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Thanks for the thought out reply. Before I get to specifics, let me throw out three thoughts:

1. First, let me define faith: complete trust in something, without personally verifiable proof.

2. I am in the same boat as you. I absolutely accept what has been taught to me in most science courses and books. But, aside from my own area of expertise, I take it for granted that past a certain point, I can't possibly reproduce the experiments and body of work in any particular field. So, my acceptance of, say, the results of organic chemistry is based on faith as defined above.

3. From my experience in the mill of American scientific academia and national laboratory culture, scientists DO NOT have an incentive to prove scientific 'canon' wrong. Especially in the politically strife world of academia, where tenure and grants are dependent not only upon good intellectual work, but upon soft skills and reputation. Too much in the fringe can sink you.

>> ^gwiz665:

@longde
I have seen the theories that have been through rigorous testing (aka the scientific method) and I can see the practical applications (power comes out of the reactor).
My logical basis stems from a mountain of scientific work in the field, where every single worker in the field has something to gain from disproving any given theory, but so far has been unable. Angels in the reactor is a rather hilarious hypothesis, but the onus of proving that hypothesis is on whoever makes it.
While the prevalent scientific theory has been verified by many independent scientists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor
If you can bring any sort of evidence, data or observation that can be analysed to the table that an angel actually powers the nuclear reactor, then present it, or have whoever made that theory present it.
Let's take a different example, since the nuclear reactor is a bit out of reach for laymen.
MAGNETS, I don't know that details about magnetic fields, but I do know that they attract/push each other depending on something or other. I have read books on why they do this, these books have been through this rigorous testing known as the scientific method, because every scientist in the world has an incentive to disprove it. This is one of the factor that make me believe in the validity of that particular book.
Furthermore theories about magnets have predictive powers in that they show how you can make magnets, and how to make different powers of magnets.
For me, knowing the gritty details of magnets is not that important, but to a physicist it is very important. A layperson just sees the results of academia knowing the details in all practical applications of it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet#Common_uses_of_magnets)
Gnosticism/agnosticism does not apply, as agnosticism implies that we cannot know and this is obviously not true, since we (the relevant scientists) do know quite a bit about it.
I'd rather use terms such as perinormal (that we do not know yet, but can be known) or blackboxing. A layperson, such as myself, blackbox a lot of things (I don't know how a CPU works down in the nitty gritty with electrons and what not), but I use it anyway - it's a black box that does shit. I click my keyboard, and letters appear on my screen - fucking magic. To me this is something I do not know all the details of, but obviously it works somehow.

@longde
I have seen the theories that have been through rigorous testing (aka the scientific method) and I can see the practical applications (power comes out of the reactor).

My logical basis stems from a mountain of scientific work in the field, where every single worker in the field has something to gain from disproving any given theory, but so far has been unable. Angels in the reactor is a rather hilarious hypothesis, but the onus of proving that hypothesis is on whoever makes it.

While the prevalent scientific theory has been verified by many independent scientists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor

If you can bring any sort of evidence, data or observation that can be analysed to the table that an angel actually powers the nuclear reactor, then present it, or have whoever made that theory present it.

Let's take a different example, since the nuclear reactor is a bit out of reach for laymen.

MAGNETS, I don't know that details about magnetic fields, but I do know that they attract/push each other depending on something or other. I have read books on why they do this, these books have been through this rigorous testing known as the scientific method, because every scientist in the world has an incentive to disprove it. This is one of the factor that make me believe in the validity of that particular book.

Furthermore theories about magnets have predictive powers in that they show how you can make magnets, and how to make different powers of magnets.

For me, knowing the gritty details of magnets is not that important, but to a physicist it is very important. A layperson just sees the results of academia knowing the details in all practical applications of it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet#Common_uses_of_magnets)

Gnosticism/agnosticism does not apply, as agnosticism implies that we cannot know and this is obviously not true, since we (the relevant scientists) do know quite a bit about it.

I'd rather use terms such as perinormal (that we do not know yet, but can be known) or blackboxing. A layperson, such as myself, blackbox a lot of things (I don't know how a CPU works down in the nitty gritty with electrons and what not), but I use it anyway - it's a black box that does shit. I click my keyboard, and letters appear on my screen - fucking magic. To me this is something I do not know all the details of, but obviously it works somehow.

