For shame, AC! What are you trying to do to my beloved quote?
Batty:
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Keep an open mind and don't accept every theory you hear out of the scientific community as fact.
Granted. However, this being a comet is out of the realm of possibility, which you would have known had you done even the most cursory research into either Mira or, for that matter, comets.
Had you posted that Mira was a Dyson Sphere, you would have been equally ridiculed as it flies in the face of both the observed facts and the notion of what a Dyson Sphere is, in precisely the way your original comment flies in the face of both the observed facts about Mira and the notion of what a comet is.
An object 400 times the radius of the sun, known as a star for at least 400 years, in a binary relationship with a smaller star can not be a "large, slow-moving comet". Please refer to these links before posting any further on this subject: MiraComet
The biggest problem with God is that he has never been found. He is pure fiction with some unfounded assumptions (beliefs) and dubious philosophy to give him an aura of credibility.
To simplify: Morality is intrasubjective whereas ethics is intersubjective.
Driving safely is a moral act if you've been brought to believe it is good (right) to drive safely, whereas it is ethical if the society you live in deems it good (right) to drive safely. For whatever reasons, in both cases.
When you say "either way, copying people's private files for your personal use is wrong" you are making an ethical statement, not a moral statement.
Because your sense of morals is likely based on the ethics of the society you live in, the two value-sets are probably very similar and it can be difficult to distinguish between them. However, you might hold the belief that some behavior is moral when you do it, while also believing that the same act would be unethical if someone else did it, like downloading mp3:s or cheating on your spouse. Also, it is quite human to think that the beliefs you have about what is moral are shared by others, i.e. that they constitute ethics. This is obviously not the case: Abortion, capital punishment and gay marriage are but a few examples.
So you're right when you say that morality and ethics are not the same thing, but you're wrong in your explanation of what the difference is.
As I said in another comment here, that way lies madness. You can never have complete data, so if you don't want to reason from an incomplete set of data you won't be doing any reasoning at all:)
Philosophy, as does science, endeavors to reason from as complete a set of data as is available. In many circumstances in philosophy this is a very small set, but if the question is an interesting one, we may still be able to make some progress towards an answer.
Hear me well now: Philosophy is based on reason and reasoning, as is science. There is no conflict between the two; they apply the same instruments in their search for answers. One deals with that which is measurable, the other with that which is not yet. But how do you think the scientist works his way from hypothesis to experiment to theory? By reason. Philosophy goes from hypothesis to _thought_-experiment to theory. There are many things that are not amenable to experimentation other than thought-experiments that are nonetheless worthy of study.
Anyway, I don't know if you really think philosophy is just "spinning your wheels" but if you do, I suppose I won't be changing your mind in a Slashdot thread. I can only say that I'm sorry and that I believe you'd benefit in whatever your line of work is if you cared to study a bit of philosophy.
Yeah, I've read it (and most of Stross' other works as well). It's very good, but I can't help but feel he glosses over the psychological impact of cloning, teleportation and "merging the state vectors" as I seem to recall he called it:)
May I recommend Richard K Morgan as well? His solution to travel between the stars is to upload and send the person as a data packet, which has a few interesting side effects.
You, my friend, need to read (about) Descartes and his methodological skepticism:) Even though he ultimately failed in his endeavor, his journey is very instructional.
When push comes to shove philosophically, we cannot be absolutely positively certain of anything, in part because our senses are imperfect. But we assume some things because the other way lies madness (and there's also a guy named William with a razor down that way). In a sense, we assume those things that let us assume the least and that simultaneously does not fly in the face of reality as we know it. It is also a big help if what we assume is thought by others to be sound reasoning, i.e. that has some intrasubjectiveness (lest we fall into the trap of solipsism). This way we can be fairly certain that what we build from these first building blocks will not fall down on us at the first breeze of opposition.
In logic (and mathematics as well I assume; all caveats about assumptions apply here) everything depends on what your axioms are. If they're reasonable you're fine with building further from them. You can build a complete formal system from nothing but axioms about three things: nothing (null, the empty set), something (usually cardinality) and addition (how to go from nothing to something). These three things are not hard to understand or accept as "true", and they are the cornerstones of just about all mathematics.
