There have been smart people in the past who've thought about that.
Among those that are at the same time religious and sane, your question is an important one. Sadly, we tend to hear more from the religious and somewhat insane, so...
Galileo quotes in his letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, which everybody should read at least three times (the full text is here in English, and here in the original Italian) St. Augustine:
If' anyone shall set the authority of Holy Writ against clear and manifest reason, he who does this knows not what he has undertaken; for he opposes to the truth not the meaning of the Bible, which is beyond his comprehension, but rather his own interpretation, not what is in the Bible, but what he has found in himself and imagines to be there.
A bit slater, Galileo says:
I entreat those wise and prudent Fathers to consider with great care the difference that exists between doctrines subject to proof and those subject to opinion. Considering the force exerted by logical deductions, they may ascertain that it is not in the power of` the professors of demonstrative sciences to change their opinions at will and apply themselves first to one side and then to the other. There is a great difference between commanding a mathematician or a philosopher and influencing a lawyer or a merchant, for demonstrated conclusions about things in nature or in the heavens cannot be changed with the same facility as opinions about what is or is not lawful in a contract, bargain, or bill of exchange. This difference was well understood by the learned and holy Fathers, as proven by their having taken great pains in refuting philosophical fallacies. This may be found expressly in some of them; in particular, we find the following words of St. Augustine:
"It is to be held as an unquestionable truth that whatever the sages of this world have demonstrated concerning physical matters is in no way contrary to our Bibles, hence whatever the sages teach in their books that is contrary to the holy Scriptures may be concluded without any hesitation to be quite false. And according to our ability let us make this evident, and let us keep the faith of our Lord, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom so that we neither become seduced by the verbiage of false philosophy nor frightened by the superstition of counterfeit religion."
From the above words I conceive that I may deduce this doctrine That in the books of the sages of this world there are contained some physical truths which are soundly demonstrated, and others that are merely stated; as to the former, it i the office of wise divines to show that they do not contradict the holy Scriptures And as to the propositions which are stated but not rigorously demonstrated, anything contrary to the Bible involved by them must be held undoubtedly false and should be proved so by every possible means.
Now if truly demonstrated physical conclusions need not be subordinated to biblical passages, but the latter must rather be shown not to interfere with the former, then before a physical proposition is condemned it must be shown to be not rigorously demonstrated-and this is to be done not by those who hold the proposition to be true, but by those who judge it to be false. This seems very reasonable and natural, for those who believe an argument to be false may much more easily find the fallacies in it than men who consider it to be true and conclusive. Indeed, in the latter case it will happen that the more the adherents of an opinion turn over their pages, examine the arguments, repeat the observations, and compare the experiences, the more they will be confirmed in that belief. And Your Highness knows what happened to the late mathematician of the University of Pisa who undertook in his old
There is absolutely no distinction between "law" and "theory". None. Any argument based on any distinction (that gravity has a higher standing that evolution, say) is nothing but a display of sillyness.
In mathematics, one similarly has "lemmas" (or, if you prefer, "lemmata") and "theorems", but there is absolutely no difference between the two groups, apart from subjective assignment of importance.
It's an ultimatum. If you want to use our software; you pretty much have to give up your copyright legal protections.
Note the "if" you used... How does one cope with such an ultimatum? Well, trivial: you just do not use our software!
"If you want to use our software, you pretty much have to give up your copyright legal protections" and "You pretty much have to give up your copyright legal protections" are completely different statements!
Embryonic stem cell research has not produced any treatments yet, while adult and umbilical cord stem cells have produced or are close to producing hundreds of cures already.
And you seem to deduce from this that embryonic stem cell research will not produce any treatments in the future? Great.
There is nothing that embryonic stem cells can do that umbilical cord stem cells can't, aside from pissing off pro-lifers.
You know this how? Unless you have already done all the research possible, there is no other way to justify this assertion but on prejudice.
It's quite discouraging to confirm the observation that one cannot assume people understand how damaging prejudice is on science!
