Ezine Excellere Number
79
1.- Of human nature (something to rock etc)...........By Creationist Charles
2.- The IRAS incident.................By Nick Obre.
3.-Orbits and gravity..................Darth Vader.
4.- Miscellaneus............................By Doctor Farthom Climbor.
2010. April.
Chile, The land of earthquakes and tsunamis.
Content:
A Treatise of Human Nature Book I, Part 4,
Section 6
SECTION VI: OF PERSONAL IDENTITY
Approximately 90% or more of neural function is subliminal.
That includes the small virtual reality representation of 'self'.
'Consciousness' (another virtual representation) is a very small
part of that information structure. Thus to be 'conscious'
of 'self' is minor and only pragmatic.
Deceit works, even 'self' deceit.
Freud's unconscious is making a comeback in evolutionary science;
<a
href="http://tinyurl.com/ydfdrlh">Evo</a>
But to the point are you more or less agreeing with Hume that the
self
is not just one thing/substance but a "bundle of impressions
one after
the other and hence human identity of self is a long series of
near
identical clones that give the belief or have the belief that
they are
each the actual person and the others are clones if anything?
Bundle theory, originated by the 18th century Scottish
philosopher
David Hume, is the ontological theory about objecthood in which
an
object consists only of a collection (bundle) of properties,
relations, or tropes.
According to bundle theory, an object consists of its properties
and
nothing more, thus neither can there be an object without
properties
nor can one even conceive of such an object. For example, bundle
theory claims that thinking of an apple compels one also to think
of
its color, its shape, the fact that it is a kind of fruit, its
cells,
its taste, or at least one other of its properties. Thus, the
theory
asserts that the apple is no more than the collection of its
properties. In particular, there is no substance in which the
properties inhere.
<a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundle_theory">Bundle</a><p>
The self: bundles and beliefs
There are at least two broadly different ways of interpreting
Hume’s
views on personal identity, and these will be presented here.
According to the first view, Hume was a bundle theorist, who held
that
the self is nothing but a bundle of interconnected perceptions.
This
view is forwarded by, for example, Positivist interpreters, who
saw
Hume as attempting to specify the “sense-contents”
(roughly, bits of
sensory-experience) that we refer to when we talk about the
self.[49]
This account draws on Hume’s remarks that a person is “a
bundle or
collection of different perceptions”.[50][51] A modern day
version of
the bundle theory of the mind has been advanced by Derek
Parfit.[52]
However, some have criticised the bundle theory interpretation of
Hume
on personal identity. Some account for Hume’s talk of people
being
bundles of perceptions as figurative, and raise the problem for
such a
view (at least in its basic form) that it is difficult to specify
what
it is that makes a bundle of perceptions the perceptions of a
distinct
person (for it seems that we can have similar perceptions to one
another, and that the interconnections between our own
perceptions
(such as causal connections) can be shared with others’
perceptual
states too).[53]
An alternative theory is that Hume is answering an
epistemological
question about the cause of people forming judgements or beliefs
about
the existence of the self.[54] In support of this interpretation
we
can point to passages that use causal terminology: “What
then gives us
so great a propension to ascribe an identity to these successive
perceptions, and to suppose ourselves possest of an invariable
and
uninterrupted existence thro' the whole course of our lives?”[55]
The problem on this way of reading Hume, then, is that experience
is
interrupted and ever-changing, but somehow causes us to form a
concept
of a constant self which is the subject of these experiences. And
Hume’s answer on this account is that it is the same
interconnections
and relations between perceptions that force the imagination to
believe in the existence of mind-independent objects. He
effectively
argues, we cannot make sense of the notion of objects existing
independently of ourselves unless we have an idea of 'ourself' as
something that occasionally becomes aware of these objects. So
the
human mind, or consciousness, is thus conceived of as a field of
experience into which various different objects appear and then
disappear: "the true idea of the human mind, is to consider
it as a
system of different perceptions or different existences, which
are
link'd together by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually
produce, destroy, influence, and modify each other."[56]
Objection one: your position assumes without evidence that the
Borg
know something.
Objection two: the probability of either receiving an some reward
or
of receiving a punishment, is so small that these possible
outcomes of
belief or disbelief can be discounted.