As to rules of reasoning being the philosopher's religion, I don't think the philosopher needs another religion; religion itself has traditionally been the master key to most philosopher's theories. When their theories came to a point where they became inconsistent the usual answer was "God made it so"; it has made me throw many a philosophical text away in disgust:)
But there is a point to all this and it is that in the places where science can tell us nothing, philosophy still can, if you care to listen and if your reasoning is sound.
"Just" philosophy (as you so eloquently put it) is not at all "meaningless and essentially useless", and quite a few answers can and have been found through philosophy.
However, the questions that are asked in philosophy cannot usually be answered empirically. Neither by observation or experiment, nor by reference to faith or revelation, but rely instead wholly on reason. This should not be taken as evidence that the questions cannot be answered. Logic, for instance, is based purely on reason and it springs, as do so many other fields of study, from philosophy. It also answers a lot of questions.
In fact most of what we now call science was at one time or other found under the heading "philosophy", and only with advances in philosophy did it spring forward as a science in it's own right.
So you see, far from being meaningless and essentially useless, philosophy is in fact inherently meaningful and useful as a tool to explore areas of knowledge science does not yet have the ability to tread. For instance, the philosophy of mind to which this discussion pertains.
Your body completely remakes itself every few years [...] you're not the same person you were 10 years ago.
Say you have an axe. You break the handle and replace it. Is it still the same axe? Most people would say yes.
Now say you later broke the head and replace it. Is it still the same axe? Most people would say yes, even though no parts of the original axe remains.
Finally, say you broke both the handle and the head and replaced them both. Is it still the same axe? Most people would say no, because you need to replace all the parts of the axe at the same time, i.e. make a new axe.
Why is this, that you can replace a part of a whole and it can still be considered the same? Why, if you replace all of the parts over time is it still the same thing, but if you replace the parts all at once it's a new thing? Answer this and you'll have answered (one of) the problem(s) with identity in teleportation.
You can be pretty certain that your body isn't destroyed and rebuilt every night, and there's the difference. To our present knowledge, destruction of the body equals death of the person.
Teleportation (as we speak of it in this thread) requires that your body be destroyed at one end of the transmission and rebuilt at the other without the death of the person. Since we don't know -- and can't know -- yet what that does to a person's "conscious state" this is a philosophical question. Science doesn't have the answers to what happens here yet. When it does, it ceases to be philosophy and becomes science.
For teleportation to be practical hinges on so many different fields of study, and needs so many technological as well as psychological and philosophical breakthroughs it isn't even funny. But the topics of identity and personal identity are well covered in modern philosophy.
Pfft, 262 feet is nothing at the kind of distances we astronomers usually measure! We want to place a telescope 1,161,600,000 to 1,330,560,000 feet away, and you're grumbling about a piddling 262 feet?! Seriously! What was that you said? Diameter? No, no, no, you can't have a 1.2 billion feet mirror -- that's just silly! The tidal stresses alone would...
I know you were being facetious, but... The Moon actually has three sides; the near side, the far side and the dark side:
The side of the Moon that faces Earth is called the near side, and the opposite side the far side. The far side should not be confused with the dark side, which is the hemisphere that is not being illuminated by the Sun at a given moment.
With teleportation you no longer exists where you were and you exist where you are now
Not quite. With teleportation you cease to exist where you were because your body is destroyed and rebuilt with new matter so that you can exist where you are now. Not as trivial as "walk[ing] through space", is it?
You might be on to something with the next paragraph though, people usually have a hard enough time getting to grips with the fact that a future me or a past me is somehow still me. Now try and make them see that the teleported me is still me. I doubt it is possible.
If you don't believe in a soul [yadayadayada]
That's one of the silliest paragraphs I've seen in a long time. The stuff I eat is part of me before I eat it? I'm uncomfortable with my body "being made up of different energy"? Jeez, Louise! Way to kill a strawman! Let's just say that even without the added complexity of whether there is a soul or not, there might be problems with teleportation and personal identity
I bet most people wouldn't step into a teleportation unless the quantum state of your atoms were reconstructed with the SAME energy.
