Ok, there's a simply way of getting rid of these articles. Go to Preferences, go to Homepage, exclude all stories from Your Rights Online or just include the headline.
Just because the site is "News for Nerds" doesn't mean that's all it is.
Slashdot has the editorial discretion to put articles on its site that aren't geared directly at you.
You can insist that, as many people have. But if you accept that there is an external world, and our scientific knowledge of that world is based in fact, and both chimpanzees and ourselves have brains, and brains have something to do with consciousness, then it makes more sense to say that both humans and chimpanzees are conscious.
That's a lot of assumptions, and they go against your skepticism. In other posts I have laid out why I've made those assumptions.
But this is backwards. What we know is primarily our thoughts, feelings, and inner perceptions (from which comes reason, logic, math, philosophy and religion), secondarily our sensual perceptions, and tertiarily the conclusions we form from our sensual perceptions (from which comes science). In that order. To raise tertiary knowledge above primary knowledge has no basis. To use it as a reason to argue that primary knowledge doesn't exist, is downright nutty.
You are making the Cartesian skeptical argument, which presumes that we know only our thoughts, feelings, and inner perceptions a priori, and therefore there is no such thing as true knowledge of the external world. Kant asked, transcendentally, "How is it possible for us to have these thoughts, feelings, etc?" He answers that the objects of experience, the physical world of appearances, must conform to the way we perceive things. We can study the outside world and be certain about its *objective* appearances. While we cannot know objects *independently* of our experience, we can know the ways in which objects *must* appear to all of us. This means that our knowledge of the physical world and its fundamental laws(causality, temporality) is real knowledge, and if we study it, we can learn things about the laws experience must always follow.
Now I extend Kant's argument by saying that it further implies materialism. If we can study the world of appearances, and come up with natural laws that govern its behavior this seems to restrict the number of ways in which we can exist in such a world(which we do). For one, it seems to imply that we are subject to the same materialistic laws(since we exist in the universe).
Now I don't necessarily believe any of the arguments I've made for certain unless I completely buy into Kant's reasoning, and certainly objections have been raised to Kant's line of reasoning. But stopping with Descartes is kind of a dead end - it doesn't permit true belief about the external world, and it rejects an assumption that we all make in our day to day lives- that we are interacting with reality and we are not being deceived as to its existence. We may never understand what consciousness truly is, but that shouldn't stop us from trying. And certainly people *appear* to be making progress on that front.
The theory of evolution does not presume it. Nowhere in the tenets of evolution does it say "Materialist theories of mind must be true." You could conceive of natural selection never producing consciousness - but the fact is, evolution did produce consciousness, and so we have to come up with an understanding of consciousness which explains how that could be. Evolution does presume that life arises only from physical matter, but then it wouldn't be a scientific theory if it didn't. It would be intelligent design, which is patently unscientific.
I think what you say is true not of a materialist theory but of a dualistic or spiritual theory of mind, which more strongly follows from the Judeo-Christian tradition. These are in fact based on superstition, and arrogantly attribute to humans and humans only a spiritual substance which gives them sentience and sapience.
The main tenet of your argument, "We only know our own consciousness a priori" is false if you flip skepticism on its head, like Immanuel Kant did. He posited that we know that there is an external world precisely because of the reasons I have stated - you cannot locate the enduring self, the cohesive subject responsible for all your thoughts. You only know a representation of the subject, And if we know that there is an external world, we are then obliged to theorize about how consciousness is a possible occurance within this world, which is material. This seems to jibe with what science has so far discovered- you do not need to posit a second substance if a materialist theory explains all phenomena.
Moreover, if you use Occam's razor as a guide, it makes much more sense to try to explain consciousness using one type of substance - physical substances - rather than posit a second substance which is unobservable and unnecessary. This way, all of phenemona can be explained by a single, formally consistent theory.
As for your last statement, Kant says that having observed reality be intelligible depends on phenemona meeting certain conditions - namely, it follows certain rules that allow us to perceive it. This means that observed reality suggests that phenemona are all connected - in fact, our understanding of reality *depends* on this being the case.
And most psychologists and neuroscientists. Most of our decisions are made for us before we become conscious of them. They've shown the responses to stimuli are often formulated before a subject even becomes aware.
Dennet objects to the notion of "qualia" - the experiential bits that make up seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. He says that these qualia don't really exist as special things, since adjusting qualia and adjusting the circuits that supposedly generate qualia conceptually achieve the same affect. While I don't follow the intricacies of his proof, I happen to agree. What we refer to as consciousness is simply a very sophisticated biological machine convincing itself that it exists as a cohesive subject. What we are actually experiencing is something all matter (organized in the correct way) is capable of - interior perception. I see no other way to reconcile consciousness with a theory of evolution, which seems to demand a materialist, single substance view of mind.
