That's something I'd be far more interested to see. The history of Han Solo leading up to ANH. Luke, as has been said everywhere, was a boring farm boy on a backwater planet. Han Solo was a riotous space cowboy smuggling for the Fetts. His story would be far more interesting.
Besides, Han is about the only character from the original trilogy whose ancestry/history/whatever aren't talked about in the prequels already...
It's funny you should put it in a formal argument like that. Just last night, I was thinking about the Catholics' interesting stance on faith and reason - namely, that they are not incompatible and if your faith seems to disagree with sound reasoning, you're misunderstanding either the articles of your faith of the results of the reasoning. I was also thinking of it in a formal way much like yours:
Axiom: The articles of Catholic faith are true. Axiom: The conclusions of sound reasoning are true. Therefore: Any apparent contradiction between faith and reason is a misunderstanding.
I really rather like it. It's a good way for a religion to save face and maintain backward compatibility (to use an analogy) while still keeping up with the progress of science. So long as they don't intentionally misunderstand the science to leave it compatible with their faith. It seems of the two, faith is the harder one to ground in fact or otherwise justify (kind of by it's nature), and so would be the one more appropriately prone to change in understanding in the face of an apparent contradiction.
I, on the other hand, have a comparitively significant web presence and a unique name.
I too have the fortune (good or ill) of a very unique name, any any search for even my last name is likely to return mostly results for me (just checked - it seems some of my family members have recently gotten greater internet presences, but the second result is still me). My first name, guaranteed all me - there are no other Forrest Cameranesi's in the world.
On top of this, I have the odd fortune that, for some reason, the web site for the Rocky Horror cast I perform with is very, very high-ranked on Google, far more so than any of my genuine internet presences.
Go do an "I'm Feeling Lucky" on me. Caution: Men In Drag.
Doesn't really bother me that much though - I make a point of not keeping any secrets, that way there's none to come back and bite me. Anybody out there doesn't like the things I do, that's their problem, and if they don't want me around for some reason that's fine. I probably wouldn't get along with them anyway.
Then how come life did not already form in one of these "universes", advance and discover us?
Because the odds of two Big Bang like events happening close enough in space and time for there to be low enough entropy for intelligent beings from both running into each other, or even noticing anything from the others' "universe", are nearly infinitesimal. By the time the earliest light from any other distant "universe" (i.e. the light from their Big Bang) passes by even the earliest light from ours, the extremely unlikely organization of energy which presently characterizes our universe will have long since wound down.
Basically: in all probability, we will never ever see another photon from another of these "universes" (nor will they see ours), because by the time any of them reach here, we will all be nothing but black holes and photons ourselves; possibly not even black holes.
I'd just like to add my own two cents to this entire discussion and point out to both sides (signal7 and everyone ridiculing him) that the universe being eternal or infinite is not contradictory with big bang theory, or at least, not with the events it describes and explains.
All it means is that what we consider cosmological history is not the entirety of cosmological history, and that while everything in the observable universe may derive from the Big Bang, THAT event was not uncaused, but had predecessor events, going on back infinitely.
Before anybody bitches that anything creating Big Bang conditions would violated the 2nd law of thermodynamics, I just wrote a post about that.
Besides, if you want to accept the Big Bang as the ultimate start of time, then at that point you've got to reject the law of conservation of mass/energy. That law states that mass or energy (same thing) is neither created nor destroyed. Ergo, mass/energy was never created. This leaves us either that mass/energy does not exist, since it was never created; or that is has *always* existed. Since I think most people would like to say that mass/energy exists, it must have always existed; or the law of its conservation is wrong.
"Big bang as the start of time" is practically modern-day Creationism, and almost begs for a 'First Cause' argument for God's existence to explain it. You've got to have an infinite and eternal thing in your explanation somewhere; why postulate additional entities when you can just say the universe itself is infinite?
Saying the universe was always in existence implies an actual infinity, and the problems this brings up are, well, practically infinite! Like for example, if the universe has always been here, and it's increasing in entropy, how come it hasn't completely run down already?
The second law of thermodynamics is no longer considered a law per se, since we discovered that thermodynamic systems such as gasses are composed of atoms which collide with one another according to time-symmetric laws, not some continuous 'gas' stuff which obeys the 2nd law the way particles obey the law of gravity, say. The fact that entropy always seems to go up is merely a statistical law, namely, that the chances of it going back down are EXTREMELY, EXTREMELY unlikely, because of all possible arrangements of (for example) the atoms in a cloud of gas, most of them are in thermal equilibrium, and a vanishingly small number of possible states of that cloud of gas have all of them on one side, or some similarly low-entropy state.
But such states are still possible. And given infinite time, anything possible will occur. So while a massive amount of energy suddenly conspiring to come together to form the super hot and dense 'initial state' of the Big Bang is vanishingly unlikely, in an eternity, it will eventually occur. An infinite number of times, in fact. So the 'universe' as we conceive it (or at least the part of it which we call 'the universe', that part which we have any hope of ever observing) is currently winding down from an extremely unlikely lapse of entropy, and an inconceivably long amount of time in the future, something just like that will happen again.
And if you take infinite space for granted too, then something just like the Big Bang is happening right now, most likely somewhere so far away that everything we consider 'the universe' will be radiation and black holes (or possibly even just radiation, once the black holes all evaporate) by the time any effects of it can reach us. In fact, if space is infinite, then it's happening an infinite number of times *right now*.
The apparent problems of physical infinities only arise if you fail to completely grasp the sheer, literally unimaginably large scale of 'infinity', and all of the implications that it brings with it. Infinity solves its own problems.
Besides, the law of thermodynamics only states that entropy never goes UP. It could remain static over the entire universe, and just shift where the particular concentrations of energy are at a given time (changing local entropy). If you assume the law of conservation of information (which is the reciprocal or inverse of entropy) is true, then that seems like it's got to be the case, anyway, since an increase in universal entropy would mean a loss of information.
The communist ideal isn't state owned property - it's the dissolution of the state.
And if you look at the anarcho-capitalist libertarians, they too seek the dissolution of the state. How can it be that two such seemingly different approaches seek the same goal?
That's a rhetorical question, mind you - I see perfectly well how they can reach the same goal, and I myself preach (and try to practice) in all matters something which I've just now coined a term for, "paradoxical centrism". This is basically the notion that a balance has to be struck, not between the two extremes, but entirely encompassing them. The solution is not to compromise, but to take both extremes to their ends at the same time. Resolving the differences between two positions just entails seeing that they are not actually different.
The economic system I advocate is one in which there is no such thing as government-owned property. No central planning of anything. No government programs. From this angle it is an entirely free-market capitalist system. However, analogous to the basic civil rights to liberty (the right act according to your will) and security (the right not to be acted upon against your will), which limit one another, there are economic rights that might be called property and prosperity - though I've not really settled on a good name for the latter right. And while free markets satisfy the right to property, they alone do not satisfy the right to prosperity, and so to compensate for that, I advocate a form of wealth redistribution that will be detailed at the end of this post.
The right to property is not, as most conservatives and libertarians make it out to be, analogous with the right to liberty. Property is not about your right to do with your stuff as you please - that's just liberty itself, your right to do whatever except as limited by other rights. Property is primarily a negative right, one which limits necessarily limits liberty, just like security does, in the sense that it is your right keep others from doing something. In particular, it is your right to keep others from doing what they please to "your" property.
But just as liberty is the more primitive of the civil rights (in that in a completely lawless primal anarchy, everyone has liberty, but no one has security), and security is brought in to counterbalance it and ensure mutual liberty for everyone (as opposed to the liberty of just a few powerful people), so property is a secondary right brought about to counterbalance the basic, primal state of everybody taking and using or abusing whatever they want. In a sense, the same way security rights are rights against crimes like assault, property rights are rights against theft and vandalism. And the purpose of property rights are to ensure the mutual enjoyment of the more basic economic right to prosperity (though be careful, that's just a name) - to have and use the available resources around you.
From a procedural and legalistic point of view, this notion of property as a negative right analogous to security, and of a right to prosperity analogous to a right to liberty, has two consequences. One is that a person has a responsibility not to deprecate public resources - basically, we have a responsibility to our environment and ecology. This ties in to Green Economics (from that Wiki link: "a theory of economics by which an economic system is considered to be a component of the ecosystem in which it resides").
But beyond that, and the real point I'm driving at here, is the system of wealth redistribution laid upon a free market, which I promised a description of earlier. What I advocate is a system whereby exactly one half of every person's income (from any source, sale of product or service, gift, inheritance, etc) is "taxed", the result of these taxes pooled, and then evenly redistributed back to those same people. I'm sure the capitalists and such in the audience are shrieking right now, but consider: if ever
I mean, when you hire a plumber, do you really want to discuss his personal views on the value of good pipes to society and so on?
