Mind:Brain::Software:Computer is too simplistic and has many explanatory problems and logical inconsistencies. See http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~ursa/philos/phinow2. htm for specifics. This theory has been kicked around for decades, and they still haven't been able to patch up all the holes.
It may be a neater theory to use occam's razor on the mind, but this is not without its problems -- not the least of which is that nobody, **absolutely nobody** pretends to know the necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness. Our understanding of consciousness has improved radically in the last 20 years, but we are still a long way from being able to give authoritative answers about consciousness, so it's probably premature to say authoritatively that 'the mind is nothing more than a manifestation of electro-chemical brain activity.' At this point, there is evidence for this belief, and it accords very well with the prevalent materialist worldview that underlies science, but to regard the question as already answered must, dare i say it, be an article of faith.
Your definition also is not precise enough to be useful either. There are multiple schools of phil of mind/cog sci that would subscribe to a much narrower interpretation and be compatible with your broad claim -- i.e. a functional interpretation or a strictly reductionistic interpretation.
If the mind is equivalent to the brain -- as you seem to be implying -- please answer for me the following question: what kind of a doctor do you get to operate on the mind?
A brain surgeon will not tell you that she operates on minds. You are being sloppy with language. A brain is not the same thing as a mind -- whatever a mind is or is not. If they were the same, then the words would be interchangeable.
Very interesting. I checked into this, and the poster is true. The founding fathers were extremely wary of a theocracy or anything that could devolve into a theocracy (a sentiment that John Ashcroft no doubt shares).
From http://www.oaoa.com/specialsections/faith/112199wa ves.htm (forgive the tt, but it preserves the formatting):
World War II kept the nation occupied in the 1940s, and church membership did not increase significantly, Findley said. "Everybody was touched by the war in some respect."
In the early 1950s, fear of Communism and worries over atomic weapons prompted Americans to turn back to the church.
In 1954, the phrase "one nation under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. In 1955, legislation put "In God we Trust" on America's money.
Popular evangelist Billy Graham got his start in the early 1950s. His popularity was fueled by fearful climate of the McCarthy era and the Korean War, Gardner said.
The difference is that copying is not theft. If you take the software out of the store, you are taking a product that they would otherwise get money for; if you download the product, you are merely copying some 1s and 0s.
It is the difference between stealing a book from a shop, and photocopying a book that your friend owns.
Yes, last I heard China invaded fifty years ago, as I said China has not invaded anywhere recently.
50 years is nothing -- certainly it is recent, historically speaking. And the mass population transfer that the government has recently escalated amounts to genocide, since Tibetans will soon be a minority in their own country. And this is ongoing.
The 'propaganda' has considerably more truth than the US media admit
Where are you getting your information? I have lived among Tibetans (in exile in India), have interviewed former political prisoners and had plenty of Tibetan friends, and I am quite certain that the Tibetans did not want to be liberated from the imperialists (as is the Chinese official line). You are correct that the situation is far more complex than the media presents it to be, but that is the nature of the media and what the average person is capable of knowing and wants to understand. Just because the issue is not totally black and white, it doesn't mean that the grey truth isn't much, much closer to the Tibetan version of history than the Chinese. See here for some disturbing information.
And I totally agree with you about the media and the administration. I believe nothing they say, and long ago recognized that everything this country does is purely for its own self-interest (which explains why we don't care enough about the Tibet situation to really make it an issue with the Chinese). Bush and his administration just make that fact perfectly transparent.
You're right, of course, but it's much more fun to try to wrap your mind around the possibility of eternal recurrence as Nietzsche conceived it. How strange your world becomes when you consider the possibility. Really. Try it for a couple of hours, and you will notice a definite shift in consciousness.
Nietzsche didn't spend the last 11 years of his life in an asylum for nothing.
Hang on a second, China has not invaded anywhere I am aware of, at least not recently and it certainly has not invaded Taiwan.
Have you never heard of Tibet? Don't tell me you believe the Chinese propaganda that Tibet has always been part of China and that the Tibetans welcomed them in 1949 with open arms.
Indeed. I am eagerly waiting for Frito Lay to tell me 'the whole truth.' If tobacco companies have always maintained their scientific integrity when discounting the alleged dangers of tobacco, why wouldn't fried food manufacturers do the same?
<?xml version='1.0' ?> <!DOCTYPE foo SYSTEM "foo.dtd" [ <!ENTITY MyInclude SYSTEM "MyInclude.xml"> ]>
This will include the file "MyInclude.xml" whenever the following entity appears: &MyInclude;
a succinct definition:
on
Web Services
·
· Score: 1
"A Web service is an interface that describes a collection of operations that are network-accessible through standardized XML messaging."
