Then help me out by maybe providing what your definition would be?
As I stated in my original post, Christianity traditionally has defined "free will" to mean the ability to do what is right. Denominations deal with determinism in various ways, but Orthodox Christianity generally agrees that one's nature determines one's will. In this sense we find a bounded will in Christianity in the way I think you'd like to find with chaos theory.
The OP opts for a definition that is "the power of contrary choice," i.e., the ability to not choose something. His logical problem was that he used a definition outside of the system he was critiquing to show the system was inconsistent.
As far as I can tell, you agree with me that his definition is wrong, since you don't apparently believe Joe Freewill has the power of contrary choice, either.
Let's reformulate that a bit: "Even if you knew the state of the universe to infinite detail at time 'X-eps', you could not predict with 100% accuracy what Joe Freewill will do at time X."
Neither can Joe.
Except that part about "God's foreknowledge" coexisting with "free will" being a "mystery". (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
(Does that mean that you don't have the power of contrary choice in this instance?)
You've got the same problem here as the OP: you're not using the Christian definition of free will to prove the system is inconsistent. Orthodox Christianity never taught that man had free will in the way that you speak of here. They taught quite early that man was determined by his nature and was free to do whatever his nature permitted. They never said that man wasn't free in heaven--just that he couldn't sin.
There is no practical difference between "classical free will" and "unpredictable even in principle". (Note: chaos isn't just "(humanly) unpredictable". It means "nothing in this universe can hope to gather the kind of information necessary to predict it for any useful length of time".)
There are so many problems with this it's hard to know where to start.
First, "classical free will" wasn't defined as "unpredictable even in principle."
Second, the bar for good scientific theory isn't chaos. It's elegance: concise formulae that describe the _order_ of the cosmos. When science answers questions at all, it's generally to limit the will--you can't measure the velocity and position of a particle at the same time, no matter how much you want to.
The deeper issue, though, is that "free will" isn't the same as "unpredictable even in principle." If something is unpredictable, we expect mathematically that it will follow decision paths with equal probability (law of averages and all that). But this is exactly the same thing as saying that there's no will involved whatsoever! The _essence_ of will is predictability (and conflict, I suppose).
Can you explain why I should care if I only have 'an effectively perfect simulation of free will', and not the genuine article? Can you propose any situation at all where the difference matters? Come on, how can anyone differentiate between someone with "classical free will" and someone that's "unpredictable even in principle"?
At the end of the day, the reason you should care is because your definition of free will, like that of the OP, is simply wrong. You can't find a definition of free will that makes you anything but an automaton in science: you're physically, chemically, and psychologically determined. The whole point of the FA is that we might not have such a free will with regard to religion as we first thought. Genetics sure never gave us _more_ freedom.
If you're going to define free will as "unpredictable even in principle", at the very least it should bother you that you're exercising logical dishonesty. It might bother you more to realize that the choices you make have no objective meaning whatsoever. And it might bother you the most that when Christianity talks about the will, it's logically more consistent than your position and stipulates that choices do have objective value.
It hasn't anything to do with prediction. Science by its nature doesn't allow free will, unless you want to invest rocks with as much free will as you have. So your assumption is grounded on an attribute you've invested yourself with that contradicts the facts, at least as far as you're willing to gather them. All you've really done here is to change the meaning of "free" to "(humanly) unpredictable."
So aren't you really doing the same thing about free will what the GP alleges Christians do with God? i.e., attributing to yourself a feature that doesn't really exist based on the facts at hand? That is to say, science doesn't provide you with any justification for believing in the power of contrary choice; you just assume that you have it because it's too complicated to go the other route. (Sounds a little like intelligent design to me.)
Even Christians don't believe God has a free will in that sense. The Bible says God cannot lie, i.e., that it's impossible for him. Christianity, and probably some other religions, define freedom as the ability to do what is right, not as the power of contrary choice. The end result of almost all scientific philosophies is the death of freedom, because choices are determined exclusively by the firing of synapses in the brain. While the soul falls outside the purview of science, and rightly so, you surely don't buy freedom by denying religion.
The only reason we come to this conclusion is that we assume will and responsibility are intertwined. This is simple foolishness. We're held culpable for all sorts of things we didn't want to do. Car accidents are a great example. Responsibility and desire have nothing to do with each other.
Responsibility is incurred by an objective standard of right and wrong. (Postmodern ideas on the subject notwithstanding.)
