It has seemed very strange to me seeing all the hype about global warming and such since I was young, yet seeing years like these recent ones where we are hitting some pretty long cold stretches, this year particularly. Are we or are we not actually having "global warming"?
FYI, from TFA: "Even so, 2008 is set to be about the 10th warmest year since 1850, and Met Office scientists say temperatures will rise again as La Nina conditions ease. "
Is there a global warming trend, when "record cold" year is actually top10 warmest in over a century? You draw your own conclusions...
Exactly. It's decidedly colder when I sleep than at midday. This instability is absolute proof of The Global Warming.
Nah. What would be proof of global warming is that you get both record highest and record lowest nighttime and daytime temperatures for both winter and summer in a few years. The average temperatures might be going up or down at your particular location, but it's pretty certain that the variation will increase everywhere, which results in the record temperatures pretty much everywhere.
Yes, but these companies can get hold of this information and use it regardless of it being available via the internet. Yes it might be a little harder but nothings stopping them - that's the whole point of the open court rule if I've understood it.
But that's just the thing, it would stop them.
Automated, distributed spidering software can be made arbitarily fast, and having enough hard disk space for any amount of text, ready for indexing and data mining and re-mining at your leisure, with arbitarily fast hardware and without big network bottlenecks. But to do this, you first need to be able to download full versions of the papers from the Internet, for free and preferably invisibly too.
However, if a human is needed in the loop with every paper, then it becomes practically impossible, because it takes time and costs for every bit of information. If you want just something specific, then the time and cost is irrelevant, and the openness of system is maintained. But then it would simply take too much time and cost too much to get it all, preventing abuse.
Also, like in this suggestion, if it's not possible to automatically identify persons in the papers, nor possible to look for papers based on people's names, then useful data mining becomes very hard, if not impossible. And as a bonus, if you can't get much useful information, there's not as much money in the data mining business, so overall there will be less organizations trying dig out everybodys private information.
Especially obivious if the cameras see each others. Also, considering it's a geek event, make sure the video records can't be hacked... Ie. no access to video storage servers from the LAN, from the Internet or with WLAN, and no discreet access opportunities to the cabling or other hardware by the guests.
Still it does seem crazy to expect enough people to install the plugin to make it universal enough for developers, as Flash is now.
Why couldn't the site just install the plugin for IE? It probably requires the user to click "yesyes" once, but don't most IE users do that automatically whenever an installation dialog pops up, so shouldn't be a problem...;-)
It's not only public search engines, it's also companies that sell data mining. Their spidering software sure won't care about some robots.txt, and they'll pretend to be regular browsers. On the contrary, robots.txt is a clue that something private might be in there, so it's more like an invitation. I also wouldn't be surprised if the spidering software of this kind of companies (and cybercrime organizations of course) even tries some common passwords when they encounter password protected sites.
Anyway, we *do* exist. Including myself, I know of at least two women who know how to use a packet sniffer. Now, we're both gay
Ah, so maybe you do exist, but you're not one of them (geek girls with correct sexual orientation). So it's quite possible that they don't exist after all, if you don't actually know any either...
Oh well, a significant other being able to do the same stuff you are able to do isn't really that nice. Far better if he/she can do different stuff.
Considering that court rooms are generally open access, I don't see how bottling the information up later on is likely to be a good idea.
Any/. reader should comprehend the difference between some information being available by traditional means, and that same information being available worldwide via web to every data miner.
Tell me, you're not even slightly worried about criminal organizations and foreign intelligence agencies (domestic "homeland security" types probably have full access anyway) and even tabloid newspapers doing data mining court records to find "interesting" potential victims, targets and recruits?
Full online access does create a problem. Many here seem to argue that openness of information is so valuable that abuse, even criminal use should be made easy. I disagree strongly. I feel a person should have full control over what personally identifiable information about him is internationally available in the internet. For example any court text available online should not have any names in it (names replaced by numbers, for example). The full text should only be available in person, or via snail mail for a cost of "shipping and handling".
These rules you describe, they all revolve around you assuming that I'm going to behave in a particular fashion, and you being encouraged to believe that you have the right to expect and demand that I do. Which means you're inevitably going to get into an accident when your preconceived notions fail to mesh with reality, which you've stopped paying attention to.
