Not TECHNICALLY true. Since "atheist" literally means "non-theist", or a person who rejects or doesn't believe in a system of dogmatic faith.
Here is where you are mistaken. To be theist is not just to be dogmatic or religious. It is to believe in God(s). That was my entire point of my post, that "religious" does not equal "theist" (see Buddhism for an example), and therefore, "non-religious" does not equal "atheist".
Blindly believing in [whatever], and [for some reason] believing in God(s) , are not the same thing. It just so happens that most people who believe in God(s) do so blindly.
The opposite of "a religious person" is not "an atheist".
What makes someone religious is their blind acceptance of some dogma. Faith defines religion - belief without or even contrary to evidence or reason. Many Buddhists are atheists and yet still religious people because they follow the doctrine of their religion without question.
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). I myself held this position for the majority of my life. But it's possible to be a non-religious theist, if you've got a sound argument for the existence of God.
Myself, I find that speaking of God makes perfect sense if you see it as speaking of the universe anthropomorphically. My beliefs are not fundamentally different from an atheist's, but suddenly I can understand theists statements about God in a way which not only means something, but quite often produces true statements on the theists parts. Seen in this way, a proof of God's existence is just a proof of the universe's existence, which is trivial as the universe is "all that which exists".
You're kidding? You're telling me that the idea is to reward lack of curiousity and thought?
Yes. They're rewarding it with a thought-provoking and educational experience.
Can you think of any better way to respond to dull-minded anti-educational attitudes than by giving them an educational experience that will capture their imagination?
The Witch invokes the Law as her excuse to put the human boy to death. The boy has violated the law and all who violate the law are worthy of death. Aslan therefore dies for someone else's violation of the law, but has himself violated none. Afterwards Aslan speaks of a deeper law that underlies the ones the witch has invoked.
You know, this is an important 'moral' of sorts that I completely missed, both reading the book as a kid and in watching the movie this weekend.
Lewis, in the last book of the series (The Last Battle), makes a point that even amongst the followers of Aslan's 'rival god' Tash, those who are good and just people still go to heaven; and those who do evil things in Aslan's name are punished just as those who follow Tash's evil directives. This points to the same message as the "Deeper Magic" that Aslan cites - it's not the written law that matters, and it's not in what god's name you do your deeds, but it's the deeds themselves that you do, as judged by the deepest, unknowable universal laws that matter. Call them "natural laws" or "God's true laws", they mean the same thing to me.
As a non-religious person I think I appreciate this message the most.
Calling Charles Manson a "mass murderer" is not libel, since he has been convicted of the crime in a court of law.
Manson didn't kill anybody himself. At least, none of the people the trail was about - he's claimed to have killed other people, but there's no actual evidence for that. Manson was certainly heavily involved in inducing many murders, and so is definitely a conspirator to murder, and I don't debate whether his sentence was justified - but as it stands, no evidence indicates that Manson himself personally killed anybody. He didn't swing any blade or pull any trigger, the girls did all of that, and since murder is usually considered *actually killing somebody*, not just conspiring to kill somebody who is then killed by someone else, by that metric Manson is not a mass murderer.
This reminds me of a bit near the end of the last book in the Ender's Game series.
Our protagonists are in a ship hovering above an alien planet and the unseen aliens below broadcast them a signal. Our protagonists are able to decipher what that signal represents - the chemical makeup of some kind of sedative - and give a collective "wtf?"
Finally they figure out - these things communicate chemically, almost "by smell" so to speak, and so their radio signals are signals for how to build the chemical they want to send into us. They see some scary new alien ship and their first thought is "sedate it", so they send us a sedative...
Meanwhile we sit here wondering WTF kind of moron would willingly build and take a sedative, not realizing that the only way the sender could conceive of us perceiving the chemical would be to ingest it. Us "looking at" the molecular structure to read it is to them like how reading the 1's and 0's of a JPEG file to see the picture would be to us. They expect that we'd manufacture and ingest the chemical the same way we'd expect someone to display a video signal.
Point being, to agree with you - a radio signal is just a radio signal. Unless you're sending some high-power aligned radio waves of the right frequencies (i.e. lasers or microwaves), it's not likely to do much harm on its own (or who knows - maybe the "harmless" radio waves we have flying all around are harmful to some extraterrestrials). To us, the only harm from a radio signal can do is communicate something to us, and if we or our systems then do something crazy with what that radio signal says, that's our own damn fault for being so gullible and/or stupid.
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but information will never hurt me."
I was just thinking about your comment, how this sort of resembles feudalism in a way, and it got me thinking. This is going to be a bit of a long tangent at first but it'll come back around in the end.
I'm writing a book about philosophy - a book on everything really, the politics I've been describing here are in there too - and in a portion of it I write a bit about religion. My final view on religion, as in deities and piety, gods and the worship of them, I call 'naturalist', as I believe that nature - not just like trees and the earth and all that, but the infinite sum total of the entire natural universe - is the only thing that meets the usual "omni" criteria of "God", and thus, proper piety (worship) is to act in accordance with nature, which is what most of the rest of the book is about (both what "God" is, and how you should "worship"; i.e. stuff about reality and morality, physics and ethics).
But after I come to that conclusion I've got this little bit about how this view fits in with "normal" types of religions, so I've got a little overview of religious classifications. It seems societies historically start out polytheist, with the notion that there are some things out there which are gods, and these gods are more or less just extremely powerful people with different wants and opinions and so on, who can be appeased in the same way a powerful person could, and that is how you worship these gods.
From there, people seem to split into two different divergences from this - either they go Monotheist and say No, there aren't a bunch of things out there that are gods, there is only ONE thing out there which is a God, and He has a specific plan and rules and these are absolute, and so the way to worship Him is to follow that plan and make sure that others also follow that plan. This kind of attitude tends to lead to crusades and holy wars and religious bigotry in its extremes.
Alternately, people go Animist and say No, there aren't just a couple of things out there that are gods, ALL things are gods, you and I and the rocks and the trees and animals, all things are gods. The way of worship associated with this is thus to respect all things and diminish yourself ('deflate your ego' so to speak), because you're really nothing more important than anything else. The problem with this is that taken to the extreme people wind up meditating themselves to death, and some such traditions even emphasize this as a goal, to become nothing and dissolve and return to the earth.
The view I described earlier encompasses BOTH of these opposite divergences from polytheism, both monotheism and animism. Yes there is only one god, and yes all things are that god. In effect it's atheist and pantheist at once - no particular thing is a god, but everything all together is god. The way of worship for this involves both following the one true way of the universe and encouraging others to do the same, but it also involves self-diminishment because you can't be certain that what you think is the true way really is, you're just going with your present best guess, so you've got to by considerate of the differences you encounter (both in the sense of being nice to people with differences from you, and actually consider their opinion, as you might learn something from it).
In effect, the scale of monotheist-polytheist-animist is shown not to be a linear scale at all but a loop, and the culmination points of both directions on the scale wrap around and converge at one point on the other side of the loop. This all relates to your comment about feudalism because I just realized there's striking parallels in types of government, just like these types of religion, which makes sense as both are really different types of dogma, declarations of what must be, one claiming to be supernatural in origin and the other just "because we said so".
Cultures seem to start out feudally, by which I mean there are a number of people who are rulers, kings or chieftains or what have you, the people follow and appease the
Occurs to me that you've just reinvented the idealized feudal system -- where people are largely responsible to and of themselves, and the higher-ups are only for when the locals can't deal with something. In turn, the higher-ups are responsible for protecting the lower levels (against outside forces, or from one another) and can be appealed to directly if the local level isn't doing the job.
I'm not familiar with this term "idealized feudal system". Is this a historically implemented political system or something entirely theoretical? Do you have any links to further information about it?
The main problem is this tends to fall apart when population pressures increase to the point where a lot of people's feet are routinely stepped on.
I wrote a big response to this and thought I had already posted it but I guess I must have just previewed instead... I'll just sum up for now that I think resistance to problems increasing with population density is actually one of the strengths of this system, as groups dynamically divide and resize and form meta-groups depending on the manageability of the present group numbers. I don't want to rewrite the whole thing I just wrote all over again right now... maybe later. But I'm fairly confident that it would hold up regardless of population density.
However... back in the days when "Trespassers Will Be Shot" was legally and socially acceptable, there was a good deal more personal incentive to do your bit, if only because no one else was going to protect you if you didn't.
