In what sense is the information public, if anybody who wasn't an insider is still waiting for the information to arrive?
They may as well release the information as an encrypted file, allow all the important people make changes to their investments and then release the decryption key for the info. The information was public, it's just that no one in the general public could read it.
You're rationale completely circumvents the point of this rule.
An advantage for being close to the announcement is already known and accepted. HFT firms pay big bucks to have machines located in the exchanges in order to learn about buy and sell offers sooner and place their own offers sooner. Whether it is fair or not, this practice of gaining an advantage by being closer) is one that people participating in the stock market have implicitly agreed to accept. Insider trading is not.
Even with spooky action at a distance you can not transmit information faster than the speed of light. You can send garbage instantly and the information necessary to decode the garbage into something useful at the speed of light.
Yes but the fact is that many people act according to opposing belief sets. Who's to say what's really right then, if it's based purely on subjective belief?
I would say there is no universal morality, although there is certainly a very strong sense of morality shared by human cultures all over the world. There is not variations in sense of morality, and people range between being very altruistic to being complete sociopaths.
I think one semi-objective way to qualify a particular set of moral values, is to try to measure the propensity of such a set to foster the flourishing of human happiness. I say "semi-objective" because I don't think there is an objective definition of happiness or flourishing. But the fact of the matter is that most people in the world share fairly compatible moral views. While there are instances of clashes between these views that will end up in the news, the world today is a relatively peaceful place compared to civilizations in the past, and pre-historic times. I don't think humans could have cities and countries without a very strong sense of collective morality.
Very compelling, yes, but that does not mean that it couldn't just be done away with, as some people do. And then who's to say that they are wrong for doing so?
I wouldn't say that anybody is moral or immoral in a universal sense. I would say that their context-sensitive morality is judged by the society they live in. Is it wrong to imprison people for violating a context-sensitive moral code. Since I don't believe in universal morality, I would defer to punishing people based on if they broke the law, and strive to ensure that the laws reflect a set of rules that will foster human happiness. I think concepts like freedom and fairness are easily shown to satisfy this criterion.
How is that a non-reason? That either assumes that God doesn't really exist or that God really isn't God (ie. something else takes higher priority).
It is a non-reason because it has no explanatory power. This kind of answer is similar to when a parent says to a child "Because I said so". The parent actually does have an underlying reason but decides not to reveal this reason. Maybe God has a good reason for doing the things he does. Many religious views, however are complacent at accepting non-reasons like "God works in mysterious ways", or "It is not for us to know God's plan". This may actually be true, but it is still a non-explanatory reason.
I'm sorry, but changing morality is inherently self-contradictory. Otherwise, you have no business calling the worst crimes in humanity wrong as long as they say "well it's right according to me".
I don't see why it is self contradictory. It would be if you choose to define morality as absolute, but you don't have to define it that way.
Hitler can say "The holocaust was right according to me" all he wants. That doesn't change the fact that the rest of society is going to judge him as being immoral according to their own moral codes. Forcing Hitler to accept our moral codes is no different than forcing him to accept God's moral codes. Should I allowed to refuse to go to hell if I don't agree with God's moral code? This was never a requirement under any moral code absolute or relative.
You have decided that I am not justified in opting out of God's moral code, but Hitler (or anybody) is justified in opting out of any relative moral code he wishes because it is not absolute. I disagree. Why? Because he is not allowed to opt out of my moral code without being considered immoral by me. Hitler, unfortunately for everyone, opted out of the moral codes of too many people and had a spectacular downfall.
The fruit gained from the scientific method does not require atheism. It still provides insight and the same results within the context of natural phenomena with that assumption in place. I see no compell
I think the word "scout" is synonymous with the BSA, and they should own that word. They, however, do not own the words "the", "boy", and "America", and should be forced to stop using those words in their name.
To assume that morality "evolves" is to go against the whole reason to listen to it. In short, it just becomes a candy-coated way of saying "I'm going to do whatever I want to do", or "We're going to do whatever we want to do", and try to inappropriately use objective language to try to avoid scrutinizing it.
I would say the fact that your morality has been honed over millions of years by natural selection is a pretty good reason to listen to it. Just like how using your lungs to breath is a pretty good idea. And just like the conscious decision to use your biologically evolved lungs to breath, using your morality to make decisions is not even really much of a choice. The guilt of acting against your own moral code is a very compelling force.
If it's not immutable and objective (and it doesn't depend on our state of evolution), then it's not what it makes itself out to be, which is a red flag that something's wrong with this definition.
I don't think morality needs to be immutable to be morality. Furthermore what could be less immutable than a morality controlled by an omnipotent dictator, that could change his
mind about what is moral any time he wants? It seems like new revelations change morality pretty frequently.
In fact I think the naturalistic evolutionary explanation of morality is far more objective than the the "it comes from God" view. For one thing it actually has reasons for being the way it is rather than the non-reason of "It's the way God wanted it".
But as I argued before, just because something can't be figured out through deductive reasoning is in no way grounds to assume that it can't exist.
No it's not. I never claimed it was. I am talking about the incompatibility of miracles with the axioms of science. Who knows maybe miracles do happen and this assumption is wrong. Or maybe FSM is true. Science can not disprove either, and both seem just as likely to me.
So it appears that this is just a war of semantics. You label it "unscientific", yet you also admit that it does not follow from the scientific method.
It does not follow the scientific method. It is the starting point of the scientific method. Denying the axiom is unscientific because it denies an axiom of science. There is no point in believing in scientific method if you don't believe what it is based on.
My gripe here is that the labeling is an authoritative attempt to avoid scrutiny. It's the flip side of what atheists often say against Christians when they inappropriately take for granted that everyone agrees upon the authority of the Bible in a debate (which obviously is not the case).
This is no different than any axiom. If you could scrutinize an axiom and prove it to be true or false, it would not be an axiom. Believing in the Bible is an axiom like believing in a universe governed by physical laws is an axiom. They are no different qualitatively, so I agree with you there. My point is not to show that science is right and religion is wrong. My point is to show that these are incompatible viewpoints.
But that's negating the whole concept of a "spirit" to begin with, and is rather just a convenient way to summarize the human organism with a term that has a misleading connotation (if this definition were indeed the case).
Why is my definition of a spirit any different? What difference does it make if the spirit is made out of atoms if the results are functionally the same? Even if you believed in God, why is it so hard to imagine that the physical universe God created is incapable of housing a soul made out of atoms?
