How many hundreds of billions of dollars are you willing to add to the defense budget to get all of those things to "work?" Even if they are never used? Or don't really work but give you a warm fuzzy feeling anyway?
Also, your definition of "failure" subtly shifts from "somebody gets a nuke" to "somebody's nuke detonates nearby." Yes, Kim Jong Il probably has nukes (no thanks to a na-na-na-I-can't-hear-you diplomatic strategy). Have those nukes killed you?
Massive nuclear attack *is* obsolete, and can't be prevented with practical missile defenses anyway. Which is why NMD advocates talk about defending against *small* ballistic missile attacks.
ICBMs are expensive and leave an obvious return address for retaliation. A *small* attack is not likely to be used against hardened military targets, but against soft targets, and typically civilian ones. Container bombs are cheaper and more effective ways for an adversary to accomplish terrorist goals, and actually *launching* a small attack means the deterrent aspect has already failed.
North Korea does not have long-range missiles and nukes to actually use them except in some last-gasp scenario. They have them to deter U.S. military action by adding risk and uncertainty to U.S. plans. Spending many bilions of dollars for an ineffective defense which will likely never be used is a total crock, especially when all military plans against North Korea suck anyhow.
"Cut and run" vs. "stay the course" is a false dichotomy.
The question is whether what the U.S. is doing in Iraq is helpful to U.S. security overall compared to *all* the possible variations in policy that could be enacted now.
Like *increasing* troops, or changing their strategy/tactics, or just getting the hell out, or whatever.
Of course, dumbshits who weren't willing to answer tough questions before the war are not the most likely to consider tough questions now, so we get "muddle along, while claiming the *next* political milestone will *really* make the difference, and this is all just *great* for the Iraqi people, and, no of course no general is asking for more troops, and anyone who questions us is a liberal revisionist terrorist-appeasing wimp...."
"Upper atmosphere" is terminal phase, meaning your interceptors need to act even faster, and must be located even nearer the target.
In any case, you have to look at the cost-effectiveness of any scheme against other competing schemes and threats. Ballistic missile threats from organized militaries seem much less important to me than other delivery mechanisms potentially used by terrorists, included state-sponsored ones. The countermeasures against those include non-proliferation, securing of nuclear materials, more intelligence gathering, and effective action against terrorist groups. All of which are much cheaper than massive hardware development.
Yes, research is useful. But research down avenues that have poor performance even if they are successful is wasteful compared to investing in approaches which have more chance of success.
Spending billions so that we can actually pour concrete in Alaska to base a non-proven system doesn't really count as "research" either.
Strawman argument. Missile defense is not protecting us against any of those things in a realistic sense.
Missile defense has not proved anything near the ability to prevent an attack by multiple advanced missiles, particularly those which would use even relatively simple anti-simulation decoy techniques.
For the newbies to missile defense, "decoys" are typically large mylar balloons which inflate in space to create radar targets as large or larger than a warhead. They are extremely cheap and light, so anybody able to make an ICBM can afford to put many decoys in their missiles. "Anti-simulation" means you put the warhead in a balloon, or in some other way make it look very similar to the cheap, plentiful decoys.
Now your putative missile defense system has to somehow deal with dozens of things that all look like cheap decoys, but only a handful are actually warheads.
The missile defense folks will hem and haw about how their system is not meant to deal with a sophisticated enemy, which is code for "we think North Korea can't really make fancy warheads that maneuver like we think Soviet warheads can" but ignoring the fact that mylar balloons are not sophisticated. Or that it is only meant to handle single isolated launches, like might occur by "accident." Or they'll say they are only deploying the system to provide the opportunity for more realistic testing. Or that they really need a launch-phase system (before the decoys get a chance to deploy), which needs to be very near the launch site, so you need to post sailors or soldiers very near North Korea (because you can't get close enough to China or Russia's launch sites without invading their territory) whenever you think a launch is probable, and keep them ready enough to respond in minutes.
As opposed to sitting around in Alaska waiting for a single warhead, with at most a few decoys, to come sailing up from North Korea, and hoping that North Korean missile designers never heard of mylar balloons. Then you get to see if the *many* billions of dollars we've spent on this system pay off or not.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle can be generalized to "conjugate" quantities.
For instance, in condensed matter physics, the wave functions that have to do with superfluidity have an uncertainty relationship between the number of particles participating in the condensate and the quantum phase of the condensate.
