Drivers have to run in ring 0 irrespective of the operating system. This includes Linux.
No they don't. It's certainly possible to design an OS so that a small kernel runs in ring 0, drivers run in ring 1, and user processes run in ring 3. (Among other ways. Of course assuming that the processor in question has 4 run levels). Many OS's don't do that, though, because there's a performance penalty involved.
Linux and Windows variants just happen to be 2 OS's built such that the drivers run in ring 0.
From what I've heard, if you thought Judo was painful, practicing Jujitsu would make you wish you were never born.
Just for the record, Aikido is another passive Martial Art which was derived from Jujitsu. It's quite ironic that such a non-violent form of self-defense was derived from one that is quite violent, and potentially deadly.
"Looked dead, didn't I? But I wasn't. But it wasn't from lack of trying, I can tell you that. Actually, Bill's last OS put me in a coma - A coma I was to lie in for four years. When I woke up, I went on what the movie advertisements refer to as a 'roaring rampage of revenge.' I roared. And I rampaged. And I got bloody satisfaction. I've squashed a hell of a lot of competitors to get to this point, but I have only one more. The last one. The one I'm driving to right now. The only one left. And when I arrive at my destination, I am gonna kill Bill."
Aaaahh, let me guess... you've never seen Johnson act in anything except maybe little snippets of wrestling you like to make fun of so you can feel superior.
For action parts, Dwayne's a great actor. I mean, hell, if people can spend a decade enjoying Arnold Schwarzenegger in movies, I'm sure they can enjoy an action hero with actual talent.
Gosh but I wish I had a mod point for you. An AC got modded up for talking out of his ass and contradicting what was stated right in The Fucking Article. Pathetic.
By the "anything-can-happen" feel, I mean the mood you feel when watching the movie, not the plot necessarily. When you have something unpolished and gritty, like all 3 of those original movies, you feel like you're not watching something made for Hollywood. So you're not going to be exposed to the usual plot devices that scream "You're watching a movie!" at you. And often they are quite original as well. It's like when I watch Evil Dead. Sure the special effects are cheesey, but it's cool to watch too because you know these amateurs (well, former amateurs) are willing to do whatever it takes to scare you and not give a fuck about the usual movie conventions.
Alien is neat because it's a tight, simple horror movie. If you watch it before knowing the capability of the Alien it delivers a lot of jolting emotion to the audience all from practically one single location. Sure a whole army of the nasty aliens versus a bunch of Marines is going to be exciting. But any idiot director should be able to elicit some cheap thrills out of that. To make an original, claustrophobic horror movie in space takes some real skill. I feel doing more with less is a much more satisfying movie experience. T2 to was great, but it was Hollywood through and through. All action, very little suspense. It looks like you kind of agree with me about Mad Max.
Don't get me wrong, I loved all of those sequels. But I loved the originals much more. It felt like the emotions I got from the originals came from a personal connection with the movies. With the sequels, it felt to me like the emotions were shoved down my throat.
Terminator 2 and Aliens? Blech! Two great movies remade to look more Hollywood to be more popular for the average, moron, moviegoer. And as for Road Warrior, well Mad Max was just too cool to be outdone.
Me personally, I'd prefer the gritty, anything-can-happen feel of the originals over any one of those sequels. Seeing the originals made me feel like I was seeing movies for the first time. The sequels were all good, but unlike their predecssors it felt like they were just good exercises within the everyday movie-going experience.
"A democracy is a form of government in which ordinary citizens may take part in governing, in contrast with monarchy or dictatorship. In contemporary usage, democracy is often understood as the same as liberal democracy."
When going to the link to "liberal democracy", you'll see...
"Liberal democracy is a form of representative democracy in which majority rule is qualified by respect for liberal rights such as freedom of speech and assembly, freedom of religion, the right to private property and privacy, as well as equality before the law and due process under the rule of law."
So yeah, in the traditional sense, democracy is simply rule by the majority. But when talking about how the term is commonly understood today, well, it's more than that. Of course a sizeable number of citizens need to be dedicated to liberty and equality for democracy to work. But without special protections for these things codified within the law, said democracy is not likely to last very long. Me personally, I'd prefer anarchy over *any* form of tyranny. The biggest problem with anarchy isn't anarchy itself but the tyrannical government likely to take its place.
