Yes, I have been speaking in a way that confuses rights with desires. But that's not because I can't comprehend the difference between them. I'm "confusing" them becase I think one is the cause of the other. As a relativist, I say that rights are derived from desire. (See my previous posts on the matter.)
My take on the attitudes of the founding fathers comes from respecting them, too. I respect them for being less religious than their contemporaries, even though they only went as far as deism and not all the way into atheism, that was still a major step away from the prevailing attitude of the time. Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and the rest had some very negative things to say about religion.
I suspect that they are the same - but that's not because of wny proof on the matter - its because it's the simplest explanation given that the things we *can* prove keep showing up with the same properties and behaviors between people. This is much like the way I suspect God (at least all the ones I've heard described so far) are probably made-up human inventions. I don't have proof, but given what I can see, it's the simplest explanation.
The really sad thing about the Shakers is that they belived that when a child came to a couple, that this was evidence that they acted in accordance with God, and when a child didn't come to be, that this means God was being disapproving. So what happened must have been that the ones who were cheating on the "no sex" rule were the ones that publicly looked the most pious, and the ones following it were the ones that publicly looks the least pious since God wasn't blessing them with kids.
A disbelief is not a belief. It is the negation of a belief. Agnosticism is compatable with atheism. People have this misconception that there are three possilities that cannot overlap: theism, atheism, and agnosticism. That's not true. An agnostic simply thinks that he doesn't know if god exists or not. It is still possible to believe god exists while admitting that said belief is not knowlege, so an agnostic can still be theistic. It is also possible to refuse to believe god exists while admitting that it is not certain knowlege that there cannot be a god. One can be both an atheist and an agnostic. I am both.
History (when done right and not done to push an agenda) is a soft science as far as I'm concerned, just like psychology or economics. George Washington existing is as likely as Autism or Schitzophrenia existing.
Apple no longer finds it necessary to block all shell access to get developers to design GUIs for all their functions. It's certainly understandable that doing so was useful in the early days of the Macintosh, to shift developers' paradigms from command-line programs.
The problem is that it also shifted developers away from the Mac altogether. By taking on the philosophy that NOBODY should use a CLI, they scared off everyone that did want one. Your post even contains a piece of this philosophy in it, in the way it is phrased - you speak of the CLI as if it is the additional extra thing. While it might look that way from the standpoint of a longtime GUI-only user, that's not an accurate description of the archetecture at all. The CLI is more core than the GUI, becuase even systems with a GUI-only mentality still have command-line args in the form of argv and argc for their programs.
The result is negligable, but not for the reason you gave. In fact, it's just the opposite. It's negligable *despite* the reason you gave. If you move mass further away from the center of the earth, that is precisely what *WOULD* slow the earth down. What makes it negligable is that (A) it's not enough mass to matter much, and not enough distance to matter much, and (B) New York is on the coast, right at sea level, whereas the material being mined for metal and concrete typically is coming out of higher ground, from hillsides. So it really isn't coming from a point closer to the earth than the skyscraper. It's more or less moving laterally - material from a mine somewhere upstate that is 600 feet above sea level getting moved to a building that is 600 feet off the sea-level ground of Manhattan.
When a figure skater doing a spin pulls her arms in toward herself to speed up, her mass is the same also, but it still works. This is the same principle.
Linear momentum depends just on the mass. Angular momentum depends both on the mass and on the radius of that mass.
The total heat energy reaching earth is not dependant on the rotation at all. (The effects you mention cancel out). What is dependant on the rotation, however, is certain lifeforms that have adapted to the current day-night cycle. A slower day means a larger difference between the high temperature in the day and the low temperature at night, making the weather more chaotic. A faster day actually ends up smoothing the temperature off more, making the weather more dull.
Like hell! USA contributes 0.1% of income to foreign aid. ? The government - yes. the individuals - no. Next time try reading the preceeding posts first. If you add the private donations of citizens within countries to the government donations made by those countries, then the US is not stingy in the slightest. It ends up outdoing all the European countries, for example.
If you aren't close to the relief efforts, then you have no idea what needs are already fufilled and which are not. Giving money is more useful because it lets the relief agaencies portion it out to what is needed, as opposed to, for example, getting 10,000 water purifiers and 1,000 generators when what they needed was 10,000 generators and 1,000 water purifiers (made up exmaple).
TV resolution is only discrete in the vertical dimension. In the horizontal direction, it's analog. There are a discrete number of scan lines, but each scan line is reproducing a fuzzy continuous pattern from an analog signal. So "640x480" is a bit of a misnomer (unless you're talking about a digital TV - but I assumed you weren't because of the "30 year old color film" remark). This makes a huge difference. It ends up meaning that the horizontal resolution is much nicer and blends together well.
