well, i guess that depends on what you mean by important. To me his race never mattered I suppose to many people it does, but I was never raised that way. If you support him primarily because of his race that is just as wrong and racist and voting agianst him because of it.
From my prespective this election was between two candidates , one who is inherently immoral in his thought process and one who was incompitent. The immoral candidate won, because people voted thier pocket book and now millions of people will pay with thier lives , because he will ensure legalized abortion continues.
Personally I would have rather Alley Keys been the first black president. He would have been better then either of the candidates who were run by the two major parties.
I consider his election a defeat for America , he will make change all right. The wrong kind.
by the way the media etc talks I wouls have though a lot more then 25 million people have been killed by AIDS in the last 20 years. I mean that only twice as many as are killed by auto accidents. what happened to 1 out of every 4 people contracting it or something like that from back in the 80's. Seems like something must be working to slow it down.
Slashdot will stop running political articles. That is about the unnerdliest topic I can think of and so out of place on slashdot. I'm sick of seeing them when I want to read about technical news.
Dumber - this study proves nothing be correlation does not prove affect and too many variable ( like if media type is relavant) are not locked down.
Duh - what you spend a lot of time thinking about affects your actions, If it doesn't something is wrong with you.
What you think about affects your preference in entertainment and your preferences re-enforce what you already think about. Might as well study if tall people are taller then average.
well, the reason this has developed is because IT professionals, have no consistent way of identifying skilled professionals. Some of the most competent computer and software people I know never have had a degree in CS or any related field. Lawyers all pass the BAR exam, accountants have several levels and types of certification.
Our field is too new and too variable to have any one test that shows you know your stuff, not that there aren't a few good candidates out there , but most people doing the hiring still haven't heard of them and don't trust them. So it seems reasonable for an employer to test you and see if you know the stuff they need you to know.
Honestly I prefer it that way, why have artificial barriers , like the need for a college degree prevent you from getting into a profession if you can prove you know what you are doing.
I worked in a recycling center for a few years. Many of them would have no intrest in electronics and would simply toss them in the dumpster because they wouldn't know where to sell them too. So call them and check before you go to bring something in.
Make parents responsible. 1) parents are naturally and always should be the primary educators of their children. 2) if children are unmotivated in school then the parents are at fault.
There are a lot of anti-science attitudes and even anti-education attitudes in the united states even today. Part of it comes from pervading American attitude of disrespect for authority , because authority in the classroom is no different. If you don't think your teacher is worth respecting , at least for what they know, then why would you want to learn what they know.
one possible solution would be to dump the,we must compulsorily educate everyone credo that is pushed so hard in the united state. Why attempt to 'help' people through education who don't want your help or the education you are attempting to provide.
Instead make it clear education is a privilege. If you are unwilling to perform the tasks that are required to learn, you won't be asked back. Then your parents can pay for daycare or enroll you in private school at their own expense. Or can be happy that their children will never earn more then minimum wage. Then children will be attending classes because the parents believe it is a worthwhile thing for them to do.
Either way, the parents would then have to take some interest in children doing well. This attitude that many parents have that it is 100% the schools fault when a child fails is utter non-sense.
Education should still have some kind of remedial classes for those who truly need help, but stop making school attendance mandatory and see how much better the schools would suddenly become.
Things that were good in the system that have been discarded:
1) An emphasis on personal responsibility 2) An emphasis on acting for the betterment of others rather then self. 3) An emphasis on acting morally, ethically and legally. 4) those who graduated were of a uniform quality in such a way that the 'reputation' of the institution you graduated from meant something about who you are.
Number 2 above is where the discussion started because the idea that education is for self-improvement comes originally from the idea that ones vocation is a calling by God and education should serve your vocation. A vocation is taken for the betterment of yourself and society at large and not for the sake of money or employment.
As you said it sounds strange to modern sensibilities. It changed because sensibilities changed. Materialistic atheism, philosophical pragmatism and philosophical liberalism have become the order of the day in modern society and each of these philosophies, by their nature oppose the idea that there even is such things as personal responsibility or morality.
The idea from the top of the thread that 'education is for self improvement' can have no meaning inside the context of any of those philosophical frameworks other then 'improving' an individuals objective situation , which is most easily measure by their wealth and self reported happiness. Education can't make you happy so itâ(TM)s only remaining function is to make one more wealthy.
I'm not necessarily talking about courses, but a specific culture and experience. Since I attended North Dakota State University I'll use it's history as an example, I understand it to be fairly typical of state schools.
In the 50's this state run school had a required dress code ( for the stated purpose of promoting unity of community). All under classmen, were required to live in the dorms. All meals were required to be taken in common at the Dorm and strict curfews were enforced.
There were codes of ethics also enforced and failure to follow them would get you expelled. Sleeping with someone you weren't married to. Consorting with 'the wrong' kind of people. Being convicted of crime all were things that could get you expelled.
In addition to that the close quarters and common uniform as well as the general conventions of society forced a certain homogeneity into the student body because if a person didn't 'fit in' and was 'liked' they would be hazed harassed or otherwise forced to leave while the faculty looked the other way.
Not to say it was a perfect or even a good system. It was in itself based on the model of older private institutions and the whole system has it's original linage in medieval monistic traditions which resulted in the founding of most of the original universities in Europe.
so culturally and structurally moral formation was always part of the experience. And only a 'certain type' of person was admitted to school or graduate from it.
That , has changed, some say for the better, I tend in many cases to agree , but a knowledge of history should force one to evaluate and understand that with any change of structure their are trade offs and none are perfect.
One consequence of this change is that the word 'educated' no longer is synomous with 'trustworthy and knowledgeable'.
Sorry to disappoint you with reality. Higher education stopped being about learning things and bettering oneself about the same time that having a higher education became something necessary for the purpose of being able to support an average family with a 'normal' lifestyle.
Of coarse it started when the norm of morality shifted from one in which 'professionals' doctors, nurses, educated people,became people who expected to be highly paid for their skills as opposed to acting altruistically, which happened as an effect of the materialistic atheism movement of the 40's and 50's in the United State at least. Prior to that most education included a moral component of altruism and one could not gradate without being believed by the professors to meet it.
The idea that degrees are taken for self betterment and the betterment of society is a hang over from the days when graduating from an institution of higher learning meant you were held to a specific ethical and moral code that was taught as part of the institution.
The fallacy is fairly easily rebuffed nowadays by the simple fact that most people view moral education as part of public education as a bad thing. So with changing world views so changed the purpose of higher education.
The bulk of degrees today are taken for vocational aka $$$ purposes and have nothing to do with actually wanting to learn the material presented in the coarse.
Of coarse no one stops you from taking classes because you want to make yourself better today, most courses offered at university do little to help learn anything more the vocational skills however. So you must ask yourself better in what way? Mostly the answer is better at making money.
I would like to start by stating as a practicing catholic that the parent post and the great grandparent demonstrate vast ignorance of catholic scholasticism and culture in both present and medieval times. The ignorance is somewhat excusable because it follows closely fallacies that are popularized 'religiously' by both some protestants and certain atheists. Still it is a fallacy in the extreme.
Catholics have never been discouraged from reading or studying the bible to the best of their ability and competence, most people forget that prior to the invention of the printing press that reading was a specialized skill much like computer programming.
They have however always been and still are discouraged from insisting publicly and vehemently that their personal interpretation of scripture is the only correct interpretation of scripture regardless of the opinion of all scholars and legitimate authority appointed for the purpose of making ruling on such interpretation may be.
It was precisely that instance that caused the excommunication of the protestant reformers. What happened to them is not substantially different to what happens today to âscientistsâ(TM) who claim that human footprints can be found side by side with dinosaur and the earth is only 10,000 years old. The only addition being that there were formalized procedures in their culture and discipline for publicly declaring someone to be in obstinately in error and severe civil penalties for continued propagation of the error after it was declared. There are still civil penalties in come cases if such âscientificâ(TM) things are taken too far today, but they are less severe and prosecuting them is less direct and therefore less honest.
The index of banned books is an index of reading material that is considered to be bad for your mental and spiritual health, as such itâ(TM)s existence was very much in line with the plutonian philosophies of state and church that existed at the time and very much a desired and expected part of the culture for which it was generated. It was no more some draconian law dictated from above then our current laws against public nudity are.
