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cx88 PCI cards

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xc5000 USB device)

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MythTV

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Time travel is possible but not in the way you think about it. It exists going backwards but is tied to alternate realities, or tied to multiple universes.

Or not. Until we can find or set up a region with a closed timelike curve, we won't be able to test such things, and it all is, well, entirely theoretical. There are several possibilities.

(Yes, I've thought about this too much.)

A/UX was indeed expensive. But even the early Macs could be decent Unix machines, as time (and open source a decade or more later) proved. The SE/30 was an incredible machine - able to take up to 128MB of RAM back when 'standard' was 1MB or less! Mine has seen lots of use as my piddly little home webserver.

But then there's the (at least) equal and opposite error, which I call Haldane's Error - the belief that anything not currently explained by science must perforce be supernatural and can never be explained by science.

Oh, what a beautiful quote, I will steal it for my students. It is simply grand... given the career and persona of J.B.S. Haldane, son of J.S. Haldane, who was one of the most influential evolutionary biologists and geneticists of all time.

It was a real blow when Wöhler was able to synthesize urea from 'inorganic' chemicals. It was held that the substances in living things were special and followed different rules. There was a very sharp - and allegedly impassible - boundary between 'organic' and 'inorganic' chemicals. The former appeared in living things and had some special 'vital force', but inorganic chemicals were 'just stuff', not living nor could they ever be living. Wöhler upset that paradigm rather dramatically.

But that didn't mean that there wasn't a difference between organic and inorganic chemistry - now organic chemistry is understood to be chemistry that involves carbon. (Though a few chemicals containing carbon are still called 'inorganic' because of that historical quirk.) But just because there isn't a magic difference between life and nonlife doesn't mean there's no difference between them.

Similarly, one can be a naturalist and still think both of the forks you propose are wrong.

Mac SE/30 (1989) as my home webserver. But it's running NetBSD.

Please Dr. Manhattan, go into your small room and cry.

A troll said mean things about me, of course I'm going to feel terrible! Or, y'know, not.

The natzis, Yemach Shemam if I might add, were not stupid, nor were they insane nor ignorant.

Actually, they were very ignorant. But you, too seem to have only read about Dawkins rather than, y'know, reading his actual words. The actual statement Dawkins made was: "It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)."

The Nazi's rejected evolution because they thought the human 'races' had been created separately by God. They were ignorant... and wicked. And frequently insane, too.

There, there. Don't cry. :-)

Even if evolution had all the negative effects you claim (it doesn't), what bearing would that have on whether it's true or not?

For Windows XP they picked Madonna's "Ray of Light". I came up with better lyrics than the stock ones.

Gotta admit, though, after maybe 5 years XP became nearly tolerable. For playing games, at least.

This rock is in equilibrium

[Citation needed]

and it can support more.

[Citation needed]

Fairly simple arithmetic using very conservative estimates leads to the conclusion that if everyone in the world were to have the lifestyle of the average US citizen, the world could support somewhere between one and two billion people (closer to one billion, maybe even less).

Writing in centuries past, many scientists felt compelled to wax poetic about cosmic mysteries and God's handiwork. Perhaps one should not be surprised at this: most scientists back then, as well as many scientists today, identify themselves as spiritually devout.

But a careful reading of older texts, particularly those concerned with the universe itself, shows that the authors invoke divinity only when they reach the boundaries of their understanding. They appeal to a higher power only when staring into the ocean of their own ignorance. They call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.

My own personal favorite example here.

What is the foundation upon which you reason morality?

Funny you should ask....

I'm not saying those acts are understandable, nor that I can empathize with them. "My thoughts are higher than your thoughts"

Once you accept that there are things that are fundamentally beyond human comprehension, it's like dividing by zero. All bets are off, you can 'prove' anything then.

I mean, what if God is exactly like a shepherd... down to the shearing and slaughter, too? (I'm sure sheep feel comforted by the presence of the shepherd... until the knife comes down.) If a God is totally beyond anything we can understand, there's no way to disprove this. By definition, It's perfectly capable of fooling us perfectly. There's no way to tell.

What is the foundation upon which you reason morality?

Funny you should ask....

