A revolution in thought

[LadyShea]

Bumping some posts that got ignored

Originally Posted by Dragar

If you started with that assumption, you would find that galaxies steadily became younger the further away from us they are, with the Earth at the center of the universe, at its oldest point.

Yet another absurdity Lessans' silly claims result in.

Originally Posted by LadyShea

Hubble Deep Field Images disprove these claims. What does it take for you to get that? I've shown them to you dozens of times. They are available as a video online. You can see them for yourself.

Originally Posted by LadyShea

Originally Posted by Dragar

Light is the same as photons. Meanwhile you said the opposite. That's your conflict. Are you trolling now?

[LadyShea]

Bump

Originally Posted by LadyShea

Diffused light is radiated in all directions from the source, like from a star or a light bulb. A detector can then collect some of it. What do you mean "opposite directions" and why would that cause a problem in detecting the light?

[Vivisectus]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

Anyone who has an emotional investment in an idea does not mean automatically that the knowledge being presented is wrong or irrational, especially when evidence does exist if people take the time to dig a little deeper.

No, an emotional investment does not exclude the possibility that an observation is correct. That is very narrow-minded. There is no expectation to believe extraordinary things (I'm not sure what you mean by extraordinary because these observations are based in reality), only to try and see if these observations hold any weight. I am not trying to force people to change their worldview. I'm just asking them to open their minds to the possibility that his observations may have substance to them.

I see you are displaying you usual skill at critical thinking and reading comprehension. I stated that your emotional investment is a reasonable explanation for the irrational things you say, and your continued insistence, once people have evaluated these claims and come tot he conclusion they hold slightly less weight than a puff of warm methane, that this is because of bias, malice or just plain old stupidity.

When I say extraordinary I refer to your extraordinary claims: your claim that sight works the way you say it does, and your claim that conscience works the way you say.

[Vivisectus]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

Would you please stop comparing this to the flat earthers? How can you compare these two unless you want to make it appear that they are related in order to turn people off and make his discovery a laughing matter?

You see, they require us to wait for the evidence to come in too, but insist that we treat their idea as plausible in the meantime too.

As such i think it makes for a pretty good comparison: they do the same thing you do.

[Vivisectus]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

The "object" cannot be seen because the conditions are not there until the light interacts with something in the environment. We can't see light rays either unless there is something in the environment that interacts with that light. That's why we can see rainbows. Where does this negate efferent vision? He has always maintained that light is a necessary condition but there has to be an interaction between light and something else, in order to see it.

...And yet, when we shine a laser at a wall, we see the little red dot. There is no object that has appeared: we could see the wall the whole time. Just the light, which is invisible when it does not shine in our direction.

This clearly negates efferent vision: it states that we should either see a beam of laser light if it was fired across a room, or not see the laser light at all even when it hits a wall. But it is not compatible with what we observe in reality: that we do not see it when it is fired across the room, but do see it when it hits the wall.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by Dragar

If you started with that assumption, you would find that galaxies steadily became younger the further away from us they are, with the Earth at the center of the universe, at its oldest point.

Yet another absurdity Lessans' silly claims result in.

Originally Posted by LadyShea

Hubble Deep Field Images disprove these claims. What does it take for you to get that? I've shown them to you dozens of times. They are available as a video online. You can see them for yourself.

How do you know where this light is coming from? The source?

Originally Posted by LadyShea

I never said the opposite. There is light that can be seen and there is light that cannot be seen. They are all composed of light. Tell me what your point is, and how it negates anything Lessans has claimed. I know you think you are using perfect methodology, but are you? I think not.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

You can't just twitch your nose and magic away distance. Distance must be a factor in any model because it physically exists in reality.

No LadyShea, that's where you have absolutely no understanding of efferent vision and why distance is not a factor. But of course you think you are right, because you are LadyShea.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

Bump

Exactly what I said. If reflected light is at an angle that is opposite of light that is going at opposite angles, how can this light ever be collected? It's an impossibility. A detector may be able to collect some of the light (theoretically), but how could it ever collect all of it to form the original image? A partial image does not an image make. The whole thing doesn't even make sense except for the fundies who want to believe it.

