Yes, I was wondering about that. On the usual definition of "species" they can't have interbred with a different species. Different subspecies yes, but species, no.
I think the fact that 59% of people thought it was human says a lot more about the intelligence of the average human than it says about the bot...
From the RA: "Cleverbot is available for conversation online, but don’t be fooled. Although Cleverbot managed to score well on the Turing test, the model that did that is different from the one you’ll find online."
If he likes doing it, sure, why not. But why is it on/.? How is it news for geeks? There's nothing technically interesting about what he's done. Should we have articles about everybody's hobbies? I don't see how this would have even made idle.
>But you don't know that it's doing so correctly unless you have something to check it against. Otherwise it's just an article of faith.
We do have something to check against: experimental result.
That's circular again. Experimental results are a part of science, so all they are checking is consistency, not correctness.
That's our reality-check system. Your argument is that thinking experimental result proves IS a reality check is unproven, frankly that argument is impossible to settle. Either you conclude that experimental consistency means there's a consistent, objective universe that can be understood (at least partially) or you do not.
Agreed. That's a metaphysical assumption that you have to make to do science. The consistency that you then get supports the view that it was a credible assumption, but not that it was a correct assumption -- other metaphysical assumptions might also lead to consistency.
There's no OTHER way to check, so if you reject the only check we have as "an article of faith" then you have an argument that can't be won.
I don't reject it as an article of faith. I accept it as an article of faith.
A statement which cannot be tested.
It's a statement that can't be tested whether you accept or reject it. That's why it's an article of faith.
There's no rational way to argue with an irrational believe. And you can just about define "irrational believe" as "belief not based on evidence".
But that still leaves the problem of what counts as evidence...
Since science recognises only one possible scientific way to check for a reality, if you don't accept that check - we'll never get anywhere.
FTFY
I think the check has made it's point. All our technology built on what we learned by trusting it has been purely beneficial.
Well, some might question whether nuclear, chemical and biological weapons have been purely beneficial. Anyway, very few of the religious doubt that science is good at what it does, they just dispute that it's the only game in town. As Socrates observed (anticipating Hume by a couple of millennia) science can't tell us how we should live our lives but it can help us to implement what we've decided.
We test scientific rules against their goal : do they protect us from thinking wrong things that are very tempting.
So you need an independent way of identifying "wrong things". Otherwise you could just identify "wrong things" as "disagreeing with the authorities" and you wouldn't need science.
Religion demands unquestioing faith and even admonishes that this is impossible then warns to battle and dispel doubt.
It depends on how you define religion. If that is your definition of religion then of course it's tautologically true but then it says nothing about God (but it might say something about politics and even about those scientists who demand an unquestioning trust in the scientific method -- "scientism"). If your definition of religion is more about belief in a God or gods then some religion demands unquestioning faith and some religion encourages questioning.
That some religious people question their faith in public changes nothing.
Well, it means that being religious does not exclude questioning one's faith in public.
Solipsism, post modernism etc are really jus boring to me. Even if true it provides no useful new theories or lines of inquiry and there's no way to satisfy curiosity on a question we can't answer.
You do realise that Karl Popper was a postmodernist, and the introduction of the notion of falsifiability into science was a result of postmodern philosophy, don't you? I'd call that a useful line of enquiry.
Everything you say about brains depends on them being deterministic. This is not proven and the assertion depends on rejecting the widely reporte observations off free wil. This is I think still contentious.
It certainly is, and one of the most interesting areas of overlap between science and philosophy. Even if the brain is not deterministic it's a puzzle where the will can come from. If the brain is purely material then there doesn't seem to be any way for the will to arise. If there's a "ghost in the machine" then there doesn't seem to be any way for it to interact, so the best scientific theories at the moment seem to be that free will is an illusion. But if that's an illusion, what does that say about the remainder of the model of the universe that we have built?
Science. Rules are based on experience and subject to change. Indeed they have changes over time.
But what are you testing them against? If you are testing them against science then all you are testing for is internal consistency because they are science. The religious can have an internally consistent world view too (they don't always, but they can).
I believe consistency of experiments prove a consistent reality you do not.
No, I believe that consistency of experiments proves (or at least gives sufficiently strong evidence of) a consistent reality too. But that's a metaphysical belief. That's why science can't afford to instantly reject claims because they're metaphysical. It depends on metaphysical claims too.
> Does science lead towards any sort of objective truth?
No, and it doesn't, and never has, claimed to. Science promises only greater understanding.
Understanding of what?
Human brains are simple relative to the universe. Science makes things understandable by creating simple models of how things work.
Is there an objective "how things work" that science works towards, then? Or are they just simplified models of nothing?
but it never approaches the complexity of the reality, that's essentially what science never claims. Science has never promised anybody truth.
So the claim that there is no God is not an attempt at a truth claim, then? Remember, I am not arguing for belief against atheism, I am arguing for agnosticism against atheism and belief.
Yes, premise 2. People who claim to believe in God and then question that same belief are lying, there's no way around that.
But people who claim to believe in quantum mechanics and then question that same belief are not necessarily lying? How come? I know lots of religious people, and all of them question their belief, to greater or lesser degrees.
At best they may be called agnostic - at least agnostics are honest enough to admit they haven't decided though.
