"I am tired of this argument. It is just plain incorrect. You do not have to buy music from the iTunes store in order to listen to it on your iPod. If you rip the music into iTunes from your CD, it will be in the AAC/MP4 standard sans DRM."
Perhaps you should actually read what the poster wrote before spouting rubbish. The whole point of Sony's DRM was to prevent ripping CDs, so you can't rip said CD to an iPod using iTunes. This means that the only way of getting it onto an iPod involves buying a song one has already paid for on CD, i.e. paying for it twice.
"when NeXT needed a compiler for Objective-C they were in a situation were they either used GCC - and the FSF refused the offers to allow any kind of exemption (IIRC money offers were included) - or developed one. They did what was best for them, and used GCC."
NeXT didn't use GCC. They licensed the NeXTStep Objective-C compiler from StepStone, a company run by Brad Cox and Tom Love, the original developers of Objective-C. I believe NeXT later acquired the Objective-C trademarks and rights from StepStone.
"I know that public transport can be and is well done over there"
You obviously haven't visited the UK. Their trains are crowded, incredibly expensive, often slow, get cancelled a lot, and in some cases you have to start for home ludicrously early because the last train that can get you to tour destination leaves at 8:30pm. Stations are dirty, wind and rain swept places where any waiting rooms or toilets are invariably closed, leaving people exposed to the wonderful English climate for hours. Forget about travelling at weekends, because that's the time they do the engineering work that's accrued through decades of neglecting the rail infrastructure, so getting to your destination will require a connecting bus journey on narrow, bumpy village roads that adds hours to the journey.
Buses are OK on some routes in big cities like London, while mediocre to poor on other routes (e.g. the pathetic service between Victoria and Knightsbridge) and extremely poor to non-existent in rural areas, while also being ridiculously expensive outside big cities. The London Underground is overpriced, antiquated, stuffy, massively overcrowded, and prone to technical problems (usually blamed on signal failures), but people in London are grateful to have it because there aren't any other underground railway systems in England. Comparing it to what's available on other European systems like the Paris Metro does however make it seem like a sewer that somebody left some old trains to rot in.
So while the British public transport system is admittedly excellent when compared to those of Yemen and Nepal, most other Western European countries (and some Eastern European ones) make it look like the overpriced, unreliable crap that it really is.
"They would much rather have EPO create new case law without debate and without those pesky MPs."
The European Courts don't use an English Common Law system of precedents, so so there is no such thing as "new case law". ECJ Judges will often use prior decisions as a basis for their opinions, but are in no way obliged to, so the fact that one group of judges interpreted laws in a particular way doesn't mean that a different set of judges will do so. One can therefore have a situation where one software patent is upheld while another similar one gets rejected on the grounds that software patents aren't valid due to the fact that two panels of judges interpret the spirit of the existing laws differently.
"With your latest response I see our dialog as being driven from two vantage points. Yours is more scientifically informed and explanitory. Mine is more speculative, muddled, and drives to a point less concerned with empirical truth than how we should look at it."
We're both speculating, because while evidence for Big Bang itself is supported by (a growing body of) observational data, what led up to it is essentially educated guesswork, and if Hawking is correct, always will be because no information from before Big Bang can ever reach us. The theory we were discussing is therefore just one of several, not all of which assume a singularity (there are various problems with singularities which lead to some cosmologists favouring models that don't require them).
"We remove aspects of the universe until there's nothing left -- no matter, no forces, no space, no time. We could just as easily call this the uncosmos or nullverse rather than perfect vacuum."
As I said previously, it's called the perfect vacuum because it behaves like one, although I didn't say in what way. Despite the fact that the perfect vacuum had no matter or _free_ energy, it still had the energy baseline or "ground state", the so-called "zero point" energy that's popularly bandied about by pseudo-scientists who have no idea what it actually is (put simply, it's the lowest possible energy level that one can have, i.e. what's left over after all energy has been removed. You can't have less energy than the baseline, but this baseline isn't actually zero, despite being the "absolute zero" for energy). The theory states that this zero point energy caused the vacuum fluctuations which produced the singularity.
"After all, cosmologists are physicists too"
Only if you regard theoretical physics and physics as the same field, which is akin to saying that organic chemistry and biology are the same field.
"Here's where philosophic queries come into play. The pragmatic difference between the comologists perfect vacuum and the philosophers nothingness is that the former instantaneously spawns a nacent universe so long as the math and theory are correct."
The perfect vacuum spawned a singularity which then expanded into the universe. However, there is no implication that this would always happen in the perfect vacuum, or that it was instantaneous; all that the theory says is that it happened once, and that there wasn't any space-time. There is very important difference between space-time not existing and something being instantaneous!
"The analogy is pretty gross but it illustrates what I mean by saying the universe didn't come from nothing and simply started. The alternative is a perfect vacuum or nothingness that can, uh, remain in its state of non-existance."
There's nothing in the theory to suggest that a perfect vacuum will always produce singularities, or that this perfect vacuum was the only one. They don't occupy any space or time, so there could have been an infinite number of them overlaid on one another, only one of which produced the singularity that became our universe.
"CO2 may not be a pollutant in the common sense (it obscures vision) but it is a poison to people in sufficient quantities"
Something that suffocates air breathing animals if you replace air with it isn't a poison, unless one counts drowning or suffocating due to being buried alive as being poisoned.
