http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/07/01/climategates-death-rattle/

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/08/03/new-study-clinches-it-the-earth-is-warming-up/

lalalalalalala! can you hear me now?

You need evidence. Lots of evidence, including the very last bit of evidence possible or imaginable. And no room for uncertainty whatsoever.

As to which god, I’d say the cheaper the better.

And how do you go about figuring out if god exists? And which god?

@68 Messier Tidy Upper
You sound like a Medieval ‘thinker’ who sub-contracted his critical faculties to the priestly class. You don’t have to have a degree in theology or physics to figure out whether god exists or not.

@72 Nigel Depledge
Thanks, Pedant! Would you like to lie down while I fetch the picture I was talking about? Phil posted it several times, you know? Must be your short attention span again?

@73 Messier Tidy Upper

You can’t say “I am surprised” now, can you?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z08_gtMz4EU

Which I thought I’d share. Enjoy.

***

PS. No reply from sHx (#50) to my #68 or Nigel Depledge (#72) yet. Why am I not surprised.

Remember the picture you used to post of a squirrel closing his ears and singing “la la la”? That’s not what real sceptics do, but that’s what you have been doing with regard to climate science.

Put up or shut up, you illiterate* mouthpiece.

Where, when and how has Phil done what you claim?

*Because, in English, proper nouns should be capitalised.

Nowhere did I say consciousness was “mysterious”.

I am familiar with the basics of Penrose’s proposition. I am also familiar with the basics of quantum mechanics.

Further conversation is pointless.

Gary 7

Remember the picture you used to post of a squirrel closing his ears and singing “la la la”? That’s not what real sceptics do, but that’s what you have been doing with regard to climate science.

Your basis for this claim and your expertise in the field climatology are what precisely, please sHx?

Yes, real skeptics are skeptical and look at the evidence for things closely.

However, if the evidence *is* there and does show conclusively that something *is* really happening they don’t keep refusing to face reality.

For that reason, there aren’t any genuine skeptics who refuse to accept the reality of Newton’s theory of Gravity, Darwin’s theory of Evolution or Einstein’s theories of Relativity – nor for the same reasons are there any serious qualified skeptics of the idea of Human Caused Global Over Heating.*

Want to see some of this evidence and assess it for yourself?

Take a lot at this :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9SGw75pVas&p=029130BFDC78FA33

& this :

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/10/26/climate-change-the-evidence/

and also this :

http://www.skepticalscience.com/

Which should provide enough facts and resources to show you what the real skeptical and scientific arguments and evidence for Human Caused Global Over-Heating are.

—-

* In the interests of accuracy & clarity – also known as Anthropogenic Global Warming.

@Prufrock: sure, heretics and skeptics aren’t dying at the stake in Judeo-Christian communities. But suffer “nothing”? Try running for president of the United States as an atheist.

Well, I dunno, Obama didn’t have many problems getting in despite being a Muslim did he?

(Joking!)

Or a member of Jeremiah Wright’s crazy “G-d d-m America” cult. Which is true & not so funny.

Now it is you who are giving Penrose too little credit. The argument you are attributing to him basically boils down to the pseudo-syllogism

1) Consciousness is mysterious
2) Quantum effects are mysterious
3) Therefore consciousness is a quantum effect.

Penrose’s argument is a lot more sophisticated than that. It just happens to be wrong.

His claim is basically that our brains can do something Godel’s theorem says is beyond the capabilities of a Turing machine (i.e. a classical computer.) If this were true, it would in fact require physics beyond the classical. Unfortunately, quantum mechanics as it is presently understood is insufficient for the job — the best QM can do is speed up certain problems like integer factorization that are intractable under classical assumptions (There’s no evidence we can factor 300-digit numbers efficiently either.)

