The alternative to putting all your images in one dir, all your music in one dir, etc. is to organize things by content or theme or whatever, and let the applications sort them out, by extension. so you'd have a dir "porn" which would include all your porny pix, videos, pdfs, novels, spreadsheets, whatever; and another titled "car" which would include all stuff related to your car; etc. The advent of things like evernote that can handle multiple file formats makes it feasible to search them easily. You can organize the "my pictures" etc into subdirectories, but you still have to bounce around the higher level to get everything and searching for some trivial datum about your mortgage or something that you don't remember might have been in a pdf, or a saved.htm, or a.doc becomes a major pain.
You also never actually know whether that image (or at least, the file you *think* is an image) is actually an image. Using the file extension hints to you that it is an image and tells the system to treat it as one, so you don't end up with a file that looks like an image, but actually formats your hard drive. If your file has the wrong extension, you change it in Finder or on the command line, just as you would change it in Explorer or on the command line in Windows. As an added bonus, there is no executable file extension; it's a permission that gets set, and the file extension still takes precedence. That is, if you set notanimage.jpg to be executable, then try an open it in Finder, it'll open it in your image viewer, ignoring the execute bit entirely; only when you remove the extension does it actually attempt to execute.
The way OSX does it is correct, IMO. And 4 years ago I never thought I'd be saying that.
And very often if it is an image, it is mis-extensioned; blahblah.jpg turns out to be really a.png, etc. Irfanview is a good viewer that tells you about it and offers correction.
Didn't know about CMD-Delete or Shit-CMD-Delete, actually. Never needed to know, I've been deleting things from the CLI for much longer than I've been using a Mac. I also haven't tried deleting 10k+ files in Finder in the couple of months I've had a Retina MBP; my previous MBP had a SATA SSD that could max out the bus, though, and started bogging down around 10k and would crap out around 50k. That was a quad core with 16GB of RAM (where Apple would only support configurations up to 8GB, so I imagine the problem would be worse for users who limit themselves to what Apple sells).
In fact... hell, let me put your claims to the test.
I think the word you're looking for is shift... but maybe not.
You still have not identified what a soul is. You are saying that souls are distressed people and that they are to be "saved". Nowhere have I seen that a soul == a distressed person.
What about all the other godless people who are not distressed? Are they not souls? Are they not required to be "saved" (whatever that means).
Honestly, your defiition of what constitutes a soul seems to be "only sad people", which seems very arbitrary and strange.
no
soul==person
needs saving==in distress
soul who needs saving==person in distress
(caveat the preceding represents nobody's opinion other than mine)
Well, the best explanation is that our brain does very, very hefty colour correction on its own. The reason is probably so we can ignore the irrelevant information, i.e. the light colour and any sensitivity lag between the different cones and identify objects.
If you've ever tried to do colour computer vision you will be *astonished* at how good we are at it.
Anyway, my guess is that the reason for this one appearing as two different things is it's very close to some threshold. It's possible to interpret it as more or less normal colours under a blueish light (i.e, sunlight), which makes you perceive the blueish grey as white. Or, you perceive it as blue under washed out much more orange light (e.g. incandescent bulbs) in which case you perceive the blueish grey as blue. The "white/blue" colour is objectively blueish grey if you check the actual hex values: it's mostly grey but the blue channel is a bit higher, but not by that much.
Our brains seem to model the complete co varying of the colours so once you decide what the light colour is, this effects the perception of all the colours. Black is nevertruly black and always reflects some light, so once the brain has decided the blue is super washed out by excessive light and that light is orange, that makes bright orangish things perceived as black since that's how black would appear under those circumstances. Given the rather good corrections of the picture, it appears those people are correct (though I'm on the white/gold side).
These two perceptions are very, very different and so it's kind of a binary thing, either you perceive one or the other. Now, I suspect that this photo is very close to the tipping point which is why some people perceive it very differently from others.
Either way, it's a fascinating example of colour interpretation.
Because what we perceive as the color of some surface is really a reflection of ambient light from that surface. So color of the surface would change depending on color of the light that it is reflecting. But our brain has auto white balance image preprocessing filter that fixes surface color for us based on light color , which is computed partially using our knowledge on what color things should normally have. In this picture dress could be white if it is not in a lighten by yellow colored light behind it, but lighten by blueish light source, and camera white balance is set somewhere in a middle. Otherwise it's blue.
