And it's kind of sad too because the discussion about objective rights was getting interesting.

I probably have a lot more experience attacking muslims from a non-muslim perspective than you do. And I don't think that's a terribly effective strategy. The problem is twofold:

First, it's pretty silly for a non-adherent of a religion to try to tell adherents what their own religion means. (For example, when you hear American politicians saying that "real Islam" is a religion of peace, does that make you feel good that they understand your religion correctly? Or do you feel a bit of, "who the hell are they to tell people what real Islam is? How can they know when they don't believe?" In my experience, and justifiably so, it's much more of the latter.)

But second, people who believe in a holy book (whether Muslim, jewish, christian, or otherwise) will always re-interpret the book if it conflicts with what they want to believe. What was once interpreted literally will now be interpreted metaphorically.

To use your example, say I found a section of the Qur'an that said "go kill all non-believers, except for the women which you should take as slaves", what would you do? You have two choices:

1) You can change your beliefs so that you believe you really should do that.

2) You can interpret that metaphorically, so "kill" means "convince" and "slaves" means "friends".

In which scenario is that helpful to me? There's no chance that you'd abandon your belief that the Qur'an is the word of god.

This is effective sometimes when dealing with adherents of other religions though. You can cite, to Christians, sections of the Qur'an that appear to say very bad things and argue "See? Muslims really do believe in an evil religion." It's sometimes very persuasive. But, of course, it's completely dishonest. The Bible says you should kill children who disrespect their parents or farmers who don't rotate their crops properly. Does that make Christianity an evil religion?

That's not quite precisely correct, or at least it is subject to misunderstanding.

That's entirely possible. Had I lived at a time when the shape of the Earth was not known, I likely would have argued that it was flat because it looked flat. If I lived as the evidence came in that it was round, I would then insist not just that it's round now but that it was always round and that my previous claims were in fact incorrect.

But I'm puzzled what the alternative view is -- that the Earth has no shape and is whatever shape we want it to be? That our conclusion that the Earth is round is no better than our previous belief that the Earth was flat, and hence there's no reason to adjust our beliefs on the basis of new information? That we shouldn't actually believe it's round because for all we know in a hundred years new evidence will come in to suggest it's cubical?

What is your claim exactly -- that it's no better to believe the Earth is round than that it's flat? Or that the Earth really was flat before, because we thought so, and now it's round, because we think so? Or that the possibility that we might change our mind in the future means we don't actually know anything now?

On the contrary, I'm arguing that our ideas can and should change as new evidence comes in and in the process we replace worse ideas with better ones.

(I should point out that nothing I've said about should be understood to mean that morality is not context-dependent. Morality is like addition. Once all the parameters are defined, the result is objectively constrained by the nature of the universe. But the answer to questions like "what do you get when you add 2 to a number?" depends on what number you start with. Just like perceived color depends on ambient light, the nature of human vision, and the actual optical properties of the object whose color we are measuring, so does perceived morality depend on a number of factors other than just the actual properties of the thing assessed.)

Slavery was *always* a moral abomination, whether people realized it or not. The Bible clearly condones what we now know is a moral abomination.

In any event, if you accept that morality can change and the Bible can be incorrect as a source of modern moral values, then it's hard to see what good it is as a guide. If we disagree with it, we have to substitute our own judgment, since "morality changed". So if you accept this view, then that condemns the Bible to be useless a source of moral guidance.

It's compatible with science only if you change the meaning of the verse. But since you are happy to do that, I have no problem. The Qu'ran is sufficiently vague that you can make it say whatever you want it to say, and so long as you are willing to reinterpret it to conform to common sense and science, it will do you no harm. The problem would be if you say, "The Qu'ran says bees eat fruit, so that's that. If you think otherwise, you are wrong and the Qu'ran is right." You can make the book mean whatever you want to mean, and so long as you are willing to do that, it cannot lead you astray.

I wish more Christians would do that. They tend to say "The Bible said the animals all died in a flood, so they died in a flood". It would be much saner to re-interpret the Bible as a metaphor or say that maybe one or two animals drowned somewhere, just as one or two bees probably occasionally eat a fruit or two. That's how you can be religious and not wind up believing lots of silly nonsense.

I think you're missing the point. The point is that people would read that portion of the Quran and think that bees generally eat fruit and they do not. The issue is not whether it's possible for you to torture language and common sense into some way of making what the Quran says arguably true. Yes, you can twist language to make Allah say whatever you want him to say. But that's not how it's supposed to work. You're supposed to understand what he's saying, not make him say something else.

If I told someone "bees eat all the fruits of the earth", you'd rightfully call me either a liar or an uneducated moron. It matters not that you can find a picture of a bee eating a fruit somewhere.

