On Buddhism

In the past, when I heard that someone had become a buddhist (Richard Gere for instance) I always felt it was a bit ridiculous. The small effort that I dedicated to the critic of such people left only room for making fun of it. My respect and sympathy for the figure of the Dalai Lama, however, has existed since I heard about him, so I was left in the middle of these two attitudes, in a shaky ground only supported by carelessness.
A superficial aesthetic interest on japanese poetry led me to read about Zen buddhism. Now I must confess my current attraction on buddhism, which is all the more unexpected since I am a devote atheist. Of course buddhism being a religion which grounds itself not in a belief in god but in the need to reduce suffering a clash is much less likely than with theistic religions. However, I have not yet understood how deeply rooted is the concept of reincarnation in buddhism, or if it is only in some (many?) of its versions that this concept exists. I find the concept totally absurd, but that has not diminished my admiration for the profoundly honest reasoning in buddhism, which much more resembles a philosophical current than a religion in the regular sense.

News - U.S. scientists create self-replicating robot

LONDON (Reuters) - Self-replicating robots are no longer the stuff of science fiction.
Scientists at the Cornell University in Ithaca, New York have created small robots that can build copies of themselves.
Each robot consists of several 10-cm (4 inch) cubes which have identical machinery, electromagnets to attach and detach to each other and a computer program for replication. The robots can bend and pick up and stack the cubes.
"Although the machines we have created are still simple compared with biological self-reproduction, they demonstrate that mechanical self-reproduction is possible and not unique to biology," Hod Lipson said in a report in the science journal Nature on Wednesday.
He and his team believe the design principle could be used to make long term, self-repairing robots that could mend themselves and be used in hazardous situations and on space flights.
The experimental robots, which don't do anything else except make copies of themselves, are powered through contacts on the surface of the table and transfer data through their faces. They self-replicate by using additional modules placed in special "feeding locations."
The machines duplicate themselves by bending over and putting their top cube on the table. Then they bend again, pick up another cube, put it on top of the first and repeat the entire process. As the new robot begins to take shape it helps to build itself.
"The four-module robot was able to construct a replica in 2.5 minutes by lifting and assembling cubes from the feeding locations," said Lipson.

Fim de citação.
Agora juntem isto ao artigo anterior sobre o Grey Goo, e quem precisa de bombas nucleares?...

Grey goo

My friend Pedro sent me this Wikipedia article about Grey Goo, a hypothetical end-of-the-world event involving nanotechnology. I was worried with this some two years ago and I remeber Bill Joy from Sun was very worried with the possibility. I found some more info on this here.

The Way of Zen

I just finished reading the book "The Way of Zen" by Alan W. Watts, (or rather, a portuguese translation of it). I was motivated by a sudden interest on Haiku poetry and a fascination for Koans. Beginning only as a superficial interest, in a short while I found myself delving deeper into it and accepting a colleague's offer to read the book just mentioned, since she remembered having read in the past a book about Zen. I also recall having some form of contact with it when I was a child (maybe watching TV? or was it some book?) and I remember a small spark of interest was always present, and it was kept alive away from indifference by the intriguing nature of the Oriental cultures to me and probably most people in the West.
Reading the book, I found Zen a fascinating and attractive philosphy, although I can't say I understood it. :-) Well, if I had, I probably would have reached Satori by now. :-) So this is not an acknowledgement of Zen as the path to take, but rather my statement that it seems a very interesting way of looking at life. I found it especially attractive as it was during the T'ang dynasty (see Hui Neng, the school of "Sudden Awakening" and the "Platform Sutra"), as an attitude in normal daily life, rather than what you find in the mainstream Za-Zen version, where explicit meditation is the rule.
The relation of Zen with many japanese art forms is also quite interesting: poetry, calligraphy, painting, serving tea or firing a bow may share much more in common than meets the eye.

Humanists, Atheists Look to Higher Global Profile

GENEVA (Reuters) - Humanist and atheist groups around the world are looking to boost their profile in 2005 to counter religious fundamentalism and efforts by some Western leaders to relaunch faith as a keystone of national life. Under pressure from the rise of militant Islam, Vatican activism in the European Union and the re-election of a "born-again" Christian to the White House, they feel they must resist to ensure the ideas of secularism survive and spread. "In the face of the religious onslaught on Humanist values, we have to speak out and get our message over," says Roy Brown, Swiss-based president of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) which links groups totaling millions of members. Two central events will be a World Atheist Conference at Vijayawada in India in early January and the IHEU's World Congress in July at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. "We must work hard to combat the encroachment of religion on public policy and on the rights of non-believers everywhere," said IHEU executive director Babu Gogineni.

Atheists, who see no evidence for the existence of a deity, and Humanists, who are mainly atheists but include some believers, share that core concern: to keep religion out of politics and limit it to the private sphere. They draw their inspiration from freethinkers down the ages, from ancient Greek and Indian philosophers through the 18th century Enlightenment that shaped much of modern political thinking in Europe and North America.

