So the focus of the seminar was on "climate change and its impact on development [in the developing world]" and not on deciding whether climate change was real. Fair enough.
Yes, it looks like they made a sensible, informed decision after this meeting, or perhaps before.
Why? [do they not wish to give airtime to denialists?] That is what we wish to know.
Who is "we"?
And honestly I would have thought the answer was self evident. The umbrella PR campaign of denial gets plenty of airtime on it's own, it doesn't need a publicly funded voice. Why should the taxpayer contribute to advertising for Monkton, who makes bags of money by his (well heeled) speaking tours? Does he need more money? The only airtime we should give these shysters is the expose which uncovers their lies, and forces them to account for those lies in front of the people they cheated.
The BBC needs to be more accountable. They should only be exempt from FOI requests when it comes to protecting journalistic sources, nothing else.
How do we know that this wasn't done for the safety of the people in the meeting? We saw what happened to Michael Mann, whose crime was to publish a controversial paper which was in the longer term proven to be essentially true.
After years of horrible persecution of scientists and accusing them of crimes for the results of their research and voicing their opinion, taking us back to the middle ages, perhaps now they will gain a bit more respect. But we're still far from paying them anything near what they deserve, anywhere in the world.
Your statement is extremist.
Michael Mann was accused (indirectly) of pedophilia. Is he a pedophile? If he is not, isn't this accusation an extreme one?
You are construing it as if the 'persecution' of scientists is a response to 'their research and voicing their opinion'. In reality that is an extremist framing of the truth, as it ignores and whitewashes a lot of misconduct that does not reasonably fall under either.
Care to detail exactly what this misconduct was, or are you going to slink away? Are you prepared to bring these accusations to a court, so that the scientist(s) in question might face their accuser?
I'm genuinely curious about how you will explain the evidence for climate change by mere misconduct on the part of thousands of conspirator scientists. How about Tyndall? Did those scientists travel back in time?.... Or, in fact, is Tyndall the source of the consipiracy... but how was secrecy maintained for 150 years?... Only fear could control such a diverse group of people for so long, but fear of what?.... Tyndall himself of course! That's it! Tyndall never died, he transformed himself into steam powered half machine/half 1800's man using 'steam punk' technologies!! Jules Verne hinted at it in his seminal work on the matter - which was why he was murdered!! And the TyndallMachine is of course be powered by coal, which is why his disciples tell us not to burn coal, they want to keep it all to ensure His immortality.
Will a mysterious albino scientist, replete with labcoat, murder me as well for revealing their secrets? Is that how this works?
The point being that I don't trust the safeguarding of my information to a person or group who thinks I'm a barbarian. Humanity is not actually divided into Americans and lesser humans.
Yes - the UN Declaration On Human Rights was certainly bad - for those of us who like to water board suspects and dislike having our actions questioned.
By way of comparison I don't remember the UN ever calling for the assassination of someone who merely published some factual material, nor did they declare such a person an "enemy of the state" nor are they in anyway implicated in an actual character assassination practiced on that person.
Also worth noting that the UN has never invaded a country on a false pretext and killed a 120 000 people. That is a lot of people. Their bodies make quite a large pile. There is an odd game of priority at play here on/. . Two US citizens get killed by drone strike - that's a travesty. Hundreds of innocent non US citizens are killed by drone strikes - that is merely unfortunate. Some people in a far off land are angry because of a stupid cartoon - that is an attack on our freeeeeeedom. A document reveals that a member of my own Parliament is a CIA informant - I had no right to that information and it should be suppressed from me, the voter.
The UN is by not by any means a perfect organisation - certain countries (e.g the US) arguably carry far more say than they should. But nevertheless they aren't the ones standing on a huge pile of bodies at this point in time. I don't know that they can be fully trusted. I know for sure that the US government cannot.
The most ironic thing is that atheism has become the new hate.
