First point: The default logical position for any proposition is to assume it false until some evidence is given. This is a principle that we employ hundreds, and perhaps thousands of times each day. For example, it is not impossible that a king cobra has crept under your bed while you slept, but if you take this possibility seriously, you will not put your foot down on the floor to get up. Serious consideration of all unlikely possibilities will leave you paralysed, and in all likelihood, clinically insane. Why, then, do we discard this principle in one single case--the existence of God?
Second: Certain cognitive heuristics, though common, have extraordinarily bad histories of reliability. Of all of these, our tendency to see conscious intentionality at work where there is none, particularly in areas where we have no explanation, has the worst record. We are hard wired towards paranoia, because a false positive in this regard was far less dangerous for our ancestors than a false negative. This error is at work in belief in conspiracy theories (the Illuminati did it), psychic phenomena (the spirits did it), all kinds of false pattern recognitions (the pattern was put there intentionally by something) and even in our reactions to bad weather (our resentment towards the weather as if it meant to spoil our picnic.) And yet, what do we fill in the gap in our understanding in cosmology with? An intentional being. Now, how reliable a guess do you really think this is?
Third: As Richard Dawkins has pointed out, we have evolved to understand the world we live in, the middle world, not that of the very big or very small. We have no talent for cosmology. And again, what we encounter in the common understanding of cosmology are principles suited to the middle world; most commonly, the expectation of intentionality. Again, how likely is this to be accurate?
Fourth: While there may be no direct evidence of God, one would expect that a universe created or informed by a divine presence would differ in some particulars from a universe not created or informed by that presence. The problem of evil raises its head, but even more so, the problem of sterility--why is the universe not teeming with life? I can imagine a universe which consists entirely of verdant pockets of life, much of it intelligent, all of it eventually accessible by normal bodily locomotion, in which all transactions between living organisms are positive sum. Thus, the lion does not eat you, but something that you provide (a nectar sack, perhaps), in return for which it provides some other service. No nature red in tooth and claw, no war, no violence. Our universe does not conform to the expectations one would have of a universe created or informed by what we conceive as God.
The objection offered to this is that perhaps God had to do it this way. But if God is constrained, what created the constraints? One of the conclusions of theology is that God is not only omniscient, omni benevolent, and omnipotent, but perfectly free. Because if God is not perfectly free, something else limits God, and that something else is actually God.
Fifth: As our conceptions of God continue to race ahead of disconfirming evidence, why do we continue to use the word God? The God of Karen Armstrong, Terry Eagleton, or Teilhard de Chardin has nothing in common with Jehovah, yet we use the same word for all. The statement: "There is some X which exists, where X can mean anything, and exists does not necessarily have its common meaning, and this X we call God" is true because it is trivial. It carries no information because its terms have no fixed meaning. Contemporary theology has argued itself into a void.
Finally: The belief in God is motivated by Einstein's parsimonious question: Is the universe friendly? But perhaps the question is not whether the universe is friendly to us, but whether we are friendly to it. Consider what happens when you fall in love: the person you love becomes radiant, extraordinary, imbued with benevolent wonder, and you are endlessly fascinated by them. You
The problem with what he was doing was that it was not PvP. He was using a teleport power to move other players into an NPC guard post. The NPC's were doing all the killing. He didn't even get the points for it, because he didn't actually defeat the enemies, and so, contrary to what he claims, he wasn't even playing by the rules of the game, because the game does not provide any incentive for this.
In short, he was griefing other players--killing them for no reason, and for no gain.
Sorry, but you're still not making your point. Did the men not fire because they didn't want to shoot people, or did they not fire because they were hunkered down behind cover afraid to move? Combat training does not overcome the instinct not to kill, it overcomes the instinct to crawl into cover and not move until danger has passed, and this instinct is a lot more powerful than the reservation against killing strangers, particularly when those strangers are trying to kill you. Combat training is intended to make offensive actions ingrained, rather than defensive action--you shoot without thinking, rather than cower without thinking. Not a single thing that you have said demonstrates anything to the contrary.
In the First World War, the Canadians were amongst the most deadly combatants, and this wasn't because they were natural born killers, but because they were largely from frontiers and occupations where physical danger was a common experience. This meant that they were much less likely to freeze and more likely to shoot back. When compared to the instinct for self preservation, the reluctance to kill is trivial; you do what you think will save your life, and if you are trained to react by removing the threat, rather than hiding from it, than that is what you will do. When the man shooting at you is just a flicker of movement, it might as well be a pixel on the screen. Driving a bayonet into a boy's chest is another matter, but you have to be pretty damn disturbed to confuse a video game, no matter how realistic, with the real thing.
The AI in the game does not have a family who will mourn him, he was not going to grow up, possibly to be a great composer, artist, writer, or statesman. The AI was never going to grow up at all, and if you can't figure that out, then video games are the least of your problems. You cannot look into the eyes on the screen and see a life snuffed out, and know that you have just killed someone who might be just like you, because a video game NPC is not like you! Because it is precisely thoughts like these that haunt men who fight in wars. You know that these aren't people. And if someone doesn't, they're already mad, and I'm betting they were like that before they ever loaded up the game.
My impression of Wii sales is that people who buy it are sold on it at parties, where it is fun to play in a group, and then hardly touch the thing a week after buying it. The limitations do not become immediately obvious. It's good enough to sell itself on novelty value, but not good enough to sustain interest. Everyone I know who has bought one goes back to their other next-gen systems shortly after buying it, and the thing spends most of its time collecting dust.
As someone who has worked on a Wii dev kit, I can tell you that the Wii is essentially a Gamecube with some extra memory kludged in and a controller gimmick. It's a hack, with all the work shifted to the developer to overcome its limitations. I'm not surprised that it's cheap. The hardware couldn't cost more than $75 to make. But what people understood the controller to be able to do, and what it could do, were two entirely different things--it could not, as promised, register position and attitude, only motion, and even that not very well. We've seen this before with Microsoft vaporware; products touted to be far more than they are in an attempt to preempt better competitors. The fact that Nintendo got it out first as an active controller doesn't mean that the idea didn't exist before. The Eyetoy and various camera apps for PC and XBox did essentially the same thing, but used a passive controller (colored objects) with the camera, and these predate the Wii by a couple of years. First isn't best, and Nintendo wasn't even the first. What strikes me about Sony is that they plan long term, and they don't ship till its good and ready. Based on product release patterns we've seen in the industry, the Wii is already peaking, the XBox360 will peak in a year or two, but the PS3 won't hit its peak for 3 or 4 years. Given the quality of the hardware, the PS3 is the one you want in the long run.
My impression of the demonstration of Microsoft's Natal is that it's not yet ready, and may never be; at several points during the demonstration the player avatar exploded into a tangled mass of limbs. I watched and compared carefully the sensitivity of the Wii's enhanced controller vs. Sony's. I could not help noticing that in the archery demo, it took several seconds to line up a shot on a broad static target (and even then it was hard to hit) while the Sony demo allowed the player to do quickly aimed called shots on a moving mesh. Sony also performed the acid test on positional control, mapping the controlled virtual object to the player's hand flawlessly. This is something Nintendo didn't even attempt.
As for the ethics of the various companies, they're all monsters, so there really isn't one that has the clear advantage here. I will say, though, that Sony is split between its hardware and its media division, and the two are constantly at loggerheads, with Sony Hardware often subverting the malicious practices of Sony Media (I've actually seen the two go at it tooth and nail in projects I've worked on.) So the guys you hate at Sony didn't build the console.
And still, none of this addresses the underlying ethos; someone who thinks that it is their place, not the government's, to defend themselves through the lethal use of force is also far less likely to trust the government with the knowledge that they have a gun. A person who registers their gun is conceding the government's right to regulate and restrict them. I would be surprised if they had a tendency to abuse a legal right, since the very act of registration indicates an acceptance of government authority. But it is far more common in America than in other Western nations for citizens to have a blanket distrust of government and to take matters--including matters of self-defense--into their own hands. This is a broad cultural right, not a legal one. It is the very contempt for legality, and for the institutions that guide and enforce it, that I am talking about here.
