...but yes, only in the sense that we are all divine. Divine or not, it is likely he - or those who conceived his story - had some semblance of true enlightenment (which is quite a natural and desirable psychological state). If one follows the precepts endorsed by Jesus, Buddha, et. al., one will inevitably transcend the mind that thinks and realize "the way it all is." There is serious merit in the Dharma, and I think it's a mistake to throw it out just because the followers of Jesus have generally no clue about the core of his teachings.
AFAIK, Evolution is still a theory. A very convincing theory, I do not doubt that, but a theory nonetheless.
Yes, evolution is a theory. But, my friend, theories are as good as you get. That's how science works! No hypothesis, no matter how widely accepted, ever goes beyond the status of "the best theory so far."
The case with evolution is very strong. It is what you should rightly call a "well-established theory." In natural language, the scientific status of evolution is "most certainly correct, but needing more study to understand all its driving dynamics."
Now, if evolution were considered an untested idea, it would be called "the evolutionary hypothesis" and then you could say "The evolutionary hypothesis is still just a hypothesis. A very convincing hypotheses, I do not doubt that, but an untested hypothesis nonetheless."
In fact, we have observed natural selection in action. The surprising phylogenic changes over even short periods can easily be extrapolated to the huge spans of time since animals evolved - time enough for the profligate diversity of all the species on Earth to arrive at their current forms. By examining DNA we have discovered clear links between all mammals, for example, between dinosaurs and birds, the common heritage of all prokaryotes like you, me, and broccoli.
The evidence will continue to pile up until it reaches the moon and beyond, but there will always be some people reluctant to accept the implications. For them it will always be "just a theory." To prevent reason being undermined by this muddy meme we need to press the point that a theory is a very strong idea.
Italian wall lizards introduced to islands in Croatia evolved larger heads, a totally different gut structure, and switched their diet from insects to plants. All in under 40 years.
If someone gains physical access to your Mac laptop it doesn't matter if you've set a password or not. They can connect its firewire port to another Mac and reboot it in Target mode to gain full access to the hard drive. They can start it up in single-user mode and set any password they want or change permissions on any files and folders.
The author seems to be implying that you just ought to give up on developing standard testing procedures altogether. That seems like it would be a useful meme for the people who brought you Guantanamo Bay, Inc.
The glaring problem with his logic is that if you repeat the test your accuracy will tend to go up, and if you apply complimentary tests, you get even better accuracy. The original writer assumes that you test, then you execute, then you forget... Well that happens, to be sure, but it's a problem of rigor.
I mentioned Guantanamo Bay because it's a fine example of a willful failure to be rigorous. Shrub, Inc.'s only concern was to generate perceived results and delay further testing as long as possible. To fill up space and create the appearance that (a) there are lots of terrorists and (b) we caught lots of them. And they got a bunch of useful political prisoners - not really imprisoned for their beliefs or affiliations - but as pure fodder for use by the political class.
Had we applied more rigorous testing there never would have been a Guantanamo Bay prison. And if we ever begin to do so, the place will evaporate in a black cloud of oil smoke.
Clever, but I don't get it. Why would a true statement be falsifiable?;-P
Well if you want to get down to it, nothing can be proven to you until your senses and your reason have sifted it and found it to be consistent with your experience. In some cases an hypothesis will be so out of whack with your experience that no argument will be able to convince you of its truth, and you'll need to see for yourself.
Insight experiences are simply the most powerful example of this principle. The only validation to be found is in going to the very place where the answer lies and seeing for yourself. Because of the nature of the problem of self, direct investigation is the only way to gain the needed experiential parity to even come to terms.
And sure, in the end, you may fail. Or even if you manage to have an "experience" (which is not the point) you can choose to believe that there is no content in what you've experienced, and nothing will have been proven to you. And that's fine too.
I have to play two sides here, because I am well convinced that meditation plays an essential role in exercising areas of the brain and aspects of consciousness that habits like thinking simply can't. But on the other hand, I'm strongly averse to the kind of mysticism as described in this thread (being opposed to reason).
Obviously, practical problems require practical solutions; our everyday experiences require us to weigh and calculate. ("Trust in Allah - but tie up your camel!") Now, when it comes to the practical problem of the self ("Who am i?") meditation and related remedies are reasonably indicated.
It just happens that mystical experiences and insights often follow, in part because the mind is no longer anchored to self-talk as its mirror of identity, but also because of what we're made of -- probability waves, mostly empty space, pure energy... the nature of which is innate to us. The sense of self and other disappears of necessity - it becomes clear to oneself that separateness is a meaningless concept, but all one has to go on is an inexpressible experience.
