Battle Royale VII Specific discussion thread

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CDL430

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The Zakath

The Zakath

Zakath says...

"Humankind does not agree universally on any issue of morality or ethics."

How does Zakath know that? Does he really have all the facts?

Some of the readers might consider this "religious trickery" but Hank Hanegraaf says on the website for his radio show... "A person would have to be omniscient and omnipotent to be able to say 'there is no God'... only someone capable of being in all places at the same time - with a perfect knowledge of all that is in the universe - can make such a statement based on all the facts."

I propose that all Atheists convert to Agnosticism unless they can "provide sufficient proof" that they are omnicient and omnipotent.
 

.Ant

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CDL430, what's the real difference between Athiesm and Agnosticism? An agnostic lives the same way as an athiest... both are equally distant from God...
 

bob b

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So Flipper posts a [drum roll, please] to announce a Press Release that claims that galaxy formation has now been solved?

It should be interesting to see if the astronomical community is as gullible as Flipper apparently seems to be. On the other hand perhaps they might be, for the claims for “dark matter” seem to indicate that there is great desperation within the community to come up with something, anything to explain the failure of proven laws of nature to match what is being revealed by the Hubble telescope.

Flipper posts:
A benchmark with a Pentium 4 overclocked to 3.45 GHz reveals a Dhrystone score of 10526 MIPS for a single processor. Therefore, about 9500 Pentium 4 processors will approximate the processing power of the human brain.
Tangents aside, ...

Tangents indeed, although the exercise is illuminating for the purpose of indicating the sheer magnitude of the [hardware] problem facing AI researchers.

The human brain is able to very effectively coordinate the results of its parallel processing structure to achieve impressive practical results, while simply having 9500 Pentium 4 processors (or many more) sitting around is only the barest beginning of a project to duplicate what any human brain seems to do with ease and little conscious effort. Does the author have any concept of the difficulties encountered in human efforts to achieve widely applicable, efficient and broadly useful "parallel processing" strategies as the human brain is able to do?

The enormous loss of efficiency and the relatively awkward coordination arrangements in current parallel processing computer schemes (except in a few very specific cases) is well known in the computing community, and because of this the prospect of “lining up” thousands or hundreds of thousands of Pentiums is a laughable approach to duplicating what a human brain does easily and apparently effortlessly using less electrical power than an ordinary light bulb.

I fear that the author is wildly optimistic in suggesting that AI efforts only have to amass thousands of individual computers in order to mimic the efficient operation and practical achievements of a single human brain.
 

bob b

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Originally posted by Aussie Thinker
The Cretinist argument of odds is always funny to read.

They love to tote out large figures of odds as though they are paying attention to some science when in actual fact they totally miss the point about odds at all.

They think if the chance of something happening is Billions to one it is unlikely to happen.

That is true..

They then forget if you have trillions of iterations the thing is not only likely to happen it is a damn near certainty.

And in regard to life.. it is 100 %.. after all it happened !

Speaking of forgetting things, you seem to have forgotten that the number of iterations has already been included in the calculations of the billion (quadrillions really) to one probability against it occurring. :devil:
 

Ash1

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SORRY KNIGHT

SORRY KNIGHT

KNIGHT

I'M REALLY SORRY. I ACCIDENTLY POSTED THIS IN THE BATTLE ROYALE VII DEBATE RESERVED FOR ZAKATH AND BOB.


here's an article from japan showing an update to the human/chimp dna similarity claims. according to the article, there's an even larger difference than previously thought.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin...n20030712b6.htm

EA
Saitama Japan

my comment about the debate...

Zakath is still clinging to the God of the Gaps argument.
He seems fairly intellegent, but still somehow misses the points in Enyart's posts...this has been a pattern throughout the debate.
 

CDL430

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Thanks for the response .ANT.

In my experience I've run into two types of Agnosticism.

Some claim that you can't know anything about God.
Others claim that they don't know enough to come to a conclusion.

The Zakath claims that science can't answer all questions in the universe.
Then in his post #6 he flat out says "God does not exist."

The Zakath is either all-knowing and all-powerful or he is an Agnostic that claims you "can't know anything about God." But of course, to make that statement you would have to be omniscient and omnipotent. I think that The Zakath should say that he is an Agnostic that claims he doesn't know enough to come to a conclusion. Maybe he does say that. I don't know because I am not omniscient or omnipotent.

