The world that we can observe is all we have to work with
That is true if by "the world we can observe" you mean replicable data and by "work with" you mean "test scientifically". Now, it's fine that we can apply the scientific method in some things that affect our daily lives, yet we are still left with these questions: What do want to observe? What do we want to work with? What is the goal, if any, of our studies? What are we trying to attain? What are we trying to avoid? What scientific tests do we make? What scientific tests should we NOT make?
Are you saying, for example, that we should abandon an ethical or moral principle we may personally have if it becomes a hindrance to some experiment? Once we do that, we're not helping Science, we're just helping the world view that rejects the principle we abandoned.
If I can, for example, create some futuristic biological technology by killing a few million human beings as part of some scientific experiment, I still need to decide if I would dare kill. (Let us assume that I could kill so many people with impunity.) If I cannot dare it, then I could try looking for other experiment that would not involve murder. It's not because I am anti-Science (after all, I am not rejecting the possibility that the hypothesis could still be tested using other experiments; no matter if such experiments are not possible at present), it's because I am anti-Murder.
But if I would dare kill a million people for the sake of scientific progress, well, hooray for scientific progress; yet I cannot look at the vast graveyard of my victims and justify myself by saying "What can I do, when you're all I had to work with?"
I'm trying to see which part of your post is actually arguing against anything I said. I mean, the tone sounds as if you don't agree with me, but it's like you're talking to someone else, some other guy who's anti-Science and who thinks Science is useless. Maybe it's because I've been too "abstract". Well then, let me stop talking about useless abstract things for now and actually state what I think of the matter.
The scientific method, being a system based on evidence and NOT proof, is only useful if people stopped thinking of it as a method for proving things. Science as Dogma (or Science as Philosophy; i.e. scientism) is Bad Science, because it contradicts the basic nature of Science as something that is not fixed. You cannot correct flawed theories, you cannot go on doing the noble act of looking for contradictory evidence, if you begin calling scientific theories as Truth.
I like Science because it helps us discover what we can do about our environment. It does that , not by proving things, but by weeding things out, narrowing down our options, helping us think clearer. What I don't like is Scientism. I don't like the arrogance of materialists who think that Science is on their side, that the triumph of Science is a triumph against God. The problem is that the "triumphs of Science" are not the triumphs of Science at all; every technology, every new discovery, is in fact either a complete accident or a triumph of human creativity and imagination, imagination that produces ideas that are then tested by Science. Science is a test for ideas (not even the only test of ideas), not the source of them. And in order to test ideas, you need to have them first.
Now, you say that abstract proof is useless. I wonder what you think of mathematics, then. I wonder if you'd dismiss the use of abstract proof in, say, theoretical physics. Of course, all logic and proof must be based on unproven claims, otherwise you can't even start proving anything. Yet once a group of people agree on which principles they need not prove, then an logical proofs for everything else would be far from "useless". Abstract logic is only hindered either when someone disagrees with your first principles (which does not necessarily mean that they are wrong) or when stubborn irrationality is involved. In such cases, neither logic nor evidence would be of much use, and we'll just have to go back to our basic ability to deal with differences (do we fight those who differ from us on principle? flee from them? concede? pretend? etc.).
A man is found holding a bloody knife in the same room as his recently dead wife. The circumstances are evidence that he killed his wife, but they are not proof. The fact that he is in possession of what seems to be the murder weapon has no logical connection with the claim that he killed her, at least in the sense that the latter does not logically follow from the former.
In fact, even if more evidence pile up, even if we see a video of him actually stabbing his wife, even if he confesses, even if there is no reasonable doubt left in anyone's mind that he did the act, all those things do not logically imply that he did it. He probably did it. He most likely did it. It would be correct for a judge to find him guilty and sentence him. But that he did the crime is not proven by the evidence against him. It just so happens that those things are connected with the hypothesis quite closely in our minds. They are all just mental connections and nothing else. A bloody knife is connected to murder as logically as a fallen spoon is connected to a visitor, or a sneeze is connected to someone thinking of you. We call the latter connections superstitions, but their difference to the "scientific" connection is merely a matter of reasonableness, not logic.
I guess I was wrong in calling Science a superstition. Superstition as a word is inescapably negative, a word used by someone if he disagrees with someone else's beliefs. Our limited brains cannot but connect the things around us, and you know what? That's perfectly okay; better than going nuts, at least. We just have to remember that while we have all the right to believe that what we think is the truth, some things (like Science, like God) just can't be proved, no matter how convinced we are of them.
Many people explain their superstitions all the time. That's what all the myths and legends were for. Of course, Science is a rather useful superstition since its explanations are based on actual evidence. But then, that's the point of it: Science is the superstition that the gathering of evidence or data leads eventually to the discovery of truth, or some useful approximation of it. It would be a (silly) truism to say "There is a lot of evidence that evidence is good!", but evidence is not proof. There is no logical connection between evidence and truth. Therefore Science is a superstition.
And that doesn't decrease my affection for Science one bit.
BPI, one of the biggest banks in the Philippines, uses Windows XP in their ATMs. The BSODs and crashes would be unbearable if not for the fact that they have so many ATMs (or "BPI Express Tellers" as they call them) installed all over our area. I usually just walk a short distance to the next nearest machine whenever I encounter a problem.
