in both places, I was talking about the philosophical reason they continue to be supported
And I think I was addressing why these are NOT the only reasons they are still supported.
The triplet from the DoI was based on Locke! WOW!!! I really fucking didn't know that!
I apologize. From your comments, I thought you were probably a teenager, and might not know. Clearly, your intellect is in some sense ahead of your social skills. I congratulate you. Anyway, since it is better to let children have their temper tantrums alone, I am done here.
Also, property rights aren't a way to reward those who produce and bring things to market. They are a way to distribute goods and stimulate production.
I don't think this is a very accurate statement. Property rights go back to before Biblical times, and tend to have more complex justification than a way to distribute goods and stimulate production. My guess is that most Americans, and certainly most American conservatives, would say that you have a God given right to property. The Declaration of Independence talks about God given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but this was cribbed from Smith (or Locke? I can't remember for sure) who actually wrote about God given rights to life, liberty, and property.
Property rights have an historical context that patent rights are probably lacking.
> Ah, gotta love that kind of reasoning, "we've always done it this way, so it's the only way it can be done, > and if you oppose doing it this way, you must want it to fail."
I don't think I said that you wanted scientific research to fail. I did claim that you seemed to say that your posts seem to claim that pure research funding will be OK, and that their justification for that claim is a string of pre-20th century discoveries. I guess I don't know how else to interpret your posts.
In any case, I don't think that my post warrants your rather caustic reply. Perhaps my post didn't read with the rather mild tone that I intended, but may I suggest that if you react so strongly to disagreements with your opinions, your blood pressure is better off if you do not post them.
> Let me just give a bit of advice: those who don't know their opponent's arguments, don't really understand their own. This is probably true, but I can't read your mind, only your posts.
> There is serious potential for advancement in our knowledge of biology and the practical > applications of it and it will happen regardless of whether or not the government funds it.
> Your claim is that only the government is capable of "basic research", and private organizations can't do that.
So let me get this straight- you want us to cut government funding from basic research, which has been the norm for the last half century at least, and your argument for why it will be OK rests on telling us we will go back go the rate of scientific advance during the enlightenment. I for one prefer the rate of scientific and medical progress we experienced from 1950-2006 rather than from 1750-1806. Perhaps you think I am building a strawman and cannot make this comparison, and perhaps you might be right, but then your examples of Newton and Mendel are similarly irrelevant at best.
In any case, private companies do contribute to pure research funding already. They pay taxes. I am not a CEO, but with all the talk of large companies fighting to keep focus on their business interests, my guess is that most companies would rather pay taxes and let the government worry about who does what pure research, and keep their own money for research that has more immediate profit and business opportunity associated with it. (Of course, if they are getting large government subsidies to do that research, that is a different matter, but I don't think this is what you had in mind.)
The question is not "would the research get done." I suppose if you wait long enough, and the research will get done, provided the babarians don't ride in from the hills, and burn down your library, so to say. The much more relevant question is "what is the best way to get research done." The status quo is government funding, and it has worked extraordinarily well over the last half century. Call me a conservative, but I don't know why you would want to mess with that. But to be fair, I don't think you said you wanted to, exactly.
I think that Lucas's theorem is the most famous argument for this. Maybe its the only one. This isn't my specialty, and I don't really know what I'm talking about here. Here is a web page that gives a summary of the argument, and claims to refutes it, so the person who wrote the page thinks he knows what he is talking about. His page references a few published works, so maybe he even does.
I don't know if these credit card companies are legally liable for this sort of identity theft, but they should be. If they are going to make money putting us all at risk for identity theft, they should pay for any damages we incure, including any inconvenience it causes us. Ditto for all these companies that collect data on us.
More and more, the PS3 is reminding me of the ADAM computer. For those who don't remember, it was the successor to the colecovision video game system, and it was going to be both a video game system, AND an affordable home computer system. Unfortunately, it tried to do too many things, didn't do enough of them well enough for the money, and flopped. (Also, the controllers attached to the SIDE of the main box, so that when you pulled them out, little kid that you were, you broke the machine.) Anyway, these similarities may only be superficial, but a much better comparison may be the LISA computer by apple. We will see...
I think that we may be seeing the echoes of European and American imperialism and racism here. Over the past few centuries, the West certainly has historically exploited and looked down upon the East, and I can only imagine that Western crowing about the virtue of Western style human rights must be a bitter pill for China to take, all the more so because in this case the West is right, or largely right.
