Violence induces more violence. Retaliation will only lead to more deaths.
This is a typical bit of retoric, but is it true? Anyone who beleives violence never solves anything needs to have a talk with the city fathers of Carthage. That particular conflict was ended with violence. It took three attempts, but by the third time the Romans figured out their problem -- on their previous attempts, they hadn't applied enough violence.
It is true that most situations are simply made worse by applying some violence. It is also true that the situations can be solved by applying even more violence. If the problem is another people, group, or nation, a sufficient amount of violence will in fact eliminate the problem. If you have the stomach for genocide...
This may not be kind, it may not be ethical, but it is true. A pacifist needs to concentrate on legitimate arguments, not repeat invalid and spurious ones.
I'm not an American, but it seems to me that if you don't like your elected officials, you can turn up and vote for someone else.
Not precisely true. Americans are generally given the choice between two people to vote for. Two people from two different political parties. Each of the political parties has roughly the same stance on each issue, they only quibble about small details, or outright disagree on things that aren't terribly important to the corporations.
It's called the two-party system, and our laws are specifically designed to encourage it and raise the bar for anyone outside the two established parties. Overall, it's a slight improvement over the Soviet-style one-party system. But not much...
I still have a Mac SE/30, one of the first 68030 based Macs. It's been a while since I did anything under the Macintosh OS, but IIRC, system time was a 32-bit value that was the number of seconds that had elapsed since the start of 1904 (why 1904 instead of 1900? I have no idea -- but I do know 1900 wasn't a leap year, despite being divisible by 4, so maybe this made the math easier). I don't know if new versions of MacOS use a 64-bit value, I'd be surprised if they didn't, but it should be noted that these older Macs can't be upgraded past System 7.
Remember, we are looking for evidence of life here, not for explanations for why evidence is missing.
And we have found some. The question is, why is it that we find this evidence for life and yet seem to be missing some other obvious signs of life (such as a chemically unlikely atmospheric composition)? And there are several possible answers. Considering all of them is not a bad idea. The only bad thing would be if we leaped to one conclusion amongst these alternatives without any evidence.
Your argument could easily be turned on its head -- since we do find this evidence for life, we need some sort of explanation for why we see this sign but not that sign of life. If we don't seek to explain this, then we're simply being dogmatic and anti-scientific. This is evidence against the idea that there is no life on Mars, and to continue to hold that there is no life on Mars in the face of contrary evidence without seeking some way to explain why we found the contrary evidence would be to simply ignore evidence that contradicts our current beliefs, and that's just plain dogmatism, not science.
That having been said, there are alternate explanations as to why we might be seeing these discolorations. The only way to know for sure of the truth is to gather more evidence, specifically from the sites in question. It would be foolish to believe life exists or believe life does not exist under the circumstances. We just don't know.
If I had to place a bet, though, I'd bet on no life. Like you, I find the atmospheric composition to be fairly compelling evidence for a lack of widespread life, and the lack of widespread life makes any life at all pretty unlikely -- life does too good a job infiltrating every conceivable environ, and then a few we would never of conceived of if we hadn't gone out and discovered them.
I mean if nothing used the o2 for that long a single bolt of lightening would turn the planet into a flaming cue ball, right ?
Err, no. Oxygen is rather reactive and tends to combine with other stuff easily, in natural non-organic chemical processes -- if all life on Earth were exterminated, the atmosphere would revert to mostly CO2, like Mars and Venus, in a matter of thousands of years (i.e. in the blink of an eye, relative to geological timescales). The fact of the matter is, our O2 producers on Earth produce O2 in such huge quantities that it makes up over 20% of our atmosphere, a ridiculously high amount considering how reactive oxygen is. The planet does not need life to scour O2 from the atmosphere. If there were no life, it would quickly revert to being a trace element.
Ahh, but we're talking about an interplanetary war, not a barroom brawl. History has shown that although southern good ol' boys may be better in a fight, northerners are better in a war. This may be related to the reason people prefer southern hospitality. In any case, I'd put my money on New York (or Boston, or Chicago, or...) street thugs over southern good ol' boys any day -- southerners are too nice, northerners will cut out your liver and feed it to the dog...:)
...I think that you must grant that they are more similar to each other than mammals are to each other...The differences among mammals is much greater...
