GENIUS FORUMS

Oh, this is simply too delectable.

Behold! The making of the Jew.

Who laments truth in the wake of his wanton calamity?

Who will wave his flag, champion his plight, to proclaim this desolate place the Promised Land...

Alex Jacob wrote:"In case you’ve forgotten, Jew boy, I chewed you up before anyone."

My ankles still have the bite marks...

Anyway, I came across this and it just seemed so weird, and yet it has an odd power in it.

Clearly, the drugs have made you numb to the fact that I feast on your innards...

For kicks.

Aesop Rock - One Brick
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I_uzRjnaBE

Wow, that was very cool. Worth getting ahold of. Shroomin. Fast Cars

It's all like hieroglyphics and requires exegesis...'Oxygen' was also very cool. 'Pleasant peasant jus tryin t' dream well'.

Aesop Rock and Del the Funkee Homosapien (Member of 'Hieroglyphics') - Preservation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rj5ehxuRQM

maestro wrote:The me is a part of language and an illusionary construct, there is no me. Only the representation of the world, and thoughts and emotions.

Oh, is that all?

For example the computer example also has a representation of the world obtained through its camera. Is it something to be like it?

Apparently, with the insignificant addition of thought and emotion.

Did you mean to contradict yourself?

Bearing in mind that the following was the catalyst to our little exchange here, one more time, brokenhead:

Leyla wrote:The difference between a priori knowledge and belief IS truth which, whilst it does not contradict empiricism, does not find its roots in it. A believer is one who clearly recognises there is no empirical evidence for his beliefs but, at the same time, contrarily holds that there should be, so---he waits for his proof; promotes this divine waiting---even unto his last silent breath.

brokenhead wrote:Leyla, your post just sounds all wrong to me. A believer is not someone who clearly recognizes there is no empirical evidence for his beliefs. On the contrary, he recognizes tons of empirical evidence. What he is forced to realize, however, is that all he has is empirical evidence, not proof. And certainly not evidence everyone will accept. "Empirical evidence" is two words. "Empirical" is by definition something everyone can agree on. "Evidence" enjoys no such unanimity. I can point to nature - the very existence of life - as evidence that there is a deity. Everyone will accept what I am pointing to, but not everyone will accept it as evidence of any such thing, or indeed, evidence of anything at all.

~

I asked you about your belief in god. You introduced faith, and said that it is the same kind of faith one has that they will exist in the future. I said that these two things are not the same, stating that you had used a false analogy and that the assumption one will exist in the future is based on their past existence and the conditions therof. Given that my assumption that I will exist in the future is based on my past existence and the conditions thereof, I asked what are the conditions for the existence of your god, whose existence you apparently embrace with as much faith as you do your own existence?

If you cannot give me such conditions, then it was indeed a false analogy and, as I said previously, I would be interested in seeing one which does work.

Saw you from one prism, few days ago while watching 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.' [sic]

Black ravens.

Heard you through the voice of another, in story, this afternoon.

"Knock know, who's throw?"

"Knock, knock. How's fair?"

"Knock."

http://deoxy.org/

Tick tock, double drop, mushroom cata-pillar...

Paradox seen through is the beginning of faith.

Steven Coyle, wandering minstrel.

Meandering wastrel?

Born with a caved in chest, built a treasure map - where the sternum formed a nexus of of Hendrix's axis. Banjo, Acoustic, Mandolin. |-)

EQ thinking in pictures takes one through autistic maze, where one learns to color, where encoding color is to decode essence. Showing love to Moms calicuts father's spectic. When she moobbaloob, I transist to attack her shoulders. Up chuck Coca, straw chew to starbursts. Ingesting this poem, I shall psydelia mushroom.

Steven Coyle wrote:Born with a caved in chest, built a treasure map - where the sternum formed a nexus of of Hendrix's axis. Banjo, Acoustic, Mandolin. |-)

EQ thinking in pictures takes one through autistic maze, where one learns to color, where encoding color is to decode essence. Showing love to Moms calicuts father's spectic. When she moobbaloob, I transist to attack her shoulders. Up chuck Coca, straw chew to starbursts. Ingesting this poem, I shall psydelia mushroom.

Steven, let me get this straight. Are you on or off your meds? Whichever the case is, have you tried the other one?

Carl G wrote:Steven Coyle, wandering minstrel.

No shit. His last two posts have given me minstrel cramps.

oken_shred,

Still on the depa-coat, I B Buddha, yo. My self? Well... I like Dali, "I AM drugs." When synthesia sprout, I learn to sip mushroom ^T. Bi-polar is step by step until nPolar unity. Third eye hums.

