> They just have to argue that the encounter with heaven produces ketamine,
So now all that's left is finding a (nonmagical) mechanism that causes ketamine to be produced/released when the brain is dying, and we'll be able to conclude that NDE's are completely unrelated to heaven, regardless of heavens existence or lack thereof.
No we can't -- that would be a basic scientific and philosophical blunder. The "(nonmagical) mechanism" could be "simply the mechanism that God uses". You can only conclude that NDE's are completely unrelated to heaven if you have already concluded that God does not exist, and I think I can see the makings of a circular argument.
But I reckon they only assume NDE's are encounters with God and Heaven because they already believe in God and Heaven, which is what I meant by they don't take NDE's as evidence of Heaven.
If all 'measured' NDEs appear to have been caused by ketamine (of course we can never PROVE *any* causal relationship...) the religionists can point out all they want that the unmeasured ones may have really been caused by heaven, but they'll just look silly.
No you're missing the point. The religionists don't have to argue any such dualism. They just have to argue that the encounter with heaven produces ketamine, and it's the ketamine that produces the qualia, the experience. They can argue that the experience can be artificially induced by introducing ketamine, but that says nothing about the supposed "natural" phenomenon.
Absolutely every experience we have come down to chemical actions in the brain. The fact that we happen to know what that chemical action is says nothing at all about the validity of the experience, and it's bad science -- going beyond the observations -- to pretend that it does. The interesting debate here is not about religion at all, it's about the nature of consciousness itself.
Wonderful -- leave them with more money for corrupt governments to screw them out of, so those kings (and presidents) can have palaces to rival the Pope's. Result!
Trust me, the poor don't need religion to get screwed over.
If you ever have to say hush to a legitimate question, it isn't science. You seem to think science is like religion.
In practice, "science" often is like a religion. It serves many functions of religion for some people, it can fiercly oppose ideas that don't fit with the official line, and it's liable to messianic pretensions ("science will answer everything"). Read Mary Midgley's "Evolution as Religion".
Of course, scientists will rightly say that "science" doesn't do any of that, science is an objective set of methods, that all those things are an abuse of science. But then, religionists will say that all the evils of religion are not really religion but are an abuse of it, and we wouldn't let them get away with it, would we?
As the religionists will correctly point out any minute now, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The experience of heaven in an NDE can be accounted for by chemical actions in the brain? Well, so can hunger -- does that mean that food doesn't exist, or that we don't need to eat? Only a few on the fringes seriously took NDEs as evidence for heaven, because the possibility of hallucinations was too obvious. So, although this is interesting, don't expect it to have any effect on the views of religionists, because it's actually irrelevant to their beliefs.
The solid theoretical ground would be fine if they were starting from scratch now (and looking at some of the research coming out of MS, they do seem to be trying for it -- we'll have to wait and see whether it delivers). One big problem for them, though, is maintaining compatibility with ealier versions of Office which were not written using what is now current best practice. Once you start trying to implement code with behaviour that's not properly understood, or pulling in code that's not properly understood, then that best practice is some help, but it doesn't give you the robustness you might want. The alternative would be to abandon back-compatibility, but that would throw away all their (perceived) lock-in and make it too easy for customers to jump ship, so that would probably be a bad business decision.
In all your replies, you're confusing economic change due to technological innovation with change forced by regulation/taxation.
No I'm not. The question is whether the change is positive or negative. The cause of the change has nothing at all to do with that. Either can have positive effects, either can have negative effects.
The blacksmiths' going out of work was not of itself "damage" to the economy, which was my point. The comparison is valid, because the point of the comparison is nothing to do with the causes of change in the business environment, it was that individual businesses, even individual economic sectors, are not the economy. You have to look at the overall picture to see whether the effect on the economy is good or bad, not just the effects on individual businesses that have not kept up with a changing market (whatever the causes of the change).
You asked for an example of how environmental laws can be bad for the economy and he gave you one.
No he didn't. He gave an example of how it was bad for one single business. If you want to look as the overall effect on the economy you need to consider who (if anyone) filled the gap the collapse of his business left, the overall effect of trade in freon substitutes, and so on. If you think his business is an example of "how environmental laws can be bad for the economy" then you must think that the internal combustion engine caused the total collapse of all Western economies because of the number of blasksmiths it put out of work.
I just came here after playing some Morrowind. That takes a lot less than 1 GB. Even heavily modded to make it look visually stunning it takes less than 1 GB.
Good to know I'm not the only one still playing that. Sure it has its limitations -- some of them down to technology that's 10 years old, some down to design issues -- but it's still the most immersive game I know, and the benchmark that other games should be trying to beat. Unfortunately, I don't think anybody know how they did it -- at least Bethesda seem not to, because Oblivion had better graphics but worse gameplay, and if it were quality of graphics I wanted then as somebody else pointed out I could watch a movie.
The Times and the Sunday Times are "just a start" according to News Corp. Presumably the Sun and the News of the World will also follow.
