There is no evidence of your solipism, so I reject that hypothesis - tentatively at least. But my charge of radical skepticism still holds. if you have propositions A and B, with a preponderance of evidence for A, it is not correct to consider them equally likely because a hasn’t been “proven.” Maybe you don’t mean to give that impression, but that is how you are coming across.
Is this straw man of yours that you cling to by faith, part of some religious ritual?
Seriously. Atheism, logically, and as far as most atheists seem to be concerned isn’t a religion. But damn if you’re not acting like it is. ‘don’t proselytize me bro’
Oooo it doesn’t use the “magik” word. Guess you got me there.
This right there I agree is the cause of our disagreement. You mention an extremely low probability event.
Where as I feel, since we can make no definitive rulings or tests on the true nature of the universe (real, simulation, delusion, etc.) the probability level of it being as it appears is unknown.
Solipsism is a doubt of the evidence because of potential inaccuracies in it’s source, not evidence it’s self.
No, based on the results of experiments you can compute the probability that some result is due to chance versus due to the hypothesis. We have done billions of experiments on the nature of the universe. We can’t necessarily account for deception, but you can certainly say that the more results you get without evidence for deception the less likely it is. We can’t come up with an exact probability, but it is not totally unknown. Keynes wrote about this very topic in his first book.
No you’ve done experiments on the nature of the universe as it appears to us. Answer me this question. Suppose an accurate simulation of a universe such as ours. Would a person existing in the simulation at our technology level be able to tell it’s fake?
If you can’t give a definite yes, then what does that imply about our ability to test our universe?
I hope everyone reading this can see why I found the skeptics in my ToK class so annoying. Say this is a simulation. We’d have to wonder,. why the simulation is so big (one’s I’ve done work only as much as needed to get useful results) Why is the universe so old? Why not design the simulation to get results in less than 14 billion years of simulation time? If the simulation just started, again why is the universe so big, which requires lots of initial conditions to be loaded?
I’ve written simulators and published on simulators, admittedly simulators of computer systems, not the real world, and the universe looks like a pitiful inefficient simulator if it is one. Sure you can say that the simulator writers have their reasons, but that is equivalent to the theist saying God works in mysterious ways.
In fact, here is a Perl simulation of a skeptic:
while (<>)
{
print "We don’t know for sure
":
}
No, it’s pointing out the obvious. Religion is hostile to everything else, and always has been, because it’s wrong, and because it’s baseless. And the latter at least has been clear since the beginning, for anyone who cared to think about it. Religion is about the denial of reality, and the advocacy of fantasy in it’s place. You yourself are doing that right now, with your advocacy of solipsism, demonstrating my point.
Not at all the same. The person who says the sky is blue when it is, is going to be very insistent about it. That doesn’t make him or her the same as someone insisting the sky is plaid.
No, I “got you” because “uncertain” and “baseless” aren’t at all the same. Science has a vast amount of evidence on it’s side; in order to claim it’s “uncertain”, you are forced into claiming the world is an illusion. That’s as close to “certain” as we are ever going to get. Religion on the other hand has nothing but evidence free anecdotes. It’s baseless because it’'s built on nothing but hot air.
Poisoned well, and maybe ad hominid fallacy
Just poisoned well fallacy
First off “I hope everyone reading this can see why I found the skeptics in my ToK class so annoying.” = “mommy he’s not agreeing with me! BAWWWW make the mean man stopp!!”*
Bottom line: the most important part of science is testability, and this is one of those questions that’s outside of testability. You can assume, and you can guess, you can poison well and ad hominid like a chump, but you can never prove. This goes for theists and atheists alike.
Jr. you can hmm and haw at why you think it wouldn’t be a good simulation, but you can’t put fourth one experiment to prove things really are as they seem.
With that I leave this. I have better things to do then spend my time arguing with self important internet people that think straw-man, poison well, and ad hominid are valid debate techniques.
If I want that I can go to /b/.
edit:
*while a poisoned well attack on my part I think I’ve earned it as patient as I was when you made a strawman so big Burningman festival wanted to buy it.