. It's really about efficiency. When people can predict what others do, everything goes much more efficiently. The cost of the efficiency is that when the prediction fails, it's worse than if there was no prediction, only reaction. However, in almost all cases, benefits of prediction far outweight the cost of occasional mis-prediction. This applies to just about everything. And the goal in engineering and lawmaking should be to make predicting as reliable as possible, rules as easy to follow and as intuitive as possible, to maximize the efficiency gains and minimize mis-predictions. . Of course roundabouts are one way to achieve this, but roundabouts, especially multi-lane roundabouts rely heavily both on rules and on trusting that others will also follow the rules in a dynamic (cars moving) situation. Traffic light controlled intersections rely on simpler rules and simpler trust in a more static situation (cars stopped behind red lights). Roundabouts make a more complex situation predictable, so they are more efficient than traffic lights, but once the situation gets too complex, once you just can't trust the other drivers to do what you predict, and can't trust them to predict what you'll do, it breaks down and you need either control (traffic lights) or communication (like direction signals, but they're both unreliable and too simple for solving roundabout congestion, and making them more complex would make 'em even more unreliable signs of what the other car is going to do). . Maybe one day we'll have cars that talk to each other, and for example in intersections the cars decide who goes when, and then just tell the drivers to either go or to stop (or just slow down in advance so there won't be a need to stop completely).
I think "TOE" is generally thought to be theory about our universe only, about the universe that started and got it's "natural laws" in our big bang (assuming the Big Bang theory is at least close to the truth).
For "multiversal TOE", we'd need a different acronym, such as TOTOE, "Theory of Theories of Everythings";-)
Right! No plastics, no chemicals, no lubricants !!! Idiot!
All these can be manufactures from just about anything with carbon and hydrogen. It just takes energy, so as long as there's oil to be pumped, it's cheaper to use the oil. It would even be possible (though not worth it) to manufacture stuff equal to crude oil.
And then of course there are oils directly from plants. This might be a big thing in the future, when genetic engineering makes it possible to design plants to produce oils with desired properties and desired extra chemicals in them. After all, proteins can manufacture just about anything, it's just a matter of desiging the proteins to produce the molecule you want. The rest (converting the protein to DNA and inserting it into a plant genome so that it works) should be possible with today's crude genetic technologies, even.
If it were theoreticly possible to get net power gain, don't you think it would have been tried?
AFAIK, there's nothing theoretically impossible about getting a net power gain with this general type of device. I mean, as far as I understand, the theoretical minimum amount of electrical power needed is far far less than the energy released in the fusion reaction. It's just that so far it's proven to be not possible in practice, due to all seemingly unavoidable losses. And yes, people have been trying. I'd think it's a wet dream of anybody who's ever played with these kind of fusors.
I predict that this is possible, and that eventually we get something like this to work. It'll probably be with a very small fusor, probably using exotic metamaterials designed spesifically for this purpose, with suitable electrical and magnetic properties such as room-temperature superconductivity, and eventually even with properties like self-correcting structure to get around radiation damage to the metamaterials. So it won't be a hobbyist who discovers how to do this.
Yes, Wikipedia is exactly that, a friend. You know, the kind of friend that likes to tell tall tales, and is generally fun to be around with. Just don't ask him/her to help with your homework, at least not if must get it right or you'll flunk;-)
Last time I checked the definition of universe is still "all existing matter and space considered as a whole"
So if the universe is "everything" can someone tell me how there can be "many?" in a way that isn't a mathematical fantasy proven in the minds of few and no where else?
I think the definition of "universe" is usually considered to be "all existing matter and space and energy considered as a whole, that is part of the same continuum with us, that is connected to us". Another universe could not be reached, even as a thought experiment bypassing all constraints like speed of light, by travelling in our 3 dimensions. Put something out of reach like this, and you have a different universe.
There are also other possible definitions of universe, and of course you can come up with fictional or hypothetical ways of connecting universes temporarily (like wormholes) or otherwise travelling between them (like avoiding timetravel paradoxes by that being travelling into different universes, not back in time in the original universe).
Only physicists can get away with this sort of crap. Any other field of science would be up in arms.
FYI, one of the things in physics being wondered is, why are the natural laws and constants so precisely constrained for universe to have "us". These laws and constants are mathematica.. Now this shows (if the math is correct), that in fact the laws and constants are *not* so precisely constrained.
