Kanicbird, you are an idiot.

The BBQ Pit
141

In arguing like that, however, we lose an – to my mind, important – distinction, namely that between contingent propositions that are known to be possible and contingent propositions that are merely not known to be impossible; the claim ‘donuts may be falling from the sky outside’, if I understand you correctly, is just as contingent as ‘it may rain outside’, yet, to me, of a fundamentally different kind, seeing how rain is sufficiently well-documented as a natural phenomenon, yet falling donuts are not.

I’m not sure how much I can agree with this quote, since it seems to assume (non-trivially, to my mind) that the answer we get is actually dependent on the type of question, while it seems to me that it may well be the case that all questions one can meaningfully ask about nature eventually lead to the same answer.

However, these would then appear to be causeless effects, which – at least on a macroscopic level – would be quite remarkable in itself. Also, if the effects originated by said metaphysical agent follow any sort of – arbitrarily complex – rules, they would be fundamentally indistinguishable from physical law; and if they are not, they would appear to be random, which seems problematic to reconcile with the notion of an intentional action.

It’s at best tangentially related to the point you’re making, but, since I’m on a bit surer footing in quantum physics than I am in philosophy, that’s not quite what happens – according to current understanding, the fact of the matter is simply that the location of a particle is never all that well defined, so there is really no way to meaningfully claim it is either ‘here’ or ‘there’, at least not until you actually perform a measurement. So there is no actual change in location; it’s merely the case that, until the particle is measured, it is not actually localized, and the measurement then has a certain chance to find it at certain places depending on the configuration of the system – there are ‘forbidden’ places, i.e. those where the probability for locating the particle is zero, even in the quantum world. However, generally, yes, it is possible for a quantum particle to be located (by measurement) arbitrarily far from the point of maximum likelihood for its position.

Possible, but not the first explanation I’d consider – a glitch in the matrix, provided the simulation argument is true, might be more reasonable, or probably I’m just going insane (it’d not be the first time I’d be forced to consider that possibility). But still, yes, it’s a possibility.

Well, science would tell me that there is no need for any action, and thus, for an agent. And – here I should take care not to speak too definitively lest I overstate the strength of my position as well as the extend of my knowledge – it could also conceivably tell me some things about a putative agent, should one exist: it is one of the most remarkable results of modern quantum physics that it is incompatible with what’s called a (local) hidden variable theory, i.e. one that would state that the properties of a quantum particle are actually definite, yet merely ‘hidden’ from our inquiring minds (this is due to Bell’s theorem and experimentally confirmed violations of Bell inequalities). In other words, no agent can locally have knowledge of those properties, yet presumably such knowledge would be necessary in order to facilitate any action. However, it is possible to construct non-local hidden variable theories consistent with the findings of Bell experiments (Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics would be such a theory). But, on the other hand, non-locality is thought to be forbidden by relativity, which maintains that (causative) influences can’t travel faster than light, so it’s difficult to see how to make such theories consistent with that.

Anyway, lacking as we do a consistent theory of quantum gravity, there is little use in me trying to pretend any of the above were truly definitive; but, should a complete physical description of reality be possible, and should that ever be found, it may well be the case that it posits definitive restrictions on anything wishing to act on reality, and it could well be the case that it would say that such quantum effect cannot have an agent behind them. (Take the preceding as marked with a bold ‘IMHO’, it’s 2 am and I may not understand these things as well as I would like to think.)

I’m not disagreeing with this; however, it may well be that science actually can say something on whether or not metaphysical agents can interact with reality at all.

142

Well, too bad for you. Your beliefs ARE delusions, there’s no rational reason to believe in your or any God, and your “epiphany” sounds like a mental illness kicking in. And claiming you are compelled to believe just underlines how irrational and baseless your viewpoint is. So, yes I’m going to keep attacking your pet delusion - and lies and delusions are all ANY faith is.

And for all your obfuscation and excuse making, all the evidence there is in the world is on my side, not yours.

