True enough, and that is quite a shame. However, I hate the idea that I need to store things on someone else's server (and therefore lose control of it) in order to have access to it over the internet. Along with everything else, a good, easy to set up, home server might start showing people why ISPs closing off ports is a bad thing. As it is, I think ISPs get away with it because most of their customers have no idea it's happening, and wouldn't know how to set up their own web server if they had port 80 open.
Any advice for a simple/small case? Not rackmount, since I certainly don't have room for a rack. I want something I can stick anywhere in my small 1 br (hence the "small like Mac mini" requirement).
Anyway, part of my point was that if someone would provide these sorts of boxes with Debian pre-installed (maybe with a basic web interface pre-installed as well), they'd probably have at least one customer right here.
I personally am not stirred by this as I have a set of linux servers set up to do the same functionality with much more speed and efficiency, but I can see this as a neat black-box turn-key solution for someone who can't deal with that level of complexity but can deal with a straight-forward UI.
Well I'm kind of jazzed about the idea, even if not the implementation. The reason is this: I don't have the money or space for a set of Linux servers. I've been expecting for some time that someone would start making "home servers", and I think there's potential in the idea. For my home use, I've been looking for a set of devices provide these features:
a web server
E-mail (SMTP, IMAP) server
DNS server
a file server (SMB, AFP) for internal (with a big hard drive)
ssh access
complete headless setup and configuration
very small (Mac mini sized or smaller)
maybe a print server
wireless access point
maybe VPN from the outside, or site-to-site tunnels
some means to back the whole thing up (easily)
Now, I know, i could get a wireless router and an ultra small form-factor computer, install linux, and set it all up. Honestly, that's what I'd like to do anyway. At the same time, it seems like such a waste-- to buy a computer with an audio card I'll never use, and more processing power than I need for any of these tasks. Plus, the video subsystems, keyboard, mouse, CDROM drive, etc. will only get used for the initial install, and I might have to buy or borrow a monitor, because I don't know how to do a completely headless linux install and I don't own a monitor.
Ok, so that's a whole lot of information that's particular to me, and I know there are plenty of ways to get what I need, but not an optimal way, without a lot of extra (wasted) money and parts. Or at least none that I know of (feel free to make suggestions). And I kind of doubt I'm alone in this.
Something that could be disproven clearly must be false (since you can't validly disprove something which is actually true). Something that could not be proven or disproven, even in principle, is meaningless, for it apparently has no effect on anything at all which we could check to see if it's true or not. Which just leaves things that *could be* proven as the truth. (Where "proof" here includes simple empirical demonstration).
And what of the things that are just know, i.e. your "logic". Neither proven nor provable, nor able to be disproven. Meaningless?
I know when I'm afraid because my heartbeat gets fast and shallow, my hairs stand on end and I get a little numb, and various muscles in my body tense up.
Really, is that how it happens? You're sitting, thinking your calm, and you heartbeat gets fast, you notice hairs standing up, and you go, "Oh, wow, I think I'm afraid. How interesting. I wouldn't have noticed if not for the hairs standing up and the racing pulse." Or do you just feel fear? Isn't fear its own feeling, independant of any of the physical phenomena which might accompany it? Could you be afraid without hairs standing up, for example? Without your heart beating faster? So what is it that truly demonstrates to you that you're afraid?
Also, do you need to prove that you're afraid, and can you prove that you're not, or do you simply know?
It seems to me that Socrates wasn't trying to piss people off - he just wound up stumping people, which has a tendency to piss people off. But making them angry wasn't a part of his plan, and seems to me that that kind of approach is completely antithetical to his methods. Emotional manipulation like that is something a Sophist would pull. Not Socrates.
Like I said, you have to know how to read Plato before they'll mean much. Socrates is sometimes very friendly, and sometimes very sarcastic, adversarial, and aggressive. You shouldn't trust Socrates in Platonic dialogs any more than you should trust Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. He doesn't mean what he says.
I don't mean to be condescending, but you see what's happening? You're trying to explain something to me as though you have all the answers and I don't, and I'm trying to explain something to you as though you're the student. Your sense that I'm being condescending comes from the fact that you believe that you know more and that I have no right to play the part of the teacher, which is equally condescending. Maybe in this fact we are equals.
I'd like to suggest that you be more ready to play the student, since that's when you're more likely to learn something. When you assume that you know more than the person with whom you're speaking, it only leaves you open to lecturing. However, what I just wrote will probably seem condescending.
My particular desire to end the conversation is because I don't think it's going anywhere. Too many meaningless word-games. Redefining "logic" to mean something that nobody means when they say "logic", and then still using it in the old/common sense when it's convenient-- it doesn't leave anywhere to go. I guess I could play Socrates and try to be aggravating, or I could just agree with everything you say all the time, or I could keep lecturing back at you. The only one that might work is to be aggravating, but like I said, it's not always fun. So... I think it's time we called it quits and moved on.
