Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Aardwolf on November 07, 2011, 02:11:29 pm
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and this is why the attitude persists, if someone is wrong, you can ignore them and let them continue on or confront them and maybe change their mind
An interesting point.
Ultimately atheists and Christians cannot both be right, nor can Muslims and Hindus, nor Zoroastrians and Shintos. Though they may have much in common, if they make any specific (falsifiable) claims, but disagree on these claims, then one or both must be wrong. And if they don't make any falsifiable claims, then <words to the effect of Derp>.
The "correct" way to settle this would be to sit down with someone who disagrees with you, and discuss the matter logically until there is no more disagreement... but of course that doesn't happen.
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and this is why the attitude persists, if someone is wrong, you can ignore them and let them continue on or confront them and maybe change their mind
An interesting point.
Ultimately atheists and Christians cannot both be right, nor can Muslims and Hindus, nor Zoroastrians and Shintos. Though they may have much in common, if they make any specific (falsifiable) claims, but disagree on these claims, then one or both must be wrong. And if they don't make any falsifiable claims, then <words to the effect of Derp>.
The "correct" way to settle this would be to sit down with someone who disagrees with you, and discuss the matter logically until there is no more disagreement... but of course that doesn't happen.
Skeptical atheists such as myself don't believe in god simply because it is non-falsifiable, there is no way to test for the existence of god and there's no real evidence for its existence, nor will there ever be. The problem is the vast majority of this planet simply has not woken up to that.
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And yet, equally non-falsifiable arguments for the existence of such things as the IPU or FSM generally fail to impress.
Damnation!
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And if they don't make any falsifiable claims, then...
they are idiots too cowardly to make a claim because they know they are wrong but don't want what they believe to not be true, so when ever they come across something that could prove them wrong they ignore it.
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The point is that if there were no religion they'd be fighting over ethic reasons.
Northern Ireland...
EDIT:
Thing is, all this barbarism displayed in the middle east and northern Africa is quite depressing and painful, however what really worries me is the slow building up of the cold war between Israel and Iran. I can somewhat trust the Israelites with their bombs since they have (1) proven till today that they aren't lunatics out to destroy their enemies with nukes without concern with their own (that is, they behave rationally), and (2) they seem a very civilized people. To a point, that is. The extremists are rising in their influence in Israel, and otoh, Iran's leaders do not shed any glimmer of hope regarding their own sanity and rationality whatsoever.
IOW, Iran is leaded by crazy theological fundies, which are about to build their first atom bombs. These people actually believe that if they destroy Israel, they will fasten the arrival of the twelve Imann and this has alledgedly some amazing metaphysical consequences, etc. The question running through my mind is, "how" insane are these people? Are they sufficiently insane to press the buttons because they really believe this ****? Or do they still have the minimum of fear engraved in their hearts with doubts?
And the point is, I shouldn't be having these doubts. When Sting sang "I hope the russians love their children too" it was true and enough. However with musllims it is not enough. A crazy who believes that a nuclear armaggedon won't bring death and destruction, tears and suffering, but joy and heaven for all their dead children is the most terrifying nightmare for all rational and common sense people (and of course I'm including the majority of religious people).
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Northern Ireland is hilarious cause it ceased to be about religion so long ago that most people involved couldn't even give a real reason why they are fighting now.
Look at the example in the original post where someone was killed for displaying a symbol of faith and now look at Northern Ireland and ask yourself when did you ever hear of anything happening that was directly caused by someone being the wrong faith? It's nothing to do with that now, it's all about nationalism. While the sides might have been drawn up based on religious differences the argument long ago ceased to be about that.
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If Iran develops nukes, they won't (most likely) be able to deliver them at anything important in Israel. The latter military is just too advanced compared to Iran (which is using vehicle types that are on display in Israeli museums). On the other hand, given it's history and current tendencies, Israel might attempt to flatten Iran (which they are perfectly capable of, considering their arsenal) if some loon gets to power at wrong time.
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If Iran develops nukes, they won't (most likely) be able to deliver them at anything important in Israel.
And this prediction is until when? When is Iran ready to "deliver" the goods? 5 years? 10 years? 20? Is that too far away for us to be relieved? It's a ticking bomb.
The latter military is just too advanced compared to Iran (which is using vehicle types that are on display in Israeli museums). On the other hand, given it's history and current tendencies, Israel might attempt to flatten Iran (which they are perfectly capable of, considering their arsenal) if some loon gets to power at wrong time.
I just don't think they'll elect such lunatic for any foresseable time.
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If Iran develops nukes, they won't (most likely) be able to deliver them at anything important in Israel. The latter military is just too advanced compared to Iran (which is using vehicle types that are on display in Israeli museums). On the other hand, given it's history and current tendencies, Israel might attempt to flatten Iran (which they are perfectly capable of, considering their arsenal) if some loon gets to power at wrong time.
If Iran got nukes Israel wouldnt be their main target, more likely the target would be one of their sunni rivals, particularly Saudi Arabia.
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if any of the smaller scale nuclear powers ****s with the us you can rest assured that their countries would be reduced to radioactive slag. though i think many of them can have small scale nuclear wars that the rest of us dont give a **** about enough to launch any warheads of our own, as cool as that would be.
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If that did happen, then you can be rest assured the Radiation would effect the rest of the Earth. So, the miniature nuclear wars would sneak up and bit you in the ***.
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Skeptical atheists such as myself don't believe in god simply because it is non-falsifiable
You're not very good at this skepticism thing, are you?
A non-falsifiable claim is not inherently wrong; there's simply no way to test it and so truth and falsity cannot be determined. You are in saying you do not believe because you cannot know if you should, which is pretty much anti-skeptical and anti-science.
If you cannot know what the answer is, it would behoove you to remain open-minded on the subject.
I just don't think they'll elect such lunatic for any foresseable time.
If you think our right-wingers are bat****, you haven't even scratched the surface of the lunacy that is the right-wing Jewish parties in Israel.
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If that did happen, then you can be rest assured the Radiation would effect the rest of the Earth. So, the miniature nuclear wars would sneak up and bit you in the ***.
frankly the nukes in our arsenal are tiny compared to what we had during the cold war. and the nukes belonging to everyone else are primitive at best. the us is actually one of the most nuked countries on the planet, just point google earth at the nevada test site. see! nukes are good for you!
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A few days after the Hiroshima bombing, the Hiroshima radiation levels were back to normal, according to US analysts (which makes sense, as an A-Bomb is supposed to discharge all its energy as soon as possible).
The public however, is not quite aware of this, probably because the genetic defects caused by those few days of radiation to those in the area are rather persistant.
If you think our right-wingers are bat****, you haven't even scratched the surface of the lunacy that is the right-wing Jewish parties in Israel.
Israeli's pay more attention to the ban of un-sedated ritual slaughter (This might be awfull English) in Holland then to the damn Euro crisis... I read an article on what the media in Israel is focusing on, this is more or less what I remember from it.
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Well, thing is with the Netherlands is that this veer to the right is significant in more ways than the banning of Halal meat, for a country that has been famous for its Liberalism, it is sad to see that culture slowly being eroded in the name of preserving it.
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You're not very good at this skepticism thing, are you?
A non-falsifiable claim is not inherently wrong; there's simply no way to test it and so truth and falsity cannot be determined. You are in saying you do not believe because you cannot know if you should, which is pretty much anti-skeptical and anti-science.
If you cannot know what the answer is, it would behoove you to remain open-minded on the subject.
Ad Hom. Actually how science works is if something is not testable it is assumed not to be true until proven otherwise in a properly scientific manner. When it comes to superstitious and supernatural nonsense, keeping an open mind about that stuff is keeping it so open that your brain falls out, a big no no in skepticism.
So I'm quite a bit better than you give me credit for.
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Science, by its very nature, does not prove, it disproves. Try again.
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Since there's been a few religion related threads, I figured I'd just post this here
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/11/iraq.humanrights?fb=native&CMP=FBCNETTXT9038
Two weeks ago, The Observer revealed how 17-year-old student Rand Abdel-Qader was beaten to death by her father after becoming infatuated with a British soldier in Basra...
...'Death was the least she deserved,' said Abdel-Qader. 'I don't regret it. I had the support of all my friends who are fathers, like me, and know what she did was unacceptable to any Muslim that honours his religion,' he said.
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Well, thing is with the Netherlands is that this veer to the right is significant in more ways than the banning of Halal meat, for a country that has been famous for its Liberalism, it is sad to see that culture slowly being eroded in the name of preserving it.
You are unfortunately quite right, but it is not as if it is affecting Israel in a significant way, whilst the euro crisis most certainly does.
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Science, by its very nature, does not prove, it disproves. Try again.
Um, no. No new theories of any kind are ever assumed to be true, it is assumed to be false until there is undeniable, replicatable, and verfied evidence acquired through sound experimentation and/or observation to support said theory. God/Ra/Zues/whatever cannot be tested for which makes it impossible to prove or disprove, rendering the theory false by default. Whenever the rules are loosened to include the possibility of any sort of divine entities or other superstitious and supernatural nonsense, anything goes and we might as well just throw up our hands and say "god did it!"
(http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc4/hs021.snc4/33426_1523284366130_1355232204_31337448_1408342_n.jpg)
Skepticism isnt about keeping an open mind, it's about verifying and proving things to filter out the junk.
EDIT: I'll also take this a step further by citing the example of the early development of atomic theory. It wasn't well accepted that atoms existed at all until the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Why? Because until then there was no proof to support it.
EDIT2: Fixed picture
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Science, by its very nature, does not prove, it disproves. Try again.
Bertrand Russell says hello. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot)
Science starts by someone making a falsifiable hypothesis and then proceeding to attempt to disprove it. The more effort it takes without it being disproved, the more strength that hypothesis has. After taking a large beating without being disproved, people start calling it a theory.
The incredible claim lies in the sentence "There are gods." therefore, it is their responsibility to make a falsifiable hypothesis regarding the theory of gods and proceed to try to disprove it. Since you cannot make such an hypothesis (with a concept of god people are happy with), we would assume the reasonable.
Going against that would be like what Russel described in the teapot argument.
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Um, no.
Yes. Nothing is ever proven, merely supported. Science is the iterative process of becoming less wrong, not the creation of truth (which is in itself not a scientific concept). You have confused science and philosophy.
Your own position is equally unfalsifiable as the position you argue against. That is the nature of unfalsifiable claims: you cannot conduct science with them at all, and your attempt to do so is a failure of your intellect. You claim the factuality of something for which, by nature, there can be no facts. It is an abomination against all rational thought.
Going against that would be like what Russel described in the teapot argument.
First, the teapot isn't unfalsifiable anymore. (No really, it's not. It'd just be a pain in the ass.) Second, Russel doesn't know his ass from his elbow. You are also busy conflating science and philosophy and so is he. If you cannot know the answer to a question, the only intelligent, responsible answer is "I don't know."
As for myself, I freely admit my atheistic stance is because I prefer to believe it is that way; but in the event such a being or beings exist, I have a backup stance. This is that they must be destroyed. No one may be morally trusted with such power.
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If you cannot know the answer to a question, the only intelligent, responsible answer is "I don't know."
Not in this case it isn't. If we follow that misguided logic, the answer to almost everything you can think of is "I don't know.".
It is illogical to assume that an incredible claim can be true just because. The answer to any question that depends on a state that may change during the course of the question for instance. Example:
"Are you on Earth?"
How do you know at that moment that aliens didn't teleport you to a plot of land on another planet identical to where you live but where bananas are called green and living mustaches walk the streets?
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That has to be one of the flimsiest straw arguments I've ever seen.
It is trivial to derive that we/you are on Earth because all other possibilities are readily (and easily) falsifiable, which is the whole point of formulating a hypothesis ("I am on Earth"): to remove from consideration things which cannot be true (in other words: falsifiable) to get a better picture of what can be true.
With respect to the discussion, God cannot be disproven (is not falsifiable), and can therefore not be discounted.
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That has to be one of the flimsiest straw arguments I've ever seen.
It is trivial to derive that we/you are on Earth because all other possibilities are readily (and easily) falsifiable.
Prove that you are not on a planet identical to Earth, which isn't Earth.
or...
Prove that there isn't an armada of space nazi yellow invisible tuna flying behind the moon.
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Differentiate the two. If nothing differentiates them at all (including the people, interactions therewith, and chance occurences) then I am on Earth no matter which body I am on. If I started on Earth, I am still on Earth, because we know that matter cannot move faster than light, and I have been on this planet all of my life. Therefore, I have not left whatever planetary body I started on.
We know there is not an armada of space nazi yellow invisible tuna flying behind the moon because invisible doesn't mean undetectable and we've sent enough probes and other craft to the moon and past the moon to know that the space immediately around it is unoccupied.
If your supposed armada is completely undetectable by any means up to and including collison then they do not exist, and the discussion is moot.
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Differentiate the two. If nothing differentiates them at all (including the people, interactions therewith, and chance occurences) then I am on Earth no matter which body I am on. If I started on Earth, I am still on Earth, because we know that matter cannot move faster than light, and I have been on this planet all of my life. Therefore, I have not left whatever planetary body I started on.
We know there is not an armada of space nazi yellow invisible tuna flying behind the moon because invisible doesn't mean undetectable and we've sent enough probes and other craft to the moon and past the moon to know that the space immediately around it is unoccupied.
If your supposed armada is completely undetectable by any means up to and including collison then they do not exist, and the discussion is moot.
The Earth doesn't have an invisible undetectable rock on a field somewhere in England, that planet has on its version of England.
Regarding the limit of the speed of matter, according to the same logic, since you cannot prove a theory, you don't know that.
Regarding the armada of space nazi yellow invisible tuna flying behind the moon, they are invisible to radar and other detection aparatus and move out of the way of anything that tries to pass there...
P.S.
I'm not going to stand here trying to reiterate the teapot argument with increasingly sillier situations. It is unreasonable to believe in something incredible, falsifiable or not, without concrete proof.
At a moment an incredible claim is being made, you have no proof, hence it is unreasonable for you to say "I don't know."
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cannot be tested for which makes it impossible to prove or disprove, rendering the theory false by default.
wtfamireading.jpg
if you have two halves of a brain you'll realize why this is paradoxical.
ed: additionally, false != not believed in, which should be obvious. of course, using words incorrectly on the internet is probably the least of all of our worries.
ed2: furthermore, it is unreasonable to say that you "know" the answer to an unprovable claim because you by definition can't know. A more proper response would be to ask "does it matter?"
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But that's the thing, you cannot, with 100% certainty, "know" anything. Hence my argument that you can assume incredible claims without evidence, as being false.
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Ghostavo: You fail science forever. I suggest taking some classes or otherwise educating yourself before trying again.
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To be honest I think you all are having an argument about semantics without realising it. Words like true, false, proof and belief have completely different meanings in common usage compared to what they mean in a discussion about science.
Since you've basically failed to agree on which set of meanings you're going on you're just going to go round and round in circles forever. :p
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But that's the thing, you cannot, with 100% certainty, "know" anything. Hence my argument that you can assume incredible claims without evidence, as being false.
Not true. With some basic definitions you can "know" lots of things, like much of mathematics. I'm sure I don't need to tell you how important math is in everyday life. Furthermore, even in layman's terms `know' and `believe' are not the same thing. Though it's not like much of this matters in layman's terms because the layman generally has no need of a rigorous proof. And chances are if you're discussing the existence of a god, it's pretty meaningless to conclude that "there is (a/no) god" when the distinction between the two is essentially academic.
To be honest I think you all are having an argument about semantics without realising it. Words like true, false, proof and belief have completely different meanings in common usage compared to what they mean in a discussion about science.
Since you've basically failed to agree on which set of meanings you're going on you're just going to go round and round in circles forever. :p
I came into this thread and I saw Luis Dias use a paradox like it was a legitimate piece of support for his argument. I'd even go as far to say that `true', `false', `proof', and `belief' have different meanings still when you talk about logic (as opposed to science or casual use), but that doesn't mean it's ok to say that if you can't empirically prove something it's false.
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Since you've basically failed to agree on which set of meanings you're going on you're just going to go round and round in circles forever. :p
HARD LIGHT PRODUCTIONS: Bringing modders round and round in circles forever
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Christianity is most certainly falsifiable. It makes several specific claims about humanity and God's relationship thereto. Here are just a few ways that Christianity could be proven false:
1) Any person other than Jesus living a life free of sin
2) The achievement of world peace
3) The elimination of poverty
4) The extinction of the Jewish people group
5) Finding Jesus's body or skeleton
Note that various people throughout history have tried all five of these.
Note also that there are four kinds of evidence: archeological/material, eyewitness, documentary/historical, and scientific/theoretical. One simply cannot focus on scientific evidence and disregard the other three.
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1) Even if Christianity was proven false by any of those criteria, do you really believe anyone would stop being a Christian?
2) Many of those while falsifying Christianity aren't exactly experiments that could be carried out.
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I came into this thread and I saw Luis Dias use a paradox like it was a legitimate piece of support for his argument. I'd even go as far to say that `true', `false', `proof', and `belief' have different meanings still when you talk about logic (as opposed to science or casual use), but that doesn't mean it's ok to say that if you can't empirically prove something it's false.
What are you rambling about my bad use of anything? Such an event is utterly impossible, mind you :).
As far as the discussion of science is concerned, people ramble a lot about how science is about proving hypothesis to be wrong, forgetting apparently that the use of it is to get hypothesis that can actually be useful, i.e., predict future empirical events.
In that sense, religion fails astonishingly, and that's probably why theologians insist that religion is not science at all :D.
Hey, but for all of you to get a sense of the really bad thinking process that is named "theology", just get this palmfaced example, here:
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=7645
So Christian theologians of all stripes have to face the challenge posed by animal pain. Here recent studies in biology have provided surprising, new insights into this old problem. In his book Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering, Michael Murray distinguishes three levels in an ascending pain hierarchy (read from the bottom up):
Level 3: a second order awareness that one is oneself experiencing (2).
Level 2: a first order, subjective experience of pain.
Level 1: information-bearing neural states produced by noxious stimuli resulting in aversive behavior.
