Britain's last hung parliament was in 1996-97, under John Major, not 1974. 1974 was the last time a hung parliament was elected; Major was elected with a slim majority, and the government became hung due to attrition during the course of the parliament.
The "readers we've been: quiet, thoughtful, patient, abstracted" have always been a small minority, but we think everybody should be like us. The ones who want to read will read. Those who don't will get distracted by the shiny. Just like our generation, the generation before us, the generation before that...
Of course, many of the character names (Gandalf, Frodo, Bilbo...), and some of the plotlines are from ancient Norse mythology, so they're public domain. Not that that will stop WB using legal and financial threats to stop people using them.
Yes, I think that's the interesting point here. Instead of pissing off a tiny minority of users, Sony is now pissing off all of its (European) distributors (all of whom will either have customers who care about other OSs or who will worry that they might). Those retailers can make life more uncomfortable for Sony than a few disgruntled users.
more European companies have been hit than American ones by the anti-monopoly and anti-kartel legislation.
From the articles I've read about the EU fining companies, I think you meant to say "more European companies have been hit than American ones by the anti-profit legislation."
Monopolies and cartels do tend to be profitable, so there is some correlation, yes.
Challenging them is all very well, but in the end doesn't really matter because in the scientific worldview, Nature is the final arbiter in the matter.
But you recognise that that's only true of the scientific viewpoint. There are other viewpoints, but presumably you think that the scientific viewpoint is more "valid" in some way than those other viewpoints -- but how are you going to argue that? Not from science, because that would be a circular argument. Also, even within modernism there was a recognition that even if Nature is the final arbiter, we often can't be sure what the actual arbitration is. What is the actual relationship between perception and reality? There's a danger there of collapsing into "mindless techno-babble", true, but there's a real and tricky issue to be faced.
Anyway, I ramble. What I really wanted was to ask you for recommended reading in 'sensible postmodernism' where they seriously tackle the issues you touched upon
Rambling relevantly, because you're leading into the sorts of issues that some postmodernists address.
Some postmodernists you should read about, rather than reading directly, because a lot of them distort and subvert language -- for good reason, but unless you realise what's going on it's all too easy to miss the point (Derrida is a particularly extreme case). But if you want a postmodernist writing about the philosophy of science in a way that is pretty clear and accessible (to geeks at least -- he gets quite formal) you could do a lot worse than reading Karl Popper. Most scientists get on very well with him ("falsifiability" is his idea), even if he does argue that the boundary between science and metaphysics can only ever be a social construct:-)
I actually stopped reading when RMS started calling people clowns and saying that they aren't going to allow people to use their broadband. Name calling? Really? Then following it by saying they won't let people use the broadband while forgetting that they just mean people suspected of violating copyright and get accused several times? Stuff this well balanced belongs on Faux News. Sorry RMS, I didn't finish reading the article because you write like a clown. (couldn't resist...)
"Postmodernism" is a very broad label. Yes, some stuff labelled postmodernism is rubbish, but some postmodernists are dealing with real issues that modernism swept under the carpet. Many postmodernists are intensely concerned about reality, and are deeply troubled by the problems they have identified with the modernist perception of reality. As far as I can see, postmodernism gets a bad rap because we've had time to forget all the dross that was produced in the name of modernism, and only remember the good stuff. Postmodernism is still going on, so we've not done that filtering yet.
I think it's also fair to say that postmodernism is particularly challenging for those with a strong commitment to the scientific worldview, because some elements of postmodernism have challenged the more extreme claims made of what science can achieve.
To drag another analogy into the fray, it is science's sparring partner with the added twist that it's got a horseshoe in its glove.
I think philosophy is a better sparring partner than religion, because that's one of its tasks -- to challenge assumptions and to tighten up reasoning (ok, two of its tasks). Religion is an actual opponent (or at least much of religion is an opponent for much of science).
Occam's razor is a dogma that not everybody accepts. Certainly most of the scientific community doesn't, because it leads directly to solipsism ("no reality" is more parsimonious than "one reality").
It is an error in reasoning, therefore, to conclude that NDE's are, despite ketamine's effect on a person, nevertheless related to heaven (unless/until further observations warrant this hypothesis).