I read the comparison to vi to be not in terms of editing functionality, but "no matter what Windows box you happen to run into, no matter how hosed, MS Edit is there, and will work."
As in the reason everyone says to learn vi, even if you can't stand it, because someday, you'll run into a hosed UNIX box, and vi will be the only thing available and working for you to edit config files.
The answer is to upload just the meta-data, possibly through their bulk-upload feature, including links to the actual data being hosted somewhere else.
Presumably they are trying to avoid Google Base as a way to distribute viruses and such by restricting everything to plain text.
I notice my attribute values cannot even include periods (I was trying to upload source code, using a "File Name" attribute of "README.txt"). In any case, the description has a 1k character limit.
running the same task on your own company computers using currently available software would take 3 weeks and for free,
It's unlikely to be truly free; much more likely is that your cost accounting system is defective. Computing infrastructure requires real money to keep in operation, from initial capital expense (reflected in depreciation), cost of the physical space, to ongoing support staff, repair work, electric power, cooling, etc. At the very least, running a 3 week job means that the system can't go down for maintenance purposes during that period.
Sun presumably charges enough to cover these costs in their setting. Your internal systems should charge you enough to cover *your* true costs, or else money is being wasted on computer infrastructure. Sun's basic premise was that they could achieve economies of scale that make their costs lower than your costs.
That said, commercial reality has to take into account that many accounting systems *are* defective in that groups are able to use resources without proper cost allocation, essentially being subsidized by some other part of the organization.
You are confused. "Garbage collection," as usually defined, is orthogonal to the handling of non-memory resources.
Languages that support automatic memory management generally behave identically to C/C++ with respect to file descriptors, so they can't be any worse than the equivalent C/C++ code in that regard.
A C/C++ program that free()s a memory block (and properly avoids referencing it afterward) which holds a data structure with a file descriptor that is no longer needed, but which does not close the file descriptor, has lost that resource just as surely as a similar program in a garbage-collected language would.
The reason to use feof() is that EOF can be returned for error conditions *other* than end-of-file. However, EOF cannot occur "naturally" in the input stream. That's why getc() returns an int and not a character.
You seem to have missed the point. Your "define it as a figure..in a higher-dimensional space" is exactly what the parent poster meant by "embedding."
A circular curve is a ONE-dimensional manifold because your position on the circle can be specified by ONE number, namely the distance travelled around the circle from an arbitrary point. ONE coordinate = ONE dimension.
The surface of the earth (or other sphere) is a TWO-dimensional object, because you need only TWO numbers (latitude & longitude) to tell where you are.
The "looping" or periodic nature of the coordinates on a manifold does *not* increase the dimension of the manifold. Think of the old arcade game of Asteroids, if you remember that far back. Your space ship flies off the right side of the screen, it shows up on the left; fly off the top, end up on the bottom. That is actually isomorphic to the surface of a donut, but it is TWO-dimensional. The screen is flat, and it DOESN'T have to be physically curved for that to work.
Yes, Google has an IM client, desktop search tool, Picasa, Google Earth,...
and guess what?
These all require WINDOWS to work. (With minor exceptions for professional-grade Google Earth, and vague promises of "working on Mac version" for desktop search.) They might not be "trapped in a browser" but they are still "trapped in a near-monopoly OS."
Yes, this might be some kind of stealth campaign, where a GoogleLinux complete with (well-tested, of course) Office-compatible replacements and a full suite of GoogleApps will show up for free in everyone's Gmail inbox one day, but I doubt it.
There are plenty of (IMO, stupid) people who question whether the planes were flown into the WTC/Pentagon/PA-field-on-the-way-to-DC? by Muslims acting on behalf of Osama bin Laden, et al., or whether it is, say, some Jewish conspiracy, with "evidence" such as the collapse of WTC 7 (spontaneously) after it was decided to demolish it, or absence of Jews from the WTC. Putting that aside as paranoid nonsense:
It's not at all obvious that all the 19 folks knew all of what was going to happen, impossible to know exactly the reasons each person did what they did, and what they thought they would achieve. One can only guess based on the stated motivations of those left behind who seem to have been involved in their training and planning, and other evidence, as revealed to us by government investigators and the press. The evidence for the "direct" cause burned up, and they certainly didn't act alone or independently.
