RestoringGuy

The numbers make no sense. What percent of children who did not die from the flu were not vaccinated? We can't compare 90% to another number that is not presented. CDC is the same crackpots wanting to cut off boys' foreskins.

The anarchist should recognize that the state currently provides immediate custody to unmarried mothers and not unmarried fathers. When the child is abducted by mother, it is usually not called abduction because of the blessing of the state. An action is to ignore state reports of child abduction whenever they don't tell you who is suspected and what is their real genetic relationship with the child (not the court's opinion of where a child should be). I tend to characterize single (birth) mothers as true child abductors, unless they are widowed or truly been abandoned. My mother used me as a tool to entrap a series of men for support; Men who I've never seen. You can't "force" people to stop this behavior, but you can influence it.

Yes. But it should be said that the word feminist applied here means the modern (college) feminist and the resulting welfare state, not classical feminists in history. Sadly the word is corrupted. On http://www.cnn.com/LIVING there is right now a headline: Raising a boy not to be a rapist. As if rapist is natural and popular and must be programmed out. Imagine if there were a headline "Raising a daughter not to circumcise boys".

It could have mixed results. Some people may be attracted to the idea of social cohesion. Others may be repelled by it.

You feel I've distorted your writing. Again, we arrive at this point of you correcting me about something you've written. I admit, I am experiencing mild frustration. Please explain to me, in what way is my writing a distortion of what you've written? I wish to understand what I don't understand. I have experienced this frustration also with regard to the thread "Validity and the Senses". It is frustrating enough that two different people use words and definitions that differ, and meaning is hard to assemble. It seems more comfortable talking with people when I try to use THEIR definitions, even if I have to invent an awkward new term or cluster of words to express my concept. I think, Moncaloono, you could try this trick. If somebody says a+a=b and you deduce a=2 in their language, then b=4 by deduction even if you do not like to use b as the correct symbol which you say is 4 in your mind. The important thing is b (or 4) should not morph into something else mid-paragraph. I make this mistake sometimes, because it is a limitation and risk of the communications system.

I always find it strange that the mothers are characterized as "unmarried" while fathers are characterized as "absent" (or "deadbeat"). He failed to propose marriage and he left her, that's the only way it happens in their view.

It seems like "random" is also a dynamic concept. You could not say 12 is a random number and 13 it not random, for example. It is all about the process of generating the numbers, rather than the numbers themselves.

A documentary video of a male baby being circumcised looks like a rape. Feminists will not watch and say nothing when asked whether they support such an act. Bodily choice has nothing to do with their agenda. I have heard their case for compassion for female victim (which I get) but the reverse is forbidden. If you read feminist online comments, they usually say circumcision is not a woman's issue, despite a woman's signature on hospital paperwork. I have never heard anyone say rape is not a man's issue, or a reason to put heads in the sand so to speak. If anything, rape and circumcision are both claimed to be the fault of men themselves. They want to tell only half the story.

From what I've read about Bitcoin, it is a work of genius from a software standpoint. I think it is a good concept as long as it does not remain the only such service which would make it a target. I have previously gone the Ubuntu route and found it frustratingly bundled with auto-updates and the new "Unity" interface which is heavily keyboard-driven and every key search is logged even if you search for how to change your screen colors. I switched to Linux Mint and found it much less troubling. Still the Linux designers have gone to the dark side and (like Microsoft/Apple/Google) plant hidden programs, and they like change for no reason despite obvious drawbacks (attitude of "make the interface most unlike Windows because Windows is bad"). For Bitcoin or things like it, I feel that security of the hardware should be considered and there are some Linux people concerned about UEFI. Those people usually just say turn it off, block it, buy something else,etc. I have no doubt you'll be able to buy and/or build computers without UEFI/vPro/iAMT/auto-updates,etc, for a long time. That is not a problem, but most people simply won't and Bitcoin will bend to accommodate them either at the user or server end of things. I would be crazy if I told people 30 years ago that everyone in 2013 will carry little GPS-chipped phones in their pockets that transmit 24/7 and store their geopositional data on a corporate server mandated by the government. Same for OnStar, SYNC, MayDay, etc. The hardware vulnerabilities are tough to convince people about until it's too late.

I am not as concerned with Bitcoin specifically nor do I know much about it. But it seems the devices needed to interface to the Internet are being more and more walled off and centrally controlled (iPad and Windows 8 come to mind). It will seem easy for the government to plant back doors inside the system just as they did with Carnivore in the 90's. Most computer/mobile systems I am aware of being sold today either accept automated updates from a centralized source, or are too closed to accept arbitrary software installation that does not pass through a corporate gatekeeper. The fact that we now see UEFI on PCs will mean something sigificant. We are used to the idea that many printers store essentially forever what they print. With UEFI there will be no keystoke that the goverment cannot recall, either by confiscation or remote recall using iAMT / vPRO that is irreversably built into the chips. Few people are paying attention to hardware, and Bitcoin seems like a clue that we are all succumbing to a sense of false security.

