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Messages - Frenzie

6753
DnD Central / Re: The Problem with Atheism
Quote from: ersi on
Today I was able to identify at least this preconceived notion of yours: "If I don't know, then nobody else knows either. (At least ersi doesn't!)" Are the facts in your life in accordance with this notion?

If you do know, you're doing a pretty good job pretending you don't by creating straw men out of e.g. physicists. My "preconceived notion" remains the same as before: without a reality check such as science, you have no idea whether your logical constructions actually relate to reality. You might have overlooked something, whether it's a fact about nature or an illogical leap in your reasoning. The latter might be detectable through reason alone, but the former unfortunately is not.

Quote from: ersi on
Besides other problems with this definition, the root philosophical issue here is that it came from your mind. The definition is not independent from your mind and thus, alas, it's unreal as per your own definition. So much for rigour.

When I say a sky-scraper-sized pink elephant that concept is also real, yet somehow it doesn't refer to anything real. It's quite simple at the basics. Of course you could greatly complicate matters by speaking of e.g. simulacra and the hyperreal because nothing is ever quite that simple. Proposing that our universe is some sort of simulacrum goes back at least to Plato. One might counter-propose that such concepts as God are themselves baseless simulacra that conceal no truth at all—a point made in some form by Baudrillard himself, if I recall correctly.

Quote from: ersi on
As for my mistakes, feel free to point them out. I am very much into learning, even from you, and certainly from my own mistakes.

I've been repeatedly paraphrasing much the same thing about epistemology. You said, "I don't like unanswered questions. In the end, I have found no question unanswerable." This seems to exemplify what I mean when I say that an answer isn't necessarily better than none.

Quote from: ersi on
Awesome. Congrats to you for this bit. Already earlier I was very close to get to the concept of subject (the logical opposite of object) which is directly relevant to what you say here, but I suspected you would denounce this as yet another meaningless word. In case you confirm that subject is a relevant concept now, I will proceed. But confirm it, please.

Probably not. :P You sound rather Platonic and Cartesian in your outlooks, while I lean more in the direction of Spinoza's liberationism or the more recent enactivism. Although I'm not entirely sure what that has to do with the universe, unless you're proposing that the universe itself has some kind of Dasein.

Quote from: Barulheira on
Social or human sciences (or whatever they are called in English) don't have anything in common with "the transcendent" - and, in fact, don't need it.

+1
6756
DnD Central / Re: The Problem with Atheism
Quote from: ersi on
The answer as per atheism: So what?

No, the answer is I don't know and you most certainly don't know either. It's not so what. The so what applies to my life in general. Imagine there is an ultimate cause, and that to presuppose such a thing is not just a meaningless combination of words. What difference does it make? To me, not particularly more or less than to discover that epigenetics plays a very important role in the heritability of traits. It's all extremely interesting, yet it doesn't affect my life at all.

You're the one who seems to have little interest in the extent of your own lack of knowledge. You just claim things willy-nilly, like that there is an ultimate cause, yet you accuse me of a lack of rigor. My rigor consists precisely of not pretending to know the answer when I don't, or that a question is meaningful just because I can ask it. My rigor consists of always trying to accept the facts for what they are rather than making the facts fit my preconceived notions. I refuse to repeat your mistakes. Something that exists independently outside your mind is the best working definition of reality I dare give. You accuse it of being fluid and malleable, which is a very intentional feature, not a bug.

A question that starts with a WH-word and ends in a question mark may look like a question, but there are presuppositions and implications at the core of the question that may not make sense at all. Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the ultimate cause? I think you need to demonstrate the necessity of why and what. Simply put, the universe is not an object inside the universe.
6757
DnD Central / Re: The Problem with Atheism
Quote from: ersi on
Already just for the reasons of clarity I am all for proper definitions. In this case, the problem is your statement "There was no matter until a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang". Now it looks like you were saying there was no mass or volume until a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.

There are a few more facets to be considered. If you're speaking of a so-called common-sense definition of matter, I hardly think non-relativistic matter counts.

Quote from: ersi on
For example psychology and sociology clearly call for a different presupposition. To assume primacy of physics is, for most purposes in our lives, out of place. Shouldn't this make one honestly question materialism/physicalism for a moment?

