Yea, that's a classic religious argument: "God has to exist, because if he doesn't you got no free will, and your existence is base and meaningless" yadda yadda yadda.
The practical answer is, either way, you still have to get up and go to work in the morning. The same world will exist. The same physical laws will apply. The only difference is we'll be missing something that we can't even perceive in the first place, and which very well may not exist at all.
From a religious standpoint you can make the same argument with God and/or the immortal soul in the place of free will and it reads exactly the same.
But that's not what he says. cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, because if I think there must be a thing that thinks, and that thing that thinks must exist, because otherwise it couldn't think. At no point does he observe himself or anything else, because all observational data is suspect to Descartes.
This is the problem. He proved he exists, but then got stuck there. In his actual argument, he followed that up with, "If I exist, then god must exist, and if god exists then the world must exist, because god wouldn't fuck with me like that" which is pretty weak.
The only way to deal with the cogito is to throw it out the window at the start, because you can never prove the existence of anything but yourself a priori.
Oh I believe it; my mother had a tumor which definitely affected her behavior. Still, tumors are an odd case because the effects they'll have on the brain can't be accurately predicted at this time, if ever...Can't lock up people just because they have brain tumors!
It's not based on free will, because we don't know if we have free will.
The legal system is based on the appearance of free will, and this is something that we will always have, until the day comes when they invent a machine that can scan a person, and then accurately predict every single action they make from that point until their death.
They can try and jail people based on their "predictions" but it is hilariously unlikely that they'll ever get it to stick, simply because there is no proof that they'll ever do anything until they actually do it.
That's a wholly different idea. What they're saying is: "If we can predict that this person is going to commit a crime based on his genetic makeup, should we put him in jail?"
That has nothing to do with your actual choices, just with genetic predispositions, which aren't the same thing. A guy who is predisposed to love blood and cutting people up could be a psycho killer...Or a fine surgeon.
Actually, I have so much knowledge of the topic of discussion I have actually gone through to the other side, and am now looking back going, "What kind of fricking moron would waste his time even thinking about this crap?"
Seriously. Where is the point? It's just another crazy brain puzzle bequeathed down to us by the pretzel-minded religious scholars of antiquity. I have heard so many arguments for and against free will...I used to think it was an important question. I remember reading Freedom Evolves, which is a well written piece by Daniel Dennett defending free will from the point of view of a physicalist who doesn't believe in mind/body separation. I remember working his arguments over in my head, trying them out against some of the dualist perspectives, who claim we'll lose things like objective morality when we "lose" free will.
And finally, it just occurred to me that "losing" free will is like losing the fricking tooth fairy. Who cares? There are a lot of really smart people who have devoted their whole lives to solving a question that has no fricking answer, and even if it did have an answer, it wouldn't matter!
And from a non-deterministic viewpoint nothing has yet been determined...The problem is, we don't know which viewpoint the universe subscribes to, and, in fact, it is extremely unlikely that we'll ever know.
From a practical standpoint there is no difference between having free will and just appearing to have free will, which is kind of like the difference between actually existing and only appearing to exist.
Since tossing all sense/experiential/experimental data in the old intellectual garbage pail basically leaves us with nothing, I prefer to just work from the assumption that, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, what you see is what there is.
The tumor thing is pretty shady anyway. I mean, are they saying that all pedophilia is a result of brain tumors? Unlikely! It's unlikely even that most mental disorders arise from measurable brain irregularities.
There are exceptions, of course, but anti-social behavior is rarely so clear cut.
It's interesting to see how many people have been brainwashed into believing that there really is a dichotomy here between free will and determinism, like you absolutely have to have one or the other. Same deal with the cogito.
I tend to side with Wittgenstein on this one: these questions are a problem of language, not of reality. It's like, "Can god create a stone so heavy god can't lift it?" Who cares?
Does having free will mean anything? No. Does having no free will mean anything different? No. We live our lives like our actions are the result of our desires, and there is no other way we could exist and still have a functioning society.
Well physical determinism never seems to hold when you add living things.
Why does the planet revolve around the sun? Physical determinism. Why does Britteny Spears roam around in public with no panties? You're definitely moving into non-euclidian geometry there.
I do find the quantum physics angle pretty interesting...There has to be something we don't yet understand to explain how we can exist in the first place...Not talking religion here, but, in terms of physics and chemistry, living things are pretty weird.