@marbles:

First you need to acknowledge what a conspiracy is. When two or more people agree to commit a crime, fraud, or some other wrongful act, it is a conspiracy. Not in theory, but in reality. Grow up, it happens.

Thanks for the vocabulary lesson, but I used the term conspiracy theory, not conspiracy. Conspiracy theory has a separate and more strongly suggestive definition (this one from Merriam-Webster): "a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators."

I openly acknowledge that the government of the United States has and does commit conspiracies, as you define the word. (You mentioned Operation Northwoods in a separate comment; a post on Letters of Note from few weeks ago may be of interest to you, too, if you haven't already seen it: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/08/possible-actions-to-provoke-harrass-or.html.) The actions described therein, and other such actions, I would aptly describe as conspiracies (were they to be enacted).

Definitions aside, my problem with posts like that of @blastido_factor is that most of their so-called conspiracies are easily debunked. They're old chestnuts. A few minutes' worth of Google searches can disprove them.

It may be helpful to distinguish between what I see as the two main "conspiracies" surrounding 9/11: (1) that 9/11 was, to put it briefly, an "inside job," and (2) that certain members of the government of the United States conspired to use the events of 9/11 as justification for a series of military actions (many of which are ongoing) against people and countries that were, in fact, uninvolved in the 9/11 attacks. The first I find no credible evidence for. The second I consider a more tenable position.


The Pentagon is the most heavily guarded building in the world and somehow over an hour after 4 planes go off course/stop responding to FAA and start slamming into buildings, that somehow one is going to be able to fly into a no-fly zone unimpeded and crash into the Pentagon without help on the inside?

Once again, much of what you mention can be attributed to poor communication between the FAA and the government agencies responsible for responding to the attacks (and, for that matter, between the various levels of government agencies). And again, this is one of the major criticism levied by the various 9/11 investigations. From page forty-five of the 9/11 Commission: "The details of what happened on the morning of September 11 are complex, but they play out a simple theme. NORAD and the FAA were unprepared for the type of attacks launched against the United States on September 11, 2001. They struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never before encountered and had never trained to meet."

Furthermore, it seems to me that one of the biggest mistakes made by a lot of the conspiracy theorists who fall into the first cateory (see above) is that they judge the events of 9/11 in the context of post-9/11 security. National security, on every level, was entirely different before 9/11 than it is now. That's not to say that the possibility of this kind of attack wasn't considered within the intelligence community pre-9/11. We know that it was (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks_advance-knowledge_debate). But was anyone adequately prepared to handle it? No.

In any event, when's the last time you looked at a map of Washington, DC? If you look at a satellite photo, you'll notice that the runways at Ronald Reagan airport are, literally, only a few thousand feet away from the Pentagon. Was a no-fly zone in place over Washington by 9:37 AM? I honestly don't know. But it's misleading to suggest that planes don't routinely fly near the Pentagon. They do.


And how did two giant titanium engines from a 757 disintegrate after hitting the Pentagon's wall? They were able to find the remains of all but one of the 64 passengers on board the flight, but only small amounts of debris from the plane?

In truth, I don't know enough about ballistics to speak for how well a titanium engine would withstand an impact with a reinforced wall at hundreds of miles an hour. But, if you're suggesting that a plane never hit the building, here's a short list of what you're wilfully ignoring: the clipped light poles, the damage to the power generator, the smoke trails, the hundreds of witnesses, the deaths of everyone aboard Flight 77, and the DNA evidence confirming the identities of 184 of the Pentagon's 189 fatalities (64 of which were the passengers on Flight 77).

Regarding the debris: It's misleading to claim that only small amounts of debris were recovered. This from Allyn E. Kilsheimer, the first structural engineer on the scene: "I saw the marks of the plane wing on the face of the building. I picked up parts of the plane with the airline markings on them. I held in my hand the tail section of the plane, and I found the black box ... I held parts of uniforms from crew members in my hands, including body parts." In addition, there are countless photos of plane wreckage both inside and outside the building (http://www.google.com/search?q=pentagon+wreckage).


Black boxes are almost always located after crashes, even if not in useable condition. Each jet had 2 recorders and none were found?