I started lossing intrest in e-bay as soon as they stopped being a place for normal people to sell thier junk and became a place for 'business' to make a killing (driving up the price and complicating the search). I want to buy online for stuff that is cheaper then I can get it for in the store , because buying online requires greater risk ( identity theft, shipping , getting shafted,inability to easily return, etc.). So if I can't get it cheap because it's basically something someone is trying to get rid of or it is something so hard to find I can't get it in my area, why would I buy it on e-bay.
Any quick check in a bilogy book will tell you what humans need.
Food , water, shelter. ( and sometimes componionship).
All other material things are tools by which the others are met. Why should it suprise people that a fast internet connection just isn't a priority for people who already have all those needs adequatly met.
The next things down the line are conviences. They are cool , but your not going to compromise your ability to get the other for them unless you suffer from some kind of illness.
because humans are "sacred". The less sacred they are the more easily exploited they are. The more easily exploited the less trust individuals in society can have of one another and in the end the fabric of that society is compromised or destroyed.
Answer me this question. Why should murder be illegal?
more to the point, the blurrier this line is made , by technology and law, the more difficult it becomes to make arguments that support treating people better then animals.
Already in spain, they are attempting to pass a law that grants the 'human rights' to all of the large apes.
The point it gets down to is. If I can eat a Pig, why can't I eat a man. If I can enslave a pig, why not a man? What makes a man more valuable then a pig, besides what the man can do?
What if I genetically engineer a pig that can do talk and has opposable thumbs? Then what are the obligations?
It is wrong to create a pig man , for a reason realted to the reason why murder is wrong. It's end resualt is to decrease the level of trust members of society can have in each other.
That decrease in trust is what evetully destroys a society.
I'm not suggesting that humans are or are not anything. I'm suggesting that there is a continuum of the value placed on human life. on one end human beings and their life, the right to stay alive , regardless of ones state is literally treated as sacred and not even the highest government official or most well meaning scientist has the right to act otherwise.
On the other side human beings are no different then animals and there is no problem with using them up , as slaves, for experimentation or whatever else.
One metric for an advanced society is the level of value it places on the lives of it's citizens.
Whatever mechanism is used to impart that value is irrelevant , aka religion or some kind of education.
However certain laws and behaviors, slavery, abortion , artificial insemination , genetic engineering of whole human beings etc. undermine that value in such a way that the members of those societies should reasonably be afraid that all other basic legal rights my be jeopardized.
After all, if human beings are on the low end of the scale then why should they have freedom, of speech , or association , or thought for that mater?
As Pavlov put it " the sooner we get over this idea that free will exists and get about the business of governing 'by conditioning' the better off we will all be".
If that is really what you want to embrace I recommend you read the book " A brave new world" and "Fahrenheit451" because that is exactly the direction that a society that allows this kind of experimentation is heading.
I do favor research into genetics and much of the medical advancement that might be made with it.
However, even the comments on this board show that people are made uncomfortable by this idea. Mostly jokes, that mask a certain discomfort from what I read.
The end result of such experimentation with human genomic material is the trivialization of the human person.
It is precisely that trivialization which has been the cause of every grossly unjust large scale act taken by human beings. The ability to see others as merely raw material to accomplish our goal is an underlying premise in the Nazi holocaust, white separatists movement, in slavery as was practiced in the American south , in the sweat shops of years past.
This kind of experimentation only re-enforces that idea, that human beings are nothing but animals, so why shouldn't they be treated like them?
It should not be allowed by any civilized nation and any nation that does allow it has already become less civilized by the very action.
It is precisely that trivilisation which has been the cause of every grossly injust large scale act taken by human beings. The ability to see others as mearly raw material to accomplish our goal is an underlying premise in the Nazi holocaust, white sepremists movement, in slavery as was practiced in the american south , in the sweat shops of years past.
This kind of experimentation only re-enforces that idea, that human beings are nothing but animals , so why shouldn't they be treated like them.
It should not be allowed by any civilized nation and any nation that does allow it has already become less civialized by the very action.
I have a really good solution. Ban in vitro fertilization , it is immoral as far as I'm concerned.
Seriously, without religious arguments, the very real question is. 'should you draw a line?'.