That's a big part of why I structured it this way. I wanted to give people "direct" control over the enforcement of their own government, in the area where they most care about it (things that directly affect them), because that way they can't go "oh poo it's these people far away making bad decisions and I can't really make a difference in it." People's only direct involvement is in their most local affairs, which they are most likely to care about even without other motivation, because these are the people you interact with frequently (by definition, as the groups are self-selecting on that basis). So you *want* to have a say in whatever groups you're in, because you chose to participate in those groups. Voting in those groups is direct, and I imagine that most groups would tend to stay at a manageable size (because unmanageably large groups would split and come together under an umbrella meta-group), so it's just you and your peers deciding what's going to happen. There's a term I'm forgetting for the feeling people have that they have a say in and control of their government... that's what I think something like this will achieve.
But since the only *direct* control is of the local groups, which will by their nature tend to stay small, and of course are self-selected as well, you avoid the problem of the tyranny of the masses that very large democracies exhibit. You effectively get a pluralist model, as higher and higher up the hierarchy, the groups are more and more abstract and divided along particular large-scale interests, motives or ideologies, so it becomes like competition between political parties. Also, the way that officers are elected in this system, you wouldn't wind up with power-mongers on political career ladders trying to become President of the World. This is because there are no campaigns, at least in the sense that there is no subset of the population who are "candidates". Everyone in a group is a candidate for any of the officer's elections, and the only people who can vote in that group are the members of that group, who aren't allowed to vote for themselves. I'm thinking of using Condorcet voting but that's a technical detail that doesn't really matter much.
The point is that since no one is "announcing their candidacy" and having to get themselves put on a ballot - everybody automatically is - then someone like a quiet contemplative problem-solver who's really good at mediating people's problems, but would never think to "run for office" as we presently think of it, may be the people's most favored candidate for Councillor or something, and then voila, he is Councillor. If he really doesn't want to be and refuses to do the job, that'll probably lose him a lot of voter confidence and they'll elect someone else. And these elections are continuous where everybody just has their current preference-order registered and whoever wins according to the current selection of registered votes, is the current [whatever]. (This may sound like a lot of vote-recounting every time someone's opinion changes, but remember, these are small groups we're talking about, at every level). So you've got to keep doing a good job while you're in charge or else you're not in charge anymore. Automatic impeachment, automatic election.
The view that I take on this is what you might call "Populist Libertarianism".
On the traditional political-spectrum chart as taught in political science classes, you have two axis - one of economic freedom and one of interpersonal freedom. Turning the chart on its corner, the "left" is liberalism, high interpersonal and low economic freedom, culminating in a purely socialist direct democracy; on the "right" is conservativism, high economic freedom and low interpersonal freedom, culminating in a purely capitalist complete dictatorship. This is the normal left/right spectrum we usually hear about, and both extreme ends of it have obvious problems with them.
On the "top" is libertarianism, more of all freedoms (as nobody can tell anybody else what do do), culminating in anarchy; on the "bottom" is populism, less of all freedoms (as everybody has some control over what other people do), culminating in tyranny.
When I speak of "Populist Libertarian" I'm basically saying "moderate", but in a way most people don't think of it. People think of moderates in terms of the left/right schism but completely ignore that while we're maintaining some equilibrium between the left and the right, we're sliding gradually toward tyranny on both sides. Tyrannical liberalism becomes Stalin's communism, and tyrannical conservatism becomes Mussolini's fascism. The libertarians have a good point that we need to move away from such tyranny, but as you point out if you go too far in that direction you wind up in anarchy, which has just as many problems of an entirely different sort.
The solution I envision is a system which acknowledges that factions and groups will exist, and allows them to exist, and allows them to form larger groups of groups, and so on and so forth, but applies to every group or meta-group the exact same set of standards as are applied to individual people. The same rules that properly govern interaction between groups of people should apply equally well to groups of groups, and so on. The same kind of standards which apply to a parent running a household should apply to a president running a country, and vice versa. If they don't, there's a problem somewhere in there - either you're governing your household or your country wrong.
As for what exactly those common rules are, I believe in what are more or less the libertarian interpersonal ideals (you can do whatever you want, except do unto others what they don't want) with semi-socialist economic ideals - basically free-market capitalism overlaid with a 50% redistribution of wealth within the group, i.e. half of what anybody brings in is divided up evenly amongst the group. The specific way I encapsulate this is with two pairs of freedoms/responsibilities:
- the freedom of liberty (to do what you want) and the responsibility to respect the liberty of others
- the freedom of security (not to be done unto as you don't want) and the responsibility to respect the security of others.
- the freedom of public property (you can do what you want with anything that's not owned by someone else) and the responsibility to respect public property (not to depreciate its value, which also encompasses environmentalism)
- the freedom of private property (you can control the things you create or acquire) and the responsibility to respect private property (i.e. no theft or vandalism).
The first and third of these are the usual emphasis of liberals, while the second and fourth are the usual emphasis of conservatives. I think they're all equally important.
As to who actually enforces these laws, i.e. who "the government" is, each group has a directly elected triad of leaders, each tasked with a different area of responsibility. The Councillor's job is to oversee the internal working of this group, applying the rules to interactions between the people (or sub-groups, if this is a meta-group) within this group. The Governor's job is to oversee the interaction between this groups and other groups of the same level and act as a
Interestingly, if you take a fascist-like view that corporations and governments go hand in hand with one another (i.e. are similar types of entities), and apply libertarian principles of keeping governments to a minimum, then you get the conclusion that not only do the governments have to go, but so do the corporations. And that solves your problem right there.
Libertarianism only makes sense with its proclaimed ideas if it treats corporations that same as governments, and holds both to the same set of standards. This, to me, means that both should be kept as minimal as possible, by holding governments to the same standards of fiscal responsibility that shareholders hold their corporations, and holding corporations to the same standards of social responsibility that we hold governments. There shouldn't be a distinction made between the two because they ARE fundamentally the same - groups of people trying to combine their power to get their way, by manipulating interpersonal and economic interactions however they can get away with it. If we have a problem with one doing one thing, then we should have a problem with the other doing it too.
The only (and very important!) difference between this view and fascism is that fascists hold that neither corporations nor governments should have to be responsible to anyone but themselves, while this view holds that both should be (both socially and fiscally) responsible to everybody they interact with.
How would you know that space-time was denser? When you move your ruler inside of it, wouldn't the ruler's size fit the density of space, showing in the case of the basketball that can fit a house that it actually is the size of a house, since it can fit a house's worth of rulers inside? Since space is just a measure of distance and distance is a measure of chemical bonds strengths over space and whatnot, it seems like it would be hard to measure space to be any more or less than 1/1.
You'd measure it by extending a really big "ruler" or other straight line through one end of the denser region and out the other and noticing that your "straight line" really isn't; it bends at it travels between areas of different density, being refracted like light crossing an air/water boundary. We see this all the time, as things travelling in "straight lines" under their own inertia, even massless and extremely-high-velocity things like photons, bend their paths as they pass by "denser" areas in space, gravitational bodies.
I really like this density model of spacetime. It meshes will with my Spinocist views of the universe (that everything is one, infinite continuous thing). You don't even have to atomize it, thinking of the volume as being "filled" with infinitesimally small particles: it can just be a continuous mesh, grid, or matrix across the fabric of spacetime - think of it like an elastic piece of latex or something, with Planck-scale grid lines drawn on it - and the "less dense" areas are where the matrix has been stretched thinner, and the lines are further apart.
It does seem to present the problem of how to account for temporal dilation in relativity, but the GP poster already implicitly accounted for that in saying that it is the speed of light which changes with the density of spacetime, rather than time which changes and light staying constant. I'm not mathematically familiar with the details of relativity like this but intuitively it seems that you could say either is constant so long as you said the other was variable. So time is constant, but the speed at which changes can occur varies with the density of the space those waves are passing through.
Which raises another interesting point... by this model, everything would be compression waves in the fabric of spacetime itself (I actually entertained a theory very similar to this in my childhood and became fond of calling the substance of spacetime "the Fabric"). Any waves in air travel at the speed of sound. So in this model, everything must actually be moving at the speed of light, whatever that speed is given the density of the space it is moving through. So we would have to account for all these massive bodies which are moving at less than the speed of light.
