aah, it's so bittersweet when someone takes the words right out of your mouth: link

"Here is my position - very briefly. It is important to distinguish between propositions that are false and those that are outside the arena of science. Those ideas that cannot be tested, even in theory, are simply not science, and they are unknowable (I am talking about factual claims, not value judgments).

Unknowable propositions are worse than wrong - they are unnecessary. As I said - deism is unnecessary. That doesn’t mean there is no god - it means that the notion of a god (depending upon how it is conceived, but the basic idea of a being outside the confines of our physical universe and its laws) is simply unknowable. It is simply wrong to say that we can know god does not exist. The only logically consistent position is agnosticism. But you can combine that with the notion that such unfalsifiable claims are unnecessary. If someone chooses to have faith in such a thing, like the FSM, I really don’t care - as long as they keep it pure faith and do not make any logical or empirical claims - that’s cheating.

Regarding the term agnostic - I would rather have the opportunity to explain to people why I am agnostic than to create the other misconception (which is absolutely used as often as possible by believers) that atheists have faith in the non-existence of god. You’re burned either way, and you will have to explain yourself, so don’t shy away from philosophical purism."

Interestingly, this is the same guy who made the comment about the ghost in the machine being dead. Dualism and deism are two different things. However, yet another comment from the original thread interprets Brooks' take on duality in a way that resonates with me:

"...it seems to me that Brooks is advocating higher states of consciousness emerging as epiphenomena, rather than a dual quality of the mind, as implied by your “ghost in the machine” remark."

To me, this is the real mystery. I wholly accept the material nature of existence, and yet I still find it magical. You can have both -- complete materialism (even determinism! more on that one day) -- and yet there is still a fantastic, infinitely rich mystery to the whole thing. It's like the Mandelbrot set -- infinitely complex, yet described by a simple formula. It seems to be an intuition that comes most easily to those who have spent some time thinking about information and computation (ie, computer science and information theory). Perhaps it's just another way of saying things that have been said before, but in a somewhat more scientifically palatable vocabulary.

Something like that.

this is an interesting blog thread: link

his summary:

"...I see no merger of neuroscience and mysticism. Quite the opposite. The ghost in the machine is long dead and only the machine remains."

The comments are particularly revealing. They repeatedly knock Brooks for supposedly giving succor to dualism. I didn't read his article that way, though in retrospect he was careful to stay on the fence. The 'new atheists' are quite virulent in their disdain for this stance, however. Here's a typical example:

"...So the rogues tell us that you have to be an agnostic if you want to be intellectually honest. Well that’s crap and you know it, rogues. You do live your life as if there were no gods, and for all intents and purposes, IMO, you are atheists. The problem with telling other people you are an agnostic, is that it would in their minds create the illusion that you are undecided - like it’s a 50/50 decision."

So I guess he's saying if I self-identify as Agnostic, I'm betraying the true cause of Atheism. Now that's rich. I'm reminded of the brilliant (as always) South Park episode, where Richard Dawkins wins the war against religion, and 500 years from now the United Atheist Alliance is locked in a battle to the death with the Allied Atheist Allegiance.

Point being, people will always be people. Why can't we all just get along?

(excerpt of comment thread from an earlier post)

Vered said:

"So the thought is that there IS a "higher existence", but religions are just sets of cultural rules and customs that have nothing to do with that higher power?

If so, do you believe that?"

and I answered:

I believe that there are aspects of our existence that transcend what we would naively expect from a perfectly materialistic world. Logically, I don't know how that can be, so the question interests me.

I also believe that all major religions were obviously created by mankind, and are flawed, and to at least some degree cause division and hatred, and someday we will need to move beyond them (in their present forms).

I believe that the 'secular atheist agenda', such as it is, often tries to fight or ignore the fact that people long for meaning in their lives, and treats that longing as a failing. I worry that because of that, people feel forced to choose from a false dichotomy: 'science', with its apparent disregard for the transcendent aspects of existence, or 'religion', which acknowledges those feelings but ties them up with various myths, traditions, and dogma.