Then a few months ago I've gone to three consecutive trips to BPI machines and all of them had issues. The last one was under maintenance, and I watched the technician fiddle w/ the Windows environment for a while before I just went and used another bank's ATM machine located nearby.
Thanks but no thanks for your "leave those poor ignorant people alone, you enlightened but hurtful jerk!" defense of us "myth-believers". I know you meant well, but I just can't seem to accept your charity for some reason.
Now, I've only heard the religious phrase "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" a bajillion times since my parents first taught me religion, but if it makes you more efficient/successful/happy, then by all means continue believing that religion blinds people from realizing that the body becomes a "rotting carcass" (as timmarhy puts it) in death. `Coz, you know, only religious people who believe in the after-life would POSSIBLY want to buy silly freshness liners for coffins.
Certainly such things as simple-minded sentimentality or vanity, which I'm sure you Science-loving atheists are immune against, have absolutely nothing to do with it.;-)
I don't think anybody has a good definition of what it is. Or what consciousness is. However, it seems tied to our physical brains, which are just following the laws of physics. Even if their are some random dice being thrown.
You might also want to consider the concepts of responsibility, justification, and ethics, all of which are linked to free will but have very little to do with the laws of physics (just like free will!).
If you are going "back" in time, then there's this idea that reality is being replayed -- is there consciousness during this replay? If not, then it's like watching a playback of a movie -- you don't assume any consciousness or free-will is happening at the time of playback.
No, it's not like a playback. Remember, you are *in* the past. You can interact with the theoretical Bob, but you decide not to so that you can act as an "omniscient observer". Suppose you decided to interact with the past by approaching Bob just as he was about to choose a drink from a vending machine. Suppose you wrote down "I know you will pick Coca-Cola" (which you know is correct) on a piece of paper, folded it, and gave it to Bob just as he pressed the Coca-Cola button. Will you therefore be able to tell him, like the scientists in the article, "Ha! I knew you would get a Coke! That writing is proof! You don't have free will!!!" Somehow I think there's something odd about that line of thinking. Somehow I think it just doesn't follow.
But what are you? Are you just a machine following the laws of physics? Does the clock pendulum swinging back and forth have free will? Does a river winding it's way downstream?
What am I? I am a sentient being, aware of myself, and able to decide.
You use the phrase "following the laws of physics" without realizing that, for pendulums, rivers, etc., it is merely a metaphor. What do we really mean when we say that a pendulum follows the laws of physics? Did the pendulum decide anything? Was it aware of the laws that it "follows", or of anything at all for that matter? What is it that motivates the pendulum to be so obedient, when it can simply break free and rebel from the shackles of these laws and follow another, much more interesting path? Etc, etc... It's just a figure of speech!
When we say that such and such computer program, for example, is "making decisions" based on such and such algorithms, sometimes we forget that we don't really mean that, as well. The story-teller in all of us like making characters, and so we give human-like characteristics even to inanimate things. At least it's an easy way to explain concepts, certainly better in this case than talking about logic gates or automata theory. Yet do you really expect me to answer such a fairy-tale question as "does a pendulum have free will"?
If you create a smart and powerful computer that is indistinguishable from a human, does it have free will, even though it's operation is completely deterministic?
Here we are again playing with words. "Indistinguishable from a human" is a useless phrase because it does not answer the important questions: Is it *actually* human, or not? Is it aware, or not? Does it feel responsibility for its actions, or does it not? Should I treat it with respect, or not?
There are two things that some fail to realize: First is that you can ask these questions to the people around you as well. Is Raenex human, or a cleverly programmed bot? Am I inside a machine that feeds fake data into my brain, such that the people I think am seeing are actually fake? The second thing is that, in the end, the only person you can trust to answer that question correctly is yourself. You know that you are aware. You know that you can take responsibility. You know. You think. Therefore, you are...Human. No matter if it turns out that you were programmed by some alien scientist using advanced technology...you are still a human being with free will.
Let me get this straight: our actions can be predicted beforehand (by other people), and is in fact known beforehand (by an omniscient Creator), ergo we do not have control (i.e. free will) over our actions?
I think there is some sort of confusion going on here, caused by the fact that people are using a useless definition of free will, one that is either overly ambiguous or obviously contradictory (making the "refutation" of free will a piece of cake). Let me explain:
Suppose there is a person Bob who actually does have free will according to your definition. (Go on, think of your definition of free will right now, and assume that Bob has it.) So he goes on with his life deciding things for himself. Now suppose you recorded every action he made in his life, then time-traveled back to when he was born. At that point, if your time-traveling self does not actually interact with Bob, you could certainly observe all his actions being played out as you recorded them. So, for example, you'll know that he will punch a school bully in the face at exactly 12:30PM, three days after his 10th birthday. You'll know that he will decide to marry his least favorite female co-worker after a particularly productive team-building exercise. You'll even know what his last words will be.
Now you have to ask yourself: since you know what Bob is going to do next, are you contradicting your previous assumption that he has free will? If so, your definition of free will is flawed.
In other words, I would like to ask: is there really a valid reason to doubt free will just because we can know with certainty what someone will do a few seconds from now? Or is it possible that, while others can predict my decisions, my decisions are still my own because I still made them? God knows what we will do, yes...but does that make him a Puppeteer, or could we see him as a wise Father, giving his children instructions, but letting them explore and discover what lies ahead on their own, sad that some of them will fall on the wrong path due to their own unfortunate flaws, yet happy to see those who will triumph?
