Nothing could be a supernatural event. That's my point - the distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" is a useless one because supposedly "supernatural" things couldn't possibly exist, as we can't even conceive of them! Everything is natural. I don't go around saying "that's natural, and that's natural, but oh, that phenomenon there is supernatural". I might say "oh that thing is happening, that other thing is happening, but wait WTF was that?" I don't dismiss the WTF-event as "supernatural" and beyond all understanding - it's just something I don't yet understand. Maybe I personally never will understand it (I'm not an infallible supergenius), but that doesn't make it beyond all possibility of understanding. That doesn't even say anything about the phenomenon at all - it say something about me and my present level of understanding. To call some unexplained thing "supernatural" and be done with is it just to give up on trying to understand the world.
This whole distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" seems to be an artifact of a time when human knowledge was seen as fixed and unchanging. "Natural" things were those we could (or did at that time) understand, which was a fixed set of observed phenomena, and everything else was "supernatural". But now that know that human knowledge can grow, that things we do not currently understand we can grow to understand later, the only things beyond the possibility of our understanding are things utterly devoid of meaning (i.e. nonsense), and so the category of "supernatural" things vanishes.
Your defintions of natural and supernatural phenomena are incorrect and lead you to your conclusion.
Those who argue in favor of naturalism use the terms in the way I am. Those who argue against use them differently. Thus, they are arguing past each other: most self-described naturalists are not denying that weird and unexplained (but not unexplainable) things happen any more than self-described supernaturalists are claiming that unobservable things happen. (Though of course there are some people who do both, and both are wrong). Now, I would argue that the naturalists' use of the terms is a better, more useful one, since the supernaturalists' use seems to mean simply "explained by current scientific theories", and thus what is natural and what is supernatural is constantly changing as science progresses, indicating that natural and supernatural are not properties of the phenomena itself but of our understanding; better terminology would be "understood" and "anomalous". And nobody disbelieves something just because they don't understand it - though they may discredit *unsubstantiated* claims that go against their present understanding. But actually show a self-described "naturalist" some phenomena not currently understood by science and he won't deny that it's happening; he'll just say he has no idea why or how it's happening, and then try to find out.
Christians don't just make claims about "something not sensibly describable is happening that no one, anywhere, ever, could tell is happening"... they make claims about things that happen in time and space. Pillars of fire, city walls falling down with trumpet blasts, walking on water, rising from the dead... all claims about real events. An atheists position is to deny that these events could be supernatural at all from the beginning, they MUST be explained by processes that are observable.
Some theists do try to place God outside the realm of proof or disproof by science. Many that I see posting here on Slashdot in fact. Similarly, religious philosophers often talk nonsense about transubstantiation and so forth - claiming that an utterly undetectable phenomenon is occurring. Those are the sort of people my earlier argument is levelled against.
Of course, many also make claims about testable phenomena - water literally turning into wine, bushes actually burning and voices coming out of them, etc. Those phenomena either occur or they do not. If a naturalist were to see such phenomena, he would be shocked and wonder what had caused them; which is to say, in response to what other phenomena do those phenomena occur? If you say that the "cause" of the phenomena is supernatural in the "not explained by science" sense, you're just saying that we don't know why it's happening - which the naturalist would agree to. If you say that the "cause" of the phenomena is supernatural in the sense that I have used the term (i.e. "nonsense"), then you're saying that there is no cause, that it just randomly happened. Some naturalists will buy that things randomly happen sometimes - just look at quantum physics - but the odds of some large scale effect like that just randomly happening are incredibly low, and we never ever see such things occur, and thus such claims require some sort of substantiation to be taken seriously.
Which seems to be the root of the "natural/supernatural" distinction you're making. Our present scientific theories do not included explanations of such phenomena because we never encounter such phenomena, so we can't examine them to *try* to explain them. If scientists came across these "supernatural" phenomena, they wouldn't deny that they were happening... they'd just say we have no idea why they're happening. That doesn't mean we *can't* have any idea why they're happening. But since we *don't* ever see such things, nobody believes that such things occur, except for people who for some reason take the authors of a very old book as infallible reporters who recorded the absolute truth; and so nobody comes up with theories
First things first: (A) seems like an axiom to me; I would like you to demonstrate or elaborate that unconceivable entities cannot exist, if possible.
To say that X is possible is to say that it could be the case that X. But if you don't even know what it would be like if X was the case, you cannot claim that it is possible for X to be the case. Basically, to say that [inconceivable entity] could possibly exist is not to say anything of meaning at all.
Say some inconceivable entity exists, and one day you encounter it. What would that be like? What would you see, hear, etc, to in any way be justified in saying you had encountered it? If you didn't see it, hear it, or anything... when in what way exactly did you "encounter" it? And if it's not possible (again, *in principle* if not in practice) to encounter (i.e. observe) something in some way, then how can you say it exists? What does that even mean?
I'm basically saying that utter nonsense is not possible because it's not anything at all. It's just words signifying nothing.
Ah, A college philosophy major in the process of matriculation!
Ah, a condescending Anonymous Coward.
I love philosophy, and I do not take issue with your attempt to defend your own personal views; however, I do detect a sent of conceit in your arguments. They would, by many people, be called sophomoric. You seem to discount the intelligence of a great many people, merely calling them irrational hoodlums. Now, this is not always a bad thing to do, I do it with creationists for instance, but... well, I think it is an unjustified dismissal in this case, but I'm going to criticize your actual arguments now.
I'm not afraid to call a bad argument a bad argument. I'm not calling the people who came up with those arguments stupid - plenty of bright people come up with bad arguments. I've come up with plenty of my own before.
1) Now, it seems to me you are using an overly broad interpretation of naturalism. The accepted public usage of the word, as used by the parent, and which you chose to ignore, would more properly be summarized by "The universe is nothing but Standard Model particles / vibrations in strings / Your favorite physics model."
That's not naturalism, that's "scientism", in the pejorative sense used by postmodernists and religious folk - the belief that our current model of science is completely correct. Maybe some people do hold that belief, but I don't think any even mildly introspective scientist, or any scientist working on the forefront of science where there are many as-yet-unexplained phenomena, would accept that view.
Certainly no one who believed that angles are real would claim that they are theoretically un-observable. [they look like people and teleport through space time. There I have conceived of it. How do they teleport through space time? I don't know, how do quantum entanglements manage to do it?] Therefore, according to you, belief in angles is compatible with a materialistic philosophy. Poppy cock.
Are these angels made of matter? That is, you can see, hear, touch, taste, smell them, etc? (Or at least some of them above?) Then their existence is compatible with a materialist philosophy. It is not compatible with our present scientific cosmology (that is, we don't think that such object actually exist), but they *could* exist and are not meaningless nonsense. But show me an angel or some evidence indicating their existence and then we'll talk. If you can't, but you've seen them yourself... I can't rightly tell you not to believe in them, but you can't convince me to believe in them without showing me something that might incline me to such beliefs. I am angel-agnostic... and fairy-agnostic, and leprechaun-agnostic, Loch-Ness-Monster-agnostic. These are meaningful ideas of objects that could exist. I just see no reason yet to postulate that they do. God, on the other hand, *if claimed to be something fundamentally beyond scientific proof or disproof* (as so many theists seem to claim), is a meaningless concept altogether. Other concepts of God may not be so meaningless. I am also Zeus-agnostic and Odin-agnostic and so forth.
Now let me look at that again. I read that as "something beyond the universe - is utter nonsense; because [the universe is] by definition, the sum of all that exists "
May I point out that many physicist postulate other universes beyond our own. So, starting from the assumption that physicists are not monumentally stupid, I deduce that they are not making the error you are accusing them of, therefore, they are not using your definition of universe. Therefor, your formal definition of universe is not the universally accepted definition (i.e. there exist other definitions;) ), therefore your argument is, again, semantical and vapid!
Fine then - substitute "multiverse" or whatever term you like for "that set of all physical phenomena", which in traditional (materialist) philosophical usage is called "the universe". My original argument
*sigh* Super-natural 1) Of or pertaing to existance outside the natural world 2) attributed to a power that seems to vilolate or go beyond natural laws; miraculous 3) Of or pertaing to a deity.
No where does it say un-observable. No one, but you, means un-observable when they say super-natural. Super-natural claims are historical claims. When someone says "and JESUS turned water into wine" they don't mean, "and nothing seemed to happend, but fweep happend" they mean, that what once, by any scientific test was water, became, by any scientific test, wine, and that there was no trick (Ie, jars switched) involved. Since water cannot become wine, something miraculous happend. Notice how my usage reflects the definition, and yours does not.
Please define what you (or they) mean by "natural". If "natural" means "explained by our scientific theories" or "scientifically testable by our current means" then any honest scientist will admit that there are "supernatural" things - things we have not presently explained, or implications of our present explanations that we cannot currently test. (Though they will likely contest the particular claims of unexplained phenomena like the one you mentioned). It is not logically impossible for water to turn to wine - we just have no way of explaining such a thing with our present theories. If you could show that that happened, and show that there really was no trick involved, scientists would be wowed and the entire world of science turned on it's head, new theories would have to be devised, or at least the old ones thrown out - but scientists would not call that supernatural, because to them, "natural" doesn't mean "explained" or "tested", it means "explainable" and "testable" in principle, which is the same thing as to say observable. We can watch it, note patterns in it, and come up with tentative ideas of what patterns follow from what other patterns in what ways, and see if those ideas hold up to further observation, which is all that science does.
See this post I just made elsewhere in this thread for more on this topic.
I think the problem here is that natural/supernatural is a poorly defined distinction.
"Natural" phenomena seems pretty universally (amongst scientists at least) to mean observable phenomena; things that could be empirically verified by someone, somewhere, somehow (not necessarily us, here, now). Given that usage, the very concept of "supernatural phenomena" seems empty - claiming that something is happening that no one, anywhere, in any way could possibly tell was happening, which means in effect that nothing is happening at all.
If supernaturalists mean "natural" phenomena in the sense of those things already fully explained by our present scientific theories... then I don't think any honest scientist would deny that "supernatural" things occur, by that definition. Sure, there's plenty of things that are not presently explained. And conversely, there are plenty of things that we take to be true as a part of accepting our current theories that we cannot yet test due to practical limitations (such as notions of various fundamental forces unifying at energy levels higher than we are able to produce) - but we COULD, in principle, test them, if we could overcome those practical limitations. That process of coming up with ways to test theories, and doing so, is a big part of what makes up science - the other part being modifying theories or creating new ones when we come up with data not previously accounted for.