This all boils down to what you assume about the existence of the supernatural a priori (in this case, a human spirit). If you assume not, then obviously there's no free will, and you don't need any neurological studies to conclude that, be
Because that indicates that morality points to something more than just the physical world. When I try to reduce my sense of right and wrong and tell it "you're just a product of evolution", it doesn't fit. It makes the whole concept meaningless, so why should I listen to it?
Imagine if you asked me why I didn't like the idea of morals from the Bible, and I said "This reduces my sacred sense of morality to just God. It makes the whole concept of morality meaningless so why should I listen to it? Just because I don't want to go to hell?
You would probably protest that my vision of what God is must be different than yours or I would not have said that. By the same token I think you're concept of "Just the physical world" is different than my view of the physical world which encompasses everything in the universe. I feel like morality being a product of an amazing process like natural selection is rather inspiring in it's elegance. Some people do not like this idea, but I find it to be very beautiful.
The matter involved with a supposed miracle would be constrained in time, not just space. Things would go back to normal once its done.
Things may "Go back to normal", but now we can no longer look at the present state and back track to learn about the past. Imagine God changes the direction of a single photon. When we detect this photon we can in theory calculate where it must have been 1 million years ago (1 million light years away in some direction). But now all that is called into question.
This "fundamental assumption" as far as it dictating God is what I disagree with, and I claim does not stem from any scientific result.
No it doesn't. It is an assumption. It is an axiom. There is no proof for this. There *can* be no proof for this. This is why believing in miracles is such a problem. It assumes this axiom is false, and hence starts you from a position that is unscientific.
But this argument already assumes non-existence of a human spirit and its interaction with our physical bodies, and our consciousness is only apart of our mental mind. Which study are you referring to?
I would rephrase it as... This argument assumes the human spirit is physical in nature and our consciousness is an emergent property of underlying physical laws. Isn't that amazing?
But I do not believe in the existence of FSM because there is no evidence to. To put God and FSM on the same level of consideration is to ignore the mountain of historical scholarship associated with the Bible, and not to mention a lot of present-day testimonies of the miraculous happening, as well as my personal experiences.
What if I said that this requirement for evidence to believe something is inherently scientific, and it falsely grants science authority over the supernatural. Science works for everything except the supernatural. When it comes to FSM you must just have faith.
But you also get things like morality and intuitive awareness. These things are less quantitative, but nonetheless real. I've heard it argued that morality is just a product of human evolution's way of sustaining individuals and society as a whole, and I agree that it helps serve that function. But morality says there is more to itself than simply self-preservation.
Biology also says there is more to morality than self preservation, if by self you mean an individual. The theory of evolution by natural selection actually now provides a framework to explain the function of morality on the level of the gene. This explains altruism and empathy beyond your children, your family, extended family, and even species. If you look at evolution as a competition between genes, and consider that We actually share many genes with other human beings, and even with other species, it makes sense for morality and empathy to exist.
There's "meaning" to it, rather than just being a means-to-an-end, and its validity does not depend on the existence of myself or humanity. This phenomenon is independent of what the scientific method says of the physical world.
This is where I would disagree. But I would also ask why it is important that morality transcends humanity or the physical world?
So here it sounds like you could just treat the supernatural in the way that some hypothesize different dimensions or universes (i.e. string theory).
Except that science treats claims of string theory (or as I like to call it "string hypothesis") to be testable in principle as a phenomenon of nature, even if tests have not yet been devised. I think most physicists will agree that string theory is the unfortunate name of a hypothesis that has certainly not risen to the level of confidence of a theory.
But we have not somehow observed every single physical interaction on every scale, including those cases in which supposed miracles have occurred. What we have done is taken a tiny amount of data and extrapolated it to give a base understanding of how the universe works. We can't do any better than that as far as science is concerned.
No we haven't observed every particle in our science lab. But most of the atoms that existed at the time the events of the Bible took place, still exist. In fact, if Jesus was a real person, the odds that some of the atoms that comprised Jesus now comprise you are almost statistically inevitable. The time and place where all the miracles of the Bible supposedly took place are not so distant. The universe is 13 billion years old, and almost unfathomably large. If miracles were happening as of 2000 years ago on earth no less, we are basically living in miracle-land in basically the same time period in cosmological terms.
I don't mean to imply their intentions, I'm just stating a verifiable fact. That's what physicists do. And it's out of necessity, not because they necessarily want to. And even if we could build a supercomputer that could simulate everything that we know of in physics, they would still have to assume this because you never know what's beyond your ability to observe or measure.
The inability to disprove the supernatural claims of the Bible is not good evidence for their truth. There are an infinite number of things science can't disprove, like unicorns, fairies, and the flying spaghetti monster. I am willing to but the God of Abraham in this same category, and should be taken equally seriously.
The overall comment here is that God made physics, but is not subject to them, including their regularity. He also made our ability to reason and observe.
It could be true that God made the physics we know about and is not subject to his own laws. That doesn't rule out the possibility that whatever universe God lives in doesn't have physical laws that govern him. Maybe we will never
Check who posted what there, friend. You are quoting someone else.
You're right I though I was talking to the original poster this whole time. Sorry about that.
As far as other things you said, science and logic are not axioms - they are deductive and inductive methods (depending on the discipline) used upon your axioms.
No science and logic are not axioms in the sense that they are more than *just* axioms. I am referring to the idea of assuming the same axioms as logic and science, and therefore putting you in a logical/scientific point of view. From the point of view of science, entire fields of logic and mathematics can be treated as de facto axioms. In that same vein I am describing the idea of assuming these same "axioms", plus the axiom that scientific evidence and the scientific method are the only valid ways of determining objective truth. Maybe this is not true, but such is the nature of axioms.
I should point out that I don't think religion and science are incompatible in principle. There are forms of religion that do not require breaking the barrier between the natural and the super natural. These would be religions that are deist or pantheist in nature. But I do think science is mutually exclusive with any sort of religion which accepts miracles as reality.
In short, there is no science experiment that can disprove anything miraculous.
I agree with this statement and that's what the problem is. This is also why science assumes that they do no happen. Rejecting the premise that "miracles do not happen", is tantamount to rejecting science as a method determining objective truth.
You asserted that miracles "destroys the ability of nature to be repeatable". Keep in mind that Christians don't just assert the supernatural, but intelligence behind the supernatural. It's not just some "noise" that randomly messes with nature - there's intent and a purpose behind it. So, you would not expect it to show up as some statistical anomaly in a lab.
In science the entire universe is a science lab.
You will note that with physics experiments, they assume a "closed" model, where only the physical ("natural") phenomenon are assumed to operate (and usually they will make further assumptions on the simplicity of the interactions to make the math easier).
