While I agree that a syntancially meaningless literal rendering is problematic, the problem with non-literal translations is that they assume that we understand Nietzsche's thought well enough to express it in our own language. While I am the first to admit that I don't fully understand everything about Nietzsche's thought, possibly because I lack the strength or the desire the will the eternal recurrence, I think that, so long as we recognize that Nietzsche's thought is beyond our own, we should be as faithful in our translation as possible. Allow Nietzsche to speak for himself, and if a phrase doesn't make sense in German, we should not feel obligated to make sense of it in English.
I suppose that my reading of Nietzsche also disagrees with Kubrick's; I can accept that you have properly interpreted the relevent scenes from 2001, but I don't think we can take Kubrick's vision as indicative of Nietzsche's thought. It's been at least eight years since I've seen it, so I'll yield to your knowledge of the film.
While your appraisal of the ugliest man is correct, I would say that his motive for killing God is vengeful; the problem of all human society is that it is founded upon the spirit of revenge. The ugliest man does not mind a God who sees his strength and beauty (though the ugliest man, as ugliest man, has neither), but rather is ashamed of his weakness. The spirit of revenge is an outgrowth of weakness: we take revenge on those who hurt us, i.e., who reveal us to be hurtable, to be weak. But as you said, that the ugliest man kills God out of revenge does not prove that Zarathustra does so for the same reason.
God is a conjecture: to kill God means to kill this conjecture. To kill God is to induce disbelief in others, just as to create God is to induce belief in others. When gods die, they die many deaths. The ugliest man killed God, the last pope watched him choke on pity, and Zarathustra inherits a world in which his "ghost" has died. It is only those men lower than Zarathsutra, higher men as they may be, that kill God.
Few people have the strength to kill God as you suggest that both the ugliest man and Zarathustra do. Killing God means acknowledging the result of a slain God: Shopenhauerianism or Zarathustrianism (I don't say Nietzscheanism because I don't think he was strong enough to will the eternal recurrence, as his later works show). Modernity is full of "atheism", but it has yet to come to terms with the death of God; modernity does not believe, but it lacks the strength to actually kill God. Indeed, no one is able to live Zarathustra's life: this is the problem of decadence.
As I tried to make clear in my original reply, I think we agree on point 1, that our apparant disagreement involves us saying pretty much the same thing in different words.
As to the proper rendering of Uebermensch, this, too, seems a pointless quarrel. Overman has become acceptable in some circles because of the efforts of Walter Kaufmann, with whose translation I have a number of problems (e.g., Stein der Weisheit as philosopher's stone, Es ist der gute Krieg, der heiligt jede Sache as the good war hallows any cause, etc.). Kaufmann's reasons for preferring overman are not based on fidelity to the German, but are in order to avoid the snickering of those readers for whom Nietzsche expressly did not write over the word superman. I would have used Uebermensch in my original post, but that might have been taken as too elitist for our democratic/. community; most people know superman, and there is no linguistic reason not to prefer it over overman.
I find your last point the most interesting. The problem with saying that Zarathustra killed God as the ugliest man killed God is that the ugliest man does so out of a spirit of revenge: Zarathustra has overcome the spirit of revenge, nauseating as such a process may be. The question then remains whether Zarathustra could kill God out of a motive other than the spirit of revenge; the text suggests that this is impossible, for the desire to kill God is a desire to punish that which torments you (as we see in TSZ IV.7). This is where Nietzsche's historicism comes into play: Zarathustra cannot do what he does unless God is dead, but he cannot be the one to kill Him (for the aforementioned reason). Zarathustra, like Nietzsche, is only possible after the death of God, just as it is only now that the Uebermensch is possible. There can be no Nietzsche unless there is first a Schopenhauer.
Lastly, I have two issues of protocol. I would suggest that we continue our correspondence over email (my address is encoded, but not hidden), since I imagine that this story will soon be archived; in any case, we are now in the realm of offtopic moderation. Secondly, I try to follow the rule of always assuming that your interlocutor knows what they're talking about and letting them themselves prove otherwise; I hope my arguments are sufficient to reveal any profound misunderstanding and that they do not require a sentence to that effect. I do not use words, the meaning of which I do not know; speaking both German and English, I feel able to use ersatz intelligently in both (and Uebermensh, for that matter!).
That having been said, I look forward to any further thoughts you may have on Nietzsche.
You say you don't think Nietzsche' superman (the last stage of evolution) was meant to replace God. Oh yes he was.
