I don't think one's expertise is necessarily an argument in a debate.
I am not arguing to the expertise - I am arguing as to why you are not understanding the problem so that you might understand the problem. If you had some engineering experience it would be easier since you would already have many of the prerequisite concepts at hand to draw upon.
If you are an expert on the topic at hand, you should be better at convincing a layperson;
But this gets at the heart of the problem I am stating: the way humans formulate meaning. It is not that simple to accept concepts that 'feel' wrong no matter how well you can follow and agree on the meanings of a logical system. You're in one system and it's not that one. It will always feel alien.
Here you 'feel' it is wrong that homeopathy is as I describe because of the meaning biases you have formed, perfectly naturally, as a function of how your brain works. Hence why the scientific method works and furthermore - and this is the tricky part - when it is [i]demonstratible[/i] scientifically that it is the case that one thing occurs but your mind tells you something else YOU SHOULD WORK TO ADJUST YOUR MIND TO THE SCIENCE, NOT THE SCIENCE TO THE MIND!
It's good to keep in mind that while not very popular in USA, homeopathy is widely embraced in Europe and elsewhere and in many of these countries homeopathy is practiced by MDs.
Still think we can escape the system by being cleverer? Every utterance is within it.
We both take opposite viewpoints for subjective reasons, and we try to beef them up with "research" or "scientific data". We both believe that our data is better, therefore we should win the argument.
No, it's more fundamental than that, for the reasons I am trying to enlighten on. You are still trying to think too 'meaningfully' about this. Remember, logic is cold. Meaning is warm.
when I talk about homeopathy I only refer to classic homeopathy, as practiced and invented by Hahnemann. No vibration crap, and always full interviews.
Why do you think homeopathy splintered off into these strange imagined realms in the first place? Why, it's because the invention of the double blind test to debunk homeopathy turned out to be pretty damn devastating.
Premature meaning is eliminated when you are blind.
homeopathic practitioners claim that remedies are proven to work in double blind studies and also on monkeys and babies, which significantly reduces the chances of placebo effect
One one side is blind: the meaning is still too premature even when you just think monkey's are still susceptible. If the placebo effect relies on the emotion of the user and monkeys don't understand what is going on like humans do (which is completelty obvious - we obviously understand, obviously. We are fundamentally different after all. We 'feel' this is true...) - well, it would be better if you told me myself where the bias arose there that we need to be rid of...
classic homeopathy is essentially empirical; remedies are (supposedly) entered into the pharmacopoeia only after being tested on a statistically significant number of people and found to have worked.
Worked? Hmm... are you sure simply checking 'worked' / 'not worked' is sufficient? Aren't we trying to validate the explanation, not describe the outcome...?
the esoteric theories of vibrations and water memory are more or rather less successful attempts to explain scientifically something that works, much like the shark's sense of smell
Isn't success our measure of correctness? I think we are trying to do a little more than just 'attempt' explanations are we not?
Since I have not read them, I can only use my own biased observation.
Right... which is kinda the problem because it WILL be flawed. Can you really pretend otherwise? Why are you bothering to defend homeopathy if you understand the issues here? What does it benefit you?
Seriously, we could have had this conversation about the curvature of the surface of the Earth some thousands of years ago. You think, "yeah, but flat Earth's are ridiculous," but you say that as if your brain had some fundamental prejudice against such obviously silly ideas and that somehow this idea is treated in a fundamentally different way.
You may think about it at that level - your brain does not; no more than a logic gate cares about what the bits its pushing about mean. THAT is the problem people have grokking the human ability to engage in such fallacious beliefs that nonetheless seem totally convincing to them. They don't understand the different levels of cognition involved.
I tried to make a point without relying on numbers as I do not have any authoritative sources.
The numbers here make the difference between the shark using a mechanism that cannot be explained without new physics and one that can be explained with existing physics.
As such it's very important - it is only shallowly analogous. The shark's senses, whilst highly sensitive, are not in any sense miraculous. How 'mind blown' you are by the result you should realise is irrelevant to the science of it.
In my mind, the explanation offered by our current understanding of science is unconvincing.
It is unconvincing that the shark senses blood by, uh, being in contact with it? Transmission of information requires a medium. Successful decoding of information requires a signal to noise ratio that is high enough for a receiver to reliably decode the information.