The whole idea of free will is an artefact of religious thought: If god is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, why do people do bad things? Answer? Free will!
Without the religious angle, there isn't much to free will. This is just another example of physical determinism, which is even more pathetically weak than it's religious counterpart, because it replaces a omnipotent puppet master with the laws of nature. Is nature taking away your ability to choose? Do the laws of physics require that you consume this twinkie instead of that ho-ho? It reduces quickly to absurdity.
Free will is like the Cartesian solipsism brought on by cogito ergo sum, where you prove your own existence, but lose all the rest of existence at the same time. What type of person does it take to sit down and wonder whether or not they exist, and if they do exist, does the rest of the world exist?
Do you have free will? Does it matter? Would you ever know the difference? The pedophile cited in the article couldn't use it as a defense in his trial, because the legal system doesn't give a damn.
I normally am not a proponent of Occam, but this is one of those cases where it's just so apt. What possible explanatory purpose is served by adding or removing free will?
It's like reading about the guy who tried to hire an undercover cop to kill his wife...The poor joker is so obviously clueless, but trying to play it down. Every time he starts asking real questions, they just bury him in bs, and he buys it...It's so obvious they're screwing with him. At one point they get him to send 'em some snapshots of local squirrels.
Nothing like a little pointless speculation to liven up the day.
The desktop gui's that are available are good enough for most users. The thing that slows adoption is most business' dependence on microsoft's office/email suite...Provide that stuff through terminal services, and no one complains about what the desktop looks like, but then you lose the cost savings, so why not go with windows native?
If online ajax services actually start living up to the hype, and start supplanting Office-type software, you'll see linux on the desktop like you've never even imagined.
It's not to make you go out and buy something, because that depends on a whole host of factors that they know damn well they can't control. Are you hungry? Do you even need shoes? Do you own an HDTV? They know that, for the most part, and delivery food ads are the exception here, you're not going to drop what you're doing and lunge out to buy their product.
What they want is to build up and reinforce this idea in your head, so that when you do need shoes or an HDtv or something, and you go to the store, you have a positive bias toward their product because it seems "familiar" to you. So it made sense for them to put ads in games, because they believed that you would subconsciously notice the ad and that subconscious recognition would reinforce that positive bias.
What seems to be happening however, and what they didn't count on, is that the games require so much focus that you're not aware of the ad, even on a subconscious level, so they're getting crap return for their advertising dollar.
There is nothing sexy or secret about the methods of scanning, but they must have put an imperial frickton of money into the process...To give the fruit of that much money away would be irresponsible to their shareholders...At least until they've made their money back with it.
Ideally we could set up a few hundred digital libraries that would all hold some percentage of the catalog, so that any 5 would be able to duplicate the entire catalog. That way, in the event of a catastrophe or some kind of weird global event, it would be more likely that an uncorrupted copy could be found.
I'd definitely like to see some not-for-profits get involved.
We have this huge puritanical hangup over it, so we put all these restrictions on drinking, and act horrified at any story of a "child" of 20 who gets illegally drunk off his ass, whereas over there pubs are social places, and men and women go there to chat with their friends and neighbors, and it's not uncommon for a parent to allow a child to take a sip of their beer, the same way it's not uncommon for a parent here to let a child take a sip of their coffee.
So by the time they can legally drink, it's not a big deal.
Consoles are never that impressive, when compared to actual computers...Computers are general purpose tools, and their architecture reflects this.
Console systems, on the other hand, are engineered for a very tight, very specific, set of tasks. This is why a console with comparatively crappy stats can walk all over a much beefier computer, and vice versa.
I would say, it's partly because, for every thoughtful, intelligent psychological theorist out there, there are five guys taping electrodes to monkey testicles in order to prove that apes percieve the color blue as the smell of radishes.
Add to that the stigma that, while sickness is external, and needs treatment, sadness is internal..."in the head" as it were, and thus is a symptom of a weak/unstable mind.
I come down somewhat in the middle myself, so while acknowledging that there are many different types of mental illness that respond well to treatment, I'd never put "sadness" in that category. Being happy and unhappy, in most people, is more about your life than about anything else, and to take a pill to be happy all the time is a little too Brave New World for me.
