqh) to some extent if not your attitude. Robots as they exist today or even conceived of in the near future are just machines with out life or intellegence. They are tools and nothing more. But we can dig a little deeper in philosophy to ask what may ever be possible and what is the real difference? What is it, that if robots were ever to acquire it, would eventually cause them to considered equal with humans. As Jeiqh pointed out we do make humans by means of a biological function, so what is it that really makes us different. Is it just the inventory of and the properties of our internal organs? Is it just chemistry? Is it capabilities? All of these are frought with enormous ethical difficulties. Could robots ever be considered human? The question is only a natural part of an historical process. Only a few hundred years ago people in another country were not considered human, even women were not considered human. A few thousand years before that and anyone not a member of ones extended family was not considered human. It is only natural that this awareness has begun to extend tentatively even farther. Might there be aliens who are equal or even superior to humans? Might some of the animals on are planet share the distiction? And finally what about robots? Is intellegent life possible in machines?One area of greatest ignorance that we have is ourselves. What is it about us humans that we consider so worthwhile? What exactly are we? If we are so confident that we are better than the animals or robots, what makes us so? Isn't this the interesting philosophical question?

Now here is a topic I can really get into! The movie "AI" explores this question much better than "I robot".I believe that the key factor is "life" which is a medium independent process. I see no reason why life cannot exist in a machine medium. However, I do believe that to have life on the same order as human beings requires a similar learning process with a real environment which will require the same growing up time as a human being. Using a simulated environment for accelerated learning is still a sophisticated programing process, because the simulated environment will always be more limited than the real thing (no real human interaction for one thing). Therefore, I think that this learning time requirement can be used as a rough test of whether we have achieved this kind of human-like machine life. Without this learning time the robot is simply programmed, and as such will be a lower order of life. For comparison, animal life is largely programed by means of instincts. Initial programming limits the depth to which the learning process can go in determining the fundamental identity of the individual. But if an animal is trained or learns for years in the company of humans like a member of the family, perhaps this changes its status. I don't know.With the possibility of machine life comes the likely ability to copy individuals. How then do we measure the human-ness or personhood of these copies? We would have to say that the copies are no more than extensions of the first one, a bit like the images on a video phone. The copies partake of the human-ness of the original but have no real individuality from it. So, for example, destroying a copy would be only slightly more like murder than switching off a video phone (destroying the image). Animal life might also be considered to have a lower degree of individuality and more of a species level personhood than human beings because of the strong instinctual programming. Therefore causing the extinction of a species should be considered murder (or even worse than murder) even if killing the individual animals is considered less than murder. I think there is great moral ambiguity between which is worse: giving a livestock a rich life (and humanizing them to some degree) before murding them or the dehumanizing factories which don't bother.Why do I talk so much about murder here? Well isn't that real question? What is the moral equivalence between scrapping the robot and the murder of a human being? It has been said that the murder of a human being is like destroying a whole world. What would it take to make a robot like a world?

It think it is pretty clear that we are walking on a razor's edge. Technology keeps increasing the destructive power of the single individual and individuals continue to show that there plenty who have the will to use that power to destroy everything. Life does not offer much security except to the deluded. It is nothing new. Life is still a jungle and survival is an everyday issue, but the scope and stakes may have changed. It is now the whole human race and even the whole planet that survives on the barest thread of hope and faith.

What drives me? Just about everything. Movies, books, games, programming, teaching, the internet, physics, ... the list is endless. If it wasn't one thing it would be another. To be bored or unhappy shows a great lack of imagination (or illness, of course). When Marx declared that value comes from work, what a load of crap. It all comes from imagination which is the creative essence of living things.What sucks all the joy and interest out of life are unimaginative people, and the worst are those who decide that the best they can come up with is killing other people. And there are those who sacrifice the well being of others for dumb things like money and power, which is still a pretty pathetic use of imagination.People with which to share the things we and they create is what makes it all dynamic and alive - growing without limit. Without others our imagination which might seem a personal thing becomes a pretty dry place. But even alone and cut off from modern society I think that my own imagination would suffice to drive me and make life enjoyable and worthwhile.

