While that's a certainly a problem, it's not generaly too unworkable in most practical situations in which these definitions are used.
Of course, on circularity: aren't all definitions ultimately circular at some point? What's the difference?
"Rhetorical question: Why should our bias be towards simpler theories?"
It's not a rhetorical question: it's a trick question. Occam's Razor as originally formulated has nothing to do with "simpler" as a principle. It has to do with not going out to the store to buy a huge butter-shooting splatter gun to butter your toast when you have a butter knife sitting right there. Parsimony asks us to see if we can use what we already have or know to explain things, rather than needing to conjure up additional factors ad hoc. This certainly has the result of making things simpler, but it is not justified on the _principal_ that things should be simpler. It's an explanatory principle NOT an existential one.
---An atheist who is simply unconvinced or unconverted is an agnostic:).---
Nope. That would confuse belief with knowledge. Angosticism/Gnosticism distinguishes belief (not jsut god belief either) via whether one knows or not (or even can know or not, in the strongest formulation). Atheism/theism distinguishes whether one believes or not, regarldess of whether they know. The two distinctions can overlap: they're not exclusive. You can be an agnostic theist or an agnostic atheist.
"I do not believe in god" is an atheist statement, but does not imply a belief in no god.
"A" "theism" means "without" "god belief" not "belief no god."
Logically, a binary negation on theism would give us "believe X" vs. "not believe X" It does not give us "believe not X." "believe not X" is a SUBSET of "not believe X."
"I don't know if god exists" (the agnostic position) isn't even on that logical continuum in the first place, so it can't be a midpoint between atheism and theism.
Need I go on?
---Random mutations that improve survivability.---
No no no. Random mutations, at best, simply increase variation. It's selection that skews that variation towards new forms of survivability.
---What you're calling 'evolution' is actually adaptation within a species.---
And with that, you've already lost the argument. There is no line between adaptation within species and without it. There is no hard line called "species" at all that somehow prevents small changes from accumulating into gestalt changes: it's simply a fuzzy classification system we use to make describing breeding populations easier.
Besides, what you've described is one half of the equation. Where do you think the variation comes from in the first place? Populations get more varied over time: not better, just more diverse. And that's all it takes for selection (natural or otherwise, as in your serial killer) to force the spread of variation in a particular direction, leaving us with a new spread of variable traits subtly skewed from the original spread.
I seriously question your assembelge of facts here. You don't seem to understand what mEve and YAdam are. They aren't due to a bottleneck moving forwards in history. They are due to a purely theoretical bottleneck looking backwards up the tree of life. mEve, when she lived, was utterly unexceptional. Lots of other women lived at the same time, and were no less special than mEve. mEve gets her designation perhaps centuries later, when all lineages without her in them at some point happen to die out. I could go on with your other claims, but I think this is enough to point out that you've overlooked the full measure of many of these ideas.
Yep. People get this wrong all the time, but Occam's Razor is NOT "the simplest explanation is always the best! LOL!" It's an explanatory principle: when you use it, you're not simply speculating about what might or might not exist, you are trying to explain various phenomena by way of other phenomena. The Razor basically asks us not to invent a completely new extraneous entity when we can explain something without doing so: using simply the raw material what we already know.
---I'm an atheist, but I recognise that I have no proof for it.---
You don't technically need any. To be sure, if you positively believe that there is no god, then you DO have a belief to defend with no proof to support it. But most atheists are simply unconvinced/unconverted, simply not believing in a god. This isn't a belief, simply a description of the person, and doesn't require a particular defense or proof. The burden of proof is on the positive claims (whether it be "god exists" or "god doesn't exist."
Occam's razor says that our conclusion should be that it's unlikely life could exist at all.
Does it? People seem to have a very poor grasp of both the actual razor and its usage. It's used for explanations that employ explanatory entities: not simply guesses about what might or might not exist.
Heya. You seem to have been beamed over recently from another dimension, so I'll clue you in so no-one figures you out: in this reality, the U.S. is an important, but hardly crucial, trading partner of China. In fact, we probably get the better end of the deal than they do. And though Bill Gates is master/President/overlord in your world, in this world a single breach of contract would never lead to any sort of painful sanctions against China. Heck, the sanctions we placed on them after Tianamen Square ("Jet Li Square, in your universe) barely even slowed em down.