Yes, both Atheists and Agnostics are distant from God but an Agnostic that claims they don't know enough to come to a conclusion is on the right path. They can admit that God is possible. For now any god will do, even "Invisible Pink Unicorn."
 

heusdens

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Cdl340:

You are right about Zakath being an agnostic.
This whole discussion is therefore not an actual debate at all between a theist and a real atheist. An agnostic leaves the issue open of what exists in primary instance: matter or consciousness.
Idealims and also theism claim that consciousness is primary to matter, materialism claims that matter is primary to consciousness.

About this 'possibility' of God thing, this sort of thing can only happen to have a reality, when you answering the basic question in philosophy (matter/consciousness, being/thinking) in the wrong way.

You can only 'think' there is a possbility there is a God, when you have included that from the grounds on as a premise by stating that consciousness has premacy over matter, and when you have not concluded that in primary instance, there is just matter, and that there is no possible way that consciousness itself can exist independend of matter.

There are people who claim that God could exist in a material way, for instance a form of energy.

God is however not defined in the way as matter is defined. Cause that would make the issue relatively easy then. We would just have 'discovered' then that we accidently came up with a different name for the same 'stuff' which already was indentified and classified to be matter.

Why use two terms for the same 'stuff'? That would be nonsense.

The issue on hand however that the definition of God does not coincide with that of matter, cause they are basically opposite.

God must be understood as a being in non-material form, outside, apart and independend from matter, and primary to matter.
Matter is attributed to the existence of God, cause it was a creation of God. Matter - in this vision - is then said to be a secondary feature of consciousness, which exists temporal and not eternal.

Materialism is the opposite vision, in which matter is the primary substance of everything that exists. Matter exists therefore in an eternal way, since it is primary, can not be destroyed or created.
This therefore overcomes the need for any 'creator' thing, and also removes the need for there being any God.

Of course, nothing forbids people to envision matter, and all of matter in an eternal way, as something of a God, but this is just projecting a human vision into matter, and does not reflect on a fundamental attribute of matter itself.

So, the only 'possibility' there exists a God, in fact can only be based on envisioning a God who exists in a material way, and in which matter is still the primary thing that exist. That is however far from what God - according to the definition in Theism - in fact is, and therefore should not be called 'God'.

Materialist don't deny for any such possibilities. The only thing materialism claims is that matter is the primary thing and consciousness the secondary thing, and matter is therefore not something that was created since the existence of matter is in no way dependend on consciousness.

In summary, when talking about this concept of a God, we should take in mind wether or not we are in fact talking about God, in the way theism defines it, or not.

The theist or idealist vision on reality, is turning reality upside down and inside out. It defines reality as a consequence of consciousness itself. It defines reality as that, since it understands consciousness to be the primary thing.

This however is not something of a 'possibility', but is a wrong approach to reality. It can be shown that this 'upside down/inside out' vision is wrong, because there is no possible way in which our consciousness could become existent from within itself. Consciousness does not contain within itself it's own cause, and therefore is not and can not be the primary substance of the world.
The only substance that can be and is primary, is that what is outside, independend and apart from the mind. Which is what we define as matter.

Consciousness as a primary substance of the world, as is the vision of theism and idealism, is in the same way impossible as it is impossible to run a program without there being any hardware in/on which the program is coded and can be run.
Nothing however stops us or dispermits us 'inventing' or 'imagining' concepts about reality, that do not conform to reality itself, and neither is it the case that reality conforms itself to our mental perception of it.
 
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wholearmor

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I haven't read all the posts on this thread so I apologize if my question has been asked already, but, believing whether there is a God or not can come down to whatever you are willing to stake your life on, right?
 

LightSon

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Rob,
Your recent post is brilliant, right up until you make the following dogmatic statements.
Originally posted by heusdens
This however is not something of a 'possibility', but is a wrong approach to reality. It can be shown that this 'upside down/inside out' vision is wrong, because there is no possible way in which our consciousness could become existent from within itself.
Were consciousness the primary thing for us, then I agree that we cannot project from our consciousness a material existence.