However, if you want to argue that science and reason come first, and you'll be willing to twist the clear words of the Qu'ran to match, then I have no quarrel with you. I think that's a silly exercise, but at least it will keep you out of trouble. If the Qu'ran says X and you want to believe Y, just find a way to argue X means Y and off you go.

It's better than actually believing that god taught bees to eat all the fruits of the Earth, isn't it?

You are correct.

I'm sorry to break this to you, but those are wasps. See, for example, this link: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:European_wasp_white_bg02.jpg
Look familiar?

That's correct. It just can't be currency-driven for anything remotely resembling a sensible currency. (Otherwise, among other things, speculators would buy up the currency today and build the future value into the current price.) It can be, for example, productivity-driven.

The Qur'an says bees eat fruit:

"And thy Lord taught the Bee to build its cells in hills, on trees, and in human habitations. Then to eat of all the fruits of the earth and find with skill the spacious paths of its Lord."

It is predictable to some extent, and to that extent it is harmless. To the extent that it is unpredictable, yes, it is harmful. Anything unpredictable is very likely to do more harm than good.

I'm not really making a qualia argument except to argue that the fact that we sense something is conclusive evidence that something exists that accounts for that sensation. The fact that people have similar sensations in similar situations proves almost conclusively that something exists in those situations that accounts for those similar sensations.

I think the more relevant experience would be perceiving that a right, anyone's right, has been violated -- our sense (in the most literal sense of the word "sense") of injustice.

And I should say that doesn't mean "injustice" has to exist in the real world in the same form as we sense it. Just like "black" in human sensation means the absence of specific frequencies of light in the physical world -- but which frequencies those are is determined solely by human vision.

You could, but no sane person would, because the cost of saving it would be hundreds of trillions of times greater than its potential utility.

Mining a block that will fit somewhere in the hash chain without knowing the previous block is about a billion, billion, billion times harder than mining a block knowing the hash of the previous block.

Not much better than people could define color three hundred years ago. Just like three hundred years ago about the best we could do with defining a color is, "it's what in the objective world corresponds to when I see something that has an apparent color", about the best we can do with natural rights or objective rights is, "it's what in the outside world corresponds to when I see something violating rights, probably something about the nature of volition". It's circular because we don't know enough about what we're perceiving or how we're perceiving it yet to do more than that. (Fully realizing that things inside us account for the perception as well, of course. See my other post in this thread.)

They are something we sense directly with a sensory mechanism that we don't understand very well yet.

I would add that most of what people say about objective rights is probably bunk. It would be like color blind people writing things about color -- "People tend to call plants green, so perhaps greenness is about plants. People tend to describe water as blue, so that probably has something to do with liquids that are refreshing, but then why don't they call soda blue?" You can see how it's clearly nonsense if you change it from rights to colors.

How can you start securing transactions now when you have no idea which transactions you need to secure? The whole point of mining is to pile calculations on top of the transactions. (And by "transactions" I mean every single transaction from the genesis block up to the ones in the block you're mining.)

It's so obvious, even two year olds understand it. That doesn't mean it's correct, but it sure as hell is obvious.

No, no faith is necessary. It's the simplest and most plausible theory to explain the observations. The observations justify the belief, so no faith is needed.

The justifiable explanation is that there is no alternative. If there is an alternative, please tell me what it is.

No faith is needed because there is no alternative. Whatever the universe is, it does in fact result in the sense perceptions we have. Every sense perception necessarily gives us some valid information about the universe because the universe was in fact such that this sense perception resulted. This must be true because there is no alternative.

But in any event, if your arguments were correct, you would be drawing the conclusion from them. If there weren't sufficient evidence to justify such a belief, then we shouldn't hold such a belief. After all, if there wasn't sufficient evidence to justify that belief, it could be incorrect. If we had faith, we'd risk acting in error for no benefit.

But I'm probably wasting my time. If you genuinely believe that it's an open question whether or not I exist, rational discussion with you is unlikely to be possible.

Okay, so there's the obvious explanation for perception -- that the rest of reality explains it. And you're saying that there's some alternate explanation that's better justified, and that would be ...

So your theory is that even though all the evidence suggests that you and everyone else have a common origin, common characteristics, and similar behavior, you have experiences and nobody else does. What evidence favors this theory over the much more rational theory that people's similar construction explains the similar experiences that explain their similar behavior?

That's complete nonsense. You have the observable similarity in behavior, the physical evidence of common origin, and medical evidence of all kinds. This is an absolutely absurd basis for any philosophy and if you really believe it, all sane people can do is point and laugh. (I'm sure you have silly ways to explain away all these things. But similarly silly arguments can maintain *any* belief against *any* evidence.) By the way, we have a term for someone who acts on beliefs like this -- "psychopath".

We're talking about the work the pool master has to do per miner. My point is that it only has to build the merkle tree once. It can then inject a different coinbase transaction in without having to recompute the rest of the tree. (The coinbase is at the tip of the tree.)