True, except that few religious believers, especially not those of the Abrahamic religions, hold their beliefs in this way. What you are proposing is apophatic theology, in which you cannot say anything about God--even that God exists in any meaningful sense. The proper response is silence. Virtually all of the faithful adhere to kataphatic theology; they want to talk about God, talk to God, and expect divine intervention on a regular basis. The core of their faith is superstition, a desire for magical control through force of will, and the response you quoted is perfectly suited to this kind of belief. They make objective claims, claims not considered "true for me" but true for everyone. So do you: with that word "miraculous" you give the whole game away. Objective claims have rational and evidentiary consequences, and must answer on those grounds. An intervening God falls within the rightful domain of science, and religion must therefore answer to science when making such claims.
All too often, as it is in your post, the kind of argument you make is accompanied, within a few sentences, by a return to this magical thinking. I call this bait-and-switch deism, where the merest wisp of a deist possibility is taken as carte blanche for the existence of a being intimately involved in the physical world. It's the magical thinking we object to. But without that magical thinking, the entire proposition loses its appeal. If reason and evidence do not apply to such an entity, neither do concepts of personality, good or evil, causation, action, intent, or any other category that is applied to God by any religion. What is left is a meaningless question mark in the dark, something so completely orthogonal to any human hope, expectation, or understanding, so utterly alien, that it is colder than the void of space.
This is not the God that any religion believes in.
Nobody here seems to be aware of where this rumour started. The doctor responsible, Wakefield, published an article with cooked results largely on the request of an ambulance-chasing law firm which was suing the drug companies, and for whom Wakefield was making a lucrative career as an expert witness. The motivation was greed, pure and simple. Wakefield's article got picked up by reporters in England and they made an hour documentary about it on TV, and all hell broke loose.
It quickly became obvious to other doctors and researchers that Wakefield cooked his results, but the media fear machine was already in high gear. Wakefield is finished as a doctor for his mind-boggling ethical breaches. The entire thing was a hoax, and yet look at all the people who actually think there is a link... to this day. There never was.
There are, however, hundreds of kids who are now paralyzed because their parents decided not to give them vaccinations. Many of these diseases can infect the spinal cord and damage it. Furthermore, the diseases have now made a comeback, and mutating, and may soon evolve into strains for which there are no vaccines. At that point, there will be thousands of kids dying or paralyzed as a result of the efforts of a lot of cranks who have no medical knowledge beyond "Mercury Bad!" Like people who wince and gag when a wiff of tobacco smoke drifts their way, thinking that a single atom will transform them instantly into a tumour, these idiots forget what even the ancient Greeks knew--that poisons become poisons by the dosage. Your body can handle low dosages of all kinds of toxic shit--it does so all the time.
The reason that autism is rising is that the number of systemetizers in the population, people like programmers, engineers, scientists--basically, nerds--is increasing, and certain job pools, and hobbies, draw nerds together. The biggest boon to nerd socializing was the internet. Now you actually have nerds marrying and having kids. Previously, being generally shy and often lacking social skills, nerds had a hard time finding each other. Autistics are extreme systemetizers. I'm quite certain that if I met and married a girl as nerdy as I am and we had four kids, at least one would be autistic. Look at the Wired article on Ausperger's Syndrome. And if you're a coder, look around at your co-workers. I'm sure you've met at least one textbook case of Auspergers in your career.
Pretty much what I was thinking. I've had the experience of being in what seemed to be imminent danger and of having everything slow down, and so have other people I know. The experience is obvious at the time, not just in retrospect. I suspect that genuine mortal danger is required rather than just excitement.
Cool. The DRM thing had me worried--it meant that Vista was a dead issue, and so were all future Windows systems. I like the Mac, used to have a Mac Plus in the old days, but I play games on my PC. Hell, I pretty much have to--I'm a game developer.
It still doesn't sound like Vista is ready out of the box, but this may, at least, mean that I don't have to restrict purchases to XP only systems, or permanently switch OS's. But I may hold off on Vista till SP1.
I've heard that the problem with Vista is not one that can be patched; the kernal has built in DRM, and the DRM is performing background checks every time you stream or play anything (even while you play games.) In other words, the flaw is by design, and will never be fixed. This would certainly explain the problem where playing music drops network bandwidth to ten or twenty percent. Apparently, if you buy Vista, you get to be screwed by the RIAA at clock cycle regularity.
Can anyone confirm this?
I'm looking to buy a new computer, but at the moment Vista is a deal breaker. I'd even be willing to buy a legit copy of XP for it, but the copy protection is too onerous--I can change my hardware configuration on a desktop machine five times in five minutes, and I'll be damned if I'm going to call Microsoft at 2:00 AM to ask permission to use MY computer. (It's not a problem on my laptop.)
By the way, I'm a little suspicious of some of the pro-Microsoft apologists here, especially after reading posts on discussions about the XBox 360 vs. PS3, which bear no relation from what I'm hearing from owners of those consoles (in some cases with the 360, former owners.) I suspect we have a few people from Microsoft's marketing department lurking here, so take at least some of the glowing reviews of Vista here with a grain of salt.