I can teach you what you're telling me, but that is not my goal. You can teach yourself while you tell me things that are irrefutably linked. My primary goal is to search for improvements and extensions of my own computational-realist thinking and I have spent a lot of time establishing what constitutes reality. I do not cling to the notion that reality is exactly the particles in our material universe, nor do I cling to the notion that the experiential world we build in our minds is the sole source of reality. I claim both of these notions can be debunked without any doubt, and that the senses and our minds lead to a reality of external objects (both tangible and abstract) which can be verified by the senses in principle by examining results of mathematical experimentation. My concern here is that your debate style has turned into some slippery grease, where you say things and later try to omit those assertions. I interpret that as refusal to self-examine. You interpret that as a state where your assertions are still valid but I have mis-read them and that is why I find contradiction. For me to retype/quote everything you have posted and wait for you to deny and/or clarify seems counterproductive. I am sure you know at this point exactly what my error is insofar as misinterpreting you, and you can set me straight.

You should read your posts. I have. You said reality is nothing more than the senses. You said if you do not experience something, then it "isn't reality". Do you claim to sense the past and all real people now? You did not say memory was accurate, you said it was not. But how would you know that it's not accurate? For that matter, how do you know what "works sometimes" are things that work in your reality, given that you say memory is inaccurate and you demand certainty for reality to exist? I am thinking now you don't want to learn. My positions are flawed also, but I try.

In this case I don't care whether or not memory is accurate, just that you believe there is such an idea of "accuracy" of memory. If you accept that your memory has some measure of accuracy (zero or otherwise) suggests to me that you can in principle compare your "real" memory to something else that is also considered by you to be real. You seem to deny that the past is essential to this discussion, or that existence of the past is in some doubt. Large enough doubt anyway to consider the past unreal to you. In that case, is not the very idea of "accuracy" of memory in equal doubt, just as the senses are insufficiently real indicators of this unreal nexus where everyone you do not currently sense might live? It makes no sense for you to say the past, and people you do not currently see, are all unreal, but somehow your memory of such things is somewhat inaccurate. Those things are unreal (being in the past which is unreal) so accuracy of memory should be a meaningless idea. Perhaps if you admit accuracy of memory has no meaning to you we can go from there.

Yes consciousness is a side-discussion here, only because sometimes "life" means "life-natural" or perhaps "life-organic" including plants and viruses, but sometimes "life" means "life-sentient" including some kinds of electronic AI and the physical construction could be irrelevant. You raise a good point, that there could be "life-self-organizing" that could include quasi-chaotic systems like galaxies. The unifying concept in all of these ideas seems to be random action. Nothing that is stuck in an infinite loop (or is completely stopped) is normally called alive. There are always cycles of action, but they are non-exact cycles, and the lifeform is able to adapt and "break free" even if it takes a long time. It is hard to imagine anything "alive" that does exactly the same thing over and over forever. To me that seems more like a mechanism, even if it happens to be made of cells.

It is not my aim to be disagreeable. I congratulate you for being skeptical of things you cannot sense. I think "sense" means more than you believe it means (memory and all the deductions of the senses). I feel there is something wrong when you say your memory is real and you accept it as sometimes faulty (how would you know that), but an objective outside reality that can be shown with arbitrarily high chance of existence is not accepted by you as real. I cannot say it is faith, but it seems like a similar unprovable choice. Your memory is sometimes faulty or it's not. The same goes for our deductive powers that indicate external reality. How can you say memory is real and external reality is a fictional? I say "fictional" not because you deny such existence, but because you are clearly denying that it deserves the word "reality".

You say "certain of" your senses. But what is certainty? Is it not reduction of error? That two things being equal, when compared, become more and more indistinguishable to your senses? To say your sense is certain, what are you comparing them to? I can only assume you mean you sense something, and later on you sense it again (and compare it to your memory of the first time, if there is such a thing as "first" time) and say "gee this is repeatable sensation" and it is now more "certain" that your senses match (What do they match? Your memory of your senses.). But if the repeatability gives certainty, then wait by your window and look for a bluebird. Mathematics is repeatable. A dream might be repeatable. And when I do a physics experiment and send my results to you, and you compare to your experiment, somewhere there is repeatability going on. But if you suppose the results of my experiment are relayed to you and match your results but the reality of them matching is "uncertain", but the sensation of a bluebird is certain, what are you using to distinguish between these two kinds of belief? I say imaginary because it could be the case that your memory is slightly less reliable (a dream can sometimes be remembered) than an exchange of repeatable experiments combined with the off chance that everyone is a real sensation of unreal beings who probably exist in some unreal nexus but you can't say for certain.

If a survival substance is excreted outside the cell membrane (stomach acid, saliva, hair), it should still qualify as a mechanism. Perhaps. Only if the automata are nondeterministic could they be called conscious. If a computer is coupled with some hardware to rapidly allow random decisions, then there can be consciousness. You could ask "how much randomness and at what MHz/GHz speed?". But we have the same problem with humans, how awake does a person have to be in the morning, how much anesthesia must wear off,before you say "yes now there is consciousness". So consciousness ought to be a continuum, perhaps based on the number of "bits per second" of randomness a system has. A monkey or dolphin may have such awareness, but at a different speed than we commonly recognize or can interpret. By random I do not necessarily mean stupid unguided randomness, but consciousness seems to require random events in the mind designed to break logical stalemates (I refer here to the Penrose argument).