It's certainly not obvious that GWB's administration (or the Clinton administration) did all that was possible to go after Al Qaeda before 9/11 gave them a big wake-up call (and a handy campaign issue as well). *That* is the stupidity, compounded by the stupidity of thinking that invading Iraq would help, while Al Qaeda-types were gleefully chatting about how the U.S. was about to make that huge mistake, and also the stupidity of using the *most* inflammatory word "crusade" to describe our Middle East policy, shitcanning generals who talked about the huge troop numbers that would be needed for decent security in post-invasion Iraq, etc.
I would certainly put Al Qaeda-related acts in the "chaos" category, anyway. 19 people is just a blip among six billion, and probably impossible to predict in specific enough detail to prevent reliably.
A certain amount of terroristic chaos is going to slip through the cracks and succeed, no matter how many powers we give to government or how much money we give to spies and analysts or the military. At the very least, nutcases will randomly pop up and kill people for no good reason at all. It's not like Osama bin Laden is directly speaking to every person who puts a bomb on a subway, or that it would stop happening if we kill enough people in his organization.
Yes, but that DRM only applies to tunes from the online Music Store, NOT iTunes, the software that lets you rip CDs to non-proprietary, non-DRM'd formats, which go just fine onto the phone.
The lapse of dietary laws has Biblical support: particularly Mark 7, and Acts 10 & 11. As for Paul, look at Galatians. Generally, the Church relies on the letters attributed to Paul and not tradition to describe what Paul said.
For some reason Slashdot seems to have lost my original response, so here goes.
"1+1=2" is a symbolic statement. "1+1=2 is True" is another symbolic statement. "1+1=3" and "1+1=3 is False" and "1+1=3 is True" are other symbolic statements. One establishes the "truth" of these statement by using axioms and higher-order logic, pretty much in a mechanical way. Moving symbols around is something computers can do very well, and seems to have very little to do with whether something is alive or not.
As you point out, with your Eskimo example, living things who are ignorant of symbolic logic, or who don't have language at all, have a very hard time with symbolic reasoning. That shows that "life" and "logical truth" are unrelated concepts, which you seem to have mixed together in a strange way.
After all, you are (to me) just a collection of symbols on a computer screen, and I am the same to you, yet we are apparently able to have a discussion, in the same way that a pair of Perl scripts might.
Your "tornado in a junkyard" example is a common piece of creationist clap-trap. It is a strawman that misrepresents how natural selection works. If you think it is a relevant argument, read different books until you understand why it is bogus, and then you will have learned something.
I can't access the Nature article you link to, but my number was referring to ONLY the neurons involved in flight control, which is substantially smaller than the total number of neurons.
I don't believe it myself, and that is one of many reasons that I am not a Catholic. However, I do know where to go to find out what it is that Catholics are supposed to believe.
This is all based on both scripture and the long-elaborated teachings of the church fathers and other tradition. They have what they think are very good reasons to believe each of the tenets of the faith, and they have the catechism to explain it.
That's a lot more care than the typical fundamentalist "I read some verse in the Bible, and I understand it in the same way my preacher told me to understand it, and there's no other way to understand it." That doesn't make Catholic doctrine any more correct, but at least you can read a long, careful description of what is being stated and why.
This is not a philosophical problem. A living bacterium vs. a dead bacterium (or human, for that matter) is determined by whether certain chemical reactions are occuring or not.
Starting such reactions from scratch is extremely difficult (impossible) *technically* but not *philosophically.*
We know very well why people die. Their body is unable to continue the biochemical processes we identify as "life." Like a heart beating, central nervous system working, etc. This is no different, except in complexity, than the various ways your computer can stop working, or your car can break down.
Now, we happen to care a lot more about people dying than computers crashing, for good reason. We don't have the technical ability to restart it, for one reason, but mostly because we care about other people for very deep reasons. That's moral philosophy. We also don't know why these chemical reactions cause "consciousness" or "free will" but there's no concrete reason to believe these are a result of anything other than the neurons in the brain acting according to the laws of chemistry and physics. Religion tells us that some kind of "life" persists beyond the body, but it doesn't provide any way to *observe* this; basically admits it is an inaccessible mystery. But these are not the determinant of "living." People are alive even when they become unconscious, and it is hard to see how a bacterium, which is undoubtedly alive has any sort of free will or consciousness.
But of course we know who created Star Trek. The fun thing about applying the techniques of modern criticism to Biblical texts is that we can find out things that we didn't know before about the people, places, and events that were involved in the production of the scripture, but left very little if any external evidence behind. As opposed to just reading it as Sunday School stories, and choosing to believe them or not.