It's ok if you don't like long standing questions being answered (or tried to), but I hope you'd try to be less negative about others trying to answer them...
String theory and other ideas may be beautiful mathematically, but do not belong into the realm of science because it cannot be observed and measured. Just because faith is based mathematics, does not make it science.
I think you're wrong here. String "theories" are not scientific theories just because of what you say. Believing them to be true would be faith based in mathematics.
However, they certainly are science, a scientific work in progress. Just about everything we know about science started as just a crazy idea. Then it might have evolved into a bunch of mathematics, then a testable hypothesis, and then rejected or tweaked or found out to be accurate to the limits of measurement. But all this is part of science, part of scientific work. String theories are currently somewhat stuck in the mathematics phase, but perhaps already LHC will shed some light in the matter.
Now I'm guessing you think the research should head in an entirely different direction, and that researching string theories is stupid waste of time. That's fair enough, but calling it unscientific is not.
A free will could not be predictable, because then it would not be free, but determined by the factors it could be predicted by.
An eternal ("outside time") type of a god could know all the free will choices made in a universe, know all that happens in that universe from the Beginning to the End, but could not predict it (if there were free will), just know it by extra-dimensionally "observing" the entire universe in question.
Sort of like it's IMHO a bit pointless to say that the last word of a book is pre-determined when you get the book. It's not "pre-determined", it just "is". You can take a guess at what is for fun if you want, or you can just open the last page and see what it is, but neither is really "predicting". I hope you get what I'm trying to say with this rather limited analogy...
But determinism absolutely precludes true free will. This is so patently obvious that I'm always shocked to see people like yourself attempting to argue against it.
There can be physical determinism (ie. if nothing affects some system, then it will behave deterministically), with non-physical free will (a non-physical consiousness, a "soul" if you will) able to do things non-deterministically.
So in the absence of consiousness, everything would work like a clockwork, except a being with a free will can make choises that change the physical universe, making it develop in a new, deterministic direction. A new choice can again chance the direction etc, but as long as no choices are made by a free will entity, everything behaves deterministically.
I think this is what people mean when they talk about determinism and free will being compatible. So they're not being inconsistent, nor are they re-defining terms, they're just using them in a context.
A concrete example. If I drop a coin, and don't excercise my free will to catch it, it's determined to hit the floor. The path and fate of the coin is deterministic, unless a free will interferes.
Now I'm not saying this is how I think, I'm just trying to explain an idea that is (by your own words) shocking to you;-)
...if you are willing (and able) to scientifically analyse what human will (free or otherwise) really is, and what are the boundaries of its freedom. If we hadn't have quantum mechanical phenomena, there would be no room for free will whatsoever, and we'd be all living a predetermined life.
I don't think neither quantum mechanism nor classical determinism allows for "free will" in the sense of being able to choose ones own actions. Wether your choices are a result of determinstic "gears" turning, or if they are influenced by random quantum mechanical events internally (and externally, of course) making the choices non-deterministic, that still leaves no possiblity of choosing. It's like with dice. With determinism (eg. every side has same number), the the die will always give the same number. With quantum mechanics, any number may come up. In either case you can't choose what number comes up.
To allow free will in the sense of being able to choose (which IMHO is the only meaningful definition of free will), you need to have something "external". And then it doesn't matter if world is deterministic or non-deterministic, the hypothetical external influence can as well paint a new numbers on the deterministic die, or it can turn the quantum mechanical die the way it wants.
Nah, after GUT there's still TOE to shoot for. And after TOE we can really start developing theories about parallel universes with twisted GUTs and ticklish TOEs. There's always more work.
And if all else fails, there's always the "soft" humanist sciences. There's as much work there as you can make up.
Well, it's only for Gods chosen people, obiviously. It's a matter of not-so-hot debate wether you become one by circumcision, or if non-chosen people who do it just cut out a perfectly good piece of skin for some pain but no gain... Another dilemma is, if you are among the chosen people by birth, but don't do it, are you no longer chosen? I don't know if any of the religious texts commanding circumcision answer these important questions unambiguously, though. But I think "Circumcision for Dummies" is being planned, and I think it'll take a shot at these more deep dilemmas, too.
I don't take issue with the assumptions themselves, merely the concept that they are certain.