As for the whole gay marriage debate, I'd say that all unions should be considered civil unions under the law - gay or straight. Let the religions or other basic belief systems decide who's married and who isn't. Take the governemnt out of it.
Anything else would be tyranny of the sheep, and rule by the minority is even more incompatable with democracy than a disregardation for human rights.
So the sheep is a tryant for appealing to the government for protection? I have to disagree with you there. If we assume that a civil right has been violated then we are saying a wrong is committed, and the wolf has no right to eat the sheep. Assuming the wolf has another food source he can get without violating civils rights, it is merely a nuissance to him, not a form of tyranny. (Ok, this analogy is beginning to be a pain.) For support on what I said about rights and democracy look
here under Tyranny of the Majority.
To decide what constitutes a violation of human rights and what should be done to protect them should be decided very carefully. But the decision needs to be made by means of pure reason more so than by majority rule.
I'm guessing that due to your beliefs you would find gays marrying to be offensive. Well I find hate speech offensive myself. (Please don't think I'm calling your speech hateful - I'm not.) But I tolerate it because I feel that I must support their constitutional right to speak that way in order me to enjoy my rights under this government myself.
(Or do you think that the actions of the early USA mean that we're not Democratic?)
I assume you're talking about laws denying minorities their basic human rights (like slavery). In that case I'd say that they are unfortunate examples of un-democratic actions taken by a democratic government due to the fallibilities of human nature.
Are you serious? I haven't heard or read everything you've uttered, but I'm going to guess that this is the dumbest thing you've every said.
So under your reasoning, witholding civil rights from a racial minority should be upheld by the government if a large enough majority is found to support it.
Establishing and upholding human rights above the influence of majority opinion is vital to a democracy. Without them our government would be nothing more than 2 wolves and a sheep voting for what to have for dinner.
Gay rights has been brewing for years, and with the recent MA court decision changing the law of that commonwealth AGAINST the majority will, the "no gay marriage" amendment Bush wants is entirely appropriate.
When it comes to civil rights, the majority will is irrelevant. Do you think that people should be able to vote to take away a minority's right to vote?
Not to mention that there are tales of Iraqi women being raped in these prisons that are beginning to come out. The stigma against rape in Iraq is crazy; some may be killed by their own families in order to save face. WTF?
Of couse, none of this makes the murder of Berg any more palatable or (as some sick Muslim extremists feel) justified. War really brings the worst out in everybody. *heavy sigh*
Yeah, I wanted to scream when I read that Java got its roots from BASIC. The roots are clearly from C, a little C++, and some Smalltalk concepts I guess. I don't know what the fuck they were thinking.
For the record, I'd call Java more of a learning programming language than something marketed towards non-programmers.
Most likely, consciousness is a sense, like sight or sound. Would you frame the discussion of your sense of smell in terms of computational power? No, me neither.
That doesn't make any sense. The experience of the senses (qualia) is what consciousness perceives when the physical body processes certain inputs from the outside world. This doesn't work when trying to explain consciousness itself. It's like saying, "Ah ha! Consciousness is merely an illusion to trick me into thinking that there is a 'me'." But the statement doesn't make any sense without assuming that there is a "me" in the first place. Just ask Descartes.
To be fair, here's a site about a few of Hannity's lies and one about Franken's. While the franken site appears to show more lies, a close reading will show that while the numbers go up to 17, there aren't actually 17 lies to be found on the site. Lying about the lies of a man who wrote: "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them".......I think my head is going to explode! (or maybe I'm lying:)
Also, there's a good website which debates the claims of Frakenlies here. I didn't read everything there, but it appears that the only specifically damning part from Frankenlies is on point 17 about the GAO. This one I got zapped with personally while arguing about the amount of damage done by the Clinton staff before they left the Whitehouse. Then I checked the actual PDF from the GAO. D'oh!
But they are so emotionally charged and so outrageous that they get air time (like this story) and folks in the intellectual elitest society of higher situational ethics and the vacuuous contradictory enlightenment of postmodern cotton candy thinking swallow these statements as gospel and run around repeating them until the mildly thoughtful person almost buys into them. And we wonder why the electoral college is still in place...
*Phew* It's a good thing you're countering unreasoned emotional argunments with such rational, evenly-considered statements.
