Reading what you wrote is like reading something written by the crack-addled, bastard love child of R. Buckminster Fuller and Emily Dickinson.
The sides aren't what you think they are. There are more than two sides. Most people are on more than one side. I'm not on a side at all. Seriously, lay off the drugs or I will be forced to blow your mind some more, man.
How do you know it doesn't happen? Sadistic aliens could have been behind any so-called miracle from any or all of the holy books. Maybe Sodom and Gomorrah were just aliens on a bender, and all that fire and brimstone was merely the rocket exhaust from an ET driving drunk. You don't know and neither do I.
I don't know whether God exists or not, and I don't care. His existence or lack thereof has absolutely no bearing on me or my life, I will live my life as I 'choose,' and I don't know or care whether choice exists, either. I'm me, I do what I want, if God has a problem with that, God can get in line to talk to me about it like everyone else.
You just made three unsupported and ridiculous assertions as if they were a logical argument. Nice hat trick.
Religion does not need to rely on faith. Buddhism certainly doesn't, but I know some consider that a philosophy, not a religion. Still, it is listed as a major world religion, and it requires no one to take anything on faith.
Predestination and free will are both pointless human speculations unsupported by any human experiences, and if free will were real, it would be a curse, not a gift, especially considering your God's planned punishments for going against arbitrary rules that you have no way of knowing came from Him.
If God were to be in residence and free will were real, God's presence would not diminish free will. So what? At most, nobody would choose to sin anymore. I don't choose to froom, either, and my not being able to choose to froom does not diminish any free will I may have.
But people could still choose to sin knowing God existed, I know I would, just to register my disapproval of God's arbitrary and unjust actions. Infinite punishment for finite transgressions, my ass. Fuck you, God, I'm going out to fuck a guy JUST TO PISS YOU OFF, YOU SHIT! I'm not even gay, I'll probably hate it, but I'm going to do it just because you said you'd torture me forever if I did. I don't negotiate with terrorists.
There is no way to know for sure. Limits of knowledge and all that. Your theory could say, 'it's all written in stone,' and your theory could accurately predict every phenomenon in the universe, but the universe could be part of a larger existence, and the laws of the universe could be subject to change. I can imagine a universe where everything is written in stone, up to a point, but not after that. I can even imagine a universe where certain events are predestined and others are not. If I can imagine that, I think my statement is accurate.
Enlightenment, as I understand it, is being in that zone all the time, in every situation. Even, say, after pouring gasoline over yourself and lighting yourself on fire.
Clean it with what? You may carry cleaning supplies with you everywhere, but most people don't. And a store could not lend you cleaning supplies and let you clean the premises, for liability reasons. I mean, 'Yay!' for personal responsibility and all, but think things through before you criticize others.
So here you are working in an office building, when you start to smell a terrible stench of decay and harsh chemicals. You have no idea what caused this smell. You then proceed to vomit due to the smell, but you don't know that it is only because of the smell. What would you do?
You got marked troll because you demonstrated not only an inability to put yourself into someone else's shoes, but a smug sense of superiority over those people that you can't empathize with. And then you had the gracelessness to whine about getting marked troll. Paaaleeeese.
What are your credentials, and why should we believe your arbitrary assertion? Could you give examples of past failures due to contamination? Could you tell us, given the particular set up of this experiment, what the possible vector of contamination is? Could you tell us why you think this particular experiment could not have created RNA? What are the difficulties that this set up does not address?
Or maybe you could just admit that 'contamination' is a total shot in the dark with no evidence to back it up.
No, it wouldn't settle anything. Any being sufficiently more powerful than you can convince you that it is omnipotent. Any being sufficiently more clever than you could convince you that it is omniscient. An advanced alien race, claiming to be God, could determine who believes in God and who doesn't, and rain sulfur and fire on the nonbelievers, so a rain of fire and sulfur from something claiming to be God would not prove God exists, sorry.
If will is determined even in part by reality, then it is not 'free,' it is bound. Bound a little, bound completely, bound is not free.
If will is even partly determined by reality, and can change reality, then it is a part of the chain of cause and effect, and whatever part of will you consider to be 'outside reality' is not outside it at all.
Do you see my point? Nothing can be partly in reality and partly outside of it. If the link exists, then it brings the part that is outside reality, inside. That part is not separate from reality, as it influences and is influenced by reality. It is then just another part of the whole, and not separated from the whole except by artificial and arbitrary human definitions.
