No, like I said...

The purpose for this discussion, for me, was to gain a better understanding of the definition of "evidence." I did that, and yet you Peter_Pan, didn't.

You obviously feel that you must stick to your position no matter what, even if you are wrong. You are not willing to consider the argument at all. You just want to draw a line in the sand and stick to your guns. And you are wrong.

Hence I have actually LEARNED SOMETHING and you have not! You have not addressed my posts at all. I wrote them for you, only because I wanted to help you learn something, not because I am arguing with you. Read it again.

If a man was hanged, is every tree in the forest "evidence of that hanging?"

The answer is no.

He was hanged only on one tree. His footprints were found there along with other footprints. There was a rope with a noose on a branch of the tree. The tree and surrounding clues are evidence only because it is connected to the hanging of the man, and that is the subject needing proof. The other trees are not evidence in that particular case. THEY ARE JUST TREES.

BUT if you are trying to prove that there are trees in the forest, then the other trees can be called evidence of that.

Now, Peter, if you want to stick to your position and refuse to understand the true meaning of the term evidence, I for one, do not care. I don't care if you learn anything or not. You can remain in the dark as you wish. You can maintain your wrong position and be happy that your "conviction is stable" until the day you die in ignorance of the meaning of the term evidence.

Your purpose for debate and argument might be to "win" or "stick to your guns" but my purpose is to gain understanding and learn something. We can both fulfill our purpose.

Jeannie, you are more than welcome to think I'm wrong. And you're more than welcome to state it as many times as you can in one post.

I didn't address your posts because they specifically addressed that which I already conceded. The fact that evidence for an investigation is entirely subjective based on the decision of a judge and jury.

But let's use your tree hanging example anyways.

Are you saying that the footprints and the rope should not be considered evidence until they're found?

If not, why even bother looking for evidence if none exists?
Just because evidence can't be presented does not mean it doesn't exist.

When I said my convictions were stable, it simply meant that I didn't change definitions, attach conditions to definitions or see-saw my viewpoint just to win the agument or defend my statements.
The lines drawn weren't drawn by me. I did however, reposition myself on said lines as they were moved about.

Not "should not." They absolutely CANNOT BE CONSIDERED EVIDENCE UNTIL THEY ARE FOUND AND CONNECTED TO THE CRIME.


The footprints and rope CANNOT be called evidence until they are found AND CONNECTED to the crime in question.

Sure, they still exist, but until they are found and connected to the crime they are not called "evidence" for the simple fact that they have not been found and connected to the crime. THEY ARE A MOOT POINT!!



You don't actually look for "evidence." What you look for is "something" that can be used as evidence.

Until it is found and connected to the crime is just "something." It is not called "evidence" until it has some meaning and connection to the question or crime.

Its all semantics. It is the meaning of 'evidence.'

Evidence is not just "something" or "stuff."

Evidence is "something or stuff that is found and used to prove something else." That is the FULL MEANING OF THE WORD.

The "something" HAS TO BE USED TO PROVE SOMETHING ELSE or it is NOT called EVIDENCE.

Its a very simple concept. Perhaps the light will dawn in your head eventually.



No, you stood your ground and defended your WRONG conclusions. We are talking about the true and proper meaning of a word. That is all. Its pretty simple. If you want to misunderstand the meaning of the word "evidence" then go ahead.

If a gun used in a crime is never found and never used to prove anything, it is not called 'evidence' because it becomes a moot point if it is never found and used for that purpose. Yes it still exists. Yes people still look for it. But until it is found and connected to the crime, it is not called "evidence."

You can stick to your incorrect definition if you want, but it is wrong. Evidence not found, not used to prove anything is a moot point. It is not evidence because the very meaning of the work forbids it to be called evidence. It only becomes evidence when it is discovered and connected to the statement or crime or whatever.

Have fun on YOUR see-saw....

Thank you I will.

Your understanding of the word evidence is wrong.

