Their religion has a requirement (essentially; I'm paraphrasing) to proselytize, while yours does not. The stakes for them are higher than they are for you. The costs they see in their cost/benefit analytic are higher than the ones you see. I don't think you would want to play tug of war with your son's religion with your family. Ultimately, it will be his choice and responsibility.
On one hand, I wish the OP could take a stand now because on the meta-level, belief should not be handled like this, with one party being forced to tip-toe and concede their position because they "care less". You should be able to express what you believe without fear of repercussion, especially from your family, and teach your children as much.
As much as I dislike religion for its ability to make people so unreasonable, it seems obvious to me that a broken home is a far larger problem than the one at hand. But, that also should be obvious to her and her family. Would they really allow this to become an serious issue if you weren't belligerent about it? If you warned them not to undermine your status as the child's father?
I was raised in a similar situation. It didn't cause problems, my dad acknowledged the realpolitik of religion and occasionally went to church, but as I got older I think I started to recognize a bit of smugness in his attitude towards the whole thing. When I talked to him about it, he usually deflected, never denying or confirming anything. Presumably he was in a similar situation, although my moms family wasn't as crazy. Like I said it wasn't a big problem, but it was always a point of suppressed tension.
Have you talked with them about it as adults, something like "look, I don't believe what you believe, and I can't outright lie to my child about that, but for his/her sake let's just both back off and let the chips fall where they may?"
I agree with everything here, but I am kind of wondering what the point of this paper is when it restates a bunch of things its readers probably already know.
I am still waiting for an essentialist/non-compatablist/whateverist to define "free will" in a way that illustrates why it is incompatible with determinism, computational intractability aside. All I can find is more of the same explanation-by-definition
Incompatibilism claims that free will is incompatible with a deterministic world: since all events, including our decisions, were determined long ago, there is no space for freedom in our choices. Compatibilism, by contrast, asserts that free will is compatible with a derministic world.
So is it a question of nomenclature, or a question of fact? Is anyone seriously still advocating for some kind of spiritual essentialism? Or am I missing some more fundamental philosophical intuition?
The more I think about this, the more it seems apparent that the question doesn't need to be answered, but dissolved. We have no reason whatsoever to believe anything we think or do arises from anything but physics, and yet, concepts like "freedom" and "will" and "decision" are still very useful, effectively describing and accurately predicting real patterns and events that happen around us at the macroscopic scale. So does it come down to the question: Are we "free" from physics? Well we are physical systems, what would it even mean for us to be free of that? When is a thing not itself?
The MWI interpretation of quantum mechanics is kind of similar to what you're trying to do here with the fifth dimension (see also: everett branches, level 3 tegmarkian multiverse). The problem is that there is nothing special about a "decision" made by a human, you're just highlighting a really small subset of those world-branches for no good reason.
For the higher dimensions... well, sure. You can talk about higher dimensional spaces where you vary the initial fundamental constants of our universe (level 2 tegmarkian multiverse) and then the space of all mathematical structures (level 4), including those without spatial or temporal dimension, and an infinite grid of 17 dimensional spoons - but there's no natural, correct way to label those things.
I don't feel that your 6,7,8,9, or 10th dimension follow any sort of logic. They sound really hand-wavey. The 6th, 7th, and 8th dimensions are just analogizing our spatial dimensions onto a larger space where (presumably) every universe is a point, which makes no sense. Our universe doesn't even have 3 spatial dimensions, it just has 3 obvious spatial dimensions, and evolution found it convenient to make us think that way. In the space of all universes, there are some with 1 spatial dimension, and some with 845.
And while this is all fun to talk about, keep in mind that we humans aren't exceptions to these mathematical spaces. We can't "escape" because everything we do, think, and plan is ultimately predicted by and accounted for whatever ultimate set of rules governs the particular structure we are embedded in. In a way, we are just a very complex form of weather.
It is interesting that the endeavor of science is ultimately to answer these questions. At the bottom we have physics, and at the top we have cosmology. It seems to me that modern physics is close to bottoming out, because the rules can only get so simple. If this is true, then there is a line of anthropic reasoning that suggests it bottoms out at the top at some point, because it would be unlikely that we find ourselves so near the bottom. In either case, one of my deepest existential terrors involves the thought of one or both of these not being true. What if it is just turtles all the way down (and up)?
If someone uses the word "gay" or "***" in the colloquial sense, I'll take it as intended within the communication - as a word that is completely independent of homophobic meaning. I won't even think less of the person. I'd probably visibly wince, and move on with my life. If they do it frequently and I'm decently acquainted I might say something about it in passing.