One comes away with a sense of awe, understandably frustrated by conventional means of expressing oneself, and of reflecting on the world. When someone asks, "What is reality like?" the only useful answers seem to be in the form of analogies, poems, and cries in the wilderness of "find out for yourself."
I think it's a mistake to assume that people who have had mystical insights are necessarily abandoning reason. Reason is after all, very very useful! Me personally, I find that reason is very helpful to remind me that I can't walk through walls after all, despite being utterly "empty."
Now, science isn't totally unable to study mystical phenomena. Dan Dennett's heterophenomenological approach ought to suffice just fine! The individual reports by people of their mystical experiences can be taken as simply being subjective reports, and you use standard methods of quantification and analysis to derive data. Over a long enough period of time you can begin to build a picture, and then you can know how to take these reports.
I think that's an important key to many such problem. One can choose to take a critical stance in which mystical assertions are points on which you must choose to agree or disagree, or you can note down the subjective report of the organic system in question, add it to your data, and hold off your conclusions until enough information is accumulated.
Of course, all this presumes that one is interested in the subject enough to look more deeply into it. But for many people, their conclusions have already been drawn.
As for my part, I am staying open to the value of mystical experience, so called, and to not-knowing as a potent epistemological stance. In fact, I feel more empty and sponge-like already!
Sure it does. It begins in the middle and ends at the boundary... or it begins at the left and ends on the right... or it began when you put the pencil tip down in the stencil and ended when you burned the paper.
Semantics!
However, give me a circle whose radius is infinity and I'll show you a straight line.
And who is strangely unable to demonstrate these insights to anyone else in a repeatable manner.
Not true! Anyone who practices meditation intensely enough - with proper guidance - can reproduce the experience. People have been helping others to reproduce the experience of meditative insight for a very long time.
In Zen you are reminded that the mind plays tricks, and you are encouraged to ignore any bizarre mystical phenomena and stick to the task at hand, which is liberating the mind from the delusion of your limited identity - which is only a construction of the mind that thinks in analogies and pictures. Furthermore you are encouraged to question all your beliefs down to the most fundamental - indeed, the very foundation of belief itself - by applying doubt as a lever.
At heart, the truth of meditative insight is not a difficult concept! To believe that "I" am responsible for giving rise to "my thoughts" and "my actions" is to give in to the most pervasive delusion of all. The deeper truth of how our thoughts and actions arises can't become clear until you disengage and simply observe the phenomena of your thoughts, perceptions, and will.
All of this is demonstrable and repeatable, for anyone who wishes to look into it. Maybe it's not "demonstrable" in the way you would like, but you can prove it to yourself easily enough.
Science has already demonstrated that there is no central place in our brains where "it all comes together" and in that sense it's objectively demonstrable that the everyday experience of being a cohesive entity is an illusion. Practices like meditation hammer that home in the most direct way possible.
Now, I know your original point was that the results of meditative insight are typically not in the form of conveniently expressible strings of ideas or images. But that is not its effect or its application. You can defrag your hard drive, and you will discover that your hard drive can say little more about the contents of its files. However, the hard drive is now more efficient and "happier" as a whole. Meditation is more like that - it attends to the foundation that the expressible is built upon, but it is not itself expressible. Put another way, your hippocampus does talk to you all the time - it just doesn't speak English. It speaks in subtle symbolic ways that bubble up.
I think ultimately what meditation demonstrates is the kind of thing we know intellectually, but are unable to experience. Things like, although objects are separate in our space-time continuum, it appears that space is abstract and in fact energy - as waves or particles - is more holistic than discreet. Thus, when an individual disengages the part of the brain that says "i am separate" he discovers that the essential self doesn't end at the borders of his skull, but is in fact a drop intermingled in an ocean of energy.
Scientifically, we can understand that space may be a kind of "universal abstraction" and we can even model it, but experiencing that directly is something altogether different.
I agree that mystical experience does have some unfortunate fallout. People who aren't accustomed to such experiences are bound to try to interpret them in conventional ways, rather than let them be. So they decide they've communed with God or received the grace of Jesus, and - although it's true in a figurative sense... it's not literally true! There is no separate God that has spoken to them, and no Jesus entity has blessed them. It's just a natural fact that we are not separate from all that is, and that the experience of self-transcendence is quite amazing.
