If only he'd rung me first.
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Darwin's Illusion
- Thread starter Neuropteron
- Start date
mikkel_the_dane
My own religion
Do you know how Popper is?
Sorry, no ─ haven't heard from him since he died.
mikkel_the_dane
My own religion
Yes, that's him, but alas he's still dead.
mikkel_the_dane
My own religion
Yes and there are still people, who agree with his position on science, which contradicts yours.
cladking
Well-Known Member
You won't be able to see this but even if I lead every evidential statement with "you won't be able to see this" and end it with "you can't see this" you still can't see this. You miss the point. Yes, it is a sort of magic, our species can't see what it doesn't believe. Some years ago a scientist discovered the stones on all four sides of the Great pyramid are different at the bottom in an isosceles shape about 40' high and extending nearly to the corners at the bases. These are clearly visible but no Egyptologists had ever reported nor studied them. They are not consistent with Egyptological "theory" so are invisible.
Conversely it is easy enough to see the impossible if we just believe it. If you believe in gradual change then you'll see a slow change between fossils. Like a movie playing in your head you don't need to even look at it or think about it!! It's magic! No matter how many times I present the self evident you still aren't going to see it. How long did posters in this thread play the words "all observed change in species is sudden"?
cladking
Well-Known Member
"
Philosophy of arithmetic[edit]
Popper's principle of falsifiability runs into prima facie difficulties when the epistemological status of mathematics is considered. It is difficult to conceive how simple statements of arithmetic, such as "2 + 2 = 4", could ever be shown to be false. If they are not open to falsification they can not be scientific. If they are not scientific, it needs to be explained how they can be informative about real world objects and events.Popper's solution[53] was an original contribution in the philosophy of mathematics. His idea was that a number statement such as "2 apples + 2 apples = 4 apples" can be taken in two senses. In its pure mathematics sense, "2 + 2 = 4" is logically true and cannot be refuted. Contrastingly, in its applied mathematics sense of it describing the physical behaviour of apples, it can be falsified. This can be done by placing two apples in a container, then proceeding to place another two apples in the same container. If there are five, three, or a number of apples that is not four in said container, the theory that "2 apples + 2 apples = 4 apples" is shown to be false. On the contrary, if there are four apples in the container, the theory of numbers is shown to be applicable to reality.[54]
LOL.
He was on the right track but 2 + 2 = 4 is falsifiable. It is not true in the real world because there are no two identical apples. Math is merely logic quantified but it never ever has a perfect fit to the real world which is logic manifest or life which is logic incarnate.
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cladking
Well-Known Member
All life is conscious. All life is individual. Behavior is the exercise of consciousness in individuals.
Your definitions are describing paradigms and these are not science. Observation and experiment are science. Paradigms come and go with every funeral.
Long live Darwin.
gnostic
The Lost One
You don’t know what empirical evidence or empirical experiments or empirical data mean, cladking.
Example:
If you had formulated a hypothesis, and if you discovered one evidence to support your hypothesis (eg explanations & predictionsj, that’s not good enough and that’s “not empirical”.
You will need to find another independent evidence or more, to verify first evidence...actually the more independent evidence you have, the better to verify your hypothesis. So, if you discovered 100 evidence that back up the first evidence, then you would have your “empirical” evidence.
Empirical evidence is about verification.
But a falsifiable hypothesis isn’t just about verifying a hypothesis being true, in Scientific Method.
Falsifiability and Scientific Method are also about finding evidence THAT CAN REFUTE any weak or erroneous hypothesis, or to even debunk existing scientific theory.
Refuting new hypotheses or existing theories are equally important as verifying them.
cladking
Well-Known Member
No. You are describing paradigms.
"Kuhn claimed that science guided by one paradigm would be 'incommensurable' with science developed under a different paradigm, by which is meant that there is no common measure for assessing the different scientific theories."
cladking
Well-Known Member
Science is theory derived from observation and experiment. It is nothing else. "Paradigms" are overarching interpretations of theory and are not science at all. They are generally mistaken for science because they underlie most peoples' models.
Darwin didn't even create theory because he had no experiment. He created a series of hypotheses that were logically consistent with observation and derived from numerous false assumptions.