You help prove my point with this one: "almost always located." Again, I'm no expert on the recovery of black boxes, but here's a point to consider: if the black boxes were within the rubble at the WTC site, you're looking to find four containers that (undamaged, nonetheless) are roughly the size of two-liter soda bottles amidst the rubble of two buildings, each with a footprint of 43,000 square feet and a height of 1,300 feet (for a combined volume of 111,000,000 cubic feet, or 3,100,000,000 liters). (You might want to check my math. And granted, that material was enormously compacted when the towers collapsed. But still, it's a large number. And it doesn't include any of the space below ground level or any of the other buildings that collapsed.) Add to that the fact that they could have been damaged beyond recognition by the collapse of the buildings and the subsequent fires. To me, that hardly seems worthy of conspiracy.


Instead we invaded Afghanistan and started waging war against the same people we trained and armed in the 80s, the same people Reagan called freedom fighters. Now we call them terrorists for defending their own sovereignty.

Here, finally, we find some common ground. I couldn't agree more. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more ardent critic of America's foreign policy.

>> ^marbles:
First you need to acknowledge what a conspiracy is ...

>> ^aurens:

There's an old Jewish proverb that runs something like this:

"A fool can throw a stone into the water that ten wise men cannot recover."

Your stones, fortunately, aren't irrecoverable. I'll offer some counterpoints to a few of your claims, and I'll leave it up to you to fish for the truth about the others.
Kinda like a jet plane's black boxes aren't irrecoverable... no wait, they were. FBI: "None of the recording devices from the two planes that hit the World Trade Center were ever recovered." But this defies reason. Black boxes are almost always located after crashes, even if not in useable condition. Each jet had 2 recorders and none were found? Anonymous source at the NTSB: "Off the record, we had the boxes,"
Conspiracy? I think so.

>> ^aurens:

I don't know what you mean by "produced,"He means if you have evidence that implicates a suspect of a crime, then you indict that person. You then find and arrest that person, charge them, and follow the rule of law. The FBI admits they have no "hard evidence" that OBL was behind the 9/11 attacks, yet he was immediately blamed for it. The Taliban offered extradition if we provided evidence and we refused. Instead we invaded Afghanistan and started waging war against the same people we trained and armed in the 80s, the same people Reagan called freedom fighters. Now we call them terrorists for defending their own sovereignty.
Conspiracy? I think so.

>> ^aurens:

The North Tower was struck at 8:46 AM, the South Tower at 9:03 AM, and the Pentagon at 9:37 AM. By my math, the Pentagon was hit fifty-one minutes after the first plane hit the WTC and thirty-four minutes after the second plane hit. The 9/11 Commission estimated that the hijacking of Flight 11, the first plane to hit the WTC, began at 8:14 AM. It's misleading, in this context...
You're talking about the Department of Defense. The Pentagon is the most heavily guarded building in the world and somehow over an hour after 4 planes go off course/stop responding to FAA and start slamming into buildings, that somehow one is going to be able to fly into a no-fly zone unimpeded and crash into the Pentagon without help on the inside? Never mind the approach the pilot took makes no sense. If your target is the Pentagon, you can cause the most damage and most causalities by doing a nose down crash in the top. Instead the amateur pilot does a high precision 360 degree turn, descending 7,000 feet in the last 2 minutes to impact the Pentagon in the front, the only spot with reinforced steel. He spends an extra 2 and half minutes in the air exposed and ends up hitting the exact spot that has been reinforced and also where the bookkeeping and accountants were. Day before 9/11: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announces that the Pentagon has lost track of $2.3 TRILLION DOLLARS of military spending.
Conspiracy? I think so. (Bonus: WeAreChange confronts Rumsfeld)
>> ^aurens:

Three videos, not one, were released.
And at least 84 remain classified. Why?
And how did two giant titanium engines from a 757 disintegrate after hitting the Pentagon's wall? They were able to find the remains of all but one of the 64 passengers on board the flight, but only small amounts of debris from the plane?
Conspiracy? I think so.

>> ^aurens:

I don't fault you, or others like you, for wanting to "think twice" about the explanations given for certain of the events surrounding 9/11. I do fault you, though, for spending so little time on your second round of thinking, and for so carelessly tossing conspiracy theories to the wind.
First you need to acknowledge what a conspiracy is. When two or more people agree to commit a crime, fraud, or some other wrongful act, it is a conspiracy. Not in theory, but in reality. Grow up, it happens. If you spent anytime at all "thinking" or looking at the evidence, then you would recognize government lies for what they are. You don't have to know the truth to recognize a lie.