It's possible that he also used the ASCII inputs as components of an L-System (a common graphics method for generating plantlife procedurally). While he doesn't have control over the input, and it is in that sense "random", he can select a sub-set of spam-related characters (e.g., '0' instead of 'o') as the basis for the system. These characters would be more likely to appear than others, and it would be possible to correlate them statistically with the semantic content of the spam messages to generate, e.g., phallic pictures for v1ag ra spam. Whether he did that or not, who knows? I didn't RTFA.
I worked tech support for several years at Ohio State, which uses a lastname.number system for emails. So common last names, like Smith (or in this case, Miller) would have associated numbers in the thousands. So I got a call one morning from Miller.3. When only one digit was forthcoming, I said, "Wow," to which the user responded, "I am 98 years old today!" I congratulated him, fixed his problem ( 5 minutes, thank you), and sent him happily on his way. One of my favorite memories of tech support, for sure.
While not quite the same as extensions, Opera does support user javascript: see http://userjs.org/. You might also find the content blocker useful. It isn't as advanced as Firefox's (it doesn't support IFRAME blocking, e.g.), and still seems to have a couple bugs on sites I visit, but it's certainly been pretty useful. And it's probably worth noting that Opera also supports AJAX widgets; I'm sure that these will be more than playthings in the future (but for now, I'll play Tetris while waiting for builds to complete).
The interface for setting site preferences is kind of nice, too; CollegeFootballNews can no longer spam me with popups for every click (not that Firefox can't do this, of course; but Opera's setup is a lot more convenient), and I can set cookie preferences for every site almost instantly.
I'll probably convert if the Thunderbird import works well.
I think this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of education. Educators should not teach (just) practical skills that you will use in the future; they should teach their students how to think in such a way that they can solve novel problems when presented with them. If you have a student who can't use Word97 because he learned MSOffice, there's a serious problem.
1. Your resume doesn't prove that you know how to think. Companies that innovate consistently need people who know how to do it--not people who know how to regurgitate information. Your resume is a list of things you can regurgitate.
My old office mate is working at Microsoft now, and he shared a few of their questions. They're designed to see how your mind works. My computability prof. was asked to solve a mathematical equation when he started working at HP many years ago--another case in point.
The big things, like creative thinking and attitude simply don't come out in the resume.
2. Management wants to forge good relationships with their workers. Happy workers stay at their jobs. My father knew a man who started his own company and footed the bill for his employees' meals while they were in the office. He saved a lot of money simply because he didn't have to waste resources on training new hires.
When any company gives you a test and a long interview, the reason you got there is because you're qualified for the job. They want to see whether or not you'll fit in with the other workers and with their intended goals, and whether your attitude towards them is appropriate. Good management fosters good relationships with employees--it's a back-scratcher's paradise.
There are toolkits available for 3D visualization that are open source. I used a couple for some work in a seminar a year or so ago. http://www.vtk.org and http://www.itk.org (owned, pretty obviously, by the same people). Their principle application has been in medical work, but I used the segmentation and registration data to begin some work on tracking torsos in video.
I think the fastest way to get (some) kids hooked on math is to show them how it's used in video games. The applications of math and physics in a gaming environment are numerous and require advanced skills in mathematics. (The Light Transport Equation, for instance, or center of mass calculations in a physics engine.)
Unfortunately, I doubt this will have much of an effect on English majors.
Man, a ten-year wait. Don't look now, but ten years ago, your processor was a LOT slower. Miniaturization == speed. It's hard to build processor cache out of core memory!
The reason you don't see things that take advantage of smaller stuff is either because you haven't followed technology trends or because you simply aren't looking. Everything has gotten smaller and is getting smaller.
While I'm certainly no fan of government legislating morality (I'd much rather people did the right thing because it was right as opposed to because they had to), so far I haven't seen a very convincing argument why the government should legalize { porn, drugs, et c. }, or how such legislation is harmful to society.
The harmful effects of drugs are pretty well known, and these effects are intrinsic to the drug. It's not as though crack suddenly becomes more addictive because it's illegal. (It may be more alluring for rebels, I suppose.) The chemical substance is still the same, the effects are just as detrimental.
I can't tell what the harmful effects are of not smoking crack. And, while I haven't checked, I'd be surprised to find a scientific study that concluded that not smoking crack hurt you.
I've also had a difficult time understanding how porn isn't denigrating to both sexes. I'm sure someone here can provide answers, though.
I spoke with a researcher at Ohio State (Dr. Arthur Epstein) a couple years ago who was working on a plastic semiconductor that would allow random access seek time on a permanent storage unit.
His details were geared more to the layman, and I think his applications were more wide-spread than hard drives or consumer-grade computers (think along the lines of wearable computers, including pen-shaped computers; he mentioned several military / GPS appliations), but he thought the technology would hit the market in about a decade (so probably seven or eight years from now).