If the experiment works. On the other hand, if it crashes and burns then it's something that doesn't matter much to Murdoch that has crashed and burned.
For what it's worth, I wouldn't call The Times a "quality paper" either, but yes, it's significantly more highbrow than The Sun. Almost everything is more highbrow than The Sun, which is probably why The Sun dominates the circulation figures. As H L Mencken might have said in different circumstances, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the British public."
A lot of very vocal voices on the Internet hate Murdoch, and that's fine. But the reality is, his newspapers and cable channels are wildly popular -- WILDLY popular, at least in the US. They typically trounce their competition by silly-wide margins.
That's true in the UK newspaper business, too. But his outlet that's doing that is The Sun (circ. ~2.9 million), not The Times (circ. ~600 thousand). You will note that he's not messing with his best-selling daily title, he's messing with his worst-selling daily title.
I think it's been a very long time since The Times has been "the anchor media of the community", except in the sense that it's sinking like an anchor (but then, they all are).
So then use multiple thresholds in your solution and it's a different thing.
So if I use two guns when commiting a felony, do I get around any laws about using a gun in the commission of a felony? I would have thought that would be construed as two cases of using a gun, not no cases of using a gun.
There is a time specified, but it's not that one. If you return the goods within 6 months, the onus is on the trader to show that the goods were not defective at the time of purchase. If you return them after six months then the onus is on you to show that they were.
Also, it's very non-EU-like. The EU consistently stamps on countries that do anything at all to make cross-border trade harder. Look at what happened to Germany's Reinheitsgebot, for instance, a law that maintained the quality of German beer, which the EU ruled illegal for just that reason.
They won't speak your language, and won't be able to mess with your thoughts.
No good reason to believe either of these. As for speaking our language, they may well have been listening to radio and watching television for decades. Certainly, if they're smart enough to figure out weapons that will obliterate us, they're smart enough to build a machine to facilitate vocal speech -- I mean, we're almost there ourselves.
GP was right, then, they won't speak my language. They'll speak Chinese, or maybe Spanish. Anyway, who says they'll be talking to the humans? Maybe they'll go straight to the dolphins (or even the mice).
Where can you do 100 miles in the UK without hitting somewhere "crazy congested"? Well, Scotland north of the M8, perhaps, and East Anglia up into Lincolnshire, but you are off the motorways there.
Slashdot Mirror
"Heaven produces ketamine" is not the same statement as "Ketamine produces heaven".
> They just have to argue that the encounter with heaven produces ketamine,
So now all that's left is finding a (nonmagical) mechanism that causes ketamine to be produced/released when the brain is dying, and we'll be able to conclude that NDE's are completely unrelated to heaven, regardless of heavens existence or lack thereof.
No we can't -- that would be a basic scientific and philosophical blunder. The "(nonmagical) mechanism" could be "simply the mechanism that God uses". You can only conclude that NDE's are completely unrelated to heaven if you have already concluded that God does not exist, and I think I can see the makings of a circular argument.
But I reckon they only assume NDE's are encounters with God and Heaven because they already believe in God and Heaven, which is what I meant by they don't take NDE's as evidence of Heaven.
If all 'measured' NDEs appear to have been caused by ketamine (of course we can never PROVE *any* causal relationship...) the religionists can point out all they want that the unmeasured ones may have really been caused by heaven, but they'll just look silly.
No you're missing the point. The religionists don't have to argue any such dualism. They just have to argue that the encounter with heaven produces ketamine, and it's the ketamine that produces the qualia, the experience. They can argue that the experience can be artificially induced by introducing ketamine, but that says nothing about the supposed "natural" phenomenon.
Absolutely every experience we have come down to chemical actions in the brain. The fact that we happen to know what that chemical action is says nothing at all about the validity of the experience, and it's bad science -- going beyond the observations -- to pretend that it does. The interesting debate here is not about religion at all, it's about the nature of consciousness itself.
Wonderful -- leave them with more money for corrupt governments to screw them out of, so those kings (and presidents) can have palaces to rival the Pope's. Result!
Trust me, the poor don't need religion to get screwed over.
If you ever have to say hush to a legitimate question, it isn't science. You seem to think science is like religion.
In practice, "science" often is like a religion. It serves many functions of religion for some people, it can fiercly oppose ideas that don't fit with the official line, and it's liable to messianic pretensions ("science will answer everything"). Read Mary Midgley's "Evolution as Religion".
Of course, scientists will rightly say that "science" doesn't do any of that, science is an objective set of methods, that all those things are an abuse of science. But then, religionists will say that all the evils of religion are not really religion but are an abuse of it, and we wouldn't let them get away with it, would we?
As the religionists will correctly point out any minute now, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The experience of heaven in an NDE can be accounted for by chemical actions in the brain? Well, so can hunger -- does that mean that food doesn't exist, or that we don't need to eat? Only a few on the fringes seriously took NDEs as evidence for heaven, because the possibility of hallucinations was too obvious. So, although this is interesting, don't expect it to have any effect on the views of religionists, because it's actually irrelevant to their beliefs.
