ZOMBIE FORUMS

Well, you have to analyze what things produce when they fo through different reactions. Wood, for example, when ignited, burns and leaves behind ash - which is basically earth. Therefore, wood is partly earth and partly fire... Igniting the wood seperates the two.

By the way, just in case anyone didn't figure this out yet, what we're talking about here is the old Aristotelian model of physical processes - one of the very first scientific paradigms. I think the point that Treeespeaker's physics teacher was trying to make was that, though flawed, Aristotle's system was a genuine attempt to explain things rationally, based on evidence - and not just some made-up superstition.

Yeah, so I guess all that other stuff that doesn't fit is quintessence.

Nah, quintessence is the stuff of the planets and the stars. Quintessence is fundamentally different than the other four elements in that it doesn't change; it is perfect and eternal. Also, it's not found in the sublunary sphere (basically a Ptolemaic term for the earth - i.e. the part of the universe beneath the moon). Quintessence, unlike the other four, doesn't fall up or down - it moves in orbits.

Everything on Earth, however, (according to Aristotle and his followers) can be described as some combination of the four sublunary elements.

On a side note, glass, as an amorphous solid, will eventually, if, of course, left long enough, run down a hill, as is the case with water. Substances like glass aren't quite liquid and aren't quite solids. This is done by supercooling a very hot liquid. Water is nearly impossible to get to form into a glass, unless you supercooled every molecule individually. Styrofoam is nearly impossible to turn into anything but an amorphous solid; essentially the opposite of water in these regards...

Ahh, but the fact is, wood also produces fire. Anything flammable has to have fire in it, really. Wood has some air too (which combines with some of the earth to form smoke), and, yes, it does have water as well. So it has all four.

Sorry I've been so lax in replying...every time I try to post an answer from my own computer, I get a little message saying Interrupted_session or Improper_session or something like that, so I can only reply from school or someone else's computer. Enough apologies, on to the debate.



Seems to me that this one sort of follows the same logic as the fired clay questions, and I guess my reply has to be the same--we're dealing with something that can't be fully explained because we just don't understand enough about what makes elements redistribute themselves. Obviously there's something changing, but we can't tell what because we don't know how the temperture change shoves the elements in the substance around.



That one's the easiest of the lot--like I mentioned in the first post, we haven't figured out a way to determine what the proportions of elements are in any elemental compound. In cases like these, the floating material is composed of more high-sphere elements like air and fire than the lower, which probably has more earth and water.



This one's cool. My only explanation is that the proximity of that much fire, which belongs in the highest sphere, to earth, from the lowest sphere, produces spectactularly swift redistribution. And I do realize that's not that great of an explanation, but it makes a certain ammount of sense--after all, we really don't know that everything redistributes itself at the same rate (in fact, things like erosion show that everything doesn't). So, a vastly heightened rate of return to normalacy isn't totally outside the bounds of belivability.



Vacuum definatly falls under one of those phenomenon that just don't fall under the rules of gravity and levity. When you get a total absence of elements, the introduction of an element to the vacuum is going to cause unpredictable results, including elements rushing to fill a space they normally would not or being forced from a space they would normally occupy.

Yevaud333, nothing to say except cool thinking (I'm just sort of systematically responding to each post in order here).

Unum Plurum, the whole idea of this theory is that it does contradict things we know inherently are true, but is very difficult to disprove with everyday experiances, making it fun to argue for. Remember, the idea of these "elements" that make up the air is outside our personal experience. I've never seen, say, nitrogen as opposed to oxygen. All I know about is air.

IcyMonkey, good job on the trees analysis (although again, please remember that we don't have a sure-fire way of figuring out what elements make up any given compound, we can just guess from things like the ash remaining and the fire rising from burning wood). And my physics prof actually just used it as the first in a series of disillusionments regarding gravity (as in, he gave us this theory, then said "oh, by the way, it's all wrong," then gave us Newtonian gravity and said "oh, by the way, it's all wrong," then gave us Einsteinian gravity and said "oh, by the way, if it isn't all wrong, we don't know yet.")



This is cool. Throw something out about how it disproves the Aristotelian model.

...and, that's all for now. I'll try to get back as soon as possible.

