NASA Moonwalker claims alien cover-up

[insanity]

So we seem to have something in common

So, for example World War II, the Holocaust, the Tsunami in 2004 and all of the victims can't be assumed to be observable "objective reality"? What's it then? A dream? A vision?

That's why I always have problems whenever people try to argue about reality.

Actually, yes. Obviously they happened, but their 'reality' is to some degree subjective by their relationship with it. The Tsunami happened, but the reality it had for a South East Asian versus the reality it had for me are completely different. My point was that in talking about reality you introduce some observer bias.

 

[Moonwalker]

Well, when I talk about reality I usually talk about events and facts, no matter if people witnessed it from different angels, different distances and have a different belief and thoughts about it. That people witness something differently does not at all affect the event and its facts. It just effects individual belief. And that's exactly why science and belief is two different things, and why the reality can be unswerving stone cold.

 

[insanity]

Well, when I talk about reality I usually talk about events and facts, no matter if people witnessed it from different angels, different distances and have a different belief and thoughts about it. That people witness something differently does not at all affect the event and its facts. It just effects individual belief. And that's exactly why science and belief is two different things, and why the reality can be unswerving stone cold.

But you cannot dismiss that facts are relative. A tsunami is often caused by earthquakes at plate-boundaries- often subducting boundaries where lithosphere is destroyed. We know that these events happen, we can have theories and models that explain the causes and even the ability to predict the wave speed and direction just by measuring energy. But there is always a probability that something else is going on that we don't understand. So while our models are often flawless and sophisticated, they don't accurately portray ultimate reality with 100% level of confidence. All we can do is just have pretty good ideas and model them.

Another example- think about the first people to record the daily variations in the weather and the sun... they did it so well that they were eventually able to make a repeatable model bout these cycles (calenders). They may have had no clue about the sidereal time of the Earth or the orbital period of the Earth. They had no clue that they were literally moving through space every second, but they still made a pretty decent model of the seasons.

 

[Eagle]

11 pages in 24 hours, lots of interest in this thread.

Who knows, weird things have happened. Maybe we can get lucky and have a more rowdy stranger HAIL us on a widely monitored frequency such that any cover-up would not be possible.

 

[Moonwalker]

But you cannot dismiss that facts are relative.

A real fact can't be relative. Otherwise you are talking about something, but not about a fact. Play of words and individual thoughts on something might be relative, which is how philosophy and/or belief works but not science, i.e. observation. In case one of your or my family member dies for example, it is not relative but a damn stone cold fact.

But there is always a probability that something else is going on that we don't understand.

Which does not mean that we won't understand it in future or that we don't undertsand what was going on. Less than ever does it relativise facts, which in case of the Tsunami is the flood and thousands of deaths as a result.

That humans did not understand the moon and the solar system for a long period of time, did not mean that we won't fly into space and to the moon manned in the 20th century That we don't know everything about the universe does not prevent us from doing all these things. Everything is explainable. The question just is if humans get the chance and the time to do so.

The unexplainable just exists in our brain. That is, the unexplainable, what religions often try to suggest and so use to take humans for fools. That is, like Einstein said, a barrier, a cage some humans create theirselves to live in it.

So while our models are often flawless and sophisticated, they don't accurately portray ultimate reality with 100% level of confidence. All we can do is just have pretty good ideas and model them.

Models don't have to accurately portray ultimate reality with 100% level of confidence. A Boeing 787 or an Airbus A380 for example is basically designed based on modeling, which does for sure not accurately portray ultimate reality with 100% level of confidence, but which is flawless and sophisticated indeed. Those models enable us to develope and reproduce thousands of airplanes, carrying billions of passengers around the globe. Again stone cold reality and anything but relative

Also, flight simulators for example also don't accurately portray ultimate reality, but they do enable trainee pilots to completely use those simulators for training, and just do a final test on the real airplane afterwards (it's just about 16 take offs and landings for young Lufthansa trainee pilots in Germany). On the next day they already fly a real 737 or A320 in liner service, with an experience of just 16 take offs and landings on a real airplane. The most work during training is done by a simulator, "just" a model, because it is way cheaper and as reliable as using a real airplane.

 

[computerex]

In case one of your or my family member dies for example, it is not relative but a damn stone cold fact.

Well what is death? The definition of death is up for debate. Is brain death considered death? What about a funky cardiac rhythm? Flat lines nearly only happen in dramas

The unexplainable just exists in our brain. That is, the unexplainable, what religions often try to suggest and so use to take humans for fools. That is, like Einstein said, a barrier, a cage some humans create theirselves to live in it.

