Monthly Archives: March 2017

1:20 CNN host eats human brains, sparking outrage

Reza Aslan, the host of "Believer" on CNN, is under fire for a scene on his show in which he ate human brains while showcasing a group of Hindus who practice cannibalism in India. Critics claim he was presenting a negative and inaccurate portrayal of the religion, as the group featured in the segment is only a very small faction and isn't embraced by mainstream Hindus in any way.

Hillary Clinton debuted a new haircut in a Snapchat post urging women to stand up and resist, and it's got shades of Claire Underwood from "House of Cards." Isthe former presidential candidate prepping for a return to the public spotlight, or was it just time for a new 'do?

When defense attorney Jesse Bright was pulled over in North Carolina while moonlighting as an Uber driver, he began filming the encounter. Allegedly, he had been pulled over for picking up a passenger from a known 'drug house,' but that didn't stop Bright from continuing to film, despite the police officers incorrectly telling him that it was illegal to do so.

A group of nine people, including eight minors, were arrested on charges related to the assault and robbery of a man, which occurred in broad daylight. The victim reportedly didn't suffer any serious injuries, and 18-year-old Darrell Smith is the only member of the group facing charges as an adult.

Two kayakers got more than they expected when they encountered some whales off the coast of Argentina. As they approached one of the massive animals, the beast maneuvered itself underneath them and then rose up, carrying the boaters on its back for a short while.

Residents in Onoway, Canada, began reporting pink water coming from their taps on Monday. It eventually was discovered that a common water treatment chemical was responsible for the brightly colored water, and according to authorities, there was no risk to the public.

Scientists at MITs Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Boston University have built a robot that can read a human's thoughts, as long as that person is wearing the connected EEG. Right now, the bot can only determine very basic commands, and can be guided by thought while performing simple tasks.

After multiple incidents of having his cars keyed in London, Kay Hussain set up a camera to try to catch the perpetrator. When he checked the footage, he saw a man who appears to look just like Donald Trump seemingly vandalizing his car.

Original post:
CNN host eats human brains, sparking outrage - New York Post

Last week, Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker published a satirical essay, in which he wondered whether the strange reality we live in could be some kind of computer game played by an advanced intelligence (us in the future or alien).

His point was that if it is, the "programmers" are messing up, given the absurdity of current events: the incredible faux-pas at the Oscars, where the wrong best picture was announced; Donald Trump, the most outsider president ever elected in U.S. history; the strange comeback by the New England Patriots at the Super Bowl. These events, claims Gopnik, are not just weird; they point to a glitch in the "Matrix," the program that runs us all.

For most people trying to make a living, pay bills or fighting an illness, to spend time considering that our reality is not the "real thing" but actually a highly-sophisticated simulation sounds ridiculous. Someone close to me said, "I wish smart people would focus on real world problems and not on this nonsense." I confess that despite being a scientist that uses simulations in my research, I tend to sympathize with this. To blame the current mess on powers beyond us sounds like a major cop out. It's like the older brother framing the younger one for the broken window. "He threw the ball!" Not our fault, not our responsibility, "they" are doing this to us.

Of course, philosophers consider such questions because they are interesting and raise points about the nature of reality and our perception of it. The Are We Living in a Simulation? question comes from a 2003 paper by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, who reasoned, compellingly, that given our own proficiency with computers and virtual reality, one of the following propositions must be true:

In other words, either we disappear, or our successors do or don't run simulations, including the one we are part of today. Bostrom's point is that if our species moves on to a new, posthuman phase, our "new us" will have unimaginable computation powers, and running realistic simulations will be a given. If this is the case, we would be like characters in a super-advanced Sims game, believing we have autonomy when, in fact, we are puppets in the hands of the game-players.

This sounds like a very Calvinist kind of situation, with God substituted by super-advanced game players. Or maybe we can call them Super Advanced Gaming Entities (S.A.G.E.)? Our fates are in the hands of "posthuman" entities with powers beyond our control. The key difference between God and a simulation (at least in this narrow context) is that God is presumably infallible, while simulations have glitches, or can have glitches.

The one glitch in the simulation argument is that there is nothing to stop the simulation at one super-advanced posthuman (alien) species. It could very well be that our simulators are, for their part, simulated by even more advanced simulators, and those by even more advanced ones, ad infinitum. Who is the first simulator? This reminds me of the "turtles all the way down" concept of Anavastha in Indian philosophy, where the world rests on an elephant that rests on a turtle that rests on a turtle that... In the West, it may be interpreted as infinite regression or the problem of the First Cause. (For a history of the "turtles all the way down" concept and its many occurrences and variations see here.)

