how much of an impact the leaker (whomever it was) had on our work to protect ourselves, the which IS needed
Bullshit. There's no need for the government to violate the Constitution to "protect" us, either in warrentless eavesdropping, or in attempting to silence those who would talk about it.
There is no Constitutionl authority to declare certain facts "classified". Indeed, under the common law, every citizen has the duty to raise a "hue and cry" if they witness a crime, and warrentless eavesdropping is a crime; at the very least, silence would have make the leaker an accessory. The leaker is a hero, not a criminal.
Are there bad guys out there who want to commit acts of murder, both individual and mass? Yes. Is keeping an eye on them, trying to intercept them before they can do it, a good idea? Absolutely. Is there a legal way to do it, to provide some (though not absolute) assurance that this won't be misused? Sure - GET A FUCKING WARRANT.
But I agree with your point. It's amazing that in many places less-lethal weapons are more regulated than firearms. (I can't legally buy a stungun, but I have a revolver and a rifle. Huh?)
I'd say the only way to ensure against misuse is to make these less-lethal weapons available to everyone; if they're so safe, let citizens use them to control rogue cops, rather than having to throw stones or, worse, shoot back.
Because [FDR] was Socialist at best and a Communist at worst.
Really, you should learn what socialism and communism are before making such statements.
FDR saved capitalism from itself by regulating it. He co-opted the left, mollifing radicals and preventing meaningful economic reform while doing nothing to distribute control of economic resources to the workers.
Yes, FDR brought about more of a command economy; but the command economy versus free market axis is orthogonal to the capitalism versus socialism one.
Socialists have little love for FDR, and he had little love for them.
I don't get a paycheck. I just get a salary. The money is electronically transferred. No check is involved.
Colliqually, regardless of how the money is transfered you still get a "paycheck", and your attempted pedantry is simply annoying. And if you want to get pedantic, the question of whether you are salaried or hourly is completely irrelevant to the matter at hand.
And yes, many of us still get actual paper checks - my employer is too small for direct deposist to be practical.
If we understand that a check is simply a document requesting your bank to give the payee the designated amount, then a check need not be a paper document, and an EFT request can rightly be called a "check".
You're assuming, from a human context, that no living thing in the ENTIRE UNIVERSE would EVER want to engage in space travel.
Not at all. The issue is not "space travel" - say, a quick run into orbit, or even to Luna or Mars, which might be an individual decision. The question is interstellar colonization, which is not something that will ever be possible without the commitment of a large chunk of a civiliation's resources.
Indeed, as TFA notes, there is "something wrong with our thinking", or at least with that of the author.
First, interstellar colonization? Unlikely. It makes nice SF, but
there's no good economic basis for it. A civilization that survives long
enough to reach the technological level necessary for interstellar
spaceflight will have stabilized its population and learned how to use
local resources to make their home world a paradise. Why go anywhere else?
The expense is enormous, the payoff non-existent. (They're working on
stellar engineering, of course, so there's no worry about their sun going
nova.) Childish species who still imagine faster-than-light loopholes might
dream of going swashbuckling across the galaxy, but grown-up races are
content to follow more mature pursuits. TFA's claims about "intelligent
life's ability to overcome scarcity, and its tendency to colonize new
habitats" are simply handwaving, generalizing from one species of
half-bright monkeys into sweeping statements about all intelligent life.
Second, there's the question of signal detection. Contrary to popular
belief, radio
and TV transmissions probably couldn't be detected at interstellar
ranges. We've only sent a handful of signals into space that are detectable
at long ranges - and mostly that's content-free radar signals. Why do we
assume others are more chatty than we are? I imagine a galaxy full of
listeners, each waiting for someone else to start talking. Additionally, compression and encryption make signal indistinguishable from noise.
Third, recognition of "mega-engineering". TFA claims "we see no signs of their activities in space". How would we know? We assume a "natural" explanation for phenomena - as we should - but if we assume the existence of greatly advanced tech, who knows what we think of as "natural" and take for granted out there that's actually engineered?
This is important because it changes line-breaks, overlays, and a number of other things...I don't want my bank account to look like it was written in "kid script" or even worse hide a negative sign or lose several zeros due to a forced line-break or substituted font with no equivalent character.
