Friends from the spiritual realm.
Sounds interesting, I would like to read it.
I am well aware of that, and it is why I don’t take the prognosis of doctors seriously. So when a doctor says this person is a vegetable, well, maybe, and maybe not. Only time will tell, if that.
There are a lot of professions that now use percentages to hedge their bets or predictions, including weathermen.
Wisdom is knowing that you don’t know anything – Socrates
In my statistics class in college the professor took the first week to show us why we should not believe statistics. It was very enlightening.
In one case he presented us a box of marbles and said “the average marble in this box is one-half inch around.” Then he asked a couple of students to sort out all the marbles from the box that were one-half inch around. Armed with a gauge the students went through the box of marbles finding not one marble that was one-half inch around.
So much for statistics.
The voices in your head then, and thus, unverifiable.
So much for wasting the professor’s time in learning the wrong lesson. I doubt very much that a professor teaching statistics at an accredited college taught anything along the lines that statistics were useless.
Unless, of course, this was a spiritual professor at a college you had a vision about.
Let’s be succinct here - I’m a materialist. I don’t believe in “consciousness particles”, only the usual known physical and energy particles. (I also see LOTS of methodological problems with lekatt’s consciousness particles - if you have a hundred billion of them in your brain or pencil, how does that add up to one mind? By committee debate? :dubious::dubious::smack:).
So anyway - if there are no consciousness particles, then your brain must logically be an organic computer. And there’s no reason we couldn’t build something just like it - or simulate it. Seriously - the ability to do so is a logical necessity, presuming the ability to completely map the particles of the brain, which is merely an implementation detail.
So, I don’t deny human identity - I deny the magic super-specialness of human identity.
What’s with the anti-machine bigotry there, in your ETA? But thanks for putting it there; it exemplifies my whole point.
What’s the difference between your mind and a dog’s mind? It’s just a matter of complexity, right? The further you climb down the evolutionary ladder the simpler the minds get until the housefly is just a wind-up toy. I think we can agree that there is not a sharp difference in the hardware (as in, the brain matter/structure) when you cross the line into self-awareness.
My current theory is that there’s not a sharp difference in the ‘software’, either; your brain patterns are pretty similar to the next critter down, with the difference in consciousness being a gradual increase in complexity rather than a ‘suddenly popped into existince with chimps’ kind of thing.
As a computer programmer, I’m aware that most of the computer programs you run function like a simple consciousness. They don’t just run through a bunch of steps and then stop; they hang around waiting for input and reacting to it. Sometimes their reactions themselves include long calculation processes that react to data as it comes in and produce intermediate data before they end - or sometimes they never end. With my understanding of how they work I can see no difference in kind between them and the human consciousness. There is a huge difference in complexity, but it’s roughly the same species of thing.
Add to this, this is the only coherent explanation of consciousness I’ve ever heard, including the spiritual ones. Seriously, consciousness particles? How are they supposed to work in concert? Souls? Positing a soul doesn’t explain how the soul functions - it just displaces the problem to someplace we can’t examine the hardware, which doesn’t change the fact that our souls demonstrably have complexity which requires interacting parts within the soul. I refuse to accept “magic” as an unvarnished explanation for demontrable and consistent complexity - if it’s magic then the magic has rules, the rules can be simulated, and the entire thing can be replicated in a computer anyway. Necessarily.
Anyway, the complete lack of alternate functional explanations leaves me no choice to but to accept my current theory until I hear a better one. Fortunately for me, my current theory seems to explain things pretty well as it is. Despite the regrettable fact that it doesn’t allow me to pretend at human unique magic specialness over machines.
Did he then go on to call off class for the rest of the semester since statistics was clearly useless? or did he actually proceed to then teach that while statistics can be misunderstood and misused it can still be very useful. In the case of doctors diagnoses it is useful to the patient for them to give their best guess as to a patient’s chances, as this will distinguish a case of ebola from a stubbed toe.
The key is to make sure the patient understands the meaning of the diagnosis.
The common phrase “There’s lies, Damn lies and statistics” is only relevant to people who misunderstand statistics, or charlatans misuse them.
Uh, how do you talk to these um, “spiritual friends?”
This is just getting pathetic. No one expects **lekatt **to come up with any rational answers here and it seems to be turning into, “let’s see what whacky shit we can get him to float next.”
I don’t hear voices, I ask questions, and am shown answers.
Most of life is unverifiable, it is called personal experience, everyone does it.
Not that way, they don’t.
He didn’t say statistics were useless, just subject to intrepretation, look at the current bank meltdown. They were not showing honest statistics. It was sound advice.
Did he then teach you have to properly use statistics, or did you figure you learned all you needed after that first example?
How many ways can personal experience be?
Then why are you still reading it? Give yourself a break. I give answers to the questions I am asked, better questions, better answers.
I don’t know, I quit the class after that, in order to buy a business.
Same reason I watch the TeeVee – shit doesn’t have to be real to be funny.
Actually in retrospect I’m now realizing that you were making my point for me. Its just the “so much for statistics” comments punched a few of my buttons. In the same way that an average of 1/2" balls in the bag doesn’t mean that there aren’t balls much greater than 1/2" in the bag, a 4 month prognosis doesn’t preclude the possibility of 10 year survival. Misusing this statistic as evidence of the incompetence of doctors or the existence of miracles would fall in the region of “lies and damn lies”.
Fair enough, now stop complaining.
Just to avoid moderator wrath I want to make it clear that in the final sentence of my previous post I am not accusing Lekatt of lying, rather saying that his misuse of statistics is the kind of thing that prompts the quote “lies, damn lies, and statistics”