Brooders.net

I didn’t finish this book.

I liked some of the concepts, but the author, Richard Dawkins, struck me as bitter and twisted throughout the first few chapters. And probably continued to complain throughout the rest of the book. Unfortunately, I also watched a documentary of his on TV, which kind of reinforced his belligerent intolerance to religion. That being said, he does have a few good points.

“There is no such thing as a Christian child, there is only a child of Christian parents.”

Insert whatever religion you like in that phrase.

Interesting point because can a child really ponder religion when their main source of “truth” (i.e. Their Parents) is telling them what to think, what to believe and how the world works? Is it Conditioning through reciting prayers and creeds? I guess it provides an easy answer to questions. Why is that mummy? “God works in mysterious ways”, or “God is teaching us a lesson”. It stops deeper questioning which doesn’t help understanding the world or situations. So his point, that children are conditioned by their parents to believe (kinda like santa claus, but with more serious restrictions on lifestyle).

It did make me reflect on my own religious upbringing. I can still recite various creeds and prayers, even though I have not attended church in 15 years. It took a while for me to throw off the concept of god. Or perhaps more accurately, recognise it only as a concept and not an actual “thing”. I am 30 now, but only in the last year or so come around to this “revelation” for want of a better word. I also wonder whether this has to do with physical proximity to my parents, as I moved interstate from them nearly 8 years ago.

So back to the book, here’s what Amazon has to say:

Discover magazine recently called Richard Dawkins “Darwin’s Rottweiler” for his fierce and effective defense of evolution. Prospect magazine voted him among the top three public intellectuals in the world (along with Umberto Eco and Noam Chomsky).

Now Dawkins turns his considerable intellect on religion, denouncing its faulty logic and the suffering it causes. He critiques God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being.

He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. In so doing, he makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just irrational, but potentially deadly. Dawkins has fashioned an impassioned, rigorous rebuttal to religion, to be embraced by anyone who sputters at the inconsistencies and cruelties that riddle the Bible, bristles at the inanity of “intelligent design,” or agonizes over fundamentalism in the Middle Eastor Middle America.

Here’s a snippet from my childhood .. I am not sure why do small children in primary school (ages 6-12) need to sing songs with lyrics like:
“what did Judas do?,
he hung himself upon an alder”.
Why? I just think it’s weird, perhaps it a story with a righteous ending where the guilty or betrayer gets punished, so it’s all ok .. and there’s a happy ending.

So here’s an interesting concept (in my mind at least), just say we have all these religions who think they are correct. So we have:

• Religion J - We’re Right, the only god, every other is false
• Religion C - We’re Right, the only god, every other is false
• Religion I - We’re Right, the only god, every other is false
• Religion B - We’re Right, enlightenment is the way
• Religion H - We’re Right, the only gods, every other is false

If everyone thinks they’re right, someone must be wrong. In fact if there is only one religion is correct, then 80% of religions are wrong. So more than likely, they are all wrong. At least that’s my current over simplistic proof that they are all wrong.

So, is my rant above equal his? The irony is not lost on me.

It probably made me think about the issue quite seriously, I just didn’t like the messenger.

Rating: Unrated (Need to probably finish it .. maybe when the pile of other books diminishes).

Ask yourself: With which instrument do you cause more greenhouse-gas emissions: your car key or your fork? ( Via Driving Us to Vegetarianism )

I subscribe to the Sentient Developments feed, and have recently been thinking about his comments regarding vegetarianism.

Check out:

• Lancet: Eat less meat to combat global warming
• David Roberts on vegetarianism and environmentalism

as much as 22% of greenhouse emissions are from agriculture

Kind of hard to believe (who can you believe nowadays anyway .. everyone has an agenda of some sort).

George has highlighted his thoughts on meat eaters ( Meat Eaters are bad people ). It’s an interesting viewpoint, not sure where I sit. I guess some of depends in how much you believe the food chain things is real or not. If you believe that people are animals and animals eat meat .. well you can probably scratch that off. I personally think that people eat too much meat, because it’s cheap and you can. There are other options for eating .. nowadays price control doesn’t exist (e.g. 100 years ago .. meat was probably really expensive).

I think there is some merit to the emissions argument. I guess that keeping, feeding, preparing, processing and transport all take their environmental toll. However, I think a reduction is more realistic option for me. One of the articles mentions a cutback of 10% to provide a reduction in emissions. The problem, people will see a lot of other issues, power, transport, industry, before this one.

