Ah yes, pausing ghostery seems to fix it.
Plasmon
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Clicking the “Donate now” button under “PayPal or Credit Card” does not seem to do anything other than refresh the page.
(browser Firefox 48.0 , OS Ubuntu)
We know that whatever they did led to Paris and Brussels
Correlation / Causation?
I have taken the survey.
As I understand it, “This painting is beautiful” is completely equivalent to “I like (the visual aspects of) this painting”.
Definitional arguments are not useful. Even using your interpretation, the point stands: the statement, properly understood, is empirical truth.
Why bring the brain into it?
No particular reason.
“This painting is beautiful” is a statement about the reaction of the speaker
That is what I mean, yes.
Or, paralleling Good_Burning_Plastic, a statement about the reaction of people generally
Whether we define beauty to be the reaction of the speaker, or the reaction of the majority of a certain group of people that are similar to the speaker, is not relevant: in both cases “This painting is beautiful” becomes an empirical truth instead of an “affective” truth.
No. “This painting is round” is a statement about the properties of the painting itself, independent of any observer. “This painting is beautiful” is a statement about the reaction of the speaker’s brain upon seeing the painting. The syntactical similarity between those different kinds of statements in English (and all other natural languages that I know of) is unfortunate to say the least.
I do not think we should dilute the meaning of the word “truth” like this.
If I say “This painting is beautiful”, I mean “my brain produces a pleasant reaction upon seeing this painting”. The latter sentence is empirical truth. See also 2-Place and 1-Place Words
“This place feel right to me”—true! Affectively true.
Also empirically true!
Shakespeare is truth
If by this, you mean “I like Shakespeare’s writing” (an empirical truth), just say so.
All advertising for a product should be produced by a competitor of the company that makes the product. This should be required by law.
Truth in advertising laws should keep the thus-produced advertising more or less factual. It would be much less annoying and manipulative than current advertising.
However, arguments such as “you can’t exactly specify what you want it to do, so it might blackmail the president into building a road in order to reduce the map distance”
The reason that such arguments do not work is that you can specify exactly what it is you want to do, and the programmers did specify exactly that.
In more complex cases, where the programmers are unable to specify exactly what they want, you do get unexpected results that can be thought of as “the program wasn’t optimizing what the programmers thought it should be optimizing, but only a (crude) approximation thereof”. (an even better example would be one where a genetic algorithm used in circuit design unexpectedly re-purposed some circuit elements to build an antenna, but I cannot find that reference right now)
me and a pretty large community of real AI builders who consider a utility-function-based goal stack to be so unworkable that it will never be used in any real AI.
Just because the programmer doesn’t explicitly code a utility function does not mean that there is no utility function. It just means that they don’t know what the utility function is.
you mustn´t make a religious belief into a premise for science
I strongly disagree. If religion were true, that would be exactely what you should do.
Of course you can´t mix up scientific work with religion.
Why?
That statement is widely accepted today, but it is only widely accepted because virtually all attempts to do so have failed.
What happened is the following: people did try to base science on religion, they did make interesting predictions based on religious hypotheses. By elementary Bayesian reasoning, if an observation would be evidence for a religion, not observing it is evidence (though possibly weak evidence) against that religion. That is hard to accept for religious people, thus they took the only remaining option : they started pretending that religion and science are somehow independent things.
Imagine—just imagine! - that Decartes did find a soul receiver in the pineal gland. Imagine that Newton did manage to find great alchemical secrets in the bible. Imagine! If that would have happened, do you think anyone would claim that “of course you can´t mix up scientific work with religion” ?
If you can only think of Francis Collins
I did say the only relatively well-known one, not the only one. Would you prefer if I used as an example Frank Tipler or Immanuel Velikovsky, both of whom make up exceedingly implausible hypotheses to fit their religious worldview, and are widely considered pseudoscientist because of that? Or Marcus Ross, who misrepresented his views on the age of the earth in order to get a paleontology phd?
No, today’s good theistic scientists, to the extent that they still exist, are precisely those who have stopped to take religion seriously as a scientific hypothesis.
he had strong interests in Eastern religions
Being interested in religion does not a theist make. Nor does merely acknowledging the possibility of an unspecified creator entity, the simulation hypothesis is not theism.
Why did you mention him then?
He is the only well-known example of a modern theistic scientist that I can think of.
Why not mention Erwin Schrödinger or Heisenberg for example?
Both are dead, and I am not familiar with their thoughts on religion.
I looked up Schrödinger on wikipedia, and there it is : “Despite being raised in a religious household, he called himself an atheist.”.
obscure hobby quite secret and separated from his scientific work
To someone who truly takes a certain religion seriously as a scientific hypothesis, attempting to extract non-obvious information from that religion’s holy book is scientific work! The book was supposedly written by, or inspired by, an omnipotent being. How could they not expect to find important clues in there?
What do you base that last sentence on?
The complete and utter lack of modern theistic scientists looking for a soul-body communication organ, to name just one example.
There many scientists today whom are also theists.
People such as Francis Collins, who claimed to have converted to christianity after seeing a three-part frozen waterfall, which he interpreted as a sign of the holy trinity? Even though 3 is a significant number in more religions than I can be bothered to count ? No, such people are not worth mentioning in a serious discussion of this subject.
Besides, not all old theistic scientists based their science on religious premises.
Very true. They would hardly have made much progress if they did!
Many tried to do it though. Another example is Isaac Newton, who tried to extract scientific information from the bible.
My point here is not that their conclusions were wrong, but that their attitude towards religion was a scientific one, an attitude rarely seen in today’s theists.
I see you mention Rene Descartes. He believed in the existence of souls, and, taking that hypothesis seriously, he concluded there has to be a way for the soul to send signals to the body. He went looking for an organ that might fulfil this purpose, and concluded that it is the pineal gland.
This conclusion is false, the true function of the pineal gland is known today, but it illustrates a point : the old theistic scientists tended to take religion seriously, they viewed it as a valid scientific hypothesis whose implications in the real world could be studied. In that sense, they were wholly unlike modern-day theists who all too often seek refuge in unfalsifyability.
It remains extremely likely that the em drive will turn out to either not work or work only by known-but-improperly-accounted-for physics (see also: Pioneer anomaly).