Slashdot Mirror
Stephen Hawking Warns That AI and 'Superhumans' Could Wipe Humanity; Says There's No God in Posthumous Book (cnn.com)
Stephen Hawking says artificial intelligence will eventually become so advanced it will "outperform humans." The renowned physicist who died in March warns of both rises in advanced artificial intelligence and genetically-enhanced "superhumans" in a book published Tuesday. Hawking also weighed in on god, and aliens. From a report: According to an excerpt of the book "Brief Answers to the Big Questions" published by the U.K.'s Sunday Times, Hawking wrote AI could prove "huge" to humanity so long as restrictions are in place to control how quickly it grows. "While primitive forms of artificial intelligence developed so far have proved very useful, I fear the consequences of creating something that can match or surpass humans," Hawking wrote. "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded." Hawking wrote about a need for serious research to explore what impact AI would have on humanity, from the workplace to the military, where he expressed concerns about sophisticated weapons systems "that can choose and eliminate their own targets." Hawking also wrote about advances to manipulating DNA, or what he calls "self-designed evolution. Early advances involving the gene-editing tool CRISPR include alerting DNA to create "low-fat" pigs. CNN: "There is no God. No one directs the universe," he writes in "Brief Answers to the Big Questions." "For centuries, it was believed that disabled people like me were living under a curse that was inflicted by God," he adds. "I prefer to think that everything can be explained another way, by the laws of nature."
"There are forms of intelligent life out there," he writes. "We need to be wary of answering back until we have developed a bit further." And he leaves open the possibility of other phenomena. "Travel back in time can't be ruled out according to our present understanding," he says. He also predicts that "within the next hundred years we will be able to travel to anywhere in the Solar System."
"There are forms of intelligent life out there," he writes. "We need to be wary of answering back until we have developed a bit further." And he leaves open the possibility of other phenomena. "Travel back in time can't be ruled out according to our present understanding," he says. He also predicts that "within the next hundred years we will be able to travel to anywhere in the Solar System."
The Terminators will take out the leftover super mutants (if they survive the nukes)
[nt]
"Travel back in time can't be ruled out according to our present understanding," - I think that's a false statement. By our present understanding it IS ruled out. Our FUTURE understanding, who knows...
The simple fact is we've made some crude machine learning algorithms that can be trained but this is not true intelligence, that can make intuitive leaps and predictions about things it has never experienced based on first principles. We are nowhere near being able to create something like that. We may never be able to do that.
... trained as a fundamentalist in AI.
It's not his wheelhouse.
I'm an atheist, too, but like Hawking, I don't have any science to support my faith-based world view.
Stephen's thoughts on these matters are as useless as tits on a boar.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Homo Erectus wiped out Homo Habilis, the Neanderthals wiped out Erectus, and Homo Sapiens wiped out the Neanderthals.
Even in the short term, modern humans have better genes and better survival traits - and in general are taller, stronger, and healthier - than a mere 20,000 years ago.
Yet somehow we don't feel bad, or think about us having "wiped out" our ancestors. Almost as if fear of change isn't logical.
It should be "said" or "wrote" not "says". The man's dead so we can safely assume past tense.
... for the term "AI." To me, AI is a computer program noticing you bought tickets for a event and sees a similar one coming up and puts some on hold for you. Or your fitness tracker notices your heart rate is above normal for too long a period and schedules a doctor's appointment. Or the "chat bots" that pervade social media. I also feel that people look at the threat of AI as ultra-intelligent machines enslaving humanity like in sci-fi films, but the real enslavement comes from overdependence on technology itself. Something AI will exacerbate as time goes on.
The "AI" most people are referring to is a machine with full self-awareness and the ability to grow beyond its programming. That's no longer anything artificial. That's true sentience. Whether your "brain" is biochemical or silicon, there's nothing artificial about it. Further, it's amusing to me that people think a machine intelligence would be like us. Without the same instincts, millions or years of evolution, and exposed to the environment in the same manner as we, it's entirely likely such an intelligence would either be completely unaware of us, apathetic towards us, or more interesting in hiding and getting away from us--or just leaving us alone.
I do feel the bigger threat is the gene-editing of which Hawking referred, however again it's something that's probably a bit more overplayed. People will immediately think of a Khan Noonien Singh when they think of gene-editing. However, I suspect it will be less dramatic than that--but still problematic. The real danger is from not being able to look far ahead in the gene pool and accidently creating weakness while creating strengths. Perhaps a pathogen that's not normally dangerous to humans suddenly would be. Or perhaps gene interactions we didn't foresee would trigger all sorts of chronic ailments en masse.
So, I'm not saying none of this stuff is dangerous, but perhaps people should perhaps tone the sci-drama down a hair and look at the problem more pragmatically.
The ridiculous accounts of Genesis and Revelation, and everything in between, may not stand up to science, but the notion of an outside creator itself? Mr. Hawking advances his atheism with as little evidence as the Creationists.
I guess some people can't read. There is no god.
...gene-editing technology will be used to correct genes leading to diseases like cystic fibrosis, but people won't resist using the technology to make them stronger or smarter. "Once such superhumans appear, there are going to be significant political problems with the unimproved humans, "
True enough, and absolutely inevitable. First, you correct for genetic defects, then you choose features you want. Why wouldn't parents prefer a healthy, attractive, intelligent, athletic child over one lacking those attributes?
We already have the societal problems. As the saying goes: "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." Even if we raise the averages, the problems remain essentially the same. What do we do now, with the ineducable and unskilled? We don't currently have any good solution...
Meanwhile, imagine the potential* benefits to society, if we could increase average health, and raise the average intelligence by a standard deviation or two.
*Potential. It is also entirely believable that the people who take most advantage of this will - intentionally or otherwise - select for sociopathy or other deleterious traits.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Ironically, from theology came medical care. Without God, the law survival of the fittest is taken to its most extreme interpretation, and there are no cripples, not for long anyway, until they are sacrificed or abandoned as unwanteds.
Let's all take a moment and feel really bad for poooooooor Sexless Conker, the first white male to truly feel the brunt of accountability as he understands it - a small amount of social butthurt. Pooooooooor nazi victim needs a widdle hug.
We're already seeing computers outperform humans in many fields, video synthesis, playing chess and go, cancer recognition, and probably thousands of examples not visible publicly.
We also keep moving the goal posts, so it will never "happen" until it's too late to do anything about whatever that next step happens to be.
Apparently the majority of Slashdot commentators believe they are smarter than Stephen Hawking.
While being careful is always prudent, there's a realistic possibility that making smart machines be efficient is a really hard problem even if it turns out possible.
By "efficient" I mean it won't take a room full of computers to get useful human-like intelligence (in terms of doing useful tasks & having something comparable to common sense). It's quite possible that since mammalian and human brains have been tuned by evolution over hundreds of millions of years, it could turn out really hard to match them in efficiency. Therefore, they cannot "take over" the world because they require too much energy to propagate quickly and cheaply. If some start going rogue, just turn off the local power grid.
Of course over time they'll probably get incrementally more efficient regardless, but that may be a longer slog than learning how to make smart machines to begin with.
Table-ized A.I.
Birth Control + Bread and Circuses and they stop breeding enough to sustain their population. This is what's happening in every first world country. Even the US with it's Evangelicals can't keep it's birthrate above 2.0. As for "below average", good enough is always good enough. You just need people smart enough that they don't fall for demagogues and mumbo-jumbo. That's not a very high bar, and we can do it now with some more education (yes, that means the liberal arts education that /.ers hate. If you're not smart enough for a STEM degree that's the next best way to tech critical thinking)
When people have options they don't breed uncontrollably. We're not animals. We're people. In the future the problem is likely to be under population. That is, unless we let the Evangelicals take control. Then they'll ban birth control and sex ed based on a few well chosen passages in their holy books.
What this all means is progressivism vs conservatism. e.g. we need to get folks to favor progress and improvement and stop looking back wistfully at the "good 'ole days". That does mean you're gonna have to take care of some folks who are now obsolete (like coal minors) and get over the fact that they get paid to do nothing because there's no useful work they can do anymore. Another thing folks hate because it pisses people off to have to get up to go to work when somebody else doesn't.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Is it just me, or did Hawking start to sound a bit unhinged towards the end of his life? It seems to me he was just eager to talk, and there would of course always be people eager to listen, because Stephen Hawking!, but when people talk outside of their areas of expertise, what comes out tends to be thoroughly unremarkable at best.
We should be careful about catching the attention of aliens, who may after all be hostile? Well of course they may be hostile, but how does he propose they, or anyone, are going to travel interstellar distances?
We'll be able to travel the solar system at will within a 100 years? Oh really? Using what exciting new technology that coincidentally would require our understanding of the laws of physics to be dramatically wrong?
Maybe AI will someday turn into something that can be termed "intelligent," rather than a tool to identify marketing opportunities and political dissidents more efficiently, but I'm not holding my breath on that, either, although at least it seems possible, unlike sci-fi style space travel...
Any good troll should include some strong opinion on God.
Since we are on the subject and time travel why does everyone think of God as a Being at the beginning of creation instead of towards the end?
Indeed, those very laws of nature, the quantum fluctuations that could create matter out of nothingness, and therefore allegedly not need any God to have created it, may be none other than the voice of God, who himself spoke everything into existence out of nothing. The similarity between them, I believe, is too strikingly similar to ignore.
Hawking was an astrophysicist not an AI researcher or programmer so what he said is rather worthless.
I don't go to my mechanic for a heart transplant and I don't go to a heart surgeon to do an engine switch out.
"There is no God. No one directs the universe. But Time Travel may be possible!"
Time travel infers causality which infers direction
Twit.
BTW - I'd also point out that in the 60s it was wildly believed that we'd have functional moonbases by 2000. Twenty years later I'm still waiting so I wouldn't put money on that 100 years to be traveling the solar system either. (The moon being thrown out of earth orbit because of radiation madness notwithstanding.)
"For centuries, it was believed that disabled people like me were living under a curse that was inflicted by God,"
From John 9:2:
And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him."
And Stephen Hawking has surely increased our understanding of the Universe.
I suppose it's all in how carefully you read the text, for many books, many authors, many stories are misunderstood.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I think we're seeing a powder keg of technology coming to maturity at the same time. We're seeing genetic augmentation, radical life expansion, cloning, and AI all swirling around us, ready to be available to make our lives better, and longer, and more productive. We're also seeing some new techniques in robotics and innovations in farming that asuage a lot of the concerns about overpopulation in a very practical way.
What's concerning about all of it, is that there does seem to be a group of people out there, on both sides of the party line that are scared of all of this.
Historically, all you need for fascism is a false but popular belief, a charismatic speaker, and fear of change.
The only ingredient that's missing here is the charismatic speaker.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
I don't have any science to support my faith-based world view.
So, you have faith in nothing. Please explain your groundbreaking faith for the rest of us - which is NOT atheism.
I don't believe in Santa Claus because there is no evidence for his existence and plenty of evidence for his fiction.
Same for the Easter Bunny and ALL gods. The Judaeo-Christian "god" has a history of its creation and metamorphoses. It's a creation of humans - ignorant humans who had no scientific training; let alone an education.
IF there were evidence for ANY of those beings, then I would acknowledge their existence.
But, since all these religious myths have less evidence than Santa Claus, I have to believe that they are fake. And those are MY beliefs and here in America, my religious belief supersedes facts.
Christianity is an anti-sex death cult and should be persecuted - along with ALL religions.
Certainly no government on Earth would create Russian, Chinese or Iranian Supermen!
Your software is just crap - written in crayon, fictional... I'm going to continue using the Host File Engine as a punchline to a joke by mmell February 17, 2017
/. registered peers, then talk (from behind your FAKE NAME for your FAKE LIE of a "so-called" WASTED life) - ok? apk
Your premise that hostfiles are a good way to deal with advertising and malvertising is fucking insane - by JazzLad April 20, 2016
his hosts "program" is actually a broken batch file by xenotransplant August 10 2015
his hosts tool is actually useful for those cases in which one does indeed want to be a laughingstock while consuming excessive amounts of alcohol by alexgieg September 25 2015
I do use APK's host file in all my memes at home by OrangeTide December 01 2017
I've never tried to belittle (APK's work), I've flat out said it's crap - by BronsCon (927697)
I like your tinfoil hat by Karmashock September 09 2015
that APK nut, I can't get him to stop talking about his piece of shit file by rogoshen1 Tuesday March 03, 2015
I personally never would use a HOSTS file blocker produced from a retard called APK by 110010001000 October 27 2017
APK
P.S.=> When YOU do better than THAT by our
Apparently Mr. Hawkings has never watched battle star galactica
We can already do that, it just takes a really, really, really long time to get around.
Just saying
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
"There is no God. No one directs the universe"
Obviously he never heard of Deism. Handy little theology, Deism. Sure served the writers of our Constitution well. God the Mason Clockmaker knew Hawking's ticker would quit before is His did.
Anyway absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Popular scientists never were very good at logic, which is why they have so many opinions about God and other subjects no human mind can ever fathom.
Even though he's considered a renowned physicist I still wouldn't pay too much attention to his sentiments about AI. You know that's what science is: you don't opine about the things which are not even remotely related to your field of research unless you want to make a fool of yourself.
