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Thought experiment proposed to reconcile psychological versus thermodynamic arrows of time:
A pair of physicists has proposed a thought experiment to help reconcile the seeming disparity between the psychological and thermodynamic arrows of time. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review E, Leonard Mlodinow and Todd Brun claim their thought experiment demonstrates that the two seemingly contradictory views of time, must always align.
When ordinary people think about time, they see the past as something that has come before and the future as a great unknown yet to come. We can remember the past, because it has happened already, but not the future, because it hasn't. Physicists, on the other hand see time as able to move either forward or backwards (towards greater entropy), which implies that we should be able to remember events in the future. So, why can't we?
It's because of the way our memories work the two say, and they've created a thought experiment to demonstrate what they mean. Imagine, they write, two chambers connected by an atomic sized tube with a turnstile in it. If there is gas in one of the chambers, individual atoms of it will move through the tube to the other chamber (towards higher entropy) tripping the turnstile as they go, in effect, counting the atoms as they pass by, until both sides have equal numbers of atoms-creating a state of equilibrium.
http://phys.org/news/2014-05-thought-psychological -thermodynamic-arrows.html
http://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/47
http://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysR evE.89.052102
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday May 06 2014, @03:54PM
I'm sorry, what does pot have to do with mind-body dualism? Societies which had no access to marijuana still developed the idea of mind-body dualism, which would suggest that it's part of human psychology and not the result of drug use.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 06 2014, @04:09PM
My tar and feather comments were more directly along the lines of it takes impaired cognitive function to believe in dualism despite the evidence against, lack of evidence for, and the stereotypical meme behaviors of transmission (conversion at the point of a sword, indoctrination/brainwashing of youth, higher popularity amongst the cognitively impaired, etc)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by edIII on Tuesday May 06 2014, @05:43PM
Faith is not "impaired cognitive function", and if you are going to be honest as a scientist, there exists no evidence and theories to disprove any of the "dualism bullshit".
I can't prove I have a soul, and you can't prove I don't.
What upsets you, and does upset me greatly as well, is that the "problem children" want to never shut up about their faith, tell us how their faith should be running our lives, and engage in the rather dangerous behavior of not understanding that faith means it's not literally true and backed by science. Major decisions that involve us all ideally should be rational and grounded in what we can actually work with in science. It's the only true fair way, and I think it's the foundation of the separation of church and state which is something I very strongly support.
Just because there exists people with low levels of maturity and sophistication that screw the whole idea of faith up, does not mean you can entirely dismiss all ontological discussions as being products of delusion or physically impaired biology.
You've used way to broad a brush to attack all of philosophy it seems and see no value in such things. Even if just recognized internally as faith, many philosophies can be quite healthy and provide people with a sense of peace and order. Regardless of what you and I believe, one fact remains. A fact we can both agree upon as rational men. We are going to die. My own faith and journey with "dualism BS" allows me my own coping mechanism for dealing with the end of what I am now.
I can have both the "dualism BS" and science. They are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I will submit to you, that many of the greatest scientists that championed science and rationality were men of faith (that doesn't mean a brand name religion). Ontological discussions and thoughts empower us, they inspire us, and drive us towards attainment of knowledge. If you've listened to the stories of these men, how was their journey not influenced by their own personal faith and how does faith hold judgement over their accomplishment?
While I understand your feelings, you have placed far to harsh a judgment against such ontological activities. They even said it was a thought experiment and weren't trying to represent it as a fundamental truth of nature to be taken at their word.
Do you exist without ANY beliefs of any kind that are not proven by science to some degree? I highly doubt that. You very much have your own dreams, ideas, and ontological journey going on right now. I choose not to marginalize that or unfairly judge it.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by naubol on Tuesday May 06 2014, @06:26PM
What concerns me...
people think I have to prove something doesn't exist for me to justify not believing in it.
people do not understand that faith is a method for choosing what to believe that is not compatible with empiricism.
faith is a popular way to try to understand the self, reality, and what to do about it, but appears to only accidentally get it right, and often is only getting it wrong except that people apply empiricism naturally and get better answers when their faith doesn't override it.
What upsets me...
faith as a reason to destroy lives, the inquisition, the crusades, the crucible, justifications for slavery, justifications for homophobia, justifications for racism or other forms of xenophobia, etc.
faith as reason for war.
