[axel77]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

What happened was, the churches were perceived as having gotten "greedy," filling their own coffers while providing nothing to the public, and many steps were taken in developing democracy specifically to remove the church's power over the public and their money.

Sorry but no, this is now so a rough simplificition I don't think it hits the truth anymore even remotly close... I thought I just described a quite more detailed version to happenings above. Yes,the chatholic church getting greedy was however the main reason the protestant church to be created firstplace, otherwise Martin Luther King would have had not much to complain about. I described before the protestantic ethic been lived by population not by priests.

BTW another interesting note: The church as commune was the prototype of the company. Today (most) companies (ltd. and stock corporation) are considered as "juristic person" that is in law a person by itself, that can own things, that can be sued and so on, without having a specific person actually owning things or actually being sourced. The concept of the corporation as a legal entity by itself was long unknown to humanity. It started with the communal church. Churches had often some local estate assigned to it. That is some fields and some herbal garden and the such. These were managed by the local priest of said church. Now things that were obvious were: * the priest does not personally own any of this, he just manages it. * when the priest dies or goes elsewhere the next assigned priest to this church will also take over catering for this estates. Even the pope was not considered to own it, as it was bound to this specific church. So they were puzzled whom it belongs to. Many decades they said "the fours walls of the church" (as building) are the owner of this estates. After the time the concept of corporation developed from this. If applied to mundane assets not assigned to a church.

Also its interesting to note that the chatholic church is obviously bureaucratic organised. And actually its by far the oldest bureaucratic organisation, and has been taken as template for many other bureaucratic organisation.

Well, although I agree scientific method has its accomplishments, I still contend that a human being is capable of intuitive associations that cannot be accounted for by past experiences and direct input alone, and that no machine would be capable of duplicating.

First I don't differ between "scientificly" having findings or having them "non-scientificly". In the matter of philosophy of science its very difficult (if not impossible) to assess what exactly makes something "scientificly". And honestly I'd say there is no scientific way of "having an idea". All theory of science is about is to test if some theory (idea gotten from somewhere/someplace not mentioned) is "true" (thus a fact) or "false" (thus an artefact). Little is said about what way developing a theory firstplace is scientifc or not, only in testing if its true or wrong. There are some modern exceptions to this like e.g. "Grounded Theory", but the general mainstream of philosphy of science does not care all that much about where ideas come from. So I personally wouldn't differ much in the scientific method of having an idea, or a non-scientific method of having an idea.

The essentially abstract nature of the human mind allows for the collection, cataloging and reordering of data in ways that are beyond mere facts and numbers.

I'm quite nosy, how should we collect, catalog and order data in a way beyond facts? (Or perceived assumptions about the true world, regardless if its a fact or an error in our mind)

And it's specifically because no two minds are alike that said information is necessarily collected, cataloged and reordered differently in each mind, making possible a different conclusion from each mind.

Well funny enough, as time progressed some minds were quite alike, given the same input. Take the periodic table of the elements, this is so fascinating. It has been discovered by three people at once, in a (i believe) 2 or 3 week timeframe. Just imagine it how gross this are! 10.000 years of human (settled) history nobody though about that. And much investigation has been done if this 3 people knew its other, had any contact, visited any common location, read any common book. No. None has been found. Then after 10.000 years within a few days, Boom! several people have the same idea. Now maybe the holy ghost flew above both. Our they shared a common shard of the same soul, who knows. But most likely it was just that moment was the first time, when all data needed was there, and the next step was quite a logical one.

Similar story about the invention of the telephone. Bell gets all the praises, but did you know that another person was at the patent office, 1 hour after bell? Same idea / same invention.

It is the creation of art that demonstrates this better than any other human ability: Taking a desire, such as a desire to impress upon a viewer the significance of an emotion, and creating an original work of art such as Munch's "The Scream." The use of color, the draft of the illustration, the caricature of expression, are all elements that cannot be "computed" from previous inputs. Nor could any machine make the judgments in design and execution that resulted in Munch's final painting.

No machine would have put fins on a '57 Chevy. No machine could have created "Citizen Kane." That is the proof that humans are more than "meat calculators."

Honestly I wouldn't take machines known to us today too much of a role modell. Can a machine be creative? Possibly if we'd just started to construct them differently. The thing is, We as humans want a specific kind of machines, do you want a machine that behaves unpredictable? I certainly don't want to have one of this things around. I like my machines predictable. Thats is why we build linear machines, with no internal feedback loops. With in advance known input/output relations. However get some chaos inside, and you can get have some surprising output...

I know I cannot convince everybody. A nice Gedankenexperiment would be, take for example a human. Now consider I copy this human atom by atom. Could this double think? I'd say yes. Many people would say no, since by copying the atoms I did not copy the soul required to "run" the human. Or take a human brain, now suppose I build an electronic machine sophisticated enough that it can emulate all of my brain cells, and having a technology detailed enough to take a snapshot of my brain in a specific moment with all electric and biochemic stati in that millisecond. Would this machine be able to think like I do? Same question, same answer that depends on opinion, that is until somebody can do this and prove such a double (electronic or biological) could think or couldn't.