PRINCIPLES ATTACKED

But they see key Humanist principles -- respect for human rights and racial and sexual equality with morality based on reason rather than on the dictates of a supreme being through a holy book -- as under assault, and not just in Muslim countries. The re-election in November of George W. Bush, U.S. Humanists fear, strengthened the influence of Christian fundamentalists dedicated to restoring the Bible, "God's word," to a central role in public life and foreign policy. Many of Bush's supporters appear to see the war in Iraq in the same terms as the president, and Muslim fundamentalists, as one arena of a cosmic struggle between good and evil in which what Humanists would regard as crimes are permissible on both sides. Bush's triumph has also boosted opponents of abortion and homosexuality, as well as supporters of Intelligent Design (ID) which rejects evolution -- the development of all life on Earth from lower forms through natural selection of the fittest -- as elaborated by 19th century British naturalist Charles Darwin. The ID movement emerged from the ranks of U.S. creationists, who believe the Bible is literally correct and that their God created the world and all in it. ID limits itself to arguing that an intelligence must have shaped life. In many U.S. states, fundamentalists on school boards ensure that creationism -- taught widely until the late 1960s -- is still present in some form. ID supporters are now demanding that their beliefs be taught alongside evolution.

Last month British philosopher Anthony Flew, long a champion of unbelief, announced to the dismay of some fellow atheists that he was now convinced an intelligence must have provided the spark of life and perhaps even done some designing. His "conversion" was greeted with delight on creationist and Catholic Web sites. But Flew hastened to clarify that he believed that the intelligence involved was not the Christian, Jewish or Muslim "personal" deity, and that there is no "afterlife."

GOD OF THE GAPS

Atheist scientist-thinkers, like British biologist Richard Dawkins, said Flew had simply come to "the god of the gaps" -- a view held by some philosophers but few scientists that some "force" must have been at play because science has not pinned down how life could have begun otherwise. In Britain, many Humanists feel that Prime Minister Tony Blair -- a strong religious believer -- and members of his government are undermining secular traditions. They point to his promotion of faith schools run by various religious communities, including two financed by a fundamentalist businessman where creationism is taught as science. Blair's push for a new law that would protect all believers from "incitement to hate" on the grounds of their faith -- a key demand of Muslim activists -- is bound to restrict criticism of religion as such, Humanists argue. His readiness to bend government policies to the views of "faith" leaders, they say, has led religious hard-liners to demand ever more concessions on social and cultural issues such as limiting the right to stage plays that might offend religion.

In most Muslim countries, religion and politics are closely intertwined and apostasy or renunciation of the faith is often a criminal offense. Penalties include execution, but "apostates" are routinely treated as outcasts and harassed. Secular and evangelical Christian groups launched a campaign at the United Nations last year to convince Islamic leaders to work to change this, but to little effect.

SOME ADVANCES

However Humanists see some advances over the past year in Europe, Asia and even in Africa where atheists have begun to organize. In Europe, Vatican efforts to have the EU constitution include a reference to the continent's Christian heritage were blocked. The European Parliament voted to bar a traditionalist Italian Catholic from becoming the new justice commissioner. France's ban on Muslim headscarves in state schools was imposed in September with few problems, despite warnings that it would unleash protests and alienate many in Europe's largest Islamic minority. In Spain, the Socialists replaced the Catholic-inspired Popular Party after its decade in power and began a series of secular reforms angering the Church hierarchy, including a move to allow gay marriage. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party lost power in India's general elections to the firmly secular Congress Party. Even at the United Nations there was good news from for Humanists. Bangladeshi writer and medical doctor Taslima Nasrin, living in exile after criticizing Islam and an active campaigner for the rights of women and the non-religious, was awarded a UNESCO prize for promoting cultural tolerance. But at the same time a Vatican campaign led to the world body adding "Christianophobia" to "Islamophobia" and anti-Semitism as issues its human rights bodies report -- a sign for many that religious forces are reinforcing their grip.

By Robert Evans (Sun Jan 9, 2005 09:31 AM ET)

Personality

I found this interesting link on the Philospohical foundations of Personality Theory.

Bottom-up To Humanity IV - Molecules

Given enough time, atoms and other more basic particles (1) subject to varying conditions and sheer randomness produced by accident structures even more stable than the atoms themselves. As before, this further level of stability means not only internal stability but also greater resistence to interference by other particles.
Form protons neutrons and electrons to atoms and then to molecules (and besides the obvious increase in size), what becomes apparent is an increase in stability.
I find it relevant to emphasize here that at this level (at least!) there is no suggestion of function, or purpose in these structures. They just behave (2).

(1) The appearance of more complex structures does not necessarily mean that all the simpler structures are aggregated in such a way. In fact, they aren't.
(2) My own atoms and molecules are like these. They have no purpose, they have no function. They just behave the way they do, and that's very fortunate indeed. Acting together, inexorably behaving as they do, they keep me alive, in a most extraordinary and unlikely balance. It is hard to imagine that something like this could have happened by pure accumulation of accidents. Or is it? :-)