1251. Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #135342 by Bonzai on February 28, 2008 at 9:06 pm

Josef Stalin was a priest.

Well IMHO that is kind of a weak argument because being a renegade priest is not a proof of religiosity. In fact Stalin was not even a renegade priest. He had been to a seminary briefly but never was a priest. There were compelling reasons other than religion that might have motivated him to enter a seminary. It was a good meal ticket and a guarantee for future employment for a boy from some backward, god forsaken part of the Empire where opportunities were scarce, For many peasant kids in Russia then,--and in some third world countries now where the Church is powerful,-- entering the priesthood was a career move.

Stalin was almost certainly an atheist, I don't see any need for us to dispute this point.


I think people like Stalin and Hitler were a league of their own, religiosity or its absence doesn't explain their behaviour (though religion or a religious mindset did contribute to the historical context in which they thrived)

1252. Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #135333 by Bonzai on February 28, 2008 at 8:53 pm

The Stalin Pol pot thing comes up and religious people honestly believe it because in their world view meanings can only be based on God so atheism necessarily leads to nihilism.

To argue against it we have to get at the source of the fallacy and explain clearly that no, God is not necessary for meaning and that atheism doesn't logically leads to nihilism. I know that Dawkins has made these points many times, but in this program he for some reason chose to answer the caller by simply saying that it was "coincidence" that Stalin et al were atheists. I don't think the caller walked away convinced,--this man said in the beginning that he never read Dawkins' books so he might not be aware of his better arguments.

1253. Dispatches: Holy Offensive

Comment #135313 by Bonzai on February 28, 2008 at 8:20 pm

I have been in London for a day. Beautiful city but the cost of everything was incredible. The conversion rate was about 1 pound to 2.2 Canadian dollars. The price of most things have about the same numerical value as they do in Toronto, something that costs a dollar here would cost one pound there, more or less. So I was paying more than double for everything,

I went to the London Eye and asked the guy how much it would cost for a ride on the ferris wheel. He looked at me in disdain and said, "First of all, this is not a ferris wheel, it is an observation wheel, secondly it costs 15 pounds a ride." I said thank you and walked away sheepishly.

1254. The Salamander's Tale

Comment #135299 by Bonzai on February 28, 2008 at 7:43 pm

Steve,

Unless you are a world-renowned physicist, I don't think it is wise to contradict any interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Just a small point. It makes sense to call someone out if his or her assertion contradicts quantum mechanics,--QM "facts" like Bell's inequality and what not,-- but contradicting an interpretation of QM is a lot murkier because there is no agreed upon interpretation of QM. The mainstream "interpretation" is basically that QM is weird, let's forget about interpretations and compute, which is not really an interpretation.

1255. The Salamander's Tale

Comment #135266 by Bonzai on February 28, 2008 at 7:10 pm

Steve,


Why are you hiding your face again? It seems that time is running backward as far as your avatar is concerned.

1256. The Salamander's Tale

Comment #135261 by Bonzai on February 28, 2008 at 7:03 pm

Nothing I said in any way contradicts relativity, and if it did, it would be great if you explained how, or in what way instead of just asserting that I am without an explanation.

Causality does have absolute meaning even in relativity. Absolute past and future of any given event is defined by the local light cone.

Without a picture it is difficult to explain what a light cone is and why it is so named, the important thing is that the future light cone contains all events that can be casually influenced by the given event and the past light cone consists of all events that can influence our event. Since the speed of any signal is limited by the speed of light and causal influence is mediated through signals of some kind, the boundary of the light cone is defined by the wave front of a light pulse sent from the given event "towards the past and the future". Imagine dropping a pebble into a pond, at the point where the pebble lands a circle of ripples would arise and spread outward. The inside of the expanding circle of ripples is sort of a low dimensional, mechanical analogy to the future light cone of the source event (the pebble hitting the pond)

The observer dependent part is the temporal order of events which are not causally related, these events lie outside of the local light cones of each other.