Darwin didn't even create theory because he had no experiment. He created a series of hypotheses that were logically consistent with observation and derived from numerous false assumptions.
What makes the most sense is the simplest narrative that can account for the appearance of man in history as we find him. Human history is consistent with naturalistic explanations of human biological, psychological, and cultural evolution. If that doesn't make sense to you, it would if you learned more. I illustrated the evidence of these things occurring a few pages back on this thread in a section that began "I think we can also suss out the origin of the concepts of intelligence and creativity."
Your argument is analogous to the creationists' use of the Cambrian explosion to serve as evidence of the creation of the kinds as outlined in Genesis. You also want to compress a long time in terms of individual human lives but a relatively short piece of human history - the time between when the only records of man were things like tools and nomadic campsites and when there was evidence of settled civilization and written records - into a single act of creation.
Agreed. I just wrote this on another thread in response to a creationist's claim that, "I have more answers and more sensible answers than "it assembled itself" :
"What you have are not what I would call answers, which need to be demonstrably correct claims. What you have are unfalsifiable claims, which have no explanatory or predictive power." This is a paraphrasing of your comment. We can't call anything fact, true, correct, knowledge, etc. unless we can demonstrate that empirically, which means accurately predicting outcomes not accurately predicted without that idea.
Do you have a hypothesis for why that is the case for you? It's not for me. In your estimation, what's the difference between us that accounts for our different experiences posting? People see my evidence and arguments, even if they aren't convinced by them.
If you believe that evolution is possible, and that if it occurred, we should find "snapshots" of its progress in the fossil record, then you can understand those fossils as being consistent with that expected evidence.
Do you believe that gradual change turned your grandmother's grandmother from a little girl into an old woman? If so, why?
If there were physical evidence of that transformation remaining, what might it look like? What if you found a scrapbook of her with a birthday photo every year from youth to old age? Would those pictures be a record of slow change, or would that be a rash hypothesis in your estimation because it can only be believed if one believes it possible?
You've moved the goalposts. Identical was not mentioned. "This can be done by placing two apples in a container, then proceeding to place another two apples in the same container." And why aren't the four apples placed in the container identical to the four found there a moment later?
What would unconscious life look like? A tree seems to be unconscious, like a human zygote. Why do you say it's not? Because it grows? Because it demonstrates tropism?
cladking
Well-Known Member
People agree with you. They share your false assumptions.
No! She was conceived, born, lived, procreated and died suddenly in less than a single "generation".
Everything in life including life itself is sudden.
No. The very basis of math is counting and no two identical things exist. You start with a false assumption that you can put two apples in a jar.
A stone. A fossil. A corpse. Applesauce.
It displays no free will.
I've made numerous predictions which have proven true and many more that can be tested. In the meantime my theory is still the simplest explanation for all the evidence.
cladking
Well-Known Member
Before everyone goes off on this I will stipulate that our ability to see free will in numerous species is highly limited. This is largely because our assumptions are wrong so it is invisible to us. We see "instinct" instead of choice.
gnostic
The Lost One
Most modern English translations of the Bible relied on the Masoretic Text (MT) as their main source when translating the Old Testament.
If we were to compare the generations of patriarchs in Genesis (5:1-32 & 11:10-32, eg from the creation of Adam to birth of Abraham) the numbers of years in MT differed to the other sources, such as Greek Septuagint (eg Codex Vaticanus) and the Samaritan Pentateuch.
| sources | numbers of years (age of patriarch when son was born) |
| Masoretic Text | 1948 |
| Septuagint (Codex Vaticanus) | 3314 |
| Samaritan Pentateuch | 2249 |
I have noticed that the Latin source - the Vulgate Bible - match the years with the Masoretic Text.
Anyway, calculating the age of earth based on the Bible, will vary widely, depending on the source being used.
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gnostic
The Lost One
Your so-called tests and evidence are phony as your storytelling.
Sometimes, but that's not relevant to the point, which was that unlike with you, they never say that they don't see my evidence or argument even when they reject it. Remember, you wrote, "You won't be able to see this but even if I lead every evidential statement with "you won't be able to see this" and end it with "you can't see this" you still can't see this."
