Or maybe "the system" reacts to the new kid on the block, if it turns out that fakes sites are very difficult to remove or oppose, of course. If not we are dealing with normal parasites. It's not the first time development of more open systems ran into problems with suppliers so they can't deliver even if they have requests. After some months the product is surely less appealing for the inevitable obsolescence.
You can use 900-dimensional vectors but can you visualize 4 space dimensional data easily? How do the synapses fire in 3d? we are 4d.
> Make up your mind. Either I am 4d and can easily visualize 4d or I'm 3d and can visualize 4d or I'm 4d but can't visualize 4d let alone 900d. Or whatever.
I asked you, it's written. So it's written "can you visualize 4 space dimensional data", I meant four dimensions of space, not 3 plus time. Then, you spoke about time and 3d brain and I mentioned synapses.
If you remember my point, a 2d creature have trouble imagining the 3d. If you prefer not to bring forth sentient creatures, simply say "from the POV of a 2d automaton", changes not one bit. You said bullshit everybody can learn vectors, i agree but I pointed out that are analysis not representations. You either say I agree it's difficult, or you prove by visualizing 4d spaces that my example was wrong. A clearly easier example is explaining colors to a colorblind guy. Of course the colors are well defined properties, and they exist for the colorblind. They don't exist for the abstraction named "the way of seeing things of a colorblind", color is transcendent in a separate plane.
>... You also keep using the word "assume" to mean something that it does not really mean. I am using the first definition in wikipedia. Whenever you express an implication, not considering some conditions under which the implication is false, you are assuming those scenarios are impossible. You are free to discard whatever seems unreasonable to you, but then your implication becomes an opinion.
>> if no transcendent creator exists > You say "no transcendental creator" -- which I still assert is an utterly meaningless statement unless and until you suitably define what a transcendental anything is
I hopefully always said "transcendent", not transcendental which then is to be considered the same word. I defined it All that can't be directly or indirectly experienced, that is the complement of reality defined as all that can be directly or indirectly experienced. To define something in term of the complement is not a problem for somebody that uses logic, I guess.
>I said that there is empirical evidence that self awareness in fact emerged from the laws of nature with not one single shred of evidence of a "guiding hand", transcendental or otherwise.
Then I misunderstood. You are still wrong, of course. You incorrectly assume that the only way for a posited god to have a self aware creature as the object of his creation is by intervention in time/space and that intervention would leave evidence behind. You are forgetting about time. A god above time does not need to put the initial conditions into motion, stay and experience this (free or predetermined) universe to tick away, see the results, adjust and so on. A god above time creates a universe, predetermined or free, and all "is" "already" complete and determined for him Because out of time there is no concept of "is" and "already" . He can insert a communication of the outcome of a future event just like you can communicate a past event, without removing the freedom of will that caused that event to have such outcome.
If I said "tomorrow you will know if I decided to eat at the restaurant or at home. Since you will know it , my decision is not really free." You'd find it unacceptable. But removing time removes the term "will" and you end up with that classical flawed argument that free will is incompatible with prophecies. That puts creationists in trouble whenever they attack evolution.
But, somebody might say, a god operating in time is what many sacred books say. I can reply: what if that's a rationalization for our, or the prophets' benefit? Besides, using sacred books means starting from the assumption that god exists so we are not making philosophy nor science.
>I am not making an assumption that begs the question -- you, my friend, are doing that. Where?
> Piffle. We live in a "three dimensional" world. I'm a physicist and mathematician. I can, and do, work in and with infinite dimensional vector spaces all the time -- they are difficult the first time you encounter them but hardly "beyond comprehension".
Reducing them to manageable concepts. You can use 900-dimensional vectors but can you visualize 4 space dimensional data easily? Why do we render additional dimensions as e.g. colors if we could visualize additional dimensions? Why don't movie editors stack all frames in a 3d solid whose section is the current frame and opt for the 2d metaphor of film which takes up more desktop space?
> Oh yeah, and let's not forget that "time" thing. Another dimension, as we managed to conceive with our three dimensional brains.
How do the synapses fire in 3d? we are 4d.
> So I'm not sure what your point is, stating something that is patently false. I also don't know why you assert Plato's Cave; on the one hand it is very relevant indeed, but on the other hand, not the way you think it is. The prisoners within the cave may well be mistaken in the conclusions they draw from their senses, sir, but that does not justify them engaging in wild flights of fancy as they try to infer the structure that casts the shadows upon the walls of their cave. Ultimately, their inferences have to be reasonable and consistent with their experience -- see remarks above about logic and common sense, their imaginings of the causes of those shadows cannot be self contradictory and correct, and if they have no predictive value on the behavior of the shadows they are fantasy, they violate mere common sense.
I don't argue with your suggested behaviour of prisoners. But you are saying that unpredictable=fantasy, no matter if even a prisoner could posit that the shadows are machinations by other sentient beings. I am saying that when they see a cube morphing into a circle it could be a rotating cylinder.
