A decade ago, no one would have questioned that it was legal to replant seeds from last year. A decade ago, no one would have questioned that it was legal to select for herbicide resistance by spraying plants and keeping the ones that lived. Now those things are illegal.
Patents on plant varieties have been valid since 1930.
Their damned plants contaminate my Heirloom seed planted crops via pollen
If you're going to open-pollinate, you take what you get. And why wouldn't you also get mad at people who plant different non-GMO plants that 'contaminate' your crops?
I'm a bit shocked that the Supreme Court gave Monsanto this one.
Why? If you started selling copies of a CD as part of a business, why would the fact that you found the original in someone's trash make a difference?
When monsanto's "patented" pollen contaminate non GMO plants, the offpring is suddenly monsanto's property.
It doesn't work that way, for GMOs or other patented strains. Accidental cross-pollination isn't' enough, there has to be a deliberate attempt to use the trait.
By a lot if they're dominant, by a little if they're recessive (although by more for generations if recessive because the trait will only crop up rarely; pun intended).
If by "a lot" you mean maybe 2% max in real-world scenarios, sure.
The problem with your argument is that almost any crop you plant will have traits that someone else will see as negative. You're either going to have to demand the right to prohibit your neighbors from planting anything you don't like (and vice-verse), or simply take responsibility for the reproduction of your own crops the way breeders already do.
e.g. If you want to breed naturally blue roses, great! But don't tell me that I can't grow red ones because it makes your job harder.
Give a way to describe the sensation of 'green' without the definition becoming circular (and obviously referring to its wavelength is woefully inadequate).
Exactly. How can you be sure that robots (including ones that don't exist yet) can't have a property, especially when you acknowledge that you don't have any way of testing for that property?
Boredom proves that human brains are not deterministic.
anybody who has thought about this problem deeply, or has worked with small children, knows that the human brain is not deterministic.
If the brain is deterministic, it should be resetting to start state every time you wake up.
And for simple tasks, should be able to go into an infinite loop quite nicely without *ever* getting bored.
No. All of these are appeals to intuition or a misunderstanding of how a deterministic processes behave.
So no, internal states do not make something deterministic or non-deterministic.
True, but unknown internal states can make something deterministic appear to be non-deterministic.
Quantum Fluctuations may be the cause
If QM makes something non-deterministic then every physical behavior is non-deterministic, including the behavior of robots.
Maybe someday when we find a truly random input instead of merely a pseudo random input, but not yet.
It shouldn't be that hard to hook up a Geiger counter to a computer.
I should have been clearer: the workers or the business (in the form of paying more people) has to pick up the slack.
In a large organization, people have babies all the time.
But even in the best-case scenario, with good planning and an expectation the the business rather than workers should pay the price, the organization needs more employees than it otherwise would. In my mind that's "picking up the slack" for the absent person.
How does that support the contention that "No, men don't get paid more than women," which is, specifically, what was asserted by hedwards?
It doesn't. But it does support his other statement:
There may be a compensation gap, but without actually looking at the whole cost of employing an employee and the productivity you can't say with any reasonable certainty that women are being under paid.
And as far as I can tell that's a perfectly reasonable claim.
I'm sure there's a word for the tendency to hold people to the letter of their most extreme opening statements even when they clearly were trying to covey something both more complex and more reasonable.
If I had to place a guess, I'd guess it goes all the way back to the Roman republic. There was a legal principle there called "Mater semper certa est," which much like in Judaism, rulings about uncertain ancestry were determined strictly by the mothers.
While that's true for some situations (like unmarried mothers, or questions of ethnicity (e.g. Jewishness)) for the most part Roman and English common law favored fathers when it came to actual custody, because of the stigma against bastards and the trade inherent in the marital contract (support in return for children). In a divorce the father kept the children because he'd 'paid' for them with food and shelter, and the mother got compensated for producing those children in the form of alimony. Not great, but everyone got something they needed - he got kids that are probably his, she got money that was hard for women to earn, and the kids had a father whose name they could take and thus be accepted into 'proper' society.
The move to favoring custody for the mother and visitation for the father didn't take hold until the 19th century, and then in the late 1970s joint custody become more common. Now there's a move to "parenting schedules" where there's no strict distinction (thank goodness).
Perhaps you have some counterexamples to offer which show that all of the disparity can be adequately explained by non-discriminatory factors?
From your own citation:
Furthermore, O'Neil found that among young people who have never had a child, women's earnings approach 98 percent of men's.
They found that the average wage rate of females was only 87.4% of the average wage rate of males; whereas, when earnings were measured by their index of total compensation (including fringe benefits), the average value of the index for females was 96.4% of the average value for males.
I'm not trying to assert that one set of number is the right one, only that with a range from 2% to 15% it's pretty easy for people to pick out one they want to be true (or find politically useful) and run with it.
