Coal for Diamonds: Why Philosophy is (Pretty) Useless

In the previous few days, I had come across an interesting topic - that which is very much controversial in the realm of reasoned and seasoned Scientists and those of advanced fields of study... That of Philosophy, and of Philosophers - and how useless they both are in the long-run mill of Knowledge.
Do not get me wrong. Philosophy is a wonderful thing, and serves it's purposes. There's certain magic to questioning the entirety of the universe as a whole, and even your own very existence. It was philosophy that has given us so many wonderful things, such as Democracy, Freedom of Thought, and the rest of the wonderful ideas that have made this modern world...
My problem is that of Philosophers claiming that a shabby bit of tact can supplement for actual knowledge of the subject at hand, and that those who have studied must sit around and listen to them rambling nonsense about matters which they have had no formal education in.

In olden times of history, Philosophers are seen as the first thinkers and scientists. Through thought and a vivid desire for knowledge, they actively pondered upon many things - God, Life, the Planet, Why things work the way that they do, and so on and so forth. They had given the basis of Science, and had set the stage for future generations. (I have included a list of notable philosophers in time [ref])
The word Philosophy is derived from two main words: Philo- (or Lover) [1] and -osophy (or Knowledge / Wisdom/ Study) [2] ([ref]) - this is a noble title, to say the least. If we didn't love philosophy, or philosophers, we wouldn't be keeping witty quotes by obscure chuckle-fucks pinned to everything we own and written down as some quoted header or footer to everything we can possibly think of writing. We all have some writer that has managed to write out a statement that has struck a chord with our very existence.

However wonderful and beautiful an art this is - Philosophy is no substitute for actual learning, and education in any field. It holds no promise for advancement in the realms of technology, or education. Philosophy today is, for what it's worth, a metaphysical science. It operates within the realms without testable and verifyable evidence, asking questions such as what if?, how come? and, of course, why? (Not the Why? that scientists work on - regarding the mechanics of an event or a happening - but why? in the sense of just perpetually compiling on why? for the sake of why?).

This became subperbly evident several days ago, when I was discussing things of a scientific nature with a stranger on the internet. This man (Nytmare8) was very intelligent, and managed for the most part to understand the conversation and carry it along quite nicely, even into the realms of higher mathematics and science... That is, until he made the statement that hot and cold were subjective.
Now, if you are aware of science to the 6th grade level, you'll remember when your teachers told you about how Energy works, and it's definition - Energy is a quantity that is often understood as the ability a physical system has to do work on other physical systems [ref]. Any movement in the Universe, and any subsequent movement by any other system, is transferred energy. Heat is Thermal energy, and, as such, is the result of energy in a mass to create movement, that generates heat. [ref] - This is not something subjective. Heat is Thermal Energy, and the lack of thermal energy is a state we call "Cold."
Needless to say, I was confused for a moment ... And there was the fact that "Subjective" didn't exist except in the realm of motion in physics, and that is only to the two people's experience of time and space.
He then goes on to make the statement: "-like light and darkness."
Light and Darkness are not subjective at all ... Light is made of Photons - an electromagnetic particle that can travel through a vacuum [ref]. Darkness is simply the description of a lack of these photons.

After a few bouts of mental exchange with this user, it becamse more and more evident that he was missing some of the most basic concepts of Scientific structure. He certainly had a grasp of what I was talking about on the conceptual level, but when it got down to the actual knowledge on the subject he had no clue about the physics concept of work, and he even denied the fundamentals of Quantum Mechanics - the only system where causality and order submits to chaos as time and space tear and overwrite each other.

When I pointed this out, and coreected him, his statements danced around in a circle for an hour until we got to the boilng point of it all - semantics and irrational what if? mumbo jumbo that had no bearings on what the actual facts where. And, when I made the statement that Philosophy is not the backbone of knowledge, and can not gain anything in terms of practicallity or facts, he got really antsy...

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We must remember, however, that I am not against philosophy... Hell, I can swing a quote and think outside the box with the best of them. If you are into Philosophy - allow myself ring you a new one for the books:
Philosophy is to Science is as Diamonds are to Coal ... Sure, Diamonds are lovely to have around, and are certainly lovely to flash around to show off. But, when it gets down to it, which one is of more utility?
Coal has many uses. Mainly, the implimentation of the chemical reactions that result in fire. We can use this to power anything, from trains to boats. We can use it to cook our foods - and even disappoint a delinquent on Christmas morning.
But what good are Diamonds?

Just as I would prefer the utilities of coal over the shine of a well-cut diamond, I prefer the Knowledge through the scientific processes and study to the ramblings of a philosopher.