With people that I trust, there should be an assumption of good intent. Being sensitive about choice of pronoun, noun, or racial/ethnic/lifestyle descriptive term strikes me as excessively pedantic and politically correct. Moreover, being excessively sensitive or easily offended strikes me as prudish and reactive, not enlightened. All communication should be judged on a case by case basis, according to the true intent underlying the chosen words. Sometimes people need to be gently reminded that their intended meaning or word choice is not culturally normative, but this is an eminently forgivable mistake that should brook no hostility.
We want Congressional hearing on Benghazi and Seal Team 6.
Irrelevant far-right red herring.
remove all Muslims in our government
Out and out racism, nice.
Fuel prices.
Well, I'm not sure what they are specifically referring to but big surprise here, an interest group is trying to improve its' bottom line. Fuel prices are already lower in America than anywhere else in the world, and are highly subsidized by the government.
I support political activism (even in this case) but I see nothing here that compels me to believe it's anything other than a self-interested, politicized, and probably irrelevant tantrum.
a selection of the highly upvoted comments:
What, no fried chicken delivery to the White House??!!! What will Moochelle and the community organizer traitor do!
I hope they stop some of the clandestine weapons Obama is sending to his Al-Qaeda friends in Syria that are massacring christians!
gun grabbers blame law abiding citizens for the deaths of the navy yard. gun grabbers blame fort hood slayings on law abiding citizens. sandy hook, same thing. all these places have one thing in common, clintons gun free zones. arm yourselves.
between illegal immigrants, jihadis, muslim brotherhoods, and others, i stand by the truckers, how about more harley riders?. how about bus loads? arrest obama, send him to jail along with his patzy hillary.
608.3a If the object that's resolving is an Aura spell, its resolution involves two steps. First, it checks whether the target specified by its enchant ability is still legal, as described in rule 608.2b. (See rule 702.5, "Enchant.") If so, the spell card becomes a permanent and is put onto the battlefield under the control of the spell's controller attached to the object it was targeting
If the target becomes illegal, the spell card should never become a permanent. But the rules reminder text for bestow says:
It becomes a creature again if it's not attached to a creature.
Clearly refers to the card when it is in play (because it has to be in play to be attached to a creature).
So unless they issue a special clarification, I don't see why the 2-for-1 will not occur.
It seems that devotion cards would only be playable in mono-colored decks, and this one looks unplayable in control (even if mono-U ended up viable) - so mono-U aggro/midrange, and it's playability is dubious even there. You really need this to reliably be a creature by turn 4 or 5 - the other effect isn't good enough. It doesn't seem powerful/consistent enough for older formats either. I really don't see this getting much play without a very specific kind of support from the set.
Monstrosity seems like a win more mechanic. The fact that its so costly just doesn't seem feasible to me.
Not really. Many games in standard and limited get to 7 or more mana, but cards that cost that much rarely see play because they're dead too often when you need something immediately. Monstrosity provides a late game mana sink/top deck potential on a lower curve card that *could* see play in constructed if pushed enough (like any other card) and will see play in limited. Granted they are all rares, but all 3 of the spoiled monstrosities are limited windmill slam power bombs.
Our brains have evolved to be extremely robust over a wide range of practical scenarios - any brain that "got stuck" in such situations would be selected against. As to the actual mechanism that allows this - well, that's a complicated subject. The first thing that comes to mind is that they are more similar to analog computers than digital ones - they're not deterministic from the design/intentional stance.
I've my share of reading in behavior economics and my opinion is that all studies that reveal irrational behavior are very poorly executed and never replicated
Not sure where you're getting that. Humans exhibit a large number of significant, and often obvious and costly cognitive biases and otherwise irrational behavior. Many of these biases seem to be heuristic shortcuts, originally useful but conceived in our pre-technological ancestral environment.
The morning after pill is clearly fine; the most extreme pro-choice advocate would probably not agree with, say, 30+ week abortion. My point is that the endpoints are uncontroversial, so there must be a smooth graduation of acceptability between them. No matter which point you pick, it's going to be arbitrary in some sense. The point at which the fetus can possibly be viable seems like a reasonable cut off to me (20 weeks). I wouldn't be opposed to an earlier cutoff (except for medically threatening cases for which there should clearly be no cutoff) as the women does have months to decide.
I do not think science has any place in the discourse that determines such moral issues. It really is not their domain or teaching authority to be telling people of what should be.
Why not? Yes, science seeks to answer what is. But morality is unavoidably tied to what is. If we value some things like "life", "liberty", and "happiness" but are increasingly plagued by difficult corner cases: abortion, euthanasia, privacy, and so forth, we have to disambiguate what those words actually mean in the actual world.
And who do you think has authority over issues of what should be?
Mensa is a scam. People paying for the privilege of smug ego-jerking. I'm not suprised that's one of their questions though. It's bull****, not lateral thinking.