I agree, it's a mistake to accord any special quality to our brains as ultimate observers. An electron detector is an observer too. It can capture and record an event, and in doing so it collapses the wave function of the electron, creating an absolute where only a potential had existed a blind moment before. As Schrodinger points out, the event is still only a wave function until your brain takes in the measurement.
Did the wave function collapse for the detector at the moment that the electron hit it, or did the whole shebang collapse when you looked at the screen? Actually, the question is meaningless because the result is the same. Regardless of when it actually happened, for the detector too, the time of the event will be retrospectively consistent. That is, the detector, if it could talk, would say it felt the electron hit it at 1:32 even though it didn't tell you until 1:35.
From that it should be clear that an observer is just another name for a physical system, so an observation is the same thing as an interaction. Since every observation involves a material interaction of some kind, it is safe to assume that what's true for detectors is true for ourselves. Every time a photon strikes your retina a physical event has taken place, something has been determined, an effect has followed a cause.
It's important to screen out the false abstraction about human observers being disconnected from the chain of events. If I tell you by email that my detector registered 6.2 you don't have to come touch the detector to make it so. If you theorize that it was still a wave until I told you, that says there's a physical link developed through my act of telling you... it is not merely an abstract link!
For as it happens, if you trace the photon from my email back to its physical source, then follow the electrons in your screen's transistors back to their source, and so on, you will find that there's been a direct physical chain set up between my finger hitting the "A" key just now and the expelled CO2 in your amazed exclamation about this fact.
That puts a new spin on things!
Philosophically speaking, yes, it is impossible to determine what - if anything - exists in between measured physical interactions. Time could stop while a huge team of quantum elves set up all the dominos for the next moment of the universe, and we would never know the difference.
So does "reality exist, then we observe it" ?
I would say, no. Existence, interaction, and observation are all the same thing.
1. Interaction of energy/matter gives rise to existence in the present. 2. Observation by an instrument is the state of the instrument, and observation by a mind is merely the conditioned state of that mind. 3. Knowledge is in part a pure conditioned state, but in effect it only arises when engaged in a process of comparison, and that comparison process only gives a significant effect in the world if it in turn moves a body.
I want to reiterate one of the most important but subtle points that came up in this rumination, which is that reality only exists right now. And as for that 'now' reality at any given time... how long is it? If the present is itself a phantom, in a sense we cannot really observe it either. We can only see it in any meaningful way, in fact, when we have a previous measurement to take it against. So all observing devices depend on some form of stateful comparison.
What does this say for "acting" devices, like bodies attached to brains? Can the brain can get the same effect - a useful action to follow a coherent stimulus - without recourse to any form of stateful comparison? I don't think so. A neuron whose resistance increases with current isn't a stateful comparison per se, but could give rise to comparable effects.
Regardless of the way states are modeled, I would bet that all special observers in nature (nervous systems) evolved from the earliest stages to perform temporal-spatial comparisons. This would be strong evidence that change is a very real phenomenon in the world even when no special observers exist, and that time can make an adaptational mark without itself having an independent existence apart from change.
Shouldn't the big networks instead take steps to improve the efficiency of filesharing applications, rather than trying to curtail them?
If the big networks like AT&T are honestly troubled by the use of torrent - which according to some reports is something like 90% of all internet traffic - it seems that the best technical solution would be to install distributed torrent nodes and predictively cache files in closer proximity to their destinations.
They could outsource it to Akamai... just a thought.
Saying "This site is designed for Internet Explorer only" is like putting up a sign outside the Wal-Mart parking lot saying "This lot is designed for Pintos only."
Seriously... there is no culture war, because nobody is seriously calling for us all to adhere to a single cultural model. Sure, some right-wing radio personalities would like to say so, but of course they're not serious, they just play these games to get everyone riled up. And those public figures that would cause the US to outlaw certain cultures - say, by amending the constitution to ban gay marriage - will find themselves laughed into obscurity.
For you see, the United States is a country where we are all free to follow any cultural traditions we wish, so long as no harm is done to anyone in the process. As new and necessary cultural traditions emerge (such as gay marriage) it is the constitutional mandate of our government to protect those traditions from being outlawed or suppressed by the prevailing culture.
The rhetorical concept of a "culture war" is quite plainly a Maguffin propped up by right wing corporatists to get stupid people to argue about things that simply don't matter, things which can never be codified into law without destroying the most important founding principle of this country - that of tolerance.
Certainly, you can have fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Jews, but I don't really see how there could be a conspiracy between them.
