Another factor is that Christianity is exclusive—one could not adhere to Christianity and, say, Mithraism at the same time, since Christianity claimed a monopoly on religious truth. Other saviour cults which did not function in the same way would not have been able to work up the same amount of religious fervour, since a man’s trust in his religion is limited by that religion’s trust in itself.
onlytheseekerfinds
Karma: 20
reading about the topic on Wikipedia
Just because there’s an article on the spread of Islam doesn’t mean that a balanced quantitative analysis on the means of its proliferation either exists or is possible. Usually when someone asserts something to that effect, the onus is on them to support their assertion by referencing a specific source.
This idea seems to be more or less taken for granted by people who oppose either Islam. Is there actually a perspicuous source of data describing in detail how Islam spread, that allows assessments of that kind to be made?
Isn’t “aptitude” simply another word for the genetic, non-environmental component of a talent?
Maybe there’s a confusion being caused here by the sentence “This is not how evolution spreads.”
It could mean at least one of the following: 1) “This is not how the theory of evolution itself was spread” 2) “This is not the mechanism according to which evolution spreads ideas”
It seems as if Lumifer interpreted your statement in the second sense (as I did initially), whereas reading your post in its original contexts suggests the first sense was the one which you intended.
I’m not active enough on LW to be able to accuse anyone here of being idle, either in given particulars or in general. I intended more of an expression of curiosity about where the stated objectives make contact with past experience than to make a lazily hidden indictment :)
It is, of course, in a trivial way
Practicality is usually in some sense “trivial”, not so? Is there any sense in which the word implies complexity or subtlety?
It could be a case where heritable should not be confused with not environmental.
There’s also an element of instrumental rationality quite beautifully captured there, shifting the focus from ideation to concrete action by setting a certain waterline for what should be regarded as worth attention.
Similar to the Latin Acta, non Verba.
It’s a principle of practicality—which category strikes me as largely overlapping HP’s home territory.
I once read something that stuck with me (it was a passing comment on people offering their ideas for a civ-style strategy game to the author): “don’t tell me what you are going to do, tell me what you have done”. I wonder if this is itself a hufflepuff virtue?
Calculemus...
I’m not entirely clear on WHAT specifically is supposed to be better about this
You don’t see any advantage in compressing sectors of possible-property-space into algorithmically decompressible representations? I suppose the unspoken assumption on my part has been that reality is itself in some sense non-arbitrary, and that organizing the candidate elements of your ontology by unifying principles would allay the unnecessary multiplication of entities.
With respect to the topic at hand: you can posit the existence of any kind of omnipotent being you like. God might be an all-powerful Mushroom. Everything in the universe may, in some deep sense, be a Mushroom. Mushrooms are thus the most Godly object in reality. This jars my intuition about what reality might plausibly be like a lot more than the idea that God is “love”, or a “universal mind”, or so on. Now the first question that comes to mind is why? Is there any logical or scientific reason to believe that reality at a level that is completely hidden from observation forever, is more likely not to be a really just a Mushroom?
There are at least two ways to respond to these questions. One of them is to say—alright, yes, to say that God is a fungus seems perverse. If we’re going to speculate on metaphysics, let’s search for some set of principles according to which we make our metaphysical suppositions, and investigate what they imply. That way we at least might have a chance at further insight into the nature of reality.
The other thing you might do is to placidly accept that the universe may be arbitrary and perverse, and that no matter how bizarre a conception of God you may posit, there’s no reason to prefer a conception that jars the intuition less. If nothing else, this seems to block the way of inquiry.
Now this so far doesn’t have anything to do with how you find out what actually exists. It’s more a defense of employing good taste (the definition of which I leave open) when speculating on what could exist.
I don’t think I see how doing so will change the likelihood of the actual existence of any such being
It’s not supposed to. It’s more an explanation of why the “God could be dishonest and you don’t have any reason to believe he isn’t” line of attack fails to account for the fact that there are reasons that people take some ideas seriously and others not, despite a lack of accessible evidence on the issue.
Each of these qualities, if proven, would still leave open all the others.
