Why are you telling me? I don't care. Neither, very likely, does Dijkstra. It's a just a fun throw-away comment he made.

Is the accuracy of the origin of either the term or the concepts essential to the quote? No.

Relax. It's not worth the time.

No, you didn't. You just suck at reading.

Nowhere do I imply that the icons are appealing -- only that they're rendered with skill that exceeds that of the average six-year-old. If a six-year-old had produced those icons, I'd be very impressed. As they're presumably the work of a professional designer, they're absolutely awful.

Well, it's very basic logic. It just takes a long time to explain, in very painful detail, to someone without a background in formal logic. To see my perspective, try to explain something like 4=2+2 in a post under the assumption that anything you write could be challenged, regardless of the relevance, by someone with no understanding of basic arithmetic. Oh, and without being able to type common operators. It'll be a pain the ass, take forever, and is very unlikely to produce positive results.

I think you replied to the wrong post.

You can't choose to believe or not believe.

  Really. Don't just take my word for it. Try it out.

Not really. The image I have is of an isolated village in the south seas fruitlessly building runways.

Sigh... Well, I tried.

I'd show you formally, but you likely won't understand it, you just you'll disagree anyway, and slashdot will make it impossible to use standard symbols.

Are you an autodidact, by chance?

You know that those are logically identical, right?

A simplified example: "John doesn't believe God exists" is identical to "John believes God does not exist" as they both expresses, unambiguously, John's beliefs about the existence of God. That is, to the question "Does John believe God exists" both statements evaluate the same way: "no".

I understand why you want to say ridiculous things like that. It may even be effective if your opponent is a moron. But it's complete nonsense. If you care, at all, about reason and logic (as many internet Atheists claim) you shouldn't abandon it so readily, regardless of your motivation.

Now that that's out of the way, this is what you *actually* want to do is differentiate between gnostic and agnostic atheism. Take a look around here, or (if you can stomach it) JREF and you'll find quite a few gnostic atheists -- those that believe, with impressive conviction, that no gods exist and assert knowledge to that effect. The more sensible agnostic atheist, while lacking a belief in god, claims no knowledge of that fact, they merely don't believe in the existence of any god.

The crux of that is 'belief' Belief is an interesting thing, as belief is not subject to the will. That is, you can't simply choose to believe or not believe in God or anything else. For example, you can't, no matter how hard you try, force yourself to disbelieve in the existence of Tom Cruise. Equally, it's impossible for you, through an act of will, to believe in Santa Clause.

Why?

I don't even know where to begin. The scope of scientific inquiry? The limits of empiricism?

Off the top of my head, Whitehead's Science and the Modern World isn't a bad place to start. Give that one a try.

Is this what they mean about religion and AI?

Because that sounds pretty religious...

You must have an exceptionally talented 6-year-old nephew.

Criticize the icons all you want, but they're certainly better than the work of 6-year-old children; your nephew excepted, of course.

The data suggest otherwise.

I don't know if you'll like it...

That would be it.

Sounds like a pretty damning indictment.

You've missed the joke.