I meant that Nietzsche does not intend for the superman to replace God as the object of our worship, i.e., the superman is not to be some higher power toward which we look for guidance and/or salvation. Man must become the superman, must become God by doing what God has done, but in so doing he abandons his relationship to anything God-like; man must not become to the superman what he formerly was to God, but he must become as God is to Himself. And since the God which Nietzsche attacks is defined by our relation to Him, viz. He is a separate Entity that embodies our desire for a moral, i.e., a just, world, the amoral superman cannot be an ersatz God. I think we are in agreement on this point, but that there was a difficulty in communication.
But first, as a quibble, please get rid of that archaic translation of the German "ubermensch" (over-man) that says "superman," a translation popularized by George Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman." Overman is the correct translation.
A quibble for a quibble, superman is the correct translation of Uebermensch; Kaufmann abandoned it in favor of overman because of its association with the comic book hero, not because it more accurately described the intent of the German. Myself assuming a higher degree of literacy in those interested in Nietzsche, I prefer the more accurate rendering of superman and superhero for Uebermensch and Ueberheld.
Hence we have Nietzsche's famous words (uttered by Zarathustra, who has killed God), "God is dead."
And here's a superfluous quibble: Zarathutra did not kill God; the Ugliest Man did. Of course, you could say, a la Stanley Rosen, that everyone in Part IV represents some part of Zarathustra, and thus that in a sense it was Zarathustra who killed God, but then you would have to say that Zarathustra also served God until the end and seeks the hermit to serve Him still (for he would also be the last Pope). I myself think that God is already dead by the action of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the death of God representing both the crisis and the greatest opportunity of Modernity: since the death of God allows us to devolve into last men (for they, too, look to nothing beyond themselves), it also holds out the possibility of the superman.
But when people ask why there is more matter than anti-matter and the respose is that anti-matter decays faster it's practically a circular answer like explaining that morphine works because it contains soporific agents. Almost everyone's immediate question is "Well why does it decay faster?" and to that there is as yet no reasonable answer.
That's not really a fair criticism, since it applies to all science. To take your morphine analogy, a circular answer would be "there is more matter than antimatter because of the CP-Breaking Agent." On the other hand, explaining how soporific agents affect the body such that they explain the observed result is a useful step, for it provides new questions which must be answered in order to understand morphine's effects; without this explanation, we would not know which questions to ask, and so couldn't advance our knowledge.
Similarly with this story. We now "know" that the CP-breaking is a result of unequal decay rates, rather than, say, unequal production rates. Thus, we now know to look at why the fundamental forces appear to work differently on antimatter than on matter, producing the observed result, rather than at why these forces, working equally on some other thing, produce more matter than antimatter in the first place (which would also produce the observed result of more matter than antimatter).
Science is judged by its ability to explain the observed phenomenon, but it advances by knowing which phenomena need to be explained in order to explain that phenomenon.
Does anyone have a link to some scholarly articles about the BMAC? The New York Times article didn't say much about any anthropological research that had been/will be done concerning them. Lacking a (deciphered) writing system, we probably can't as yet determine much with regard to linguistics, but the other stuff (pottery, architecture, etc) should tell us a bit about cultural linkages to other groups. They built impressive mud-brick buildings, but does their design suggest anything about who they were? The article suggests that they may have come from Turkey or from up North, but that's a pretty wide field of possibility.
As an offtopic aside, do I get any points for being the first ontopic post?
In the case of the dinosaur extinctions, they were on their way down when the asteroid hit, perhaps being the last straw. But this earlier event that somehow wiped out up to 80% of life on earth didn't kill them off. Interesting...
According to Peter Ward in the CNN article (same link as in/. story),
"Perhaps creatures reproducing with buried eggs survived and large animals with live births did not."
And you all laughed when my dad built a bomb shelter...
While the statement suggests that an eruption, if it occurs, is still a ways off, I still feel kind of excited by the news. If it does turn into an eruption, we'll have been able to study the ground activity that preceeded it in detail for a significant period of time beforehand. But then again, I'm an amateur when it comes to this -- any real geologists know if we've had this kind of research opportunity before?
I mean, come on, just because the guy did not complete a college degree doesn't make him an idiot. It seems too many people are down on this guy just because he doesn't have a degree behind his name. Don't get me wrong, I do find the magnitude and risks of this undertaking quite high. That's a no brainer. But who here is to say he won't pull this off. If its because he has no degree, I say think again.
I don't think it's a question of stereotypes; I haven't seen any posts that say it'll never work because he doesn't have a college degree. I would say he's a madman even if he had a Ph.D. in Backyard Rocket Design from MIT. I would say he's mad were he Goddard himself.