That isn't how I see things at all. We don't punish people because they are responsible for their actions, that is just silly and pointless. We punish them to discourage them from doing it again, and to discourage others from doing it. Cause and effect. This is not about determining what is right and wrong. It is about determining what is effective and ineffective, what gets people what they need and want, and what hampers them. Right and wrong are human concepts, and entirely relative.
Even if you have free will, you have no way of knowing whether you are rational or not. Your argument is entirely tangential, so much so that I can't even determine what you are trying to prove.
People are not rational. That has been proven, over and over again. Games theory experiments show that people almost never make the most rational choice. Nobody is completely rational.
Certainty is a feeling, like joy or hatred. The brain does not arrive at the feeling of certainty through a rational process, but rather through a holistic, emotional process that is not rational at all.
People do not make decisions, and then act on them. They act, and then make up a story about why they did what they did. That story, even if true, is never the whole truth.
The sense of self is just a sense, like hearing or sight. All the senses are tracks on the movie of life, like the sound track is on a real movie. Nobody is watching the movie. There is no little man looking out of your eyes and listening through your ears. There is no one at the helm. Your thoughts do not come from you, and neither do they come from outside you.
When you are totally in the moment, say an intense coding session, or athletic competition, all sense of self goes away. There is no separation between observer and observed. The sense of self isn't needed, so it isn't referred to.
We are model makers. We make models of the world. Our sense of self exists to show us how we relate to the models we've made. That is all.
Oh it isn't really terrifying. Reality may or may not be comprehensible, but in any case, there is no way to tell if my present comprehension of it is correct.
I have to proceed under the assumption that the universe is comprehensible, or there would be no reason to try to comprehend it. If there were proof that the world were incomprehensible, that would change things.
Okay, we get it, YOU think this is a First Amendment issue. That doesn't mean it is. Others have provided airtight reasoning as to why you are wrong. Now maybe you could provide some reasoning to back up your assertions. Is it legal to advocate shooting the president? Is it legal for me and a bunch of friends to plan how to kill you? Is it legal to shout 'Fire!' in a crowded, non-burning theater?
You can not conspire to commit crimes. Prostitution is currently a crime. Therefore, you can not legally talk about providing sexual services. Therefore, you are wrong and this is not a free speech issue, no matter how much you would like to reduce it to something that simple.
Even if things have 'already been written,' there is no way to know. As we can't know the future, whether or not the future is already set in stone is irrelevant.
The statement, "My free will allows me to be proactive about the future' is true, whether or not free will is an illusion. Your proactiveness is no less real even if it is predetermined that you will choose to be proactive about your future. Saying that free will is an illusion does not mean we have no choice. Of course we have choice, it is just that that choice is predetermined, too.
Even if my choices are predetermined, that does not mean that I can not choose. Choosing feels the same, either way. So why be depressed? The future is still unknown, your choices are still yours to make, as long as you don't use a belief in predetermination as an excuse not to make choices, that belief does not change things.
How would that even work? Can you learn from your environment? If so, your will is bound, it is not free. If the will is, even in part, determined by the environment, it may as well be completely determined by the environment. And if it isn't determined by the environment at all, then you can not grow or change. Free will is an illusion, on one semantic level, but it is an important concept on another.
Put it this way, whether or not we have free will in reality, everyone knows the feeling of having one's will constrained by circumstance, the feeling of being imposed on, of having more or less choice, and more or less freedom. That is what the concept of free will is about, that feeling. On one level, there is no such thing as 'love,' just chemical interactions in the brain. But on another level, love is a real, meaningful concept.
Why would you hate the concept of not having a free will? Whether you do or do not have free will doesn't change anything in any meaningful way.
Again, I have to ask: can businesses push around every single government on the planet, and is that a good thing?
The thing is, corporations can't vote, and they can't control the vote of their owners, employees, and customers. They can donate money, but so can competitors.
Monopoly abuses of power stifle innovation and destroy free markets.
That is, at most, a very minor theme of Permutation City. It is more about the nature of consciousness itself, and how arbitrary and unknowable the substrate of consciousness is.