Your tirade doesn't shoot down the poster's point. It confirms it. If CLI's are such an inhospitable thing, why go back to them? The decision to use UNIX as a base for Apple's new OS is kind of proof that command-lines don't kill an OS as badly as the Apple zealots used to claim it did. The argument used to be that if the gui is built on top of a system that has a cli underneath, then it must be sucky because it isn't possible to havea good gui unless you abandon the cli. Thankfully that argument has been given the death it richly deserves, and it's ironic that it took Apple itself to prove to it's own zealots how full of crap they were with that argument.
Did Xerox really invent the GUI? W, the precursor to X11, existed pre-Macintosh as well (But I don't know how W and Xerox PARC's gui compare, date-wise.)
Almost. It's not that other things can't be true, but that if they are, we'll never really be able to know that they're true. The scientific method is the most reliable means we have to sift truth from falsehood (and even it's not perfect). Things that don't fall under it are not necessarily all false. It's just taht they're all unknown.
They completely ignore the fact that falsifiability is a strength of scientific theory.
True - the difference between scientific unproven theories (which all of them are, technically) and religious unproven theories (which all all of them are, technically) is that the scientific ones have falsifiability - there is at least one known way that could have proven then wrong if they were, and it hasn't been able to do it so far. There is a wide gulf of difference between "failed to prove it wrong because there's no way to even theoretically try to prove it wrong" (religious theories) versus "failed to prove it wrong despite many tries that theoretically might have worked." (scientific theories) Neither amounts to proof - but the second one is a close approximation to proof (as the number of attempts and methods to disprove it approaches infinity, the theory approaches being proven true.) Whereas the first type isn't even a slight tiny step toward proof, and as the number of trials approaches infinity, the theory doesn't move one iota closer to being proven true because it was never falsifiable in the first place.
Our brains or eyes could very well have seen red as green, etc.
Not really. The words "red" and "green" got invented after our brains started getting perceptions of them. Therefore they are an arbitrary mapping in the first place. In other words, I really don't even know if what I experience as "red" matches what you do NOW. All I know is that since birth both of us were taught to match a sensation to a word "red", and that this sensation is triggered by the same exact stimuli. What we don't know is what is going on in each other's heads when our eyes are subjected to these similar stimuli. We might be labelling different sensations with the same word, but in a totally consistent fashion so we can't tell. All I really know is "When your eyes are subjected to light that has a strongest amplitude within this general frequency range, whatever mental reaction you get to that is something you have learned to call 'red', and when my eyes are subjected to the same type of light, I have also learned to call my mental reaction 'red'. But I don't know if yours and mine are the same mental reaction, and there's no way I could ever tell."
The word "unalienable" and "God" are inseparable in that context, and they understood that.
Keep in mind that these were the same people who would have called a lightning strike an "act of God", until Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod and proved that lightning could be redirected away from a building, which pretty much killed the idea that god was directing it. They lived in a day and age in which saying something is granted by God was synonymous with saying it is part of nature. The only reason they didn't say "granted by nature" is because at the time it would have meant the exact same thing to them. The necessary belief in God in order for rights to be considered unalienable and innate. Can you provide some proof that such is not the case, and that you can base unalienable rights on a purely faithless (in the sense of being ethics-relative) basis?
No, I cannot. But I believe that the only difference between me and you in that regard is that I am willing to admit it to myself. The closest I can get to saying those rights are "innate" is in the fact that it's the kind of world most people would want to live in. It's "innate" in the same way that wanting to eat food is "innate". Desire to have those rights is an emotional drive we all seem to share.
(By the way, your statement contains the parenthetical implication that faithless equals ethics-relative. That's not necessarily true. I happen to be both, but there exist others who are not.)
I'll just make the argument that sensory experience can't really make that leap into confirmation of external reality.
Not by itself, no - but in conjunction with Occam's Razor it can. I observe a world that appears to exist outside myself and behave independantly of my observations. While I technically cannot observe what is happening when I'm not observing, I can notice how if I leave the room and come back that things behave as if they occurred without my observation being necessary. If I meet a newborn baby when visiting relatives, and then return five years later to visit again, the newborn is now a five-year old child, seeming to indicate that things occurred without my observance being necessary. If I leave out a bowl of ice cream and forget about it, then several hours later when I notice it again is now melted - giving the appearance that things occur when I'm not observing them. By Occam's Razor, the hypothesis I go with is the one that assumes an objective reality does in fact exist and does in fact act independantly of myself - because while that might seems like adding an unnecessary extra entity, which Occam's Razor says is a no-no, the alternative is to make my subconsious unnecessarily infinitely more complex and able to keep track of the entirety of the universe I have experienced so far, and update it appropriately when I look at it again. This is also a no-no by Occam's Razor, and it's a bigger no-no.
