“Revolution in Thought: A new look at determinism and free will"

[peacegirl]

Wait, let me preemptively answer.

The light from the sun does not bounce off the moon, but it *at* the moon, and therefore we see it in real time. Right?

How pathetic that any person could believe such nonsense,

It amazes me that you don't understand the simplest concept.

O, irony!

Light travels. Light strikes an object, and it obeys the law of reflection.

Earlier you said light does not bounce off an object.

This is where language becomes problematic. Light gets reflected and absorbed when it strikes an object, but it doesn't adopt the object's wavelength and travel with it through space/time. Again, light travels, but not with the image of the object (i.e., the wavelength) when the object itself is outside of our field of view. Our photoreceptors would have nothing to work with. That's what he meant when he said an image is not being reflected. He did not say light doesn't strike objects and travel at 186,000 miles a second.

The author was not disputing this.

OK

He was disputing the fact that because light strikes an object, it takes on the characteristics of that object.

Huh? Wuh? What does that mean, “takes on the characteristics of that object”? Light does not “take on the characteristics of the object” it bounces off.

Yes, but it is assumed that the light's wavelength changes depending on the characteristics of the object it strikes and then travels with it until it reaches a telescope that can gather the light and magnify the image. Isn't that the theme?

Light is just light. If light bounces off the moon it does not become the moon. So whatever the hell your author is babbling about, he is disputing a strawman.

Who said light becomes the moon? That's absurd. You are the one creating a strawman because he never said that.

That is what he meant when he said the image is not reflected.

No one ever said “images” are reflected. Yet again you repeat this idiocy. Images are formed in the mind. They are not reflected.

That's what I meant.

According to his observations,

He had no observations,

He had many, and they were accurate.

light allows the object to be revealed when looking at it, but it does not bring the image (i.e.,the lightwaves of said object)

Objects do not have light waves. Light has light waves.

Objects reflect light. That's what I meant. Stop trying to make me look stupid.

through space/time to our eyes. The word "lightwaves" is the only way I can express this concept. Give me a better word, and I'll use it. Remember, it's not the word that makes or breaks the truth, especially when language is limited, so keep that in mind. It's not meant to fool anyone.

What makes or breaks what you are saying is fact. And in fact what you are saying is wholly broken.

It's not only NOT broken; it's a very astute observation coming from a different angle, which deserves further investigation.

 

[peacegirl]

Pg

Why do you think you are not getting any traction here?

Because people have been burned so many times by fraudulent claims, and this claim is so extraordinary that they can't imagine there is any truth to the claim that we can achieve world peace; so as not to be burned again, or to be thought of as suckers, they are positioning themselves in such a way that won't allow them even to consider that this discovery could be right. They have already made up their minds as a protective mechanism, which makes it doubly hard for me to prove to them that there is something to this knowledge.

Yes, this is your silly little defense mechanism. It must be our fault because we dislike having our “precious world view” challenged, or because we don’t want to be “burned” by fraudulent claims. The truth is much simpler. Your author’s claims are stupid and wrong and we are smart and right and therefore we reject his stupid and wrong claims.

Please stop using my words against me. It is easy to do, but it's disingenuous.

 

[peacegirl]

How many times have I said this version of sight does NOT violate physics?

Who care how many times you say it? It DOES violate physics, in the most fundamental way possible. As has been explained to you about a million times, it straightforwardly violates relativity, And relativity is correct and your author is full of shit.

No, it doesn't. I don't care what you have to say, Pood. You are taking this personally, and, consequently, you won't be able to be objective about anything that would disrupt what you have determined is nonnegotiable. I don't mean to hurt you with this challenge, but if he is right, you may have to rethink some of your beliefs to accommodate this new way of seeing the world. Remember: There are no sacred cows, not even in science.

 

[peacegirl]

This has got nothing to do with winning friends and influencing people. It has to do with the fact that the author’s claims are garbage.

If one could win friends and influence people to accept garbage claims, that is bad, not good.

These aren't garbage claims, and calling the claims garbage doesn't make them so. You are putting yourself too high on a pedestal by making yourself an arbiter of what is true and what isn't, when you don't have the knowledge to do that. You have never studied his work from day one. All you have ever done is tried to ruin him through laughter because you didn't like his claims. That's not how it's done. You react with anger because his claims would falsify some of the beliefs that you hold. I never realized how invested you are in keeping the status quo , and why you cannot face the possibility that some of your beliefs may be proven wrong.