Spiders and insects—the sort of creatures most exhibiting the kinds of behavior mentioned by Ayala—experience (1). But there's no reason at all to attribute (2) to such creatures. It's plausible that they aren't sentient beings at all with some sort of subjective, interior life. That sort of experience plausibly does not arise until one gets to the level of vertebrates in the animal kingdom. But even though animals like dogs, cats, and horses experience pain, nevertheless the evidence is that they do not experience level (3), the awareness that they are in pain. For the awareness that one is oneself in pain requires self-awareness, which is centered in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain—a section of the brain which is missing in all animals except for the humanoid primates. Thus, amazingly, even though animals may experience pain, they are not aware of being in pain. God in His mercy has apparently spared animals the awareness of pain. This is a tremendous comfort to us pet owners. For even though your dog or cat may be in pain, it really isn't aware of it and so doesn't suffer as you would if you were in pain.
Talk about "armwaving". Don't you guys ever worry about inflicting pain on your pets! He may seem to be suffering like hell to you, but he's not a human, has no soul, and so because of my scientifically-sounding-made-up-**** we can be sure that he's not really feeling pain.
So all christian theology hinting that pain is based upon mankind's sins is saved as a theory!! Alleluiah, brother, for we all have witnessed the power of Alice-in-Wonderland-Logic-MegaCircuit!
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I came into this thread and I saw Luis Dias use a paradox like it was a legitimate piece of support for his argument. I'd even go as far to say that `true', `false', `proof', and `belief' have different meanings still when you talk about logic (as opposed to science or casual use), but that doesn't mean it's ok to say that if you can't empirically prove something it's false.
What are you rambling about my bad use of anything? Such an event is utterly impossible, mind you :).
As far as the discussion of science is concerned, people ramble a lot about how science is about proving hypothesis to be wrong, forgetting apparently that the use of it is to get hypothesis that can actually be useful, i.e., predict future empirical events.
In that sense, religion fails astonishingly, and that's probably why theologians insist that religion is not science at all :D.
Hey, but for all of you to get a sense of the really bad thinking process that is named "theology", just get this palmfaced example, here:
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=7645
Science doesn't deal with `true' and `false', unless by `true' and `false' (or correct and incorrect, or whatever you want to call it) you mean `probably' and `probably not'. These sets of words mean very different things in just about every context. There is no way to possibly determine the existence of a deist god, likewise there are no scientific tests you can do to either confirm or hurt that idea. You just can't figure it out, and given how meaningless it is, no one really cares unless you make an equally meaningless claim that you know such a god either exists or doesn't exist. (well of course he either doesn't exist or exists, but hopefully you know what I mean :p )
In contrast, you can make fairly strong inductive arguments that a Judeo-Christian god doesn't exist, and there are scientific ways to test for his existence. This, however, doesn't absolutely prove anything, especially considering how ill-defined `god' is not matter what religion you belong to.
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To be honest I think you all are having an argument about semantics without realising it. Words like true, false, proof and belief have completely different meanings in common usage compared to what they mean in a discussion about science.
Since you've basically failed to agree on which set of meanings you're going on you're just going to go round and round in circles forever. :p
Thank you for that injection of sense. If I had to read anyone else say science proves anything to be true, I might scream.
The scientific method assumes the null hypothesis, unless there is sufficient evidence to reject it which favours an experimental hypothesis. The null hypothesis is always that the proposed explanation being tested is the least probable explanation (or false). Always. Rejection of the null does not mean the experimental hypothesis is true, or similarly not false, it just means there is a greater weighting of evidence in favour of the experimental hypothesis.
Science never "proves" anything to be "true," but rather collects evidence that shows a particular explanation is the "most probable" by eliminating alternatives with less evidence supporting them. Big difference.
This is why a grasp of statistical probabilities is required to understand science in general.
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Science never "proves" anything to be "true," but rather collects evidence that shows a particular explanation is the "most probable" by eliminating alternatives with less evidence supporting them. Big difference.
Thank you for explaining it in a manner better than I could.
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Wait, so when I say it, I fail science forever, but when MP-Ryan says it, it's true?
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Arguments go in, arguments come out. You can't explain that. There's always a miscommunication...
Ok, joking aside for this is srs bsns.
For the reasons mentioned before, science really doesn't have anything to say about the accuracy (much less truth value) of any non-falsifiable claims.
They may be valid, or they may be invalid, but as long as there are no ways to disprove them, they really don't matter much at all.
It would, however, be just as unscientific to claim them untrue as it is to claim them true - making any kind of statement about them is against scientific method. The correct answer is "don't know" or, as I prefer, THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
Furthermore, there is a concept called "explanatory value". It is used to describe how much value a hypothesis has in explaining certain things.
God hypothesis, by virtue of explaining everything, explains exactly nothing. Its explanatory value is less than nothing.
Example:
Universe spawns into existence. Two competinc hypotheses are that it A) came out of nothing, and B) God did it.
Hypothesis A has more explanatory value than B, because it opens new questions about how exactly can something come out of nothing, and answering those questions has advanced our physical knowledge infinitely more than extrapolating hypothesis B... which basically cannot be done. Except you'd have to consider the possibility of god coming out of nothingness in the first place.
Further problems in the God hypothesis and reasons why it's not falsifiable include:
-no clear definition of the terms included in the hypothesis (primarily, what is entity called "god")
OR
-all definitions given for entity called "god" are metaphysical properties that can not be observed
-problem of original cause getting, actually, more complicated than without god hypothesis
-lack of predictive value (closely tied to explanatory value, but not exactly the same - basically means that you can't really do mathematical formulation of a model if all you say is God Did/Does It)
From the perspective of scientific world view, God hypothesis has just as much or little relevance as Russel's Teapot, Invisible Pink Unicorn, or Flying Spaghetti Monster. All of these can be interchangeably used to explain everything... yet none of them explains anything at all.
My personal viewpoint is not to concentrate on the question "does God exist" and rather try to ask people how they define God in the first place, ie. what properties do they consider an entity to have to be called "God".
If our universe is a simulation, does the user on the computer system that runs the simulation count as "God" to us simulated entities?
I would argue there's nothing divine in such a position despite the huge amount of control and power that the simulation-running person would have over us.
Would a sysadmin of the computer that the simulation runs on be a bigger God than the user who runs our universe simulation?
How long would it take until some jackass within the simulated universe would start running an universe simulator?
How would it affect the amount of stress on the original computer?
How many universes could be simulated recursively before a system crash?
How likely is it for civilizations to develop computer technology capable of simulating an universe?
Would it be of any benefit to science if we encounter a phenomenon and can't explain it, but instead just say "It's just the way the simulation is" or "Admin made it that way"?
Wouldn't it be more beneficial to us as simulated entities to try to figure out the underlying mechanics of the simulation software?
For example, we can observe that gravity seems to be proportional to the product masses and inversely proportional to square of distance. This has a lot more predictive value than "Admin made things fall at 9.80665 m/s^2 acceleration.
Then we can start to think, what makes things fall... rather than just say "Admin made things do this thing we call falling".
Point is - maybe the "that's how simulator works" is the final answer. It could be. It's very possible we are living in a simulated universe (although the recursive universe simulation thing sort of limits things on that regard). But, until we have completely reverse engineered exactly how the simulator works, science cannot accept "that's how the simulator works" as a valid hypothesis as it does not have explanatory or predictive value.
And even then we can never be sure we have completely reverse engineered the simulator... so we have to keep looking for things we may have missed, observing the universe to find inconsistencies in our models of it... and when we found them, we try to explain them and if our old theories can't explain them, we try something new.
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Wait, so when I say it, I fail science forever, but when MP-Ryan says it, it's true?
When you say it, you assume the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. MP-Ryan does not.
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Thank you for that injection of sense. If I had to read anyone else say science proves anything to be true, I might scream.
The real problem is when you start adding words like believe into that mix. Believe is a dumb word to use in any kind of scientific conversation because it carries different meanings for different people. Hell this whole argument got started because of two people using different meanings for the word and got compounded by people mixing lay and scientific uses of other words.
That said, I don't think you should need to write an essay to say why you are an atheist. "I'm an atheist cause science can't prove God exists so I go with the simplest explanation" is a perfectly reasonable answer.
As far as I'm concerned there is nothing wrong with a lay person saying that science has proved something true or false. You just have to remember that it means that whatever has been proved true simply is the only currently viable hypothesis as all the others can't support all the available evidence and are thus much less probable. The problem has never been people using the lay definitions. The problem is people mixing the two together in one sentence so that it ends up a confused mess.
If you try to then use the more scientific definition to prove the lay one wrong you end up with this cluster**** of stupidity. On the other hand, if people try to insist on everyone only using the scientific terms, they're going to come off as pretentious arseholes.
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Everything else aside, this was a fantastic thread to sit back and munch popcorn to.
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It would, however, be just as unscientific to claim them untrue as it is to claim them true - making any kind of statement about them is against scientific method. The correct answer is "don't know" or, as I prefer, THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
As an aside (and to slightly stir the pot), this is why agnosticism is a better position for a reasoning scientist to take than [militant] atheism (of the Dawkins, etc variety).
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1) Even if Christianity was proven false by any of those criteria, do you really believe anyone would stop being a Christian?
Well, Mormonism was falsified, and look how that turned out. I'm quite confident Christianity itself won't be, of course.
2) Many of those while falsifying Christianity aren't exactly experiments that could be carried out.
Quite a few high-ranking Jewish and Roman leaders had the means, motive, and opportunity to do #5 when it would have been the easiest time to do so.
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Maybe (though doubtful that they would have bothered), but the simple fact is that it's going to be pretty hard to do it now, and even if it was done, no one would believe it.
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Wait, so when I say it, I fail science forever, but when MP-Ryan says it, it's true?
When you say it, you assume the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. MP-Ryan does not.
No I didn't. I presented an argument that you still didn't answer.
Either it is reasonable to assume an unfalsifiable statement as false OR the answer to almost every single possible statement is "I don't know.".
One can come up with any number of unfalsifiable statements for any number of situations. Yet when people ask, for instance, how does the double-slit experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment) work, I don't see anyone saying "I don't know, His Noodly Appendage may be changing my results!".
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Science doesn't deal with `true' and `false', unless by `true' and `false' (or correct and incorrect, or whatever you want to call it) you mean `probably' and `probably not'. These sets of words mean very different things in just about every context.
I can't believe this is directed to me.... go ahead. Preach the bible to a priest please.
There is no way to possibly determine the existence of a deist god, likewise there are no scientific tests you can do to either confirm or hurt that idea. You just can't figure it out, and given how meaningless it is, no one really cares unless you make an equally meaningless claim that you know such a god either exists or doesn't exist. (well of course he either doesn't exist or exists, but hopefully you know what I mean :p )
Oh, I don't detest from a single moment the Ignostic position. It's just too "convoluted" to speak in everyday's terms, and in practice it ends up being exactly the same as atheism: ignoring the question or saying "No" to it (and then ignoring it) is exactly the same, and it has, mind you, the exact same metaphysical consequence wrt the main religions: either you end up equally in hell or "anihilated" in the pit of fire or smth.
Splitting hairs is a nice hobby, be my guest. I happen to think that atheism is a much more fun position than the "holier-than-thou" semantical approach of ignosticism... And I think roughly the same about Agnosticism: it's just Atheism in Coward Clothes.
In contrast, you can make fairly strong inductive arguments that a Judeo-Christian god doesn't exist, and there are scientific ways to test for his existence. This, however, doesn't absolutely prove anything, especially considering how ill-defined `god' is not matter what religion you belong to.
It's ill defined not by design, but by evolution. All the "well-defined gods" are dead for a long long time, and for obvious reasons. We are left with the more ambiguous semantical rubbish versions.
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For the reasons mentioned before, science really doesn't have anything to say about the accuracy (much less truth value) of any non-falsifiable claims.
They may be valid, or they may be invalid, but as long as there are no ways to disprove them, they really don't matter much at all.
This is all theoretically fine and dandy, except that in the real world we live in, they *do* matter a *lot*, since many "null hypothesis" that people have in their brains include metaphysical unfalsifiable shenanigans that no one could ever prove true or false. And yet, they steer human actions and morals, as if they do exist.
It would, however, be just as unscientific to claim them untrue as it is to claim them true - making any kind of statement about them is against scientific method. The correct answer is "don't know" or, as I prefer, THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
I c wot u did thar. And I agree, for sure. However, there are some claims that we think are above scrutiny that perhaps aren't at all. For instance, the afterlife. I'd argue that there is a ton of materialistic empirical evidence for its inexistence, and most people are aware of it.
Then we can start to think, what makes things fall... rather than just say "Admin made things do this thing we call falling".
Yeah, nice text. I also abhor the "goddidit" meme that religion spews for everything, while opening the arms in an awestruck fashion.... as if curiosity and wonder was really the underlying forces behind religion...
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I happen to think that atheism is a much more fun position than the "holier-than-thou" semantical approach of ignosticism... And I think roughly the same about Agnosticism: it's just Atheism in Coward Clothes.
Fun has nothing to do with it. Saying that agnosticsm is just atheism in coward clothes is not only wrong, but fails to address any the issues of truth. But if you find that boldly asserting things you don't know is existentially satisfying, I'm happy for you and I respect your beliefs.
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Agnostics are simply people who have not found a religion that suits their own personal spirituality, that's not Atheism as in 'not believing in a God', it is more a case of 'not believing in a religion', problem is, religions don't like being thought of as something seperate from the deity they represent, and so this mis-interpretation of Atheism is spread around as though all agnostics were 'Christian-Lite' or something.
Edit: Thinking about it, the last word I'd use to describe an agnostic is 'coward'. They are brave enough to admit ignorance, spiritual enough to want to believe in something bigger than themselves, and yet strong-willed enough to not 'go with the crowd' whilst looking for those answers. Some could argue that they are foolish for having any kind of spirituality, and maybe they are, but for the main part, I'd rather see more personal interpretation of 'right and wrong' and less dictated interpretation of it in the world.
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I happen to think that atheism is a much more fun position than the "holier-than-thou" semantical approach of ignosticism... And I think roughly the same about Agnosticism: it's just Atheism in Coward Clothes.
Fun has nothing to do with it. Saying that agnosticsm is just atheism in coward clothes is not only wrong, but fails to address any the issues of truth. But if you find that boldly asserting things you don't know is existentially satisfying, I'm happy for you and I respect your beliefs.
Of course, that is the usual thing one agnostic says. In truth, most atheists are technically agnostics, they just dont suffer the silly proclamations religious people are known for and wont try to give them a 50-50 chance of being right, which, for obvious reasons would have been ridiculous. The coward accusation isas old as the term itself, whose sole purpose was to get Darwin out of trouble from his own time.
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Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.
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Ok, let's see if we can make some sense out of the terminology.
There seems to be some confusion about what atheism and agnosticism are.
Atheism is not denying of God's existence, it's denying the existence of divine on a conceptual basis.
This is pretty much what I tried to illustrate with my example about a simulated universe in my earlier post.
For the sake of the conversation, let's assume that a single entity existed before our universe, and created our universe with all the mighty computational powers at their disposal, and our universe is running on their computer system, and that the entity either has or doesn't have direct access to simulation parametres (it doesn't relevantly change the analogy as both points of view exist about God in theism).
Most would argue there would be nothing divine about such a being, yet it would be exactly identical to the concept of God in most monotheistic religions when viewed from the simulated universe. So, what exactly is it that makes a being qualify as a "god" or "divine"? Sufficiently long oral tradition or old enough written text describing the entity and names them as divine god, rather than simply a being with extraordinary (from our point of view) powers?
Atheism takes a point of view that divine does not exist, that division between "divine" and "mundane" is completely arbitrary and needless. In other words, the position of a-theism is that theism (as in, concept of divinity) is fundamentally flawed way to describe the world around us. In atheist's perspective, theism creates a baseless border between different parts of the universe; as the polar opposite of theism, atheism favours a more holistic world view that doesn't automatically create any fundamental difference between sentient beings just based on their power levels or other attributes. We are all the same, gods, humans, aliens, animals, people, beings... wouldn't a God to us be just a regular person among his own people?
In other words, I can't really say for certain that a being described as "God" in judao-christian tradition does not or can not exist. There is, even if rather unlikely in my opinion, the possibility that such a being does exist, and it would be rather unscientific of me to claim with any absolute certainty that it doesn't exist.
But I can say pretty certainly that (in my opinion) there would not be anything divine in it; such a being would be a natural phenomenon just as ourselves, or gravity, or the rest of the universe, or the universe that houses the computer system running our universe as a simulation.
If someone wants to claim there is something divine in something, the burden of proof is on them, just as the task of falsifying the hypothesis falls to those who can do experiments related to it. As an example, it was long thought that flies spawn out of nothingness and that was to some seen as an example of divine life-creating force in action.
Further inspection revealed the microscopic eggs that their larvae hatch from, which put quite a crimp to the divine life-creating force hypothesis, as you may imagine.
TL;DR: Atheism doesn't really bother denying the existence of individual deities. It just says if they exist, they are not divine, and questions whether it is appropriate to pledge servitude to a being arbitrarily named God, when the concept of "divine" loses its meaning.
Some atheists also criticize churches of mismanaging the religions, regardless of the perceived pointlessness of religions in the first place, and urge people to think to themselves rather than submitting blindly to dogmas thrown at them by authority figures (parents at first, later also religious leaders). But, I would view that as more of a socio-political issue than a theological or metaphysical one.
Agnosticism, on the other hand, takes a more of a middle ground position about the existence of divine. What agnosticism says, quite simply, is that we can not gain objective knowledge about the existence of the divine, by the definition of the divine. It is a position that, due to some properties typically associated to divinity, says that since the divine cannot be researched, we can not and shouldn't form and definite statements about its existence one way or another.
Or, as Neutral President would say: "I have no strong feelings one way or the other".
Now, where would I position myself with regards to these definitions? I'd have to say I'm an atheist first and foremost. However, there is one single thing that I could acknowledge as divine, and that is the sum of everything that exists (nested universes or not, this definition includes everything that exists). That is the only thing I could consider "divine", as every other subset of it is smaller than the full set of existence.
Now, if that superset of existence happens to possess a mechanism of being sentient, that sentience I would consider a divine being, and might even dub it "God" if the word had meaning for me.
My position at the moment is that the existence of such superconsciousness is unlikely, but completely denying the possibility of its existence is something I don't want to do either.
As such, you could call me an agnostic, with a provision that the only theism I could find acceptable is pantheism, and even that I find unlikely.
If you have trouble defining what you are, or what someone else is, start with asking how you define the concept of "divine" and whether or not you believe such thing exists. That is much more sensible approach than asking "do you believe in God (which one)?"
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words
Hmm... I've only ever seen atheism and agnosticism defined in terms of deities, though these definitions do seem to be much better. Problem is I'd think it's more difficult to define divine than to define god, though I suppose such definitions should be unavoidable in discussions on the topic regardless of which definitions of atheism and agnosticism you use.