You don't *have* to work harder to pick up the slack unless you're the only other one in the company.
Pray tell, by what magic does this work? If 2/10 people in a department are on parental leave, do 20% of your clients automatically hold off on new orders? If you're getting the same amount of work done, but by fewer people, those people have to be doing more work. And if it's paid leave the money has to come from somewhere.
biology/chemistry(two hard sciences) with an intent to move on to dental school
Doing original scientific research and merely learning about some of its results aren't quite the same thing. If they were, Scientific American would have already made me an astrophysicist, an economist and a neurologist.
Evidently it is, but it doesn't work as a counter-argument because it begs the question.
It's good that you understand that, because I wasn't making an argument, I was trying to clarify a viewpoint.
what they all argued and argue is that those mathematical entities have such properties that they cannot be reduced to mere imagination
And I take the opposing view. Both philosophical positions are perfectly plausible. I just don't understand your hostility.
So Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger etc. have now all been all reduced to reinstatements of Socrates and merged into Phil. 101?
No, no. The specific statement of yours that I was discussing is a basic point that comes up in many early epistemology discussions, about the same time as basic Descartes and Plato's cave. I still don't see its relevance to a discussion of ontology, especially since the argument applies (for the most part) to both positions.
I'm not an anti-realist - I really do believe that the physical world exists, etc. On the other hand I don't believe that things like beauty, circles, and numbers exist as independent, abstract objects, so I'm not a Platonic realist. One consequence of this is that I believe that people invented ideals like "circle" and "ten" in order to describe or simplify things like plates and groups, rather than those ideals existing before people and "made" the physical world conform to them.
You happen to use the geometrical rules you yourself (including your brain) are built with to deal with within the Universe you live in. You cannot not do it.
Exactly - we conform ourselves, including our concepts, to fit the universe. To say the universe conforms to a set of concepts is causally backward.
...you'll never know whether...
Well, of course not. This is pretty basic Phil 101 "all I know is that I know nothing" epistemology, and is irrelevant to our debate on ontology.
As I see it, your refutation counts as agreeing with my original argument.
That's because you didn't understand it. Probably all my fault (I shouldn't do philosophy when I'm tired), but hopefully I've managed to communicate better this time.
With the necessary consequence, by reductio ad absurdum, that we know nothing about nothing, and all our technology just happens to work by pure luck.... I fail to see how one can hold such a notion that math, logic and related fields are human inventions and simultaneously that they hold true.
Well, some parts are true by definition (like pure mathematics) and the rest are chosen to fit the real world like scientific theory (applied math and most of the rest). We shouldn't be any more surprised that math and logic work than science works, because we alter them or choose what to apply where in order to make it work. When you want to paint a house and you measure it, does nature specifically "make" the house and paint fit a "multiply to get the area" rule and an "add up the sides" rule? Or do you choose to multiply some numbers and add others because following that model gets you a useful answer, even though nature doesn't 'know' what "house", "paint", "add", or "area" means?
What it implies is quite literally that when I say "there is one apple over there", in reality "mumble-mumble mumble-mumble apple mumble-mumble".
No, your statement is a perfectly valid description of a situation. I'm saying that nature doesn't conform to the sentence, you thought up that sentence to conform to a (possible) state of nature - i.e. the category "apple" only exists in you head.
Just because that makes it "easier" in to pretend each and every kind of supernatural doesn't exist, no matter how agnostic or atheistic it is?
I don't agree with Platonic realism and related philosophical positions, that's all. I see no connection to atheism, etc.
Try rewriting all you said removing the law of non-contradiction and see how far you go.
You're asking me to rewrite something without using one of the basic concepts people use to think about things. Are words human inventions? Can you rewrite your post without them?
The process involved in just DNA replication (not counting the transcription and translation processes involved in protein synthesis) in even the simplest prokaryotic cells involves more than 30 specialized proteins that perform the tasks of accurately copying the genetic material.
First, "even the simplest prokaryotic cells" are hard-core veterans of the evolutionary process. The first living things almost certainly used slower and less efficient, but simpler, systems for absolutely everything. For example, DNA can be copied with only a polymerase and temperature cycling, so the fact that living things use a more complex system now doesn't mean that a stripped-down version is impossible. Also, early life didn't necessarily use DNA or proteins - RNA (and many xNAs) can both store information like DNA and react like proteins, so it's quite possible that life started off with a single molecule (or a single molecule and some "free helpers", like spontaneously forming lipids or minerals) and later added proteins (tougher and more flexible) and DNA (long-term storage).
For any origin theory to succeed it must provide an explanation of these things: 1. It must explain the origin of the system for storing and encoding digital information in the cell. 2. It must explain the origin of the information itself that is stored in DNA 3. It must explain the origin of the integrated complexity, or functional interdependence, of the cell's information processing system.