There are thousands of guns in my town. One man was murdered. One of those guns was used to murder him. All of the guns are NOT evidence. A lawyer would certainly not confiscate all the guns in town and present them in court as evidence.

Even if he had the actual gun that was used in the crime, he could not call it evidence unless it was proven that it was the gun that fired the bullet that killed the man. Hence the bullet and the fingerprints all will be tested. If they support the idea that this was the gun used, THEN AND ONLY THEN does the gun become evidence, and then and only then will the lawyer present the gun to the court.

Why are you quoting yourself? Are you talking to yourself now?

See saw?

At least I learned something. Yes I changed my position because I discovered and agreed on the correct meaning and use of the word "evidence."

I am here to learn, not to defend my ego or position. There is no point in debate, argument or discussion if you are not willing to think about and seriously consider the other position with enough flexibility to change your mind. That is the ONLY way to learn anything.

Think.

The question was how we can observe things our senses do not directly detect. It is undeniable that first acted as if there was no way and then when I explained the way you stated that you already knew.

So if not testing me or asking questions what is the point of such feigned ignorance?

No. Calling Pan an idiot was just a blatant display of arrogance on your part, not to mention a gross breaking of the forum rules. And now with this post you're just reinforcing your crime.

Personally I'm surprised they let you get away with calling people idiots on these forums. You must have special privileges.

I haven't seen you make a sensible point yet.



Look who's talking.

You just said, "Address the Substance", yet here you are making personal remarks and ad hominem attacks on the other poster by calling him an idiot and self-absorbed.

I don't know how you get away with these personal attacks on a continued basis.

Then what are you doing in it?

I thought you said you were retired.

That's a terrible attitude. If we keep science sealed away in our ivory towers it's not just that the public will never understand but that they will grow distrustful of those keeping secrets from them. It's bad enough as it is without you telling me I've got nothing profound enough to be worth sharing.

It's called physics. The most recognizable branch or it in our lives is called chemistry. Move up the scale a bit more and our word for the effects is called biology. Move up the scale quite a ways further and you get government types and chess tactics and yomi and so on.

Like you said earlier all of the attributes of our universe arise from quantum properties. The ones that are non-local have been staring us in the face since long before we knew about the local ones.


Can I explain how the local effects come together to produce these non-local ones? Not any more than I can explain chess strategy in terms of how a pawn can move. How long do I need to continue this explanation of what emergent properties are?

Why does that stop us from knowing this but not stop us from figuring out something like F=ma or the Einstein version of that?


"I lean toward the mystical because this is where I see the evidence pointing."
Once again you find yourself sitting in front of your own quote about science supporting spirituality. It gets worse when you see another recent quote placed next to it: "I'm not claiming to have "evidence" for anything."

Checkmate. You've already flipped the board because you didn't like how it was playing out but here we are with them all laid back out in that same pattern. Are you going to admit fault here or just knock everything over again?

[quote[

If you believe that Biologists know everything there is to know about how neurons work (especially in terms of synchronicity in large arrays, they either you're the one who should cross biology off the list of subjects you could be involved with, or biology has come a very long way since I've retired.
So are you finally saying that you were a Biologist?
Well, I'd prefer not to take your word for it so you can just answer with a trivial question: if you apply curare to a nerve what direction do the potassium ions flow?

We can account for all of the ions moving through the membrane, use simple calculus to measure the resistance down the axon vs the resistance through the membrane to work out how they behave as capacitors to increase the rate of opening channels. We know all about the molecular configurations in charge of the refractory period and all manner on cell junctions other than the generic dendrites around an axon. We know about the constant signal that comes from leaking neuroreceptors and have even identified it beyond the analog level down to where it occurs in precise units much like the quantum effects you bring up so often.

Thanks to things like GFP we can now map out the neuron connectivity of the brain in all the colors of the rainbow (and if I could find it I'd show a picture of a monkey brain that's been done with,)and psychologist haven't exactly been sitting around twiddling their thumbs while biochemistry marched on either.

