Trust me and the wiktionary, it's immanent. Unless you're confident the second coming is soon:)
About the proof I repeat there can't be one. Whatever a God could do in this world to prove he's root, it would be indistinguishable by an hypothetical completely immanent being, a "creature", who found ways to "hack into" reality. I, for one, wouldn't welcome any god-simulating overlords.
The point you raise about "God not showing up" is huge, even if rationalizations can be done from the point of view of a believer. I'd bypass them and simply ask: "Do you think mankind would convert as one, if God showed up?"
As for Mr. Bush, I wonder how the God speaking to him hasn't reminded him of the most obviously applicable Scripture about terrorism:
"I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. 5But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him."
>>Just curious: defining God as something (also) transcendent, what kind of evidence could back up his divinity and be experienanced in our immanent world?
>According to my religions, God is not only transcendent. In Christianity, for instance, God is partially imminent.
Yes, that's why I said "(also)". Anyway the immanent "part" can be potentially experienced, so countless proof could be conceived depending on its definition, even if none has materialized for me.
> Anyway, if something is transcendent, then how can it have any bearing on the physical world we live in?
The transcendent creator can have any bearing on the creation, no problems here. Let's make a simple example. You load up Conway's game of life. You are not really god in that reality because you are limited by your own mortality and by the hardware, yet you have total control of the configuration of cells, and the time axis (you can stop, turn back, fork restore etc). You can change the rules, too. Any rule is equivalent since they ultimately are all conventional. Yet your reality is completely disconnected to the game's one. In fact the game exists only as an abstraction in the mind that experienced it. You could devise three states logic and 54 dimensions in a variation of the game which makes it impossible to map to our dimension, that is understanding WTF is going on. And in the transcendent dimension, which in our case is our reality, the game is "electrons travelling around", there is no cells, no gliders, nothing created or destroyed.
Back to my request: If creature in the virtual world of Life acquired self consciousness, there is no way you can prove to them the existence of your world. You can map a webcam to some part of their world and tell them it represents your world (for them, "the transcendent"). But while they can watch, it's all a representation, indistinguishable in quality from what could be conjured inside their world.
When we translate this example to our world, anyway, there is a big problem. We can't map immanent concepts outside our dimension because there is no guarantee they have meaning there.
"God is one", "There is no god"? "IS" surely has not meaning outside immanent because "IS" means being part of reality. JHVH saying "I am" might as well be a rationalization made for human's benefit, strictly speaking a completely transcendent "entity" never "IS". "One" might be another rationalization. "God" has no meaning outside our perspective, denotes the owner of the abstraction that we call reality.
I might be too inexperienced with MSOffice XP stuff but I don't see the "save as..." option in Publisher's embedded images. I embedded them so it's not permissions related. Missing integration with the underlying filesystem is crucial, I'd say.
> [Christians, or more precisely the kind that you experienced]...believe anything they're told, without any evidence to back it up whatsoever.
Just curious: defining God as something (also) transcendent, what kind of evidence could back up his divinity and be experienced in our immanent world?
Well, given that Bush appears as a religious fanatic (the textbook false prophet, if you ask me, but I digress) helps in dismissing his ramblings. In fact my foremost objection to this kind of experimentation is philosophical, not religious. If I experiment on my fellow humans' genome I'm going to sacrifice an embryo to do research. To save other people? That's what they say, but it really is "to save other people under our terms". Because profit will be made out of this research, because patents will decide who will benefit. So essentially some slashdotters here are applauding yet another step forward of a world they despise.
Same for "lesser species": experimentation on animals and especially humans makes victims. It all ought to be done in the open, so to minimize the number of victims. Producing more pain than necessary is criminal, fullstop.
Making a religious fuss kinda helps the pro "life slaughtering for private profit" movement to get the sympathy of people who have enough of religious propaganda.
> "being against gays, people who like to fuck for fun"
Peculiar way of being against somebody, getting nailed for his sins. Maybe he was against their sins? Makes more sense.