Mention the phrase "state monopoly of violence" to these people and watch their hackles rise. But the alternative is a claimed right, though not a legal one, to personal violence. Ask someone who complains constantly about the "gubmint" how many weapons they have, and whether they are registered. Chances are they have at least one or two that aren't, tucked away somewhere in their home. And they are eager to assert that they know how to get even. I know a couple of these people in Canada, who send me links to anti-government tirades from U.S. sites. Given that their inspiration is almost entirely American, think of how many people fit this description in America.
Whether Canada has more guns than the U.S., the second point is valid. And we do have a lot of guns, and in Switzerland, where they have mandatory military service, everyone keeps the gun they trained with in their home.
The difference is the attitude towards guns and violence in general. In Canada, as in Switzerland, violence is recognized as a state monopoly. We leave that for the police in time of peace, and the army in time of war. The temptation to pick up a gun and use it on someone is regarded as criminal, period. If you want to join a militia, you join the army. If you want to learn to defend yourself, you take martial arts. Guns are for people working in official positions, and even they have to answer an inquiry when they do. When six poorly trained RCMP tasered a man to death in an airport, they got raked over the coals, and they're still getting raked over the coals.
Americans believe they have the right to defend themselves with firearms. But what constitutes self-defense? Who decides? Because if someone is carrying a gun, it becomes spur of the moment, and the guy with the gun decides on the spot. If he's none too bright (and that describes about 10 to 15% of any population) he may decide that shooting you for dissing him is self-defense. And he may decide that just looking at him is dissing him. Or he or she might just be scared, and act on that--my wife mentioned a night where she heard someone running up behind her, and spun to attack him. It was jogger, but she might have shot him if she'd had a gun. If you don't take the time to think--and stupid or scared people don't--you shoot. America's problem isn't just too many guns, it's the fact that people carry them around and feel that they have the right to use them. You have claimed a right which, in the hands of stupid or frightened people, amounts to a right to kill. Since you can't outlaw stupidity and fear, you have a problem.
As for video games, media has a negligible effect on normal people. What does influence them are other human beings. Even kids know the difference between fantasy and reality, much better than we think they do. The Columbine killers were not normal human beings: one was your garden variety psychopath, and the other was a lost kid who fell under the influence of a garden variety psychopath. They didn't do it because they were goths, gamers, the trenchcoat mafia, or any other such nonsense. And psychopaths remain psychopaths even if you treat them to a steady diet of Winnie the Pooh and Little House on the Prairie.
A psychopath is a person in your neighbourhood, as the old sesame street tune goes. And sooner or later, he's going to blow up. Not letting him have instant access to guns is a good start, but you cannot change his nature. He can't kill anyone with a copy of Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty, and games may even give him an outlet for his madness. Tell your legislators to stop wasting your time and money on this crap.
Precipitation tends to happen in weather which is warmer than what you normally expect at the poles. If the temperatures in the Antarctic rise, we would expect to see more precipitation, leading to thicker ice, because Antarctica is an actual land mass that can support it. The Arctic, on the other hand, is floating in the ocean, which is warming. So thicker ice in the Antarctic is entirely consistent with global warming, although it's good news for sea levels. Now, if only we can get Greenland and Northern Canada and Russia to stop melting...
Secondly, rather than paying attention to media boilerplate, watch where the oil producers are putting their money. They are all jockeying for position for Arctic Oil. Russia, which flatly denies that Global Warming is happening, planted a Russian flag under the Arctic Ocean at the North Pole. Canada's current government, who only recently admitted that Global Warming might be happening, stationed troops in the far North to protect Canadian Oil claims up there as one of their first initiatives four years back. And you might recall, if you're over 40, a joint American\Canadian venture of two ships trying to make it through the Northwest Passage: a Canadian ice breaker and a modified American oil tanker. It was a bust--they got through, but the tanker got ripped to shreds (it wasn't carrying oil, fortunately.) Now, all the oil companies are competing for rights in the Arctic--rights that are worth nothing unless arctic ice recedes to an unprecedented extent.
So, pay no attention to what they say--watch what the oil producers are doing. What do they know that we don't? That, more than anything, convinces me that global warming is real.
There are things that Obama has done that I like, and things I don't like. On the basis of the things I like I'm willing to give him some time with the things I don't like.
All of the talk about the bailouts seems to stem from an inability to see what's really at stake here. These banks hold portfolios that are broadly linked to nearly every aspect of the finances of the country. Let one fail, and you may see a chain reaction which quickly makes your investments, your bank account, and finally your job, evaporate. It isn't the banks they are protecting, it is these portfolios. As it is, the bonus system is probably a thing of the past, so investment brokers will, in all likelihood, wind up as salary men like the rest of us. The gilded age of Wall Street is over. Believe me, the government is aware of your complaints, and these guys all have a target on their heads, fairly or unfairly. And it's mainly the Republicans who want to pull the trigger.
Everyone I have spoken to who works in the financial industry (and I'm in Canada, where the banks are sound, and none of this money will go to them) thinks the "Let them fail!" crowd is stark raving mad. A major part of these funds are pensions and retirement savings--yours included. If these fail, a huge sector of the populace--retirees--will suddenly be bankrupted. Those that can return to the workforce will, others will go on welfare or simply starve in the streets. At this point, the recession will become a massive depression, and I expect that most of the Slashdot crowd will find themselves competing with former retirees for low paying service jobs. The collapse of disposable income will be reflected in a collapse of the tax base, with a resultant loss of revenue that will make the cost of the bailouts look like chicken feed. Everything will tank, and the debt will become insurmountable.
In the aftermath, all talk of military involvement will be moot. The marines will find themselves hitchhiking home after their supplies run out--armies have always moved on their stomachs. This has not changed. As the bullet from the collapse ricochets around the globe, we are likely to be treated to some very unsavory political movements. Our last depression gave us the Nazis. If you think we have security concerns now, let the banks fail, and wait.
The point of the bailouts is not to override the market. The point is to keep the market going long enough to sort itself out.
This proof, and much of this discussion, seems to hinge on the idea that free will implies lack of causation. In fact, if anyone made choices that were entirely random, we would assume something was deeply wrong with them and look for the 'cause' of their condition.
We make choices for reasons. We allow people to deny responsibility only if there is some cause which overcomes their chain of reasoning--a breach of normal brain function triggered by something involuntary (a blow to the head, poisoning, being drugged or sick, etc.) That is, we expect their choices to be caused by a sound chain of reasoning. In fact, we would be deeply suspicious of any decisions where a person could not explain his or her own motivations. This does not in any way imply that reasoning is not part of the chain of causation of the physical world; we simply regard that causal chain at a different level of abstraction and representation.
Determinism does not contradict free will, and is probably required for it.
1. You confuse biological selection with cultural selection.
2. Natural selection is still very much at work in human beings.
3. Human survival is largely irrelevant to cultural selection. So long as the idea survives, it matters little how many people die because of its stupidity. The idea that cats were affiliated with the devil outlasted the bubonic plague, although it killed whole towns by removing the one predator that might kill the disease carrying rats.
4. Almost no idea, with the exception of simple and precise mathematical proofs, are transmitted unchanged. This applies especially to religion. Nearly all American Christians, transported to Europe 400 years ago, would quite correctly be convicted of heresy, and probably executed.
5. The currently politically strident brand of Christianity in America has existed for less than 150 years; ideas like the rapture, dominionism, dispensationalism, etc, are fringe inventions of the 19th century that have gained popularity. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say it has lasted less than 50 years, as some of its tenets were first formulated in the 70's. There is no reason to believe that this mixture of ideas, in the mind of someone in control of nuclear weapons, is a stable configuration.
5. The boom-bust cycle you mention is the result of unopposed population growth in a limited ecology, not the result of stupidity per se or fashion. Rabbits in Australia aren't following fashions or being idiots--they just don't have predators. Secular societies seem capable of avoiding this collapse by limiting birth rates; religious societies don't seem to limit birthrates.
