LOL. No working around it. It's like when you go to a scientist or a mathematician with a question expecting a clear "yes" or "no" answer and they start: "Well, it depends..." ;)

Here's another one for your collection then. I read once an esoteric buddhist answer it thus: "No, gods are irreal, a figment of imagination. But you are too."

A Buddhist here. What happens is that Buddhism doesn't care. If gods don't exist, that's fine. If they do, they don't matter. So, why bother? Consequently, you'll find Buddhists who do believe in gods and somehow insert them into their practice because "why not?"; others who do but don't because "they're not important"; others who don't and don't because "meh"; and still others who don't and do, because "why not?" (more or less my case, as I think the concept of gods useful in an abstract, poetic kind of way). In any case it doesn't make the person to be more or less of a Buddhist.

I guess a way to better picture it then would be by making a comparison with politics. If atheism were to be the "extreme left" of the line, and theism its "extreme right", with agnosticism as middle left, Buddhism would be a bubble in the middle spreading into both directions, covering the center-left to center-right range and touching both agnosticism on the left side and, well, whatever agnosticism's mirror image is on the right one.

That image fits well with Buddhism's self description as (and preaching of) a middle path, as whenever you posit some radical dichotomy to a Buddhist, no matter the subject, he'll usually answer with something akin to "both", "neither" or, if your question happens to include these two additional options, with "none of the above". It's just how Buddhism works. :-)

That. Plus, a dog (or anything with a brain) isn't a simple input/output system because the external input doesn't get all clean and shiny to the processing center, it gets mixed with memory and other internal factors. So, even if you could control external factors such that the input was exactly the same, what would get processed would still not be the same input, but a variation thereof, and hence different outputs. Which is why animals (and neural-network-based AIs) need training rather than programming. Training reinforces the memory aspect that goes with the input so that the output can become more reliably independent of internal factors, but it can never be 100% successful, after all the internal factors themselves change over time, what throws a wrench into any carefully adjusted feedback loop.

Also, robots will develop the equivalent to our emotions simply because complex enough neural networks will capture patterns that even the researches don't know are there, and over time this will build up to something. "To what" is anyone's guess.

So, when will you youngsters stop with this nonsense of misapplying the word "energy" to science-y stuff? As any theology student knows it's always meant the activity of God in the world. Gee, silly 16th'ers and their "mechanics" distorting the plain meaning of the language for us good folk!

And get off (the ancient ruins of) my lawn!

That's a good definition of bureaucracy, and what are public schools other than bureaucracies aimed at the parent-children demographics?

Parents who think their children are important do all they can to make it so. Up to and including, on worst case scenarios, learning enough to be able to teach their kids themselves. But it'd be better if they joined forces to get an actually good *and* cheap private school system going rather than doing things individually. Vote with your wallet, not matter how small it is, to get the good teachers from those fucked up government schools to leave them and start working for you at a place that actually values the fact they're good teachers, not good bureaucrats.

When people want they have the power to make right what's wrong. And many times making right requires parallel thinking. Going into the public school system should be always the absolute last resort. In every other instance people should always prefer that which they actually control.

Unless we can't see it because it's all wrapped up by the counter-annihilation of space colliding with anti-space!

At the cost of much expanded social security. Which in turn won't (probably) be much more expensive in absolute terms. Once you have robots mining, producing energy, manufacturing (including themselves) and repairing each other (and us), scarcity will drop to such a low level that what we consider wealth will be new base standard, as much as today's base standard is a Middle Age kings' notion of ultimate richness. Those with interest and talent will work to earn more than that, the majority won't, and won't really need too.

All that's required for that is cheap energy. If fusion happens we'll get there. If not, who knows?

It's more radical than that. Your examples, corrected:

a) Hey, isn't "this" "nifty"? "There are" double quotes around "this" "thing" "I" "am" "saying" "here"!

b) "Now" "I" "am going" to "say" some "thing" "else" with double quotes "around" "it"!

c) "Now" let "me" "try" "saying" some "thing" "scientific" like: "gravity" "exists". Or: "e" = "m" "c" ^2.

The goal is to only remove this kind of double quote after becoming rigourosly, absolutely certain, with no doubt whatsoever, it can be removed. And in doing so replacing whatever is within it with the correct, true, proved beyond doubt version, no matter its complexity or counterintuitiveness. All the while making sure you don't forget it all still surrounded by the unsurpassable, global double quotes of the wall between the "outside world" (if any) and what remains our inner construction of an "outside world".

If you look into them you see a typical pattern of government messing economic things around to accelerate growth beyond its natural curve or somehow trick debt away leading to a crash down the line. Fixed money cannot fix these issues, but neither can fiat money even though the later was specifically thought about as a means of fixing such problems. As the saying goes, there's no fixing stupid.

Additionally, gold is mostly fixed, but not as much as it should:

a) Now and then huge influxes happen causing all kinds of inflationary trouble. New World gold entering Europe in waves during the colonial period is a prime example.

b) It can be devalued by government-mandated restricting of coinage rights and obligatory mixing with less valuable metals, as happened in the late Roman Empire.

c) Banks can take advantage of the fact its heavy and the need of people for portability by first issuing paper money in the amount of the their reserves, and then issuing more paper than they had metal in reserve so as to lend more than they really could.