Besides, the implications of fornication were quite different from present society, with serious risk of becoming a pariah or lapidation if found out, for submitted women.
Are you making a case for my original post? Thank you!:)
Well, counting the distribution of windows vs. linux _desktop_ users (excluding the geeks and people double booting) back in 2006 with the figures given in the study (.0037 Lin.86 XP+Vista) my workplace would have been 10000 times more rare than one with all windows users (I'm talking about what they use at home).
How lucky was I huh? Or the study is crappy, dunno:)
OTOH anecdotal evidence doesn't make data, nobody switched to linux this year. Neither did anybody switch to vista, vista came with new laptops only.
completely different from the former. Of course if the source were open, we could discuss how much of the IE6 code is still there.
>>with a different GUI
>Same basic GUI. New polish.
Which makes that different. If you take the same amount of time figuring out IE7 GUI and FF Opera Konqueror or Safari, I didn't and nobody who came to me complaining about the "polish" did either. Coincidence?
>>and different HTML rendering
>Same HTML rendering. Much better CSS rendering.
Which makes the rendered HTML page look different. Of course I'd have better said CSS, you might be right about the HTML but I hope for the sake of win users that they added some compliance in that area too.
> we just generally don't tend to complain that we shouldn't receive updates because they fix too many bugs.
Nice bit of circular reasoning, calling it an update.
> Yes, if you have configured your computer to automatically download and install "high priority" as well as "critical" updates...
But a completely different browser with a different GUI and different HTML rendering is not an "update".
Might it be that long time windows users are as illiterate about computing as they were the first months because the window environment wants to redefine everything in its exclusive way to make it painful for people to try getting out?
And it has good potential for harm. But that is true for any new tech and it's always been this way.
Anyway the more we advance in this field, the more apparent will be the abyss that separates us from $DEITY's realm. Virtual artificial life, where somebody devises a set of rules for a virtual world that ends up with entities of such world being self-aware (for some definitions of awareness), would be quite more useful from a philosophical POV than these experiments, but this might help as a step.
I think the money involved is such stories is infinitesimal compared to a corporation having to pay taxes for a branch as big as a country, even if it's a developing nation.
I completely agree. But I'd define this a mild "reign of terror".
I am not liking it so I'm gonna fight it (as my ultimate rebellion is actually believing the propaganda called "democracy" and "justice" that some interest have fed us throughout the years).
But how to fight? Shall I do exactly what they want us to avoid? Or avoid their products? Or avoid them but in the cases where they are extending copyright or patents on something they have no conceivable right on? (+70years, silly patents).
On another perspective, NeoCons will have big explaining to do upstairs, if the God they're trying to justify themselves with is really there:
- "You see, My Lord, I just wanted to..." - "Please, call me Allah." - "...Oopsie..."
2. (used to indicate inclusion within something abstract or immaterial): in politics; in the autumn.
> lacking any evidence of violations of known physical laws in the brain, it's scientifically useless.
This is a tautology. Introducing concepts that are beyond what can be scientifically experienced is useless from a scientific POV, like e.g. the concept of color is useless from the point of view of counting from one to ten.
If i get it right, our view of the world currently stops at quantum physics with potential states of particles that become actual for reasons that are mathematically modeled but can't be mathematically determined. If I say that there's the invisible pink unicorn that determines all the states according to his mood I'm scientifically useless, but currently science can't prove me wrong either.
So instead of the funny reactions I see to GP post, from the scientific point of view a better reply is "whatever".
> While that may be the case, how does one rule out that the possibility that the activity is a delayed reaction to sensory input, rather than an immediate one?
Might be, but if you are trying to force a "mechanical" model of the brain (which I don't assume you're doing) think about this: a degree of randomness helps avoiding stalling or deadlock situation (think about old toy cars with stupid algorithms to avoid obstacles that get stuck hitting the same spot over and over, or how ethernet devices cope with packet collisions). On another perspective, the one of behavior, predictable patterns are weaker than randomized one, because the external world is subjected to chaotic changes and because you will never catch by surprise a competitor who's studying you. So a degree of randomness is likely an evolutionary advantage.