The scientist would just say that the supernaturalist had a bad definition of "natural" - those "supernatural" things are really natural things, they're just presently unexplained or untested.
But that's all very philosophical and not really the point about whether or not "supernatural" things occur. If all superstitious and religious claims were reduced (as seems to be the trend more and more) to "something not sensibly describable is happening that no one, anywhere, ever, could tell is happening", I don't think any scientists or naturalists would have a problem with that - such beliefs have no implications at all and can't be used to any good in any argument, so there is no harm (and no benefit) in believing either way about them. Truth is irrelevant to an empty claim. But the point of contention is really over questions like "does wine turn to Christ's blood during Catholic communion?" Understood as an empirical question - that is, taking those words literally (and assuming that Christ's blood wasn't actually regular wine, but human blood of some sort) as meaning that the wine should lose it's wine-like qualities and take on blood-like qualities - the answer is a simple "No", as can easily be verified by observation. Understood in the weird pseudo-philosophical way that modern Catholics do, as "transubstantiation" (it retains all the same observable qualities, but it's essential 'substance', an undetectable thing devoid of any observable qualities, is transformed), the claim has been reduced to meaningless verbiage and we can all sigh a nice big "ok, whatever", because that claim mean nothing at all.
So back to atheism. If a theist can say what exactly he means by "God exists" - as in, say how the world would be different (in some way that someone somewhere could somehow detect someday) if it were the case that God did not exist - then God's existence becomes an empirical question which could be proven or disproven by science, eventually. Bear in mind though that you are defining what you mean by "God" by giving this description of how things would differ, so if you say for example merely "if God didn't exist, nothing would exist", you're just saying "God" is the universe. But most theists don't want to put God down on that level at all, so they say God is something beyond all observation and detection, who we can only believe in by faith - which makes a claim of God's existence (or non-existence) just as empty and meaningless a claim as that of transubstantiation. Ok, so some entity you call "God" exists which has no noticeable impact on the world - so?
Perhaps. I'd have to see the site first. In general I'd have to say I'm OK with it (and honored), but I want to know what it is I'll be associated with in the great immutable records of the interweb. Link me when you've got something mostly done and I'll give you an answer.
My coffee hasn't kicked in either, but I believe your statement is more accurately expressed as "...there are truths we can't prove", not "things we can't know". The difference being we can know them to a lesser degree of certainty. Scientific knowledge is not derived from proving hypotheses in logic systems (that would be Math), so Godel doesn't really apply. Scientific knowledge certainly exists, but almost all of it is unprovable in a logical sense. However, it is empirically established to a degree that to deny it would be irrational.
I don't even drink coffee so I'm probably even less lucid then you both right now, but I think your point is pretty close to the one that I was going to make in response to Just Some Guy. When I speak of knowledge I'm speaking of knowledge about the world, i.e. something with some implications upon our experience, where if it were true the world would appear in such a way, and if it were not true it would appear in such-and-such other way. Sentences like the Liar Paradox and the Godel Sentence (I'll admit that I'm not extremely familiar with the intricacies of Godel's theorem and how exactly it differs from the Liar Paradox) are meaningless inasmuch as they cannot be consistently assigned truth-values BECAUSE they do not make any claims about the world. Someone, I don't recall who at the moment, had a proposed resolution to the Liar's Paradox that went along those lines; you define truth for all simple sentences about objects in the world, then define truth for sentences about those sentences, and so on forever; nowhere in this process do things like the Liar Paradox or the Godel Sentence have truth defined for them, so they remain meaningless formal nonsense, neither true nor false.
Technically, I would call claims about supernatural entities meaningless in a similar, though somewhat opposite way: they're not making any claims about the world at all, if they're claiming that there are things wholly (in principle) undetectable, so it's not that they're false, they're just not true - because they are meaningless and no truth value can be assigned to them. (This is not to reject the principle of bivalence, merely to amend it's language slightly: for any meaningful proposition P, P is true XOR false). Since the supposed claim has no implications on anything, it would make no difference if it were true or false that such a thing existed; but since there's no internal problems just formally resolving the sentences that make such claims (like the Liar and Godel sentences), you can go ahead and call it true or false if you really want to and it will never have any implication on any of your reasoning, because you're not really saying anything of any meaning by such a claim. It as though you add a premise to some argument "...and also, something else is true". But without saying what that something else is, that premise will never come into play in any argument, because it it devoid of any content; it is a completely empty claim that says nothing. Claims about supernatural things (which to be perfectly clear, I mean things *unobservable in principle*; not simply unexplained, weird or paranormal phenomena) are just as empty.
Godel's theorem and the Liar's paradox and such prove that there are certain strings of words that cannot be assigned truth values. But that's OK with me, because those strings of words don't really say anything about the world, so they shouldn't be called true or false in the first place.
A philosophical position is not the same thing as an article of faith. While you could argue that a given philosophical position is not "proven", inasmuch as you (or perhaps someone besides yourself) may not be convinced by the arguments in it's favor, others may find the argument absolutely convincing such that any disagreement with it seems necessarily irrational.
I wouldn't call myself an atheist exactly (I'm a sort of pantheist), but I'm certainly a naturalist, so lets look at that first "article of faith" you listed:
1) that nothing exists but natural phenomena (matter)
I assume by "natural" or "material" phenomena, you (or they) mean observable phenomena, as in 'observable in principle'; you could by some means, perhaps not *yet* technologically possible, empirically tell whether or not that phenomena in fact occurred. That is, there is some observation you could make, some experiment you could do, that perhaps we are presently unable to do due to practical limits, which would tell you whether the sentence describing that phenomenon was true.
Given that that is what is meant by that, it seems patently absurd to conclude that anything non-natural exists (which is the same thing as to say that there are unknowable truths), on the basis that:
(A) Conceivability is possibility (and vice versa). Something is logically possible if and only if it could be conceived of; if you couldn't even conceive of what it would be for something to be the case, then you clearly have no idea what it even is that is in question, and so that non-idea cannot possibly be true.
(B) One can only conceive what one could, hypothetically, perceive. Consider someone asks you to conceive of "a foo upon a fweep". You have some rough notion of something placed on something else, but in order to conceive of these things, you have to ask "what is a foo?" and "what is a fweep?", and the descriptions which follow in response must ultimately cache out in some sort of perceptual terms (it looks like this, it sounds like this, it feels like this, etc). So to conceive of something, you must understand what it woud be to perceive it; thus, you could only conceive what you could (if such a thing existed) perceive. (As an aside, this does not mean that you must undertake the act of consciously imagining something every time you are asked to conceive of it; it is merely enough to note that "yes, that is a sort of perception I could have; now what about it?")
From A and B, it deductively follows that the only things logically possible are things which are perceivable (a.k.a. observable); so if "natural" or "material" phenomena are understood to be just such observable phenomena, as it seems they are, then it deductively follows that only natural/material phenomena are logically possible. From there, the atheist can perhaps derive his other two items of doctrine, but my point here is not to defend atheism; it is to defend philosophy from the accusation that it is mere baseless comparison of different articles of faith.
Now... maybe you can find some flaw in my argument there. Maybe my premises A and B are false somehow, and I've overlooked something. Maybe my understanding of "natural" or "material" phenomena is not correct, and those terms rightly denote something other than what I take them to. Maybe you can't find any flaws but you just don't buy it anyway. The point is, there is good, some (like I) would say irrefutable evidence to support such a position. I certainly consider such a thing quite easily proven; I have just done so. So to accept naturalism is hardly an article of faith; and it seems that something like atheism - or at least, something quite unlike the supernaturalist theism common to most modern major religions - logically follows from such a position. So the atheist (of a certain variety at least) has good grounds by which to claim that his position is not one of faith.
Now, there are some logical arguments for the existence of God as well, which I'm sure you're aware of; the ontol
It sounds to me that the passage you quoted is saying that the last-mile markets it the LEAST competitive part of it, but that "services" provided by ISPs like email hosting and such are a competitive market. That is, anyone can set up a little server farm and buy a high-speed line and provide good email service to compete with an ISP's bundled mail service. Heck, I buy my mail service on the cheap from my old, much smaller, local dialup ISP (so I can keep the same address I've had for 15 years), despite paying Cox for local service which comes with an email account that I never use.
But not just anyone can provide local connectivity; that service is concentrated in the hands of a few big telcos, the cable and phone companies.
The "Universal Bill of Rights", as "promulgated under the authority of the Universal Supreme Law; the Law of God; the Law of Nature; the Law of the Constitution; and the Law of Common Sense". Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Batman.
Think of it this way: A cooperative is indistinguishable from a corporation when looking at its production process (assuming they produce the same things), yet the basis on which they organise is entirely different, cooperation between equals vs. a hierarchical power structure.
Ah, I think this does nicely illustrate the differences in terminology here. I would class a cooperative as a type of corporation - it is still an incorporated entity, that is, many agents acting as one. (I'm not entirely sure, but I would suspect that many coops are in fact legally incorporated, so that they can legally act as one body). It's just an atypical sort of corporation, and you could (and I would) argue, a better sort of corporation. Likewise, I'd say that the sort of collective organisation I was describing in my previous post is still technically a state, it's just an atypical sort of state, and you could (and I would) argue, a better sort of state.
If you want to define a state (as I have often heard it defined) as a "monopoly on the legitimate use of force", then I would in some sense agree with an anarchist that there are no legitimate states. That is, no one individual or group can rightfully claim a monopoly on the legitimate use of force; if the use of force is legitimate in some circumstance to some end, then it doesn't matter who exercises that force. In this sense, there is no government; at least, no government apart from the people themselves. But in another sense, there is only one, supreme government, and that is the people themselves, who collectively have the right to act as the mediator of conflicts, so that the situation doesn't devolve into might-makes-right.