(although I strongly believe that we should NOT be making distinctions about what civil liberties (aside from voting and holding office) should be granted to a non-citizen verus a citizen while within US jurisdiction. We then in turn expose ourselves to having to prove at every street corner that we are citizens. Think a Nazi SS Trooper shouting "PAPERS!" at every bus stop, airport (oops, too late!), train station, and highway blockade. And God help you if you don't have official permission to go to another city.)
I do not think I have seen this very basic point ever been made around here.
The consensus seems to be that non-US-citizens do not enjoy (most of?) the rights US citizens do. This appears to be supported at every level. I find it extraordinarily regressive. The idea that citizenship is required to be granted right to privacy, for example, seems to me something not compatible with a elementary understanding of basic human rights.
We, Slashdot readers/writers, are the future of freedom.
Urgh. As much as I appreciate the fact that among the piles of nonsensical babbling to be found here there are, from time to time, amazing jewels of insight and clarity (which is precisely why I keep coming (this is actually not different from what happens in any other group of people)),
I hope you are wrong, very wrong.
I used to feel the same way you do, but in the past year, I've come to realize, that I can get worked up over things like this, or I can ignore them and live my own life. If the NSA wants to tap my phone, log my web usage, let them. It's a waste of their resources. They're not going to get anything interesting about me.
You are wrong. They will eventually find something interesting. Maybe they'll get it wrong, but that does not change the consequences a bit.
Do some reading up on how things worked in every single oppressive regime in history, and find out how many of the people that ended up being viciously crushed "had anything interesting" against themselves.
That is not being the devil's advocate: that's just being reasonable and consistent.
You may find it surprising, but I know personally cases of (small) business that have stopped trading with the US because of that. I know lots of scientists that refuse to take part in anything USian, despite the fact that this may be a professional loss for them. I know people who will take a flight doing 3 hops just in order to avoid having to stop in an USian airport, and this usually means not flying an USian airline. I know personally a chilean guy who rejected a prize adorned with lots of money and even more prestige from a (semi?)governmental USian organization.
So shareholders have ethics? What good is having 'ethics' if you do not act according to them? Why do these ethic shareholders not react when they see these evil executives do things (in their name!) they do not agree with?
I am sorry, but phenomenologically, these shareholders are as 'evil' as you picture the bad executives.
The only way to stop it is to disband the federal government completely and rebuild it with MUCH less power [...]
If I did not know from experience that "ideas" like these cause the suffering of millions, I'd laugh at you. As I do know, I find you at the very least misguided.
You seem to be under the impression that free markets exist. They do not: they have never existed and never will. They are an abstraction, which is not found in nature. In particular, nothing that has happened int his world is due to "free markets".
"Free markets" are a idiological tool, like lots of other things that do not exist.
You clearly live a life of a kind that has been made possible by the very fact that those free markets do not exist.
it is somewhat contradictory that the article first criticizes the US Gov't for maintaining too much Internet control, and then criticizes it for inducing ICANN to forfeit Internet control over to non-US entities.
You cannot be saying that you do not see how and why the US might be interested in those "non-US" entities like Afghanistan and Iraq? You cannot possibly be that gullible.
Dude: you want to find basic philosophical errors so badly it is somewhat funny.
Actually quite the reverse- I want people to tell the truth. If they KNOW something, I want that knowledge to be unchangeable, and if they're just telling me an opinion, I don't want them to use the word "KNOW".
Unchangable, definite knowldege is only possible for non-finite beings: being finite, we cannot in any way state anything definite because our experience is finite, and, likely, insufficient on any matter. So, basically, you want to reserve the word "know" for beings other than humans. You are free to do that.
I am becoming repetitive, but here we go again: the fact that you use that definition of "knowing" (which is not at all the "common sense" definition, not the one used by science) makes your statement about the impossibility of knowing true. But it is a rather uninteresting truth, as it the impossibility of that kind of knowledge is contained in its very definition.
I have no idea from where you conclude that there is an error: certainly nothing I said in that paragraph affords that conclusion.
The concept that something is irrelevant means that you are making a conscious decision to ignore evidence. Since you are not infalible and omniscient, you simply aren't qualified to make that decision, nobody is.
Dude: the fact that we are even able to ignore irrelevant evidence, in matters like "who set up the constants" as much as in more prosaic things like ambient noise, are what allows us to form concepts, ideas, reason, develop a consciousness, and not go crazy in the first 15 minutes of our existance.
