Re: Is Consciousness Computable?
On 6/30/2014 9:35 PM, LizR wrote: ISTM... In primitive materialism, what exists are space / time and matter / energy. Information is an emergent property of the arrangements of those things, like entropy. Neither of these exist at the level of fundamental particles, or Planck cells, or strings, or whatever else may be the primitive mass-energy/space-time) involved. There are problems with this view if information has primitive status, which would indicate that the real picture is something like it from bit or what might be called primitive informationism. Evidence for PI come from the entropy of black holes, the black hole information paradox, the Landauer limit, the Beckenstein bound, the holographic principle, and (unless I already covered that) the requirement that erasing a bit of information requires some irreducible amount of energy. (And maybe some other things I don't know about ... perish the thought). That's the Landauer limit, which isn't really relevant at a fundamental level. It's a thermodynamic law which is reducible to statistical mechanics. PI isn't equivalent to comp, but from what you said above PI might be a necessary consequence of comp, which would give the ontological chain arithmetic - consciousness - information - matter (I think ... this is all ISTM of course). OK, except I think the chain is: arithmetic - information - matter - consciousness - arithmetic and I'm not so inclined to take it as more than another possible model of the world. I think of it as a way to describe and predict and think about the world; but without supposing that it's possible to prove or to know with certainty the world must be that way. As for A Garrett Lisi, I was under the impression that his particles were something like a point in a weight diagram - or something - which sounds to me at least like some form of information theoretic entity. But I have to admit my understanding of how birds and flowers could emerge from the E8 group or whatever it's called is, well, about like this... In a way, all of fundamental physics posits information theoretic entities. Particles are nothing more than what satisfies particle equations. Bruno complains about Aristotle and primitive matter, but I don't know any physicists who go around saying,I've discovered primitive matter. or Let's work on finding primitive matter. They just want a theory that is a little more comprehensive, a little more accurate, a little more predictive than the one they have now. And they couldn't care less what stuff is needed in their theory - only that it works. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Is Consciousness Computable?
On 1 July 2014 17:59, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/30/2014 9:35 PM, LizR wrote: ISTM... In primitive materialism, what exists are space / time and matter / energy. Information is an emergent property of the arrangements of those things, like entropy. Neither of these exist at the level of fundamental particles, or Planck cells, or strings, or whatever else may be the primitive mass-energy/space-time) involved. There are problems with this view if information has primitive status, which would indicate that the real picture is something like it from bit or what might be called primitive informationism. Evidence for PI come from the entropy of black holes, the black hole information paradox, the Landauer limit, the Beckenstein bound, the holographic principle, and (unless I already covered that) the requirement that erasing a bit of information requires some irreducible amount of energy. (And maybe some other things I don't know about ... perish the thought). That's the Landauer limit, which isn't really relevant at a fundamental level. It's a thermodynamic law which is reducible to statistical mechanics. Interesting. How is the energy required to erase a single bit reducible to statistical mechanics? PI isn't equivalent to comp, but from what you said above PI might be a necessary consequence of comp, which would give the ontological chain arithmetic - consciousness - information - matter (I think ... this is all ISTM of course). OK, except I think the chain is: arithmetic - information - matter - consciousness - arithmetic That doesn't make sense to me. I mean everything except the last term is OK, but you're apparently claiming that arithmetic is fundamental AND an invention of the human mind. Which at first glance looks suspiciously like fence sitting and having and eating your cake... Unless you have a theory of circular ontology, of course, in which case please fill in a few more details. and I'm not so inclined to take it as more than another possible model of the world. We aren't in a position to do more than build models of the world. If you think it's a possible model then that's *all* you can ever claim for it, well, unless some evidence comes along that disproves it, when you can't even do that. I think of it as a way to describe and predict and think about the world; but without supposing that it's possible to prove or to know with certainty the world must be that way. Of course, we can't know for certain what the world is like. As for A Garrett Lisi, I was under the impression that his particles were something like a point in a weight diagram - or something - which sounds to me at least like some form of information theoretic entity. But I have to admit my understanding of how birds and flowers could emerge from the E8 group or whatever it's called is, well, about like this... In a way, all of fundamental physics posits information theoretic entities. Particles are nothing more than what satisfies particle equations. Bruno complains about Aristotle and primitive matter, but I don't know any physicists who go around saying,I've discovered primitive matter. or Let's work on finding primitive matter. Well, I think Bruno thinks it's more an unconscious assumption for most physicists, rather than something explicitly stated. For example your statement about your mother implicitly assumes her mind is nothing but what her brain does. That's a primitive materialist assumption (and one that may be right, of course) but my point is that no one stops to make it explicit, because nowadays it's deeply ingrained in the thought processes of anyone who isn't strongly religious, and goes without saying. They just want a theory that is a little more comprehensive, a little more accurate, a little more predictive than the one they have now. And they couldn't care less what stuff is needed in their theory - only that it works. So why the century-long kerfuffle about the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics? :-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Selecting your future branch
On 1 July 2014 17:38, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/30/2014 9:03 PM, LizR wrote: Well, that's quite straightforward. Brent is assuming the (so called) Aristotelean paradigm, and hence that his mother *is* her brain. I'm assuming (on some evidence) that she, her stream of consciousness, is what her brain does. For example, she remembers her childhood very clearly, better than the recent past (like whether or not she's told you about her childhood in the last two days). I don't see how this jibes with Kim's idea of poor reception. It *doesn't* jibe with it, that was his point. As far as I can see, Kim is suggesting that poor reception - the workings of memory, perception and so on - cause a consciousness which is basically unchanged to appear different to the outside world. As he (?) says, one doesn't feel that one's mind changes as one gets older, one feels that external things have changed - e.g. my memory may fail me more, but (on this view) that is an external thing, a piece of wetware, going wrong, rather than something about me that has changed. Apologies if I am misrepresenting Kim here, that was my reading. It seems like a particularly clear cut distinction between the Aristotle and Plato camps' views, which is why I tried to highlight that fact (if fact it be). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
RE: Pluto bounces back!
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Samiya Illias Chris, I could respond in many ways, but none seems adequate. Samiya – matters of this nature are never easy to discuss… so no worries. I could say that I believe because I find the Quran to be factually correct, but that only vindicated my belief... Good point. I could say that as I studied and observed the beauty and the patterns in nature, the finest details, I too have studied the beauty and patterns in nature in detail… and am awed by the elegance of it all as well. I became convinced that there had to be a Creator behind it, but that also only vindicated my belief... Could you’re a priori belief have caused you to become convinced? I could think that may be since I was born in the faith, perhaps that's why it was natural, but I was asking questions, and I must admit, sometimes even fantasising how it would have been to be born in another faith or culture... I can say that the trials and experiences of life brought me closer to God, made me study the faith earnestly, and helped me discover the endless patience and my loving God through it all. You can say all these things, and I am sure that for you they did result in you becoming closer to your faith. But these same things you speak of had different outcomes in the hearts of different people. I am not trying to diminish your personal story, but making the point that the experience of life and the wonders of existence and nature has brought different meaning for different people. Is their meaning less valid than yours? Yet, I think, the latent belief was there all along, it was only my conscious self which took its own sweet time to realise and appreciate it! Whatever may the reason be, I'm glad that I'm a believer, and I lovingly worship my Creator. I can tell that you do. I am interested in finding out what it was – within you – that germinated your belief… or was it already there in you by having been born into the faith. Perhaps this short video expresses it more eloquently: http://www.andiesisle.com/creation/magnificent.html Forgive me, but I am more interested in hearing what you think than in the expressions contained within some video. Reagrds, Chris Regards, Samiya On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 8:41 AM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: Samiya…. May I ask you why you believe. It is obvious that you do believe, but why… and please not the canned answer supplied by dogma but the deep inner personal reasons that motivate you to believe? Can we cut through all the bull shit and get straight at the core of the matter… with the simple direct question of why? Not in the generic sense, but rather in the exquisitely personal dimension of your own innermost wellspring of being.. your own emergent self-awareness. (which you believe was given to you by your God) Why? What is your personal story. Dogma does not interest me in the least; personal stories I do however find fascinating. Chris, in the Pacific Northwest (one of the best spots on the earth) From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Samiya Illias Sent: Saturday, June 28, 2014 8:04 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Pluto bounces back! On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 1:31 AM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 7:40 PM, Samiya Illias samiyaill...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 6:20 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote: Another example: does the Quran allow for possibility that it could be wrong etc? PGC No, it doesn't, as explained above. It allows for human evaluation, Which is pretty pointless, if the text is god's truth written large. This kind of fake advertising of scientific doubt is also present in the Bible; e.g. doubting apostle Thomas. As in yes, if you are the doubting type... we've reserved a place for you. My answer is: Sorry, you don't allow real doubt. Thomas and these figures can only doubt inside the book, not the book itself. Your doubt is false doubt. and suggests parameters that we can use such as discrepancy, falsifiability, trying to write a similar book without God's help, How can we even be sure the Quran, Bible, etc. are written with god's help? How can we be sure it is not a political tool of men, pretending to be god's voice simply, for obvious human reason? etc., and repeatedly claims that this Book is without any crookedness, You do not address the problem of blaspheme raised and continue to make statements about him, even though you believe you cannot understand him. Apologies, but that is crooked to me. errors or mistakes, and a guidance and blessing from the Lord of the Worlds.
Re: Speaking of free speech...
On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 12:49 AM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: I don't see how the university can stop the student union from banning things if they want to, I guess, assuming the student union owns the buildings in which such bans apply. but then I can't see how the SU can stop students from forming a club either! This all seems rather weird... as you say they can just meet in a bar or cafe if they want to. Wasn't it students calling for someone to be stoned recently, in a slightly nastier example of students trying to uphold idiotic laws? (In my day students GOT stoned, damn it. Never thoght I'd be holding that up as an example of moral rectitude...) On 1 July 2014 00:29, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: This seems to be a student union thing. Maybe the university should intervene and ban the student union from banning things. It probably will, for the sake of it's own reputation. I can't help but desire that the university does not intervene, though. It is perhaps more instructive to let the students experience, in a somewhat safe environment, what happens when you give absolute power to ideologues, and let them figure out how to recover freedom in their own terms. The Neitzsche club people are smart, they will hold meetings in the Starbucks in front of the university and embarrass the apprentice censors. Cheers Telmo. On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 7:48 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: Nothing like a good university stimulate intellectual debate - about who should be prohibited from debating and what should not be mentioned. Brent On 6/29/2014 10:41 PM, LizR wrote: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/05/university-college-london-s-nietzsche-club-is-banned.html This is sheer insanity, to quote that bloke from Dad's Army. I can only hope that the Neitzsche Club will not be killed off, but made stronger - and if it *is* full of rabid ideogogues misrepresenting Friedrich's ideas, let them do it in public so everyone can have a good laugh. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: American Intelligence
yes, Guitar, I understood the sarcasm, but it was sarcasm with a good point. It has meaning for me, not only for the topics on the mailing list, but my own, up from liberalism thing, which I used to be. Once one knows ones goals, then the path needs no ideology, merely, a search for the best way to that goal, and a certain vehemence toward those who obstruct for 'faith' reasons. One's personal views are usually interesting, because it deals with feeling as well as facts. I think it should be obvious that this was a bad try towards humor, and not an attempt to sell personal politics. PGC -Original Message- From: Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, Jun 30, 2014 7:32 pm Subject: Re: American Intelligence On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 2:30 PM, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: Pantheists are cool, as are Lobian machines, immaterialists, materialist, Schrodinger wave stuff. I do have probs with Marxists-Progressives because of the destabilization issue. Udder den dat, let a thousand flowers bloom (as Marxist Mao once said). Progressives get very huffy when one publically disagrees with them (how dare they!) Looks like Magister Criss did too. It's how some people get their amygylas work. It needs a good workout every now and then. I am happy to provide the stimuli in this sense. But, yes, it does divert the awareness from the nature of consciousness-but that's how reality is, as we do the ivory tower waltz-life breaks in like a bomb going off in Falujah. I think it should be obvious that this was a bad try towards humor, and not an attempt to sell personal politics. PGC You maggots think you can get away with ignoring the titles of your superiors? 50 Laps and N pushups, all of you except spud: Humans, machines, universal ones, Löbian ones, materialists, immaterialists, physicalists, Darwinists, pantheists, recursive fetishists, atheists, agnostics, idiotics, MSR, P-time nutheads, tronifiers, computationalists, magicians, quantum jerks (with AND without collapse of wave function, I don't care) and the rest of your foul undisciplined ontological technically genderless asses! This is an argument of authority! From an ignorant, hypocrite jerk that doesn't believe in them, no less! Don't provoke me to deter your asses any more than this. Ok? Good. Emulate it. Yes, emulate the goodness. Run it. You won't know whether it'll ever stop. That's better, see? :-) PGC -Original Message- From: Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Sun, Jun 29, 2014 8:33 pm Subject: Re: American Intelligence On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 1:14 AM, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: I tend to agree with your sentiments, Telmo. My idea, should you care, is that if one goes to war, half measures and quarter measures end up quite badly. If one can achieve peace, justice, and free beer, without doing violence to one's fellow primates, this is a great thing. But it is not assured, that simply because one tries a peaceable track, that it will even work. So, if one fights, why hold back? Observe, the results of the US's partial warfare model, and decide for yourself if it has been a brimming success or not? The nuclear war thing, I likely fret more about then any.other participant, on this mailing list. The primary reason for this is that fission, and fusion weapons, are now very old, and the missile tech to carry the bombs are only a bit younger. If I was a citizen of Europe, I would be very concerned that the deliberate diminishment of US power, would invite aggression from places where it would have seemed a laughable, fiction, only a decade ago. To wit, you folks are now on your own, with the current US leadership. It may not bother you, even a bit, but I see that this is a new geopolitical fact. Be well. Uhm... thanks for your help and strategic advise, sir. We, speaking for all european leftist pacifist tree hugging conspirators present, know what to do now: we'll keep relations with US at optimum rimming status as we have done for the last 60 odd years, and you can chill a bit with the right wing spam editorials on the list. That's just the geopolitical situation right now according to PGC HQ (first and therefore most prestigious HQ of the list by far!), you get our allegiance, but we need a bit of freedom in return. You know qpq sir, strengthen troop morale and such. Also we should all take your example and call Russell Prof. Standish or Professor, from now on exclusively! Any slip up with titles and I will ceremonially curse your name with modest restraint in the forest with my scary looking but kind canine; only if nobody is watching though, otherwise it'll look weird which would be going too far. You maggots
Re: Germany sets record for peak energy use - 50 percent comes from solar (Update)
Do you see the average citizen wanting fission power nowadays? It seems cheaper and quicker to go with sun and wind for electricity, once the storage issue is put in the rear view mirror. Actually there is no such evidence except when the exposure is huge. I'll have a lot more to say about that shortly but I've got to go to work now. John K Clark -Original Message- From: John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, Jun 30, 2014 1:50 pm Subject: Re: Germany sets record for peak energy use - 50 percent comes from solar (Update) On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 2:55 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: LFTR does not exist in reality (at least yet) And that is not surprising given that the amount of money spent of LFTR research during the last half century is virtually zero. I have however looked at some interesting solid breeder designs namely TerraPower’s travelling wave breeder proposal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower Curious of you have looked at travelling wave breeder concept at all? I am not impressed with the traveling wave reactor, it's just a even more complicated type of solid fuel Uranium breeder that was already complacated enough, and it still uses molten sodium as a coolant. It's only advantage is that it pushes the the waste disposal problem under the rug for 40 or 50 years, but it doesn't burn all the transuranics or even all the Uranium so at the end of the reactor's lifetime you've got about 240 tons of heavy elements like Uranium and Plutonium and even heavier more exotic stuff and 60 tons of lighter radioactive fission products. And a traveling wave reactor is big, not in power output but in physical size. A LFTR is extremely compact, believe it or not Alvin Weinberg originally came up with the LFTR idea because he was told by the Air Force to find a nuclear reactor that could power an airplane. Weinberg never thought that a nuclear airplane was a very good idea but he took the Air Force money anyway because he was sure that a small very high temperature nuclear reactor that operated at atmospheric pressure would be useful for other things. We are going to disagree on the ultimate impact of nuclear accidents such as Chernobyl or Fukushima –I feel that there is actuary evidence to suggest a strong linkage to these events and subsequent cancer deaths Actually there is no such evidence except when the exposure is huge. I'll have a lot more to say about that shortly but I've got to go to work now. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
What's the answer? What's the question?