I'm not saying those acts are understandable, nor that I can empathize with them. "My thoughts are higher than your thoughts"

Once you accept that there are things that are fundamentally beyond human comprehension, it's like dividing by zero. All bets are off, you can 'prove' anything then.

I mean, what if God is exactly like a shepherd... down to the shearing and slaughter, too? (I'm sure sheep feel comforted by the presence of the shepherd... until the knife comes down.) If a God is totally beyond anything we can understand, there's no way to disprove this. By definition, It's perfectly capable of fooling us perfectly. There's no way to tell.

(A little more about time-travel in general here)

I know you were kidding, but I got tired of people talking about 'unused land' back when the world population hit six billion, and I did the math to show how stupid an idea it is.

We've just seen that some propositions are futile to deny. It's not that they couldn't be true. It's just that if they were true, they'd inevitably and automatically render everything else pointless.

So it's possible to have pragmatic grounds for selecting certain 'axioms', specific 'properly basic beleifs'. I can't prove fundamental notions like 'my reason has the potential to be effective' and 'my senses relay information correlated with an external reality' and 'the simplest explanation that covers the facts should be preferred'. And yet... it's not whimsy or prejudice that drives me to accept these ideas. It's the fact that not assuming them automatically means 'game over'.

And, interestingly, if you accept such 'non-defeatist' axioms, you get a coherent and demonstrably productive worldview. You get logic and science and medicine... and, yes, even love and all that. (Based on this, I'd probably best be categorized as a "Foundherentist" who leans to Foundationalism.)

...[So] there are a few limited things that I take 'on faith' not because of evidence but because assuming anything else is automatically futile. However, I try to keep those to the smallest possible set - because one of those assumptions is Ockham's Razor.

But I don't (or, at least, I'm not aware that I) take anything 'on faith' in the sense of 'despite' evidence. So if you want to convince me to take God 'on faith', you're going to need evidence.

We've just seen that some propositions are futile to deny. It's not that they couldn't be true. It's just that if they were true, they'd inevitably and automatically render everything else pointless.

So it's possible to have pragmatic grounds for selecting certain 'axioms', specific 'properly basic beleifs'. I can't prove fundamental notions like 'my reason has the potential to be effective' and 'my senses relay information correlated with an external reality' and 'the simplest explanation that covers the facts should be preferred'. And yet... it's not whimsy or prejudice that drives me to accept these ideas. It's the fact that not assuming them automatically means 'game over'.

And, interestingly, if you accept such 'non-defeatist' axioms, you get a coherent and demonstrably productive worldview. You get logic and science and medicine... and, yes, even love and all that. (Based on this, I'd probably best be categorized as a "Foundherentist" who leans to Foundationalism.)

...[So] there are a few limited things that I take 'on faith' not because of evidence but because assuming anything else is automatically futile. However, I try to keep those to the smallest possible set - because one of those assumptions is Ockham's Razor.

But I don't (or, at least, I'm not aware that I) take anything 'on faith' in the sense of 'despite' evidence. So if you want to convince me to take God 'on faith', you're going to need evidence.

...there is no way to prove that e.g. our senses and perceptions reflect reality.

It's true that there's no way to disprove solipsism. No evidence of any kind could possibly be mustered to contradict the idea... since any such evidence could just be more illusion. You can't prove that the outside world exists, that the sense-data coming in has some relation to an actual external reality. You have to take it 'on faith'.

Except... hold up. Let's assume the converse for a moment. Okay, fine, have it your way. We'll grant that nothing but your own mind is real and everything else is just a dream you're having.

Then what?

You've just rendered everything pointless. Solipsism and related brain-in-a-vat models are internally consistent, but practically useless. If our senses don't correlate at all with an external world... then what? Assuming that sort of thing inevitably leads to futility. The alternative idea - that the senses do relay data that in some way informs us about an outside world - doesn't have that inevitable implication, and has the bonus of being at least potentially falsifiable.

More here.

The 'supernatural' in practice means 'incomprehensible' - unknowable by humans - something forever beyond human ken, something we will never be capable of understanding. Different terms are used - the 'ineffable', the 'mystery', and so forth - but the basic idea is the same.