I think science is properly an empirical pursuit that has often been tainted by faith. That people are scientists and have faith does not mean that faith is required for science or even a good thing to mix with science.
It is not an argument either that we need to be inspired by faith, plenty of monists have accomplished much in science. Yes, there were and are highly important dualists in science (for example, Newton, Pascal, Descartes), it is not an argument that this means we are better off for faith and dualism. It is possible we would be so much more advanced if we had culturally rejected dualism. I believe we cannot know, and you are not making an argument against this supposition.
Let us say, for the sake of argument, that I have a belief which did not derive from science or from a probabilistic argument. If, upon examining this belief under scrutiny, I cannot construct a valid chain of reasoning for sustaining the belief, I believe that I should stop believing it. I believe that is much more essential than whether or not I hold such beliefs. I choose not to believe in the soul because I cannot construct a valid chain of reasoning.
All that said, I do wish that we promoted empiricism and demoted the social value of faith, but I am not so bothered as I used to be by the idea that some people value "faith" and "dualistic" thinking. It does not "upset" me.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday May 06 2014, @07:15PM
Faith is a choice to believe in something because it feels right. It feels as if there is truth there that could be found, if only you had the data and the reasoning to see it.
This is why I find faith empowering. It comes from my heart, my dreams, my passion for something. I don't literally mean that I dream of purple Unicorns on the far side of the Moon weaving our fates, or that would be entirely healthy to believe. Scientists have the same dreams and base them upon previous examples of ideas and phenomena that have valid chains of reasoning. In that way, I have faith in the multi-verse theory being true (tied to the Big Bang via radiation?), even though it's just the beginnings of figuring that out.
The key is to be able to switch hats. You can have faith all you want, but when you are dealing with other people, switch to empiricism.
Of course that doesn't mean you can take that position to the extreme and allow behavior that is clearly damaging to the commons. It explicitly means dealing with other people and we are not very good at realizing or accepting that our own actions always affect others. So just be intelligent and judicious about it.
You're right, we may never know the true value of either faith or empiricism being applied to our species.
Just as I seemly can't argue that we should have more faith, you have no basis to argue that pure empiricism is going to be that much better.
We are human beings fraught with emotions, a severely confined space, common materials that have to be shared, a ridiculous sex drive, and the absolute terrifying knowledge that it's all going to end, but end realllllly soon for you. 100 years. Tops.
It's a miracle we are here now given the circumstances.
So I would ask you to consider that ontological pursuits, and faith in different expressions thereof, be considered if anything a coping mechanism to let us balance it all out and not go insane or turn into emotionless and sexless robots.
There is some value in the behavior.
You are generalizing and lumping all expressions of faith into one negative category.
Just because we are evolving with it, and there are so many problems we all have, doesn't dismiss faith. In fact, faith doesn't have ANYTHING to do with most of that anyways. More often than not when we study history we find that faith had not much to do with it, but it was human failings and vice that was involved. Men wanted rooms full of women for carnal pleasure. "Faith" found a way. Yay.
Faith is just a behavior with a wide spectrum to say the least. If there is anything that I am arguing is that the intellectually minded ontological pursuits are valid, not harmful, and can be helpful when framed properly.
In some way I almost feel that it is disrespectful to those men you acknowledged as "dualists", as you marginalize them. You assume that their feelings regarding faith were a handicap and they succeeded despite it. I choose to believe, and give them the benefit of the doubt at least, that they were men of enough intelligence to properly use both faith and empiricism by maintaining the balance between the two.
Let's not mince words. You want the Christians and the Muslims to shut the fuck up, put away their toys, and let the adults concentrate for once on getting the world back on track.
I get that. Your position of demoting the social value smacks of intolerance though. I would urge you to remember that advocating these kinds of behaviors to marginalize certain people in public, especially in scientific circles, has been to our detriment in many notable cases.
That's really my main fear to be honest. Is that I get marginalized in public because I am a student of philosophy primarily that has participated in the so-called goofy stuff like mysticism, meditation, and exposure to these older cultures. I can be both a student of philosophy and rigorously apply empiricism in my daily life. I truly love both.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by VLM on Tuesday May 06 2014, @09:08PM
"Scientists have the same dreams and base them upon previous examples of ideas and phenomena that have valid chains of reasoning."
Something I've never understood about faith is the whole lack of empathy thing, and relativity, especially geographic relativity.