>>Little OT For sufficiently complex cellular automata simulations you have to assume self conscience will eventually emerge for some automata, else it breaks the atheist model and all those with immanent-only gods.
>Not off topic at all -- in our discussion -- but false. This isn't assumed at all. You can empirically observe that you yourself are conscious, and also observe that your consciousness is strictly and reproducibly tied to the function of a collection of matter with a good deal of organization, and infer from more empirical evidence that your hardware, that absolutely obeys physical laws that make it, if you like, a "cellular automaton", emerged from a process of natural selection and evolution. No "assumptions" at all
I say that if no transcendent creator exists this is the scenario. You say that since no transcendent creator exists this is the scenario. The funny thing, even if you formalized and experimentally replicated the conditions under which a conscience emerge, you still haven't said if it belongs into other dimensions, like or unlike ours and you are unable to. To be more clear, a cellular automaton whose behaviour i control (within the limits imposed by the simulation) is indistinguishable from all the others. That doesn't prove I don't really control it.
I had replied to this post and cannot see the reply so maybe i forgot to post. Ignore if a quick dupe.
> The law of contradiction is the basis of logic and contradictory things are impossible in all domains.w
The law of contradiction is an axiom, phenomena can be described and predicted using logic following that axiom. I think we both agree that things don't understand nor follow laws, laws model how things work and if they fail to, a more accurate law is needed.
So let's take a cellular automata world with n-ary logic where n is variable. Each cell when tested for a state adopts it without discarding the other states and returns one or more of its states. Will the law of contradiction model anything there? You say it must. I say it might not. You'd have to prove it for every configuration. It is irrelevant that the law evidently models the engine that produces such a simulation (our brain ATM or a pc), just as our pc adopting binary does not prevent a computer to count up to 20 or treat the result of a divide by zero as unsigned infinite for some purposes. We have superposition of states in our world but not in the macroscopic world. If we did, maybe we'd have developed a model resembling the Buddhist "tetralemma" instead of switching between classical and quantum theories.
It is perfectly possible that an all encompassing logic system rules over everything that is. But that happens inside of ANY simulation which represents a closed system, defining "all that is" exactly as we do here. So if it always happen and it doesn't prevent anything outside its simulated world, why should our law prevent anything outside reality?
> Technology has moved on, and Usenet is an anachronism.
As a distributed content provider subdivided by categories, usenet was better than most centralized systems we have today. It doesn't matter if they are implemented in the cloud: if fb throws you out, who cares how many redundant servers they have.
Usenet did leave people with too much freedom, so alternatives who removed such control creeped in. Now we are at the stage of megaupload and company that is replacing bittorrent that is replacing p2p. See an involution? You become the dumb terminal again.
You are reasoning under the bold, if not irrational assumption that this world's logic and concepts can be translated 1:1 to the creator's domain.
For the creatures of a 2d cellular automata simulations, the concept of height is beyond comprehension. Plato's cave.
Little OT For sufficiently complex cellular automata simulations you have to assume self conscience will eventually emerge for some automata, else it breaks the atheist model and all those with immanent-only gods.
So, to be precise, I should have said: "If you believe in a creator belonging to a transcendent dimension with a property comparable to our will..."
What about you, oh well... "If a god exists" - to exist means to belong to the universe, let's say meta-exist, else a transcendent god can't fit by definition.
"and has sufficient complexity to be considered `alive'" alive means featuring a series of physical chemical energetic properties. How would you map them outside this universe? and what about the concepts of sufficiency or complexity? All those are ideas rooted inside of space-time. But we talk about the hypothetical something that caused space-time to be. Believers think that "alive", "one (two, many)", "love", "good", "bad", exist in the realm of god. You cannot assume that in general, if you want to make strong conclusions.
" and `sentient' and sufficient entropy to be able to experience".. Entropy? It's like a (very difficult to obtain) sentient creature in Conway's game of life who said: if our creator has a sufficient number of dots...
"(...)and if there is such a thing as a `beginning' (implying a rather deep broken symmetry in one spatiotemporal variable)"
Too strong of an implication. For a transcendent creator, the time is part of creation, the beginning is not t=0, the beginning is "define t". Nothing prevents the creation of an infinitely extending time in both directions. Nothing prevents a deep broken symmetry either. Nothing prevents a god having his own universe's time, too. The model that "a god created space-time in time itself" makes little sense.
" -- all of which seem somewhat implausible if not downright self-contradictory a priori" no argument here.
"or rather `from the beginning', since it seems as though things would have to be fairly amazingly tuned without any tuner for any one of these conditions to be true, given the scale of and any plausible model for the structure of `god' I of course still see assumptions. Time, Scale and structures outside of space/time, how do they look?... But let's assume. Then, nothing prevents the tiniest possibility to have happened, post facto. In other words, a world could be the product of an almost impossible event, that took an almost eternity to happen, no big deal.
