I have seen pretty much nothing from the so-called rationalists on this thread besides ad hominems and blatant insults. Take a look in the mirror. Heh. I'm even speaking a language that should be familiar to fans of evolutionary theory or science generally. But you aren't arguing on those same terms; rather you are saying that these people are scarey, or that they are a sign of human failure. You aren't actually providing anything but character attacks and non-sequitors. "evolution" is theory, not fact. If you want to use scientific terms, it is theory, not fact. What is fact is genetic adaptation, but not "evolution" as such. Because according to scientific epistemic theory, a theory is only ever a provisional model which accounts for the facts, and this provisional model will always be a cognitive model relative to the state of human perception. That is pretty much the textbook definition of scientific theory. It's the reason why old theories are abandoned in place of new ones.
But, the same can be applied to so-called "Facts". At one time it would have been said "That pluto is a planet is an undeniable fact". What a "Planet" is, is an arbitrary definition that changes over-time, and as a result, Pluto is no longer a planet, in fact.
It's not meant as an insult stickben. It's meant as a truthful proposition. You say "none of your argument makes sense" as a matter of fact it makes a lot of sense to people who are more educated than you.
I didn't make this stuff up, I will not claim any originality on any of this. It is the result of years of private study of humanities most revered thinkers.
Having that behind me it is obvious to me that your inability to make sense out of my comments is the consequence not of my not making sense, but your inability to make sense of them. I.e. ignorance.
It's as if I went in depth into the arcitecture of neural networks in the human brain - presumably a subject you know nothing about - and then you said "none of that makes sense". True, if only you tacked on "to me."
It is a valid question. Just because I think it is relatively simple to resolve doesn't mean it's not a good question. Paritucularly of interest for theology is whether or not evolution tends toward a teleological end and that is debatable within science with the vast majority being reductionists tending toward explanations that deny teleology, nevertheless, evolution does tend to evolve sympathetically to its environment and not solely as the result of random mutations but also due to epigenetic factors. Methyl and Acetyl groups become attached to the Genome which up- or down-regulate the expression of the gene. This process is triggered by environmental factors which provides an avenue for environmental factors to inform the genetic adaptation of the organism which could be related to teleology. For example; the Flamingo is not genetically pink, it is white, but due to epigenetic factors and the consumption of large quantities of betacarotene the flamingo is generally pink. The same epigenetic adaptation occurs in humans who consume excess betacarotene and the condition is known as Carotenemia which has as it's primary symptom orange skin similar to that of Jaundice.
This is a key point of contention when it comes to evolutionary theory which could drastically alter the way "evolution" is assimilated into the over-all perspective of people who accept it as fact. There is a similar debate surrounding the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology. Whether or not the universe tends toward an environment suitable for and containing self-conscious beings. If so, then this it is tending toward a teleological end, which theologically could be taken as "God's Plan". This depth of inquiry isn't generally what people mean when they assert that "Evolution is fact" rather they think that the standard interpretation of the facts which is also called "Evolution" but which tends to no teleological end is the "Fact" of evolution, when it is a metaphysical assumptions supervening on the theory of evolution.
My honest opinion would be that the educational system needs a complete overhaul such that it can honor these distinctions and inform our children correctly instead of from the ideological base of eliminativists. But, the public inquiry can't get beyond simple forms and naive concepts of "Fact", "Theory" and so forth.
That's not even close to what I was saying. What I was saying is probably more elusive that most of the opinions you've heard. Give it some time and thought, maybe it will come to you.
Jesus Christ man, does any of that really matter to you? Whether I am 29 or 30 or 3 doesn't matter if what I'm saying is true or false. I keep trying to transcend egotistical identification and valuation and move the discussion toward truth valuation, but I can't do it alone.
You guys eat up comments that are sympathetic to your own attitudes, even if those comments are shallow and vulgar. Yet if someone tries to raise the conversation above the lowest of human thought you get upset. At this rate we will never get to talking about the really controversial and hard-to-stomach subjects like paraphilia. Nor will we be able to talk about the unification of subject and object in a reciprocating system of differentiation as reflected by the Yin-Yang symbol, the Ouroborous, Möbius Strip and John Wheeler's Participatory Anthropic Principle (Cosmology) or what even the Weak-AP generally indicates. We will be forever busy taking a stand against each other, waving our banners, stomping our feet and repeating the phrase from Kipling's Jungle Book "We are right because we all say so."
By the way, I even created a youtube video called "Defending the Churchlands" in which I defended their "Eliminativism" to some extent. The video has gained quite a bit of praise on youtube considering it's content. But, right now I am challenging slavish and blind adherence to reductionism and eliminativism which is not the same context as when I was defending them.