In pre relativistic physics spacetime is stratified into "parallel" slices of simultaneous events (a snapshot of the universe at a given instant if you like), this stratification is 1) global and 2) absolute(i.e observer independent). As a result events can be ordered temporally on an absolute and universal scale by ordering these slices.

In relativity, events that appear to be simultaneous with a given reference event necessarily lie outside its light cone,--so in particular they are not casually related to the reference event, this is easy to understand because no information can be transmitted faster than the speed of light for any observer. This means these events cannot be assigned to the absolute past or future to the reference event. As a result, one doesn't have the observer independent stratification of spacetime into slices of "snapshots" like in pre-relativistic physics any more,

1257. Dispatches: Holy Offensive

Comment #135145 by Bonzai on February 28, 2008 at 3:18 pm

That woman who was the "minster of race harmony" (?)was an absolutely disgrace. She sounded as though freedom of expression was only the concern of a handful artists and writers rather than a central principle of modern democracy. At least I can understand that religious fanatics and "multi-faith" leaders have a vested interest to shield religion from criticism and mockery, but a government minister should know better.

The Bishop who stood up for freedom of speech in part 4 showed a lot of integrity and independent thinking. Sensible religious people do exist.

1258. Fleabytes

Comment #135013 by Bonzai on February 28, 2008 at 12:45 pm

AL,

Wrong on the Jewish countYou can get on God's good side by being born Jewish, then by keeping the law.

Not necessarily, you also can convert even though Jews don't evangelize like Christians and Muslims.

Edit

At least according to one religious Jew I talked to, when a gentile dies he just dies. There may be some afterlife for Jews, not sure what it is though. Not really a bad deal for atheists who think that there is nothing after death anyway,


I don't think Muslims believe that you are born a piece of crap like Christians do, sin is mostly what you do later in life and yes, in Islam there are lots of sins and the punishments are nasty,--both in life and after.

1259. Fleabytes

Comment #135004 by Bonzai on February 28, 2008 at 12:37 pm

I agree with the criticism expressed here against Christianity's attitude towards suffering, but I should caution people that it is not the only way that religion explains why bad things happen (as Goldy pointed out)

Different cultures have different takes on why there is suffering, the idea that humans are somehow intrinsically unworthy or "polluted" is a very Christian concept, even Jews and Muslims don't believe it,--at least not to the same extent.

Judaism believes that we can get on God's good side by keeping the law. It is a uniquely Christian concept that we are so "polluted" that we are completely irredeemable except through Jesus' blood sacrifice. Judaism is actually quite interesting, the Book of Job basically says that you can be a be perfectly righteous person but still get shit just because God feels like it, In the end God appeared to Job but never answered any of his questions, he basically just browbeaten Job into saying uncle.

1260. Feb 12th: Happy Darwin Day!

Comment #134972 by Bonzai on February 28, 2008 at 12:17 pm

Epinephrine

Steve Zara - I PMd you about stats.

Actually ,if you don't mind, can you post it here? While I can't say I have any deep understanding of statistics I do have some training and work experience in the area and I am interested in learning more about epidemiology.

Thanks.

1261. Fleabytes

Comment #134963 by Bonzai on February 28, 2008 at 12:09 pm

scottishgeologist

Its the old "argument from suffering" but the theists simply dont have an answer.
the theists simply dont have an answer.

Actually they do, but at the cost of denying God's benevolence or omnipotent, or accepting multiple gods.

Theistic beliefs come in many shapes and forms, conventional Christianity only represents one version of theism,

The Gnostic Christians, for example, believed that the world was an imperfect realm created by an evil God,--aka Yahweh.

In some theistic beliefs such as Hinduism God is beyond good and evil and it embraces both life and destruction (Hinduism is actually monotheistic, the multiple gods are manifestations of the same entity and represent its various aspects, Shiva would be the personification of chaos and destruction)

Polytheists get around the problem of suffering by postulating that there are good and evil gods battling each others and the bad guys sometimes win. There is actually a Christian version, according to which for some inexplicable reasons Satan is able to rule the world temporarily, with the promise that God will deal with him later. This seems to be a clumsy way to get around the problem of evil using polytheistic argument while trying to avoid giving Satan the equal status to God.