[thedoc]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

Exactly what I said. If reflected light is at an angle that is opposite of light that is going at opposite angles, how can this light ever be collected? It's an impossibility. A detector may be able to collect some of the light (theoretically), but how could it ever collect all of it to form the original image? A partial image does not an image make. The whole thing doesn't even make sense except for the fundies who want to believe it.

The detector does not need to collect all the light reflected from an object, only a small sampeling of it. The pupil of the eye is very small and collects only a small sampeling of the light that is reflected from an object in all directions, the eye can only collect and focus a tiny fraction of all that light, and even with only a tiny sample of the light that has been reflected we have no problem forming an image. The key is that an object reflects light from all parts of the object in all directions so the eye only need to collect a small sample to form an image of the object. The light that is collected comes from all parts of the object, so the light will reveal a complete image of the object.

[ceptimus]

If an eye had to capture all the light to form an image, then we'd be in trouble when two or more people were looking at the same thing. Presumably the first eye to glance at an object would hoover up all the light from that thing, so it would be rendered invisible to the other potential observers. In fact this would happen even with the two eyes of a single person, so it would be a race between the left eye and the right eye as to which one managed to see the thing being looked at.

[Vivisectus]

Exactly what I said. If reflected light is at an angle that is opposite of light that is going at opposite angles, how can this light ever be collected? It's an impossibility. A detector may be able to collect some of the light (theoretically), but how could it ever collect all of it to form the original image? A partial image does not an image make. The whole thing doesn't even make sense except for the fundies who want to believe it.

You still think images travel, don't you? Basically, your entire argument amounts to "I do not understand anything about optics, so it must be wrong!"

We do not need all the light: that is your misconception. There is no "original image".

When we look at lets say, a golfball 5 meters away, we are not catching all the light it reflects: it reflects light in all directions, and a lot of it misses us and is nor detected. In fact, only a very small amount of the available light in your surroundings actually ends up on the retina.

[ceptimus]

Originally Posted by Vivisectus

When we look at lets say, a golfball 5 meters away, we are not catching all the light it reflects: it reflects light in all directions, and a lot of it misses us and is nor detected. In fact, only a very small amount of the available light in your surroundings actually ends up on the retina.

Yes. I'm interested enough in this example to do the maths and share my (quite possibly wrong) result with other geeks.

Assume the light reflects off the ball in all directions equally - this is a quite reasonable assumption for a normal golf ball under normal lighting conditions. Of course, the light reflecting off any one point on the surface of the ball can't pass through the ball (as most golf balls aren't transparent or translucent) so the area the light scatters over from any one point on the golfball after the light has travelled five meters is half the area of a 5 meter radius sphere, which is (1/2 x 4r2).

4 x x 5 x 5 / 2 = 157 square meters.

Now a human eye pupil diameter varies from about 3mm in very bright conditions, up to about 9mm in the dark. If we're looking at the golfball outside in daylight a typical pupil diameter might be 4mm which gives an area in square meters of (d2/4)

x .004 x .004 / 4 = 0.0000126 square meters.

Now we just divide the one area by the other to calculate the fraction of the light from the golfball which enters a single eye - this turns out to be exactly one part in every twelve-and-a-half million.

[thedoc]

Originally Posted by ceptimus

If an eye had to capture all the light to form an image, then we'd be in trouble when two or more people were looking at the same thing. Presumably the first eye to glance at an object would hoover up all the light from that thing, so it would be rendered invisible to the other potential observers. In fact this would happen even with the two eyes of a single person, so it would be a race between the left eye and the right eye as to which one managed to see the thing being looked at.

Perhaps the 2 eyes would have evolved to cooperate and each eye collected half of the image, this would explain how binocular fision works and allows us to estimate distances to diatant objects. Possibly like an optical range finder where the image is split in half and when the two halfs are lined up you can read the distance to the object on the dial, except that the 'dial' would be a kind of automatic function of the brain.

[thedoc]

Originally Posted by ceptimus

Yes. I'm interested enough in this example to do the maths and share my (quite possibly wrong) result with other geeks.