If a bank's website - any website, really - is dependant on the presense of certain fonts or the use of certain font sizes in order to be useful, the designer needs to be take out and severely beaten.
Yes, they are two different things...but the first often leads to the second
Um, no. Copyright infrigement in no way, shape, or form leads to theft.
Is it possible to record a 20 second clip, and not use that to lead to theft?
It is in fact impossible to record a 20 second clip, and use that to lead to theft. It is impossible to record an entire work, and use that to lead to theft. Copying is not theft.
Instead we'll just end up with people pulling guns for every minor slight against them
Pardon me, but your ignorance is showing.
39 of the 50 states have "shall issue" CCW laws, essentially requiring the state to issue a conceal weapon permit to any adult with a clean record. Vermont and Alaska allow people to carry without a permit.
This does not result in people pulling guns for every minor slight against them. In fact, the opposite correlation is seen: states with more permissive gun laws have less violent crime.
if somebody puts a hole through the plane, or through some critical component, everybody could die.
Explosive decompression is a myth. A bullethole in the airplane fuselage is no big deal - yes you get a slow air leak, but just stick something over it.
Critical components need to be hardened and redundant.
the Supreme Court has held that indecent broadcast speech can be restricted. Unlike ordinary public speech, which one can ignore simply by going home and closing the door, indecent speech (and images) can be broadcast through the walls of your home at any time of the day or night.
Ah, I forgot to mention that indecency provisions also prevent one from adquately describing the rancid bullshit repeatedly thrown by the nine whores in black.
One can't ignore a broadcast? Every TV and radio that I have ever owned has had controls on it...as George Carlin put it, "Well hey, reverend, there are two knobs on the radio! One of the turns the radio off, the other changes the station! Imagine that, reverend! You can actually change the station! It's called freedom of choice, and it's one of the principles this country was founded on! Look it up in the library, reverend, if you have any of them left when you've finished burning all the books!"
I can completely and totally shut out Howard Stern, Don Imus, Oprah Winfrey, Rush Limbaugh, whoever annoys me for whatever reason, from my TV and radio.
It can even be inserted into an otherwise innocuous broadcast.
If I choose to invite someone into my house and they insert rude, boorish, or offensive statements into otherwise innocuous behavior, I just don't invite them again. No big deal.
We can all do the same with broadcast content. (I hear rumors there are even people who choose not to have TVs at all!)
Fucking bunch of pricks need to fucking learn to read. There's no fucking "indecency" exception in Amendment fucking I.
Barring "indecent" speech is barring political speech - there's no way to adquately describe the shit-for-brains Bush administration or the limp-dick (what's the female equivalent? Limp-clitoris just doesn't ring right...cobwebbed-cunt, maybe?) cowards in Congress without "indecent" language.
The electoral system and the way the Senate was supposed to be (represents the state governments, NOT THE PEOPLE), was DESIGNED to make sure the minority didn't get screwed.
And it didn't work. That's why the Senate was re-designed; unfortunately the re-design is not a huge improvement.
Remember, it was Nader's line, and he cost Gore the election.
Nader didn't cost Gore the election. Gore screwed himself by failing to distinguish himself from Bush, so that he won with such a narrow margin that scumbag Republicans were able to steal the election.
Was there a big difference between Gore and Bush in 2000? Maybe. Did Gore make it clear that there was a difference? No. That's his fault.
Of course, it's not Gore's fault that thousands were illegally disenfranchised, that illegitimate absentee ballots were counted, that illegal ballot forms were used, that faulty ballot counting technology was used. It is Gore's fault that he called only for a limited recount, not a full state-wide one - which would have revealed that in spite of all the dirty tactics, Gore still got more votes in Florida.
But Gore should have whipped Bush like a red-headed stepchild. There's no excuse for it having been close enough to steal.
Reasoning doesn't add knowledge, but only manipulates your
existing knowledge into other conclusions and results.
"Other conclusions and results" is new knowledge. When Pythagoras
discovered irrational numbers, when Godel created his incompleteness proof,
they discovered new knowledge.
Mutations also do not generate any new information, but
result in a loss of data.
That's simply incorrect. It's not just wrong in biology, it's wrong in
information theory; adding a random signal to existing data increases
entropy (try compressing the output of/dev/random).
There are some amazing predictions in the Bible that have
come true and some of them are coming true in our time, before our
eyes.