It's a fairly common character weakness to want to blame the world's ills on some "other" - on a group of faceless caricatures who differ from the "us" in some arbitrary way. The world's ills are the fault of the black, the jew, the brown immigrant, the arab, the gay, the muslim, the theist.
"Fortunate, then, that we aren't offering up these memories as evidence of god, but rather as a proof that Atheism is a belief."
What memories. Find me ONE person who "remembers" god.
As previously discussed, people frequently experience events that they remember as encounters with a deity. They also actively pursue other forms of remembering their beliefs - reading texts, reciting, actively pursuing an oral tradition that recalls encounters with the deity form previous generations (e.g. Judaism).
Whether these memories are accurate or not is irrelevant in the case of the shirt example. What is relevant is that they are remembered as true.
"because you haven't dealt with the counter arguments to Russell's teapot"
Yes I have. They are completely analogous. If you feel that there are counterpoints I haven't addressed, state them here IN YOUR OWN WORDS. I have to be sure you know what you're talking about since you haven't exactly been a paragon in this regard.
You are hung up on not wanting to discuss the anti teapot. If we mutually agree that we will not pursue some rhetorical means (e.g. wallpapering by producing multiple replies, trying to tire out the other person) and other such strategm, are we able to find a way forward here?
I don't think this line of rhetorical strategem is constructive. You DO have a habit of not responding to key parts of my posts, and this prevents the discussion from moving forward. However, now we have reached a stalemate again by constantly arguing about whose turn it is to prove an argument. For my part in that, I apologise.
I suspect (from experience) that they are likely to archive this thread before long. You have the option of continuing this discussion outside of this forum, albeit in a modified way to prevent the combatative behaviour we've seen here. Let me know what you would like to do.
"to believe something" simply means any cognitive content held as true in spite of the absence of proof or even evidence.
Some propositions we believe are also true (these are labelled on the diagram "knowledge") and some are not. In addition some truths we don't know.
"And belief is stored in exactly the same way."
Nuh uh. Citation please.
You think the things we believe don't need to be remembered by the brain? All knowledge is stored in synapses and neurons in the brain, regardless of whether is is held true by empirical means, or not.
"all information in the brain is stored in exactly the same way."
The key word is INFORMATION. Belief is not information.
Belief is information, since we need to remember the propositions we hold to be true (that is, what we believe).
"It tells us that since we accept some things to be true based on cognitive/memory/belief means alone,"
Remove the "belief" part, and your statement has merit.
You've got into a bit of a loop about this one. What I said is that within the context of the worked example, the terminology "sincere belief/memory" can be used interchangeably. The fact that this does not always apply is irrelevant.
You didn't correctly address the ontological argument either. And show working.
This whole discussion has been about the ontological argument: which is that Atheists assert that there are zero deities, and offer no proof of that assertion.
Incidentally, you haven't shown my WHY I didn't address it correctly. You're stuck now and you have no one to blame but yourself.
Not my job to do yours. Read the material correctly.
"Hence it certainly could be said that people remember God"
No they cannot. Just ask them.
"they certainly remember experiencing spiritual phenomena"
They remember feeling something which is itself not evidence of god.
Fortunate, then, that we aren't offering up these memories as evidence of god, but rather as a proof that Atheism is a belief.
"it is logically erroneous to assert that positive truth claims bear a burden of proof while negative truth claims do not."
Excellent. So you admit that a Zokooloo might exist since you haven't met your burden of evidence that it doesn't exist. This is know as being "hoisted by your own petard"
The Zokooloo is currently out of play because you haven't dealt with the counter arguments to Russell's teapot. In fact, I might just say that it has been demonstrated to be not analogous.
"Functionally a memory is a sincere belief"
But a sincere belief is not memory.
Irrelevant. A memory is interpreted, cognitively, as a sincere belief. We apply the same axioms of reliability.
Actually, given the fact that memory is stored in the brain in a physical manner, it's as much of physical evidence as a file in a computer's memory. Memory in itself is a kind of physical evidence in the brain.