Think about the difference between the notion of the 'powerful alien' (a staple of science fiction) and the notion of a 'god' in a religion. What's the essential difference between them? In the stories, they both do amazing, astonishing things. But a powerful alien is (ultimately, eventually) comprehensible - often in the story humans are able to figure out some way of duplicating its powers, or interfering with them, etc. Gods, though, are beyond what humans can do, and there's no point in trying to figure out why or how they do what they do.

And if you decide that something is fundamentally incomprehensible, you will stop trying to understand it. E.g. here or here.

The 'supernatural' in practice means 'incomprehensible' - unknowable by humans - something forever beyond human ken, something we will never be capable of understanding. Different terms are used - the 'ineffable', the 'mystery', and so forth - but the basic idea is the same.

Think about the difference between the notion of the 'powerful alien' (a staple of science fiction) and the notion of a 'god' in a religion. What's the essential difference between them? In the stories, they both do amazing, astonishing things. But a powerful alien is (ultimately, eventually) comprehensible - often in the story humans are able to figure out some way of duplicating its powers, or interfering with them, etc. Gods, though, are beyond what humans can do, and there's no point in trying to figure out why or how they do what they do.

And if you decide that something is fundamentally incomprehensible, you will stop trying to understand it. E.g. here or here.

There, you can't argue with that.

Of course, if you're willing to go the 'God is beyond human understanding' route, then it's the intellectual equivalent of dividing by zero. You can 'prove' anything at that point.

Or, as Daniel Dennett puts it:

"One reader of an early draft of this chapter complained at this point, saying that by treating the hypothesis of God as just one more scientific hypothesis, to be evaluated by the standards of science in particular and rational thought in general, Dawkins and I are ignoring the very widespread claim by believers in God that their faith is quite beyond reason, not a matter to which such mundane methods of testing applies. It is not just unsympathetic, he claimed, but strictly unwarranted for me simply to assume that the scientific method continues to apply with full force in this domain of truth.

Very well, let's consider the objection. I doubt that the defender of religion will find it attractive, once we explore it carefully.

The philosopher Ronaldo de Souza once memorably described philosophical theology as "intellectual tennis without a net," and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgement was up. But we can lower it if you really want to.

It's your serve.

Whatever you serve, suppose I return service rudely as follows: "What you say implies that God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tin foil. That's not much of a God to worship!". If you then volley back, demanding to know how I can logically justify my claim that your serve has such a preposterous implication, I will reply: "oh, do you want the net up for my returns, but not for your serves?

Either way the net stays up, or it stays down. If the net is down there are no rules and anybody can say anything, a mug's game if there ever was one. I have been giving you the benefit of the assumption that you would not waste your own time or mine by playing with the net down."

If you want to make real decisions then those decisions have to have real consequences.

And the goal is to get back to a place where decisions don't have consequences anymore?

We make a normative decision to have faith in science the same way we do to have faith in religion.

I, er, disagree. Strongly. There are big differences between 'believing in something based on evidence', 'believing in something without evidence', and 'believing in something despite evidence'.

Feynman said no one understands - present tense - quantum mechanics. He never stopped trying to change that, to make it comprehensible. He figured it just wasn't understood - yet.

If the past can't be changed, you can have causal loops (self-causing events) but those aren't inconsistent like paradoxes. And that's ignoring the many-worlds resolution.

If the past can't be changed, you can have causal loops (self-causing events) but those aren't inconsistent like paradoxes. And that's ignoring the many-worlds resolution.

The only question is the bandwidth, and how many people have access to the channel. See here.

What happened to the Marty who grew up with a go-getting SF-author father?

Of course, I've thought about time travel more than is healthy.

That was one of my thoughts from the first one... especially after I saw II.

My big thing in Back to the Future was... how the frick are his parents still together? Wouldn't the father be accusing the mother of cheating on him with Calvin Klein once it became obvious that Marty (their 3rd child) looked EXACTLY like the guy? Hell, I wouldn't buy that. The only other possibility is she was assaulted by a deranged Calvin Klein decades later and blocked it out.

