Chrs' emporium of Techie stuff and other assorted things

My first reply

Teal's first reply.

Right, then.

Originally posted by Teal

That culture can influence moral behavior/ideology is not in dispute. That culture defines morality is. This shows influence, granted, but does not establish that morality is necessarily defined by culture. Anyone can claim the sun is blue. A culture could inexplicably conclude that the sun must be blue despite not appearing blue. The sun is not influenced by what we think about it, even if all our kids start drawing

...

So, I'm having a discussion with Teallaura as we speak about objective versus relative morality. Teallaura is asserting that - if morality is culturally relative - we would expect a society to exist or to have existed in which murder (defined as, for the purpose of this, "malicious killing without caveat") is acceptable.

I, unsurprisingly, do not agree.

Unnecessary logicy bits!
M = A society in which murder is acceptable exists.
R = Moral relativism. ...

I managed to pop back to my university library today. Books. Nomnomnom:
News on the Chinese Room
Cryptography: Theory and Practice
The economics of equal opportunity
Artificial Intelligence (Pearson)
Software Metrics
Heuristics and Biases
Cognitive Biases

A nice selection of Comp. Sci, philosophy and Soc. Sci. I need to get reading

Question and Mark Scheme:

30. Giant robots are going to take over the world!!! (probably) [2]


Answer: False. Giant robots take a lot of resources, it's pretty unlikely anyone would
take over the world that way. Also, there's no evidence to date that robots are that
talented, and currently they have no legal status as moral agents so they can not own
anything. But I'll give points to any good argument about why this might be a danger
too.

...

Crosspost from my blog.

Permalink: http://blog.chrs181818.com/?p=23

I recently (after a few weeks of um-ing and arr-ing about it) picked up a Kindle. I don’t have an appropriate picture-taking device, so have an amazon link instead. I ended up deciding on the £109 Kindle Touch despite some original doubts about the ease of use of the interface and that the touch is the better device – despite being £20 more expensive.

…On the down side, I had to buy it in PC

...