Any line is going to be drawn on religious grounds.
The Roman Catholic church teaches that all forms of artificial insemination do violence against the dignity of the human person and are morally and intrinsically evil. I agree, your millage may very.
I could be wrong but, isn't the idea that data collection is often based on available resources and available resources are allocated based on the researches paradigm and beliefs of the researcher doing the work, which often results in data useful for refining the model being ignored or even not collected and thus unintentionally putting embedding the paradigm of the researcher into data because of the fact that you can't find what you don't look for?
I can see how large numbers of computers with cheap sensors and huge databases of millions of observations help to ease that problem by making in cheaper to check many possibilities.
I'm still doubt that they fully serve as an answer to the problem , because resources no matter how large are never infinite.
The idea of natural 'law' is a shadowy way of avoiding the idea of a natural law giver. I very much believe in the existence of the natural law giver so I have no argument with you. Natural law is a very useful construct to use as a common ground for deists, which was my point about assumptions being made and is the assumption in the document you quoted.
The only scientifically provable laws of nature are those of physics and the consequences of those are such that the only 'rights' which can be explicitly derived from them is the 'right' to fight for ones survival with as much power as can accumulate through ones own abilities.
The idea of a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness as granted in the American constitution is provably and grounded firmly in and only in Judeo-christian philosophy,especially as it pertains the value of the human person as created uniquely and loved by God individually, without which it exist in a vacuum and is rendered inconsequential and effectively inoperative.
That may account for part the reason people in Asian countries readily accept what would be unacceptable impingement on their rights by government in western countries.
The abandonment of strong belief in deity significantly endangers even the idea that such things as a right exist.
i would suggest that any atheist who is not entirely utilitarian in their outlook on life is not living in what they claim to be reality.
Of coarse I would expect them to immediately and correctly counter that there is no particular reason from their perspective that they do so.
Which is fine with me so long as they also acknowledge that for the same reasons if I live in what they believe is unreality there is no particular reason I should not do so as long as it is pleasing to me.
What I find annoying are the often repeated attempts of those who do not believe in moral absolutes to claim the existence of moral absolutes and to assert that I should believe as they do.
That being said, the idea that 'rights' exist is developed primarily from the concept that if an action is taken that person is 'wronged'. That is what I was pointing out.
The idea the the individual has value above that of the state is simply not proven out by physics. To what law of physics do you intend to appeal to prove such a case? It can only be proven out be the belief in something beyond what is natural to the individual. some kind of super-natural reality.
without a religious argument what you are saying is simply incorrect.
The state exists. End of story.
The reason it exists is an artifact of human evaluation and its cause is that larger groups have more power then smaller groups and thus provide a survival advantage to the group as a whole not necessarily the individual.
The individual is only relevant in that equation in so much as they are sufficient pacified by advantage and or privileges ( sometimes granted as legal rights) as that they continue to perform in an acceptable way perceived to be adventurous to the group at large.
so without getting religion into the discussion you can argue pro or con a law based on your perception of how it will effect individual happiness and survivability and how that trades off against the happiness and survivability of the rest of the group, but that is about it.
To assert the individual has some quality other then their physical ability to enforce their own will, that necessitates or demands they be granted some privilege of law, especially when the individual in question denies they should have the privilege, is to assert a value of the human person that is beyond the laws of physics and social power. In short to make the argument necessitates their exists some super-natural reality beyond what can be scientifically proven.
A very little study of psychology will prove out that people have different personality types.
Studies and data such as this would be much more useful if they were correlated against that kind of information.
The fact is it is natural for large numbers of people to find working with computers unrewarding.
Certainly any 'kenestitic' learner has a genetic disadvantage in this field as does anyone who is so heavily left brained as to not be able to comprehend the machines below the level of the artistic/ languistic abstraction they represent.
Not to say some of them wouldn't do well in 'computers' , but they would need to find a sub-field that fit their specific abilities.
I've often wondered if the 'gender bias' in the IT industry is not mostly an effect of this kind of issue. Perhaps there are just fewer females to whom this type of work is appealing.
I've never seen any real numbers to know one way or another.