When you do that - when you make a word that was intended to make distinction into one that can't - you make the word meaningless and useless. You do that with consciousness as well when you apply it to all life. It renders the word synonymous with life making the phrase "conscious life" redundant and tautological.
Here's a comment from another thread yesterday that makes the argument against doing that.
The purpose of prose is to communicate ideas. I have a thought in my head right now that you don't know about yet, but I want you to hold it as well for whatever purpose. If I choose my words well and you are literate in my language, that happens when I translate that idea into words, send them to you, and you render them as a thought in your head. Do these thoughts look alike? Are we thinking the same thought now? If so, I have achieved my purpose.
But to do this, the words must have limited, restricted meaning. The extension of a definition is the collection of things and types of things to which it refers. The more we can narrow that, the better success we have in sending ideas to one another using words. What you want to do is to broaden that extension, to include more kinds of things under the rubric of religion. This just makes it more difficult to know what you mean when you use the word.
Information theory concerns itself with this matter of the fidelity of the transmission of information mathematically: "Information theory is the mathematical study of the quantification, storage, and communication of information."
We have a similar problem in contract bridge, where we are trying to describe the strength and shape of our hands to our partners to decide or optimal contract or defense. The best bidding systems are the most granular, that is, the bids have the most limited and specific meanings. But we have orders of magnitude more possible hands to describe than bids and legal bidding sequences to represent them all, so each bid must describe a range of possible hands, but the fewer per bid, the better for communicating what you're looking at to your partner (and the opponents).
Likewise, ordinary language is the attempt to map a much smaller assortment of words onto a much larger assortment of possibilities to describe, and thus we must balance between giving words a range of meanings and limiting or constricting those meanings. We sould never broaden the meanings for no useful purpose.
Then let's count non-identical things: one, two, done.
You can't have meant what this appears to mean. Certainly you understand that one can put two apples lying beside a jar into the jar provided the jar's capacity is sufficient, so what do you actually mean instead?
I asked, "What would unconscious life look like?" So now the word life has had its extension modified to include things called nonliving by others. I can now have no idea what you mean when you call something alive if rocks are included. And why do you call applesauce unconscious but not apple trees? What behavior tells you that one is awake but not the other?
Unconscious means demonstrating no free will, but trees are conscious? Now I suppose that we need to extend free will to any movement or change. For you, all change is sudden, all matter is alive, all life is conscious (although you've now identified unconscious life), and now all life has free will. Of course you aren't understood.
None that you've presented in these threads to my knowledge. But that doesn't surprise you, right, since, according to you, such things are invisible to others even after you post them?
cladking
Well-Known Member
I think you mustta missed this from #6075; My definition was quoted. I present definitions and evidence and they remain unseen or gainsaid. You say the fossil record shows gradual change in species and it fits what people believe.
Yes! This is the nature of life.
NO!!! exactly the opposite is true. I must parse the many definitions and connotations of every word to reflect your beliefs; your intent. I'm sure I do this quite adequately. I'm actually extremely adept at extracting author intent which is what I call "reading minds". I even can see information that wasn't intended to be published.
Like abstractions or the number of ramps to build an infinite number of pyramids? You can't count what doesn't exist and everything that exists is unique. You can abstract the hell out of it but this orange plus that apple still don't make two of anything.
There is no such thing as unconscious life. The closest you can get to it in a fit individual would be something like a seed. A toad in deep hibernation is for most practical purposes "unconscious" but it still must awaken.
Yes!
Sometimes I think if you walk by a sassafras with a shovel the leaves will wilt.
You're right. "All" of my predictions are irrelevant to this thread. Of course I can make many but if I made any they are speculative.
Ancient Reality
A response to this statement in another thread wouldn't be appropriate there. Proof isn’t evidence. You keep getting hung up in semantics. Semantics is one of the chief ways we use to create our circular arguments and some use it to demolish other arguments. But semantics isn't real, it's...
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cladking
Well-Known Member
Again my "theory" is technically a lot of interrelated hypotheses that relate to all of reality and human history. Darwin's "theory" were really interrelated hypotheses that applied solely to how species change. His assumptions were wrong and mine are based on everyone makes sense.