I like to call this sort of view "panarchism" (and yes I'm aware that there are several other different meanings of that word), both in the sense that it is rule-by-all (we are all the government), and as modeled after "pantheism", which I find it parallels. Pantheism is quite a bit like atheism, in that it claims there are no "Gods" above and beyond the physical world; but it differs in that the physical world itself could rightly be called "God", as it can fullfil all the same functions (ultimate arbiter of reality and morality). Likewise, panarchism in my sense of the word claims, like anarchism, that there are no legitimate "States" above and beyond the people; but that the people themselves acting collectively could rightly be called "the State", as they can fullfil all the same functions (judicial and executive powers).
There is no objection in mainstream Anarchism against the collective of individuals taking action against one who misuses his freedom to trample on the freedoms of others.
I'm not claiming there to be any objections to it, but rather there seems to be a lack of emphasis on it. That anarchism places no moral responsibility on individuals to form collective bodies and guarantee the peace and freedom of their fellow people.
Though even with that said, I have to ask you: if anarchism allows for a collective body to go about making sure people aren't trampling each other's rights, how is that at all different from a directly democratic libertarian society? (Setting aside possible ideological differences on what our rights are regarding property or possessions). I've always understood the difference between libertarians and anarchists, in this respect at least, to be that libertarians feel that there is a need for a state (a collective agent) with the very limited power of preventing one person from abusing others' rights, while anarchists want to do away with all states whatsoever. Which is what makes anarchy (in that sense, which seems to be the commonly understood sense of it) an untenable position - it devolves to a state of "might makes right" if everyone has to defend their rights with their own power alone, or if only popular people enjoyed defense by others.
If you have a collective agent which takes on the responsibility of ensuring universal justice for all (even the unpopular people) over some region, how is that not a state? It'd be a much nicer state than the ones we have now that think they can do anything they want, and it'd be a direct democracy instead of some convoluted representative or parliamentary system, but still, it's a state, so how is that anarchism? If you say it's because the power of enforcement lies in the hands of each and every individual, then I have to ask: Are those individuals acting just according to their own will (i.e. their own interpretation of who is in the right in the conflicts they are attempting to mediate), or in accordance with the democratically decided will (or interpretation) of the collective agent (the state)?
If the former, you've still got "might makes right" sort of anarchy - in any given conflict, a bunch of people may take opposite sides and defend the person they think is in the right from the other person and everybody who is defending him, and then you've basically got just gang warfare; me and my buddies versus you and yours. If the latter, where you have some sort of collective decision-making process to try to determine who is in the right in the conflict at hand, and then everyone acts in accordance with that decision to defend the person we've agreed is in the right, then you just have a directly democratic state wherein everyone is a member of the police force, and no particular "police men" have some special set of powers that others don't. And again, I'll agree that that's a much better sort of state than any of the kind we have now - a state where everyone is a member of both the executive and judicial, and there is no legislative because the law is nothing but a simple short explanation of people's rights; a state where the law exists solely to ensure the freedom of every individual and nothing more, but ensures it via placing a responsibility on the collective body as a whole.
But it's still a state, inasmuch as you have a collective agency, a body of people acting as one, which claims the authority to collectively decide who is right and who is wrong in any given conflict, and to collectively act in accordance with that decision to secure justice for all. So I fail to see how that is anarchy. If you don't have such a collective agency, then you certainly do have anarchy - but then my original critique of it, that it fails to properly ensure the mutual defense of everyone's rights, still stands.
I don't want to get bogged down debating what the actual state of advocacy for various positions in the U.S. is, so I won't argue with you there, but on a communism is only the left equivalent of fascism if your left-right axis is purely an economical one. Typically, if you're talking a two-dimensional political spectrum (as I am), then "left" positions are in favor of individualism on social matters (i.e liberal about people's lifestyle choices) and collectivism on economic matters (i.e. communism or socialism), while the "right" is in favor of individualism on economic matters (i.e. capitalism) and collectivism on social matters (i.e. enforced conservative morality).
In that sense, fascism is opposed to anarcho-socialism. Fascism doesn't have to be racist. It just has to be opposed to individual freedom, for the supposed good of society; and opposed to the regulation of markets, even for the betterment of society.
The notion that the truth can be determined by figuring out the most extreme positions you can think of, and then figuring out what is midway between them, and calling that "the truth" is completely absurd. The truth is what it is, regardless of what extreme examples we come up with or what the midpoint between them is.
What I'm saying is that if you have two genuinely opposite extremist positions, which are completely opposed to each other on every possible issue, then everything about which one side is right (in accordance with "what actually is", the objective truth), the other side is wrong, and vice versa. Thus, if you accept the well-founded arguments from both sides, and synthesize a new position which incorporates the conclusions of all those well-founded arguments, you will have a better position than either of the two extremes though, or that the issue is ever really completely collapsed down to a straight line where for every right answer one side has, they have a wrong answer. But that's why I'm saying you need to really look at what the full spectrum is to get a good idea of where the "moderate" truth really lies.
I'm not saying "whatever happens to be in the middle of some spectrum, lets call that the truth". I'm saying that what is actually the truth will be the true middle of any such false dichotomy, because if you're trying to cram everything down into a one-dimensional analysis, and that dimension is really a "straight line" (we're getting into tricky metaphorical territory here), then the true extremes will be each half right and half wrong. It's rare that any actual debate really is occurring between such perfectly opposed extremes.
For an example, lets say by hypothesis that the libertarians are right about everything (I don't think they are, but most people here are familiar with their use of the two-dimensional Nolan chart to argue their position, and how that contrasts with the typical one-dimensional political axis, so it makes a good example). There are then two variables in the issue at hand: whether personal freedom is universally good, and whether economic freedom is universally good, and the truth (by hypothesis, since we're taking a libertarian position for this example) is that both of those are true. There are thus precisely two ways of being wrong: you could believe that there are exceptions to the goodness of personal freedom, and you could believe that there are exceptions to the goodness of economic freedom. The libertarians would thus argue that the liberals are wrong in one way for being against universal economic freedom, and that the conservatives are wrong in another way for being against universal personal freedom; and that their "moderate" position, agreeing with half of one side and half of the other, is the truth.
Now, I don't agree that the libertarians are completely correct precisely because this two-dimensional model is a bit too simplistic. Populists or collectivists, who are opposite the libertarians on Nolan's two-dimensional spectrum, also have some good arguments regarding collective responsibility, while the libertarians argue almost entirely about individual freedom and see collective responsibility as antithetical to that. But once again, I see this as a false dichotomy: it is possible to support the position that individual freedom is a universally good thing, but that responsibility to the collective group is also a universally good thing; that one is necessary for the other; and that whenever one is understood to impinge on the other, you've made some sort of an error. This is thus another "moderate" position, on a simple two-dimensional chart, but if you were to actually model the issue with every variable as it's own axis, it would be in one corner of a four-dimensional chart, the same as the libertarians are in one corner of a two-dimensional chart, and not truly in the middle of a one-dimensional dichotomy. And it's possible that there are other variables that I'm completely missing, and there is another position which w
I'm not sure if you're accusing me of making a one-dimensional analysis, but if you are you'll note I did reference the Nolan chart which is a two-dimensional graph of positions on the political spectrum, and I'm fond of using a variety of higher-dimensional models myself. In general I tend to find wherever there is a long-standing controversy, the two "sides" in the end seems to be talking past each other, propounding issues orthagonal to each other; in other words, they're not arguing opposite sides on a single issue, but they're arguing different issues.
A classic political example of this is that some people who identify themselves as "conservative" because of economics issues, and argue against "liberals" because of those same economics issues, may actually agree with those liberals on social or interpersonal issues; and likewise, some "liberals" who argue against "conservatives" on social issues may agree with some of those same conservatives on economic issues. This breakdown of the left-right axis is what lead to the Nolan chart's two-dimensional spectrum.
Myself, I see each of the axis of the Nolan chart itself as a false dichotomy; there are in fact at least four dimensions that need plotting there. It's not just personal freedom and economic freedom; each of those axes can be broken down into two axes of individual freedom and collective responsibility. People who hold positions "against freedom" on some axis of the Nolan chart are often actually arguing for collective responsibility (that is, responsibility to society as a member thereof), which doesn't have to come at the expense of personal freedom and may in fact be required to ensure it. Consider how much personal freedom (as in "freedom from", negative liberty) anyone would have if there were no police forces to keep the strong from simply plowing over the weak; and then consider that those police forces can only exist if everyone is collectively responsible enough to support them. Anyone who supports the moderate social position that there should be police forces, but only to the extent of limiting some individuals from trampling over the freedoms of other individuals, is actually in favor of both individual social freedom and collective social responsibility.
You could be (and people often are) just one or the other, though the tenability of your position would be questionable; you could argue that everyone should be free to do anything and not have to be responsible for guarding the equal freedoms of others (like an anarchist), or that everyone should be mutually responsible for everyone else's social wellbeing but there should be very little personal freedom (like most collectivist religious types). I guess theoretically you could support neither - believing that no one should be socially free, that people must adhere to some particular strict code of behavior handed down from above, but that no one is responsible for ensuring that anybody else must do so. I guess some Christian Anarchists could hold that position, but it seems pretty rare and rather indefensible IMO.
So yes, the truth is multidimensional. I never said otherwise.
If you caught idiots such as them on an honest day, you will find that they intentionally push their 'views' farther 'right' than they themselves believe, as many foolish people cling to the idea that 'the truth is in the middle', and by pushing their slander they hope to shove the public to their view points
This is just a pet peeve of mine, to see people make claims like yours above, about people who seek the middle to find the truth. Quite often the truth is "in the middle", which is to say, both sides of such a divide often have very good points that all need consideration.
The fallacy people fall for is thinking that the spectrum of which the middle is correct is the spectrum of commonly espoused positions. It's not. It's the spectrum of POSSIBLE positions. You're absolutely right that the middle of what are presently called Liberal and Conservative positions is nowhere close to 'the truth', because what we call Liberals are actually fairly moderate. There's a much, MUCH further left position that could be taken (anarcho-socialism, the complete abolishment of all notions of government and property, where everyone is free to do and take what they please, regardless of it's effects on others) and between THAT position and it's farthest-right equivalent (fascism or corporatism, what I like to term "tyrano-capitalism" in contrast to anarch-socialism) that the moderate truth lies.
