Profile for SkeleTony

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Displayed name	SkeleTony
Member number	156
Title	Shock Trooper
Postcount	219
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Registered	Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00

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Getting BoA soon, need some explanation FIRST! in Blades of Avernum
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Tuesday, February 1 2005 09:51 Profile #10 I never got too far with programming myself(did a bunch of half-finished and half-assed things with VB and C++ Builder and a few other languages) so what follows are my best guesses and may be completely off the mark. I think that it depends on how much of the game is "hard coded" and how much of it is in data files that any programmer can access. The hard-coded stuff is probably stuff that cannot be mucked with unless the author releases the source code. Some retail games, like Heroes III, have enjoyed(well, suffered is more like it i the case of HoMM III) extensive revisions in teh form of actual fan made expansion packs which add scripting languages ahe other features, simply by modifying the accessible files. Some games, like many first person shooters, have level editors released for them which enable extensive modding without really messing with the engine(probably the case with Diablo II as well). And there are some games, like all of Spiderweb's games that, aside from the capabilites of the offically released scenario editors, you will not be able to alter jack crap! Understandable from Jeff's POV. If I had created Avernum/Exile, I would not want one of those grammatically challenged console kiddies popping off with "lOok!! I mak teh Bath of fire remaek with the Averanl engine!! its 2 awesome!! Plz Dl it and teLl me if ist gooD!" -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Tuesday, February 1 2005 09:31 Profile #241 quote: Originally written by Solodric: I understand, but you two ARE getting offtopic. may I suggest starting a thread of your own, since you two both seem to like using the extended posts with the qoutes in them? IF that is the case then this thread has been off-topic since page one. ALL threads evolve becuase that is how humans communicate. We NEVER sit down to have a three hour discussion on politics. We sit down and say "How's your daughter doing? I hear she went to medical school...?" and we end up, three hours later with "The problem with teh democratic party is that they are trying to appeal to conservative and moderates, thereby losing the liberal base and for what? The conservatives are staying were they are and the moderates don't matter!". -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Tuesday, February 1 2005 09:04 Profile #239 quote: Originally written by Solodric: Written by Skeletony: "We're talking about SCIENCE here!" No, no, we're talking about the root of all evil, and while it may be necessary to explore religion and science to find the root of all evil, we're getting really offtopic. You misunderstand. The above comment was not in regards to the thread as a whole.What I was refering to was our side discussion of whether scientific hypotheses required observation. Thuryl made the point that non-scientific hypothese could be made sans observation. -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Tuesday, February 1 2005 08:44 Profile #236 quote: Originally written by Le Diable d'Ouangs: See, this is the part that just doesn't make any sense to me. I would rather say that I don't have direct experience of my hands in the way that I have direct experience of my thoughts. When I'm thinking, I just know that I'm thinking -- one step. When I see my hands, I perceive them first and conclude from that that they exist -- two steps. See this is where those axioms/first principles come in. YOURS is a solipsist one or at least a "Solipsism might be possible" one. Mine is a materialist one. BOTH are assumptions(what I and most philosophers would call "necessary assumptions" or "useful assumptions"). These initial foundations are not subject to proofs and such the way existential claims which follow from them are. You arbitrarily determine that your "knowing" that you think is a single step while you (in MY view) struggle to make a case that MY "knowing" that things independently exist is somehow multiplicative. I am aware of my hands in the same number of "steps" as you are aware of your thoughts but even that is beside the point because it is not the number of determining "steps" that matters but simply the quality of reasoning. I don't care if you can break down my understandings into one THOUSAND steps, so long as none of those steps is irrational. quote: quote: I disagree. We disagree on the extraneous assessments of what we experience(i.e. whether something is "beautiful", "ugly" or "meh") but not the events themselves. A terrorist sees the falling of the twin towers as beautiful. I see it as horrendous. We both see the towers falling though. Assuming that both of you even exist, which is something you only know by interpreting your own perception. You are still not getting the whole "first principles" thing. YOU are choosing the axiom that "We cannot be sure of anything". I am choosing the axiom "We CAN be sure of some things." Neither of our axioms can be proven incorrect. That is why they are called "necessary assumptions". Part of my materilist axiom is that we do exist and are not figments in something else's imagination or some such. The only thing you can really contest is what FOLLOWS from this axiom and to do THAT you have to grant, even if only for the sake of argument, the assumption/axiom that I adopt. That is why I don't do a lot of "challenging" of solipsists and the like. They operate from a principle I cannot accept and cannot challenge except to point out how observation contradicts their position which means NOTHING to them since observation is unreliable/false anyway(in their worldview). In the same vein, your "challenge" that I or WE may not exist is like trying to introduce "touchdowns" into the game of baseball. quote: You're right that avoiding making assumptions altogether doesn't get us anywhere past solipsism, but the point is that solipsism isn't a viewpoint that can be conclusively ruled out, even if it's a viewpoint that has no practical value. It IS ruled out by MY axioms! Logically, there is no way around this. First principles/necessary assumptions cannot be challenged by the methods and processes that emerge from those principles. To argue otherwise is like trying to use math to prove that math works! If someone does not believe you can actually quantify things sequentially through addition, subtraction and multiplication then using addition, subtraction and multiplication to show them otherwise is nonsense! quote: quote: If that were so then we would all be sitting around on our hands in a nightmare bout of solipsism chattering "I cannot say anything is true!". I cannot even say THAT is true." "I cannot say that I cannot say that I cannot say THAT is true!!" We DO have surefire ways of distinguihsing reality from fantasy. It is a combination of concurrent observation, repeatability, testing/experiement etc. None of which are absolutely certain. If they were, we wouldn't make mistakes. Sure we would. Just because things are objectively true does not mean that we cannot mispercieve or misunderstand those things! You are trying to argue that since we CAN make mistakes, we can NEVER be certain that we HAVEN'T made mistakes in every single facet of every issue in life. I disagree with this. We CAN be 100% certain that trees exist and that WE exist("I THINK, therefore I AM.") and still make mistakes regarding how much sunlight trees need or how tall humans can grow. quote: quote: I am sorry but from my POV that sounds like complete nonsense. It is material objects we cannot get away from and thoughts which are fleeting. A rock will exist regardless of whether you are thinking about it. That is why you are surprised when you accidentally trip over the rug or stub your toe on a rock. The object gets you even though you were unaware of it being there. But what does it actually mean to say the rock existed before you were thinking about it? It means that before I was thinking about the rock, someone else was observing me walking toward it with my head in a book and subsequently stubbing my toe on said rock. Even without this bit of concurrent observatrion, the rock is existent as evidenced by my toe-stubbing even though I was not thinking about the rock. I honestly don't think we are going to get past this one as you seem to, for whatever reasons, place the thought of such things on a higher pedestal than the things themselves. Roaches have no abstract thoughts and cannot even concieve of "rocks" and yet they navigate around them as well. Automobiles have no thoughts at all and yet if one hits a rock, damage will occur(even with no humans around at the time). quote: *It came into your* awareness at the precise moment that you stubbed your toe on it. So? All the more evidence that physically existent objects are interacting in a physical universe. quote: Any assumptions about its prior existence are based on holding a certain model of the universe. EXACTLY! The "materialist" model! As opposed to YOUR presuppositional model(the "Anything is possible and we can never know anything!"' model). quote: Which was exactly my point - it's possible for a scientific discovery to occur without any initial observation taking place at all. ?!?!?!? How so? quote: Once you have a hypothesis, it doesn't matter how you got that hypothesis. Sure it does! The "Creationist hypothesis"(for example) is NOT science! We are talking about SCIENCE here! Scientific hypotheses require observation! quote: That depends on what you mean by "exists". Again, I am not much interested in useless semantics. Essential definitions here. If someone claims that hyperspace travel is possible via cold fusion, I don't want to sit around asking inane questions like "What does "cold" mean?", "What does "fusion" mean?", and "What does "space" mean?" etc. quote: When is presupposition a trap and when is it the formation of assumptions or axioms necessary for a coherent and meaningful view of the world? Presupposition is ALWAYS a trap. Necessary assumptions/first principles are unavoidable, so tieing your brain up in circular knots worrying about them is useless. quote: The trouble is, if we weren't capable of thinking rationally, we wouldn't necessarily know that we weren't. We would not be talking or thinking at ALL beyond the survival instincts of some quadrepedal mammal's ability so that point is moot. To ask if we would know we were irrational if in fact we were irrational is like asking if we would try to walk if we never had legs and never were aware of such things existing. quote: That's right. An interesting consequence of Godel's theorem is that in a formal system such as logic, although you can construct a proof of something, there's no way to construct a proof that your proof is sound. Again, I am no mathematician. perhaps if I were, I would have greater appreciation for Godel and his Incompleteness Theorem". As it stands, he is just someone who is invoked WAYYYY too often in existetntial debates by people(Usually the J.Z. Knight/Ramtha crowd but sometimes more reasonable people like yourself). Even so, I was able to deconstruct and demolish "Hilbert's Hotel" in a debate I had with a creationist sometime ago so maybe I need to sit down and make an effort with Godel some time. It seems silly to me that humans put so much credence on the fact that we can construct nonsense statements and paradoxes!? As if this fact alone refuted logic! quote: I maintain that this definition begs the question. The fact that thinking requires a brain is an observation about the world, not part of the definition of thinking. And I disagree and we are not going to get any further with that one either. TO me, defining thinking in any way that does not include the brain is meaningless. You might as well define thinking as "The smell of purple". quote: Again, the fact that damage to our brains impairs our ability to think is an observation about the world, NOT a necessary fact of logic.** From YOUR "assumptions"/axioms maybe. Not mine. From MY materialist POV, the fact that you cannot think without your brain proves that you need your brain to think. As soon as you show me a thought that exists sans a brain, we will have something new to discuss on this matter. quote: [b]Yes. I'm saying that's a possibility we can never completely rule out. The only reason it should be treated as a belief of last resort is that it would be disastrous to take such a thing as being true -- but that's not the same as saying it can't be true. [/b] It cannot be true. If it were true then we would know nothing. SInce we know things and the universe operates in a consistent manner, we do not live in the "anything is possible" universe. If we DID live in the "AiP" universe then it would be possible that we know EVERYTHING(with 100% certainty)! Your argument refutes itself! quote: *Your answer is interesting to me. Surely memories are stored in some form or another in the brain (in fact, neurologists are already starting to find out certain things about how* they're stored). Sort of but not how one might think they are "stored"(in fact, I am not sure "stored" is correct terminology). We kind of note down, in sloppy short-hand notation, experiences we have. Later, when recalling those experiences, we create complex visuals and fleshed out prose to tell the story of what happened. Could a machine do that? I don't know. I am not much concerned with the matter either. I suppose it may be one of those "hypothetically possible but practically infeasable" deals. quote: Surely, then, if you produce a sufficiently accurate duplicate of a human at a certain point in time, the original and the duplicate will be identical in all ways, including self-awareness, regardless of the fact that one has actually experienced things and the other merely has the neurological remnants of its prototype's experiences. Or are you arguing that self-awareness isn't a state function? I think Gould's contingency theory would apply here. There are simply too zoggin' many variables to account for and no matter how hard you try, you can never really duplicate them all to replicate the developement of humanity. [ Tuesday, February 01, 2005 08:59: Message edited by: SkeleTony ] -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00**
Graphic Novels-- Comic Books in General
