I’m just going to float the idea. I don’t want to plan it.
TSZ get together
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Category Archives: Uncategorized
What is a decision in phoodoo world?
This is a thread to allow discussions about how those lucky enough to have free will make decisions.
As materialism doesn’t explain squat, this thread is a place for explanations from those that presumably have them.
What is a decision?
Arcatia has stated that before any thought can occur, first there must be a chemical change in the brain. So if before any decision is made, we first need a chemical change, then it is not really a decision, now is it? It is merely a response to that chemical change, for which we have no control over.
On several occasions keiths has ducked and dodged away from this problem. Arcatia now seems to want to run away from it, as has every other materialist here on this forum. About the best you can hope for is some kind of obfuscated rant about what is meaning, what is will, how do we know we know, what’s the epistemological nature of the epistemology…and on, and on the deflections to anything that could be considered an answer go. Generally people here pretend that if you stick the suffix “sian” at the end of any name, you have said something profound.
So it deserves it own thread. Let the bullshit answers speak for themselves. In the end we will see if anyone actually tries to address it. Its the toughest question for materialists to wiggle out of in my opinion.
Evolution Visualized
Is language a search?
Given sentences can be expressed in a hierarchy / taxonomy that can have moveable, functional elements, are they amenable to exploitation / investigation by GAs? (We already know Markov Chains work – http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/idbots/ )
If All ideas can be expressed in language then could digitally evolved sentences be genuinely creative? It’s like genetic programming for people language 😀
H/T Mung.
The Tide Turns in Landlocked Ohio
Back in May of this year, Zack Kopplin reported that an Ohio school district was teaching creationism using a video from Harun Yahya. Yahya is the pseudonym of Adnan Oktar, an Islamic televangelist and creationist.
Hemant Mehta, The Friendly Atheist, notes the that new CEO of the Youngstown school district is putting a stop to that. Starting immediately, science classes in the district will conform to state standards. Creationism, including the intelligent design variant, are definitely not part of those standards.
It looks like a good start to the school year in Ohio.
Shell sort [edited to provoke]
[Distinguishable entities operating identically by simple rules can form structures high in specified complexity. That is, the crabs in the video differ in size, but not in the “program” they execute. Want more specified complexity? Just add crabs.]
Not to mistaken for the Shellsort algorithm devised by Donald Shell (1924-2015).
How Much For The Baptists?
Matt Wilbourn, one of the founders of the Muskogee Atheist Community donated $100 to the Murrow Indian Children’s Home. His donation was returned because the MICH gets most of its funding from the American Baptist Churches Association and “accepting a donation from atheists would go against everything they believe in.”
Matt upped the ante to $250. Still refused. He and his wife then started a GoFundMe page to see if they could raise $1000 for the charity. At the time of this post the total amount pledged is $12,670 and climbing.
I encourage everyone to donate until we find out how much money it takes to convince a Baptist to do the right thing.
Polyworld
from 2007. Long but worth the watch. Let’s discuss below?
Another take on the Conspira-Sea Cruise
Remember the Conspire-Sea Cruise, attended and reported on by TSZ commenter ‘Colin’, aka ‘Learned Hand’?
Popular Mechanics sent a reporter, Bronwen Dickey, on the same cruise, and here is her dispatch:
I Went on a Weeklong Cruise For Conspiracy Theorists. It Ended Poorly.
What do you get when you stick some of the conspiracy world’s biggest celebrities and their die-hard fans on a cruise ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for a week? Some fascinating insight into our strange times. And one near fistfight.
Genetic load and junk.
Mung, to petrushka, elsewhere:
Everyone does not understand “genetic load” and those that do claim to understand are probably wrong. Why don’t you start an OP on genetic load and the genetic load argument? That would be interesting. Betting you won’t.
This is such an OP. I believe the genetic load argument*** was initially proposed by Susumu Ohno in 1972, whose paper also introduced the then-scare-quoted term “junk”. It’s brief, accessible, and worth a read for anyone who wishes to offer an opinion/understand (not necessarily in that order).
The short version: sequence-related function must be subject to deleterious mutations. Long genomes (such as those of most eukaryotes) contain too many bases for the entire genome to be considered functional in that way, given known mutation rates. The bulk of such genomes must either have functions that are not related to sequence, or no function at all.
Interestingly, the paper is hosted on the site of an anti-junk-er, Andras Pellionisz, a self-promoting double-PhD’d … er … maverick. Also of interest is that, contrary to some ID narratives, the idea was initially resisted by ‘Darwinists’, if that term is understood not as people who simply accept evolution, but as people who place most emphasis on Natural Selection. Perfectionism is not the sole preserve of Creationists.