I should get back to work soon, but I can't help but thinking that somehow "mass" is an effect of some sort of illusion that things are moving slower than light. I'm not sure what entirely would cause this illussion. I've also got a feeling that the quantum wave-nature of all things, and how it diminishes with mass (i.e. more massive things have smaller probability fields), is somehow related to this. I was reading Scott Adams' "God's Debris" last night, and it raises a hypothesis that all motion is due to the universe vanishing and coming back into existence again "an instant" later (an immeasurable instant as nothing exists to measure the passage of time while it has all vanished), but not exactly as it was, differing 'randomly' based on probability, and 'inertia' is just the probability of one thing to reappear more in a certain direction. This hypothesis says the speed of light is just the limit of how far away from its previous position a thing can appear. I've got a feeling that this all ties in to the density model of reality quite nicely somehow...
Have you tried blowing on the DVD, and wiggling it around a bit?
Have you tried buying a PS2/Gamecube?
This reminds me of an old Apple ad from '95 or '96...
A presenter at some conference is up on stage having trouble with his slideshow or whatever, apparently the computer's fault, and he blames his new OS, Win95. Various people in the crowd start yelling out advice to try and help him, "check your autoexec.bat", "no, try editing your config.sys" and so on and so on.
Meanwhile a voiceover says "when you want a computer that's easy to use, there's still only one choice..." after which someone in the crowd suggests "Get a Macintosh!".
I teach my daughter Buddhist mythology because I feel that mythology is an extremely important, but neglected part of society. In fact I think it's fair to say that the lack of a meaningful mythos is a large part of what's wrong with many societies today. However this is something that I teach at home, or occasionally at temple. I don't expect the local middle school to teach mythology, of any sort, along side of science coursework. What I do expect is that her school teach her something about other cultures & beliefs and that while some beliefs may seem silly, and potentially deluded, they are NOT a reason to persecute another human being.
I wasn't aware that Buddhism had a particular mythology associated with it. Most of the Buddhists I know are subscribers to many Buddhist philosophical ideals but do not follow it religiously, or even consider it a religion but rather "a philosophy" (i.e. they don't take it as irrefutable dogma, but rather, as a set of possibly questioned notions which they presently agree with for the most part).
From the rest of your message I get the impression that the mythology you speak of is more a set of parables than the typical western epic mythology of gods and heroes, or Zoroastrian/Abrahamic battles between good and evil. If that is so, or even if that's not entirely so but the parables are the parts that you emphasize to your children when you teach them this mythology, I have to agree with you that that sort of thing is a major lack of our modern culture, though I wouldn't quite say it that mythology in specific is what we lack. I think the missing piece is proper narrative illustration of the dry and abstract facts of reality and morality. Parabolic mythology (I think I just made that term up) is a good means of illustrating those lessons, but what could function just as well, and justifiably be taught in secular classrooms, bringing this kind of illustration to the masses, is a better teaching of history.
Tell the factual stories of our past as the interesting and engaging *stories* that they are, humanize them so the students understand that these things happened to real people, and *as a consequence of* other things happening, rather than just an unconnected series of meaningless dates and names as most history is taught today. Don't oversimplify the chain of cause and effect, and don't tell the stories with any particular moral agenda - try to tell them as completely and neutrally as possible - but make it a point to ask the students, "what do you think we can learn from these events?". Just make the connection that this isn't irrelevant dry stuff that happened and so what who cares, but that these are interesting true stories, and there are important lessons in there that are immediately applicable to today's life. And encourage the students to think about what those lessons might be.
It's very, very easy to get caught up in a strongly anti-theist thinking because, particularly in US, those mythos has little or no resonance with most people and the behavior of many of the Abrahamic Fundamentalists can be profoundly negative. I, Myself am fortunate to have stumbled upon the wittings of Mowlana Jalaluddin Rumi as a youth and the struggle to come to terms with and understand the powerful and beautiful writings of a devout Muslim did much neutralized my "All Abrahamics Must DIE" sentiment.
I'd like to recommend you also look up the Gospel of Thomas online if you can find it. It's one of the early Christian books that didn't make the cut for the Bible. I never really put much thought into examining Christian teachings too seriously once I got fed up with all the B.S., but this book made me realize that Jesus really was quite an astute philosopher, provided you can read through the flowery and hyperbolic language he uses. The site that linked me to that book, which also has a good deal of other interesting original notions on it, was the Reciprocality project.
Okay, since you're saying that there os no dogmatic way of defining reality (this is what I think you're saying), then why do we have to treat as dogma those axioms that those specific natural philosophers came up with? Why do we have to reat scientific naturalism as THE ONE AND ONLY form of science (don't take this as shouting)?
I'm not saying we should - in fact I explicitly said that if you can come up with problems with the scientific method, that they should be appropriately addressed and the method revised accordingly if need by. It's simply the best we've got right now, and has stood the test of time as the best we've had for a while.
Another nifty question I would like to get input from you on: Why do we have to tie religion to theism, and the existance of God? Is every religion theistic? Therefore my question implies: just because you're not a Christian doesn't mean you're exempt from any dogma. Therefore everybody has "crutches".
I agree, I'm not saying Christians or other monotheists are the only dogmatic people - someone who religiously follows the teachings of the Buddha or Confucius or believes in the ancient Norse or Roman pantheons is just as religious and dogmatic, and to the extent that that means they don't question things, such dogmas/religions are just as dangerous as any monotheistic religion.
However, it doesn't follow from that that EVERYBODY has crutches. Those who are open to questioning everything are not relying on crutches. However, nobody is a perfect runner, we all stop to rest at times, and sit where we are for a while or lean on something or even, when we are too exhausted or injured, let others carry us a bit... but that doesn't make us habitual crutch-users. It's not black and white, everyone can at least *try* to walk a bit, and nobody is a perfect runner, but those who use crutches all the time or just let others carry them are never going to develop the leg strength to be able to walk on their own. I'm just saying it's better to try to walk if at all possible, rather than just to use the crutches all the time.
My good freind, can you tell me how on earth you were capable of knowing that it's an elephant? Methinks it's rather quite like a walrus.
I'm not sure if it's an elephant or a walrus, or maybe both or neither; but I am sure that we're all feeling things in the same universe, and together we could give a better description than any of us alone. And if we could open our eyes and see our way around, instead of just fumbling in the dark, we still wouldn't see exactly the same thing, or see the whole universe all at once, but at least we'd know when we were both feeling different limbs of the same animal.
Sight is just a better means of exploring the universe than touch. If we had a better sense than sight, that'd be even better and I'd recommend its use. That's the analogy I'm making here: dogmatic religion is like fumbling around in the dark. You're getting some truths but they're all small and disconnected and you must fill in the gaps with your imagination, and given the differences in imagination that leads to wildly different descriptions of the same things. Natural philosophy like science is more like sight: you can take in a much broader picture far more quickly and get a lot more detail and accuracy out of it. It's still not perfect, it's not omniscience, but it seems to be the best sense that we've developed so far.
Excellent! A very worthy post, filled with worthy ideas. I must admit it's more eloquent than my usual fare.
Thanks. I was kinda sad nobody else replied to that, I wanted to see what kind of discussion it would generate, but I can easily see it getting lost in the thousands of messages in that thread.
Worthy in fact of becoming one of the few theists I have made "Friend"!
I'm curious... your post a few messages up implies that you are religious in some way or another ("If parents feel that teaching their children the myths of their religion is important, *as I do*"). But here you call me a theist (which, funny enough, it never occurred to me to call myself - I used to be a hardcore atheist, and by the time I'd adopted any kind of theist beliefs I'd stopped using labels on myself). So what are you, then, if a non-theist religious person... some sort of animist?
I really look forward to future discussions!
Me too. Added you to my friends list too, lets see what goes on:-)
Or say you wrap your finite universe into a closed loop, so there's no edge. Except, now you've added dimensions to the finite ones you already had - are they finite or infinite?
Why have I added dimensions? If I have a compact spacetime, there is no mathematical reason for me to embed it into some higher-dimensional space. None of our standard physical theories make use of any such embedding.
Because a circle is a two-dimensional figure, even though it has only one dimension or axis along its line; a sphere or taurus is a three-dimensional figure even though it only has two dimensions or axis' along its surface; and so on. In order for a continuum of some sort to be looped, for the two poles of some axis to wrap around on themselves, you have to define it as a figure it in a higher-dimensional space.