So tell me a little bit about what those two presentations were about. If you didn't take notes I understand that the details would probably not be easy to recall but you should be able to give a general summary and maybe mention the problems they were working on.

Hell, I'll do so myself to give a example: About a year ago I attended a presentation about plant development. He spent the first forty percent or so giving a rehash about the important chemicals at play that you learn about in introductory courses (stuff like auxin and WUS.) The rest of the presentation was about explaining how his team had created various models for cell division and some tests he had done. The discovery I recall best was that while working with physicists thy noticed a pattern in certain fibers that matched closely with something the physics folks were familiar with. Now recognizing how the cells oriented these they were about to accurately predict cell divisions but being real go-getters they experimented and showed that when they changed the directions of stress they could make the cells organize in patters that still matched the model. Apparently in peer reviewed journals they got a lot of criticism so they went and did it in several different ways to show that their technique was not altering the process in ways other than what they had wanted. Admittedly at this point it started to go over my head and his next two features that really extended the reach of his work have left my memory but he had a lot of video of things like the process in 3d and mentions of how the margin of error got smaller and smaller as they added these things in.

Altogether this stuff accounts for things like those Fibonacci spirals plants generate and how they manage to control their growth. It's really just a bunch of local effects that add up to interesting non-local effects.

*I can go into the basic stuff like what auxin is if anyone wants to know. I just didn't think it was worth explaining to Abra if he's really already educated on biology matters.

This looks more like justifications for yourself.

I've heard you go both ways on how much we know and don't know though so would you like to make a concrete claim about where you stand for that?

If it happens every time wouldn't it seem likely that you're doing something inappropriate? If everybody says so shouldn't you face the issue of how you represent science?

I put up with evangelicals being horribly redundant with what they say to me because I understand that they think anyone who's not fully in agreement with them just doesn't understand and I'm trying to put up with your mirror image of that same thing but I would really appreciate it if you could set that aside and accept that I know what you're talking about.

With that in mind, NO. I'm not demanding that and as patient as I am I'm still getting very tired of repeating this to you. If you were really interested in telling us what we know and we do not I shouldn't have nearly so much trouble getting you to tell me what we know and do not. Here's what we know: not enough to rule out a God of the gaps.

The thing is I am very particular about knowing what I know and what I don't know. You don't seem to really care about this and so everything I hear from you seems to follow this pattern:
"But we don't know everything!"
"What more would we need to know to deal with this particular thing?"
"Everything."

And then I push that a little more telling you that you're wrong and we only need to know some thing but you don't hear it and you even extend your belief that you're undeniably right so far that you start sticking your own arguments in my mouth... and continuing to fight them.
YOU are the one saying that we need to know everything and YOU are the one saying that is ridiculous.

That phrase is getting a bit more refined so I take it you've had to look up a webpage and read it a few times so far?

Tell me what they are already.


"I lean toward the mystical because this is where I see the evidence pointing. "
You're being redundant.

Thanks for stealing my arguments again. How can you be so certain that you understand and that I don't that you can repeat my own explanations to my face?

Maybe you should sit down and tell everyone else what these things are so they'll understand how that's not a violation of non-locality.

Ok, that phrase is deceptive. I want you to demonstrate that you know what these things are because rankly this all sounds like a lot of fluff.

Like my recent "when you don't know perform tests to collect evidence" line of discussion with Sky you seem to understand that it's good to look for some evidence in reality instead of explaining reality with no basis. Bravo.

What do you mean by precise details?

Aren't those "capabilities" "technical details"?

Really though, stop acting like I can't follow what you're saying and show that you can follow what I am. I have been asking you to point out aspects of various things that are unsolvable with the knowledge we have. You no doubt think I'm doing this so that when you don't I can stand triumphant and laugh as I proclaim that we really do know everything but that's dead wrong. Pointing these things out is trivial for anyone who has been involved in science as you can't even begin to do your job without knowing about them so I am really probing to figure out just what the hell field you were involved in and so far it looks like the deepest you've ever been involved with science was PBS specials.