It doesn't matter where you were born or what religion you're born into, the hard sciences all work the same way pretty much for eternity. Magnets do about the same thing here as in China, the NMR spectrum of D20 looks about the same, the specific gravity of water is about the same... And not just facts but ways of thinking. Ochem reaction mechanisms are the same everywhere for everyone no matter your activities on Sunday morning, or lack thereof. If I was popped outta mom in Japan, I could solve equations exactly like I do today, here. Aside from boring economic issues, ancestors and location just don't matter. No matter where you travel, geology "just works", like every hard science.
Yet, a biologically identical version of myself can grow up on the other side of the planet and apparently faith means something entirely different to them, up to and including we're supposed to violate the golden rule against the local clone copy in all kinds of unpleasant ways. And supposedly we all have souls but the souls there all hate the souls over here, because souls care a lot about geography, or whatever.
And all I can find in common between these faiths is something along the lines of "reason is unnecessary", although that similarity is apparently not enough to allow peaceful coexistence. Generally when two groups of people are killing each other over belief systems, both sides usually have "reason is unnecessary" at the core of both their systems, which is an interesting correlation.
Its all very much like watching a bunch of jock sports fans talk about their love of "their" team and hatred of the followers of the other team, and a guy who's uninterested in sports saying the whole thing is an unwise form of interpersonal relationship building and getting a rather hard time about it. You wanna watch the Packers on TV because you really like the Packers and hate the Bears, fine, have fun, but don't expect anyone else, anywhere else, to think it actually means anything or is useful out in the real world. The Bears, after all, are human beings just like us, even if they hate the Packers in retribution.
So those committed true believing Christians, if they were born 3000 years ago, they'd be ... Christians? I think not. Welcome to worship of Odin. Or born in Palestine instead of USA, they'd be true believing Islamic suicide bombers, right? So if there is no absolute and all faith means is when and where you were born (vaguely like astrology) then what meaning or worth could it possibly have?
Faith sounds kinda like hard drugs. You can play with them to feel better, but its playing with fire and lots have gotten burned.
"That's really my main fear to be honest. Is that I get marginalized in public because I am a student of philosophy primarily that has participated in"
Don't worry, your guys were gleefully burning our guys at the stake centuries ago not the other way around, but like I wrote, it was centuries ago, and both sides have advanced beyond that. So no worries, at least in a civilized area.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Oligonicella on Tuesday May 06 2014, @11:06PM
"Something I've never understood about faith is the whole lack of empathy thing, and relativity, especially geographic relativity."
That's a broad paint brush loaded with bullshit. Empathy is not associated with either faith or lack thereof. I've known religious people with far more empathy than some atheists I've known. Those people on both sides were both from here and afar.
"Faith sounds kinda like hard drugs. You can play with them to feel better, but its playing with fire and lots have gotten burned."
Exactly the same can be said for those without.
Religious and areligious people have helped greatly and persecuted greatly, and with equal measure and zeal.
"Don't worry, your guys were gleefully burning our guys at the stake centuries ago not the other way around..."
And ours were doing the same thing (mostly with tanks and firing squads) very recently, like even this last month.
"...but like I wrote, it was centuries ago, and both sides have advanced beyond that. So no worries, at least in a civilized area."
Like Russia today? Maybe China? Maybe here in the US?
Atheists can be just as pompous, close minded and bent on persecution as anyone else. To think otherwise is consciously putting on blinders. Just another way of saying "having faith".
(Score: 2) by naubol on Tuesday May 06 2014, @10:01PM
Uhh, I really want to respond to you in a way that seems almost colorless and without emotion.
I don't think faith necessarily leads to all those horrible things listed. I think it has been used to do those things and that is when I'm upset. I was trying to draw this distinction between being upset about faith-related matters and being merely "concerned". So, it wasn't meant to generalize to all uses of faith by any means whatsoever. My apologies for not making that clearer.
I don't feel that I agree with how you took my last sentence. I especially don't think it is a question of tolerance, because I make space for you to have your views, etc. I wouldn't attempt to persecute you, prevent you from marrying, or promulgating your ideas in a reasonable fashion. In every sense of the word "tolerate" that I think is important, I would try to tolerate you. It also wouldn't prevent me from becoming friends with you, attending your wedding, or celebrating your success and happiness on this mortal coil.
