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107
General Discussion / Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« on: July 04, 2009, 09:43:48 am »
Am I the only one who finds the idea of 'black robots' necessarily hilarious?
108
General Discussion / Re: Fred Travalena's Dead
« on: June 29, 2009, 04:30:31 pm »
Pfft. Ever since Fawcett died and people started going on about 'spooky coincidences' and it being 'that month', I knew this would happen. When Jackson died, everyone was on red alert, so now the following deaths that wouldn't have been associated are now viewed as noteworthy 'coincidences'; people are looking for deaths to confirm what they're looking for. And it only happens once a year because of the low probability of a catalytic death pair like Jackson's and Fawcett's.
That said, as soon as The Obama cures cancer, this probably won't happen again.
That said, as soon as The Obama cures cancer, this probably won't happen again.
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General Discussion / Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« on: June 23, 2009, 06:37:52 pm »Correct. However, please do note that I never stated that the claims contained in those records were empirical. Anyone (well, any historian with the proper connections) can see these records. And one can then claim that the records claim that Aethelbert married Bertha. That can be easily verified by anyone reading the records. That the records claim something is empirical. The verasity of those claims, not so much.
Yes, you’re right here; it was hypocritical of me to pick on that like I did, given the rest of my post.
[I know you edited this out, but I wanted to make this concession.]
On free will…
The question of free will is one of those ones that is often treated as unanswerable and of utmost and unwavering importance when it is actually easily resolved and of little ongoing importance. (So, naturally, now I’m about to address the question I’ve just bashed.)
Free will is never satisfactorily defined. If I were to define it as the ability to consciously make our own choices, that wouldn’t get us very far, because our choices being conscious and our own doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know and still doesn’t preclude determinability, which goes against the spirit of its intention. If I were to define free will as defying determinability, then radiation would have free will for being random. If I were to define it as the ability to make choices that ‘could go either way’, it would be outright false because a reducing approach will tell us that we our simply the sum of the interaction of our parts, the behaviour of which can in turn be predicted.
But! I’m sure you see what I did there. I just applied contingent, scientific knowledge to the problem in implying that the reducing approach is valid. That’s where there’s some room for people to jump in with, ‘But how do you know? You’re assuming that science is correct…but you don’t know that!’ The problem here is that such people imply that even the most basic and indisputable scientific knowledge goes halfway or all of the way out of the window as soon as they go into philosophy mode. This approach is only useful within the limited scope of metaphysics and whatnot, because for discussion of things as they contingently are, the evidence we have is good enough to say that the Universe is macroscopically determinable, even if it’s not provable or necessarily necessary.
To punch another hole in the concept, free will is one of those questions that is treated overly…sapio-centric, if you like. (And I know you will like, because you like –centrics.) What I mean by that is that our human tendency to forget that we are of the same stuff as the Universe clouds our ability to answer the free will question. To look at the question from a higher perspective still, we realise that the question is only raised because our advanced sapience affords us the opportunity to ask such a question about ourselves. Free will revolves around ‘consciousness’, but consciousness is simply a convenient but by no means absolute quality that simply clouds the free will issue. From a Universal perspective, consciousness is nothing special, and thus doesn’t make us warrant the question of free will any more than my water bottle does.
That all aside, even if we accept free will as being a valid concept (for it does hold some meaning to some people, even if doing so is doublethink or the definition is outright invalid), it still doesn’t make any difference. There is no practical difference between a state of free will and a state of not having free will—as I think you touched upon. The fact is that we live assuming our decisions make any difference, which would be the case whether or not we had free will…and that’s reasonable, given that the alternative is to try to ‘do nothing’ (which is still a choice, and so wouldn’t work anyway).
A richer question is what the practical and contingent extents of determinability are.
110
General Discussion / Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« on: June 23, 2009, 02:03:39 pm »Truthfully, you don't really know that your knowledge is true…yours is faith-based, but both are knowledge.
I object to your usage of ‘knowledge’ here to lump together any belief or conviction. By definition, that which is known is knowledge, and vice versa. I don’t consider belief to be knowledge, because it is not sufficiently substantiated to be rational to believe—again by definition. If one has faith that the Sun will rise, that’s not knowledge, even if it’s true. Knowledge is decided by how a position is reached, not what the position is or its veracity.
Of course, that makes the acceptance of knowledge qua knowledge arbitrary, because everything is technically based on faith (or so I believe), and thus nothing could ever be knowledge. But that’s another matter.
Diabetes is another area where numerous supposedly objective and knowledgeable individuals believe in a false system. Ask most doctors how many types of diabetes there are and they'll give you a laughablely incorrect answer: two. Present them with a case of LADA (Latent autoimmune diabetes in adults) and they'll be stumped. But that isn’t the end; there are well over a hundred different forms of diabetes.
However, it isn't that the science was wrong, but that the conceptual frameworks resulting from scientific research were wrong.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you, but that doesn’t indicate a fault in the scientific method or even a specific failing in its results in the field of medicine, but simply ignorance on the part of someone within the field. That’s not even an error in execution.
Why did Aethelbert of Kent marry Bertha, daughter of Charibert? That he married her is based on empirical evidence, insofar as we can observe physical records attesting to this event.
The records’ claims are not empirical evidence in that they are not results generated using an empirical approach.
But that only attests to the "what," not the "why." Unfortunately history is a rather sloppy science experiment. There are no controls, the lab notes are fragmented and biased, and we've yet to figure out how to re-run the experiment.
Or consider the Harry Potter series. That it is a financial success can be confirmed empirically through examination of sales receipts and shipment records. Why it appealed to individuals to such a degree as to cause them to wait in lines for hours, dressed in ridiculous outfits, just to get a new book at a midnight release is... well, outside the realm of strict empiricism. They did it because they liked the books, but why did they like the books?
