A general rule here is that, in the abscence of a good causal model predicting why there would be more examples, you need at least two examples of something before you can conclude that it is likely that there are more than the one example you currently have. That's how you establish it as a possible reproducible pattern, rather than a one-off fluke. We currently only have one example of life appearing in the universe: here. So we really can't say too much yet about the odds of it appearing elsewhere.
"Something alive" would be incredible enough, because it's fairly likely that it would be foriegn to us, and teach us a great deal about the different possibilities for living creatures.
---catholic... as in "one holy catholic and apistolic (sp?) church" = Christian---
Uh, isn't that definition sort of bending the truth of the situation with regard to the differing opinions of the various Protestant churches? There' nothing wrong with finding points of commonality: but I don't see the point in wiping away differences with a pat definition that simply ignores them.
---yes that is true, but the problem is closing the gap. the guy with the longer sword/reach etc can hit you before you can hit them asuming equal speed between the two of you.---
In this case, the opponents with the longer sword would have to be faster, not of equal speed, to compensate. Larger, heavier swords take more time to swing, and more time to recover from a swing.
Not in Ep 1. He came into the story too late in the game, and was totaly underwhelming as a character. In Ep 2, maybe an attempt: but as you note: a no go. The other unique characteristic of Han was that he was just a regular joe hero: he was the perfect foil for the stilted jedi froofery of the few jedi hanging around. Now, when we have hundreds of ultra-serious jedi, we have no such cynical foil.
---but you cannot use the force to harm someone....that is the way of the dark side---
What bollocks. Force for a good cause is perfectly justified. Allowing Dooku to run off contributes to millions upon millions of deaths. Striking out against evil does not make you evil, no matter what Lucas' crazy mysticism demands. As David B said, good people have good friends to help you deal with the things you might have to do in the name of justice, and yet still stay a good person.
Two words: Han Solo. The new films have no Han Solo character: no dashing, witty antihero/hero. He's what made the original trilogy so fun, despite all its flaws. The new films are just... dry. Ep 1 didn't even have a real main character to identify with.
Read your Kenshin! Shorter swords in close range allow one to block much more quickly than longer ones can strike. And once you get in close enough (inside their defense), the opponent with the longer sword is toast.
---I can tell you that I am not blocked from a damn thing.---
How would you know what you don't know? To you, these sites simply look like unregistered addresses...
---And where might you be from, oh free one?---
A place far away, where they have this thing called: "kidding." I understand that my cultural practices distress and frighten you, but I assure you that my "kidding" will cause you no ill effects. In time, you will learn to tell the "serious" from the "kid."
Hah: you Americans think the Chinese have it bad, and are missing all the best content on the net? If you only knew what YOUR country has been blocking off from YOU! And you don't even know it's being done!
---A bit further than this. China probably CAN prevent the viewing of news.bbc.co.uk and cnn.com but they'll NEVER keep up to date the block list for NGOs and other more independent and direct news sources.---
You seem to be assuming that the Chinese will use an excluding system whereby they run around blocking objectionable content. But what if they used an including system, whereby they only allowed people to go to sites that they approve? So they don't need to worry about blocking new addresses: only things they've checked out and signed off on will get through.
I dunno: I haven't seen any posts here, or anywhere, from people in China and Cuba. Granted, there's the language barrier, but you'd hope that there were at least some english speaking in-China Linux geeks surfing, or with translators, that would have something to say on such a germaine subject. Can we confirm that people in China can even READ this part of slashdot?
Padme's line "Ani Ani, are you okay?" in the romance-in-the-Tellitubbie-land scences got a big laugh out of me. Maybe that sequence was an intentional joke for us medical care professionals, and the writers really are geniuses.
It probably does (assuming that fact is true), but you'd think, at lesat provisionally, that there would be some rhyme and reason to why theaters didn't open Clones as big as they did Spider-man. Perhaps because they knew something about Clones that we don't, or perhaps the success of Spider-Man, which could open in lots of theaters because it was largely unopposed by other big pictures, meant that it kept many of the theaters that Clones would have otherwise opened on if it had run unopposed.
---What I find amusing is an atheist calling something "immoral," thereby adopting tenets of theism without thinking. Without God, there is no morality: only situational advantage, and it is illogical and senseless to "have to worry about the future."---
Good greif man, PLATO refuted this argument thousands of years before you were born. I dare you to try and explain how the existence of a God "makes" morality. The very cocnept ("making" or "deciding") morality is incoherent.