I believe you're suffering from the taxonomical equivelent of the "all foreigners look alike" syndrome. Even biologists aren't immune to this: there are species of mice in which the genetic variation with the species is greater than the variation between humans and chimps, and yet we consider these mice different varieties of the same species whereas we don't even consider chimps to be in the same genus as us. The point being that the closer something is to being like you, the more exagerated the minor differences appear, whereas for things sufficiently alien, the differences are almost impossible to notice. This is how our brains operate.
That having been said, I think you're on crack. The amount of variation among sea-life dwarfs the amount of variation on land by several orders of magnitude. Mammals are remarkably similar compared to one another, especially when you start looking at their organs and skeletons and you know, just taking them apart and seeing how they tick. We all have all the same parts, just in different proportions. We all operate pretty much the same way. Fish are way more varied than mammals...
Heh! That's a nice assumption... of course, since we've never come up with a decent definition of intelligence, much less a means for objectively testing it, it may or may not be a defensible assuption depends on what you think intelligence means and which arbitrary system of measurement you've picked to base your evidence on...
If you think about it, people who have a deep understanding (deep by the average citizens' point of view, shallow in the tech world) of computers and technology are pretty much regarded as witches by most folks out in the world. The best way, my friends and I thought, to fight this kind of mindset is simply to adopt a shroud of religion.
Err, how would adopting the shroud of religion help? Wiccans aren't thought any less evil for being Wiccans rather than simply witches...
Of course, you're going to say "But Wiccans don't worship the same God, our church would!" That doesn't stop Southern Baptists from distributing pamphlets claiming Catholics are evil pagan Satan worshippers.
...if a christian church says its ok, then maybe it isnt the work of the devil, or witches, or evil haxors. Its ok, because god says it can exist.
Again, not likely. First of all, you'd need a Christian church to say it's okay, and second, that won't mean anything to anyone outside that church (see above re-Baptists and Catholics).
Underage Cattholics can drink alcohol as part of services.
Rather, Catholic churches can serve alcohol to minors as part of services. I don't believe there's any law against minors drinking alcohol anywhere, as least not that I know of. The laws are always against serving it to minors. But I could be wrong...
Which is roughly equivalent to saying they have their religious liberty in their own lands, but not in the United States in general. This is kind of like saying you have the right to copy eBooks under US Law, as long as you do it in Russia.
Don't be ridiculous, the creator would write machine code. He wouldn't even use an assembler, much less so called "higher level" languages designed to simplify coding for obviously inadequate beings...
Err, what kernel patches has Alan written relating to ext3? I don't know of any. And I was under the impression including ext3 didn't require any changes to the rest of the kernel...
I assume that since ext3 only adds journaling to ext2, reiser is "faster" than ext3 also.
The problem with this assumption is that journaling can (and generally does) make many file operations faster (due to not having to move the head so much). Since ext3 is therefore faster than ext2, it's an open question whether ReiserFS is faster than ext3. The fact that ReiserFS is faster than ext2 doesn't really tell us anything on this point.
That having been said, I suspect ReiserFS is faster in general than ext3, due to the whole niftyness of the layout, but I'd have to see some numbers before this was more than a suspicion...
I would contest that it's mature (it is brand new)
But, you see, it isn't. Not really. The journaling part is new, but in most other respects this filesystem is many years old. Unlike Reiser which has a brand new never before used filesystem layout. ext3's filesystem layout is so old, an old bo (Debian 1.3) system could read it. So I would contest that it's "brand new". In many ways, it's the one of the most mature filesystems available at the moment...
Gee, you weren't intelligent enough to get it even after I spelled it out explicitly for you.
Since you failed to sign in and failed to identify yourself as the previous poster, your "spelling it out explicitly" was impossible -- the best I could assume you were doing was giving me your interpretation of someone else's words. I'm not stupid enough to accept something as true simply because someone else says so -- why would I think your interpretation of someone else's words was any better than mine? Once you made it clear they were your words you were explaining, I got it quite well. I'm just not stupid enough to make the kind of assumptions without any evidence that you expected me to make.
"You can't place any credence at all in the Principle of Induction based on the fact that it has tended to work more often than not in the past unless you already accept that the Principle of Induction is true."
Nope. In fact, I don't accept that the principle of induction is true
You can't place any credence at all in the Principle of Induction based on the fact that it has tended to work more often than not in the past unless you already place some credence in it, and you have no reason to place any credence in it until you do. I'm not at all claiming you're insisting that you're certain it's true. My apologies if you're too stupid to see what my point actually is. But if you accept anything as evidence for anything, you clearly do accept it as true regardless of what claims you may make about your doxastic attitudes...
