I am not saying "we did that", though I can see how it comes across that way. I just want everybody to understand that philosophy is not a bunch of post-modern gibberish. there are post-modern gibberish philosophies, but there are also plenty of philosophers who will call thema s they are.
The scentific method as it stands today has been carefully pruned by philosophers of science and the empiricist branch of philosophy more generally. the "new science" as you might call it is still just as much based in philosophy as the old, moreso in fact. It is simply different philosophy which could not have existed without the stuff which we now consider laughable.
When a scientist is trying to extrapolate knowledge from data, they need the tools of philosophy to do it. When a mathematician is trying to apply their abstract concepts ot the real world they need philosophy to do it. They may no longer call what they are doing philosophy, but it is in the same way that you use your knowledge of physics to make a sandwich that doesn't fall apart.
So I suppose that really I am saying "we did that" because in this case we is anybody who pursues an organised and consistent theory of whatever the universe is. People whoa re philosophers and nothing else are only of value if they can help the specialists be better philosophers themselves.
(By the way, I had to look up Navel Gazing. In four years, it never came up)
As a person with a philosophy degre, I feel professionally obliged to remind you that all mathematics and science...in effect all of human progress...are simply branches of philosophy which eventually became specialized enough and developed enough axioms to seperate themselves. Science was once known as natural philosphy, Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" whcih essentially defined the computer is a pure philisophical work and Bertrand Russel is dually one of the great mathematicians and philosophers of the 20th century. Any time before 1600 if you asked anybody who engaged with scientific or mathematical problems what they were doing, I give you much better than even odds that they would have said "philosophy".
I am NOT saying that people should rush out and get philosophy degrees (not on their own at least, it's a great double major). However, if STEM graduates would consider how much funding philosophy departments get against what we have given the species,they might consider refraining from kicking us.
That is simply not true. This is the decade of PC gaming being easy and awesome. There are some insane people who will happily drop 1500 dollars on a pair of GPUs.
Not only do I have concerns about how this will work under very high ambient temperatures, I don't see it's usefulness for 99.99999% of users. If you are spending that kind of money, you could have a machine that is virtually soundless and has at least one and probably 2 high end GPUs. This really limits your options because of the unique form factor and I don't really see tradeoff.
For comparison, my PC with an overclocked i5 2500k and 7970 is 3 decibles above ambient (34 db in my apartment) as measured by an open vent in the top. That is actually coil whine, not fans. I could do the same thing to any single GPU machine for at most 400 USD and in most cases under 300.
Hybrids do not burn fuel while moving generally, since they have a "stop-start" feature. The ones that do are running the engine at optimal RPM to product power which will later be used to propel the car.
I don't need to define consciousness to stipulate A because while we have been unable to create a firm definition of the word, the ability to exist without any external influence is an aspect commonly agreed upon about it. Yes, you could stipulate that it is not the case, but then you would be losing almost all literature on the subject and would effectively be choosing to speak a different language.
C does hold given A and B. It's true that only the consciousness itself can determine that it is a consciousness, but given A and B it would still be correct in that determination even if every single fact it believed it knew about the nature of the external world was wrong. We know this because our hypothetical consciousness IS a consciousness (we've already decided that in A), IS capable of deciding that it is a consciousness and is wrong about the external world.
You could argue that this is a Gettier problem because the consciousness believes that it is a consciousness but is using the faulty evidence of it's sensory input of the external world to support that belief, and therefore does not actually know it, but I don't think that would hold. If the consciousness needs to know that its sensory input is correct before knowing that it is a consciousness, then that means it cannot ever determine that it is a consciousness because it cannot ever determine that its sensory inputs are correct.
This means that YOU don't know that your consciousness is a consciousness. Cogito Ergo Sum falls apart because the thinker can no longer be certain that there is an entity called "I" which is doubting the existence of the external world. Now we can either accept those things and the consequences of them, or we can stipulate in our definition of consciousness that something can be conscious without having any knowledge of the external world. Which would you rather?
As I was saying, it does seem that what he meant was dualism vs determinism as you suggest in your third paragraph. However, as to how to deal with the question as asked the real issue seems to be whether or not multiple observers are required. If only one is required than consciousness is plainly objective. If we demand that multiple beings observe a single consciousness than plainly it is not. However, I would have trouble saying that the consciousness only existed, or was only experienced "subjectively". Since the issue at hand is that the consciousness is effectively observing it's own observations, I don't see that the consciousness has to do any interpreting and thus produce a subjective result. It's like my second favourite Garfield cartoon.
"And now, ladies and gentlemen, The amazing Odie will READ HIS OWN MIND!"
