Please understand, that the lack of belief does not mean a belief in opposite. If I say I lack the belief that a god exists, I am not saying I believe there is no god. I am saying "the idea is not even worth contemplating".
I think that "the idea is not even worth contemplating" is a belief.
The two points that I have been trying to get across here are that (a) atheism shares some of the flaws of religion, and (b) it's not very scientific to make absolute judgements about untestable hypotheses. (b) is particularly interesting because atheists tend to think that their beliefs are backed up by science.
Anyway, thankyou for replying - it's been interesting, but I'm not convinced.
Sorry, but this is not correct. Atheism is NOT the assumption that "god does not exist because we cannot see him". Atheism is simply the lack of belief that a god exists.
I don't think so. I think it is faith in a godless Universe. You cannot prove there is no God, therefore you have faith that there is no God. If you had no belief on the subject whatsoever, you would acknowledge that you do not know.
Look, you said, some posts ago, that you changed your atheist mind and became a religious person because the religion gave you the answers you were looking for. Which answers would that be?
I'm not a religious person, I am a person that does not claim to know whether there is a God or not.
When you ask an athiest something like "what am I?", "why do I perceive the world in the way that I do?", or "what happens to me when I die?", you'll get answers that are perfectly correct. However, the answers are profoundly unsatisfactory from my perspective, because they explain only what happens to the physical part of me - the only part that an athiest will acknowledge the existence of. The wrong question has been answered, because I think there is more to me than that. At least religion addresses the question that I actually asked, even if it doesn't answer it.
It's important that we think about these things, because we may otherwise find ourselves making poor assumptions. There is nothing worse than bad science. You may say that religion is full of poor assumptions. Well, we can find plenty of rubbish religions, but that is not proof that all parts of all religions are always rubbish.
Claiming that the scientific basis of atheism is weak is just humorous.
It is weak. Athiesm is profoundly unscientific. It is the assumption that God does not exist because we cannot see Him. Surely the scientific position on anything that cannot be tested should be "I don't know"?
You have faith in athiesm, and I don't. It really is as simple as that.
Of course I can. Kill someone, anyone. Did the universe cease to exist? If we destroy the earth will the Universe cease to exist? Well, it is, however infeasible, at least possible. Therefore my theory is testable. Unlike Intelligent design, which proposes no experiments at all.
That just means that you can verify specific cases. It's not a proof of universality.
No. Science describes the world through logical mathematical models, verifyable by experiment. God or gods do not enter into any equation. Some spoke of a divine clockwork, but most professionals speak in terms of what they've got, which is a collecton of models.
My point was directed at how we got to the stage of using models in the first place. Primitive religions saw all natural events as the direct actions of gods, whereas the three major Western religions see nature as a separate and analysable entity. The Enlightenment happened because of religion, not in spite of it, because religion laid the groundwork required for it.
Science is all about objectivity - I am sure we would agree that this is so. Well, when you can come up with an absolute proof of the non-existence of God, then great, it's science. Until that time, you are arguing from a position of faith about untestable hypotheses.
Anyway, wow.. this is the first time I've joined in an argument of this type from the non-athiest perspective. It's been interesting. I hope that I've challenged you to think about your assumptions a bit. For the record, I have no idea if there's a God or not. I just suspect that there probably is. I wanted to think for myself about these issues, and this is where it got me. See you around.
Matter to who? Myself? Everyone? The Universe? The Universe will not stop existing is I cease to be. My life or death, like this entire planet, is largely an inconsequential occurance.
That sounds like "unsubstanstiated belief" to me. It certainly isn't science. Can you suggest an experiment to falsify your theory? If not, then I say that it's on a par with intelligent design, scientifically speaking.
In what sense? In what possible way does religion benefit society over science? What result from following religion will emerge that cannot emerge from thinking rationally and objectively? Religion does not have a very good track record in regard to its benefit to society.
The benefits that religion provides are now taken for granted. You may be interested to know that science is actually quite solidly founded on principles from Western religion. These include absolutism, which tells us that the laws of the Universe are the same everywhere, and that nothing can be both true and not true at the same time. They also describe the world as the operation of a machine built by God, rather than the direct actions of God, meaning that it was possible to analyse and experiment.
They are an inevitability of religious thought. Eventually they will declare that 2+2=5, or at least that Pi=4. The logic of their position demands it.
Wow. I am amazed. You have followed the assumptions inherent in materialism to their conclusion, but you still accept them. Do you not see a conflict between your perception of the world and your beliefs? Don't you feel you have the power to make choices?