"But under your plan what do you do if you don't get an election with > 50% choosing a candidate for decades? Does the incumbent stay in power?"
You form an emergency coalition like Britain did in WWII, when elections were suspended. Ministerial posts are given to those who are best suited to them, irrespective of what party they belong to, and the hope of getting their party elected gives them an incentive to do a good job. Prime ministers / presidents can rotate in six month increments between each of the prospective candidates until one of the parties gets elected (if indeed they do). If the public either likes the temporary system so much that they decide not to vote anybody into power, or keeps it because they hate everyone, then so be it -- that's democracy in action.
"Depending on how much I needed the job and how good the job was, I've done things that were unquestionably wrong. It was easier to live with since it wasn't my decision, since my supervisor was forcing my hand, since the alternative was unemployment."
Translation: I could have done the right thing, but instead decided to act in a way that was beneficial to myself. This is OK, because somebody else told me to do it.
"If the tech sector collapses again and I find myself doing tech support again (Please, no! not a 3rd time!) I may well find myself in that unpleasant situation again."
If my own comforts must be obtained by depriving others of theirs, then so be it, because the good of one outweighs the good of many. It will of course be OK, because somebody else will be telling me to do it.
"Mandatory voting combined with a preferential voting system would make the US a much better nation IMO."
Mandatory voting is only acceptable if one of the options is "none of the above", and if this is what most people select, then other elections have to be held with entirely different candidates, until the public finally accepts one of them.
IMO a rather better system would be one where any election in which less than 51% of the eligible population bothers to vote is assumed to be a case of "none of the above", and therefore becomes invalid. This would make not voting into a valid protest against all the candidates, thereby preventing situations where countries are governed by somebody who only 15% of the population voted for, which is lamentably common in most so-called "democracies".
"Sadly, America has gone to war about every 20 years. Since the time of reagan, that has changed to about every 4 years. "
The problem is that they've been going to war with the wrong people. Thomas Jefferson, a notably wise American, once said:
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.... God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion; what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms."
"It is much easier to fight corruption in a smaller country, then it is to fight it in a nation as large as America"
That's nothing more than a convenient excuse. People in the US know who the corrupt people are and where they live, so they can hang the bastards from lamp posts just as easily as people in a smaller country can -- all they need is the will to do so. Two quotes sum up the reasons why corruption is endemic in nations that call themselves free democracies:
"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too." -- Somerset Maugham
"The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first, the love of soft living and the get rich quick theory of life." -- Teddy Roosevelt
"Blu-ray sells to the consumer who already has a substantial investment in HDTV."
Blu-ray sells to the consumer whose investment in HDTV was for a system with HDMI that works properly. Those with HDMI are a subset of the people who substantially invested in HDTV, and HDMI that actually works properly is owned by a subset of that subset.
"You keep buying DVDs until you find out that the new movies are not brought out on DVD anymore. Or even the old movies."
They won't stop releasing A-list titles on DVD until one of the two HD formats displaces it in terms of installed base, and that won't start to happen until there are cheap Chinese imports that rival the cost of DVD players. Media companies have shareholders who expect to see some returns on their investments, and they'd go apeshit if the board decided to ignore 90% of their potential market to serve the 10% who have a system with better DRM. It will also piss off hire companies, each of whom both buys large numbers of A-list titles, and pays more for them than consumers do.
"Really, what gave you the impression that freedom of choice actually exists, in this world that is lead by corporate america?"
Corporate America has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders, who can take legal action against a board of directors acts in ways that are demonstrably prejudicial to their investment.
"you reference the universe in toto to explain a "more perfect" type of "perfect vacuum" that didn't exist "in the universe" because it lacked space too"
You seem to have misunderstood what I wrote. My point was that the perfect vacuum which produced the singularity _cannot_ exist in the universe, so definitions of "perfect vacuum" which include space are fine for physicists, but not cosmologists.
"Apparently, the lack of space is a triffling difference and once it's eliminated it doesn't exist in the universe?"
Space always exists in the universe, hence the fact that physicists (who deal with the universe) define perfect vacuums in terms of it. However, the perfect vacuum that produced the singularity didn't exist in the universe because there wasn't any universe, so there wasn't any space as we understand the term.
"I think we should let "perfect vacuum" refer to what we want inside particle accelerators and find some other name for what came "before" or simply provided for the "cosmic egg" or sigularity. If the universe as it was at time zero is qualifiable then we should turn to something more mathematic and philosophic. Otherwise we end up squabbling over misunderstandable names."
They're only problematic to people from outside the fields in question. Scientists are quite accustomed to different fields using the same term for different things, so they aren't in the least confused by the fact that the cosmological "perfect vacuum" is subtly different from the one used in particle physics.
"we shouldn't talk of the universe being created out of nothing. There is simply the universe with its existance which started."
The universe came from the singularity (if one ascribes to that particular cosmological idea), and the singularity came from a vacuum fluctuation that occurred in a point with no dimensions. No dimensions and no mass is a pretty good description of nothing.
"Like negative numbers, nothingness must exist conceptually."
Cosmologists who support the theory we are debating postulate that it existed physically, not just conceptually, and in fact still does beyond the boundaries of the universe. The problem most people have when thinking about Big Bang is that they imagine the universe expanding into some form of "space" that already existed, whereas Big Bang, based on general relativity, states that space itself is expanding, and therefore did not exist until Big Bang, and does not exist beyond the universe's periphery. They'd be the first to admit that they could well be wrong, but the fact that they already know it's counter-intuitive means that arguments based on intuition won't be regarded as proof of this.
