On Wednesday, January 29, 2014 10:37:03 AM UTC-5, Phil Hobbs wrote:   
      
   snip   
      
   > > further troublemaker, information theory is not a theory, and it is   
   >    
   > > not science. Why? Because there is no specific, formulated   
   >    
   >snip   
   >    
   >    
   > How about "there is no encoding scheme that can send data at an average    
   >    
   > rate higher than BW*log_2(1+SNR) ?"  All it takes is one counterexample.   
      
   Uh, could you say that in english?    
   >    
   >    
    But I have never heard any scientific "laws" come from   
   >    
   > > this area that can be disproven in a global sense. And this could be   
   >    
   > > my ignorance regarding cybernetics. respectfully, John B   
   > snip snip   
   >    
   > > Evidence-Based Medicine Review of the parachute: "It is an   
   >    
   > > interesting technology, but unproven. Given that no double-blind   
   >    
   > > clinical trials have been done, we cannot recommend it for safety   
   >    
   > > and efficacy."   
   >    
   >    
   >    
   > But the manufacturer has never had a complaint from a dissatisfied   
   >    
   > customer. ;)   
   >    
   Well,the EBM is practically that dumb. As I studied medical science, I began   
   to study philosophy of science a bit. ("the science of science") Because the   
   medical people were reaching outlandish conclusions. And I discovered that the   
   ole Francis Bacon:     
   hypothesis -> experiment -> truth paradigm was out of favor as a general   
   paradigm. (1620) I think that "logical positivism" - AJ Ayers (1920) was just   
   a re-statement of that idea. The idea was that, if you do an experiment, it   
   somehow leads to the only "   
   truth." And we go marching on to higher understanding. Science as progress.   
   (and reductionism, narrowing.)   
   Enter Karl Popper, who said that corroborating evidence was cheap, and the   
   criterion of science was that it should be "Novel" and "disprovable." Now the   
   "Novel" part is where a value judgement comes in, istm.   
   So lets say more about the value judgement part of that criterion. Suppose we   
   say it should 'capture the public imagination,' be exciting. Newton,   
   Helmholtz, Darwin, Einstein passed that test, but for various reasons. (I am   
   electing Helmholtz as    
   spokesman for the 3 laws of TDX, but it was Mayer, a doctor, who first   
   formulated the conservation of energy. But Herr Helmholtz enjoyed his "Heat   
   Death of the Universe" narrative that scared children and non-scientists into   
   listening. )   
   And another might be that the Law can be stated in ordinary vernacular. For   
   example, you can state the second law of TDX as "Hot things get colder." A   
   part of that is the feeling that exponents of the Law can write about it and   
   say why it's good for you.    
   (To look at Galileo and Darwin, we'd have to get into the printing press,   
   Luther, religious wars, serfs, the Catholics, etc.)    
   Let's see - shopping list - finally it should connect to the overall structure   
   of science and ideally be a powerful heuristic for further knowledge.    
   And and...I'm going to add a controversial criterion in the "perfect Law." It   
   should allow human beings to understand themselves more, particularly the   
   ambiguous role of the mind. This consciousness-being-qualia factor. A bit   
   about myself - I have lived    
   in India and certainly studied the Buddha-Hindu-Chan-Tibet view of the mind as   
   illusion that forms the center of their sensibility.    
   And there's an interesting tie-in with Darwin I'd like to touch on. Namely,   
   that, as our brains evolved, we developed a really good model of the world.   
   (look around you if you don't believe me.) I mean the physical world we jump   
   around in, turn on a    
   light switch, catch a fly ball. So there evolved a 'model' of the world in our   
   heads. And part of that model was that we liked to have it stationary - became   
   attached to a particular vision. Why? Because any change could signal danger.   
   So this model part of the physical world got generalized to all of our   
   consciousness. All of our awareness got funneled through this system.   
   Shankaracarya ("shank") uses the example of you're walking along and think you   
   see a snake. You jump, but it was    
   only a stick. (8th century India.) So the core of Hindu philosophy is based on   
   the mind as illusion, false conditioning, and attachment to the mind.    
   Asian philosophy has one thing that Westerners are generally unaware of - one   
   idea. That is that we do not think our thoughts. We are not the author of our   
   thoughts. The test here is: try to stop your thought train for 10 minutes.    
      
   That's my delusion, and I'm sticking to it, for now anyway.   
   JB   
      
      
      
      
   And I could add that finally, the Law should   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)