Let's take an alternate case. Let's say that experiments have shown that when someone has sex, their brain appears stimulated in certain areas and that if you recreate that brain stimulation, the person has feelings similar to the feelings they had while having sex. Would you then conclude from this experiment that sex doesn't really happen, since you can create similar feelings by directly affecting their brain? Would you conclude that the sex the person reported experiencing before must have been just a hallucination? Hardly.
No, because having sex is a common physical practice. We already have proof that sex happens. There is no evidence for the existence of God, only claims by believers that he exists. In the absence of the claimed source of the experience, the only thing left to be accounted for is the experience itself. We would expect there to be a physical reality underlying every experience--a neurological state. We already know what causes out-of-body experiences and near-death-experiences (oxygen deprivation starving parts of the brain which handle vision and body location.) Now we are beginning to have some idea of what underlies mystical experiences, and how they can be induced, by practice or by direct manipulation of the brain.
But the fact that I might hallucinate a unicorn, and have a distinct neurological event that corresponds to this experience, does not mean that the unicorn exists. Having a 'spiritual' experience in no way suggests that spirits exist. This is precisely the point that Sam Harris and other neuro-scientists have been trying to make.
Actually, I went to the Atheist Alliance meeting last week in Washington. There weren't that many fat people there.:)
The point was also made, in every speech critical of religion, that Islam is far worse than Christianity. In fact, we've been making this point for a while. You really should get out more. We all knew damn well that the dog wasn't sniffing for Christian bombs. The main criticisms of Christianity now being made by atheists are that Christianity is degenerating into a fundamentalist/political movement similar to Islam, and that the state sponsored privileges that Christians are now demanding play right into the hands of radicalizing Imams who want to recruit terrorist fanatics in the West; support for religious schools and faith-based programs, and laws against the criticism of religious beliefs.
We'll be happy to turn our attention to Islam, as soon as Christians get out of our way.
Yes, the original word used meant simply 'young woman'.
The myth of the virgin birth leads to one of the most interesting contradictions of the bible. In the original Jewish myth, the messiah was supposed to be a descendant of David. So the Gospel stories go into a long list of the lineage of Joseph leading back to David (and yes, there are two different lineages given.) But the Greeks and Romans mythologized their heroes by making them semi-divine, the children of gods. In the Gospels, these two mythological traditions suffer a head on collision: Jesus must the the descendant of David to be the Jewish messiah, but he cannot be the descendant of David because the virgin birth makes Joseph's lineage irrelevant. The Catholics compound the problem with the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, by which even Mary is the product of divine intercession. This means that even Mary's lineage (irrelevant, in any case, to Jesus and the messianic myth, since Jewish birth lines were entirely patriarchal) could not be traced to anyone.
This contradiction lies at the very heart of Christian mythology. These twin assertions are one of the core tenets of the faith. Jesus can either be the messiah, or a Hellenistic demi-god. He cannot be both.
Taoism is about going with the flow, and not imposing preconceptualised ideas and outcomes. It's perfectly compatible with being intelligent, and very compatible with science. In short, it is about exploiting existing currents to attain your outcomes, recognizing what is rather than what you would like it to be, and not trying to fight reality and wasting your energies in doing so.
Understanding where those currents are and where they are going takes a lot of intelligence. Understanding them at their deepest level, and riding them to go against what is considered to be the dominant flow, takes genius.
So you would take news that the Universe is very poorly suited for intelligent life as the proof that it was made specifically to support intelligent life?
Play with the numbers however you like. The number of hidden assumptions you begin with make it all meaningless.
This is just a mathematical rephrasing of an old argument, and it falls by the same disproof (you cannot argue for the existence of something simply by insisting that existence is one of its essential properties.)
The reason no one talks about this now is that it's wrong. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is actually correct.
The other thing that big L libertarians don't understand is that you are going to have a government. It just may not be a government you elect. If the government you elect isn't strong enough to hold its own against large private interests, the private interests will take over and engage in rent seeking behaviour. You will still pay taxes of some kind, but you may not receive any services for them, and you won't be able to fire the bastards. And the police will work for them.
Capitalism is only possible through government enforcement of contract law, maintanence of infrastructure (roads, power, sewage, public transport, fire departments, etc) and the monopolisation of force. That last one might have you screeching, but if you would like to see the alternative, take a look at most of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa--the really poor ones. Small mercenary armies ride around in trucks, looking for someone to hire them, and then conduct minor wars in the streets. Because the governments of these countries aren't actually strong enough to prevent people from being robbed at gunpoint, there really isn't much point in earning more than you can spend today, so nobody works very hard and everyone is dirt poor. The countries are in a continual state of low grade civil war. As for infrastructure, the road to the president's house is the only one paved, and when he leaves town, they turn off the power--to the entire town!