Objection three: we cannot choose our beliefs. We form our
beliefs on
the basis of evidence, not on the basis of desire. No matter how
much
one may want to believe that a given proposition is true, one
cannot
bring oneself to do so simply through an act of will. Rather, in
order
for one to come to believe that a proposition is true one
requires
evidence for its truth.
Pascal’s Wager seeks to justify Christian faith by
considering the
various possible consequences of belief and disbelief in the God
of
Christianity. If we believe in the Christian God, the argument
runs,
then if he exists then we will receive an infinitely great reward
in
heaven while if he does not then we will have lost little or
nothing.
If we do not believe in the Christian God, the argument
continues,
then if he exists then we will receive an infinitely great
punishment
in hell while if he does not then we will have gained little or
nothing. The possible outcomes of belief in the Christian God,
then,
are on balance better than the possible outcomes of disbelief in
the
Christian God. It is better to either receive an infinitely great
reward in heaven or lose little or nothing than it is to either
receive an infinitely great punishment in hell or gain little or
nothing.
The conclusion that Pascal’s Wager draws from this is that
belief in
the Christian God is the rational course of action, even if there
is
no evidence that he exists. If the Christian God does not exist
then
it is of little importance whether we believe or disbelieve in
him. If
the Christian God does exist then it is of great importance that
we do
believe in him. In order to cover ourselves in all circumstances,
therefore, we ought to believe that the Christian God exists. A
formal
statement of this argument might be constructed as follows:
Pascal’s Wager
(1) It is possible that the Christian God exists and it is
possible
that the Christian God does not exist.
(2) If one believes in the Christian God then if he exists then
one
receives an infinitely great reward and if he does not exist then
one
loses little or nothing.
(3) If one does not believe in the Christian God then if he
exists
then one receives an infinitely great punishment and if he does
not
exist then one gains little or nothing.
(4) It is better to either receive an infinitely great reward or
lose
little or nothing than it is to either receive an infinitely
great
punishment or gain little or nothing.
Therefore:
(5) It is better to believe in the Christian God than it is to
disbelieve in the Christian God.
(6) If one course of action is better than another then it is
rational
to follow that course of action and irrational to follow the
other.
Therefore:
(7) It is rational to believe in the Christian God and irrational
to
disbelieve in the Christian God.
Three common objections to this argument will be considered here.
A
more detailed discussion of each can be found by following the
appropriate link.
OBJECTION 1:
The first of these objections targets the third premise of the
argument as it is stated above. It is the objection that Pascal’s
Wager illicitly assumes a Christian view of the criteria for
entrance
into heaven, i.e. it illicitly assumes that if there are infinite
rewards and punishments to be had then they will be distributed
on the
basis of belief or disbelief in the Christian god. There are many
possible ways in which such rewards and punishments might be
distributed; they might be distributed on the basis of belief in
the
Christian God, or on the basis of good deeds, or on the basis of
belief in the Muslim God, for instance. In fact, distribution of
heavenly rewards and infernal punishments on almost any basis
imaginable appears to be possible. It is only, however, if such
rewards and punishments are distributed on the basis of belief in
the
Christian God that belief in the Christian God is in our
interests. On
many of the other possible distributive schemes, it is by
disbelieving
in the Christian God that one receives a heavenly reward. If any
of
those distributive schemes were the true scheme, though, then the
third premise of Pascal’s Wager would be false. It would not
be the
case that if one does not believe in the Christian God and the
Christian God does not exist then one gains little or nothing,
for if
such a distributive scheme were the true scheme then one might
gain a
great deal (i.e. an infinite reward in heaven) by disbelieving in
the
Christian God. In order to demonstrate that the third premise of
his
argument is true, then, the advocate of Pascal’s Wager must
demonstrate that the only possible criterion for entrance into
heaven
is belief in the Christian God and the only possible criterion
for
entrance into hell is disbelief in the Christian God. This, the
objector suggests, cannot be demonstrated, for it is false.