Another thing from II
- Biff steals the time machine, alters the timeline, and returns to the regular 2015 to put the time machine back
- Marty and Doc go back in time to the altered timeline, but when Marty suggests they just go back to 2015 to stop Biff Doc says they can't
- Because they would simply travel along the altered timeline where Biff is now Rich

Then how the frick did Biff travel forward along the altered timeline to return the time machine?

Of course, I've thought about time travel more than is healthy.

There are definite problems with the logic used in "Mere Christianity". Which is why you're modded "funny" right now, I guess.

Well, we can all breath a heavy sigh of relief now that you've answered that question for all of us. Will you be taking on world hunger next week?

Hell, I handled that ages ago.

On a more serious note, help me out. I've always wondered what motivates a troll. I mean, come on, what do you get out of it? Do you really think you don't have anything positive to add to a conversation? Is it that you don't think you can defend a position, so you'll just do ad hominem?

Look, even if you succeed in derailing a conversation, inhibiting communication, and irritating people... like, wow. Stupid people do that without trying, all the time. Screwing things up is easy. It's trivial. It's like trying to be the world's best stumbler, or putting a lot of effort into doing a really awesome faceplant. What's the point?

The reality is that the embryo is biologically a distinct human being.

Actually, that 'reality' is in dispute.

Not the 'biologically distinct' aspect. The 'human being' aspect. An fertilized egg or a blastula is certainly 'human life', but by that definition so is a liver cell. The question is, is it a human being?

I've thought about this, and reached the conclusion that if it doesn't have a human brain, then it's not a human being. Whether or not a brain is a sufficient condition for 'humanity', it seems to be a necessary one. So, a fertilized egg or a blastula, while certainly 'human life', is not (yet) a 'human being', so far as I can tell.

In the late 1980s, ecologist Thomas Ray, who is now at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, got wind of Core Wars and saw its potential for studying evolution. He built Tierra, a computerised world populated by self-replicating programs that could make errors as they reproduced.

I was so amazed by the results claimed for Tierra that I went and reimplemented it myself. And damned if I didn't get similar results. At the time, it blew me away that such a system could come up with novel solutions I hadn't expected or 'programmed in'. Indeed, a couple times it took me a while to even figure out how the things worked.

In the late 1980s, ecologist Thomas Ray, who is now at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, got wind of Core Wars and saw its potential for studying evolution. He built Tierra, a computerised world populated by self-replicating programs that could make errors as they reproduced.

I was so amazed by the results claimed for Tierra that I went and reimplemented it myself. And damned if I didn't get similar results. At the time, it blew me away that such a system could come up with novel solutions I hadn't expected or 'programmed in'. Indeed, a couple times it took me a while to even figure out how the things worked.

Particularly, the rule requiring third-party repeatable material experiments prevent us from answering questions that involve the non-material (the quality of this universe's actual existence versus other mathematical universes only mathematical existence) or by definition cannot be observed in a third-party manner (first-hand-observer experience).

Of course, you're assuming that the answers to those questions must be non-material. As ever, I simply refer you to Haldane, who was just as convinced as you. Let's take first-person experience. If it supervenes on the brain (like, contra Haldane, inheritance supervenes on molecules), and we figure out how this happens (to use Haldane's terminology, we come up with a 'mechanistic theory of consciousness'), then we very likely will be able to determine if "my red" is the same color as "your red". You are free to doubt such a theory is possible. Personally, I'm willing to bet you'll be another notch on Tyson's list.

Hence why there is a difference between physics and meta-physics. The fudge that absolute materialists try is to "redefine" existence as only that which science can address -- "metaphysics is unscientific, therefore we'll use some rhetoric to label it 'unscientific' to believe that metaphysics exists" . It's not a solution, it's just wishing away the problem.

Sometimes a problem doesn't actually exist. I strongly suspect that a lot of these questions a problematic because we're looking at them wrong. People used to wonder if the Earth went on forever, or had an edge. It had to be one or the other, right? Then the hidden assumption that the Earth was flat was recognized, and the answer became obvious - "none of the above". I suspect the question of "has the universe existed forever or does it have a beginning (edge)?" is one of those questions. Similarly for "actual existence" versus "mathematical existence" - it's not clear to me that they are both actual types of "existence" per se. In what sense can it be said that the "Mandelbrot Set" exists?