If you get down to it, there's no evidence for anything.
Sure there is. There's no evidence for the Principle of Induction, but if you accept it as an assumption, you can use it to demonstrate that there is evidence for all sorts of other things.
Have fun with solipsism.
Err, why would you think I'm a solipsist? I never claimed the Principle of Induction was false, after all. Just unsupported and unsupportable...
Sorry to reply twice, but I just noticed something really funny...
But a empirical fact is that it has worked a lot, in the sense that past observations very often do lead to reliable future predictions. If that stopped being true, then I'd put a lot less credence in the idea that the past can reliably predict the future.
You realize here you're claiming you would loose credance the Principle of Induction based on its past performance. If it started working less reliably, you'd consider it's future performance to be less reliable. THAT'S USING THE PRINCIPLE OF INDUCTION! Before you were just making a circular argument. Here you're making a flat-out contradictory one! Trust me, I'm a logician, that's an even bigger no-no.
It also highlights what David Hume said -- we seem to have difficulty NOT using it, regardless of its epistemic credentials...
I was the orignal poster you were replying to, and I claimed no such thing. I said that my belief about auras didn't come from someone telling me there are no auras. It comes from finding no credible evidence for them, via talking to people, reading things, etc.
I see. My apologies, I misinterpretted what you meant when you said you came to that conclusion on your own.
... I adopt it as a working assumption because it's worked in the past
Please reread what you've written carefully. Notice what you're saying after "because". You're making an invalid inference. Your logic is circular. Trust the logician -- circular logic is bad.
See, there's a perfect example of the idiocy that too much philosophising leads you to. Perhaps you have enough wit to discern why my previous paragraph was not the "circular reasoning" to which you allude. But I'll spell it out: like I said, I never said I could prove that induction always works. In fact, I believe that it doesn't always work. But an empirical fact is that it has worked a lot, in the sense that past observations very often do lead to reliable future predictions. If that stopped being true, then I'd put a lot less credence in the idea that the past can reliably predict the future.
I never thought you were claiming you could prove anything with induction, nor that you believe induction always works. Your argument is still blatantly circular. You can't place any credence at all in the Principle of Induction based on the fact that it has tended to work more often than not in the past unless you already accept that the Principle of Induction is true. You're using the Principle of Induction to justify you use of the Principle of Induction.
Are you of subnormal intelligence, or what? How many times do I have to say that I haven't claimed to have proven anything? I think it's a disease of philosophy majors. They love to go around trying to point up everyone's "logical flaws" and tell you how nobody knows anything for certain, but that's quite beside the actual point.
I've done none of this. You're the only person bringing "certainty" into this discussion.
Nobody can ever know "Truth" for certain. It's all just relative likelihoods and how you arrive at those estimates.
And to assert that evidence of what you've observed or what has happened in the past in any way at all boosts the relative likelihood of a given proposition requires faith in the Principle of Induction, for which you cannot possibly have any evidence, inductive/empirical or otherwise.
Grrr... why should I wait 20 seconds to post a reply if I can do it in 18? What's two seconds between friends? Oh well, after typing this additional paragraph, I'm sure the 20 second rule will be satisfied. The message will also consume more space in the database. And this is desired why, exactly?
I did read what you said, and I never thought you claimed that atoms don't exist. I said it was nonsense to think that you have to see something to believe something.
Which was precisely my point. I was asking why someone claimed to believe something didn't exist based on his own observations and not on anything anyone else said. I queried if the reason was because he hadn't seen it himself, and pointed out that that was a stupid reason. I'm glad we agree on this.
And what, talking to people does not constitute personally gathering evidence?
It does, but again, if you reread the original post I was replying to and my reply, the original poster was claiming he did NOT do this.
It's called "inductive logic", as opposed to "deductive logic". Look it up.
No need. I'm a philosophy major, and from your post it's quite obvious I know and understand a hell of a lot more about inductive logic than you do. For instance, I understand the problems involved with using it that empiricist David Hume was famous for expounding upon.
No, you can't prove things via induction. But you can reasonably infer them unless presented with contrary evidence. Based on induction, I can have grounds for believing something without proving it.
