gehringer_2

There are many naturally occurring radioactive elements that produce positrons when they decay - they just annihilate themselves pretty quickly. They have a machine at CERN that can generate anti-protons.

It's more the problem of the logical regression. In the current cosmology, the big bang is the beginning of time. You both can't but can't help ask "What came before." No matter how many levels you regress on that the question just re-appears again at the next level.

the counter argument is that he could have quit, and ratted out his org. But that's easy to say in hindsight, The truth is that being right is no protection against being blackballed out of ever managing again anywhere by the 'old boy's club'

but No-Land? Not sure I want to be a receiver on his team.

Last comment on the topic then back to our regularly scheduled programming. There is only one set physical laws for the entire universe. There are no different rules for what goes on in a human brain vs what goes on in the roots of trees or the inside of stars or the egg in your frying pan. You appear to be arguing the brain plays by different rules. The only 'ghost' is consciousness itself and both physical scientists and psychologists are chasing it.

??. I think if there is any overall argument it's that origin questions are pretty pointless no matter what your theological perspective. The two questions: "Where did the big bang come from?"; and "Where did god come from?" are exactly equal and neither theology nor science can answer either. The bottom line is that there are unanswerable questions no matter what you do or don't choose to believe about them.

I'd put that under Campbell the plantation mentality was strong and the org was too cheap to keep winning right up there on their list of sins.

you have two 'inconceivables' up against one another. The first is the depth of complexity and organization we see in the world we inhabit. Not very likely things could have gotten to here. But other is how long the 10+ billion years is we've had for things to get here. In the end it's sort of a fools errand to try to assign a probability to the observed outcome.

no - I've already talked about this - but it's all happening after the fact so to speak. It's the 'thought' part. You can go to the lab and tell the researcher what you are thinking and they can track the result, but if you don't tell them from *your consciousness* they have no way to make that connection - there is no access to your consciousness in any of the apparatus - and at the molecular level, how the though causes the release of a neurotransmitter is not accessible. It's not inconceivable it may be figured out, but they aren't really getting much close at a fundamental level. It's all "watch and describe science". A number of years ago Douglas Hofstadter laid out the thesis that the problem is just one of the depth of complexity burying the possibility of observation of the mechanism. The example he gave is that if you track a pinball's motion over any short term, you will be very hard pressed to see that there is some intelligence controlling it or how. That is one way out of the problem. But that still doesn't give you any solution to how a thought causes a chemical reaction, only that it does. And again, you can report that you 'made a decision' but in the end how would you prove that your thoughts are independent and not just the result to stimulus response outcome. You may believe they are, but that does nothing to prove they at any objective level because there is only our subjective reporting as evidence. Your beliefs may all be part of the same stimulus response conditioning.

This is true, but if a guy can make good hires, then from a practical standpoint that's pretty much as good as him having talent himself. But even given that, I will still be calling for Hinch's head if they come out of the gate all hitting below their averages again. That just can't happen three times in a row.

Why are you not considering the Neural Patterns THEMSELVES as the chemical process that changes the physical state of stasis? In chemistry, every reactions system obeys fixed rules. Every subsequent state of matter is the direct consequence of the prior states an the material and/or energy crossing the system boundary and the relationships are immutable. Maybe I'll reverse the thesis to approach from a different angle: According to chemistry and physics, what happens chemically in your brain simply can't be influenced by something like a thought because a thought doesn't exist in any process definition in chemistry/physics. But you can actually can draw the conundrum out even further: as far as science is concerned, there is no difference between a living chemical process and a dead one. Both are following the exact same rules, and there is nothing you can point to in a living process in terms of the physical laws that it is obeying that separate it from a dead one, which is another way of saying that chemistry and physics don't recognize what we call 'life' as being something definable or distinct in chemical or physical terms at all.

You lock him up because if he left you could do a lot worse? In general I think Hinch is fine - he seems to have a real talent for managing a bullpen, which is probably the most important thing a modern manager has to be good at. The one caveat is that if they start another season with all their hitters in the tank, then you have to lay that at Hinch's door because your outlier occurrences are proving themselves to be trends.

LOL - that's what I was thinking. Man is actually damn lucky it hasn't killed him yet. You have to be born with a lucky gene package to be that resistant.