The psychological definition you propse supports my view perfectly. Consciousness is a pure experience. What would it mean for our emotions to interfere with our consciousness when conscious experience itself is the product of those emotions? Unless you want to suggest that anything that is the product of emotion cannot be objective and therefore because consciousness is such a product it does not exist objectively and/or cannot be viewed objectively. That would be splitting the finest of hairs, and even then I would still say that the consciousness was being viewed objectively. That said, I can absolutely see how somebody could feel the other way.
Consciousness cannot be defined as an awareness of one's immediate surroundings because
A: It is possible to have a consciousness that exists in a vacuum. B: It is possible for that consciousness to believe that it is not in a vacuum because its method of detecting the outside world is faulty. C: A and B both being the case, qualification as a consciousness must not require knowledge of anything outside itself.
Because of this, and some other sticking points, there is no test for whether or not something else is "conscious". In fact, we don't really know what consciousness is, only that there is some bundle of qualities which we call consciousness not all of which we can define or be aware of but which be believe must exist.
"The question of whether the human consciousness is subjective or objective is largely philosophical."
I have a philosophy degree and I have no idea what this sentence means. I think they mean whether consciousness is the product of a deterministic process or some kind of dualism (a soul, whatever that is). Either way, the experience of consciousness must be objective because what the thinker experiences IS the consciousness. In fact, I would argue that consciousness is the only thing that can be experienced objectively, since all other senses and experiences are filtered through consciousness. Cogito ergo sum and all that jazz.
But that's all rubbish anyway because as far as I'm concerned the question itself doesn't make sense.
Red Delicious apples did have me convinced for a long time that I disliked apples, but Cavendish bananas seem fine to me. I can see how they might be improved but they do at least have a flavour and a texture. And they make yummy muffins.
I see what you're getting at but I don't think it holds up. My preferred definition of intelligence is the ability to make correct decisions more often than average. making a decision, even about whether or not a statement has meaning, requires you to pare down a near infinite set of options to the one which you believe is in your best interests. While imagination, the ability to catalog options that others would not notice, can be a component of intelligence it is of no use without rational decision making ability which would allow one to identify and dismiss nonsensical claims.
For example, the sentence "wholeness quiets infinite phenomena" from the article. I pretty quickly identified a possible meaning for the sentence, and doing so requires some imagination. However, if that was all I could do I would miss the obvious markers that suggest that the author had either no intended meaning or should not be trusted. To cite just one, it lacks any specificity as to what it means by either "wholeness" or "infinite phenomena", both of which could be so qidely interpreted that any author worth listening to would have selected different language.
I think in a situation like this the intelligent thing to do is to contemplate the usefulness of whatever meaning you can find but to dismiss the original sentence itself as gibberish. To do only the latter is shortsighted, but to do only the former is foolish.
I'll concede that those last couple sentences are a bit of a mess, and that I had a couple spelling errors, but beyond that my comment was well above internet standards. Also, Slashdot removed my new lines which emant it wasn't in my nicely fromatted paragraphs.
My experience is that a sort of logical conservatism that is in stark contrast to reality is common among people who have an education that is entirely technical. I like to say that Libertarianism is for people with no liberal arts background and Communism is for people with ONLY a liberal arts background.
Basically, systems that work out best (by a western measure) for society tend to be complicated and messy, because they need to allow several conflicting viewpoints to coexist. In science, and ESPECIALLY engineering, people are trained to simplify and isolate. As a result, people with only that very technical background tend to apply the same reasoning to their political views, say taking one principle and modifying their position to serve that over all others. This leads to a position that is consistent but doesn't take into account all of the facts, because very few people are capable of dealing with each element of social problems with that level of logical rigour (this is why we have an adversarial legeal system and our eladers need cabinets and advisors).
The advantage of a liberal arts education is that you learn (if you want to anyway) to reduce these kinds of problems into things that can be managed. You lose a great deal of precision in doing so, but you gain accuracy. Another nice thing is that liberal degrees tend to encourage taking a wide range of courses, including sciences. STEM degrees are so specialized now that there isn't really time in the curriculum to throw in some arts courses. I recently attended an engineering open house at Western and they get effectively 1.5 credits in non-technical electives over 4 years. In contrast,I took a minimum number of philosophy courses to get my degree and was able to indulge in a whole range of different topics. I totally understand why it is this way, but the end result is that STEM students are LESS LIKELY to become well-rounded individuals.
And music students. Honestly, I've never been in a department that was more insular (at least at my university). I honestly had somebody basically tell me that I must be miserable and a bit evil after describing basic Descartes. But that's neither here nor there.
