If the truth changes all the time what good is the truth?

Wait wait wait. So you're saying that truth is independent of belief?

That's pretty much the same thing. There aren't many people that roll out of bed in the morning and say to themselves that they will intentionally make the world worse today.

Ya but there are a lot of reasons you might not be allowed to put cattle mutilation in the paper. I bet if I had a column I filled with roadkill pictures some people would want to put a stop to it too.

So what exactly was s/he publishing and why was s/he told to stop?

So when you use the word reality you're talking about something that doesn't have to be the same as "what's really going on"? I think that's a big source of confusion because to the rest of us that's pretty much exactly what we mean by reality. Personally I'd use the term world view for what you seem to be talking about.



We were saying something more like "why not just not agree that lions and cheetahs can eat you? Believe their teeth are made out of squeeky toys and that their claws are balloon animals. If belief can change what's actually happening it should be that easy."

You said yourself that it's not betting the planet. It would just be a "bad day."

But why not just believe that there are no reptilians and all of that if reality is what you make it? If it works how you've been saying you could just choose for newscasters to be a bunch of pricks doing their best to support party views while having some general flaws in their thinking that cause a variety of problems and fail to handle others.

I'm sure it looks to you like that's the world I've chosen and if that's all it takes for things to be "real" why not choose the same yourself? Did you accidentally choose something a lot worse and there's no do overs?

You have that choice every waking moment. You'd want to do a little research to make sure you did it the right way but brain damage could effectively take you there.

Thing is though that given the choice between essentially being too retarded to take care of yourself but happy vs intelligent enough that you recognize the hardships of life it's no contest. The story of Oedipus is enough to show that we had already firmly decided as a species which we prefer ages ago.

*he ends up king of a prosperous country with a happy family but then he learns that it's all really horrible as he married his mother and had incest babies. She kills herself and he stabs his eyes out. There was this big prophecy where everyone basically knew it was going to happen too but he in ignorance everyone's attempts to avoid the situation are what made it happen. Had he known before he acted in those ways it would have been easy to prevent.

Not even a million will die? Seems like kind of a small death toll for something so many football fields large.

But we've already landed a satellite on an asteroid. Whether that one is dense or not-dense we shouldn't have that rough of a time deflecting it. Still some odds that we'd fail but you multiply the chance of that with the chance of it hitting in the first place and it gets awfully small.

The question is why do you remember?

You sort of can decide they don't exist but you need a lifetime of practicing doing that and most people are never going to learn to shut off their perception like that.

But nonetheless if you mangle both of their legs they can decide that their legs are fine all they want but they're not going to be able to walk and very shortly they'll probably have to decide that their nose didn't just hit the ground to keep their own little "reality" going.

And you definitely don't get to decide that you didn't get shot in the head 32 times or anything like that.

That's a really dead on summary. Yup.

To tell the truth I don't care about what's true. True doesn't mean anything to me the way you've used it. The snarky thing I said in my last post is essentially why.

So really it's been about strong philosophy and all the long reminders of how science works are just here because certain people turn every fight against them into a "me vs science/religion" thing and I fit into the one much more easily than the other.

Well the difference between invisible pink unicorns and my god is that my god is better because I say and feel so and if anybody says or feels otherwise they don't count. You can say that about invisible pink unicorns. Ok, you can but then it wouldn't count as per above.

I prefer to talk about negative evidence. You cannot completely prove that anything doesn't exist, you can only find the things that are there.

There might be a teacup in Earth's orbit on the exact opposite side of the Sun from us. It's certainly possible although not remotely probable. We can't prove there isn't first of all because it's hard to get somewhere with a line of sight to such a location, secondly because even if we could no telescope would be able to resolve a teacup at-

ok, little aside. Most of our satellites and such are less than 6,325 kilometers from the surface of the Earth. That number happens to be the radius of Earth and I've only chosen it to give a sense of scale. The Moon is 385,000 kilometers away.
So to the point: While the satellites that scan the surface of the Earth to make pictures like those used in Google Earth or whatever map/weather service are able to resolve things human-sized or around that if you point them at the moon they would have a hard time resolving something more like the size of a house. Now the Earth is about 150,000,000 kilometers from the sun so if you just went sideways enough to see the other side of our orbit you'd have to look almost 300 million kilometers to see the supposed location of the teacup.