6. Ideas do not suddenly collapse--the regimes that enforce them do. Nobody in the East Bloc believed in Communism in 1990. That's why it vanished when the wall fell.
You may be surprised to find that many, if not most, of your morals did not originate with Christianity. What we call Christian morals now would be barely recognizable to a Christian of 500 years ago, let alone 1500 years ago. 500 years ago torture was a spectator sport, slavery was quite acceptable, we didn't even have words for racism and sexism, and Christians were about as tolerant of other religious opinions as the Taliban are now. The aristocracy feasted while the peasants starved, and atheism was a capital crime, virtually unknown.
There really wasn't much Christian charity in the Christian world. Losing your religion just means that you will find out, for the first time, how, when, and why we have the morals we do.
Sorry... I've actually heard programmers say things like that seriously--then go on to break everything. I figured you might be joking, but I had to be sure.
Uh, huh... and good luck figuring out what they hell you've done when you have to fix or extend it months later. Comments aren't just for other people, they're for you too.
But you need some experience in the field to actually know that...
Exactly. Within a couple of years of this law being put into place, Ernst Zundel got put on trial for Holocaust denial. The result was that a member of the lunatic fringe got a national podium to speak from. How many people know about Steyn? Well, a lot now; his book will sell like hotcakes as a result of this trial. Criticisms of his arguments had all but laid it to rest, but there will be no stopping it now.
The people mounting this attack are the most politically inept lot I have ever seen. This is an own goal in overtime. I have a good idea of what the hate speech law was trying to prevent, but it is being applied to stifle any criticism of any cultural tradition, which means that regardless of how dysfunctional imported customs are, no one can actually come out and say they're messed up. The people in these human rights tribunals don't even have any credentials to justify their authority--and they get to define what hate speech is. So the trial will generate a lot of discussion outside of Canada, but those inside Canada will have to be careful what they say, because it might be considered hate speech.
With a single stroke, civilization is stopped in its tracks.
Actually, that was a scientist, Galileo, who didn't have the math to explain elliptical orbits and fudged his data. Since even the idea that planets moved around the sun was very unpopular at the time, and Galileo didn't have any peers, the peer review process didn't actually exist to check his work. When Newton shot this down, nobody complained.
Kuhn has been exaggerated, and even his original claims do not fit the history of science well. Scientists tend to be conservative, and wait for strong evidence in support of a new theory so that they don't get taken in by the fringe. What Kuhn does not mention, of course, is that fringe theories that are just dead wrong outnumber valid theories a hundred to one, strongly justifying this approach (ID is an example of the far lunatic fringe.) His story of multiple Copernican Revolutions is also wrong. A Copernican Revolution occurs when a valid scientific theory arrives which brings a solid foundation to further research. There is at most one in each scientific field of research--examples include the original work of Copernicus (which became the basis for Galileo, Newton, and eventually Einstein), Darwin's theory of evolution, plate tectonics, and DNA. Prior to these advances the field is a chaotic mash of data with no means of organization, only guesswork. Einstein's work was not a Copernican revolution, but a refinement of existing physics into the very large and small scales. He did not prove Newton wrong.
What makes Kuhn so popular is the narrative of the lone genius who, in David and Goliath fashion, takes on the powerful and corrupt empire to change the world. According to this narrative, science is just a majority opinion defended by political maneuvering. This is utter bullshit. The fastest way to win a Nobel prize and establish your career is to prove other scientists wrong--but for that, you need evidence. ID doesn't have any. Not a single scrap. ID isn't a scientific theory, but a well financed marketing campaign masquerading as one, presenting this narrative and a soggy heap of postmodernist drivel to encourage and exploit ignorance.
All of this misses the point that Jobs is basically a non-technical user throwing tantrums in the design room until he gets what he wants. This is why everything is closed (or at least, you don't have to open it to use it.) The average user just wants something that they can use without knowing how it works. Jobs knows what the naive user wants. His ego, however, did get him the boot in the 80's, damaged Apple, limited Next, and still gets him into trouble.
The rest of the industry is dominated by nerds, the kind of people who know how to use vi. What are the chances that they're going to know what granny, or art girl, or a lawyer, wants? What are the chances that a committee of them is going to know?
As for secrecy, if you have the option of releasing a product that kicks ass the first time people see it, or one that BSOD's for six months in full public view before it finally ships, what would you do? Microsoft has to release the beta to get full support. Apple doesn't have to.
I get why Jobs does what he does. I also know that he's a narcissistic asshole. His talent, and his narcissism, are two different things, and he might be more successful if he weren't an asshole, but that probably wouldn't change Apple's style of product development.
Although the actual words 'global warming' may have not been used, I remember the basic idea coming up in a grade 12 geography class I took, way back in 1975. The teacher talked about the composition of the atmosphere and the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere (a very small trace amount, 0.0360%) and mentioned that as the main contributer to the greenhouse effect, it is quite possible that human consumption of long sequestered carbon is enough to significantly affect this proportion and strengthen the greenhouse effect. When global warming broke in the news, I wasn't the slightest bit surprised, having heard about the likelihood of this happening 20 years before. If an idea appears in a high school science class, it has probably been kicking around for a while.
It wasn't the rule system itself that was important, but the very idea of a role playing game. D&D was the first attempt to come up with a war game system that could be applied to general storytelling with players each playing a single character. All the other RPG systems were derived from this core idea, and a lot of the fantasy and nearly all fantasy computer games can trace their influence, directly or indirectly, to this first RPG.
Of course, once someone had created one RPG, it was fairly easy to come up with others and improve upon it. It seemed so obvious... once someone else had thought of it.
Oddly enough, during the 70's a lot of former flower children tried to come up with games where players actually played together rather than against each other. They abhorred D&D for its violent content--and yet, it fit exactly the dynamics they were looking for, and RPGs are the only kind of non-competitive game that survived the decade.
I actually don't mind specialized characters that do one thing really well. Jack-of-all-trade characters who are masters of none become tedious in an adventure unless the player is very creative, and such creativity works only when the rule system is open ended (detailed rule systems deny everything they do not expressly permit--I actually enjoyed 1st and 2nd ed's gaps for this very reason) and the DM is very flexible. Otherwise the game becomes a litany of can't, won't, miss, fail, and trivial damage, eventually making the player wonder why they bother. Specialized characters are simple characters, and that is precisely what most modules will throw at you, which means they will choose the terms of engagement and you will be left doing something that you suck at. Versatility is good in theory, lousy in practice.
Don't forget that the limiting factor on any ability is the stat behind it and the in-class out-class distinction, and no one is likely to be good at everything. This is the problem with the Paladin in 3.5--he is a cross-class which mingles two wildly diverse skill sets, requiring him to be heavily penalized, given a normal stat spread, in at least part of his class skills, so he ends up being a weak tank or a weak cleric, or both. Giving the average fighter lock-picking skills may be interesting, but he is not likely to have either the intelligence or the dexterity to do it well, which means you will have effectively pissed those skill points away into something that the party will never use. It is, after all, a party game, not a solo game.
If you want to make the game more variated, stress role playing and the charisma/intelligence/wisdom abilities. Let the characters gain points in charisma as they gain confidence and have more interesting stories to tell. Low non-essential dump stats can rise because the characters have never stressed these in their training; when they start their careers, they may be out of shape, inexperienced, lack polish and confidence, and the physical types won't know much. But the wizard who has to slog thirty miles a day with a 25 lb pack on her back is going to get in shape whether she likes it or not, the idiot jock fighter is going to have to talk to people and learn about the world, and so on. Then you may get flexible characters. Otherwise the stats will dictate everything. Don't complain that the players always do the same thing if there's nothing else they can expect to succeed at.