I'm no expert either, but as I understand it, three major things contributed to the cultural decline of Islam: 1) the Crusades; 2) the Mongol invasion; 3) Muslim thelogical and philosophical rejection of the Greeks in favor of religious orthodoxy. Of course, you also have the Turks, and European Imperalism, but those came later. Western Europe, on the other hand, avoided invasion by Islam (southern Spain excepted) with a few key historical battles, was protected from the Mongols by Eastern Europe (especially Russia), and by Islam, and later from the Turks by Eastern Europe. Western Europe was also reintroduced to Aristotle through Islam, accepted him theologically, and this in part allowed it to eventually give birth to the Enlightenment, eg science among other things.
Makes you wonder if 100 years from now, after display technology has moved on to God-knows-what, people think LC technology primarily as some sort of biotechnology, sort of like we think of the radar device in our microwave as being primarily a cooking device, or the mirror as a safety device in cars. Then the moment is over, and you post whatever your view is on the personhood of embryonic stem cells.
Many, many comments focus on how silly this article is, the posters implying or outright stating that if they had a terminal disease, they would quit everything and go live on a tropical island for the rest of their days, or something like it. I think these posts show a very poor appreciation of death. I am still young, and don't think I have a good appreciation of death either, but my impression is that one of the really crappy things about death is that its not, eg, trumpets playing in the background while the fallen hero captain kirk slowly exits, stage left, after having saved billions of lives one last time. Instead death is telling your spouse where you put the phone bill while you still can, or having to choose whether the funeral is on Friday or Saturday, and deciding whether to have a graveside service with all the rain. Death is not dramatic, it is pedestrian. This article reflects this fact, which probably makes it terrifying, but not "retarded", or any of the other pejorative adjectives I have seen used.
The money would also go into propping up organized crime. The original prohibition gave us the Mafia. The ban on marijuana/cocain/heroin has given us the South American based organized crime groups. Etc.
I'm not sure the GP was suggesting we ban alcohol and cigarettes, but its always funny to me that in the US that we can't have, eg, higher taxes to help the poor get medical bills, because people who earn their money should get to keep it, and its not the government's job to take care of every person anyway- a person has to take personal responsibility. However, as soon as those lightly taxed people want to spend their money on something that offends the US's historical puritan sensibilities, like marijuana or alcohol, then their money isn't theirs to spend on what they want to anymore, and the government must come to their rescue, either with a ban or with heavy taxes, to keep people from harming themselves with something that may be (if used too much), in the very long run, bad for their health.
Let's grant for a moment that the literal Rapture will come, perhaps right out of the "Left Behind" books. Even so, isn't it sort of silly to worry about RFID? Won't getting the mark of the "Beast" have to accompany some sort of decision that you know has religious weight behind it, in the sense you know you aren't just choosing to buy and sell, but to "pay" for the privilege of buying and selling by following the beast. In other words, you don't have to worry about Satan doing the equivalent of, say, hiding at the county fair, and substituting his "666" for the stamp they give you to let leave to get lunch and then come back, right? Perhaps this is supposed to be interesting as technology that would allow the Beast to, uh, do his thing, but when all you really need is tatoo technology that has been around for thousands of years to mark people with "666", how is it interesting in that way either? In any case, we should all welcome the Rapture. If believing the Bible more or less literally is all that is going to get me eternal salvation, I know I for one would rather go ahead and have the tiny demon flies come now, so that I know to change my mind, instead of after I'm dead when it's too late. All the same, my guess is this has real political implications. For example, I think a lot of conservative Christians dislike the UN in part because they think it may eventually be the tool of the Antichrist.
I just don't know why anyone would ever call it a "pack mule" when its real name, "BigDog", is so much cooler.
Also, did anyone watch the movie of BigDog? It looks really creepy, actually. I guess I was subconsciously expecting to see, oh I don't know, a big robotic dog, maybe Bell from "Bell and Sebastion" with metal instead of fur. Intead BigDog looks more like something you would frantically blow away in Starship Troopers before it rips your head off with its long insect-like legs. If I had one, I think I'd want to attach something to it that looks like a little like a head, at least. When they kick it, and it moves its legs to keep from falling over, I squirm. It's like it's ALMOST alive, but not quite.
Yes, but Christianity theology is based heavily on Plato, and later Aristotle, which science owes a lot to. Yes, the West was reintroduced to the Greeks through Islam, but it was theologians and philosophers, not scientists, who were introduced. Historically, the courage that scientific inquiry would find some sort of answer in an ordered world grew in part out of faith in a creator. Kepler famously believed the Sun should be at the center of the solar system because he found it a fitting place for God to live. The Catholic Church has, in general, been a great patron of both the arts and of the sciences. Galileo found the Church at a bad time, when it was politically reeling from the Reformation. In fact, Copernicus published his theory with the blessing of the Church, which makes the persecution of Galileo all the more historically interesting.