Some of them are as certain as certain gets. Ie. there is no higher level of certainity available.
Also, some of the certainities are of logical kind. Like it is certain that current big bang model rather accurately explains the measured temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background radiation... No big surprise there, because these very measurements were used to fine-tune the model to match reality (and the important thing here is, fine-tuning didn't make model contradict any other observations, if it did that would prove the model wrong, "untweakable").
Or then you could see through his bias, be a better person so to speak, and discuss the rather valid point he's making... You shouldn't to limit yourself on limitations (a bias is a limitation) of other people, even when it's a convenient excuse.
If a piece of test is not worth discussing, then it's not really worth derogatory comments like yours either.
The creator of a simulation is still restrained *as regards the simulation* by the parameters of that simulation. A human being, obviously, is not restrained literally by his or her creating an online avatar, but he or she *is* constrained in his or her ability to act with that avatar inside that particular virtual world by the rules governing avatars.
What do you mean? Certainly the simulation could be stopped any time, contents of the database changed in any way necessary or even the database converted for a completely new simulation engine, and the sentient AI creatures wouldn't know anything happened.
And what rules governing avatars? The creator programmed any rules there is, so he's free to change them, either universally or adding special cases to the simulation code. Also consider the concept of "soul" in this context. The AIs in the simulation could be completely separate pieces of code that just control the avatars, and not really running as part of the simulated avatar, not in their simulated "brains". That could make a lot of sense from the simulation point of view, because otherwise the AI would be sort of simulation inside simulation (if the AI run on the simulated neural network of the brains of simulated creatures), and very inefficient.
And, pointedly, this argument isn't happening in a vacuum (with hypothetical religions and hypothetical deities) but with actual posited deities of actual religions. Many of whom, I feel compelled to point out, argue that they are *consistent* and *do not alter their mind/decisions*.
If I read you correctly, then I have to disagree. I have yet to see a god of any kind claim anything like that. I've only seen humans claim such a thing about their version of a god. Consider the possibility that these humans may be wrong...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
It has seemed very strange to me seeing all the hype about global warming and such since I was young, yet seeing years like these recent ones where we are hitting some pretty long cold stretches, this year particularly. Are we or are we not actually having "global warming"?
FYI, from TFA: "Even so, 2008 is set to be about the 10th warmest year since 1850, and Met Office scientists say temperatures will rise again as La Nina conditions ease. "
Is there a global warming trend, when "record cold" year is actually top10 warmest in over a century? You draw your own conclusions...
Exactly. It's decidedly colder when I sleep than at midday. This instability is absolute proof of The Global Warming.
Nah. What would be proof of global warming is that you get both record highest and record lowest nighttime and daytime temperatures for both winter and summer in a few years. The average temperatures might be going up or down at your particular location, but it's pretty certain that the variation will increase everywhere, which results in the record temperatures pretty much everywhere.
Yes, but these companies can get hold of this information and use it regardless of it being available via the internet. Yes it might be a little harder but nothings stopping them - that's the whole point of the open court rule if I've understood it.
But that's just the thing, it would stop them.
Automated, distributed spidering software can be made arbitarily fast, and having enough hard disk space for any amount of text, ready for indexing and data mining and re-mining at your leisure, with arbitarily fast hardware and without big network bottlenecks. But to do this, you first need to be able to download full versions of the papers from the Internet, for free and preferably invisibly too.
However, if a human is needed in the loop with every paper, then it becomes practically impossible, because it takes time and costs for every bit of information. If you want just something specific, then the time and cost is irrelevant, and the openness of system is maintained. But then it would simply take too much time and cost too much to get it all, preventing abuse.
Also, like in this suggestion, if it's not possible to automatically identify persons in the papers, nor possible to look for papers based on people's names, then useful data mining becomes very hard, if not impossible. And as a bonus, if you can't get much useful information, there's not as much money in the data mining business, so overall there will be less organizations trying dig out everybodys private information.
Especially obivious if the cameras see each others. Also, considering it's a geek event, make sure the video records can't be hacked... Ie. no access to video storage servers from the LAN, from the Internet or with WLAN, and no discreet access opportunities to the cabling or other hardware by the guests.
Still it does seem crazy to expect enough people to install the plugin to make it universal enough for developers, as Flash is now.
