it was sitting on the anti static bag ontop of the towel

Be careful with that.  Those bags are designed to direct any static current around the outside of the bag, keeping it away from the precious contents inside.  By placing said precious on top of the bag, you're exposing it to a bit of risk.

theyre looking pretty impressed at something (especially the ones about a third of the way from this end)


large image:

Spoiler :

Arnifix has a bumper car?

AWESOME!

Adolf Hitler would have come close to winning one too, in his early days.

In fact, I'm pretty sure he got nominated some time in the late 30's

FENCE SITTER

Take for example a question, 'should people be responsible for their actions?'

Yeah, that's where it gets a bit tricky.  I really do think that everyone is essentially a victim (or benefactor) or their own mind and environment, but society just wouldn't work if we took that stance where responsibility for our actions is concerned.

Individuals still have the knowledge that actions have consequences as part of the "database" in their heads.  And other individuals need to enforce those consequences for them to exist.  It's as if man made laws are no different to natural laws, and because those enforcing them would equally lack the responsibility for the action of punishment, it kind of all works out in the end.  

So yeah, it does kind of works both ways regardless. Interesting.

Which 'other' inputs do you mean? Do you mean what to see, hear and taste etc?

"I think therefore I am" is what is most obvious to me, my senses come secondary to that. What I see and hear, I have no evidence to trust what I see and hear is real.

Everything I learn about the universe, like the laws of physics, the way the brain works etc, ultimately comes through my senses. And I don't trust them as much as as the obvious "I think therefore I am", which is the only thing I truly can trust.

I mean everything.  Every input one of our senses gets changes the physical state of our brain in some way, shape, or form.  You may not trust everything you see and hear, which is a good thing, but the way in which your mind perceives that input still helps to build on the database in your head.  Any decision you make in life has nothing else to go on but what's in that database, and the physical state of what processes that information.

My vague theory is that if a deterministic system is so complex that it is effectively impossible to mredict with 100% accuracy ( too much data required to be calculated) then it is indistingushable from a chaotic system.

IOW the iillusion of free will is so complete that it may as well be considered as such. If you could know every single variable (i.e the motion and state of every single particle that has had any effect, direct or indirect on your brain since the beginning of the universe) then you could predict peoples behaviour precisely.

The implications on the "meaning" of existence are irrelevant to this. Meaning is a purely subjective sentient construct. We seem to require "meaning" to exist, not the universe

I wish the computer-made-of-meat in my head was organised enough to put it so succinctly.

Thanks, I agree.

Why do you insist that none of us are 'different', do you see me going around to people saying "You do have free will and you got not choice about it!".

No, I don't, i'm not qualified to make judgments about other people, because I can only see reality from my perceptive.
I can come to a conclusion about my reality as I perceive it, and if I have free will, but I can't do that for someone else because I don't know how they perceive reality, or even if they perceive reality at all.

Fair enough.  But again, it wouldn't be "not-irrational" to think you are any different.  It would simply be a mad assumption with no basis.

It is rational for me to assume I know how you perceive reality, as I can see exactly were your argument is coming from, and I know that I'd be making the same assumptions if it weren't for other things I can see my mind has perceived.

If you have no free will, then you can't be rational at all, because you don't have the ability to make rational decisions.

And it's you that thinks it's an illusion, it's fair enough that you make that conclusion for yourself, but don't pretend it's a fact. The debate on whether humans have free will has been going on for centuries and is still going on.

Well, no, but "decisions" cannot be irrational either, as they are all just (albeit highly complex) mechanical reactions in response to other (re)actions, so everything is, by default, "not-irrational".  But I suppose my closing statement was a poor choice of words, in hindsight.  It's more semantics than anything though.

I have (for lack of a better word) 'decided' that that is not so much a fact, but the only "not-irrational" way of looking at it... but not by choice. All the information (input) my mind has been influenced by, including that which it itself has created, shows no reason for it not to be a fact.  Sure, the experience of my own consciousness should well lead my mind to believe the opposite as fact; the old "I think therefore I am" adage, but other input my mind has had, created, and processed over my lifetime has lead it/me to question what most see as obvious, and not see it as the paradox it appears to be from the outside.. or should I say, "the inside".

Believing Free Will to be fact, or at least "rational", means making that same "leap of faith" as religion; accepting without proof that there is something else influencing the universe other than the natural laws.  Us.  While that god complex may be an idea too hard for many to give up, even more so that the idea of a higher power, it makes more "not-irrational" sense not believing it.

That's just the way I see it.  Not that I have a choice.  Like any 'decision' I make in life, the outcome is always going to be governed by what I know, how my physical mind perceived and processed it, and the chemical state it's in at the time.  None of you are any different, other than the way your own mind perceives the data it's received.

God does not play dice with the universe.

However, I do believe - and I don't know how you could disagree (indeed, you've presented nothing to show that the analogy is blatantly wrong) - that pouring scrabble letters onto a table to randomly form a sentence is analogous to amino acids randomly arranging themselves into the correct order to form a protein.

Yeah, that is a good analogy imo.  But I don't think it's a very good anaolgy to use in any argument trying to show the unlikelihood of life creating itself from the "primordial ooze"

If you take into account the sheer amount of matter in the universe, the number of ways in which the atoms can connect to form amino acids, they ways in which those can interact to join and fold into proteins, and the amount of time (virtually limitless) there is for it to happen, then you have to ask yourself "how could it not happen, somewhere, sometime?".  And once the first steps take place, the rest is almost an unavoidable chain reaction, given time.

It may take an unimaginable number of monkeys randomly mashing typewriter keys before one of them accidentally spits out the complete works of William Shakespeare, but given enough monkeys and time, one of them undoubtedly will.

There's a lot of monkeys in the universe, more than any of us could comprehend.  And they've spent a very very long time sitting in front of those typewriters.

Morals exist outside of religion though. I might not think much of Dawkins opinions / theories, but I still think he's a decent person, and has good moral judgement.

Oh for sure, and that's what I was getting at a few posts up.  But I think that for some people they don't as much, and religion provides them with a sort of external factor to keep them in check.  It may be a generic, sometimes nonsensical moral code, but it's better than nothing, for those that need something.

No normal person should need a set of rules passed down by an all powerful, vengeful "God" to dictate right from wrong, but in my eyes some parts of humanity have proven that they really still do... it's sad.