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well, i guess that depends on what you mean by important. To me his race never mattered I suppose to many people it does, but I was never raised that way. If you support him primarily because of his race that is just as wrong and racist and voting agianst him because of it.
From my prespective this election was between two candidates , one who is inherently immoral in his thought process and one who was incompitent. The immoral candidate won, because people voted thier pocket book and now millions of people will pay with thier lives , because he will ensure legalized abortion continues.
Personally I would have rather Alley Keys been the first black president. He would have been better then either of the candidates who were run by the two major parties.
I consider his election a defeat for America , he will make change all right. The wrong kind.
by the way the media etc talks I wouls have though a lot more then 25 million people have been killed by AIDS
in the last 20 years. I mean that only twice as many as are killed by auto accidents. what happened to 1 out of every 4 people contracting it or something like that from back in the 80's. Seems like something must be working to slow it down.
Slashdot will stop running political articles. That is about the unnerdliest topic I can think of and so out of place on slashdot. I'm sick of seeing them when I want to read about technical news.
i thought about writing more, but what difference would it make now , we have him 4 years, for better or worse.
Dumber - this study proves nothing be correlation does not prove affect and too many variable ( like if media type is relavant) are not locked down.
Duh - what you spend a lot of time thinking about affects your actions, If it doesn't something is wrong with you.
What you think about affects your preference in entertainment and your preferences re-enforce what you already think about. Might as well study if tall people are taller then average.
hey, couldn't the bubble of hot gas itself account for some kind of lensing effect?
well, the reason this has developed is because IT professionals, have no consistent way of identifying skilled professionals. Some of the most competent computer and software people I know never have had a degree in CS or any related field.
Lawyers all pass the BAR exam, accountants have several levels and types of certification.
Our field is too new and too variable to have any one test that shows you know your stuff, not that there aren't a few good candidates out there , but most people doing the hiring still haven't heard of them and don't trust them. So it seems reasonable for an employer to test you and see if you know the stuff they need you to know.
Honestly I prefer it that way, why have artificial barriers , like the need for a college degree prevent you from getting into a profession if you can prove you know what you are doing.
I worked in a recycling center for a few years. Many of them would have no intrest in electronics and would simply toss them in the dumpster because they wouldn't know where to sell them too. So call them and check before you go to bring something in.
Make parents responsible.
1) parents are naturally and always should be the primary educators of their children.
2) if children are unmotivated in school then the parents are at fault.
There are a lot of anti-science attitudes and even anti-education attitudes in the united states even today. Part of it comes from pervading American attitude of disrespect for authority , because authority in the classroom is no different. If you don't think your teacher is worth respecting , at least for what they know, then why would you want to learn what they know.
one possible solution would be to dump the ,we must compulsorily educate everyone credo that is pushed so hard in the united state. Why attempt to 'help' people through education who don't want your help or the education you are attempting to provide.
Instead make it clear education is a privilege. If you are unwilling to perform the tasks that are required to learn, you won't be asked back. Then your parents can pay for daycare or enroll you in private school at their own expense. Or can be happy that their children will never earn more then minimum wage. Then children will be attending classes because the parents believe it is a worthwhile thing for them to do.
Either way, the parents would then have to take some interest in children doing well. This attitude that many parents have that it is 100% the schools fault when a child fails is utter non-sense.
Education should still have some kind of remedial classes for those who truly need help, but stop making school attendance mandatory and see how much better the schools would suddenly become.
Things that were good in the system that have been discarded:
1) An emphasis on personal responsibility
2) An emphasis on acting for the betterment of others rather then self.
3) An emphasis on acting morally, ethically and legally.
4) those who graduated were of a uniform quality in such a way that the 'reputation' of the institution you graduated from meant something about who you are.
Number 2 above is where the discussion started because the idea that education is for self-improvement comes originally from the idea that ones vocation is a calling by God and education should serve your vocation. A vocation is taken for the betterment of yourself and society at large and not for the sake of money or employment.
As you said it sounds strange to modern sensibilities. It changed because sensibilities changed. Materialistic atheism, philosophical pragmatism and philosophical liberalism have become the order of the day in modern society and each of these philosophies, by their nature oppose the idea that there even is such things as personal responsibility or morality.
