We have managed to have a more or less nuanced discussion about AIDS, I think. There is no reason that we can't have a similar one on drugs, except of course that we can't:-). But for example, I know that if a male has unprotected heterosexual sex with an HIV positive woman, his chance of contracting hiv is something like 1/1000. For a woman with an hiv-positive man, its something like 1/200. For two men, ~1/50. So, if I am trying to convince my kid not to have unprotected sex, I can use these numbers. But what about if I don't want my kid to use LSD. As far as I can tell, there are NO convincing numbers. They may exist out there somewhere, but I can't find them. They certainly weren't told to me when I was in school. No, I was shown videos of kids smoking pot and slipping into comas. I wonder if anybody has EVER smoked a marijuana joint and slipped into a coma? I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't even happened once. No, we treat drug education more like the Mickey Mouse club than anything else. ("D-R-U-G-S will K-I-L-L you!) So I would think we could at least try to have the level of discourse that we have with AIDS.
How many recreation alcohol consumers kill children, fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters each year? Did the right to dominion over their own bodies also include a right over someone else's?
Certainly not. And this is, in my mind, the strongest argument to keep drugs such as crack illegal. But I wonder, how many people are killed each year by people due to their drug use, and how many people are killed each year by criminally inclined people who happen to take drugs. Also, how many people are killed by the illegal drug trade every year, meaning the process by which drugs are illegally created and distributed, a process that would no longer exist if those drugs were legal. Remember that the mafia grew up during Prohibition. Similarly, a lot of organized crime has grown up around the distribution of illegal drugs. Finally, its not clear how many users of, eg, crack we would have if drugs weren't illegal. During prohibition, hard liquor consumption went up, because hard liquor takes up less space than beer, and it is easier to smuggle. Similarly, in the 80s when police began to crack down on marijuana use, heroine and cocaine became much more popular, because it is much easier to smuggle. So it is possible that making these recreational drugs illegal actual encourages people to use more potent drugs. Of course, whether making some subclass of these drugs legal would discourage these now addicted people from using those same, harder drugs is a different question. Finally, any kind of drug legalization would presumably have to be accompanied by programs to help addicts. We would treat drug abuse as a disease, rather than a crime. Then I wonder how many people would still be committing crimes to get crack, when they could simply go to a shelter instead.
And before anyone starts in with "what about alcohol, its a drug!" or "what about cigarettes!" trying to turn my opinions around...ban them all. There are too many adverse effects to using any of them.
What about red meat? People can get away with vegetarian diets. Too much red meat will cause heart damage as surely as too much alcohol will damage your liver. And additionally, there is the argument that the animals raised for red meat consume food that is grown on land that could be used to grow food for starving people instead of for beef for overweight Americans. And why not ban tanning salons. And sodas- after all, all that sugar is bad for us. And all of the other things we do that are bad when not done in moderation, which I suppose includes just about everything. At the very least, banning red meat and sodas would seem to be the logical conclusion to your argument. I for one think there is something to be said for the government not messing with people, and just letting them live their lives like they want. Congress doesn't need to justify whether drinking alcohol is worth it for me- only I need to do that.
That's only the half of it. In this country, we have an attitude that medication can fix anything. Your kid can't pay attention- medicate him. You weigh too much- medicate yourself. Etc. I think maybe it comes from the recent success of medicine over the last few decades. In any case, right or wrong, it is difficult to present this class of drugs as the devil incarnate, while that class of drugs is the cure for whatever ails you. Combine this with the teenage feeling of invincibility, and you have teenagers doing things like sniffing freon and gasoline. Because when you are taught that drugs are poisons, but the message of society, as well as every other television commercial, is also that drugs are OK, then you start to think that maybe poisons are drugs, and that they are OK too. What we need is a sane approach to drug use in general.
Focus is not necessarily indicative of money spent, but I do remember that when Ashcroft first became attorney general, one of his major goals was to address "improper use of medicinal marijuana." In a lot of people's eyes, marijuana may not be as bad as heroin and crack, but it is playing in the same league. For example see: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1656481/p osts . So I'm not sure that the DEA does spend a lot more on cocaine than on weed.
In most cases, we don't need to remember every little thing that happens to us to make statements about "truth." If we could understand truth without throwing any information away, then I suppose we would be understanding things the way God understands them (the status of His existence not withstanding.) But even then, I'm not sure that we could call such a state undertanding- it would just be knowing. Throwing information away is a necessary part of understanding a history, such as the "war" ("skirmish"? "attack"?) between Israel and Lebanon. The question is, I think, to what degree we do this in a way that reflects the history we are trying to understand, rather than our own personal, perhaps irrelevant histories. In other words- does the photographer who takes a picture of smoke rising from the building, and color balances it to make the smoke stand out (I don't know if this is realistic, btw, you are the photographer!) doing this because he has some personal prejudice towards making the world believe that Israel must stop its attack, or whether because the reality of the situation demands that we focus our attention on the fact that certain buildings are burning up. It would seem that human beings are able to put aside their personal prejudices when trying to understand things. After all, I would argue that it is effectively done in science all the time. We ought to be able to do the same thing, or try to do the same thing, even with something as personal and emotional as war.
I think the example you give is a better illustration of the untrustworthy nature of memory rather than to the elusiveness of truth. Everyone agrees on anything reasoned deductively, like mathematics. And with science we have found ways to make interesting statements that are agreed to by everybody in the same sphere of time, at least, and I would argue with only a few caveats probably throughout history. So there are many classes of statements that we can evaluate as true or false. Certainly there is a subjective nature to the universe that is much, much harder to make true statements about, but that doesn't mean that it can't be done. I have always thought that was a major goal of art. In any case, even if we can't make true statements about the subjective nature of the universe, certainly it is supposed to be a goal of certain types of journalism to make types of statements that can be evaluated as true or false, at least to within human fallibility.