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Tuesday, February 1 2005 07:23 Profile #15 quote: Originally written by Toast at the Slith Guard Post: Hello all, I am interested in finding good places to look at reviews for graphic novels, not The Comics Journal . Most of the places I can find which review new graphic novels are awful. They look like they are written by drunk monkeys. I can find what is forthcoming for science fiction and fantasy at SF Site and Locus Magazine I have a few favorite graphic novels-- Stan Mack, The Cartoon History of the Universe, P. Craig Russell-- The Ring of the Nibelungen, Frank Miller-- 300, The Dark Night Returns, Ronin, Alan Moore-- Promothea, and Box Office Poison. Do you have any favorites or recommendations. Regards, Toast. I have been pretty much out of the scene for a long time(I quit buying them in protest of what Marvel was trying to do to the industry back in the early-mid 1990's. You could not find a more dispicable company than Marvel if you were investigating child-porn rings!) but my favorites: 1)Faust: Love of the Damned - One of the most revolutionary and well-written comics of all time(and Tim Vigil's 'Berni Wrightson meets Bill Senkiewicz style art does not hurt any either!). It is an adult gothic horror meets anti-hero kind of book. The book that McFarlane tried to rip off with his crappy "Spawn". Not only is the book revolutionary for the style and approach taken by writer David Quinn(who became so popular as a result of Faust that he was writing everything from Dr. Strange to columns in Wizard magazine on scripting as well as countless other books fro DC, Marvel and various indies.) but also because the series averages an issue released every few YEARS!! Tim Vigil is DAMNED opposed to the standard monthly grind and his work shows this. Astonishing detail! The book also makes no bones about it being very sexual and very violent as well as sexually violent! SO the faint of heart need not apply. TO give an idea of just how disturbing this book can be, several comic shops were shut down in the 90's just for selling the book! Visually, Faust is like a combination of Wolverine + Batman + Satan which is probably why the book sold as well as it did even to people who did not get the story(which IS admittedly complex and deep). Was turned into a very crappy direct-to-video movie which you should avoid like the plague! Find out more at www.brokenhalos.com/ 2)The Crow - James O'barr's original magnum opus was one of the most emotionally moving works of graphic literature ever produced. Forget that crappy Brandon Lee movie which resmebled O'Barr's book about as much as Sesame Street does. James does a masterful job of building up the characters...letting you into their lives and personalities, before socking you in the gut with the "Atrocity Exhibition" of book four. As far as illustration goes, he bridges the gap between Will Eisner and Ernie Colon and does so without distracting the reader. 3)The Justice Machine - Something to be said for REALLY good superhero books that don't follow the herd. Orginally created by artist-writer Michael Gustovich and given a soul when writer Tony Isabella was brought on during the Comico run, it is the story of "Six good little soldiers" who work as THE law enforcement arm of the governement of "Georwell"( another world, sort of "futuristic Earth"-like in another dimension) who slowly come to realize that everything they believed in was a lie. Isabella's knack for developing relationships between the various characters and weaving intricate plots is on full display here. Stomped the crap out of "X-Men" and other overhyped kiddie soap operas! 4) Miracleman(aka "Marvelman") - Probably Alan Moore's best work in the superheroes genre. Better plotting and pace than Watchmen and aged well(Watchmen became dated quickly with the end of the cold war). 5)The American - Written by Mark Verheiden and published by Dark Horse in the late 80's/early 90's, this was the book that Captain America COULD have been...but wasn't. Got a little wonky around issue 4 or 5 when they introduced "Robo-Eisenhower" but the first 3 or 4 issues(which were collected in trade paperback form) are gold. 6)Roachmill - Originally published by Blackthorne and later by Dark Horse (before forced cancellation because of a silly and quite frivolous law suit brought by DC comics for alleged similarities to Ambush Bug), It is the story of a futuristic pest-exterminator(in a future where "pests" can be anything from aliens to mother-in-laws as long as you have a license!) who looks like Clint Eastwood...only with two insectoid appendages extending from the small of his back and a "bug eye". This book did not give a rat's ass about convention or boundries. The story would go from zany and milk-out-the-nose funny to tear jerker in the span of a few pages. The way the book was drawn(by Rich Heeden and Tom Mcweeny) was, at the time, shockingly innovative. Characters would reach from one panel into other panels and cause panels' borders to fracture like shatterd glass when they would land in one. You always had to be scanning the backgrounds as if reading a "Where's Waldo?" book because they were chock full of funny and bizarre cultural references. 7)The Badger - Written by Mike Baron adn originally published by First Comics, it is the story of Viet Nam veteran Norbert Sykes who suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder(9 of 'em!). One of his personalities(the one he most often enjoys) is Wisconsin's only costumed crimefighter, The Badger. Badge' is a master of several esoteric martial arts and can talk to animals(A power he recieved in 'Nam when God appeared before him as a giant hamster named "Myrtle"). Together with a supporting cast of friends including a 5th century druid named Ham and a talking Yeti, he embarks on adventures I could not begin to do justice to here. 8)The Prowler - A little known or remembered book by Tim Truman(Hawkman, Scout) that was published by Eclipse comics in the 80's. It was the story of a former vigilante who fought crime during the pulp-fiction era of the 1930s as "The Prowler"(Think The Shadow with a ski mask and fedora) who, at 75 years(circa 1985 or so) of age comes out of retirement to train young Scott Kida as his protege'/replacement. The book's title character was given a compelling faux-history through back up psuedo-reprints of his 1940s comic strips and a flexi-disc(included with the Prowler min-series "Revenge of the Prowler") with a few songs by Truman himself. One, an Andrews Sisters style swing number and the other a brilliantly evocative theme song from the psuedo-TV series that went off the air sometime before the time of the comic series itself. Honorable mentions: Hero Alliance: End of the Golden Age(serious superheoes), Power Factor(More serious supers by the same author, Kevin Juare), Concrete(Paul Chadwick), Maelstrom(Laugh out loud sword and sorcery by Jim Somerville), Scout(Tim Truman), Dark Wolf( Father Tremaine is a Catholic priest by day...a demonic avenger by night! Fun stuff.), Mantra(Man trapped in vivacious female body fights crime with sword and sorcery by Mike W. Barr), Sludge(another "Ultraverse" book), Jon Sable : Freelance(By Mike Grell who also did Green Arrow and Warlord for D.C.). [ Tuesday, February 01, 2005 09:26: Message edited by: SkeleTony ] -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Getting BoA soon, need some explanation FIRST! in Blades of Avernum Editor
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Tuesday, February 1 2005 05:52 Profile #8 If you're looking to create your own fantasy world and modules/scenarios within, complete with your own races, skills, magic systems etc., then you might want to download Runesword II which is both freeware and open source. To be honest, even with all of it's capabilities and features, it is probably still nowhere near as good as BoA because of it's "dumbed down" RPG mechanics(which can be changed to your liking but would involve a lot of coding) combined with a very 'world specific magic system. In other words the magic system is unlike how sorcery is generally depicted in fantasy, which is great so long as you are not creating YOUR OWN campaign setting and are happy to just create scenarios within RS' world of "Eternia". But with some hard work you can change about anything in Runesword(and several people in the RS community have already done impressive things such as creating "Superhero" worlds, instead of fantasy, and scenarios within these other world-settings). Many VB programmers are currently working on improving Runesword's engine(both the creator and the game engine itself) through a Sourceforge project because there ARE a lot of annoying bugs in the program(but what can you say...it's FREE!). Apologies if this post is a no-no in the SW forums. I am assuming Jeff would have no problem with such a plug but I have been wrong before... [ Tuesday, February 01, 2005 05:54: Message edited by: SkeleTony ] -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Getting BoA soon, need some explanation FIRST! in Blades of Avernum
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Tuesday, February 1 2005 05:52 Profile #8 If you're looking to create your own fantasy world and modules/scenarios within, complete with your own races, skills, magic systems etc., then you might want to download Runesword II which is both freeware and open source. To be honest, even with all of it's capabilities and features, it is probably still nowhere near as good as BoA because of it's "dumbed down" RPG mechanics(which can be changed to your liking but would involve a lot of coding) combined with a very 'world specific magic system. In other words the magic system is unlike how sorcery is generally depicted in fantasy, which is great so long as you are not creating YOUR OWN campaign setting and are happy to just create scenarios within RS' world of "Eternia". But with some hard work you can change about anything in Runesword(and several people in the RS community have already done impressive things such as creating "Superhero" worlds, instead of fantasy, and scenarios within these other world-settings). Many VB programmers are currently working on improving Runesword's engine(both the creator and the game engine itself) through a Sourceforge project because there ARE a lot of annoying bugs in the program(but what can you say...it's FREE!). Apologies if this post is a no-no in the SW forums. I am assuming Jeff would have no problem with such a plug but I have been wrong before... [ Tuesday, February 01, 2005 05:54: Message edited by: SkeleTony ] -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Announcment! get your Player Character concept made! in Blades of Avernum
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Monday, January 31 2005 14:14 Profile #16 quote: Originally written by Xen: quote: Originally written by The Ripper: Neo or Trinity I refuse to do matrix character on moral principles- on the grounds that the last one sucked so bad (the creators COULD have continued on a grand adventure dealing with a massive example of "Platos Cave" style philiosphy. instead they made it a gigantic goody goody suck fest, where the machiens, enslavers of humanity, and all around bad guys, suddenlly turn into almost compassionate deal givers that let thier sourc eof power go as it pleases, because soem ninny happend to save them, and destroy the realm in which thier power supply was kept at bay with. wonderful. great philosophical mind bending end of plot thier.) None of the Matrix movies were worth the price of admission, unless you just like special effects and the first one had less to do with Plato's Cave analogy than it had to do with Taoist philosophy(the whole "Butterfly dreaming it's a man" nonsense) whihc had been done on film before and much better elsewhere. If I were forced to say two good things about The Matrix, it would be "Lawrence Fishburne". [ Monday, January 31, 2005 14:17: Message edited by: SkeleTony ] -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Monday, January 31 2005 04:21 Profile #229 Man what is with you guys changing your handles every few days?!? Anyways, I missed this post of Thuryl's(or whatever he is calling himself now): quote: Originally written by Thuryl: quote: But I never defined "brain" as "thought". I defined mind as thought and emergent from the physical brain. I said defining a brain INTO thought (that is, defining thought as requiring a brain), not defining a brain AS thought. Obviously, if you define thought as the activity of a brain then thought requires a brain, but I argue that's not an adequate definition because it doesn't capture the commonsense notion of what thought is. What "commonsense notion" is that? I think the essentiual definition of "thought" is concious OR unconcious brain activity. quote: *What I'm saying, to put it in the simplest possible terms, is that thoughts are qualia. Surely you've had direct experience of your own* thoughts?** That's a tricky one. I suppose you would have to define "direct experience" a bit more clearly. I don't have direct expereince of my thoughts in the way I have direct expereince of my hands for example. quote: That still doesn't tell you what that noise sounds like unless you have felt what it is like to hear that noise. Knowing why you hear something is not even close to the same thing as knowing what it feels like to hear it. Who cares? I am not interested(as far as this debate goes) in what my subjectiove appreciation of the sound may be. Only that I can verify that something is causing the physical vibrations I am detecting via my ear lobes. quote: quote: There are no humans with non-human eyes/brains. If there were then I would think they might possibly be seeing what I see as "green" on a stop sign, instead of "red". There do, of course, exist people who see nothing at all instead of red on that stop sign (blind people, or people with achromatopsia). Yes, because their eyes are defective, not "otherworldly" or extraterrestrial in orgin. quote: [b](Incidentally, you picked an interesting choice of argument; there's actually some evidence, based on study of the optic nerves of cadavers, that about 1 in 1000 people may see red and green as inverted in exactly the way you describe. The evidence isn't conclusive, as far as I know, but the possibility of colour-inverted people hasn't been ruled out.) [/b] You realize this only supports my argument right? Human eyes that are not defective or a mutation operate the same as all other normal human eyes. If soemone is seeing "green" in place of "red" then it is, as you concede above, because their eyes are mechanically/physically different. quote: I'd argue that "objective experience" is a contradiction in terms. Everything we experience is subjective because everything we experience is processed by our own mind and nobody else's. I disagree. We disagree on the extraneous assessments of what we experience(i.e. whether something is "beautiful", "ugly" or "meh") but not the events themselves. A terrorist sees the falling of teh twi towers as beautiful. I see it as horrendous. We both see the towers falling though. quote: quote: See I don't think that "caused" is right the way you are using it above. There is not really a single "cause" of my perception but rather a few different components: The actual object I am percieving and my sensory organs and brain matter. Fine. "Contingent on the presence of that actual object"? That should work. quote: quote: Furthermore, you are once again implying things with a dependent existence are equivalent of things which independently exist. I'm implying we have no surefire way of telling the difference between the two. If that were so then we would all be sitting around on our hands in a nightmare bout of solipsism chattering "I cannopt say anything is true!". I cannot even say THAT is true." "I cannot say that I cannot say that I cannot say THAT is true!!" We DO have surefire ways of distinguihsing reality from fantasy. It is a combination of concurrent observation, repeatability, testing/experiement etc. Imaginary things cannot be measured, tested or scrutinized. If someone tells me a God MAY exist adn goes on to describe a God that cannot be detected, measured or otehrwise understood then they are claiming an imaginary thing might exist. Makes no sense to me. quote: quote: In essence saying that since the thought in my head is "caused" by my brain, thoughts are existent in the same way that trees, caused by climatological conditions, "exist". I think thoughts exist in an even more real and certain sense. A material object is an abstraction which we assume from our perceptions; the boundaries we set to any given "object" as distinct from other objects are arbitrary and defined by our mind (the fact that people don't take this fact into account is why they think the Ship of Theseus is a paradox.) A thought is something we can't get away from; we'd be thinking all the time even in the absence of external input. I am sorry but from my POV that sounds like complete nonsense. It is material objects we cannot get away from and thoughts which are fleeting. A rock will exist regardless of whether you are thinking about it. That is why you are surprised when you accidentally trip over the rug or stub your toe on a rock. The object gets you even though you were unaware of it being there. Thoughts can NEVER have such effects themselves, under any circumstances. I have never been clotheslined or set on fire by a thought. quote: quote: What is unscientific is assuming that what he reported anecdotally(re: that he had a dream in which the structure of benzene came to him) happened just as he reported but that is another issue. YES it is unscientific to rely on dreams in such a way but so what? If I am inspired to invent a better sugar-free beverage than Diet Soda because of a daydream or hallucination I had then how I go about inventing said beverage will be where the scientific process occurs. The "inspiration" part is rather inconsequential(or maybe "incidental" would be a better word) to the whole matter of how science works. So you'd support dropping the "observation" criterion from your previous method altogether? No. The "dreaming"/imagining is NOT "observation". Observation would be sitting in front of my chemistry set watching how various cemicals react and discovering what flavors are produced. quote: quote: THat's not what I was arguing. Let's say that I came here boldly proclaiming, in all of my closed-minded furor, that girls who wanted to be working 'models' had to be of a certain height and weight range in addition to having appealing facial features/bone structure by the general consensus of the modeling community and society in general. Now along comes someone who says "Hey! My friend does hand modeling for those Palmoloive dish soap commercials and she is overweight and short!" See what I mean? Hand models and runway models are both models but clearly the guy in the above analogy is fishing