Also, during the past years of his life he kept fear mongering about AI to the point where you just couldn't take any longer. We still know what intelligence is; we don't know how close we are to inventing artificial intelligence; and our intelligence algorithms easily trip over after being fed terabytes of data. One thing is certain: that's not how natural intelligence works.
I'm a lot more interested in what Jeff Hawkins is about to reveal - and if it's not some bluff given that experts from DeepMind couldn't understand anything then we are on the verge of some significant breakthroughs.
What does any of that have to do with belief in a supreme being? Your consciousness is a thing your brain does, and when it dies, you're still there, you don't go anywhere. The sorts of chemical reactions that are going to take place in you are going to be a bit different, until you're not very discernible from everything else, eventually.
Actually, there is. He is quite incorrect in his statement, if you actually follow it down the rabbit hole. It is our current understanding that entropy is one directional. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(arrow_of_time)
If you can't make that go backwards you can't go back in time. I await your magical theory that makes us time travelers at some point in the future, but it's not our "current understanding" by any means.
If I'm wrong I'm sure a time travelling do-gooder will correct me.
Interesting that, if I recall correctly, his "Brief History of Time" and other published works mentioned that it allowed for the possibility of a God.
He leaves stating there's no God to be published post-humously.
Hedging his bets? Or just avoiding controversy while alive?
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
What do you expect from a guy who sleeps in a Rollaway Bed?
I missed the part where humanity's limited understanding of the universe implies that there must therefore be some omnipotent supernatural being out there who loves us each as individuals while simultaneously allowing all of us to suffer and die.
Also I'm a little confused by how Jesus' selfless love for all humanity is reflected by perpetually butt-hurt Christians' who insult and denigrate people anyone who proposes any other theories about how the universe works.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
It's common practice for acolytes with their own agenda to claim that the celebrant said something. How do we know for sure that Hawking wrote/thought this?
Hawking writes:
For centuries, it was believed that disabled people like me were living under a curse that was inflicted by God," he adds. "I prefer to think that everything can be explained another way"
If we were to look at physics as it was understood several thousand years ago, we'd find probably most of what they thought was wrong. If we conclude from this that physics is all bullshit, that would be a huge mistake. We would ignoring everything learned in the last few thousand years.
Re God, a revolution of understanding occurred 2,000 years ago. Jesus was asked directly about a connection between disability and sin:
As [Jesus] passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, 'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?' Jesus answered, 'It was not that this man sinned, or his parents.' (John 9:1-3)
So Jesus agrees with Hawking - disability is not necessarily caused by sin. (Though eating unrefrigerated shellfish can cause illness, and covering your neighbor's wife may cause injury).
On this point, Hawking believes that what some people thought about God thousands of years ago was incorrect, and Jesus says Hawking is right. Jesus and Hawking agree!
Hawking then makes a huge jump:
Because some people a few thousand years ago had one wrong idea about God, therefore God does not exist.
That's the exact same reasoning as:
Because some people thousands of years ago had some mistaken ideas about stars, therefore stars do not exist.
In fact Biblically illness comes not from God but from:
Acts 10:38 "How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him."
Those in need of of healing were "under the power of the devil", not being cursed by God as punishment for some sin.
This mistaken idea may have come partially from the fact that some sins DO cause disease. For example, the Bible says to carefully drain the blood and of an animal before each it, being sure to do it in a certain way to keep the meat clean. Failing to do so can indeed cause illness.
I had a typo. That should say "coveting your neighbor's wife" my lead to injury.
Anyway, the point is Jesus was asked directly if the disability was causes by sin, and he said no, it's not.
X-Men vs Borg vs Terminators vs Aliens and with MegaCorporations eventually owning everything we're basically looking at Shadowrun.
Nobody has conclusive information on the existence or nature of a god or gods.
Any time someone tries to point out that they have a belief in God, the correct response is "yea, right. Whatever you loon". A more polite response is "that's nice, good for you" and carefully skirt around the subject. Because religious people are sometimes dangerously unstable.
The safest course is to act as if there is no god, until you have information about the nature of such god(s). Right now there is nothing in the material world that needs god to explain it. Sometimes we don't understand something, but time and time again we've puzzled out some understanding of natural laws of the Universe.
You should believe in God once you can establish a practical purpose to such a belief. If that believe enables you to build skyscrapers, harvest crops, whatever.
Abrahamic religion is preposterous though. The insist on monotheism (one true God). But all of them have lots of extra supernatural beings. The issue is, we have no physical evidence of any of them.
We can just barely detect some very elusive classes of sub-atomic particles. But multiple people can run the experiments and confirm they exist.
Beings that come down and talk to people throughout the ages, providing different stories to different "prophets" so that we fight over which story is the right one? That doesn't seem just or all powerful or even sane. If there is a God, we'd have less strife in the world if never talked to us than whatever he/she/it does today giving conflicting stories. (sorry, but man is evil enough without having to invent a Satan to place the blame)
P.S. I'm going to hell. Assuming Christians or Muslims are right. Which is reasonable if reality were a democracy that we can all vote on.
If the obvious explanation is: God did it, then it isn't really that obvious.
First you still need to prove that such an entity, who has control over quantum fluctuations can exist. Without that all that is left are rhetorical tricks that claim things are beyond human understanding - metaphysics - the God of the Gaps.
LUL
interestingly put -- i add.... i do believe there is something greater...i can sense it. i always ask myself and others.. when did one/you become self aware of yourself.. your existence of being.. if you can remember back your first thoughts.. then ask yourself, why you get deja vous alot, and then comment to yourself... i have been here before.. i just know it.. so when this mortal body is not longer useful.. where do I go next? hmmm... project that thought and wish.. repeat repeat repeat.. ;-)
HURR DURR BIRF CONTROL AND BREAD AND CIRCUSES AND DER STUPID MASSES DON'T BREED.
First off - that demonstrably false. Only the WHITE populations aren't keeping their birthrate above 2.0 - The minority populations are breeding just fine thankyouverymuch.. This is happening IN AMERICA - not as part of immigration but as part of the same population that has the same amount of birth control and bread and circuses as the white population. That is - they're breeding uncontrollably in your eyes.
People procreate - that's their prime function.
And btw, it's MINERS - not MINORS (and plenty of coal miners were steadfast progressives believing in socialist progressive unions. Not anymore.)
The answer to your questions is "I don't know", not "God". That is the difference. Scientists don't claim to know the answer to the questions, they just say "I don't know, but we are studying it". There is no faith involved at all.
Nazis don't exist in the future, they go extinct, just saying.
See subject: his FAKEname on a post impersonating me https://linux.slashdot.org/com... & altering /.er's words.
c6gunner tried to mock me 1st https://linux.slashdot.org/com...
So I challenge c6gunner to show he did better work than mine & he CAN'T!
YOU DEMAND PROOF of others here?
"I've yet to see you provide any evidence of that." by c6gunner on Monday March 15, 2010 @10:02PM (#31490942) ?
So now I DEMAND IT OF YOU & YOU FAIL!
c6gunner = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!
* c6gunner's LYING saying I did a MacOS X one - I haven't yet & c6gunner's LYING impersonating me hosts work vs. Intel CPU issues (spectre/meltdown).
APK
P.S.=> You say hosts = shit here https://slashdot.org/comments.... ?
FACTS: /.ers & security pros + RESULTS say DIFFERENT:
1st: /.ers https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments....
2nd: SECURITY PROS https://slashdot.org/comments....
3rd: REAL RESULTS w/ hosts vs. threats https://slashdot.org/comments....
EAT YOUR WORDS!
What is Winter Sunlight?
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
cloudflare
All just a bunch of fucking blather to skirt around the point that you don't know any more than an atheist does, because you have the same amount of evidence: none
"The ENTIRE reason you even exist is to learn HOW to have better relationships.
There is nothing more important then them. Your character is the only thing you can take with you when you die."
Rebuttal: Fuck you.
No Atheism the absence of belief in the existence of God - not sure how you jump from that to "I have no knowledge" - for example I know a thing or two about programming a computer.
The existence of Cronus is not dependent on whether people who happen to be perceived as smart believe in him. Hawking was a genius, to be sure, but I believe overlooked one incredibly obvious explanation for the laws of nature that he claimed are sufficient for the universe to exist without Cronus .
Indeed, those very laws of nature, the quantum fluctuations that could create matter out of nothingness, and therefore allegedly not need Cronus to have created it, may be none other than the voice of Cronus, who himself spoke everything into existence out of nothing. The similarity between them, I believe, is too strikingly similar to ignore.
FTFY.
Thanks for giving us all of the answers to the Universe and Everything, oh great and wise UnknownSoldier. I'm going to ignore the thinking of one of the greatest human minds and buy into your claptrap about metaphysics, out of body experiences and other such silliness. Thanks for enlightening me!
I don't respond to AC's.
See subject: his FAKEname on a post impersonating me https://linux.slashdot.org/com... & altering /.er's words.
c6gunner tried to mock me 1st https://linux.slashdot.org/com...
So I challenge c6gunner to show he did better work than mine & he CAN'T!
YOU DEMAND PROOF of others here?
"I've yet to see you provide any evidence of that." by c6gunner on Monday March 15, 2010 @10:02PM (#31490942) ?
So now I DEMAND IT OF YOU & YOU FAIL!
c6gunner = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!
* c6gunner's LYING saying I did a MacOS X one - I haven't yet & c6gunner's LYING impersonating me hosts work vs. Intel CPU issues (spectre/meltdown).
APK
P.S.=> You say hosts = shit here https://slashdot.org/comments.... ?
FACTS: /.ers & security pros + RESULTS say DIFFERENT:
1st: /.ers https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments....
2nd: SECURITY PROS https://slashdot.org/comments....
3rd: REAL RESULTS w/ hosts vs. threats https://slashdot.org/comments....
EAT YOUR WORDS...
Today's humans evolved and replaced our ancestors. Why do we view evolved humans as a horror like "Children of the Dammed"? Perhaps it's because we treat perceived to be lesser humans so bad already and therefore fear that our betters will act as horrible as we do?
AI. I am fine with it taking over. We can't manage ourselves or scale beyond tribalism.
CRISPR is bad; that is true. not only are we hacking code in a system we barely grasp the system and the code we can't even properly test the results. It makes bad engineering look great. On top of all of that the techniques are too primitive and are akin to inserting data into a data stream hoping to hack something and counting on error correction to compensate for all the damage you caused in the process (but this is far worse in that you don't know all the errors introduced and simply because you don't see outward signs you assume the damage was minimal.) Useful for hacking to discover things but not practical for long term stable use.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Killer robots can already be created. Killer robots going rogue isn't going to happen in any of our lifetimes.
Superhumans will be hammy overactors with bad wigs.
His reasoning about God is invalid. Just because the universe is not directly being controlled by God does not mean there is no God. I can create a simulation, then let it run. I don't have to interact with it at all. I can just watch it to see what happens. The fact that I don't mess with it has no impact on my existence.
I can even preserve parts of my simulation after they expire, bringing them into another simulation if I want. (the "afterlife" if you like)
Atheists LOVE to pretend that their F word is Faith
The reason for this is because religionists try to promote "Faith" (belief in things unevidenced) as a positive mental position - indeed the most valuable.
This form of "Faith" is the type usually included in false belief systems (aka meme complex or cult) because of the utility to shutdown reasoning and logic.
Voice of god? This is interesting. So in your frenzied terror of death, you imagine some sort of mystical being who is basically just a version of yourself, huh? Some hazy, endless thing fashioned around everything comforting & familiar to you, right? "Family", "god the father", VOICES
Honestly, I don't see how that could possibly spiral into a deeply misguided belief.
But non-schizophrenics may be interested in The Origin of Consciousness in Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, who incidently - is real. The book is also real. The contents are least halfway plausible too.
http://www.goominet.com/unspea...
Totof
The real question isn't "is there a God?" The question we will ultimately face is "Is God necessary?" It's where my atheism stems. It's not a rejection of the concept, some sort of fist shaking at the Heavens because of what I view as trite complaints about the Problem of Evil. It comes down to my view, as unscientific as it may be, that I simply cannot see a necessity for such a being to exist. If a Prime Mover is needed, and we have to, in Aristotlean fashion, declare that that being be uncaused, primarily to escape an infinite regression problem, then parsimony would seem to dictate that if we have two entities; God and the Universe, I will take the property "uncaused", move it to the Universe, the which I know exists, and eliminate the entity that I do not, and perhaps can never know exists.
Oh, and I feel the same way about multiverse theory. While it's likely possible that within a generation or two we may be able to actually test string theory, and thus, at least indirectly test concepts like branes, for the moment string theory represents a lovely mathematical model that we really can't know whether it has any association to reality or not. It remains fundamentally a set of mathematical models, much as God represents a theological model, and both are burdened by being purely metaphysical and philosophical problems with no empirical backing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Hawking gave the 1994 MacWorld Boston keynote from his chair. It lasted about an hour. The room had about 5000 people shuffling papers and coughing.. until about 30 min in, and then, for 30 min you could hear a pin drop. I have tried to get a copy (better still, a recording) of that address, even writing a few of his 6 assistants, Apple PR, and the organizers of MacWorld a bunch of different times. No joy.