Now consider the sort of background noise a homeopathic explanation for the shark's senses would entail - some water memory nonsense or something. Also consider how much harder it would to have a mechanism that somehow has to untangle the information in the water so the shark can use it.
It would not seem that you are not an engineer of any sort are you? It again all comes down to the numbers so if you do not really understand what they entail then your notions of what would be too 'big' or 'small' are going to be liable to being incorrect.
I think the only reason it is accepted is that it is empirically observed and to deny the obvious would make even the most fundamentalist scientist look silly.
You say that like any other reason for accepting anything scientifically is valid.
(Of course homeopathy is NOT empirically observed. That's what all the proper science done on it shows. And yet here you are doing the very thing you think the other side is engaged in: namely formulating a plausible hypothetical world where it would work rather than attempt to derive the nature of the world we are in by seeing how it works.)
Hahnemann pioneered and always favored the centesimal or "C scale", diluting a substance 1 part in a 100 of diluent. Some homeopaths developed a decimal scale (D or X) diluting the substance 1 part in 10 of diluent. Hahnemann never used this scale but it was very popular throughout the 19th century and still is in Europe.
According to homeopathic dogma these must be inferior products then... or are you saying these ones work but others don't...
Hmm... I don't know how this is supposed to help the case for homeopathy or your shark analogy - at all.
Homeopathy has also been integrated into the national health care systems of numerous countries including India, Mexico, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom.
Ah - therefore it must be true!
Man, am I ever ashamed to have my country in that list.
I cannot recall if I told you this before or not but I will repeat it again:
NO ONE, not a single one of us, is immune to the kind of psychological effects I am describing here that explain how we can believe something is real even when it is not. It does not matter how clever you are - in the end you cannot change the hardware of the brain. Our brains formulate explanations in a certain way that is susceptible to these sorts of false positives. That means even the cleverest scientists can fall into this trap.
And of course you make the mistaken assumption that all that goes on in a national health system represents the best practises possible - now surely you cannot be that naive?
and most practitioners use dillutions lower than what we give sharks credit for.
So what the fuck has water memory got to do with it then? That's the explanation you have to create when there's no 'active' substance to speak of.
"Remove bias? You what? Nooooo, you increase the bias by assuming you can, somehow, magically avoid the psychology of confirmation and 'know', just by doing, that it works."
Sorry - you can't confirm it from within the system. You have to step out of the system. You can't do that - no one can. Therefore you must be blind to the system. The observer too must be blind to it. Double blinding. It works because it takes the out the human bias as much as possible.
Of course, you aren't biased. Nope. Of course not. You're special. You're unique. You aren't like those other humans - your brain could never engage in such an error. Nope.
Emotional window dressing for humans is not strictly necessary - it just improves the taste. In a sense you are basically advocating that science needs a marketer because humans are emotionally driven beasts who, because they want pleasure and because of the way they associate concepts will tend to equate 'what is true' (and truth as a concept is often only a very shallow 'what is my head model of the world - that is true' which lacks any depth of introspection) with 'what is pleasurable'.
Myself I'd go transhumanist but obviously a lot of people wouldn't like that idea for the aforementioned reasons...
The whole point of the placebo effect is that it is *NOT* a causation - it is a correlation. It is more a statement about how our brains formulate hypotheses about the world than it is some spooky, "the way you feel about something will change the outcome," effect.
Trust me, you can be down right negative about some remedy working and *STILL* get better and *STILL* want to associate the remedy with the result.
Unfortunately that's because those pushing 'natural' remedies and such that do work are more than happy to push other 'alternative' remedies that don't and either don't care about the distinction or don't understand it. It therefore all becomes one great mash-up because those involved in the alternative industry really don't seem to give a crap about whether or not their products actually do what they believe they do.
So was i a quack before the study, and not one after?
No. You're a quack if your shown that chewing gum has no effect and then start inventing reasons why the science cannot be correct and that gum chewing [i]is[/i] the reason.
YOU are making the promotion of the correlation to the causation - not your kids.
