Ah, so/. should have a warning for all those people who use firefox on OSX? No, it should have a warning for all those that find PDFs an annoyance for a variety of reasons, especially with the most common configuration on Windows (Firefox or IE with the Adobe plugin automatically picked up) crashing. This would, at a guess, be at least 40% of the Slashdot population (which as far as I remember is a tiny sliver above 50% Windows). Claiming "it doesn't matter because it can be configured away" is irrelevant and elitist; what's relevant is that it is actually an annoyance for a lot of people.
GPL (which, through hindering proprietary derivates hinders creation of free software through the domination of free software codebases.) Do you have any evidence to back that up, or are you, as you put it "babbling"? Evidence of the GPL hindering proprietary derivates? That's the point of it.
Creation of proprietary derivates feeding back to free software? Look at the number of contributions the BSDs get from their proprietary derivates. Heck, for a period of years, FreeBSD development of major subsystems was almost exclusively driven by contributions from proprietary derivates.
With the GPL active, it channels development away from codebases that can be shared between the propritary derivates and free software and towards pure proprietary codebases instead. From pure proprietary codebases there flow little competence and no patches.
And regarding your last paragraph: so you instead trust your data to companies whose stated goal is profit and whose internal goals you can not know. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Perhaps you should try all of these excellent systems on FreeBSD or OpenBSD. Thanks for the compliment; I've been part of the team for making both of those systems. And I still use FreeBSD, just not as my default desktop, because that doesn't fit with what I work with at the moment.
Try installing a fresy copy of XP or Vista. Where is acrobat? Not there? That's because it is not there by default. It's a choice on your part. It's not there by default, but it definately a default choice, because it is what everything points at. Which is what counts in this case - not "Can you configure yourself around it", but "Is it an annoyance for a lot of people?"
PDFs don't work in firefox under windows? Really? What about the foxit reader plugin? There is possibly a Foxit reader plugin; that is not included in Firefox/Foxit reader by default. The default push is towards the Acrobat reader, which works with Firefox if you've just installed both programs.
And on MacOS? You can't view PDFs in a browser without using Acrobat? Sounds odd, considering PDF is built in to OSX? You can't view PDFs in Firefox on OSX at all, as far as I know. Firefox downloads them, which is annoying. In Safari it works, but, that means you're forced to be playing around with Safari instead of Firefox, which is an annoyance. Due to plugins and consistency I and many others like to use Firefox.
Also, please read more carefully. I said I kicked out LINUX from my life, and my criticism was of LINUS. Not Unix. LINUX. An implementation of Unix, the one you happened to be babbling about, and one I feel have damaged free software, through it's at times lousy attitude and through it's use of the GPL (which, through hindering proprietary derivates hinders creation of free software through the domination of free software codebases.)
The default reader under Windows is Adobe Reader. Everything points at it, and those are the plugins that actually works with the browsers people use, at least to the best of my knowledge.
I choose to use Windows/Mac on the desktop at work at the moment due to compatibility issues with software that other people in my organization use. The choice of running Windows or Firefox on Mac is true for a large fraction of the Slashdot user base; in neither of these does PDFs work. Neither did they work very well on Unix the last time I used Unix as a desktop; XPDF had problems with rendering for many years, as well as not supporting PDF indexes (have they fixed that yet?), and gv had occasional problems with rendering, constant problems with links not working, and at least occasional slow rendering speed. So, there has constantly been problems with PDFs, on many different platforms. If that is fixed in some recent distributions of Linux which cover some parts of the userbase - so, it is still rude.
I'll also note that I mostly kicked out Linux of my life over 10 years ago, and my debates with Linus over technical/ethical issues since has led me to feel good about that decision. Whether it is "pleasant" or not doesn't matter when it comes to running a system where I feel I can't trust the lead developer to avoid hosing users' data to get better benchmarks. Nor where there's code in plain sight and I can't hack the code and contribute it back without feeling I stab free software in the back (ref use of the GPL license.)
PDFs sucks in the default reader, and it often requires external shitty setup. This makes the format suck (on the web) for many/most people. Thus, it is courteous to give a warning. Whether a warning is unnecessary for YOU doesn't matter - it's courteous because the format is annoying for a large enough fraction to matter.