And belief is stored in exactly the same way. So if one is physical evidence, so is the other.
Of course, evidence is taken in totality. So just like stuff can be put on to a computer to implicate someone, memories can also be false. It is suggestive and not conclusive.
Yes, exactly. Most relevant is that memory is subject to confirmation bias.
None of which means that it's not physical evidence.
Physically, all information in the brain is stored in exactly the same way. We only apply some heuristic when recalling it from memory. So if memory is physical evidence, so is all thought.
What does this tell us?
It tells us that since we accept some things to be true based on cognitive/memory/belief means alone, it is not reasonable to assume that everything needs to leave a physical trail of evidence. But we knew that anyway (e.g by understanding the limits of observation)
Well, as we established, recalled memory is a form of sincere belief. Hence it certainly could be said that people remember God - they certainly remember experiencing spiritual phenomena, and would readily offer these up if asked.
So the shirt argument is a winner. I'll be using it again. You've got hung up on some confusion about word definition, but you still accept that non-empirical methods, which are subject to confirmation bias, suffice when no physical evidence is available. Which means that, in your mind, it is perfectly reasonable to believe in something which by definition, will never have physical evidence.
in any case, you failed to address Chamberlains argument - which is, essentially:
"it is logically erroneous to assert that positive truth claims bear a burden of proof while negative truth claims do not.[11] All truth claims bear a burden of proof"
So Atheists have a burden of proof to prove that no deities exist. This is, of course, ontologically linked to the off TV and the 3 year old (demonstrating that we were not, originally, atheists), and to the number problem, which you felt uncomfortable about, and snipped from further discussion (thus, it it is considered proven). So there is no reason to assume that the number of deities is zero.
Atheism, with it's specific positive and negative assertions, for which there is no empirical proof, can only be reasonably considered a belief.
Slashdot Mirror
So the focus of the seminar was on "climate change and its impact on development [in the developing world]" and not on deciding whether climate change was real. Fair enough.
Why? [do they not wish to give airtime to denialists?] That is what we wish to know.
Who is "we"?
And honestly I would have thought the answer was self evident. The umbrella PR campaign of denial gets plenty of airtime on it's own, it doesn't need a publicly funded voice. Why should the taxpayer contribute to advertising for Monkton, who makes bags of money by his (well heeled) speaking tours? Does he need more money? The only airtime we should give these shysters is the expose which uncovers their lies, and forces them to account for those lies in front of the people they cheated.
The BBC needs to be more accountable. They should only be exempt from FOI requests when it comes to protecting journalistic sources, nothing else.
How do we know that this wasn't done for the safety of the people in the meeting? We saw what happened to Michael Mann, whose crime was to publish a controversial paper which was in the longer term proven to be essentially true.
After years of horrible persecution of scientists and accusing them of crimes for the results of their research and voicing their opinion, taking us back to the middle ages, perhaps now they will gain a bit more respect. But we're still far from paying them anything near what they deserve, anywhere in the world.
Your statement is extremist.
Michael Mann was accused (indirectly) of pedophilia. Is he a pedophile? If he is not, isn't this accusation an extreme one?
You are construing it as if the 'persecution' of scientists is a response to 'their research and voicing their opinion'. In reality that is an extremist framing of the truth, as it ignores and whitewashes a lot of misconduct that does not reasonably fall under either.
Care to detail exactly what this misconduct was, or are you going to slink away? Are you prepared to bring these accusations to a court, so that the scientist(s) in question might face their accuser?
I'm genuinely curious about how you will explain the evidence for climate change by mere misconduct on the part of thousands of conspirator scientists. How about Tyndall? Did those scientists travel back in time?.... Or, in fact, is Tyndall the source of the consipiracy ... but how was secrecy maintained for 150 years? ... Only fear could control such a diverse group of people for so long, but fear of what? .... Tyndall himself of course! That's it! Tyndall never died, he transformed himself into steam powered half machine/half 1800's man using 'steam punk' technologies!! Jules Verne hinted at it in his seminal work on the matter - which was why he was murdered!! And the TyndallMachine is of course be powered by coal, which is why his disciples tell us not to burn coal, they want to keep it all to ensure His immortality.
