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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 "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded."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)
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.
It should be "said" or "wrote" not "says". The man's dead so we can safely assume past tense.
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.
...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.
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.
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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?
"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
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.
Medical care is sourced in empathy - a common trait in humans.
Many religions and ideas of God interpret the sick and disadvantage of being cursed by God as noted in the summary above. For example, the The Hindu's have their caste system and the Christians a notion of the "elect" and "reprobates".
...regardless of what he believes or not...he's separated from God for eternity...even Pascal believed it was better to be wrong than separated for an eternity...
nothing to see here - move along
Certainly no government on Earth would create Russian, Chinese or Iranian Supermen!
Just saying
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
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.
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.
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.
In his book Black Holes and Time Warps -- Einstein's Outrageous Legacy, Kip Thorne described a plausible time machine. It relied on exotic stuff (wormholes whose entry/exit points could be moved around) but the description holds up. Briefly, it works like this:
- take a wormhole whose ends can be moved around;
- move one end around with respect to the other, so that the local time of the moved end ages more slowly that the other end (per The Twin Paradox);
- and voilà, you have a time machine: go forward or backward in time depending on which direction you choose to pass through.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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?
Tell me about it. It takes me a whole year just to get round to the other side of the sun and back.
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.
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.
With God(s) thousands (millions?) of humans have been sacrificed over the millennia in various attempts to please various gods.
Ironically, up until recent times, most wars were the result of people fighting over who had the best god or, if they had the same god, the proper way to worship this god.
Without God there's less chance you'll be dragged out of your house and strapped to a stone altar to be mutilated.
But, since it's pretty obvious you're a typical theist, I'm not surprised you presented absolutely zero evidence for your statement.. I suppose that we're just supposed to accept your theory on... (wait for it)..... faith.
Grow the fuck up..
Chess programs have absolutely nothing to do with AI. Most chess programs are just brute force engines... The computer isn't "thinking" it just runs through millions of possible moves every second to arrive at a desired finish.
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.
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.
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.
Unless you're white, then you're expected to bear the burden of every atrocity your ancestors may or may not have been involved in.
I think most people would be satisfied if we just dealt with the atrocities being committed here and now. If you're not involved in them, I don't think you have anything to be concerned about. Don't let some overheated activist tell you how to feel about yourself. You only hear more about white people today because the pendulum is swinging back.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
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.. ;-)
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.
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.
So, which of the thousands of gods will you put your wager on?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
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.
even Pascal believed it was better to be wrong than separated for an eternity...
Except Pascal was both, because he ended up choosing a false god instead of the one true god, Cronus. Oops, looks like his little wager just fell to pieces.
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.
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Superhumans will be hammy overactors with bad wigs.
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.
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.
Yet America voted in a President who discounts the opinion of scientists because he thinks they have a political agenda. And in the UK a leading proponent of Brexit advises "who needs experts" and the UK duly votes to leave against the advice of experts. People are keenly interested in the views of people they regard as leaders. Stephen Hawking was a brilliant thinker and I for one am interested in his conclusions.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Without God there's less chance you'll be dragged out of your house and strapped to a stone altar to be mutilated.
But there's an increased chance to be dragged out of your house and stood up next to a wall to be shot for wrong thinking.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
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
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.
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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.
"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.
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Ironically, up until recent times, most wars were the result of people fighting over who had the best god or, if they had the same god, the proper way to worship this god.
Religion is a convenient excuse that can be given to the general population in order to get support for starting a war, but most wars are the result of one or both of two things: desire for power/control and resources.
that's right - only god is permanent...
nothing to see here - move along
that was not his wager...read history then get back to me...
nothing to see here - move along
Think I'm going to trust Hawking's word on this over yours.
Or he believes in nothing at all.
Unless there is reincarnation then who knows what he would be believing currently.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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...
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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.
...regardless of what he believes or not...he's separated from God for eternity...even Pascal believed it was better to be wrong than separated for an eternity...
That's only true if your god exists. Seeing as how your god is one of thousands, how sure are you that you're believing in the correct one?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
What do you mean, my premise? It was Kip Thorne's idea. If you think it's wrong, take it up with him.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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'.
Entropy is an idea which correlates with experiments, so is relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. No experiment has been done which rules out time travel (or reversing entropy for that matter,) we can only even rule anything out within extremely precise contexts, outside those contexts there are no known rules. Moreover, relativity clearly predicts the ability to time travel (in fact, we know how to do all the calculations for it from ergospheres around rotating black holes right now - the only real question for engineering that is making such a thing traversible without killing the traveller.)
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.
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.
He also ended up living his brief moment devoted to a false idea, which, given this is all there is, was an infinite tragedy.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
...regardless of what he believes or not...he's separated from God for eternity...even Pascal believed it was better to be wrong than separated for an eternity...