You can name just as many atrocities that Muslim Arabs have committed against Israel. Over the years the suicide bombings, the kidnappings, and the rockets add up, you know. This debate is tired and it doesn't go anywhere. Both sides are convinced they are waging a defensive war, and anything can be justified if one thinks one is defending oneself.
You never hear anyone who speaks loudly condemn both sides for their ethical failures over the years. Why does everyone have to declare one side or the other innocent of all crimes?
Why don't we just look at the facts: Israel exists in a sea of Arab countries, some of whom consistently announce their intention to wipe them from the face of the Earth. This tense climate has made both sides afraid, and people who are afraid make bad decisions. Because of these bad decisions, the Muslims in Palestine have become more marginalized and more radicalized. The Israelis have become more aggressive.
This does not exempt either side from culpability, and it also does not make either side the clear moral victor.
The only way peace will be accomplished in the Middle East is if both sides learn to move past their grievances and realize that the past has no rational relationship to how they should proceed in the future. The past is all sunken cost. Both sides need to say to themselves: How do we prevent further death?
The article says that the reason why graphics drivers are allowed to be closed-source is that they have been ported from another OS, and so they don't qualify as Linux-derived works.
I think the fact that you have to download those graphics drivers later is because the specific distributions have a policy that they don't want to include restricted drivers and want to stick only with GPLed code in their distributions.
If this isn't being discussed, then it becomes permissible to make Linux-derived works and sell them as proprietary products without any consideration for the open source copyright holders or licensing.
This goes to the core of what open source is about.
It's much better to make your license and culture mean something than to entice corporations by coddling their proprietary impulses.
I would like to suggest not that our accomplishments are insignificant, but rather, that maybe we shouldn't make value judgements at all about their worth, since worth is merely a human valuation. We have no pre-existing reason to declare the brain and its capabilities 'better' or 'best' - The human brain is an adaptively fit machine capable of performances that are marvelous to itself. As far as whether they're marvelous to anyone else, we do not have any grounds for saying that they are. So declaring ourselves the best is a bit like Leonardo da Vinci staring at the Mona Lisa and bragging, "Man, I'm good" Isn't his own opinion a little suspect, devoid of any real utility in deciding whether the Mona Lisa is good or not?
Evolution had no intent in bringing the brain out as 'better' than all of its other machines, so why should we treat ourselves as the paragon of intellect and creativity? At the very least we should be neutral regarding our position in the cosmos, not declaring ourselves insignificant or significant, simply able to regulate experience enough to have a net effect.
Yeah, let's all live in a penal society where 1 million people are behind bars, many of them spending most of their lives there.
Oh wait, we already do.
I'm not about coddling criminals, but what you're talking about is insane. A 300 year sentence behind bars for a death threat?
Furthermore, I'm not quite sure who you're arguing against here - no one says or has ever said we shouldn't have laws and penalties.The difference among people seems to be about what purpose those laws and penalties serve.
In my opinion, the goal of our policies should be correction and rehabilitation rather than retribution. Like it or not, responsibility for a person's crime does not rest solely on that individual - there is an entire system of poverty and abuse that cultivates criminality. That system needs to be corrected, not just the individual. And it's hard to see how destroying a person's life over one crime resolves the issue of criminality.
It isn't the exception. Think of the thousand kindnesses that exist as conditions of pursuing your daily activities . Most everyone follows traffic laws, good etiquette on sidewalks, and some even open the door for you when it's not clearly in their immediate interest to do so, just to name some examples. You just don't notice that these things happen because you've been conditioned to take them for granted.
In day to day life, at least inside of America, it's the destructive impulses of mankind that are exceptional and sensational - why else does the news focus so much on murder, death, greed, etc etc? Because they are at least moderately unusual, at least in domestic American life (which is admittedly itself pretty unusual).
Civilization itself is a cooperative agreement whereby the individual exchanges absolute freedom for the ability to survive and, hopefully, prosper. However, only the giving up of absolute freedom is guaranteed; the due compensation for this forfeiture is not. Therefore, civilization at its very core involves at least a partially altruistic sacrifice.
And indeed humans have many unselfish cognitive faculties such as empathy, whereby we automatically think about the thoughts and feelings of others around us. These thoughts, intuitions, and feelings are hardwired into our cognitive repertoire and they are the foundations of ethics, which governs how we relate to each other. Some even believe they are the foundations of intelligence. We don't notice it when these faculties kick in but they do all the time. The proof? Society functions, at least minimally well.
So people all the time have to suspend their immediate gratification and satiation of appetites for the good of others; it's a condition of society being functional at all.