Free will is simply someone's ability to decide what to do. That others can see in advance what he'll decide does absolutely nothing to question the ability.
I came here to read comments about the kids from MIT who beat the house playing blackjack, not your silly superstitions.
Really?! Believe it or not, your holiness, I came here to read about the MIT kids, too! (Does this make this post on-topic now? No? Oh well...) Now, silly superstition or not, do you deny that Geoffrey's reply to the Anonymous Coward was flawed? Wait...do you think *I* was the Anonymous Coward? I wasn't. I don't flame just because of some offensive sig. But I'll happily join a flamefest from time to time, on-topic or not, like any normal geek. Good day to you.
P.S. I tried your suggestion. Head-soaking is a surprisingly pleasant experience. I think I'll do it often from now on. Thanks!
No shit! But we are talking about Chmcginn's sig, which claims that homosexuality isn't mentioned in the New Testament. Paul's epistles, which are part of the New Testament, mentions homosexuality, thus disproving Chmcginn's claim.
It's awfully awkward to explain this, but my remark about The New and Improved New Testament(TM) was meant to be sarcastic. It seemed to me as if Geoffrey.landis thought that the Gospels are the only books worthy of the New Testament, or he thinks Paul's writings aren't as "true" as the Gospels (hint: they're all part of the Holy Scriptures, as compiled by the Church). This to me seemed like an awful simplification of Christianity (read: "Cafeteria Christianity"), where one could pick and choose which books in the Bible to trust, based on one's own biases. Hence the sarcastic remark.
Damn, this is getting crazy. Mod this thread down, please!
Let everybody mod me off-topic, but I don't know how the heck you were modded informative. The sig said "...mentioned in the New Testament...", which is where those passages came from. Or is there a New Improved and Highly Abridged New Testament, containing only the Gospel of the Cafeteria Christian, which narrates how Jesus was only a peace-loving hippie who just wanted us all to get along and embrace each other?
IANAE (I am not an economist), but you might be missing the point here. Sure, limiting the whole human population to a land mass the size of Texas might not be feasible, but it's just Texas we're talking about here. Filling up a theoretical Texas with people to the brink of unsustainability is far, far from a world-wide population problem. The fact that we can even imagine this thought-experiment gives credence to the claim that the problem isn't in the size of the world's population at all.
You say that all the additional resources needed for a Texas-sized megapolis would involve spreading workers all over the world, but won't a land mass the size of the mainland U.S. alone (or of North America, at most) be sufficient, given our current state of technology? You say that we can't all be vegan, living only on the produce of U.S. farmland. But won't the U.S. meat industry be sufficient to feed the omnivores as well? I'm honestly curious here. If we concentrated all the necessary resources to sustain the current population into one place, how much land do we really need?
Of course, we're not talking about the real Texas or the real U.S. here. Your parent post wasn't asking for a world-wide immigration; he's just showing why the "problem" is probably not a world-wide resource problem. Is it a political problem? Is it a problem with the distribution of wealth? Is it an education problem? A morality problem? All of the above? Maybe, maybe not. But something tells me the solution needs to be more complex than the Malthusian ones currently being advocated by many economists (e.g. 1) Instigate population decline. 2) ??? 3) Profit!).
I can't say I'm surprised that you got modded down. This news has nothing to do with the kind of research the pope opposes, and in fact is exactly what he is trying to endorse, yet some people just enjoy mocking him for his "anti-Science" position against creating human beings just to kill them for their cells. Too bad I don't have mod-points.
That was what I was trying to say. But I did a search on Wikipedia and it turns out that injecting sperm into the uterus is another form of artificial insemination. Well, I still don't agree with that, but mainly for abstract reasons (the religious notion that a soul deserves to be conceived via the sacred marital act), so it's not really worth arguing.
So, even if you artificially conceive out of love, in a loving marriage, to raise beautiful children, sorry - 'natural law' says you can't, because the meanings the church has given cannot be changed, nor should they be. Nothing natural about it, actually...
Awww...poor loving couple weren't allowed to murder humans so that they could have a loving family. *sniff* Bad Church! Bad!
I've been saying this for years! Those sissy elves made Middle-Earth too soft! Their overly-peaceful ways made Sauron's rise to power almost inevitable!
Facts? Truth?! What is the truth that Galileo defended? What is the truth that this evil organization called the Catholic Church tried to hide from the world, the truth that poor, lonely Galileo had to stand for by himself, risking his career and his reputation? Well, let's see!
Is the sun truly stationary?
Is the Earth's orbit circular?
Is the moon NOT a cause of the tides?
Since these are wrong, can we now say that Galileo was a bad scientist, since the goal of "truth" wasn't achieved? Can we say that Galileo was willing to "trash scientific truth" in favor of his own scientific interpretation of evidence?
No, because Science is about evidence, not about "Truth". Truth is (in part) for philosophy, something that Galileo and many other scholars of his time weren't really good at, and something that they often confused with Science.
