Who gets to decide what is a pet and what is a child?
Who gets to decide what is human and what is not? I hate these arguments. I mean, who gets to decide whether the unusually intelligent should be given freedom or forced to invent things to service the rest of us? Who says the unusually strong shouldn't be forced to do manual labour? Who says slavery is wrong? Who gets to decide that people that suffer from deformities shouldn't be put on display and exploited for public entertainment? These are all things we've already worked out the answers to.
The real question should be: who gets to decide that a trait which has been added to the genome by scientists purposefully rearranging DNA is unnatural and makes something inhuman (and thus not subject to existing moral codes), while the odd mutations that have been caused by exposure to radiation, or pollution, or bad drugs, etc. are natural, and that those that bear said mutations are clearly still human?
Who gets to decide if its okay to use hybrids for testing purposes since they resemble humans so closely? I always want to add, "Right. Who gets to decide that death row inmates, or the mentally retarded, or people who's skin color varies from our own should not be used for medical experiments?" to that one. This isn't anything new in terms of moral issues. Next!
Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I don't think humanity is currently ready to answer those questions. Humanity could answer those questions just fine if it could assert reason over the urge to declare everything an us or a them, often over the most trivial of differences...but I'm really not arguing with you because I don't have any faith in the general public's ability to think clearly about this.
Maybe i'm just so cynical that I expect people to fear anything that is near human but not quite. Yeah. With you on the cynicism.
For the record, I don't think avoiding the issue is right either - regardless of the fact that, yes, we're going to screw things up no matter how we approach this (or any other) new field. I mean really, imagine where we'd be if mankind had just sat around discussing the ethical issues of fire, as opposed to learning what it is and how to harness it. True, we'd never have burned all those people at the stake, but...
A child borne of a rape/one night stand is still a human. Obviously, I think this only gets dragged into the discussion to counter the argument that we shouldn't create creatures that could only face a life of pain and misery - because it's kind of obvious that we're already perfectly capable of taking care of even the most unwanted of our own, though we don't always choose to do so.
The next generation of terrorists may have tentacles. I think it's rather unlikely that the next generation of terrorists will come from Japan. Perhaps not, but I think we might be getting closer to who's actually in charge of Gundam here...
Alright then - why is that distinction actually relevant? I mean, I understand how some people would be afraid that rich people would have poor people killed for their organs...but doesn't that boil down to the same thing as the "if you fill out the organ donor card, the paramedics won't really try to save your life" hypothesis?
Killing off the competitors that keep you in check, so that you don't destroy the environment that keeps you alive? Competitors aren't the only thing that keeps you in check. Stressing the environment (but not necessarily destroying it - after all, it's evolving to be resillient to your actions as well) can cause unfavorable conditions that would kill off a bunch of your kind and allow the environment to recover. Half of your population dying every so often isn't necessarily something evolution would select against - so long as the remaining half is still strong enough to defend itself. In fact it would be beneficial in the long run if the half that dies happens to be the less intelligent bunch that can't figure out how to ration its remaining resources. Heck, it also puts pressure on the environment itself to evolve, increasing the odds that if your species fails another will be ready to take its place. No need for divine intervention here.
I know, it sounds cold and horrible, but it's foolish to assume that the universe operates on fuzzy human principles like fairness, and counter-productive to be outraged when one finds that this assumption is false.
You believe that Microsoft is the epitome of natural progress? No, I believe that MS is approaching an evolutionary dead end, and will be selected out of existence if it doesn't adapt. But Microsoft isn't a biological organism so the analogy doesn't really hold either way.
but how does unbiased evolution avoid heat death? Who says evolution can't possibly be a self-correcting process?
I wouldn't argue with that. I thought you were talking about what motivates the government itself to be the way it is (corrupt/non-corrupt, libertarian/authoritarian, etc) in the face of a populace that largely believes such behavior to be immoral. The successful application of education to social engineering is something different, at least from my perspective.
As for the last sentence in your prior post (which I shouldn't have ignored):
Instead of trying to fix religion and hope that it magically somehow fix everything else, I believe it is better to fix everything else one step at a time, then religion will follow (or dissapear). Agreed. That's pretty close to the point I was making in my original post. I never meant to imply that religion is the only force that stabalizes a society, only that it has played a large part of that role in the past, and that its utility should not be ignored - regardless of how absurd the various other doctrines it subscribes to may be.
Already happening. The biggest things holding GL back are the ridiculously hard to read specifications and some (minor) runtime inefficiency.
In terms of documentation, some of the extensions read something like this: "if feature bit A is enabled then stage B of the OpenGL pipeline (see section c.d - of the OpenGL Specification version e.f, augmented by extension G) is replaced by block H as described in this extension - except when bit I is also enabled, or bit J is disabled, or the currently bound K is not L (subject to interatction with extension M, if it is present), or when rendering N or O (unless option P has been specified)." It's incredibly annoying to have to parse that kind of language when all you want to know is whether you screwed up or it's a driver bug. Hopefully OpenGL 3.0 helps here.
