The problem is, a 'philosophical zombie' is defined as a being who acts exactly like a normal human, but has no conscious experience.
So if you ask a zombie "Are you a zombie?" it should respond just like a normal human would: "No! I'm a perfectly functioning normal human, can't you see that?"
And of course, since it's a zombie, it's wrong. It's 'lying'. So even if you could "turn off" the center for consciousness (doubtful; consciousness is likely distributed, the result of the brain's functioning, not the brain's functioning with a consciousness center tacked on. To quote Douglas Hofstadter "Consciousness is not a power moon-roof.") you'd have *no way of knowing* that you turned off the center of consciousness. Weird, huh?
Yes, and that argument is self-evidently silly because you're presupposing that there is a difference between "you" and "your fingernail clippings" when your criterion for deciding what is or is not a human just IS having human DNA.
Do you have human DNA? Yes.
Does your fingernail clipping that you just clipped this morning? Yes.
Well then, if 'having human DNA' is the criterion for deciding humanity, both "you" and "your discarded fingernail" ARE human, and it doesn't do you any good to say "No, I'm human, that's just a fingernail clipping."
That argument misses the point because it changes your definition of what constitutes a human. First you said it's "stuff with human DNA." And then we point out the absurdity of that criterion, you change your definition to "A fully grown human specimen" which implicitly DENIES humanity to the very thing you were trying to attribute it to, that is, an undifferentiated clump of human cells.
If we incinerated that fingernail clipping, we would be incinerating ITS "entire DNA", now wouldn't we? And yet you don't care one bit about this, because it's manifestly not human, even though it has human DNA. And yet you DO care about a set of undifferentiated cells that you probably couldn't even see unaided.
To put it succinctly, the "having human DNA" argument just doesn't even get off the ground, regardless of your attempts to backdoor in some other criteria, like *actually being a human*.
His theory proves the universe is self aware. Mass is simply energy like everything else, and energy is never created or destroyed. It's his theory that allows people today to say that the universe is self aware.
No, it doesn't. The fact that he discovered that mass and energy and convertible by e=mc2 and that spacetime is bent by gravity doesn't give you any license to say "the universe is self-aware."
That's a complete non-sequitur.
So while there might not be a personal God, we do know that time is relative. If you travel at a faster speed time slows down, because distance shrinks. Now we have discovered non-locality and we see that distance itself is the illusion and that when an object is on the quantum level, distance ceases to exist.
Athiests have faith in the idea that a God doesn't, and shouldn't exist. How they rationalize it is their business, but these beliefs are the core of athiesm. You can't even spell "atheist" right, how then do you propose to know what atheists believe?
Apologies if English isn't your first language, but otherwise there's no excuse.
Anyway, I'm an atheist and I have no "faith" in the idea that God doesn't exist, nor do I think he "shouldn't" exist. So no, those beliefs aren't "the core" of my atheism.
If there is no randomness in the universe, then everything in the universe is deliberate,
Fallacy of Bifurcation.
The universe could be non-random AND be non-deliberate.
It might be mindless, not requiring any deliberation.
and this is the entire basis for intelligent design. The only way to logically dispute intelligent design is by proving that randomness exists somewhere in the universe.
No, that isn't the "only" way. One logical way of disproving your ideas would be pointing out the numerous deductive fallacies you employ, such as the fallacy of bifurcation you used above.
Furthermore, it's an open question as to whether randomness does exist. QM and some findings in Newtonian physics make it seem likely to me.
You can't say the Big bang was random if nothing in the universe was an accident. If all events are caused, then even the big bang had to have a cause.
All events don't need to have a cause. Funny, I was just reading Hume take apart this idea this morning.
Anyway, there's no reason why the rules that apply inside the universe necessarily apply to the universe itself (fallacy of composition) or apply outside the universe.
Furthermore, there could be an infinite set of causes and still be no conscious agent behind it all. You haven't demonstrated the impossibility of this either.
I'm a philosopher myself.
I am too.
Well, at least a philosophy minor. But I am a neuroscience major, so I do know a little bit about self-awareness...
