Guest posts by Innominate

1

Religion / Re: Responses to a few common arguments

« on: August 13, 2010, 02:45:36 pm »

I wont lie that most of the stuff being talked about is out of my expertise, so the things I say may easily be countered. Not trying to seem stupid, but perhaps Ill get some clarification on things I may or may not be misunderstanding.

It's esoteric philosophy that has no basis in reality. So not being an expert is probably a good thing.

I guess my point is this: why is a shared heritage more important than disagreement about the very nature of the deity they worship?

A little variation of your john example, lets use SG, and you me, and ratc

Say you me and ratc all knew SG only in the forums. It all started off with just the Elements section, and SG was ban happy because of all the n00bs. We all agreed on that. Then SG had a sudden shift of attitude. I think that it isnt SG, and that someone hacked the account, so I start disregarding SG tell people what I think SG's opinion really would be, where as you and ratc just think that  she had a change of heart. The forum then splits into 2 different sections. The wiki and the forum itself. ratc only stuck around in the wiki, and you only stuck around in the forums.  You would get a different view of SG than what ratc got. In reality, they are still the same person, buit because they are dealing with different things, you see different sides.[/quote]
Your example is solid, but there's a caveat: how do we differentiate between one person who has three different perspectives and three different people? Unless we have some method of exclusion (which is harder than you think once you let people be mistaken about their claims) the concept of difference or similarity is mostly meaningless.

Yes, but we aren't competing with three different ideas, but an infinite continuum with infinite dimensionality. For any two non-identical possible deities, there is another possible deity more similar to both of them. We have a super-infinity (aleph2) of possible deities, with an infinity of areas over which they may disagree and no way to decide, unless we do so arbitrarily, which ones are more similar. It isn't a mathematical limitation but a philosophical one.

Actually, I took it as we ARE comparing a finite amount of ideas. We are only talking about established religion. Not something that people randomly made up that has next to no followers aside from the person who created it.

But most people don't follow the religion to the letter. We have 6 and a half billion people on this planet, almost none of whom agree on everything to do with faith or religion. Factor in the (very, very speculative) possibility of 100 billion humans being alive over the ages, and we can see that the number of different religious beliefs ever to have existed must be very large indeed; what's more, those 100 billion might have different views on religion throughout their lives (say as adults compared to children). We can't even assume that one of those 100 billion people would have got it exactly right, or even close to right, because there are so many possible differences that haven't even been considered, and probably never will.

If I had to make a conservative estimate at the number of different combinations of religious ideas humans have ever had, I would say roughly 100 trillion - 1,000 different combinations over the average person's life. This is probably off by very large factor, as it roughly translates into changing your mind about even the most insignificant religious detail only a thousand times. Most people probably change their minds far more than that; the number of details about which to change your mind is of course infinite, though we only consider a finite - but very large - number in our lives.

Eventually, trying to figure out which combinations of religious beliefs have actually been held by a living person and which haven't is not worth it.

Note that I would argue that a survey is not a valid way to decide philosophical matters. Not only is the general public pretty mediocre when it comes to such issues, but upbringing and pre-conceived ideas get in the way. If you ask a group of atheists which is more similar you would find that some of them would laugh and say they didn't really see a difference between any of the three. If you ask a moderate Christian you would probably find they consider their belief more similar to Allah, while a fundamentalist Christian may (again, all of these are simply possible responses) consider both other options equally ridiculous or misguided.

So what WOULD you believe to e a good sample to test out something like this? We are talking about religion and so every person in the world has a bias against it. I think the only way to make it more accurate would be to take it out of context of religion, and try to keep the attributes the same.

The only way to decide philosophical issues is with philosophical reasoning. It might be possible to construct a deductive argument, but people would almost certainly disagree with the premises. Really, it's an issue that can't be decided (barring an extraordinarily persuasive philosophical argument).

I'll sum up my position, since I think I've lost the plot here and there in my other posts on the topic:
We determine whether two entities are the same by finding a characteristic (or set of characteristics) which are uniquely held by that entity. No such set of characteristics exists for deities, or many other things.
Fun fact: we can't even distinguish between different electrons (same with protons, neutrons, etc.). We have no way of knowing whether a given electron is the one we just saw in the same place, or whether another one took its place (assuming that the two were close together anyway). In fact, two types of very different statistical mechanics (Fermi-Dirac statistics and Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics) hinge on this point. MB statistics assumes that we can distinguish between particles, while FD statistics assumes that we can't. It turns out that FD statistics correctly describes the distribution of "fermions" (electrons, protons, neutrons, etc.), but it approaches MB statistics at high temperatures and low densities, which implies that fermions are in fact indistinguishable when close together.