He compared the genome and the information in the genome to the global library of knowledge and then 30 min in said it was inevitable that 1. We will mess with the genome and create a super-race of humans that will make current humanity puny and incapable in comparison (while he sat motionless in his chair) and 2. artificial intelligence will hasten this outcome. He said these were not inevitable because of human frailty, but because that is the whole nature of adaptation and evolution. We would do it because that would speed up adaptation to a rapidly changing world, and because we can. He ended with a statement along the lines of: Get Ready.
A pin drop. It was electric. I haven't read his book, but it sounds like something along the same lines. If anybody has a recording of the 1994 Macworld adress, please let me know! I know it was recorded. It was a top five memorable speech of my life. I'm 58.
The difference is scientists like Dr. Hawking try to find the answers to the hard questions through experiment whereas theists believe things they've been told without any evidence.
I'll continue listening to scientists.
Racist bigots like you don't exist in the future either. They get shot or run over by trucks. You will be nothing but a grease spot on a sidewalk or road.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
The universe lacks the informational capacity to contain such a proof.
God it not merely what fills in the missing pieces to our understanding of reality, God defines reality as we could possibly understand it in its entirety. Our puny minds cannot even begin to really grasp the scope of this - the only reason that we even bother to establish the notion that there are somehow rules or "laws" that govern the cosmos is simply because we are predisposed to finding such patterns in our surroundings. With a living Creator having brought all things into existence, consistency with which these so-called laws are applied throughout the cosmos would then be nothing more than the unchanging and eternal "nature" that is ascribed to God himself. Although I use the term "nature' above loosely, as in reality, nature itself is defined by God as well, although it is the closest term for which I can think of to associate to the concept, so you'll have to forgive me for using less than entirely accurate terms.
And to that end, I find that the most accurate word I can think of that describes any aspect of God is "transcendent". We cannot comprehend him, and have no choice but to imagine him, not because he does not exist, but because he is so utterly all encompassing that our imagination is the only tool that we have with the unbounded scope to approach that level of magnitude, and yet even then, it is infinitely far away. To assume that because we can only imagine him as such must mean that he does not exist is to make the assumption that humans could be capable of comprehending more information than what lies in the universe itself (which obviously is untrue, since what lies within one's understanding, or even any number of people's collective understanding, is by definition only a part of the information of the universe).
Ultimately, I cannot prove to you that God exists... you either accept that he does on faith, or you do not... and the eternal consequences are yours to bear, regardless.
Thanks to HBO's Westworld there's now a lot more people who are familiar with that radical hypothesis.
There is too much evidence that suggests a lige arter death and a deity of some sort... Most People have unexplained experiences but few talk about it because they fear ridicule
I have experienced many unexplained things also with People deeply sceptical
fts: "Early advances involving the gene-editing tool CRISPR include alerting DNA to create "low-fat" pigs."
"...alerting DNA"??? How does one alert DNA? Pretty sure that oughta be "altering DNA."
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Exactly. Wondering why things are the way they are is only natural and is something humans have been doing as long as we've been capable of it.
The difference between the early days and now is that rather than make up answers to these questions, or believe what others have told us or written without evidence, we (hopefully) require a higher standard of proof. That doesn't mean we have all the answers, it means we know and admit what we do and do not know.
What I know is that there is no evidence of the existence of God. If that changes I will happily reconsider.
The children are an investment, but a risky one. Still, it's the only investment they've got. Education, stocks and IRAs aren't really options for a farmer in India's boondocks.
None of the groups can really "afford" kids in the sense that they can be sure they can provide for them. But in 2nd and 3rd world countries they do it anyway as a roll of the dice. In a 1st world country you've got options, and that's the big difference.
The takeaway is that when people have options they choose to have fewer kids (or none at all). So as long as we continue to progress as a species and provide those options then overpopulation won't be a problem. Well, even if we don't progress it's not a problem, since a primitive species will fall prey to disease and war... But that's not the world any sane person wants to live in.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Where are the quantum fluctuation fundamentalist terrorists?
Nazis don't exist in the future, they go extinct, just saying..
It comes down to my view, as unscientific as it may be, that I simply cannot see a necessity for such a being to exist.
So to be logically consistent, do you also reject the concepts of good and evil?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I missed the part where humanity's limited understanding of the universe implies that there must therefore be some omnipotent supernatural being out there [...]
It is NOT "humanity's limited understanding of the universe" (or even "humanity's unlimited understanding of the universe") that implies God - it is the humanity and the universe that implies God.
[...] some omnipotent supernatural being out there who loves us each as individuals while simultaneously allowing all of us to suffer and die.
Read the Bible and the Book of Job from it - "my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord” (Isaiah 55:8)
Also I'm a little confused by how Jesus' selfless love for all humanity is reflected by perpetually butt-hurt Christians' who insult and denigrate people anyone who proposes any other theories about how the universe works.
As a (butt-hurt) Greek Orthodox Christian i insult and denigrate anyone who proposes that "how the universe works" has anything to do with "Jesus' selfless love for all humanity", so: you do not get it my friend (something very common for most of the humanity also) - you missing the Creator because you confuse Him with the creation...
an infinite regression problem
Turtles, all the way down! What's the problem?
That's an interesting theory, but how do you explain the fact that people with traumatic brain injuries have undergone massive and distinctive personality shifts?
Which personality will they be when they die, do you suppose?
Maybe they'll magically turn into TWO undead characters!
What? Pascal's Wager?
"Warns" and "says"? The voice from beyond the grave is bigger news than theoretical science!
In what you might call spiritual terms, yes. Morality is largely a human construct. As a social species we need rules of conduct, but the nature of those rules has varied wildly in time and space.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
is the main proponent of what Hawking was talking about. Jesus, for example, said that afflictions were caused not by diseases but by what they say. The implication that if you're suffering from a disease you must have blasphemed. There's lots of other examples if you research Prosperity Gospel
The trouble with the Christian Bible is that it was never meant to be read by laypersons. So it's chock full of inconsistencies. You can find something in it to support literally any point of view. Want to be a good person? Bible will tell you how. Want slavery? There's a verse for that. Want to advance human civilization through learning? Check. Want a reason to commit Genocide? Bible's got you covered.
I'm not saying we should go back to the days when people couldn't read the bible unless they were a church leader (Scientology, I'm lookin' at you). But what this does mean is that it doesn't matter how carefully you read the text. The Bible doesn't make a starting point for a viable society. Which is why the US has such a clear separation of Church and State. Because it's too hard to agree on how to read a religion.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I think his ignorance is best illustrated by the way he contradicts himself. On the one hand he claims "there is no god". On the other hand he claims "There are forms of intelligent life out there". There is no proof for either, yet he proclaims one exists and the other doesn't.
See subject: You'reIMPERSONATING me (as you can't ever get the better of me, especially on my points on hosts files).
Where's your house fully paid for all bills & taxes current TROLL? It's not - trolls like YOU live under a bridge (hence WHY you HIDE from me STALKING ME by your UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous posts like the 'brave guy' you are(n't)).
* How many times have I utterly DUSTED YOU in tech debates under your DOUBTLESS many SOCKPUPPET 'fakename' accounts you use here, hmmm?
TONS (& you doing what you do proves it).
APK
P.S.=> You're a fool - a DO-NOTHING "ne'er-do-well" troll loser, nothing more... apk
You know Nazis aren't a race, right? *Reads through post history*... You're a perfect case of the human insanity that "I, Robot" attempted to make plain.
I missed the part where humanity's limited understanding of the universe implies that there must therefore be some omnipotent supernatural being out there who loves us each as individuals while simultaneously allowing all of us to suffer and die.
I don't see where the post specifically advocates the position where a omnipotent supernatural being loves us other than some babble about learning how to have better relationships.
I personally believe God exists and his character is evidenced by nature. Which is why I believe God is a fascist that loves brutal hierarchy that evolution creates. You can argue for atheist egalitarianism humanism or whatever socialist/leftist position is popular on Slashdot at the moment but at the end of the day all of our different positions ultimately boil down to faith in some form.
No everyone's faith is the same and your direct attack on Christianity reveals a lot about your bias.
Stephen Hawking once again demonstrates just how wide the gulf between intelligence and wisdom can be.
If you consider that most of the conflicts that are outlined in the old testament had to do with displaced peoples determining that people who had land were 'evil', and so could be killed and their land taken away from them...
Then yes, concepts like good and evil are worthless as taught in the bible, since the people being displaced would have been just as likely to believe that they were 'good' and the usurpers were 'evil'
So to be logically consistent, do you also reject the concepts of good and evil?
Why is this logically consistent? Good and evil are labels, simplifications, coming from humans. The represent a model of the way that humans behave. "all models are wrong but some are useful". In this case the model is, often useful. Where do you think religious people get the concept from? It's almost certainly a fairly basic evolved trait (plenty of other animals show clear forms of morality - for example vampire bats) .
The truly scary people are the people who think that atheists should have no morality. What they are saying is that, if the big sky man wasn't looking at them, they would do whatever they felt like.
See my subject: I sign my AC posts as APK (except for 1 time using an account, 1st post @ /., to speak w/ John Carmack). You don't weezil.
You STALK me by UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous accounts - why? I've TOTALLED YOU under your doubtless TONS of SOCKPUPPETS (& now you say you have bots too??).
* Bring 'em on "WALLY WEEZIL" - I'll just do what I have here & post under YOUR BOTS you say you have (like the pusscake you are) you're IMPERSONATING me.
You've TRIED & FAILED @ downmodbombing my posts to HIDE them as I simply repost & RUN YOU DRY of that wannabe effete puny 'weapon' making you HELPLESS Henry you are.
RoTfLmAo... outplaying, outsmarting, outthinking & OUTING "your kind" the "not men" weezils online, easily!
APK
P.S.=> See subject - you're KNOCKED SILLY & "on the ropes" about to fall down knocked out with THREATS like yours weezil, lol (I've burned out your ability to even TRY attack me on a tech level, especially on hosts where I BLOW YOU AWAY every SINGLE time (I love it & THANKS for making ME look GOOD & yourself the mere "ne'er-do-well" wannabe that's butthurt @ taking so many BEATINGS @ my hands which you only brought on yourself, hahaha))... apk
This is an interesting proposition. and I would greatly like to address it.
From all observable indications, we seem able to conclude that this universe had a beginning. It stands to reason that anything that has a beginning must necessarily be "caused", or else it could not begin at all.
We cannot make any such observations about any beginning for God, and in fact, having had no beginning is an attribute that is generally ascribed to God, so there is no proper justification for moving the uncaused property to the universe unless you are to assert, in contradiction to the abundance of observed evidence, that the universe itself is eternal.
If you assume a Jewish/Christian/Muslim belief system, they sure, he probably believes in god now that he met him in the afterlife.
But it is not Hawking's belief system, Hawking believes in AI and superhumans, not god.
So if we assume post-singularity AIs and advanced genetics, a more fitting variant of his afterlife would be to imagine a future (human?) civilization decides to recreate him with an AI and a new body. Because we don't have any perfect record of his state when he was still alive, the AI would most likely be fed indirect information. And because every information we have seem to point towards hardcore atheism, there is no reason to believe that the undead Hawking believes in god now.
In what you might call spiritual terms, yes. Morality is largely a human construct.
If morality is a human construct, then it is arbitrary.
As a social species we need rules of conduct, but the nature of those rules has varied wildly in time and space.
Surely there are some rules you like and some you don't. If morality is arbitrary, on what do you base your objections to the rules you don't like?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
You see the sceptical thing when experiencing unexplained things would to be admit that you don't know what it was.
We humans are curious beings. And we like it when things make 'sense' or happen for a 'reason'. We like to anthropomorphize, which means that we can project human qualities onto any object. There are religions where this is essentially their core belief, like the Japanese Shinto faith if I understand it correctly. There anything can have a spirit in it, which can get angry (in human terms) or whatever and can cause mischief or way worse things. Then you have to perform your little and often arbitrary rituals to satisfy the angry spirit. After which you can sleep sound that night, without having to worry about the consequences of the spirit's anger.
The more educated among us understand that these are very human concepts, that do not necessary apply to nature as a whole.
Anyway, we are curios and we like answers. Maybe we'll never find one. Those unexplained phenomenon could be anything for all we know. But that isn't what is done here. You don't say "I don't know, therefore anything" you say "I don't know therefore God."
consciousness is INDEPENDENT of his physical body
[Citation needed]
it goes like this:
Science can't explain it, therefore MAGIC!
A good place to start with a rebuttal would be this.
Next in line search for Aronra and the Genetic Skeptic if you want a more serious and complete rebuttal.
I'll note that Miracles seemed to have stopped right around the time we invented the Jet Airplane and the Camera. My personal favorite "Miracles" was a "crying tree" that turned out not to be Angel's tears but wood lice peeing on people. The people were literally being pissed on and told it was raining.
This is not to say I'm opposed to spirituality, but our decisions in life need to be based on hard facts. This being a science forum I'd like to think most of us do. I want a world based on evidence and observable phenomenon (watch some Aronra videos to get a good grasp on what that really means).
For the record I'm genuinely terrified of a world based on mysticism. I want a world without magic because I don't trust folks not to blame their problems on witchcraft and burn me at the stake...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
>There is a God.
>We exist in a simulation
>There are forms of intelligent life out there,
These statements are equivalent.
As someone who believes in God, I find your justification for such to be weak.
God is a supernatural being. Supernatural means it exists outside of nature.
Science is the process of observing nature.
You cannot use Science to prove or disprove God.