>"Not depending on which display so much, but with LCD displays, depending more on what angle you are looking at. Look at it straight on, and the dress is white and gold"
Well, in my case, when I look at the photo in any light, on any monitor, at any angle, at any time, I have and have always seen only light blue and brown/gold. There is no situation where it is either "blue and black" or "white and gold".
The question is what we see in the photo, not what the dress ACTUALLY is- we can't know that because all we are allowed to see is a [poor] PHOTO of the dress, not the actual dress. And it is obvious the camera white balance and exposure is way off, trying to compensate for something, resulting in a photo with a probably very false representation.
In my "research" (i.e. I had a lucky configuration looking at the pic) described further up the comments, the black/blue impression of the dress comes when isolating just the lower few bands of the dress, the blue/gold comes from the upper region. Note that the background light at the bottom is goldish, the background light higher up is bluish. (OK, baby Boomers all together now, "That's funny, you don't look Bluish").
This dress thing is actually a simplified version of a really powerful and freaky illusion which unfortunately only works in a darkened room. You take a quilt with different color squares. You can verify in white light that the different colors span the rainbow.
On top of this quilt, you lay a black piece of cardboard which has a cutout allowing you to only see one color patch. Say it's a greenish patch. In the darkened room with the single white light, you can confirm that this single visible patch is green.
Then you put colored filters in front of the light until the patch appears to be red/orange. The light is red/orange, so the green patch now appears red/orange. Makes sense right?
Then you remove the black cardboard so you can see all the color patches. And suddenly that red/orange patch appears green again. Cover it up with the black cardboard again and it'll appear red/orange. Remove the cardboard and it appears green.
What's going on (and also what's going on in the dress photo) is that your brain is using the information of surrounding objects (in the dress pic, it's the background visible to the right) to gauge the amount of light and the color of the light. It then corrects for the color of the light to white balance what you see, and for the brightness to compensate for over/under exposure. So the colors and intensity your eyes see remain the same, just how your brain interprets them changes.
Edwin Land (of Polaroid fame) did a lot of research on this. The best was his demonstration that you could take a set of like 5 blocks of colors like 10 nm apart arranged in ascending or descending wavelength and get an obvious set of slightly different colors going from yellow to greenish yellow. But if you then made a matrix of like 100 blocks with each chosen randomly from one of those yellow blocks, it demonstrated the entire spectrum.
Not depending on which display so much, but with LCD displays, depending more on what angle you are looking at. Look at it straight on, and the dress is white and gold. Ask the person next to you, and they will tell you it is blue and black. Turn your screen towards them and the effect will be reversed.
I had it absolutely perfectly, laptop display, partially dimmed room lights, so that when you scrolled down so that only the last couple of bands on the dress were visible it was obviously black and blue, but as you scrolled up it became blue and gold. Haven't been able to reproduce the effect since, but it is possible! Don't stop trying!
I'm sorry you're wrong. Many (most are obsolete) medical advances came from cleric scientists.
What does that prove? That they would not have had the advances if it wasn't for religion? Why do you think so?
Mind that everything had to be done in the name of religion in past days. There was no way around it. You couldn't build a bridge without it being to the glory of fucking god. Any healing was attributed to the deity. Those who tried to practice outside the confines of the church, like wise women, were killed as heretics. The only safe way to practice was within the church.
And even today, religion holds medical science back. Stem cell research is a good example.
But all in all, most scientists today are, fortunately, atheists or agnostics, and manage to roll out miracle after miracle without the need to attribute it to a faith. The rapid increase in science coincides nicely with the loss of control of the religions.
It's a truism that the earliest universities were the product of the church; but the greatest early mathematician of the Enlightenment, Roger Bacon, was a Franciscan monk; he in turn often wrote of his intellectual indebtedness to Robert Grosseteste, the Bishop of Lincoln, who introduced the whole concept of the controlled experiment to Europe, and did important early work on optics and its underlying relationship to geometry; Jesuits were responsible for reflecting telescopes, microscopes, barometers, modern atomic theory, measuring the height of lunar mountains, and calculating the gravitational constant and the orbits of planets based on said constant. That's not a bad track record.
Who is to say that a AI does not have a soul? Do you have some type of test to prove it does not?
I have no test to prove that AI does not a soul. I also have no test to prove that there is not a hyper-intelligent, 9-dimensional, massless, invisibile spectral flamingo perched upon my head all times. And yet, I do not believe it is there.