Your basic biological desire for a particular sort of sandwich might not be an entirely free choice, but that doesn't mean that all of your choices are directed by biology.
Logic is a perfect system, but it relies upon making the correct assumptions. Your assumption is that all properties of the Universe are understood, and there is nothing more to you that the structures that make you up. This sounds like science, but it is not. It is faith in materialism, which is much the same as faith in a religion, but it's on poorer evidence. The evidence of your own mind should tell you that you are more than the sum of your parts.
Yeah, I used to think like that. You must think I'm some sort of religious freak, but I'm not. I just found that athiesm didn't answer some key questions about existence, and realised that its scientific basis is incredibly weak.
At the core of my old philosophy was the belief that all events are reducible to physical laws, which is perfectly sound when we are talking about the Universe in general, but fails to explain what we call "consciousness". Is consciousness an illusion, an emergent property of a sufficiently complex system? I don't think so, because it doesn't feel like it. The behaviour of Conway's game and the patterns in a fractal may remind us of nature, but there is more to it, at least where humans are concerned.
That's not scientific, of course. But science is about objectively analysing the world, carrying out experiments and reaching conclusions based on the facts available. It is fundamentally limited by the bounds of what can be measured and what cannot. That is why there are questions that science cannot answer: if science attempts to answer them, it has ceased to be science.
I hate it when people trot out glib lines about scientists not knowing everything. I think that eventually we will understand all the physical laws of our world, because in principle a scientist can understand anything that he can experiment upon. But I don't think that includes people.
Ah, a man of faith. You have faith that one day, science will provide the mathematical rules that describe how you think: in effect, that your free will is reducible to equations and rules. I disagree. I have faith that I am not any sort of Turing machine, because I'm certain that I have free will. This, to me, is evidence for the existence of God, since it indicates that there is more to reality than that which can be measured and studied scientifically.
It is said (not by me, I hasten to say!) to be contradictory because there was no sin, and thus no death, in the world until Adam did the apple thing. Thus, Adam, Eve, and the other creatures of Eden existed before evolution was even possible, because evolution requires things to reproduce and die. Thus, it is felt that evolution is incompatible with a literal belief in the Bible's text. As it is also thought by fundamentalists that a literal belief in the Bible is a requirement for entry to Heaven, evolution must be wrong, since it disagrees. In effect, the fundamentalists are idolising the text of the Bible, worshipping it instead of the Man they claim to follow.
There is reason to doubt the literal truth of the Bible. For instance, we know quite well that the Earth is not 6000 years old, and nor was it created in 7 days. It seems certain that evolution and other natural processes were involved. But "the Bible is not perfect" does not imply "there is no God".
I used to be an athiest and I changed my mind, because I realised that it took a lot more faith to picture myself as a deterministic cog in a Universe consisting only of mathematically perfect laws, than as a part of a greater plan. The idea of being a mere biological machine ceased to appeal to me when it became a matter of denying reality as I perceived it. What about you? Have you really thought about this?
Perhaps there is extraordinary evidence for the existence of God. Perhaps it's you.
However, he has got a lot of attention for his show now. He capitalised on his misfortune quite nicely.
Re:PLEASE, enough with the words!
on
The Podjacker Threat
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Ironically, Maddox's page about bloggers is itself an article on Maddox's blog. Maddox is clearly a man twisted by self-loathing and a fetish for pirates. Arr.
Good idea, I think. Easy to do with Linux, but not very easy to do with the other OS.
What you are talking about really does highlight the advantages of the Unix design over the DOS design that Windows has inherited. Unix always separated user and system files - they're traditionally on separate filesystems, and there's no reason not to make the system partitions entirely read-only (you'd probably have to put/var in a RAM disk, as live CDs tend to, but that's not difficult). Your suggestion takes this a step further, putting the read-only flag in hardware instead of in/etc/fstab, so that a root compromise is only effective until the machine reboots.
Whereas the Windows design puts all system files on the same disk that the user expects to use. You can change this to some extent, but programs will still expect to be able to write to c:\, and even if you've moved c:\winnt to some other drive, there are still system files on c:\. This makes it very difficult to apply any sort of hardware protection - the design simply doesn't accommodate it.
So, in the end, it's a problem that only Microsoft can solve, for most machines. And their preferred solution is going to be TCPA. A complex and restrictive hardware hack to solve software design problems.. great idea, eh? Your idea is much better.
Indeed, as soon as you can precisely define intelligence, you can write a program to do it.
