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The Geek Rapture (Blog Entry by dag)
there was an interesting anti-singularity article on a blog somewhere...

here:
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/antisingularity.html

I'll try to summarize since it's a bit long.


"Let's call this the "weak Antisingularity hypothesis" - the idea that technical progress and social progress are uncorrelated, and may even run in opposite directions."


"Unfortunately, there's also a "strong Antisingularity hypothesis." The strong Antisingularity hypothesis suggests that the coincidence of technical progress and social decay is not, in fact, a coincidence. It's actually a case of cause and effect."

"If technical progress actually causes social and political decay, Mike Judge is an optimist. What happens when the Singularity really approaches, but it's not quite here yet? When the curve of technology is almost vertical, but not yet infinite? "Damn, yo." "


But basically, singularity or no singularity - the future isn't that bright.


written by bluecliff  | 23 hours 34 minutes 27 seconds ago | CH
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Murakami: Hard Boiled Wonderland & The End of the World
*music
*promote


written by bluecliff  | 2 days 10 hours 13 minutes ago | CH
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A President who cares about the little guy
the truly bad is always hidden in the good. like a cancer.

I spit on your humanitarian values.
Everything you people stand for is wrong, degenerate, and sad.


written by bluecliff  | 2 days 20 hours 41 minutes ago | CH
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Christopher Hitchens on the Cosmos and the end of the world
but mad dogs and Englishmen go out into the noonday sun


written by bluecliff  | 3 days 5 hours 17 minutes ago | CH
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Sam Harris makes a joke and a point
>> ^chilaxe:
Knowledge is just a humanistic term for data... data points organized into patterns at a level of summary that's useful to the conscious mind.

Philosophy and introspection is fine, just so long as it's not claimed to trump science. Legislating its trumping of science is particularly going too far.


No, knowledge is word which we use to denote "state of mind" a psychological and mental faculty, which we do not fully understand.
I know that I exist, bu I don't knoew exactly how it is that this knowledge occurs
Data is something utterly different. YOu can say a magazine article has data but it doesn't have "knowledge"
Only when conscious (or semi-conscious) beings apply their mental faculties to "data" do we have knowledge.






written by bluecliff  | 4 days 10 hours 15 minutes ago | CH
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Sam Harris makes a joke and a point
Could you tell me what that evidence is?


written by bluecliff  | 4 days 10 hours 26 minutes ago | CH
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Is the Internet an Effective Forum for Public Debate?
Unfortunately the question is whether any merchandise can become tool for liberty. A better question is - isn't a tool in itself a non-public entity? Anything that is used for a definitive purpose, which is utilitarian, defines the user by the mode of its usage.


written by bluecliff  | 4 days 13 hours ago | CH
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Christopher Hitchens on Religion and Anti-theism
you yanks can even make atheism a religion.


written by bluecliff  | 5 days 54 minutes ago | CH
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BAN ALL SIFTQUISITIONS!!! (Wtf Talk Post)
perhaps its time for some SEXUAL HEALING


written by bluecliff  | 5 days 8 hours 17 minutes ago | CH
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Hitchens: Christianity is not imposed?
>> ^HadouKen24:
>> ^bluecliff:
heres a metaphor for you
your walking down a path which leads over a cliff, do you go ahead across the cliff and then if you fall blame gravity?

Hell, in the christian world view, is a constant of the human condition, it is the nature of the world, not of God. He doesn't send you to hell, you send yourself to hell - essentially speaking (although crudely put)

Now this leads you theological and cosmological problems about who created the world etc. but thats not his current argument.


That interpretation is not consistent with the plain language of the New Testament. Damnation always presented as an act of condemnation by a divine Judge. A more poetic interpretation may serve to salve one's conscience, but probably isn't very sound doctrine by Scriptural standards. The prose of the Pauline epistles does not really admit of the looseness of poetic interpretation.

Hell is not merely the suffering one inflicts upon oneself, either here or in the afterlife, but suffering that is inflicted by another.


I have no idea what you mean with your rant about how "the world is purely parodic." Whatever logical connection it has with the argument at hand didn't make it out of your head and into the post.


I was trying to discombobulate the torrent of sociological shit that often ails most of the comments.
(anyway its a quote from a french guy)
I suppose it ended as a FAIL...


But
I really don't think hell being "inflicted by another" is accurate. The standard theology goes (as far as I know) - hell is the absence of God. And the choice, in christian terms, is between the search for God and a life of sin, which is inherent to the world. It's a much more naturalist world view, if you look at it from that perspective. The "act of condemnation" is there, but need not be, it's only because the judeo-christian God communicates with his people, in a sort of one on one, that this is possible. As far as I know christians take this communication to be an act of divine mercy


(You may be right about St. Paul.)

















written by bluecliff  | 6 days 10 hours 14 minutes ago | CH
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Hitchens: Christianity is not imposed?
It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.

Ever since sentences started to circulate in brains devoted to reflection, an effort at total identification has been made, because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another; all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of Ariadne's thread leading thought into its own labyrinth.

But the copula of terms is no less irritating than the copulation of bodies. And when I scream I AM THE SUN an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy.


written by bluecliff  | 6 days 23 hours 46 minutes ago | CH
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Hitchens: Christianity is not imposed?
everyone, indeed, is.


written by bluecliff  | 1 week ago | CH
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Hitchens: Christianity is not imposed?
heres a metaphor for you
your walking down a path which leads over a cliff, do you go ahead across the cliff and then if you fall blame gravity?

Hell, in the christian world view, is a constant of the human condition, it is the nature of the world, not of God. He doesn't send you to hell, you send yourself to hell - essentially speaking (although crudely put)

Now this leads you theological and cosmological problems about who created the world etc. but thats not his current argument.


written by bluecliff  | 1 week ago | CH
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True Romance-Moor Children
I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night.


written by bluecliff  | 1 week ago | CH
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UPVOTE EVERYTHING DAY (Sift Talk Post)
>> ^blankfist:
>> ^bluecliff:
fuck this, stop erasing shit


No.


yes sir mister american liberal sir. roger. wilco. over. out.







written by bluecliff  | 1 week 1 day ago | CH
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