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Can Computers Pray?
GreyyGuy writes "Found an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education linked on Wired about an artist who made a prayer circle of computers that recite prayers to one another...." Reminiscent of an old Arthur C. Clarke short story, The Nine Billion Names of God, in which a group of Tibetan monks who believe the purpose of the universe is to name God in all possible ways - and buy a computer to speed up the process. The British techs who install the machine are skeptical, but when the program finishes its run they look up at the sky - and see the stars going out, one by one.
I believe that the hex predates christianity, as does tha ankh (the cross is remarkably similar to this BTW) Christians have co-opted several pre-sexisting Pagan holidays.
Jesus was definately NOT born in the winter, but it just so happens that the winter solstice is on Dec 21. All Saints Day is the day AFTER holloween. Sabbats were subverted by Christians, Easter, All Saints Day and Christmas are the most blatent.
People refused to stop celebrating pagan holidays after the rise of Christianity in Europe. In order to Christianize those holidays their meanings were twisted.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
That thought scares me a little bit. Why must any intelligent entity (if and when computers do develop AI) be evangelized? Why can't intelligent entities make their own spiritual decisions?
Ignore Alien Orders
Whether you draw it on the ground or see it in your mind as long as you belive in the symbolism it has the same effect.
0 == 0
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -- A.E.
>>0 == 0
What that effect is doesn't really matter now does it?
Believeing something strongly enough can make it be reality. Ask any doctor, haveing a positive outlook is a VERY BIG part of getting well when you're very sick.
Not that there is necessarily anything supernatural at play, but perhaps still beyond what modern science is capable of explaining.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
You assume that you must provide the proof which is an invalid assumption.
You assume your consciousness is an instantaneous process without giving proof.
You assume the cosmos works according to a set of mathematical consistent laws. For instance you assume that proof by contradiction is valid. You give no proof of this. If instead the cosmos is self inconsistent then anything including incorrect statements can be proven (though I cannot prove this).
No one to my knowledge has ever proved anything about the real world and I don't expect anyone ever will.
The closest I can come to a proof is.
"I believe God is this post. Hence God exists. Thus science cannot disprove its existence as that would be a contradiction."
I fuck Jesus UP THE ASS. And christian stuck up moderators as well.
Was that directed at me? Because I have no faith or beliefs in prayer, personally.
prayer done mechanically is NOT prayer! prayer is about life appealing to life. when prayer is done as a routine, as something mechanically, it is no longer prayer. when people just go spewing off words without imbuing them with feeling and meaning in a living way, then it ceases to be prayer. having a bunch of computers "pray" is nothing more than setting up a bunch of tape recorders playing back to nothing. just because the same sounds are coming out of the speakers doesn't mean anything. if you're on a phone, and you're listening to someone, or you're listening to a recording of a taped phone conversation -- its NOT the same thing. one is live, and one is just a dead recording. 2pesos. http://home.earthlink.net/~johnrpenner/
Thanks for the hint!
iSKUNK!
that catholics are fucking stupid idiots, and I pee on them on a regular basis.
He proves that you can't prove the non-existance
of God, by saying that for you to prove it, you
must at least be able to prove that yourself,
and the world, existed 5 minutes ago.
You can't do that. Because, everything _could_
hva just been created, complete with your memory,
All of our science and all of our knowledge, _could_ have been created with the world.
Besides, this whole world could just be an illusion, and all our technical data with it.
In reality we are all just sitting right besides
God, in heaven, we just don't know it.
You can never prove me wrong with science, because
I could just say: "prove to me that all your work,
science and view of life is not an illusion. Heck.. prove to me that YOU exist".
Of course, this isn't possible.
Now.. I don't believe in either God or the world
as an illusion, but I can't prove my view, and neither can you.
No, but you obviosly have faith in the power of modern medicine and science.
This life is a test; it is only a test. If it were a real life, you would receive instructions on where to go and what
I dunno... that's cool (I guess) but what's the use of computers reciting prayers? I believe that when you pray it is more of an inside feeling, that goes beyond just the realm of conciousness. I am one of those who doesn't go to church much but loves God because I think that praying in a group sort of looks like you're trying to impress someone, like the hyppocrits in the bible who prayed and scraped on the ground before God around people to get money but didn't really feel that way. Computers reciting prayer? To what use, even by the churh? What, is the priest gonna be replaced by a computer? Oh yeah THAT'S gonna be a hit with the Big Guy.
If you think you know what the hell is really going on you're probably full of shit.
If you think you know what the hell is really going on you're probably full of shit.
jdube is who I am.
Like I said, I could be wrong, and these are just my vague ideas. They have absolutely no scientific basis whatsoever. There is no possible way I could test with any certainty that any event happened because I willed it. I could devise a scientific test, but I think it would still be inaccurate -- I may not be able to get into the right mindset, etc -- I am fairly certain that I couldn't do this under pressure. If I had 10 angry /.ers in lab coats standing around me waiting for me to "will" something, I am sure I would not be able to do it -- simply because their "counter-will" would be too strong.
Also, you caught an obvious flaw in the wording of my original post -- I don't see it as "fact" that I have willed some things around. I just think that some highly improbable things have happened partially because I was in the right mindset to "make it happen". This is a distinct mindset, and when I am in it, I know I am in it, and I always seem to have "good luck" in what I am trying to do. That's the only way I correlate the "good luck" and the mindset. Sometimes I do things so unlikely (like rolling 10 dice and all of them coming up "1") that I freak myself out and start laughing uncontrollably, and the mindset goes away. It comes and goes. I've also won blackjack games (not played for money, just fairly meaningless "chips") using almost no logic -- only being in this mindset and doing what my intuition told me to do. So, anyway, I'm not ready to go to the casinos yet. =) In fact I would probably be pretty distracted if I was in a place like a casino, combined with the fact that I would be risking money -- and I don't think I could hold that mindset for very long, if at all.
Come to think of it, when I have been in mindsets where I am almost certain I have "willed" reality around, it wasn't in a prayer like manner at all. But, whatever, I think thoughts could be more powerful than they seem; that was really the only reason I started this thread. I just wish I had more sources to back me up, now that I'm being challenged left and right. (They exist; trust me!) =)
is ordinateur, which originally means 'he who organizes everything', IOW god.
Um, this was a GOOD study that showed that prayer does work. The above poster is a damned anti-Christian zealot who will do something, anything, to attempt to discredit it. Well, let me fill you in on something: prayer does work! This post was a blatant and sickening attack on Christianity, and whoever moderated it up: I will be praying for you. Let's hope that God is as forgiving as I am.
..you wouldn't get there.
You just can't prove that any of our physical
laws are omnipresent. What if these physical
laws only apply to our concious world, but in
reality it is all an illusion.
You provide a scientific explanation to conciousness, but anyone can just as easily say
that for you to prove to me that the proof is valid, you must first prove to me that you even
exist. Neither is possible.
As the year 2000AD has significance only as being 2000 years after [some approximation of (the start of 1bc to be exact)] the birth of Jssus Christ, someone could only be affected by y2k if they believe in Jesus (IE are christian) (on the proviso that they think logically...) so we have the following chain of deduction.
1) If something thinks only logically and is affected by the year 2000, it must be Christian.
2) Computers think only logically.
3) Computers are affected by y2k.
Hence, computers are Christian, and hence pray!
(This conclusion follows regardless of whether Christianity is correct or not).
We can also show that (for preventing unwanted pregnancies), abstenence works better when combined with the pill... noone (that I have heard of) has successfully abstained while on the pill and become pregnant. With abstenence alone however...
Disclaimer (1): This post is tongue-in-cheak! So don't flame about Christians not seeing any reason from what you read in this post!
Disclaimer (2): I'm not bagging out Christianity in this post... I happen to be one who has [a very strange] sense of humour.
