A careful analysis may show that you see as a "problem" may, in fact, be a necessary prerequisite for anything resembling "intelligent thought".
I didn't say "mind is bad and it cannot produce anything useful". The "problem" i mentioned is not the mind per se, but the way the mind is, i believe (although, quite an unnecessary statement, i cannot prove), incomplete in some fundamental way(s). Pretty much the same way Life is incomplete - but it's easy to see that from the perspective of the Mind. (i'm capitalising the initials to show i'm refering to the respective principles, from a philosophical perspective)
You are correct in saying that the Next Step (whatever that is) is incomprehensible to us, pretty much the way the mind is "incomprehensible" (forced language) to animals, or life is "incomprehensible" (again) to dead matter. But that does not imply it is a nothing. Lack of comprehension does not refute existence.
Actually, it's sort of strange how most people who accept the fundamental assumptions of the theory of evolution, at the same time seem to assume that Homo Sapiens is the definitive pinnacle. Actually there are two ways to further qualify that: - the weak one - the assumption that the human species will not improve within the current evolutionary frame (the principle of mind) - the strong one - the assumption that the principle of mind is the last big step and there's no further evolutionary big change (um, revolutionary change?) down the road
The problem of God's existence is one of the hardest that people can ever face, yet there are so many silly arguments (on both sides), it makes me laugh.
I believe that fundamental limits in the way the mind works make us believe all kinds of silly things about the reality. I believe that no amount of intellect enhancing (in the Star Trek sense) could overcome this problem. I believe it will be solved only by the emergence, over the course of evolution, of a radically new principle, as different from and as superior to the principle of mind, as mind is different from and superior to unintelligent life (or life is to unanimated matter). The next Big Step, if you wish. That next step may or may not involve us, humans.:-/
One hint to the current state of affairs might be Godel's theorem. Another hint might be the irepressible tendency of people to fall prey to A Thinking System, or A Dogma, any dogma, be it religion, science, whatever, while a priory rejecting all the other.
I believe, though I can't prove, that the universe presented to me by my senses is not an artifact of my own existence but exists separately from me, is consistent and will remain consistent after I am dead. (i.e. the universe isn't a figment of my imagination). I believe, though I can't prove, that other entities that resemble me in appearance and behavior (people) have the same kind of agency and observer status as myself and therefore have value similar in kind to myself. (i.e. contrary to the assertion of the psychopath, I believe other people really are people).
Funny, i rely on the same lemmas. Yet i'm not an atheist (well, ok, most religious people will have a hard time labeling me as religious too). I have no problems accepting those lemmas, while at the same time accepting the lemma of the consciousness that is essentially independent of its material support (mind you, i said "consciousness" not "mind"; mind you, i said "essentially" not "completely").
It's the typical religious "Big Daddy in the Sky" lemma that i'm having problems with - as, i suspect, you do.
It hit me that the universe can't expand inside of nothing... if nothing existed when the universe was infinitesmally small, not even nothingness itself, how can the universe expand into that? it doesn't exist.
Multiple fallacies.
By the same token, how can the Universe exist at all "inside of nothing"? It gets even worse: why should it have any particular size and be limited to it, instead of being "free" to change it?
Your problem is that you believe that a finite Universe must exist inside of "something". It doesn't have to. It could be self-contained. There are multiple geometries which are compatible with the "non-limited yet finite" Universe. E.g. the hyper-spheric geometry (although STOP NOW and don't imagine a sphere because that will get you back to your initial puzzle of "what contains that sphere?").
You're simply thinking of a particular geometry which has the property that, if you keep on walking straight indefinitely, you keep on seeing indefinitely many new places. Most of the Big Bang models simply state that, if you keep on walking straight long enough, you get back from where you departed. That model does not require it to be contained in anything. It's just a play of attributes of the space.
Right, the either-black-or-white view, the hallmark of those who deem themselves intelligent but are merely able to accomplish some marginal and narrow task.
It's bad when there's strictly one way to do it. It's a very good thing when there are just a few ways to "do it", chosen for valid reasons. It's a pathological case when the language chooses as primary goal to bundle heaps of different ways to "do it" just for the heck of it. Perl is like that.
As for the two positions you mention: you mean there are jobs in the field of programming just because there are more ways to implement the same algorithm over and over? Don't be ridiculous!
Perl is fine, with one exception: the "there's more than one way to do it" concept. Anyone suggesting to use such a language in any serious software project should be fired with prejudice.