"One Meridian Plaza is a 38-floor skyscraper in Philadelphia that suffered a severe fire on February 23, 1991. The fire started on the 22nd floor and raged for 18 hours, gutting eight floors and causing an estimated $100 million in direct property loss. 1 2 3 It was later described by Philadelphia officials as "the most significant fire in this century". "
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/compare/fires.html


This clip is a pathetic little band-aid against the piles of "weird shit" about 9/11 that still to this day should make any intelligent person think twice.

Such as:

- The alleged masterminds of 9/11 have never been produced and never put to trial, despite having supposedly been captured in 2001/02

- Total failure of the air defense system. The Pentagon was struck One hour and Twenty minutes after the attacks began, yet there was no response from Andrews Air Force base, which is just 10 MILES away and supposed to be in charge of defending the capitol.

- The Bush / Bin Ladin / Saudi families connection was never fully explored or explained.

- According to two first responders, black boxes were found, but later "disappeared" and their existence denied by the 9/11 Commision Report.

- The multiple military wargames planned long in advance and held on the morning of September 11th included scenarios of a domestic air crisis, a plane crashing into a government building, and a large-scale emergency in New York. Some fucking co-incidence huh.

- Of all the cameras around the pentagon, including the security tapes taken from local gas stations, only one blurry clip was released.

- The remains of the twin towers were quickly carried off and buried before any forensic investigations could be done.

the list goes on....


9/11 Never Forget??

You're damn right I'll never forget. You can count on it.

I'm having zero problem watching videos everywhere except VideoSift - it's just a black box and if I right click it says "video not loaded" - I'm not having a problem anywhere except here. Any idea if there's something happening on the back end?



-nevermind- I think it may be a problem with embedded YT videos not working for me anywhere....

>> ^jimnms:

Is there supposed to be video? I just see a black box and hear people talking.


I've had lots of problems with CH videos since I upgraded toFirefox 5. I am not able to submit CH videos with Firefox, I had to use IE to submit this. And once submitted, I cannot see the video here, if I use Firefox. I can play it OK in the CH site itself, or play it fine on here if I use IE instead.. sigh.

Posted this via some sort of facebook plugin first which I don't enjoy. So sorry about double post.

My theory is that this type of technology will finally allow us to have a "mainframe" PC in the basement with a stack of disks and a pile of ram so that we can just plug a monitor, keyboard, and mouse in any room we feel like it and run session of the main PC. With existing interconnect tech this would be very hard. Now it can be one cable. Poof: computer is now a black box service for the house, simplifying life for those of us with a couple of TVs, media library, kids, portable devices, etc.

Is there supposed to be video? I just see a black box and hear people talking.

Why is it a tiny box inside the big black box? I want to actually be able to see video not see video surrounded by inky blackness.

>> ^Croccydile:

>> ^ant:
/me wonders if 3:27+ had yellow Norton boxes.

Those are Office 2007 actually
>> ^blackjackshellac:
I found myself with a monitor lacking a vga cable so I figured while driving by BestBuy that I'd pop in and see if I could get a replacement cable. Long story short: 45 !@#! dollars for a !@#! vga cable. I didn't even look at the HDMI cables lest my head explode.
Fuck Best Buy, stupid twats.
ps. Ordered one from newegg for 5$

I had a similar experience looking for HDMI stuffs only to come across 6' cables ranging from $50 to nearly $100 (?!) The sad part is I later found a Belkin 6' HDMI for $20 at Lowes. A hardware store. What the fuck Best Buy? (Guess which one I wound up buying)


Look at the end of the rack with yellow and black boxes.

Alright @enoch, I'll take up your challenge.

I have many questions that I would like answered, that nothing answers yet. I am not very interested in why I exist, because I don't think there is any particular meaning in that - I can read meaning in to my existence, sure, but there's no outside meaning to my existence or anything's existence. Some may view this as cynical, I see it as reasonable.

I am very interested in how. How does my brain work, how do I have a consciousness, how does my body influence my mind, and vice versa.

Why does regular physics break down at sub-atomic levels? Does this fact ripple up throughout the scales, so a quantum fluctuation affects my mood in the end?

Are dreams just random firings of neurons? Are they something else? We often see some sort of meaning in our dreams (and sometimes none at all), why is that? Do we make up the meaning as we go along, or do we project meaning into our dreams for ourselves to interpret? After all, if dreams are in fact created by ourselves, instead of just random, there must (or might) be some underlying meaning in it.

Our psyche is interesting, because our entire view of the world depends on it. A madman may see the world different than me, everyone may see the world different than me, why is that? Is it merely a physiological difference, is it something else? I don't know at this point.