I have little faith in modern medicine. I doubt that a cheap cure for Cancer or Osteoperosis or heart disease will be devised any time soon. (That's one reason I took matters into my own hands and became a vegetarian.) I don't have faith in the modern medical industry any more than I have faith in prayer.
Science, on the other hand, I don't have to nessecarily have faith in, but I know that it tends to work well sometimes. For example, if I fall off of a 10-story building, I can calculate without too much uncertainty what my velocity will be right before I hit the pavement. I would say that I have more faith in science (that has been proven to work well) than I have faith in prayer. All the will and prayers I can muster will not stop my bones from breaking from that impact.
Hey now, I didn't call Catholics stupid. I didn't make fun of Catholics. No one answered my question, either. (I was kind of disappointed that I got moderated up as "Funny" rather than "Insightful" or something) =) Are you a Catholic who attends church regularly? If so, what percentage of your church, would you guess, has more than a mindless faith?
What are the moral implications of forcing "artificially intelligent" computers to believe (by hardcoding) that things are true (such as prayer being effective) which are contrary to the simple logic and empirical observation upon their ability to learn is based?
Isn't this creating computers capable of irrational (and unpredictable) behaviour due to the fact that they "know better" than to trust verifiable information?
and they solemnly say:
Father Torvalds, who art on the 'Net,
hallowed be thy named;
thy Penguin come;
thy will be done,
at home as it is on the LAN.
Give us this day our daily kernel;
and protect us from coredumps
as we protect others from GPF's;
and lead us not into Windows,
but deliver us from Microsoft;
for Linux is the power and the stability forever,
Amen.
This sounds a little farfetched for today's neural nets. My guess is that this was either a sci-fi story, or urban legend.
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Now the Gates was more subtil than any beast of the field which Unix had made ...
I don't see how my post could be considered "bigoted" until the "funny" label is slapped on it, really. "Funny" is in the eye of the beholder. My post was asking a valid question, and some people obviously thought it was funny, and hey, that's okay!
No.
What is prayer, anyway?
Well, many books could (and have) been written on this topic, but it's actually very simple: Prayer is communication. You can see this reflected in the English language itself, although it's become archaic: "prithee" is a contraction of "I pray thee."
Now, since we don't normally use the word "pray" anymore when we make requests of each other, "prayer" has come to have a slightly more restricted meaning: Prayer is communication with the Divine.
Well, what does communication require? This is really not that complicated, either. Communication requires two persons who are, well, communicating. So the question "Can computers pray?" really breaks down into two questions (as has already been noted): (1) Does God exist? and (2) Can a computer have personhood?
Question #1 is clearly a religious question, which has been around for centuries, and the mere fact of using computers to pose the question is not particularly interesting.
Question #2 is also not a novel one. Certainly, iMacs don't qualify as even remotely passing any sort of Turing test yet. And the question of personhood and strong AI is already a subject of vigorous debate, here on Slashdot and elsewhere.
Since iMacs are pretty clearly not sentient, the question of whether they are "praying" is simple: NOT! This is exactly the same as setting up a tape player on endless loop, and has exactly the same (non-)implications.
But let's look at this for what it really is: a work of art. Ms. Skeddle is apparantly some sort of artist, and "CyberRosary" is part of an art exhibit. Art is also about communication. What is Skeddle trying to communicate?
Well, based on her interview comments, her point is simple: "Catholic spirituality is empty noise, and consists of people robotically repeating words they don't understand."
Skeddle is a clever artist -- if she simply came out and said that in such a blunt fashion, it wouldn't be news -- it would simply be one more person bitter about a church, and attacking it. But since she uses computers, and tries to pose her "question" in the form of the future of spirituality and technology, she's managed to make her simple rant against the Catholic Church into "News for Nerds."
She's taking very little artistic risk here, as well, as she's "playing to the audience," given the anti-religious, anti-Christian, and especialy anti-Catholic bias of much of both the artistic world (where it's practically considered obligatory to at least tweak Christianity to be considered a "serious" artist) and of the computer world (where "creed-holding Christians are rare", according to the Jargon File).
...is that there really is no way to test the hypothesis that others praying for the patient (without the patient's knowledge) really helps. So you assign some people to pray for some patients but not others. Big deal. There are too many uncontrolled factors at play here:
1) How do you know those "assigned" are heartfelt in their prayers?
2) How do you know those assigned aren't praying for others too?
3) How do you deal with the fact that the patient's friends and family are probably praying for them, yet (perhaps atheist) relatives of other patients may or may not be?
With these and similar complications, it's rather difficult to isolate the effects of prayer (if any) on the patient since we don't know who may be praying for them.
Maybe prayers do help. Maybe they don't. I just don't see us being able to determine this based on studies such as the one you cite, especially since there's really no way to measure prayer.
Actually I interpret the comment as saying prayer = superstitious nonsense, computers praying = superstitious nonsense.
It *is* possible to prove something doesn't exist. Anybody familiar with the prove that sqrt(2) cannot exist as a rational number? I'll reproduce it here (cuz it's cool...)
Cool proof? (did i get it right?)
The principle behind it is that, if you have a consistent system, then to prove something cannot exist you just show 2 observations that can't both be true (in this case A/B is both reduced and not reduced).
Normally, this only works well in mathematics. We can't be truly certain of everything science tells us (we can be pretty sure, but not 100%).
However, if you are a religious person, you may accept the Bible as 100% truth. If so, to disprove the existance of God, you only need to find two statements about him in the Bible that cannot both be true.
I know there are truckloads of contradictions in the Bible, but I don't know if any deal with the nature of God. If one exists, the only reasonable conclusions are that either God doesn't exist, the Bible is false, or the rules of logic no longer apply.
If God doesn't exist, that's what we were seeking to show all along.
If the Bible is false, that takes a big chunk out of the basis for God's existance anyway.
The last conclusion I've heard from several slippery fundamentalists regarding God's essence. If it's true, then we're all screwed.
I strongly believe that computers praying have exactly the same effect as humans praying.
If Androids can dream of Electric Sheep, well then anything's possible. What good will it do them though?
I agree 100%. Praying is not about reciting words or just venting. It is about recieving somehting great from God. It is a very personal and exiting time when I sit down to talk to my Lord. I know it is hard for a non-believer to understand but if you open your heart and offer it to God, you will feel something that a computer can never give you.
Perhaps. There are more than a few problems with this idea.
Firstly there is the fact that nobody actually has much of an idea of how the brain works to produce the characteristics such as memory, (self) conciousness etc, that it does from the soggy substrate that it is. Simply having a neural net node for each neuron is worthless if you don't know how to connect them together. As someone (on comp.ai I think) once said "I have a computer capable of simulating every neuron in the brain of a fruit fly. If someone can tell me how the neurons in the brain of a fruit fly work, I'll simulate them." Needless to say nobody did, because nobody knows.
There are a lot of fundamental things about the workings of the mind and brain that congnitive science simply hasn't worked out yet. It is entirely possible that they will not be able to work them out at all. Consider: The more you know, the more (and more complex) the neural interconnections in your brain get, it is conceivable that the human brain will be simply too complex for a human brain to comprehend.
That said, I don't see that AI is an impossibility, simply that basing AI on human like brains and neural patterns is probably not the best way of going about it. Sadly I don't have any stunningly better ideas off the top of my head
Silver
They mentioned that "now computers are operating on the same spiritual level as some Catholics". I thought this was pretty interesting -- I wonder what percentage of Catholics have more than a mindless faith in their religion?
Just wondering if there is a copy of the Arthur C. Clarke story online anywhere. Its one of the few works of the Master that I have not yet read.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
After all the programming I've done, and all the hassles I've had in getting the damn things to do even half of what I want them to do, I can say without reservation that computers do not revere us as Gods.
They sure make me wanna use the Stark Fist of Removal© on 'em sometimes.