for a non-applicable example to rationalize a dissenting view. So now you're only claiming that the "natural" sciences require an assumption of materialism, and that the "social" sciences don't? I am claiming that the "social sciences" are irrelvant to this discussion, just as bringing up the "hand models" would be in the above analogy. quote: I wasn't under the impression that that was the argument you were making, since you just used the blanket term "science". We we are discussing existential claims and such. If a God or a dragon literally existed in our universe/reality then it would not be up to economic "scientists" to verify this. IT would be biologists and zoologists. quote: *Even then, I'd argue that the natural sciences only require a weak form of materialism (assuming that matter exists), rather than a strong form (assuming that only* matter exists.) I would say they require that matter exist AND be the primary stuff of the universe(Classic materialism). quote: quote: See "model" example above. Calling economics "science" in this discussion is like invoking someone with an honorary doctorate(re:Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.) in a discussion about medical malpractice or something. I don't think it's beside the point at all. I don't think either of us disagree that in a non-material world, the social sciences would be the only sciences worth studying. Actually, I cannot agree with that since, to me, it is a nonsense statement. I have no idea what a "non-material world" might be. quote: What I'm saying is that that still counts as science, so science doesn't require materialism. And hand models still count as models so models can be any height or appearance imaginable. Problem is that that assertion is only TRUE IF you include the appropriate qualifier("social scientist or hand** model). quote: Unless you're going to argue that the sciences that do require materialism are somehow more intellectually sound in principle than the ones that don't, I think it's unfair to draw a distinction between sciences which require materialism and sciences which don't. I don't know that I would say "more intellectually sound..." but as far as figuring out what exists and how it exists, yes, physicists are better suited than economists. [quote]I'm saying not only that people can do this, but that everyone in the world (including respected scientists) does it all the time (albeit not to such an extreme degree), and that they couldn't possibly form anything resembling a coherent belief system if they didn't.[quote] I know I am going to catch all Hell for saying this but anyway... THAT is where skepticism/critical thought come in. Any scientist worth his salt will be a skeptic/criticial thinker. Skepticism is a means of keeping an eye out for what Shermer calls "errors in thinking". Fallacies that spring forth from personal bias adn such. We cannot be completely objective/unbiased this is true but we CAN avoid the problems of being so. We do NOT necessrily have to fall into the traps of presupposition and the like. quote: To say that you've proved something via reasoning requires, at the very least, a conviction that your own reasoning is correct. Brains, as we've already agreed, aren't purely logical things. It's always possible you've made some error in logic even if nobody notices it, so how can you be completely certain of any conclusion arrived at through a line of reasoning? Here's the thing though. BRains are capable of both rational adn irrational thought, we both agree. However it is the very fact that we DO have teh ability to think logically and rationally and therefore to spot those "errors" of thinking. The scientific method is largely built upon this truth. I am convinved that this universe has limitations or boundries. I am further convicned that humans are capable of recognizing some/many of these limitations. I am also convinced that I have correctly identified a few myself(I am not the first mind you but that is unimportant) such as the fact that something cannot be 'A' and 'not A' by ANY rational system of thought. Therefore, round squares, transcendent gods and things that grow while shrinking do not exist. We may disagree on much but I think this should be the very LEAST of which we should agree on. quote: Prove it. And prove it without using empirical evidence, because there's always the possibility that any empirical evidence you use is a hallucination. Not true. What I think you mean to say is that it is always possible for someone to deny what they know to be true and against such a person, nothing can be proven. We do not need to prove this because by definition it is true. Like it or not "walking" is defined as an ambulatory activity/movement of legged creatures. "Thinking" is the act of mentally concieving of ideas using the brain. We do not think using our elbows adn if WE are thinking(and I think you will agree that we are) then we must be doing so with SOMETHING that WE have. It makes no sense to speculate that I am thinking with a piece of magic in some other world that somehow becomes non-functional when my brain is thoroughly damaged. Followed to it's logical conclusion, your line of reasoning suggests that we live in an "anything is possible" universe where we cannot say we know anything. quote: Okay, here's a simple question that will tell me what I originally wanted to know one way or the other; if I made a completely accurate molecule-by-molecule duplicate of a self-aware human being, would the duplicate be self-aware? The duplicate hasn't "experienced" anything, because it was only just created, but from a materialist perspective there isn't any difference between the two now. Possibly but it would be self-aware in the same way a bewborn baby is self aware. Experiences define who we are. [ Monday, January 31, 2005 14:00: Message edited by: SkeleTony ] -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Monday, January 31 2005 02:58 Profile #228 quote: Originally written by Solodric: On a side note, while animals and humans understand fear of injury, humans are the only animal with the poor fortune to have the reasoning capability to understand death. This has been studied. Yeah and this is also COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT! It is not "fear of death" that drives a creature to behave fearfully. It is fear of impending danger/harm. Our understanding of death only fuels our philosophy and rhetoric. ANimals(aside from humans) do not think abstractly and so do not have such grand concepts as "good" and "evil" but they DO have an idea of "right" and "wrong"! quote: One person had a brain defect that made her act completely savage, and when she was recovered, and educated/introduced into society, she began making humane slaughtering houses for cattle. In her words "It isn't the death they are afraid of, because they do not truly understand that concept. It's the new environment that scares cows is all, they're scared as they would be whenever they're shipped to an unfamiliar location." What is your point with this anecdote? -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Monday, January 31 2005 02:53 Profile #227 quote: Originally written by Solodric: I've heard the "Hitler" argument many times, where people try to bring him into it to prove my argument is incorrect because someone did something horrendously horrible by OUR standards. First off, Hitler himself was a tool, and he was insane, and by law and by common sense, any person too insane to understand thier own actions is not responsible, they should be put in the loony bin. If you dont believe he was insane, go read his works, he wrote a few things. The guy was a nutcase, but a good public speaker, who was actually originally an artist. His art dealer was a Jew, actually, and he would have died without his help. A few unfortunate events lead to where hitler was and what he did, but if it hadn't been him, it honestly would have been some other crackpot. Back on topic, I understand you need to bear the consequences of the others actions, that doesn't mean said person is evil, and it doesn't make you evil for defending yourself if they aren't. To put it bluntly, "Thats just the way things are" sometimes. As for the bombings, Skeletony, they believe us to be the unholy plague/scourge of the planet. Honestly I don't blame the people who committed the acts. It was the ones behind it, the ones who brainwashed them from childhood, I'd like to get MY hands on, because it takes a good deal of intelligence and perception to run such a thing, hence they are the most likely to know what they're doing is evil. You are misunderstanding me completely guy. I was not invoking Hitler to make a case against any particular worldview. I was merely showing that Evil is in the eye of the beholder. WHen people become convicned, rightly or wrongly, that THEIR people are being oppressed(by the Jews/Americans/Christians/Atheists/whatever) they become hostile. When this hostility reaches a boiling point we get terrorists and nazis. Trust me, I catch all Hell from my fellow liberals because I favor bombing the crap out of those Mthrfckrs! Where you are completely wrong is in assuming that the terrorists' leaders are somehow less conditioned than the people they lead. It is all a matter of (mis)perception and the Osam Bin Ladens are every bit as convinced as anyone else that the "infidels" are working for Satan against their people. [ Monday, January 31, 2005 14:07: Message edited by: SkeleTony ] -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Monday, January 31 2005 02:12 Profile #224 Animals, including humans, DO know fear of inury. It is not a matter of being "too stupid to know". Those members of any given species who lacked this chemical redaction to the onset of danger didn't survive to pass on their crappy genetics via offspring. And almost NO ONE or no thing "knows they are doing evil". Hitler did not think he was doing evil. He was actually a fairly fundementalist catholic(except for the dabbling with pagan occultism a bit) and thought he was doing God's work. Same goes for Jim Jones and David Koresh and the 9/11 terrorists. These persons actions were evil by MY standards because I was not brainwashed or indoctrinated into the beliefs they held. Hitler's scapegoating of the Jews was not much different than Falwell/Robertson/JAmes Kenndy's scapegoating of atheists/gays/liberals. He was able to take it to the horrendous extremes he did because of the particular political & economic landscape of early 20th century Germany. Hell, as "Liberty-friendly" as our country was we STILL had MCarthyism/Jim Crow/Wallace and the like! In order for christians to understand how, for example, the Islamic terrorists are champions of righteousness by their moral standards, you have to imagine how you would feel and react if Christians, in America lived in abject poverty and misery and this was due in large part to Afghani Muslims bombing the crap out of your homeland and supporting your enemies. It doesn't matter that this is a misperception on their part(that America is waging war on Islam). What matters is that you are CONVINCED that this is so. If you were convicned, as a Christian in America of the above hypothetical then you would be cheering on "Freedom Fighters" who blow stuff up as well. Hell, many fundementalists cheer on Abortion clinic bombers as it is! -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Sunday, January 30 2005 11:40 Profile #221 quote: Originally written by The Creator: For the purposes of this discussion, let us define God as "A supernatural force that occasionally does stuff that that would otherwise not be possible (or 'miracles')." This is something that should be testable - if we can find evidence of miraculous occurances, then God = true, otherwise false. Trouble is, can we agree on what counts as valid evidence? Apparently, the story I posted earlier doesn't in your view. How many people need to witness something for it to be considered credible? How much evidence does there need to be for you to believe that it actually happened and was not falsified? E.g. if a man came back from the dead, would the account of multiple witnesses that he was cold and stiff before and video evidence of him walking around now be sufficient for you? Would you need a Death Certificate from a doctor? Would one doctor's opinion be enough? Would you need to smell the rotting flesh and see him get up yourself? Anecdotal evidence is inadmissable in support of extraordinary claims. If I claim my sister is a nuclear physicist, this is an ORDINARY claim and IS supported by my anecdote. We regularly observe that people work as nuclear physicists and the claim is not something that would cause us to throw out much of what we have learned and observed for the last several thousand years. Claiming that a "miracle" occured is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence to support it. NO AMOUNT of anecdote will support such a claim because we are always left with the more likely explanation that people are mistaken or lying or delusional. One of the first things you should be providing in support of your "miracle" is a mechanism. "God did it!" is as meaningless as "Someone did it with science!". We have to be able to scrutinise the phenomenom to understand that it did in fact happen as is claimed. If you cannot provide a mechanism then that is STRONG evidence AGAINST your miracle. Imaginary things do not have mechanisms. Tolkien never explained how magic worked because it DIDN'T and any attempt to explain it realistically would have ruined the fantasy and been laughable for anyone thinking in terms of realism. [ Monday, January 31, 2005 02:17: Message edited by: SkeleTony ] -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Sunday, January 30 2005 11:06 Profile #220 quote: Originally written by GremlinJoe: Here is what I mean: Christians have no choice but to accept the concepts of good and evil. Then you are saying that many, if not MOST Christians knowingly commit evil. Does not sound like a very good sales pitch for Christianity. quote: God clearly says that the two exist. If you think you're a christian but don't believe there is a good and evil, then you've gone way out in left field and may have lost your mind. If you belong to a group of people who think along the same lines, well, you're not christians but a group of religiously confused folks. Furthermore, An atheist could believe that good and evil exist. I never said they rejected them. Its just that logically there's no sense to do so if no one is in supreme authority to set laws. Man's laws change and have loopholes. I know many atheists believe in a right and wrong. But what is right and what is wrong? Not everyone will agree. Why bother? The above is downright laughable. I don't know who taught you that Christians agreed on some objective morality but you should punch them in the face for doing so. The only difference between the way Christians disagree and the way atheists disagree about moral issues is that Christians will invariably pull out the "No True Scotsman" fallacy to rationalize their position. Anyone doing different than they is not a "true Christian". They are not interpreting the scriptures correctly or are being fooled by the devil. We ALL do what we feel is "right" for completely selfish reasons. We enjoy being thought of in a certain way by others as well as ourselves. If I did not get a good feeling from returning someone's dropped/lost wallet/purse or somesuch then what would motivate me to keep doing so? But the fact is I DO get a good feeling when I do "good" even on the rare occasion when the beneficiary of my good deed seems unappreciative. I can sleep at night knowing that, for all my flaws I can still say I am honest and trustworthy. Historically, there have been cultures that favored values such as strength and ruthlessness over honesty and trust. In these societies morals are/were quite different. quote: Logically, No God=everyone decides for themselves what good and evil are. Who else is more qualified,right? Answer the following: Are "good" and "evil" determined simply by God's whim? Or is "good", good and "evil", evil and God simply recognizes them for what they are? If you answer "yes" to the first question(and therefore "no" to the second) then you concede that there is no reason child molestation cannot be "good" if God, hypothetically decided to make it so. The question then becomes IF God did such a thing, what would be YOUR reaction? If you say that you would NOT molest children then you are admitting that you have your own moral compass, regardless of what God might decree. YOU determine what is "good" and what is "evil" and you simply happen to think that God is "good". Either way you must admit that it is YOU who decides for yourself what is good and