Are there blasphemy laws at Talk Islam? …
Are there blasphemy laws at Talk Islam?
Because I am apparently not allowed to talk about the Arabian Nights, Julian Assange and systems theory, or to correct Thabet the Comment Nazi in any of his calumnies about me.
it would be nice if i knew the rules.
This, for example, is apparently a lie.
Frontpage authors have complete control over their threads.
THE, 
Admin, 
Arwi 2:56 pm on January 23, 2011 Permalink |
Yes, it would be nice if you knew the rules. But while this is on the front page:
There’s a fairly well-documented history of media playing down domestic terror threats that don’t involve Arab or Muslim conspirators. Those that do are treated differently; there are plenty of cases where law enforcement stepped in long before such plans were operational– and yet much of the media coverage would still refer to them as a form of terrorism.
Shams al-Nahar 3:00 pm on January 23, 2011 Permalink |
so? that means i cant talk about the Arabian Nights or Systems Theory according to Julian Assange?
unpack that for me please O naaqat.*
i am a frontpager. Thabet deleted my front page post. Is that or is it not a violation of house rules?
* warrior-poet.
Admin 6:03 am on January 24, 2011 Permalink |
here are the rules – there’s a bit more to it than is quoted above, namely:
Shams al-Nahar 7:09 am on January 24, 2011 Permalink |
Ban me naow then. or give me justice. Since i am not allowed to refute thabets calumnies against me.
I left GNXP as a co-blogger when razib gave front page privs to flaming islamophobes. I asked him to take me off the blogroll. This is chronologically documented on my old blog. I am not obsessed with either you, Brother Thabet, or with razib. I would say razib is obsessed with me, even stalking me on other blogs.
And you know nothing, brother thabet, about my relationship with Ali Eteraz, unless razib told you or Ali himself. You didnt know me then. You didnt know me when i co-blogged at GNXP or when i was a republican. we met here when Aziz invited me to blog here. is razib sockpuppetting you? it seems to relly infuriate razib that i reverted, wouldnt you say? he seeks to discredit me by saying i am a muslim that posts at a muslim blog.
i will tell you all i think Ali still reads here.
Look at the retitle of his paperback.
shams 12:59 am on January 25, 2011 Permalink |
“brother” thabet has now deleted all the comments on the thread where he accused me of sheik fever….. I saved his comment and i will post it on my playlist.
so you can judge for yourself if “brother” thabet abused his admin privs.
all i ask is justice.
is that too much?
THE 2:38 am on January 25, 2011 Permalink |
I wish you’d restart a new blog of your own.
I keep finding lots of great links I’d like to post for you,
but they don’t really fit in, on the websites you frequent.
THE 2:52 am on January 25, 2011 Permalink
Like this for example.
THE 4:42 am on January 25, 2011 Permalink
Or this
THE 4:52 am on January 25, 2011 Permalink
Or this
THE 4:56 am on January 25, 2011 Permalink
Supporting data here.
CRB Foodstuffs price index is now higher than in the global crisis year of 2008
shams 5:44 am on January 25, 2011 Permalink
Spock…you are isomorphic with razib. you both see my reversion as a defection from rationality, like im some sort of IQ traitor.
I DIDN’T WAKE UP AND DECIDE TO BE MUSLIM ON A WHIM.
The Real ragdolled me like the biggest bombora ever.
i didnt have a choice.
and i cant go backwards.
time travel to the past is impossible, because of closed form time curves.
Interestingly, ibn Arabi, Hawking, and Caroll all agree on this.
THE 7:16 am on January 25, 2011 Permalink
Forgive me shams, I believe “the real” to be a mental construct.
For me, the mind knows nothing about reality except the theories it constructs as brain-cyberspace models, based ultimately on information inputs from the culture and the wider sensory inputs.
For me, the real is a theory.
shams 7:24 am on January 25, 2011 Permalink
As for other secularists.
You dont have the substrate to get the signal, and you dont want to/think you cant build the substrate.
For me, the Real is empirical data.
bi la kayfah
THE 1:22 pm on January 25, 2011 Permalink
There are no theory-free observations.
shams 3:08 pm on January 25, 2011 Permalink
experience is a theory free observation.
as in, i experienced the Real.
THE 3:44 pm on January 25, 2011 Permalink
You went from a subjective brainstate to an interpretation of what it was – how?
shams 7:09 pm on January 25, 2011 Permalink
dude i got ragdolled.
what do you not unnerstand about that?