This is the problem of the "First Mover" so often discussed in philosophy, and what it comes down to - and what other philosophical problems about the limits of the universe, i.e. the extent of space - is that eventually you have to base your explanation on SOMETHING infinite and all-encompassing.
Say for example you've got some finite universe. Ok, what's at the edge, a sign saying "space ends, mind the drop"? And what's past that? It seems, and there is something beyond that. Is that thing infinite then? If not, you can keep repeating this question forever...
Or say you wrap your finite universe into a closed loop, so there's no edge. Except, now you've added dimensions to the finite ones you already had - are they finite or infinite? If you wrap that up into another loop, you've added more dimensions... and so on and so on infinitely. Infinite dimensions.
The same thing works if you use an "information", "simulation" or "dream" model, which is what your notion of God seems to fit into. God is something informationally beyond our universe, inaccessible to us except as He imposes himself into our universe the same way our universe is inaccessible to our computer programs except as we input data into those systems. The problem here is... simulations within our computers are finite. Our computers themselves are finite systems. But is our universe? Yeah? Ok then, is God's universe finite? If so, is the one outside of HIS finite? And so on...
At some point, you either have to say there's an infinite stack of nested "universes", an infinite number of looped dimensions, or just an infinite universe. You could say that the layer just above "ours" is the infinite one in the "stack" view of things, and call that "God", but that's not very useful to our explanation of anything, it doesn't add any new information for us to explain our universe, so by Ockham's razor, why bother postulating that?
Atheistic philosophers have used this to support the notion that God does not exist, or rather, that there's no reason to support any notion of God's existence and so by default we should not believe in God. I, however, side with people like Spinoza, in noting that an infinite universe - just our natural universe, if continued infinitely, nothing supernatural required - has all of the properties we normally attribute to god. Omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, un- or self-caused, un- or self-defined, infallible, invulnerable... an infinite universe meets the textbook definition of God (albiet without any specific personal characteristics attributed to it). So why postulate some God beyond the universe? Nature, the Universe, God - all the same thing. Elegant, harmonious, and infinite.
Then you have to ask by the second law of thermo, if no energy can be created or destroyed, where did the energy in the universe come from? There's no valid explanation for that.
The first law of thermodynamics (which is the one you're thinking of; the second law is the one about entropy) is actually a nice refutation of any sort of creation theory, including Big Bang variants that hold that that event was the "start of time."
According to the first law, energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Projected into the future, this means that no energy WILL ever be destroyed, i.e. it will continue to exist for ever. Projected into the past, this means that no energy HAS ever been created, i.e. it has existed since forever. Time is infinite in both directions. There is no end and there is no beginning; no destruction, and no creation. QED.
I object to this grouping of religion and philosophy, and I think your confusion thereof underlies the other problems with your post. Please don't think I'm attacking you - you've got a lot of things right in your post, mostly I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here, but I'll touch on a couple of points you've made along the way. The quoted bit above is just the most relevant.
Religion is an established claim of wisdom, a set of declarations and imperatives that are set out as "right". Philosophy is about the pursuit of wisdom, the quest to discover what is right, including notions of both reality and morality. The core of the philosophical discipline is to always question everything. Every hypothesis is only tentative, but you've got to go with something so you go with the best you have, and keep questioning and refining and coming up with better things.
Most importantly, philosophy is about META-questioning: figuring out how to ask and answer specific questions, either physical or ethical in nature. At some point some natural philosophers (i.e. people asking questions about physics, as opposed to questions about ethics) came up with some axioms about reason and observation that provided a really efficient and reliable way of asking and answering physical questions about reality. These became the scientific method, and what was then called "natural philosophy" we now just call science.
Religion, on the other hand, is not in contrast to science but in contrast to philosophy, because it is about dogma, authority, and NOT questioning things. Religion is about taking some set of specific things on faith, while philosophy is a personal quest for what things must be taken on faith to support everything else, e.g. the axioms underlying the scientific method. In this you are right, that science is a sort of "belief system", but it goes far deeper than religious belief systems, and by "real scientists" (not just scientists by profession, but, those most like the "natural philosophers" from whom their discipline derives), those axioms of the scientific method are still in theory quite questionable, if you can come up with anything to question of them (i.e. if you could show something both being and not-being in the same manner at the same time then you could call into question the Law of Non-Contradiction). These two, religion and philosophy, are not in absolute conflict within any individual: a person may be philosophical and question some things, but be religion and unquestioning about others; witness scientists who doggedly question the nature of reality but turn to religion as a basis for their morality.
Unfortunately, ethical/moral philosophers have yet to come to popular consensus on anything resembling a "scientific method of morality" - which is not to say that science could answer moral questions, but that there may exist some objective method of answering ethical questions akin to how science answers physical questions. Personally I believe in something I call the "normative method" which is quite similar to a democratic court/jury system, coupled with a very small set of universally agreable abstract 'rights' (analogous to the axioms of the scientific method), and arrives at the tentative conclusions we call "ethical norms", which are what "laws" in the political/justice sense of the word (as well as other 'weaker' traditions and customs) are. But importantly, normative laws are just as tentative as scientific laws, and both can and should be questioned however possible! Some laws of both sorts are very well tested and need little qualification, i.e. that people should not kill other people, or that masses tend to attract one another in a certain way, etc... but even those have exceptions and are questionable in extenuating or extreme circumstances, requiring further and more refined scientific or normative laws to capture the actual nuances of nature - a task which is never complete.
You might be on to something there. It would not be the first time that people do exactly what they are told to do even though they know it's stupid in order to highlight that stupidity. Frequently, trying to explain to those in power that they are wielding their power wrongly just does not work; they need to see the consequences of their actions before they realise they have made a mistake.
The problem is, the more hypocritical power-holders will often blame their subordinates FOR carrying out their orders as told, when they were so obviously stupid - I mean, what else are they being paid for if not to catch mistakes like that? They're the specialists in their field, they should know better than their superiors.
Of course like you said, if a subordinate actually SAYS "That's a stupid idea that's going to cause lots of problems for both of us", the superiors don't much like hearing that either. It puts the subordinates in a catch-22... do as you're told, damn the consequences, and take the blame when things go wrong, or don't do as you're told and be punished for insubordination.
I've had some bosses like this. I have no illusions that people in politics are any better.
That's like saying you're a liberal conservative. Populism and libertarianism are traditionally seen as opposite poles on a two-axis political scale, same way liberal and conservative are the poles of the other axis of that scale.
I think the term you're looking for is "moderate".
(Or maybe you meant you're a libertarian leaning toward the populist side of libertarianism, i.e. a moderate libertarian? Same way a "liberal conservative" might mean a moderate conservative).
Both my old Aladdin soundtrack tape and the MP3 version I recently acquired (which is clearly from CD and not tape judging by quality) contain the cut-off-your-hand line, so it certainly made it out there on some form of media...
The other advantages you listed are substantial, but not this one I'm afraid. Google's searches are already on the order of 0.2 seconds. I can't imagine anyone "on the margin" switching to MS because they get their results in 0.002 seconds plus download time rather than 0.2 seconds plus download time. I could be wrong though: Are there people who do rapid searches in succession and can process the data from those searches at that speed?
It doesn't matter whether MSN search is perceptively faster than Google search or not.
What matters is that, if you've got the difference you describe there, Microsoft can legally and truthfully claim "NEW Turbo-Charged® MSN Search 3000 - up to ONE HUNDRED TIMES FASTER than Google!" And users will buy into the marketing B.S.
You have no idea (actually most of you probably do have some idea) how often I have clueless family members tell me they need a new computer because "the internet is so slow on this one", and when I ask them about what kind of connection they're using I find out it's dial-up. The computer is not the limiting factor there, but surely, getting a faster one will compensate for that slow connection right?
It's the same reason people most people buy cars that have so-and-so much horsepower or some other statistic - to most drivers those numbers don't really mean anything, they just sound good when you're comparison shopping.
There's a lot of information out there and most people don't have the time or inclination to learn even enough to filter the useful data from the B.S., and so they just read what's in 72-point bold capital red text and believe that, cause "why not? That's as good as anything to base a judgement off of, and somebody who knows more than me obviously thought it important enough to shove in my face."