Not that I find any of these credible, but they do represent interesting attempts that the ancients made to explain why there is suffering, and they also show that contemporary Christianity is by no means a universal model for theistic beliefs.

1262. Pakistan blocks YouTube over blasphemous video

Comment #134504 by Bonzai on February 27, 2008 at 10:43 pm

Apparently Pakistan has lifted the ban because Youtube has agreed to censor itself by pulling the offending clip which was, according to the Pakistani authority, "totally anti-Quranic" and "very blasphemous."


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/26/pakistan-lifts-youtube-ba_n_88522.html

1263. Fleabytes

Comment #134464 by Bonzai on February 27, 2008 at 8:35 pm

Please tell me you're joking! Those bumper stickers must have been meant as satire - which noone could be so thick as to take seriously. Sure this is not an urban myth?

Probably not.

Do you think it is a satire that Christians want Harry Potter banned?

How about this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCh2FXzD6R4

Can't remember what it is called, there is this something's law which says that no matter how you try to parody a fundie on internet chat forums you will always run into a real article who is even more weird. I think it applies beyond the internet.

1264. Fleabytes

Comment #134456 by Bonzai on February 27, 2008 at 8:14 pm

Mphil

Anyway, it means there is no justification for simply asserting ad hoc (and mostly ex post facto of being made aware of the cruelties) "well, it was meant metaphorically for x".

True. But I suggest that so called "fundamentalists" who understand their KJB "literally" are no less ad hoc.

Some jurisdictions in the U.S. with large Hispanic populations were considering adopting Spanish as a second official language. This brought out protests from the "English only" people, Many of these people were Christian fundamentalists and they made their point with a bumper sticker that read " If English was good enough for Jesus, it is good enough for me!"

1265. Fleabytes

Comment #134448 by Bonzai on February 27, 2008 at 7:55 pm

Mphil,

-The bible is very specific on what hell is, and there's much more to it than seperation from god. Real torture and pain, not just metaphorically via the absence of god, is mentioned.

It is actually not so obvious what is literal and what is metaphorical. Keep in mind that we are reading modern translations of a book written in a completely different culture thousands of years ago.

Modern English is a very rigid and structured language for which the distinction of metaphors and factual assertions are relatively clear cut. But in more "poetic" languages such as my native Chinese , metaphors are often weaved into ordinary assertions seamlessly, the native speaker familiar with the cultural context would have little problem in figuring out the intended meanings of words but a lot would be lost in translation.

Sometimes simple linguistic misunderstanding can have very unfortunate consequences.

http://www.thestar.com/News/Ontario/article/306896

1266. Fleabytes

Comment #134420 by Bonzai on February 27, 2008 at 7:02 pm

Are you aware of Peter Atkins view on philosophy? He makes the claim that it is useless, I think he is being a tad strident on the matter

If you think that was harsh you should listen to Feynman and Steven Weinberg.

I tend to agree with Atkins, but I will just leave it at that. I don't want to get into another fight with Mphil now that I am not high. :-)

1267. Fleabytes

Comment #134418 by Bonzai on February 27, 2008 at 6:51 pm

I don't know if a Christian is compelled to believe in a literal hell. There are liberal minded Christians who claim that the notion of hell was primarily invented by the Catholic Church. Jesus only mentioned it very briefly and the lake of fire etc were metaphors. It was a mental state of separation from God, not physical torment, all the glorious and graphic torture were dreamt up by the Church.

The bottom line is that the Bible is a confusing and self contradicting mess and sayings attributed to Jesus are often as cryptic as messages in fortune cookies. One can justify almost any position from "the word of God" with the appropriate interpretation. There are "Christians" like John Spong at one end and Fred Phelps at the other, they have nothing in common except for a nominal shared belief in "Christianity". I think it is tricky to assume what a Christian is compelled to believe, it seems that a lot is negotiable.