THE 7:39 pm on January 25, 2011 Permalink
I understand. I’m just unimpressed.
There are so many things that can do that.
shams 4:45 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
lol
no, u dont unnerstand.
you dont have the substrate for the particular experience.
shams 4:56 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
Dosteoyekski, who once faced a firing squad and spent years in political prison in siberia, said that most people dont realize that it is possible to have a momentary experience so powerful that it outweighs a lifetime of ordinary experience.
Will you ever have that experience, Spock?
THE 7:38 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
I have no interest in “experiences” shams.
I seek nature’s truth that’s all.
Experiences are for sensualists like you.
What you really need is a Tasp.
Then you could have “experiences” 100 times a day.
You would become a slave to the wire.
I would not.
If I found the “god center” in my brain I would ask a neurosurgeon to burn it out, like a tumor.
I have no need of that stuff.
We have science now.
bk 7:42 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
Start a new thread.
This is interesting, though completely off topic
Make your case for why God does not exist.
Or maybe that you simply don’t care?
THE 8:47 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
I don’t care.
Even if God exists I will never worship him.
I am a radical humanist.
Man is my only god.
I don’t worship alien beings.
bk 8:54 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
I think you unwittingly worship God, just the same.
As humans, we are all bound to limitation.
But Islam forbids the worship of idols and what you describe is not God, but an idol. Any object of though you can create is likewise, an idol. Thought is an idol.
Anything that you love and put positive energy into is a form of worship and since God is unlimited, according to Islam, humanism is probably an acceptable form of worship.
Atleast that is my opinion according to my understanding of Islam.
THE 9:08 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
An Islam that inclusive is tautologically true.
So its actually devoid of content.
like A=A
bk 9:17 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
No. I understand your conclusion but you, again, place limitations on human beings and God.
I think sometimes the allure of Atheism is the revolutionary appeal of one who is bucking a system. Who rejects the madness.
This appeal requires the atheist to put all believers in the same category of imbeciles who all believe is some ill conceived “space alien.” This is my only problem with atheism. It is insulting to the intelligence of many brilliant minds. People I respect.
Actually, it is possible that human beings are capable of knowing without the facilities of senses and brain. Not all knowledge is physical in essense. Words fail.
Suffice it to say that just because “THE” hasn’t had the God experience doesn’t necessarily lead to the conclusion that God is unknowable or unknown.
Devoid of content you have experienced? Maybe.
Devoid of content, absolutely. No necessarily.
bk 9:28 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
That was only half an answer and not the best half.
Let’s say Islam purports to describe a Center.
Anyone moving towards the center in an intentional way might be described as a Muslim or one submitted to God even if they are unaware of the Center as the Absolute.
Not being aware precisely of the Center does not invalidate the Center nor the general direction of people who head towards the Center. Even if they move towards the Center for secondary or less precise reasons.
THE 9:32 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
I see no reason for the dualist hypothesis. I am a monist until I have very strong evidence otherwise.
And the evidence would need to be a lot more than “feelings”, subjective brain-states.
But I didn’t say that. I said even if he exists (i.e. is knowable), I am not going to worship him/her/it
i.e. I will never value another god, higher than my god, Man.
I am already a monotheist. My god is Man.
bk 9:36 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
I am ok with your statement of belief. If you care.
I only criticize your description of God:
“I don’t worship alien beings.”
I one worships the Creator, then one is not bound to alien worship.
bk 9:42 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
and then
You did.
bk 9:51 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
Another way to look at it is this:
As a monist, from what I understand
You either believe only in material
or in the ideal which is I guess consciousness or a product of the brain.
Science has gotten to the bottom of neither.
As scientist look deeper into the material world, to the quantum and beyond, things become unclear and murky or even “mystical.”
And no one is even close to any real theory of consciousness.
So I would have to say that your monism is built on a foundation atleast as sketchy as my belief in God.
You have experience, but you cannot fully explain it.
Most religious experience is explained in precisely the same manner.
THE 9:52 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
These are not exclusive postion.
I am deeply sceptical about anything outside nature, because I see no reason to believe nature even has an outside.
But even if it does, even if there is a God, even if he is somehow knowable through some as yet unspecified means. Still I will not worship him because I already have a god.
bk 9:58 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
And I applaud you for refusing to worship an idol.
Al-Hamdulleelah!