Some recent discussions have centred on the (putative) features of hierarchical-reductionist ontologies, and whether comp (whatever its intrinsic merits or deficiencies) should be considered as just another candidate theory in that category, This prompts me to consider what fundamental question a particular theory is designed to answer. Making this explicit may help us to see what other questions are, by the same token (and perhaps only implicitly), treated as subsidiary or, as it were, merely awaiting resolution in due course in terms of the central explanatory thrust. I think it's fair to say that theories centred on an exhaustively-reducible physical or material ontology seek to answer the question of What are the fundamental entities and relations that underlie and constitute everything that exists and how did things get to be this way?. Even if this is a rather crude formulation, if questions such as these are deemed central and definitive, the issue of How and why does it *appear* to us that things are this way? becomes subsidiary and presumably awaits ultimate elucidation in the same terms. IOW, both we and what appears to us will in the end be explained, exhaustively, as composite phenomena in a physical hierarchy that can be reduced without loss to the basic entities and relations. ISTM however that comp asks different questions from the outset: How and why does it APPEAR that certain entities and relations constitute everything that exists, and what the hell is appearance anyway? To be sure, in order to deal with such questions comp has to begin with How does everything get to be this way?, but the crucial distinction is that basic physical entities and relations are, in this mode of question-and-answer, a complex by-product of the logic of appearance, and the subjects of said appearance. A further consequence is that it is no longer obvious that subjects, or what appears to them, are reducible in any straightforward way, either to physical entities and relations, or to the original first-order combinatorial ontology. It is true that we can pose questions in the first way and still say that we are non-eliminative about consciousness. The problem though is that because we have already committed ourselves to an exhaustively reductive mode of explanation, we can't help consigning such first-person phenomena to a subsidiary status, as an impenetrable mystery, an essentially irrelevant epiphenomenon, or some sort of weirdly-anomalous side-effect of basic physical activity. ISTM that this mode of question-and-answer, from the outset, essentially can't escape trivialising, ignoring, or rendering unanswerable in principle, the role of the first person. Consequently, I can't avoid the suspicion that, despite its phenomenal success (pun intended) it can't, in the end, be the most helpful way of asking the most fundamental questions. Whatever its independent merits or demerits, and its inherent complexity, ISTM that comp gets closer to a way of posing questions that might in the end yield more satisfying and complete answers. As it happens, in so doing it rehabilitates earlier attempts in the tradition stemming from the Greeks and Indians, and from later exemplars such as Berkeley and Kant. And perhaps most interestingly, its central motivation originates in, and simultaneously strikes at the heart of, the tacit assumption of its rivals that perception and cognition are (somehow) second-order relational phenomena attached to some putative virtual level of an exhaustively material reduction. David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: American Intelligence
On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 1:32 PM, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: yes, Guitar, I understood the sarcasm, but it was sarcasm with a good point. It was just me playing chickenhawk. You can read too much into it, if you like though. It has meaning for me, not only for the topics on the mailing list, but my own, up from liberalism thing, which I used to be. I think Chris had something more relevant to say. That everybody uses labels out of necessity, but that it is our job to listen to the person underneath that and show the right kind of restraint and rise above our flaw. This is not left, btw. Your presupposed distinction between all left and right is too hard and inflexible. Most of it is propaganda/media nonsense anyway. Still you keep iterating these lines of thinking hook line and sinker. Once one knows ones goals, then the path needs no ideology, merely, a search for the best way to that goal, which is the ideology, you preach. and a certain vehemence toward those who obstruct for 'faith' reasons. the degree of how radical. One's personal views are usually interesting, because it deals with feeling as well as facts. But your views are different from personal views. You apply blanket generalizations to whole cultural, political, religious, and racial groups + demand violent force. This is a militant, radical, although not yet extremist view. Your view includes hurting others, way outside the rationale of defense. And no, not everybody's personal views are interesting. Some are tediously transparent and predictable. I'd say, even of my own, most are pretty predictable, so I can see the merit of throwing the exceptional one in occasionally. But not submerge people with them. Flooding the list in your posts with the usual culturally divisive right wing sensationalist rhetoric call to arms of late; that was my target as newly appointed Chickenhawk General. Anybody can buy weapons magazines and throw on the TV, and we see the same stuff. Open a club or something, as I don't see why this stuff has to become a mainstay focus of the list. PGC I think it should be obvious that this was a bad try towards humor, and not an attempt to sell personal politics. PGC -Original Message- From: Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, Jun 30, 2014 7:32 pm Subject: Re: American Intelligence On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 2:30 PM, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: Pantheists are cool, as are Lobian machines, immaterialists, materialist, Schrodinger wave stuff. I do have probs with Marxists-Progressives because of the destabilization issue. Udder den dat, let a thousand flowers bloom (as Marxist Mao once said). Progressives get very huffy when one publically disagrees with them (how dare they!) Looks like Magister Criss did too. It's how some people get their amygylas work. It needs a good workout every now and then. I am happy to provide the stimuli in this sense. But, yes, it does divert the awareness from the nature of consciousness-but that's how reality is, as we do the ivory tower waltz-life breaks in like a bomb going off in Falujah. I think it should be obvious that this was a bad try towards humor, and not an attempt to sell personal politics. PGC You maggots think you can get away with ignoring the titles of your superiors? 50 Laps and N pushups, all of you except spud: Humans, machines, universal ones, Löbian ones, materialists, immaterialists, physicalists, Darwinists, pantheists, recursive fetishists, atheists, agnostics, idiotics, MSR, P-time nutheads, tronifiers, computationalists, magicians, quantum jerks (with AND without collapse of wave function, I don't care) and the rest of your foul undisciplined ontological technically genderless asses! This is an argument of authority! From an ignorant, hypocrite jerk that doesn't believe in them, no less! Don't provoke me to deter your asses any more than this. Ok? Good. Emulate it. Yes, emulate the goodness. Run it. You won't know whether it'll ever stop. That's better, see? :-) PGC -Original Message- From: Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Sun, Jun 29, 2014 8:33 pm Subject: Re: American Intelligence On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 1:14 AM, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: I tend to agree with your sentiments, Telmo. My idea, should you care, is that if one goes to war, half measures and quarter measures end up quite badly. If one can achieve peace, justice, and free beer, without doing violence to one's fellow primates, this is a great thing. But it is not assured, that simply because one tries a peaceable track, that it will even work. So, if one fights, why hold back? Observe, the results of the US's
Re: Pluto bounces back!
On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 6:11 PM, Samiya Illias samiyaill...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 7:17 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 5:03 AM, Samiya Illias samiyaill...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 1:31 AM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote: I respect a possible god's creation more than thinking it somebody's job to convert people. This makes god's magnificence, as you call it, very small. I still have no idea of whether you see the blaspheme problem here or not. PGC We agree that it is blasphemy to attribute to God or make statements on God's behalf what God hasn't stated. However, we also consider it blasphemy to deny God or God's communication, pretending that God hasn't sent any message, when God has indeed provided guidance for humans. I don't know this and I challenge you, the Quran, indeed anybody, to provide convincing evidence. Okay, challenge the Quran... read it and see if it answers you with convincing evidence. But you have provided us with insights and the pleasure of some translations, so I have been reading it, in an informal sense. You made the claim about factual accuracy of Quran, therefore burden of proof lies with you. I don't know how factually accurate the Quran is, nor do I understand your particular interpretation of this. Your claim in this regard, could be the very blasphemy you speak of. You seem to think that the Message is for a particular culture, I tell you its for all humanity from the Lord of the Worlds. Cultures compete. War is our collective history. That's besides the point. Not if you care about factual accuracy of history: You are saying our cultural differences have no influence on religion/holy books/their interpretation? If you consider this a fact... then why do people with cultural roots from Western Europe tend to be Christian? Same question for other religions and their regions. If I grow up in Jewish or Christian background, this preselects me to be more accessible to Jewish or Christian theology/books/interpretations than to Quran. Ok, the Quran is for all culture; but then the Bible says the same. You still avoid the question of why the Quran above all other sacred books. Because it is the last in the series of revelations: the final revelation, and because it has been protected from changes. We Muslims are required to believe in all revelations, not just the Quran. Its an article of faith. And also because the prior scriptures foretell the coming of Prophet Muhammad. Those are not factual or rational reasons to answer the question: Why this book, and not others? The book asserts a primary status. So why not ask this question? If this were a matter of personal religion, that would be private. But since you want factual accuracy, and to tie scientific/rational approach to Quran, the question is valid. Science, ability to doubt, question, and strive for accuracy in facts and descriptions belongs to all of us, no matter the religion. Agree That's refreshing to see. That you can intuit a place, where we can talk/reason beyond religion and about it. PGC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Pluto bounces back!
What is your definition of factual accuracy? Kindly explain with some examples. Samiya On 01-Jul-2014, at 5:46 pm, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 6:11 PM, Samiya Illias samiyaill...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 7:17 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 5:03 AM, Samiya Illias samiyaill...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 1:31 AM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote: I respect a possible god's creation more than thinking it somebody's job to convert people. This makes god's magnificence, as you call it, very small. I still have no idea of whether you see the blaspheme problem here or not. PGC We agree that it is blasphemy to attribute to God or make statements on God's behalf what God hasn't stated. However, we also consider it blasphemy to deny God or God's communication, pretending that God hasn't sent any message, when God has indeed provided guidance for humans. I don't know this and I challenge you, the Quran, indeed anybody, to provide convincing evidence. Okay, challenge the Quran... read it and see if it answers you with convincing evidence. But you have provided us with insights and the pleasure of some translations, so I have been reading it, in an informal sense. You made the claim about factual accuracy of Quran, therefore burden of proof lies with you. I don't know how factually accurate the Quran is, nor do I understand your particular interpretation of this. Your claim in this regard, could be the very blasphemy you speak of. You seem to think that the Message is for a particular culture, I tell you its for all humanity from the Lord of the Worlds. Cultures compete. War is our collective history. That's besides the point. Not if you care about factual accuracy of history: You are saying our cultural differences have no influence on religion/holy books/their interpretation? If you consider this a fact... then why do people with cultural roots from Western Europe tend to be Christian? Same question for other religions and their regions. If I grow up in Jewish or Christian background, this preselects me to be more accessible to Jewish or Christian theology/books/interpretations than to Quran. Ok, the Quran is for all culture; but then the Bible says the same. You still avoid the question of why the Quran above all other sacred books. Because it is the last in the series of revelations: the final revelation, and because it has been protected from changes. We Muslims are required to believe in all revelations, not just the Quran. Its an article of faith. And also because the prior scriptures foretell the coming of Prophet Muhammad. Those are not factual or rational reasons to answer the question: Why this book, and not others? The book asserts a primary status. So why not ask this question? If this were a matter of personal religion, that would be private. But since you want factual accuracy, and to tie scientific/rational approach to Quran, the question is valid. Science, ability to doubt, question, and strive for accuracy in facts and descriptions belongs to all of us, no matter the religion. Agree That's refreshing to see. That you can intuit a place, where we can talk/reason beyond religion and about it. PGC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Pluto bounces back!
On 01-Jul-2014, at 1:15 pm, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Samiya Illias Chris, I could respond in many ways, but none seems adequate. Samiya – matters of this nature are never easy to discuss… so no worries. I could say that I believe because I find the Quran to be factually correct, but that only vindicated my belief... Good point. I could say that as I studied and observed the beauty and the patterns in nature, the finest details, I too have studied the beauty and patterns in nature in detail… and am awed by the elegance of it all as well. I became convinced that there had to be a Creator behind it, but that also only vindicated my belief... Could you’re a priori belief have caused you to become convinced? Maybe I could think that may be since I was born in the faith, perhaps that's why it was natural, but I was asking questions, and I must admit, sometimes even fantasising how it would have been to be born in another faith or culture... I can say that the trials and experiences of life brought me closer to God, made me study the faith earnestly, and helped me discover the endless patience and my loving God through it all. You can say all these things, and I am sure that for you they did result in you becoming closer to your faith. But these same things you speak of had different outcomes in the hearts of different people. Of course, perceptions vary and so do responses I am not trying to diminish your personal story, but making the point that the experience of life and the wonders of existence and nature has brought different meaning for different people. Is their meaning less valid than yours? Not for me to judge Yet, I think, the latent belief was there all along, it was only my conscious self which took its own sweet time to realise and appreciate it! Whatever may the reason be, I'm glad that I'm a believer, and I lovingly worship my Creator. I can tell that you do. I am interested in finding out what it was – within you – that germinated your belief… or was it already there in you by having been born into the faith. Maybe. Being born in a practicing family means God is remembered daily, not only in prayer but also in acts of charity and kindness. So whether you're doing things out of the love of God or out of fear of God, you do remember God. Perhaps this short video expresses it more eloquently: http://www.andiesisle.com/creation/magnificent.html Forgive me, but I am more interested in hearing what you think than in the expressions contained within some video. Ah, but I'm very find of this one: I believe, just like a child... Regards, Samiya Reagrds, Chris Regards, Samiya On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 8:41 AM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: Samiya…. May I ask you why you believe. It is obvious that you do believe, but why… and please not the canned answer supplied by dogma but the deep inner personal reasons that motivate you to believe? Can we cut through all the bull shit and get straight at the core of the matter… with the simple direct question of why? Not in the generic sense, but rather in the exquisitely personal dimension of your own innermost wellspring of being.. your own emergent self-awareness. (which you believe was given to you by your God) Why? What is your personal story. Dogma does not interest me in the least; personal stories I do however find fascinating. Chris, in the Pacific Northwest (one of the best spots on the earth) From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Samiya Illias Sent: Saturday, June 28, 2014 8:04 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Pluto bounces back! On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 1:31 AM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 7:40 PM, Samiya Illias samiyaill...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 6:20 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote: Another example: does the Quran allow for possibility that it could be wrong etc? PGC No, it doesn't, as explained above. It allows for human evaluation, Which is pretty pointless, if the text is god's truth written large. This kind of fake advertising of scientific doubt is also present in the Bible; e.g. doubting apostle Thomas. As in yes, if you are the doubting type... we've reserved a place for you. My answer is: Sorry, you don't allow real doubt. Thomas and these figures can only doubt inside the book, not the book itself. Your doubt is false doubt. and suggests parameters that we can use such as discrepancy, falsifiability, trying to write a similar book
Re: Germany sets record for peak energy use - 50 percent comes from solar (Update)
On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 8:20 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: a LFTR does make U233, and more that it needs to keep functioning by about 8%. That depends on how the LFTR is designed and operated, if done correctly the figure is close to zero, just enough U233 to keep it going but no more. Operating as designed this is contaminated with U232 which makes it unsuitable for a bomb. Yes, a sub-critical 5 Kilogram mass of LFTR produced U233 would give off a massive 43 Sieverts of radiation per hour, so the bomb makers would have to work fast because such an exposure would kill them in 72 hours and make them too sick to work a lot sooner than that. And because it is not the U232 itself that gives off those intense Gamma rays but a decay product of U232 (Thallium 208) after 10 years the radiation from that 5 KG chunk would not be less but would actually be 3 times more intense. By contrast the same amount of Plutonium would only give off .03 Sieverts of radiation per hour and even less with U235. But if the operators skim out Pa233, which is the precusor to U233, and then let it beta decay to U233 it's not contaminated by U232 and is usable for a bomb. Doing that would not violate the laws of physics but it would be damn hard to do. First of all you'd have to stop the reactor otherwise the neutron flux would continually make trace (but still deadly) amounts of U232 from U233 and Pa233. Then you'd need to set up a chemical extraction plant inside the reactor to get the Protactinium; a chemical plant that could deal with 700 degree Centigrade molten salt that is going to remain hot for years. Even if you waited one hour after reactor shutdown to let the shortest lived and thus most dangerous fission products to decay, just one liter of the salt would produce 350 watts of heat and would kill anyone in minutes unless they were protected by many meters of concrete. There is no way a rogue reactor operator could do all this without anybody noticing. And a rogue state wouldn't do it because there are far far easier ways to make a bomb than by using U233 and a LFTR. It's harder to make bomb from U233 because it's critical mass is about half again that of plutonium but it has been done. It's been done but not often and not well. No nation has a pure U233 bomb in it's stockpile because the attempts to make one were not encouraging. In 1955 the USA set off a plutonium-U233 hybrid composite bomb, it was expected to produce 33 kilotons but only managed 22. As far as I know the only pure U233 bomb was set off by India in 1988 and was a complete flop, it produced a miniscule explosion of only 200 tons of TNT. A LFTR economy would decrease the chances of weapon proliferation not increase it. A LFTR needs fissionable material to get started, it could use U233 made in another reactor but a better idea would be to use Plutonium, there are already thousands of tons of that dangerous stuff on the planet and this would be a great way to get rid of it. Also the Thorium economy would reduce the need for U235 enrichment plants. And by the way, there is a close cousin to the LFTR called a WAMSR that doesn't use Thorium but is specifically designed to eat nuclear waste; 200 of them could supply the entire world's electrical needs for 72 years by burning up the 270,000 tons of spent fuel rods that old fashioned reactors have already made. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Germany sets record for peak energy use - 50 percent comes from solar (Update)
Why has the nuclear sector stayed away from LFTR and favored the current type of reactor design? One word - bombs. That's one of the reasons but there are others. Companies like GE and Westinghouse have no reason to be interested in a LFTR, they don't make reactors anymore (few people do) they make their money by fabricating the fuel rods that go into reactors made many decades ago; but a LFTR needs no fuel fabrication, it's fuel is a liquid. Another reason is that people just don't like change especially if it has anything to do with the unmentionable nu**ear word, and a LFTR is radically different from existing reactors; not only does it use a different element as fuel and its a liquid not a solid but to design one chemists would be at least as important as physicists and probably more so. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Germany sets record for peak energy use - 50 percent comes from solar (Update)
On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 8:50 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: In fact most deaths due to radiation accidents come from mishandling or misusing medical radioisotopes. Here's a list of all fatalities from radiation accidents. [...] And here is a list of some other energy related accidents: In 1975 the Shimantan/Banqiao hydroelectric Dam in China failed and killed 171,000 people. In 1979 the Morvi hydroelectric Dam in India failed and killed 1500 people, In 1998 a oil pipeline in Nigeria exploded and killed 1078 people. In 1907 the Monongah Coal Mine in West Virginia exploded and killed at least 500 people. In 1944 a liquified natural gas factory exploded in Cleveland Ohio and killed 130 people. In 2011 the Fukushima nuclear power plant melted down and killed nobody. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Tyson is not atheist (was Re: So, a new kind of non-boolean, non-digital, computer architecture
On 30 Jun 2014, at 07:02, meekerdb wrote: On 6/29/2014 7:33 PM, LizR wrote: On 30 June 2014 04:43, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 9:44 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: agnosticism is of course the defining principle of the scientific method, so we really need the concept in order to understand the status of scientific theories. I like what Isaac Asimov, a fellow who knew a thing or two about science, had to say on this subject: I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time. So he knows that he only has enough evidence to be agnostic, but he is emotionally convinced to be an atheist nonetheless. OK, so that puts him on a par with religious believers who are also emotionally convinced, though not of the same thing. No more so that being an aSanta-Clausist. Actually I think there is enough evidence to prove (in the 'beyond reasonable doubt' sense) that the God of the bible does not exist. Already the number PI of the bible does not exist. But that does not per se prevent the number PI to exist (at least in some sense, clear for mathematicians). If by God, you mean the God of the bible + the assumption that the bible is 100% correct, then I agree with you: that God does not plausibly exist. But for some believers, even Christians, the bible is not assumed to be 100% correct. Only some sects (like Jehovah's Witnesses (the french naming) insist on literal interpretations. Most Christians in Europa adheres to Christianity for what they take as its moral value, and consider with varying degrees that there is some partial historicity in the story. But you don't have to prove something doesn't exist to reasonably fail to believe that it does. I don't have proof that there is no teapot orbiting Jupiter, but that doesn't make me epitemologically irresponsible to assert I don't believe there is one. Careful as I don't believe there is a teapot is different from I believe there is no teapot. Personally, I don't believe that there is teapot orbiting Jupiter, but why would I believe that there is no teapot? I have no real evidences for that too. I have only a speculation extrapolated from my limited knowledge of teapot and Jupiter. I might *bet* that there is no teapot, but then I can easily conceive losing the bet, by the usual bad luck. I can conceive that a teapot might be part of a debris or trashed out from some space station, and that one or two asteroid(s) give(s) it the right impulsion to go around Jupiter. You know we pollute the whole Solar System, not just our planet and oceans. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Tyson is not atheist (was Re: So, a new kind of non-boolean, non-digital, computer architecture
On 30 Jun 2014, at 07:41, meekerdb wrote: On 6/29/2014 10:20 PM, LizR wrote: On 30 June 2014 17:02, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/29/2014 7:33 PM, LizR wrote: On 30 June 2014 04:43, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 9:44 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: agnosticism is of course the defining principle of the scientific method, so we really need the concept in order to understand the status of scientific theories. I like what Isaac Asimov, a fellow who knew a thing or two about science, had to say on this subject: I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time. So he knows that he only has enough evidence to be agnostic, but he is emotionally convinced to be an atheist nonetheless. OK, so that puts him on a par with religious believers who are also emotionally convinced, though not of the same thing. No more so that being an aSanta-Clausist. Well there you go then. I rest my case. Actually I think there is enough evidence to prove (in the 'beyond reasonable doubt' sense) that the God of the bible does not exist. But you don't have to prove something doesn't exist to reasonably fail to believe that it does. I don't have proof that there is no teapot orbiting Jupiter, but that doesn't make me epitemologically irresponsible to assert I don't believe there is one. Atheists don't just believe that the biblical god doesn't exist, they believe that there are no supernatural forces involved in the operation of the universe. Where is this written? Do you speak for all atheists, or just ones in NZ? While I consider this likely, I don't consider it 100% proven, because as Arthur C Clark said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and it's at least conceivable that there are sufficiently advanced beings out there that they can act outside what we call nature. That seems to really waffle. If we knew these beings could so act wouldn't we just readjust what we call nature. In fact that's a general problem with saying what it would mean for some events to be supernatural. In the past many events were thought to be supernatural, acts of God, e.g. sickness, lightning, drought, earthquakes,...but are now thought to be natural. So it some new phenomena is observed why wouldn't we just assume it was natural even if we didn't have an explanation. I agree with you. I think we can relate this to Occam. If we have a theory which explains a lot, and fail to explain a new phenomena, we should not abandon the theory, unless the new phenomena does violate the theory. I think that supernatural has no meaning at all. No more than the incompatibilist theory of free will which I think does not make sense (I agree with John Clark on this). Supernatural would mean violating the laws of physics, and that makes no sense because physics, by quasi-definition, changes itself each time she is violated. (But comp + materialism do introduce something close to magic: primitive matter capable of selecting consciousness, but without any role in the computations). For example I am not 100% sure that the universe wasn't created by some intelligent beings with sufficiently advanced technology to create big bangs (they may of course have evolved naturally in another universe). I don't think it's likely, but that's my emotional prejudices at work. I can't see that I can claim with certainty that it's impossible, and since these being would fit with some definitions of god (creator of the unvierse) then I can't say it is 100% proven that god doesn't exist. Didn't you slip from something or someone beyond our current explanation to god. You speak for atheists, what do you have to say for religionists? Are they just worshiping some unknown possibility. What is the god they believe in - that's the god I don't believe in. I think you have muddled the word god in order make it seem unreasonable to assert definitively that god doesn't exist. But in the process you've made god into something quite different from the god of religion. A mere shadow of the once powerful Yaweh, Baal, Zeus, Thor,... Earth was thought to be a tortoise, then we learn better. Similarly the notion of God is the notion of an all encompassing one unifying all things. It was thought to be a sort of father in the sky, but we
Re: Is Consciousness Computable?