This has got nothing to do with winning friends and influencing people. It has to do with the fact that the author’s claims are garbage.



If one could win friends and influence people to accept garbage claims, that is bad, not good.

These aren't garbage claims, and calling the claims garbage doesn't make them so. You are putting yourself too high on a pedestal by making yourself an arbiter of what is true and what isn't, when you don't have the knowledge to do that. You never studied his work with a desire to understand. All you have ever done is try to ruin him through lulz because you didn't like his claims. This lulz took on a life of its own, and it was horrible to witness. You and your cronies turned his 30-year work into an unrecognizable piece of garbage. That's on YOU. You are reacting with such vitriol, for if he is right, his observations may falsify several beliefs that you hold dear. I never realized how invested you are in your worldview, and the reason why you may have a difficult time facing the possibility that it needs a complete overhaul.

 

[bilby]

If this is what you have concluded from my efforts to explain that you need to understand the principles in this book before coming to a premature conclusion, I HAVE FAILED.

Again.

The common factor in each of your failures is you. Perhaps it's time to consider changing yourself and your ideas, given the repeated abject failures of your plan to change everyone else and their ideas?

 

[bilby]

Light travels. Light strikes an object, and it obeys the law of reflection.

Earlier you said light does not bounce off an object

Well, obviously it does both. It bounces off and does not bounce off, depending on what you are trying to prove at the time. And before you say "that's a contradiction", just think - do you really want people to continue to suffer, just so that you can point out contradictions?

The Truth^TM doesn't care about mere contradictions.

 

[bilby]

Foolish is one way to say it.

Ignorant, narrow minded, dogmatic.

You do adapt what you see posed and integrate it in to your narrative. That would IMO idicte intelligence.

When photons were mentioned to explain how the retina works you added photons to your posts. I brought up Faraday on this thread and you referenced him in another.

I see what you are dong and hear the wheels spinning in your head because for most of my adult life I was immersed in company politics. It was inescapable You are not in any way new to me.

From my perspective you have a marketing messaging problem. In a sense you are trying to sell a product.

'My product is great and a revolutionary new development. It will grow hair on your head and increase make virility Trust me I know it is true, my wife loves the results. Try it, for only $29.95 a bottle'

A typical TV supplement commercial narrative. in some ways similar form to your pitch for your ideas.

Nothing about mirrors disproves his claim.

Well, the fact that you can't explain how they work, pretty much does, actually.

Light hits a surface and, depending on the angle it strikes, and whether the surface is smooth or rocky, determines the angle of incidence, but it doesn't take the object's lightwave with it in its travels.

This is only not wrong, insofar as it fails to be sufficiently coherent as to say anything at all.

It reads like you took a paragraph from an elementary optics lesson, shredded it, ran the shreds through a blender, and then tried to reassemble the words into sentences using the rules of grammar, but without really understanding any of the words' meanings.

That's what he meant when he said objects don't reflect an image.

But we observe that mirrors do reflect an image. A mirror is an object. So he was, quite simply, wrong.

Do you see why language is limited in this case?

The reason that what you just said is meaningless has little to do with language.

 

[bilby]

What they tried to make us believe is that if it takes 8 minutes for the light from the sun to reach us, it would take hundreds of years for the reflection of Columbus to reach Rigel, even with a powerful telescope. But why would they need a telescope?

The clue is in the name:

From tele- +‎ -scope. From Latin tēlescopium, from Ancient Greek τηλεσκόπος (tēleskópos, “far-seeing”), from τῆλε (têle, “afar”) + σκοπέω(skopéō, “I look at”).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/telescope

They need a telescope, because the thing they are trying to see is a long way away.

Despite being large and luminous, many stars can only be seen with a telescope - which makes no sense at all if sight does not entail light travelling from object to eye, at lightspeed.

It makes a lot of sense. Telescopes bring objects into the field of view because they magnify them.

That's a one word description, not an explanation, and you clearly don't understand what you describe, as your next paragraph makes clear.

In the usual model of sight, a telescope works by collecting the light that passes through (or reflects off) a large diameter collector, and focuses it into a smaller diameter eyepiece.

In your efferent vision model, light need not travel through space for us to see a star, which is instantly visible due to its size and luminosity. So any star visible with a telescope should slso be visible without one.