Slashdot Mirror
Not TECHNICALLY true. Since "atheist" literally means "non-theist", or a person who rejects or doesn't believe in a system of dogmatic faith.
Here is where you are mistaken. To be theist is not just to be dogmatic or religious. It is to believe in God(s). That was my entire point of my post, that "religious" does not equal "theist" (see Buddhism for an example), and therefore, "non-religious" does not equal "atheist".
Blindly believing in [whatever], and [for some reason] believing in God(s) , are not the same thing. It just so happens that most people who believe in God(s) do so blindly.
The opposite of "a religious person" is not "an atheist".
What makes someone religious is their blind acceptance of some dogma. Faith defines religion - belief without or even contrary to evidence or reason. Many Buddhists are atheists and yet still religious people because they follow the doctrine of their religion without question.
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). I myself held this position for the majority of my life. But it's possible to be a non-religious theist, if you've got a sound argument for the existence of God.
Myself, I find that speaking of God makes perfect sense if you see it as speaking of the universe anthropomorphically. My beliefs are not fundamentally different from an atheist's, but suddenly I can understand theists statements about God in a way which not only means something, but quite often produces true statements on the theists parts. Seen in this way, a proof of God's existence is just a proof of the universe's existence, which is trivial as the universe is "all that which exists".
You're kidding? You're telling me that the idea is to reward lack of curiousity and thought?
Yes. They're rewarding it with a thought-provoking and educational experience.
Can you think of any better way to respond to dull-minded anti-educational attitudes than by giving them an educational experience that will capture their imagination?
The Witch invokes the Law as her excuse to put the human boy to death. The boy has violated the law and all who violate the law are worthy of death. Aslan therefore dies for someone else's violation of the law, but has himself violated none. Afterwards Aslan speaks of a deeper law that underlies the ones the witch has invoked.
You know, this is an important 'moral' of sorts that I completely missed, both reading the book as a kid and in watching the movie this weekend.
Lewis, in the last book of the series (The Last Battle), makes a point that even amongst the followers of Aslan's 'rival god' Tash, those who are good and just people still go to heaven; and those who do evil things in Aslan's name are punished just as those who follow Tash's evil directives. This points to the same message as the "Deeper Magic" that Aslan cites - it's not the written law that matters, and it's not in what god's name you do your deeds, but it's the deeds themselves that you do, as judged by the deepest, unknowable universal laws that matter. Call them "natural laws" or "God's true laws", they mean the same thing to me.
As a non-religious person I think I appreciate this message the most.
Calling Charles Manson a "mass murderer" is not libel, since he has been convicted of the crime in a court of law.
Manson didn't kill anybody himself. At least, none of the people the trail was about - he's claimed to have killed other people, but there's no actual evidence for that. Manson was certainly heavily involved in inducing many murders, and so is definitely a conspirator to murder, and I don't debate whether his sentence was justified - but as it stands, no evidence indicates that Manson himself personally killed anybody. He didn't swing any blade or pull any trigger, the girls did all of that, and since murder is usually considered *actually killing somebody*, not just conspiring to kill somebody who is then killed by someone else, by that metric Manson is not a mass murderer.
This reminds me of a bit near the end of the last book in the Ender's Game series.
Our protagonists are in a ship hovering above an alien planet and the unseen aliens below broadcast them a signal. Our protagonists are able to decipher what that signal represents - the chemical makeup of some kind of sedative - and give a collective "wtf?"
Finally they figure out - these things communicate chemically, almost "by smell" so to speak, and so their radio signals are signals for how to build the chemical they want to send into us. They see some scary new alien ship and their first thought is "sedate it", so they send us a sedative...
Meanwhile we sit here wondering WTF kind of moron would willingly build and take a sedative, not realizing that the only way the sender could conceive of us perceiving the chemical would be to ingest it. Us "looking at" the molecular structure to read it is to them like how reading the 1's and 0's of a JPEG file to see the picture would be to us. They expect that we'd manufacture and ingest the chemical the same way we'd expect someone to display a video signal.
Point being, to agree with you - a radio signal is just a radio signal. Unless you're sending some high-power aligned radio waves of the right frequencies (i.e. lasers or microwaves), it's not likely to do much harm on its own (or who knows - maybe the "harmless" radio waves we have flying all around are harmful to some extraterrestrials). To us, the only harm from a radio signal can do is communicate something to us, and if we or our systems then do something crazy with what that radio signal says, that's our own damn fault for being so gullible and/or stupid.
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but information will never hurt me."
I was just thinking about your comment, how this sort of resembles feudalism in a way, and it got me thinking. This is going to be a bit of a long tangent at first but it'll come back around in the end.
I'm writing a book about philosophy - a book on everything really, the politics I've been describing here are in there too - and in a portion of it I write a bit about religion. My final view on religion, as in deities and piety, gods and the worship of them, I call 'naturalist', as I believe that nature - not just like trees and the earth and all that, but the infinite sum total of the entire natural universe - is the only thing that meets the usual "omni" criteria of "God", and thus, proper piety (worship) is to act in accordance with nature, which is what most of the rest of the book is about (both what "God" is, and how you should "worship"; i.e. stuff about reality and morality, physics and ethics).
But after I come to that conclusion I've got this little bit about how this view fits in with "normal" types of religions, so I've got a little overview of religious classifications. It seems societies historically start out polytheist, with the notion that there are some things out there which are gods, and these gods are more or less just extremely powerful people with different wants and opinions and so on, who can be appeased in the same way a powerful person could, and that is how you worship these gods.
From there, people seem to split into two different divergences from this - either they go Monotheist and say No, there aren't a bunch of things out there that are gods, there is only ONE thing out there which is a God, and He has a specific plan and rules and these are absolute, and so the way to worship Him is to follow that plan and make sure that others also follow that plan. This kind of attitude tends to lead to crusades and holy wars and religious bigotry in its extremes.
Alternately, people go Animist and say No, there aren't just a couple of things out there that are gods, ALL things are gods, you and I and the rocks and the trees and animals, all things are gods. The way of worship associated with this is thus to respect all things and diminish yourself ('deflate your ego' so to speak), because you're really nothing more important than anything else. The problem with this is that taken to the extreme people wind up meditating themselves to death, and some such traditions even emphasize this as a goal, to become nothing and dissolve and return to the earth.
The view I described earlier encompasses BOTH of these opposite divergences from polytheism, both monotheism and animism. Yes there is only one god, and yes all things are that god. In effect it's atheist and pantheist at once - no particular thing is a god, but everything all together is god. The way of worship for this involves both following the one true way of the universe and encouraging others to do the same, but it also involves self-diminishment because you can't be certain that what you think is the true way really is, you're just going with your present best guess, so you've got to by considerate of the differences you encounter (both in the sense of being nice to people with differences from you, and actually consider their opinion, as you might learn something from it).
In effect, the scale of monotheist-polytheist-animist is shown not to be a linear scale at all but a loop, and the culmination points of both directions on the scale wrap around and converge at one point on the other side of the loop. This all relates to your comment about feudalism because I just realized there's striking parallels in types of government, just like these types of religion, which makes sense as both are really different types of dogma, declarations of what must be, one claiming to be supernatural in origin and the other just "because we said so".
Cultures seem to start out feudally, by which I mean there are a number of people who are rulers, kings or chieftains or what have you, the people follow and appease the
Occurs to me that you've just reinvented the idealized feudal system -- where people are largely responsible to and of themselves, and the higher-ups are only for when the locals can't deal with something. In turn, the higher-ups are responsible for protecting the lower levels (against outside forces, or from one another) and can be appealed to directly if the local level isn't doing the job.
I'm not familiar with this term "idealized feudal system". Is this a historically implemented political system or something entirely theoretical? Do you have any links to further information about it?
The main problem is this tends to fall apart when population pressures increase to the point where a lot of people's feet are routinely stepped on.
I wrote a big response to this and thought I had already posted it but I guess I must have just previewed instead... I'll just sum up for now that I think resistance to problems increasing with population density is actually one of the strengths of this system, as groups dynamically divide and resize and form meta-groups depending on the manageability of the present group numbers. I don't want to rewrite the whole thing I just wrote all over again right now... maybe later. But I'm fairly confident that it would hold up regardless of population density.
However... back in the days when "Trespassers Will Be Shot" was legally and socially acceptable, there was a good deal more personal incentive to do your bit, if only because no one else was going to protect you if you didn't.