If they believe in God, whey should they be called agnostic? And if they believe in God, why should they stop examining that belief?
>How do you know that science is actually improving our understanding of the universe? Can you show that with science (without begging the question) or is that a metaphysical claim?
Yes I can. Every single time we EVER do an experiment and it does what the theory predicted it would that's the proof.
No, it's evidence (not proof) that science is self-consistent, not that it corresponds to any "understanding of the universe".
>No. In terms of logic the base assumptions would be axioms, not theories/hypotheses. What are the axioms of science?
Logic has axioms. Science does not. Science has a method with rules for investigation and explanation of the universe. nothing more, nothing less.
I suppose you could call the rules of the scientific method "axioms" but it's seriously stretching the word - they are rather the rules as adapted over countless challenges and mistakes.
So you must have something against which you can test methods, to determine which ones are more prone to mistakes, and to determine whether they are actually giving an "explanation of the universe".
>Sorry, but that's still a circular argument. Instead of using logic to prove logic, you are using logic to prove mathematics and mathematics to prove logic. Putting in an extra step (which I would dispute anyway) does not remove the circularity.
Nor does that make it false.
I know it doesn't make logic false (that would be an argument from fallacy fallacy), but it makes your claim that logic is proven and validated false.
We don't prove mathematics with logic anyway - we moved past that a long, long time ago (try reading up on the history of information theory) - in fact the very existence of computers (and computational theory) has it's origins in the search for empirical ways to test mathematics. That was what Lambda, Turing and Bool were working on and their work combined from the bases of all computers programs. We test mathematics through functional equivalence.
More-over mutual reinforcement is NOT circular reasoning, it is circular in process but it's not WRONG for that. Mutual reinforcement is the essence of all science.
Try proving mathematics without logic, and see how far you get. And even if you manage, try proving logic without using logic. It simply can't be done. The validity of logic is a necessa
>Yes it does. I'm not talking about the things that science hasn't explained yet, I'm talking about the unavoidable metaphysical assumptions science has to make, such as the assumption of an external reality to be observed (the rejection of solipsism).
Reject insanity is not assumption.
Having said that - here is the rejection of solipsism -I prefer: it doesn't MATTER. Let's assume it's true: all of reality is a delusion - either we're all the delusion of one "person" - or the delusion is absolutely consistent since we all report the same things. Our experiences vary but more accurate tests than that all converge on the same data.
What is the difference between a "true" reality, and an illusion so consistent and strong as to be absolutely impossible to distinguish from a true reality ?
Answer: there isn't one. You can build the entire edifice of modern scientific knowledge just as effectively on solipsism as on it being false. There's NO difference, it has no impact on anything - which makes it nothing but stupid speculation and raises the very important philosophical question that if the consequences of two ideas are absolutely and entirely impossible to differentiate - then are they really different things ?
Either there is an objective reality - or there is an lllusion of one so perfect as to make absolutely no difference. Either way science stands - and occam's razor can be CORRECTLY used to reject the second "either" as being needlessly complex.
Rejection of solipsism isn't the only metaphysical assumption that science makes. Does science lead towards any sort of objective truth? If you believe that it does then that's a metaphysical assumption -- you can't prove it with science. If you don't then any claims that science has disproved the existence of God are meaningless because science can't prove or disprove anything.
A real reality has far fewer dependent variables for exactly the same outcome. In the end - solipsism isn't so much rejected as ignored because the entire line of thinking is completely and utterly useless and right or wrong about it changes NOTHING about anything else. Ergo, who gives a shit ?
Solipsism isn't totally ignored, because it remains a useful check against the arrogance of thinking that we can definitely know the truth. We can ignore it and say that we have enough confidence that what we think is the truth is good enough for our everyday lives, but we can't say we know the truth.
>That claim is easily falsifiable. I take it you've never read Paul Tillich, a Lutheran minister who argued that talk of the existence of God was a category error, or Don Cupitt, an Anglican priest who has argued not only that God does not exist but that all means -- including deception -- should be used to prevent belief in God. There are strands of religion that discourage questioning (and they tend to be particularly vocal) but there are also strands that actively encourage it. On the other hand, quite a few scientists seem resistant to questioning of science's base assumptions (both Stephen Hawkins and Richard Dawkins in recent years).
I said religion - not specific people who claim to be religious - when their actions are decidedly NOT religious. An atheist priest is a contradiction in terms. You cannot believe AND not believe at the same time. Aristotles FIRST law of logic: the law of identity - a thing cannot be other than itself.
Now you are changing your claim -- and showing your ignorance of Paul Tillich (who was not an atheist) and the Church (which in supporting these people -- even if they are atheists -- is supporting questioning of their own beliefs).
In deductive logic a typical example would be written as
Premise one: A = B
Premise two: B = C
Premise three: A C
Is a false argument, A cannot be other than itself, so if A = B and B = C then A MUST equal C. Remember deductive logic gives required truthful consequence (if the premises are
That's the one I was going to suggest. Programming is about more than coding, and TMMM covers a lot of the stuff that a lot of programmers seem to lack.
MIX was intentionally problematic to avoid dependencies on platform assumptions that might not be portable -- a questionable tactic, but it was intentional. For the rest, it's a valuable reference (I've used it since college), but not really didactic.