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There seems to be some confusion about what atheism and agnosticism are.
That's cause it means different things to different people. As far as I'm concerned your entire definition was wrong because it doesn't match the one I've always used.
One definition I've always liked for its simplicity is that a theist believes in a specific god, an agnostic believes that there is something out there but that it is either unknown or unknowable, and an atheist simply has no belief, deciding that there is no point in acting as if there is something out there without proof.
Again, once you go away from a simple definition like that, you get into a massive cluster**** of competing definitions that vary wildly in how atheists and agnostics there are.
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Atheism, in a broad sense, is the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athiest
theism is the belief in a god or gods... polytheism = many gods, monotheism... yada yada
atheism is the belief that there is no god(s). Nada. Does not exist. Not the belief that there is no proof of such a being, but that there is proof that there is no such being(s). Hence the a, meaning "not".
It's simple word definitions, they are based from their root meanings in older languages.
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Well, we wander back into the minefield of 'proven' and 'not proven' a bit there ;)
I can readily accept that a deity is not proven, however, it's risky to say that the non-existence of one has been proven. It's one of the tricky ones because it cannot be proven because any question can be hit with the 'omnipotent' wildcard.
Maybe the term that should be used rather than 'Deity', which is a very wide-ranging term, is 'Creator'? I think the main bone of contention between Atheists and Religions is the matter of Creation, whether we owe our lives to some entity, whether the Universe only exists because it was made by a being etc. I think those are the real abrasive issues involved. Things like Slavery, Abuse and Empire Building a far more an aspect of Human Nature and can, as has been mentioned, been done for a variety of reasons of which religion is included, but is not exclusive.
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But a theist can be monotheist, polytheist, deist, or pantheist... :p
The broadest definition of theist is that they believe in at least one deity. That's a pretty good definition. Atheism would be denying the existence of any deity. However, my definition avoids any problems with actually denying existence of the beings described as gods - instead of denying their existence (no matter how unlikely), I deny their divine status.
Hence my analogy about the person running a simulated universe, and the concept of God in said simulated universe. Miracle occurs? Nothing divine about it, and in fact it wasn't a miracle at all, the admin just typed in a few commands and changed a few variables.
Though, considering the vast scale of the universe, thinking that the universe's creator would have the time or effort to focus on individual civilizations, much less individual nations or individual people is vanity of the highest order and I really don't get why people seem so dead set on divine beings having such a deep and unnatural interest in my life or soul or both.
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atheism is the belief that there is no god(s). Nada. Does not exist. Not the belief that there is no proof of such a being, but that there is proof that there is no such being(s). Hence the a, meaning "not".
Wrong!
Find me an atheist who will flat out make any such claim. Even Dawkins has repeatedly refused to say such a thing. And I'd say that any definition of Atheism which excludes Dawkins is as idiotic as any definition of Catholicism that excludes all the popes. :p
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Certainly, a generic sense of atheism among the public is that it takes the position that god(s) do(es)n't exist. This would be why I typically call myself agnostic versus atheist because I simply believe that there is not (and probably never will be) enough data to make that determination on the principles of rationalism and science. There are a lot of people who call themselves atheists and take the same position, but that is not what the public at large typically thinks of atheism, which is why you see all these conflicting definitions of terms.
As I like to explain it to some religious friends and family members: I don't believe in [your] Judeo-Christian God and "His" creation of the universe, but I cannot rule out that something a human would view as a deity is responsible for the laws of physics as we know them, and the subsequent creation of the universe as we understand it.
That is a position I've always associated with agnosticism, but I'm willing to bit there are a fair number of self-proclaimed atheists even on HLP that agree with it.
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atheism is the belief that there is no god(s). Nada. Does not exist. Not the belief that there is no proof of such a being, but that there is proof that there is no such being(s). Hence the a, meaning "not".
Wrong!
Find me an atheist who will flat out make any such claim. Even Dawkins has repeatedly refused to say such a thing. And I'd say that any definition of Atheism which excludes Dawkins is as idiotic as any definition of Catholicism that excludes all the popes. :p
Fail!
Eastern Orthodox. :P
EDIT: Also:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/atheist -"one who believes that there is no deity"
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Yeah, and that MP is 100% sensible, were it not for the fact that I also cannot rule out a giant bunny is responsible for the Creation, or Pasta for that matter. Or a giant banana. Hey perhaps what created this whole mess is a multitude of ant-like figures from another universe whose intelligence is expressed in the patterns of their wanderings. Perhaps the Creator is the Devil himself. Or Galactus. Or, why not, Primus, who hid himself from Unicron inside the planet of Cybertron...
I cannot rule out any of this, and the fact that there exist a trillion infinite different possibilities render the propositions we get from the christians and muslims, etc., patently ridiculous and most assuredly untrue, specially considering its inherent inconsistencies and the traces of imagination gone wild in every single one of their holy writings.
This is why, to me, calling myself an agnostic is also somewhat ridiculous, as if I was saying to the religious person , "hey, yeah that can indeed be the case, just as much as it can be not the case....", which is false. The actual probability of a christian being metaphysically "right" is preposterously infinitesimal.
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I cannot rule out any of this, and the fact that there exist a trillion infinite different possibilities render the propositions we get from the christians and muslims, etc., patently ridiculous and most assuredly untrue, do you propose that there is no such thing as truth?? There are a trillion infinite possibilities that govern the makeup of your physique, and yet only one of them is true. Are you patently ridiculous? specially considering its inherent inconsistencies and the traces of imagination gone wild in every single one of their holy writings. Which you have read. In their entirety. And then re-scrutinized? How about a little studying into some of the original language texts? Is the answer to any of the above questions an affirmative??
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"Original"? That is surely an hilarious thing. And to answer that, yes, I have studied and read extensively on the fragmented tapestry that the "bible" is, and to refer to the "original" texts is something hilarious. There are thousands of "original" texts that have been scrapped, edited out, included, excluded, twisted, badly translated (the case of the young woman being wrongly translated to "virgin" woman is perhaps the most comical and known), and many of these changes were made for political and "moral" reasons.
There is no "True" bible, that is an oxymoron. There is a multitude of texts that have been collected and joined together, etc. Many of them are not even original stories from ancient hebreus, but mythical stories that have been copied and pasted from other places.
do you propose that there is no such thing as truth?? There are a trillion infinite possibilities that govern the makeup of your physique, and yet only one of them is true. Are you patently ridiculous?
The difference being (for any reasonable person this is ****ing obvious) that there are empirical evidences for empirical theories, while there are no empirical evidences whatsoever (BY DEFINITION) for metaphysical "truths". Further, I don't need to know the "fundamental truth", the "absolute truth" that explains my existence for my life to have any meaning. I will have none of that, because I know I cannot know such a bizarro thing about the reality. The things I know about what is real or not are contained and constrained inside the information and pattern-gathering activity that mankind has indulged for the past 10 thousand years or more. Nothing less, and nothing more.
Unless of course some god decides to talk to my head. If that ever happens though, I advise everyone around me to escape fast.
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If you claim to respect science, then (as NGTMR put it), you have to respect the principle that an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - for any phenomenon or thing.
A person respecting the premise of the scientific method cannot make the claim that deities are false, merely that the objective evidence collected to date does not support their existence, the same as the evidence doesn't support bunnies, pasta, bananas, or Transformers being responsible. But, once again, there's a big difference between saying the evidence doesn't support that hypothesis and saying they certainly aren't responsible.
You either respect the scientific method, or you don't. If you respect it, then you cannot say simply that deities don't exist. Nuance is required. Science doesn't say that religious explanations are completely incorrect, it says that the evidence they are incorrect outweighs the evidence they are correct.
Sooner or later one of the various lectures a few of us have given around here on the scientific method is actually going to stick for some people, but it appears that it's going to be later.
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As an aside: for the non-native English speakers, particularly those who speak romance languages as their first language (this is not just aimed at luis, although he made me notice it most recently):
Strike the word "surely" from your vocabulary. Most of you are using it incorrectly (or at least, awkwardly), and it lends an obnoxious tone to your posts that I don't think you intend. Not to nitpick as I admire that you can speak/write in multiple languages, just trying to be helpful as far as conversational English goes.
Carry on.
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-snip-
If you claim to respect science, then (as NGTMR put it), you have to respect the principle that an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - for any phenomenon or thing.
A person respecting the premise of the scientific method cannot make the claim that deities are false, merely that the objective evidence collected to date does not support their existence, the same as the evidence doesn't support bunnies, pasta, bananas, or Transformers being responsible. But, once again, there's a big difference between saying the evidence doesn't support that hypothesis and saying they certainly aren't responsible.
Come on, I know you are being 100% honest, but this reeks of concern trolling about nitpicking details. Yes, technically, you are "absolutely" right. But if you go that path, you must also never speak anything like "Atoms certainly exist". Because they don't "certainly exist", it just happens that the empirical evidence is amazingly correlated with the postulation of such entities, but you can never be "sure", reality may be fooling you pretty hard.
Given the preposterous numbers of alternatives, I can safely bet with anyone (and apparently making a fortune here in HLP) that the universe is not ruled by a Transformer. And perhaps that bet is even safer than the one proclaiming the existence of atoms. That's my point!
You either respect the scientific method, or you don't. If you respect it, then you cannot say simply that deities don't exist. Nuance is required. Science doesn't say that religious explanations are completely incorrect, it says that the evidence they are incorrect outweighs the evidence they are correct.
And it outweights so much that to say anything but "gods surely do not exist" is just taking semantics too damned seriously. I said it already: technically most atheists are agnostics, but people do not sciencespeak in their every day life. They speak frankly. And frankly, given the figures related, God does not exist. Period.
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Strike the word "surely" from your vocabulary. Most of you are using it incorrectly (or at least, awkwardly), and it lends an obnoxious tone to your posts that I don't think you intend. Not to nitpick as I admire that you can speak/write in multiple languages, just trying to be helpful as far as conversational English goes
Oh sorry, I can surely ahhhmmmm.... definitely see that happen :D.
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As an aside: for the non-native English speakers, particularly those who speak romance languages as their first language (this is not just aimed at luis, although he made me notice it most recently):
Strike the word "surely" from your vocabulary. Most of you are using it incorrectly (or at least, awkwardly), and it lends an obnoxious tone to your posts that I don't think you intend. Not to nitpick as I admire that you can speak/write in multiple languages, just trying to be helpful as far as conversational English goes.
Carry on.
Inconceivable!
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Yeah, sometimes 'surely' comes across as the adverb form of 'most'.
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As an aside (and to slightly stir the pot), this is why agnosticism is a better position for a reasoning scientist to take than [militant] atheism (of the Dawkins, etc variety).
Actually, when you get him down to brass tacks he rates himself as a 9(1-10 where 10 = no god, period, end of debate) on an agnostic scale, rather than an actual atheist.
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(http://blog.syracuse.com/axeman/medium_leslie%20neilson.bmp)
I am serious... and don't call me Shirley
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Science and religion do not deal with the same kinds of truth. To put forth religion as an enemy and opponent of science is to denigrate both. Because religion is founded upon the idea that there are other kinds of truth that lie outside the realm of scientific empiricism (science) or even pure rationalism (philosophy).
And to anyone who looks for the presence of existential meaning in science, and finds nothing but what and how, not why, this is a perfectly reasonable idea. Just because something cannot be reduced to observations of a sensory nature does not mean it does not exist. So believing in both scientific theories and religious beliefs that apparently contradict those theories need not be any contradiction at all.
Regardless of whatever idiocy that is perpetrated in the name of religion, the idea that it can contain real truth is not something that cannot be simply dismissed. Why is as legitimate a question as how or what.
So stop fighting, you two. Be content in your own domains.
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Didn't want to troll Valathil's thread, Maths' snide against "godrays" made me spill my evening milk. That was hilarious!
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Science and religion do not deal with the same kinds of truth. To put forth religion as an enemy and opponent of science is to denigrate both. Because religion is founded upon the idea that there are other kinds of truth that lie outside the realm of scientific empiricism (science) or even pure rationalism (philosophy).
Yeaaaah, which is just bull****.
Hey, I have an idea. I'll create a bunch of "truths" that are the silliest thing. But I will say that its "truth" is different from the scientific one and the religious one. Then it miraculously makes sense and is validated. And dare not science geeks make fun of me! I'll demonstrate with my own truthiness why they are only being bigoted and small minded. I'll make products that will cure cancer with water! Measles with small percentages of itself! Any disease with supernatural weeds!
Oh wait, ****, someone already had this idea....
And to anyone who looks for the presence of existential meaning in science, and finds nothing but what and how, not why, this is a perfectly reasonable idea. Just because something cannot be reduced to observations of a sensory nature does not mean it does not exist. So believing in both scientific theories and religious beliefs that apparently contradict those theories need not be any contradiction at all.
This is Alice-in-Wonderland cucoo logic. Look, it doesn't work that way. Let me help you, please pay attention.
Let's imagine a conversation. Here:
Me: Hey, howddoyado?
You: Fine and dandy.
Me: Hey, you know what? God exists.
You: Who's that?
Me: It's an all powerful being, omniscient, all loving, he created all this **** you see around us.
You: Man that's awesome. How do you know that?
Me: Magic.
You: Magic? What do you mean magic? Surely you have evidence going on for your hypothesis, I mean they are big assertions you are making here!!
Me: Nope. I don't need to. You see, my "kind" of knowledge is different from yours. To prove the existence of the simplest stuff like an atom, or a solid state of helium, etc., you need hard evidence, hard work, tons of people really banging up their heads in multiple dead ends until they slowly get to the correct answer.
You: Yeah, it's called the scientific method.
Me: Tough ****. I don't. I just make it up and sounds good, and I feel fine for believing it. And I made some self-consistent writings on it, so it must be true!
You: But that's not....
Me: That's not the scientific method! I agree! But this is not science, my friend, I call this "Religion", so your rules don't apply in my playground, you see?
You: Heeey isn't that cheating? Surely ...
Me: No it's not cheating, it's called Theology, and don't call me Shirley.
Regardless of whatever idiocy that is perpetrated in the name of religion, the idea that it can contain real truth is not something that cannot be simply dismissed. Why is as legitimate a question as how or what.
Questions are legitimate. Handwaved answers aren't. Specially if someone proclaims they have some special "relation" with the "ultimate" source of this truth.
So stop fighting, you two. Be content in your own domains.
I don't believe in NOMA, so your rules don't apply with me? (he, see? I just played your own game against you!)
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This is Alice-in-Wonderland cucoo logic. Look, it doesn't work that way. Let me help you, please pay attention.
I take it you've never actually read Alice in Wonderland.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00tw1tl/The_End_of_God_A_Horizon_Guide_to_Science_and_Religion/
Relevant to the overarching theme rather than the semantic one :P
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This is Alice-in-Wonderland cucoo logic. Look, it doesn't work that way. Let me help you, please pay attention.
I take it you've never actually read Alice in Wonderland.
Some months, every single day. To my kids.
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This is Alice-in-Wonderland cucoo logic. Look, it doesn't work that way. Let me help you, please pay attention.
I take it you've never actually read Alice in Wonderland.
Some months, every single day. To my kids.
Someone report him to CPS. That's abuse. :lol:
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i refuse to call myself an atheist just on the shear number of militant atheists out there making atheism look bad. i will also not call myself agnostic because you get bible thumpers targeting you for conversion because you're perceived as open to the idea of the existence of a deity. for awhile i instead (likely erroneously, but who the **** cares) started to use the term nihilist. of course as that term got popular with angstridden teenage emo punks, i now lack a term in which to describe my views on the (non)existence of divine power. instead i give you a list of statements that i agree with:
1: science should focus on questions in can potentially answer.
2: there are questions in the universe that should remain unanswered.
2b: these are the questions that science cannot answer.
2c: people who attempt to answer those questions should be impaled.
3: if god exists and is all powerful, he is evil.
3b: god and the devil are the same entity.
4: if god is ruler of the universe, he is not a very good one.
4b: if god exists it is mankind's responsibility to depose him and take his place.
4c: god should then be impaled.
5: if god does not exist, that saves us a lot of time
5b: thus we should assume a non-existence of god until counter evidence produces itself.
i guess you can call this nukism.*
*i try to start a new cult of personality religion every 3 weeks.
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I'm totally down with nukism
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Fail!
Eastern Orthodox. :P
How wonderful of you to miss the point I was making so perfectly. :p
The point I was making that is that it is possible to make a definition for the word Catholic where the Popes are excluded. But to then assert that this is the only possible true definition is ludicrous.
See what you did there? Are you seriously going to claim anyone who belongs to the Roman Catholic church is NOT a catholic?
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/atheist -"one who believes that there is no deity"
Which brings me back to my point about the complete cluster**** of definitions for atheism compounded by the complete cluster**** of meanings for the word belief. That definition doesn't agree with the one on Wikipedia and Dictionary.com gives several competing definitions.
Certainly, a generic sense of atheism among the public is that it takes the position that god(s) do(es)n't exist. This would be why I typically call myself agnostic versus atheist because I simply believe that there is not (and probably never will be) enough data to make that determination on the principles of rationalism and science. There are a lot of people who call themselves atheists and take the same position, but that is not what the public at large typically thinks of atheism, which is why you see all these conflicting definitions of terms.
As I like to explain it to some religious friends and family members: I don't believe in [your] Judeo-Christian God and "His" creation of the universe, but I cannot rule out that something a human would view as a deity is responsible for the laws of physics as we know them, and the subsequent creation of the universe as we understand it.
That is a position I've always associated with agnosticism, but I'm willing to bit there are a fair number of self-proclaimed atheists even on HLP that agree with it.
I tend to disagree with that because I've always viewed theism/atheism with "a" having the same meaning as in moral/amoral. The "a" does not denote the exact opposite but a lack of something. An amoral person has no morals, he has a lack of morality both good and bad. It is an immoral (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/immoral) person goes out of his way to do things that are not moral.
In the same vein I'd view atheism as a lack of theism. A lack of belief in gods. It is an irreligious person who goes out of his way to disbelieve in God. And the truth is I suspect you'll find very few people who are actually irreligious. Most of the people who seem like it simply have a lack of belief when questioned on the fact.
Lumping yourself in with the agnostics leaves those who do have belief in gods but no actual belief in who they are with no word to describe themselves. So from a purely practical point of view I prefer the definition I'm using here because it gives the agnostics a word of their own and doesn't end up with the word Atheism belonging to a group of people who when questioned don't even hold that belief anyway. :p
for awhile i instead (likely erroneously, but who the **** cares) started to use the term nihilist.