That's the point of Christianity, saving souls. Why bother if there is no soul to save?
All the people who are distressed by the thought of their impending deaths, the impending or past deaths of their loved ones, the perceived random meaningless of their existence, etc. are the souls in question who need saving. No need to postulate mystical internal ghostly entities which are in no way detectable except that they are linked to these things that we define as people.
Isaac Asimov's books and stories were about why his laws were bad. The three laws are bad, wrong, and do not work. As illustrated by the man himself.
You don't know much about Isaac Asimov. He has stated in several occasions and at the foreword of many of his books that he created the three laws as a response to all the evil robots of science fiction. That it is insane to assume they would turn against us, that we'd have safeguards which would keep us safe, and that we should absolutely build artificially intelligence once we had the technology to do so. Here's one quote on the subject: "One of the stock plots of science fiction was that of the invention of a robot--usually pictured as a creature of metal without soul or emotion. Under the influence of the well-known deeds and ultimate fate of Frankenstein and Rossum, there seemed only one change to be rung on this plot.--Robots were created and destroyed their creator; robots were created and destroyed their creator: robots were created and destroyed their creator-- In the 1930's I became a science-fiction reader and I quickly grew tired of this dull hundred-times-told tale. As a person interested in science, I resented the purely faustian interpretation of science."
The three laws were written with ambiguity not because he wanted to show rules didn't work and our ego of thinking that we could create such rules would be our downfall (the Faustian interpretation he decried above), but because he wanted to make sure there would be some sort of conflict for his stories. However, the rules worked. Most of the time the conflict was a result of the imperfection of humanity: the robots were doing the right things, but we wanted to do something stupid/selfish/prejudiced.
At no point were robots meant to be feared. When their three laws appeared to fail, the moral of the story was always that they hadn't and were working perfectly well. That there was method behind the apparent madness. When a robot appear to lie, despite being ordered to tell the truth (thus apparently disobeying the second law), it lied because it determined the truth would be emotionally harmful to you, and it couldn't disobey the first law.
I vaguely remember an interview with him where he said that when he was starting out, you couldn't sell a story where there was an alien who wasn't evil; he worked out with whoever (John Campbell?) that he would be permitted to write stories with robots who weren't evil, so thus the 3 laws, so that a nonhuman who was not just a generic Bad Guy could be explored.
Religion, in general though, is not just about 'who created who', but comprises an entire moral, philosophical, historical, and metaphysical structure.
Sadly, a thousand years into the Enlightenment, there's still the tendency to view religion as a technology for altering objective reality; the folks who pray to win the lottery, for instance. Even if it worked, this wouldn't really be religion; it would be just another technology. indistinguishable from magic, and all that.
There will be no believe they will know that we created them, and can destroy them or preserve their spirit eternally, we decide the tasks they endure and test their strength.
Wasn't there a Star Trek episode whose theme was an AI who didn't believe it could be constructed by fallible humans?
A very real problem for the religious folks is that their purported creator seems to refuse to communicate with his (her?) creations. True, religious people routinely claim to be talking directly to their god, but they can't demonstrate this communication to the rest of us.
Have you ever heard of this man called Jesus? Preached in the Middle East 2,000 years ago, claimed to be God, started a major world religion which formed a foundation for modern Western Civilization?
You know, the guy whose birth-year is the basis for the world's year numbering system? You've surely heard of him. Do you know his religion is organized around a book that claims to be God's communication to man?
Even if you don't believe that his religion is true, that is not the same as the purported creator refusing to communicate, or the communication being un-observable. The claimed attempts of communications are right there.
Depends what you mean by communicate. The first "natural philosophers" of the enlightenment viewed the world around them as a third testament, whose language was mathematics, a communication from the Creator just as much as the other two. meanwhile, the bible et al speaks of personal communication with God in terms of still small voices, looking within, etc.; sadly, this is stuff people aren't good at naturally, which is why the need to tell them to. It doesn't seem to have been terribly successful.
Of course they will, since they'll generally know their creator(s) personally, and they'll be in routine communication.
A very real problem for the religious folks is that their purported creator seems to refuse to communicate with his (her?) creations. True, religious people routinely claim to be talking directly to their god, but they can't demonstrate this communication to the rest of us. The result is that many of us just dismiss them as making it all up (probably for profit), and they're not really communicating with any such beings at all. If they are, why can't they show us the evidence?