what is evil. On the question of how morals developed... We have morals for the same reason we have hair. Because we are an animal that does. Social/pack animals do not survive long without social ties. Even wolves and apes(okay nonhuman apes!) have codified behaviors they adhere to. A member breaking their social taboos is exiled or turned on violently! Paleontologists have discovered dinosaur remians of individuals who had suffered broken legs but did not die from those wounds. They had time to heal adn eventually die from other causes. This implies the group/pack was lookijng after the injured member. With the progression of time and onset of abstract thought and developement of language and tool use, simple behaviors like those above become more complex laws and ethics. Edit: wanted to add that empathy is one of the key factors for altruism. You will notice that humans feel far less guilty about stepping on spiders as they do killing humans. They feel somewhat more guilty about killing killing dogs adn cats. The more similar creatures are to one another, the easier it is to empathise with them. Hollywood movies use the trick of anthropomorphisization to play on this. The reason we jerk back tears when a collie or german shephard is killed in a movie is because the movie makes them almost totally human. Dogs' character/personality are exaggerated in movies and they are even given thoughts and behaviors which real dogs could not have. Lassie will find a way to break the language barrier and tell Timmy that someone has fallen into a deep well and needs help. Timmy would not have had a pet tarantula named "Lassie". ABout the best anthropomorphisizing of spiders done by Hollywood was with Charlotte's Web adn even that was of very limited sucess in terms of tear-jerking. [ Monday, January 31, 2005 02:35: Message edited by: SkeleTony ] -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Sunday, January 30 2005 10:52 Profile #219 Edit: Nevermind. Misread Creator's "list post". Okay I just had a gander at Creator's list and immediately saw what they were doing. They are counting anyone who believes or is generally thought to have believed that God created the universe. That is why they have Kepler, Pasteur, Faraday and the like on there. It is a "bait-and-switch" scam. There is a HUGE difference between a "Creationist"(note the capital 'C') and someone who believes in a "creator" of the universe. The more you check out that list of Creator's the more laughable adn obviously dishonest it truns out to be. The author calls C. Everett Koop a creationist because, and this will crack you up, someone told him that Koop wrote a private letter to them stating that evolution was mathematically impossible!! Not only an anecdote but anecdotal hearsay! Plus, I am no member of the C. Everett Koop fan club but having listene4d to him in the past, I have a hard time believing him to be so stupid as to fall for the "probability argument" against evolution. THe odds of evolutioon happening are 100%. This is because you cannot retroactively assign probabilities to an event that has transpired. Creator: Anytime you get ready to pull something off teh AiG or ICR or Dr. Dino(Kent Hovind) sites, you should ALWAYS head over to the Talkorgins site and make sure it isn't more nonsense that has already been refuted or flat out dishonest that has been exposed. Creationists in general are anything BUT honest. [ Monday, January 31, 2005 02:44: Message edited by: SkeleTony ] -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Sunday, January 30 2005 10:39 Profile #218 quote: Originally written by PoD person: [b] quote: Dispute away! Give us a single example of an event that is best explained by God. The Resurrection, for one. Lazarus, as a subsidiary example. [/b] AGAIN, you are not getting this. If I told you that I saw a man get shot in the head but three days later he was alive adn walking around is this evidence that Odin ressurected him? What is the best explanation of the following: 1)One of the 5,000 deities believed to exist magically resuurect the man who did die from the gun shot. 2)The bullet only grazed the man, causing bleeding and causing him to hit the ground and go unconcious(which I took for death). 3)The bullet did more than graze(perhaps the led slug flattened out on impact and arced around the outside of the skull before exiting the other side of the head) but doctors were able to save the man in surgery. 4)The man was carrying a lucky rabbit's foot. Hint: There is more than one answer. #'s 2 & 3 above are both regularly observed and mundane(non-extraordinary) explanations. Reason demands that we eliminate THOSE beforer we consider #1 or #4. The crucifixion in particular: First of all, we have no reliable historical evidence of the man named Jesus ever existing. A fraudulent insertion into Josephus' writings(long after he died most likely) and Tacitus' parroting of popular beliefs of the time. But that detail is rather incidental because even if, for teh sake of argument, I grant you the histroical truth of Jesus' existence we have teh following: Most people crucified in ancient Rome would take several days(sometimes nearly two weeks!) to die. The reason Romans started spearing and leg-breaking and all that was because they got tired of taking down an apparently dead man only to hear him start moaning and begging for mercy. There is a considerable likelihood that Jesus may not have been dead when taken down from the cross. He was only up for three days(tops!)! He could have played possum and gotten lucky. FAR more likely than the "magical ressurection" idea. In any case, even if we give you the existence of Jesus, we have no reason to think a ressurection happened. Accounts of any ressurection are better explained by human error and deception or delusion. quote: Don't bother trashing the bible, I know it's coming; you don't believe anything from that book. Why do you assume I would respond by trashing the Bible? I don't believe anything from the Cat in teh Hat either but I don't trash that book!? Anyways I don't even like to get into the Biblical errancy stuff. Boring. quote: So, for more modern examples, there have been several healing miracles performed with water from Lourdes. LOL!!! Been a while since someone hit me with Lourdes. The funny thing about the alleged healing waters of Lourdes is that, if you go strictly by percentages adn statisitcs, you are actually better off staying at home and wishing on stars if you have cancer or some other terminal disease. The natural remission rates of those who have never been to Lourdes are slightly better than those who have!! Not much of a miracle! Cue the ridiculous "Non-decomposing corpses of preserved saints" sketch wherein we learn all about the wonders of giving your dead friends frequent hot wax treatments so they don't look quite as bad as they should. quote: A Latin-American priest, either already a saint or in the process of becoming one, named Padre Pio, when asked to pray for a terminally ill person, whom he had never seen, did so, and they were healed. Cite? Anecdotal evidence is, sorry but I am going to be blunt here, Bulls#t. Every religion from UFO cults to modern druidic-pagan tree worshippers make the same sorts of claims. NONE of them have any evidence that these things occured. ANYONE can say "SOmeone told me this happened and I believe it!" Again, Occam's razor suggests that pattern recognition and outright lying are more likely explanations. quote: That, I might add, happened on more than one occasion, and each time doctors were completely unable to explain the patient's recovery. Again, if you have a cite or something, it would do you a lot of good. The medical and scientific communities as a whoe are unaware of any such events. quote: Finally, one priest, whose faith had begun to waver, prayed for a sign as he celebrated the Eucharist. As he performed the ceremony, the bread in his hand literally became flesh, and the wine in the chalice similarly became blood. The resulting flesh has been preserved as a relic of the Church, and tests performed on it have revealed that it was cardiac tissue from a man who had died at the age of 33 and one-half, or the age of Jesus when he was crucified. ROTFLMAO!!! DO I even need to say anything...? quote: God is omnipresent, so he did cause your flat tire, but so did the nail (don't reply to this). Oh no you don't! Post something stupid and I am going to call you on it! I go to all teh trouble of explaining the principle of the razor to you(that we do not UNECESSARILY multiply entities for explanation) and you do what? You post an unecessary multiplication of entities. All that is required to explain the flat is the nail. Beyond that we have no evidence pointing to what caused the nail. Having said THAT, "ordinary" explanations must be ruled out BEFORE "extraordinary" ones are considered. quote: [b]On to Occam's Razor. I think you missed the qualifier, about traipsing through meta-science. While it (the good old Razor) is indeed against a single instance of divine intervention, the existence of a God is the simplest explanation for the existence of an infinite collection of laws governing almost all natural phenomena, as well as for anomalous phenomena, which we shall label "miracles." [/b] No, guy, it isn't. First of all OR says nothing about "simplest" anything. I will allow "simplest" when used in the correct context of being synonomous with "Explanation which does not unecessarily multiply entities..." but NOT when by "simplest" you mean "The shortest answer". "God did it". Is a short answer, but it is also the one with the greatest possible multiplication of unecessary entities. quote: So, really, my argumentation here is more Deist than my natural Catholic, except for the part about the occasional miracle but, let's face it, it's nice to be unconditionally loved, and it's also motivation to live morally, in the quest for eternal reward. Crap, I could do three pages on that one paragraph(but I won't)! How is it moral to do things because you think you will be paid for them??? I will let Mr. Einstein tackle this one: "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." -- Albert Einstein, "Religion and Science," New York Times Magazine, 9 November 1930 quote: Finally, on to why there is absolutely no parallel between God and cartoon characters. No adult believes that Wile E. Coyote exists as anything but an animation on the television screen. Why do you believe that? I know you have not met every adult have you? In any case you AGAIN ignored very simple requests and instructions. I foresaw your answer in my previous reply and said specifically to address the matter as a hypotheitcal and NOT pull out the ad numeri argument. Now, without calling me a liar or any such childishness, let's try this again: I have a relative(good old uncle "Bob") who DOES believe that Wile E. Coyote is a real coyote who orders heat-seeking missles from A.C.M.E. to chase roadrunners with. Do you have a SINGLE BIT of evidence to say your God belief is more likely than his "cartoon belief"? quote: No one has credited Wile E. Coyote with saving him/her from alcoholism, cancer, or suicide. Not only is that a bald assertion (www.datanation.com/fallacies), but is probably comepletely false! People are often inspired to great things by simple entertainment. We constantly hear stories of the sick man who would not give up, motivated by his appreciation for Music/baseball/a certain TV show/a particular fictional character etc. Is it so hard to think that somebody hitting rock bottom from alcoholism and ready to cash in his chips would be brought out of his funk by a particularly funny Warner Bros. cartoon? quote: Even temporarily, for the sake of argument, assuming that God is a figment of the imagination, Wile E. Coyote does not cause the same amount of wacky neurochemical or psychosomatic effects. Even if this were true(it's not), it would be irrelevant. Are you even paying attention?! quote: Once again, belief in Wile E. Coyote has driven no one to hallucinate or speak in tongues, so they differ entirely in terms of their intensity as constructs of the human mind. WIle E. Coyote : 3 points God : 0 I cannot believe you just cited the propensity to act like an ass on the church floor and hallucinate as points for God. quote: Lastly, in a bit of a darker vein, no crusades or inquistions have taken place in the name of Wile E. Coyote. Wile E. : 10 God : -7 Seriously though, are you trying to argue that people don't do catostrophic things for false beliefs?!? I refer you to 9/11, The Heaven's Gate cult, the Aztecs ritual sacrifie of several hundred people per year(eating their heartts even)etc. quote: Since this difference seems entirely obvious, at least to me, you seem to be making that comparison, not to make any actual logical point, but to insult and belittle anyone who would be so stupid as to believe in a god. Because you are not THINKING guy. You are presumming that other possible beliefs have a default status of being "silly" if you and yours do not follow them while YOUR beliefs should be granted better simply because you believe them. Try this(for real this time): Pretend for a minute that no one was rqaised with, indoctrinated into or otherwise coerced through their formative childhood years to believe in ANY extraordinary supernatural/spiritual/magical beliefs. Pretend that ANY such claims made are now on equal footing and evertyone is examining them for the first time. Now rank the following claims in order of likelihood and tell us why each gets whatever rank they get: a)Your God. b)Quetzelcoatyl c)Extraterrestrials seeded the planet and created religions as a joke. d)Genies wished the universe into existence and are in control of all. e)We are all just images in the mind of a sleeping child. quote: [Off-topic, pointless little addendum] No one has used the argument, brought up earlier, of "Can He make a stone so heavy..." His "stone so heavy" is humanity. He gave us free will so that there would be something in His universe outside of his control.[/Off-topic, pointless little addendum] I don't use the "Stone so heavy..." argument because it is bollocks. The only thing more ridiculous in my mind is your above answer to the argument. If God cannot lift humanity then he is not omnipotent. End of paradox. God himself(since you have identified the "omni-God") cannot have free will so how could he give US free will? THink about this, God is sitting around X billion years ago. At this point, being all-knowing, he KNOWS that Adam and Eve will do as the Bible tells us they did. Now pay close attention here: God KNOWS...not "suspects" but KNOWS this, correct? Now at what point could God have pondered a decision to create humans adn give them free will? If he alreaady knows they will exist then he cannot decide not to create them without thwarting his previous knowledge. This applies to every single event and possible decision you can imagine. Omniscience and free will are mutually exclusive! -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
how to make skins tell me plz in Blades of Avernum