So do you think that all art is propaganda? (For that matter, I think that science becomes propaganda as well.) Couldn't it just be that a photographer, or artist, is pursuing truth? Of course the process of taking a picture involves ignoring certain pieces of information, and highlighting other pieces. The picture is still not propaganda if its purpose is to tell the truth. Sure, you could be wrong about what the truth is. So the photo may be wrong. Your own personal experience and desires will in general affect the likelihood that you and the photo are wrong. But that doesn't make it propaganda.
In a popular physics lecture I heard once from Krauss (who is quoted in this article), he claimed that in principle it may be possible to bend (or warp, hehe) space-time, in the same manner that Einstein teaches us mass naturally bends it, to effectively travel faster than the speed of light. However, this would take inconceivably large amounts of energies (as in many times the total outputs of stars, as I recall.)
Certainly we can consider faith and reason separately. But the West has a long tradition of wanting desperately to relate them to each other. I think that Christianity can even be seen as the child of that union- attempting to fuse the Hebrew tradition of faith in the word of Prophets with the Greek tradition of reason and mathematics. I think that to pursue Truth, we need both reason and faith. For example, why do we spend so much time and money on science? I personally think it is because it leads to new technology, but also because we think it's going to get us close to Truth. But whatever the reason, it has to say something about our core essence. To make it more personal- when a scientist is peer-reviewing a paper, and evaluating it for correctness, this has little to do with faith. But this is only part of the decision to publish a scientific paper. The other is whether the result is significant enough to publish. And this decision has to involve both faith and reason. Remember that science is as much a statement about what is interesting to study as it is a statement on how to study what is interesting.
Genius is about a lot more than coming up with a new answer. It is about defining what the important questions are. The really good answers often become questions themselves. For example, Einstein could never believe quantum mechanics for a variety of reasons that are probably best described as philosophical, or even religious. But his (and others) EPR paper about the paradoxes caused by entangled quantum particles is still crucial for our current understanding of how quantum mechanics is so weird. It just turned out that Einstein's answer to his own question was wrong. But in understanding this aspect of quantum mechanics, we are really just answering Einstein. And of course, we consider quantum mechanics to be so strange because it is so different from the physics of Newton as well. So we are also still answering Newton (and his successors). But in a very real way, which I won't go into here, the language of quantum mechanics is just the language of Newton, with an added part that says "EXCEPT now it's different like this...."
Has anyone figured out if this is a service being offered by circuit cities all over the country, or just by one particular local store? It looks to me from the article like it might be a single store. After all, the only real evidence we have is a single picture of a sign, no press release or anything is linked to. This would make a whole lot more sense. I'm not a lawyer, but it would seem to be a pretty clear cut case of breaking the law (stupidity of the law not withstanding.) Naively, then, it would seem to be terrible mistake to offer this service. Sure, there may be some angle that isn't obvious, but a simpler explanation would be that a single local store offered this service without understanding the risks involved.
Damon would seem to me to be fine as Kirk. But casting Spock is the hard part. Not many people have been able to play Vulcans that aren't boring as hell.
The transition between two materials can cause light to bend. Think a prism. The glass bends the different wavelengths of light at different angles, which is why it creates a rainbow. In general, some of the light will be reflected, and some of the light will not. My guess is that the technology behind all of this might involve some fancy materials that, for practical purposes, doesn't reflect any of the light, and to boot is able bend the light many many times in just such a way that it makes the person inside a device made of this material invisible. I didn't read TFA very carefully, though.
I think the answer would have to be hope. As long as there is another generation of "people", no matter how radically different than we are, perhaps they can get it right. Or at least they can try. This helps give us the courage to try too. Hope is never entirely reasonable, but it is rational.
Theists assert that it was created by God. Non-theists don't. We aren't replacing a logical quantity (GOD) with another quantity. That's something you just don't seem to be able to grasp.
To simply state "God created the universe" is a boring statement. The real argument is over what this statement means. What sort of "God" created the universe. Does He care about human beings? Is He rational? Does answering these questions twist our concept of God so profoundly that it isn't really relevant to ask the question anymore? And you seem to want to divide the world into "theists" and "non-theists". And your division of everybody into "theists" and "non-theists" seems very artificial to me. Where does Einstein, a pantheist, fall into your categorization? He believed in God as the Universe, which I think must be intimately connected with his dream of a single, unifying equation of physics. Or the enlightenment Deists?
We aren't replacing a logical quantity (GOD) with another quantity. That's something you just don't seem to be able to grasp. I agree with this statement. What I'm saying is that the expression "God exists" is really only interesting because it is only a kind of short hand for a lot of other statements.
No, I don't. My position is, that being's existence isn't real. I don't have to prove anything.
My statement was that you have to take a position on the frailty of the human condition, not on the existence of God. Hell, the logical positivists would (I think) claim that the existence of God isn't even a meaningful question, so they certainly haven't taken a position of the existence of God (which doesn't even mean anything if you are a logical positivist, since it doesn't have any empirically observable implications.) My points is that no human being can really simply say "God doesn't exist." This is just shorthand for another set of answers, typically a sort of scientific-reductionist kind of humanism, which is fine.
If you choose to imagine that the Big Sky Fairy will fix things for you, you may be missing out on the opportunity to take action for yourself, and I am pretty sure many people do.