Why couldn't the site just install the plugin for IE? It probably requires the user to click "yesyes" once, but don't most IE users do that automatically whenever an installation dialog pops up, so shouldn't be a problem... ;-)
It's not only public search engines, it's also companies that sell data mining. Their spidering software sure won't care about some robots.txt, and they'll pretend to be regular browsers. On the contrary, robots.txt is a clue that something private might be in there, so it's more like an invitation. I also wouldn't be surprised if the spidering software of this kind of companies (and cybercrime organizations of course) even tries some common passwords when they encounter password protected sites.
She wants to 'anonymize' court records by substituting initials for names.
My name is Xavier Zachary Quincy. How does this help me?
Try googling for xzq, and you'll have your answer.
Anyway, we *do* exist. Including myself, I know of at least two women who know how to use a packet sniffer. Now, we're both gay
Ah, so maybe you do exist, but you're not one of them (geek girls with correct sexual orientation). So it's quite possible that they don't exist after all, if you don't actually know any either...
Oh well, a significant other being able to do the same stuff you are able to do isn't really that nice. Far better if he/she can do different stuff.
Considering that court rooms are generally open access, I don't see how bottling the information up later on is likely to be a good idea.
Any /. reader should comprehend the difference between some information being available by traditional means, and that same information being available worldwide via web to every data miner.
Tell me, you're not even slightly worried about criminal organizations and foreign intelligence agencies (domestic "homeland security" types probably have full access anyway) and even tabloid newspapers doing data mining court records to find "interesting" potential victims, targets and recruits?
Full online access does create a problem. Many here seem to argue that openness of information is so valuable that abuse, even criminal use should be made easy. I disagree strongly. I feel a person should have full control over what personally identifiable information about him is internationally available in the internet. For example any court text available online should not have any names in it (names replaced by numbers, for example). The full text should only be available in person, or via snail mail for a cost of "shipping and handling".
These rules you describe, they all revolve around you assuming that I'm going to behave in a particular fashion, and you being encouraged to believe that you have the right to expect and demand that I do. Which means you're inevitably going to get into an accident when your preconceived notions fail to mesh with reality, which you've stopped paying attention to.
.
It's really about efficiency. When people can predict what others do, everything goes much more efficiently. The cost of the efficiency is that when the prediction fails, it's worse than if there was no prediction, only reaction. However, in almost all cases, benefits of prediction far outweight the cost of occasional mis-prediction. This applies to just about everything. And the goal in engineering and lawmaking should be to make predicting as reliable as possible, rules as easy to follow and as intuitive as possible, to maximize the efficiency gains and minimize mis-predictions.
.
Of course roundabouts are one way to achieve this, but roundabouts, especially multi-lane roundabouts rely heavily both on rules and on trusting that others will also follow the rules in a dynamic (cars moving) situation. Traffic light controlled intersections rely on simpler rules and simpler trust in a more static situation (cars stopped behind red lights). Roundabouts make a more complex situation predictable, so they are more efficient than traffic lights, but once the situation gets too complex, once you just can't trust the other drivers to do what you predict, and can't trust them to predict what you'll do, it breaks down and you need either control (traffic lights) or communication (like direction signals, but they're both unreliable and too simple for solving roundabout congestion, and making them more complex would make 'em even more unreliable signs of what the other car is going to do).
.
Maybe one day we'll have cars that talk to each other, and for example in intersections the cars decide who goes when, and then just tell the drivers to either go or to stop (or just slow down in advance so there won't be a need to stop completely).
I think "TOE" is generally thought to be theory about our universe only, about the universe that started and got it's "natural laws" in our big bang (assuming the Big Bang theory is at least close to the truth).
For "multiversal TOE", we'd need a different acronym, such as TOTOE, "Theory of Theories of Everythings" ;-)
Right! No plastics, no chemicals, no lubricants !!!
Idiot!
All these can be manufactures from just about anything with carbon and hydrogen. It just takes energy, so as long as there's oil to be pumped, it's cheaper to use the oil. It would even be possible (though not worth it) to manufacture stuff equal to crude oil.
And then of course there are oils directly from plants. This might be a big thing in the future, when genetic engineering makes it possible to design plants to produce oils with desired properties and desired extra chemicals in them. After all, proteins can manufacture just about anything, it's just a matter of desiging the proteins to produce the molecule you want. The rest (converting the protein to DNA and inserting it into a plant genome so that it works) should be possible with today's crude genetic technologies, even.