The problem with theism as opposed to childlike belief in fairytales and paranoid conspiracy theories is that it is very, very old. Theism is pre-historic, since our earliest writings mention gods frequently. It seems that theistic beliefs had been developing for a long time before we started actively recording the things we’ve been doing with ourselves. There is no way we can prove that it was ‘made up’ and that a few godlike beings didn’t turn up on our planet to impart intelligence as the OP asks us to think about.
Also, there’s the problem that it is general. You may argue that fairytales and mythologies are all false, but then there may be elements of truth to individual myths. Deluge myths are a plenty and it seems that in the middle east there were once large floods. Whilst it’s not likely the entire globe was covered, it is entirely possible that large portions of our land were, that caused people to think the entire world was covered in water. Without going into any details, it is also likely there is elements of truth to certain conspiracy theories.
The concept of god isn’t something you can just write off as false. You can write off Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and other religions as false, but the idea of the divine I do not think you can.
It also depends highly on how you define god. Why would these aliens not be gods for giving us life and being more advanced than us? Do gods need to be omnipotent? In that case, are much of the Greek and Roman pantheon not gods because they’re not all powerful like Zeus? Whether something is a god or not, is clearly a matter of perspective.
Hardly. It would be nice though if your argument went beyond “we can’t prove it” and “we don’t know for sure.” An MIT philosophy professor couldn’t get anywhere with those guys, and I’m not about to claim I’m 1% as skilled in this subject as he was. It is unfalsifiable, scientifically not worthy of notice, and equivalent to last Thursdayism.
]quote]
Bottom line: the most important part of science is testability, and this is one of those questions that’s outside of testability. You can assume, and you can guess, you can poison well and ad hominid like a chump, but you can never prove. This goes for theists and atheists alike.
[/quote]
Au contraire, we test it all the time. The results of any scientific experiment can be
ignored with considerably more justification than what you are giving. You have to assume that the simulation is perfect, there are no simulation artifacts, and that the simulation creators made an overly complex one for no reason you can give. This is a classic application of Ockham’s Razor - it is foolish to assume the complicated simulation when the plain old natural world explains everything just as well.
Hard to do, since you are defining the simulation to be identical to the natural world in all respects. Plus, of course, the burden of proof is on you.
Ad hominem? Calling you a skeptic (not a nasty word the last time I looked) when you are giving exactly their argument? Maybe someone can show me the strawman argument? I’m quite at a loss what he thinks it is. A bit of snark I will admit to.
Well, when come back bring argument that most of us didn’t outgrow our sophomore year of college.
I’ll just point out that fairy tales are pretty old also. I have no idea if gods preceded fairy tales (by which I mean legends of heroes) or the other way around.
As for our intelligence, if there were a big gap between us and chimps, or if we didn’t have fossil records of ancestors with ever increasing intelligence, it would be a far more reasonable hypothesis. I don’t think the OP believes the hypothesis, btw, I think it was being used to examine theistic reactions.
Kudos to you for bringing up the problem of the definition of god. I can only write off the gods I know about. God as an alien in your definition is not impossible, and does not violate natural laws. We’d look like gods well enough if we went back, and we’re still primitive. All we can say is that there is no particular reason to think any such thing happened, but if real evidence turned up we’d have to re-evaluate our position.
I just want to inject myself into a small bit of the science debate, here.
Yes, yes, yes. The hypothesis is that the laws work the same everywhere. And the evidence is that they do… until you look at the evidence. We have perfectly good laws of gravitation that work beautifully here. But when we used them to examine ‘out there,’ the data didn’t correspond to what the laws said should happen. And as several others have mentioned, Richard Feynstein said that ‘if it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.’
It could be that the law as we know it is wrong. (if gravity isn’t a strict inverse squared relation, but is still the same everywhere.) It could be that the laws don’t work the same out there. (if space curves such that the relation isn’t the same everywhere.) Or… The relation could be right, the laws work the same everywhere, and there might just be something else out there. (like dark matter.)
Dark matter was proposed to explain the discrepancy. And the way we ‘know’ how much dark matter is in a given area is based on how much that area appears to deviate from the laws we expect to hold everywhere.
I’m not saying that that makes the proposal false. Neutrinos were proposed just the same way, and then discovered by experiment. I’m just saying that dark matter isn’t the evidence you think it is. Dark matter is a proposal that let’s us keep saying that the laws work the same everywhere. In fact, without that proposal, we would have to say that the evidence is that the laws don’t work the same everywhere.