Apart from the fact that I'm not quite sure what you even mean by "the SAME energy" in this context, I bet most people wouldn't step into a teleportation, period.
Slashdot Mirror
For shame, AC! What are you trying to do to my beloved quote?
Batty:
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Time to die.
Yes they do, even on archived stories.
That was the Norwegian Blue. Keep your scandinavian countries straight, ok?
I'm Godwin-ing this thread right here:
/:=)
(oh yes, you're absolutely right, that IS a happy hitler smiley)
Let me guess: You're American, right?
Granted. However, this being a comet is out of the realm of possibility, which you would have known had you done even the most cursory research into either Mira or, for that matter, comets.
Had you posted that Mira was a Dyson Sphere, you would have been equally ridiculed as it flies in the face of both the observed facts and the notion of what a Dyson Sphere is, in precisely the way your original comment flies in the face of both the observed facts about Mira and the notion of what a comet is.
What are you blabbering about "It could happen"?
An object 400 times the radius of the sun, known as a star for at least 400 years, in a binary relationship with a smaller star can not be a "large, slow-moving comet". Please refer to these links before posting any further on this subject: Mira Comet
You are obviously either a troll or a devout creationist/ID loony, so we end this here. Enjoy your delusions.
The biggest problem with God is that he has never been found. He is pure fiction with some unfounded assumptions (beliefs) and dubious philosophy to give him an aura of credibility.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Insightful? Flamebait, more like.
Actually it's "Iä! Iä!" you dumb homophobe.
Wrong.
To simplify: Morality is intrasubjective whereas ethics is intersubjective.
Driving safely is a moral act if you've been brought to believe it is good (right) to drive safely, whereas it is ethical if the society you live in deems it good (right) to drive safely. For whatever reasons, in both cases.
When you say "either way, copying people's private files for your personal use is wrong" you are making an ethical statement, not a moral statement.
Because your sense of morals is likely based on the ethics of the society you live in, the two value-sets are probably very similar and it can be difficult to distinguish between them. However, you might hold the belief that some behavior is moral when you do it, while also believing that the same act would be unethical if someone else did it, like downloading mp3:s or cheating on your spouse. Also, it is quite human to think that the beliefs you have about what is moral are shared by others, i.e. that they constitute ethics. This is obviously not the case: Abortion, capital punishment and gay marriage are but a few examples.
So you're right when you say that morality and ethics are not the same thing, but you're wrong in your explanation of what the difference is.
+1 It's funny because it's true.
If I only had mod-points... That was brilliant, sir. Thank you.
hitler hitler
As I said in another comment here, that way lies madness. You can never have complete data, so if you don't want to reason from an incomplete set of data you won't be doing any reasoning at all :)
:)
Philosophy, as does science, endeavors to reason from as complete a set of data as is available. In many circumstances in philosophy this is a very small set, but if the question is an interesting one, we may still be able to make some progress towards an answer.
Hear me well now: Philosophy is based on reason and reasoning, as is science. There is no conflict between the two; they apply the same instruments in their search for answers. One deals with that which is measurable, the other with that which is not yet. But how do you think the scientist works his way from hypothesis to experiment to theory? By reason. Philosophy goes from hypothesis to _thought_-experiment to theory. There are many things that are not amenable to experimentation other than thought-experiments that are nonetheless worthy of study.
Anyway, I don't know if you really think philosophy is just "spinning your wheels" but if you do, I suppose I won't be changing your mind in a Slashdot thread. I can only say that I'm sorry and that I believe you'd benefit in whatever your line of work is if you cared to study a bit of philosophy.
Cheers
Yeah, I've read it (and most of Stross' other works as well). It's very good, but I can't help but feel he glosses over the psychological impact of cloning, teleportation and "merging the state vectors" as I seem to recall he called it :)
May I recommend Richard K Morgan as well? His solution to travel between the stars is to upload and send the person as a data packet, which has a few interesting side effects.
You, my friend, need to read (about) Descartes and his methodological skepticism :) Even though he ultimately failed in his endeavor, his journey is very instructional.