1. Many xNAs form chains spontaneously and replicate when thermocycled.
2. Some of those chains will have useful info that makes replication more likely or protects itself better...
3....and can later add more parts via natural selection.
It is why Intelligent Design... is the only theory that currently offers an explanation that accounts for these three points.
Partly true: ID is only supported by argument from ignorance - that's why it's so absurd.
I'm interested in hearing all theories that can do this, naturalistic or otherwise, but if it can't even explain the basic facts that must be explained, the don't call it an origin theory, don't pretend it's legitimate, and don't waste the electrons sending it to me.
Read first. Then tell me what's wrong with all of those ideas.
Which makes sense, they're invented by human beings.
...nature as a whole "follows" the principle of non-contradiction, arithmetic, generalized geometry
Except that we chose geometrical and arithmetic axioms to fit what we saw in the word around us, we had to drop an axiom from geometry when nature didn't want to "follow" the rules we invented. Even the law of non-contradiction is described as a "law of thought" rather than something outside the mind - you shouldn't be surprised when nothing ends up being X and not-X when you defined the categories as having no members in common.
It's true that while arresting you the police can search you and your immediate surroundings and confiscate most of what they find - but this is a limited ability based on the compelling needs of safety and evidence preservation. They can't use the house keys they confiscated to search your house, open your safety deposit box, etc. without a warrant, because those searches aren't justified by either of those two compelling needs. The bit I quoted before is another example of a search that is not allowed as part of an arrest.
In this case the defense is arguing that because neither the need for safety nor the need to preserve evidence justified the use of the cell phone, any evidence collected as a result of that use should be thrown out, the same way it would be if they had used the key to his front door to find evidence in his house without a warrant to search the home.
Slashdot Mirror
Patents on plant varieties have been valid since 1930.
If you're going to open-pollinate, you take what you get. And why wouldn't you also get mad at people who plant different non-GMO plants that 'contaminate' your crops?
Why? If you started selling copies of a CD as part of a business, why would the fact that you found the original in someone's trash make a difference?
So he lets his plants reproduce with anything the wind blows along, and then gets mad that someone else was growing the 'wrong' type?
If he let his purebred dog run loose, and my mutt knocks her up, could he sue me for 'contaminating' his line of animals?
Uh, yeah. Since 1930.
It doesn't work that way, for GMOs or other patented strains. Accidental cross-pollination isn't' enough, there has to be a deliberate attempt to use the trait.
If by "a lot" you mean maybe 2% max in real-world scenarios, sure.
The problem with your argument is that almost any crop you plant will have traits that someone else will see as negative. You're either going to have to demand the right to prohibit your neighbors from planting anything you don't like (and vice-verse), or simply take responsibility for the reproduction of your own crops the way breeders already do.
e.g. If you want to breed naturally blue roses, great! But don't tell me that I can't grow red ones because it makes your job harder.
The patent has expired on glyphosate (generic Roundup). This is about selling seed.
It's a lot safer than most herbicides, and was used before GMOs came along.
Exactly. How can you be sure that robots (including ones that don't exist yet) can't have a property, especially when you acknowledge that you don't have any way of testing for that property?
No. All of these are appeals to intuition or a misunderstanding of how a deterministic processes behave.
True, but unknown internal states can make something deterministic appear to be non-deterministic.
If QM makes something non-deterministic then every physical behavior is non-deterministic, including the behavior of robots.
It shouldn't be that hard to hook up a Geiger counter to a computer.
I had some unusual experiences. How does that demonstrate that my mind is non-deterministic?
Give me a way to test something for qualia, and I'll get right to it.
Massive, wide-ranging absolutist claim with no actual evidence or argument ... You've convinced me!
So the business picks up the slack, rather then the workers. Someone still has to do it.
But even in the best-case scenario, with good planning and an expectation the the business rather than workers should pay the price, the organization needs more employees than it otherwise would. In my mind that's "picking up the slack" for the absent person.
It doesn't. But it does support his other statement:
And as far as I can tell that's a perfectly reasonable claim.
I'm sure there's a word for the tendency to hold people to the letter of their most extreme opening statements even when they clearly were trying to covey something both more complex and more reasonable.
While that's true for some situations (like unmarried mothers, or questions of ethnicity (e.g. Jewishness)) for the most part Roman and English common law favored fathers when it came to actual custody, because of the stigma against bastards and the trade inherent in the marital contract (support in return for children). In a divorce the father kept the children because he'd 'paid' for them with food and shelter, and the mother got compensated for producing those children in the form of alimony. Not great, but everyone got something they needed - he got kids that are probably his, she got money that was hard for women to earn, and the kids had a father whose name they could take and thus be accepted into 'proper' society.
The move to favoring custody for the mother and visitation for the father didn't take hold until the 19th century, and then in the late 1970s joint custody become more common. Now there's a move to "parenting schedules" where there's no strict distinction (thank goodness).
