I think you should read the first post in this thread again.
You mean the one which reads "Yet, there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy..."? What is that supposed to prove?
And also read up on the Rhine experiments, as only one example.
Said experiment's results have never been successfully replicated. When faced with that fact, the reasonable conclusion is that the experiment was flawed, not that ESP is real.
Strange things happen all the time, and they don't have to all simply be misperception.
Sure, they don't have to be. But there's no reason to think that it's anything else.
Sure, our brains are great at making connections which aren't really there. But there also *countless* probability-defying examples of people's minds making connections which ARE there - but which they would have no possible way of knowing, if our brains are really "just meat".
Name three documented examples.
After all, consciousness itself is a metaphysical phenomenon. It is generated by physical means, as far as we know; and it very well may not outlast our physical components. But it still is something that is more than merely matter; that in itself should tell you that other forms of more-than-matter are at least *possible*, if not probable.
I admit that it's possible. Now what? That has absolutely no bearing on the rest.
Of course, such an experiment could be hoaxed, and even if not hoaxed, it would not be a repeatable experiment.
Sure it could. Obviously not with the same person, but there's no reason you couldn't apply principles of clinical trials and such to this. Get a thousand dying volunteers and run them through something like what you described, and see how many manage to communicate from beyond the grave. Ensuring that they don't subvert the process by communicating before they die might be tricky, but I imagine there would be ways.
I'm an atheist, and I cannot help but think that this is how religions get started.
I don't doubt it. If you were a bit more credulous you'd believe that these entities were real. You'd do what they asked, and tell people about it, and if you were convincing enough then other people would start to believe as well. The most credulous of them would see coincidences or have hallucinations which they would take as reinforcing their belief, and off you go. Most of the time it'll die in the cradle as you either won't believe, or you won't be convincing to others and so the belief will die with you, or you'll accumulate a small band of followers and it eventually dies out. But every so often it'll hit the right spot and keep growing.
I'm sorry, but nobody alive today remembers what Jesus said or did. A lot of people remember what they read about Jesus saying and doing. But the same could be said about Frodo, or Harry Potter.
The credence of billions is no more proof that Jesus did any of this stuff than my own lack of belief is proof against.
Out of six billion people on the planet, and all the billions who have lived throughout history, exactly one of them gets this unique window on the world that I call "me".
There's no scientific explanation for it. Until somebody figures out a way to measure it or even to observe it in people other than themselves, there can't be.
This strange phenomenon is, as far as I can tell, the only reason for thinking that there might be more to the world than just physics. Even then it's no proof, but it's a powerful suggestion.
It seems pretty mundane to suppose that after going through the most fundamental transformation a person can possibly experience, they have nothing better to do than hang around their old family some more.
You and everybody else who thinks that your brain is anything more than a piece of meat which observes the world through obvious and direct means should read The Demon-Haunted World. Among other things, our brain is really good at picking out "unusual" occurrences and completely ignoring the mundane. The two times that you and your lover tried to call each other simultaneously stand out in your brain far more than the hundred thousand times that it didn't happen, and even though probability tells you that there's an obvious explanation for what happened, your brain is built in such a way that you will think it's important. Fighting against this impulse is key to understanding how the world works but it's quite difficult.
You can have maximum freedom or maximum security but you can not have both, and any attempt to have more of one will result in you having less of the other.
Where do people get this idea? I'm serious, I want to know. Where did you get it, for example?
It just makes no sense, neither logically nor historically. Look at the most dangerous states to live in throughout history, most of them were also among the least free. Look at the most free states throughout history, most of them were quite safe.
Freedom is a security measure! There's no choice between freedom and security. With good freedom comes good security. If you try to trade off your freedom for security, you'll end up having neither one.
While it's true that a lot of mathematics is done in purely an abstract manner, but algebra and calculus were both built pretty much for the sole purpose of doing physics. That many people can't conceive of how to use them when they learn them speaks only to their poor mental capacity or the poor construction of the courses they took. I recall my delight when I realized that d=.5at^2 could be easily derived using calculus instead of merely being taken as a commandment from on high, and of course calculus was created exactly for this sort of thing.
I'm pretty sure the natural phenomena which follow e^x "as opposed to 2^x" are actually following a curve like e^kx where k is an arbitrary constant. And it turns out that this is exactly equivalent to 2^kx where k is a slightly different arbitrary constant. So nothing really interesting there, except that humans find e to be a convenient base to work with.
Nothing makes a GUI inherently any slower than a text interface. A good GUI should take up a miniscule percentage of your overall CPU. And if your CPU isn't being used at 100%, then it has enough time to run and should not slow down. If it does, it means that the networking is blocking on the CPU or that your CPU is over-utilized and you're starting to have contention between different processes.
On another note, Firefox is a bloated pig and is not a good example of GUI downloaders.
Anti-virus software only works against known threats. As far as I know, there is no software intelligent enough to detect that a piece of unknown software is a threat.