With the cooperation of the social network providers -- some of whom already said that they were cooperating with the government during the riots. Yes, of course the instigators could move onto other networks, but it doesn't matter so much if hardly anybody is listening to them there.
>Incompatible? It certainly places it outside science, but when pushed even science has to accept things without proof. I
No, it doesn't - the closest you'll ever see is "we are still looking for proof of something that makes sense".
Yes it does. I'm not talking about the things that science hasn't explained yet, I'm talking about the unavoidable metaphysical assumptions science has to make, such as the assumption of an external reality to be observed (the rejection of solipsism).
>it has no (scientific) answer to the solipsist who insists that the material world is an illusion.
Actually, yes it does - several. You my friend are about 2000 years out of date on your science. The "material world is an illusion" argument has been held as a proven fallacy since the time of St. Augustine.
You are about 300 years out on your history and totally wrong on your philosophy. Solopsism is still an active position in philosophy; it hasn't yet been shown to be a fallacy. The closest to a disproof of solipsism you are going to find is arguments for why it isn't interesting which is not the same as it being false (amusingly, the arguments are usually based on a secular version of Pascal's wager).
> All attempts to eliminate metaphysics from science so far have failed dismally
[Citation needed] - and you won't find one that isn't biased. On the contrary - any mention of metaphysics will automatically get your theory rejected. If it can't be proven, tested and repeated it is NOT science. Nothing that relies on something like that is every considered science and scientists give NO real credence to any such hypotheses - unless they believe they have found a way to test them and make them BECOME science.
Only by scientists who have no idea about the underlying foundations of science. The last attempt to exclude metaphysics from science was logical positivism, which was thoroughly demolished over the course of the 20th century (notably by Karl Popper), and all of its advocates abandoned it -- not least because logical positivism was itself based on metaphysical claims. In his Logic of Scientific Discovery Popper argued that the distinction between objective and subjective was a social convention; there is no absolute boundary (that's not to say that there's no distinction, it's saying that the distinction is fuzzy). That's the same work that gave science falsifiability as a criterion, and all the detailed rules needed to make falsifiability work (which many of its proponents don't seem to know about) are based on that. If you have a foundation for science that avoids metaphysics then publish -- you'll become famous and make a fortune on the lecture circuit. But first be aware of past attempts and why they failed.
>And as I was arguing last week in a different thread, there are unresolved arguments in science over what counts as an observation, which leads to arguments over what is proven.
Yes, this only strengthens my argument about the weakness of human observation - the reason we develop technology that is better at it than us. As our technology improves further our ability to observe improves as well, and these arguments become smaller.
Again you're missing the point. All that is doing is transferring the problem. The issue isn't over how good our observations are, they're about what counts as an observation.
Religion on the other hand opposes criticism, it doesn't say "question even our base assumptions" - no priest has ever (publicily) questioned the existence of god
That claim is easily falsifiable. I take it you've never read Paul Tillich, a Lutheran minister who argued that talk of the existence of God was a category error, or Don Cupitt, an Anglican priest who has argued not only that God does not exist but that all means -- including deception -- should be used to prevent b
My main concern with shutting down any form of communication in a situation like a riot is that now anyone nearby not participating in the riots have a lot less information about what is happening where (I'm sure a service like twitter would be helpful in finding places where riots are happening and avoid them as much as possible). They will also find it harder to contact their loved ones to ensure them that they are OK or check that their loved ones are OK (I would imagine that if a riot is happening and you can't get through to someone, a lot of people will start panicking).
A point that David Cameron himself made, which is why he did not suggest shutting down twitter, he suggested cutting off access for the instigators of the trouble. Doesn't make for such a sensationalist headline, though, does it? (And no, I am not a Cameron supporter, I see his policies and those of his party as damaging and divisive. But there are plenty of real things to criticise him for, there's no need to invent stuff like this.)
That is why any kind of censorship has to be fought as if it was "North Korea was run by Hitler disguised as Big Brother" because that is what all those things has in common.
They're also run by people who breathe, so by your argument we should put a stop to breathing. Ever heard of affirming the consequent?
I was watching that debate as it was broadcast live. The PM made it clear that he was talking about stopping specific individual's access to social networking, not the whole population's access to it. He specifically stated that social networking was an important resource for the public to have access to during civil disobedience, because during the riots people were using it to avoid areas where there was. Whether it would be right to cut off an individual's access is an important debate, but the UK Pirate Party would much rather we thought he was talking about something more draconian.
>It doesn't fall flat. You say that religion rejects evidence. It doesn't. It doesn't reject empirical evidence either. It fully accepts empirical evidence and modifies its beliefs based on empirical evidence.
I didn't say it doesn't accept evidence, I said it ALSO accepts truths WITHOUT empirical evidence.
No, that's what I said. What you said was "Religion by default rejects belief based on evidence", which is false.
That's incompatible with science which demands evidence for ALL things. If you believe ONE thing without proof, or EVERYTHING without proof is completely unimportant - the results are exactly the same.
Incompatible? It certainly places it outside science, but when pushed even science has to accept things without proof. It has no (scientific) answer to the solipsist who insists that the material world is an illusion. All attempts to eliminate metaphysics from science so far have failed dismally. And as I was arguing last week in a different thread, there are unresolved arguments in science over what counts as an observation, which leads to arguments over what is proven.