That, and many others, were the issues that i noticed while wrestling with IPSec. I mean, IPSec is nice and all, if you're a medium-to-large company that just goes ahead and buys a full solution from vendor XYZ. But it's a big pain in the butt for everyone else. At some point, i discovered OpenVPN and i got hooked immediately. Clients and servers for all major operating systems (the same software can be either client or software, just flip a config bit), nice GUI for Windows, compression, rock-solid encryption, reliability, simplicity of installation and configuration... I'll never use IPsec again, unless i'm doing a corporate-scale deployment. And, who knows, maybe "enterprise" solutions based on OpenVPN will become available at some point.
IPSec sucks. Overdesigned protocol that simply gives you too much rope to not be tempted to hang yourself, too many "slightly different" implementations that are actually different enough to not interoperate, a big pain in the ass to configure correctly, no good AND free clients (especially GUI ones) for popular OSes, etc.
Have a look at OpenVPN. After i tried it, i swore i'll never get back to IPSec.
I'm doing the same thing, but i'm not even restricting MAC addresses. I even give DHCP addresses to anyone.:-) But, once you connect, you can't do anything. You're behind an allow-nothing firewall. You must open up an OpenVPN tunnel if you wanna go through the firewall.
IPSec is not the way to go, not for a small setup. I've been there, done that. It sucks. Overdesigned piece of crap. Since i started to use OpenVPN, i never looked back. All the features of an IPSec VPN, but none of the hassles.
By far the best way to accomplish that is by using OpenVPN. I tried everything, IPSec, SSH tunneling, you name it. They all suck. SSH is, let's face it, limited. IPSec is cumbersome, not exactly friendly to all operating systems, doesn't play well with NAT (unless you use UDP encapsulation), etc. It is glaringly obvious that it's a severely overdesigned protocol.
Enter OpenVPN. It uses SSL for encryption, but it's not a SSL-based pseudo-VPN, but a true VPN - it can forward any IP protocol. Think of it as having the functionality of IPSec, but using a simpler and more sensible implementation. It's cross-platform (Linux, Windows, Solaris... you name it). It's simple to install and configure (same software can be either server or client and the config file semantics are similar). It's secure (it can use signed certificates, passwords, any authentication mechanism you like). It can compress the traffic on the fly (using LZO which is pretty damn fast and low-overhead). If you use TCP transport instead of UDP, it can tunnel through ordinary HTTP proxies. It has dummy-friendly GUI for Windows. It slices, it dices and it makes coffee... oh, well, maybe not that.
Anyway, i'm running an OpenVPN server on my home firewall, and i put OpenVPN on all my computers (my workstation at the office, my laptop, etc.). Wherever i go, i just fire up OpenVPN and "i'm home". I run IMAP through it, so my IMAP clients (Evolution), no matter where they are, they "see" the same IMAP servers and folders. That is awesome - different systems, yet my mail looks the same. And it's also secure.;-)
My wireless access point has no security whatsoever: no encryption, no MAC filtering, no SSID cloaking... it even gives you a DHCP address.:-) However, it's behind a totally restrictive firewall. The only way to work around that is to open an OpenVPN tunnel. Then you can do pretty much anything, through the tunnel, of course.
That's sound and sane advice. But maybe he has crappy insurance and he fears a hefty medical bill? I know it sounds irrational but, heck, myself i've made worse decisions in not as critical situations, so i'm not judging him.
Anyway, i learned Linux on Slackware, many years ago. If push comes to shove, i'll support Pat. That probably will involve sending some money through PayPal, since that's pretty much all i can do.
I just want to know an email address other than Pat's, since he might not be in the condition to read his email and accept PayPal money. A relative, maybe? Or perhaps the Slackware community can setup a public fund?
It's a good thing you're humble, because you're wrong. Total determinism was an ancient dream of science that proved wrong. Einstein was the last of the "titans" to believe in it. The quantum physics guys demolished that dream. At the quantum level, everything is a probability. It's just that things play out in such a way that, at a macro level, the Universe appears to be deterministic. But that's just an emergent property of a probabilistical foundation.
But i agree with you that psychic phenomena should not be rejected outright, based on present day's scientific dogma.
Slashdot Mirror
and it's based on MythTV:
http://www.mythtv.org/
A careful analysis may show that you see as a "problem" may, in fact, be a necessary prerequisite for anything resembling "intelligent thought".
I didn't say "mind is bad and it cannot produce anything useful". The "problem" i mentioned is not the mind per se, but the way the mind is, i believe (although, quite an unnecessary statement, i cannot prove), incomplete in some fundamental way(s).
