I did not misread or misquote. He called what the article writer does "astrology" - saying that to an astronomer is just about the worst insult you can give a scientist.
Comparing astrology to astronomy is truly ignorant and stupid. Astrology is NOT a science and it's methodology bears absolutely no resemblance to science whatsoever - certainly not to climate science (his exact words) and definitely not to astronomy (the science that IS being compared with climate science in the article).
Science has rules, it has checks and balances to protect us against human fallibility, astrology prays on the very fallibilities that science is designed to protect us against.
>Yes, the "method" of science is similar in the disciplines of astrology and climate science
And the fact that you think astrology is a science shows us exactly how little your opinion is worth. Do not confuse astrology with astronomy, only one of those is a science.
>It: People is ignorant? It's suppossed to be are. Aparently you 'is' ignorant....I'm pretty sure I gave it that line when I checked it out about two years ago...
>What the FREAKING heck gives you the idea that things can simply be nationalized in the US?! That wouldn't be constitutional in any way as an over-riding policy. WTF?!
Two words: eminent domain. Sorry, your constitution allows it's existence which makes pretty much anything else it says about private property nothing but sugarcoating.
Mind you, with your bias so obviously displayed in your username... why am I bothering to even reply to you ? You're obviously not going to try and have a reasonable debate because you'll never, ever consider the possibility that apple could be wrong about something.
Sorry - but if I pay for something, I demand the right to modify it as I see fit. I paid for my phone, and I'm very happy that I could modify it by putting cyanogenmod on it which is much nicer than sense. Tell me... where can I find a (legal, supported and approved of by the original company) custom mod of IOS for an iphone ?
>Yeah, that's an overly broad software patent if I ever saw one
"overly broad software patent" is a tautology, being a software patent makes it overly broad by definition. If it covers software that IS overly broad.
Your example is a case where there is so much inconsistency in reports that it's absolutely impossible to ever really figure out what happened ? Hell for all we know the BD's were telling the truth - I don't trust cultist religions (or any other religions) but I don't trust the FBI either.
Oh... and really your analogy is pretty damn flawed anyway. The BD's got in a shootout with the cops. By your analogy that makes Apple the federal government ? Nah, think of it more as a gangwar, and google is the dude who just happens to live in the neighbourhood and finally got sick of the crossfire hitting his kids.
I was rather more thinking of somebody in a bad neighbourhood who has been shot at and mugged repeatedly, eventually he buys a gun. Now an armed assailant breaks in through his back door yet again - and he shoots at him. Happens to kill him. There's barely a cop in the world who will even bother arrest the guy, because there's no honest judge in the world who would EVER convict you in such a clear-cut case of self defense.
Have you READ the apple patents in question ? If implementing similiar tech in some android platforms is "stealing their property" then I'm robbing your house if I happen to paint mine the same color... and this while your house is white !
Oh lawdylawd ! Your house has doors! So does mine ! I must have stolen your whole brain !
Fucking idiot...
Btw. Ideas are not, nor should they be refered to as "property" and there is absolutely no basis in law for calling them that despite the fact that many lawyers do so - they do it to encourage people to think in a way that is utterly unsubstantiated exactly BECAUSE it's neither true nor sensible to MAKE true.
>"Your honor, my client never shot anyone before he bought that gun."
More like: "Your honor my client hates guns, has publicly spoken out against them and never owned one. When he was repeatedly shot at over the last few months, he finally bought one and started shooting back".
I am not sure I'm in favor of google getting the Motorolla patents - or any patents - but you should at least get your facts straight. Frankly in your OWN analogy - google is clearly a self-defense case.
Any quote is an appeal to authority. By itself that's a fallacy. It can only strengthen an already strong argument. It cannot make a bad one better. Despite Crichton 's legendary research efforts. ( the Jurassic park premise was only proven flawed several years later) I wouldn't call him an authority on conservation anyway. I just liked the way he worded an idea I agree with.
Wanting, indeed striving to survive is the prerogative of every life form. That does include us and I believe space exploration is our one chance to really Jp our odds (Cohen would agree). Success is Not guaranteed bit we ought to try.
That said I don't agree with your less than other creatures idea. I also don't think we're more. In fact I take exception to us being called homo sapience
Wisdom is our rarest attribute so that's out and there is no genus homo. We (and other extinct homo variants) differ only marginally more from pan troglodytes or pan pinuscus than they do differ from one another. We are the third living chimpanzee. And clearly got our sex drives from the same ancestors as bonobos did! I'd call us pan curiosita if I'm feeling generous. The chimp that asks questions. But pan destructus would sadly fit even better
Your sig would be so much more convincing if you could spell superior right... or were you being ironic? If so I would suggest making it just a little more obvious, I would suggest "souperior".
>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.
