You don't know your mythology - Thor isn't credited with inventing the hammer, and very likely the real creature that "invented" it was a pre-human banging rocks and would certainly have been long forgotten by the time humans came on the scene, or even by the time a species capable of forming myths would have come along.
If you think a long dead pre-human is a bona fide god, you have an incredibly low threshold for divinity, so low as to be meaningless and worthless for the purpose of this discussion.
Darwin may not have been an atheist. In his work he left room for god as the creator, but evolution as the method.
I would say the reason atheists talk about god so much these days is because there is a large - and growing - segment of the population seeing to put their god in every venue they can despite it being inappropriate.
Example of inappropriate venue: creationists trying to have a non-scientific argument given equal time with scientific arguments in science classes.
First it implies that there may not be a limit to what we can understand about our universe through science - this may or may not be true.
Second it implies that the important things about our universe are the ones that can be learned through science instead of other venues.
Third it implies that atheists are not, themselves, without potentially irrational beliefs or faith in things which are not proven to be true, but those things wouldn't cause an atheist to be a bad scientist.
I know many scientists who have produced amazing work. Some of them are religious, some are not. I now many more scientists who are incredibly sloppy and produce what I would consider to be extremely bad, sloppy and outright wrong work. Some of them are religious, some are not.
The absolute and only rule seems to be that the ones who produce good work are rigorous in their application of the scientific method to their work and who are able to abide by what they see rather than what they would like to see.
Some of the greatest scientists of all time have been deeply religious. Newton was ridiculously religious and believed in any number of completely insane (to our thinking) pseudo-scientific nonsense ideas, and yet his work in maths and physics were works of staggering scientific importance and value. Copernicus was religious. Le Metre was a catholic priest (and a cosmologist who posited something that eventually evolved into the Big Bang Theory). Gregor Mendel was a friar and yet pioneered genetics. And that's just western thinkers! Look at some of the eastern philosophers - less well known to most, but they gave us algebra, a modern framework for medicine, and a number of engineering and technological techniques, and were quite religious.
Really, the answer, to me, seems to be to let the science be the science and let the faith be the faith. Let the faith drive the desire for scientific inquiry if you like, but the people of faith who did and do amazing science seem to be the ones who can recognize where one method ends and the other begins.
Are you seriously saying you can't think of any non-religious rationale for prohibiting most forms of homicide? Are you seriously saying that "thou shalt not murder" (you even misunderstood the rule you were trying to quote, because Old Testament Yahweh was just fine with killing) is the only basis in our modern legal system for not condoning murder?
Perhaps more worryingly, are you seriously suggesting that you, yourself, are unable to see any reason not to murder someone because an old book says you shouldn't, or that doesn't rely on a religious argument?
Now, if you aren't really saying that you can't come up with any non-religious reasons for not committing murder, perhaps you will then be able to admit that most laws we have probably can also be understood in purely non-religious terms also, and you won't try such a ridiculously disingenuous line of argumentation in the future.
Because it really is a stupid, stupid line of arguing and it basically makes the person making that "I don't murder because God says not to" person come off like a raving psychopath who is just itching to go on a killing spree except they once read a book that said not to.
Me, as an atheist, I can think of dozens of reasons not to murder people, and all of them are much, much, MUCH more compelling than "a book told me not to."
Some legal concepts may have paralleled religious law, but you will probably be shocked to see that in modern legal systems, the laws that are still on the books and enforced today tend to be the ones where there can be a non-religious basis at a minimum for that law, even if there may be a religious basis as well. There are very, very few laws on the books in modern legal systems today that have a purely religious basis and that cannot be understood with only non-religious arguments and in many cases those laws are being removed as being outdated.
There is no need for religion in order to have good reasons for not killing other people or violating many laws that people like to think are based on religion but actually can come about quite nicely from purely rational reasons. You may not be able to think of them, but that doesn't mean other people cannot.
Same thing for fetus vs. baby. You may not be able to discern a difference but that does not mean other people cannot.
The point where you become a fanatic, to me, is when you say you want to make your religious beliefs something everyone must live by. Actually, the point where you become a religious fanatic to me is the point where your religious beliefs override your ability to rationally evaluate things, but I don't personally give much of a shit about whether your thinking is impaired until and unless it affects me - you are entitled to believe whatever you like, but you are not entitled to try and force me to go along with it on the basis of an appeal to what I consider a supernatural fiction.
"I find it odd that so many believe without doubt that there is extraterrestrial life despite no indication that there is (note, I think there there probably is, considering how many planets there must be, but accept that this rock may possibly be the only one alive), yet are just as certain that God doesn't exist, despite witnesses to the contrary."
I believe it very likely that extra-terrestrial life exists because i have unambiguous proof that life exists, and I see no reason to think Earth is somehow unique as a harbor for life in the entire huge universe.
I do not believe in god or gods because I have never seen ANY evidence what-so-ever for the existence of ANY god, and thus see no reason to invoke one.
If you can show me unambiguous proof that even one bona fide god exists, I will consider the possibility that other gods, even yours, may exist.