The other problem, of course, is that characters and NPC's have cookie cutter personalities. A foreign or elvish accent appears to be one where they speak without contractions (a convention misconstrued from Tolkien, whose elves, being ancient, spoke in an antiquated dialect.) Would it kill the DM to give halflings an Irish accent, dwarves a Scottish accent, orcs a cockney accent, and foreigners a German or French accent? Even alignment just seems to be the team tag on the NPC's; good vs evil becomes red vs. blue, with alignments having little or no influence on strategies or behaviour. Good NPC's don't help each other out, evils seem to be all too willing to set aside their differences and combine en masse, lawfuls don't work together while chaotics do, and everything devolves into a grey featureless mass I call 'selfish neutral'. A brotherhood of Paladins should be terrifying, because if you mess with one you mess with all, and if you mess with all, you mess with their god. You can get away with violating physical laws in a world of magic (although even magic has its own logic) but the one thing you can never get away with in telling a story is to violate the principle of character. Do that, and all that's left is hack and slash, because the NPC's behave like some weird alien AIs, and role playing is pointless.
Finally, I'm glad to see, from the character sheets, that passive observation has been entrenched in the rules, but any competent DM should have known that what the character sees and knows from being on the scene would be considerably more than what the pl
Do you realize whatever evidence that is completely immanent (a necessary condition to be scientifically explorable) is insufficient to tell a god from an immanent creature? Back to the game's metaphor, whatever thing the creator does to the game's universe to assert his "divinity" is indistinguishable from what a hypothetical creature that found a weakness in the game implementation so it's able to reprogram it.
This is called "preserving the phenomena"--arguing that a claim is true on the basis that it does not contradict observed phenomena. This is trivial. The claim of existence of fairies or unicorns in some hitherto undiscovered location does not contradict observed phenomena either, but we assume they do not exist by Occam's razor. The claim makes no testable predictions, nor can it be falsified, and it proliferates assumptions needlessly.
The term evidence is misleading, the correct one is revelation. It may seems specious but IMHO an atheist/agnostic which does not believe until he gets a revelation is acceptable, one that waits for evidence is not behaving logically.
Subjective convictions do not lend support to anything. All religions make claims based upon 'revelation' that are mutually incompatible. At most one, if any, can be right. What does this say about the reliability of revelation?
So what?. A light bulb burns out in the instant T. Postulating time as continuous the probability of it happening numerically is zero. The event happens anyway. Events do not know about their probability. Of course that enables people to say: no way I am betting on that event happening at instant T since it's so improbable. It doesn't enable people to say: burning at any instant is improbable so no burning will occur.
Irrelevant, and a gross misunderstanding of probability and the claims of religion. To put the analogy in proper focus, you are the one claiming that the light bulb will burn out at a specified instant. One of the possibilities is correct--the light bulb will burn out at some time; at least one of the huge set of all possible explanations for the origins of the universe must be right. You are the one claiming that only your explanation is valid, or that the light bulb must burn out at 07:32 and 498 milliseconds on March 28th. On what basis? What are the odds that you are right?
Yep, also because the spiritual dimension could well be just a scientifically unexplored/unexplorable aspect of our universe, spiritual != divine. Atheists rejecting spirituality unless a scientific framework is built around it ought to realize that atheism is independent of the existence of such dimension.
Non sequitor. Dimension? What dimension? Spiritual practices are cognitive methods intended to instill habits of thought conducive to peace of mind and greater compassion. They do this quite well without requiring any form of superstition. There is no extra-spatial dimension involved.
A supernatural explanation being the traditional fallback one doesn't prevent a hypothetical divinity to act in/through the spiritual dimension. Theism is independent of the existence of such dimension even if most religions aren't.
Incoherent. As much as I can make any sense of this, it is another case of preserving the phenomena.
Warning: circular reasoning. They are the foundation of religious dogmas only if God(s) never inspired any religion. Else the dogma is either the equivalent of an axiom, or a misconception. The problem of a god allowing such a misconception is interesting but faith specific.
Circular reasoning indeed. You believe in your dogmas because you think they were inspired by God, and you believe in God because your dogmas tell you to. I need something other than your opinion, and your assent to these dogmas, on which to base my judgements.
Yes, that's pretty much it. The belief is a metaphor for connection and interelatedness. God is not real, but God is a fascinating fictional character in a story that remains a story but is still true in the way myths are true. The question "What would Jesus do?" is irrelevant to the historical Jesus--indeed, the very existence or non-existence of Jesus becomes irrelevant--but serves as a useful thought experiment when Jesus is imagined as the perfect human being. This is preferable to combing over gospel passages for moral guidance, as some passages of the gospels do not paint a particularly flattering portrait.
If you look up the word faith, you will find that out of 11 meanings, only 3 pertain to supernatural or dogmatic elements, and the rest deal with trust, optimism, courage, loyalty, and honesty. It's the non-dogmatic aspects that we need; in fact, I consider the level of faith in these senses to be a society's most important intangible wealth. Unfortunately it seems that the word has been stripped of all but the supernatural meanings, primarily for political reasons, and the loss of emphasis on faith in ourselves and others is costing us dearly.
if I run Conway's game of life, this reality is game of life's transcendent. The ineffable place where the creator stays. Supposing self aware creatures emerge from the game, they have no way to know about, say, the third dimension, or color. So Is our reality cold, dark, void of space, just because it's transcendent then?
No, but the knowledge of an entity operating within that game regarding the outside world would be void--pure speculation. Ineffable means inexpressable, which brings us to Wittgenstein's "Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent." The very word God becomes meaningless, because it could mean anything, and therefore it means nothing. The concept of a creator carries within it the sense of personality, intentionality, causation and therefore time, etc. These are existential claims because they involve categories that are coherent only within the framework of metaphysical naturalism. All kataphatic theology involves similar language.
The end result is to elevate a single possible explanation in a potentially infinite range of possible explanations, many of which may be inconceivable for us, most of which require no intentional agency--mathematical symmetries, parallel universes, meta-universes, branes, etc. Of those which do cite an intentional agency, few of those possible agencies would be likely to be concerned about a small dusting of conscious organisms on a single speck of the cosmos. The God of religion is but a single point in a very large search space, and therefore has a vanishingly small probability of being true.
Without evidence for a belief, only the belief itself remains to be explained, and the human predilection for intentional explanations, ego-centrism, social conventions, and a tradition of pre-scientific supernatural beliefs is all that is required here. Taking that into consideration, the probability of the theistic explanation drops back to negligible.
All of this does not mean that spiritual practices are worthless, but it does mean that the supernatural explanations that often accompany them are. These are the foundations of religious dogmas, without which these dogmas cannot survive.
This is, by far, the weakest response I have received on this matter.
An interventionist God is not like a programmer who makes exceptions to your actions. It is like demanding that the programmer personally devote all of his attention to monitoring your progress in the game, and manually intervene when it looks like you are losing. Want to talk about humility? What you are demanding is the unsurpassed pinnacle of arrogance--you expect God to be your own personal full time wetnurse. And don't take my word as an atheist. Take my word as a former believer. There was never a time when I was not astonished by the expectations of many believers that God's primary purpose was to be their personal caretaker.
As an atheist, I am somewhat amused. As a believer, I would have been thoroughly appalled. And by the way, the interventionist God has to be squared with the problem of theodicy. No one has ever managed to do this. All attempts rely on bait-and-switch deism.
The quantum theory bit is a popular ploy amongst the New Age crowd, made all the more popular by the fact that quantum theory is so hard to understand. If you understood it at all, you wouldn't mention it, because it is irrelevant to the current discussion. What you are asking for is not a revision to science, but the abandonment of science. You want to discard the inductive method in favour of mere speculation. Show us the evidence. But you should know that the elder traditions of Christian theology have entirely abandoned proofs of the existence of God because they are embarrasments--they have failed every time. These now insist on the unfounded assertion that faith is superior to knowledge simply because it is faith. This ploy has impressed only the believers.
Nihilism was the position of the romantics, particularly Nietsche, all of whom were anti-rationalist. This too is a strawman argument. Rationalists have no use for nihilism.