As someone raised Roman Catholic, I can only tell you that for me personally, if you accidently misspelled "Pope" as "Poop", I would think it was funny and not be offended at all. Especially if I didn't think it was done intentionally, but maybe even if you meant to be offensive.
They're still separate organizations, so a company adopting RHEL isn't as much a win for Ubuntu as that company adopting Ubuntu. However, it's a bigger win for Ubuntu than if that company uses Windows.
It's not just about the upstream (though certainly that matters), but a company adopting RHEL will develop greater Linux expertise, and therefore feel more comfortable using Linux in the future. That company will gain from open standards/formats, which will make it easier to bring more Linux machines onto the network without worrying about interoperability with Windows. These additionaly Linux machines may still be RHEL, but maybe not. Either way, it's opened a door to Ubuntu a little wider than it would be opened otherwise.
Well, again, i think we differ on how we can talk about this. I'm not sure the degree to which we actually disagree. I'd be tempted to ask (hypothetically) what you would do if you felt compelled to believe something that could not be systematized into a logical/scientific framework? Where would your loyalty lie, towards truth or logic? It sounds, however, that you're inclined to say that the truth that couldn't be systematized would still be "logic", which I don't follow.
"I'm afraid", for example, seems to be a statement that is neither logical nor illogical.
So your God is either some thing in the universe, in which case they could be many different "gods" but not in the ultimate, upper-case sense we usually mean in the modern West; or, God is just the whole of the universe.
I think "God" is too big a topic to tackle before we have "being" and "knowledge" straight (or unless it comes up through other means). And I don't remember claiming to have a "God", but maybe your remembering a past conversation (I think we must have gotten into something on/. before).
I think you're right, though, to recognize that talk of "God" is often confused and misunderstood, and it's important to know what a person means, not just what they say.
I also think you're onto something if you're trying to bind understanding to action. I wrote a quick paper a long time ago trying to modify Kant's critique, and denying the possibility of knowledge/understanding/experience without action which changes your world-- as in an object of knowledge cannot be known by man without a final cause, which means that man's interaction with a changing world is necessary for understanding.
I'm not too interested in getting into a Socratic dialectic, though-- it requires too much, if you know what I mean. If I'm going to play the part of Socrates, for example, then I'd have to get you angry, which is too hard to do over the internet-- and not always fun.
In general, this last post makes me think that there are a lot of linguistic problems in our discussion. I don't think you're using "logic" in any way that I've ever heard someone use it. It seems like your "logic" has nothing to do with the whole, "If P then Q" sense of 'logic' (which is generally what I expect someone to mean by the word). I've never read/met anyone involved in philosophy, for example, who would be willing to say that Kantian intuition is part of logic, but rather people might say that logic and mathematics are based on temporal/spacial intuition.
However, if "logic" is a short-hand for things which are known, certain, etc.-- then it doesn't have the relation to science that you imply elsewhere. I'm not sure how to proceed since I'm not sure how to judge your meaning. Maybe you mean something different from "science" too?
However, I'd agree that "truth" is necessarily bound up in intuition and sense (which I guess seems to be where you're going), but it's also bound to things like feeling and emotion. Those things are sometimes equally undeniable. Aristotle (who for many purposes should be considered the father of what people generally call "logic") said that logic itself was only to be believed because it elicited a feeling that it could not be denied (which is not to say that it was the only thing that could not be denied), and so other feelings which are also undeniable has equal share of truth. Sometimes these truths are, however, what most people would call "illogical". Hell, sometimes those truths are downright crazy, and still manage to be true.
It'd take us a lot more discussion, I think, before we'd get very far in this, but the great failing of many philosophers (especially modern, post-"scientific method" philosophy) is an unwillingness to talk about anything that cannot be driven through a mathmatical proof of some kind. For a fun time (depends on your idea of fun), read Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, Descartes Mediations on First Philosophy, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and then Heidegger's Being and Time (in that order). I wish I could be kind and choose some selections for you, but I don't have the time. If you manage to get through all that, go back and read some Plato and Aristotle, and the Plato and Aristotle will change your way of thinking about things. It's really a bit of witchcraft there. But it probably won't happen until after you've finished the Hume>Descartes>Kant>Heidegger progression. (or have you done that all already?)
I feel like there's something else I should respond to, though:
Because it's possible to not have faith in something, therefore just the fact that you have faith in something doesn't make it true.
Are there perhaps things that it is impossible to not have faith in? The same way a person might deny the truth of a math proof because they don't understand it, might someone deny the truth of an assertion of faith because they don't understand it?
I know they work because they say they work and I'm unable to conceive of them possibly not working. I know logic works because it would be illogical for it not to.