For me, I find it particularly annoying because the default Adobe PDF plugin on Windows sometimes crash my browser. I think that's true for many others, too, though I don't know that for sure.
In Norway, we have that limitation: The media is not allowed to divulge the identity of an accused, unless the person is already a public person or there is another compelling reason (suspicion of false arrest would likely be counted as one).
We do not seem to have much of a problem with false arrests; the only problems I know of are the usual ones of the prosecution sometimes going "gung ho" (wanting to convict SOMEBODY no matter what, to save face) and occasional abuse of the "Police can put somebody in detention for 24 hour before pressing charges". Overall, it seems to work fine, and the hiding of identity from media publication seems to only be positive.
Open about 40 tabs, pointing at different sites. Keep doing browsing with this amount of tabs for a few hours.
Of course, how much of a problem you see depends on what platform you are on - I've primarily seen the problem on Windows, with Mac OS X showing much less of it. The fragging issue recently discovered seems to be a likely culprit.
I'll also note that for me it "seems to be" associated with flash and Javascript, though I've not been able to pinpoint clearly. And I've not come in with a bug report because it's not possible to report anything sane - just "Firefox fucks up under heavy use".
5) Anyone who suggests $10-$13 is a rip-off for a CD needs to think about the fact that that is the same as 3 cups of coffee at starbucks and often less than the price of a new book. Think about the amount of use you get out of an album. I see the comparison that's natural as being DVDs. And they are priced lower than CDs, at least where I am. So I don't buy CDs. I don't pirate them either; I just listen to less music, and more or less no new music.
Insightful. Good argument against present policy; loss of contributors. I've always thought of it more in loss of information that may be useful, but loss of contributors totally trump that (and almost certainly trump the search issue, too.)
Those guidelines help keep Wikipedia from filling up with useless trivia, which would negatively affect important articles. Do you have any arguments for the latter part? I'm not claiming there are none - just that there so far hasn't been much. The best people have come up with has been "Could get in the way during search". I can personally add "Would add work during bulk editing", and I still doubt that matter enough.
This is a very clear argument showing the difference between the "meta"-people for Wikipedia - those that are interested in Wikipedia-the-site (as a hobby, mostly), and those that contribute content. Opinions are different, and it's hard to merge the two communities.
Actually, science has been around a long time. The Scientific Method had its framework established in 1637, about two centuries before it met your criteria. Correct. What hasn't been around has been the combination of the necessary knowledge base and the size of the scientific culture. Setting a reasonable time estimate on this is hard; you could push it forward until we actually had peer reviews as a standard - which would be in the middle of the 20th century - or you could push it back to about 1850 as what I feel is an early point, in many ways a too early point.
As for doctorates and MDs: and I consider an MD today to be a layperson, and I consider them as a group to always have been. Their work is in the practice, not research, and their education in the process of science is limited. The construction of motors is a scientific engineering field; yet, an auto mechanic isn't a scientist, and shouldn't be. An MD is closer to a scientist, yet (s)he still a layperson with some knowledge, from my perspective.
And it seems we agree on God - my point was that until God is defined in a testable manner, it is not possible to answer if there is a God. It is outside science.
Hmmm. The best evidence I have see puts this at much later; as far as I remember, starting at 80 years and going onwards. The idea isn't that it's legends accumulated over time, really - it's more as a variant of older legends, just as the 10 commandments is a subset of the 42 declarations of purity (42 declarations of Ma'at) from the kemetic religion present in Egypt at the time the hebrews started wandering in the desert.
I am interested in evidence, of course, it's just that "The Case for Christ" is strongly criticized for being one-sided - it has not done any investigation on the critical side, only on the apologetic side. See all the main Amazon reviews, for instance, or this more in depth review I found when looking for something else.
You are missing my point. I am asking, as a first approximation to having this be reasonable, for a reasonable line of proof that the witnesses (A) existed, and (B) actually would say what is claimed.
As it is, I can say "I actually have 100,000 witnesses that say that Jesus WASN'T DEAD, he was just fairly much knocked out, and we saw him be replaced by another guy and taken off to rest."