My personal inclination is that embryos are not individuals, and that embryonic stem cell research should continue. However, the personhood of an embryo is not a scientific question. It is rather a philosophical and ethical conclusion drawn from scientific facts. How can people who turn to religion to help them answer philosophical and ethics questions be violating the separation of church and state? What else do you expect them to do? We haven't passed a law that lets the Pope decide whether stem cell research should be allowed. The power still lies with the people.
I think this comment does distinguish between science and ideology, or at least between science and ethics. The statement did equate stem cell research with "breeding our own kind for parts" without any sort of justification, but this is different from, say, claiming "the laws of thermodynamics makes evolution impossible." There is a definite answer as to whether thermodynamics makes evolution impossible. There is not a definite answer as to whether stem cell research is ethical. Blurring these two lines is part of what creates the whole "creationism-as-science" debacle. Please, let's not further blur this line! The ethics of stem cell research, genetic engineering, etc are exactly the types of issues that the science community should reach outside itself for input on.
> The private sector doesn't want to invest in this. That should speak volumes about even the scientific > community's faith (pardon the pun) in embrionic stem cell research.
Just because the private sector doesn't want to invest in it doesn't mean that its not promising. My understanding is that embryonic stem cell research is still pure research (frankly, thats pretty much all I know about it.) The private sector doesn't tend to fund pure research directly; they do it with the rest of us, through the government.
I don't remember exactly what the numbers were, but as I recall this proposition passed in CA by a large margin. Even if it has to be passed again, I think it will be. This will be at most a temporary setback.
Remember, the alternative was not between a bill being introduced, or not introduced- it was between whether or not there would be a democratic debate on this at all. There is no use getting mad at the recording industry for wanting this. It is in its nature. You might as well get angry at the sun for setting at the end of each day. Congress is another matter entirely. But this is the way it is supposed to work. The RIAA represents American citizens that have a right to have their voices heard, the same as the rest of us do. The point is to not waste time ranting about the RIAA, which isn't productive (although boycotting their goods is productive), but rather to (politely) rant to your representatives in Congress how mad you will be at them if a law like this is passed. They care a lot more than the RIAA does if you, and people like you, are angry at them. The fact of the matter is that the RIAA is only entitled to as much of a "balance" as it has the congressional votes to support.
They had intelligence on some of the people on those planes, right? What went wrong was something else. Bad luck, bad administration, I don't know what it was, but it seems like the Patriot act is more of a distraction than anything else, and an almost hypocritical one at that- we tell our young adults to go die for our ideals, and then are willing to throw them away at home to marginally improve our own safety. In any case, Katrina shows how woefully ill prepared our government is for a disaster they know about days in advance. Not to mention the fact that from what I can tell from his response to criticism about these warrentless wiretaps, my President seems to claim he can do what ever he wants to since we are in a state of war, so I don't see why we he thinks we need the Patriot Act. As a bonus, I would guess I'm made safer by wearing my seatbelt than by the patriot act anyway- ~ 40,000 people die in auto accidents every year. But then, that's different, because I have a much better illusion of control when I drive than when a couple dozen nut jobs decide to crash planes into a building.
> Now, if you focus solely on a system in its transient state, then > you can simultaneously cool one part and heat another, but you can't > keep that up indefinitely.
The planet is, what, 4 billion years old. I'm not expert on this, but for the sake of argument, I would guess that the timescale of a "transient state" of the planet could be thousands of millions of years. In any case, the Earth is of course not a thermodynamically closed system, which complicates applying the laws of thermodynamics, and we do have planet-wide insulation- the atmosphere is not entirely uniform, and the ground and water confuse everything as well. Just as an example, look at the moon. As I recall, the surface facing the sun is very, very hot, while that away from teh sun is very, very cool since there is no atmosphere to insulate the surface. I don't know if a doomsday scenario is possible where the planet has different areas warm and cool, but you sure can't argue that it obviously can't happen from the principles of thermodynamics. In fact, in my experience, very few things are obvious from the principles of thermodynamics:-).