Nature is self aware.
In my philosophy classes, professors routinely warn against making broad statements that aren't backed up by logical reasoning.
You've never provided any (good) evidence for this claim. Earlier you tried to make it a PREMISE of yours, which is just an attempt to beg the question.
So if he believed in Spinoza's God, then his God is self aware and "alive" just as nature is self aware and alive. Whether or not that self awareness has a personal relationship with humans is another question.
Really? Because Steven Nadler, a leading Spinoza and Leibniz scholar just gave a speech at my school a few weeks ago where he re-iterated the idea that Spinoza's God WASN'T conscious or self-aware, but was in fact Nature.
In fact Steven Nadler (again, a world-famous Spinoza and Liebniz scholar) even says that Spinoza was essentially an atheist.
He certainly didn't think his "God" was self aware or "alive".
That is a false reading of Spinoza.
For a 'philosopher' you seem to be ignorant of logical fallacies, important philosophers in the area you're discussing, and even basic readings of the text. You also seem
He is dealing with it: he's advocating a means by which to make things more fair.
The fact that life isn't fair isn't proof at all that we should strive to make it as fair as we can. If you say a baby drowning in a pool I sure hope you'd help and not just shrug and say "Oh well, life's not fair."
That may be so, but it's no answer to anything, it's just an excuse for inaction.
No, it really isn't that simple. Here, watch: OK, say we live in a universe with random macro events (we might), and that these random, acausal, macro events often influence our decision making. So you're standing there holding the pen deciding whether or not to buy the car, and then, out of the blue, a random, totally acausal, switch flips in your brain, forcing you to buy the car. If the switch would have flipped the other way (as it easily could have) you wouldn't have bought the car.
Now, tell me where, in this random scenario, the "free will" enters into the equation? Are you saying that "free will" is the equivalent of a cosmic coin flip? I don't think you actually believe that. So then how is it that random events, events that could not have been predicted causally, can be your free will? That wouldn't make us free, that'd make us human slot machines.
Yeah, because if Afghanistan were something other than a democracy, like a dictatorship or a theocracy or something, those sheep wouldn't have a thing to worry about...
There is a difference between simple copyright infringement and plagiarism. In this case the writer apparently committed both, but it's the charge of plagiarism that causes him to be labeled a thief, because plagiarism is a form of theft. If I took some of my (legally obtained) mp3s and tried to pass them off as my own creation, that would be a form of theft.
I was just discussing this very topic with my professor yesterday, and he insisted that that Chomsky's reputation is greatly overstated when it came to overturning behaviorism. For 10 years after Chomsky's paper behaviorists were still plugging away with their rats and pigeons because lab scientists don't really care what some linguist has to say about the behaviorism of language. Chomsky was obviously right and behaviorism was wrong, but it was overturned mostly because it just didn't work. Lab animals just could not be conditioned in the way behaviorism predicted. They just were not black boxes. So it's somewhat of a myth to say that Chomsky's review was the death-knell of behaviorism. To this day behaviorist methods are still used in labs.
I'd be fine with it, as long as he credited me, which ALL of these teachers are doing. They say "I'm going to teach how to play a Rolling Stones song", not "Here's this little song I wrote called Satisfaction, here's how to play it."
There's an obvious difference between the two scenarios.
Is it some tenet of copyright law that it's only infringement if it's an entire series of a show or an entire record or something like that? If iFilm hosts as much as a single piece of copyrighted data without permission, they are guilty of copyright infringement. That's what it means.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is, a 'philosophical zombie' is defined as a being who acts exactly like a normal human, but has no conscious experience.
So if you ask a zombie "Are you a zombie?" it should respond just like a normal human would: "No! I'm a perfectly functioning normal human, can't you see that?"
And of course, since it's a zombie, it's wrong. It's 'lying'. So even if you could "turn off" the center for consciousness (doubtful; consciousness is likely distributed, the result of the brain's functioning, not the brain's functioning with a consciousness center tacked on. To quote Douglas Hofstadter "Consciousness is not a power moon-roof.") you'd have *no way of knowing* that you turned off the center of consciousness. Weird, huh?