Now, that's a random piece of fiction. So is any other claim of witnesses unless we have some reasonable sort of evidence of them. As it is, there is as far as I can tell the evidence around the Bible makes it most likely to be stories assembled some many years after Jesus' death, based on people that WERE NOT EYE WITNESSES. The historical record indicate, to our best approximation, that the guy didn't exist.
So, my claim that the witnesses are "unreliable" isn't due to what they witnessed, it is due to the evidence around the record. As a such, it is non-circular - I would require similar proof for most other claims, assuming I bothered to check whether they were true or not at all.
I am willing to accept that I will be more skeptical towards witnesses claiming that they have seen evidence that God exists than many other claims, as this is a fairly large claim, so I will want to go with the simplest explanation - which is that they follow normal psychology. It's just the same as I would require a fair bit of proof before accepting that Shiva exists.
Degree in the field is just a heuristic. Somebody may be right without one, it's just so exceedingly rare that we generally don't bother to take the cost of evaluating their position. If they came with other evidence that their position should be taken seriously - e.g, the endorsement of several notables in the field - then we would evaluate it even without the degree. The same might happen if they have very strong credentials in other fields, leading us to think it is likely they are right. (e.g, Richard Feynman did relevant biology research during his sabbatical.)
Science wasn't in my opinion reasonably formed until at least 1850, maybe later. We had too little grounding in how to do science for it to work properly.
As for the idea that the "community scoffed at the idea of washing hands between various medical activities" for a long time, the germ theory of disease was introduced in 1862 (by Pasteur), and Lister started with antiseptics in 1867, which was fairly rapidly accepted. In 1900, it had more or less turned upside down the practice of medicine, moving doctors from working at home to working in hospitals.
Here we are talking not of scientists accepting things, but of laypeople (doctors), and even then it took only about 30 years to turn the practice upside down. Yes, there were some anecdotal stuff around antiseptics before 1867 - but as far as I can tell, no actual science. Getting from initial science (germ theory in 1861/1862) to massive acceptance and change of behavior for laypeople dependent on this (including large investments) took 30-40 years. Not that bad, IMO. And we, as far as I can tell, much more efficient at handling scientific information now than we were then.
As for definite answer on God: Give us a clear definition of God, and we can help give you answers. However, as far as I can tell, "Is there a God" isn't a clear question (it gives no predictions), so there's no answer. To quote Pauli: "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." (ie, it does not contain any predictive power.)
I don't have a problem with the scientific method. However Evolution isn't PART of the scientific method, because it hasn't predicted ANYTHING. BEEP. Thanks for playing, go back to start due to incorrect statement. There has been a bunch of predictions, including e.g. disease viciousness change (malaria, dysentery), murder frequency depending on relationship, change in bacterial responses, predictions of species formation, etc. Your playing again would start with reading up on things before making global statements about them, in order to conform with the standards of rational discussion and, if you are a Christian, the 7th commandment. Do you want to play again?
When scientists can create life from inert matter, I'll agree that evolution conforms to the scientific method (Thesis, Antithesis, Hypothesis, Synthesis, Replication etc). Until then, don't call it scientific fact, nor treat it as such.
BEEP. Thanks for playing, go back to start due to discussing a totally unrelated issue. The issue you are discussing is called "Abiogenesis" and is separate from "evolution" (change of living things into different forms due to reproduction and natural selection). Please make sure claims you make about things actually match with what the discussion is about if you want to play again. Do you want to play again?
Yours truly, the Rational Discussion And Science Game.
I like your argument, just a slight correction of fact: Thunder comes from Thor-dønn, meaning something like "Thor-bang" (a dønn is more like the sound of a large wave or thunder than "bang", which would be the same short explosion in norse as in english). Ie, Thor was the one throwing lightning bolts. Odin was the all-father and father of Thor (and is the source for the day Wednesday, from Woten's day, which is a germanic variant of Odin's day).