That's a big part of why I structured it this way. I wanted to give people "direct" control over the enforcement of their own government, in the area where they most care about it (things that directly affect them), because that way they can't go "oh poo it's these people far away making bad decisions and I can't really make a difference in it." People's only direct involvement is in their most local affairs, which they are most likely to care about even without other motivation, because these are the people you interact with frequently (by definition, as the groups are self-selecting on that basis). So you *want* to have a say in whatever groups you're in, because you chose to participate in those groups. Voting in those groups is direct, and I imagine that most groups would tend to stay at a manageable size (because unmanageably large groups would split and come together under an umbrella meta-group), so it's just you and your peers deciding what's going to happen. There's a term I'm forgetting for the feeling people have that they have a say in and control of their government... that's what I think something like this will achieve.
But since the only *direct* control is of the local groups, which will by their nature tend to stay small, and of course are self-selected as well, you avoid the problem of the tyranny of the masses that very large democracies exhibit. You effectively get a pluralist model, as higher and higher up the hierarchy, the groups are more and more abstract and divided along particular large-scale interests, motives or ideologies, so it becomes like competition between political parties. Also, the way that officers are elected in this system, you wouldn't wind up with power-mongers on political career ladders trying to become President of the World. This is because there are no campaigns, at least in the sense that there is no subset of the population who are "candidates". Everyone in a group is a candidate for any of the officer's elections, and the only people who can vote in that group are the members of that group, who aren't allowed to vote for themselves. I'm thinking of using Condorcet voting but that's a technical detail that doesn't really matter much.
The point is that since no one is "announcing their candidacy" and having to get themselves put on a ballot - everybody automatically is - then someone like a quiet contemplative problem-solver who's really good at mediating people's problems, but would never think to "run for office" as we presently think of it, may be the people's most favored candidate for Councillor or something, and then voila, he is Councillor. If he really doesn't want to be and refuses to do the job, that'll probably lose him a lot of voter confidence and they'll elect someone else. And these elections are continuous where everybody just has their current preference-order registered and whoever wins according to the current selection of registered votes, is the current [whatever]. (This may sound like a lot of vote-recounting every time someone's opinion changes, but remember, these are small groups we're talking about, at every level). So you've got to keep doing a good job while you're in charge or else you're not in charge anymore. Automatic impeachment, automatic election.
The view that I take on this is what you might call "Populist Libertarianism".
On the traditional political-spectrum chart as taught in political science classes, you have two axis - one of economic freedom and one of interpersonal freedom. Turning the chart on its corner, the "left" is liberalism, high interpersonal and low economic freedom, culminating in a purely socialist direct democracy; on the "right" is conservativism, high economic freedom and low interpersonal freedom, culminating in a purely capitalist complete dictatorship. This is the normal left/right spectrum we usually hear about, and both extreme ends of it have obvious problems with them.
On the "top" is libertarianism, more of all freedoms (as nobody can tell anybody else what do do), culminating in anarchy; on the "bottom" is populism, less of all freedoms (as everybody has some control over what other people do), culminating in tyranny.
When I speak of "Populist Libertarian" I'm basically saying "moderate", but in a way most people don't think of it. People think of moderates in terms of the left/right schism but completely ignore that while we're maintaining some equilibrium between the left and the right, we're sliding gradually toward tyranny on both sides. Tyrannical liberalism becomes Stalin's communism, and tyrannical conservatism becomes Mussolini's fascism. The libertarians have a good point that we need to move away from such tyranny, but as you point out if you go too far in that direction you wind up in anarchy, which has just as many problems of an entirely different sort.
The solution I envision is a system which acknowledges that factions and groups will exist, and allows them to exist, and allows them to form larger groups of groups, and so on and so forth, but applies to every group or meta-group the exact same set of standards as are applied to individual people. The same rules that properly govern interaction between groups of people should apply equally well to groups of groups, and so on. The same kind of standards which apply to a parent running a household should apply to a president running a country, and vice versa. If they don't, there's a problem somewhere in there - either you're governing your household or your country wrong.
As for what exactly those common rules are, I believe in what are more or less the libertarian interpersonal ideals (you can do whatever you want, except do unto others what they don't want) with semi-socialist economic ideals - basically free-market capitalism overlaid with a 50% redistribution of wealth within the group, i.e. half of what anybody brings in is divided up evenly amongst the group. The specific way I encapsulate this is with two pairs of freedoms/responsibilities:
- the freedom of liberty (to do what you want) and the responsibility to respect the liberty of others
- the freedom of security (not to be done unto as you don't want) and the responsibility to respect the security of others.
- the freedom of public property (you can do what you want with anything that's not owned by someone else) and the responsibility to respect public property (not to depreciate its value, which also encompasses environmentalism)
- the freedom of private property (you can control the things you create or acquire) and the responsibility to respect private property (i.e. no theft or vandalism).
The first and third of these are the usual emphasis of liberals, while the second and fourth are the usual emphasis of conservatives. I think they're all equally important.
As to who actually enforces these laws, i.e. who "the government" is, each group has a directly elected triad of leaders, each tasked with a different area of responsibility. The Councillor's job is to oversee the internal working of this group, applying the rules to interactions between the people (or sub-groups, if this is a meta-group) within this group. The Governor's job is to oversee the interaction between this groups and other groups of the same level and act as a
Interestingly, if you take a fascist-like view that corporations and governments go hand in hand with one another (i.e. are similar types of entities), and apply libertarian principles of keeping governments to a minimum, then you get the conclusion that not only do the governments have to go, but so do the corporations. And that solves your problem right there.
Libertarianism only makes sense with its proclaimed ideas if it treats corporations that same as governments, and holds both to the same set of standards. This, to me, means that both should be kept as minimal as possible, by holding governments to the same standards of fiscal responsibility that shareholders hold their corporations, and holding corporations to the same standards of social responsibility that we hold governments. There shouldn't be a distinction made between the two because they ARE fundamentally the same - groups of people trying to combine their power to get their way, by manipulating interpersonal and economic interactions however they can get away with it. If we have a problem with one doing one thing, then we should have a problem with the other doing it too.
The only (and very important!) difference between this view and fascism is that fascists hold that neither corporations nor governments should have to be responsible to anyone but themselves, while this view holds that both should be (both socially and fiscally) responsible to everybody they interact with.
How would you know that space-time was denser? When you move your ruler inside of it, wouldn't the ruler's size fit the density of space, showing in the case of the basketball that can fit a house that it actually is the size of a house, since it can fit a house's worth of rulers inside? Since space is just a measure of distance and distance is a measure of chemical bonds strengths over space and whatnot, it seems like it would be hard to measure space to be any more or less than 1/1.
You'd measure it by extending a really big "ruler" or other straight line through one end of the denser region and out the other and noticing that your "straight line" really isn't; it bends at it travels between areas of different density, being refracted like light crossing an air/water boundary. We see this all the time, as things travelling in "straight lines" under their own inertia, even massless and extremely-high-velocity things like photons, bend their paths as they pass by "denser" areas in space, gravitational bodies.
I really like this density model of spacetime. It meshes will with my Spinocist views of the universe (that everything is one, infinite continuous thing). You don't even have to atomize it, thinking of the volume as being "filled" with infinitesimally small particles: it can just be a continuous mesh, grid, or matrix across the fabric of spacetime - think of it like an elastic piece of latex or something, with Planck-scale grid lines drawn on it - and the "less dense" areas are where the matrix has been stretched thinner, and the lines are further apart.
It does seem to present the problem of how to account for temporal dilation in relativity, but the GP poster already implicitly accounted for that in saying that it is the speed of light which changes with the density of spacetime, rather than time which changes and light staying constant. I'm not mathematically familiar with the details of relativity like this but intuitively it seems that you could say either is constant so long as you said the other was variable. So time is constant, but the speed at which changes can occur varies with the density of the space those waves are passing through.
Which raises another interesting point... by this model, everything would be compression waves in the fabric of spacetime itself (I actually entertained a theory very similar to this in my childhood and became fond of calling the substance of spacetime "the Fabric"). Any waves in air travel at the speed of sound. So in this model, everything must actually be moving at the speed of light, whatever that speed is given the density of the space it is moving through. So we would have to account for all these massive bodies which are moving at less than the speed of light.
