Sunday School

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

The Purists are losing: How American Catholic are rewriting the rules.

I have yet to hear a Christian Nationalist who is not a just a paltry liar for Jesus while I think Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia is an honorable man.

Do you count?

The phrase “or belief” is not pedantry. It is the legal firewall against turning human rights into religious privilege.

World of Woo: WHO and the Death of Evidence-Based Medicine.

Environment: Buying green can quietly erase its own efficiency gains.

In 1776, the Western world still understood human societies as hierarchies, enforced by authority.

For me, Time is not a river. Nor is it fundamental. It is the comparison between positions, states, and relations we call “flow” once change is observed. So, if nothing happens, nothing changes. If nothing changes, there is no physical distinction between “time passed” and “time did not pass.”

Consciousness may not be a separate faculty at all. It may be what certain information-processing loops feel like from the inside when perception, attention, memory, and action-planning are integrated tightly enough. If we cannot define reliable indicators of consciousness, we risk two opposite errors: granting moral status to sophisticated mimicry or denying moral status to systems or animals that actually have experience.

This experiment does not solve abiogenesis, but it does show that parts of the life process can be assembled from non-living components.

Occam’s Razor is not dead. It has been demoted. It is no longer the supreme judge of scientific truth as Nature may not owe us humans a simple explanation.

AI shows promise in the fight against fake news. What will it do to literature? The long-term gains from AI are the hardest to understand but cognitive warfare is real. We should understand the complex AI Pantheon where diversity and competition may prevent any one system from dominating, without human sacrifices.

“Democracy is always a controversial idea,” Raskin said. “Monarchy is obviously a betrayal of that idea. Aristocracy is a radical betrayal of that idea. Theocracy is just somebody dressing up their pretensions to power and dictatorship in religious garb.”

Sunday Book Club: The Blind Spot.

Some photographs taken last week. Scenes from America’s 250th birthday.

While you are waiting for the kettle to boil……

Happy Birthday America!

Celebrating 250 Years of Religious Freedom: The Founders’ Vision for America. 1776, Then and Now…Several videos.

Coffee Break Videos:  AI has hacked the code of human civilization. How consciousness evolved – and why AI can’t have it. Does Religion Poison Everything? Mehdi Hasan is lying to you. Bible lessons for Texas Public School Students.

 

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Nick Fish, President of American Atheists; So, today, in celebration of the Fourth and in honor of the “confirmed infidel” and “howling atheist” who penned our Declaration, let’s consider Thomas Jefferson’s actual words:

“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”

“No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever.”

“Question with boldness even the existence of a God…”

“…in answer to [the] question why the Ten Commandments should not now be a part of the common law of England we may say they are not because they never were.” 

Jefferson’s belief in the absolute separation of church and state was neither incidental nor isolated to a single letter. And that conviction didn’t end with Jefferson. It was carried forward and codified into law by James Madison, the Father of our Constitution, whose own writings make clear he, too, would have regarded the Religious Liberty Commission’s policy recommendations as an affront to the First Amendment.

In Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments, Madison rejected public funds for parochial schools:

“…the Bill implies either that the Civil Magistrate is a competent Judge of Religious Truth; or that he may employ Religion as an engine of Civil policy. The first is an arrogant pretension falsified by the contradictory opinions of Rulers in all ages, and throughout the world: the second an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation…”

Madison vetoed legislation that would have directed public funds to religious institutions, warning against the precedent of government entanglement with sectarian causes. And he was extremely explicit about chaplains:

“The Constitution of the U.S. forbids everything like an establishment of a national religion… The establishment of the chaplainship to [Congress] is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles…” 

And on the consequences of entangling religion and government:

“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”

 

 

[jakelafort]

looks like a great many interesting articles in School….gonna read some when i get a shot.

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

World of Woo: WHO and the Death of Evidence-Based Medicine.

Evidently, the World Health Organization has a no-threshold view of Alcohol, which ignores the entire history of U.S. Prohibition, with battery-poisoned rot-gut bathtub gin and gang wars in the streets over “sales turf.”

This no-threshold view of alcohol would also give support to the old racist bans on selling “fire water” to Indigenous peoples (which interestingly enough happened both in North America and Australia, with two different Indigenous peoples.). It furthermore would give support the Islamic World’s repressive Sha’ria Law policies against alcohol use.

Alcohol-World Health Organization
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/alcohol

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Thanks Jake.

Enco  –

The key line in the WHO article is “There is no form of alcohol consumption that is risk-free” and that even low levels carry some risk and can cause harm. I would contend that there is no safe amount of alcohol. There are only lower-risk amounts. For health, the optimal amount is none. That does not mean one drink will ruin someone’s health. It means the risk curve does not start at “benefit” or “neutral”; it starts at some degree of added risk, even if that risk is tiny at very low consumption.

