I've always wondered how that contradiction is supposed to work... God is supposedly above and beyond space, time, causality, physics, logic and basic common sense, and yet if you're in his good books he'll come and talk to you out of a bush on fire.
Please, you can have one or the other and not be immediately inconsistent with yourself, but not both.
I have the same problems, but it normally appears when I try and go to a site by just typing part of the URL into Firefox and expecting it to find the rest.
Really need to change ISP... and luckily I live in a country where that's feasible.
The difference being that if it works by the placebo effect, we can't just go ahead and put them in every car as standard, because people won't know they're there and there won't be a placebo effect.
I see so much wrong with your post I'm not sure where to start... let's just go one bit at a time.
First off, "no mind no universe" is demonstrably false by the fact that for a mind to come into being, the universe needs to already be there to provide somewhere to live for the organism that's going to have a mind. No universe means no minds, so if it were also true in the other direction, neither universe nor mind could exist since they'd both be in need of the other
Next up, you mentioned human life specifically not observing the Big Bang. So only humans have minds? Why not chimps or other great apes? They exhibit all the features of intelligence to some degree or another, as do all kinds of other animals. Humans are different by degree of intelligence, not by a huge leap forward.
Lastly, you don't believe in other minds? At first I took this to mean that you don't believe in non-human minds, but do you actually mean you think yourself to be the only mind in the universe? Really? I have to wonder why you would bother posting on Slashdot, or indeed reading it, if that's the case, it's not like any of the commenters or editors have minds, so why bother to tell us what you think?
They aren't effecting *us* gravitationally from outside of the area we can see, they're affecting something on the edge of what we can see.
Then again... if the light has had time to reach us from when [distant object] was affected by [even more distant object] (so that we could see it happening) then so should the gravity from [even more distant object]... if I remember rightly, gravity "travels" at light-speed.
This whole thing has that air of "probably interesting, might be bullshit, might be too complex for armchair science-ing". It all sounds good, but then there are apparent holes, but you'd think that the scientists doing the research would have already thought of anything that's obvious enough for us to think of it in the time between reading a Slashdot article and writing a comment.
I object to "save the planet" on the basis that whatever we do, we will have approximately zero effect on the planet. The minutely thin green layer of stuff on the surface of the planet, perhaps, but the planet is a colossal ball of metal and rock, it's not going anywhere soon
As for exterminating life on Earth... we'd have to be very thorough - there's stuff living in the volcanic vents in the depths of the oceans, entirely independent of the Sun, I doubt we'd be able to kill them without a substantial effort to do so. People talk about "killing the planet" when they really mean "killing the part of the biosphere that interests us". It's still a big problem if we do kill it, but it's not the end of life on Earth
It's a rapidly cycling series of photos of Lindsay Lohan, demonstrating that she has approximately one facial expression (you can see the hair/clothes blinking around, but the face stays the same).
There's a fungus growing inside the post-meltdown reactor at Chernobyl that appears to be using the radiation as an energy source (capturing the energy with melanin I believe). Using radioactive waste instead of sunlight, check.
There's a bacteria found in a factory out-flow somewhere, capable of digesting certain nylon byproducts. Eating garbage, check.
As for tailpipe fumes... well quite a lot of things use CO2, I believe they're called plants. The other gases in exhaust fumes are still fairly poisonous but I'm sure evolution will get on top of that one soon.
Makes me wonder what would happen if someone stated "Megapedia" and threw open the doors to any and every type of information... the stuff Wikipedia doesn't want because it's not "encyclopaedic" enough, and all the things listed on the "What Wikipedia is not" page, welcome it all in with open arms.
The main problem would be overcoming the automatic "Wikipedia it" response to a need for info... well, I guess that and the amount of inane drivel you'd get posted.
You're starting to make a little more sense, but the "to keep us easily ruled" stuff reads like a bad conspiracy theory. As a species we've been at this "civilisation" game for a LONG time, because it's been to our benefit, not because some shadowy controllers dictated it... I'm pretty sure bakers and blacksmiths out-date the Illuminati.