"I'm being only slightly pedantic by exclaiming that a perfect vacuum is something. It's space without matter no different than the space between a hydrogen nucleus and its electron".
It's space without matter _in the current universe_, but this does not mean that a perfect vacuum requires a universe (and therefore space), hence the fact that the perfect vacuum cosmologists envisage "before" the singularity was more perfect than any vacuum that can exist in the universe because it not only lacked matter and free energy, but also space.
"I did not mean to restrict the agnosticism question to God only, as you seem to think--I have no problem expanding it to include the Absolute (or "reality" as you say)."
Quote from your original post, which was in answer to something Kaffeine wrote:
"Agnosticism is a philosophical position that God is unknown and/or inherently unknowable."
This was my reply, which started this whole debate:
"It is you who is incorrect. The term "agnostic" was invented by T. H. Huxley, and (to use your own canard) in layman's terms, can be described as "Don't claim it if you can't explain it". Huxley did not restrict this to religious matters, but also scientific ones, because he was just as dismayed by those who accept laws and theories because they are based on some "authority", or for their conformance with a preconceived world view, as he was with religions that expect people to believe in them for precisely the same reasons.
"It is quite commonly agreed among philosophers that his definition is not the correct use of the term."
Claiming that philosophers commonly agree on anything is absurd. It would therefore be more accurate to say that some philosophers use the term in ways that are different from Huxley, while others don't.
"See my quote of Stein, later, for more on this."
Stein is obviously biased, as is proven by his assertion that Robert Flint (who he agrees with) summed things up correctly, while Bertrand Russell is merely one of "a few people" who have used the term as Huxley defined it.
"Please explain where in there it supports your definition that has lack of evidence at the core of the definition."
I did not claim this, Kaffeine did. Given that my whole point is that Huxleys' use of the term is definitive, I fail to see how you could possibly imagine that I would say otherwise.
It seems that the rest of your post is an attempt to answer Kaffeine, and not me, because just about everything you're including supports my original contention that Huxley's definition of agnosticism as a general view of the nature of reality is indeed correct. If you want to debate Kaffeine's views, then please do so with him / her, because neither Huxley nor I agree with them.
"I think you are overestimating the European / British cell markets."
Agreed. As somebody who has lived his entire life in two European countries, and spent significant amounts of time in several others, I can heartily attest to the fact that the image European Slashdotters project of a continent filled to the brim with discerning people is utter tripe. The average European watches garbage reality shows and dreadful home-grown drama and action series that make the US-sourced stuff we get look like works of genius by comparison, listens to shitty throwaway music, and is just as likely (and in some countries, a lot more likely) to be driven by marketing hype and faddishness as his or her US counterpart. 95% of the people who use cell phones here haven't even heard of 3G, and most of the remaining 5% would give an answer like "It's something on phones that's supposed to be good, but costs a lot", so they won't even know the iPhone doesn't have it, because they'll never ask for it.
So the continent that's the home of vastly overpriced luxuries like haute couture, nouveu cuisine, and brands such as Gucci, Chanel, Lambourghini, and Rolex will jump all over the iPhone if Apple can convince them them that it's _the_ think to have.
"Ultimately, I'm trying to argue that there's no such thing as nothingness."
Current cosmology postulates that there was indeed a period of absolute nothingness (i.e. a perfect vacuum) that produced the singularity by a process know as vacuum fluctuation. If you search for authoritative sources on the web, be warned: the singularity's lack of space is positively intuitive when compared with virtual chaos and virtual particles!
"This does essentially agree with your explanation of Huxley's view. However, his having invented the term does not make his view authoritative."
I really do hope this is an attempt at a joke, because claiming that the person who invented a term and clearly defined it in several published works isn't authoritative is a mind- bogglingly silly thing to say.
"Agnosticism is a formal, philosophical term which means what I had written previously"
Agnosticism is not a _formal_ philosophical term. It is a word word which T. H. Huxley invented one day to describe his own philosophy, which was synthesised from his readings of other philosophers such as Hume and Kant, just as some of Tolkien's invented terms were synthesised from his readings of Anglo-Saxon and other Germanic mythologies. Claiming that either man isn't _the_ authority on the meaning of the words they invented is absurd.
""Real definition" is an interesting term; I suppose it depends what you mean by that"
The real definition of an invented word is the one that it's inventor gave it.
"Philosophical dictionaries almost universally do not contain the definition you speak of, and respected dictionaries such as merriam-webster prefer the one I've mentioned"
I hope you realise that dictionaries are simply records of common usage, not one-stop sources for the truth, hence the fact that they frequently contradict one another on both spellings and definitions. I for example have included links later on in this document that include a dictionary of philosophy which doesn't agree with your definition (and could doubtless have found several others if I'd bothered to look further).
"The hypothetical opinion of one man who invented the term is not really relevant"
A lot of sources seem to agree with my position that it's vitally relevant.
"The etymology of a word is interesting, but it doesn't determine the definition."
This is true for words that came into the English language via largely unknown routes whose definitions can only be arrived at by examining common usage at different historic periods. We do however have a very precise record of when "agnostic" entered the language, and also copious amounts of published material from its inventor describing its meaning, so your claim is at best an eloquent attempt to grasp at straws.