No, but I do care that he knows and informs me that Brand X of pipe, while more expensive than Brand Y of pipe, will last significantly longer than Brand Y would, and that over the lifetime of Brand X pipes I would have to spend more than the difference between the two replacing or repairing the Brand Y pipes.
Basically, I care that he's not just interested in selling me the product with the cheapest price tag (the best short-term value), but the product that will save me the most money in the end (the long-term value). And I might even be happy to pay a little more for his services (above and beyond the extra expense of Brand X pipes) to get these even greater long-term savings.
The BSD license does not limit anyone's freedom to copy code. It allows the author of that code the freedom not to distribute any modifications he makes to it, or not to exempt his creation from restrictions imposed by copyright law. That it, it simply does not impose the obligation to distribute the code, either at all or under any particular license. Any code that is out there and distributed is still free to use, and using it in a closed project does not affect that. If I take a BSD-licensed project, modify the code, and distribute only binaries, I haven't *done* anything to the original code, locked it up, or prevented anybody from copying it.
The only restrictions being applied are to the *new* code I wrote, and those restrictions are allowable only because of existing copyright law. If you don't like those restrictions, what you need to argue against is copyright law in general, not the BSD license. While copyright laws exist, even public domain is no more "free" than the BSD license (cause I could take something in the public domain, use it in my commercial creation, and apply copying restrictions to that).
Consider an analogy of speech in the common sense. (All code is is written speech). A situation analogous to copyright would be to say that I may say something to you and require you not to repeat it, and if you do, you are guilty under the law. The opposite of this, such as the BSD license or a public domain license, would be simply to say something to you; what you do with that is entirely up to you, repeat it or not, I don't care.
GPL doesn't mesh extremely well with this analogy because there is no "speech source" vs "compiled speech", but something roughly analogous to the GPL would be *requiring* you, if you ever repeated what I said (even in modified form), to furnish the person you spoke to with a written copy of that statement. That's not freedom for anyone: that's a duty placed on you, which grants anyone you speak to (about this thing) the entitlement of a written copy of that.
In the speech case it plainly obvious what is the most free of these things: simply being able to say things to people, and they are not obligated to act or not act in any particular way about that. This is analogous to the public domain license, and a BSD type license would simply require that you attribute any repetition of that statement to me, a very slight loss of freedom. Standard copyright laws and "copyleft" laws like the GPL both impose restrictions on people and so are far less free. The only illusion of a lack of freedom in a BSD or public domain situation, with no copyleft requirements, arises because you still have copyright requirements being imposed by some people. The problem is not these middle licenses; the problem is copyright itself, the notion that you can at all "license" written speech and other creative works. The GPL is complicit in that kind of thinking, and the situation it drives toward is no more free than the one with traditional copyright.
It's not hard to reproduce the bland Federation look since it's really one step above 21st century cubicle design. The Borg techno-look is much, much better.
The Borg look's not hard to reproduce either. You should see some of the dark workshops I've worked in as a repair tech: whole rooms covered in disassembled machines, miles of assorted cables and wires hanging from the rafters, the green shade of assorted dead circuit boards decorating the walls, isolated hanging lamps illuminating your workspace... not that I had a problem with any of this, mind you, I absolutely loved the decor, but it's not like it's hard to reproduce. Get enough exposed parts around you and you'll easily get the look of a Borg interior (or possibly the Playboy mansion, depending on what kind of 'parts' you've got exposed around you).
The big problem with this - and don't get me wrong, I really love the idea from a technical standpoint (presuming heavy encryption is standard, automatic and ubiquitous) - is that governments assert a right to regulate radio broadcasts as they see fit, as the radio spectrum is a public resource. The only reason unregulated spectrum is unregulated right now is because they let it be - if the FCC so chose, they could impose regulations on that part of the spectrum, and then the nice happy FCC hardware-confiscation vans show up to shut down your "pirate radio station".
Nobody cares if you run a Gigabit cable over the fence to your neighbor's house except you and your neighbor. A wired network could be built with privately owned equipment between owners of private property and nobody would give a damn - and even if government DID give a damn, the people will really throw shit fits if the government starts telling them what they can do with their own private property on their own private property. (Then again, out where I live in southern California, most people don't own the property they live on anyway, even ostensibly i.e. mortgages - everybody rents or leases. Feudalism all over again, working just to pay the land-lords... or the banks, if you're lucky. But that's another topic).
But as has been covered elsewhere in this thread, there are large social and especially technical hurdles to getting a wired mesh network running and widely adopted (and therefore useful). A wireless solution like yours is far better technologically and largely circumvents the social problems, but leaves itself wide open to government regulation of a sort that not many people will be prone to complain about.
and the Reciprocality Project is a site with a more serious theory that the neurotypical mentality may in fact be a real mental disorder (sections 0, 1, and 2, and the special introduction linked at the top, will be of particular interest on this topic).
This is very off topic, and I almost emailed you directly instead of responding here, but I thought this might perhaps spawn some interesting input from other people as well, so I'll ask this here instead.
From your messages in this thread and the few others of yours I've read, you seem to be an independent and free thinking individual. I'm judging this entirely on the fact that you hold some rather unconventional views, such that it seems unlikely your views were indoctrinated into you, and that you rather arrived at them as the result of independent thought. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but that's the impression I get.
So my question for you, assuming you are such an individual, is why you identify yourself as a "Christ follower". This is not to imply in any way that a person who agrees with the teachings of Jesus would by necessity be some sort of blind dogmatic zombie - for I myself agree with a good many of the genuine teachings of Jesus, and I feel any unbiased and sensible person would do the same. Rather, I'm genuinely curious as to why someone as (apparently) rational, naturalistic and free-thinking as yourself would (A) pick one particular historic individual as a person to identify themselves with by association, and (B) describe themselves as a "follower" of such a person, or any person for that matter. Is it just tradition, or something else?
Some background on myself, so you'll understand why I ask this... I was raised by Christian parents, one Catholic by upbringing and the other Protestant, but both of them versed in Buddhism and other eastern traditions and neither really practicing members of anything. I was raised "as a Christian", but around by 12 years old or so became highly averse to authority of any sort (either as to what "is" or what "ought"), and became... almost a nihilist and anarchist, but I realized how those weren't really tenable positions either (see my other response to you elsewhere in this thread). So most of my life I've been developing a naturalist philosophy of reality and morality, striving to strike a balance between the scientific and the mystical, the normative and the spiritual... and only recently have I gotten to a point where I can understand the statements of traditional religions as something other than nonsense. (And indeed, I now see immense beauty in many of the traditional teachings, when understood in a way that grounds them to the mundane world).
So while, in a positive sense you might be able to call me a Christian - in the same sense that Ghandi called himself a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, and so on - I wouldn't self-identify as such to the (implicit) exclusion of others, and in no way would I call myself a "follower" of any of them. We (myself and the authors of traditional religions) may walk a lot of the same paths, but I walk them because I find them the right paths to walk, not because anyone else happens to be walking them. So I'm curious, again, why you associate yourself with just the one particular person, Jesus - which seem to imply an exclusion of other figures, though I somehow doubt you meant it that way - and why you say that you "follow" him rather than simply agree with him?
First, I want to say that I don't mean just to detract from you - I largely (though not entirely) agree with a lot of your ideals, and one way or another find your posts in this thread quite interesting, so I've added you to my "friends" list, but I don't have time to respond in detail to everything you've posted in this thread. Nevertheless, I want to take issue with one small point here...
Anarchy is not "take what you want" that is chaotic nihilism. Anarchy just means no government.
Anarchy literally means "without rulers", a ruler being of course, someone who enforces rules. This is not entirely the same as being without government. What you seem to seek (and I agree with you here) is not an absence of rule entirely, but rather self-rule, autonomy or personal sovereignty; freedom from outside rule. While this concept has often been called anarchy and its adherents sometimes self-identify as "anarchists" (as opposed to those colloquial identified as "anarchists" of the violence and destruction connotation), less misleading terms have been coined to describe an anti-tyranny but still not truly anarchy position, such "minarchy" or (small-L) libertarianism
True anarchy in the literal sense of the word *IS* the praxiological equivalent of epistemological nihilism. In nihilism, there is nothing true or false, real or unreal (or at least, there is no strict method enforced, even by oneself upon oneself, to determine what makes an idea true or false) - people just think however they think for whatever reason. In anarchy, there is nothing good or evil, moral or immoral (or at least, there is no strict method enforced, even by oneself upon oneself, to determine what makes a deed good or evil) - people just act however they act for whatever reason.
