FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
Simplicity, in the information theoretic sense, since you're dispensing with all the complexity involved with God.
Infinite universal cycles, simulation, and God are all equally non-materialistic, and it seems to me that information theory doesn't apply to non-materialistic explanations. In what sense would it? In what sense is God more complex than a universe looping according to non-observable physics without beginning or end? Is there math that can be shown proving one less complex than the other? You mention Kolmogorov complexity, but I'm skeptical. Wikipedia provides:
the Kolmogorov complexity of an object, such as a piece of text, is the length of a shortest computer program (in a predetermined programming language) that produces the object as output.
...I don't think you can write a computer program that produces either "God" or "A looping Universe" or "The computer the universe is being simulated on" as output in any meaningful sense, so I don't think you can meaningfully calculate the Kolmogorov complexity of any one of these, nor compare their complexity to determine which is the "least complex". All three concepts are, by definition, outside the bounds of observable reality, which means that whatever statements you make about them are unfalsifiable. I see no reason to presume that you can meaningfully do math on unfalsifiables.
Explaining "all but one" beats the alternatives.
It doesn't, actually, if the alternatives do not conflict with materialism when materialism gives answers that seem reasonable. Christians did not reject the concepts of math or gravity or the rocket equations. The whole claim of Materialism is that it was better because it left no need for anything further. It turns out that it does in fact need further things, and in addition appears to require discarding quite a large amount of solid evidence. Those realities pretty seriously undermine its claims to primacy through simplicity, occam's razor, etc, or that people are forced to it by a hard-nosed commitment to only draw forced conclusions.
There are no forced conclusions are forced. All reason is irreducibly axiomatic. We all believe as we will. We each make our bets and take our chances.
Besides, why isn't the Big Bang covered by "materialism"?
Because the math says it happened, but the math also says it can't happen. That is just another way of saying "we don't have a good explanation for this phenomenon."
Our intuitive notions of causality went out the window the moment quantum mechanics, with all it's superposition, entanglement and reference-frame/observer dependent definitions of cause and effect arrived.
Our "intuitive notions of causality" are the foundation of Materialism. Abandon those, and what remains? If you get to appeal to miracles, why shouldn't I?
The math does a better job.
The math doesn't do a job at all. It isn't supporting your conclusion. Your commitment to Materialism is axiomatic, not ultimately dependent on the outcome of a formula.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Christians have not gotten rid of the Old Testament God, and Christianity built the stability, peace and plenty that made a grift like the Enlightenment possible.
I am familiar with the argument, but its just redefining omnipotence. A truly omnipotent being could resolve whatever conceptual validity issues there are by changing the universe.
I really don't think that's a definition of "omnipotence" that most Christians, past or present, would actually agree with, and if forced to use that definition, I think most would concede that the God they posit is not in fact omnipotent in this sense. I'd be very interested in examples of Christians arguing otherwise, if you've seen any.
In your book, you could make up be down for example, pretty easily.
I could very easily include the string "in this world, up is down". I couldn't describe the necessary causes and effects of such a change, because logically-invalid linguistic constructions have no necessary causes and effects. Any effects I then attribute to "up is down" in the story are not the cause or result of up being down, they're the result of my direct, arbitrary will.
Notably, the Christian idea that humans have a free will separate from that of God, common to most branches of the faith, logically depends on God not actually having this sort of relationship to our world; ditto for many other parts of Christian theology and philosophy. As I understand it, the Christian conception of God contains a lot of examples of him being shaped by the necessities and interdependencies of what is taken to be baseline, unalterable reality. All of these would flatly contradict the concept of omnipotence as you define the term, which is fair enough, but it is in fact just redefining omnipotence, and my impression is that their definition came first by a number of centuries.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
...If I'm understanding you correctly, this was what I was getting at with "a given hull surface". The current cruiser has a square cross-section, so you could do a set of superfiring turrets on each of the four sides, but only the back turret of each set would actually be fully reversible.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
If I create a simulation of a human society on a computer, am I an omniscient God relative to the simulated humans?
I think you're on the right track, separating access to data from retention of data. if the "simulation" is a single integer between one and three, I'd say you have both. If it's extremely complex, humans can have total access, but almost no retention. My understanding of the term "omniscience" is that it's referring to both perfect access and perfect retention.
Does a rock that God is "incapable" of lifting because the mere existence of that specific rock is so beneath Him that He can't be bothered to distinguish it fit?
This would seem to be a question about the hypothetical God's capacities, saying that he's not omniscient, and possibly degrading his omnipotence by his incapacity to aim or direct his absolute power. But saying that this would make him unable to lift a rock seems like linguistic confusion; the simplest way of describing this scenario is that he can lift the rock, what he can't do is find it, or notice it, or however we describe it being irretrievably outside his attention.