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Religion / Re: Responses to a few common arguments

« on: August 12, 2010, 07:33:02 am »

I confess I'm not entirely sure I understand what you're getting at here. I'll try to address the question as best I can though.

Firstly, you're assuming God is a purely conceptual entity, i.e. God doesn't actually exist. Thus if this is intended as evidence against religion then it's sort of circular reasoning. If it's a question about beliefs then it's one that someone who thinks God is more than just an idea (a theist) will have a difficult time answering, since from their perspective the dilemma doesn't exist.

I didn't mean to imply that God being conceptual is equivalent to non-existence (which would, as you point out, be circular reasoning), nor is this intended as evidence against religion. My argument was simply that "the same god" is very different from saying "the same person". With a person, we can identify characteristics which are uniquely representative of that person; if people disagree about other details, then we still have some way of saying "that's the same person because they have the same fingerprints/DNA/social security number (or equivalent)". With a deity we have no such unique identifier.

Let's say three people know a guy named John. They all agree he's male and that his name is John, but disagree about almost everything else. One person says he has a son, another that the son was a fraud after his inheritance, and the last one that he was just a spokesman. One person says he is extremely picky about hundreds of things, another that he only cares that people love him, and the last one that he is also extremely picky but about mostly different things. They disagree about what John has done and what he thinks about many issues. Some believe that John demands money from his other friends, others that he's only friends with certain people, and others that he wants to be friends with anybody. Each of them believes he wrote a great book, but it's a different one for all three (though two of the books have half the same content). One thinks John has three fundamentally different roles combined in one, while the others thinks that's absurd. One of the few things in common is that they agree that John's cousin Abraham is a top guy.

I guess my point is this: why is a shared heritage more important than disagreement about the very nature of the deity they worship?

Second, while it would be extremely daunting to say, try and write a computer program to determine how similar two ideas are using a mathematical algorithm,

If we have some metric available then it's doable. For example, we can compare ideas using a finite number of different categories and having a score in each, and we can then calculate the Euclidean distance between them. The problem is that the weighting given to each category and the number and type of categories is arbitrary (in actuality there are an infinite number of areas in which ideas might differ). It's the same problem with a deity; everyone disagrees about what is more important, so comparing them by any such measure is impossible. And if we can't decide what constitutes "different" and "the same", how can we say two deities are the same or not?

It is still entirely possible to group religions based on what they believe. Take the three following ideas:
1) the Christain concept of God
2) the Islamic concept of God (Allah)
3) a cosmic invisible pink unicorn
If you surveyed people about how similar each of these three ideas are to one another you would pretty much always get the same response. That is, that Islamic and Christian beliefs are much closer to one another than they are to invisible unicorns.

What you have pointed out is more of a limitation on mathematical analysis than saying anything about religion. Unless of course I misunderstood.

Yes, but we aren't competing with three different ideas, but an infinite continuum with infinite dimensionality. For any two non-identical possible deities, there is another possible deity more similar to both of them. We have a super-infinity (aleph₂) of possible deities, with an infinity of areas over which they may disagree and no way to decide, unless we do so arbitrarily, which ones are more similar. It isn't a mathematical limitation but a philosophical one.

Note that I would argue that a survey is not a valid way to decide philosophical matters. Not only is the general public pretty mediocre when it comes to such issues, but upbringing and pre-conceived ideas get in the way. If you ask a group of atheists which is more similar you would find that some of them would laugh and say they didn't really see a difference between any of the three. If you ask a moderate Christian you would probably find they consider their belief more similar to Allah, while a fundamentalist Christian may (again, all of these are simply possible responses) consider both other options equally ridiculous or misguided.

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Game Suggestions and Feedback / Re: Solving Fire Stall

« on: August 10, 2010, 12:42:08 pm »

So it seems that there are several counters to a pure fire stall.

• Mirror Shield/Jade Shield - shutting down the fire lances for 1 or 2 light quanta seems like a good deal. Jade Shield is even good on its own, whereas Mirror Shield is only really good in a light mono or as a counter. Some form of permanent control might be needed against Fahrenheits
• Quanta denial - Earthquake, discord/black hole or pests. All of the above will effectively shut down a fire stall and a good deal of other decks
• Very fast rush - I don't actually PvP, so I don't know which rush decks will be enough to beat the CC. Maybe graboid/shrieker with burrowing? Each shrieker is only 5 damage a turn burrowed, but you should on average have twice as many shriekers as he has SoGs at any time, and they can be unburrowed for a finisher - shrieker rush could also have earthquakes to absolutely thrash this deck
• Aether with fire/darkness splash for permanent control - Beats the CC, destroys SoGs, Fire Shields and Fahrenheits
• Powerful healing stalls - Granite skin plus miracle to heal hundreds of HP easily. Earthquake again would destroy fire stalls, but this deck would not be particularly effective against growth decks (unless it also packed antimatter, like MrSexington's "Rage Quit Deck")

The biggest argument I can see against the fire stall is that its counters are not competitive against other deck types, which for some of them may be true.