EDIT

For a timely example of Christians who passionately disagree on key matters, the Anglican Church of Canada is at risk of splitting up over same sex marriage, while the Church establishment supports SSM local parishes are breaking away.

http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/305517

1268. Fleabytes

Comment #134405 by Bonzai on February 27, 2008 at 6:20 pm

Sorry to go off topic,--yet again,--I found this link but don't know where to post it. I think many of you would find the topics interesting, especially MPhil.

As a disclaimer I don't endorse all the views expressed especially the opinions of some people who sound suspiciously "postmodernist"
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/science/index.html

1269. Add another flea to the list...

Comment #133785 by Bonzai on February 26, 2008 at 7:22 pm

That depends on what people go to see sports for, I suppose.

The drug ban is not nearly as comprehensive for the professional sports because people go to see performance, there is no romantic expectations as in so called "amateur" sport events like the Olympics.Yeah, the Olympics is supposed to be for amateurs, the ancient Greek atheletes probably didn't quit their day jobs in order to train for it, but can you honestly call training level for Olympics atheletes today "amateur"?

1270. Add another flea to the list...

Comment #133690 by Bonzai on February 26, 2008 at 2:31 pm

I have a fear of flying

Hmm.. no kidding, doesn't seem rational for someone who is so into technology and science. :)

1271. Add another flea to the list...

Comment #133686 by Bonzai on February 26, 2008 at 2:20 pm

Yeah, Steve, post a picture with you and your husband.

1272. Add another flea to the list...

Comment #133676 by Bonzai on February 26, 2008 at 2:01 pm

Why is Steve Zara putting on his hat again?

1273. Add another flea to the list...

Comment #133666 by Bonzai on February 26, 2008 at 1:42 pm

although I have seen stuff that suggests it was more than that, although maybe it was after Mao's death.

I know what you mean, there were rituals which may convey the impression of supernaturalism.

For example, I read that during the cultural revolution the peasants sang to Mao's portraits and made reports to them. But I don't think that deep in their minds they considered Mao a god. Emperors were always larger than life but no one would pray to them to try to, say, get cured of diseases. In Chinese culture rituals serve a social function which doesn't have to have any supernatural implication,--while they sometimes do, but not always.

Confucius was big on rituals and ancestor worship, but when asked point blank about the supernatural and the afterlife his answer was "I don't know and I don't care" This attitude may be a little difficult to understand for those who are brought up in the Christian tradition,--but the Jews would probably get it.

1274. Add another flea to the list...

Comment #133654 by Bonzai on February 26, 2008 at 1:17 pm

there is plenty of evidence that many Chinese worshipped Mao as a god.

Not in the supernatural sense, but in the sense of an Emperor,--all wise and kind etc. I don't think that is the same thing as in Western religion.

1275. Evidence can't shake your faith if your faith excludes it as evidence

Comment #133641 by Bonzai on February 26, 2008 at 1:00 pm

I only read some short stories by Lovecraft, never found him very good, I must be missing something. What I found most annoying was that whenever he got to the real scary or disturbing parts he would just say "It is so horrible that it cannot be described in human words.." or something to that effect. Very helpful, maybe he meant to leave it to the imagination, or maybe he was simply lost for words.

Based on my admittedly small sample his stories seem to always fall flat in the end. Interesting ideas about witchcraft and what not, but IMHO his narrative is too thin to sustain the story. There aren't enough detail descriptions of scenes and subtle psychological states. Stephen King on the other hand is a master of creating the right mood.

1276. Add another flea to the list...

Comment #133629 by Bonzai on February 26, 2008 at 12:49 pm

F=M(V)
f you have more mass, and create more velocity, you will have more force. If anyone cares to overturn the laws of physics, I shall sit back and marvel.

Sorry to nit pick (while I was chastising Quine the other day), you meant momentum. Force is the rate of change of momentum, so the force it takes to retard or stop an object with large momentum doesn't have to be very big if you can bring it down slowly over a long duration (imagine hitting on a big sponge or being caught on a safety net)

Also, having great momentum doesn't mean you can actually hit someone. The Judo guy may trick you in such a way that you end up hitting the ground with a bigger bang, which physiologically translates to more pain for you.