It is true that altruism in its absolute form doesn't exist. But I would argue that altruism in its absolute form is meaningless. All acts have to be *motivated by something* or else they would not happen. And all human motivation has its origin in a pleasure response, even if minimal; that is, the end of every action has to be made desirable, and therefore, all acts, even those that are selfless, involve some pleasure being awarded to the doer, even if the act involves the doer's sacrifice of himself.
So when we argue about whether or not an action is selfless, we should be assessing the degree of pleasure obtained by suspending one's personal desires for the sake of others. It is a tenet of of ascetic philosophies that it is much better to get a greater quantity of pleasure from acting in someone else's interest than one's own. And I've never heard that a person should derive absolutely no benefit from committing an act for someone else, though judging by these debates this is apparently how some people misunderstand altruism. Such a definition of altruism would make selfless acts impossible, and I would argue, meaningless.
I don't think that's what he's saying at all. You are completely misrepresenting the facts. Furthermore, it's difficult to see why you invoke the notion of categorical imperative, as this is primarily an epistemic question, not an ethical one(though it may have ethical implications). In other words, it primarily concerns the conditions under which we believe or disbelieve a claim, and the conditions under which factual reality(to which we are accountable) may be misrepresented. The only real issue which Kant would bring to the table here is whether lying is wrong but there is no real debate here, is there?
First, if we cannot agree on what the Swift Boat veterans actually did, we can't actually discuss the issue meaningfully.
Neither of your two situations represent what actually occurred. The group used the testimony of people who were directly contradicting the official testimony that they had already made during the Vietnam War. Some had even *recommended* Kerry for the awards he received, and all of the Swift Boat veterans had not even been in a position to witness or judge his heroic actions at the time they occured. Some even admitted that their grievances concerned not what John Kerry did during the war but instead what John Kerry said after the war. These are people who signed a letter attacking John Kerry simply because they disagreed with John Kerry's public criticisms about war operations.
So, who are we to say which testimony was true with regards to those who directly contradicted themselves? The fact that the prior testimony was made ostensibly without financial and political inducement while the latter testimony was made with it seems to cast doubt over the latter. Thus, at the very least, we should not be affected at all by the claims of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth(that is, their claims should not cause us to think less of John Kerry or to think more of John Kerry).
My mistake, a theorem. But ruling out other geometries, given a triangle in Euclidean geometry, the Pythagorean theorem holds true and *must* hold true.
The intuition that we live in a Euclidean world turned out to be false, but if I understand correctly, that wasn't apparent until Einstein(correct?).
My point still holds. I was just trying to point out that a scientific theory and a mathematical theorem represent two conceptually different kinds of knowledge. I'm sure there are analytically true statements about triangles in Riemannian geometries that would be better examples.
This is nitpicking, but the Pythagorean Theorem is a mathematical axiom. It must be true according to the definition of the triangle; it is *inconceivable* that the Pythagorean theorem could be false.
There is no necessity built into evolution that makes it true, because it is a scientific claim. There could be a counterexample tomorrow that refutes evolution completely, and if we accepted it we'd have to abandon evolution and form a new theory. Evolution is not a true theory unless it is backed up by experience.
Now of course there is so much experience(evidence) supporting evolution that it has the status of objective fact and it would be foolish to withhold assent from it, at least its essence. But still, any belief about the world is subject to doubt - at the very core because our experience is mediated by our fallible senses - and thus evolution and every other scientific theory can always be disputed.
"You really should consider a political career. I didn't say what you quote, although I grant that it allowed you to gracefully segue into your pious and orthodox rant."
Perhaps you should consider a political career . From your top-parent post:
Get real. This is hardly "commercial space flight," it is an extremely elitist amusement park for the very wealthy. Good luck getting your 15 min ride any time soon.
'Because' may not have been a word that you used, but you certainly imply that space flight will always remain at most a privelege of the very wealthy.
"Historically, new technologies have never broken the laws of thermodynamics. Never ever. In order to fulfill these childish dreams of mass space travel, escaping earthly cataclysm, terraforming and colonizing Mars, etc. you need to assume that some currently unsuspected technology can harness vast amounts of energy that in any case are not present on earth, or that the laws of thermodynamics will be broken or bent beyond recognition."
Of course they've never broken the laws of thermodynamics. That's what a law is. It can't be broken; nature depends on it. But your invocation of the 'laws of thermodynamics' here is confusing and makes me think you don't actually know what they are. There is nothing in the laws of thermodynamics that says we can't explore space. The only thing Thermodynamics says is that 1) Conservation of energy. 2) The net entropy change of the universe in any energy transfer must be positive or zero. 3) The multiplicity/entropy of a system will go to zero as its temperature goes to zero.