I'm hardly a Bible thumper, but this kind of textual analysis is real interesting to me, in a "ancient history" kind of way, just as comparative religions is really interesting in a "I didn't know there were so many ways of confronting the unknowable" kind of way.
the inevitable consequence is that human beings are nothing more than sacks of interesting electro-chemical reactions.
Ah, yes. But very interesting reactions indeed, as far as humans are concerned.
And if that is the case, the inevitable consequence is that we are incapable of making truth claims, because electro-chemical reactions are incapable of making truth claims: boiling water, for example, doesn't make truth claims. It just boils.
Hmmm. So if I find a piece of paper with "1+1=2" printed on it, it must have come from a human? Or could it have been printed by a computer? Is it any less true when an unintelligent machine makes the "truth claim" than when a human does? Or is it not a "truth claim" when a machine makes it?
Yes, you might say, "a computer printout proves that a human designed and programmed it", but then that means that the creation of "truth claiming ability" is no more powerful than a geek who knows how to program. Surely if natural evolution can make flies able to do amazing flight maneuvers with only a few hundred neurons it can make symbolic reasoning happen given a few billion.
And if we are incapable of making truth claims, then it is impossible for you to say anything about human origins whatsoever.
I think, when somebody will be able to create life from dead materials, we will be able to discuss a Theories Of Creation Without The Creator
Um. This was the basis for the beginnings of "organic chemistry": Woehler's synthesis of urea showed that the chemical substances in living things are no different than the chemicals in dead things.
People are very close to synthesizing viruses from scratch, for instance. It is a matter of complexity, not a matter of chemistry. Chemical synthesis is *hard* to do in the lab. That doesn't mean there is anything magical about the chemicals that make up the human body, for instance.
Humans can't build the Himalayas with a bulldozer. That doesn't mean God made them, does it?
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, yes. And I'd like a pony.
How many hundreds of billions of dollars are you willing to add to the defense budget to get all of those things to "work?" Even if they are never used? Or don't really work but give you a warm fuzzy feeling anyway?
Also, your definition of "failure" subtly shifts from "somebody gets a nuke" to "somebody's nuke detonates nearby." Yes, Kim Jong Il probably has nukes (no thanks to a na-na-na-I-can't-hear-you diplomatic strategy). Have those nukes killed you?
Massive nuclear attack *is* obsolete, and can't be prevented with practical missile defenses anyway. Which is why NMD advocates talk about defending against *small* ballistic missile attacks.
ICBMs are expensive and leave an obvious return address for retaliation. A *small* attack is not likely to be used against hardened military targets, but against soft targets, and typically civilian ones. Container bombs are cheaper and more effective ways for an adversary to accomplish terrorist goals, and actually *launching* a small attack means the deterrent aspect has already failed.
North Korea does not have long-range missiles and nukes to actually use them except in some last-gasp scenario. They have them to deter U.S. military action by adding risk and uncertainty to U.S. plans. Spending many bilions of dollars for an ineffective defense which will likely never be used is a total crock, especially when all military plans against North Korea suck anyhow.
"Cut and run" vs. "stay the course" is a false dichotomy.
The question is whether what the U.S. is doing in Iraq is helpful to U.S. security overall compared to *all* the possible variations in policy that could be enacted now.
Like *increasing* troops, or changing their strategy/tactics, or just getting the hell out, or whatever.
Of course, dumbshits who weren't willing to answer tough questions before the war are not the most likely to consider tough questions now, so we get "muddle along, while claiming the *next* political milestone will *really* make the difference, and this is all just *great* for the Iraqi people, and, no of course no general is asking for more troops, and anyone who questions us is a liberal revisionist terrorist-appeasing wimp...."
"Upper atmosphere" is terminal phase, meaning your interceptors need to act even faster, and must be located even nearer the target.
In any case, you have to look at the cost-effectiveness of any scheme against other competing schemes and threats. Ballistic missile threats from organized militaries seem much less important to me than other delivery mechanisms potentially used by terrorists, included state-sponsored ones. The countermeasures against those include non-proliferation, securing of nuclear materials, more intelligence gathering, and effective action against terrorist groups. All of which are much cheaper than massive hardware development.
Yes, research is useful. But research down avenues that have poor performance even if they are successful is wasteful compared to investing in approaches which have more chance of success.
