JillSwift

But not all areas are covered by science. For example, 'Does God exist?'. Science has no business addressing that question since there is no way to test it. It is supernatural and outside the purview of science. However, based on a scientist's background and science's track record, many scientists come to the logical conclusion that God does not exist and are very comfortable in that position.

 

But of course they don't know God doesn't exist. How could they? But they take (what they believe to be) the indirect evidence around them, along with their experiences, background, and all the rest, and come to that conclusion. Very logical.

Did you mean, then, you were just going to stop arguing this with me? A method to shut me out?

 

The only way to take the "indirect evidence" as evidence for god is to make as a priori the decision that there is a god. That's to make a conclusion then find evidence to support it. This necessarily means to exclude evidence that isn't supportive. It's not logical in the least.

 

Also, you keep framing the atheistic argument as being gnostic, where the fact is the vast majority of atheist positions are agnostic. The actual answer to "Does god exist?" is "I don't actually know, given the nature of 'god', but there is no evidence to be found and no way to test so I stay with the null hypothesis".

 

As for the supernatural - here's the thing with that:

 

1. Assume there is a supernatural X, there are then two possibilities:

-- a. X can affect our world in some way

-- b. X can not effect our world in any way

2. If (a) is true, science can be brought to bear to test if X exists indirectly through its effects.

3. If (b) is true, then even if X does exist it is utterly irrelevant.

 

So long as it's claimed that god is not testable, then even if got exists it is irrelevant.

It seems clear to me that you have concluded that your frame of reference is the correct one and that the way theists think and reason is in some ways flawed. Apologies if I misstated your position.

 

I tend to feel that scientific thought and theistic thought are really two very different things, and one is really in no way qualified to suggest to the other how to reason. Kind of like baseball players not really being qualified to pass judgement on how soccer players approach their sport.

 

Since the dialogue seems to me to be breaking down and neither of us is budging, I'll go ahead and call it quits.

 

Thanks for the debate!

 

Okies.

 

Just a final thought or so: I don't think theists have flawed thinking, but the thinking leading to theism is flawed. Probably just a quibble, but I don't want to seem like I'd call the theist people themselves unreasonable, 'cuz they ain't.

Thanks Jill! I'll check them out!

 

 

Pretty much every aspect interests me! Especially the culture of Transhumanism. But also philosophy of mind as it relates to AI. And I am interested in what happens after the Singularity when we colonize space.

 

I was unaware there was a culture around transhumanism. (Seems early to me ==)

 

You may also be interested in posts in the Medical Science/Psychiatry & Psychology forum, there's a few threads discussing the Difficult Problem of Consciousness.

No, my intent was to say that I have yet to meet someone who claims to know the best way of doing something, and then tells me that they don't use that method. Reminds me of a line from "Meet Me in St. Louis"; "Wasn't I lucky to be born in my favorite city?" --Tootie.

This does not then jibe with:

 

If you had been born to very religious people in the mountains of Pakistan you would in all likelihood be making very different arguments than if you had been born to scientists in Paris. And you would be just as confident in both cases.

What does personal confidence have to do with it? Aren't the results of a given epistemology a better metric?

I am new to this forum and am wondering if anyone here is familiar with the concept of the technological singularity?

 

"A technological singularity is a hypothetical event occurring when technological progress becomes so rapid and the growth of artificial intelligence is so great that the future after the singularity become qualitatively different and harder to predict"

 

Yup. See:

 

What Can Be Done To Protect Us From the Dangers of the Technological Singularity

 

and

 

The Technological Singularity: all but inevitable?

 

What aspect(s) of the concept interest you? ==

I do realize you can spin a statement to make it sound as if it favors your position.

AS you demonstrate here.

 

I could have said you have 'confidence or trust in a person trying to make money by selling another overpriced text book', where a theist has belief in a person 'who took a vow of poverty and is dedicating his life to study and the betterment of mankind'. But that wouldn't have been fair.

It would have been silly rhetoric, neither fair nor unfair. At best a plea to vanity, at worst a appeal to authority.

 

When you get right down to it you decide who and what you want to believe and why. As does the theist. But you have also decided that you are just and he is a fool.

Was your intent is to say different methods of deciding what is real and what is not are all perfectly equal? If that were true, we'd have garnered as much useful technology from the study of theology as from empirical science.

 

Despite your implication, there is no 'contrary evidence' to the existence of God. Given the lack of evidence either way it seems unreasonable to deny the theist his beliefs.