I don't see any prohibition of space travel in there. There is no a priori or a posteriori reason why space travel can't happen. You might say that somehow mass space travel would violate the second law, but you're forgetting about the plumes of exhaust and the energy exchange that must emit from rockets and other such byproducts in order to travel space, which push up the entropy of the universe. So now that you're physical argument is bust, what are you left with? Bleak, cynical, depressing arguments. Let's examine those.
"It is sappy to believe that "just because we are ignorant today doesn't mean we will remain so tomorrow," or something similar is somehow an acceptable and rational stance. Your belief in the eventual appearance of the mystery technology and its vast implicit energy pool is a magical-religious belief akin to faith in the eventual arrival of a god-like figure and the subsequent salvation of the world in some way. It is ridiculous."
Just because it doesn't satisfy your glum sensibilities doesn't mean its irrational. It's actually a scientific observation. A principle of scientific parsimony would say that the rules that govern behavior don't just spontaneously change. The rules that have governed the way all life populates its environment for the past 3 billion years are not going to just spontaneously stop governing our behavior once humans have populated the entire earth. Where do we go? Space.
I'm very aware that what has motivated our space exploration has been military and the defense industry. And what motivates our military? Securing resources for America. Why the hell else are we in Iraq? Why the hell else did we need to stand off with Russia and to obliterate communism? I can tell you (and I can tell you'll probably agree) it wasn't because we wanted to spread "DEMOCRACY" and "FREEDOM."
As for the rest of your , I have no idea what the hell this has to do with my argument that manned space exploration is inevitable. You've turned a discussion about space exploration into a tract about the 'war on terror', 9/11 Conspiracies, the war in Iraq and oil. No one ever disputed any of the facts you enumerate, while some (but not all of them) are harebrained and paranoid. Talk about straw men.
In any case, that whole bit defeats your point, because petroleum is exactly the kind of finite resource whose depletion is going to push us into space to look for other sustainable energy sources.
You're toeing a line that has been obsolete since the Scooter Libby and 'Plame-gate' case revealed deliberate efforts on behalf of the administration, all the way up to Cheney, to discredit people with information which directly refuted administration claims.
Congress was not given all of the intelligence available. There was much intelligence at the time to the contrary. Yet what was presented to the American public was an unequivocal case that Iraq was an immediate threat to our national security.
There are memos, such as the Downing Street memo of a meeting between American officials and Blair, which demonstrate these concerted efforts to fix the intelligence.
So no, it's not "lying" in the same sense that I would be lying if I said I had a billion dollars, which is a simple denial of fact. It's something much more insidious and dishonest. It is a coordinated, deliberate campaign to manipulate the facts. You don't have to lie if you can mold reality to reflect what you say. Unchecked by a rubberstamping Congress, a lazy media, and an American public still reeling from September 11th, the administration was powerful enough to do just this.
The President and his administration are seasoned misinformers. They don't even have to lie to lie.
Where his argument is tired and cliche, yours is fatally myopic. Saying "We will never colonize space because only the extremely rich and elite go there now" is like saying "The sun will never burn out because right now it looks really bright." It's absurdly shortsighted.
Remember that while space holds a nearly infinite amount of usable resources, earth houses a finite amount of usable resources that are becoming scarcer by the second. I would argue that the desire for resources has fuelled all human migration, large and small. Saying humans will not leave the planet earth not only ignores written history, it ignores pre-history and the nature of life as it has always existed. Having evolved from single-celled germs that live in the oceans, then to land-dwelling beasts, then to monkeys and the great apes, humans then had to migrate from Africa, to Asia Minor and Central Asia, to Australia and to Europe, to England, to the Americas. All because they were chasing the resources necessary for their survival.
So by the simple likelihood that humans will continue to behave similarly to how they have behaved, its obvious that eventually there will be an economic need for humans to live in space. If there's not an economic need, there will be a military need.
As for the issue of cost, commercial spaceflight has only existed for a few years now. That means our technological limitations at the moment cause spaceflight to be exceedingly rare and thus expensive. As more money is poured into spaceflight, the availability (supply) of spaceflight will go up, and the price will come down. But again, it won't be for travel that commerce starts to move beyond sub-orbital altitudes into outer space. It will be because space is economically valuable.
Of course, but Google has plenty of other products which have won out in part because of Google's 'cool' aesthetic. Google search won out for a lot of the same reasons that Apple products win out, simplicity of design and usability...Like with Apple, Google's products have become entrenched in our culture, and you can hardly go anywhere without both hearing about this new song on someone's iPod or how someone is going to Google such-and-such later....Google and Apple are very similar in that regard.
With respect to video, they lost. But at least they had the sense to know they were losing because someone got to it better and faster than they did.
