Modern Sci-Fi - the enslavement of scientific reality to religious delusion

Gene Ward Smith wrote:

Well, but we know there is such a thing as consciousness, even if we
don't know the why or how. Why is that worse than the Alcubierre
"drive" as a vague, sketchy idea?

Because we know consciousness exists. Neither telepathy or FTL drives
qualify.

--
Erik Max Francis && && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM, Y!M erikmaxfrancis
Come not between the dragon and his wrath.
-- King Lear (Act I, Scene I)

On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 15:12:00 -0700, Erik Max Francis
wrote:

Gene Ward Smith wrote:

Well, but we know there is such a thing as consciousness, even if we
don't know the why or how. Why is that worse than the Alcubierre
"drive" as a vague, sketchy idea?

Because we know consciousness exists. Neither telepathy or FTL drives
qualify.

You didn't answer the question asked.

David Johnston wrote:

On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 15:12:00 -0700, Erik Max Francis
wrote:

Gene Ward Smith wrote:

Well, but we know there is such a thing as consciousness, even if we
don't know the why or how. Why is that worse than the Alcubierre
"drive" as a vague, sketchy idea?
Because we know consciousness exists. Neither telepathy or FTL drives
qualify.

You didn't answer the question asked.

I didn't answer the question asked because the answer is irrelevant to
what we were discussing.

--
Erik Max Francis && && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM, Y!M erikmaxfrancis
Come not between the dragon and his wrath.
-- King Lear (Act I, Scene I)

On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 15:37:41 -0700, Erik Max Francis
wrote:

David Johnston wrote:

On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 15:12:00 -0700, Erik Max Francis
wrote:

Gene Ward Smith wrote:

Well, but we know there is such a thing as consciousness, even if we
don't know the why or how. Why is that worse than the Alcubierre
"drive" as a vague, sketchy idea?
Because we know consciousness exists. Neither telepathy or FTL drives
qualify.

You didn't answer the question asked.

I didn't answer the question asked because the answer is irrelevant to
what we were discussing.

What were you discussing?

David Johnston wrote:
On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 15:37:41 -0700, Erik Max Francis
wrote:

You didn't answer the question asked.

I didn't answer the question asked because the answer is irrelevant to
what we were discussing.

What were you discussing?

The question was whether consciousness was just as good a "vague,
sketchy idea", or excuse, to use telepathy in a science fiction story
as the Alcubierre "drive" is for FTL. The Alcubierre drive doesn't
provide a workable mechanism, but its theoretical existence is an
excuse to have warp drives in science fiction.

In sci.space.policy, on Thu, 14 Sep 2006 22:27:50 -0700, sez:
` On Thu, 14 Sep 2006 11:28:34 +0200, Eivind Kjorstad
` wrote:

` Uncle Clover wrote:
`
`
` there are no observed mechanisms on which for psychic phenomenon to occur.
` None. Zero. Zilch. Humans have thoughts, but there is not now nor has
` there ever been any reasonable indication that thoughts can exist beyond
` the confines of a physical brain.
`
` For me personally, there is one aditional reason to assume that psychic
` phenomenon do not, infact, exist.
`
` *IF* the phenomenons worked, it'd be a tremendous evolutionary advantage
` to those that had them. Which would mean that once a few members of a
` species had a weak version of it, there'd be tremendous evolutionary
` pressure to have it, and to improve it.
`
` Why would it be an advantage? I've often thought that a society of
` telepaths would be very hard to live with. Do you really want to know
` all the initial responses people have to things you say and do, before
` they politely edit them out? Knowing how your spouse _really_ feels
` about your mother, for example? Or that your parents really wish that
` they had never had you, when you have kept them up for the 10th
` straight night in a row with your colic? It could be a disadvantage
` in a socially-oriented mammal to have this kind of ability.

Considering this comment, and taking into account the chick-machine
link, and the observation about empirical evidence for evolution
were there a telepathic ability, the pleasant plot line occurs:
telepathy is in fact easy and ubiquitous, and always works between
living organisms, which is why all organisms have evolved almost
perfectly impervious shields to it. The introduction of a novel
chemical then cripples the shield function, causing the subject's
thoughts to be readable, or his behaviour to be controllable, by
mental exertion from a person trained to master the outgoing
aspect of the function.


` And to some of the questions about "why do we need to classify science
` fiction versus fantasy", I am reminded of a thread a while ago about
` that, where, as is being demonstrated in this thread so well, it
` appears that some of the science fiction fans really do feel that
` fantasy has cooties, and they don't want to catch them.

I don't have a phobia towards fantasy; when I want a fantasy hit
I can go and find some. I just object to not being able to find
real SF, which is a completely different reading experience which
satisfies a completely different interest which inhabits a different
part of my head. It's the same as craving improvizational jazz-
rock when the airwaves are wall-to-wall with commercial pop-rock.
It can be tolerable in small doses, but I don't want it clogging
the whole of my brain.