You can do this IF you have faith in the Principle of Induction, which says that the future resembles the past, or more generally (and accurately) that the unobserved resembles the observed. This principle is not only unproven but is unprovable in principle. You can't even have evidence for it. "It's always worked before" doesn't work because it's a circular argument (you're trying to use the principle of induction to prove the principle of induction).
IF you accept on faith (and faith alone) that the Principle of Induction is true, THEN you can reasonably infer from the evidence the things you claim are reasonable to infer. But without that faith, you can't reasonably infer anything from evidence...
No. Faith is belief in something with the certainty that you can't be wrong.
No, faith is belief in something without evidence. Certainty is not required (but is often there anyways -- for example, most people are certain that evidence for something makes the truth of that something more likely, despite the fact that the is not and cannot be evidence for this fact -- it's something that you have to just accept on faith).
That's the lamest argument I've ever heard. No, I don't have to see something in order to come to reasonable conclusions.
I never claimed you did. I was attempting to guess why the original poster claimed he had come to a certain conclusion not based on anything others told him. I was deliberately pointing out that "because I've never seen it myself" is a lame argument. That you for reiterating my point.
200 years ago, there was a lack of evidence for the existence of ancient reptiles larger than elephants. That was not in any way, shape, or form, evidence for their nonexistence. It would not have been reasonable to believe in them 200 years ago, but it would not have been reasonable to believe they never existed, either. A lack of a reason to believe P is *not* a reason to believe not-P. That's extremely flawed logic...
Nonsense. There is plenty of hard experimental evidence for atoms. It is totally absurd to claim that all claims are equally supported by evidence and hence equally likely.
Reread my post, heck reread your reply and the section you quoted. I *never* made the claim you're saying I made. Nor did I claim atoms don't exist. Nor did I claim there was no evidence for their existence. All I said was, if you're like most people (myself included), you believe in them and believe there is good evidence for their existence because you've been taught that, not because you personally have gathered evidence yourself.
More nonsense. I can reasonably conclude based on evidence that minds have a lot to do with brains. I can't prove that rocks don't have minds, and hence I cannot say for sure whether they do or not, but that doesn't mean I have no basis for believing it.
More logic errors. The fact that all squares are rectangles does not imply that only squares are rectangles. Regardless of how excellent your reasons are for thinking your mind has something to do with your brain, you have no evidence that minds only arise from the functioning of brains. You accept this principle on faith, and thus can reasonably conclude that rocks don't have minds. But unless you have faith in that unproven principle, your logical conclusion does not follow from the evidence. And since you do believe your conclusion, one can conclude one of two things: (a) you have faith in a principle you have no evidence at all for, or (b) you are illogical.
Reasonable belief based on evidence does not require proof, and is not faith.
All belief requires faith. If you had no faith at all, you would be a Pyrrhonist. You can't even have evidence unless you have faith in certain principles (for example, that your senses are essentially truth-conducive).
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This is a typical bit of retoric, but is it true? Anyone who beleives violence never solves anything needs to have a talk with the city fathers of Carthage. That particular conflict was ended with violence. It took three attempts, but by the third time the Romans figured out their problem -- on their previous attempts, they hadn't applied enough violence.
It is true that most situations are simply made worse by applying some violence. It is also true that the situations can be solved by applying even more violence. If the problem is another people, group, or nation, a sufficient amount of violence will in fact eliminate the problem. If you have the stomach for genocide...
This may not be kind, it may not be ethical, but it is true. A pacifist needs to concentrate on legitimate arguments, not repeat invalid and spurious ones.
Not precisely true. Americans are generally given the choice between two people to vote for. Two people from two different political parties. Each of the political parties has roughly the same stance on each issue, they only quibble about small details, or outright disagree on things that aren't terribly important to the corporations.
It's called the two-party system, and our laws are specifically designed to encourage it and raise the bar for anyone outside the two established parties. Overall, it's a slight improvement over the Soviet-style one-party system. But not much...
I still have a Mac SE/30, one of the first 68030 based Macs. It's been a while since I did anything under the Macintosh OS, but IIRC, system time was a 32-bit value that was the number of seconds that had elapsed since the start of 1904 (why 1904 instead of 1900? I have no idea -- but I do know 1900 wasn't a leap year, despite being divisible by 4, so maybe this made the math easier). I don't know if new versions of MacOS use a 64-bit value, I'd be surprised if they didn't, but it should be noted that these older Macs can't be upgraded past System 7.