1277. Add another flea to the list...

Comment #133616 by Bonzai on February 26, 2008 at 12:39 pm

Richard Morgan

PS Set your Character encoding to Unicode (UTF-8) to eliminate the hieroglyphics.

Well I did set the character encoding to Unicode on my Firefox browser, but I am still seeing strange characters.

1278. Add another flea to the list...

Comment #133613 by Bonzai on February 26, 2008 at 12:36 pm

If you think Bruce Lee movies are accurate depictions of what happens in real fights....

Of course I don't get that from the movies. Actually I never seen any of them. In the West he might be known mostly as a movie star, but we (I am Chinese) knew him as a martial artist mostly, He was well known as a good combat fighter even before he started making movies.

1279. Add another flea to the list...

Comment #133574 by Bonzai on February 26, 2008 at 11:32 am

You will crush a smaller person. That is physics, not Mr. Miagi.

What if you miss?

There are martial art styles for small people which don't fight you with force. The idea is to either evade you until the small person can strike or to somehow divert your momentum and use it against you (e.g Judo)

Bruce Lee was a small guy, 5'2" or something like that, small but compact.

1280. Add another flea to the list...

Comment #133567 by Bonzai on February 26, 2008 at 11:24 am

Summers are great and winter usually isn't too bad but this one is getting me down. We have had about 2 meters of snow so far and not much of it has melted. It melts a little bit and gets all icy and then we get more snow on top of it. We have another 10 - 15 cm predicted for today. It is snowing outside right now.

Now winter isn't really a selling point for Canada, is it?

Depending on where you are the winter can range from bad to horrendous. I don't know how people survive, let alone enjoy being in places where the temperature is around -40 C everyday and with the wind it feels like -50C. I am lucky to be in Toronto, it is mild by comparison.

One thing that intrigues me is what motivated people to settle in bleak, cold places in the first place? In the beginning there were lots of places to roam about and you didn't need traveling documents and immigration papers. You could go anywhere you liked. I would think most people would go to places with plenty of food and nice climates. Why did people settle in places like the Arctic (or Northern Manitoba for that matter) Did they get lost during their long migration and got stuck?

P.S. Vancouver is warm but rains everyday.

1281. Ad 'likely to offend gay people'

Comment #133550 by Bonzai on February 26, 2008 at 11:02 am

"eradicated"?

Oh dear, this does remind me somewhat of the idea of a Final Solution. Perhaps you may wish to replace "eraticated" with "somewhat inconvenienced", just to keep people from thinking of you as a ranting extremist nutter, which I am sure you aren't.

Besides "the final solution", the Islamic Republic of Iran has another way to "cure" homosexuals. Apparently it performs the most sex change operations in the world except for Thailand.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7259057.stm

I just saw that, I think this may be a somewhat related thread to post it.

1282. Church is paying a high price for its celibacy rule

Comment #133174 by Bonzai on February 25, 2008 at 6:48 pm

I think you can go back to Saul of Tarsus for that idea.

Strange that they didn't throw castration into the package. Instead of horny men trying to resist temptation from anything that moved a neutered priesthood would solve many problems,--not to mention a lot safer for children. I am sure they could have found some theological justifications for cutting off their balls. God's eunuchs seems an appropriate enough title for those who devote their lives to serve the almighty.

1283. Church is paying a high price for its celibacy rule

Comment #132891 by Bonzai on February 25, 2008 at 11:25 am

Steve,

My understanding of why celibacy was introduced was to prevent wives from inheriting part of the property and wealth of the catholic church.

Anyone know if this is true?

I read that some priests working in wealthy parishes actually became quite wealthy, when the priest died the wealth passed on to the wife and children. But if the priest died without family, the Church would inherit the wealth. So the Church created the celibacy rule in order to get a hold of the wealth left by dead priests. The rule was introduced only in the 11th century if I remember correctly.