As for inefficiency, this mostly relates to things like the difference between HLSL and GLSL/ARB*p shaders. In the former instance it's required that you compile the shaders into an intermediate, binary, assembly-like form that the drivers then compile into device code. This means that string parsing and the first set of optimizations (like dead code removal) happen offline. GL requires that you hand it shaders in raw string format, which means the driver has to do more work at load time. Multiplied by several hundred shaders this can add several seconds of load time (which is important when writing tames) that DX doesn't otherwise impose (though there are ways to hide this latency). There's also more minor issues like the fact that DX gives the driver the opportunity to precompute the data input to shader bindings (vertex declarations in DX9, input assembler objects in DX10) whereas GL forces the driver to do this at draw time.
Not that either issue makes it impossible to make great games with GL (Id has proven that ages ago, obviously), it just makes it a bit more of a pain and the less-than-obvious choice when your target platform is Windows.
(my appologies if this is a dupe to an earlier reply I thought I made to this post but am unable to see on/. - I assume I F'd up and didn't actually hit submit before I closed my browser, but I thought I'd mention it on the off chance that two similar posts suddenly show up)
You're assuming that the beliefs of the common people have something to do with those of their leaders. This is hardly ever true - especially not in countries where the leaders either come from a ruling caste or from extremist revolutionary groups (who, while often considered "men of the people" really aren't anything of the sort). Religion plays the role of justifying (it's this way because god says so) and enforcing (be good, god is watching) cultural norms. Where those morals/values/norms come from in the first place is largely irrelevant to my argument, my appologies if this wasn't clear.
I'm sure the Muslims blowing up other Muslims will disagree with you. The problem with your naive notion is that even in groups of Christians and Muslims there are separate groups. Believing in an eternal afterlife with a big supernatural single parent in the sky does not make you less likely to kill. It makes you more likely to kill because death becomes less important to you. What you see as one big group of identical Muslims is, to them, several completely different groups that all call themselves Muslims (though, really our group has the only real faith). There's a reason the various sects have different names and territories. I never said it makes people less likely to kill, simply that it makes them less likely to harm "their own" (as defined by the pertinent religious authority).
As soon as you put some figurehead above human morality everything else goes to shit because you are just "following orders". Welcome to Earth, you must be new here... Let me show you the history full of entangled religious and political systems, where one is used to simultaneously legitimize and enforce the dictates of the other. On the left you'll see the pharaohs of Egypt, the god-emperors of China, and the high priests of all sorts of other little groups. On your right you'll see the Divine Right of Kings and a long history of state-sponsored religious institutions... Watch as the masses buy whatever they're told by the guy with the special hat...
The separation of church and state, and the development of a distinct moral basis for each is a relatively new development in human history (though, admitadely we'd have had it a lot sooner if Rome hadn't collapsed, wiping out the phillosophical advances made by the ancient Greeks).
Ask yourself this, how many person B's have been killed because person A didn't believe in God and person B did? A handle of people under communism and other ideologies? Again sounds like the problem wasn't really atheism. Tell that to the old orthodox monks and their families in Russia and Eastern Europe. Or to the buddhists in Tibet. The number becomes huge if you add the people who were sent to do unbelievably hard labour in incredibly poor conditions for years on end in order to "correct their misguided belief in irrational fairy-tales".
Religion is a big part of what keeps societies stable - a point that isn't invalidated just because we happen to live in one of the few societies that's managed to enshrine most of its values elsewhere.
Feudalism and all those delightful things that came with it came *after* the christianisation Feudalism, yes. Rampant barbarism, no - that would have followed on the heels of the Roman Empire collapsing. Feudalism was a stabalizing force, compared to the chaos that followed after Rome fell in on itself and left a giant power vaccum. Remember - the barbarians that sacked the remains of the Roman Empire (burning libraries, destroying great buildings, killing lots and lots of random people, etc) were not (yet) christians.
Early right makes might fudalism was the legacy of the barbarian invasion. The church eventually morphed that into "the lord of the land also has some responsibilities to his subjects, and will burn in hell if he neglects these duties" type feudalism.
Yes, you can make a case that the Church's benign influence eventually got rid of all this barbarism Which is what I'm doing. Keyword is eventually. Obviously the church brought misery of its own, I didn't meen to sound like I was denying that.
your attempt at invoking the Church for everything that's good in society You're reading far too much into what I said.
I'm getting the impression I'm feeding a troll. No, either I wasn't clear enough or you just willfully misunderstood my comments, neither of which is the same as me being a troll.
Please do not confuse atheism and inefficient economic/political system. I didn't. I described how an anti-faith economic/political system contributed to its own inefficiency.
Of course people will steal supplies and slack off on the job, if they can get away with it and have no chance of promotion. Yes, we see that here too, to a limited degree. But a lot of people in our culture who have no hope of advancement (think average middle-age, undereducated, retail worker) also don't steal whatever they can, whenever they can, because they've been brought up to believe it's somehow morally wrong to do so. A lot do, but in my experience most don't - even when they know they won't be caught and punished.
By the later days of the Eastern European communist regimes, that ethic had been almost completely replaced with a preocupation with avoiding the secret police. Much of what we call morality had been reduced to this: if you can stay out of their sights, you can do whatever you want...which leads rather naturally to people turning in their neighbors in exchange for favors from the government (happened a lot), or stealing little things from work (happened a lot), or breaking little rules whenever possible (happened a lot), or any number of other destructive behaviors.