Let me write a book where I get to describe predictions I made twenty
years ago, and I can make some good predictions myself. After I die give me
followers to pick and choose and selectively translate my predictions, and
I could get quite a reputation.
Of course the most important Biblical prediction was the one attributed
to Jesus that the "Second Coming" would occur within a generation. It
didn't.
The record on Biblical "predictions" is no better than that of Tibetan
Buddhist or American Indian or Nostradamus's "predictions"; occasionally,
in the vague, translated, and selected language, one can find what appear
to be hits - but only after the fact and never about specifics, and often
in a way that simply resulted from someone deciding to make their favorite
prophecy come true. (For example, there's far-right wackjobs who believe
that the Second Coming will occur after the Temple in Jerusalem is rebuilt
and are therefore actively trying to make this happen.)
The only one who can KNOW what is rational or irrational is
someone who knows EVERYTHING, ie. is omniscient.
Not correct. Rational thinking is a well-defined process. I don't need
to know everything to determine if a given argument is rational or not any
more than I need to know all integers to determine if given integer is
prime. (I may not be able to tell if the argument's axioms and data are
valid, but I can still analyze the form of the argument.)
Belief in resurrection, for example seems irrational only
because we don't have even the slightest knowledge of the technology and
mechanisms behind it.
No, belief in resurrection (in the sense under discussion) is irrational
because there's no evidence to suggest it has ever occurred.
Wireless communication or other modern technology would be
considered extraordinary by a first century person, but we who understand
somewhat at least, the principles behind these, consider them ordinary
every day things.
Um, yes. They are ordinary every day things in the 21st century. If you
suggest that they were ordinary every day things in the 1st century, that
the Roman legions used wifi to co-ordinate their logistics, that would
indeed be an extraordinary claim, and you'd better have some damn good
evidence to back it up.
Likewise, the claim that some dead people (long and truly dead, not
merely mistaken for dead, or short-term dead but revived with medical
technology) got up and walked around is an extraordinary claim - it is not
usual, ordinary or regular - and so you'd better have some damn good
evidence to back it up. Likewise, the claim that people somehow survive
their bodily death is an extraordinary one - it is not usual, ordinary or
regular to "see dead people".
We have only two ways of getting information. One is through our personal experience as brought to us by our senses. We have lots of evidence that these senses can be deceived. The other way we get information is by communication from someone else. When someone tells you something, you either have to BELIEVE or not.
There is an additional path to knowledge: we can use reasoning. In the classic syllogism, "All men are mortal", "Socrates is a man", and the working of the syllogism are bits of information communicated to me; but the conclusion "Socrates is mortal" need not be.
A thought, emotion, the codes stored in DNA or a computer program, the arrangement of symbols on a page, all are carried by and as far as we can tell, bound to physical matter-energy forms. That doesn't mean that these things HAVE to be thus bound.
But we have no evidence that they appear in such unbound forms. What you're saying is equivalent to "As far as we can tell, objects in motion stay in motion and objects at rest stay at rest unless acted upon by some outside force, but that doesn't mean that things HAVE to be that way!" It may be true, in some we-can-never-know-for-certain way, that my car might rear up on it's back wheels and start dancing a jig, without any outside force. But we have no evidence to expect that; it is out of line with the pattern of observations we call "natural law", and anyone basing important decisions on a belief that cars are going to start dancing is not sane.
Planck said, "We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or that if they have
existed up to now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future." And that's true, in the philosophical sense; maybe the whole universe will turn to lime jello at noon GMT today, we can't rule it out. But if I told you that I know that this is going to happen, because my neighbor's cat had a dream about it (I know about the dream because I'm a pet psychic, you see), you'd say I was nuts.
You can BELIEVE that many call "supernatural" is irrational, but you can never KNOW that.
No, I can indeed listen to people's arguments and know that they are irrational. Rational and irrational are fairly well defined when applied to arguments.
(Note that it is entirely possible for the conclusion of an irrational argument to be true, after all: remember the old joke about why fire engines are red. And a rational argument can still have an incorrect conclusion, if based on faulty axioms or data.)