Maybe not explicit... but they might conspire in the sense of mutually upholding a literal interpretation of their common scriptural heritage. Then they can disagree as to whether Jesus was a prophet or the Messiah, whatever that is.
Objective-C++ is becoming more common all the time. I've used it quite a bit myself, and expect to use it a lot more in porting my MVC C++ Carbon app to Cocoa.
To give the readers a little more insight into how the languages interact...
With Objective-C++ you can freely mix C++ and Objective-C classes, and they each do their own object creation and destruction in their own way. You can send Objective-C object instances messages from within C++ class methods, and you can call C++ object instance methods from within Objective-C methods. You can also freely mix in C functions, as with C++ and Objective-C.
You can talk about work - what else? Well, trivia, I suppose. What you saw on TV last night... But seriously, the way to talk about work is to paint it in broad strokes, embellish the challenges. This even applies to coding.
Consider:
"Today I wrote three custom Drupal modules to support media nodes. The cool part is the site needs to merge their old database into a new Drupal installation so I made a joining table that associates the original data with a set of basic nodes. I had to map the original description fields to the nodes' built-in body field, in a different manner for each source table. You know, because they didn't really follow any consistent naming conventions. It's extra work, which sucks, but - well, no, I guess I would have still had to make an array to map one type onto another, if only as a general solution. We get this a lot."
Instead:
"Today I glued the carcass of an old website to a new one. Out with the cobwebs, in with the shiny newness. As usual, it was long hours sitting on my ass (yes, yes, it's all yours, sorry) but I pulled it out after a decent lunch... and after re-reading that email you wrote me last night. I'm pretty sure it was your reference to soggy french fries that gave me the final key I was looking for. Anyways, by two I was typing code with one hand and lasso-ing dust bunnies with the other. I slapped it all down in front of my boss and told him: Man, I'm taking off early to wash the office stink off my body. Don't try and stop me or you'll have to answer to my Jenny."
Ha ha, then again maybe both will elicit blank stares... Best apply your own sensibilities, not mine!
Let's just simplify the equation a bit more through the magic of science!
Women are more attracted to symmetrical, masculine persons during the period of ovulation. You need to know when that is, and make sure you are the one who satisfies that longing. During the interim periods women are more attracted to the stable, dependable, kind, security-providing sort of person. This tends to be the case just as much for lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual women.
Now, consider whether your intended is a cat-lover. Apart from the obvious ramifications of felinophilia, there is an increased likelihood that she could be infected with the toxoplasma gondii parasite. Also, if she is fond of undercooked meats, beware. Toxoplasma gondii is capable of altering behavior in radical ways. In mice, it causes them to become attracted to the odor of cat urine. In human females it increases sexual promiscuity and risk-taking behaviors. In males, it increases stupidity. It has also been linked to schizophrenia. Thank god there's a cure.
Watch the biological and psychological elements. Remember that - yes - you can infer a personality in all things... but intent, choice, preference, the sense of need... all these can be biologically driven and need to be considered in their influence over behavioral trends, especially in regard to sex and fidelity, for those who prefer it.
Your best bet, then, is to be meticulous in your selection. Stay close to the healthiest females. Take a yoga class, go to the gym. Instead of going to the pub at night for your beauty-pints, try a juice bar in the afternoon. Ask one of the perky lasses that frequent such places about wheatgrass.
But be wary also. Even here... you must be watchful for signs of mental instability, the tendency to bounce away. On the other hand, if she doesn't really fire up your brain, have a good wank to clear your head and let her bounce, bounce, bounce.
Once you get a good one, strong of body, mind, and spirit, never let your attention slacken. Stay engaged. Never retreat. Consider the film The Shining as an instructive beacon why you should never, ever, get addicted to work, stress, and oblivion.
Bear in mind that in Europe, unlike in the United States, men and women generally like each other. If you're not having lunch as often with male and female friends, you should feel like the Troglodyte you are. That goes for you women too. Develop a taste for espresso, lighten up, and for god's sake call up a girl just to hang out. Coward.
Okay, okay, but what are the odds that Joe DiMaggio would have such a streak, and land Marilyn Monroe? Somebody needs to get on that simulation asap. Here are my statistics, by the way...
Slashdot Mirror
...but yes, only in the sense that we are all divine. Divine or not, it is likely he - or those who conceived his story - had some semblance of true enlightenment (which is quite a natural and desirable psychological state). If one follows the precepts endorsed by Jesus, Buddha, et. al., one will inevitably transcend the mind that thinks and realize "the way it all is." There is serious merit in the Dharma, and I think it's a mistake to throw it out just because the followers of Jesus have generally no clue about the core of his teachings.