I'm not making this shit up. A lot of my family and friends is from that region - this is their actual experience (would have been mine too, had the regimes not changed when they did).
I believe U.S. and Europe have plenty of successful atheists who perform well on the job. Obviously. The US and Euorope also managed to replace "work hard to better yourself in the after-life, because god says you should" with "work hard to better yourself in this life". The communists failed at this because, shockingly enough, "work hard to better society in general" is a bit too abstract for the average Joe Worker, especially when it comes from a group that's commonly believed to be a pack of liars.
A pen is worth whatever a pen is worth(something that is entirely subjective). Appologies, you are of course correct. I meant to say costs, or perhaps requires more resources to produce. So sorry to have caused confusion.
The standard non-tortured evolutionary theory I'm familiar with requires a constant survival and reproductive advantage, generation to generation, in order to effect change.
Subtle error: evolution favors beneficial traits and selects against harmful traits. Random mutations that don't fall into either category can be left alone to spread through a population for many generations, until changing conditions force said mutation into one of the other categories.
A structure that exists for one person in a million to experience religious ecstasy wouldn't work.
Really? You can't think of anything that a single inspired individual might accomplish at a time when all his brethren were more given to avoiding conflict? You don't think he'd be better equipped to acquire resources and mates than the others? And said structure need not appear fully formed in one generation. It could (and would, obviously) evolve a little bit at a time.
Nor could it possibly evolve by this reasoning if religion didn't already exist. Nor did "societies" exist when the modern brain evolved, or religion as we know it.
Only in creation mythologies do things spring fully-formed into existence. Evolution is slow, incremental. I don't think science will ever answer how this bit of brain matter formed, but it's not hard to come up with ways it might have formed. For instance, at some point humans got smart enough to differentiate between the actual family unit and the idea of a family, and obviously invested emotional meaning into both. It makes sense that a group that develops the ability to form strong emotional ties to abstract ideas would have an evolutionary advantage: such a group would have a far greater investment in the idea of "us". Also, groups where this tendency can be easily exploited by the more intelligent members would fare better since power would shift towards individuals that are more likely to correctly react to danger.
I merely claimed that atheist scientists acted in the disinterest of actual science to avoid believing something that sounded biblical, and that reality ends up looking a whole lot like SOME kind of interpretation of Genesis.
I really don't know where or when you learned what you're talking about, because I've never heard of any explanations for the world's geology except periodic volcanic activity (falling ash), techtonic movement, the odd meteor, and glacier-wrought inland seas. I really can't think of any secular scientist avoiding the topic because it sounded Biblical, in fact I recall a lot of them saying things like "early pre-humans might have been around at the time, this could be how it slipped into our mythology". But my exposure doesn't include material more than 25-30 years old, so maybe that was well before my time.
Forced by and taking refuge from the Anthropic Principle. The fact that all the mathematical and physical constants in the universe are "set" in the very narrow ranges which allows the formation of matter, of atoms, of atoms heavier than iron, allows for the existence of liquids, of nuclear fusion and of life. The only palatable alternative to the conclusion that the universe was created for the purpose of sustaining life, is the conclusion that there are an infinite number of unobservable universes that DON'T "work" and that we happen to be in one of the only ones that does.
Oh please, the Anthropic Principle, at it's core, simply states that anything which is observed by humans will be tainted by human bias - it's just a truism! It doesn't mean that the universe was created for us, only that it seems that way from our perspective. The other non-human-friendly universes that get brought up when dealing with the Anthropic Principle are described for the sake of argument or illustration, and while some may take their existence literally, the Anthropic Principle itself does not require that they be real. I mean for cying out loud, this is
In the context of evolution you could define it as something along the lines of "the group that survived the longest is the one that benefitted most". If something makes me more likely to kill than be killed, it's beneficial to me. The same applies at the level of groups or species. This should be obvious.
To get even the most dedicated hardcore gamer to get Vista and reinstall everything (yeah, yeah, upgrades are possible... but didn't work, ever, with Windows) just to get DX10, the difference would have to be akin to Vodoo2 vs. GTX8800. You'd rather get a gamer to blow 500 bucks on a new graphics card than to trash his finely tuned system. You'd be surprised at what some of the hardcores will do. I mean, honestly, nobody actually needs quad-SLI and yet...but you're right, that's not much of a market.
Now, as a game developer, do you develop for DX10? Because one thing is a given, you have to also develop for DX9, or your game won't sell (and if it does, you'll be plagued by returns because it won't run on XP). How many studios can take the risk of doing a DX10-only game today, with a market that's about the size of the Mac market? DX10 only? Nobody that isn't owned by Microsoft or being paid a lot of money to do their bidding will be doing that for at least a year or two, that's for sure. But the big studios can afford to do both at once (their engines are already set up to be ported to far more exotic platforms so it's not such a burden for them), so DX10 will slowly become mainstream. Once Microsoft discontinues XP people will have to get Vista and six months to a year after that things will have changed.
Either that or OpenGL 3.0 will do away with the ridiculously convoluted spec/extension system we have now, and more developers will use it, and MS will be forced to adapt DX or let it die... And I really hope they'd choose to adapt, a lot of great innovation's come about because of competition between the two (GL's extension mechanism allows IHVs to slip in little features that aren't guaranteed to be useful, DX forces features which are proven to be useful to become mainstream, the cycle repeats).