Pacal's wager is game theory... plain and simple. But bad game theory as he didn't fill in the whole decision/reward matrix. For example, perhaps those that didn't believe in fairy tales and anthropomophic gods and did good without the explicity reward promist are those that will be truly rewarded in the end. Where does that put you?
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
You're missing the nuance of the argument. Hawking has made it clear elsewhere that the real issue, as I state elsewhere, isn't whether God exists or not, but rather what is the point of invoking God at all? In one of his books of essays, he makes it pretty clear that judging by how the universe works, God would have been heavily constrained in what the starting parameters would even be. That's one of the weakest aspects of the Strong Anthropic Principle as used as a justification for God (ie. if the starting conditions weren't JUST right, there wouldn't be a Universe capable of supporting life, so therefore God!). If it is true, then God Himself is limited by a set of mathematical principles that mean only certain types of Universes within a fairly narrow grouping of all the possible universes will permit complex structures to form. That being the case, claiming God created the Universe has very little utility at all, and then you're faced with asking the question whether such an entity, however envisioned (the sort of distant and unpersonified Prime Mover by the Deists or the much more involved God of the Judeao-Christian religions), is even necessary? In other words, what particular problem is solved by invoking God, that doesn't in fact just push the question back?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
I think it comes from the plane that all righteous flies and unrighteous spiders (those not worthy of Spider Valhalla go to); The Infinite Turd.
This space unintentionally left blank.
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.
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.
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.
Atheism is as faith-based as religion is.
Neither is supported by science.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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.
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.
If there is a God, then who created that God?
Easy peasy... Evil ->> That which harms human flourishing!
I never asserted any such thing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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!
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.
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.
Good old Pascal's Wager, an act of craven cowardice and an insult to God Almighty. Pascal's Wager is predicated on God being so stupid that He can't tell you're going through the motions out of fear and that you don't actually have faith. I'm sorry, but if God does exist, I'm not going to stand in front of him as a liar and insult Him to His face. And as for "what will you say to God?", there is nothing I can say, no case to plead, nothing to explain because God knows all. He (if He exists) knows why I didn't believe in Him. I will either burn or not, but I will do it with a clean conscience.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Not just humans. Both mammals and avians have shown empathy.
Oh bullshit. Killing the nonbeliever has been modus operandi of religion for millennia. FYI: nonbeliever = wrong thinking.
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
I don't believe just in case for the same reason you don't put garlic over your doorway to keep vampires out
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Go learn to have an OBE.
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.
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
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.
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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
God doesn't exist... but his mythology gets a bad rap because of arrogant people like you. In your mythology, "god" would be very upset at you for telling him what he must do in regards to Mr Hawkins. Tell me,why do you hate God so much?
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
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.
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.
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?
Deism merely strips God of any human attributes. It doesn't really make God's existence any more probable.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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).
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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.
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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."
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.
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
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
Having killer robots controlled by evil people is very likely worse that them going "rogue".
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Another Coward demonstrating that someone can have neither.
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
There is a bit of truth to that statement, no doubt. But when you can use religion to whip the mob into a frenzy....
Nevertheless, the idea that religion is the reason we have medical care is moronic at best. Religion, generally, has blamed various afflictions on demons or angry gods. If a demon is the reason you have the sniffles, what the fuck would be the point of attempting to treat them with medicine? Better to go get a really big knife and let the demon out... Problem solved..
It would be so much better if you actually read something that he said or wrote than imagine what you think it might be from reading a Slashdot summary.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
But there's an increased chance to be dragged out of your house and stood up next to a wall to be shot for wrong thinking.
Well... 6 of this, half a dozen of that....
Faith is a kind of binary variable: you either have faith, or you have not.
There are plenty of religions, that means the practitioners have faith.
And there is one exception: Atheism. That means the people don't practice anything, and: have no faith.
Atheism is as faith-based as religion is.
So no: Atheism is not faith based. It is the absence of faith. You could as well say, a vacuum is based on gases as in an atmosphere just like all atmospheres are based on gases. Hint: there is no gas in a vacuum. And there is no faith in atheism.
And finally you might grasp it: Atheism is not a religion, hence it has nothing to do with faith anyway.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I was going to go with Thor.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Nevertheless, the idea that religion is the reason we have medical care is moronic at best. Religion, generally, has blamed various afflictions on demons or angry gods. If a demon is the reason you have the sniffles, what the fuck would be the point of attempting to treat them with medicine? Better to go get a really big knife and let the demon out... Problem solved..
One could argue that religion could be a reason we have medical care if your religion promotes the value of human life. I'm not stating definitively that this is how medical science came about, I'm only pointing out that it isn't logically inconsistent.
The Torah has an entire chapter about diagnosing and quarantining skin disease (usually translated as leprosy, but clearly not the disease that's called leprosy now), and even a section about some kind of mold infestation in a home. So clearly there was a desire to have working medical treatments, but obviously it was quite limited 3,000 years ago.