Is it the same to say, "I know faith works because it would be faithless for it not to"? What's the difference between that and what you said? See, there's not even a logical problem in saying, "It would be illogical for logic to fail to 'work', but it doesn't work." You see, because if it doesn't 'work', then there's no logical problem in truth being "illogical".
Yet still, if we ever were to figure out how to dig deeper than that, then *that* would be a better place to lay our foundation.
Exactly. And you can dig deeper than empiricism. There's lots of philosophical writing on this. If you want something explicit, though overly-simplistic, check out Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Whole big chuncks are about why empiricism fails us. There are better works on the subject, but they're generally less straight-forward. Plato's Theatetus, for example, is a great piece on the foundation of knowledge, but you have to know how to read Plato if you want to get anywhere.
There must be a piece of ground that is more firm than what you're trying to build on, because you've already reached a level of certainty that you cannot possibly reach from "logic" and "science". In other words, there's something else you're relying on that you haven't realized you're relying on.
Truth cannot simply be "that which is proven", and really you already know that. If it were only "proven things", then what's the classification of the "true" things before they have been proven? Did they become true with the proof? And what of the things which you believe are proven, and then you realize later that there's a flaw in your "proof". Were those things true before you found the flaw?
It's certain that mankind (or some other thinking/aware thing) is necessary in order for true statements to be made, but it's also undoubtable that the truth is not dependant on the whim (or knowledge) of mankind. It's far more complicated than the definition you've laid out, yet none of this knowledge is given by logic-- any ability to engage in speach/logic (logos) is dependant on already having this knowledge.
What solution is that?
Before I could ever hope to tell you what it is, you have to first understand what it's not. Knowledge can't be passed on until you've hit the critical moment of confusion.
The problem you're describing just leads to the regress argument. How do you justify what it is you used to justify the use of logic and senses? And then how do you justify THAT? It leads to either an infinite regress, the declaration of some thing as unquestionably foundational, or circular self-supporting coherentism.
Well, exactly, it either leads to infinite regression, which leads to the volatilization of all truth and knowledge, or declaration of something as unquestionable. Obviously, something must be unquestionable if you ever want to claim hold of anything as "true", however, you cannot declare that thing to be unquestionable by virtue of scientific reasoning. It must be something that is unquestionable because you know it through a faculty that is both immediate and unquestionable.
The alternative? You have to accept that you have no grounding for knowledge. You don't even have a grounding for an approximation of uncertain knowledge. You just have no grounding whatsoever, to the degree that you cannot even claim to lack grounding, because you need some grounds on which to base that claim. You don't really want to be there.
And again, the scientific method has this embedded in itself, with the notion that you can never prove (completely justify) a theory, but rather just disprove or fail to disprove a theory. Theories that hold up well to criticism are used and considered "true", or at least "truer" than less resilient theories. The reliance on senses and logic as an epistemological theory is no different.
Even if all that were possible, it still leaves you with no knowledge. None. Whatsoever. Any given statement only falls into "disproven" or "yet to be disproven", but never "true". And that's after you've already assumed true (on faith, if not knowledge, and you're saying you can't have knowledge) that cynicism is the road to truth. Yet this cynicism never gets you to truth.
That's not an epistemological theory. It's a paradox that, if we assume it to be good, demonstrates that no knowledge is possible. In that case, "creationism" has no less a claim to truth than "science", since nothing can be known, and neither will be disproven. Why insist on all that when clearly there's a better solution?
And I'm saying that science - as in the methodology of science, not any particular body of scientific theories - is identical with those "other" ways of knowledge. The only things I can't doubt are logic and my senses, so they are the foundation of all certainty and thus knowledge.
What is it that tells you that you can't doubt logic and your senses? It's not logic and it's not your senses, but it's some other-- I don't know what you want to call it: feeling, instinct, or maybe intuition-- it's something else, some other form of knowledge, that allows you to know that you must follow logic, senses, and experience in order to understand truth, and further that understanding of truth is a goal.
So there's a form of knowledge/understanding first, which tells you that there are rules of understanding, and things that make sense and things that don't. Without this form of knowledge, you wouldn't be able to know whether logic and senses were trustworthy, or be able to decide that even if they aren't, they're the best thing you have going.
Think about it: how do you know they're the best thing going? How do you know what logic/senses are, or whether there aren't more trustworthy "feelings" that knowledge ought to be based on? I'm not doubting that logic/senses are best, but asking, "what kind of knowledge is that?"
It isn't logical, and it's not something sensed through your 5 senses. It's something... else. You might call it a conviction or a belief, a feeling or a form of faith, or whatever you else you might like, but this is certain: it doesn't come through logic or sense, and it's necessary before scientific thought (or logic or senses) can take form.
There's some good thoughts in there, but my issue was really with this:
To justify a belief in a theory of epistemology would require that you already take some epistemological theory for granted. Which is why I don't try to justify any theory of epistemology but rather try to call into question all epistemological theories and see what holds up. Which is also why the answer to the second question is easy. I believe that empiricism is the correct theory of epistemology because I am unable to do otherwise, no matter how I might try.