Sure, but because they're the only ones allowed to stay home that long, they become the only one who gets pressured to do so.
From your own citation:
I'm not trying to assert that one set of number is the right one, only that with a range from 2% to 15% it's pretty easy for people to pick out one they want to be true (or find politically useful) and run with it.
Pray tell, by what magic does this work? If 2/10 people in a department are on parental leave, do 20% of your clients automatically hold off on new orders? If you're getting the same amount of work done, but by fewer people, those people have to be doing more work. And if it's paid leave the money has to come from somewhere.
True.
Doing original scientific research and merely learning about some of its results aren't quite the same thing. If they were, Scientific American would have already made me an astrophysicist, an economist and a neurologist.
It's good that you understand that, because I wasn't making an argument, I was trying to clarify a viewpoint.
And I take the opposing view. Both philosophical positions are perfectly plausible. I just don't understand your hostility.
No, no. The specific statement of yours that I was discussing is a basic point that comes up in many early epistemology discussions, about the same time as basic Descartes and Plato's cave. I still don't see its relevance to a discussion of ontology, especially since the argument applies (for the most part) to both positions.
I'm not an anti-realist - I really do believe that the physical world exists, etc. On the other hand I don't believe that things like beauty, circles, and numbers exist as independent, abstract objects, so I'm not a Platonic realist. One consequence of this is that I believe that people invented ideals like "circle" and "ten" in order to describe or simplify things like plates and groups, rather than those ideals existing before people and "made" the physical world conform to them.
Exactly - we conform ourselves, including our concepts, to fit the universe. To say the universe conforms to a set of concepts is causally backward.
Well, of course not. This is pretty basic Phil 101 "all I know is that I know nothing" epistemology, and is irrelevant to our debate on ontology.
That's because you didn't understand it. Probably all my fault (I shouldn't do philosophy when I'm tired), but hopefully I've managed to communicate better this time.
Well, some parts are true by definition (like pure mathematics) and the rest are chosen to fit the real world like scientific theory (applied math and most of the rest). We shouldn't be any more surprised that math and logic work than science works, because we alter them or choose what to apply where in order to make it work. When you want to paint a house and you measure it, does nature specifically "make" the house and paint fit a "multiply to get the area" rule and an "add up the sides" rule? Or do you choose to multiply some numbers and add others because following that model gets you a useful answer, even though nature doesn't 'know' what "house", "paint", "add", or "area" means?
No, your statement is a perfectly valid description of a situation. I'm saying that nature doesn't conform to the sentence, you thought up that sentence to conform to a (possible) state of nature - i.e. the category "apple" only exists in you head.
I don't agree with Platonic realism and related philosophical positions, that's all. I see no connection to atheism, etc.
You're asking me to rewrite something without using one of the basic concepts people use to think about things. Are words human inventions? Can you rewrite your post without them?
First, "even the simplest prokaryotic cells" are hard-core veterans of the evolutionary process. The first living things almost certainly used slower and less efficient, but simpler, systems for absolutely everything. For example, DNA can be copied with only a polymerase and temperature cycling, so the fact that living things use a more complex system now doesn't mean that a stripped-down version is impossible. Also, early life didn't necessarily use DNA or proteins - RNA (and many xNAs) can both store information like DNA and react like proteins, so it's quite possible that life started off with a single molecule (or a single molecule and some "free helpers", like spontaneously forming lipids or minerals) and later added proteins (tougher and more flexible) and DNA (long-term storage).
1. Many xNAs form chains spontaneously and replicate when thermocycled. ...and can later add more parts via natural selection.
2. Some of those chains will have useful info that makes replication more likely or protects itself better...
3.
Partly true: ID is only supported by argument from ignorance - that's why it's so absurd.
Read first. Then tell me what's wrong with all of those ideas.
Which makes sense, they're invented by human beings.
Except that we chose geometrical and arithmetic axioms to fit what we saw in the word around us, we had to drop an axiom from geometry when nature didn't want to "follow" the rules we invented. Even the law of non-contradiction is described as a "law of thought" rather than something outside the mind - you shouldn't be surprised when nothing ends up being X and not-X when you defined the categories as having no members in common.
No, I'm not agreeing with you.
It's true that while arresting you the police can search you and your immediate surroundings and confiscate most of what they find - but this is a limited ability based on the compelling needs of safety and evidence preservation. They can't use the house keys they confiscated to search your house, open your safety deposit box, etc. without a warrant, because those searches aren't justified by either of those two compelling needs. The bit I quoted before is another example of a search that is not allowed as part of an arrest.
In this case the defense is arguing that because neither the need for safety nor the need to preserve evidence justified the use of the cell phone, any evidence collected as a result of that use should be thrown out, the same way it would be if they had used the key to his front door to find evidence in his house without a warrant to search the home.