Perhaps the ruling has more to do with the business model than anything else. You have a company that takes a piece of copyrighted artwork, fiddles with it, and then makes money. There is no creation process. Ethically it appears a bad practice, at least to me.
Exactly! Science can only describe the universe, we can never be sure we are actually explaining it... truth is the domain of philosophy and religion.
I'd say the theory of gravity is a pretty damn good explanation for why things fall to the ground, and contains a lot more truth than any similar theory originating out of religion or philosophy.
Philosophy and religion contain truth only in that they can be consistent. They really say very little of importance, in fact maybe even nothing, about reality as it operates without a human component. Sure, Buddhism might be spot on in describing the big Illusion about life, but that's just commentary on how humans perceive the world, and an interesting sociological note.
Philosophy and religion can never escape their essential human component, because they are created by humans and their underlying base is human thought. Compare that to science, where the underlying base is the observable world. Sure, we are limited in what we can measure and determine by our human senses, but a tree does exist as a collection of subatomic particles, just as we do, irregardless of a human observer. That's the only thing that is true and real.
To me there is a clear distinction between plants, animals and human beings.
I think once you look into things, the distinction because very vague, especially between humans and animals. I debate a lot with a buddy of mine about what makes humans unique, and invariably we end up talking about monkeys that can communicate with sign language. He isn't satisfied that they can gesture a few words or comprehend, he wants substantial sentences that demonstrate a realization of the self.
Honestly, given the rather intricate social structures of some animals (like wolves) I am very hard pressed think there is anything fundamentally different between humans and animals. Humans are, afterall, animals. Any uniquess we have is just the result of our evolutionary path, and I think it entirely unreasable to assume that most of the intelligences and emotions we developed are undevelopable in animals or are in fact, undeveloped. Sure, I doubt a dolphin could chat with me about Lie groups, but I can't hear a 30 minute series of clicks and then reproduce them flawlessly. The latter impresses me a whole hell of a lot more than my own ability with mathematics.
Talk about human uniquess and supremacy (by what measure it doesn't matter) is, to me, frightenly reminescent of racist hate speech.
Many many scientists have a deep spirituality or faith and feel that science just gets you closer to the creation. I've never had a problem with science versus faith: to put it into religious terms, I presume that science is our attempt at explaining "how," and spirituality is our attempt at explaining "why." There's no disconnect here.
I cannot offer anything other than annecdote to back up what I'm about to say, and my experience is primarily with other mathematicians, but of all my friends, the most staunch atheists are also mathematicians or physicists.
I also honestly believe if people were not raised to be religous, you'd find that many many scientists would be agnostic, if not atheistic. Again, I only say this based on personal experience since I was raised in what I consider a very religion-neutral environment. No one told me there was a cosmic being, and no one told me there wasn't one. Learned all of that from the media.
I also have issues with the idea that faith and science are NOT mutually exclusive. What's more, a lot of what people take for faith isn't faith at all but playing the odds. I have 'faith' that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I also understand how the sun got there, why the earth revolves around the sun, and why the earth rotates. I also understand what sort of event would cause the earth to stop rotating. Given the low probability of an event occuring that stops the rotation of the earth, I therefor conclude it will rise tomorrow. I "believe" the sun will rise tomorrow, have 'faith' it will rise tomorrow because probability dictates it. There is, in fact, every reason to believe the sun will rise tomorrow. Where is the leap?
Why do I personally see spiritual faith conflicting with scientific reasoning? Mostly because spiritual faith almost always (in my experience) requires a leap of some sort. Take the idea of an afterlife. Here we have an example of something we can not measure emperically with any of our senses. We cannot touch it, cannot taste it, cannot smell it or hear it. We have no reports of people who have been to an afterlife, so we don't even have anecdotal evidence. Afterlife does not manifest itself in our world (unless you lay creedence with reports of ghosts, which we presume have seen the afterlife, so I guess we have a meta-anectdote of its existence). In short, if you took a monkey that could speak and had no training in religion and told him about the afterlife, their proper response would be, "Sounds ridiculous."