My point here is that there is obviously another source of knowledge, not based on or derived from 'the scientific method', that you trust and believe well enough that your belief in the 'scientific method' is founded on it. It's a sort of knowledge that you know before you investigate, before you 'prove'-- you just know. You are unable to believe otherwise, "no matter how [you] might try."
This form of knowledge is better and more certain than that gained through 'science', because 'science' gains it's certainty though this knowledge, not the other way around.
I have a hard time thinking humans came from apes. I think we started as a primative human, but, not that far.
Ah... but you're thinking too small. The theory of evolution does not state that man evolved from apes, but that man evolved from the earliest forms of life. At one point in man's evolution, he was a one-celled organism. Later on, some form of reptile. Eventually, in the recent past, Man's ancestors were chimp-like creatures. Some people would still classify humans as belonging to the classification of "great apes", meaning we're still apes.
So, no, we were never gorillas or chimps, if that's what you mean by "ape".
Isn't that a bit loose? Obviously, the scientific method isn't a theory at all, it's just a method. You seem to have adopted an epistemological theory that knowledge can only be attained through this one particular method, which is obviously false. After all, what in our senses could have taught us to trust this method?
For that matter, it's worth mentioning that no method of attaining knowledge can show an epistemological theory of knowledge to be true, if that theory is that the method in question is the true measure of truth. The whole thing would be entirely circular, and therefore entirely meaningless. Belief in the scientific method is (and must) always be based on something other than the scientific method.
I've never really understood the idea of licensing software per CPU. It seems a bit crazy/arbitrary to me. Why not charge per DIMM or RAM, or per byte of L2 cache?
I wasn't talking about support or anything, just failure rate-- as in, "I bought this computer, and something flat-out broke." I've been working in IT (one way or another) for years, and all brands sell products which fail sometimes. In the range of the years I've been working, Packard Bell, Gateway, and Compaq all had high failure rates (this is all my personal experience). Dell, Sony, Apple have always been within the "acceptable" failure-rate range, Dell having probably the highest of those three, but their support helped keep them in "acceptable". IBM Thinkpads were considered "excellent".
However, these days, I don't trust Lenovo yet, and finding Windows much harder to support than OSX (I won't go into that here, but it's not because of any shortage of Windows knowledge on my part), I tend to lean towards Macintoshes whenever Windows isn't necessary. The price really isn't considerably higher, the support is good, and OSX is easier to deal with as an OS (for everything from trouble-shooting to imaging).
Well, you may have read about Apple portables and Dells, but I've purchased several of each. The failure rate is roughly the same, which is roughly the same, in my experience, as HP and Sony. That is to say, generally they're fine, sometimes you get a system with a glitch or two, and every once in a while you get a total lemon. I own a Macbook Pro, and there are no problems.
Other vendors have pleny of design flaws, especially when they make big hardware changes-- it just doesn't make news.
And the whole thing of Apple machines being expensive is largely a myth. Yeah, you can show me that those cheap Dell Dimensions are cheaper than the cheapest Mac, but those cheap Dells are terrible little crippled machines. Price out an Optiplex ultra-small form factor machine with similar specs to a Mac mini, and tell me whether you get it cheaper than a Mac mini. Last time i checked it out, as similar as you could make them, the mini was $100 less.
Compare the Mac Pro with a similarly configured Dell Precision. Compare the iMac with a small form-factor optiplex with a wide-screen 20" LCD. Macs aren't even more expensive, it's only that they're on-par with Dell's high-end line, not their cheap $300 computers.
Have you tried Vista, though? I wouldn't run that crap if it came pre-installed for free. In fact, it puts the "crap" in "cheap crap". (not the cheap, however)
Yeah, the low-end Dell Dimensions are cheap crap. Among other cheap crap, they're pretty high-quality cheap crap, but they still aren't nice computers. This as opposed to... I don't know... Gateway or E-Machines, which, last I checked, were low-quality cheap crap.
I wouldn't recommend the low-end Dimensions to anyone who could afford better, but I would recommend them to someone who couldn't afford better. Low-quality cheap crap, on the other hand, I wouldn't recommend to anyone under any circumstances, even if it's $25 less.
Apple is competitive on price-- the low-end just doesn't go as low. So Dell sells a $300 desktop, and Apple doesn't compete in that market. But you can't compete with Dell in that market, either, because they sell high-quality cheap crap in massive quantities, and they get as good prices as anyone. The only way to get a computer out the door for less than Dell is to sell low-quality cheap crap, and you'll probably still need to take some losses. The profit margins on those $250 Dells are just miniscule, and you can't under-cut that very much. So if you're waiting for a $100 Mac mini, you'll be waiting for a while.