Will a mysterious albino scientist, replete with labcoat, murder me as well for revealing their secrets? Is that how this works?
You statement implies the atheism is less crazy than other religions - to which I would say [citation needed].
And how many people died in the Darfur Genocide? Where was the UN during that crisis?
Where were you? Do you hold yourself personally responsible for the deaths in Darfur? If not, then your comparison is ridiculous.
The point being that I don't trust the safeguarding of my information to a person or group who thinks I'm a barbarian. Humanity is not actually divided into Americans and lesser humans.
By way of comparison I don't remember the UN ever calling for the assassination of someone who merely published some factual material, nor did they declare such a person an "enemy of the state" nor are they in anyway implicated in an actual character assassination practiced on that person.
Also worth noting that the UN has never invaded a country on a false pretext and killed a 120 000 people. That is a lot of people. Their bodies make quite a large pile. There is an odd game of priority at play here on /. . Two US citizens get killed by drone strike - that's a travesty. Hundreds of innocent non US citizens are killed by drone strikes - that is merely unfortunate. Some people in a far off land are angry because of a stupid cartoon - that is an attack on our freeeeeeedom. A document reveals that a member of my own Parliament is a CIA informant - I had no right to that information and it should be suppressed from me, the voter.
The UN is by not by any means a perfect organisation - certain countries (e.g the US) arguably carry far more say than they should. But nevertheless they aren't the ones standing on a huge pile of bodies at this point in time. I don't know that they can be fully trusted. I know for sure that the US government cannot.
Including your own, of course
It's a fairly common character weakness to want to blame the world's ills on some "other" - on a group of faceless caricatures who differ from the "us" in some arbitrary way. The world's ills are the fault of the black, the jew, the brown immigrant, the arab, the gay, the muslim, the theist.
I assume you include your own religion in that judgement
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em I guess.
And notably of course our economy is so good that the government makes money by borrowing it.
See other posts.
"Fortunate, then, that we aren't offering up these memories as evidence of god, but rather as a proof that Atheism is a belief." What memories. Find me ONE person who "remembers" god.
As previously discussed, people frequently experience events that they remember as encounters with a deity. They also actively pursue other forms of remembering their beliefs - reading texts, reciting, actively pursuing an oral tradition that recalls encounters with the deity form previous generations (e.g. Judaism).
Whether these memories are accurate or not is irrelevant in the case of the shirt example. What is relevant is that they are remembered as true.
"because you haven't dealt with the counter arguments to Russell's teapot" Yes I have. They are completely analogous. If you feel that there are counterpoints I haven't addressed, state them here IN YOUR OWN WORDS. I have to be sure you know what you're talking about since you haven't exactly been a paragon in this regard.
You are hung up on not wanting to discuss the anti teapot. If we mutually agree that we will not pursue some rhetorical means (e.g. wallpapering by producing multiple replies, trying to tire out the other person) and other such strategm, are we able to find a way forward here?
I suspect (from experience) that they are likely to archive this thread before long. You have the option of continuing this discussion outside of this forum, albeit in a modified way to prevent the combatative behaviour we've seen here. Let me know what you would like to do.
"A memory is interpreted, cognitively, as a sincere belief."
But not JUST as a sincere belief. That JUST is where you fall into error.
And I repeat : belief encompasses recollection (memory): since everything we know, we also believe. Some things we believe are also objectively true, some things are not. In addition, truth and belief overlap: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Classical-Definition-of-Kno.svg See main article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology To quote
"to believe something" simply means any cognitive content held as true in spite of the absence of proof or even evidence.
Some propositions we believe are also true (these are labelled on the diagram "knowledge") and some are not. In addition some truths we don't know.
"And belief is stored in exactly the same way."
Nuh uh. Citation please.