Yes, Christianity believes in a "Big Sky Fairy" that orders its people to commit genocide, sacrifices its own son on the cross, and condemns people to eternal fire for enjoying a piece of fruit. As you might be able to guess, I think this is a terrible misrepresentation of Christianity. If nothing else, Christianity is a great work of art that tries to wrestle with why life can be so wonderful and so terrible. You might disagree with its answers (assuming it offers any), but you cannot escape its questions. It is a testament to the power of Christian imagery and language that a Christian can seem to sum up all his answers to these many questions with the statement "I believe in God, and in Jesus." But the non-Christian cannot also answer all those questions with the statement "God does not exist." So after he makes that statement, he still must answer these other questions which are not in the "yes or no" format (like, for example, in light of all the pain we experience in life, where do we draw hope?). Incidentally, I understand that atheism doesn't necessarily lead to despair.
I can't find what book you are talking about (I guess I don't know how to read your.sig) so I have no idea if you are agreeing with me or not:-P
Except that I believe that the copyright law is written so that, for purposes of that law, copyrighted works have some very large value ($275K comes to mind.) IANAL, though.
I disagree that the non-theist asserts nothing. Certainly the existence of "God" (whatever particular Incarnation you mean, of course, hehe) cannot be proven or disproven. And maybe if you are going to simply take an abstract theological position of "weak agnosticism", then you aren't asserting anything. But if "God exists" were simply an academic question, it would be confined to academia. "God exists" is also a fully religious question, and religion is really about the frailty of the human condition, and personal transformation in light of that frailty. And I think to be a human being, you have to take a position on that, which, incidentally, is why religion has been used so successfully throughout history to control people. The reason that the statement "the Christian God exists" is interesting is that it is an answer for human frailty. It is a promise that there is morality, redemption, and hope despite a world that allows suffering. This may not be the non-theists answer. But to live his (or her) life, he has to have some answer. And even if that answer is as simple as despair, it cannot be based entirely on deductive logic, or on scientific facts, because it is going to be subjective, and logic and science are not subjective. It will depend on something akin to faith, or at least on imagination.
Well, to be fair. to achieve this Christian utopia requires the direct intervention of God to fix whatever is fundamentally broken in the world. I think the Christian religion recognizes the sort of paradoxes that the parent poster refers to do exist- that wisdom requires suffering and pain, etc. It just also offers hope that someday this may be fixed. However, this doesn't mean that we will necessarily be put back to a pre-fallen state, precisely. John tells us that Thomas is able to see the nail marks on Jesus' hands, and put his hand into his side. Jesus wounds are still there because they are important. They were not suffered in vain, and we do not suffer in vain. They are simply healed, as we will be healed. So I don't think the GP post is at all incompatible with the Christian promise of eternal life.
I read an article at one point that claimed that the real reason that allofmp3.com is so cheap is the weakness of the Russian ruble. The article claimed a CD's worth of songs on allofmp3 was roughly comparable to the cost of a CD in RUSSIA. I can't find the article anymore, though. (There are some similar ones on google if you just do a search for "weak ruble allofmp3".) Probably it was written by someone who wanted that to be the case. It certainly tickles my funny bone. The average worker often gets screwed having to "adjust" to globalization while the big companies just make bigger profits, and I like the idea of big companies getting screwed once in a while. Of course, I also found a very balanced article on Slate.com claiming that allofmp3 was probably, but not necessarily, illegal. In any case, I personally don't use it since I don't want my credit card attached to something that has at least a good possibility of being illegal.
It is a common misconception that entangled particles enables instantaneous communication at a distance. Entangled particles cannot be used to send messages faster than the speed of light. What quantum mechanics, and the entangled particles, seems to tell us is that the universe can be thought of as fundamentally non-local (the double slit experiment would seem to imply the same thing), but NOT in a way that allows us to communicate faster than the speed of light.
From my murky memory of history, I seem to remember that armies historically have run out of manpower before they run out of any sort of raw materials. Especially for a modern state, manpower would seem to really be the limiting factor in a war. You need people to make the bullets, and people to fire them. You also need bodies for your post-war economy. So I would think practically speaking that saving a life would be worth any sort of material cost. Wars like the Iraq and Vietnam wars may be a little different, since the US's sovereignty doesn't seem to have been immediately threatened, but in those wars, the PR payoff with saving lives would similarly be almost priceless.
I would disagree that it treats procreation as nothing more than a biological process. Urination is treated as a biological process. No one ever thinks about whether urination is right or wrong. If I had been born not needing or able to urinate, this wouldn't have bothered me very much, at least in so far as I would miss out on the process of urination. If I found out I would need surgery tomorrow that would leave me unable to urinate, I also wouldn't have a problem with this, although I might have a problem with whatever contraption I needed to use to get urea out of my body.
Having children is different. If I found out tomorrow I would need surgery that made me sterile, or that I had been born sterile, this would bother me a great deal. Why? Because I regard procreation as much more than a biological process. It is somehow intimately connected with our entire being. If artificial insemination, and like technology, treated people as a commodity, then would-be parents wouldn't sell their houses to free up cash for their treatment, as some are apt to do. They would go for the cheapest option- adoption (which is not to say I think adoption treats people as a commodity.) But artificial insemination is not about treating procreation as a simple biological process, like urination, or treating people as a commodity, where one would go for the best deal. It is about taking part in procreation as a miracle. It's why they will devote so much of their resources to artificial insemination. Now, this technology may offend you because it would seem that people are performing parts of the miracle that should be reserved for God. Perhaps in some way it even degrades the process of human reproduction by putting human finger prints where there should be only God's. Fine. I disagree with that view, but I can understand it. But I think it is very inaccurate to say that artificial insemination and similar technology treats reproduction as merely a biological process, or people as a commodity.
