"The sky is blue" is a simple fact that is proven to oneself immediately by senses alone. Philosophers call that "a posteriori" knowledge, but we all know it. Games like blue glasses or transient changes like weather are tricks that interfere with the blueness of the sky only in the most trivial cases.
I can know things I don't believe: Thor is the god of thunder. Nice guys finish last. Guiness is good for you. Those are all statements that are known one way or another, the distinctions I'm talking about. I'm not talking about whether they're true or not, which is another matter entirely.
Mathematical theorems are proven only within their own axiomatic system. Mathematicians will tell you that they are not facts about the real world - engineers will heartily agree. When they resolve to axioms, they are a matter of faith. When they are derived from, say, geometric construction, they are a matter of belief, or even fact when you've worked the constructions yourself. Even then the "therefore" operation is a matter of faith.
Proven means demonstrated exhaustively to you. That is the Enlightenment basis for accepting knowledge. Science is a faith based on a very few articles, basically falsifiability and consistency. Scientists and others who accept scientific knowledge believe other scientists and many mathematicians. If you think science is purely proveable, or that you accept most knowledge solely on proof, you're gripping an imperfect foundation too loosely. Again, we're examining ways of knowing knowledge. Those ways have implications for the likely truth of the knowledge, but they do not determine it, nor does the truth value determine which kind of acceptance we have. Any accepted knowledge can be wrong, The progression from facts through beliefs to faiths allows much less reliability of the truth of that knowledge. But that is a separate issue. Just as the testability of info determines whether it is a matter of faith or not, without regard to whether it fails that test.
We're going to spend a $TRILLION on the Iraq War, and we're paying at least 50% more for gas than before we invaded. If we all ran on cow power, we'd have saved at least that amount. How do you like it?
The average American household uses 5KW across the year. Since heating that two car garage is helping keep America dependent on foreign oil, seems to me that whining about $6 a month to run on local energy is cheapass. Especially while Americans are paying around $3 a gallon for gas in cars that get an average 22MPG, less than 10 years ago.
I find the notion that this is all just a dream much simpler than the notion that there is even more complexity beyond the limits of my immediate perception.
I don't believe that it's just a dream, but it's the "just" part that I discount. Everything I can remember experiencing convinces me that this is a dream that must be treated as real, or the consequences are too dire. Gravity and apes especially.
Somewhere along the way from a college philosophy into to a degree in epistemology you learn that "knowledge" doesn't have to be justified, or even believed. You can be wrong, or imagine something you know is impossible, for knowledge to exist without either of those conditions. Knowledge is just information in a human mind.
BTW, I did not say that knowledge must be deduced - it can be sensed, like "the sky is blue", or "that punch hurts". Mathematical theorems are defined as unproven facts - beliefs, some of which are unproveable, others perhaps proveable.
The entire set of distinctions I put so simply hinges on the degree of "justification" of knowledge. How one must accept different knowledge determines whether it is fact, belief or faith. People devote lifetimes to investigating lots of things that pay well over time, or are too hard for them to ever fully understand, or are more fun to investigate than to know. That doesn't stop me from just getting it right and moving on to living better with the question settled.
Fast NAND Flash will read at over 100Mbps (write doesn't need to be fast). Toshiba has had that part in 1Gb for over 2 years, so it's cheap now, especially in lower densities. Cheap enough to embed in a RAM stick with an ASIC that blits from separate Flash chips to separate RAM chips in parallel at startup. Which should restore the startup image to RAM in a couple of seconds or less. Upgrading the image in Flash is infrequent and low-performance, so Flash's write limitations aren't a problem. GBps HDs are largely wasted in PCs, hogging all the buses and CPU.
You are correct that hibernate/HD is a cheap way right now. But that Toshiba part (and its peers) target mobile devices. Which is where most of our tech innovation is going. From where it will deploy to the smaller niches of workstations and servers. HDs are power hungry, noisy, heavy, failure-prone, fat, and better replaced by chips. Except in large network storage facilities, which will become even more popular as computing becomes even more mobile than the computers.