And that's our only disagreement. I see nothing metaphysical in doing experiments with the PHYSICAL world to verify abstract hypotheses. Experiments are part of science but it's not circular as you suggest. The very REASON it's part of science is to force science to remain physical. The reality would be the same with or without science, the experiment would have the same results with or without the scientific edifice. Experiments are mandated BY science for exactly that reason. It doesn't prove science consistent - it tests science against reality. A completely abstracted field can be entirely consistent (mathematics) - but science is NOT abstract or metaphysical exactly because it forces itself to check it's results against physical reality - that process is called experimentation. Calling it "part of science" is accurate in general - but it doesn't make it part of the consistency there-off, it's the ENFORCEMENT of REALITY there-in. A different concept altogether. Experiments aren't MEANT to check consistency but to check ACCURACY. In fact it's an important point that science is often NOT consistent. We occasionally have theories that match observed reality in a given scenario perfectly - but contradict one another. Ultimately we strive to reconcile them in a new and improved theory (this is the current state of physics where quantum physics and relativity have several major contradictions but each in their area is showing immense success). But this happens exactly because science doesn't offer truth - only a greater understanding of the universe. A theory is just a mental model to understand the universe with. Experiments is way to make sure the model really DOES fit the universe we try to understand. This is why both quantum physics and relativity remain useful even though we have glaring evidence that one of both is making some major mistakes. Fixing those mistakes are important, but they don't invalidate the usefulness of the theories in the meantime for that segment of reality they DO accurately model. Your argument breaks down exactly because science is NOT consistent. In fact Einstein once said the most remarkable thing about the universe is that it makes any sense at all - that we can understand it at all. There is no compulsion on reality to be understandable, sensible or even logical (let alone consistent) - yet it is, and that is remarkable. Taking advantage of that fact is what science is FOR. In fact, you may recall this discussion began due to our discovery of an observation that is highly inconsistent with not only current theory but also all previous observations- the inconsistency is what lets us find NEW knowledge. It's unlikely... but what if in trying to solve this conundrum -we find the explanation for the inconsistency of quantum and relativistic physics ? For all we know - the key to the Grand Unified Theory is figuring out why this star is so odd...
>I don't reject it as an article of faith. I accept it as an article of faith.
I do reject it as an article of faith. I accept it as a matter of fact. What we disagree on is just that. For you it's a matter of faith. I consider it long proven to be a matter of fact. I say the checks we use have proven it enough, you say they don't prove it (to your satisfaction) hence you deem it a matter of faith.
>It's a statement that can't be tested whether you accept or reject it. That's why it's an article of faith.
Not quite what I meant. I believe we HAVE tested as a matter of fact that there is an objective reality that can be understood. You reject the test and declare the existence of that reality a matter of faith. What I meant is - there is no OTHER way to test if that reality exists. If you accept the test that science has as valid, then it's
>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 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. 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. A statement which cannot be tested. 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".
Since there's only one possible way to check for a reality, and you don't accept that check - we'll never get anywhere. I think the check has made it's point. All our technology built on what we learned by trusting it has been purely beneficial.
In the end, you may call it trite but the bible says Jesus healed less than 10 sick people, and saved 3 lives (if you include his own). Louis Pasteur's germ theory of disease and his pastuerization process combined saves about a billion lives every single day (if you add in every person who doesn't get an infection today because of something based on either of those).
I've re-read your post, and want to add two things. I quoted Chrichton (who - btw was is actually a real scientist - notably a biologist (more notably a medical doctor) and was one for a long time before he started writing) as a more jocular and less serious way to make my point. I never suggested that particular line should be taken as factual.
Secondly -you and I are saying the exact same thing - and arguing about the semantic detail. You are much more accurate and complex in your wording but your conclusion and mine are identical.
Okay, I am not going to argue with somebody trained in the field. My point was much simpler and actually greatly overlaps with yours - particularly this bit:
"and we poison the water, air and soil with thousands of chemicals and chemical cocktails (an issue which is now so bad it's affecting us"
- Exactly. The impacts we're having will ultimately cause our own (possible) extinction.
Now it's quite true that our many varied impacts are more complex than (most) extinction events - but you COULD see it as one event "evolution of modern man" , I won't argue about whether that's a valid way to look at it- you're better trained for such analysis than me and I defer to your knowledge. What stands is that we are harming the living organisms on the planet severely - and that harms us. You gave lots of interesting links and data but nothing disproved my core point.
At the same time many top scientists in your own field, including Jack Cohen, agrees with my view (in fact my post directly quoted some of his works a few times - though it was single lines and an idea which is why I didn't credit him in particular, especially since I grossly oversimplified it). The Boston Foreskin Collector is an expert in this particular field of biology and he strongly believes our combined impacts are smaller than any extinction event by many orders of magnitude.
Ironically - what you're saying is while very true, not very relevent. Worst case scenario - humanity does something so stupid we wipe out every vertebrate on the planet. We take out 95% of the bacteria and all the insects while we're at it, oh and let's take out all the fish as well (which we're pretty close to doing anyway).
