Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (81703)	6/22/2010 6:55:34 PM
From: koan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

>>I know what Douthat is. That was not my point.>> Just another stupid conservative writer. >>So you are a conservative, I guess. You had me fooled. That's right. I voted for John McCain because he reminds me of my grandfather.>> And you cannot see what an idiot John McCain is and a lying sack of shit? He couldn't even use a computer, picked Palin and talked about bombing Iran. McCain graduated at the bottom of his class and is as stupid as they come. Hope your gand dad was not like McCain. My grandpa was a member of the KKK and not one of my heros.

To: tejek who wrote (81703)	6/22/2010 7:09:23 PM
From: koan	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 89467

From another thread. Here is what you right wingers don't know. Besides the value of learning from our wise men and women. A Land of Illusion..... This Is a Simulation The brain creates a picture of reality that we mistake for the actual thing. By GEORGE JOHNSON THE USER ILLUSION Cutting Consciousness Down to Size. By Tor Norretranders. Translated by Jonathan Sydenham. Illustrated. 467 pp. New York: Viking. $29.95. epressed by the second law of thermodynamics (order inevitably gives way to randomness), the physicist James Clerk Maxwell set out in the 19th century to show that there was a more powerful force in the universe: the human mind. He proceeded by designing a thought experiment: Suppose two glass spheres are connected by a tube to form a dumbbell. In the tube sits an imp -- Maxwell's demon -- measuring the air molecules drifting by. By opening and closing a tiny door, the demon allows the speedier molecules to accumulate in the left chamber, while keeping the slower molecules in the right one. Gradually the temperature -- a measure of the movement of molecules -- increases in the first chamber. If the door is held ajar, the hotter air rushes through the passage into the cooler chamber. Put a turbine in the middle of the flow and the system will perform work. Simply by exercising intelligence, Maxwell argued, the demon can create order from disorder and energy for free. It took a century for scientists to realize fully what was wrong with this picture. In ''The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size,'' the Danish science writer Tor Norretranders uses the story to launch an all-out assault on the worshipful place so often awarded to human awareness. Consciousness is not only powerless to overcome the entropic slide, he says, but incapable of giving more than the roughest sense of what is going on around us. The world as it appears is a paltry simulation. And the biggest illusion is that we trick ourselves into believing we experience the world's full glory.