"The sky is blue" is a simple fact that is proven to oneself immediately by senses alone. The traditions that I have read hold that a posteriori knowledge may not be trustworthy. For example, you may be wearing blue glasses that you are not aware of, or your psychology may be contributing to your vision or thinking in a strange way, etc.
Games like blue glasses or transient changes like weather are tricks that interfere with the blueness of the sky only in the most trivial cases.
What about when the Sun sets everyday, and the sky appears to be orange? Or Galileo's relativity (the one we are all inclined to believe), and Einstein's relativity? Or the flatness of the Earth? Or the indivisibility of protons and neutrons? Or that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees (equivalent to whether the geometry of the universe is Euclidean or not)? There are many examples of our senses fooling us.
I can know things I don't believe: Thor is the god of thunder. But if you don't believe that Thor is the god of thunder, how can you know it? Just saying something doesn't mean that you know it. You can flip a coin, and hide the result from me. Me being aware of the possibility that "you have heads" doesn't meant that I know you do have heads.
Mathematical theorems are proven only within their own axiomatic system. Yes, so mathematical theorems may be inherently tautological. This doesn't mean that they are unproven. Certainly they are proven deductively, except perhaps for the human fallibility of the mathematicians. Now these (perhaps tautological) mathematical models may be useful in that they apply to the real world. But they will always be models, and the real world will never exactly follow them, at least if they are complicated enough to be non-trivial. I disagree that mathematics involves any faith at all. Modern pure mathematicians don't tend to care a whit as to whether their axioms are "true" or "not true", at least not in a capacity as a mathematician. They only care if their axioms are followed. We at least claim to be past Plato and Kant, who wanted their mathematical axioms to have some sort of reality to them.
Science is a faith based on a very few articles, basically falsifiability and consistency... If you think science is purely proveable, or that you accept most knowledge solely on proof, you're gripping an imperfect foundation too loosely. I don't think that science is purely provable. In fact, I don't think it is provable at all. After all, you can always do another, more exact (or even less exact) experiment, right? So how can you ever say that you have exhaustively demonstrated scientific facts to yourself? I think that only mathematics is provable, and even then perhaps only in this crappy tautological sense that doesn't sit will with my mathematical intuition, but is still kind of compelling. But you seem to want to claim that "fact" must be provable. If "fact" is provable, and if "provable" means that it must be exhaustively demonstrated, then I don't know how we can state any scientific statement to be "fact", given the unreliability of the senses. (Incidentally, apparently for you, even "proving" a fact is not enough. We must also know that our fact is proven. Is the statement that a particular assertion is a fact itself a fact? Then wouldn't this statement also need to be proven, since it is also a fact. Wouldn't this go on forever?) I claim that any definition of "fact" should somehow incorporate that a "factual" statement should be somehow affirmed by the external world. Then empirical and scientific statements can be "facts", even if they are not able to be exhaustively demonstrated.
As to science incorporating "faith"- again, I disagree. The word faith has a long history of meanings. Any sort of definition of faith must answer those meanings. And faith tends to involve a transpersonal relationship(to quote wikipedia). So say that "faith" is part of the scientific process is to a
The real difference, I think, is that American's don't want to have to depend on anybody. That's why we love the cowboy so much. He can just ride off into the wilderness with nothing but his gun and his horse, handle whatever trouble he runs into, and still have the skills to finish off the day with some chile con carne, damn it! I know I wish I could do that. Instead, I would probably get a rash from the rain, or a burn from the sun, and the one time I tried to ride a horse it hurt my testicles like hell, etc. And the wilderness doesn't really exist anymore anyway, why with all the fences and all. So I have to depend on my society to feed me, protect me, etc. But I sort of regard it as a kind of necessary evil, and I have this kind of idealistic, probably silly image of self-reliance that I at least like to pretend I strive for.
Europeans, as far as I can tell, don't feel this way. They are happy to depend on society to help them. That's why they don't mind making guns illegal. The police will be around to protect them. Of course, when everybody becomes zombies, they won't be able to find any guns to fight the zombies with, and will get eaten, while here in the States we will be able to go into our trusty Walmart, get the massive reserve of arms there, and blow those zombies to hell, but that is a different issue:-)
Somewhere along the way from a college philosophy into to a degree in epistemology you learn that "knowledge" doesn't have to be justified, or even believed.
I don't see how we can say that a person "knows" something that they do not believe. Where did you learn this, I would be curious. I majored in physics in college, but was always curious about philosophy. Also, I wasn't saying that knowledge had to be accompanied by an act of justification- only that it must have the quality of being justified, for example affirmed by the nature of external reality.
BTW, I did not say that knowledge must be deduced - it can be sensed, like "the sky is blue", or "that punch hurts". I'm sorry, you used the word "prove", which in my experience tends to indicate deductive reasoning. It would seem problematic, though, to say that we "proved" the sky is blue because we sensed it. Surely our senses can deceive us. Perhaps you are wearing blue glasses, and the sky is not really blue at that time. I suppose you can start playing game with whether you really mean some external sky, or simply your mental representation of the sky, but again, I would think you then run into the problem that whether or not something is fact no longer represents whether or not it represents the real external world in any way (see my last comment.)
Mathematical theorems are defined as unproven facts Haven't mathematical theorems always been proven (deductively)? Or are you a positivist...
The entire set of distinctions I put so simply hinges on the degree of "justification" of knowledge. Right, you don't seem to reference at all whether something is actually true. A fact is simply a belief that has been "proven". I guess I don't know what you mean by "proven" anymore, but in any case I would think that any sort of understanding of "fact" must somehow involve whether reality somehow affirms or is consistent with your belief. I am a scientist, though, and sort of stuck in the enlightenment, and so this bothers me. Maybe it doesn't bother you.