Life isn't gone. Virusses still exist (though I am aware that many biologists don't consider them a lifeform there is definite dissent in the field about that - personally I side with those that consider them one and prefer more inclusive definitions of "alive" than 'DNA molecule' - a more successful one than we are actually) , we won't get ALL the bacteria - the extremophiles will survive, a few others too. In fact all the corpses we leave lying around will probably be very fertile breeding ground for the few that survive and they will absolutely prosper.
The simple reality is, if even one single organism survive - even if it's a single celled organism... life will go on, in ten million years teh planet will be crawling with new multicellular creatures. They may take a completely different route, they may never evolve dipoblasts and tripoblasts - or a very similar one.
But humanity cannot wipe out life. Hell even if we COULD somehow wipe out every single lifeform on the planet... I wager life would start again. Now this is a less proven point - I side with the scientists who believe life to be extremely resilient and able to spring up anywhere and everywhere that it's remotely possible - and nothing we do short of actually blowing the planet to smithereens will make it completely impossible for anything to EVER live on again.
Life will go on - but we won't be here, we won't be part of it. We may take out everything in nature that think is "normal" but we won't be the end of life. All our most powerful technology, even all our nuclear bombs at once won't do as much harm as a single comet - and life survived them. All we do, in all our areas are horrible - and we risk being an extinction event as a species, taking ourselves and every other lifeform we know out. But I am quite convinced new life will come - will find a way.
This is NOT consolation, it's not an argument against conservation - on the contrary, if we value the existence of our species then we must increase our effort to conserve. We must live in greater harmony with other species. We must reduce pollution and eradicate things like DDT (btw. kudo's for noting where I live, and being aware of the issue - I am firmly opposed to DDT for malaria fighting, not least because it's utterly ineffective, all you get is resistent mosquitos that
We test scientific rules against their goal : do they protect us from thinking wrong things that are very tempting. Such as "what people who can kill us want us to believe ". That's what it's for. To protect us from ourselves and others. If its doing that it's working. You can't just think what makes you feel good when you must do reality checks.
This is no fun anymore if you're going to be all reasonable.:p
Here's a Shorter reply : Religion demands unquestioing faith and even admonishes that this is impossible then warns to battle and dispel doubt. That some religious people question their faith in public changes nothing.
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.
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.
Science. Rules are based on experience and subject to change. Indeed they have changes over time.
I believe consistency of experiments prove a consistent reality you do not.
Law of the excluded middle applies to deductive logic only. Deductive logic only applies to the abstract. Maths is deductive science is inductive.
We'll never convince each other here. But ill grant that your arguments are interesting.
> Does science lead towards any sort of objective truth?
No, and it doesn't, and never has, claimed to. Science promises only greater understanding. Objective truth is only promised by religions and charlatans (often the same person) who aren't burdened by having to be consistent or open to new ideas. Science is under no obligation to prove a claim it doesn't make.
>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.
And we have no need for solipsism to do so. Science already rejects absolute truth on much simpler grounds. Human brains are simple relative to the universe. Science makes things understandable by creating simple models of how things work. These models can get progressively more complex and so our understanding grows but they are not truth and never claimed to be. Thermodynamics is a very useful model but it's decidedly NOT truth. Gravity is a great model, but it isn't truth either. The more complex we make the model, the deeper our understanding goes - and the fewer people can understand it - but it never approaches the complexity of the reality, that's essentially what science never claims. Science has never promised anybody truth. Unlike all the people and concepts that promise truth - science is honest enough to admit that truth is beyond human comprehension and almost certainly will always be.
We only come close to claiming objective truth in matters so highly abstract that their existence and all their properties can be entirely quantified. Mathemeticians can discover objective and absolute truths. Scientists aren't dealing with something a simple as mathematics.
>The actual structure of the argument is: >Premise 1: No A is B (your claim) >Premise 2: There exists at least one A that is B (observation) >This leads to a contradiction, so one of the premises must be false.
Yes, premise 2. People who claim to believe in God and then question that same belief are lying, there's no way around that. At best they may be called agnostic - at least agnostics are honest enough to admit they haven't decided though.
>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. 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. They are the precautions we've learned from bitter experience to apply to our thinking to protect ourselves against three terrible sources of falsehood: 1) Believing what we want to believe 2) Believing what has always been believed 3) Believing what those in power wants us to believe. This is why science has forever been at war with religion and governments - because science assaults their very foundations - both depend on people taking their ideas from those three sources and science is absolutely designed to not be subject to any of them.
>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. We don't prove mathematics with logic anyway - we moved past that a long, long t
>In your first two paragraphs you argue that man has not had a massive effect on this planet's ecosystem compared to any other species, because natural events have caused mass extinction in the past.
I argued about man's effect on other species over the sum of the lifetime of the planet. I didn't argue that we have no impact, I pointed out how another lifeform caused one of the biggest extinction events in history by changing the structure of the atmosphere - any doubt that a lifeform can do so is settled right there (as one example).
As I indicated some (not all) mass extinctions are caused by terestrial events, some by life-forms. We are at a very real risk of being one of those life-forms that cause a mass extinction event, and unlike the plants we have very little chance of surviving it ourselves if we do. A global nuclear war would be a mass extinction event, it would also take humanity out right along with it. See my point ?