143

In my experience on another board, I often find myself frustrated with people who make absolute claims for the rightness of their view and reject out of hand any eavidence that might tend to point out where they might be in error. In general, they tend to make offensive statements regarding the sanity and motivation of their opponents.

The only difference beteen your posts on the subject nd theirs is that they most emphatically don’t claim to be atheist.

144

Oh dear god:

sigh So basically, you’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t.

145

Fair enough, but until kanicbird pops his beak into this thread, we gotta make due with what we’ve got.

Ooookay…now you’re sounding like one of those New Age nitwits who claim you can only get cancer if you “prayed” for it. :dubious:

Who the hell would choose eternal damnation as an option?!? Besides, the only “hell” I know exists as life on this planet, and I sure as fuck didn’t ask to be born.

146

You are ignoring the tiny little difference that there IS no evidence for me to “reject out of hand”, or at all. What evidence there is, is against religions being true.

147

That there is no evidence for God’s existence, for one.

I would say that rain falling is contingent on something like rain clouds forming, while donuts falling are contingent on something like an airplane door opening. There is, of course, the matter of probability, which is easy to confuse with the matter of possibility, but they really are unrelated in this context. Rain falls more often than donuts, but one being more likely than the other does not mean one is more possible than the other.

Well, there is a moon, for example. There is an awful lot about it that we can examine. Its mass. Its distance from the earth. Its geological composition. Its history. And so on. Science will reveal to us the answer to each question, but no more. And this is what Eddington means. We are exposing the moon’s mass, the moon’s distance, the moon’s rocks, the moon’s past — but not the moon qua the moon. As an entity, it is completely independent of our questions, or even of our existence really.

Unless, of course, they coincided with one’s religious experiences. Assuming God communicates with us through our temporal lobe, then a sufficiently consistent pattern of limbic system activity with correspondent physical manifestation leads to a reasonable assumption of cause and effect. Unfortunately, as Ramachandran has shown, science cannot tell us which is the cause and which is the effect. Faith again is called upon to answer the question.

That’s the beauty of science. It allows for contradiction and resolution. That’s why, philosophically, we do not allow for science to determine truth. Such an allowance would demean science, and reduce it, as I alluded to before, to a quasi-religion.

Today’s ridiculous theory is tomorrow’s astounding discovery, and vice-versa. More often than not, it is the nature of a scientific discovery that it raises more questions than it answers. And that’s a good thing. I wish people would see this aesthetic wholeness of science, instead of a weird metaphor of it — some panaceaic revelation from the Oracle of Bill Nye that answers every type of question and proves all things. It is a disservice to science that many of its proponents are people who understand it the least. It’s what led my favorite atheist philosopher, Daniel Denett, to declare, “There’s nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.”

I think you’re right that it could. Then again, science has yet to define reality. And it is especially difficult to resolve how the macro world arises from the quantum world. As Neils Bohr said, “There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum mechanical description.” Or as Werner Heisenberg put it, “The atoms or the elementary particles are not real; they form a world of potentialities and possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”

Science cannot say anything at all about any metaphysical agent, period.

148

Ask Der Trihs. Or Czarcasm. Ask them if they would rather spend eternity in the arms of Jesus or burning in hell?

149

I’m still not convinced that Der Trihs is an atheist. He seems intent upon ruining its credibility as a philosophy. Of course, he could just be a dumbass.

150

First of all, there IS no eternal hell. There’s certainly no Biblical basis for hell; the Catholic Church made up the concept of fire & brimstone out of whole cloth, as a method of controlling people. Not only that, the concept of hell violates Newton’s Law regarding the conservation of energy. What, exactly, burns in hell? Your soul? Even if you presume the existence of the soul, the only way to feel pain in hell is for your soul itself to be consumed by the flames. And once the energy of your soul burns out, that’s it, no more hell. It won’t last forever, and it certainly won’t feel like forever – indeed, your awareness will most likely vanish long before your soul burns out, because the human consciousness can only withstand a certain level of physical or emotional pain. Once you pass that threshold, your consciousness winks out, that’s it bye-bye, and the only way you’ll awaken again is if your body is still alive, or you reincarnate. Trust me, I know this.