Once we have that clarified, we might discover we've been just as wrong as the old 'endless Earth/edge' people were.

You did not read the links, in particular this one: http://ingles.homeunix.net/rants/atheism/haldane.html. People have been giving up and asserting "this or that will never have a scientific explanation" for a long time... and someone else comes along and figures it out. We have a history of several thousand years showing that people are very frequently - quite possibly always - wrong when they claim "this can't be explained scientifically". Just saying "I don't see how that could be explained" is not a good case.t.

You're arguing a straw man, because that's not the case anybody has been making. The case is that "we might find an explanation tomorrow" is unfalsifiable because there is always another tomorrow. Induction is used to generate hypotheses, not to test them. I don't think you even realise what falsifiability means. You have to ask yourself "what hypothetical experimental result could convince me this theory is incorrect"; if the answer is "none", then it is unfalsifiable and unscientific. Hence why absolute materialism is also an unscientific philosophy. The search does not stop until a satisfactory explanation is found, so no falsifying (ie, unsuccessful) experiment can ever conclude. (And -- see below -- if something is found that cannot be addressed with an experimental material explanation, it gets categorised out of the evidence.)

Existence is another thing that we don't have answers for... yet. So?

So, the way we have constructed the rules (yes we -- science is an entirely artificial process) actually means we can't experimentally answer those questions. It's our own categorisation rules not a technological limitation that prevents us from designing an appropriate experiment. Particularly, the rule requiring third-party repeatable material experiments prevent us from answering questions that involve the non-material (the quality of this universe's actual existence versus other mathematical universes only mathematical existence) or by definition cannot be observed in a third-party manner (first-hand-observer experience). Hence why there is a difference between physics and meta-physics. The fudge that absolute materialists try is to "redefine" existence as only that which science can address -- "metaphysics is unscientific, therefore we'll use some rhetoric to label it 'unscientific' to believe that metaphysics exists" . It's not a solution, it's just wishing away the problem.

Roger Zelazny put it poetically, in his novel "Lord Of Light": "The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable."

Scientists don't take much notice of novels or poets. We do take note of mathematicians, and you might like to look up Godel's incompleteness theorem and Turing's halting problem. There are things that are mathematically true that we can never prove, so the idea of things that theoretically can't be proven is not foreign to us. And there are searches for rational explanations that we can never know whether they'll ever reach a conclusion.

Actually that can be very clearly categorised. There are theoretically discoverable limits on knowledge, and with just a very little bit of thought (about what is and isn't acceptable scientific evidence) you can find any number of philosophical questions science cannot satisfactorily answer. Does the colour red look the same to you as it does to me? is one of the more famous examples of the mind-brain problem -- scientifically we can get as far as the electrochemistry in the brain but not to the (first-hand) experience. Absolute rational materialists usually try to duck the issue by insisting vehemently that the experience doesn't exist. Similarly, the difference between mathematical and actual existence ("why does this universe actually exist in a sense that any other set of equations I scribble on paper does not").

You did not read the links, in particular this one: http://ingles.homeunix.net/rants/atheism/haldane.html. People have been giving up and asserting "this or that will never have a scientific explanation" for a long time... and someone else comes along and figures it out. We have a history of several thousand years showing that people are very frequently - quite possibly always - wrong when they claim "this can't be explained scientifically". Just saying "I don't see how that could be explained" is not a good case.

Consciousness is a current bugaboo, sure. We don't know how consciousness arises from the brain... yet. But I don't have to assert the experience doesn't exist to be very confident that it's intimately related to the brain. Here's another link for you where that case it laid out in detail: http://ingles.homeunix.net/rants/atheism/braincase.html. (Or just go read some Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who writes like a poet.)

Existence is another thing that we don't have answers for... yet. So? Before Benjamin Franklin, was it reasonable to say that God (or Thor, or the Thunderbirds, or Zeus, or Seth, or what have you) caused lightning? No, the proper response to "What causes lighting?" was "Darn if I, or anyone else, knows... yet."