In a philosophical sense, I may say that it may be "possible" (though extremely unlikely) that some given miracle-story occurred, since I do not claim full understanding of the Universe. Maybe there are small invisible men from Alpha Centauri running around inside my walls, who are responsible for my missing socks. I can't prove they're not there. ("You don't seem them? I told you, they're invisible! That just strengthens the case that they exist!") Maybe Boddhidharma rose from the dead and was seen in the mountains of China carrying one sandal; I wasn't there. (Surely you don't think the story of Jesus is the only resurrectionmyth out there?) Maybe Miss Cleo can really see the future in her crystal ball and everyone who says she's a fraud is lying.
However, it would still be irrational to believe such extraordinary stories - to act under the asusmption that they are true - based on nothing more than the reports of ancient mythologies, or sparse and contradictory contemporary testimony, or easily-faked uncontrolled demonstrations. Extraordinary claims may turn out to be true, but believing in them without
The vast majority of software developers want to get paid for their work.
And if this work is important, the community of users will organize and hire software developers to work on it. Thanks to the fact that it is Free Sotfware, the user comminity can do this.
The idea that personality or "mind" being in and of itself not physical is not that far fetched. We do this "resurrection" thing all the time with computers.
Are you suggesting that computers are not physical?
Nothing material, that is anything having mass, is transferred from a backup into the new computer.
Energy has mass. The transfer of information involves the moment of some form of mass or energy - tapes, disks, punch-cards, electrical signals, radio waves, whatever - and then physical changes at the destination.
Can your "soul" be backed up somewhere
It might be possible to capture enough information about the brain to create a device or simulation capable of functioning in the same way. It's an SF classic. So what? We're still not dealing with anything supernatural.
There is evidence from the article and others about near death experiences, that the physical dimensions we normally experience is not all there is.
NDEs are evidence of nothing except that the chemistry of a brain near death can sometimes generate similar experiences to the chemistry of a brain on ketamine. Interesting, but hardly evidence for metaphysical propositions.
How is it possible to walk on water? I BELIEVE that Jesus did. Did He arise from death, after three days, without refrigeration or other modern medical technology? I believe He did and many have died for that belief.
Well, I hate to tell you, but these things that you BELIEVE are irrational conclusions with no worthwhile evidence to support them. You didn't see Jesus walk on water or come up out of the grave; you're selecting ancient unreliable reports, at odds with our best knowledge about the objective universe, that tell you what you want to hear - while rejecting other ancient reports, no less (or more) reliable, about other gods and heroes. Indeed, if you saw someone walk on water today you'd assume it was a magic trick. (Actually, walking on water is easy. Just wait for it to freeze.)
Indeed, all this senseless killing and dying is real good evidence against the existance of some sort of omnipotent and omniscient superbeing who's emotionally attached to Homo sapiens.
Does it mean that prolonged coma could perhaps be treated with a sort of jump start, like, an ECT shock to induce "reboot"?
Coma isn't flatline, it's just a lack on consciousness.
My understanding of reversed flatline EEGs is that they are spontaneous once the blood and oxygen start flowing again, there's not any sort of "jumpstart" needed. It seems it's not true that neurons only fire when prompted by others, but (at least some) will fire on their own (at least sometimes). Which makes sense, of course, since how else would the thing get going?
Which one is "you"?...It's one of those questions that seem unanswerable.
Which is often an indication of bad assumptions.
Which is "you" after the duplication? First we ought to ask, is there a "you" before the duplication?
Look closely. What is this "you"? "Your" body? That's not the same from moment to moment, atoms entering and leaving with every breath. "Your" thoughts? Just as changing and fluid. "Your" memories? But "you" are making new ones and forgetting old ones each day.
Go down to a stream and sit on the rocks. Perhaps you'll see a spot where whirlpools form for a bit, a knot of water that under the conditions takes on a perceptible form for a few seconds, then melts away as conditions change. Then, a little later, in the same spot, another whirlpool forms.
Is it the same whirlpool?
The question isn't meaningful. "Same" here is a construction of mind, a mere question of our agreements about language, not denotative of any truth about the world.
"You" are just a character in the story being told by your brain.
One story about Zen Master Bankei says that he was very scared of death as a child. When he had his great enlightenment, he realized that "he" could never die, because "he" had never been born. Now that's liberation!
Dead (to most of us) means gone, kaput, nada, the big zero. No coming back . You weren't not coming back, because you came back.