For the love of God (oh wait, you're supposedly agnostic,)just use a technical term that was involved in your job! Anything!

Yet you won't ever engage me in philosophy.

Use simpler terms instead of hiding them. You are saying you have philosophical arguments based on scientific evidence.

It was already clear to me. I want it to be clear to you.

How simple do I need to make it?

The scientific "evidence" comes from the following empirical observations:

1. This universe has been empirically observed to show properties of non-local behavior.

2. This universe has been empirically observed to show properties of quantum behavior on fairly large orchestrated scales (i.e. via the Einstein-Bose condensates)

3. This universe has been empirically observed to show properties of non-local entanglement.

Those are all observed "evidence" of behavioral capabilities. Behavior is "evidence" of itself.

So while I'm not claiming to have 'evidence' of spirit, I do claim that we have already observed behaviors that are in harmony with what spiritual teachings suggest that spirit should be capable of.

So I suppose you could say that I recognize evidence of spiritual behavior via the observations of science.

I'm merely sharing this vantage point as food for thought. I'm not claiming any absolute proofs of anything.

Whether or not you agree that this is 'evidence' for anything beyond the behaviors themselves is fine with me. Like I say, I'm merely suggesting correspondences between scientific observations and spiritual teachings for whatever they are worth.

But I don't see how you could deny the observed behaviors themselves.

Typically the arguments I always hear take the form of the following:

"But non-locality, entanglement, and large-scale orchestration of quantum behavior only applies to very limited and precise situations!"

Well, I'm not impressed by those kinds of arguments because all that describes is our limited knowledge of these things. From a philosophical point of view I look at the bigger picture. I take the point of view that through our limited knowledge we have already observed that these things are possible. But that in no way implies that these things are restricted to our limited knowledge of them.

There's no way that science can say that the few examples that have already been observed are the only way for these capabilities of the universe to become manifest. As far as I'm concerned all science has truly shown us is that these things are indeed possible and may very well be taking place in many other situations that we simply haven't yet discovered.

Science is still in diapers. That's not a put-down of science, that's just the truth. There is much that science doesn't yet know and may possibly never be able to know for various reasons.

You mentioned the following:



Well, if you're preaching that science can ultimately explain away everything then I'd say that you're preaching a personal dream that may never be realized.

Tell the public that science has all the answers and there's no need for spirit isn't necessarily a trustworthy thing to do either.

Better off telling them the truth! Science is still in diapers, and while it has panned out great in terms of technology, let's not pretend that it can say anything at all about our true essence especially in terms of spirituality.

And let's own up to the fact that science has indeed observed properties of non-locality, entanglement, and large-scale orchestration of quantum behavior, and not belittle those thoughts as being "misrepresentative of science". They aren't misrepresentative at all. That's precisely what science has indeed observed! Let's not pretend otherwise.

I just gave you a lecture about being redundant. Given the context I would think you could tell I was complaining about your writing.

Show me that you understand what non-local behavior means.

Show me that- well that you even remember when that happens.

How is this useful?
*A few posts back I explained how it's irrelevant.


"The bible is like a person, if you torture it long enough you can make it say anything you want."- Episcopal bishop
I don't see the Bible here but the spirit you're talking about seems to work just like it, and I'm usually quite discerning when it comes to faith.

Is it plausible or is the evidence pointing AT it?

Big difference pal.

Right now it's not even clear if you actually believe that.

Stop making this about me. I'm asking you if you're saying it's evidence or not.

So in simple words, are you saying it is not evidence?

So in simple words, are you saying it is evidence?

I'm not very typical then am I? I'm asking you when they apply and what reasons you have to think they are relevant to this topic. Stop acting like I'm the someone who's thrown garbage arguments at you for years. This is something different.

You pump fog into the room until you can't see anymore.


What does that mean? Don't you say that all things are possible when you have observed nothing?

