Arrogance and smug self-satisfaction.
Offline Wanna know what has been really pissing me off lately? This argument for theism:
"I don't see how all of this could have happened without a creator."
Really? YOU can't see it, huh? Well, I suppose since YOU are so F*****G super intelligent and your enormous brain can't encompass it, it can't possibly be true? A fact cannot exist outside YOUR immensely extensive experience in this universe?
GODDAM it! Get your ego under control already! Just admit that you're fallible! Admit that there IS a possibility that there may not be a creator! You have not been right about everything in your life, so you are not an authority on reality! I fully admit I don't know everything, and I would NEVER claim to KNOW (with a capital "K-N-O-W" ) if there was a god or not.
It's amazing to me how most major religions teach humility in word, but not in practice.
Now, if you'd like to join us in the imperfect human race, I'd like to talk to you. Otherwise, you risk a verbal H-bomb from me.
Robb
P.S. Atheists who claim absolute knowledge on the subject irritate the crap out of me too.
"The general opinion is not always the perfect truth..."
- Giordano Bruno
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Thank you. I was worried you were ascribing to me the words of a rather crazy person. I appreciate the correction.
I largely agree with this assessment (totus_tuus', not Marquis'), though perhaps not fully.
Politics is also largely founded on game theory- and as a device of math and logic, you can put aside your assumptions and look at the core of what's happening through these understandings.
For example: regardless of belief, we can often come to agree on stances of social libertarianism and separation of church and state because it furthers everybody's goals of liberty equally. The problem comes when, by virtue of majority only, some religious individuals go against these principles.
Not necessarily so; they could merely be outlawed from politics by making the system more representative of personal needs and wants, rather than social ones.
If we know what individual people need and want for themselves, then we can extrapolate an ideal socioeconomic system to provide for those needs and wants without cross-pollinating between those otherwise sovereign individuals.
What that means is having people tell us what they want and need, and not what they want *for* other people. The logistics of game-theory and mathematical models of economy can potentially handle the rest without ideological bias.
Anyway, it's not necessary to kill people, or even physically harm them, to remove religion. Traditional tactics of deprogramming and education can work (although expensive, it could be automated).
Religious people are people- and often as decent as any atheist- who have the unfortunate (and reversible) condition of indoctrination and ignorance. Many of us see this not as some crime or mark of guilt, but as a disease that needs treatment.
I have.
Thanks for the refreshing civil reply, Blake. Again my applogies for my confusion in haste in my previous post.
I must admit, I'm not much of a mathemetician and my understanding of game theory is sketchy; but, I know enough of matgematical systems to be of the opinion that while they are very useful models of reality, they are not reality itself. For example, if I chart the progress of my daily stroll from my house on a graph, walking five miles an hour say, I can somewhat accurately predict my location after an hour, two hours, three hours of walking. I can demonstrate to another the effect of my motion, but that other person still has not experienced my motion itself. To do that he must actually see me walking. The graph is only a tool, a representation of my motion, it is not the thing itself.
I'm not certain what you're advocating here. Are you saying that we somehow develop a system independent of emotional invlovement on the part of individuals? Be very careful here, since a close examination of governmental systems seems to indicate that the further away the government is from the individual, the less it seems to correspond to the true will of the individual.
Even if you aren't advocating such a system, I'm afraid that personal needs and wants and social needs and wants are inextricably intertwined in a complex web of interactions. We are beings designed, whether by a Creator or by evolution, to live in community; we seem to long for that, but try as we might the best we can achieve is to live in society, or pieces of societies and many of our actions impact on those societies in significant ways. Beyond that, there are those in our societies, children for example, who are not equipped to make decisions *for* themselves. What a child wants and what is best for him - and for society - are often and emphatically not the same thing.
If you want, use game theory and other mathematical models to predict behaviorss and develop strategies for how we ought to order our lives together, that's fine, but remember it's a model and not the reality of the thing itself. We'll always have folks advocating splitting heads with battle axes as opposed to those who advocate some form of constructive engagement.
"With its enduring appeal to the search for truth, philosophy has the great responsibility of forming thought and culture; and now it must strive resolutely to recover its original vocation." Pope John Paul II
You're vastly underestimating the complexity of mathematical models- and in particular computer models. These often provide predictions far more accurate than mere observation can achieve.
Not so.