If it were theoreticly possible to get net power gain, don't you think it would have been tried?
AFAIK, there's nothing theoretically impossible about getting a net power gain with this general type of device. I mean, as far as I understand, the theoretical minimum amount of electrical power needed is far far less than the energy released in the fusion reaction. It's just that so far it's proven to be not possible in practice, due to all seemingly unavoidable losses. And yes, people have been trying. I'd think it's a wet dream of anybody who's ever played with these kind of fusors.
I predict that this is possible, and that eventually we get something like this to work. It'll probably be with a very small fusor, probably using exotic metamaterials designed spesifically for this purpose, with suitable electrical and magnetic properties such as room-temperature superconductivity, and eventually even with properties like self-correcting structure to get around radiation damage to the metamaterials. So it won't be a hobbyist who discovers how to do this.
Yes, Wikipedia is exactly that, a friend. You know, the kind of friend that likes to tell tall tales, and is generally fun to be around with. Just don't ask him/her to help with your homework, at least not if must get it right or you'll flunk ;-)
Last time I checked the definition of universe is still "all existing matter and space considered as a whole"
So if the universe is "everything" can someone tell me how there can be "many?" in a way that isn't a mathematical fantasy proven in the minds of few and no where else?
I think the definition of "universe" is usually considered to be "all existing matter and space and energy considered as a whole, that is part of the same continuum with us, that is connected to us". Another universe could not be reached, even as a thought experiment bypassing all constraints like speed of light, by travelling in our 3 dimensions. Put something out of reach like this, and you have a different universe.
There are also other possible definitions of universe, and of course you can come up with fictional or hypothetical ways of connecting universes temporarily (like wormholes) or otherwise travelling between them (like avoiding timetravel paradoxes by that being travelling into different universes, not back in time in the original universe).
Only physicists can get away with this sort of crap. Any other field of science would be up in arms.
FYI, one of the things in physics being wondered is, why are the natural laws and constants so precisely constrained for universe to have "us". These laws and constants are mathematica.. Now this shows (if the math is correct), that in fact the laws and constants are *not* so precisely constrained.
It's ok if you don't like long standing questions being answered (or tried to), but I hope you'd try to be less negative about others trying to answer them...
String theory and other ideas may be beautiful mathematically, but do not belong into the realm of science because it cannot be observed and measured. Just because faith is based mathematics, does not make it science.
I think you're wrong here. String "theories" are not scientific theories just because of what you say. Believing them to be true would be faith based in mathematics.
However, they certainly are science, a scientific work in progress. Just about everything we know about science started as just a crazy idea. Then it might have evolved into a bunch of mathematics, then a testable hypothesis, and then rejected or tweaked or found out to be accurate to the limits of measurement. But all this is part of science, part of scientific work. String theories are currently somewhat stuck in the mathematics phase, but perhaps already LHC will shed some light in the matter.
Now I'm guessing you think the research should head in an entirely different direction, and that researching string theories is stupid waste of time. That's fair enough, but calling it unscientific is not.
Human free will might be predictable for God
A free will could not be predictable, because then it would not be free, but determined by the factors it could be predicted by.
An eternal ("outside time") type of a god could know all the free will choices made in a universe, know all that happens in that universe from the Beginning to the End, but could not predict it (if there were free will), just know it by extra-dimensionally "observing" the entire universe in question.
Sort of like it's IMHO a bit pointless to say that the last word of a book is pre-determined when you get the book. It's not "pre-determined", it just "is". You can take a guess at what is for fun if you want, or you can just open the last page and see what it is, but neither is really "predicting". I hope you get what I'm trying to say with this rather limited analogy...
But determinism absolutely precludes true free will. This is so patently obvious that I'm always shocked to see people like yourself attempting to argue against it.
There can be physical determinism (ie. if nothing affects some system, then it will behave deterministically), with non-physical free will (a non-physical consiousness, a "soul" if you will) able to do things non-deterministically.
So in the absence of consiousness, everything would work like a clockwork, except a being with a free will can make choises that change the physical universe, making it develop in a new, deterministic direction. A new choice can again chance the direction etc, but as long as no choices are made by a free will entity, everything behaves deterministically.