I agree that people should be more aware of how stuff works outside of their own little bubble, but I think that's more of a general symptom of people being increasingly cut off from the people around them (and the world at large) than it is a flaw in the idea of specialising to get things done. What you were saying originally (that every person should be forced to participate in every form of labour that they rely on) goes a little further than just "knowing what's going on"
People should be more involved with the world outside their own sphere, yes. They should be better informed and subjected to less propaganda, yes. A lot of things suck about the exact current situation, I agree... but "if you want to eat, go farm it" isn't a solution to any of that. If anything it would mean people spend all their waking hours desperately trying to do their allotted share of everything (the amount of time spent on the travel between places involved in that would be a killer) and never have any time left to think about things.
Friggin love Steam. Hell, I've bought games on Steam after already having a pirated copy because the games were too good to not throw some money at the people who made them.
Steam is about the only (legal) place where I can find, buy, download and play a game without ever having to leave my chair... Steam rocks.
I would worry that the 1% of bacteria that aren't killed by cleaning product X are the ones you really need to worry about, and by killing off all the competition you'd give them free rein over the area.
Buying things is quick, easy, and without hassle. Pirating on the other hand is a pain in the ass, time consuming, and risky. My time is worth more than what it takes to pirate
I have the exact opposite leanings. To go buy a game I have to go out to some shitty games store (the ones around here are all shitty, your mileage may vary) and that takes time out of my day. At the very least I have to go online and buy it, and then it takes a few days to arrive. Pirated copy... takes minutes to find a torrent, then I can leave it downloading in the background and when I come back later it's done
If it were feasible, total self sufficiency would be kinda cool, but even with the technology you mentioned it's going to be impractical for any individual to do everything for themselves - we built up a society full of specialists and tradespeople for a reason.
Even as early as Plato's days he was writing that every man has his particular skill or specialisation and should do that job well, become an expert etc rather than try and be a jack of all trades.
I'm not saying it's not a good idea in principle to have more decentralised control of things - focusing all the power into a few hands very often works out badly for everyone else, but having every single person participate in every single task involved in the creation of every single item they want to use simply is not possible. Well... unless you live the life of a Buddhist monk and have almost no wants/possessions at all.
It's not practical for every person to participate in the creation of every single thing they want - it's far more efficient to have people who specialise in producing one thing, then trade with each other. You can do that trade directly (offer people whatever it is you're good at making in exchange for whatever it is you want from them) or, as most of the world does it, use money as a universally agreed placeholder - the problem with direct trade being that not everyone will want to swap for the thing you're offering.
To be honest it sounds like you want to return to the pre-civilised world, before modern society, and live as a hunter-gatherer or something. Personally I'd rather have all the benefits that society brings... like medicine, manufacturing and Slashdot, but hey, good luck with your thing.
That person might be convinced of it, but that doesn't make their story true.
I don't take issue with Noah (or whoever) for writing that there was a global flood - they lived a long time ago and didn't have the science to know any better. The problem is the people now who read that story and claim that it's absolute truth, despite the myriad ways in which it is in fact not possible
Ah, fair point.
Ok, in that case education is being replaced with... what... a daycare service? If they aren't learning useful skills AND aren't even having facts drummed into them by rote, what exactly are they supposed to be learning?
I myself purchased the game, downloaded and installed the (cracked) pirated copy, then replaced the serial number in the system registry with the legitimate registration number.
Can you advise on how well that works when it comes to the online components of the game? I kinda want to play it, but the pirated copies can't go online and a legit copy comes laden with DRM nastiness (both deal breakers for me) but if you can combine the 2 to make it work fully then I'm willing to pay for the serial number.
The real answer is that the entire flood story is impossible in about a dozen different ways... but I guess for the purpose of winding up Christians, pointing out a contradiction within their beliefs is more effective than just telling them that they're flat out wrong.
All Biology is today is memorizing where a heart is in a cat, pig, frog, etc. And memorizing muscles, bones, and classifying animals.
I think you'll find that this is precisely the problem - education is being replaced with rote learning of stuff you could look up in 5 seconds with access to Google/Wikipedia, and would likely forget the details of within hours of the exam (if you remember it for that long in the first place)
Sure, it's really useful to know it by heart if you're using it day to day (and would be pretty stupid to not know if you were using it day to day, but it'd be a lot more useful for schools to teach relevant skills and methodology, the scientific method or the important theories in science.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always wondered how that contradiction is supposed to work... God is supposedly above and beyond space, time, causality, physics, logic and basic common sense, and yet if you're in his good books he'll come and talk to you out of a bush on fire.