If you want to know what web services are -- and why they will be extremely important for e-businesses (especially B2B) and are not "just RPC" -- see the following paper, from which the quote above was lifted: http://www-4.ibm.com/software/solutions/webservice s/pdf/WSCA.pdf
Yes, I am all for high intelligence and low desire for a career in politics being prerequisites for being a politician. I've known some extremely intelligent people though that I would never trust to be a politician. There are some extremely intelligent people who are well adjusted, but in my experience, they are the minority (but I guess that's true of people in general).
The trouble, of course, is that very intelligent people by and large do not want to be politicians, sometimes vehemently so, and would resist being elected/nominated. What kind of intellectual stimulation can a career in politics offer? It appeals to the baser desire to exert power over others -- which most people have to lesser and greater extents -- without any of the intellectual stimulation of building a thermonuclear weapon, for example.
I think if Plato had been a wine seller, there would have been no Republic and no conception of a perfect ruler -- except in the way non-philosophers 'do philosophy' after too much wine;-), but perhaps you're right.
Yes, you are correct. It is the one who least desires to rule that should rule. I think that goes too far though. Anybody who doesn't want to rule qualifies -- not just the guy who so passionately detests the very idea of ruling that he can think about nothing else but not ruling.
It is interesting to note that the current system -- in the U.S., at least -- ensures that only those who most want to exercise that ruling power actually get to. I don't know about you, but a person who decides to devote their life to politics is a person that I would not trust for anything more important than a little league. And yet we do. These people who only know, understand, respect, and desire power decide all our fates.
Yes, it is vain for Plato to say that the perfect ruler is a philosopher, but then again, if he didn't think that philosophers were pretty bloody cool, he would have done something else. He was obviously a brilliant guy. Having known quite a few philosophy majors, I would certainly have a philosopher or two on the committee that I mentioned above.
Writing an editor hardly qualifies as a brilliancy.
Try again. Can you come up with something like the idea of a Turing machine or TCP or packet-switching or concurrent programming or even a single bloody algorithm that we remember the guy for? I don't think so. He was a mediocre programmer who made some extremely shrewd deals -- largely because his unquenchable thirst for power is matched only by his lack of anything remotely resembling a conscience, and he was willing to do things that most of us tell our kids they absolutely shouldn't do.
He doesn't even belong in the same book as people like Turing, Dijkstra, Knuth, or even the likes of Bill Joy (those are in descending order). You can talk about brilliancies with these guys and plenty of other compsci people, but Bill Gates is just a ruthless businessman. He will be forgotten, nothing more than a footnote in a second-rate book.
Strange how your comment causes me to doubt you understood my comment. I do have a girlfriend, but that is irrelevant. Clearly you have yet to develop a sense of humor, otherwise you would have seen my comment as the humorous self-referentially contradictory statement that it was meant to be. Perhaps you needed a smiley:-), like so many other humorless souls.
I'm waiting for the Goldbach Conjecture to be proved, but not holding my breath.
From mathworld: "Schnirelman (1939) proved that every even number can be written as the sum of not more than 300,000 primes (Dunham 1990), which seems a rather far cry from a proof for two primes!" Still a ways to go, gents.
Slashdot Mirror
Mind:Brain::Software:Computer is too simplistic and has many explanatory problems and logical inconsistencies. See http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~ursa/philos/phinow2. htm for specifics. This theory has been kicked around for decades, and they still haven't been able to patch up all the holes.
It may be a neater theory to use occam's razor on the mind, but this is not without its problems -- not the least of which is that nobody, **absolutely nobody** pretends to know the necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness. Our understanding of consciousness has improved radically in the last 20 years, but we are still a long way from being able to give authoritative answers about consciousness, so it's probably premature to say authoritatively that 'the mind is nothing more than a manifestation of electro-chemical brain activity.' At this point, there is evidence for this belief, and it accords very well with the prevalent materialist worldview that underlies science, but to regard the question as already answered must, dare i say it, be an article of faith.
Your definition also is not precise enough to be useful either. There are multiple schools of phil of mind/cog sci that would subscribe to a much narrower interpretation and be compatible with your broad claim -- i.e. a functional interpretation or a strictly reductionistic interpretation.Anyway, just something to think about...
A brain surgeon will not tell you that she operates on minds. You are being sloppy with language. A brain is not the same thing as a mind -- whatever a mind is or is not. If they were the same, then the words would be interchangeable.
Also, see http://www.potameides.com/cpa/archive/2000_12_10_a rchive.html for more info.
For once, that is on topic. I'm glad to see that the phrase 'bill gates sucks' had the lowest decay rate of the phrases that the guy tested for.
I agree completely, but the Q is pretty bloody close to a God, and I met 'him' in a vision so can vouch for 'his' existence ;-)
It is the difference between stealing a book from a shop, and photocopying a book that your friend owns.