On 7/1/2014 1:01 AM, LizR wrote: On 1 July 2014 17:59, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/30/2014 9:35 PM, LizR wrote: ISTM... In primitive materialism, what exists are space / time and matter / energy. Information is an emergent property of the arrangements of those things, like entropy. Neither of these exist at the level of fundamental particles, or Planck cells, or strings, or whatever else may be the primitive mass-energy/space-time) involved. There are problems with this view if information has primitive status, which would indicate that the real picture is something like it from bit or what might be called primitive informationism. Evidence for PI come from the entropy of black holes, the black hole information paradox, the Landauer limit, the Beckenstein bound, the holographic principle, and (unless I already covered that) the requirement that erasing a bit of information requires some irreducible amount of energy. (And maybe some other things I don't know about ... perish the thought). That's the Landauer limit, which isn't really relevant at a fundamental level. It's a thermodynamic law which is reducible to statistical mechanics. Interesting. How is the energy required to erase a single bit reducible to statistical mechanics? PI isn't equivalent to comp, but from what you said above PI might be a necessary consequence of comp, which would give the ontological chain arithmetic - consciousness - information - matter (I think ... this is all ISTM of course). OK, except I think the chain is: arithmetic - information - matter - consciousness - arithmetic That doesn't make sense to me. I mean everything except the last term is OK, but you're apparently claiming that arithmetic is fundamental AND an invention of the human mind. Which at first glance looks suspiciously like fence sitting and having and eating your cake... Unless you have a theory of circular ontology, of course, in which case please fill in a few more details. Why? The details are no different than in the linear case. In the details you look at each - separately. What's different about the circular case is that you don't suppose that one of the levels is fundamental or primitive. But I generally consider ontolgy to be derivative. You gather data, create a model, test it. If it passes every test, makes good predictions, fits with other theories, then you think it's a pretty good model and may be telling you what the world is like. THEN you look at and ask what are the essential parts of it, what does it require to exist. But that's more of a philosophical than a scientific enterprise, because, as in QM, there maybe radically different ways to ascribe an ontology to the same mathematical system. Even Bruno's very abstract theory is ambiguous about whether the ur-stuff is arithmetic or threads of computation. You can probably show they are empirically equivalent - just like Hilbert space and Feynman paths give the same answers but are ontologically quite different. and I'm not so inclined to take it as more than another possible model of the world. We aren't in a position to do more than build models of the world. If you think it's a possible model then that's /all/ you can ever claim for it, well, unless some evidence comes along that disproves it, when you can't even do that. I think of it as a way to describe and predict and think about the world; but without supposing that it's possible to prove or to know with certainty the world must be that way. Of course, we can't know for certain what the world is like. As for A Garrett Lisi, I was under the impression that his particles were something like a point in a weight diagram - or something - which sounds to me at least like some form of information theoretic entity. But I have to admit my understanding of how birds and flowers could emerge from the E8 group or whatever it's called is, well, about like this... In a way, all of fundamental physics posits information theoretic entities. Particles are nothing more than what satisfies particle equations. Bruno complains about Aristotle and primitive matter, but I don't know any physicists who go around saying,I've discovered primitive matter. or Let's work on finding primitive matter. Well, I think Bruno thinks it's more an unconscious assumption for most physicists, rather than something explicitly stated. For example your statement about your mother implicitly assumes her mind is nothing but what her brain does. That's a primitive materialist assumption But it's not an assumption. There's lots of evidence for it and practically none against it. I don't think Bruno contests that. He just supposes that this mind/body relation can be explained from a level he considers more
Re: Tyson is not atheist (was Re: So, a new kind of non-boolean, non-digital, computer architecture
On 30 Jun 2014, at 20:53, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote: Thinking that atheism could be bad, is like believing that red hair is a sign of the devil. The problem of atheism, is that it is - either scientifically trivial (santa klaus does not exist), - or a religion in disguise (a primitive physical universe exists and is exclusively what explains all the rest). Red hair, like atheism, is a difference without a distinction. Not, on the other hand is it axiomatically, the sign of a great mind. If Tyson is, it's of little concern, unless one is in it for gossip. Then it becomes compelling. Was it the writer, Truman Capote who said, there are three great things in the world, religion, science, and gossip. As for me, I am often quite envious of people who are atheists, not for the brilliance of their thoughts, but for the cocksure, self- confidence, and their apparent ability to be matter of fact in how they deal with the great turbulence of the Human Condition. By the way,.this is the first time I have use the phrase, cocksure, in a sentence. Anyway,.it's something.I admire, unlike when they.chose to egg on the Jesus people, when the Islamistand roll red with blood and severed body parts. This, I find objectionable, even though I am not a Christian. But I still admire the Atheists sureity. Atheism, as I know it, is a slight variant of christianism. They share basically the same creation (matter), and the same God (even if the atheist defends that God just to deny its existence). That hides the real deep question: is reality WYSIWYG? or is it that what we see is only the border of a much vaster volume? Bruno -Original Message- From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: 30-Jun-2014 14:01:14 + Subject: Re: Tyson is not atheist (was Re: So, a new kind of non- boolean, non-digital, computer architecture On 29 Jun 2014, at 23:19, Kim Jones wrote: On 29 Jun 2014, at 7:19 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: I think it is more related with ego-psychological issue than with the matter subject. Bruno Precisely. Which is why you will understand that to respond any further to the belligerence of his posts is merely an invitation to do battle with his ego rather than to seriously explore the subject? Each post is a trap that he has laid, a bait. Do not take the hameçon. I appreciate John Clark effort. he is probably the only detractor of the UDA that I know doing this openly and publicly. It is far more respectable than any others, which I got only reports by some wutness that they said something negative, always behind the back. I have never met detractors. Academically, I met only enthusiasm, except form those people who told me that there Gödel's theorem was not interesting and who like to mock computer scientists (those guys too much stupid to do pure mathematics), and which demolished me before I could even met them. Then Clark is more and more clear, making his mistakes more and more clear too. And I progress on this somehow delicate point. I think John Clark is not completely hopeless .He understood all the points but still go out of the body in the duplication, and refuse to consider the (many) copies *first person experience*. It is still a bit of a mystery why he seems to avoid that. Bruno Kim -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com . Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to
Re: Disproving physicalism from COMP
On 01 Jul 2014, at 02:50, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 1 July 2014 03:14, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 30 Jun 2014, at 02:14, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 26 June 2014 12:03, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: On 25 June 2014 16:52, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/24/2014 2:29 AM, LizR wrote: On 24 June 2014 17:04, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: If primitive matter existed, and if it has a role for consciousness, or for consciousness instantiation, step 8, and the argument above, makes that role very mysterious, so much that it is not clear why we could still say yes to the doctor in virtue of correct digital rendering. You can still say yes to the doctor because he is going to use matter to make your brain prosthesis. Surely that will just be a copy that thinks it's you - it won't be you, so if you are destroyed in the process of making the digital copy, you really do die. While in comp the digital copy is you, by definition. ?? Comp is the theory that it will be you after the doctor gives you a prothesis for your brain (plus some other assumptions). It will be you even after you are duplicated (though it's troubling for JKC that you is both singular and plural). Yes, that's right. And primitive materialism would distinguish between two identical versions of you, if only because they occupy different positions (and due to no-cloning). So a PM copy could only ever be a copy that thinks it's you, while a comp copy would be one that actually is you (assuming comp is correct, of course). I don't think comp necessarily includes the idea that the copy would be you, just that the copy would be conscious in the same way as you. Then you are using comp in a different sense than in the UDA. I mean that if the copy is conscious in the same way as you, but still is not you (which is often argued with the teleportation without annihilation), then you would not say that you survive in the usual clinical sense of surviving from the first person perspective. The other guy would only be a well done impostor and you would say No thanks to the doctor. OK, I misunderstood this part of your definition. You have suggested that comp requires faith, but I thought that this faith involves believing that the computerised brain will have the same sort of consciousness as the original; not faith that the copy will be the same person as the original. The latter claim, I think, follows from the former logically and not as a matter of faith, because its negation would result in absurdity as I could then state that I do not survive from one moment to the next but only have the delusional belief that I do. OK. Bruno Obviously it is *necessary* that the copy be conscious if it is also you, but whether it is *sufficient* is a further argument in the philosophy of personal identity. I think it is sufficient, but not everyone agrees. Derek Partfit's book Reasons and Persons discusses these questions. I think Parfit is wrong on this, and I vaguely remember having thought that it was that error which prevents him to see the FPI. I thought that he would have grasped the SWE, he would have understood (as I think you do) that such a personal identity notion (distinguishing the two comp notion referred above) makes not much sense. I might take a further look. Bruno -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this
Re: Selecting your future branch
On 7/1/2014 1:09 AM, LizR wrote: On 1 July 2014 17:38, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/30/2014 9:03 PM, LizR wrote: Well, that's quite straightforward. Brent is assuming the (so called) Aristotelean paradigm, and hence that his mother /is/ her brain. I'm assuming (on some evidence) that she, her stream of consciousness, is what her brain does. For example, she remembers her childhood very clearly, better than the recent past (like whether or not she's told you about her childhood in the last two days). I don't see how this jibes with Kim's idea of poor reception. It /doesn't/ jibe with it, that was his point. As far as I can see, Kim is suggesting that poor reception - the workings of memory, perception and so on - cause a consciousness which is basically unchanged to appear different to the outside world. As he (?) says, one doesn't feel that one's mind changes as one gets older, I don't think that's true. I think differently than I did as a child. As a child one experiences many more things as new, fresh, surprising. one feels that external things have changed - e.g. my memory may fail me more, but (on this view) that is an external thing, a piece of wetware, going wrong, rather than something about me that has changed. But I see this as denial of the simple fact that there is no sense to saying one is the same person without one's memories. My father died of Alzheimer's and he was definitely not the same person, in the sense of personality, when he had lost his memory. Of course he was the same person in the physical and legal sense of continuity. I think it's mere wishful thinking to suppose there is a you a soul that is independent of all your memories (including the unconscious ones). Brent Apologies if I am misrepresenting Kim here, that was my reading. It seems like a particularly clear cut distinction between the Aristotle and Plato camps' views, which is why I tried to highlight that fact (if fact it be). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Tyson is not atheist (was Re: So, a new kind of non-boolean, non-digital, computer architecture
On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 12:31 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Why in hell do we keep talking about ancient ignoramuses like Plotinus and the worst physicist who ever lived, Aristotle? Aristotle was a brilliant physicist. WHAT?! Indeed, his word initiates physics. If Aristotle had never been born physics would have advanced more quickly than it has, for over a thousand years it had the dead weight of Aristotle holding it back. That his theories were all refuted has nothing to do with that. Aristotle's theories could have been easily refuted even in his own day, like his theory that women have fewer teeth than men. Or take his theory that heavy things fall faster than lighter ones, even if he was too lazy to perform the experiment he should have been able to figure out from pure logic that this can't be right. If you take a big rock and tie it to a slightly smaller rock with a rope with some slack in it and drop them then both rocks would fall slower than the big rock alone because the slower moving smaller rock would bog it down, but the tied together object would fall faster than the big rock because the new object is heavier than the big rock alone. you treat current theology as bullshit No it's worse than that, farmers can tell you that fields of bullshit exists without a doubt, but theology has no field of study, that is to say an expert on theology doesn't know anymore about how the universe operates than a non-expert. 1) God does not answer prayers. How do you know that? You told me, you said that's not what you mean by God. By the way, it might be possible that with comp Well good for comp. 2) God is not omnipotent. omnipotence is self-contradictory. I know, but a little thing like being self-contradictory would never stop a good theologian. 3) God is not omniscient. With comp God is 3p Well good for comp and good for pee. 4) God is not intelligent. How do you know that? You told me, you said that's not what you mean by God. 5) God is not conscious. With comp (+ classical epistemology), this is subtle. God, the ONE, arithmetical truth splits into the 3p outer realm Well good for comp and good for those peepee outer realms. 6) God has nothing to do with morality. I think it has to do. That is probablmy the act of faith of the Platonist Faith sucks. Why is passionately believing in something without a good reason a virtue? 7) God is not a being at all just some sort of vague undefined principle. It is responsible for the whole being Then perhaps I should pray to the Higgs Field. you have already your religion on this. Wow, calling a guy known for disliking religion religious, never heard that one before, at least I never heard it before I was 12. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Germany sets record for peak energy use - 50 percent comes from solar (Update)
On 7/1/2014 4:36 AM, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote: Do you see the average citizen wanting fission power nowadays? It seems cheaper and quicker to go with sun and wind for electricity, once the storage issue is put in the rear view mirror. Actually there is no such evidence except when the exposure is huge. I'll have a lot more to say about that shortly but I've got to go to work now. John K Clark I'm all for sun and wind, but the storage and transmission issue may be a lot harder to solve in the short term than building LFTRs. And even building LFTRs will probably take ten years fo development. The average citizen doesn't want fission power because every nuclear power release of radioactive material is treated by the media as a huge tragic disaster. Suppose they treated medical radiation errors the same way - then the average citizen would be afraid to get an x-ray. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What's the answer? What's the question?
On 7/1/2014 5:00 AM, David Nyman wrote: Some recent discussions have centred on the (putative) features of hierarchical-reductionist ontologies, and whether comp (whatever its intrinsic merits or deficiencies) should be considered as just another candidate theory in that category, This prompts me to consider what fundamental question a particular theory is designed to answer. Making this explicit may help us to see what other questions are, by the same token (and perhaps only implicitly), treated as subsidiary or, as it were, merely awaiting resolution in due course in terms of the central explanatory thrust. I think it's fair to say that theories centred on an exhaustively-reducible physical or material ontology seek to answer the question of What are the fundamental entities and relations that underlie and constitute everything that exists and how did things get to be this way?. Even if this is a rather crude formulation, if questions such as these are deemed central and definitive, the issue of How and why does it *appear* to us that things are this way? becomes subsidiary and presumably awaits ultimate elucidation in the same terms. IOW, both we and what appears to us will in the end be explained, exhaustively, as composite phenomena in a physical hierarchy that can be reduced without loss to the basic entities and relations. ISTM however that comp asks different questions from the outset: How and why does it APPEAR that certain entities and relations constitute everything that exists, and what the hell is appearance anyway? To be sure, in order to deal with such questions comp has to begin with How does everything get to be this way?, but the crucial distinction is that basic physical entities and relations are, in this mode of question-and-answer, a complex by-product of the logic of appearance, and the subjects of said appearance. A further consequence is that it is no longer obvious that subjects, or what appears to them, are reducible in any straightforward way, either to physical entities and relations, or to the original first-order combinatorial ontology. I think you have created a strawman exhaustively-reducible physical or material ontology. Sure, physicists take forces and matter as working assumptions - but they don't say what they are. They are never anything other than elements of a mathematical model which works well. And what does it mean to work well? It means to explain appearances - exactly the same thing you put forward as a uniquely different goal of comp. Although I think comp is an interesting theory and worthy of study, I think I look at it differently than Bruno. I look at it as just another mathematical model, one whose ontology happens to be computations. I think Bruno assumes the ontology first, notes that it can 'explain everything' - and then sets out to see if 'everything' can be pared down to what appears. It is true that we can pose questions in the first way and still say that we are non-eliminative about consciousness. The problem though is that because we have already committed ourselves to an exhaustively reductive mode of explanation, we can't help consigning such first-person phenomena to a subsidiary status, as an impenetrable mystery, an essentially irrelevant epiphenomenon, or some sort of weirdly-anomalous side-effect of basic physical activity. ISTM that this mode of question-and-answer, from the outset, essentially can't escape trivialising, ignoring, or rendering unanswerable in principle, the role of the first person. Consequently, I can't avoid the suspicion that, despite its phenomenal success (pun intended) it can't, in the end, be the most helpful way of asking the most fundamental questions. As I noted in another post, any explanation is going to be exhaustively reductive or it's going to be reduction with loss. You can't have it both ways. Bruno's theory explicitly defines the loss, i.e. unprovable truths of arithmetic. That may be a feature, or it may be a bug. Brent Whatever its independent merits or demerits, and its inherent complexity, ISTM that comp gets closer to a way of posing questions that might in the end yield more satisfying and complete answers. As it happens, in so doing it rehabilitates earlier attempts in the tradition stemming from the Greeks and Indians, and from later exemplars such as Berkeley and Kant. And perhaps most interestingly, its central motivation originates in, and simultaneously strikes at the heart of, the tacit assumption of its rivals that perception and cognition are (somehow) second-order relational phenomena attached to some putative virtual level of an exhaustively material reduction. David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to
Re: Pluto bounces back!