Humans, in general, want to preserve the concept that our concious minds are special, and cannot be replicated in a robot, because that truely faces us with the idea that our being is completely mortal, and the idea of a soul is otherwise replaced with a set of chemicals and cell networks that are little more than a product of cause and effect.*
Do we? I certainly don't. In fact, the idea that there is something in consciousness that is outside the chain of cause and effect is truly terrifying, because that would mean that the universe is not comprehensible on a fundamental level.
If consciousness is outside the chain of cause and effect, how do we learn from experience? Can this supposed soul be changed by experience? Can it influence reality? If so, then how can it be outside the chain of cause and effect? The idea of an individual soul, completely cut off from reality and beyond all outside influence, is nonsensical to me.
If a right is something you have and no one can take away, then we have no rights. Anyone can take away everything you have with a bullet.
If an entitlement is something you don't have and someone must give you, then all rights are entitlements. A right is something we all agree to uphold, without that agreement, you don't have 'rights' you have 'power.' For instance, your right to free speech. I can take that away from you, but other people have agreed to defend you if I try. You are entitled to free speech because your fellow citizens have agreed to give you something: the defense of your power to speak.
The free market is imperfect. Monopolies, imbalance of information, and externalities can all skew the market unfairly, harming both buyers and sellers.
What Intel did was clearly wrong, harmful to the free market, and to society as a whole. Adam Smith himself admitted that markets need regulation in order to remain free. This is one such case.
AMD surely could ramp up production fast enough. Thankfully, no corporation can push around national governments, unless those governments let them. Not doing business is not an option. Legal tricks to do business with a country, and not fall under that country's laws, will not work.
You seem to be gloating over Intel's imaginary ability to screw with the EU and control markets. Do you relish the idea of national governments being powerless to control corporations?
Right? Can't look it up. This is work related material, I'm sorry, but if this is an issue in the workplace, the workers need to be informed. I think I'll talk to HR tomorrow. This block of relevant audiovisual material is antithetical to an integrated and diverse work environment that honors all genders and masturbatory styles equally. If they won't change this policy, I will demand that upskirt webcams be installed in all female workers desks so that we can enforce a no masturbation policy equally.
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Reading what you wrote is like reading something written by the crack-addled, bastard love child of R. Buckminster Fuller and Emily Dickinson.
The sides aren't what you think they are. There are more than two sides. Most people are on more than one side. I'm not on a side at all. Seriously, lay off the drugs or I will be forced to blow your mind some more, man.
*Whistles, hands in pockets, rocking on feet, looking around innocently*
Right. The damn thing could become completely knowable the moment after I decided it wasn't. Oh well, tra-la-la.
How do you know it doesn't happen? Sadistic aliens could have been behind any so-called miracle from any or all of the holy books. Maybe Sodom and Gomorrah were just aliens on a bender, and all that fire and brimstone was merely the rocket exhaust from an ET driving drunk. You don't know and neither do I.
I don't know whether God exists or not, and I don't care. His existence or lack thereof has absolutely no bearing on me or my life, I will live my life as I 'choose,' and I don't know or care whether choice exists, either. I'm me, I do what I want, if God has a problem with that, God can get in line to talk to me about it like everyone else.
You just made three unsupported and ridiculous assertions as if they were a logical argument. Nice hat trick.
Religion does not need to rely on faith. Buddhism certainly doesn't, but I know some consider that a philosophy, not a religion. Still, it is listed as a major world religion, and it requires no one to take anything on faith.
Predestination and free will are both pointless human speculations unsupported by any human experiences, and if free will were real, it would be a curse, not a gift, especially considering your God's planned punishments for going against arbitrary rules that you have no way of knowing came from Him.
If God were to be in residence and free will were real, God's presence would not diminish free will. So what? At most, nobody would choose to sin anymore. I don't choose to froom, either, and my not being able to choose to froom does not diminish any free will I may have.
But people could still choose to sin knowing God existed, I know I would, just to register my disapproval of God's arbitrary and unjust actions. Infinite punishment for finite transgressions, my ass. Fuck you, God, I'm going out to fuck a guy JUST TO PISS YOU OFF, YOU SHIT! I'm not even gay, I'll probably hate it, but I'm going to do it just because you said you'd torture me forever if I did. I don't negotiate with terrorists.