Now if you want my idea for a nerf, consider this for all the "growth nukes" (fire lance, ice lance, siphon life): X damage per 10 quanta, up to 24 damage. Now it takes 5 of the cards to kill somebody, assuming you play them simultaneously (no healing) and you haven't already damaged them. This would mean that fire lance's effectiveness plateaus at 70 quanta (though you can kill somebody with 5 cards and 63 quanta; 4*21 + 18 = 102 damage). Basically, the stall would have to survive for on average 18 rounds (assuming 30 cards and 6 lances) to get enough lances to kill you. And if you can't kill it in 18 rounds, and you can't heal or prevent the damage that it does before lancing (say from Fahrenheit), and you can't deny quanta, outlast its damage or play a reflecting shield, then what does your deck actually do?

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Religion / Re: Responses to a few common arguments

« on: August 09, 2010, 11:30:07 am »

If two people believe in the same thing, but have completely different beliefs about that thing, does it even make sense to say they believe in the same thing?

No. No, it doesn’t. But the point here is that these three faiths do not have completely different beliefs, but differing beliefs. A comparison would be the difference between communism and capitalism, and the difference between the Republican and Democrat parties. The difference between the first two is a complete difference, whereas the second two have differences over common ground. Compare the Republican party with the Chinese Communist Party of the 1950s, and suddenly the Republicans look a lot closer to the Democrats than they may do otherwise.

Fair enough. But how similar do their beliefs have to be for it to be the same God? If a hypothetical (and possibly crazy) Christian believes that Jesus was Zeus' son and Yahweh killed him in a fit of rage, does that mean he still believes in the same God?

And if we decide that they do indeed believe in the same thing, why is it limited to Jews, Christians and Muslims? Why don't we say that spiritualists and Satanists (LaVeyan; believes that they are god) believe in the same God? After all, if we don't decide what God they believe in based on their beliefs about it, what criterion do we use?

The three faiths of Christianity, Judaism and Islam are often linked because they arose from a common ancestor and, as PuppyChow helpfully pointed out, even share an overlap of holy texts. Even from a classification perspective, they are similar in that they are monotheistic beliefs with a paternal God, as opposed to the pantheism of Hinduism, or animism of Shinto. It would be like asking, “Why are people always comparing BMW, Mercedes and Porsche?” They are all German automakers, and have more in common with one another than with Ford, or Toyota.

I suppose common ancestry plus common beliefs is good enough, but I have philosophical problems with it. Similar to what I said above, how common does ancestry have to be to be the same deity? Almost all current religions are descended from either ancestor or animal worship if you go back far enough; the Jews used to be polytheists, for one thing. The early books of the Pentateuch use the word Elohim, which is a plural form for the word "god" (not God, which is Yhwh or Yahweh) as a holdover from that period of their religious understanding.  The Israelites were using it to mean a singular god around the time that Genesis was written (probably were at least), but the language nonetheless reflects the origin of their belief.

Do we define them to be the same if they all agree on it? What about people who disagree? Do we define them to be the same if they came from the same historical groups? Then everyone worships the same God if you go back far enough.

I must humbly beg your indulgence, but I’m afraid I don’t understand this point. Could you please rephrase it?

If a number of groups with different beliefs all agree that they worship the same god, does that make it true? Similarly, if everyone else agrees but one group doesn't, who gets the casting vote? (imagine the schoolyard taunts, "You worship our god!", "Nuh-uh!") And if historical precedent is the deciding factor, then where in history do we draw the line? All humans came out of Africa, where we most likely all worshipped our ancestors or animals (or maybe the elements). Does that mean that everyone who subscribes to a religion worships the same deity?

In my view, every group worships a different god that they call the same name.

Do you mean, in your view, everyone worships the same god with a different name? Otherwise, yes, every monotheistic religion does worship a different god with the same name – ‘god.’ But atheistic, polytheistic, pantheistic, animistic and burritoonastic religions do not.