And since you mention it, even if everything Penrose claimed about the human mind was true, it still wouldn’t make Libertarian free will a sensible or even coherent idea (which you should already know given what you’ve been reading.) But perhaps you think quantum mechanics offers a way out. This, to me, indicates that you have no understanding whatsoever of quantum mechanics and because of this you think it’s the same as magic. It’s not. There are plenty of known macroscopic systems where quantum effects are extremely important: High-T superconductors, liquid helium, even F&#$@ing magnets. Do you think these somehow come closer to conscious behavior than any of the programs written by AI researchers on oh so ordinary semiconductor technology? (Transistors also use quantum effects in important ways if you must know.) Oh well. If you really are a die hard mystic it’s no use arguing against you. If you truly understood what you believed, it wouldn’t be mystical, and if you don’t understand what you believe how am I supposed to convince you it’s false. If your actual motivation is to learn something rather than to justify your vague intuitions about consciousness being “something special” or whatever see: http://www.mth.kcl.ac.uk/~llandau/Homepage/Math/penrose.html

Anyway, Penrose’s great sin was not so much proposing the idea (which is superficially promising, but doesn’t actually work when you fill in the details) but in refusing to abandon the idea when it was shown repeatedly to be unworkable — although he has of late tended to increasingly label it as pure speculation rather than the sound argument he originally presented it as, either that or he avoids discussing it entirely.

,,,then, of course, there’s this,,,(by; Your Move: The Maze of Free Will
By GALEN STRAWSON”)

“It may be that we stand condemned by Nietzsche:

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far. It is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Münchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness … (“Beyond Good and Evil,” 1886)”

,,,and this is the part I like,,,

“to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness …”

Perhaps, IF quantum mechanics has anything to do with it, that’s exactly how consciousness gets its start,,,

Gary 7

This trust may yet be proven to be borne out, or it may not. It’s possible the original researchers are correct, and it’s possible their critics are. The best way to find out is more science.

The worth of the work NASA presented has been way overblown, but it isn’t bad science, I don’t think. Regardless of the quality of science, I think it’s been politicized in order to help garner interest in NASA. I personally have to question whether the result advances NASA’s objective given that it really doesn’t change where or how we will be looking for life on other worlds since it shines basically no new light on the origins of life.

As I said;

“So, I guess from this authoritative statement you must be either a theoretical physicist or a cosmologist?”

I don’t usually click on a posters name, so no, I didn’t KNOW he was such but from my statement you might surmise I was willing to ALLOW he might have some knowledge of what he spoke.

,,,but dissing Penrose merely because he has made some speculative proposals does a disservice to Penrose, implying he’s gone “round the bend”. From MY point of view, he’s just exploring strange possibilities, some of which might just be “crazy enough” to be true.

,,,and I don’t recall that Penrose was saying anything about quantum COMPUTATION, he merely proposed that there may be some kind of quantum influence(such as entanglement) that could determine the structure of consciousness.

Gary 7
PS Have you ever noticed the similarities between the quantum “foam” and the US political system?Lots of random noise, with the occasional rise of some kind of self sustaining structure.

not that advanced degrees and professorships are exactly required to figure out that Penrose has a history of making extraordinary claims on less than extraordinary evidence, but if you had even done the minimal research of checking Rob’s profile you would have figured out that he is in fact a fully credentialed cosmologist.

On Penrose’s quantum brain idea. There’s a lot more wrong with it than just the size of the structures involved.

1) It’s motivated by a misapplication of Godel’s theorem.
2) If brains did what Penrose claimed they could do (verify the consistency of mathematics rather than just assume it) quantum computation would not be sufficient to explain the effect — hypercomputation would be required. Hypercomputation requires either closed timelike loops or a violation of unitarity/linearity. Both are pretty far out there as far as physical plausibility is concerned.
3)quantum effects are not the same as quantum computation. The Aussies showed the former, not the latter. This is interesting but not exactly earth shattering — heck, you can’t even understand blackbody radiation without taking quantum effects into account.

Looks like an interesting paper. From the Abstract:

We argue that a cosmic defect seeded by a pre-inflationary particle could explain the giant rings, the large bulk flow, and their alignment.

One of the more effective “hooks,” in my opinion.