>I know my front door can easily be breached by a determined attacker, yet I put a lock on it
Of course, the world is full of towns and cities where people do NOT put locks on, or bother to shut the locks that came with the door. A lock can reduce casual theft, reducing the casual thieves work better.
This is no less true of cybersecurity. As long as most cybercriminals get away with it most of the time - we won't see a reduction in exploits.
> like shag carpet which is a thick loose pile of thread instead of a rug someone had sex on/with
I dispute the accuracy of that claim, there is no reason that your "instead of" could not be replaced with "as well as". In fact, considering how soft and comfortable shag carpets are compared to other carpets the odds that somebody already shagged on it is much higher than other carpets. Then again not so long ago shag was a popular brand of particularly strong pipe tobacco, Sherlock Holmes had an affinity for it and once declared that solved a case "over an ounce of shag" (in the short stories). So that means you can have a smoking shag while smoking shag on a shag.
What a lovely post... too bad you're just plain wrong.
>Not since the beginnings of life on this planet has one species had the ability to affect so many others
This is an utterly unproven assertion, I nearly left it at [Citation needed] but the reality is that if a comet wiped us off the face of the earth tomorrow, chances are in 20 million years there would be NO surviving evidence of our ever having been here. There could have been many other intelligent species who reached our levels and we would not have any way of knowing. It's possible we're unique, but it's by no means certain.
>Species have started going extinct at a far greater rate since humans started mucking things up than before Not even remotely true - the history of life on this planet is filled with mass extinctions that make our entire existence look like a blimp on a chart. The Cambrian extinction wiped out 96% of the species alive at that time - we still don't know what caused it (we have some theories but nothing confirmed). The K/T event wiped out just about every species on the planet bigger than a rat. Lucky for us... our ancestors then were about the size of shrews, the few surviving large animals were all aquatic (nile crocodile and the great white shark for example). The history of this planet is one of repeated mass-extinctions, over and over just when life reaches an apparent high-point the universe throws a rock at us or the planet freezes over and 95% or more of the life forms around get wiped out in an instant. The average life expectancy of a species is 10-million years (we're already there in other words) and 97% of the life forms that have ever existed are extinct. 94% of them were extinct before mammals arrived - let alone humans. The good news is, each time there's a mass extinction it's followed by the greatest booms of biodiversity that we find in history. Right after an extinction there are no predators, no specialists so all sorts of bodyplans and weird evolutionary ideas can survive - soon they start to get weeded out as specialists do better and biodiversity eventually stabilizes around systems that have only a few species in each niche. We're in the middle of such a stable intermediary period.
There is a much more pragmatic reason to do conservation - exactly because extinction is such a guarantee. Mass extinctions would take us with it - and not all mass extinctions happen because a rock fell from the sky. Some are caused by life forms. One of the largest mass extinctions was caused by the evolution of photosynthesis in plants. Suddenly the air was pumped full of a terribly toxic, highly corrosive gas - ultimately making up 21% of the atmosphere - practically every other lifeform on the planet died out. But new lifeforms evolved - which turned this poison into a crucial part of their very biochemistry - for us (as their descendents) oxygen is not a horribly corrosive poison - it's the gas we cannot live without !
The reason to try and keep the natural order we evolved in as stable as possible with as few disruptions as possible, to preserve as many species as we can is simple: life will go on, the planet will survive with or without us... but every disruption we make - every species WE drive extinct, every forrest we chop down is risking OUR OWN survival. We can do only limited actions to protect ourselves from rocks falling out of the sky, but we can try to keep from melting the polar ice-caps ourselves. We can try to keep species alive, to preserve a balance we are evolved to fit into - or we risk taking ourselves out with them.
As Michael Chrighton says in Ian Malcolm's speech near the end of Jurassic Park (the book, not the movie), we don't have to worry about saving the planet- but if we're lucky (and smart), we may be able to save ourselves.
>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. 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 ?
>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. 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 true the conclusion MUST be true). In short those case you cite don't disprove my claim at all. All they prove is that some people give up the faith of religion without giving up the job. That's a completely different concept.
>Theories != base assumptions. Theories != hypotheses. Hypotheses != base assumptions. Theories in science = base assumptions. Technically you should only use the word theory for a hypotheses that has been so resilient that there is no reasonable doubt left about it's truthfullness. Newton's laws didn't become a theory until three hundred years after his death. Darwin's theory only really became a theory in the 1960's when DNA became a well known concept in science. Scientists still question both. You however expect them to waste their time questioning things completely useless. Like solipsism - it's a case of - even if you're wrong it changes NOTHING about the outcome of any research... ever. Ergo - it's a waste of time to worry about it. Religions are welcome t
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If I'm a real man... er... negative, I am a meat popsickle.
I did not misread or misquote. He called what the article writer does "astrology" - saying that to an astronomer is just about the worst insult you can give a scientist.