You have a cognitive structure which by all appearances seems real. If you perceive a distinct dichotomy between religion and science then you will have the tendency to conform your perception of others into that dualistic conceptualization. If that is the case, I guess it might seem like I am arguing for "creationism in science class" but if you were a theists, you'd think I was arguing the exact opposite. The range of comments on my youtube channel are from "You have a good heart and God's love will come streaming though you at any moment" to "amazing neurophilosophical videos? keep it up" to "Thank you for your advice on my essay on Metzinger! Your channel is great, and even though you don't consider yourself an academic philosopher, your intellect and? insight is astounding." and "Great videos brother, keep em' coming ... the more enlightened voices on? here the better for all of us!!" and conversely there is "Gay", "You suck" and a bunch like that too. None of it really means anything to me, I'm just sharing it show you how much of it is in the conceptual architecture of the people I'm talking with.
I think the big words are confusing you, not me. I never once said "Creationism" should be taught in a science course. I clearly distinguished between the scientific method and transcendental idealism, making trascendent ideals of a different sort than science, and therefor not a good supporting argument for teaching religion in the classroom, not at all.
What should be taught in the science class is that epistemological foundations and limitations of the scientific method and the scope of science which leaves the realm of transcendental idealism untainted by the slavish adherence to reductive materialism.
Big words, I know, but those are the words commonly acceptable by philosophers. If you want me to call "Transcendental idealism" or "Reductive Materialism" something else, fine, let me know, if you want an explanation of what they are, great, I can do that. But I'm not going to withhold my opinion because you can't understand it.
"Evolution is a fact. Plain & simple"
No it's not "Plain and Simple" this is from someone who has no epistemological foundations to speak of. Without that, you are knee-deep in muck. But you can certainly feel like you belong with all the other people stuck in the mud with you. I happen to be a big fan of science, the scientific method, the scientific community and to some extent reductive and eliminative materialism. Two authors I appreciate very much are Pat and Paul Churchland, both Neurophilosophers, originators of the term "Eliminativism", and professors at UCSD. I have "The Engine of Reason; The Seat of the Soul" and "Brain-Wise" on my bookshelf at home and I have studied them thoroughly along with their predecessors' work "The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul" by Francis Crick (Nobel prize winner and co-founder of the double-helix strucutre of DNA) and "The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach" by Christoph Koch. To name a few of their sympathizers, I also have "Descartes' Error" by Antonio Domasio, "Being No One" and "The Ego Tunnel" by Neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger and "Consciousness: An Introduction" by converted Psi-researcher and born-again reductionist Susan Blackmore. That covers about a fifth of the top shelf of my book shelf. Know that you aren't talking to someone who is ignorant. I can tell you step-by-step the evolution of the human eye from a simple photosensitive cell containing either melanopsin or rhodopsin to the pin-hole eye of the Squid and up to the compound eye of the fruit-fly and the human eye. I can tell you many of these eyes share a HOX gene known as PAX6 that is also responsible for the shape of the cranial vault. I can explain how the excitation of the retinal ganglion cells transmit information through the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus on their way to the occipital lobe where discrete visual processing occurs and I can tell you that absolutely none of it fits Crick and Koch's criteria for the Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCC).
It's simple? Maybe if you have relatively simple concepts and little actual, firmly-planted knowledge.
Just to clarify an "idiot" is someone who scores the same as a 7-year old on Weschler's Scale of Intelligence (old version). It is an indication of a cognitive impairment and not willed act. The term should never be used with an air of approval or disapproval. IMHO the way the term is colloquially used is a complete falshood and misrepresentation of reality borne out of the egotistical desire to feel superior. Again, just my humble opinion. I also think it is egotistically satisfying to be able to sit back and say "What an idiot!" and laugh at someone else and so provides the basis for much popular entertainment. The same wouldn't fly if the targets were "mentally handicapped" it's only when we can project idiocy as a willful act that we can justify our derision.
I really liked it, though I could criticize it too. Particularly the idea that 0 wasn't really good enough, that "belonging" was the height of his life, egotistical romantic love, and the caste system are all status quo. At first I could identify with 0 being mistreated so much, but then he went and felt like he belonged. Belonging, reflect the basic function of ego which is to appear worthy and acceptable. That is why it is so dominant, because the absence of egotistical satisfaction can mean depression. 0 was depressed, but if he had been able to drop his desire to be accepted and belong to some other he would have become infinity himself. He would have broken off all the chains of fate that dominate those around him.
"Emptiness is lonliness, and lonliness is cleanliness, and cleanliness is godliness, and God is empty just like me." - Zero, Smashing Pumpkins
The question is not to be taken in isolation or if it is to be taken in isolation, like most philosophical thought experiments, you can't violate the bounds of the experiment by introducing concepts which are not already contained within it.
That "Sound" is relative to a hearing aparatus, is one thing and by invoking "Sound waves" which are relative to seeing aparati you haven't solved the riddle, you've only introduced a new concept and violated the conditions of the thought experiment.
If the signal was analog however it would need to be repeated much more often and signal loss would become a major issue. That binary can be decoded by mapping each octet onto their respective numbers in the following chain from left to right 1/2/4/8/16/32/64/128 and adding the corresponding values together and then referencing them on a UNICODE chart. 01101010 becomes 0+2+4+0+16+0+64+0=86 which corresponds to the Latin capital letter V. This can also be transcoded to hexadecimal in which the same letter is represented by a 4 digit "nibble".
No, computer processing speed is mostly irrelevant to internet bandwidth. In-fact, it's mostly irrelevant to a PCs over all performance. That the central processing unit (CPU) can perform many quadrillion flops per second is irrelevant if the North Bridge is not capable of buffering at the same speed. If the bands leading from the peripheral components interfaces (PCI slots) or advanced graphics ports (AGP) is slow then the processor will process information fast, but will bottle-neck at the South Bridge. A new MB architecture would be required, the AT form-factor with its typical bus speeds would not allow for much performance increase. Also you would need to make sure your Network Interface Card (NIC) is top of the line and operating at 1GB/s or greater. Gigabit Ethernet NICs are becoming more common, but I personally am running a 100 Base-TX network with only a 10/100 full-duplex NIC.
But, the same can be applied to so-called "Facts". At one time it would have been said "That pluto is a planet is an undeniable fact". What a "Planet" is, is an arbitrary definition that changes over-time, and as a result, Pluto is no longer a planet, in fact.
It's not meant as an insult stickben. It's meant as a truthful proposition. You say "none of your argument makes sense" as a matter of fact it makes a lot of sense to people who are more educated than you.
I didn't make this stuff up, I will not claim any originality on any of this. It is the result of years of private study of humanities most revered thinkers.
Having that behind me it is obvious to me that your inability to make sense out of my comments is the consequence not of my not making sense, but your inability to make sense of them. I.e. ignorance.
It's as if I went in depth into the arcitecture of neural networks in the human brain - presumably a subject you know nothing about - and then you said "none of that makes sense". True, if only you tacked on "to me."
No it's not simpler. You only think it is because you are that simple.
It is a valid question. Just because I think it is relatively simple to resolve doesn't mean it's not a good question. Paritucularly of interest for theology is whether or not evolution tends toward a teleological end and that is debatable within science with the vast majority being reductionists tending toward explanations that deny teleology, nevertheless, evolution does tend to evolve sympathetically to its environment and not solely as the result of random mutations but also due to epigenetic factors. Methyl and Acetyl groups become attached to the Genome which up- or down-regulate the expression of the gene. This process is triggered by environmental factors which provides an avenue for environmental factors to inform the genetic adaptation of the organism which could be related to teleology. For example; the Flamingo is not genetically pink, it is white, but due to epigenetic factors and the consumption of large quantities of betacarotene the flamingo is generally pink. The same epigenetic adaptation occurs in humans who consume excess betacarotene and the condition is known as Carotenemia which has as it's primary symptom orange skin similar to that of Jaundice.
This is a key point of contention when it comes to evolutionary theory which could drastically alter the way "evolution" is assimilated into the over-all perspective of people who accept it as fact. There is a similar debate surrounding the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology. Whether or not the universe tends toward an environment suitable for and containing self-conscious beings. If so, then this it is tending toward a teleological end, which theologically could be taken as "God's Plan". This depth of inquiry isn't generally what people mean when they assert that "Evolution is fact" rather they think that the standard interpretation of the facts which is also called "Evolution" but which tends to no teleological end is the "Fact" of evolution, when it is a metaphysical assumptions supervening on the theory of evolution.
My honest opinion would be that the educational system needs a complete overhaul such that it can honor these distinctions and inform our children correctly instead of from the ideological base of eliminativists. But, the public inquiry can't get beyond simple forms and naive concepts of "Fact", "Theory" and so forth.
That's not even close to what I was saying. What I was saying is probably more elusive that most of the opinions you've heard. Give it some time and thought, maybe it will come to you.
Jesus Christ man, does any of that really matter to you? Whether I am 29 or 30 or 3 doesn't matter if what I'm saying is true or false. I keep trying to transcend egotistical identification and valuation and move the discussion toward truth valuation, but I can't do it alone.