After birth children red taking care of, yes. However, it's obvious some children survive after birth without their mothers: children give up for adoption or raised by the state, children of mothers who die during childbirth, etc. I am obviously referring to situations in which the fetus is not able to survive outside the mother's body - as in, even if there are other people willing to take care of the child, it cannot survive since it has not developed sufficiently.
On to your responses to my questions:
1) Yes, absolutely, if you have neighbors who are literally unable to survive unless contained in your body, you can absolutely have them aborted. Such a circumstance has very likely never happened in human history, but I would be AOK if it did and you chose to abort them.
2) So if you lost your job your neighbors would have no other means of support at all? You are fully legally responsible for them in the exact same way a parent is legally responsible for their child once that child is born?
3) we actually agree somewhat - I think abortion past the point where the offspring could be kept alive outside of the mother should be restricted to certain special cases (health of the mother, coercion or force being used to have prevented the mother from seeking an abortion earlier, potentially in the case of extreme birth defects that were not testable prior to that stage). I can't tell you what age a fetus becomes sentient, so instead I use the 'can it survive outside the mothers body with appropriate medical care' as the cut off. Interestingly, as technology advances, that date is pushed earlier and earlier. The good news is that the people who are anti-abortion can, if they like, fund organizations that will provide such care to infants taken from unwilling mothers who are past that point. The mother will not have to carry the child, and the anti-abortion person can then take responsibility for the life of that child since they clearly feel they have more of a right to determine what happens that he mother does. Win-win!
On the might makes right issue and issues of kids being snorted the day before they would have been born: the number of abortions performed that late is vanishingly small. I have, several times, in fact, said that I think that the cut off should be the point in development when the fetus could survive externally of the mother. At that point I think the offspring should be removed and put up for adoption rather than simply terminated.
Honestly, I think you're being facile. Most of your arguments ignore points I have already made or involve ridiculous situations that could never come to pass, or seem to intentionally misconstrue my points. An example of this would be the way you approach the neighbor stuff. It's ridiculous on the face of it and you know it.
First, let me say I don't know that I agree with what Anonymous (maybe) did in this case.
Now, for the devil's advocate argument for why what they did was right:
Anonymous is not concerned with AN individual or justice in A specific case. Their actions, by and large, are done either on a lark or, in some cases, to try and cause a larger change.
In this case, for example, Anonymous probably doesn't care if this girl got "justice" or this guy was actually guilty - they want to send a message to people like this guy: You are not untouchable, we will find you, and you had better watch your shit. They publicly outed the man they think is responsible because they wanted it to make a splash and to get as much publicity as possible to spread that message; had they simply turned in the information to the police it's very likely that the end result would have been less awareness of what happened and who was responsible, even if it may have increased the possibility of a legal conviction.
The guy's life is totally fucked now - I mean, innocent or guilty he's basically fucked. Authorities will go after him and he will have to deal with that; other people will just assume he's guilty regardless, he's fucked 9 ways from Sunday, and far, far more than he would EVER be from a criminal conviction for whatever he might have done.
They're counting on that being scary enough to get some people to change their ways - to their ethical calculus that is worth a potential innocent being fucked.
I don't think it's right to do that, but I can definitely see the appeal as a way to try and shift the balance of power in situations where often there are no legal remedies or one does not feel that legal remedies can work, or that they would make a change.
It sounds like she had some pretty shitty parents.
First - and this is by far the least of the mistakes they made - she was clearly not well educated on how to handle herself online when people make demands, yet was let loose online. Her parents should have made sure that she was using the best privacy settings, knew what kinds of people might be out there, and how to shut them down if they start asking for things like flashes.
Second, when they found out what was going on and how she was freaking out about it, they should have made sure she had therapy. Therapy to teach her how to cope with the fallout, but also therapy to deal with her underlying issues because jesus fucking christ, her actions were not the actions of a well adjusted kid (I don't mean the flashing, I mean how she handled being outed and slut-shamed).
Third, if none of the therapeutic options worked and she had to move to a different area, as her family did, they should have investigated, I don't know, a name change, or maybe her not going back on Facebook ever again? I mean, the fuck?
The guy who did this is scum - he's an absolute douchebag and if there's justice in the world he'll get what's coming to him, but he is not responsible for her killing herself, he's responsible for pressuring her, blackmailing her, and attempting to slut-shame her. The other kids in her circle are responsible for bullying her over this. Her parents are responsible for doing a shit job raising her to handle what is, honestly, a fairly mild bout of shaming.
When I was a teenager I was slut-shamed mercilessly at my high-school because I had *gasp* slept with 2 different guys (neither of whom I was dating but both of whom decided to brag about it), taunted for being a geek, and basically treated like shit by a lot of the kids there just like a lot of people were when they were in high school. The difference for me was that my folks and the adults in my life made it EXTREMELY FUCKING CLEAR that the problem was with the people who were acting like assholes and when I was having a hard time coping they helped me and supported me in ways that made me better able to handle myself. My mom actually would role-play how to deal with people being assholes and my dad taught me how to handle myself physically if it came to that, and a counselor taught me how to keep myself calm when being faced with assholes so that I could put the things my parents taught me to use.