I should get back to work soon, but I can't help but thinking that somehow "mass" is an effect of some sort of illusion that things are moving slower than light. I'm not sure what entirely would cause this illussion. I've also got a feeling that the quantum wave-nature of all things, and how it diminishes with mass (i.e. more massive things have smaller probability fields), is somehow related to this. I was reading Scott Adams' "God's Debris" last night, and it raises a hypothesis that all motion is due to the universe vanishing and coming back into existence again "an instant" later (an immeasurable instant as nothing exists to measure the passage of time while it has all vanished), but not exactly as it was, differing 'randomly' based on probability, and 'inertia' is just the probability of one thing to reappear more in a certain direction. This hypothesis says the speed of light is just the limit of how far away from its previous position a thing can appear. I've got a feeling that this all ties in to the density model of reality quite nicely somehow...
This reminds me of an old Apple ad from '95 or '96...
A presenter at some conference is up on stage having trouble with his slideshow or whatever, apparently the computer's fault, and he blames his new OS, Win95. Various people in the crowd start yelling out advice to try and help him, "check your autoexec.bat", "no, try editing your config.sys" and so on and so on.
Meanwhile a voiceover says "when you want a computer that's easy to use, there's still only one choice..." after which someone in the crowd suggests "Get a Macintosh!".
MOD PARENT UP +1 LOL
I teach my daughter Buddhist mythology because I feel that mythology is an extremely important, but neglected part of society. In fact I think it's fair to say that the lack of a meaningful mythos is a large part of what's wrong with many societies today. However this is something that I teach at home, or occasionally at temple. I don't expect the local middle school to teach mythology, of any sort, along side of science coursework. What I do expect is that her school teach her something about other cultures & beliefs and that while some beliefs may seem silly, and potentially deluded, they are NOT a reason to persecute another human being.
I wasn't aware that Buddhism had a particular mythology associated with it. Most of the Buddhists I know are subscribers to many Buddhist philosophical ideals but do not follow it religiously, or even consider it a religion but rather "a philosophy" (i.e. they don't take it as irrefutable dogma, but rather, as a set of possibly questioned notions which they presently agree with for the most part).
From the rest of your message I get the impression that the mythology you speak of is more a set of parables than the typical western epic mythology of gods and heroes, or Zoroastrian/Abrahamic battles between good and evil. If that is so, or even if that's not entirely so but the parables are the parts that you emphasize to your children when you teach them this mythology, I have to agree with you that that sort of thing is a major lack of our modern culture, though I wouldn't quite say it that mythology in specific is what we lack. I think the missing piece is proper narrative illustration of the dry and abstract facts of reality and morality. Parabolic mythology (I think I just made that term up) is a good means of illustrating those lessons, but what could function just as well, and justifiably be taught in secular classrooms, bringing this kind of illustration to the masses, is a better teaching of history.
Tell the factual stories of our past as the interesting and engaging *stories* that they are, humanize them so the students understand that these things happened to real people, and *as a consequence of* other things happening, rather than just an unconnected series of meaningless dates and names as most history is taught today. Don't oversimplify the chain of cause and effect, and don't tell the stories with any particular moral agenda - try to tell them as completely and neutrally as possible - but make it a point to ask the students, "what do you think we can learn from these events?". Just make the connection that this isn't irrelevant dry stuff that happened and so what who cares, but that these are interesting true stories, and there are important lessons in there that are immediately applicable to today's life. And encourage the students to think about what those lessons might be.
It's very, very easy to get caught up in a strongly anti-theist thinking because, particularly in US, those mythos has little or no resonance with most people and the behavior of many of the Abrahamic Fundamentalists can be profoundly negative. I, Myself am fortunate to have stumbled upon the wittings of Mowlana Jalaluddin Rumi as a youth and the struggle to come to terms with and understand the powerful and beautiful writings of a devout Muslim did much neutralized my "All Abrahamics Must DIE" sentiment.
I'd like to recommend you also look up the Gospel of Thomas online if you can find it. It's one of the early Christian books that didn't make the cut for the Bible. I never really put much thought into examining Christian teachings too seriously once I got fed up with all the B.S., but this book made me realize that Jesus really was quite an astute philosopher, provided you can read through the flowery and hyperbolic language he uses. The site that linked me to that book, which also has a good deal of other interesting original notions on it, was the Reciprocality project.
Okay, since you're saying that there os no dogmatic way of defining reality (this is what I think you're saying), then why do we have to treat as dogma those axioms that those specific natural philosophers came up with? Why do we have to reat scientific naturalism as THE ONE AND ONLY form of science (don't take this as shouting)?
I'm not saying we should - in fact I explicitly said that if you can come up with problems with the scientific method, that they should be appropriately addressed and the method revised accordingly if need by. It's simply the best we've got right now, and has stood the test of time as the best we've had for a while.
Another nifty question I would like to get input from you on: Why do we have to tie religion to theism, and the existance of God? Is every religion theistic? Therefore my question implies: just because you're not a Christian doesn't mean you're exempt from any dogma. Therefore everybody has "crutches".
I agree, I'm not saying Christians or other monotheists are the only dogmatic people - someone who religiously follows the teachings of the Buddha or Confucius or believes in the ancient Norse or Roman pantheons is just as religious and dogmatic, and to the extent that that means they don't question things, such dogmas/religions are just as dangerous as any monotheistic religion.
However, it doesn't follow from that that EVERYBODY has crutches. Those who are open to questioning everything are not relying on crutches. However, nobody is a perfect runner, we all stop to rest at times, and sit where we are for a while or lean on something or even, when we are too exhausted or injured, let others carry us a bit... but that doesn't make us habitual crutch-users. It's not black and white, everyone can at least *try* to walk a bit, and nobody is a perfect runner, but those who use crutches all the time or just let others carry them are never going to develop the leg strength to be able to walk on their own. I'm just saying it's better to try to walk if at all possible, rather than just to use the crutches all the time.
My good freind, can you tell me how on earth you were capable of knowing that it's an elephant? Methinks it's rather quite like a walrus.
I'm not sure if it's an elephant or a walrus, or maybe both or neither; but I am sure that we're all feeling things in the same universe, and together we could give a better description than any of us alone. And if we could open our eyes and see our way around, instead of just fumbling in the dark, we still wouldn't see exactly the same thing, or see the whole universe all at once, but at least we'd know when we were both feeling different limbs of the same animal.
Sight is just a better means of exploring the universe than touch. If we had a better sense than sight, that'd be even better and I'd recommend its use. That's the analogy I'm making here: dogmatic religion is like fumbling around in the dark. You're getting some truths but they're all small and disconnected and you must fill in the gaps with your imagination, and given the differences in imagination that leads to wildly different descriptions of the same things. Natural philosophy like science is more like sight: you can take in a much broader picture far more quickly and get a lot more detail and accuracy out of it. It's still not perfect, it's not omniscience, but it seems to be the best sense that we've developed so far.
Excellent! A very worthy post, filled with worthy ideas. I must admit it's more eloquent than my usual fare.
:-)
Thanks. I was kinda sad nobody else replied to that, I wanted to see what kind of discussion it would generate, but I can easily see it getting lost in the thousands of messages in that thread.
Worthy in fact of becoming one of the few theists I have made "Friend"!
I'm curious... your post a few messages up implies that you are religious in some way or another ("If parents feel that teaching their children the myths of their religion is important, *as I do*"). But here you call me a theist (which, funny enough, it never occurred to me to call myself - I used to be a hardcore atheist, and by the time I'd adopted any kind of theist beliefs I'd stopped using labels on myself). So what are you, then, if a non-theist religious person... some sort of animist?
I really look forward to future discussions!
Me too. Added you to my friends list too, lets see what goes on
Or say you wrap your finite universe into a closed loop, so there's no edge. Except, now you've added dimensions to the finite ones you already had - are they finite or infinite?
Why have I added dimensions? If I have a compact spacetime, there is no mathematical reason for me to embed it into some higher-dimensional space. None of our standard physical theories make use of any such embedding.
Because a circle is a two-dimensional figure, even though it has only one dimension or axis along its line; a sphere or taurus is a three-dimensional figure even though it only has two dimensions or axis' along its surface; and so on. In order for a continuum of some sort to be looped, for the two poles of some axis to wrap around on themselves, you have to define it as a figure it in a higher-dimensional space.