Besides, if there were a delay it would be quite variable not to have been yet detected as such by all but superficial analysis, so a more general theory of something random inside the brain would hold.
> IBM is a company, companies as a rule of thumb aren't nice when it means they're not making money for their shareholders.
Maybe it all boiled down to considering the potential dollars coming from that patent, net of the probable litigation costs, Vs the actual loss of face in front of the geeks that are helping IBM fight MS dominance in the desktop OS.
Well done IBM, the currently less evil of 'em all.
I'd add that unfortunately openSuse is a distro that is more likely to contain lawsuit material from MS. With all the respect for the achievements of openSuse team, i'm not touching it.
> What has any bastard done to deserve being used as a derogative term...
IANALinguist but I'd assume that insults like "bastard" and "son of a bitch" are not meant to offend bastards or bitches, but to conjure in the recipient the image that his mother has screwed up another guy to generate him.
Slashdot Mirror
> My feelings are less "that poor man!" and more "probably not the best way to solve the problem".
:)
Yep, best way imho would be 15 seconds of social services per email sent for spammers (= life) and fine those who buy things from spammers.
Death to all spammers is a close second, though
>imminent
:)
Trust me and the wiktionary, it's immanent. Unless you're confident the second coming is soon
About the proof I repeat there can't be one. Whatever a God could do in this world to prove he's root, it would be indistinguishable by an hypothetical completely immanent being, a "creature", who found ways to "hack into" reality. I, for one, wouldn't welcome any god-simulating overlords.
The point you raise about "God not showing up" is huge, even if rationalizations can be done from the point of view of a believer. I'd bypass them and simply ask: "Do you think mankind would convert as one, if God showed up?"
As for Mr. Bush, I wonder how the God speaking to him hasn't reminded him of the most obviously applicable Scripture about terrorism:
"I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. 5But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him."
That's because real standards pose no barrier of interoperability. Compare this with, say, having to implement support for NTFS.
:)
Besides, IMHO the CGI on windows problem is: windows
>>Just curious: defining God as something (also) transcendent, what kind of evidence could back up his divinity and be experienanced in our immanent world?
>According to my religions, God is not only transcendent. In Christianity, for instance, God is partially imminent.
Yes, that's why I said "(also)". Anyway the immanent "part" can be potentially experienced, so countless proof could be conceived depending on its definition, even if none has materialized for me.
> Anyway, if something is transcendent, then how can it have any bearing on the physical world we live in?
The transcendent creator can have any bearing on the creation, no problems here.
Let's make a simple example. You load up Conway's game of life. You are not really god in that reality because you are limited by your own mortality and by the hardware, yet you have total control of the configuration of cells, and the time axis (you can stop, turn back, fork restore etc). You can change the rules, too. Any rule is equivalent since they ultimately are all conventional.
Yet your reality is completely disconnected to the game's one. In fact the game exists only as an abstraction in the mind that experienced it. You could devise three states logic and 54 dimensions in a variation of the game which makes it impossible to map to our dimension, that is understanding WTF is going on. And in the transcendent dimension, which in our case is our reality, the game is "electrons travelling around", there is no cells, no gliders, nothing created or destroyed.
Back to my request:
If creature in the virtual world of Life acquired self consciousness, there is no way you can prove to them the existence of your world. You can map a webcam to some part of their world and tell them it represents your world (for them, "the transcendent"). But while they can watch, it's all a representation, indistinguishable in quality from what could be conjured inside their world.
When we translate this example to our world, anyway, there is a big problem. We can't map immanent concepts outside our dimension because there is no guarantee they have meaning there.
"God is one", "There is no god"?