Please, you can have one or the other and not be immediately inconsistent with yourself, but not both.
Wait... I'm no biologist, but there's an amino acid that is also a base?
I read it that way at first too...
That would be pretty swish though - an AI writing music. Someone should get on that, give AL (caps for clarity) some competition.
I have the same problems, but it normally appears when I try and go to a site by just typing part of the URL into Firefox and expecting it to find the rest. Really need to change ISP... and luckily I live in a country where that's feasible.
The difference being that if it works by the placebo effect, we can't just go ahead and put them in every car as standard, because people won't know they're there and there won't be a placebo effect.
I see so much wrong with your post I'm not sure where to start... let's just go one bit at a time.
First off, "no mind no universe" is demonstrably false by the fact that for a mind to come into being, the universe needs to already be there to provide somewhere to live for the organism that's going to have a mind. No universe means no minds, so if it were also true in the other direction, neither universe nor mind could exist since they'd both be in need of the other
Next up, you mentioned human life specifically not observing the Big Bang. So only humans have minds? Why not chimps or other great apes? They exhibit all the features of intelligence to some degree or another, as do all kinds of other animals. Humans are different by degree of intelligence, not by a huge leap forward.
Lastly, you don't believe in other minds? At first I took this to mean that you don't believe in non-human minds, but do you actually mean you think yourself to be the only mind in the universe? Really? I have to wonder why you would bother posting on Slashdot, or indeed reading it, if that's the case, it's not like any of the commenters or editors have minds, so why bother to tell us what you think?
They aren't effecting *us* gravitationally from outside of the area we can see, they're affecting something on the edge of what we can see.
Then again... if the light has had time to reach us from when [distant object] was affected by [even more distant object] (so that we could see it happening) then so should the gravity from [even more distant object]... if I remember rightly, gravity "travels" at light-speed.
This whole thing has that air of "probably interesting, might be bullshit, might be too complex for armchair science-ing". It all sounds good, but then there are apparent holes, but you'd think that the scientists doing the research would have already thought of anything that's obvious enough for us to think of it in the time between reading a Slashdot article and writing a comment.
I believe they do it that way in France... so yeah, it's kind of a bad idea.
I object to "save the planet" on the basis that whatever we do, we will have approximately zero effect on the planet. The minutely thin green layer of stuff on the surface of the planet, perhaps, but the planet is a colossal ball of metal and rock, it's not going anywhere soon
As for exterminating life on Earth... we'd have to be very thorough - there's stuff living in the volcanic vents in the depths of the oceans, entirely independent of the Sun, I doubt we'd be able to kill them without a substantial effort to do so. People talk about "killing the planet" when they really mean "killing the part of the biosphere that interests us". It's still a big problem if we do kill it, but it's not the end of life on Earth
It's a rapidly cycling series of photos of Lindsay Lohan, demonstrating that she has approximately one facial expression (you can see the hair/clothes blinking around, but the face stays the same).
There's a fungus growing inside the post-meltdown reactor at Chernobyl that appears to be using the radiation as an energy source (capturing the energy with melanin I believe). Using radioactive waste instead of sunlight, check.
There's a bacteria found in a factory out-flow somewhere, capable of digesting certain nylon byproducts. Eating garbage, check.
As for tailpipe fumes... well quite a lot of things use CO2, I believe they're called plants. The other gases in exhaust fumes are still fairly poisonous but I'm sure evolution will get on top of that one soon.
Makes me wonder what would happen if someone stated "Megapedia" and threw open the doors to any and every type of information... the stuff Wikipedia doesn't want because it's not "encyclopaedic" enough, and all the things listed on the "What Wikipedia is not" page, welcome it all in with open arms.
The main problem would be overcoming the automatic "Wikipedia it" response to a need for info... well, I guess that and the amount of inane drivel you'd get posted.
You're starting to make a little more sense, but the "to keep us easily ruled" stuff reads like a bad conspiracy theory. As a species we've been at this "civilisation" game for a LONG time, because it's been to our benefit, not because some shadowy controllers dictated it... I'm pretty sure bakers and blacksmiths out-date the Illuminati.