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Sunday, January 30 2005 09:12 Profile #7 quote: Originally written by Titch: I would like to no how you make skins in char grapics it shows the skins on the map and there in little boxes, i also found a sit of boxes with no one it it I n Yr teh siknz!!! Far teh #D grapztic but no just 2dz paint. (Translation for those who don't speak Titch): "Skins" are done for 3D models, not 2D. BoA uses 2D graphics. Just use a paint prgram to create your art adn follow the advice & instructions of the others above(especially that link to thte tutorial). -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Saturday, January 29 2005 18:53 Profile #199 quote: Originally written by PoD person: quote: See what I mean? Hand models adn runway models are both models but clearly the guy in the above analogy is fishing for a non-applicable example to rationalize a dissenting view. Enter Wile E. Coyote and the Smurfs . . . Only kidding; however, if someone continually compares an important, gravely serious cornerstone of your belief system to cartoon characters, basically just for effect, it can grow irksome in the extreme. WHy is my (admittedly hypothetical but that isn't the point) belief in the existence of Wile E. or ssmurfs automatically regarded as somehow beneath your equally unsupported belief in God(s)? You make the all too common error of assuming that your existential claim/belief gets a free pass that claims/beliefs you do not happen to share enthusiasm for do not. Like it or not there is an equal amount of evidence supporting God(no matter HOW important it is to YOU) and Cartoon characters and dragons. Here is Charles Fiterman's' original piece that does a better job of explaining this point I think: quote: God is a common name often given to gods just as Dog is a common name often given to dogs. It is not a special case. You cannot define God anymore than you can define Fred. There is a vague common notion of what the word means in this forum. If you have some special meaning such as "The Floogle predefining all Bugles under but not including kumquats." your meaning is something else enterely and your version of God may well exist or not exist or be nonsense. Most gods are small statues and exist. The common meaning is something close to the Christian God. God must exist in some sense or we couldn't be discussing him. I think the sense in which he exists is as a persistant made up thing, a relative of Superman and Wile E. Coyote. If so I don't have to prove what he isn't because it's so very plain what he is. He is a member of a large class of highly similar beings who systematically violate physical law in steriotyped ways. As the name implies and every Bible admits God is a god. This is a very large problem. Anything that violates physical law is very likely a myth. If I have to choose between some god and ordinary physical reality, the real world is going to win. And God claims exclusivity. If God exists; Zeus, Quetzalchoatal, etc. do not and vice versa. Any argument for God must have an addendum demonstrating why it isn't an argument for Huitzelpolchitli instead. In the case of Pascal's wager it must demonstrate why it isn't an argument for worshiping Kim Jong Il who seems a far better target for an argument based on bribes and terror. In the case of moral arguments nature worship must be eliminated and it seems a far better target for an argument based on benefiting the world. Like Superman, God has a history, descriptions of him change over time. Like Superman he is the product of known processes operating for known reasons at known times. Like Superman God has a copyright. Wherever you see Superman you see the claim that DC comics or some such corporate entity owns him. If he was real they wouldn't dare. Superman would leave them stranded on the dark side of the moon. God is far greater than Superman but every religion claims a copyrite. There is no god but God and the nasty little man with pointed teeth is his prophet. God let his only son die under torture to avenge his own anger against a man and woman four thousand years dead. Like Wile E. Coyote God's motives are mysterious if you think him real but easy and obvious if you consider what he really is. Why does Wile E. buy a heat seeking missile and not food? Because it's funny and the point of Wile E. Coyote is to be funny. Why does God demand belief, because belief supports a priest class and the point of gods is to support priests. Why does God allow a tsunami to kill so many harmless people, dogs, goats and even beetles. Because God is a made up thing and made up things have no power over earthquakes. quote: On the other hand, I believe that your "disproof" of a Transcendent God is seriously flawed. By the same logic you use, string theory and its eleven dimensions are impossible. No. By itself, the notion of other dimensions existing within reality is not logically inconsistent. But if a String theorist tries to explain away flaws that ARE revealed at some point by saying "It's not a contradiction in Bizzaro's dimension!" then the whole thing is nonsense. quote: Also, it relies on the assumption that God has not intervened in the realm which we can perceive, and the Creator and I would obviously dispute that. Dispute away! Give us a single example of an event that is best explained by God. quote: You also insist on considering the concept physically, as opposed to metaphysically. Science and Logic can, with time, provide an infinite amount of answers concerning the laws of the universe, but when asked "Why?" the laws are a certain way, it can point only to other laws. Asking "why" is begging the question. You are presuming there is a "why" reason. It is like when creationsits argue that evolution cannot tell us why we are here or what the meaning of life is. Not only does evolution have nothing to do with such matters, who says there is a "meaning" or purpose to existence? quote: e.g. Atoms act a certain way because their particles act a certain way, and their particles act that way because they are composed of quarks and gluons, which in turn act a certain way. Somewhere along this chain of reasoning, however, we run into a wall. Science can define the reasons for phenomena with ever-increasing accuracy, but where it fails is defining the reason(s) for that/those reason(s). If physics tells us anything it is that existence is infinite regress. We will NEVER find the "ultimate cause" because no such thing exists. Everything can be traced to still "smaller"(for lack of a better word) causes. quote: When one traipses along through such meta-science (although the word science does not apply at all here, sans the existence of any sort of Scientific Method), one finds that Occam's Razor, which you feel compelled to invoke to disprove instances of supernatural intervention, is actually on one's side. The simplest reason for all the various reasons defined by science is the existence of a God. I believe in God because "That's just the way things are," is simply not adequate explanation for me. You are the latest in a long line of people who misunderstand Occam's razor. "God did it" is far from the "simplest" explanation. In fact, you cannot get any more needlessly complex than that! OR states that we do not unecessarily multiply entities for explanation(not "the shortest sentence wins!"). If I find a nail in my flat tire then the nail is what likely caused the flat. I do NOT invoke magical, nail-lobbing gremlins because they are an unecessary multiplication of entities. A nail suits just fine adn the most reasonable explanations for the nail are all mundane(e.g. the nail fell off a truck hauling lumber or somesuch). -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Saturday, January 29 2005 18:24 Profile #197 quote: Originally written by Kelandon: I am giving you a third concept of a "god": a powerful, invisible being. That's a god in the traditional sense, the way the ancient Greeks, Romans, Hindus, and many others thought of a god. Okay before I get to trying to work with your ambiguous definition(which I will do since I do not see you providing any clearer one anytime soon), what is the point of calling YOUR proposal "the traditional" concept? THe reason why the gods of early polytheistic religions were not "all powerful" is because gods, like anything else, evolve. The earliest inclination when humans were creating gods to explain things was to create a new god to explain each thing needing an explanation. Poseidon ruled the seas and caused tidal waves. Zeus ruled the gods themselves and caused lightning, etc. When competing religions were encounterd or invented, of course the tendency was to make sure YOUR gods were more powerful than the other guy's gods. Eventually someone trumped all of polytheism by creating a single God who had all the power imaginable and more! The equivalent of two lovers arguing over who loves who more when finally one of them says "I love you INFINITY!" and the debate ends. Furthermore, your proposal is NOT the "common" definition of God by any stretch of the imagination. Right now there is a trend, that only recently really got rolling, to define God as NOT being "omni-(fill in the blank)" because the internet has made it much easier to find out just how full-of-holes those concepts are. It is a sort of back-peddling to escape falling into the paradoxes theists have dug for themselves. Does this make your invisible, "merely powerful but not ALL-powerful God more likely? only if we grant you the leeway to define the universe, atoms, the sun etc. as "God", which I do NOT grant. We already have words for naturally occuring entities and phenomenae. Renaming them "God" is like renaming a poodle "Sasquatch" to proove that bigfoot may exist. Now as for your not-quite-specific definition of "invisible and powerful sentient being", sorry but no. Such a thing cannot exist unless you are talking about an earthly creature with incredible camoflauge capability(maybe an octopus would qualify as God?) but I do not think you are. I think you are proposing a thing with no physical brain that yet thinks. That is like saying there is an animal with wags the tail it does not have or walks but has no legs. You can call that a semantic argument if it will help you sleep better but that is my position. Again, you have a few options here to support your claim: 1)Show us a sentient being or thought that exists without a brain or 2)Cough up an invisible, brained creature/entity that is "powerful"(whatever that means). quote: If you want further definition of what I mean, I refer you to those forms of religion for their definitions of gods. So I should take Zeus as an example of a God that might exist? quote: In order to completely discount divinity, you must provide some sort of reason why that kind of god cannot not exist. quote: Done that. You just aren't getting what I am saying. A transcendent deity cannot exist because the very definition of "beyond our reality and therefore not constrained by the limitations inherent in our universe" excludes such a thing being part of our reality and universe. quote: Otherwise you can only say that an all-powerful, all-present, all-knowing God doesn't seem logically possible, but gods could exist, and while they are not necessarily the most likely explanations of events — nor the most useful — they are possible. I disagree and I do not even bother much tackling traditional Abrahamic notions of the tri-omni God anymore. It is old hat and most theologians I encounter have conceded that battle by now. quote: quote: It is not up to me to define an unlimited number of possible existential claims that can be made and refute them. Define "God" adn tehn we will talk about it. I would've thought that the onus was on you, because you're trying to disprove a commonly held (or at least controversial). One of the main reasons I stayed away from strong atheism for years was because of the commonly held notion(which I accepted) that saying "God does not exist" is a positive assertion which entails the burden of proof. I no longer believe that is so. Even strong atheism is a negative response to a positive claim(that "God exists") adn when you factor in the law of non-contradiction argument, strong atheism is clearly NOT a positive assertion which demands prrof. It is still a negative and you cannot prove a negative. I am saying that not only do I lack gods, but the universe also lacks gods because the concept is counter-logical. If someone told you your house was on fire and not burning or your dog had been hit by a car was inside sleeping, you would dismiss the claims as nonsense. But somehow "God" gets a hall pass to roam the corridors of absurdity. quote: In order to do that, you would have to define your term and then refute it. YOU have said that God may exist. I asked you to define "God" because otherwise you might as well have said "The Snozzwoggler may exist." It is YOUR assertion, not mine. You define it otehrwise I have no idea what we are discussing. quote: I claim that your definition of "God" above is terrible and does fit the normal usage of the word. My definition(such as it is) fits 99% of the Gods still around today. The reason why so many Gods are described as "transcendent" or "beyond time, space and the physical universe" is because, as usual, they do not see how big the whole is they are digging. They mean to dig an escape tunnel to evade the watchmen of reason but they do not stop digging until they hit magma and when they look up, there are those watchmen, shaking their heads in bemused resignation. quote: A god can just be a powerful, invisible, intelligent being — the humanoid intelligence is what distinguishes it from any sort of natural phenomena. If it has human intelligence then it has a brain. If you claim that God can run really fast then this means it has physical legs, unless you are defining 'run' as something else like 'floating' or teleporting. quote: [b]If science were necessarily atheistic, then why have the best scientists often been religious? [/b] Even though Stareye was all over this one I will add that not only was Einstein religious(he called it "Cosmic religious feeling" but he was also defniately an atheist. He identified as believing in a Spinozan God-concept in polite company. Baruch Spinoza was a sort of father of pantheism but whereas SPinoza's pantheism was sort of ambiguous about whether "God" was merely a synonym for "universe" or whether God was an independent entity, modern pantehism(which started with Einstein) was much less so. quote: Originally written by Albert Einstein: The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exist as an independent cause of natural events. - Albert Einstein, Science, Philosophy, and Religion, A Symposium, published by the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., New York, 1941 The above quote is one of MANY in which he denounces or dismisses the transcendent and supernatural. It is a clear endorsement of naturalism. Einstein was a product of his times. Back then "atheist" was a dirty word that was commoinly thought to mean someone with sever character flaws, irrationally stubborn and hateful towards the religious or God. Given that characterization it is no wonder he did not come out and use the word, instead saying much the same thing with less economical and more eloquent prose. You have to read AROUND his dismissal of "personal gods" to see that he also dismissed every quality attributed to ANY transcendent god-concept. Too often, theists will dwell on the "Personal God" portion and conclude that this must mean he accepted some less personal god-concept. Einstein was not "without religion" but he WAS "without gods". "God" was a metaphor for "nature" or "universe". Currently some 60% of all NAS scientists are atheist. That is including scientists from ALL fields imaginable. When you narrow it down to the "hard sciences" of Astrophysics, biology, geology etc., the number grows dramatically and if you count ONLY the biologists, less than 5% of those are theists of any sort and of those who are, most are deists, fideists and theistic pantheists. The more you know about how the universe works, the less apt you are to have god-beliefs. quote: Let me draw an analogy. One person looks at a flower and says, "It's beautiful." Another person looks at it and says, "No, it's not." Does science have any interest in this situation or ability to render judgment on which one is right? False analogy. Neither of them CAN BE "right". It is impossible to assign an objective "TRUE"/"FALSE" condition to such a subjective evaluation. "God exists"("existence" being employed in teh same usage as one says "Trees exist") is a whole different animal. When you say "God exists" you are making a fundemental claim about the nature of reality and THAT is the domain of science! quote: Obviously not. But why? The critical point here is that no experiments can be done that would demonstrate the truth or falsity of either claim. Nope. THe default status of an existential claim which does not follow from rules of inference is "FALSE" until you show otherwise. If you say "God exists", the scientist asks "What is "God" and where does it exist?". Eventually you must provide mechanisms and such adn tell what God is made of and therefore how you are able to discern/infer his existence. IF you say "He is made of 'spirit'" then the onus is upon you to cough up some "spirit" so that scientists can get to developing a "Spiritometer" to track down God. If you cannot give us some "spirit" then your claim is either false or not worth considering for it's truth-status. If God is an unfalsifiable hypothesis then that ends the debate right there. It's not "Brilling in the Slithey Toaves.". It is not even a 40% chance of "brilling". Brilling, slithey and toaves are not words. It is complete nonsense.