There is a caveat though. For people that, say, believe that the Bible was inspired by the word of a cosmic entity, and that it's not just a bunch of jive in there, the leap to believing there is an afterlife isn't such a feat.
The conflict I always have with faith is it is just sloppy. It generally doesn't fit in with human intuition, nor does it really work with our entire intelligence. It's really like betting strongly without knowing the odds too well. Those huge leaps of faith are like betting everything and not knowing the odds at all! Betting isn't by nature bad, but you want to try to limit the shitty choices you make in life.
I think the final straw for me is that faith is the same across the board, no matter your spirituality. The faith of someone who comes to me jabbering about the mightly invisible cross-beaked wren that lives in a volcano and dictates the lives of the gnomes that live in our brains is the same faith of the Christian, or the Jew. All you can give most western religions is the fact that they have some established history. Or better yet you can look towards a real religion. Say Mormonism. There are some pretty "wild" stories that surround how Mormonism came to be, and in the internal literature. At least, wild to most people raised in Western society. I bet a majority of westerners would balk at the stories. But if you reversed situations, if you had Mormonism being founded 2000 years ago and then Catholics coming to your door with their stor
They're not really willing to accept that any god which created the Universe as it is (if it did), is probably way more complicated and larger than they've previously conceived of. It hurts their head to accept that any such god might be more than the rigidly defined view they have of it/him.
I've wondered if part of it too isn't that subconsciously people realize that accepting the idea that their cosmic entity was so ill-defined for a thousand or so years doesn't perhaps mean the entire thing was just ad hoc. This quickly begets a person that has no need for a cosmic entity.
On a slightly different note, I've always liked the idea that perhaps life itself is this cosmic entity. Our sixth sense, let's say. Is that just thre remarkable processing power of our brain at work, taking a bunch of subconscious cues and telling us to act? Maybe we'll find out in a few million years that those Taoists were really right!
Why not? I always thought role-playing games (mainly MUDs) were a great way to ponder what makes gender. I think most people discover what sociologists have been saying for years: gender by and large is a social construct, and gender similarities are much more common.
In short, a lot of the ways men and women behave has nothing to do with them having a penis or a vagina. To give you one example, consider the typical notion that men want to bang just about everything. Now look at the media's portrayal of maleness and the male fantasy. Look at music videos, movies, advertisements.
So yeah, it really does boil down to: why not? I don't think there needs to be any reason or rational for why people want to explore the realities of the opposite sex. Just someone who realizes gender categorization is probably the biggest sham in human history. Next to some other obvious things that will go unmentioned;)
I've used Google Earth and admit it is pretty cool, but I don't know if it really conveys the impressiveness of the natural world to the degree you say it does. At least, it doesn't to me. These are just pixels on the screen, and good for a general sense of things (like surveying the Sahara desert) but does it really educate you about these places?
I do a lot of backcountry backpacking and hiking, and also a lot of reading about backcountry places. It never ceases to amaze me how little knowledge I really gain just from reading, rather than doing. And I am not just talking about practical issues like whether a poncho or a rain-jacket is better suited to certain conditions. I mean about the physical world.
There is a danger in thinking you know too much. Maybe not so much with the physical layout of the world, but you can get an idea of what I mean by talking with people who think they know a lot about the world's cultures but have never lived outside their country. They really have a false idea of what things are like.
Considering how relatively easy it is to just pack up and do something adventurous, I can't see how Google Earth is anything more than pretty cool.
I move around about once a year (even different countries) and have found no substitute for just actually walking around the city (or biking if it is a large city). Is there any particular reason to know where things are before you are even in the city? I'll admit that being able to plot routes to and from places is nifty, and being able to find possible short-cuts nice, but using paper maps isn't all that difficulty especially once you know the lay of the land.
How in the world is the above a troll? It is a concern for some of us. I run Linux on an old (G3 Pismo) PowerBook and frequently have trouble finding a non-x86 version.
Sales of alternative powered cars will be proportional to their ability to meet the needs and wants of consumers.
Needs and wants which are largely derived from media advertisements. It is interesting to see how the average American views the vehicle compared with the average European. The American sees it as a liberating device, a tool of freedom, a big status symbol. In most European countries, this is just not the case. I'd say a car is viewed more as a functional device.