-- then god and the universe would a) be the same thing, as the universe is everything that exists and god (if god exists) is as great as everything that exists Q.E.D. How does the possibility of a transcendent creator (when creation implies being external to the object of creation) fit this model? Source for "is as great as"? Christians? nope you have to exclude all religions where god has transcendent traits, because there god ("also") meta exists. "b) would be hellaciously tuned to produce whatever else is tuned as an impossible act of will by that god, without a meta-god tuner."
And the meta- would need a meta-meta- and so on? Let me quote what I said elsewhere
Let's say a creator meta-exists. "Then who created him?" is 4 times a problem "Then", because in the plane of the creator the logic system might not define implications. "Who" because in the plane of the creator of the creator the concept of person could be meaningless. "Created" because that concept depends on time and we are only sure the concept is defined for us. And "?" because an ineffable plane might not contemplate the concept of "question".
The infinite regression is an accumulation of assumptions, you make one every time you apply a human concept outside the universe, into transcendent planes.
> If your "creator" has absolutely no influence on your "cellular automata"... Always false for the definition of creator, the creator is responsible for the existence and every detail of the creation.
>... then he is irrelevant to their lives Because it is a logic impossibility. Empirical evidence (me firing up Conway's game of life and not ceasing to exist just because from the point of view of the created universe I am not interfering) backs that up, in case you need it.
From the point of view of the hypothetical creator of the universe, that includes space and time, there are no places *in time* for him to influence his creation. Because time is object of creation itself, it's not something running independently, saying "God sees something wrong and intervened at this point with a miracle" is a rationalization for "God created the universe, obviously including all past present and future interactions within it".
> and for all intents and purposes does not exist. Correction, "for all intents and purposes that are internal to the created object". Which is a way to say, again, that transcendent a transcendent being is outside the immanent universe, transcendent stuff is transcendent, obvious by definition - and very masturbatory since you bring the subject, well, up.
If I were atheist I wouldn't be appeased by the proofs you ask for. What if somebody has sufficiently advanced technology to manipulate matter? We are already at the nanotech level. If you find a way to manipulate carbon-14 ratios and other aspects, you can create convincing fakes.
All-in is impossible whenever there are two different version of the same fact. How many noah tales? gospels? QED.
IMO if you find out that one thing that was written had a different meaning than the literal one, you can dismiss whatever interpretations, the symbolic when you think it's literal, the literal when you think it's symbolic. In one religious book a guy claimed he'd rebuild a temple. He didn't. According to the book, he meant a different thing that he did later, resurrection. Conditions are met.
All in is there: your adherence to what you, or the tradition you choose to follow says, must be complete, all-in, else you are hypocrite or in bad faith.
Everybody has the right to his own version, nobody has any right to force others to believe their own version. Yet I'd suggest standing on the shoulder of giants, and first see what your own catholic, protestant, muslim, etc. tradition says, you can always criticize it later and move on.
Kilimanjaro and Antarctica is the same place, in the scale of the universe. Where is it written that natural laws are equal everywhere? all the time? Tomorrow E=mc^3 is improbable not impossible.
On the other hand, even as I'm arguing with atheists all the time, the "finely tuned" terms used to define conditions for life is a post facto rationalization, not an argument. You can't say anything about what would have happened if laws were different, you have not enough power to model such scenario. So if our finely tuned conditions had not been met, we wouldn't be here discussing it, maybe some other forms would consider theirs the finely tuned conditions. If you believe, a god can fine tune whatever he wants from the very beginning, if you don't nothing is tuned because there is not the tuner.
Does the creator of a cellular automata world need to interfere with it? It did already by creating it, yet there is no way for such a world to witness any indication of an external entity, and when such thing happen they have no way of proving it's external and not coming from some previously unearthed rules.
And what about creating a world whose properties you are immediately and completely aware of, such as when i defined a banal f(t)=t as a cellular automaton? Do you interfere later with the creation? No, there is no "later" from your point of view. Creation equals intervention at any point of its time.
Your "If they do, then we should see some indication of it" has just been proven invalid by the first example.
AND break a gazillion tutorials and blog posts that rely on the traditional filesystem layout.
Fedora is "pulling an Ubuntu", they want to make their OS an unique experience so that migrating away is more difficult. That's what ubuntu windows and macs do, I wonder if fedora has enough clout to outweigh the obvious problems of this transition.
Normal users need only to know the package system, advanced ones invisible files in their dir and/etc and/user/local. Pro users are not scared by a bunch of dirs.
If the file layout mattered so much, gobolinux would have enjoyed more fame I guess.
> How do you make phone calls then without looking stupid? You don't. You always look stupid.
Jokes aside, I am not comfortable with siri servers, I'd rather have the phone contact the web services directly to get the answers. But I might have misunderstood its architecture.
It was another user explaining the meaning and he was pretty accurate in the definition, he was forcibly limited in its examples to abstractions we make. If he could describe something belonging outside this plane of existence he'd be quite an interesting guy.
"Conceptual" is not the same, concepts involve thinking.