I think I need to use a little bit different language. I'm not trying to say that religious belief is necessarily baseless. There is good religion and bad religion, and I do think that in a sense religion does use models, which it enhances or abandons over time. However, science is by its nature a much more limited enterprise than religion. For example, the Big Bang tries to tell us what relics of the very beginning of the world we can still see. Christianity tries to relate the very beginning of the world with the value of the human soul, with whether people should steal, and with what you and I should do with our lives. The latter is a much bigger undertaking. It can be dangerous to confuse the former with the latter.
As you point out, science doesn't give us morality. You bring up that what I call assumptions may as well be faith. What I have been trying to say is that for the scientist in his/her lab, it doesn't matter. All that matters are predictable results. Now, you seem to say that faith does matter, and that's true. But not to a scientist in the lab. Neither faith, nor social responsibility, nor the value of the human soul. Science is a cold pursuit of more predictions. (Of course, outside the lab, a scientist is also a human being, and these things hopefully matter very much, and whether we want certain labs to exist at all is a very good question.) Now, you may say that science is not justified without faith. Again to the scientist, this doesn't matter. You can say that it matters. Fine. This is no longer a debate, because the scientist doesn't care, at least not the positivist scientist you seemed to represent earlier. He won't even argue with you.
The question is whether you really want to say that this scientist, in his cold, amoral lab, is more or less identical to the priest. I am reminded of the story of Moses in genesis, when God allows Moses to perform miracles to try to convince the Pharoah to let the Jews out of slavery, but he is not convinced, in part because his magicians can perform "miracles" too. Of course, the magicians are not really like Moses at all, because Moses's miracles are an expression of divine will, while the magicians simply reflect the will of the Pharoah. I think that to say that science and religion are the same is to make the same mistake that the Pharoah did. Scientists are like the magicians, who are good at their jobs because they perform "miracles", which in turn are just reflections of quite imperfect human will. We don't expect them to be any more, but we also must not forget they are any more. Priests and ministers, like Moses, are good at their jobs when they reflect divine will, regardless of whether miracles are involved at all. To forget this is to risk making the the scientists becoming our priests and ministers, which they are not qualified for.
> There are no differences- for instance, in the Pacific Northwest, my own Kwakiutal relatives had the laws of > areodynamics figured out for the last 5000 years. Why didn't they build airplanes? Because they saw no use in > it other than for toys. As I've said, I don't know anything about your Kwakiutal relatives, but I think its a little ridiculous to say that the only thing standing between someone building a plane and building that plane is the will to do so.
> But you're actually not willing to let one class of philosophers argue about it- legal philosophers. > No, there you get all huffy and fundamentalist all of a sudden. I can only assume you are referring to the article? First, I would hardly consider politicians or lawyers legal philosophers. And whether or not the constitutions prevents, say, creationism from being taught as science is a legal question concerning the 1st amendment which I don't understand very well. However, I do think that science class should teach what scientists by and large believe, and that evolution should not be singled out from other theories. To tell them that scientists are unsure of evolution is lying to them in my view. I also think it would be great if every person took a class on the philosophy of science. However, high school is probably too young to do it.
> The problem is, religion is also justified by empirical observation for the most part. Just a different set of > observations than you're familiar with. Private revelation is exactly that: empirical observation. But science is not justified by any kind of empirical observation, only by repeatable observation by different people. Personal relevation is inherently personal.
> However, my point is that human beings don't do anything on pure reason- FAITH IS ALWAYS INVOLVED AT SOME POINT. > Reject faith, and you reject everything. Your notion of "faith" seems to be interchangeable with my notion of "assumption." And yes, any sort of human thought seems to involve assumptions. This is still no reason to say "science is just another religion."
> If so, you've missed a key piece of Christian theology. But my point is that Einstien will never be known for > having the insight of the discovery of the laws of intertia- there can be only one first. Yes, Newton discovered his law of Gravity. However, Newton's law of gravity is not justified by the fact that Newton said it. Empirical observation justifies it. Jesus's statements are justified because he was divinely inspired/was divine (don't want to get too much into that theological distinction...) This is quite different. I don't understand how anyone can think they are the same. That Newton's made the argument for gravity first has nothing to do with it.
> Maybe not the Bible- but there is more to philosophy and religion than just the Bible. There is no reason at all > that a different model, a different myth, can't be used to create an airplane- after all, there is not that much > difference between an airplane and a boomerang, and the Australian natives came up with that one. I do not think the point is whether or not in principle some myth could explain how to build an airplane. The question is whether that myth is justified using the kind of rigorous, egalitarian, peer-reviewed methods of modern science or not, and if it does not use these methods for justification, whether the methods it DOES use have major differences.
Slashdot Mirror
in both places, I was talking about the philosophical reason they continue to be supported
And I think I was addressing why these are NOT the only reasons they are still supported.