The major problem was that the transition of electrons between different media (e.g., from a silicon semiconductor to a plastic semiconductor) could very easily corrupt the data transmitted. He thought it would be a few years before those kinks would be worked out.
More information about his research lab is at http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~mepl/.
I think, perhaps, our perception of whether the ACLU's position is actually consistent or not will rest in whether or not we find abortion a "moral" issue. (Or some other hotbutton topic that the ACLU wants to write about.)
The other problem is that some might have "moral" problems with their tax dollars financing someone's religious education.
Your opinion simply depends on what kind of morals you hold. The ACLU pretty clearly states that they don't think we should be able to force everyone to support a religious practice with which they disagree. They simply fail to mention that to a lot of people, abortion *is* a religious (Satanic) practice, legality notwithstanding.
Probably because speaking is incredibly complicated, and providing realistic speech from unmarked text is an intractable problem.
When you write something down, you don't provide a pronunciation guide. Rather, the reader is guided by context. For instance, if I write the word "import", how do you pronounce it? If we're talking about trade deficits, you probably know that the stress is on the second syllable; but if we're discussing meaning, the stress is on the first.
How do we expect computers that have a difficult time with context to make a pronunciation decision? This is a serious barrier to "good" text to speech (whatever "good" means).
If you mean that you want the voice to sound more natural, even if it's pronouncing words incorrectly, you still have a lot of hard problems. For instance, the muscles in the tongue and lips move differently based on how phonemes are grouped. Coarticulation models are difficult to construct, and when you try to account for a convincing number of muscles and vibrations, the problem may quickly become intractable.
Not only do we have to pay attention to the physics of speaking, but also the physics of hearing. The amount of signal processing involved can be pretty staggering if you're going to implement a complete system. Thierry Dutoit has a really good book on the subject called An Introduction to Text-to-Speech Synthesis. You should check it out if you want a somewhat more exhaustive answer to your question.
This actually is a use of the word "maybe" that should tickle the linguists among us. I'm not much of one, but it is interesting to note the use of a conditional ("maybe") with what is obviously not conditional.
Perhaps the author is attempting to address a perceived flaw in the 1 TB disk by saying, "Well, hey, it won't store as much as your 100TB dream disk, but at least you won't break your eject button when you're trying to watch the Simpsons."
Slashdot Mirror
As I stated in my original post, Christianity traditionally has defined "free will" to mean the ability to do what is right. Denominations deal with determinism in various ways, but Orthodox Christianity generally agrees that one's nature determines one's will. In this sense we find a bounded will in Christianity in the way I think you'd like to find with chaos theory.
The OP opts for a definition that is "the power of contrary choice," i.e., the ability to not choose something. His logical problem was that he used a definition outside of the system he was critiquing to show the system was inconsistent.
As far as I can tell, you agree with me that his definition is wrong, since you don't apparently believe Joe Freewill has the power of contrary choice, either.
Neither can Joe.
(Does that mean that you don't have the power of contrary choice in this instance?)
You've got the same problem here as the OP: you're not using the Christian definition of free will to prove the system is inconsistent. Orthodox Christianity never taught that man had free will in the way that you speak of here. They taught quite early that man was determined by his nature and was free to do whatever his nature permitted. They never said that man wasn't free in heaven--just that he couldn't sin.
There are so many problems with this it's hard to know where to start.
First, "classical free will" wasn't defined as "unpredictable even in principle."
Second, the bar for good scientific theory isn't chaos. It's elegance: concise formulae that describe the _order_ of the cosmos. When science answers questions at all, it's generally to limit the will--you can't measure the velocity and position of a particle at the same time, no matter how much you want to.
The deeper issue, though, is that "free will" isn't the same as "unpredictable even in principle." If something is unpredictable, we expect mathematically that it will follow decision paths with equal probability (law of averages and all that). But this is exactly the same thing as saying that there's no will involved whatsoever! The _essence_ of will is predictability (and conflict, I suppose).
At the end of the day, the reason you should care is because your definition of free will, like that of the OP, is simply wrong. You can't find a definition of free will that makes you anything but an automaton in science: you're physically, chemically, and psychologically determined. The whole point of the FA is that we might not have such a free will with regard to religion as we first thought. Genetics sure never gave us _more_ freedom.
If you're going to define free will as "unpredictable even in principle", at the very least it should bother you that you're exercising logical dishonesty. It might bother you more to realize that the choices you make have no objective meaning whatsoever. And it might bother you the most that when Christianity talks about the will, it's logically more consistent than your position and stipulates that choices do have objective value.