The way you phrase it makes it seem that physics acknowledges the existence of the supernatural and willingly concedes this domain to some other discipline (like theology). How I would describe it is that physics assumes a physical reality. Any non-physical claims can never be proven and are thus incompatible with physics. If it could somehow be shown that God was real, the view of physics would be that because God is real, he is now under the umnbrella of physics and it is the job of physics to understand the physical laws that govern the behavior of God.
And it makes sense to assume this for their intents and purposes because they are interested in how the physical (natural) world operates. But that should not be mistaken for "complete" or "open" knowledge of reality
I do not claim that I nor science has complete knowledge, or that I nor science right about anything with 100% certainty. In fact it is required by science to never be 100% sure you have complete knowledge.
Another example is in theoretical computer science. We know from the Halting Problem that there is no way to logically deduce whether any given program will halt or not. However, it is still the case that every program will either halt or run forever, even though logical deduction cannot determine which. Perfectly coherent, yet admittedly incomplete logical knowledge (and logic, here, is the one saying that it's incomplete).
I am well aware of the halting problem, and yes I agree there are problems for which we not only
Well you made it seem like you were pretty unhappy with idea of being confused with someone who believed the earth was 6000 years old, when you said:
I really dislike young earth creationists expounding their views publicly. It gives people the false impression that one cannot be a Christian without thinking the Earth is 6017 years old, or whatever figure they're on these days.
I inferred this was because you thought this was a ridiculous view to hold. I think it's pretty ridiculous as well. Does that make young earth creationists dumb? I don't know, maybe that's not fair. They are still smarter than chimpanzees and dolphins. I would say it makes them dumber (relative) and not necessarily dumb (absolute). In any case I feel it was a fair inference on my part to assume you thought young earth creationists were dumb compared to you, although maybe you would be more politically correct about it.
The supernatural can invade the natural without violating any premise of the scientific method - it can only say things about stuff that's measurable and repeatable - this is no secret, and certainly not a refutation.
Except that the ability and history of the supernatural doing this, completely destroys the ability of nature to be repeatable. Every time you measure something you will not be sure if it is an accurate measurement or some kind of miracle occurring. All scientific data is in question. If someone ever disproves your theory, you can say that the evidence they used to disprove it may have been obtained during a miracle and therefore invalid, or worse you can say that your theory was the result of a miracle, and therefore it is correct because it was guided by the hand of God.
I believe in the authority of science because it's an extension of human observation and reason, but I'm also able to reason about that observation and reason, and realize what exactly it can and cannot do, and many people fail to do this.
I fully embrace the limitations of science, logic, and reason. These are limitations set by science logic and reason. Notice the humility of these disciplines.
The thing about what we're talking about is that foundations for any belief system, whether its called axioms in math, first principles in physics, or faith in Christianity, cannot be logically deduced into further basic things - otherwise you get infinite regression.
Agreed. This is one area where science and religion are quite similar. They both rely on axioms. The difference is that you aren't starting with logic and science as axioms. You are starting with religion as your axioms, and you are allowing religious concepts like miracles overrule.
This would be like me claiming to be a christian. I believe in the bible except when it contradicts science and logic. I therefore only believe the parts of the Bible that can be verified by science. So far I believe that there may have been a person named Jesus but he was probably just a regular person with some nice ideas of how we might want to live. There is however no heaven, no hell, no God, no virgin birth, no resurrection, etc. Am I really a Christian?
I'm not calling anyone dumb. That's a completely wrong term to use anyway for someone you disagree with in this context anyway, because it's not pointing out a fault in any system of reasoning.
No, it would not be christ-like to call anyone dumb. But you can let me infer that you think young creationists are dumb. Let me ask you this. Is *anybody* dumb?
What is your reason for *not* believing that a miracle is the reason the scientific evidence for an old earth wrong? My reason is that I have chosen the axiom of science and logic, and therefore don't believe in miracles. What's your reason? I am not saying I am sure I'm right, but I do have r
Well, we can kill them with the usual sort of weapons. Point is that it takes a while for humans to get out of hand.
We can kill robots with the usual sorts of weapons too (i.e. bullets, missiles, bombs, nukes). There's a few weapons that don't work as well like biological and normal chemical weapons, but then there are a few new weapons that would work like EMP, hacking, etc.
Well, then these improved humans, will it be cost effective to use them for anything in space?
Yes, for a few potential reasons.
1. These new humans could be made more robust for space travel (i.e. resistance to radiation) and require fewer resources to function (i.e. require sunlight rather than food, toilets, oxygen, etc). They could even be much smaller, requiring less rocket fuel to propel. They would essentially be human consciousnesses running in robotic bodies.
2. A human consciousness may no longer be limited to 1 body. It may be possible to upload a human consciousness to a small robot, send it to mars and then merge the consciousnesses back together once an hour, or once a day, or when the robot comes back to earth. If the robot is killed, the consciousness would only lose a few memories that were created since the last sync. These removes the restriction of needing to be extra super careful which is currently only done on manned missions.
Not at all. These missions are notorious for being rather lightweight on computational power.
Yes, exactly. The reason that a robot can't currently do as much as a person is because it is lightweight on computational power. The reason we send robots is because they are cost effective. Meaning the efficacy/cost is better with a robot.
And here's an issue with that. Who gets trusted with this sort of system? Say a business wants to set up a mining operation using self annealing, von Neumann machines that happen to be at least as smart as humans. What sort of controls would be in place to keep them from overrunning the Asteroid Belt, possibly even the entire galaxy?
What's to prevent humans form doing this? Let's say the Chinese set up a mining operation with human astronauts. What sort of controls do we have to keep them from overrunning the asteroid belt or the entire galaxy?
Humans can get out of control too in pretty much the same ways. But at least they want and need certain things; they act and communicate in certain ways; and it takes time and a lot of resources to make more viable humans (even if you're going the Star Wars cloning route). A population doubling time of 30 years (for a typical fertile human society) is a lot less risky than a population doubling time of one month.
That's going to change. As computers and nanorobots become more advanced, we will inevitably incorporate them into our own bodies. Maybe at first it will just be robots to clean out our arteries and kill cancer cells where they might pop up. But I think eventually it will also include things like adding more memory and processing power to our own brains, and finally replacing our weak physical bodies altogether.
Even in the Brave New World of superhuman robotics, you need some sort of real time off switch (or at least the ability to escalate to combat such threats on their own terms). And humans aren't going to accept another computer system as the control.
No, we are going to become the new computer system.