>No. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of omnipotence that was dealt with in the early days of Christianity. As I have already explained, putting "God can" in front of a meaningless statement doesn't make it meaningful, and "Proof of God in a system that excludes proof of God" is meaningless.
But that's not what I did. I said God excluded proof of his existence - by choice, and declares it to be a choice, ergo he COULD have made a different choice and those of us who look at religion from the outside can judge the psychology of those who came up with it by the attributes they gave their god's persona. One of which is that they created a god who - right from the start when things like lightning was still held as proof of his actions already declared that he refuses to give proof. That's quite prescient, or perhaps it means our ancestors were a little more sceptical than we give them credit for.
>But it's completely accurate.
As I've said, it doesn't seem to be rejection of proof so much as rejection of coercion to belief. Not the same thing. In the Christian account God provided evidence (not the same as proof) -- John 20:27, for example. Yes, Jesus said that it was better for those who did not require such proof, but that seems to be a matter of trust. If you employ a PI to find out that your wife is not cheating it indicates a lack of trust and could sour the relationship when she finds out -- even if she's a scientist and is in favour of evidence-based decision making.
No it's not. A bee sees something completely different when it looks at that flower - because it sees a wider part of the spectrum, a dog sees less than we do... who sees the truth ? None of us. We all see what we want to see, or rather more correctly - what we NEED to see.
We see the same thing differently. We all see a flower.
>What, our innate ideas of logic are worthless if they're not infallible? The existence of fallacies doesn't show that we don't get it right most of the time. The failures are interesting, but we have to get logic right to form a view of the world that is sufficiently coherent to get by.
We have no innate logic. We have a pattern matching brain which laymen call logic (these days) because they don't KNOW what logic is. Unless you can recite aristotle's laws of logic - and more importantly construct an argument that obeys them you are not being logical AT ALL.
That seems a ridiculously narrow view of logic to me. I routinely use predicate calculus and shout at the TV when an advertisement affirms the consequent, but I can't recite Aristotle's laws of logic. And even those who have not studied formal logic (which I have, at university level -- they didn't bother including Aristotle's laws of
>[Citation needed]
Hebrews Chapter 11 verse 1 âoeNOW FAITH IS the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things NOT SEENâ.
Citation given.
Oh look -- it talks about evidence.
>No, religion by default accepts belief based on evidence (Psalm 34:8). It just has accepts as evidence more than science does, and the additional things that they accept as evidence in very rare cases leads them to different conclusions.
Now you're arguing semantics (stupidly). If I replace "evidence" with "empirical evidence" then you're entire argument falls flat.
It doesn't fall flat. You say that religion rejects evidence. It doesn't. It doesn't reject empirical evidence either. It fully accepts empirical evidence and modifies its beliefs based on empirical evidence.
This is an absolute. The people who believe in god, believe he is almighty, ergo if he so chooses he could so do.
No. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of omnipotence that was dealt with in the early days of Christianity. As I have already explained, putting "God can" in front of a meaningless statement doesn't make it meaningful, and "Proof of God in a system that excludes proof of God" is meaningless.
Which is fine if all you care about is surviving, if understanding, knowledge and perhaps even a bit of truth is your goal - then you must recognize it's massive deficiencies.
Recognising that there are massive deficiencies is not the same as saying that it's usually wrong. It's usually right, but it's well worth exploring those cases where it isn't.
Each of our eyes has a blind spot so big that we cannot see the moon if it's right in front of us - smack in the middle. We never see that blind spot because our brain just fills in what it thinks should be there from other clues (mostly memories from when our eyes last moved and the area in the blindspot was visible). What our senses are is data-collecting sensors - what we perceive as reality is that data mashed up with a massive amount of processing which is heavily tilted by past experiences and prejudice. It's remarkably INaccurate in fact. Frankly that's a good thing for survival. "There is a radiation with a wavelength of 400nm coming from there, adjacently up to there, and upwards up to there and and and and and is useful for cognition... "there's a blue flower over there" is useful, so we SEE a blue flower, but that is NOT what our eyes detected.
But it's completely accurate.
This time you're completely wrong. Logic is NOT some innate process and most people have almost NO skill at all at it. Logic is the foundation of maths and has strict rules. If our innate ideas of logic were worth anything at all then fallacies would not exist as they would never be convincing at all.
What, our innate ideas of logic are worthless if they're not infallible? The existence of fallacies doesn't show that we don't get it right most of the time. The failures are interesting, but we have to get logic right to form a view of the world that is sufficiently coherent to get by.
Human history - all of it. Oh and just about EVERY idea about the universe that was ever advanced prior to science coming into maturity in the last 2 centuries.
If "anything not based on lots of evidence and testing is almost always false" we wouldn't have made it through human history.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I was wondering about that. On the usual definition of "species" they can't have interbred with a different species. Different subspecies yes, but species, no.
The big appeal of G+ is that I don't get constantly spammed about games. Lots of G+ games and it loses it's USP.
Plenty of people might want to attack flights from Canada to the USA, Europe, Israel, etc.