--
================================================== ========================
Pete Vincent
Disclaimer: all I know I learned from reading Usenet.

On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 14:08:23 +0200, Pascal Bourguignon
wrote:


First, we're not amoeba, so any advantage is better kept as that, an
advantage. If 99% of the population was telepathic, it wouldn't be an
advantage anymore.

Telepaths are like people with good vision or good hearing - they can
observe many types of danger and avoid them.

More, the non-telephatic could be at advantage!

Why?

pete wrote:
In sci.space.policy, on 14 Sep 2006 18:12:35 -0700, sez:

` Gene Ward Smith wrote:

` We've had plenty of opportunity to
` observe what happens when you accelerate matter up to near-light
` speeds, and what it does is behave in the way relativity says it should
` behave. You might as well claim that it's unlikely you can get to the
` Moon by putting flubber in your Air Jordans, but there's no reason to
` rule it out as a practical possibility.

` Specifically, when an object accelerates faster it effectively gets
` heavier. As you approach the speed of light, this apparent weight
` increases basically without limit, so that it's harder to push the
` object to go faster and you can't get to the speed of light, however
` much effort you put in. It's somewhere between Hilbert's paradoxes of
` infinity and Zeno's paradoxes of motion.

Well, that's a poor way of putting it, as it is quite clear that
things don't get heavier at all. They do not gain mass, because
that would be something which is absolutely detectable via
gravitation, which would then imply absolute motion through an
absolute space, which is just the opposite of the point of
relativity in the first place.

To be specific, if you have two objects side by side, and relative
to you they are traveling at a sliver less than c, they do not
experience a greatly increased gravitational attraction to each
other, and thus they demonstrably are not heavier, nor more massive,
than they appear to any other observer in any other reference
frame, including the one in which they are at rest. What they
do have, relative to you, is a vastly greater momentum than they
would be calculated to have using a naive Newtonian computation,
and similarly, they would have a vastly greater kinetic energy
than that computed via Newton's equation.

This is why I didn't say "mass". But if that sounds like I'm claiming
to know what I'm talking about, - I don't.

I think I see that you are right; for instance, if the mobile
laboratory includes the mutually stationary objects attracting each
other, a clock, and a third object of insignificant rest mass in orbit
around the first two, then before doing the Riemann geometry I suppose
a stationary observer perceives that the moving clock runs slower and
the orbit of the third particle merely reflects the rest masses of the
first two objects and the retardation of time. If gravity depended on
apparent mass then... oh, hang on, I'm not sure that I have got it.

But another everyday definition of "heavier" is how much force and
energy you need to put in to accelerate the object.

Wayne Throop wrote:
:
: Specifically, when an object accelerates faster it effectively gets
: heavier. As you approach the speed of light, this apparent weight
: increases basically without limit, so that it's harder to push the
: object to go faster and you can't get to the speed of light, however
: much effort you put in. It's somewhere between Hilbert's paradoxes of
: infinity and Zeno's paradoxes of motion.

I still say that's the wrong way to think about it. It's making it too
complicated; the restriction is one of kinematics, not dynamics. That is,
rules of motion without taking account of mass at all. And the simple
point is, if lightspeed invariant (and everything behaves as if it is),
then no matter how much you accelerate, you never approach lightspeed
at all. You are always just as far away as you ever were, and it's
always getting away from you at 300,000 km/sec or so. It's not a matter
of how hard you push. It's that you never make any progress at all,
from your own perspective.

But that's just me. Well, it's also the way Einstein treated it
in his 1905 paper; as a matter of kinematics, not dynamics.

It sounds like a Zeno paradox, anyway, although I'm not sure he wrote
this one. Before you can accelerate to the speed of light, you have to
accelerate to half the speed of light, and then you find your speed
relative to light is the same as it was and you haven't half-achieved
your goal, you haven't achieved it at all.

Of course, lots of folks speculate that maybe you can change velocity
without actually accelerating; that is, some sort of discontinuous change.
That still doesn't work, and you still don't need to resort to dynamics
to see the problems with it.

It's a poke in the eye for Zeno, though.

Howard Brazee wrote:
On 12 Sep 2006 15:52:43 -0700, "RichA" wrote:

Science fiction fell to pieces in the 1980s when the fantasists took
over from the hard scifi writers and started catering to the duller
classes out there. It's typified by Star Wars where instead of using
your BRAIN and technology to fight, escape, etc, you use "The Force."
It reminds me of a line from a movie that went, "Art doesn't belong to
the people, it belongs to the people who can truly appreciate it."

I think reality was the cause of this move to fantasy. All the old
stories about rockets to the planets and stars became soft SF. We
knew more about what colonization of Mars is like, and how unlikely
interstellar empires are.

Since SF that we loved is now fantasy, (and the SF we loved included
Psi powers), our definitions changed.

"Unlikely" thanks to the liberals. If not for them, science fiction of
the 1960s and 1970s would now be reality. The leftlibs killed this
project;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project..._propulsion%29