They also taught me - from a very young age - how to deal with people my age and older who were being creepy, aggressive, pushy, whatever. They figured my being disabused of the notion that there are no bad people out there would be better than my being abused or pressured in this way. It may have made me a bit cynical and a bit wary, but it definitely saved me from several instances where things could have gone very badly very quickly had I not been taught how to be properly wary.
It absolutely sucks that this girl killed herself, but it sounds like there were so many fucked up things going on in this entire thing that everyone involved should take a very long look at themselves and strive to realize that they basically suck as human beings and need to get better.
If your argument were true, that unless the simulation creators went out of their way to hide that this is a simulation we would know about it because of obvious signs, you would be able to provide an example of such a sign.
You have not supported your argument, you have not been able to come up with a single sign of it when asked, and you instead choose to call your audience intellectually lazy because they do not make your points for you.
That, right there, is the evidence that you are both stupid and a poor communicator, and your calling me lazy when you can't be bothered to support your own point makes you a hypocrite as well. Good bye, good luck, and I won't bother to read your drivel in the future.
I understood your statement perfectly, you just didn't give any specific examples. To me this indicates you are an extremely poor communicator and/or trolling.
If you aren't smart enough to come up with examples to support your own argument, or to communicate them clearly, you should own up to that rather than criticizing other people who were genuinely curious and asking you to elaborate on your point with specifics.
A secret known by more than one person is not a secret.
I have had "friends" spill the beans about various things I would rather have kept secret in my life and it didn't require Facebook or any other technology to facilitate it. When I was in college we didn't actually have Facebook (we barely had the net and then just for the comp sci/engineering departments) and yet people still outed other people or blabbed shit they shouldn't have that wasn't their place to do things.
The problem is thoughtless assholes, not shitty privacy functionality.
I won't talk any more about intelligent simulation creators converting and downloading their sims into their own universe, even if the rules are extremely different between universes. We convert entities from one framework to another all the time, and just as there are commonalities between our universe and the universes we create sufficient to allow that, there would likely be sufficient commonalities between the creators universe and ours, if such exist. The rules might not be the same, but we can be modified to handle those changes, I'm sure.
If our universe is an accidental simulation - some kind of natural phenomena of an existing universe or whatever - then it's still not impossible to imagine a multitude of scenarios where we could get into that larger universe, despite massive differences. It's likely that any universe capable of containing our simulation would have at least some conceptual commonality with ours, even if the details are different. Unless those universes are literally completely separate - as in, they cannot have any interaction with ours nor we with them in any possible way after we come into existence - there will be some kind of conceptual connection and ability to convert.
In Earth's history life has entered multiple realms that were previously considered hostile. The scope may be vastly larger and almost impossible to comprehend, but it makes sense to me that, if there is any kind of connection between simulator and simulation universes things could get into the larger universe. Look at life in our world - whenever it is possible for something to exist in a different physical space, and those physical spaces interact, they do interact and transfer.
There are no reasons to believe it is impossible and plenty of reasons - examples on a smaller scale - to show that it could be possible to be translated to something bigger whether intentionally with the assistance of a simulating intelligence or through our own efforts to transcend, if there is any connection.
I see what you're saying about sufficiently - so lets just go with what we have now, today, and take it from there:
First, I'm using sim to mean a discrete entity within a larger system, and simulation to be that larger system.
We have taken self-driving models from simulation to the road. I fact, pretty much any automated system is run in simulation first before being put into the real world. They may not be self-aware, but they are sims we can make and that we have lifted out of their world and into ours. We have done this with autopilots. We have done this with stock trading systems, warehouse simulations, ecosystem sims, and on and on and on. We routinely create sims within simulations and once they have developed put them into our universe once they have been proven to be able to handle themselves in a way that isn't adverse. They only handle a very small subset of our universe, true, but that subset continually gets larger and larger. Why wouldn't a sim be able to eventually handle functioning in as big a subset of our universe as a human being could, once our technology has advanced? Unless one posits that human beings are uniquely privileged machines - a soul or whatever - there is no reason to think that another organized system akin to a life form can't become just as sophisticated - or more - as we are.
Further, there's no particular reason why a sim created to run in a universe with vastly different rules can't be taught to learn new ones. I fact, look at human development - when we are babies our brains simply don't have the circuitry to actually understand our universe; we do not grasp object permanence, we do not have any sense of where we end and those around us begin, or even that there are other people. Yet over time we are gradually introduced to new things and we gradually develop the circuitry to handle the "real" rules of the universe as opposed to our infantile version of it. When we are babies the rules of the universe as we understand them are vastly different than the ones we understand once we have developed, to the point where it is extremely difficult for more developed human beings to even begin to understand just how bizarre those rules actually were.
We do that already with sims for automated systems as I've said. We start it off is very limited environment and slowly teach it how to handle new things until the simulation is as close as we can make it to real world conditions, and them we put those automated systems into the real world.