On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 5:02 PM, Samiya Illias samiyaill...@gmail.com wrote: What is your definition of factual accuracy? Kindly explain with some examples. You posted on this list bringing up factual accuracy regarding the Quran, if I remember correctly. This is why I posed the question in a variety of ways. But if I were to answer this in a strong technical sense of some domain, I might be making the same mistake, blasphemy or crookedness that I sense in the quoted/translated passages we discuss. Perhaps it is part of things that we cannot prove to each other and perhaps this means that faith in this point, requires that we wrestle with, question, doubt this kind of phenomenon or problem, of which there seem to be many, and never, in our present kind of form at least, become comfortable with it. Following this kind of line, perhaps nobody can answer this for anybody else, or not even for ourselves. Some people say we are the answer; but this is a bit too easy for me, although I can relate to the thought. Sometimes this gives me vertigo or makes me feel empty, and at other times I feel like the emptiness is just more space to fill with joy, fascination, wonder, and negation of pain, that we can share; if we stay polite, honest, maintain peace, stay alert, learn to reason with more distance, and appropriacy, tame our bestiality to minimize harming creation, and lust for control etc. This means distancing ourselves enough from our own strict theology and learning from our inner self and creation more directly, which is difficult, but the only way I can parse, that would stop us from calling ourselves names, fighting, waging war to hide our insecurity. Our personal theology gives us security but takes away what little control we may have. Our insecurity and our fears however, is something we share across all religions. Maybe we should question them more directly, rather than reciting our best verses, every time we can't find a good answer. You'll find many answers in many texts and some contributions on this list. Whether they satisfy/convince you, or whether they can do so in principle or not, is a different question. It is in any case a good constant question to wrestle with, learn from, and read about for the theological search beyond and underneath the strong/loud interpretation of strict confessional religion, cultural programs, and authoritative misuse of science, religion, and history. It points also to the question of the relation between theology/science, and the question of possible abuse (e.g. prohibition). So you see, I can't really answer your question, but you said you could... ;-) PGC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Is Consciousness Computable?
On 01 Jul 2014, at 06:35, LizR wrote: ISTM... In primitive materialism, what exists are space / time and matter / energy. Information is an emergent property of the arrangements of those things, like entropy. Neither of these exist at the level of fundamental particles, or Planck cells, or strings, or whatever else may be the primitive mass-energy/space-time) involved. There are problems with this view if information has primitive status, which would indicate that the real picture is something like it from bit or what might be called primitive informationism. Evidence for PI come from the entropy of black holes, the black hole information paradox, the Landauer limit, the Beckenstein bound, the holographic principle, and (unless I already covered that) the requirement that erasing a bit of information requires some irreducible amount of energy. (And maybe some other things I don't know about ... perish the thought). Shannon's notion of information, and Kolmogorov-Chaitin-Solovay notions of information are purely mathematical (and usually definable in arithmetic, but non computable). But quantum information, despite a rather precise mathematical formulation, will be considered as much physical as the quantum reality can be, and might be more primitive in some attempt to unify the physical laws. PI isn't equivalent to comp, but from what you said above PI might be a necessary consequence of comp, which would give the ontological chain arithmetic - consciousness - information - matter (I think ... this is all ISTM of course). The question is to interpret that correctly. usually I just prefer to ignore the word information as it is a tricky word, having many sense, from the 3p Shannon notion to the 1p human content-full beliefs informed with the news, called in french information, like in TV information. I would see a lot of intermediate 3p information coming logically before consciousness. The UD, and thus the sigma_1 sentences can be said to handle a lot of information in the 3p sense, but consciousness, or just the 1p creates the information when it differentiates, like looking at an alternate possibilities of the type W v M, in self-multiplication (on all relevant sigma_1 sentences). Roughly, the difference between classical and quantum information is that the classical information is entirely determined above your substitution level, and the quantum information is entirely determined by the infinities of computations below your substitution level. QM becomes an empirical evidences that there is a very stable first person plural reality, of the type we have to justify by the person points of view modalities. As for A Garrett Lisi, I was under the impression that his particles were something like a point in a weight diagram - or something - which sounds to me at least like some form of information theoretic entity. But I have to admit my understanding of how birds and flowers could emerge from the E8 group or whatever it's called is, well, about like this... Beautiful mathematics, and I tend to believe in this and E8, and the Monster group, Moonshine, ... Normally the arithmetical quantization should justify those groups. The advantage of comp is that it unifies not just all what we see, but also all a large part of what we don't see. (By the Solovay G/G* difference and its intensional variants). Bruno -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Is Consciousness Computable?
On 01 Jul 2014, at 07:59, meekerdb wrote: On 6/30/2014 9:35 PM, LizR wrote: ISTM... In primitive materialism, what exists are space / time and matter / energy. Information is an emergent property of the arrangements of those things, like entropy. Neither of these exist at the level of fundamental particles, or Planck cells, or strings, or whatever else may be the primitive mass-energy/space-time) involved. There are problems with this view if information has primitive status, which would indicate that the real picture is something like it from bit or what might be called primitive informationism. Evidence for PI come from the entropy of black holes, the black hole information paradox, the Landauer limit, the Beckenstein bound, the holographic principle, and (unless I already covered that) the requirement that erasing a bit of information requires some irreducible amount of energy. (And maybe some other things I don't know about ... perish the thought). That's the Landauer limit, which isn't really relevant at a fundamental level. It's a thermodynamic law which is reducible to statistical mechanics. PI isn't equivalent to comp, but from what you said above PI might be a necessary consequence of comp, which would give the ontological chain arithmetic - consciousness - information - matter (I think ... this is all ISTM of course). OK, except I think the chain is: arithmetic - information - matter - consciousness - arithmetic Arithmetic, even one diophantine equation can supports loop of that kind. There is a paradoxal combinator which provides solution to such loop Yx = x(Yx). Y provides semantical fixed point, and you can get the second recursion theorem too. Like in general relativity Gödel show the existence of circular time loop. Any way the - are not temporal, but logical, or epistemological. and I'm not so inclined to take it as more than another possible model of the world. I think of it as a way to describe and predict and think about the world; but without supposing that it's possible to prove or to know with certainty the world must be that way. The criteria remains the same. That's why I insist that comp + some definition of knowledge can be tested. As for A Garrett Lisi, I was under the impression that his particles were something like a point in a weight diagram - or something - which sounds to me at least like some form of information theoretic entity. But I have to admit my understanding of how birds and flowers could emerge from the E8 group or whatever it's called is, well, about like this... In a way, all of fundamental physics posits information theoretic entities. Particles are nothing more than what satisfies particle equations. Bruno complains about Aristotle and primitive matter, but I don't know any physicists who go around saying,I've discovered primitive matter. That's is exactly why I have no complains on physicists. Most are neutral on this. Some are christians. I complain only about physicalist. And I don't complain, I just show them epistemologically inconsistent if they assumes comp together with physicalism. I certainly complain when they eliminate person and consciousness. or Let's work on finding primitive matter. They just want a theory that is a little more comprehensive, a little more accurate, a little more predictive than the one they have now. And they couldn't care less what stuff is needed in their theory - only that it works. That is your right, but that is not an argument to defend this or that theory when the goal is the search of the truth. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at
Re: Germany sets record for peak energy use - 50 percent comes from solar (Update)
On 7/1/2014 9:17 AM, John Clark wrote: Why has the nuclear sector stayed away from LFTR and favored the current type of reactor design? One word - bombs. That's one of the reasons but there are others. Companies like GE and Westinghouse have no reason to be interested in a LFTR, they don't make reactors anymore (few people do) they make their money by fabricating the fuel rods that go into reactors made many decades ago; but a LFTR needs no fuel fabrication, it's fuel is a liquid. Another reason is that people just don't like change especially if it has anything to do with the unmentionable nu**ear word, and a LFTR is radically different from existing reactors; not only does it use a different element as fuel and its a liquid not a solid but to design one chemists would be at least as important as physicists and probably more so. Wigner, who proposed the LFTR, was trained as a chemist, although he became famous as a Wigner. It's not only that people don't like to change, there is a lot of regulation that has grown up around fission reactors because of the public fear of them. But those regulations are all tailored around PWRs. So even if you had a completed and tested design of a LFTR power plant, when you applied for a permit to build it someplace you'd be asked whether it conformed to the NRC standards - and it wouldn't because they are standards for a different kind of reactor. So of course the local government isn't going to let you build a nuclear reactor that doesn't comply with standards. And they don't have either the money or the expertise to defined LFTR standards. So the only way LFTRs are going to become part of the power mix is for governments to undertake their development and write standards - which is exactly how PWRs got built. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Germany sets record for peak energy use - 50 percent comes from solar (Update)
On 7/1/2014 9:33 AM, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 8:50 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: In fact most deaths due to radiation accidents come from mishandling or misusing medical radioisotopes. Here's a list of all fatalities from radiation accidents. [...] And here is a list of some other energy related accidents: In 1975 the Shimantan/Banqiao hydroelectric Dam in China failed and killed 171,000 people. In 1979 the Morvi hydroelectric Dam in India failed and killed 1500 people, In 1998 a oil pipeline in Nigeria exploded and killed 1078 people. In 1907 the Monongah Coal Mine in West Virginia exploded and killed at least 500 people. In 1944 a liquified natural gas factory exploded in Cleveland Ohio and killed 130 people. In 2011 the Fukushima nuclear power plant melted down and killed nobody. And radon gas, a byproduct of coal mining and cement production, is the second leading cause of lung cancer (well behind cigarette smoking). Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Tyson is not atheist (was Re: So, a new kind of non-boolean, non-digital, computer architecture
On 7/1/2014 9:40 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: But you don't have to prove something doesn't exist to reasonably fail to believe that it does. I don't have proof that there is no teapot orbiting Jupiter, but that doesn't make me epitemologically irresponsible to assert I don't believe there is one. Careful as I don't believe there is a teapot is different from I believe there is no teapot. Personally, I don't believe that there is teapot orbiting Jupiter, but why would I believe that there is no teapot? I have no real evidences for that too. I have only a speculation extrapolated from my limited knowledge of teapot and Jupiter. I might *bet* that there is no teapot, but then I can easily conceive losing the bet, by the usual bad luck. How you would bet and at what odds is the real measure of belief. I think you believe there is no teapot. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Tyson is not atheist (was Re: So, a new kind of non-boolean, non-digital, computer architecture
On 7/1/2014 10:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 30 Jun 2014, at 07:41, meekerdb wrote: On 6/29/2014 10:20 PM, LizR wrote: On 30 June 2014 17:02, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/29/2014 7:33 PM, LizR wrote: On 30 June 2014 04:43, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com mailto:johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 9:44 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com mailto:lizj...@gmail.com wrote: agnosticism is of course the defining principle of the scientific method, so we really need the concept in order to understand the status of scientific theories. I like what Isaac Asimov, a fellow who knew a thing or two about science, had to say on this subject: I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time. So he knows that he only has enough evidence to be agnostic, but he is emotionally convinced to be an atheist nonetheless. OK, so that puts him on a par with religious believers who are also emotionally convinced, though not of the same thing. No more so that being an aSanta-Clausist. Well there you go then. I rest my case. Actually I think there is enough evidence to prove (in the 'beyond reasonable doubt' sense) that the God of the bible does not exist. But you don't have to prove something doesn't exist to reasonably fail to believe that it does. I don't have proof that there is no teapot orbiting Jupiter, but that doesn't make me epitemologically irresponsible to assert I don't believe there is one. Atheists don't just believe that the biblical god doesn't exist, they believe that there are no supernatural forces involved in the operation of the universe. Where is this written? Do you speak for all atheists, or just ones in NZ? While I consider this likely, I don't consider it 100% proven, because as Arthur C Clark said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and it's at least conceivable that there are sufficiently advanced beings out there that they can act outside what we call nature. That seems to really waffle. If we knew these beings could so act wouldn't we just readjust what we call nature. In fact that's a general problem with saying what it would mean for some events to be supernatural. In the past many events were thought to be supernatural, acts of God, e.g. sickness, lightning, drought, earthquakes,...but are now thought to be natural. So it some new phenomena is observed why wouldn't we just assume it was natural even if we didn't have an explanation. I agree with you. I think we can relate this to Occam. If we have a theory which explains a lot, and fail to explain a new phenomena, we should not abandon the theory, unless the new phenomena does violate the theory. I think that supernatural has no meaning at all. No more than the incompatibilist theory of free will which I think does not make sense (I agree with John Clark on this). Supernatural would mean violating the laws of physics, and that makes no sense because physics, by quasi-definition, changes itself each time she is violated. (But comp + materialism do introduce something close to magic: primitive matter capable of selecting consciousness, but without any role in the computations). For example I am not 100% sure that the universe wasn't created by some intelligent beings with sufficiently advanced technology to create big bangs (they may of course have evolved naturally in another universe). I don't think it's likely, but that's my emotional prejudices at work. I can't see that I can claim with certainty that it's impossible, and since these being would fit with some definitions of god (creator of the unvierse) then I can't say it is 100% proven that god doesn't exist. Didn't you slip from something or someone beyond our current explanation to god. You speak for atheists, what do you have to say for religionists? Are they just worshiping some unknown possibility. What is the god they believe in - that's the god I don't believe in. I think you have muddled the word god in order make it seem unreasonable to assert definitively that god doesn't exist. But in the process you've made god into something quite different from the god of religion. A mere shadow of the once powerful Yaweh, Baal, Zeus, Thor,... Earth was thought
Re: Is Consciousness Computable?
On 7/1/2014 12:04 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: In a way, all of fundamental physics posits information theoretic entities. Particles are nothing more than what satisfies particle equations. Bruno complains about Aristotle and primitive matter, but I don't know any physicists who go around saying,I've discovered primitive matter. That's is exactly why I have no complains on physicists. Most are neutral on this. Some are christians. I complain only about physicalist. And I don't complain, I just show them epistemologically inconsistent if they assumes comp together with physicalism. I certainly complain when they eliminate person and consciousness. or Let's work on finding primitive matter. They just want a theory that is a little more comprehensive, a little more accurate, a little more predictive than the one they have now. And they couldn't care less what stuff is needed in their theory - only that it works. That is your right, but that is not an argument to defend this or that theory when the goal is the search of the truth. I'm all for searching for what is true. I'm suspicious of searches for THE truth. Brent Is that the truth? No, but it's a lot simpler. --- Walt Kelly in Pogo -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: How can a grown man be an atheist ?
Hi Russell,
Ah! I don't quite grok it completely, but thank you for this example. We
had to assume an already existing measure on the Reals. Where does that
come from?
On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 9:38 PM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au
wrote:
On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 08:32:37PM -0400, Stephen Paul King wrote:
Hi Russell,
I don't get it. How does the constraint of a finite sample overcome
the
inherent zero measure?
Because a finite constraint matches an infinite number of zero measure
items.
Consider the set of real numbers matching the constraint that the
initial sequence in the binary expansion is 0.110000111
Even though each real number has measure zero, the set of all numbers
matching that constraint has measure 2^{-13} (about 0.000122).
Assuming the standard measure on the reals, of course.
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Re: What's the answer? What's the question?
On 1 July 2014 19:24, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I think you have created a strawman exhaustively-reducible physical or material ontology. Sure, physicists take forces and matter as working assumptions - but they don't say what they are. They are never anything other than elements of a mathematical model which works well. And what does it mean to work well? It means to explain appearances - exactly the same thing you put forward as a uniquely different goal of comp. Firstly, I'm not really persuaded by your contention that forces and matter, to use your example, are merely elements of a mathematical model which works well. Rather, in terms of that very model, such elements are precisely those that (at least in principle) are supposed to comprise a fully-sufficient bottom-up ontology for the theory as a whole. The point, again in principle at least, is that nothing *above* the level of the basic ontology need be taken into account in the evolution of states defined in terms of it; put simply, there is no top-down causality. It is for this reason that I've been pointing out that whatever levels are posited above the basic ontology cannot possess, in terms of the theory, any independent ontological significance. Rather, what we *can* say is that such macroscopic, or composite, phenomena as temperature or, for that matter, the neural correlates of consciousness, are *explanatorily* relevant. We might go so far as to describe these phenomena as epistemological integrations over the ontological fundamentals. But if we do that the problem should become painfully obvious: the theory in which we are working has no explicit epistemological component. It is in fact explicitly designed to render a principled account of the relevant phenomena in the absence of any particular epistemological assumptions. Secondly, I think you may have missed the distinction I was attempting to make between a theory having the fundamental goal of seeking to explain what appears and one that seeks to explain why and how appearance manifests to its subjects. In the first case the goal is to create a mathematical model of appearance (i.e. physics), on the assumption (should this be considered at all) that the phenomena of perception and cognition will fall out of it at some later stage. In the second case the goal is to justify from first principles the existence, in the first place, of perceivers and cognisers and, in the second place, the appearances that manifest to them; then to show that the latter constitute, amongst other things, an accurate model of physics. Although I think comp is an interesting theory and worthy of study, I think I look at it differently than Bruno. I look at it as just another mathematical model, one whose ontology happens to be computations. But I have already said why I think comp can be distinguished from other theories in this respect. I may well be mistaken, but I don't see you have actually addressed the points I sought to make. As I noted in another post, any explanation is going to be exhaustively reductive or it's going to be reduction with loss. You can't have it both ways. Bruno's theory explicitly defines the loss, i.e. unprovable truths of arithmetic. That may be a feature, or it may be a bug. I don't agree that these alternatives exclude each other. In fact, I've been trying to point out that an exhaustively reductive physical theory cannot avoid losing consciousness. Hence the stipulation without loss is only tenable when that unfortunate consequence is ignored or trivialised. My argument has also been that Bruno's theory, whatever else its merits or demerits, is not reductive in the relevant sense; so far I haven't seen you respond directly to these points. David On 7/1/2014 5:00 AM, David Nyman wrote: Some recent discussions have centred on the (putative) features of hierarchical-reductionist ontologies, and whether comp (whatever its intrinsic merits or deficiencies) should be considered as just another candidate theory in that category, This prompts me to consider what fundamental question a particular theory is designed to answer. Making this explicit may help us to see what other questions are, by the same token (and perhaps only implicitly), treated as subsidiary or, as it were, merely awaiting resolution in due course in terms of the central explanatory thrust. I think it's fair to say that theories centred on an exhaustively-reducible physical or material ontology seek to answer the question of What are the fundamental entities and relations that underlie and constitute everything that exists and how did things get to be this way?. Even if this is a rather crude formulation, if questions such as these are deemed central and definitive, the issue of How and why does it *appear* to us that things are this way? becomes subsidiary and presumably awaits ultimate elucidation in the same terms. IOW, both we and what appears to us
Re: What's the answer? What's the question?