That sub-second syncronization is integral to the function of both GPS and the internet right? If we didn't account for relativistic variation in the timing of events between satellites and position on earth, GPS would completely non-functional. So yes, this is important. It simply isn't visible to the average user, even in IT. We don't need to deel with it because the low level programmers already have.
I have no interest in motorsport persay, but as far as science and technology I'm inclined towards F1 over NASCAR. They have to warm up the coolant and oil on a timer a few hours before they come in for the day because the engines are assembled at operating temperature and are completely siezed when cold. I don't want to detract from the huge amount of skill involved in NASCAR, both as a driver and engineer, but F1 is very much the geekier of the two.
If I was going to attend one I'd go to NASCAR. If I was going to watch one on TV it would be F1.
But I prefer to drive my own gas-guzzling turbocharged...Golf... Never mind that bit. Motosport is very odd a a spectator sport to me. Rally is kind of cool looking at least. I've gone off topic.
This is more or less the main thing I voted against Harper over. Yes, he was terrible in many ways but this was the most blatantly anti-public-interest. Unfortunately according to former members of the NRC, rebuilding what Harper dismantled could take decades.
Contrary to popular belief, one that I held for many years, Monsanto has dropped all lawsuits in which the seeds were found to have naturally drifted into other fields. Think about it, their buisness is GM crops. Presuming they aren't stupid, they will have worked out that while the gain of suing a farmer is minimal, the public outcry against the cornerstone of their buisness would be huge (and anyway they would be unlikely to win such a case because there is no Mens Rea). Unofrtunately they seem to have managed to get the worst of both worlds.
Cross pollination is something that will likely happen in nature as well, and has been happening. GMO (Monsanto's efforts) are absolutely not anything like this process.
Ok. I think the key question is who cares. Houses, cars, airplanes, the internet, twinkies, lightbulbs, cell phones, roads, bacon, hats, speakers, tylenol, vacuum cleaners, scissors, multimeters, cages, cameras, pianos, boxes, nuclear power stations, kettles, pants, chairs, spaceships, windows and video games don't occur naturally either.
Slashdot Mirror
I have never heard of Mr. Ayyadurai, so you can feel good about that.
I am not saying "we did that", though I can see how it comes across that way. I just want everybody to understand that philosophy is not a bunch of post-modern gibberish. there are post-modern gibberish philosophies, but there are also plenty of philosophers who will call thema s they are.
The scentific method as it stands today has been carefully pruned by philosophers of science and the empiricist branch of philosophy more generally. the "new science" as you might call it is still just as much based in philosophy as the old, moreso in fact. It is simply different philosophy which could not have existed without the stuff which we now consider laughable.
When a scientist is trying to extrapolate knowledge from data, they need the tools of philosophy to do it. When a mathematician is trying to apply their abstract concepts ot the real world they need philosophy to do it. They may no longer call what they are doing philosophy, but it is in the same way that you use your knowledge of physics to make a sandwich that doesn't fall apart.
So I suppose that really I am saying "we did that" because in this case we is anybody who pursues an organised and consistent theory of whatever the universe is. People whoa re philosophers and nothing else are only of value if they can help the specialists be better philosophers themselves.
(By the way, I had to look up Navel Gazing. In four years, it never came up)
As a person with a philosophy degre, I feel professionally obliged to remind you that all mathematics and science...in effect all of human progress...are simply branches of philosophy which eventually became specialized enough and developed enough axioms to seperate themselves. Science was once known as natural philosphy, Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" whcih essentially defined the computer is a pure philisophical work and Bertrand Russel is dually one of the great mathematicians and philosophers of the 20th century. Any time before 1600 if you asked anybody who engaged with scientific or mathematical problems what they were doing, I give you much better than even odds that they would have said "philosophy".
I am NOT saying that people should rush out and get philosophy degrees (not on their own at least, it's a great double major). However, if STEM graduates would consider how much funding philosophy departments get against what we have given the species,they might consider refraining from kicking us.
That is simply not true. This is the decade of PC gaming being easy and awesome. There are some insane people who will happily drop 1500 dollars on a pair of GPUs.
Not only do I have concerns about how this will work under very high ambient temperatures, I don't see it's usefulness for 99.99999% of users. If you are spending that kind of money, you could have a machine that is virtually soundless and has at least one and probably 2 high end GPUs. This really limits your options because of the unique form factor and I don't really see tradeoff.
For comparison, my PC with an overclocked i5 2500k and 7970 is 3 decibles above ambient (34 db in my apartment) as measured by an open vent in the top. That is actually coil whine, not fans. I could do the same thing to any single GPU machine for at most 400 USD and in most cases under 300.