The solid theoretical ground would be fine if they were starting from scratch now (and looking at some of the research coming out of MS, they do seem to be trying for it -- we'll have to wait and see whether it delivers). One big problem for them, though, is maintaining compatibility with ealier versions of Office which were not written using what is now current best practice. Once you start trying to implement code with behaviour that's not properly understood, or pulling in code that's not properly understood, then that best practice is some help, but it doesn't give you the robustness you might want. The alternative would be to abandon back-compatibility, but that would throw away all their (perceived) lock-in and make it too easy for customers to jump ship, so that would probably be a bad business decision.
In all your replies, you're confusing economic change due to technological innovation with change forced by regulation/taxation.
No I'm not. The question is whether the change is positive or negative. The cause of the change has nothing at all to do with that. Either can have positive effects, either can have negative effects.
The blacksmiths' going out of work was not of itself "damage" to the economy, which was my point. The comparison is valid, because the point of the comparison is nothing to do with the causes of change in the business environment, it was that individual businesses, even individual economic sectors, are not the economy. You have to look at the overall picture to see whether the effect on the economy is good or bad, not just the effects on individual businesses that have not kept up with a changing market (whatever the causes of the change).
You asked for an example of how environmental laws can be bad for the economy and he gave you one.
No he didn't. He gave an example of how it was bad for one single business. If you want to look as the overall effect on the economy you need to consider who (if anyone) filled the gap the collapse of his business left, the overall effect of trade in freon substitutes, and so on. If you think his business is an example of "how environmental laws can be bad for the economy" then you must think that the internal combustion engine caused the total collapse of all Western economies because of the number of blasksmiths it put out of work.
Also from TFA: "Granted, this information was already obvious to Dutch road designers"...
I just came here after playing some Morrowind. That takes a lot less than 1 GB. Even heavily modded to make it look visually stunning it takes less than 1 GB.
Good to know I'm not the only one still playing that. Sure it has its limitations -- some of them down to technology that's 10 years old, some down to design issues -- but it's still the most immersive game I know, and the benchmark that other games should be trying to beat. Unfortunately, I don't think anybody know how they did it -- at least Bethesda seem not to, because Oblivion had better graphics but worse gameplay, and if it were quality of graphics I wanted then as somebody else pointed out I could watch a movie.
The Times and the Sunday Times are "just a start" according to News Corp. Presumably the Sun and the News of the World will also follow.
If the experiment works. On the other hand, if it crashes and burns then it's something that doesn't matter much to Murdoch that has crashed and burned.
For what it's worth, I wouldn't call The Times a "quality paper" either, but yes, it's significantly more highbrow than The Sun. Almost everything is more highbrow than The Sun, which is probably why The Sun dominates the circulation figures. As H L Mencken might have said in different circumstances, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the British public."
I'm surprised you put it so low.
A lot of very vocal voices on the Internet hate Murdoch, and that's fine. But the reality is, his newspapers and cable channels are wildly popular -- WILDLY popular, at least in the US. They typically trounce their competition by silly-wide margins.
That's true in the UK newspaper business, too. But his outlet that's doing that is The Sun (circ. ~2.9 million), not The Times (circ. ~600 thousand). You will note that he's not messing with his best-selling daily title, he's messing with his worst-selling daily title.
I think it's been a very long time since The Times has been "the anchor media of the community", except in the sense that it's sinking like an anchor (but then, they all are).
So then use multiple thresholds in your solution and it's a different thing.
So if I use two guns when commiting a felony, do I get around any laws about using a gun in the commission of a felony? I would have thought that would be construed as two cases of using a gun, not no cases of using a gun.
There is a time specified, but it's not that one. If you return the goods within 6 months, the onus is on the trader to show that the goods were not defective at the time of purchase. If you return them after six months then the onus is on you to show that they were.
There's nothing to stop anybody copying the laws of the EU if they wanted to, apart from the usual legislative hurdles of getting the laws passed. So?
Also, it's very non-EU-like. The EU consistently stamps on countries that do anything at all to make cross-border trade harder. Look at what happened to Germany's Reinheitsgebot, for instance, a law that maintained the quality of German beer, which the EU ruled illegal for just that reason.
They won't speak your language, and won't be able to mess with your thoughts.
No good reason to believe either of these. As for speaking our language, they may well have been listening to radio and watching television for decades. Certainly, if they're smart enough to figure out weapons that will obliterate us, they're smart enough to build a machine to facilitate vocal speech -- I mean, we're almost there ourselves.
GP was right, then, they won't speak my language. They'll speak Chinese, or maybe Spanish. Anyway, who says they'll be talking to the humans? Maybe they'll go straight to the dolphins (or even the mice).
Where can you do 100 miles in the UK without hitting somewhere "crazy congested"? Well, Scotland north of the M8, perhaps, and East Anglia up into Lincolnshire, but you are off the motorways there.
You do realise that Switzerland is not in the EU, don't you?
Thing is, Swizerland is in Europe, not in the USA.