It hasn't anything to do with prediction. Science by its nature doesn't allow free will, unless you want to invest rocks with as much free will as you have. So your assumption is grounded on an attribute you've invested yourself with that contradicts the facts, at least as far as you're willing to gather them. All you've really done here is to change the meaning of "free" to "(humanly) unpredictable."
So aren't you really doing the same thing about free will what the GP alleges Christians do with God? i.e., attributing to yourself a feature that doesn't really exist based on the facts at hand? That is to say, science doesn't provide you with any justification for believing in the power of contrary choice; you just assume that you have it because it's too complicated to go the other route. (Sounds a little like intelligent design to me.)
Even Christians don't believe God has a free will in that sense. The Bible says God cannot lie, i.e., that it's impossible for him. Christianity, and probably some other religions, define freedom as the ability to do what is right, not as the power of contrary choice. The end result of almost all scientific philosophies is the death of freedom, because choices are determined exclusively by the firing of synapses in the brain. While the soul falls outside the purview of science, and rightly so, you surely don't buy freedom by denying religion.
My cousin has a friend who does science art: http://www.kevinvanaelst.com/art.html is the site.
The only reason we come to this conclusion is that we assume will and responsibility are intertwined. This is simple foolishness. We're held culpable for all sorts of things we didn't want to do. Car accidents are a great example. Responsibility and desire have nothing to do with each other. Responsibility is incurred by an objective standard of right and wrong. (Postmodern ideas on the subject notwithstanding.)
It's possible that he also used the ASCII inputs as components of an L-System (a common graphics method for generating plantlife procedurally). While he doesn't have control over the input, and it is in that sense "random", he can select a sub-set of spam-related characters (e.g., '0' instead of 'o') as the basis for the system. These characters would be more likely to appear than others, and it would be possible to correlate them statistically with the semantic content of the spam messages to generate, e.g., phallic pictures for v1ag ra spam. Whether he did that or not, who knows? I didn't RTFA.
Try adding site:www.yoururl.com to the search criteria.
I worked tech support for several years at Ohio State, which uses a lastname.number system for emails. So common last names, like Smith (or in this case, Miller) would have associated numbers in the thousands. So I got a call one morning from Miller.3. When only one digit was forthcoming, I said, "Wow," to which the user responded, "I am 98 years old today!" I congratulated him, fixed his problem ( 5 minutes, thank you), and sent him happily on his way. One of my favorite memories of tech support, for sure.
While not quite the same as extensions, Opera does support user javascript: see http://userjs.org/. You might also find the content blocker useful. It isn't as advanced as Firefox's (it doesn't support IFRAME blocking, e.g.), and still seems to have a couple bugs on sites I visit, but it's certainly been pretty useful. And it's probably worth noting that Opera also supports AJAX widgets; I'm sure that these will be more than playthings in the future (but for now, I'll play Tetris while waiting for builds to complete).
The interface for setting site preferences is kind of nice, too; CollegeFootballNews can no longer spam me with popups for every click (not that Firefox can't do this, of course; but Opera's setup is a lot more convenient), and I can set cookie preferences for every site almost instantly.
I'll probably convert if the Thunderbird import works well.
I think this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of education. Educators should not teach (just) practical skills that you will use in the future; they should teach their students how to think in such a way that they can solve novel problems when presented with them. If you have a student who can't use Word97 because he learned MSOffice, there's a serious problem.
Did you ask them to pull it down, by any chance? Neighbors occasionally accommodate.
1. Your resume doesn't prove that you know how to think. Companies that innovate consistently need people who know how to do it--not people who know how to regurgitate information. Your resume is a list of things you can regurgitate.
My old office mate is working at Microsoft now, and he shared a few of their questions. They're designed to see how your mind works. My computability prof. was asked to solve a mathematical equation when he started working at HP many years ago--another case in point.
The big things, like creative thinking and attitude simply don't come out in the resume.
2. Management wants to forge good relationships with their workers. Happy workers stay at their jobs. My father knew a man who started his own company and footed the bill for his employees' meals while they were in the office. He saved a lot of money simply because he didn't have to waste resources on training new hires.
When any company gives you a test and a long interview, the reason you got there is because you're qualified for the job. They want to see whether or not you'll fit in with the other workers and with their intended goals, and whether your attitude towards them is appropriate. Good management fosters good relationships with employees--it's a back-scratcher's paradise.
I'm sorry, don't you mean:
<xml>
<office>???</office>
<profit/>
</xml>
Wasn't it Knuth who said that being a good programmer required being a good writer?