AFAIK, Evolution is still a theory. A very convincing theory, I do not doubt that, but a theory nonetheless.
Yes, evolution is a theory. But, my friend, theories are as good as you get. That's how science works! No hypothesis, no matter how widely accepted, ever goes beyond the status of "the best theory so far."
The case with evolution is very strong. It is what you should rightly call a "well-established theory." In natural language, the scientific status of evolution is "most certainly correct, but needing more study to understand all its driving dynamics."
Now, if evolution were considered an untested idea, it would be called "the evolutionary hypothesis" and then you could say "The evolutionary hypothesis is still just a hypothesis. A very convincing hypotheses, I do not doubt that, but an untested hypothesis nonetheless."
In fact, we have observed natural selection in action. The surprising phylogenic changes over even short periods can easily be extrapolated to the huge spans of time since animals evolved - time enough for the profligate diversity of all the species on Earth to arrive at their current forms. By examining DNA we have discovered clear links between all mammals, for example, between dinosaurs and birds, the common heritage of all prokaryotes like you, me, and broccoli.
The evidence will continue to pile up until it reaches the moon and beyond, but there will always be some people reluctant to accept the implications. For them it will always be "just a theory." To prevent reason being undermined by this muddy meme we need to press the point that a theory is a very strong idea.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080421-lizard-evolution.html
Italian wall lizards introduced to islands in Croatia evolved larger heads, a totally different gut structure, and switched their diet from insects to plants. All in under 40 years.
...they'll say: "This species is still stuck on ideologies!"
If someone gains physical access to your Mac laptop it doesn't matter if you've set a password or not. They can connect its firewire port to another Mac and reboot it in Target mode to gain full access to the hard drive. They can start it up in single-user mode and set any password they want or change permissions on any files and folders.
The thieves had no savvy, that much is certain.
But option-shift-k has always been a fine way to type the apple logo for those who cant stop calling it the "apple key."
...would be to know how not to be seen!
The author seems to be implying that you just ought to give up on developing standard testing procedures altogether. That seems like it would be a useful meme for the people who brought you Guantanamo Bay, Inc.
The glaring problem with his logic is that if you repeat the test your accuracy will tend to go up, and if you apply complimentary tests, you get even better accuracy. The original writer assumes that you test, then you execute, then you forget... Well that happens, to be sure, but it's a problem of rigor.
I mentioned Guantanamo Bay because it's a fine example of a willful failure to be rigorous. Shrub, Inc.'s only concern was to generate perceived results and delay further testing as long as possible. To fill up space and create the appearance that (a) there are lots of terrorists and (b) we caught lots of them. And they got a bunch of useful political prisoners - not really imprisoned for their beliefs or affiliations - but as pure fodder for use by the political class.
Had we applied more rigorous testing there never would have been a Guantanamo Bay prison. And if we ever begin to do so, the place will evaporate in a black cloud of oil smoke.
Clever, but I don't get it. Why would a true statement be falsifiable? ;-P
Well if you want to get down to it, nothing can be proven to you until your senses and your reason have sifted it and found it to be consistent with your experience. In some cases an hypothesis will be so out of whack with your experience that no argument will be able to convince you of its truth, and you'll need to see for yourself.
Insight experiences are simply the most powerful example of this principle. The only validation to be found is in going to the very place where the answer lies and seeing for yourself. Because of the nature of the problem of self, direct investigation is the only way to gain the needed experiential parity to even come to terms.
And sure, in the end, you may fail. Or even if you manage to have an "experience" (which is not the point) you can choose to believe that there is no content in what you've experienced, and nothing will have been proven to you. And that's fine too.
I have to play two sides here, because I am well convinced that meditation plays an essential role in exercising areas of the brain and aspects of consciousness that habits like thinking simply can't. But on the other hand, I'm strongly averse to the kind of mysticism as described in this thread (being opposed to reason).
Obviously, practical problems require practical solutions; our everyday experiences require us to weigh and calculate. ("Trust in Allah - but tie up your camel!") Now, when it comes to the practical problem of the self ("Who am i?") meditation and related remedies are reasonably indicated.
It just happens that mystical experiences and insights often follow, in part because the mind is no longer anchored to self-talk as its mirror of identity, but also because of what we're made of -- probability waves, mostly empty space, pure energy... the nature of which is innate to us. The sense of self and other disappears of necessity - it becomes clear to oneself that separateness is a meaningless concept, but all one has to go on is an inexpressible experience.