But you then err by extrapolating your materialism to a non material God. God is beyond the boundaries and disciplines you are invoking. God as a real, non-material being of power is not subject to the laws from which you operate and on which you base your logic. Your conclusions are flawed because materialism is your premise. If materialism is wrong, then your logic is ill-equipped to aid you in coming to conclusions that conform to reality.
 

heusdens

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Originally posted by LightSon
Rob,
Your recent post is brilliant, right up until you make the following dogmatic statements.

Were consciousness the primary thing for us, then I agree that we cannot project from our consciousness a material existence.

Our whole misunderstand of course from the fact that to us consciousness is the 'primary thing'. But we have to consider if and wether that what is primary and essential to our existence as humans, must and does coincide with the primacy of the world's objective existence. And it comes out that it can not.
So we must accept the truth, that althoug consciousness is primary to us, it is not primary to the world as such.

But you then err by extrapolating your materialism to a non material God. God is beyond the boundaries and disciplines you are invoking. God as a real, non-material being of power is not subject to the laws from which you operate and on which you base your logic. Your conclusions are flawed because materialism is your premise. If materialism is wrong, then your logic is ill-equipped to aid you in coming to conclusions that conform to reality.

I did not extrapolate from my material assumption to a non-material God, but just stated the theist interpretation of what God in fact is.
We have to place the argument in the domain of what us lets decide and base our selves on materialism. It is in fact a reasoned conclusion, in which we arrive at materialism.

The question involved in this is then, from what knowledge do we know that something outside, apart and independend of our consciousness is the primary substance of the world.

If we compare materialism and idealism, we can state that there in fact only two options. Some people base themselves on idealism, others on materialism.

How do we decide or know for ourselves, which of the two is the right conclusion, if this is at all knowable?

Did I just state that the materialist assumption is correct, without considering why it would be correct?
Although my previous post did not include the reasoning behind the conclusion that materialism is the right assumption, it is of course the case that I have made within my own reasoning a conclusion of why matter is the primary substance, and not consciousness.

Based on what and how at all, would I assume that?
Matter is not even the primary thing I know about, since the primary thing I know about, is my own consciousness.

It would be thinkable and logical if instead of matter, I would have assumed that consciousness would be the primary substance. It is the first and primary thing I know about.

So, I must have reasoned this, before arriving at the conclusion that not consciousness, but matter must be the primary substance of the world.

How on earth do I know that?

In my reasoning, I have to deal with not just the fact and acknowledgement of my own (consciouss) existence, but that of anything that forms and shapes the world.
Most of these things, which I came to know about, are things of which I know they exist apart, outside and independend of my own consciousness.

I could in pure theory and purely in my imagination assume that at some point, all these things that objectively exist, would not at all exist. All what I could project then about the world would be a completely empty and void world. It would in fact constitute nothing, besided my own thinking awareness. So, at the very minimum, I would have to state that my own consciousness would have to exist.

The other thing is this. When we reason about the concept of a non-existing world, a world in which nothing (not even my own consciousness) would be there, I would have to admit and acknowledge that such could not possible form any grounds for there being a world. A mere nothing does not constitute any reason or ground for there factually be a world.
From this one must conclude that the world itself, can not possible have formed on the grounds of a non-existing world.
Which means that since the world does exist now, this must have been always the case, in whatever form. A mere nothing can not exist, therefore something must have existed always.

Based on this knowledge, I could posit two hypothesis on how the world could exist.
The first hypothesis is that the world in fundament exists in the form of consciousness. And since I do not know of any consciousness outside of my own, this would mean: my consciousness. Restating this, this first hypothesis then states: that what is primary to the world, is formed and constituted by my consciousness.
The second and alternative hypothesis I have to state is, that if such is not the case, then quite logically, that what the world in first instance is, must be formed and based by a substance, which is outside, apart and independend of my consciousness.

Either one of these, must be correct.

The reason why we have to reject the first one is, that this would mean that everything that exists, would have to be dependend on my consciousness. That would mean, that my consciouss existence would be in fact everything what the world in fact is.
But the fact which contradicts this hypothesis is that within my consciousness, I can not find the grounds and reason for the existence of my own consciousness, neither is there a consciousness which reflects back on the indefinite past.
All my consciousness is able to tell me is that it has not existed always, and thus it's reasons and causes for it's existence must lie outside of my consciousness itself. And besides of that, I happen to be aware of the fact that my consciousness does not include everything that exists.