Of course, I'd still ask him to go ahead and do it anyway; there's no risk he'd crash into my house or that of a loved one. Madmen do occasionally pull something off. Just because a couple of bicycle mechanics manage to survive, however, doesn't mean that a great many others don't go splat, their experiments providing footage for countless commercials which state "there's a better way to do things." But, better he go splat than me, and I want his cool toys.
Nietzsche once said that the human was a bridge between God and animal.
Doesn't he actually say that "Man is a rope, tied between beast and superman"? I don't think that the superman was meant to replace God, since the problem with God was that we looked to Him rather than to ourselves.
As to your interpretation of the end of the film, it seems to overlook the importance of the willing of the eternal recurrence, a concept which calls the whole notion of the superman into doubt; the whole point of the "Soothsayer" (TSZ II.19) is that his truth shatters Zarathustra's great hopes for mankind.
That being said, your interpretation of the end of the film could work if it were split from Nietzsche and expressed in terms of messianism (not necessarily religious; Marx and Hegel's end of history is messianism), which ushering in a new world cannot be described adequately to the old. Of course, Nietzsche would say that messianism in all its forms, Zoarastriansim, Judaism, Christianity, Enlightenment, Hegelianism, Marxism, etc., is a desire for an other world or a behind-the-world (Hinterwelt), and thus a manifestation of the spirit of revenge which will be overcome by willing the eternal recurrence.
As to this whole business about koans, while Nietzsche did respect Buddhism more than Christianity (he thought he was the first European to understand Buddhism), it was not his end-goal, nor was anything like it. The crisis of the West was the decadence of the old slave morality; Buddhism was the decadence of an old master morality, but it was decadence all the same. Buddhism, too, remained something to be overcome for Nietzsche.
weren't we already supposed to have flying cars? They are the great pumpkin of the technological world. Give it up already; they aren't coming, Charlie Brown.
Um, not to criticize too much, but did you watch the end of that movie?
I swear, when the Great Pumpkin does come, he is so gonna damn your non-believin' ass to pedestrian Hell.
Really now, do you want to send all the Liberal Arts folk into industry? English majors designing your seatbelts? Classicists deciding whether to use rebar or not?
I think we all feel a lot safer with us Liberal Arts folks locked up in our ivory tower, where we belong.
How would we do that, exactly? We may have the commented C-code, but to take your analogy a step further, we lack a keyboard (fast, reliable way to change), compiler (proteome), and the ability to program in anything more than Basic (maybe Pascal for the really good geneticists).
I don't think it's the beliefs that matter so much as the activity which such beliefs cause. While Buddhists certainly have a different conception of the world than nuns, the act of meditation seems similar to the way in which some people pray.
Of course, looking at Buddhism does certainly help make sense of these findings. Since meditation is essentially the suppression of conscious thought, finding that the brain becomes less active in the frontal lobe would bolster the claim that much of conscious thought is centered in the frontal lobe. But I think this has already been shown.
The really interesting thing is that similar activity was seen in the brains of praying nuns. This would suggest that their prayer was similar to Buddhist meditation, and therefore may hold some of the same appeal. Considering that the appeal of Buddhist meditation is the loss of personal identity...
I'm afraid that I have to agree with the criticism of the procedure cited in the article. It seems that this guy's found a way to create the heads-in-jars found on Futurama, except without the ability to control giant robots.
The whole procedure actually reminds me a bit of the plot of David Bowie's Outside CD, where some crazy futuristic people perform bizarre medical operations as forms of artistic expression. Or that crazy German guy who embalms corpses in order to sculpt them (saw it on the Learning Channel).
Eternal life is much less desirable when you lack the usuable energy to do anything (assuming that these miracle workers manage to keep you alive without consuming energy).
Whether aliens would get any civil rights would probably depend a lot on chance, seeing as what civil rights include is a pretty arbitrary thing. Whether they would have any civil rights would just be a matter of how the government in their particular locale decided to treat them. As others here have been fond of pointing out, civil rights are noticed more in the violation than the observance.
The real question is what kind of rights we think they ought to have, and that depends on what you think of natural rights. Aquinas based them on a fellow-feeling among all of humanity, and seeing as this compassion was the will of God, you had a legal obligation to respect them. Aliens, not being human, and thus not that object which the Bible commands you to love, would not be entitled to these rights.
If you're a Hobbesian, however, then these aliens would need to have no greater fear than that of violent death in order to be worthy of natural rights. If they fear anything else more than violent death, they have no natural rights.
Thomas Jefferson believed more along the lines of Hobbesian natural right, but couched it in the rhetoric of religion, attributing rights to "Nature and Nature's God." (just as an aside, why not the Bible's God?)
Those who discuss "human rights" tend, as a general rule, to base them on compassion and fellow-feeling. They would have no natural rights unless they were cute enough to warrant our compassion.