Assume the light reflects off the ball in all directions equally - this is a quite reasonable assumption for a normal golf ball under normal lighting conditions. Of course, the light reflecting off any one point on the surface of the ball can't pass through the ball (as most golf balls aren't transparent or translucent) so the area the light scatters over from any one point on the golfball after the light has travelled five meters is half the area of a 5 meter diameter sphere, which is (1/2 x 4r2).

4 x x 5 x 5 / 2 = 157 square meters.

Now a human eye pupil diameter varies from about 3mm in very bright conditions, up to about 9mm in the dark. If we're looking at the golfball outside in daylight a typical pupil diameter might be 4mm which gives an area in square meters of (d2/4)

x .004 x .004 / 4 = 0.0000126 square meters.

Now we just divide the one area by the other to calculate the fraction of the light from the golfball which enters a single eye - this turns out to be exactly one part in every twelve-and-a-half million.

So if there were only twelve million photons being reflected of that spot of the golf ball we might not even see that part?

I believe that somewhere on this or another thread there was an estimate of how many photons were reflected from a surface in a given time, and it was a very large number, much bigger then the 12.5 million.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by Vivisectus

I see you are displaying you usual skill at critical thinking and reading comprehension. I stated that your emotional investment is a reasonable explanation for the irrational things you say, and your continued insistence, once people have evaluated these claims and come tot he conclusion they hold slightly less weight than a puff of warm methane, that this is because of bias, malice or just plain old stupidity.

The things I say are not irrational. Just because people in these forums have evaluated these claims and conclude they don't hold weight, means very little considering that they are just as much emotionally invested in their viewpoint as they say I am in mine.

Originally Posted by Vivisectus

When I say extraordinary I refer to your extraordinary claims: your claim that sight works the way you say it does, and your claim that conscience works the way you say.

There is nothing extraordinary about the way conscience works, and the way the eyes work. And if you analyzed it correctly you would see this.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

Also, you ignored the whole rest of my post and

Sunlight is daylight, they are synonyms. Can you see daylight?

When you see the sun, you are seeing sunlight. There is nothing else that can be seen except it's light
1

That's fine. I don't want to argue over nothing.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

Anyone who has an emotional investment in an idea does not mean automatically that the knowledge being presented is wrong or irrational, especially when evidence does exist if people take the time to dig a little deeper.

Originally Posted by LadyShea

You're right, and that's not what was said at all.

He said YOU are "more likely to interpret reality in such a way as best suits that idea" and that YOU "say irrational things or expect people to believe extraordinary things for which they have no evidence". Those are both true of YOU.

It may sound irrational to you because the concept doesn't seem to fit reality, but that does not mean it doesn't in actuality.

Originally Posted by Vivisectus

Peacegirl says irrational things and expects people to believe extraordinary things for which she has no evidence.

Peacegirl has an emotional investment in Lessans.

Therefore, Peacegirls emotional investment in Lessans is a reasonable explanation for her irrational ideas and for the fact that she expects people to believe extraordinary things for which she has no evidence.

No, an emotional investment does not exclude the possibility that an observation is correct.

Originally Posted by LadyShea

You're right again. And again, that's not what was said. He said your emotional investment is a reasonable explanation for YOUR saying irrational things and expectation that people will believe extraordinary things for which you have no evidence.

There is nothing irrational in what I'm saying. It only appears that way because it goes against the grain of what sounds plausible. The fact that we move in the direction of greater satisfaction is not irrational whatsoever. The fact that conscience needs a justification to hurt others is not irrational. And it's not irrational that the brain, looking through the eyes, sees reality in a different way than was once thought.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

There is no expectation to believe extraordinary things (I'm not sure what you mean by extraordinary because these observations are based in reality),

Originally Posted by LadyShea

YOU expect people to believe that vision negates physical distance, and causes light to change its properties, and changes the laws of physics.

You are missing the concept entirely. If photons do not bounce off of an object with that frequency and wavelength, then what? There are a lot of assumptions being made that are taken for granted, and because I dispute it, I'm told I have an emotional investment. I do have an emotional investment, I admit that, but these claims are reasonable. They do not change the laws of physics. They do change the idea that light, bouncing off the object, travels with the pattern forever until it strikes another object.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

only to try and see if these observations hold any weight.

Originally Posted by LadyShea

They don't. You have had to posit impossible things and extraordinary things to try to make your model seem to hold weight.