But the Earth DOES revolve around the sun, doesn't it? Yes, how heroic of this one man, what GUTS he had, to face the bad, tyrannical pope who would dare threaten to torture him, the best scientist in the world, the Father of Modern Science, just to cruelly abolish the obvious *glaring* TRUTH that the Earth revolved around the sun! How dare the pope put his horrid religion and his stupid assumptions above Galileo's clear-as-the-sun truth. How dare he!
...Except, Galileo wasn't the only one. You're so happy to point out that Copernicus never published his works until shortly before he died, apparently because he was afraid that Evil Church will get him (instead of, say, because he was afrad that his scholarly peers might reject such a revolutionary idea). But he DID publish it! And years later, a non-insignificant number of scholars were already heliocentrists, some of them part of the clergy. And the pope never persecuted them, though a few theologians wanted to. Hey, the Church isn't so anti-Science after all, huh?
Let me borrow a favorite phrase by atheists: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." For generations the most brilliant scholars of Europe were under the spell of Aristotle, and thought that the Earth was the center of the universe (among other incorrect things). Now, when the theory of heliocentrism was thought up, the only evidence for it was the clever mathematical interpretation of strange astronimical data. It was a solid theory, and explained the data beautifully, but it was not enough, because geocentrism was too ingrained in the scholars' minds. A good scientist would have waited for further evidence to convince geocentrists that they were wrong (e.g. the eventual discovery of other planets, the development of optics, astronomy, etc.), but Galileo wanted to brag about his perceived superiority. He was so fanatical about his belief that he was willing to challenge his religion on the basis of a clever (and, as we know, not completely correct) mathematical model. That is not good Science. That is just heresy.
Now, your claim that the Church was willing to "trash scientific truth" is misleading because, as I said, there is no such thing as a scientific truth. We only have what the scientists of the present have agreed upon, based on evidence, to be the most believable theory. Science is Occam's Razor applied to present data. Evidence will always accumulate, and it will sometimes be discredited, and it will sometimes change. But all in all, evidence is not "truth". What the Church was willing to do was to punish the irrational fanaticism bordering on heresy towards a strange (to them at the time) theory, which has been presented in such a disrespecful manner.
You call it an atrocity, yet any defensive act by an enemy will always be considered offensive. I'm not saying that there weren't harsh punishments done by corrupt authority figures during that time, or that the harsher punishments weren't atrocities, but what the heck wouldn't you call an atrocity, when you consider "house-arrest for fighting religion" to be an atrocity? You are unden
imprisoning a scientist for the rest of their life
Man, just because you were born in a world where practically anyone claiming to have a science degree is considered infallible by the media doesn't make Galileo's imprisonment unforgivable. He wasn't imprisoned because of his scientific findings, but because of his behavior that implied an unacceptably belligerent stance against his intellectual opponents. He not only insulted his scholarly peers, but also certain religious authorities (e.g. the pope) who were the very people trying to defend him. Which leads us to...
threatening [him] with death, torture and excommunication
First of all, I doubt that the pope at the time ever threatened to order bodily harm against Galileo, but you're welcome to enlighten me on that point. Now, I wonder whether it's even worth while arguing about excommunication with you, given that apparently you do not accept it as anything other than a cruel expulsion. I wonder if you could at least accept that the a person whose actual beliefs do not jive with his professed belief system would be foolish to remain within that system, or that said belief-system would be quite self-destructive if it allowed dissenting members to continue on acting as members.
Yet we haven't addressed the central issue: was the former Cardinal defending the debilitating life-long house arrest of Galileo, or was he merely saying that the trial itself was a rational response (if harsh for our standards) against one accused of heresy under the authority of the Church, and that it wasn't an attack on Science at all? I'm saying that your answer to that might reveal a real bigotry against the Church, a bigotry that is willing to contradict scientific principles. Science isn't concerned with "geniuses" but with the proper presentation of evidence, which Galileo utterly failed due to his arrogance. It is the bigoted blindness that leads to such conclusions as that the current pope is a geocentric dunce, or that he wants to bring us back to the political environment of Galileo's time.
You're claiming that the pope is a geocentrist. You actually believe that he defended Galileo's sentence because he thinks the Sun revolved around the Earth. Just...wow.
Clearly bigotry isn't caused by religion. You have shown by your own statements that bigotry and general block-headedness is the problem of the person, not necessarily his belief system.
I try not to insult people's beliefs. It's against my beliefs.
Oh, I don't know. Telling people to "buck up" for reasons that they cannot accept seems rather insulting to me. Telling them to be be free from the things they care for: even more so.
Buddhism... says that there is a way out of suffering here and now, regardless of anything else, and it shows you how so you can see if it works for you or not.
Cool! Then the poor, the abused, the hunted, the tortured people of the world who are suffering here and now would probably do good converting to Buddhism immediately. But then, it's probably difficult to achieve Nirvana while being tortured, because of...you know...all the pain and shit.
The image of a Christian martyr being tortured to death, yet still hopeful in the promise of heaven, is quite easy to conjure in light of the many Christian martyrs who died that way. Now, I know about Buddhist martyrs, yet for all their worldly heroism I feel they merely wanted to escape from something. What do you promise a suffering Buddhist? What hope is there for people in pain to believe that no one is listening to them? Nothing. Not even the mercy of God. In fact, compared to this, even hell seems merciful. Even the hell-bound have a certain dignity, because at least they have a destiny beyond hopeless "Nirvana".