Besides, it's just an example. You get my overall argument.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, there's a simply way of getting rid of these articles. Go to Preferences, go to Homepage, exclude all stories from Your Rights Online or just include the headline.
Just because the site is "News for Nerds" doesn't mean that's all it is.
Slashdot has the editorial discretion to put articles on its site that aren't geared directly at you.
You can insist that, as many people have. But if you accept that there is an external world, and our scientific knowledge of that world is based in fact, and both chimpanzees and ourselves have brains, and brains have something to do with consciousness, then it makes more sense to say that both humans and chimpanzees are conscious.
That's a lot of assumptions, and they go against your skepticism. In other posts I have laid out why I've made those assumptions.
You are making the Cartesian skeptical argument, which presumes that we know only our thoughts, feelings, and inner perceptions a priori, and therefore there is no such thing as true knowledge of the external world. Kant asked, transcendentally, "How is it possible for us to have these thoughts, feelings, etc?" He answers that the objects of experience, the physical world of appearances, must conform to the way we perceive things. We can study the outside world and be certain about its *objective* appearances. While we cannot know objects *independently* of our experience, we can know the ways in which objects *must* appear to all of us. This means that our knowledge of the physical world and its fundamental laws(causality, temporality) is real knowledge, and if we study it, we can learn things about the laws experience must always follow.
Now I extend Kant's argument by saying that it further implies materialism. If we can study the world of appearances, and come up with natural laws that govern its behavior this seems to restrict the number of ways in which we can exist in such a world(which we do). For one, it seems to imply that we are subject to the same materialistic laws(since we exist in the universe).
Now I don't necessarily believe any of the arguments I've made for certain unless I completely buy into Kant's reasoning, and certainly objections have been raised to Kant's line of reasoning. But stopping with Descartes is kind of a dead end - it doesn't permit true belief about the external world, and it rejects an assumption that we all make in our day to day lives- that we are interacting with reality and we are not being deceived as to its existence. We may never understand what consciousness truly is, but that shouldn't stop us from trying. And certainly people *appear* to be making progress on that front.
The theory of evolution does not presume it. Nowhere in the tenets of evolution does it say "Materialist theories of mind must be true." You could conceive of natural selection never producing consciousness - but the fact is, evolution did produce consciousness, and so we have to come up with an understanding of consciousness which explains how that could be. Evolution does presume that life arises only from physical matter, but then it wouldn't be a scientific theory if it didn't. It would be intelligent design, which is patently unscientific.
I think what you say is true not of a materialist theory but of a dualistic or spiritual theory of mind, which more strongly follows from the Judeo-Christian tradition. These are in fact based on superstition, and arrogantly attribute to humans and humans only a spiritual substance which gives them sentience and sapience.
The main tenet of your argument, "We only know our own consciousness a priori" is false if you flip skepticism on its head, like Immanuel Kant did. He posited that we know that there is an external world precisely because of the reasons I have stated - you cannot locate the enduring self, the cohesive subject responsible for all your thoughts. You only know a representation of the subject, And if we know that there is an external world, we are then obliged to theorize about how consciousness is a possible occurance within this world, which is material. This seems to jibe with what science has so far discovered- you do not need to posit a second substance if a materialist theory explains all phenomena.
Moreover, if you use Occam's razor as a guide, it makes much more sense to try to explain consciousness using one type of substance - physical substances - rather than posit a second substance which is unobservable and unnecessary. This way, all of phenemona can be explained by a single, formally consistent theory.
As for your last statement, Kant says that having observed reality be intelligible depends on phenemona meeting certain conditions - namely, it follows certain rules that allow us to perceive it. This means that observed reality suggests that phenemona are all connected - in fact, our understanding of reality *depends* on this being the case.
And most psychologists and neuroscientists. Most of our decisions are made for us before we become conscious of them. They've shown the responses to stimuli are often formulated before a subject even becomes aware.
Dennet objects to the notion of "qualia" - the experiential bits that make up seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. He says that these qualia don't really exist as special things, since adjusting qualia and adjusting the circuits that supposedly generate qualia conceptually achieve the same affect. While I don't follow the intricacies of his proof, I happen to agree. What we refer to as consciousness is simply a very sophisticated biological machine convincing itself that it exists as a cohesive subject. What we are actually experiencing is something all matter (organized in the correct way) is capable of - interior perception. I see no other way to reconcile consciousness with a theory of evolution, which seems to demand a materialist, single substance view of mind.
You can name just as many atrocities that Muslim Arabs have committed against Israel. Over the years the suicide bombings, the kidnappings, and the rockets add up, you know. This debate is tired and it doesn't go anywhere. Both sides are convinced they are waging a defensive war, and anything can be justified if one thinks one is defending oneself.