> "Either way it means you think your god doesn't actually exist"
Exactly, just like the programmer of a cellular automata simulation hasn't got any coordinates in the simulations. Even if not strictly a god, though, He still has enough power to influence every aspect of the simulation. Some religious god says "I exist" from his POV and that's a subject of faith, irrelevant to your assertion. Yet your assertion is pretty tautologic, not very useful.
That's more or less what LessFS does. It does compression and also does De-duplication, so it is equal or many many times more efficient and space saving than simple compression.
LOL at the anti linux comments below. I see your transparent compression and raise you the deb package management with debian multi arch repos. *rakes in the chips* Nice playing with you pals.
I'm sure I wasn't clear, should have spent more time on that post.
f is a universe with infinite parameter t. If you travelled through t you'd notice f is always defined. It is "eternal" if you call t "time". There is no beginning or end visible from those travelling through t, yet such an universe is a creation, the cause is external.
I didn't physically create f (i can only create an approximate implementation of it). But creating in my mind ends up yielding a better parallelism with our world and the hypothetical creator.
I'd essentially boil it down to a confusing version of the dual of "god of the gaps". Science fills all the gaps finding a forcibly existing eternal universe with no whatsoever interference and proclaims god's death, religion, or better philosophy, says it's still an assumption.
In particular, there is no evidence whatsoever that any of the qualities ascribed to deities are found in that plane
Even stronger: there Can't be no evidence, by definition of transcendent. Every time one applies our concepts to that plane, it's an assumption. So it's worse than getting no evidence.
Let's stay with cellular automata. You have a simulation and some "creatures" eventually become conscious and able to communicate. You are not godlike, you're transcendent wrt them because their world is made of simulated cells, your abstraction is their reality.
You want to show yourself to them. What will you do? "flip" some cells against the rules? but how can they be sure this flipping comes from outside instead of being a property of their universe which hasn't manifested itself till that moment? Or one peer who "got root"? What will you answer when they ask you how many cells you are made of? how will you explain smell to them without mapping it to some cell configuration? and so on.
That wouldn't be a problem because the automata would probably TRUST you after enough godlike stuff happen, but 100% valid proof will escape them forever.
Without science, your "transcendental plane" is an empty and meaningless abstraction
Without cellology your reality is an empty and meaningless abstraction, automata say. Completely accurate, and completely irrelevant to you. Of course, you exist, while the hypothetical god doesn't necessarily.
Besides, even if you could somehow "prove" the existence of a transcendental plane, nothing in your argument is inapplicable to that plane itself, so you'll end up with an infinite hierarchy of "transcendental planes". I don't see the point.
Painfully wrong, you dunno what part of the proof is applicable to that plane itself. Only if that plane has the same concepts and the same logic as our plane the proof would be valid.
Let's say a creator meta-exists. "Then who created him?" is 4 times a problem "Then", because in the plane of the creator the logic system might not define implications. "Who" because in the plane of the creator of the creator the concept of person could be meaningless. "Created" because that concept depends on time and we are only sure the concept is defined for us. And "?" because an ineffable plane might not contemplate the concept of "question".
The infinite regression is an accumulation of assumptions, you make one every time you apply a human concept outside the universe, into transcendent planes.
Religions are in the same spot, but they say "trust us", not "we have logically concluded that...". Which is more consistent, or cunning, depending on your POV.
> Ah. I think the word you're looking for is "imaginary".
Ah. I thought people would check if concepts are equivalent before suggesting substitutions.
Even if "no whatsoever transcendent stuff is there", the concept of transcendent is as equivalent to the concept of imaginary as mom is equivalent to daughter.
It would be better IMHO if discussing religion didn't involve obliterating philosophy.
My first post: "science is compatible with whatever is transcendent by definition of both science and transcendent, since the object they talk about is exactly complementary".
Another post of mine: "...a hypothetical creator..."
You: choose the meaning of hypothetical.
I choose 3. God may or not meta-exist, if it does, is he prevented to (whatever I was saying)?
You: If 2-4, no science involved, I am not interested.
Me: science being independent from the transcendent is my statement in the very beginning, so we agree on the involvement of science with a hypothetical god and in being interested in what one likes.
however, your proof has a huge hole, it assumes that your one-celled eternal universe actually exists
to exist means to be an arbitrary part of reality, defined as "all the things you can directly or indirectly or potentially have an experience of". Are you ok with that definition? Solipsist-proof. (a transcendent god cannot exist by that definition, the question is if some god meta-exists)
translated to the eternal universe f(t) what all the things is ? R real numbers: to exist means to be real, defined as all the t that f can be applied to. f(t) returns t which is in its domain by definition.
Maybe you require f to be part of the physical universe, part of our reality? Then I would be on the same plane of f, couldn't have created it and it would be as eternal as our universe, no more no less. So, you arbitrarily pick an unsuitable candidate and the proof doesn't work ? Paint me surprised.
If you translate your requirement to this universe and a hypothetical transcendent plane, your statement becomes: nothing can exist really unless it has roots in the realm of a god. Beautifully religious, philosophically a failure to respect the definition of transcendent. And a hypothetical eternal creator, outside time, must by definition see our universe like we see f(t), past present and future together.