OBJECTION 2:
The second objection to Pascal’s Wager targets the fourth
premise of
the argument as it is stated above. It is the objection that the
probability that God exists, and so the probability of either
receiving an infinite reward in heaven or of receiving an
infinite
punishment in hell, is so small that these possible outcomes of
belief
or disbelief can be discounted. The choice between belief and
disbelief is thus taken to be a choice between losing little or
nothing and gaining little or nothing. As it is better to gain
little
or nothing than it is to lose little or nothing, this objection
concludes that it is wagering on atheism, rather than wagering on
theism, that is the rational course of action. It is better, the
objection suggests, to take the certain benefits of disbelief
(the
joys of indulging in sin and of being free from religious
commitments)
by wagering that God doesn’t exist than it is to gamble on
the vastly
improbable hope of a heavenly reward and almost certainly gain
nothing
at all.
OBJECTION 3:
The third objection targets the inference
from the fifth and sixth
premises to the conclusion. It is the objection that we cannot
choose
our beliefs. We form our beliefs on the basis of evidence, not on
the
basis of desire. No matter how much one may want to believe that
a
given proposition is true, one cannot bring oneself to do so
simply
through an act of will. Rather, in order for one to come to
believe
that a proposition is true one requires evidence for its truth.
Pascal’s Wager, though, merely prescribes belief in God; it
does not
provide any evidence that such a belief would be true. As such,
it
asks us to do the impossible: to believe without reason.
Yeah! To believe without reason is called FAITH.
The Planet X Saga: Science.........By Nick
Obre.
As you can read at the scientist's page,
Nibiru, planet X, etc., just cannot exist.
Every detail on those planets are false.
You can rest assured nothing will happen in this world in the
coming thousand years.
You can sleep tight, as I was sleeping last 27 february, 2010,
when a real big quake 8.8 magnitude shattered every house in
Chile, where I happened to be standing, and the sea produced a
tsunami who sweeps away houses, dogs and cars, people and birds,
even rats- and left Chile as in 1950.
Some of us thinks hard, and produced the Why we are in the 3
world instead of at the team of the developed countries. Several
times we had been on the verge of to became a developed country,
and bingo, planet Earth reconsidere the matter and sent us to the
bottom of the barrel.
Where we are now.
If somebody could had told me : beware with your gadgets,
computers, books and things, because a big earthquake is
coming... I certainly would had doned something about it. I would
fasten things, the big ones on the floor, sticks to the shelves
not to sway and went to the floor with everything jumping around.
I would had left the door open to be able to run to the yard, or
better still, I would had told my family to stay at the yard
seated on armchairs and robbed with blankets waiting for the
show.
Nothing I knew, so I suffered as everyone else. My 17 computers
went to the floor, the big shelves collapsed one against the
other, the thousand little things were scattered to the floor,
the door was not able to open with the debris from the outside of
my office.
The big earthenware I bought at Pomaire (where they work in art
on clay) went to the ground and were grinded there; pots and pans
went to the floor, shattered after the impact.
Some other people does not loose glasses and cups, or had to take
the computers from the floor and clean them with a mop. They saw
their buildings collapse and were entombed among floors. Others
saw their ancient big houses collapse in clouds of dust. Others,
of course, saw the blackness of night became the nothingness of
death.
So I ask you: could we believe nothing is going to happen in this
big stone called Earth, voyaging as an arrow flies in the air,
towards a ball of fire who is traveling as fast as your
imagination could grasp with an unknown course nobody plotted?
The IRAS Incident Brown Dwarfs Orbits and
Gravity
New (1/19/03): SOHO images Miscellaneous
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2.- The IRAS Incident.................By Nick Obre.
Many people, including Mr. Hazlewood, claim that NASA
actually sighted Planet X in 1983, and it was reported in the
Washington Post! The article claims that two scientists named
Neugebauer and Houck used the Infrared Astronomy Satellite
(called IRAS) and found a Jupiter-sized object a few billion
kilometers out from the Sun.
This turns out not to be the case. Rather than rely on the
accuracy of a newspaper article (and you can find out how
accurate those are elsewhere on this site) I did something that
never occurred to the doomsayers: I sent an email to the two
astronomers asking what happened back in '83. Gerry Neugebauer
replied, and told me the real poop.
IRAS was designed to look in the far-infrared, well past what our
eyes see. At the time, no one was really sure what it would find.
To everyone's surprise, several bright point sources were found
that did not correspond to anything seen on optical images taken
of the same areas. In the press conference, the two scientists
said that these objects could be almost anything, from a tenth
planet in our solar system to distant galaxies.