If you make a simulation simple enough, then it seems to me that you really can have complete omniscience and complete omnipotence over it in a very real sense, while still being unable to instantiate certain forms of illogical constructs. You cannot invent a story in your head that you can't change, because "story" necessarily implies "changable". You can't make a story where down is up in a meaningful sense; you can make a story that contains the string "down is up", but you can't rigorously describe the subsequent cause and effect, because invalid verbal constructions have no causes or effects.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
...seems like a disagreement over the definition of "omnipotent". If omnipotent means "can do anything", I'd argue that "simultaniously existing and not existing" isn't a "thing". It's like the old question of whether God could make a rock he can't lift; the proper answer is mu, because "a rock he can't lift" is a category error. If I'm writing a book, relative to the characters it seems to me that I'm pretty clearly omnipotent, but I still can't make up be down or a = !a, because there's no conceptual validity to such linguistic constructions. I think most Christians, at least of the ones who understand the question and grasp the abstractions, would agree.
Finite God (in that God is merely hugely powerful but not truly omnipotent) is one of the more popular solutions to the problem of Theodicy.
Is the idea that a truly omnipotent God be able to, say, both exist and not exist, or redefine good and evil arbitrarily, while a God that could not do these things would be limited, hence not be omnipotent? ?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
Is Justice not a good enough answer? In the sense that when wrong is done, restitution must be made? If you accept it as a coherent argument that God's omnipotence doesn't allow him to make people love him of their own free will, it seems like you might also accept that God's omnipotence doesn't allow him to nullify the basic concept of justice either.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
I've just pushed up flat-color textures for the frigate and its two primary turrets. Let me know if they're working. I'm going to try to get the rest of the capital ships unwrapped and textured in a similar fashion this week, if that works for you.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
Thanks much for this! It's neat seeing how different people approach the problems involved!
Railguns should be exceptionally good at causing specific component damage but cause low hull/structural damage, missiles cause large-scale hull/structural damage, while beam weapons cause less than either but also cause heat damage.
I'd agree with the railguns; they're crit-seekers, at least at the low-to-mid end when the projectiles are too small to fit a nuke warhead. I'm leaning toward beams just being balanced, in that they just sort of melt ships generally. The best defense against beams to my mind is speed, since faster ships have an easier time avoiding their engagement envelope while pelting them with projectiles. So that incentivizes the ship-builders to put heavy beams on faster ships, since they'll need to close the distance as rapidly as possible... or else just use a much bigger beam, and compensate by having it run on expendable coolant or something similar. Or possibly both; booster fuel could be dual-purpose coolant. A frigate that runs its beam for five seconds and then has to refill on coolant could be just fine, if that five seconds is enough to core other frigates or severely damage a destroyer.
Re: Armor, shields and point defense, the way I'm thinking about it is drawn more from what I know about modern naval combat, and the idea is that no defense is particularly good. The best defense is not to get shot at. Failing that, the defenses are there to make the best of a bad situation, and they all come with significant drawbacks. Armor's too heavy, and I just made a big post about various options for making shields less First-Order-Optimal and more of a specialized, situational defense.
Point defense are the most extreme, they don't get depleted at all (even if you include an ammo system, point defense ammo should use up so little space as to be effectively endless).
I'd disagree. PD cannons, whether chemical or railgun, have a basic problem: they use small guns with lower velocities and shorter effective ranges to engage projectiles closing at very high speed. Pushing the engagement distance out as far as possible is very beneficial, but the further out you go, the more you need to compensate for lack of effective accuracy against a moving target with sheer volume of fire. This means your PD guns are probably better off firing very inefficiently in pursuit of marginal increases in effectiveness, because there's no point preserving ammo if the ship gets cut in half by a torpedo. I'd say PD guns should absolutely be limited by ammo, heat, capacitors, whatever other mechanics seem appropriate; fire efficiency is not really something they can afford.
A dedicated pursuit ship with extreme forward speed, forward-facing weaponry and armor but helpless if intercepted at an angle can be quite interesting for example. In general directionality and weapon cones add lots of variety and potential for outplaying.
Yeah, this is the sort of thing I'm really hoping we can execute in terms of encounter logic and, I suppose, enemy AI. I'm definately trying to think of directionality and intended attack profile for the ships I'm making. The gun cruiser I'm currently working on has beam periscopes in the nose of the ship, so it can cover something like a 340-degree arc, able to target pretty much anywhere but directly behind it, while the railgun batteries are set up to fire straight ahead only.
Imo the same should go for shields; There is no reason for Armor to build up heat, and pd should build up less than beam weapons/shields.
Shields generating heat would be a fantastic drawback, wish I'd thought of that for the writeup!
Excellent writeup sir, thanks for taking the time!
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Well, how many Christians' concern with worldly life crosses the line (and by a lot). It seems the case of overwhelming majority of them.