Science incorporates in its very essence the fact that we are neither fallible nor omniscient. What do you want humanity to do: develop a procedure for infallible and omniscient beings to acquire knowledge? What would that do for anyone? We have developed ways to deal with our own limitations. Yet you find those ways to be at fault for the very fact that we are limited.
Thus science is doomed to being forever wrong and incomplete.
Yes!
You seem to find this is a bad thing. I do not.
The difference comes from your demanding that the search for knowledge on the part of humans attain perfect, inmutable, complete knowledge, and my acknowledging that that is an unmeetable demand.
I, as a principle, do not find a problem when I and others are not able to meet demands that are by their very essence unreachable.
I have no idea how you get from "science does not care who set up the constants" (because that is not its subject matter, but the subject matter of metaphisics or whatever) to "it is based on faith". Absolutely no idea.
If you don't care about a given set of data, you are taking it on faith that given set of data is truly irrelevant. How hard is this to understand?
When what you want is to be able to predict where Mars will be tomorrow night at midnight, you do not care who set up the universal gravity constant at the value it has now. It is a completely irrelevant piece of data.
Now, that irrelevance has been stablished by experience, and of course, as anything else which has been stablished by experience, is subject to being rejected did new information come which requires it. But the position of Mars has been quite precisely been predicted since at least the Sumerians, and yet no one has ever used in doing that determination any information even remotely related to "who set up the constants".
Even if you acknowledge that "someone" set it the constant at its value and that that "someone" could very well change the value before tommorrow midnight and make your calculations wrong, that is completely irrelevant, because the calculations you make are your best guess given the informatio
The "who set up the universal constants" is a question which is completely irrelevant to science. It belongs to metaphysics, religion or---this is the candidate I'd favor---is essentially nonsensical.
And thus, science has a basic philosophical error in it- one which makes science into more faith than fact.
Dude: you want to find basic philosophical errors so badly it is somewhat funny.
I have no idea from where you conclude that there is an error: certainly nothing I said in that paragraph affords that conclusion.
I have no idea how you get from "science does not care who set up the constants" (because that is not its subject matter, but the subject matter of metaphisics or whatever) to "it is based on faith". Absolutely no idea.
(Most of the proofs of existence of God and/or other similar stuff are based on arguments of infinite regression, like the one you are hinting at. I have failed, since I became aware of those arguments, that they prove not much more than the lack of imagination of the one using them. For example, in your case: why can it not be that universal constants are like they are just because they are? Or maybe because they cannot be otherwise?)
That too requires faith. You can't get away from it- science is a religion.
You missed the point completely.
I am just saying that onthological arguments based on regression are very deeply broken because they are never accompanied by an explanation of why infinite regression is not a possibility. It requires absolutely no faith on no one's to realize that this is something that needs justifying.
I am not saying that the hypothesis of infinite regression is valid, true or anything like that: only that it needs being taken care of.
Science is merely interested in the fact that universal constants are as they are.
Yep, and as such, it will always remain based on belief and tautologies.
You keep saying that, but it is 100% counterfactual.
Science has most certainly and verifiably produced more that belief and tautologies. Look around you: the monitor, the plastic out of which your keyboard is made, the vaccines you've had as a child, the TV waves going through you, the fabric from which your cloths are made, your deodorant, the artifical flavour of the last piece of gum you had.
I'd expect anyone who says that science is based on belief to jump out of my window, as a concrete proof that they live by that idea. Otherwise, I cannot but conclude what the person in question really believes is that "science is based on belief except when it talks about gravity".
Randomness requires a belief I do not share- the belief that there is no underlying structure to the universe.
Note that you are defining "structure" so as to exclude randomness... Of course you can do that, but then your statement becomes void.
I can only suggest that you study probability theory a bit: you'll immediately notice that randomness is in no way incompatible with the existence of "structure".
Moreover, in most cases, randomness is just a convenient model devised to deal with "hidden variables", "macro-scale observations" &c. (There are interpretations of quantum mechanics in which randomness is a taken as intrinsic, but this is rather controversial) As such, its role is precisely to incorporate in our reasoning some kinds of lack of information.