Guess which it turned out to be? Sure enough, much deeper images
were taken, and some of the objects were found to be dense gas
clouds in our own Galaxy, while others turned out to be very
distant galaxies. In fact, these observations heralded the
discovery of a new type of object: Ultra-luminous Infrared
Galaxies (ULIRGs). These are galaxies in which there is a burst
of stars being born. The cocoons of dust in which the stars are
enshrouded generates copious infrared, which is what was detected
by IRAS. They published these results in the prestigious
Astrophysical Journal, and you can even read it yourself.
So IRAS did not see Nibiru, Planet X, or anything of the sort,
despite the claims of the doomcriers. Of course, they now claim
that NASA is clamping down on the press for Planet X. The
original Post article, they say, was hastily retracted due to
pressure from the NASA thugs. Of course, the doomcriers have
absolutely no evidence of this (because, of course, this claim is
wrong), but they continue to state it as if it is fact. It is
nothing of the sort. They like to make claims like this for many
reasons: it generates an "us vs. them" mentality, which
is great for conspiracies, and it helps sell books and/or videos.
But it's wrong at best and a lie at worst.
A good page with a lot of detail about the IRAS observations is
written by Tom Chester, an astronomer on the original IRAS team
that found the mystery sources. Straight from the horse's mouth,
if you will.
You can also read more about IRAS and Planet X at the Planet X
and the Pole Shift website, which also has a copy of the original
Washington Post article.
-
Brown Dwarfs
[Note added January 19, 2003: in this section, I
originally mistakenly gave the brown dwarf a visual magnitude of
17, when in fact it's more like 25. This is a factor of about
1600 in brightness. I have made the correction in this section
and fixed the math involved. While a factor of 1600 seems like a
lot, it doesn't change my argument that if Planet X were a brown
dwarf, it would be easily visible to the naked eye.]
Mr. Hazlewood and many others on the web claim that Planet X is a
brown dwarf. As strongly as I can make this claim, this is
impossible.
Why? Because of what a brown dwarf is. We are familiar with
stars, which are luminous balls of gas that fuse elements in
their core. Stars are massive enough that the pressure and
temperature in their cores are enough to maintain fusion. Planets
are smaller, cooler objects which are, in general, not
self-luminous. Planets are bright because they reflect sunlight.
Their mass is too small to have fusion in the core.
A brown dwarf is an object that is somewhere in the netherworld
between stars and planets. By definition, a brown dwarf is an
object that has a mass less than is needed to sustain fusion, and
at the lower mass end they blend into planets. For more detail,
you can read my pages about brown dwarfs here and here.
Brown dwarfs are born hot, since they are formed, like stars,
from a collapsing cloud of gas and dust. This process makes a lot
of heat, sometimes enough that even a brown dwarf can have fusion
in its core, at least for a while. But they cannot maintain that
fusion, and eventually cool off.
A mature brown dwarf glows in infrared. It has a temperature of
something like 1000 to 2500 degrees Celsius. An object that hot
puts out very little visible light, but gives off more infrared.
Not that they're all that bright: they are so faint that the
first brown dwarf discovered, named Gliese 229b, eluded detection
until 1995! It glows feebly at about magnitude 25 in visible
light. That makes it roughly 1/40,000,000th the brightness of the
faintest star visible to the unaided eye, and takes a fair sized
telescope to see at all.
However (and this is a big however), Gliese 229b is a long way
off: about 18 light years away, or roughly 200 trillion
kilometers! If we go with Mr. Hazlewood's claim that Planet X is
a brown dwarf, we can assume it is much like Gliese 229b. At a
distance of even Pluto's orbit, Planet X would be a billion times
brighter, glowing visibly at magnitude 2, making it a relatively
bright star! Mind you, as I write this (July 2002) it must be
significantly closer to us than Pluto, and proportionally
brighter. It would be the third brightest object in the sky (only
the Moon and Sun would be brighter). We don't see it, which leads
me to the conclusion that it doesn't exist.