The problem with this argument, though, is that someone who, say, works with electron microscopes every day does have everyday experience with elements.

But, on the subject, what about things falling faster than other things? Leaves, for example, fall slower than, say, sticks, but both are made of earth. Dust just floats in the air.

Also, how do you explain earth or air particles dissolving evenly in water?

Silly Unum, the idea is based on everyday, normal observable experience. The idea is that you are only able to use what your naked eye can determine. This does not preclude microscopes, but artificial means such as SEMs are probably not allowed in the theory.

The idea is that since the theory is based of easily-observable phenomena, you must find easily observable phenomena that disprove it.

Quite easy, as most posts have shown, but attacking the theory on the basis of quantum mechanics is foolish, because the theory will on its face be unable to coexist with it. Therefore, supposing that quantum mechanics is even valid automatically disproves the theory. So leave electrons out of it.

Of course, I could be misinterpreting Tree's intentions, but that's how I read what he wanted.

Hmmph, Pyromancer took mine. When ice freezes, its crystalline structure is less dense than liquid water, so it floats.
As for the rocket thing- don't forget, the rocket exhaust is being propelled *upwards*. Divested of the upward force from the fire, the "Earth" rocket is trying to get back to its natural, lower height. When the rocket is turned the other way, the fire is below it, pushing it upwards.

Are the original levels known exactly? I mean, you could just pour a glass of water into the Grand Canyon- I'm pretty sure the bottom is below sea level.

Really, the theory isn't all *that* incorrect- it's just an unnecessary anthropomorphication of the fact that hot gases tend to be lighter than cold ones, which tend to be lighter than liquids, which tend to be lighter than solids.

Which would make quintessence what, plasma? (Fairly accurate, oddly enough.)

I don't know what freezing water into ice would really tell us, since we can't directly perceive the crystalline structure with our inborn senses.

I like your take on the rocket, though; hadn't thought of the "rocket's heading downward because the earth shell is falling and the fire exhaust is rising" interpretation.

And as for whether the theory involves an "unnecessary anthropomorphication," (vocab high - weeee!) it often seems as though even in today's physics we make use of similar concepts. "Hydrophobic" and "hydrophilic" (literally "water fearing" and "water loving") parts of molecules are one of the simplest and most linguistically ingrained examples thereof, but there is also the way we talk about how metals "like" losing their electrons and so forth.

I guess I just mention it because, although we've officially abandoned the idea, it seems like a fundamental human way of looking at the universe to ascribe at least some measure of sentience or motivation to even the non-living matter around us. Maybe there's something to it, even. Granted it would be nothing like our consciousness, but who's to say there's not something it's like to be a bat? (Quick - name that philosopher! ) And granted that, what about the idea that there might be something it's like to be an electron, or a whole bunch of electrons? Moving in the opposite direction (out to more complex systems than mere Homo sapiens), it might even be possible to conjecture that there's something it's like to experience "life" (such as it is) as a hive of bees, an ecosystem, or even a galactic core.

Of course, there's little if any way of knowing anything about any of these systems' "mental processes" even if they do exist, but since when has impracticality diminished our enthusiasm for a subject?

Interesting, Yevaud...

You know, there are people who conjecture that consciousness is simply a consequence of complexity. If so, it may be that the Universe itself, as a whole, is a conscious entity. What could we call such an entity? I'd call it "God".

See, here's the thing. Anthropomorphication of physical phenomena is perfectly fine when it's simply a shorthand way of expressing a concept, but *not* when it is used in place of a real theory of the underlying mechanics. The Aristotleian model, or whatever it is presented here, seems to imply that there is something inherent in the various phases of matter which makes them want to move to a certain height, which is a bit misleading, as it doesn't directly deal with the realtionships between gravity, mass, and volume that cause less dense materials to rise above denser ones. I went on about this a bit in an earlier post. (In the part on Abunai's definition of consciousness. Yes, that was originally a thread on Luck. I think I got a bit sidetracked somewhere :)


Aughh... Yevaud, dude, your posts are generally pretty lucid, but the phrasing in that bit gave me a headache. I think I know what you're saying, though. I've always wondered what it's like to "be" an amoeba. Does it "feel" anything at all upon stumbling across a rich source of nutrients, or when it is near death? After all, everything *we* feel is predicated on nothing more than the interactions of a bunch of one-celled organisms. (I actually went into my own definition of consciousness in the post linked above- It's somewhat relevant, but I'm too lazy to write it over again :)

Modern physics still anthropomorphizes. It's just that we've reduced the anthropomorphizations to 4. They're called "forces". What is a force, after all, other than a relationship that involves one thing "wanting" to be closer to or farther away from another thing? I could include the concept of inertia too. Why does an object "want" to remain at constant velocity?