The latter. I hold that even people who say they worship the same god do not in fact do so if they disagree about its character. Like with the analogy of the blind men and the elephant, not one of them gets it right; none of them are worshipping the same deity, nor are any of them worshipping the actual deity (in the analogy at least). We unfortunately don't have a prayer post office, where people who pray to "The God that smites gays but not adulterers" and the ones that pray to "The God that smites adulterers but not gays" get their prayers redirected to "The actual God, who may or may not smite gays or adulterers". It's probably a bad way of putting it actually, but my point is that conceptual entities are too varied to be "reached" by approximations.

While with physical entities (say, a house or a person) we can ignore conflicting details and "deliver to the right address/name", we have no such luxury with conceptual entities; there is no set of qualities which uniquely defines a concept. There are so many possible details to differ that we can't figure out the closest match.

Imagine we have an apple in a box, and three men, Adam, Bob and Carl are betting on what is inside. Adam says, "I bet it is red, tasty and sharp". Bob says "I bet it is blue, tasty and round". Carl says "I bet it is red, bland and round". Assuming for the sake of argument that apples are red, tasty and round, who wins the bet? Each of them is right about two qualities and wrong about one. Do we arbitrarily assume that some qualities (say, colour and taste) are more important, and decide that anybody who gets those correct wins? The problem is that any such decision is open to disagreement. So when people say that Judaism and Christianity are close enough to be worshipping the same God, somebody (say, Fred Phelps) disagrees. And you can't resolve such a disagreement, because there is no external logic to deciding what is more important, only what beliefs (internally) say is.

Put more simply, there is no analogue to an email address or a fingerprint for a concept. We can't externally pin down one unique identifier (even a set of partial identifiers which, all up, give the full identity), nor can we quantify how similar or dissimilar two concepts are. There is just no way of deciding whether two ideas are or are not "the same" beyond simply saying so.

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Darkness / Re: Voodoo Doll

« on: August 08, 2010, 06:57:15 am »

My Incarnate killer:

Code: [Select]

6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6u7 6u7 6u7 6u7 6u7 6u7 7t4 7t4 7t4 7t4 7t4 7t4 7t4 7t4 7t8 7t8 7tc 7tc 7tc 7tg 7tg 7tg 7tg 7tg 7tgQuestion marks are upgraded Voodoo Dolls.

Strategy is to steal graveyards, antimatter vampires and get your voodoo dolls poisoned by retrovirii and bloodsuckers.

AI is smart enough not to target your voodoo dolls unless no other options are available however (still not smart enough to ignore them), so we don't steal graveyards or have other creatures.

It really does need a way to kill the graveyards however, so perhaps -3 siphon life, -3-5 obsidian towers, +4-6 explosion and +2 fire storm and change to fire mark. Once Eclipse comes out, Vampires will survive one fire storm while Elite Skeletons, Bloodsuckers and Retrovirii will die. Also, try not to antimatter before the first Eclipse comes out, because they'll end up with only -2 instead of -6. If Incarnate has only 1 Eclipse and you have used most of your 6 antimatters, you can explode the Eclipse to get -8 damage vampires (and 2 less damage from all other creatures) for a turn or two. Probably better to save it for a Vampire Dagger however.

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Issue Archive / Trainer: +quanta from opponent's upgraded pillars

« on: August 08, 2010, 06:45:45 am »

In the current version of the trainer (8th August in GMT+11), I seem to be getting the +1 darkness quanta from Incarnate's obsidian towers (not the normal pillar increase however).

Just tested it against Divine Glory and an AI5, and the same thing seems to be happening. I speculate that it happens against all opponents with upgraded towers, but I can't test it against T50.

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Religion / Re: Responses to a few common arguments

« on: August 08, 2010, 06:12:35 am »

I would slightly disagree with this Dawkins point. I would classify an atheist perspective as an outright casting off of a view, and many believers of a faith do not have that perspective to other faiths. For example, Jews, Christians and Muslims are all “children of Abraham”, and all believe in the same God, but name Him differently, and ascribe different words and actions to him. I would not think that any one of these faiths would throw away the entirety of the other two, but be more precise in what was agreed and disagreed. A scalpel, rather than a broadsword.

I hear this a lot, but I've never been convinced. If two people believe in the same thing, but have completely different beliefs about that thing, does it even make sense to say they believe in the same thing? And if we decide that they do indeed believe in the same thing, why is it limited to Jews, Christians and Muslims? Why don't we say that spiritualists and Satanists (LaVeyan; believes that they are god) believe in the same God? After all, if we don't decide what God they believe in based on their beliefs about it, what criterion do we use?

Do we define them to be the same if they all agree on it? What about people who disagree? Do we define them to be the same if they came from the same historical groups? Then everyone worships the same God if you go back far enough.

In my view, every group worships a different god that they call the same name.