No bilby. Objects that are too small would not be seen without a telescope because they don't meet the conditions for sight.

Stars are fucking huge.

Telescopes help with size and luminosity by focusing the object into a smaller-diameter eyepiece, as you mentioned. That would put the object into one's field of view.

A telescope reduces your field of view. You get a more detailed picture, but of a smaller patch of sky. Everything that is in the field of view of a telescope is in the field of view of a person standing in the same place, but looking with the naked eye.

We can test this. All we need is a clear night, and a telescope.

When we test it, we discover - (that is, literally anyone who wants to look, discovers for themselves, regardless of what books they have read, or what pre-conceptions they have, or what they expect to see, or who they trust, or who they believe, or who is their friend, or who is their enemy, or whether they are a scientist, a bricklayer, a stage magician or a bus driver; Everyone can see) - that more stars are visible with a telescope, than without one.

Of course it doesn't take some special individual to see this, because it can be observed by anyone.

Yup.

And it proves my case that telescopes magnify celestial bodies so that they come into one's field of view.

NO!

Do you not know what a "field of view" is?

A telescope reduces one's field of view, as a prerequisite for "maginfying" an image. And the celestial bodies themselves are not affected. If the celestial body were magnified by pointing a telescope at it, then the guy without a telescope standing next to you would also see the stars appear when the telescope was pointed at them. The only way to explain why he doesn't, is to understand that light has to travel through the telescope in order for the observer to see the star. Vision must, therefore, be dependent upon light travelling (at lightspeed) from object to observer.

There is no argument here.

How do you explain that, other than by saying "my model of instant vision must be wrong"? Does pointing a telescope at a star make it larger? Does pointing a telescope at a star make it more luminous? If so, how come the star becomes visible only to the person looking through the telescope, but not to a person with no telescope who is standing right beside him?

Because the magnification allows light to enter the telescope.

The telescope does the magnifying. You are putting effect ahead of cause here.

If that star were not magnified, the light being emitted would never reach us through space/time

The star isn't affected at all. If it were, when a person looked through the telescope, everyone nearby would suddenly be able to see the star, even without a telescope of their own.

because the image is not traveling.

The image is, and must be, passing through the telescope. So it must be travelling.

We are seeing it because it is, once again, large enough and bright enough to be seen

All stars are, in absolute terms, huge and very bright.

due to magnification.

Whether they are magnified or not.

 

[bilby]

After all this time, you think I'm trying to pitch a product, and nothing more? I'm speechless!

To the point of not even denying the allegation, I note.

 

[bilby]

It's not fair.

Spoken like a spoiled toddler. Life ain't fair. But it is real, and it doesn't care about your opinions.

 

[bilby]

This is where language becomes problematic.

I think you mean "This is where I not only don't know what I am talking about, but also don't know the meanings of many of the words I am about to use".

 

[bilby]

Stop trying to make me look stupid.

You should tell that to your mirror.

(That's the object that reflects an image of you, if you weren't sure).

 

[bilby]

Please stop using my words against me. It is easy to do...

Then you need to learn how to communicate better. FAR better. Or you have no hope of ever achieving anything at all in your entire life.

 

[pood]

This has got nothing to do with winning friends and influencing people. It has to do with the fact that the author’s claims are garbage.

If one could win friends and influence people to accept garbage claims, that is bad, not good.

These aren't garbage claims, and calling the claims garbage doesn't make them so. You are putting yourself too high on a pedestal by making yourself an arbiter of what is true and what isn't, when you don't have the knowledge to do that. You have never studied his work from day one. All you have ever done is tried to ruin him through laughter because you didn't like his claims.

This is so sadly typical of you.

It has nothing to do with whether I “like” his claims or not. Whether I “like” a claim or not is irrelevant to reality.

I don’t “like” the fact that I am going to die, but I know that I am.

I don’t like or dislike your author’s claims about light and sight. I just have the knowledge to know they are utter garbage, and that is all that matters.

It’s nothing personal.

 

[DBT]

Pg

Why do you think you are not getting any traction here?

Because people have been burned so many times by fraudulent claims, and this claim is so extraordinary that they can't imagine there is any truth to the claim that we can achieve world peace; so as not to be burned again, or to be thought of as suckers, they are positioning themselves in such a way that won't allow them even to consider that this discovery could be right. They have already made up their minds as a protective mechanism, which makes it doubly hard for me to prove to them that there is something to this knowledge.