You think the things we believe don't need to be remembered by the brain? All knowledge is stored in synapses and neurons in the brain, regardless of whether is is held true by empirical means, or not.
"all information in the brain is stored in exactly the same way."
The key word is INFORMATION. Belief is not information.
Belief is information, since we need to remember the propositions we hold to be true (that is, what we believe).
"It tells us that since we accept some things to be true based on cognitive/memory/belief means alone,"
Remove the "belief" part, and your statement has merit.
I think this might be confusion about word usage.
You've got into a bit of a loop about this one. What I said is that within the context of the worked example, the terminology "sincere belief/memory" can be used interchangeably. The fact that this does not always apply is irrelevant.
You didn't correctly address the ontological argument either. And show working.
This whole discussion has been about the ontological argument: which is that Atheists assert that there are zero deities, and offer no proof of that assertion.
Incidentally, you haven't shown my WHY I didn't address it correctly. You're stuck now and you have no one to blame but yourself.
Not my job to do yours. Read the material correctly.
"Hence it certainly could be said that people remember God" No they cannot. Just ask them. "they certainly remember experiencing spiritual phenomena" They remember feeling something which is itself not evidence of god.
Fortunate, then, that we aren't offering up these memories as evidence of god, but rather as a proof that Atheism is a belief.
"it is logically erroneous to assert that positive truth claims bear a burden of proof while negative truth claims do not." Excellent. So you admit that a Zokooloo might exist since you haven't met your burden of evidence that it doesn't exist. This is know as being "hoisted by your own petard"
The Zokooloo is currently out of play because you haven't dealt with the counter arguments to Russell's teapot. In fact, I might just say that it has been demonstrated to be not analogous.
"Functionally a memory is a sincere belief" But a sincere belief is not memory.
Irrelevant. A memory is interpreted, cognitively, as a sincere belief. We apply the same axioms of reliability.
Actually, given the fact that memory is stored in the brain in a physical manner, it's as much of physical evidence as a file in a computer's memory. Memory in itself is a kind of physical evidence in the brain.
And belief is stored in exactly the same way. So if one is physical evidence, so is the other.
Of course, evidence is taken in totality. So just like stuff can be put on to a computer to implicate someone, memories can also be false. It is suggestive and not conclusive.
Yes, exactly. Most relevant is that memory is subject to confirmation bias.
None of which means that it's not physical evidence.
Physically, all information in the brain is stored in exactly the same way. We only apply some heuristic when recalling it from memory. So if memory is physical evidence, so is all thought.
What does this tell us?
It tells us that since we accept some things to be true based on cognitive/memory/belief means alone, it is not reasonable to assume that everything needs to leave a physical trail of evidence. But we knew that anyway (e.g by understanding the limits of observation)
The shirt example demonstrates this excellently.
Not necessary - see later post. And I correctly understood set theory. You just didn't understand what I was saying.
You didn't correctly address his argument. Try again. And show working.
So the shirt argument is a winner. I'll be using it again. You've got hung up on some confusion about word definition, but you still accept that non-empirical methods, which are subject to confirmation bias, suffice when no physical evidence is available. Which means that, in your mind, it is perfectly reasonable to believe in something which by definition, will never have physical evidence. in any case, you failed to address Chamberlains argument - which is, essentially: "it is logically erroneous to assert that positive truth claims bear a burden of proof while negative truth claims do not.[11] All truth claims bear a burden of proof" So Atheists have a burden of proof to prove that no deities exist. This is, of course, ontologically linked to the off TV and the 3 year old (demonstrating that we were not, originally, atheists), and to the number problem, which you felt uncomfortable about, and snipped from further discussion (thus, it it is considered proven). So there is no reason to assume that the number of deities is zero. Atheism, with it's specific positive and negative assertions, for which there is no empirical proof, can only be reasonably considered a belief.
You've failed to address the topic at hand. I'm particularly interested in your failure to address Chamberlain's argument. That's a clincher.