Both are just as flawed as their respective opposites, dogmatism and tyranny. In both cases, a balance needs to be stricken - some core set of notions must be taken as absolute (the assumptions of rationalism and empiricism in the scientific method, in one case; and things like basic freedoms such as liberty and security in the other), which has shades of dogmatism and tyranny in itself, the notion that there are "absolute" laws regarding reality and morality. But of course, the other extremes of nihilism and anarchy bring their respective offerings to the table as well, and it's clear that for every basic assumption there is a corresponding burden of proof - with rationalism and empiricism come the burdens of skepticism and agnosticism - and likewise, for every freedom there is a corresponding responsibility. With the freedom of liberty comes the responsibility of mercy, that is, the responsibility not to infringe on others' security; and with the freedom of security comes the responsibility of leniency, or the responsibility not to infringe on others liberty.
More or less it all comes down to the Golden Rule (I prefer the negative formulation, "do not unto others what you would not have done unto you"), common across all cultures, universal to humankind. Ethics and morality are really quite simple and versatile when you see how it all comes down to this, and as law and government are nothing but the formal enforcement of some system of morals or ethics, they should reflect that as well. Complex specialized bureaucracies enforcing hundreds of years of case law and legal codes specifying the minute details of every little thing are unnecessary and in the end ultimately harmful to everyone.
While I agree that modern law is overly complex, an exception for ignorance would create a severe moral hazard by encouraging people to purposefully remain willfully ignorant of the law, while penalizing the well-informed good citizen, which is a highly undesirable outcome.
Right - which is why I don't advocate allowing an "I didn't know" excuse, and rather advocate changing the law such that it's reasonable to expect everybody to know, and then hold people accountable for knowing and abiding by that simple set of laws.
I agree with what your lawyer friends tell you: Apple cannot order users to not use the software they sell on non-Apple hardware. A person can clearly combine two products they've legally purchased together, for their own private use, in any way they damn well please.
What Apple *can* do, however, is disclaim any warranty on their software for platforms they have not conducted quality assurance testing on - i.e. their own hardware. In other words "Sure, you can try to install this on whatever you like, but fat chance getting it to work and don't come crying to us when it doesn't."
I know this is highly tangential, but I see this phrase all over and it infuriates me...
Ignorance of the law is no excuse, and it never has been.
But it *should* be. It is unjust to hold someone accountable for violations of rules they were unaware of. Modern law is so complex that no one (even people with many years of legal training) can be truly aware of them all - even professional lawyers use comprehensive reference texts regularly. Consequently we have a lot of people being held accountable for violations of esoteric codes they cannot reasonably be expected to know about. This is one of the fundamental problems of pretty much all modern governments, and it's not a very big improvement from the arbitrary rulings of the monarchs and dictators of non-constitutional governments past. I am sure that myself and almost every single person reading this is guilty of something that they are not aware of. This leads to a condition where everyone is a criminal and can always be brought up on charges of *something* if they annoy the powers that be enough - a situation just inviting government abuse of power.
The solution? Simple. Fewer (and simpler) laws, that have logical backing to support them and as such should seem common sense almost universally. Then you can expect people to know the law in full, and can be justified in holding them accountable to it.
Sorry again for the tangent. This subject is a pet peeve of mine.
I agree with the statements of fact you've made, but I think you're once again misunderstanding what I mean by "opposed to the realm of."
My original topic, as it relates to that phrase, was the fact that that many people seem to think that what is true or false (reality) is the right topic of study for science, while what is good or evil (morality) is the right topic of study for religion. Not just that they disagree about reality, but they say that religion is not at all about what is real, it's entirely about what is moral, and that's what religion is good for. They are putting religion as a label for "stuff about morality", and science as a label for "stuff about reality".
The reason I mentioned secular ethics is because that is clearly (by definition) not religious and yet still is about morality, good and evil. So by the same reasoning that leads people to make the above-mentioned distinction - that despite many claims they make about what is real or true, that's not really the point of religious doctrines - once secular ethics is most widely accepted as a basis for determining good and evil, such people would argue that religion is not really about morality, despite making many claims about what is good or evil. But then, what is religion "about", if neither reality or morality?
My point is that defining religion by the subject matter it 'rightly' covers winds up with a constantly shifting definition of what religion is, eventually destroying any meaning the word has. Your definition that it covers 'supernatural' things (those things beyond our contemporary understanding of the natural universe) suffers the same problem, as things previously thought to be supernatural are finally understood naturally. A long time ago thunder was considered a supernatural effect, and diseases were the divine punishment of the gods, but we now understand these things naturally. The word "supernatural" is being continually marginalized and will someday be understood as the nonsense word it is, pointing at nothing at all, because anything that is, is natural.
If you define religion by subject matter, then you make that word suffer the same problem - once no subject matter is seen as the proper subject of religion, what exactly is left? What does "religion" *mean*? We can talk about religious approaches to ethics versus secular approaches, but if the "religion is about morality" definition is true, then that means that even secular ethics are religious - an obvious contradiction. Likewise, we can talk about religions vs secular approaches to 'supernatural' things (that which is beyond our current understanding) - the secular or natural approach is to seek to understand it naturally, while religious folk say things like "God did it" and leave it at that. Basically what I'm getting at is that if you define "religion" by subject matter, then any secular study of said subject matter is suddenly "religious", which is obviously contradictory and so that can't be how things are.
Which is why I'm emphasizing that religion is not defined by the subject matter it talks about. Religion makes claims of truth and goodness; it discusses things that we now understand far better than religious texts describe them, and things which even most intelligent and educated people don't understand all that well at all. Religion talks about both reality and morality, the natural universe and the 'supernatural' universe, and secular studies discuss all those same topics, so that cannot be the defining quality of a religion.
Thus why I say religion is defined by its *approach to* subject matters, not the subject matters themselves. The "God did it" religious approach is to see a question or problem and make up (or look up) an excuse to solve it for you, so you don't have to deal with any more questions or problems, sticking your head in the sand. The secular or naturalist approach is to see a question or problem and *try to solve it*. That is the distinction between religion and secular/natural studies. One is dogmatic an
You must be confusing me with someone else... in fact, I didn't use any form of the word "assume" in my last post. Nonetheless, I happen to agree that every claim is an assumption.
Indeed I did confuse you and another post in this thread. But regardless of that, right here you're misunderstanding me in a vital way. I'm not just saying all claims made are assumptions. I'm saying that by thinking anything, you are implicitly making assumptions about all possible claims. The 'implicit' is important - maybe you haven't thought to ask yet whether there's a knife-wielding murderer directly behind you, but unless you have reason to think there might be you assume that there's not. It's essentially Occham's razor - posit as little as is needed to explain things and nothing more until something requires further explanation. (This is also what I mean be a "positive" idea - an idea which posits something). Put this way it should be obvious that we naturally do assume the negative until proven positive, but people often seem to make the jump to "proven positive" on extremely flimsy evidence. In your blindfold example, you have good reason to expect there might be a wall in front of you, from years of experience with rooms and walls and such. From what I've seen, with God, most people have no experience with God as they define it but believe that he exists simply because they've been told so.
Rather, "supernatural" pertains to that which is not physical or material or can be perceived or explained by natural laws or emperical senses; and by definition includes god(s) and divinity.
So is the study of logic supernatural then? How about analytic psychology? There are a number of "sciences" which deal strictly in the realm of human thought, but in a rational and methodical way, which do not normally fall under the domain of "supernatural" topics, and yet have no more relation to the physical world and empirical observation than does talk about God.
There are countless examples in history. Religious belief held that the earth was the centre of the universe, that the sun revolved around the earth, that the story of creation was literal (the Catholic church now accepts evolution as a mechanism used by god).
This is what I meant by implying that religion is not opposite the *realm* of science. Religions make many claims about the same subject matter that science covers; people just accept science as more authoritative in those matters now. If someday a majority of people take a natural approach to ethics, will that make religion then opposed to the realm of ethics as well? Religion and science are at odds over these topics, but they do not have exclusive and opposite domains of authority, one over physical things and one over ethical. (Although I agree that science alone per se *cannot* directly answer ethical questions, but that there is a separate science-like natural method for answering such questions, with its own axioms and processes that stand on their own equal to the scientific method; and that this method is already partially developed in the notions of human rights and due process of law).
"What makes someone atheist is not believing in God(s). As it happens this is the default position of someone who is not religious, as without observed evidence of logical proof, it is irrational to believe in God(s)."
No, you definitely said atheist.