I have absolutely no doubt that our sims and our simulations will get more complex as our own technology advances unless the laws of physics prohibit it to happen. Ad we will certainly have sims every bit as complicated and self-aware as human beings are nowadays, and I would say that such a sim waing around and interacting with our world in a body that is equally capable as a human body is now would be, for all intents and purposes, a sim at was uplifted into a hire level universe.
But why and how? What obvious signs would need to be looked for that would prove we are in a simulation and that would make sense to exist inside the simulation for purposes other than to let us know it is a sim?
Give specifics, not vague hand waving. As far as I can see, ore than "this is a simulation" being etched onto literally everything, most any sign we would see that might Titus off would basically seem just like the natural lawsof the universe and would therefore be ambiguous.
I just always assumed that people experienced god when they felt something that they simply had no way to handle other than "it's god."
Example: when I was younger I was on a trip to an extremely cold location. When I exhaled it seemed my breath turned into rainbows. One of the people on the trip said that this was proof god exists and wants us to see beauty. I took it as proof that it was cold enough that the water vapor in my breath was freezing upon contact with the very cold air and interacting with the lit in such a way as to yield rainbows.
There's also very likely some physical predisposition to experiencing "god" - we can make people experience what they say is the presence of god or someone by inducing strong magnetic fields on some parts of their brains, and it is easier to do so with some people rather than others. It's supposedly like that feeling you get when you are is dark room and know you aren't alone, except a lot moreso and with euphoria too.
Basically, combine that predisposition to feel that presence with a novel and beautiful phenomena and voila, one experiences god in what, to them, seems a very real way.
Galileo was, but that was more because he was kind of a dick to the Pope as opposed to because of his scientific work.
And you do know that it was a Catholic priest who is credited in part with what became the Big Bang theory?
And that during western civilizations dark ages a huge amount of scientific progress was made by Islamic thinkers?
Wait, you don't know those things because just like the ideologues you decry, you yourself are an ideologue who ignores facts that don't suit your world view.
Religion, in and of itself, is not anti-science. It is when people use those religions to try and exert control that science is hurt. Ideological atheists are just as capable of fucking up science as theists. Look at Lysenkoism.
The problem is, as it has ever been, people unwilling to take in new information and allow it to change their minds. Religion is not the problem - adherence to dogma is.
I'm an atheist and some of the best scientists I've run into in my career are rather devout members of their various religions. Some of the worst are atheists who are every bit as dogmatic in their beliefs as the most insane fundamentalist Christian or Muslim you would care to name.
If you do it by being a loudmouth who doesn't respect the science, then yes, you will likely experience trouble because you will be seen - rightly - as a crank. Lots of people think Einstein was wrong, but most of them come off as batshit crazy time wasters.
But if you do solid work and have good evidence to back it up and are respectful of the science, you will meet substantially less resistance. Especially if you couch your experiments in language that suggests you just want to further bolster the current models - say, "I want to use the LHC to confirm xyz prediction of the standard model" vs. "the standard model is wrong and I want to use the LHC to prove it!"
Why would it have to be designed to hide the fact that it is a simulation?
When programmers make games to they try to hide the fact that it is a game from the entities within the game?
Sure, we are a bit more complex than our video games, but compared to anyone who might program us, we are likely equally simple as Mario or Sonic etc.
More likely, if we are even remotely relevant to any entity running our sim, is that if we ever figure it out they just fix the bug and revert to a save state before the bug caused a problem and resume. If they even care.
Who says we are even important to the simulation? Given the size of the thing it seems more likely we are just an emergent thing rather than an intended thing.
Who says war, famine, death etc are horrible things? War has lead us to land on the moon. Famine and disease have driven us to understand biology and create a world where more people can live, etc. pain and suffering have lead to many beautiful things, and some would argue that without knowing abject suffering we cannot know bliss.
Who says that there's only one right answer to the ethical questions that are raised?
You are making a lot of assumptions with your questions.not that they are necessarily bad, but just that it presumes a LOT in order for your questions to be valid.
That reasoning is pretty common in these kinds of discussions, and it's fun to think about.
Though I will say, the person you quote is massively overstating the case that particle accelerators would somehow draw attention. We have many more, and often much more energetic, particle collisions happening in our atmosphere every second of every day. The only reason we care about making accelerators is because we can control the experiment and more directly observe the results by putting the detection equipment exactly where we want it.
Humanity is a long, long ways from having any appreciable effect on the underlying simulation. To say our laughably puny accelerators, despite being the pinnacle of our current development, would somehow even register in this universe, let alone one larger than this, reminds me of a flea with an erection floating on its back down a river, beaming with pride because a drawbridge just happens to be getting raised while he is underneath it.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the argument the person put forth initially, I find that very unlikely.
You don't know your mythology - Thor isn't credited with inventing the hammer, and very likely the real creature that "invented" it was a pre-human banging rocks and would certainly have been long forgotten by the time humans came on the scene, or even by the time a species capable of forming myths would have come along.
If you think a long dead pre-human is a bona fide god, you have an incredibly low threshold for divinity, so low as to be meaningless and worthless for the purpose of this discussion.