And we have found some. The question is, why is it that we find this evidence for life and yet seem to be missing some other obvious signs of life (such as a chemically unlikely atmospheric composition)? And there are several possible answers. Considering all of them is not a bad idea. The only bad thing would be if we leaped to one conclusion amongst these alternatives without any evidence.
Your argument could easily be turned on its head -- since we do find this evidence for life, we need some sort of explanation for why we see this sign but not that sign of life. If we don't seek to explain this, then we're simply being dogmatic and anti-scientific. This is evidence against the idea that there is no life on Mars, and to continue to hold that there is no life on Mars in the face of contrary evidence without seeking some way to explain why we found the contrary evidence would be to simply ignore evidence that contradicts our current beliefs, and that's just plain dogmatism, not science.
That having been said, there are alternate explanations as to why we might be seeing these discolorations. The only way to know for sure of the truth is to gather more evidence, specifically from the sites in question. It would be foolish to believe life exists or believe life does not exist under the circumstances. We just don't know.
If I had to place a bet, though, I'd bet on no life. Like you, I find the atmospheric composition to be fairly compelling evidence for a lack of widespread life, and the lack of widespread life makes any life at all pretty unlikely -- life does too good a job infiltrating every conceivable environ, and then a few we would never of conceived of if we hadn't gone out and discovered them.
Err, no. Oxygen is rather reactive and tends to combine with other stuff easily, in natural non-organic chemical processes -- if all life on Earth were exterminated, the atmosphere would revert to mostly CO2, like Mars and Venus, in a matter of thousands of years (i.e. in the blink of an eye, relative to geological timescales). The fact of the matter is, our O2 producers on Earth produce O2 in such huge quantities that it makes up over 20% of our atmosphere, a ridiculously high amount considering how reactive oxygen is. The planet does not need life to scour O2 from the atmosphere. If there were no life, it would quickly revert to being a trace element.
Ahh, but we're talking about an interplanetary war, not a barroom brawl. History has shown that although southern good ol' boys may be better in a fight, northerners are better in a war. This may be related to the reason people prefer southern hospitality. In any case, I'd put my money on New York (or Boston, or Chicago, or ...) street thugs over southern good ol' boys any day -- southerners are too nice, northerners will cut out your liver and feed it to the dog... :)
I believe you're suffering from the taxonomical equivelent of the "all foreigners look alike" syndrome. Even biologists aren't immune to this: there are species of mice in which the genetic variation with the species is greater than the variation between humans and chimps, and yet we consider these mice different varieties of the same species whereas we don't even consider chimps to be in the same genus as us. The point being that the closer something is to being like you, the more exagerated the minor differences appear, whereas for things sufficiently alien, the differences are almost impossible to notice. This is how our brains operate.
That having been said, I think you're on crack. The amount of variation among sea-life dwarfs the amount of variation on land by several orders of magnitude. Mammals are remarkably similar compared to one another, especially when you start looking at their organs and skeletons and you know, just taking them apart and seeing how they tick. We all have all the same parts, just in different proportions. We all operate pretty much the same way. Fish are way more varied than mammals...
Heh! That's a nice assumption... of course, since we've never come up with a decent definition of intelligence, much less a means for objectively testing it, it may or may not be a defensible assuption depends on what you think intelligence means and which arbitrary system of measurement you've picked to base your evidence on...
Err, how would adopting the shroud of religion help? Wiccans aren't thought any less evil for being Wiccans rather than simply witches...
Of course, you're going to say "But Wiccans don't worship the same God, our church would!" That doesn't stop Southern Baptists from distributing pamphlets claiming Catholics are evil pagan Satan worshippers.
Again, not likely. First of all, you'd need a Christian church to say it's okay, and second, that won't mean anything to anyone outside that church (see above re-Baptists and Catholics).
:)
- Reverend GT [ULC]
Only after we settle the holy wars over what editor to use. There are still heretics out there who think vi is a good idea...
Rather, Catholic churches can serve alcohol to minors as part of services. I don't believe there's any law against minors drinking alcohol anywhere, as least not that I know of. The laws are always against serving it to minors. But I could be wrong...
Annoying those of us who don't need him (e.g. the citizens of Minnesota)...
Which is roughly equivalent to saying they have their religious liberty in their own lands, but not in the United States in general. This is kind of like saying you have the right to copy eBooks under US Law, as long as you do it in Russia.