What do I mean by that? In a nutshell:
Events X, Y and Z occur in that order. Repeated observation of that pattern of occurrences is a correlation. XYZXYZXYZ... and so forth. The pattern is strengthened. The promotion from correlation to causation allows one to formulate the hypothesis: Z follows Y because Y caused Z, Y follows X because X caused Y and so on... You perform this sort of thing perfectly naturally as a function of your brain. The problem? Sometimes Z follows Y. Sometimes it may follow it a lot. But Y may not ever be causing Z.
And superstition is born. Science separates "child is well," followed, "child was given remedy," therefore, "remedy cured child" from "remedy had no effect, child became well for other reasons." And it must do this by removing the BIAS of the observer - the natural tendency for your brain to work just as it does.
And so the double blind trial is born and knowledge increases exponentially yet our brains are still, basically, superstitious and without innate understanding of this concept. To your brain if correlation occurs frequently enough it's causation. End of. Ideas are associated and that's that.
Re:I've thought long and hard on this subject. . .
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Science vs. Homeopathy
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· Score: 1
Maybe? I've seen it happen. Weird shit. And don't try to explain it away with science - trying to explain farting Leprechauns scientifically would make the science look ridiculous and hence wrong.
Shark Smell
Sharks have two nostrils through which some can detect odors up to 91 meters away (about the length of a football field). Some species can smell one molecule of blood in over one million molecules of water - that's equal to one drop of blood in 94 liters (25 gallons) of water. Some sharks hunt for food like dogs following scent trails. They swim back and forth searching for trails of scent and then follow the strongest one.
For more perspective, 1ml of a solution which has gone through a 30C dilution would have been diluted into a volume of water equal to that of a cube of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 meters per side, or about 105 light years.
These are MASSIVE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE in difference - mind bogglingly huge. It was bunk then, it's bunk now and now amount of trying to retrofit things is going to change the fact that homeopathic 'remedies' are just water. Water. Nothing else remains. And that's not even taking into account the weird things that would have to happen if it actually was true - just think about all the infinitesimally small things out there that are diluted in all the water you come into contact every day!
Details are important and I cannot emphasise enough just how fucking huge the scale difference is in your analogy here.
What bothers me is why would respected scientists chose to go ahead and publish such revolutionary research, bound to be thoroughly examined by their peers, if they did not have the results to back it up?
Humans are weird and scientists are human. They are not any more immune to delusions than the rest of us. That's why the method is paramount and replication vital to ensure self-bullshitting has not occurred. It happens. All the time. Even to the best of us.
I'm not a n00b but the installer is damn useful in and of itself. I installed debian on an old laptop where trying more conventional methods would have failed badly. Namely because the CD-ROM on the laptop was fucked and it would not boot from a USB key.
1. Certainly physical reality can be described mathematically, but is it unkown whether physical reality can be _adequately_ described mathematically in order to recreate the processes of the human brain.
Well the problem of incompleteness, as you have touched on, it that it is NOT possible to know if your description is 'adequate'. However it could be interpreted that incompleteness is mathematics stating that it cannot decide if the axioms you choose for a particular mathematics is valid or not. Appealing to the 'metamathematics' or 'higher' authourity to 'decide' validity (by adding a new axiom) only leads to an infinite cycle because the 'mathematics' is of equal power as the 'metamathematics' - that is there is nothing new that grants metamathematics the ability to 'decide' whether or not its axioms are any more valid than 'mathematics'. The critical threshold for this disturbing result seems to be the ability for mathematics to self-refer.
So you can take it or leave it as to whether or not it is the case that mathematics is adequate to describe the physical but it is not adequate to decide on the whole of physics since there is always going to be a hole which cannot be decided within the system and would need empirical verification.
It is not reasonable to assume that all the processes of the brain are isomorphic to some complex mathematical system,
No, it's absolutely reasonable if you accept premise 1. It is question-begging to accept the brain as a physical system, accept physics as a mathematical one and then deny that the brain is isomorphic to a mathematical system.
It is also jumping to conclusions to say that understanding the physical reality of our brains will explain the mind and its' intelligence.
Representation is explanation.
Whether computers are sufficient to represent any other mathematical system may hinge on the halting problem and the inability to formally define the mathematical system completely and self-consistently.