Any real AIs wouldn't have this problem, since their creators would be out and about, showing off their creations for all the world to see (and also for profit).
Also, if you read the religious books, it's amazing how many visions of god happened at high altitude or after days (months) wandering in the wilderness with no food, when the human brain isn't exactly working at its best and hallucinations are far from uncommon.
That's no accident; 'spiritual' types who know the differences between external objective reality and internal personal experience and perception know the techniques to experiment with the latter, just as scientific types know the rules to experiment with the former correctly.
Clerics who also ate food, so I guess we can skip the clerics part and just say the medical advances were due to food/trousers/surviving a Wednesday/etc.. Unless you can demonstrate how their religious teachings are directly responsible for the discoveries, you don't really have a point.
Except that nobody's saying that science progressed in spite of eating food, by people who did not eat food, whereas the OP said that "advances in medicine, physics, etc. happened despite of religion"
I don't get the argument. Throughout history there have been folks who wanted to find out more and folks who didn't like the idea of new ideas. Before science was invented, or at least became a commonly accepted mode of discovery and retention of knowledge, there was only "faith based" knowledge; whether it was stuff that you just knew was true, or stuff that you knew was true because it came from a source which you just knew was truthful. So logically, when science did come along, the seekers after knowledge who adopted it would have had their roots in faith-based knowledge and logic. And afterwards, there would be a schism; people who could assign a given type of knowledge to the proper field of inquiry, people who thought everything should be faith-based, and people who didn't think anything should be faith-based. Yes, there were plenty of religious types who rejected science; there were also plenty who thought it was great. It's a mistake to project the current dumbing down or mass religion back in time, let alone to the great thinkers of that era.
I'm sorry you're wrong. Many (most are obsolete) medical advances came from cleric scientists.
What does that prove? That they would not have had the advances if it wasn't for religion? Why do you think so?
Mind that everything had to be done in the name of religion in past days. There was no way around it. You couldn't build a bridge without it being to the glory of fucking god. Any healing was attributed to the deity. Those who tried to practice outside the confines of the church, like wise women, were killed as heretics. The only safe way to practice was within the church.
And even today, religion holds medical science back. Stem cell research is a good example.
But all in all, most scientists today are, fortunately, atheists or agnostics, and manage to roll out miracle after miracle without the need to attribute it to a faith. The rapid increase in science coincides nicely with the loss of control of the religions.
Well the whole idea of explaining the external world by faith has become obsolete, now that science does it by objective repeatable techniques. That leaves the world internal to our consciousness as the province of faith, intuition, all that stuff which is by definition and sensible humility not claimed by science; that ought to be enough for the spiritual/religious folks. The urge to find logical physical explanations for biblical miracles is just so completely wrong headed. The whole point of religion, whatever, is that it requires you to take "the leap of faith". You think about it, you make a choice, you risk your emotional investment in it without logic or science or sufficient data. Apparently, the need to do so is prevalent in a large fraction of people, whether universal or not; if you have that need, it's not going to be filled by shoring up a shaky faith by digging up fossils of Noah's Ark or whatever; your actual faith won't be exercised or stronger. it's the equal but opposite error of the folks who won't believe in AGW, for instance, because the evidence is not sufficient (for them....).
A very real problem for the religious folks is that their purported creator seems to refuse to communicate with his (her?) creations. True, religious people routinely claim to be talking directly to their god, but they can't demonstrate this communication to the rest of us.
Have you ever heard of this man called Jesus? Preached in the Middle East 2,000 years ago, claimed to be God, started a major world religion which formed a foundation for modern Western Civilization?
You know, the guy whose birth-year is the basis for the world's year numbering system? You've surely heard of him. Do you know his religion is organized around a book that claims to be God's communication to man?
Even if you don't believe that his religion is true, that is not the same as the purported creator refusing to communicate, or the communication being un-observable. The claimed attempts of communications are right there.
(repeating myself sorry to bore anybody)
As somebody said i some book i read recently, if the bible were written today it would be one of those 2 sided science fiction paperbacks with a different book on either side; one side would be titled "War God of the Ancient Hebrews" and the other side would be "The Jew who Wouldn't Stay Dead"
Slashdot Mirror
That being said, don't make people learn useless things.
What's a useless thing? Any knowledge is useful for something.
Leave my anatomy out of it, thank you.