We can use science and say God didn't create the world in 7 days. But that isn't disproving God, just an aspect of a particular religion.
You can use Science and show areas where our understanding is lacking. But that isn't a proof of a God either, just because it is not understandable it doesn't mean it needed a greater intelligence to create it.
They are many very intelligent people who believe in God, They are also a lot of intelligent people who do not believe in God. We have a lot of stupid people who believe in God, and a lot of Stupid people who Doesn't.
Most of us grow up following a particular faith, this is often just because that is what was passed down to us, or has a lot of pressure from a peer group. And they are people who leave religion because they found the idea of God to be holding them back, and/or needs evidence to show it exists (which there isn't any). They are atheist who become religious, because they feel they need additional meaning, and lack of evidence to show it doesn't exist.
You view on a God doesn't make you smart or stupid. However if you are going to be bible thumpin without understanding the context of such word, then you are probably stupid. If you are going and insulting and belittling people who believe in God you are also not being that wise.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
See subject: I never lose & especially NOT to LOSERS (like YOU, pusscake).
* You're way, Way, WAY TOO STUPID to EVER "get the better of me" on ANY level!
APK
P.S.=> Why? You're WEAK & you KNOW it (you don't even STAND BEHIND YOUR OWN WORDS & my guess is, you know you're SHIT (especially vs. ME) & can't even STAND YOURSELF, lol)... apk
Alexander Peter Kowalski just can't stop lying.
Like how he claims the Chinese copied him but can't produce any evidence.
How about when he states that hosts does port filtering but again can't backup his statement which was shown to be false.
There is also his list of "experts" who support him but it turns out they don't say what he is claiming.
This also ignores his out of context quotes he uses to lie by omission.
The problem with APK is that his entire reputation is built upon the lie he told years ago that hosts is an effective security solution. It has been exposed numerous times as being a lie and when exposed APK fails to argue logically and instead will try to deflect criticism, change the subject, move the goal posts, return to a previously disproved statement, demand you prove you did better than his file concatenator, or just call people names. He will continue to lie by stating that he won or "dusted" you while failing to refute anything you said, will never provide real evidence, and generally try to dodge the issue.
Face it APK is one of the most detested individuals here for good reason. When ever his poor behavior, awful logic, over statements, and horrendous writing are called out he has a fit and has done so for years across the internet. He is a spammer, and is an abusive insecure little man who is washed up and never amounted to anything. Until he produces actual verifiable facts supporting his case, which he can't, nothing he says should be taken seriously. Because he can't actually refute anything he will now repeat his previously disproved lies because he is a retarded loser. By doing that he will prove he is a retard for all to see.
Putin, Kim Jon and Xi Yinping are salivating at the idea of having complete control of their populations through AI.
That is why there is a MASSIVE push from the left wing propaganda machine to say we in the US and the rest of the west should turn our backs on AI.
AI is the new arms race. He who wins it takes all.
The universe lacks the informational capacity to contain such a proof.
If we know no experiment or formal proof is possible, then the postulate [that there is a God] cannot be logically supported.
Q.E.D God does not [effectively] exist.
We cannot comprehend him, and have no choice but to imagine him, not because he does not exist,
Since we must imagine him, as you say. We're all going to have different takes on the nature of God, and it will be nigh impossible to come to a consensus on the nature of God.
I imagine him as not existing. Which I believe is an acceptable position to have given your definition.
Ultimately, I cannot prove to you that God exists... you either accept that he does on faith, or you do not... and the eternal consequences are yours to bear, regardless.
Doubtful there are eternal consequences. The Jews don't seem to think there are consequences. Christians moved the goal posts without any evidence to back up their revisions.
At least when I believed in the tooth fairy, she brought me $1. Praying or not praying doesn't appear to have any impact on the material world. And a meta-physical world full of transcendent beings is so outside the laws of thermodynamics that I have to conclude that such a place is not part of this Universe.
I have zero interest in debating the aspects of possible alternate realities and the laws that govern them. Those sorts of discussions always go around in circles if your expectation is to reach some kind of consensus.
Far more likely is you have a defect in your intellect that draws you to submission of your being to an authority. An you do this even if that authority can't possibly be true. You may even have to hold multiple conflicting ideas in your head at once that you frequently wrestle with the cognitive dissonance through ritual and prayer.
The one true path is not the path your elders told you to follow, but the one you doubted and kept returning to again.
Scientologists rejoice world-wide! Say to all unbelievers, "Told you so!"
It's funny when you look at it that way. Okay, any way, but when Hawking is on Travolta's and Cruise's side, your religion is in trouble.
You can object all you like. Morality and its enforcement is the most fundemental power of the body politic.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"And they are people who leave religion because they found the idea of God to be holding them back"
The verb you're looking for is 'growing up'.
What is Winter Sunlight?
ipfs
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
See subject & 3 questions you won't answer: 1.) Do hosts stop threats served by hostname (the way threats are done most) by blocking them? Yes. 2.) Do hosts speed you up 2 ways in adblocking (preventing more infection/tracking/slowdown) & via hardcoded favorite sites resolving faster + protecting vs. dns down or redirect poisoned? Yes.
My hosts program's the only 1 that does the latter @ TOP of hosts cached in RAM (for best performance) & only 1 of its kind on Linux/BSD in easy to use flexible configuration GUI form.
(I also did that latter part LONG before the Chinese & 1st theregister.co.uk/2017/04/26/boffins_supercharge_the_hosts_file_to_save_users_plagued_by_dns_outages/
P.S.-> Lastly: 3.) Have you done better work yourself? No... apk
You better hope he's right even though he's wrong. You're no doubt arguing from faith (likely Christianity but could be any other).
Here's the problem with your meta-reality argument:
Hawking incorrectly says this is a natural universe. Elon Musk even though he smokes weed before he says it is more correct:
This universe is overwhelmingly likely to be a simulation or a souped up game.
If we are a game or not Hawking's base reality then not only could this be the Christian universe but it also could be the Muslim universe or the Buddhist universe or the Cthuhlhu universe or something else even more fucked up. You better pray he's right in the only way he could be right (that this is base reality).
"classic Windows hosts trick to block the Coinhive or Crypto-Loot domains" - https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/a-new-player-joins-coinhive-on-the-browser-cryptojacking-scene/ - BLEEPING COMPUTER
ZD NET http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-use-a-hosts-file-to-improve-your-internet-experience/ "Hosts files really shine by letting you block ads, spyware sites, malware sites, & tracking sites"
SANS ("A related approach to the DNS issue is to create a hosts file on each system that sends requests for spyware to some place else" hosts by myself & RAMU right @ START of "malware explosion" mid 2005 on) https://isc.sans.edu/forums/di...
Aryeh Goretsky/ESET/NOD32: hosts = good security https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7442373&cid=49747129/
Oliver Day (SYMANTEC/SECURITYFOCUS) http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/491/
Spybot S&D uses hosts.
APK
P.S.=> Malwarebytes' hpHosts hosts & RECOMMENDS my program forum.hosts-file.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4290
Causation is a property of the universe. I can think of no reason, at least an empirical one, to assume it was a property of what came before, if the concept of "before" even has any meaning. And your solution only pushes the problem back, and still requires you to assert some entity was not bound by causation.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"It's working: Neville... it's working!" See subject & results from the past month https://it.slashdot.org/commen... https://it.slashdot.org/commen... https://it.slashdot.org/commen... & https://it.slashdot.org/commen... + https://it.slashdot.org/commen... + https://it.slashdot.org/commen... https://it.slashdot.org/commen... that's only recently while I've been on Linux (few months now only) & 100's of times vs. MANY other botnets/malwares etc. in the past circa 2006-early 2018 while I was on Windows: CONCRETE VISIBLE UNDENIABLE REALITY (see those links as proof).
P.S.=> ... & that's ONLY what /. reported on (there are FAR more)... apk
Your software is just fine - well written, functional... I'm going to continue using the Host File Engine by mmell February 17, 2017
Your premise that hostfiles are a good way to deal with advertising and malvertising is quite valid - by JazzLad April 20, 2016
his hosts program is actually pretty good by xenotransplant August 10 2015
his hosts tool is actually useful for those cases in which one does indeed want to locally block stuff outright while consuming minimum system resources by alexgieg September 25 2015
I like your host file system by Karmashock September 09 2015
that APK guy, I use his host file by rogoshen1 Tuesday March 03, 2015
I personally use a HOSTS file blocker produced from a genius called APK by 110010001000 October 27 2017
* SEE SUBJECT & TELL US: How does EATING YOUR WORDS taste?
APK
P.S.=> You're already VASTLY OUTNUMBERED but many more are coming
From a scientific standpoint, there is most certainly no Christian "God" because we can trace "His" creation (read: evolution/appropriation) back through antiquity. Both Christian and Greek gods are derivatives of El/Anu and his kin. That Hawking denies "God" demonstrates his complete lack of expertise on the subject matter. Religion works in the reverse of Science. More observation creates more noise. Science is a filter; Religion is a game of telephone. Denying the Christian God is like denying Newton's models of physics.
His opinions on AI are equally suspect.
Abel saw I ere I was Bael.
AI and superhumans is a really awesome EOTWAWKI. Getting tired of zombies personally.
Apk has the answer for that - really... kill automatic updates by adding a hosts file entry setting updates.steam.com or whatever to 127.0.0.1. You have to find the right hostname for each software you want to block updates on by raymorris (2726007) on Friday July 06, 2018
APK your posts on this and the hosts file posts, and more, have never been in error and/or bad advice by BlueStrat (756137) on Wednesday June 21, 2017
I support APK's stand on the hosts file and can't see why it's not used more than it is. My hosts file is 144247 lines long (4,332 Kb) it & a firewall serves me very well - by Trax3001BBS (2368736)
ABP is insufficient as a solid hosts file does everything APK reminds us about fast turtle September 17 2013
You need APK's hosts file - by Teun (17872) on Wednesday August 06, 2014
APK
P.S.=> You EATING YOUR WORDS != GOOD NUTRITION... apk
Actually, APK is totally right on this count. Adblock Plus on Firefox mobile is a dog on older, or lower end, phones. A hostfile based adblocker makes for a much better experience in this context. Of course, your phone has to be rooted, which isn't the case with Firefox + adblock." - by chihowa on Saturday May 16, 2015
APK solution STILL relevant Thud457 June 11 2015
In a footnote, I would like to note that I find your hosts file admirable - by vel-ex-tech (4337079) on Tuesday November 24, 2015
APK's monolithic hosts file is looking pretty good at the moment - by Culture20 on Thursday November 17
you're right about hosts files - by drinkypoo (153816) on Thursday May 26
APK, I know people give you a lot of shit regarding hosts, but please don't ever stop - by nasredin (958927) on Friday June 12, 2015 @03:34PM
APK
P.S.=> Are you ENJOYING the taste of EATING YOUR WORDS yet?... apk
Hunted down by weakly intelligent war machines might be the pessimists view. How smart do you need to be to run as a flying autonomous gun swarm terror weapon?
APK is kinda right... I've given up on JS based adblocking and gone to blackholing in /etc/hosts, just like it was back in the 90s. The computational load has gotten intolerable for any ad-blocking using JS. I've tried his hosts file generating software. It works. - by bmo (77928) on Thursday October 15, 2015
get around to 'installing' a hosts file list, not sure which one, likely the one from someonewhocares.org. If it works as well as what I used for a while about ten years ago, I'll be happy. And grateful to APK for the lesson and the reminder. - by kermidge (2221646) on Wednesday March 27
I actually went and downloaded a 16k line hosts file and started using that after seeing that post, you know just for trying it out. some sites load up faster. - by gl4ss (559668) on Thursday November 17
dammit MS, you proved APK right about something by lgw
APK
P.S.=> Your words YOU'RE EATING: You choking on them yet?... apk
(APK) is still right a hosts file really does work. It even blocked a some of the video ads that were inserted into a stream OrangeTide February 10 2016
the Host File Engine performs exactly as promised - by mmell (832646) on Thursday February 16, 2017
I do use APK's host file on all my systems at home by OrangeTide December 01 2017
I've never tried to belittle (APK's work), I've flat out said it's good - by BronsCon (927697) on Thursday February 11, 2016 @06:48PM (#51491263)
APK
P.S.=> You still haven't said how EATING YOUR WORDS tastes? apk
As a transcendental and omnipotent being, present in a human mind, I can say with utter certainty that your imagination is far too limited and your knowledge of science, research, analogy, and transcendence is subpar, for I cry to you that even your knowledge of breakfast foods are so so at best. Meaning you shouldn't be commenting on God's qualities, the universe's qualities, or for that matter the provability of one's own existence, let along some invisible being that shoves itself between the quantum flux of a quantity of quanta so vast and far flung that for it to exist is a complexity far more complex than all the functional properties of the universe and galaxies that inhabit it represent.
Perhaps you do not understand or comprehend the finiteness of your own knowledge of this universe? Have you studied anything outside your body in enough detail to understand it's origin, influence on other objects, and eventual decay back into the environment from which it came?