-that location. Even if we sent some rocket full of people there they'd have no hope of searching an earth sized area for a teacup. If we send a bunch of satellites there to just do picture scans for teacups there would be lots of places where some bit of dust created a cone shaped blind spot where the teacup could be.

So basically we could bankrupt the resources of the Earth looking for this teacup but never prove it wasn't there. However, if it actually was there we might find it with a single astronaut in a single day and then it would be settled. Bam. Teacup. Right there. Saw it and took pictures. 0 doubt left.

This is what makes strong arguments strong and weak arguments weak. "Compound x is the chemical in the snake venom that acts as the poison" so if you remove it and the venom is still poisonous you know the claim was wrong while if you remove it and the venom no longer works (and you've done a proper control so that you know the way you remove it didn't mess up some other component,) then you know it was right. Philosophy obviously doesn't deal with examples like that, otherwise it would be science before being tests, but the same concepts apply.

Quote mining?

Would you say it went over your head?

So you're much bolder about trying to claim territory when you're not talking to me. Interesting.

We've been agreeing that science doesn't know everything from the start. I've spent pages explaining this to you.

I've even already explained that the issue is what you want that to mean.

The first one was good but #2 is a dumb point. He shouldn't have to and his use of language is clear.

If he's had the word misuse/misrepresent thrown at him unfairly in the past it's definitely appropriate in this case.

I thought you'd finally left -_-;

I'm talking about when you pulled two quotes from me.

"You also haven't heard me claim that in this topic or any other one."
"You've made it abundantly clear that you can't convey any details of that sort so at the level you can handle YES it has all the answers."

And acted like they were a contradiction. I'll bold it differently this time for the very important part you seem to have skipped:

You've made it abundantly clear that you can't convey any details of that sort so at the level you can handle YES it has all the answers.

I actually prefer to not be in the spotlight but the actual meaning was not so much about how grand my philosophy is (I'm a bit disgusted to think that average could be very far below it,) but rather how weak yours is.

Philosophy doesn't even have right or wrong answers but you've still managed to adopt horribly flimsy and minimal function notions. The thing is philosophy uses a lot of the same things as Science and not-so-coincidentally they happen to be the same ones you want to sweep under the rug.

So that's what you mean by gap?

Well, you don't seem to be interested in taking a minute to comprehend the shape of the Earth thing so I can stop typing it up but not that you've sort of stepped out of safety for a whole split second to give a loose definition of what a gap is I should be able to talk about missing links.

*By the way, there's some pretty major hipocricy in accusing me of not knowing about things left to research when I've spent the last few pages asking you to show us that you've got any idea what they are. If you really want me to list off things I can do it but I know you won't ask because then you'd look bad for not being able to reciprocate.

So the old notion of a missing link between man and ape has been around quite awhile. Then we found one. Oh, but it wasn't solved by a long shot because the gap had not been filled- where was the missing link between ape-man and man or ape-man and ape? In the 90's we had something like twenty intermediates or close side branches but that just means more gaps.

The critical thing missing from the gaps argument is that the gaps have become smaller each time and now they're so small you couldn't even trip in them while walking along. In total disregard of this you and others claim that there are more gaps than ever. The people who see evolution as an opponent to their faith would never stop demanding missing links lest a full pedigree of every individual born be presented to them (and if you've ever looked into who your recent ancestors were you'll know you can't go back more than just a few generations before you can't find everyone. Personally it only takes 4 generations before it's impossible to keep tracing some of my ancestors back.)

So what you're saying here is really like if we had a fossil of Lucy and a fossil of her great grandson showed up you'd just have another gap between her and him. You hide it off in physics where your ignorance can more easily go about it's day but the truth of the matter is that the number of gaps means nothing. We've been cutting them apart and at this point they don't look like Swiss cheese but rather smooth concrete. There are still holes in it but they are tiny and for matters like faith they are effectively gone, unless you want to dice up your faith into equally small bits and scatter it about in all the gaps constantly shuffling them around whenever someone touches another gap and renders it too small for the already meaninglessly small bit of faith you tried to nestle into that spot.

There you go being religious at me again.
Tell me, is there anyone that doesn't agree with you for reasons other than "everything I say goes over their heads because they're stupid"? It seems horrible to live in a world where you think that abut so many people.