Slashdot Mirror
First point: The default logical position for any proposition is to assume it false until some evidence is given. This is a principle that we employ hundreds, and perhaps thousands of times each day. For example, it is not impossible that a king cobra has crept under your bed while you slept, but if you take this possibility seriously, you will not put your foot down on the floor to get up. Serious consideration of all unlikely possibilities will leave you paralysed, and in all likelihood, clinically insane. Why, then, do we discard this principle in one single case--the existence of God? Second: Certain cognitive heuristics, though common, have extraordinarily bad histories of reliability. Of all of these, our tendency to see conscious intentionality at work where there is none, particularly in areas where we have no explanation, has the worst record. We are hard wired towards paranoia, because a false positive in this regard was far less dangerous for our ancestors than a false negative. This error is at work in belief in conspiracy theories (the Illuminati did it), psychic phenomena (the spirits did it), all kinds of false pattern recognitions (the pattern was put there intentionally by something) and even in our reactions to bad weather (our resentment towards the weather as if it meant to spoil our picnic.) And yet, what do we fill in the gap in our understanding in cosmology with? An intentional being. Now, how reliable a guess do you really think this is? Third: As Richard Dawkins has pointed out, we have evolved to understand the world we live in, the middle world, not that of the very big or very small. We have no talent for cosmology. And again, what we encounter in the common understanding of cosmology are principles suited to the middle world; most commonly, the expectation of intentionality. Again, how likely is this to be accurate? Fourth: While there may be no direct evidence of God, one would expect that a universe created or informed by a divine presence would differ in some particulars from a universe not created or informed by that presence. The problem of evil raises its head, but even more so, the problem of sterility--why is the universe not teeming with life? I can imagine a universe which consists entirely of verdant pockets of life, much of it intelligent, all of it eventually accessible by normal bodily locomotion, in which all transactions between living organisms are positive sum. Thus, the lion does not eat you, but something that you provide (a nectar sack, perhaps), in return for which it provides some other service. No nature red in tooth and claw, no war, no violence. Our universe does not conform to the expectations one would have of a universe created or informed by what we conceive as God. The objection offered to this is that perhaps God had to do it this way. But if God is constrained, what created the constraints? One of the conclusions of theology is that God is not only omniscient, omni benevolent, and omnipotent, but perfectly free. Because if God is not perfectly free, something else limits God, and that something else is actually God. Fifth: As our conceptions of God continue to race ahead of disconfirming evidence, why do we continue to use the word God? The God of Karen Armstrong, Terry Eagleton, or Teilhard de Chardin has nothing in common with Jehovah, yet we use the same word for all. The statement: "There is some X which exists, where X can mean anything, and exists does not necessarily have its common meaning, and this X we call God" is true because it is trivial. It carries no information because its terms have no fixed meaning. Contemporary theology has argued itself into a void. Finally: The belief in God is motivated by Einstein's parsimonious question: Is the universe friendly? But perhaps the question is not whether the universe is friendly to us, but whether we are friendly to it. Consider what happens when you fall in love: the person you love becomes radiant, extraordinary, imbued with benevolent wonder, and you are endlessly fascinated by them. You
The problem with what he was doing was that it was not PvP. He was using a teleport power to move other players into an NPC guard post. The NPC's were doing all the killing. He didn't even get the points for it, because he didn't actually defeat the enemies, and so, contrary to what he claims, he wasn't even playing by the rules of the game, because the game does not provide any incentive for this.
In short, he was griefing other players--killing them for no reason, and for no gain.
Sorry, but you're still not making your point. Did the men not fire because they didn't want to shoot people, or did they not fire because they were hunkered down behind cover afraid to move? Combat training does not overcome the instinct not to kill, it overcomes the instinct to crawl into cover and not move until danger has passed, and this instinct is a lot more powerful than the reservation against killing strangers, particularly when those strangers are trying to kill you. Combat training is intended to make offensive actions ingrained, rather than defensive action--you shoot without thinking, rather than cower without thinking. Not a single thing that you have said demonstrates anything to the contrary.
In the First World War, the Canadians were amongst the most deadly combatants, and this wasn't because they were natural born killers, but because they were largely from frontiers and occupations where physical danger was a common experience. This meant that they were much less likely to freeze and more likely to shoot back. When compared to the instinct for self preservation, the reluctance to kill is trivial; you do what you think will save your life, and if you are trained to react by removing the threat, rather than hiding from it, than that is what you will do. When the man shooting at you is just a flicker of movement, it might as well be a pixel on the screen. Driving a bayonet into a boy's chest is another matter, but you have to be pretty damn disturbed to confuse a video game, no matter how realistic, with the real thing.
The AI in the game does not have a family who will mourn him, he was not going to grow up, possibly to be a great composer, artist, writer, or statesman. The AI was never going to grow up at all, and if you can't figure that out, then video games are the least of your problems. You cannot look into the eyes on the screen and see a life snuffed out, and know that you have just killed someone who might be just like you, because a video game NPC is not like you! Because it is precisely thoughts like these that haunt men who fight in wars. You know that these aren't people. And if someone doesn't, they're already mad, and I'm betting they were like that before they ever loaded up the game.
My impression of Wii sales is that people who buy it are sold on it at parties, where it is fun to play in a group, and then hardly touch the thing a week after buying it. The limitations do not become immediately obvious. It's good enough to sell itself on novelty value, but not good enough to sustain interest. Everyone I know who has bought one goes back to their other next-gen systems shortly after buying it, and the thing spends most of its time collecting dust.
As someone who has worked on a Wii dev kit, I can tell you that the Wii is essentially a Gamecube with some extra memory kludged in and a controller gimmick. It's a hack, with all the work shifted to the developer to overcome its limitations. I'm not surprised that it's cheap. The hardware couldn't cost more than $75 to make. But what people understood the controller to be able to do, and what it could do, were two entirely different things--it could not, as promised, register position and attitude, only motion, and even that not very well. We've seen this before with Microsoft vaporware; products touted to be far more than they are in an attempt to preempt better competitors. The fact that Nintendo got it out first as an active controller doesn't mean that the idea didn't exist before. The Eyetoy and various camera apps for PC and XBox did essentially the same thing, but used a passive controller (colored objects) with the camera, and these predate the Wii by a couple of years. First isn't best, and Nintendo wasn't even the first. What strikes me about Sony is that they plan long term, and they don't ship till its good and ready. Based on product release patterns we've seen in the industry, the Wii is already peaking, the XBox360 will peak in a year or two, but the PS3 won't hit its peak for 3 or 4 years. Given the quality of the hardware, the PS3 is the one you want in the long run.
My impression of the demonstration of Microsoft's Natal is that it's not yet ready, and may never be; at several points during the demonstration the player avatar exploded into a tangled mass of limbs. I watched and compared carefully the sensitivity of the Wii's enhanced controller vs. Sony's. I could not help noticing that in the archery demo, it took several seconds to line up a shot on a broad static target (and even then it was hard to hit) while the Sony demo allowed the player to do quickly aimed called shots on a moving mesh. Sony also performed the acid test on positional control, mapping the controlled virtual object to the player's hand flawlessly. This is something Nintendo didn't even attempt.
As for the ethics of the various companies, they're all monsters, so there really isn't one that has the clear advantage here. I will say, though, that Sony is split between its hardware and its media division, and the two are constantly at loggerheads, with Sony Hardware often subverting the malicious practices of Sony Media (I've actually seen the two go at it tooth and nail in projects I've worked on.) So the guys you hate at Sony didn't build the console.
And still, none of this addresses the underlying ethos; someone who thinks that it is their place, not the government's, to defend themselves through the lethal use of force is also far less likely to trust the government with the knowledge that they have a gun. A person who registers their gun is conceding the government's right to regulate and restrict them. I would be surprised if they had a tendency to abuse a legal right, since the very act of registration indicates an acceptance of government authority. But it is far more common in America than in other Western nations for citizens to have a blanket distrust of government and to take matters--including matters of self-defense--into their own hands. This is a broad cultural right, not a legal one. It is the very contempt for legality, and for the institutions that guide and enforce it, that I am talking about here.