You never hear anyone who speaks loudly condemn both sides for their ethical failures over the years. Why does everyone have to declare one side or the other innocent of all crimes?
Why don't we just look at the facts: Israel exists in a sea of Arab countries, some of whom consistently announce their intention to wipe them from the face of the Earth. This tense climate has made both sides afraid, and people who are afraid make bad decisions. Because of these bad decisions, the Muslims in Palestine have become more marginalized and more radicalized. The Israelis have become more aggressive.
This does not exempt either side from culpability, and it also does not make either side the clear moral victor.
The only way peace will be accomplished in the Middle East is if both sides learn to move past their grievances and realize that the past has no rational relationship to how they should proceed in the future. The past is all sunken cost. Both sides need to say to themselves: How do we prevent further death?
That bus was going at least 75.
The article says that the reason why graphics drivers are allowed to be closed-source is that they have been ported from another OS, and so they don't qualify as Linux-derived works.
I think the fact that you have to download those graphics drivers later is because the specific distributions have a policy that they don't want to include restricted drivers and want to stick only with GPLed code in their distributions.
If this isn't being discussed, then it becomes permissible to make Linux-derived works and sell them as proprietary products without any consideration for the open source copyright holders or licensing.
This goes to the core of what open source is about.
It's much better to make your license and culture mean something than to entice corporations by coddling their proprietary impulses.
I would like to suggest not that our accomplishments are insignificant, but rather, that maybe we shouldn't make value judgements at all about their worth, since worth is merely a human valuation. We have no pre-existing reason to declare the brain and its capabilities 'better' or 'best' - The human brain is an adaptively fit machine capable of performances that are marvelous to itself. As far as whether they're marvelous to anyone else, we do not have any grounds for saying that they are. So declaring ourselves the best is a bit like Leonardo da Vinci staring at the Mona Lisa and bragging, "Man, I'm good" Isn't his own opinion a little suspect, devoid of any real utility in deciding whether the Mona Lisa is good or not?
Evolution had no intent in bringing the brain out as 'better' than all of its other machines, so why should we treat ourselves as the paragon of intellect and creativity? At the very least we should be neutral regarding our position in the cosmos, not declaring ourselves insignificant or significant, simply able to regulate experience enough to have a net effect.
Yeah, let's all live in a penal society where 1 million people are behind bars, many of them spending most of their lives there.
Oh wait, we already do.
I'm not about coddling criminals, but what you're talking about is insane. A 300 year sentence behind bars for a death threat?
Furthermore, I'm not quite sure who you're arguing against here - no one says or has ever said we shouldn't have laws and penalties.The difference among people seems to be about what purpose those laws and penalties serve.
In my opinion, the goal of our policies should be correction and rehabilitation rather than retribution. Like it or not, responsibility for a person's crime does not rest solely on that individual - there is an entire system of poverty and abuse that cultivates criminality. That system needs to be corrected, not just the individual. And it's hard to see how destroying a person's life over one crime resolves the issue of criminality.
Just you and me.
For instance, rIght now I'm choosing not to have a three-way with two girls, because I'm waiting for the right people, Jessica Alba and Jessica Biel.
I think he needs more CSF (Cerebrospinal fluid) to nourish his brain cells and alter their troll-like behavior.
The squirrels are given pouches containing cyanide-laced acorns, ready for quick consumption should they have to endure hostile interrogation.
Don't be sillly. The RIAA will sue you with much less evidence than a screenshot.
I too have encountered this problem, and have also found a solution.
1. Erase your primary hard drive.
2. Install a different operating system.
This will allow you to uninstall all of your programs.
It isn't the exception. Think of the thousand kindnesses that exist as conditions of pursuing your daily activities . Most everyone follows traffic laws, good etiquette on sidewalks, and some even open the door for you when it's not clearly in their immediate interest to do so, just to name some examples. You just don't notice that these things happen because you've been conditioned to take them for granted.
In day to day life, at least inside of America, it's the destructive impulses of mankind that are exceptional and sensational - why else does the news focus so much on murder, death, greed, etc etc? Because they are at least moderately unusual, at least in domestic American life (which is admittedly itself pretty unusual).
Civilization itself is a cooperative agreement whereby the individual exchanges absolute freedom for the ability to survive and, hopefully, prosper. However, only the giving up of absolute freedom is guaranteed; the due compensation for this forfeiture is not. Therefore, civilization at its very core involves at least a partially altruistic sacrifice.
And indeed humans have many unselfish cognitive faculties such as empathy, whereby we automatically think about the thoughts and feelings of others around us. These thoughts, intuitions, and feelings are hardwired into our cognitive repertoire and they are the foundations of ethics, which governs how we relate to each other. Some even believe they are the foundations of intelligence. We don't notice it when these faculties kick in but they do all the time. The proof? Society functions, at least minimally well.