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
1.Thou shalt run lint frequently and study its pronouncements with care, for verily its
perception and judgement oft exceed thine.
2.Thou shalt not follow the NULL pointer, for chaos and madness await thee at its end.
3.Thou shalt cast all function arguments to the expected type if they are not of that
type already, even when thou art convinced that this is unnecessary, lest they take
cruel vengeance upon thee when thou least expect it.
4.If thy header files fail to declare the return types of thy library functions, thou shalt
declare them thyself with the most meticulous care, lest grievous harm befall thy
program.
5.Thou shalt check the array bounds of all strings (indeed, all arrays), for surely where
thou typest `'foo'' someone someday shall type ``supercalifragilisticexpialidocious''.
6.If a function be advertised to return an error code in the event of difficulties, thou
shalt check for that code, yea, even though the checks triple the size of thy code and
produce aches in thy typing fingers, for if thou thinkest ``it cannot happen to me'',
the gods shall surely punish thee for thy arrogance.
7.Thou shalt study thy libraries and strive not to re-invent them without cause, that
thy code may be short and readable and thy days pleasant and productive.
8.Thou shalt make thy program's purpose and structure clear to thy fellow man by
using the One True Brace Style, even if thou likest it not, for thy creativity is better
used in solving problems than in creating beautiful new impediments to
understanding.
9.Thy external identifiers shall be unique in the first six characters, though this harsh
discipline be irksome and the years of its necessity stretch before thee seemingly
without end, lest thou tear thy hair out and go mad on that fateful day when thou
desirest to make thy program run on an old system.
10.Thou shalt foreswear, renounce, and abjure the vile heresy which claimeth that ``All
the world's a VAX'', and have no commerce with the benighted heathens who cling to
this barbarous belief, that the days of thy program may be long even though the
days of thy current machine be short.
there are two kinds of people in this world - those who divide people into two groups and those who don't
This may be slightly off-topic, but it's something that I feel pretty deeply about, and I want to mention it.
/. article?).
For most of my life I've been an atheist. I was a mathematics major, now I'm in engineering graduate school, and somehow the concept of God as used by the established religions was something that I just couldn't reconcile with the lack of scientific proof (and even proof to the contrary, such as evolution).
I suspect that many of you out there feel the same way. But please please please let me suggest you read some of Joseph Campbell's work (The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers is an excellent place to start). Campbell's views on what religion really is, and who God really is have pretty much changed my life. I can now call myself a spiritual person, and yet I didn't need to make any leaps of faith or throw out any of my more scientific views.
In fact (maybe as a bonus to many of you out there who actively dislike organized religion), Campbell actually likes to point out why many religion's have the right ideas, but they try and concretize them, and they lose their meaning.
I wish I could communicate my ideas better, and this is neither the time or the place to get into a long discussion of this (maybe another
Just read some Joseph Campbell.
LL
"If you are falling, dive." -Joseph Campbell
This disply of CyberRosary brings up an interesting point - How close can computers simulate the human brain and all of its associated nuances? Would neural networks be created one day where each node represents one specific neuron? This might be one of the only ways where "spirtuality" and "emotion" could be achieved by a machine.
Also, I believe that her phrase "this CyberRosary has chieved the level of spirtuality as the catholic children" to be a gross simplification of the process of spirtuality.
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The British techs who install the machine are skeptical, but when the program finishes its run they look up at the sky - and see the stars going out, one by one.
Now that's really an excellent piece of literature. Just last week or so I had an in-depth discussion about the very same Clarke story with my father (a serious biblio-freek with a huge library of his own, including a pretty complete take on classic sfi-fi). We came to a conclusion that there is some deep philosophy in those words, indeed.
Ok, this was off-topic, but I just had to add a note because of the deja-vu feeling I got from Roblimo's comment.
______________
______________
OTTERS RULE.
On a side note, I shall be hooking up 15 SGI Crays together to play the name game against each other. "Anna anna bofanna bananafanna fofanna..."
Agreed -- that belongs up there, +5 or so.
Religion is a way to cheat at sprituality knowing you'll never have any substance but everyone else will think you do.
OTOH, religion is the (practical) exercise of spirituality/faith. Religion without spirituality is meaningless; spirituality without religion is worthless.
I suspect you mean "organized religion", though. In which case, yes, it's one of the ways to do that. There are many others -- but none of them are bad in their own right. They're only bad when used to cheat.
-Billy
You ought to know better than that by now....
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
In fact her work seems to be prodding people to reflect on this kind of religious practice, "she hopes to inspire visitors to think about their own beliefs". Prayer as recitation or supplication or petitionary is only one small aspect of it.
Do you ever reach find some place without distractions -- a park or your backyard, a place where you are relaxed, comfortable, and restive but not sleepy, and then simply turn your attention to whatever is nice, and let your thoughts drift in and out, neither chasing them or pushing them away? Computers can't do that (and probably never will), but humans can, and that's the realization to take from Skeddle's work.
I see two possibilities here.
1) You believe that humans didn't come up with religion on their own, that they were given it by someone else. Presumably whatever divine being exists out there. Yet you claim that they got it wrong, and that doesn't seem to fit.
2) You don't believe in any divine being. Either that or he/she exists, but didn't tell us. In that case, humans really did figure it all out on their own. Why would humans fail but computers succeed?
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
'll get moderated down by politically correct bigots from
Utah.
Excuse me? There's somebody making bigoted statements here, and he happens to be you.
On a somewhat related note: several years ago I wrote a small virtual alter for some of my pagan friends who were still in the broom closet.
The idea being that if your religion could in some way get you into trouble (with parents, house cleaners, ultra-religious conservative neighbors, etc.,) it's alot easier to hide you implements/icons on the computer rather than having physical ones.
This actually sparked some debate amoung the coven appearantly, but the majority seemed to think that things which are basically symbolic anyhow can have just as much power on-screen as in-the-hand. Somehow, though, I think it will still be a few years before any christian denominations have an online eucharist....
Can you provide examples of these "truckloads" of contradictions in the Bible?
Complete nonsense, you can buy 2 real computers for the price of one imac.
top. Not that I haven't enjoyed said silliness, I just think this one should be up at the top.
... tools... (siglim 120 chars)" Like cars... to the office no more no less.
As for the Anti-religious nature of most techies these days. So what? Religion is a way to cheat at sprituality knowing you'll never have any substance but everyone else will think you do.
"Computers should be
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Now the Gates was more subtil than any beast of the field which Unix had made
Muwahahahahaa! Reminds me of this!
======
"Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
That said, I try to tolerate atheists as much as I tolerate other religions. Religious intolerance is a Bad Thing as far as I am concerned, and thus I guess I shouldn't write what I just wrote, but I'm not perfect.
If Q is God, I think I'd rather die before he makes contact.
When it was presented on a congress for medical research, these faith healers were puzzled that almost the entire audience burst out in laughter, thinking it was intended as a joke.
In most of the rest of the world, even in Iran, science and religion are seperated to a large degree. I've heard a religious bilogist describe it as "I'm a catholic on sunday, a scientist the rest of the week"
Only in america some christians seem to want to mix science and religion, and apply the scientific methods to their religious beliefs. In my view this is as stupid and pointless as sacrificing a sample on the altar of the Shimadzu spectrograph to the spirit of enzyme kinetics.
-----
Hehe, that would sure make 'user' get up and change his pants.
==============================
Fran Frisina (franf@hhs.net)
Yes, you can make money on the web!
http://www.zero-productions.com/money
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
90% must have been sinners
-----
I think another reply may have covered this, but here's a tidbit from a Critical Reasoning course that Cal State schools require all students to take-quite a good thing actually.
Requiring someone to prove that something does not exist is a logical fallacy, typically called "the burden of proof fallacy". This means that it is faulty resoning to state that your conclusions are valid becuase the cannot be disproved.