People make a big deal about stealing other Unix features because, when other unixes impliment the feature, it's some obscure CLI think that only uber-geeks can get working in a practical manner. When OSX does it, there are fancy animations that make the common folk go "ooooh" and "aaaaaah".
Well, "not ready" could mean "still too expensive" or "uses too much power to stick in a laptop". Either way, I haven't seen a laptop yet with a 64-bit Intel processor.
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True enough, and that is quite a shame. However, I hate the idea that I need to store things on someone else's server (and therefore lose control of it) in order to have access to it over the internet. Along with everything else, a good, easy to set up, home server might start showing people why ISPs closing off ports is a bad thing. As it is, I think ISPs get away with it because most of their customers have no idea it's happening, and wouldn't know how to set up their own web server if they had port 80 open.
Any advice for a simple/small case? Not rackmount, since I certainly don't have room for a rack. I want something I can stick anywhere in my small 1 br (hence the "small like Mac mini" requirement).
Anyway, part of my point was that if someone would provide these sorts of boxes with Debian pre-installed (maybe with a basic web interface pre-installed as well), they'd probably have at least one customer right here.
I personally am not stirred by this as I have a set of linux servers set up to do the same functionality with much more speed and efficiency, but I can see this as a neat black-box turn-key solution for someone who can't deal with that level of complexity but can deal with a straight-forward UI.
Well I'm kind of jazzed about the idea, even if not the implementation. The reason is this: I don't have the money or space for a set of Linux servers. I've been expecting for some time that someone would start making "home servers", and I think there's potential in the idea. For my home use, I've been looking for a set of devices provide these features:
Now, I know, i could get a wireless router and an ultra small form-factor computer, install linux, and set it all up. Honestly, that's what I'd like to do anyway. At the same time, it seems like such a waste-- to buy a computer with an audio card I'll never use, and more processing power than I need for any of these tasks. Plus, the video subsystems, keyboard, mouse, CDROM drive, etc. will only get used for the initial install, and I might have to buy or borrow a monitor, because I don't know how to do a completely headless linux install and I don't own a monitor.
Ok, so that's a whole lot of information that's particular to me, and I know there are plenty of ways to get what I need, but not an optimal way, without a lot of extra (wasted) money and parts. Or at least none that I know of (feel free to make suggestions). And I kind of doubt I'm alone in this.
Something that could be disproven clearly must be false (since you can't validly disprove something which is actually true). Something that could not be proven or disproven, even in principle, is meaningless, for it apparently has no effect on anything at all which we could check to see if it's true or not. Which just leaves things that *could be* proven as the truth. (Where "proof" here includes simple empirical demonstration).
And what of the things that are just know, i.e. your "logic". Neither proven nor provable, nor able to be disproven. Meaningless?
I know when I'm afraid because my heartbeat gets fast and shallow, my hairs stand on end and I get a little numb, and various muscles in my body tense up.
Really, is that how it happens? You're sitting, thinking your calm, and you heartbeat gets fast, you notice hairs standing up, and you go, "Oh, wow, I think I'm afraid. How interesting. I wouldn't have noticed if not for the hairs standing up and the racing pulse." Or do you just feel fear? Isn't fear its own feeling, independant of any of the physical phenomena which might accompany it? Could you be afraid without hairs standing up, for example? Without your heart beating faster? So what is it that truly demonstrates to you that you're afraid?
Also, do you need to prove that you're afraid, and can you prove that you're not, or do you simply know?
It seems to me that Socrates wasn't trying to piss people off - he just wound up stumping people, which has a tendency to piss people off. But making them angry wasn't a part of his plan, and seems to me that that kind of approach is completely antithetical to his methods. Emotional manipulation like that is something a Sophist would pull. Not Socrates.
Like I said, you have to know how to read Plato before they'll mean much. Socrates is sometimes very friendly, and sometimes very sarcastic, adversarial, and aggressive. You shouldn't trust Socrates in Platonic dialogs any more than you should trust Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. He doesn't mean what he says.
I don't mean to be condescending, but you see what's happening? You're trying to explain something to me as though you have all the answers and I don't, and I'm trying to explain something to you as though you're the student. Your sense that I'm being condescending comes from the fact that you believe that you know more and that I have no right to play the part of the teacher, which is equally condescending. Maybe in this fact we are equals.
I'd like to suggest that you be more ready to play the student, since that's when you're more likely to learn something. When you assume that you know more than the person with whom you're speaking, it only leaves you open to lecturing. However, what I just wrote will probably seem condescending.
My particular desire to end the conversation is because I don't think it's going anywhere. Too many meaningless word-games. Redefining "logic" to mean something that nobody means when they say "logic", and then still using it in the old/common sense when it's convenient-- it doesn't leave anywhere to go. I guess I could play Socrates and try to be aggravating, or I could just agree with everything you say all the time, or I could keep lecturing back at you. The only one that might work is to be aggravating, but like I said, it's not always fun. So... I think it's time we called it quits and moved on.