One comes away with a sense of awe, understandably frustrated by conventional means of expressing oneself, and of reflecting on the world. When someone asks, "What is reality like?" the only useful answers seem to be in the form of analogies, poems, and cries in the wilderness of "find out for yourself."
I think it's a mistake to assume that people who have had mystical insights are necessarily abandoning reason. Reason is after all, very very useful! Me personally, I find that reason is very helpful to remind me that I can't walk through walls after all, despite being utterly "empty."
Now, science isn't totally unable to study mystical phenomena. Dan Dennett's heterophenomenological approach ought to suffice just fine! The individual reports by people of their mystical experiences can be taken as simply being subjective reports, and you use standard methods of quantification and analysis to derive data. Over a long enough period of time you can begin to build a picture, and then you can know how to take these reports.
I think that's an important key to many such problem. One can choose to take a critical stance in which mystical assertions are points on which you must choose to agree or disagree, or you can note down the subjective report of the organic system in question, add it to your data, and hold off your conclusions until enough information is accumulated.
Of course, all this presumes that one is interested in the subject enough to look more deeply into it. But for many people, their conclusions have already been drawn.
As for my part, I am staying open to the value of mystical experience, so called, and to not-knowing as a potent epistemological stance. In fact, I feel more empty and sponge-like already!
Sure it does. It begins in the middle and ends at the boundary... or it begins at the left and ends on the right... or it began when you put the pencil tip down in the stencil and ended when you burned the paper.
Semantics!
However, give me a circle whose radius is infinity and I'll show you a straight line.
And who is strangely unable to demonstrate these insights to anyone else in a repeatable manner.
Not true! Anyone who practices meditation intensely enough - with proper guidance - can reproduce the experience. People have been helping others to reproduce the experience of meditative insight for a very long time.
In Zen you are reminded that the mind plays tricks, and you are encouraged to ignore any bizarre mystical phenomena and stick to the task at hand, which is liberating the mind from the delusion of your limited identity - which is only a construction of the mind that thinks in analogies and pictures. Furthermore you are encouraged to question all your beliefs down to the most fundamental - indeed, the very foundation of belief itself - by applying doubt as a lever.
At heart, the truth of meditative insight is not a difficult concept! To believe that "I" am responsible for giving rise to "my thoughts" and "my actions" is to give in to the most pervasive delusion of all. The deeper truth of how our thoughts and actions arises can't become clear until you disengage and simply observe the phenomena of your thoughts, perceptions, and will.
All of this is demonstrable and repeatable, for anyone who wishes to look into it. Maybe it's not "demonstrable" in the way you would like, but you can prove it to yourself easily enough.
Science has already demonstrated that there is no central place in our brains where "it all comes together" and in that sense it's objectively demonstrable that the everyday experience of being a cohesive entity is an illusion. Practices like meditation hammer that home in the most direct way possible.
Now, I know your original point was that the results of meditative insight are typically not in the form of conveniently expressible strings of ideas or images. But that is not its effect or its application. You can defrag your hard drive, and you will discover that your hard drive can say little more about the contents of its files. However, the hard drive is now more efficient and "happier" as a whole. Meditation is more like that - it attends to the foundation that the expressible is built upon, but it is not itself expressible. Put another way, your hippocampus does talk to you all the time - it just doesn't speak English. It speaks in subtle symbolic ways that bubble up.
I think ultimately what meditation demonstrates is the kind of thing we know intellectually, but are unable to experience. Things like, although objects are separate in our space-time continuum, it appears that space is abstract and in fact energy - as waves or particles - is more holistic than discreet. Thus, when an individual disengages the part of the brain that says "i am separate" he discovers that the essential self doesn't end at the borders of his skull, but is in fact a drop intermingled in an ocean of energy.
Scientifically, we can understand that space may be a kind of "universal abstraction" and we can even model it, but experiencing that directly is something altogether different.
I agree that mystical experience does have some unfortunate fallout. People who aren't accustomed to such experiences are bound to try to interpret them in conventional ways, rather than let them be. So they decide they've communed with God or received the grace of Jesus, and - although it's true in a figurative sense... it's not literally true! There is no separate God that has spoken to them, and no Jesus entity has blessed them. It's just a natural fact that we are not separate from all that is, and that the experience of self-transcendence is quite amazing.
I agree, it's a mistake to accord any special quality to our brains as ultimate observers. An electron detector is an observer too. It can capture and record an event, and in doing so it collapses the wave function of the electron, creating an absolute where only a potential had existed a blind moment before. As Schrodinger points out, the event is still only a wave function until your brain takes in the measurement.