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We have managed to have a more or less nuanced discussion about AIDS, I think. There is no reason that we can't have a similar one on drugs, except of course that we can't :-). But for example, I know that if a male has unprotected heterosexual sex with an HIV positive woman, his chance of contracting hiv is something like 1/1000. For a woman with an hiv-positive man, its something like 1/200. For two men, ~1/50. So, if I am trying to convince my kid not to have unprotected sex, I can use these numbers. But what about if I don't want my kid to use LSD. As far as I can tell, there are NO convincing numbers. They may exist out there somewhere, but I can't find them. They certainly weren't told to me when I was in school. No, I was shown videos of kids smoking pot and slipping into comas. I wonder if anybody has EVER smoked a marijuana joint and slipped into a coma? I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't even happened once. No, we treat drug education more like the Mickey Mouse club than anything else. ("D-R-U-G-S will K-I-L-L you!) So I would think we could at least try to have the level of discourse that we have with AIDS.
How many recreation alcohol consumers kill children, fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters each year? Did the right to dominion over their own bodies also include a right over someone else's?
Certainly not. And this is, in my mind, the strongest argument to keep drugs such as crack illegal. But I wonder, how many people are killed each year by people due to their drug use, and how many people are killed each year by criminally inclined people who happen to take drugs. Also, how many people are killed by the illegal drug trade every year, meaning the process by which drugs are illegally created and distributed, a process that would no longer exist if those drugs were legal. Remember that the mafia grew up during Prohibition. Similarly, a lot of organized crime has grown up around the distribution of illegal drugs. Finally, its not clear how many users of, eg, crack we would have if drugs weren't illegal. During prohibition, hard liquor consumption went up, because hard liquor takes up less space than beer, and it is easier to smuggle. Similarly, in the 80s when police began to crack down on marijuana use, heroine and cocaine became much more popular, because it is much easier to smuggle. So it is possible that making these recreational drugs illegal actual encourages people to use more potent drugs. Of course, whether making some subclass of these drugs legal would discourage these now addicted people from using those same, harder drugs is a different question. Finally, any kind of drug legalization would presumably have to be accompanied by programs to help addicts. We would treat drug abuse as a disease, rather than a crime. Then I wonder how many people would still be committing crimes to get crack, when they could simply go to a shelter instead.
And before anyone starts in with "what about alcohol, its a drug!" or "what about cigarettes!" trying to turn my opinions around...ban them all. There are too many adverse effects to using any of them.
What about red meat? People can get away with vegetarian diets. Too much red meat will cause heart damage as surely as too much alcohol will damage your liver. And additionally, there is the argument that the animals raised for red meat consume food that is grown on land that could be used to grow food for starving people instead of for beef for overweight Americans. And why not ban tanning salons. And sodas- after all, all that sugar is bad for us. And all of the other things we do that are bad when not done in moderation, which I suppose includes just about everything. At the very least, banning red meat and sodas would seem to be the logical conclusion to your argument. I for one think there is something to be said for the government not messing with people, and just letting them live their lives like they want. Congress doesn't need to justify whether drinking alcohol is worth it for me- only I need to do that.
That's only the half of it. In this country, we have an attitude that medication can fix anything. Your kid can't pay attention- medicate him. You weigh too much- medicate yourself. Etc. I think maybe it comes from the recent success of medicine over the last few decades. In any case, right or wrong, it is difficult to present this class of drugs as the devil incarnate, while that class of drugs is the cure for whatever ails you. Combine this with the teenage feeling of invincibility, and you have teenagers doing things like sniffing freon and gasoline. Because when you are taught that drugs are poisons, but the message of society, as well as every other television commercial, is also that drugs are OK, then you start to think that maybe poisons are drugs, and that they are OK too. What we need is a sane approach to drug use in general.
Focus is not necessarily indicative of money spent, but I do remember that when Ashcroft first became attorney general, one of his major goals was to address "improper use of medicinal marijuana." In a lot of people's eyes, marijuana may not be as bad as heroin and crack, but it is playing in the same league. For example see: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1656481/p osts . So I'm not sure that the DEA does spend a lot more on cocaine than on weed.
In most cases, we don't need to remember every little thing that happens to us to make statements about "truth." If we could understand truth without throwing any information away, then I suppose we would be understanding things the way God understands them (the status of His existence not withstanding.) But even then, I'm not sure that we could call such a state undertanding- it would just be knowing. Throwing information away is a necessary part of understanding a history, such as the "war" ("skirmish"? "attack"?) between Israel and Lebanon. The question is, I think, to what degree we do this in a way that reflects the history we are trying to understand, rather than our own personal, perhaps irrelevant histories. In other words- does the photographer who takes a picture of smoke rising from the building, and color balances it to make the smoke stand out (I don't know if this is realistic, btw, you are the photographer!) doing this because he has some personal prejudice towards making the world believe that Israel must stop its attack, or whether because the reality of the situation demands that we focus our attention on the fact that certain buildings are burning up. It would seem that human beings are able to put aside their personal prejudices when trying to understand things. After all, I would argue that it is effectively done in science all the time. We ought to be able to do the same thing, or try to do the same thing, even with something as personal and emotional as war.
I think the example you give is a better illustration of the untrustworthy nature of memory rather than to the elusiveness of truth. Everyone agrees on anything reasoned deductively, like mathematics. And with science we have found ways to make interesting statements that are agreed to by everybody in the same sphere of time, at least, and I would argue with only a few caveats probably throughout history. So there are many classes of statements that we can evaluate as true or false. Certainly there is a subjective nature to the universe that is much, much harder to make true statements about, but that doesn't mean that it can't be done. I have always thought that was a major goal of art. In any case, even if we can't make true statements about the subjective nature of the universe, certainly it is supposed to be a goal of certain types of journalism to make types of statements that can be evaluated as true or false, at least to within human fallibility.