Perhaps, or perhaps not. Certainly caring more about earthly affairs is an error I'm prone to, which I must constantly try to resist, and a lot of people calling themselves Christians don't seem to be on the right side of the line. On the other hand, I'm not confident that either of us can rigorously identify where the line between "making a good-faith effort" and "only pretending to try" is, and I'm certainly not confident that most non-Christians even understand what Christians are aiming for.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
It is equally not obvious why a thinking Christian theist should care about any earthly affairs and do not concentrate only on saving souls from eternal fire.
Christians do not have the power to save souls from eternal hellfire. Each person chooses whether or not they want to accept salvation, and by far the best influence you can have on their decision is to be genuinely involved in their lives. If they are concerned with earthly affairs, being involved in their lives is going to require you to be at least a little concerned with earthly affairs as well. Being a Christian does involve putting a hard cap on how concerned one is with earthly affairs, though.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Do you and @ArjinFerman need to apply to be admins, or is there a way to do that on my end?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
never played with a wiki before. I'm willing to give it a try. Got a preference?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Thanks! :D I've just posted up a bunch more in the August thread, so check 'em out and tell me what you think!
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Well, I got a post I'm working on about ship weapons and game mechanics ideas, so I'll ping ya for that when I get it posted!
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
heh, sorry. I'm asking to try to understand the argument better, not out of skepticism over whether they exist. Obviously links would be best, but I'm not Gatsaru either; I'd be happy with just your rough impressions.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Do you equally take responsibility for all the impositions of the system you're currently defending?
Bro, you can't invent your own definition of the enlightenment, then say that everybody else's definition is wrong because it doesn't fit your own.
I'm not saying that your definition of the Enlightenment is wrong because it contradicts mine. I'm asking you what your definition is based on, how it is derived. I'm pointing to a pair of purported Enlightenment revolutions, and observing that the features people generally ascribe to the Enlightenment don't actually cluster the way the standard narrative claims. One revolution is much more secularized and rationalist than the other, two values usually taken to be core elements of the Enlightenment.
If your definition holds that individual liberties are a core, definitional element of the Enlightenment, my argument isn't that you're wrong, it's that you should then conclude that the French Revolution isn't a central example of the Enlightenment, and neither are the succeeding generations who took the French Revolution as a positive example of how to make a better world. The problem then becomes that absolutely everyone else appears to be certain that the French Revolution is a central example of the Enlightenment, and we can both notice we are confused together.
You say that your assessment comes from reading the words of theorists and revolutionaries, by which I have to assume you mean literally the French revolutionaries themselves. This is a good way to learn about the French Revolution, but not about the ocean spanning movement of the Enlightenment, on which exists a massive corpus of work by theorists arguing for the importance of individual rights.
My claim is that different types of evidence should carry different weight, and the order roughly goes: writings of theorists < theory as understood by revolutionaries < actions taken by revolutionaries/political actors < action as interpreted by the next generation of theorists/revolutionaries/political actors. Ideologies have a core, an identifiable set of central beliefs that define them. I'm arguing that the best way to identify that core is to look at which ideas make it into practice and then get propagated down through the generations and into subsequent revolutions and government reforms, versus those that do not. How could it be otherwise?
I do not think I am engaging in circular thinking. If the French Revolution is a central example of an Enlightenment project, than the values it trampled can't be definitional elements of the Enlightenment. If the values it trampled are definitional to the Enlightenment, then the French Revolution can't be a central example of an Enlightenment project. ...Otherwise, it seems to me that the definition of the Enlightenment is simply incoherent.
If you want to argue that the enlightenment brought tyranny, centralization, and religious persecution, you need to grapple with the fact that all those things were happening before the enlightenment and that the broad European history of the enlightenment is less absolutism and greater religious tolerance.
The French Revolution brought some of the worst tyranny, centralization of unaccountable power and religious persecution Europe had ever seen, and led to a military dictatorship that plunged Europe into one of the worst sequences of warfare it had suffered to date. Direct ideological descendants, Marx in particular, did significantly worse. They were worse than the status quo, and not by a small margin. I get that the American/British-style eventually spread and a lot of the European nations eventually settled down into peace and normalcy, and now they DO care a lot about individual liberties and other Enlightenment principles, and don't guillotine each other randomly. What I'm trying to do is to track the specifics of how that actually happened, compared to the recieved story of how it happened.
You and Mandalay seem to be arguing that the French Revolution's murderous nature was par for the course. It was not. France wasn't a slaughterhouse under the ancien regime. America pulled off a revolution with absolutely minimal bloodletting. People have argued that tyranny and massacres were the norm for French politics, but the whole point of a revolution is that you stop doing things the way they've been done, and start doing them exactly the way you think they should be done. And again, there'd be no point in arguing about it if everyone recognized that the FR was a monstrous mistake. They don't! It's been lauded as a victory for freedom and social progress for two hundred years!