As for me, personally, being a game developer - I don't intend to touch DX10 for a long time, and then only if GL's performance somehow becomes too horrible to bear on Windows. It doesn't offer anything that GL + NVIDIA's / the ARB's extensions can't already do except a cleaner interface and slightly less driver overhead.
And please don't bring up the Mac market...gawds...*resists urge to rant about Apple*
God is a circle which is also a square Of course! It's all so clear now! The Devine Being is a cylinder who's height equals its diameter! Why, oh why couldn't I see this before?!
Truly sir, I am intrigued, and humbled, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter...
I think it's pretty clear that he was talking about post-Roman Europe, which also rules out ancient Greece. You know, the bad old days when the lord of the land (big guy with a sword) was free to walk into any peasant's house, take his winter's food stores, rape his wife, and then force him to fight someone he's never heard of, for no reason except that his odds of survival were higher if he agreed to do so.
Yes, a lot of that went on in the early days of christianity, but ultimately it was the church that instilled the ideals of leaving each other alone (except when the other is a heathen, though that was an exception to day-to-day life), working hard for the glory of the church/your god-given country, providing for your family, and helping those in need when possible. I think most people would recognize as the pillars of old European (which is distinct from Greco-Roman) civilization.
First, what becomes ever more tortured is the atheistic explanations of why we would have a brain structure whose only purpose seems to be allowing us to perceive the presence of God. Random mutation which allowed the rise of relegion, a clearly beneficial stabalizing force in ancient societies. Standard, non-tortured, evolutionary theory (you know the one, right? the one where beneficial traits, shockingly, benefit their host and thus spread?) takes it from there. Sounds a lot less tortured to me than "magic super-being is lonely, and thus creates an entire species that just can't help but acknowledge his presence (because it's built into their brains, see!) - and then refuses to protect them from the other perfect being he created (the one that spontaneously glitched out and became evil), in fact he lets them suffer so as to prove to the other created beings (yeah, he had other beings, but they were less like him than we are so he was still lonely) that the evil one is actually evil and that he's not really the bad guy...because there was some doubt over this issue among the other perfect beings (which, apparently, were less like him than we are, though they didn't fall for the old snake in a tree ploy)."
The best modern examples of these are the big bang theory, the theories of mile-deep floods after the ice age. Right... Except that those mile-deep floods have never, scientifically, been shown to have occurred at the same time, let alone a mere six thousand years ago. Whoops - did religeon just cheery-pick the facts? Naw, couldn't be...
Atheistic scientists today are forced to take refuge in a belief in an infinite number of unknowable universes, a theory which is neither scientific nor rational. Huh? Forced? Really? By whom? And what, precicely, are they taking refuge from? And don't you dare say "that gaping god-shaped hole in their hearts" unless you can prove to me that you know said atheistic scientists first-hand.
Here, let me fix that for you: a few atheistic scientists today have found a mathematically elegant description of the universe which suggests an infinite number of unknowable universes, a theory which is interesting and, as far as we know, mathematically sound (though scientists are quick to point out that mathematically sound is not the same thing as real), which many other atheistic scientists consider neat (though no serious atheistic scientist would call it, a mere theory, literal truth or dogma).
Look, I agree, faith has a lot of utility, and our society is a lot less stable than it would be if we'd held firmly to the beliefs of the past. The destabalization we're seeing today scares me too, and I can certainly understand how horrific it must seem to someone that's used to the stability that religeous values provide (been there, done that). But we'd also be in the bad old days when most families had either lost a child to sickness or knew someone that had. Not that I could possibly explain why that would actually be a bad thing to someone that believes in a super-fun-happy after-life with your Best Pal [Deity], where you can hang out with all your dead friends, and all the cool historic figures you always dreamed of meeting as a kid (except the bad ones), for all [improbable time span].
I'm not even being entierly sarcastic here, I was brought up in the christian faith...believe me I know all the standard replies so just don't bother. Go flame another heathen - your kind is why I got out of that insanity to begin with.
the device should be banned under the penalty of death
Imagine how much trouble there will be if they are armed with a direct brain inducer so they can improve their ability to condition the sect members. Further to this, having a device like this available will enable any nuthead with any belief system to found a successful sect. But, but...we could finally make people feel safe at airports! If we can't make people wear these on airplanes then the terrorists win! Think of the children!
Actually, scarry thought here...but if you paired this up with some drugs you could probably get people into a state where they'd tell you whatever you want to know, and with none of the trauma/inaccuracy that's built into current interrogation techniques. Yikes, now I'll be up all night wondering whether that would be better or worse than plain old torture (though, I'll admit, I'm leaning towards the side of better)...
Do you really think belief in fairy big beard or whatever makes people less likely to kill each other? Yes, at least within a group of believers. I mean, look at what happens when law and order break down in a city: random violence breaks out and does a lot of damage which will later have to be repaired. Religeon is just a tool to legitimize those that impose the laws on the rest, and the belief in the magic sky-fairy that sees everything makes people police themselves more than they otherwise would - after all, societies have always been ruled by a minority of the population, and if people didn't keep themselves in line there'd be no way to maintain order.