For these reasons, I have to adapt the alternative hypothesis, which states that that which is primary to the world itself, must be a substance which is outside, apart from and independend of my consciousness.

We call this substance: matter. And we know that matter has existed always, and is independend of anything else.

My consciouss outlook on and about the world were in fact 'created' and must have been caused by things existing outside of my own consciousness. No other cause is available here but the existence of matter. But my consciousness, although primary to my outlook on the world, is not primary to the world itself.
 
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Spartin

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Originally posted by August
Aussie Thinker wrote:


This is the same kind of reasoning that assures us that if you put a million monkeys in a cage with a million keyboards they will eventually type a Shakespeare play. And I'll have to admit that I've talked to scientists who believe it. But someone who really understands the nature of statistics knows that it won't happen. Similarly you could monitor a closed box of gas for as many years as you would care to specify, but Boyle's law would never be violated, even though by your reasoning the box would eventually fly off in some direction (assuming dimensions beyond the range of Brownian motion.)


Who is to say after 50 million years those monkeys couldn't evolve into something more cerebral? Given time and a proper pathway of evolution, I think those monkeys could possibly make Shakespeare a childrens author. It is all down to random chance here. The fact that the formation of life is made by far more than "1 million monkeys". It is made of more than I even have words to express. It is far more plausible than the Planet of the Apes scenario due to the fact that there is more "monkeys" involved with chemical laws of positive and negative charge attraction involved. This all comes down to speculation though. No answers here, just some thoughts :)


Spartin
 

August

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Bob B wrote:
<



I would agree that it would be impossible for matter/energy to initially come into existence by
natural means.

Thus, the probability of an agent external to the universe doing the job is precisely unity.>

As it now stands, the observational evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the "big bang" model of the origin of the universe. This model does not represent a "gap" in scientific knowledge, as is the statistical problem with the random mutation, natural selection aspect of evolution; or the strange makeup of the solar system. In those cases, science at least has something to work with, and may eventually come up with explanations. But the "big bang" represents a completely different type of phenomenon, for which science presently has no foundation to treat, because it violates basic physical principles. For that reason it has to be regarded as "supernatural", at least in the sense of being outside our present model of "nature".
That still doesn't quite prove that a supernatural intelligence caused it.
I would be completely convinced if there were a completely clear, obvious reason for it. My problem is that I believe Jesus meant it when he said, "God is spirit, and desires such to worship Him". I light of that, I don't see why God would create a potential problem-generating entity like the physical universe.
Probability analysis is normally applied to large numbers of events. If there are only 1 or 2 possibilities, the result is obvious, as you state.
 

heusdens

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August:

Physics has already come up with a rather well established physical theory that could explain how a Big Bang could happen to occur.
It does not violate any physical principle, and is neither explained by "supernatural" things, but just plain and ordinary physics theory, based on the properties of a "false" vacuum (an energy density state that can not be quickly lowered).

Perhaps update your knowledge on this website Inflation for beginners and this one Was Cosmic Inflation the 'Bang' of the Big Bang?
 
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heusdens

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Originally posted by RogerB
Knowledge? More like pie-in-the-sky, got a hole - make up a new theory, we'll make this work bull $hit.

Is this supposed to mean anything?

It just sounds like farting.:sigh:
 

Flipper

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BobB wrote:

So Flipper posts a [drum roll, please] to announce a Press Release that claims that galaxy formation has now been solved?

Well, it was from the Royal Astronomical Society. I believe it is a safe assumption to make that their PR department didn't just decide that it was a slow news day, and that they would therefore issue a press release without consulting their scientific staff.

Perhaps you missed the part that said:

The work has been done by Professor Carlos Frenk with colleagues Dr Carlton Baugh and Dr Shaun Cole of the University of Durham, and Dr Cedric Lacey of the Theoretical Astrophysics Centre, Copenhagen, Denmark. Dr Baugh will present these new results on Thursday 10th April at the UK's National Astronomy Meeting at the University of Southampton.

Not to mention the quote from Frenk. Anyway, the point of posting that release was not to show a potential solution to galaxy formation but rather to point out that proto-galaxies had been observed (whereas Enyart had said they had not), as well as providing a bit of detail on what they were looking for ("The tell-tale signs are the blue colour of young stars, together with the a missing chunk in the spectrum of their light, absorbed by intervening gas clouds during its long journey from the early universe to terrestrial telescopes").