Right now, the most liberal position along the interpersonal axis (referring to the Nolan Chart here) that anybody is arguing is a fairly moderate position - that there should be governance of some sort, to keep people from doing certain kinds of bad things to each other, but that government should be very limited and generally allow people to do most things they want to do, so long as nobody gets hurt. So the "middle" between that and the hardcore social conservatives in this country is actually a very conservative position itself, because nobody is crazy enough to argue the far-liberal side, but plenty are crazy enough to argue the far-conservative side, so the public get a false impression of where the ends of the spectrum are and thus where the middle lies.
So overall I agree with what you're saying the conservatives are doing, but it's not foolish to believe that "the truth is in the middle". The middle just isn't what people think it is, because they don't tend to consider possible positions that people aren't screaming about all the time.
perhaps then those of us who do have pension funds should consider whether we care about having them ethically invested in decent organisations, or, have don't car and allow the the money to be put into alcohol/tobacco/gambling/munitions etc?
I seem to have missed a segue here. Where do alcohol/tobacco/gambling/munitions/etc factor in to the ethics of a corporation? You seem to be (maybe?) conflating two different senses of "ethics". There's the one sense where some consider activities concerning the above things immoral and thus supporting those who manufacture or trade in such things an "unethical" investment. Then there's another sense (which I thought we were talking about) where the behavior of the companies is ethical or unethical (as in, how they deal with other companies, governments, individuals, the environment; regardless of what it is they make or sell), and thus supporting those companies likewise ethical or unethical.
Personally I don't care what a company makes or sells (even if it's things I'd rather not use, or even sometimes things I'd rather others not use), so long as they're not abusing monopoly power, bribing governments, exploiting the law, screwing over their customers, dumping toxic crap into the environment, etc.
whilst I applaud your irony, as with the best irony there is truth in it. The snag is that we the public are responsible for rapacious control by the big corporates. Yes, really, because our pensions are invested in corporations and we demand the highest growth in our savings and most people have no interest in how the money is invested or the consequences of the pressures to perform placed on the investees. If a corporation fails to meet the demands of its shareholders, it is punished hard. The snag is that people most dependent on managed pension funds are those most likely to be hurt by their actions - people who can manage their own pensions are likely to be wealthy enough and high enough up the corporate ladder to have some say in their life.
You seem to be overlooking a certain chunk of the populace in your analysis here: people who don't HAVE pension funds, because they don't work for big corporations. It seems to me that THOSE are the kind of people out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere most likely to be hurt by this sort of decision.
Now let Achilles be a photon, and let the tortoise be a spaceship. The spaceship has an unlimited amount of fuel, and can keep up a constant acceleration for as long as the pilot likes. So, the pilot looks out his back window, and sees nothing. The photons behind him (well, the ones that started far enough away that is) can never catch him. It looks like there is a black hole following him. In fact, what with the equivalence of acceleration and gravity, from the astronaut's frame of reference, there IS a black hole following him! Of course, if he gives up trying to escape it, and just lets himself fall back into it, then he stops accelerating, the photons can catch up, and the black hole disappears.
Tangential question here:
If you were in a spaceship hovering just above the event horizon of a black hole (accelerating away from is just sufficiently to keep that distance) - and neglecting for the moment that you couldn't biologically survive that sort of acceleration - then looking out to your left or right, toward the "horizon" of the sphere contained within the event horizon, you would see in the distance your own self, however many light-seconds in the past it takes for light to travel around the black hole, correct? That is, very near the event horizon, any light reflecting off of you tangential to the event horizon would bend around the black hole and strike you from the other side. So you would see the image of your own spaceship smeared along the horizon (provided there weren't any other objects blocking the light from making that loop), while below you was an inky void and above you was a distorted image of the rest of the sky, compressed into a hemisphere. All that should be correct, right?
So my question is, under high acceleration in open space, such that you have this "acceleration black hole" behind you, would you see the same sort of effects? Look left or right or up or down (here saying the black hole is "behind" you rather than "below" you as above) or anywhere along the circle perpendicular to your line of motion, and you'd see the image of your own spaceship? If so, how does that work? And if not, why not?
I'll agree that it seems a far stretch of plausibility, both that religion would be eliminated from human society and that such magical replication technology would be invented, especially in the short time span portrayed in the Trek series. But that didn't seem to be the author's point in that critique. It seemed much more like a political than a science-fictional commentary - not "oh right, like that will ever happen, keep dreaming bud" but instead "this 'glorious future' is only glorious if you're a militant athestic commie-fascist".
However I will completely agree with you that the existence of their level of technology seems a bit discontinuous with the rest of their apparent level of development and social structure. Their transporters, replicators and holodecks seem to imply that they can create and manipulate mass and energy on a very fine-tuned level (and have AI advanced enough to do these things automatically and fill in the details as needed, as they can just request the holodeck to "create a chair. make these changes to it." etc as I recall from some Voyager episode). With that kind of tech it seems like the only limit they should have is available mass-energy to manipulate, and available computing power; and given enough of those, everything in the real would should be as manipulable as things in a virtual world would be. Replicate a huge biosphere in space, tell the computer to make landscape that looks like so-and-so, keep the weather like such, gimme a nice house designed to these specifications, and take a scan of those three hotties over there, make these modifications to them, and give me some repli-holo-copies of them who like to play in the field all day, dance naked in the rain and have hot foursomes all day long. Oh and computer, keep the house cleaned up, and feel free to repair any wear and tear that happens to by body - don't want to be getting old now, eh?
Heck, with that level of technology the computers should be able to interface directly with people's minds (scan the brain-state and interpret appropriately), so you wouldn't even have to ask the computer for something - you just will it to be and it's replicated for you. Combine that with their equivalent of the internet and you could get an interesting, non-collectivist sort of collective consciousness - you just wonder some question to yourself, the computer(s) check to see if anybody knows the answer to that and isn't keeping it a secret, and then tells you the answer. (I'm assuming the computers here are as they are portrayed in Trek; very capable systems that can accomplish pretty much anything processing task you ask of them, even creative ones as per the holodeck example in my first paragraph, but which have no independent will or motivation of their own). You wouldn't get a borg-like hive mind, but it would be like... like everything you ever thought was automatically blogged, except the things you didn't want to be public knowledge, and everybody had a direct neural link to a search engine which automatically scanned all these blogs for whatever you asked it to, and presented that information direct to your mind. You wonder a question, and "recall" an answer as though it was just something you had momentarily forgotten. It's just be a much faster, more comprehensive version of the sort of information exchange that we already do with the internet, and with journals and books before that.
Even in this fantastical setup, there would still be perfectly good reason to have spaceships going about and exploring: novelty! Exploration for it's own sake! Boredom is the bane of the well-off, and so these incredibly well-off people would be searching for new cultures, new phenomena, new anything to occupy their interest. You can only do so much creative art sitting at home by yourself before you need more inspiration, and you can only do so much science when your observations are only of a limited area - and what's left to do in such a utopia (besides satisfy your basic desires whenever they come up) other than art and sci
Consider redesigning the premise of the Federation, taking into account the critique that it's basically a fascist state.
Wow. Just wow. That was just... horrible.
The author of that critique seems to be some kind of religious conservative who takes offense at the fact that the Federation doesn't use money and talk about God all the time. Nevermind the fact that they have replicators and thus there is no scarcity and no need for money OR for communistic redistribution of wealth - just throw your garbage into the recycler and replicate whatever you want. In the Star Trek future, everything is as plentiful and reusable as air, and so there is no more need for any economic system to regulate it than there is to regulate the distribution of air here today. We don't have air banks or air credits because we don't need them, and neither to we strictly ration out the use of air in equal parts, because there's plenty of it and people can just take whatever they want. Economic systems are just a solution to problems of scarcity - where there is no scarcity, economics disappear.
But what really gets me is that the author seems to be somehow offended by the notion that you might have a nontheistic society. Not militantly atheistic - you don't see Federation people ridiculing anyone for their religious beliefs or trying to convince them that God doesn't exist. They just don't seem to have many such beliefs of their own. I'm sure there's still philosophy classes in their academies, and old religious are taught as history... but this whole thing sounds like some old polytheist complaining about our (contemporary, western) society because we don't sacrifice livestock to the local fertility gods. So? What's the problem if we don't? And what's wrong with "explaining away" disembodies entities as "energy beings" or whatnot, if that's a real explanation in the (fictional) science of Star Trek? Should they just ignore their scientific explanations so that there are still some mysteries to "wow" people?
He seems to think that without such mysterious religious doctrine, and without some sort of capitalist economic system, everybody would have nothing better to do than... well... join the military I guess. The series is set on a military ship, of course you're going to see military lifestyles there! But the ordinary people living planetside, in a world of plenty with no scarcity - what, you think they won't have anything interesting to do? What about art or science for it's own sake, not for profit? Taking up some occupation that you enjoy doing for it's own take, like cooking, designing clothes, writing software, etc? In a world of plenty, people don't *need* to be paid to do things - they'll do whatever they enjoy doing, and if something needs doing, someone who needs it done will do it, if someone who enjoys doing it hasn't done it already. Heck, what about just playing games for fun?
I have to wonder if this person's vision of heaven is of some job where he gets to work really hard and gets paid lots of money which he can then turn around and give straight to some incomprehensible mysterious God, who he spends all of his free time worshipping. Seems like it must take a serious lack of imagination not to be able to envision enjoying a life of luxury where money isn't needed, where everything is there free for the taking, and nothing is an indecipherable mystery that couldn't be solved with sufficient investigation. Wouldn't that be nice? It's a stretch of the imagination to think that it could practically happen, but in Star Trek the basic premise is that that HAS happened - and look at the awesome society that has followed. How could anyone think that such a society is bad?
Homer: (taunting Mr. Burns) What are you gonna do? Release the dogs? Or the bees? Or the dogs with bees in their mouth and when they bark, they shoot bees at you?
Homer:...Well go ahead, do your worst!
Burns: My worst, eh!? Smithers - release the robotic Richard Simmons!
Ah, small world indeed! I grew up in the town where Laurel Springs is headquartered (hence how I transferred there from their now-defunct on-site sister school, Mountain View, which I attended in 9th grade). Don't suppose you ever paid a visit to my fair little Ojai while you were working through Laurel Springs, did you?
Slashdot Mirror
What do you think would be a super natural event?