I think there's room for something else.

- Artiphys

I found this to be fascinating:

The Neural Buddhists.

excerpt:

"In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism."

Got a chance to talk with Ben Goertzel (http://www.goertzel.org/blog/blog.htm). He's got some fresh ideas about integrating virtual agents into worlds like Second Life. The problem he's running up against is what I would call the "hand of God" paradox.

If you create a simulated, Matrix-like world, and you want it to be internally consistent, can you interact with that world (as opposed to just observe it), and not screw it up in some subtle way?

Descartes wrestled with this problem long ago; Wikipedia claims it's known as "the problem of interactionism". Well, we have a concrete example of that problem right in front of us, in the form of a software conundrum.

In a perfectly simulated world, our simulated entities would act according to their own internally perfect physical properties. Simulated energy would be used to contract simulated muscles or turn simulated motors, which in turn would run simulated limbs, wheels, and so on. But what controls the actions of these agents, simulated vehicles, humans, etc? In today's video game worlds (including social worlds like Second Life, which use essentially the same sort of technology as WoW or Grand Theft Auto), a user manipulates an input device (mouse, keyboard, joystick), giving commands to his/her character, such as run, jump, shoot, pick things up, etc. Presently, these commands are typically translated into animations, so the character will run through a predetermined sequence of moves that relate to the command requested. There are some clever tricks to segue between animations, but basically it's like each command starts a flipbook movie of what the character should do.

But this throws off the whole idea of a consistent, simulated virtual world. These pre-determined motions don't pay any mind to things like gravity, inertia, or the fact that solid bodies don't move through each other. If you watch closely, most video games occasionally give out on the illusion of reality in subtle ways, such as trolls and warriors walking through each other like ghosts in World of Warcraft. Other games, especially FPS (First-Person Shooters), typically control what you can do so that you don't have the freedom to perform actions that would tear the fabric of the illusion.

But all this becomes a big problem if you want to create realistic, artificial beings that will live in this world and act consistently with each other, as well as interact meaningfully with the godlike avatars that we control from outside. The paradigm has to shift significantly, in ways that ripple through the architectural choices that are made when you put together a software engine that can run this sort of simulation.

An environment like this should be designed more like the kind of simulations that are used in serious robotics work, such as the Gazebo component of Player/Stage (ok, Microsoft has something like that as well). These simulators don't let you just go ahead and do whatever an animator can think of. If you want to walk across a room, well you better have some control software that is capable of keeping you from falling down. If you want to pick up an object, you need grippers, with proper friction coefficients at their 'fingertips'; you need to control them in such a way that they grasp the object, pick it up with a force greater than gravity, and manipulate it in the way that you envision. And, your simulator needs to be capable of faithfully and efficiently simulating all this interaction without running into the common problems of stability and consistency you see with these sorts of algorithms.

At the top level, where a human user might be manipulating a joystick, you still want things to be relatively easy. But what's going on under the hood is now at least an order of magnitude more complex than in today's video game engines. Commands to move your avatar, instead of just branching into some cool-looking animated move, have to control your avatar as if it were a robot in the virtual landscape. There are things we can do to cheat a bit, such as having virtual balancing forces, but the basic paradigm has to be that the physics -- the rules underlying the virtual Universe -- are inviolate.

This is a whole new way of thinking about (virtual) reality.

"Hopefully, the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, who are about to inherit the earth as we pass away, will treat us better than our ancestors treated them in the five centuries that Western Man ruled the world.

Otherwise, we all go out with a bang. "

-- Pat Buchanan


I do not in any way endorse his politics or ideology, but I have to admit to a grudging admiration for his intellect and (lately at least) his considerable courage in saying things most of us would prefer left unsaid.

a new clip from Anybots, with funny comments from another blogger:

http://www.botjunkie.com/2008/05/01/robot-slaves-slaves-monty-gets-a-roomba/

this is my brother's video:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3d4v6fAukrw

I really like it.