Why I am an atheist – Sabine

I am an atheist because when I was about four or five years old, my father brought me down to this little stream at the bottom of our garden and he made me put my hand into the clear cold water and told me about Heraclitus and the concept of panta rhei (everything moves and nothing stays the same). And when I was ten years old, our teacher marched us to a big mosaic/mural in our school depicting Plato’s analogy of the cave. Well, I knew then as much as I know now (45 years later) that I want to always search and find what is real and what can be known and to discover how everything always changes and evolves and not get stuck with some fixed idea/image reflecting from a wall.

Sabine
Germany

Well, now that you raise the question, Mitt…

Rmoney is pandering to the birthers now at a campaign stop in Michigan.

No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised.

Wait…how do I know that? I haven’t seen Mitt’s birth certificate, but I’ve seen Obama’s. Why should I believe him?

Oh. Because he’s white and looks like everyone else at his rallies. White people look like they were born in America, while brown people all look like foreigners and their claims of being born here are all questionable. I forgot.

I’d like to see him repeat that claim at an open rally in inner city Detroit, though. He might be the funny-looking one there.

Reminder: Podcast Sunday!

It’s going to get interesting this weekend: we will have Brownian, Louis, Jen McCreight, and Rebecca Watson on a Google+ hangout on Sunday, 5pm Central time, to talk about the limitations of the current skepticism and atheism movements, and how Third Wave Atheism/Atheism+/Sniny New Atheism should and can extend our reach.

A lot of people have been writing me asking to join in, but notice that Google+ has a ten person limit to hangouts, and I’ve already booked five of us. I’ll be sending out invitations to the primary guests first, and I’m going to let them talk for a while before maybe sending out a broader wave of invitations for the limited spaces left. I may also ask the late-comers to limit themselves to a short comment or question and then step out to let others in.

You will be able to watch and listen live on Google+ and youtube, and I’ll keep my eye on the comments for good questions to pass along to our panel. I’m afraid this one might get swamped with people clamoring to join in; don’t be offended if you’re not allowed in, I will try to pay attention to comments during the discussion!

What does it even mean to pass the mirror test?

The mirror test is a well known indicator for some degree of self-awareness: surreptitiously mark an animal’s face, show it a mirror, and see if it recognizes that the reflected image is of itself by whether it reaches up to touch or remove the mark. We see that behavior and infer that the animal has some knowledge of itself and can recognize that the mirror image is not another animal.

But now robots are being specifically programmed to pass the mirror test.

Ow. It makes my brain hurt.

So this is a computer that has no other indicators of consciousness or awareness or autonomous “thought” (whatever that means…my brain is hurting again), and is being coded to respond to a specific kind of visual input with a specific response…to literally pass the mirror test by rote. Does that really count as passing?

I think that all it actually accomplishes is to subvert the mirror test. It’s always been a proxy for a more sophisticated cognitive ability, the maintenance of a sophisticated mental map of the world around us that includes an entity we call “self”, and I don’t think that training a visual processing task to identify a specific shape unique to the robot design counts.

I’d also like to see what happens if two identical robots are made and put in the same room. To recognize “self” you also have to have a concept of “other”.

Dead squid can dance

Take one squid. Pin it down in a dish. Dissect out one of the peripheral nerves innervating the fin. Plug it into your iPod, and stimulate the nerve with the speaker output while playing Insane in the Membrane. Record the behavior of the chromatophores.

You have my permission, once I’m dead, to run any kind of patterned electrical signal through my nerves to see what my corpse will do. I don’t have the nice chromatophores, but maybe you could get some interesting twitches.

You minorities need to stop feeling so damned sorry for yourselves!

Whine, whine, whine. That’s all minorities ever do. Steve King (Racist, IA) would like you all to man up, act white, and join a church.

I went to the Iowa State website and […] I typed in “multicultural” and it came back to me, at the time, 59 different multicultural groups listed to operate on campus at Iowa State. It started with Asians and it ended with Zeitgeist, so from A to Z, and most of them were victims’ groups, victimology, people that feel sorry for themselves and they’re out there recruiting our young people to be part of the group that feels sorry for themselves. […]

And then, you’re brought into a group of people that are–have a grievance against society rather than understand there’s a tremendous blessing in this society.

Multiculturalism is a dirty word. There is but One True Culture, and you will shut up and be assimilated. There’s something wrong with you if you have any grievances against Steve King’s society.

Hey, Iowans, how do you keep electing this moron? And as long as you’re doing that anyway, can we send all of our Bachmann supporters south to live in his district?

Texas is about to get worse

I usually avoid Texas political news because it makes me ill, so I’m a little late to this…but would you believe the Texas legislature took a turn to the right in the last election? The Tea Party led a wave of new lunatics right into the halls of power in that state…and what they want to do as a top priority is follow the Louisiana path of demolishing public education and vouchers, vouchers, vouchers.

State Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, the outspoken voice of the far right in the Senate, said he will be pushing vouchers that parents of school-age children could use for charter schools, online offerings or additional alternatives to the public schools.

"To me, school choice is the photo ID bill of this session," the Houston lawmaker said. "Our base has wanted us to pass photo voter ID for years, and we did it. They’ve been wanting us to pass school choice for years. This is the year to do it, in my view. That issue will do more to impact the future of Texas and the quality of education than anything else we could do."

If you haven’t heard about this photo ID bill, it’s a racist law passed to suppress minority voters by requiring photo ID at the polls. They say it’s to prevent voter fraud, but since that’s a nonexistent problem, you know what it’s about: preventing poor brown people from voting. It’s one strategy the Republicans have to stay in office, and that’s by suppressing voter turnout while making it easy for well-off white folks to make their preferences known.

So it’s telling that this dingleberry and his base so value fucking racism, and that now their next priority is to screw over education. That’s the second prong of the Republican strategy: keeping people stupid. They know that anyone with a brain will turn away in revulsion from the Tea Party policies, so they have to make sure no one in the electorate develops one.

Why I am an atheist – Matthew Pocock

It is difficult to explain why I am an atheist without starting at the beginning. I was born in the mid-70s in rural Oxfordshire, England. My parents where Born Again Christians of the ‘burn your Beetles records’ variety, and believed with all the passion and transparency of youth that they where blessed and anointed to do the Lord’s work. They met at a Christian youth event and that has set the tenner for the rest of their lives together. Needless to say, my siblings and I where raised to treat Jesus as the other member of our family, albeit an invisible and all-powerful one. Jesus was firstly the saviour of our family, and only then the saviour of our church, country and the world. It was an intensely personal faith. Our parents believed in strict parenting. Child-rearing and the training of working dogs could be accomplished using essentially the same approach, although children seemed to have longer memories and where better at dissembling than hounds, and while the dog got a newspaper on the nose, we got the cane. It was enough to know that we had done wrong; there was little need to explain why. They loved us dearly (and still do), but I felt we always came a distant third behind Jesus and my parents to each other, in that order.

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