There are toolkits available for 3D visualization that are open source. I used a couple for some work in a seminar a year or so ago. http://www.vtk.org and http://www.itk.org (owned, pretty obviously, by the same people). Their principle application has been in medical work, but I used the segmentation and registration data to begin some work on tracking torsos in video.
Sometimes the best ideas leverage old ones. (I think we sometimes call that innovation.)
I think the fastest way to get (some) kids hooked on math is to show them how it's used in video games. The applications of math and physics in a gaming environment are numerous and require advanced skills in mathematics. (The Light Transport Equation, for instance, or center of mass calculations in a physics engine.)
Unfortunately, I doubt this will have much of an effect on English majors.
Man, a ten-year wait. Don't look now, but ten years ago, your processor was a LOT slower. Miniaturization == speed. It's hard to build processor cache out of core memory!
The reason you don't see things that take advantage of smaller stuff is either because you haven't followed technology trends or because you simply aren't looking. Everything has gotten smaller and is getting smaller.
While I'm certainly no fan of government legislating morality (I'd much rather people did the right thing because it was right as opposed to because they had to), so far I haven't seen a very convincing argument why the government should legalize { porn, drugs, et c. }, or how such legislation is harmful to society.
The harmful effects of drugs are pretty well known, and these effects are intrinsic to the drug. It's not as though crack suddenly becomes more addictive because it's illegal. (It may be more alluring for rebels, I suppose.) The chemical substance is still the same, the effects are just as detrimental.
I can't tell what the harmful effects are of not smoking crack. And, while I haven't checked, I'd be surprised to find a scientific study that concluded that not smoking crack hurt you.
I've also had a difficult time understanding how porn isn't denigrating to both sexes. I'm sure someone here can provide answers, though.
The problem is that the grandparent misspelled the word. It's _lederhosen_, as in "Leather pants."
The off-the-cuff translation is "I have vegetables in my pants." In this case, the article should be taken as an understood personal possessive.
I spoke with a researcher at Ohio State (Dr. Arthur Epstein) a couple years ago who was working on a plastic semiconductor that would allow random access seek time on a permanent storage unit.
His details were geared more to the layman, and I think his applications were more wide-spread than hard drives or consumer-grade computers (think along the lines of wearable computers, including pen-shaped computers; he mentioned several military / GPS appliations), but he thought the technology would hit the market in about a decade (so probably seven or eight years from now).
The major problem was that the transition of electrons between different media (e.g., from a silicon semiconductor to a plastic semiconductor) could very easily corrupt the data transmitted. He thought it would be a few years before those kinks would be worked out.
More information about his research lab is at http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~mepl/.
I think, perhaps, our perception of whether the ACLU's position is actually consistent or not will rest in whether or not we find abortion a "moral" issue. (Or some other hotbutton topic that the ACLU wants to write about.)
The other problem is that some might have "moral" problems with their tax dollars financing someone's religious education.
Your opinion simply depends on what kind of morals you hold. The ACLU pretty clearly states that they don't think we should be able to force everyone to support a religious practice with which they disagree. They simply fail to mention that to a lot of people, abortion *is* a religious (Satanic) practice, legality notwithstanding.
Probably because speaking is incredibly complicated, and providing realistic speech from unmarked text is an intractable problem.
When you write something down, you don't provide a pronunciation guide. Rather, the reader is guided by context. For instance, if I write the word "import", how do you pronounce it? If we're talking about trade deficits, you probably know that the stress is on the second syllable; but if we're discussing meaning, the stress is on the first.
How do we expect computers that have a difficult time with context to make a pronunciation decision? This is a serious barrier to "good" text to speech (whatever "good" means).
If you mean that you want the voice to sound more natural, even if it's pronouncing words incorrectly, you still have a lot of hard problems. For instance, the muscles in the tongue and lips move differently based on how phonemes are grouped. Coarticulation models are difficult to construct, and when you try to account for a convincing number of muscles and vibrations, the problem may quickly become intractable.
Not only do we have to pay attention to the physics of speaking, but also the physics of hearing. The amount of signal processing involved can be pretty staggering if you're going to implement a complete system. Thierry Dutoit has a really good book on the subject called An Introduction to Text-to-Speech Synthesis. You should check it out if you want a somewhat more exhaustive answer to your question.
This actually is a use of the word "maybe" that should tickle the linguists among us. I'm not much of one, but it is interesting to note the use of a conditional ("maybe") with what is obviously not conditional.
Perhaps the author is attempting to address a perceived flaw in the 1 TB disk by saying, "Well, hey, it won't store as much as your 100TB dream disk, but at least you won't break your eject button when you're trying to watch the Simpsons."
Just a guess, though. Maybe I'm wrong.