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BS: The God Delusion 2010
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Smokey. Date: 28 Sep 10 - 03:19 PM .....I didn't mean immediately... |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Stringsinger Date: 28 Sep 10 - 03:17 PM "a. But we know memory eventually becomes static and unchanging--the story becomes set, so to speak. And we know all sensations dwindle to zero eventually. Nothing changes for the rest of time and since time is characterized by change, time has ended. b. But eternity has no end so there must be some memory modification and sensations not at zero." We don't know that memory becomes static and unchanging. This is a hypothesis that has not been tested. It's an assumption. We do know that memory is tied to the brain and is constantly changing as our perceptions of what we see in life change. We don't even know physically what eternity is. If the universe(s) collapse, which is theoretically a possibility, then what eternity is there? And if it's not there, why would it not have ended? Once again the attempt to prove logically an argument is reliant on the agreement of premises and those you offer are unprovable by scientific means. They haven't been tested. They are assumptions. The problem for the argument of a super "consciousness" that extends beyond the brain is not provable and one's experience of this supposed "consciousness" can only be supposed and not proven. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Smokey. Date: 28 Sep 10 - 02:10 PM Try thinking of Margaret Thatcher naked. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: TheSnail Date: 28 Sep 10 - 02:02 PM I find it tricky doing sloth and lust at the same time. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Smokey. Date: 28 Sep 10 - 01:25 PM some of them are mutually incompatible You obviously need more practise :-) |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: TheSnail Date: 28 Sep 10 - 01:22 PM Yeah! Gluttony, sloth and lust! They are from the Seven Deadly Sins. I think I've done all of them. Not becessarily at the same time; some of them are mutually incompatible. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Bill D Date: 28 Sep 10 - 01:14 PM "Gluttony, sloth and lust! My favorite pastimes!" ...not necessarily in that order..... |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: GUEST Date: 28 Sep 10 - 12:44 PM
"No child raised from birth as a Christian, Muslim or whatever religion was around them by sheer chance of birth was ever left alone to believe what they wanted. "Steve Shaw |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Mrrzy Date: 28 Sep 10 - 12:26 PM Yeah! Gluttony, sloth and lust! My favorite pastimes! |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: TheSnail Date: 28 Sep 10 - 12:11 PM The Ten Commandments may not admire me very much, I think I've broken several. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Steve Shaw Date: 28 Sep 10 - 11:58 AM Touché! |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Amos Date: 28 Sep 10 - 11:56 AM Welll, I wasn't worried about THAT!! LOL! I do think it is important to notice, however, that admiration is a capabililty that is found in lots of life forms (dogs and humans most immediately come to mind) that does not occur in physics. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: TheSnail Date: 28 Sep 10 - 11:51 AM Amos In the sure certainty they will not reciprocate... But neither will they cast you into eternal damnation and nobody will burn you at the stake if you don't believe in them. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Amos Date: 28 Sep 10 - 11:40 AM admire the laws of physics In the sure certainty they will not reciprocate... |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Steve Shaw Date: 28 Sep 10 - 10:55 AM Well, religion has long had this habit of not leaving people alone to believe what they want. No child raised from birth as a Christian, Muslim or whatever religion was around them by sheer chance of birth was ever left alone to believe what they wanted. Adults forcing religion on children is no different from those Jehovah's Witnesses you don't like, except that at least you can tell the Witnesses to go away. The world is certainly a place of wonder and mystery but we have yet to find anything hereto unexplained that needed to be explained with magic or the supernatural. Revel in the glorious ordinariness of it all and admire the laws of physics! |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: GUEST,Patsy Date: 28 Sep 10 - 10:27 AM I don't really think that anyone will truly ever agree about the beginning of the world or whether God exists or not no matter how many scientists and theologians argue and debate. Every time a new so called theory comes to light another skeptic will disagree about either side. Not all scientists deny God either so there you are. It is a wonder and a mystery because the world is such am amazing place apart from the manmade catastrophes. Could it be that we are just fortunate that we are on this planet? At the same time I don't appreciate anyone forcing any view down my throat i.e. Jehovah's knocking at my door or preachers in the street, people should be left alone to believe what they want quietly. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Amos Date: 28 Sep 10 - 09:09 AM Atheists, agnostics most knowledgeable about religion, survey says By Mitchell Landsberg, Los Angeles Times If you want to know about God, you might want to talk to an atheist. Heresy? Perhaps. But a survey that measured Americans' knowledge of religion found that atheists and agnostics knew more, on average, than followers of most major faiths. In fact, the gaps in knowledge among some of the faithful may give new meaning to the term "blind faith." A majority of Protestants, for instance, couldn't identify Martin Luther as the driving force behind the Protestant Reformation, according to the survey, released Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Four in 10 Catholics misunderstood the meaning of their church's central ritual, incorrectly saying that the bread and wine used in Holy Communion are intended to merely symbolize the body and blood of Christ, not actually become them. Atheists and agnostics — those who believe there is no God or who aren't sure — were more likely to answer the survey's questions correctly. Jews and Mormons ranked just below them in the survey's measurement of religious knowledge — so close as to be statistically tied. So why would an atheist know more about religion than a Christian? American atheists and agnostics tend to be people who grew up in a religious tradition and consciously gave it up, often after a great deal of reflection and study, said Alan Cooperman, associate director for research at the Pew Forum. "These are people who thought a lot about religion," he said. "They're not indifferent. They care about it." Atheists and agnostics also tend to be relatively well educated, and the survey found, not surprisingly, that the most knowledgeable people were also the best educated. However, it said that atheists and agnostics also outperformed believers who had a similar level of education. ... (LA Times) |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Amos Date: 27 Sep 10 - 10:41 PM Well, I think it is a silly question to begin with. I doubt anyone who would bother trying to answer it in would be in any shape to do so, and anyone who WAS, wouldn't. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Bill D Date: 27 Sep 10 - 10:15 PM It? You mean " the question of the existence of deity."?...naawwww, the tests were on all the other stuff of Phil. 101. The paper was an attempt to see if they could do anything except regurgitate information.....most could not. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Amos Date: 27 Sep 10 - 08:34 PM MAybe so, but it would have made a lousy multiple choice test... |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Bill D Date: 27 Sep 10 - 08:12 PM "...philosophy doesn't consider the question of the existence of deity." Then why did I have to grade 75 freshman papers on it in 1968? Well, what was assigned was to write a short paper showing they they understood the status of the claims and history of attempting to answer the question, and Epistemology IS a valid philosophical question. What we (meaning the dept. head who chose the topic) didn't anticipate was that it was way too difficult define the topic in such a way as to just elicit an understanding of the issue. This was **Kansas** and many kids took it as an opportunity to 'defend' their belief system....and I had to give too many 'C' grades to kids who got 'A's on multiple choice tests....The issue was just too 'loaded' for beginners. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Ed T Date: 27 Sep 10 - 07:19 PM Need a little empathy? Feel a bit too shy to post? This may be for you? oxytocin Next thing will be a religion tonic. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Mrrzy Date: 27 Sep 10 - 05:14 PM LOL! Not to mention that if they'd have had fMRI when I was in grad school they'd have had to use a much bigger crowbar to get me out... |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Amos Date: 27 Sep 10 - 02:12 PM "The last few decades have seen a surge of invention of technologies that enable the observation or perturbation of information in the brain. Functional MRI, which measures blood flow changes associated with brain activity, is being explored for purposes as diverse as lie detection, prediction of human decision making, and assessment of language recovery after stroke. Implanted electrical stimulators, which enable control of neural circuit activity, are borne by hundreds of thousands of people to treat conditions such as deafness, Parkinson's disease, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. And new methods, such as the use of light to activate or silence specific neurons in the brain, are being widely utilized by researchers to reveal insights into how to control neural circuits to achieve therapeutically useful changes in brain dynamics. We are entering a neurotechnology renaissance, in which the toolbox for understanding the brain and engineering its functions is expanding in both scope and power at an unprecedented rate. This toolbox has grown to the point where the strategic utilization of multiple neurotechnologies in conjunction with one another, as a system, may yield fundamental new capabilities, both scientific and clinical, beyond what they can offer alone. For example, consider a system that reads out activity from a brain circuit, computes a strategy for controlling the circuit so it enters a desired state or performs a specific computation, and then delivers information into the brain to achieve this control strategy. Such a system would enable brain computations to be guided by predefined goals set by the patient or clinician, or adaptively steered in response to the circumstances of the patient's environment or the instantaneous state of the patient's brain. ..." Article here at MIT Tech magazine. Wow. Programmable hoomings. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Amos Date: 27 Sep 10 - 12:45 PM Often, it doesn't even include the existence of the philosopher! They do the loop (shoop-shoop!) They do the Mrzzy loop! They do the loop (shoop-shoop!) They do the Mrzzy loop! It makes a soup (shoop-shoop) That does a loop-di-loop! The Mrzzy loop! That Mrzzy loop! (Shanana chorus fades out...) |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Mrrzy Date: 27 Sep 10 - 12:02 PM I talked to a theologian the other day, who said that philosophy doesn't consider the question of the existence of deity. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: TheSnail Date: 27 Sep 10 - 09:43 AM Smokey Here's a bargain for y'all - be quick while it's going cheap. 'The Quantum Activist Course' Dr Amit Goswami Thanks for that, Smokey. Absolutely delightful. I think I might try some of that Quantum Naturopathy. I notice Josep has made no further reference to Dr Goswami. Thank you, Josep, for your postings of 24 Sep 10 - 08:09 PM and 08:11 PM. Might I suggest you read them and make an effort to understand them? I would particularly draw your attention to - "The laws of classical mechanics thus follow from the laws of quantum mechanics as a statistical average at the limit of large systems or large quantum numbers." For an idea of what "large systems" means, take a look at this - http://www.av8n.com/physics/quantum-classical.htm Ammonia is small and behaves as a quantum object, methylethylamine is large and does not (both at low temperatures) so a cat at room temperature (or above if it is alive)...? Taking atomic nuclei as single particles for the purpose of this argument, I reckon ammonia has 10 particles, methylethylamine has 37. A cat is going to be in the order of Avogadro's number per 10gms, about 10 to the power of 25 particles. A cat is composed of quantum particles. It is not, of itself, a quantum object. For whoever it was that said QM has proven nothing Quantum Mechanics has not "proven" anything. Not because there is anything wrong with it but simply because it is a theory and that is not what theories do. "Quantum mechanics had enormous success in explaining many of the features of our world." "Quantum theory also provides accurate descriptions for many previously unexplained phenomena " Theories explain and describe. They make predictions which can be tested by experiments which will either disprove them or provide supporting evidence (but never actually prove them to be true). I suggest that you do some reading up on the theory of science before making pronouncements that Quantum Mechanics has proved anything about consciousness. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Steve Shaw Date: 27 Sep 10 - 06:12 AM A bit of an Aunt Sally there with your self-styled atheist. I haven't met an awful lot of atheists who want to put up arguments that disprove God, to be honest. The sheer illogicality of God is that he has been invoked to explain a complex universe whilst being far more complex and inexplicable himself than the thing he's supposed to be the explanation for. It hardly helps that, in order to exist, he has been excused all the rules of physics and the need to have any evidence for his existence. This particular self-styled (what IS that anyway?) atheist has concluded that, from all this, the chances of his existing are vanishingly small, but I really can't be arsed to try to disprove his existence, either to myself or to anyone else. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: GUEST,josep Date: 26 Sep 10 - 10:45 PM ///josep... unfortunately, the logic you employ to come to this conclusion is fraught with embedded assumptions and equivocations. It would take an houur or two to dissect your paragraph and list all the problems, and I don't have the time, and you would no doubt just reject them..(we humans are ABLE to deny or accept such 'proofs'...it's part OF being human)/// Sorry Bill D but there is nothing wrong with the logic I employed. Studying subjective brain states with a subjective brain state is self-referential--it goes nowhere. Once I argued with a self-styled "atheist" who told me the best argument atheists can offer against the existence of god is "Can god make a stone so heavy even he couldn't lift it?" He said that statement disproves the notion of god. I tried to tell him that he was going to make atheists look like utter fools if he thinks he can go into a debate armed with that as his logical proof. The statement is self-referential. It compares god to god and nothing useful can be gotten from comparing a thing to itself. It's not a valid comparison. A statement has to go somewhere. It has to go from A to B. Statements like the one quoted above go nowhere. A circles around and comes back to A. No different than "Everything I tell you is a lie." It is circular, it goes nowhere, i.e. conveys no useful information as opposed to, say, "Everything josep tells you is a lie." Whether it's true or not is beside the point, it conveys something useful because it isn't circular. You can't use your subjective brain states to study someone else's subjective brain states and call it an objective study. It can only be objective if an outside consciousness validates your conclusions but that outside consciousness would also be subjective. So consciousness was never addressed in your study and this is necessarily so because we can't get outside our own consciousness to study it objectively. That's pretty much the cornerstone of every epistemological argument. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Steve Shaw Date: 26 Sep 10 - 07:15 PM "If you took all the logical fallacies from this thread and laid them end to end, it would be longer than the thing that won the 'World's Longest Thing' competition..." Ha! String theory again! |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Smokey. Date: 26 Sep 10 - 06:08 PM The same way we know that not all leprechauns are gay. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Amos Date: 26 Sep 10 - 04:46 PM If consciousness is not primal, how would we now? A |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Smokey. Date: 26 Sep 10 - 04:44 PM If you took all the logical fallacies from this thread and laid them end to end, it would be longer than the thing that won the 'World's Longest Thing' competition. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Amos Date: 26 Sep 10 - 04:18 PM Frank's argument is similar to the "my cellphone generates all kinds of interesting messages" assertion. The wiring may definitely be mappable to the sending of messages, but that is no certain demonstration that it generates them. It could similarly be argued that asserting that understanding is brought about solely by brain mechanics is comparable to asserting that your cell phone understands the messages people leave on it, and saves them and relays them to you with comprehension, which is silly on the face of it. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Bill D Date: 26 Sep 10 - 02:53 PM "Hence consciousness is not epiphenomenal and is primal." josep... unfortunately, the logic you employ to come to this conclusion is fraught with embedded assumptions and equivocations. It would take an houur or two to dissect your paragraph and list all the problems, and I don't have the time, and you would no doubt just reject them..(we humans are ABLE to deny or accept such 'proofs'...it's part OF being human) It is true that a conscious being cannot objectively access all the causes and processes which comprise 'its' awareness and motivation (as I mentioned in my post about the "edietic reduction"), but neither does awareness itself logically imply that "..consciousness is not epiphenomenal and is primal". |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: GUEST,josep Date: 26 Sep 10 - 02:14 PM ///The illusion of consciousness outside of the brain can never be reasonably established since it is unmeasurable. Activity in the brain, however, is measurable and different states of consciousness can be manipulated by electrodes to the brain including a sense of god and religion. The idea of an external "consciousness" is pure nonsense. The illusion of an external consciousness is something that can be manipulated by stimulating areas of the brain./// Suppose you have extremely complex technology and mathematics that enable you to map in very minute detail any given brain state—color, shape, texture perception as well states of fear, joy, sorrow, terror, ecstasy, anger, jealousy, contentment, boredom, pain etc. No matter how many people you test, the results are generally the same with minor variations. So is your knowledge of brains states complete? No. We are dealing with perceptions called qualia which involve perceptions and feelings that we all have but which we cannot communicate to others. You cannot communicate your perception of the color blue to someone else. You simply tell them it is blue and they must simply know what you mean. So in evaluating qualia of your test subjects with your super technology, your knowledge is incomplete because you must evaluate your own role as the observer. Your evaluation cannot be part of an objective brain state because your own observation is inherently subjective. There must be another consciousness to evaluate your role as observer but whose? Since everyone else's brain states are no more complete than yours and yours no more than theirs, then you would have to conclude that your study of the brain states is incomplete simply because consciousness was excluded from them altogether. Consciousness cannot be included because it is outside the objective reality being studied. Hence consciousness is not epiphenomenal and is primal. In short, your assertions are bogus. ///The idea of an external "higher consciousness" is even more ridiculous. It assumes the existence of a "higher power" that guides the human thinking process. This is true sophistry. If there can exist a "higher consciousness" that is absolute, it can be argued also that there is a "lower consciousness" that negates any "higher consciousness". It's the old argument that because one conceives of a god, it must exist. The classic refutation is that if one doesn't, then it doesn't exist. /// Huh, what? What was any of that supposed to mean? |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Stringsinger Date: 26 Sep 10 - 12:59 PM There is no scientific evidence to support that we are a brain in a vat. This is a construct that has never been determined by the study of biology, physiology, embryology or any of the legitimate physical sciences. The burden of proof is on the person stating that consciousness exists outside of the physical brain. The illusion of consciousness outside of the brain can never be reasonably established since it is unmeasurable. Activity in the brain, however, is measurable and different states of consciousness can be manipulated by electrodes to the brain including a sense of god and religion. The idea of an external "consciousness" is pure nonsense. The illusion of an external consciousness is something that can be manipulated by stimulating areas of the brain. The idea of an external "higher consciousness" is even more ridiculous. It assumes the existence of a "higher power" that guides the human thinking process. This is true sophistry. If there can exist a "higher consciousness" that is absolute, it can be argued also that there is a "lower consciousness" that negates any "higher consciousness". It's the old argument that because one conceives of a god, it must exist. The classic refutation is that if one doesn't, then it doesn't exist. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: GUEST,josep Date: 26 Sep 10 - 10:55 AM ///Well, whether or not it is delusional it cannot be argued that it is consciousness, since even if if what it is being conscious of is a delusion, the act of being conscious of it is still occurring. The notion that all experience and all experiences are just delusions, and nothing is really experiencing anything is absurd, in my view. The other thing to bear in mind is that agreement on an illusion beings about reality. As long as we can get a consensus about the solidity of solids and the visibility of light and so on, it doesn't much matter whether it is "illusory"/ From what point of view could you sort out whether it was real or illusion? It's a silly circular chase./// It's the old brain-in-a-vat argument. You're nothing but a brain suspended in a vat wfilled with a solution in a laboratory somewhere and a mad scientist is stimulating that brain with electrical impulses to simluate all your life experiences. Even your reading this right now is just an illusion caused by the mad scientist. How can you prove that you are not a brain in a vat somewhere? I used to have a similar thought when I was very young after watching "The Wizard of Oz." I wondered, "What if I'm really in a coma right now and none of this is happening and when I wake up, I'll be a grown man who is just dreaming all this and all the people I know then will be people I knew in this dream." So how can you prove you are not in a coma right now just dreaming all this? You can't, just as you cannot prove that you are not a brain in a vat. But that doesn't mean that because you can't disprove the notion that you should then put any stock in it. Someone insisting consciousness is an illusion is proposing the brain-in-a-vat argument. Consciousness is an illusion so everything that occurs in consciousness is likewise an illusion. Since you can't disprove consciousness is an illusion, you should therefore conclude that consciousness is an illusion. But since the person making the claim is doing so within my consciousness, he too is an illusion and his assertion that consciousness is an illusion is an illusion therefore consciousness is real. Kind of like, "Everything I tell you is a lie." It's the worst kind of sophistry and sheer nonsense. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Amos Date: 25 Sep 10 - 10:41 PM Well, whether or not it is delusional it cannot be argued that it is consciousness, since even if if what it is being conscious of is a delusion, the act of being conscious of it is still occurring. The notion that all experience and all experiences are just delusions, and nothing is really experiencing anything is absurd, in my view. The other thing to bear in mind is that agreement on an illusion beings about reality. As long as we can get a consensus about the solidity of solids and the visibility of light and so on, it doesn't much matter whether it is "illusory"/ From what point of view could you sort out whether it was real or illusion? It's a silly circular chase. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Mrrzy Date: 25 Sep 10 - 09:45 PM So, I take it we're agreed that faith is not rational, which is why we're off on this tangent? |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Stringsinger Date: 25 Sep 10 - 06:47 PM Thinking about "consciousness" brings to mind how this can be delusional. If the brain is dysfunctional, then "consciousness" might possibly be an illusion. This, then would mean that any attempt to prove an independent "consciousness" from the physical working of the brain might be an establishment of a deluded outcome. Logic is peculiar in that there are those who are in mental institutions today who claim their logic is infallible. They tend to be absolute in their authoritarian opinion about how things should be. They can prove it to you by their logic. Logic has to be tempered with observable facts, not philosophical manipulations. The first giveaway of a dysfunctional mind is an opinion that won't be tempered by new information. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Smokey. Date: 25 Sep 10 - 06:19 PM Well, you're wrong. Yes, Josep, you said that already, and I don't begrudge you your opinion. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: GUEST,josep Date: 25 Sep 10 - 06:04 PM ///You can't even prove to another person that you are conscious./// That's solipsism. It's actually the opposite of solipsism, which is the postulation that YOU are the only conscious entity in the Universe./// It's the same argument. If you can't prove to another that you are conscious, he can't prove to you that he is. Therefore, you are free to assume that you are the only conscious being in the universe. But then he's free to assume the same about himself. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: GUEST,josep Date: 25 Sep 10 - 05:55 PM ///Actually Josep, what I said was "Quantum physics hasn't proven anything yet",/// Well, you're wrong. ////and it was specifically in direct response to your comment that "Quantum physics has proven experimentally that consciousness collapses the wave function of a wavicle into a particle, into matter."/// Well, you're wrong there too. It HAS been proven. I already mentioned the experiment of Alain Aspect who proved the EPR Paradox really does happen and that it does not violate Special Relativity as Einstein said it would. Ironically, it was Einstein who formulated the paradox to disprove QM and ended up proving it. The same with Schroedinger's cat--it was supposed to disprove the idea of wave functions and ended up proving it. But then EPR and Schroedinger's cat are closely related thought experiments born from the same type of thinking. They were wrong. QM is not only valid, it is more correct than any other theories currently out there. Certainly not all physicists buy the same interpretations and that's good because someone may come up with something better. But for now, the Copenhagen Interpretation fits the data better than any other interpretation. I'll easily grant you that it is not likely a complete science. I would be disappointed if it was but it works well enough for now. ///I regard that as an unproven but nonetheless interesting theory which, as such, provides no real evidence for the survival of consciousness after death, let alone proof, as you have claimed.//// That's because you let Lox throw you off saying my argument was based on QM and I tried to make clear that it was not. It has nothing to do with QM. Some of the side arguments such as universal consciousness have a case with QM which lends credence to my argument but the argument itself is COMPLETELY STAND-ALONE It is purely logical and requires nothing else to make its case. ///As I understand it, QM doesn't set out to prove things, but to attempt to explain them. It has a long way to go before it is established and agreed upon even amongst its own proponents before it is in any position to actually prove anything independantly. I like to know at least how many legs a horse has before I back it. /// "Set out to prove things" is a vague phrase. QM didn't set out to prove that classical physics was useless at the subatomic realm because they already knew that such was the case which is why QM came into being at all. The stuff about wave functions and theories championed by Gell-Mann, Bohm, Yukawa, Bell, Scroedinger, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, Sarfatti, Feynmann and others arose long after Planck first proposed the existence of quanta. No one saw any of that coming. That's just standard science. Newton couldn't have foreseen relativity even though both his system and Einstein's are considered classical physics. There were plenty of physicists saying, "I'll stick with Newton. If people expect me to believe identical twins age at different rates in different relativistic frames of reference and that time is the fourth dimension they must be on dangerous drugs." |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Steve Shaw Date: 25 Sep 10 - 04:21 PM For Beethoven he spake, "Oh man, help thyself." |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Amos Date: 25 Sep 10 - 04:00 PM Putting aside the theological horsepucky, I have to side with Josep on this issue. It is a fact that beings communicate, and arrive through communicating at understanding. Given this the argument that you "cannot prove" you are conscious to another being is specious, a sort of antagonist Turing test assertion which relies for any weight on a completely unnatural state of mind, burying the natural attention behind a synthetic erection of shallow pedantic logic. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: GUEST,Romans 14 v Date: 25 Sep 10 - 03:12 PM 11For it is written, As I live, saith the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God. 12So then every one of us shall give account of himself to God. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Smokey. Date: 25 Sep 10 - 02:55 PM Pardon my use of the old-English spelling of 'independently'. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Smokey. Date: 25 Sep 10 - 02:48 PM Actually Josep, what I said was "Quantum physics hasn't proven anything yet", and it was specifically in direct response to your comment that "Quantum physics has proven experimentally that consciousness collapses the wave function of a wavicle into a particle, into matter." I regard that as an unproven but nonetheless interesting theory which, as such, provides no real evidence for the survival of consciousness after death, let alone proof, as you have claimed. As I understand it, QM doesn't set out to prove things, but to attempt to explain them. It has a long way to go before it is established and agreed upon even amongst its own proponents before it is in any position to actually prove anything independantly. I like to know at least how many legs a horse has before I back it. |
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Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010 From: Paul Burke Date: 25 Sep 10 - 02:02 PM You can't even prove to another person that you are conscious./// That's solipsism. It's actually the opposite of solipsism, which is the postulation that YOU are the only conscious entity in the Universe. But I left the Solipsist Society when it split. |