Certainly any nihilist complaining is doing it all wrong. :p
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I'm totally down with nukism
int followers = 0;
while(followers < 100){
if(newFollower())
followers ++;
}
drinkCoolaid();
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Nukism rule no2 sucks: there are no bad questions. Only bad methodologies of getting answers to those questions. And many times, we are still unable to answer a lot of them. However, no crazy person should be impaled by trying to do so. Who knows, he might be the next Einstein.
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Nukism rule no2 sucks: there are no bad questions. Only bad methodologies of getting answers to those questions. And many times, we are still unable to answer a lot of them. However, no crazy person should be impaled by trying to do so. Who knows, he might be the next Einstein.
IMPALE HIM!
i like how these rules work
of course you missed 2b. if science can answer it, its not a bad question. you might get a grey area with things like string theory or or dark matter/energy. of course any good scientist will break down any problem into pieces that they can solve, and if they dont think they can answer a question they usually are smart enough to stay away from it. should probibly add an addendum that it is the responsibility of science to decide which questions should not be answered, but id rather see einstein impaled than that rule get abused.
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This is Alice-in-Wonderland cucoo logic. Look, it doesn't work that way. Let me help you, please pay attention.
I take it you've never actually read Alice in Wonderland.
Some months, every single day. To my kids.
Shame that doesn't guarantee you see what it's actually saying. :p But I digress.
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I don't mind digressions. Problem is, you're just trolling my ass with your shenanigans, by making a vague accusation of my illiteracy or something.
Yeah you're very smart, I get it. Why don't you actually share your wits with us for a change?
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There are a whole host of words that describe someone's belief. Most atheists are Weak Atheists who don't so much believe that it's impossible for there to be deities, but that the chances of any described in any religion existing are highly remote. From this viewpoint it's possible that Thor exists, just pretty unlikely.
Strong Atheism out and out rejects the possibility of gods existing as so unlikely they are effectively zero.
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I don't mind digressions. Problem is, you're just trolling my ass with your shenanigans, by making a vague accusation of my illiteracy or something.
Yeah you're very smart, I get it. Why don't you actually share your wits with us for a change?
http://www.osnews.com/story/22972/It_Doesn_t_Add_up_Mathematics_in_Wonderland
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should probibly add an addendum that it is the responsibility of science to decide which questions should not be answered, but id rather see einstein impaled than that rule get abused.
Yeah, let's ask science. Hey SCIENCE. Please could you give us an answer?
To what you ask?
Simple. Give us an answer about what we don't know yet but that we know we can't ever know? Oh, you say that's paradoxical?
IMPALE SCIENCE!
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Ok Polpolion, nice text. Still haven't the faintest idea on what you are accusing me of. Basically you insult me and then make me work to understand exactly where your insult comes from. That's really nice. You're a swell guy indeed.
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Ok Polpolion, nice text. Still haven't the faintest idea on what you are accusing me of. Basically you insult me and then make me work to understand exactly where your insult comes from. That's really nice. You're a swell guy indeed.
None of what I said was meant to be an insult, in stark contrast to your sarcasm. Point being, in equating Alice in Wonderland to `cucoo' logic in the way that you've done, you've revealed a fundamental misunderstanding of the points the book makes, the core of which are highlighted in the text I posted. It's not all that relevant to the discussion at hand, though, so I made sure to note my digression. :p
ed: You should read the NYT article discussed in the second half of the text, too.
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NO U. You didn't get Alice.
Now I'll let you work out why, and I'll even give you a hint. It's also very well described in the text you linked.
Let's see if you like your own poison (and no, I'm not trolling I am serious).
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should probibly add an addendum that it is the responsibility of science to decide which questions should not be answered, but id rather see einstein impaled than that rule get abused.
Yeah, let's ask science. Hey SCIENCE. Please could you give us an answer?
To what you ask?
Simple. Give us an answer about what we don't know yet but that we know we can't ever know? Oh, you say that's paradoxical?
IMPALE SCIENCE!
yes but was it science that asked the question? perhaps i should punish both the asker and the one who answers.
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I go by this:
1. Impale all the things.
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Science and religion do not deal with the same kinds of truth. To put forth religion as an enemy and opponent of science is to denigrate both. Because religion is founded upon the idea that there are other kinds of truth that lie outside the realm of scientific empiricism (science) or even pure rationalism (philosophy).
Yeaaaah, which is just bull****.
Hey, I have an idea. I'll create a bunch of "truths" that are the silliest thing. But I will say that its "truth" is different from the scientific one and the religious one. Then it miraculously makes sense and is validated. And dare not science geeks make fun of me! I'll demonstrate with my own truthiness why they are only being bigoted and small minded. I'll make products that will cure cancer with water! Measles with small percentages of itself! Any disease with supernatural weeds!
Oh wait, ****, someone already had this idea....
And to anyone who looks for the presence of existential meaning in science, and finds nothing but what and how, not why, this is a perfectly reasonable idea. Just because something cannot be reduced to observations of a sensory nature does not mean it does not exist. So believing in both scientific theories and religious beliefs that apparently contradict those theories need not be any contradiction at all.
This is Alice-in-Wonderland cucoo logic. Look, it doesn't work that way. Let me help you, please pay attention.
Let's imagine a conversation. Here:
Me: Hey, howddoyado?
You: Fine and dandy.
Me: Hey, you know what? God exists.
You: Who's that?
Me: It's an all powerful being, omniscient, all loving, he created all this **** you see around us.
You: Man that's awesome. How do you know that?
Me: Magic.
You: Magic? What do you mean magic? Surely you have evidence going on for your hypothesis, I mean they are big assertions you are making here!!
Me: Nope. I don't need to. You see, my "kind" of knowledge is different from yours. To prove the existence of the simplest stuff like an atom, or a solid state of helium, etc., you need hard evidence, hard work, tons of people really banging up their heads in multiple dead ends until they slowly get to the correct answer.
You: Yeah, it's called the scientific method.
Me: Tough ****. I don't. I just make it up and sounds good, and I feel fine for believing it. And I made some self-consistent writings on it, so it must be true!
You: But that's not....
Me: That's not the scientific method! I agree! But this is not science, my friend, I call this "Religion", so your rules don't apply in my playground, you see?
You: Heeey isn't that cheating? Surely ...
Me: No it's not cheating, it's called Theology, and don't call me Shirley.
Regardless of whatever idiocy that is perpetrated in the name of religion, the idea that it can contain real truth is not something that cannot be simply dismissed. Why is as legitimate a question as how or what.
Questions are legitimate. Handwaved answers aren't. Specially if someone proclaims they have some special "relation" with the "ultimate" source of this truth.
So stop fighting, you two. Be content in your own domains.
I don't believe in NOMA, so your rules don't apply with me? (he, see? I just played your own game against you!)
Religion is not entirely composed of handwaving. Otherwise it would just produce fools and not thinkers like Ghandi, St. Augustine or hell, JRR Tolkien. Like it or not, valuable insight can result from an individual's religious beliefs.
And it's no less cuckoo to pretend that reality is much less complicated than it actually is. You can't handwave everything into a set of simple logical truths. To claim otherwise would be *puts on Spock ears* illogical, my dear.
But good luck becoming the new Kazan. :p
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I don't mind digressions. Problem is, you're just trolling my ass with your shenanigans, by making a vague accusation of my illiteracy or something.
Yeah you're very smart, I get it. Why don't you actually share your wits with us for a change?
http://www.osnews.com/story/22972/It_Doesn_t_Add_up_Mathematics_in_Wonderland
WHAT ABOUT IN MATHMAGIC LAND? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRD4gb0p5RM)
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I go by this:
1. Impale all the things.
I thought the idea was to nuke all the things.... it's so confusing...
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Religion is not entirely composed of handwaving. Otherwise it would just produce fools and not thinkers like Ghandi, St. Augustine or hell, JRR Tolkien. Like it or not, valuable insight can result from an individual's religious beliefs.
But does it stem from religious thinking or something else? The plot thickens.... I really doubt that the holy truth of the trinity has contributed anything to our well being, for example.
And it's no less cuckoo to pretend that reality is much less complicated than it actually is. You can't handwave everything into a set of simple logical truths. To claim otherwise would be *puts on Spock ears* illogical, my dear.
Exactly. So why all the religious bull****? Reality is *HARD*, and it requires *WORK*, HARD WORK. Not sitting on our comfortable chairs spewing metaphyisical unfalsifiable shenanigans that make you "feel" this or that. We discovered this basic insight about reality some centuries ago, but apparently it still hasn't penetrated every thinking brain.
But good luck becoming the new Kazan. :p
I tried to look for that one, but I still don't know who you are referring to...
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Kazan was a forum member known for not getting a joke and for denying the undenyable truth that Clangers did live on the moon. (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=26705.0)
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Oh right... just another mindless insult thrown up. But the troll is me... I see how this works.
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I go by this:
1. Impale all the things.
(http://memegenerator.net/cache/instances/400x/10/11083/11350005.jpg)
(http://memegenerator.net/cache/instances/400x/10/11083/11349957.jpg)
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I go by this:
1. Impale all the things.
I thought the idea was to nuke all the things.... it's so confusing...
well after we nuke things the state of technolgy will be in a rather horrid state, and we would have depleted our nuclear arsenal as well. this is where we implement good old vlad style terror and impale anyone among the survivors who doesn't play ball. i mean if they cant follow simple rules (like for, example, no breathing) then they deserve to die and i can carve a pretty mean looking steak.
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Religion is not entirely composed of handwaving. Otherwise it would just produce fools and not thinkers like Ghandi, St. Augustine or hell, JRR Tolkien. Like it or not, valuable insight can result from an individual's religious beliefs.
But does it stem from religious thinking or something else? The plot thickens.... I really doubt that the holy truth of the trinity has contributed anything to our well being, for example.
And it's no less cuckoo to pretend that reality is much less complicated than it actually is. You can't handwave everything into a set of simple logical truths. To claim otherwise would be *puts on Spock ears* illogical, my dear.
Exactly. So why all the religious bull****? Reality is *HARD*, and it requires *WORK*, HARD WORK. Not sitting on our comfortable chairs spewing metaphyisical unfalsifiable shenanigans that make you "feel" this or that. We discovered this basic insight about reality some centuries ago, but apparently it still hasn't penetrated every thinking brain.
But good luck becoming the new Kazan. :p
I tried to look for that one, but I still don't know who you are referring to...
Christianity it not about the Trinity. Ignore the dogma. That's a distraction from its real ideas.
And the possibility that empirical analysis might have inherit limits as a font of truth is continuing to sail right over your head. If something can't be reduced to a purely empirical phenomenon, it must not exist. This is the dogma of people who think that science can explain all: it can only make judgements on sensory phenomenon, so it is just assumed that only sensory (and thus physical) phenomenon are real, and everything else is bull****. Acknowledge that anything could lie outside that realm and your position falls apart.
It's kinda funny because I held the same beliefs you did when I was 14. Then I read Descartes and realized that studying the behavior of quarks doesn't actually reveal very much of the fundamental nature of existence. I didn't have as much of a desire to be a scientist after that day. And I gradually became a lot more accepting of religion. A tolerant atheist with leanings toward the Dao instead of an intolerant, religion-is-always-just-plain-wrong atheist.
Also, :lol: that you didn't know who Kazan was. Kids these days. I was more referring to his position as the resident anti-religion pundit of the forum.
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Christianity it not about the Trinity. Ignore the dogma. It is a distraction from its real ideas.
No true Scotsman.
If you drop the established properties of <insert religion here> and claim that it's real ideals are <insert list here>, who's to say that isn't just your idea about what the "real ideas" are?
Certainly, I could sort of agree that christianity should be all about love and tolerance and generally being nice to other people, but the salvation dogma and the stuff about the immortal soul are quite essential to Christianity, especially regarding the concept of how to make sure your soul is saved from eternal nothingness (not sure if want).
Also, those "true ideals" are nothing exclusive to Christianity. The Golden Rule, as an example, is just one formulation of Kant's categorical imperative, and thus there's nothing specific to Christianity in it, and nothing to say that it is a divine moral rule. It just happens to make sense.
And the possibility that empirical analysis might have inherit limits as a font of truth is continuing to sail right over your head. If something can't be reduced to a purely empirical phenomenon, it must not exist. This is the dogma of people who think that science can explain all: it can only make judgements on sensory phenomenon, so it is just assumed that only sensory (and thus physical) phenomenon are real, and everything else is bull****. Acknowledge that anything could lie outside that realm and your position falls apart.
False dichotomy.
Thinking that all non-observable things are "bull****" is something no scientist should ever do. Our observational capabilities increase all the time, making us able to measure things that we previously could not do.
In the time of Greek natural philosophers, the hypothesis of "atoms" (as made by Democritus) as small particles that everything is made of was just as much unobservable than other theories about the world (such as the four elements, or the Greek pantheon of gods causing things to happen). Today, we can measure and observe individual atoms and see how they behave. We can observe individual particles that make up the atoms, and we can collide them with large energies to see what happens when they decompose at high energy conditions.
This, among other things, is how we're trying to figure out how gravity (as an example) works.
If your dichotomy were true, no one would be seriously trying to ever observe anything new or to improve our means of observing things. If we can't observe something, we make stuff that can observe it, but until we have observed it, we consider a hypothesis just that - a hypothesis. A supporting observation is usually required to make it a theory. Notably enough, a lot of things especially in particle physics have been predicted long before they could be observed, and they were not considered "bull****" despite the inability to observe them at the time.
So, please don't claim that science-oriented people think that if something can't be observed, it's automatically bull****.
It's bull**** if it can't be objectively observed by its definition; these types of claims typically also tend to be non-falsifiable.
As an interesting aside, religious experiences have been researched widely through means of neurology, and we have a fairly good idea about what's causing them. We can even reproduce religious experiences by stimulating certain sections of the brain with magnetic fields or with oxygen deprivation in some individuals. The human brain has certain things in its layout that are the same in every member of H. sapiens sapiensis, thus it shouldn't be a surprise that people's experiences in similar conditions are, in fact, similar.
Thus the claims of extrasensory perception about supernatural are, in fact, rather suspect and most likely fully internal phenomenon produced as a natural function of human brain. Some experience it more often and more stronger than others, which is suspected to be related to genetics to some extent and possibly also a function of upbringing when the brain develops. The upbringing definitely affects the perception of the religious experience - people tend to experience what their cultural ideas make them expect.
All in all it seems pretty obvious to me that if religious behaviour suddenly emerged right now, it would probably be diagnosed as a small neurological disorder, and religions would either be deemed mass delusion caused by similar neurological disorder, or exploitation of the people who happen to have this affliction. Instead of being considered neutral or beneficial - or, in the case of certain areas of the world, the norm - it might be considered harmful or at the very least something that a person should be aware of.
On the other hand, same could be said about falling in love. Makes the brain go quite nuts.
Now that I think of it, it's pretty obvious that there has been strong selective pressure to preserve the "falling-in-love" behaviour in the human nervous system, just as there has probably been selective pressure to maintain the "religious-experience" behaviour; the former purely through biological basis (people in love tend to form babbys) and the latter through sociological behaviour, I would say. The religious people have probably selectively chosen mates that also tended to be religious.
It might actually be extremely interesting to do some genetic research on what causes religiousness, how long ago the behaviour emerged, when it became more common, and also why different areas have vast differences in reported religiousness (for example, comparing Europe with the US population). If there were no meaningful differences in the genetics regarding religious behavior, then it might be that cultural exposure has a big effect on behaviour - or people are just faking being religious because it's the social norm...
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It's bull**** if it can't be objectively observed by its definition; these types of claims typically also tend to be non-falsifiable.
Sailed right over your head too. Does the condition of falsifiability require empirical falsifiability? To those who believe only scientific (empirical) truth is real truth, yes. To those who do not, no. Hell no. I'm not some fringe nut by claiming this. I'm saying nothing that hasn't been said before by Kant or Descartes. Empirical truth is not the only kind of truth.
I'm going to avoid justifying religion for the moment, since I can't even get you to acknowledge the possibility of non-empirical knowledge. Your analysis of my position was incorrect: I really am attacking the idea of empirical falsifiability as the final authority of truth. Especially the empirical part of it.
Try to construct a theory of reality without using a single a priori statement (which is what pure empiricism requires you to do). I dare you.
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In the future, for the sake of this argument, I'll just strip down religion to it's most common traits; the idea of something lying outside the purely material world. the idea of a god, personal or impersonal, and the idea of a soul that is not wholly dependent on current physical reality. You can leave out morality right now. But focus on my previous post for now please.
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In the future, for the sake of this argument, I'll just strip down religion to it's most common traits; the idea of something lying outside the purely material world. the idea of a god, personal or impersonal, and the idea of a soul that is not wholly dependent on current physical reality. You can leave out morality right now. But focus on my previous post for now please.
But how is it not part of physical reality if it's real?
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Is a thought part of physical reality? By what sense do you become aware of it? Touch, taste, smell, sound, sight? Which one? What is its physical source? None. Why then, it must not be real! The very thought that it isn't real must not be real!
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Amusing that you assume that thought, which is an internal biological process, must be detected by external receptors as with touch and smell, to be real...
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This, again, kind of falls to semantics. If you define reality as "everything that exists" and you say that souls and God and heaven exist, then they must be part of reality.
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The point is redsniper that pure empiricism requires you to disregard non-sensory things. Just because.
Amusing that you assume that thought, which is an internal biological process, must be detected by external receptors as with touch and smell, to be real...
An internal biological process? You are describing a sensory observation (using catscans of brain activity if you want a direct observation) that correlates with the thought, but you have not described the thought itself. You can describe how the data associated with color is transmitted from the eyes to the brain, but that doesn't mean you've described what the color red actually is.
And it makes just as much sense to describe the catscan of the "internal biological processes" as images in the mind.
I am amused that you assume I am full of naivity in this matter.
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Christianity it not about the Trinity. Ignore the dogma. That's a distraction from its real ideas.
I agree with the "no-true-scotsman" criticism that Herra aludes here. If you are saying that the christian dogma is not important for Christianity then you are talking rubbish. I understand that you may not see it important for yourself, but that's an entirely different matter. You just denounce yourself as a non christian. And that's fine as well. Just as long as we keep the conversation honest. You are not allowed to say that the Trinity is not important for Christianity.
Because hell yeah, it is important.