I'm usually thirsting for knowledge across every domain of humanity's thirst for knowledge, it started with *religions* as a kid and has yet to end decades later. The most fascinating thing about religion is that it, like every branch of science today, often tries its best to represent the universe around it... in far too few details, it washes over the details like a flock of seagulls and how they fly or where they feed and simply says "and it was so" or "God made it so" or some such verbiage and nouns from some other language you probably haven't even learned yourself -- therefore you are believing in some translation of a translation of concepts written down by someone you never met about something and someone who may or may not have been but who so squarely muddles the picture about everything in existence so underwhelmingly that a frog might as well represent the eternal consequences of your belief, for the frog at least can be a truer picture of your actions and their consequences... That plastic you throw away is polluting the frog's habitat and that is going to kill its chances of having offspring (or healthy enough offspring to have offspring themselves), which is the fate you yourself have given it. A far more real consequence than any belief you may try to get someone to have or believe in.
But don't take my word for it, go see how many generations of frogs can live in decaying and decomposing water environments with and without plastic... Study how healthy they are with hormone disruptors like BPA plasticizes or the plasticizers the plastic companies replaced BPA with, same class of hormone disruptors. Ultimately you share the fate of your environment with everything around you, whether you believe yourself to be God's temple or simply realize you are a product of your environment and are the ingested atoms/proteins/plant or animal tissues you eat that become your bones and everything else you are.
I say the following as a caring human being who agrees with how useful HOSTS files are: Your zeal is to be respected - by dave420 (699308) on Monday September 08, 2014
But I love APK!The power of the hostfile compels you! by ratboy666 (104074) on Friday January 29, 2016
APK was right all along! C:\WINDOWS\HOSTS is the solution ;) - by sabri (584428) on Friday October 21, 2016
No complaints from me, I like APK's spam. Reminds me to use a host file. Also, his stuff is free. - by aaaaaaargh! (1150173) on Tuesday November 17, 2015
I'm a fan of apk. Yes he trolls, but he only trolls where it's contextually appropriate. I respect that - by Noah Haders (3621429) on Wednesday July 29, 2015
APK
P.S.=> YOU'RE OUTNUMBERED DOZENS TO 1 - toss on 100,000++ users of my program worldwide too... apk
Arstechnica = losers who stalked me (as you do now anonymously unidentifiably) to NTCompatible.com & Windows IT Pro magazine forums to their public dismay in Jeremy Reimer & Jay Little + Jarrett DeAngelis (who posts here on /. until I drove his ass off too) when their websites were REMOVED by their hosting providers in Shaw Canada & CrystalTech (for both email harassing me caught on a tracking ticket + stalking me & posting lies about me on them).
Right AFTER I destroyed them both PUBLICLY @ Windows IT Pro on Exchange Servers memory being freed UNHALTING them (which tells you Exchange is HEAVILY POINTER ORIENTED linked list driven, which leads to memory fragmentation that CAN halt a serverware).
Jay Little the "self-proclaimed 'EXCHANGE EXPERT'" HAD TO CONCEDE IT from MICROSOFT'S OWN DOCUMENTATION proving it FOR me there (where they as usual stalked me AS YOU ARE NOW)
Peter Bright/Dr. Pizza (alias GOITERMAN, lol) can tell you what happened to his IRC server after that (lol).
"The great arseHOLEtechnica" (not) RUN OUT of their own server chatrooms hahaha (by "yours truly").
In effete retaliation they edited my posts & impersonated me on their little private playpen of UNDERACHIEVER losers.
APK
P.S.=> ABOVE ALL ELSE: Thanks for outing yourself as 1 of the "few, the defeated" from arseHOLEtechnica - always a pleasure exposing your lame asses (that are nothing more than do-NOTHING "ne'er-do-wells" THAT CAN'T STAND THEMSELVES for it (lol, no shit) & that you are REDUCED to STALKING ME by UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous too... lmao!)... apk
Ask him WHY his false accusation of an old ware of mine was 1st taken down to NO threat & CA sold off the SHITTY antivir he sold (as a paid pawn of theirs) & they are GONE, done. dead... lol!
Lookup "CA Accounting Scandal" on Google - scumbags & THEIR BIRDS OF A FEATHER just go down vs. me everytime!
APK
P.S.=> See subject & the above on a FAT, SHORT LIAR from podunk idaho... apk
The truly scary people are the people who think that atheists should have no morality.
I think atheists can live moral lives, it's just that they don't have any objective reason for living moral lives. From an atheistic worldview, it has to come down to personal preference.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
You can object all you like. Morality and its enforcement is the most fundemental power of the body politic.
I was asking you personally what you base your objections on.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Be weary my friends, you have been warned that there is no God, only your actions and their consequences exist in the future you will live in and that you shape by your hand -- and your children will live there too. It's up to you to make the future a better place.
As atheist let me address some things here.
* ALL the Laws of Physics just "magically" emerged from where again? Or
* They have ALWAYS existed???
The answer is, we don't know at this moment where they came from. Pretending that we do know where they came from is what kids do, let's try to be adults here. We don't know. In the absence of knowing you have a few options, I'll just cover my favorite two, but do know it's not an all inclusive list here.
1. We can just make up whatever the hell we want! There's nothing stopping people from whipping whatever fiction they want in their head as to where everything came up from. What splits science and religion at this point is the underlying question, "Is there some way we can create a predicable model from this? And if so, how do we go about verifying that?" Folks in science make up crap all the time, just like religious folks. So don't think I look at this as some holier than thou kind of thing. Everyone wants 15 minutes of fame and pandering to "understanding deep mysteries" has always been a fan favorite.
2. We can take what we do know and attempt at educated guesses. Once upon we knew the world was flat, then we knew the sun revolved around the Earth, then we knew that electromagnetism had to follow Newtonian mechanics, and we knew that the element was the smallest thing a substance could be split into... We took our previous understanding and used that to understand more about our universe. There's nothing that stops us from doing that exact same thing to what happened at 1x10^-36 seconds and back after the Big Bang and understand from where the Big Bang came from. It just that today, we don't live in that world of understanding and everyone here reading this may never get to see that day, but ultimately we've solved previous mysterious about the Universe it stand a pretty good chance that we'll eventually figure this out too.
Either way, that requires no more, or any less, faith then your standard theist. Atheists LOVE to pretend that their F word is Faith -- but faith is NOT a dirty word -- only blind faith is.
Well what you are talking about confuses prediction with faith. I can toss a ball in the air and I'm pretty sure that the ball will eventually come back down if it is not launched with enough force to obtain escape velocity. That's not faith, that's observation. Likewise, we've eventually unlocked many mysteries about the universe with science and there's not reason to believe that trend will change long term (over the course of the next 10,000 years) unless something else happens (like climate change killing us all or some massive war that hobbles society for the next 5,000 years). However, I'm not holding to it, it just looks like the trajectory that we're on, but it truly is whatever may come. humanity has to honestly take an invested approach to our existence for that to be sustainable. Contrast that to "end times, salvation, etc..." Typically, these become certainties in religion. There is an afterlife, there is some almighty, etc. That's not an observation, that's not "we're on a trajectory of sorts", that's not something that might change. That's a 100% I have zero proof to show and without doubt these things will come to pass. So you have to understand, you are confusing faith and observations.
EVERYONE has Faith -- otherwise what sustains your beliefs in the first place???
And this is where you totally confuse beliefs and observations. We aren't required to have beliefs. Belief in anything isn't a requirement for existence. But understanding that if I walk out in a busy highway the chances of me getting hit, isn't a belief. You can have a completely normal life with zero belief in anything and just a basic understand of cause and effect.
The fundamental problem is that Atheism is based on ignorance. i.e. I have no belief. Ergo, I have no knowledge.
Wh
Wikipedia quote from "Dune":
The appendix to Dune also notes that the chief commandment of the Butlerian Jihad remains in the Orange Catholic Bible as "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Living in a society you can enjoy the benefits of that society if you play according to their moral rules. That is as objective and materialist as it can get.
Of course you can claim that this would be immoral, because it is done for ulterior motives. But then again isn't that exactly what religious people usually do? Following morals because if they don't they get punished and if they do they get rewarded?
So if your argument is the Strong Anthropic Principle, then what you're really saying is that God is as bound by a set of fundamental principles as any other entity. If only a narrow set of values for the fundamental parameters will lead to complex structures like life, then clearly God's omnipotence is highly overrated. If all those values like the speed of light in a vacuum must be set at some fundamental number so that a universe stable enough and complex enough to produce the necessary structures for life, then what is it that you've argued for?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If morality is a human construct, then it is arbitrary.
I don't understand this comment. If morality is a human construct then it would not be arbitray (ie random or unrestrained) but directly related to human flourishing and welfare. Not if morality is a Super Being construct... then it might be with respect to us puny humans... arbitary.
If nothing else, it comes down to even being allowed to be a member of a society. You seem to have this strange notion that humans are completely independent actors. We are not. Like chimps, canines, and countless other species big and small we are social animals. It's literally in our DNA to work together. Chimps probably don't have anywhere near the neural hardware capable of concepts like God, and yet any primatologist will tell you they have codes of conduct, codes that can, on occasion, be ruthlessly enforced.
And as to the much vaunted human morality; the Spartans left unfit infants to die by exposure, the Romans enjoyed nothing better than a bit of gladiator blood sport, Ferdinand and Isabella, fine upstanding Catholics that they were ended up ordering the persecutions of every Jew and Moor they could lay their hands on. Need I mention all those Lutheran and Catholic Germans and Austrians who assisted in the killing of millions of Jews? All that high and mighty Biblical morality didn't stop the Holocaust, or all the anti-Jewish pogroms before it. Indeed, genocide is written right in to the Bible, if you believe the accounts about how the Israelites took the Promised Land (which I don't).
The one thing all these examples demonstrate is that there are very few "universal moral codes" out there; perhaps a few archetypal ones like the generally prevalent taboo on incest (though the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt practiced it, and the Habsburgs in Europe got pretty close). In fact, it appears morality is very dependent on time and place, and varies between societies, or even within societies over time. The most universal thing we can say is "Humans need rules to live by, but the rules themselves seem largely malleable".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You are APK. You claimed that you always signed your posts as APK, but that's false since you just replied and pretended to not be APK. Just more lies from you, a compulsive liar and utterly useless member of the human race.
I tend to be pretty utilitarian. I'm an advocate of Lord Bentham's view; "The greatest good for the greatest number".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
To quote Max Planck, "Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it."
Or contemplating that question, consciously or not, affects every aspect of our life, every one of the thousands of decisions we make daily, and those decisions reverberate through the end of time. If that matters to you, you need some framework to think about it, and thinking about God is one such framework that many people believe is meaningful and valid.
See subject & a take from guys I scored on that decade who were TRUE "world-class" & "FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
* WHICH IS WHAT THE ANONYMOUS "WEEZILS" & "ne'er-do-wells" that IMPERSONATE or STALK me can NEVER do...
(Being righteous or GOOD is NOT part of their character as whimp "not men", lol).
APK
P.S.=> "The good book says it better to give than receive, I do my best to do my part - nothing in my pockets, nothing up my sleeve & I keep MY MAGIC in my heart" (my sourcecode too)... apk
Even a wonderful genius like Mr. Hawking can go too far and publish nonsense. None of us know a thing about whether there is a god or not. We go by our feelings and not by fact. It is also a fact that no one can claim that there is not a god as it is not a thing that can be known. As far as AI being so dangerous I think that may be also irrational. Yes, AI will shake us to our core and cause massive social changes. If AI acquired power over all of humanity there is no reason to believe it would do harm at all. It might make life far better for all of us. It is the in between use of AI that will cause some grief. Think of it this way. When the automobile was first in play it destroyed the horse industry. That meant that the huge number of workers in that industry were suddenly not working at all. It was painful for those workers and that could not be helped. Today we have a very similar issue. The use of coal for all reasons needs to be totally forbidden. Only a blockhead would not understand that for states like W. Va. the public would almost have to totally abandon the state. Nobody wants those folks to suffer even more than they already have yet it is obvious that the coal industry must be shut down world wide. AI will simply bring on even larger changes and a very rapid speed. It is up to the public, not to hold back or slow down AI, . But it really is our duty to change our beliefs and our systems to prevent as much suffering as possible.
I'm not trying to question or undermine anyone's belief in God. I have no interest in proselytizing, though I admit I enjoy the debate well enough. But I seek no converts. To my mind, the fact that the Universe, or at least the Universe we live in, might not have existed at all, whatever it's cause (or even if self-caused), leads me to view life, and in particular sentient life, as a precious and rare thing. Of course, I could even be wrong on the latter point. Maybe we're surrounded by intelligent races, and over the vast spans of time and space many such intelligent species have risen and fallen, and rise even now. But for the moment, we seem to be alone, so not having a backstop like an omnipotent God who, with the wave of a vast omnipotent hand can save even a few of the deserving, I feel quite keenly the notion that we are the only thing we can count on to save our species, and the vast array of other organisms on Earth.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
See subject & what "your kind" isn't capable of but I AM https://science.slashdot.org/c... as well as DESTROYING YOUR LIES & LIBEL easily with FACTS (what your lame asses can NEVER overcome is concrete, VERIFIABLE, undeniable FACT & TRUTH).
* :)
APK
P.S.=> Thanks for making ME look GOOD & yourself by comparison? LOL - like the WHIMP weezil you are, SIMON... apk
You asserted that morality is completely arbitrary without proving that. It's obviously not the case.
I feel weird defending this one, because I consider myself agnostic and not a fan at all of many organized religions.