No, that's not it.

 

[peacegirl]

Pg

You have 3 choices

1. Stop posting.
2. Continue posting ad infinitum.
3. Recognize the flaws in the book and redo your approach.

The major concepts are not flawed. How it is extended could always be improved upon.

You are modifying your approach a little. Saying his choice of words could have been better. He was not a scientist. But the revolutionary idea is still true.

He was a scientist of human behavior. How’s that?

To communicate an idea and get buy in you have to understand your audience and how they perceive you. Ten use a narrative in the context of perceptions.

Reagan was called the great commutator for a reason, he was skilled at communicating with regular people. Politicians have political consultants who figure out what to say to appeal to and concatenate with groups of people.

There is no way I could appeal to this group other than watering it down, and I did not want to do that.

Your approach is all wrong for the forum. Generally secular skeptics who like to debate and argue.

If you started with 'I realize that there are issues with the book but I think the occlusion has merit and would like to discuss it' things might have gone differently.

I would have loved people to read it and give me suggestions on making it more succinct or clearer, but I never got there.

You with 'This is true, all of it. And I will prove it'. So we debate your alleged proofs.

You need to add a lite give and take.

All I wanted to do was share his knowledge but no matter how I introduced his claim regarding the senses, I would have gotten slack. Same with his other claim.

So ends the post mortem analysis. Sometimes called lessons learned.

Have you leaned anything from all the posts?

I appreciate your feedback and I’m sorry that my presentation may not have been the best, but please understand my position that I was coming here to share a discovery, not to get them to agree if they don’t. But I never got that far. How can I move forward with an audience who refuses to read anything so we can have had a productive discussion, especially regarding his first discovery which shows how war and crime can be prevented. It’s ashame that not one person has asked any questions or wanted to know how it’s possible. I don’t know how I could have done anything more to create interest. It appears that skepticism has created a block that I cannot penetrate.

 

[DBT]

The problem is that there are no physical means or mechanisms by which real time/ instant vision could work. It would have to be magic vision.

Incorrect. There is no gap if you see the object in real time, because it meets the requirements of size and luminosity. You keep assuming that, although light travels, it is bringing the image of the object to our eyes because the object reflected that lightwave. If the light does not bring the image to us through space/time, then how do we see without it violating physics? Efferent vision. You keep going back to the idea that when light strikes an object it takes on the object’s chacteristics, but that is not what is happening if Lessans is right. Light reveals. It is a necessary condition of sight, but it does not bring anything to us.

There is always a gap between light emission or reflection and information acquisition by the eyes, processing by the brain and conscious representation in the form of sight: we see the object.

That is basically how it works. No real time/ instant vision, just a physical process.

Nooo. You are missing the entire claim. Light travels, but the eyes and brain work differently than previously thought. You have to give this author a break, or you will just keep repeating the same old mantra that there is no way for us to see without light traveling to us with the image (sorry bilby, but this is the only way I can explain it). You will never get it if you keep thinking in these terms, not because he was wrong, but because you refuse to entertain the idea that there is no violation of physics.

Light in fact has speed and travel time. Light is in fact radiated by the sun, stars, etc, and reflected by the moon and other dark objects, the objects all around us during daylight hours are illuminated by the sun, and the moon and stars by night. We see these things because they either radiate or reflect light.

Without light we cannot see.

Right. Who is saying otherwise?

Go into a dark room and you see nothing, flip the light switch and there it all is, the room is illuminated.

Agreed.

It's as simple as that. The eyes acquire light, the brain generates vision. The eyes don't see, that is the function of the brain.

The brain focuses the eyes to see the real world. The brain doesn't generate vision.

Who is disputing this? The brain is involved, but it does not explain how this occurs. It's all theoretical, not fact!

You are disputing it with the claim of instant vision/seeing. Claiming that things like stars are seen instantly without the time lag between light emission and acquisition by the eyes and brain.

By making the claim, you are trying to bypass the fundamental principles of physics.