Good point, Icy. I can imagine a discussion between a student and his professor.

"Why does the apple fall?"
"Uhh... because of gravity!"
"Cool! And what's gravity?"
"Uhh... a curve in space-time!"
"Cool! Why does a curve in space-time make two pieces of matter move toward each other?"
"Uhh... well, you can visualize space as a plane, or a bedsheet, say, and when you drop a bowling ball into the middle of it, all the marbles lying on the surface get pulled down into the depression, which we call a 'gravity well'."
"Cool! But, since the 2-D analogy you just used relies on 3-D gravity to work, doesn't that mean that there would have to be a 4-D form of gravity to explain our 3-D gravity?"
"Uhh... sure!"
"Cool! So where does 4-D gravity come from?"
"Uhh... well... you see... hey, look, an elephant!"


This is an issue which even the most recent theories regarding the realtionships between gravity, mass, and volume don't quite address. (Or at least, in all the explanations which I've heard, they all do eventually boil down to, "Well, such-and-such tends to react in this fashion, because it just does," which could be as easily and accurately be summed up by saying it wants to do so. And in most early science classes, this language actually is used.) Of course, I don't claim to be an expert in this area, so feel free to point me in the right direction if the statements I just made are completely off-base.


Sorry about the rough linguistic sledding; that's what I get for using specialized terminology from a philosophy paper without a proper introduction. :P Though I had forgotten who wrote it originally, according to Google it seems to have been Thomas Nagel. And yeah, your summary/restatement was right on target. (DISCLAIMER: I do not remember anything about the article any more aside from his catchy way of describing the process of imagining oneself into the perspective of a bat. Not responsible for inconsistencies between my post and the rest of his article. )

I went ahead and perused the thread you linked to; wow. Very interesting take, and the Godelian loops you mention are pretty much the same thing I've heard about in a few other places. The idea of a consciousness continuum is also fascinating, and your description of more-complex systems being able to comprehend less-complex ones definitely stands as far as fairly simple computer programming goes. (Though it is interesting to note that we've already reached programs whose complexity is too great for any one human alone to understand, and with new evolutionary development tools things are bound to get even more interesting.) Will have to read that Gödel, Escher, Bach book; meant to last summer at my dad's urging but I never got around to it.

Cool, y'all. I think this thread is starting to rank up there with the POCKET DIMENSION OPEN!!! thread.

EDIT: Added disclaimer.

Yeah, interesting point Icy. I suppose the "anthropomorphic", de facto explanations (i.e. "it does because it does") are used as the totality of explanations for phenomena, rather than simply a convenient way of referencing them, only when we don't have a working lower-level model of the mechanisms which underlie them. As we gain more understanding, such unsatisfying explanations then become innocuous shorthand, and the real anthropomorphization moves down a level. Take gravity, for example. If the existence of gravitons were proven, Yevaaud's professor would be able to explain to his student how gravity works through the agency of gravitons, but then when asked why the gravitons behaved the way they did, he would have to fall back on the de facto explanation. (btw, I'm pretty sure that the rubber-sheet analogy, while providing a useful view of the *effects* of gravity, is not usually considered to have anything to do with its actual mechanisms. I could be wrong, though.)