For example, I could poll Bob. He wants: To drink apple juice
From that, we could use computer modeling to trace out every step in the economic supply chain necessary to get this for Bob, and we calculate how many man hours of work, and what skill level of work, and use Game theory to determine the relative values of those by weighing them against the wants of every other member of society, and then tell Bob exactly how much work of his chosen profession that he needs to do to get that apple juice.
We can tell him in terms of "money", but that isn't strictly necessary (it's just a abstract trade medium between different forms of work).
In the same way, bod could want to attend a social party where other people who have something in common with Bob also attend and talk to each-other. We can average all of their needs for this, and create an optimal setting for this, and determine every resource that needs to be put into it, finally giving Bob and idea of how much he needs to work to get that.
It doesn't matter what you want- it can always be put in terms of resources. Sometimes you may want something extremely difficult, and in those cases it will be extremely expensive (economics). We don't need to speak at all to anybody's private lives, though, beyond what they want and don't want for themselves. Other people's wants for them, or their wants for others, are irrelevant.
Bethany, for example, may dislike fat people, and want them to lose weight- Sorry Bethany, no can do; that's their business.
However, if she states her preferences in terms of herself: Bethany wants not to ever see fat people. Bethany wants to have social events with fit people.
*Now* we can figure out what that will take, and accommodate Bethany if she's willing to work hard enough to make it happen.
It's basically a traveling salesman problem of game theory and behavioral psychology and economics. It's something no human society could ever accomplish on its own through purely human intelligence, but which a powerful computer with heuristic simulations would be perfectly suited for (FYI, this is an intelligent computer- we have these).
It could be done easily at first with a limited subset of possible, simple, desires (modern super computers could handle this without very much trouble), and then expanded as our technological ability improves through economic and social efficiency.
The best thing about it is that when it's not working effectively enough, we know exactly how to improve it: More research and statistics to refine the models, more processing power to perform more iterations, more efficient algorithms. Democrats, Republicans, Communists- they don't need to argue about these things.
In our current, and incredibly inefficient, system, there is no clear path forward because we don't have the computations to reveal it- everybody wants to improve the economy, but they don't know how. This is pure "how"- it's motivations are primitive and necessarily simple- improve the happiness and prosperity of society as a whole (perhaps- or whatever we want to tell it that we want it to do- we could tell it we want to maximize music production, and it could do that instead; Happy and prosperous seem to be good metrics, though.)
Perhaps I'm a bit old-fashioned and behind the times, but I have a real problem with relegating my ability to make decisions to a machine of human making. I hold to the principle that it is my right to dispose of my goods in a manner of my choosing.
How are we going to quantify "happiness"? Whose prosperity are we going to use as a benchmark? Who determines which statistics become the input for the computer's computations? There's still a great amount of space for human error here.
You don't, but I do have a precedent for a situation where the created tries to become the decison maker thinking that it knew better than the creator. I'd rather not provide an opportunity for that disaster to occur again.
A large part of the human happiness you see to mae the standard for the perfomenace of this system lies in the need for humans to be challenged, to mae their own decisions for their good. Computers as a tool, yes; as our salvation, no thanks.
"With its enduring appeal to the search for truth, philosophy has the great responsibility of forming thought and culture; and now it must strive resolutely to recover its original vocation." Pope John Paul II
Yes, pretty much. See trans-humanism.
That doesn't really have anything to do with what I said though...
What makes each person happy is relative to that person- the best method tends to be self-reporting. And prediction based on various aspects of the individual using advanced learning and pattern finding mechanics.
That is, what makes a person happy is what makes that person happy- this can be determined, and given to the person to the extent it is possible given a fair share of resources as per production/consumption.
Person A: I want to eat strawberries and play tennis. I will make shoes as work.
Computer: Demand for shoes processed against production of strawberries and tennis equipment, pairing with tennis partner, indicate that you can receive X demand for every Y supply of shoes you produce.
Not at all. In understanding why there is no room for human error, the prior two questions are answered.
You're implying the terminator movies or something along those lines (beyond the Theistic implications, though those movies are largely mirroring mythology in their plots)- any understanding of deterministic computation reveals why the "terminator" circumstance is not plausible.
Regardless, your "precedent" is fundamentally different from what we're discussing in at least two or three ways.
Those ideas come from a misunderstanding of the technology- a misunderstanding on the behalf of bad science fiction writers who thought it was a good idea to turn to mythology and copy over-used plots from elsewhere.
And this is something that would emerge as a property if necessary for maximizing happiness.