Yes, and that argument is self-evidently silly because you're presupposing that there is a difference between "you" and "your fingernail clippings" when your criterion for deciding what is or is not a human just IS having human DNA.
Do you have human DNA? Yes. Does your fingernail clipping that you just clipped this morning? Yes.
Well then, if 'having human DNA' is the criterion for deciding humanity, both "you" and "your discarded fingernail" ARE human, and it doesn't do you any good to say "No, I'm human, that's just a fingernail clipping."
That argument misses the point because it changes your definition of what constitutes a human. First you said it's "stuff with human DNA." And then we point out the absurdity of that criterion, you change your definition to "A fully grown human specimen" which implicitly DENIES humanity to the very thing you were trying to attribute it to, that is, an undifferentiated clump of human cells.
If we incinerated that fingernail clipping, we would be incinerating ITS "entire DNA", now wouldn't we? And yet you don't care one bit about this, because it's manifestly not human, even though it has human DNA. And yet you DO care about a set of undifferentiated cells that you probably couldn't even see unaided.
To put it succinctly, the "having human DNA" argument just doesn't even get off the ground, regardless of your attempts to backdoor in some other criteria, like *actually being a human*.
It's good to know he can still find work.
His theory proves the universe is self aware. Mass is simply energy like everything else, and energy is never created or destroyed. It's his theory that allows people today to say that the universe is self aware.
No, it doesn't. The fact that he discovered that mass and energy and convertible by e=mc2 and that spacetime is bent by gravity doesn't give you any license to say "the universe is self-aware." That's a complete non-sequitur.
So while there might not be a personal God, we do know that time is relative. If you travel at a faster speed time slows down, because distance shrinks. Now we have discovered non-locality and we see that distance itself is the illusion and that when an object is on the quantum level, distance ceases to exist.
Athiests have faith in the idea that a God doesn't, and shouldn't exist. How they rationalize it is their business, but these beliefs are the core of athiesm. You can't even spell "atheist" right, how then do you propose to know what atheists believe? Apologies if English isn't your first language, but otherwise there's no excuse. Anyway, I'm an atheist and I have no "faith" in the idea that God doesn't exist, nor do I think he "shouldn't" exist. So no, those beliefs aren't "the core" of my atheism.
If there is no randomness in the universe, then everything in the universe is deliberate,
Fallacy of Bifurcation. The universe could be non-random AND be non-deliberate. It might be mindless, not requiring any deliberation.
and this is the entire basis for intelligent design. The only way to logically dispute intelligent design is by proving that randomness exists somewhere in the universe.
No, that isn't the "only" way. One logical way of disproving your ideas would be pointing out the numerous deductive fallacies you employ, such as the fallacy of bifurcation you used above. Furthermore, it's an open question as to whether randomness does exist. QM and some findings in Newtonian physics make it seem likely to me.
You can't say the Big bang was random if nothing in the universe was an accident. If all events are caused, then even the big bang had to have a cause.
All events don't need to have a cause. Funny, I was just reading Hume take apart this idea this morning. Anyway, there's no reason why the rules that apply inside the universe necessarily apply to the universe itself (fallacy of composition) or apply outside the universe. Furthermore, there could be an infinite set of causes and still be no conscious agent behind it all. You haven't demonstrated the impossibility of this either.
I'm a philosopher myself.
I am too. Well, at least a philosophy minor. But I am a neuroscience major, so I do know a little bit about self-awareness...
Nature is self aware.
In my philosophy classes, professors routinely warn against making broad statements that aren't backed up by logical reasoning. You've never provided any (good) evidence for this claim. Earlier you tried to make it a PREMISE of yours, which is just an attempt to beg the question.
So if he believed in Spinoza's God, then his God is self aware and "alive" just as nature is self aware and alive. Whether or not that self awareness has a personal relationship with humans is another question.