The idea from the top of the thread that 'education is for self improvement' can have no meaning inside the context of any of those philosophical frameworks other then 'improving' an individuals objective situation , which is most easily measure by their wealth and self reported happiness. Education can't make you happy so itâ(TM)s only remaining function is to make one more wealthy.
I'm not necessarily talking about courses, but a specific culture and experience. Since I attended North Dakota State University I'll use it's history as an example, I understand it to be fairly typical of state schools.
In the 50's this state run school had a required dress code ( for the stated purpose of promoting unity of community).
All under classmen, were required to live in the dorms. All meals were required to be taken in common at the Dorm and strict curfews were enforced.
There were codes of ethics also enforced and failure to follow them would get you expelled.
Sleeping with someone you weren't married to.
Consorting with 'the wrong' kind of people.
Being convicted of crime all were things that could get you expelled.
In addition to that the close quarters and common uniform as well as the general conventions of society forced a certain homogeneity into the student body because if a person didn't 'fit in' and was 'liked' they would be hazed harassed or otherwise forced to leave while the faculty looked the other way.
Not to say it was a perfect or even a good system.
It was in itself based on the model of older private institutions and the whole system has it's original linage in medieval monistic traditions which resulted in the founding of most of the original universities in Europe.
so culturally and structurally moral formation was always part of the experience. And only a 'certain type' of person was admitted to school or graduate from it.
That , has changed, some say for the better, I tend in many cases to agree , but a knowledge of history should force one to evaluate and understand that with any change of structure their are trade offs and none are perfect.
One consequence of this change is that the word 'educated' no longer is synomous with 'trustworthy and knowledgeable'.
Sorry to disappoint you with reality. Higher education stopped being about learning things and bettering oneself about the same time that having a higher education became something necessary for the purpose of being able to support an average family with a 'normal' lifestyle.
Of coarse it started when the norm of morality shifted from one in which 'professionals' doctors, nurses, educated people ,became people who expected to be highly paid for their skills as opposed to acting altruistically, which happened as an effect of the materialistic atheism movement of the 40's and 50's in the United State at least. Prior to that most education included a moral component of altruism and one could not gradate without being believed by the professors to meet it.
The idea that degrees are taken for self betterment and the betterment of society is a hang over from the days when graduating from an institution of higher learning meant you were held to a specific ethical and moral code that was taught as part of the institution.
The fallacy is fairly easily rebuffed nowadays by the simple fact that most people view moral education as part of public education as a bad thing. So with changing world views so changed the purpose of higher education.
The bulk of degrees today are taken for vocational aka $$$ purposes and have nothing to do with actually wanting to learn the material presented in the coarse.
Of coarse no one stops you from taking classes because you want to make yourself better today, most courses offered at university do little to help learn anything more the vocational skills however. So you must ask yourself better in what way? Mostly the answer is better at making money.
I would like to start by stating as a practicing catholic that the parent post and the great grandparent demonstrate vast ignorance of catholic scholasticism and culture in both present and medieval times. The ignorance is somewhat excusable because it follows closely fallacies that are popularized 'religiously' by both some protestants and certain atheists. Still it is a fallacy in the extreme.
Catholics have never been discouraged from reading or studying the bible to the best of their ability and competence, most people forget that prior to the invention of the printing press that reading was a specialized skill much like computer programming.
They have however always been and still are discouraged from insisting publicly and vehemently that their personal interpretation of scripture is the only correct interpretation of scripture regardless of the opinion of all scholars and legitimate authority appointed for the purpose of making ruling on such interpretation may be.
It was precisely that instance that caused the excommunication of the protestant reformers. What happened to them is not substantially different to what happens today to âscientistsâ(TM) who claim that human footprints can be found side by side with dinosaur and the earth is only 10,000 years old. The only addition being that there were formalized procedures in their culture and discipline for publicly declaring someone to be in obstinately in error and severe civil penalties for continued propagation of the error after it was declared. There are still civil penalties in come cases if such âscientificâ(TM) things are taken too far today, but they are less severe and prosecuting them is less direct and therefore less honest.
The index of banned books is an index of reading material that is considered to be bad for your mental and spiritual health, as such itâ(TM)s existence was very much in line with the plutonian philosophies of state and church that existed at the time and very much a desired and expected part of the culture for which it was generated. It was no more some draconian law dictated from above then our current laws against public nudity are.