Well, they do it here. Of course, our local water utility is semi-privatized...The city spun them off about 50 years ago, so they don't have access to imminent domain and have to play by the rules.
I'd kinda be interested to see how something like that would work out for fiber...Clearly don't want the federal government involved in it because they'll screw it up, but at the same time, the private companies will do what's best for themselves and to hell with the consumers.
In the article, the locals had attempted to do FTTP previously, and been intimidated out of it by SBC...They ran some seriously abusive push polls, "Do you want your tax dollars paying for your neighbor to get porn?" and "How many schools do you think will close because tax payers won't support both the school referendum and the fiber referendum?" and the local government caved. Still, local service utility co-ops work pretty well for this sort of thing. Too bad we don't see more of that.
Originally it was the phone company, which is why we have wire sharing today. Cable has gotten big enough, however, that they could do their share.
Regardless, if there is money to be made by running wire to a place, someone will do it, and, in the interest of not having 5 sets of wire going to each house, companies should be allowed to purchase space on existing wires, from the company that ran the wire in the first place. You have to add in that stipulation, or the company that ran the wire will refuse to allow others to use it as well, resulting in multiple sets of wire.
This is perfectly normal for utilities. Rival gas companies use the same pipes, because it's stupid to double up if you don't need more capacity.
Understood...The law governing it right now is far from simple, and includes wire sharing, and about a billion more things. If we deregulated them completely, the phone companies would use the fact that they control most of the fiber backbones to choke out the cable companies by not allowing them to use the wire. The cable companies would fight back by laying their own wire, and we'd end up with dozens of bit players and a completely ridiculous hodgepodge network of fiber.
I'd say the right way to get it done was to take it away from the private companies altogether, but what a nightmare that would be! We'd never get fiber! Basically what we need is an efficient, redundant and pervasive network, and while we're never going to get this from private industry, the public sector would screw it up hopelessly as well.
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Yea, that's a classic religious argument: "God has to exist, because if he doesn't you got no free will, and your existence is base and meaningless" yadda yadda yadda.
The practical answer is, either way, you still have to get up and go to work in the morning. The same world will exist. The same physical laws will apply. The only difference is we'll be missing something that we can't even perceive in the first place, and which very well may not exist at all.
From a religious standpoint you can make the same argument with God and/or the immortal soul in the place of free will and it reads exactly the same.
But that's not what he says. cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, because if I think there must be a thing that thinks, and that thing that thinks must exist, because otherwise it couldn't think. At no point does he observe himself or anything else, because all observational data is suspect to Descartes.
This is the problem. He proved he exists, but then got stuck there. In his actual argument, he followed that up with, "If I exist, then god must exist, and if god exists then the world must exist, because god wouldn't fuck with me like that" which is pretty weak.
The only way to deal with the cogito is to throw it out the window at the start, because you can never prove the existence of anything but yourself a priori.
Oh I believe it; my mother had a tumor which definitely affected her behavior. Still, tumors are an odd case because the effects they'll have on the brain can't be accurately predicted at this time, if ever...Can't lock up people just because they have brain tumors!
It's not based on free will, because we don't know if we have free will.
The legal system is based on the appearance of free will, and this is something that we will always have, until the day comes when they invent a machine that can scan a person, and then accurately predict every single action they make from that point until their death.
They can try and jail people based on their "predictions" but it is hilariously unlikely that they'll ever get it to stick, simply because there is no proof that they'll ever do anything until they actually do it.
That's a wholly different idea. What they're saying is: "If we can predict that this person is going to commit a crime based on his genetic makeup, should we put him in jail?"
That has nothing to do with your actual choices, just with genetic predispositions, which aren't the same thing. A guy who is predisposed to love blood and cutting people up could be a psycho killer...Or a fine surgeon.
Actually, I have so much knowledge of the topic of discussion I have actually gone through to the other side, and am now looking back going, "What kind of fricking moron would waste his time even thinking about this crap?"
Seriously. Where is the point? It's just another crazy brain puzzle bequeathed down to us by the pretzel-minded religious scholars of antiquity. I have heard so many arguments for and against free will...I used to think it was an important question. I remember reading Freedom Evolves, which is a well written piece by Daniel Dennett defending free will from the point of view of a physicalist who doesn't believe in mind/body separation. I remember working his arguments over in my head, trying them out against some of the dualist perspectives, who claim we'll lose things like objective morality when we "lose" free will.