So do you think that all art is propaganda? (For that matter, I think that science becomes propaganda as well.) Couldn't it just be that a photographer, or artist, is pursuing truth? Of course the process of taking a picture involves ignoring certain pieces of information, and highlighting other pieces. The picture is still not propaganda if its purpose is to tell the truth. Sure, you could be wrong about what the truth is. So the photo may be wrong. Your own personal experience and desires will in general affect the likelihood that you and the photo are wrong. But that doesn't make it propaganda.
In a popular physics lecture I heard once from Krauss (who is quoted in this article), he claimed that in principle it may be possible to bend (or warp, hehe) space-time, in the same manner that Einstein teaches us mass naturally bends it, to effectively travel faster than the speed of light. However, this would take inconceivably large amounts of energies (as in many times the total outputs of stars, as I recall.)
Certainly we can consider faith and reason separately. But the West has a long tradition of wanting desperately to relate them to each other. I think that Christianity can even be seen as the child of that union- attempting to fuse the Hebrew tradition of faith in the word of Prophets with the Greek tradition of reason and mathematics. I think that to pursue Truth, we need both reason and faith. For example, why do we spend so much time and money on science? I personally think it is because it leads to new technology, but also because we think it's going to get us close to Truth. But whatever the reason, it has to say something about our core essence. To make it more personal- when a scientist is peer-reviewing a paper, and evaluating it for correctness, this has little to do with faith. But this is only part of the decision to publish a scientific paper. The other is whether the result is significant enough to publish. And this decision has to involve both faith and reason. Remember that science is as much a statement about what is interesting to study as it is a statement on how to study what is interesting.
Genius is about a lot more than coming up with a new answer. It is about defining what the important questions are. The really good answers often become questions themselves. For example, Einstein could never believe quantum mechanics for a variety of reasons that are probably best described as philosophical, or even religious. But his (and others) EPR paper about the paradoxes caused by entangled quantum particles is still crucial for our current understanding of how quantum mechanics is so weird. It just turned out that Einstein's answer to his own question was wrong. But in understanding this aspect of quantum mechanics, we are really just answering Einstein. And of course, we consider quantum mechanics to be so strange because it is so different from the physics of Newton as well. So we are also still answering Newton (and his successors). But in a very real way, which I won't go into here, the language of quantum mechanics is just the language of Newton, with an added part that says "EXCEPT now it's different like this...."
Has anyone figured out if this is a service being offered by circuit cities all over the country, or just by one particular local store? It looks to me from the article like it might be a single store. After all, the only real evidence we have is a single picture of a sign, no press release or anything is linked to. This would make a whole lot more sense. I'm not a lawyer, but it would seem to be a pretty clear cut case of breaking the law (stupidity of the law not withstanding.) Naively, then, it would seem to be terrible mistake to offer this service. Sure, there may be some angle that isn't obvious, but a simpler explanation would be that a single local store offered this service without understanding the risks involved.
Damon would seem to me to be fine as Kirk. But casting Spock is the hard part. Not many people have been able to play Vulcans that aren't boring as hell.
The transition between two materials can cause light to bend. Think a prism. The glass bends the different wavelengths of light at different angles, which is why it creates a rainbow. In general, some of the light will be reflected, and some of the light will not. My guess is that the technology behind all of this might involve some fancy materials that, for practical purposes, doesn't reflect any of the light, and to boot is able bend the light many many times in just such a way that it makes the person inside a device made of this material invisible. I didn't read TFA very carefully, though.
I think the answer would have to be hope. As long as there is another generation of "people", no matter how radically different than we are, perhaps they can get it right. Or at least they can try. This helps give us the courage to try too. Hope is never entirely reasonable, but it is rational.
Theists assert that it was created by God. Non-theists don't. We aren't replacing a logical quantity (GOD) with another quantity. That's something you just don't seem to be able to grasp.
.sig) so I have no idea if you are agreeing with me or not :-P
To simply state "God created the universe" is a boring statement. The real argument is over what this statement means. What sort of "God" created the universe. Does He care about human beings? Is He rational? Does answering these questions twist our concept of God so profoundly that it isn't really relevant to ask the question anymore? And you seem to want to divide the world into "theists" and "non-theists". And your division of everybody into "theists" and "non-theists" seems very artificial to me. Where does Einstein, a pantheist, fall into your categorization? He believed in God as the Universe, which I think must be intimately connected with his dream of a single, unifying equation of physics. Or the enlightenment Deists?
We aren't replacing a logical quantity (GOD) with another quantity. That's something you just don't seem to be able to grasp.
I agree with this statement. What I'm saying is that the expression "God exists" is really only interesting because it is only a kind of short hand for a lot of other statements.
No, I don't. My position is, that being's existence isn't real. I don't have to prove anything.
My statement was that you have to take a position on the frailty of the human condition, not on the existence of God. Hell, the logical positivists would (I think) claim that the existence of God isn't even a meaningful question, so they certainly haven't taken a position of the existence of God (which doesn't even mean anything if you are a logical positivist, since it doesn't have any empirically observable implications.) My points is that no human being can really simply say "God doesn't exist." This is just shorthand for another set of answers, typically a sort of scientific-reductionist kind of humanism, which is fine.
If you choose to imagine that the Big Sky Fairy will fix things for you, you may be missing out on the opportunity to take action for yourself, and I am pretty sure many people do.