Cartomancer would be the person to answer this question in detail.

1284. Evidence can't shake your faith if your faith excludes it as evidence

Comment #132685 by Bonzai on February 25, 2008 at 6:02 am

imagine fish gets stabbed in the left lung and the surgeon tells him they have to open him up and patch up his left lung, fish starts protesting 'how do you know its not in my right lung?'

No, he would say he has gills.

1285. How he was sentenced to die

Comment #132675 by Bonzai on February 25, 2008 at 5:39 am

The Soviet Union was not, the Afghan communists might have been.

Might be, but nothing compares to the scourge of Islam fundamentalism. Anyone who would fuck the Mullahs and drag that country to even the 19th century would be doing it a great favour.

1286. How he was sentenced to die

Comment #132663 by Bonzai on February 25, 2008 at 5:14 am

nosobad

Pakistan declares war on YouTube

Pakistan is the prime example of a country completely fucked up by religion,--poor, backward, violent and superstitious YET they incredibly believe that they are the model of moral righteousness while all the infidels are going to hell. I have had exchanges with some Pakistani Muslims online and what struck me was their absolute confidence of their moral superiority. The name Pakistan means, get it, land of the pure.

If Pakistan is being rewarded for its "submission" Allah sure has a wicked sense of humour, These idiots prove certainly that humans evolved from apes, some of us are still steeped in apehood...

1287. Fleabytes

Comment #132661 by Bonzai on February 25, 2008 at 5:08 am

..rehashing of old atheist arguments...

Very true, but what new arguments have theists come up? So why do we need any new argument against same old same old muddled thinking?

1288. How he was sentenced to die

Comment #132599 by Bonzai on February 25, 2008 at 3:00 am

The Soviet Union in the 1980's was not nearly as bad as North Korea.

1289. Evidence can't shake your faith if your faith excludes it as evidence

Comment #132594 by Bonzai on February 25, 2008 at 2:44 am

Any not even then. I can't think of any evidence that would support the idea of an eternal, infinite, supernatural God.

You're right, those adjectives really have no meaning if you dissect them carefully. Just a word game.

1290. Evidence can't shake your faith if your faith excludes it as evidence

Comment #132586 by Bonzai on February 25, 2008 at 2:22 am

hungarianelephant

Campos sounds like a law professor who has spent more time than most in a court. Huge amounts of legal time and energy are devoted to creating "impressions" in the jurors' minds, which it is hoped will create the framework for them to build a mental picture. It's become the fashion for the prosecution case to begin with a mountain of prejudicial stuff of marginal relevance, which often should never have been admitted in the first place. If you simply concentrate on presenting evidence on behalf of your client, you will be acting in the finest legal traditions. You will also probably lose.

Interesting and revealing. I think in that case we are really barking up the wrong tree to decry Campos' faulty logic because the article may just be a PR smokescreen intended to confuse.

1291. Evidence can't shake your faith if your faith excludes it as evidence

Comment #132582 by Bonzai on February 25, 2008 at 2:07 am

I would have a problem. How would you distinguish between "deity" and "very clever aliens"?

Problem is "God" is not specific enough to be an explanation of anything. It is just a stand in for our ignorance. So unless the theists have a specific list of properties about their Gods and some descriptions about whatever divine processes in question "God did it" is an empty statement, its precise meaning is "I don't know".

So my view is that there is never any evidence that can be used to support the existence of God unless there is a concrete meaning given to God in the first place. A mere assertion of existence without any detail attribute is not even an existence claim at all even though it looks like one as a result of linguistics. What is existence without attribute? Maybe the philosophers here would take a stab at it but I think it has no meaning.

The problem with the theists is whenever they get specific they are invariably shown to be wrong so to avoid being nailed down their concept of God becomes more and more vague and now to the point of completely vacuous and serves only as a gap filler.

1292. How he was sentenced to die

Comment #132576 by Bonzai on February 25, 2008 at 1:57 am

Afghanistan would probably have been better off under the Soviets. At least women got to go to school and people don't get killed for blasphemy.