What I said was, being an atheist is not believing in gods; and also, as a separate thing, that the default position of a person who is not religious (that is to say does not take any claim on faith, which is the same as saying a person who is agnostic) is to assume positive claims false (and thus the contradictory negative claims true) unless there is evidence in their favor. So an agnostic may make no explicit claims about the existence of God, but must implicitly, by their other beliefs, assume one way or the other. The only way out of would be if said person did not even understand the question - you could hold not even an assumption about God if you're not sure what "God" means, but given that you understand that, you're either assuming yes or no implicitly in your other beliefs, even if you're not making any explicit claims about it.
I guess it comes down to Occam's Razor. I don't know whether or not you have elves in your pockets, but given that there is no reason to think so, and such a hypothesis offers nothing in the way of explanation as nothing requires such an explanation, I'm going to assume that you do not have elves in your pockets. The default position is not to postulate a thing's existence unless there is some need to do so; to assume it doesn't exist unless there's reason to think it does. This applies to God as well as it does to anything else.
Then you might know that, at least for Catholics, it is expected that they use their reason fully in the investigation and acceptance of their faith.
Half of my extended family are devout Catholics. If I didn't know them so well I would never have guessed them to be religious people, as all of them (the adults at least) are college educated and work either in the medical profession or as educators, and almost never do anything invoking the supernatural whatsoever. Even the few religious events I've attended with them have a friendly, welcoming feeling to them, and don't at all make me feel alienated or like I'm somehow violating my own naturalist beliefs by being there.
I'm rather quite fond of Catholics (ones like them, at least) for this reason - they don't let their faith get in the way of their reason. If there is an apparent of conflict between them, they don't discard their reason, but rather modify their understanding of the articles of their faith to remain compatible with reality.
For this reason I see the entire Catholic faith, in a sense, similar to a huge software project struggling to maintain reverse compatibility. A long time ago, someone hacked together a workable program for how to run a human life, which had some pretty huge feature gaps and some serious bugs but for the most part worked pretty darn well, and a lot of people adopted it. In the intervening millennia, newer and more efficient programs have been created for running this or that bit of life, and the developers of the Catholic faith program - which are just its advanced users, since it's open source you know - have incorporated hooks for those algorithms and modified their own code base to maintain reverse compatibility with the old program. Slowly, over the ages, their own code is becoming deprecated, but it's still there with extra layers to translate between the new code and the old, since there's some bits of old code that don't have newer replacements yet, and so people want to keep using this old program since there's no fully suitable replacement for it yet.
It's really a marvelous piece of social engineering and now that I think about it, quite a sensible approach. Some of us may be 1337 hax0rs who can code up our own life-programs from scratch, taking the best of what we've seen and inventing our own and tying it all together into one elegant system, thus rejecting anyone else's system as weak and broken and in many ways quite Evil (to use a technical term). But not all the lusers out there can code up their own stuff, and they've got to use something in the meanwhile, so they use whatever hack job best suits their needs. Catholicism seems something like Mac OS X - lots of free and open source stuff in there, highly compatible with open and non-proprietary systems, but with layers that make it all reverse compatible with the older Mac code, and a slick face on top of it all that most everybody feels comfortable using.
My biggest pet project is, by this analogy, writing a whole new Life OS from scratch, all open source with clean and elegant code, no ugly hacks, and a full feature set that's mostly compatible with all the major brands out there, only breaking compatibility in places where the other brands had really ugly hacks that shouldn't be propagated - thus allowing anyone who wants to switch completely over to this new and improved system in a very easy transition, and leave their old junkware behind. I know put in those terms it sounds like a major project that will never be finished - and I guess, like any great open source project, it never will be - but I hope that at the very least I'll wind up with a usable product that other systems can incorporate bits of into their own code. I'll be happy if it just helps programs like Catholicism, who seem eager to incorporate newer cleaner code, to develop into a better product in the end, thus migrating all their millions of users off the crapware that they're currently using.
No offense to Catholics or anyone else is intended by this post. I think you're being stupid if you blindly follow anything, but chances are you and I would agree on a good majority of topics, once we got the semantics straightened out.
You have grossly misstated the principle of bivalence. From Wikipedia: "In logic, the principle of bivalence states that for any proposition P, either P is true or P is false." You said "if any claim is false, its negation is true" (and in your examples you demonstrate that you intend "negation" to mean "opposite") which is only true when P is boolean.
I did not mean for negation to mean "opposite" in the sense most people think of things (capitalist vs communist, creation vs destruction, etc). I specifically chose the word "negation" to be as accurate to the principle of bivalence as possible. If "[something] exists" is false, its negation "[something] does not exist" is true, as "[something] does not exist" is equivalent to "it is not the case that [something] exists".
You seem to think I mean opposites in the sense that one would claim "if something is not being destroyed then it is being created", which is blatantly false (something being "not-destroyed" is being "preserved", not "created"), but people think of creation and destruction as "opposites" - which they are a sort of. I like to call that sort of opposite "reciprocal", as opposed to "negation", to borrow mathematical terms. The type of "opposite" I've been speaking of thus far has mostly been negation. (To take a brief tangent, I find that pretty much by definition, reciprocal-type opposites always occur together, while negation-types never do, and the confusion between them is the cause of many false dichotomies that are commonly believed, e.g. between egoism and altruism).
But to get back to the gist of things - you say that agnostics believe it is scientifically impossible to know whether or not God exists. While this may be the strict use of it in comparative religion, I have seen it used more broadly in a general epistemological sense to mean the reservation of judgement about negative claims (as in "x is not so") until reason directly dictates belief in such claims - in other words, as someone in this thread mentioned, the position that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
You also say it is possible to not make any assumptions, but the claim I am making here is that everyone is always making an implicit assumption about every possible claim - that their explicit beliefs have infinitely far-reaching implications about the rest of the universe - and that default position for such claims is usually negative, and should always be negative, unless reasonable evidence indicates otherwise. This is because, given that one is making implicit assumptions about all possible claims, it is not possible to hold all possible positive claims true at once, but it is possible to hold all negative claims true at once.
Lets take someone's height for an example. Call this person John. John may be 6'0", or 6'1", or 6'2", or 5'11", or 5'10", and so on and so forth - there's an infinite number of heights that John could be. Now, I cannot assume that John is 6'0" and 6'1" and so on, because those positions are contrary. However, I *can* assume the negations of all those claims - John is not 6'0", John is not 6'1", and so on - without ever deriving a set of contrary positions. You can assume all positive claims to be false (thus all negative claims true) and get nothing contrary, but you cannot assume all positive claims true (and thus all negative claims false) without your resulting set of claims being contrary, for John must be all heights at once, your hypothetical planet must be all colors at once, etc.
Effectively, what I'm getting at is that it is logically safe to assume "no claim is true" (the position of skepticism) until proven otherwise, but it is not logically safe to assume "every claim is true" (what would you even call that? naivety? I can't imagine anyone has ever held such a position). Since you are always making implicit assumptions about every claim, it is most rational to assume those claims false until you have evidence to the contrary - otherwise, you're picking and choosing which ones to assume
I find an agnostic approach infinitely more rational than a religious approach. Question everything. Nothing is ever entirely certain (though there are some things very strongly suggested by evidence, i.e. the laws of gravity, or things that are very safe to assume, i.e. the rules of logic).
And before some grammar Nazi finds this, yes, I just noticed that I used "i.e." where I should have used "e.g." So sue me.
I think you're confusing atheist and agnostic, the latter being the logical default position, since there's no proof God doesn't exist either.
I'm not confusing them - that's my very point.
The opposite of religious is not atheist, it's agnostic. Religious people believe "[This] is so. Period. End of story." Agnostic people say "I'm not entirely certain what is so. (But the evidence suggests [this], and I think it's safe to assume [that])."
Atheism, theism, or what have you, are all words describing a type of claim about the existence or non-existence of God(s). One can be religiously theistic, religiously atheistic, agnostically theistic or agnostically atheistic. Theism and atheism describe the claim at stake, namely, about the existence of God(s): religious or agnostic describe the attitude toward those claims (or any other claims for that matter).
I find an agnostic approach infinitely more rational than a religious approach. Question everything. Nothing is ever entirely certain (though there are some things very strongly suggested by evidence, i.e. the laws of gravity, or things that are very safe to assume, i.e. the rules of logic).
The quote of mine you're responding to is simply stating that the rational, agnostic default position, for anything, is to assume that a claim is false until there is reason to believe it is so. By the principle of bivalence (that if any claim is false, its negation is true), if you don't believe something is so, you're assuming (though not as a matter of faith; just a tentative assumption) that it's not so. Since an agnostic position is not to believe anything until there's good reason, an agnostic must necessarily assume that any claim about something's existence is false until they have reason to believe it true. So unless you have good reason to believe in God, don't.