Hybrids do not burn fuel while moving generally, since they have a "stop-start" feature. The ones that do are running the engine at optimal RPM to product power which will later be used to propel the car.
I wouldn't argue with the rest of it.
I don't know if that was a joke, but it is extremely accurate.
I don't need to define consciousness to stipulate A because while we have been unable to create a firm definition of the word, the ability to exist without any external influence is an aspect commonly agreed upon about it. Yes, you could stipulate that it is not the case, but then you would be losing almost all literature on the subject and would effectively be choosing to speak a different language.
C does hold given A and B. It's true that only the consciousness itself can determine that it is a consciousness, but given A and B it would still be correct in that determination even if every single fact it believed it knew about the nature of the external world was wrong. We know this because our hypothetical consciousness IS a consciousness (we've already decided that in A), IS capable of deciding that it is a consciousness and is wrong about the external world.
You could argue that this is a Gettier problem because the consciousness believes that it is a consciousness but is using the faulty evidence of it's sensory input of the external world to support that belief, and therefore does not actually know it, but I don't think that would hold. If the consciousness needs to know that its sensory input is correct before knowing that it is a consciousness, then that means it cannot ever determine that it is a consciousness because it cannot ever determine that its sensory inputs are correct.
This means that YOU don't know that your consciousness is a consciousness. Cogito Ergo Sum falls apart because the thinker can no longer be certain that there is an entity called "I" which is doubting the existence of the external world. Now we can either accept those things and the consequences of them, or we can stipulate in our definition of consciousness that something can be conscious without having any knowledge of the external world. Which would you rather?
That was the joke.
As I was saying, it does seem that what he meant was dualism vs determinism as you suggest in your third paragraph. However, as to how to deal with the question as asked the real issue seems to be whether or not multiple observers are required. If only one is required than consciousness is plainly objective. If we demand that multiple beings observe a single consciousness than plainly it is not. However, I would have trouble saying that the consciousness only existed, or was only experienced "subjectively". Since the issue at hand is that the consciousness is effectively observing it's own observations, I don't see that the consciousness has to do any interpreting and thus produce a subjective result. It's like my second favourite Garfield cartoon.
"And now, ladies and gentlemen, The amazing Odie will READ HIS OWN MIND!"
The psychological definition you propse supports my view perfectly. Consciousness is a pure experience. What would it mean for our emotions to interfere with our consciousness when conscious experience itself is the product of those emotions? Unless you want to suggest that anything that is the product of emotion cannot be objective and therefore because consciousness is such a product it does not exist objectively and/or cannot be viewed objectively. That would be splitting the finest of hairs, and even then I would still say that the consciousness was being viewed objectively. That said, I can absolutely see how somebody could feel the other way.
Thou hast hit upon the nail as it were.
Science of philosophy *shiver*. It only works the other way round -_-
Consciousness cannot be defined as an awareness of one's immediate surroundings because
A: It is possible to have a consciousness that exists in a vacuum.
B: It is possible for that consciousness to believe that it is not in a vacuum because its method of detecting the outside world is faulty.
C: A and B both being the case, qualification as a consciousness must not require knowledge of anything outside itself.
Because of this, and some other sticking points, there is no test for whether or not something else is "conscious". In fact, we don't really know what consciousness is, only that there is some bundle of qualities which we call consciousness not all of which we can define or be aware of but which be believe must exist.
"The question of whether the human consciousness is subjective or objective is largely philosophical."
I have a philosophy degree and I have no idea what this sentence means. I think they mean whether consciousness is the product of a deterministic process or some kind of dualism (a soul, whatever that is). Either way, the experience of consciousness must be objective because what the thinker experiences IS the consciousness. In fact, I would argue that consciousness is the only thing that can be experienced objectively, since all other senses and experiences are filtered through consciousness. Cogito ergo sum and all that jazz.
But that's all rubbish anyway because as far as I'm concerned the question itself doesn't make sense.
Red Delicious apples did have me convinced for a long time that I disliked apples, but Cavendish bananas seem fine to me. I can see how they might be improved but they do at least have a flavour and a texture. And they make yummy muffins.
I see what you're getting at but I don't think it holds up. My preferred definition of intelligence is the ability to make correct decisions more often than average. making a decision, even about whether or not a statement has meaning, requires you to pare down a near infinite set of options to the one which you believe is in your best interests. While imagination, the ability to catalog options that others would not notice, can be a component of intelligence it is of no use without rational decision making ability which would allow one to identify and dismiss nonsensical claims.