See the above answer: the power of mathematics is so much that it can eat itself. The halting problem, in a way, is a nonsense question which asks: "Give me a finite proof for every infinite property of the natural numbers." Now if you can see why requiring a 'finite' proof for every infinite property is basically an arbitrary limit then it is not too much of a leap to see there must be infinite proofs of these things. The problem with infinite proofs, of course, is that you need an infinite amount of time to generate them. And in a way this is just equivalent to saying, "this cannot be answered."
[blockquote]Would these machines be 'more human' than people? Or would they simply be better at math?[/blockquote]
If physics is describable mathematics and understanding physics could be said to be intelligent then being better at math would be an advantage. If fact we can see how being poor at math, and similar other activities, makes one less intelligent in general.
But you are right of course - no formal discussion of the intelligence of humans or machines can be done without a formal understanding of what intelligence exhibits as far as observable properties.
Now given that I have no reason to think that we cannot build machines we'd recognise as intelligent if we accept that:
Our physical reality can be described mathematically.
As part of physical reality our brains are essentially isomorphic to some complex mathematical system.
Computers are sufficient to represent any other mathematical system.
We should therefore reason that it is possible and the problem is probably more one of managing complexity in design; something that is very hard to do. Having evolved the brain as an organ has been in development for millions of years. If a solution can be found natural selection will find it - but it might take a long time to do so.
I think a 'breeding' of intelligent machines could be done to get our machines to 'pass' a series of intelligence tests. Better they do, the more 'intelligent' we say that machine is.
So what? There were people living at the time of Hercules but I don't see you worshipping Zeus. Clearly the simple fact that homo sapiens has existed for 300,000 odd years isn't sufficient is it now?
If you deny historical accounts of Jesus existence, you deny all historical records.
No, I really don't. I only have to deny the veracity of the Gospels - putting a whole dent in that 'Gospel Truth' phrase.
In the scientific method, people formulate hypothesis. Time and time again these hypothesis are discovered to be incorrect and reformulated.
Uh, yeah. That's kind of the point. Remove everything that is false and assume what is left is true. That's how it works.
That bother you? Science is not for you then.
Evolution will never be able to answer this particular question you will end up refactoring it indefinitely.
Oh, you want definitive answers. Again, that's mathematics down the hall, just ignore that Kurt Godel fellow or you might get depressed.
Otherwise you'll just have to accept the fact that self-correction is a strength, not a weakness.
This is just your personal opinion.
No, it really isn't. There are no scientific alternatives. That's not an opinion, just a fact. (Sorry, ID advocates screaming that it is scientific does not make it so. They are liars. People lie - religious people doubly so - that's just a fact. An uncomfortable one for you but one nonetheless.)
Science preceded evolution. The Roman Catholic church preceded evolution. Before evolutioon came along, science was not athiestic.
No. The method has always being atheistic even if its adherents have not. (Would you at least spell it right eh?) How exactly is the RCC relevant here? Are you trying to say older things are more true? If so, I've got some tribal belief systems that should be right up your alley!
Just because a few people decided that science can only be athiestic does not make it so.
That is correct. The problem is that just because you have decided that your god must be involved there doesn't mean it can. Hey, you want to believe that science is the search for the face of your god or something knock yourself out. Science can't actually say anything about it though. Science doesn't give a crap about human egocentrism.
The problem is that you have the concept floating around in your tiny head that atheism entails all sorts of things it doesn't. This is quite common for those who inform themselves about epistemological matters through Wikipedia. But, here, let me lay it out for you because I'm a generous man: atheism = without gods. That's it. Anything else is superfluous.
Now - here's the problem for you. If you want to say, "SCIENCE IS NOT GODLESS!" then which god is it not godless of? I suggest that once you have undone the great East/West split and rolled all the Protestant churches back into Catholicism, merged back with Judaism and incorporated Islam - then absorbed Hinduism, Buddism, Taoism and so forth - you know, when you god guys have figured it all out amongst yourselves - then you might be able to make a case. Until then Science Is Atheistic is a mantra that serves you just as well - even if it were not just a fact of the system being totally unemotional.
You other comments are irrelevant from a scientific perspective.
Excellent, you are learning.
Personal opinion.