Strange that you'd tell me my own argument goes over my head. It's been awhile though so I don't recall who I explained it to. Do you remember who was talking about probabilities for our universe?

String theory is currently the best supported hypothesis about that and it may sound a bit familiar when I remind you that people are working on confirming it.
"Oh, but that would just mean the dice were actually smaller dice and science has never gone into what those dice are!" Well of course it hasn't, we're not there yet.

Now here's where we agree: the next step isn't going to be "it's made of smaller dice" any time soon, if ever. Your argument is that unless we get to the indivisible dice of truth (God) knowing about the rest isn't any better than knowing nothing. I'm taking a number line approach and saying that even if you stat at fifty billion each number you count in whatever direction is still one more than you had before. Now if you read carefully this is a very easy point for you to hound me on but I feel safe not having anywhere to go after the way you've been dealing with my posts so basically I don't think you'll know how to take advantage of it because you've got basically 0 adaptability in an argument.

At one point folks thought the elements were the dice. We described what the elements did better and learned how to split them. I always try to avoid pointing out literary mechanisms but I guess I'll have to do so here to make it clear to you that I'm not talking about quarks.
We learned that air and earth and water were made of smaller things and that fire was something different. Then we described what the (new) elements did better and learned how to split them. Now we're describing what the (new-new) elements do better and we're working on splitting them.

The true essence of the dice has been smaller dice every time, simply because dice is such a vague and meaningless word when we go applying it to atoms or quarks or whatnot.

Again, not knowing what the smallest dice are isn't a big deal and asking such a thing is even meaningless if it turns out the dice get smaller infinitely. We aren't at the end right now so there's no way to know if there is an end (unless you'd like to enlighten me,[/sarcasm]) so really what you've been saying doesn't really mean anything. It sounds kind of deep and if you want to convince yourself it is then it feels deep but it's really about as shallow as the layer of moisture on my finger after it's been in my mouth.

Physics technically encompasses chemistry but the two fields split because the atom-stuff was getting in the way of what physicists preferred to be involved with and turned out to have it's own special set of uses that didn't really need much feedback from physics. It's not really relevant but as anyone reading may have gathered I don't think you are reading this.

Well, that and how my earlier description of your thinking we couldn't know any numbers before we knew the smallest one kind of already went over this exact thing.

Isn't it interesting how blind your "you just don't understand" arguments look when I'm not just giving relevant responses but even pre-empting future ones? How could it being going over my head when I've shown that I know where it's going?

It's looking like that phrase has stopped meaning anything and is basically just some buzz word fresh out of the box.
(psst, thinking outside of the box doesn't mean taking what you were doing to the other side of some cardboard and continuing exactly as you had been.)

So what exactly is unknowable?
Disclaimer: I'm not stating that we're going to know everything or anything like that. This is specifically about you explaining your own argument to show if it has any meaning or not.

Refer back to my posts from quite awhile ago where I said you wanted science ignorant so you could have something like this.

But really, what does knowing what it is change about what it actually is? It's not as if the Earth could have been a five point star or dodecahedron before people came along and cleaved away the potential until that sphere-ish shape was the only thing left. It was what it was long before we figured it out.

When the dice where materials they came from atoms latching on to each other. When the dice where atoms they came condensing energy and other atoms fusing together with more energy. Now the dice are mainly quarks and we may find that those come from strings. Once strings are established as the dice we'll start working on figuring out where they came from until we can be sure enough of it at which point we'll have something new to call the dice.

This is why your philosophy is weak and has been every time other people used it throughout history. You want to put the "true" dice a step or two into the unknown where you can always say we know nothing and there no risk or people figuring it out. Without that risk that comes from properly defining something it also completely lacks explanatory power. This total potentiality you talk about is much like sending full signals of red, green, and blue at a television screen: you just get a big chunk of nothing. There's no picture there until you take away blue potential is come places, green in others, and red wherever- as unlike the Earth these philosophical concepts are in our heads and their value comes precisely from our having defined them. Thoughts and ideas that are not clear are more like flatulence than brilliance and you have to work to impart value upon them.

The tragedy is that you seem to want to throw out everything that's been worked on like throwing out fine dining in favor of uncooked eggs and pus.

You forgot to include a reason for why your point of view was worth applying. As it stands you've given me no reason to adopt it lest I prefer to fill my life with slack jawed admiration for blurry outlines of concepts in the back of my head that I have to be careful to never try to understand lest I ruin them.

