Descartes’ cogito ergo sum is a classic example of begging the question. the existEnce of your thoughts does not demonstrate the existEnce of you as an entity.
Did you hear that Rene Descartes was in a tavern with Roger Bacon, having a couple of glasses of wine. Bacon notices that it’s almost closing time, and says to Descartes: “Almost time to go. What do you say to another round?”
Descatres says: “I think not.”
And he disappears.
Huh? What do you define as entity? Descartes did not claim this meant you had a body, just that you existed - and how can thoughts exist without someone to think them? If a computer was having thoughts in the sense he meant, it would be an entity also, at least to my understanding.
If I remember the essay correctly, mswas is wrong about Descartes thinking God is self evident. He did say that god followed directly from cogito ergo sum, but by a process of deduction. Only one’s existence is self-evident.
David Hume speaks for me in this matter.
According to your rationalist cult that has a very specific bias that will apply perjorative connotations to words in order to weight the view of what is ‘rational’ in order to make it sound as though their side is the most correct.
Basically, people on your side of the coin use clever semantics to limit the doors that people choose to open. I read the best description of the science worship set, “It’s like a drunk looking for his lost keys under the lamppost because there is more light there.” Look at how often people will scoff at ANY conspiracy theory, even though we all know that conspiracies are business as usual in politics, that conspiracies are the blood in the veins of any political establishment, and that all governmental entities have worked to keep their populace ignorant of what’s really going on. Yet people who are supposed to be rational skeptics will scoff in your face when you question a conspiracy theory and don’t automatically dismiss it.
Basically what I am saying is that you guys swing heavily into the negative direction, which isn’t skeptical either. You assume something isn’t true until it’s been proven to be true. A true skeptic would not assume anything negative or positive about something that they have insufficient proof of. That’s why I believe that someone who is truely scientifically minded cannot be an atheist, they must remain agnostic, because the God question has not been sufficiently answered for them. Yet a whole gaggle of atheists will jump on me for believing in God saying it’s irrational for me to believe in such when they 1) Don’t know what I mean when I say the word God and 2) Have insufficient evidence for falsification. So they are being dogmatic, and not scientific, yet telling me that I am tone deaf to science.
It is not scientific to judge someone else’s subjective experience by your own objective standards. CitizenBob I have decided that it is possible to be objective but ONLY from your perspective. So your subjective experience, once you have embraced it as the only one you can truly ever 100% know, can be seen objectively.
As an example. Visualize a sculpted head. When looked at from the front it looks just like a head. However on the side, I carved out deep grooves in it so that there are valleys to which you can see all the way through it. Now you are looking at it from the front where it looks solid. I am telling you it’s got hollow bits, but you won’t believe me because from your angle you see it as solid, but I know for a FACT that it has hollow bits because I am looking directly at it. Now I recommend that you come around to the side to see what I am saying, yet you refuse to, continuing to scoff. This describes my experience on the Straight Dope. tomndebb Words are objects and can be seen from multiple angles. I am asking you to look at it from a different angle and all you can say is that I am making things up and redefining words, even though in almost every single thread, someone has popped in to say that they see my point, like in the idolatry/graven image thread. They pointed out examples of religious sects that support my interpretation of that commandment. Some sects don’t agree with my interpretation and that’s fine, but that doesn’t mean I am just pulling shit out of my ass, yet you continue to maintain that your narrow little perspective of those words is the correct interpretation, and I am arguing with that, because I think that you are only looking at the word from the angle that you can see it from. Now, I seem to recall that you are not an atheist yourself, but you share a lot of the same mindset that they do in that you will ignore most of what you cannot explain. Me, I am more fascinated by the things that aren’t easily explainable. I am not saying I know the answers to everything, but I am interested in exploring the questions. Yet for some reason I keep getting harassed with “Prove it”, rather than getting finding people willing to explore the question with me. I can’t prove a lot of what I am saying, because I am not stating that it is true, I am stating that it “Might” be true, and that many people in this country particularly are too willing to take a shallow look at an issue and then consider the case shut.