Comparing astrology to astronomy is truly ignorant and stupid. Astrology is NOT a science and it's methodology bears absolutely no resemblance to science whatsoever - certainly not to climate science (his exact words) and definitely not to astronomy (the science that IS being compared with climate science in the article).
Science has rules, it has checks and balances to protect us against human fallibility, astrology prays on the very fallibilities that science is designed to protect us against.
What are you ? More stupid than the GP ?
>Yes, the "method" of science is similar in the disciplines of astrology and climate science
And the fact that you think astrology is a science shows us exactly how little your opinion is worth. Do not confuse astrology with astronomy, only one of those is a science.
>It: People is ignorant? It's suppossed to be are. Aparently you 'is' ignorant. ...I'm pretty sure I gave it that line when I checked it out about two years ago...
>What the FREAKING heck gives you the idea that things can simply be nationalized in the US?! That wouldn't be constitutional in any way as an over-riding policy. WTF?!
Two words: eminent domain.
Sorry, your constitution allows it's existence which makes pretty much anything else it says about private property nothing but sugarcoating.
Mind you, with your bias so obviously displayed in your username... why am I bothering to even reply to you ?
You're obviously not going to try and have a reasonable debate because you'll never, ever consider the possibility that apple could be wrong about something.
Sorry - but if I pay for something, I demand the right to modify it as I see fit. I paid for my phone, and I'm very happy that I could modify it by putting cyanogenmod on it which is much nicer than sense. Tell me... where can I find a (legal, supported and approved of by the original company) custom mod of IOS for an iphone ?
Yeah... that's what I thought.
>Yeah, that's an overly broad software patent if I ever saw one
"overly broad software patent" is a tautology, being a software patent makes it overly broad by definition. If it covers software that IS overly broad.
>Sounds like the defense of the Branch Davidians.
Your example is a case where there is so much inconsistency in reports that it's absolutely impossible to ever really figure out what happened ? Hell for all we know the BD's were telling the truth - I don't trust cultist religions (or any other religions) but I don't trust the FBI either.
Oh... and really your analogy is pretty damn flawed anyway. The BD's got in a shootout with the cops. By your analogy that makes Apple the federal government ? Nah, think of it more as a gangwar, and google is the dude who just happens to live in the neighbourhood and finally got sick of the crossfire hitting his kids.
I was rather more thinking of somebody in a bad neighbourhood who has been shot at and mugged repeatedly, eventually he buys a gun. Now an armed assailant breaks in through his back door yet again - and he shoots at him. Happens to kill him. There's barely a cop in the world who will even bother arrest the guy, because there's no honest judge in the world who would EVER convict you in such a clear-cut case of self defense.
>(stole another's property)
Have you READ the apple patents in question ? If implementing similiar tech in some android platforms is "stealing their property" then I'm robbing your house if I happen to paint mine the same color... and this while your house is white !
Oh lawdylawd ! Your house has doors! So does mine ! I must have stolen your whole brain !
Fucking idiot...
Btw. Ideas are not, nor should they be refered to as "property" and there is absolutely no basis in law for calling them that despite the fact that many lawyers do so - they do it to encourage people to think in a way that is utterly unsubstantiated exactly BECAUSE it's neither true nor sensible to MAKE true.
>"Your honor, my client never shot anyone before he bought that gun."
More like: "Your honor my client hates guns, has publicly spoken out against them and never owned one. When he was repeatedly shot at over the last few months, he finally bought one and started shooting back".
I am not sure I'm in favor of google getting the Motorolla patents - or any patents - but you should at least get your facts straight. Frankly in your OWN analogy - google is clearly a self-defense case.
Any quote is an appeal to authority. By itself that's a fallacy. It can only strengthen an already strong argument. It cannot make a bad one better. Despite Crichton 's legendary research efforts. ( the Jurassic park premise was only proven flawed several years later) I wouldn't call him an authority on conservation anyway. I just liked the way he worded an idea I agree with.
Wanting, indeed striving to survive is the prerogative of every life form. That does include us and I believe space exploration is our one chance to really Jp our odds (Cohen would agree). Success is
Not guaranteed bit we ought to try.
That said I don't agree with your less than other creatures idea. I also don't think we're more. In fact I take exception to us being called homo sapience
Wisdom is our rarest attribute so that's out and there is no genus homo. We (and other extinct homo variants) differ only marginally more from pan troglodytes or pan pinuscus than they do differ from one another. We are the third living chimpanzee. And clearly got our sex drives from the same ancestors as bonobos did!
I'd call us pan curiosita if I'm feeling generous. The chimp that asks questions. But pan destructus would sadly fit even better
not guaranteed but trying is worth it
Your sig would be so much more convincing if you could spell superior right... or were you being ironic? If so I would suggest making it just a little more obvious, I would suggest "souperior".
>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.