I'm ready to see Holl bumped. Haven't cared much for his play recently.

One more shot to get on the same wavelength here. Tell me how your *decision* to wait to eat changed the chemistry in your brain such that you didn't walk to the refrigerator. That is the missing link. For a *thought* to change what your body does, the mental process has to generate a *cause* in the physical world - i.e. it has to change a reaction in your brain chemistry. We have zero understanding of how that happens. We can see it after the fact - that you make a decision to do something and then neuronal activity appears in your brain, but how a thought causes those neurons to fire? Missing link. You hold two competing options in your mind - depending on which you pick, different neurons are going to fire, but according to the laws of physics, in the moment before you make the *decision*, your brain chemistry has only one possible path - the one determined by its present state and the rules of chemistry. Yet you changed it, or at least you believed you changed it (that is unless conscious choice is the delusion) - how?

Manning is basically a 4 seam fastball pitcher. He doesn't have the velo a Verlander had but it's that kind of pitcher profile. So just for perspective I'd note that JV threw over 500 MLB innings before he reached a one K/IP K rate. Manning is at ~225. He has enough stuff if stays healthy and learns how to use it - never any guarantees with pitchers but I would understand if the Tiger are willing to give him more time to develop before moving him.

but you have just defined a machine that reacts in a programmed way. That model excludes the possibility of true volition. The next chemical state of your brain is *fully* determined by its current state, the laws of 'physics', plus the sum of the additional external stimuli that act on it. There is no place in that model for a consciousness, whatever we think that is, to affect that. The aspect of 'volition' that defines it as volition and not simple stimulus response is that it can originate separately from the simple sum of the external inputs - otherwise it is not volition - in which case we should stop putting people in jail for doing things they actually have no real control over because all a person's *will* is is the sum of their environmental experience and genetic programming. Again - I wouldn't say categorically that this may not be the true, I certainly can't prove it isn't, and 'science' would argue that it is true, but if it is, all of civilization is then based on the lie that people are responsible for what they do when they aren't.

It it could be arranged, it might actually be sorta fun to have a crack at expropriating some tech from China in an area where they are a world leader. Having them experience being the aggrieved party in some tech theft might be just the thing to help bring around their thinking....

Yes - this is pretty much just the 'what's outside' the universe paradox in different guise. If the universe needed a first mover, what moved it, etc. You can add a layer to the depth of the recursion but you still end up in the same paradox.

What does a Chinese LiFePO4 battery plant allow them to steal from us when they are miles ahead of us in that tech? Seems the the bigger potential for knowledge transfer is the other way.

When I hear the name 'Pat Caputo', the immediate word association that comes to mind is "shell of his former self.'

I have very mixed feelings about guys in a room deciding who the best teams are based on their subjective projections of what they think they will do based player availability. (BTW - in case any one wonders, I'm still bitter over Wayne Duke telling MI they could skip a Rose Bowl because Denny Franklin was injured ). It would be one thing if FSU had actually lost a game after Travis went down, but they haven't. UM hasn't looked all that great for the last three weeks either, and we still have our star QB. But maybe the committee should decide we've taken more O-line injuries than they think appropriate and bump us out? There is a reason you play the games and the winners are the winners and the losers are the losers. If there is a problem with records being suspect because of scheduling abuse - then put an end to scheduling abuse, but please don't let old dudes in a room establish a precedent for overruling the results on the field.

He'd prolly walk across the lake to find a little peace and quiet.

Mine is a different question. You are talking about the framework around which you hang the construction of self-identity. One of the hats I have worn is more or less as a chemist and what I'm talking about is how a thought in your mind turns into an action in physical/temporal space. How does a process in what we call conciousness - which cannot be located in the physical domain, create the chemical event in the physical domain that cascades into the creation of causation in the physical world? Sure we know how an axon works, but not how you make an axon fire by 'making a decision'. We think we know that mind affects matter, we believe volition exists nearly universally, but we cannot locate mind in matter and whatever the interface is eludes our understanding.

I know athletes are not exactly interchangeable, but when you have that much talent on one side of the ball and so little on the other, you'd think there would be a couple of guys you could move to the other side get more balance.