... it is not merely an abstract link!
Did the wave function collapse for the detector at the moment that the electron hit it, or did the whole shebang collapse when you looked at the screen? Actually, the question is meaningless because the result is the same. Regardless of when it actually happened, for the detector too, the time of the event will be retrospectively consistent. That is, the detector, if it could talk, would say it felt the electron hit it at 1:32 even though it didn't tell you until 1:35.
From that it should be clear that an observer is just another name for a physical system, so an observation is the same thing as an interaction. Since every observation involves a material interaction of some kind, it is safe to assume that what's true for detectors is true for ourselves. Every time a photon strikes your retina a physical event has taken place, something has been determined, an effect has followed a cause.
It's important to screen out the false abstraction about human observers being disconnected from the chain of events. If I tell you by email that my detector registered 6.2 you don't have to come touch the detector to make it so. If you theorize that it was still a wave until I told you, that says there's a physical link developed through my act of telling you
For as it happens, if you trace the photon from my email back to its physical source, then follow the electrons in your screen's transistors back to their source, and so on, you will find that there's been a direct physical chain set up between my finger hitting the "A" key just now and the expelled CO2 in your amazed exclamation about this fact.
That puts a new spin on things!
Philosophically speaking, yes, it is impossible to determine what - if anything - exists in between measured physical interactions. Time could stop while a huge team of quantum elves set up all the dominos for the next moment of the universe, and we would never know the difference.
So does "reality exist, then we observe it" ?
I would say, no. Existence, interaction, and observation are all the same thing.
1. Interaction of energy/matter gives rise to existence in the present.
2. Observation by an instrument is the state of the instrument, and observation by a mind is merely the conditioned state of that mind.
3. Knowledge is in part a pure conditioned state, but in effect it only arises when engaged in a process of comparison, and that comparison process only gives a significant effect in the world if it in turn moves a body.
I want to reiterate one of the most important but subtle points that came up in this rumination, which is that reality only exists right now. And as for that 'now' reality at any given time... how long is it? If the present is itself a phantom, in a sense we cannot really observe it either. We can only see it in any meaningful way, in fact, when we have a previous measurement to take it against. So all observing devices depend on some form of stateful comparison.
What does this say for "acting" devices, like bodies attached to brains? Can the brain can get the same effect - a useful action to follow a coherent stimulus - without recourse to any form of stateful comparison? I don't think so. A neuron whose resistance increases with current isn't a stateful comparison per se, but could give rise to comparable effects.
Regardless of the way states are modeled, I would bet that all special observers in nature (nervous systems) evolved from the earliest stages to perform temporal-spatial comparisons. This would be strong evidence that change is a very real phenomenon in the world even when no special observers exist, and that time can make an adaptational mark without itself having an independent existence apart from change.
Shouldn't the big networks instead take steps to improve the efficiency of filesharing applications, rather than trying to curtail them?
If the big networks like AT&T are honestly troubled by the use of torrent - which according to some reports is something like 90% of all internet traffic - it seems that the best technical solution would be to install distributed torrent nodes and predictively cache files in closer proximity to their destinations.
They could outsource it to Akamai... just a thought.
Saying "This site is designed for Internet Explorer only" is like putting up a sign outside the Wal-Mart parking lot saying "This lot is designed for Pintos only."
Truly I am a master of metaphor...
Seriously... there is no culture war, because nobody is seriously calling for us all to adhere to a single cultural model. Sure, some right-wing radio personalities would like to say so, but of course they're not serious, they just play these games to get everyone riled up. And those public figures that would cause the US to outlaw certain cultures - say, by amending the constitution to ban gay marriage - will find themselves laughed into obscurity.
For you see, the United States is a country where we are all free to follow any cultural traditions we wish, so long as no harm is done to anyone in the process. As new and necessary cultural traditions emerge (such as gay marriage) it is the constitutional mandate of our government to protect those traditions from being outlawed or suppressed by the prevailing culture.
The rhetorical concept of a "culture war" is quite plainly a Maguffin propped up by right wing corporatists to get stupid people to argue about things that simply don't matter, things which can never be codified into law without destroying the most important founding principle of this country - that of tolerance.
Certainly, you can have fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Jews, but I don't really see how there could be a conspiracy between them.
Maybe not explicit... but they might conspire in the sense of mutually upholding a literal interpretation of their common scriptural heritage. Then they can disagree as to whether Jesus was a prophet or the Messiah, whatever that is.