You will also notice that America has an inordinant amount of car advertisements on the television, most of which show the car as a liberator in some fashion, be it through speed on some curvy road to an SUV climbing alpine mountains. I can only really attest for Sweden, but percentage of car comercials here is much less, with themes usually different. The caveate is that as we adopt American culture more and more, the car commercials come in kind.
Vehicles really don't offer that much freedom, because freedom is a state of mind rather than a location. I know this is hard to swallow for most Americans, but it is simply the truth. I've never owned a vehicle, and bicycle everywhere, all seasons of the sea, snow or shine, and oddly enough manage to do all right. Most people really are not served anything by having the OPTION to, on a whim, travel 400km, any given day.
I guess what I mean to say is that there is likely a large percentage of people who have "needs" that are not satisfied by alternative transportation, who, in reality would be served quite well by alternative transportation, but for their past inculcation.
However, since you are defining the concepts, you can't test whether they are true...they ARE true because they are defined that way. If you say 8+9 is 17, it's only true because you define the underlying concepts such that they are always true. However, if someone else is counting in hexidecimal, they'd say you are wrong-but they are defining the concepts diferently.
Truth is not the issue, but derivability. Mathematics differs from philosophy and theology strongly in this matter, which is why we can explore the physical universe so well using mathematics. In philosophy, there is no clear way to derive new statements or ideas.
It seems to me that most "scientists" do one of two things when encountering something they can't explain: 1) ignore it and try not to think about it, usually alluding to some undiscovered principle at work; or 2) ridicule ideas outside the mainstream of science to draw attention away from problems with applying conventional wisdom There is of course the "non-scientific" theory-a non-human intelligence or other supernatural effect may be involved.
As someone who works with scientsits, I have to say this isn't a good characterization at all. (And more, I can speak from personal experience, where even in mathematics oddness occurs). Most scientists worth their salt are basically curious and dilligent people, and so if a topic interests them sufficiently, they will pursue it.
They ignore things when it just is not interesting or broadly outside their field of experience. Only after that, if the situation is sufficiently bizarre, do they throw up their hands and "just ignore it."
The scientist doesn't accept non-scientific theories precisely because of the little reason to do so. Why should I, or anyone else, accept an idea that a) cannot be tested b) cannot be reproduced and c) starts with incredible, entirely arbitrary assumptions? This is, contrary to what your sig says, what keenly separates mathematical sciences from any religion.
Sometimes people in math or the hard sciences forget about human intelligence: What is intelligence? How did it come into being? How is it that I think and have feelings if all that I am is a pile of chemical reactions?
Yet it is from hard science that we know so much about human intelligence, so no, I do not think they forget about them. What a lot of them are, though, are materialists.
Human intelligence is always brought up as being some great, unique, and mystifying thing. The awe though is not in the seeming stupifying complexity of any sentient being, but the physiology of it all. With greater understanding of exactly how the brain works really comes more appreciation, than just effectively tossing the question out as inexplicable and then creating a religion behind it.
Look at how our understanding of celestial mechanics evolved. At first maybe we thought the stars and planets were pushed around by some giant being of power. Eventually we had Newtonian mechanics and general relativity. For simple things like, say, orbits, it really isn't so mystifying how it works. I think one would be hard pressed to find an educated person that saw the movement of the stars these days as reason to consider spiritual forces necessarily present.
I guess what I am saying is human thought is in the same category, just a bit more complex than simple planetary revolution.
So why insist on rulling out a hypothesis that the same thing happens on a much larger scale?
I wouldn't call your hypothesis absurd at all, just strongly unncessary, and hence largely irrelevant. What we observe about the universe points to one thing only, really: the universe obeys laws. It certainly doesn't suggest we are in someone's computer program. That is a huge leap, and begs a whole lot of questions.
More importantly, it doesn't matter even if we were in a giant computer program, since we can only observe the physical universe with
One main difference is that science can produce objective results, whereas religion does not. What's more, though, is that science revels in the mysteries of the universe. Religious explanations for "mircales" is throwing one's arms up in the air and admitting defeat in the face of insufficient understanding.