Bitcoin avoids these by making them simply impossible. In regards to "a", the rate of entry is fixed, predictable, and not a single "ounce" of Bitcoins will ever enter the universe after the pool is exhausted. About "b", there's no mixing of anything, a microBTC is a microBTC, no more and no less. And on "c", it's literally impossible for a bank to even pretend to have more than it really has, because the whole history of which BTCs entered and left it is public knowledge.

Then we'd be left with only governments basic stupidity to deal with, an overall net gain.

The problem is that GPL isn't clear. I personally prefer BSD, but I understand both licenses well enough to know why I prefer BSD. Now, try showing the GPL, particularly v3, to a developer. Not a FAQ, the license itself. He'll fall asleep after 2 minutes. Contrast this with the BSD license: a small text that in a few short sentences explains, in as much clarity as is legally possible, what it means.

Here's a suggestion for GPL folk then: try writing a GPLv4 that is concise, clear, fits into at most a single page, and is as much non-lawyered-up as possible. That might not solve the issue of lack of adoption, but it'll certainly help.

True, but it doesn't affect the argument. I use GPD in arguing about this because its the one macroeconomic concept everyone knows and, more importantly, has some idea of what it means. But sure, it's a gross simplification.

All of these reasons are based on an assumption that simply isn't true: that deflation continues when production stops. It doesn't. Without minimal production, only enough to counterbalance consumption of perishable goods, the amount of goods in the economy represented by the fixed amount of currency doesn't increase, meaning a certain amount of money isn't able to purchase any more tomorrow than it purchased yesterday, hence neither deflation nor inflation. With no production and perishable goods all being consumed, the total amount of goods diminishes, meaning that same fixed amount of currency is now able to purchase less and less, and thus that prices increase. This means there's a tension between the impulse to store money as it "automatically" increases in value and the need to invest it so that said "automatic" increase happens, and thus an equilibrium point, represented by the rate of return, between saving under one's mattress versus investing into production.

The negative effects you describe do exist however, but as symptoms of an overall adjustment of the whole economy to a system of fixed money, not as a cyclical phenomena. Once the economy adjusts it starts moving around the equilibrium point, and growth resumes. But a natural growth at a slow, sustainable rate, not this system of fast growth followed by a recession followed by fast growth followed by a recession... we have now.

$1000? If the Bitcoin theory becomes true some day in the future (a huge if) and it were to replace national currencies for the entire world (an even huger if), it might end up valued at more than $3.4 million each (at 2013 valuation). The math is simple. Current global GDP is about $72 trillion, BTCs are capped at about 21 million, hence $72 trillion / 21 million BTC ~= $3.4 million per BTC at cap time. If this were today then people would use it at 6 decimal places (microBTCs) as the day to day currency, equivalent to about $3.40, and the maximum divisibility of 8 places, equivalent to about ~$0.034, as the corresponding "cents", said valuations adjusting upwards (in terms of purchasing power) at roughly 4% per year accompanying the increase in global GDP.

I doubt any of that'll happen though. For one, governments don't want monetary power outside their hands. For another, most economists around are convinced ("convinced" as in "I believe in it from the bottom of my heart!" and "My preferred theorist said so and his equations are so pretty and I have tons of faith in him!") that deflation is evil. And third, drugs, porn, drugs, weapons, drugs, tax, drugs, pedophilia, and won't anyone please think of the children!?

Agreed. In fact, that's an argument for philosophical skepticism that I sometimes play with adopting. Most philosophical systems are perfectly coherent, so much so when you read one with an open mind you tend to be convinced. But then you read another that says the exact opposite and it has the same effect. After many doses of that one tends to start seeing all of that as vain, although then one notices that what it's really good at is producing questions, thousands upon thousands of them, all of which quite challenging and most of them outright controversial. Then the whole endeavor becomes interesting again. :-)

I apologize if I'm giving the impression of hostility. Part of it could be that English isn't my native language. From my perspective I'm being playful, as I look at Philosophy mostly in a ludic way. In fact, depending on my mood I could even be arguing against ontology (I'm somewhat enamored of Kyoto School's "muology" for example, which builds upon the Eastern concept of "emptiness" instead of ontologies' "being"), or even against realism as a whole, defending some anti-realist position or another (a favorite of mine is arguing for instrumentalism against scientific realism). It all comes down to what'd be more interesting. I find few thing more boring than someone agreeing with all my positions, as there's no possible discussion in there. The more pronounced the disagreement, the better. :-)

The main anti-realist positions, and most realist alternatives to classic ontologies, come as direct consequences from reflecting upon the impossibility of true knowledge, so much so that the typical approach for one confronting ontology is for him to come from an epistemological perspective. Your causal argument, for example, seems to me to be basically epistemological, hence my going back to a previous link in the chain of reasons that leads to it. If that previous link isn't good, or has some other interesting consequences, the effects down the line can be significant, what results in a more interesting (and fun) discussion.

Evidently it is, but it doesn't work as a counter-argument because it begs the question. When one proposes an ontology it's usually against what one perceives as a naive usage of causality or, more precisely, of historicity. In fact, no ontological realist has ever ignored or argued that it isn't the human mind that imagines mathematical entities, what they all argued and argue is that those mathematical entities have such properties that they cannot be reduced to mere imagination, and hence the repositioning of these things into an ordered system that in many instances works inversely to causal discovery.

LOL, seriously? So Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger etc. have now all been all reduced to reinstatements of Socrates and merged into Phil. 101? I know Analytic philosophers don't see things quite the way Continental ones do, but even so that's going a little too far. :P