Excuse some nitpickiness, but wood is dead cells, and the silicon substrate could be painted on wood. Cellular or not cellular also seems arbitrary to me. I would move in the direction of a metabolic system that is in principle capable of adapting in random ways and reproducing a copy of the original system, and perhaps that there is an internal blueprint of what is being built (such as DNA) inside the system. Cells seems like just one way to do it. If a robot can build copies of itself (not just assemble from prefab parts) and build copies of the computer chips containing the blueprint for more robots, that seems quite beyond robots today, and sufficient to say it is alive.to my gut instinct.

Why is it, when there is some small chance of uncertainty with regard to real existence outside your experience, you discard our common reality in favor of your own sensory reality, while at the same time the inaccuracy of your memory is a thing you accept and tolerate? When you look at the moon, it exists in your experience, and you retain memory of it, but you will say it might not exist right now. If there is possibly no ordering of events, then it might be the case that you have made some conclusions and the feeling you have that they are based on prior experience is only imaginary. So why accept such a conclusion?

Yes that is true. Accessing memory happens in the present. But do you distinguish between memory and current (here-and-now) sensory input? If you do distinguish, isn't that admitting to an ordering of events? If you do not distinguish, how do you currently sense (or remember) that your memory is reliable or true?

Still it does not work. An nonliving system can also "focus" entropy outside itself to preserve a mechanism. A solar panel can charge a battery (forcing entropy outside to flow outside the battery), and the battery can be used to turn the panel toward the sun the next morning. Plus a life form that is dying may be free to spiral upward in entropy long before it is called "dead". Entropy, unless radically redefined, has no place in this discussion.

It is also possible dragons will fly out of my ass and I will have no awareness of it. I do not claim time is real (as we measure and name it), but some kinds of ordering of events are real due to cause and effect. That is all I need to complete the proof of objective reality and I will explain why ordering cannot be denied. You and I both seem to accept that when you are "told" about what exists previous to your existence, you are being told about a thing outside your experience - something other than that which you can know or prove first-hand. But this claim you are saying, that your reality is limited to what you experience is similarly unknowable and unprovable. How is it you can know your reality has this limitation of sensory experience alone? I am just a guy here typing, these words are part of your experience, yet to you they do not prove I exist you only admit the possibility I exist. I get that. But how do you prove your main point (reality being limited to experience)? If that point is provable, supply the proof or else you are asking us all to accept such a thing on faith. But if that point is unprovable, then you must admit the possibility that your reality is not constrained by your experience because you think faith is a bad way to go. In other words, you seem to be taking the unprovability of things outside your experience as proof that your reality lacks such things. That seems more like faith, because you are accepting it without proof. By ordering events in your experience, first you have a sensory experience, and then you say "yes, this experience is part of my reality and I know it now". I am not telling you what you experience. You are telling me experience "only goes back as far as my memory". But you have memories of the past and do you have those memories "right now at this moment"? If not, do you deny your memories exist? If your memories do exist "now", then please observe that you are admitting to two distinct classes of events: experiences you remember, and experiences that seem "new". An ordering of events is assumed here, even if it is only a temporary mental distinction you are feeling right now. So you must either discard memory as reliable and say it has nothing to do with your reality (memory is an act of faith so you shouldn't remember why you should trust your senses at all), or else admit that events can sometimes be ordered and faith is not required for such an ordering to exist in your reality. If ordering of events exists in your reality, I believe my argument about the origin of you (hence objective reality) stands because you have a first experience (or memory if you wish) that has an origin which you can't deny is real and proven to be real.

Entropy should really not be mentioned here. The Second Law of Thermodynamics refers to a closed (isolated) system which life forms typically are not. Without isolation, a system (living or nonliving) is free to increase or decrease in entropy as it interacts with its environment. If you can enclose a rat in a sealed box in the vacuum of space, then add up the entropy of the rat, its exhale and excrement, the sum total of the contents of the box has increasing entropy just as the Second Law says. That is no different than a nonliving system inside the box.

That seems fine only if you an eternal being. If you are not eternal, in your theory you must deny your own existence. Here's why: Your experiences 1000 years ago did not exist, so there was no reality back then under your theory. Once that is accepted, it is clear the reality that generated your conception and birth (which by your own claim are limited to your experience) also did not exist. So how can you be here on Earth now? Are your experiences eternal, or are you admitting there is something to reality that is outside your experience?

That is not reality. Isn't that experience? Reality and experience are distinct, which can be proven by the origin of consciousness. If you equate reality with the senses and experience, then there is no mechanism for becoming conscious. Once unconscious (or yet to become born), a person can never wake up because they lack the awareness to create the experience of waking up. It is chicken and egg. Physical reality must do the job of generating awareness, because there are times we do not have these senses you speak of. Reality "as a purely mental process" is not sufficient, it is a mindfuck taught to us by colleges and new age jewelry stores.