Those who think that privatization of all government services are the way to go should begin by seeing Gangs of New York, which depicts in one scene the relationship between rival privately owned fire departments. The arrive at the scene of a fire, get into a fight about who gets to put it out, and start a full fledged street brawl, which turns into a riot, while the entire block burns to the ground. This is an accurate depiction of what frequently happened.
Well said. Nerds tend to towards Auspergers and high functioning autism, with a poor understanding of other people, and little awareness of social relationships. Go read up on Auspergers, and look around at the people in a high tech workplace, particularly the code monkeys. It's all there: rigid posture, social awkwardness, rapid fire monotone speech, and low interest in social interaction.
I keep hearing people in this discussion talk about how programming is a solitary activity. I have a name for these people: bedroom coders. They still think they're a fourteen year old hacking out code for their own use that no one else will ever have to deal with. The result is that when they work on a large project, other people are constantly cleaning up after them, because what they break in your code is your problem. The consequences of their actions on others are of no concern.
Hence, the libertarianism.
Breaking these habits is the greatest challenge, and the highest priority, of the people who manage them--because what you get if you allow it to go unchallenged is something like Vista. This is the motivation behind Extreme Programming and a lot of other advanced coding methodologies.
Note that they don't say that the devices were attached to the squirrels, but were inside the squirrels. You have no idea whether the squirrel in your yard is a good Iranian squirrel, or a treacherous American infidel squirrel. So now Iranians will become paranoid whenever they see a squirrel. The religious police will eye them with suspicion. Squirrels will be taken in and kept in dark holes, and questioned mercilessly (the specially trained squirrels can probably talk; they're CIA squirrels, after all.) Hell, the Imams may issue a squirrel fatwa, ordering death to all squirrels.
I'll admit that Iran is getting a bit squirrely. But it has nothing to do with the rodents...
Net neutrality actually discourages the main providers from building more infrastructure, and instead allows them to charge more for existing infrastructure. Indeed, it will encourage them to create artificial shortages so that they can increase their prices. Many services, like online games, search engines, and free academic sites, will become difficult or impossible to access. Indeed, online games would probably become unworkable without net neutrality. What you will be able to access is a few highly successful commercial sites--mainly PORN, and lots of it, because porn sites can afford to pay the premium prices to expedite their packets.
Of course, not all information will be hard to access. Those who have the money to pay for extra bandwidth will have no problem getting their message out to the public. We will all rest easier knowing that Rupert Murdoch and rich Saudi extremists will be able to buy the internet at last.
Of course, massive layoffs never work. There are two kinds of employees--politicians and workers. The workers are too busy to see the boom come down, so they are the ones who get laid off. The politicians keep their eyes on the politics of the company, which means that they don't really have time to get much work done. They are really good at looking good--but not very good at actually getting work done.
Each time you downsize, you cut a disproportionate quantity of productive employees. Think of it as a crash diet; you waste muscle and increase the percentage of fat. This is why crash dieting is a good predictor of future obesity. It's also why companies that go through this binge/purge cycle become less and less competitive with each cycle. Look at Ford, GM, and Chrysler. How many times have they done this? My, now there's a success story...
First of all, this is precisely my point with regard to Anderson's research. The predictor variables are linked for aggression. The kind of person who likes Myst (and will therefore play it a lot if assigned it) is different from the kind of person who plays Quake (and will play it a lot if assigned it.) They will also react to the games in different ways. Again, the conclusion is that people who enjoy Myst are different from those who enjoy Quake.
The studies on which I based the claim are not studies which address ALL behaviour, but a large number of sociological, psychological, and economic studies which addressed different behaviours and different predictors. The picture emerging from all of these studies, when seen together, is that a growing list of behaviours are innate, well predicted by genetic traits, or well predicted by peer environment, while other factors continue to fall in predictable influence. The examples are too numerous to mention, and could (and have) filled several books and dozens of journals. All of this research is being done in a field where the dominant assumption has been that people are shaped directly by their society and culture. It turns out that two people can live in the same society, the same culture, with the same education, and even live in the same household, but vary widely in nearly all behavioural traits depending on different birth parents or different peer sets. Correlations found in behaviour within a family probably have little to do with actual parenting techniques and a great deal to do with shared genetics and peer environment. The chief societal and parental influence seems to be in control of peer group association. The most important decision a parent may make is in what neighbourhood they raise their kids. Even the theory that criminality is caused by low self-esteem has fallen--prison populations actually have higher self-esteem than the general average. The media continues to decline in the estimation of influence.
The thrust of Anderson's argument is that we should limit what is available to the general population because certain unstable or anti-social personalities might be pushed over the edge by them. He readily admits the influence is marginal and insignificant for the vast majority of the population (even he isn't contesting this--I'm not sure why you are.) The same argument can be made for many books (including the Bible), religion, sports, political ideas, alcohol, pornography, or anything that can become addictive--in other words, pretty much everything. It's an old argument, and it's always been wrong for the same reason: the list of things you would have to ban to make everyone safe would eventually include the sum total of human culture.