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That's something I'd be far more interested to see. The history of Han Solo leading up to ANH. Luke, as has been said everywhere, was a boring farm boy on a backwater planet. Han Solo was a riotous space cowboy smuggling for the Fetts. His story would be far more interesting.
Besides, Han is about the only character from the original trilogy whose ancestry/history/whatever aren't talked about in the prequels already...
It's funny you should put it in a formal argument like that. Just last night, I was thinking about the Catholics' interesting stance on faith and reason - namely, that they are not incompatible and if your faith seems to disagree with sound reasoning, you're misunderstanding either the articles of your faith of the results of the reasoning. I was also thinking of it in a formal way much like yours:
Axiom: The articles of Catholic faith are true.
Axiom: The conclusions of sound reasoning are true.
Therefore: Any apparent contradiction between faith and reason is a misunderstanding.
I really rather like it. It's a good way for a religion to save face and maintain backward compatibility (to use an analogy) while still keeping up with the progress of science. So long as they don't intentionally misunderstand the science to leave it compatible with their faith. It seems of the two, faith is the harder one to ground in fact or otherwise justify (kind of by it's nature), and so would be the one more appropriately prone to change in understanding in the face of an apparent contradiction.
I, on the other hand, have a comparitively significant web presence and a unique name.
I too have the fortune (good or ill) of a very unique name, any any search for even my last name is likely to return mostly results for me (just checked - it seems some of my family members have recently gotten greater internet presences, but the second result is still me). My first name, guaranteed all me - there are no other Forrest Cameranesi's in the world.
On top of this, I have the odd fortune that, for some reason, the web site for the Rocky Horror cast I perform with is very, very high-ranked on Google, far more so than any of my genuine internet presences.
Go do an "I'm Feeling Lucky" on me. Caution: Men In Drag.
Doesn't really bother me that much though - I make a point of not keeping any secrets, that way there's none to come back and bite me. Anybody out there doesn't like the things I do, that's their problem, and if they don't want me around for some reason that's fine. I probably wouldn't get along with them anyway.
Then how come life did not already form in one of these "universes", advance and discover us?
Because the odds of two Big Bang like events happening close enough in space and time for there to be low enough entropy for intelligent beings from both running into each other, or even noticing anything from the others' "universe", are nearly infinitesimal. By the time the earliest light from any other distant "universe" (i.e. the light from their Big Bang) passes by even the earliest light from ours, the extremely unlikely organization of energy which presently characterizes our universe will have long since wound down.
Basically: in all probability, we will never ever see another photon from another of these "universes" (nor will they see ours), because by the time any of them reach here, we will all be nothing but black holes and photons ourselves; possibly not even black holes.
I'd just like to add my own two cents to this entire discussion and point out to both sides (signal7 and everyone ridiculing him) that the universe being eternal or infinite is not contradictory with big bang theory, or at least, not with the events it describes and explains.
All it means is that what we consider cosmological history is not the entirety of cosmological history, and that while everything in the observable universe may derive from the Big Bang, THAT event was not uncaused, but had predecessor events, going on back infinitely.
Before anybody bitches that anything creating Big Bang conditions would violated the 2nd law of thermodynamics, I just wrote a post about that.
Besides, if you want to accept the Big Bang as the ultimate start of time, then at that point you've got to reject the law of conservation of mass/energy. That law states that mass or energy (same thing) is neither created nor destroyed. Ergo, mass/energy was never created. This leaves us either that mass/energy does not exist, since it was never created; or that is has *always* existed. Since I think most people would like to say that mass/energy exists, it must have always existed; or the law of its conservation is wrong.
"Big bang as the start of time" is practically modern-day Creationism, and almost begs for a 'First Cause' argument for God's existence to explain it. You've got to have an infinite and eternal thing in your explanation somewhere; why postulate additional entities when you can just say the universe itself is infinite?
Saying the universe was always in existence implies an actual infinity, and the problems this brings up are, well, practically infinite! Like for example, if the universe has always been here, and it's increasing in entropy, how come it hasn't completely run down already?
The second law of thermodynamics is no longer considered a law per se, since we discovered that thermodynamic systems such as gasses are composed of atoms which collide with one another according to time-symmetric laws, not some continuous 'gas' stuff which obeys the 2nd law the way particles obey the law of gravity, say. The fact that entropy always seems to go up is merely a statistical law, namely, that the chances of it going back down are EXTREMELY, EXTREMELY unlikely, because of all possible arrangements of (for example) the atoms in a cloud of gas, most of them are in thermal equilibrium, and a vanishingly small number of possible states of that cloud of gas have all of them on one side, or some similarly low-entropy state.
But such states are still possible. And given infinite time, anything possible will occur. So while a massive amount of energy suddenly conspiring to come together to form the super hot and dense 'initial state' of the Big Bang is vanishingly unlikely, in an eternity, it will eventually occur. An infinite number of times, in fact. So the 'universe' as we conceive it (or at least the part of it which we call 'the universe', that part which we have any hope of ever observing) is currently winding down from an extremely unlikely lapse of entropy, and an inconceivably long amount of time in the future, something just like that will happen again.
And if you take infinite space for granted too, then something just like the Big Bang is happening right now, most likely somewhere so far away that everything we consider 'the universe' will be radiation and black holes (or possibly even just radiation, once the black holes all evaporate) by the time any effects of it can reach us. In fact, if space is infinite, then it's happening an infinite number of times *right now*.
The apparent problems of physical infinities only arise if you fail to completely grasp the sheer, literally unimaginably large scale of 'infinity', and all of the implications that it brings with it. Infinity solves its own problems.
Besides, the law of thermodynamics only states that entropy never goes UP. It could remain static over the entire universe, and just shift where the particular concentrations of energy are at a given time (changing local entropy). If you assume the law of conservation of information (which is the reciprocal or inverse of entropy) is true, then that seems like it's got to be the case, anyway, since an increase in universal entropy would mean a loss of information.
The communist ideal isn't state owned property - it's the dissolution of the state.
And if you look at the anarcho-capitalist libertarians, they too seek the dissolution of the state. How can it be that two such seemingly different approaches seek the same goal?
That's a rhetorical question, mind you - I see perfectly well how they can reach the same goal, and I myself preach (and try to practice) in all matters something which I've just now coined a term for, "paradoxical centrism". This is basically the notion that a balance has to be struck, not between the two extremes, but entirely encompassing them. The solution is not to compromise, but to take both extremes to their ends at the same time. Resolving the differences between two positions just entails seeing that they are not actually different.
The economic system I advocate is one in which there is no such thing as government-owned property. No central planning of anything. No government programs. From this angle it is an entirely free-market capitalist system. However, analogous to the basic civil rights to liberty (the right act according to your will) and security (the right not to be acted upon against your will), which limit one another, there are economic rights that might be called property and prosperity - though I've not really settled on a good name for the latter right. And while free markets satisfy the right to property, they alone do not satisfy the right to prosperity, and so to compensate for that, I advocate a form of wealth redistribution that will be detailed at the end of this post.
The right to property is not, as most conservatives and libertarians make it out to be, analogous with the right to liberty. Property is not about your right to do with your stuff as you please - that's just liberty itself, your right to do whatever except as limited by other rights. Property is primarily a negative right, one which limits necessarily limits liberty, just like security does, in the sense that it is your right keep others from doing something. In particular, it is your right to keep others from doing what they please to "your" property.
But just as liberty is the more primitive of the civil rights (in that in a completely lawless primal anarchy, everyone has liberty, but no one has security), and security is brought in to counterbalance it and ensure mutual liberty for everyone (as opposed to the liberty of just a few powerful people), so property is a secondary right brought about to counterbalance the basic, primal state of everybody taking and using or abusing whatever they want. In a sense, the same way security rights are rights against crimes like assault, property rights are rights against theft and vandalism. And the purpose of property rights are to ensure the mutual enjoyment of the more basic economic right to prosperity (though be careful, that's just a name) - to have and use the available resources around you.
From a procedural and legalistic point of view, this notion of property as a negative right analogous to security, and of a right to prosperity analogous to a right to liberty, has two consequences. One is that a person has a responsibility not to deprecate public resources - basically, we have a responsibility to our environment and ecology. This ties in to Green Economics (from that Wiki link: "a theory of economics by which an economic system is considered to be a component of the ecosystem in which it resides").
But beyond that, and the real point I'm driving at here, is the system of wealth redistribution laid upon a free market, which I promised a description of earlier. What I advocate is a system whereby exactly one half of every person's income (from any source, sale of product or service, gift, inheritance, etc) is "taxed", the result of these taxes pooled, and then evenly redistributed back to those same people. I'm sure the capitalists and such in the audience are shrieking right now, but consider: if ever
I mean, when you hire a plumber, do you really want to discuss his personal views on the value of good pipes to society and so on?