WRT young earth christians: I am attempting to use the argument that their statements is in violation of the 7th commandment, thou shalt not bear false witness, as they are effectively misrepresenting the claims of science, due to ignorance. Given your vastly superior (compared to mine) knowledge of the bible and I assume interpretation, does this fly reasonably? Feel free to use the argument if you can get it to work reasonably - I am attempting to use my knowledge of influence to get it up and flying, though it is hard, as I get so annoyed at the Young Earth Creationists' arrogance...
You mean that the scientists should be slanted? I have my evidence from living with scientist and reading science and discussing with creationists. Creationists have been slanted, generally misrepresenting the position of mainstream biology. So, I distrust them with slanting because I see them lying all the time, either by intent or by being careless with the facts. Overall, I believe in the goodness of people so I think it is mostly them being uneducated and biased. However, overall, I have not yet seen any person both understand the claims of mainstream biology (including mechanisms) and strongly disagree with them. The strongest any serious scientist goes around it is that they "are somewhat skeptical" or "are not entirely convinced that this is sufficient". And even those are precious few, as the evidence is strong. (And I say that having looked at the evidence and many counterarguments - though good counterarguments are hard to find, as there are so many repeated lies covering them up.)
Which witnesses? As far as I can tell, there isn't any proof that the Bible isn't a work of fiction, and very little evidence that Jesus existed - little enough that if we discount the evidence from the Bible (which would be circular), the normal reaction would be to consider a person with so little evidence fictional. From what I've read, he doesn't show up where we'd expect him to show up in the roman records.
So, which witnesses? Apart from the general "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof", of course.
Have you considered, that maybe, it's us humans who have made errors in our findings.
Yes. That is why I, in contrast to you, have looked carefully at the evidence before having a public opinion in this area. At a mere two to five years at an hour a day, you should have learned enough to be able to contribute to the discussion. I recommend you start with a quick reading of social psychology and opinion forming to learn a bit about how you form opinions and sources of error, continue with a bit of basic conceptualization/philosophy of science to understand how we form scientific opinions ("Uncommon sense" by Cramer is a good read, as is "Connected knowledge" by the same author), then a bit of underlying biology to understand the commonalities, then a bit of statistics to understand how we form knowledge from data. Then play around with making evolutionary systems to find solutions, and read Dawkins or similar to get an understanding of evolution. Then, when you understand the claims and what the underlying reasoning for them are - and you can come back and say something.
As it is you are pissing in the pool of knowledge because you think "That's the way to make it warm". You don't understand about forming knowledge, of what is a fact and what is not, of how we learn about facts and all facts are theory. You spout irrational statements from not even understanding the language or the underlying concepts under it.
To use your own references, you're in violation of the 7th commandment: Thou shalt not bear false witness. You are bearing false witness as a result of bearing witness in an area where there is plenty of evidence and you have not looked at it. This is, in my opinion, immoral, because it hurt people by supporting lies, and these lies end up poisoning people's behavior. In your opinion, assuming you trust that book, it should be immortal because it is in violation of the 7th commandment.
Dare you learn before you open your mouth again? Dare you look to the knowledge carefully, checking it out before you bear more witness? Dare you go into the possibility that you are wrong and have misunderstood, investing the care to say "I will not say anything until I have looked into the work that thousands of people in collaboration have done, thousands of people that have started out religious and have investigated the world because they saw it as a work of God and saw it as the ultimate reverence to investigate it carefully? Dare I look into things that may change my beliefs, to show respect for those other believers that have actually spent time looking carefully before bearing witness? Dare I go into the position where I may see that I have been arrogant in believing I could disagree with people that have spend hundreds of thousands of years looking at the evidence without looking at the evidence? Dare I take back my public statement and say 'I did not yet know enough, but I pledge to look carefully and be humble before God, seeing what people have learned about the world, ever being critical about it but not coming with any statements until I have actually looked at the good people that have gone before me into this quest to see how the world works'?"