...but maybe not. All of these studies are by the same researcher, a guy named Craig Anderson, who has been pushing his conclusion long before he had any data for it. There is a strong confirmation bias at work here. His latest study argues that people who play games like Halo are more aggressive at the end of the school term than people who play something like Myst.
But here's the complication. Myst appeals to casual gamers--people who play games in their spare time. Halo appeals to hardcore gamers, who do it as a hobby. That means they make time for it. Given that the time they make for it may be time taken from their studies, and their work load may be piling up, is this result due to the aggressive influence of gaming, or due to the impact of the stress of having their workload pile up at the end of the term? Too much work, and too little time to do it, will make anyone irritable, impatient, and aggressive. All he has demonstrated here is that the people who play Myst are different from the people who play Halo. Duh! The industry could have told him that years ago.
Recent research into human behaviour finds too main causal factors: genetic predisposition (measured in twin studies), and peer influence (for example, why do children speak with the accent of their peers and not that of their parents.) These probably account for as much as 90% of variance. The remaining 10% includes parent, teachers, life experience, and all media. So how much influence is left for video games? Not a lot.
The underlying assumption to all of these arguments is the Blank Slate--the idea that humans have no distinct personality apart from what is programmed into them by their upbringing and environment. This idea has been thoroughly debunked in hundreds of studies--read Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate.
The two main contributers to personality and behaviour are genetic predisposition and peer influence. Despite innumerable claims that violent media cause violent behaviour, there is no evidence to support this claim. It is far more likely that violent personalities are drawn to violent media, so that the two may sometimes appear together, but no causal link has ever been established from violent media to violent behaviour. The results they claim to be significant are so slight that they can easily vanish into a statistical margin of error. The few studies which have claimed to show a link have done so by construing boisterous or playful behaviour as violent.
Watch a boy having fun. What does he do? He gets rowdy. These people don't seem to understand even the first thing about children.
In the case of Virginia, Columbine, etc, what you have is personality predisposed by nature towards violence, with a near total absence of peer influence. These people aren't socialized towards violence by games--they aren't socialized at all! The result is a fetid swamp of self-absorbtion, in which an already unbalanced character putrifies and becomes a monster.
If Dr. Phil is dishing this slop, he's a fool, a fraud, and an embarrassment to psychology. He's a side-show carny, not a qualified psychologist.
There is a difference between following the rules of a contract with regards to a product sold, and insisting that the contract should dictate how all of the signer's business is done. One of the reasons that Hollywood exports so many movies is that they control so much of the distribution, including distribution for Canadian and European films. The talent, of course, is not all American--but if you don't go through Hollywood, you don't get into the distribution system. These rules do not protect the actual talent, but are an attempt to sustain a broken business model which supports a bloated corporate empire. We don't want to import the worst of American stupidity with the best of American culture.
Black markets are a sign that the legal system has fallen out of sync with economic reality, and are symptomatic of state imposed artificial shortages. If this situation persists long enough, eventually black markets become the economy, and the "official" economy dies out. This has actually happened to the music business before, and was the way that the movie industry got started (they moved to the West coast to escape Edison's lawyers, who wanted to enforce the patents on the movie camera.) This will probably happen to the music industry, where prices are grossly inflated. When unit production costs are high, you make your money on price. When unit production cost is low, you make your money on volume. Songs can be replicated at almost no cost. They should be selling them at prices so low that people won't even bother to back them up--they'll just redownload them if their hard drives crashes. Instead, they are following the model established in the early days of vinyl.
The movie industry, however, is simply losing out to other modes of entertainment: TV, games, and the internet. Hollywood is in trouble because electronic, interactive media are an entirely new creature which is making the very format of movies seem obsolete. Movie downloads are not lost sales, they are for the most part people who would only bother with the movie if it's free (otherwise they might tape it when it comes on TV.) The problem with piracy is not lost sales, but deluded accountants counting imaginary dollars.
The article talks about possible biological factors favouring religious belief. It does not claim that religious faith is genetically determined. Please read the original article before posting.
This reminds me of the old days of the Commodore 64, when the copy protection schemes sent the disk drive head skating over to track 0. The C64 had no sensor to keep the head in bounds, so it would slam against a hard stop, throwing the head out of alignment, quickly ruining the drive (constant realignment gradually made the drive unusable.) Even if you bought a legit copy of software, you had to use a cracked version or you would destroy your drive. Eventually most people gave up on buying the software altogether.
In fact, the reason that most of the people I know didn't buy a copy of XP, and won't buy Vista, is the heavy handed DRM attached to it, which requires you to get permission from Microsoft to run your computer after 5 hardware changes. I can make 5 hardware changes in 5 minutes when I'm testing hardware. There is no way that I am going to spend half the night on the phone calling Microsoft. If I'm having a problem with hardware, I don't need the additional aggravation. I have a legit copy on my laptop--which never changes hardware--but I'll never install one on my desktop machine.