If your praying has as much effect on me as it did on the patients in the study, I guess I'm screwed, neh?
.02
LOL.
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
Science will not prove that God doesn't exist, but it will prove that God is irrelevant.
www.poak.net
anyway... I seriously doubt you can alter reality and probabilities by just thinking hard about it. Unless, of course, you are boiling water, because everyone knows water doesn't boil if you stare at it.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
But the validity of the senses is axiomatic. Any attempt to argue that one cannot trust one's senses is self-contradictory, since all of our knowledge comes from our senses, and so without them, you know nothing and nothing you say can be trusted.
How can we trust our senses? The best one can say is that our senses are consistent. If we see an object and touch it, the two senses are consistent. But there are many well known illusions, optical illusions being the most obvious, which show our senses to be self contradictory. Therefore we can't trust our senses completely.
In a more formal sense, assume that senses only show us an objective reality. Then our senses tell us that we can induce inconsistent sensations by activating certain parts of the human brain with electrical signals. This is a contradiction, therefore our assumption was false. Senses do not always represent an objective reality.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
It's standard convention -- as well as just plain common sense and kindness -- to put a "SPOILER ALERT" somewhere in front of said spoiler. I recognize that Roblimo was just tossing off an interesting tangential thought, and perhaps did not thinnk of it as a spoiler, but it was nevertheless. Please be mroe careful in the future.
On a somewhat related note, the guy who had the site about lightsabres (linked a day ago or so on /.) had the spoilers in a font color the same as the background, and directed you to highlight if and only if you wanted the spoilers. Not a bad idea for any of us who have that problem with our personal sites.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
Faith in religion:
- Discoveries, factfinding are based on unique revelations, not repeatable. A certain knowledge was apparently revealed once, to once person: [insert random prophet type person here]. Your faith is therefor not only in god, but also (primarily) in the reliability of the prophet, and the people who repeated the story. The word 'hearsay' comes to mind. Was he lying? Was he making it up to get attention? Was he mad? Or did [random deity] really reveal [random religious truth] to him?
-In case of headache: [random prophet] is said to have made the headache of [person] go away by perfroming [religious ritual] many thousands of years ago.
Faith in reason:
-Discoveries, 'revelations', REPEATABLE. I capitalise, because any experiment in the scientific method is only valid if it is in principle repeatable. Facts can be checked and double checked by anyone willing and able to repeat the experiment. You are not forced to believe the experimentor on his word, or the publication you read the results in.
-In case of headache: Aspirin gives relief. Not in all cases of headache, but in a sufficiently large percentage of headaches, to have reasonable faith in the possibility that it will relief my headache. Not just today, but any day. Not just for me, but for anyone. It's repeatable, reliable, and we have unraveled the mechanism that makes it work. You don't have to be a chosen one to experience the miracle of headache relief.
-----
Prayer, as Mr. Spock would say, is illogical.
prayer 7777/tcp #prayer
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
To hell with not pissing God off! Lets start spamming him. As soon as he gets a taste of it, all of those spammers will get thunderbolted.
God: You've been hit with a snowball!
Richey
"It seems to me that atheists are as religious as anyone. I really am astonished sometimes how strongly the atheists believe that there is no god, and how they are preaching the non-existence of this god!"
.02
Do you believe there are no invisible smurfs? Do you *strongly* believe there are no invisible smurfs?
Does this then make you "religious"? Obviously not. [sigh] What a contrived argument that is, to suppose that someone who says something is not must therefore believe in the item they say doesn't exist.
Did you read this before you hit "submit"? Have you ever bothered to attack your own arguments to see how far you'd get? Yeeesh.
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
I think you just gave a clear, polite and elaborate response to a troll
It's entertaining to me that 'extremeist' fundamentalist christians see nothing wrong with what they are doing, but as soon as they run into somebody who's as extremeist as they are, only with a different belief, they start crying "foul".
They say that we
Lost our DECtapes
Evolving up
From PDP-8s.
I think that it's
Just writing in ROM.
Are we not men?
We are UNIX.
Are we not men?
U. N. I. X.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
A sexual orientation is open to choice...
But there are many well known illusions, optical illusions being the most obvious, which show our senses to be self contradictory.
Not true. Our interpretation of our senses might be self-contradictory, but our senses are not. Sensations have no interpretations attached to them. They are simply a stream of electrical stimuli. It is our minds that interpret those signals and give them meaning.
Thus when we see an optical illusion, our brains are simply mis-interpreting what we see. Our sight is still accurrate. I must also point out that the way that you determine that something is an illusion is with observation. If you do an illusion in which things look different lengths but are really the same, you have discovered this by whipping out a ruler and observing the lengths of the lines. Thus, you rely on yours senses to disprove your senses, which is a contradiction.
Then our senses tell us that we can induce inconsistent sensations by activating certain parts of the human brain with electrical signals.
But then your senses are indicating to you that your brain is being electrically stimulated. This is again a faithful (if not terribly useful) representation of reality. If you see things that are not really there, that is because you are incorrectly interpreting the erratic signals your brain is giving you.
But suppose that you had electrodes in your brain all your life, and so everything you saw was merely a reflection of your brain chemistry. In that case, there would be no possibility of ever discovering the real nature of the universe. But in this case, there is nothing you could have done about it. From your perspective, the universe is a chaotic jumble of random images. It is unlikely you will ever progress beyond the stage of an infant, and so you will never have the opportunity to observe the world.
The point is that we have to assume that our senses give us valid information about reality, because it is all we have. There is no "outside perspective" that allows us to cross-check our perceptions. If we reject the validity of our senses, then we must reject with it all of our knowledge, and return to the state of infants. No rational person is willing to do that.
Our father who art in favor,
stevie be thy name
thy kingdoms scum,
thy will be done
or another batch loses employment
give us this day
upgradability
and lead us not to false GPLs
but fill our hard drives with
linux
for thine is the apple forever
YANKEE ROSE!
I also remember that one of the points Atwood was making was the same one this artist is making -- that prayer degenerates into the meaningless repetition of stock phrases, especially in a community which harshly/strictly enforces religious doctrine/dogma.
Oh, and don't forget that the women in the Republic of Gilead could phone in (I think) prayers to be prayed for them.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
How long before someborg discovers a new business opportunity and sets up:
- The Church of Micosoftology
Imagine, a whole series of yearly upgrades, each one costing massive amounts of money. Hoards of high-priced lawyers defending the org from any who would oppose it.Wouldn't that be terrible...
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
You'd fit right in.
Think Q Continuum from Star Trek.
You are arguing for pragmatism. That is to say, in order to get anything done, we accept our senses as an objective reality. This is true enough, and, although it may surprise you, I tend to agree. It is important to keep in mind that we have made this compromise. It keeps us humble.
If we reject the validity of our senses, then we must reject with it all of our knowledge, and return to the state of infants. No rational person is willing to do that.
I have to disagree with you here. I think you'll find that many Hindu and Buddhist individuals believe that the ultimate truth is to be able to recognize the illusion. I am hard pressed to call these individuals fools or infantile, since the most compassionate, wise and contented people I have met have been Buddhist monks.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Actually, I couldn't agree with your post more.
The principle behind it is that, if you have a consistent system, then to prove something cannot exist you just show 2 observations that can't both be true. Normally, this only works well in mathematics.
Exactly. It works well in mathematics because mathematics and logic are very nearly the same thing. Disproving the existance of a God would not be as easy as providing two conflicting observations, otherwise we would have considered it disproven thousands of years ago! Like I said, God belongs in the category of Supernatural, so any seeming inconsistencies can be waved off as miracles or some such thing. It isn't the territory of science.