---There is no reason to be moral/nice/kind to one's fellow man apart from a perceptible advantage gained; if you cannot identify the exact advantage, you are acting illogically.---
God forbid we actually act morally because we CARE about virtue, or have compassion for others, right? Or DID your God forbid it? Tell me: of the two of us, which one worships a being who supposedly commanded its followers to dash unborn infants out on the rocks?
---Atheism, if carried to its logical conclusion, inexorably leads to nihilism.---
Nonsense: please explain how the lack of a PARTICULAR ideology (theism) requires that a person have NO beliefs or ideology, let alone believe IN nothing (nihilism).
---The gist of Gould's dissatisfaction with this is that it is all too teleological. Genes don't want anything.---
This is where I think Gould's ideolouge tendancies took over his honesty. Dawkins et al never claimed that genes really "want" anything, and that this was anything more than metaphor. He even carefully explains this, for goodness sake! Gould hammered Dawkins on what was essentially an unfair characterization of Dawkin's argument, based on little more than the title. This was not an honest criticism.
I like Dawkins, and in fact I think he's far more on the ball with a lot of things about evolution than was Gould. But Dawkins, for all his deep insight and clarity, was not quite the essayist or litterary wit that Gould was. Dawkins does kick ass though.
Scientific thought is NOT supposed to be darwinian. Evolution doesn't promise "right" or "best" choices, or even a consistent direction. The scientific method, on the contrary, is extremely competitive, but the standards are meant to stay the same: good scholarship taking on all challengers consistently and in detail. Darwinian evolution is blind: it has no intentions, no direction. Science DOES have a hopefuly intention: more and more complete and objective knowledge of the world around us.
Dawkins didn't even argue that WE were selfish. It's our genes that he argued are "selfish" (an idea more poetic than accurate, as Dawkin's has admitted). This is important, because often the 'selfish' nature of genes can even lead to genetic dispositions towards extreme altruism.
---You are positing a house without a builder. Occam's Razor would seem to indicate that what is necessary for the house to come into being is a builder.---
Occam would hav caught onto the false analougy. We assume that houses were built by builders because of all sorts of pertinent information about both houses and builders: we can see the plans, watch them be built, see tool marks from their making, talk to the builders, etc. None of these things are present in the natural world alone. In fact, your argument essetially boils down to "geez, nature is so unnatural: it can't possibly be natural!" But, of course, the only place we can get any sense of "what is natural" is from studying nature itself. To find nature to be unatturally anything is logically nonsense: it simply reveals a previous misunderstanding about nature.
---What is necessary for the universe to come into being is a creator (no God didn't come into being because he's pure act).---
Any could just say: so is the beginning of the universe (I doubt you even know what you MEAN by "pure act" anyway, so I dare you to try and prove that claim wrong). I know you BELIEVE that this is what happened, but you have to understand that that does not make your belief logically necessary.
---I live in a causal universe. Everything around me is caused by something else. I cause this message. My parents caused me. All the way back to....what? I could not cause this message if my parents had not caused me, and so on, all the way back.---
Except, if you accept Aquinas' proof (which there is no reason to: and endless cycle of causes is not logically incoherent: just motion causing ITSELF: i.e. being recursive), then you DON'T live in an entirely causal universe. At least one thing that exists is _not_ caused by something else. And there's simply no reason that you can provide why the universe's birth itself couldn't be that uncaused cause. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Worse, there is no reason why there couldn't have been LOTS of different causes. Or even new uncaused causes happening right now. What possibly could rule that out once you claim it's possible that things can be uncaused?
Now, please pull out the argument from design, the argument from faith, the ontological argument... we could have some fun.
Look. You can't prove an empirical fact (existence of something) from logical proofs alone. At some point, to prove any empirical fact, you're going to have to make unfounded assumptions.
Interestingly enough, causality is one of them. Have you ever thought about how one would go about proving causality in a way that wouldn't beg the question? It can't be conclusively done. We just infer it. So when you say that you live in a causal universe...well, I'm not inclined to disagree so much as to point out that we are wired to infer that... but there's no way to know for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
A general rule here is that, in the abscence of a good causal model predicting why there would be more examples, you need at least two examples of something before you can conclude that it is likely that there are more than the one example you currently have. That's how you establish it as a possible reproducible pattern, rather than a one-off fluke. We currently only have one example of life appearing in the universe: here. So we really can't say too much yet about the odds of it appearing elsewhere.