I do not drink any alcohol. Considering I am an atheist and live in Ireland, I get interesting looks and questions about my stance on it. Someone once said, “Oh have few beers and live a bit”. My reply was something like “I will remain sober and hopefully live a bit longer”…No hangovers, no fog, no regrets. Hard to improve on that. I do not preach, do not perform purity and do not judge those that do drink, so obviously I am not a Christian 😊

I once left a group of Muslims very confused when I told them that I did not drink alcohol. At a hotel in Tunisia during Ramadan! It got me free tea and ‘bambalouni’ (Tunisian doughnut) which probably has more sugar that a beer!

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

I myself haven’t drank in 11 years and don’t plan to restart, at least until medical science can create instant regrowing brain and liver cells. For me, it’s not a virtue signal; I just don’t want brain and liver troubles on top of any pancreas troubles that may come from diabetes.

It still struck me as curious that the World Health Organization didn’t account for the obvious health harms that come from trying to ban people’s attempt to alter their consciousness. Prohibition is truly no-threshold.

A bambalouni might just be their version of a culinary ‘Bababooey’ for the Kuffir.

[Strega]

Thanks Reg!

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

I was surprised to read that Ireland is to consider decriminalizing the possession of all drugs for personal use. I have smoked weed throughout my adult life (a few times a year) and nobody cares about it. But I suspect the religious objectors will be out in force again even though they keep losing (marriage equality, abortion, divorce). It will be fun to hear the debates. It’s time to light one up and watch a movie!

[Simon Paynton]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

Occam’s Razor is not dead. It has been demoted. It is no longer the supreme judge of scientific truth as Nature may not owe us humans a simple explanation.

I would say that Nature is elegant but not necessarily simple.  I don’t believe the most simple explanation is the right one.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Simon, here is a great read from a previous Sunday School….Life is Simple…

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

AI shows promise in the fight against fake news.

Here’s hoping it does good because fighting Misinformation/Disinformation/Malinformation is hard enough between humans of different cultures and languages, even with smartphone translators.

Today, at the store where I work, a Caribbean man was sporting a florescent yellowish green shirt with the bold, black letters spelling the word (I’ll try to sanitize it for any minors): “CVNT.”

I asked him in French: “Savez-vous que ces dit? Lisez-vous cet mot? En Anglais, c’est offensif! Vous ne peut pas dit ces en radio ou television! C’est un insult pour vous! No bon pour vous, Monsieur!”

Translation: “Do you know what that says? Have you read that word? In English, it is offensive! You cannot say it on radio or television! It is an insult for you! Not good for you, Sir!”

Whoever provided clothes for the recent arrivals of Caribbeans clearly doesn’t have their well-being in mind. Earlier, I seen a Caribbean man with a T-Shirt announcing him as a “Black Queen.” I gave him my finest Seinfeldian explanation that there’s nothing wroooong with that, but life is better when you know English. Another Caribbean man wore a hat that said “Coast Guard”, yet couldn’t tell me where he served or trained.

It wouldn’t surprise me if this was all some trolling prank by some Alt-Righter on Reddit intent on getting these men in trouble! And not one helping hand from the “No Kings” crowd who, if they really cared about immigrants, would kindly sit them down and explain the culture to them!

“It…is…not…One…World!”–Paul Harvey.

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

Occam’s Razor is not dead. It has been demoted. It is no longer the supreme judge of scientific truth as Nature may not owe us humans a simple explanation.

Nature has always been complicated from the time we first beheld it and started thinking about it. Occam’s Razor is not a rule for the Natural Universe, it is a rule for our attempt to understand the Natural Universe and summarize it’s phenomenon for ourselves and to help each other understand as well.

If there are 93 million possible combinations of atoms that can form a protein, well, I guess that’s as simple a explanation as we can make of it. And if we’re to benefit from these proteins, we’d best get cracking and use AI and Ion Mass Spectrometry to observe and possibly craft these proteins as needed.

Clear as mud, but that’s how we make bricks.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

And if we’re to benefit from these proteins, we’d best get cracking and use AI and Ion Mass Spectrometry to observe and possibly craft these proteins as needed.

Understanding protein chains is one of the greatest initial accomplishments of AI. Before AI we had a very small library of knowledge on the structure of protein chains. Some scientists had spent years trying to work out the structure of just one protein.

A protein starts as a long chain of amino acids, a bit like a woolen string. But each bit of the string has different chemical properties, so when it folds up, it does not simply become a random ball. It forms a specific 3D shape, with pockets, ridges, hinges and surfaces. That shape largely determines what the protein can do. It might look like a random accidental knotted mess, but it is very specific structure based on the “sentences” in its code.

Then we got AlphaFold.

Then AI discovered the structure of 200,000,000 proteins and asked “Got any more for me?”