I know you'd never describe it like that but I'm quite convinced that you won't be able to explain how that's different from what you've been preaching (and I'm only using standards that an actual preacher would easily be able to fulfill.)

I'd be really glad if you'd realized that this was why I started talking to you in the first place but you've got some kind of mental force field in place to prevent yourself from ever evaluating your beliefs. Really I'd have expected this from the start except that you said you weren't religious. We can really tidily sort out all of the trouble I've had with your view if you switch from calling yourself agnostic or whatever to saying you're religious. Just one little thing will make it all make sense.

Only in a semantic sense.
"Well if you think "taking a life" and "not hiring someone" are either ethically or categorically equivalent," is more than enough to show that you find them very different and because we're talking about what's legal or not it's implied that the illegal one is more severe.

But if you don't think it's more severe then what about murder makes it ok to pass laws against it? Oh- looks like you actually got to that in the next bit.


That's a rather dodgy way of defining things. If everyone in town decided to not sell food to the negros and not provide them with transportation would they be taking a life or just keeping goods and services?

With the way our society is set up it's clearly visible that it's both of those things. By not allowing certain groups access to pay for whatever position you're taking a lot away from them. Abra has been calling me overly materialistic lately but the way you've just described the difference seems to genuinely have that problem.

But really, why would anyone object to discrimination if it didn't take anything away from people?

I don't understand how your reading comprehension could be so low that you could miss what that meant.

Oh well, I guess that's pretty much the end of the thread as everyone left seems capable of integrating new information.

It ends up being enough of a drawn out history lesson as it is without me going on about how and what Henry Eyring did with transition states.

Stuff like replica printing I'd be all for giving out name drops but my repertoire of "who did what" is really focused on Biology and biology doesn't come up much in these (beyond irreducible complexity opinions.)

That's actually a good thing though as it seems everyone here is knowledgeable enough to accept genetics for the most part.

Remember a few posts ago when I talked about how you SHOULD be able to stump me? Remember how I had asked you to tell me about what those lectures you attended were about?

You've made it abundantly clear that you can't convey any details of that sort so at the level you can handle YES it has all the answers. There are obviously and undeniably things we don't understand but the problem here is that you don't understand the significance of that and constantly apply it to situations that don't make sense.

You also haven't heard me claim that in this topic or any other one.

The hell does that mean? We'd have to know 100% to know that the previous amount was 5% wouldn't we?

No, I do know what you're talking about but that's one of those less than justified cosmological issues. We know about how much gas there is in the vacuum of space and about how much is planets and how much is stars. Add that all up and it's not enough to hold things in orbit in our galaxy.
So they made something up. Dark matter, referring to some mystery mass of things that we couldn't detect. Maybe we just don't understand how gravity works on larger scales or maybe there really is about 3 times as much mass just hidden away somewhere, everywhere.

But to get to five percent you've got to add in dark energy. Another one of those things they just made up when the numbers didn't add up. What you won't hear about on NOVA or the discovery channel specials is what the hell those numbers are (seriously, they just omit it every freaking time.) Well the big maths from Einstein and Hawking and all the rest is way too much to go into in a show like that (and would mostly go over my head as well,) but what they are talking about is the energy it takes to stretch space-time.

We know how going near the speed of light warps space-time quite a bit and if you actually get relativity you know that's because energy, mostly in the form of a lot of mass, meaning lots of gravity, has really accumulated in the process of reaching that speed.

Now, much like how we could misunderstand large scale gravity there's options for misunderstanding this as well. Imagine if instead of space-time even really stretching in the energy fashion at all that all those particles that arise from the quantum field were essentially shrinking. You would expect some problems because with relativity time progresses at non-uniform rates so we should end up with very large atoms but if instead this was a normal progression of the quantum field itself it would be a different story.

Obviously that's highly speculative but you seem pretty annoyed with my just recanting general information so I thought I'd experiment a little.

If you're talking about the 95% I think you are that's "number of hairs on your head" information.

We're never going to count the number of hairs on everyone's heads, or at least not without such advanced technology that it's impossible to talk about it in a meaningful way at this point in time. But what does the number of hairs on your head matter? A much more useful piece of information is how many there are in a square centimeter. We can work that one out easily if you've got any reason to want to know (like if you were dealing with hair implants.)