"Something alive" would be incredible enough, because it's fairly likely that it would be foriegn to us, and teach us a great deal about the different possibilities for living creatures.
---catholic... as in "one holy catholic and apistolic (sp?) church" = Christian---
Uh, isn't that definition sort of bending the truth of the situation with regard to the differing opinions of the various Protestant churches? There' nothing wrong with finding points of commonality: but I don't see the point in wiping away differences with a pat definition that simply ignores them.
---yes that is true, but the problem is closing the gap. the guy with the longer sword/reach etc can hit you before you can hit them asuming equal speed between the two of you.---
In this case, the opponents with the longer sword would have to be faster, not of equal speed, to compensate. Larger, heavier swords take more time to swing, and more time to recover from a swing.
Not in Ep 1. He came into the story too late in the game, and was totaly underwhelming as a character. In Ep 2, maybe an attempt: but as you note: a no go. The other unique characteristic of Han was that he was just a regular joe hero: he was the perfect foil for the stilted jedi froofery of the few jedi hanging around. Now, when we have hundreds of ultra-serious jedi, we have no such cynical foil.
---but you cannot use the force to harm someone....that is the way of the dark side---
What bollocks. Force for a good cause is perfectly justified. Allowing Dooku to run off contributes to millions upon millions of deaths. Striking out against evil does not make you evil, no matter what Lucas' crazy mysticism demands. As David B said, good people have good friends to help you deal with the things you might have to do in the name of justice, and yet still stay a good person.
Two words: Han Solo. The new films have no Han Solo character: no dashing, witty antihero/hero. He's what made the original trilogy so fun, despite all its flaws. The new films are just... dry. Ep 1 didn't even have a real main character to identify with.
Read your Kenshin! Shorter swords in close range allow one to block much more quickly than longer ones can strike. And once you get in close enough (inside their defense), the opponent with the longer sword is toast.
Maybe, like many martial arts masters, Yoda likes to play up his supposed frailty to catch others off guard.
---I can tell you that I am not blocked from a damn thing.---
How would you know what you don't know? To you, these sites simply look like unregistered addresses...
---And where might you be from, oh free one?---
A place far away, where they have this thing called: "kidding." I understand that my cultural practices distress and frighten you, but I assure you that my "kidding" will cause you no ill effects. In time, you will learn to tell the "serious" from the "kid."
Hah: you Americans think the Chinese have it bad, and are missing all the best content on the net? If you only knew what YOUR country has been blocking off from YOU! And you don't even know it's being done!
---A bit further than this. China probably CAN prevent the viewing of news.bbc.co.uk and cnn.com but they'll NEVER keep up to date the block list for NGOs and other more independent and direct news sources.---
You seem to be assuming that the Chinese will use an excluding system whereby they run around blocking objectionable content. But what if they used an including system, whereby they only allowed people to go to sites that they approve? So they don't need to worry about blocking new addresses: only things they've checked out and signed off on will get through.
Heh: wait till the Chinese find out about FoxNews! Finally, a fair and balanced news program!
Or maybe FoxNews is already allowed in China, thanks to Murdoch's sniveling love of pleasing dictators to get his projects on the cable lines.
I dunno: I haven't seen any posts here, or anywhere, from people in China and Cuba. Granted, there's the language barrier, but you'd hope that there were at least some english speaking in-China Linux geeks surfing, or with translators, that would have something to say on such a germaine subject. Can we confirm that people in China can even READ this part of slashdot?
Padme's line "Ani Ani, are you okay?" in the romance-in-the-Tellitubbie-land scences got a big laugh out of me. Maybe that sequence was an intentional joke for us medical care professionals, and the writers really are geniuses.
It probably does (assuming that fact is true), but you'd think, at lesat provisionally, that there would be some rhyme and reason to why theaters didn't open Clones as big as they did Spider-man. Perhaps because they knew something about Clones that we don't, or perhaps the success of Spider-Man, which could open in lots of theaters because it was largely unopposed by other big pictures, meant that it kept many of the theaters that Clones would have otherwise opened on if it had run unopposed.
---What I find amusing is an atheist calling something "immoral," thereby adopting tenets of theism without thinking. Without God, there is no morality: only situational advantage, and it is illogical and senseless to "have to worry about the future."---
Good greif man, PLATO refuted this argument thousands of years before you were born. I dare you to try and explain how the existence of a God "makes" morality. The very cocnept ("making" or "deciding") morality is incoherent.