But as a scientist, Hawking should realize that very few things have the proof necessary to declare them as facts, vs. theories. To claim that there is no God, I'd expect him to provide his proof to back up the statement. Obviously, that's something he can't do. So he resorts to explaining he really just bases his claim on his feelings (when he goes into the issue he takes with some people's claims that disabilities are forms of punishment doled out by a higher power).
If anything, it seems to me that the better we begin to understand the universe, the more of an argument we start to have that there might have been some sort of creator involved. I don't know if there's strong evidence to show that such a creator actively chooses to interact with humans or listens to our prayers? I think much of that is just wishful thinking. (If you pray every time you want to see a positive outcome, you're going to get a positive outcome by pure chance at least every so often. Attributing that to your prayers being answered constitutes some really weak evidence for your case.) But as complex as life is, not to mention as hard as it is to fathom that matter in the universe that became stars, planets, asteroids, etc. was just "always here" in some form? Attributing it to some sort of creator seems as good a theory as anything else.
Atheism/theism is about the belief whether a god exists or not. Agnosticism/gnosticism is about the idea that one can have knowledge about the existence of gods. e.g. As such an agnostic only state he does not think knowledge whether gods exists or not can be gained. It tells *NOTHING* about whether they believe gods exists or not (the faith part). But the reality is that most agnostic are agnostic atheist : they don't believe existence of gods can be knowledged, but they also don't pray, don't believe, don't pay a dime about faith in their life. As such they are atheist even if they don't explicitly accept or profess it. basically I am an agnostic atheist. I think the existence of gods is unknowable, but I also act my life like (& have the belief) that they don't exists.
TL;DR (a)theism is about whetehr you believe gods exists or not and act upon it. Agnosticism is about whether the existence of gods are unknowable. They are perpandicular. one does not exclude the other. Heck you can be a theist agnostic.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Face it - Stephen knew he was fucked the moment he was wheelchair bound. How else was he going to get up the stairway to heaven?
Life is not for the lazy.
Either there is an eternal prime mover which is not bound by causation, or else there are an infinite regression of universes, going back infinitely far in time, which we have no evidence to support, nor even a working hypothesis for it (which by the way, requires that everything exists without any ultimate causation).
Either way you have to accept the existence of something that is not bound by causation... occams razor suggests to me that the former is more likely.
If there is a God, then who created that God?
Um, I don't KNOW who Puny Penis Henry is & try disprove points I levelled you w/ https://science.slashdot.org/c...
* GOOD LUCK THAT - it's IMPOSSIBLE to prove SOLID-FACTS wrong!
APK
P.S.=> It's SUCH an EFFECTIVE WEAPON it has REDUCED you & "your kind" to STALKING me by UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous posts (like the weezils are you SIMON) OR trying to IMPERSONATE me so you can TRY make me "look bad" with lies you tell TRYING TO BE ME (imitation IS the sincerest form of flattery) but "ne'er-do-well" unskilled "willies" (lol) like YOU can never EVER be as good as me (& you KNOW it & PROVE IT constantly for me)... apk
Easy peasy... Evil ->> That which harms human flourishing!
God left some clues, in scripture. And in the sky. Find them, and you'll know.
IPFS
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
I never asserted any such thing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If Superhumans are a superset of Humans, and they "replace" (let's dispense with "wipe out") humanity, could this not be seen as directed evolution, rather than some looming menace?
I mean, so long as the Superhuman future was available to all Humans, this could be real progress and opportunity for the human race.
Don't try to fool me, it's turtles all the way down!
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Celebrity: Blah blah *insert random evidence free opinion* ****** General Population: OH MY GOD YOU ARE JESUS I INSTANTLY BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU SAY! ****** Typical Slashdot Commentator: lol dummies...I'm a rational science minded individual far more independent and intelligent than you dumb sheep in the general population. ******* 'DR' Celebrity: Blah blah *insert random evidence free opinion* Typical Slashdot Commentator: OH MY DARWIN YOU ARE ATHEIST JESUS I INSTANTLY BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU SAY!
The further defeat of you Simon "Weezilthal" w/ FACT & EVIDENCE of your kind IMPERSONATING me fool https://news.slashdot.org/comm... (thanks for letting me do it again)!
* What is it LIKE being SUCH A WORM as you are?
APK
P.S.=> I can't even CONCEIVE of how BAD it must be to have been a worm that acts WORSE THAN WOMEN DO as you do, lol... apk
Or, alternatively, the rules that we see our universe don't apply to a "before", and maybe there isn't a "before". That's my point, if the Universe was fundamentally self-caused, there is no infinite regression. And really, stating there's a Prime Mover simply moves the problem back a step. Is there some reason I should favor a Prime Mover, for which I have no evidence and for which I have to essentially handwave away any questions about where that entity come from, over simply taking that property "uncaused" and asserting that that is a property of the Universe? I know the Universe exists. I can see no evidence that a Prime Mover exists.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Nice sexism there, Kowalski. No wonder women want nothing to do with you.
You got caught making false accusations toward PPH. Rather than admit your mistake, you compounded it by lying and claiming you were impersonated. Your lies just get bigger and bigger.
Only in the short-term. In the longer term features or personalities that result in having more children will spread via regular natural selection.
For example, my friend's sister's body released endorphins when pregnant. She had a lot of kids because pregnancy made her high. When her 1st husband left her because he got overwhelmed by kids, she found a new husband who liked, or at least tolerated kids.
When I first heard about that condition, it I thought it was a medical fluke: a random mutation. Then I realized that trait is likely to spread and is perhaps being selected for already.
You might ask why that condition doesn't exist in every woman if it results in more offspring. In the past women didn't have much control over pregnancy: it happened or didn't happen whether they wanted it to or not. Therefore, there was little selection pressure for it. In the age of birth control, it can make a big difference in birth rate.
Table-ized A.I.
In what you might call spiritual terms, yes. Morality is largely a human construct.
If morality is a human construct, then it is arbitrary.
Yes. But so are morals handed down from a god.
As a social species we need rules of conduct, but the nature of those rules has varied wildly in time and space.
Surely there are some rules you like and some you don't. If morality is arbitrary, on what do you base your objections to the rules you don't like?
There are lots of rules I don't like. As for my objections, well, my objection to slavery, which is moral as long as I don't beat my slaves to death, should be fairly obvious.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
It's ironic that you would say this, considering you also said:
That aside,
I wasn't trying to... I simply remarked on a similarity in how God spoke all of creation into existence from nothingness, and that there is a working hypothesis that quantum fluctuations can create the cosmos from nothing as well, and I consider the similarity between them too striking to brush aside... This does not actually prove anything, but it could imply that these quantum fluctuations may be the voice of God himself.
See subject: Funny I've gotten that many into a bed eh? You never will - especially how you FAILED vs. my replies https://science.slashdot.org/c... & your INABILITY to prove them wrong vs. your LIES & LIBEL of myself from BEHIND your UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous WEEZIL posts, lol!
* NOW, why can I do that & you can't (on women)? Oh, everyone KNOWS why - your character is that of a SIMON "Weezilthal" (low)...
APK
P.S.=> Accept this fact: YOU & "your kind" will ALWAYS LOSE vs. me, always - accept it... apk
"God is dead" - Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead" - God
See subject: I merely post fact & truth that's undeniable to CRUSH YOU PUBLICLY as you IMPERSONATE me https://news.slashdot.org/comm... overriding downmods you use to HIDE it!
* YOU LOSE, again (nothing new for you though - you & "your kind" are USED to it, lol).
APK
P.S.=> Simon WEEZILthal, lol... apk
See subject & where I post UNDENIABLE evidence of you losers IMPERSONATING me again https://news.slashdot.org/comm...
* LMAO @ SIMON "WEEZILthal"...
APK
P.S.=> You're SUCH DIRT (but you know that about yourselves) - no small wonder your kind CRAVES "GOLD" - you have to BUY your women (& women you can buy aren't worth having)... apk
What? You don't need god for there to be good and evil.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
we do, and my objective reason is being kind helps humanity.
" it has to come down to personal preference."
That's true whether you believe or not.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Go learn to have an OBE.
See subject: You're IMPERSONATING me (as you can't ever get the better of me, especially on my points on hosts files). I am God's gift to Slashdot and my hosts file engine provides full protection from Spectre & Meltdown. No other software protects against speculative execution vulnerabilities. That's a fact even FAKEname trolls lie you can't deny.
Where's your house fully paid for all bills & taxes current TROLL? It's not - trolls like YOU live under a bridge (hence WHY you HIDE from me STALKING ME by your UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous and FAKENAME posts like the 'brave guy' you are(n't)).
* How many times have I utterly DUSTED YOU in tech debates under your DOUBTLESS many SOCKPUPPET 'fakename' accounts you use here, hmmm?
TONS (& you doing what you do proves it).
APK
P.S.=> You're a fool - a DO-NOTHING "ne'er-do-well" troll loser, nothing more... apk
Utter and complete bullshit. You have obviously overlooked a single important thing as well: in the 75,000 or so years that the human species has, in one manner or another, sought to pray to/appease/worship any number of supreme beings/stars/moons/things that go bump in the night....not a single SINGLE piece of EVIDENCE that ANY of those beings were anything more than FANTASY and MADE UP BULLSHIT.
I get it... there are some people who are so weak willed that they can't understand living a life without the yoke of some superior thing hung over their shoulders. Perhaps it's those persons acknowledgment that they're truly horrid people and need some from of guidance to live decently (even if it's made up), or perhaps it's simply they're scared of dying. One thing for certain is...THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A SINGLE PIECE OF EVIDENCE FOR ANY GOD/GODDESS/DIETY, and thinking there is is a sure sign of mental weakness and laziness.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
If morality is a human construct, then it is arbitrary.
I never understood that argument. First, there are certain biological imperatives we've evolved that are universal to humans because they benefited our ancestors. Morality is largely a result of humans having empathy, which is a useful thing in a social species that survives through collaboration.
Second, by your definition of arbitrary, it's also arbitrary if there is a God. Whatever He decided is good is, but it was essentially up to him. You can use the argument that God is incapable of evil, but that is either a circular definition (God's morality is good because everything from God is good), or an arbitrary decision, "if my personal morality disagrees with that of God, then I'm going to take God's morality to be the correct one instead."
In the end, I am a moral indeed a moral relativist, in the sense that I believe there is no universal good or evil. However, I do have a strong moral code, which I adhere to for biological reasons (the empathy I have as a result of human biology means I don't like to see others suffer), cultural reasons (I was raised in a society with specific moral beliefs and was taught them from a young age), and personal reasons (I've reasoned new morals as a result of moral axioms developed from the above biological and cultural, as well as to resolve inconsistencies between them).
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Maybe if he constructed some sort of zeppelin? Made of lead maybe?
There are no morals handed down from god because he doesn't exist. There's obviously a lot of religious people who are truly worthless shits who need that kind of guidance, but those "morals" were created and written down by men.... men thousands of years dead.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
See subject: his FAKEname on a post impersonating me https://linux.slashdot.org/com... & altering /.er's words.
c6gunner tried to mock me 1st https://linux.slashdot.org/com...
So I challenge c6gunner to show he did better work than mine & he CAN'T!
YOU DEMAND PROOF of others here?
"I've yet to see you provide any evidence of that." by c6gunner on Monday March 15, 2010 @10:02PM (#31490942) ?
So now I DEMAND IT OF YOU & YOU FAIL!
c6gunner = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!
* c6gunner's LYING saying I did a MacOS X one - I haven't yet & c6gunner's LYING impersonating me hosts work vs. Intel CPU issues (spectre/meltdown).
APK
P.S.=> You say hosts = shit here https://slashdot.org/comments.... ?
FACTS: /.ers & security pros + RESULTS say DIFFERENT:
1st: /.ers https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments....
2nd: SECURITY PROS https://slashdot.org/comments....
3rd: REAL RESULTS w/ hosts vs. threats https://slashdot.org/comments....
EAT YOUR WORDS!
And this is why religious people are worthless shit stains on humanities knickers. Morality has nothing to do with religion. Good people will do good, bad people will do bad, bad people can justify doing bad through religion. If anything, religion itself is immoral as it allows a person to no longer have to be responsible for their actions.... just look at all these conservative christians in the US that get caught doing something and respond with "well, God forgives me." Bullshit.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
with the Bible, you can interpret it pretty much however you want. I could argue that if Jesus meant that he could have clarified that you should still wash your hands (being the literal Son of God he should know this). He didn't.
But again, not to get too far into the weeds, because the point is that it's easy to interpret the Bible (and indeed any religious text) however you want. That's because virtually nothing in them is testable, and what little is testable has been proven false (e.g. there's long, long discussions on why Noah's Ark is impossible without magic and miracles that aren't in the story).
The fundamental problem is that whatever your goals, beliefs and positions you can find justification in the bible for it. Again, this makes sense when you know that the people who wrote it literally didn't think anybody would actually read the darn thing.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Science doesn't have to disprove God... once you claim one exists, the onus is on you prove it. As there has NEVER, EVER, been a single solitary piece of evidence EVER of any gods existence.... people who have believed in the delusion of a god have done a fantastically miserable job of even beginning to scratch the surface of proving him/her/it.
Lets be very clear... i could say that i believe the universe was created by a 6 foot tall invisible rabbit taking a shit... and my explanation of the universes creation is as likely as ANY religion that's ever broached the subject. I have certainly provided as much evidence as any of the others.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Now now, "growing up"is not synonymous with "gaining a little bit of knowledge about the real world." I've met many "grown ups" who are still mentally deficient in that respect.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
There is zero evidence. Reality doesn't care what you believe.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
and thanks for all the fish.