On the bright side, it never tells the wrong time, and I receive absolutely no SPAM.
Objective-C++ is becoming more common all the time. I've used it quite a bit myself, and expect to use it a lot more in porting my MVC C++ Carbon app to Cocoa.
To give the readers a little more insight into how the languages interact...
With Objective-C++ you can freely mix C++ and Objective-C classes, and they each do their own object creation and destruction in their own way. You can send Objective-C object instances messages from within C++ class methods, and you can call C++ object instance methods from within Objective-C methods. You can also freely mix in C functions, as with C++ and Objective-C.
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ObjectiveC/Articles/chapter_12_section_3.html
You can talk about work - what else? Well, trivia, I suppose. What you saw on TV last night... But seriously, the way to talk about work is to paint it in broad strokes, embellish the challenges. This even applies to coding.
Consider:
"Today I wrote three custom Drupal modules to support media nodes. The cool part is the site needs to merge their old database into a new Drupal installation so I made a joining table that associates the original data with a set of basic nodes. I had to map the original description fields to the nodes' built-in body field, in a different manner for each source table. You know, because they didn't really follow any consistent naming conventions. It's extra work, which sucks, but - well, no, I guess I would have still had to make an array to map one type onto another, if only as a general solution. We get this a lot."
Instead:
"Today I glued the carcass of an old website to a new one. Out with the cobwebs, in with the shiny newness. As usual, it was long hours sitting on my ass (yes, yes, it's all yours, sorry) but I pulled it out after a decent lunch... and after re-reading that email you wrote me last night. I'm pretty sure it was your reference to soggy french fries that gave me the final key I was looking for. Anyways, by two I was typing code with one hand and lasso-ing dust bunnies with the other. I slapped it all down in front of my boss and told him: Man, I'm taking off early to wash the office stink off my body. Don't try and stop me or you'll have to answer to my Jenny."
Ha ha, then again maybe both will elicit blank stares... Best apply your own sensibilities, not mine!
Let's just simplify the equation a bit more through the magic of science!
Women are more attracted to symmetrical, masculine persons during the period of ovulation. You need to know when that is, and make sure you are the one who satisfies that longing. During the interim periods women are more attracted to the stable, dependable, kind, security-providing sort of person. This tends to be the case just as much for lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual women.
Now, consider whether your intended is a cat-lover. Apart from the obvious ramifications of felinophilia, there is an increased likelihood that she could be infected with the toxoplasma gondii parasite. Also, if she is fond of undercooked meats, beware. Toxoplasma gondii is capable of altering behavior in radical ways. In mice, it causes them to become attracted to the odor of cat urine. In human females it increases sexual promiscuity and risk-taking behaviors. In males, it increases stupidity. It has also been linked to schizophrenia. Thank god there's a cure.
Watch the biological and psychological elements. Remember that - yes - you can infer a personality in all things... but intent, choice, preference, the sense of need... all these can be biologically driven and need to be considered in their influence over behavioral trends, especially in regard to sex and fidelity, for those who prefer it.
Your best bet, then, is to be meticulous in your selection. Stay close to the healthiest females. Take a yoga class, go to the gym. Instead of going to the pub at night for your beauty-pints, try a juice bar in the afternoon. Ask one of the perky lasses that frequent such places about wheatgrass.
But be wary also. Even here... you must be watchful for signs of mental instability, the tendency to bounce away. On the other hand, if she doesn't really fire up your brain, have a good wank to clear your head and let her bounce, bounce, bounce.
Once you get a good one, strong of body, mind, and spirit, never let your attention slacken. Stay engaged. Never retreat. Consider the film The Shining as an instructive beacon why you should never, ever, get addicted to work, stress, and oblivion.
Bear in mind that in Europe, unlike in the United States, men and women generally like each other. If you're not having lunch as often with male and female friends, you should feel like the Troglodyte you are. That goes for you women too. Develop a taste for espresso, lighten up, and for god's sake call up a girl just to hang out. Coward.
Science!
Here's a tip: find a girl with interests. You'll find her as you follow your own. Natch.
1) Post to Slashdot
2) ????
3) Get a Date
4) Profit!
Okay, okay, but what are the odds that Joe DiMaggio would have such a streak, and land Marilyn Monroe? Somebody needs to get on that simulation asap. Here are my statistics, by the way...
> uptime
21:37 up 44 days, 7:58, 2 users, load averages: 0.24 0.27 0.30
Mod GP up, baby!