Whether there is contrary evidence depends entirely on which god you're talking about. It is as perfectly reasonable to deny a theist's belief in god as it is reasonable to deny belief in fairies, gnomes and flumphartigans. No evidence of their existence means no reason in believing in them.

(For illustrative purposes only -- Don't really know you so I'm just picking a topic. Could be any subject you believe but do not have first hand experience with.)

 

Do you believe in DNA, that it exists, that it is responsible for traits and how people develop? (Hoping the answer is yes.)

Have you ever worked with DNA, helped map a genome, done cloning, worked in a microbiology lab? (Hoping the answer is no.)

 

What is your evidence of its existence? Because someone else said so? Do you have faith in those strangers who write papers or talk online regarding the subject? So even though you lack the evidence, you have faith that it is true. Does that feel like pure fiction to you? Do you feel like you are fabricating a belief?

 

Is it that much of a stretch for you to be allowed your faith in what strangers are telling you is true, but not to understand how someone can have faith in God?

 

You do realize there is more than one definition for "faith", right?

 

Per your analogy, I'd have "faith" DNA exists where faith means "confidence or trust in a person or thing". This is in contrast to "belief that is without evidence, or in spite of contrary evidence", which would be religious faith.

I must have missed it. What is Zarnaxus' final test of the "Australia hypothesis"? Seeing it from space and actually being threre were not enough for him to be 100% certain. It sounds to me like he believes he can never be 100% certain.

He can't be. 100% certainty can't be attained - strictly speaking. Though a functional certainty can be. Intellectual honesty requires the recognition of the fact that we are nothing near omniscient, and there is always the chance - even if so remote as to be not worth consideration in daily life - that what we are certain about is in fact untrue.

 

Someone who believes in God can make up for the lack of evidence with faith.

 

Zarnaxus has enough evidence for Australia's existence, yet uses faith in the slim possibility of "The entire world is a conspiracy against you, making you believe that Australia exists!!" to maintain his bit of doubt.

 

While their respective faiths may cover different amounts of evidence territory, I don't see much difference between the two. One doubts with evidence; one believes without evidence.

Zarnaxus isn't only admitting that trickery or misinterpretation may well mean there is no Australia in objective reality. I doubt very much though that this doubt is more than the admission of a tremendously remote possibility in regard to what I said before.

 

It's not even close to being the opposite of "belief without evidence".

 

Making up for a lack of evidence with faith sounds like pure fiction, though. Isn't there a huge difference between admitting that perfect certainty isn't achievable (without discarding functional certainty) and fabricating a belief?

It seems to me that you should have directed these comments toward Zarnaxus. He is the one who doesn't seem to have complete faith that Australia truly exists. I do have complete faith it exists.

 

I am questioning his logic in doubting the existence of something so clearly defined, and at the same time not understanding how someone else's logic can lead them to believe in God. Seems to me to be opposite sides of the same coin. One is unsure of some existence despite the evidence, the other is sure of some existence despite the lack of evidence.

I don't see it like that.

 

Zarnaxus isn't claiming not to know Australia is there, rather that even though we can have a high certainty about Australia (as my previous post) we can't be supremely certain without a final test of the "Australia hypothesis" - a test we can manage to do.

 

As contrast, there is a dearth of evidence for "god", and no way to test the god hypothesis.

 

I've been debating the whole god idea for over two decades, and I've yet to come across any argument in favor that has consistent logic. So, I can't see them being two sides to one coin, but wildly different approaches to trying to understand reality. One is reasonable (faith as in a high degree of certainty), the other is just bizarre (faith as in belief without evidence or despite contrary evidence).

Do you believe Australia exists? I mean, maybe not 100%, but enough so that you believe it is probably so? Confident enough that you would buy a plane ticket, board the plane, and put your life at risk, since if it is not there you are going to have to land in the middle of the ocean? Will you act out your life as if it exists, talking about Sydney without a smirk on your face, believing people when they tell you they've seen koalas and kangaroos on their vacation to Australia? Would you be willing to bet all your worldly possessions that it exists? I'll take a chance that the answer to these questions is yes.

 

So how can you have so much faith in the existence in a hunk of rock you've never seen, yet find it so incomprehensible that someone else can have the same faith that God exists?

 

If trying to test the claim that there is a continent and country called "Australia", no one will ever claim that the reason one can not find it is because:

• You must first have faith - and if you can't see it, you've not enough faith.
• Australia is inherently beyond human understanding, and thus can not be detected by human means.
• Australia exists outside our universe - it has no energy, mater, or dimension. It is supernatural/metaphysical. Thus, you can not detect it.