Sorry, you lose again. Stating it's my personal opinion does not make it so. But then since your entire knowledge of science seems to come through a distorted lens of Catholicism it is hardly surprising. Don't you have enough embarrassing things to deal with without making yourselves look even more outdated?
The truth is that no one living today was around when the world was created.
The truth is that no one living today was around when Jesus was supposedly killed on a cross.
Hmm...
It is like saying you have the number 4 and telling me that it came about definitively by adding 2 and 2 together. However, you can also get 4 by adding 1 and 3. Either way you still have 4. The same is true of the universe.
Not really but your simplifications are cute.
evolution is not valid as the only answer.
It is the only valid scientific one despite protests to the contrary.
The problem with the evolution debate as it stands in schools is that it pushes an atheistic belief system on to everyone under the guise of science.
The atheistic 'belief system' doesn't include gods. Neither does any scientific hypotheses. Science is atheistic. Deal with it. You can include any gods you want on your own time.
This is not reasonable, rational or correct.
I'm afraid it is. The personal heartfelt beliefs of people don't get to trump the cold unemotional world of numbers just because people like that story better.
I don't really see anyone ever trying to refute Creationism.
Well if you will go ahead and posit and unfalsifiable hypothesis, well, I guess we just have to accept it as true then...
The approach seems to be I don't believe in God, therefore you are wrong and people stop there. However, that does not use the scientific method.
No, the scientific method says that if you posit a 'god' you're the one with the responsibility to attach meaning to that jumble of letters.
It seems to be a double standard that you can try to apply the scientific method to show that evolution is possible while creation is not.
That's not a double standard - that's applying one standard. It would be using double standards to shoehorn a 'god' into the equation when nothing scientific can be said about such a thing.
I don't know anyone who believes in God and yet does not believe in Creation.
You lack of knowledge of god concepts validates your limited conceptualisation of gods?
Therefore, for something finite to be created it would have to come from something infinite. Otherwise, that too would also be a god.
So the finite creating the finite is a god... Yeah... that makes no sense at all.
To the athiest, I ask you to prove to me the non-existence of God. I have never found anyone who can do this.
First, prove the non-existence of Leprechauns. I have never found a god believer who can do this.
Without proof, both methods of the birth of Universe are possible and thus both should be taught.
Ah, you have such a limited concept of what possible birth methods they might be - either it's Biblical Creation as written down in the Middle East by people suffering ergot poisoning or it's that nonsense science tells us based on observing the universe.
Sorry bucko, just because you think 'God' is the only alternative doesn't mean it is. There's a whole infinite world of untapped potential on the whole 'ideas you can't show wrong because you literally cannot show them wrong' front.
Do you know what ID proposes? It proposes that if evolution is wrong then it's right.
Sorry boys and girls, science doesn't like false dichotomies. You don't get to decide a default position just because you want to.
The ID guys are less than the Evolution guys. That's mainly because they have avoided doing science in order to re-brand Creationism and pretend they aren't really talking about Yahweh as the designer.
Slashdot Mirror
I fail to see the relevance here.
Do you understand the concept of bias?
I am not arguing to the expertise - I am arguing as to why you are not understanding the problem so that you might understand the problem. If you had some engineering experience it would be easier since you would already have many of the prerequisite concepts at hand to draw upon.
But this gets at the heart of the problem I am stating: the way humans formulate meaning. It is not that simple to accept concepts that 'feel' wrong no matter how well you can follow and agree on the meanings of a logical system. You're in one system and it's not that one. It will always feel alien.
Here you 'feel' it is wrong that homeopathy is as I describe because of the meaning biases you have formed, perfectly naturally, as a function of how your brain works. Hence why the scientific method works and furthermore - and this is the tricky part - when it is [i]demonstratible[/i] scientifically that it is the case that one thing occurs but your mind tells you something else YOU SHOULD WORK TO ADJUST YOUR MIND TO THE SCIENCE, NOT THE SCIENCE TO THE MIND!
And in Korea people worry about fan death. http://www.fandeath.net/
Still think we can escape the system by being cleverer? Every utterance is within it.
No, it's more fundamental than that, for the reasons I am trying to enlighten on. You are still trying to think too 'meaningfully' about this. Remember, logic is cold. Meaning is warm.