There is no way to know for sure. Limits of knowledge and all that. Your theory could say, 'it's all written in stone,' and your theory could accurately predict every phenomenon in the universe, but the universe could be part of a larger existence, and the laws of the universe could be subject to change. I can imagine a universe where everything is written in stone, up to a point, but not after that. I can even imagine a universe where certain events are predestined and others are not. If I can imagine that, I think my statement is accurate.
'Likes to play mind games' was option c)
Enlightenment, as I understand it, is being in that zone all the time, in every situation. Even, say, after pouring gasoline over yourself and lighting yourself on fire.
Clean it with what? You may carry cleaning supplies with you everywhere, but most people don't. And a store could not lend you cleaning supplies and let you clean the premises, for liability reasons. I mean, 'Yay!' for personal responsibility and all, but think things through before you criticize others.
So here you are working in an office building, when you start to smell a terrible stench of decay and harsh chemicals. You have no idea what caused this smell. You then proceed to vomit due to the smell, but you don't know that it is only because of the smell. What would you do?
You got marked troll because you demonstrated not only an inability to put yourself into someone else's shoes, but a smug sense of superiority over those people that you can't empathize with. And then you had the gracelessness to whine about getting marked troll. Paaaleeeese.
What are your credentials, and why should we believe your arbitrary assertion? Could you give examples of past failures due to contamination? Could you tell us, given the particular set up of this experiment, what the possible vector of contamination is? Could you tell us why you think this particular experiment could not have created RNA? What are the difficulties that this set up does not address?
Or maybe you could just admit that 'contamination' is a total shot in the dark with no evidence to back it up.
No, it wouldn't settle anything. Any being sufficiently more powerful than you can convince you that it is omnipotent. Any being sufficiently more clever than you could convince you that it is omniscient. An advanced alien race, claiming to be God, could determine who believes in God and who doesn't, and rain sulfur and fire on the nonbelievers, so a rain of fire and sulfur from something claiming to be God would not prove God exists, sorry.
If will is determined even in part by reality, then it is not 'free,' it is bound. Bound a little, bound completely, bound is not free.
If will is even partly determined by reality, and can change reality, then it is a part of the chain of cause and effect, and whatever part of will you consider to be 'outside reality' is not outside it at all.
Do you see my point? Nothing can be partly in reality and partly outside of it. If the link exists, then it brings the part that is outside reality, inside. That part is not separate from reality, as it influences and is influenced by reality. It is then just another part of the whole, and not separated from the whole except by artificial and arbitrary human definitions.
That isn't how I see things at all. We don't punish people because they are responsible for their actions, that is just silly and pointless. We punish them to discourage them from doing it again, and to discourage others from doing it. Cause and effect. This is not about determining what is right and wrong. It is about determining what is effective and ineffective, what gets people what they need and want, and what hampers them. Right and wrong are human concepts, and entirely relative.
Even if you have free will, you have no way of knowing whether you are rational or not. Your argument is entirely tangential, so much so that I can't even determine what you are trying to prove.
People are not rational. That has been proven, over and over again. Games theory experiments show that people almost never make the most rational choice. Nobody is completely rational.
Certainty is a feeling, like joy or hatred. The brain does not arrive at the feeling of certainty through a rational process, but rather through a holistic, emotional process that is not rational at all.
People do not make decisions, and then act on them. They act, and then make up a story about why they did what they did. That story, even if true, is never the whole truth.
The sense of self is just a sense, like hearing or sight. All the senses are tracks on the movie of life, like the sound track is on a real movie. Nobody is watching the movie. There is no little man looking out of your eyes and listening through your ears. There is no one at the helm. Your thoughts do not come from you, and neither do they come from outside you.
When you are totally in the moment, say an intense coding session, or athletic competition, all sense of self goes away. There is no separation between observer and observed. The sense of self isn't needed, so it isn't referred to.
We are model makers. We make models of the world. Our sense of self exists to show us how we relate to the models we've made. That is all.
Oh it isn't really terrifying. Reality may or may not be comprehensible, but in any case, there is no way to tell if my present comprehension of it is correct.
I have to proceed under the assumption that the universe is comprehensible, or there would be no reason to try to comprehend it. If there were proof that the world were incomprehensible, that would change things.
Okay, we get it, YOU think this is a First Amendment issue. That doesn't mean it is. Others have provided airtight reasoning as to why you are wrong. Now maybe you could provide some reasoning to back up your assertions. Is it legal to advocate shooting the president? Is it legal for me and a bunch of friends to plan how to kill you? Is it legal to shout 'Fire!' in a crowded, non-burning theater?