In terms of early tribalism, the ones that figured it out grew into stable societies and prospered. The ones that didn't either stayed extremely small so that ordinary family bonds took care of most in-fighting, or were simply wiped out. Evolution.
A good example of religeon's utility is what happened in a lot of Eastern European nations after the communists had thoroughly suppressed the churches: they lost the old "love your neighbor, work hard, don't step out of line, and God will reward you in the end" ethic/morality. By the time my parents (who are from a formerly communist country) entered the work force (several generations later) it had become a sport to slack off as much as possible and steal some little thing from work each day - and I'm talking about the vast majority of the population here. After all, if it isn't somehow wrong to steal from the state, and be a burden on society in general then why bother working hard?
It doesn't sound like much but it adds up fast when you consider how many people did this, and that their economies really weren't geared to mass produce cheap, disposable items like ours are (pens are worth a hell of a lot more when they're made of metal rather than cheap plastics). If the communists had simply found a way to get (well, force) a genuine endorsement from the various churches (like all the rulers of the even more brutal and repressive fudal system that preceeded many of their regimes had) rather than fighting them and thus convincing the population that they were evil, they would have lasted a lot longer (higher levels of production, less energy expended policing the population).
I know, I'm simplifying in order to illustrate my point - there's obviously a lot more to it than that, and what you describe isn't invalid by any means (one only has to look at the Islamic world to see it in action). I just don't think it precludes the fact that religeous beliefs do serve to enforce societal norms - whatever those may be.
DirectX is just a COM interface to the video driver. I wish (really, I do - I trust NV's engineers way more than MS's). Fact is the DX runtime does a fair bit of work before the driver gets to do its bit - DX calls aren't all implemented as jmp equivalent_driver_entry_point. True, the stuff the runtime does is mostly trivial but that hasn't stoped MS from tangling the implementation into the horrible mess they've made with Vista. This is all because, right from the start, DX10's runtime assumes the new driver model is available - so it is all, essentially, designed and built on top of a platform that includes (optional) virtualization of GPU resources (for god's sake, they should have just let the IHVs do this like before), automatic graphics system restarts if the hardware ever times out (yawn), some special hookups for Aero (yawn some more), and DRM (hate).
I bet that if Microsoft gave the go-ahead to ATI/NVIDIA/INTEL there'd be DX10 support for XP in the very next release. The only reason they aren't doing it is because Microsoft is artificially blocking them. Believe me, I share your confidence in NVIDIA and ATI's engineers. I'm sure they could back-port their DX10 stuff to XP...but MS would still have to lead the way by backporting, testing, and then maintaining and supporting their part of the DX10 implementation - which they simply won't do, for obvious reasons.
They did the exact same thing with OpenGL when Vista was in Beta. Microsoft went around making a lot of noise saying "It can't be done!!" but the driver writers were saying it was easy. Eventually they gave in and Bingo! We have OpenGL on Vista. That really isn't what I've heard from the IHVs. MS stalled on GL support because they actually had to do something on their side to properly support it (keep in mind that Opengl32.dll, which houses all the entry points up to GL 1.something, is written and maintained by MS and that the IHVs have to plug their drivers into that, and then expose everything else as extensions on top of it). I spent some time talking to one of ATI's devs at GDC06 about the framebuffer_object extension and, since this was still news at the time, the conversation drifted to OpenGL support in Vista. According to him it went more along these lines:
Microsoft hands out the driver development kit and says, "This should be everything you need to implement OpenGL support."
IHV's look at it and say "um, no, you forgot to add this bit"
Microsoft says, "Huh, you're right. Tell you what, we don't have time for this (Vista's already behind, you know!) so is it OK if we support GL but just disable Aero while it's running?"
Someone leaks the answer and the GL community is instantly outraged that their stuff won't work with the shiny new Aero experience (that half of them had been hating on for months already).
Someone, again, makes the claim that MS is out to kill OpenGL (yeah, like they'd actually break Windows support for some of the all-time most popular games).
Microsoft finally changes its schedule and puts in the feature.
GL community declares victory, and then continues to gripe about how long it's taking to get Vista out.
I agree 100% that the biggest roadblock to DX10 on XP is artificial, but it's not just the evil marketing guys trying to sell Vista. There's also the evil "discontinue XP" guys that don't want to dedicate resources to the old platform. As a game developer, I hate them for it, but it is good business sense - or would have been if Vista were actually the miracle it was supposed to be and people were actually adopting it at a decent rate.
Oh well. So much for squeezing out that extra 2 FPS (wheee!) by writing a DX backend. Continuing to be an OpenGL shop...at least until we do an XBOX title.
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Unfortunately, Netcraft could not be reached for comment.
Who gets to decide what is human and what is not? I hate these arguments. I mean, who gets to decide whether the unusually intelligent should be given freedom or forced to invent things to service the rest of us? Who says the unusually strong shouldn't be forced to do manual labour? Who says slavery is wrong? Who gets to decide that people that suffer from deformities shouldn't be put on display and exploited for public entertainment? These are all things we've already worked out the answers to.