Delays: Of Research Papers and My Delays in Posting

This is just an information update -
I have yet to recently post a fabulous update in this blog of scientific reasoning due to the increasing difficulties in my current research papers for my classes. -.-
This, of course, meaning that I may have to return to the topic of String Theory at a later date, and instead pick a better topic to work with that is much simpler to convey in the short time I have in regards to what my classes at the current moment are leaving me with. I should have a break somewhere in the area of April to July where I can further elaborate on broader topics.

For now, however, I am taking suggestions for the next piece. I was thinking more along the lines of a few posts debunking various and poorly-represented (either intentionally or out of sheer stupidity) instances of irrational thought, logical systems, and scientific methods. Perhaps a bit of Kent Hovind, NephilimFree, and the bullocks of other various nut jobs on the internet. Maybe a 9/11 Conspiracy nut and an Illuminati hunter for a nice even mix.

As for now, I am taking suggestions.

Great Minds - Brace for Shock! (3 Part course)

The following lessons that I will be typing up over the next few weeks are part of a three-sectioned course encompassing both Quantum Mechanics, General Relativity, and the String Theory. There will be less equations that would be expected in such postings on the account of four facts:
1) This is simply an introductory course to the thought processes and Laws which govern all of the Universe.
2) I will only post as many equations needed to explain the principles.
3) Most of the equations require vast study to understand segments from which we draw the equations and numbers from.
4) Big numbers, weird symbols, and long equations tend to scare both those of weak mental resolve and small children.

So, therefore, note that the next few postings may contain matters that require a vastly open mind to comprehend the facts presented. Also note that the postings may be far-between due to my studies. I will post them as soon as I get around to them.

Space, Time and the Paradox of an Existance Without Time

In the course of human history, the wonders of the Universe have baffled and confound us beyond all complexity. We marveled in awe at the stars above, and the plants below. But, this topic is going to talk about the thing that seems to have awed us above all things : the observance of Space and Time. And today we will also be tackling the fantastic myth that somewhere exists a place where you can have Space, but not Time (in particular, the religious concept of an Eternal Heaven).
This will not be a philosophical rant today, but a mathematical proof that this entire proposition about a Timeless existence is utter and complete bullshit. (It may be a set-up for something later on along philosophical lines.)

A Brief History Lesson

There was one thing that seemed to be bred within us above all others - a realization that tomorrow is the future, yesterday was the past, and today is the present. We could recognize this very early on, and we were born knowing this fact. With this passing of facts and scripting of History man, and recognizing that we are born, from old, and then die, mankind was birthed with an awareness of Time.
It intrigued us to the point of wishing we could change the past, or have long-term events in the future foretold to us by surveyors of the heavenly bodies and the workers of spiritual things outside our own existence. With this realization came a common-knowledge fact about humanity:

Yesterday is set in stone. We are living today. We may or may not be living tomorrow.

We also became aware very early on that things had dimension. If you saw a very small rock on the horizon, sure enough you could walk to that rock and discover that it was truly a mountain. We also learned that, with a little comparison, we could determine how EXACTLY big things were, such as how exactly dense they were ("EUREKA!" Archimedes! [ref]) and the dimensions of such objects beyond our measurements (the Pythagorean Theorem was utilized by civilizations MUCH older than the theorem's namesake [ref]).
The area that these things take up is the object's dimensions in Space.

It was not until the grandmaster of popular Science, Albert Einstein, came around that we realized that the two ideas are fundamentally linked together in his popular Theory of Relativity [ref]. This theorem and the formulas proposed not only perfectly calculated the paths of Mercury, but also provided an accurate ideal for the measurement of Gravity, Mass, and Motion that Newton's Three Laws were incapable of calculating.

The Math

But enough history. It's time to move on to the point of this lesson: The Relativity of Space and Time, and how one cannot exist without the other. For this, I will refer to one of the more morbid consequences of travel at near-light speeds through space:

When two observers are in relative uniform motion and far away from any gravitational mass, the point of view of each will be that the other's (moving) clock is ticking at a slower rate than the local clock. The faster the relative velocity, the greater the magnitude of time dilation. This case is sometimes called special relativistic time dilation. It is often interpreted as time "slowing down" for the other (moving) clock. But that is only true from the physical point of view of the local observer, and of others at relative rest (i.e. in the local observer's frame of reference). The point of view of the other observer will be that again the local clock (this time the other clock) is correct and it is the distant moving one that is slow. From a local perspective, time registered by clocks that are at rest with respect to the local frame of reference (and far from any gravitational mass) always appears to pass at the same rate.