One solution is to use a universally accessible pad that's pre-agreed upon. Like, "download CNN.com at precisely 5:00am, convert it to binary, and use that."
The downsides are that each pad has to be agreed upon in advance (which is not SO bad, since you don't actually exchange lots of data at that point) and someone could observe you accessing particular sites.
Well, they sorta redeemed themselves briefly with the "Homer has a horrible secret" episode when they wooshed us by pretending to be another clip show with Homer flashing back to his skateboard-over-canyon escapade. Then Lisa cuts in, ending the flashback: "Dad... everyone's sick of that memory!"
Re:As a friend once remarked
on
Sim-Dud?
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· Score: 1
---The world is a big place, and people are small. Anybody who thinks that humanity has a really significant impact on large-scale systems is suffering from delusions of grandeur.---
Just because you're an innumerate, and big numbers blow your mind, doesn't mean you have to try to infect the rest of us.
---The naturalistic assumption rejects without consideration even the possibility of non-naturalistic explanations of events.---
Uh, did I say that? Science, which is what we are talking about (your shifty switch nonwithstanding) can't confirm or disconfirm supernatural claims. Even if we have a perfectly ordinary event, like my shower getting clogged by hair, anyone can maintain that a supernatural being was the real cause. What can we say about claims like this? Not much.
---But the naturalist goes too far. He says, "I can't explain it, but it is definitely not supernatural."---
Who are you talking about/to? And why do you keep switching from "scientist" to "naturalist"? Plenty of scientists believe in god: but that doesn't mean that they use god as an explanation to any problem they have, and even they did, they couldn't TEST that claim. Their job is to explain: supernatural explanations can explain everything and anything, and hence nothing. There's no point to saying that supernatural isn't involved, but there's no point to saying that is was either. You just keep searching for explanations that can be understood. If there aren't any, then there's nothing more that can be done. People can speculate about the supernatural all they want, irregardless of them being scientists.
---The fact that a thing cannot presently be explained certainly does not mean that it has an immediate supernatural cause, but it may have one.---
Again, ANYTHING, even things that seem to have clear explanations, can be claimed to have a supernatural cause. Supernatural hand-waving can answer anything.
---Rejection of this possibility is intellectually dishonest when it comes from someone who would have us believe that he is only seeking to "explain phenomena", and it reveals that the "seeker" is not really interested in the answers, but only in answers of a certain kind.---
Supernatural explanations don't explain in a way that science can use. There is a search for a certain kind: a kind that is intelligible and useful. If no such explanation can be found, that's fine. And again, you can speculate about the supernatural all you want, whether on an unanswered question or an answered one.
Likewise, if birth is a meaningless event in the moral development of a being, why celebrate Jesus' birth so loudly, rather than his conception? Why not send the Wise Men and shepards and stars and stuff to pay homage to the implanted egg in Mary's uterus?
---The naturalistic approach to science (for example) assumes that all phenomena can and must be explained without reference to anyone or anything outside the observable universe. This is a prejudice.---
No, a practical necessity. Science tries to explain phenomena, period. You cannot "explain" something by simply referencing the supernatural.
If something really does have a supernatural cause, it will quite correctly and accurately simply show up in science as something that cannot be explained (because that's what the supernatural IS: outside our ability to observe and hence understand). You are free to speculate on supernatual causes all you want: the point is that science cannot aid you in any way in nailing down those speculations. And it doesn't work the other way around: just because you can't explain something doesn't mean it's supernatural.
Well, if that's really true (anecdotal as it is, and perhaps not taking into account varying strategies in different cultures for preventing home invasion), that would sort of reflect more on people the UK's failure to take precautions against crime more than anything else, since the UK currently has a per capita burglary rate of 30% higher than the U.S. (higher assault and mugging rates as well) The U.S. leads in the far less common murder rate: but even with our gun laws loosening, and the UK's tightening, our rates are dropping and theirs are going up. The only really conclusive effect we can find behind this seems to be differences in the likihood of getting caught, not necessarily gun ownership. DOJ study
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While that's a certainly a problem, it's not generaly too unworkable in most practical situations in which these definitions are used. Of course, on circularity: aren't all definitions ultimately circular at some point? What's the difference?
"Rhetorical question: Why should our bias be towards simpler theories?"