This offers at least some sort of comfort, given that we all seem to be enslaved in an endless nested web of simulators. Only the first simulator is truly free. Familiar?

For Bostrom's argument to work, the key assumption is that advanced intelligences will have an interest in simulating their ancestors (in this case, us). Why would they, exactly? Would they expect to gain some new information about their reality by looking at their evolutionary past?

It seems to me that being so advanced they would have collected enough knowledge about their past to have little interest in this kind of simulation. Forward-looking may be much more interesting to them. They may have virtual-reality museums, where they could go and experience the lives and tribulations of their ancestors. But a full-fledged, resource-consuming simulation of an entire universe? Sounds like a colossal waste of time.

The simulation argument messes with our self-esteem, since it assumes that we have no free will, that we are just deluded puppets thinking we are free to make choices. To believe this is to give up our sense of autonomy: after all, if it's all a big game that we can't control, why bother? This is the danger with this kind of philosophical argument, to actually make us into what it's claiming we are, so that we end up abdicating our right to fight for what we believe in.

Let us make sure that we don't confuse philosophical arguments with our very real socio-political reality, especially not now. We need all the autonomy that we can muster to protect our freedom of choice.

Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist and writer and a professor of natural philosophy, physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. He is currently teaching a Massive Online Open Course titled Question Reality! that goes much deeper into these questions. His latest book is The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected: A Natural Philosopher's Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything. You can keep up with Marcelo on Facebook and Twitter: @mgleiser

Link:
Why Reality Is Not A Video Game And Why It Matters - NPR

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. (photo credit:REUTERS)

Human rights organizations have called for the United Nations secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, to add the IDF to the blacklist of states and armed organizations responsible for serial injury to children during armed conflict, alongside brutal terrorist and guerrilla organizations such as ISIS and al-Qaida. This attests to the international communitys profound misunderstanding of the difficulty sovereign states face in low-intensity war (fighting terrorist/guerrilla organizations) while minimizing the collateral damage.

For years the State of Israel has endured a deep lack of understanding regarding its war against terrorist organizations. A prominent case in point is the UNs Goldstone Report that was published after Operation Cast Lead in 2009. This report served as a moral earthquake as far as Israel was concerned, as it stated that Israel had a policy of deliberately harming civilian noncombatants.

In an op-ed published two years later (April 2011) in The Washington Post, Goldstone retracted this statement and admitted that if I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.

Upon retraction, Goldstone argued that the international laws of war should be implemented by nonstate organizations, such as Hamas, to the same extent in which they should be implemented by the armies of sovereign states. According to Goldstone, lack of implementation of the international laws of war during warfare should lead to investigation of the violating party.

This assertion is compelling testimony to the lack of understanding that the terrorist organizations, such as Hamas which the IDF is fighting, have an entirely different value system from that which is acceptable to Israel as a democratic country. These organizations tend not to take human life into consideration not the lives of their own activists, or the lives of the population in whose name they are fighting, or the lives of the enemy.

Thus, despite their similarity to conventional armies and their military might possessing as they do large quantities of ammunition, an organized military force and sophisticated military tactics and strategy not only do they not adhere to international law during fighting, they deliberately violate it. One of their main strategies is to fight against Israeli civilian populations and IDF soldiers from within their own civilian populations, in order to deliberately blur the distinction between the civilians and their fighters for instance, firing rockets or mortar shells from civilian facilities such as schools, mosques, churches and hospitals. In this way they hope to force the IDF to target those facilities and thus deprive it of legitimacy to act, leading to condemnation of the IDF and Israel by the international community.

Such acts by these organizations from within civilian populations lay the responsibility for endangering civilian security on them and not on the IDF. Nevertheless, during battle, the IDF as a moral army is undoubtedly responsible for maintaining not only the human dignity of Israels civilians and soldiers, but also the human dignity of the opposing sides civilians and soldiers. Meaning, the IDF must strive to minimize as much as possible the damage caused to the civilian population of the other side.

However, it must be understood that so long as the UN and human rights organizations are unable to comprehend the huge difference between conventional wars and low-intensity wars; and until the legal and moral justifications for the various actions taken during combat are adjusted accordingly, we will continue to witness international condemnation of Israeli and IDF actions. Liram Koblentz-Stenzler is a doctoral student of military ethics and terror in the Political Science Department at Tel Aviv University. She previously was a research fellow at Yale University

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A disgrace to human rights - Jerusalem Post Israel News