I agree that people should be more aware of how stuff works outside of their own little bubble, but I think that's more of a general symptom of people being increasingly cut off from the people around them (and the world at large) than it is a flaw in the idea of specialising to get things done. What you were saying originally (that every person should be forced to participate in every form of labour that they rely on) goes a little further than just "knowing what's going on"
People should be more involved with the world outside their own sphere, yes. They should be better informed and subjected to less propaganda, yes. A lot of things suck about the exact current situation, I agree... but "if you want to eat, go farm it" isn't a solution to any of that. If anything it would mean people spend all their waking hours desperately trying to do their allotted share of everything (the amount of time spent on the travel between places involved in that would be a killer) and never have any time left to think about things.
Friggin love Steam. Hell, I've bought games on Steam after already having a pirated copy because the games were too good to not throw some money at the people who made them.
Steam is about the only (legal) place where I can find, buy, download and play a game without ever having to leave my chair... Steam rocks.
I would worry that the 1% of bacteria that aren't killed by cleaning product X are the ones you really need to worry about, and by killing off all the competition you'd give them free rein over the area.
Buying things is quick, easy, and without hassle. Pirating on the other hand is a pain in the ass, time consuming, and risky. My time is worth more than what it takes to pirate
I have the exact opposite leanings. To go buy a game I have to go out to some shitty games store (the ones around here are all shitty, your mileage may vary) and that takes time out of my day. At the very least I have to go online and buy it, and then it takes a few days to arrive. Pirated copy... takes minutes to find a torrent, then I can leave it downloading in the background and when I come back later it's done
Hell, it's not worth my time to not pirate stuff
If it were feasible, total self sufficiency would be kinda cool, but even with the technology you mentioned it's going to be impractical for any individual to do everything for themselves - we built up a society full of specialists and tradespeople for a reason.
Even as early as Plato's days he was writing that every man has his particular skill or specialisation and should do that job well, become an expert etc rather than try and be a jack of all trades.
I'm not saying it's not a good idea in principle to have more decentralised control of things - focusing all the power into a few hands very often works out badly for everyone else, but having every single person participate in every single task involved in the creation of every single item they want to use simply is not possible. Well... unless you live the life of a Buddhist monk and have almost no wants/possessions at all.
Until they build a giant pair of scissors out of moon-metal...
It's not practical for every person to participate in the creation of every single thing they want - it's far more efficient to have people who specialise in producing one thing, then trade with each other. You can do that trade directly (offer people whatever it is you're good at making in exchange for whatever it is you want from them) or, as most of the world does it, use money as a universally agreed placeholder - the problem with direct trade being that not everyone will want to swap for the thing you're offering.
To be honest it sounds like you want to return to the pre-civilised world, before modern society, and live as a hunter-gatherer or something. Personally I'd rather have all the benefits that society brings... like medicine, manufacturing and Slashdot, but hey, good luck with your thing.
That person might be convinced of it, but that doesn't make their story true.
I don't take issue with Noah (or whoever) for writing that there was a global flood - they lived a long time ago and didn't have the science to know any better. The problem is the people now who read that story and claim that it's absolute truth, despite the myriad ways in which it is in fact not possible
Ah, fair point. Ok, in that case education is being replaced with... what... a daycare service? If they aren't learning useful skills AND aren't even having facts drummed into them by rote, what exactly are they supposed to be learning?
I myself purchased the game, downloaded and installed the (cracked) pirated copy, then replaced the serial number in the system registry with the legitimate registration number.
Can you advise on how well that works when it comes to the online components of the game? I kinda want to play it, but the pirated copies can't go online and a legit copy comes laden with DRM nastiness (both deal breakers for me) but if you can combine the 2 to make it work fully then I'm willing to pay for the serial number.
The real answer is that the entire flood story is impossible in about a dozen different ways... but I guess for the purpose of winding up Christians, pointing out a contradiction within their beliefs is more effective than just telling them that they're flat out wrong.
All Biology is today is memorizing where a heart is in a cat, pig, frog, etc. And memorizing muscles, bones, and classifying animals.
I think you'll find that this is precisely the problem - education is being replaced with rote learning of stuff you could look up in 5 seconds with access to Google/Wikipedia, and would likely forget the details of within hours of the exam (if you remember it for that long in the first place)
Sure, it's really useful to know it by heart if you're using it day to day (and would be pretty stupid to not know if you were using it day to day, but it'd be a lot more useful for schools to teach relevant skills and methodology, the scientific method or the important theories in science.
Like for example... that one called evolution
It would seem they're also incompetent.