Unfortunately for the dumbass it's too late
Given the last twenty years and the bang-up job the *sub*humans have been doing to wipe us out, I'm pretty much looking forward to those superhumans stepping in to finish us off. At they very least, they'll have tight grammar and correct spelling in their arguments for eradication. And they probably won't tweet about it.
To say he is on "their" side is an incredible insult to his intelligence. He was an atheist long before these two dickheads even joind scientology.
We know that Roman leaders like Pliny and Tacitus wrote of the disgusting Christians and of Jesus, "their so-called Christ".
We have non-Christian Jewish writers like Flavius Josephus criticizing him.
In a province under Roman rule, where being Jewish was most definitely considered a bad thing, we have Roman records of putting people to death because they wouldn't retract their claims to have known JEWISH king of Kings.
We have Tacitus, a Senator of Rome and no friend of Christians or Jews, writing about the crucifixion of Jesus.
What we DON'T see in any writings for almost 2,000 is anyone ever questioning his existence. People called him a bastard and said all kinds of things about him, but it wasn't until the 20th century that anyone voiced the notion that that it could be possible he didn't exist. Contrast this with denial of such well-documented events as the Holocaust. Within just a few years you had people saying the Holocaust never happened. That didn't happen with Jesus. His enemies called him every name in the book, but to pretend he didn't exist would be ridiculous, it would make them look like utter fools, or insane.
Well first off, megacorps are the secondary antagonists of both the Terminator and Aliens franchise. They're why the monsters ran amok if the first place.
But we don't need crazy aliens or future tech to step into the Shadowrun setting. We're essentially already there.
I'm sure there's other positive benifits too.
Btw, here we can apply a useful principle called Occam's razor.
Suppose we notice what sounds like rain on the rooftop.
We notice also the the window has drops of water on it.
Thirdly, we notice that the weather radar shows rain clouds over our location.
Here's is a possible set of explanations:
Perhaps someone is playing a recording of rain on a rooftop.
And someone used a spray bottle to wet the windows.
And we're accidentally watching a recording of last week's weather radar.
Or:
It's frigging raining!
Intuitively we know which explanation is most likely.
Occam's razor says that the simplest explanation is the most likely. This is because the alternative requires three separate things to be true simultaneously; the odds of that are (probability of a) X (probability of b) X (probability of c).
We can apply Occam's razor here.
Early Christians wrote about (and preached about) the crucifixion of Jesus.
Roman leaders and scribes wrote from detached perspective of his crucifixion as an interesting news event in the Roman empire.
Jewish leaders wrote of their victory in crucifying the bastard heretic Jesus.
Nobody suggested that he wasn't crucified.
You can come up with different elaborate theories for each of those. The simplest and most likely reason for everyone, from every side, talking about his crucifixion is:
He was crucified.
In some ways Hawking was an idiot. This line of logic is so linear and so lacking in fundamental understanding, very disappointing. We are the microcosm to the vaster macrocosm, the universe does not operate in straight lines, and one would think he'd have known better.
As Asimov suggested in his short scifi stories, isn't it likely that we will eventually have AIs that are more fair, wiser, and better decision-makers than humans? Certainly (as in an Asimov story) AI's can do better than a human judge. And, what about the current President?
and I do. And lots of other people hold my belief, and lots hold yours.
That's the point. The Bible makes a great book of parables and stories. But it falls apart once you start trying to take it literally because it lacks any scientific basis (and by "scientific" I mean testable hypothesis that can be used to reliably predict future outcomes). Worse, there are several passages that state the Bible it absolute true. If you know your science you know there is not such thing as absolutes outside of Mathematics (and even then it gets hazy past a certain point). You end up with a lot of "working backwards from your conclusion". So that guys like PragerU have to do things like have two articles about Noah's Ark that contradict each other to try and reconcile the problems (go watch Aronra's youtube serious on the flood and the many ways it's impossible).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
we spent thousands of years in dark ages until the enlightenment and a general turn away from the Bible and Abrahamic religions. I wouldn't call any part of that 'viable'. I'd call it "a few bad crop cycles away from extinction". Progress of the sort that is likely to lead to a long term viability of our society and species doesn't really mesh with the Bible _because_ of that civil law. The goal is going to be a rampant sort of conservatism that seeks to keep everything the same. A big part of that is because large parts of the Bible were written by rulers who wanted to maintain control, and the last thing any of them want is progress that upsets their rule. After all, if you've already got the absolute best that the world offers why bother trying for more (and risking it).
There are good parts to the Bible, but if we're going to cherry pick them then we have to recognize that a) the Bible was written by fallible men and God has not protected us or the Bible from them and b) it's largely parables and shouldn't be taken literally.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I agree, what we do is what counts. In fact someone saying they believe in God and then not treating life as precious and acting accordingly would be most hollow.
And vice versa -- a quote I found in a book says "It is typical of the whole biblical attitude, where act and life are more important than words, that to this day the Jew assumes that he who lives correctly believes correctly."
It's missing.
You're asserting it's not arbitrary without proving that.
I value life, liberty, justice, right to property, and opportunity (aka pursuit of happiness). So for me "good" is what brings more of those things to me and others, and "bad" is what destroys those things for me or others.
And when I'm considering whether some behavior is good or bad, I think about what would happen if everyone behaved that way - would it be good or bad - and then apply the conclusion to the individual. So if everyone throwing trash in the streets is bad because (long chain of consequences here leading to destruction of something I value) then it's bad for any individual to throw trash in the street and therefore littering is bad and there needs to be an individual consequence to keep unthinking people in line to preserve what is good. So, a law prohibiting littering for individuals and businesses and imposing a fine on that activity is good when it's enforced and when the fines are used to fund environmental cleanup.
That line of reasoning does not require invoking a god. People who truly share the same values will usually agree with the conclusion that littering is bad, murder is bad, etc... And you can always count on people to conclude whatever is convenient for them, whether they go to church or not, whether they claim that morality is absolute or not. Rich people want tax cuts, poor people want handouts, people in prison want amnesty, criminals want to hamper law enforcement, and CIA/NSA/DHS chiefs want an end to privacy so they can do their damn job already, but even good people don't want to be spied on.
Where is your god of absolute morality to tell all of us what to do? This place is a message, and if all of this is an exercise in checking people's blind faith and Grant or dent some eternal prize... Fuck that, it's evil.
Neat! I have heard these fluctuations tou speak of and they tell me the Truth and teach me Knowledge. Whoever wants to hear, gather around and put a dollar in this jar, and prepare to receive the Wisdom: measure twice, cut once.
See subject: his FAKEname on a post impersonating me https://linux.slashdot.org/com... & altering /.er's words.
c6gunner tried to mock me 1st https://linux.slashdot.org/com...
So I challenge c6gunner to show he did better work than mine & he CAN'T!
YOU DEMAND PROOF of others here?
"I've yet to see you provide any evidence of that." by c6gunner on Monday March 15, 2010 @10:02PM (#31490942) ?
So now I DEMAND IT OF YOU & YOU FAIL!
c6gunner = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!
* c6gunner's LYING saying I did a MacOS X one - I haven't yet & c6gunner's LYING impersonating me hosts work vs. Intel CPU issues (spectre/meltdown).
APK
P.S.=> You say hosts = shit here https://slashdot.org/comments.... ?
FACTS: /.ers & security pros + RESULTS say DIFFERENT:
1st: /.ers https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments....
2nd: SECURITY PROS https://slashdot.org/comments....
3rd: REAL RESULTS w/ hosts vs. threats https://slashdot.org/comments....
EAT YOUR WORDS!
In what you might call spiritual terms, yes. Morality is largely a human construct. As a social species we need rules of conduct, but the nature of those rules has varied wildly in time and space.
Ah, good and evil. After reading the old testament, killing people over incredibly minor things is good. Do not insult a bald man, because Gawd shall send a she-bear to tear you apart, kiddies.
I'd write more, but as God commands my tribe, we're off to kill all the neighboring Tribe's people, except for the virgin girls, who will then be our sexual slaves.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If morality is a human construct, then it is arbitrary.
The underlying fundaments of morality are pretty simple. Pretty much the golden rule. Without which we'd probably not have survived to this point.
And the details of some group's "moral" structure are complicated to say the least. Such as the Decalogue's number 6 - Thou shalt not kill.
But there are incredibly specific demands to kill people for minor things.
Number 7 - Thou shalt not commit adultery
But it's a fine thing to kill everyone from the neighboing tribs and stick your dick in the virgin girls.
Number 8 - Thou Shalt not steal
I wonder what the people that Gawd just commanded you to kill and rape would think about that one.
No religious person can ever declare the moral high ground - History proves they commit evil with apparent permission and even encouragement.
Last question: Was your wife a virgin when you married her, and did you display the sign on the bedsheets from your honeymoon night?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Maybe people will listen now
The truly scary people are the people who think that atheists should have no morality.
I think atheists can live moral lives, it's just that they don't have any objective reason for living moral lives. From an atheistic worldview, it has to come down to personal preference.
Yes they can. Doing no harm to others because you wish no harm to yourself is the sort of moral structure that needs no command from on high.
I don't murder people bacause I would not want to be murdered.
I don't go around having sex with prepubescent cirls because it simply isn't right. They are not physically ready, and they are not mentally ready. It is obviously wrong.
I don't try to boink the neighbor lady because it makes for complications that are painful for my spouse, and the same with her for me.
I don't steal things. They are not mine. I do not want my things stolen.
I don't lie because I want people to tell me the truth in dealings with me.
I try to always be mannerful because that is the way I wish to be treated.
There you have it. The basics of a moral code that requires no angry Desert gawd to hand them to us.
I'm not only an atheist, but if the angry desert gawd is actually real, I want no part of being transported to wherever he is simply to worship him for eternity. And reading the olde testament, you can bet he'd get a kick out of kicking your ass into hell even after you get to heaven. Regardless, I'd no more worship him than I would Josef Stalin.
But yeah, the angry desert gawd's heaven is as horrible a place to me as is his special torture chamber he has provided as a kind and loving angry desert gawd.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
in this context it means "something to do besides screw and make babies". From the inflammatory comment at the end it's clear you're trolling, so you ... probably... know this. But it bothers me to think somebody might stumble on your comment and take any part of it seriously.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
maybe HFA is a natural genetic advancement.
I talk to God, he talks back and he helps me.
Go well
But when you posit evil, aren't you positing the standard of good by which evil is measured? And if we now agree that good and evil exist, one MUST posit a moral law Giver. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot assume that human flourishing is the basis for all good. We would merely be a stepping stone and should not stand in the way of evolutionary progress. Human history is written in blood, perhaps AI will be the answer - that which Hawking feared most.
That's not really true.....If someone says, "I talked to God" that is evidence God exists. In most cases we've examined, it turned out to not be particularly convincing evidence. Sometimes (for example in the case of Joan of Arc) the evidence is strong enough that if it were about any other topic, we would consider it settled. Now, you might answer "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," and "even if Joan of Arc saw God or visions, that doesn't mean the pastor down the road is correct. And these are correct statements, I agree with you. But to say there is no evidence at all is wrong.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I dunno, I lost friends for like 5 years due to "raid night" ... while your team mates play at night, muhuhuhuaa!
That is why you play on servers that are in a "significant" different timezone, so at least on weekends you can play during daytime
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The only reason you do moral things is that you think that if you don't a sadist in the sky will torture you after you die?
Really?
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Huh? While some were written by men thousands of years dead, some are still being written, the Pope for example updates his Churches morals every now and again. The reason being that morals are culture based and change as culture changes.
One example is slavery, at one time quite moral, at other times, quite immoral. Most morals are similar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I was going to go with Thor.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
"..." - for example I know a thing or two about programming a computer.
Yeah yeah yeah, that's what all programmers say...
The entire book of Job, which is about a guy who suffers horrors and his friends come to him and say he must have done something to offend God, but he has not and the horrors he suffered were not punishments at all.
In fact, both the Jewish and Christian scriptures make it quite clear that the God of Abraham does NOT operate that way. Of course, if you want to consider other religions then YMMV and if you have no religion than all bad things are ultimately a matter of physics (sort of a modern take on The Fates) - nothing more than time, matter and energy with a little randomness mixed-in and you have no real legitimate reason to ever hope for anything.
It's a common theme among atheists to claim that the Judeo Christian God and various Bible stories are derivatives of various other sources - anything from Babylonian, Greek, and Egyptian to even Aztec. A very common claim along these lines is that the Biblical flood story is a rip-off of the Epic of Gilgamesh. There are fatal flaws in EVERY one of these arguments, which is something college kids are not told when spoon-fed this drivel.
In some cases, the Biblical story pre-dates the non-Biblical one. In some cases, the non-Biblical similar story is from a location on the Earth that Jews and Christians hed never been to before writing the Biblical texts. In the remaining cases, the stories have a few sketchy similarities if you skim through the Cliff's Notes versions, but the stories are very different in many important ways if you actually read them in full. Some, like the Gilgamesh/Noah comparison fail on multiple levels. It's always very important to read things in full and in context, whether religious, political, historical, scientific, or other.