Roger Zelazny put it poetically, in his novel "Lord Of Light": "The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable."

Actually that can be very clearly categorised. There are theoretically discoverable limits on knowledge, and with just a very little bit of thought (about what is and isn't acceptable scientific evidence) you can find any number of philosophical questions science cannot satisfactorily answer. Does the colour red look the same to you as it does to me? is one of the more famous examples of the mind-brain problem -- scientifically we can get as far as the electrochemistry in the brain but not to the (first-hand) experience. Absolute rational materialists usually try to duck the issue by insisting vehemently that the experience doesn't exist. Similarly, the difference between mathematical and actual existence ("why does this universe actually exist in a sense that any other set of equations I scribble on paper does not").

You did not read the links, in particular this one: http://ingles.homeunix.net/rants/atheism/haldane.html. People have been giving up and asserting "this or that will never have a scientific explanation" for a long time... and someone else comes along and figures it out. We have a history of several thousand years showing that people are very frequently - quite possibly always - wrong when they claim "this can't be explained scientifically". Just saying "I don't see how that could be explained" is not a good case.

Consciousness is a current bugaboo, sure. We don't know how consciousness arises from the brain... yet. But I don't have to assert the experience doesn't exist to be very confident that it's intimately related to the brain. Here's another link for you where that case it laid out in detail: http://ingles.homeunix.net/rants/atheism/braincase.html. (Or just go read some Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who writes like a poet.)

Existence is another thing that we don't have answers for... yet. So? Before Benjamin Franklin, was it reasonable to say that God (or Thor, or the Thunderbirds, or Zeus, or Seth, or what have you) caused lightning? No, the proper response to "What causes lighting?" was "Darn if I, or anyone else, knows... yet."

Roger Zelazny put it poetically, in his novel "Lord Of Light": "The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable."

Absolute rational materialism* is based on the assertion that there is a rational scientific explanation for everything.

Not necessarily. One can note that the list of things that have a "rational scientific explanation" has been growing monotonically since we've been keeping track - the total has never gone down. Nothing's ever moved from the "has a rational scientific explanation" column to the "explained only supernaturally" column.

One can be a rational materialist and simply go with induction there.

Then there's the philosophical problem with the 'unknowable'. How can we, in practice, distinguish between something that doesn't have a "rational scientific explanation" and something that can't have one? From a practical perspective, the only way to tell which category something falls into is to try to understand it; if you succeed, then it was knowable. The problem is, if you fail, you can't conclude that it's unknowable. It might be... but it also might be the case that you just didn't happen to figure out something knowable, and you or someone else might have better luck on a subsequent attempt. Especially when one notes the documented risks of allowing supernatural explanations.

In practice, there ends up being no real difference between "absolute rational materialism" and just plain "rational materialism"... Either way, there's no point in accepting supernatural explanations. All you can say is, "we don't have a good account of that yet."

Absolute rational materialism* is based on the assertion that there is a rational scientific explanation for everything.

Not necessarily. One can note that the list of things that have a "rational scientific explanation" has been growing monotonically since we've been keeping track - the total has never gone down. Nothing's ever moved from the "has a rational scientific explanation" column to the "explained only supernaturally" column.

One can be a rational materialist and simply go with induction there.

Then there's the philosophical problem with the 'unknowable'. How can we, in practice, distinguish between something that doesn't have a "rational scientific explanation" and something that can't have one? From a practical perspective, the only way to tell which category something falls into is to try to understand it; if you succeed, then it was knowable. The problem is, if you fail, you can't conclude that it's unknowable. It might be... but it also might be the case that you just didn't happen to figure out something knowable, and you or someone else might have better luck on a subsequent attempt. Especially when one notes the documented risks of allowing supernatural explanations.

In practice, there ends up being no real difference between "absolute rational materialism" and just plain "rational materialism"... Either way, there's no point in accepting supernatural explanations. All you can say is, "we don't have a good account of that yet."

And even then, to be fair, back in the 1970's and before, there weren't mandatory reporting laws for sexual abuse. Society in general has become more aware of the problems; the Church really wasn't out of step with the prevailing attitudes.

(Of course, what does that say about their claims to be moral leaders?)