This is the problem of the "First Mover" so often discussed in philosophy, and what it comes down to - and what other philosophical problems about the limits of the universe, i.e. the extent of space - is that eventually you have to base your explanation on SOMETHING infinite and all-encompassing.
Say for example you've got some finite universe. Ok, what's at the edge, a sign saying "space ends, mind the drop"? And what's past that? It seems, and there is something beyond that. Is that thing infinite then? If not, you can keep repeating this question forever...
Or say you wrap your finite universe into a closed loop, so there's no edge. Except, now you've added dimensions to the finite ones you already had - are they finite or infinite? If you wrap that up into another loop, you've added more dimensions... and so on and so on infinitely. Infinite dimensions.
The same thing works if you use an "information", "simulation" or "dream" model, which is what your notion of God seems to fit into. God is something informationally beyond our universe, inaccessible to us except as He imposes himself into our universe the same way our universe is inaccessible to our computer programs except as we input data into those systems. The problem here is... simulations within our computers are finite. Our computers themselves are finite systems. But is our universe? Yeah? Ok then, is God's universe finite? If so, is the one outside of HIS finite? And so on...
At some point, you either have to say there's an infinite stack of nested "universes", an infinite number of looped dimensions, or just an infinite universe. You could say that the layer just above "ours" is the infinite one in the "stack" view of things, and call that "God", but that's not very useful to our explanation of anything, it doesn't add any new information for us to explain our universe, so by Ockham's razor, why bother postulating that?
Atheistic philosophers have used this to support the notion that God does not exist, or rather, that there's no reason to support any notion of God's existence and so by default we should not believe in God. I, however, side with people like Spinoza, in noting that an infinite universe - just our natural universe, if continued infinitely, nothing supernatural required - has all of the properties we normally attribute to god. Omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, un- or self-caused, un- or self-defined, infallible, invulnerable... an infinite universe meets the textbook definition of God (albiet without any specific personal characteristics attributed to it). So why postulate some God beyond the universe? Nature, the Universe, God - all the same thing. Elegant, harmonious, and infinite.
Then you have to ask by the second law of thermo, if no energy can be created or destroyed, where did the energy in the universe come from? There's no valid explanation for that.
The first law of thermodynamics (which is the one you're thinking of; the second law is the one about entropy) is actually a nice refutation of any sort of creation theory, including Big Bang variants that hold that that event was the "start of time."
According to the first law, energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Projected into the future, this means that no energy WILL ever be destroyed, i.e. it will continue to exist for ever. Projected into the past, this means that no energy HAS ever been created, i.e. it has existed since forever. Time is infinite in both directions. There is no end and there is no beginning; no destruction, and no creation. QED.
If you dismiss religion/philosophy...
I object to this grouping of religion and philosophy, and I think your confusion thereof underlies the other problems with your post. Please don't think I'm attacking you - you've got a lot of things right in your post, mostly I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here, but I'll touch on a couple of points you've made along the way. The quoted bit above is just the most relevant.
Religion is an established claim of wisdom, a set of declarations and imperatives that are set out as "right". Philosophy is about the pursuit of wisdom, the quest to discover what is right, including notions of both reality and morality. The core of the philosophical discipline is to always question everything. Every hypothesis is only tentative, but you've got to go with something so you go with the best you have, and keep questioning and refining and coming up with better things.
Most importantly, philosophy is about META-questioning: figuring out how to ask and answer specific questions, either physical or ethical in nature. At some point some natural philosophers (i.e. people asking questions about physics, as opposed to questions about ethics) came up with some axioms about reason and observation that provided a really efficient and reliable way of asking and answering physical questions about reality. These became the scientific method, and what was then called "natural philosophy" we now just call science.
Religion, on the other hand, is not in contrast to science but in contrast to philosophy, because it is about dogma, authority, and NOT questioning things. Religion is about taking some set of specific things on faith, while philosophy is a personal quest for what things must be taken on faith to support everything else, e.g. the axioms underlying the scientific method. In this you are right, that science is a sort of "belief system", but it goes far deeper than religious belief systems, and by "real scientists" (not just scientists by profession, but, those most like the "natural philosophers" from whom their discipline derives), those axioms of the scientific method are still in theory quite questionable, if you can come up with anything to question of them (i.e. if you could show something both being and not-being in the same manner at the same time then you could call into question the Law of Non-Contradiction). These two, religion and philosophy, are not in absolute conflict within any individual: a person may be philosophical and question some things, but be religion and unquestioning about others; witness scientists who doggedly question the nature of reality but turn to religion as a basis for their morality.
Unfortunately, ethical/moral philosophers have yet to come to popular consensus on anything resembling a "scientific method of morality" - which is not to say that science could answer moral questions, but that there may exist some objective method of answering ethical questions akin to how science answers physical questions. Personally I believe in something I call the "normative method" which is quite similar to a democratic court/jury system, coupled with a very small set of universally agreable abstract 'rights' (analogous to the axioms of the scientific method), and arrives at the tentative conclusions we call "ethical norms", which are what "laws" in the political/justice sense of the word (as well as other 'weaker' traditions and customs) are. But importantly, normative laws are just as tentative as scientific laws, and both can and should be questioned however possible! Some laws of both sorts are very well tested and need little qualification, i.e. that people should not kill other people, or that masses tend to attract one another in a certain way, etc... but even those have exceptions and are questionable in extenuating or extreme circumstances, requiring further and more refined scientific or normative laws to capture the actual nuances of nature - a task which is never complete.
Anyway, that was a long sub-tangent, but the poi
You might be on to something there. It would not be the first time that people do exactly what they are told to do even though they know it's stupid in order to highlight that stupidity. Frequently, trying to explain to those in power that they are wielding their power wrongly just does not work; they need to see the consequences of their actions before they realise they have made a mistake.
The problem is, the more hypocritical power-holders will often blame their subordinates FOR carrying out their orders as told, when they were so obviously stupid - I mean, what else are they being paid for if not to catch mistakes like that? They're the specialists in their field, they should know better than their superiors.
Of course like you said, if a subordinate actually SAYS "That's a stupid idea that's going to cause lots of problems for both of us", the superiors don't much like hearing that either. It puts the subordinates in a catch-22... do as you're told, damn the consequences, and take the blame when things go wrong, or don't do as you're told and be punished for insubordination.
I've had some bosses like this. I have no illusions that people in politics are any better.
PS: I'm a populist libertarian.
That's like saying you're a liberal conservative. Populism and libertarianism are traditionally seen as opposite poles on a two-axis political scale, same way liberal and conservative are the poles of the other axis of that scale.
I think the term you're looking for is "moderate".
(Or maybe you meant you're a libertarian leaning toward the populist side of libertarianism, i.e. a moderate libertarian? Same way a "liberal conservative" might mean a moderate conservative).
Both my old Aladdin soundtrack tape and the MP3 version I recently acquired (which is clearly from CD and not tape judging by quality) contain the cut-off-your-hand line, so it certainly made it out there on some form of media...
The other advantages you listed are substantial, but not this one I'm afraid. Google's searches are already on the order of 0.2 seconds. I can't imagine anyone "on the margin" switching to MS because they get their results in 0.002 seconds plus download time rather than 0.2 seconds plus download time. I could be wrong though: Are there people who do rapid searches in succession and can process the data from those searches at that speed?
It doesn't matter whether MSN search is perceptively faster than Google search or not.
What matters is that, if you've got the difference you describe there, Microsoft can legally and truthfully claim "NEW Turbo-Charged® MSN Search 3000 - up to ONE HUNDRED TIMES FASTER than Google!" And users will buy into the marketing B.S.
You have no idea (actually most of you probably do have some idea) how often I have clueless family members tell me they need a new computer because "the internet is so slow on this one", and when I ask them about what kind of connection they're using I find out it's dial-up. The computer is not the limiting factor there, but surely, getting a faster one will compensate for that slow connection right?
It's the same reason people most people buy cars that have so-and-so much horsepower or some other statistic - to most drivers those numbers don't really mean anything, they just sound good when you're comparison shopping.
There's a lot of information out there and most people don't have the time or inclination to learn even enough to filter the useful data from the B.S., and so they just read what's in 72-point bold capital red text and believe that, cause "why not? That's as good as anything to base a judgement off of, and somebody who knows more than me obviously thought it important enough to shove in my face."