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True, except that few religious believers, especially not those of the Abrahamic religions, hold their beliefs in this way. What you are proposing is apophatic theology, in which you cannot say anything about God--even that God exists in any meaningful sense. The proper response is silence. Virtually all of the faithful adhere to kataphatic theology; they want to talk about God, talk to God, and expect divine intervention on a regular basis. The core of their faith is superstition, a desire for magical control through force of will, and the response you quoted is perfectly suited to this kind of belief. They make objective claims, claims not considered "true for me" but true for everyone. So do you: with that word "miraculous" you give the whole game away. Objective claims have rational and evidentiary consequences, and must answer on those grounds. An intervening God falls within the rightful domain of science, and religion must therefore answer to science when making such claims.
All too often, as it is in your post, the kind of argument you make is accompanied, within a few sentences, by a return to this magical thinking. I call this bait-and-switch deism, where the merest wisp of a deist possibility is taken as carte blanche for the existence of a being intimately involved in the physical world. It's the magical thinking we object to. But without that magical thinking, the entire proposition loses its appeal. If reason and evidence do not apply to such an entity, neither do concepts of personality, good or evil, causation, action, intent, or any other category that is applied to God by any religion. What is left is a meaningless question mark in the dark, something so completely orthogonal to any human hope, expectation, or understanding, so utterly alien, that it is colder than the void of space.
This is not the God that any religion believes in.
Nobody here seems to be aware of where this rumour started. The doctor responsible, Wakefield, published an article with cooked results largely on the request of an ambulance-chasing law firm which was suing the drug companies, and for whom Wakefield was making a lucrative career as an expert witness. The motivation was greed, pure and simple. Wakefield's article got picked up by reporters in England and they made an hour documentary about it on TV, and all hell broke loose.
It quickly became obvious to other doctors and researchers that Wakefield cooked his results, but the media fear machine was already in high gear. Wakefield is finished as a doctor for his mind-boggling ethical breaches. The entire thing was a hoax, and yet look at all the people who actually think there is a link... to this day. There never was.
There are, however, hundreds of kids who are now paralyzed because their parents decided not to give them vaccinations. Many of these diseases can infect the spinal cord and damage it. Furthermore, the diseases have now made a comeback, and mutating, and may soon evolve into strains for which there are no vaccines. At that point, there will be thousands of kids dying or paralyzed as a result of the efforts of a lot of cranks who have no medical knowledge beyond "Mercury Bad!" Like people who wince and gag when a wiff of tobacco smoke drifts their way, thinking that a single atom will transform them instantly into a tumour, these idiots forget what even the ancient Greeks knew--that poisons become poisons by the dosage. Your body can handle low dosages of all kinds of toxic shit--it does so all the time.
The reason that autism is rising is that the number of systemetizers in the population, people like programmers, engineers, scientists--basically, nerds--is increasing, and certain job pools, and hobbies, draw nerds together. The biggest boon to nerd socializing was the internet. Now you actually have nerds marrying and having kids. Previously, being generally shy and often lacking social skills, nerds had a hard time finding each other. Autistics are extreme systemetizers. I'm quite certain that if I met and married a girl as nerdy as I am and we had four kids, at least one would be autistic. Look at the Wired article on Ausperger's Syndrome. And if you're a coder, look around at your co-workers. I'm sure you've met at least one textbook case of Auspergers in your career.
Pretty much what I was thinking. I've had the experience of being in what seemed to be imminent danger and of having everything slow down, and so have other people I know. The experience is obvious at the time, not just in retrospect. I suspect that genuine mortal danger is required rather than just excitement.
And of course, the problem with this one is that all that sound and vibration drains the battery.
Cool. The DRM thing had me worried--it meant that Vista was a dead issue, and so were all future Windows systems. I like the Mac, used to have a Mac Plus in the old days, but I play games on my PC. Hell, I pretty much have to--I'm a game developer.
It still doesn't sound like Vista is ready out of the box, but this may, at least, mean that I don't have to restrict purchases to XP only systems, or permanently switch OS's. But I may hold off on Vista till SP1.
I've heard that the problem with Vista is not one that can be patched; the kernal has built in DRM, and the DRM is performing background checks every time you stream or play anything (even while you play games.) In other words, the flaw is by design, and will never be fixed. This would certainly explain the problem where playing music drops network bandwidth to ten or twenty percent. Apparently, if you buy Vista, you get to be screwed by the RIAA at clock cycle regularity.
Can anyone confirm this?
I'm looking to buy a new computer, but at the moment Vista is a deal breaker. I'd even be willing to buy a legit copy of XP for it, but the copy protection is too onerous--I can change my hardware configuration on a desktop machine five times in five minutes, and I'll be damned if I'm going to call Microsoft at 2:00 AM to ask permission to use MY computer. (It's not a problem on my laptop.)
By the way, I'm a little suspicious of some of the pro-Microsoft apologists here, especially after reading posts on discussions about the XBox 360 vs. PS3, which bear no relation from what I'm hearing from owners of those consoles (in some cases with the 360, former owners.) I suspect we have a few people from Microsoft's marketing department lurking here, so take at least some of the glowing reviews of Vista here with a grain of salt.