"IS" surely has not meaning outside immanent because "IS" means being part of reality. JHVH saying "I am" might as well be a rationalization made for human's benefit, strictly speaking a completely transcendent "entity" never "IS".
"One" might be another rationalization.
"God" has no meaning outside our perspective, denotes the owner of the abstraction that we call reality.
I might be too inexperienced with MSOffice XP stuff but I don't see the "save as..." option in Publisher's embedded images. I embedded them so it's not permissions related. Missing integration with the underlying filesystem is crucial, I'd say.
> [Christians, or more precisely the kind that you experienced] ...believe anything they're told, without any evidence to back it up whatsoever.
Just curious: defining God as something (also) transcendent, what kind of evidence could back up his divinity and be experienced in our immanent world?
Well, given that Bush appears as a religious fanatic (the textbook false prophet, if you ask me, but I digress) helps in dismissing his ramblings.
In fact my foremost objection to this kind of experimentation is philosophical, not religious.
If I experiment on my fellow humans' genome I'm going to sacrifice an embryo to do research. To save other people? That's what they say, but it really is "to save other people under our terms". Because profit will be made out of this research, because patents will decide who will benefit.
So essentially some slashdotters here are applauding yet another step forward of a world they despise.
Same for "lesser species": experimentation on animals and especially humans makes victims. It all ought to be done in the open, so to minimize the number of victims. Producing more pain than necessary is criminal, fullstop.
Making a religious fuss kinda helps the pro "life slaughtering for private profit" movement to get the sympathy of people who have enough of religious propaganda.
In the context of a grammatical error, sure.
> "being against gays, people who like to fuck for fun"
:)
Peculiar way of being against somebody, getting nailed for his sins. Maybe he was against their sins? Makes more sense.
Besides, the implications of fornication were quite different from present society, with serious risk of becoming a pariah or lapidation if found out, for submitted women.
Are you making a case for my original post? Thank you!
I couldn't care less about people liking it or not, but I'm perfectly able to make fun of the Bible without misreading it, so why can't others read?
"Do this and you will live forever" != "do this in remembrance of me".
One could also assert that you'd "live forever" anyway, in either the hypothetical god's glory or damnation, whatever those states mean.
Besides, "great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language" sounds quite ample.
Well, counting the distribution of windows vs. linux _desktop_ users (excluding the geeks and people double booting) back in 2006 with the figures given in the study (.0037 Lin .86 XP+Vista) my workplace would have been 10000 times more rare than one with all windows users (I'm talking about what they use at home).
:)
How lucky was I huh? Or the study is crappy, dunno
OTOH anecdotal evidence doesn't make data, nobody switched to linux this year. Neither did anybody switch to vista, vista came with new laptops only.
>>But a completely different browser
>Same browser. New version.
completely different from the former. Of course if the source were open, we could discuss how much of the IE6 code is still there.
>>with a different GUI
>Same basic GUI. New polish.
Which makes that different. If you take the same amount of time figuring out IE7 GUI and FF Opera Konqueror or Safari, I didn't and nobody who came to me complaining about the "polish" did either. Coincidence?
>>and different HTML rendering
>Same HTML rendering. Much better CSS rendering.
Which makes the rendered HTML page look different. Of course I'd have better said CSS, you might be right about the HTML but I hope for the sake of win users that they added some compliance in that area too.
> we just generally don't tend to complain that we shouldn't receive updates because they fix too many bugs.
Nice bit of circular reasoning, calling it an update.
As much as I'm against RIAA, see comment history, I agree that being blamed for not suing these ones is an exaggeration.
And RIAA can shut us up by simply suing them too.
> Yes, if you have configured your computer to automatically download and install "high priority" as well as "critical" updates...
But a completely different browser with a different GUI and different HTML rendering is not an "update".
Might it be that long time windows users are as illiterate about computing as they were the first months because the window environment wants to redefine everything in its exclusive way to make it painful for people to try getting out?
Indeed it's a fork :)
And it has good potential for harm. But that is true for any new tech and it's always been this way.
