Sisyphus

Can I ask where people chose "none?" Do you frequent Luddite forums? We're not ready for mechanized looms! I'm reminded of this: http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/ Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged I didn't see that you answered these. Since only you answered, I'll pick on you directly. #1 offers nothing but curiosity? Really? We already do effectively know that intelligent aliens exist. The universe is too big for them not to. But actually meeting them? How could that not be the most momentous event in human history? You'd get the cultural and philosophical treasure of an entirely separate species, like the meeting of the eastern and western hemispheres in the age of exploration, but times a thousand (and without smallpox or land grabs). And #3 is a big no? Why? That is a bit less than twice the power consumption of the human race currently. So really, we already do have that power, and to a large degree it is in the wrong hands. A huge proportion of our social and environmental ills are the result of generating and geographically controlling energy.

Gods can only eat existing things if they're properly "cooked" into maximum entropy. The universe is an oven.

This, at least, I agree with. While I personally don't think a zygote is worth much, I do think a person emerges over time, and it's a moral grey area that should be taken seriously. My ideal for abortion is the Clintonian one: "Safe, legal, and rare." And by "safe" I also include not having those measures intended to simply punish the pregnant woman, like making exceptions to doctor-patient confidentiality. For the record, the morning after pill is not technically abortion. It prevents pregnancy with a dose of hormones, and my understanding is it makes the user quite ill in doing so. So, at least, I don't think anyone would treat it casually more than once. I think the majority of users are probably panicked, and not at all casual. Though obviously I don't have any statistics to back that up. And I don't really see the difference here, besides a basically arbitrary distinction. (Sperm and egg before fertilization are medical waste, but the instant one works its way inside the other it's sacred?) But I don't think there's anything more to do than agree to disagree on that. Everybody has to draw a line somewhere. You wouldn't have prevented them being a person, because they already were. If there is a reasonable chance of recovery, switching off life support would be just like murdering someone in their sleep. However, if they're not just comatose but brain dead, then I would consider that person already gone, and the moral (but not ethical) obligation would be to harvest the useable organs. I consider those three types of unconsciousness (something which has never been conscious, an interval of unconsciousness, and something which can't ever be conscious again) to be separate, morally, even if in each case it is technically a living, genetically human organism. Only the second do I think of as a person.

I don't know. Asserting that there are no gods doesn't really say anything positive about the cause, nature, or purpose of the universe. It just excludes a certain set of possible causes, natures, or purposes. And it definitely doesn't include supernatural agencies, ritual observances, or moral codes. (Though it doesn't necessarily exclude any of those things.) At most, you could say that "naturalism" says something about the nature of the universe, i.e. that it obeys consistent natural laws at all times. It doesn't fit any other part of that definition. The "new atheism" as opposed to regular old atheism, on the other hand, doesn't really say anything about the universe. It just says something about religion, namely that it is inherently irrational and destructive and should not be respected. From what I gather, they're not saying "there is no god," they're saying "it is irrational to think there is a god," which is not the same thing.

Under what definition of "religion" is the so-called "new atheism" a religion?

Can I ask why you consider it always immoral? Do you consider birth control also immoral (though presumably less so)? I ask because you seem to agree with me that destroying a zygote is not as bad as destroying a child. I would say that that is the case because of the properties of "personhood" that one has and the other does not. In my mind, a zygote, though genetically human, is still just a single-celled organism, and whatever it is that makes human life valuable, it isn't shared by single-celled organisms. Thus I see destroying it as preventing a person, not killing one. Just like destroying an egg and sperm (by, say, preventing them from physically combining) is also preventing a person. So I guess I'm asking, where do we disagree?

I don't know what you mean by unsubstantial, but there's no such thing as fire without oxygen. That's what fire is: something rapidly combining with oxygen.

Well, again, in the trivial sense that you can't look at that spot and see with your eyes the same thing in the same way, then no, you can't see it. But that doesn't mean that information is lost. In fact, you could get all the same information, if someone was filming it with a good enough camera. In both cases, you're taking in sensory information, and interpreting it to piece together an event in the past. The only difference is that in the first case you are on the "leading edge" of the information cone (or actually not, because light doesn't travel at C through air, and the biological processing takes time, but close to it), and in the second case you're farther behind the leading edge. It doesn't feel like the same thing, because the first one feels like "now," and the second one feels like the past. But really they're both the past, and neither is more "real" than the other.

Option 1: An instant-communication link (unreproduceable) with an alien civilization billions of lightyears distant. The agent says they're similar enough to us to communicate (and they want to) and generally less advanced than us. Option 2: A cheap and 100% effective cure for all cancers. Option 3: 300 shoebox sized black boxes that can each generate up to 100 gigawatts of electricity, with no inputs and no outputs except for electric current. They can't be reproduced or reverse engineered. They will each last for 1 million years.