You don't have it as often. Both humans and moderately advanced robotics can find things to do while they wait too.
That's my point. Latency is becoming less of a problem as the away team becomes smarter. The theoretical limit is that the away team is as smart as the earth team and no communication is required at all, and therefore latency is not an issue ever.
Currently, there aren't.
Actually there are, and Nasa uses them. They are called robots. They are even starting to be used for unmanned missions on Earth because they are more cost effective in many capacities here.
It's not a computational problem and we're nowhere near any such limits of humans.
If we are talking about the effectiveness of machines vs. robots, it is 100% about computational power. It certainly isn't about strength or shininess. Otherwise we were bested a long time ago. It used to be that humans were better at every kind of computation than robots except doing arithmetic. Humans are currently still better at abstract thought, but now computers are also better at flying planes and spaceships, playing chess, and telling you the best route to take, etc. Soon they will be better at actually driving cars and visual processing.
Currently, on average a robot is much more cost effective. Yes humans are better at some things, but they are not worth the 100x+ cost.
Honestly for what task is a human being on mars going to be more cost effective in the near future?
You have the control/communication problem with human beings too. What happens when a human is not sure of what to do and he/she needs to wait for orders from earth, or earth needs to wait for the humans on mars to send data back to them.
You solve the communication problem for humans and machines in the same way. You make the algorithms smarter so they don't to be micromanaged. The only decisions that need to be made on earth are macro decisions like "what should we study next week" rather than "how should we drive around this rock" For humans this means a high level of training (which astronauts have). This was not possible back when computers were not as powerful. The proficiency of computers is growing exponentially. Just consider how many jobs computers are doing even in manned missions.
Yes humans are just an expensive payload, but why use them when there are more cost effective payload options?
Humans have basically hit their computational limit. The increase in human productivity is basically due to computer augmentation. At some point computer augmentation will be so great that the human contribution will be negligible.
The free market does not solve the tragedy of the commons problem. That does not make the free market bad or a failure. It is just not the right tool for that problem. For rewarding good investments and setting prices of goods and services, the free market works great. We should be using government regulation where that works best and the free market where that works best.
It is only ideologues who either claim the free market solves everything or that the free market solves nothing.
I don't agree that people should be free to make competitive cables, but that doesn't mean the market isn't free. If anything this is a DMCA issue involving the restriction of the circumvention of technical protection measures.
If this is evidence that the market isn't free than so is the fact that it is illegal to sell pirated DVDs at Walmart.
The problem is: people already bought their iphones.
I thought Apple people were used to being pressured to continuously buy expensive apple stuff.
The software update will "brick their device", by making it incapable of being charged, by the power adapter that worked fine before.
Blocking use of an unsanctioned cable is not "bricking their device".
This is likely to result in a class action suit against Apple; potentially with a demand to repair/replace hardware that was rendered inoperable.
Apple exists in a state of constant litigation. What would be weird is if they didn't get sued or sue others.
(E.g. Replace customers' iPhones with new ones, that will work with all their charging cables, or pay the cost of replacement for all the 3rd party charging cables consumers had purchased, PLUS the price difference for any new cables the customer would have purchased from a 3rd party)
How about just don't upgrade to IOS7. Or better yet stop buying iphones in the future if you don't like being treated like shit.
You are not entitled to an iphone or IOS made to your preferred specifications, you are only entitled to choose what you buy. This is what the free market is.
This is why I propose Apple should not only block unauthorized and dangerous cables, they should start selling Apple certified electrical outlets with computer chips in them that authenticate them as being the real deal. This will not only prevent people from using dangerous counterfeit electrical outlets, but give Apple an opportunity to block dangerous counterfeit smartphones from being charged on the safe and authentic electrical outlets.
Yes but you started talking about how one-way trips are something that the government would never do. I never even suggested that this would be the government doing this at that point, but you wanted to talk about that for some reason. I was willing to go down that road because I don't mind allowing the topic to evolve.
Just as a hypothetical example, we use the half lives of radioactive isotopes to date things. We assume that the half lives have remained constant since the big bang. And we use this to logically determine how old certain fossils and rocks are by measuring how many radioactive isotopes are left and calculating when these animals died or rocks were buried. We then discover that in fact the half lives of radioactive isotopes have been getting longer, which we then deduce means that the half lives were shorter in the past, and that things actually appeared to be much older than they really were. We come up with new equations to date things and it turns out things that we thought were 4.5 billion years old are actually only 6000 years old.
I will be the first to say that this is absolutely fucking ridiculously improbable. I will also say that this is at least a falsifiable claim, and therefore can be considered amongst all the other falsifiable claims as having some greater than 0 chance of being true. That doesn't mean you should believe it is true. It just means you shouldn't be 100% sure that it is false. I would consider this infinitely more likely than the idea that Jesus was the son of God, and even if it turned out the earth was 6000 years old, that doesn't lend anymore credibility to other unfalsifiable claims made in the Bible.
People a long time, when they had protologic, stumbled upon this neat trick for convincing other people they were right with "logic" that could not be falsified. religion is born. It turned out that while it was convincing to irrational humans, it was not actually very good at figuring out the truth. Later, other people decided that claims of this sort should not even be worthy of consideration, and logic/science is born.
Things which are thought to be false, are falsifiable, meaning that can be shown to be false, and presumably already have been. Things that are thought to be true *can* also be falsifiable, in the sense that it is possible for many things that we currently consider true to be shown to be false in the future given new evidence. By the same token things we think are false things can also be shown to be true given new evidence.
Some things fall into an entirely different category of unfalsifiable. These are the category of things that cannot even in principle ever be shown to be false. This doesn;t not mean that they are true, but it means they can never be verified. You might be tempted to believe such things must necessarily be true, if it were not for the fact that there are infinitely many unfalsifiable claims, many of which are mutually exclusive.
For example: "I claim that I am always right. Even when it seems like I am wrong, it only seems that way because other people who don't agree with me are wrong." Anything from expert opinions, eyewitnesses, scientists reading instruments can all be conceivably refuted with my claim. The problem with my claim is that there is no way to verify it's truth. It seems almost blatantly false, but if it were true, how would you know?
Falsifiable claims all exist in a realm in which there is actually some probability that they are true and some probability that they are false, and these probabilities can change over time with new evidence. Unfalsifiable claims exist in a realm where they can never be proven true or false. They are essentially useless.
Slashdot Mirror
In what sense is the information public, if anybody who wasn't an insider is still waiting for the information to arrive?
They may as well release the information as an encrypted file, allow all the important people make changes to their investments and then release the decryption key for the info. The information was public, it's just that no one in the general public could read it.