Actually, litigation would be easier, especially if the Groper were photo graphed during the event
Because airports do like to encourage photography in the security check area...
I think the fact that 59% of people thought it was human says a lot more about the intelligence of the average human than it says about the bot...
From the RA: "Cleverbot is available for conversation online, but don’t be fooled. Although Cleverbot managed to score well on the Turing test, the model that did that is different from the one you’ll find online."
We were discussing you, not me.
Oh, the government can do lots of wrong. But folks keep electing them...
Again, I really wish you'd direct your ire to the ones who deserve it, the ones who put those
in power there
.
FTFY.
If he likes doing it, sure, why not. But why is it on /.? How is it news for geeks? There's nothing technically interesting about what he's done. Should we have articles about everybody's hobbies? I don't see how this would have even made idle.
>But you don't know that it's doing so correctly unless you have something to check it against. Otherwise it's just an article of faith.
We do have something to check against: experimental result.
That's circular again. Experimental results are a part of science, so all they are checking is consistency, not correctness.
That's our reality-check system. Your argument is that thinking experimental result proves IS a reality check is unproven, frankly that argument is impossible to settle. Either you conclude that experimental consistency means there's a consistent, objective universe that can be understood (at least partially) or you do not.
Agreed. That's a metaphysical assumption that you have to make to do science. The consistency that you then get supports the view that it was a credible assumption, but not that it was a correct assumption -- other metaphysical assumptions might also lead to consistency.
There's no OTHER way to check, so if you reject the only check we have as "an article of faith" then you have an argument that can't be won.
I don't reject it as an article of faith. I accept it as an article of faith.
A statement which cannot be tested.
It's a statement that can't be tested whether you accept or reject it. That's why it's an article of faith.
There's no rational way to argue with an irrational believe. And you can just about define "irrational believe" as "belief not based on evidence".
But that still leaves the problem of what counts as evidence...
Since science recognises only one possible scientific way to check for a reality, if you don't accept that check - we'll never get anywhere.
FTFY
I think the check has made it's point. All our technology built on what we learned by trusting it has been purely beneficial.
Well, some might question whether nuclear, chemical and biological weapons have been purely beneficial. Anyway, very few of the religious doubt that science is good at what it does, they just dispute that it's the only game in town. As Socrates observed (anticipating Hume by a couple of millennia) science can't tell us how we should live our lives but it can help us to implement what we've decided.
But you don't know that it's doing so correctly unless you have something to check it against. Otherwise it's just an article of faith.
We test scientific rules against their goal : do they protect us from thinking wrong things that are very tempting.
So you need an independent way of identifying "wrong things". Otherwise you could just identify "wrong things" as "disagreeing with the authorities" and you wouldn't need science.
Religion demands unquestioing faith and even admonishes that this is impossible then warns to battle and dispel doubt.
It depends on how you define religion. If that is your definition of religion then of course it's tautologically true but then it says nothing about God (but it might say something about politics and even about those scientists who demand an unquestioning trust in the scientific method -- "scientism"). If your definition of religion is more about belief in a God or gods then some religion demands unquestioning faith and some religion encourages questioning.
That some religious people question their faith in public changes nothing.
Well, it means that being religious does not exclude questioning one's faith in public.
Solipsism, post modernism etc are really jus boring to me. Even if true it provides no useful new theories or lines of inquiry and there's no way to satisfy curiosity on a question we can't answer.
You do realise that Karl Popper was a postmodernist, and the introduction of the notion of falsifiability into science was a result of postmodern philosophy, don't you? I'd call that a useful line of enquiry.
Everything you say about brains depends on them being deterministic. This is not proven and the assertion depends on rejecting the widely reporte observations off free wil. This is I think still contentious.
It certainly is, and one of the most interesting areas of overlap between science and philosophy. Even if the brain is not deterministic it's a puzzle where the will can come from. If the brain is purely material then there doesn't seem to be any way for the will to arise. If there's a "ghost in the machine" then there doesn't seem to be any way for it to interact, so the best scientific theories at the moment seem to be that free will is an illusion. But if that's an illusion, what does that say about the remainder of the model of the universe that we have built?
Science. Rules are based on experience and subject to change. Indeed they have changes over time.
But what are you testing them against? If you are testing them against science then all you are testing for is internal consistency because they are science. The religious can have an internally consistent world view too (they don't always, but they can).
I believe consistency of experiments prove a consistent reality you do not.
No, I believe that consistency of experiments proves (or at least gives sufficiently strong evidence of) a consistent reality too. But that's a metaphysical belief. That's why science can't afford to instantly reject claims because they're metaphysical. It depends on metaphysical claims too.
> Does science lead towards any sort of objective truth?
No, and it doesn't, and never has, claimed to. Science promises only greater understanding.
Understanding of what?
Human brains are simple relative to the universe. Science makes things understandable by creating simple models of how things work.
Is there an objective "how things work" that science works towards, then? Or are they just simplified models of nothing?
but it never approaches the complexity of the reality, that's essentially what science never claims. Science has never promised anybody truth.
So the claim that there is no God is not an attempt at a truth claim, then? Remember, I am not arguing for belief against atheism, I am arguing for agnosticism against atheism and belief.
Yes, premise 2. People who claim to believe in God and then question that same belief are lying, there's no way around that.