Mention the phrase "state monopoly of violence" to these people and watch their hackles rise. But the alternative is a claimed right, though not a legal one, to personal violence. Ask someone who complains constantly about the "gubmint" how many weapons they have, and whether they are registered. Chances are they have at least one or two that aren't, tucked away somewhere in their home. And they are eager to assert that they know how to get even. I know a couple of these people in Canada, who send me links to anti-government tirades from U.S. sites. Given that their inspiration is almost entirely American, think of how many people fit this description in America.
Whether Canada has more guns than the U.S., the second point is valid. And we do have a lot of guns, and in Switzerland, where they have mandatory military service, everyone keeps the gun they trained with in their home.
The difference is the attitude towards guns and violence in general. In Canada, as in Switzerland, violence is recognized as a state monopoly. We leave that for the police in time of peace, and the army in time of war. The temptation to pick up a gun and use it on someone is regarded as criminal, period. If you want to join a militia, you join the army. If you want to learn to defend yourself, you take martial arts. Guns are for people working in official positions, and even they have to answer an inquiry when they do. When six poorly trained RCMP tasered a man to death in an airport, they got raked over the coals, and they're still getting raked over the coals.
Americans believe they have the right to defend themselves with firearms. But what constitutes self-defense? Who decides? Because if someone is carrying a gun, it becomes spur of the moment, and the guy with the gun decides on the spot. If he's none too bright (and that describes about 10 to 15% of any population) he may decide that shooting you for dissing him is self-defense. And he may decide that just looking at him is dissing him. Or he or she might just be scared, and act on that--my wife mentioned a night where she heard someone running up behind her, and spun to attack him. It was jogger, but she might have shot him if she'd had a gun. If you don't take the time to think--and stupid or scared people don't--you shoot. America's problem isn't just too many guns, it's the fact that people carry them around and feel that they have the right to use them. You have claimed a right which, in the hands of stupid or frightened people, amounts to a right to kill. Since you can't outlaw stupidity and fear, you have a problem.
As for video games, media has a negligible effect on normal people. What does influence them are other human beings. Even kids know the difference between fantasy and reality, much better than we think they do. The Columbine killers were not normal human beings: one was your garden variety psychopath, and the other was a lost kid who fell under the influence of a garden variety psychopath. They didn't do it because they were goths, gamers, the trenchcoat mafia, or any other such nonsense. And psychopaths remain psychopaths even if you treat them to a steady diet of Winnie the Pooh and Little House on the Prairie.
A psychopath is a person in your neighbourhood, as the old sesame street tune goes. And sooner or later, he's going to blow up. Not letting him have instant access to guns is a good start, but you cannot change his nature. He can't kill anyone with a copy of Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty, and games may even give him an outlet for his madness. Tell your legislators to stop wasting your time and money on this crap.
Exactly. Two points:
Precipitation tends to happen in weather which is warmer than what you normally expect at the poles. If the temperatures in the Antarctic rise, we would expect to see more precipitation, leading to thicker ice, because Antarctica is an actual land mass that can support it. The Arctic, on the other hand, is floating in the ocean, which is warming. So thicker ice in the Antarctic is entirely consistent with global warming, although it's good news for sea levels. Now, if only we can get Greenland and Northern Canada and Russia to stop melting...
Secondly, rather than paying attention to media boilerplate, watch where the oil producers are putting their money. They are all jockeying for position for Arctic Oil. Russia, which flatly denies that Global Warming is happening, planted a Russian flag under the Arctic Ocean at the North Pole. Canada's current government, who only recently admitted that Global Warming might be happening, stationed troops in the far North to protect Canadian Oil claims up there as one of their first initiatives four years back. And you might recall, if you're over 40, a joint American\Canadian venture of two ships trying to make it through the Northwest Passage: a Canadian ice breaker and a modified American oil tanker. It was a bust--they got through, but the tanker got ripped to shreds (it wasn't carrying oil, fortunately.) Now, all the oil companies are competing for rights in the Arctic--rights that are worth nothing unless arctic ice recedes to an unprecedented extent.
So, pay no attention to what they say--watch what the oil producers are doing. What do they know that we don't? That, more than anything, convinces me that global warming is real.
There are things that Obama has done that I like, and things I don't like. On the basis of the things I like I'm willing to give him some time with the things I don't like.
All of the talk about the bailouts seems to stem from an inability to see what's really at stake here. These banks hold portfolios that are broadly linked to nearly every aspect of the finances of the country. Let one fail, and you may see a chain reaction which quickly makes your investments, your bank account, and finally your job, evaporate. It isn't the banks they are protecting, it is these portfolios. As it is, the bonus system is probably a thing of the past, so investment brokers will, in all likelihood, wind up as salary men like the rest of us. The gilded age of Wall Street is over. Believe me, the government is aware of your complaints, and these guys all have a target on their heads, fairly or unfairly. And it's mainly the Republicans who want to pull the trigger.
Everyone I have spoken to who works in the financial industry (and I'm in Canada, where the banks are sound, and none of this money will go to them) thinks the "Let them fail!" crowd is stark raving mad. A major part of these funds are pensions and retirement savings--yours included. If these fail, a huge sector of the populace--retirees--will suddenly be bankrupted. Those that can return to the workforce will, others will go on welfare or simply starve in the streets. At this point, the recession will become a massive depression, and I expect that most of the Slashdot crowd will find themselves competing with former retirees for low paying service jobs. The collapse of disposable income will be reflected in a collapse of the tax base, with a resultant loss of revenue that will make the cost of the bailouts look like chicken feed. Everything will tank, and the debt will become insurmountable.
In the aftermath, all talk of military involvement will be moot. The marines will find themselves hitchhiking home after their supplies run out--armies have always moved on their stomachs. This has not changed. As the bullet from the collapse ricochets around the globe, we are likely to be treated to some very unsavory political movements. Our last depression gave us the Nazis. If you think we have security concerns now, let the banks fail, and wait.
The point of the bailouts is not to override the market. The point is to keep the market going long enough to sort itself out.
This proof, and much of this discussion, seems to hinge on the idea that free will implies lack of causation. In fact, if anyone made choices that were entirely random, we would assume something was deeply wrong with them and look for the 'cause' of their condition.
We make choices for reasons. We allow people to deny responsibility only if there is some cause which overcomes their chain of reasoning--a breach of normal brain function triggered by something involuntary (a blow to the head, poisoning, being drugged or sick, etc.) That is, we expect their choices to be caused by a sound chain of reasoning. In fact, we would be deeply suspicious of any decisions where a person could not explain his or her own motivations. This does not in any way imply that reasoning is not part of the chain of causation of the physical world; we simply regard that causal chain at a different level of abstraction and representation.
Determinism does not contradict free will, and is probably required for it.
Hmmm... where to begin...
1. You confuse biological selection with cultural selection.
2. Natural selection is still very much at work in human beings.
3. Human survival is largely irrelevant to cultural selection. So long as the idea survives, it matters little how many people die because of its stupidity. The idea that cats were affiliated with the devil outlasted the bubonic plague, although it killed whole towns by removing the one predator that might kill the disease carrying rats.
4. Almost no idea, with the exception of simple and precise mathematical proofs, are transmitted unchanged. This applies especially to religion. Nearly all American Christians, transported to Europe 400 years ago, would quite correctly be convicted of heresy, and probably executed.
5. The currently politically strident brand of Christianity in America has existed for less than 150 years; ideas like the rapture, dominionism, dispensationalism, etc, are fringe inventions of the 19th century that have gained popularity. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say it has lasted less than 50 years, as some of its tenets were first formulated in the 70's. There is no reason to believe that this mixture of ideas, in the mind of someone in control of nuclear weapons, is a stable configuration.
5. The boom-bust cycle you mention is the result of unopposed population growth in a limited ecology, not the result of stupidity per se or fashion. Rabbits in Australia aren't following fashions or being idiots--they just don't have predators. Secular societies seem capable of avoiding this collapse by limiting birth rates; religious societies don't seem to limit birthrates.