Darwin may not have been an atheist. In his work he left room for god as the creator, but evolution as the method.
I would say the reason atheists talk about god so much these days is because there is a large - and growing - segment of the population seeing to put their god in every venue they can despite it being inappropriate.
Example of inappropriate venue: creationists trying to have a non-scientific argument given equal time with scientific arguments in science classes.
Caveat: I'm an atheist.
There are a few problems with your question.
First it implies that there may not be a limit to what we can understand about our universe through science - this may or may not be true.
Second it implies that the important things about our universe are the ones that can be learned through science instead of other venues.
Third it implies that atheists are not, themselves, without potentially irrational beliefs or faith in things which are not proven to be true, but those things wouldn't cause an atheist to be a bad scientist.
I know many scientists who have produced amazing work. Some of them are religious, some are not. I now many more scientists who are incredibly sloppy and produce what I would consider to be extremely bad, sloppy and outright wrong work. Some of them are religious, some are not.
The absolute and only rule seems to be that the ones who produce good work are rigorous in their application of the scientific method to their work and who are able to abide by what they see rather than what they would like to see.
Some of the greatest scientists of all time have been deeply religious. Newton was ridiculously religious and believed in any number of completely insane (to our thinking) pseudo-scientific nonsense ideas, and yet his work in maths and physics were works of staggering scientific importance and value. Copernicus was religious. Le Metre was a catholic priest (and a cosmologist who posited something that eventually evolved into the Big Bang Theory). Gregor Mendel was a friar and yet pioneered genetics. And that's just western thinkers! Look at some of the eastern philosophers - less well known to most, but they gave us algebra, a modern framework for medicine, and a number of engineering and technological techniques, and were quite religious.
Really, the answer, to me, seems to be to let the science be the science and let the faith be the faith. Let the faith drive the desire for scientific inquiry if you like, but the people of faith who did and do amazing science seem to be the ones who can recognize where one method ends and the other begins.
Are you seriously saying you can't think of any non-religious rationale for prohibiting most forms of homicide? Are you seriously saying that "thou shalt not murder" (you even misunderstood the rule you were trying to quote, because Old Testament Yahweh was just fine with killing) is the only basis in our modern legal system for not condoning murder?
Perhaps more worryingly, are you seriously suggesting that you, yourself, are unable to see any reason not to murder someone because an old book says you shouldn't, or that doesn't rely on a religious argument?
Now, if you aren't really saying that you can't come up with any non-religious reasons for not committing murder, perhaps you will then be able to admit that most laws we have probably can also be understood in purely non-religious terms also, and you won't try such a ridiculously disingenuous line of argumentation in the future.
Because it really is a stupid, stupid line of arguing and it basically makes the person making that "I don't murder because God says not to" person come off like a raving psychopath who is just itching to go on a killing spree except they once read a book that said not to.
Me, as an atheist, I can think of dozens of reasons not to murder people, and all of them are much, much, MUCH more compelling than "a book told me not to."
Some legal concepts may have paralleled religious law, but you will probably be shocked to see that in modern legal systems, the laws that are still on the books and enforced today tend to be the ones where there can be a non-religious basis at a minimum for that law, even if there may be a religious basis as well. There are very, very few laws on the books in modern legal systems today that have a purely religious basis and that cannot be understood with only non-religious arguments and in many cases those laws are being removed as being outdated.
There is no need for religion in order to have good reasons for not killing other people or violating many laws that people like to think are based on religion but actually can come about quite nicely from purely rational reasons. You may not be able to think of them, but that doesn't mean other people cannot.
Same thing for fetus vs. baby. You may not be able to discern a difference but that does not mean other people cannot.
The point where you become a fanatic, to me, is when you say you want to make your religious beliefs something everyone must live by. Actually, the point where you become a religious fanatic to me is the point where your religious beliefs override your ability to rationally evaluate things, but I don't personally give much of a shit about whether your thinking is impaired until and unless it affects me - you are entitled to believe whatever you like, but you are not entitled to try and force me to go along with it on the basis of an appeal to what I consider a supernatural fiction.
"I find it odd that so many believe without doubt that there is extraterrestrial life despite no indication that there is (note, I think there there probably is, considering how many planets there must be, but accept that this rock may possibly be the only one alive), yet are just as certain that God doesn't exist, despite witnesses to the contrary."
I believe it very likely that extra-terrestrial life exists because i have unambiguous proof that life exists, and I see no reason to think Earth is somehow unique as a harbor for life in the entire huge universe.
I do not believe in god or gods because I have never seen ANY evidence what-so-ever for the existence of ANY god, and thus see no reason to invoke one.
If you can show me unambiguous proof that even one bona fide god exists, I will consider the possibility that other gods, even yours, may exist.
I love autocorrect... Clearly I was not referring to children being snorted. Though that doesn't happen often either!