This observance is known as time dilation [ref] and refers to the drastic alteration of an experience of time as one travels through space at high speeds.
What we can conclude from this mathematical observation is that Space is inherently linked to time in terms of a reference to time as we travel through space, and can be summed down simply:
The faster we're going, the more laps we can do around a track in substantially less time relative to the observer. However to us who are going faster, the objects in space begin to blur and our experience of time is separate from those others.

This is why Speed, a measurement of our travel through Space, is calculated as the following:
Speed = Distance/Time

The Fallacy

Now with the lesson in Space-Time relativity done: now comes the part of destroying this utterly foolish claim that the Afterlife can have Space, but not time. It will be both short, sweet, and to the point:
Time is a relative concept based upon your travel through Space. All that is required for Time to exist is a Space to move through.

Let us use the calculation above:
Speed = Distance / Time












Now, utilizing the Distributive Law [ref] (something one learns in Grade-school Algebra):
Distance = Speed * Time
Time = Distance / Speed

So, let's put me in this fantastic Afterlife : and I decide that I want to see if I can run as fast as a spiritual being as I could as a Mortal. I find (to much annoyance) that when I had counted to 5 (I cannot use seconds - the conjecture is that Time does not exist), I had only managed to travel 15 meters. So, I can calculate my speed as the following:
Speed = 15 meters / 5 counts (ct)
Speed = 3 m/ct

Of course, from this, I can calculate how far I could travel by the time I had counted to 10:
Distance = 3 m/ct * 10ct
Distance = (3 meters / 1 count) * (10 count)
Distance = (3 meters / 1 count) * (10 count) (Simplification)
Distance = (3 * 10 meters)
Distance = 30 meters

And now - I just heard some dipshit Spirit talking about how there's no time in this place with Space, so I told him to watch as I performed the following conversion of my non-impressive speed for running 60 meters:
Time = 60 m / 3m/ct
Time = (60 meters) / (3 meters / 1 count)
Time = (60 meters) * (1 count / 3 meters) (Reciprocal Flip)
Time = (60 meters) * (1 count / 3 meters) (Simplification)
Time = 60 count / 3
Time = 20 count

So, what is the logical conclusion we can draw from this scenario? It is simple:
If you can measure space, you can measure your travel through it.
If you measure your travel through Space, you can ultimately come to find a measurement of time.
All that is required for Time to Exist is motion and the ability to count. -_-

Final Thoughts

As a man of Logic, I captured this claim as bullshit right off the bat. Space and Time are combined fabrics of our existence. They are the combined measurements of our locations within any place, what space we take up, and our position at a certain point of time in the existence you are.

These are the baselines for any existence in any place which cannot be altered nor debated. If you're traveling through it, Time exists in it...

Unless the next words out of their mouths are that Heaven is located within a Singularity, lacking Definition of Space, then they have no other talking ground.

Color : "Why Everyone is WRONG and I'm Right!"

This particular post is going to discuss a topic that is a well-fought foe of mine in both the sense of fallacious arguments and term papers. This beast is such a massive topic that I can only explain the logic of the situation here, and it will be enough information to have the reader entranced for a nice length of time...
But, I will try.

In Fallacious Logic - people may stake the claim that there is no such thing as subjective truth because of this topic, and that our minds will always work the same. That this is somehow an evidence of a Creator, some ultimate moral authority.
(You can first point out that you're not talking about Color, you are talking about Morality. And THEN you can crush their feeble argument)

Color is something we don't often think about in life. Most of us have lost the idea of how lucky we are to be able to see in color. Some of us are forced to see in contrasts only - of Black, gray, and white (Color blindness). And, there are a cursed lucky few of us who have the honor of seeing color in response to certain stimuli during normal aspects of our day in the form of sound, touch, patterns, and smell (Synesthesia).
Now, in the cases that variate from the norm, we must state where their problems originate. In Color blindness, the problem mainly stems from broken or fried-out nerve receptors within the eyes, causing them to be unable to comprehend differentiating wavelengths. In Synesthesia, however, the mind takes other signals and interprets them as color, or other senses - essentially, it is a processing error within the mind.

It is with these three cases that we can draw three conclusions about color:
1) Color is a primary computation of the rebounded wavelengths of light, captured by our eyes.
2) This information is processed by and interpreted by the brain.
3) Color is a function of both the mind's calculated interpretation of input, and the capture of our eyes.