The non-scientific person sees inexplicable things as evidence that the very fabric of the universe is inexplicable, and ergo must have links to some spiritual substance. Defaulting to a belief that everything CAN be explained (but perhaps not understood) is just the consequence of realizing that what you prescribe to a god, I could just as easily link to an intergalatic space walrus. There is no necessity for any specific type of spiritual force, and because of this there is absolutely no reason to give any particular spiritual theory merit.
See, I look at genuine miracles as chances to explore in greater depth how the universe works. The spiritualist explanation offers nothing new. Not only that, it completely settles the issue by fitting this data in with what amounts to a gigantic intellectual wank session, which we call theology. It tacitly WRITES OFF the true miracle, and damn son, it actually suggests we shouldn't try to understand it more.
That's the greatest insult I can think of.
Of course, as a mathematician I do my fair share of intellectual wanking, but it's funny how the objects I play with have a whole of a hell lot more revelance to the universe than theories about pink unicorns ever will.
The only redeeming factor of religion is that it helps some people get through life. But honestly, all it takes is a little bit of thought to come up with your own guiding principles, live a good life, and maybe, just maybe, live it with joy.
So in conclusion, mysteries don't point to shit. They are just that.
I remember at one point you can become a dragon or dragon-like creature at some point and explore this cloud like realm. I always tried to model my dinosaur creatures as much like this dragon as I could, so impressed was I.
Great game.
>>On a note, I think that video games actually promote social interaction, problem solving, reactions, that kind of stuff. Have you ever played Halo 2, on xbox live?
I can assure you (as someone who played video games for a good portion of their youth) that I do more for my problem solving ability by considering a single problem about representations of finite dimensional-algebras than will a hundred people solving video-game problems for their entire lives. Unless, of course, the video-game problems involve representations of finite-dimensional algebras.
I am consistenly baffled by people who talk about "if" or "when" video games are shown to influence the behavior of people. It's long been known that just about everything you engage in shapes your personality and identity.
For an example, look at research into gender identity performed since the 70's. It is pretty well established that things like the male-sex drive and competitiveness are largely learned behaviors (via the different sorts of social games males play compared to females, the different reward systems, and then later, media influences).
Slashdot Mirror
Only if you take chimp to mean genus. The common chimp (Pan troglodytes) is not the same species as the bonobo (Pan paniscus).
Perhaps the ruling has more to do with the business model than anything else. You have a company that takes a piece of copyrighted artwork, fiddles with it, and then makes money. There is no creation process. Ethically it appears a bad practice, at least to me.
I'd say the theory of gravity is a pretty damn good explanation for why things fall to the ground, and contains a lot more truth than any similar theory originating out of religion or philosophy.
Philosophy and religion contain truth only in that they can be consistent. They really say very little of importance, in fact maybe even nothing, about reality as it operates without a human component. Sure, Buddhism might be spot on in describing the big Illusion about life, but that's just commentary on how humans perceive the world, and an interesting sociological note.
Philosophy and religion can never escape their essential human component, because they are created by humans and their underlying base is human thought. Compare that to science, where the underlying base is the observable world. Sure, we are limited in what we can measure and determine by our human senses, but a tree does exist as a collection of subatomic particles, just as we do, irregardless of a human observer. That's the only thing that is true and real.
To me there is a clear distinction between plants, animals and human beings. I think once you look into things, the distinction because very vague, especially between humans and animals. I debate a lot with a buddy of mine about what makes humans unique, and invariably we end up talking about monkeys that can communicate with sign language. He isn't satisfied that they can gesture a few words or comprehend, he wants substantial sentences that demonstrate a realization of the self. Honestly, given the rather intricate social structures of some animals (like wolves) I am very hard pressed think there is anything fundamentally different between humans and animals. Humans are, afterall, animals. Any uniquess we have is just the result of our evolutionary path, and I think it entirely unreasable to assume that most of the intelligences and emotions we developed are undevelopable in animals or are in fact, undeveloped. Sure, I doubt a dolphin could chat with me about Lie groups, but I can't hear a 30 minute series of clicks and then reproduce them flawlessly. The latter impresses me a whole hell of a lot more than my own ability with mathematics. Talk about human uniquess and supremacy (by what measure it doesn't matter) is, to me, frightenly reminescent of racist hate speech.