It sounds like you're confusing different definitions of primacy. Heck, I don't even know what your obsession with primacy is all about. Energy probably came first, then matter, then at some point us. So what?
6759
DnD Central / Re: The Problem with Atheism
Quote from: ersi on
What do you make of the fact that Big Bang itself has been around only since fifties or sixties? This is what I mean by trend word.

One would think a hypothesis from the 1930s would take relatively recent and theretofore unexplained observations into account. If it also successfully predicts observations that were made since, that improves its validity and usefulness.

Quote from: ersi on
I am not disputing anything what you say about "physical", but refusal to acknowledge the normal common-sense meaning of the word "matter" is a bad sign. Random contextless re-definitions of common concepts won't help physicists nor anyone else.

If something with mass and volume isn't the "normal" definition of matter, what is?
6760
Browsers & Technology / Re: My Opera Backup
Sure, but they'd at least let me use up to 2TB or so… I doubt I'd come anywhere near that. ;)
Quote from: j7n on
I get capped at 10 megabits for being online too much. And still only during the evening and night.

Heck, that'd be a lot better than 64kbps. At 50Mbit you can burn through a 100GB limit in minutes if you're not careful. Watch a few YouTube vids in 1080p (you don't even need anywhere near 50Mbit for that) and you've reached it already. I'm hoping they'll at least up the limit to 150GB or 200GB or so before I'll crack and shell out the money for unlimited, because this is severely cutting into my downloading new Linux distros and the like.
6761
DnD Central / Re: The Problem with Atheism
Quote from: ersi on
The other synonyms are relatively recent trend words, designed to obfuscate the fact that physicists have philosophical presuppositions, namely the tendency to believe in the primacy of matter.

A physicist does not have to be a physicalist or a materialist. But surely describing physicists as people with a tendency to believe in the "primacy" of that which is physical is much closer to being accurate than speaking of matter. There was no matter until a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.

Quote from: Barulheira on
Or: not to believe in the primacy of anything else.

It's a bit of a false dilemma, isn't it. Just wiggle and squeeze a bit and it'll all nicely fit into predefined categories. :P
6762
Browsers & Technology / Re: My Opera Backup
I prepared the first 15 million comments* for sharing. The total size is  639.5MB. I won't upload them yet because I'm really close to the stupid bandwidth limit, and instead of something semi-reasonable like 1Mbit they drop you to an archaic 64kbit if you go over. Is saving the €7.50/month unlimited bandwidth worth it? Well, it does add up to a day trip or two so I'd like to think it does…

* Actually 3.2 + 1.2 million minus private and deleted comments.
6764
Browsers & Technology / Re: Linux Laptop
Well, suffice it to say that even if my wife or I had the expertise, neither of us would want to spend the time writing a driver just to make things work. :P

http://www.bto.eu has some potentially interesting products, but they have no specific experience or guarantee for Linux.

Lenovo is generally well-supported. I wonder if you can buy those without the Windows tax somewhere.
6765
Browsers & Technology / Re: Linux Laptop
Yeah, 4GB is pretty much a minimum. But isn't most ARM hardware poorly documented and therefore poorly supported? (Outside of junk like Android.)
6768
Browsers & Technology / Re: Linux Laptop
Quote from: Macallan on
Depends what you want to do with it.

The usual works. Run Firefox, Gimp, LibreOffice,* watch the occasional video (possibly in Flash), perhaps play the occasional game… on the one hand just about anything will do because even the lowliest Core i3 will probably (slightly) outperform the current Core 2 Duo processor, but some crappy Acer stuff that breaks after a year or two is hardly what she's looking for. Iirc she's got an AMD Phenom II x4 965 in her desktop, so it'd probably need to be at least an i5 to match that. Getting a new laptop after the old one served for over five years should probably represent a noticeable upgrade…

* She likes reasonably complex spreadsheets and she has a rather high-quality DSLR, so CPU power isn't completely unimportant.
6771
Browsers & Technology / Re: Linux Laptop
There'd also be the potential problem that while the vast majority of software I use is free and even precompiled for ARM in the Debian repositories,* that'd completely lock you out of proprietary software. For a netbook that might be acceptable, but I don't quite think it is for a proper laptop.

Regarding Loongson, I have to say that, as interesting as a little competition is, in terms of specs to price every Loongson product I've seen (like this) leaves me cold.

* Although I should add, I'm actually getting ideas for a new laptop for my wife. Then again, she does like both Debian and "outdated" software.