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.
Science is not needed to disprove the existence of god. Logic suffices for that task.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
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."
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
According to Christian/Jewish Mythology, you don't have to believe in god.
You only are required:
a) to worship him
b) not to worship any other god (pretty clear indication that HE is not the only one)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Ironically, from theology came medical care.
Ironically, a famous recent saint, the so-called "Mother Theresa" was strong on theology and much less so in medical care and her houses of the dying were exactly that and nothing else. A few documentaries unveiled that people in there didn't even get basic care. Didn't stop the woman from posing with the stars and gathering millions (much of which nobody has any idea of where it went).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
- and voilÃ, you have a time machine: go forward or backward in time depending on which direction you choose to pass through. ... good luck to get to the space "in time" where you wanted to be. And you as well move in time just ordinarily as the traversal through the WH puts you under the same changes of space time curvation like traveling with other means.
You haven't.
You have a time/space machine. And while passing through it you move in space
A time machine strictly speaking means: I want to be in London 1800 to the sylvester party. The solar system and hence earth and hence London was somewhere else at that time. Good luck to find a force free travel path through space time from my current location in the Universe to that _location_
It is not the time travel that is the problem, that is probably super easy: but covering the 0.5 light years the earth has traveled in the mean time ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Oh bullshit. Killing the nonbeliever has been modus operandi of religion for millennia. FYI: nonbeliever = wrong thinking.
Two millennia.
For all what we know: the Christians started it.
Before that a greek trader, praying and offering to Poseidon to have a safe passage to Carthago, would simply ask there: and what is your god of the seas? The answer would perhaps be Melkart, and so he would sacrifice to Melkart for a safe passage home. It is as simple as that.
Before Christianity, wars on other religions were extremely rare. Usually Religion equals Culture/Nation, as e.g. still in our days in case of the Jews. So if you wanted to kill the Carthagers/Phoenicians, it was not a war on their religion, that would have been pointless.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, that again?
The Pascal wager is logically inconsistent. That's not only my opinion either. In the premise of the argument he says "we do not know if god exists or not" but in the body of the argument he uses "a priori" a feature of god - that he likes believers. How do you know that considering the premise?
So, the argument is in fact "If god exists and he is as described by chistianity then you are better off as a believer". Well, duh!
Not many people think, you know! Not really think. They just think they do. (old Nawi, the Nation, Southern Pelagic Ocean; circa 19th century).
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."
Yet America voted in a President who discounts the opinion of scientists because he thinks they have a political agenda. And in the UK a leading proponent of Brexit advises "who needs experts" and the UK duly votes to leave against the advice of experts. People are keenly interested in the views of people they regard as leaders. Stephen Hawking was a brilliant thinker and I for one am interested in his conclusions.
The whole AI stance seems like a Pauling's Vitamin C moment for Hawking.
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.
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.
So, you are Islamic?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Ahh, the old "do the research" argument. Can't fail that one.
I bow before your brilliance. I am sure Pascal would be proud.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I have never been convinced that the wager was Pascal's reason for believing. That it was just a thought experiment, and if it ensnared those with no ability to think for themselves, so be it.
I can't believe that he thinks you can just "decide to believe" in anything, he was smarter than that. I don't believe "fake it till you make it" exists; at least not for rather profound things like believing in a deity.
I have no proof of this, but I am not a philosopher or a historian.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
It is my understanding that you are correct.
But, holy fuck dude; that is some people are actually doing that. What a way to torture one's self.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
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.
The 42nd one.
Thorne described a plausible time machine. It relied on exotic stuff (wormholes whose entry/exit points could be moved around) but the description holds up. Briefly, it works like this:
- take a wormhole whose ends can be moved around;
- move one end around with respect to the other, so that the local time of the moved end ages more slowly that the other end (per The Twin Paradox);
- and voilÃ, you have a time machine: go forward or backward in time depending on which direction you choose to pass through.
Assume you could create wormholes and do all of that shit you are still taking an entirely locally subluminal path thru the wormhole. There is no twin paradox or any reference frame where you are observed to be travelling backward in time.
Misunderstanding arises from people doing math on outcomes... x appears at y after interval z in frame c. Reality doesn't work this way. It matters HOW you ended up where you are in space and time not the fact you are there.
No, he is quite correct in his statement. We do not know if time travel is possible, there is no physical law that we know of that prevents it.
Information necessary to convert the corpse of Stephen Hawking back into a living person does not exist.
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"?
I didn't appeal to anything. Said I would "trust" his word over yours because I trust that he would have done his diligence when saying it hasn't been proven impossible. Lack of observable phenomena is not the same as proof. How long did it take to observe the curvature of space-time?
Time-travel is highly unlikely based on what we know but that is not the same as proven impossible.