Murphy’s Laws of Combat

Murphy’s Laws of Combat:

Murphy’s Laws of Combat -- for Memorial Day

[put together by Marines]

If your sergeant can see you, so can the enemy.
If the enemy is within range, so are you.
Incoming fire always has the right of way.
What can be seen can be hit, what can be hit can be killed.
There is no such thing as an atheist in a firefight.

Friendly fire — isn’t.
Recoilless rifles — aren’t.
Suppressive fires — don’t.
Interchangeable parts — aren’t.

The most dangerous thing in the world is a second lieutenant with a map and a compass.

There is always a way.
The best way is never the easy way.
The easy way is always mined.
The important things are always simple; the simple things are always hard.

No combat ready unit has ever passed inspection.
No inspection ready unit has ever passed combat.

No operations plan ever survives initial contact.
There is no such thing as a perfect plan.

Sniper’s motto: “Reach out and touch someone.”
Sniper’s philosophy: “If you run, you’ll only die tired.”

Read more ....

Reality guide: A poster of how everything fits together | New Scientist

If you have any interest in how everything may hang together, this is useful:



Where it's most useful, however, is reminding us how little we actually know.

Reality guide: A poster of how everything fits together | New Scientist

A realist critique of Romney's foreign policy

Does Liberty require free will?

Is there "free will" in heaven? What about "free will" in life?
 (Photo credit: Zombie Inc. Wholesale Zombies for Over 25 years)

Ah, the eternal question.  Expressing an opinion affirming existence of free will, as a recent article in the Economist's sister magazine, Intelligent Life does, is to open the floodgates of dogmatism.  That can be fun, and a bit mind-stretching, but often seems to deteriorate into a "conversation" where people are actually talking past one another.  Yet political philosophers--especially libertarians--seem to need some kind of assumption of moral agency for their speculations to have meaning.  How can it make sense to talk about "liberty" if humans have no capacity for independent choice?

Does it even matter?  If to feel that one is free is to be free, isn't that enough?  That leads us down some dark paths.  Brains can be manipulated, and so can perceptions.  As the technologies of social control grow more effective, it's conceivable to live as a community of happy robots, each convinvced it is free, each acting according to plan.

The more we look, the more the philosophy--and the language--get in the way.  For one thing, what is "free will"?  Does it mean an "uncaused cause," or "a nonlocal thought," or is it simply the sense that we feel we weigh and struggle with alternatives before committing to a course of action?  Perhaps the best definition I've seen comes from the comments to the aformentioned article:

A biological or AI system has free will if its future behavior cannot be predicted solely by observing its past behaviour or external communications. A stronger definition would require inability to make such prections regardless of the methods used (eg deep scans of arbitratry complexity of the brain/system). I suspect humans have free will only in the first form of this definition, though for now there probably exists no technology to refute free will of the stronger kind either. (Thomas Anantharaman).

Or how about this one?  Also from the same comments section:

While recognizing the logic of determinism, I choose (?) to invoke "freedom for all practical purposes," meaning behavior that cannot be predicted and anticipated by another agent is effectively free. The brain and its behavior are sufficiently complex that it takes as much or more effort to predict and thereby control it as to "live" it. And that means we are all practically free and that no one has the ability to control others without incurring a high cost. A sufficiently complex machine would become as free as we are, if it took more effort to control it than that effort was worth in economic terms. (Thomas Earle Moore)

The no free-will bus campaign (Photo credit: morgantj)

Perhaps the best we can hope for is to be too complex to predict, too complex to plan, too complex for outsiders to control.  If that is happening, and I have the occasional power to self-modify my own habits of action and mind, that's good enough for me.  And it's more than valuable enough to preserve.  While a free will does not require a free society, a free society implies the possibility of free will.

NEURONS V FREE WILL | More Intelligent Life

Related articles

• The Illusionary Tale of Free Will (constructivecontemplation.wordpress.com)
• Once Again Free Will! A Placeholder (choiceindying.com)
• Choosing the Right Behaviors (forbes.com)
• Intelligent Life in the Universe (unastronomy.com)
• The Future of Moral Machines (opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com)

Reality strikes back

According to an "unnamed administration official" - often assumed to be Karl Rove - in conversation with journalist Ron Suskind, October 2004:

"[He] said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,'
which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors.... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

Reality is what happens even after you deny it. Karl Rove, meet President Obama.