I repeat: a cellular automata world is not electrons flowing in a circuit. That's our reality. Its reality is the meaning we give to the output of such flowing. Which reminds me of John 1, and that what we translate as "word" is in Greek "Logos".
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe "the system" reacts to the new kid on the block, if it turns out that fakes sites are very difficult to remove or oppose, of course. If not we are dealing with normal parasites.
It's not the first time development of more open systems ran into problems with suppliers so they can't deliver even if they have requests. After some months the product is surely less appealing for the inevitable obsolescence.
You can use 900-dimensional vectors but can you visualize 4 space dimensional data easily?
How do the synapses fire in 3d? we are 4d.
> Make up your mind. Either I am 4d and can easily visualize 4d or I'm 3d and can visualize 4d or I'm 4d but can't visualize 4d let alone 900d. Or whatever.
I asked you, it's written. So it's written "can you visualize 4 space dimensional data", I meant four dimensions of space, not 3 plus time.
Then, you spoke about time and 3d brain and I mentioned synapses.
If you remember my point, a 2d creature have trouble imagining the 3d. If you prefer not to bring forth sentient creatures, simply say "from the POV of a 2d automaton", changes not one bit.
You said bullshit everybody can learn vectors, i agree but I pointed out that are analysis not representations. You either say I agree it's difficult, or you prove by visualizing 4d spaces that my example was wrong. A clearly easier example is explaining colors to a colorblind guy. Of course the colors are well defined properties, and they exist for the colorblind. They don't exist for the abstraction named "the way of seeing things of a colorblind", color is transcendent in a separate plane.
> ... You also keep using the word "assume" to mean something that it does not really mean.
I am using the first definition in wikipedia. Whenever you express an implication, not considering some conditions under which the implication is false, you are assuming those scenarios are impossible. You are free to discard whatever seems unreasonable to you, but then your implication becomes an opinion.
>> if no transcendent creator exists
> You say "no transcendental creator" -- which I still assert is an utterly meaningless statement unless and until you suitably define what a transcendental anything is
I hopefully always said "transcendent", not transcendental which then is to be considered the same word. I defined it All that can't be directly or indirectly experienced, that is the complement of reality defined as all that can be directly or indirectly experienced.
To define something in term of the complement is not a problem for somebody that uses logic, I guess.
>I said that there is empirical evidence that self awareness in fact emerged from the laws of nature with not one single shred of evidence of a "guiding hand", transcendental or otherwise.
Then I misunderstood. You are still wrong, of course.
You incorrectly assume that the only way for a posited god to have a self aware creature as the object of his creation is by intervention in time/space and that intervention would leave evidence behind.
You are forgetting about time. A god above time does not need to put the initial conditions into motion, stay and experience this (free or predetermined) universe to tick away, see the results, adjust and so on. A god above time creates a universe, predetermined or free, and all "is" "already" complete and determined for him Because out of time there is no concept of "is" and "already" . He can insert a communication of the outcome of a future event just like you can communicate a past event, without removing the freedom of will that caused that event to have such outcome.
If I said "tomorrow you will know if I decided to eat at the restaurant or at home. Since you will know it , my decision is not really free." You'd find it unacceptable. But removing time removes the term "will" and you end up with that classical flawed argument that free will is incompatible with prophecies. That puts creationists in trouble whenever they attack evolution.
But, somebody might say, a god operating in time is what many sacred books say. I can reply: what if that's a rationalization for our, or the prophets' benefit? Besides, using sacred books means starting from the assumption that god exists so we are not making philosophy nor science.
>I am not making an assumption that begs the question -- you, my friend, are doing that.
Where?
You the
As for the rest of your post:
> Piffle. We live in a "three dimensional" world. I'm a physicist and mathematician. I can, and do, work in and with infinite dimensional vector spaces all the time -- they are difficult the first time you encounter them but hardly "beyond comprehension".
Reducing them to manageable concepts. You can use 900-dimensional vectors but can you visualize 4 space dimensional data easily? Why do we render additional dimensions as e.g. colors if we could visualize additional dimensions? Why don't movie editors stack all frames in a 3d solid whose section is the current frame and opt for the 2d metaphor of film which takes up more desktop space?
> Oh yeah, and let's not forget that "time" thing. Another dimension, as we managed to conceive with our three dimensional brains.
How do the synapses fire in 3d? we are 4d.
> So I'm not sure what your point is, stating something that is patently false. I also don't know why you assert Plato's Cave; on the one hand it is very relevant indeed, but on the other hand, not the way you think it is. The prisoners within the cave may well be mistaken in the conclusions they draw from their senses, sir, but that does not justify them engaging in wild flights of fancy as they try to infer the structure that casts the shadows upon the walls of their cave. Ultimately, their inferences have to be reasonable and consistent with their experience -- see remarks above about logic and common sense, their imaginings of the causes of those shadows cannot be self contradictory and correct, and if they have no predictive value on the behavior of the shadows they are fantasy, they violate mere common sense.