As you see, how you would have to treat aliens would depend a lot on the possible basis for natural rights. How they would actually be treated would depend a lot on chance.
Your university ought to have very specific guidelines regarding intellectual property rights, although you may have to visit its graduate homepage in order to find them. My university lists its guidlines here, if you'd like to get a feel for the kind of rights you generally have (although it is based on Canadian law).
Student work is generally the property of the student, and work produced in group projects is the joint property of the group members. The professor would therefore need to get your approval for any subsequent publication.
Note that this is not the case if students do not own their own work. Seeing as you are not an employee, however, the university could not claim ownership of your work without your consent, so I do not see how student work would not be the property of the student.
Note also that declaring his intent to appropriate student work at the beginning of the semester does not constitute a formal contract, even if he explicitly stated that continuing with the course constituted acceptance of his right. Moreover, your university likely has policies regarding the appropriateness of such a request in the first place. In any case, any attempt to get you to sign such a contract before your grades have been reported would likely constitute duress; such an attempt would probably also violate stated university policy. Both the university and any potential publisher would likely want to know this before publication, and as a concerned party with partial ownership rights, it would not be inappropriate for you to bring it to their attention.
Intellectual property rights are actually quite neat and specific in academia; it is their application that can get messy. But not in this case.
To be fair to the Founding Fathers, they were not thrilled with the place of common law in the Republic. James Madison, the man most responsible for the form, character, and content of the Constitution, was against the practice of common law: he accepted only some of its conclusions, while rejecting the method by which they were arrived at.
As he argues in his Report on the Alien and Sedition Acts (January 7, 1800. Papers of James Madison, vol 17, pp. 307-50):
Whether the common law be admitted as of legal or of constitutional obligation, it would confer on the judicial department a discretion little short of a legislative power.
On the supposition of its having a constitutional obligation, this power in the judges would be permanent and irremediable by the legislature. On the other supposition, the power would not expire, until the legislature should have introduced a full system of statutory provisions. Let it be observed too, that besides all the uncertainties above enumerated, and which present an immense field for judicial discretion, it would remain with the same department to decide what parts of the common law would, and would not, be properly applicable to the circumstances of the United States.
A discretion of this sort, has always been lamented as incongruous and dangerous, even in the colonial and state courts; although so much narrowed by positive provisions in the local codes on all the principal subjects embraced by the common law. Under the United States, where so few laws exist on those subjects, and where so great a lapse of time must happen before the vast chasm could be supplied, it is manifest that the power of the judges over the law would, in fact, erect them into legislators; and that for a long time, it would be impossible for the citizens to conjecture, either what was, or would be law.
Madison, and every other Founder whose thoughts on the subject I have encountered, desired that the good conclusions that are in common law be codified by the various legislatures responsible for creating law, and that the form of common law be abandoned. The courts were to have appelate, not legislative, authority.
In this same paper, Madison also says why the colonists had a right to rebel, rejecting that it had its origin in common law. But I've wasted enough server-space as it is.
Actually, this doesn't affect the debate one way or the other unless you have already decided the debate. This is merely one example of an unenforceable law: the mere existence of unenforceable laws does not mean that unenforceable laws are unjust -- the question itself assumes that unenforceable laws exist.
In any case, the way I heard this debate had nothing to do with justice: is an unenforceable law a law at all? A second question concerns whether unjust laws are laws at all. And these questions are of course answered by: what is justice? Or rather, is justice such that it can bind where positive (as in asserted) law does not?
(c.f., Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, L.Ron, Rand, Satre, Mr. Bean, Epicurus (through Lucretius), Diogenes the Cynic, Me, Maurice Strong, La Rouche, and any ignorant gawker for considered opinions on the topic)
I can see it now: Germany and China team up to battle the Jedi. Germany because it's actually an elaborate money-making scam (You think Jedi Temples come cheap? "You don't need your money." "We don't need our money." "These aren't the droids we stole from you." "These aren't the droids they stole from us." "We're free to go now." "You're free to go now."), China because it's actually a subversive political organization ("You're the guardians of what?"). Just imagine it; Jedi running around, lighting themselves on fire and insisting that you have to look up every word you don't know in a dictionary. John Travolta tries to turn all of Yoda's crappy stories into blockbuster movies, while Brad Pitt makes a film about the seven years some guy spent on Dagobah.
Yeah, if we're going to test the power of the internet, this is definitely how I want to do it.