Pretty much the same way Life is incomplete - but it's easy to see that from the perspective of the Mind. (i'm capitalising the initials to show i'm refering to the respective principles, from a philosophical perspective)
You are correct in saying that the Next Step (whatever that is) is incomprehensible to us, pretty much the way the mind is "incomprehensible" (forced language) to animals, or life is "incomprehensible" (again) to dead matter. But that does not imply it is a nothing.
Lack of comprehension does not refute existence.
Actually, it's sort of strange how most people who accept the fundamental assumptions of the theory of evolution, at the same time seem to assume that Homo Sapiens is the definitive pinnacle. Actually there are two ways to further qualify that:
- the weak one - the assumption that the human species will not improve within the current evolutionary frame (the principle of mind)
- the strong one - the assumption that the principle of mind is the last big step and there's no further evolutionary big change (um, revolutionary change?) down the road
Yeah, but that whole business about ineffable/inaccessible cardinals honestly freaks me out.
:-)
P.S.: I'm cool with transfinite numbers though.
just kidding (sort of)
I believe you're actually thinking about the number 0.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms
Buddhism does not excludes fighting back, if the situation requires it.
Disclaimer: i'm not a dyed-in-the-wool buddhist, but i sympathise with some buddhist points of view (and i actually studied buddhism quite a lot)
The problem of God's existence is one of the hardest that people can ever face, yet there are so many silly arguments (on both sides), it makes me laugh.
If you read the Old Testament, apparently God cannot control Himself sometimes. :-)
I believe that fundamental limits in the way the mind works make us believe all kinds of silly things about the reality. I believe that no amount of intellect enhancing (in the Star Trek sense) could overcome this problem. :-/
I believe it will be solved only by the emergence, over the course of evolution, of a radically new principle, as different from and as superior to the principle of mind, as mind is different from and superior to unintelligent life (or life is to unanimated matter). The next Big Step, if you wish.
That next step may or may not involve us, humans.
One hint to the current state of affairs might be Godel's theorem.
Another hint might be the irepressible tendency of people to fall prey to A Thinking System, or A Dogma, any dogma, be it religion, science, whatever, while a priory rejecting all the other.
I believe, though I can't prove, that the universe presented to me by my senses is not an artifact of my own existence but exists separately from me, is consistent and will remain consistent after I am dead. (i.e. the universe isn't a figment of my imagination).
I believe, though I can't prove, that other entities that resemble me in appearance and behavior (people) have the same kind of agency and observer status as myself and therefore have value similar in kind to myself. (i.e. contrary to the assertion of the psychopath, I believe other people really are people).
Funny, i rely on the same lemmas. Yet i'm not an atheist (well, ok, most religious people will have a hard time labeling me as religious too).
I have no problems accepting those lemmas, while at the same time accepting the lemma of the consciousness that is essentially independent of its material support (mind you, i said "consciousness" not "mind"; mind you, i said "essentially" not "completely").
It's the typical religious "Big Daddy in the Sky" lemma that i'm having problems with - as, i suspect, you do.
It hit me that the universe can't expand inside of nothing... if nothing existed when the universe was infinitesmally small, not even nothingness itself, how can the universe expand into that? it doesn't exist.
Multiple fallacies.
By the same token, how can the Universe exist at all "inside of nothing"?
It gets even worse: why should it have any particular size and be limited to it, instead of being "free" to change it?
Your problem is that you believe that a finite Universe must exist inside of "something". It doesn't have to. It could be self-contained.
There are multiple geometries which are compatible with the "non-limited yet finite" Universe. E.g. the hyper-spheric geometry (although STOP NOW and don't imagine a sphere because that will get you back to your initial puzzle of "what contains that sphere?").
You're simply thinking of a particular geometry which has the property that, if you keep on walking straight indefinitely, you keep on seeing indefinitely many new places. Most of the Big Bang models simply state that, if you keep on walking straight long enough, you get back from where you departed.
That model does not require it to be contained in anything. It's just a play of attributes of the space.
(subject)
Right, the either-black-or-white view, the hallmark of those who deem themselves intelligent but are merely able to accomplish some marginal and narrow task.
It's bad when there's strictly one way to do it.
It's a very good thing when there are just a few ways to "do it", chosen for valid reasons.
It's a pathological case when the language chooses as primary goal to bundle heaps of different ways to "do it" just for the heck of it. Perl is like that.
As for the two positions you mention: you mean there are jobs in the field of programming just because there are more ways to implement the same algorithm over and over? Don't be ridiculous!
Perl is fine, with one exception: the "there's more than one way to do it" concept. Anyone suggesting to use such a language in any serious software project should be fired with prejudice.
I actually mean it.
I'm using Apache-2.0.51 and PHP-4.3.10, with several typical PHP apps (webmail, photo gallery, whatever).