Leyla Shen, Warrior Princess, wrote:Bearing in mind that the following was the catalyst to our little exchange here, one more time, brokenhead:

Are you gonna start that again?

A believer is one who clearly recognises there is no empirical evidence for his beliefs but, at the same time, contrarily holds that there should be, so---he waits for his proof; promotes this divine waiting---even unto his last silent breath

Has everything that you presently know been proven to you at some point?

You can't know how ridiculous your description of a "believer" sounds. I'm not waiting for proof of anything. You are clearly not a believer in any Deity, so why exactly is it that you think you are qualified to state what faith is like for someone who has it?

I asked you about your belief in god. You introduced faith, and said that it is the same kind of faith one has that they will exist in the future. I said that these two things are not the same

Okay, they are not the same. I was not trying to claim they were the same. I was trying to draw on something you are familiar with in hopes of illuminating something with which you, by your own admission, are not. I was trying to help you understand. A thousand pardons if I used an insufficient or otherwise inappropriate or inapplicable analogy.

If we can keep the tone less argumentative, we might just get somewhere. But is that really important to you? Do you really want to understand what faith is, or are you content in not having it? I have no intention or desire to try to make you feel somehow less because you say you do not have faith. No one with true faith would ever want to do that, despite what fundamentalists, Catholics, and other assholes might say.

The process is not a philosophical one, nor is it purely intellectual. It is pretty basic. If I ignore everything that I was taught about God, how do I answer the questions myself? It's that simple. I have often wondered which is easier, to believe in God or not to believe in God. Let's leave aside who he is and what he wants or does and just ask, does God exist? Or we can ask can God exist? That is, is it possible? I first - and maybe this is just me, I don't know how anyone else would approach this - I first have to decide that it is possible. This is a huge step, at least it was for me. I cannot say if the notion of God would have naturally arisen if I wasn't introduced to the concept, because I was introduced to it. Be that as it may, I then find myself saying, if it is possible that God exists, where do I go from here? This is not something you decide. It is something you either know or do not know. Does God exist? Or - is there a God? I simply look at a new baby and feel that life has a purpose. I do not believe that the earth is the only place in the Universe where life exists. The very Cosmological Principal guarantees us that the earth's position is nothing special. I believe furthermore that there are beings on countless numbers of planets throughout this galaxy any every other galaxy.

I believe... Fuck what I believe. What do you believe, Your Honor?

Brokenhead, your argumentation reminds me a bit of G.K. Chesterton in his apologetic book "Orthodoxy". Would you recognize yourself in this?

The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle. [He] is not allowed to retain even the tiniest imp, though it might be hiding in a pimpernel. The Christian admits that the universe is manifold and even miscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he is complex. The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist’s world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane. The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the interesting person before mentioned is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

He takes the argument further and arrives at something that is actually a common criticism against much of the philosophy going around at this place.

The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives. They have both locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside with the sun and stars; they are both unable to get out, the one into the health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health and happiness of the earth. Their position is quite reasonable; nay, in a sense it is infinitely reasonable, just as a threepenny bit is infinitely circular. But there is such a thing as a mean infinity, a base and slavish eternity. It is amusing to notice that many of the moderns, whether skeptics or mystics, have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is the very symbol of this ultimate nullity. When they wish to represent eternity, they represent it by a serpent with his tail in his mouth. There is a startling sarcasm in the image of that very unsatisfactory meal. The eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the eastern pessimists, the eternity of the supercilious theosophists and higher scientists of to-day is, indeed, very well presented by a serpent eating his tail, a degraded animal who destroys even himself.

In the above is truth but there's also mistake. One could say it's missing the point while being well spotted.

[How's that as paradox, Mr. Chesterton?]

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:Brokenhead, your argumentation reminds me a bit of G.K. Chesterton in his apologetic book "Orthodoxy". Would you recognize yourself in this?

The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle. [He] is not allowed to retain even the tiniest imp, though it might be hiding in a pimpernel. The Christian admits that the universe is manifold and even miscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he is complex. The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist’s world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane. The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the interesting person before mentioned is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

He takes the argument further and arrives at something that is actually a common criticism against much of the philosophy going around at this place.