I'd argue that support for the war itself was definitely built upon emotional appeals. It was called Operation Iraqi Freedom when most Iraqis were against the war. That and many pundits attempted to make links between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 (something the President later admitted don't exist). With polls showing that many (most IIRC) supporters of the war believed the link was real, it looks like the strategy worked.
Sure the method of protest the LUG president is using is idiotic. But that doesn't give you an excuse to be a hypocrite.
Hmm I was rather disappointed after all the noise. The Passion is well made and rather realistic, but it is hardly controversial: we are shown the story of Christ as we already know it, blow by blow.
The realistic portrayal of the events was what appealed to me actually. With so many Jesus films either skimming over the details or injecting a good deal of their own interpretation, I thought it was refreshing to see the events as presented by the Bible. (And no, even after being raised Catholic, there were still a lot of details about the telling of the cruxifixion which I was unclear on.) Telling the story from a revolutionary point of view is great too, but occassionally it's good to see something adhering to the original source.
Speaking of "The Last Temptation of Christ" though, I caught some of it on TV and noticed that some parts of The Passion seemed to be "borrowed" from that film. There was the blood spurt as the first nail is driven home, the reaction when the cross is sunk securely in the ground, and I think both did a POV shot from the cross as it is being propped up. Did you get the same impression?
Did anyone besides me have to suppress an overwhelming desire to hum "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" when Jesus was put up on the cross in The Passion?
I did end up enjoying The Passion more than I thought I would. Except for demons hounding Judas into suicide (I think guilt alone would have been enough), the crow pecking out the eyes of the thief (WTF?) and Satan's corny freak-out after Jesus died on the cross I thought it was well done. Anyone who thought this was overwhelmingly gory just haven't seen many gory movies.
WARNING: The above paragraph you just read contained spoilers.
To my mind, intuition is a shortcut to somewhere else, and is useless without reason to back it up. Similarly, I would concede that reason itself seems to give us few new insights, without intuition to "inspire" us.
Well that in a nutshell is what I'd say also. I guess the reason that I put so much emphasis on the role of "intuition" (whatever you feel that boils down to) is that when it pans out well, it leads to the most revolutionary ideas in science. Otherwise all you're doing is tweaking knowledge you've already been given. The best sign that there are going to be great new ideas coming out of science is when you hear something like, "All the great problems have already been solved." (Which is what they suspected before Relativity was invented/discovered).
That's a convenient argument, but it doesn't hold, except in the sense that "All Models are wrong... some models are useful." For example, the only perfect model of the universe is the universe itself. That doesn't prevent us from attaining knowledge about the universe, and creating models to account for that knowledge. These models are not perfect models, but they are useful. In the same way, it is unnecessary to have a perfect model of the human brain to attain useful knowledge about it.
I agree with this. I especially like your line that "the only perfect model of the universe is the universe itself." I was thinking of "understanding the brain" as forming an overriding theory (or model) which could explain it and mind completely, which I think we both feel is impossible. Of course it is possible to understand elements of the brain. If we didn't try to do this then we'd be suppressing a whole slew of medical advances.
My main point of all this, put in your terms, would be that because we (and any other consciousness) are unable to create a perfect model of the universe, there will always be elements of it which are unexplained and the exact means which we must take to explain them, uncertain.
Now how this all connects to Pantheism or something like Taoism, well... would you consider it a cop-out if I said we should just agree to disagree about this? Just for both of us to get to the point we are now is beginning to fill up the discussions of a Slashdot article with an off-topic thread that probably interests only the two of us.
By the way, have you taken any philosophy courses or do you teach philosophy? Are you a scientist of some sort? I thought your posts were excellent.
But I think I'm getting distracted by answering some of your specific objections... I'm really mostly concerned with why you think intuition is different than reason.
Because intuition is defined as "The act or faculty of knowing or sensing without the use of rational processes" (reason). Given the definition, either you think that intuition is different than reason or that it doesn't exist at all.
Lets, for the sake of argument, assume that we *must* have intuition to get to new knowledge, and that reason can only come along behind and fill in the blanks... What does that get us ?
It gets you the ability to discover knowledge you wouldn't be able to get if you were only able to use empricism and pure reason alone. Is there a point of yours here that I'm missing? It would also give the process of doing science a creative component. It takes creativity to formulate the best a priori model to describe your emprical observations as completely and simply as possible. Otherwise, all of science could be accomplished with an algoritm.