Basically you have a situation where there is a physics question (are CTCs possible, and if so, how would they work?), where one of the strongest arguments available is based on the assumption of free will (the feeling that older-me can *choose* freely to warn younger-me away from the CTC).

From my own far-too-long-and-obsessive meditation on time travel:

A lot of people don't like this model because it would seem to eliminate any possibility of free will. Personally, I don't particularly worry about whether I have free will or not. If I do have free will, then I don't have to worry about it. If I don't, then there's no point in worrying about it. Either way...

But this model doesn't necessarily pose problems for free will. Consider normal ideas about time and free will. Your parents freely chose to have you, right? At the very least, their free choices led them to the point where they did have you, though hopefully they were happy about it.

Now, assuming no time travel, those choices cannot now be changed, right? They cannot now decide not to have had you. The moment of choice was back then, somewhere in the past. Once that choice was made, it was fixed. Assuming free will, it was not totally determined by what led up to it in some physical deterministic sense, but once made it could not be changed. This is not a constraint on free will.

Now, just by adding in time travel we needn't change anything about this. Choices are freely made at the moment they are decided. It's just that now it's possible to know what those free choices "were" at a point in time "before" the choice "will be" made. (English again forces us to use strange tenses to speak about this. Oh, well.) Remember, in this model, there is no privileged point we can pick out and call 'the present'. Every moment is past to some instants, future to others. Every moment is a "present".

(Note that some people use this idea to reconcile the idea of God knowing what we will do with the notion of free will. God, existing outside of time, doesn't ordain what people do, It just sees them doing it. I only bring it up to point out that lots of people have no problem in principle with the idea that they both have free will and yet someone knows with certainty what they will do. I don't see why it's any different if someone besides a God has that knowledge...)

If you see a movie of yourself from the future doing certain things tomorrow, from a certain perspective it doesn't mean that you are "fated" to do those things. It just means that you know, when that time comes around, that doing those things will seem to you to be the best available choice.

Perhaps the future choice seems silly, or even terrible. Well, can't you think of a moment where you've made a choice, and then later (perhaps only a second later) thought, "What was I thinking?" The fact that it seems unlikely to you that you will make that choice doesn't mean that you won't make it. People do things they never expected to do, even said they wouldn't do, all the time.

Here, play with it yourself, like I did. I think you'd be interested in the results I got. Including parasitism and symbiosis.

Here, play with it yourself, like I did. I think you'd be interested in the results I got. Including parasitism and symbiosis.

There is only proof that god didn't do X.

Allow me to point out that the list of "things that don't require a god to explain" has been growing monotonically since we've been keeping records. The total has never gone down - nothing has ever moved from the "explained without gods" to the "explained with gods" column.

(Oh, and something else to consider.)

I have aMule with Kad and a bunch of other things running on an ARM-based NAS. Of course, since it has a full-size hard drive, it takes somewhat more power than a flash drive, but I think it only makes sense to have some disk space when you're running these applications.

http://kasj.homeunix.net/~teknohog/hardware/kasj/

Is it time for strong encryption of packet payloads yet? ssh? Ostiary? However it goes, I'm good...just need to know the new standard for basic web browsing...

Any sufficiently advanced alien is indistinguishable from God.

Actually, nope.

From "Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny:

"Then the one called Raltariki is really a demon?" asked Tak.

"Yes - and no," said Yama."If by 'demon' you mean a malefic, supernatural creature, possessed of great powers, life span and the ability to temporarily assume virtually any shape - then the answer is no. This is the generally accepted definition, but it is untrue in one respect."

"Oh? And what may that be?"

"It is not a supernatural creature."

"But it is all those other things?"

"Yes."

"Then I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be supernatural or not - so long as it is malefic, possesses great powers and life span and has the ability to change its shape at will."

"Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy - it is a matter of essence."

You always need a target.

Actually, no. There are a-life systems that don't have any explicit target or 'fitness function', and yet display increasing complexity and even ecologies. (I wrote a version myself just to play with it, and reproduced the results myself. Even a couple minor new ones.)

It's a very unusual kind of GA, I'll grant. But it seems to be a GA nevertheless.