Spending billions so that we can actually pour concrete in Alaska to base a non-proven system doesn't really count as "research" either.
No, no, no.
You ship the bomb hidden in a shipment of marijuana or cocaine. Those don't get inspected like FedEx packages do.
Strawman argument. Missile defense is not protecting us against any of those things in a realistic sense.
Missile defense has not proved anything near the ability to prevent an attack by multiple advanced missiles, particularly those which would use even relatively simple anti-simulation decoy techniques.
For the newbies to missile defense, "decoys" are typically large mylar balloons which inflate in space to create radar targets as large or larger than a warhead. They are extremely cheap and light, so anybody able to make an ICBM can afford to put many decoys in their missiles. "Anti-simulation" means you put the warhead in a balloon, or in some other way make it look very similar to the cheap, plentiful decoys.
Now your putative missile defense system has to somehow deal with dozens of things that all look like cheap decoys, but only a handful are actually warheads.
The missile defense folks will hem and haw about how their system is not meant to deal with a sophisticated enemy, which is code for "we think North Korea can't really make fancy warheads that maneuver like we think Soviet warheads can" but ignoring the fact that mylar balloons are not sophisticated. Or that it is only meant to handle single isolated launches, like might occur by "accident." Or they'll say they are only deploying the system to provide the opportunity for more realistic testing. Or that they really need a launch-phase system (before the decoys get a chance to deploy), which needs to be very near the launch site, so you need to post sailors or soldiers very near North Korea (because you can't get close enough to China or Russia's launch sites without invading their territory) whenever you think a launch is probable, and keep them ready enough to respond in minutes.
As opposed to sitting around in Alaska waiting for a single warhead, with at most a few decoys, to come sailing up from North Korea, and hoping that North Korean missile designers never heard of mylar balloons. Then you get to see if the *many* billions of dollars we've spent on this system pay off or not.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle can be generalized to "conjugate" quantities.
For instance, in condensed matter physics, the wave functions that have to do with superfluidity have an uncertainty relationship between the number of particles participating in the condensate and the quantum phase of the condensate.
I read the comparison to vi to be not in terms of editing functionality, but "no matter what Windows box you happen to run into, no matter how hosed, MS Edit is there, and will work."
As in the reason everyone says to learn vi, even if you can't stand it, because someday, you'll run into a hosed UNIX box, and vi will be the only thing available and working for you to edit config files.
Then again, I'm an emacs nut. What do I know?
The answer is to upload just the meta-data, possibly through their bulk-upload feature, including links to the actual data being hosted somewhere else.
Presumably they are trying to avoid Google Base as a way to distribute viruses and such by restricting everything to plain text.
I notice my attribute values cannot even include periods (I was trying to upload source code, using a "File Name" attribute of "README.txt"). In any case, the description has a 1k character limit.
running the same task on your own company computers using currently available software would take 3 weeks and for free,
It's unlikely to be truly free; much more likely is that your cost accounting system is defective. Computing infrastructure requires real money to keep in operation, from initial capital expense (reflected in depreciation), cost of the physical space, to ongoing support staff, repair work, electric power, cooling, etc. At the very least, running a 3 week job means that the system can't go down for maintenance purposes during that period.
Sun presumably charges enough to cover these costs in their setting. Your internal systems should charge you enough to cover *your* true costs, or else money is being wasted on computer infrastructure. Sun's basic premise was that they could achieve economies of scale that make their costs lower than your costs.
That said, commercial reality has to take into account that many accounting systems *are* defective in that groups are able to use resources without proper cost allocation, essentially being subsidized by some other part of the organization.
You are confused. "Garbage collection," as usually defined, is orthogonal to the handling of non-memory resources.
Languages that support automatic memory management generally behave identically to C/C++ with respect to file descriptors, so they can't be any worse than the equivalent C/C++ code in that regard.
A C/C++ program that free()s a memory block (and properly avoids referencing it afterward) which holds a data structure with a file descriptor that is no longer needed, but which does not close the file descriptor, has lost that resource just as surely as a similar program in a garbage-collected language would.
The reason to use feof() is that EOF can be returned for error conditions *other* than end-of-file. However, EOF cannot occur "naturally" in the input stream. That's why getc() returns an int and not a character.
You seem to have missed the point. Your "define it as a figure..in a higher-dimensional space" is exactly what the parent poster meant by "embedding."