And the possibility that empirical analysis might have inherit limits as a font of truth is continuing to sail right over your head.
Again, I appeal to your sense of honesty here. You won't find one sentence of mine ever proclaiming the inevitability of the "completion" of the building of "all truth". I'm not even into that sort of thing. So before you go ahead and proclaim that something sailed "over my head", it would be wiser to actually confirm that I ever meant such a thing.
No, sure, truth is limited. It always is. If you say that empirical analsys has "inherent" limits, I have some things I'd like to reply. First, who is going to define the "inherency" of these limits? You see, this "inherent" thing that you are referring to is a reference to the Kantian "thing-in-itself", which I don't really subscribe to at all (also been "refuted" as a legitimate way to think about stuff for two centuries now...). What I mean is, I don't subscribe to this thought that there is an "inherent" limit to empirical analysis. What there is, and I'll fully agree with that, are real present limitations wrt what science can tell us about trillions of things. And in such voids, we try to fill them with some sketched explanations, tentative hypothesis, metaphors, poetry, intuition, etc.,etc. And that's fine. I never disagreed with that. It's what we got, it's what we use.
But when we start telling ourselves that these intuitions we have are somehow in a "different plane of knowledge", a "different truth" from hard sciences, and we start saying that these metaphors we tell ourselves are above scientific scrutiny because they belong to such different landscape, we are just fooling ourselves into delusion.
There is only one world. Our world.
If something can't be reduced to a purely empirical phenomenon, it must not exist.
Name me one such example. Tell me something that "exists" but has no empirical expression whatsoever. I dare you.
This is the dogma of people who think that science can explain all: it can only make judgements on sensory phenomenon, so it is just assumed that only sensory (and thus physical) phenomenon are real, and everything else is bull****. Acknowledge that anything could lie outside that realm and your position falls apart.
Ok I byte, tell me what you are thinking as an example here. And then I will gladly teach you why such an example stems completely from empirical observation.
It's kinda funny because I held the same beliefs you did when I was 14. Then I read Descartes and realized that studying the behavior of quarks doesn't actually reveal very much of the fundamental nature of existence. I didn't have as much of a desire to be a scientist after that day. And I gradually became a lot more accepting of religion. A tolerant atheist with leanings toward the Dao instead of an intolerant, religion-is-always-just-plain-wrong atheist.
Spare me the condescending tone. I could reply that I also enjoyed the deistic / pantheistic "feeling" of oneness and magicalness and wonder of the cosmos as the thing in itself, etc.,etc., when I was 15 or 16. And then I ****ing grew up. But that would sound patronizing wouldn't it?
Also, :lol: that you didn't know who Kazan was. Kids these days.
I don't understand the jerkiness. Why do you behave like that? Did I do something wrong to you? Why should I know who Kazan was? And why do you take me as a "kid", apart from the obvious insulting implicit notion that "only a kid would have the thoughts that you have"?
I'm a father of three, actually, although the truth of my statements wouldn't change if I was 4 years old.
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Is a thought part of physical reality? By what sense do you become aware of it? Touch, taste, smell, sound, sight? Which one? What is its physical source? None.
Hint, the source of thought starts with a B and ends in RAIN. And no, it is not completely composed of water.
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I was using Christianity as an example of a religion, not its particular qualities.
Name me one such example. Tell me something that "exists" but has no empirical expression whatsoever. I dare you.
Read my response to whatisname above.
And as for using the word kid, I knew your age when I posted that. That was a joke. And I'll drop any comments that remotely resemble condescending from now on.
But I am presenting a rational argument that empiricism does not produce knowledge of all things that exist. Maybe the argument is wrong. But I am currently presenting it without any appeals to faith or irrationality. I am simply questioning your position on logical grounds. Or to connect me position with pantheism. You are engaging in ad hominem attacks to far greater extent than I am. You have no right to call me delusional for that. Be careful before you accuse others of being a jerk.
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Is a thought part of physical reality? By what sense do you become aware of it? Touch, taste, smell, sound, sight? Which one? What is its physical source? None.
Hint, the source of thought starts with a B and ends in RAIN. And no, it is not completely composed of water.
The thought itself, not the percieved material object whose activity correlates with it.
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Try to construct a theory of reality without using a single a priori statement (which is what pure empiricism requires you to do). I dare you.
Ah, so you go there. We have a smarty here, gentlemen, this is not your usual theist here, but a Bayesian one.
Thing is, you assume in your hypothesis (the hypothesis being that "pure empiricism" requires at least one a priori statement out of empirical reality to build a true theory of reality), that the objective of this theory of reality is to be absolutely true.
The trick is, I refuse the meaningfulness of this truth at all.
It simply lacks any meaning to me. Thus I do not need this perfect logical system that you are alluding to. In my eyes, the empirical reality that we construct with our theories are fuzzy, semantically not rigorous, always "Wrong" in the "pure sense", always polluted.
It is, for any logical perfectionist theologian, an abomination of chaos, disorder, "untruth". And yet, it moves. It works! Better than that, it works better than any perfect system ever thought out by any armchair philosopher (impale Descartes now!).
Why? Because it is a self-correcting system of checking its hypothesis with the only feedback we decided was sufficiently trustworthy: empirical data, that is, as unsubjective as possible. In this sense, it's like evolution: it does not need a working "a priori" anything at its base, it only needs time and work. Eventually, it will become better and better.
It's like someone building the very ship he is sailing in the sea.
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Is a thought part of physical reality? By what sense do you become aware of it? Touch, taste, smell, sound, sight? Which one? What is its physical source? None.
Hint, the source of thought starts with a B and ends in RAIN. And no, it is not completely composed of water.
The thought itself, not the percieved material object whose activity correlates with it.
Ah yes, the "though itself". Like the "rock itself" and all the numenous things we never "really" get to see.
You are assuming the existence of a different plane of existence "the Real itself", to conclude the existence of a different plane of existence.
I am not impressed. Had you exemplified with "God" or "Ghosts" or "Demons", etc., it would be exactly the same.
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It is, for any logical perfectionist theologian, an abomination of chaos, disorder, "untruth". And yet, it moves. It works! Better than that, it works better than any perfect system ever thought out by any armchair philosopher (impale Descartes now!).
I relent! I relent! I just can't handle being called names!
That whole post was invective.
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Is a thought part of physical reality? By what sense do you become aware of it? Touch, taste, smell, sound, sight? Which one? What is its physical source? None.
Hint, the source of thought starts with a B and ends in RAIN. And no, it is not completely composed of water.
The thought itself, not the percieved material object whose activity correlates with it.
Ah yes, the "though itself". Like the "rock itself" and all the numenous things we never "really" get to see.
You are assuming the existence of a different plane of existence "the Real itself", to conclude the existence of a different plane of existence.
I am not impressed. Had you exemplified with "God" or "Ghosts" or "Demons", etc., it would be exactly the same.
Thoughts exist. How do you know? Because you are aware of their existence right now. Not through senses, but you are aware of them. The same cannot be said of God. At the very least, not directly. You're not helping yourself by making such blatant strawmen.
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Also:
1. Truth as I have used it is synonymous with knowledge. Any knowledge.
2. "Just shut up and observe" works fine until you start making statements that are not justified by these observations. You use logic to check. Are you going to bash logic as an instrument of the evil theologian? It needs to be consistent. That's why we need rationalism.
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Are you saying that I cannot sense my thoughts? I can hear them. When I express them sounds or actions come about.
Written words are physical.
You know, try to think without sounds in your head. Perhaps pictures come to mind. Or feelings, you know like dopamine-induced, or adrenaline, etc. Try to formulate a thought without the words you learned with your eyes. Are you using spatial geometry now? Like the one you learned when you were a toddler playing with legos? Or are you thinking about touch?
Again, where is this "unsensorial" thinking thing? I cannot find it. Without the material, I am nothing.
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You hear them? You hear them?! With what? Your ears?!!!! You percieve the thoughts in your head by the movement of your eardrum?
If not, you can hear without using your ears. Wow.
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Also:
1. Truth as I have used it is synonymous with knowledge. Any knowledge.
2. "Just shut up and observe" works fine until you start making statements that are not justified by these observations. You use logic to check. Are you going to bash logic as an instrument of the evil theologian? It needs to be consistent. That's why we need rationalism.
No, sometimes theologians misuse logic to mountainpalm-worthiness heights, but that's not logic's fault.
Reason is fine. It's our brain linking one phenomena to the next. And then voilá, maths is born.
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You hear them? You hear them?! With what? Your ears?!!!! You percieve the thoughts in your head by the movement of your eardrum?
Does it matter if I hear them with my eardrums, if I hear them anyway? Of course not. What matters is that the signal is carried through to the important channels inside my brain. I can hear my thoughts. Everyone can.
You can't? That's what you are hiding now? In sheer comical denial of the obvious?
If not, you can hear without using your ears. Wow.
Yeah, I'm just super like that. I can even hear full songs in my head as if the real singers were inside my brain! Isn't that like super magical?
Oh, wait, people usually can do all this? Oh man, I thought I was magical... :)
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Nevermind, misread what you said.
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@Mr Vega:
Why should I need to define thought itself? Obviously it's related to electrochemical impulses and neuron firing, but is much more complex than anything we can yet quantify in a completely satisfactory way. However, that doesn't mean it's not 'real', or not part of 'physical reality'.
I believe we can safely define 'what is real', as everything that has or can have a testable effect on something else. Gravity (despite being referred to as a 'fictitious force' in physics -- that's another matter entirely), is demonstrably real. It causes things to accelerate in a predictable way. The sun is real. It gives off EM radiation and warms our planet in a predictable way. Thought is real. I can tell you to not visualize a tree, and TOO LATE, for unless you've never seen a tree in your life, you just did. What if you were given a dose of hallucinogenic substance? Then you'll start having hallucinatory thoughts. Thus, thought is real, because we can affect it, and it can affect us, and these interactions are testable.
The prior point I was making is that our five senses are not the only means of detecting what is 'real' in this world. Would you like another example? Which of your five senses detects the billions of neutrinos that are currently passing through your body? None of them? Oh dear, clearly neutrinos aren't real, then!
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Mr Vega, now you are being silly. I was saying that you can hear your own thoughts, not mine. I understand you want to divert attention to the lack of actual replies on your part, but try not to troll me too much ;).
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Watisname, you can detect neutrinos by getting them to collide with hydrogen in water, causing a flash. You gain knowledge of their existence by sensory means. Doesnt matter if you observe them directly, or by observing them effect other objects.
I wanted to actually have a debate against you guys, but you just keep turning my position into something it isn't. Bye. Go strawman something else.
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Mr Vega, now you are being silly. I was saying that you can hear your own thoughts, not mine. I understand you want to divert attention to the lack of actual replies on your part, but try not to troll me too much ;).
You equated recalling a sound and hearing it for the first time as being materially identical. I would point out the problems with that, but, you know, I'd be a troll.
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I was answering well, I think. Never strayed off topic or into strawmans.
I know that the Big C (Consciousness) is mostly where the metaphysical "non-material truths" theories reside now, since all the other stuff is just immediately doubtful nowadays, but even then you should at least admit that this Big C's immaterial existence is quite in check with all the data that is flowing in in the neurosciences, showing how we can manipulate it with quite material tools. Some people have, for instance, been inserted with metallical micro wires that were pinpointed to very specific spots in the brain, in order to change their feelings. One woman who constantly battled with feelings of depression and sadness in agonizing levels was treated like this and then she said that she was feeling happiness for the first time in years. She gave this wide smile while at it, and I was amazed.
Yeah, it's quite disconcerting, but reality rarely isn't.
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When I ask you to describe anything mental, you give me observed phenomenon that correlates with the mental thing. You didn't describe the thing itself, what the color red is. What the sensation actually is. Not what is happening from the perspective of an outside observer while the sensation is occurring.
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Mr Vega, now you are being silly. I was saying that you can hear your own thoughts, not mine. I understand you want to divert attention to the lack of actual replies on your part, but try not to troll me too much ;).
You equated recalling a sound and hearing it for the first time as being materially identical. I would point out the problems with that, but, you know, I'd be a troll.
No, that would be more interesting. I'll skip the passive agressiveness (I understand it), and focus on the issue here. While it is true that the material phenomena of "sound" is non-existent when you think about a song, for instance, the electrical signals that a part of your brain channels is exactly the same, "virtualizing" the signals that would have come from your ears if you had heard them from actual sounds that your hear had received.
This is why allucinations happen, for instance - something goes wrong in this interaction and you actually confuse stuff that you are imagining with the actual inputs from your eyes. Mostly, we don't confuse them and we are aware when we are hearing our thoughts or actual sounds.
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And that doesn't lead you to doubt sensory input? Like say, the very sensory input saying that your brain can be manipulated? The end result of materialism is total skepticism.
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When I ask you to describe anything mental, you give me observed phenomenon that correlates with the mental thing. You didn't describe the thing itself, what the color red is. What the sensation actually is. Not what is happening from the perspective of an outside observer while the sensation is occurring.
Because, as I said, I don't think that anyone can say what anything *really is*. This is a Kantian "thing in itself", the noumena. It's completely unachievable. We simply agree that X is red, that red is a color that ranges from wavelenght X to Y, more or less, and that it is the signal that is formed in the brain that is correlated with the input from the Red sensors. This is all that is required.
I feel the red, and that "feeling" is unsharable directly. Of course, you can express it. With art for instance.
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It doesn't unnerve you that your knowledge of reality is dependent upon the validity of the actual feeling, a feeling that by your description, is unsharable and apparently unstudiable?
For your theory of reality, you focus on the results, while I focus on the process of arriving at those results and finding them trustworthy. I determine that in order for the process to work there must be things present which the results do not show. But they have to be there. That's my position.
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And that doesn't lead you to doubt sensory input? Like say, the very sensory input saying that your brain can be manipulated? The end result of materialism is total skepticism.
No, it isn't. It makes "total skepticism" possible, but this possibility is also meaningless to me, since I was never interested in the "absolute truth" in the first place. We live in our empirical reality and we form our theories in this world, about it and nothing else.
Is it possible that we are all wrong and we are actually "brain in the vats"? Why yes, of course. But I don't care about that. If I don't have any evidence that my brain is being manipulated, I won't care about it and behave as if it isn't, because it is more parsimonious to just assume it isn't. If I have evidence that it *is*, then I'll worry about it at that point.
Not before.
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It doesn't unnerve you that your knowledge of reality is dependent upon the validity of the actual feeling, a feeling that by your description, is unsharable and apparently unstudiable?
We can share its qualities, traits and characteristics. For instance, I can share with you the feeling of RED. Just imagine RED. Bang, see? I just shared a feeling with you. What I cannot do is directly transmit it, but the internet link is behaving tonight just fine, and is doing a perfect indirect job at it ;).
For your theory of reality, you focus on the results, while I focus on the process of arriving at those results and finding them trustworthy.
Well, I don't think that assessment is a good one, since I did describe the process and the importance of it. "Trust" is built with success. If you have a given "result" of some hypothesis, the measure of its quality is the actual use of it, that is, the predictive power of it.
For example, one has a theory that the sun "rises" every 24 hours more or less. Because the theory has proven itself with its prediction power so often and so precisely, it's really trustworthy. If you use a method that has worked 100% of the time earlier on, then that's a safe bet.
How can you arrive at any result without any check and balance to the actual subject at hand? Without it, you'll end up thinking that the universe is actually composed of 4 elements, because your logic dictated it, or some such...
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You are focusing on what the feelings are telling you, not what themselves feelings actually are. Just because the brain activity sensed by means of a catscan and the thought correlates does not mean they are one and the same.
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Eagh
Are you seriously arging about the existence of abstract concepts?
Does Pi exist? How about Neper's number? Oh and what about imaginary unit?
Come to think of it, does number 1 exist?
Abstract concepts are used by cognitive processes. Cognitive processes require a physical host.
Also, here's how I define "real":
Herra Tohtori's Rule of Existence
If X interacts with reality, it is real (ie. exists on the same level as with the things it interacts with).
1st Corollary: If something interacts with reality, it can be measured in some way.
2nd Corollary: Things that do not interact with reality in any way are completely irrelevant.
Hence, everything that exists, exists. And everything that exists is real and natural. Supernatural is by definition something beyond nature, ie. does not interact with reality and is therefore irrelevant.
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Mr Vega, again, I don't *care* what they *actually are*. They happen and that's that. A word will never capture it. A mathematical equation will never capture it. A metaphor will never capture it. A religious rite will never capture it. It is what it is, and that's that.
What we *can* do is understand how to manipulate it, how it works, what causes it, how can we bend it, how can we use it.
And that's the only sensible use of information on this matter. Anything else is just pompous noise (I'm referring to the souls and what not).
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Thanks Herra, that was a breath of fresh air from those two debating what the definition of "is" is.
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This thread seems like a FlamingCobra thread. And this "Luis Dias" seems like a FlamingCobra. :blah:
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people arguing over tiny details like this is what makes conversations like this dull and unreadable.
Eagh
Are you seriously arging about the existence of abstract concepts?
Does Pi exist? How about Neper's number? Oh and what about imaginary unit?
Come to think of it, does number 1 exist?
Abstract concepts are used by cognitive processes. Cognitive processes require a physical host.
Also, here's how I define "real":
Herra Tohtori's Rule of Existence
If X interacts with reality, it is real (ie. exists on the same level as with the things it interacts with).
1st Corollary: If something interacts with reality, it can be measured in some way.
2nd Corollary: Things that do not interact with reality in any way are completely irrelevant.
Hence, everything that exists, exists. And everything that exists is real and natural. Supernatural is by definition something beyond nature, ie. does not interact with reality and is therefore irrelevant.
nice way of putting that, i should put that into nukeism before all our scientists get impaled.
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Basically:
Consciousness itself cannot be described using math or fundamental principles.
What causes it can.
We cannot detect other dimensions or metaphysical entities with our five senses and devices that enhance our five senses. However this does not mean they do not exist. All this means is that we do not have evidence that supports their existence at this time, and for all practical (non-scientific-and/or-technical) purposes, we can act like they do not exist.
Edit1:{If it exists, it is real.
Existence and reality are two different words for the same concept in science. In casual, everyday life, reality is a term for what we can perceive (with our senses).}
Edit2: Today, I have heard the term "Trinity" in relation to Christianity. I do not know what that means. And I used to call myself a Christian a long time ago.