No, not everything is explainable. Does anyone know the cause of the big bang? Do we even have any definite proof as to whether the big bang even took place? We have cosmic background radiation. In other words, the answer to one of the most fundamental question is based on some random speculation. Can we explain the particle-wave duality? Can we explain quantum entanglement, or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? Oh wait, it's a fundamental property of the universe! We may as well have penguins speculating about quantum chromodynamics.

 

[Eagle]

Models don't have to accurately portray ultimate reality with 100% level of confidence. A Boeing 787 or an Airbus A380 for example is basically designed based on modeling, which does for sure not accurately portray ultimate reality with 100% level of confidence, but which is flawless and sophisticated indeed. Those models enable us to develop and reproduce thousands of airplanes, carrying billions of passengers around the globe. Again stone cold reality and anything but relative

That being said there are good models and spectacularly bad models. Generally there is a direct correlation between a model being accurate or useful and how well the phenomena is understood.

Of course not all models are created equal, Climate models being easy prey. Well understood building blocks about convective transport, cloud nucleation, radiative cooling and absorption don't stack together like Legos. A historical dataset possibly contaminated with uncertainties due to constant changes in the instrument's local environment. Added are successive levels of abstraction to avoid making computationally intensive 2^n problem into a 2^n^n or worse. So, not all models are created equally.

(Heat transport models for stars are rather complex but are believed to be very accurate, they can predict the characteristics of most any stars including variables. However they have very little predictive capability for events like sunspots or flares. Enough observation has allowed us to understand the mechanisms that cause a sunspot or flare and detect one as it forms; but not the ability to predict that one will form a week or more in advance. And simulating the periodic cycles of flares and sunspots is more a stasticical trick of fitting a series of sine waves to past data rather than any deep understanding of the underlying mechanisms of the cycles.)

Also, flight simulators for example also don't accurately portray ultimate reality, but they do enable trainee pilots to completely use those simulators for training, and just do a final test on the real airplane afterwards (it's just about 16 take offs and landings for young Lufthansa trainee pilots in Germany). On the next day they already fly a real 737 or A320 in liner service, with an experience of just 16 take offs and landings on a real airplane. The most work during training is done by a simulator, "just" a model, because it is way cheaper and as reliable as using a real airplane.

Excellently said.

 

[Moonwalker]

Well what is death?

Albert Einstein, my grandpa, the dinosaurs, billions of humans and other life forms who have passed their lives.

The definition of death is up for debate. Is brain death considered death? What about a funky cardiac rhythm? Flat lines nearly only happen in dramas

The definition and moment of clinical death might be up for debate for some people. But death is not up for debate. The death of my grandba, or of the dinosaurs for example, is not debatable. It's stone cold fact.

No, not everything is explainable. Does anyone know the cause of the big bang? Do we even have any definite proof as to whether the big bang even took place? We have cosmic background radiation. In other words, the answer to one of the most fundamental question is based on some random speculation. Can we explain the particle-wave duality? Can we explain quantum entanglement, or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? Oh wait, it's a fundamental property of the universe! We may as well have penguins speculating about quantum chromodynamics.

That we don't know certain things yet does not mean it is not explainable. That a baby doesn't know much about the world it had been born into, doesn't mean it lives in an unexplainable world. That animals don't know even a fraction of what we know, doesn't mean that animals live in an unexplainable world. We didn't know much about the solar system for a long period of time. But yet, the solar system always was and is explainable. That we didn't know anything about genetics for a long period of time, didn't mean it is not explainable. We just had to find out, and we did and continue to do so.

Everything is explainable. Anything else is based on restricted religous thought patterns. The question just is if humans will have enough time to explain everything.

 

[computerex]

Albert Einstein, my grandpa, the dinosaurs, billions of humans and other life forms who have passed their lives.

The definition and moment of clinical death might be up for debate for some people. But death is not up for debate. The death of my grandba, or of the dinosaurs for example, is not debatable. It's stone cold fact.

The thing is, you are going by your definition of death. What about Brahmans ? The Jains? They believe in Samsara, or rebirth. To them Einstein, your grandpa, the dinosaurs, are very much alive. There are countless examples.

Everything is explainable. Anything else is based on restricted religous thought patterns. The question just is if humans will have enough time to explain everything.

Based on your logic I can hypothesize that hydrogen gas will spontaneously transform into liquid oxygen given enough time. In other words, what you said can't possibly be put to test. So how can you be so sure of this?

People have been wondering about our origins since there were people. Yet we have had little luck...We are still stumbling in the dark making wild guesses, clinging onto anything we can find.