After birth children red taking care of, yes. However, it's obvious some children survive after birth without their mothers: children give up for adoption or raised by the state, children of mothers who die during childbirth, etc. I am obviously referring to situations in which the fetus is not able to survive outside the mother's body - as in, even if there are other people willing to take care of the child, it cannot survive since it has not developed sufficiently.
On to your responses to my questions:
1) Yes, absolutely, if you have neighbors who are literally unable to survive unless contained in your body, you can absolutely have them aborted. Such a circumstance has very likely never happened in human history, but I would be AOK if it did and you chose to abort them.
2) So if you lost your job your neighbors would have no other means of support at all? You are fully legally responsible for them in the exact same way a parent is legally responsible for their child once that child is born?
3) we actually agree somewhat - I think abortion past the point where the offspring could be kept alive outside of the mother should be restricted to certain special cases (health of the mother, coercion or force being used to have prevented the mother from seeking an abortion earlier, potentially in the case of extreme birth defects that were not testable prior to that stage). I can't tell you what age a fetus becomes sentient, so instead I use the 'can it survive outside the mothers body with appropriate medical care' as the cut off. Interestingly, as technology advances, that date is pushed earlier and earlier. The good news is that the people who are anti-abortion can, if they like, fund organizations that will provide such care to infants taken from unwilling mothers who are past that point. The mother will not have to carry the child, and the anti-abortion person can then take responsibility for the life of that child since they clearly feel they have more of a right to determine what happens that he mother does. Win-win!
On the might makes right issue and issues of kids being snorted the day before they would have been born: the number of abortions performed that late is vanishingly small. I have, several times, in fact, said that I think that the cut off should be the point in development when the fetus could survive externally of the mother. At that point I think the offspring should be removed and put up for adoption rather than simply terminated.
Honestly, I think you're being facile. Most of your arguments ignore points I have already made or involve ridiculous situations that could never come to pass, or seem to intentionally misconstrue my points. An example of this would be the way you approach the neighbor stuff. It's ridiculous on the face of it and you know it.
First, let me say I don't know that I agree with what Anonymous (maybe) did in this case.
Now, for the devil's advocate argument for why what they did was right:
Anonymous is not concerned with AN individual or justice in A specific case. Their actions, by and large, are done either on a lark or, in some cases, to try and cause a larger change.
In this case, for example, Anonymous probably doesn't care if this girl got "justice" or this guy was actually guilty - they want to send a message to people like this guy: You are not untouchable, we will find you, and you had better watch your shit. They publicly outed the man they think is responsible because they wanted it to make a splash and to get as much publicity as possible to spread that message; had they simply turned in the information to the police it's very likely that the end result would have been less awareness of what happened and who was responsible, even if it may have increased the possibility of a legal conviction.
The guy's life is totally fucked now - I mean, innocent or guilty he's basically fucked. Authorities will go after him and he will have to deal with that; other people will just assume he's guilty regardless, he's fucked 9 ways from Sunday, and far, far more than he would EVER be from a criminal conviction for whatever he might have done.
They're counting on that being scary enough to get some people to change their ways - to their ethical calculus that is worth a potential innocent being fucked.
I don't think it's right to do that, but I can definitely see the appeal as a way to try and shift the balance of power in situations where often there are no legal remedies or one does not feel that legal remedies can work, or that they would make a change.
It sounds like she had some pretty shitty parents.
First - and this is by far the least of the mistakes they made - she was clearly not well educated on how to handle herself online when people make demands, yet was let loose online. Her parents should have made sure that she was using the best privacy settings, knew what kinds of people might be out there, and how to shut them down if they start asking for things like flashes.
Second, when they found out what was going on and how she was freaking out about it, they should have made sure she had therapy. Therapy to teach her how to cope with the fallout, but also therapy to deal with her underlying issues because jesus fucking christ, her actions were not the actions of a well adjusted kid (I don't mean the flashing, I mean how she handled being outed and slut-shamed).
Third, if none of the therapeutic options worked and she had to move to a different area, as her family did, they should have investigated, I don't know, a name change, or maybe her not going back on Facebook ever again? I mean, the fuck?
The guy who did this is scum - he's an absolute douchebag and if there's justice in the world he'll get what's coming to him, but he is not responsible for her killing herself, he's responsible for pressuring her, blackmailing her, and attempting to slut-shame her. The other kids in her circle are responsible for bullying her over this. Her parents are responsible for doing a shit job raising her to handle what is, honestly, a fairly mild bout of shaming.
When I was a teenager I was slut-shamed mercilessly at my high-school because I had *gasp* slept with 2 different guys (neither of whom I was dating but both of whom decided to brag about it), taunted for being a geek, and basically treated like shit by a lot of the kids there just like a lot of people were when they were in high school. The difference for me was that my folks and the adults in my life made it EXTREMELY FUCKING CLEAR that the problem was with the people who were acting like assholes and when I was having a hard time coping they helped me and supported me in ways that made me better able to handle myself. My mom actually would role-play how to deal with people being assholes and my dad taught me how to handle myself physically if it came to that, and a counselor taught me how to keep myself calm when being faced with assholes so that I could put the things my parents taught me to use.