Well, fine, but that rules out the whole notion of NDEs as "evidence" or some sort of afterlife. Which is ok, since NDEs aren't evidence of anything except that a dying brain is rather like a brain dosed with ketamine; but since notions of the afterlife are basically based on NDEs plus wishful thinking, you're left with just wishful thinking. Such as:
it does seem extremely wasteful of mother nature to just toss away the contents when the container wears out.
But Mother Nature is extremely wasteful, all the time - how many sperm get wasted to fertilize one zygote?
Anyway, there's no "container" or "contents" here; the self is what the body does, not something the body somehow "contains".
Maybe cliniically dead =/ dead?
Well, that's well-established. There's clinically dead, brain dead, legally dead. What's more interesting is that brain death (an EEG flatline) seems to be a reversible condition. (Though how much brain damage and personality change can be suffered before we say that while a body may be moving around and talking, that the person who was previously associated with it has died?)
I prefer not to get my science from MSNBC and other mainstream media sources.
Yeah. The info about cryogenic treatment for resuscitation was fine, but conflating that with cryonics was off-base, and bringing in near-death experiences was just dumb. There's nothing supernatural about such experiences, take the right drugs and you can have them yourself.
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Bullshit. There's no need for the government to violate the Constitution to "protect" us, either in warrentless eavesdropping, or in attempting to silence those who would talk about it.
Terrorism is a simple form of criminality that predates the founding of the U.S. and the establishment of our Constitution. It's not something new and unique in human experience that requires us to shred the law in order to be "protected".
There is no Constitutionl authority to declare certain facts "classified". Indeed, under the common law, every citizen has the duty to raise a "hue and cry" if they witness a crime, and warrentless eavesdropping is a crime; at the very least, silence would have make the leaker an accessory. The leaker is a hero, not a criminal.
Are there bad guys out there who want to commit acts of murder, both individual and mass? Yes. Is keeping an eye on them, trying to intercept them before they can do it, a good idea? Absolutely. Is there a legal way to do it, to provide some (though not absolute) assurance that this won't be misused? Sure - GET A FUCKING WARRANT .
Except, of course, for those who get killed by tasers.
But I agree with your point. It's amazing that in many places less-lethal weapons are more regulated than firearms. (I can't legally buy a stungun, but I have a revolver and a rifle. Huh?)
I'd say the only way to ensure against misuse is to make these less-lethal weapons available to everyone; if they're so safe, let citizens use them to control rogue cops, rather than having to throw stones or, worse, shoot back.
Really, you should learn what socialism and communism are before making such statements.
FDR saved capitalism from itself by regulating it. He co-opted the left, mollifing radicals and preventing meaningful economic reform while doing nothing to distribute control of economic resources to the workers.
Yes, FDR brought about more of a command economy; but the command economy versus free market axis is orthogonal to the capitalism versus socialism one.
Socialists have little love for FDR, and he had little love for them.
Colliqually, regardless of how the money is transfered you still get a "paycheck", and your attempted pedantry is simply annoying. And if you want to get pedantic, the question of whether you are salaried or hourly is completely irrelevant to the matter at hand.
And yes, many of us still get actual paper checks - my employer is too small for direct deposist to be practical.
If we understand that a check is simply a document requesting your bank to give the payee the designated amount, then a check need not be a paper document, and an EFT request can rightly be called a "check".
Not at all. The issue is not "space travel" - say, a quick run into orbit, or even to Luna or Mars, which might be an individual decision. The question is interstellar colonization, which is not something that will ever be possible without the commitment of a large chunk of a civiliation's resources.
Indeed, as TFA notes, there is "something wrong with our thinking", or at least with that of the author.
First, interstellar colonization? Unlikely. It makes nice SF, but there's no good economic basis for it. A civilization that survives long enough to reach the technological level necessary for interstellar spaceflight will have stabilized its population and learned how to use local resources to make their home world a paradise. Why go anywhere else? The expense is enormous, the payoff non-existent. (They're working on stellar engineering, of course, so there's no worry about their sun going nova.) Childish species who still imagine faster-than-light loopholes might dream of going swashbuckling across the galaxy, but grown-up races are content to follow more mature pursuits. TFA's claims about "intelligent life's ability to overcome scarcity, and its tendency to colonize new habitats" are simply handwaving, generalizing from one species of half-bright monkeys into sweeping statements about all intelligent life.