:)
;)
When push comes to shove philosophically, we cannot be absolutely positively certain of anything, in part because our senses are imperfect. But we assume some things because the other way lies madness (and there's also a guy named William with a razor down that way). In a sense, we assume those things that let us assume the least and that simultaneously does not fly in the face of reality as we know it. It is also a big help if what we assume is thought by others to be sound reasoning, i.e. that has some intrasubjectiveness (lest we fall into the trap of solipsism). This way we can be fairly certain that what we build from these first building blocks will not fall down on us at the first breeze of opposition.
In logic (and mathematics as well I assume; all caveats about assumptions apply here) everything depends on what your axioms are. If they're reasonable you're fine with building further from them. You can build a complete formal system from nothing but axioms about three things: nothing (null, the empty set), something (usually cardinality) and addition (how to go from nothing to something). These three things are not hard to understand or accept as "true", and they are the cornerstones of just about all mathematics.
As to rules of reasoning being the philosopher's religion, I don't think the philosopher needs another religion; religion itself has traditionally been the master key to most philosopher's theories. When their theories came to a point where they became inconsistent the usual answer was "God made it so"; it has made me throw many a philosophical text away in disgust
But there is a point to all this and it is that in the places where science can tell us nothing, philosophy still can, if you care to listen and if your reasoning is sound.
Cheers
There should be no shortage of single guys here...
Oh, but I disagree :)
"Just" philosophy (as you so eloquently put it) is not at all "meaningless and essentially useless", and quite a few answers can and have been found through philosophy.
However, the questions that are asked in philosophy cannot usually be answered empirically. Neither by observation or experiment, nor by reference to faith or revelation, but rely instead wholly on reason. This should not be taken as evidence that the questions cannot be answered. Logic, for instance, is based purely on reason and it springs, as do so many other fields of study, from philosophy. It also answers a lot of questions.
In fact most of what we now call science was at one time or other found under the heading "philosophy", and only with advances in philosophy did it spring forward as a science in it's own right.
So you see, far from being meaningless and essentially useless, philosophy is in fact inherently meaningful and useful as a tool to explore areas of knowledge science does not yet have the ability to tread. For instance, the philosophy of mind to which this discussion pertains.
Now say you later broke the head and replace it. Is it still the same axe? Most people would say yes, even though no parts of the original axe remains.
Finally, say you broke both the handle and the head and replaced them both. Is it still the same axe? Most people would say no, because you need to replace all the parts of the axe at the same time, i.e. make a new axe.
Why is this, that you can replace a part of a whole and it can still be considered the same? Why, if you replace all of the parts over time is it still the same thing, but if you replace the parts all at once it's a new thing? Answer this and you'll have answered (one of) the problem(s) with identity in teleportation.
Teleportation (as we speak of it in this thread) requires that your body be destroyed at one end of the transmission and rebuilt at the other without the death of the person. Since we don't know -- and can't know -- yet what that does to a person's "conscious state" this is a philosophical question. Science doesn't have the answers to what happens here yet. When it does, it ceases to be philosophy and becomes science.
For teleportation to be practical hinges on so many different fields of study, and needs so many technological as well as psychological and philosophical breakthroughs it isn't even funny. But the topics of identity and personal identity are well covered in modern philosophy.
Pfft, 262 feet is nothing at the kind of distances we astronomers usually measure!
We want to place a telescope 1,161,600,000 to 1,330,560,000 feet away, and you're grumbling about a piddling 262 feet?! Seriously!
What was that you said? Diameter? No, no, no, you can't have a 1.2 billion feet mirror -- that's just silly! The tidal stresses alone would...
Succinctly put. Well done, sir!
You might be on to something with the next paragraph though, people usually have a hard enough time getting to grips with the fact that a future me or a past me is somehow still me. Now try and make them see that the teleported me is still me. I doubt it is possible.
That's one of the silliest paragraphs I've seen in a long time. The stuff I eat is part of me before I eat it? I'm uncomfortable with my body "being made up of different energy"? Jeez, Louise! Way to kill a strawman! Let's just say that even without the added complexity of whether there is a soul or not, there might be problems with teleportation and personal identity Apart from the fact that I'm not quite sure what you even mean by "the SAME energy" in this context, I bet most people wouldn't step into a teleportation, period.