The triplet from the DoI was based on Locke! WOW!!! I really fucking didn't know that!
I apologize. From your comments, I thought you were probably a teenager, and might not know. Clearly, your intellect is in some sense ahead of your social skills. I congratulate you. Anyway, since it is better to let children have their temper tantrums alone, I am done here.
Also, property rights aren't a way to reward those who produce and bring things to market. They are a way to distribute goods and stimulate production.
I don't think this is a very accurate statement. Property rights go back to before Biblical times, and tend to have more complex justification than a way to distribute goods and stimulate production. My guess is that most Americans, and certainly most American conservatives, would say that you have a God given right to property. The Declaration of Independence talks about God given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but this was cribbed from Smith (or Locke? I can't remember for sure) who actually wrote about God given rights to life, liberty, and property.
Property rights have an historical context that patent rights are probably lacking.
> Ah, gotta love that kind of reasoning, "we've always done it this way, so it's the only way it can be done,
> and if you oppose doing it this way, you must want it to fail."
I don't think I said that you wanted scientific research to fail. I did claim that you seemed to say that your posts seem to claim that pure research funding will be OK, and that their justification for that claim is a string of pre-20th century discoveries. I guess I don't know how else to interpret your posts.
In any case, I don't think that my post warrants your rather caustic reply. Perhaps my post didn't read with the rather mild tone that I intended, but may I suggest that if you react so strongly to disagreements with your opinions, your blood pressure is better off if you do not post them.
> Let me just give a bit of advice: those who don't know their opponent's arguments, don't really understand their own.
This is probably true, but I can't read your mind, only your posts.
> There is serious potential for advancement in our knowledge of biology and the practical
> applications of it and it will happen regardless of whether or not the government funds it.
> Your claim is that only the government is capable of "basic research", and private organizations can't do that.
So let me get this straight- you want us to cut government funding from basic research, which has been the norm for the last half century at least, and your argument for why it will be OK rests on telling us we will go back go the rate of scientific advance during the enlightenment. I for one prefer the rate of scientific and medical progress we experienced from 1950-2006 rather than from 1750-1806. Perhaps you think I am building a strawman and cannot make this comparison, and perhaps you might be right, but then your examples of Newton and Mendel are similarly irrelevant at best.
In any case, private companies do contribute to pure research funding already. They pay taxes. I am not a CEO, but with all the talk of large companies fighting to keep focus on their business interests, my guess is that most companies would rather pay taxes and let the government worry about who does what pure research, and keep their own money for research that has more immediate profit and business opportunity associated with it. (Of course, if they are getting large government subsidies to do that research, that is a different matter, but I don't think this is what you had in mind.)
The question is not "would the research get done." I suppose if you wait long enough, and the research will get done, provided the babarians don't ride in from the hills, and burn down your library, so to say. The much more relevant question is "what is the best way to get research done." The status quo is government funding, and it has worked extraordinarily well over the last half century. Call me a conservative, but I don't know why you would want to mess with that. But to be fair, I don't think you said you wanted to, exactly.
I think that Lucas's theorem is the most famous argument for this. Maybe its the only one. This isn't my specialty, and I don't really know what I'm talking about here. Here is a web page that gives a summary of the argument, and claims to refutes it, so the person who wrote the page thinks he knows what he is talking about. His page references a few published works, so maybe he even does.
s /lucas.html
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/g.mccaughan/g/remark
I don't know if these credit card companies are legally liable for this sort of identity theft, but they should be. If they are going to make money putting us all at risk for identity theft, they should pay for any damages we incure, including any inconvenience it causes us. Ditto for all these companies that collect data on us.
More and more, the PS3 is reminding me of the ADAM computer. For those who don't remember, it was the successor to the colecovision video game system, and it was going to be both a video game system, AND an affordable home computer system. Unfortunately, it tried to do too many things, didn't do enough of them well enough for the money, and flopped. (Also, the controllers attached to the SIDE of the main box, so that when you pulled them out, little kid that you were, you broke the machine.) Anyway, these similarities may only be superficial, but a much better comparison may be the LISA computer by apple. We will see...
I think that we may be seeing the echoes of European and American imperialism and racism here. Over the past few centuries, the West certainly has historically exploited and looked down upon the East, and I can only imagine that Western crowing about the virtue of Western style human rights must be a bitter pill for China to take, all the more so because in this case the West is right, or largely right.