Second, there's the question of signal detection. Contrary to popular belief, radio and TV transmissions probably couldn't be detected at interstellar ranges. We've only sent a handful of signals into space that are detectable at long ranges - and mostly that's content-free radar signals. Why do we assume others are more chatty than we are? I imagine a galaxy full of listeners, each waiting for someone else to start talking. Additionally, compression and encryption make signal indistinguishable from noise.
Third, recognition of "mega-engineering". TFA claims "we see no signs of their activities in space". How would we know? We assume a "natural" explanation for phenomena - as we should - but if we assume the existence of greatly advanced tech, who knows what we think of as "natural" and take for granted out there that's actually engineered?
If a bank's website - any website, really - is dependant on the presense of certain fonts or the use of certain font sizes in order to be useful, the designer needs to be take out and severely beaten.
Um, no. Copyright infrigement in no way, shape, or form leads to theft.
It is in fact impossible to record a 20 second clip, and use that to lead to theft. It is impossible to record an entire work, and use that to lead to theft. Copying is not theft.
Pardon me, but your ignorance is showing.
39 of the 50 states have "shall issue" CCW laws, essentially requiring the state to issue a conceal weapon permit to any adult with a clean record. Vermont and Alaska allow people to carry without a permit.
This does not result in people pulling guns for every minor slight against them. In fact, the opposite correlation is seen: states with more permissive gun laws have less violent crime.
Explosive decompression is a myth. A bullethole in the airplane fuselage is no big deal - yes you get a slow air leak, but just stick something over it.
Critical components need to be hardened and redundant.
Like common sense should tell all involved that growing certain plants should not cause criminal proceedings?
Welcome to the War on Copying. I've been predicting it for years now, and I expect it will be every bit as successful as the War on Drugs
Another Marble Mouse fan here. I'll give it up when they pry my cold dead fingers off of it.
Ah, I forgot to mention that indecency provisions also prevent one from adquately describing the rancid bullshit repeatedly thrown by the nine whores in black.
One can't ignore a broadcast? Every TV and radio that I have ever owned has had controls on it...as George Carlin put it, "Well hey, reverend, there are two knobs on the radio! One of the turns the radio off, the other changes the station! Imagine that, reverend! You can actually change the station! It's called freedom of choice, and it's one of the principles this country was founded on! Look it up in the library, reverend, if you have any of them left when you've finished burning all the books!"
I can completely and totally shut out Howard Stern, Don Imus, Oprah Winfrey, Rush Limbaugh, whoever annoys me for whatever reason, from my TV and radio.
If I choose to invite someone into my house and they insert rude, boorish, or offensive statements into otherwise innocuous behavior, I just don't invite them again. No big deal. We can all do the same with broadcast content. (I hear rumors there are even people who choose not to have TVs at all!)
Fucking bunch of pricks need to fucking learn to read. There's no fucking "indecency" exception in Amendment fucking I.
Barring "indecent" speech is barring political speech - there's no way to adquately describe the shit-for-brains Bush administration or the limp-dick (what's the female equivalent? Limp-clitoris just doesn't ring right...cobwebbed-cunt, maybe?) cowards in Congress without "indecent" language.
Right. The founders thought parties so very, very wrong, that Jefferson and Madison started one, amd Hamilton created another which Washington joined.
And it didn't work. That's why the Senate was re-designed; unfortunately the re-design is not a huge improvement.
Nader didn't cost Gore the election. Gore screwed himself by failing to distinguish himself from Bush, so that he won with such a narrow margin that scumbag Republicans were able to steal the election.
Was there a big difference between Gore and Bush in 2000? Maybe. Did Gore make it clear that there was a difference? No. That's his fault.
Of course, it's not Gore's fault that thousands were illegally disenfranchised, that illegitimate absentee ballots were counted, that illegal ballot forms were used, that faulty ballot counting technology was used. It is Gore's fault that he called only for a limited recount, not a full state-wide one - which would have revealed that in spite of all the dirty tactics, Gore still got more votes in Florida.
But Gore should have whipped Bush like a red-headed stepchild. There's no excuse for it having been close enough to steal.