Therefore it doesn't matter if the climate is changing. Until a threatening piece of software is actually released into the wild (and antivirus vendors start protecting against it) there is absolutely no point to installing anti-virus software on a Mac.
Except that law, business, and political science students aren't what are generally meant by "nerds". And even if it were, it's not what are generally meant by "we".
It's just hubris. It's like a star lawyer thinking that his experience in winning an underdog case in front of the Supreme Court is going to help him build a PC from parts. If he's that smart he can probably do it, but no way is he going to be as good at it as an expert.
OK, I thought the problem was loss of balance or control, clearly it's something more profound.
It sounds like a very unpleasant solution and I hope your surgery works out.
However your case is very far from the norm. The vast majority of overweight people are physically capable of eliminating and preventing their condition even if they may be mentally incapable.
But it is still good to keep in mind that not everybody is like that, and some people truly do have a real physical condition such as yours.
Don't kid yourself. Nerds are good with technology, not politics. These people are as good at bending laws and manipulating courts as the average slashdotter is at recompiling his kernel. Just as the average politician's political expertise doesn't help them at all in the world of technology, our technological expertise doesn't help us at all in their world.
Germany was OK with the peace terms imposed on it after WWII but not with the peace terms imposed after WWI: hence, dramatically different results.
I'd be careful with that. The outcomes of those two wars were vastly different even before peace terms. In WWI German soil wasn't even touched before the surrender, which then led to the sentiment that they got a raw deal. In WWII their cities were pounded to rubble, their men killed, their streets filled with enemy soldiers, and their government evaporated. It was very, very clear that they had soundly lost the war this time around.
2 billion was a fairly arbitrary number based on the phrase "vast majority". I figure that 4/6 counts as a "vast majority". (Hey, it's enough to override a US Presidential veto.) So if someone is claiming that it is false that the vast majority of the world has enough to eat, that means that more than two billion people don't.
The fact that 800 million people in the world don't have enough to eat is a tragedy, especially since the food is there and it's entirely a failure of distribution and politics. But as sad as this situation is, it's vastly better than in centuries past, which was my point.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you should read the first post in this thread again.
You mean the one which reads "Yet, there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy..."? What is that supposed to prove?
And also read up on the Rhine experiments, as only one example.
Said experiment's results have never been successfully replicated. When faced with that fact, the reasonable conclusion is that the experiment was flawed, not that ESP is real.
Strange things happen all the time, and they don't have to all simply be misperception.
Sure, they don't have to be. But there's no reason to think that it's anything else.
Sure, our brains are great at making connections which aren't really there. But there also *countless* probability-defying examples of people's minds making connections which ARE there - but which they would have no possible way of knowing, if our brains are really "just meat".
Name three documented examples.
After all, consciousness itself is a metaphysical phenomenon. It is generated by physical means, as far as we know; and it very well may not outlast our physical components. But it still is something that is more than merely matter; that in itself should tell you that other forms of more-than-matter are at least *possible*, if not probable.
I admit that it's possible. Now what? That has absolutely no bearing on the rest.
Of course, such an experiment could be hoaxed, and even if not hoaxed, it would not be a repeatable experiment.
Sure it could. Obviously not with the same person, but there's no reason you couldn't apply principles of clinical trials and such to this. Get a thousand dying volunteers and run them through something like what you described, and see how many manage to communicate from beyond the grave. Ensuring that they don't subvert the process by communicating before they die might be tricky, but I imagine there would be ways.
Very interesting story, thanks!
I'm an atheist, and I cannot help but think that this is how religions get started.
I don't doubt it. If you were a bit more credulous you'd believe that these entities were real. You'd do what they asked, and tell people about it, and if you were convincing enough then other people would start to believe as well. The most credulous of them would see coincidences or have hallucinations which they would take as reinforcing their belief, and off you go. Most of the time it'll die in the cradle as you either won't believe, or you won't be convincing to others and so the belief will die with you, or you'll accumulate a small band of followers and it eventually dies out. But every so often it'll hit the right spot and keep growing.
I'm sorry, but nobody alive today remembers what Jesus said or did. A lot of people remember what they read about Jesus saying and doing. But the same could be said about Frodo, or Harry Potter.
The credence of billions is no more proof that Jesus did any of this stuff than my own lack of belief is proof against.
Still doesn't explain why I am me.
Out of six billion people on the planet, and all the billions who have lived throughout history, exactly one of them gets this unique window on the world that I call "me".
There's no scientific explanation for it. Until somebody figures out a way to measure it or even to observe it in people other than themselves, there can't be.
This strange phenomenon is, as far as I can tell, the only reason for thinking that there might be more to the world than just physics. Even then it's no proof, but it's a powerful suggestion.
But what if you're in the wrong religion? Every week you're just making God madder and madder.
(Yes, it's from Homer Simpson, but as with so many things he got this one exactly right.)
It seems pretty mundane to suppose that after going through the most fundamental transformation a person can possibly experience, they have nothing better to do than hang around their old family some more.