THE 10:04 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
My monism is built on Ockham’s razor. I am a monist until I have compelling reason not to be. Unity is simpler than duality.
bk 10:08 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
Ask Shams to explain her fav Shaykh’s theory:
Wahdat al-Wujud to you sometime.
You may find more common ground than you think.
aziz 3:03 pm on January 26, 2011 Permalink
Keid, you take the extremist position that there is no reality – and then you insist that reality is only empirical. There’s a fundamental tension that not even Godel can save you from here.
I welcome your intellectual pity, and i reciprocate.
THE 6:56 pm on January 26, 2011 Permalink
OK deconstruct. I am not saying there is no reality. (How could I possibly know that?). I am saying reality is for us a theory.
Now it’s very possible that it is a true theory. It certainly agrees with all the empirical evidence, in the information flows we have access to, that there is an external causal reality. That external stuff also seems to form our physical substrate.
But we try to make theories now about the nature of that external & substrate-level reality. We start to understand that although it obeys rules that seemed to be mechanical when we first started to study it, the deeper we go into the structure, the more it becomes abstract and information-like.
Particles become quanta become qubit states in a information-bearing field?
Also very important this: The whole notion of a continuous space with continuous fields, breaks down as you get to the Planckian level, 10^-35 meters. So we need a new paradigm.
So now we postulate: Is there a supportive subPlanckian substrate to the entire world? Presumably it could be even more information-like, more abstract. Could it be pure information?
How could this work?
Well there are clues. Number one IMHO is the holographic conjecture. We can reinterpret the quantum fields that make up the universe as a isomorphic to fields in an outgoing 2 dimensional surface at the edge of the universe. The area of that surface has to be quantized into planck-sized areas. Could it be a cellular lattice of some kind? In some, as yet unknown, geometry?
Then the information could be qubits being exchanged between cells in that geometry.
Understand that lattices can arise naturally, e.g Crystals. Geometry just has to have the right symmetry, thats all, to form repeating cells capable of computation.
I know this is vague and impressionistic, but I’m not a real physicist and I’m out of my depth here.
As you can imagine, I’m paying a lot of attention to current attempts to confirm Hogan’s noise.
THE 8:12 pm on January 26, 2011 Permalink
I found Paola Zizzi’s paper thought provoking.
THE 5:03 am on January 25, 2011 Permalink |
The food data is relevant to the Tunisian crisis of course, and the other riots across Nth Africa.
aziz 9:30 am on January 25, 2011 Permalink |
Keid, you’ve watched The Matrix one too many times
THE 1:48 pm on January 25, 2011 Permalink
In a sense we do live in a Matrix Aziz.
We “live” in a subjective model-of-reality our brains construct.
Our world is built of information.
So information is for us, the ultimate substrate.
It’s interesting because there is a school of physics that the world itself may be an information system – in effect the universe is isomorphic to a natural quantum computer.
People like Seth Lloyd and even all the way back to John Archibald Wheeler (“it from bit”) come to mind as “founding fathers” of this viewpoint.
shams 3:12 pm on January 25, 2011 Permalink
and the Holographic Universe rears its misshapen head.
lawl. see how he directs the conversation, my habbibi?
a true subversive.
but you see….that isnt proven….that information is reality. Dr. Zeilingers hypothesis, as i recall….the quantum teleportation guy.
shams 3:14 pm on January 25, 2011 Permalink
i guess i should technically say the Holographic Multiverse.
Damn you Spock for an intransigent threadjacker!
this thread is about Thabet the Tyrant of TalkIslam and how he unjustly deleted my front page rebuttal of his calumnies.
THE 3:55 pm on January 25, 2011 Permalink
I plead innocent. Aziz brought up the Matrix.
Theories are never proven. For an unbiased observer, their truth-value (posterior probability) depends on the strength of the evidence that supports/refutes them, no more no less.
This thread has many branches.
aziz 8:02 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
you used the word isomorphic, but I think you meant homomorphic, though actually I’d agree with isomorphic as being more accurate.
THE 8:56 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
Isomorphic is all that could ever be proved empirically. Since a perfect quantum simulation would be indistinguishable from the real thing for someone living in it.
Admin 6:22 am on January 27, 2011 Permalink |
this is all just cargo cult quantum.