The real question should be: who gets to decide that a trait which has been added to the genome by scientists purposefully rearranging DNA is unnatural and makes something inhuman (and thus not subject to existing moral codes), while the odd mutations that have been caused by exposure to radiation, or pollution, or bad drugs, etc. are natural, and that those that bear said mutations are clearly still human? Who gets to decide if its okay to use hybrids for testing purposes since they resemble humans so closely? I always want to add, "Right. Who gets to decide that death row inmates, or the mentally retarded, or people who's skin color varies from our own should not be used for medical experiments?" to that one. This isn't anything new in terms of moral issues. Next! Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I don't think humanity is currently ready to answer those questions. Humanity could answer those questions just fine if it could assert reason over the urge to declare everything an us or a them, often over the most trivial of differences...but I'm really not arguing with you because I don't have any faith in the general public's ability to think clearly about this. Maybe i'm just so cynical that I expect people to fear anything that is near human but not quite. Yeah. With you on the cynicism.
For the record, I don't think avoiding the issue is right either - regardless of the fact that, yes, we're going to screw things up no matter how we approach this (or any other) new field. I mean really, imagine where we'd be if mankind had just sat around discussing the ethical issues of fire, as opposed to learning what it is and how to harness it. True, we'd never have burned all those people at the stake, but... A child borne of a rape/one night stand is still a human. Obviously, I think this only gets dragged into the discussion to counter the argument that we shouldn't create creatures that could only face a life of pain and misery - because it's kind of obvious that we're already perfectly capable of taking care of even the most unwanted of our own, though we don't always choose to do so.
Alright then - why is that distinction actually relevant? I mean, I understand how some people would be afraid that rich people would have poor people killed for their organs...but doesn't that boil down to the same thing as the "if you fill out the organ donor card, the paramedics won't really try to save your life" hypothesis?
I know, it sounds cold and horrible, but it's foolish to assume that the universe operates on fuzzy human principles like fairness, and counter-productive to be outraged when one finds that this assumption is false. You believe that Microsoft is the epitome of natural progress? No, I believe that MS is approaching an evolutionary dead end, and will be selected out of existence if it doesn't adapt. But Microsoft isn't a biological organism so the analogy doesn't really hold either way. but how does unbiased evolution avoid heat death? Who says evolution can't possibly be a self-correcting process?
As for the last sentence in your prior post (which I shouldn't have ignored): Instead of trying to fix religion and hope that it magically somehow fix everything else, I believe it is better to fix everything else one step at a time, then religion will follow (or dissapear). Agreed. That's pretty close to the point I was making in my original post. I never meant to imply that religion is the only force that stabalizes a society, only that it has played a large part of that role in the past, and that its utility should not be ignored - regardless of how absurd the various other doctrines it subscribes to may be.
Already happening. The biggest things holding GL back are the ridiculously hard to read specifications and some (minor) runtime inefficiency.
/. - I assume I F'd up and didn't actually hit submit before I closed my browser, but I thought I'd mention it on the off chance that two similar posts suddenly show up)
In terms of documentation, some of the extensions read something like this: "if feature bit A is enabled then stage B of the OpenGL pipeline (see section c.d - of the OpenGL Specification version e.f, augmented by extension G) is replaced by block H as described in this extension - except when bit I is also enabled, or bit J is disabled, or the currently bound K is not L (subject to interatction with extension M, if it is present), or when rendering N or O (unless option P has been specified)." It's incredibly annoying to have to parse that kind of language when all you want to know is whether you screwed up or it's a driver bug. Hopefully OpenGL 3.0 helps here.
As for inefficiency, this mostly relates to things like the difference between HLSL and GLSL/ARB*p shaders. In the former instance it's required that you compile the shaders into an intermediate, binary, assembly-like form that the drivers then compile into device code. This means that string parsing and the first set of optimizations (like dead code removal) happen offline. GL requires that you hand it shaders in raw string format, which means the driver has to do more work at load time. Multiplied by several hundred shaders this can add several seconds of load time (which is important when writing tames) that DX doesn't otherwise impose (though there are ways to hide this latency). There's also more minor issues like the fact that DX gives the driver the opportunity to precompute the data input to shader bindings (vertex declarations in DX9, input assembler objects in DX10) whereas GL forces the driver to do this at draw time.
Not that either issue makes it impossible to make great games with GL (Id has proven that ages ago, obviously), it just makes it a bit more of a pain and the less-than-obvious choice when your target platform is Windows.
(my appologies if this is a dupe to an earlier reply I thought I made to this post but am unable to see on
You're assuming that the beliefs of the common people have something to do with those of their leaders. This is hardly ever true - especially not in countries where the leaders either come from a ruling caste or from extremist revolutionary groups (who, while often considered "men of the people" really aren't anything of the sort). Religion plays the role of justifying (it's this way because god says so) and enforcing (be good, god is watching) cultural norms. Where those morals/values/norms come from in the first place is largely irrelevant to my argument, my appologies if this wasn't clear.
"Oh no! The launch is a disaster! To the bunker! Wheeeeeee! Abort! Abort!!"