Yes that is right, accept that you should say near lightspeed, say 99.9999995% of light speed, which is close enough to make a 10 light year voyage last only a third of a day. So why not accept this fact and envision the future of space travel that this implies rather than making up ridiculous fantasies about space empires and such. Like maybe we don't need government in space. Let there be exploration and settlement and leave each other alone, which sounds good to me. What is it that people find so hard to let go of? Yes and Star Trek had these transporters that take apart your atoms and reassemble them at your destination. All these ideas sound like fun science fiction, but there is no science or technology to make us think that any such thing will ever exist. In fact, relativity tells us that if such means did exist for large distances we would have the same kind of paradoxes that we have in time travel (You know killing your mother before you were born). So all these fantasies still require that relativity be wrong somehow. There is not even a good idea in this one, just technobabble to impress those who know a little about quantum physics, but not enough.

One of my points in starting this forum is because I peceive that a lot of the resistance to relativity was due to a lack of understanding of it. People dont understand that relativity is not an obstical to star travel. Just because we cannot go faster than the speed of light does not mean that we cannot go to the stars as quickly as we want. According to relativity we can cross the galaxy in seconds. It is just that we cannot expect to make it home for dinner afterwards. This is inaccurate. What breaks down is local realism. This is really a comination of things like the speed of light and determinism. But the weak link here is determinism not the speed of light. Some people cling stubbornly enough to determinism for philosophical reasons that they would rather toss the limit to the speed of light. But all of scientific evidence and logical consistency suggest it is determism that does not hold, and that the speed of light is unbreakable. Scientist now discard all unified field theories which have tachions (which go faster than light) as evidence that these theories are wrong. This is simple untrue. Bell's experiments does show that there is a connectedness to the universe which exceeds the speed of light but it connot be used to transmit information. There is no way to send a message faster than the speed of light. As much as some people would like this to be true. It is not. This is a misuse of the results of quantum mechanics. It absurd to think that consciousness is the determining factor in quantum mechanics that leads the existence of cats which are both dead and alive at the same time. However, with the downfall of determinism, of which quantum mechanics is definite evidence, science can no longer be used as a blunt club to disprove or scoff at the belief in that mental consciousness interacts directly with matter. I am afraid not. Massless objects travel at the speed of light. Nothing can go faster that the speed of light because it is really an infinite speed. To go faster than the speed of light is logically equivalent to traveling backwards in time. I have no objection to this. I believe there are such things as esp and such. I also believe that there very nature will always make them somewhat unreliable. We may one day be able to travel to distant galaxies with esp or something but I think that we will never be able to prove that we have done so.

Very interesting quote. I am very much want to know where you got it. I like to see the context of such quotes. I have seen many of Einstein's quotes misused terribly.

This is a good and accurate description. Perhaps this will clear up a few things for anyone who did not get what I was saying. I am glad it all makes simple sense to you. Other people have a harder time. I am an educator as well as a physicist and it is my job to unravel the difficulties and not just say how simple it really is. My question was posed in the language of common sense, because that is the way most people think. You cannot educate by simply speaking your own special (physics) language and expect all people to understand it. I would be careful about starting a fight here by questioning how well other people understand something just because they don't understand it the same way you do. If you want to talk about real understanding, well then the only language suitable for relativity is mathematics. Real understanding of relativity is being able to do the math. Show me a solution to a problem to show me your credentials and point out the errors in my math to make a valid criticism. Otherwise your just talking some philosophy of relativity (some meta-physics), and in that case your only authority can come from how well you argue your case, not how well you can put down your opponent.

No one suggested going at the speed of light. The question again is what is the limitation that relativity imposes upon space travel. How soon can you get to a star 10 light years away? It is a myth that scientist are eventually proven wrong by later scientists. If that were true why do we still teach Newton's physics in school. It was never proved wrong. It was merely improved upon. I think the same is the case with Relativity. It will never be proven wrong. Something that works so well for so long doesn't get disproved.

If you disallow everythingUser-agent: *Disallow: /this does not block the web crawlers from your index.html, right? It just blocks them from indexing the directory contents, right?