MRAM has been appealing since the 1960s as a single tech for all storage, including executable and even archival. If they pull this off, finally achieving 3D volumes of cheap, fast density, we'll drop a lot of the bottlenecks that specific electronic tech has brought with it. Even more interesting, especially in the long run, will be the widespread deployment of electromagnetoptical devices for engineering the interplay of those fundamental forces. Jumping through electronic hoops like hibernate/HD will be as obscure as magnetic core memories.
Science, as logical positivism, is ultimately faith. As is all knowledge, as it is possible that this is just a dream, or was created complete a moment ago, including memories.
But we distinguish science from other faith because there exists stronger proof through consistent sensory experience, accepting consistent mental models of them. Proof destroys faith, even when proof makes knowledge real. They're different.
Gravity is science to humans who can prove it. Is it science to apes who can't?
"Provable Faith: You don't know that something is true, but you know a mechanism where it can be proved. For now, you've adopted a belief in the most likely outcome. (E.g. is there intelligent life in outer space, because there sure isn't on earth;-])"
That's not really faith, it's belief - as you say yourself. Faith is special: it's knowledge that's accepted, but cannot be proven. Like "an unknowable fact exists". That's much more different from simple belief, like "I have a gun in my pocket", than a proveable, but unproven, fact like the 10E999999th root of 11. The metaphysical aspect makes it faith, a more important distinction than whether one has actually proven the proveable.
You're also conflating truth with knowledge, which I have not. Proven facts are true as well as known, but that distinction of truth is not relevant to distinctions among ways of knowing. Unless we're talking about which way is more reliable, or which is more inclusive, which we weren't.
No, you don't know the definition of belief, even when it's shown to you. The whole point of belief is that you can accept knowledge without actually getting the proof, for other reasons - like trusting a teacher, or intractability of exhaustive proof, or low cost of error.
Belief is knowledge without proof. Faith is a special case of belief, that can be known without proof even being possible. Just to help you get this a little more, remember that knowledge does not have to be correct, just known.
I'm more interested in SW components that I can embed in my own apps to access Notes services like calendars, directories and email, in existing Notes servers. Not because Notes is good (whether it is or not), but because so much valuable info is locked up in Notes servers. I'd love to populate a Postgres DB datamart with "live" (low latency) calendar info from across an enterprise so my various apps don't have to each connect to Notes.
Conversely, the Mythbusters often seem to have merely failed to execute a comprehensive experiment rigorously when they "bust" a "myth". Some experimental error rather than an accurate experimental model that disproves the questionable story. When they blow it, are they making metaphysics?
What about an ape who can talk with humans (maybe sign language) about its personal environment. But who can't possibly understand the mutual gravitational attraction of matter, though they can shake an apple from a tree. Is gravity both "ape faith" and "human science"?
There are many proofs that something can be proven, without being able to actually prove it. Or fail to disprove it, which is the scientific method.
I know that 23234.4324 * 154.32323 is a number, even before I do the math. That's my belief in math at work. It can be proven - it has been proven to me that it can be proven, even before it it has been proven.
Your failure to understand something so simple and common, Anonymous obtuse Coward, makes my final question about faiths and incompetence even more interesting, especially because you cannot understand it.
What about a GPL Notes client, so people wanting to deliver "Web" services from Notes servers can use or research the client code necessary to connect?
I've been hearing about these kinds of devices since "bubble memory.
Why can't I get a motherboard with 500MB Flash for storing an image of system memory exactly after the OS is loaded and initialized, that is blitted over to RAM and then tweaked (system clock, network counters, etc) in a few milliseconds? All the "loading" from storage to RAM includes minutes of computation like a second "compilation" that's practically identical every time I start the machine. How much computing power is wasted on that redundant exercise every day, around the world? I'd like to reinit only when the startup becomes corrupt, which a "known good" ROM instance could avoid better than the current chaotic process.
And I thought "Zero Point Energy" was just technobabble.
Fact: what you know that you have proven to yourself Belief: what you know that you could prove to yourself but have not Faith: what you know that you can not prove to yourself
Is there a distinction between faith you can't prove to yourself because it's not proveable (metaphysics), and faith you're too dumb to prove?
