Scientists at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology have truly created a monster. A team of researchers who
specialize in the darker side of artificial intelligence made news for their
latest creation: “Norman”, a machine-learning bot that “sees death in whatever
image it looks at”, its creators told HuffPost.
Pinar Yanardag, Manuel Cebrian and
Iyad Rahwan wanted to prove that an artificial intelligence algorithm would be
influenced by the kind of content fed to it. So they made Norman, named for
“Psycho” character Norman Bates, and had it read image captions from a Reddit
forum that features disturbing footage of people dying.
The team then showed Norman randomly
generated inkblots and compared the way it captioned the images to the captions
created by a standard AI. For instance, where a standard AI sees, “A black and
white photo of a small bird,” Norman sees, “Man gets pulled into dough machine”.
(1)
Seeing life everywhere. Trained to
ignore death. Wondering why and how we came to be. Questioning everything
regarding our being.
And yet, the questions we ask hold the
key to our prejudice. And as all other questions, already contain the answers
we secretly wish for.
Audacious humans dancing on a bed of
death…
Too busy to see that what they see is
the key to what you don’t see…
In an interview prior to a speech at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, last week, Dawkins told the media that parents have too much influence in their children’s education, especially when it comes to religion.
“There is a balancing act and you have to balance the rights of parents and the rights of children, and I think the balance has swung too far towards parents,” Dawkins told the Irish Times. “Children do need to be protected so that they can have a proper education and not be indoctrinated in whatever religion their parents happen to have been brought up in.”
He added, “You have to write off those people” who value the Bible over science.
Dawkins was in Ireland, along with physicist Lawrence Krauss as part of a tour promoting Arizona State University’s Origins Project. “And parents of course have concerns and a say, but they don’t have the right to shield their children from knowledge,” Krauss said. “That’s not a right any more than they have the right to shield their children from health care or medicine. And those parents that do that are often tried and imprisoned when they refuse to allow their children to get blood transfusions or whatever is necessary for their health. And this is necessary for their mental health.” [1]
Meet the religion of today.
It is not called religion and yet it is.
It is called “Love for science”, a.k.a. “scientism”.
Practiced by people BELIEVING that science will answer all metaphysical questions, even when these are not even part of the realm of science.
Meet the new fascism.
It is not called fascism.
It is called “Love for knowledge”.
Practiced by people who believe only their knowledge is the correct one. By people who speak for tolerance and yet they are intolerant to any other opinion than their own.
Meet the old religion.
In the beginning it was not called religion either.
It was called “Love”.
Practiced by people who just believed in… love. By people who had answered all the great metaphysical problems. In their heart. Now. By people who were tolerant, even to their enemies while they slaughtered them.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is potentially wading into hot water next month when it hosts a meeting set up by Nobelist Luc Montagnier to discuss his controversial research on what has become known as “the memory of water.” The afternoon at the agency’s Paris headquarters will feature talks about the virologist’s widely ridiculed idea that water can carry information via an electromagnetic imprint from DNA and other molecules.
The meeting has so far raised little public opposition from researchers, but the announcement on UNESCO’s website acknowledges its controversial nature, saying:
The promoters of this conference are aware of the critical reactions aroused by this work in parts of the scientific community, so they wish to communicate their results with the utmost rigor. The aim is to foster a broad and multidisciplinary discussion. These data seem particularly important because they further enrich the immense achievements of molecular biology. They also suggest the development of new modes of transmission of genetic messages (transmission, transduction, teleportation, etc.).
Montagnier says the issue is actually getting less controversial as fresh evidence for his claims is coming in. “More scientists are becoming convinced by the data,” he says.
At least one blogger is taking offense, however: “Shame on @UNESCO for hosting this absurd pseudoscience conference about Montagnier’s nonsense,” tweeted Andy Lewis, who hosts the blog The Quackometer, last week. “This is classic pathological science—dredging around in the noise of irreproducible experiments by practitioners whose expertise is not in these fields in order to support hypotheses that fly in the face of well-established scientific principles,” Lewis writes in an e-mail to ScienceInsider.
Montagnier, 82, who shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 2008 for the discovery of HIV, stunned many fellow scientists about 5 years ago with claims that DNA emits weak electromagnetic waves that cause structural changes in water that persist even in extremely high dilutions. Montagnier considers himself an intellectual heir to the controversial French scientist Jacques Benveniste, who claimed in a 1988 Nature paper that water can retain “memories” of compounds even when diluted at a very high level—a claim that caused a sensation in the press and was taken as support of homeopathy by its proponents, but that other scientists weren’t able to replicate. (1)
One blogger! Wow!
We are talking about some serious opposition here.
Unfortunately it seems that no matter what credentials you have, if you discuss about something the “people” find absurd, then we will laugh at you.
Because science is nothing special.
Science is just the new religion.
And its followers decide on its path.
What the majorities find correct is based on assumptions and axioms.
What science finds true is based on assumptions and axioms as well.
Religion on the other hand is counter-intuitive. For the majorities.
Search your feelings.
Look for that “illogical” heart inside you.
Listen to it’s irrational voice…
We once knew many things.
Now we have forgotten them.
It isn’t only biblical figures who lived to well-seasoned ages of 900 years or more. Ancient texts from many cultures have listed life spans most modern people find simply and literally unbelievable. Some say it’s due to misunderstandings in the translation process, or that the numbers have symbolic meaning—but against the many explanations are also counterarguments that leave the historian wondering whether the human lifespan has actually decreased so significantly over thousands of years.
For example, one explanation is that the ancient Near East understanding of a year could be different than our concept of a year today. Perhaps a year meant an orbit of the moon (a month) instead of an orbit of the sun (12 months).
But if we make the changes accordingly, while it brings the age of the biblical figure Adam down from 930 to a more reasonable 77 at the time of his death, it also means he would have fathered his son Enoch at the age of 11. And Enoch would have only been 5 years old when he fathered Methuselah.
In ancient China, super-centenarians were also commonplace, according to many texts. Joseph P. Hou, Ph.D., acupuncturist, wrote in his book “Healthy Longevity Techniques”: “According to Chinese medical records, a doctor named Cuie Wenze of the Qin dynasty lived to be 300 years old. Gee Yule of the later Han dynasty lived to be 280 years old. A high ranking Taoist master monk, Hui Zhao, lived to be 290 years old and Lo Zichange lived to be 180 years old. As recorded in the The Chinese Encyclopedia of Materia Medica, He Nengci of the Tang dynasty lived to be 168 years old. A Taoist master, Li Qingyuan, lived to be 250 years old. In modern times, a traditional Chinese medicine doctor, Lo Mingshan of Sichuan province, lived to be 124 years old.”
Dr. Hou said the Eastern key to longevity is “nourishing life,” including not only physical nourishment, but also mental and spiritual nourishment.
The Shahnameh or Shahnama (“The Book of Kings”) is a Persian epic poem written by Ferdowsi around the end of the 10th century A.D. It tells of kings reigning 1,000 years, several hundred years, down to 150 years, and so on. (1)
Look closely. It’s not that life expectancy has not risen during the last years. (see “Life expectancy – The lie of modern medicine“) It is that life expectancy has FALLEN during the last years!
See the truth behind the prejudice.
We are not more “progressed”.
We are not more “evolved”.
We are just arrogant frightened small people,
who have forgotten they are gods.
We have become un-human.
We have lost connection with nature.
We have lost connection with the cosmos.
We have lost connection with ourselves.
And now we pay the price…
We try to be immortals because we once knew we were. But we cannot be, unless we give up our dream. Look back into the past, and see your future.