There is a great realm of knowledge and understanding outside of science and empiricism. This is not just philosophically conceivable, this is a certain reality. We tend to call this realm "The Humanities."
If History, Art, Literature, Music, etc can be important subjects worthy of study, belief, and acceptance, then we must admit that Science does not have a stranglehold on reality and truth. Such things can be found outside its control. If real, valuable information can be found in Literature, then it becomes a much shorter leap to postulate that real, valuable information could be found in religion and the supernatural. It isn’t necessitated; there is still a logical leap, but there is less distance to cross.
If I pointed out that the scientific method and empirical approaches have failed to fully explain human behaviour (or more specifically, why our brains ‘tell us' to do what we do), that doesn’t indicate that the scientific method is one too weak to explain our behaviour. It would be possible to predict a brain’s behaviour and thus a human’s behaviour if one were to analyse it at a low enough level and with enough understanding of the underlying structures.
The thing is that you’re the trees for the forest. The accepted knowledge of sociology, history, art, music, literature and the rest are (or should be) rooted in approaches that are at least pseudo-empirical. If I know that people respond well to certain colours or other aesthetics, it’s because of evidence (data) that says so. If I make a general statement about the way and the why people behave and it becomes a prominent sociological principle, it’s because (or so one would hope) I’ve made an observation about behaviour, formed an explanation and used an approach that is empirical in its basics.
The reason that science might seem to fail is that you’re dealing with equivocal ideas like the ‘why’ of sociology or the ‘taste’ of art that aren’t being used rigorously or are not being looked at from the right perspective, which is causing a breakdown that you’re attributing to a breakdown of empirical approach as opposed to your input being unsuitable. It’s like how maths seems to break down if we casually treat infinity as a number. While even in something as exact as physics we can get away with that, we can’t do so within the scope of mathematics, even though mathematics can very much address infinity—just not as a number.
You claim that the sun will rise in two hours, I claim that Pride and Prejudice is a good book. You wait two hours and behold!, the sun rises on your body. I read for two hours, and the sun rises on my mind. You can point to the sun in the sky as proof that you were right, where as I have nothing to prove my case. But I would still argue that I was the one who benefited most from those two hours and that my claim was more affirmed than yours.
This is a good example of what I meant. If you were to give an explanation of what it means to ‘benefit’ from your activities and give a way to quantify that benefit based on preference, one could settle the argument.
[Edited for quote tag corrections, minor sentence change.]
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General Discussion / Re: Humanity: Good News, Bad News
« on: May 27, 2009, 11:43:29 pm »
What do you think about more strictly regulating inbreeding and linebreeding? For example, would it be a good idea to make it necessary for breeders and sellers to apply for, hold and renew licences to breed and sell inbred and linebred dogs (or, really, any such animal in general) to make sure it's done for legitimate purposes and for buyers to apply for a permit to verify that they require specifically an inbred or linebred animal (as opposed to one that isn't either of those) for legitimate purposes?
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General Discussion / Re: Stuff you LOVE, baby
« on: May 09, 2009, 12:30:48 pm »I just saw two hours of a movie called Shogun, It was really good I didn't have time for the whole thing though. I need to get that thing, its a book too I found out.
http://www.chronocompendium.com/Forums/index.php/topic,4011/
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General Discussion / Re: The "WTF? Check this link out!" thread!
« on: April 19, 2009, 06:19:09 am »
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Museum_of_Bad_Art&oldid=284216421#Thefts
Not to condone that link, but I happened to notice that the video got the formula for the volume of a sphere wrong. (Besides which, the Earth isn't a sphere etc.) The world must know!
http://rathergood.com/spacemen
Not to condone that link, but I happened to notice that the video got the formula for the volume of a sphere wrong. (Besides which, the Earth isn't a sphere etc.) The world must know!
115
General Discussion / Re: So... Do you dream?
« on: April 13, 2009, 11:37:56 pm »Perhaps your own life is nothing but a lucid dream.
I, at least, think that that would make things seem even more amazing if I knew that to be so!
That would be an interesting explanation for déjà vu. Rather than just experiencing a similar/identical set of circumstances, it was because you dreamt of the future...or something of that nature.
It could also be that sometimes the brain retroactively creates a false memory of having dreamed of the event.
I have verbal and thought processes in my dreams. As in sometimes dream-version-of-me actually thinks instead of speaks.
Does anyone else have that?
I think I've had that once that I can recall. I think 'I' did a 'tricky' bit of maths in my head (in my head). I can't remember any more than that, so it could've been anything from a 'large' sum to solving a quadratic equation to something else. Although, knowing me, maybe I just recited pi.
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General Discussion / Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« on: April 05, 2009, 10:00:09 am »...[Fiat money] makes those who get the newly printed money first wealthier while making everyone else poorer, and causes continuous inflation which encourages people to take on debt instead of save...
Elaborate?
117
General Discussion / Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« on: March 26, 2009, 01:35:54 pm »
Or, worse still, when the author refers to a single hand as 'the hand', as if it should be taken as a given that it's the right one. (Obviously it won't be the left one, because authors invariably feel a need to state when it's the left hand as if it were some perverseness.)
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General Discussion / Re: Gran Torino
« on: March 21, 2009, 05:19:38 pm »
Anyone else notice the ironic Jesus parallels?
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General Discussion / Re: The "WTF? Check this link out!" thread!
« on: March 06, 2009, 11:02:52 pm »120
General Discussion / Re: Pictures Thread
« on: February 26, 2009, 12:37:13 am »I wish it was the old days where you actually learned to speak the bloody language.
I was arguing for this the other day, but my position was weakened by my ignorance of how many people would actually want to. Do you have any idea how many Latinists would prefer to also learn to translate the other way?