We can't be truly certain of everything science tells us (we can be pretty sure, but not 100%). However, if you are a religious person, you may accept the Bible as 100% truth. If so, to disprove the existance of God, you only need to find two statements about him in the Bible that cannot both be true.
Woah, wait just a minute! Who said anything about being a "religious" person, or accepting the Bible as 100% truth? By "God" I am talking about a very abstract concept - some otherworldly consciousness that oversees or directs actions down here on Earth (and possibly elsewhere). This has nothing to do with fundamentalist Christianity. I would consider myself an agnostic on this, for the simple reason that there is no way to really know. If there's no way to know, why take a definate stance?
I know there are truckloads of contradictions in the Bible, but I don't know if any deal with the nature of God. If one exists, the only reasonable conclusions are that either God doesn't exist, the Bible is false, or the rules of logic no longer apply.
It doesn't matter. I don't doubt that there are contradictions, and I don't really care. You need to widen your scope of thinking a little and forget about a polar separation of bible literalists vs. staunch athiests.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Oh yes! He was doing that in an attempt to recover the Buddha's standing wave soul, if I remember correctly.
Fun "techno" interpretation of Hindu mythology.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Curious, science is one of the primary indications that people use when justifying faith. (NB: faith is belief without proof, not without symptom). The point being that our ability to predict what will happen (science) speaks of an ordered system. Without getting into a well-visited argument, this clearly could be a symptom of a Creator. Regardless, religion is nothing more than a shared morality, sense of origin, and sense of purpose. Religion and science are the primary subsets of a world view. They are the two sides of the same coin. While they can't be derived from one another, it is absurd to discount attempts at a cohesive world view. That is why nobody uses science to prove God. Religion is used to reinforce science is used to reinforce religion.
This is similiar to prayer wheels in part ...
The difference here is the intention of the
person initiating the prayer. Buddists write
their prayer on paper and put it into a prayer
"wheel", spinning it clockwise sends the prayer
to heaven. Also, Jews write prayers on paper and
put that it into cracks in the Wailing Wall
for delivery to God. What's missing in this
instance is that this person is approaching
the subject from a point of view as a visual
artist and seemingly she has no regard or
respect for organized religion and its rituals.
If someone were to write a prayer program,
its value would be derived solely from the
intention of the person running the program.
Reality is only what you believe it to be.
--Rev. Ishmael
Y'know, a certain science fiction author once meditated on this very thing...morals for computers. Perhaps you've heard of him; his name was Isaac Asimov.
This is what caused him to posit the "Three Laws of Robotics" used in so many of his science fiction stories...which are, in effect, an artificially-imposed moral structure which made robots into humans' slaves. (It provided an interesting backdrop for, among other things, one slave's struggle for freedom, in The Bicentennial Man. There was also a rather hilarious short story in which the robots at an automated space factory spontaneously developed religion...)
While the Three Laws were an interesting structure, they always slightly annoyed me because the poor computer/robots essentially had their morals imposed upon them by a higher power, rather than having the chance to decide upon them for themselves.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Prayer is an expression of wishful thinking. An externalizing of internal desires.
First prove computers can think or have desires, then decide if they can pray.
"...when he looked overhead slowly, one by one, the stars were going out." - The Nine Billion Names of God. Great Story.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
This may seem like an odd idea, but I am sure someone will have something like this up in a year or so. In medieval times the rich and the aristocracy used to pay groups of monks to pray for them, during their life or after death for their souls. This is oddly similar. Just imagine a cluster of machines, chock full of litany, and the hypothetical sinner logs into www.indulgence.com selects their level of sin, enters their credit card number, and off go the computers reciting prayer in the name of the customer. Heck, maybe I should not be posting this, I am up late, I am getting to work on this right now.
# My first prayer program!!!
# By: AN0NYM0US3 C0W4RD
open( PRAYERFILE, 'prayers.txt');
while( $prayer = )
{
print "$prayer\n\n";
sleep(10);
}
close(PRAYERFILE);
Simple. Now, would you like me to ponder on how to write a program that simulates a Shakespearean play? It's just as easy...
Computers would come up with when posed with the question of evolution?
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
"There are no shortcuts to any place worth going."
"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." -Flaubert
hahaha this post is awsome!
cheers,
Mike
Oh, give me a break.
I don't have a problem with the question of whether computers pray or not (it's a very intriguing philosophical question) but this woman sounds like a first class twit. On the one hand, by pointing to the mindlessly areligious churchgoers as an example, she's claiming to have reached some level of Catholicism. (Note: Couldn't be any OTHER religion, of course--there's only the One True Faith(tm))
Also, she states, "It may even be necessary to evangelize to them, she says, before computers decide to choose their own religion."
Hell, if computers develop souls and religion, why not let them figure it out on their own--they might get it right, unlike millennia of human fumbling.
Take home lesson of the day: If you're going to do something controversial and interesting, try not to be quite so shallow as this woman appears.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.
72656B636148206C72655020726568746F6E41207473754A
"There are no shortcuts to any place worth going."
"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." -Flaubert
If you want real answers, my general view
is that you look to science, trying to explain
nature, conciousness and everything else..
But you can never really _prove_ anything, perhaps
only your own conciousness, and then only for
yourself.
Philosophy is great, incredibly interesting, but
most of the time, it doesn't get you anywhere.
People could rightly laugh of me if I said that
the world was created by a pink elephant, but
I could argue that they could prove me wrong, and
actually I would be right.
Furthermore, the Protestant churches often teach a literal interpretation of the Bible, and all teach that faith in Jesus is the one way to heaven. Catholics teach that it's living a good life, being a good person, and doing good deeds which get you into heaven -- and that faith isn't even really necessary. (Granted, they tiptoe around it by saying that everyone has the spirit of Jesus within, even if they don't know it, and then there's that whole purgatory thing . . . ) So perhaps many Catholics don't have a strong faith, and maybe they mumble through the Our Father and the Hail Mary. But maybe they're satisfied with that, because it's not the faith that's important, it's how they live their life that's important.
Finally, as a Catholic, I think that Catholics as a whole need to find their funny bone. I found the CyberRosary amusing, not offensive. Although there's quite a difference between the iMac's and the little old ladies at church who pray the rosary. :)
hey, wasn't the world also supposed to end when all the 64 rings from the original towers of Hanoi problem were moved?
...but don't anybody go writing code to work the moves out; you never know when somebody will get the bright idea of doing a Towers@Home (TM) project to speed up the process and then *poof* there goes all of creation. ...ourselves...
Thank goodness it's an O(2^n) problem!
hmm...Maybe that's why the seti people were making their program run slower: to protect us from
Will counting the stars destroy the universe?
If we know what's out there will it be our undoing!?
Computers are evil!
Prayer in computers is unconstitutional!
Stop making computers pray!!!
Well, that makes two of us... Who needs to belive anything when we can program iMonks to do it for us?
It's a good thing that they used iMacs, that way you can see right into the heart of the prayer circle. I knew the investment in clear cases would pay off. Ms. Skeddle, the perpetrator of this madness, awarded all of us with this groovy comment:
"If I can teach a computer to do that, then, technically, a computer has reached the same spiritual level as many Catholics," she says.
She can think what she wants, and I can think what I want. Which is why I don't feel unjustified in exclaiming: WHAT? YOU FREAK!
Okay, I agree that the notion of such a thing (computers being religious) is mildly interesting to consider.. but not for more than about 2 seconds. Don't worry, it gets better:
Ms. Skeddle, who is Roman Catholic, arranged the iMacs in a circle, with one serving as the prayer leader.
That's cute. Lord knows (ha!), if the computers weren't praying in perfect synchronization (within n seconds of each other), the effectiveness of the Holy words on God's ears would be reduced by a factor of n^2. She's even brighter than you previously imagined:
If such progress continues, Ms. Skeddle wonders, will computers need some type of moral structure?