(some links)
The only source you provide that isn't a laughable single line of text that make the dictionaries i used at infant school look like the Complete Oxford is the Catholic Forum. It is thus interesting to note that their definition agrees with Huxley's (and therefore mine). Quote:
"A philosophical theory that it is impossible to arrive at a knowledge of reality, either because it is of its nature unknowable or because the human mind is unable to apprehend it. _Its chief use_ is to deny that human reason can arrive at a knowledge of God and some truths of religion." (emphasis mine). There is a big difference between "its chief use" and "it is defined as".
I shall now supply some links of my own. Please note that none of these refer to simplistic single lines of text masquerading as definitions:
1. The Catholic Encyclopaedia (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01215c.htm) contains an excellent treatment on agnosticism, having several definitions of the term. They distinguish between agnosticism as a philosophy (a la Huxley), and theological / religious agnosticism, which are the ones you're trying to claim are the entirety of agnosticism.
2. Interdisciplinary Enclyclopedia of Religion And Science (http://www.disf.org/en/Voci/1.asp). Again, an extremely detailed treatment which shows that agnosticism is not only about gods and religions, but the nature of reality itself.
3. The Philosophical Dictionary (http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/a2.htm). Quote:
"agnosticism
Belief that human beings do not have sufficient evidence to warrant either the affirmation or the denial of a proposition. The term is used especia
"Yes, accounting for contemporary physics and cosmology we can work backwards to a certain point that's amazingly (preposterously) specific and say there was a time zero, then a mystery, then (1x10^-43 seconds, right?) a Big Bang and the arrival of Time and Space. Why is this considered the birth of the Universe out of nowhere?"
Because, as I said previously, the fact that there was no space until the singularity exploded means that the term "where" had no meaning, ergo the singularity had no where and was thus nowhere, and than space happened, at which point nowhere became somewhere. Thus, it is perfectly correct to say space and time came from nowhere (and nowhen), because there was no where or when before Big Bang.
"So let's skip the Science and point out that you're assuming our somethingness appeared out of a nothingness"
The only problem with this is that I'm not assuming it came from "no thing", only "no where", and "no when", hence the fact that this is what my post talked about. It is you who is assuming this is what I meant -- I said nothing remotely like it.
"Claiming it's literaly true that Time and Space appeared out of nowhere would be like claiming it's literally true that one can't fly a plane off the edge of the East"
It's actually more like trying to say how hot three miles is. The term "where" expresses one's position in terms of something else _in space_, e.g. "Where am I? 5 miles NE of Calcutta". Because the singularity had one dimension, there was no space for it to exist in, so concepts that are defined in terms of both space and the existence of more than one point within it are completely nonsensical.
"However there are still two common uses of the word: existence god is not knowable, or existence of god is not known (discussed here)."
The first sentence in the Wikipedia entry is wrong, because the "Gnostic" part of agnostic refers to Gnosticism rather than gnosis, i.e. those who claim to have knowledge about that which is mysterious. This is clear from Huxley's writings on the subject:
"So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "agnostic". It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant"
This confusion about the derivation of the term has led to the common misperception of what agnosticism is, because an agnostic isn't a person who doesn't know, but is someone who does not claim to have any knowledge of, or belief in, things that cannot currently be known.
N.B: I stopped reading at that first sentence, as it's hard to take any article which begins with such an obviously erroneous statement seriously.
"Theism refers to a belief in god, whereas agnosticism speaks to the question of knowledge, or the truth about a belief"
This quote from Huxley's, "Agnosticism: A Symposium" makes it quite clear that what you are saying is incorrect:
"... Thus it will be seen that I have a sort of patent right in "Agnostic" (it is my trade mark); and I am entitled to say that I can state authentically what was originally meant by Agnosticism....
1. Agnosticism is of the essence of science, whether ancient or modern. It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe.
2. Consequently Agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the greater part of anti-theology. On the whole, the "bosh" of heterodoxy is more offensive to me than that of orthodoxy, because heterodoxy professes to be guided by reason and science, and orthodoxy does not."
"I therefore maintain anyone who says "I don't know if god exists, but I believe that he does on faith" is both a theist and an agnostic."
Please see above, because one cannot be a theist and an agnostic any more than one can be an atheist and an agnostic, because agnosticism is antithetical to having any firm opinion on topics that cannot be proven or falsified.
"Please elaborate. Given the definition of agnostic in that essay, I don't see anything glaryingly contradictory when compared to what you quoted above."
This part:
"Agnosticism and gnosticism are dealing with knowledge, i.e., knowing or not knowing"
An incorrect definition of gnosticism leads to an incorrect definition of agnosticism, and the rest of the article builds its arguments around this incorrect definition. Gnosticism isn't "knowing", but claiming to have knowledge of that which is currently both unknown and unknowable; agnosticism is a negation of this, i.e. a recognition of the fact that the only reasonable and logical statement one can make about something that is both unknown and unknowable is that we don't know anything about it!
Embezzlers are dreamers too. They dream of free money, and all those others whose dreams of free money will lead to them giving free money to the embezzler.
Slashdot Mirror
"I am tired of this argument. It is just plain incorrect.
You do not have to buy music from the iTunes store in order to listen to it on your iPod. If you rip the music into iTunes from your CD, it will be in the AAC/MP4 standard sans DRM."