That is correct. What I’m trying to get across is that there’s a set of qualities which offer a conception of God that would be worth hoping is true; and that the ability to make Australia, or the universe, vanish on act of will is not sufficient to win the appellation of ‘God’.
I don’t see any reason people can’t believe things they also see as lacking a purpose
Because believing in something—really believing in it—is not costless. It comes at the cost of those other beliefs incompatible with the one in question. This doesn’t make it impossible to harbour beliefs without any useful purpose, but it’s a reason to expect to to be uncommon. Should an idea be incorrect merely because it’s uncommon? No; but if it’s both rare and intrinsically unappealing—lacking both the force of reason and the weight of mass assent, why then should it be taken seriously?
You can believe that some object fails to possess some property for reasons other than a lack of evidence. For example, I believe there are no integers greater than three but less than two. This is not merely because I’ve never encountered such a number, but because the integers are defined such that I can believe with unfailing certainty that I never will. Anything that might be both greater than three and less than two is by definition not an integer.
Similarly, any conception of God worth taking seriously to begin with is not simply any arbitrary vector in the space of all possible properties. The orientation of the “god vector” along any given axis should satisfy at the very least some aesthetic criterion—and if possible some logical one—which accords with a rank ordering of all positions by some definition of “greatness”. Without a metric of greatness by which to specify the location, or range of locations, of a conceptual vector along dimensions of interest, there is no concept whatever left to be analyzed.
If it is given that such a metric is a necessary element in a obtaining a robust, non-arbitrary conception of God, it follows that the same rules emphatically do not apply to both essential and inessential properties. Some properties can be rejected out hand merely because they violate the rank-ordering necessary to identify the concept in question.
Moreover—essential properties may not be asserted to not belong to at least one object without simultaneously denying the existence of that object (since any object satisfying the spanning set of some concept’s defining properties is an instantiation of it), whereas inessential properties may be regarded as either applying to the object or not without compelling us to adopt any particular propositional attitude towards its existence.
Many of the “details” of God’s character—his status as creator of the universe, his moral perfection (subsuming his honesty) and all that would essentially make a conception of God one that’s worth adulating, is bound up in Anselm’s definition of God: “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”. (edit for clarity: from this definition follow the attributes ascribed to God that are commonly treated as essential)
Thoughtful people would recognize a difference between ascribing to God inessential properties, such as gender, and essential properties, such as infinite love. A failure to notice which properties can be doubted without changing the subject would extend uncertainty about whether or not God possesses some inessential property into uncertainty about his core properties. Was that where you were going?
This equation is simply the sum of each x = i choose k for k in [ 1, i ].
So what he’s saying is that the neural circuits that follow the principles he describes have one neuron to represent every possible combination of on/off states in the set of inputs. It’s the most brain-dead way you could possibly implement a classifier system.
From a paper by Dr. Tsien, retrieved from http://www.augusta.edu/mcg/discovery/bbdi/tsien/documents/theoryofconnectivity.pdf
Fifth, this power-of-two mathematical logic confines the total numbers of distinct inputs ( i ) coming into a given microcircuit in order to best utilize the available cell resources. For instance, as a result of its exponential growth, at a mere i = 40, the total number of neurons ( n ) required to cover all possible connectivity patterns within a microcircuit would be more than 10^12 (already exceeding the total number of neurons in the human brain). For Caenorhabditis elegans – which has only 302 neurons, limiting i to 8 or less at a given neural node makes good economic sense. Furthermore, by employing a sub-modular approach (e.g., using a set of four or fi ve inputs per subnode), a given circuit can greatly increase the input types it can process with the same number of neurons. ′
He also mentions cortical layering. It seems like he’s envisioning the brain as a forest of smaller, relatively shallow networks following the principles he describes, rather than one tree where all neurons are wired together in a uniform way.
Is linking this article (ideologically loaded, unreflective, devoid of any logical analysis of any form) calculated to get a rise out of the kind of people who post here?
It’s puzzling that you’ve termed these risks “long term” when America is currently being rocked with race riots and Europe has an ongoing refugee crisis.
It seems like (a) and (c) are easily granted, but what’s your definition of “non-arbitrary”, and how should we determine if that definition is itself a non-arbitrary one?
This topic is one I enjoy thinking about so thank you for your post :)