I mean look at the thread where I talked about terrorists and soldiers being equal. Americans harangued me for my idiotic politics, but a few foreigners chimed in and said, “What Erek is saying is in line with a lot of what people over here are saying.” Yesterday I was on a train and I heard two black kids talking about Osama bin Laden, and one was comparing him to William Wallace. The perspective on bin Laden I have found is very different between the white overclass and the black underclass, at least where I live. I’ve spoken to a lot of black people who see his villification as just more of whitey’s lies. They have seen it all before, white people treating darker people like shit and then talking about them being animals when they fight back. What I am fighting here is some pretty supreme ignorance, and I don’t presume to speak for anyone but myself, yet I do find a lot of the standard bigotries emanating from the rigid stances that American establishment intellectuals tend to take. People here are going to be in for a very rude awakening when not only muslim terrorists want to take out America, but also South American terrorists who are tired of seeing American choppers gas Colombian farms out of some hypocritical stance on cocaine, and yet despite this, I’ll still hear people on these boards defend the drug war and attempt to villify me as a druggie that just wants to justify his drug use, when the reality is I have significantly decreased my intake, and I haven’t been harassed since I was 19 and got strip searched in the middle of the street because someone fingered me as a heroin dealer.
To put it succinctly, your way is incorrect. It is important that you understand though, that when I am dismissing the stupid arguments I hear on these boards that I am not talking about science, I am talking about the flagellated version that you guys think of as scientific. You think that your particular way of viewing it is the “correct” way and that’s why you are wrong, because there are whole levels of nuance that you consider wrong due to what you were taught about how to deal with the mysterious. Many of you can’t understand how using the word ‘occult’ in a perjorative context displays your ignorance. The word ‘occult’ just means hidden. There is a lot that the scientific establishment has yet to address. There have been many cults throughout history that have made quite successful forays into the realm of politics, and as I have been saying, the farther you go back into history the less the ‘occult’ is removed from the day to day operations of politics and scientific inquiry.
So you’ve had your time with your Hegelian Thesis-Antithesis delusion, but it’s about time you woke up to Synthesis. The Thesis-Antithesis delusion worked for a time as it taught you about how to define things that you could prove, it helped you to learn how to discern that which can be proven and that which cannot be proven, but you’ve taken it too far, you have begun to claim that, that which cannot be proven is false, and that simply is incorrect. Just because something hasn’t been proven doesn’t make it false, and your belief that whole strata of society are delusional is nothing more than as you’ve put it before, Cultural-Bigotry.
So a Fairy is a personification of a process. You choose to look at it as dry and mechanical, others choose to view it through personification. It’s like Gremlins running the inner workings of a computer. However, the Gremlin is a personified entity that one may use to view the inner workings of a machine, and it might not be as detailed or exact as your representation, but they also might be using the word Gremlin in a much more abstract way than you might be believe. Your way is not MORE CORRECT than theirs, what would be more correct is finding a synthesis between the personification and the mechanistic view. Your brain is run by chemical processes. It is a machine, it carries information via physical processes, so does a computer, they are both manifestations of the whole consciousness, and your brain is no more conscious than the computer because both are serving a similar function, and are part of a larger extelligence. Whenever I hear people arguing that there is no God I think of T-cells arguing that there is no such thing as a Human.
Erek
Well, for the most part the keys have been there. In fact, I don’t know of a case where the keys have been somewhere else. And looking for keys under the light is a lot more rational than going to Paris to look for them because it would be very sweet if they were there, and no one has proved that they aren’t there.
The rest of the post is the usual misunderstanding of science and atheism, and your accusation that we don’t respond to your definition of god which you refuse to elaborate on.
Actually, no.
In many threads, someone will pop in to indicate that they have, despite your abuse of vocabulary, discerned your intent. The rest of your lengthy strawman is just that (which again carefully ignored the actual point I made). I am not arguing against the points you have attempted to make with any (imagined on your part ) “rationalist” straitjacket. While you are often a ditz, you do occasionally make valid points.
Rather, I am making the point that your persistent abuse of the language, both imposing your idiolect on your posts and attempting to excoriate other posters for failing to go along with your bizarre meanings, actually harms your attempts to convey your thoughts since most threads deteriorate into personal feuds where people attempt to point out the errors that you have posted using English words while you simply dance around claiming that they are too narrow in their understanding because they prefer that you use the common language in an understandable fashion.