No, but I do care that he knows and informs me that Brand X of pipe, while more expensive than Brand Y of pipe, will last significantly longer than Brand Y would, and that over the lifetime of Brand X pipes I would have to spend more than the difference between the two replacing or repairing the Brand Y pipes.
Basically, I care that he's not just interested in selling me the product with the cheapest price tag (the best short-term value), but the product that will save me the most money in the end (the long-term value). And I might even be happy to pay a little more for his services (above and beyond the extra expense of Brand X pipes) to get these even greater long-term savings.
The BSD license does not limit anyone's freedom to copy code. It allows the author of that code the freedom not to distribute any modifications he makes to it, or not to exempt his creation from restrictions imposed by copyright law. That it, it simply does not impose the obligation to distribute the code, either at all or under any particular license. Any code that is out there and distributed is still free to use, and using it in a closed project does not affect that. If I take a BSD-licensed project, modify the code, and distribute only binaries, I haven't *done* anything to the original code, locked it up, or prevented anybody from copying it.
The only restrictions being applied are to the *new* code I wrote, and those restrictions are allowable only because of existing copyright law. If you don't like those restrictions, what you need to argue against is copyright law in general, not the BSD license. While copyright laws exist, even public domain is no more "free" than the BSD license (cause I could take something in the public domain, use it in my commercial creation, and apply copying restrictions to that).
Consider an analogy of speech in the common sense. (All code is is written speech). A situation analogous to copyright would be to say that I may say something to you and require you not to repeat it, and if you do, you are guilty under the law. The opposite of this, such as the BSD license or a public domain license, would be simply to say something to you; what you do with that is entirely up to you, repeat it or not, I don't care.
GPL doesn't mesh extremely well with this analogy because there is no "speech source" vs "compiled speech", but something roughly analogous to the GPL would be *requiring* you, if you ever repeated what I said (even in modified form), to furnish the person you spoke to with a written copy of that statement. That's not freedom for anyone: that's a duty placed on you, which grants anyone you speak to (about this thing) the entitlement of a written copy of that.
In the speech case it plainly obvious what is the most free of these things: simply being able to say things to people, and they are not obligated to act or not act in any particular way about that. This is analogous to the public domain license, and a BSD type license would simply require that you attribute any repetition of that statement to me, a very slight loss of freedom. Standard copyright laws and "copyleft" laws like the GPL both impose restrictions on people and so are far less free. The only illusion of a lack of freedom in a BSD or public domain situation, with no copyleft requirements, arises because you still have copyright requirements being imposed by some people. The problem is not these middle licenses; the problem is copyright itself, the notion that you can at all "license" written speech and other creative works. The GPL is complicit in that kind of thinking, and the situation it drives toward is no more free than the one with traditional copyright.
It's not hard to reproduce the bland Federation look since it's really one step above 21st century cubicle design. The Borg techno-look is much, much better.
The Borg look's not hard to reproduce either. You should see some of the dark workshops I've worked in as a repair tech: whole rooms covered in disassembled machines, miles of assorted cables and wires hanging from the rafters, the green shade of assorted dead circuit boards decorating the walls, isolated hanging lamps illuminating your workspace... not that I had a problem with any of this, mind you, I absolutely loved the decor, but it's not like it's hard to reproduce. Get enough exposed parts around you and you'll easily get the look of a Borg interior (or possibly the Playboy mansion, depending on what kind of 'parts' you've got exposed around you).
The big problem with this - and don't get me wrong, I really love the idea from a technical standpoint (presuming heavy encryption is standard, automatic and ubiquitous) - is that governments assert a right to regulate radio broadcasts as they see fit, as the radio spectrum is a public resource. The only reason unregulated spectrum is unregulated right now is because they let it be - if the FCC so chose, they could impose regulations on that part of the spectrum, and then the nice happy FCC hardware-confiscation vans show up to shut down your "pirate radio station".
Nobody cares if you run a Gigabit cable over the fence to your neighbor's house except you and your neighbor. A wired network could be built with privately owned equipment between owners of private property and nobody would give a damn - and even if government DID give a damn, the people will really throw shit fits if the government starts telling them what they can do with their own private property on their own private property. (Then again, out where I live in southern California, most people don't own the property they live on anyway, even ostensibly i.e. mortgages - everybody rents or leases. Feudalism all over again, working just to pay the land-lords... or the banks, if you're lucky. But that's another topic).
But as has been covered elsewhere in this thread, there are large social and especially technical hurdles to getting a wired mesh network running and widely adopted (and therefore useful). A wireless solution like yours is far better technologically and largely circumvents the social problems, but leaves itself wide open to government regulation of a sort that not many people will be prone to complain about.
I'm uncertain about my position on this...
What, is the conversation going too fast for you?
Two links for you:
The Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical, is a satirical site by AS people, and the place where that quote probably came from.
and the Reciprocality Project is a site with a more serious theory that the neurotypical mentality may in fact be a real mental disorder (sections 0, 1, and 2, and the special introduction linked at the top, will be of particular interest on this topic).
This is very off topic, and I almost emailed you directly instead of responding here, but I thought this might perhaps spawn some interesting input from other people as well, so I'll ask this here instead.
From your messages in this thread and the few others of yours I've read, you seem to be an independent and free thinking individual. I'm judging this entirely on the fact that you hold some rather unconventional views, such that it seems unlikely your views were indoctrinated into you, and that you rather arrived at them as the result of independent thought. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but that's the impression I get.
So my question for you, assuming you are such an individual, is why you identify yourself as a "Christ follower". This is not to imply in any way that a person who agrees with the teachings of Jesus would by necessity be some sort of blind dogmatic zombie - for I myself agree with a good many of the genuine teachings of Jesus, and I feel any unbiased and sensible person would do the same. Rather, I'm genuinely curious as to why someone as (apparently) rational, naturalistic and free-thinking as yourself would (A) pick one particular historic individual as a person to identify themselves with by association, and (B) describe themselves as a "follower" of such a person, or any person for that matter. Is it just tradition, or something else?
Some background on myself, so you'll understand why I ask this... I was raised by Christian parents, one Catholic by upbringing and the other Protestant, but both of them versed in Buddhism and other eastern traditions and neither really practicing members of anything. I was raised "as a Christian", but around by 12 years old or so became highly averse to authority of any sort (either as to what "is" or what "ought"), and became... almost a nihilist and anarchist, but I realized how those weren't really tenable positions either (see my other response to you elsewhere in this thread). So most of my life I've been developing a naturalist philosophy of reality and morality, striving to strike a balance between the scientific and the mystical, the normative and the spiritual... and only recently have I gotten to a point where I can understand the statements of traditional religions as something other than nonsense. (And indeed, I now see immense beauty in many of the traditional teachings, when understood in a way that grounds them to the mundane world).
So while, in a positive sense you might be able to call me a Christian - in the same sense that Ghandi called himself a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, and so on - I wouldn't self-identify as such to the (implicit) exclusion of others, and in no way would I call myself a "follower" of any of them. We (myself and the authors of traditional religions) may walk a lot of the same paths, but I walk them because I find them the right paths to walk, not because anyone else happens to be walking them. So I'm curious, again, why you associate yourself with just the one particular person, Jesus - which seem to imply an exclusion of other figures, though I somehow doubt you meant it that way - and why you say that you "follow" him rather than simply agree with him?
First, I want to say that I don't mean just to detract from you - I largely (though not entirely) agree with a lot of your ideals, and one way or another find your posts in this thread quite interesting, so I've added you to my "friends" list, but I don't have time to respond in detail to everything you've posted in this thread. Nevertheless, I want to take issue with one small point here...
Anarchy is not "take what you want" that is chaotic nihilism. Anarchy just means no government.
Anarchy literally means "without rulers", a ruler being of course, someone who enforces rules. This is not entirely the same as being without government. What you seem to seek (and I agree with you here) is not an absence of rule entirely, but rather self-rule, autonomy or personal sovereignty; freedom from outside rule. While this concept has often been called anarchy and its adherents sometimes self-identify as "anarchists" (as opposed to those colloquial identified as "anarchists" of the violence and destruction connotation), less misleading terms have been coined to describe an anti-tyranny but still not truly anarchy position, such "minarchy" or (small-L) libertarianism
True anarchy in the literal sense of the word *IS* the praxiological equivalent of epistemological nihilism. In nihilism, there is nothing true or false, real or unreal (or at least, there is no strict method enforced, even by oneself upon oneself, to determine what makes an idea true or false) - people just think however they think for whatever reason. In anarchy, there is nothing good or evil, moral or immoral (or at least, there is no strict method enforced, even by oneself upon oneself, to determine what makes a deed good or evil) - people just act however they act for whatever reason.