6. Ideas do not suddenly collapse--the regimes that enforce them do. Nobody in the East Bloc believed in Communism in 1990. That's why it vanished when the wall fell.
You may be surprised to find that many, if not most, of your morals did not originate with Christianity. What we call Christian morals now would be barely recognizable to a Christian of 500 years ago, let alone 1500 years ago. 500 years ago torture was a spectator sport, slavery was quite acceptable, we didn't even have words for racism and sexism, and Christians were about as tolerant of other religious opinions as the Taliban are now. The aristocracy feasted while the peasants starved, and atheism was a capital crime, virtually unknown.
There really wasn't much Christian charity in the Christian world. Losing your religion just means that you will find out, for the first time, how, when, and why we have the morals we do.
Agreed. There may be many good police, but you only need a few bad ones...
The main problem with giving police discretionary powers is that many police have no discretion.
Sorry... I've actually heard programmers say things like that seriously--then go on to break everything. I figured you might be joking, but I had to be sure.
Uh, huh... and good luck figuring out what they hell you've done when you have to fix or extend it months later. Comments aren't just for other people, they're for you too.
But you need some experience in the field to actually know that...
Exactly. Within a couple of years of this law being put into place, Ernst Zundel got put on trial for Holocaust denial. The result was that a member of the lunatic fringe got a national podium to speak from. How many people know about Steyn? Well, a lot now; his book will sell like hotcakes as a result of this trial. Criticisms of his arguments had all but laid it to rest, but there will be no stopping it now.
The people mounting this attack are the most politically inept lot I have ever seen. This is an own goal in overtime. I have a good idea of what the hate speech law was trying to prevent, but it is being applied to stifle any criticism of any cultural tradition, which means that regardless of how dysfunctional imported customs are, no one can actually come out and say they're messed up. The people in these human rights tribunals don't even have any credentials to justify their authority--and they get to define what hate speech is. So the trial will generate a lot of discussion outside of Canada, but those inside Canada will have to be careful what they say, because it might be considered hate speech.
With a single stroke, civilization is stopped in its tracks.
Actually, that was a scientist, Galileo, who didn't have the math to explain elliptical orbits and fudged his data. Since even the idea that planets moved around the sun was very unpopular at the time, and Galileo didn't have any peers, the peer review process didn't actually exist to check his work. When Newton shot this down, nobody complained.
Kuhn has been exaggerated, and even his original claims do not fit the history of science well. Scientists tend to be conservative, and wait for strong evidence in support of a new theory so that they don't get taken in by the fringe. What Kuhn does not mention, of course, is that fringe theories that are just dead wrong outnumber valid theories a hundred to one, strongly justifying this approach (ID is an example of the far lunatic fringe.) His story of multiple Copernican Revolutions is also wrong. A Copernican Revolution occurs when a valid scientific theory arrives which brings a solid foundation to further research. There is at most one in each scientific field of research--examples include the original work of Copernicus (which became the basis for Galileo, Newton, and eventually Einstein), Darwin's theory of evolution, plate tectonics, and DNA. Prior to these advances the field is a chaotic mash of data with no means of organization, only guesswork. Einstein's work was not a Copernican revolution, but a refinement of existing physics into the very large and small scales. He did not prove Newton wrong.
What makes Kuhn so popular is the narrative of the lone genius who, in David and Goliath fashion, takes on the powerful and corrupt empire to change the world. According to this narrative, science is just a majority opinion defended by political maneuvering. This is utter bullshit. The fastest way to win a Nobel prize and establish your career is to prove other scientists wrong--but for that, you need evidence. ID doesn't have any. Not a single scrap. ID isn't a scientific theory, but a well financed marketing campaign masquerading as one, presenting this narrative and a soggy heap of postmodernist drivel to encourage and exploit ignorance.
All of this misses the point that Jobs is basically a non-technical user throwing tantrums in the design room until he gets what he wants. This is why everything is closed (or at least, you don't have to open it to use it.) The average user just wants something that they can use without knowing how it works. Jobs knows what the naive user wants. His ego, however, did get him the boot in the 80's, damaged Apple, limited Next, and still gets him into trouble.
The rest of the industry is dominated by nerds, the kind of people who know how to use vi. What are the chances that they're going to know what granny, or art girl, or a lawyer, wants? What are the chances that a committee of them is going to know?
As for secrecy, if you have the option of releasing a product that kicks ass the first time people see it, or one that BSOD's for six months in full public view before it finally ships, what would you do? Microsoft has to release the beta to get full support. Apple doesn't have to.
I get why Jobs does what he does. I also know that he's a narcissistic asshole. His talent, and his narcissism, are two different things, and he might be more successful if he weren't an asshole, but that probably wouldn't change Apple's style of product development.
Although the actual words 'global warming' may have not been used, I remember the basic idea coming up in a grade 12 geography class I took, way back in 1975. The teacher talked about the composition of the atmosphere and the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere (a very small trace amount, 0.0360%) and mentioned that as the main contributer to the greenhouse effect, it is quite possible that human consumption of long sequestered carbon is enough to significantly affect this proportion and strengthen the greenhouse effect. When global warming broke in the news, I wasn't the slightest bit surprised, having heard about the likelihood of this happening 20 years before. If an idea appears in a high school science class, it has probably been kicking around for a while.
The parent post is definitely trolling.
Nah, if the stress gets to be too much, we just kill an artist.
And eat him.
It wasn't the rule system itself that was important, but the very idea of a role playing game. D&D was the first attempt to come up with a war game system that could be applied to general storytelling with players each playing a single character. All the other RPG systems were derived from this core idea, and a lot of the fantasy and nearly all fantasy computer games can trace their influence, directly or indirectly, to this first RPG.
Of course, once someone had created one RPG, it was fairly easy to come up with others and improve upon it. It seemed so obvious... once someone else had thought of it.
Oddly enough, during the 70's a lot of former flower children tried to come up with games where players actually played together rather than against each other. They abhorred D&D for its violent content--and yet, it fit exactly the dynamics they were looking for, and RPGs are the only kind of non-competitive game that survived the decade.
I actually don't mind specialized characters that do one thing really well. Jack-of-all-trade characters who are masters of none become tedious in an adventure unless the player is very creative, and such creativity works only when the rule system is open ended (detailed rule systems deny everything they do not expressly permit--I actually enjoyed 1st and 2nd ed's gaps for this very reason) and the DM is very flexible. Otherwise the game becomes a litany of can't, won't, miss, fail, and trivial damage, eventually making the player wonder why they bother. Specialized characters are simple characters, and that is precisely what most modules will throw at you, which means they will choose the terms of engagement and you will be left doing something that you suck at. Versatility is good in theory, lousy in practice.
Don't forget that the limiting factor on any ability is the stat behind it and the in-class out-class distinction, and no one is likely to be good at everything. This is the problem with the Paladin in 3.5--he is a cross-class which mingles two wildly diverse skill sets, requiring him to be heavily penalized, given a normal stat spread, in at least part of his class skills, so he ends up being a weak tank or a weak cleric, or both. Giving the average fighter lock-picking skills may be interesting, but he is not likely to have either the intelligence or the dexterity to do it well, which means you will have effectively pissed those skill points away into something that the party will never use. It is, after all, a party game, not a solo game.
If you want to make the game more variated, stress role playing and the charisma/intelligence/wisdom abilities. Let the characters gain points in charisma as they gain confidence and have more interesting stories to tell. Low non-essential dump stats can rise because the characters have never stressed these in their training; when they start their careers, they may be out of shape, inexperienced, lack polish and confidence, and the physical types won't know much. But the wizard who has to slog thirty miles a day with a 25 lb pack on her back is going to get in shape whether she likes it or not, the idiot jock fighter is going to have to talk to people and learn about the world, and so on. Then you may get flexible characters. Otherwise the stats will dictate everything. Don't complain that the players always do the same thing if there's nothing else they can expect to succeed at.