Are you brave enough to actually CHECK, to say "Yeah, you're right, I haven't checked out and read the books on how science works and what scientists do and what evidence they see for age and evolution, I have not shown reverence for God and his complexity, I have possibly borne false witness because I don't really know what I am talking against, I cannot see in the colors of a drop of oil on water the maths of quantum mechanics and how that shows the greatness of the Universe and God, I cannot see how quantum mechanics form the rules of chemistry and these work out when I mix orange juice and milk, I do not understand and know the mechanics of evolution and cannot see how that influence the spread of disease or the formation of limbs, I have not checked out how radioactivity works and tested th
Wouldn't the fact that nobody has been able to construct it that show that DESIGN doesn't work, rather than the opposite?;)
Apart from that, I know of no reasonable attempt to construct this using pure evolution set up to reward higher intelligence in competition for resources. I have some ideas of how to set up such an experiment, though I'm not sure I would like to - I find a truly intelligent, replicating, competing, resource consuming computer virus to be a scary thought...
On another note, Wolfram takes these tiny Turing machines as reason to not believe that people have souls, while I on the other hand take these to indicate that life must be designed, but that has to do more with the general properties of Turing machines rather than the size of them. OK, I'll bite: What properties? As far as I can tell, the only argument that could be made to show that "life must be designed" is a general proof that the structures it contains could not occur by any other means. Do we agree? This would be the "irreducable complexity" argument from intelligent design, but backed by an actual proof. To date, to the best of my knowledge, no such argument has come forth - instead, there has been a series of claims based on "this could not occur with a general upward slope of survivability" (based on the claimer being unable to conceive of a way, or not trying), with these each time debunked by somebody else actually showing that this upward slope could occur (and usually showing that it does occur in nature, in the form of previous forms still existing.)
I just don't get what this has to do with universal computing machines.
For the soul argument (which as far as I can tell is different than the designed argument), I read the properties of human behaviour to function perfectly well inside a "computer" mapped on top of neural networks as mapped on top of chemistry mapped on top of physics, with the emergent behaviour of the overall system optimizing for reproduction in a context that is slightly different from the present one. I don't see any phenomena that are incompatible with this view.
Incidentally, the neural network we use for this is also turing complete assuming infinite memory; I see this as somewhat irrelevant, as no matter how we slice it the brain is finite. This comes as an obvious result of quantization.
I don't see the simpleness of universal turing machines as being relevant on any point here, nor the general properties of turing machines.
Slashdot Mirror
Creation of proprietary derivates feeding back to free software? Look at the number of contributions the BSDs get from their proprietary derivates. Heck, for a period of years, FreeBSD development of major subsystems was almost exclusively driven by contributions from proprietary derivates.
With the GPL active, it channels development away from codebases that can be shared between the propritary derivates and free software and towards pure proprietary codebases instead. From pure proprietary codebases there flow little competence and no patches.
Eivind.
Eivind.
I choose to use Windows/Mac on the desktop at work at the moment due to compatibility issues with software that other people in my organization use. The choice of running Windows or Firefox on Mac is true for a large fraction of the Slashdot user base; in neither of these does PDFs work. Neither did they work very well on Unix the last time I used Unix as a desktop; XPDF had problems with rendering for many years, as well as not supporting PDF indexes (have they fixed that yet?), and gv had occasional problems with rendering, constant problems with links not working, and at least occasional slow rendering speed. So, there has constantly been problems with PDFs, on many different platforms. If that is fixed in some recent distributions of Linux which cover some parts of the userbase - so, it is still rude.
I'll also note that I mostly kicked out Linux of my life over 10 years ago, and my debates with Linus over technical/ethical issues since has led me to feel good about that decision. Whether it is "pleasant" or not doesn't matter when it comes to running a system where I feel I can't trust the lead developer to avoid hosing users' data to get better benchmarks. Nor where there's code in plain sight and I can't hack the code and contribute it back without feeling I stab free software in the back (ref use of the GPL license.)
Eivind.
For me, I find it particularly annoying because the default Adobe PDF plugin on Windows sometimes crash my browser. I think that's true for many others, too, though I don't know that for sure.
Eivind.
We do not seem to have much of a problem with false arrests; the only problems I know of are the usual ones of the prosecution sometimes going "gung ho" (wanting to convict SOMEBODY no matter what, to save face) and occasional abuse of the "Police can put somebody in detention for 24 hour before pressing charges". Overall, it seems to work fine, and the hiding of identity from media publication seems to only be positive.