"Other conclusions and results" is new knowledge. When Pythagoras discovered irrational numbers, when Godel created his incompleteness proof, they discovered new knowledge.
That's simply incorrect. It's not just wrong in biology, it's wrong in information theory; adding a random signal to existing data increases entropy (try compressing the output of /dev/random).
Let me write a book where I get to describe predictions I made twenty years ago, and I can make some good predictions myself. After I die give me followers to pick and choose and selectively translate my predictions, and I could get quite a reputation.
Of course the most important Biblical prediction was the one attributed to Jesus that the "Second Coming" would occur within a generation. It didn't.
The record on Biblical "predictions" is no better than that of Tibetan Buddhist or American Indian or Nostradamus's "predictions"; occasionally, in the vague, translated, and selected language, one can find what appear to be hits - but only after the fact and never about specifics, and often in a way that simply resulted from someone deciding to make their favorite prophecy come true. (For example, there's far-right wackjobs who believe that the Second Coming will occur after the Temple in Jerusalem is rebuilt and are therefore actively trying to make this happen.)
Not correct. Rational thinking is a well-defined process. I don't need to know everything to determine if a given argument is rational or not any more than I need to know all integers to determine if given integer is prime. (I may not be able to tell if the argument's axioms and data are valid, but I can still analyze the form of the argument.)
No, belief in resurrection (in the sense under discussion) is irrational because there's no evidence to suggest it has ever occurred.
beyond what is usual, ordinary, regular, or established. (You keep asking what words mean...may I suggest dictionary.reference.com?)
Um, yes. They are ordinary every day things in the 21st century. If you suggest that they were ordinary every day things in the 1st century, that the Roman legions used wifi to co-ordinate their logistics, that would indeed be an extraordinary claim, and you'd better have some damn good evidence to back it up.
Likewise, the claim that some dead people (long and truly dead, not merely mistaken for dead, or short-term dead but revived with medical technology) got up and walked around is an extraordinary claim - it is not usual, ordinary or regular - and so you'd better have some damn good evidence to back it up. Likewise, the claim that people somehow survive their bodily death is an extraordinary one - it is not usual, ordinary or regular to "see dead people".
There is an additional path to knowledge: we can use reasoning. In the classic syllogism, "All men are mortal", "Socrates is a man", and the working of the syllogism are bits of information communicated to me; but the conclusion "Socrates is mortal" need not be.
But we have no evidence that they appear in such unbound forms. What you're saying is equivalent to "As far as we can tell, objects in motion stay in motion and objects at rest stay at rest unless acted upon by some outside force, but that doesn't mean that things HAVE to be that way!" It may be true, in some we-can-never-know-for-certain way, that my car might rear up on it's back wheels and start dancing a jig, without any outside force. But we have no evidence to expect that; it is out of line with the pattern of observations we call "natural law", and anyone basing important decisions on a belief that cars are going to start dancing is not sane.
Planck said, "We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or that if they have existed up to now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future." And that's true, in the philosophical sense; maybe the whole universe will turn to lime jello at noon GMT today, we can't rule it out. But if I told you that I know that this is going to happen, because my neighbor's cat had a dream about it (I know about the dream because I'm a pet psychic, you see), you'd say I was nuts.
No, I can indeed listen to people's arguments and know that they are irrational. Rational and irrational are fairly well defined when applied to arguments.
(Note that it is entirely possible for the conclusion of an irrational argument to be true, after all: remember the old joke about why fire engines are red. And a rational argument can still have an incorrect conclusion, if based on faulty axioms or data.)
In a philosophical sense, I may say that it may be "possible" (though extremely unlikely) that some given miracle-story occurred, since I do not claim full understanding of the Universe. Maybe there are small invisible men from Alpha Centauri running around inside my walls, who are responsible for my missing socks. I can't prove they're not there. ("You don't seem them? I told you, they're invisible! That just strengthens the case that they exist!") Maybe Boddhidharma rose from the dead and was seen in the mountains of China carrying one sandal; I wasn't there. (Surely you don't think the story of Jesus is the only resurrection myth out there?) Maybe Miss Cleo can really see the future in her crystal ball and everyone who says she's a fraud is lying.