Before AlphaFold, we often knew the order of the beads on the string, but not the shape of the finished ball. AI learned enough from known protein structures to predict how many unknown strings would fold. That gave biology a 3D map for millions of proteins that previously existed mostly as letter sequences.

It’s like we had a ‘knitting pattern’ written as letters. But we often had no idea what the knitted object looked like. AlphaFold helped turn the written pattern into a 3D model.

DNA sequencing told us the spelling of proteins. AlphaFold helped show us their shape. And in proteins, shape is not arbitrary, it is function. It’s accuracy is astounding.

Now we have upgraded versions of AlphaFold. Imagine a string that could be read from left to right, Amino acid 01 – Amino acid 240. Easy enough. But when it is folded into a 3D structure, Amino acid 91 might be beside amino acid 213 in the folded structure. That is a very different problem from decoding a left-to-right sequence. AlphaFold looks at related versions of the same protein across many organisms from its “Evolution Database” (my wording) and if two amino-acid positions change together across evolution, they may be physically close in the folded protein, even if they are far apart in the straight chain. Evolution leaves clues AlphaFold can work with.

The strategies it uses to “search and decode” (me again) are nothing humans can do. AlphaFold is a deep neural network that directly predicts geometry from biological evidence of millions of proteins chains across nature. It then predicates the 3D coordinates of atoms from the protein’s primary amino-acid sequence before I have had my breakfast. The beautiful part is that AlphaFold uses evolution almost like a natural experiment run billions of times. AlphaFold is not watching the wool roll up physically. It is looking at millions of similar balls of wool from nature, learning which parts of the string tend to end up touching, and predicting the compact 3D ball that best fits those constraints.

There are further advances more recently. The Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel, has done great work in computational protein design where “where AI improves protein-design algorithms, describing it as a way to design biomolecules with useful functions, including possible applications such as breaking down plastic waste.”

Researchers from the Technion and Tel Aviv University have developed a pioneering AI system that translates protein sequences into natural language.  Its BetaDescribe AI system is almost ‘post-AlphaFold’. It is not just predicting the ball of wool’s shape, but trying to generate a useful biological description of the ball. Like asking it “Given this protein sequence, what can we say in human language about what this protein may do?”

We used to know the string. Now, for millions of proteins, AI gives us a very good idea of the folded ball.

I have an amino acid ‘protein chain’ tattooed on my arm that reads “I am made of stars”.

 

[TheEncogitationer]

Fellow Unbelievers:

In 1776, the Western world still understood human societies as hierarchies, enforced by authority.

Fantastic article from Commentary and Allen Guelzo. It absolutely hit home about the ideals that underpinned our founding, where we fell short, and where we did better. I was amazed to learn the full extent our founding inspired movements for freedom worldwide!

The only addendum I could add is: To Hell with Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and to Hell with Ian Carroll’s nonexistent revisionist scholarship!

Yes, our history was and is chock with injustices, but there is no worse place for the fungus of injustice than the sterilizing Petri Dish of our Great Experiment because injustice dies a suffering death here and hopefully will continue to do so!

I should add that Commentary is a very scholarly magazine! I first learned about Thomas Sowell’s great work from the pages of Commentary.. Jewish religion or Jewish heritage is not required to enjoy it.

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

Mehdi Hasan is lying to you.

Glad you posted this. It’s easy to forget Medhi Hassan in the polluted sea of others like him in Cyberspace.

Here’s just a short list of others who spread his poison against Jews and Israel. All ideologies and creeds and sadly a few professed “Libertarians” and Atheists too:

ArchPolitics, Breaking Points, Carrie Prejean Boller, Pat Buchanan, Tucker Carlson, Noam Chomsky, Ian Carroll, Charlamagne Tha God, Eric Clapton, Dave Chapelle, Chronicles Magazine, Ali Dawah, Jimmy Dore, David Duke, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! (which should be called Peppermint Patty of Mob Rule Now!), “Professor” Dave Farina, Louis Farrakhan, Nick Fuentes, Chris Hedges, The I’ve Had It Podcast with Jennifer Welch and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan, The Hodge Twins a.k.a The Conservative Twins, Scott Horton, Megyn Kelly, Kyle Kulinski of Secular Talk, Zohran Mamdani, John Meersheimer, T.J. Kirk a.k.a. “The Amazing Atheist”, Tom Metzger, Piers Morgan, Candace Owens, Lewellyn Rockwell of AntiWar.com, Ron Paul, Stew Peters, Ms. Rachael, Jeffery Sachs, Dave Smith, Richard Spenser, The Young Turks with Ana Casparian and Cenk Uygur, Roger Waters, “Professor” Jiang Xueqin.

There are many others, these are just the few that first come to mind and I had to stop when the nausea kicked in. Feel free to add as many as you can stand.

[Author]

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