Let's take an alternate case. Let's say that experiments have shown that when someone has sex, their brain appears stimulated in certain areas and that if you recreate that brain stimulation, the person has feelings similar to the feelings they had while having sex. Would you then conclude from this experiment that sex doesn't really happen, since you can create similar feelings by directly affecting their brain? Would you conclude that the sex the person reported experiencing before must have been just a hallucination? Hardly.
No, because having sex is a common physical practice. We already have proof that sex happens. There is no evidence for the existence of God, only claims by believers that he exists. In the absence of the claimed source of the experience, the only thing left to be accounted for is the experience itself. We would expect there to be a physical reality underlying every experience--a neurological state. We already know what causes out-of-body experiences and near-death-experiences (oxygen deprivation starving parts of the brain which handle vision and body location.) Now we are beginning to have some idea of what underlies mystical experiences, and how they can be induced, by practice or by direct manipulation of the brain.
But the fact that I might hallucinate a unicorn, and have a distinct neurological event that corresponds to this experience, does not mean that the unicorn exists. Having a 'spiritual' experience in no way suggests that spirits exist. This is precisely the point that Sam Harris and other neuro-scientists have been trying to make.
Actually, I went to the Atheist Alliance meeting last week in Washington. There weren't that many fat people there. :)
The point was also made, in every speech critical of religion, that Islam is far worse than Christianity. In fact, we've been making this point for a while. You really should get out more. We all knew damn well that the dog wasn't sniffing for Christian bombs. The main criticisms of Christianity now being made by atheists are that Christianity is degenerating into a fundamentalist/political movement similar to Islam, and that the state sponsored privileges that Christians are now demanding play right into the hands of radicalizing Imams who want to recruit terrorist fanatics in the West; support for religious schools and faith-based programs, and laws against the criticism of religious beliefs.
We'll be happy to turn our attention to Islam, as soon as Christians get out of our way.
Yes, the original word used meant simply 'young woman'.
The myth of the virgin birth leads to one of the most interesting contradictions of the bible. In the original Jewish myth, the messiah was supposed to be a descendant of David. So the Gospel stories go into a long list of the lineage of Joseph leading back to David (and yes, there are two different lineages given.) But the Greeks and Romans mythologized their heroes by making them semi-divine, the children of gods. In the Gospels, these two mythological traditions suffer a head on collision: Jesus must the the descendant of David to be the Jewish messiah, but he cannot be the descendant of David because the virgin birth makes Joseph's lineage irrelevant. The Catholics compound the problem with the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, by which even Mary is the product of divine intercession. This means that even Mary's lineage (irrelevant, in any case, to Jesus and the messianic myth, since Jewish birth lines were entirely patriarchal) could not be traced to anyone.
This contradiction lies at the very heart of Christian mythology. These twin assertions are one of the core tenets of the faith. Jesus can either be the messiah, or a Hellenistic demi-god. He cannot be both.
Taoism is about going with the flow, and not imposing preconceptualised ideas and outcomes. It's perfectly compatible with being intelligent, and very compatible with science. In short, it is about exploiting existing currents to attain your outcomes, recognizing what is rather than what you would like it to be, and not trying to fight reality and wasting your energies in doing so.
Understanding where those currents are and where they are going takes a lot of intelligence. Understanding them at their deepest level, and riding them to go against what is considered to be the dominant flow, takes genius.
So you would take news that the Universe is very poorly suited for intelligent life as the proof that it was made specifically to support intelligent life?
Play with the numbers however you like. The number of hidden assumptions you begin with make it all meaningless.
This is just a mathematical rephrasing of an old argument, and it falls by the same disproof (you cannot argue for the existence of something simply by insisting that existence is one of its essential properties.)
The reason no one talks about this now is that it's wrong. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is actually correct.
The other thing that big L libertarians don't understand is that you are going to have a government. It just may not be a government you elect. If the government you elect isn't strong enough to hold its own against large private interests, the private interests will take over and engage in rent seeking behaviour. You will still pay taxes of some kind, but you may not receive any services for them, and you won't be able to fire the bastards. And the police will work for them.
Capitalism is only possible through government enforcement of contract law, maintanence of infrastructure (roads, power, sewage, public transport, fire departments, etc) and the monopolisation of force. That last one might have you screeching, but if you would like to see the alternative, take a look at most of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa--the really poor ones. Small mercenary armies ride around in trucks, looking for someone to hire them, and then conduct minor wars in the streets. Because the governments of these countries aren't actually strong enough to prevent people from being robbed at gunpoint, there really isn't much point in earning more than you can spend today, so nobody works very hard and everyone is dirt poor. The countries are in a continual state of low grade civil war. As for infrastructure, the road to the president's house is the only one paved, and when he leaves town, they turn off the power--to the entire town!