The assumption that the universe outside myself exists is the assumption that fits all the facts with the least complication.
That would only be a problem if I disagreed with the original poster. I actually agree with the original and disagree with you, so this doesn't present a problem for me.
Hell, even the Vatican (arguably the institution with the greatest vested interest in literal biblical interpretation) doesn't accept creationism anymore.
A literal interpretation is at odds with the concept of raising people to sainthood, or of having a pontiff at all in the first place, or of having ancient relic iconography. I don't think the Vatican has the greatest vested interest in literal biblical interpretation.
It says he exists outside time. It also says he created the universe in 6 days. So which part was lying then? Or are you going to engage in some fun mental gymnastics to reconcile this?
The point of that passage, from the Bible, isn't to say the world was created in six thousand years, as many people might argue.
That's not where the 6,000 year figure comes from. The 6,000 year figure comes from following the "Foo begat Bar begat Baz" chain all the way from Adam and Eve to a known point in history and counting how long that would be (ballpark figure) based on the length of time between generations.
It's based on the assumption that the begat chain is unbroken and has no gaps in it (i.e. that every "begat" is a one-generation (father/son) link and does not represent an indirect generation jump (grandfather begat son). Therefore if you count the begats you would know the number of generations that passed.
Of course, the whole theory is messed up when you throw in the fact that there is precedent in the Bible for some people to live absurdly long lifespans, so you can't assume much from the number of generations. It's not even an internally self-consistent theory within the Bible itself, and yet there are people convinced of it. (Not surprising, since if you take the Bible as TRUTH, you have to already be in the practice of reconciling incompatable internal inconsitencies in order to go through the mental gymnastics to make it work.)
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Yes, I have been speaking in a way that confuses rights with desires. But that's not because I can't comprehend the difference between them. I'm "confusing" them becase I think one is the cause of the other. As a relativist, I say that rights are derived from desire. (See my previous posts on the matter.)
My take on the attitudes of the founding fathers comes from respecting them, too. I respect them for being less religious than their contemporaries, even though they only went as far as deism and not all the way into atheism, that was still a major step away from the prevailing attitude of the time. Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and the rest had some very negative things to say about religion.
I suspect that they are the same - but that's not because of wny proof on the matter - its because it's the simplest explanation given that the things we *can* prove keep showing up with the same properties and behaviors between people. This is much like the way I suspect God (at least all the ones I've heard described so far) are probably made-up human inventions. I don't have proof, but given what I can see, it's the simplest explanation.
And how do you handle the problem of qualia?
I don't remember ever seeing the word "qualia" before. You'll have to elaborate.
The really sad thing about the Shakers is that they belived that when a child came to a couple, that this was evidence that they acted in accordance with God, and when a child didn't come to be, that this means God was being disapproving. So what happened must have been that the ones who were cheating on the "no sex" rule were the ones that publicly looked the most pious, and the ones following it were the ones that publicly looks the least pious since God wasn't blessing them with kids.
A disbelief is not a belief. It is the negation of a belief. Agnosticism is compatable with atheism. People have this misconception that there are three possilities that cannot overlap: theism, atheism, and agnosticism. That's not true. An agnostic simply thinks that he doesn't know if god exists or not. It is still possible to believe god exists while admitting that said belief is not knowlege, so an agnostic can still be theistic. It is also possible to refuse to believe god exists while admitting that it is not certain knowlege that there cannot be a god. One can be both an atheist and an agnostic. I am both.
History (when done right and not done to push an agenda) is a soft science as far as I'm concerned, just like psychology or economics. George Washington existing is as likely as Autism or Schitzophrenia existing.
Apple no longer finds it necessary to block all shell access to get developers to design GUIs for all their functions. It's certainly understandable that doing so was useful in the early days of the Macintosh, to shift developers' paradigms from command-line programs.
The problem is that it also shifted developers away from the Mac altogether. By taking on the philosophy that NOBODY should use a CLI, they scared off everyone that did want one. Your post even contains a piece of this philosophy in it, in the way it is phrased - you speak of the CLI as if it is the additional extra thing. While it might look that way from the standpoint of a longtime GUI-only user, that's not an accurate description of the archetecture at all. The CLI is more core than the GUI, becuase even systems with a GUI-only mentality still have command-line args in the form of argv and argc for their programs.