A circular curve is a ONE-dimensional manifold because your position on the circle can be specified by ONE number, namely the distance travelled around the circle from an arbitrary point. ONE coordinate = ONE dimension.
The surface of the earth (or other sphere) is a TWO-dimensional object, because you need only TWO numbers (latitude & longitude) to tell where you are.
The "looping" or periodic nature of the coordinates on a manifold does *not* increase the dimension of the manifold. Think of the old arcade game of Asteroids, if you remember that far back. Your space ship flies off the right side of the screen, it shows up on the left; fly off the top, end up on the bottom. That is actually isomorphic to the surface of a donut, but it is TWO-dimensional. The screen is flat, and it DOESN'T have to be physically curved for that to work.
Yes, Google has an IM client, desktop search tool, Picasa, Google Earth,...
and guess what?
These all require WINDOWS to work. (With minor exceptions for professional-grade Google Earth, and vague promises of "working on Mac version" for desktop search.) They might not be "trapped in a browser" but they are still "trapped in a near-monopoly OS."
Yes, this might be some kind of stealth campaign, where a GoogleLinux complete with (well-tested, of course) Office-compatible replacements and a full suite of GoogleApps will show up for free in everyone's Gmail inbox one day, but I doubt it.
There are plenty of (IMO, stupid) people who question whether the planes were flown into the WTC/Pentagon/PA-field-on-the-way-to-DC? by Muslims acting on behalf of Osama bin Laden, et al., or whether it is, say, some Jewish conspiracy, with "evidence" such as the collapse of WTC 7 (spontaneously) after it was decided to demolish it, or absence of Jews from the WTC. Putting that aside as paranoid nonsense:
It's not at all obvious that all the 19 folks knew all of what was going to happen, impossible to know exactly the reasons each person did what they did, and what they thought they would achieve. One can only guess based on the stated motivations of those left behind who seem to have been involved in their training and planning, and other evidence, as revealed to us by government investigators and the press. The evidence for the "direct" cause burned up, and they certainly didn't act alone or independently.
It's certainly not obvious that GWB's administration (or the Clinton administration) did all that was possible to go after Al Qaeda before 9/11 gave them a big wake-up call (and a handy campaign issue as well). *That* is the stupidity, compounded by the stupidity of thinking that invading Iraq would help, while Al Qaeda-types were gleefully chatting about how the U.S. was about to make that huge mistake, and also the stupidity of using the *most* inflammatory word "crusade" to describe our Middle East policy, shitcanning generals who talked about the huge troop numbers that would be needed for decent security in post-invasion Iraq, etc.
I would certainly put Al Qaeda-related acts in the "chaos" category, anyway. 19 people is just a blip among six billion, and probably impossible to predict in specific enough detail to prevent reliably.
A certain amount of terroristic chaos is going to slip through the cracks and succeed, no matter how many powers we give to government or how much money we give to spies and analysts or the military. At the very least, nutcases will randomly pop up and kill people for no good reason at all. It's not like Osama bin Laden is directly speaking to every person who puts a bomb on a subway, or that it would stop happening if we kill enough people in his organization.
Yes, but that DRM only applies to tunes from the online Music Store, NOT iTunes, the software that lets you rip CDs to non-proprietary, non-DRM'd formats, which go just fine onto the phone.
The lapse of dietary laws has Biblical support: particularly Mark 7, and Acts 10 & 11. As for Paul, look at Galatians. Generally, the Church relies on the letters attributed to Paul and not tradition to describe what Paul said.
For some reason Slashdot seems to have lost my original response, so here goes.
"1+1=2" is a symbolic statement. "1+1=2 is True" is another symbolic statement.
"1+1=3" and "1+1=3 is False" and "1+1=3 is True" are other symbolic statements. One establishes the "truth" of these statement by using axioms and higher-order logic, pretty much in a mechanical way. Moving symbols around is something computers can do very well, and seems to have very little to do with whether something is alive or not.
As you point out, with your Eskimo example, living things who are ignorant of symbolic logic, or who don't have language at all, have a very hard time with symbolic reasoning. That shows that "life" and "logical truth" are unrelated concepts, which you seem to have mixed together in a strange way.
After all, you are (to me) just a collection of symbols on a computer screen, and I am the same to you, yet we are apparently able to have a discussion, in the same way that a pair of Perl scripts might.
Your "tornado in a junkyard" example is a common piece of creationist clap-trap. It is a strawman that misrepresents how natural selection works. If you think it is a relevant argument, read different books until you understand why it is bogus, and then you will have learned something.