I don't argue with your suggested behaviour of prisoners. But you are saying that unpredictable=fantasy, no matter if even a prisoner could posit that the shadows are machinations by other sentient beings. I am saying that when they see a cube morphing into a circle it could be a rotating cylinder.
>>Little OT For sufficiently complex cellular automata simulations you have to assume self conscience will eventually emerge for some automata, else it breaks the atheist model and all those with immanent-only gods.
>Not off topic at all -- in our discussion -- but false. This isn't assumed at all. You can empirically observe that you yourself are conscious, and also observe that your consciousness is strictly and reproducibly tied to the function of a collection of matter with a good deal of organization, and infer from more empirical evidence that your hardware, that absolutely obeys physical laws that make it, if you like, a "cellular automaton", emerged from a process of natural selection and evolution. No "assumptions" at all
I say that if no transcendent creator exists this is the scenario. You say that since no transcendent creator exists this is the scenario. The funny thing, even if you formalized and experimentally replicated the conditions under which a conscience emerge, you still haven't said if it belongs into other dimensions, like or unlike ours and you are unable to. To be more clear, a cellular automaton whose behaviour i control (within the limits imposed by the simulation) is indistinguishable from all the others. That doesn't prove I don't really control it.
I had replied to this post and cannot see the reply so maybe i forgot to post. Ignore if a quick dupe.
> The law of contradiction is the basis of logic and contradictory things are impossible in all domains.w
The law of contradiction is an axiom, phenomena can be described and predicted using logic following that axiom. I think we both agree that things don't understand nor follow laws, laws model how things work and if they fail to, a more accurate law is needed.
So let's take a cellular automata world with n-ary logic where n is variable. Each cell when tested for a state adopts it without discarding the other states and returns one or more of its states. Will the law of contradiction model anything there? You say it must. I say it might not. You'd have to prove it for every configuration. It is irrelevant that the law evidently models the engine that produces such a simulation (our brain ATM or a pc), just as our pc adopting binary does not prevent a computer to count up to 20 or treat the result of a divide by zero as unsigned infinite for some purposes.
We have superposition of states in our world but not in the macroscopic world. If we did, maybe we'd have developed a model resembling the Buddhist "tetralemma" instead of switching between classical and quantum theories.
It is perfectly possible that an all encompassing logic system rules over everything that is. But that happens inside of ANY simulation which represents a closed system, defining "all that is" exactly as we do here. So if it always happen and it doesn't prevent anything outside its simulated world, why should our law prevent anything outside reality?
> Technology has moved on, and Usenet is an anachronism.
As a distributed content provider subdivided by categories, usenet was better than most centralized systems we have today. It doesn't matter if they are implemented in the cloud: if fb throws you out, who cares how many redundant servers they have.
Usenet did leave people with too much freedom, so alternatives who removed such control creeped in. Now we are at the stage of megaupload and company that is replacing bittorrent that is replacing p2p. See an involution? You become the dumb terminal again.
You are reasoning under the bold, if not irrational assumption that this world's logic and concepts can be translated 1:1 to the creator's domain.
For the creatures of a 2d cellular automata simulations, the concept of height is beyond comprehension. Plato's cave.
Little OT For sufficiently complex cellular automata simulations you have to assume self conscience will eventually emerge for some automata, else it breaks the atheist model and all those with immanent-only gods.
So, to be precise, I should have said:
"If you believe in a creator belonging to a transcendent dimension with a property comparable to our will..."
What about you, oh well...
"If a god exists"
- to exist means to belong to the universe, let's say meta-exist, else a transcendent god can't fit by definition.
"and has sufficient complexity to be considered `alive'"
alive means featuring a series of physical chemical energetic properties. How would you map them outside this universe? and what about the concepts of sufficiency or complexity? All those are ideas rooted inside of space-time. But we talk about the hypothetical something that caused space-time to be.
Believers think that "alive", "one (two, many)", "love", "good", "bad", exist in the realm of god. You cannot assume that in general, if you want to make strong conclusions.
" and `sentient' and sufficient entropy to be able to experience"..
Entropy? It's like a (very difficult to obtain) sentient creature in Conway's game of life who said: if our creator has a sufficient number of dots...
"(...)and if there is such a thing as a `beginning' (implying a rather deep broken symmetry in one spatiotemporal variable)"
Too strong of an implication. For a transcendent creator, the time is part of creation, the beginning is not t=0, the beginning is "define t".
Nothing prevents the creation of an infinitely extending time in both directions. Nothing prevents a deep broken symmetry either. Nothing prevents a god having his own universe's time, too. The model that "a god created space-time in time itself" makes little sense.
" -- all of which seem somewhat implausible if not downright self-contradictory a priori"
no argument here.
"or rather `from the beginning', since it seems as though things would have to be fairly amazingly tuned without any tuner for any one of these conditions to be true, given the scale of and any plausible model for the structure of `god'
I of course still see assumptions. Time, Scale and structures outside of space/time, how do they look?... But let's assume. Then, nothing prevents the tiniest possibility to have happened, post facto. In other words, a world could be the product of an almost impossible event, that took an almost eternity to happen, no big deal.