However, I don't believe that I'm being intolerant if I suggest that people arguing out of positions built on faith have a weaker view and shouldn't be, say, denying climate change or evolution. I think tolerating all things in every possible way that the word tolerate can be used is a very bad idea and it is a culture war what we should "tolerate" based on values we think are better for our culture.
I also don't believe I'm being intolerant if I think you're less connected to reality because you claim to be a person of faith. I think you almost certainly think the same thing of me, and I'm okay with that nor do I see that possible view by you as one of intolerance.
Public marginalization is unavoidable. If you are a trend setter, you have to be okay with this. If your population group is losing credibility for its views, then you will find yourself somewhat marginalized. But, while we should accept this broadly, there are specific things, like burning people at the stake, preventing marriages in the population group, or other such things.... we should not accept these.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday May 07 2014, @12:28AM
Never argued against that at all, and that's part of the challenge with my position here about how faith and empiricism can coexist. I'm defending the study of philosophy and ontological discussions in general as being intellectual valid and undeserving of the scorn they receive. I feel that is an overreaction to religion and the attempt to correct it goes too far.
There is no position
Faith does not have positions. Faith is logically precluded from participating in science, and other than an inspiration for new avenues of thought, has no place with empiricism.
There is no comparing empiricism with faith in terms of it's benefits towards a cooperative relationship with each other. Empiricism and our abilities to reason lead towards independently reproducible truths, and there is nothing more fair than how that truth is distributed. It's self evident to me that we should use that when making big decisions that affect us all, and all the way down to how we treat other people.
I feel that you are. That's a lot of judgement in that statement. A lifetime could be spent trying to argue that and you could read Groonch's post in this thread about how you are acting as a scientific authority on what is real.
Especially when related the content of this submission. It's some gentlemen proposing a simple thought experiment attempting to explain or present an idea about how something might work.
My problem with that is that it creates a constant battle about what is correct, and what is incorrect, and then heaping shit loads of judgement on the whole thing.
It's simply unnecessary. We may have dialogue about different aspects of our faiths and we may even form groups of like minds. As long as we act like rational adults about it and realize that faith is never about being right, there is no problem.
That's why faith isn't the issue, but human behavior is.
Greed is a sin. However, greed is also a seemingly emergent behavior. Greed is not based on faith, and humans would act greedy even with all faith removed.
Yet how much of religion is involved with greed? All of these truly negative aspects of faith would creep right back into your Utopia of pure science. Instead of an angry God willing to smite greedy little Naubol, it will be a review group of his peers attempting to explain the true consequences of his action with peer reviewed scientific dissertations about the benefits of the proper and equal distribution of the twinkies you took and snarfed down all on your own you bastard.
Consider the problems of Net Neutrality. What part of faith is involved in that again? I haven't heard Comcast claiming that God supported their way to bilk us out of more money. Without faith, the people involved are complete assholes all on their own.
Are you saying that faith itself leads towards the character flaws that express themselves in ways we often discuss and lament here? This is why I deny the assertion that faith is the cause of all these problems.
Faith is a rather large category of distinct groups and is a broad spectrum of how it attempts to interact with empiricism. The organized religions have been undoubtedly harmful, but I will defend the ontological pursuits of our philosophers as valuable to humanity in general and can provide some help in dealing with the human condition.
All sides here want to be correct, but I don't think that faith and empiricism without each other will answer our great questions, and lead towards our harmonious coexistence with each other and the universe. That last part may sound a bit treehuggy, but the whole living in harmony thing is rather important in a closed system with limited resources.
None of what I am saying means it would be better if you believed in a god, or in the same particular beliefs I have. I'm not saying you have to do that. I'm saying it might be a good idea to believe in something, even if you can't prove it's real yet. Don't be afraid to take that leap of faith that something might turn out be to correct even if you can't see the science yet.
Our real challenge is that element of ourselves that can me major assholes and bitches, and having faith, or not having faith, doesn't stop it from affecting our behavior. Faith can give us strength, or it can hobble us, but that is entirely up to us.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ezber Bozmak on Tuesday May 06 2014, @07:26PM
> people do not understand that faith is a method for choosing what to believe that is not compatible with empiricism.
100x this. The very definition of faith is a belief that can be neither proven nor disproved. People who try to make faith (whether it be their own or that of others) be verifiable have completely misunderstood the concept.