Those who think that privatization of all government services are the way to go should begin by seeing Gangs of New York, which depicts in one scene the relationship between rival privately owned fire departments. The arrive at the scene of a fire, get into a fight about who gets to put it out, and start a full fledged street brawl, which turns into a riot, while the entire block burns to the ground. This is an accurate depiction of what frequently happened.
Well said. Nerds tend to towards Auspergers and high functioning autism, with a poor understanding of other people, and little awareness of social relationships. Go read up on Auspergers, and look around at the people in a high tech workplace, particularly the code monkeys. It's all there: rigid posture, social awkwardness, rapid fire monotone speech, and low interest in social interaction.
I keep hearing people in this discussion talk about how programming is a solitary activity. I have a name for these people: bedroom coders. They still think they're a fourteen year old hacking out code for their own use that no one else will ever have to deal with. The result is that when they work on a large project, other people are constantly cleaning up after them, because what they break in your code is your problem. The consequences of their actions on others are of no concern.
Hence, the libertarianism.
Breaking these habits is the greatest challenge, and the highest priority, of the people who manage them--because what you get if you allow it to go unchallenged is something like Vista. This is the motivation behind Extreme Programming and a lot of other advanced coding methodologies.
Note that they don't say that the devices were attached to the squirrels, but were inside the squirrels. You have no idea whether the squirrel in your yard is a good Iranian squirrel, or a treacherous American infidel squirrel. So now Iranians will become paranoid whenever they see a squirrel. The religious police will eye them with suspicion. Squirrels will be taken in and kept in dark holes, and questioned mercilessly (the specially trained squirrels can probably talk; they're CIA squirrels, after all.) Hell, the Imams may issue a squirrel fatwa, ordering death to all squirrels.
I'll admit that Iran is getting a bit squirrely. But it has nothing to do with the rodents...
Was his name Ender Wiggin, by any chance? Maybe he was a natural game leader...
Doh, right. It was 2:00 AM and I was half asleep when I wrote it.
Net neutrality actually discourages the main providers from building more infrastructure, and instead allows them to charge more for existing infrastructure. Indeed, it will encourage them to create artificial shortages so that they can increase their prices. Many services, like online games, search engines, and free academic sites, will become difficult or impossible to access. Indeed, online games would probably become unworkable without net neutrality. What you will be able to access is a few highly successful commercial sites--mainly PORN, and lots of it, because porn sites can afford to pay the premium prices to expedite their packets.
Of course, not all information will be hard to access. Those who have the money to pay for extra bandwidth will have no problem getting their message out to the public. We will all rest easier knowing that Rupert Murdoch and rich Saudi extremists will be able to buy the internet at last.
Of course, massive layoffs never work. There are two kinds of employees--politicians and workers. The workers are too busy to see the boom come down, so they are the ones who get laid off. The politicians keep their eyes on the politics of the company, which means that they don't really have time to get much work done. They are really good at looking good--but not very good at actually getting work done.
Each time you downsize, you cut a disproportionate quantity of productive employees. Think of it as a crash diet; you waste muscle and increase the percentage of fat. This is why crash dieting is a good predictor of future obesity. It's also why companies that go through this binge/purge cycle become less and less competitive with each cycle. Look at Ford, GM, and Chrysler. How many times have they done this? My, now there's a success story...
First of all, this is precisely my point with regard to Anderson's research. The predictor variables are linked for aggression. The kind of person who likes Myst (and will therefore play it a lot if assigned it) is different from the kind of person who plays Quake (and will play it a lot if assigned it.) They will also react to the games in different ways. Again, the conclusion is that people who enjoy Myst are different from those who enjoy Quake.
The studies on which I based the claim are not studies which address ALL behaviour, but a large number of sociological, psychological, and economic studies which addressed different behaviours and different predictors. The picture emerging from all of these studies, when seen together, is that a growing list of behaviours are innate, well predicted by genetic traits, or well predicted by peer environment, while other factors continue to fall in predictable influence. The examples are too numerous to mention, and could (and have) filled several books and dozens of journals. All of this research is being done in a field where the dominant assumption has been that people are shaped directly by their society and culture. It turns out that two people can live in the same society, the same culture, with the same education, and even live in the same household, but vary widely in nearly all behavioural traits depending on different birth parents or different peer sets. Correlations found in behaviour within a family probably have little to do with actual parenting techniques and a great deal to do with shared genetics and peer environment. The chief societal and parental influence seems to be in control of peer group association. The most important decision a parent may make is in what neighbourhood they raise their kids. Even the theory that criminality is caused by low self-esteem has fallen--prison populations actually have higher self-esteem than the general average. The media continues to decline in the estimation of influence.
The thrust of Anderson's argument is that we should limit what is available to the general population because certain unstable or anti-social personalities might be pushed over the edge by them. He readily admits the influence is marginal and insignificant for the vast majority of the population (even he isn't contesting this--I'm not sure why you are.) The same argument can be made for many books (including the Bible), religion, sports, political ideas, alcohol, pornography, or anything that can become addictive--in other words, pretty much everything. It's an old argument, and it's always been wrong for the same reason: the list of things you would have to ban to make everyone safe would eventually include the sum total of human culture.