1293. How he was sentenced to die

Comment #132569 by Bonzai on February 25, 2008 at 1:40 am

I'm curious as to what a "23 year old student" is doing in that particular area?

Seems that he is Afghan and he is there because it is his home.

1294. Evidence can't shake your faith if your faith excludes it as evidence

Comment #132541 by Bonzai on February 25, 2008 at 12:34 am

"No believer will find his faith shaken by evidence that is evidence only in the light of assumptions he does not share and considers flatly wrong."

To the extent that this is true, it is an observation about the mindset of the believer rather than a demonstration that "evidence" has no meaning.

Fish is a law professor apparently, I wonder what he would say in a trial if he is serious about his post modern "theory" of evidence.

"Yeah.. dear jurors, it is true that all evidence suggests that my client is the murderer. er.. but that is only under the assumption that these findings actually constitute evidence.. the eyewitness accounts, the dna and blood stain found all over my client's shirt... the butcher knife with my client's finger prints and the victims blood found in my client's closet ... the evidence is against my client beyond a shadow of the doubt only under the overarching assumptions that the eye-witnesses have not been bewitched by the devil and the blood stain, dna, the knife etc were not planted by little green men from Mass when they stop time... But if you share my assumption that the devil and little green Martians are actively at work the evidence can be dismissed easily... so the conventional assumptions about evidence are flatly wrong..I therefore ask that my clients be acquitted. I rest my case, thank you very much.."

Judge asks, "Mr. Fish, are you smoking those stuffs that juxtamonkey gave you?"

" Mr, Judge.. er...maybe.. depending on your assumption about what constitutes smoking... . it is not smoking by my definition ..er..since I inhaled it through my rectum.."

1295. How he was sentenced to die

Comment #132540 by Bonzai on February 25, 2008 at 12:15 am

Yeah, I wonder if the current regime is really a whole lot better than the Talibans,

1296. Richard Dawkins on five of his favorite books

Comment #132538 by Bonzai on February 25, 2008 at 12:07 am

"The joy of gay sex" by Siverstein and Picano.

Somehow I like do it yourself books.

1297. Physicist Neil Turok: Big Bang Wasn't the Beginning

Comment #132307 by Bonzai on February 24, 2008 at 3:16 pm

Brian,

OK Bonzai. I just didn't get Engineering mathematics very well in Uni. To say it was unclear to me is an understatement. Any tips on getting maths without doing a boat load of study? I did quite well in High-school calculus, etc, just not Uni.

If you just want to have some conceptual understanding of the kind of topics discussed here, you probably don't need a lot of math.

Steve Zara is good at explaining things, he probably can point you to some good books that give a conceptual survey on some of the topics.

For physics my favourite is Roger Penrose's monster "the road to reality", but it takes a bit of work to get through. He started from the Pythagoras theorem and elementary calculus and leads you to string theory and quantum gravity and sketching the mathematics required along the way. He claims the work is self contained and he assumes the readers know only how to add and multiply fractions, but I think this may not be realistic.

The reason I like Penrose is that he always has something original to offer and he doesn't dumb things down like Hawkings does. He shows you the math and actually tries to explain what is going on behind the equations. The downside is that it would require a lot more work on the reader's part. How often do you see a "popular science" book that comes with exercises?


Another book that one may find interesting is Lee Smolin's "the troubles with physics" (that seems to be the title) No math in this one. This is a rather scathing critique of string theory and comments on what he thinks has gone wrong in physics research. It is a controversial book and decidedly partisan, but it provides a good balance to the hypes you find in many popular books on string theory,--I haven't read Brian Greene's "the elegant universe" but his TV documentary comes across like propaganda IMO.

Engineering math textbooks emphasize on computations for good reasons, but they are not very good in developing conceptual understanding and appreciation. For that purpose I would recommend "What is mathematics" by Courant and Robbins http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Elementary-Approach-Ideas-Methods/dp/0195105192

1298. Physicist Neil Turok: Big Bang Wasn't the Beginning

Comment #132277 by Bonzai on February 24, 2008 at 2:39 pm

Spinoza,

Bonzai, that's because non-philosophers are content to misunderstand others without realizing it.