As I said earlier, that interpretation of NDE's seems usually to be based on a prior belief in heaven (for whatever reason). If one has a prior belief in heaven and finds a process at death that gives one an experience of approaching heaven then i think there is the ground for a hypothesis that they are related.
But saying that something is supernaturally caused says, precisely, that we cannot explain it (by definition);
No it doesn't, it means that we can't explain it naturalistically by definition.
Can you cite me an example where the scientific consensus has been something that isn't true, but used to fiercly oppose ideas that don't fit with the official line?
A lot of the opposition to Darwin's theory of evolution came from the scientific community rather than the religious community, something that tends to get swept under the carpet when people are trying to polarise the science v. religion argument. The theory of continental drift got fierce opposition from the scientific community when it was first proposed. The Catholic Church rejected Galileo's heliocentrism on scientific, rather than theological, advice. The scientific community was originally very hostile to quantum mechanics...actually, it's harder to think of scientific breakthroughs that have been readily accepted on presentation of the evidence.
But hang on - if a religious person is going to use this tactic (which I think is a valid one), then first they have to explain what the "religious method" is.
I'm not sure then have to define a method, but they do have to identify their epistemological basis.
There was a documentary about Delia Derbyshire on BBC Radio 4 last week. It seems that in a previous documentary they'd played just the rhythm track from something she did in, I think, 1971, and the electronic music forums erupted with cries of hoax because it sounded so much like dance music of 30 years later, and they reckonned it was technically impossible back then. She was a very impressive composer and engineer.
I know these seem like weak arguments. Like I said, this is not all I have to say but I have a really hard time articulating this particular feeling I have about the utility of the existence of religion (if not religion itself) to science. I think it's crucial though.
It looks like the 3rd and 4th parts of Mill's argument in "On Liberty", for freedom of opintion and expression of opinion:
We have now recognized the necessity to the mental well-being of mankind (on which all their other well-being depends) of freedom of opinion, and freedom of the expression of opinion, on four distinct grounds; which we will now briefly recapitulate.
First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.
Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any object is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.
Note also that as a practical matter, irrationality provides a substantial incentive for people who embody rationality. It scares me sometimes, but we owe a great deal to the religs for pointing out exactly what needs to be looked at. They're like the guys with the flags on golf courses;-)
I suspect you're wrong there. The religionists' ground has been pretty thoroughly examined over the centuries, and there's little new to be gained there. Most religionists are using arguments that have already been thoroughly debunked. There are a few who are not irrational, but the form of religion that they end up with is not one that is any real problem to other rationalists (although the reasons that a rational religion can exist might be disturbing to some). All of that is very familiar ground. What needs to be looked at is whatever nobody is looking at, the unnoticed and untested assumptions. That's where the interesting stuff will be. They are very hard to spot, though,so most people don't even bother looking.
They're rather different, I think. Looking at the pictures it looks as if they are staffed kiosks. We have them in London, too. The Dr. Who police box was a telephone box specifically for the police (rather like the PD Telephone that Officer Dibble uses in Top Cat, but with a shelter over it.
pushed the envelope of props and effect to the limit, and often moved the boundaries.
Often moved the scenery, too. It was seriously underfunded in those days. "Pushed the envelope of props and effect to the limit" of what could be achieved with some fibreboard and a couple of pots of emulsion, true...
Although the overall script was somewhat routine, there was still a reasonable sprinkling of the snappy lines that have been a staple of the show since Douglas Adams was script editor (maybe before). Apart from the silly flying through space bit at the start, and the utterly naff new theme and opening credits, at least it didn't suck and looks worth following. A bit of bizarre behaviour was a staple of newly regenerated doctors in the classic version, so the daft stuff with the food was in keeping with that.
But when you make such an argument representing science as a divorced dogmatic institution akin to the Catholic Church, it is immediately obvious that you are spoon-fed the religious spin of your brethren.
Whose brethren?
Now, you can't do that with your Biblical Canon, can you?
Whose Biblical canon??
Ultimately, the religion that you devotedly worship
What religion that I devotedly worship???