I can't access the Nature article you link to, but my number was referring to ONLY the neurons involved in flight control, which is substantially smaller than the total number of neurons.
I don't believe it myself, and that is one of many reasons that I am not a Catholic. However, I do know where to go to find out what it is that Catholics are supposed to believe.
This is all based on both scripture and the long-elaborated teachings of the church fathers and other tradition. They have what they think are very good reasons to believe each of the tenets of the faith, and they have the catechism to explain it.
That's a lot more care than the typical fundamentalist "I read some verse in the Bible, and I understand it in the same way my preacher told me to understand it, and there's no other way to understand it." That doesn't make Catholic doctrine any more correct, but at least you can read a long, careful description of what is being stated and why.
Doesn't the immaculate conception refer to the fact that Jesus was born of a virgin?
e chism/p122a3p2.htm.
No. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07674d.htm
The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is that *Mary* was free of original sin. This isn't some kind of Catholic secret. Anyone can read the catechism http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/cat
This is not a philosophical problem. A living bacterium vs. a dead bacterium (or human, for that matter) is determined by whether certain chemical reactions are occuring or not.
Starting such reactions from scratch is extremely difficult (impossible) *technically* but not *philosophically.*
We know very well why people die. Their body is unable to continue the biochemical processes we identify as "life." Like a heart beating, central nervous system working, etc. This is no different, except in complexity, than the various ways your computer can stop working, or your car can break down.
Now, we happen to care a lot more about people dying than computers crashing, for good reason. We don't have the technical ability to restart it, for one reason, but mostly because we care about other people for very deep reasons. That's moral philosophy. We also don't know why these chemical reactions cause "consciousness" or "free will" but there's no concrete reason to believe these are a result of anything other than the neurons in the brain acting according to the laws of chemistry and physics. Religion tells us that some kind of "life" persists beyond the body, but it doesn't provide any way to *observe* this; basically admits it is an inaccessible mystery. But these are not the determinant of "living." People are alive even when they become unconscious, and it is hard to see how a bacterium, which is undoubtedly alive has any sort of free will or consciousness.
Nice, and perhaps funny.
But of course we know who created Star Trek. The fun thing about applying the techniques of modern criticism to Biblical texts is that we can find out things that we didn't know before about the people, places, and events that were involved in the production of the scripture, but left very little if any external evidence behind. As opposed to just reading it as Sunday School stories, and choosing to believe them or not.
I'm hardly a Bible thumper, but this kind of textual analysis is real interesting to me, in a "ancient history" kind of way, just as comparative religions is really interesting in a "I didn't know there were so many ways of confronting the unknowable" kind of way.
That's a pretty pathetic "refutation" of the Documentary Hypothesis.
It reeks of strawman.
the inevitable consequence is that human beings are nothing more than sacks of interesting electro-chemical reactions.
Ah, yes. But very interesting reactions indeed, as far as humans are concerned.
And if that is the case, the inevitable consequence is that we are incapable of making truth claims, because electro-chemical reactions are incapable of making truth claims: boiling water, for example, doesn't make truth claims. It just boils.
Hmmm. So if I find a piece of paper with "1+1=2" printed on it, it must have come from a human? Or could it have been printed by a computer? Is it any less true when an unintelligent machine makes the "truth claim" than when a human does? Or is it not a "truth claim" when a machine makes it?
Yes, you might say, "a computer printout proves that a human designed and programmed it", but then that means that the creation of "truth claiming ability" is no more powerful than a geek who knows how to program. Surely if natural evolution can make flies able to do amazing flight maneuvers with only a few hundred neurons it can make symbolic reasoning happen given a few billion.
And if we are incapable of making truth claims, then it is impossible for you to say anything about human origins whatsoever.
Your philosophy of logic is very strange.
I think, when somebody will be able to create life from dead materials, we will be able to discuss a Theories Of Creation Without The Creator
Um. This was the basis for the beginnings of "organic chemistry": Woehler's synthesis of urea showed that the chemical substances in living things are no different than the chemicals in dead things.
People are very close to synthesizing viruses from scratch, for instance. It is a matter of complexity, not a matter of chemistry. Chemical synthesis is *hard* to do in the lab. That doesn't mean there is anything magical about the chemicals that make up the human body, for instance.
Humans can't build the Himalayas with a bulldozer. That doesn't mean God made them, does it?