I'm no expert either, but as I understand it, three major things contributed to the cultural decline of Islam: 1) the Crusades; 2) the Mongol invasion; 3) Muslim thelogical and philosophical rejection of the Greeks in favor of religious orthodoxy. Of course, you also have the Turks, and European Imperalism, but those came later. Western Europe, on the other hand, avoided invasion by Islam (southern Spain excepted) with a few key historical battles, was protected from the Mongols by Eastern Europe (especially Russia), and by Islam, and later from the Turks by Eastern Europe. Western Europe was also reintroduced to Aristotle through Islam, accepted him theologically, and this in part allowed it to eventually give birth to the Enlightenment, eg science among other things.
Makes you wonder if 100 years from now, after display technology has moved on to God-knows-what, people think LC technology primarily as some sort of biotechnology, sort of like we think of the radar device in our microwave as being primarily a cooking device, or the mirror as a safety device in cars. Then the moment is over, and you post whatever your view is on the personhood of embryonic stem cells.
Many, many comments focus on how silly this article is, the posters implying or outright stating that if they had a terminal disease, they would quit everything and go live on a tropical island for the rest of their days, or something like it. I think these posts show a very poor appreciation of death. I am still young, and don't think I have a good appreciation of death either, but my impression is that one of the really crappy things about death is that its not, eg, trumpets playing in the background while the fallen hero captain kirk slowly exits, stage left, after having saved billions of lives one last time. Instead death is telling your spouse where you put the phone bill while you still can, or having to choose whether the funeral is on Friday or Saturday, and deciding whether to have a graveside service with all the rain. Death is not dramatic, it is pedestrian. This article reflects this fact, which probably makes it terrifying, but not "retarded", or any of the other pejorative adjectives I have seen used.
You are clearly not mormon...
The money would also go into propping up organized crime. The original prohibition gave us the Mafia. The ban on marijuana/cocain/heroin has given us the South American based organized crime groups. Etc.
I'm not sure the GP was suggesting we ban alcohol and cigarettes, but its always funny to me that in the US that we can't have, eg, higher taxes to help the poor get medical bills, because people who earn their money should get to keep it, and its not the government's job to take care of every person anyway- a person has to take personal responsibility. However, as soon as those lightly taxed people want to spend their money on something that offends the US's historical puritan sensibilities, like marijuana or alcohol, then their money isn't theirs to spend on what they want to anymore, and the government must come to their rescue, either with a ban or with heavy taxes, to keep people from harming themselves with something that may be (if used too much), in the very long run, bad for their health.
Let's grant for a moment that the literal Rapture will come, perhaps right out of the "Left Behind" books. Even so, isn't it sort of silly to worry about RFID? Won't getting the mark of the "Beast" have to accompany some sort of decision that you know has religious weight behind it, in the sense you know you aren't just choosing to buy and sell, but to "pay" for the privilege of buying and selling by following the beast. In other words, you don't have to worry about Satan doing the equivalent of, say, hiding at the county fair, and substituting his "666" for the stamp they give you to let leave to get lunch and then come back, right? Perhaps this is supposed to be interesting as technology that would allow the Beast to, uh, do his thing, but when all you really need is tatoo technology that has been around for thousands of years to mark people with "666", how is it interesting in that way either? In any case, we should all welcome the Rapture. If believing the Bible more or less literally is all that is going to get me eternal salvation, I know I for one would rather go ahead and have the tiny demon flies come now, so that I know to change my mind, instead of after I'm dead when it's too late. All the same, my guess is this has real political implications. For example, I think a lot of conservative Christians dislike the UN in part because they think it may eventually be the tool of the Antichrist.
I just don't know why anyone would ever call it a "pack mule" when its real name, "BigDog", is so much cooler.
Also, did anyone watch the movie of BigDog? It looks really creepy, actually. I guess I was subconsciously expecting to see, oh I don't know, a big robotic dog, maybe Bell from "Bell and Sebastion" with metal instead of fur. Intead BigDog looks more like something you would frantically blow away in Starship Troopers before it rips your head off with its long insect-like legs. If I had one, I think I'd want to attach something to it that looks like a little like a head, at least. When they kick it, and it moves its legs to keep from falling over, I squirm. It's like it's ALMOST alive, but not quite.
Yes, but Christianity theology is based heavily on Plato, and later Aristotle, which science owes a lot to. Yes, the West was reintroduced to the Greeks through Islam, but it was theologians and philosophers, not scientists, who were introduced. Historically, the courage that scientific inquiry would find some sort of answer in an ordered world grew in part out of faith in a creator. Kepler famously believed the Sun should be at the center of the solar system because he found it a fitting place for God to live. The Catholic Church has, in general, been a great patron of both the arts and of the sciences. Galileo found the Church at a bad time, when it was politically reeling from the Reformation. In fact, Copernicus published his theory with the blessing of the Church, which makes the persecution of Galileo all the more historically interesting.