So, you don't feel that the events of 9/11 were objectively wrong? That Al Qaeda and the families of the victims that died that day are both equally correct in their perspective of events?
Can you define what you mean by "objective"? How is saying "X is objectively wrong" different than saying "We can clearly all agree that X is wrong"?
Every time wizards makes a minor rules change everyone loses their mind... how often does the legend rule matter, and why is the legend-as-removal interaction superior to the alternative? Plenty of interactivity is created when people actually use their cards rather than having them cancel out.
What does "evidence" mean to you? As I see it, evidence is simply that which justifies belief. The definition is rather circular, but with good reason. The purpose of beliefs are to compress the sophisticated reality we live in into the mental model we keep in our head. So, as I interpret the concept of faith, it can only be undesirable; something to be minimized when possible. Why you would ever want to increase the distance between reality (whatever that may be) and your internal representation of it?
Goodwill, trust, friendship, love. Learning how to accept the better parts of humanity was a huge leap of faith for me.
There is evidence for all those things: I have first-hand experience of them all, and my interactions with others suggest they have as well. They're not faith based, they are just abstract. How is this different than religious faith (I anticipate the counterargument)? The most important distinction is that they stand alone as subjective experience. They are valuable as "psychologically emergent phenomena resulting from human interaction", or whatever you want to call it.
You can feel an omnipresent sky-daddy who loves you: religious fervor, euphoria, and belief are certainly real psychological events. But that's not enough. God needs to actually exist for the belief to be valid - unless you are skilled enough at self-deception that you can circumvent this truth in order to acquire the aforementioned euphoria, in which case, more power to you.
Since they are both logically inconsistent, I don't think this belongs in debate. There's nothing to debate, it's like a vs thread where everything is made up and the points don't matter.
Though if I actually were to play this game, I'd take the stance that omniscience grants omnipotence. I'm not really going to bother to explain why because everyone here would probably think I was crazy. Suffice to say it has to do with infinite computational capacity and the anthropic principle.
Everyone seems to agree that omnipotence granting omniscience, though I think it may make the original question more interesting if you specify that omnipotence can only actually grant what is logically consistent. Either way, the transformation runs into the problem of specification; if you have a little black box of omnipotence, how does your little human brain actually specify what you want in the first place? Think about all the cautionary tales about wishes going wrong. I'd say that no matter how you slice it, one would need omniscience in order to utilize their omnipotence.
On one hand, I wish the OP could take a stand now because on the meta-level, belief should not be handled like this, with one party being forced to tip-toe and concede their position because they "care less". You should be able to express what you believe without fear of repercussion, especially from your family, and teach your children as much.
As much as I dislike religion for its ability to make people so unreasonable, it seems obvious to me that a broken home is a far larger problem than the one at hand. But, that also should be obvious to her and her family. Would they really allow this to become an serious issue if you weren't belligerent about it? If you warned them not to undermine your status as the child's father?
I was raised in a similar situation. It didn't cause problems, my dad acknowledged the realpolitik of religion and occasionally went to church, but as I got older I think I started to recognize a bit of smugness in his attitude towards the whole thing. When I talked to him about it, he usually deflected, never denying or confirming anything. Presumably he was in a similar situation, although my moms family wasn't as crazy. Like I said it wasn't a big problem, but it was always a point of suppressed tension.
Have you talked with them about it as adults, something like "look, I don't believe what you believe, and I can't outright lie to my child about that, but for his/her sake let's just both back off and let the chips fall where they may?"
I am still waiting for an essentialist/non-compatablist/whateverist to define "free will" in a way that illustrates why it is incompatible with determinism, computational intractability aside. All I can find is more of the same explanation-by-definition
So is it a question of nomenclature, or a question of fact? Is anyone seriously still advocating for some kind of spiritual essentialism? Or am I missing some more fundamental philosophical intuition?
The more I think about this, the more it seems apparent that the question doesn't need to be answered, but dissolved. We have no reason whatsoever to believe anything we think or do arises from anything but physics, and yet, concepts like "freedom" and "will" and "decision" are still very useful, effectively describing and accurately predicting real patterns and events that happen around us at the macroscopic scale. So does it come down to the question: Are we "free" from physics? Well we are physical systems, what would it even mean for us to be free of that? When is a thing not itself?
For the higher dimensions... well, sure. You can talk about higher dimensional spaces where you vary the initial fundamental constants of our universe (level 2 tegmarkian multiverse) and then the space of all mathematical structures (level 4), including those without spatial or temporal dimension, and an infinite grid of 17 dimensional spoons - but there's no natural, correct way to label those things.
