Aeaeae

You're welcome Michael.

I'm glad to see that there are recovered threads that made it outside the Garbage Pile. For a moment, I thought I was in the habit of reading garbage (probably true, HAHA).

I'ved tried to recover the text from the pdf files. It appears the program I used to output the file uses nonstandard word spacers - copy/pasting the text results in no spaces between words. I tried some freeware pdf-to-txt converters, but alas, with the same depressing result. For what it's worth, decompressing the pdf file gives a text in the following format:

(The)-315.5(text)-314.2(is)-316.1(written)-320.7(like)-319.9(this)-312(.)

I'm quite handy with computers, but I have no idea what the numbers and parentheses mean. If anyone here knows how to get rid of these, well, post away! When I get irritated enough I'll probably review my regex and blast them all to heck. Worst comes to worse, OCR could do it, with some more labor.

So much for being a Portable Document Format.

There was one thread I lost; "Thoughts on Aging" by Barbara Branden. The thread that exists here is much shorter than the one I recall. Sadly, it was the one I was reading when the site went down. Refreshing the browser meant the cache was overwritten. Damn. I would have traded it for that blasted "Apology" thread (which I liked when it was fresh), or all the garbage threads for that matter.

And to add my own contribution to the ongoing "Plag-Hunt".

Pross, V., post #7

The main objection to the argument from design involving complexity is that many systems which display complex order and structure can, in fact, be explained as the end result of perfectly ordinary natural process. This does not, of course, prove that ALL ordered systems have arisen naturally, (as argued in the video) BUT it makes us cautious about the inferring the existence of a supernatural designer purely on the rather superficial grounds that something looks too complicated to have arisen by chance.

Davies, P.C.W., "God and the New Physics," Penguin: London, 1990, reprint (pp.165-166)

The main objection to the argument from design involving complexity is that many systems which display complex order and structure can, in fact, be explained as the end result of perfectly ordinary natural processes. This does not, of course, prove that all ordered systems have arisen naturally, but it makes us cautious about inferring the existence of a designer purely on the rather superficial grounds that something looks too complicated to have arisen by chance.

Does this mean the thread goes to the Garbage Pile? Or that only the Pross posts get deleted?

The main objection to the former would be the argument that only two Pross posts are on the thread, and there are no direct replies within the complex order and structure of the other members' posts. To which infers, of course, that the process of deleting merely the Pross posts would preserve the ordered thread that has arisen naturally. The superficial semblance of this paragraph to the ones above can be taken as grounds for something that looks too complicated to have arisen by chance.

This could become a popular pastime here, as an intellectual (albeit masochistic) exercise of sorts.

(Note from MSK: Thank you, Aeaeae. Duly edited.)

I've been reading some of the older posts I missed. I haven't seen the vid mentoned in the original post, due to my crappy dialup connection. What Roger Campbell has written is quite interesting.

Roger Campbell, post #19

What Dennett doesn't seem to have a clue about is the actual source of resistance to good evolutionary thinking among linguists, psychologists, and the like. He imagines that they have been dazzled by Stephen Jay Gould, when in fact the source of their confusions is not their conception of biological evolution, but rather their conception of knowledge. He should have been pointing the finger at those who imagine that knowledge is qualitatively different from everything else in the universe, "therefore" it could not have emerged from anything else. But this would entail pointing the finger at Noam Chomsky and his allies, not at Stephen Jay Gould.

I'll try to pick this up later on the other thread...

What are linguists and psychologists resisting about evolution? That their academic realm will be engulfed by evolutionary psychology?

Even if knowledge is qualitatively different from the rest of the universe, it would not mean it is exempt from evolutionary principles. After all, the first bacterium would be qualitatively different from the preceding non-bacteria-filled environment, yet it is subject to evolution.

The evidence is very strong that intelligence and behaviour are evolved. There is an increasing synergy between the neurosciences and computer science. It's very possible that research on say, learning rules of neural nets, will have a lot to say on the nature of knowledge in the epistemology of the future (if it would still be called epistemology then).

But perhaps this is better suited in the epistemology forum.

Where is the other thread?

An interesting take on this would be that the universe itself is evolved from mathematical randomness (Process Physics). That is, information theory, sufficiently advanced, would be sufficient to be a basis for a 'Theory of Everything', from which all the rest of physics follows... then chemistry... biology... Of course, Process Physics is very speculative at best right now.

If true, however, this would be the ultimate proof that there is no God, or at the very least, disprove that an intelligence is necessary to account for existence.

Regarding the immediate post above, by James Heaps-Nelson, I seem to remember that there was an experiment where stimulation of certain brain areas led to people having a "God" experience. Just imagine an EMP device that targets that particular part. BOOM! A weapon of mass conversion! :devil:

You can call me Victor. Oh wait, that's taken already.

Aeaeae would be fine though. I'll reserve my rights to anonymity until such time as I judge it proper to reveal the grand unpronouncable, inutterable, mortally wounding, magnificence that is my name; for such monumental purposes as spewing recycled bile across objectivist cyberspace, nuking Iran, killing babies, and hyperventilating over passionate critics...

On second thought, I'll just go back to lurk-mode. It's bad to send a robot to do a clown's job.

Thanks for the welcome!

Email sent.

So that was the problem with the registration. Apology accepted. But you owe me a few bucks, as I have to repair one of my cybernetic wrist joints for the virtual-carpal-tunnel-syndrome I got while repeatedly clicking "Log In." :geek:

Digitally signed,

I, Turing Machine

Hello everyone,

As my first post here, it's rather awkward to do it right on this thread. This has nothing to do with the current... whatever. But I figure everyone could use a little healthy distraction now, so...

I'ved lurked here occasionally, as I do with other objectivist sites. Most of my lurking here was when this site was new. Then I stopped when it appeared the site went down, only to resume my lurking habits recently. I'ved just read Michaels's description of a hacker (?) and a lost thread. Perhaps there were other threads that were lost (?)

I'm writing this since I have printouts (in PDF) of some threads at that time. I printed them from my browser cache when OL was down, so I could read them later without having to go to the site. Packrat that I am, they're still on my hard disk. I think the Apology Thread is one of those threads. I don't know which ones were lost and which ones restored, so I'm just going to list them.

God Gene

3 quick and easy ways to nip reason in the bud!

An Apology to Barbara Branden (I think this is the one mentioned above)

Big Numbers

David Kelley Biography

Different ways of thinking

Dragonfly

full of the holy spirit

Hear all Evil. See all Evil. Speak all Evil.

In Attempted Praise of Objectivist Turkey

Introducing the David Kelley Corner

Rational Men Must Be Tolerant of Others

Review of Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature

SOLO is going insane

The Appeal of Orthodoxy

The Humor of Ayn Rand (long thread)

The Philosophy of History: On Bias

why did she choose ayn rand?

If Michael wants, I'll send him a zip file of this threads.

As far as objectivist sites go, this one's remarkable for it's civility (for the most part). I hope it remains that way, though the navigation around here can use some improvement, goddammit!!!

Nothing on this post is plagiary, as far as I know.