And finally, it just occurred to me that "losing" free will is like losing the fricking tooth fairy. Who cares? There are a lot of really smart people who have devoted their whole lives to solving a question that has no fricking answer, and even if it did have an answer, it wouldn't matter!
And from a non-deterministic viewpoint nothing has yet been determined...The problem is, we don't know which viewpoint the universe subscribes to, and, in fact, it is extremely unlikely that we'll ever know.
From a practical standpoint there is no difference between having free will and just appearing to have free will, which is kind of like the difference between actually existing and only appearing to exist.
Since tossing all sense/experiential/experimental data in the old intellectual garbage pail basically leaves us with nothing, I prefer to just work from the assumption that, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, what you see is what there is.
Innocent until proven guilty is U.S law, not common law from England. If they decide they want to lock your ass up, they can.
The tumor thing is pretty shady anyway. I mean, are they saying that all pedophilia is a result of brain tumors? Unlikely! It's unlikely even that most mental disorders arise from measurable brain irregularities.
There are exceptions, of course, but anti-social behavior is rarely so clear cut.
It's interesting to see how many people have been brainwashed into believing that there really is a dichotomy here between free will and determinism, like you absolutely have to have one or the other. Same deal with the cogito.
I tend to side with Wittgenstein on this one: these questions are a problem of language, not of reality. It's like, "Can god create a stone so heavy god can't lift it?" Who cares?
Does having free will mean anything? No. Does having no free will mean anything different? No. We live our lives like our actions are the result of our desires, and there is no other way we could exist and still have a functioning society.
So why worry about it? It's mental masturbation.
Well physical determinism never seems to hold when you add living things.
Why does the planet revolve around the sun? Physical determinism. Why does Britteny Spears roam around in public with no panties? You're definitely moving into non-euclidian geometry there.
I do find the quantum physics angle pretty interesting...There has to be something we don't yet understand to explain how we can exist in the first place...Not talking religion here, but, in terms of physics and chemistry, living things are pretty weird.
The whole idea of free will is an artefact of religious thought: If god is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, why do people do bad things? Answer? Free will!
Without the religious angle, there isn't much to free will. This is just another example of physical determinism, which is even more pathetically weak than it's religious counterpart, because it replaces a omnipotent puppet master with the laws of nature. Is nature taking away your ability to choose? Do the laws of physics require that you consume this twinkie instead of that ho-ho? It reduces quickly to absurdity.
Free will is like the Cartesian solipsism brought on by cogito ergo sum, where you prove your own existence, but lose all the rest of existence at the same time. What type of person does it take to sit down and wonder whether or not they exist, and if they do exist, does the rest of the world exist?
Do you have free will? Does it matter? Would you ever know the difference? The pedophile cited in the article couldn't use it as a defense in his trial, because the legal system doesn't give a damn.
I normally am not a proponent of Occam, but this is one of those cases where it's just so apt. What possible explanatory purpose is served by adding or removing free will?
It's like the stuff you see on 419 Eater where they convince the scammers to send in photos of themselves looking stupid.
Anyone with a half a clue would have twigged to it...The request is so clearly useless.
They had the whole exchange posted for a while, but it was only recently that anyone in the media bothered to track down the actual guy.
It's like reading about the guy who tried to hire an undercover cop to kill his wife...The poor joker is so obviously clueless, but trying to play it down. Every time he starts asking real questions, they just bury him in bs, and he buys it...It's so obvious they're screwing with him. At one point they get him to send 'em some snapshots of local squirrels.
An entertaining read.
Nothing like a little pointless speculation to liven up the day.
The desktop gui's that are available are good enough for most users. The thing that slows adoption is most business' dependence on microsoft's office/email suite...Provide that stuff through terminal services, and no one complains about what the desktop looks like, but then you lose the cost savings, so why not go with windows native?
If online ajax services actually start living up to the hype, and start supplanting Office-type software, you'll see linux on the desktop like you've never even imagined.
You're missing the whole point of advertising.
It's not to make you go out and buy something, because that depends on a whole host of factors that they know damn well they can't control. Are you hungry? Do you even need shoes? Do you own an HDTV? They know that, for the most part, and delivery food ads are the exception here, you're not going to drop what you're doing and lunge out to buy their product.