Perhaps you should actually read what the poster wrote before spouting rubbish. The whole point of Sony's DRM was to prevent ripping CDs, so you can't rip said CD to an iPod using iTunes. This means that the only way of getting it onto an iPod involves buying a song one has already paid for on CD, i.e. paying for it twice.
"The only benifit I can see from Apple is if they want to include propritary code."
Or want to put some CUPS code directly into closed-source bits of MacOS X without worrying about having to open-source everything that touches it.
"when NeXT needed a compiler for Objective-C they were in a situation were they either used GCC - and the FSF refused the offers to allow any kind of exemption (IIRC money offers were included) - or developed one. They did what was best for them, and used GCC."
NeXT didn't use GCC. They licensed the NeXTStep Objective-C compiler from StepStone, a company run by Brad Cox and Tom Love, the original developers of Objective-C. I believe NeXT later acquired the Objective-C trademarks and rights from StepStone.
"I know that public transport can be and is well done over there"
You obviously haven't visited the UK. Their trains are crowded, incredibly expensive, often slow, get cancelled a lot, and in some cases you have to start for home ludicrously early because the last train that can get you to tour destination leaves at 8:30pm. Stations are dirty, wind and rain swept places where any waiting rooms or toilets are invariably closed, leaving people exposed to the wonderful English climate for hours. Forget about travelling at weekends, because that's the time they do the engineering work that's accrued through decades of neglecting the rail infrastructure, so getting to your destination will require a connecting bus journey on narrow, bumpy village roads that adds hours to the journey.
Buses are OK on some routes in big cities like London, while mediocre to poor on other routes (e.g. the pathetic service between Victoria and Knightsbridge) and extremely poor to non-existent in rural areas, while also being ridiculously expensive outside big cities. The London Underground is overpriced, antiquated, stuffy, massively overcrowded, and prone to technical problems (usually blamed on signal failures), but people in London are grateful to have it because there aren't any other underground railway systems in England. Comparing it to what's available on other European systems like the Paris Metro does however make it seem like a sewer that somebody left some old trains to rot in.
So while the British public transport system is admittedly excellent when compared to those of Yemen and Nepal, most other Western European countries (and some Eastern European ones) make it look like the overpriced, unreliable crap that it really is.
"They would much rather have EPO create new case law without debate and without those pesky MPs."
The European Courts don't use an English Common Law system of precedents, so so there is no such thing as "new case law". ECJ Judges will often use prior decisions as a basis for their opinions, but are in no way obliged to, so the fact that one group of judges interpreted laws in a particular way doesn't mean that a different set of judges will do so. One can therefore have a situation where one software patent is upheld while another similar one gets rejected on the grounds that software patents aren't valid due to the fact that two panels of judges interpret the spirit of the existing laws differently.
"With your latest response I see our dialog as being driven from two vantage points. Yours is more scientifically informed and explanitory. Mine is more speculative, muddled, and drives to a point less concerned with empirical truth than how we should look at it."
We're both speculating, because while evidence for Big Bang itself is supported by (a growing body of) observational data, what led up to it is essentially educated guesswork, and if Hawking is correct, always will be because no information from before Big Bang can ever reach us. The theory we were discussing is therefore just one of several, not all of which assume a singularity (there are various problems with singularities which lead to some cosmologists favouring models that don't require them).
"We remove aspects of the universe until there's nothing left -- no matter, no forces, no space, no time. We could just as easily call this the uncosmos or nullverse rather than perfect vacuum."
As I said previously, it's called the perfect vacuum because it behaves like one, although I didn't say in what way. Despite the fact that the perfect vacuum had no matter or _free_ energy, it still had the energy baseline or "ground state", the so-called "zero point" energy that's popularly bandied about by pseudo-scientists who have no idea what it actually is (put simply, it's the lowest possible energy level that one can have, i.e. what's left over after all energy has been removed. You can't have less energy than the baseline, but this baseline isn't actually zero, despite being the "absolute zero" for energy). The theory states that this zero point energy caused the vacuum fluctuations which produced the singularity.
"After all, cosmologists are physicists too"
Only if you regard theoretical physics and physics as the same field, which is akin to saying that organic chemistry and biology are the same field.
"Here's where philosophic queries come into play. The pragmatic difference between the comologists perfect vacuum and the philosophers nothingness is that the former instantaneously spawns a nacent universe so long as the math and theory are correct."
The perfect vacuum spawned a singularity which then expanded into the universe. However, there is no implication that this would always happen in the perfect vacuum, or that it was instantaneous; all that the theory says is that it happened once, and that there wasn't any space-time. There is very important difference between space-time not existing and something being instantaneous!
"The analogy is pretty gross but it illustrates what I mean by saying the universe didn't come from nothing and simply started. The alternative is a perfect vacuum or nothingness that can, uh, remain in its state of non-existance."
There's nothing in the theory to suggest that a perfect vacuum will always produce singularities, or that this perfect vacuum was the only one. They don't occupy any space or time, so there could have been an infinite number of them overlaid on one another, only one of which produced the singularity that became our universe.
"First line of the Wikipedia article on...."
Wikipedia is no more a reference than what's scrawled on the walls of a public toilet is a reference.
"CO2 may not be a pollutant in the common sense (it obscures vision) but it is a poison to people in sufficient quantities"
Something that suffocates air breathing animals if you replace air with it isn't a poison, unless one counts drowning or suffocating due to being buried alive as being poisoned.