50 years is nothing -- certainly it is recent, historically speaking. And the mass population transfer that the government has recently escalated amounts to genocide, since Tibetans will soon be a minority in their own country. And this is ongoing.
The 'propaganda' has considerably more truth than the US media admit
Where are you getting your information? I have lived among Tibetans (in exile in India), have interviewed former political prisoners and had plenty of Tibetan friends, and I am quite certain that the Tibetans did not want to be liberated from the imperialists (as is the Chinese official line). You are correct that the situation is far more complex than the media presents it to be, but that is the nature of the media and what the average person is capable of knowing and wants to understand. Just because the issue is not totally black and white, it doesn't mean that the grey truth isn't much, much closer to the Tibetan version of history than the Chinese. See here for some disturbing information.
And I totally agree with you about the media and the administration. I believe nothing they say, and long ago recognized that everything this country does is purely for its own self-interest (which explains why we don't care enough about the Tibet situation to really make it an issue with the Chinese). Bush and his administration just make that fact perfectly transparent.
Right, but the OP said "XML Document cannot contain another XML Document, with or without namespaces", which is wrong.
Nietzsche didn't spend the last 11 years of his life in an asylum for nothing.
Have you never heard of Tibet? Don't tell me you believe the Chinese propaganda that Tibet has always been part of China and that the Tibetans welcomed them in 1949 with open arms.
then perhaps Nietzsche was right after all, as I've said infinitely many times before.
...and Mars is finally habitable due to terraforming, will only the sci fi lovers get to reap the benefits and move to Mars?
Indeed. I am eagerly waiting for Frito Lay to tell me 'the whole truth.' If tobacco companies have always maintained their scientific integrity when discounting the alleged dangers of tobacco, why wouldn't fried food manufacturers do the same?
This will include the file "MyInclude.xml" whenever the following entity appears: &MyInclude;
If you want to know what web services are -- and why they will be extremely important for e-businesses (especially B2B) and are not "just RPC" -- see the following paper, from which the quote above was lifted: http://www-4.ibm.com/software/solutions/webservice s/pdf/WSCA.pdf
Regarding your sig: the Free Speech movement also came out of Berkeley and belongs with Unix and LSD.
The trouble, of course, is that very intelligent people by and large do not want to be politicians, sometimes vehemently so, and would resist being elected/nominated. What kind of intellectual stimulation can a career in politics offer? It appeals to the baser desire to exert power over others -- which most people have to lesser and greater extents -- without any of the intellectual stimulation of building a thermonuclear weapon, for example.
I think if Plato had been a wine seller, there would have been no Republic and no conception of a perfect ruler -- except in the way non-philosophers 'do philosophy' after too much wine ;-), but perhaps you're right.
It is interesting to note that the current system -- in the U.S., at least -- ensures that only those who most want to exercise that ruling power actually get to. I don't know about you, but a person who decides to devote their life to politics is a person that I would not trust for anything more important than a little league. And yet we do. These people who only know, understand, respect, and desire power decide all our fates.
Yes, it is vain for Plato to say that the perfect ruler is a philosopher, but then again, if he didn't think that philosophers were pretty bloody cool, he would have done something else. He was obviously a brilliant guy. Having known quite a few philosophy majors, I would certainly have a philosopher or two on the committee that I mentioned above.
Try again. Can you come up with something like the idea of a Turing machine or TCP or packet-switching or concurrent programming or even a single bloody algorithm that we remember the guy for? I don't think so. He was a mediocre programmer who made some extremely shrewd deals -- largely because his unquenchable thirst for power is matched only by his lack of anything remotely resembling a conscience, and he was willing to do things that most of us tell our kids they absolutely shouldn't do.
He doesn't even belong in the same book as people like Turing, Dijkstra, Knuth, or even the likes of Bill Joy (those are in descending order). You can talk about brilliancies with these guys and plenty of other compsci people, but Bill Gates is just a ruthless businessman. He will be forgotten, nothing more than a footnote in a second-rate book.
He's been working on The Semantic Web.
The essence of man is a question. -- Milan Kundera
Strange how your comment causes me to doubt you understood my comment. I do have a girlfriend, but that is irrelevant. Clearly you have yet to develop a sense of humor, otherwise you would have seen my comment as the humorous self-referentially contradictory statement that it was meant to be. Perhaps you needed a smiley :-), like so many other humorless souls.
From mathworld: "Schnirelman (1939) proved that every even number can be written as the sum of not more than 300,000 primes (Dunham 1990), which seems a rather far cry from a proof for two primes!" Still a ways to go, gents.
I've thought about it, and I must exist, 'cause if I don't, then my girlfriend has been a very bad girl.