However, given the option between hell and “the loving arms of Jesus”, I’d choose hell over heaven any day. Mainly because of certain fundamentalist members of my family who I do NOT want to spend eternity with – I may be cursed to walk the rest of this life with them, but once this life is done with, we’re parting ways, game over. And frankly, I would never trust any so-called God who allows their crimes against children (and adults, as it turns out) to be “forgiven” simply because they believe in that fairy tale. ANY so-called God who forgives murderers and child abusers is NO God, in my opinion, but a Demon who must be destroyed or banished. (Hmm…on second thought, maybe I’ll allow my soul to go to heaven after all, just so I can sit on Christ’s lap and stick a shiv between his eyes. Worth a shot, perhaps?)

151

In other words, it’s a foolish idea; there’s no rational reason at all to think that there’s a God to do any communicating. Nor is there any validity to an answer gained by “faith”, which is nothing more than simply declaring what you want to be so, is so and insisting that everyone else treat your empty assertion with respect.

Since there’s no rational reason to think that any such things exist, that’s hardly a weakness of science.

Be the groveling slave of your demongod for eternity, or scream in agony forever ? Some choice. I’m glad there’s no chance of it being true.

Oh, please. Nothing I’ve ever done here or elsewhere could be anything but a benefit to atheism, given how intensely it’s hated. I’d have to publicly eat babies to make it look worse in the eyes of the believers.

152

And I wish you would hold up a mirror and say that the next time you bring my name up. My last post concerning the nature of this god is exactly what I believe(that the evidence for it’s existence is as real as the evidence for the Atom on “Lost”-namely none), so if you have trouble with those that disagree with your premise, do not automatically assume that those who disagree do so only because they do not understand what you are saying-they may fully understand your premise and, believe it or not, still disagree with your premise.

153

Indeed, the probability of these two options being the ONLY choices is about equal with the chance that I’ll ever agree with Der Trihs. Therefore, I agree with Der Trihs.

(Uh-oh…)

154

This is the best you can do?? Let’s turn it around-would you rather spend the rest of your life in Oz or Apopkolips? Pellucidar or Hades? Candyland or Mordor?

155

I’d rather spend eternity in the arms of an attractive woman, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to bloody happen, does it? People are not atheists because they’d rather go to hell than heaven, they’re atheists because they don’t believe that there’s any significant possibility that they’ll do either.

156

Skald the Rhymer, thank you for pitting the douchebag that ruined my thread.

157

I didn’t formulate the two options; you did.

158

Yes, that was a bad example; but there’s a whole class of propositions merely thought to be contingent because they’re not known to be impossible, and there always will be, from a scientific viewpoint. I would say those are distinct from propositions that are known to be possible.

But if there was a theory of everything, that would be the fundamental answer to all of those questions pursued thoroughly; of such a theory, you could ask any question about the moon and obtain the correct answer without ever looking at the sky, since it gives you a description of all physically possible worlds, including our own. That’s what I mean when I say that all questions that one can sensibly ask about nature may well have the same answer. (The problem is of course with knowing whether or not one actually has the correct theory of everything, which, if there is a multiplicity of possible ones, one can never do; however, I don’t see that the theory couldn’t be (provably) unique, i.e. that there is just one way to make physical realities, in which case science would overcome its own limitations. You may argue here that this is still not all there is to know, that we still haven’t proven that there are no black sheep, but I think we then know whether or not black sheep are possible; you might then say that a claim of the form ‘x is impossible’ is still open to falsification, and can’t strictly be known one way or the other, but I’m not actually sure that holds, either – it is a bit akin to requesting that one know all points of a line before one could claim to know the line, but actually two points and the fact that it is a line suffice completely; similarly, knowing the fundamental theory and the fact that this is a physical reality might well determine it totally, too.)