I started lossing intrest in e-bay as soon as they stopped being a place for normal people to sell thier junk and became a place for 'business' to make a killing (driving up the price and complicating the search). I want to buy online for stuff that is cheaper then I can get it for in the store , because buying online requires greater risk ( identity theft, shipping , getting shafted,inability to easily return, etc.). So if I can't get it cheap because it's basically something someone is trying to get rid of or it is something so hard to find I can't get it in my area, why would I buy it on e-bay.
Any quick check in a bilogy book will tell you what humans need.
Food , water, shelter. ( and sometimes componionship).
All other material things are tools by which the others are met. Why should it suprise people that a fast internet connection just isn't a priority for people who already have all those needs adequatly met.
The next things down the line are conviences. They are cool , but your not going to compromise your ability to get the other for them unless you suffer from some kind of illness.
because humans are "sacred".
The less sacred they are the more easily exploited they are. The more easily exploited the less trust individuals in society can have of one another and in the end the fabric of that society is compromised or destroyed.
Answer me this question. Why should murder be illegal?
more to the point, the blurrier this line is made , by technology and law, the more difficult it becomes to make arguments that support treating people better then animals.
Already in spain, they are attempting to pass a law that grants the 'human rights' to all of the large apes.
The point it gets down to is. If I can eat a Pig, why can't I eat a man. If I can enslave a pig, why not a man? What makes a man more valuable then a pig, besides what the man can do?
What if I genetically engineer a pig that can do talk and has opposable thumbs? Then what are the obligations?
It is wrong to create a pig man , for a reason realted to the reason why murder is wrong.
It's end resualt is to decrease the level of trust members of society can have in each other.
That decrease in trust is what evetully destroys a society.
I'm not suggesting that humans are or are not anything. I'm suggesting that there is a continuum of the value placed on human life.
on one end human beings and their life, the right to stay alive , regardless of ones state is literally treated as sacred and not even the highest government official or most well meaning scientist has the right to act otherwise.
On the other side human beings are no different then animals and there is no problem with using them up , as slaves, for experimentation or whatever else.
One metric for an advanced society is the level of value it places on the lives of it's citizens.
Whatever mechanism is used to impart that value is irrelevant , aka religion or some kind of education.
However certain laws and behaviors, slavery, abortion , artificial insemination , genetic engineering of whole human beings etc. undermine that value in such a way that the members of those societies should reasonably be afraid that all other basic legal rights my be jeopardized.
After all, if human beings are on the low end of the scale then why should they have freedom, of speech , or association , or thought for that mater?
As Pavlov put it " the sooner we get over this idea that free will exists and get about the business of governing 'by conditioning' the better off we will all be".
If that is really what you want to embrace I recommend you read the book " A brave new world" and "Fahrenheit451" because that is exactly the direction that a society that allows this kind of experimentation is heading.
I do favor research into genetics and much of the medical advancement that might be made with it.
However, even the comments on this board show that people are made uncomfortable by this idea. Mostly jokes, that mask a certain discomfort from what I read.
The end result of such experimentation with human genomic material is the trivialization of the human person.
It is precisely that trivialization which has been the cause of every grossly unjust large scale act taken by human beings. The ability to see others as merely raw material to accomplish our goal is an underlying premise in the Nazi holocaust, white separatists movement, in slavery as was practiced in the American south , in the sweat shops of years past.
This kind of experimentation only re-enforces that idea, that human beings are nothing but animals, so why shouldn't they be treated like them?
It should not be allowed by any civilized nation and any nation that does allow it has already become less civilized by the very action.
It is precisely that trivilisation which has been the cause of every grossly injust large scale act taken by human beings. The ability to see others as mearly raw material to accomplish our goal is an underlying premise in the Nazi holocaust, white sepremists movement, in slavery as was practiced in the american south , in the sweat shops of years past.
This kind of experimentation only re-enforces that idea, that human beings are nothing but animals , so why shouldn't they be treated like them.
It should not be allowed by any civilized nation and any nation that does allow it has already become less civialized by the very action.
I have a really good solution. Ban in vitro fertilization , it is immoral as far as I'm concerned.