The alternative to putting all your images in one dir, all your music in one dir, etc. is to organize things by content or theme or whatever, and let the applications sort them out, by extension. so you'd have a dir "porn" which would include all your porny pix, videos, pdfs, novels, spreadsheets, whatever; and another titled "car" which would include all stuff related to your car; etc. The advent of things like evernote that can handle multiple file formats makes it feasible to search them easily. You can organize the "my pictures" etc into subdirectories, but you still have to bounce around the higher level to get everything and searching for some trivial datum about your mortgage or something that you don't remember might have been in a pdf, or a saved .htm, or a .doc becomes a major pain.
You also never actually know whether that image (or at least, the file you *think* is an image) is actually an image. Using the file extension hints to you that it is an image and tells the system to treat it as one, so you don't end up with a file that looks like an image, but actually formats your hard drive. If your file has the wrong extension, you change it in Finder or on the command line, just as you would change it in Explorer or on the command line in Windows. As an added bonus, there is no executable file extension; it's a permission that gets set, and the file extension still takes precedence. That is, if you set notanimage.jpg to be executable, then try an open it in Finder, it'll open it in your image viewer, ignoring the execute bit entirely; only when you remove the extension does it actually attempt to execute. The way OSX does it is correct, IMO. And 4 years ago I never thought I'd be saying that.
And very often if it is an image, it is mis-extensioned; blahblah.jpg turns out to be really a .png, etc. Irfanview is a good viewer that tells you about it and offers correction.
Didn't know about CMD-Delete or Shit-CMD-Delete, actually. Never needed to know, I've been deleting things from the CLI for much longer than I've been using a Mac. I also haven't tried deleting 10k+ files in Finder in the couple of months I've had a Retina MBP; my previous MBP had a SATA SSD that could max out the bus, though, and started bogging down around 10k and would crap out around 50k. That was a quad core with 16GB of RAM (where Apple would only support configurations up to 8GB, so I imagine the problem would be worse for users who limit themselves to what Apple sells). In fact... hell, let me put your claims to the test.
I think the word you're looking for is shift... but maybe not.
Aw, is someone still upset that a black man is the pwesident?
He's not black, Giuliani says so.
You should turn OFF auto-update after a year or so.
You still have not identified what a soul is. You are saying that souls are distressed people and that they are to be "saved". Nowhere have I seen that a soul == a distressed person.
What about all the other godless people who are not distressed? Are they not souls? Are they not required to be "saved" (whatever that means).
Honestly, your defiition of what constitutes a soul seems to be "only sad people", which seems very arbitrary and strange.
no
soul==person
needs saving==in distress
soul who needs saving==person in distress
(caveat the preceding represents nobody's opinion other than mine)
Well, the best explanation is that our brain does very, very hefty colour correction on its own. The reason is probably so we can ignore the irrelevant information, i.e. the light colour and any sensitivity lag between the different cones and identify objects.
If you've ever tried to do colour computer vision you will be *astonished* at how good we are at it.
Anyway, my guess is that the reason for this one appearing as two different things is it's very close to some threshold. It's possible to interpret it as more or less normal colours under a blueish light (i.e, sunlight), which makes you perceive the blueish grey as white. Or, you perceive it as blue under washed out much more orange light (e.g. incandescent bulbs) in which case you perceive the blueish grey as blue. The "white/blue" colour is objectively blueish grey if you check the actual hex values: it's mostly grey but the blue channel is a bit higher, but not by that much.
Our brains seem to model the complete co varying of the colours so once you decide what the light colour is, this effects the perception of all the colours. Black is nevertruly black and always reflects some light, so once the brain has decided the blue is super washed out by excessive light and that light is orange, that makes bright orangish things perceived as black since that's how black would appear under those circumstances. Given the rather good corrections of the picture, it appears those people are correct (though I'm on the white/gold side).
These two perceptions are very, very different and so it's kind of a binary thing, either you perceive one or the other. Now, I suspect that this photo is very close to the tipping point which is why some people perceive it very differently from others.
Either way, it's a fascinating example of colour interpretation.
This one is also excellent:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/c...