Hey, I'm never one to complain about a bit of specialized language when regular English doesn't fit the bill ('cause we all know what a dirty whore it is :) Just- y'know, give us a bit of heads up next time. I was worrying that you had met up with Krylex in real life and were consequently high or something…

I just read the paper- interesting, but he didn't seem to be saying much except that due to differences in the structure of our brains, humans and other species think differently, and that due to the inherent limitations of the processing power of our own brains, we would be unable to successfully emulate the way the brain of another species perceives reality in our minds. Now why did that take 9 pages to say? Oh, right- he's a professor ;) He did seem to be suggesting some sort of linguistic reform at the end that I didn't quite understand, so perhaps the paper did have a further point. And I should note that advanced, hyper-intelligent AI's would render his point moot by being able to fully emulate the workings of a bat's brain inside their own minds. If they, y'know don't turn us all into law-of-thermodynamics-violating human batteries first :)


Not quite. I haven't slaved over any over-complex CAD drawings yet :) (really, I didn't mind though- I was watching a movie at the time I was drawing those)


"I am unable to disqualify it."
- Dr. Richard Feynman, 1966, Professor Emeritus, Cal Tech, on the subject of gravity being 4th-dimensional in nature.

Damnit all, I now have something utterly useless in the overall scheme of things to ponder. Hell, my notebook contains more 4-d cubes than notes after I started thinking about those. It only makes me kindof realize how insignificant I am to the overall scheme of things and how I would just like to sleep. Sleeping is nice, no worrys of gravity there. Now, back to my total perspective vortex so I can attempt to use my mediocre physics and logic knowledge to figure out gravity and why things fall down and so forth...

Dammit...stupid 3D-limited mind...aaaaghhh!

Has anyone heard an accurate explanation of how 4-dimensional space works?

As for anthropomorphization, what about the theory that, at first, the universe was a jumble of energy and matter, which eventually, in a process similar to evolution, emerged into the current system of existence? This would explain why things work the way they do, up to a point. Of course, eventually everything degrades into de facto argumentation, which is why people believe in God.

Anyone have an example of a system which does not degrade into an,"it just does," statement?

Two things, quickly. First being, when water freezes into ice, the composition is the same; no chemical change occurs, such as the kind that occurs when burning something, only a physical variable is altered. Furthermore, only 10% of ice floats above water. The rest is submerged. You lose.

Secondly, as for 4th dimensional space. You know what 0 dimension is, it's a point. 1st is a line, 2nd is a square, 3rd is a cube. To draw a cube, you draw two squares and connect the vertices. To draw the 4th dimensional "hypercube" as it is called, you draw two cubes and connect THEIR vertices. Of course, trying to express the fourth dimension on a two dimensional surface isn't exactly a great idea, that will help you visualize maybe a little. For simple computations in fourth dimensional space analysis, since the 3-d equation for measuring the volume of air is 4/3(pi)r^3, the 4-d one is 1/2(pi^2)r^4.

those little ^ mean raised to the number that follows.

It's kind of hard to understand, and even harder to explain, since we are restricted by our plane of existance, which is in three dimensions. We can only SEE what is in our plane of existance, so we only see three dimensional slices of fourth dimensional articles, just as, for example, in 2 dimensions, a sphere would seem to be only a circle, because of the restriction of planes of existance. It's very intriguing.

Another thing that is very interesting to note is perspective. In 2 dimensions, you can get an entire view of something in one glance, because it's all flat out. In 3 dimensions, there are perspectives, things look different from different angles... try to imagine that in FOUR dimensions. When restricted by two dimensions, you can only move backwards and forwards, left and right, so you only have one perspective, you can't jump right into the middle of something. In three dimensions, you can also move up and down, but humans can still only visualize one half of a cube at a time. Hypothetically, if there were fourth dimensional beings, they could visualize an entire cube, similar to the way we can visualize an entire square.

If you take a class in Non-Euclidian Geometry, you can understand this much better, which basically operates inside the parameters of Euclid's 5th true axiom, cause it's kinda tricky.

Ugh... math theory... LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO.

Anyway, yea, pizza.

Nice post, Angel. If you enjoy thinking in the 4th and higher dimensions, I recommend this thread. (Though the multidimensional analysis didn't really pick up until this point.) We've already hashed out a fair amount of the terrain, so you'll forgive me if I don't go over it again.

And Unum, you raise a valid question. I've been trying to think of a system that has actual reasons for any of its basic tenets and admit that I've drawn a blank so far. Help, anyone?