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That is true if by "the world we can observe" you mean replicable data and by "work with" you mean "test scientifically". Now, it's fine that we can apply the scientific method in some things that affect our daily lives, yet we are still left with these questions: What do want to observe? What do we want to work with? What is the goal, if any, of our studies? What are we trying to attain? What are we trying to avoid? What scientific tests do we make? What scientific tests should we NOT make?
Are you saying, for example, that we should abandon an ethical or moral principle we may personally have if it becomes a hindrance to some experiment? Once we do that, we're not helping Science, we're just helping the world view that rejects the principle we abandoned.
If I can, for example, create some futuristic biological technology by killing a few million human beings as part of some scientific experiment, I still need to decide if I would dare kill. (Let us assume that I could kill so many people with impunity.) If I cannot dare it, then I could try looking for other experiment that would not involve murder. It's not because I am anti-Science (after all, I am not rejecting the possibility that the hypothesis could still be tested using other experiments; no matter if such experiments are not possible at present), it's because I am anti-Murder.
But if I would dare kill a million people for the sake of scientific progress, well, hooray for scientific progress; yet I cannot look at the vast graveyard of my victims and justify myself by saying "What can I do, when you're all I had to work with?"
I'm trying to see which part of your post is actually arguing against anything I said. I mean, the tone sounds as if you don't agree with me, but it's like you're talking to someone else, some other guy who's anti-Science and who thinks Science is useless. Maybe it's because I've been too "abstract". Well then, let me stop talking about useless abstract things for now and actually state what I think of the matter.
The scientific method, being a system based on evidence and NOT proof, is only useful if people stopped thinking of it as a method for proving things. Science as Dogma (or Science as Philosophy; i.e. scientism) is Bad Science, because it contradicts the basic nature of Science as something that is not fixed. You cannot correct flawed theories, you cannot go on doing the noble act of looking for contradictory evidence, if you begin calling scientific theories as Truth.
I like Science because it helps us discover what we can do about our environment. It does that , not by proving things, but by weeding things out, narrowing down our options, helping us think clearer. What I don't like is Scientism. I don't like the arrogance of materialists who think that Science is on their side, that the triumph of Science is a triumph against God. The problem is that the "triumphs of Science" are not the triumphs of Science at all; every technology, every new discovery, is in fact either a complete accident or a triumph of human creativity and imagination, imagination that produces ideas that are then tested by Science. Science is a test for ideas (not even the only test of ideas), not the source of them. And in order to test ideas, you need to have them first.
Now, you say that abstract proof is useless. I wonder what you think of mathematics, then. I wonder if you'd dismiss the use of abstract proof in, say, theoretical physics. Of course, all logic and proof must be based on unproven claims, otherwise you can't even start proving anything. Yet once a group of people agree on which principles they need not prove, then an logical proofs for everything else would be far from "useless". Abstract logic is only hindered either when someone disagrees with your first principles (which does not necessarily mean that they are wrong) or when stubborn irrationality is involved. In such cases, neither logic nor evidence would be of much use, and we'll just have to go back to our basic ability to deal with differences (do we fight those who differ from us on principle? flee from them? concede? pretend? etc.).
So tell me, where do we disagree?
A man is found holding a bloody knife in the same room as his recently dead wife. The circumstances are evidence that he killed his wife, but they are not proof. The fact that he is in possession of what seems to be the murder weapon has no logical connection with the claim that he killed her, at least in the sense that the latter does not logically follow from the former.
In fact, even if more evidence pile up, even if we see a video of him actually stabbing his wife, even if he confesses, even if there is no reasonable doubt left in anyone's mind that he did the act, all those things do not logically imply that he did it. He probably did it. He most likely did it. It would be correct for a judge to find him guilty and sentence him. But that he did the crime is not proven by the evidence against him. It just so happens that those things are connected with the hypothesis quite closely in our minds. They are all just mental connections and nothing else. A bloody knife is connected to murder as logically as a fallen spoon is connected to a visitor, or a sneeze is connected to someone thinking of you. We call the latter connections superstitions, but their difference to the "scientific" connection is merely a matter of reasonableness, not logic.
I guess I was wrong in calling Science a superstition. Superstition as a word is inescapably negative, a word used by someone if he disagrees with someone else's beliefs. Our limited brains cannot but connect the things around us, and you know what? That's perfectly okay; better than going nuts, at least. We just have to remember that while we have all the right to believe that what we think is the truth, some things (like Science, like God) just can't be proved, no matter how convinced we are of them.
Many people explain their superstitions all the time. That's what all the myths and legends were for. Of course, Science is a rather useful superstition since its explanations are based on actual evidence. But then, that's the point of it: Science is the superstition that the gathering of evidence or data leads eventually to the discovery of truth, or some useful approximation of it. It would be a (silly) truism to say "There is a lot of evidence that evidence is good!", but evidence is not proof. There is no logical connection between evidence and truth. Therefore Science is a superstition.
And that doesn't decrease my affection for Science one bit.
BPI, one of the biggest banks in the Philippines, uses Windows XP in their ATMs. The BSODs and crashes would be unbearable if not for the fact that they have so many ATMs (or "BPI Express Tellers" as they call them) installed all over our area. I usually just walk a short distance to the next nearest machine whenever I encounter a problem.