Just because I am an atheist, a militant, rabid one at that, doesn't mean there is nothing that I believe. I believe a lot of things, that I have not had demonstrated. Many things just make sense to me, so I don't question them further. It's hard to list these things without being inane; stuff like gravity, physical laws, the properties of objects so on.

I have my own theories on more advanced stuff, which is completely open to ridicule, but they are things I believe based on my own observations and what I have seen from others more learned in the respected fields. Obviously, when I journey on to guesswork like this, I keep in mind that it might not be like this at all, but so far I think so.

An example: gwiz665's theory of consciousness.

The consciousness is an emergent property of our complex brain structure. It is a very mechanistic thing, which runs like software on our brain hardware. Obviously, I don't know much about our hardware, but this is a very interesting subject. I think that given enough computer power, we can simulate it in a turing machine, but I've grown uncertain as to how this can be accomplished. Hopefully neuroscience will get some insight into this, they're certainly working on it.

I think we can physically see our consciousness, but it's just really, really hard. We can theoretically see which programs run on a computer too, by looking at the electrical currents in the computer, but without knowing how exactly the computer interprets those data, we're pretty much in the dark. It's the same with the mind vs. brain.

I believe that our perception of our consciousness is different from what it actually is. We have very little privileged knowledge about our consciousness, because our brain, basically, makes it up as it goes along. I think there's significant ret-conning going on at all times as well, because our consciousness does not pick up all senses at all times, but our brain does - when something is important enough, it is written into our conscious narrative. How this weighing of importance happens is extremely important to me, how do we value things? We obviously have a way in our consciousness, where we associate meaning, value etc. to things, but what happens at a lower level? How is memory distributed in the brain, how is consciousness, how is deduction etc.

I basically make the assumption that the brain is a computer. A massively parallel computer, which processes a nearly infinite number of threads at once (~1 per neuron). How this is organized is beyond me, I black box it - it just makes sense at this point. It may be very wrong, but it seems to work and answer some questions.

I also assume that I'm right until something tells me otherwise - I think it's the only way to live. I can't doubt everything all the time.

I put up a new link - I guess the original one didn't like hotlinking.

Also - reading your nvm makes it unfunny

In reply to this comment by lucky760:
All I see is a black box with large white text: "Visit creepygif.com to view this GIF animation."

I'm guessing that wasn't your intent.

[edit]
nvm- tried it again and now I see a black boy saying "That's racist."

In reply to this comment by SlipperyPete:
http://www.creepygif.com/images/full/10.gif

edit: wish I could embed!

Almonildo:
So here's where it gets muddy. Let's take your scenario of the entirely computerized brain, instead, this time, it's a COPY of an existing person's brain, rather than the end result of a sequential replacement of our unfortunate subject.
Would it be a crime, murder, to disconnect the power from that computer, or to destroy it?
I don't see it the same way, either - to assume the computer simulation would possess awareness. I don't know that would be a given. Possible - but not a given. (And I admittedly lean toward "doubtful".)
Taken further - a computer that simulates an "uninitiated" brain. Would it "develop" awareness? Would it behave differently if given the same sensory inputs? And how would we know? (Currently, we couldn't.)

The problem I have is that it doesn't make sense for it all to be correlated physically. Each individual cell fires or doesn't. An impulse is propagated or it isn't. The co-location of function ends at the macro level of "in the brain" or "in this area of the brain". Beyond that, the physical behavior of the brain is dispersed into individual cells. Awareness is obviously a product of many simultaneous stimuli which are never physically co-incident.

Here's another one: You propose that you can tell you're aware, but you cannot be sure of those around you. They act like they're aware, but it's impossible (so far, anyway) to say for certain. I can see two ways of looking at this.
One is to presume awareness because, as you say, you see no reason not to. To me that's like saying, "I have a 1'x1' black box with a white stripe. It contains duck trousers. Other black boxes must contain duck trousers because they also have white stripes."
Another way is to say that it suggests intuitively that awareness is distinct from behavior. We can't be certain anyone else is "aware" because the physical existence by itself isn't proof enough.

Another avenue that I might want to investigate further is lobotomies. Is it possible a lobotomized patient has been stripped of their awareness? I don't know enough about it to formulate a informed opinion on the subject. (In fact, the previous question might be terribly offensive to the lobotomized!)