It's not a rhetorical question: it's a trick question. Occam's Razor as originally formulated has nothing to do with "simpler" as a principle. It has to do with not going out to the store to buy a huge butter-shooting splatter gun to butter your toast when you have a butter knife sitting right there. Parsimony asks us to see if we can use what we already have or know to explain things, rather than needing to conjure up additional factors ad hoc. This certainly has the result of making things simpler, but it is not justified on the _principal_ that things should be simpler. It's an explanatory principle NOT an existential one.
I was responding "Yep" to msoya, by the way, not agreeing with your pixie hypothesis. I musta hit the wrong link.
Sorry, forgot to add break tags to that. Should previewed.
---An atheist who is simply unconvinced or unconverted is an agnostic :).---
Nope. That would confuse belief with knowledge. Angosticism/Gnosticism distinguishes belief (not jsut god belief either) via whether one knows or not (or even can know or not, in the strongest formulation). Atheism/theism distinguishes whether one believes or not, regarldess of whether they know. The two distinctions can overlap: they're not exclusive. You can be an agnostic theist or an agnostic atheist.
"I do not believe in god" is an atheist statement, but does not imply a belief in no god.
"A" "theism" means "without" "god belief" not "belief no god."
Logically, a binary negation on theism would give us "believe X" vs. "not believe X" It does not give us "believe not X." "believe not X" is a SUBSET of "not believe X."
"I don't know if god exists" (the agnostic position) isn't even on that logical continuum in the first place, so it can't be a midpoint between atheism and theism.
Need I go on?
---Random mutations that improve survivability.--- No no no. Random mutations, at best, simply increase variation. It's selection that skews that variation towards new forms of survivability.
---What you're calling 'evolution' is actually adaptation within a species.--- And with that, you've already lost the argument. There is no line between adaptation within species and without it. There is no hard line called "species" at all that somehow prevents small changes from accumulating into gestalt changes: it's simply a fuzzy classification system we use to make describing breeding populations easier. Besides, what you've described is one half of the equation. Where do you think the variation comes from in the first place? Populations get more varied over time: not better, just more diverse. And that's all it takes for selection (natural or otherwise, as in your serial killer) to force the spread of variation in a particular direction, leaving us with a new spread of variable traits subtly skewed from the original spread.
I seriously question your assembelge of facts here. You don't seem to understand what mEve and YAdam are. They aren't due to a bottleneck moving forwards in history. They are due to a purely theoretical bottleneck looking backwards up the tree of life. mEve, when she lived, was utterly unexceptional. Lots of other women lived at the same time, and were no less special than mEve. mEve gets her designation perhaps centuries later, when all lineages without her in them at some point happen to die out. I could go on with your other claims, but I think this is enough to point out that you've overlooked the full measure of many of these ideas.
Yep. People get this wrong all the time, but Occam's Razor is NOT "the simplest explanation is always the best! LOL!" It's an explanatory principle: when you use it, you're not simply speculating about what might or might not exist, you are trying to explain various phenomena by way of other phenomena. The Razor basically asks us not to invent a completely new extraneous entity when we can explain something without doing so: using simply the raw material what we already know.
---I'm an atheist, but I recognise that I have no proof for it.---
You don't technically need any. To be sure, if you positively believe that there is no god, then you DO have a belief to defend with no proof to support it. But most atheists are simply unconvinced/unconverted, simply not believing in a god. This isn't a belief, simply a description of the person, and doesn't require a particular defense or proof. The burden of proof is on the positive claims (whether it be "god exists" or "god doesn't exist."
Occam's razor says that our conclusion should be that it's unlikely life could exist at all.
Does it? People seem to have a very poor grasp of both the actual razor and its usage. It's used for explanations that employ explanatory entities: not simply guesses about what might or might not exist.
Heya. You seem to have been beamed over recently from another dimension, so I'll clue you in so no-one figures you out: in this reality, the U.S. is an important, but hardly crucial, trading partner of China. In fact, we probably get the better end of the deal than they do. And though Bill Gates is master/President/overlord in your world, in this world a single breach of contract would never lead to any sort of painful sanctions against China. Heck, the sanctions we placed on them after Tianamen Square ("Jet Li Square, in your universe) barely even slowed em down.
Wait wait! Don't shut science down yet! We still haven't discovered how to make a tasty diet soda! Oh wait. Shit. Forget i said anything.