So maybe we’ll end up eating meat flavoured sludge at some point in an effort to reduce emissions.

This sounds like 1960s sci fi, but it’s actually modern day research.

The Vanderbilt Bionic Arm website has a video containing interviews with the researchers and shows demos of it working.
The site claims:

Unconventional power source could revolutionize the design of prosthetic limbs

The video won my attention by starting out with Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader dueling in “Empire Strikes Back”, then showing Luke’s prosthesis. Anyway, back to reality, the reason for “rocket power” is the use of gas to extend and contract these artificial muscles. Apparently, state of the art robotics for this size, is 1/6 the strength capability of human muscle. So their use of gas to rocket power things gets better size to strength performance. Not surprisingly, some of the funding is coming from the military, whose workers are prone to losing limbs in battle.

See also Rocket-powered mechanical arm could revolutionize prosthetics.

( Via Livejournal Cyberpunk )

So, a couple of weeks after Udon and Artificial Machines, and a bit further into Age of Spritual Machines and I’m starting to change my mind on the topic … perhaps this AI and computational power is making a bit more sense.

So far I’m really really enjoying The Age of Spiritual Machines. It’s a pretty out there book, on par with most cyberpunk science fiction .. just that it’s mostly research fact.

A couple of tidbits so far that I like:

• Do people think or just calculate - most people will argue that machines calculate
• What will computing power in 2020 be like, (will we have strong AI) …
• Computational power of computing has been increasing since we’ve had computing, Moore’s Law is still at work (even without bizarro Nanotechnolgy or Quantum computing)
• Computers learn the opposite direction to people. Children learn language via sounds, then reading and writing symbols - while Computers can output and read symbols well before they can understand spoken lanuguage.

A thought occured to me while I’ve been reading. Some of my disbelief is probably due to the yuck factor, or self preservation context of my thoughts. Perhaps even pride. Surely the human mind is unique. If my mind could be transfered would it really be me? How would I know that I had been transferred to the new hardware?

But then it occured to me … I’ve gone under a general anaesthetic before .. how do I know it was me that woke up afterwards? I guess if you think of that as being “powered down” and then brought back, then the feeling of transferring conciousness to new hardware isn’t as hard to swallow.

Every night, we sleep (power down?) and come back in the morning with the same memories. So is the whole mind downloading/upload to new hardware just a technology issue? That would be freaky, yes .. upgrade me to new body … wake up the next day in a new “skin”.

Kurzweil seems to think so.

The book is a philosophical rollercoaster. My other current started reading book pile consists of “Future Shock”, The God Delusion, and “The Tipping Point” feels like they’re all subsets of this book. Future Shock because it looks at Acceleration Change, and people having more difficulty adapting … but I think Kurzweil is describing technology as an aid to this problem, augmenting humans for the better. The God Delusion is similar due to the absence of any Supernatural god, and the authors strong belief that evolution is how people became what we are today. It’s almost like this book is the God Delusion, just with a mix of technological expectations built in. The tipping point (although I’ve only just read 20 pages or so) is sometimes the irrational reason for why things occur, especially with the irrationality of people.

The whole mind uploading and downloading thing (often core theme to Cyberpunk fiction) is quite an interesting issue, which the book touches on. In the novel “Altered Carbon”, certion special forces soldiers were trained to be downloaded into new bodies and beamed across to wherever they were needed. Not only that, but most people had a real time backup of themselves in their “Cortical Stack”(Storage device somewhere in the back of their skull), as long as that wasn’t destroyed .. you could be brought back. So if you had a heart attack, got shot, bled to death you were capable of resurrection. The book was good in that respect, serious psychological trauma still required therapy once you were brought back. There were also laws against uploading yourself (or mind) into multiple bodies .. now that’s a mind bending topic. The Age of Spiritual machines also covers this very same topic, if you could non-invasively (and non-destructrively) scan and copy someones mind, and upload to another body .. both of them would claim to be the same person.

This book, probably best described as transhumanist, is almost cyberpunk science fiction. If I had read this when authored in 1999, I think I would have called it that. Now, it feels like this is actually in the realms of possibility.

I get the feeling, that as I keep reading the book this “Udon and Machines” series will continue.