Seriously, without religious arguments, the very real question is. 'should you draw a line?'.
Any line is going to be drawn on religious grounds.
The Roman Catholic church teaches that all forms of artificial insemination do violence against the dignity of the human person and are morally and intrinsically evil. I agree, your millage may very.
I could be wrong but, isn't the idea that data collection is often based on available resources and available resources are allocated based on the researches paradigm and beliefs of the researcher doing the work, which often results in data useful for refining the model being ignored or even not collected and thus unintentionally putting embedding the paradigm of the researcher into data because of the fact that you can't find what you don't look for?
I can see how large numbers of computers with cheap sensors and huge databases of millions of observations help to ease that problem by making in cheaper to check many possibilities.
I'm still doubt that they fully serve as an answer to the problem , because resources no matter how large are never infinite.
The idea of natural 'law' is a shadowy way of avoiding the idea of a natural law giver. I very much believe in the existence of the natural law giver so I have no argument with you. Natural law is a very useful construct to use as a common ground for deists, which was my point about assumptions being made and is the assumption in the document you quoted.
The only scientifically provable laws of nature are those of physics and the consequences of those are such that the only 'rights' which can be explicitly derived from them is the 'right' to fight for ones survival with as much power as can accumulate through ones own abilities.
The idea of a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness as granted in the American constitution is provably and grounded firmly in and only in Judeo-christian philosophy,especially as it pertains the value of the human person as created uniquely and loved by God individually, without which it exist in a vacuum and is rendered inconsequential and effectively inoperative.
That may account for part the reason people in Asian countries readily accept what would be unacceptable impingement on their rights by government in western countries.
The abandonment of strong belief in deity significantly endangers even the idea that such things as a right exist.
i would suggest that any atheist who is not entirely utilitarian in their outlook on life is not living in what they claim to be reality.
Of coarse I would expect them to immediately and correctly counter that there is no particular reason from their perspective that they do so.
Which is fine with me so long as they also acknowledge that for the same reasons if I live in what they believe is unreality there is no particular reason I should not do so as long as it is pleasing to me.
What I find annoying are the often repeated attempts of those who do not believe in moral absolutes to claim the existence of moral absolutes and to assert that I should believe as they do.
That being said, the idea that 'rights' exist is developed primarily from the concept that if an action is taken that person is 'wronged'. That is what I was pointing out.
The idea the the individual has value above that of the state is simply not proven out by physics.
To what law of physics do you intend to appeal to prove such a case? It can only be proven out be the belief in something beyond what is natural to the individual. some kind of super-natural reality.
without a religious argument what you are saying is simply incorrect.
The state exists. End of story.
The reason it exists is an artifact of human evaluation and its cause is that larger groups have more power then smaller groups and thus provide a survival advantage to the group as a whole not necessarily the individual.
The individual is only relevant in that equation in so much as they are sufficient pacified by advantage and or privileges ( sometimes granted as legal rights) as that they continue to perform in an acceptable way perceived to be adventurous to the group at large.
so without getting religion into the discussion you can argue pro or con a law based on your perception of how it will effect individual happiness and survivability and how that trades off against the happiness and survivability of the rest of the group, but that is about it.
To assert the individual has some quality other then their physical ability to enforce their own will, that necessitates or demands they be granted some privilege of law, especially when the individual in question denies they should have the privilege, is to assert a value of the human person that is beyond the laws of physics and social power. In short to make the argument necessitates their exists some super-natural reality beyond what can be scientifically proven.
A very little study of psychology will prove out that people have different personality types. Studies and data such as this would be much more useful if they were correlated against that kind of information. The fact is it is natural for large numbers of people to find working with computers unrewarding. Certainly any 'kenestitic' learner has a genetic disadvantage in this field as does anyone who is so heavily left brained as to not be able to comprehend the machines below the level of the artistic/ languistic abstraction they represent. Not to say some of them wouldn't do well in 'computers' , but they would need to find a sub-field that fit their specific abilities. I've often wondered if the 'gender bias' in the IT industry is not mostly an effect of this kind of issue. Perhaps there are just fewer females to whom this type of work is appealing. I've never seen any real numbers to know one way or another.