On 7/1/2014 1:32 PM, David Nyman wrote: On 1 July 2014 19:24, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I think you have created a strawman exhaustively-reducible physical or material ontology. Sure, physicists take forces and matter as working assumptions - but they don't say what they are. They are never anything other than elements of a mathematical model which works well. And what does it mean to work well? It means to explain appearances - exactly the same thing you put forward as a uniquely different goal of comp. Firstly, I'm not really persuaded by your contention that forces and matter, to use your example, are merely elements of a mathematical model which works well. Rather, in terms of that very model, such elements are precisely those that (at least in principle) are supposed to comprise a fully-sufficient bottom-up ontology for the theory as a whole. The point, again in principle at least, is that nothing *above* the level of the basic ontology need be taken into account in the evolution of states defined in terms of it; put simply, there is no top-down causality. Actually, causality, except in the no-spacelike influence, doesn't enter into fundamental physics. Models are generally time-symmetric. It is for this reason that I've been pointing out that whatever levels are posited above the basic ontology cannot possess, in terms of the theory, any independent ontological significance. And are you saying that is different for comp? That there's top-down causality in comp? What's top? Rather, what we *can* say is that such macroscopic, or composite, phenomena as temperature or, for that matter, the neural correlates of consciousness, are *explanatorily* relevant. We might go so far as to describe these phenomena as epistemological integrations over the ontological fundamentals. But if we do that the problem should become painfully obvious: the theory in which we are working has no explicit epistemological component. I think you're confusing epistemological and subjective. It is in fact explicitly designed to render a principled account of the relevant phenomena in the absence of any particular epistemological assumptions. Secondly, I think you may have missed the distinction I was attempting to make between a theory having the fundamental goal of seeking to explain what appears and one that seeks to explain why and how appearance manifests to its subjects. In the first case the goal is to create a mathematical model of appearance (i.e. physics), on the assumption (should this be considered at all) that the phenomena of perception and cognition will fall out of it at some later stage. In the second case the goal is to justify from first principles the existence, in the first place, of perceivers and cognisers and, in the second place, the appearances that manifest to them; then to show that the latter constitute, amongst other things, an accurate model of physics. Ok, I may have missed that. That's why I say once conscious-like behavior is engineered, talk about percievers and cognisers will seem to be quaint questions, like Where is the elan vital in a virus? Comp has an explanation of why some questions about consciousness are unanswerable, on pain of logical contradiction; and in that respect it is an improvement over more vague philosophizing such as Darwin's musing that if the brain were simple enough enough to understand itself would not be powerful enough to understand itself. Although I think comp is an interesting theory and worthy of study, I think I look at it differently than Bruno. I look at it as just another mathematical model, one whose ontology happens to be computations. But I have already said why I think comp can be distinguished from other theories in this respect. I may well be mistaken, but I don't see you have actually addressed the points I sought to make. As I noted in another post, any explanation is going to be exhaustively reductive or it's going to be reduction with loss. You can't have it both ways. Bruno's theory explicitly defines the loss, i.e. unprovable truths of arithmetic. That may be a feature, or it may be a bug. I don't agree that these alternatives exclude each other. What's in between explaining everything and leaving somethings unexplained? In fact, I've been trying to point out that an exhaustively reductive physical theory cannot avoid losing consciousness. Hence the stipulation without loss is only tenable when that unfortunate consequence is ignored or trivialised. My argument has also been that Bruno's theory, whatever else its merits or demerits, is not reductive in the relevant sense; so far I haven't seen you respond directly to these points. But it does lose consciousness in the sense of self-reflective consciousness. That's in the unprovable truth. And non-self-reflective consciousness can be accounted for by neurophysiology. I think you have unrealistic ideas of what is explained and
Re: What's the answer? What's the question?
On 2 July 2014 06:24, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: Although I think comp is an interesting theory and worthy of study, I think I look at it differently than Bruno. I look at it as just another mathematical model, one whose ontology happens to be computations. I think Bruno assumes the ontology first, notes that it can 'explain everything' - and then sets out to see if 'everything' can be pared down to what appears. To be fair Bruno claims to be agnostic about comp. I imagine it's hard to construct a TOE that *doesn't* start by assuming an ontology that looks as though it can 'explain everything' (whatever that is assumed to be - in the case of comp it's consciousness plus - allegedly - the physical universe). With comp it's more explicit what the assumed ontology is than in most theories of physics, but only because most theories assume default materialism (as already mentioned in other posts ad nauseum) while comp is explicitly making a different set of assumptions. Although I am agnostic* on comp I can see no harm in this, and some potential good. * Bruno often appears to think I'm a materialist, while you often seem to think I'm a comp-ist or perhaps something less flattering ... but I've learned many times, and after discussing many subjects with many people, that being assumed to be in the opposite camp is a normal peril of being agnostic :) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What's the answer? What's the question?
On 2 July 2014 09:33, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 7/1/2014 1:32 PM, David Nyman wrote: On 1 July 2014 19:24, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I think you have created a strawman exhaustively-reducible physical or material ontology. Sure, physicists take forces and matter as working assumptions - but they don't say what they are. They are never anything other than elements of a mathematical model which works well. And what does it mean to work well? It means to explain appearances - exactly the same thing you put forward as a uniquely different goal of comp. Firstly, I'm not really persuaded by your contention that forces and matter, to use your example, are merely elements of a mathematical model which works well. Rather, in terms of that very model, such elements are precisely those that (at least in principle) are supposed to comprise a fully-sufficient bottom-up ontology for the theory as a whole. The point, again in principle at least, is that nothing *above* the level of the basic ontology need be taken into account in the evolution of states defined in terms of it; put simply, there is no top-down causality. Actually, causality, except in the no-spacelike influence, doesn't enter into fundamental physics. Models are generally time-symmetric. I agree. As Victor Stenger mentions in The Comprehensible Cosmos causality is just another word for the 2nd law, and the 2nd law is an emergent result of the universe being in a special state - namely expanding. The expansion determines an arrow of time via various processes where initially time-symmetric systems freeze out into bound states (quarks, nuclei, stars etc). This has the effect of allowing the entropy ceiling to rise so a system that was originally at thermodynamic equilibrium is able to move away from it as it cools / expands. So the question boils down to whether the expansion is a result of fundamental physics, or incidental / local. Eternal inflation seems to suggest it's fundamental - or does it? Can someone more knowledgeable correct me on that, if necessary? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What's the answer? What's the question?
On 7/1/2014 2:55 PM, LizR wrote: On 2 July 2014 09:33, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 7/1/2014 1:32 PM, David Nyman wrote: On 1 July 2014 19:24, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I think you have created a strawman exhaustively-reducible physical or material ontology. Sure, physicists take forces and matter as working assumptions - but they don't say what they are. They are never anything other than elements of a mathematical model which works well. And what does it mean to work well? It means to explain appearances - exactly the same thing you put forward as a uniquely different goal of comp. Firstly, I'm not really persuaded by your contention that forces and matter, to use your example, are merely elements of a mathematical model which works well. Rather, in terms of that very model, such elements are precisely those that (at least in principle) are supposed to comprise a fully-sufficient bottom-up ontology for the theory as a whole. The point, again in principle at least, is that nothing *above* the level of the basic ontology need be taken into account in the evolution of states defined in terms of it; put simply, there is no top-down causality. Actually, causality, except in the no-spacelike influence, doesn't enter into fundamental physics. Models are generally time-symmetric. I agree. As Victor Stenger mentions in The Comprehensible Cosmos causality is just another word for the 2nd law, and the 2nd law is an emergent result of the universe being in a special state - namely expanding. The expansion determines an arrow of time via various processes where initially time-symmetric systems freeze out into bound states (quarks, nuclei, stars etc). This has the effect of allowing the entropy ceiling to rise so a system that was originally at thermodynamic equilibrium is able to move away from it as it cools / expands. So the question boils down to whether the expansion is a result of fundamental physics, or incidental / local. Eternal inflation seems to suggest it's fundamental - or does it? Can someone more knowledgeable correct me on that, if necessary? Just about any theory that includes a universe (and what good would one be if it didn't) is going to allow multiple universes. Otherwise there would have to be some principle allowing one but forbidding others. If the universe is big sometime and small others then physical time is probably going to point to inflation (not deflation). But still, the fact that the universe seems to have started in a low entropy state needs explanation (c.f. Sean Carroll's From Eternity to Here). Brent Any eternal God would be so bored after one eternity that It would do Its best to commit suicide by creating an equally adept Opponent. Half of the time the Opponent would succeed and the process would repeat. It is impossible to know whether the current God is an even or odd term in the series. --- Roahn Wynar -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What's the answer? What's the question?
On 2 July 2014 10:16, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 7/1/2014 2:55 PM, LizR wrote: I agree. As Victor Stenger mentions in The Comprehensible Cosmos causality is just another word for the 2nd law, and the 2nd law is an emergent result of the universe being in a special state - namely expanding. The expansion determines an arrow of time via various processes where initially time-symmetric systems freeze out into bound states (quarks, nuclei, stars etc). This has the effect of allowing the entropy ceiling to rise so a system that was originally at thermodynamic equilibrium is able to move away from it as it cools / expands. So the question boils down to whether the expansion is a result of fundamental physics, or incidental / local. Eternal inflation seems to suggest it's fundamental - or does it? Can someone more knowledgeable correct me on that, if necessary? If the universe is big sometime and small others then physical time is probably going to point to inflation (not deflation). Absolutely, probably because of a mechanism similar to the one I mentioned above, which boils down to more space = more room to do stuff in. I'm not questioning how the entropy gradient is derived from expansion, that seems fairly obvious, at least to me. My question is: Does Eternal Inflation make expansion the result of fundamental physics? E.I. appears to be time asymmetric - indeed, it appears to be *vastly* time asymmetric, with our local entropy gradient a pale shadow of the asymmetry built into a field that expands space exponentially forever. That would, at first sight, appear to be a time asymmetry built into fundamental physics. But is it, really? And if so, how come? But still, the fact that the universe seems to have started in a low entropy state needs explanation (c.f. Sean Carroll's From Eternity to Here). Obviously EI is one potential explanation for this, with big bang bubbles popping out of the inflaton field, each giving rise to an infinite universe. Each nucleation (I think it's called) creates a smooth expanding space-time filled with some form of energy that turns into quarks and leptons when it cools sufficiently, which it does due to the residual expansion. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Speaking of free speech...
On 1 July 2014 23:05, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 12:49 AM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: I don't see how the university can stop the student union from banning things if they want to, I guess, assuming the student union owns the buildings in which such bans apply. I don't think the union's likely to own any buildings on the college campus - only their HQ in Malet Street (where I once went to see Arthur C Clark give a talk :-) ... but they may well be able to make life difficult for anyone who wants to do banned things by, essentailly, bullying them politely until they stop. As I think you already said, they can always convene in the local cafe. This all reflects far worse on the U.L.U. than it does on the Neitzsche Soc. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What's the answer? What's the question?
On 7/1/2014 3:43 PM, LizR wrote: On 2 July 2014 10:16, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 7/1/2014 2:55 PM, LizR wrote: I agree. As Victor Stenger mentions in The Comprehensible Cosmos causality is just another word for the 2nd law, and the 2nd law is an emergent result of the universe being in a special state - namely expanding. The expansion determines an arrow of time via various processes where initially time-symmetric systems freeze out into bound states (quarks, nuclei, stars etc). This has the effect of allowing the entropy ceiling to rise so a system that was originally at thermodynamic equilibrium is able to move away from it as it cools / expands. So the question boils down to whether the expansion is a result of fundamental physics, or incidental / local. Eternal inflation seems to suggest it's fundamental - or does it? Can someone more knowledgeable correct me on that, if necessary? If the universe is big sometime and small others then physical time is probably going to point to inflation (not deflation). Absolutely, probably because of a mechanism similar to the one I mentioned above, which boils down to more space = more room to do stuff in. I'm not questioning how the entropy gradient is derived from expansion, that seems fairly obvious, at least to me. My question is: Does Eternal Inflation make expansion the result of fundamental physics? E.I. appears to be time asymmetric It's not asymmetric. In the Carroll-Chen model universes have a minimal point and expand in both directions, as measured in physical time. In coordinate time, it's universe that contracts to a few Planck volumes and the re-expands. Coordinate time is just a label in the equations - so you can say they really expand, even though the mathematics are symmetric. Brent - indeed, it appears to be /vastly/ time asymmetric, with our local entropy gradient a pale shadow of the asymmetry built into a field that expands space exponentially forever. That would, at first sight, appear to be a time asymmetry built into fundamental physics. But is it, really? And if so, how come? But still, the fact that the universe seems to have started in a low entropy state needs explanation (c.f. Sean Carroll's From Eternity to Here). Obviously EI is one potential explanation for this, with big bang bubbles popping out of the inflaton field, each giving rise to an infinite universe. Each nucleation (I think it's called) creates a smooth expanding space-time filled with some form of energy that turns into quarks and leptons when it cools sufficiently, which it does due to the residual expansion. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: American Intelligence
SMad will likely not work with say, an Iranian guv mint, but it worked ok with the Sovs. You fear a Pyrrhic victory, I fear capitulation. honestly see the connection with my comment. MAD is posturing, the end result of which is NOT to have a war. But the original question was IF we had a war, THEN why hold back? Which I thought I answered quite sensibly. -Original Message- From: LizR lizj...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, Jun 30, 2014 10:56 pm Subject: Re: American Intelligence On 1 July 2014 00:38, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: I tend to agree with your sentiments, Telmo. My idea, should you care, is that if one goes to war, half measures and quarter measures end up quite badly. If one can achieve peace, justice, and free beer, without doing violence to one's fellow primates, this is a great thing. But it is not assured, that simply because one tries a peaceable track, that it will even work. So, if one fights, why hold back? Because all out nuclear war would make large chunks of the planet uninhabitable? Well, I somehow do remember MAD, and it worked with the Sovs, but I suspect less so with Iran, Isis and North Kor. Do you disagree? (I assume that the above comment is intended as a reply to my comment above, which was a reply to the comment above that...) If so, the original question was if one fights, why hold back? to which I replied that not holding back might destroy the planet. To which spudboy100 says he somehow does remember MAD - I don't honestly see the connection with my comment. MAD is posturing, the end result of which is NOT to have a war. But the original question was IF we had a war, THEN why hold back? Which I thought I answered quite sensibly. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: American Intelligence
Of course not Chris! Are you trying to be witty perchance? -Original Message- From: 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, Jun 30, 2014 11:57 am Subject: RE: American Intelligence From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] Heh, your words say no, but your keyboard says yes yes yes. Which is weird since I am not bent that way. I do worry a bit about why your president is arming up his agencies, like EPA, and the Post Office with swat teams and weapons. My guess is, it is to ensure that the Party remains in power permanently, I mean, why else do it? I guess Banana Republic isn't just a clothing franchise, anymore. Are you trying to be witty perchance? Oh... no worries mate I will live just fine... don't over-estimate your own importance to me or anyone else... I am merely making the point that you are a war-mongering coward. I don't expect to change you. Who cares if I am a US citizen or not? If I was not a US citizen would I therefore not have the right -- for some strange reason -- to not be calling you a coward? I am however a US citizen, sorry buddy -- see you have to deal with me and millions of other US citizens who think people like you are off their rockers. -Original Message- From: 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Sun, Jun 29, 2014 10:57 pm Subject: RE: RE: RE: American Intelligence -Original Message- From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2014 5:04 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: RE: RE: American Intelligence Chris, so how will you be able to live with yourself, if, say, you cannot budge me from my horrible views? Secondly, you are not a US citizen, are you? How will you control America if you cannot even control, influence, or browbeat me? Just curious. Oh... no worries mate I will live just fine... don't over-estimate your own importance to me or anyone else... I am merely making the point that you are a war-mongering coward. I don't expect to change you. Who cares if I am a US citizen or not? If I was not a US citizen would I therefore not have the right -- for some strange reason -- to not be calling you a coward? I am however a US citizen, sorry buddy -- see you have to deal with me and millions of other US citizens who think people like you are off their rockers. You see things in the optic of control -- quite telling actually, illuminating in fact of your own psychology that you used that particular term... you see, not everyone sees things the way you see things. Not everyone seeks to control outcomes. I, usually like to work things out, except when dealing with intolerant individuals, such as say yourself spudboy. In such cases, since I know a-priori that there is no working things out I will be right there in your face and have no interest in even trying to work it out -- you don't operate on that wavelength spudboy -- you seek to impose your world view and wish to do so with violent means... you pine for total war A-hole, but are too much of a coward to go do the fighting yourself. No, there is no working anything out with individuals such as you, who portray anyone who does not share their desire for a global conflagration as being a traitor. Thus I do not even bother; why waste any energy. But I will make the point that you are a coward; and have some fun with it. Chris -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because
Re: American Intelligence
It worked for the Nazis, it may be working for the Jihadists, and the longing to be led has been a feature of the Sovs, Mao, Kims, and Kampuchea. To say otherwise is to be a-historical as in, false. OK, so you agree with me that it isn't just a Left thing as you said it was earlier, which is what prompted my comment about Nuremberg rallies in the first place. -Original Message- From: LizR lizj...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tue, Jul 1, 2014 12:07 am Subject: Re: American Intelligence On 1 July 2014 00:37, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: Nuremberg was the who Gobbels propaganda thing, but Stalin had mass rallies as well, and North Korea and Iran still does. Malice can wear different forms. Le Bon was a fav or Both Adolf and Lenin (not Lennon). OK, so you agree with me that it isn't just a Left thing as you said it was earlier, which is what prompted my comment about Nuremberg rallies in the first place. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Tyson is not atheist (was Re: So, a new kind of non-boolean, non-digital, computer architecture
What about the newest guy? Reminds me of Jon Pertwee, minus the fluff heads. But anyone married to an actor from Doctor Who is good in my book (well, apart from David Tennant...) -Original Message- From: LizR lizj...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tue, Jul 1, 2014 12:46 am Subject: Re: Tyson is not atheist (was Re: So, a new kind of non-boolean, non-digital, computer architecture On 1 July 2014 06:53, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: Thinking that atheism could be bad, is like believing that red hair is a sign of the devil. Red hair, like atheism, is a difference without a distinction. Not, on the other hand is it axiomatically, the sign of a great mind. If Tyson is, it's of little concern, unless one is in it for gossip. Then it becomes compelling. Was it the writer, Truman Capote who said, there are three great things in the world, religion, science, and gossip. As for me, I am often quite envious of people who are atheists, not for the brilliance of their thoughts, but for the cocksure, self-confidence, and their apparent ability to be matter of fact in how they deal with the great turbulence of the Human Condition. By the way,.this is the first time I have use the phrase, cocksure, in a sentence. Anyway,.it's something.I admire, unlike when they.chose to egg on the Jesus people, when the Islamistand roll red with blood and severed body parts. This, I find objectionable, even though I am not a Christian. But I still admire the Atheists sureity. Hmm, I'm not sure I admire complete certainty about non-trivial matters myself. But as Brent has explained elsewhere it's all down to semantics anyway, apparently Richard Dawkins believes there may be gods, and hence is in my terminology agnostic even as he loudly proclaims himself an atheist. But anyone married to an actor from Doctor Who is good in my book (well, apart from David Tennant...) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: American Intelligence