For the past several months I have been a "fence sitter." I now have a term to describe what I am. "Agnostic." Technically, however, I am not an Agnostic. Though I accept the fact that we do not have evidence that proves or disproves the existence of God, I do not know whether I should believe in God or not, considering the fact that pretty much everyone around me is a Christian. Upbringing has a significant influence on people. Like me. Sometimes it's hard to let go. Especially when you consider "just in case" situations.
EDIT3: Nuke, is your real first name "Vlad" by any chance?
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Today, I have heard the term "Trinity" in relation to Christianity. I do not know what that means. And I used to call myself a Christian a long time ago.
God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
It's pretty hard to make any kind of claim that relationship between them isn't important to Christianity. :p
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That shows you how much of a christian I was. :ick:
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Consciousness itself cannot be described using math or fundamental principles.
chaos theory is your friend.
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My, how my little tangent has grown! :D
If X interacts with reality, it is real (ie. exists on the same level as with the things it interacts with).
1st Corollary: If something interacts with reality, it can be measured in some way.
2nd Corollary: Things that do not interact with reality in any way are completely irrelevant.
Hence, everything that exists, exists. And everything that exists is real and natural. Supernatural is by definition something beyond nature, ie. does not interact with reality and is therefore irrelevant.
I approve of this :yes:
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Watisname, you can detect neutrinos by getting them to collide with hydrogen in water, causing a flash. You gain knowledge of their existence by sensory means.
That was exactly the point I was making, good job. Now you've expanded your description of sensory means from the five senses you used originally.
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.....Woman is sacred. :nervous:
EDIT: I had to go to a funeral today. I don't see why I had to go. My mom said I was related to... whoever that guy was. I didn't know him personally. I don't like churches. Whenever I go in one I feel like I'm not supposed to be there. My heart starts to race, and it stays accelerated pretty much the whole time. I dislike the singing/hymns. I used to be a Baptist when I was a weeee liiiiiiittel kid. I had never seen those "choir robes" before except on TV/CNN whenever they showed Catholic... stuff. So when I walked in there and saw those robes, lights started going of in my head, going, CATHOLIC! CATHOLIC! CATHOLIC! But I knew the Church was Methodist. But a connection had been made. Ad I still felt like I did not belong, regardless.
I feel like an oddball whenever they make us stand up to sing because I don't know the hymns and I think they suck anyway. And all this stuff about Jesus. If God is a benevolent god, then why should you have to go to Him through Jesus? Shouldn't he accept all good people? Shouldn't it be about what kind of person you are and what you do instead of what you believe? Or is it only in the court of Man that you are judged by your actions?
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You already know the answers to those questions.
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And all this stuff about Jesus. If God is a benevolent god, then why should you have to go to Him through Jesus? Shouldn't he accept all good people? Shouldn't it be about what kind of person you are and what you do instead of what you believe? Or is it only in the court of Man that you are judged by your actions?
There are far more troublesome things in soteriology than that.
Like, you know, why the whole thing with incarnated aspect of God was required to die by slowly suffocating in a horrifyingly agonizing manner and how that act of brutality is supposed to abolish us of our sins simply if we believe so.
Even if I believed in the divine as a concept I wouldn't buy that. At all. Of course that bit is among the more lucid parts of the things credited to the same being. My personal top 10 WTF moments in Judao-Christian scripture include, in not any particular order:
0. Creating the Universe (This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move)
1. Creating a species of sociopaths without ability to separate Good from Evil.
2. Banishing said species into life of suffering and perpetual sin because of half illegitimately, half by accident gaining said knowledge due to actions of a snake, while "condemning" the snake to the fate of forever crawling on the ground on its belly (one must ask, what kind of snake was this if it did not already crawl on the ground on its belly).
3. Banishing a good portion of rebellious staff members along with their leader (previously God's second-in-command, Lucifer) in a War in Heaven.
4. -Flooding the entire world because
A) humanity was being uppity about behaving like God wanted and
B) the rebels cast out of heaven (Grigori, or Watchers, or Fallen Angels) had mingled with humans and produced hybrid offspring (Nephilim)
...and saving supposedly one human family (inbreeding and incest never seemed to be much of an issue in God's eyes) along with a single pair of all the other non-aquatic animals on Earth, and afterwards forming a covenant with remaining humanity to never do it again (and introducing a new physics feature, light refraction, to make rainbows happen)
5. Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (the method was actually quite awesome, but the reasons for it were not)
6. Trolling Abraham to almost slaughter his heir as a ritual sacrifice (which raises the question, how often did people sacrifice humans to God at this point anyway...)
7. Sending his Chosen People to Egypt (to save them from a famine that, arguably, God could have prevented, with full knowledge that they would be "enslaved" in there few centuries afterwards
8. Getting his Chosen People out of Egypt only to send them to a "Promised Land" already inhabited by other people (who, of course, were to be driven away or destroyed because they were not God's chosen people. The question arises, wouldn't there have been room for everyone, and what was so special about the "Promised Land". Also during this operation Exodus, he decided it would be a good idea to give his Chosen People a huge set of more or less arbitrary and nonsensical rules for his Chosen People to obey, without explanations or room for questioning them
9. After a few thousand years of sinful humans having to determine the fate of their souls presumably by their actions in life, God probably got fed up that people still weren't meeting his standards and decided to divide himself up into three parts, one of which he sent to be incarnated as a human, with a plan to suffer an excruciating death (which I consider to be a huge dick move since the primary personality of God wasn't really involved in the suffering, only the Son part did that allegedly) as part of God's plan to salvage the souls of the damned. Or something.
10. Finally, the alleged plan for the end of the world as relayed through vivid hallucinations probably triggered by some psychoactive substances: Apparently, God has imprisoned a mighty monster in another plane of existence (some sources claim this to be the cast-out Lucifer in a form of Dragon, some call it Leviathan, some call it Satan or the Devil, and it should be noted that equating Lucifer as the Devil is not necessarily the only interpretation though it tends to be the most common these days), from which it will eventually escape and conquer the world for some time, before Jesus returns to Earth to liberate it from the monster's iron grip, only for the world to end with all deceased persons suddenly coming to life again, which would pretty much be a zombie apocalypse...
/me puts on sunglasses
...of biblical proportions.
(http://i54.tinypic.com/2vum2he.png)
YEEEAAAHHHHHHH
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i kinda like where this is going.
And very well played Herra. :)
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0. Creating the Universe (This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move)
Ahem - credit where credit is due, good sir.
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i still believe that, if god exists, it is mankind's collective duty to depose him.
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Not to rain on a tiny portion of Herra's fun little Biblical literalist romp, but the doctrine of the Trinity traditionally states that the three persons of God remain one in nature, so it was God's true personhood suffering on that cross. In addition, the persons of the Trinity are held to be equally eternal, so it's not some matter of God snapping his fingers and cutting off a slice of Jesus (boy that's a fun image) to head to Earth. Do carry on with the sunglasses, though. :p
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Not to rain on a tiny portion of Herra's fun little Biblical literalist romp, but the doctrine of the Trinity traditionally states that the three persons of God remain one in nature
True for Catholicism, but not for all other Christian denominations. A number of Protestant branches do not recognize the Catholic version of the Trinity.
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Watisname, you can detect neutrinos by getting them to collide with hydrogen in water, causing a flash. You gain knowledge of their existence by sensory means.
That was exactly the point I was making, good job. Now you've expanded your description of sensory means from the five senses you used originally.
You see the flash by sight. Use of one of the five senses is still required.
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Not to rain on a tiny portion of Herra's fun little Biblical literalist romp, but the doctrine of the Trinity traditionally states that the three persons of God remain one in nature, so it was God's true personhood suffering on that cross. In addition, the persons of the Trinity are held to be equally eternal, so it's not some matter of God snapping his fingers and cutting off a slice of Jesus (boy that's a fun image) to head to Earth. Do carry on with the sunglasses, though. :p
still i dont view this kinda thing as an actual sacrifice for the people and their sins. for an immortal entity which by definition can not die, such a torturous demise would actually produce some form of entertainment from the otherwise monotonous existence of an immortal, sorta like a cosmic pain fetish or something. how does the immortal offspring of an immortal being getting his jollies from a little bit of mortal torture-murder help save us from evil and make us immortal?
it makes more sense that hey-sus is just your typical cult leader in it for the power of having people worship everything that they say and do and embellish the **** out of it to bring in others into their fold. this demotes hey-sus and his followers from son of god and his disciples to a zeroth century charlie manson and his family. way i see it its just another group of hippies of another empire, protesting the establishment, taking hallucinogenic substances, questioning authority and so on. look how many cults were formed back around the 60s (for example, the church of satan). apply the same thing on a superstitious roman era population and the effect is multiplied.
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Not to rain on a tiny portion of Herra's fun little Biblical literalist romp, but the doctrine of the Trinity traditionally states that the three persons of God remain one in nature
True for Catholicism, but not for all other Christian denominations. A number of Protestant branches do not recognize the Catholic version of the Trinity.
Hey, don't look at me, they were the ones who decided to nail a paper to the door and change the rules just because. :p
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Watisname, you can detect neutrinos by getting them to collide with hydrogen in water, causing a flash. You gain knowledge of their existence by sensory means.
That was exactly the point I was making, good job. Now you've expanded your description of sensory means from the five senses you used originally.
You see the flash by sight. Use of one of the five senses is still required.
Sure, this is valid if we consider any form detection of EM waves, despite the type of detector, as an extension of one of our five senses, namely vision. However, if we go with that then what makes thought any different? Despite our limited understanding of the details of cognition, we can decipher quite a lot about thought through the use of fMRI and the like.
There is also still the option of defining 'what is real' to be anything that can affect or be affected by other things in detectable ways. Herra mentioned this, too. This definition is nice because it works for neutrinos just as much as it does for thought, and it also provides an effective criterion for determining if various 'supernatural' phenomenon are 'real' or not.
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Not to rain on a tiny portion of Herra's fun little Biblical literalist romp...
Biblical literalism considers all that is said in the Bible to be an accurate and exact description of what happened. I don't think that is sensible in any context. Thus my critique is more of the events themselves rather than how they were supposedly achieved.
Note that I intentionally skipped all the objections about how something (seemingly impossible) was done - such as packing all the land animals in a single ark, a patent impossibility in itself - and tried to concentrate more on the reasons God supposedly had for doing all these things. The Flood is another impossibility, but I'm willing to assume that it just happened, and inspect the effects it had, and why it was done, and I find it unacceptable with these merits alone.
The how is but a function following the what, and what God did in most of these cases is either inexcusably cruel, or plain acts of a madman.
And yeah, I am aware that now someone will bring up God's superior morality and claiming whatever God does is automatically good and right by definition of being an act of god. To which I reply with a slightly modified quote from a source you should by all means recognize (if not, look it up):
"You've made yourself judge, jury, and if necessary executioner. By what right have you appointed yourself to this position?"
"Superior morality."
"Yes. I recall how you used your superior morality when we first encountered you. You put us on trial for the crimes of humanity."
"The jury is still out on that, make no mistake."
"Your arrogant pretence at being the moral guardian of the universe strikes me as being hollow, God. I see no evidence that you are guided by a superior moral code, or any code whatsoever. You may be nearly omnipotent, and I don't deny that your parlour tricks are very impressive, but morality? I don't see it. I don't acknowledge it, God. I would put human morality against the God's any day. And perhaps that's the reason that we fascinate you so. Because our puny behaviour shows you a glimmer of the one thing that evades your omnipotence, a moral centre."
...but the doctrine of the Trinity traditionally states that the three persons of God remain one in nature, so it was God's true personhood suffering on that cross. In addition, the persons of the Trinity are held to be equally eternal, so it's not some matter of God snapping his fingers and cutting off a slice of Jesus (boy that's a fun image) to head to Earth. Do carry on with the sunglasses, though. :p
Well, the fact of the matter is that first mentions of Father, Son and Holy Spirit come into the scripture comparatively late and by that time God had multiple times referred to himself simply as "I Am" (sounds familiar with pantheistic overconsciousness to me, but other aspects of this particular God sort of speak against that interpretation). No mention about existing in specifically three different aspects, but a singular entity that just is.
Moreover, Jesus didn't seem to think so, as he directed his thoughts in spoken form to his Father multiple times according to the written record (however dubious): Most well known (and, IMHO, most important) would be these I guess (not literal, but CBA to look up the exact verses):
1. Father, if it's possible, take this burden away from me.
2. Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.
3. Father, Father, why have you forsaken me?*
At the very least, it seems apparent that Jesus was speaking to a separate personality who consciously chose to remain separate from the entity sent to Earth, thus avoiding the actual experience. It's possible that they merged again after Jesus was airlifted to heavens above, but then it remains a question why the whole concept of trinity is still valid in any way (more valid would be to consider that God can take any form it wishes - sometimes I wonder why Burning Bush is not counted among the apparitions of God, but I guess trinity sound a lot better as a word than quaternity. Also Burning Bush sort of breaks the litany... In the name of Father, Son, Holy Spirit and Burning Bush doesn't sound nearly as convincing as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
One thing should be said about christianity - it's makers really knew their show business inside out. As a people management exercise it is a rather impressive one - from an obscure cult to the biggest (albeit fractured) religion in the Earth in less than 2000 years? It is an impressive feat, no matter what my personal thoughts about the content of said religion are.
Too bad they basically chose to use their power over people to dominate, oppress and condemn them rather than just giving nonjudgmental guidance. And meddling with secular power is something no religion should ever do, it tends to ruin the whole concept.
*I know quite well it's a direct quote from earlier book, but I think it is still relevant to consider Jesus meant just what he said rather than simply making an obscure reference to earlier scripture.
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One thing should be said about christianity - it's makers really knew their show business inside out. As a people management exercise it is a rather impressive one - from an obscure cult to the biggest (albeit fractured) religion in the Earth in less than 2000 years? It is an impressive feat, no matter what my personal thoughts about the content of said religion are.
That might just mostly be because of the Roman influences. Chrstianity was adapted for the Roman Empire by Constantine.
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i always considered christianity to be the last ditch attempt to save the roman empire from decay and its inevitable collapse. we all know how that turned out.
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i always considered christianity to be the last ditch attempt to save the roman empire from decay and its inevitable collapse. we all know how that turned out.
I'm also inclined to believe that whatever Constantine's personal beliefs were, the adoption of Christianity as state belief was done primarily for political reasons. He may have been a legit believer, but he was first and foremost a statesman. I suspect he wanted to install empire-wide unified clergy, and he just happened to have convenient ties to a relatively new religion; his mother was a christian. Constantine himself was only baptized shortly before his death, though he did advertise himself as a christian.
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Did Herra just quoted TNG as an argument here? roflmao
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The part about Christianity that compells me the most nowadays is that you could easily rip off "Genesis" and use it to write a cool transhumanist sci-fi novel...
... you know... all that forbidden knowledge (creating AIs/superintelligences?) and being thrown out of Eden (the real universe?) crap ;)
If processing power really would become so ubiquitous to allow the simulation of entire civilizations then the notion of a "Dickhead" God "just messing around" and "losing interest later" suddenly also becomes plausible - if not in our Universe then certainly in the ones we may eventually create ourselves once we reach our technological singularity event.
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Yeah Mikes, I wouldn't mind you derailing the current conversation towards that stuff. Very intriguing as a concept really.
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Did Herra just quoted TNG as an argument here? roflmao
Yes
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The part about Christianity that compells me the most nowadays is that you could easily rip off "Genesis" and use it to write a cool transhumanist sci-fi novel...
... you know... all that forbidden knowledge (creating AIs/superintelligences?) and being thrown out of Eden (the real universe?) crap ;)
If processing power really would become so ubiquitous to allow the simulation of entire civilizations then the notion of a "Dickhead" God "just messing around" and "losing interest later" suddenly also becomes plausible - if not in our Universe then certainly in the ones we may eventually create ourselves once we reach our technological singularity event.
There's a reason why one of the nicknames of the Singularity concept is "Rapture of the Nerds".
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There's a reason why one of the nicknames of the Singularity concept is "Rapture of the Nerds".
Under the assumption that there won't be any hard limits to technological progress it's also a somewhat plausible outcome.
(Course "plausible" may turn out to be as plausible as spaceflight by aiming a cannon at the moon.)
I wonder if any theologian ever pondered how God - assuming he exists - would deal with a post singularity civilization. Considering the trouble he supposedly had with a single tribe of pesky humans early on, he may be a little out of his depth. ;) Especially if it turns out the universe was a birthday present from his parents...
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Not to rain on a tiny portion of Herra's fun little Biblical literalist romp, but the doctrine of the Trinity traditionally states that the three persons of God remain one in nature
True for Catholicism, but not for all other Christian denominations. A number of Protestant branches do not recognize the Catholic version of the Trinity.
I was always taught that Jesus and God were not the same and that Jesus was the Son of God. Two totally separate things. Jesus =/= Incarnation of God. All that **** is Catholic junk.
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Watisname, you can detect neutrinos by getting them to collide with hydrogen in water, causing a flash. You gain knowledge of their existence by sensory means.
That was exactly the point I was making, good job. Now you've expanded your description of sensory means from the five senses you used originally.
You see the flash by sight. Use of one of the five senses is still required.
Sure, this is valid if we consider any form detection of EM waves, despite the type of detector, as an extension of one of our five senses, namely vision. However, if we go with that then what makes thought any different? Despite our limited understanding of the details of cognition, we can decipher quite a lot about thought through the use of fMRI and the like.
There is also still the option of defining 'what is real' to be anything that can affect or be affected by other things in detectable ways. Herra mentioned this, too. This definition is nice because it works for neutrinos just as much as it does for thought, and it also provides an effective criterion for determining if various 'supernatural' phenomenon are 'real' or not.
So you are designating the production of thoughts in the mind, be they images, recalls, or abstract, as falling under the category of something that is "sensed". A sixth sense, apparently. I am challenging this. At least on a surface level, thoughts cannot be classified as sensory data. Any material object, no matter how far removed from ordinary experience, still has to involve some use of the five senses to be detected. UV light can be sensed by looking at photographic plate, or by feeling the affect of a sunburn, but still one of the five is involved regardless. Can you say the same for thoughts? The very obvious answer is no. You need a better argument to convince me otherwise.
And as for the correlation argument you use with MRI scans, that the scans correlate with thought is irrelevant. That they correlate does not mean that they are the same. I do not understand why you place senses on a pedastal, and ignore internal thoughts, when they are equally real. Even an ultra empiricist like Hume criticized correlation arguments.
And I never used the word supernatural.