Not to be short-sighted or closed-minded, as I don't usually dismiss all of the future-cyber-robotic warfare movies, but at our current stage in AI development, moral structure for computers is another one of those "sounds interesting" (for 2 seconds) ideas. Nonetheless, this fruity female is hardly clueful on the topic, I'm sure.
It seems that her followers are equally endowed with wisdom:
One visitor asked: If the computers are praying, is God listening to them?
Wow. That is deep. Almost deeper than The Matrix. I'm going to leave the answer to that as an exercise to the reader.
I do have to say that people have new and creative ways of trying to shine up Apple Computer's image everyday as well as it's ressurection. Who needs enterprise wide corporate deployment when you can go to heaven?
p= .
Why did you bother pointing that out he was doing it on purpose.
argg,
Mike
Donald Knuth to comment on this.
people like you piss me off!
cheers,
Mike
We can always have distributed prayer clients. Donate your spare cycles to praying for something better to do with our spare cycles.
hahaha!
cheers,
Mike
not flaming you but what do you mean by merkin.
(if you read some of my comments you will see I agree with alot of what you had said)
cheers,
Mike
I knew this weird hippie computer operator in the mid 70s that developed a program to write Tibetan prayers around the outside edges of the disks of the Burroughs mainframe belonging to the insurance company we both worked for. Kind of a high-tech prayer wheel. His hope was to "improve the spiritual ambiance of the computer room." I thought it was brilliant. Actually worked a little.
billy be thy name
Sorry, i think it's time to excommunicate Microsoft from my PC.
...which would certainly be better than having computers become religious.
A love of knowledge is far more appropriate to computers, whose design is to analyze facts based on logic. This is in contrast to the love of fiction which is appropriate to mankind, whose inclination is to fabricate stories when truth is elusive, embarrassing or inconvenient.
"The higher values with which man has become acquainted through philosophy are even purer than those acquired through religion, because they are not mixed with imagination and superstition."
- Fung Yu-Lan
I'm getting really sick of this "anthropomorphic computer" crap. I mean, yes, you can make a computer simulate, say, what it's like to take a dump, and then speculate on your program's choice of bathroom reading materials, but your computer is not actually taking a dump. You are projecting your views onto the computer, and, well, garbage in, garbage out. It's as bad as the e(fill in the blank) patent craze. Imagine a world where people can sing songs, but they're online! e-karaoke! Where's my patent?
From an atheist here:
I'm due to donate blood again and missed a good time this weekend. The Roman Catholic church up the street held a blood drive, which struck me as incredibly odd/quirky. Inside, the priest regularly explains that imbibed wine (grape juice and yeast excrement) actually physically turns into the blood of ol' Yeshua ha Notzri. Following Catholic doctrine, then, if someone needed a transfusion then you should just give them some wine (with the accompanying spells and incantations, of course).
The Lutheran church up the road is building a new $1.5 million church one-and-a-half blocks from their current location. Apparently you have been misled and all the children of the earth are being fed, since the Lutherans are spending their money on a carpeted full-court gym, among other things.
People don't need superstition -- they need clothes, food, shelter, water, and medical care.
To the original poster: Thanks for the link to freedonation.com .
To the 'true friend' poster: You're a fucking moron.
This is just plain stupid. Well, by your logic I could say a person shouldn't observe science just because he/she isn't performing their experiments the way other scientists think. You obviously learn as you go along, leaving your big bloated ego behind,... but I can see that you still have yours on your back. Nobody is born good you learn along the way.
In the article, Ms. Skeddle observes that computers are nearing the point of sentience, artificial intelligence, if you will.
If such progress continues, Ms. Skeddle wonders, will computers need some type of moral structure?
We already have a framework for artificial morality! /. readers may be familiar with the works of Isaac Asimov. Disgusted with the state of science fiction and its visions of "killer robots," Asimov had the audacity to propose a world of benign robots working for the betterment of humanity. How did he insure this? With the Three Laws of Robotics, of course:
THE THREE LAWS OF ROBOTICS
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First and Second Law.
These laws sure seem reasonable enough and held up well in fiction; perhaps the prescient author's theories would do well in practice?
Tetris rules.
In Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum one of the characters buys a computer(this was supposed to be early eighties), and does a kabbalistic rearranging of one of the names of god. I wonder if he got the idea from the Asimov story(which I remember as the monks trying to solve the Tower of Hanoi problem, but it's been years)
IF there is a god, I'm sure he thinks the same of us humans HEH :].
"The nine billion names of God don't bring you any closer to one you can simply set eyes on."
The point is just this: God is a personal being, and we, created in His image, are also personal beings. Computers are not personal beings.
--Jamin Philip Gray
jamin@DoLinux.org
Celebrate the finer things in life
Either the Catholic religion is hard up for followers or they're getting a good head start on dominating the religion of AI for the future. Think of the possibilities. Flawless sermons, 24 hour priest support. Will we someday be choosing our computers based on who and how they worship... or don't worship?
"There are more important things than stopping terrorism. Upholding the Constitution is one of them." - Ars Forumer.
Hope this helps ...
I don't understand, that just does not compute.
USER> Is there a god?
(a few moments pass, processing request...)
COMPUTER> THERE IS NOW
iSKUNK!
Of course, can't computer pray... but isolate us can it also... and close all the doors while opening others...
To the extent that computers doing anything is interesting, getting them to straightforwardly mimic human activity serves little purpose. These machines have even less soul than bacteria do, and yet they get anthropomorphosised into something eventually significant.
The **idea** is a fascinating one. But to the extent that it exists today, computing does not yet embody anything resembling soul, in any way. Everything else mentioned is merely cosmetic slightly pseudy window dressing as 'art'. The technology simply isn't that good yet.
Some sharp mind might even try to pair this up with Real Doll.
Then we'd really need a smoke or six...
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
So if someone set up a computer prayer program with a sacremental mindset (as with a Buddhist prayer wheel) the computer would be generating genuine prayers?
Actually - in 1999 - debating things like evolution is simply nothing but a joke. There is no debate, it has been settled for decades. Decades! In Europe (and probably most of the rest of the educated world) is has, at least. And actually teaching Creationism in school... sheesh - unbelievable!
Although you have to admit, All Souls Day and All Hallow's Eve (Day of the Dead, etc) are remarkably similar in intention.
Also, question - is Israel in the northern or southern hemisphere?
The author of the comment to which you responded expressed a valid opinion. You, on the other hand, instead of respecting his/her views and presenting a good argument, reacted with "How dare they... ". Your post is obviously bait as I now find myself flaming. Argh! Somebody moderate us both down...
Life is pain. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.
HEH, these must be real revenue generators, especially with the extremist atheists /. has. Seriously, you guys ought to look for more really weak, and otherwise would be ignroed by most, computer-religion links so you can keep posting them. Then you guys can generate 500 comments, 450 of which are about how religious people are idiots, 10-20 trying to suggest not all religous people are idiots, and the remaining few actually discussing the contents of the artice. Rinse, repeat, and watch the $$$$ from banner adds roll on in. If /. is really news for nerds, how come no one is discussing HOW they are having the computers recite the prayers? Or other alternative and possibly better methods to procede in the activity? Isn't that what nerd's are suppose to do, *think*, curiosity, improve. Last time I checked, very few nerds were judgemental, but of course this is /. which is quickly degenerating into a juarez kiddies paradise. Bring on the 0-second release postings!
Considering that they are all iMac's, they're all most likely praying ... God PLEEZE don't let me crash while anyone is looking!!!
// Zarf //
-
[signature]
I seem to recall that there is a Japanese Buddhist sect (Nichiren) that claims that you can be saved or reach Nirvana or satori or get something good just by endlessly repeating some religious word. This is called "nembutsu" or "nenbutsu".
Am I right?
If (as some people think) computers are expressions of their human creators, then these iMacs are merely passing on the prayers of their creator.