You can not conspire to commit crimes. Prostitution is currently a crime. Therefore, you can not legally talk about providing sexual services. Therefore, you are wrong and this is not a free speech issue, no matter how much you would like to reduce it to something that simple.
Even if things have 'already been written,' there is no way to know. As we can't know the future, whether or not the future is already set in stone is irrelevant.
The statement, "My free will allows me to be proactive about the future' is true, whether or not free will is an illusion. Your proactiveness is no less real even if it is predetermined that you will choose to be proactive about your future. Saying that free will is an illusion does not mean we have no choice. Of course we have choice, it is just that that choice is predetermined, too.
Even if my choices are predetermined, that does not mean that I can not choose. Choosing feels the same, either way. So why be depressed? The future is still unknown, your choices are still yours to make, as long as you don't use a belief in predetermination as an excuse not to make choices, that belief does not change things.
How would that even work? Can you learn from your environment? If so, your will is bound, it is not free. If the will is, even in part, determined by the environment, it may as well be completely determined by the environment. And if it isn't determined by the environment at all, then you can not grow or change. Free will is an illusion, on one semantic level, but it is an important concept on another.
Put it this way, whether or not we have free will in reality, everyone knows the feeling of having one's will constrained by circumstance, the feeling of being imposed on, of having more or less choice, and more or less freedom. That is what the concept of free will is about, that feeling. On one level, there is no such thing as 'love,' just chemical interactions in the brain. But on another level, love is a real, meaningful concept.
Why would you hate the concept of not having a free will? Whether you do or do not have free will doesn't change anything in any meaningful way.
Again, I have to ask: can businesses push around every single government on the planet, and is that a good thing?
The thing is, corporations can't vote, and they can't control the vote of their owners, employees, and customers. They can donate money, but so can competitors.
Monopoly abuses of power stifle innovation and destroy free markets.
That is, at most, a very minor theme of Permutation City. It is more about the nature of consciousness itself, and how arbitrary and unknowable the substrate of consciousness is.
Humans, in general, want to preserve the concept that our concious minds are special, and cannot be replicated in a robot, because that truely faces us with the idea that our being is completely mortal, and the idea of a soul is otherwise replaced with a set of chemicals and cell networks that are little more than a product of cause and effect.*
Do we? I certainly don't. In fact, the idea that there is something in consciousness that is outside the chain of cause and effect is truly terrifying, because that would mean that the universe is not comprehensible on a fundamental level.
If consciousness is outside the chain of cause and effect, how do we learn from experience? Can this supposed soul be changed by experience? Can it influence reality? If so, then how can it be outside the chain of cause and effect? The idea of an individual soul, completely cut off from reality and beyond all outside influence, is nonsensical to me.
If a right is something you have and no one can take away, then we have no rights. Anyone can take away everything you have with a bullet.
If an entitlement is something you don't have and someone must give you, then all rights are entitlements. A right is something we all agree to uphold, without that agreement, you don't have 'rights' you have 'power.' For instance, your right to free speech. I can take that away from you, but other people have agreed to defend you if I try. You are entitled to free speech because your fellow citizens have agreed to give you something: the defense of your power to speak.
The free market is imperfect. Monopolies, imbalance of information, and externalities can all skew the market unfairly, harming both buyers and sellers.
What Intel did was clearly wrong, harmful to the free market, and to society as a whole. Adam Smith himself admitted that markets need regulation in order to remain free. This is one such case.
AMD surely could ramp up production fast enough. Thankfully, no corporation can push around national governments, unless those governments let them. Not doing business is not an option. Legal tricks to do business with a country, and not fall under that country's laws, will not work.
You seem to be gloating over Intel's imaginary ability to screw with the EU and control markets. Do you relish the idea of national governments being powerless to control corporations?
Right? Can't look it up. This is work related material, I'm sorry, but if this is an issue in the workplace, the workers need to be informed. I think I'll talk to HR tomorrow. This block of relevant audiovisual material is antithetical to an integrated and diverse work environment that honors all genders and masturbatory styles equally. If they won't change this policy, I will demand that upskirt webcams be installed in all female workers desks so that we can enforce a no masturbation policy equally.