The result is negligable, but not for the reason you gave. In fact, it's just the opposite. It's negligable *despite* the reason you gave. If you move mass further away from the center of the earth, that is precisely what *WOULD* slow the earth down. What makes it negligable is that (A) it's not enough mass to matter much, and not enough distance to matter much, and (B) New York is on the coast, right at sea level, whereas the material being mined for metal and concrete typically is coming out of higher ground, from hillsides. So it really isn't coming from a point closer to the earth than the skyscraper. It's more or less moving laterally - material from a mine somewhere upstate that is 600 feet above sea level getting moved to a building that is 600 feet off the sea-level ground of Manhattan.
Isn't the mass of earth still the same?
When a figure skater doing a spin pulls her arms in toward herself to speed up, her mass is the same also, but it still works. This is the same principle.
Linear momentum depends just on the mass. Angular momentum depends both on the mass and on the radius of that mass.
The total heat energy reaching earth is not dependant on the rotation at all. (The effects you mention cancel out). What is dependant on the rotation, however, is certain lifeforms that have adapted to the current day-night cycle. A slower day means a larger difference between the high temperature in the day and the low temperature at night, making the weather more chaotic. A faster day actually ends up smoothing the temperature off more, making the weather more dull.
Don't you love how Americans have to TELL everybody how much they donated. Felling a little bit of guilt there, eh?
Yeah, how dare us for correcting a fucking liar. When someone lies about us we're supposed to say nothing.
Like hell! USA contributes 0.1% of income to foreign aid.
?
The government - yes. the individuals - no. Next time try reading the preceeding posts first. If you add the private donations of citizens within countries to the government donations made by those countries, then the US is not stingy in the slightest. It ends up outdoing all the European countries, for example.
If you aren't close to the relief efforts, then you have no idea what needs are already fufilled and which are not. Giving money is more useful because it lets the relief agaencies portion it out to what is needed, as opposed to, for example, getting 10,000 water purifiers and 1,000 generators when what they needed was 10,000 generators and 1,000 water purifiers (made up exmaple).
TV resolution is only discrete in the vertical dimension. In the horizontal direction, it's analog. There are a discrete number of scan lines, but each scan line is reproducing a fuzzy continuous pattern from an analog signal. So "640x480" is a bit of a misnomer (unless you're talking about a digital TV - but I assumed you weren't because of the "30 year old color film" remark). This makes a huge difference. It ends up meaning that the horizontal resolution is much nicer and blends together well.
Your tirade doesn't shoot down the poster's point. It confirms it. If CLI's are such an inhospitable thing, why go back to them? The decision to use UNIX as a base for Apple's new OS is kind of proof that command-lines don't kill an OS as badly as the Apple zealots used to claim it did. The argument used to be that if the gui is built on top of a system that has a cli underneath, then it must be sucky because it isn't possible to havea good gui unless you abandon the cli. Thankfully that argument has been given the death it richly deserves, and it's ironic that it took Apple itself to prove to it's own zealots how full of crap they were with that argument.
Did Xerox really invent the GUI? W, the precursor to X11, existed pre-Macintosh as well (But I don't know how W and Xerox PARC's gui compare, date-wise.)
Almost. It's not that other things can't be true, but that if they are, we'll never really be able to know that they're true. The scientific method is the most reliable means we have to sift truth from falsehood (and even it's not perfect). Things that don't fall under it are not necessarily all false. It's just taht they're all unknown.
They completely ignore the fact that falsifiability is a strength of scientific theory.
True - the difference between scientific unproven theories (which all of them are, technically) and religious unproven theories (which all all of them are, technically) is that the scientific ones have falsifiability - there is at least one known way that could have proven then wrong if they were, and it hasn't been able to do it so far. There is a wide gulf of difference between "failed to prove it wrong because there's no way to even theoretically try to prove it wrong" (religious theories) versus "failed to prove it wrong despite many tries that theoretically might have worked." (scientific theories) Neither amounts to proof - but the second one is a close approximation to proof (as the number of attempts and methods to disprove it approaches infinity, the theory approaches being proven true.) Whereas the first type isn't even a slight tiny step toward proof, and as the number of trials approaches infinity, the theory doesn't move one iota closer to being proven true because it was never falsifiable in the first place.
Our brains or eyes could very well have seen red as green, etc.