And that's our only disagreement. I see nothing metaphysical in doing experiments with the PHYSICAL world to verify abstract hypotheses. Experiments are part of science but it's not circular as you suggest. The very REASON it's part of science is to force science to remain physical. The reality would be the same with or without science, the experiment would have the same results with or without the scientific edifice. Experiments are mandated BY science for exactly that reason. It doesn't prove science consistent - it tests science against reality. A completely abstracted field can be entirely consistent (mathematics) - but science is NOT abstract or metaphysical exactly because it forces itself to check it's results against physical reality - that process is called experimentation. Calling it "part of science" is accurate in general - but it doesn't make it part of the consistency there-off, it's the ENFORCEMENT of REALITY there-in. A different concept altogether. Experiments aren't MEANT to check consistency but to check ACCURACY. In fact it's an important point that science is often NOT consistent. We occasionally have theories that match observed reality in a given scenario perfectly - but contradict one another. Ultimately we strive to reconcile them in a new and improved theory (this is the current state of physics where quantum physics and relativity have several major contradictions but each in their area is showing immense success). But this happens exactly because science doesn't offer truth - only a greater understanding of the universe. A theory is just a mental model to understand the universe with. Experiments is way to make sure the model really DOES fit the universe we try to understand. This is why both quantum physics and relativity remain useful even though we have glaring evidence that one of both is making some major mistakes. Fixing those mistakes are important, but they don't invalidate the usefulness of the theories in the meantime for that segment of reality they DO accurately model. Your argument breaks down exactly because science is NOT consistent. In fact Einstein once said the most remarkable thing about the universe is that it makes any sense at all - that we can understand it at all. There is no compulsion on reality to be understandable, sensible or even logical (let alone consistent) - yet it is, and that is remarkable. Taking advantage of that fact is what science is FOR.
In fact, you may recall this discussion began due to our discovery of an observation that is highly inconsistent with not only current theory but also all previous observations- the inconsistency is what lets us find NEW knowledge. It's unlikely... but what if in trying to solve this conundrum -we find the explanation for the inconsistency of quantum and relativistic physics ? For all we know - the key to the Grand Unified Theory is figuring out why this star is so odd...
>I don't reject it as an article of faith. I accept it as an article of faith.
I do reject it as an article of faith. I accept it as a matter of fact. What we disagree on is just that. For you it's a matter of faith. I consider it long proven to be a matter of fact. I say the checks we use have proven it enough, you say they don't prove it (to your satisfaction) hence you deem it a matter of faith.
>It's a statement that can't be tested whether you accept or reject it. That's why it's an article of faith.
Not quite what I meant. I believe we HAVE tested as a matter of fact that there is an objective reality that can be understood. You reject the test and declare the existence of that reality a matter of faith. What I meant is - there is no OTHER way to test if that reality exists. If you accept the test that science has as valid, then it's
>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 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. 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. A statement which cannot be tested. 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".
Since there's only one possible way to check for a reality, and you don't accept that check - we'll never get anywhere. I think the check has made it's point. All our technology built on what we learned by trusting it has been purely beneficial.
In the end, you may call it trite but the bible says Jesus healed less than 10 sick people, and saved 3 lives (if you include his own). Louis Pasteur's germ theory of disease and his pastuerization process combined saves about a billion lives every single day (if you add in every person who doesn't get an infection today because of something based on either of those).
That's the difference in my book.
I've re-read your post, and want to add two things. I quoted Chrichton (who - btw was is actually a real scientist - notably a biologist (more notably a medical doctor) and was one for a long time before he started writing) as a more jocular and less serious way to make my point. I never suggested that particular line should be taken as factual.
Secondly -you and I are saying the exact same thing - and arguing about the semantic detail. You are much more accurate and complex in your wording but your conclusion and mine are identical.
Okay, I am not going to argue with somebody trained in the field. My point was much simpler and actually greatly overlaps with yours - particularly this bit:
"and we poison the water, air and soil with thousands of chemicals and chemical cocktails (an issue which is now so bad it's affecting us"
- Exactly. The impacts we're having will ultimately cause our own (possible) extinction.
Now it's quite true that our many varied impacts are more complex than (most) extinction events - but you COULD see it as one event "evolution of modern man" , I won't argue about whether that's a valid way to look at it- you're better trained for such analysis than me and I defer to your knowledge.
What stands is that we are harming the living organisms on the planet severely - and that harms us. You gave lots of interesting links and data but nothing disproved my core point.
At the same time many top scientists in your own field, including Jack Cohen, agrees with my view (in fact my post directly quoted some of his works a few times - though it was single lines and an idea which is why I didn't credit him in particular, especially since I grossly oversimplified it).
The Boston Foreskin Collector is an expert in this particular field of biology and he strongly believes our combined impacts are smaller than any extinction event by many orders of magnitude.
Ironically - what you're saying is while very true, not very relevent. Worst case scenario - humanity does something so stupid we wipe out every vertebrate on the planet. We take out 95% of the bacteria and all the insects while we're at it, oh and let's take out all the fish as well (which we're pretty close to doing anyway).