As someone raised Roman Catholic, I can only tell you that for me personally, if you accidently misspelled "Pope" as "Poop", I would think it was funny and not be offended at all. Especially if I didn't think it was done intentionally, but maybe even if you meant to be offensive.
They're still separate organizations, so a company adopting RHEL isn't as much a win for Ubuntu as that company adopting Ubuntu. However, it's a bigger win for Ubuntu than if that company uses Windows.
It's not just about the upstream (though certainly that matters), but a company adopting RHEL will develop greater Linux expertise, and therefore feel more comfortable using Linux in the future. That company will gain from open standards/formats, which will make it easier to bring more Linux machines onto the network without worrying about interoperability with Windows. These additionaly Linux machines may still be RHEL, but maybe not. Either way, it's opened a door to Ubuntu a little wider than it would be opened otherwise.
Well, again, i think we differ on how we can talk about this. I'm not sure the degree to which we actually disagree. I'd be tempted to ask (hypothetically) what you would do if you felt compelled to believe something that could not be systematized into a logical/scientific framework? Where would your loyalty lie, towards truth or logic? It sounds, however, that you're inclined to say that the truth that couldn't be systematized would still be "logic", which I don't follow.
"I'm afraid", for example, seems to be a statement that is neither logical nor illogical.
So your God is either some thing in the universe, in which case they could be many different "gods" but not in the ultimate, upper-case sense we usually mean in the modern West; or, God is just the whole of the universe.
I think "God" is too big a topic to tackle before we have "being" and "knowledge" straight (or unless it comes up through other means). And I don't remember claiming to have a "God", but maybe your remembering a past conversation (I think we must have gotten into something on /. before).
I think you're right, though, to recognize that talk of "God" is often confused and misunderstood, and it's important to know what a person means, not just what they say.
I also think you're onto something if you're trying to bind understanding to action. I wrote a quick paper a long time ago trying to modify Kant's critique, and denying the possibility of knowledge/understanding/experience without action which changes your world-- as in an object of knowledge cannot be known by man without a final cause, which means that man's interaction with a changing world is necessary for understanding.
I'm not too interested in getting into a Socratic dialectic, though-- it requires too much, if you know what I mean. If I'm going to play the part of Socrates, for example, then I'd have to get you angry, which is too hard to do over the internet-- and not always fun.
It's been nice talking to you though.
In general, this last post makes me think that there are a lot of linguistic problems in our discussion. I don't think you're using "logic" in any way that I've ever heard someone use it. It seems like your "logic" has nothing to do with the whole, "If P then Q" sense of 'logic' (which is generally what I expect someone to mean by the word). I've never read/met anyone involved in philosophy, for example, who would be willing to say that Kantian intuition is part of logic, but rather people might say that logic and mathematics are based on temporal/spacial intuition.
However, if "logic" is a short-hand for things which are known, certain, etc.-- then it doesn't have the relation to science that you imply elsewhere. I'm not sure how to proceed since I'm not sure how to judge your meaning. Maybe you mean something different from "science" too?
However, I'd agree that "truth" is necessarily bound up in intuition and sense (which I guess seems to be where you're going), but it's also bound to things like feeling and emotion. Those things are sometimes equally undeniable. Aristotle (who for many purposes should be considered the father of what people generally call "logic") said that logic itself was only to be believed because it elicited a feeling that it could not be denied (which is not to say that it was the only thing that could not be denied), and so other feelings which are also undeniable has equal share of truth. Sometimes these truths are, however, what most people would call "illogical". Hell, sometimes those truths are downright crazy, and still manage to be true.
It'd take us a lot more discussion, I think, before we'd get very far in this, but the great failing of many philosophers (especially modern, post-"scientific method" philosophy) is an unwillingness to talk about anything that cannot be driven through a mathmatical proof of some kind. For a fun time (depends on your idea of fun), read Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, Descartes Mediations on First Philosophy, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and then Heidegger's Being and Time (in that order). I wish I could be kind and choose some selections for you, but I don't have the time. If you manage to get through all that, go back and read some Plato and Aristotle, and the Plato and Aristotle will change your way of thinking about things. It's really a bit of witchcraft there. But it probably won't happen until after you've finished the Hume>Descartes>Kant>Heidegger progression. (or have you done that all already?)
I feel like there's something else I should respond to, though:
Because it's possible to not have faith in something, therefore just the fact that you have faith in something doesn't make it true.
Are there perhaps things that it is impossible to not have faith in? The same way a person might deny the truth of a math proof because they don't understand it, might someone deny the truth of an assertion of faith because they don't understand it?
Or Dell laptops?
I know they work because they say they work and I'm unable to conceive of them possibly not working. I know logic works because it would be illogical for it not to.