Why do you think homeopathy splintered off into these strange imagined realms in the first place? Why, it's because the invention of the double blind test to debunk homeopathy turned out to be pretty damn devastating.
Premature meaning is eliminated when you are blind.
One one side is blind: the meaning is still too premature even when you just think monkey's are still susceptible. If the placebo effect relies on the emotion of the user and monkeys don't understand what is going on like humans do (which is completelty obvious - we obviously understand, obviously. We are fundamentally different after all. We 'feel' this is true...) - well, it would be better if you told me myself where the bias arose there that we need to be rid of...
Worked? Hmm... are you sure simply checking 'worked' / 'not worked' is sufficient? Aren't we trying to validate the explanation, not describe the outcome...?
Isn't success our measure of correctness? I think we are trying to do a little more than just 'attempt' explanations are we not?
It is clear you did not understand what I said - I understand why of course and why you couldn't help it.
The marketing and economics of science should never be seen as a primary activity.
Nothing you say is fundamentally wrong - it just mashes up the concepts too much.
Seriously, we could have had this conversation about the curvature of the surface of the Earth some thousands of years ago. You think, "yeah, but flat Earth's are ridiculous," but you say that as if your brain had some fundamental prejudice against such obviously silly ideas and that somehow this idea is treated in a fundamentally different way.
You may think about it at that level - your brain does not; no more than a logic gate cares about what the bits its pushing about mean. THAT is the problem people have grokking the human ability to engage in such fallacious beliefs that nonetheless seem totally convincing to them. They don't understand the different levels of cognition involved.
The numbers here make the difference between the shark using a mechanism that cannot be explained without new physics and one that can be explained with existing physics.
As such it's very important - it is only shallowly analogous. The shark's senses, whilst highly sensitive, are not in any sense miraculous. How 'mind blown' you are by the result you should realise is irrelevant to the science of it.
It is unconvincing that the shark senses blood by, uh, being in contact with it? Transmission of information requires a medium. Successful decoding of information requires a signal to noise ratio that is high enough for a receiver to reliably decode the information.
Now consider the sort of background noise a homeopathic explanation for the shark's senses would entail - some water memory nonsense or something. Also consider how much harder it would to have a mechanism that somehow has to untangle the information in the water so the shark can use it.
It would not seem that you are not an engineer of any sort are you? It again all comes down to the numbers so if you do not really understand what they entail then your notions of what would be too 'big' or 'small' are going to be liable to being incorrect.
You say that like any other reason for accepting anything scientifically is valid.
(Of course homeopathy is NOT empirically observed. That's what all the proper science done on it shows. And yet here you are doing the very thing you think the other side is engaged in: namely formulating a plausible hypothetical world where it would work rather than attempt to derive the nature of the world we are in by seeing how it works.)
According to homeopathic dogma these must be inferior products then... or are you saying these ones work but others don't...
Hmm... I don't know how this is supposed to help the case for homeopathy or your shark analogy - at all.
Ah - therefore it must be true!
Man, am I ever ashamed to have my country in that list.
I cannot recall if I told you this before or not but I will repeat it again:
NO ONE, not a single one of us, is immune to the kind of psychological effects I am describing here that explain how we can believe something is real even when it is not. It does not matter how clever you are - in the end you cannot change the hardware of the brain. Our brains formulate explanations in a certain way that is susceptible to these sorts of false positives. That means even the cleverest scientists can fall into this trap.
And of course you make the mistaken assumption that all that goes on in a national health system represents the best practises possible - now surely you cannot be that naive?
So what the fuck has water memory got to do with it then? That's the explanation you have to create when there's no 'active' substance to speak of.
You are trying to support the rele
"Remove bias? You what? Nooooo, you increase the bias by assuming you can, somehow, magically avoid the psychology of confirmation and 'know', just by doing, that it works."
Sorry - you can't confirm it from within the system. You have to step out of the system. You can't do that - no one can. Therefore you must be blind to the system. The observer too must be blind to it. Double blinding. It works because it takes the out the human bias as much as possible.
Of course, you aren't biased. Nope. Of course not. You're special. You're unique. You aren't like those other humans - your brain could never engage in such an error. Nope.
Yes, mathematics.