Many many scientists have a deep spirituality or faith and feel that science just gets you closer to the creation. I've never had a problem with science versus faith: to put it into religious terms, I presume that science is our attempt at explaining "how," and spirituality is our attempt at explaining "why." There's no disconnect here.
I cannot offer anything other than annecdote to back up what I'm about to say, and my experience is primarily with other mathematicians, but of all my friends, the most staunch atheists are also mathematicians or physicists.
I also honestly believe if people were not raised to be religous, you'd find that many many scientists would be agnostic, if not atheistic. Again, I only say this based on personal experience since I was raised in what I consider a very religion-neutral environment. No one told me there was a cosmic being, and no one told me there wasn't one. Learned all of that from the media.
I also have issues with the idea that faith and science are NOT mutually exclusive. What's more, a lot of what people take for faith isn't faith at all but playing the odds. I have 'faith' that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I also understand how the sun got there, why the earth revolves around the sun, and why the earth rotates. I also understand what sort of event would cause the earth to stop rotating. Given the low probability of an event occuring that stops the rotation of the earth, I therefor conclude it will rise tomorrow. I "believe" the sun will rise tomorrow, have 'faith' it will rise tomorrow because probability dictates it. There is, in fact, every reason to believe the sun will rise tomorrow. Where is the leap?
Why do I personally see spiritual faith conflicting with scientific reasoning? Mostly because spiritual faith almost always (in my experience) requires a leap of some sort. Take the idea of an afterlife. Here we have an example of something we can not measure emperically with any of our senses. We cannot touch it, cannot taste it, cannot smell it or hear it. We have no reports of people who have been to an afterlife, so we don't even have anecdotal evidence. Afterlife does not manifest itself in our world (unless you lay creedence with reports of ghosts, which we presume have seen the afterlife, so I guess we have a meta-anectdote of its existence). In short, if you took a monkey that could speak and had no training in religion and told him about the afterlife, their proper response would be, "Sounds ridiculous."
There is a caveat though. For people that, say, believe that the Bible was inspired by the word of a cosmic entity, and that it's not just a bunch of jive in there, the leap to believing there is an afterlife isn't such a feat.
The conflict I always have with faith is it is just sloppy. It generally doesn't fit in with human intuition, nor does it really work with our entire intelligence. It's really like betting strongly without knowing the odds too well. Those huge leaps of faith are like betting everything and not knowing the odds at all! Betting isn't by nature bad, but you want to try to limit the shitty choices you make in life.
I think the final straw for me is that faith is the same across the board, no matter your spirituality. The faith of someone who comes to me jabbering about the mightly invisible cross-beaked wren that lives in a volcano and dictates the lives of the gnomes that live in our brains is the same faith of the Christian, or the Jew. All you can give most western religions is the fact that they have some established history. Or better yet you can look towards a real religion. Say Mormonism. There are some pretty "wild" stories that surround how Mormonism came to be, and in the internal literature. At least, wild to most people raised in Western society. I bet a majority of westerners would balk at the stories. But if you reversed situations, if you had Mormonism being founded 2000 years ago and then Catholics coming to your door with their stor
I've wondered if part of it too isn't that subconsciously people realize that accepting the idea that their cosmic entity was so ill-defined for a thousand or so years doesn't perhaps mean the entire thing was just ad hoc. This quickly begets a person that has no need for a cosmic entity.
On a slightly different note, I've always liked the idea that perhaps life itself is this cosmic entity. Our sixth sense, let's say. Is that just thre remarkable processing power of our brain at work, taking a bunch of subconscious cues and telling us to act? Maybe we'll find out in a few million years that those Taoists were really right!