Right, but only if it works a certain way. If it works just like electricity, only traveling instantaneously, then it would make calculations instantaneous. But what they offered was "instantaneous communication," which is a lot less specific. So: plans to build a 200ft diameter spheres, which are capable of once per minute sending either a 0 or 1 to any other such sphere, at instantaneous speeds. That would count, right? Can you build an instantaneous calculator out of those? But again, that would only be true of food production, which is only a small part of modern economies.

Much of the New Testament takes the form of letters between early Christian churches, mostly from St. Paul. By "Jewish churches" I assume he means Christian churches made up of Hebrews/Israelities.

I think Severian's point is that it's subjective. Severian is more moral than Strontidog under Severian's moral code. And presumably vice versa. i.e., saying you're more moral than group X is hard to justify, because they can say the same thing about you, under the rules of group X.

More specifically, the ability not to have to produce one's own food. If enough food for one person could be grown on one plant with almost no effort, then that would just finally complete the transition. The proportion of farmers could go from 1 or 2 percent to zero percent. If we could all produce everything that all of us have ourselves, then it might end the need for society. But it doesn't. Food is only one of the many, many things I consume but don't produce myself. And to aquire those things, I have to work, producing something that someone else is willing to pay for.

Well specify then! It's your scenario. I could say the same about your pick, in which you say "instantaneous communication of data will lead to computers of any size that can operate at speeds that we can not currently comprehend." But who says? What if it comes in the form of 200 foot spheres that can transmit 1 bit per minute between each other? I don't get it. Why would that happen?

Oh, I knew what his point was. I just happen to think it's wrong. Hi.

Not exactly. There wouldn't have been any BAM, because there wouldn't have been any clear "first organism." It's not like one moment you've got a bunch of dead chemicals, then the next you've got a fully formed microbe undergoing on all the processes of life. Did you go to the Wikipedia link? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

That is a fair point. One man's persecution is another man's protection of children. What are the criteria for political asylum? It's more than just "it's illegal there, but not here."

And why do you think that caused you to change your views? IOW, you used to be fine with it before a "level of complexity," presumably because you didn't think of the pre-complex as worthwhile. Right? Yet now you think of it as "our children," deserving of sacrifice. How does having a developed child change one's opinion of something like a zygote? (And sorry if I'm putting words in your mouth with any of this.)

Everything is poison in a sufficiently large dose, and nothing is poison in a sufficiently small dose. Drinking too much water can kill you. A few molecules of cyanide won't hurt you. So there's really no such thing as a "poisonous" substance. Just substances that are harmful at relatively low doses. (And, of course, there are organisms that evolve the ability to produce certain substances specifically because they are harmful to others in small doses.) That said, most things we use as medicine are harmful to us. They're just less harmful than the ailments they treat. Penicilin is not good for you. It's bad for you. However, it is less bad for you than the bacterial infections that you use it to treat.

I would imagine a lot of the information you gather would be EM radiation. You look at the tracks. You look at the fossils. Etc. Can you intercept a photon that traveled directly from the living dinosaur? Probably not, barring unusual light paths, like looking at a reflection off of something 40ly away. But what's special about that path of information? You gather photons in your eye, and interpret them to deduce something about a past event. That description applies to looking through a telescope at a distance supernova, or examining dinosaur bones.

Publishing in general has a very small or nonexistent profit margin in general, except on big hits, which carry everything else. I don't know about textbooks in particular, though. It might be different.

We can still gather information about that dinosaur grazing in Germany.

The stereotype of the nutjob homeschoolers doesn't come from nowhere. One of Conservapedia's main stated goals is a resource for homeschooling parents. However, I know they're not all that way. I actually think I would love to homeschool kids, if I didn't have to work. And I didn't think it would totally screw them up socially. And I had kids. And I didn't ever want any time away from them. And vice versa. Hmm.

I suppose you could argue that it would encourage a lot of population growth, and that overpopulation is already the source of many of our problems. There is truth in this, but as an absolute statement I disagree. Human populations do not universally increase without limit, and those places where they don't tend to actually be places where food supply is most secure. I also don't think there is a single population limit that can live sustainably, but it depends on our methods of doing so. The world can only sustainably support a small number of hunter-gatherers, but perhaps a large number of superfruit eaters (that also use energy and materials in a sustainable way).

Not enough info to answer the question. I guess you thought I was kidding about the big mirror, but the point I was trying to make was that you can't assume that all information travels at the speed of light by the shortest possible route. If it did, you would have no way of learning about anything that has happened on Earth more than a fraction of a second ago.