Even if we assume that, somehow, magically, Planet X does not
glow in the visible (even though Mr. Hazlewood claims many times
in his book that it does indeed glow), it would still reflect
sunlight. A brown dwarf has about the same size as Jupiter (due
to the way planets behave, piling more mass onto Jupiter won't
make it bigger, it'll make it denser). Jupiter is actually the
fourth brightest object in the sky, so a reflecting brown dwarf
would be similarly bright. However, again, we don't see it.
Finally, a brown dwarf may be puny compared to a star, but can be
very massive compared to a planet. Ms. Lieder claims that Planet
X has a mass something like 5 times the Earth's mass, which is
more like a normal planet than a brown dwarf. Either way,
something this massive plowing through the solar system would be
greatly affecting the orbits of the outer planets. However, the
planets appear to be just where they should assuming Planet X
does not exist.
Conclusion: Doomsayers claim Planet X is a brown dwarf (or even a
massive planet). However, it's not hard to see that there can be
no such brown dwarf anywhere near the Earth. Therefore, the
claims are wrong.
3.- Orbits and Gravity................By Darth Vader.
Planet X is claimed to be on an orbit that brings it close to the
Sun every 3600 years. Now, if we assume that this orbit obeys the
laws of gravity, then we can calculate its distance at any given
time. This depends on the math of gravity, which is pretty well
understood.
However, the equations used to figure distance based on orbital
velocity are not simple, but I used the method as described by
Dr. Joseph Gallant, Assistant Professor of Physics at Kent State
University, which allows for plug-and-chug solutions. I find that
in one year, Planet X must be about 900 million kilometers away
from the Earth, give or take a hundred million. This is much
closer to Earth than Saturn, and just a bit farther than Jupiter!
[Note (added July 27, 2002): A small Oops here; when I did this
calculation originally, I did it incorrectly, and got a distance
too small by about a factor of two (I originally said 550 million
kilometers). I have been more careful and got this new number.]
I have written up detailed notes on how I arrived at this figure:
what assumptions I made and how I calculated it. They are on the
"Planet X and Orbit Math page. There is a fair bit of math
there, but hopefully I have made it clear what I did and why I
did it.
So, Planet X was roughly the same distance to us a Saturn in May
2002, it should have been at least as bright as Saturn and
getting brighter by the minute. Saturn is one of the brightest
objects in the sky. We see nothing like this, so again I conclude
Planet X does not exist.
Of course, Mr. Hazlewood claims that we do not understand
gravity, but that's completely incorrect. We understand gravity
well enough to calculate orbits for comets and asteroids and send
probes to other planets. If Planet X doesn't obey the laws of
gravity as we know them, then it's magic, and then he's wrong
anyway.
4.- Miscellaneous.........................By Doctor Farthom Climbor.
Sometimes the science abused by the doomsayers is pretty
garbled. Take, for example, this passage from Mr. Hazlewood's
book "Blindsided", where on page 11 he quotes a source
(anonymous, of course), who says:
A whole team was contacting every observatory in France -- just
sent a message. The Neuchatel observatory got it. They are very
excited, wondering if it is a comet or a brown dwarf, through the
latest coordinates given. The daughter of the astronomer reports
that they suspect a comet or a brown dwarf on the process to
becoming a pulsar since it emits "waves."
To be perfectly blunt, this quotation is just plain silly. First,
a comet is easily distinguishable from a brown dwarf using an
optical telescope: the brown dwarf appears as a star, while a
comet has a distinctly fuzzy appearance. Second, a brown dwarf
cannot become a pulsar. A pulsar is formed when a massive star
(100 or more times the mass of even the largest brown dwarf)
explodes as a supernova. The core collapses, forming a neutron
star. This rapidly rotating ultradense object can emit two beams
of light like a lighthouse does. We see these beams as rapid
pulses, hence the term "pulsar". But a brown dwarf
cannot form a pulsar. Third, everything emits waves. A star does,
a pulsar does, a comet and brown dwarf do, you do. Anything above
absolute zero emits electromagnetic waves, so that statement by
Mr. Hazlewood's anonymous mole is particularly weird, and
non-informative. In other words, it's meaningless. Even if this
informant meant pulses from a pulsar, it's still wrong, since a
brown dwarf cannot become a pulsar.
Incidentally, the Neuchatel Observatory is
in Switzerland, not France. Mr. Hazlewood's informant didn't even
get that part right.
ppppppppppppppppppp
Only the birds fly.