They also taught me - from a very young age - how to deal with people my age and older who were being creepy, aggressive, pushy, whatever. They figured my being disabused of the notion that there are no bad people out there would be better than my being abused or pressured in this way. It may have made me a bit cynical and a bit wary, but it definitely saved me from several instances where things could have gone very badly very quickly had I not been taught how to be properly wary.
It absolutely sucks that this girl killed herself, but it sounds like there were so many fucked up things going on in this entire thing that everyone involved should take a very long look at themselves and strive to realize that they basically suck as human beings and need to get better.
If your argument were true, that unless the simulation creators went out of their way to hide that this is a simulation we would know about it because of obvious signs, you would be able to provide an example of such a sign.
You have not supported your argument, you have not been able to come up with a single sign of it when asked, and you instead choose to call your audience intellectually lazy because they do not make your points for you.
That, right there, is the evidence that you are both stupid and a poor communicator, and your calling me lazy when you can't be bothered to support your own point makes you a hypocrite as well. Good bye, good luck, and I won't bother to read your drivel in the future.
I understood your statement perfectly, you just didn't give any specific examples. To me this indicates you are an extremely poor communicator and/or trolling.
If you aren't smart enough to come up with examples to support your own argument, or to communicate them clearly, you should own up to that rather than criticizing other people who were genuinely curious and asking you to elaborate on your point with specifics.
Still doesn't answer my question: what would be an obvious, unmistakeable tell tale that would be something not planted in the sim?
A secret known by more than one person is not a secret.
I have had "friends" spill the beans about various things I would rather have kept secret in my life and it didn't require Facebook or any other technology to facilitate it. When I was in college we didn't actually have Facebook (we barely had the net and then just for the comp sci/engineering departments) and yet people still outed other people or blabbed shit they shouldn't have that wasn't their place to do things.
The problem is thoughtless assholes, not shitty privacy functionality.
I won't talk any more about intelligent simulation creators converting and downloading their sims into their own universe, even if the rules are extremely different between universes. We convert entities from one framework to another all the time, and just as there are commonalities between our universe and the universes we create sufficient to allow that, there would likely be sufficient commonalities between the creators universe and ours, if such exist. The rules might not be the same, but we can be modified to handle those changes, I'm sure.
If our universe is an accidental simulation - some kind of natural phenomena of an existing universe or whatever - then it's still not impossible to imagine a multitude of scenarios where we could get into that larger universe, despite massive differences. It's likely that any universe capable of containing our simulation would have at least some conceptual commonality with ours, even if the details are different. Unless those universes are literally completely separate - as in, they cannot have any interaction with ours nor we with them in any possible way after we come into existence - there will be some kind of conceptual connection and ability to convert.
In Earth's history life has entered multiple realms that were previously considered hostile. The scope may be vastly larger and almost impossible to comprehend, but it makes sense to me that, if there is any kind of connection between simulator and simulation universes things could get into the larger universe. Look at life in our world - whenever it is possible for something to exist in a different physical space, and those physical spaces interact, they do interact and transfer.
There are no reasons to believe it is impossible and plenty of reasons - examples on a smaller scale - to show that it could be possible to be translated to something bigger whether intentionally with the assistance of a simulating intelligence or through our own efforts to transcend, if there is any connection.
Also, wow, I hate autocorrect and autocomplete - hopefully the typos didn't cloud the message.
I see what you're saying about sufficiently - so lets just go with what we have now, today, and take it from there:
First, I'm using sim to mean a discrete entity within a larger system, and simulation to be that larger system.
We have taken self-driving models from simulation to the road. I fact, pretty much any automated system is run in simulation first before being put into the real world. They may not be self-aware, but they are sims we can make and that we have lifted out of their world and into ours. We have done this with autopilots. We have done this with stock trading systems, warehouse simulations, ecosystem sims, and on and on and on. We routinely create sims within simulations and once they have developed put them into our universe once they have been proven to be able to handle themselves in a way that isn't adverse. They only handle a very small subset of our universe, true, but that subset continually gets larger and larger. Why wouldn't a sim be able to eventually handle functioning in as big a subset of our universe as a human being could, once our technology has advanced? Unless one posits that human beings are uniquely privileged machines - a soul or whatever - there is no reason to think that another organized system akin to a life form can't become just as sophisticated - or more - as we are.
Further, there's no particular reason why a sim created to run in a universe with vastly different rules can't be taught to learn new ones. I fact, look at human development - when we are babies our brains simply don't have the circuitry to actually understand our universe; we do not grasp object permanence, we do not have any sense of where we end and those around us begin, or even that there are other people. Yet over time we are gradually introduced to new things and we gradually develop the circuitry to handle the "real" rules of the universe as opposed to our infantile version of it. When we are babies the rules of the universe as we understand them are vastly different than the ones we understand once we have developed, to the point where it is extremely difficult for more developed human beings to even begin to understand just how bizarre those rules actually were.
Why couldn't a sim be handled the same way? Take a simple sim that is not capable of any kind of self-awareness and operates by rules that are vastly different than the ones ie universe we ultimately want it to inhabit. Add in capacity slowly in a way that the sim can integrate the capabilities, exposé it to slightly different rules, etc. and so on?