If you’d like to make your case to me in a single, coherent essay, I’d be happy to have you guest post at at my geekblog, where more of the readership is probably sympathetic to your position than mine. I think there’s a productive debate possible, but not in the context of this site and not so fragmented as your argument has been here due to it being largely defensive.
You are excellent at marshaling factoids but I would like to see if, given a platform to construct a real, cohesive argument, you can persuade. I invite you to try.
THE 7:27 am on January 27, 2011 Permalink
Like I say I’m not a real physicist. Amateur enthusiast is much more appropriate description. I try to summarize what I read as well as I can understand it.
Actually our subjective model of reality is much less realistic than you seem to think it is. Some trivial examples: There are no such things as colors in the real world. Matter is not really continuous surfaces, atoms are mostly empty space etc. So our intuitive subjective mental models of reality are “evolutionarily functional” rather than theoretically deep.
That’s why QM is so counter-intuitive. Reality is rather different upon closer study than our brains’ naive models suggest.
Really though, I am not qualified to do a coherent review. Anyone who’s really interested is far better off Googling on any hints and keywords I drop, and reading the massive literature on the subject themselves, beginning with maybe Wikipedia and then mining the content of ArXive.
I can’t do your research for you, Aziz. In any case it is better for you to follow your own initiative. Only you can select the articles, papers etc appropriate to your own level of comprehension.
I am content if my hints get you to look for it yourself.
If you’re not interested enough or stimulated enough to look it up for yourself, then don’t bother.
As for “cargo cult quantum” I don’t know. There’s.a lot of serious firepower there, supporting the “digital Physics” community.
Nobel prizewinners etc. Susskind? t’Hooft? Wheeler? Deutsche? Tegmark? Does it get any bigger? These are serious names. This is no fringe movement. This is a significant school of thought. That’s why the literature is so vast.
A professionally written review paper, would be a much better option, or follow the links on the Wikipedia article I linked.
Time’s another thing. I am currently preoccupied with the financial crisis, which is far from over IMHO.
I am getting embarrassingly rusty on the physics.
I used to spend far more time trying to keep up with trends and skimming for interesting papers, than I have had time for since the financial crash.
I don’t know how long until I can go back to my old physics focus, such as it was.
In most cases the stuff I wrote on this thread was based on papers I read several years ago. Pre-crash.
I drift wistfully past ArXive now and again…….
bk 5:35 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink |
since your accusation was ill-founded, this comment is deleted.
shams 5:46 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink |
wallah i thot that was Aziz the Philosopher King in his Official Capacity.
lawl.
shams 6:09 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink |
i guess that is the question, Aziz. Are admins allowed to use their powers to suppress criticism of their positions on TI?
I was only criticizing “brother” thabet’s calumnies against me and deliberate mistatements of my positions.
I fisked him, and only him.
i quoted him and refuted each statement.
and he deleted my post.
bk 6:23 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
regardless of who, one has to question whether this is actually a forum or simply a bully pulpit for some loser who has no trouble dropping a shitstorm on people and then using his admin position to erase any consequences.
When did trollbet become a republican?
shams 7:31 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink
/shrug
thabet is a western culture chauvinist.
like razib.
they think western culture has all the answers.
they not republicans……. they are conservatives.
They endorse “conservative” first culture anti-empirical phailosophy.
Phall if ye will but rise ye must.
/spit
aziz 8:03 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink |
actually admin was me, i just forgot to logout of the admin accct while i was trying to do site maintenance
im the only one who ever really posts under admin
THE 4:03 pm on January 23, 2011 Permalink |
Here’s something you could notice. A very successful evangelical Buddhist movement in Thailand.
Dhammakaya. 23 spectacular images.
THE 5:08 pm on January 23, 2011 Permalink |
The biological basis of Buddhism?
THE 5:40 am on January 24, 2011 Permalink |
Another recent story on the biological impact of meditation.
Admin 5:57 am on January 24, 2011 Permalink |
If you would like a Journal, we would be happy to provide you with one. These are interesting links and I think a journal devoted to this sort of thing would be a great addition.
Journals also get autolinked in the right sidebar, so you’d probably attract more diverse commentary.
THE 9:15 am on January 24, 2011 Permalink |
Thank you for your offer.
I am an old acquaintance of Shams,
I am content to comment occasionally on her threads.
If you are interested in this kind of thing,
I am currently watching a documentary on Chinese TV about the
World Heritage treasures on the sacred or “fairy” mountain, Mount Wudang.