So this would mean we can only gain new knowledge in a way we don't currently understand. Does that mean we cannot ever understand our own intuition ? Not necessarily.
Perhaps. But all I need to support my theory is for there to always be the need for intuitions for our reasoning to continue to give us results. It doesn't matter whether you can later explain the source of individual intuitions rationally after they happen or not. They just have to keep coming.
Does it mean we can't understand our own brains ? (Great quotations aside) - no. I mean I like this one "640K should be enough memory for anyone".. but that wasn't true either.
Materialism says that mind is reducible to brain structure and brain functions. So understanding the brain is the same thing as understanding the mind. Every time you create thoughts to explain mind you create a bigger mind to explain with more thoughts. Any thoughts about mind are by definition subsets of mind. That's the kind of thing that causes all kinds of paradoxes in mathematics, sets that contain themselves.
It wouldn't surprise me if the phrase "understanding the mind" (or consciousness) is a meaningless concept. Analagous to square circles and the like.
And even if this is true - I am still unconvinced that intuition itself cannot be explained through completely rational, reasonable, and material models.
You use intuition to form your axioms. The axioms are assumed, not proven. Now something is unexplained. You ask, "Why these axioms?" So you question the basis you have for knowledge. How? You use more intuitions to question your first intuitions. This leads to more unexplained axioms. How do you explain the new axioms? More intuitions to question old intuitions. How do you propose that this cycle ends? Simple. You can't.
But you don't say that. You say that intuition leads to lines of thought that cannot be found by pure reason. If I cannot get there through pure reason, then how can I verify that my conclusions are correct through the application of reason ?
Either I misstated my position or you misunderstood it. Intuition jumpstarts you to new lines of thought to test. The verification is done through reason. How do you explain new insights that your current system of thought is incapable of if you only allow yourself to work within that system of thought? Simple. You don't. You must always depend on insights which are not definable within your current system of thought. How does this end? It doesn't. You will always be uncertain. Science is always uncertain anyways, right? It's impossible to prove or disprove any a posteriori claims completely. A priori is a different matter though. Though I'd claim that Godel's theorem puts some limitations on this as well.
I heard a great quote once. It goes, "If the brain were simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it.";) Brain chemistry doesn't buy you anything unless you can explain exactly how they form new thoughts. You're just shifting the question to somewhere else, not answering it.
So your point is what ? That intuition is more reliable than reason ?
No, it's that intuition leads to lines of thought that cannot be found by pure reason. To evaluate whether or not an intuition is correct/applicable takes the application of reason.
Intuition is root of all these tools ? Nay, sir, I suggest that reason is.
And I'd suggest that the formalization of reasoning had to be arrived at by intuition. It wasn't just handed to us by the gods. After enough trial and error, we've discovered reason, and it gives us a more reliable way of evaluating intuitions. But the day intuition is abandoned in favor of reason is the exact same day the scientific progress ends.
Slashdot Mirror
No they don't. It's certainly possible to design an OS so that a small kernel runs in ring 0, drivers run in ring 1, and user processes run in ring 3. (Among other ways. Of course assuming that the processor in question has 4 run levels). Many OS's don't do that, though, because there's a performance penalty involved.
Linux and Windows variants just happen to be 2 OS's built such that the drivers run in ring 0.
From what I've heard, if you thought Judo was painful, practicing Jujitsu would make you wish you were never born.
Just for the record, Aikido is another passive Martial Art which was derived from Jujitsu. It's quite ironic that such a non-violent form of self-defense was derived from one that is quite violent, and potentially deadly.
"Looked dead, didn't I? But I wasn't. But it wasn't from lack of trying, I can tell you that. Actually, Bill's last OS put me in a coma - A coma I was to lie in for four years. When I woke up, I went on what the movie advertisements refer to as a 'roaring rampage of revenge.' I roared. And I rampaged. And I got bloody satisfaction. I've squashed a hell of a lot of competitors to get to this point, but I have only one more. The last one. The one I'm driving to right now. The only one left. And when I arrive at my destination, I am gonna kill Bill."
(Apologies to Tarantino)
Aaaahh, let me guess... you've never seen Johnson act in anything except maybe little snippets of wrestling you like to make fun of so you can feel superior.
For action parts, Dwayne's a great actor. I mean, hell, if people can spend a decade enjoying Arnold Schwarzenegger in movies, I'm sure they can enjoy an action hero with actual talent.