This rash assumption that anybody who so much as dares to question any aspect of scientific practice must be a raving religios fundie rather demonstrates the point that was being made at the start of this subthread. For what it's worth, if there is any "religion" that I "devotedly worship" then it's rationalism, and I would love to see your argument that rationalism "is but a text, a tradition, and a specific, geographically-bound set of dogmatic interpretations of that [what?] canon in its happy apologiae".
By far the most important line of separation between science and religion is that the science, as an institution of many specializations provides us with choices and freedom while religion, in its many diverse institutions refining the sole spiritual, or shall we say, behavioral aspect of life, strives to limit the freedom of its adherents.
Unless you choose to define "religion" in a way which makes that true, that's wrong as a matter of fact. Some religion does that, and it's the sort of religion that you're most likely to notice (as it tries to limit behavioural aspects of your life or that of those you care about), but not all religion does that so that can't be a "line of separation".
I mean that religionists could argue that ketamine is the mechanism God uses to produce the experience of heaven in the physical body (which, if the religionists are mainstream Christian, they may argue that the spirit will soon be leaving anyway, so this is just a transitional experience). There are also chemical processes that produce the experience I have of sitting in a room typing this message whilst listening to a French world music internet radio station -- or, if you are a religionist, that God uses to give me the experience of sitting in a room etc. The experiences are not 100% dependable. If I've recently taken a hallucinogen then the physical sensations I receive might not be produced by by external physical environment, but the resulting chemical processes in the brain would have to match those produced by the actual experience of sitting in a room etc, because those chemical processes are what the experience is (unless you're a dualist and you believe that it is some sort of a ghost in the machine that has the experiences). If I've recently had ketamine administered then my experience of heaven may not be produced by a "real" experience of heaven (the materialist will be sure they are not), but if a "real" experience of heaven exists for the material body (and if we're still looking from a materialist perspective) then it will be the same chemical processes as a "fake" one.
Slashdot Mirror
Britain's last hung parliament was in 1996-97, under John Major, not 1974. 1974 was the last time a hung parliament was elected; Major was elected with a slim majority, and the government became hung due to attrition during the course of the parliament.
The "readers we've been: quiet, thoughtful, patient, abstracted" have always been a small minority, but we think everybody should be like us. The ones who want to read will read. Those who don't will get distracted by the shiny. Just like our generation, the generation before us, the generation before that...
I suppose the time to be disturbed is when it can't tell. Time to start looking at that spam!
Of course, many of the character names (Gandalf, Frodo, Bilbo...), and some of the plotlines are from ancient Norse mythology, so they're public domain. Not that that will stop WB using legal and financial threats to stop people using them.
Yes, I think that's the interesting point here. Instead of pissing off a tiny minority of users, Sony is now pissing off all of its (European) distributors (all of whom will either have customers who care about other OSs or who will worry that they might). Those retailers can make life more uncomfortable for Sony than a few disgruntled users.
more European companies have been hit than American ones by the anti-monopoly and anti-kartel legislation.
From the articles I've read about the EU fining companies, I think you meant to say "more European companies have been hit than American ones by the anti-profit legislation."
Monopolies and cartels do tend to be profitable, so there is some correlation, yes.
Challenging them is all very well, but in the end doesn't really matter because in the scientific worldview, Nature is the final arbiter in the matter.
But you recognise that that's only true of the scientific viewpoint. There are other viewpoints, but presumably you think that the scientific viewpoint is more "valid" in some way than those other viewpoints -- but how are you going to argue that? Not from science, because that would be a circular argument. Also, even within modernism there was a recognition that even if Nature is the final arbiter, we often can't be sure what the actual arbitration is. What is the actual relationship between perception and reality? There's a danger there of collapsing into "mindless techno-babble", true, but there's a real and tricky issue to be faced.
Anyway, I ramble. What I really wanted was to ask you for recommended reading in 'sensible postmodernism' where they seriously tackle the issues you touched upon
Rambling relevantly, because you're leading into the sorts of issues that some postmodernists address.
Some postmodernists you should read about, rather than reading directly, because a lot of them distort and subvert language -- for good reason, but unless you realise what's going on it's all too easy to miss the point (Derrida is a particularly extreme case). But if you want a postmodernist writing about the philosophy of science in a way that is pretty clear and accessible (to geeks at least -- he gets quite formal) you could do a lot worse than reading Karl Popper. Most scientists get on very well with him ("falsifiability" is his idea), even if he does argue that the boundary between science and metaphysics can only ever be a social construct :-)
He said that it would enable MPs to better communicate with their constituents and keep track of what they want.