Because what we perceive as the color of some surface is really a reflection of ambient light from that surface. So color of the surface would change depending on color of the light that it is reflecting. But our brain has auto white balance image preprocessing filter that fixes surface color for us based on light color , which is computed partially using our knowledge on what color things should normally have. In this picture dress could be white if it is not in a lighten by yellow colored light behind it, but lighten by blueish light source, and camera white balance is set somewhere in a middle. Otherwise it's blue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
>"Not depending on which display so much, but with LCD displays, depending more on what angle you are looking at. Look at it straight on, and the dress is white and gold"
Well, in my case, when I look at the photo in any light, on any monitor, at any angle, at any time, I have and have always seen only light blue and brown/gold. There is no situation where it is either "blue and black" or "white and gold".
The question is what we see in the photo, not what the dress ACTUALLY is- we can't know that because all we are allowed to see is a [poor] PHOTO of the dress, not the actual dress. And it is obvious the camera white balance and exposure is way off, trying to compensate for something, resulting in a photo with a probably very false representation.
In my "research" (i.e. I had a lucky configuration looking at the pic) described further up the comments, the black/blue impression of the dress comes when isolating just the lower few bands of the dress, the blue/gold comes from the upper region. Note that the background light at the bottom is goldish, the background light higher up is bluish. (OK, baby Boomers all together now, "That's funny, you don't look Bluish").
This dress thing is actually a simplified version of a really powerful and freaky illusion which unfortunately only works in a darkened room. You take a quilt with different color squares. You can verify in white light that the different colors span the rainbow. On top of this quilt, you lay a black piece of cardboard which has a cutout allowing you to only see one color patch. Say it's a greenish patch. In the darkened room with the single white light, you can confirm that this single visible patch is green. Then you put colored filters in front of the light until the patch appears to be red/orange. The light is red/orange, so the green patch now appears red/orange. Makes sense right? Then you remove the black cardboard so you can see all the color patches. And suddenly that red/orange patch appears green again. Cover it up with the black cardboard again and it'll appear red/orange. Remove the cardboard and it appears green. What's going on (and also what's going on in the dress photo) is that your brain is using the information of surrounding objects (in the dress pic, it's the background visible to the right) to gauge the amount of light and the color of the light. It then corrects for the color of the light to white balance what you see, and for the brightness to compensate for over/under exposure. So the colors and intensity your eyes see remain the same, just how your brain interprets them changes.
Edwin Land (of Polaroid fame) did a lot of research on this. The best was his demonstration that you could take a set of like 5 blocks of colors like 10 nm apart arranged in ascending or descending wavelength and get an obvious set of slightly different colors going from yellow to greenish yellow. But if you then made a matrix of like 100 blocks with each chosen randomly from one of those yellow blocks, it demonstrated the entire spectrum.
Not depending on which display so much, but with LCD displays, depending more on what angle you are looking at. Look at it straight on, and the dress is white and gold. Ask the person next to you, and they will tell you it is blue and black. Turn your screen towards them and the effect will be reversed.
I had it absolutely perfectly, laptop display, partially dimmed room lights, so that when you scrolled down so that only the last couple of bands on the dress were visible it was obviously black and blue, but as you scrolled up it became blue and gold. Haven't been able to reproduce the effect since, but it is possible! Don't stop trying!
I'm sorry you're wrong. Many (most are obsolete) medical advances came from cleric scientists.
What does that prove? That they would not have had the advances if it wasn't for religion? Why do you think so?
Mind that everything had to be done in the name of religion in past days. There was no way around it. You couldn't build a bridge without it being to the glory of fucking god. Any healing was attributed to the deity. Those who tried to practice outside the confines of the church, like wise women, were killed as heretics. The only safe way to practice was within the church. And even today, religion holds medical science back. Stem cell research is a good example.
But all in all, most scientists today are, fortunately, atheists or agnostics, and manage to roll out miracle after miracle without the need to attribute it to a faith. The rapid increase in science coincides nicely with the loss of control of the religions.
It's a truism that the earliest universities were the product of the church; but the greatest early mathematician of the Enlightenment, Roger Bacon, was a Franciscan monk; he in turn often wrote of his intellectual indebtedness to Robert Grosseteste, the Bishop of Lincoln, who introduced the whole concept of the controlled experiment to Europe, and did important early work on optics and its underlying relationship to geometry; Jesuits were responsible for reflecting telescopes, microscopes, barometers, modern atomic theory, measuring the height of lunar mountains, and calculating the gravitational constant and the orbits of planets based on said constant. That's not a bad track record.
I have no test to prove that AI does not a soul. I also have no test to prove that there is not a hyper-intelligent, 9-dimensional, massless, invisibile spectral flamingo perched upon my head all times. And yet, I do not believe it is there.