Don't be ridiculous, the creator would write machine code. He wouldn't even use an assembler, much less so called "higher level" languages designed to simplify coding for obviously inadequate beings...
Err, what kernel patches has Alan written relating to ext3? I don't know of any. And I was under the impression including ext3 didn't require any changes to the rest of the kernel...
The problem with this assumption is that journaling can (and generally does) make many file operations faster (due to not having to move the head so much). Since ext3 is therefore faster than ext2, it's an open question whether ReiserFS is faster than ext3. The fact that ReiserFS is faster than ext2 doesn't really tell us anything on this point.
That having been said, I suspect ReiserFS is faster in general than ext3, due to the whole niftyness of the layout, but I'd have to see some numbers before this was more than a suspicion...
But, you see, it isn't. Not really. The journaling part is new, but in most other respects this filesystem is many years old. Unlike Reiser which has a brand new never before used filesystem layout. ext3's filesystem layout is so old, an old bo (Debian 1.3) system could read it. So I would contest that it's "brand new". In many ways, it's the one of the most mature filesystems available at the moment...
I give credence to the idea that "past is a good predictor of future" according to, guess what, whether past actually is a good predictor of future.
There you go again! Don't you see it? Are you really THAT dense?
Since you failed to sign in and failed to identify yourself as the previous poster, your "spelling it out explicitly" was impossible -- the best I could assume you were doing was giving me your interpretation of someone else's words. I'm not stupid enough to accept something as true simply because someone else says so -- why would I think your interpretation of someone else's words was any better than mine? Once you made it clear they were your words you were explaining, I got it quite well. I'm just not stupid enough to make the kind of assumptions without any evidence that you expected me to make.
"You can't place any credence at all in the Principle of Induction based on the fact that it has tended to work more often than not in the past unless you already accept that the Principle of Induction is true."
Nope. In fact, I don't accept that the principle of induction is true
You can't place any credence at all in the Principle of Induction based on the fact that it has tended to work more often than not in the past unless you already place some credence in it, and you have no reason to place any credence in it until you do. I'm not at all claiming you're insisting that you're certain it's true. My apologies if you're too stupid to see what my point actually is. But if you accept anything as evidence for anything, you clearly do accept it as true regardless of what claims you may make about your doxastic attitudes...
If you get down to it, there's no evidence for anything.
Sure there is. There's no evidence for the Principle of Induction, but if you accept it as an assumption, you can use it to demonstrate that there is evidence for all sorts of other things.
Have fun with solipsism.
Err, why would you think I'm a solipsist? I never claimed the Principle of Induction was false, after all. Just unsupported and unsupportable...
But a empirical fact is that it has worked a lot, in the sense that past observations very often do lead to reliable future predictions. If that stopped being true, then I'd put a lot less credence in the idea that the past can reliably predict the future.
You realize here you're claiming you would loose credance the Principle of Induction based on its past performance. If it started working less reliably, you'd consider it's future performance to be less reliable. THAT'S USING THE PRINCIPLE OF INDUCTION! Before you were just making a circular argument. Here you're making a flat-out contradictory one! Trust me, I'm a logician, that's an even bigger no-no.
It also highlights what David Hume said -- we seem to have difficulty NOT using it, regardless of its epistemic credentials...
I see. My apologies, I misinterpretted what you meant when you said you came to that conclusion on your own.
Please reread what you've written carefully. Notice what you're saying after "because". You're making an invalid inference. Your logic is circular. Trust the logician -- circular logic is bad.
See, there's a perfect example of the idiocy that too much philosophising leads you to. Perhaps you have enough wit to discern why my previous paragraph was not the "circular reasoning" to which you allude. But I'll spell it out: like I said, I never said I could prove that induction always works. In fact, I believe that it doesn't always work. But an empirical fact is that it has worked a lot, in the sense that past observations very often do lead to reliable future predictions. If that stopped being true, then I'd put a lot less credence in the idea that the past can reliably predict the future.
I never thought you were claiming you could prove anything with induction, nor that you believe induction always works. Your argument is still blatantly circular. You can't place any credence at all in the Principle of Induction based on the fact that it has tended to work more often than not in the past unless you already accept that the Principle of Induction is true. You're using the Principle of Induction to justify you use of the Principle of Induction.
Are you of subnormal intelligence, or what? How many times do I have to say that I haven't claimed to have proven anything? I think it's a disease of philosophy majors. They love to go around trying to point up everyone's "logical flaws" and tell you how nobody knows anything for certain, but that's quite beside the actual point.