You can't just pick one country you don't like, ignore all the others, and act like their own history started in 1789.
I'm picking the first two (three, counting Britain) countries in the chain, and trying to make sense of the divide between them. The next step is to follow the branches of that split forward through the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. I'm not sure what to do with the argument that I can't act like the history starts in 1789, because 1789 is when this set of people secure absolute power and begin to use it. We can look at what came before them, or what opposed them, but neither seems to me to be of much help to the central problem; they won, they got to reshape their political world as they saw fit, and what they produced is what we have to judge them by. What am I missing?
Beyond this, your insistence that the success of the incredibly enlightenment oriented, rationalist-ruled, post revolutionary nations of Britain and America add proof that the enlightenment is bad is just baffling.
Britian and America diverged very sharply from France. If they're the central examples of the Enlightenment, fine, the French Revolution and its descendent ideologies are non-central, and then we need to ask why no one else seems to understand this. If France is the central example, then the extreme political divergence means America and Britian are the non-central examples, and their excellent results can't be attributed to Enlightenment ideology. If all three are central examples, then we need to admit that "The Enlightenment" can mean pretty much anything, and is thus an incoherent term.
Further, the French did what they did for specific reasons, and those reasons clearly derive from elements of Enlightenment philosophy, specifically the axiomatic confidence in human reason. I believe it is easy to demonstrate how those ideas contributed directly to the disastrous consequences in France, and how they continued to propagate through the subsequent generations of thinkers and actors.
The past 200 years are far away the most prosperous in all of human history. It is insufficient to say "science existed before"...
Science existed before the Enlightenment. The Scientific and Industrial revolutions are absolutely, obviously the reason for the graph you posted. The question is whether the Enlightenment is responsible for those revolutions, a question we can't answer without nailing down an understanding of what the ideology itself actually is and is not. I note that both revolutions were heavily driven by Britain and America, so the split mentioned above seems like it's pretty relevant.
The point isn't that science is fake, it's that the Enlightenment wasn't ever science, and especially not when it explicitly claimed to be. The educational revolution underpinning the birth of Science started with Gutenburg and Protestantism. The Enlightenment took shape because science already existed and was demonstrating its value. The Enlightenment itself was not a scientific movement, but a philosophical and political one. It frequently deployed fake science for political ends, using social hacks to bypass skepticism and verification because the lie was "too good to check"; Marxism and Freudianism being two of the more consequential examples, but the social sciences generally are rife with examples. Its ideological nature frequently undermined actual science, occasionally to disastrous effect.
Science and Industry, meanwhile, were obviously useful and experienced little to no ideological opposition from any quarter. No one who mattered was arguing that science sucked and should be stopped. What people were arguing against, and occasionally fighting, were Enlightenment social innovations. A fundamental part of the Ideology's strategy has always been to frame opposition to its schemes as opposition to Science. That's part of what makes it so pernicious.
Or at least, that's the reality as I understand it. If you think the Enlightenment was actually critical to the Scientific and Industrial revolutions, though, it'd be good to lay out exactly why, what, and when it did the things to get the ball rolling. I'm skeptical, but open to being proven wrong.
Okay, what's the determined outcome that we should expect, given the evident bio?
There was a passage you posted once, that talked about how if you stepped through the last few hundred years in fifty-year increments, reasonable predictions would be completely blown out every time. I can imagine reasons why that sort of pattern might not continue, since there's good reasons to think the last few hundred years have been unusually prone to chaos... but why would one be sure the chaos has concluded?
You talk about Anglos devouring the light-cone, an eventuality that, accounting to translation, I think I agree would be less than preferable. Are they going to devour the light-cone because their biology determines it?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
Yes. Why would one believe such a thing? Is there a FAQ or a Sequence this meme derives from?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
The people outraged on his behalf, perhaps, from a certain point of view. Unfortunately, the underlying problem didn't start with him and won't end with him.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8hr ago
No argument there. But Reconstruction didn't actually work like it was supposed to, resulting in Jim Crow, and that sowed the seeds for lots of problems we're still dealing with. There's an argument that letting things slide helps keep the peace, but if people start noticing that one cohesive group has its wrongdoings ignored, and another group has even non-wrongdoings hammered mercilessly, that builds resentment.
We're debating epistemology, and @self_made_human is arguing that some unfalsifiable theories about the origin of the universe are superior to others because they are "lower complexity" in the information-theory sense, which he proposed measuring through Kolmogorov complexity. My position is that there is no way to rigorously measure the Kolmogorov complexity of the Christian God, or of the Karmic Wheel, or of a universe that loops infinitely via unknown physics even in principle; you cannot measure things you cannot adequately describe, and mechanisms that are unobservable and unfalsifiable cannot be adequately described by definition.
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