Nothing could be a supernatural event. That's my point - the distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" is a useless one because supposedly "supernatural" things couldn't possibly exist, as we can't even conceive of them! Everything is natural. I don't go around saying "that's natural, and that's natural, but oh, that phenomenon there is supernatural". I might say "oh that thing is happening, that other thing is happening, but wait WTF was that?" I don't dismiss the WTF-event as "supernatural" and beyond all understanding - it's just something I don't yet understand. Maybe I personally never will understand it (I'm not an infallible supergenius), but that doesn't make it beyond all possibility of understanding. That doesn't even say anything about the phenomenon at all - it say something about me and my present level of understanding. To call some unexplained thing "supernatural" and be done with is it just to give up on trying to understand the world.
This whole distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" seems to be an artifact of a time when human knowledge was seen as fixed and unchanging. "Natural" things were those we could (or did at that time) understand, which was a fixed set of observed phenomena, and everything else was "supernatural". But now that know that human knowledge can grow, that things we do not currently understand we can grow to understand later, the only things beyond the possibility of our understanding are things utterly devoid of meaning (i.e. nonsense), and so the category of "supernatural" things vanishes.
Your defintions of natural and supernatural phenomena are incorrect and lead you to your conclusion.
Those who argue in favor of naturalism use the terms in the way I am. Those who argue against use them differently. Thus, they are arguing past each other: most self-described naturalists are not denying that weird and unexplained (but not unexplainable) things happen any more than self-described supernaturalists are claiming that unobservable things happen. (Though of course there are some people who do both, and both are wrong). Now, I would argue that the naturalists' use of the terms is a better, more useful one, since the supernaturalists' use seems to mean simply "explained by current scientific theories", and thus what is natural and what is supernatural is constantly changing as science progresses, indicating that natural and supernatural are not properties of the phenomena itself but of our understanding; better terminology would be "understood" and "anomalous". And nobody disbelieves something just because they don't understand it - though they may discredit *unsubstantiated* claims that go against their present understanding. But actually show a self-described "naturalist" some phenomena not currently understood by science and he won't deny that it's happening; he'll just say he has no idea why or how it's happening, and then try to find out.
Christians don't just make claims about "something not sensibly describable is happening that no one, anywhere, ever, could tell is happening"... they make claims about things that happen in time and space. Pillars of fire, city walls falling down with trumpet blasts, walking on water, rising from the dead... all claims about real events. An atheists position is to deny that these events could be supernatural at all from the beginning, they MUST be explained by processes that are observable.
Some theists do try to place God outside the realm of proof or disproof by science. Many that I see posting here on Slashdot in fact. Similarly, religious philosophers often talk nonsense about transubstantiation and so forth - claiming that an utterly undetectable phenomenon is occurring. Those are the sort of people my earlier argument is levelled against.
Of course, many also make claims about testable phenomena - water literally turning into wine, bushes actually burning and voices coming out of them, etc. Those phenomena either occur or they do not. If a naturalist were to see such phenomena, he would be shocked and wonder what had caused them; which is to say, in response to what other phenomena do those phenomena occur? If you say that the "cause" of the phenomena is supernatural in the "not explained by science" sense, you're just saying that we don't know why it's happening - which the naturalist would agree to. If you say that the "cause" of the phenomena is supernatural in the sense that I have used the term (i.e. "nonsense"), then you're saying that there is no cause, that it just randomly happened. Some naturalists will buy that things randomly happen sometimes - just look at quantum physics - but the odds of some large scale effect like that just randomly happening are incredibly low, and we never ever see such things occur, and thus such claims require some sort of substantiation to be taken seriously.
Which seems to be the root of the "natural/supernatural" distinction you're making. Our present scientific theories do not included explanations of such phenomena because we never encounter such phenomena, so we can't examine them to *try* to explain them. If scientists came across these "supernatural" phenomena, they wouldn't deny that they were happening... they'd just say we have no idea why they're happening. That doesn't mean we *can't* have any idea why they're happening. But since we *don't* ever see such things, nobody believes that such things occur, except for people who for some reason take the authors of a very old book as infallible reporters who recorded the absolute truth; and so nobody comes up with theories
First things first: (A) seems like an axiom to me; I would like you to demonstrate or elaborate that unconceivable entities cannot exist, if possible.
To say that X is possible is to say that it could be the case that X. But if you don't even know what it would be like if X was the case, you cannot claim that it is possible for X to be the case. Basically, to say that [inconceivable entity] could possibly exist is not to say anything of meaning at all.
Say some inconceivable entity exists, and one day you encounter it. What would that be like? What would you see, hear, etc, to in any way be justified in saying you had encountered it? If you didn't see it, hear it, or anything... when in what way exactly did you "encounter" it? And if it's not possible (again, *in principle* if not in practice) to encounter (i.e. observe) something in some way, then how can you say it exists? What does that even mean?
I'm basically saying that utter nonsense is not possible because it's not anything at all. It's just words signifying nothing.
Ah, A college philosophy major in the process of matriculation!
... well, I think it is an unjustified dismissal in this case, but I'm going to criticize your actual arguments now.
;) ), therefore your argument is, again, semantical and vapid!
Ah, a condescending Anonymous Coward.
I love philosophy, and I do not take issue with your attempt to defend your own personal views; however, I do detect a sent of conceit in your arguments. They would, by many people, be called sophomoric. You seem to discount the intelligence of a great many people, merely calling them irrational hoodlums. Now, this is not always a bad thing to do, I do it with creationists for instance, but
I'm not afraid to call a bad argument a bad argument. I'm not calling the people who came up with those arguments stupid - plenty of bright people come up with bad arguments. I've come up with plenty of my own before.
1) Now, it seems to me you are using an overly broad interpretation of naturalism. The accepted public usage of the word, as used by the parent, and which you chose to ignore, would more properly be summarized by "The universe is nothing but Standard Model particles / vibrations in strings / Your favorite physics model."
That's not naturalism, that's "scientism", in the pejorative sense used by postmodernists and religious folk - the belief that our current model of science is completely correct. Maybe some people do hold that belief, but I don't think any even mildly introspective scientist, or any scientist working on the forefront of science where there are many as-yet-unexplained phenomena, would accept that view.
Certainly no one who believed that angles are real would claim that they are theoretically un-observable. [they look like people and teleport through space time. There I have conceived of it. How do they teleport through space time? I don't know, how do quantum entanglements manage to do it?] Therefore, according to you, belief in angles is compatible with a materialistic philosophy. Poppy cock.
Are these angels made of matter? That is, you can see, hear, touch, taste, smell them, etc? (Or at least some of them above?) Then their existence is compatible with a materialist philosophy. It is not compatible with our present scientific cosmology (that is, we don't think that such object actually exist), but they *could* exist and are not meaningless nonsense. But show me an angel or some evidence indicating their existence and then we'll talk. If you can't, but you've seen them yourself... I can't rightly tell you not to believe in them, but you can't convince me to believe in them without showing me something that might incline me to such beliefs. I am angel-agnostic... and fairy-agnostic, and leprechaun-agnostic, Loch-Ness-Monster-agnostic. These are meaningful ideas of objects that could exist. I just see no reason yet to postulate that they do. God, on the other hand, *if claimed to be something fundamentally beyond scientific proof or disproof* (as so many theists seem to claim), is a meaningless concept altogether. Other concepts of God may not be so meaningless. I am also Zeus-agnostic and Odin-agnostic and so forth.
Now let me look at that again. I read that as "something beyond the universe - is utter nonsense; because [the universe is] by definition, the sum of all that exists "
May I point out that many physicist postulate other universes beyond our own. So, starting from the assumption that physicists are not monumentally stupid, I deduce that they are not making the error you are accusing them of, therefore, they are not using your definition of universe. Therefor, your formal definition of universe is not the universally accepted definition (i.e. there exist other definitions
Fine then - substitute "multiverse" or whatever term you like for "that set of all physical phenomena", which in traditional (materialist) philosophical usage is called "the universe". My original argument
*sigh* Super-natural
1) Of or pertaing to existance outside the natural world
2) attributed to a power that seems to vilolate or go beyond natural laws; miraculous
3) Of or pertaing to a deity.
No where does it say un-observable. No one, but you, means un-observable when they say super-natural. Super-natural claims are historical claims. When someone says "and JESUS turned water into wine" they don't mean, "and nothing seemed to happend, but fweep happend" they mean, that what once, by any scientific test was water, became, by any scientific test, wine, and that there was no trick (Ie, jars switched) involved. Since water cannot become wine, something miraculous happend. Notice how my usage reflects the definition, and yours does not.
Please define what you (or they) mean by "natural". If "natural" means "explained by our scientific theories" or "scientifically testable by our current means" then any honest scientist will admit that there are "supernatural" things - things we have not presently explained, or implications of our present explanations that we cannot currently test. (Though they will likely contest the particular claims of unexplained phenomena like the one you mentioned). It is not logically impossible for water to turn to wine - we just have no way of explaining such a thing with our present theories. If you could show that that happened, and show that there really was no trick involved, scientists would be wowed and the entire world of science turned on it's head, new theories would have to be devised, or at least the old ones thrown out - but scientists would not call that supernatural, because to them, "natural" doesn't mean "explained" or "tested", it means "explainable" and "testable" in principle, which is the same thing as to say observable. We can watch it, note patterns in it, and come up with tentative ideas of what patterns follow from what other patterns in what ways, and see if those ideas hold up to further observation, which is all that science does.
See this post I just made elsewhere in this thread for more on this topic.
I think the problem here is that natural/supernatural is a poorly defined distinction.
"Natural" phenomena seems pretty universally (amongst scientists at least) to mean observable phenomena; things that could be empirically verified by someone, somewhere, somehow (not necessarily us, here, now). Given that usage, the very concept of "supernatural phenomena" seems empty - claiming that something is happening that no one, anywhere, in any way could possibly tell was happening, which means in effect that nothing is happening at all.
If supernaturalists mean "natural" phenomena in the sense of those things already fully explained by our present scientific theories... then I don't think any honest scientist would deny that "supernatural" things occur, by that definition. Sure, there's plenty of things that are not presently explained. And conversely, there are plenty of things that we take to be true as a part of accepting our current theories that we cannot yet test due to practical limitations (such as notions of various fundamental forces unifying at energy levels higher than we are able to produce) - but we COULD, in principle, test them, if we could overcome those practical limitations. That process of coming up with ways to test theories, and doing so, is a big part of what makes up science - the other part being modifying theories or creating new ones when we come up with data not previously accounted for.