(btw, yes: I do know the difference between Fulan Gong and Lamaism; it just worked better this way)
Most of the information under What Information Do We Collect? is reasonable, but the information required by the federal government is problematic. The fact that the center will not use that information against me specifically (ensured by the non-use of unique information) is hardly reassuring; there is something objectionable about the idea that there is, somewhere in the ever-secure filing cabinet of a rec center, a piece of paper that lists my name, address, income, family, and race.
The information that the rec center requests is reasonable and seems to serve legitimate purposes. The federal government, on the other hand, wants data that I, as a citizen, do not want anyone but them to have (at least in conjunction with my name and address). If they need the info, does it have to go on the same form as the other information?
Sorry for the following comment, but what I don't understand is the way the Evil Men in Suits get attacked. The basic thrust is that we shouldn't give people -- in this case, the OK Men in Suits -- the power to do things we don't want them doing; don't trust them to use the power only in the way we want them to use it (e.g., tracking kiddie porn and terrorism).
But at the same time, we insist that the government be involved in every other aspect of our lives, trusting them with far more potentially pernicious powers in those areas. I'm here referring to Hayek's Road to Serfdom. While this is a more libertarian forum than the population as a whole, I wonder why the solution to DCS1000 seems to be outrage that they are betraying the trust we gave them. If they can't be trusted with the power, why trust them with the prerogative to acquire the power? Why put them in a position to betray our trust if we don't trust them? Or if we do trust them with the prerogative to acquire the power, why not with the power itself? This doesn't seem like a coherent position, to both trust and withhold trust.
If we were really concerned with limiting the powers of government, on the idea that we can't trust its executors, we would paraphrase Madison, Hamilton, and Jay not Benjamin Franklin (the latter portion, about receiving neither, is apocryphal -- it was added by people disturbed by the suggestion that, even if we got security, we would not deserve it if we so abandoned our freedom. Not that I think Moonwick is such a one; the tenor of his comment suggests that he was merely paraphrasing the misquotation of another who could not accept the radicalism of Franklin's statement.)
P.S., So if I'm doing a doctoral dissertation on James Madison, does that make this post flame-bait, insightful, or a troll?
I think there's actually a bigger problem than this. Namely, if you want to send a message of any length, you produce a proportionally longer spam. "I think it is time to impliment Operation Stinky-Whistler" translates to about a page of text. When I did a longer passage about the ancient history of the Corbetts (only about two short paragraphs), I got a spam six times as long. Basically, it would only be useful as encryption for things like "GW noon PCInet Sniper Omar."
But even this is problematic. This sort of encryption wouldn't be too hard to break (the intelligent folk on this subject have already posted), and the Evil Men in Suits would just have more types of fish to look for in their net; so Osama bin Laden isn't about to touch it.
"But isn't the site suggesting that we use this to force the Evil Men in Suits to read our spam?" Yes, but this isn't a feasible idea. Once they've broken the code, they'll just look for those search terms (or more likely in this case, phrases); the context in which they occur wouldn't greatly increase the load on their system. Unless we also encrypt things like "Bill Clinton loses SS protection in a few years; wanna start something?" they won't bother looking. And in that case, why not just send it in the clear? Because this method is so transparent, the Evil Men in Suits aren't about to spend any extra time on spam, seeing as bin Laden won't transmit using it.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose that my reading of Nietzsche also disagrees with Kubrick's; I can accept that you have properly interpreted the relevent scenes from 2001, but I don't think we can take Kubrick's vision as indicative of Nietzsche's thought. It's been at least eight years since I've seen it, so I'll yield to your knowledge of the film.
While your appraisal of the ugliest man is correct, I would say that his motive for killing God is vengeful; the problem of all human society is that it is founded upon the spirit of revenge. The ugliest man does not mind a God who sees his strength and beauty (though the ugliest man, as ugliest man, has neither), but rather is ashamed of his weakness. The spirit of revenge is an outgrowth of weakness: we take revenge on those who hurt us, i.e., who reveal us to be hurtable, to be weak. But as you said, that the ugliest man kills God out of revenge does not prove that Zarathustra does so for the same reason.
God is a conjecture: to kill God means to kill this conjecture. To kill God is to induce disbelief in others, just as to create God is to induce belief in others. When gods die, they die many deaths. The ugliest man killed God, the last pope watched him choke on pity, and Zarathustra inherits a world in which his "ghost" has died. It is only those men lower than Zarathsutra, higher men as they may be, that kill God.
Few people have the strength to kill God as you suggest that both the ugliest man and Zarathustra do. Killing God means acknowledging the result of a slain God: Shopenhauerianism or Zarathustrianism (I don't say Nietzscheanism because I don't think he was strong enough to will the eternal recurrence, as his later works show). Modernity is full of "atheism", but it has yet to come to terms with the death of God; modernity does not believe, but it lacks the strength to actually kill God. Indeed, no one is able to live Zarathustra's life: this is the problem of decadence.