Why not? I always thought role-playing games (mainly MUDs) were a great way to ponder what makes gender. I think most people discover what sociologists have been saying for years: gender by and large is a social construct, and gender similarities are much more common. In short, a lot of the ways men and women behave has nothing to do with them having a penis or a vagina. To give you one example, consider the typical notion that men want to bang just about everything. Now look at the media's portrayal of maleness and the male fantasy. Look at music videos, movies, advertisements. So yeah, it really does boil down to: why not? I don't think there needs to be any reason or rational for why people want to explore the realities of the opposite sex. Just someone who realizes gender categorization is probably the biggest sham in human history. Next to some other obvious things that will go unmentioned ;)
I've used Google Earth and admit it is pretty cool, but I don't know if it really conveys the impressiveness of the natural world to the degree you say it does. At least, it doesn't to me. These are just pixels on the screen, and good for a general sense of things (like surveying the Sahara desert) but does it really educate you about these places?
I do a lot of backcountry backpacking and hiking, and also a lot of reading about backcountry places. It never ceases to amaze me how little knowledge I really gain just from reading, rather than doing. And I am not just talking about practical issues like whether a poncho or a rain-jacket is better suited to certain conditions. I mean about the physical world.
There is a danger in thinking you know too much. Maybe not so much with the physical layout of the world, but you can get an idea of what I mean by talking with people who think they know a lot about the world's cultures but have never lived outside their country. They really have a false idea of what things are like.
Considering how relatively easy it is to just pack up and do something adventurous, I can't see how Google Earth is anything more than pretty cool.
I move around about once a year (even different countries) and have found no substitute for just actually walking around the city (or biking if it is a large city). Is there any particular reason to know where things are before you are even in the city? I'll admit that being able to plot routes to and from places is nifty, and being able to find possible short-cuts nice, but using paper maps isn't all that difficulty especially once you know the lay of the land.
How in the world is the above a troll? It is a concern for some of us. I run Linux on an old (G3 Pismo) PowerBook and frequently have trouble finding a non-x86 version.
Wait, an 8-inch penis isn't normal?
Sales of alternative powered cars will be proportional to their ability to meet the needs and wants of consumers. Needs and wants which are largely derived from media advertisements. It is interesting to see how the average American views the vehicle compared with the average European. The American sees it as a liberating device, a tool of freedom, a big status symbol. In most European countries, this is just not the case. I'd say a car is viewed more as a functional device. You will also notice that America has an inordinant amount of car advertisements on the television, most of which show the car as a liberator in some fashion, be it through speed on some curvy road to an SUV climbing alpine mountains. I can only really attest for Sweden, but percentage of car comercials here is much less, with themes usually different. The caveate is that as we adopt American culture more and more, the car commercials come in kind. Vehicles really don't offer that much freedom, because freedom is a state of mind rather than a location. I know this is hard to swallow for most Americans, but it is simply the truth. I've never owned a vehicle, and bicycle everywhere, all seasons of the sea, snow or shine, and oddly enough manage to do all right. Most people really are not served anything by having the OPTION to, on a whim, travel 400km, any given day. I guess what I mean to say is that there is likely a large percentage of people who have "needs" that are not satisfied by alternative transportation, who, in reality would be served quite well by alternative transportation, but for their past inculcation.
Truth is not the issue, but derivability. Mathematics differs from philosophy and theology strongly in this matter, which is why we can explore the physical universe so well using mathematics. In philosophy, there is no clear way to derive new statements or ideas.
It seems to me that most "scientists" do one of two things when encountering something they can't explain: 1) ignore it and try not to think about it, usually alluding to some undiscovered principle at work; or 2) ridicule ideas outside the mainstream of science to draw attention away from problems with applying conventional wisdom There is of course the "non-scientific" theory-a non-human intelligence or other supernatural effect may be involved.
As someone who works with scientsits, I have to say this isn't a good characterization at all. (And more, I can speak from personal experience, where even in mathematics oddness occurs). Most scientists worth their salt are basically curious and dilligent people, and so if a topic interests them sufficiently, they will pursue it.
They ignore things when it just is not interesting or broadly outside their field of experience. Only after that, if the situation is sufficiently bizarre, do they throw up their hands and "just ignore it."