Misunderstanding occurs, that is life. It is not difficult to rectify, the technique is called "ASK IF IT IS UNCLEAR"

I don't think you need to study sophisticated philosophy to master this technique.

On the other hand, witnessing philosophers having informal talks among themselves doesn't convince me that they are better in communicating themselves than the non philosophers.

In fact just the opposite, very often you see their conversations degenerate into massive confusions because of the tangential word games that only philosophers would play.

You're also just rehashing a debate that went on in philosophy 100 years ago. Check out "Ordinary Language Philosophy" (Austin, Ryle, Strawson, Wittgenstein, etc).

I wouldn't be surprised that it is old hat, many philosophers are still doing Plato, But then not knowing what the movement was all about I would expect that "ordinary language" was found to be inadequate for the purpose of Scholastic philosophy because the later often doesn't have a specific enough context and a shared substrate of meanings except through words. .

That's nonsense. There is no such thing as "meaning" independent of context.

Yes, of course. But what is peculiar about philosophy is that the context is often also constructed with words with nothing else to anchor the words (consider metaphysics)

In physics, for example, there is a vast substrate of shared meanings made up of intuitions, data, facts, equations etc. People with shared access to this substrate of meanings can communicate even without spelling out everything in details and making all the qualifying clauses. Words are just pointers.

Sometimes even mathematics is just pointers, mathematicians would cringe at some mathematical procedures that physicists use, for example getting rid of infinities with renormalization. It is definitely mathematically wrong (anyone who writes infinity -infinity = 0 in a first year calculus course would definitely get a zero)but it works. The reason why it works in the context that physicists use it is not to be found in the mathematical formalism, the physics is hidden somewhere, it is important to find that out. But my point is, in this case the math is just a "pointer", it would be missing the point to just say that the math is not kosher, more important is to explain why unkosher math actually works for these problems.

Since I don't want to start another fight with yet another philosopher I will just leave it as that. Let's agree to disagree.

1299. Physicist Neil Turok: Big Bang Wasn't the Beginning

Comment #132249 by Bonzai on February 24, 2008 at 2:09 pm

Brian,

Quine's nitpicking has nothing to do with string theory, it is about the inductive nature of science.

His second post on "only way" is equally misplaced. By that Turok means the only way compatible with known constraints imposed by relativity and Quantum mechanics etc. No one in physics would be talking about logically impossibilities, again showing that Quine missed the context,

EDIT; That was an interview about some ideas on the speculative end of cosmology, Turok was not giving a lecture on scientific method 101 for Zeus' sake.

1300. Physicist Neil Turok: Big Bang Wasn't the Beginning

Comment #132236 by Bonzai on February 24, 2008 at 1:56 pm

Quine,

Stop the pedantic nitpicking, would you?

I hate to keep saying this, somehow it seems only philosophers have problems understanding people making simple points without spelling out everything explicitly.

My theory is that all *real* discussions happen within a context and the context would clarify the intended meanings of words. For example, scientists or just people who have some basic understanding of how science works would have no problem parsing Turok's statement and understand his intended meaning.

But philosophical discussions often take place at such a high level of generality and abstraction that they are divorced from any concrete context,--in other words they may very well be just BS pretending to be profound discussions.

In the absence of any context words are the only tool for philosophers to convey "meanings",--though I would be somewhat hesitant to consider much of metaphysics or ontology "meaningful", but that's just me.

Spending too much time on these scholastic activities may lead to an occupational hazard for the philosopher, namely a failure to understand how people use language informally in real communications and the tendency to appear like condescending smart asses when he tries to "correct" others' perceived misuse of language,--this may actually be a health hazard because it may lead to beating in some circles

EDIT: Not to single out philosophers I notice the same affliction in some lawyers as well, though not as serious.