Is it the same to say, "I know faith works because it would be faithless for it not to"? What's the difference between that and what you said? See, there's not even a logical problem in saying, "It would be illogical for logic to fail to 'work', but it doesn't work." You see, because if it doesn't 'work', then there's no logical problem in truth being "illogical".
Yet still, if we ever were to figure out how to dig deeper than that, then *that* would be a better place to lay our foundation.
Exactly. And you can dig deeper than empiricism. There's lots of philosophical writing on this. If you want something explicit, though overly-simplistic, check out Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Whole big chuncks are about why empiricism fails us. There are better works on the subject, but they're generally less straight-forward. Plato's Theatetus, for example, is a great piece on the foundation of knowledge, but you have to know how to read Plato if you want to get anywhere.
There must be a piece of ground that is more firm than what you're trying to build on, because you've already reached a level of certainty that you cannot possibly reach from "logic" and "science". In other words, there's something else you're relying on that you haven't realized you're relying on.
Truth cannot simply be "that which is proven", and really you already know that. If it were only "proven things", then what's the classification of the "true" things before they have been proven? Did they become true with the proof? And what of the things which you believe are proven, and then you realize later that there's a flaw in your "proof". Were those things true before you found the flaw?
It's certain that mankind (or some other thinking/aware thing) is necessary in order for true statements to be made, but it's also undoubtable that the truth is not dependant on the whim (or knowledge) of mankind. It's far more complicated than the definition you've laid out, yet none of this knowledge is given by logic-- any ability to engage in speach/logic (logos) is dependant on already having this knowledge.
What solution is that?
Before I could ever hope to tell you what it is, you have to first understand what it's not. Knowledge can't be passed on until you've hit the critical moment of confusion.
The problem you're describing just leads to the regress argument. How do you justify what it is you used to justify the use of logic and senses? And then how do you justify THAT? It leads to either an infinite regress, the declaration of some thing as unquestionably foundational, or circular self-supporting coherentism.
Well, exactly, it either leads to infinite regression, which leads to the volatilization of all truth and knowledge, or declaration of something as unquestionable. Obviously, something must be unquestionable if you ever want to claim hold of anything as "true", however, you cannot declare that thing to be unquestionable by virtue of scientific reasoning. It must be something that is unquestionable because you know it through a faculty that is both immediate and unquestionable.
The alternative? You have to accept that you have no grounding for knowledge. You don't even have a grounding for an approximation of uncertain knowledge. You just have no grounding whatsoever, to the degree that you cannot even claim to lack grounding, because you need some grounds on which to base that claim. You don't really want to be there.
And again, the scientific method has this embedded in itself, with the notion that you can never prove (completely justify) a theory, but rather just disprove or fail to disprove a theory. Theories that hold up well to criticism are used and considered "true", or at least "truer" than less resilient theories. The reliance on senses and logic as an epistemological theory is no different.
Even if all that were possible, it still leaves you with no knowledge. None. Whatsoever. Any given statement only falls into "disproven" or "yet to be disproven", but never "true". And that's after you've already assumed true (on faith, if not knowledge, and you're saying you can't have knowledge) that cynicism is the road to truth. Yet this cynicism never gets you to truth.
That's not an epistemological theory. It's a paradox that, if we assume it to be good, demonstrates that no knowledge is possible. In that case, "creationism" has no less a claim to truth than "science", since nothing can be known, and neither will be disproven. Why insist on all that when clearly there's a better solution?
I agree with you on most points, but note this:
And I'm saying that science - as in the methodology of science, not any particular body of scientific theories - is identical with those "other" ways of knowledge. The only things I can't doubt are logic and my senses, so they are the foundation of all certainty and thus knowledge.
What is it that tells you that you can't doubt logic and your senses? It's not logic and it's not your senses, but it's some other-- I don't know what you want to call it: feeling, instinct, or maybe intuition-- it's something else, some other form of knowledge, that allows you to know that you must follow logic, senses, and experience in order to understand truth, and further that understanding of truth is a goal.
So there's a form of knowledge/understanding first, which tells you that there are rules of understanding, and things that make sense and things that don't. Without this form of knowledge, you wouldn't be able to know whether logic and senses were trustworthy, or be able to decide that even if they aren't, they're the best thing you have going.
Think about it: how do you know they're the best thing going? How do you know what logic/senses are, or whether there aren't more trustworthy "feelings" that knowledge ought to be based on? I'm not doubting that logic/senses are best, but asking, "what kind of knowledge is that?"
It isn't logical, and it's not something sensed through your 5 senses. It's something... else. You might call it a conviction or a belief, a feeling or a form of faith, or whatever you else you might like, but this is certain: it doesn't come through logic or sense, and it's necessary before scientific thought (or logic or senses) can take form.