Then a few months ago I've gone to three consecutive trips to BPI machines and all of them had issues. The last one was under maintenance, and I watched the technician fiddle w/ the Windows environment for a while before I just went and used another bank's ATM machine located nearby.
No shit? :-P
Thanks but no thanks for your "leave those poor ignorant people alone, you enlightened but hurtful jerk!" defense of us "myth-believers". I know you meant well, but I just can't seem to accept your charity for some reason.
Now, I've only heard the religious phrase "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" a bajillion times since my parents first taught me religion, but if it makes you more efficient/successful/happy, then by all means continue believing that religion blinds people from realizing that the body becomes a "rotting carcass" (as timmarhy puts it) in death. `Coz, you know, only religious people who believe in the after-life would POSSIBLY want to buy silly freshness liners for coffins.
Certainly such things as simple-minded sentimentality or vanity, which I'm sure you Science-loving atheists are immune against, have absolutely nothing to do with it. ;-)
I don't think anybody has a good definition of what it is. Or what consciousness is. However, it seems tied to our physical brains, which are just following the laws of physics. Even if their are some random dice being thrown.
You might also want to consider the concepts of responsibility, justification, and ethics, all of which are linked to free will but have very little to do with the laws of physics (just like free will!).
If you are going "back" in time, then there's this idea that reality is being replayed -- is there consciousness during this replay? If not, then it's like watching a playback of a movie -- you don't assume any consciousness or free-will is happening at the time of playback.
No, it's not like a playback. Remember, you are *in* the past. You can interact with the theoretical Bob, but you decide not to so that you can act as an "omniscient observer". Suppose you decided to interact with the past by approaching Bob just as he was about to choose a drink from a vending machine. Suppose you wrote down "I know you will pick Coca-Cola" (which you know is correct) on a piece of paper, folded it, and gave it to Bob just as he pressed the Coca-Cola button. Will you therefore be able to tell him, like the scientists in the article, "Ha! I knew you would get a Coke! That writing is proof! You don't have free will!!!" Somehow I think there's something odd about that line of thinking. Somehow I think it just doesn't follow.
But what are you? Are you just a machine following the laws of physics? Does the clock pendulum swinging back and forth have free will? Does a river winding it's way downstream?
What am I? I am a sentient being, aware of myself, and able to decide.
You use the phrase "following the laws of physics" without realizing that, for pendulums, rivers, etc., it is merely a metaphor. What do we really mean when we say that a pendulum follows the laws of physics? Did the pendulum decide anything? Was it aware of the laws that it "follows", or of anything at all for that matter? What is it that motivates the pendulum to be so obedient, when it can simply break free and rebel from the shackles of these laws and follow another, much more interesting path? Etc, etc... It's just a figure of speech!
When we say that such and such computer program, for example, is "making decisions" based on such and such algorithms, sometimes we forget that we don't really mean that, as well. The story-teller in all of us like making characters, and so we give human-like characteristics even to inanimate things. At least it's an easy way to explain concepts, certainly better in this case than talking about logic gates or automata theory. Yet do you really expect me to answer such a fairy-tale question as "does a pendulum have free will"?
If you create a smart and powerful computer that is indistinguishable from a human, does it have free will, even though it's operation is completely deterministic?
Here we are again playing with words. "Indistinguishable from a human" is a useless phrase because it does not answer the important questions: Is it *actually* human, or not? Is it aware, or not? Does it feel responsibility for its actions, or does it not? Should I treat it with respect, or not?
There are two things that some fail to realize: First is that you can ask these questions to the people around you as well. Is Raenex human, or a cleverly programmed bot? Am I inside a machine that feeds fake data into my brain, such that the people I think am seeing are actually fake? The second thing is that, in the end, the only person you can trust to answer that question correctly is yourself. You know that you are aware. You know that you can take responsibility. You know. You think. Therefore, you are...Human. No matter if it turns out that you were programmed by some alien scientist using advanced technology...you are still a human being with free will.
Let me get this straight: our actions can be predicted beforehand (by other people), and is in fact known beforehand (by an omniscient Creator), ergo we do not have control (i.e. free will) over our actions?
I think there is some sort of confusion going on here, caused by the fact that people are using a useless definition of free will, one that is either overly ambiguous or obviously contradictory (making the "refutation" of free will a piece of cake). Let me explain:
Suppose there is a person Bob who actually does have free will according to your definition. (Go on, think of your definition of free will right now, and assume that Bob has it.) So he goes on with his life deciding things for himself. Now suppose you recorded every action he made in his life, then time-traveled back to when he was born. At that point, if your time-traveling self does not actually interact with Bob, you could certainly observe all his actions being played out as you recorded them. So, for example, you'll know that he will punch a school bully in the face at exactly 12:30PM, three days after his 10th birthday. You'll know that he will decide to marry his least favorite female co-worker after a particularly productive team-building exercise. You'll even know what his last words will be.
Now you have to ask yourself: since you know what Bob is going to do next, are you contradicting your previous assumption that he has free will? If so, your definition of free will is flawed.
In other words, I would like to ask: is there really a valid reason to doubt free will just because we can know with certainty what someone will do a few seconds from now? Or is it possible that, while others can predict my decisions, my decisions are still my own because I still made them? God knows what we will do, yes...but does that make him a Puppeteer, or could we see him as a wise Father, giving his children instructions, but letting them explore and discover what lies ahead on their own, sad that some of them will fall on the wrong path due to their own unfortunate flaws, yet happy to see those who will triumph?