The scientist would just say that the supernaturalist had a bad definition of "natural" - those "supernatural" things are really natural things, they're just presently unexplained or untested.
But that's all very philosophical and not really the point about whether or not "supernatural" things occur. If all superstitious and religious claims were reduced (as seems to be the trend more and more) to "something not sensibly describable is happening that no one, anywhere, ever, could tell is happening", I don't think any scientists or naturalists would have a problem with that - such beliefs have no implications at all and can't be used to any good in any argument, so there is no harm (and no benefit) in believing either way about them. Truth is irrelevant to an empty claim. But the point of contention is really over questions like "does wine turn to Christ's blood during Catholic communion?" Understood as an empirical question - that is, taking those words literally (and assuming that Christ's blood wasn't actually regular wine, but human blood of some sort) as meaning that the wine should lose it's wine-like qualities and take on blood-like qualities - the answer is a simple "No", as can easily be verified by observation. Understood in the weird pseudo-philosophical way that modern Catholics do, as "transubstantiation" (it retains all the same observable qualities, but it's essential 'substance', an undetectable thing devoid of any observable qualities, is transformed), the claim has been reduced to meaningless verbiage and we can all sigh a nice big "ok, whatever", because that claim mean nothing at all.
So back to atheism. If a theist can say what exactly he means by "God exists" - as in, say how the world would be different (in some way that someone somewhere could somehow detect someday) if it were the case that God did not exist - then God's existence becomes an empirical question which could be proven or disproven by science, eventually. Bear in mind though that you are defining what you mean by "God" by giving this description of how things would differ, so if you say for example merely "if God didn't exist, nothing would exist", you're just saying "God" is the universe. But most theists don't want to put God down on that level at all, so they say God is something beyond all observation and detection, who we can only believe in by faith - which makes a claim of God's existence (or non-existence) just as empty and meaningless a claim as that of transubstantiation. Ok, so some entity you call "God" exists which has no noticeable impact on the world - so?
I guess in this s
Perhaps. I'd have to see the site first. In general I'd have to say I'm OK with it (and honored), but I want to know what it is I'll be associated with in the great immutable records of the interweb. Link me when you've got something mostly done and I'll give you an answer.
My coffee hasn't kicked in either, but I believe your statement is more accurately expressed as "...there are truths we can't prove", not "things we can't know". The difference being we can know them to a lesser degree of certainty. Scientific knowledge is not derived from proving hypotheses in logic systems (that would be Math), so Godel doesn't really apply. Scientific knowledge certainly exists, but almost all of it is unprovable in a logical sense. However, it is empirically established to a degree that to deny it would be irrational.
I don't even drink coffee so I'm probably even less lucid then you both right now, but I think your point is pretty close to the one that I was going to make in response to Just Some Guy. When I speak of knowledge I'm speaking of knowledge about the world, i.e. something with some implications upon our experience, where if it were true the world would appear in such a way, and if it were not true it would appear in such-and-such other way. Sentences like the Liar Paradox and the Godel Sentence (I'll admit that I'm not extremely familiar with the intricacies of Godel's theorem and how exactly it differs from the Liar Paradox) are meaningless inasmuch as they cannot be consistently assigned truth-values BECAUSE they do not make any claims about the world. Someone, I don't recall who at the moment, had a proposed resolution to the Liar's Paradox that went along those lines; you define truth for all simple sentences about objects in the world, then define truth for sentences about those sentences, and so on forever; nowhere in this process do things like the Liar Paradox or the Godel Sentence have truth defined for them, so they remain meaningless formal nonsense, neither true nor false.
Technically, I would call claims about supernatural entities meaningless in a similar, though somewhat opposite way: they're not making any claims about the world at all, if they're claiming that there are things wholly (in principle) undetectable, so it's not that they're false, they're just not true - because they are meaningless and no truth value can be assigned to them. (This is not to reject the principle of bivalence, merely to amend it's language slightly: for any meaningful proposition P, P is true XOR false). Since the supposed claim has no implications on anything, it would make no difference if it were true or false that such a thing existed; but since there's no internal problems just formally resolving the sentences that make such claims (like the Liar and Godel sentences), you can go ahead and call it true or false if you really want to and it will never have any implication on any of your reasoning, because you're not really saying anything of any meaning by such a claim. It as though you add a premise to some argument "...and also, something else is true". But without saying what that something else is, that premise will never come into play in any argument, because it it devoid of any content; it is a completely empty claim that says nothing. Claims about supernatural things (which to be perfectly clear, I mean things *unobservable in principle*; not simply unexplained, weird or paranormal phenomena) are just as empty.
Godel's theorem and the Liar's paradox and such prove that there are certain strings of words that cannot be assigned truth values. But that's OK with me, because those strings of words don't really say anything about the world, so they shouldn't be called true or false in the first place.
A philosophical position is not the same thing as an article of faith. While you could argue that a given philosophical position is not "proven", inasmuch as you (or perhaps someone besides yourself) may not be convinced by the arguments in it's favor, others may find the argument absolutely convincing such that any disagreement with it seems necessarily irrational.
I wouldn't call myself an atheist exactly (I'm a sort of pantheist), but I'm certainly a naturalist, so lets look at that first "article of faith" you listed:
1) that nothing exists but natural phenomena (matter)
I assume by "natural" or "material" phenomena, you (or they) mean observable phenomena, as in 'observable in principle'; you could by some means, perhaps not *yet* technologically possible, empirically tell whether or not that phenomena in fact occurred. That is, there is some observation you could make, some experiment you could do, that perhaps we are presently unable to do due to practical limits, which would tell you whether the sentence describing that phenomenon was true.
Given that that is what is meant by that, it seems patently absurd to conclude that anything non-natural exists (which is the same thing as to say that there are unknowable truths), on the basis that:
(A) Conceivability is possibility (and vice versa). Something is logically possible if and only if it could be conceived of; if you couldn't even conceive of what it would be for something to be the case, then you clearly have no idea what it even is that is in question, and so that non-idea cannot possibly be true.
(B) One can only conceive what one could, hypothetically, perceive. Consider someone asks you to conceive of "a foo upon a fweep". You have some rough notion of something placed on something else, but in order to conceive of these things, you have to ask "what is a foo?" and "what is a fweep?", and the descriptions which follow in response must ultimately cache out in some sort of perceptual terms (it looks like this, it sounds like this, it feels like this, etc). So to conceive of something, you must understand what it woud be to perceive it; thus, you could only conceive what you could (if such a thing existed) perceive. (As an aside, this does not mean that you must undertake the act of consciously imagining something every time you are asked to conceive of it; it is merely enough to note that "yes, that is a sort of perception I could have; now what about it?")
From A and B, it deductively follows that the only things logically possible are things which are perceivable (a.k.a. observable); so if "natural" or "material" phenomena are understood to be just such observable phenomena, as it seems they are, then it deductively follows that only natural/material phenomena are logically possible. From there, the atheist can perhaps derive his other two items of doctrine, but my point here is not to defend atheism; it is to defend philosophy from the accusation that it is mere baseless comparison of different articles of faith.
Now... maybe you can find some flaw in my argument there. Maybe my premises A and B are false somehow, and I've overlooked something. Maybe my understanding of "natural" or "material" phenomena is not correct, and those terms rightly denote something other than what I take them to. Maybe you can't find any flaws but you just don't buy it anyway. The point is, there is good, some (like I) would say irrefutable evidence to support such a position. I certainly consider such a thing quite easily proven; I have just done so. So to accept naturalism is hardly an article of faith; and it seems that something like atheism - or at least, something quite unlike the supernaturalist theism common to most modern major religions - logically follows from such a position. So the atheist (of a certain variety at least) has good grounds by which to claim that his position is not one of faith.
Now, there are some logical arguments for the existence of God as well, which I'm sure you're aware of; the ontol
It sounds to me that the passage you quoted is saying that the last-mile markets it the LEAST competitive part of it, but that "services" provided by ISPs like email hosting and such are a competitive market. That is, anyone can set up a little server farm and buy a high-speed line and provide good email service to compete with an ISP's bundled mail service. Heck, I buy my mail service on the cheap from my old, much smaller, local dialup ISP (so I can keep the same address I've had for 15 years), despite paying Cox for local service which comes with an email account that I never use.
But not just anyone can provide local connectivity; that service is concentrated in the hands of a few big telcos, the cable and phone companies.
Google helpfully turned up that exact phrase on this site, from the "Temple of the Screaming Electron":
n ts/univrite.html
http://www.totse.com/en/politics/political_docume
The "Universal Bill of Rights", as "promulgated under the authority of the Universal Supreme Law; the Law of God; the Law of Nature; the Law of the Constitution; and the Law of Common Sense". Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Batman.
Think of it this way: A cooperative is indistinguishable from a corporation when looking at its production process (assuming they produce the same things), yet the basis on which they organise is entirely different, cooperation between equals vs. a hierarchical power structure.
Ah, I think this does nicely illustrate the differences in terminology here. I would class a cooperative as a type of corporation - it is still an incorporated entity, that is, many agents acting as one. (I'm not entirely sure, but I would suspect that many coops are in fact legally incorporated, so that they can legally act as one body). It's just an atypical sort of corporation, and you could (and I would) argue, a better sort of corporation. Likewise, I'd say that the sort of collective organisation I was describing in my previous post is still technically a state, it's just an atypical sort of state, and you could (and I would) argue, a better sort of state.
If you want to define a state (as I have often heard it defined) as a "monopoly on the legitimate use of force", then I would in some sense agree with an anarchist that there are no legitimate states. That is, no one individual or group can rightfully claim a monopoly on the legitimate use of force; if the use of force is legitimate in some circumstance to some end, then it doesn't matter who exercises that force. In this sense, there is no government; at least, no government apart from the people themselves. But in another sense, there is only one, supreme government, and that is the people themselves, who collectively have the right to act as the mediator of conflicts, so that the situation doesn't devolve into might-makes-right.