You're rationale completely circumvents the point of this rule.
An advantage for being close to the announcement is already known and accepted. HFT firms pay big bucks to have machines located in the exchanges in order to learn about buy and sell offers sooner and place their own offers sooner. Whether it is fair or not, this practice of gaining an advantage by being closer) is one that people participating in the stock market have implicitly agreed to accept. Insider trading is not.
Actually I meant to say 2:00:00.007pm
Even with spooky action at a distance you can not transmit information faster than the speed of light. You can send garbage instantly and the information necessary to decode the garbage into something useful at the speed of light.
It's pretty hard to prove intent (i.e. whether something was on accident or on purpose)
The information was not public at 2pm in Chicago. It was public at 2:00.007pm
Yes but the fact is that many people act according to opposing belief sets. Who's to say what's really right then, if it's based purely on subjective belief?
I would say there is no universal morality, although there is certainly a very strong sense of morality shared by human cultures all over the world. There is not variations in sense of morality, and people range between being very altruistic to being complete sociopaths.
I think one semi-objective way to qualify a particular set of moral values, is to try to measure the propensity of such a set to foster the flourishing of human happiness. I say "semi-objective" because I don't think there is an objective definition of happiness or flourishing. But the fact of the matter is that most people in the world share fairly compatible moral views. While there are instances of clashes between these views that will end up in the news, the world today is a relatively peaceful place compared to civilizations in the past, and pre-historic times. I don't think humans could have cities and countries without a very strong sense of collective morality.
Very compelling, yes, but that does not mean that it couldn't just be done away with, as some people do. And then who's to say that they are wrong for doing so?
I wouldn't say that anybody is moral or immoral in a universal sense. I would say that their context-sensitive morality is judged by the society they live in. Is it wrong to imprison people for violating a context-sensitive moral code. Since I don't believe in universal morality, I would defer to punishing people based on if they broke the law, and strive to ensure that the laws reflect a set of rules that will foster human happiness. I think concepts like freedom and fairness are easily shown to satisfy this criterion.
How is that a non-reason? That either assumes that God doesn't really exist or that God really isn't God (ie. something else takes higher priority).
It is a non-reason because it has no explanatory power. This kind of answer is similar to when a parent says to a child "Because I said so". The parent actually does have an underlying reason but decides not to reveal this reason. Maybe God has a good reason for doing the things he does. Many religious views, however are complacent at accepting non-reasons like "God works in mysterious ways", or "It is not for us to know God's plan". This may actually be true, but it is still a non-explanatory reason.
I'm sorry, but changing morality is inherently self-contradictory. Otherwise, you have no business calling the worst crimes in humanity wrong as long as they say "well it's right according to me".
I don't see why it is self contradictory. It would be if you choose to define morality as absolute, but you don't have to define it that way.
Hitler can say "The holocaust was right according to me" all he wants. That doesn't change the fact that the rest of society is going to judge him as being immoral according to their own moral codes. Forcing Hitler to accept our moral codes is no different than forcing him to accept God's moral codes. Should I allowed to refuse to go to hell if I don't agree with God's moral code? This was never a requirement under any moral code absolute or relative.
You have decided that I am not justified in opting out of God's moral code, but Hitler (or anybody) is justified in opting out of any relative moral code he wishes because it is not absolute. I disagree. Why? Because he is not allowed to opt out of my moral code without being considered immoral by me. Hitler, unfortunately for everyone, opted out of the moral codes of too many people and had a spectacular downfall.
The fruit gained from the scientific method does not require atheism. It still provides insight and the same results within the context of natural phenomena with that assumption in place. I see no compell
I think the word "scout" is synonymous with the BSA, and they should own that word. They, however, do not own the words "the", "boy", and "America", and should be forced to stop using those words in their name.
To assume that morality "evolves" is to go against the whole reason to listen to it. In short, it just becomes a candy-coated way of saying "I'm going to do whatever I want to do", or "We're going to do whatever we want to do", and try to inappropriately use objective language to try to avoid scrutinizing it.
I would say the fact that your morality has been honed over millions of years by natural selection is a pretty good reason to listen to it. Just like how using your lungs to breath is a pretty good idea. And just like the conscious decision to use your biologically evolved lungs to breath, using your morality to make decisions is not even really much of a choice. The guilt of acting against your own moral code is a very compelling force.
If it's not immutable and objective (and it doesn't depend on our state of evolution), then it's not what it makes itself out to be, which is a red flag that something's wrong with this definition.
I don't think morality needs to be immutable to be morality. Furthermore what could be less immutable than a morality controlled by an omnipotent dictator, that could change his mind about what is moral any time he wants? It seems like new revelations change morality pretty frequently.
In fact I think the naturalistic evolutionary explanation of morality is far more objective than the the "it comes from God" view. For one thing it actually has reasons for being the way it is rather than the non-reason of "It's the way God wanted it".
But as I argued before, just because something can't be figured out through deductive reasoning is in no way grounds to assume that it can't exist.
No it's not. I never claimed it was. I am talking about the incompatibility of miracles with the axioms of science. Who knows maybe miracles do happen and this assumption is wrong. Or maybe FSM is true. Science can not disprove either, and both seem just as likely to me.
So it appears that this is just a war of semantics. You label it "unscientific", yet you also admit that it does not follow from the scientific method.
It does not follow the scientific method. It is the starting point of the scientific method. Denying the axiom is unscientific because it denies an axiom of science. There is no point in believing in scientific method if you don't believe what it is based on.
My gripe here is that the labeling is an authoritative attempt to avoid scrutiny. It's the flip side of what atheists often say against Christians when they inappropriately take for granted that everyone agrees upon the authority of the Bible in a debate (which obviously is not the case).
This is no different than any axiom. If you could scrutinize an axiom and prove it to be true or false, it would not be an axiom. Believing in the Bible is an axiom like believing in a universe governed by physical laws is an axiom. They are no different qualitatively, so I agree with you there. My point is not to show that science is right and religion is wrong. My point is to show that these are incompatible viewpoints.
But that's negating the whole concept of a "spirit" to begin with, and is rather just a convenient way to summarize the human organism with a term that has a misleading connotation (if this definition were indeed the case).
Why is my definition of a spirit any different? What difference does it make if the spirit is made out of atoms if the results are functionally the same? Even if you believed in God, why is it so hard to imagine that the physical universe God created is incapable of housing a soul made out of atoms?