Free will is simply someone's ability to decide what to do. That others can see in advance what he'll decide does absolutely nothing to question the ability.
Really?! Believe it or not, your holiness, I came here to read about the MIT kids, too! (Does this make this post on-topic now? No? Oh well...) Now, silly superstition or not, do you deny that Geoffrey's reply to the Anonymous Coward was flawed? Wait...do you think *I* was the Anonymous Coward? I wasn't. I don't flame just because of some offensive sig. But I'll happily join a flamefest from time to time, on-topic or not, like any normal geek. Good day to you.
P.S. I tried your suggestion. Head-soaking is a surprisingly pleasant experience. I think I'll do it often from now on. Thanks!
No shit! But we are talking about Chmcginn's sig, which claims that homosexuality isn't mentioned in the New Testament. Paul's epistles, which are part of the New Testament, mentions homosexuality, thus disproving Chmcginn's claim.
It's awfully awkward to explain this, but my remark about The New and Improved New Testament(TM) was meant to be sarcastic. It seemed to me as if Geoffrey.landis thought that the Gospels are the only books worthy of the New Testament, or he thinks Paul's writings aren't as "true" as the Gospels (hint: they're all part of the Holy Scriptures, as compiled by the Church). This to me seemed like an awful simplification of Christianity (read: "Cafeteria Christianity"), where one could pick and choose which books in the Bible to trust, based on one's own biases. Hence the sarcastic remark.
Damn, this is getting crazy. Mod this thread down, please!
Let everybody mod me off-topic, but I don't know how the heck you were modded informative. The sig said "...mentioned in the New Testament...", which is where those passages came from. Or is there a New Improved and Highly Abridged New Testament, containing only the Gospel of the Cafeteria Christian, which narrates how Jesus was only a peace-loving hippie who just wanted us all to get along and embrace each other?
IANAE (I am not an economist), but you might be missing the point here. Sure, limiting the whole human population to a land mass the size of Texas might not be feasible, but it's just Texas we're talking about here. Filling up a theoretical Texas with people to the brink of unsustainability is far, far from a world-wide population problem. The fact that we can even imagine this thought-experiment gives credence to the claim that the problem isn't in the size of the world's population at all.
You say that all the additional resources needed for a Texas-sized megapolis would involve spreading workers all over the world, but won't a land mass the size of the mainland U.S. alone (or of North America, at most) be sufficient, given our current state of technology? You say that we can't all be vegan, living only on the produce of U.S. farmland. But won't the U.S. meat industry be sufficient to feed the omnivores as well? I'm honestly curious here. If we concentrated all the necessary resources to sustain the current population into one place, how much land do we really need?
Of course, we're not talking about the real Texas or the real U.S. here. Your parent post wasn't asking for a world-wide immigration; he's just showing why the "problem" is probably not a world-wide resource problem. Is it a political problem? Is it a problem with the distribution of wealth? Is it an education problem? A morality problem? All of the above? Maybe, maybe not. But something tells me the solution needs to be more complex than the Malthusian ones currently being advocated by many economists (e.g. 1) Instigate population decline. 2) ??? 3) Profit!).
The question is, basically, do we want Wikipedia to be a Encyclopaedia Galactica, or do we want it to be the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe?
I, for one, prefer an encyclopedia that includes the recipe for the best drink in existence.
I can't say I'm surprised that you got modded down. This news has nothing to do with the kind of research the pope opposes, and in fact is exactly what he is trying to endorse, yet some people just enjoy mocking him for his "anti-Science" position against creating human beings just to kill them for their cells. Too bad I don't have mod-points.
That was what I was trying to say. But I did a search on Wikipedia and it turns out that injecting sperm into the uterus is another form of artificial insemination. Well, I still don't agree with that, but mainly for abstract reasons (the religious notion that a soul deserves to be conceived via the sacred marital act), so it's not really worth arguing.
Stupid! It's artificial insemination he was talking about! You don't need to destroy embryos just to do that!
Awww...poor loving couple weren't allowed to murder humans so that they could have a loving family. *sniff* Bad Church! Bad!
/sarcasm
I've been saying this for years! Those sissy elves made Middle-Earth too soft! Their overly-peaceful ways made Sauron's rise to power almost inevitable!
Oh, wait...
Thank you sir for your funny signature. I enjoyed it so much, I almost spit out the water I was drinking from a Gatorade bottle.
I have patent rights on using sports-drink bottles as distilled water containers, by the way. There! I'm no longer off-topic!
Facts? Truth?! What is the truth that Galileo defended? What is the truth that this evil organization called the Catholic Church tried to hide from the world, the truth that poor, lonely Galileo had to stand for by himself, risking his career and his reputation? Well, let's see!
Is the sun truly stationary?
Is the Earth's orbit circular?
Is the moon NOT a cause of the tides?
Since these are wrong, can we now say that Galileo was a bad scientist, since the goal of "truth" wasn't achieved? Can we say that Galileo was willing to "trash scientific truth" in favor of his own scientific interpretation of evidence?