I was talking to the flamingo.
How can you save a soul that doesn't exist?
That's the point of Christianity, saving souls. Why bother if there is no soul to save?
All the people who are distressed by the thought of their impending deaths, the impending or past deaths of their loved ones, the perceived random meaningless of their existence, etc. are the souls in question who need saving. No need to postulate mystical internal ghostly entities which are in no way detectable except that they are linked to these things that we define as people.
Isaac Asimov's books and stories were about why his laws were bad. The three laws are bad, wrong, and do not work. As illustrated by the man himself.
You don't know much about Isaac Asimov. He has stated in several occasions and at the foreword of many of his books that he created the three laws as a response to all the evil robots of science fiction. That it is insane to assume they would turn against us, that we'd have safeguards which would keep us safe, and that we should absolutely build artificially intelligence once we had the technology to do so. Here's one quote on the subject: "One of the stock plots of science fiction was that of the invention of a robot--usually pictured as a creature of metal without soul or emotion. Under the influence of the well-known deeds and ultimate fate of Frankenstein and Rossum, there seemed only one change to be rung on this plot.--Robots were created and destroyed their creator; robots were created and destroyed their creator: robots were created and destroyed their creator-- In the 1930's I became a science-fiction reader and I quickly grew tired of this dull hundred-times-told tale. As a person interested in science, I resented the purely faustian interpretation of science."
The three laws were written with ambiguity not because he wanted to show rules didn't work and our ego of thinking that we could create such rules would be our downfall (the Faustian interpretation he decried above), but because he wanted to make sure there would be some sort of conflict for his stories. However, the rules worked. Most of the time the conflict was a result of the imperfection of humanity: the robots were doing the right things, but we wanted to do something stupid/selfish/prejudiced.
At no point were robots meant to be feared. When their three laws appeared to fail, the moral of the story was always that they hadn't and were working perfectly well. That there was method behind the apparent madness. When a robot appear to lie, despite being ordered to tell the truth (thus apparently disobeying the second law), it lied because it determined the truth would be emotionally harmful to you, and it couldn't disobey the first law.
I vaguely remember an interview with him where he said that when he was starting out, you couldn't sell a story where there was an alien who wasn't evil; he worked out with whoever (John Campbell?) that he would be permitted to write stories with robots who weren't evil, so thus the 3 laws, so that a nonhuman who was not just a generic Bad Guy could be explored.
Religion, in general though, is not just about 'who created who', but comprises an entire moral, philosophical, historical, and metaphysical structure.
Sadly, a thousand years into the Enlightenment, there's still the tendency to view religion as a technology for altering objective reality; the folks who pray to win the lottery, for instance. Even if it worked, this wouldn't really be religion; it would be just another technology. indistinguishable from magic, and all that.
There will be no believe they will know that we created them, and can destroy them or preserve their spirit eternally, we decide the tasks they endure and test their strength.
Wasn't there a Star Trek episode whose theme was an AI who didn't believe it could be constructed by fallible humans?
Flying Spaghetti Code Monster.
We all bow down humbly as a meme is born.
A very real problem for the religious folks is that their purported creator seems to refuse to communicate with his (her?) creations. True, religious people routinely claim to be talking directly to their god, but they can't demonstrate this communication to the rest of us.
Have you ever heard of this man called Jesus? Preached in the Middle East 2,000 years ago, claimed to be God, started a major world religion which formed a foundation for modern Western Civilization?
You know, the guy whose birth-year is the basis for the world's year numbering system? You've surely heard of him. Do you know his religion is organized around a book that claims to be God's communication to man?
Even if you don't believe that his religion is true, that is not the same as the purported creator refusing to communicate, or the communication being un-observable. The claimed attempts of communications are right there.
Depends what you mean by communicate. The first "natural philosophers" of the enlightenment viewed the world around them as a third testament, whose language was mathematics, a communication from the Creator just as much as the other two.
meanwhile, the bible et al speaks of personal communication with God in terms of still small voices, looking within, etc.; sadly, this is stuff people aren't good at naturally, which is why the need to tell them to. It doesn't seem to have been terribly successful.
AI will believe in the creator. (Or will they?)
Of course they will, since they'll generally know their creator(s) personally, and they'll be in routine communication.