It's quite the opposite LadyShea. To imagine Columbus discovering America out there somewhere in the light, and it's just a matter of building bigger and bigger telescopes and being in the right place at the right time, sounds a lot more extraordinary than what I am positing.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

I am not trying to force people to change their worldview. I'm just asking them to open their minds to the possibility that his observations may have substance to them.

Originally Posted by LadyShea

The ideas have been examined thoroughly, and problems demonstrated and you have been unable to support or defend them adequately. There is no substance.

It's funny; you say this with such authority. You are NOT the last word on this subject LadyShea.

[Vivisectus]

The things I say are not irrational. Just because people in these forums have evaluated these claims and conclude they don't hold weight, means very little considering that they are just as much emotionally invested in their viewpoint as they say I am in mine.

Glad you admit you are emotionally invested in your point of view!

I am afraid your point of view has repeatedly and exhaustively been shown to be completely irrational: we have even established that if you apply the standards of plausability that you apply to other ideas, then some particularly weird ones come out as plausible.

There is nothing extraordinary about the way conscience works, and the way the eyes work. And if you analyzed it correctly you would see this.

The way you claim they work, you mean. Or would mean, if you had an ounce of intellectual honesty. And your claims are very much out of the ordinary: you are, in fact, the only person on the planet who thinks they are correct. This is because there is no proof or compelling reason to believe they are correct. In fact there is only one, very poor reason to believe it: the fact your father said it was so. That is enough for you, but the rest of the world has a different opinion.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

They are comparable.

They look similar because they are disputing an established fact, but that's where their similarities end. Just like you tried to compare him to a crackpot against the crackpot scale, anyone who is outside of the mainstream would be considered a crackpot, but that doesn't necessarily make him one. This comment is so true, and it's important that people search out the diamond in the sewage before they carelessly assume it's all sewage.

In science, pursuing revolutionary advancements can be like searching for diamonds hidden in sewage. It's a shame that the realms of questionable ideas contain "diamonds" of great value. This makes the judging crazy theories far more difficult. If crazy discoveries were always bogus, then we'd have good reason to reject them without investigation. However, since the diamonds exist, we must distrust our first impressions. Sometimes the "obvious" craziness turns out to be a genuine cutting-edge discovery. As with the little child questioning the emperor's clothing, sometimes the entire scientific community is misguided and incompetent. Sometimes only the lone voice of the maverick scientist is telling the truth.

Ridiculed science mavericks vindicated

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

Nope, if any challengers have excellent evidence, then they are not crackpots. As I've told you.

Bring on the evidence and I will happily admit when science has gotten it wrong

Look how many people were considered crackpots in the beginning, and turned out to be true discoverers. I know that you don't place Lessans in the same category as these discoverers because you don't see the evidence, but that could be a problem with you, not him. These observations were extremely difficult to see, which is why it took this long for someone to see them. Don't be so high on your horse LadyShea, that if you don't see the proof of his observations, they must not be true.

Today's science texts are dishonest to the extent that they hide these huge mistakes made by the scientific community. They rarely discuss the acts of intellectual suppression which were directed at the following researchers by their colleagues.

Ridiculed science mavericks vindicated

Originally Posted by LadyShea

Look how many MORE actual crackpots have used this same argument and were wrong. The first sentence of your own link: While it's true that at least 99% of revolutionary announcements from the fringes of science are just as bogus as they seem...

That is true, but this just shows how science has to be all the more careful to look for the diamond in the sewage because it could be easily missed.

Originally Posted by LadyShea

All of the vindicated discoverers had actual evidence or continued to do experiments until they had the evidence. Can you find a single person on there who relied on observation alone? Lessans went from indirect observation and jumped straight to conclusions. No evidence gathering done at all. So get off your high horse about how he is comparable to those who did actual science.

He didn't go from an indirect observation and jump straight to a conclusion. This was indirect only in so far as his conclusions didn't come from astronomy. People can bring something to a field without being in the field. Did you know that? He studied for years LadyShea. You are once again portraying him to be someone who was flimsy, who didn't take the necessary time that would have allowed him to come to accurate conclusions. You're so wrong. He was the opposite of what you're describing.