Anyway the more we advance in this field, the more apparent will be the abyss that separates us from $DEITY's realm. Virtual artificial life, where somebody devises a set of rules for a virtual world that ends up with entities of such world being self-aware (for some definitions of awareness), would be quite more useful from a philosophical POV than these experiments, but this might help as a step.
I think the money involved is such stories is infinitesimal compared to a corporation having to pay taxes for a branch as big as a country, even if it's a developing nation.
I completely agree. But I'd define this a mild "reign of terror".
I am not liking it so I'm gonna fight it (as my ultimate rebellion is actually believing the propaganda called "democracy" and "justice" that some interest have fed us throughout the years).
But how to fight? Shall I do exactly what they want us to avoid? Or avoid their products? Or avoid them but in the cases where they are extending copyright or patents on something they have no conceivable right on? (+70years, silly patents).
On another perspective, NeoCons will have big explaining to do upstairs, if the God they're trying to justify themselves with is really there:
- "You see, My Lord, I just wanted to..."
- "Please, call me Allah."
- "...Oopsie..."
> On the other hand, the concept of color is absolutely critical from the point of view of counting from one to tan.
Oh noes, not the Church of Tantology again!
> How can a physical entity exist inside a non-physical entity?
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/in
in: (...)
2. (used to indicate inclusion within something abstract or immaterial): in politics; in the autumn.
> lacking any evidence of violations of known physical laws in the brain, it's scientifically useless.
This is a tautology. Introducing concepts that are beyond what can be scientifically experienced is useless from a scientific POV, like e.g. the concept of color is useless from the point of view of counting from one to ten.
If i get it right, our view of the world currently stops at quantum physics with potential states of particles that become actual for reasons that are mathematically modeled but can't be mathematically determined. If I say that there's the invisible pink unicorn that determines all the states according to his mood I'm scientifically useless, but currently science can't prove me wrong either.
So instead of the funny reactions I see to GP post, from the scientific point of view a better reply is "whatever".
> While that may be the case, how does one rule out that the possibility that the activity is a delayed reaction to sensory input, rather than an immediate one?
Might be, but if you are trying to force a "mechanical" model of the brain (which I don't assume you're doing) think about this: a degree of randomness helps avoiding stalling or deadlock situation (think about old toy cars with stupid algorithms to avoid obstacles that get stuck hitting the same spot over and over, or how ethernet devices cope with packet collisions).
On another perspective, the one of behavior, predictable patterns are weaker than randomized one, because the external world is subjected to chaotic changes and because you will never catch by surprise a competitor who's studying you. So a degree of randomness is likely an evolutionary advantage.
Besides, if there were a delay it would be quite variable not to have been yet detected as such by all but superficial analysis, so a more general theory of something random inside the brain would hold.
> IBM is a company, companies as a rule of thumb aren't nice when it means they're not making money for their shareholders.
Maybe it all boiled down to considering the potential dollars coming from that patent, net of the probable litigation costs, Vs the actual loss of face in front of the geeks that are helping IBM fight MS dominance in the desktop OS.
Well done IBM, the currently less evil of 'em all.
>> ... and pursuing a strategy that borrows from the company's successful formula in personal computer software.
> I'll bet this sentence is not going to go over too well with the slashdot crowd.
Why? It's perfect. Of course the formula is =850*77.1
The laptop is now called the XO, because if you turn the logo 90 degrees, it looks like a child.
And with no rotation whatsoever XO looks like the emoticon for Cartman. Makes a perfect reaction to XP.
I'd add that unfortunately openSuse is a distro that is more likely to contain lawsuit material from MS. With all the respect for the achievements of openSuse team, i'm not touching it.
> What has any bastard done to deserve being used as a derogative term...
IANALinguist but I'd assume that insults like "bastard" and "son of a bitch" are not meant to offend bastards or bitches, but to conjure in the recipient the image that his mother has screwed up another guy to generate him.