What do you believe in

[rayheinrich]

"All the intellectual culture in the world will not atone for vicious habits and a tarnished soul."
- C. C. Taylor, President, Milligan College

[dukealien]

I believe in science (small "s") because it's pretty and it works. You have to admire a belief system which eschews being The Truth or The Light, limiting itself to being The Way. Honest, that. But there are heretics who assert that they can find, or even have found, the final Truth. I abjure and revile this "The" Science, which makes me, I suppose, an adherent of the Church of science, Skeptic.

[busker]

I believe in a future where cybernetics is a reality, and eugenics is not a synonym for genocide.
A future where genetic engineering makes us all beautiful and healthy and live for 200 years, while brain chips make us super intelligent and able to terraform Venus.

[rayheinrich]

I believe in a future where cybernetics is a reality, and eugenics is not a synonym for genocide.
A future where genetic engineering makes us all beautiful and healthy and live for 200 years, while brain chips make us super intelligent and able to terraform Venus.

And here I was thinking Mars was gonna be hard.

And what's THAT in your hand? Cybernetics IS a reality.

"Eugenics" will always have negative press.
Just use a different word. One I've seen used recently is "parental preferences".

---

I believe in trees...
Especially the young ones that are still alive.

And cat food cans...
The full ones, not the empty ones.

[CRNDLSM]

Welp, there's a few different versions of this, but it's mind boggling how bad the world must have been for so many people to die over things that never happened.  Like, accepting brutally tortured deaths... pretty bizarre gus


Old roman creed

I believe in God the Father almighty;
and in Christ Jesus His only Son, our Lord,
        Who was born from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,
        Who under Pontius Pilate was crucified and buried,
        on the third day rose again from the dead,
        ascended to heaven,
        sits at the right hand of the Father,
        whence He will come to judge the living and the dead,
and in the Holy Spirit,
the holy Church,
the remission of sins,
the resurrection of the flesh
(the life everlasting).

[busker]

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I believe in a future where cybernetics is a reality, and eugenics is not a synonym for genocide.
A future where genetic engineering makes us all beautiful and healthy and live for 200 years, while brain chips make us super intelligent and able to terraform Venus.

And here I was thinking Mars was gonna be hard.

And what's THAT in your hand? Cybernetics IS a reality.

"Eugenics" will always have negative press.
Just use a different word. One I've seen used recently is "parental preferences".

---

I believe in trees...
Especially the young ones that are still alive.

And cat food cans...
The full ones, not the empty ones.

Just as most “AI” applications are unsupervised machine learning on large data sets, “cybernetics” has come to mean control theory.
I mean the actual man machine cyborg future, with brain chip implants

---

1697849069[/url]']
Welp, there's a few different versions of this, but it's mind boggling how bad the world must have been for so many people to die over things that never happened.  Like, accepting brutally tortured deaths... pretty bizarre gus


Old roman creed

I believe in God the Father almighty;
and in Christ Jesus His only Son, our Lord,
        Who was born from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,
        Who under Pontius Pilate was crucified and buried,
        on the third day rose again from the dead,
        ascended to heaven,
        sits at the right hand of the Father,
        whence He will come to judge the living and the dead,
and in the Holy Spirit,
the holy Church,
the remission of sins,
the resurrection of the flesh
(the life everlasting).

The whole “Jesus was a myth” notion flies in the face of hundreds of years of scholarship.
The Rylands papyrus fragment is dated to the second century.
It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to argue that Jesus was made up, than to simply accept that he was an apocalyptic Jewish prophet who was baptised by John the Baptist, preached in and around Galilee for around three years, went to Jerusalem to spread his mission, and fell afoul of the authorities and was crucified for claiming to be the king of Jews, a treasonous offence against the Roman emperor.

[Quixilated]

I believe in kindness.
And sunshine and dirt.
And that there is something very wrong with peas.
I believe that stories are powerful and essential
and that books are the best weapon.

[rayheinrich]

Just as most “AI” applications are unsupervised machine learning on large data sets, “cybernetics” has come to mean control theory.
I mean the actual man machine cyborg future, with brain chip implants

"Cybernetics" didn't "come to mean", it has always meant control theory. See Wiki article below:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics

I was being ironic when I made that comment, I was implying that our smartphones had a
control over us reminiscent of 1984. Neither "cyborg" or "cybernetic" are the terms you're
looking for. Using that smartphone you're holding in your hand makes you a cyborg.
The difference between the smartphone and the implant is intended to be a quantitative one.
While the communication bandwidth of a successful implant is intended to be higher, both
the smartphone and the implant are still (until the implant reaches human intelligence levels)
man-machine interfaces. It's probably best not to use any words with "cy" in them and
just call the damn things "cognitive enhancement implants" or some such.