So people all the time have to suspend their immediate gratification and satiation of appetites for the good of others; it's a condition of society being functional at all.
It is true that altruism in its absolute form doesn't exist. But I would argue that altruism in its absolute form is meaningless. All acts have to be *motivated by something* or else they would not happen. And all human motivation has its origin in a pleasure response, even if minimal; that is, the end of every action has to be made desirable, and therefore, all acts, even those that are selfless, involve some pleasure being awarded to the doer, even if the act involves the doer's sacrifice of himself.
So when we argue about whether or not an action is selfless, we should be assessing the degree of pleasure obtained by suspending one's personal desires for the sake of others. It is a tenet of of ascetic philosophies that it is much better to get a greater quantity of pleasure from acting in someone else's interest than one's own. And I've never heard that a person should derive absolutely no benefit from committing an act for someone else, though judging by these debates this is apparently how some people misunderstand altruism. Such a definition of altruism would make selfless acts impossible, and I would argue, meaningless.
they've already administered a trial batch to Dick Cheney.
I don't think that's what he's saying at all. You are completely misrepresenting the facts. Furthermore, it's difficult to see why you invoke the notion of categorical imperative, as this is primarily an epistemic question, not an ethical one(though it may have ethical implications). In other words, it primarily concerns the conditions under which we believe or disbelieve a claim, and the conditions under which factual reality(to which we are accountable) may be misrepresented. The only real issue which Kant would bring to the table here is whether lying is wrong but there is no real debate here, is there?
First, if we cannot agree on what the Swift Boat veterans actually did, we can't actually discuss the issue meaningfully.
Neither of your two situations represent what actually occurred. The group used the testimony of people who were directly contradicting the official testimony that they had already made during the Vietnam War. Some had even *recommended* Kerry for the awards he received, and all of the Swift Boat veterans had not even been in a position to witness or judge his heroic actions at the time they occured. Some even admitted that their grievances concerned not what John Kerry did during the war but instead what John Kerry said after the war. These are people who signed a letter attacking John Kerry simply because they disagreed with John Kerry's public criticisms about war operations.
So, who are we to say which testimony was true with regards to those who directly contradicted themselves? The fact that the prior testimony was made ostensibly without financial and political inducement while the latter testimony was made with it seems to cast doubt over the latter. Thus, at the very least, we should not be affected at all by the claims of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth(that is, their claims should not cause us to think less of John Kerry or to think more of John Kerry).
My mistake, a theorem. But ruling out other geometries, given a triangle in Euclidean geometry, the Pythagorean theorem holds true and *must* hold true.
The intuition that we live in a Euclidean world turned out to be false, but if I understand correctly, that wasn't apparent until Einstein(correct?).
My point still holds. I was just trying to point out that a scientific theory and a mathematical theorem represent two conceptually different kinds of knowledge. I'm sure there are analytically true statements about triangles in Riemannian geometries that would be better examples.
This is nitpicking, but the Pythagorean Theorem is a mathematical axiom. It must be true according to the definition of the triangle; it is *inconceivable* that the Pythagorean theorem could be false.
There is no necessity built into evolution that makes it true, because it is a scientific claim. There could be a counterexample tomorrow that refutes evolution completely, and if we accepted it we'd have to abandon evolution and form a new theory. Evolution is not a true theory unless it is backed up by experience.
Now of course there is so much experience(evidence) supporting evolution that it has the status of objective fact and it would be foolish to withhold assent from it, at least its essence. But still, any belief about the world is subject to doubt - at the very core because our experience is mediated by our fallible senses - and thus evolution and every other scientific theory can always be disputed.
Perhaps you should consider a political career . From your top-parent post:
'Because' may not have been a word that you used, but you certainly imply that space flight will always remain at most a privelege of the very wealthy.
"Historically, new technologies have never broken the laws of thermodynamics. Never ever. In order to fulfill these childish dreams of mass space travel, escaping earthly cataclysm, terraforming and colonizing Mars, etc. you need to assume that some currently unsuspected technology can harness vast amounts of energy that in any case are not present on earth, or that the laws of thermodynamics will be broken or bent beyond recognition."
Of course they've never broken the laws of thermodynamics. That's what a law is. It can't be broken; nature depends on it. But your invocation of the 'laws of thermodynamics' here is confusing and makes me think you don't actually know what they are. There is nothing in the laws of thermodynamics that says we can't explore space. The only thing Thermodynamics says is that 1) Conservation of energy. 2) The net entropy change of the universe in any energy transfer must be positive or zero. 3) The multiplicity/entropy of a system will go to zero as its temperature goes to zero.