Really? Because Steven Nadler, a leading Spinoza and Leibniz scholar just gave a speech at my school a few weeks ago where he re-iterated the idea that Spinoza's God WASN'T conscious or self-aware, but was in fact Nature. In fact Steven Nadler (again, a world-famous Spinoza and Liebniz scholar) even says that Spinoza was essentially an atheist. He certainly didn't think his "God" was self aware or "alive". That is a false reading of Spinoza. For a 'philosopher' you seem to be ignorant of logical fallacies, important philosophers in the area you're discussing, and even basic readings of the text. You also seem
He is dealing with it: he's advocating a means by which to make things more fair.
The fact that life isn't fair isn't proof at all that we should strive to make it as fair as we can. If you say a baby drowning in a pool I sure hope you'd help and not just shrug and say "Oh well, life's not fair."
That may be so, but it's no answer to anything, it's just an excuse for inaction.
Cows do drink milk. What do you think the udders are for, humans?
No, it really isn't that simple. Here, watch: OK, say we live in a universe with random macro events (we might), and that these random, acausal, macro events often influence our decision making. So you're standing there holding the pen deciding whether or not to buy the car, and then, out of the blue, a random, totally acausal, switch flips in your brain, forcing you to buy the car. If the switch would have flipped the other way (as it easily could have) you wouldn't have bought the car. Now, tell me where, in this random scenario, the "free will" enters into the equation? Are you saying that "free will" is the equivalent of a cosmic coin flip? I don't think you actually believe that. So then how is it that random events, events that could not have been predicted causally, can be your free will? That wouldn't make us free, that'd make us human slot machines.
Yeah, because if Afghanistan were something other than a democracy, like a dictatorship or a theocracy or something, those sheep wouldn't have a thing to worry about...
How is that a solution? If most of the reviewers are magazines and big websites who whore themselves out, then aren't you just aggregating shit?
Or ontologically challenged.
God help us.
There is a difference between simple copyright infringement and plagiarism. In this case the writer apparently committed both, but it's the charge of plagiarism that causes him to be labeled a thief, because plagiarism is a form of theft. If I took some of my (legally obtained) mp3s and tried to pass them off as my own creation, that would be a form of theft.
I was just discussing this very topic with my professor yesterday, and he insisted that that Chomsky's reputation is greatly overstated when it came to overturning behaviorism. For 10 years after Chomsky's paper behaviorists were still plugging away with their rats and pigeons because lab scientists don't really care what some linguist has to say about the behaviorism of language. Chomsky was obviously right and behaviorism was wrong, but it was overturned mostly because it just didn't work. Lab animals just could not be conditioned in the way behaviorism predicted. They just were not black boxes. So it's somewhat of a myth to say that Chomsky's review was the death-knell of behaviorism. To this day behaviorist methods are still used in labs.
Don't say that!
I'd be fine with it, as long as he credited me, which ALL of these teachers are doing. They say "I'm going to teach how to play a Rolling Stones song", not "Here's this little song I wrote called Satisfaction, here's how to play it."
There's an obvious difference between the two scenarios.
You can't really crack open your hard drive and 'see' you Word documents either, but they're still there.
We actually know for a fact that Jesus rode a raptor into Jersualem: http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/UnNews:Legitimate_Bib lical_archeologists_discover_raptor_tracks_in_Jeru salem/
In order to understand this Emoticon, and indeed all others, it's necessary to become aquanted with Emoticonics: http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Emoticonics
"Man is....nothing but the sum of his actions." - Jean-Paul Sartre
Is it some tenet of copyright law that it's only infringement if it's an entire series of a show or an entire record or something like that? If iFilm hosts as much as a single piece of copyrighted data without permission, they are guilty of copyright infringement. That's what it means.
Yes it is.
Wasn't he in the Cure?
I can't be bothered to complete
Shit!
Now it says "He who spends a storm beneath a tree, takes life with a grain of TNT."!
I think this is a clear message that Slashdot is planning to blow itself up and take the interweb with it.
The bottom of my Slashdot page says "This page will self-destruct."
Should I be scared?
I think it sounds more like a NEU! song, Hallogallo for instance: 10 minutes of the same drum line/guitar line looped over and over again.