And I agree on that "AI" term. Its meaning has been so misconstrued as to be useless.
Not that I ever liked the term even when its meaning hadn't been diluted. The researchers
who first coined "AI" were studying real intelligence, there's was nothing "artificial" about it.
Calling it "artificial" wasn't scientific, it was either giving in to, or actually believing religious
dogma.

Artificial...
I have no problem calling an implant or a computer a machine, just as long as humans
are classified as machines as well. Large Language Models are products, just like we are,
of natural selection. They've come about, just like we have, through the process of evolution.
That humans somehow belong in a unique category is a conceit. The same conceit that
gave us to fantasize an all-powerful god that conveniently turns around and makes us
in its image. All to claim a privileged status. Kings could justify their power, we could
justify our abuse of other animals and hold all manner of other prejudices. For instance:
That women are less intelligent than men, that other peoples, races, nationalities,
religions, etc. are inherently lesser. The same prejudice is at work when we place
the term "artificial" in front of intelligence. Artificial means inferior, not real, not actual,
undeserving of equal consideration.

So yep, I don't approve of using "artificial".

[busker]

Ok, you’re technically correct. But 70s popular culture made it a much cooler term.

Human brains are the original neural networks, with primary data picked up through the five senses over years.
There is a set of hard coded instructions that we call the survival instinct (that includes reproduction and child rearing).
In theory it should be possible to create a human like robot that uses its appendages to act upon its survival instinct and uses the primary data from five sense receptors to add to its knowledge base or for survival.

Such a robot, if fed with the data we have on the internet, could be human like in its intelligence.
The challenge will be to mirror the number of synapses we have in the brain to make an adequately complex beast.

We have 100 bn neurons vs 134 bn transistors on the best chip, google tells me.
There are 22 bn computers on the internet. So even taking 50 bn transistors per computer that’s 1100 bn bn or 1.1 * 10^21 possible connections.

By contrast, 100 bn neurons can result in 1000 trillion synapses or a mere 10^15 connections

So, build a human like robot, give it the survival instinct, give it the 5 senses, and connect it to the internet. Job done.

[RiverNotch]

one thing that's emphasized in a lot of the texts pertaining to this sort of thing i've read is that it's generally better to remain quiet about this sort of thing. if you're wrong about what you say, you condemn both yourself and those who believe in what you just said; if you're right, you condemn those who disrespect what you just said, and by extension yourself. discernment is a gift no longer prized, and i'm not sure i even have xD

all that said, at the very least i acknowledge that what i believe in, i can't prove. so i don't believe in science. i can't be like you, CRNDLSM, considering billy's original post in this thread, not unless we boil science down even further to mere causality xP

[CRNDLSM]

The thing is, I believe in science, so I know most of what I believe in a spiritual manner comes from insanity, I think too much logic is really insane, you have to be able to cope with life's natural chaos, so you have to be a little chaos to cope. Too much logic will break like dry board. Discernment is all we really have, to take in all the words and figure out what's right. It's a lifelong process. I say I trust atheists typically because they don't believe just whatever they're told. I also believe any God would be more likely to shatter your beliefs than congratulate you for how right you are....

[Wjames]

I believe I am a fraction of the infinite - everything is one.

[busker]

@River - do you follow New Testament scholarship? I enjoy reading Bart Ehrman, who’s one of the few academics that write books for the lay public.

@CRNDL - the traditional religions are of course primitive superstitions that simply have great psychological resonance. But that has nothing to do with the existence of a guy named Joshua in northern Judea in the early first century

Jesus’s life is better documented than that of the Buddha

[RiverNotch]

@CRNDLDM just to be clear, when i say "i don't believe in science", i mean whatever "belief" i have in it is on a different level entirely, in the same way i "believe" the color red is red or being beaten up hurts

@busker i haven't heard of him, and right now i'm not really obligated to look into that sort of thing. i just take the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (in its original version -- no "filioque") as a given and quickly move on

[O. M. Geezersnaps]

"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people believe you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt." 
~Mark Twain