The scientist doesn't accept non-scientific theories precisely because of the little reason to do so. Why should I, or anyone else, accept an idea that a) cannot be tested b) cannot be reproduced and c) starts with incredible, entirely arbitrary assumptions? This is, contrary to what your sig says, what keenly separates mathematical sciences from any religion.
Sometimes people in math or the hard sciences forget about human intelligence: What is intelligence? How did it come into being? How is it that I think and have feelings if all that I am is a pile of chemical reactions?
Yet it is from hard science that we know so much about human intelligence, so no, I do not think they forget about them. What a lot of them are, though, are materialists.
Human intelligence is always brought up as being some great, unique, and mystifying thing. The awe though is not in the seeming stupifying complexity of any sentient being, but the physiology of it all. With greater understanding of exactly how the brain works really comes more appreciation, than just effectively tossing the question out as inexplicable and then creating a religion behind it.
Look at how our understanding of celestial mechanics evolved. At first maybe we thought the stars and planets were pushed around by some giant being of power. Eventually we had Newtonian mechanics and general relativity. For simple things like, say, orbits, it really isn't so mystifying how it works. I think one would be hard pressed to find an educated person that saw the movement of the stars these days as reason to consider spiritual forces necessarily present.
I guess what I am saying is human thought is in the same category, just a bit more complex than simple planetary revolution.
So why insist on rulling out a hypothesis that the same thing happens on a much larger scale?
I wouldn't call your hypothesis absurd at all, just strongly unncessary, and hence largely irrelevant. What we observe about the universe points to one thing only, really: the universe obeys laws. It certainly doesn't suggest we are in someone's computer program. That is a huge leap, and begs a whole lot of questions.
More importantly, it doesn't matter even if we were in a giant computer program, since we can only observe the physical universe with
One main difference is that science can produce objective results, whereas religion does not. What's more, though, is that science revels in the mysteries of the universe. Religious explanations for "mircales" is throwing one's arms up in the air and admitting defeat in the face of insufficient understanding. The non-scientific person sees inexplicable things as evidence that the very fabric of the universe is inexplicable, and ergo must have links to some spiritual substance. Defaulting to a belief that everything CAN be explained (but perhaps not understood) is just the consequence of realizing that what you prescribe to a god, I could just as easily link to an intergalatic space walrus. There is no necessity for any specific type of spiritual force, and because of this there is absolutely no reason to give any particular spiritual theory merit. See, I look at genuine miracles as chances to explore in greater depth how the universe works. The spiritualist explanation offers nothing new. Not only that, it completely settles the issue by fitting this data in with what amounts to a gigantic intellectual wank session, which we call theology. It tacitly WRITES OFF the true miracle, and damn son, it actually suggests we shouldn't try to understand it more. That's the greatest insult I can think of. Of course, as a mathematician I do my fair share of intellectual wanking, but it's funny how the objects I play with have a whole of a hell lot more revelance to the universe than theories about pink unicorns ever will. The only redeeming factor of religion is that it helps some people get through life. But honestly, all it takes is a little bit of thought to come up with your own guiding principles, live a good life, and maybe, just maybe, live it with joy. So in conclusion, mysteries don't point to shit. They are just that.
I remember at one point you can become a dragon or dragon-like creature at some point and explore this cloud like realm. I always tried to model my dinosaur creatures as much like this dragon as I could, so impressed was I. Great game.
>>On a note, I think that video games actually promote social interaction, problem solving, reactions, that kind of stuff. Have you ever played Halo 2, on xbox live?
I can assure you (as someone who played video games for a good portion of their youth) that I do more for my problem solving ability by considering a single problem about representations of finite dimensional-algebras than will a hundred people solving video-game problems for their entire lives. Unless, of course, the video-game problems involve representations of finite-dimensional algebras.
I am consistenly baffled by people who talk about "if" or "when" video games are shown to influence the behavior of people. It's long been known that just about everything you engage in shapes your personality and identity.
For an example, look at research into gender identity performed since the 70's. It is pretty well established that things like the male-sex drive and competitiveness are largely learned behaviors (via the different sorts of social games males play compared to females, the different reward systems, and then later, media influences).