The separation of church and state, and the development of a distinct moral basis for each is a relatively new development in human history (though, admitadely we'd have had it a lot sooner if Rome hadn't collapsed, wiping out the phillosophical advances made by the ancient Greeks). Ask yourself this, how many person B's have been killed because person A didn't believe in God and person B did? A handle of people under communism and other ideologies? Again sounds like the problem wasn't really atheism. Tell that to the old orthodox monks and their families in Russia and Eastern Europe. Or to the buddhists in Tibet. The number becomes huge if you add the people who were sent to do unbelievably hard labour in incredibly poor conditions for years on end in order to "correct their misguided belief in irrational fairy-tales".
Religion is a big part of what keeps societies stable - a point that isn't invalidated just because we happen to live in one of the few societies that's managed to enshrine most of its values elsewhere.
Early right makes might fudalism was the legacy of the barbarian invasion. The church eventually morphed that into "the lord of the land also has some responsibilities to his subjects, and will burn in hell if he neglects these duties" type feudalism. Yes, you can make a case that the Church's benign influence eventually got rid of all this barbarism Which is what I'm doing. Keyword is eventually. Obviously the church brought misery of its own, I didn't meen to sound like I was denying that. your attempt at invoking the Church for everything that's good in society You're reading far too much into what I said. I'm getting the impression I'm feeding a troll. No, either I wasn't clear enough or you just willfully misunderstood my comments, neither of which is the same as me being a troll.
By the later days of the Eastern European communist regimes, that ethic had been almost completely replaced with a preocupation with avoiding the secret police. Much of what we call morality had been reduced to this: if you can stay out of their sights, you can do whatever you want...which leads rather naturally to people turning in their neighbors in exchange for favors from the government (happened a lot), or stealing little things from work (happened a lot), or breaking little rules whenever possible (happened a lot), or any number of other destructive behaviors.
I'm not making this shit up. A lot of my family and friends is from that region - this is their actual experience (would have been mine too, had the regimes not changed when they did). I believe U.S. and Europe have plenty of successful atheists who perform well on the job. Obviously. The US and Euorope also managed to replace "work hard to better yourself in the after-life, because god says you should" with "work hard to better yourself in this life". The communists failed at this because, shockingly enough, "work hard to better society in general" is a bit too abstract for the average Joe Worker, especially when it comes from a group that's commonly believed to be a pack of liars.
The standard non-tortured evolutionary theory I'm familiar with requires a constant survival and reproductive advantage, generation to generation, in order to effect change.
Subtle error: evolution favors beneficial traits and selects against harmful traits. Random mutations that don't fall into either category can be left alone to spread through a population for many generations, until changing conditions force said mutation into one of the other categories.
A structure that exists for one person in a million to experience religious ecstasy wouldn't work.
Really? You can't think of anything that a single inspired individual might accomplish at a time when all his brethren were more given to avoiding conflict? You don't think he'd be better equipped to acquire resources and mates than the others? And said structure need not appear fully formed in one generation. It could (and would, obviously) evolve a little bit at a time.
Nor could it possibly evolve by this reasoning if religion didn't already exist. Nor did "societies" exist when the modern brain evolved, or religion as we know it.
Only in creation mythologies do things spring fully-formed into existence. Evolution is slow, incremental. I don't think science will ever answer how this bit of brain matter formed, but it's not hard to come up with ways it might have formed. For instance, at some point humans got smart enough to differentiate between the actual family unit and the idea of a family, and obviously invested emotional meaning into both. It makes sense that a group that develops the ability to form strong emotional ties to abstract ideas would have an evolutionary advantage: such a group would have a far greater investment in the idea of "us". Also, groups where this tendency can be easily exploited by the more intelligent members would fare better since power would shift towards individuals that are more likely to correctly react to danger.
I merely claimed that atheist scientists acted in the disinterest of actual science to avoid believing something that sounded biblical, and that reality ends up looking a whole lot like SOME kind of interpretation of Genesis.
I really don't know where or when you learned what you're talking about, because I've never heard of any explanations for the world's geology except periodic volcanic activity (falling ash), techtonic movement, the odd meteor, and glacier-wrought inland seas. I really can't think of any secular scientist avoiding the topic because it sounded Biblical, in fact I recall a lot of them saying things like "early pre-humans might have been around at the time, this could be how it slipped into our mythology". But my exposure doesn't include material more than 25-30 years old, so maybe that was well before my time.
Forced by and taking refuge from the Anthropic Principle. The fact that all the mathematical and physical constants in the universe are "set" in the very narrow ranges which allows the formation of matter, of atoms, of atoms heavier than iron, allows for the existence of liquids, of nuclear fusion and of life. The only palatable alternative to the conclusion that the universe was created for the purpose of sustaining life, is the conclusion that there are an infinite number of unobservable universes that DON'T "work" and that we happen to be in one of the only ones that does.
Oh please, the Anthropic Principle, at it's core, simply states that anything which is observed by humans will be tainted by human bias - it's just a truism! It doesn't mean that the universe was created for us, only that it seems that way from our perspective. The other non-human-friendly universes that get brought up when dealing with the Anthropic Principle are described for the sake of argument or illustration, and while some may take their existence literally, the Anthropic Principle itself does not require that they be real. I mean for cying out loud, this is
In the context of evolution you could define it as something along the lines of "the group that survived the longest is the one that benefitted most". If something makes me more likely to kill than be killed, it's beneficial to me. The same applies at the level of groups or species. This should be obvious.