(Score: 1) by Groonch on Tuesday May 06 2014, @08:11PM
Empirical proof is great for the stuff it can reach, but it really only works well on a certain limited kind of repeatable problem. It doesn't even reach all scientific matters (like much of current astrophysics), and much less stuff that's of daily concern to everyone as human beings. For instance, there is no way of empirically proving human beings are sentient. You know they are sentient, because you have privileged reference to your own empirically unverifiable sentience. Then there's the million things we do and have to take on trust in all of our human relationships.
I get it when a scientific materialist is pissed off about people asserting statements of faith that fly in the face of what we know empirically. However, they misstep when they don't distinguish what we know empirically is not true from stuff that is merely empirically unverifiable. It is an empirical fact the world is older than 6000 years. But it is not an empirically verifiable fact that God or a mind (in the dualistic sense), etc. don't exist. Yes, the burden should be on the proponent, but then, exactly what experiment could prove or disprove these things? If there isn't one, you can't state with scientific authority that they are false.
You can take an ethical or political stance that unverifiable ideas are suspect, lead to bad things, and should thus be rejected. And I respect that as a personal choice, even if it's to some degree futile. But don't speak with scientific authority on things where there is no scientific authority.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 06 2014, @09:36PM
"If there isn't one, you can't state with scientific authority that they are false."
You can state with absolute certainty and (scientific) authority that given existing evidence, theories, and experimental results, it is an unscientific statement or unscientific claim.
Staying away from the inflammatory "God" discussion, it should be trivial to come up with utterly unscientific statements. This years womens fashion trends are inferior to last years. My favorite sport is superior to your favorite sport. My favorite color is blue. I strongly feel the earth is flat and the globe is a conspiracy theory (note: you can prove its round, but you can't prove much about my feelings). My favorite breed of dog is superior to all others. My source code editor is superior to yours. Clojure is better than Scala.
Given sufficient data and criteria you could express a scientific claim about Clojure being better than Scala, but I didn't provide that, so its just noise.
(Score: 1) by Groonch on Tuesday May 06 2014, @11:29PM
Stating with absolute scientific authority that a claim is unverifiable or unscientific, however one might understand that, is very different from saying it's false or even meaningless. Having the first one doesn't get you to the second one.
If I posited a the existence alternate universe that did not interact in any way with our universe, such a belief would be unverifiable. It is not necessarily untrue, however. Now, this opens an epistemological Pandora's box of how one might distinguish the unverifiable ideas one accepts from the unverifiable ideas one rejects, but that's a value decision based on an intellectual ethos, not scientific disproof.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by marcello_dl on Wednesday May 07 2014, @09:25AM
> What concerns me...
> people think I have to prove something doesn't exist for me to justify not believing in it.
Ask them where in the sacred book this vision is outlined.
Because in Matthew and Luke there is:
"If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet."
See? "Welcome", "Listen". Two different things from "Believe". Belief can't be anything but personal. You have to avoid falling for incomplete atheist reasonings, and from the social pressure of believers.
Forcing belief is evil, because it prevents personal belief to occur potentially. So even if I like to bash atheists because their arguments are the C equivalent of out of bounds arrays every time they make an assertion in the domain of transcendent concepts, I think many believers are in much more danger because they had the example of their master and they did not follow it.
(Score: 1) by Magic Oddball on Wednesday May 07 2014, @11:32AM
"Faith" has been used as a reason for those things, but the actual reason in each case was bigotry. As an agnostic, I've seen as much of that among the hardcore atheists as I have among the hardcore religious, and possibly more.
Faith has been how people explained their urge to protect the lives of children or adults, to risk their lives repeatedly helping runaway slaves reach freedom, and to fight homophobia/racism/xenophobia or other forms of hatred. It's really no different from my urge to do ethical things even when it's to my own detriment, they just put a different label on it.
On the other side, I've seen a lot of "scientific" non-believers that insisted people like me would be better off being killed as soon as it was clear we couldn't be made 'normal' like them, and that blew off any scientific studies or evidence to the contrary. I've also seen non-believers come up with pseudoscientific BS about how other races are naturally inferior (including as a justification for slavery), or claim gay people need compulsory 'treatment' for their 'disorder.'
Let's also not forget, for that matter, that clear sexism or misogyny (in the classic sense of clear hostility) is more common in both the atheist and tech communities than it is in the rest of society. Given we're not led by ancient texts as they are, the opposite should apply -- or maybe I should figure if the ancient texts or belief was really the problem, we should be far more egalitarian or far less patriarchal.