The fact that something is complex by no means whatsoever requires that something else exist which can keep track of its complexity and/or control it.
And yet, we know of no other complexity, no other set of rules, that was not set up by an intelligent mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Not yet, but when he comes, it will have been a happy day after all, another happy day.
There have been smart people in the past who've thought about that. Among those that are at the same time religious and sane, your question is an important one. Sadly, we tend to hear more from the religious and somewhat insane, so...
Galileo quotes in his letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, which everybody should read at least three times (the full text is here in English, and here in the original Italian) St. Augustine:
A bit slater, Galileo says:
Well, your 8th grade science books were wrong.
There is absolutely no distinction between "law" and "theory". None. Any argument based on any distinction (that gravity has a higher standing that evolution, say) is nothing but a display of sillyness.
In mathematics, one similarly has "lemmas" (or, if you prefer, "lemmata") and "theorems", but there is absolutely no difference between the two groups, apart from subjective assignment of importance.
Hmm. I do no think I've seen anyone say "I am a neo-con" before...
Note the "if" you used... How does one cope with such an ultimatum? Well, trivial: you just do not use our software!
"If you want to use our software, you pretty much have to give up your copyright legal protections" and "You pretty much have to give up your copyright legal protections" are completely different statements!
And you seem to deduce from this that embryonic stem cell research will not produce any treatments in the future? Great.
You know this how? Unless you have already done all the research possible, there is no other way to justify this assertion but on prejudice.
It's quite discouraging to confirm the observation that one cannot assume people understand how damaging prejudice is on science!
That he found someone with a different definition by no means contradicts his statement that his definition is "widely accepted".
If he had said "universally accepted", you might have a point. Well, he didn't.
I do not think I have seen this very basic point ever been made around here.
The consensus seems to be that non-US-citizens do not enjoy (most of?) the rights US citizens do. This appears to be supported at every level. I find it extraordinarily regressive. The idea that citizenship is required to be granted right to privacy, for example, seems to me something not compatible with a elementary understanding of basic human rights.
Urgh. As much as I appreciate the fact that among the piles of nonsensical babbling to be found here there are, from time to time, amazing jewels of insight and clarity (which is precisely why I keep coming (this is actually not different from what happens in any other group of people)), I hope you are wrong, very wrong.
You are wrong. They will eventually find something interesting. Maybe they'll get it wrong, but that does not change the consequences a bit.
Do some reading up on how things worked in every single oppressive regime in history, and find out how many of the people that ended up being viciously crushed "had anything interesting" against themselves.
Nop, it's not that.
That is not being the devil's advocate: that's just being reasonable and consistent.
You may find it surprising, but I know personally cases of (small) business that have stopped trading with the US because of that. I know lots of scientists that refuse to take part in anything USian, despite the fact that this may be a professional loss for them. I know people who will take a flight doing 3 hops just in order to avoid having to stop in an USian airport, and this usually means not flying an USian airline. I know personally a chilean guy who rejected a prize adorned with lots of money and even more prestige from a (semi?)governmental USian organization.
So shareholders have ethics? What good is having 'ethics' if you do not act according to them? Why do these ethic shareholders not react when they see these evil executives do things (in their name!) they do not agree with?
I am sorry, but phenomenologically, these shareholders are as 'evil' as you picture the bad executives.
Oh, so "Linux" charged you a couple of thousands?
If so, let me know: I have some items you might be interested in...
Can you provide an example of a free market, today or in history?
Hmm. And why can't you get your data structures from a well-tested well-designed library? You know, like you do in C++?
If I did not know from experience that "ideas" like these cause the suffering of millions, I'd laugh at you. As I do know, I find you at the very least misguided.
You seem to be under the impression that free markets exist. They do not: they have never existed and never will. They are an abstraction, which is not found in nature. In particular, nothing that has happened int his world is due to "free markets".
"Free markets" are a idiological tool, like lots of other things that do not exist.
You clearly live a life of a kind that has been made possible by the very fact that those free markets do not exist.
That is a very anhistorical statement.
You cannot be saying that you do not see how and why the US might be interested in those "non-US" entities like Afghanistan and Iraq? You cannot possibly be that gullible.