For example, the sentence "wholeness quiets infinite phenomena" from the article. I pretty quickly identified a possible meaning for the sentence, and doing so requires some imagination. However, if that was all I could do I would miss the obvious markers that suggest that the author had either no intended meaning or should not be trusted. To cite just one, it lacks any specificity as to what it means by either "wholeness" or "infinite phenomena", both of which could be so qidely interpreted that any author worth listening to would have selected different language.
I think in a situation like this the intelligent thing to do is to contemplate the usefulness of whatever meaning you can find but to dismiss the original sentence itself as gibberish. To do only the latter is shortsighted, but to do only the former is foolish.
Am I wrong about this? Forget the alien whatever, the idea of thousands of large comets orbiting a planet sounds neat to me.
I'll concede that those last couple sentences are a bit of a mess, and that I had a couple spelling errors, but beyond that my comment was well above internet standards. Also, Slashdot removed my new lines which emant it wasn't in my nicely fromatted paragraphs.
As you can see, I have fixed this problem now.
My experience is that a sort of logical conservatism that is in stark contrast to reality is common among people who have an education that is entirely technical. I like to say that Libertarianism is for people with no liberal arts background and Communism is for people with ONLY a liberal arts background. Basically, systems that work out best (by a western measure) for society tend to be complicated and messy, because they need to allow several conflicting viewpoints to coexist. In science, and ESPECIALLY engineering, people are trained to simplify and isolate. As a result, people with only that very technical background tend to apply the same reasoning to their political views, say taking one principle and modifying their position to serve that over all others. This leads to a position that is consistent but doesn't take into account all of the facts, because very few people are capable of dealing with each element of social problems with that level of logical rigour (this is why we have an adversarial legeal system and our eladers need cabinets and advisors). The advantage of a liberal arts education is that you learn (if you want to anyway) to reduce these kinds of problems into things that can be managed. You lose a great deal of precision in doing so, but you gain accuracy. Another nice thing is that liberal degrees tend to encourage taking a wide range of courses, including sciences. STEM degrees are so specialized now that there isn't really time in the curriculum to throw in some arts courses. I recently attended an engineering open house at Western and they get effectively 1.5 credits in non-technical electives over 4 years. In contrast,I took a minimum number of philosophy courses to get my degree and was able to indulge in a whole range of different topics. I totally understand why it is this way, but the end result is that STEM students are LESS LIKELY to become well-rounded individuals. And music students. Honestly, I've never been in a department that was more insular (at least at my university). I honestly had somebody basically tell me that I must be miserable and a bit evil after describing basic Descartes. But that's neither here nor there.
No, it doesn't. It is, however, an example of an area where this sort of thing matters.
That sub-second syncronization is integral to the function of both GPS and the internet right? If we didn't account for relativistic variation in the timing of events between satellites and position on earth, GPS would completely non-functional. So yes, this is important. It simply isn't visible to the average user, even in IT. We don't need to deel with it because the low level programmers already have.
I have no interest in motorsport persay, but as far as science and technology I'm inclined towards F1 over NASCAR. They have to warm up the coolant and oil on a timer a few hours before they come in for the day because the engines are assembled at operating temperature and are completely siezed when cold. I don't want to detract from the huge amount of skill involved in NASCAR, both as a driver and engineer, but F1 is very much the geekier of the two. If I was going to attend one I'd go to NASCAR. If I was going to watch one on TV it would be F1. But I prefer to drive my own gas-guzzling turbocharged...Golf... Never mind that bit. Motosport is very odd a a spectator sport to me. Rally is kind of cool looking at least. I've gone off topic.
This is more or less the main thing I voted against Harper over. Yes, he was terrible in many ways but this was the most blatantly anti-public-interest. Unfortunately according to former members of the NRC, rebuilding what Harper dismantled could take decades.
Contrary to popular belief, one that I held for many years, Monsanto has dropped all lawsuits in which the seeds were found to have naturally drifted into other fields. Think about it, their buisness is GM crops. Presuming they aren't stupid, they will have worked out that while the gain of suing a farmer is minimal, the public outcry against the cornerstone of their buisness would be huge (and anyway they would be unlikely to win such a case because there is no Mens Rea). Unofrtunately they seem to have managed to get the worst of both worlds.
Wow. That just had everything didn't it. A non sequitur, an unstated major premise and TWO ad hominems.
Cross pollination is something that will likely happen in nature as well, and has been happening. GMO (Monsanto's efforts) are absolutely not anything like this process.
Ok. I think the key question is who cares. Houses, cars, airplanes, the internet, twinkies, lightbulbs, cell phones, roads, bacon, hats, speakers, tylenol, vacuum cleaners, scissors, multimeters, cages, cameras, pianos, boxes, nuclear power stations, kettles, pants, chairs, spaceships, windows and video games don't occur naturally either.