Well, a flat universe is infinite too... but only just. A saddle-shaped universe is REALLY darn infinite. :)
One solution is to use a universally accessible pad that's pre-agreed upon. Like, "download CNN.com at precisely 5:00am, convert it to binary, and use that." The downsides are that each pad has to be agreed upon in advance (which is not SO bad, since you don't actually exchange lots of data at that point) and someone could observe you accessing particular sites.
They cut that last bit out in syndication so that they can hawk more Clearasil.
and.... starwipe!
Well, they sorta redeemed themselves briefly with the "Homer has a horrible secret" episode when they wooshed us by pretending to be another clip show with Homer flashing back to his skateboard-over-canyon escapade. Then Lisa cuts in, ending the flashback: "Dad... everyone's sick of that memory!"
Wow, your friend is amazingly witty and original.
---Wow, I'm glad scientists have finally found a way around that pesky problem of not being able to prove negatives.---
I would hope so, considering that the statement "not being able to prove a negative" is, itself, a negative.
You CAN prove negatives. There is no general rule against it.
---The world is a big place, and people are small. Anybody who thinks that humanity has a really significant impact on large-scale systems is suffering from delusions of grandeur.---
Just because you're an innumerate, and big numbers blow your mind, doesn't mean you have to try to infect the rest of us.
---The naturalistic assumption rejects without consideration even the possibility of non-naturalistic explanations of events.---
Uh, did I say that? Science, which is what we are talking about (your shifty switch nonwithstanding) can't confirm or disconfirm supernatural claims. Even if we have a perfectly ordinary event, like my shower getting clogged by hair, anyone can maintain that a supernatural being was the real cause. What can we say about claims like this? Not much.
---But the naturalist goes too far. He says, "I can't explain it, but it is definitely not supernatural."---
Who are you talking about/to? And why do you keep switching from "scientist" to "naturalist"? Plenty of scientists believe in god: but that doesn't mean that they use god as an explanation to any problem they have, and even they did, they couldn't TEST that claim. Their job is to explain: supernatural explanations can explain everything and anything, and hence nothing. There's no point to saying that supernatural isn't involved, but there's no point to saying that is was either. You just keep searching for explanations that can be understood. If there aren't any, then there's nothing more that can be done. People can speculate about the supernatural all they want, irregardless of them being scientists.
---The fact that a thing cannot presently be explained certainly does not mean that it has an immediate supernatural cause, but it may have one.---
Again, ANYTHING, even things that seem to have clear explanations, can be claimed to have a supernatural cause. Supernatural hand-waving can answer anything.
---Rejection of this possibility is intellectually dishonest when it comes from someone who would have us believe that he is only seeking to "explain phenomena", and it reveals that the "seeker" is not really interested in the answers, but only in answers of a certain kind.---
Supernatural explanations don't explain in a way that science can use. There is a search for a certain kind: a kind that is intelligible and useful. If no such explanation can be found, that's fine. And again, you can speculate about the supernatural all you want, whether on an unanswered question or an answered one.
Likewise, if birth is a meaningless event in the moral development of a being, why celebrate Jesus' birth so loudly, rather than his conception? Why not send the Wise Men and shepards and stars and stuff to pay homage to the implanted egg in Mary's uterus?
---The naturalistic approach to science (for example) assumes that all phenomena can and must be explained without reference to anyone or anything outside the observable universe. This is a prejudice.---
No, a practical necessity. Science tries to explain phenomena, period. You cannot "explain" something by simply referencing the supernatural.
If something really does have a supernatural cause, it will quite correctly and accurately simply show up in science as something that cannot be explained (because that's what the supernatural IS: outside our ability to observe and hence understand). You are free to speculate on supernatual causes all you want: the point is that science cannot aid you in any way in nailing down those speculations.
And it doesn't work the other way around: just because you can't explain something doesn't mean it's supernatural.
Well, if that's really true (anecdotal as it is, and perhaps not taking into account varying strategies in different cultures for preventing home invasion), that would sort of reflect more on people the UK's failure to take precautions against crime more than anything else, since the UK currently has a per capita burglary rate of 30% higher than the U.S. (higher assault and mugging rates as well) The U.S. leads in the far less common murder rate: but even with our gun laws loosening, and the UK's tightening, our rates are dropping and theirs are going up.
The only really conclusive effect we can find behind this seems to be differences in the likihood of getting caught, not necessarily gun ownership.
DOJ study