Eivind.
Thank you very, very much for that post.
Of course, how much of a problem you see depends on what platform you are on - I've primarily seen the problem on Windows, with Mac OS X showing much less of it. The fragging issue recently discovered seems to be a likely culprit.
I'll also note that for me it "seems to be" associated with flash and Javascript, though I've not been able to pinpoint clearly. And I've not come in with a bug report because it's not possible to report anything sane - just "Firefox fucks up under heavy use".
Eivind.
Eivind.
Eivind.
So - any more arguments?
Eivind.
Eivind.
As for doctorates and MDs: and I consider an MD today to be a layperson, and I consider them as a group to always have been. Their work is in the practice, not research, and their education in the process of science is limited. The construction of motors is a scientific engineering field; yet, an auto mechanic isn't a scientist, and shouldn't be. An MD is closer to a scientist, yet (s)he still a layperson with some knowledge, from my perspective.
And it seems we agree on God - my point was that until God is defined in a testable manner, it is not possible to answer if there is a God. It is outside science.
Eivind.
I am interested in evidence, of course, it's just that "The Case for Christ" is strongly criticized for being one-sided - it has not done any investigation on the critical side, only on the apologetic side. See all the main Amazon reviews, for instance, or this more in depth review I found when looking for something else.
Here's another book that seems less biased: http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Evidence-Research-Discoveries-Investigated/dp/0062514725/ref=sid_dp_dp/104-5990516-7600706
Eivind.
As it is, I can say "I actually have 100,000 witnesses that say that Jesus WASN'T DEAD, he was just fairly much knocked out, and we saw him be replaced by another guy and taken off to rest."
Now, that's a random piece of fiction. So is any other claim of witnesses unless we have some reasonable sort of evidence of them. As it is, there is as far as I can tell the evidence around the Bible makes it most likely to be stories assembled some many years after Jesus' death, based on people that WERE NOT EYE WITNESSES. The historical record indicate, to our best approximation, that the guy didn't exist.
So, my claim that the witnesses are "unreliable" isn't due to what they witnessed, it is due to the evidence around the record. As a such, it is non-circular - I would require similar proof for most other claims, assuming I bothered to check whether they were true or not at all.
I am willing to accept that I will be more skeptical towards witnesses claiming that they have seen evidence that God exists than many other claims, as this is a fairly large claim, so I will want to go with the simplest explanation - which is that they follow normal psychology. It's just the same as I would require a fair bit of proof before accepting that Shiva exists.
Eivind.
Eivind.
As for the idea that the "community scoffed at the idea of washing hands between various medical activities" for a long time, the germ theory of disease was introduced in 1862 (by Pasteur), and Lister started with antiseptics in 1867, which was fairly rapidly accepted. In 1900, it had more or less turned upside down the practice of medicine, moving doctors from working at home to working in hospitals.
Here we are talking not of scientists accepting things, but of laypeople (doctors), and even then it took only about 30 years to turn the practice upside down. Yes, there were some anecdotal stuff around antiseptics before 1867 - but as far as I can tell, no actual science. Getting from initial science (germ theory in 1861/1862) to massive acceptance and change of behavior for laypeople dependent on this (including large investments) took 30-40 years. Not that bad, IMO. And we, as far as I can tell, much more efficient at handling scientific information now than we were then.
As for definite answer on God: Give us a clear definition of God, and we can help give you answers. However, as far as I can tell, "Is there a God" isn't a clear question (it gives no predictions), so there's no answer. To quote Pauli: "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." (ie, it does not contain any predictive power.)
Eivind.
When scientists can create life from inert matter, I'll agree that evolution conforms to the scientific method (Thesis, Antithesis, Hypothesis, Synthesis, Replication etc). Until then, don't call it scientific fact, nor treat it as such.
BEEP. Thanks for playing, go back to start due to discussing a totally unrelated issue. The issue you are discussing is called "Abiogenesis" and is separate from "evolution" (change of living things into different forms due to reproduction and natural selection). Please make sure claims you make about things actually match with what the discussion is about if you want to play again. Do you want to play again?
Yours truly, the Rational Discussion And Science Game.