What they want is to build up and reinforce this idea in your head, so that when you do need shoes or an HDtv or something, and you go to the store, you have a positive bias toward their product because it seems "familiar" to you. So it made sense for them to put ads in games, because they believed that you would subconsciously notice the ad and that subconscious recognition would reinforce that positive bias.
What seems to be happening however, and what they didn't count on, is that the games require so much focus that you're not aware of the ad, even on a subconscious level, so they're getting crap return for their advertising dollar.
I bet they won't.
There is nothing sexy or secret about the methods of scanning, but they must have put an imperial frickton of money into the process...To give the fruit of that much money away would be irresponsible to their shareholders...At least until they've made their money back with it.
The more the merrier!
Ideally we could set up a few hundred digital libraries that would all hold some percentage of the catalog, so that any 5 would be able to duplicate the entire catalog. That way, in the event of a catastrophe or some kind of weird global event, it would be more likely that an uncorrupted copy could be found.
I'd definitely like to see some not-for-profits get involved.
If you restrict it, you make it more exciting.
We have this huge puritanical hangup over it, so we put all these restrictions on drinking, and act horrified at any story of a "child" of 20 who gets illegally drunk off his ass, whereas over there pubs are social places, and men and women go there to chat with their friends and neighbors, and it's not uncommon for a parent to allow a child to take a sip of their beer, the same way it's not uncommon for a parent here to let a child take a sip of their coffee.
So by the time they can legally drink, it's not a big deal.
Consoles are never that impressive, when compared to actual computers...Computers are general purpose tools, and their architecture reflects this.
Console systems, on the other hand, are engineered for a very tight, very specific, set of tasks. This is why a console with comparatively crappy stats can walk all over a much beefier computer, and vice versa.
I would say, it's partly because, for every thoughtful, intelligent psychological theorist out there, there are five guys taping electrodes to monkey testicles in order to prove that apes percieve the color blue as the smell of radishes.
Add to that the stigma that, while sickness is external, and needs treatment, sadness is internal..."in the head" as it were, and thus is a symptom of a weak/unstable mind.
I come down somewhat in the middle myself, so while acknowledging that there are many different types of mental illness that respond well to treatment, I'd never put "sadness" in that category. Being happy and unhappy, in most people, is more about your life than about anything else, and to take a pill to be happy all the time is a little too Brave New World for me.
Well, they do it here. Of course, our local water utility is semi-privatized...The city spun them off about 50 years ago, so they don't have access to imminent domain and have to play by the rules.
I'd kinda be interested to see how something like that would work out for fiber...Clearly don't want the federal government involved in it because they'll screw it up, but at the same time, the private companies will do what's best for themselves and to hell with the consumers.
In the article, the locals had attempted to do FTTP previously, and been intimidated out of it by SBC...They ran some seriously abusive push polls, "Do you want your tax dollars paying for your neighbor to get porn?" and "How many schools do you think will close because tax payers won't support both the school referendum and the fiber referendum?" and the local government caved. Still, local service utility co-ops work pretty well for this sort of thing. Too bad we don't see more of that.
Originally it was the phone company, which is why we have wire sharing today. Cable has gotten big enough, however, that they could do their share.
Regardless, if there is money to be made by running wire to a place, someone will do it, and, in the interest of not having 5 sets of wire going to each house, companies should be allowed to purchase space on existing wires, from the company that ran the wire in the first place. You have to add in that stipulation, or the company that ran the wire will refuse to allow others to use it as well, resulting in multiple sets of wire.
This is perfectly normal for utilities. Rival gas companies use the same pipes, because it's stupid to double up if you don't need more capacity.
Understood...The law governing it right now is far from simple, and includes wire sharing, and about a billion more things. If we deregulated them completely, the phone companies would use the fact that they control most of the fiber backbones to choke out the cable companies by not allowing them to use the wire. The cable companies would fight back by laying their own wire, and we'd end up with dozens of bit players and a completely ridiculous hodgepodge network of fiber.
I'd say the right way to get it done was to take it away from the private companies altogether, but what a nightmare that would be! We'd never get fiber! Basically what we need is an efficient, redundant and pervasive network, and while we're never going to get this from private industry, the public sector would screw it up hopelessly as well.