I don't see any prohibition of space travel in there. There is no a priori or a posteriori reason why space travel can't happen. You might say that somehow mass space travel would violate the second law, but you're forgetting about the plumes of exhaust and the energy exchange that must emit from rockets and other such byproducts in order to travel space, which push up the entropy of the universe. So now that you're physical argument is bust, what are you left with? Bleak, cynical, depressing arguments. Let's examine those.
"It is sappy to believe that "just because we are ignorant today doesn't mean we will remain so tomorrow," or something similar is somehow an acceptable and rational stance. Your belief in the eventual appearance of the mystery technology and its vast implicit energy pool is a magical-religious belief akin to faith in the eventual arrival of a god-like figure and the subsequent salvation of the world in some way. It is ridiculous."
Just because it doesn't satisfy your glum sensibilities doesn't mean its irrational. It's actually a scientific observation. A principle of scientific parsimony would say that the rules that govern behavior don't just spontaneously change. The rules that have governed the way all life populates its environment for the past 3 billion years are not going to just spontaneously stop governing our behavior once humans have populated the entire earth. Where do we go? Space.
I'm very aware that what has motivated our space exploration has been military and the defense industry. And what motivates our military? Securing resources for America. Why the hell else are we in Iraq? Why the hell else did we need to stand off with Russia and to obliterate communism? I can tell you (and I can tell you'll probably agree) it wasn't because we wanted to spread "DEMOCRACY" and "FREEDOM."
As for the rest of your , I have no idea what the hell this has to do with my argument that manned space exploration is inevitable. You've turned a discussion about space exploration into a tract about the 'war on terror', 9/11 Conspiracies, the war in Iraq and oil. No one ever disputed any of the facts you enumerate, while some (but not all of them) are harebrained and paranoid. Talk about straw men.
In any case, that whole bit defeats your point, because petroleum is exactly the kind of finite resource whose depletion is going to push us into space to look for other sustainable energy sources.
You're toeing a line that has been obsolete since the Scooter Libby and 'Plame-gate' case revealed deliberate efforts on behalf of the administration, all the way up to Cheney, to discredit people with information which directly refuted administration claims.
Congress was not given all of the intelligence available. There was much intelligence at the time to the contrary. Yet what was presented to the American public was an unequivocal case that Iraq was an immediate threat to our national security.
There are memos, such as the Downing Street memo of a meeting between American officials and Blair, which demonstrate these concerted efforts to fix the intelligence.
So no, it's not "lying" in the same sense that I would be lying if I said I had a billion dollars, which is a simple denial of fact. It's something much more insidious and dishonest. It is a coordinated, deliberate campaign to manipulate the facts. You don't have to lie if you can mold reality to reflect what you say. Unchecked by a rubberstamping Congress, a lazy media, and an American public still reeling from September 11th, the administration was powerful enough to do just this.
The President and his administration are seasoned misinformers. They don't even have to lie to lie.
Where his argument is tired and cliche, yours is fatally myopic. Saying "We will never colonize space because only the extremely rich and elite go there now" is like saying "The sun will never burn out because right now it looks really bright." It's absurdly shortsighted.
Remember that while space holds a nearly infinite amount of usable resources, earth houses a finite amount of usable resources that are becoming scarcer by the second. I would argue that the desire for resources has fuelled all human migration, large and small. Saying humans will not leave the planet earth not only ignores written history, it ignores pre-history and the nature of life as it has always existed. Having evolved from single-celled germs that live in the oceans, then to land-dwelling beasts, then to monkeys and the great apes, humans then had to migrate from Africa, to Asia Minor and Central Asia, to Australia and to Europe, to England, to the Americas. All because they were chasing the resources necessary for their survival.
So by the simple likelihood that humans will continue to behave similarly to how they have behaved, its obvious that eventually there will be an economic need for humans to live in space. If there's not an economic need, there will be a military need.
As for the issue of cost, commercial spaceflight has only existed for a few years now. That means our technological limitations at the moment cause spaceflight to be exceedingly rare and thus expensive. As more money is poured into spaceflight, the availability (supply) of spaceflight will go up, and the price will come down. But again, it won't be for travel that commerce starts to move beyond sub-orbital altitudes into outer space. It will be because space is economically valuable.
Of course, but Google has plenty of other products which have won out in part because of Google's 'cool' aesthetic. Google search won out for a lot of the same reasons that Apple products win out, simplicity of design and usability...Like with Apple, Google's products have become entrenched in our culture, and you can hardly go anywhere without both hearing about this new song on someone's iPod or how someone is going to Google such-and-such later....Google and Apple are very similar in that regard.
With respect to video, they lost. But at least they had the sense to know they were losing because someone got to it better and faster than they did.
Besides, it's just an example. You get my overall argument.