Emotional window dressing for humans is not strictly necessary - it just improves the taste. In a sense you are basically advocating that science needs a marketer because humans are emotionally driven beasts who, because they want pleasure and because of the way they associate concepts will tend to equate 'what is true' (and truth as a concept is often only a very shallow 'what is my head model of the world - that is true' which lacks any depth of introspection) with 'what is pleasurable'.
Myself I'd go transhumanist but obviously a lot of people wouldn't like that idea for the aforementioned reasons...
The whole point of the placebo effect is that it is *NOT* a causation - it is a correlation. It is more a statement about how our brains formulate hypotheses about the world than it is some spooky, "the way you feel about something will change the outcome," effect.
Trust me, you can be down right negative about some remedy working and *STILL* get better and *STILL* want to associate the remedy with the result.
Without facts science is just mathematics.
YOU are making the promotion of the correlation to the causation - not your kids.
What do I mean by that? In a nutshell:
Events X, Y and Z occur in that order. Repeated observation of that pattern of occurrences is a correlation. XYZXYZXYZ... and so forth. The pattern is strengthened. The promotion from correlation to causation allows one to formulate the hypothesis: Z follows Y because Y caused Z, Y follows X because X caused Y and so on... You perform this sort of thing perfectly naturally as a function of your brain. The problem? Sometimes Z follows Y. Sometimes it may follow it a lot. But Y may not ever be causing Z.
And superstition is born. Science separates "child is well," followed, "child was given remedy," therefore, "remedy cured child" from "remedy had no effect, child became well for other reasons." And it must do this by removing the BIAS of the observer - the natural tendency for your brain to work just as it does.
And so the double blind trial is born and knowledge increases exponentially yet our brains are still, basically, superstitious and without innate understanding of this concept. To your brain if correlation occurs frequently enough it's causation. End of. Ideas are associated and that's that.
Yep: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo
Maybe? I've seen it happen. Weird shit. And don't try to explain it away with science - trying to explain farting Leprechauns scientifically would make the science look ridiculous and hence wrong.
Details are important and I cannot emphasise enough just how fucking huge the scale difference is in your analogy here. Humans are weird and scientists are human. They are not any more immune to delusions than the rest of us. That's why the method is paramount and replication vital to ensure self-bullshitting has not occurred. It happens. All the time. Even to the best of us.
I'm not a n00b but the installer is damn useful in and of itself. I installed debian on an old laptop where trying more conventional methods would have failed badly. Namely because the CD-ROM on the laptop was fucked and it would not boot from a USB key.
So you can take it or leave it as to whether or not it is the case that mathematics is adequate to describe the physical but it is not adequate to decide on the whole of physics since there is always going to be a hole which cannot be decided within the system and would need empirical verification. No, it's absolutely reasonable if you accept premise 1. It is question-begging to accept the brain as a physical system, accept physics as a mathematical one and then deny that the brain is isomorphic to a mathematical system. Representation is explanation. See the above answer: the power of mathematics is so much that it can eat itself. The halting problem, in a way, is a nonsense question which asks: "Give me a finite proof for every infinite property of the natural numbers." Now if you can see why requiring a 'finite' proof for every infinite property is basically an arbitrary limit then it is not too much of a leap to see there must be infinite proofs of these things. The problem with infinite proofs, of course, is that you need an infinite amount of time to generate them. And in a way this is just equivalent to saying, "this cannot be answered."
But you are right of course - no formal discussion of the intelligence of humans or machines can be done without a formal understanding of what intelligence exhibits as far as observable properties.
Now given that I have no reason to think that we cannot build machines we'd recognise as intelligent if we accept that:
- Our physical reality can be described mathematically.
- As part of physical reality our brains are essentially isomorphic to some complex mathematical system.
- Computers are sufficient to represent any other mathematical system.
We should therefore reason that it is possible and the problem is probably more one of managing complexity in design; something that is very hard to do. Having evolved the brain as an organ has been in development for millions of years. If a solution can be found natural selection will find it - but it might take a long time to do so.I think a 'breeding' of intelligent machines could be done to get our machines to 'pass' a series of intelligence tests. Better they do, the more 'intelligent' we say that machine is.