I think this is what people mean when they talk about determinism and free will being compatible. So they're not being inconsistent, nor are they re-defining terms, they're just using them in a context.
A concrete example. If I drop a coin, and don't excercise my free will to catch it, it's determined to hit the floor. The path and fate of the coin is deterministic, unless a free will interferes.
Now I'm not saying this is how I think, I'm just trying to explain an idea that is (by your own words) shocking to you ;-)
...if you are willing (and able) to scientifically analyse what human will (free or otherwise) really is, and what are the boundaries of its freedom. If we hadn't have quantum mechanical phenomena, there would be no room for free will whatsoever, and we'd be all living a predetermined life.
I don't think neither quantum mechanism nor classical determinism allows for "free will" in the sense of being able to choose ones own actions. Wether your choices are a result of determinstic "gears" turning, or if they are influenced by random quantum mechanical events internally (and externally, of course) making the choices non-deterministic, that still leaves no possiblity of choosing. It's like with dice. With determinism (eg. every side has same number), the the die will always give the same number. With quantum mechanics, any number may come up. In either case you can't choose what number comes up.
To allow free will in the sense of being able to choose (which IMHO is the only meaningful definition of free will), you need to have something "external". And then it doesn't matter if world is deterministic or non-deterministic, the hypothetical external influence can as well paint a new numbers on the deterministic die, or it can turn the quantum mechanical die the way it wants.
Nah, after GUT there's still TOE to shoot for. And after TOE we can really start developing theories about parallel universes with twisted GUTs and ticklish TOEs. There's always more work.
And if all else fails, there's always the "soft" humanist sciences. There's as much work there as you can make up.
Well, it's only for Gods chosen people, obiviously. It's a matter of not-so-hot debate wether you become one by circumcision, or if non-chosen people who do it just cut out a perfectly good piece of skin for some pain but no gain... Another dilemma is, if you are among the chosen people by birth, but don't do it, are you no longer chosen? I don't know if any of the religious texts commanding circumcision answer these important questions unambiguously, though. But I think "Circumcision for Dummies" is being planned, and I think it'll take a shot at these more deep dilemmas, too.
I don't take issue with the assumptions themselves, merely the concept that they are certain.
Some of them are as certain as certain gets. Ie. there is no higher level of certainity available.
Also, some of the certainities are of logical kind. Like it is certain that current big bang model rather accurately explains the measured temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background radiation... No big surprise there, because these very measurements were used to fine-tune the model to match reality (and the important thing here is, fine-tuning didn't make model contradict any other observations, if it did that would prove the model wrong, "untweakable").
Or then you could see through his bias, be a better person so to speak, and discuss the rather valid point he's making... You shouldn't to limit yourself on limitations (a bias is a limitation) of other people, even when it's a convenient excuse.
If a piece of test is not worth discussing, then it's not really worth derogatory comments like yours either.
The creator of a simulation is still restrained *as regards the simulation* by the parameters of that simulation. A human being, obviously, is not restrained literally by his or her creating an online avatar, but he or she *is* constrained in his or her ability to act with that avatar inside that particular virtual world by the rules governing avatars.
What do you mean? Certainly the simulation could be stopped any time, contents of the database changed in any way necessary or even the database converted for a completely new simulation engine, and the sentient AI creatures wouldn't know anything happened.
And what rules governing avatars? The creator programmed any rules there is, so he's free to change them, either universally or adding special cases to the simulation code. Also consider the concept of "soul" in this context. The AIs in the simulation could be completely separate pieces of code that just control the avatars, and not really running as part of the simulated avatar, not in their simulated "brains". That could make a lot of sense from the simulation point of view, because otherwise the AI would be sort of simulation inside simulation (if the AI run on the simulated neural network of the brains of simulated creatures), and very inefficient.
And, pointedly, this argument isn't happening in a vacuum (with hypothetical religions and hypothetical deities) but with actual posited deities of actual religions. Many of whom, I feel compelled to point out, argue that they are *consistent* and *do not alter their mind/decisions*.
If I read you correctly, then I have to disagree. I have yet to see a god of any kind claim anything like that. I've only seen humans claim such a thing about their version of a god. Consider the possibility that these humans may be wrong... ;-)