This all boils down to what you assume about the existence of the supernatural a priori (in this case, a human spirit). If you assume not, then obviously there's no free will, and you don't need any neurological studies to conclude that, be
Because that indicates that morality points to something more than just the physical world. When I try to reduce my sense of right and wrong and tell it "you're just a product of evolution", it doesn't fit. It makes the whole concept meaningless, so why should I listen to it?
Imagine if you asked me why I didn't like the idea of morals from the Bible, and I said "This reduces my sacred sense of morality to just God. It makes the whole concept of morality meaningless so why should I listen to it? Just because I don't want to go to hell?
You would probably protest that my vision of what God is must be different than yours or I would not have said that. By the same token I think you're concept of "Just the physical world" is different than my view of the physical world which encompasses everything in the universe. I feel like morality being a product of an amazing process like natural selection is rather inspiring in it's elegance. Some people do not like this idea, but I find it to be very beautiful.
The matter involved with a supposed miracle would be constrained in time, not just space. Things would go back to normal once its done.
Things may "Go back to normal", but now we can no longer look at the present state and back track to learn about the past. Imagine God changes the direction of a single photon. When we detect this photon we can in theory calculate where it must have been 1 million years ago (1 million light years away in some direction). But now all that is called into question.
This "fundamental assumption" as far as it dictating God is what I disagree with, and I claim does not stem from any scientific result.
No it doesn't. It is an assumption. It is an axiom. There is no proof for this. There *can* be no proof for this. This is why believing in miracles is such a problem. It assumes this axiom is false, and hence starts you from a position that is unscientific.
But this argument already assumes non-existence of a human spirit and its interaction with our physical bodies, and our consciousness is only apart of our mental mind. Which study are you referring to?
I would rephrase it as... This argument assumes the human spirit is physical in nature and our consciousness is an emergent property of underlying physical laws. Isn't that amazing?
Which study are you referring to?
There have been many.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will
But I do not believe in the existence of FSM because there is no evidence to. To put God and FSM on the same level of consideration is to ignore the mountain of historical scholarship associated with the Bible, and not to mention a lot of present-day testimonies of the miraculous happening, as well as my personal experiences.
What if I said that this requirement for evidence to believe something is inherently scientific, and it falsely grants science authority over the supernatural. Science works for everything except the supernatural. When it comes to FSM you must just have faith.
But you also get things like morality and intuitive awareness. These things are less quantitative, but nonetheless real. I've heard it argued that morality is just a product of human evolution's way of sustaining individuals and society as a whole, and I agree that it helps serve that function. But morality says there is more to itself than simply self-preservation.
Biology also says there is more to morality than self preservation, if by self you mean an individual. The theory of evolution by natural selection actually now provides a framework to explain the function of morality on the level of the gene. This explains altruism and empathy beyond your children, your family, extended family, and even species. If you look at evolution as a competition between genes, and consider that We actually share many genes with other human beings, and even with other species, it makes sense for morality and empathy to exist.
There's "meaning" to it, rather than just being a means-to-an-end, and its validity does not depend on the existence of myself or humanity. This phenomenon is independent of what the scientific method says of the physical world.
This is where I would disagree. But I would also ask why it is important that morality transcends humanity or the physical world?
So here it sounds like you could just treat the supernatural in the way that some hypothesize different dimensions or universes (i.e. string theory).
Except that science treats claims of string theory (or as I like to call it "string hypothesis") to be testable in principle as a phenomenon of nature, even if tests have not yet been devised. I think most physicists will agree that string theory is the unfortunate name of a hypothesis that has certainly not risen to the level of confidence of a theory.
But we have not somehow observed every single physical interaction on every scale, including those cases in which supposed miracles have occurred. What we have done is taken a tiny amount of data and extrapolated it to give a base understanding of how the universe works. We can't do any better than that as far as science is concerned.
No we haven't observed every particle in our science lab. But most of the atoms that existed at the time the events of the Bible took place, still exist. In fact, if Jesus was a real person, the odds that some of the atoms that comprised Jesus now comprise you are almost statistically inevitable. The time and place where all the miracles of the Bible supposedly took place are not so distant. The universe is 13 billion years old, and almost unfathomably large. If miracles were happening as of 2000 years ago on earth no less, we are basically living in miracle-land in basically the same time period in cosmological terms.
I don't mean to imply their intentions, I'm just stating a verifiable fact. That's what physicists do. And it's out of necessity, not because they necessarily want to. And even if we could build a supercomputer that could simulate everything that we know of in physics, they would still have to assume this because you never know what's beyond your ability to observe or measure.
The inability to disprove the supernatural claims of the Bible is not good evidence for their truth. There are an infinite number of things science can't disprove, like unicorns, fairies, and the flying spaghetti monster. I am willing to but the God of Abraham in this same category, and should be taken equally seriously.
The overall comment here is that God made physics, but is not subject to them, including their regularity. He also made our ability to reason and observe.
It could be true that God made the physics we know about and is not subject to his own laws. That doesn't rule out the possibility that whatever universe God lives in doesn't have physical laws that govern him. Maybe we will never
Check who posted what there, friend. You are quoting someone else.
You're right I though I was talking to the original poster this whole time. Sorry about that.
As far as other things you said, science and logic are not axioms - they are deductive and inductive methods (depending on the discipline) used upon your axioms.
No science and logic are not axioms in the sense that they are more than *just* axioms. I am referring to the idea of assuming the same axioms as logic and science, and therefore putting you in a logical/scientific point of view. From the point of view of science, entire fields of logic and mathematics can be treated as de facto axioms. In that same vein I am describing the idea of assuming these same "axioms", plus the axiom that scientific evidence and the scientific method are the only valid ways of determining objective truth. Maybe this is not true, but such is the nature of axioms.
I should point out that I don't think religion and science are incompatible in principle. There are forms of religion that do not require breaking the barrier between the natural and the super natural. These would be religions that are deist or pantheist in nature. But I do think science is mutually exclusive with any sort of religion which accepts miracles as reality.
In short, there is no science experiment that can disprove anything miraculous.
I agree with this statement and that's what the problem is. This is also why science assumes that they do no happen. Rejecting the premise that "miracles do not happen", is tantamount to rejecting science as a method determining objective truth.
You asserted that miracles "destroys the ability of nature to be repeatable". Keep in mind that Christians don't just assert the supernatural, but intelligence behind the supernatural. It's not just some "noise" that randomly messes with nature - there's intent and a purpose behind it. So, you would not expect it to show up as some statistical anomaly in a lab.
In science the entire universe is a science lab.