Yes, Christianity believes in a "Big Sky Fairy" that orders its people to commit genocide, sacrifices its own son on the cross, and condemns people to eternal fire for enjoying a piece of fruit. As you might be able to guess, I think this is a terrible misrepresentation of Christianity. If nothing else, Christianity is a great work of art that tries to wrestle with why life can be so wonderful and so terrible. You might disagree with its answers (assuming it offers any), but you cannot escape its questions. It is a testament to the power of Christian imagery and language that a Christian can seem to sum up all his answers to these many questions with the statement "I believe in God, and in Jesus." But the non-Christian cannot also answer all those questions with the statement "God does not exist." So after he makes that statement, he still must answer these other questions which are not in the "yes or no" format (like, for example, in light of all the pain we experience in life, where do we draw hope?). Incidentally, I understand that atheism doesn't necessarily lead to despair.
I can't find what book you are talking about (I guess I don't know how to read your
Except that I believe that the copyright law is written so that, for purposes of that law, copyrighted works have some very large value ($275K comes to mind.) IANAL, though.
I disagree that the non-theist asserts nothing. Certainly the existence of "God" (whatever particular Incarnation you mean, of course, hehe) cannot be proven or disproven. And maybe if you are going to simply take an abstract theological position of "weak agnosticism", then you aren't asserting anything. But if "God exists" were simply an academic question, it would be confined to academia. "God exists" is also a fully religious question, and religion is really about the frailty of the human condition, and personal transformation in light of that frailty. And I think to be a human being, you have to take a position on that, which, incidentally, is why religion has been used so successfully throughout history to control people. The reason that the statement "the Christian God exists" is interesting is that it is an answer for human frailty. It is a promise that there is morality, redemption, and hope despite a world that allows suffering. This may not be the non-theists answer. But to live his (or her) life, he has to have some answer. And even if that answer is as simple as despair, it cannot be based entirely on deductive logic, or on scientific facts, because it is going to be subjective, and logic and science are not subjective. It will depend on something akin to faith, or at least on imagination.
Well, to be fair. to achieve this Christian utopia requires the direct intervention of God to fix whatever is fundamentally broken in the world. I think the Christian religion recognizes the sort of paradoxes that the parent poster refers to do exist- that wisdom requires suffering and pain, etc. It just also offers hope that someday this may be fixed. However, this doesn't mean that we will necessarily be put back to a pre-fallen state, precisely. John tells us that Thomas is able to see the nail marks on Jesus' hands, and put his hand into his side. Jesus wounds are still there because they are important. They were not suffered in vain, and we do not suffer in vain. They are simply healed, as we will be healed. So I don't think the GP post is at all incompatible with the Christian promise of eternal life.
I read an article at one point that claimed that the real reason that allofmp3.com is so cheap is the weakness of the Russian ruble. The article claimed a CD's worth of songs on allofmp3 was roughly comparable to the cost of a CD in RUSSIA. I can't find the article anymore, though. (There are some similar ones on google if you just do a search for "weak ruble allofmp3".) Probably it was written by someone who wanted that to be the case. It certainly tickles my funny bone. The average worker often gets screwed having to "adjust" to globalization while the big companies just make bigger profits, and I like the idea of big companies getting screwed once in a while. Of course, I also found a very balanced article on Slate.com claiming that allofmp3 was probably, but not necessarily, illegal. In any case, I personally don't use it since I don't want my credit card attached to something that has at least a good possibility of being illegal.
It is a common misconception that entangled particles enables instantaneous communication at a distance. Entangled particles cannot be used to send messages faster than the speed of light. What quantum mechanics, and the entangled particles, seems to tell us is that the universe can be thought of as fundamentally non-local (the double slit experiment would seem to imply the same thing), but NOT in a way that allows us to communicate faster than the speed of light.
From my murky memory of history, I seem to remember that armies historically have run out of manpower before they run out of any sort of raw materials. Especially for a modern state, manpower would seem to really be the limiting factor in a war. You need people to make the bullets, and people to fire them. You also need bodies for your post-war economy. So I would think practically speaking that saving a life would be worth any sort of material cost. Wars like the Iraq and Vietnam wars may be a little different, since the US's sovereignty doesn't seem to have been immediately threatened, but in those wars, the PR payoff with saving lives would similarly be almost priceless.
I would disagree that it treats procreation as nothing more than a biological process. Urination is treated as a biological process. No one ever thinks about whether urination is right or wrong. If I had been born not needing or able to urinate, this wouldn't have bothered me very much, at least in so far as I would miss out on the process of urination. If I found out I would need surgery tomorrow that would leave me unable to urinate, I also wouldn't have a problem with this, although I might have a problem with whatever contraption I needed to use to get urea out of my body.
Having children is different. If I found out tomorrow I would need surgery that made me sterile, or that I had been born sterile, this would bother me a great deal. Why? Because I regard procreation as much more than a biological process. It is somehow intimately connected with our entire being. If artificial insemination, and like technology, treated people as a commodity, then would-be parents wouldn't sell their houses to free up cash for their treatment, as some are apt to do. They would go for the cheapest option- adoption (which is not to say I think adoption treats people as a commodity.) But artificial insemination is not about treating procreation as a simple biological process, like urination, or treating people as a commodity, where one would go for the best deal. It is about taking part in procreation as a miracle. It's why they will devote so much of their resources to artificial insemination. Now, this technology may offend you because it would seem that people are performing parts of the miracle that should be reserved for God. Perhaps in some way it even degrades the process of human reproduction by putting human finger prints where there should be only God's. Fine. I disagree with that view, but I can understand it. But I think it is very inaccurate to say that artificial insemination and similar technology treats reproduction as merely a biological process, or people as a commodity.
"The sky is blue" is a simple fact that is proven to oneself immediately by senses alone.