It is from here that we must step out of our own little bubble for a moment and fully define Color.
Color is the mind's interpretation of captured wavelengths of light, based upon the different wavelengths of light absorbed or reflected by the pigments in the object. [ref]

That underlined statement is possibly the most important part of the entire rambling. It tells us that, ultimately, it is up to the mind's chemical and reasoning processes to take this information and process it... And here, my friends, is where science can go no further.
There are no more tests that can be done. No more research. This is where the evidence comes to a grinding halt.
The truth is - there is no evidence to make the claim that everyone sees the same color. That my blue is your blue. That my pink is your pink. That my green is your green.
For all we know, what my mind processes as Blue is what your mind processes as Green. And what my mind says is Red, may be your Yellow.
This observation was first made in a paper called:
"How Culture Conditions the Colours We See" by Umberto Eco [ref]

In his paper, Umberto Eco made the genuine observation that Color is less than an observation and more related to language. It is a description of objects and pigments, more than the actual colors themselves. Color is not a fixed definition. It is just as ambiguous as the culture prescribing it. He also made the conjecture that color is something we relate to based upon how we are raised and taught as children as to the description of.
I will make this example:

 Step back into a time machine. You are now 2 years old. Your look into the sky and your mother begins explaining to you: "The sky is Blue." It was not until that moment in time that you knew what blue was. Now, everything you see that looks like the sky is now, of course, Blue. Water is Blue. Daddy's Jersey is Blue. The bottle of Pepsi is Blue. And so on.

As you can see in this example I have made - Just because we ascribe everything that looks like the sky "Blue" does not mean that we are all seeing the same thing. It just means that we have, as a culture, ascribed "Blue" to a certain wavelength of color that our minds can perceive.

And so here we are at the end of this explanation of Color.
So, what did we learn from this entire page? What conclusions can we draw?
First of all, we learned that we cannot scientifically provide evidence for or against the idea of a universal or subjective color scheme.
However, we have also learned that the color scheme is not a fixed definition - but instead, a result of what culture we were raised in and are simply descriptions of common wavelengths that reach our eyes. It is simply a category we place things in.

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tl;dr?
Anyone who makes a positive or negative claim on this topic is full of bullshit. Science has yet to obtain evidence of a universal color scheme, or a subjective color scheme.
There's just as much evidence for both sides.

Change in Blog Layout

As cool as I thought it was, I had gotten many complaints about the layout of my site making it difficult to read. So I have reluctantly turned my back from my aesthetically-pleasing transparent layout to a solid black posting background to fit both the theme and mood which I want to portray and make it easier for other people to read it.
Always feel free to leave me comments of how I can improve both my writing and my site. Though it's presentation was altered, information never halts. It never stops.

Occam's Razor - Ur doin it rong!

Of all the things that I have observed in my quest for understanding the human mind - is that humans will constantly blurt out things without knowing what the fuck they are talking about. It is a constant ordeal that someone will do this. You can bet money that the person you're talking to on the cell phone will do just this in the next few seconds.
It's Human nature.

But what we should not do is allow such ignorance to change the facts.

For some reason, as time goes on we forget that facts do not bend to the stupid, the ignorant, and the mentally incompetent. That because someone takes a tree and begins talking as if the tree was bubblegum, that does not make the tree any more chewy and delicious, nor does it make bubblegum wooden and leafy. One of these is a citation of the greatest description of human reasoning in the world, Occam's Razor.
Whenever I am in a discussion with some zealot fundie about some branch of science that they OBVIOUSLY don't understand, they will never fail to try an attempt at utilizing Occam's Razor in order to somehow say that, since "God dun it" is simpler than the highly complex mathematical equations and the piles of evidence and data gathered on the subject, then Occam's Razor says that God must have magically proofed this universe out of nothing.

This is the point where I usually throw a fit in my head. Picture, if you will, the feeling of opening your head and dumping broken glass into your brain, and then screwing back on your cranium. That is my exact feeling on the matter.
Firstly, that's not the correct application of Occam's Razor. It is not that the simplest answer is the correct one, but the most SIMPLE and LOGICAL answer is the correct one. Thus, the theory of *insert topic here* is the choice, because saying that an unprovable and incomprehensible Magic Cloud Man did it is illogical (and, frankly, just plain lazy).[example]
SECONDLY - that's not even what OCCAM'S RAZOR IS. Occam's Razor is nothing more than the  definition of a mental path our mind automatically takes when confronted with several possible options - in which case the mind will take the least logical option and automatically remove it from the list of possible solutions. [def]
It's a DESCRIPTION of something that happens AUTOMATICALLY. It is not a reasoning tool. It is not an argument. Your brain does this every single time it is presented with conflicting or alternate options - it will automatically shake off any illogical options without notice or permission.

In short - please realize this: Occam's Razor is a description of an automatic process.