You will note that with physics experiments, they assume a "closed" model, where only the physical ("natural") phenomenon are assumed to operate (and usually they will make further assumptions on the simplicity of the interactions to make the math easier).
The way you phrase it makes it seem that physics acknowledges the existence of the supernatural and willingly concedes this domain to some other discipline (like theology). How I would describe it is that physics assumes a physical reality. Any non-physical claims can never be proven and are thus incompatible with physics. If it could somehow be shown that God was real, the view of physics would be that because God is real, he is now under the umnbrella of physics and it is the job of physics to understand the physical laws that govern the behavior of God.
And it makes sense to assume this for their intents and purposes because they are interested in how the physical (natural) world operates. But that should not be mistaken for "complete" or "open" knowledge of reality
I do not claim that I nor science has complete knowledge, or that I nor science right about anything with 100% certainty. In fact it is required by science to never be 100% sure you have complete knowledge.
Another example is in theoretical computer science. We know from the Halting Problem that there is no way to logically deduce whether any given program will halt or not. However, it is still the case that every program will either halt or run forever, even though logical deduction cannot determine which. Perfectly coherent, yet admittedly incomplete logical knowledge (and logic, here, is the one saying that it's incomplete).
I am well aware of the halting problem, and yes I agree there are problems for which we not only
When did I call young earth creationists dumb?
Well you made it seem like you were pretty unhappy with idea of being confused with someone who believed the earth was 6000 years old, when you said:
I really dislike young earth creationists expounding their views publicly. It gives people the false impression that one cannot be a Christian without thinking the Earth is 6017 years old, or whatever figure they're on these days.
I inferred this was because you thought this was a ridiculous view to hold. I think it's pretty ridiculous as well. Does that make young earth creationists dumb? I don't know, maybe that's not fair. They are still smarter than chimpanzees and dolphins. I would say it makes them dumber (relative) and not necessarily dumb (absolute). In any case I feel it was a fair inference on my part to assume you thought young earth creationists were dumb compared to you, although maybe you would be more politically correct about it.
The supernatural can invade the natural without violating any premise of the scientific method - it can only say things about stuff that's measurable and repeatable - this is no secret, and certainly not a refutation.
Except that the ability and history of the supernatural doing this, completely destroys the ability of nature to be repeatable. Every time you measure something you will not be sure if it is an accurate measurement or some kind of miracle occurring. All scientific data is in question. If someone ever disproves your theory, you can say that the evidence they used to disprove it may have been obtained during a miracle and therefore invalid, or worse you can say that your theory was the result of a miracle, and therefore it is correct because it was guided by the hand of God.
I believe in the authority of science because it's an extension of human observation and reason, but I'm also able to reason about that observation and reason, and realize what exactly it can and cannot do, and many people fail to do this.
I fully embrace the limitations of science, logic, and reason. These are limitations set by science logic and reason. Notice the humility of these disciplines.
The thing about what we're talking about is that foundations for any belief system, whether its called axioms in math, first principles in physics, or faith in Christianity, cannot be logically deduced into further basic things - otherwise you get infinite regression.
Agreed. This is one area where science and religion are quite similar. They both rely on axioms. The difference is that you aren't starting with logic and science as axioms. You are starting with religion as your axioms, and you are allowing religious concepts like miracles overrule.
This would be like me claiming to be a christian. I believe in the bible except when it contradicts science and logic. I therefore only believe the parts of the Bible that can be verified by science. So far I believe that there may have been a person named Jesus but he was probably just a regular person with some nice ideas of how we might want to live. There is however no heaven, no hell, no God, no virgin birth, no resurrection, etc. Am I really a Christian?
I'm not calling anyone dumb. That's a completely wrong term to use anyway for someone you disagree with in this context anyway, because it's not pointing out a fault in any system of reasoning.
No, it would not be christ-like to call anyone dumb. But you can let me infer that you think young creationists are dumb. Let me ask you this. Is *anybody* dumb?
What is your reason for *not* believing that a miracle is the reason the scientific evidence for an old earth wrong? My reason is that I have chosen the axiom of science and logic, and therefore don't believe in miracles. What's your reason? I am not saying I am sure I'm right, but I do have r
Well, we can kill them with the usual sort of weapons. Point is that it takes a while for humans to get out of hand.
We can kill robots with the usual sorts of weapons too (i.e. bullets, missiles, bombs, nukes). There's a few weapons that don't work as well like biological and normal chemical weapons, but then there are a few new weapons that would work like EMP, hacking, etc.
Well, then these improved humans, will it be cost effective to use them for anything in space?
Yes, for a few potential reasons.
1. These new humans could be made more robust for space travel (i.e. resistance to radiation) and require fewer resources to function (i.e. require sunlight rather than food, toilets, oxygen, etc). They could even be much smaller, requiring less rocket fuel to propel. They would essentially be human consciousnesses running in robotic bodies.
2. A human consciousness may no longer be limited to 1 body. It may be possible to upload a human consciousness to a small robot, send it to mars and then merge the consciousnesses back together once an hour, or once a day, or when the robot comes back to earth. If the robot is killed, the consciousness would only lose a few memories that were created since the last sync. These removes the restriction of needing to be extra super careful which is currently only done on manned missions.
Not at all. These missions are notorious for being rather lightweight on computational power.
Yes, exactly. The reason that a robot can't currently do as much as a person is because it is lightweight on computational power. The reason we send robots is because they are cost effective. Meaning the efficacy/cost is better with a robot.
And here's an issue with that. Who gets trusted with this sort of system? Say a business wants to set up a mining operation using self annealing, von Neumann machines that happen to be at least as smart as humans. What sort of controls would be in place to keep them from overrunning the Asteroid Belt, possibly even the entire galaxy?
What's to prevent humans form doing this? Let's say the Chinese set up a mining operation with human astronauts. What sort of controls do we have to keep them from overrunning the asteroid belt or the entire galaxy?
Humans can get out of control too in pretty much the same ways. But at least they want and need certain things; they act and communicate in certain ways; and it takes time and a lot of resources to make more viable humans (even if you're going the Star Wars cloning route). A population doubling time of 30 years (for a typical fertile human society) is a lot less risky than a population doubling time of one month.
That's going to change. As computers and nanorobots become more advanced, we will inevitably incorporate them into our own bodies. Maybe at first it will just be robots to clean out our arteries and kill cancer cells where they might pop up. But I think eventually it will also include things like adding more memory and processing power to our own brains, and finally replacing our weak physical bodies altogether.
Even in the Brave New World of superhuman robotics, you need some sort of real time off switch (or at least the ability to escalate to combat such threats on their own terms). And humans aren't going to accept another computer system as the control.
