Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re: Christian Theocracy (Score 1) 1168

You completely ignored the part where he talked about how liberty and free association trumps all, even though he agrees with your sentiments. That makes you a bad person. By contrast, DarkOx is a very good, honest person.

The worst of all evils is meddlers doing their meddling. Stop it.

Comment Re:Moderate BS (Score 1) 1128

Thank you! And that's exactly what I want to know! Why do they lie? Are they even lying to themselves? It's so very perplexing.

That's why I read the news, and all the comments. I am on a long-term search to uncover how it is that a certain class of mind "thinks". Personally, I am becoming convinced that leftists are p-zombies. You can't simulate actual reasoning about real-world affairs, so the behavior of artificial, [seemingly] intelligent beings who don't seem quite right, sort of a behavioral uncanny valley, are the p-zombie red flags. These are not real people in the sense that I am a real people. That's all I got.

Comment Clarification on ID (Score 1) 669

99.9% of the sciencey types don't get what ID is really about. It is too easy and too tempting to dismiss out of hand (and to disrespect) in the Dawkins Fan Club echo chamber, in efforts to garner lay-atheist / GNU Atheist attaboys.

So, how to distill the fundamental essence underpinning the multiple facets of ID into a brief enough sentence or two that a GNU can get through before even having a chance to give in to the desire to impress his peers and make himself feel important by buttressing his woo-flagging credentials?

ID is basically an effort to rigorously model various aspects / subsystems of living systems and / or their environments, in rigorously defined contexts, so as to provide an unambiguous analysis of how the given system under consideration changes over time, and what other sorts of systems-with-changes (of more well-understood systems that change, evolve, etc.) the given phenomenon is precisely analogous to- that we can more readily appreciate and wrap our minds around- so as to be able to confidently assess whether or not the systems under consideration evolve / change in ways that fall outside of what would otherwise be considered normal probability bounds. That is to say, ID generally wants to be able to demonstrate that phenomenon X had to have taken place in life's history in precise conditions modeled Y, and that this is inescapable, this is conservative, this is bare minimum, this is indisputable. So now one and all can clearly see that phenomenon X is entirely analogous to rolling 1,000 die 1,000 times and getting all sixes each time. Or entirely analogous to finding an electron outside its orbital 10,000 out of 10,000 times. Or whatever.

This approach does not invoke potential "miracles" as they are popularly understood. Everything in such investigations has nothing to do with logically impossible events. Such events are possible in principle, which means they should be investigated.

Of course most ID proponents think the writing is on the wall and that with information (evidence) already available, it is possible (necessary) to intuit that many such known phenomena / events in life's history qualify as being extraordinarily unlikely, as per the way things normally work. But obviously until the formalizations are rigorous enough and the evidence and data are plentiful enough such that no one can disagree without being an evident fool, there is more work to be done. All the while being open to some theories about some phenomena being entirely explicable given the "normal" or "usual" behavior / probability bounds of the systems / contexts in which they are defined / modeled. This is open mindedness. This is the true pursuit of empirical knowledge.

The popular-atheists and Dawkins-cult movements however will rule out such considerations and investigations from the outset, due to philosophical convictions of which they themselves are blissfully and fervently unaware.

Comment Re:Cool, But... (Score 1) 351

Thank you for posing this question. While not a serious student of the NDE phenomenon, I am somewhat familiar. Your question is a rather large elephant in the room IMHO, and is frequently on my mind. I have never seen a good answer. In fact I never see anyone of the materialist bent even address the question.

Why should dying brains (and the minds they help facilitate) have similar experiences at all during the process of dying? Why should there be any common elements? Why should / how could the brain be making the first person, subjective experience at all possible in this circumstance? Setting that little problem aside for the moment, it's still a bit like everyone having common elements in their dreams on Monday nights, even for those who go to bed thinking it's Tuesday.

Further, there seem to be cultural influences on these common experiences. That's just weird. All of it is fascinatingly weird.

Slashdot Top Deals

The amount of beauty required launch 1 ship = 1 Millihelen

Working...