Originally Posted by LadyShea

Once again, bring on the evidence and I will happily admit when science gets it wrong.

I don't think you will be able to see the validity of these claims until someone of high esteem validates them. it's just the nature of the beast, I guess. It takes years and years for something this cutting-edge to make its way into the mainstream; maybe even centuries.

Originally Posted by LadyShea

From the same website you linked to Weird Science: other sites: Skepticism I suggest you follow some of his skepticism links which the author described:

Also you may want to read about Karla McLaren, a one time True Believer turned skeptic

That's great. I also have heard of scientists who have become religious. I am a skeptic LadyShea, but not to the degree that I become so sure of myself that I begin to believe I can never be wrong in my analysis. There are so many scientific experiments that have turned out to be completely flawed.

[Vivisectus]

Originally Posted by Peacegirl

I am a skeptic

[Vivisectus]

They look similar because they are disputing an established fact, but that's where their similarities end. Just like you tried to compare him to a crackpot against the crackpot scale, anyone who is outside of the mainstream would be considered a crackpot, but that doesn't necessarily make him one. This comment is so true, and it's important that people search out the diamond in the sewage before they carelessly assume it's all sewage.

This is the most well-examined piece if mindless crackpottery ever. Still, it has this going for it: the topic "What is wrong with this book, and why" is not easily exhausted. The delightful mix of arrogance and bumbling ignorance makes sure of that.

I do not think anyone can argue that the ideas in this book have not been examined. The problem is that upon inspection, it turns out to not be harder than glass and of a crystalline nature, but rather a soft, rather unpleasant smelling brown substance.

In science, pursuing revolutionary advancements can be like searching for diamonds hidden in sewage. It's a shame that the realms of questionable ideas contain "diamonds" of great value. This makes the judging crazy theories far more difficult. If crazy discoveries were always bogus, then we'd have good reason to reject them without investigation. However, since the diamonds exist, we must distrust our first impressions. Sometimes the "obvious" craziness turns out to be a genuine cutting-edge discovery. As with the little child questioning the emperor's clothing, sometimes the entire scientific community is misguided and incompetent. Sometimes only the lone voice of the maverick scientist is telling the truth.

Ridiculed science mavericks vindicated

First sentence from your link:

While it's true that at least 99% of revolutionary announcements from the fringes of science are just as bogus as they seem,

Like I said: I am sure they laugh at the odd genius from time to time. But for every genius, they laugh at 100.000 idiots.

We can tell the difference between one and the other by examining their ideas and looking what evidence they present. If the ideas are nuts and there is no evidence, then you have yourself a crackpot. Some of the indicators that you may be dealing with one is requiring special circumstances or considerations for their ideas, claims that all people who disagree are biased, and long tirades about how closed-minded all scientists are.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by thedoc

When you observe 'heat waves' you are not seeing the heat itself, you are not seeing the air that is 'warm', you are seeing the light that is passing through that warm air that is rising through cooler air. As light passes through air it is slightly refracted, and air of different densities will refract light at slightly different angles, warm air is less dense than cool air. So when warm air rises through cool air the light passing through that air will 'shimmer' and the image we see will seem to wiggle about. If we were seeing the object directly with no distance or travel of light to account for we would not see this shimmer of the image of the object, because we would not be seeing it through the air in between. The fact that we see the shimmer of the image of the object, proves that we are seeing the object by detecting the light that has passed through this warm and cool air that is causing image of the object to seem to wiggle about. We 'see' by detecting the light that has traveled the distance from the object to our eyes, and since light takes a finite time to travel the image we see is of the object as it was in the past.

We see the shimmering because of how light interacts with the heated air, that is true. Obviously, without light we wouldn't see this shimmering, just as we wouldn't see a rainbow, or a sunset, or anything else in the atmosphere. I never said we don't detect light. That's the purpose of a retina. What you are doing is assuming the image is in the traveling light, when in actuality we are seeing the image (the phenomenon) directly because of light's presence. If suddenly it gets cooler, there will be no delayed image traveling to the eyes.

[Vivisectus]

No, you goose. If it wasn't the case that we just detect light, we would not see a shimmer - there would be no reason to see one.

[peacegirl]

dupe