---There is no reason to be moral/nice/kind to one's fellow man apart from a perceptible advantage gained; if you cannot identify the exact advantage, you are acting illogically.---
God forbid we actually act morally because we CARE about virtue, or have compassion for others, right? Or DID your God forbid it? Tell me: of the two of us, which one worships a being who supposedly commanded its followers to dash unborn infants out on the rocks?
---Atheism, if carried to its logical conclusion, inexorably leads to nihilism.---
Nonsense: please explain how the lack of a PARTICULAR ideology (theism) requires that a person have NO beliefs or ideology, let alone believe IN nothing (nihilism).
---The gist of Gould's dissatisfaction with this is that it is all too teleological. Genes don't want anything.---
This is where I think Gould's ideolouge tendancies took over his honesty. Dawkins et al never claimed that genes really "want" anything, and that this was anything more than metaphor. He even carefully explains this, for goodness sake! Gould hammered Dawkins on what was essentially an unfair characterization of Dawkin's argument, based on little more than the title. This was not an honest criticism.
I like Dawkins, and in fact I think he's far more on the ball with a lot of things about evolution than was Gould. But Dawkins, for all his deep insight and clarity, was not quite the essayist or litterary wit that Gould was. Dawkins does kick ass though.
yeah yeah: as usual, a simplistic rhetorical jab instead of substantive criticism.
Your post should help put to rest the myth that the strongly religious are necessarily more ethical or compassionate.
Scientific thought is NOT supposed to be darwinian. Evolution doesn't promise "right" or "best" choices, or even a consistent direction. The scientific method, on the contrary, is extremely competitive, but the standards are meant to stay the same: good scholarship taking on all challengers consistently and in detail. Darwinian evolution is blind: it has no intentions, no direction. Science DOES have a hopefuly intention: more and more complete and objective knowledge of the world around us.
Dawkins didn't even argue that WE were selfish. It's our genes that he argued are "selfish" (an idea more poetic than accurate, as Dawkin's has admitted). This is important, because often the 'selfish' nature of genes can even lead to genetic dispositions towards extreme altruism.
---You are positing a house without a builder. Occam's Razor would seem to indicate that what is necessary for the house to come into being is a builder.---
Occam would hav caught onto the false analougy. We assume that houses were built by builders because of all sorts of pertinent information about both houses and builders: we can see the plans, watch them be built, see tool marks from their making, talk to the builders, etc. None of these things are present in the natural world alone. In fact, your argument essetially boils down to "geez, nature is so unnatural: it can't possibly be natural!" But, of course, the only place we can get any sense of "what is natural" is from studying nature itself. To find nature to be unatturally anything is logically nonsense: it simply reveals a previous misunderstanding about nature.
---What is necessary for the universe to come into being is a creator (no God didn't come into being because he's pure act).---
Any could just say: so is the beginning of the universe (I doubt you even know what you MEAN by "pure act" anyway, so I dare you to try and prove that claim wrong).
I know you BELIEVE that this is what happened, but you have to understand that that does not make your belief logically necessary.
---I live in a causal universe. Everything around me is caused by something else. I cause this message. My parents caused me. All the way back to....what? I could not cause this message if my parents had not caused me, and so on, all the way back.---
Except, if you accept Aquinas' proof (which there is no reason to: and endless cycle of causes is not logically incoherent: just motion causing ITSELF: i.e. being recursive), then you DON'T live in an entirely causal universe. At least one thing that exists is _not_ caused by something else. And there's simply no reason that you can provide why the universe's birth itself couldn't be that uncaused cause. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Worse, there is no reason why there couldn't have been LOTS of different causes. Or even new uncaused causes happening right now. What possibly could rule that out once you claim it's possible that things can be uncaused?
Now, please pull out the argument from design, the argument from faith, the ontological argument... we could have some fun.
Look. You can't prove an empirical fact (existence of something) from logical proofs alone. At some point, to prove any empirical fact, you're going to have to make unfounded assumptions.
Interestingly enough, causality is one of them. Have you ever thought about how one would go about proving causality in a way that wouldn't beg the question? It can't be conclusively done. We just infer it. So when you say that you live in a causal universe...well, I'm not inclined to disagree so much as to point out that we are wired to infer that... but there's no way to know for sure.