"But under your plan what do you do if you don't get an election with > 50% choosing a candidate for decades? Does the incumbent stay in power?"
You form an emergency coalition like Britain did in WWII, when elections were suspended. Ministerial posts are given to those who are best suited to them, irrespective of what party they belong to, and the hope of getting their party elected gives them an incentive to do a good job. Prime ministers / presidents can rotate in six month increments between each of the prospective candidates until one of the parties gets elected (if indeed they do). If the public either likes the temporary system so much that they decide not to vote anybody into power, or keeps it because they hate everyone, then so be it -- that's democracy in action.
"Depending on how much I needed the job and how good the job was, I've done things that were unquestionably wrong. It was easier to live with since it wasn't my decision, since my supervisor was forcing my hand, since the alternative was unemployment."
Translation: I could have done the right thing, but instead decided to act in a way that was beneficial to myself. This is OK, because somebody else told me to do it.
"If the tech sector collapses again and I find myself doing tech support again (Please, no! not a 3rd time!) I may well find myself in that unpleasant situation again."
If my own comforts must be obtained by depriving others of theirs, then so be it, because the good of one outweighs the good of many. It will of course be OK, because somebody else will be telling me to do it.
"Mandatory voting combined with a preferential voting system would make the US a much better nation IMO."
Mandatory voting is only acceptable if one of the options is "none of the above", and if this is what most people select, then other elections have to be held with entirely different candidates, until the public finally accepts one of them.
IMO a rather better system would be one where any election in which less than 51% of the eligible population bothers to vote is assumed to be a case of "none of the above", and therefore becomes invalid. This would make not voting into a valid protest against all the candidates, thereby preventing situations where countries are governed by somebody who only 15% of the population voted for, which is lamentably common in most so-called "democracies".
"Sadly, America has gone to war about every 20 years. Since the time of reagan, that has changed to about every 4 years. "
... God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion; what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms."
The problem is that they've been going to war with the wrong people. Thomas Jefferson, a notably wise American, once said:
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
"It is much easier to fight corruption in a smaller country, then it is to fight it in a nation as large as America"
That's nothing more than a convenient excuse. People in the US know who the corrupt people are and where they live, so they can hang the bastards from lamp posts just as easily as people in a smaller country can -- all they need is the will to do so. Two quotes sum up the reasons why corruption is endemic in nations that call themselves free democracies:
"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too." -- Somerset Maugham
"The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first, the love of soft living and the get rich quick theory of life." -- Teddy Roosevelt
"Blu-ray sells to the consumer who already has a substantial investment in HDTV."
Blu-ray sells to the consumer whose investment in HDTV was for a system with HDMI that works properly. Those with HDMI are a subset of the people who substantially invested in HDTV, and HDMI that actually works properly is owned by a subset of that subset.
"You keep buying DVDs until you find out that the new movies are not brought out on DVD anymore. Or even the old movies."
They won't stop releasing A-list titles on DVD until one of the two HD formats displaces it in terms of installed base, and that won't start to happen until there are cheap Chinese imports that rival the cost of DVD players. Media companies have shareholders who expect to see some returns on their investments, and they'd go apeshit if the board decided to ignore 90% of their potential market to serve the 10% who have a system with better DRM. It will also piss off hire companies, each of whom both buys large numbers of A-list titles, and pays more for them than consumers do.
"Really, what gave you the impression that freedom of choice actually exists, in this world that is lead by corporate america?"
Corporate America has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders, who can take legal action against a board of directors acts in ways that are demonstrably prejudicial to their investment.
"you reference the universe in toto to explain a "more perfect" type of "perfect vacuum" that didn't exist "in the universe" because it lacked space too"
You seem to have misunderstood what I wrote. My point was that the perfect vacuum which produced the singularity _cannot_ exist in the universe, so definitions of "perfect vacuum" which include space are fine for physicists, but not cosmologists.
"Apparently, the lack of space is a triffling difference and once it's eliminated it doesn't exist in the universe?"
Space always exists in the universe, hence the fact that physicists (who deal with the universe) define perfect vacuums in terms of it. However, the perfect vacuum that produced the singularity didn't exist in the universe because there wasn't any universe, so there wasn't any space as we understand the term.
"I think we should let "perfect vacuum" refer to what we want inside particle accelerators and find some other name for what came "before" or simply provided for the "cosmic egg" or sigularity. If the universe as it was at time zero is qualifiable then we should turn to something more mathematic and philosophic. Otherwise we end up squabbling over misunderstandable names."
They're only problematic to people from outside the fields in question. Scientists are quite accustomed to different fields using the same term for different things, so they aren't in the least confused by the fact that the cosmological "perfect vacuum" is subtly different from the one used in particle physics.
"we shouldn't talk of the universe being created out of nothing. There is simply the universe with its existance which started."
The universe came from the singularity (if one ascribes to that particular cosmological idea), and the singularity came from a vacuum fluctuation that occurred in a point with no dimensions. No dimensions and no mass is a pretty good description of nothing.
"Like negative numbers, nothingness must exist conceptually."