It should be interesting to see if the astronomical community is as gullible as Flipper apparently seems to be. On the other hand perhaps they might be, for the claims for “dark matter” seem to indicate that there is great desperation within the community to come up with something, anything to explain the failure of proven laws of nature to match what is being revealed by the Hubble telescope.

How interesting that you should mention dark matter and the Hubble Space Telescope in the same breath. You see, these deep field observations are reliant on the existence of dark matter. To see so far back in time, astronomers use the gravitational distortion caused by large galaxies to act as a lense to magnify this ancient light.

The gravitational lensing effect can be measured and the power of the lense can be predicted from this. This effectively allows astronomers to weigh distant galaxies under certain conditions. The results from these studies indicate that dark matter is a reality.

Best of all, gravitational lensing is responsible for some of the most spectacular images in modern astronomy, such as this beautiful image from the Hubble Space Telescope. All of the yellowish objects are galaxies in the massive cluster called Abell 2218. The long red and blue arcs surrounding them are images of distant background galaxies seen through the cluster: the light from these galaxies has been bent, stretched, distorted and magnified by the dark matter inside the cluster. At a glance, this image tells us two fundamental and amazing things about the Universe: that mass bends light, and that dark matter exists.

Gravitational Lensing Group, University of Edinburgh
http://www.roe.ac.uk/~meg/darkmatter/lensing.html

By all means, check out this press release (don't worry, it also has "further scientific descriptions" from the Canada France Hawaii Telescope observatory.

An international team based in France has announced the first direct detection of the dark matter by measuring the cosmic astigmatism caused by the gravitational lensing effect first noted by Albert Einstein some ninety years ago. Light rays from distant galaxies are slightly deflected by gravity as they pass through and near clumps of dark matter on their way to the Earth. Consequently, the appearance of a distant galaxy is slightly distorted.

For the first time, this type of distortion has been detected. Using a series of deep images obtained at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope over the past two years (Figure 1), the French team analyzed the shapes of some 200,000 faint galaxies spread over two square degrees of the sky (an area approximately 10 times greater than that of the full moon). They have determined that the galaxies appear to be elongated in a coherent manner over large regions of the sky. The measured effect is small, a percent or so deviation from a purely random distribution of shapes, but the accuracy of the results leaves no doubt that the signal is due to the gravitational lensing effect of the dark matter distribution. These results have been partially confirmed by subsequent reports from two teams, one English and the other American, who have studied different patches of the sky.

http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/News/Lensing/

And something funky from Bell Labs - an alternative Dark Matter mapping method. The interesting thing about this one is that only the "right" mass map (i.e. including Dark Matter) will provide an image that is comparable to what is observed from Hubble:

http://www.bell-labs.com/org/physicalsciences/projects/darkmatter/darkmatter1.html

BobB wrote:
The human brain is able to very effectively coordinate the results of its parallel processing structure to achieve impressive practical results, while simply having 9500 Pentium 4 processors (or many more) sitting around is only the barest beginning of a project to duplicate what any human brain seems to do with ease and little conscious effort. Does the author have any concept of the difficulties encountered in human efforts to achieve widely applicable, efficient and broadly useful "parallel processing" strategies as the human brain is able to do?

Bob chose to pick MIPS as his measurement of brain processing power. I used the cluster illustration purely to illustrate the difference in a raw hardware requirement between Bob's figures and the conventionally accepted ones.

A prospective cluster would have currently insurmountable latency and parallel programming technical issues, never mind having a new AI language.

With the development of optical interconnects and another 20 years of development, who knows? Certainly a number of heavy hitters (Ray Kurzweil, Bill Joy to name two high profile commentators/developers) seem to think so.
 

bob b

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Flipper
I have been hearing this same sort of "pie in the sky" for 50 years now and the strange part is that the faster computers get the more scientists discover how much further they have to go before they can match what goes on in the head of even a newborn baby.

Its a moving target and the scientists studying how the "hardware/software" in human brains does what it does are not only staying ahead of the computer hardware/software guys but are actually widening the gap.
 

Flipper

New member
Well, time will tell.

The point is, in a processing-to-processing comparison, MIPS aren't ideal common ground between organic and mechanic processing, but they seem to be the best we've got at the moment.

MIPS aren't even a particularly good way of comparing even processor performance any more.
 
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