But if you want to say that somebody only knows 5% of what there is to know about the hairs on your head if they've only directly counted 5% of them you're can't see the forest for the trees.

At a glance someone can say if most of your hairs are black, brown, or whatever and say if you've got any major bald spots or a receding hairline. Color and overall shape, are you going to say that these are just two things counted compared to millions of uncounted hairs on your head as if that's the same thing?

You can keep saying that but you don't seem to have a real point beyond how you want to strip science of any power to justify your beliefs.

Of course not, it's just changing what science is so it's easier for you. You don't want to strip away something from everyone else, that's just a side effect of wrapping yourself in this "Science can't say I'm wrong" security blanket.

If you want to equivocate. You don't seem to hold any concern for how riddled with fallacy your arguments are so that's probably what you want to do.

Like what? I know there are things we don't know but you don't seem to be able to apply any of it in a relevant way. The real revelation here is that it's you don't care what science knows, as long as it's not everything you think your argument automatically stands but THAT is what I'm disagreeing with you about here and basically every other time we contact each other.

I'm not saying that science knows everything. I'm saying that it can be clearly shown that you're wrong even if we know almost nothing.

Once again: stop making me into Jack 2.0
I'm not a new version of someone you've argued with before and I'm not arguing their points. Stop kidding yourself thinking that you can argue against what they've said at me; I'm arguing something different and there's not just this one stereotype group of people that all say the same thing out of some kind of hatred for what you stand for.

I know you're not going to suddenly open your eyes and see that I'm an individual but if you're going to tell me to think outside the box without even paying enough attention to see what I'm saying how would you ever know if it's in the box or not?
Oh right, anyone that disagrees with you just doesn't "get it" because you're a fundamentalist Christian that just doesn't want to be called Christian.

And Africa isn't part of the Americas. Oh, you never said that? Well everyone that ever disagrees with me thinks that Africa is where Brazil's at so it's probably a key part of your argument. Wouldn't it be dumb if I kept reminding you that Africa's south of Europe as if you were arguing otherwise? Especially after you had told me a dozen times that you knew that and agreed but that it had nothing to do with the discussion?

Try thinking about core samples. If we had one of those little fast food scratch off cards and we took the silver stuff off of just a few thin lines through the center of it, like maybe 5% of the area, would might be able to make out the words "try again" and then what would it matter that we still had 95% of the stuff unscratched?

You've been saying I talk about it since long before I ever brought it up.

As far as you're concerned...
You know, that's really telling about you. You don't care what I'm saying, as far as you're concerned it's dumb and I smell bad unless I agree with you and I probably still smell for having opposed you for so long.

I asked you what a gap IS. I didn't say science knows everything. How can you can you mix those two up and write up such an vacuous response? You really need to think outside of that box where all of your rehearsed rants are stored.

I'm not asking you to play quote-fu like I do but when you pick out a single tiny fragment of what I've said you can at least make your response correlate to it.

What I've been saying is basically that you're a liar. Not in the sense that any of that is false but more like,
Well it would be like a child saying he didn't break some vase. Then it comes out that they did break it with a baseball and they say "ya, I didn't break it, the baseball did."

Now your responses don't typically acknowledge what you quoted but if they did we'd get to that stage.

You're playing a deceptive little game, basically every time you bring those things up. It's very much like saying "I didn't do it, the baseball did." That's clearly the wrong context.

Might as well ask again: what you do you mean by gaps? I'm not asking how big they are. I'm asking what makes something a gap and what that means.

"God of the gaps" is so played out. Go ahead and keep doing it if you like but it makes it clear that I'm philosophically superior.


You're kidding yourself if you think I'm going to forget what I'm talking about and suddenly decide that it's all these fake targets you keep acting like you're getting bulls-eyes on.

I figured "I don't know what I call evidence" was a good enough indicator that you hadn't picked it up yet so I thought I'd give that another go but I'm glad that you've already picked it up.

Well like in the designer thread some of you evidence was in the form of "I think" this or that. Like how you think a butterfly's wing is too complex to not have an intelligent force to make it.
"I think" or that sort of thing makes it speculation.

Now if you could say that the processes that make the butterfly wing just popped into existence out of nowhere in a single step or something like that- well, that would still be a claim but we could actually check that in some ways and checking is where you get evidence.