I've done none of this. You're the only person bringing "certainty" into this discussion.
Nobody can ever know "Truth" for certain. It's all just relative likelihoods and how you arrive at those estimates.
And to assert that evidence of what you've observed or what has happened in the past in any way at all boosts the relative likelihood of a given proposition requires faith in the Principle of Induction, for which you cannot possibly have any evidence, inductive/empirical or otherwise.
Grrr... why should I wait 20 seconds to post a reply if I can do it in 18? What's two seconds between friends? Oh well, after typing this additional paragraph, I'm sure the 20 second rule will be satisfied. The message will also consume more space in the database. And this is desired why, exactly?
Which was precisely my point. I was asking why someone claimed to believe something didn't exist based on his own observations and not on anything anyone else said. I queried if the reason was because he hadn't seen it himself, and pointed out that that was a stupid reason. I'm glad we agree on this.
And what, talking to people does not constitute personally gathering evidence?
It does, but again, if you reread the original post I was replying to and my reply, the original poster was claiming he did NOT do this.
It's called "inductive logic", as opposed to "deductive logic". Look it up.
No need. I'm a philosophy major, and from your post it's quite obvious I know and understand a hell of a lot more about inductive logic than you do. For instance, I understand the problems involved with using it that empiricist David Hume was famous for expounding upon.
No, you can't prove things via induction. But you can reasonably infer them unless presented with contrary evidence. Based on induction, I can have grounds for believing something without proving it.
You can do this IF you have faith in the Principle of Induction, which says that the future resembles the past, or more generally (and accurately) that the unobserved resembles the observed. This principle is not only unproven but is unprovable in principle. You can't even have evidence for it. "It's always worked before" doesn't work because it's a circular argument (you're trying to use the principle of induction to prove the principle of induction).
IF you accept on faith (and faith alone) that the Principle of Induction is true, THEN you can reasonably infer from the evidence the things you claim are reasonable to infer. But without that faith, you can't reasonably infer anything from evidence...
No. Faith is belief in something with the certainty that you can't be wrong.
No, faith is belief in something without evidence. Certainty is not required (but is often there anyways -- for example, most people are certain that evidence for something makes the truth of that something more likely, despite the fact that the is not and cannot be evidence for this fact -- it's something that you have to just accept on faith).
I never claimed you did. I was attempting to guess why the original poster claimed he had come to a certain conclusion not based on anything others told him. I was deliberately pointing out that "because I've never seen it myself" is a lame argument. That you for reiterating my point.
200 years ago, there was a lack of evidence for the existence of ancient reptiles larger than elephants. That was not in any way, shape, or form, evidence for their nonexistence. It would not have been reasonable to believe in them 200 years ago, but it would not have been reasonable to believe they never existed, either. A lack of a reason to believe P is *not* a reason to believe not-P. That's extremely flawed logic...
Nonsense. There is plenty of hard experimental evidence for atoms. It is totally absurd to claim that all claims are equally supported by evidence and hence equally likely.
Reread my post, heck reread your reply and the section you quoted. I *never* made the claim you're saying I made. Nor did I claim atoms don't exist. Nor did I claim there was no evidence for their existence. All I said was, if you're like most people (myself included), you believe in them and believe there is good evidence for their existence because you've been taught that, not because you personally have gathered evidence yourself.
More nonsense. I can reasonably conclude based on evidence that minds have a lot to do with brains. I can't prove that rocks don't have minds, and hence I cannot say for sure whether they do or not, but that doesn't mean I have no basis for believing it.
More logic errors. The fact that all squares are rectangles does not imply that only squares are rectangles. Regardless of how excellent your reasons are for thinking your mind has something to do with your brain, you have no evidence that minds only arise from the functioning of brains. You accept this principle on faith, and thus can reasonably conclude that rocks don't have minds. But unless you have faith in that unproven principle, your logical conclusion does not follow from the evidence. And since you do believe your conclusion, one can conclude one of two things: (a) you have faith in a principle you have no evidence at all for, or (b) you are illogical.
Reasonable belief based on evidence does not require proof, and is not faith.
All belief requires faith. If you had no faith at all, you would be a Pyrrhonist. You can't even have evidence unless you have faith in certain principles (for example, that your senses are essentially truth-conducive).