The traditions that I have read hold that a posteriori knowledge may not be trustworthy. For example, you may be wearing blue glasses that you are not aware of, or your psychology may be contributing to your vision or thinking in a strange way, etc.
Games like blue glasses or transient changes like weather are tricks that interfere with the blueness of the sky only in the most trivial cases.
What about when the Sun sets everyday, and the sky appears to be orange? Or Galileo's relativity (the one we are all inclined to believe), and Einstein's relativity? Or the flatness of the Earth? Or the indivisibility of protons and neutrons? Or that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees (equivalent to whether the geometry of the universe is Euclidean or not)? There are many examples of our senses fooling us.
I can know things I don't believe: Thor is the god of thunder.
But if you don't believe that Thor is the god of thunder, how can you know it? Just saying something doesn't mean that you know it. You can flip a coin, and hide the result from me. Me being aware of the possibility that "you have heads" doesn't meant that I know you do have heads.
Mathematical theorems are proven only within their own axiomatic system.
Yes, so mathematical theorems may be inherently tautological. This doesn't mean that they are unproven. Certainly they are proven deductively, except perhaps for the human fallibility of the mathematicians. Now these (perhaps tautological) mathematical models may be useful in that they apply to the real world. But they will always be models, and the real world will never exactly follow them, at least if they are complicated enough to be non-trivial. I disagree that mathematics involves any faith at all. Modern pure mathematicians don't tend to care a whit as to whether their axioms are "true" or "not true", at least not in a capacity as a mathematician. They only care if their axioms are followed. We at least claim to be past Plato and Kant, who wanted their mathematical axioms to have some sort of reality to them.
Science is a faith based on a very few articles, basically falsifiability and consistency... If you think science is purely proveable, or that you accept most knowledge solely on proof, you're gripping an imperfect foundation too loosely.
I don't think that science is purely provable. In fact, I don't think it is provable at all. After all, you can always do another, more exact (or even less exact) experiment, right? So how can you ever say that you have exhaustively demonstrated scientific facts to yourself? I think that only mathematics is provable, and even then perhaps only in this crappy tautological sense that doesn't sit will with my mathematical intuition, but is still kind of compelling. But you seem to want to claim that "fact" must be provable. If "fact" is provable, and if "provable" means that it must be exhaustively demonstrated, then I don't know how we can state any scientific statement to be "fact", given the unreliability of the senses. (Incidentally, apparently for you, even "proving" a fact is not enough. We must also know that our fact is proven. Is the statement that a particular assertion is a fact itself a fact? Then wouldn't this statement also need to be proven, since it is also a fact. Wouldn't this go on forever?) I claim that any definition of "fact" should somehow incorporate that a "factual" statement should be somehow affirmed by the external world. Then empirical and scientific statements can be "facts", even if they are not able to be exhaustively demonstrated.
As to science incorporating "faith"- again, I disagree. The word faith has a long history of meanings. Any sort of definition of faith must answer those meanings. And faith tends to involve a transpersonal relationship(to quote wikipedia). So say that "faith" is part of the scientific process is to a
The real difference, I think, is that American's don't want to have to depend on anybody. That's why we love the cowboy so much. He can just ride off into the wilderness with nothing but his gun and his horse, handle whatever trouble he runs into, and still have the skills to finish off the day with some chile con carne, damn it! I know I wish I could do that. Instead, I would probably get a rash from the rain, or a burn from the sun, and the one time I tried to ride a horse it hurt my testicles like hell, etc. And the wilderness doesn't really exist anymore anyway, why with all the fences and all. So I have to depend on my society to feed me, protect me, etc. But I sort of regard it as a kind of necessary evil, and I have this kind of idealistic, probably silly image of self-reliance that I at least like to pretend I strive for.
:-)
Europeans, as far as I can tell, don't feel this way. They are happy to depend on society to help them. That's why they don't mind making guns illegal. The police will be around to protect them. Of course, when everybody becomes zombies, they won't be able to find any guns to fight the zombies with, and will get eaten, while here in the States we will be able to go into our trusty Walmart, get the massive reserve of arms there, and blow those zombies to hell, but that is a different issue
Somewhere along the way from a college philosophy into to a degree in epistemology you learn that "knowledge" doesn't have to be justified, or even believed.
I don't see how we can say that a person "knows" something that they do not believe. Where did you learn this, I would be curious. I majored in physics in college, but was always curious about philosophy. Also, I wasn't saying that knowledge had to be accompanied by an act of justification- only that it must have the quality of being justified, for example affirmed by the nature of external reality.
BTW, I did not say that knowledge must be deduced - it can be sensed, like "the sky is blue", or "that punch hurts".
I'm sorry, you used the word "prove", which in my experience tends to indicate deductive reasoning. It would seem problematic, though, to say that we "proved" the sky is blue because we sensed it. Surely our senses can deceive us. Perhaps you are wearing blue glasses, and the sky is not really blue at that time. I suppose you can start playing game with whether you really mean some external sky, or simply your mental representation of the sky, but again, I would think you then run into the problem that whether or not something is fact no longer represents whether or not it represents the real external world in any way (see my last comment.)
Mathematical theorems are defined as unproven facts
Haven't mathematical theorems always been proven (deductively)? Or are you a positivist...
The entire set of distinctions I put so simply hinges on the degree of "justification" of knowledge.
Right, you don't seem to reference at all whether something is actually true. A fact is simply a belief that has been "proven". I guess I don't know what you mean by "proven" anymore, but in any case I would think that any sort of understanding of "fact" must somehow involve whether reality somehow affirms or is consistent with your belief. I am a scientist, though, and sort of stuck in the enlightenment, and so this bothers me. Maybe it doesn't bother you.