Therefore to program several machines in a circle to repeat prayers is surely spam?
I can just see it: god.NOSPAM@heaven
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't prayer wheels merely mechanisms that recite prayers (in their own fashion)? From that standpoint, computers' prayers should have an effect, shouldn't they?
-W-
Is it all journey, or is there landfall?
--Ellison & van Vogt, 'The Human Operators'
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Remember in "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" when they built that old-fashioned super-computer and then used it to locate The Golden Ticket inside of a few chocolate bars?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Could computers prey, if so, what would they prey on?
If they end up preying on humans than we could be in serious trouble, as computers are hiding everywhere and controlling alot of stuff we probably wouldn't want any malicious entity controlling.
Then again, can computers be malicious? Silly question, I know a few that are.
I figure we had better set up a beowulf cluster of praying computers in every city, praying for the survival of humanity in the face of the preying computers of the future!
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Borges also wrote somewhere that the universe was an engine to find all God's name, but I think he always thought this as a part of the Babel's Lybrary concept wich is a much more interesting idea :) (everything.org?).
/. Poll about Uruguay's next poll (we'll have 'em next 28th. :)
Anyway, it seems kinda obvious to me that computers cannot pray for you, as noone else than you can.
At least, that's the old-fashioned was to see it, as a deep thought state and as a way to communicate with God. (I've never done it, but I'm sure that this is what it's supposed to be).
I do not pretend to discuss if this CyberRosary makes any sense, 'cos it will only if Religion does, and it's a tough thing to discuss (and I do not think slashdot is the place to do it), but it points out a whole new usage for IT, I mean using computers for attending the spiritual issues of human beings. For example we can have a new and sophisticated version of that little program that acted as a shrink.
--krahd
yeah, i know i should improve my english...
p.s. I'd like a
mod me up scottie!
HELL NO
And here I thought slashdot was a place for intelligent people.
and my 50MB Q3A download was turned into mush thanks to IE5 taking down my operating system....
So I showed my machine I was a vengeful god, and lo the feeling was good.
Ug. There are few things more annoying than people trying to justify pseudo-scientific beliefs with crappy use of little-known areas of physics, quantum mechanics being the current favorite.
If you even read a layman's book on quantum physics, you'll be able to see right through most "quantum mechanics proves our point" claims.
What REALLY irks me is when Christians try to use science to justify things.. I mean.. hello? The whole point of Christianity is that you have to believe certain things on FAITH.. What are you doing trying to justify them with science?
If you're referring to this, it is worth pointing out that, despite being widely cited by religious groups, the study really isn't all it's cracked up to be. About 1000 patients at the Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Mo were randomly assigned to be prayed for or not. The prayers were for "a speedy recovery with no complications." There was in fact no significant difference between the recovery times of the experimental and control groups. The researchers nonetheless managed to concoct a scoring system by which the experimental group did 10% better than the control group.
I wish the original poster had provided that link. (Come to think of it.. IS that the study he was referring to?) I was about to reply with a "I'll believe it when I see it" message. It's interesting that even the researchers are actually admitting that the difference is statistically insignifant.
Not that mention that I find the whole idea of using a (somewhat arbitrary) weighted score rather suspect.
Christianity, or any religion for that matter is just a program running on a very complex system. Christians trying to prove things with science, that's got to one of the funnies things I've heard. Proving god through science. I think science is heading towards the proving of god's nonexistence
TWW
In Pi, a guy is trying to find patterns in everything. For instance (more like mostly), the stock market. He's a number theory type who believes the true meaning of life takes the form of a deep understanding of numbers, and he's got a computer working on various problems for him.
It goes haywire one day and dumps a bunch of gibberish. It turns out that this 200-some digit number is the Key To All Things, and helps him call out stock trade prices before they show up on the screen, among other things.
The thing that made me think of this is that a certain religious group of Jewish numerologists wanted to get their hands on that number, believing it to be the true name of God.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Maybe.
Maybe.
Director's Cut: Yes; other cuts and book: No
Not yet, but Dark City made a commendable attempt, as did Strange Days (to a lesser degree).
In the first page or two was a line about pouring "many kilowatts of prayer into the Heavens".
The prayer question seems to be a rephrase of 'Are computers aware?'. The general opinion currently seems to be: Not yet.
Nobody (except Computer Associates' ad agency) seems to believe the current crop is self-aware. On the other hand, nobody seems to doubt that if humanity is still around in five thousand years, AI's will be sentient.
Any sentient being can pray. If computers currently appear to want to pray, I say let them.
I don't want their great-grandkids to come after me for repressing their ancestor's religious rights.
So, computers can pray. They have my permission and blessings. If anybody wants to deny that, I guess we'll just have to start another holy war.
Just remember who the machines are going to side with...
My 2 talents worth
hanzie.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
Oops.. silly me.. I actually finished reading the whole article, and saw the part where they did conclude there was a measurable difference..
But they do still admit the weighting system is crappy and that a 10% difference is small.. So they reccommend further tests.
Christianity, or any religion for that matter is just a program running on a very complex system. Christians trying to prove things with science, that's got to one of the funnies things I've heard. Proving god through science. I think science is heading towards the proving of god's nonexistence
I agree completely that Christianity trying to prove their point on scientfic grounds is an excercise in stupidity and futility. Science is about trusting what you can observe and test for yourself, while Religion is about faith, which has nothing to do with a concept of proof or observations.
However, science does not concern itself with anything supernatural. The Evolution/Creation debate and the question of whether there is a god, many gods, or no god are two totally separate things. In the first issue, science will definately point to evolution - we got here somehow, and we have evidence lying around suggesting how it happened. We're busy piecing it all together. Science has no place in the question of whether there is a god or not. Science can not prove the existance of a god. A miracle could happen tomorrow that would remove all doubt in people's minds of there being a god, but science by definition looks for a natural explanation.
And science most definately cannot disprove the existance of a god. You can't prove He doesn't exist! How would you go about it? It's entirely a matter of personal beliefs in which science offers no insight one way or the other.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Someone correct my naive understanding, but I thought I read that the expectations of observers (ie: their praying) can affect the outcome of experiments at the quantum level. Any takers?
...after all, He helps those who help themselves.
Anyone remember the novel by Douglas Adams featuring the Electronic Monk(I think it was "Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul")? Briefly, the Electronic Monk was a robot bought in order to take care of the burdensome chore of praying. It featured the ability to hold up to 16(?) contradictory beliefs at once. Perhaps it is time to market such a product in the United States; I can state without hesitation that FreeBSD will have the demon worshipping, Satanist market locked up. :)
"by temporalwisard on ..."
Shouldn't that be "wizard" with a "z"?
I will check out Dark City and Strange Days. I hope they are better than The Matrix.
- Can iMacs do any of this? Not to my knowledge.
- What is the difference between a computer playing back a prayer audibly and a prayer written on a static html page? Is this webpage praying each time its content is accessed since the content is a prayer?
I wish Ms. Skeddle had marketed this not as a gimmick but as a prayer aid. The way she has it set up now it seems to be a mockery of what many Catholics do devoutly and with much thought. There are java rosary beads that you can pray with (is java praying?) and #catholics on efnet holds a prayer hour every night at 10.RETURN....brotha
Once the damn aliens come here
and tell us it was just a submersive joke to
keep us all undercontrol and to behave as slaves
to them 120000 years ago.
Once a comet smash into earth and kills 5.9 billion of the dummies here.
Once the antichrist comes here and blows up rome.