My personal inclination is that embryos are not individuals, and that embryonic stem cell research should continue. However, the personhood of an embryo is not a scientific question. It is rather a philosophical and ethical conclusion drawn from scientific facts. How can people who turn to religion to help them answer philosophical and ethics questions be violating the separation of church and state? What else do you expect them to do? We haven't passed a law that lets the Pope decide whether stem cell research should be allowed. The power still lies with the people.
I think this comment does distinguish between science and ideology, or at least between science and ethics. The statement did equate stem cell research with "breeding our own kind for parts" without any sort of justification, but this is different from, say, claiming "the laws of thermodynamics makes evolution impossible." There is a definite answer as to whether thermodynamics makes evolution impossible. There is not a definite answer as to whether stem cell research is ethical. Blurring these two lines is part of what creates the whole "creationism-as-science" debacle. Please, let's not further blur this line! The ethics of stem cell research, genetic engineering, etc are exactly the types of issues that the science community should reach outside itself for input on.
> The private sector doesn't want to invest in this. That should speak volumes about even the scientific
> community's faith (pardon the pun) in embrionic stem cell research.
Just because the private sector doesn't want to invest in it doesn't mean that its not promising. My understanding is that embryonic stem cell research is still pure research (frankly, thats pretty much all I know about it.) The private sector doesn't tend to fund pure research directly; they do it with the rest of us, through the government.
I don't remember exactly what the numbers were, but as I recall this proposition passed in CA by a large margin. Even if it has to be passed again, I think it will be. This will be at most a temporary setback.
Remember, the alternative was not between a bill being introduced, or not introduced- it was between whether or not there would be a democratic debate on this at all. There is no use getting mad at the recording industry for wanting this. It is in its nature. You might as well get angry at the sun for setting at the end of each day. Congress is another matter entirely. But this is the way it is supposed to work. The RIAA represents American citizens that have a right to have their voices heard, the same as the rest of us do. The point is to not waste time ranting about the RIAA, which isn't productive (although boycotting their goods is productive), but rather to (politely) rant to your representatives in Congress how mad you will be at them if a law like this is passed. They care a lot more than the RIAA does if you, and people like you, are angry at them. The fact of the matter is that the RIAA is only entitled to as much of a "balance" as it has the congressional votes to support.
They had intelligence on some of the people on those planes, right? What went wrong was something else. Bad luck, bad administration, I don't know what it was, but it seems like the Patriot act is more of a distraction than anything else, and an almost hypocritical one at that- we tell our young adults to go die for our ideals, and then are willing to throw them away at home to marginally improve our own safety. In any case, Katrina shows how woefully ill prepared our government is for a disaster they know about days in advance. Not to mention the fact that from what I can tell from his response to criticism about these warrentless wiretaps, my President seems to claim he can do what ever he wants to since we are in a state of war, so I don't see why we he thinks we need the Patriot Act. As a bonus, I would guess I'm made safer by wearing my seatbelt than by the patriot act anyway- ~ 40,000 people die in auto accidents every year. But then, that's different, because I have a much better illusion of control when I drive than when a couple dozen nut jobs decide to crash planes into a building.
> Now, if you focus solely on a system in its transient state, then
:-).
> you can simultaneously cool one part and heat another, but you can't
> keep that up indefinitely.
The planet is, what, 4 billion years old. I'm not expert on this, but for the sake of argument, I would guess that the timescale of a "transient state" of the planet could be thousands of millions of years. In any case, the Earth is of course not a thermodynamically closed system, which complicates applying the laws of thermodynamics, and we do have planet-wide insulation- the atmosphere is not entirely uniform, and the ground and water confuse everything as well. Just as an example, look at the moon. As I recall, the surface facing the sun is very, very hot, while that away from teh sun is very, very cool since there is no atmosphere to insulate the surface. I don't know if a doomsday scenario is possible where the planet has different areas warm and cool, but you sure can't argue that it obviously can't happen from the principles of thermodynamics. In fact, in my experience, very few things are obvious from the principles of thermodynamics
I think I need to use a little bit different language. I'm not trying to say that religious belief is necessarily baseless. There is good religion and bad religion, and I do think that in a sense religion does use models, which it enhances or abandons over time. However, science is by its nature a much more limited enterprise than religion. For example, the Big Bang tries to tell us what relics of the very beginning of the world we can still see. Christianity tries to relate the very beginning of the world with the value of the human soul, with whether people should steal, and with what you and I should do with our lives. The latter is a much bigger undertaking. It can be dangerous to confuse the former with the latter.