I like to call this sort of view "panarchism" (and yes I'm aware that there are several other different meanings of that word), both in the sense that it is rule-by-all (we are all the government), and as modeled after "pantheism", which I find it parallels. Pantheism is quite a bit like atheism, in that it claims there are no "Gods" above and beyond the physical world; but it differs in that the physical world itself could rightly be called "God", as it can fullfil all the same functions (ultimate arbiter of reality and morality). Likewise, panarchism in my sense of the word claims, like anarchism, that there are no legitimate "States" above and beyond the people; but that the people themselves acting collectively could rightly be called "the State", as they can fullfil all the same functions (judicial and executive powers).
There is no objection in mainstream Anarchism against the collective of individuals taking action against one who misuses his freedom to trample on the freedoms of others.
I'm not claiming there to be any objections to it, but rather there seems to be a lack of emphasis on it. That anarchism places no moral responsibility on individuals to form collective bodies and guarantee the peace and freedom of their fellow people.
Though even with that said, I have to ask you: if anarchism allows for a collective body to go about making sure people aren't trampling each other's rights, how is that at all different from a directly democratic libertarian society? (Setting aside possible ideological differences on what our rights are regarding property or possessions). I've always understood the difference between libertarians and anarchists, in this respect at least, to be that libertarians feel that there is a need for a state (a collective agent) with the very limited power of preventing one person from abusing others' rights, while anarchists want to do away with all states whatsoever. Which is what makes anarchy (in that sense, which seems to be the commonly understood sense of it) an untenable position - it devolves to a state of "might makes right" if everyone has to defend their rights with their own power alone, or if only popular people enjoyed defense by others.
If you have a collective agent which takes on the responsibility of ensuring universal justice for all (even the unpopular people) over some region, how is that not a state? It'd be a much nicer state than the ones we have now that think they can do anything they want, and it'd be a direct democracy instead of some convoluted representative or parliamentary system, but still, it's a state, so how is that anarchism? If you say it's because the power of enforcement lies in the hands of each and every individual, then I have to ask: Are those individuals acting just according to their own will (i.e. their own interpretation of who is in the right in the conflicts they are attempting to mediate), or in accordance with the democratically decided will (or interpretation) of the collective agent (the state)?
If the former, you've still got "might makes right" sort of anarchy - in any given conflict, a bunch of people may take opposite sides and defend the person they think is in the right from the other person and everybody who is defending him, and then you've basically got just gang warfare; me and my buddies versus you and yours. If the latter, where you have some sort of collective decision-making process to try to determine who is in the right in the conflict at hand, and then everyone acts in accordance with that decision to defend the person we've agreed is in the right, then you just have a directly democratic state wherein everyone is a member of the police force, and no particular "police men" have some special set of powers that others don't. And again, I'll agree that that's a much better sort of state than any of the kind we have now - a state where everyone is a member of both the executive and judicial, and there is no legislative because the law is nothing but a simple short explanation of people's rights; a state where the law exists solely to ensure the freedom of every individual and nothing more, but ensures it via placing a responsibility on the collective body as a whole.
But it's still a state, inasmuch as you have a collective agency, a body of people acting as one, which claims the authority to collectively decide who is right and who is wrong in any given conflict, and to collectively act in accordance with that decision to secure justice for all. So I fail to see how that is anarchy. If you don't have such a collective agency, then you certainly do have anarchy - but then my original critique of it, that it fails to properly ensure the mutual defense of everyone's rights, still stands.
I don't want to get bogged down debating what the actual state of advocacy for various positions in the U.S. is, so I won't argue with you there, but on a communism is only the left equivalent of fascism if your left-right axis is purely an economical one. Typically, if you're talking a two-dimensional political spectrum (as I am), then "left" positions are in favor of individualism on social matters (i.e liberal about people's lifestyle choices) and collectivism on economic matters (i.e. communism or socialism), while the "right" is in favor of individualism on economic matters (i.e. capitalism) and collectivism on social matters (i.e. enforced conservative morality).
In that sense, fascism is opposed to anarcho-socialism. Fascism doesn't have to be racist. It just has to be opposed to individual freedom, for the supposed good of society; and opposed to the regulation of markets, even for the betterment of society.
The notion that the truth can be determined by figuring out the most extreme positions you can think of, and then figuring out what is midway between them, and calling that "the truth" is completely absurd. The truth is what it is, regardless of what extreme examples we come up with or what the midpoint between them is.
What I'm saying is that if you have two genuinely opposite extremist positions, which are completely opposed to each other on every possible issue, then everything about which one side is right (in accordance with "what actually is", the objective truth), the other side is wrong, and vice versa. Thus, if you accept the well-founded arguments from both sides, and synthesize a new position which incorporates the conclusions of all those well-founded arguments, you will have a better position than either of the two extremes though, or that the issue is ever really completely collapsed down to a straight line where for every right answer one side has, they have a wrong answer. But that's why I'm saying you need to really look at what the full spectrum is to get a good idea of where the "moderate" truth really lies.
I'm not saying "whatever happens to be in the middle of some spectrum, lets call that the truth". I'm saying that what is actually the truth will be the true middle of any such false dichotomy, because if you're trying to cram everything down into a one-dimensional analysis, and that dimension is really a "straight line" (we're getting into tricky metaphorical territory here), then the true extremes will be each half right and half wrong. It's rare that any actual debate really is occurring between such perfectly opposed extremes.
For an example, lets say by hypothesis that the libertarians are right about everything (I don't think they are, but most people here are familiar with their use of the two-dimensional Nolan chart to argue their position, and how that contrasts with the typical one-dimensional political axis, so it makes a good example). There are then two variables in the issue at hand: whether personal freedom is universally good, and whether economic freedom is universally good, and the truth (by hypothesis, since we're taking a libertarian position for this example) is that both of those are true. There are thus precisely two ways of being wrong: you could believe that there are exceptions to the goodness of personal freedom, and you could believe that there are exceptions to the goodness of economic freedom. The libertarians would thus argue that the liberals are wrong in one way for being against universal economic freedom, and that the conservatives are wrong in another way for being against universal personal freedom; and that their "moderate" position, agreeing with half of one side and half of the other, is the truth.
Now, I don't agree that the libertarians are completely correct precisely because this two-dimensional model is a bit too simplistic. Populists or collectivists, who are opposite the libertarians on Nolan's two-dimensional spectrum, also have some good arguments regarding collective responsibility, while the libertarians argue almost entirely about individual freedom and see collective responsibility as antithetical to that. But once again, I see this as a false dichotomy: it is possible to support the position that individual freedom is a universally good thing, but that responsibility to the collective group is also a universally good thing; that one is necessary for the other; and that whenever one is understood to impinge on the other, you've made some sort of an error. This is thus another "moderate" position, on a simple two-dimensional chart, but if you were to actually model the issue with every variable as it's own axis, it would be in one corner of a four-dimensional chart, the same as the libertarians are in one corner of a two-dimensional chart, and not truly in the middle of a one-dimensional dichotomy. And it's possible that there are other variables that I'm completely missing, and there is another position which w
I'm not sure if you're accusing me of making a one-dimensional analysis, but if you are you'll note I did reference the Nolan chart which is a two-dimensional graph of positions on the political spectrum, and I'm fond of using a variety of higher-dimensional models myself. In general I tend to find wherever there is a long-standing controversy, the two "sides" in the end seems to be talking past each other, propounding issues orthagonal to each other; in other words, they're not arguing opposite sides on a single issue, but they're arguing different issues.
A classic political example of this is that some people who identify themselves as "conservative" because of economics issues, and argue against "liberals" because of those same economics issues, may actually agree with those liberals on social or interpersonal issues; and likewise, some "liberals" who argue against "conservatives" on social issues may agree with some of those same conservatives on economic issues. This breakdown of the left-right axis is what lead to the Nolan chart's two-dimensional spectrum.
Myself, I see each of the axis of the Nolan chart itself as a false dichotomy; there are in fact at least four dimensions that need plotting there. It's not just personal freedom and economic freedom; each of those axes can be broken down into two axes of individual freedom and collective responsibility. People who hold positions "against freedom" on some axis of the Nolan chart are often actually arguing for collective responsibility (that is, responsibility to society as a member thereof), which doesn't have to come at the expense of personal freedom and may in fact be required to ensure it. Consider how much personal freedom (as in "freedom from", negative liberty) anyone would have if there were no police forces to keep the strong from simply plowing over the weak; and then consider that those police forces can only exist if everyone is collectively responsible enough to support them. Anyone who supports the moderate social position that there should be police forces, but only to the extent of limiting some individuals from trampling over the freedoms of other individuals, is actually in favor of both individual social freedom and collective social responsibility.
You could be (and people often are) just one or the other, though the tenability of your position would be questionable; you could argue that everyone should be free to do anything and not have to be responsible for guarding the equal freedoms of others (like an anarchist), or that everyone should be mutually responsible for everyone else's social wellbeing but there should be very little personal freedom (like most collectivist religious types). I guess theoretically you could support neither - believing that no one should be socially free, that people must adhere to some particular strict code of behavior handed down from above, but that no one is responsible for ensuring that anybody else must do so. I guess some Christian Anarchists could hold that position, but it seems pretty rare and rather indefensible IMO.
So yes, the truth is multidimensional. I never said otherwise.
Yeah, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are REAL seekers of "truth". Uh-huh. Suure.
Who ever called them moderate?
If you caught idiots such as them on an honest day, you will find that they intentionally push their 'views' farther 'right' than they themselves believe, as many foolish people cling to the idea that 'the truth is in the middle', and by pushing their slander they hope to shove the public to their view points
This is just a pet peeve of mine, to see people make claims like yours above, about people who seek the middle to find the truth. Quite often the truth is "in the middle", which is to say, both sides of such a divide often have very good points that all need consideration.
The fallacy people fall for is thinking that the spectrum of which the middle is correct is the spectrum of commonly espoused positions. It's not. It's the spectrum of POSSIBLE positions. You're absolutely right that the middle of what are presently called Liberal and Conservative positions is nowhere close to 'the truth', because what we call Liberals are actually fairly moderate. There's a much, MUCH further left position that could be taken (anarcho-socialism, the complete abolishment of all notions of government and property, where everyone is free to do and take what they please, regardless of it's effects on others) and between THAT position and it's farthest-right equivalent (fascism or corporatism, what I like to term "tyrano-capitalism" in contrast to anarch-socialism) that the moderate truth lies.