And maybe you're an Anonymous Coward who can tell the difference between an OS war flamefest response, and a response actually pointing out that the OS is the key to the solution. Even pointing out how to keep the old OS, pointing out how the old HW is also the problem.
You know, an Anonymous Coward actually able to understand the info in a post, rather than just jumping into OS flamewar mode when seeing a point about OS choice affecting the task.
Oh, right - that's unheard of on Slashdot. I must have you confused with an actual person, not an Anonymous flaming Coward.
So now you're trying to argue by thinking you're the one who can say whether my statement is hyberbole or not, after you couldn't even distinguish between nothingness and totality.
Give it up, Anonymous retard Coward. You've got nothing.
All we ever got from our flashmobs in NYC was blowing the "terrorized" mindset with an edgy kumbayah. Meanwhile, Chinese get bargains. Who are capitalists, and who are the brainwashed masses?
Truth is stranger, and more powerful, than fiction. The accurate story of the world takes much less effort to maintain, as it is just one world that maintains itself. Needed info can be had just by looking at the world.
Lies require energy every time. To maintain the illusion of consistency, each lie requires its own little world to be maintained. Every inconsistency grows a little resistance from the audience, towards the tipping point back to disbelief, when the suspension crashes to Earth.
And telling the truth about liars is fun. It's invigorating. Since the lies are spread so broad, they're spread thin, even if in many layers. Just telling the truth in public rips through the package for many people. When you teach people not just the truth, but how to learn and tell it, your power grows exponentially.
Otherwise we never would have learned it ourselves. Truth has more than a chance. Its only weakness is how easy it is to lie at first, but truth wins if you can just keep it up.
Which is scarier: the FBI knows they can't really tell whether someone wore gloves and imaged the drive, but is lying to us to pretend they're protecting us, or they actually believe their own BS?
Slashdot Mirror
"The sky is blue" is a simple fact that is proven to oneself immediately by senses alone. Philosophers call that "a posteriori" knowledge, but we all know it. Games like blue glasses or transient changes like weather are tricks that interfere with the blueness of the sky only in the most trivial cases.
I can know things I don't believe: Thor is the god of thunder. Nice guys finish last. Guiness is good for you. Those are all statements that are known one way or another, the distinctions I'm talking about. I'm not talking about whether they're true or not, which is another matter entirely.
Mathematical theorems are proven only within their own axiomatic system. Mathematicians will tell you that they are not facts about the real world - engineers will heartily agree. When they resolve to axioms, they are a matter of faith. When they are derived from, say, geometric construction, they are a matter of belief, or even fact when you've worked the constructions yourself. Even then the "therefore" operation is a matter of faith.
Proven means demonstrated exhaustively to you. That is the Enlightenment basis for accepting knowledge. Science is a faith based on a very few articles, basically falsifiability and consistency. Scientists and others who accept scientific knowledge believe other scientists and many mathematicians. If you think science is purely proveable, or that you accept most knowledge solely on proof, you're gripping an imperfect foundation too loosely. Again, we're examining ways of knowing knowledge. Those ways have implications for the likely truth of the knowledge, but they do not determine it, nor does the truth value determine which kind of acceptance we have. Any accepted knowledge can be wrong, The progression from facts through beliefs to faiths allows much less reliability of the truth of that knowledge. But that is a separate issue. Just as the testability of info determines whether it is a matter of faith or not, without regard to whether it fails that test.
Oh, right - according to the natural gas industry, there's no problem with America's dependence on foreign natural gas.
And according to the oil industry, there's no problem with our dependence on foreign oil.
And according to the nuclear power industry, nuke power is too cheap to measure, and perfectly clean and safe.
We're going to spend a $TRILLION on the Iraq War, and we're paying at least 50% more for gas than before we invaded. If we all ran on cow power, we'd have saved at least that amount. How do you like it?
The average American household uses 5KW across the year. Since heating that two car garage is helping keep America dependent on foreign oil, seems to me that whining about $6 a month to run on local energy is cheapass. Especially while Americans are paying around $3 a gallon for gas in cars that get an average 22MPG, less than 10 years ago.
We're all just walkon extras in someone else's nightmare, though I don't believe that.