(the above borrowed from Charles Fiterman's B-Net defenses of materialism and science). quote: Does science then indicate that the flower is not beautiful? No, science doesn't suggest an answer one way or another, because no data can be gathered. If NO DATA CAN BE GATHERED for something with an alleged independent existence, then what does that tell us about the claim? There is no possibility of an elephant being in my trunk because if an elephant were in my trunk and I had reason to say this was so, then there would be measurable effects that indicate this. It is not that my 'Trunk elephant detector' is on the fritz if I can find no warping or damage to my trunk. It is because the elephant in question does not exist. quote: Similarly, no data can be gathered on "gods" at this point. Does science then render the judgment that gods can't exist? No but again, this is a strawman adn I am not sure how I got haranged into playing Devil's advocate on this one. Science is atheistic in that it lacks gods in the same way that a couch is atheistic. Doesn't mean that the person sitting on the couch or doing science must be an atheist and especially not a "strong atheist". quote: [b]I know what your objection is going to be: the description of the flower is a qualitative one, whereas the existence of a being is a quantitative one (a binary, where 0 is non-existence and 1 is existence). I would suggest, though, that this difference is not the crucial point; rather, the similar lack of ability to test is important. [/b] I could not disagree more! You are employing and advocating the old "bat-and-switch" scam with words. it does not logically follow that if I can find a Matisse painting attractive, God must be possible to exist in the same sense that the tree outside my window does. [/qb]The same "definition" as in the previous sentence: the definition (by standard usage) of the word "god."[/qb] THere is no such animal. YOU are(even if only to play an advocate role) making the assertion that something you call "God" might exist. Now, in the last few months alone, I have heard "God" defined as the universe, the sun, Kim Jong Il/divine emporers, Eric Clapton, the tri-omni YawWeh/Allah/Jehova, various emotional qualities like love, fear, trust, hope etc., Extraterrestrials, and various vaccuous ontological, spiritual nothings. Many people assure me that there's is the "real"/traditional/standard/common defintion. I am tired of guessing. Define this thing you think may exist and tell us why you draw such an inference. If your God is a "transcendent" God then he is impossible for logical reasons. If he is merely a natural phenomenom then he is no God to me. quote: That's a statement that I'm not willing to accept. The only sentience that we know of right now emerges from brain activity, but to say that this is the only possible sentience is the epitome of the mistake that you have been accused of earlier, thinking that what we know now is all that there is to know. quote: I never said(or thought) such a thing. AGAIN, this is a strawman. That is exactly what you said. You said, "T[h]e only grounds I would bother contesting your hypothetical god is if you are saying it is 'wise' but has no physical brain. Sentience is a property emergent from brained entities. Something cannot have brain functions and lack a brain." The "I never thought..." thing is in refernce to your stating that I was guilty of "thinking that what we know now is all that there is to know". THAT is the strawman and bears NO relation to my position. It is the equivalent of arguing against someone's flat-tax proposal by creating adn then knocking down the strawman of "Someone who thinks he's better than us!". It is a pathetic attempt to sway otehrs by painting me as someone motivated by a conviction that I already know everything or some such ridiculousness. quote: If "Sentience is a property emergent from brained entities" doesn't obviously indicate "The only possible sentience emerges from brain activity," then what on earth does it mean? Saying sentience can exist in some nebulous "other way" without providing a descriptive mechanism to illustrate your claim is like saying "God did it!" when asked what went wrong with the car. It is, until you define your calim better, a nonsense statement which I am not inclined to ponder. I have no idea how something could "wal" without having legs('walk-enablers') and I have no idea how something could "think" without a 'brain'('thought-enabler'). Until you show me a thought enabler that is NOT made of meat and is instead made of some "spirit" or pieces of magic, I dismiss your claim as not possible in THIS reality. quote: Let me summarize my objections so that we don't get bogged down in details. You have claimed, from a number of different branches of thought, that no gods exist. (If this is not your claim, you may wish to state explicitly what you're arguing before you scream "STRAWMAN!!11" hysterically.) How ironic. You commit a strawman by characterizing me as someone prone to "screaming strawman hysterically". quote: You have used logic and science to try to back up your claim. I argue that science has nothing to say on the matter either way, and logic doesn't disprove the existence of gods by the normal definition, despite pointing out some contradictions in the specific case of one popular kind of god, the second kind of god in your examples above. If science has nothing to say on the matter either way, then fairies and dragons have a roughly 50% chance to exist, correct? of course not. Science goes so far as to say that such things, as per the descriptions provided, do not likely exist in THIS universe. Where pure science stops, logic takes over. If your God is both "beyond" and "within" our reality then he is logically impossible. -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Saturday, January 29 2005 05:15 Profile #185 quote: Originally written by The Creator: Perhaps I chose my words poorly. I suppose that we'd all agree that the most straightforward explanation is the most likely and simply disagree on which is the most straightforward. i, if that were the one and only such occurance, I'd probably agree with you. Thing is, there are a tremendous number of things that most Christians would accept as miracles that I know of. They could all be explained away in extreme ways, with hallucinations, lying, set ups and so forth. Though Stareye already swatted that one out of the park, I would like to add that you are incorrect to say these explanations are the "extremes". The reason why OR rules out such explanations as "God did it" is because the more likely, common and mundane explanations (which must first be eliminated before considering the extraordinary) are deception, pattern recognition, general misperception and delusion. On the subject of pattern recognition behavior itself, this is probably the biggest culprit in why people believe weird things(to borrow from Shermer's great book). In essence, humans will "find" evidence to support their beliefs even when their beliefs are COMPLETELY false and not supported by eny evidence worth considering. UFOlogists would see all the same evidence of government cover-up and alien abductions and such even if we have never been visited by E.T.s. Theists will see all teh same "miracles" even if they never happened! The human mind is particularly prone to this behavior. We rely on memories and memories are the most unreliable thing we could rely on! We do not store experiences in our mind the way a hard drive stores jpeg images or some such. We CREATE memories(or the related visuals/sounds and such) on the fly to suit our needs. Over time(and not taking very long at all) recollections of an event will almost always DRASTICALLY differ from what actually occured. This is why we have JFK conspiracy buffs who will "recall" things that were impossible(or damn near so) such as grassy knoll gunmen. THis is also why anecdotes about alleged miracles cannot be taken seriously. We have NO WAY to scrutinise an anecdote and someone who is disposed towards a belief in miracles will recall a simple breeze in the backyard as a mighty gale-force wind in their bedrooms! We are guilty of this behavior even when not pushing some sort of wild conspiracy or supernatural claim. Surviving a bar fight with one drunk who was verbally supported by his drunken cohorts is recounted as having broken several limbs of a band of thugs who attacked and if the drunk managed to slip and fall during the scuffle, this will later be recalled as him pissing himself and slipping on his own urine. quote: But the likelihood of that seems so small to me that it's much easier to believe that there's at least a fair bit of truth in them.* I don't have a link to teh study handy but some group or the other conducted an experiement wherein they asked a number of people "Do you remember meeting Bugs Bunny at Disneyland when you were just a small child?"(I believe the subjects had been 'set up' by being told, truthfully or falsely that they had visited Disneyland as toddlers). The overweehelming majority responded in the affirmative and could even recal; details of the encounter. Big problem: Bugs bunny is a WArnher Bros. character and has never appeared at Disneyland. quote: I guess I'm just curious to see at what point people would accept that divine/spiritual intervention is more likely than not. When you can show me that deception, delusion, misperception adn pattern recognition cannot account for a phenomenom. -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Saturday, January 29 2005 04:51 Profile #184 quote: Originally written by Andrew Miller: quote: Originally written by Bad-Ass Mother Custer: Name-dropping is essentially useless in philosophy, and I'm certainly not going to condone a 'philosophical' discussion which focuses so damned heavily on ontology; while there is a time and place for the nature of being in this kind of discussion, under most circumstances getting into that turns it into a debate-class circlejerk where actual truth becomes meaningless and the only particular criterion for success is greater experience in sophism. Looking back, it seems he may have actually been right! ;) SkeleTony, I can't match your knowledge of philosophy. I think, however, that I can safely assert that you can't prove that God does not exist, You can assert this yes...but not "safely". THis is another fallacy called the bald assertion(AKA "groundless assertion"). Common examples of this fallacy are "There is more to the universe than matter, energy, space and time!"(offered in support of an existential claim for "souls" or the spiritual realm) and "We will never truly understand how the mind works!". In order for an assertion to be valid(and this includes an assertion that God does NOT exist), one must substantiate it. Give a reasoned account of why the assertion should be accepted as true. quote: and it seems to me that even you admit there is some possibility (however remote) that a divine being could exist. Kel' made the same assumption a few posts back. It is not true. I do not think there is even a miniscule chance that transcendent gods exist. They are impossible by their very definitions. quote: Given that, how is your "strong" atheism anything greater than a belief? A "belief" is differnt than an acceptance of reality. One can "believe" in fire-breathing dragons. One does NOT believe that 2 + 2 = 4. Once ACCEPTS that adding two and two results in four. -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Saturday, January 29 2005 04:40 Profile #183 quote: Originally written by Kelandon: quote: Originally written by SkeleTony: Your charge that I am "closed minded", typical as it is, is a groundless assertion you do not bother to substantiate. I thought it was obvious. The description in my post above is the most reasonable (and until fairly recently, most widely accepted) idea of a god, and it logically followed from a number of posts that had already been made, but you had ruled it out without discussion. I am not dismissing undefined or poorly defined existential claims. I am saying that until you give me a definition that means SOMETHING then your claim is not worth considering for it's degree of "possibility". Whenever I have asked theists to describe or define "God", I get one of a few different responses: 1)God is a natural object like the Sun or Kim Jong Il or the universe itself which the theist worships as a God. or 2)God is something logically inconsistent but this does not matter because he is "above/beyond" logical constraint. To the first one above, I am an atheist because I do not worship such things and do not call them "God". I do not doubt that these things exist. To the second one, I am a "strong atheist" because such things are impossible by their very definition. If God is "beyond" our physical universe then he cannot intereact with it. His alleged "existence" is of no more relevance than his status as an imaginary thing. There is no way to distinguish whether he exists in some incomprehensible way or is a made up thing. Therefore, he cannot exist. Imagine our solar system is a cauldron and the universe is a "kitchen". Everything in the "cauldon" is defined as something in a(the) cauldron. You have peas, carrots, broth, meat...etc. All sorts of stuff but nothing that is "too big to fit in the cauldron" because by definition such a thing could not be "in the cauldron". Now imagine there is a chef in the kitchen. Every once in while he stirs teh contents of the cauldron up causing us to react in shock awe awe at the "miracle". The ONLY WAY we can say that chef existed is because he intereacted with the cauldron. His existence did not cause anything truly miraculous to happen. We are still peas and carrots and such and not SUVs and we still bob about in a broth. Now lets say some particular celery stalk decides to tell us that that chef is sort of incosequential compared to the "Megachef". "What is the "megachef"?" we ask. "He is a chef infinitely tall and massive who knows all" The celery replies. "But the kitchen is not infinite! He could not fit if he were infinitely large!? And why don't we see him stirring pots in some "megachef way" that we would be able to distinguish him from the normal chef?" "The megachef is the kitchen itself and everything beyond the kitchen. He imposes the phsycial constraints and limitations on his existence that we would recognise as SOP for a kitchen without any megachef." "???So...in other words, we cannot tell teh megachef from an ordinary kitchen? Why call the kitchen a megachef then adn assert that it is without constraint?" We ask. And so on.. Either the universe has limitations and operates by natural means and restrictions OR things in and of the universe exist which have no such constraints. In order to be of THIS reality, things must abide the same restriction os this reality(or else we cannot say this reality has such restrictions). Beings without such constraints may be of some "other reality" where the restrictions of logic and matter and energy do not apply but these hypothetical entities, for US, are impossible. quote: The only way that you can deny the possibility of something without being closed-minded is to define exactly what that something is and then demonstrate why any version of it is completely impossible. You have not done that for divine beings yet. It is not up to me to define an unlimited number of possible existential claims that can be made and refute them. Define "God" adn tehn we will talk about it. It boils down to this: I do not call things which exist naturally within our reality "Gods". I call such things "The universe", "The sun", or "Angelina Jolie". Transcendent gods are a nonsense concept by definition. quote: You seem to have drawn the wrong conclusion from this, though. Science is inherently agnostic, not atheistic: science can only disbelieve in something if there's evidence against it. As an agnostic-atheist myself, let me tell you that science IS both. Science, as a method and process lacks any gods so technically, you are wrong(though the idea of assigning philosophical beliefs to a system itself, as if it were a thinking entity, is a bit wonky). There is no evidence against Santa Claus' existence, fairies, gods, geneies or anything else if you apply the "transcendent" qualifier. Science lacks all of these things. quote: Philosophy can disbelieve in something without evidence, but that's something else again. Materialism is the philosophy of science(for the most part adn as far as the actual practice of science is concerned) but I am wondering about your choice of "disbelieve" as it implies a willful rejection or somesuch which science would be incapable of since science is not a man in a lecture hall(or lab coat) or somesuch.. quote: Occam's Razor does not tell us what is true in the absence of evidence; it merely tells us what our working assumptions ought to be in the absence of evidence. OR tells us, not what is true ro false itself, but where proposed explanations are acceptable by reasoned evaluation. OR tells me that the best explanation for my flat tire is that a rusty nail caused it. A mischeivious gremlin is unecessary and would require an even more preposterous multiplication of entities to exaplain so it is dismissed. That does not mean that you cannot believe in gremlins on "faith" or whatever. Just that your insurance policy should not have to cover gremlins, geneies, gods, demons, voodoo, malicious wishing etc. We know that there are a vatriety of ways in which a rusty nail can end up in a car tire. Falling off a flat bed truck, dropped in the street by kids, Intentionally placed by sabotuers etc. Before we even consider the "gremlin explanation", we need to rule out those other mundanities. quote: God is a non-falsifiable hypothesis. Science neither believes nor disbelieves in such things. NOW you are getting it! ;) quote: quote: The concept you present above is too sketchy and ambiguous to be of any use to me in evaluating it for consistency and such. So are you saying that it's possible? No. I am saying that "Zibble ploink 5rXng!" is not subject to consideration of whether it is possible or not. It is either vague or complete nonsense. quote: That's a normal definition of a god, you know. "Normal definition of God" Chuckle. Dare I say that that is half the problem here...? quote: That's the idea that you'd have to deal with if you wanted to say that there cannot possibly be gods of any kind, because that fits well within the definition.