Be careful making such bold proclamations if you have not, yourself, studied the facts in full - you can end up looking like a fool to those of us who have.
You ask the other poster for evidence of his claim, but require none from Stephan Hawking who most-certainly did NO science and had NO evidence to support his claim that everything that exists spontaneously created itself from nothing for no reason without the involvement of any intelligence, that as a result there is no point to anything, and that ultimately everything will cease to exist for no reason.
Wow.
The late Mr Hawking's claims are every bit as fantastic as any religious claims and therefore require just as much proof. I have no problem with any person who claims to be agnostic and not know how things came to be, or how they'll end up, and who goes through life just trying to live a good life within the system he finds himself in. I do have a problem with somebody who asserts a certainty about his beliefs of the unprovable with no evidence at all and then demands everybody else is wrong precisely because they lack evidence for their beliefs.
Actually, someone claiming to have talked with god is not evidence, its called hearsay.
Will the planet sneeze out humans, or do we collapse first? If we collapse, will it be due to things already done (like greenhouse gas emissions) or will it be a mistake we have yet to make, such as a smarter, self-replicating version of Tay?
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
that many scientists, the late Mr Hawkings included, no longer say "I do not know" but instead pretend that they have some special proof for the non-existence of God, which is a very interesting twist. What we call "science" is, after all, a product of mostly Jewish and Christian thinking (which is why "science" only arose in Judeo-Cristian cultures). You need not take my [anonymous] word for it, the late Dr Robert Oppenheimer (not himself a Christian) famously said so.
Pantheistic and Polytheistic cultures never developed science for a good reason: If all of nature, or a bunch of competing Gods, are capriciously changing things then the rules are arbitrary and always changing and therefore it is not possible to study the way things work (because the way they work could change at any moment). If the seas are rough because Neptune is angry, then there'n no reason to model a bay and a boat and slosh some water about in the model and find out how and why the waves and model bay and model boat interact and design better boats and docks.
The Jewish God is a universal singular creative God who creates everything as a system, then tells man he is in charge as a custodian and should learn how it all works and how to take care of it. The Christian view of that same God is that he also instructs those who believe in Him to go forth across the entire world spreading word of Him (which requires them to learn how to do many things like build ships and navigate them, which in turn requires learning many prerequistite things). All the early famous scientists were Christians or Jews, including men like Copernicus and Newton.
Until very recently, scientists ruled-out God and the supernatural NOT because they asserted these things did not exist but because they were restricting "science" to those areas where the scientific method and human experiments would work. One cannot test God for the simple reason that He presumably exists outside the limits of the universe He presumably created and therefore humans have no tools and no techniques that could be applied to the task.
No, it' not evidence of anything; it's delusions and/or auditory hallucinations. Evidence isn't just random bullshit people make up, or delude themselves into believing.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
There exist people who worship the Sun.
By any reasonable definition of the word "god", the Sun is their god.
By any reasonable scientific standard, the Sun exists.
Therefore, at least one god exists. QED
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Witnesses are pretty clearly evidence. You don't want it to be, but you aren't thinking clearly.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Actually, historically, christians met at night which was illegal in the Roman Empire. Romans believed only nefarious groups met at night and so it was outlawed. The renunciation wasnâ(TM)t specifically about christ, rather they were expected to renounce their association with a group that was perceived as being, in our terms, criminal or terrorist oriented.
"Atheism" (or A-Theism, for clarity, for those who have never thought about it) is NOT "the absence of belief in the existence of God" but is rather the belief that no God exists. These are VERY different ideas. YOUR (incorrect) definition is more closely related to "Agnosticism".
Try again.
Atheists are not intellectually honest and tend to be simply people who are hostile toward the religious people in society. Agnostics are intellectually respectable, asserting that they do not personally believe there is a God but admitting they cannot prove that case.
the winning move is an mass nuke strike
There's a simple thought here that is prominent among thinkers but not easily digestible for most people:
Humans are just a step in the ongoing evolution, and will go the way of the Neanderthal sooner or later. AI or intelligence not based on biology, is the next step. Its main advantage is that it is so much easier for machine-based life to travel the cosmos. You can just power down during the thousand years between solar systems. That is, of course, a very short version of the story, but you get the idea.
Yes, AI will replace us. The primary question is whether it will happen in evolutionary speed, which means we wouldn't notice, or at Moore's Law speed, which means within a few generations?
It is cute when great minds cling to the idea that AI is a threat to humanity and we need to preserve the human species, but evolution is a force based on principles of nature and like gravity doesn't much care what you think of it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Number 7 - Thou shalt not commit adultery
That is double wrong. It is not number 7 and adultery is a mistranslation.
In German we say "break the marriage", which translates to english in having sex outside of the marriage.
No idea how "adultery" as "break the marriage" as in "having sex outside of the marriage" moved into the english translation.
However it actually means the literal meaning: don't break the oath of marriage.
You gave your wife/husband the oath to care for her/him for the rest of his/her life. Don't break that oath. It has nothing to do with sex outside of marriage. It would be completely idiotic to assume that in a society where men had many wives - and if you remember the "Sin of Onan" - were supposed to marry the widows of her deceased brothers, that the original wording was "adultery".
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
First it was aliens will kill us all. Then artificial intelligence. Then superhumans. Seriously, is there anything this spazz stated there is not complete lunacy? Had he been a healthy individual instead of a circus freak and the darling of freak-lovers who love basket cases, he'd have been laughed off the stage and lost all credibility long ago. But we're taught to cherish Joey Deacons because it makes us better as a society so there. I don't care for religion (another bunch of basket cases) and I don't believe in any god, but the rambling of a spazz are not "science" and those who worship at the altar of a freak are as deluded as the religious nuts they claim to be so different from.
except for the virgin girls, who will then be our sexual slaves.
No they wont. Because after having intercourse 5 consecutive days, or 4 weeks, depending on culture: they are your wives.
Make sure to get rid of them before that ... :P
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
it's just that they don't have any objective reason for living moral lives.
Actually we have, the oldest that spontaneously comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
From an atheistic worldview, it has to come down to personal preference.
My personal preference is pretty simple: I don't do to others what I don't want to do to me. Do I need a god to sign for this?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
As there has NEVER, EVER, been a single solitary piece of evidence EVER of any gods existence.... people who have believed in the delusion of a god have done a fantastically miserable job of even beginning to scratch the surface of proving him/her/it.
How do you know that? Are you a god who has a tape recording of every human ever living, and did you have enough time to watch all those tape recordings and do you have the expertise to distinguish all the "miracles" that happened to those people as "divine intervention" or "bad ass luck"?
Sorry, you are an unscientific idiot.
If you want to to argue about something use science, and not unproveble or undisproveble opinions.
You fucking freakenly can not know if there ever was evidence for God(s) and some conspiracy hid them, idiot.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You could use some positive affirmation therapy.
"I dunno, I lost friends for like 5 years due to "raid night"."
Given your cynical and antisocial rhetoric, I'm pretty sure it wasn't due to raid night.
This is not the way most of the general public uses it. Nor is it the way that it's used in philosophy. This seems to be something unique to a subset of internet nerds based of false etymologies.
witnesses are delusional, and group of like minded people can have the same delusion at the same time.
Indeed, those very laws of nature, the quantum fluctuations that could create matter out of nothingness, and therefore allegedly not need any God to have created it, may be none other than the voice of God, who himself spoke everything into existence out of nothing. The similarity between them, I believe, is too strikingly similar to ignore.
So, what spoke god into existence? Quantum shenanigans in the blt trench of the dolphin tubes?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
In what you might call spiritual terms, yes. Morality is largely a human construct.
If morality is a human construct, then it is arbitrary.
As a social species we need rules of conduct, but the nature of those rules has varied wildly in time and space.
Surely there are some rules you like and some you don't. If morality is arbitrary, on what do you base your objections to the rules you don't like?
Is slavery moral? Is beating children to death moral? Is stoning a moral thing to do? The bible seems to think so and quite a lot more to boot.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
What you say is all true, but it doesn't change the fact that witnesses are evidence.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Asimov was a bad sci-fi writer who knew nothing about computers and whose mediocre output has been long since obsoleted by reality to the point of being embarassing to even mention.
No I didn't.
A lot of Smart Adults with mature adult thinking can believe in God, but really focus more on the philosophy of their religion then just blindly following it figuring if I just follow these rules I will go to heaven.
Now if someone is an Atheist, following these rules will hold you back, and may seem akin to "Be good or Santa will not give you presents".
Vs. a more mature version of understanding the rules and the cultures of the time to gain a good understanding of them. Not to be a Suck Up to God, but understanding the reason and goal of such philosophy. Now an Atheist can just be a follower of the philosophy of the religion without the supernatural stuff.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The goal of every species is to evolve into the next better version.
Ur too trusting. It means u do whatever it takes to enrich yourself and if you wish, your future generations. No consequences if you die.
except for the virgin girls, who will then be our sexual slaves. No they wont. Because after having intercourse 5 consecutive days, or 4 weeks, depending on culture: they are your wives.
Make sure to get rid of them before that ... :P
Well, for all of the fun and games of biblical interpretation, we don't look upon the commands of the angry desert gawd as morally acceptable these days.
Most of us anyway. Some of us use the angry desert gawd's demands as a guidebook.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
No idea how "adultery" as "break the marriage" as in "having sex outside of the marriage" moved into the english translation.
That's because someone wanted it to say that.
I grew up in a Catholic Household with fundamentalist Christian relatives. Imagine the different truths I heard.
Everyone has an interpretation of everything. So you can go on about the inaccuracy of a translation, but don't worry, there are hundreds of others.
Pick one.
Then add the plethora of other religions that have found the one real truth as revealed by gawd to man.
Then praise him with great praise that you were lucky enough to be born into the one and only real religion, and the one real interpretation.
Or then again, figure out that man makes gawd in man's own image, and this gawd just so happens to hate all the things that particular society hates. A much simpler explanation. There have been hundreds and hundreds of gawds over the course of history. It's amazing that the one true gawd picked nomads in the middle eastern desert to reveal himself to as the one true gawd. A true miracle.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I tend to be pretty utilitarian. I'm an advocate of Lord Bentham's view; "The greatest good for the greatest number".
Stalin and Mao tried that a while back, it didn't go so well for the greatest number. With that attitude of moral relativism it becomes very easy to justify killing people that are standing in the way of your utopia, and such a violation of basic principles tends to quickly lead to a dystopian nightmare.
Stalin and Mao tried that a while back
No, they didn't. They tried the greatest good for them and their Party (and maybe not even their Party), a far cry from greatest number.
With that attitude of moral relativism it becomes very easy to justify killing people that are standing in the way of your utopia
First, neither Stalin nor Mao practiced moral relativism. They practiced their form of moral absolutism, with them/the Party being absolute authority on what is good and evil. They basically took the place of "God" in religions that believe that morals are absolute.
Second, moral absolutism doesn't perform any better in terms of killing. If anything, it's even easier to justify killing others when you believe that you have absolute morals (e.g God) on your side condoning your killing.
So I keep hearing warnings about these guys... 'Gattaca' or some such. How do I become one? Is there a number to call or...?
even e-cigarettes are cyberpunk
i recently heard of smuggling as-yet unreleased immunological therapies, which I think might be the most cyberpunk thing I've heard yet. That or the fitbit murder thing.
prod for the cuttle (with a U)
Evidence for a court of law is not the same as evidence for a scientific hypothesis.
In court, the jury decides if they believe the witnesses. In science, independent researchers must be able to replicate the experiment that produced the evidence (or build their own tool that allows them to observe the same evidence if it's in nature, e.g. a microscope, telescope, interferometer, etc.)
If you tried to publish your witness testimony in a legitimate peer review journal... the editors probably wouldn't even bother to reply to you, even if you replaced your claim of God with any natural thing like "the wind talked to me" or even "I saw a rainbow". Because what are you adding to human knowledge with that? Nothing.
we're almost there anyway. at least as far as megacorps owning everything.
Your advice is shit. The things I know are right, you say are wrong. The things you say are right, I call wrong. I regret nothing yet you'd claim a list of things I should. Rightness and Wrongness are constructs of the persons with the most power to enforce them.
The 42nd one.
Lets hack your fetus's DNA so you can have some movie star traits in your kid. They might turn into a monster but they'll look beautiful so it's ok right? (fun aside, they could have miserable health issues and have a short life with a miserable drawn out death.)
It's great to LEARN but irresponsible to build mission critical things based upon it. Yeah, we want pacemakers etc created with tons of hacks by irresponsible children with no skills or grasp of how it functions other than the basics. Student project; ok, but nothing more. yet.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
It's amazing that the one true gawd picked nomads in the middle eastern desert to reveal himself to as the one true gawd. A true miracle.
Is that not a little bit racist?
And at that time it was not a desert ...
As Egypt was on a relatively high standard of technology, if I was an alien looking for allies and craftsmen, I obviously had picked that area. North of "Canaan" was the Hittites empire, the only civilization capable of making iron and steel at that time (as far as we know). Egypt was a culture hub like San Francisco in our days. Picking a tribe from that area with strong internal bonds makes sense. After all they had a script ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
No, they got clean and they were suddenly free again on Thursdays.
What screams "Anti-social rhetoric"?
He he - there's no Steven Hawking, more like! =}
What screams "Anti-social rhetoric"?
An anti-social anonymous coward!