I find the notion that this is all just a dream much simpler than the notion that there is even more complexity beyond the limits of my immediate perception.
I don't believe that it's just a dream, but it's the "just" part that I discount. Everything I can remember experiencing convinces me that this is a dream that must be treated as real, or the consequences are too dire. Gravity and apes especially.
Somewhere along the way from a college philosophy into to a degree in epistemology you learn that "knowledge" doesn't have to be justified, or even believed. You can be wrong, or imagine something you know is impossible, for knowledge to exist without either of those conditions. Knowledge is just information in a human mind.
BTW, I did not say that knowledge must be deduced - it can be sensed, like "the sky is blue", or "that punch hurts". Mathematical theorems are defined as unproven facts - beliefs, some of which are unproveable, others perhaps proveable.
The entire set of distinctions I put so simply hinges on the degree of "justification" of knowledge. How one must accept different knowledge determines whether it is fact, belief or faith. People devote lifetimes to investigating lots of things that pay well over time, or are too hard for them to ever fully understand, or are more fun to investigate than to know. That doesn't stop me from just getting it right and moving on to living better with the question settled.
Fast NAND Flash will read at over 100Mbps (write doesn't need to be fast). Toshiba has had that part in 1Gb for over 2 years, so it's cheap now, especially in lower densities. Cheap enough to embed in a RAM stick with an ASIC that blits from separate Flash chips to separate RAM chips in parallel at startup. Which should restore the startup image to RAM in a couple of seconds or less. Upgrading the image in Flash is infrequent and low-performance, so Flash's write limitations aren't a problem. GBps HDs are largely wasted in PCs, hogging all the buses and CPU.
You are correct that hibernate/HD is a cheap way right now. But that Toshiba part (and its peers) target mobile devices. Which is where most of our tech innovation is going. From where it will deploy to the smaller niches of workstations and servers. HDs are power hungry, noisy, heavy, failure-prone, fat, and better replaced by chips. Except in large network storage facilities, which will become even more popular as computing becomes even more mobile than the computers.
MRAM has been appealing since the 1960s as a single tech for all storage, including executable and even archival. If they pull this off, finally achieving 3D volumes of cheap, fast density, we'll drop a lot of the bottlenecks that specific electronic tech has brought with it. Even more interesting, especially in the long run, will be the widespread deployment of electromagnetoptical devices for engineering the interplay of those fundamental forces. Jumping through electronic hoops like hibernate/HD will be as obscure as magnetic core memories.
Science, as logical positivism, is ultimately faith. As is all knowledge, as it is possible that this is just a dream, or was created complete a moment ago, including memories.
But we distinguish science from other faith because there exists stronger proof through consistent sensory experience, accepting consistent mental models of them. Proof destroys faith, even when proof makes knowledge real. They're different.
Gravity is science to humans who can prove it. Is it science to apes who can't?
Prove it - with a tall building.
"Provable Faith: You don't know that something is true, but you know a mechanism where it can be proved. For now, you've adopted a belief in the most likely outcome. (E.g. is there intelligent life in outer space, because there sure isn't on earth;-])"
That's not really faith, it's belief - as you say yourself. Faith is special: it's knowledge that's accepted, but cannot be proven. Like "an unknowable fact exists". That's much more different from simple belief, like "I have a gun in my pocket", than a proveable, but unproven, fact like the 10E999999th root of 11. The metaphysical aspect makes it faith, a more important distinction than whether one has actually proven the proveable.
You're also conflating truth with knowledge, which I have not. Proven facts are true as well as known, but that distinction of truth is not relevant to distinctions among ways of knowing. Unless we're talking about which way is more reliable, or which is more inclusive, which we weren't.
No, you don't know the definition of belief, even when it's shown to you. The whole point of belief is that you can accept knowledge without actually getting the proof, for other reasons - like trusting a teacher, or intractability of exhaustive proof, or low cost of error.
Belief is knowledge without proof. Faith is a special case of belief, that can be known without proof even being possible. Just to help you get this a little more, remember that knowledge does not have to be correct, just known.
You're the Anonymous twit Coward who flings around insults like "silly" as if they could possibly make you look any less ignorant.