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No, it isn't. It makes "total skepticism" possible, but this possibility is also meaningless to me, since I was never interested in the "absolute truth" in the first place. We live in our empirical reality and we form our theories in this world, about it and nothing else.
Like it or not, not everyone is an instrumentalist or pragmatist, and those who aren't, aren't all as stupid and delusional as you make them out to be.
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No, it isn't. It makes "total skepticism" possible, but this possibility is also meaningless to me, since I was never interested in the "absolute truth" in the first place. We live in our empirical reality and we form our theories in this world, about it and nothing else.
Like it or not, not everyone is an instrumentalist or pragmatist, and those who aren't, aren't all as stupid and delusional as you make them out to be.
Idealism is great. I love it. I love the sheer chaos that it usually brings, the smell of revolution in the morning.
Yet, all that is poetry in action. If you are willing to concede that God is a poetic character, then we will be alright. If however you are on to proclaim the truth of his existence as a fact, as something that even trasncends reality as we are here describing it, I must say that you are indeed delusional, although not stupid (since I've seen amazingly intelligent people falling into the same trap, it mustn't be a question of intelligence).
To me God has always been a teleological moral dream, like the ultimate muse. It need not to exist in any other place than in men's hearts as a "call". It's the ultimate romantical figure that "saves us" from our "materialistic doom", from death. It tries to do this by inspiring a supernatural way of thinking. A way of thinking that trasncends the egotistical genes and the "fake" altruism that abounds in us.
It is a revolutionary way of thinking. And I don't mind that bit at all. Like I said, I love idealism, it shatters the world and crushes all status quos.
For instance, I myself am an idealistic anti-theist. I really do believe that we cannot base our romantic bursts with bronze age myths with its obsolete moralities and barbaric tropes, and what I see in the middle east happening with the population, specially the women and the kids is like a punch to the stomach. I hate it. With all my heart.
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Herra, I'd try banging out a response to you, since I think you're going off on a few wrong tangents with some of the points you made, at least when viewed in light of how traditional Christian doctrine treats them, but I can't say I'm really in a mood to do so. It's much more fun to keep sitting back and munching popcorn at where this is going, anyway. :p
(But just for the sake of doing so, the "burning bush" was never viewed as some distinct person of God, in the same way that the Trinity represents that. Instead, you could more properly view it as God manifesting himself in some physical form to Moses. This happens multiple times in the Bible; the Holy Spirit is traditionally associated with a roaring wind and "tongues of fire," so it's very similar imagery.)
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Watisname, you can detect neutrinos by getting them to collide with hydrogen in water, causing a flash. You gain knowledge of their existence by sensory means.
That was exactly the point I was making, good job. Now you've expanded your description of sensory means from the five senses you used originally.
You see the flash by sight. Use of one of the five senses is still required.
Sure, this is valid if we consider any form detection of EM waves, despite the type of detector, as an extension of one of our five senses, namely vision. However, if we go with that then what makes thought any different? Despite our limited understanding of the details of cognition, we can decipher quite a lot about thought through the use of fMRI and the like.
There is also still the option of defining 'what is real' to be anything that can affect or be affected by other things in detectable ways. Herra mentioned this, too. This definition is nice because it works for neutrinos just as much as it does for thought, and it also provides an effective criterion for determining if various 'supernatural' phenomenon are 'real' or not.
So you are designating the production of thoughts in the mind, be they images, recalls, or abstract, as falling under the category of something that is "sensed". A sixth sense, apparently. I am challenging this. At least on a surface level, thoughts cannot be classified as sensory data. Any material object, no matter how far removed from ordinary experience, still has to involve some use of the five senses to be detected. UV light can be sensed by looking at photographic plate, or by feeling the affect of a sunburn, but still one of the five is involved regardless. Can you say the same for thoughts? The very obvious answer is no. You need a better argument to convince me otherwise.
And as for the correlation argument you use with MRI scans, that the scans correlate with thought is irrelevant. That they correlate does not mean that they are the same. I do not understand why you place senses on a pedastal, and ignore internal thoughts, when they are equally real. Even an ultra empiricist like Hume criticized correlation arguments.
And I never used the word supernatural.
By that logic quantum particles don't exist for you either... I guess. I mean, brain activity is actually measurable... while several quantum particles exist in theory, but can not be reliably measured at all lol.
Seriously... measuring brain activity isn't even the bleeding edge anymore as far as physics go... I mean heck... we're already seeing the first gadgets that can be controlled by concentrated thought.... so with respect.... uh: Pfffffft!? ;)
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No, it isn't. It makes "total skepticism" possible, but this possibility is also meaningless to me, since I was never interested in the "absolute truth" in the first place. We live in our empirical reality and we form our theories in this world, about it and nothing else.
Like it or not, not everyone is an instrumentalist or pragmatist, and those who aren't, aren't all as stupid and delusional as you make them out to be.
Idealism is great. I love it. I love the sheer chaos that it usually brings, the smell of revolution in the morning.
Yet, all that is poetry in action. If you are willing to concede that God is a poetic character, then we will be alright. If however you are on to proclaim the truth of his existence as a fact, as something that even trasncends reality as we are here describing it, I must say that you are indeed delusional, although not stupid (since I've seen amazingly intelligent people falling into the same trap, it mustn't be a question of intelligence).
To me God has always been a teleological moral dream, like the ultimate muse. It need not to exist in any other place than in men's hearts as a "call". It's the ultimate romantical figure that "saves us" from our "materialistic doom", from death. It tries to do this by inspiring a supernatural way of thinking. A way of thinking that trasncends the egotistical genes and the "fake" altruism that abounds in us.
It is a revolutionary way of thinking. And I don't mind that bit at all. Like I said, I love idealism, it shatters the world and crushes all status quos.
For instance, I myself am an idealistic anti-theist. I really do believe that we cannot base our romantic bursts with bronze age myths with its obsolete moralities and barbaric tropes, and what I see in the middle east happening with the population, specially the women and the kids is like a punch to the stomach. I hate it. With all my heart.
I am not referring to idealism. I am referring to scientific realism. The belief that the fact that the sun has come up every day at a set interval depending on the season for a very long time means that you can be absolutely certain that it will continue to do so (after taking into account like the earth's slowing rotation and the like). That true knowledge is possible, that a theory need not be an approximation. As in, anti-total-skepticism. I wasn't referring to God or that all's right in the world. That's that strawmaning I talked about. Like I said, I am an atheist (certainly in regards to the idea of God taking on personal characteristics). I am also not a materialist or an empiricist. The anti-god arguments you all throw out are born from radical empiricism, the kind Hume advocated. I think these arguments are bad ones. I agree with one particular conclusion of yours, just not the reasoning that led you there.
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Watisname, you can detect neutrinos by getting them to collide with hydrogen in water, causing a flash. You gain knowledge of their existence by sensory means.
That was exactly the point I was making, good job. Now you've expanded your description of sensory means from the five senses you used originally.
You see the flash by sight. Use of one of the five senses is still required.
Sure, this is valid if we consider any form detection of EM waves, despite the type of detector, as an extension of one of our five senses, namely vision. However, if we go with that then what makes thought any different? Despite our limited understanding of the details of cognition, we can decipher quite a lot about thought through the use of fMRI and the like.
There is also still the option of defining 'what is real' to be anything that can affect or be affected by other things in detectable ways. Herra mentioned this, too. This definition is nice because it works for neutrinos just as much as it does for thought, and it also provides an effective criterion for determining if various 'supernatural' phenomenon are 'real' or not.
So you are designating the production of thoughts in the mind, be they images, recalls, or abstract, as falling under the category of something that is "sensed". A sixth sense, apparently. I am challenging this. At least on a surface level, thoughts cannot be classified as sensory data. Any material object, no matter how far removed from ordinary experience, still has to involve some use of the five senses to be detected. UV light can be sensed by looking at photographic plate, or by feeling the affect of a sunburn, but still one of the five is involved regardless. Can you say the same for thoughts? The very obvious answer is no. You need a better argument to convince me otherwise.
And as for the correlation argument you use with MRI scans, that the scans correlate with thought is irrelevant. That they correlate does not mean that they are the same. I do not understand why you place senses on a pedastal, and ignore internal thoughts, when they are equally real. Even an ultra empiricist like Hume criticized correlation arguments.
And I never used the word supernatural.
By that logic quantum particles don't exist for you either... I guess. I mean, brain activity is actually measurable... while several quantum particles exist in theory, but can not be reliably measured at all lol.
Seriously... measuring brain activity isn't even the bleeding edge anymore as far as physics go... I mean heck... we're already seeing the first gadgets that can be controlled by concentrated thought.... so with respect.... uh: Pfffffft!? ;)
I just said that there IS a correlation between thought and brain activity. Are you all completely incapable of representing my position correctly? Correlation does not even imply causation, let alone that the activity and the thought are one in the same, let alone that you can it's even possible to reduce the thought (if I have to use the term thing in itself, I will) to sensory data anyway. That there is interaction does not prove materialism. It might prove monism, but not materialism.
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(But just for the sake of doing so, the "burning bush" was never viewed as some distinct person of God, in the same way that the Trinity represents that. Instead, you could more properly view it as God manifesting himself in some physical form to Moses. This happens multiple times in the Bible; the Holy Spirit is traditionally associated with a roaring wind and "tongues of fire," so it's very similar imagery.)
moses was quite fond of hallucinogenic plants. the burning bush is supposedly one of these plants. moses was quite high when he wrote the 10 commandments.
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Watisname, you can detect neutrinos by getting them to collide with hydrogen in water, causing a flash. You gain knowledge of their existence by sensory means.
That was exactly the point I was making, good job. Now you've expanded your description of sensory means from the five senses you used originally.
You see the flash by sight. Use of one of the five senses is still required.
Sure, this is valid if we consider any form detection of EM waves, despite the type of detector, as an extension of one of our five senses, namely vision. However, if we go with that then what makes thought any different? Despite our limited understanding of the details of cognition, we can decipher quite a lot about thought through the use of fMRI and the like.
There is also still the option of defining 'what is real' to be anything that can affect or be affected by other things in detectable ways. Herra mentioned this, too. This definition is nice because it works for neutrinos just as much as it does for thought, and it also provides an effective criterion for determining if various 'supernatural' phenomenon are 'real' or not.
So you are designating the production of thoughts in the mind, be they images, recalls, or abstract, as falling under the category of something that is "sensed". A sixth sense, apparently. I am challenging this. At least on a surface level, thoughts cannot be classified as sensory data. Any material object, no matter how far removed from ordinary experience, still has to involve some use of the five senses to be detected. UV light can be sensed by looking at photographic plate, or by feeling the affect of a sunburn, but still one of the five is involved regardless. Can you say the same for thoughts? The very obvious answer is no. You need a better argument to convince me otherwise.
And as for the correlation argument you use with MRI scans, that the scans correlate with thought is irrelevant. That they correlate does not mean that they are the same. I do not understand why you place senses on a pedastal, and ignore internal thoughts, when they are equally real. Even an ultra empiricist like Hume criticized correlation arguments.
And I never used the word supernatural.
By that logic quantum particles don't exist for you either... I guess. I mean, brain activity is actually measurable... while several quantum particles exist in theory, but can not be reliably measured at all lol.
Seriously... measuring brain activity isn't even the bleeding edge anymore as far as physics go... I mean heck... we're already seeing the first gadgets that can be controlled by concentrated thought.... so with respect.... uh: Pfffffft!? ;)
I just said that there IS a correlation between thought and brain activity. Are you all completely incapable of representing my position correctly? Correlation does not even imply causation, let alone that the activity and the thought are one in the same, let alone that you can it's even possible to reduce the thought (if I have to use the term thing in itself, I will) to sensory data anyway. That there is interaction does not prove materialism. It might prove monism, but not materialism.
There are a lot of studies linking parts of the brain with various processes, like memory, emotions, sensory input, muscle output, reasoning, language, you name it. Since every one of these influences thought, I would assume it would be a natural phenomenon and so measurable.
Can you describe what you mean by thought in more detail?
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The thought itself. What you are thinking right now in your head. You are aware of these thoughts without having to sense them. Scientific theory, which is all about sensory analysis, direct and indirect, can explain everything except the existence of these thoughts, because they appear to fall outside the senses. So the goal is to somehow explain thinking as something that is actually sensed after all (which smacks of behaviorism), or reduce sensory information to a special kind of thought, or accept mind-body dualism.
Also, it don't think it was glue. Sorry.
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Here we go again, to the core of the woo. This is, I should say, the nth discussion about woo in consciousness that I have in the internetz tbh, and in every single one of them, there's always the amazed one about the very glorious magic zero-point of "awareness!". To go to the damned path of dualism reeks of some lack of self-discipline in the thinking about this theme, I am afraid. Perhaps as an introductionary lecture, I'd advise you mr. Daniel Dennett, who has some good videos on the issue. Perhaps starting with this one, which is rather witty in general, about consciousness and that magical spot within it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48ol4sHasA8&feature=gv
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You can brand it woo or a delusion, but you can't make it go away. And your understanding of sensory analysis is dependent on the woo. And as for his video, that our minds form additional patterns from sensory input according to loosely set rules isn't much of a hammer blow against consciousness.
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So the goal is to somehow explain thinking as something that is actually sensed after all (which smacks of behaviorism), or reduce sensory information to a special kind of thought, or accept mind-body dualism.
I'ma go with the first/second one. Neurons transmit sensory information to the brain, and the neurons in the brain make us think.
No, it doesn't explain why I feel like a viewer in the control center for my body... but as far as I am concerned, nothing useful will come out of trying to understand that.
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No, it isn't. It makes "total skepticism" possible, but this possibility is also meaningless to me, since I was never interested in the "absolute truth" in the first place. We live in our empirical reality and we form our theories in this world, about it and nothing else.
Like it or not, not everyone is an instrumentalist or pragmatist, and those who aren't, aren't all as stupid and delusional as you make them out to be.
Idealism is great. I love it. I love the sheer chaos that it usually brings, the smell of revolution in the morning.
Yet, all that is poetry in action. If you are willing to concede that God is a poetic character, then we will be alright. If however you are on to proclaim the truth of his existence as a fact, as something that even trasncends reality as we are here describing it, I must say that you are indeed delusional, although not stupid (since I've seen amazingly intelligent people falling into the same trap, it mustn't be a question of intelligence).
To me God has always been a teleological moral dream, like the ultimate muse. It need not to exist in any other place than in men's hearts as a "call". It's the ultimate romantical figure that "saves us" from our "materialistic doom", from death. It tries to do this by inspiring a supernatural way of thinking. A way of thinking that trasncends the egotistical genes and the "fake" altruism that abounds in us.
It is a revolutionary way of thinking. And I don't mind that bit at all. Like I said, I love idealism, it shatters the world and crushes all status quos.
For instance, I myself am an idealistic anti-theist. I really do believe that we cannot base our romantic bursts with bronze age myths with its obsolete moralities and barbaric tropes, and what I see in the middle east happening with the population, specially the women and the kids is like a punch to the stomach. I hate it. With all my heart.
I am not referring to idealism. I am referring to scientific realism. The belief that the fact that the sun has come up every day at a set interval depending on the season for a very long time means that you can be absolutely certain that it will continue to do so (after taking into account like the earth's slowing rotation and the like). That true knowledge is possible, that a theory need not be an approximation. As in, anti-total-skepticism. I wasn't referring to God or that all's right in the world. That's that strawmaning I talked about. Like I said, I am an atheist (certainly in regards to the idea of God taking on personal characteristics). I am also not a materialist or an empiricist. The anti-god arguments you all throw out are born from radical empiricism, the kind Hume advocated. I think these arguments are bad ones. I agree with one particular conclusion of yours, just not the reasoning that led you there.
Watisname, you can detect neutrinos by getting them to collide with hydrogen in water, causing a flash. You gain knowledge of their existence by sensory means.
That was exactly the point I was making, good job. Now you've expanded your description of sensory means from the five senses you used originally.
You see the flash by sight. Use of one of the five senses is still required.
Sure, this is valid if we consider any form detection of EM waves, despite the type of detector, as an extension of one of our five senses, namely vision. However, if we go with that then what makes thought any different? Despite our limited understanding of the details of cognition, we can decipher quite a lot about thought through the use of fMRI and the like.
There is also still the option of defining 'what is real' to be anything that can affect or be affected by other things in detectable ways. Herra mentioned this, too. This definition is nice because it works for neutrinos just as much as it does for thought, and it also provides an effective criterion for determining if various 'supernatural' phenomenon are 'real' or not.
So you are designating the production of thoughts in the mind, be they images, recalls, or abstract, as falling under the category of something that is "sensed". A sixth sense, apparently. I am challenging this. At least on a surface level, thoughts cannot be classified as sensory data. Any material object, no matter how far removed from ordinary experience, still has to involve some use of the five senses to be detected. UV light can be sensed by looking at photographic plate, or by feeling the affect of a sunburn, but still one of the five is involved regardless. Can you say the same for thoughts? The very obvious answer is no. You need a better argument to convince me otherwise.
And as for the correlation argument you use with MRI scans, that the scans correlate with thought is irrelevant. That they correlate does not mean that they are the same. I do not understand why you place senses on a pedastal, and ignore internal thoughts, when they are equally real. Even an ultra empiricist like Hume criticized correlation arguments.
And I never used the word supernatural.
By that logic quantum particles don't exist for you either... I guess. I mean, brain activity is actually measurable... while several quantum particles exist in theory, but can not be reliably measured at all lol.
Seriously... measuring brain activity isn't even the bleeding edge anymore as far as physics go... I mean heck... we're already seeing the first gadgets that can be controlled by concentrated thought.... so with respect.... uh: Pfffffft!? ;)
I just said that there IS a correlation between thought and brain activity. Are you all completely incapable of representing my position correctly? Correlation does not even imply causation, let alone that the activity and the thought are one in the same, let alone that you can it's even possible to reduce the thought (if I have to use the term thing in itself, I will) to sensory data anyway. That there is interaction does not prove materialism. It might prove monism, but not materialism.
Correlation surely implies causation, in absence of credible alternative explanations (compatible with Occams Razor), and in the absence of evidence to the contrary. In fact, when you think about it, all we can observe in the world are correlations. So while correlation does not prove causation with 100% certainty (nothing can be proven with 100% certainty), it sure is a good hint.
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For ****'s sake! You guy's need to learn how to quote properly. :p
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I find the black hole of unintelligible rhetoric quite fitting for this thread. :P
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once again another page of unintelligible gibberish.
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You can brand it woo or a delusion, but you can't make it go away.