...but maybe not. All of these studies are by the same researcher, a guy named Craig Anderson, who has been pushing his conclusion long before he had any data for it. There is a strong confirmation bias at work here. His latest study argues that people who play games like Halo are more aggressive at the end of the school term than people who play something like Myst.
But here's the complication. Myst appeals to casual gamers--people who play games in their spare time. Halo appeals to hardcore gamers, who do it as a hobby. That means they make time for it. Given that the time they make for it may be time taken from their studies, and their work load may be piling up, is this result due to the aggressive influence of gaming, or due to the impact of the stress of having their workload pile up at the end of the term? Too much work, and too little time to do it, will make anyone irritable, impatient, and aggressive. All he has demonstrated here is that the people who play Myst are different from the people who play Halo. Duh! The industry could have told him that years ago.
Recent research into human behaviour finds too main causal factors: genetic predisposition (measured in twin studies), and peer influence (for example, why do children speak with the accent of their peers and not that of their parents.) These probably account for as much as 90% of variance. The remaining 10% includes parent, teachers, life experience, and all media. So how much influence is left for video games? Not a lot.
The underlying assumption to all of these arguments is the Blank Slate--the idea that humans have no distinct personality apart from what is programmed into them by their upbringing and environment. This idea has been thoroughly debunked in hundreds of studies--read Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate.
The two main contributers to personality and behaviour are genetic predisposition and peer influence. Despite innumerable claims that violent media cause violent behaviour, there is no evidence to support this claim. It is far more likely that violent personalities are drawn to violent media, so that the two may sometimes appear together, but no causal link has ever been established from violent media to violent behaviour. The results they claim to be significant are so slight that they can easily vanish into a statistical margin of error. The few studies which have claimed to show a link have done so by construing boisterous or playful behaviour as violent.
Watch a boy having fun. What does he do? He gets rowdy. These people don't seem to understand even the first thing about children.
In the case of Virginia, Columbine, etc, what you have is personality predisposed by nature towards violence, with a near total absence of peer influence. These people aren't socialized towards violence by games--they aren't socialized at all! The result is a fetid swamp of self-absorbtion, in which an already unbalanced character putrifies and becomes a monster.
If Dr. Phil is dishing this slop, he's a fool, a fraud, and an embarrassment to psychology. He's a side-show carny, not a qualified psychologist.
There is a difference between following the rules of a contract with regards to a product sold, and insisting that the contract should dictate how all of the signer's business is done. One of the reasons that Hollywood exports so many movies is that they control so much of the distribution, including distribution for Canadian and European films. The talent, of course, is not all American--but if you don't go through Hollywood, you don't get into the distribution system. These rules do not protect the actual talent, but are an attempt to sustain a broken business model which supports a bloated corporate empire. We don't want to import the worst of American stupidity with the best of American culture.
Black markets are a sign that the legal system has fallen out of sync with economic reality, and are symptomatic of state imposed artificial shortages. If this situation persists long enough, eventually black markets become the economy, and the "official" economy dies out. This has actually happened to the music business before, and was the way that the movie industry got started (they moved to the West coast to escape Edison's lawyers, who wanted to enforce the patents on the movie camera.) This will probably happen to the music industry, where prices are grossly inflated. When unit production costs are high, you make your money on price. When unit production cost is low, you make your money on volume. Songs can be replicated at almost no cost. They should be selling them at prices so low that people won't even bother to back them up--they'll just redownload them if their hard drives crashes. Instead, they are following the model established in the early days of vinyl.
The movie industry, however, is simply losing out to other modes of entertainment: TV, games, and the internet. Hollywood is in trouble because electronic, interactive media are an entirely new creature which is making the very format of movies seem obsolete. Movie downloads are not lost sales, they are for the most part people who would only bother with the movie if it's free (otherwise they might tape it when it comes on TV.) The problem with piracy is not lost sales, but deluded accountants counting imaginary dollars.
The article talks about possible biological factors favouring religious belief. It does not claim that religious faith is genetically determined. Please read the original article before posting.
The rest of your post is irrelevant.
This reminds me of the old days of the Commodore 64, when the copy protection schemes sent the disk drive head skating over to track 0. The C64 had no sensor to keep the head in bounds, so it would slam against a hard stop, throwing the head out of alignment, quickly ruining the drive (constant realignment gradually made the drive unusable.) Even if you bought a legit copy of software, you had to use a cracked version or you would destroy your drive. Eventually most people gave up on buying the software altogether.
In fact, the reason that most of the people I know didn't buy a copy of XP, and won't buy Vista, is the heavy handed DRM attached to it, which requires you to get permission from Microsoft to run your computer after 5 hardware changes. I can make 5 hardware changes in 5 minutes when I'm testing hardware. There is no way that I am going to spend half the night on the phone calling Microsoft. If I'm having a problem with hardware, I don't need the additional aggravation. I have a legit copy on my laptop--which never changes hardware--but I'll never install one on my desktop machine.