So what? There were people living at the time of Hercules but I don't see you worshipping Zeus. Clearly the simple fact that homo sapiens has existed for 300,000 odd years isn't sufficient is it now?
No, I really don't. I only have to deny the veracity of the Gospels - putting a whole dent in that 'Gospel Truth' phrase.
Uh, yeah. That's kind of the point. Remove everything that is false and assume what is left is true. That's how it works.
That bother you? Science is not for you then.
Oh, you want definitive answers. Again, that's mathematics down the hall, just ignore that Kurt Godel fellow or you might get depressed.
Otherwise you'll just have to accept the fact that self-correction is a strength, not a weakness.
No, it really isn't. There are no scientific alternatives. That's not an opinion, just a fact. (Sorry, ID advocates screaming that it is scientific does not make it so. They are liars. People lie - religious people doubly so - that's just a fact. An uncomfortable one for you but one nonetheless.)
No. The method has always being atheistic even if its adherents have not. (Would you at least spell it right eh?) How exactly is the RCC relevant here? Are you trying to say older things are more true? If so, I've got some tribal belief systems that should be right up your alley!
That is correct. The problem is that just because you have decided that your god must be involved there doesn't mean it can. Hey, you want to believe that science is the search for the face of your god or something knock yourself out. Science can't actually say anything about it though. Science doesn't give a crap about human egocentrism.
The problem is that you have the concept floating around in your tiny head that atheism entails all sorts of things it doesn't. This is quite common for those who inform themselves about epistemological matters through Wikipedia. But, here, let me lay it out for you because I'm a generous man: atheism = without gods. That's it. Anything else is superfluous.
Now - here's the problem for you. If you want to say, "SCIENCE IS NOT GODLESS!" then which god is it not godless of? I suggest that once you have undone the great East/West split and rolled all the Protestant churches back into Catholicism, merged back with Judaism and incorporated Islam - then absorbed Hinduism, Buddism, Taoism and so forth - you know, when you god guys have figured it all out amongst yourselves - then you might be able to make a case. Until then Science Is Atheistic is a mantra that serves you just as well - even if it were not just a fact of the system being totally unemotional.
Excellent, you are learning.
Sorry, you lose again. Stating it's my personal opinion does not make it so. But then since your entire knowledge of science seems to come through a distorted lens of Catholicism it is hardly surprising. Don't you have enough embarrassing things to deal with without making yourselves look even more outdated?
Hmm... Not really but your simplifications are cute. It is the only valid scientific one despite protests to the contrary. The atheistic 'belief system' doesn't include gods. Neither does any scientific hypotheses. Science is atheistic. Deal with it. You can include any gods you want on your own time. I'm afraid it is. The personal heartfelt beliefs of people don't get to trump the cold unemotional world of numbers just because people like that story better. Well if you will go ahead and posit and unfalsifiable hypothesis, well, I guess we just have to accept it as true then... No, the scientific method says that if you posit a 'god' you're the one with the responsibility to attach meaning to that jumble of letters. That's not a double standard - that's applying one standard. It would be using double standards to shoehorn a 'god' into the equation when nothing scientific can be said about such a thing. You lack of knowledge of god concepts validates your limited conceptualisation of gods? So the finite creating the finite is a god... Yeah... that makes no sense at all. First, prove the non-existence of Leprechauns. I have never found a god believer who can do this. Ah, you have such a limited concept of what possible birth methods they might be - either it's Biblical Creation as written down in the Middle East by people suffering ergot poisoning or it's that nonsense science tells us based on observing the universe.
Sorry bucko, just because you think 'God' is the only alternative doesn't mean it is. There's a whole infinite world of untapped potential on the whole 'ideas you can't show wrong because you literally cannot show them wrong' front.
Do you know what ID proposes? It proposes that if evolution is wrong then it's right.
Sorry boys and girls, science doesn't like false dichotomies. You don't get to decide a default position just because you want to.
The ID guys are less than the Evolution guys. That's mainly because they have avoided doing science in order to re-brand Creationism and pretend they aren't really talking about Yahweh as the designer.
The ultimate irony of evolution is that the breeders can't understand it?
Hmm... I guess Yahweh wants us to be ignorant of pretty much anything that doesn't revolve around worshipping him then.