I’m not quite sure which of my points you’re arguing against – that the workings of a metaphysical agent, when they follow rules, can just as well be called physical laws, or that, if they don’t follow rules, they’d have to be random? I do not see where the limbic system enters this – if there is a consistent pattern, one can derive laws describing this pattern, and at that point, it would seem that parsimony dictates to run with the hypothesis that doesn’t include metaphysical entities.

First of all, I’m thinking by now that the hidden variable thing that I mentioned doesn’t really have to say anything about the metaphysical at all, so I’d like to retract that.
However, secondly, I think we’ll need to talk about this truth thing some more. You’re right in – implicitly, at least, if I understand you correctly – saying that truths depend on the truth of certain assumptions; however, I don’t think that the equality of all such sets of assumptions is a given, as I take you to be arguing (I’ll eschew jargon for a moment here, for fear of tangling myself up too much in only half-understood definitions): take, as a baseline, the solipsist, who assumes nothing, and knows one thing, the existence of himself. This he knows absolutely, since the perception of self entails the existence of self. Any proposition is consistent with this, however, of fundamentally undecidable truth value, since the negation of any proposition is just as consistent.

Then, as a sort of ‘step two’, we can think of a solipsist making one assumption about the world, which it seems to me would be the existence of something else besides him (call it ‘external existence’) – since he could never gain any knowledge about this something else other than through faith, this would be a kind of metaphysical solipsist (I don’t know that that’s a position ever seriously considered by anyone, though). His knowledge, depending on the truth of his assumption, would contain the existence of his self, and any claim about the realm of metaphysical existence he has faith in.

Continuing to paint by numbers, one can make a second assumption, namely that one’s perception is not totally misleading about the external existence – this would be a position from where you could do science; through a series of observations and inferences, one could eventually (by sheer enumeration) know all existential truths, or, if the world happened to be amenable to being expressed through one fundamental and unique theory, one could literally know everything – contingent, of course, on the truth of the two fundamental assumptions!

I think – though am by no means certain – that a position that includes a belief in the metaphysical would now have to be one making three assumptions, the third being just that – the existence of the metaphysical. It may be that this is an alternate ‘two assumptions’ viewpoint, but I don’t see how – any modification of the two assumptions would seem to amount to a mere partitioning of the things that have external existence into things that are metaphysical and things that are physical, which I don’t think can be the way to go, since it would merely mean that the physical things are attributed with a sort of ‘fringe’ of apparently uncaused events, again provided that the metaphysical acts according to rules (it occurs to me that randomness may in effect just be a rule in itself). The metaphysical thus would have to be a truly distinct domain from the physical, and knowledge of this domain could only come by faith.

But then what? It seems to me, the first three viewpoints are fundamentally indistinguishable (seeing how all propositions are compatible with solipsism, including those arrived at by scientific means); however, the fourth one is singular in that if the assumptions of either of the preceding are sufficient, its assumption of a metaphysical domain is unnecessary. That, of course, doesn’t prove it wrong, but in this case, parsimony again suggests that we run with the simpler viewpoint (though it is insufficient to decide between the first three viewpoints, since even though numbers one and two contain less assumptions, we don’t – and can’t – know whether they actually describe anything; that is itself mandated on the assumptions of viewpoint number three).

So it is, in my opinion, not quite that obvious that all epistemologies are equal; indeed, to the best of my current knowledge and abilities, it would seem like there is a point of view that is the most reasonable one, and number three appears to win out. However, this may just be a testament to the fact that my current knowledge and abilities are grossly inadequate to even think about such things. :slight_smile:

Quantum mechanics does include classical mechanics in the limit of large quantum numbers, even if only in a statistical way (or possibly exactly if one follows a ‘Many Worlds’ kind of interpretation). It may be that we have to resign ourselves to the fact that our world is only classical on average, but that is only a problem of conception, not one of science.

I think that’s where you and I disagree fundamentally – I say it can at least tell us if there is any necessity to invoke the workings of such an agent.

159

But that’s what IDers say, isn’t it?

160

They’re using the word ‘science’ somewhat differently from myself, though.