Gosh but I wish I had a mod point for you. An AC got modded up for talking out of his ass and contradicting what was stated right in The Fucking Article. Pathetic.
By the "anything-can-happen" feel, I mean the mood you feel when watching the movie, not the plot necessarily. When you have something unpolished and gritty, like all 3 of those original movies, you feel like you're not watching something made for Hollywood. So you're not going to be exposed to the usual plot devices that scream "You're watching a movie!" at you. And often they are quite original as well. It's like when I watch Evil Dead. Sure the special effects are cheesey, but it's cool to watch too because you know these amateurs (well, former amateurs) are willing to do whatever it takes to scare you and not give a fuck about the usual movie conventions.
Alien is neat because it's a tight, simple horror movie. If you watch it before knowing the capability of the Alien it delivers a lot of jolting emotion to the audience all from practically one single location. Sure a whole army of the nasty aliens versus a bunch of Marines is going to be exciting. But any idiot director should be able to elicit some cheap thrills out of that. To make an original, claustrophobic horror movie in space takes some real skill. I feel doing more with less is a much more satisfying movie experience. T2 to was great, but it was Hollywood through and through. All action, very little suspense. It looks like you kind of agree with me about Mad Max.
Don't get me wrong, I loved all of those sequels. But I loved the originals much more. It felt like the emotions I got from the originals came from a personal connection with the movies. With the sequels, it felt to me like the emotions were shoved down my throat.
YMMV
Terminator 2 and Aliens? Blech! Two great movies remade to look more Hollywood to be more popular for the average, moron, moviegoer. And as for Road Warrior, well Mad Max was just too cool to be outdone.
Me personally, I'd prefer the gritty, anything-can-happen feel of the originals over any one of those sequels. Seeing the originals made me feel like I was seeing movies for the first time. The sequels were all good, but unlike their predecssors it felt like they were just good exercises within the everyday movie-going experience.
"A democracy is a form of government in which ordinary citizens may take part in governing, in contrast with monarchy or dictatorship. In contemporary usage, democracy is often understood as the same as liberal democracy."
When going to the link to "liberal democracy", you'll see...
"Liberal democracy is a form of representative democracy in which majority rule is qualified by respect for liberal rights such as freedom of speech and assembly, freedom of religion, the right to private property and privacy, as well as equality before the law and due process under the rule of law."
So yeah, in the traditional sense, democracy is simply rule by the majority. But when talking about how the term is commonly understood today, well, it's more than that. Of course a sizeable number of citizens need to be dedicated to liberty and equality for democracy to work. But without special protections for these things codified within the law, said democracy is not likely to last very long. Me personally, I'd prefer anarchy over *any* form of tyranny. The biggest problem with anarchy isn't anarchy itself but the tyrannical government likely to take its place.
As for the whole gay marriage debate, I'd say that all unions should be considered civil unions under the law - gay or straight. Let the religions or other basic belief systems decide who's married and who isn't. Take the governemnt out of it.
I'll shut up now.
So the sheep is a tryant for appealing to the government for protection? I have to disagree with you there. If we assume that a civil right has been violated then we are saying a wrong is committed, and the wolf has no right to eat the sheep. Assuming the wolf has another food source he can get without violating civils rights, it is merely a nuissance to him, not a form of tyranny. (Ok, this analogy is beginning to be a pain.) For support on what I said about rights and democracy look here under Tyranny of the Majority.
To decide what constitutes a violation of human rights and what should be done to protect them should be decided very carefully. But the decision needs to be made by means of pure reason more so than by majority rule.
I'm guessing that due to your beliefs you would find gays marrying to be offensive. Well I find hate speech offensive myself. (Please don't think I'm calling your speech hateful - I'm not.) But I tolerate it because I feel that I must support their constitutional right to speak that way in order me to enjoy my rights under this government myself.
(Or do you think that the actions of the early USA mean that we're not Democratic?)
I assume you're talking about laws denying minorities their basic human rights (like slavery). In that case I'd say that they are unfortunate examples of un-democratic actions taken by a democratic government due to the fallibilities of human nature.
Are you serious? I haven't heard or read everything you've uttered, but I'm going to guess that this is the dumbest thing you've every said.