You and everybody else who thinks that your brain is anything more than a piece of meat which observes the world through obvious and direct means should read The Demon-Haunted World. Among other things, our brain is really good at picking out "unusual" occurrences and completely ignoring the mundane. The two times that you and your lover tried to call each other simultaneously stand out in your brain far more than the hundred thousand times that it didn't happen, and even though probability tells you that there's an obvious explanation for what happened, your brain is built in such a way that you will think it's important. Fighting against this impulse is key to understanding how the world works but it's quite difficult.
You can have maximum freedom or maximum security but you can not have both, and any attempt to have more of one will result in you having less of the other.
Where do people get this idea? I'm serious, I want to know. Where did you get it, for example?
It just makes no sense, neither logically nor historically. Look at the most dangerous states to live in throughout history, most of them were also among the least free. Look at the most free states throughout history, most of them were quite safe.
Freedom is a security measure! There's no choice between freedom and security. With good freedom comes good security. If you try to trade off your freedom for security, you'll end up having neither one.
And this would be different from cell phones how?
The existing laws cover the problem. If you want to do something, enforce them better.
Oh no!
While it's true that a lot of mathematics is done in purely an abstract manner, but algebra and calculus were both built pretty much for the sole purpose of doing physics. That many people can't conceive of how to use them when they learn them speaks only to their poor mental capacity or the poor construction of the courses they took. I recall my delight when I realized that d=.5at^2 could be easily derived using calculus instead of merely being taken as a commandment from on high, and of course calculus was created exactly for this sort of thing.
I'm pretty sure the natural phenomena which follow e^x "as opposed to 2^x" are actually following a curve like e^kx where k is an arbitrary constant. And it turns out that this is exactly equivalent to 2^kx where k is a slightly different arbitrary constant. So nothing really interesting there, except that humans find e to be a convenient base to work with.
Better yet, let's just outlaw all reckless driving, then we could punish people who do it no matter what the reason. Oh wait, we've already done that.
Because draconian punishments work so well to prevent all these other crimes.
Nothing makes a GUI inherently any slower than a text interface. A good GUI should take up a miniscule percentage of your overall CPU. And if your CPU isn't being used at 100%, then it has enough time to run and should not slow down. If it does, it means that the networking is blocking on the CPU or that your CPU is over-utilized and you're starting to have contention between different processes.
On another note, Firefox is a bloated pig and is not a good example of GUI downloaders.
That just means that ws_ftp's GUI is a pile of shit, it doesn't mean that GUIs are inherently slow.
Anti-virus software only works against known threats. As far as I know, there is no software intelligent enough to detect that a piece of unknown software is a threat.
Therefore it doesn't matter if the climate is changing. Until a threatening piece of software is actually released into the wild (and antivirus vendors start protecting against it) there is absolutely no point to installing anti-virus software on a Mac.
Except that law, business, and political science students aren't what are generally meant by "nerds". And even if it were, it's not what are generally meant by "we".
It's just hubris. It's like a star lawyer thinking that his experience in winning an underdog case in front of the Supreme Court is going to help him build a PC from parts. If he's that smart he can probably do it, but no way is he going to be as good at it as an expert.
OK, I thought the problem was loss of balance or control, clearly it's something more profound.
It sounds like a very unpleasant solution and I hope your surgery works out.
However your case is very far from the norm. The vast majority of overweight people are physically capable of eliminating and preventing their condition even if they may be mentally incapable.
But it is still good to keep in mind that not everybody is like that, and some people truly do have a real physical condition such as yours.
Don't kid yourself. Nerds are good with technology, not politics. These people are as good at bending laws and manipulating courts as the average slashdotter is at recompiling his kernel. Just as the average politician's political expertise doesn't help them at all in the world of technology, our technological expertise doesn't help us at all in their world.
Whatever TCP replaced was probably designed by a bunch of PhDs too. I really don't see your point.
Germany was OK with the peace terms imposed on it after WWII but not with the peace terms imposed after WWI: hence, dramatically different results.
I'd be careful with that. The outcomes of those two wars were vastly different even before peace terms. In WWI German soil wasn't even touched before the surrender, which then led to the sentiment that they got a raw deal. In WWII their cities were pounded to rubble, their men killed, their streets filled with enemy soldiers, and their government evaporated. It was very, very clear that they had soundly lost the war this time around.
2 billion was a fairly arbitrary number based on the phrase "vast majority". I figure that 4/6 counts as a "vast majority". (Hey, it's enough to override a US Presidential veto.) So if someone is claiming that it is false that the vast majority of the world has enough to eat, that means that more than two billion people don't.
The fact that 800 million people in the world don't have enough to eat is a tragedy, especially since the food is there and it's entirely a failure of distribution and politics. But as sad as this situation is, it's vastly better than in centuries past, which was my point.
I care about results, not what the phone monkeys think of me. So far, asking for a supervisor has never failed to improve my results.