Eivind, Norwegian (and atheist)
Eivind.
Eivind.
Eivind.
So, which witnesses? Apart from the general "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof", of course.
Eivind.
Have you considered, that maybe, it's us humans who have made errors in our findings.
Yes. That is why I, in contrast to you, have looked carefully at the evidence before having a public opinion in this area. At a mere two to five years at an hour a day, you should have learned enough to be able to contribute to the discussion. I recommend you start with a quick reading of social psychology and opinion forming to learn a bit about how you form opinions and sources of error, continue with a bit of basic conceptualization/philosophy of science to understand how we form scientific opinions ("Uncommon sense" by Cramer is a good read, as is "Connected knowledge" by the same author), then a bit of underlying biology to understand the commonalities, then a bit of statistics to understand how we form knowledge from data. Then play around with making evolutionary systems to find solutions, and read Dawkins or similar to get an understanding of evolution. Then, when you understand the claims and what the underlying reasoning for them are - and you can come back and say something.
As it is you are pissing in the pool of knowledge because you think "That's the way to make it warm". You don't understand about forming knowledge, of what is a fact and what is not, of how we learn about facts and all facts are theory. You spout irrational statements from not even understanding the language or the underlying concepts under it.
To use your own references, you're in violation of the 7th commandment: Thou shalt not bear false witness. You are bearing false witness as a result of bearing witness in an area where there is plenty of evidence and you have not looked at it. This is, in my opinion, immoral, because it hurt people by supporting lies, and these lies end up poisoning people's behavior. In your opinion, assuming you trust that book, it should be immortal because it is in violation of the 7th commandment.
Dare you learn before you open your mouth again? Dare you look to the knowledge carefully, checking it out before you bear more witness? Dare you go into the possibility that you are wrong and have misunderstood, investing the care to say "I will not say anything until I have looked into the work that thousands of people in collaboration have done, thousands of people that have started out religious and have investigated the world because they saw it as a work of God and saw it as the ultimate reverence to investigate it carefully? Dare I look into things that may change my beliefs, to show respect for those other believers that have actually spent time looking carefully before bearing witness? Dare I go into the position where I may see that I have been arrogant in believing I could disagree with people that have spend hundreds of thousands of years looking at the evidence without looking at the evidence? Dare I take back my public statement and say 'I did not yet know enough, but I pledge to look carefully and be humble before God, seeing what people have learned about the world, ever being critical about it but not coming with any statements until I have actually looked at the good people that have gone before me into this quest to see how the world works'?"
Are you brave enough to actually CHECK, to say "Yeah, you're right, I haven't checked out and read the books on how science works and what scientists do and what evidence they see for age and evolution, I have not shown reverence for God and his complexity, I have possibly borne false witness because I don't really know what I am talking against, I cannot see in the colors of a drop of oil on water the maths of quantum mechanics and how that shows the greatness of the Universe and God, I cannot see how quantum mechanics form the rules of chemistry and these work out when I mix orange juice and milk, I do not understand and know the mechanics of evolution and cannot see how that influence the spread of disease or the formation of limbs, I have not checked out how radioactivity works and tested th
Apart from that, I know of no reasonable attempt to construct this using pure evolution set up to reward higher intelligence in competition for resources. I have some ideas of how to set up such an experiment, though I'm not sure I would like to - I find a truly intelligent, replicating, competing, resource consuming computer virus to be a scary thought...
Eivind.
I just don't get what this has to do with universal computing machines.
For the soul argument (which as far as I can tell is different than the designed argument), I read the properties of human behaviour to function perfectly well inside a "computer" mapped on top of neural networks as mapped on top of chemistry mapped on top of physics, with the emergent behaviour of the overall system optimizing for reproduction in a context that is slightly different from the present one. I don't see any phenomena that are incompatible with this view.
Incidentally, the neural network we use for this is also turing complete assuming infinite memory; I see this as somewhat irrelevant, as no matter how we slice it the brain is finite. This comes as an obvious result of quantization.
I don't see the simpleness of universal turing machines as being relevant on any point here, nor the general properties of turing machines.
Could you connect the dots for me?
Eivind.