-- then god and the universe would a) be the same thing, as the universe is everything that exists and god (if god exists) is as great as everything that exists Q.E.D.
How does the possibility of a transcendent creator (when creation implies being external to the object of creation) fit this model? Source for "is as great as"? Christians? nope you have to exclude all religions where god has transcendent traits, because there god ("also") meta exists.
"b) would be hellaciously tuned to produce whatever else is tuned as an impossible act of will by that god, without a meta-god tuner."
And the meta- would need a meta-meta- and so on? Let me quote what I said elsewhere
That search engine for perl code is already installed at /dev/random.
So an engine called chomp finds restaurants. Paint me surprised :)
> If your "creator" has absolutely no influence on your "cellular automata"...
Always false for the definition of creator, the creator is responsible for the existence and every detail of the creation.
> ... then he is irrelevant to their lives
Because it is a logic impossibility. Empirical evidence (me firing up Conway's game of life and not ceasing to exist just because from the point of view of the created universe I am not interfering) backs that up, in case you need it.
From the point of view of the hypothetical creator of the universe, that includes space and time, there are no places *in time* for him to influence his creation. Because time is object of creation itself, it's not something running independently, saying "God sees something wrong and intervened at this point with a miracle" is a rationalization for "God created the universe, obviously including all past present and future interactions within it".
> and for all intents and purposes does not exist.
Correction, "for all intents and purposes that are internal to the created object". Which is a way to say, again, that transcendent a transcendent being is outside the immanent universe, transcendent stuff is transcendent, obvious by definition - and very masturbatory since you bring the subject, well, up.
If I were atheist I wouldn't be appeased by the proofs you ask for. What if somebody has sufficiently advanced technology to manipulate matter? We are already at the nanotech level. If you find a way to manipulate carbon-14 ratios and other aspects, you can create convincing fakes.
All-in is impossible whenever there are two different version of the same fact. How many noah tales? gospels? QED.
IMO if you find out that one thing that was written had a different meaning than the literal one, you can dismiss whatever interpretations, the symbolic when you think it's literal, the literal when you think it's symbolic.
In one religious book a guy claimed he'd rebuild a temple. He didn't. According to the book, he meant a different thing that he did later, resurrection. Conditions are met.
All in is there: your adherence to what you, or the tradition you choose to follow says, must be complete, all-in, else you are hypocrite or in bad faith.
Everybody has the right to his own version, nobody has any right to force others to believe their own version. Yet I'd suggest standing on the shoulder of giants, and first see what your own catholic, protestant, muslim, etc. tradition says, you can always criticize it later and move on.
Kilimanjaro and Antarctica is the same place, in the scale of the universe.
Where is it written that natural laws are equal everywhere? all the time? Tomorrow E=mc^3 is improbable not impossible.
On the other hand, even as I'm arguing with atheists all the time, the "finely tuned" terms used to define conditions for life is a post facto rationalization, not an argument. You can't say anything about what would have happened if laws were different, you have not enough power to model such scenario. So if our finely tuned conditions had not been met, we wouldn't be here discussing it, maybe some other forms would consider theirs the finely tuned conditions.
If you believe, a god can fine tune whatever he wants from the very beginning, if you don't nothing is tuned because there is not the tuner.
Does the creator of a cellular automata world need to interfere with it? It did already by creating it, yet there is no way for such a world to witness any indication of an external entity, and when such thing happen they have no way of proving it's external and not coming from some previously unearthed rules.
And what about creating a world whose properties you are immediately and completely aware of, such as when i defined a banal f(t)=t as a cellular automaton? Do you interfere later with the creation? No, there is no "later" from your point of view. Creation equals intervention at any point of its time.
Your "If they do, then we should see some indication of it" has just been proven invalid by the first example.
Date a blonde.
jk
AND break a gazillion tutorials and blog posts that rely on the traditional filesystem layout.
Fedora is "pulling an Ubuntu", they want to make their OS an unique experience so that migrating away is more difficult. That's what ubuntu windows and macs do, I wonder if fedora has enough clout to outweigh the obvious problems of this transition.
Normal users need only to know the package system, advanced ones invisible files in their dir and /etc and /user/local. Pro users are not scared by a bunch of dirs.
If the file layout mattered so much, gobolinux would have enjoyed more fame I guess.
> How do you make phone calls then without looking stupid?
You don't. You always look stupid.
Jokes aside, I am not comfortable with siri servers, I'd rather have the phone contact the web services directly to get the answers. But I might have misunderstood its architecture.
It was another user explaining the meaning and he was pretty accurate in the definition, he was forcibly limited in its examples to abstractions we make. If he could describe something belonging outside this plane of existence he'd be quite an interesting guy.
"Conceptual" is not the same, concepts involve thinking.