There's some good thoughts in there, but my issue was really with this:
My point here is that there is obviously another source of knowledge, not based on or derived from 'the scientific method', that you trust and believe well enough that your belief in the 'scientific method' is founded on it. It's a sort of knowledge that you know before you investigate, before you 'prove'-- you just know. You are unable to believe otherwise, "no matter how [you] might try."
This form of knowledge is better and more certain than that gained through 'science', because 'science' gains it's certainty though this knowledge, not the other way around.
I have a hard time thinking humans came from apes. I think we started as a primative human, but, not that far.
Ah... but you're thinking too small. The theory of evolution does not state that man evolved from apes, but that man evolved from the earliest forms of life. At one point in man's evolution, he was a one-celled organism. Later on, some form of reptile. Eventually, in the recent past, Man's ancestors were chimp-like creatures. Some people would still classify humans as belonging to the classification of "great apes", meaning we're still apes.
So, no, we were never gorillas or chimps, if that's what you mean by "ape".
Not even "things you'll never understand"? I don't know about you, but as I've gotten older, I've found that most things, in fact, fall into either:
Isn't that a bit loose? Obviously, the scientific method isn't a theory at all, it's just a method. You seem to have adopted an epistemological theory that knowledge can only be attained through this one particular method, which is obviously false. After all, what in our senses could have taught us to trust this method?
For that matter, it's worth mentioning that no method of attaining knowledge can show an epistemological theory of knowledge to be true, if that theory is that the method in question is the true measure of truth. The whole thing would be entirely circular, and therefore entirely meaningless. Belief in the scientific method is (and must) always be based on something other than the scientific method.
I've never really understood the idea of licensing software per CPU. It seems a bit crazy/arbitrary to me. Why not charge per DIMM or RAM, or per byte of L2 cache?
However, these days, I don't trust Lenovo yet, and finding Windows much harder to support than OSX (I won't go into that here, but it's not because of any shortage of Windows knowledge on my part), I tend to lean towards Macintoshes whenever Windows isn't necessary. The price really isn't considerably higher, the support is good, and OSX is easier to deal with as an OS (for everything from trouble-shooting to imaging).
Well, you may have read about Apple portables and Dells, but I've purchased several of each. The failure rate is roughly the same, which is roughly the same, in my experience, as HP and Sony. That is to say, generally they're fine, sometimes you get a system with a glitch or two, and every once in a while you get a total lemon. I own a Macbook Pro, and there are no problems.
Other vendors have pleny of design flaws, especially when they make big hardware changes-- it just doesn't make news.
And the whole thing of Apple machines being expensive is largely a myth. Yeah, you can show me that those cheap Dell Dimensions are cheaper than the cheapest Mac, but those cheap Dells are terrible little crippled machines. Price out an Optiplex ultra-small form factor machine with similar specs to a Mac mini, and tell me whether you get it cheaper than a Mac mini. Last time i checked it out, as similar as you could make them, the mini was $100 less.
Compare the Mac Pro with a similarly configured Dell Precision. Compare the iMac with a small form-factor optiplex with a wide-screen 20" LCD. Macs aren't even more expensive, it's only that they're on-par with Dell's high-end line, not their cheap $300 computers.
Have you tried Vista, though? I wouldn't run that crap if it came pre-installed for free. In fact, it puts the "crap" in "cheap crap". (not the cheap, however)
Yeah, the low-end Dell Dimensions are cheap crap. Among other cheap crap, they're pretty high-quality cheap crap, but they still aren't nice computers. This as opposed to... I don't know... Gateway or E-Machines, which, last I checked, were low-quality cheap crap.
I wouldn't recommend the low-end Dimensions to anyone who could afford better, but I would recommend them to someone who couldn't afford better. Low-quality cheap crap, on the other hand, I wouldn't recommend to anyone under any circumstances, even if it's $25 less.
What "current price differentials"? You mean the Mac Pro being priced $1000 less than a comparably configured Dell?
Apple is competitive on price-- the low-end just doesn't go as low. So Dell sells a $300 desktop, and Apple doesn't compete in that market. But you can't compete with Dell in that market, either, because they sell high-quality cheap crap in massive quantities, and they get as good prices as anyone. The only way to get a computer out the door for less than Dell is to sell low-quality cheap crap, and you'll probably still need to take some losses. The profit margins on those $250 Dells are just miniscule, and you can't under-cut that very much. So if you're waiting for a $100 Mac mini, you'll be waiting for a while.
People make a big deal about stealing other Unix features because, when other unixes impliment the feature, it's some obscure CLI think that only uber-geeks can get working in a practical manner. When OSX does it, there are fancy animations that make the common folk go "ooooh" and "aaaaaah".
Well, "not ready" could mean "still too expensive" or "uses too much power to stick in a laptop". Either way, I haven't seen a laptop yet with a 64-bit Intel processor.