Where folks commonly say similar things about "god".

 

Secondly, "Australia" is very clearly defined. On seeing any continent, we could test it against the definition and know clearly if we're looking at Australia or not. Whereas "god" is very vaguely defined, and many definitions are in direct contradiction with other definitions. Many of the definitions for god are internally inconsistent, meaning they can't describe anything real.

 

So, it seems rather easy to say "Australia exists" with faith that one is correct (as in the sort of faith that lets you say the sun will rise tomorrow, i.e. very likely right, with a nonzero chance of being wrong), while it seems rather unreasonable to have the same certainty about god.

Well, I am an outsider, but I have investigated the nature of psychiatry for almost 3 to 4 years now.

Argument from authority. Unsupported assertion. Fallacies.

 

My motivations are:

Irrelevant. Evidence is what was asked for.

 

Really simply put: the measurable can't be the source for itself.

Unsupported assertion. Fallacy.

 

There is no proof for any disorder in de brain as cause for mental problems or behaviour

Unsupported assertion. Fallacy.

 

No matter if it is money or some wacky ideology, it is clear to me (as a good intended human being) that it should be ended.

Appeal to good intentions. Fallacy.

 

I hope this answers your question as to why I am discussing psychiatry on this forum today.

You've been asked for evidence many times and have yet to do anything other than make bald assertions. Because you can not or will not provide evidence, your argument does not hold water.

Pretty good explanations. Thanks!

 

I suppose that punch cards work in a similar way, by converting the holes to ones or zeros in some process.

Yep, spot on.

The keyboard, most of the time.

 

The CPU instructions themselves exist as bits during execution, stored like any other data in memory.

The source of those instructions came from a programmer tapping away at a keyboard - and that process is simply monitoring the opening and closing of switches (the keys) and interpret them as which key was pressed, and store the associated character in memory.

Those character codes are then converted into CPU instructions via a previous set of CPU instructions (the compiler).

 

The original CPU instructions to make all this come to pass were probably also entered via a keyboard, with the interpretation of those keystrokes handled by a hardware interpreter of a sort no longer in use.

 

HTH

The Internet Archive may be what you're looking for.

It looks good, but I have heard horror stories about Acer. I've read that Gateway, HP and Acer are the three worst brands to buy a laptop from and from my experience with gateway, I can say that Gateway definitely belongs on that list. Dell is probably your best bet, my entire college runs on dell and they only time they act up is when IT does something retarded to them.

You just never know. I've owned HP and Acer laptops and they just go and go and go.

A friend's Acer likewise was a stalwart little machine.

Someone else I know had an Acer that was essentially a $1500 paper weight. A co-worker had an HP that only seemed to work if you pressed down on the screen hinges before you started it up - and even after several trips to HP's repair center, no one was the wiser as to why.

 

What it boils down to is, buy from somewhere they have a liberal return policy, and consider extra warranties. 'cause you just never know.

Look here:

 

http://www.openprinting.org/printer_list.cgi

Y'all really should have gone with "Idea Fight Club"

Google started a wiki for conversations now?

Heh. That's an apt description.

Some ideas:

 

"Speculations, Burgeoning Ideas, and the Occasional Crackpot Notion"

"Speculation, Early Postulates, and the Odd bit of Flotsam"

"Wherein we Speculate, Examine, and Eviscerate Ideas"

"A place to discover the brutality of peer review."

"Examinations of Arguments Not Mainstream"

"Idea Fight Club" (First rule: We don't talk about this forum.)

And most of the time the line between speculation and pseudoscience is too thin to differentiate.

Well, initially. Pseudoscience becomes obvious when it refuses to change upon introduction of evidence.

 

Never the less, the point is good. It's unreasonable to expect our dear moderators to sift through all the chaff.

Jill, word order absolutely matters. You can look to the "primacy effect" for further reading.

Mmmm. Evidence. Good stuff.

We don't care much for discussions that purposely ignore a lack of rigor, so why have a sub-forum partly dedicated to it?

I can get behind this argument.

Who's the last person to complain about having a discussion moved to "speculations"? (in place of complaining about the word "pseudoscience")

And this suggests word order... how?

There's no evidence that I am aware of that word order makes the difference being claimed here.

I have no idea what matter is so I don't know? Is matter made up of particles or is it strings of energy?

Yes.

 

Mind, the words are just handy labels. They don't define anything absolutely, and only work well within a given context.

 

Its nonintuitive, because our brains are the result of evolution within the context of matter-as-objects.

Six of one, half dozen of the other.