Both are just as flawed as their respective opposites, dogmatism and tyranny. In both cases, a balance needs to be stricken - some core set of notions must be taken as absolute (the assumptions of rationalism and empiricism in the scientific method, in one case; and things like basic freedoms such as liberty and security in the other), which has shades of dogmatism and tyranny in itself, the notion that there are "absolute" laws regarding reality and morality. But of course, the other extremes of nihilism and anarchy bring their respective offerings to the table as well, and it's clear that for every basic assumption there is a corresponding burden of proof - with rationalism and empiricism come the burdens of skepticism and agnosticism - and likewise, for every freedom there is a corresponding responsibility. With the freedom of liberty comes the responsibility of mercy, that is, the responsibility not to infringe on others' security; and with the freedom of security comes the responsibility of leniency, or the responsibility not to infringe on others liberty.
More or less it all comes down to the Golden Rule (I prefer the negative formulation, "do not unto others what you would not have done unto you"), common across all cultures, universal to humankind. Ethics and morality are really quite simple and versatile when you see how it all comes down to this, and as law and government are nothing but the formal enforcement of some system of morals or ethics, they should reflect that as well. Complex specialized bureaucracies enforcing hundreds of years of case law and legal codes specifying the minute details of every little thing are unnecessary and in the end ultimately harmful to everyone.
While I agree that modern law is overly complex, an exception for ignorance would create a severe moral hazard by encouraging people to purposefully remain willfully ignorant of the law, while penalizing the well-informed good citizen, which is a highly undesirable outcome.
Right - which is why I don't advocate allowing an "I didn't know" excuse, and rather advocate changing the law such that it's reasonable to expect everybody to know, and then hold people accountable for knowing and abiding by that simple set of laws.
I agree with what your lawyer friends tell you: Apple cannot order users to not use the software they sell on non-Apple hardware. A person can clearly combine two products they've legally purchased together, for their own private use, in any way they damn well please.
What Apple *can* do, however, is disclaim any warranty on their software for platforms they have not conducted quality assurance testing on - i.e. their own hardware. In other words "Sure, you can try to install this on whatever you like, but fat chance getting it to work and don't come crying to us when it doesn't."
I know this is highly tangential, but I see this phrase all over and it infuriates me...
Ignorance of the law is no excuse, and it never has been.
But it *should* be. It is unjust to hold someone accountable for violations of rules they were unaware of. Modern law is so complex that no one (even people with many years of legal training) can be truly aware of them all - even professional lawyers use comprehensive reference texts regularly. Consequently we have a lot of people being held accountable for violations of esoteric codes they cannot reasonably be expected to know about. This is one of the fundamental problems of pretty much all modern governments, and it's not a very big improvement from the arbitrary rulings of the monarchs and dictators of non-constitutional governments past. I am sure that myself and almost every single person reading this is guilty of something that they are not aware of. This leads to a condition where everyone is a criminal and can always be brought up on charges of *something* if they annoy the powers that be enough - a situation just inviting government abuse of power.
The solution? Simple. Fewer (and simpler) laws, that have logical backing to support them and as such should seem common sense almost universally. Then you can expect people to know the law in full, and can be justified in holding them accountable to it.
Sorry again for the tangent. This subject is a pet peeve of mine.
I agree with the statements of fact you've made, but I think you're once again misunderstanding what I mean by "opposed to the realm of."
My original topic, as it relates to that phrase, was the fact that that many people seem to think that what is true or false (reality) is the right topic of study for science, while what is good or evil (morality) is the right topic of study for religion. Not just that they disagree about reality, but they say that religion is not at all about what is real, it's entirely about what is moral, and that's what religion is good for. They are putting religion as a label for "stuff about morality", and science as a label for "stuff about reality".
The reason I mentioned secular ethics is because that is clearly (by definition) not religious and yet still is about morality, good and evil. So by the same reasoning that leads people to make the above-mentioned distinction - that despite many claims they make about what is real or true, that's not really the point of religious doctrines - once secular ethics is most widely accepted as a basis for determining good and evil, such people would argue that religion is not really about morality, despite making many claims about what is good or evil. But then, what is religion "about", if neither reality or morality?
My point is that defining religion by the subject matter it 'rightly' covers winds up with a constantly shifting definition of what religion is, eventually destroying any meaning the word has. Your definition that it covers 'supernatural' things (those things beyond our contemporary understanding of the natural universe) suffers the same problem, as things previously thought to be supernatural are finally understood naturally. A long time ago thunder was considered a supernatural effect, and diseases were the divine punishment of the gods, but we now understand these things naturally. The word "supernatural" is being continually marginalized and will someday be understood as the nonsense word it is, pointing at nothing at all, because anything that is, is natural.
If you define religion by subject matter, then you make that word suffer the same problem - once no subject matter is seen as the proper subject of religion, what exactly is left? What does "religion" *mean*? We can talk about religious approaches to ethics versus secular approaches, but if the "religion is about morality" definition is true, then that means that even secular ethics are religious - an obvious contradiction. Likewise, we can talk about religions vs secular approaches to 'supernatural' things (that which is beyond our current understanding) - the secular or natural approach is to seek to understand it naturally, while religious folk say things like "God did it" and leave it at that. Basically what I'm getting at is that if you define "religion" by subject matter, then any secular study of said subject matter is suddenly "religious", which is obviously contradictory and so that can't be how things are.
Which is why I'm emphasizing that religion is not defined by the subject matter it talks about. Religion makes claims of truth and goodness; it discusses things that we now understand far better than religious texts describe them, and things which even most intelligent and educated people don't understand all that well at all. Religion talks about both reality and morality, the natural universe and the 'supernatural' universe, and secular studies discuss all those same topics, so that cannot be the defining quality of a religion.
Thus why I say religion is defined by its *approach to* subject matters, not the subject matters themselves. The "God did it" religious approach is to see a question or problem and make up (or look up) an excuse to solve it for you, so you don't have to deal with any more questions or problems, sticking your head in the sand. The secular or naturalist approach is to see a question or problem and *try to solve it*. That is the distinction between religion and secular/natural studies. One is dogmatic an
You must be confusing me with someone else ... in fact, I didn't use any form of the word "assume" in my last post. Nonetheless, I happen to agree that every claim is an assumption.
Indeed I did confuse you and another post in this thread. But regardless of that, right here you're misunderstanding me in a vital way. I'm not just saying all claims made are assumptions. I'm saying that by thinking anything, you are implicitly making assumptions about all possible claims. The 'implicit' is important - maybe you haven't thought to ask yet whether there's a knife-wielding murderer directly behind you, but unless you have reason to think there might be you assume that there's not. It's essentially Occham's razor - posit as little as is needed to explain things and nothing more until something requires further explanation. (This is also what I mean be a "positive" idea - an idea which posits something). Put this way it should be obvious that we naturally do assume the negative until proven positive, but people often seem to make the jump to "proven positive" on extremely flimsy evidence. In your blindfold example, you have good reason to expect there might be a wall in front of you, from years of experience with rooms and walls and such. From what I've seen, with God, most people have no experience with God as they define it but believe that he exists simply because they've been told so.
Rather, "supernatural" pertains to that which is not physical or material or can be perceived or explained by natural laws or emperical senses; and by definition includes god(s) and divinity.
So is the study of logic supernatural then? How about analytic psychology? There are a number of "sciences" which deal strictly in the realm of human thought, but in a rational and methodical way, which do not normally fall under the domain of "supernatural" topics, and yet have no more relation to the physical world and empirical observation than does talk about God.
There are countless examples in history. Religious belief held that the earth was the centre of the universe, that the sun revolved around the earth, that the story of creation was literal (the Catholic church now accepts evolution as a mechanism used by god).
This is what I meant by implying that religion is not opposite the *realm* of science. Religions make many claims about the same subject matter that science covers; people just accept science as more authoritative in those matters now. If someday a majority of people take a natural approach to ethics, will that make religion then opposed to the realm of ethics as well? Religion and science are at odds over these topics, but they do not have exclusive and opposite domains of authority, one over physical things and one over ethical. (Although I agree that science alone per se *cannot* directly answer ethical questions, but that there is a separate science-like natural method for answering such questions, with its own axioms and processes that stand on their own equal to the scientific method; and that this method is already partially developed in the notions of human rights and due process of law).
"What makes someone atheist is not believing in God(s). As it happens this is the default position of someone who is not religious, as without observed evidence of logical proof, it is irrational to believe in God(s)."
No, you definitely said atheist.