I don't feel that your 6,7,8,9, or 10th dimension follow any sort of logic. They sound really hand-wavey. The 6th, 7th, and 8th dimensions are just analogizing our spatial dimensions onto a larger space where (presumably) every universe is a point, which makes no sense. Our universe doesn't even have 3 spatial dimensions, it just has 3 obvious spatial dimensions, and evolution found it convenient to make us think that way. In the space of all universes, there are some with 1 spatial dimension, and some with 845.
And while this is all fun to talk about, keep in mind that we humans aren't exceptions to these mathematical spaces. We can't "escape" because everything we do, think, and plan is ultimately predicted by and accounted for whatever ultimate set of rules governs the particular structure we are embedded in. In a way, we are just a very complex form of weather.
It is interesting that the endeavor of science is ultimately to answer these questions. At the bottom we have physics, and at the top we have cosmology. It seems to me that modern physics is close to bottoming out, because the rules can only get so simple. If this is true, then there is a line of anthropic reasoning that suggests it bottoms out at the top at some point, because it would be unlikely that we find ourselves so near the bottom. In either case, one of my deepest existential terrors involves the thought of one or both of these not being true. What if it is just turtles all the way down (and up)?
With people that I trust, there should be an assumption of good intent. Being sensitive about choice of pronoun, noun, or racial/ethnic/lifestyle descriptive term strikes me as excessively pedantic and politically correct. Moreover, being excessively sensitive or easily offended strikes me as prudish and reactive, not enlightened. All communication should be judged on a case by case basis, according to the true intent underlying the chosen words. Sometimes people need to be gently reminded that their intended meaning or word choice is not culturally normative, but this is an eminently forgivable mistake that should brook no hostility.
Irrelevant far-right red herring.
Out and out racism, nice.
Well, I'm not sure what they are specifically referring to but big surprise here, an interest group is trying to improve its' bottom line. Fuel prices are already lower in America than anywhere else in the world, and are highly subsidized by the government.
I support political activism (even in this case) but I see nothing here that compels me to believe it's anything other than a self-interested, politicized, and probably irrelevant tantrum.
a selection of the highly upvoted comments:
If the target becomes illegal, the spell card should never become a permanent. But the
rulesreminder text for bestow says:Clearly refers to the card when it is in play (because it has to be in play to be attached to a creature).
So unless they issue a special clarification, I don't see why the 2-for-1 will not occur.
For EDH though, it's pretty neat.
Not really. Many games in standard and limited get to 7 or more mana, but cards that cost that much rarely see play because they're dead too often when you need something immediately. Monstrosity provides a late game mana sink/top deck potential on a lower curve card that *could* see play in constructed if pushed enough (like any other card) and will see play in limited. Granted they are all rares, but all 3 of the spoiled monstrosities are limited windmill slam power bombs.
Not sure where you're getting that. Humans exhibit a large number of significant, and often obvious and costly cognitive biases and otherwise irrational behavior. Many of these biases seem to be heuristic shortcuts, originally useful but conceived in our pre-technological ancestral environment.
Why not? Yes, science seeks to answer what is. But morality is unavoidably tied to what is. If we value some things like "life", "liberty", and "happiness" but are increasingly plagued by difficult corner cases: abortion, euthanasia, privacy, and so forth, we have to disambiguate what those words actually mean in the actual world.
And who do you think has authority over issues of what should be?
Can you define what you mean by "objective"? How is saying "X is objectively wrong" different than saying "We can clearly all agree that X is wrong"?
There is evidence for all those things: I have first-hand experience of them all, and my interactions with others suggest they have as well. They're not faith based, they are just abstract. How is this different than religious faith (I anticipate the counterargument)? The most important distinction is that they stand alone as subjective experience. They are valuable as "psychologically emergent phenomena resulting from human interaction", or whatever you want to call it.
You can feel an omnipresent sky-daddy who loves you: religious fervor, euphoria, and belief are certainly real psychological events. But that's not enough. God needs to actually exist for the belief to be valid - unless you are skilled enough at self-deception that you can circumvent this truth in order to acquire the aforementioned euphoria, in which case, more power to you.
Though if I actually were to play this game, I'd take the stance that omniscience grants omnipotence. I'm not really going to bother to explain why because everyone here would probably think I was crazy. Suffice to say it has to do with infinite computational capacity and the anthropic principle.
Everyone seems to agree that omnipotence granting omniscience, though I think it may make the original question more interesting if you specify that omnipotence can only actually grant what is logically consistent. Either way, the transformation runs into the problem of specification; if you have a little black box of omnipotence, how does your little human brain actually specify what you want in the first place? Think about all the cautionary tales about wishes going wrong. I'd say that no matter how you slice it, one would need omniscience in order to utilize their omnipotence.