The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives. They have both locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside with the sun and stars; they are both unable to get out, the one into the health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health and happiness of the earth. Their position is quite reasonable; nay, in a sense it is infinitely reasonable, just as a threepenny bit is infinitely circular. But there is such a thing as a mean infinity, a base and slavish eternity. It is amusing to notice that many of the moderns, whether skeptics or mystics, have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is the very symbol of this ultimate nullity. When they wish to represent eternity, they represent it by a serpent with his tail in his mouth. There is a startling sarcasm in the image of that very unsatisfactory meal. The eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the eastern pessimists, the eternity of the supercilious theosophists and higher scientists of to-day is, indeed, very well presented by a serpent eating his tail, a degraded animal who destroys even himself.

In the above is truth but there's also mistake. One could say it's missing the point while being well spotted.

[How's that as paradox, Mr. Chesterton?]

Recognize myself in it? I have no idea what he's trying to say. Why are you reading Chesterton? G. K. Chesterton is nothing to me.

That was my impression too: I read it but I have no idea what he is trying to say. This is my shortest post ever and now look: I have to tack something on to the end of it...

Random

Thinks cartoons are psychedelic. Same phenomenon as taking trace amounts of horse tranquilizer. Dope.

DHodges,

Is this some sort of joke?

If you leave a hot cup of coffee in a room, eventually it will come to thermal equilibrium, cooling to the same temperature as the room.

That does NOT mean that it is impossible to have a hot cup of coffee.

No one said it was and it isn't likely that is what the author was saying, is it? What he was saying is that easy references to anything being possible, despite the 2nd law of thermodynamics, simply because the sun is sitting out there is an unexamined and false notion. It's really a nice, interesting article. Too bad more people don't read it. Here's a more relevant bit:


The second law is all about probability, it uses probability at the microscopic level to predict macroscopic change: carbon distributes itself more and more uniformly in an insulated solid because this is what the laws of probability predict, when diffusion alone is operative. The reason natural forces may turn a spaceship, or a TV set, or a computer into a pile of rubble but not vice-versa is also probability: of all the possible arrangements atoms could take, only a very small percentage could fly to the moon and back, or receive pictures and sound from the other side of the Earth, or add, subtract, multiply and divide real numbers with high accuracy. The second law of thermodynamics is the reason that computers will degenerate into scrap metal over time, and, in the absence of intelligence, the reverse process will not occur; and it is also the reason that animals, when they die, decay into simple organic and inorganic compounds, and, in the absence of intelligence, the reverse process will not occur.

In a recent Mathematical Intelligencer article ["A Mathematician's View of Evolution," The Mathematical Intelligencer 22, number 4, 5-7, 2000] I asserted that the idea that the four fundamental forces of physics alone could rearrange the fundamental particles of Nature into spaceships, nuclear power plants, and computers, connected to laser printers, CRTs, keyboards and the Internet, appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics in a spectacular way.1 Anyone who has made such an argument is familiar with the standard reply: the Earth is an open system, it receives energy from the sun, and order can increase in an open system, as long as it is "compensated" somehow by a comparable or greater decrease outside the system. S. Angrist and L. Hepler, for example (again in Order and Chaos ) write, "In a certain sense the development of civilization may appear contradictory to the second law.... Even though society can effect local reductions in entropy, the general and universal trend of entropy increase easily swamps the anomalous but important efforts of civilized man. Each localized, man-made or machine-made entropy decrease is accompanied by a greater increase in entropy of the surroundings, thereby maintaining the required increase in total entropy."

According to this reasoning, then, the second law does not prevent scrap metal from reorganizing itself into a computer in one room, as long as two computers in the next room are rusting into scrap metal -- and the door is open. (Or the thermal entropy in the next room is increasing--though I'm not sure what the conversion rate is between computers and thermal entropy.) This strange argument of "compensation" makes no sense logically: an extremely improbable event is not rendered less improbable by the occurrence of other events which are more probable.

brokenhead wrote: Recognize myself in it? I have no idea what he's trying to say. Why are you reading Chesterton? G. K. Chesterton is nothing to me.

Well, the Christian, or the 'Jew' for that matter, would have a hard time recognizing himself anyway. Chesterton is to me ages ago, I thought it might help at least to structure your thoughts on faith a bit. Never mind!

That was my impression too: I read it but I have no idea what he is trying to say.

What? the first paragraph was excellent, and funny. The second paragraph wasn't much, and as to the ouroboros, he misunderstands it.

Iolaus wrote:The second paragraph wasn't much, and as to the ouroboros, he misunderstands it.

What's your take?

Are you gonna start that again?

Yes, probably---depending on what you mean by "that."

The Court, however, will take a brief recess. Even judges need beauty sleep. :)