I don't think that you can simulate a person to any degree of accuracy using a Turing machine, because I don't think that all of our thought processes are reducible to machine operations. How can consciousness fit into a program? (The standard answer to this question is of course that consciousness is merely an illusion - but that's a bit of a cop out if you ask me).
Weed's more dangerous than you think. The one positive thing that can be said about it is that it is possible to stop using it. You can't say the same for the opiates, cocaine, or even tobacco. Yes, I do know what I'm talking about from first hand experience, so there.
The line has to be drawn somewhere. If not here, then where? Moving the line towards harder drugs would have extreme consequences. I know that pro-pot propaganda talks of the success of the legalisation experiments in Holland and Alaska, but they don't tell you about the problems that they caused, e.g. more crime, more hard drug users.
And then what, once the line has been moved once already? What will you say to the "Free the Heroin Campaign"? "No way, man, that stuff's bad, mm-kay"? Even though that's what they said to you about weed?
For an ultra-cheap solution, you could wire your electricity meter to your computer, so that a signal is delivered to your computer every time a certain amount of energy has been used. You can then write software to log energy consumption, etc. This is easy if you have a modern meter with a light that flashes every watt-hour.
I tried this, and it works, but shamefully my house uses 300W on standby. Until I read this thread, I thought that was normal. I'd better get going on a power audit:).
Your domestic electricity meter can be used for this purpose, particularly if it is one of the modern ones with a light that flashes every time a certain amount of energy has been consumed. I have mine wired up to my computer, which is able to compute power consumption, draw graphs, log data, etc.. It only cost a few pounds to do it, as it's just a light sensor and a comparator. The disadvantage is that it records the sum total.
However, this thread has put me to shame. My house uses about 300W on standby, and it really shouldn't - the only two devices that should be using much energy are a computer and an aquarium pump. It would be much cheaper to get that 300W of extra heat from gas.
The real point of the 90 days is to force a confession. They want suspects to "co-operate", and imprisoning them for 90 days is a good way to do that. It is also a good way to force a confession out of someone who hasn't done anything wrong. It is, in effect, a form of torture. It bypasses the due process of the law.
As you're already legally required to hand over your encryption keys under earlier legislation, and the police certainly aren't brute-forcing AES-256 in 90 days, I don't think it has anything to do with encryption at all. Expect to see requests for more than 90 days, mandated by "recent events", in the near future. Perhaps they will even use "new encryption algorithms" as an excuse.
It is your problem, as the suspect, to prove that it is NOT encrypted data. This legislation has not been very well thought out: as a general principle, the burden on proof must not lie on the accused, who should be innocent until proven guilty! Additionally, how do you distinguish ciphertext and random numbers? If the encryption algorithm is any good, there should be no test that distinguishes them.
Check out this Labour Party survey about terrorism. The Labour Party are the ones pushing this draconian Terrorism Bill, for which they claim popular support. It is so biased that one of their ministers has actually apologised for it.
What a disappointing site (Bush or Chimp). Was expecting something a bit like ratemykitten, which is much better. Display random photos Bush and Chimp and allow users to click on the one that looks more like a chimp! And have statistics on the most chimp-like presidential photo, and the most president-like chimp photo. Talk about a missed opportunity:(.
It did surprise me that Scotty could use a centuries-old computer system so easily. We're supposed to believe that he was confused by the user interface, but was still able to use the machine almost immediately? Hmm. Had it been a punch-card machine, would he have instinctively known how to use it?
Of course the rest of Star Trek IV is completely believable!
Slashdot Mirror
Please understand, that the lack of belief does not mean a belief in opposite. If I say I lack the belief that a god exists, I am not saying I believe there is no god. I am saying "the idea is not even worth contemplating".
I think that "the idea is not even worth contemplating" is a belief.
The two points that I have been trying to get across here are that (a) atheism shares some of the flaws of religion, and (b) it's not very scientific to make absolute judgements about untestable hypotheses. (b) is particularly interesting because atheists tend to think that their beliefs are backed up by science.
Anyway, thankyou for replying - it's been interesting, but I'm not convinced.
I don't think so. I think it is faith in a godless Universe. You cannot prove there is no God, therefore you have faith that there is no God. If you had no belief on the subject whatsoever, you would acknowledge that you do not know.
Look, you said, some posts ago, that you changed your atheist mind and became a religious person because the religion gave you the answers you were looking for. Which answers would that be?
I'm not a religious person, I am a person that does not claim to know whether there is a God or not.