 

[insanity]

Everything is explainable. Anything else is based on restricted religous thought patterns. The question just is if humans will have enough time to explain everything.

Again, our explanations will always have bias. Science is largely based on the logic of statistics- even the 'hard' sciences admit freely that there is always room for error and unexplained processes that drive the processes we attempt to explain. There are things we can observe objectively (like death, tsunamis, and the results of geopolitics) and we can explain with a great deal of depth but it does not mean we have conclusively explained the phenomena.

To borrow your example, livestock probably know nothing of the global food-supply chain which they are destined to become a part of. For them, reality is eating and unwittingly getting primed for dinner. They can only draw connections between things they can observe- like a lot of their buddies magically disappearing. If they attempted to explain why, I'd bet their answer would lack the sophistication and nuance that could explain the global supply chain.

Everything is limited by what they can make sense of- humans, while amazing, are not able to see with absolute confidence the nature of ultimate reality. To think we are capable of explaining everything with no degree of uncertainty is the definition of blind and (often) misguided faith. Heck, uncertainty is so well understood as a given, that it is a principal of quantum mechanics.

 

[Urwumpe]

The thing is, you are going by your definition of death. What about Brahmans ? The Jains? They believe in Samsara, or rebirth. To them Einstein, your grandpa, the dinosaurs, are very much alive. There are countless examples.

Comparative religion was never your strength.* They all have concepts of death, what they don't share with other religions (including among the religions you cite) is a common concept of afterlife. Rebirth is to be born again after death - your soul is in most of them never killed (like in Christianity), you are born again until you break the viscous circle of reincarnation. I only know that the ancient Egypts had a concept of the soul dying.

There is no scientific definition of what a soul is, and even die-hard theologists get problems explaining what a soul is. The most universal definition is: The essence which makes you different to the substances which make up your physical body. A soulless object is just structure.

But you can't see a soul, can't tell what feature is soul and what is structure and can't tell how to detect a soul - it is not accessible by reason and thus, not by science.

*Shameless novel quotation.

 

[Moonwalker]

That Einstein, my grandpa and the dinosaurs are gone is not my definition of death but a fact. There is no single vital sign. No matter what individuals do believe and wish.

That we don't see the nature of ultimate reality with absolute confidence does not mean that the nature is not fully explainable. Everything that exists and happens is potentially explainable. No matter if we're capable of doing so or not.

The soul: initially was an old religious/philosophic conception of what today we know weighs about 1,3kg and is located in our head.

 

[jedidia]

and even die-hard theologists get problems explaining what a soul is.

I bothered with the topic for quite some time, but it would lead too far to roll it all up here. Fact is, if you don't use platon, but instead the old testament as a hermeneutical key to the new testament, you end up with a pretty surprising result, that is radically different from popular christian teaching. You end up with a "soul" that is inseperable of body and mind, and can only exist in unison with them (actually, "soul" (psyche) is the mind... what we generally consider "soul" would be closer to the "Pneuma", or "spirit" as it usually gets translated, but it doesn't fit too well either).

 

[Hielor]

\Science is largely based on the logic of statistics- even the 'hard' sciences admit freely that there is always room for error and unexplained processes that drive the processes we attempt to explain.

Yet another difference between science and religion--science will happily admit there is room for error and that they might be wrong, while religions proclaim that they have all the facts and they're always right, and then quietly change their tune over the course of centuries as they are proven wrong...

 

[JEL]

Or, in more plain language, no matter who or what controls your "dream", if you analise behaviour and laws and based on these observations develop a theory how things in your dream work which allow reliable predictions, you're doing science, No matter wheather you're really in a dream or not.

I never said you could NOT do science on your perceived reality

You can easily count how many sheep you dream about each night, and note that in your notebook, and then extrapolate some theory about dream-sheep from that.

However, what I DID say is that HOW you INTERPRET the reality you personally experience is always, at it's core base of understanding, a matter of BELIEF.

That is: You either BELIEVE it's a dream you are having, maybe a bit like virtual reality, and that the sheep are virtual creations of your own mind, or you BELIEVE it's a real world existing outside, and independent of, your mind, and that the sheep are actually there in their own right, that they are non-virtual, or you BELIEVE something else (whatever that may be)

The sheep you see may behave and look just the same, regardless of whether you believe they're virtual or real (or actually unicorns in disguise as sheep, should that happen to be the case)

Perhaps your argument makes less sense to me, because I am a lucid dreamer. That is, I *can* control the vast majority of things inside my dreams.