Life isn't gone. Virusses still exist (though I am aware that many biologists don't consider them a lifeform there is definite dissent in the field about that - personally I side with those that consider them one and prefer more inclusive definitions of "alive" than 'DNA molecule' - a more successful one than we are actually) , we won't get ALL the bacteria - the extremophiles will survive, a few others too. In fact all the corpses we leave lying around will probably be very fertile breeding ground for the few that survive and they will absolutely prosper.
The simple reality is, if even one single organism survive - even if it's a single celled organism... life will go on, in ten million years teh planet will be crawling with new multicellular creatures. They may take a completely different route, they may never evolve dipoblasts and tripoblasts - or a very similar one.
But humanity cannot wipe out life. Hell even if we COULD somehow wipe out every single lifeform on the planet... I wager life would start again. Now this is a less proven point - I side with the scientists who believe life to be extremely resilient and able to spring up anywhere and everywhere that it's remotely possible - and nothing we do short of actually blowing the planet to smithereens will make it completely impossible for anything to EVER live on again.
Life will go on - but we won't be here, we won't be part of it. We may take out everything in nature that think is "normal" but we won't be the end of life. All our most powerful technology, even all our nuclear bombs at once won't do as much harm as a single comet - and life survived them.
All we do, in all our areas are horrible - and we risk being an extinction event as a species, taking ourselves and every other lifeform we know out. But I am quite convinced new life will come - will find a way.
This is NOT consolation, it's not an argument against conservation - on the contrary, if we value the existence of our species then we must increase our effort to conserve. We must live in greater harmony with other species. We must reduce pollution and eradicate things like DDT (btw. kudo's for noting where I live, and being aware of the issue - I am firmly opposed to DDT for malaria fighting, not least because it's utterly ineffective, all you get is resistent mosquitos that
That's what science is. An independent way of identifying wrong ideas. Even your own.
We test scientific rules against their goal : do they protect us from thinking wrong things that are very tempting. Such as "what people who can kill us want us to believe ". That's what it's for. To protect us from ourselves and others. If its doing that it's working. You can't just think what makes you feel good when you must do reality checks.
This is no fun anymore if you're going to be all reasonable. :p
Here's a Shorter reply :
Religion demands unquestioing faith and even admonishes that this is impossible then warns to battle and dispel doubt. That some religious people question their faith in public changes nothing.
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.
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.
Science. Rules are based on experience and subject to change. Indeed they have changes over time.
I believe consistency of experiments prove a consistent reality you do not.
Law of the excluded middle applies to deductive logic only. Deductive logic only applies to the abstract. Maths is deductive science is inductive.
We'll never convince each other here. But ill grant that your arguments are interesting.
> Does science lead towards any sort of objective truth?
No, and it doesn't, and never has, claimed to. Science promises only greater understanding. Objective truth is only promised by religions and charlatans (often the same person) who aren't burdened by having to be consistent or open to new ideas.
Science is under no obligation to prove a claim it doesn't make.
>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.
And we have no need for solipsism to do so. Science already rejects absolute truth on much simpler grounds. Human brains are simple relative to the universe. Science makes things understandable by creating simple models of how things work. These models can get progressively more complex and so our understanding grows but they are not truth and never claimed to be. Thermodynamics is a very useful model but it's decidedly NOT truth. Gravity is a great model, but it isn't truth either. The more complex we make the model, the deeper our understanding goes - and the fewer people can understand it - but it never approaches the complexity of the reality, that's essentially what science never claims. Science has never promised anybody truth. Unlike all the people and concepts that promise truth - science is honest enough to admit that truth is beyond human comprehension and almost certainly will always be.
We only come close to claiming objective truth in matters so highly abstract that their existence and all their properties can be entirely quantified. Mathemeticians can discover objective and absolute truths. Scientists aren't dealing with something a simple as mathematics.
>The actual structure of the argument is:
>Premise 1: No A is B (your claim)
>Premise 2: There exists at least one A that is B (observation)
>This leads to a contradiction, so one of the premises must be false.
Yes, premise 2. People who claim to believe in God and then question that same belief are lying, there's no way around that.
At best they may be called agnostic - at least agnostics are honest enough to admit they haven't decided though.
>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. 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. They are the precautions we've learned from bitter experience to apply to our thinking to protect ourselves against three terrible sources of falsehood:
1) Believing what we want to believe
2) Believing what has always been believed
3) Believing what those in power wants us to believe.
This is why science has forever been at war with religion and governments - because science assaults their very foundations - both depend on people taking their ideas from those three sources and science is absolutely designed to not be subject to any of them.
>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. We don't prove mathematics with logic anyway - we moved past that a long, long t
>In your first two paragraphs you argue that man has not had a massive effect on this planet's ecosystem compared to any other species, because natural events have caused mass extinction in the past.
I argued about man's effect on other species over the sum of the lifetime of the planet. I didn't argue that we have no impact, I pointed out how another lifeform caused one of the biggest extinction events in history by changing the structure of the atmosphere - any doubt that a lifeform can do so is settled right there (as one example).