When you ask an athiest something like "what am I?", "why do I perceive the world in the way that I do?", or "what happens to me when I die?", you'll get answers that are perfectly correct. However, the answers are profoundly unsatisfactory from my perspective, because they explain only what happens to the physical part of me - the only part that an athiest will acknowledge the existence of. The wrong question has been answered, because I think there is more to me than that. At least religion addresses the question that I actually asked, even if it doesn't answer it.
It's important that we think about these things, because we may otherwise find ourselves making poor assumptions. There is nothing worse than bad science. You may say that religion is full of poor assumptions. Well, we can find plenty of rubbish religions, but that is not proof that all parts of all religions are always rubbish.
It is weak. Athiesm is profoundly unscientific. It is the assumption that God does not exist because we cannot see Him. Surely the scientific position on anything that cannot be tested should be "I don't know"?
You have faith in athiesm, and I don't. It really is as simple as that.
That just means that you can verify specific cases. It's not a proof of universality.
No. Science describes the world through logical mathematical models, verifyable by experiment. God or gods do not enter into any equation. Some spoke of a divine clockwork, but most professionals speak in terms of what they've got, which is a collecton of models.
My point was directed at how we got to the stage of using models in the first place. Primitive religions saw all natural events as the direct actions of gods, whereas the three major Western religions see nature as a separate and analysable entity. The Enlightenment happened because of religion, not in spite of it, because religion laid the groundwork required for it.
Science is all about objectivity - I am sure we would agree that this is so. Well, when you can come up with an absolute proof of the non-existence of God, then great, it's science. Until that time, you are arguing from a position of faith about untestable hypotheses.
Anyway, wow.. this is the first time I've joined in an argument of this type from the non-athiest perspective. It's been interesting. I hope that I've challenged you to think about your assumptions a bit. For the record, I have no idea if there's a God or not. I just suspect that there probably is. I wanted to think for myself about these issues, and this is where it got me. See you around.
That sounds like "unsubstanstiated belief" to me. It certainly isn't science. Can you suggest an experiment to falsify your theory? If not, then I say that it's on a par with intelligent design, scientifically speaking.
In what sense? In what possible way does religion benefit society over science? What result from following religion will emerge that cannot emerge from thinking rationally and objectively? Religion does not have a very good track record in regard to its benefit to society.
The benefits that religion provides are now taken for granted. You may be interested to know that science is actually quite solidly founded on principles from Western religion. These include absolutism, which tells us that the laws of the Universe are the same everywhere, and that nothing can be both true and not true at the same time. They also describe the world as the operation of a machine built by God, rather than the direct actions of God, meaning that it was possible to analyse and experiment.
They are an inevitability of religious thought. Eventually they will declare that 2+2=5, or at least that Pi=4. The logic of their position demands it.
Not all religious people are fundamentalists.
Wow. I am amazed. You have followed the assumptions inherent in materialism to their conclusion, but you still accept them. Do you not see a conflict between your perception of the world and your beliefs? Don't you feel you have the power to make choices?
Your basic biological desire for a particular sort of sandwich might not be an entirely free choice, but that doesn't mean that all of your choices are directed by biology.
Logic is a perfect system, but it relies upon making the correct assumptions. Your assumption is that all properties of the Universe are understood, and there is nothing more to you that the structures that make you up. This sounds like science, but it is not. It is faith in materialism, which is much the same as faith in a religion, but it's on poorer evidence. The evidence of your own mind should tell you that you are more than the sum of your parts.
At the core of my old philosophy was the belief that all events are reducible to physical laws, which is perfectly sound when we are talking about the Universe in general, but fails to explain what we call "consciousness". Is consciousness an illusion, an emergent property of a sufficiently complex system? I don't think so, because it doesn't feel like it. The behaviour of Conway's game and the patterns in a fractal may remind us of nature, but there is more to it, at least where humans are concerned.
That's not scientific, of course. But science is about objectively analysing the world, carrying out experiments and reaching conclusions based on the facts available. It is fundamentally limited by the bounds of what can be measured and what cannot. That is why there are questions that science cannot answer: if science attempts to answer them, it has ceased to be science.
I hate it when people trot out glib lines about scientists not knowing everything. I think that eventually we will understand all the physical laws of our world, because in principle a scientist can understand anything that he can experiment upon. But I don't think that includes people.
Ah, a man of faith. You have faith that one day, science will provide the mathematical rules that describe how you think: in effect, that your free will is reducible to equations and rules. I disagree. I have faith that I am not any sort of Turing machine, because I'm certain that I have free will. This, to me, is evidence for the existence of God, since it indicates that there is more to reality than that which can be measured and studied scientifically.