As you point out, science doesn't give us morality. You bring up that what I call assumptions may as well be faith. What I have been trying to say is that for the scientist in his/her lab, it doesn't matter. All that matters are predictable results. Now, you seem to say that faith does matter, and that's true. But not to a scientist in the lab. Neither faith, nor social responsibility, nor the value of the human soul. Science is a cold pursuit of more predictions. (Of course, outside the lab, a scientist is also a human being, and these things hopefully matter very much, and whether we want certain labs to exist at all is a very good question.) Now, you may say that science is not justified without faith. Again to the scientist, this doesn't matter. You can say that it matters. Fine. This is no longer a debate, because the scientist doesn't care, at least not the positivist scientist you seemed to represent earlier. He won't even argue with you.
The question is whether you really want to say that this scientist, in his cold, amoral lab, is more or less identical to the priest. I am reminded of the story of Moses in genesis, when God allows Moses to perform miracles to try to convince the Pharoah to let the Jews out of slavery, but he is not convinced, in part because his magicians can perform "miracles" too. Of course, the magicians are not really like Moses at all, because Moses's miracles are an expression of divine will, while the magicians simply reflect the will of the Pharoah. I think that to say that science and religion are the same is to make the same mistake that the Pharoah did. Scientists are like the magicians, who are good at their jobs because they perform "miracles", which in turn are just reflections of quite imperfect human will. We don't expect them to be any more, but we also must not forget they are any more. Priests and ministers, like Moses, are good at their jobs when they reflect divine will, regardless of whether miracles are involved at all. To forget this is to risk making the the scientists becoming our priests and ministers, which they are not qualified for.
> There are no differences- for instance, in the Pacific Northwest, my own Kwakiutal relatives had the laws of
> areodynamics figured out for the last 5000 years. Why didn't they build airplanes? Because they saw no use in
> it other than for toys.
As I've said, I don't know anything about your Kwakiutal relatives, but I think its a little ridiculous to say that the only thing standing between someone building a plane and building that plane is the will to do so.
> But you're actually not willing to let one class of philosophers argue about it- legal philosophers.
> No, there you get all huffy and fundamentalist all of a sudden.
I can only assume you are referring to the article? First, I would hardly consider politicians or lawyers legal
philosophers. And whether or not the constitutions prevents, say, creationism from being taught as science
is a legal question concerning the 1st amendment which I don't understand very well. However, I do think that
science class should teach what scientists by and large believe, and that evolution should not be singled out
from other theories. To tell them that scientists are unsure of evolution is lying to them in my view.
I also think it would be great if every person took a class on the philosophy of science. However,
high school is probably too young to do it.
> The problem is, religion is also justified by empirical observation for the most part. Just a different set of
> observations than you're familiar with. Private revelation is exactly that: empirical observation.
But science is not justified by any kind of empirical observation, only by repeatable observation by different people. Personal relevation is inherently personal.
> However, my point is that human beings don't do anything on pure reason- FAITH IS ALWAYS INVOLVED AT SOME POINT.
> Reject faith, and you reject everything.
Your notion of "faith" seems to be interchangeable with my notion of "assumption." And yes, any sort of human thought seems to involve assumptions. This is still no reason to say "science is just another religion."
> If so, you've missed a key piece of Christian theology. But my point is that Einstien will never be known for
> having the insight of the discovery of the laws of intertia- there can be only one first.
Yes, Newton discovered his law of Gravity. However, Newton's law of gravity is not justified by the fact that Newton said it. Empirical observation justifies it. Jesus's statements are justified because he was divinely inspired/was divine (don't want to get too much into that theological distinction...) This is quite different. I don't understand how anyone can think they are the same. That Newton's made the argument for gravity first has nothing to do with it.
> Maybe not the Bible- but there is more to philosophy and religion than just the Bible. There is no reason at all
> that a different model, a different myth, can't be used to create an airplane- after all, there is not that much
> difference between an airplane and a boomerang, and the Australian natives came up with that one.
I do not think the point is whether or not in principle some myth could explain how to build an airplane. The question is whether that myth is justified using the kind of rigorous, egalitarian, peer-reviewed methods of modern science or not, and if it does not use these methods for justification, whether the methods it DOES use have major differences.