The other problem, of course, is that characters and NPC's have cookie cutter personalities. A foreign or elvish accent appears to be one where they speak without contractions (a convention misconstrued from Tolkien, whose elves, being ancient, spoke in an antiquated dialect.) Would it kill the DM to give halflings an Irish accent, dwarves a Scottish accent, orcs a cockney accent, and foreigners a German or French accent? Even alignment just seems to be the team tag on the NPC's; good vs evil becomes red vs. blue, with alignments having little or no influence on strategies or behaviour. Good NPC's don't help each other out, evils seem to be all too willing to set aside their differences and combine en masse, lawfuls don't work together while chaotics do, and everything devolves into a grey featureless mass I call 'selfish neutral'. A brotherhood of Paladins should be terrifying, because if you mess with one you mess with all, and if you mess with all, you mess with their god. You can get away with violating physical laws in a world of magic (although even magic has its own logic) but the one thing you can never get away with in telling a story is to violate the principle of character. Do that, and all that's left is hack and slash, because the NPC's behave like some weird alien AIs, and role playing is pointless.
Finally, I'm glad to see, from the character sheets, that passive observation has been entrenched in the rules, but any competent DM should have known that what the character sees and knows from being on the scene would be considerably more than what the pl
Do you realize whatever evidence that is completely immanent (a necessary condition to be scientifically explorable) is insufficient to tell a god from an immanent creature? Back to the game's metaphor, whatever thing the creator does to the game's universe to assert his "divinity" is indistinguishable from what a hypothetical creature that found a weakness in the game implementation so it's able to reprogram it.
This is called "preserving the phenomena"--arguing that a claim is true on the basis that it does not contradict observed phenomena. This is trivial. The claim of existence of fairies or unicorns in some hitherto undiscovered location does not contradict observed phenomena either, but we assume they do not exist by Occam's razor. The claim makes no testable predictions, nor can it be falsified, and it proliferates assumptions needlessly.
The term evidence is misleading, the correct one is revelation. It may seems specious but IMHO an atheist/agnostic which does not believe until he gets a revelation is acceptable, one that waits for evidence is not behaving logically.
Subjective convictions do not lend support to anything. All religions make claims based upon 'revelation' that are mutually incompatible. At most one, if any, can be right. What does this say about the reliability of revelation?
So what?. A light bulb burns out in the instant T. Postulating time as continuous the probability of it happening numerically is zero. The event happens anyway. Events do not know about their probability. Of course that enables people to say: no way I am betting on that event happening at instant T since it's so improbable. It doesn't enable people to say: burning at any instant is improbable so no burning will occur.
Irrelevant, and a gross misunderstanding of probability and the claims of religion. To put the analogy in proper focus, you are the one claiming that the light bulb will burn out at a specified instant. One of the possibilities is correct--the light bulb will burn out at some time; at least one of the huge set of all possible explanations for the origins of the universe must be right. You are the one claiming that only your explanation is valid, or that the light bulb must burn out at 07:32 and 498 milliseconds on March 28th. On what basis? What are the odds that you are right?
Yep, also because the spiritual dimension could well be just a scientifically unexplored/unexplorable aspect of our universe, spiritual != divine. Atheists rejecting spirituality unless a scientific framework is built around it ought to realize that atheism is independent of the existence of such dimension.
Non sequitor. Dimension? What dimension? Spiritual practices are cognitive methods intended to instill habits of thought conducive to peace of mind and greater compassion. They do this quite well without requiring any form of superstition. There is no extra-spatial dimension involved.
A supernatural explanation being the traditional fallback one doesn't prevent a hypothetical divinity to act in/through the spiritual dimension. Theism is independent of the existence of such dimension even if most religions aren't.
Incoherent. As much as I can make any sense of this, it is another case of preserving the phenomena.
Warning: circular reasoning. They are the foundation of religious dogmas only if God(s) never inspired any religion. Else the dogma is either the equivalent of an axiom, or a misconception. The problem of a god allowing such a misconception is interesting but faith specific.
Circular reasoning indeed. You believe in your dogmas because you think they were inspired by God, and you believe in God because your dogmas tell you to. I need something other than your opinion, and your assent to these dogmas, on which to base my judgements.
Yes, that's pretty much it. The belief is a metaphor for connection and interelatedness. God is not real, but God is a fascinating fictional character in a story that remains a story but is still true in the way myths are true. The question "What would Jesus do?" is irrelevant to the historical Jesus--indeed, the very existence or non-existence of Jesus becomes irrelevant--but serves as a useful thought experiment when Jesus is imagined as the perfect human being. This is preferable to combing over gospel passages for moral guidance, as some passages of the gospels do not paint a particularly flattering portrait.
If you look up the word faith, you will find that out of 11 meanings, only 3 pertain to supernatural or dogmatic elements, and the rest deal with trust, optimism, courage, loyalty, and honesty. It's the non-dogmatic aspects that we need; in fact, I consider the level of faith in these senses to be a society's most important intangible wealth. Unfortunately it seems that the word has been stripped of all but the supernatural meanings, primarily for political reasons, and the loss of emphasis on faith in ourselves and others is costing us dearly.
if I run Conway's game of life, this reality is game of life's transcendent. The ineffable place where the creator stays. Supposing self aware creatures emerge from the game, they have no way to know about, say, the third dimension, or color. So Is our reality cold, dark, void of space, just because it's transcendent then?
No, but the knowledge of an entity operating within that game regarding the outside world would be void--pure speculation. Ineffable means inexpressable, which brings us to Wittgenstein's "Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent." The very word God becomes meaningless, because it could mean anything, and therefore it means nothing. The concept of a creator carries within it the sense of personality, intentionality, causation and therefore time, etc. These are existential claims because they involve categories that are coherent only within the framework of metaphysical naturalism. All kataphatic theology involves similar language.
The end result is to elevate a single possible explanation in a potentially infinite range of possible explanations, many of which may be inconceivable for us, most of which require no intentional agency--mathematical symmetries, parallel universes, meta-universes, branes, etc. Of those which do cite an intentional agency, few of those possible agencies would be likely to be concerned about a small dusting of conscious organisms on a single speck of the cosmos. The God of religion is but a single point in a very large search space, and therefore has a vanishingly small probability of being true.
Without evidence for a belief, only the belief itself remains to be explained, and the human predilection for intentional explanations, ego-centrism, social conventions, and a tradition of pre-scientific supernatural beliefs is all that is required here. Taking that into consideration, the probability of the theistic explanation drops back to negligible.
All of this does not mean that spiritual practices are worthless, but it does mean that the supernatural explanations that often accompany them are. These are the foundations of religious dogmas, without which these dogmas cannot survive.
This is, by far, the weakest response I have received on this matter.
An interventionist God is not like a programmer who makes exceptions to your actions. It is like demanding that the programmer personally devote all of his attention to monitoring your progress in the game, and manually intervene when it looks like you are losing. Want to talk about humility? What you are demanding is the unsurpassed pinnacle of arrogance--you expect God to be your own personal full time wetnurse. And don't take my word as an atheist. Take my word as a former believer. There was never a time when I was not astonished by the expectations of many believers that God's primary purpose was to be their personal caretaker.
As an atheist, I am somewhat amused. As a believer, I would have been thoroughly appalled. And by the way, the interventionist God has to be squared with the problem of theodicy. No one has ever managed to do this. All attempts rely on bait-and-switch deism.
The quantum theory bit is a popular ploy amongst the New Age crowd, made all the more popular by the fact that quantum theory is so hard to understand. If you understood it at all, you wouldn't mention it, because it is irrelevant to the current discussion. What you are asking for is not a revision to science, but the abandonment of science. You want to discard the inductive method in favour of mere speculation. Show us the evidence. But you should know that the elder traditions of Christian theology have entirely abandoned proofs of the existence of God because they are embarrasments--they have failed every time. These now insist on the unfounded assertion that faith is superior to knowledge simply because it is faith. This ploy has impressed only the believers.
Nihilism was the position of the romantics, particularly Nietsche, all of whom were anti-rationalist. This too is a strawman argument. Rationalists have no use for nihilism.