So in simple words, are you saying that we don't know anything?

Stop just saying that. Tell me what some of them are. Tell me where you think there is room.
COMMIT TO YOUR CLAIMS.

What dream have I expressed here?


Here's a little reminder of what I just said: "NO. I'm not demanding that"

So im direct terms, are you saying that atheism is inherently immoral and sinister?

Where's the justification in calling that the truth?

Remember, it's other people that said that's "misrepresentative of science," not me.

But just to clarify they're not telling you that those facts are misrepresentations. It's the conclusions that you drawn about them.
Well no, I can't say you draw any conclusions, your language is still incredibly vague and uncommitted. What are you saying those things mean?

Where's the justification in suggesting otherwise?

Aww, too tuckered out to handle my questions?

The notion that science was frequently totally flipped on it's head can basically be said to have been amputated when we started with the scientific method. That simple process of making predictions and checking them was a real revolution and the beginning of real understanding.

As I've said (and apparently been ignored,) we know something like 99.999% of how our universe works. The Earth being flat is 90% correct. The Earth being a sphere is 90% more correct. The Earth being a squashed sphere 90% more and having a wider southern hemisphere 90% more still.

You act as if saying the Earth is a squashed sphere is as different from just a sphere as saying that it is a pyramid and that another step down the road and we will think it is starfish shaped.

Last time you backpedaled into quantum mechanics. Got a plan for actually confronting this this time?

You'd have a hard time supporting a number like that since it's impossible to know how much we don't yet know.


Have you not even been paying attention to modern science? It's recently been proposed and supported by observations that everything we know about this universe is less than 5% of what the universe is actually made of.

So where do you come up with your 99.999%?

It's more like, all scientific knowledge put together represents less than 5% of what the universe is actually made of. And we don't even understand that 5% very well.

So as far as I can see there's over 95% of the universe that we don't yet know or understand at all.

So I guess we differ in our views quite dramatically then.

Good Lord (sorry for the christian expression) it´s so good to see you still posting my friend. I hope u r doing great in ur portion of the Universe.
Greetings from the South of America (not Texas, Florida, or Alabama, etc)
I´m talking the real south of America, Ecuador (my country), Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, etc.

TLW!!! Long time no see! (2 years maybe?) Hope you are doing well!

99.999% or 5%?. Even trying to determine to what degree we understand our universe strikes me as a fool's errand, for the reason stated in your first paragraph.

I think the only measure we can ever have is the number of questions we've answered vs. the number of questions we've asked. Even at 100% we would still have no measure of our degree of understanding. And of course new questions arise every day.

Read the rest of the freaking post.

Math. You want to classify our knowledge linearly while I'm using inverse logarithms. How can you miss that reading what I just wrote?

We work on scales. Newton's equations describe most of what we see and work very well until you get to the very large or the very small. You can use them 90% of the time just fine. It's not a single piece of the puzzle, it's the majority of it. We've got a lot more than that now though so the upper size where we start running into problems is bigger than the observable universe and the only place where the lower size shows up to pose problems is inside of black holes or billions of years ago at the start of the universe.

Nobody with much comprehension of scale is going to say that looks like 5%. Bigger than the universe is by default not something that has any current impact on us so this really just simplifies down to the beginning of our universe and inside of black holes. Both of those are tiny so we've got 99.999% of the puzzle put together. There are and may always be lots of little details left to fill in but we know what it looks like.

We know that the Earth is roughly spherical. Your 5% talk sounds exactly like you think we're going to wake up tomorrow and throw away what we knew and call it a pyramid. That's unmistakably bullcrap.


It's quite simple. If you have a 5% of the puzzle pieces on the board can you tell if you're looking at a picture of puppies or if it's flowers? Maybe but you could very easily be mistaken. If you have 99% of the pieces places and the puzzle looks like puppies do you think you will reasonably find out later that it was actually a donkey-pinata?

It's all about recognizing what way is reasonable to count.