If you have a problem with a particular poster or two who choose to use language badly as oddly as you do, just ignore the posters. Most of us have been around long enough to recognize the one trick ponies who substitute repeated refrains for thought. On the other hand, by so often aiming your odd claims directly at those posters, you are pretending that they are a substantive portion of the readership who need to be addressed–which seriously calls your judgment into question.
And since you post relentlessly and at length in a Forum that I am required to read, I am not at liberty to ignore your abuses of the language, so I am going to keep being prompted to point out your errors.
And of the times when the keys aren’t under the light?
You stated at one point that you understood why I don’t elaborate on the definition of God when I used the state of the internet as an example. I don’t misunderstand science and atheism at all. I think it is you that misunderstands science. You take your falsification too far is what I am saying. I am not talking about other scientists, I am talknig about the people I am talking to on these boards that are abusing science to support their own dogmatic opinions. There’s a big difference.
The word ‘Selah’ means “Pause and Consider” so I am going to give you something to pause and consider, not something I am saying is true, just something to pause and consider.
Back in the 50s when the CIA was being formed, they started a propaganda campaign against UFOs. They were afraid that the Soviets would use a belief in UFOs to create a War of the Worlds scenario and scare the population shitless. So they enlisted comedians and journalists and such to scoff at the idea of UFOs. Now this scoffing became a standard part of the culture. It is something that even you do. Now you have no evidence either way as to whether or not aliens visit this planet. The truth is simply that you do not know. Yet you scoff at people who believe in UFOs. I think that there are enough people who claim to have experience with UFOs that I am willing to accept that UFO visitation MAY be true. I am not saying they ARE true, simply that they might be, I don’t know either way. Now, I think that my position is more scientifically rigorous than yours on this particular subject, because I do not lean either way about their existance really. In short I am agnostic on the subject. I don’t think you are tone deaf to science, but I think you miss a few notes here and there, because you anticipate the note rather than being patient and playing it on time, or you hesitate for a little too long and fall out of time with the rest of the orchestra. Playing your note too early, playing it too late or not playing it at all are equal as far as missing your note. Just as with science assuming something is true without evidence is not a good idea, and assuming it is false without evidence is not a good idea, just as leaning in one direction or the other while lacking evidence is not a good idea. I would say that I understand science better than you think I do, and that you don’t understand it as well as you think you do.
Erek
Such as? Sometimes we haven’t found them yet, but then we can bring a flashlight or make the street light brighter. We still don’t go to Paris.
Well you may be right - I’m not sure you understand your definition of god any better than I understand your definition of god. I know you don’t get atheism, but you’re not alone in this one.
Want to give a specific example of someone abusing science to support a dogmatic opinion?
Cite? I know the Air Force gave out disinformation about what actually crashed at Roswell. Did the CIA employ George Adamski? I’m not saying the CIA couldn’t have done this, but is there any evidence outside the extreme set of saucer nuts. (There I go again.) In the early 50s there was Project Bluebook, and there was at least one movie that was highly supportive of UFOs, with quite dramatic footage of the radar contacts over Washington and the Arnold footage which started it all. And, why do you think comedians would have to be paid by the CIA to do jokes about little green men? Was “Purple People Eater” paid for by the Feds?
You have no idea about how much I have studied UFOs. I actually own and have read quite a few books on the subject, both by supporters and debunkers. I’ve been following this subject for nearly 40 years. Consider:
All the cases of contact reported have been shown to be factually incorrect, as far as anything has been shown. Consider Adamski (know who he was?) and Roswell, and the Hills.
UFO sightings have been shown to track popular culture.
Are you aware of the Great Airship Mystery of the 1890s. This involved many instances, all across the country, of sightings of advanced airships, and close encounters of the third kind with their pilots (who hailed from New England.) Many were seen by multiple people. The evidence for the existence of these ships was as good or better than that for UFOs (meaning an alien explanation of them) - but we know there was nothing there.
There have been many predictions by the believers about impending contact. Nothing has happened. The supposed evidence from the government has been shown to be forgeries. Plus, there is the totally unbelievable claim that for almost 60 years the government has kept the existence of contact with aliens totally secret… Come on now!
I believe (though I don’t know) that intelligent life does exist off the earth. I don’t know the answer to Fermi’s paradox. It is remotely possible we have been visited, once maybe, but it must be a very stupid alien to be seen without wanting to be seen. (And perhaps we were visited in the far past, before man.) Yet I do know that 99.99% of UFO reports are bunkum, and withholding belief until there is some solid evidence is the only rational approach.