As to the proper rendering of Uebermensch, this, too, seems a pointless quarrel. Overman has become acceptable in some circles because of the efforts of Walter Kaufmann, with whose translation I have a number of problems (e.g., Stein der Weisheit as philosopher's stone, Es ist der gute Krieg, der heiligt jede Sache as the good war hallows any cause, etc.). Kaufmann's reasons for preferring overman are not based on fidelity to the German, but are in order to avoid the snickering of those readers for whom Nietzsche expressly did not write over the word superman. I would have used Uebermensch in my original post, but that might have been taken as too elitist for our democratic /. community; most people know superman, and there is no linguistic reason not to prefer it over overman.
I find your last point the most interesting. The problem with saying that Zarathustra killed God as the ugliest man killed God is that the ugliest man does so out of a spirit of revenge: Zarathustra has overcome the spirit of revenge, nauseating as such a process may be. The question then remains whether Zarathustra could kill God out of a motive other than the spirit of revenge; the text suggests that this is impossible, for the desire to kill God is a desire to punish that which torments you (as we see in TSZ IV.7). This is where Nietzsche's historicism comes into play: Zarathustra cannot do what he does unless God is dead, but he cannot be the one to kill Him (for the aforementioned reason). Zarathustra, like Nietzsche, is only possible after the death of God, just as it is only now that the Uebermensch is possible. There can be no Nietzsche unless there is first a Schopenhauer.
Lastly, I have two issues of protocol. I would suggest that we continue our correspondence over email (my address is encoded, but not hidden), since I imagine that this story will soon be archived; in any case, we are now in the realm of offtopic moderation. Secondly, I try to follow the rule of always assuming that your interlocutor knows what they're talking about and letting them themselves prove otherwise; I hope my arguments are sufficient to reveal any profound misunderstanding and that they do not require a sentence to that effect. I do not use words, the meaning of which I do not know; speaking both German and English, I feel able to use ersatz intelligently in both (and Uebermensh, for that matter!).
That having been said, I look forward to any further thoughts you may have on Nietzsche.
I meant that Nietzsche does not intend for the superman to replace God as the object of our worship, i.e., the superman is not to be some higher power toward which we look for guidance and/or salvation. Man must become the superman, must become God by doing what God has done, but in so doing he abandons his relationship to anything God-like; man must not become to the superman what he formerly was to God, but he must become as God is to Himself. And since the God which Nietzsche attacks is defined by our relation to Him, viz. He is a separate Entity that embodies our desire for a moral, i.e., a just, world, the amoral superman cannot be an ersatz God. I think we are in agreement on this point, but that there was a difficulty in communication.
A quibble for a quibble, superman is the correct translation of Uebermensch; Kaufmann abandoned it in favor of overman because of its association with the comic book hero, not because it more accurately described the intent of the German. Myself assuming a higher degree of literacy in those interested in Nietzsche, I prefer the more accurate rendering of superman and superhero for Uebermensch and Ueberheld.
And here's a superfluous quibble: Zarathutra did not kill God; the Ugliest Man did. Of course, you could say, a la Stanley Rosen, that everyone in Part IV represents some part of Zarathustra, and thus that in a sense it was Zarathustra who killed God, but then you would have to say that Zarathustra also served God until the end and seeks the hermit to serve Him still (for he would also be the last Pope). I myself think that God is already dead by the action of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the death of God representing both the crisis and the greatest opportunity of Modernity: since the death of God allows us to devolve into last men (for they, too, look to nothing beyond themselves), it also holds out the possibility of the superman.
That's not really a fair criticism, since it applies to all science. To take your morphine analogy, a circular answer would be "there is more matter than antimatter because of the CP-Breaking Agent." On the other hand, explaining how soporific agents affect the body such that they explain the observed result is a useful step, for it provides new questions which must be answered in order to understand morphine's effects; without this explanation, we would not know which questions to ask, and so couldn't advance our knowledge.
Similarly with this story. We now "know" that the CP-breaking is a result of unequal decay rates, rather than, say, unequal production rates. Thus, we now know to look at why the fundamental forces appear to work differently on antimatter than on matter, producing the observed result, rather than at why these forces, working equally on some other thing, produce more matter than antimatter in the first place (which would also produce the observed result of more matter than antimatter).
Science is judged by its ability to explain the observed phenomenon, but it advances by knowing which phenomena need to be explained in order to explain that phenomenon.
As an offtopic aside, do I get any points for being the first ontopic post?