No, we are going to become the new computer system.
You don't have it as often. Both humans and moderately advanced robotics can find things to do while they wait too.
That's my point. Latency is becoming less of a problem as the away team becomes smarter. The theoretical limit is that the away team is as smart as the earth team and no communication is required at all, and therefore latency is not an issue ever.
Currently, there aren't.
Actually there are, and Nasa uses them. They are called robots. They are even starting to be used for unmanned missions on Earth because they are more cost effective in many capacities here.
It's not a computational problem and we're nowhere near any such limits of humans.
If we are talking about the effectiveness of machines vs. robots, it is 100% about computational power. It certainly isn't about strength or shininess. Otherwise we were bested a long time ago. It used to be that humans were better at every kind of computation than robots except doing arithmetic. Humans are currently still better at abstract thought, but now computers are also better at flying planes and spaceships, playing chess, and telling you the best route to take, etc. Soon they will be better at actually driving cars and visual processing.
Currently, on average a robot is much more cost effective. Yes humans are better at some things, but they are not worth the 100x+ cost.
Honestly for what task is a human being on mars going to be more cost effective in the near future?
You have the control/communication problem with human beings too. What happens when a human is not sure of what to do and he/she needs to wait for orders from earth, or earth needs to wait for the humans on mars to send data back to them.
You solve the communication problem for humans and machines in the same way. You make the algorithms smarter so they don't to be micromanaged. The only decisions that need to be made on earth are macro decisions like "what should we study next week" rather than "how should we drive around this rock" For humans this means a high level of training (which astronauts have). This was not possible back when computers were not as powerful. The proficiency of computers is growing exponentially. Just consider how many jobs computers are doing even in manned missions.
Yes humans are just an expensive payload, but why use them when there are more cost effective payload options?
Humans have basically hit their computational limit. The increase in human productivity is basically due to computer augmentation. At some point computer augmentation will be so great that the human contribution will be negligible.
The free market does not solve the tragedy of the commons problem. That does not make the free market bad or a failure. It is just not the right tool for that problem. For rewarding good investments and setting prices of goods and services, the free market works great. We should be using government regulation where that works best and the free market where that works best.
It is only ideologues who either claim the free market solves everything or that the free market solves nothing.
I don't agree that people should be free to make competitive cables, but that doesn't mean the market isn't free. If anything this is a DMCA issue involving the restriction of the circumvention of technical protection measures.
If this is evidence that the market isn't free than so is the fact that it is illegal to sell pirated DVDs at Walmart.
Can you give an example of a law assumed by the free market that limits people's ability to make choices?
The problem is: people already bought their iphones.
I thought Apple people were used to being pressured to continuously buy expensive apple stuff.
The software update will "brick their device", by making it incapable of being charged, by the power adapter that worked fine before.
Blocking use of an unsanctioned cable is not "bricking their device".
This is likely to result in a class action suit against Apple; potentially with a demand to repair/replace hardware that was rendered inoperable.
Apple exists in a state of constant litigation. What would be weird is if they didn't get sued or sue others.
(E.g. Replace customers' iPhones with new ones, that will work with all their charging cables, or pay the cost of replacement for all the 3rd party charging cables consumers had purchased, PLUS the price difference for any new cables the customer would have purchased from a 3rd party)
How about just don't upgrade to IOS7. Or better yet stop buying iphones in the future if you don't like being treated like shit.
You are not entitled to an iphone or IOS made to your preferred specifications, you are only entitled to choose what you buy. This is what the free market is.
This is why I propose Apple should not only block unauthorized and dangerous cables, they should start selling Apple certified electrical outlets with computer chips in them that authenticate them as being the real deal. This will not only prevent people from using dangerous counterfeit electrical outlets, but give Apple an opportunity to block dangerous counterfeit smartphones from being charged on the safe and authentic electrical outlets.
Yes but you started talking about how one-way trips are something that the government would never do. I never even suggested that this would be the government doing this at that point, but you wanted to talk about that for some reason. I was willing to go down that road because I don't mind allowing the topic to evolve.
Now you are bitching about the topic changing...
Just as a hypothetical example, we use the half lives of radioactive isotopes to date things. We assume that the half lives have remained constant since the big bang. And we use this to logically determine how old certain fossils and rocks are by measuring how many radioactive isotopes are left and calculating when these animals died or rocks were buried. We then discover that in fact the half lives of radioactive isotopes have been getting longer, which we then deduce means that the half lives were shorter in the past, and that things actually appeared to be much older than they really were. We come up with new equations to date things and it turns out things that we thought were 4.5 billion years old are actually only 6000 years old.
I will be the first to say that this is absolutely fucking ridiculously improbable. I will also say that this is at least a falsifiable claim, and therefore can be considered amongst all the other falsifiable claims as having some greater than 0 chance of being true. That doesn't mean you should believe it is true. It just means you shouldn't be 100% sure that it is false. I would consider this infinitely more likely than the idea that Jesus was the son of God, and even if it turned out the earth was 6000 years old, that doesn't lend anymore credibility to other unfalsifiable claims made in the Bible.
People a long time, when they had protologic, stumbled upon this neat trick for convincing other people they were right with "logic" that could not be falsified. religion is born. It turned out that while it was convincing to irrational humans, it was not actually very good at figuring out the truth. Later, other people decided that claims of this sort should not even be worthy of consideration, and logic/science is born.
Things which are thought to be false, are falsifiable, meaning that can be shown to be false, and presumably already have been. Things that are thought to be true *can* also be falsifiable, in the sense that it is possible for many things that we currently consider true to be shown to be false in the future given new evidence. By the same token things we think are false things can also be shown to be true given new evidence.
Some things fall into an entirely different category of unfalsifiable. These are the category of things that cannot even in principle ever be shown to be false. This doesn;t not mean that they are true, but it means they can never be verified. You might be tempted to believe such things must necessarily be true, if it were not for the fact that there are infinitely many unfalsifiable claims, many of which are mutually exclusive.
For example: "I claim that I am always right. Even when it seems like I am wrong, it only seems that way because other people who don't agree with me are wrong." Anything from expert opinions, eyewitnesses, scientists reading instruments can all be conceivably refuted with my claim. The problem with my claim is that there is no way to verify it's truth. It seems almost blatantly false, but if it were true, how would you know?
Falsifiable claims all exist in a realm in which there is actually some probability that they are true and some probability that they are false, and these probabilities can change over time with new evidence. Unfalsifiable claims exist in a realm where they can never be proven true or false. They are essentially useless.