And you again show you don’t get science. Why should science be involved at all until there is enough evidence for a hypothesis? Science does not call for gullible potential acceptance until shown otherwise. The null hypothesis is that there is nothing there, and the believers are invited to provide evidence to falsify this.
And again you show that you don’t understand science, because you keep applying it to my arguments when I’m not applying it. All I am saying is that people close the case too quickly on arguments they have no evidence for either way. I will not provide a cite for the ideas presented above because all I was doing is presenting a possibility. There are numerous possibilities in these issues that end up being lumped in with ‘the occult’, all I am saying is that I am not willing to close the book as quickly as many of the so-called scientists who are rarely more than pseudo-intellectual hobbyists. My only point in this, my main point has been and remains to be that there is an undercurrent in society that thinks it is skeptical to close the door on a question that hasn’t been answered, because they cannot prove it one way or another. I am saying simply that there are a lot of people who don’t understand that absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence, and yet get all high and mighty about it on message boards such as this one. I’m done with this argument, you are one of the people who I have been arguing with regularly on this subject who I maintain respect for, but if you can’t see my point, and continue to insist that it’s a misunderstanding of science, then we are concluded, I’m spinning my wheels and wasting my time because you’re merely being obstinant. I am talking about the way people approach problems. I don’t understand why it’s so difficult to comprehend.
My example is Der Trihs dismissing Babylonian Cosmology without knowing about it because he doesn’t need to know about it. That’s about the best example that has ever fallen into my lap. Basically Der Trihs is an idiot for thinking that, but he’s one of the only people that will come straight out and say something that extreme, whereas many of the rest of you will behave like that but won’t take as extreme a stance on it as he does. If you can’t prove something all that it proves is that you can’t prove it. It doesn’t prove that it’s false. That is science in it’s purest rawest form, and if you take dispute with this, then YOU don’t understand science. I get it just fine.
I’ve been arguing about semantic bias, not scientific fact, when you get that through your stubborn skull we’ll get along much better.
Erek
And the UFO stuff is pretty interesting btw.
Which, I suppose, means that you’re out in a field somewhere, stumbling around in the dark with no idea where you are or what you’re doing.
I like this analogy!
mswas, you know, you’re not supposed to post your sig EVERY time. Just once per thread.
Anything that makes you feel good about your bias.
I aim to please.
Guinistasia Is that the eleventh commandment?
Not quite, as I showed before, it is you who is showing bias by even refusing to consider the evidence that sources like Robert A. Wilson were mistaken in their predictions *(or joking as Wilson is more willing to say nowadays) and misled by cuckoos.
When the only way to deal with that contradictory evidence is for you to say that it was “possibly true in other universes” that is once again the “heads I win tails you lose” mega bias that you have in this subject.
First remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother’s eye, as Jesus used to say.
- It is curious that you did acknowledge that the Illuminatus trilogy was indeed a parody, but you ignored that Cosmic Trigger has as a subtitle: Final Secret of the Illuminati, That is why I made the joke earlier if you follow Wilson then you should read Illuminatus so then the atomic level whoosh Wilson did to you will be complete.
Have you ever done brainstorming? Idea generation is cool, but we all need an internal censor to stop us from uttering total bullshit. We all come up with ideas that are screwy - the first step is to do some preliminary investigation to at least get confidence that there is some evidence in support of the idea. It then becomes a hypothesis. Just saying there is no evidence for or against is not adequate to make something a hypothesis. It’s better to have people assume you’re an idiot than to open your mouth and prove it. Evaluating ideas is the way of keeping us from opening our mouths!
I didn’t think we were arguing scientific fact - just scientific process. No scientist actually ever closes the door on anything. (Except stuff proven impossible, and UFOs aren’t in that class.) We just don’t pay attention (except for a few hardy souls like Phil Klass) until some evidence shows up.
BTW, absence of evidence can be evidence of absence - if the hypothesis says the evidence should be there. Evolution implies that there should be certain types of fossils - if none were ever found, that would be evidence against it. It’s not proof, it is evidence. In any case, there is plenty of evidence against the stuff you claim (or as much as can be expected from something nonexistent.) You sound like the creationist who stands inside a museum loaded with fossils and yells “there is no evidence for evolution.”