But people who claim to believe in quantum mechanics and then question that same belief are not necessarily lying? How come? I know lots of religious people, and all of them question their belief, to greater or lesser degrees.
At best they may be called agnostic - at least agnostics are honest enough to admit they haven't decided though.
If they believe in God, whey should they be called agnostic? And if they believe in God, why should they stop examining that belief?
>How do you know that science is actually improving our understanding of the universe? Can you show that with science (without begging the question) or is that a metaphysical claim?
Yes I can. Every single time we EVER do an experiment and it does what the theory predicted it would that's the proof.
No, it's evidence (not proof) that science is self-consistent, not that it corresponds to any "understanding of the universe".
>No. In terms of logic the base assumptions would be axioms, not theories/hypotheses. What are the axioms of science?
Logic has axioms. Science does not. Science has a method with rules for investigation and explanation of the universe. nothing more, nothing less. I suppose you could call the rules of the scientific method "axioms" but it's seriously stretching the word - they are rather the rules as adapted over countless challenges and mistakes.
So you must have something against which you can test methods, to determine which ones are more prone to mistakes, and to determine whether they are actually giving an "explanation of the universe".
>Sorry, but that's still a circular argument. Instead of using logic to prove logic, you are using logic to prove mathematics and mathematics to prove logic. Putting in an extra step (which I would dispute anyway) does not remove the circularity.
Nor does that make it false.
I know it doesn't make logic false (that would be an argument from fallacy fallacy), but it makes your claim that logic is proven and validated false.
We don't prove mathematics with logic anyway - we moved past that a long, long time ago (try reading up on the history of information theory) - in fact the very existence of computers (and computational theory) has it's origins in the search for empirical ways to test mathematics. That was what Lambda, Turing and Bool were working on and their work combined from the bases of all computers programs. We test mathematics through functional equivalence. More-over mutual reinforcement is NOT circular reasoning, it is circular in process but it's not WRONG for that. Mutual reinforcement is the essence of all science.
Try proving mathematics without logic, and see how far you get. And even if you manage, try proving logic without using logic. It simply can't be done. The validity of logic is a necessa
>Yes it does. I'm not talking about the things that science hasn't explained yet, I'm talking about the unavoidable metaphysical assumptions science has to make, such as the assumption of an external reality to be observed (the rejection of solipsism).
Reject insanity is not assumption. Having said that - here is the rejection of solipsism -I prefer: it doesn't MATTER. Let's assume it's true: all of reality is a delusion - either we're all the delusion of one "person" - or the delusion is absolutely consistent since we all report the same things. Our experiences vary but more accurate tests than that all converge on the same data. What is the difference between a "true" reality, and an illusion so consistent and strong as to be absolutely impossible to distinguish from a true reality ? Answer: there isn't one. You can build the entire edifice of modern scientific knowledge just as effectively on solipsism as on it being false. There's NO difference, it has no impact on anything - which makes it nothing but stupid speculation and raises the very important philosophical question that if the consequences of two ideas are absolutely and entirely impossible to differentiate - then are they really different things ? Either there is an objective reality - or there is an lllusion of one so perfect as to make absolutely no difference. Either way science stands - and occam's razor can be CORRECTLY used to reject the second "either" as being needlessly complex.
Rejection of solipsism isn't the only metaphysical assumption that science makes. Does science lead towards any sort of objective truth? If you believe that it does then that's a metaphysical assumption -- you can't prove it with science. If you don't then any claims that science has disproved the existence of God are meaningless because science can't prove or disprove anything.
A real reality has far fewer dependent variables for exactly the same outcome. In the end - solipsism isn't so much rejected as ignored because the entire line of thinking is completely and utterly useless and right or wrong about it changes NOTHING about anything else. Ergo, who gives a shit ?
Solipsism isn't totally ignored, because it remains a useful check against the arrogance of thinking that we can definitely know the truth. We can ignore it and say that we have enough confidence that what we think is the truth is good enough for our everyday lives, but we can't say we know the truth.
>That claim is easily falsifiable. I take it you've never read Paul Tillich, a Lutheran minister who argued that talk of the existence of God was a category error, or Don Cupitt, an Anglican priest who has argued not only that God does not exist but that all means -- including deception -- should be used to prevent belief in God. There are strands of religion that discourage questioning (and they tend to be particularly vocal) but there are also strands that actively encourage it. On the other hand, quite a few scientists seem resistant to questioning of science's base assumptions (both Stephen Hawkins and Richard Dawkins in recent years).
I said religion - not specific people who claim to be religious - when their actions are decidedly NOT religious. An atheist priest is a contradiction in terms. You cannot believe AND not believe at the same time. Aristotles FIRST law of logic: the law of identity - a thing cannot be other than itself.
Now you are changing your claim -- and showing your ignorance of Paul Tillich (who was not an atheist) and the Church (which in supporting these people -- even if they are atheists -- is supporting questioning of their own beliefs).
In deductive logic a typical example would be written as Premise one: A = B Premise two: B = C Premise three: A C Is a false argument, A cannot be other than itself, so if A = B and B = C then A MUST equal C. Remember deductive logic gives required truthful consequence (if the premises are
That's the one I was going to suggest. Programming is about more than coding, and TMMM covers a lot of the stuff that a lot of programmers seem to lack.