"Faith" in this context is just what religious people like to blame or credit for their urges -- really no different from non-believers like us blaming/crediting our intelligence, parenting, or other things. Both sides are making the claim from the same psychological/emotional stance, and can cause just as much harm or good acting on those impulses; they're emotions either way, and neither side is intrinsically superior to the other.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 06 2014, @06:27PM
"I can't prove I have a soul, and you can't prove I don't."
That would quite effectively remove it from the realm of rational discussion. It would also remove it from rational philosophical discussion, as any argument can be circumvented by a declaration of belief. It can be studied, but not rationally. At best it puts it somewhere like classical element theory (air, earth, fire, and water) such that a study of it could possibly improve one's quality of life, or even be a coping mechanism in some peculiar form, but using it as a basis of chemical research is highly unlikely to be successful and in a modern world full of decisions to make about chemicals and chemistry and the environment, would likely be a strong net negative. But if classical elemental theory is not true, however theoretically appealing it may be, in practice it adds nothing to reality.
The appeal to authority bit does not impress me very much. Great thinkers of the past, great politicians, great scientists, all had faith, true. They also owned slaves, and were men. I agree with the factual observation of all three characteristics, and that all three characteristics substantially influenced their lives in general, but disagree that insight or accomplishment or worth requires any or all of the three.
"unfairly judge it"
From your discussion of great thinkers, I think you've judged it a net positive for humanity. I've come to an opposite conclusion, that its been a net negative toward humanity, in total, yielding some negative feelings toward it. Probably not going to be able to hash this one out in a short time on SN.
"screw the whole idea of faith up, does not mean you can entirely dismiss all ontological discussions as being products of delusion or physically impaired biology."
Has faith ever spontaneously arisen, under careful scrutiny? Enormous quantities of historical evidence show it only spreads at the point of a sword, peer pressure, or by brainwashing, especially of youth. Some delusional, medically mentally ill people have, under observation, created their own peculiar faiths. Usually it doesn't turn out well for them or their victims, and luckily doesn't usually spread via the three transmission mechanisms previously mentioned. That doesn't disprove a faith cannot exist from a positive source and be spread in a positive manner, although its apparently never happened before, or at least not while under observation.
A large aspect of this debate seems to relate to an aesthetic judgment of occams razor.
I enjoyed your post and found your arguments interesting, although I disagreed with them. Have a nice day
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday May 06 2014, @07:20PM
Thank you as well.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1) by Groonch on Tuesday May 06 2014, @07:39PM
Not to mention that there is no necessary correlation between "faith" and philosophical dualism. Most religious faiths are dualistic, sure, but then most believe the universe actually exists, so perhaps it's wise not to dismiss *everything* a religious person might believe. The GP acts as if all the philosophical problems have been solved and we are just waiting for a few crazy hold-outs to shut up. There are actually a lot of theoretical problems with monism. For one, saying that consciousness is an emergent property of the mind explains nothing about what what consciousness is or why any physical process should be able to produce it. There's a well known essay by a philosopher Chalmers about "the hard problem" of consciousness that gets into this in detail.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday May 06 2014, @09:15PM
You can't prove that fairies and unicorns don't exist, but you'd call me crazy if I said I believed in them.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday May 06 2014, @11:41PM
No. I wouldn't.
Instead, I would tell you that's pretty interesting and sounds rather beautiful. A horse that farts rainbows and has a magical horn that makes you feel better. Fairy dust makes you fly with happy thoughts.
I would not ridicule you or judge you for that, even though, it sounds like the unsophisticated and uncomplicated dreams of little children to me and others.
I do that, because I would want you to do that for me.
Now that being said, I will look at you like you're crazy and I would ridicule you severely if you were trying to tell me the fairies objected to my penchant for eating Cheetos on the couch naked and touching myself.
So until your faith actually gets in my way and allows you to do stupid stuff with the commons I'm not going to judge you. Ha. Fairies man. You're something else dude.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday May 06 2014, @10:25PM
I find your lack of faith disturbing. Pray I am not disturbed further!
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday May 06 2014, @04:34PM
I'm making a joke of VLM's comment about progress in regards to dualism. While scientific evidence is moving away from dualism, legalized use of pot is increasing. Thus society is making "progress" towards "understanding" dualism. No longer chained by mysticism and religious dogma, your free thinking pot head can still be a dualist while sticking it to the man.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 06 2014, @09:30PM
woosh!