So, how fat a pipe do you need for that? 100 Mb/s? 1 Gb/s?
The internet would be no use. You need a gas pipe.
I actually stopped reading when RMS started calling people clowns and saying that they aren't going to allow people to use their broadband. Name calling? Really? Then following it by saying they won't let people use the broadband while forgetting that they just mean people suspected of violating copyright and get accused several times? Stuff this well balanced belongs on Faux News. Sorry RMS, I didn't finish reading the article because you write like a clown. (couldn't resist...)
Fixed that for ya.
"Postmodernism" is a very broad label. Yes, some stuff labelled postmodernism is rubbish, but some postmodernists are dealing with real issues that modernism swept under the carpet. Many postmodernists are intensely concerned about reality, and are deeply troubled by the problems they have identified with the modernist perception of reality. As far as I can see, postmodernism gets a bad rap because we've had time to forget all the dross that was produced in the name of modernism, and only remember the good stuff. Postmodernism is still going on, so we've not done that filtering yet.
I think it's also fair to say that postmodernism is particularly challenging for those with a strong commitment to the scientific worldview, because some elements of postmodernism have challenged the more extreme claims made of what science can achieve.
Not even we Brits like our beer that warm. Now, a beer river, on the other hand...
To drag another analogy into the fray, it is science's sparring partner with the added twist that it's got a horseshoe in its glove.
I think philosophy is a better sparring partner than religion, because that's one of its tasks -- to challenge assumptions and to tighten up reasoning (ok, two of its tasks). Religion is an actual opponent (or at least much of religion is an opponent for much of science).
That's what Ockham's Razor is for.
Occam's razor is a dogma that not everybody accepts. Certainly most of the scientific community doesn't, because it leads directly to solipsism ("no reality" is more parsimonious than "one reality").
It is an error in reasoning, therefore, to conclude that NDE's are, despite ketamine's effect on a person, nevertheless related to heaven (unless/until further observations warrant this hypothesis).
As I said earlier, that interpretation of NDE's seems usually to be based on a prior belief in heaven (for whatever reason). If one has a prior belief in heaven and finds a process at death that gives one an experience of approaching heaven then i think there is the ground for a hypothesis that they are related.
But saying that something is supernaturally caused says, precisely, that we cannot explain it (by definition);
No it doesn't, it means that we can't explain it naturalistically by definition.
Can you cite me an example where the scientific consensus has been something that isn't true, but used to fiercly oppose ideas that don't fit with the official line?
A lot of the opposition to Darwin's theory of evolution came from the scientific community rather than the religious community, something that tends to get swept under the carpet when people are trying to polarise the science v. religion argument. The theory of continental drift got fierce opposition from the scientific community when it was first proposed. The Catholic Church rejected Galileo's heliocentrism on scientific, rather than theological, advice. The scientific community was originally very hostile to quantum mechanics...actually, it's harder to think of scientific breakthroughs that have been readily accepted on presentation of the evidence.
But hang on - if a religious person is going to use this tactic (which I think is a valid one), then first they have to explain what the "religious method" is.
I'm not sure then have to define a method, but they do have to identify their epistemological basis.
There was a documentary about Delia Derbyshire on BBC Radio 4 last week. It seems that in a previous documentary they'd played just the rhythm track from something she did in, I think, 1971, and the electronic music forums erupted with cries of hoax because it sounded so much like dance music of 30 years later, and they reckonned it was technically impossible back then. She was a very impressive composer and engineer.
I know these seem like weak arguments. Like I said, this is not all I have to say but I have a really hard time articulating this particular feeling I have about the utility of the existence of religion (if not religion itself) to science. I think it's crucial though.
It looks like the 3rd and 4th parts of Mill's argument in "On Liberty", for freedom of opintion and expression of opinion:
We have now recognized the necessity to the mental well-being of mankind (on which all their other well-being depends) of freedom of opinion, and freedom of the expression of opinion, on four distinct grounds; which we will now briefly recapitulate.
First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.
Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any object is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.
Note also that as a practical matter, irrationality provides a substantial incentive for people who embody rationality. It scares me sometimes, but we owe a great deal to the religs for pointing out exactly what needs to be looked at. They're like the guys with the flags on golf courses ;-)
I suspect you're wrong there. The religionists' ground has been pretty thoroughly examined over the centuries, and there's little new to be gained there. Most religionists are using arguments that have already been thoroughly debunked. There are a few who are not irrational, but the form of religion that they end up with is not one that is any real problem to other rationalists (although the reasons that a rational religion can exist might be disturbing to some). All of that is very familiar ground. What needs to be looked at is whatever nobody is looking at, the unnoticed and untested assumptions. That's where the interesting stuff will be. They are very hard to spot, though,so most people don't even bother looking.
They're rather different, I think. Looking at the pictures it looks as if they are staffed kiosks. We have them in London, too. The Dr. Who police box was a telephone box specifically for the police (rather like the PD Telephone that Officer Dibble uses in Top Cat, but with a shelter over it.
Yeah, I stopped watching before Tom Baker, too.
pushed the envelope of props and effect to the limit, and often moved the boundaries.
Often moved the scenery, too. It was seriously underfunded in those days. "Pushed the envelope of props and effect to the limit" of what could be achieved with some fibreboard and a couple of pots of emulsion, true...
Although the overall script was somewhat routine, there was still a reasonable sprinkling of the snappy lines that have been a staple of the show since Douglas Adams was script editor (maybe before). Apart from the silly flying through space bit at the start, and the utterly naff new theme and opening credits, at least it didn't suck and looks worth following. A bit of bizarre behaviour was a staple of newly regenerated doctors in the classic version, so the daft stuff with the food was in keeping with that.
Probably wouldn't be a good thing. All the straight men would be out committing crimes in the hope of being arrested.
It's a very long time since they looked like that on the outside, either. Or like anything, actually, as we no longer have them as far as I am aware.
But when you make such an argument representing science as a divorced dogmatic institution akin to the Catholic Church, it is immediately obvious that you are spoon-fed the religious spin of your brethren.
Whose brethren?
Now, you can't do that with your Biblical Canon, can you?
Whose Biblical canon??
Ultimately, the religion that you devotedly worship
What religion that I devotedly worship???
This rash assumption that anybody who so much as dares to question any aspect of scientific practice must be a raving religios fundie rather demonstrates the point that was being made at the start of this subthread. For what it's worth, if there is any "religion" that I "devotedly worship" then it's rationalism, and I would love to see your argument that rationalism "is but a text, a tradition, and a specific, geographically-bound set of dogmatic interpretations of that [what?] canon in its happy apologiae".
By far the most important line of separation between science and religion is that the science, as an institution of many specializations provides us with choices and freedom while religion, in its many diverse institutions refining the sole spiritual, or shall we say, behavioral aspect of life, strives to limit the freedom of its adherents.
Unless you choose to define "religion" in a way which makes that true, that's wrong as a matter of fact. Some religion does that, and it's the sort of religion that you're most likely to notice (as it tries to limit behavioural aspects of your life or that of those you care about), but not all religion does that so that can't be a "line of separation".
I mean that religionists could argue that ketamine is the mechanism God uses to produce the experience of heaven in the physical body (which, if the religionists are mainstream Christian, they may argue that the spirit will soon be leaving anyway, so this is just a transitional experience). There are also chemical processes that produce the experience I have of sitting in a room typing this message whilst listening to a French world music internet radio station -- or, if you are a religionist, that God uses to give me the experience of sitting in a room etc. The experiences are not 100% dependable. If I've recently taken a hallucinogen then the physical sensations I receive might not be produced by by external physical environment, but the resulting chemical processes in the brain would have to match those produced by the actual experience of sitting in a room etc, because those chemical processes are what the experience is (unless you're a dualist and you believe that it is some sort of a ghost in the machine that has the experiences). If I've recently had ketamine administered then my experience of heaven may not be produced by a "real" experience of heaven (the materialist will be sure they are not), but if a "real" experience of heaven exists for the material body (and if we're still looking from a materialist perspective) then it will be the same chemical processes as a "fake" one.