It is said (not by me, I hasten to say!) to be contradictory because there was no sin, and thus no death, in the world until Adam did the apple thing. Thus, Adam, Eve, and the other creatures of Eden existed before evolution was even possible, because evolution requires things to reproduce and die. Thus, it is felt that evolution is incompatible with a literal belief in the Bible's text. As it is also thought by fundamentalists that a literal belief in the Bible is a requirement for entry to Heaven, evolution must be wrong, since it disagrees. In effect, the fundamentalists are idolising the text of the Bible, worshipping it instead of the Man they claim to follow.
I used to be an athiest and I changed my mind, because I realised that it took a lot more faith to picture myself as a deterministic cog in a Universe consisting only of mathematically perfect laws, than as a part of a greater plan. The idea of being a mere biological machine ceased to appeal to me when it became a matter of denying reality as I perceived it. What about you? Have you really thought about this?
Perhaps there is extraordinary evidence for the existence of God. Perhaps it's you.
I think he made that one too. He loves ninjas too. They're his bit on the side.
However, he has got a lot of attention for his show now. He capitalised on his misfortune quite nicely.
Ironically, Maddox's page about bloggers is itself an article on Maddox's blog. Maddox is clearly a man twisted by self-loathing and a fetish for pirates. Arr.
What you are talking about really does highlight the advantages of the Unix design over the DOS design that Windows has inherited. Unix always separated user and system files - they're traditionally on separate filesystems, and there's no reason not to make the system partitions entirely read-only (you'd probably have to put /var in a RAM disk, as live CDs tend to, but that's not difficult). Your suggestion takes this a step further, putting the read-only flag in hardware instead of in /etc/fstab, so that a root compromise is only effective until the machine reboots.
Whereas the Windows design puts all system files on the same disk that the user expects to use. You can change this to some extent, but programs will still expect to be able to write to c:\, and even if you've moved c:\winnt to some other drive, there are still system files on c:\. This makes it very difficult to apply any sort of hardware protection - the design simply doesn't accommodate it.
So, in the end, it's a problem that only Microsoft can solve, for most machines. And their preferred solution is going to be TCPA. A complex and restrictive hardware hack to solve software design problems.. great idea, eh? Your idea is much better.
I don't think that you can simulate a person to any degree of accuracy using a Turing machine, because I don't think that all of our thought processes are reducible to machine operations. How can consciousness fit into a program? (The standard answer to this question is of course that consciousness is merely an illusion - but that's a bit of a cop out if you ask me).
The line has to be drawn somewhere. If not here, then where? Moving the line towards harder drugs would have extreme consequences. I know that pro-pot propaganda talks of the success of the legalisation experiments in Holland and Alaska, but they don't tell you about the problems that they caused, e.g. more crime, more hard drug users.
And then what, once the line has been moved once already? What will you say to the "Free the Heroin Campaign"? "No way, man, that stuff's bad, mm-kay"? Even though that's what they said to you about weed?
I tried this, and it works, but shamefully my house uses 300W on standby. Until I read this thread, I thought that was normal. I'd better get going on a power audit :).
However, this thread has put me to shame. My house uses about 300W on standby, and it really shouldn't - the only two devices that should be using much energy are a computer and an aquarium pump. It would be much cheaper to get that 300W of extra heat from gas.
As you're already legally required to hand over your encryption keys under earlier legislation, and the police certainly aren't brute-forcing AES-256 in 90 days, I don't think it has anything to do with encryption at all. Expect to see requests for more than 90 days, mandated by "recent events", in the near future. Perhaps they will even use "new encryption algorithms" as an excuse.
It is your problem, as the suspect, to prove that it is NOT encrypted data. This legislation has not been very well thought out: as a general principle, the burden on proof must not lie on the accused, who should be innocent until proven guilty! Additionally, how do you distinguish ciphertext and random numbers? If the encryption algorithm is any good, there should be no test that distinguishes them.
Check out this Labour Party survey about terrorism. The Labour Party are the ones pushing this draconian Terrorism Bill, for which they claim popular support. It is so biased that one of their ministers has actually apologised for it.
That does sound really cool. I'd certainly go!
What a disappointing site (Bush or Chimp). Was expecting something a bit like ratemykitten, which is much better. Display random photos Bush and Chimp and allow users to click on the one that looks more like a chimp! And have statistics on the most chimp-like presidential photo, and the most president-like chimp photo. Talk about a missed opportunity :(.
Of course the rest of Star Trek IV is completely believable!