We do that already with sims for automated systems as I've said. We start it off is very limited environment and slowly teach it how to handle new things until the simulation is as close as we can make it to real world conditions, and them we put those automated systems into the real world.
I have absolutely no doubt that our sims and our simulations will get more complex as our own technology advances unless the laws of physics prohibit it to happen. Ad we will certainly have sims every bit as complicated and self-aware as human beings are nowadays, and I would say that such a sim waing around and interacting with our world in a body that is equally capable as a human body is now would be, for all intents and purposes, a sim at was uplifted into a hire level universe.
But why and how? What obvious signs would need to be looked for that would prove we are in a simulation and that would make sense to exist inside the simulation for purposes other than to let us know it is a sim?
Give specifics, not vague hand waving. As far as I can see, ore than "this is a simulation" being etched onto literally everything, most any sign we would see that might Titus off would basically seem just like the natural lawsof the universe and would therefore be ambiguous.
I just always assumed that people experienced god when they felt something that they simply had no way to handle other than "it's god."
Example: when I was younger I was on a trip to an extremely cold location. When I exhaled it seemed my breath turned into rainbows. One of the people on the trip said that this was proof god exists and wants us to see beauty. I took it as proof that it was cold enough that the water vapor in my breath was freezing upon contact with the very cold air and interacting with the lit in such a way as to yield rainbows.
There's also very likely some physical predisposition to experiencing "god" - we can make people experience what they say is the presence of god or someone by inducing strong magnetic fields on some parts of their brains, and it is easier to do so with some people rather than others. It's supposedly like that feeling you get when you are is dark room and know you aren't alone, except a lot moreso and with euphoria too.
Basically, combine that predisposition to feel that presence with a novel and beautiful phenomena and voila, one experiences god in what, to them, seems a very real way.
Copernicus wasn't persecuted...
Galileo was, but that was more because he was kind of a dick to the Pope as opposed to because of his scientific work.
And you do know that it was a Catholic priest who is credited in part with what became the Big Bang theory?
And that during western civilizations dark ages a huge amount of scientific progress was made by Islamic thinkers?
Wait, you don't know those things because just like the ideologues you decry, you yourself are an ideologue who ignores facts that don't suit your world view.
Religion, in and of itself, is not anti-science. It is when people use those religions to try and exert control that science is hurt. Ideological atheists are just as capable of fucking up science as theists. Look at Lysenkoism.
The problem is, as it has ever been, people unwilling to take in new information and allow it to change their minds. Religion is not the problem - adherence to dogma is.
I'm an atheist and some of the best scientists I've run into in my career are rather devout members of their various religions. Some of the worst are atheists who are every bit as dogmatic in their beliefs as the most insane fundamentalist Christian or Muslim you would care to name.
If you do it by being a loudmouth who doesn't respect the science, then yes, you will likely experience trouble because you will be seen - rightly - as a crank. Lots of people think Einstein was wrong, but most of them come off as batshit crazy time wasters.
But if you do solid work and have good evidence to back it up and are respectful of the science, you will meet substantially less resistance. Especially if you couch your experiments in language that suggests you just want to further bolster the current models - say, "I want to use the LHC to confirm xyz prediction of the standard model" vs. "the standard model is wrong and I want to use the LHC to prove it!"
Why would it have to be designed to hide the fact that it is a simulation?
When programmers make games to they try to hide the fact that it is a game from the entities within the game?
Sure, we are a bit more complex than our video games, but compared to anyone who might program us, we are likely equally simple as Mario or Sonic etc.
More likely, if we are even remotely relevant to any entity running our sim, is that if we ever figure it out they just fix the bug and revert to a save state before the bug caused a problem and resume. If they even care.
Who says we are even important to the simulation? Given the size of the thing it seems more likely we are just an emergent thing rather than an intended thing.
Who says war, famine, death etc are horrible things? War has lead us to land on the moon. Famine and disease have driven us to understand biology and create a world where more people can live, etc. pain and suffering have lead to many beautiful things, and some would argue that without knowing abject suffering we cannot know bliss.
Who says that there's only one right answer to the ethical questions that are raised?
You are making a lot of assumptions with your questions.not that they are necessarily bad, but just that it presumes a LOT in order for your questions to be valid.
That reasoning is pretty common in these kinds of discussions, and it's fun to think about.
Though I will say, the person you quote is massively overstating the case that particle accelerators would somehow draw attention. We have many more, and often much more energetic, particle collisions happening in our atmosphere every second of every day. The only reason we care about making accelerators is because we can control the experiment and more directly observe the results by putting the detection equipment exactly where we want it.
Humanity is a long, long ways from having any appreciable effect on the underlying simulation. To say our laughably puny accelerators, despite being the pinnacle of our current development, would somehow even register in this universe, let alone one larger than this, reminds me of a flea with an erection floating on its back down a river, beaming with pride because a drawbridge just happens to be getting raised while he is underneath it.