I actually predicted talk about lucid dreaming would come (since it's not the first time I have this debate about solipsism)

I can do lucid dreaming to, some times.

But as you point out yourself, your control is limited. You don't go to bed knowing WHAT dream you'll have and how it should play out in every exact detail, but you CAN sometimes control the course of the dream (like undoing an action, or rewinding some events and then have them play out differently the second time)

You can't force yourself to dream a particular dream on request, like ordering a pay-per-view movie you want to see, or atleast I can't. If that was possible I would never dream about anything but beautiful women

Where the religious people go wrong is trying to drive a wedge between science and belief by taking metaphors and analogies literally instead of using their mind to just appreciate how cool it all really is. I admit I'm biased, I have a lot of faith in the scientific method as the best way to describe our reality, but I don't discount the possibility for a higher power.

That coupling is exactly what I also would like people to appreciate. We are all in the same boat; we see some kind of reality play out before us, and we all have to make up our own minds about WHAT this reality is. That's why I don't like when it becomes science versus god. That kind of thinking only divides us and creates gaps between us, where there are no real gaps.

No matter what each of us subjectively think is real, we could be wrong. And thus we should always allow other people to have their beliefs in peace without ridiculing or patronizing them, just as they should also allow us to have our beliefs in peace.

A mutual understanding for that premise, that none of us can say we have absolute insight, hopefully could yield some more respect for one another. So that science would leave spirituality in peace, and spirituality would leave science in peace, because both 'camps' would realize that 'reality' is a strictly personal thing and that we are completely equally limited from knowing it fully.

No more blowing up abortion-clinics because your god tells you to, and no more banning of saying grace in schools, where they wish to do so, because you feel religion is unethical. Live and let live, practised by both sides.

Yet another difference between science and religion--science will happily admit there is room for error and that they might be wrong, while religions proclaim that they have all the facts and they're always right, and then quietly change their tune over the course of centuries as they are proven wrong...

So you will admit that you could be wrong and I could be right?

Actually I don't want to mash any more potatoes on this subject since it will probably be something people will debate for ever anyways without ever being able to reach any final conclusions that all are happy with

But thanks for the talk Hielor :tiphat:

Disagreeing is not a crime

 

[Urwumpe]

Yet another difference between science and religion--science will happily admit there is room for error and that they might be wrong, while religions proclaim that they have all the facts and they're always right, and then quietly change their tune over the course of centuries as they are proven wrong...

Even worse: Scientists can tell how much they can be wrong.

 

[computerex]

They all have concepts of death, what they don't share with other religions (including among the religions you cite) is a common concept of afterlife. Rebirth is to be born again after death - your soul is in most of them never killed (like in Christianity), you are born again until you break the viscous circle of reincarnation. I only know that the ancient Egypts had a concept of the soul dying.

As far as I know Jains, Brahmins, and Buddhists believe that upon moksha (or Nirvana in Buddhism, but that is a little different) the soul is assimilated within the supreme being. In other words you become part of nature upon being enlightened.

But the point is that they have their own definition of death. My anatomy teacher's sister for example believes that people never really die, they are always there spiritually.

So the death of his grandpa may be a straightforward fact for Moonwalker, however for some people it can be very complex, thus making death relative to each person's definition.

That we don't see the nature of ultimate reality with absolute confidence does not mean that the nature is not fully explainable. Everything that exists and happens is potentially explainable. No matter if we're capable of doing so or not.

This is how an argument works: You say something, I say that I disagree and here is why, then you reply addressing my arguments.
All you are doing here is repeating yourself. You already told us that you believe that your grandpa is dead, there is no need to repeat.

You wrote:

Everything is explainable. Anything else is based on restricted religous thought patterns. The question just is if humans will have enough time to explain everything.

To which I replied:

Based on your logic I can hypothesize that hydrogen gas will spontaneously transform into liquid oxygen given enough time. In other words, what you said can't possibly be put to test. So how can you be so sure of this?

To which you replied:

That we don't see the nature of ultimate reality with absolute confidence does not mean that the nature is not fully explainable. Everything that exists and happens is potentially explainable. No matter if we're capable of doing so or not.

Do you see how similar the above is to this?

Everything is explainable. Anything else is based on restricted religous thought patterns. The question just is if humans will have enough time to explain everything.

Aside from a few contradictions and a couple fallacies they are nearly identical in message.
I would like you to answer:

Based on your logic I can hypothesize that hydrogen gas will spontaneously transform into liquid oxygen given enough time. In other words, what you said can't possibly be put to test. So how can you be so sure of this?

Don't reply with what you have already said twice please