According to Peter Ward in the CNN article (same link as in /. story),
And you all laughed when my dad built a bomb shelter...
While the statement suggests that an eruption, if it occurs, is still a ways off, I still feel kind of excited by the news. If it does turn into an eruption, we'll have been able to study the ground activity that preceeded it in detail for a significant period of time beforehand. But then again, I'm an amateur when it comes to this -- any real geologists know if we've had this kind of research opportunity before?
I don't think it's a question of stereotypes; I haven't seen any posts that say it'll never work because he doesn't have a college degree. I would say he's a madman even if he had a Ph.D. in Backyard Rocket Design from MIT. I would say he's mad were he Goddard himself.
Of course, I'd still ask him to go ahead and do it anyway; there's no risk he'd crash into my house or that of a loved one. Madmen do occasionally pull something off. Just because a couple of bicycle mechanics manage to survive, however, doesn't mean that a great many others don't go splat, their experiments providing footage for countless commercials which state "there's a better way to do things." But, better he go splat than me, and I want his cool toys.
Doesn't he actually say that "Man is a rope, tied between beast and superman"? I don't think that the superman was meant to replace God, since the problem with God was that we looked to Him rather than to ourselves.
As to your interpretation of the end of the film, it seems to overlook the importance of the willing of the eternal recurrence, a concept which calls the whole notion of the superman into doubt; the whole point of the "Soothsayer" (TSZ II.19) is that his truth shatters Zarathustra's great hopes for mankind.
That being said, your interpretation of the end of the film could work if it were split from Nietzsche and expressed in terms of messianism (not necessarily religious; Marx and Hegel's end of history is messianism), which ushering in a new world cannot be described adequately to the old. Of course, Nietzsche would say that messianism in all its forms, Zoarastriansim, Judaism, Christianity, Enlightenment, Hegelianism, Marxism, etc., is a desire for an other world or a behind-the-world (Hinterwelt), and thus a manifestation of the spirit of revenge which will be overcome by willing the eternal recurrence.
As to this whole business about koans, while Nietzsche did respect Buddhism more than Christianity (he thought he was the first European to understand Buddhism), it was not his end-goal, nor was anything like it. The crisis of the West was the decadence of the old slave morality; Buddhism was the decadence of an old master morality, but it was decadence all the same. Buddhism, too, remained something to be overcome for Nietzsche.
Um, not to criticize too much, but did you watch the end of that movie?
I swear, when the Great Pumpkin does come, he is so gonna damn your non-believin' ass to pedestrian Hell.
Really now, do you want to send all the Liberal Arts folk into industry? English majors designing your seatbelts? Classicists deciding whether to use rebar or not?
I think we all feel a lot safer with us Liberal Arts folks locked up in our ivory tower, where we belong.
How would we do that, exactly? We may have the commented C-code, but to take your analogy a step further, we lack a keyboard (fast, reliable way to change), compiler (proteome), and the ability to program in anything more than Basic (maybe Pascal for the really good geneticists).
Of course, looking at Buddhism does certainly help make sense of these findings. Since meditation is essentially the suppression of conscious thought, finding that the brain becomes less active in the frontal lobe would bolster the claim that much of conscious thought is centered in the frontal lobe. But I think this has already been shown.
The really interesting thing is that similar activity was seen in the brains of praying nuns. This would suggest that their prayer was similar to Buddhist meditation, and therefore may hold some of the same appeal. Considering that the appeal of Buddhist meditation is the loss of personal identity ...
So that's how they did the special effects in ET! (although I think his glowed orange)
The whole procedure actually reminds me a bit of the plot of David Bowie's Outside CD, where some crazy futuristic people perform bizarre medical operations as forms of artistic expression. Or that crazy German guy who embalms corpses in order to sculpt them (saw it on the Learning Channel).
Eternal life is much less desirable when you lack the usuable energy to do anything (assuming that these miracle workers manage to keep you alive without consuming energy).
The real question is what kind of rights we think they ought to have, and that depends on what you think of natural rights. Aquinas based them on a fellow-feeling among all of humanity, and seeing as this compassion was the will of God, you had a legal obligation to respect them. Aliens, not being human, and thus not that object which the Bible commands you to love, would not be entitled to these rights.
If you're a Hobbesian, however, then these aliens would need to have no greater fear than that of violent death in order to be worthy of natural rights. If they fear anything else more than violent death, they have no natural rights.
Thomas Jefferson believed more along the lines of Hobbesian natural right, but couched it in the rhetoric of religion, attributing rights to "Nature and Nature's God." (just as an aside, why not the Bible's God?)