No problem whatsoever. I have no idea what all the fuss is about.
That, and many others, were the issues that i noticed while wrestling with IPSec.
I mean, IPSec is nice and all, if you're a medium-to-large company that just goes ahead and buys a full solution from vendor XYZ. But it's a big pain in the butt for everyone else.
At some point, i discovered OpenVPN and i got hooked immediately. Clients and servers for all major operating systems (the same software can be either client or software, just flip a config bit), nice GUI for Windows, compression, rock-solid encryption, reliability, simplicity of installation and configuration...
I'll never use IPsec again, unless i'm doing a corporate-scale deployment. And, who knows, maybe "enterprise" solutions based on OpenVPN will become available at some point.
IPSec sucks. Overdesigned protocol that simply gives you too much rope to not be tempted to hang yourself, too many "slightly different" implementations that are actually different enough to not interoperate, a big pain in the ass to configure correctly, no good AND free clients (especially GUI ones) for popular OSes, etc.
Have a look at OpenVPN. After i tried it, i swore i'll never get back to IPSec.
According to this very article we're commenting now :-) it's not secure.
Have a look at OpenVPN instead.
But it's also a lot more limited.
Have a look at OpenVPN. I did, and i never looked back.
I'm doing the same thing, but i'm not even restricting MAC addresses. I even give DHCP addresses to anyone. :-)
But, once you connect, you can't do anything. You're behind an allow-nothing firewall. You must open up an OpenVPN tunnel if you wanna go through the firewall.
IPSec is not the way to go, not for a small setup. I've been there, done that. It sucks. Overdesigned piece of crap.
Since i started to use OpenVPN, i never looked back. All the features of an IPSec VPN, but none of the hassles.
By far the best way to accomplish that is by using OpenVPN.
;-)
:-) However, it's behind a totally restrictive firewall. The only way to work around that is to open an OpenVPN tunnel. Then you can do pretty much anything, through the tunnel, of course.
I tried everything, IPSec, SSH tunneling, you name it. They all suck. SSH is, let's face it, limited. IPSec is cumbersome, not exactly friendly to all operating systems, doesn't play well with NAT (unless you use UDP encapsulation), etc. It is glaringly obvious that it's a severely overdesigned protocol.
Enter OpenVPN. It uses SSL for encryption, but it's not a SSL-based pseudo-VPN, but a true VPN - it can forward any IP protocol. Think of it as having the functionality of IPSec, but using a simpler and more sensible implementation.
It's cross-platform (Linux, Windows, Solaris... you name it). It's simple to install and configure (same software can be either server or client and the config file semantics are similar). It's secure (it can use signed certificates, passwords, any authentication mechanism you like). It can compress the traffic on the fly (using LZO which is pretty damn fast and low-overhead). If you use TCP transport instead of UDP, it can tunnel through ordinary HTTP proxies. It has dummy-friendly GUI for Windows. It slices, it dices and it makes coffee... oh, well, maybe not that.
Anyway, i'm running an OpenVPN server on my home firewall, and i put OpenVPN on all my computers (my workstation at the office, my laptop, etc.). Wherever i go, i just fire up OpenVPN and "i'm home".
I run IMAP through it, so my IMAP clients (Evolution), no matter where they are, they "see" the same IMAP servers and folders. That is awesome - different systems, yet my mail looks the same. And it's also secure.
My wireless access point has no security whatsoever: no encryption, no MAC filtering, no SSID cloaking... it even gives you a DHCP address.
It rocks!
Ever heard of "don't feed the troll"? ;-)
That's sound and sane advice.
But maybe he has crappy insurance and he fears a hefty medical bill? I know it sounds irrational but, heck, myself i've made worse decisions in not as critical situations, so i'm not judging him.
Anyway, i learned Linux on Slackware, many years ago. If push comes to shove, i'll support Pat. That probably will involve sending some money through PayPal, since that's pretty much all i can do.
I just want to know an email address other than Pat's, since he might not be in the condition to read his email and accept PayPal money. A relative, maybe? Or perhaps the Slackware community can setup a public fund?
So, i guess Thunderbird 1.0 will be released later on? Is it 0.9 that's supposed to complement Firefox 1.0?
It's a good thing you're humble, because you're wrong.
Total determinism was an ancient dream of science that proved wrong. Einstein was the last of the "titans" to believe in it. The quantum physics guys demolished that dream.
At the quantum level, everything is a probability. It's just that things play out in such a way that, at a macro level, the Universe appears to be deterministic. But that's just an emergent property of a probabilistical foundation.
But i agree with you that psychic phenomena should not be rejected outright, based on present day's scientific dogma.