Right now, the most liberal position along the interpersonal axis (referring to the Nolan Chart here) that anybody is arguing is a fairly moderate position - that there should be governance of some sort, to keep people from doing certain kinds of bad things to each other, but that government should be very limited and generally allow people to do most things they want to do, so long as nobody gets hurt. So the "middle" between that and the hardcore social conservatives in this country is actually a very conservative position itself, because nobody is crazy enough to argue the far-liberal side, but plenty are crazy enough to argue the far-conservative side, so the public get a false impression of where the ends of the spectrum are and thus where the middle lies.
So overall I agree with what you're saying the conservatives are doing, but it's not foolish to believe that "the truth is in the middle". The middle just isn't what people think it is, because they don't tend to consider possible positions that people aren't screaming about all the time.
perhaps then those of us who do have pension funds should consider whether we care about having them ethically invested in decent organisations, or, have don't car and allow the the money to be put into alcohol/tobacco/gambling/munitions etc?
I seem to have missed a segue here. Where do alcohol/tobacco/gambling/munitions/etc factor in to the ethics of a corporation? You seem to be (maybe?) conflating two different senses of "ethics". There's the one sense where some consider activities concerning the above things immoral and thus supporting those who manufacture or trade in such things an "unethical" investment. Then there's another sense (which I thought we were talking about) where the behavior of the companies is ethical or unethical (as in, how they deal with other companies, governments, individuals, the environment; regardless of what it is they make or sell), and thus supporting those companies likewise ethical or unethical.
Personally I don't care what a company makes or sells (even if it's things I'd rather not use, or even sometimes things I'd rather others not use), so long as they're not abusing monopoly power, bribing governments, exploiting the law, screwing over their customers, dumping toxic crap into the environment, etc.
whilst I applaud your irony, as with the best irony there is truth in it. The snag is that we the public are responsible for rapacious control by the big corporates. Yes, really, because our pensions are invested in corporations and we demand the highest growth in our savings and most people have no interest in how the money is invested or the consequences of the pressures to perform placed on the investees. If a corporation fails to meet the demands of its shareholders, it is punished hard. The snag is that people most dependent on managed pension funds are those most likely to be hurt by their actions - people who can manage their own pensions are likely to be wealthy enough and high enough up the corporate ladder to have some say in their life.
You seem to be overlooking a certain chunk of the populace in your analysis here: people who don't HAVE pension funds, because they don't work for big corporations. It seems to me that THOSE are the kind of people out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere most likely to be hurt by this sort of decision.
Now let Achilles be a photon, and let the tortoise be a spaceship. The spaceship has an unlimited amount of fuel, and can keep up a constant acceleration for as long as the pilot likes. So, the pilot looks out his back window, and sees nothing. The photons behind him (well, the ones that started far enough away that is) can never catch him. It looks like there is a black hole following him. In fact, what with the equivalence of acceleration and gravity, from the astronaut's frame of reference, there IS a black hole following him! Of course, if he gives up trying to escape it, and just lets himself fall back into it, then he stops accelerating, the photons can catch up, and the black hole disappears.
Tangential question here:
If you were in a spaceship hovering just above the event horizon of a black hole (accelerating away from is just sufficiently to keep that distance) - and neglecting for the moment that you couldn't biologically survive that sort of acceleration - then looking out to your left or right, toward the "horizon" of the sphere contained within the event horizon, you would see in the distance your own self, however many light-seconds in the past it takes for light to travel around the black hole, correct? That is, very near the event horizon, any light reflecting off of you tangential to the event horizon would bend around the black hole and strike you from the other side. So you would see the image of your own spaceship smeared along the horizon (provided there weren't any other objects blocking the light from making that loop), while below you was an inky void and above you was a distorted image of the rest of the sky, compressed into a hemisphere. All that should be correct, right?
So my question is, under high acceleration in open space, such that you have this "acceleration black hole" behind you, would you see the same sort of effects? Look left or right or up or down (here saying the black hole is "behind" you rather than "below" you as above) or anywhere along the circle perpendicular to your line of motion, and you'd see the image of your own spaceship? If so, how does that work? And if not, why not?
I'll agree that it seems a far stretch of plausibility, both that religion would be eliminated from human society and that such magical replication technology would be invented, especially in the short time span portrayed in the Trek series. But that didn't seem to be the author's point in that critique. It seemed much more like a political than a science-fictional commentary - not "oh right, like that will ever happen, keep dreaming bud" but instead "this 'glorious future' is only glorious if you're a militant athestic commie-fascist".
However I will completely agree with you that the existence of their level of technology seems a bit discontinuous with the rest of their apparent level of development and social structure. Their transporters, replicators and holodecks seem to imply that they can create and manipulate mass and energy on a very fine-tuned level (and have AI advanced enough to do these things automatically and fill in the details as needed, as they can just request the holodeck to "create a chair. make these changes to it." etc as I recall from some Voyager episode). With that kind of tech it seems like the only limit they should have is available mass-energy to manipulate, and available computing power; and given enough of those, everything in the real would should be as manipulable as things in a virtual world would be. Replicate a huge biosphere in space, tell the computer to make landscape that looks like so-and-so, keep the weather like such, gimme a nice house designed to these specifications, and take a scan of those three hotties over there, make these modifications to them, and give me some repli-holo-copies of them who like to play in the field all day, dance naked in the rain and have hot foursomes all day long. Oh and computer, keep the house cleaned up, and feel free to repair any wear and tear that happens to by body - don't want to be getting old now, eh?
Heck, with that level of technology the computers should be able to interface directly with people's minds (scan the brain-state and interpret appropriately), so you wouldn't even have to ask the computer for something - you just will it to be and it's replicated for you. Combine that with their equivalent of the internet and you could get an interesting, non-collectivist sort of collective consciousness - you just wonder some question to yourself, the computer(s) check to see if anybody knows the answer to that and isn't keeping it a secret, and then tells you the answer. (I'm assuming the computers here are as they are portrayed in Trek; very capable systems that can accomplish pretty much anything processing task you ask of them, even creative ones as per the holodeck example in my first paragraph, but which have no independent will or motivation of their own). You wouldn't get a borg-like hive mind, but it would be like... like everything you ever thought was automatically blogged, except the things you didn't want to be public knowledge, and everybody had a direct neural link to a search engine which automatically scanned all these blogs for whatever you asked it to, and presented that information direct to your mind. You wonder a question, and "recall" an answer as though it was just something you had momentarily forgotten. It's just be a much faster, more comprehensive version of the sort of information exchange that we already do with the internet, and with journals and books before that.
Even in this fantastical setup, there would still be perfectly good reason to have spaceships going about and exploring: novelty! Exploration for it's own sake! Boredom is the bane of the well-off, and so these incredibly well-off people would be searching for new cultures, new phenomena, new anything to occupy their interest. You can only do so much creative art sitting at home by yourself before you need more inspiration, and you can only do so much science when your observations are only of a limited area - and what's left to do in such a utopia (besides satisfy your basic desires whenever they come up) other than art and sci
Consider redesigning the premise of the Federation, taking into account the critique that it's basically a fascist state.
Wow. Just wow. That was just... horrible.
The author of that critique seems to be some kind of religious conservative who takes offense at the fact that the Federation doesn't use money and talk about God all the time. Nevermind the fact that they have replicators and thus there is no scarcity and no need for money OR for communistic redistribution of wealth - just throw your garbage into the recycler and replicate whatever you want. In the Star Trek future, everything is as plentiful and reusable as air, and so there is no more need for any economic system to regulate it than there is to regulate the distribution of air here today. We don't have air banks or air credits because we don't need them, and neither to we strictly ration out the use of air in equal parts, because there's plenty of it and people can just take whatever they want. Economic systems are just a solution to problems of scarcity - where there is no scarcity, economics disappear.
But what really gets me is that the author seems to be somehow offended by the notion that you might have a nontheistic society. Not militantly atheistic - you don't see Federation people ridiculing anyone for their religious beliefs or trying to convince them that God doesn't exist. They just don't seem to have many such beliefs of their own. I'm sure there's still philosophy classes in their academies, and old religious are taught as history... but this whole thing sounds like some old polytheist complaining about our (contemporary, western) society because we don't sacrifice livestock to the local fertility gods. So? What's the problem if we don't? And what's wrong with "explaining away" disembodies entities as "energy beings" or whatnot, if that's a real explanation in the (fictional) science of Star Trek? Should they just ignore their scientific explanations so that there are still some mysteries to "wow" people?
He seems to think that without such mysterious religious doctrine, and without some sort of capitalist economic system, everybody would have nothing better to do than... well... join the military I guess. The series is set on a military ship, of course you're going to see military lifestyles there! But the ordinary people living planetside, in a world of plenty with no scarcity - what, you think they won't have anything interesting to do? What about art or science for it's own sake, not for profit? Taking up some occupation that you enjoy doing for it's own take, like cooking, designing clothes, writing software, etc? In a world of plenty, people don't *need* to be paid to do things - they'll do whatever they enjoy doing, and if something needs doing, someone who needs it done will do it, if someone who enjoys doing it hasn't done it already. Heck, what about just playing games for fun?
I have to wonder if this person's vision of heaven is of some job where he gets to work really hard and gets paid lots of money which he can then turn around and give straight to some incomprehensible mysterious God, who he spends all of his free time worshipping. Seems like it must take a serious lack of imagination not to be able to envision enjoying a life of luxury where money isn't needed, where everything is there free for the taking, and nothing is an indecipherable mystery that couldn't be solved with sufficient investigation. Wouldn't that be nice? It's a stretch of the imagination to think that it could practically happen, but in Star Trek the basic premise is that that HAS happened - and look at the awesome society that has followed. How could anyone think that such a society is bad?
Homer: (taunting Mr. Burns) What are you gonna do? Release the dogs? Or the bees? Or the dogs with bees in their mouth and when they bark, they shoot bees at you?
...Well go ahead, do your worst!
Homer:
Burns: My worst, eh!? Smithers - release the robotic Richard Simmons!
Ah, small world indeed! I grew up in the town where Laurel Springs is headquartered (hence how I transferred there from their now-defunct on-site sister school, Mountain View, which I attended in 9th grade). Don't suppose you ever paid a visit to my fair little Ojai while you were working through Laurel Springs, did you?