* What fits within what definition? quote: quote: Sentience is a property emergent from brained entities. You can't possibly know that with certainty. How do you know? ;) quote: That's a statement that I'm not willing to accept. The only sentience that we know of right now emerges from brain activity, but to say that this is the only possible sentience is the epitome of the mistake that you have been accused of earlier, thinking that what we know now is all that there is to know. I never said(or thought) such a thing. AGAIN, this is a strawman. Go HERE to learn more about logical fallacies. The same falalcious arguments can be made for "walking". THe only "walking" we know of is an activity performed by things with legs. WHo knows what sort of "walking" might be done by the gelatinous mind-warbblers of Regus VII! -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Saturday, January 29 2005 03:31 Profile #182 quote: Originally written by Thuryl: quote: If we do NOT explicitly define our terms then the whole discussion is worthless. If thought can be anything from an idea to a purple walnut then what is the point? I don't object to defining our terms; I object specifically to your definition, because I object to your defining the concept of a brain into thought. But I never defined "brain" as "thought". I defined mind as thought and emergent from the physical brain. quote: Thoughts are something we have direct experience of; when you have a thought, your experience of it doesn't have any subjective quality of "brain-ness" to it, despite the fact that a brain is involved in producing it. I am not sure what you are getting at here. I have never had any direct experience with anyone's thoughts and I think such a thing is probably impossible. quote: *Sure, brains may create thought, but to our experience* the thought comes first and the brain comes second; we know thoughts before we know brains.** This is a bit tricky but I think it goes back to our axioms again. I observe that "brains" => "thought" as "Legs" => "walking" and my "necessary assumption"(materialism) is that this is so and such axioms are beyond using any methods that proceed from them to evalute. WHat you seem to be doing here is(as I think TM was alluding to) solipsistic adn since I am a materilaist(different axiom) we will get nowhere fast in this part of the discussion. But more on this below I think. quote: (Anyway, every system has basic concepts that it can't define. Thought may be one of them. Nor is explaining the reasons for its existence the same as defining it, at least to me. If you don't mind me bringing up the blind man from a previous page, telling him everything physicists know about wavelengths of light and cells in the retina doesn't tell him everything I know about the colour red, because I know what it actually looks like, even though that information is beyond my power to describe. See this I disagree with completely. I know that the reason "Red" appears as it does to me is because of a particular configuration/organization of my physicological bits and pieces. It is the same as my knowledge that my car can make a lot of noise because my muffler is attached and working(or not) a certain way. If I come upon another car that has the same exact makeup with the same muffler attached in the same way, the reasonable inference is that it too(barring any "defects"/deviance in the construction) will make similar noise. There are no humans with non-human eyes/brains. If there were then I would think they might possibly be seeing what I see as "green" on a stop sign, instead of "red". quote: Likewise, I couldn't describe to a hypothetical non-sentient intelligent being what it's like to have a thought.) What is an "intelligent" but "non-sentient" being?!? I submit that that is another impossible thing but I concede that a redefinition of "intelligence" will allow one a proverbial 'escape hatch' from that one. quote: quote: Actually, no. Linguistic argument or no, I am making a distinction between perceptions/seeing and imagining. One requires an externally existent object while the other creates images of an object what do not reside outside that person's head. Fine. Since you don't want to stretch the definition of "perception" that far, can we at least say you'd be having a subjective experience? We could but if my suspicions are correct, you will simply define "experience" in such a way that we are stuck in the same dillemma anyway. In other words "subjective experince" is no where near the same thing as an OBJECTIVE one. That is to say that my imagining what it is like to be hit by a car is not the same thing as being hit by a car while crossing the street. The former can only be recounted as anecdote while the latter can be observed concurrently by a whole bunch of people. quote: I regard subjective experience as being synonymous with perception, but for the purposes of my argument it's not overly important which words I use. I think this is pretty important because I do NOT equate the two. Right now I am thinking that Gargamel should have gotten a new cat to chase Smurfs. I can report this idea to you but YOU cannot "percieve" the idea. And if I were percieving it, then it would not be imagination but rather there would be an actual wizard with a stupid cat trying to catch smurfs. quote: Your definition of "observation" seems to require a perception that corresponds to an actual object and is caused by that actual object. See I don't think that "caused" is right the way you are using it above. There is not really a single "cause" of my perception but rather a few different components: The actual object I am percieving and my sensory organs and brain matter. Furthermore, you are once again implying things with a dependent existence are equivalent of things which independently exist. In essence saying that since the thought in my head is "caused" by my brain, thoughts are existent in the same way that trees, caused by climatological conditions, "exist". If this is what you are saying then I disagree wholeheartedly because trees do not reuire my thinking about them to exist adn if you are NOT thinking abouyt them, you can still run into one adn break your nose. You will NEVER run into my thoughts and neither will I. I will not be kicked by a "walking" either. I will be kicked by legs. quote: If so, firstly, that's not my definition (in fact, that definition doesn't mean much to me because I don't even hold a correspondence theory of truth), and secondly, that's not how science works. Remember Kekule's dream in which the structure of benzene came to him? Was he being unscientific by using that dream as an inspiration to test whether the structure he interpreted the dream as conveying to him was correct? What is unscientific is assuming that what he reporeted anecdotally(re: that he had a dream in which the structure of benzene came to him) happened just as he reported but that is another issue. YES it is unscientific to rely on dreams in such a way but so what? If I am inspired to invent a better sugar-free beverage than Diet Soda because of a daydream or hallucination I had then how I go about inventing said beverage will be where the scientific process occurs. The "inspiration" part is rather inconsequential(or maybe "incidental" would be a better word) to the whole matter of how science works. quote: [b] quote: Hypothesis doesn't require materialism for the same reason. Probably right here but hypotheses really don't even require SCIENCE! YECism is a grand hypothesis after all! We were debating whether science required hypotheses, not whether hypotheses required science.[/b][/quote] Actually we were debating whether science(and hypotheses) required materialism. I think it is ogvious that science requires hypothesizing because developed theories do not fall together from the ether. quote: (None of the individual components of science require* science as a whole in order to take place, anyway.)** ??? What is THAT supposed to mean(not agreeing or disagreeing...I simply cannot make sense of what you said there)? quote: Conducting an experiment may not require materialism. Many experiments in economics and psychology take the form of abstract games (e.g. the Prisoner's Dilemma) which require only the experimental subjects and no specific material apparatus. quote: Economics and psychology...? That is a whole 'nother debate there friend. :) If you're going to argue that all experiments conducted in economics and psychology are unscientific, I'm afraid I'm going to have to argue that they meet all the criteria of your posted definition, so you'll have to expand your definition. THat's not what I was arguing. Let's say that I came here boldly proclaiming, in all of my closed-minded furor, that girls who wanted to be working 'models' had to be of a certain height adn weight range in addition to having appealing facial features/bone structure by the general consensus of the modeling community and society in general. Now along comes someone who says "Hey! My friend does hand modeling for those Palmoloive dish soap commercials adn she is overweight adn short!" See what I mean? Hand models adn runway models are both models but clearly the guy in the above analogy is fishing for a non-applicable example to rationalize a dissenting view. quote: I'm saying that an attempt to falsify requires only two things: conditions under which the hypothesis would be falsified, and a further experiment which tests whether those conditions apply. Those conditions don't have to involve anything material if the hypothesis is about something non-material (e.g. the hypothesis in economics that "rational individuals will always act in their own best interests"; rational individuals can, in principle, exist and have interests in a universe without matter), and I've already argued that experiments don't necessarily require materialism. See "model" example above. Calling economics "science" in this discussion is like invoking someone with an honorary doctorate(re:Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.) in a discussion about medical malpractice or something. quote: (By the way, no theory is strictly falsifiable if you don't want it to be anyway; you can explain away any data you like.)* ??? Again, what is your point here? That if someone wanted to they could plug their fingers in therir ears and chant :"BLAH BLAH, I can't hear you because superstring theory works LA LA LA!"? WHat does that have to do with proving grounds for falsification?!? quote: quote: Incidently, I think you are the first actual scientist I have met that has disagreed with this point about materialism. I wonder how many more of you are hiding out in your labs...? :D Talk to a quantum physicist some time. It's mostly in biology that you tend to meet the hardline reductionists these days. I have spoken with people who invoke QP/QM to support ridiculous positions but I am not sure I have ever actually discussed anything with a quantum physicist. Much of what they would have to say would go over my head anyway as I and math are old enemies. quote: quote: You are aware of course that having a scientific degree(however one defines THAT qualification) does not make one a scientist. Working in a field of science and publishing in peer reviewed journals does. Otherwise the creationsits would be right to say that a ton of scientists were denying evolution(their lists, when not outright fraud, are composed mostly of engineers and computer tech guys and such whose views on biology are irrelevant). Point taken. Is anyone always a scientist anyway? No, but that is irrelevant to my above contentions. I am concerned only that they be scientists when they are (claiming to be)doing science. quote: Surely, if there is some objective standard for whether a method is scientific, one is a scientist when one is applying a scientific method and not when one is not. Or perhaps a scientist is one who habitually (if not always) applies scientific methods, in much the same way that a sailor is frequently but not always found on a seagoing vessel. Cannot say that would be wrong. Just that I would not be disposed towards saying that someone employing the SM while brushing their teeth is not doing science in any way that would be meaningful in this discussion. quote: Sorry. I try to minimise the amount of semantic argument required, but I do consider semantics both interesting and important. Anyway, I really don't believe there's a consensus on what the scientific method is; my experience is that lots of scientists think everyone knows what it is, but nobody can really give it a detailed and coherent description when pressed. I will take you at your word on this as you undoubtedly have more quality experience with working scientists than I do. quote: quote: No. I do not doubt what I have expressed in here as certain. What I AM saying is that if I am wrong and I am made aware that I was wrong then I will not cling to my "wrongness". If you don't believe it's even logically possible that you could be wrong, then I can't see how stating what you would do if you were wrong is meaningful. (Okay, in a classical-logic sense it is, but in classical logic you could equally say, being absolutely confident in the assumption you're right, "If I am wrong, Napoleon was American and round squares exist", which is one of the reasons I'm a little uncomfortable with classical logic.) Just that. I say that thought is an emergent property of brains and does not exsit sans brains(has no independent existence) adn of this I am certain. I am also certain that logically inconsistent gods(and otehr entities) do not exist. I do not believe it is possible I am wrong on this but I also did not believe my fellow Americans would ever go back to "boy bands" after New Kids on the Block were finally eradicated by my local music scene. In all seriousness though, your only recourse here is to show me a thought that exists without a brain, or a round square or a God. Until then, I cannot be called "closed minded"(as some have) for saying that which is impossible, is in fact impossible. quote: On the other hand, if you do think there are some conceivable circumstances under which you could be proven wrong, then surely that means you're leaving room for doubt over whether you are right. But I don't think there are any such circumstances. Doesn't mean I am entrenched or something so that I could not see that I was wrong if I were in fact wrong. No human can see how a round square could exist. You can speculate that this is because we lack some capability or something but that argument supports any claim no matter how ridiculous or nonsensical(e.g. I can claim that I gave birth to my mother, rather than the reverse adn say that this makes sense if only we had the capacity to understand that "mother" meant "child of" rather than "parent of"). quote: I get the impression that this is really turning into a semantic discussion hinged on the meaning of the word "doubt". Actually a lot of this debate has been about defining and redefining words. I have tended to use the "essential definitions" of words to avoid spinning my wheels in meaningless solopsistic rambling. I say that a square cannot be "round" because if it is synonomous with "not round" for all intnets and purposes. I still cannot fathom why anyone would bother contending this when they themselves cannot show me how this is wrong!? quote: quote: See this is exactly my point. "Meaning" does NOT exist(in the way we are using the term "exists" to describe matter and such). "Mind" does NOT exist. "Walking" does NOT exist. You cannot put any of those non-existent things in a jar or box and tell me how much they weigh or how big they are. They have a dependent existence. "Walking" is something that LEGS do(and legs EXIST!). "Mind" is a property of the brain and thinking is something that brains do(and brains EXIST!). If there were no minds, there'd be nobody to know that brains existed, and therefore it'd be meaningless to say that they existed. If there were no brains, there would be no minds and therefore no one to say that minds existed. Your move. quote: Therefore minds are more directly the objects of our experience, and we can be more certain of their occurrence (since you don't like the word "existence" as applied to minds). I do not doubt that we think or that thoughts "occur", just as I do not doubt that "waling" occurs. My contention is with the idea that we could "walk" without "Material parts which allow for walking as an activity"(legs). The only reason you can even continue this discussion is because you have a brain. Whack yourself in the head with a big red hammer and then come tell me that thoughts can exist without brains. You cannot do it! quote: What can it mean for something to have a meaning if the meaning doesn't mean anything to anyone? quote: Don't know. Not my dog you got there. Yes it is. You're saying that things can exist independent of our experience. I'm saying that the concept of things existing independent of our experience is a concept that cannot be meaningfully understood. :Boggle: How did you go from the quasi-zen "What is meaning?" thing to...?! Nevermind. Let's get back on track here. "Meaning" is often, if not always subjective I think we both agree. So is your bone of contention with me over my definitions and this is all just semantic quibbling? Is it not so much that you think a round shaped square might exist but rather that you should be able to redefine "square" as being "round"? Well, knock yourself out then. How do you expect to function in our world though? Officer: "you know why I pulled you over right?" Thuryl : "Because you define running red lights and driving on the sidewalk as "reckless driving" when in actuallity I was no driving at all. The only reason you think I was is because you are thinking that. In my mind, I have been relaxing at the beach, minding my own business when you..." Officer :( reaching for sobriety testing equipment)"Would you step out of the car please...? quote: Whoa. I think that linking genetic inheritance with self-awareness is a very long bow to draw indeed; it almost seems like a kind of biological mysticism.