You might as well dismiss these guys as there is probably zero worth doing now. However the now has gases and anthrax so we'll see what they will do if anything. I am betting they will. This boogie monster, this Caliphate you brandish about as if it should somehow inspire chills and shivers of fear in all who hear the dread word mentioned… is nothing more than a few thousand well-armed Salafi thugs in the deserts of Syria Iraq. We should be afraid… why exactly? The funny thing for me is that you will no doubt produce some kind of answer… so please do humor me. Why should a few thousand scary looking thugs with automatic weapons in some far away desert scare anybody beyond their immediate neighbors? -Original Message- From: 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tue, Jul 1, 2014 1:28 am Subject: RE: American Intelligence From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] Sent: Monday, June 30, 2014 9:54 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: American Intelligence You have a splendid idea there and many people round the world agree with you. This is not an irrational argument, though likely, too optimistic. Your sensibilities, and mine, are not shared globally. look to the new Caliphate, for an example on people differing in world view. This boogie monster, this Caliphate you brandish about as if it should somehow inspire chills and shivers of fear in all who hear the dread word mentioned… is nothing more than a few thousand well-armed Salafi thugs in the deserts of Syria Iraq. We should be afraid… why exactly? The funny thing for me is that you will no doubt produce some kind of answer… so please do humor me. Why should a few thousand scary looking thugs with automatic weapons in some far away desert scare anybody beyond their immediate neighbors? And anyway.. I really hope nobody will ever use nuclear weapons anymore; this will only result in our own extinction (if anybody ever survive, it will be at minima the end of our civilization). There is really no point to ever think it could be a safe detterent to use one. Quentin -Original Message- From: Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, Jun 30, 2014 11:15 am Subject: Re: American Intelligence And anyway.. I really hope nobody will ever use nuclear weapons anymore; this will only result in our own extinction (if anybody ever survive, it will be at minima the end of our civilization). There is really no point to ever think it could be a safe detterent to use one. Quentin 2014-06-30 17:07 GMT+02:00 Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com: The USA has the capacity to destroy the missile before it even touch the US... USA has not the capacity to do this for all the Russian ICBM *by treaties* not because it's too difficult... USA has enough anti-ICBM to destroy any north korean ICBM who would threaten them... I doubt that North Korea has developed stealth ICBM... Quentin 2014-06-30 17:01 GMT+02:00 spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com: Quentin, I am more concerned that if North Korea attacks the US, Obama and his party will do nothing. It'll just make things worse! We cannot risk things getting out of hand. The entire human species is at stake. We can absorb the damage done and minimize our losses. We'd be killing their children as well as their leaders, we cannot do this! This is what I see, in reaction to a Kim Strike. Also, as you rightly mentioned: do you really think that if the USA use nuke against those countries, China and Russia (and others who have the bomb) will do nothing ? lay back and enjoy it, maybe ;-D ? I am more worried about what our elites do than what China and Russia do. I don't see this as a hollow threat, or a paper tiger, Quentin, as this article indicates. Its from Reuters, which is a progressive news agency. I never post stuff from Fox, or some blog, when I engage in polly discussions, because its more meaningful when the news comes from ones' own. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/02/us-northkorea-missiles-idUSBREA4102S20140502 http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/02/us-northkorea-missiles-idUSBREA4102S20140502 Yes, from what I've read, a local nuclear conflict is pretty sure to escalate to a full blown global nuclear conflict leading to global destruction... do you really think that if the USA use nuke against those countries, China and Russia (and others who have the bomb) will do nothing ? Quentin -Original Message- From: Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, Jun 30, 2014 10:16 am Subject: Re: American Intelligence 2014-06-30 14:38 GMT+02:00 spudboy100
Re: American Intelligence
From: spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com SMad will likely not work with say, an Iranian guv mint, but it worked ok with the Sovs. You fear a Pyrrhic victory, I fear capitulation. That is bullshit -- couch potato general man -- you don't know that! And the BS you just spouted is directly contradicted by the US CIA and military assessments of the Iranian regime, that have all concluded that it is a rational actor. You really should refrain from prognosticating on military affairs, of which you are consistently wrong on and for which you display a surprising ignorance -- perhaps due to your being psychologically crippled by your own passionate hatred of Islam. Go eat a doughnut or something. Chris [happy that spudboy will never be a general or involved in defense planning] honestly see the connection with my comment. MAD is posturing, the end result of which is NOT to have a war. But the original question was IF we had a war, THEN why hold back? Which I thought I answered quite sensibly. -Original Message- From: LizR lizj...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, Jun 30, 2014 10:56 pm Subject: Re: American Intelligence On 1 July 2014 00:38, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: I tend to agree with your sentiments, Telmo. My idea, should you care, is that if one goes to war, half measures and quarter measures end up quite badly. If one can achieve peace, justice, and free beer, without doing violence to one's fellow primates, this is a great thing. But it is not assured, that simply because one tries a peaceable track, that it will even work. So, if one fights, why hold back? Because all out nuclear war would make large chunks of the planet uninhabitable? Well, I somehow do remember MAD, and it worked with the Sovs, but I suspect less so with Iran, Isis and North Kor. Do you disagree? (I assume that the above comment is intended as a reply to my comment above, which was a reply to the comment above that...) If so, the original question was if one fights, why hold back? to which I replied that not holding back might destroy the planet. To which spudboy100 says he somehow does remember MAD - I don't honestly see the connection with my comment. MAD is posturing, the end result of which is NOT to have a war. But the original question was IF we had a war, THEN why hold back? Which I thought I answered quite sensibly. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: American Intelligence
From: spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tuesday, July 1, 2014 4:11 PM Subject: Re: American Intelligence Of course not Chris! Then you must surely be on the lookout for those black helicopters are coming to get you... quick put on your tin foil hat to protect you from the mind control waves. Chris. Are you trying to be witty perchance? -Original Message- From: 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, Jun 30, 2014 11:57 am Subject: RE: American Intelligence From:everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] Heh, your words say no, but your keyboard says yes yes yes. Which is weird since I am not bent that way. I do worry a bit about why your president is arming up his agencies, like EPA, and the Post Office with swat teams and weapons. My guess is, it is to ensure that the Party remains in power permanently, I mean, why else do it? I guess Banana Republic isn't just a clothing franchise, anymore. Are you trying to be witty perchance? Oh... no worries mate I will live just fine... don't over-estimate your own importance to me or anyone else... I am merely making the point that you are a war-mongering coward. I don't expect to change you. Who cares if I am a US citizen or not? If I was not a US citizen would I therefore not have the right -- for some strange reason -- to not be calling you a coward? I am however a US citizen, sorry buddy -- see you have to deal with me and millions of other US citizens who think people like you are off their rockers. -Original Message- From: 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Sun, Jun 29, 2014 10:57 pm Subject: RE: RE: RE: American Intelligence -Original Message- From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2014 5:04 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: RE: RE: American Intelligence Chris, so how will you be able to live with yourself, if, say, you cannot budge me from my horrible views? Secondly, you are not a US citizen, are you? How will you control America if you cannot even control, influence, or browbeat me? Just curious. Oh... no worries mate I will live just fine... don't over-estimate your own importance to me or anyone else... I am merely making the point that you are a war-mongering coward. I don't expect to change you. Who cares if I am a US citizen or not? If I was not a US citizen would I therefore not have the right -- for some strange reason -- to not be calling you a coward? I am however a US citizen, sorry buddy -- see you have to deal with me and millions of other US citizens who think people like you are off their rockers. You see things in the optic of control -- quite telling actually, illuminating in fact of your own psychology that you used that particular term... you see, not everyone sees things the way you see things. Not everyone seeks to control outcomes. I, usually like to work things out, except when dealing with intolerant individuals, such as say yourself spudboy. In such cases, since I know a-priori that there is no working things out I will be right there in your face and have no interest in even trying to work it out -- you don't operate on that wavelength spudboy -- you seek to impose your world view and wish to do so with violent means... you pine for total war A-hole, but are too much of a coward to go do the fighting yourself. No, there is no working anything out with individuals such as you, who portray anyone who does not share their desire for a global conflagration as being a traitor. Thus I do not even bother; why waste any energy. But I will make the point that you are a coward; and have some fun with it. Chris -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything
Re: American Intelligence
From: spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tuesday, July 1, 2014 4:20 PM Subject: Re: American Intelligence You might as well dismiss these guys as there is probably zero worth doing now. However the now has gases and anthrax so we'll see what they will do if anything. I am betting they will. Of course you are spudhead... you choose to live in dread. The world has much bigger problems than a couple thousand malcontents in the Middle East -- invoking a return to medieval-ism as their rallying cry. The fact that you are obsessed with this distraction reveals a rather poor analytic functionality operating in your brain (such as it is) Chris This boogie monster, this Caliphate you brandish about as if it should somehow inspire chills and shivers of fear in all who hear the dread word mentioned… is nothing more than a few thousand well-armed Salafi thugs in the deserts of Syria Iraq. We should be afraid… why exactly? The funny thing for me is that you will no doubt produce some kind of answer… so please do humor me. Why should a few thousand scary looking thugs with automatic weapons in some far away desert scare anybody beyond their immediate neighbors? -Original Message- From: 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tue, Jul 1, 2014 1:28 am Subject: RE: American Intelligence From:everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] Sent: Monday, June 30, 2014 9:54 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: American Intelligence You have a splendid idea there and many people round the world agree with you. This is not an irrational argument, though likely, too optimistic. Your sensibilities, and mine, are not shared globally. look to the new Caliphate, for an example on people differing in world view. This boogie monster, this Caliphate you brandish about as if it should somehow inspire chills and shivers of fear in all who hear the dread word mentioned… is nothing more than a few thousand well-armed Salafi thugs in the deserts of Syria Iraq. We should be afraid… why exactly? The funny thing for me is that you will no doubt produce some kind of answer… so please do humor me. Why should a few thousand scary looking thugs with automatic weapons in some far away desert scare anybody beyond their immediate neighbors? And anyway.. I really hope nobody will ever use nuclear weapons anymore; this will only result in our own extinction (if anybody ever survive, it will be at minima the end of our civilization). There is really no point to ever think it could be a safe detterent to use one. Quentin -Original Message- From: Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, Jun 30, 2014 11:15 am Subject: Re: American Intelligence And anyway.. I really hope nobody will ever use nuclear weapons anymore; this will only result in our own extinction (if anybody ever survive, it will be at minima the end of our civilization). There is really no point to ever think it could be a safe detterent to use one. Quentin 2014-06-30 17:07 GMT+02:00 Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com: The USA has the capacity to destroy the missile before it even touch the US... USA has not the capacity to do this for all the Russian ICBM *by treaties* not because it's too difficult... USA has enough anti-ICBM to destroy any north korean ICBM who would threaten them... I doubt that North Korea has developed stealth ICBM... Quentin 2014-06-30 17:01 GMT+02:00 spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com: Quentin, I am more concerned that if North Korea attacks the US, Obama and his party will do nothing. It'll just make things worse! We cannot risk things getting out of hand. The entire human species is at stake. We can absorb the damage done and minimize our losses. We'd be killing their children as well as their leaders, we cannot do this! This is what I see, in reaction to a Kim Strike. Also, as you rightly mentioned: do you really think that if the USA use nuke against those countries, China and Russia (and others who have the bomb) will do nothing ? lay back and enjoy it, maybe ;-D ? I am more worried about what our elites do than what China and Russia do. I don't see this as a hollow threat, or a paper tiger, Quentin, as this article indicates. Its from Reuters, which is a progressive news agency. I never post stuff from Fox, or some blog, when I engage in polly discussions, because its more meaningful when the news comes from ones' own. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/02/us-northkorea-missiles-idUSBREA4102S20140502 http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/02/us-northkorea-missiles-idUSBREA4102S20140502 Yes, from
Re: What's the answer? What's the question?
On 1 July 2014 22:33, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: The point, again in principle at least, is that nothing *above* the level of the basic ontology need be taken into account in the evolution of states defined in terms of it; put simply, there is no top-down causality. Actually, causality, except in the no-spacelike influence, doesn't enter into fundamental physics. Models are generally time-symmetric. Well, I was trying to be short, hence to put it simply. Would you take issue with the preceding statement that The point, again in principle at least, is that nothing *above* the level of the basic ontology need be taken into account in the evolution of states defined in terms of it.? And if so, what essential difference would your specific disagreement make to the point in question? It is for this reason that I've been pointing out that whatever levels are posited above the basic ontology cannot possess, in terms of the theory, any independent ontological significance. And are you saying that is different for comp? That there's top-down causality in comp? What's top? I'm saying that comp uses its basic ontological assumptions to motivate an epistemology - i.e. a theory of knowledge and knowers. Hence I'm suggesting that from this point on that the consequences of this epistemology become irreducible to the original ontology; instead the theory must hinge thereafter on the principled relations that can be established between such knowers and the putative objects of their knowledge. Rather, what we *can* say is that such macroscopic, or composite, phenomena as temperature or, for that matter, the neural correlates of consciousness, are *explanatorily* relevant. We might go so far as to describe these phenomena as epistemological integrations over the ontological fundamentals. But if we do that the problem should become painfully obvious: the theory in which we are working has no explicit epistemological component. I think you're confusing epistemological and subjective. I disagree. I'm using epistemological in the sense of what is consequential on an explicit theory of knowledge and knowers. AFAIK physics deploys no such explicit theory and relies on no such consequences; in fact it seeks to be independent of any particular such theory, which is tacitly regarded as being irrelevant to what is to be explained. That is my criterion for distinguishing the two types of theory I had in mind. In the first case the goal is to create a mathematical model of appearance (i.e. physics), on the assumption (should this be considered at all) that the phenomena of perception and cognition will fall out of it at some later stage. In the second case the goal is to justify from first principles the existence, in the first place, of perceivers and cognisers and, in the second place, the appearances that manifest to them; then to show that the latter constitute, amongst other things, an accurate model of physics. Ok, I may have missed that. That's why I say once conscious-like behavior is engineered, talk about percievers and cognisers will seem to be quaint questions, like Where is the elan vital in a virus? I'm afraid I fail to see the logical connection between I may have missed that and That's why However, you seem to be saying that you personally favour theories of the first type and that you suppose the effect of the continuing success of such an approach will be to eliminate discussion, or possibly even recognition, of any remaining explanatory gap. Is that accurate? Do you see no merit in the second type of theory? Do you disagree that one can usefully differentiate theories by the kinds of question they set out to answer? As I noted in another post, any explanation is going to be exhaustively reductive or it's going to be reduction with loss. You can't have it both ways. I don't agree that these alternatives exclude each other. What's in between explaining everything and leaving somethings unexplained? Forgive me, I could more accurately have said that I didn't consider them to be at odds. IOW, when I've used the term exhaustively reductive, what I mean is that the 3p reduction is intended to exhaust what is to required be explained in terms of the theory, but that this cannot be without loss because the first-person is thereby trivialised, eliminated, or rendered hopelessly mysterious. My argument has also been that Bruno's theory, whatever else its merits or demerits, is not reductive in the relevant sense; so far I haven't seen you respond directly to these points. But it does lose consciousness in the sense of self-reflective consciousness. That's in the unprovable truth. I don't know why you say that it loses consciousness when a principled relation between proof and unprovable truth is an essential goal of the technical and conceptual resources of the theory. In particular, it's this relation that may lead to a resolution of the
Re: What's the answer? What's the question?
On 7/1/2014 4:42 PM, David Nyman wrote: On 1 July 2014 22:33, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: The point, again in principle at least, is that nothing *above* the level of the basic ontology need be taken into account in the evolution of states defined in terms of it; put simply, there is no top-down causality. Actually, causality, except in the no-spacelike influence, doesn't enter into fundamental physics. Models are generally time-symmetric. Well, I was trying to be short, hence to put it simply. Would you take issue with the preceding statement that The point, again in principle at least, is that nothing *above* the level of the basic ontology need be taken into account in the evolution of states defined in terms of it.? And if so, what essential difference would your specific disagreement make to the point in question? I agree with that. It is for this reason that I've been pointing out that whatever levels are posited above the basic ontology cannot possess, in terms of the theory, any independent ontological significance. And are you saying that is different for comp? That there's top-down causality in comp? What's top? I'm saying that comp uses its basic ontological assumptions to motivate an epistemology - i.e. a theory of knowledge and knowers. Well, it assumes one; although I'm not sure how the ontology of arithmetical realism motivated it. It assumes that provable+true=known. I don't think this is a good axiom in the sense of obviously true. It's subject to Gettier's paradox. But there's nothing wrong with assuming a model and seeing where it leads. Hence I'm suggesting that from this point on that the consequences of this epistemology become irreducible to the original ontology; ?? I don't think I can parse that. The consequences of an epistemology are things known. An ontology is things that exist. So you're saying, things known become irreducible to things that exist? Were they reducible before, i.e. before the ontological assumption motivated the epistemology? instead the theory must hinge thereafter on the principled relations that can be established between such knowers and the putative objects of their knowledge. OK. Rather, what we *can* say is that such macroscopic, or composite, phenomena as temperature or, for that matter, the neural correlates of consciousness, are *explanatorily* relevant. We might go so far as to describe these phenomena as epistemological integrations over the ontological fundamentals. But if we do that the problem should become painfully obvious: the theory in which we are working has no explicit epistemological component. I think you're confusing epistemological and subjective. I disagree. I'm using epistemological in the sense of what is consequential on an explicit theory of knowledge and knowers. AFAIK physics deploys no such explicit theory and relies on no such consequences; in fact it seeks to be independent of any particular such theory, which is tacitly regarded as being irrelevant to what is to be explained. That is my criterion for distinguishing the two types of theory I had in mind. OK. Although, physics does struggle with that it means to observe something because observation is never as a superposition. It is assumed that we need to know about how humans work to answer this in detail. In the first case the goal is to create a mathematical model of appearance (i.e. physics), on the assumption (should this be considered at all) that the phenomena of perception and cognition will fall out of it at some later stage. In the second case the goal is to justify from first principles the existence, in the first place, of perceivers and cognisers and, in the second place, the appearances that manifest to them; then to show that the latter constitute, amongst other things, an accurate model of physics. Ok, I may have missed that. That's why I say once conscious-like behavior is engineered, talk about percievers and cognisers will seem to be quaint questions, like Where is the elan vital in a virus? I'm afraid I fail to see the logical connection between I may have missed that and That's why However, you seem to be saying that you personally favour theories of the first type and that you suppose the effect of the continuing success of such an approach will be to eliminate discussion, or possibly even recognition, of any remaining explanatory gap. Is that accurate? Almost. I think the explanatory gap will remain, just as true but unprovable theorems of arithmetic will remain. But it will be a side issue, not a subject of scientific research. Do you see no merit in the second type of theory? Do you disagree that one can usefully differentiate theories by the kinds of question they set out to answer? No, I agree. But usefully differentiating a theory is not the same as differentiating a useful theory. I can differentiate theory that asks, What does God command us to do. from a
Re: What's the answer? What's the question?