As I indicated some (not all) mass extinctions are caused by terestrial events, some by life-forms. We are at a very real risk of being one of those life-forms that cause a mass extinction event, and unlike the plants we have very little chance of surviving it ourselves if we do.
A global nuclear war would be a mass extinction event, it would also take humanity out right along with it. See my point ?
>I know my front door can easily be breached by a determined attacker, yet I put a lock on it
Of course, the world is full of towns and cities where people do NOT put locks on, or bother to shut the locks that came with the door.
A lock can reduce casual theft, reducing the casual thieves work better.
This is no less true of cybersecurity. As long as most cybercriminals get away with it most of the time - we won't see a reduction in exploits.
> like shag carpet which is a thick loose pile of thread instead of a rug someone had sex on/with
I dispute the accuracy of that claim, there is no reason that your "instead of" could not be replaced with "as well as". In fact, considering how soft and comfortable shag carpets are compared to other carpets the odds that somebody already shagged on it is much higher than other carpets.
Then again not so long ago shag was a popular brand of particularly strong pipe tobacco, Sherlock Holmes had an affinity for it and once declared that solved a case "over an ounce of shag" (in the short stories).
So that means you can have a smoking shag while smoking shag on a shag.
What a lovely post... too bad you're just plain wrong.
>Not since the beginnings of life on this planet has one species had the ability to affect so many others
This is an utterly unproven assertion, I nearly left it at [Citation needed] but the reality is that if a comet wiped us off the face of the earth tomorrow, chances are in 20 million years there would be NO surviving evidence of our ever having been here. There could have been many other intelligent species who reached our levels and we would not have any way of knowing. It's possible we're unique, but it's by no means certain.
>Species have started going extinct at a far greater rate since humans started mucking things up than before
Not even remotely true - the history of life on this planet is filled with mass extinctions that make our entire existence look like a blimp on a chart. The Cambrian extinction wiped out 96% of the species alive at that time - we still don't know what caused it (we have some theories but nothing confirmed). The K/T event wiped out just about every species on the planet bigger than a rat. Lucky for us... our ancestors then were about the size of shrews, the few surviving large animals were all aquatic (nile crocodile and the great white shark for example). The history of this planet is one of repeated mass-extinctions, over and over just when life reaches an apparent high-point the universe throws a rock at us or the planet freezes over and 95% or more of the life forms around get wiped out in an instant.
The average life expectancy of a species is 10-million years (we're already there in other words) and 97% of the life forms that have ever existed are extinct. 94% of them were extinct before mammals arrived - let alone humans.
The good news is, each time there's a mass extinction it's followed by the greatest booms of biodiversity that we find in history. Right after an extinction there are no predators, no specialists so all sorts of bodyplans and weird evolutionary ideas can survive - soon they start to get weeded out as specialists do better and biodiversity eventually stabilizes around systems that have only a few species in each niche. We're in the middle of such a stable intermediary period.
There is a much more pragmatic reason to do conservation - exactly because extinction is such a guarantee. Mass extinctions would take us with it - and not all mass extinctions happen because a rock fell from the sky. Some are caused by life forms. One of the largest mass extinctions was caused by the evolution of photosynthesis in plants. Suddenly the air was pumped full of a terribly toxic, highly corrosive gas - ultimately making up 21% of the atmosphere - practically every other lifeform on the planet died out. But new lifeforms evolved - which turned this poison into a crucial part of their very biochemistry - for us (as their descendents) oxygen is not a horribly corrosive poison - it's the gas we cannot live without !
The reason to try and keep the natural order we evolved in as stable as possible with as few disruptions as possible, to preserve as many species as we can is simple: life will go on, the planet will survive with or without us... but every disruption we make - every species WE drive extinct, every forrest we chop down is risking OUR OWN survival. We can do only limited actions to protect ourselves from rocks falling out of the sky, but we can try to keep from melting the polar ice-caps ourselves. We can try to keep species alive, to preserve a balance we are evolved to fit into - or we risk taking ourselves out with them.
As Michael Chrighton says in Ian Malcolm's speech near the end of Jurassic Park (the book, not the movie), we don't have to worry about saving the planet- but if we're lucky (and smart), we may be able to save ourselves.
>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.
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 ?
>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.
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 true the conclusion MUST be true).
In short those case you cite don't disprove my claim at all. All they prove is that some people give up the faith of religion without giving up the job. That's a completely different concept.
>Theories != base assumptions.
Theories != hypotheses. Hypotheses != base assumptions.
Theories in science = base assumptions.
Technically you should only use the word theory for a hypotheses that has been so resilient that there is no reasonable doubt left about it's truthfullness. Newton's laws didn't become a theory until three hundred years after his death. Darwin's theory only really became a theory in the 1960's when DNA became a well known concept in science. Scientists still question both.
You however expect them to waste their time questioning things completely useless. Like solipsism - it's a case of - even if you're wrong it changes NOTHING about the outcome of any research... ever. Ergo - it's a waste of time to worry about it. Religions are welcome t