Not really. The words "red" and "green" got invented after our brains started getting perceptions of them. Therefore they are an arbitrary mapping in the first place. In other words, I really don't even know if what I experience as "red" matches what you do NOW. All I know is that since birth both of us were taught to match a sensation to a word "red", and that this sensation is triggered by the same exact stimuli. What we don't know is what is going on in each other's heads when our eyes are subjected to these similar stimuli. We might be labelling different sensations with the same word, but in a totally consistent fashion so we can't tell. All I really know is "When your eyes are subjected to light that has a strongest amplitude within this general frequency range, whatever mental reaction you get to that is something you have learned to call 'red', and when my eyes are subjected to the same type of light, I have also learned to call my mental reaction 'red'. But I don't know if yours and mine are the same mental reaction, and there's no way I could ever tell."
The word "unalienable" and "God" are inseparable in that context, and they understood that.
Keep in mind that these were the same people who would have called a lightning strike an "act of God", until Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod and proved that lightning could be redirected away from a building, which pretty much killed the idea that god was directing it. They lived in a day and age in which saying something is granted by God was synonymous with saying it is part of nature. The only reason they didn't say "granted by nature" is because at the time it would have meant the exact same thing to them.
The necessary belief in God in order for rights to be considered unalienable and innate. Can you provide some proof that such is not the case, and that you can base unalienable rights on a purely faithless (in the sense of being ethics-relative) basis?
No, I cannot. But I believe that the only difference between me and you in that regard is that I am willing to admit it to myself. The closest I can get to saying those rights are "innate" is in the fact that it's the kind of world most people would want to live in. It's "innate" in the same way that wanting to eat food is "innate". Desire to have those rights is an emotional drive we all seem to share.
(By the way, your statement contains the parenthetical implication that faithless equals ethics-relative. That's not necessarily true. I happen to be both, but there exist others who are not.)
I'll just make the argument that sensory experience can't really make that leap into confirmation of external reality.
Not by itself, no - but in conjunction with Occam's Razor it can. I observe a world that appears to exist outside myself and behave independantly of my observations. While I technically cannot observe what is happening when I'm not observing, I can notice how if I leave the room and come back that things behave as if they occurred without my observation being necessary. If I meet a newborn baby when visiting relatives, and then return five years later to visit again, the newborn is now a five-year old child, seeming to indicate that things occurred without my observance being necessary. If I leave out a bowl of ice cream and forget about it, then several hours later when I notice it again is now melted - giving the appearance that things occur when I'm not observing them. By Occam's Razor, the hypothesis I go with is the one that assumes an objective reality does in fact exist and does in fact act independantly of myself - because while that might seems like adding an unnecessary extra entity, which Occam's Razor says is a no-no, the alternative is to make my subconsious unnecessarily infinitely more complex and able to keep track of the entirety of the universe I have experienced so far, and update it appropriately when I look at it again. This is also a no-no by Occam's Razor, and it's a bigger no-no.
The assumption that the universe outside myself exists is the assumption that fits all the facts with the least complication.
That would only be a problem if I disagreed with the original poster. I actually agree with the original and disagree with you, so this doesn't present a problem for me.
Hell, even the Vatican (arguably the institution with the greatest vested interest in literal biblical interpretation) doesn't accept creationism anymore.
A literal interpretation is at odds with the concept of raising people to sainthood, or of having a pontiff at all in the first place, or of having ancient relic iconography. I don't think the Vatican has the greatest vested interest in literal biblical interpretation.
It says he exists outside time. It also says he created the universe in 6 days. So which part was lying then? Or are you going to engage in some fun mental gymnastics to reconcile this?
The point of that passage, from the Bible, isn't to say the world was created in six thousand years, as many people might argue.
That's not where the 6,000 year figure comes from. The 6,000 year figure comes from following the "Foo begat Bar begat Baz" chain all the way from Adam and Eve to a known point in history and counting how long that would be (ballpark figure) based on the length of time between generations.
It's based on the assumption that the begat chain is unbroken and has no gaps in it (i.e. that every "begat" is a one-generation (father/son) link and does not represent an indirect generation jump (grandfather begat son). Therefore if you count the begats you would know the number of generations that passed.
Of course, the whole theory is messed up when you throw in the fact that there is precedent in the Bible for some people to live absurdly long lifespans, so you can't assume much from the number of generations. It's not even an internally self-consistent theory within the Bible itself, and yet there are people convinced of it. (Not surprising, since if you take the Bible as TRUTH, you have to already be in the practice of reconciling incompatable internal inconsitencies in order to go through the mental gymnastics to make it work.)
Pascal's Wager - been there, done that - It's a pile of crap.