On 2 July 2014 10:57, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 7/1/2014 3:43 PM, LizR wrote: My question is: Does Eternal Inflation make expansion the result of fundamental physics? E.I. appears to be time asymmetric It's not asymmetric. In the Carroll-Chen model universes have a minimal point and expand in both directions, as measured in physical time. In coordinate time, it's universe that contracts to a few Planck volumes and the re-expands. Coordinate time is just a label in the equations - so you can say they really expand, even though the mathematics are symmetric. Ah yes, that's interesting. Not that I am an expert on anti de-Sitter space and all that, but it looks to my limited understanding as though they are saying that eternal inflation is somehow occurring in a timeless (or perhaps time-symmetric) manner, and big bangs define their own time direction. I suspected the latter but couldn't quite grok the former, maybe because the word inflation seems to imply a biult in AOT. At some point I will get around to reading this, and hopefully understand the idea better as a result... http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0410270v1.pdf -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Tyson is not atheist (was Re: So, a new kind of non-boolean, non-digital, computer architecture
Dear Bruno, Hear Hear! Well said! On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 1:22 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 30 Jun 2014, at 07:41, meekerdb wrote: On 6/29/2014 10:20 PM, LizR wrote: On 30 June 2014 17:02, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/29/2014 7:33 PM, LizR wrote: On 30 June 2014 04:43, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 9:44 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: agnosticism is of course the defining principle of the scientific method, so we really need the concept in order to understand the status of scientific theories. I like what Isaac Asimov, a fellow who knew a thing or two about science, had to say on this subject: I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time. So he knows that he only has enough evidence to be agnostic, but he is emotionally convinced to be an atheist nonetheless. OK, so that puts him on a par with religious believers who are also emotionally convinced, though not of the same thing. No more so that being an aSanta-Clausist. Well there you go then. I rest my case. Actually I think there is enough evidence to prove (in the 'beyond reasonable doubt' sense) that the God of the bible does not exist. But you don't have to prove something doesn't exist to reasonably fail to believe that it does. I don't have proof that there is no teapot orbiting Jupiter, but that doesn't make me epitemologically irresponsible to assert I don't believe there is one. Atheists don't just believe that the biblical god doesn't exist, they believe that there are no supernatural forces involved in the operation of the universe. Where is this written? Do you speak for all atheists, or just ones in NZ? While I consider this likely, I don't consider it 100% proven, because as Arthur C Clark said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and it's at least conceivable that there are sufficiently advanced beings out there that they can act outside what we call nature. That seems to really waffle. If we knew these beings could so act wouldn't we just readjust what we call nature. In fact that's a general problem with saying what it would mean for some events to be supernatural. In the past many events were thought to be supernatural, acts of God, e.g. sickness, lightning, drought, earthquakes,...but are now thought to be natural. So it some new phenomena is observed why wouldn't we just assume it was natural even if we didn't have an explanation. I agree with you. I think we can relate this to Occam. If we have a theory which explains a lot, and fail to explain a new phenomena, we should not abandon the theory, unless the new phenomena does violate the theory. I think that supernatural has no meaning at all. No more than the incompatibilist theory of free will which I think does not make sense (I agree with John Clark on this). Supernatural would mean violating the laws of physics, and that makes no sense because physics, by quasi-definition, changes itself each time she is violated. (But comp + materialism do introduce something close to magic: primitive matter capable of selecting consciousness, but without any role in the computations). For example I am not 100% sure that the universe wasn't created by some intelligent beings with sufficiently advanced technology to create big bangs (they may of course have evolved naturally in another universe). I don't think it's likely, but that's my emotional prejudices at work. I can't see that I can claim with certainty that it's impossible, and since these being would fit with some definitions of god (creator of the unvierse) then I can't say it is 100% proven that god doesn't exist. Didn't you slip from something or someone beyond our current explanation to god. You speak for atheists, what do you have to say for religionists? Are they just worshiping some unknown possibility. What is the god they believe in - that's the god I don't believe in. I think you have muddled the word god in order make it seem unreasonable to assert definitively that god doesn't exist. But in the process you've made god into something quite different from the god of religion. A mere shadow of the once powerful Yaweh, Baal, Zeus, Thor,... Earth was thought to be a tortoise, then we learn better. Similarly the notion of God is the notion of an all encompassing one unifying all things. It was thought to
Re: American Intelligence
On 2 July 2014 11:09, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: SMad will likely not work with say, an Iranian guv mint, but it worked ok with the Sovs. You fear a Pyrrhic victory, I fear capitulation. Yes, MAD wouldn't work with a nation of suicide bombers, for example, it requires the other side to have a rational desire to stay alive. I suspect that covers most world leaders myself but who knows you *may *have a point. Assuming you do, then you're basically saying you'd rather the human race died on its feet than lived on its knees, a view with which I have some sympathy (although having died on its feet there isn't a chance for a later slaves' revolt...) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Pluto bounces back!
Now I see why I am unable to answer you. Thanks for explaining! So, in principle, you are against any claims of factual accuracy from any person or religion, and therefore prejudiced against all scriptures? Given that I am convinced about the Quran being the truth from God, and you convinced that nobody can have anything from God, I don't see if there is a point in continuing this debate. Thanks for indulging me and letting me express my point of view. I pray that God blesses all those who earnestly seek with assured faith. Amen. Samiya On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 11:28 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 5:02 PM, Samiya Illias samiyaill...@gmail.com wrote: What is your definition of factual accuracy? Kindly explain with some examples. You posted on this list bringing up factual accuracy regarding the Quran, if I remember correctly. This is why I posed the question in a variety of ways. But if I were to answer this in a strong technical sense of some domain, I might be making the same mistake, blasphemy or crookedness that I sense in the quoted/translated passages we discuss. Perhaps it is part of things that we cannot prove to each other and perhaps this means that faith in this point, requires that we wrestle with, question, doubt this kind of phenomenon or problem, of which there seem to be many, and never, in our present kind of form at least, become comfortable with it. Following this kind of line, perhaps nobody can answer this for anybody else, or not even for ourselves. Some people say we are the answer; but this is a bit too easy for me, although I can relate to the thought. Sometimes this gives me vertigo or makes me feel empty, and at other times I feel like the emptiness is just more space to fill with joy, fascination, wonder, and negation of pain, that we can share; if we stay polite, honest, maintain peace, stay alert, learn to reason with more distance, and appropriacy, tame our bestiality to minimize harming creation, and lust for control etc. This means distancing ourselves enough from our own strict theology and learning from our inner self and creation more directly, which is difficult, but the only way I can parse, that would stop us from calling ourselves names, fighting, waging war to hide our insecurity. Our personal theology gives us security but takes away what little control we may have. Our insecurity and our fears however, is something we share across all religions. Maybe we should question them more directly, rather than reciting our best verses, every time we can't find a good answer. You'll find many answers in many texts and some contributions on this list. Whether they satisfy/convince you, or whether they can do so in principle or not, is a different question. It is in any case a good constant question to wrestle with, learn from, and read about for the theological search beyond and underneath the strong/loud interpretation of strict confessional religion, cultural programs, and authoritative misuse of science, religion, and history. It points also to the question of the relation between theology/science, and the question of possible abuse (e.g. prohibition). So you see, I can't really answer your question, but you said you could... ;-) PGC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Is Consciousness Computable?
On 2 July 2014 05:33, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 7/1/2014 1:01 AM, LizR wrote: On 1 July 2014 17:59, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/30/2014 9:35 PM, LizR wrote: ISTM... In primitive materialism, what exists are space / time and matter / energy. Information is an emergent property of the arrangements of those things, like entropy. Neither of these exist at the level of fundamental particles, or Planck cells, or strings, or whatever else may be the primitive mass-energy/space-time) involved. There are problems with this view if information has primitive status, which would indicate that the real picture is something like it from bit or what might be called primitive informationism. Evidence for PI come from the entropy of black holes, the black hole information paradox, the Landauer limit, the Beckenstein bound, the holographic principle, and (unless I already covered that) the requirement that erasing a bit of information requires some irreducible amount of energy. (And maybe some other things I don't know about ... perish the thought). That's the Landauer limit, which isn't really relevant at a fundamental level. It's a thermodynamic law which is reducible to statistical mechanics. Interesting. How is the energy required to erase a single bit reducible to statistical mechanics? I'd appreciate an answer to this question, if you have one. I can't see the connection and am genuinely interested, I wasn't being rhetorical. PI isn't equivalent to comp, but from what you said above PI might be a necessary consequence of comp, which would give the ontological chain arithmetic - consciousness - information - matter (I think ... this is all ISTM of course). OK, except I think the chain is: arithmetic - information - matter - consciousness - arithmetic That doesn't make sense to me. I mean everything except the last term is OK, but you're apparently claiming that arithmetic is fundamental AND an invention of the human mind. Which at first glance looks suspiciously like fence sitting and having and eating your cake... Unless you have a theory of circular ontology, of course, in which case please fill in a few more details. Why? The details are no different than in the linear case. In the details you look at each - separately. What's different about the circular case is that you don't suppose that one of the levels is fundamental or primitive. OK, so how does that work? Like I said, I don't understand it. Intuitively, saying that A causes B and B causes A doesn't appear to make sense, it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation (though luckily evolution can answer that one). Some more information would be appreciated. But I generally consider ontolgy to be derivative. You gather data, create a model, test it. If it passes every test, makes good predictions, fits with other theories, then you think it's a pretty good model and may be telling you what the world is like. THEN you look at and ask what are the essential parts of it, what does it require to exist. But that's more of a philosophical than a scientific enterprise, because, as in QM, there maybe radically different ways to ascribe an ontology to the same mathematical system. Even Bruno's very abstract theory is ambiguous about whether the ur-stuff is arithmetic or threads of computation. You can probably show they are empirically equivalent - just like Hilbert space and Feynman paths give the same answers but are ontologically quite different. OK. How you get to it is, of course, via empiricism (how else?). But so far most physicists (that I've come across) have considered that a reductionist ontology is most likely to be correct. Of course the majority doesn't rule in physics, and it's fine that you prefer a circular ontology, I'd just like to know how it's actually supposed to work, (preferably sans waffle, if you can manage it). and I'm not so inclined to take it as more than another possible model of the world. We aren't in a position to do more than build models of the world. If you think it's a possible model then that's *all* you can ever claim for it, well, unless some evidence comes along that disproves it, when you can't even do that. I think of it as a way to describe and predict and think about the world; but without supposing that it's possible to prove or to know with certainty the world must be that way. Of course, we can't know for certain what the world is like. As for A Garrett Lisi, I was under the impression that his particles were something like a point in a weight diagram - or something - which sounds to me at least like some form of information theoretic entity. But I have to admit my understanding of how birds and flowers could emerge from the E8 group or whatever it's called is, well, about like this... In a way, all of fundamental physics posits information theoretic entities. Particles
Re: Pluto bounces back!
On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 3:34 AM, Samiya Illias samiyaill...@gmail.com wrote: Now I see why I am unable to answer you. Thanks for explaining! So, in principle, you are against any claims of factual accuracy from any person or religion, and therefore prejudiced against all scriptures? That would be too quick. I think most religions make good points, if we handle them respectfully and carefully, instead of them handling us to be short. Given that I am convinced about the Quran being the truth from God, and you convinced that nobody can have anything from God, A supreme entity is possible. And a privately fruitful relationship with personal theology as well. I'm just unsure that some people have the right to force other people on this matter; or to convert them to do or think anything beyond their personal, unprovable relationship to such a possible incomprehensible god. Especially when people fight, label other people to wage war, or cause suffering. An example of theology in written word or scripture I appreciate: According to Goethe's Faust (ending of second part), a work of fiction, god also takes care of those who doubt, because they believe more passionately in searching the creation than merely believing in it, which allows the doubting mystic Faust to exercise greater mercy and love (having searched and question creation and god more, he learned to do gods work better by loving more truly...). Gretchen, the innocent feminine principle, whom Faust has wronged intervenes in the heavenly court: He might have done wrong. But his search was sincere. The eternal feminine principle in the judging role, grants Faust's into her heaven, despite his profound mistakes and sins. I try to enjoy and be inspired by many good scriptures, exemplars, and science. But I don't know about their truth and don't care about forcing these on others. This is because I have faith in that people's relation to their theology is untouchable, should not be violated, sacred if you will; with the problematic exception that we sometimes cause pain and suffering with its clash with reality and our violent histories. I have faith in seeking and doubting honestly, so that we can learn how to continuously better ourselves and our inseparable relation to, in your words, creation, reality, truth, and other people. So if Quran mentions respect and search positively, I agree for example. I tend to disagree with the stuff that commands us about our personal relation to god, what god is, what not to search (prohibition), to fight for god etc. Samiya I don't see if there is a point in continuing this debate. I see it more as a questioning exchange. I don't intend to win anything here :-) but ok, of course. PGC Thanks for indulging me and letting me express my point of view. I pray that God blesses all those who earnestly seek with assured faith. Amen. On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 11:28 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 5:02 PM, Samiya Illias samiyaill...@gmail.com wrote: What is your definition of factual accuracy? Kindly explain with some examples. You posted on this list bringing up factual accuracy regarding the Quran, if I remember correctly. This is why I posed the question in a variety of ways. But if I were to answer this in a strong technical sense of some domain, I might be making the same mistake, blasphemy or crookedness that I sense in the quoted/translated passages we discuss. Perhaps it is part of things that we cannot prove to each other and perhaps this means that faith in this point, requires that we wrestle with, question, doubt this kind of phenomenon or problem, of which there seem to be many, and never, in our present kind of form at least, become comfortable with it. Following this kind of line, perhaps nobody can answer this for anybody else, or not even for ourselves. Some people say we are the answer; but this is a bit too easy for me, although I can relate to the thought. Sometimes this gives me vertigo or makes me feel empty, and at other times I feel like the emptiness is just more space to fill with joy, fascination, wonder, and negation of pain, that we can share; if we stay polite, honest, maintain peace, stay alert, learn to reason with more distance, and appropriacy, tame our bestiality to minimize harming creation, and lust for control etc. This means distancing ourselves enough from our own strict theology and learning from our inner self and creation more directly, which is difficult, but the only way I can parse, that would stop us from calling ourselves names, fighting, waging war to hide our insecurity. Our personal theology gives us security but takes away what little control we may have. Our insecurity and our fears however, is something we share across all religions. Maybe we should question them more directly, rather than reciting our best verses, every time we can't find a good answer.
RE: Pluto bounces back!