Cosmologists who support the theory we are debating postulate that it existed physically, not just conceptually, and in fact still does beyond the boundaries of the universe. The problem most people have when thinking about Big Bang is that they imagine the universe expanding into some form of "space" that already existed, whereas Big Bang, based on general relativity, states that space itself is expanding, and therefore did not exist until Big Bang, and does not exist beyond the universe's periphery. They'd be the first to admit that they could well be wrong, but the fact that they already know it's counter-intuitive means that arguments based on intuition won't be regarded as proof of this.
"I'm being only slightly pedantic by exclaiming that a perfect vacuum is something. It's space without matter no different than the space between a hydrogen nucleus and its electron".
It's space without matter _in the current universe_, but this does not mean that a perfect vacuum requires a universe (and therefore space), hence the fact that the perfect vacuum cosmologists envisage "before" the singularity was more perfect than any vacuum that can exist in the universe because it not only lacked matter and free energy, but also space.
"I did not mean to restrict the agnosticism question to God only, as you seem to think--I have no problem expanding it to include the Absolute (or "reality" as you say)."
Quote from your original post, which was in answer to something Kaffeine wrote:
"Agnosticism is a philosophical position that God is unknown and/or inherently unknowable."
This was my reply, which started this whole debate:
"It is you who is incorrect. The term "agnostic" was invented by T. H. Huxley, and (to use your own canard) in layman's terms, can be described as "Don't claim it if you can't explain it". Huxley did not restrict this to religious matters, but also scientific ones, because he was just as dismayed by those who accept laws and theories because they are based on some "authority", or for their conformance with a preconceived world view, as he was with religions that expect people to believe in them for precisely the same reasons.
"It is quite commonly agreed among philosophers that his definition is not the correct use of the term."
Claiming that philosophers commonly agree on anything is absurd. It would therefore be more accurate to say that some philosophers use the term in ways that are different from Huxley, while others don't.
"See my quote of Stein, later, for more on this."
Stein is obviously biased, as is proven by his assertion that Robert Flint (who he agrees with) summed things up correctly, while Bertrand Russell is merely one of "a few people" who have used the term as Huxley defined it.
"Please explain where in there it supports your definition that has lack of evidence at the core of the definition."
I did not claim this, Kaffeine did. Given that my whole point is that Huxleys' use of the term is definitive, I fail to see how you could possibly imagine that I would say otherwise.
It seems that the rest of your post is an attempt to answer Kaffeine, and not me, because just about everything you're including supports my original contention that Huxley's definition of agnosticism as a general view of the nature of reality is indeed correct. If you want to debate Kaffeine's views, then please do so with him / her, because neither Huxley nor I agree with them.
"Ahh, but a perfect vacuum is space (something) with nothing in it!"
I fail to see why nothing requires any space to not exist in.
"I think you are overestimating the European / British cell markets."
Agreed. As somebody who has lived his entire life in two European countries, and spent significant amounts of time in several others, I can heartily attest to the fact that the image European Slashdotters project of a continent filled to the brim with discerning people is utter tripe. The average European watches garbage reality shows and dreadful home-grown drama and action series that make the US-sourced stuff we get look like works of genius by comparison, listens to shitty throwaway music, and is just as likely (and in some countries, a lot more likely) to be driven by marketing hype and faddishness as his or her US counterpart. 95% of the people who use cell phones here haven't even heard of 3G, and most of the remaining 5% would give an answer like "It's something on phones that's supposed to be good, but costs a lot", so they won't even know the iPhone doesn't have it, because they'll never ask for it.
So the continent that's the home of vastly overpriced luxuries like haute couture, nouveu cuisine, and brands such as Gucci, Chanel, Lambourghini, and Rolex will jump all over the iPhone if Apple can convince them them that it's _the_ think to have.
"Ultimately, I'm trying to argue that there's no such thing as nothingness."
Current cosmology postulates that there was indeed a period of absolute nothingness (i.e. a perfect vacuum) that produced the singularity by a process know as vacuum fluctuation. If you search for authoritative sources on the web, be warned: the singularity's lack of space is positively intuitive when compared with virtual chaos and virtual particles!
"This does essentially agree with your explanation of Huxley's view. However, his having invented the term does not make his view authoritative."
I really do hope this is an attempt at a joke, because claiming that the person who invented a term and clearly defined it in several published works isn't authoritative is a mind- bogglingly silly thing to say.
"Agnosticism is a formal, philosophical term which means what I had written previously"
Agnosticism is not a _formal_ philosophical term. It is a word word which T. H. Huxley invented one day to describe his own philosophy, which was synthesised from his readings of other philosophers such as Hume and Kant, just as some of Tolkien's invented terms were synthesised from his readings of Anglo-Saxon and other Germanic mythologies. Claiming that either man isn't _the_ authority on the meaning of the words they invented is absurd.
""Real definition" is an interesting term; I suppose it depends what you mean by that"
The real definition of an invented word is the one that it's inventor gave it.
"Philosophical dictionaries almost universally do not contain the definition you speak of, and respected dictionaries such as merriam-webster prefer the one I've mentioned"
I hope you realise that dictionaries are simply records of common usage, not one-stop sources for the truth, hence the fact that they frequently contradict one another on both spellings and definitions. I for example have included links later on in this document that include a dictionary of philosophy which doesn't agree with your definition (and could doubtless have found several others if I'd bothered to look further).
"The hypothetical opinion of one man who invented the term is not really relevant"
A lot of sources seem to agree with my position that it's vitally relevant.
"The etymology of a word is interesting, but it doesn't determine the definition."