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Darkness / Re: Nightmare | Nightmare

« on: August 08, 2010, 06:10:04 am »

I don't know how i feel about this card.  Other than stopping your opponent from drawing for one turn, it feels highly situational and mostly for anti fractal.  I just think it could do something more interesting or be tweaked for an extra effect. Just feels like it'll be an under powered card.

Against players, yes. Although even then stopping them from drawing a card for a turn is pretty awesome, and you thwart hourglasses/sundials pretty well too.

Against the AI however, you allow them to play whatever creature you wish. It works brilliantly with death + sparks, fuelling condors, bone shields and graveyards, or photons, a >1 point block shield and aflatoxin, flooding or antimatter. If you want you can even fill their hand with weapons (after you made one of yours fly) to get rid of a troublesome one, or powerful dragons which you then antimatter. Against the AI it's one of the most versatile cards we have. It especially kicks ass against Eternal Phoenix, that bastard.

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Religion / Re: The First Cause Argument

« on: August 05, 2010, 09:22:39 am »

As to the cause of God, the reference to citing omnipotence was to link the entity implied in this argument to God, not to presuppose omnipotence. Being able to violate causality is a major part of what this argument implies about the creator of the universe.

But why is this ability peculiar to God? Why cannot the universe create itself?

This is interesting, because I think this sort of applies both here and in the responses thread (with regards to the references to the work of Dr. Persinger).

At what point does something cease to be a measurement of a phenomena often attributed to God (or gods) and at what point are you measuring what God is doing?

I would argue that just as understanding how the nerves in my arm work doesn't mean my arm doesn't act in accordance with my will, understanding the universe doesn't mean it doesn't obey God's will.

It's valid point to make, but one that is also unfalsifiable. We can't prove what the "ultimate motivator" is for anything; my hand pushes a pencil but my mind controls my hand. Who's to say that the universe isn't similarly powered by another, greater force? I find it philosophically distasteful, personally, simply because it raises a further question: who's to say that there isn't another, greater force controlling my mind as well? If we allow the 'unseen mover' to move one thing, why not other things? At that point it comes down to whatever you personally decide is the case, or enter into the murky world of trying to understand what a being - so huge that we are like ants to it, unable to see anything but its effects - is thinking.

I know I sort of skipped over a lot of your post, and I apologize for that. I've become rather busy recently so I haven't had time to give as thorough response as your post deserves, so I settled on responding to part of it. I'll try to get back to the rest later.

Take as much time as you need. Though in a week or so I will probably be leaving the forum, because Elements has lost its sparkle for me (too long with too few spins from FGs, and also my deck is fully upgraded), so you may just get the last word

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General Discussion / Re: Best Shield in Elements?

« on: August 05, 2010, 09:16:47 am »

Arguably, the stealing is significantly worse for phase shield than others. Although most people pack more phase shields in a deck than other shields, when you lose one to steal you can't do anything for 2 turns as well as losing 3 turns of your immunity. So whereas a full phase shield deck can give 18 turns of immunity, after a single well-timed steal you have 15 turns of immunity, 2 of which you can't damage your opponent, so effectively 13 turns. That's with just one steal.

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Darkness / Re: Nightmare | Nightmare

« on: August 05, 2010, 09:08:18 am »

I loved HoMM2 so much. Never was any good at the multiplayer aspect (too much building up, not enough rushing for resources), but I loved the exploration and clashes of huge armies. I kicked ass with all the ranged units Order (I think it was Order?) had, like hobbits, titans and magi.

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Darkness / Re: Nightmare | Nightmare

« on: August 04, 2010, 02:52:43 pm »

It's really only good against the kind of decks that want to empty their hand and/or draw multiple cards per turn (larger decks with hourglass).

I noted in my super awesome post on page two of this thread that Nightmare has little effect on hourglasses.  Suppose you use Nightmare on Paradox, who has an empty hand and four hourglasses out.  The first turn he doesn't draw, and discards one.  The second turn he draws one at the beginning of the turn (instead of two), very likely plays whatever card he draws, and then starts using hourglasses as usual.

The card does produce some interesting synergies, some of which I noted earlier and some of which nobody has thought of yet.

Only if they play every card they draw except the last one of each round. A FG with an empty hand and hourglasses is limited to one natural draw per round and as many hourglasses as they can use with an unbroken string of card plays. Once the hand is full of junk, the only way to bring back the second natural draw is to keep a playable card and discard a junk one the next turn (which, if the card is high value but still unplayable, will probably never happen against AI).

Very powerful against fractal decks, quite good against hourglass and precog decks, and a very slight annoyance against everyone else. Actually, it would annoy me a lot to have my hand full of junk even if it didn't hinder me.