Either that or OpenGL 3.0 will do away with the ridiculously convoluted spec/extension system we have now, and more developers will use it, and MS will be forced to adapt DX or let it die... And I really hope they'd choose to adapt, a lot of great innovation's come about because of competition between the two (GL's extension mechanism allows IHVs to slip in little features that aren't guaranteed to be useful, DX forces features which are proven to be useful to become mainstream, the cycle repeats).
As for me, personally, being a game developer - I don't intend to touch DX10 for a long time, and then only if GL's performance somehow becomes too horrible to bear on Windows. It doesn't offer anything that GL + NVIDIA's / the ARB's extensions can't already do except a cleaner interface and slightly less driver overhead.
And please don't bring up the Mac market...gawds...*resists urge to rant about Apple*
Truly sir, I am intrigued, and humbled, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter...
Hey! That's immortal soul thing, you insensitive clod! :-)
I'd mod parent up. Seriously.
I think it's pretty clear that he was talking about post-Roman Europe, which also rules out ancient Greece. You know, the bad old days when the lord of the land (big guy with a sword) was free to walk into any peasant's house, take his winter's food stores, rape his wife, and then force him to fight someone he's never heard of, for no reason except that his odds of survival were higher if he agreed to do so.
Yes, a lot of that went on in the early days of christianity, but ultimately it was the church that instilled the ideals of leaving each other alone (except when the other is a heathen, though that was an exception to day-to-day life), working hard for the glory of the church/your god-given country, providing for your family, and helping those in need when possible. I think most people would recognize as the pillars of old European (which is distinct from Greco-Roman) civilization.
Here, let me fix that for you: a few atheistic scientists today have found a mathematically elegant description of the universe which suggests an infinite number of unknowable universes, a theory which is interesting and, as far as we know, mathematically sound (though scientists are quick to point out that mathematically sound is not the same thing as real), which many other atheistic scientists consider neat (though no serious atheistic scientist would call it, a mere theory, literal truth or dogma).
Look, I agree, faith has a lot of utility, and our society is a lot less stable than it would be if we'd held firmly to the beliefs of the past. The destabalization we're seeing today scares me too, and I can certainly understand how horrific it must seem to someone that's used to the stability that religeous values provide (been there, done that). But we'd also be in the bad old days when most families had either lost a child to sickness or knew someone that had. Not that I could possibly explain why that would actually be a bad thing to someone that believes in a super-fun-happy after-life with your Best Pal [Deity], where you can hang out with all your dead friends, and all the cool historic figures you always dreamed of meeting as a kid (except the bad ones), for all [improbable time span].
I'm not even being entierly sarcastic here, I was brought up in the christian faith...believe me I know all the standard replies so just don't bother. Go flame another heathen - your kind is why I got out of that insanity to begin with.
Actually, scarry thought here...but if you paired this up with some drugs you could probably get people into a state where they'd tell you whatever you want to know, and with none of the trauma/inaccuracy that's built into current interrogation techniques. Yikes, now I'll be up all night wondering whether that would be better or worse than plain old torture (though, I'll admit, I'm leaning towards the side of better)...
In terms of early tribalism, the ones that figured it out grew into stable societies and prospered. The ones that didn't either stayed extremely small so that ordinary family bonds took care of most in-fighting, or were simply wiped out. Evolution.
A good example of religeon's utility is what happened in a lot of Eastern European nations after the communists had thoroughly suppressed the churches: they lost the old "love your neighbor, work hard, don't step out of line, and God will reward you in the end" ethic/morality. By the time my parents (who are from a formerly communist country) entered the work force (several generations later) it had become a sport to slack off as much as possible and steal some little thing from work each day - and I'm talking about the vast majority of the population here. After all, if it isn't somehow wrong to steal from the state, and be a burden on society in general then why bother working hard?
It doesn't sound like much but it adds up fast when you consider how many people did this, and that their economies really weren't geared to mass produce cheap, disposable items like ours are (pens are worth a hell of a lot more when they're made of metal rather than cheap plastics). If the communists had simply found a way to get (well, force) a genuine endorsement from the various churches (like all the rulers of the even more brutal and repressive fudal system that preceeded many of their regimes had) rather than fighting them and thus convincing the population that they were evil, they would have lasted a lot longer (higher levels of production, less energy expended policing the population).
I know, I'm simplifying in order to illustrate my point - there's obviously a lot more to it than that, and what you describe isn't invalid by any means (one only has to look at the Islamic world to see it in action). I just don't think it precludes the fact that religeous beliefs do serve to enforce societal norms - whatever those may be.
I agree 100% that the biggest roadblock to DX10 on XP is artificial, but it's not just the evil marketing guys trying to sell Vista. There's also the evil "discontinue XP" guys that don't want to dedicate resources to the old platform. As a game developer, I hate them for it, but it is good business sense - or would have been if Vista were actually the miracle it was supposed to be and people were actually adopting it at a decent rate.
Oh well. So much for squeezing out that extra 2 FPS (wheee!) by writing a DX backend. Continuing to be an OpenGL shop...at least until we do an XBOX title.