What I said was, being an atheist is not believing in gods; and also, as a separate thing, that the default position of a person who is not religious (that is to say does not take any claim on faith, which is the same as saying a person who is agnostic) is to assume positive claims false (and thus the contradictory negative claims true) unless there is evidence in their favor. So an agnostic may make no explicit claims about the existence of God, but must implicitly, by their other beliefs, assume one way or the other. The only way out of would be if said person did not even understand the question - you could hold not even an assumption about God if you're not sure what "God" means, but given that you understand that, you're either assuming yes or no implicitly in your other beliefs, even if you're not making any explicit claims about it.
I guess it comes down to Occam's Razor. I don't know whether or not you have elves in your pockets, but given that there is no reason to think so, and such a hypothesis offers nothing in the way of explanation as nothing requires such an explanation, I'm going to assume that you do not have elves in your pockets. The default position is not to postulate a thing's existence unless there is some need to do so; to assume it doesn't exist unless there's reason to think it does. This applies to God as well as it does to anything else.
Then you might know that, at least for Catholics, it is expected that they use their reason fully in the investigation and acceptance of their faith.
Half of my extended family are devout Catholics. If I didn't know them so well I would never have guessed them to be religious people, as all of them (the adults at least) are college educated and work either in the medical profession or as educators, and almost never do anything invoking the supernatural whatsoever. Even the few religious events I've attended with them have a friendly, welcoming feeling to them, and don't at all make me feel alienated or like I'm somehow violating my own naturalist beliefs by being there.
I'm rather quite fond of Catholics (ones like them, at least) for this reason - they don't let their faith get in the way of their reason. If there is an apparent of conflict between them, they don't discard their reason, but rather modify their understanding of the articles of their faith to remain compatible with reality.
For this reason I see the entire Catholic faith, in a sense, similar to a huge software project struggling to maintain reverse compatibility. A long time ago, someone hacked together a workable program for how to run a human life, which had some pretty huge feature gaps and some serious bugs but for the most part worked pretty darn well, and a lot of people adopted it. In the intervening millennia, newer and more efficient programs have been created for running this or that bit of life, and the developers of the Catholic faith program - which are just its advanced users, since it's open source you know - have incorporated hooks for those algorithms and modified their own code base to maintain reverse compatibility with the old program. Slowly, over the ages, their own code is becoming deprecated, but it's still there with extra layers to translate between the new code and the old, since there's some bits of old code that don't have newer replacements yet, and so people want to keep using this old program since there's no fully suitable replacement for it yet.
It's really a marvelous piece of social engineering and now that I think about it, quite a sensible approach. Some of us may be 1337 hax0rs who can code up our own life-programs from scratch, taking the best of what we've seen and inventing our own and tying it all together into one elegant system, thus rejecting anyone else's system as weak and broken and in many ways quite Evil (to use a technical term). But not all the lusers out there can code up their own stuff, and they've got to use something in the meanwhile, so they use whatever hack job best suits their needs. Catholicism seems something like Mac OS X - lots of free and open source stuff in there, highly compatible with open and non-proprietary systems, but with layers that make it all reverse compatible with the older Mac code, and a slick face on top of it all that most everybody feels comfortable using.
My biggest pet project is, by this analogy, writing a whole new Life OS from scratch, all open source with clean and elegant code, no ugly hacks, and a full feature set that's mostly compatible with all the major brands out there, only breaking compatibility in places where the other brands had really ugly hacks that shouldn't be propagated - thus allowing anyone who wants to switch completely over to this new and improved system in a very easy transition, and leave their old junkware behind. I know put in those terms it sounds like a major project that will never be finished - and I guess, like any great open source project, it never will be - but I hope that at the very least I'll wind up with a usable product that other systems can incorporate bits of into their own code. I'll be happy if it just helps programs like Catholicism, who seem eager to incorporate newer cleaner code, to develop into a better product in the end, thus migrating all their millions of users off the crapware that they're currently using.
No offense to Catholics or anyone else is intended by this post. I think you're being stupid if you blindly follow anything, but chances are you and I would agree on a good majority of topics, once we got the semantics straightened out.
You have grossly misstated the principle of bivalence. From Wikipedia: "In logic, the principle of bivalence states that for any proposition P, either P is true or P is false." You said "if any claim is false, its negation is true" (and in your examples you demonstrate that you intend "negation" to mean "opposite") which is only true when P is boolean.
I did not mean for negation to mean "opposite" in the sense most people think of things (capitalist vs communist, creation vs destruction, etc). I specifically chose the word "negation" to be as accurate to the principle of bivalence as possible. If "[something] exists" is false, its negation "[something] does not exist" is true, as "[something] does not exist" is equivalent to "it is not the case that [something] exists".
You seem to think I mean opposites in the sense that one would claim "if something is not being destroyed then it is being created", which is blatantly false (something being "not-destroyed" is being "preserved", not "created"), but people think of creation and destruction as "opposites" - which they are a sort of. I like to call that sort of opposite "reciprocal", as opposed to "negation", to borrow mathematical terms. The type of "opposite" I've been speaking of thus far has mostly been negation. (To take a brief tangent, I find that pretty much by definition, reciprocal-type opposites always occur together, while negation-types never do, and the confusion between them is the cause of many false dichotomies that are commonly believed, e.g. between egoism and altruism).
But to get back to the gist of things - you say that agnostics believe it is scientifically impossible to know whether or not God exists. While this may be the strict use of it in comparative religion, I have seen it used more broadly in a general epistemological sense to mean the reservation of judgement about negative claims (as in "x is not so") until reason directly dictates belief in such claims - in other words, as someone in this thread mentioned, the position that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
You also say it is possible to not make any assumptions, but the claim I am making here is that everyone is always making an implicit assumption about every possible claim - that their explicit beliefs have infinitely far-reaching implications about the rest of the universe - and that default position for such claims is usually negative, and should always be negative, unless reasonable evidence indicates otherwise. This is because, given that one is making implicit assumptions about all possible claims, it is not possible to hold all possible positive claims true at once, but it is possible to hold all negative claims true at once.
Lets take someone's height for an example. Call this person John. John may be 6'0", or 6'1", or 6'2", or 5'11", or 5'10", and so on and so forth - there's an infinite number of heights that John could be. Now, I cannot assume that John is 6'0" and 6'1" and so on, because those positions are contrary. However, I *can* assume the negations of all those claims - John is not 6'0", John is not 6'1", and so on - without ever deriving a set of contrary positions. You can assume all positive claims to be false (thus all negative claims true) and get nothing contrary, but you cannot assume all positive claims true (and thus all negative claims false) without your resulting set of claims being contrary, for John must be all heights at once, your hypothetical planet must be all colors at once, etc.
Effectively, what I'm getting at is that it is logically safe to assume "no claim is true" (the position of skepticism) until proven otherwise, but it is not logically safe to assume "every claim is true" (what would you even call that? naivety? I can't imagine anyone has ever held such a position). Since you are always making implicit assumptions about every claim, it is most rational to assume those claims false until you have evidence to the contrary - otherwise, you're picking and choosing which ones to assume
I find an agnostic approach infinitely more rational than a religious approach. Question everything. Nothing is ever entirely certain (though there are some things very strongly suggested by evidence, i.e. the laws of gravity, or things that are very safe to assume, i.e. the rules of logic).
And before some grammar Nazi finds this, yes, I just noticed that I used "i.e." where I should have used "e.g." So sue me.
I think you're confusing atheist and agnostic, the latter being the logical default position, since there's no proof God doesn't exist either.
I'm not confusing them - that's my very point.
The opposite of religious is not atheist, it's agnostic. Religious people believe "[This] is so. Period. End of story." Agnostic people say "I'm not entirely certain what is so. (But the evidence suggests [this], and I think it's safe to assume [that])."
Atheism, theism, or what have you, are all words describing a type of claim about the existence or non-existence of God(s). One can be religiously theistic, religiously atheistic, agnostically theistic or agnostically atheistic. Theism and atheism describe the claim at stake, namely, about the existence of God(s): religious or agnostic describe the attitude toward those claims (or any other claims for that matter).
I find an agnostic approach infinitely more rational than a religious approach. Question everything. Nothing is ever entirely certain (though there are some things very strongly suggested by evidence, i.e. the laws of gravity, or things that are very safe to assume, i.e. the rules of logic).
The quote of mine you're responding to is simply stating that the rational, agnostic default position, for anything, is to assume that a claim is false until there is reason to believe it is so. By the principle of bivalence (that if any claim is false, its negation is true), if you don't believe something is so, you're assuming (though not as a matter of faith; just a tentative assumption) that it's not so. Since an agnostic position is not to believe anything until there's good reason, an agnostic must necessarily assume that any claim about something's existence is false until they have reason to believe it true. So unless you have good reason to believe in God, don't.