"If it has been "proven" that the proof would show it to be true then it proves that it is true" is gibberish.
You've demonstrated nothing but ignorance of proofs, reason and how knowledge works. Come back when you've got something worth reading.
I'm more interested in SW components that I can embed in my own apps to access Notes services like calendars, directories and email, in existing Notes servers. Not because Notes is good (whether it is or not), but because so much valuable info is locked up in Notes servers. I'd love to populate a Postgres DB datamart with "live" (low latency) calendar info from across an enterprise so my various apps don't have to each connect to Notes.
Conversely, the Mythbusters often seem to have merely failed to execute a comprehensive experiment rigorously when they "bust" a "myth". Some experimental error rather than an accurate experimental model that disproves the questionable story. When they blow it, are they making metaphysics?
What about an ape who can talk with humans (maybe sign language) about its personal environment. But who can't possibly understand the mutual gravitational attraction of matter, though they can shake an apple from a tree. Is gravity both "ape faith" and "human science"?
There are many proofs that something can be proven, without being able to actually prove it. Or fail to disprove it, which is the scientific method.
I know that 23234.4324 * 154.32323 is a number, even before I do the math. That's my belief in math at work. It can be proven - it has been proven to me that it can be proven, even before it it has been proven.
Your failure to understand something so simple and common, Anonymous obtuse Coward, makes my final question about faiths and incompetence even more interesting, especially because you cannot understand it.
What about a GPL Notes client, so people wanting to deliver "Web" services from Notes servers can use or research the client code necessary to connect?
I've been hearing about these kinds of devices since "bubble memory.
Why can't I get a motherboard with 500MB Flash for storing an image of system memory exactly after the OS is loaded and initialized, that is blitted over to RAM and then tweaked (system clock, network counters, etc) in a few milliseconds? All the "loading" from storage to RAM includes minutes of computation like a second "compilation" that's practically identical every time I start the machine. How much computing power is wasted on that redundant exercise every day, around the world? I'd like to reinit only when the startup becomes corrupt, which a "known good" ROM instance could avoid better than the current chaotic process.
And I thought "Zero Point Energy" was just technobabble.
Fact: what you know that you have proven to yourself
Belief: what you know that you could prove to yourself but have not
Faith: what you know that you can not prove to yourself
Is there a distinction between faith you can't prove to yourself because it's not proveable (metaphysics), and faith you're too dumb to prove?
And maybe you're an Anonymous Coward who can tell the difference between an OS war flamefest response, and a response actually pointing out that the OS is the key to the solution. Even pointing out how to keep the old OS, pointing out how the old HW is also the problem.
You know, an Anonymous Coward actually able to understand the info in a post, rather than just jumping into OS flamewar mode when seeing a point about OS choice affecting the task.
Oh, right - that's unheard of on Slashdot. I must have you confused with an actual person, not an Anonymous flaming Coward.
So now you're trying to argue by thinking you're the one who can say whether my statement is hyberbole or not, after you couldn't even distinguish between nothingness and totality.
Give it up, Anonymous retard Coward. You've got nothing.
All we ever got from our flashmobs in NYC was blowing the "terrorized" mindset with an edgy kumbayah. Meanwhile, Chinese get bargains. Who are capitalists, and who are the brainwashed masses?
Truth is stranger, and more powerful, than fiction. The accurate story of the world takes much less effort to maintain, as it is just one world that maintains itself. Needed info can be had just by looking at the world.
Lies require energy every time. To maintain the illusion of consistency, each lie requires its own little world to be maintained. Every inconsistency grows a little resistance from the audience, towards the tipping point back to disbelief, when the suspension crashes to Earth.
And telling the truth about liars is fun. It's invigorating. Since the lies are spread so broad, they're spread thin, even if in many layers. Just telling the truth in public rips through the package for many people. When you teach people not just the truth, but how to learn and tell it, your power grows exponentially.
Otherwise we never would have learned it ourselves. Truth has more than a chance. Its only weakness is how easy it is to lie at first, but truth wins if you can just keep it up.
Which is scarier: the FBI knows they can't really tell whether someone wore gloves and imaged the drive, but is lying to us to pretend they're protecting us, or they actually believe their own BS?