MIX was intentionally problematic to avoid dependencies on platform assumptions that might not be portable -- a questionable tactic, but it was intentional. For the rest, it's a valuable reference (I've used it since college), but not really didactic.
With the cooperation of the social network providers -- some of whom already said that they were cooperating with the government during the riots. Yes, of course the instigators could move onto other networks, but it doesn't matter so much if hardly anybody is listening to them there.
>Incompatible? It certainly places it outside science, but when pushed even science has to accept things without proof. I
No, it doesn't - the closest you'll ever see is "we are still looking for proof of something that makes sense".
Yes it does. I'm not talking about the things that science hasn't explained yet, I'm talking about the unavoidable metaphysical assumptions science has to make, such as the assumption of an external reality to be observed (the rejection of solipsism).
>it has no (scientific) answer to the solipsist who insists that the material world is an illusion.
Actually, yes it does - several. You my friend are about 2000 years out of date on your science. The "material world is an illusion" argument has been held as a proven fallacy since the time of St. Augustine.
You are about 300 years out on your history and totally wrong on your philosophy. Solopsism is still an active position in philosophy; it hasn't yet been shown to be a fallacy. The closest to a disproof of solipsism you are going to find is arguments for why it isn't interesting which is not the same as it being false (amusingly, the arguments are usually based on a secular version of Pascal's wager).
> All attempts to eliminate metaphysics from science so far have failed dismally [Citation needed] - and you won't find one that isn't biased. On the contrary - any mention of metaphysics will automatically get your theory rejected. If it can't be proven, tested and repeated it is NOT science. Nothing that relies on something like that is every considered science and scientists give NO real credence to any such hypotheses - unless they believe they have found a way to test them and make them BECOME science.
Only by scientists who have no idea about the underlying foundations of science. The last attempt to exclude metaphysics from science was logical positivism, which was thoroughly demolished over the course of the 20th century (notably by Karl Popper), and all of its advocates abandoned it -- not least because logical positivism was itself based on metaphysical claims. In his Logic of Scientific Discovery Popper argued that the distinction between objective and subjective was a social convention; there is no absolute boundary (that's not to say that there's no distinction, it's saying that the distinction is fuzzy). That's the same work that gave science falsifiability as a criterion, and all the detailed rules needed to make falsifiability work (which many of its proponents don't seem to know about) are based on that. If you have a foundation for science that avoids metaphysics then publish -- you'll become famous and make a fortune on the lecture circuit. But first be aware of past attempts and why they failed.
>And as I was arguing last week in a different thread, there are unresolved arguments in science over what counts as an observation, which leads to arguments over what is proven.
Yes, this only strengthens my argument about the weakness of human observation - the reason we develop technology that is better at it than us. As our technology improves further our ability to observe improves as well, and these arguments become smaller.
Again you're missing the point. All that is doing is transferring the problem. The issue isn't over how good our observations are, they're about what counts as an observation.
Religion on the other hand opposes criticism, it doesn't say "question even our base assumptions" - no priest has ever (publicily) questioned the existence of god
That claim is easily falsifiable. I take it you've never read Paul Tillich, a Lutheran minister who argued that talk of the existence of God was a category error, or Don Cupitt, an Anglican priest who has argued not only that God does not exist but that all means -- including deception -- should be used to prevent b
My main concern with shutting down any form of communication in a situation like a riot is that now anyone nearby not participating in the riots have a lot less information about what is happening where (I'm sure a service like twitter would be helpful in finding places where riots are happening and avoid them as much as possible). They will also find it harder to contact their loved ones to ensure them that they are OK or check that their loved ones are OK (I would imagine that if a riot is happening and you can't get through to someone, a lot of people will start panicking).
A point that David Cameron himself made, which is why he did not suggest shutting down twitter, he suggested cutting off access for the instigators of the trouble. Doesn't make for such a sensationalist headline, though, does it? (And no, I am not a Cameron supporter, I see his policies and those of his party as damaging and divisive. But there are plenty of real things to criticise him for, there's no need to invent stuff like this.)
That is why any kind of censorship has to be fought as if it was "North Korea was run by Hitler disguised as Big Brother" because that is what all those things has in common.
They're also run by people who breathe, so by your argument we should put a stop to breathing. Ever heard of affirming the consequent?
I was watching that debate as it was broadcast live. The PM made it clear that he was talking about stopping specific individual's access to social networking, not the whole population's access to it. He specifically stated that social networking was an important resource for the public to have access to during civil disobedience, because during the riots people were using it to avoid areas where there was. Whether it would be right to cut off an individual's access is an important debate, but the UK Pirate Party would much rather we thought he was talking about something more draconian.
I was going to suggest Mandarin. Why do you think it's not needed? My experience in China is that you won't get far without it, even in the cities.
>It doesn't fall flat. You say that religion rejects evidence. It doesn't. It doesn't reject empirical evidence either. It fully accepts empirical evidence and modifies its beliefs based on empirical evidence.
I didn't say it doesn't accept evidence, I said it ALSO accepts truths WITHOUT empirical evidence.
No, that's what I said. What you said was "Religion by default rejects belief based on evidence", which is false.