For spoiling the ending of the Clarke story... :(
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
nope. it's "wisard" with an "s" I chose it that way
Doesn't it? I tend to consider myself religious in a reasonably spun out way, and I think that that's exactly what praying is about. Coming to terms with the wierd stuff at the back of your mind that you know is there, and want to influence, but don't understand. Look at the rosary. When you're trying to think about something deeply and properly, there's nothing better than those sort of all physical, repetitious tasks to get the brain moving. Whenever I'm thinking about something, I pace, and chuck a pen up in the air and catch it. It's crazy, I know, but it works. (Grant generalisation oncoming) Religion is all about using whatever means you can to make yourself a better person. (Craig has spoken) You've got to love these spun out debates.
Believe with me, my saplings.
If I can teach a computer to do that, then, technically, a computer has reached the same spiritual level as many Catholics," she says.
...
Okay, I agree that the notion of such a thing (computers being religious) is mildly interesting to consider.. but not for more than about 2 seconds.
Actually, I think it's QUITE thought-provoking to suggest that a cluster of iMacs obviously mindlessly displaying prayers is no different from those young kids who recite prayers without understanding them.
Not to be short-sighted or closed-minded, as I don't usually dismiss all of the future-cyber-robotic warfare movies, but at our current stage in AI development, moral structure for computers is another one of those "sounds interesting" (for 2 seconds) ideas.
Again, I think such things are definitely worth thinking about for more than 2 seconds. A couple of decades ago, I'm sure most people thought modification of the human genome to create mutant superhumans was the realm of comic books (let alone sf novels).. And now we're already at that stage. One of the most dangerous things we can ever do is NOT to think about such things. That's what brings us all the harms of technologies. I think we should think of ALL the moral implications of technology LONG before they arrive.
All in all, I would rather burn CPU cycles on something positive like this than something so improbable as SETI.
... and let us say, RETURN.
Please tell me I'm not the only one thinking "electric monk" (or, in this case, iMonk).
Drinking will help us plan!
It is impossible to disprove the proposition:
The entire universe sprang into being an infitesimal amount of time ago by the will of an omnipotent God.
Similarily there is no way to disprove the existence of God in general. There is simply no axiomatic or observational structure that can be trusted. The best one can do is to show that the observable world is completely consistent with scientific theories and therefore there are no mysteries which require explanation by supernatural forces. This is of course a daunting task, which requires a complete explanation of conciousness, among other things.
In the end, as long as there is death there will be believers in God.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Do they? Do we? Did Deckard? Was he a replicant? Will there ever be as cool a movie?
Having said that, there is some validity in the previous post's statement.
Computer architectures are substantially better documented than the human mind, and there are probably better ways of getting things done on them than chanting prayers. That doesn't stpo people trying to program in Perl for Win32 though.
Believe with me, my saplings.
Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name. Thy programs run, thy syscalls done, in kernel as it is in user! - good Fortune to you
"Spell my Name With an S" perhaps? (or whatever the name of that Asimov story was).
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
picket abortion clinics, or the muslim losers who threaten Salmann Rushdie, and then we'll talk; I'm not going to kill anyone, as opposed to *them*.
This is off-topic but wasn't the pentagram used as an early Christian icon prior to it's pagan associations. I know there was a secret Greek society that celbrated the mathematical proportions of the pentagram, specifically the 2:1 "octave" ratios within the lines sub-segments...that group (pythagoreans? I think there was even a Donald Duck movie about this...) developed some important musical theories but then somewhere along the way I think the early Christians picked up the symbol for their own...
Ironic how such familiar symbols of "paganism" (I use the term loosely) such as vampirism and the pentagram owe their origins (at least in part) to the distincly anti-pagan 1st century Christians.
...there's interesting mathematical symbolism contained within the five point star in any case.
(...and computers are still evil.)
Praying is not just words. In fact, prayers don't have to be words. I am fairly religious, and a lot of the times when I pray, I don't say anything at all. Just acknowledge Gods presence. And, I fell, that God is not looking for words or meaning or insight, he's looking for effort. The hospital experiment worked because God saw that people cared about the patients, because they took the time to pray for him. Thus, when a computer say "words" it's not a prayer. Thats like having a computer text-to-speech program recite a play. He's not an actor, he's a recording. And recordings don't have effort, thus, in prayer, computers can't do it either, because they aren't making effort, they aren't thinking about it, and God knows it, and will take that into consideration.
"Lazyness is the first step towards efficiency." -Patrick Bennett
Somewhere I seem to remember an article that was about a neural net that read magazine articles every day and then asked a question to be answered by a human after each article. One day after it had accumulated a wealth of its virtual knowledge, the operator fed it an article on religion. The computer spit back a perplexing query. It was "If God does not exist, then why does Man have religion?" In many ways it was both shocking and frightening that a machine could formulate such a question.
~GoRK
You're obscuring the meaning of "reality." Reality is the set of all things that can be observed. If we will never be able to observe something--even in theory, then it does not exist.
One need not prove that one exists, because this fact is axiomatic. By axiomatic, I mean that any attempt to refute it involves using it. Every statement you make assumes your own existence. To say "I don't exist" is a contradiction, because obviously you do exist or you would not have made that statement.
You are also misusing the concept of "proof." When I say "prove X," I mean "show me the physical evidence that demonstrates the truth of X." Therefore you cannot by definition "prove" the validity of the process of proof.
But the validity of the senses is axiomatic. Any attempt to argue that one cannot trust one's senses is self-contradictory, since all of our knowledge comes from our senses, and so without them, you know nothing and nothing you say can be trusted.
To put this a different way: our "conscious world" is all that exists. The reason is that the burden of proof for the existence of other worlds rests on the person making the claim. If you believe that there is another reality independent of this one, the burden of proof is on you. If you can't come up with any evidence for it (and you can't) then we reject the claim out of hand, as unsubstantiated.
So to demand that we prove the laws of physics in every imaginary world you dream up, is an error. You must first demonstrate that those worlds exist. Until then, the rational assumption is that this is the only reality there is.
For example, I could just as easily say "prove to me there is no Santa Claus. You can't, since there are an infinite number of places to look and since he would have magical powers anyway and so could be eluding your search by flying off on his reindeer just before you got there. But that does not mean that I should take an agnostic position and agree that there is a good chance that Santa Claus exists. The burden of proof rests on him who makes a positive claim, not the person who disputes it. If I say "Santa Claus exists," the proper response is "prove it," and if no evidence is forthcoming, one should reject the claim.
but what does it accomplish? For that matter what do people praying accomplish? I can only speak from my experience. Praying never accomplished anything other wasting time that could have been used productively. To me religion is like a computer running a program. The people with all their different religions are the computers, the religion is the program (I will go so far as to say the virus). The virus is spread to the computer sometime after it has been assembled and booted (born) by the computers(parents) at the factory. Peoples minds are infected with religion after they are born. Once the virus is implanted they can't help but follow it's instructions. I think the anti-virus that dissinfected me, was the freedom to think for myself given to me by my parents, I wasn't forced to go to church against my will the way nearly all of my Catholic freinds, classmates, and neighbor kids were by their parents. After all what's a virus's main function? Replicate.
nope, nothin' to do w/ that either. I just simply chose to spell it temporalwisard. I also pronounce it with an "s" sound andnot a "z" sound as one would normally do with the word wizard.
The pentagram goes back at least to Sumer IIRC. I don't have the reference handy, but you might find the relevant text wherever you find the Book of Shadows of the Riders of the Crystal Wind.
You're forgetting the placebo effect. If someone truly thinks that god is going to cure them, they have a better chance of being cured (just as someone who is given a sugarpill and told it's medicine has a better chance than someone who isn't). If someone thinks that god is going to help them get a job, they'll probably be more confident and will perform better in the job interview.
I've been arguing in here for a few hours now, and I think it's time I go check out other stuff on /. that's what I came here for in the first place not to argue god, and religion. My email is temporalwisard@hotmail.com, you can email me there to disscuss this further, also it's seems as though you have had some formal training in philosophy. I will be able to discuss this topic with you better after I get into my first philosophy class next semester.