So under your reasoning, witholding civil rights from a racial minority should be upheld by the government if a large enough majority is found to support it.
Establishing and upholding human rights above the influence of majority opinion is vital to a democracy. Without them our government would be nothing more than 2 wolves and a sheep voting for what to have for dinner.
When it comes to civil rights, the majority will is irrelevant. Do you think that people should be able to vote to take away a minority's right to vote?
Not to mention that there are tales of Iraqi women being raped in these prisons that are beginning to come out. The stigma against rape in Iraq is crazy; some may be killed by their own families in order to save face. WTF?
Of couse, none of this makes the murder of Berg any more palatable or (as some sick Muslim extremists feel) justified. War really brings the worst out in everybody. *heavy sigh*
Exactly. Klingons are probably water-based as well. The title makes no sense.
Yeah, I wanted to scream when I read that Java got its roots from BASIC. The roots are clearly from C, a little C++, and some Smalltalk concepts I guess. I don't know what the fuck they were thinking.
For the record, I'd call Java more of a learning programming language than something marketed towards non-programmers.
That doesn't make any sense. The experience of the senses (qualia) is what consciousness perceives when the physical body processes certain inputs from the outside world. This doesn't work when trying to explain consciousness itself. It's like saying, "Ah ha! Consciousness is merely an illusion to trick me into thinking that there is a 'me'." But the statement doesn't make any sense without assuming that there is a "me" in the first place. Just ask Descartes.
Also, there's a good website which debates the claims of Frakenlies here. I didn't read everything there, but it appears that the only specifically damning part from Frankenlies is on point 17 about the GAO. This one I got zapped with personally while arguing about the amount of damage done by the Clinton staff before they left the Whitehouse. Then I checked the actual PDF from the GAO. D'oh!
*Phew* It's a good thing you're countering unreasoned emotional argunments with such rational, evenly-considered statements.
I'd argue that support for the war itself was definitely built upon emotional appeals. It was called Operation Iraqi Freedom when most Iraqis were against the war. That and many pundits attempted to make links between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 (something the President later admitted don't exist). With polls showing that many (most IIRC) supporters of the war believed the link was real, it looks like the strategy worked.
Sure the method of protest the LUG president is using is idiotic. But that doesn't give you an excuse to be a hypocrite.
Just wait a month.
Does this mean that Microsoft is embracing the Unix Philosphy? I think I feel faint.
The realistic portrayal of the events was what appealed to me actually. With so many Jesus films either skimming over the details or injecting a good deal of their own interpretation, I thought it was refreshing to see the events as presented by the Bible. (And no, even after being raised Catholic, there were still a lot of details about the telling of the cruxifixion which I was unclear on.) Telling the story from a revolutionary point of view is great too, but occassionally it's good to see something adhering to the original source.
Speaking of "The Last Temptation of Christ" though, I caught some of it on TV and noticed that some parts of The Passion seemed to be "borrowed" from that film. There was the blood spurt as the first nail is driven home, the reaction when the cross is sunk securely in the ground, and I think both did a POV shot from the cross as it is being propped up. Did you get the same impression?
Did anyone besides me have to suppress an overwhelming desire to hum "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" when Jesus was put up on the cross in The Passion?
I did end up enjoying The Passion more than I thought I would. Except for demons hounding Judas into suicide (I think guilt alone would have been enough), the crow pecking out the eyes of the thief (WTF?) and Satan's corny freak-out after Jesus died on the cross I thought it was well done. Anyone who thought this was overwhelmingly gory just haven't seen many gory movies.
WARNING: The above paragraph you just read contained spoilers.
Well that in a nutshell is what I'd say also. I guess the reason that I put so much emphasis on the role of "intuition" (whatever you feel that boils down to) is that when it pans out well, it leads to the most revolutionary ideas in science. Otherwise all you're doing is tweaking knowledge you've already been given. The best sign that there are going to be great new ideas coming out of science is when you hear something like, "All the great problems have already been solved." (Which is what they suspected before Relativity was invented/discovered).
That's a convenient argument, but it doesn't hold, except in the sense that "All Models are wrong... some models are useful." For example, the only perfect model of the universe is the universe itself. That doesn't prevent us from attaining knowledge about the universe, and creating models to account for that knowledge. These models are not perfect models, but they are useful. In the same way, it is unnecessary to have a perfect model of the human brain to attain useful knowledge about it.