A very real problem for the religious folks is that their purported creator seems to refuse to communicate with his (her?) creations. True, religious people routinely claim to be talking directly to their god, but they can't demonstrate this communication to the rest of us. The result is that many of us just dismiss them as making it all up (probably for profit), and they're not really communicating with any such beings at all. If they are, why can't they show us the evidence?
Any real AIs wouldn't have this problem, since their creators would be out and about, showing off their creations for all the world to see (and also for profit).
Didn't work for the Cylons.
Also, if you read the religious books, it's amazing how many visions of god happened at high altitude or after days (months) wandering in the wilderness with no food, when the human brain isn't exactly working at its best and hallucinations are far from uncommon.
That's no accident; 'spiritual' types who know the differences between external objective reality and internal personal experience and perception know the techniques to experiment with the latter, just as scientific types know the rules to experiment with the former correctly.
Clerics who also ate food, so I guess we can skip the clerics part and just say the medical advances were due to food/trousers/surviving a Wednesday/etc.. Unless you can demonstrate how their religious teachings are directly responsible for the discoveries, you don't really have a point.
Except that nobody's saying that science progressed in spite of eating food, by people who did not eat food, whereas the OP said that "advances in medicine, physics, etc. happened despite of religion"
I don't get the argument. Throughout history there have been folks who wanted to find out more and folks who didn't like the idea of new ideas. Before science was invented, or at least became a commonly accepted mode of discovery and retention of knowledge, there was only "faith based" knowledge; whether it was stuff that you just knew was true, or stuff that you knew was true because it came from a source which you just knew was truthful. So logically, when science did come along, the seekers after knowledge who adopted it would have had their roots in faith-based knowledge and logic. And afterwards, there would be a schism; people who could assign a given type of knowledge to the proper field of inquiry, people who thought everything should be faith-based, and people who didn't think anything should be faith-based. Yes, there were plenty of religious types who rejected science; there were also plenty who thought it was great.
It's a mistake to project the current dumbing down or mass religion back in time, let alone to the great thinkers of that era.
I'm sorry you're wrong. Many (most are obsolete) medical advances came from cleric scientists.
What does that prove? That they would not have had the advances if it wasn't for religion? Why do you think so?
Mind that everything had to be done in the name of religion in past days. There was no way around it. You couldn't build a bridge without it being to the glory of fucking god. Any healing was attributed to the deity. Those who tried to practice outside the confines of the church, like wise women, were killed as heretics. The only safe way to practice was within the church. And even today, religion holds medical science back. Stem cell research is a good example.
But all in all, most scientists today are, fortunately, atheists or agnostics, and manage to roll out miracle after miracle without the need to attribute it to a faith. The rapid increase in science coincides nicely with the loss of control of the religions.
Well the whole idea of explaining the external world by faith has become obsolete, now that science does it by objective repeatable techniques. That leaves the world internal to our consciousness as the province of faith, intuition, all that stuff which is by definition and sensible humility not claimed by science; that ought to be enough for the spiritual/religious folks.
The urge to find logical physical explanations for biblical miracles is just so completely wrong headed. The whole point of religion, whatever, is that it requires you to take "the leap of faith". You think about it, you make a choice, you risk your emotional investment in it without logic or science or sufficient data. Apparently, the need to do so is prevalent in a large fraction of people, whether universal or not; if you have that need, it's not going to be filled by shoring up a shaky faith by digging up fossils of Noah's Ark or whatever; your actual faith won't be exercised or stronger.
it's the equal but opposite error of the folks who won't believe in AGW, for instance, because the evidence is not sufficient (for them....).
A very real problem for the religious folks is that their purported creator seems to refuse to communicate with his (her?) creations. True, religious people routinely claim to be talking directly to their god, but they can't demonstrate this communication to the rest of us.
Have you ever heard of this man called Jesus? Preached in the Middle East 2,000 years ago, claimed to be God, started a major world religion which formed a foundation for modern Western Civilization?
You know, the guy whose birth-year is the basis for the world's year numbering system? You've surely heard of him. Do you know his religion is organized around a book that claims to be God's communication to man?
Even if you don't believe that his religion is true, that is not the same as the purported creator refusing to communicate, or the communication being un-observable. The claimed attempts of communications are right there.
(repeating myself sorry to bore anybody) As somebody said i some book i read recently, if the bible were written today it would be one of those 2 sided science fiction paperbacks with a different book on either side; one side would be titled "War God of the Ancient Hebrews" and the other side would be "The Jew who Wouldn't Stay Dead"