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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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rshow55 - 07:55am Sep 18, 2002 EST (# 4365 of 4370)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

This thread, more than anything else, has been about human rationality - and the lack of it -- in the context of the Cold War and its aftermath - all issues connected to the issue of missile defense and its difficultes. An enormous amount of technical discussion about MD has gone on here - - and patterns have been discussed here which, if funded and backed by reasonable force, could resolve key issues at the level people need for real decision - to the courtroom standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" - with everyone able to watch, and check - and with umpiring standards that could for essentially all reasonable people.

The US "missile defense" program and set of doctrines makes no technically detailed sense at all, if one weighs odds, costs, and what can reasonably be done. The program is quite interesting as an exemplar of human frailty, deception, self deception, agressiveness, and recent military history - and has been a format for a great deal of discussion.

We're animals. Very special animals. We've got capacities that have emerged, that are natural to us - that make all the wonders, beauties and horrors of the world possible.

We have to face up to the checkable - and inescapable parts of what Francis Crick calls "the astonishing hypothesis" -- and do it without reducing man. Here's the beginning of the Introduction of The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul by Francis Crick

The Astonishing Hypothesis is that "You," your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: "You're nothing but a pack of neurons." The hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can truly be called astonishing.

I put "no more" and "nothing" in italics - because they are problematic. We're everything we are. But whether you happen to be religious, or not - our ideas are representations in our brains - and we can be wrong - even when we feel passionately that something must be true.

rshow55 - 10:26am Sep 18, 2002 EST (# 4366 of 4370)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

On the cover of the 1988 Sceptre reprint of Scott Turow's OneL: What they really teach you at Harvard Law School there's a great one-line review - credited to THE NEW YORK TIMES:

" A wonderful book . . . Should be read by anyone who every worried about being human."

We all worry about being human - and we need to be able to understand - and agree on, some basic things about what it is to be a human being. We're having problems, and crazy emotional responses, dealing with just that basic question.

I have tremendous respect for the many references cited in MD3936-3945 rshow55 8/23/02 6:11pm . . and much respect for Pinker's work covered this week in Brain Work By DAVID RAKOFF http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/15/magazine/15QUESTIONS.html and In Nature vs. Nurture, a Voice for Nature By NICHOLAS WADE http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/17/science/social/17PINK.html

But it seems to me that as far as human welfare goes, lchic's rhyme, widely taught, might do as much good as all those references put together. In part by summarizing much of what those references teach. With an added "sense of the odds" that hasn't been taught enough.

Adults need secrets, lies and fictions
To live within their contradictions

If children and adults understood that - we'd be more humane, and solve more practical problems.

Before adults would let children learn lchic's little rhyme -- they'd have to learn some things themselves.

3997 rshow55 8/27/02 1:12pm ... 3998 rshow55 8/27/02 1:20pm
3999 rshow55 8/27/02 1:21pm ... 4000 rshow55 8/27/02 3:51pm
4001 rshow55 8/27/02 4:06pm

We need some more "emotional intelligence" - but need to learn some intellectual and logical information, too - stuff that anybody ought to be able to understand. There are emergent properties. As things get more complicated - order, and sometimes beautiful order, can form out of chaotic conditions. When salt crystals form from solution, that sort of things happen. Lots of things like that happen, again and again.

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New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense