Date for what?
I’ve said a few times that we are not.
What exactly is it that you want to discuss, other than critiquing my posts.
I am all ears…
But you’re not. That’s why I keep critiquing. I posted this 60 posts ago.
I gave you a demarcation point in the post where I showed the beginning of Science, which of course is the point where non-science stops and science begins.
This was much earlier than your estimate and goes back to thousands of years before to 3000 BC. One date that comes up in context of expanding mathematics is 2000 BC.
I also posited that the earliest “questions” were asked by hominids even before the emergence of homo sapiens. Where is that divergent from your OP question?
In prior posts I have shown an alpha Chimpanzee “worship” in the form of passive -aggressive behavior during a thunderstorm, by shaking a stick at the sky and beating the bushes, warning that “unseen powerful being” up there who is making loud noises, throwing fire, and water at him and his family.
That was not science, but it was specific reactive behavior to external pressure caused by “unseen” but powerful enemies (gods?).
microtubules, just to mention one. And there are many others. “math is the essence of spacetime”. If you are going to keep insisting that you are on topic, when you’re obviously not, then I’m going to continue with my critiques.
The demarcation of science is not something that happened once either. I never gave an estimate of when it happened, so I don’t even know what you mean by that. In fact I posted a video about science in ancient Rome. If you want a conversation, notice how the person you are conversing with needs to constantly clarify what you say, and correct you when you misunderstand them. Notice how your own comments change from post from to post.
Posts like this are part of what I’m critiquing. You post it, then have a problem because I didn’t agree with it. If you want to google things and claim they are fact because you get a hit, fine, but on this forum, you need to show that your reference is valid, that it’s been peer reviewed, that others have built on it, that it wasn’t countered with other evidence, that it’s more than a popular idea that sounds cool.
The Idea That Trees Talk to Cooperate Is Misleading - Scientific American
Unfortunately, the explanation most favored by popularizers, that trees send out resources to strengthen the community, is least likely. This would require natural selection to be countered by group selection—where groups that cooperate win out over groups that do not. When these forces conflict, natural selection almost always wins, because individuals are so much more numerous than groups and turn over much more rapidly.
In interviews, Simard has said that she purposely uses anthropomorphism and culturally weighted words like “mother”—even though the trees in question are male as well as female—so that people can relate to trees better, because “if we can relate to it, then we’re going to care about it more.”
Do trees need to have human values and emotions for us to let them live? The science supporting conservation is compelling enough. New discoveries about the underground world are thrilling enough. The public deserves to hear the true story, without the confusion of personification and stretched metaphor.
1 Like
[quote=“lausten, post:206, topic:10237”]
Do trees need to have human values and emotions for us to let them live?
No, they don’t need to. Humans do, but they don’t except for a few.
The science supporting conservation is compelling enough. New discoveries about the underground world are thrilling enough.
Yes, thrilling for humans. Trees are too busy doing conservation.
The public deserves to hear the true story, without the confusion of personification and stretched metaphor.
But that is relative. I never heard anybody complain about Carl Sagan’s conversational style.
Or
Neil deGrasse Tyson (US: /dəˈɡræs/ də-GRASS or UK: /dəˈɡrɑːs/ də-GRAHSS; born October 5, 1958) is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator.
Since 1996, he has been the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. The center is part of the American Museum of Natural History, where Tyson founded the Department of Astrophysics in 1997 and has been a research associate in the department since 2003.
From 1995 to 2005, Tyson wrote monthly essays in the “Universe” column for Natural History magazine, some of which were later published in his books Death by Black Hole (2007) and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (2017). During the same period, he wrote a monthly column in StarDate magazine, answering questions about the universe under the pen name “Merlin”.
Tyson served on a 2001 government commission on the future of the U.S. aerospace industry and on the 2004 Moon, Mars and Beyond commission. He was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal in the same year. From 2006 to 2011, he hosted the television show NOVA ScienceNow on PBS.
Since 2009, Tyson has hosted the weekly podcast StarTalk. A spin-off, also called StarTalk, began airing on National Geographic in 2015. In 2014, he hosted the television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a successor to Carl Sagan’s 1980 series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.[1] The U.S. National Academy of Sciences awarded Tyson the Public Welfare Medal in 2015 for his “extraordinary role in exciting the public about the wonders of science”.[2]
(Neil deGrasse Tyson - Wikipedia)
People may be interested in these things, but not prepared to spend 6 years for a Masters degree. They don’t come here to look at complex equations. They want to talk about science in common language. To insist on rigorous scientific language defeats the purpose of recruiting new minds.
But strictly speaking, I find scribbles on a blackboard uninteresting. I just want to know what the scribbles tell us. If I can understand the accompanying narrative to a hypothesis, it is sufficient for me.
I just want to understand, not make a living at it.
There is a large and easily defined difference between science for the masses and pseudo science. Talking trees is pseudo science. “We are star stuff” has facts that go with it that Sagan put in common language.
And, actually, people did complain about Sagan. My college roommates dad went to school with him, and did not like him.
1 Like
First, thanks for that excellent find. There is a lot of information in that link.
OK, instead of talking , what is the word for trees communicating and warning each other in case of an infestation?
We have named bacterial communication as “quorum sensing”.
Would you say that trees communicate via quorum sensing?
When chemicals interact are they communicating (sharing information)?
What is information sharing ? Technically, is that communicating (talking)?
And that begs the question if communication is limited to very specific data (words) or if it includes the sharing of all forms of data, including mathematical data?
This is why I view all data as having specific “values” and values are symbolically codifiable and applicable as mathematical “in essence”.
And we arrive at Tegmark’s “mathematical universe”, fundamentally filled with non-physical “values”, that may become dynamically expressed in a range of density patterns (fractals?).
Apparently, Penrose is not the only one who sees this “universal mathematical data sharing” as a form of thought and as an acceptable real scientific possibility.
(note that this universal condition does not imply “intelligent design”, but suggests a quasi-intelligent self-ordering.)
It is in the self-ordering, that patterns emerge and the densest patterns are observable and experienced as reality.
Reality is not what it seems
The universe is made of consciousness
When we look around ourselves, we perceive a world of qualities: colours, melodies, textures, scents, and flavours. With the automatism of a reflex, we then take it for granted that these qualities are the world; that is, that the world out there, as it is in itself, is made of the colours, melodies, scents, and flavours that appear on the screen of our perception.
Yet, our mainstream metaphysics—physicalism—denies that: according to physicalism, all those qualities exist solely inside our skull, in that they are somehow—nobody has ever coherently and explicitly specified how—conjured up into existence by our brain activity.
This is what Anil Seth refers to as confirmation of the brain’s expectation as compared to prior data stored in memory.
Seth’s own view falls along the lines of predictive coding theories of consciousness. These theories see the brain as a Bayesian processing system, one that is constantly making predictions, receiving error correction from the world, and adjusting. In this view, perception happens from the inside out rather than outside in. The system is constantly making predictions about what is there, receiving sensory information, and adjusting. more .. Anil Seth’s theory of consciousness – SelfAwarePatterns
See “microtubules” thread.
The world, as it is outside the screen of perception, has no intrinsic qualities. Instead, it is supposed to be a realm of pure quantitative abstraction, which one cannot even visualise, for any visualisation already entails qualities.
In other words, the world out there has mass, charge, spin, and linear momentum, but not colour, texture, scent or flavour.