Those who discuss "human rights" tend, as a general rule, to base them on compassion and fellow-feeling. They would have no natural rights unless they were cute enough to warrant our compassion.
As you see, how you would have to treat aliens would depend a lot on the possible basis for natural rights. How they would actually be treated would depend a lot on chance.
Have cheer; the Daily Show is available. The Comedy Network plays it one day behind on weeknights at 11:00pm, and then again Tue-Fri at 3:00am.
Student work is generally the property of the student, and work produced in group projects is the joint property of the group members. The professor would therefore need to get your approval for any subsequent publication.
Note that this is not the case if students do not own their own work. Seeing as you are not an employee, however, the university could not claim ownership of your work without your consent, so I do not see how student work would not be the property of the student.
Note also that declaring his intent to appropriate student work at the beginning of the semester does not constitute a formal contract, even if he explicitly stated that continuing with the course constituted acceptance of his right. Moreover, your university likely has policies regarding the appropriateness of such a request in the first place. In any case, any attempt to get you to sign such a contract before your grades have been reported would likely constitute duress; such an attempt would probably also violate stated university policy. Both the university and any potential publisher would likely want to know this before publication, and as a concerned party with partial ownership rights, it would not be inappropriate for you to bring it to their attention.
Intellectual property rights are actually quite neat and specific in academia; it is their application that can get messy. But not in this case.
As he argues in his Report on the Alien and Sedition Acts (January 7, 1800. Papers of James Madison, vol 17, pp. 307-50):
Madison, and every other Founder whose thoughts on the subject I have encountered, desired that the good conclusions that are in common law be codified by the various legislatures responsible for creating law, and that the form of common law be abandoned. The courts were to have appelate, not legislative, authority.
In this same paper, Madison also says why the colonists had a right to rebel, rejecting that it had its origin in common law. But I've wasted enough server-space as it is.
In any case, the way I heard this debate had nothing to do with justice: is an unenforceable law a law at all? A second question concerns whether unjust laws are laws at all. And these questions are of course answered by: what is justice? Or rather, is justice such that it can bind where positive (as in asserted) law does not?
(c.f., Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, L.Ron, Rand, Satre, Mr. Bean, Epicurus (through Lucretius), Diogenes the Cynic, Me, Maurice Strong, La Rouche, and any ignorant gawker for considered opinions on the topic)
Yeah, if we're going to test the power of the internet, this is definitely how I want to do it.
(btw, yes: I do know the difference between Fulan Gong and Lamaism; it just worked better this way)
The information that the rec center requests is reasonable and seems to serve legitimate purposes. The federal government, on the other hand, wants data that I, as a citizen, do not want anyone but them to have (at least in conjunction with my name and address). If they need the info, does it have to go on the same form as the other information?
But at the same time, we insist that the government be involved in every other aspect of our lives, trusting them with far more potentially pernicious powers in those areas. I'm here referring to Hayek's Road to Serfdom. While this is a more libertarian forum than the population as a whole, I wonder why the solution to DCS1000 seems to be outrage that they are betraying the trust we gave them. If they can't be trusted with the power, why trust them with the prerogative to acquire the power? Why put them in a position to betray our trust if we don't trust them? Or if we do trust them with the prerogative to acquire the power, why not with the power itself? This doesn't seem like a coherent position, to both trust and withhold trust.
If we were really concerned with limiting the powers of government, on the idea that we can't trust its executors, we would paraphrase Madison, Hamilton, and Jay not Benjamin Franklin (the latter portion, about receiving neither, is apocryphal -- it was added by people disturbed by the suggestion that, even if we got security, we would not deserve it if we so abandoned our freedom. Not that I think Moonwick is such a one; the tenor of his comment suggests that he was merely paraphrasing the misquotation of another who could not accept the radicalism of Franklin's statement.)
P.S., So if I'm doing a doctoral dissertation on James Madison, does that make this post flame-bait, insightful, or a troll?
But even this is problematic. This sort of encryption wouldn't be too hard to break (the intelligent folk on this subject have already posted), and the Evil Men in Suits would just have more types of fish to look for in their net; so Osama bin Laden isn't about to touch it.
"But isn't the site suggesting that we use this to force the Evil Men in Suits to read our spam?" Yes, but this isn't a feasible idea. Once they've broken the code, they'll just look for those search terms (or more likely in this case, phrases); the context in which they occur wouldn't greatly increase the load on their system. Unless we also encrypt things like "Bill Clinton loses SS protection in a few years; wanna start something?" they won't bother looking. And in that case, why not just send it in the clear? Because this method is so transparent, the Evil Men in Suits aren't about to spend any extra time on spam, seeing as bin Laden won't transmit using it.