How many times have I said this version of sight does NOT violate physics? The reason we don't see stars without a time lag is the same reason we don't see the moon without a time lag. Distance is not as much a factor as size and luminosity. If a star exists but can't be seen because it is too far away, a telescope won't help. Any celestial body has to be visible, however faint, for a telescope to collect the light and magnify it. The ACTUAL star has to be visible, not just light that was emitted light-years earlier, which present-day thinking believes is all that is necessary. To repeat: The star has to be within the field of view of the telescope for it to collect the emitted light. It cannot magnify something that isn't there. IOW, if a star is too far away, and therefore too dim for it to be seen, a telescope won't be able to give us any new information.

Stars radiate light. That's how we are able to see them. Our eyes detect light from the stars and our brain generates mental imagery of them in conscious form. Stars are luminous because they emit light.

 

[pood]

Pg

You have 3 choices

1. Stop posting.
2. Continue posting ad infinitum.
3. Recognize the flaws in the book and redo your approach.

The major concepts are not flawed. How it is extended could always be improved upon.

You are modifying your approach a little. Saying his choice of words could have been better. He was not a scientist. But the revolutionary idea is still true.

He was a scientist of human behavior. How’s that?

To communicate an idea and get buy in you have to understand your audience and how they perceive you. Ten use a narrative in the context of perceptions.

Reagan was called the great commutator for a reason, he was skilled at communicating with regular people. Politicians have political consultants who figure out what to say to appeal to and concatenate with groups of people.

There is no way I could appeal to this group other than watering it down, and I did not want to do that.

Your approach is all wrong for the forum. Generally secular skeptics who like to debate and argue.

If you started with 'I realize that there are issues with the book but I think the occlusion has merit and would like to discuss it' things might have gone differently.

I would have loved people to read it and give me suggestions on making it more succinct or clearer, but I never got there.

You with 'This is true, all of it. And I will prove it'. So we debate your alleged proofs.

You need to add a lite give and take.

All I wanted to do was share his knowledge but no matter how I introduced his claim regarding the senses, I would have gotten slack. Same with his other claim.

So ends the post mortem analysis. Sometimes called lessons learned.

Have you leaned anything from all the posts?

I appreciate your feedback and I’m sorry that my presentation may not have been the best, but please understand my position that I was coming here to share a discovery, not to get them to agree if they don’t. But I never got that far. How can I move forward with an audience who refuses to read anything so we can have had a productive discussion, especially regarding his first discovery which shows how war and crime can be prevented. It’s ashame that not one person has asked any questions or wanted to know how it’s possible. I don’t know how I could have done anything more to create interest. It appears that skepticism has created a block that I cannot penetrate.

People have read the posted materials.

That is precisely why we disagree with the posted materials.

 

[pood]

I have asked @peacegirl to do this.

To post a concise summary consisting of premises and a conclusion about her author’s argument to determinism and free will.

I have not asked to her to post such an argument about light and sight because her author’s claims in this respect are obvious garbage that cannot be sustained by any argument.

I tried to help peacegirl elucidate the author’s claims about determinism and free will in a formal manner. She rejected my help.

Can she do it herself?

No, she cannot.

Let’s see if she can prove me wrong.

 

[steve_bank]

Suggestions?

If Lessans had presented his ideas as a fictional story of a person and people enacting his philosophy we might be reading it today.

Scifi and other writers have presented their vision of society as fiction and garnered an audience.

The Null-A series by A.E. van Vogt is a classic Golden Age science fiction trilogy focusing on non-Aristotelian logic, General Semantics, and superhuman abilities. Centered on protagonist Gilbert Gosseyn, the books explore themes of identity, evolution, and interstellar conspiracy.

The World of Null-A - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Gilbert Gosseyn (pronounced go-sane), a man living in an apparent utopia where those with superior understanding and mental control rule the rest of humanity, wants to be tested by the giant Machine that determines such superiority. However, he finds that his memories are false. In his search for his real identity, he discovers that he has extra bodies that are activated when he dies (so that, in a sense, he cannot be killed), that a galactic society of humans exists outside the Solar System, a large interstellar empire wishes to conquer both the Earth and Venus (inhabited by masters of non-Aristotelian logic), and he has extra brain matter that, when properly trained, can allow him to move matter with his mind.

People may not realize how controversial the original Star Trek series was in the 60s. They framed social issues in scifi getting past the censors. And of course Twilight Zone, studies in humn nature.

Woulda Coulda Shoulda

The book is not fixable. It is pseudoscience.

You yourself can not speak to it, you dodge by saying it is too complex for words.