That's incompatible with science which demands evidence for ALL things. If you believe ONE thing without proof, or EVERYTHING without proof is completely unimportant - the results are exactly the same.
Incompatible? It certainly places it outside science, but when pushed even science has to accept things without proof. It has no (scientific) answer to the solipsist who insists that the material world is an illusion. All attempts to eliminate metaphysics from science so far have failed dismally. And as I was arguing last week in a different thread, there are unresolved arguments in science over what counts as an observation, which leads to arguments over what is proven.
>No. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of omnipotence that was dealt with in the early days of Christianity. As I have already explained, putting "God can" in front of a meaningless statement doesn't make it meaningful, and "Proof of God in a system that excludes proof of God" is meaningless.
But that's not what I did. I said God excluded proof of his existence - by choice, and declares it to be a choice, ergo he COULD have made a different choice and those of us who look at religion from the outside can judge the psychology of those who came up with it by the attributes they gave their god's persona. One of which is that they created a god who - right from the start when things like lightning was still held as proof of his actions already declared that he refuses to give proof. That's quite prescient, or perhaps it means our ancestors were a little more sceptical than we give them credit for.
>But it's completely accurate.
As I've said, it doesn't seem to be rejection of proof so much as rejection of coercion to belief. Not the same thing. In the Christian account God provided evidence (not the same as proof) -- John 20:27, for example. Yes, Jesus said that it was better for those who did not require such proof, but that seems to be a matter of trust. If you employ a PI to find out that your wife is not cheating it indicates a lack of trust and could sour the relationship when she finds out -- even if she's a scientist and is in favour of evidence-based decision making.
No it's not. A bee sees something completely different when it looks at that flower - because it sees a wider part of the spectrum, a dog sees less than we do... who sees the truth ? None of us. We all see what we want to see, or rather more correctly - what we NEED to see.
We see the same thing differently. We all see a flower.
>What, our innate ideas of logic are worthless if they're not infallible? The existence of fallacies doesn't show that we don't get it right most of the time. The failures are interesting, but we have to get logic right to form a view of the world that is sufficiently coherent to get by.
We have no innate logic. We have a pattern matching brain which laymen call logic (these days) because they don't KNOW what logic is. Unless you can recite aristotle's laws of logic - and more importantly construct an argument that obeys them you are not being logical AT ALL.
That seems a ridiculously narrow view of logic to me. I routinely use predicate calculus and shout at the TV when an advertisement affirms the consequent, but I can't recite Aristotle's laws of logic. And even those who have not studied formal logic (which I have, at university level -- they didn't bother including Aristotle's laws of
>[Citation needed] Hebrews Chapter 11 verse 1 âoeNOW FAITH IS the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things NOT SEENâ.
Citation given.
Oh look -- it talks about evidence.
>No, religion by default accepts belief based on evidence (Psalm 34:8). It just has accepts as evidence more than science does, and the additional things that they accept as evidence in very rare cases leads them to different conclusions.
Now you're arguing semantics (stupidly). If I replace "evidence" with "empirical evidence" then you're entire argument falls flat.
It doesn't fall flat. You say that religion rejects evidence. It doesn't. It doesn't reject empirical evidence either. It fully accepts empirical evidence and modifies its beliefs based on empirical evidence.
This is an absolute. The people who believe in god, believe he is almighty, ergo if he so chooses he could so do.
No. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of omnipotence that was dealt with in the early days of Christianity. As I have already explained, putting "God can" in front of a meaningless statement doesn't make it meaningful, and "Proof of God in a system that excludes proof of God" is meaningless.
Which is fine if all you care about is surviving, if understanding, knowledge and perhaps even a bit of truth is your goal - then you must recognize it's massive deficiencies.
Recognising that there are massive deficiencies is not the same as saying that it's usually wrong. It's usually right, but it's well worth exploring those cases where it isn't.
Each of our eyes has a blind spot so big that we cannot see the moon if it's right in front of us - smack in the middle. We never see that blind spot because our brain just fills in what it thinks should be there from other clues (mostly memories from when our eyes last moved and the area in the blindspot was visible). What our senses are is data-collecting sensors - what we perceive as reality is that data mashed up with a massive amount of processing which is heavily tilted by past experiences and prejudice. It's remarkably INaccurate in fact. Frankly that's a good thing for survival. "There is a radiation with a wavelength of 400nm coming from there, adjacently up to there, and upwards up to there and and and and and is useful for cognition... "there's a blue flower over there" is useful, so we SEE a blue flower, but that is NOT what our eyes detected.
But it's completely accurate.
This time you're completely wrong. Logic is NOT some innate process and most people have almost NO skill at all at it. Logic is the foundation of maths and has strict rules. If our innate ideas of logic were worth anything at all then fallacies would not exist as they would never be convincing at all.
What, our innate ideas of logic are worthless if they're not infallible? The existence of fallacies doesn't show that we don't get it right most of the time. The failures are interesting, but we have to get logic right to form a view of the world that is sufficiently coherent to get by.
Human history - all of it. Oh and just about EVERY idea about the universe that was ever advanced prior to science coming into maturity in the last 2 centuries.
If "anything not based on lots of evidence and testing is almost always false" we wouldn't have made it through human history.