I agree with this. I especially like your line that "the only perfect model of the universe is the universe itself." I was thinking of "understanding the brain" as forming an overriding theory (or model) which could explain it and mind completely, which I think we both feel is impossible. Of course it is possible to understand elements of the brain. If we didn't try to do this then we'd be suppressing a whole slew of medical advances.
My main point of all this, put in your terms, would be that because we (and any other consciousness) are unable to create a perfect model of the universe, there will always be elements of it which are unexplained and the exact means which we must take to explain them, uncertain.
Now how this all connects to Pantheism or something like Taoism, well... would you consider it a cop-out if I said we should just agree to disagree about this? Just for both of us to get to the point we are now is beginning to fill up the discussions of a Slashdot article with an off-topic thread that probably interests only the two of us.
By the way, have you taken any philosophy courses or do you teach philosophy? Are you a scientist of some sort? I thought your posts were excellent.
Take care,
Brian
Because intuition is defined as "The act or faculty of knowing or sensing without the use of rational processes" (reason). Given the definition, either you think that intuition is different than reason or that it doesn't exist at all.
Lets, for the sake of argument, assume that we *must* have intuition to get to new knowledge, and that reason can only come along behind and fill in the blanks... What does that get us ?
It gets you the ability to discover knowledge you wouldn't be able to get if you were only able to use empricism and pure reason alone. Is there a point of yours here that I'm missing? It would also give the process of doing science a creative component. It takes creativity to formulate the best a priori model to describe your emprical observations as completely and simply as possible. Otherwise, all of science could be accomplished with an algoritm.
So this would mean we can only gain new knowledge in a way we don't currently understand. Does that mean we cannot ever understand our own intuition ? Not necessarily.
Perhaps. But all I need to support my theory is for there to always be the need for intuitions for our reasoning to continue to give us results. It doesn't matter whether you can later explain the source of individual intuitions rationally after they happen or not. They just have to keep coming.
Does it mean we can't understand our own brains ? (Great quotations aside) - no. I mean I like this one "640K should be enough memory for anyone".. but that wasn't true either.
Materialism says that mind is reducible to brain structure and brain functions. So understanding the brain is the same thing as understanding the mind. Every time you create thoughts to explain mind you create a bigger mind to explain with more thoughts. Any thoughts about mind are by definition subsets of mind. That's the kind of thing that causes all kinds of paradoxes in mathematics, sets that contain themselves.
It wouldn't surprise me if the phrase "understanding the mind" (or consciousness) is a meaningless concept. Analagous to square circles and the like.
You use intuition to form your axioms. The axioms are assumed, not proven. Now something is unexplained. You ask, "Why these axioms?" So you question the basis you have for knowledge. How? You use more intuitions to question your first intuitions. This leads to more unexplained axioms. How do you explain the new axioms? More intuitions to question old intuitions. How do you propose that this cycle ends? Simple. You can't.
But you don't say that. You say that intuition leads to lines of thought that cannot be found by pure reason. If I cannot get there through pure reason, then how can I verify that my conclusions are correct through the application of reason ?
Either I misstated my position or you misunderstood it. Intuition jumpstarts you to new lines of thought to test. The verification is done through reason. How do you explain new insights that your current system of thought is incapable of if you only allow yourself to work within that system of thought? Simple. You don't. You must always depend on insights which are not definable within your current system of thought. How does this end? It doesn't. You will always be uncertain. Science is always uncertain anyways, right? It's impossible to prove or disprove any a posteriori claims completely. A priori is a different matter though. Though I'd claim that Godel's theorem puts some limitations on this as well.
I heard a great quote once. It goes, "If the brain were simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it." ;) Brain chemistry doesn't buy you anything unless you can explain exactly how they form new thoughts. You're just shifting the question to somewhere else, not answering it.
No, it's that intuition leads to lines of thought that cannot be found by pure reason. To evaluate whether or not an intuition is correct/applicable takes the application of reason.
Intuition is root of all these tools ? Nay, sir, I suggest that reason is.
And I'd suggest that the formalization of reasoning had to be arrived at by intuition. It wasn't just handed to us by the gods. After enough trial and error, we've discovered reason, and it gives us a more reliable way of evaluating intuitions. But the day intuition is abandoned in favor of reason is the exact same day the scientific progress ends.