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Samiya Illias Now I see why I am unable to answer you. Thanks for explaining! So, in principle, you are against any claims of factual accuracy from any person or religion, and therefore prejudiced against all scriptures? I apologize for interjecting… however questioning a faith’s claims to factual accuracy in support of its central tenets and dogma does not amount to prejudice. How is this prejudice? A faith can be held for deeply felt reasons, but can faith present its central dogmas in a manner that is falsifiable Science accepts the need for experiment falsification; why shouldn’t religion? Chris Given that I am convinced about the Quran being the truth from God, and you convinced that nobody can have anything from God, I don't see if there is a point in continuing this debate. Thanks for indulging me and letting me express my point of view. I pray that God blesses all those who earnestly seek with assured faith. Amen. Samiya On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 11:28 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 5:02 PM, Samiya Illias samiyaill...@gmail.com wrote: What is your definition of factual accuracy? Kindly explain with some examples. You posted on this list bringing up factual accuracy regarding the Quran, if I remember correctly. This is why I posed the question in a variety of ways. But if I were to answer this in a strong technical sense of some domain, I might be making the same mistake, blasphemy or crookedness that I sense in the quoted/translated passages we discuss. Perhaps it is part of things that we cannot prove to each other and perhaps this means that faith in this point, requires that we wrestle with, question, doubt this kind of phenomenon or problem, of which there seem to be many, and never, in our present kind of form at least, become comfortable with it. Following this kind of line, perhaps nobody can answer this for anybody else, or not even for ourselves. Some people say we are the answer; but this is a bit too easy for me, although I can relate to the thought. Sometimes this gives me vertigo or makes me feel empty, and at other times I feel like the emptiness is just more space to fill with joy, fascination, wonder, and negation of pain, that we can share; if we stay polite, honest, maintain peace, stay alert, learn to reason with more distance, and appropriacy, tame our bestiality to minimize harming creation, and lust for control etc. This means distancing ourselves enough from our own strict theology and learning from our inner self and creation more directly, which is difficult, but the only way I can parse, that would stop us from calling ourselves names, fighting, waging war to hide our insecurity. Our personal theology gives us security but takes away what little control we may have. Our insecurity and our fears however, is something we share across all religions. Maybe we should question them more directly, rather than reciting our best verses, every time we can't find a good answer. You'll find many answers in many texts and some contributions on this list. Whether they satisfy/convince you, or whether they can do so in principle or not, is a different question. It is in any case a good constant question to wrestle with, learn from, and read about for the theological search beyond and underneath the strong/loud interpretation of strict confessional religion, cultural programs, and authoritative misuse of science, religion, and history. It points also to the question of the relation between theology/science, and the question of possible abuse (e.g. prohibition). So you see, I can't really answer your question, but you said you could... ;-) PGC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group,
Re: Selecting your future branch
On 2 July 2014 05:44, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 7/1/2014 1:09 AM, LizR wrote: On 1 July 2014 17:38, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/30/2014 9:03 PM, LizR wrote: Well, that's quite straightforward. Brent is assuming the (so called) Aristotelean paradigm, and hence that his mother *is* her brain. I'm assuming (on some evidence) that she, her stream of consciousness, is what her brain does. For example, she remembers her childhood very clearly, better than the recent past (like whether or not she's told you about her childhood in the last two days). I don't see how this jibes with Kim's idea of poor reception. It *doesn't* jibe with it, that was his point. As far as I can see, Kim is suggesting that poor reception - the workings of memory, perception and so on - cause a consciousness which is basically unchanged to appear different to the outside world. As he (?) says, one doesn't feel that one's mind changes as one gets older, I don't think that's true. I think differently than I did as a child. As a child one experiences many more things as new, fresh, surprising. OK, so you disagree with Kim (or my reading of Kim) on that. You're on different sides in the what is consciousness vs what are the contents of consciousness? debate. Or indeed the materialist vs comp debate, which come to the same conclusion (physicalism = we are nothing but our memories, predispositions etc - consciousness is not anything fundamental, it is just a user illusion, to quote Dan Dennett, a sort of glorified desktop created by the brain, with no user except itself. Comp = consciousness exists and is (more or less) fundamental.) one feels that external things have changed - e.g. my memory may fail me more, but (on this view) that is an external thing, a piece of wetware, going wrong, rather than something about me that has changed. But I see this as denial of the simple fact that there is no sense to saying one is the same person without one's memories. My father died of Alzheimer's and he was definitely not the same person, in the sense of personality, when he had lost his memory. Of course he was the same person in the physical and legal sense of continuity. I think it's mere wishful thinking to suppose there is a you a soul that is independent of all your memories (including the unconscious ones). This may well be true, but it isn't a simple fact. Or rather if it is, we can't know that it is, at least assuming the scientific method is correct. Bruno can probably fill in the details of whether comp posits a you separate from your memories etc better than I can. I suspect that it does, but I may be wrong. Needless to say I can see that either of these views may be correct - there is evidence for both, imho - or perhaps the answer is something completely different. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Germany sets record for peak energy use - 50 percent comes from solar (Update)
On 2 July 2014 04:17, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: Why has the nuclear sector stayed away from LFTR and favored the current type of reactor design? One word - bombs. That's one of the reasons but there are others. Companies like GE and Westinghouse have no reason to be interested in a LFTR, they don't make reactors anymore (few people do) they make their money by fabricating the fuel rods that go into reactors made many decades ago; but a LFTR needs no fuel fabrication, it's fuel is a liquid. Another reason is that people just don't like change especially if it has anything to do with the unmentionable nu**ear word, and a LFTR is radically different from existing reactors; not only does it use a different element as fuel and its a liquid not a solid but to design one chemists would be at least as important as physicists and probably more so. OK, I will amend my answer in the light of new evidence, In the spirit of Ford Prefect's amendment to the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy's entry on Earth, I will amend it from Bombs to Mostly Bombs. No, actually, it looks like the correct answer is Bombs plus laziness and inertia and short-sightedness and not wanting to rock the boat. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Is Consciousness Computable?
On 7/1/2014 6:52 PM, LizR wrote: On 2 July 2014 05:33, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 7/1/2014 1:01 AM, LizR wrote: On 1 July 2014 17:59, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/30/2014 9:35 PM, LizR wrote: ISTM... In primitive materialism, what exists are space / time and matter / energy. Information is an emergent property of the arrangements of those things, like entropy. Neither of these exist at the level of fundamental particles, or Planck cells, or strings, or whatever else may be the primitive mass-energy/space-time) involved. There are problems with this view if information has primitive status, which would indicate that the real picture is something like it from bit or what might be called primitive informationism. Evidence for PI come from the entropy of black holes, the black hole information paradox, the Landauer limit, the Beckenstein bound, the holographic principle, and (unless I already covered that) the requirement that erasing a bit of information requires some irreducible amount of energy. (And maybe some other things I don't know about ... perish the thought). That's the Landauer limit, which isn't really relevant at a fundamental level. It's a thermodynamic law which is reducible to statistical mechanics. Interesting. How is the energy required to erase a single bit reducible to statistical mechanics? I'd appreciate an answer to this question, if you have one. I can't see the connection and am genuinely interested, I wasn't being rhetorical. Erasing a bit means putting it in a known state, which is a decrease in entropy. Since overall entropy cannot decrease this must be transferred to the environment. If the environment is at temperature T the work required to do this is ST, or for one bit kTln(2). This is a very small number because Boltzmann's constant k is very small. So real computers use many orders of magnitude more energy per bit. Feynman noted that it can be avoided by using reversible computing. PI isn't equivalent to comp, but from what you said above PI might be a necessary consequence of comp, which would give the ontological chain arithmetic - consciousness - information - matter (I think ... this is all ISTM of course). OK, except I think the chain is: arithmetic - information - matter - consciousness - arithmetic That doesn't make sense to me. I mean everything except the last term is OK, but you're apparently claiming that arithmetic is fundamental AND an invention of the human mind. Which at first glance looks suspiciously like fence sitting and having and eating your cake... Unless you have a theory of circular ontology, of course, in which case please fill in a few more details. Why? The details are no different than in the linear case. In the details you look at each - separately. What's different about the circular case is that you don't suppose that one of the levels is fundamental or primitive. OK, so how does that work? Like I said, I don't understand it. Intuitively, saying that A causes B and B causes A doesn't appear to make sense, It's not a causal relationship, it's an explanatory -. it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation (though luckily evolution can answer that one). Some more information would be appreciated. But I generally consider ontolgy to be derivative. You gather data, create a model, test it. If it passes every test, makes good predictions, fits with other theories, then you think it's a pretty good model and may be telling you what the world is like. THEN you look at and ask what are the essential parts of it, what does it require to exist. But that's more of a philosophical than a scientific enterprise, because, as in QM, there maybe radically different ways to ascribe an ontology to the same mathematical system. Even Bruno's very abstract theory is ambiguous about whether the ur-stuff is arithmetic or threads of computation. You can probably show they are empirically equivalent - just like Hilbert space and Feynman paths give the same answers but are ontologically quite different. OK. How you get to it is, of course, via empiricism (how else?). But so far most physicists (that I've come across) have considered that a reductionist ontology is most likely to be correct. What would a non-reductionist ontology look like? Some kind of Holism. Plotinus talks about The One, but what good is that. If you stop taking this stuff so seriously (searching for THE TRUTH) and think of these theories as different models for an unknowable reality, then you see that a model with ONE part isn't very useful. You immediately then
Re: Pluto bounces back!
On 02-Jul-2014, at 7:44 am, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Samiya Illias Now I see why I am unable to answer you. Thanks for explaining! So, in principle, you are against any claims of factual accuracy from any person or religion, and therefore prejudiced against all scriptures? I apologize for interjecting… however questioning a faith’s claims to factual accuracy in support of its central tenets and dogma does not amount to prejudice. How is this prejudice? A faith can be held for deeply felt reasons, but can faith present its central dogmas in a manner that is falsifiable Science accepts the need for experiment falsification; why shouldn’t religion? Chris Religion does accept the need for experiment falsification. Rather, the Quran invites it's readers to think deeply and verify, as if this book was from other than God, it would have contained much discrepancy. I posted a selection of verses which contained info verifiable by today's science, PGC doesn't agree to their being as proofs of 'factual accuracy'. He asked for what the Quran says, so I quoted other verses explaining the faith, which obviously is non-verifiable. Hence, I asked what he was looking for. Perhaps 'prejudice' is too strong a word. I'll apologise to PGC. Thanks for interjecting :) Samiya Given that I am convinced about the Quran being the truth from God, and you convinced that nobody can have anything from God, I don't see if there is a point in continuing this debate. Thanks for indulging me and letting me express my point of view. I pray that God blesses all those who earnestly seek with assured faith. Amen. Samiya On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 11:28 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 5:02 PM, Samiya Illias samiyaill...@gmail.com wrote: What is your definition of factual accuracy? Kindly explain with some examples. You posted on this list bringing up factual accuracy regarding the Quran, if I remember correctly. This is why I posed the question in a variety of ways. But if I were to answer this in a strong technical sense of some domain, I might be making the same mistake, blasphemy or crookedness that I sense in the quoted/translated passages we discuss. Perhaps it is part of things that we cannot prove to each other and perhaps this means that faith in this point, requires that we wrestle with, question, doubt this kind of phenomenon or problem, of which there seem to be many, and never, in our present kind of form at least, become comfortable with it. Following this kind of line, perhaps nobody can answer this for anybody else, or not even for ourselves. Some people say we are the answer; but this is a bit too easy for me, although I can relate to the thought. Sometimes this gives me vertigo or makes me feel empty, and at other times I feel like the emptiness is just more space to fill with joy, fascination, wonder, and negation of pain, that we can share; if we stay polite, honest, maintain peace, stay alert, learn to reason with more distance, and appropriacy, tame our bestiality to minimize harming creation, and lust for control etc. This means distancing ourselves enough from our own strict theology and learning from our inner self and creation more directly, which is difficult, but the only way I can parse, that would stop us from calling ourselves names, fighting, waging war to hide our insecurity. Our personal theology gives us security but takes away what little control we may have. Our insecurity and our fears however, is something we share across all religions. Maybe we should question them more directly, rather than reciting our best verses, every time we can't find a good answer. You'll find many answers in many texts and some contributions on this list. Whether they satisfy/convince you, or whether they can do so in principle or not, is a different question. It is in any case a good constant question to wrestle with, learn from, and read about for the theological search beyond and underneath the strong/loud interpretation of strict confessional religion, cultural programs, and authoritative misuse of science, religion, and history. It points also to the question of the relation between theology/science, and the question of possible abuse (e.g. prohibition). So you see, I can't really answer your question, but you said you could... ;-) PGC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this
Re: Pluto bounces back!
On 02-Jul-2014, at 7:31 am, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 3:34 AM, Samiya Illias samiyaill...@gmail.com wrote: Now I see why I am unable to answer you. Thanks for explaining! So, in principle, you are against any claims of factual accuracy from any person or religion, and therefore prejudiced against all scriptures? That would be too quick. I apologise! I think most religions make good points, if we handle them respectfully and carefully, instead of them handling us to be short. Given that I am convinced about the Quran being the truth from God, and you convinced that nobody can have anything from God, A supreme entity is possible. And a privately fruitful relationship with personal theology as well. I'm just unsure that some people have the right to force other people on this matter; or to convert them to do or think anything beyond their personal, unprovable relationship to such a possible incomprehensible god. Especially when people fight, label other people to wage war, or cause suffering. In my mind, these are two separate issues: (1) personal belief and conviction of the veracity of a scripture, (2) the practice of it by those who profess to be its adherents. I may disagree with the interpretation and application of the scripture by some Muslims, but that in no way reduces my belief in God, the Quran or the Hereafter. An example of theology in written word or scripture I appreciate: According to Goethe's Faust (ending of second part), a work of fiction, god also takes care of those who doubt, because they believe more passionately in searching the creation than merely believing in it, which allows the doubting mystic Faust to exercise greater mercy and love (having searched and question creation and god more, he learned to do gods work better by loving more truly...). Gretchen, the innocent feminine principle, whom Faust has wronged intervenes in the heavenly court: He might have done wrong. But his search was sincere. The eternal feminine principle in the judging role, grants Faust's into her heaven, despite his profound mistakes and sins. Of course God loves and guides all who seek earnestly and sincerely. We cannot peep into each other's hearts, but God knows us better than we know ourselves. Each of us is born in different circumstances and with a unique exam. Only God truly knows what we are dealing with and how sincerely are we seeking the truth. I also believe that God is the Most Appreciating, as well as Most Just, and that nobody will be wronged in the least. God is keeping a careful account of all things, and being Most Merciful, God keeps forgiving our mistakes. Of course, I cannot proof any of this, but this is part of my faith. I try to enjoy and be inspired by many good scriptures, exemplars, and science. But I don't know about their truth and don't care about forcing these on others. I'm not trying to force it either. I only suggest that this is a book worth studying, and am willing to try answering the questions This is because I have faith in that people's relation to their theology is untouchable, should not be violated, sacred if you will; with the problematic exception that we sometimes cause pain and suffering with its clash with reality and our violent histories. I have faith in seeking and doubting honestly, so that we can learn how to continuously better ourselves and our inseparable relation to, in your words, creation, reality, truth, and other people. 'inseparable relation' :) So if Quran mentions respect and search positively, I agree for example. I tend to disagree with the stuff that commands us about our personal relation to god, what god is, what not to search (prohibition), to fight for god etc. If someday you become convinced that this book is indeed from God, you will naturally abandon doubt and take guidance from God about personal and social matters willingly. And when you see religion being abused for social ends, you will be able to distinguish between God's commands and peoples' actions. Remember, each of us came to this earth alone, and each us returns alone, with our own beliefs and deeds. Samiya Samiya I don't see if there is a point in continuing this debate. I see it more as a questioning exchange. I don't intend to win anything here :-) but ok, of course. PGC Thanks for indulging me and letting me express my point of view. I pray that God blesses all those who earnestly seek with assured faith. Amen. On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 11:28 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 5:02 PM, Samiya Illias samiyaill...@gmail.com wrote: What is your definition of factual accuracy? Kindly explain with some examples. You posted on this list bringing up factual accuracy regarding the Quran, if I
Re: Pluto bounces back!
Just a thought. If I was god, and I was in communication with the puny beings I had created, given free will, threatened with eternal damnation but then said they had a chance at salvation as long as they lick my metaphorical boots with regular prayers and so on, which I think is a perfectly reasonable request, even supreme beings need a bit of ego massage - and as long as they accepted my word, as dictated to my chosen prophet, *then* I would have shown my all-merciful nature by flicking ahead a few thousand years and seeing a series of future predestined events (because free will only gets you so far, after all), and I would then have dictated a series of prophecies that I would state in the language of the future, explaining to my chosen ones how to write it all down. And then I would have checked back regularly throughout future history that no one had inadvertantly made any mistakes in transcription, like saying stuff about virgins when I'd quite clearly stated woman of high birth or camels and needles when I originally said rope, and so on. And if any such changes crept in, well a quick cut and paste would put it right, on the books and my minion's memories. So there would be no excuse for disbelief when I'd predicted thousands of years in advance that human beings would one day fly, walk on the Moon, split the atom and so on. Hell (as it were), just to show my divine beneficence, I might even throw in the real TOE somewhere in the Book of Revelations. (Or whatever the equivalent is in the Torah or Quran or I Ching or Norse Eddas or whatever.) But I guess that would take all the fun out of condemning people to eternal hellfire because they didn't believe stuff written in obscure, cryptic language 3000 years previously. Anyway, as Brent was saying, quoting someone, we have no way of knowing whether we have got the good or evil god on this particular kalpa. But I can make a pretty shrewd guess. (Hahahahahaaha! Oops sorry ignore the laughter it just slipped out...) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Is Consciousness Computable?
On 2 July 2014 15:46, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 7/1/2014 6:52 PM, LizR wrote: Interesting. How is the energy required to erase a single bit reducible to statistical mechanics? Erasing a bit means putting it in a known state, which is a decrease in entropy. I don't get why a known state is important here. I certainly don't see why it's a decrease in entropy. (I assume you mean known to someone?) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Is Consciousness Computable?
On 2 July 2014 15:46, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: OK, so how does that work? Like I said, I don't understand it. Intuitively, saying that A causes B and B causes A doesn't appear to make sense, It's not a causal relationship, it's an explanatory -. Sorry I should have said explains although I thought it was obvious I was using causal in an explanatory sense, not a physical one. Anyway, please continue the explanation. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Is Consciousness Computable?
On 2 July 2014 15:46, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: What would a non-reductionist ontology look like? The explanatory chain you gave earlier would look like one if I could make sense of it. Some kind of Holism. Plotinus talks about The One, but what good is that. If you stop taking this stuff so seriously (searching for THE TRUTH) and think of these theories as different models for an unknowable reality, then you see that a model with ONE part isn't very useful. You immediately then have to start explaining why it seems to have parts in spite of being The One. Any chance of you explaining what you meant without all the waffle? I'm actually interested to know. Please could you start with that diagram which goes from arithmetic to arithmetic and explain how it makes sense, or is reductionist, or SOMETHING. I am starting to get a tronnies feel as I keep asking for clarification and none appears... Anyway I hve to go now kids to feed etc hope to hear somethijng sensible next time! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Is Consciousness Computable?
On 7/1/2014 9:40 PM, LizR wrote: On 2 July 2014 15:46, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 7/1/2014 6:52 PM, LizR wrote: Interesting. How is the energy required to erase a single bit reducible to statistical mechanics? Erasing a bit means putting it in a known state, which is a decrease in entropy. I don't get why a known state is important here. I certainly don't see why it's a decrease in entropy. (I assume you mean known to someone?) If you just left it in some unknown state you wouldn't be erasing it. Entropy decreases because before the bit was in one of two possible states; after it's in only one. http://www.nature.com/news/the-unavoidable-cost-of-computation-revealed-1.10186 Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Is Consciousness Computable?
On 7/1/2014 9:42 PM, LizR wrote: On 2 July 2014 15:46, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: OK, so how does that work? Like I said, I don't understand it. Intuitively, saying that A causes B and B causes A doesn't appear to make sense, It's not a causal relationship, it's an explanatory -. Sorry I should have said explains although I thought it was obvious I was using causal in an explanatory sense, not a physical one. Anyway, please continue the explanation. You don't understand what is meant by physics - biology or biology - evolution - mathematics or mathematics - physics? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Is Consciousness Computable?
On 7/1/2014 9:47 PM, LizR wrote: On 2 July 2014 15:46, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: What would a non-reductionist ontology look like? The explanatory chain you gave earlier would look like one if I could make sense of it. Some kind of Holism. Plotinus talks about The One, but what good is that. If you stop taking this stuff so seriously (searching for THE TRUTH) and think of these theories as different models for an unknowable reality, then you see that a model with ONE part isn't very useful. You immediately then have to start explaining why it seems to have parts in spite of being The One. Any chance of you explaining what you meant without all the waffle? I'm actually interested to know. Please could you start with that diagram which goes from arithmetic to arithmetic and explain how it makes sense, or is reductionist, or SOMETHING. I am starting to get a tronnies feel as I keep asking for clarification and none appears... Anyway I hve to go now kids to feed etc hope to hear somethijng sensible next time! Each step - is whole field of science and you want me to explain it? It's not a worked out, unified causal theory. It's just a way of seeing that there isn't necessarily some ur-stuff that explains everything else. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