Personally, I think that if you have to propose that 90% or more of the universe is something we can’t see, is only ‘observable’ because the laws of physics as we know them appear to be violated, and doesn’t exist here, we should seriously explore the other options. I also think it still has a good chance of being correct.
The atheist wouldn’t be surprised by the existence of extra-terrestrials.
The agnostic would probably react in the exact same way the atheist would.
The theist, however, would have two options:
-
Simply deny the existence of extraterrestrial aliens anyway, despite the millions upon millions of physical evidence.
-
Conclude that their God was true all along, but that he didn’t exist outside of the world but within it.
Over the years we’ve found lots of unexpected things, like black holes. The dark matter hypothesis has been supported by seeing things that look like the influence of dark matter all over, including relative local ones. As far as I have read, the dark matter hypothesis (which also fits with particle physics) doesn’t conflict with gravity, and is a much simpler explanation for what is seen than gravity varying randomly throughout the universe.
I never claimed that dark matter was evidence. I was thinking more of spectrographic evidence that stars work the same way far away as they do here.
Science always accepts things that explain new data without invalidating existing experiments. Relativity is an excellent example of that. If a Higgs boson fits into the structure of subatomic particles and explains what we see from gravitational lensing, etc., that’s a very elegant explanation. None of this violates laws or says that laws vary with location.
Dark matter is provisional - if anyone finds a better explanation, that would be fine.
A CroMagnum would first ask the aliens “Do you feel lucky, punk?” 
Or call the aliens demons, or tools of Satan, or simply liars. I’d expect a lot of that.
No. You didn’t. You only claimed that there was evidence for dark matter. I’ll quote it in a moment.
Yes, and I agree with this. And at the level of stars and solar systems, the laws of gravity as we know them appear to work, too.
The ‘evidence’ for dark matter is actually backwards from this. The evidence is basically two assumptions:
- That the laws work the same everywhere. So far, this has proven to be a good assumption. I like it. (Edit:And as my roommate pointed out, science would be nearly impossible without it. We almost have to assume this.)
- That the equations we use to weigh a solar system should be able to weigh a galaxy, in spite of evidence to the contrary. I could think of many previous scientific models that didn’t work well when they were scaled up or down. It has almost never been a good assumption that the model is still correct when it deviates this much from experiment.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast12jan_1.htm
There is now pretty strong evidence for event horizons. But until this came along, even Stephen Hawking wondered whether something might prevent matter from compressing that much. But it isn’t a comparable analogy with dark matter. Black holes were proposed by the equations of gravity and there wasn’t really any evidence to the contrary. Dark matter had to be proposed because experiment was at such odds with theory.
- Theistic Alien Intervention. Aliens were either what the bible describes as angels or otherwise unknowing tools of God to breathe life into us. Redemption only applies to humanity anyway, although I imagine there’d be some who would try converting the aliens, freeing them from the bondage of lies they’ve created for themselves and about us.
You know what else was proposed by such methods, based on its gravitational effects on something we could see? Neptune.
Now that I freely admit to. But we’ve got multiple strands supporting the existence of dark matter - the cosmological evidence and particle physics theory. Is it a done deal? No way - I’m waiting for the supercollider to make a Higgs boson.
There is a big difference between laws not working, or being inconsistent, and the laws being incomplete at extreme conditions. You can theoretically, but not practically, measure the impact of relativity under normal conditions. Perhaps once we understand dark matter we will detect it all around us, once we know how to look. Though Feynman did say theory must change based on experiments, he also noted that sometimes experimental results change because of theory. He mentioned that Milliken actually made a mistake measuring the charge of the electron. Those who reproduced the experiment originally came up with close to the same number, and the value drifted slowly over time to the real one. So the impact of dark matter might be seen today, but is being thrown away as not matching expectations.
And other explanations can be proposed also. The acceptance of dark matter is provisional, until tests are done to verify or falsify this hypothesis. If nothing shows up, there will be a lot of head scratching and going back to the whiteboard.
If you really want an odd hypothesis to account for data, you should be looking at dark energy.
Good one. The consistency of natural laws, while perhaps an assumption, is constantly being tested by people predicting the existence of things based on them. The things, like Neptune and the Oort cloud, keep showing up.