You guys eat up comments that are sympathetic to your own attitudes, even if those comments are shallow and vulgar. Yet if someone tries to raise the conversation above the lowest of human thought you get upset. At this rate we will never get to talking about the really controversial and hard-to-stomach subjects like paraphilia. Nor will we be able to talk about the unification of subject and object in a reciprocating system of differentiation as reflected by the Yin-Yang symbol, the Ouroborous, Möbius Strip and John Wheeler's Participatory Anthropic Principle (Cosmology) or what even the Weak-AP generally indicates. We will be forever busy taking a stand against each other, waving our banners, stomping our feet and repeating the phrase from Kipling's Jungle Book "We are right because we all say so."
You have a cognitive structure which by all appearances seems real. If you perceive a distinct dichotomy between religion and science then you will have the tendency to conform your perception of others into that dualistic conceptualization. If that is the case, I guess it might seem like I am arguing for "creationism in science class" but if you were a theists, you'd think I was arguing the exact opposite. The range of comments on my youtube channel are from "You have a good heart and God's love will come streaming though you at any moment" to "amazing neurophilosophical videos? keep it up" to "Thank you for your advice on my essay on Metzinger! Your channel is great, and even though you don't consider yourself an academic philosopher, your intellect and? insight is astounding." and "Great videos brother, keep em' coming ... the more enlightened voices on? here the better for all of us!!" and conversely there is "Gay", "You suck" and a bunch like that too. None of it really means anything to me, I'm just sharing it show you how much of it is in the conceptual architecture of the people I'm talking with.
I think the big words are confusing you, not me. I never once said "Creationism" should be taught in a science course. I clearly distinguished between the scientific method and transcendental idealism, making trascendent ideals of a different sort than science, and therefor not a good supporting argument for teaching religion in the classroom, not at all.
What should be taught in the science class is that epistemological foundations and limitations of the scientific method and the scope of science which leaves the realm of transcendental idealism untainted by the slavish adherence to reductive materialism.
Big words, I know, but those are the words commonly acceptable by philosophers. If you want me to call "Transcendental idealism" or "Reductive Materialism" something else, fine, let me know, if you want an explanation of what they are, great, I can do that. But I'm not going to withhold my opinion because you can't understand it.
"Evolution is a fact. Plain & simple"
No it's not "Plain and Simple" this is from someone who has no epistemological foundations to speak of. Without that, you are knee-deep in muck. But you can certainly feel like you belong with all the other people stuck in the mud with you. I happen to be a big fan of science, the scientific method, the scientific community and to some extent reductive and eliminative materialism. Two authors I appreciate very much are Pat and Paul Churchland, both Neurophilosophers, originators of the term "Eliminativism", and professors at UCSD. I have "The Engine of Reason; The Seat of the Soul" and "Brain-Wise" on my bookshelf at home and I have studied them thoroughly along with their predecessors' work "The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul" by Francis Crick (Nobel prize winner and co-founder of the double-helix strucutre of DNA) and "The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach" by Christoph Koch. To name a few of their sympathizers, I also have "Descartes' Error" by Antonio Domasio, "Being No One" and "The Ego Tunnel" by Neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger and "Consciousness: An Introduction" by converted Psi-researcher and born-again reductionist Susan Blackmore. That covers about a fifth of the top shelf of my book shelf. Know that you aren't talking to someone who is ignorant. I can tell you step-by-step the evolution of the human eye from a simple photosensitive cell containing either melanopsin or rhodopsin to the pin-hole eye of the Squid and up to the compound eye of the fruit-fly and the human eye. I can tell you many of these eyes share a HOX gene known as PAX6 that is also responsible for the shape of the cranial vault. I can explain how the excitation of the retinal ganglion cells transmit information through the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus on their way to the occipital lobe where discrete visual processing occurs and I can tell you that absolutely none of it fits Crick and Koch's criteria for the Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCC).
It's simple? Maybe if you have relatively simple concepts and little actual, firmly-planted knowledge.
"Emptiness is lonliness, and lonliness is cleanliness, and cleanliness is godliness, and God is empty just like me." - Zero, Smashing Pumpkins
The question is not to be taken in isolation or if it is to be taken in isolation, like most philosophical thought experiments, you can't violate the bounds of the experiment by introducing concepts which are not already contained within it.
That "Sound" is relative to a hearing aparatus, is one thing and by invoking "Sound waves" which are relative to seeing aparati you haven't solved the riddle, you've only introduced a new concept and violated the conditions of the thought experiment.
I find this stuff very interesting.