I am sorry: I cannot argue with you anymore. Honestly, I have grown bored of your arguments: I can take so much of semantic confusions.
Do read up, though, some on quantum theory: it is quite deterministic...
Unchangable, definite knowldege is only possible for non-finite beings: being finite, we cannot in any way state anything definite because our experience is finite, and, likely, insufficient on any matter. So, basically, you want to reserve the word "know" for beings other than humans. You are free to do that.
I am becoming repetitive, but here we go again: the fact that you use that definition of "knowing" (which is not at all the "common sense" definition, not the one used by science) makes your statement about the impossibility of knowing true. But it is a rather uninteresting truth, as it the impossibility of that kind of knowledge is contained in its very definition.
Dude: the fact that we are even able to ignore irrelevant evidence, in matters like "who set up the constants" as much as in more prosaic things like ambient noise, are what allows us to form concepts, ideas, reason, develop a consciousness, and not go crazy in the first 15 minutes of our existance.
Science incorporates in its very essence the fact that we are neither fallible nor omniscient. What do you want humanity to do: develop a procedure for infallible and omniscient beings to acquire knowledge? What would that do for anyone? We have developed ways to deal with our own limitations. Yet you find those ways to be at fault for the very fact that we are limited.
Yes!
You seem to find this is a bad thing. I do not.
The difference comes from your demanding that the search for knowledge on the part of humans attain perfect, inmutable, complete knowledge, and my acknowledging that that is an unmeetable demand.
I, as a principle, do not find a problem when I and others are not able to meet demands that are by their very essence unreachable.
When what you want is to be able to predict where Mars will be tomorrow night at midnight, you do not care who set up the universal gravity constant at the value it has now. It is a completely irrelevant piece of data.
Now, that irrelevance has been stablished by experience, and of course, as anything else which has been stablished by experience, is subject to being rejected did new information come which requires it. But the position of Mars has been quite precisely been predicted since at least the Sumerians, and yet no one has ever used in doing that determination any information even remotely related to "who set up the constants".
Even if you acknowledge that "someone" set it the constant at its value and that that "someone" could very well change the value before tommorrow midnight and make your calculations wrong, that is completely irrelevant, because the calculations you make are your best guess given the informatio
Dude: you want to find basic philosophical errors so badly it is somewhat funny.
I have no idea from where you conclude that there is an error: certainly nothing I said in that paragraph affords that conclusion.
I have no idea how you get from "science does not care who set up the constants" (because that is not its subject matter, but the subject matter of metaphisics or whatever) to "it is based on faith". Absolutely no idea.
You missed the point completely.
I am just saying that onthological arguments based on regression are very deeply broken because they are never accompanied by an explanation of why infinite regression is not a possibility. It requires absolutely no faith on no one's to realize that this is something that needs justifying.
I am not saying that the hypothesis of infinite regression is valid, true or anything like that: only that it needs being taken care of.
You keep saying that, but it is 100% counterfactual.
Science has most certainly and verifiably produced more that belief and tautologies. Look around you: the monitor, the plastic out of which your keyboard is made, the vaccines you've had as a child, the TV waves going through you, the fabric from which your cloths are made, your deodorant, the artifical flavour of the last piece of gum you had.
I'd expect anyone who says that science is based on belief to jump out of my window, as a concrete proof that they live by that idea. Otherwise, I cannot but conclude what the person in question really believes is that "science is based on belief except when it talks about gravity".
Note that you are defining "structure" so as to exclude randomness... Of course you can do that, but then your statement becomes void.
I can only suggest that you study probability theory a bit: you'll immediately notice that randomness is in no way incompatible with the existence of "structure".
Moreover, in most cases, randomness is just a convenient model devised to deal with "hidden variables", "macro-scale observations" &c. (There are interpretations of quantum mechanics in which randomness is a taken as intrinsic, but this is rather controversial) As such, its role is precisely to incorporate in our reasoning some kinds of lack of information.
We know of no intelligent mind w
Dear networkBoy,
it's "kernel", not "kernal".
Regards,
Me.
How hard is it to read the full set of intructions before starting following them? I ask myself this evey single time I have to grade an exam...