This is true for words that came into the English language via largely unknown routes whose definitions can only be arrived at by examining common usage at different historic periods. We do however have a very precise record of when "agnostic" entered the language, and also copious amounts of published material from its inventor describing its meaning, so your claim is at best an eloquent attempt to grasp at straws.
(some links)
The only source you provide that isn't a laughable single line of text that make the dictionaries i used at infant school look like the Complete Oxford is the Catholic Forum. It is thus interesting to note that their definition agrees with Huxley's (and therefore mine). Quote:
"A philosophical theory that it is impossible to arrive at a knowledge of reality, either because it is of its nature unknowable or because the human mind is unable to apprehend it. _Its chief use_ is to deny that human reason can arrive at a knowledge of God and some truths of religion." (emphasis mine). There is a big difference between "its chief use" and "it is defined as".
I shall now supply some links of my own. Please note that none of these refer to simplistic single lines of text masquerading as definitions:
1. The Catholic Encyclopaedia (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01215c.htm) contains an excellent treatment on agnosticism, having several definitions of the term. They distinguish between agnosticism as a philosophy (a la Huxley), and theological / religious agnosticism, which are the ones you're trying to claim are the entirety of agnosticism.
2. Interdisciplinary Enclyclopedia of Religion And Science (http://www.disf.org/en/Voci/1.asp). Again, an extremely detailed treatment which shows that agnosticism is not only about gods and religions, but the nature of reality itself.
3. The Philosophical Dictionary (http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/a2.htm). Quote:
"agnosticism
Belief that human beings do not have sufficient evidence to warrant either the affirmation or the denial of a proposition. The term is used especia
"Yes, accounting for contemporary physics and cosmology we can work backwards to a certain point that's amazingly (preposterously) specific and say there was a time zero, then a mystery, then (1x10^-43 seconds, right?) a Big Bang and the arrival of Time and Space. Why is this considered the birth of the Universe out of nowhere?"
Because, as I said previously, the fact that there was no space until the singularity exploded means that the term "where" had no meaning, ergo the singularity had no where and was thus nowhere, and than space happened, at which point nowhere became somewhere. Thus, it is perfectly correct to say space and time came from nowhere (and nowhen), because there was no where or when before Big Bang.
"So let's skip the Science and point out that you're assuming our somethingness appeared out of a nothingness"
The only problem with this is that I'm not assuming it came from "no thing", only "no where", and "no when", hence the fact that this is what my post talked about. It is you who is assuming this is what I meant -- I said nothing remotely like it.
"Claiming it's literaly true that Time and Space appeared out of nowhere would be like claiming it's literally true that one can't fly a plane off the edge of the East"
It's actually more like trying to say how hot three miles is. The term "where" expresses one's position in terms of something else _in space_, e.g. "Where am I? 5 miles NE of Calcutta". Because the singularity had one dimension, there was no space for it to exist in, so concepts that are defined in terms of both space and the existence of more than one point within it are completely nonsensical.
"However there are still two common uses of the word: existence god is not knowable, or existence of god is not known (discussed here)."
The first sentence in the Wikipedia entry is wrong, because the "Gnostic" part of agnostic refers to Gnosticism rather than gnosis, i.e. those who claim to have knowledge about that which is mysterious. This is clear from Huxley's writings on the subject:
"So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "agnostic". It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant"
This confusion about the derivation of the term has led to the common misperception of what agnosticism is, because an agnostic isn't a person who doesn't know, but is someone who does not claim to have any knowledge of, or belief in, things that cannot currently be known.
N.B: I stopped reading at that first sentence, as it's hard to take any article which begins with such an obviously erroneous statement seriously.
"Theism refers to a belief in god, whereas agnosticism speaks to the question of knowledge, or the truth about a belief"
This quote from Huxley's, "Agnosticism: A Symposium" makes it quite clear that what you are saying is incorrect:
"... Thus it will be seen that I have a sort of patent right in "Agnostic" (it is my trade mark); and I am entitled to say that I can state authentically what was originally meant by Agnosticism....
1. Agnosticism is of the essence of science, whether ancient or modern. It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe.
2. Consequently Agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the greater part of anti-theology. On the whole, the "bosh" of heterodoxy is more offensive to me than that of orthodoxy, because heterodoxy professes to be guided by reason and science, and orthodoxy does not."
"I therefore maintain anyone who says "I don't know if god exists, but I believe that he does on faith" is both a theist and an agnostic."
Please see above, because one cannot be a theist and an agnostic any more than one can be an atheist and an agnostic, because agnosticism is antithetical to having any firm opinion on topics that cannot be proven or falsified.
"Please elaborate. Given the definition of agnostic in that essay, I don't see anything glaryingly contradictory when compared to what you quoted above."
This part:
"Agnosticism and gnosticism are dealing with knowledge, i.e., knowing or not knowing"
An incorrect definition of gnosticism leads to an incorrect definition of agnosticism, and the rest of the article builds its arguments around this incorrect definition. Gnosticism isn't "knowing", but claiming to have knowledge of that which is currently both unknown and unknowable; agnosticism is a negation of this, i.e. a recognition of the fact that the only reasonable and logical statement one can make about something that is both unknown and unknowable is that we don't know anything about it!
Embezzlers are dreamers too. They dream of free money, and all those others whose dreams of free money will lead to them giving free money to the embezzler.