* You don't agree that genetics play a role in determining are personalities, intellect and such? quote: As for experiences, if you're a strict materialist, surely you're committed to the idea that any knowledge or experiences must be stored in some physical form, and therefore be measurable and replicable in principle. Not sure what you are getting at there. If you are saying that "ideas" and such should have a phsyical existence themselves then no, materialists would disagree. If you are saying that ideas must, according to materialism, have a real-world reference, then I would tentatively agree because I am unaware of any idea in history which did not. Even gods and dragons are imagined from a human frame of reference. -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Friday, January 28 2005 02:58 Profile #166 quote: Originally written by Thuryl: quote: AT this time I am doing just that. "Thoughts" are defined as "brain activity" That's a silly definition. For one thing, we can have brain activity without thinking (our brains are still active when we're unconscious). Yeah...?So...? I never said we could not have brain activity without thinking but we cannot have brain activity without BRAINS. quote: For another, it's an unfair definition; brains are important because of what they do (thinking), not because of the kind of matter they're made of. Though I agree with this subjective opinion about what makes a brain "important", I fail to see what this has to do with what I posted. The important point is that brains are matter adn they generate thought(not the other way around). quote: The fact that the composition of a living brain is sufficient for thought doesn't prove that it's necessary for thought, unless you explicitly define thought as requiring a brain, which is no better than proof by assertion. If we do NOT explicitly define our terms then the whole discussion is worthless. If thought can be anything from an idea to a purple walnut then what is the point? quote: quote: I see where you are coming from now. I would say yes. Thoughts = "mind". I can find no good argument to show me otherwise. The problem lies in defining a mind, as an object with boundaries. (To slightly paraphrase Wittgenstein, we cannot draw a limit to thought, for to do that we would have to be able to think both sides of the limit.) I think this is a case of applying the same conditions to a thing which does not exist independently as we would to a thing which DOES. Thoughts/minds and brains are not equivalent in their existence any more than making a killing on the stock market is equivalent to killing your wife for the insurance money. quote: Is unconscious brain activity still part of the mind? One can argue either way. A mind is an abstraction in the same sense as any other object composed of multiple parts is; which parts to include and which to exclude is partly a matter of subjective judgement. Good question and not one I am prepared to answer yet. Will think on it adn try to get back to you. quote: quote: Okay, I gotcha. In other words the insane person does not think to himself "I am insane"(oversimplification I know). I guess my first reaction to the above is to question what you mean by "seeing". I can envision things in daydreams or under the influence of LSD but am I "seeing" these things? I would say no. I am imaginaing those things. "Seeing" requires that something be there to see. Interesting, but basically another linguistic argument. Can we at least agree that you'd be experiencing perceptions of some sort? Actually, no. Linguistic argument or no, I am making a distinction between perceptions/seeing and imagining. One requires an externally existent object while the other creates images of an object what do not reside outside that person's head. quote: Time for another cards-on-the-table moment; I don't think that human brains are inherently wired for logic. I think it's a human invention that's an outgrowth of language, and that our thoughts are much less precise and dependent on consistency than the laws of classical logic. Well, this is to one extent or the other true. We are(historically speaking at least) better wired for superstition and "faith" and this is probably what allowed us to survive early in our ancestry. However we do have an amazing capacity(when we choose to use it) for rational thought. quote: A word, for example, can have opposite meanings to different people; if both participants in a conversation hold the relatively common belief that "inflammable" means "not flammable", and one of them uses the word in this way and is understood, then the word has been used to mean that; if you argue that the word does not in fact mean that, you may have lexicographers on your side, but the fact remains that it has been successfully used to mean that, and that, after all, is what language is all about. Yes, words shift meaning with context and usage, speaker and audience. That is why I am not one of those who pull out dictionaries to support an argument(re: "Here it says that an atheist is someone who is wicked and hates God!"). However, there are what I call essential definitions for use in these sorts of debates. Whenever a particular type of theist offers a critique of atheism in general by attacking what amounts to(at best) a small minority of particular atheists(re: strong atheists), I point out that the bare essential definition of the term is one who lacks a positive belief in God(s), for whatever reason. Just as the essential defintion of "Christian" is one who believes in Christ(for whatever reason and by whatever usage of "believes" one invokes). I do not challenge Christianity in general by pointing out the goofiness of Pentacostal snake handlers or Mormon ideas for example. quote: quote: My contention is that, if someone abandons the scientific method itself...does not regard rules of inference and all that, then they are not doing science. The scientific method requires materialism, pure and simple. Going through your laundry list below (on which I shall say more when it comes): Observation doesn't require materialism; it's a pure act of perception, and thus a mental process. Depends on what you mean by "perception" adn "observation". I think science is pretty clear on how these terms are applied and they most certainly reuire a materialist axiom. quote: Hypothesis doesn't require materialism for the same reason. Probably right here but hypotheses really don't even require SCIENCE! YECism is a grand hypothesis after all! quote: Conducting an experiment may not require materialism. Many experiments in economics and psychology take the form of abstract games (e.g. the Prisoner's Dilemma) which require only the experimental subjects and no specific material apparatus. Economics and psychology...? That is a whole 'nother debate there friend. :) quote: [b] They'd still work fine in a world containing no matter (assuming some non-material means for minds to communicate with each other). Attempts to falsify are a part of the experimental process; if the original experiment didn't require them, subsequent experiments aren't likely to require them either. I am not getting you here. Are you saying that grounds for falsification are not necessary to science?!? I am almost positive I am reading you wrong so I will await your explanation on that. quote: [qb]Formation of a theory is a mental process and doesn't require materialism.[/b] Arguable but even if I granted this one and the hypothesis point, that would still leave most of science requiring materialism. Incidently, I think you are the first actual scientist I have met that has disagreed with this point about materialism. I wonder how many more of you are hiding out in your labs...? :D quote: Paul Feyerabend, for starters. (Admittedly, he spent most of his career as a philosopher, but he had a degree in science.)* You are aware of course that having a scientific degree(however one defines THAT qualification) does not make one a scientist. Working in a field of science and publishing in peer reviewed journals does. Otherwise the creationsits would be right to say that a ton of scientists were denying evolution(their lists, when not outright fraud, are composed mostly of engineers and computer tech guys and such whose views on biology are irrelevant). quote: That's not a method. That's a list of words. "Testing", especially, is such a broad term that it can be (and is!) used to mean anything a particular researcher wants it to mean. Many scientists and mathematicians argue that mathematics counts as a science; many argue that it doesn't. Sigh I oversimplified because, going from memory and without any books in front of me ATM, I was sure I would fail if I tried to give a word-for-word definition of the Liberal scientific method and I was under the impression that you were already aware of such anyway adn we could deal with the crux of my arguments(right or wrong) rahter than these semantics. quote: And that no such reason could ever exist? Surely if any observation at any future point in time could ever change your mind, then there's room for doubt (even though I'm not saying that that doubt should necessarily have an influence on your actions in your daily life, since something can be as good as certain without being absolutely certain). No. I do not doubt what I have expressed in here as certain. What I AM saying is that if I am wrong adn I am made aware that I was wrong then I will not cling to my "wrongness". Cue the argument that says that I am too stubborn to ever accept any proof that I was wrong "so we will not bother providing said proof". :) quote: quote: I mean that, not only does matter exist, but everything with an INDEPENDENT existence(that is an existence that would be so regardless of whether there were entities capable of appreciating it. I would assert that the idea of something existing without anyone ever observing it or any consequences of it is meaningless, because "meaning" itself is something that can only exist if there's something for a thing to mean anything to - that is, a conscious being. See this is exactly my point. "Meaning" does NOT exist(in the way we are using the term "exists" to describe matter and such). "Mind" does NOT exist. "Walking" does NOT exist. You cannot put any of those non-existent things in a jar or box and tell me how much they weigh or how big they are. They have a dependent existence. "Walking" is something that LEGS do(and legs EXIST!). "Mind" is a property of the brain and thinking is something that brains do(and brains EXIST!). You cannot pull the 'bait-and-switch' with the term "existence" like that. quote: *Without a conscious observer, everything* is meaningless. Agreed. Doesn't change my arguments though. quote: What can it mean for something to have a meaning if the meaning doesn't mean anything to anyone?** Don't know. Not my dog you got there. quote: [b] EDIT: A further thought: would you willing to entertain the idea that "meaning", like "walking", is something a thing does rather than something it has?[qb] In essence what I have said all along. There are two types of "existence". Dependent and independent. Meaning falls under the former usage. quote: [qb]In fact, isn't this exactly the sense in which we use the word when we say that something means different things to different people? So if something doesn't mean something to somebody, how can it be said to mean anything at all?[/b] Don't know. I do not argue for any objective "meaning"(in fact I deny it as vigorously as I deny the existence of round squares and such). quote: quote: I don't follow you. You are saying that the universe and everything within it probably or does exist but we do not have these universal things we percieve? THe rock exists whether I stub my toe on it or not. SOmeone else can come along and stud their toe on the rock and though I never percieved it, the rock exists. How can you possibly know this? Again, part of that "necessary assumption"/axiom thing. Knowledge has to proceed from somewhere. Mine is the materialist axiom. quote: quote: May be. I will think on that some more but it occurs to me that I don't have many axioms/first principles. Basically mine boils down to "We percieve reality because it exists" as opposed to "reality exists because we percieve it"(or similar ideas). If there weren't someone to perceive it, whether it existed or not would be irrelevant. Agreed. [quote] Of course, then you have all that quantum weirdness about observation affecting results, which I'll try to avoid getting into because I'm far from an expert, having read only a handful of books on the subject.[quote] Yeah, that won't be necessary, nor would it do any good as I have banged heads with people who DO claim expertise in this area and am still unconvicned of their position(s). TO me, bring quantum mechanics into a philosophical discussion is like bringing a fishing pole to a billiards tournament(rather than a pool cue). Sure you can do it, but you will just end up sucking as both a fisherman and a pool player. quote: Are you saying you accord some special status to brains; that they do something that it is in principle impossible for any machine to accomplish? Define "machine". Actually, as I said above in the "fleshy android" bit, I do not deny the possibility of replicating the brain through artifice. But there is probably a lot more questions to deal with like what role does the absence of genetic inheritence play in the machine's self-awareness? How important or replicable is a lifetime of experiences to the machine's abstract-thought ability? etc. -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony Shock Trooper Member # 156	written Friday, January 28 2005 00:34 Profile #164 quote: Originally written by Garrison: Though I am impressed with many of certain people's lengthy arguments, I still think that what we consider to be paranormal apparition ghosts do exist. God might exist, and invisible dragons do not. Here is an interesting backwards argument: I think that ghosts exist because that would be evidence of a soul, and a soul would indicate that a higher spiritual being could exist, and so God could be real. That argument IS backwards! WHy do you think souls exist? This seems circular(at the very least) but I cannot make enough sense of it to really address it. -------------------- "I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi Posts: 219 \| Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00

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