No, because Science is about evidence, not about "Truth". Truth is (in part) for philosophy, something that Galileo and many other scholars of his time weren't really good at, and something that they often confused with Science.
But the Earth DOES revolve around the sun, doesn't it? Yes, how heroic of this one man, what GUTS he had, to face the bad, tyrannical pope who would dare threaten to torture him, the best scientist in the world, the Father of Modern Science, just to cruelly abolish the obvious *glaring* TRUTH that the Earth revolved around the sun! How dare the pope put his horrid religion and his stupid assumptions above Galileo's clear-as-the-sun truth. How dare he!
...Except, Galileo wasn't the only one. You're so happy to point out that Copernicus never published his works until shortly before he died, apparently because he was afraid that Evil Church will get him (instead of, say, because he was afrad that his scholarly peers might reject such a revolutionary idea). But he DID publish it! And years later, a non-insignificant number of scholars were already heliocentrists, some of them part of the clergy. And the pope never persecuted them, though a few theologians wanted to. Hey, the Church isn't so anti-Science after all, huh?
Let me borrow a favorite phrase by atheists: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." For generations the most brilliant scholars of Europe were under the spell of Aristotle, and thought that the Earth was the center of the universe (among other incorrect things). Now, when the theory of heliocentrism was thought up, the only evidence for it was the clever mathematical interpretation of strange astronimical data. It was a solid theory, and explained the data beautifully, but it was not enough, because geocentrism was too ingrained in the scholars' minds. A good scientist would have waited for further evidence to convince geocentrists that they were wrong (e.g. the eventual discovery of other planets, the development of optics, astronomy, etc.), but Galileo wanted to brag about his perceived superiority. He was so fanatical about his belief that he was willing to challenge his religion on the basis of a clever (and, as we know, not completely correct) mathematical model. That is not good Science. That is just heresy.
Now, your claim that the Church was willing to "trash scientific truth" is misleading because, as I said, there is no such thing as a scientific truth. We only have what the scientists of the present have agreed upon, based on evidence, to be the most believable theory. Science is Occam's Razor applied to present data. Evidence will always accumulate, and it will sometimes be discredited, and it will sometimes change. But all in all, evidence is not "truth". What the Church was willing to do was to punish the irrational fanaticism bordering on heresy towards a strange (to them at the time) theory, which has been presented in such a disrespecful manner.
You call it an atrocity, yet any defensive act by an enemy will always be considered offensive. I'm not saying that there weren't harsh punishments done by corrupt authority figures during that time, or that the harsher punishments weren't atrocities, but what the heck wouldn't you call an atrocity, when you consider "house-arrest for fighting religion" to be an atrocity? You are unden
translated into English
Man, just because you were born in a world where practically anyone claiming to have a science degree is considered infallible by the media doesn't make Galileo's imprisonment unforgivable. He wasn't imprisoned because of his scientific findings, but because of his behavior that implied an unacceptably belligerent stance against his intellectual opponents. He not only insulted his scholarly peers, but also certain religious authorities (e.g. the pope) who were the very people trying to defend him. Which leads us to...
First of all, I doubt that the pope at the time ever threatened to order bodily harm against Galileo, but you're welcome to enlighten me on that point. Now, I wonder whether it's even worth while arguing about excommunication with you, given that apparently you do not accept it as anything other than a cruel expulsion. I wonder if you could at least accept that the a person whose actual beliefs do not jive with his professed belief system would be foolish to remain within that system, or that said belief-system would be quite self-destructive if it allowed dissenting members to continue on acting as members.
Yet we haven't addressed the central issue: was the former Cardinal defending the debilitating life-long house arrest of Galileo, or was he merely saying that the trial itself was a rational response (if harsh for our standards) against one accused of heresy under the authority of the Church, and that it wasn't an attack on Science at all? I'm saying that your answer to that might reveal a real bigotry against the Church, a bigotry that is willing to contradict scientific principles. Science isn't concerned with "geniuses" but with the proper presentation of evidence, which Galileo utterly failed due to his arrogance. It is the bigoted blindness that leads to such conclusions as that the current pope is a geocentric dunce, or that he wants to bring us back to the political environment of Galileo's time.
You're claiming that the pope is a geocentrist. You actually believe that he defended Galileo's sentence because he thinks the Sun revolved around the Earth. Just...wow.
Clearly bigotry isn't caused by religion. You have shown by your own statements that bigotry and general block-headedness is the problem of the person, not necessarily his belief system.
Oh, I don't know. Telling people to "buck up" for reasons that they cannot accept seems rather insulting to me. Telling them to be be free from the things they care for: even more so.
Cool! Then the poor, the abused, the hunted, the tortured people of the world who are suffering here and now would probably do good converting to Buddhism immediately. But then, it's probably difficult to achieve Nirvana while being tortured, because of...you know...all the pain and shit.
The image of a Christian martyr being tortured to death, yet still hopeful in the promise of heaven, is quite easy to conjure in light of the many Christian martyrs who died that way. Now, I know about Buddhist martyrs, yet for all their worldly heroism I feel they merely wanted to escape from something. What do you promise a suffering Buddhist? What hope is there for people in pain to believe that no one is listening to them? Nothing. Not even the mercy of God. In fact, compared to this, even hell seems merciful. Even the hell-bound have a certain dignity, because at least they have a destiny beyond hopeless "Nirvana".