Indeed not. For instance, people still believe in astrology while having an university degree.
These kinds of things will never go away.
And your understanding of sensory analysis is dependent on the woo.
As much as you'd like that to be true, it isn't. I don't need the "woo", just empirical questioning, experimentation, lots and lots and lots of work. Eventually, we will have a good theory about consciousness. And people won't like it.
And as for his video, that our minds form additional patterns from sensory input according to loosely set rules isn't much of a hammer blow against consciousness.
Ah, so you haven't seen the video entirely, coz you just missed the entire thesis of it. That's ok, you skimmed and you didn't like it, just don't pretend you have seen it because it's obvious you didn't. It's your loss anyway, and I don't really care that much since I don't even know you.
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once again another page of unintelligible gibberish.
Come on, there is no need to advertize your incapabilities so clearly... :D
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Eventually, we will have a good theory about consciousness.
I do believe you have just conceded defeat.
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No, it isn't. It makes "total skepticism" possible, but this possibility is also meaningless to me, since I was never interested in the "absolute truth" in the first place. We live in our empirical reality and we form our theories in this world, about it and nothing else.
Like it or not, not everyone is an instrumentalist or pragmatist, and those who aren't, aren't all as stupid and delusional as you make them out to be.
Idealism is great. I love it. I love the sheer chaos that it usually brings, the smell of revolution in the morning.
Yet, all that is poetry in action. If you are willing to concede that God is a poetic character, then we will be alright. If however you are on to proclaim the truth of his existence as a fact, as something that even trasncends reality as we are here describing it, I must say that you are indeed delusional, although not stupid (since I've seen amazingly intelligent people falling into the same trap, it mustn't be a question of intelligence).
To me God has always been a teleological moral dream, like the ultimate muse. It need not to exist in any other place than in men's hearts as a "call". It's the ultimate romantical figure that "saves us" from our "materialistic doom", from death. It tries to do this by inspiring a supernatural way of thinking. A way of thinking that trasncends the egotistical genes and the "fake" altruism that abounds in us.
It is a revolutionary way of thinking. And I don't mind that bit at all. Like I said, I love idealism, it shatters the world and crushes all status quos.
For instance, I myself am an idealistic anti-theist. I really do believe that we cannot base our romantic bursts with bronze age myths with its obsolete moralities and barbaric tropes, and what I see in the middle east happening with the population, specially the women and the kids is like a punch to the stomach. I hate it. With all my heart.
I am not referring to idealism. I am referring to scientific realism. The belief that the fact that the sun has come up every day at a set interval depending on the season for a very long time means that you can be absolutely certain that it will continue to do so (after taking into account like the earth's slowing rotation and the like). That true knowledge is possible, that a theory need not be an approximation. As in, anti-total-skepticism. I wasn't referring to God or that all's right in the world. That's that strawmaning I talked about. Like I said, I am an atheist (certainly in regards to the idea of God taking on personal characteristics). I am also not a materialist or an empiricist. The anti-god arguments you all throw out are born from radical empiricism, the kind Hume advocated. I think these arguments are bad ones. I agree with one particular conclusion of yours, just not the reasoning that led you there.
Watisname, you can detect neutrinos by getting them to collide with hydrogen in water, causing a flash. You gain knowledge of their existence by sensory means.
That was exactly the point I was making, good job. Now you've expanded your description of sensory means from the five senses you used originally.
You see the flash by sight. Use of one of the five senses is still required.
Sure, this is valid if we consider any form detection of EM waves, despite the type of detector, as an extension of one of our five senses, namely vision. However, if we go with that then what makes thought any different? Despite our limited understanding of the details of cognition, we can decipher quite a lot about thought through the use of fMRI and the like.
There is also still the option of defining 'what is real' to be anything that can affect or be affected by other things in detectable ways. Herra mentioned this, too. This definition is nice because it works for neutrinos just as much as it does for thought, and it also provides an effective criterion for determining if various 'supernatural' phenomenon are 'real' or not.
So you are designating the production of thoughts in the mind, be they images, recalls, or abstract, as falling under the category of something that is "sensed". A sixth sense, apparently. I am challenging this. At least on a surface level, thoughts cannot be classified as sensory data. Any material object, no matter how far removed from ordinary experience, still has to involve some use of the five senses to be detected. UV light can be sensed by looking at photographic plate, or by feeling the affect of a sunburn, but still one of the five is involved regardless. Can you say the same for thoughts? The very obvious answer is no. You need a better argument to convince me otherwise.
And as for the correlation argument you use with MRI scans, that the scans correlate with thought is irrelevant. That they correlate does not mean that they are the same. I do not understand why you place senses on a pedastal, and ignore internal thoughts, when they are equally real. Even an ultra empiricist like Hume criticized correlation arguments.
And I never used the word supernatural.
By that logic quantum particles don't exist for you either... I guess. I mean, brain activity is actually measurable... while several quantum particles exist in theory, but can not be reliably measured at all lol.
Seriously... measuring brain activity isn't even the bleeding edge anymore as far as physics go... I mean heck... we're already seeing the first gadgets that can be controlled by concentrated thought.... so with respect.... uh: Pfffffft!? ;)
I just said that there IS a correlation between thought and brain activity. Are you all completely incapable of representing my position correctly? Correlation does not even imply causation, let alone that the activity and the thought are one in the same, let alone that you can it's even possible to reduce the thought (if I have to use the term thing in itself, I will) to sensory data anyway. That there is interaction does not prove materialism. It might prove monism, but not materialism.
Correlation surely implies causation, in absence of credible alternative explanations (compatible with Occams Razor), and in the absence of evidence to the contrary. In fact, when you think about it, all we can observe in the world are correlations. So while correlation does not prove causation with 100% certainty (nothing can be proven with 100% certainty), it sure is a good hint.
epic quote muhahahahaha
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once again another page of unintelligible gibberish.
Come on, there is no need to advertize your incapabilities so clearly... :D
for me im more concerned about the lack of entertaining reading material than debate over crap that should have been figured out by the end of ones high school years. when you get into these damn exchanges, the thread gets really really really boring. lest drivel, more trolling pls.
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once again another page of unintelligible gibberish.
Come on, there is no need to advertize your incapabilities so clearly... :D
And there is no need to question why people call you a troll :D.
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once again another page of unintelligible gibberish.
Come on, there is no need to advertize your incapabilities so clearly... :D
And there is no need to question why people call you a troll :D.
*Sigh* I wish an0n were here...
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*Sigh* I wish an0n were here...
Second. He trolled with a purpose.
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No, it isn't. It makes "total skepticism" possible, but this possibility is also meaningless to me, since I was never interested in the "absolute truth" in the first place. We live in our empirical reality and we form our theories in this world, about it and nothing else.
Like it or not, not everyone is an instrumentalist or pragmatist, and those who aren't, aren't all as stupid and delusional as you make them out to be.
Idealism is great. I love it. I love the sheer chaos that it usually brings, the smell of revolution in the morning.
Yet, all that is poetry in action. If you are willing to concede that God is a poetic character, then we will be alright. If however you are on to proclaim the truth of his existence as a fact, as something that even trasncends reality as we are here describing it, I must say that you are indeed delusional, although not stupid (since I've seen amazingly intelligent people falling into the same trap, it mustn't be a question of intelligence).
To me God has always been a teleological moral dream, like the ultimate muse. It need not to exist in any other place than in men's hearts as a "call". It's the ultimate romantical figure that "saves us" from our "materialistic doom", from death. It tries to do this by inspiring a supernatural way of thinking. A way of thinking that trasncends the egotistical genes and the "fake" altruism that abounds in us.
It is a revolutionary way of thinking. And I don't mind that bit at all. Like I said, I love idealism, it shatters the world and crushes all status quos.
For instance, I myself am an idealistic anti-theist. I really do believe that we cannot base our romantic bursts with bronze age myths with its obsolete moralities and barbaric tropes, and what I see in the middle east happening with the population, specially the women and the kids is like a punch to the stomach. I hate it. With all my heart.
I am not referring to idealism. I am referring to scientific realism. The belief that the fact that the sun has come up every day at a set interval depending on the season for a very long time means that you can be absolutely certain that it will continue to do so (after taking into account like the earth's slowing rotation and the like). That true knowledge is possible, that a theory need not be an approximation. As in, anti-total-skepticism. I wasn't referring to God or that all's right in the world. That's that strawmaning I talked about. Like I said, I am an atheist (certainly in regards to the idea of God taking on personal characteristics). I am also not a materialist or an empiricist. The anti-god arguments you all throw out are born from radical empiricism, the kind Hume advocated. I think these arguments are bad ones. I agree with one particular conclusion of yours, just not the reasoning that led you there.
Watisname, you can detect neutrinos by getting them to collide with hydrogen in water, causing a flash. You gain knowledge of their existence by sensory means.
That was exactly the point I was making, good job. Now you've expanded your description of sensory means from the five senses you used originally.
You see the flash by sight. Use of one of the five senses is still required.
Sure, this is valid if we consider any form detection of EM waves, despite the type of detector, as an extension of one of our five senses, namely vision. However, if we go with that then what makes thought any different? Despite our limited understanding of the details of cognition, we can decipher quite a lot about thought through the use of fMRI and the like.
There is also still the option of defining 'what is real' to be anything that can affect or be affected by other things in detectable ways. Herra mentioned this, too. This definition is nice because it works for neutrinos just as much as it does for thought, and it also provides an effective criterion for determining if various 'supernatural' phenomenon are 'real' or not.
So you are designating the production of thoughts in the mind, be they images, recalls, or abstract, as falling under the category of something that is "sensed". A sixth sense, apparently. I am challenging this. At least on a surface level, thoughts cannot be classified as sensory data. Any material object, no matter how far removed from ordinary experience, still has to involve some use of the five senses to be detected. UV light can be sensed by looking at photographic plate, or by feeling the affect of a sunburn, but still one of the five is involved regardless. Can you say the same for thoughts? The very obvious answer is no. You need a better argument to convince me otherwise.
And as for the correlation argument you use with MRI scans, that the scans correlate with thought is irrelevant. That they correlate does not mean that they are the same. I do not understand why you place senses on a pedastal, and ignore internal thoughts, when they are equally real. Even an ultra empiricist like Hume criticized correlation arguments.
And I never used the word supernatural.
By that logic quantum particles don't exist for you either... I guess. I mean, brain activity is actually measurable... while several quantum particles exist in theory, but can not be reliably measured at all lol.
Seriously... measuring brain activity isn't even the bleeding edge anymore as far as physics go... I mean heck... we're already seeing the first gadgets that can be controlled by concentrated thought.... so with respect.... uh: Pfffffft!? ;)
I just said that there IS a correlation between thought and brain activity. Are you all completely incapable of representing my position correctly? Correlation does not even imply causation, let alone that the activity and the thought are one in the same, let alone that you can it's even possible to reduce the thought (if I have to use the term thing in itself, I will) to sensory data anyway. That there is interaction does not prove materialism. It might prove monism, but not materialism.
Correlation surely implies causation, in absence of credible alternative explanations (compatible with Occams Razor), and in the absence of evidence to the contrary. In fact, when you think about it, all we can observe in the world are correlations. So while correlation does not prove causation with 100% certainty (nothing can be proven with 100% certainty), it sure is a good hint.
epic quote muhahahahaha
Isn't it great? I mean, seriously!
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Eventually, we will have a good theory about consciousness.
I do believe you have just conceded defeat.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvdf5n-zI14
Two cavemen watching a lighning storm.
"HEY dude, that's awessooooome. PROOF OF GOD! That's no natural **** right there, Can't be!
"No it isn't you dumbass. We will eventually understand lightnings, it's just that we don't right now. There's no good reason to goo woooish on this ****, despite it being fancy and stuff
"AH! You just said you *don't* understand lightnings! You HAVE CONCEDED DEFEAT!
"Wait wat? DoubliuteeEEff? What did you smoke? I want that ****.
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once again another page of unintelligible gibberish.
Come on, there is no need to advertize your incapabilities so clearly... :D
And there is no need to question why people call you a troll :D.
Heeeey he started it!!!! :D
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My head is deeply and truly up my ass.
At what point did Vega argue it was completely unexplainable, as opposed to you cannot explain it now so it might as well be magic for us?
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I was going more for skepticism than unexplainability. The issues I raised are going to leave room for some doubt regardless. I certainly never claimed that the actual scientific observations spoke of were wrong. Of course evolution occurred, a brain is composed of neurons bouncing electrical pulses back and forth, etc. Reality has to be consistent, after all, regardless of what it is "made of". I went after the philosophical interpretation of these findings, that he can't go as far with them as he thinks he can. I prefer reconciliation over anything else. Like I said, I'm a tolerant atheist.
And Nuke was frankly right. There was way too much rhetoric in that debate. I should have gone for simplicity and simply said something like "that empirical analysis is dependent upon sensory input means you start running into problems when you apply it to the physical structures associated with said sensory input, especially the ones associated with sensory processing, and that these problems don't just go way if you make more detailed and precise empirical observations". There, I don't need to say any more.
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My head is deeply and truly up my ass.
At what point did Vega argue it was completely unexplainable, as opposed to you cannot explain it now so it might as well be magic for us?
And at what point did I concede? Of course if you start substituting what I say with your shenanigans, then everything's possible. In some forums, for example, even outright banning.
So unless you want a troll fest with back and forths of silly retarded shots that fly entirely past the points raised, I'd suggest you actually made a point.
The real issue here is one of absolutism (or objectivism, etc) vs relativism (or subjectivism, etc.). Mr Vega, while being a self-professed atheist is still thinking in Descartian terms, he is still thinking in absolutist terms. For mr Vega, the Thing-In-Itself is something that is not only Real, but tangible and should be "explained" by someone. Perhaps religion? Doubtful, since he's an atheist, but surely "not science!"
Mind you, I had skipped this reply from mr Vega, among all the sillyness here (because apparently a conversation is "boring" without trolling....), which clarifies this difference:
I am not referring to idealism. I am referring to scientific realism. The belief that the fact that the sun has come up every day at a set interval depending on the season for a very long time means that you can be absolutely certain that it will continue to do so (after taking into account like the earth's slowing rotation and the like). That true knowledge is possible, that a theory need not be an approximation
Exactly. This is the crux of the problem, and for sure, Mr. Vega is still trapped in this absolutist way of thinking, this idea that the Truth with capital T is attainable with science (or anything for that matter). Of course, it's all rubbish. Induction is not a sufficient means to reach truth (known since Hume), and all the deductions one can write on the screen (like, say, that the sun will come up tomorrow is deducible from Earth's rotation) always depend upon the assumption of many more premises which are turtles all the way down, and most of them are quite ellusive, illusory, and certainly not totally and absolutely true.
Science is always contingent upon many assumptions, and that's fine. Science does not and should not deal with the Truth with capital T because that kind of Truth is nonsense, and this is inferred since Kant himself, and demonstrated beautifully by Nietzsche himself in almost all of his writings.
Thing is, all this kind of thought stems directly from religion, and it's a relic from it. That mr. Vega proclaims himself as an atheist, while endorsing this kind of thought is a contradiction, and he probably knows it as well (his hints to the probable acception of lesser "personal gods" come to mind - deism? pantheism?). All these "isms" suffer from the same cognitive problem. There is no Truth, and that's the truth!
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And Nuke was frankly right. There was way too much rhetoric in that debate. I should have gone for simplicity and simply said something like "that empirical analysis is dependent upon sensory input means you start running into problems when you apply it to the physical structures associated with said sensory input, especially the ones associated with sensory processing, and that these problems don't just go way if you make more detailed and precise empirical observations". There, I don't need to say any more.
Rubbish - this is the old "the brain can't ever understand itself" silly retort that I can't believe you sir as an intelligent person could ever endorse. It's childish, "superman vs batman" level of childish.
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Not even the most abstract kind of truth? 2+2=4?
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Some would say mathematics is not a science, and doesn't have the same limitations.
Others would point out Gödel's incompleteness theorems.
Pick your poison.
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And Nuke was frankly right. There was way too much rhetoric in that debate. I should have gone for simplicity and simply said something like "that empirical analysis is dependent upon sensory input means you start running into problems when you apply it to the physical structures associated with said sensory input, especially the ones associated with sensory processing, and that these problems don't just go way if you make more detailed and precise empirical observations". There, I don't need to say any more.
Rubbish - this is the old "the brain can't ever understand itself" silly retort that I can't believe you sir as an intelligent person could ever endorse. It's childish, "superman vs batman" level of childish.
And you were actually treating me respectfully for two seconds. I never said understanding is impossible. Just not the kind according to your taste. If I leave the door open to two interpretations of the same empirical theory, why do you care? If all you care about is empiricism, then why not allow me to be deluded about things that don't concern you, in your opinion? You've clearly been extremely offended.
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Some would say mathematics is not a science, and doesn't have the same limitations.
Others would point out Gödel's incompleteness theorems.
Pick your poison.
Wait, you're saying that something might fall outside the bounds of science?!! WHAT?!!!!!
Luis Dias might then immediately go for the "mathematics are abstractions derived from observing nature" theory that Hume would approve of. Which I would retort with a poverty of the stimulus argument if I wasn't lazy by this point.
Edit - Actually I take that back. That he loves Hume doesn't mean he still thinks Tabula Rasa is a valid theory. Nevermind.
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Wait, you're saying that something might fall outside the bounds of science?!! WHAT?!!!!!
I've always thought of it as Science studying the universe while Mathematics studies the abstract.
One can think of mathematics as one of science's axioms I guess...
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Well, they correlate, for sure. Which one runs according to the others rules is a matter of debate.
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Exactly. This is the crux of the problem, and for sure, Mr. Vega is still trapped in this absolutist way of thinking, this idea that the Truth with capital T is attainable with science (or anything for that matter). Of course, it's all rubbish. Induction is not a sufficient means to reach truth (known since Hume), and all the deductions one can write on the screen (like, say, that the sun will come up tomorrow is deducible from Earth's rotation) always depend upon the assumption of many more premises which are turtles all the way down, and most of them are quite ellusive, illusory, and certainly not totally and absolutely true.
All you can say it that is at least a coincidence, whereas I am willing to go further and say that there's nothing wrong with deciding that it really is a set pattern. And you used the word childish to describe this kind of thinking? I would have reserved that phrase for an actual five year old, but hey! To each his own.
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There is no Truth, and that's the truth!
So if the truth is that there's no Truth, how do we declare the lack of Truth as truth?
(yo dawg i herd u like truths)
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thats it. this thread is getting old