> "Either way it means you think your god doesn't actually exist"
Exactly, just like the programmer of a cellular automata simulation hasn't got any coordinates in the simulations. Even if not strictly a god, though, He still has enough power to influence every aspect of the simulation.
Some religious god says "I exist" from his POV and that's a subject of faith, irrelevant to your assertion. Yet your assertion is pretty tautologic, not very useful.
That's more or less what LessFS does.
It does compression and also does De-duplication, so it is equal or many many times more efficient and space saving than simple compression.
LOL at the anti linux comments below. I see your transparent compression and raise you the deb package management with debian multi arch repos. *rakes in the chips* Nice playing with you pals.
I'm sure I wasn't clear, should have spent more time on that post.
f is a universe with infinite parameter t. If you travelled through t you'd notice f is always defined. It is "eternal" if you call t "time". There is no beginning or end visible from those travelling through t, yet such an universe is a creation, the cause is external.
I didn't physically create f (i can only create an approximate implementation of it). But creating in my mind ends up yielding a better parallelism with our world and the hypothetical creator.
I'd essentially boil it down to a confusing version of the dual of "god of the gaps".
Science fills all the gaps finding a forcibly existing eternal universe with no whatsoever interference and proclaims god's death, religion, or better philosophy, says it's still an assumption.
Even stronger: there Can't be no evidence, by definition of transcendent. Every time one applies our concepts to that plane, it's an assumption. So it's worse than getting no evidence.
Let's stay with cellular automata. You have a simulation and some "creatures" eventually become conscious and able to communicate. You are not godlike, you're transcendent wrt them because their world is made of simulated cells, your abstraction is their reality.
You want to show yourself to them. What will you do? "flip" some cells against the rules? but how can they be sure this flipping comes from outside instead of being a property of their universe which hasn't manifested itself till that moment? Or one peer who "got root"?
What will you answer when they ask you how many cells you are made of? how will you explain smell to them without mapping it to some cell configuration? and so on.
That wouldn't be a problem because the automata would probably TRUST you after enough godlike stuff happen, but 100% valid proof will escape them forever.
Without cellology your reality is an empty and meaningless abstraction, automata say. Completely accurate, and completely irrelevant to you. Of course, you exist, while the hypothetical god doesn't necessarily.
Painfully wrong, you dunno what part of the proof is applicable to that plane itself. Only if that plane has the same concepts and the same logic as our plane the proof would be valid.
Let's say a creator meta-exists. "Then who created him?" is 4 times a problem "Then", because in the plane of the creator the logic system might not define implications. "Who" because in the plane of the creator of the creator the concept of person could be meaningless. "Created" because that concept depends on time and we are only sure the concept is defined for us. And "?" because an ineffable plane might not contemplate the concept of "question".
The infinite regression is an accumulation of assumptions, you make one every time you apply a human concept outside the universe, into transcendent planes.
Religions are in the same spot, but they say "trust us", not "we have logically concluded that...". Which is more consistent, or cunning, depending on your POV.
> Ah. I think the word you're looking for is "imaginary".
Ah. I thought people would check if concepts are equivalent before suggesting substitutions.
Even if "no whatsoever transcendent stuff is there", the concept of transcendent is as equivalent to the concept of imaginary as mom is equivalent to daughter.
It would be better IMHO if discussing religion didn't involve obliterating philosophy.
My first post: "science is compatible with whatever is transcendent by definition of both science and transcendent, since the object they talk about is exactly complementary".
Another post of mine: "...a hypothetical creator..."
You: choose the meaning of hypothetical.
I choose 3. God may or not meta-exist, if it does, is he prevented to (whatever I was saying)?
You: If 2-4, no science involved, I am not interested.
Me: science being independent from the transcendent is my statement in the very beginning, so we agree on the involvement of science with a hypothetical god and in being interested in what one likes.
the two sides are: censoring the video is wrong, and censoring the video is wrong from a religious point of view.
to exist means to be an arbitrary part of reality, defined as "all the things you can directly or indirectly or potentially have an experience of". Are you ok with that definition? Solipsist-proof. (a transcendent god cannot exist by that definition, the question is if some god meta-exists)
translated to the eternal universe f(t) what all the things is ? R real numbers: to exist means to be real, defined as all the t that f can be applied to.
f(t) returns t which is in its domain by definition.
Maybe you require f to be part of the physical universe, part of our reality? Then I would be on the same plane of f, couldn't have created it and it would be as eternal as our universe, no more no less. So, you arbitrarily pick an unsuitable candidate and the proof doesn't work ? Paint me surprised.
If you translate your requirement to this universe and a hypothetical transcendent plane, your statement becomes: nothing can exist really unless it has roots in the realm of a god. Beautifully religious, philosophically a failure to respect the definition of transcendent.
And a hypothetical eternal creator, outside time, must by definition see our universe like we see f(t), past present and future together.
I repeat: a cellular automata world is not electrons flowing in a circuit. That's our reality. Its reality is the meaning we give to the output of such flowing. Which reminds me of John 1, and that what we translate as "word" is in Greek "Logos".