Amen, to that! Brainstorming is the unwritten 0_th step of the scientific process that anyone who has done it understands! I sometimes forget that certain other people, [wink wink, nudge nudge, say no moooo!]. The scientific process is only testing if your resulting idea (hypotheis) is a bad one or not – very Socratic.
Ok, slight beef growing here… You know that there are scientific crooks just like in any other field… in fact, I wonder if the crooks often do better than those of use who do it right… E.g. - Some make a great amount of money trying to mystify the fundamentals of physics while the rest of us are actually trying trying to figure out how stuff works – and the average street-goer thinks they know everythig there will ever be known about a certain field.
For example, Quantum Mechanics is a great model, I have every faith in it! – When trying to measure position and momentum, I run into (more than) the usual ultimate limitations + Running statistics on actual high energy exps seems to match up reasonably well to the model… but the model is horribly limited – it can’t predict anything better than it’s statistical bases: heis uncert princ, plank length, etc, and a bunch of mathematicians decided to play philosopher about it, claiming that they are GOD (AKA, they know EVERYTHING about the system and nothing more CAN be known - and because those particular theorists can’t predict it, it’s unpredictable). I think the line gets crossed in MSWAS’s direction when certain individuals make statements like that. Meanwhile, the rest of us are working our knuckles down to the bone (on miniscule govt $$) trying to develop the next and (always hopefully) better model.
Heh, I’ve seen it happen. I have some fundie Hard-core Christian friends… I met one who was a physics grad-student – I have no idea why he was there…
Not always unwritten. I designed an internal research funding process that was designed to give more money as people went further along with their idea development. We explicitly had a phase 0 consisting of any crazy idea you came up with. Before you went to anyone for seed money, though (actually hours) you had to show you validated it in some way - perhaps by doing an experiment, perhaps by a literature search.
There is a great book by Bob Colwell on the design of the Pentium Pro that I just reviewed for a journal/magazine. (Wiley loves me and sends me free books 
) He structures it by phases of the development process, starting with Concept. It is a great book, and everything he says about Intel is true - good, bad and crazy.
By crooks do you mean popularizers who know the field, popularizers who don’t, or real crooks like our Korean friend? I’ve given enough talks to VPs to know you got to simplify almost to the point of incorrectness to get the point across. I can testify that Nobel Laureate VPs are no exception to this rule.
You were not an idiot for a brief shining moment the other day. Ahh it was glorious.
sigh It’s funny how you guys can continuously miss the point and then claim it’s insulting or arrogant for me to point out that you’ve missed the point. I haven’t at all tried to defend anything factual at all ever. My position is that your vaunted science is as equally full of quacks and charlatans as mystics, and that your side of this argument has created a certain sort of doublespeak that makes it difficult to discuss certain concepts because you’ve created a perjorative definition for a word and claim that it’s the ‘real’ definition for that word. You have yet to even be arguing the same subject that I’m arguing.
I guess there is little point in continuing because you’re not even on the same page, and we’re talking at cross purposes. I’ve understood this for some months now, and have tried to get you onto the same page, but it hasn’t worked, so there isn’t any point in trying. You think that I have a certain goal in mind and no matter how many times I tell you that it isn’t my goal you still want to teach me what I already know.
It’s exactly like GIGObuster who is making fun of Robert Anton Wilson’s “Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati”, even though the PREFACE refutes everything that he’s saying about the book. Wilson didn’t make any predictions about anything, he wrote an autobiographical account of his quest to get past his own personal prejudices, and uncover his own biases. The only prediction his book makes is that it will have a profound effect on people, which it clearly did if one bothers to read the testimonials by authors such as Philip K. Dick or Henry Miller. It had a profound effect on me. The author even states in that book that Illuminatus was always meant to be a satire of conspiracy theorists.
Yet GIGObuster continues to believe that Wilson was making predictions, and you continue to believe that I am trying to prove facts. Both of us have the same stated goal, uncovering bias. That’s it, that’s all I’m trying to do. I am not trying to ‘prove’ anything. So here I am painting a picture and you keep telling me I don’t know the proper way to use a screwdriver.
Erek