However, it would still be irrational to believe such extraordinary stories - to act under the asusmption that they are true - based on nothing more than the reports of ancient mythologies, or sparse and contradictory contemporary testimony, or easily-faked uncontrolled demonstrations. Extraordinary claims may turn out to be true, but believing in them without
RMS speaks about Free Software, not Open Source; and he has no problem with people being paid to work on, and selling, Free Software.
And if this work is important, the community of users will organize and hire software developers to work on it. Thanks to the fact that it is Free Sotfware, the user comminity can do this.
"of, pertaining to, or being above or beyond what is natural; unexplainable by natural law or phenomena".
Are you suggesting that computers are not physical?
Energy has mass. The transfer of information involves the moment of some form of mass or energy - tapes, disks, punch-cards, electrical signals, radio waves, whatever - and then physical changes at the destination.
It might be possible to capture enough information about the brain to create a device or simulation capable of functioning in the same way. It's an SF classic. So what? We're still not dealing with anything supernatural.
NDEs are evidence of nothing except that the chemistry of a brain near death can sometimes generate similar experiences to the chemistry of a brain on ketamine. Interesting, but hardly evidence for metaphysical propositions.
Well, I hate to tell you, but these things that you BELIEVE are irrational conclusions with no worthwhile evidence to support them. You didn't see Jesus walk on water or come up out of the grave; you're selecting ancient unreliable reports, at odds with our best knowledge about the objective universe, that tell you what you want to hear - while rejecting other ancient reports, no less (or more) reliable, about other gods and heroes. Indeed, if you saw someone walk on water today you'd assume it was a magic trick. (Actually, walking on water is easy. Just wait for it to freeze.)
The fact that people have died for a belief says jack shit about whether it's true. People have died believing that their Ghost Shirts would protect them from bullets, that U.S. troops wouldn't shoot peaceful American citizens, that they will go to heaven for suicide bombing, or that they should participate in the Iraq invasion because Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks.
Indeed, all this senseless killing and dying is real good evidence against the existance of some sort of omnipotent and omniscient superbeing who's emotionally attached to Homo sapiens.
Coma isn't flatline, it's just a lack on consciousness.
My understanding of reversed flatline EEGs is that they are spontaneous once the blood and oxygen start flowing again, there's not any sort of "jumpstart" needed. It seems it's not true that neurons only fire when prompted by others, but (at least some) will fire on their own (at least sometimes). Which makes sense, of course, since how else would the thing get going?
Which is often an indication of bad assumptions.
Which is "you" after the duplication? First we ought to ask, is there a "you" before the duplication?
Look closely. What is this "you"? "Your" body? That's not the same from moment to moment, atoms entering and leaving with every breath. "Your" thoughts? Just as changing and fluid. "Your" memories? But "you" are making new ones and forgetting old ones each day.
Go down to a stream and sit on the rocks. Perhaps you'll see a spot where whirlpools form for a bit, a knot of water that under the conditions takes on a perceptible form for a few seconds, then melts away as conditions change. Then, a little later, in the same spot, another whirlpool forms.
Is it the same whirlpool?
The question isn't meaningful. "Same" here is a construction of mind, a mere question of our agreements about language, not denotative of any truth about the world.
"You" are just a character in the story being told by your brain.
One story about Zen Master Bankei says that he was very scared of death as a child. When he had his great enlightenment, he realized that "he" could never die, because "he" had never been born. Now that's liberation!
Well, fine, but that rules out the whole notion of NDEs as "evidence" or some sort of afterlife. Which is ok, since NDEs aren't evidence of anything except that a dying brain is rather like a brain dosed with ketamine; but since notions of the afterlife are basically based on NDEs plus wishful thinking, you're left with just wishful thinking. Such as:
But Mother Nature is extremely wasteful, all the time - how many sperm get wasted to fertilize one zygote?
Anyway, there's no "container" or "contents" here; the self is what the body does, not something the body somehow "contains".
Well, that's well-established. There's clinically dead, brain dead, legally dead. What's more interesting is that brain death (an EEG flatline) seems to be a reversible condition. (Though how much brain damage and personality change can be suffered before we say that while a body may be moving around and talking, that the person who was previously associated with it has died?)
Yeah. The info about cryogenic treatment for resuscitation was fine, but conflating that with cryonics was off-base, and bringing in near-death experiences was just dumb. There's nothing supernatural about such experiences, take the right drugs and you can have them yourself.