More recent work has characterised the nonfunctional fraction, and this lends considerable empirical support to Ohno’s contentions.
[eta: link to comment]
***[eta: in relation to genome size, not the first time anyone, ever, discussed genetic load!]
The Great Filter
Hoping this will be more fun / less confrontational, but certainly ID and non-ID perspectives will differ. In a nutshell ‘The Great Filter’ is an event that stops life inevitably filling the universe. Others have written much better accounts, so here is your background reading:
The Drake Equation
The Fermi Paradox
One-stop synopsis if you don’t want the top 3
What do the folks here think? Is there a great filter(s) are we past it / them? My vote is there is at least one ahead of us and we probably won’t make it. Candidates include:
Environmental catastrophe, war using highly potent (N/B/C) weapons, religious zealotry taking us backwards..
I also think other possibilities are flawed assumptions in the Fermi Paradox (maybe marginal / diminishing utility in expansion beyond a certain point, or perhaps transcendence out of this physical realm for sufficiently advanced species. Certainly a million SciFi tropes (Let’s see if we can make a list? Childhood’s End, Mass Effect…) have come from this. What do you folks think?
Kinds, Baramins, Whatever
This is an attempt to revive a discussion of “created kinds”, holobaramins, or whatever you want to call them. How do you define their boundaries? Can anyone name any specific holobaramins? Is there anyone who believes they exist and is willing to defend their existence?
Did Patrick Matthew prove natural selection is just a line of reasoning in its conclusions.
I recently found Patrick Matthew , some 20 years before, had some important conclusions about how natural selection can lead to new species. Darwin agreed he had come to like conclusions, on main points, as he did. This is not known well and indeed they emphasis wAllace as a co discoverer of evolution but say nothing about Matthew.
This brings up a good YEC creationist point.
Matthew did do just what darwin did. he observed the seeming hand of selection controling survival/reproduction of individuals and so new environments bring new controls and so new species.
this is fine for creationism. its minor changes in types/kinds of biology. Yet matthew, a little, and darwin, a great deal, then went on to extrapolate from this the entire creation of biology. Its entire complexity and diversity as from selection on traits. Yet Matthew did no more investigation then his idea of selection. So it follows the both men ‘s conclusions on evolutions story in biology are just lines of reasoning from simple raw data points.
Both desperately embrace the fossil record, geology concepts for deposition, to make thier lines of reasoning.
I say Matthew’s existence in these matters proves Darwins idea was mostly lines of reasoning from a minor trivial observation of selections ability to determine success in creatures survival.
So evolutionism really is based on a real selection truth and then is wild extrapolation.
Micro does not equal Macro after all. Macro needs to cross boundaries beyond selection on traits. It needs these mutations desperately and thats the great error in the lines of reasoning.
Best Illusion of the Year Finalists
http://illusionoftheyear.com/cat/top-10-finalists/2016/
Something fun, for a change.
Patrickatheism
If God exists, atheism is false. Thus atheism is dependent upon the truth of whether or not God exists.
Imagine a world in which it is true that God exists and it is also the case that atheism is true.
This is the world of Patrickatheism.
Atheism, Truth, Morals
Imagine my surprise when I heard that atheism was based on a search for truth. We all know that’s false.
Let’s examine a couple recent examples. Continue reading
Shades of TSZ vs UD?
Deepak seems to be using familiar terms:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU6TkfCGlX8
Cartesian Skepticism
The main features of Cartesianism are:
(1) the use of methodical doubt as a tool for testing beliefs and reaching certainty.
– A Companion to Epistemology, p 57
It seems odd to me that keiths, who denies the possibility of certainty, is a champion of Cartesian skepticism.
A Cartesian skeptic will argue that no empirical proposition about anything other than one’s own mind and its contents is sufficiently warranted because there are always legitimate grounds for doubting it.
… A Cartesian requires certainty.
– A Companion to Epistemology, p 457
keiths is not a Cartesian Skeptic.
Cartesian scepticism, more impressed with Descartes’ argument for scepticism than his own reply, holds that we do not have any knowledge of any empirical proposition about anything beyond the contents of our own minds. The reason, roughly put, is that there is a legitimate doubt about all such propositions because there is no way to justifiably deny that our senses are being stimulated by some cause (an evil spirit, for example) which is radically different from the objects which we normally think affect our senses.
A Companion to Epistemology, p 457
keiths is not a Cartesian Skeptic.
Is it even possible to be Cartesian Skeptic?
Slavery in the Bible
The Christian Bible condones slavery explicitly in numerous passages. One of those reference often by slave owners in the Antebellum South comes from the story of Noah.
Genesis 9:24-27
9:24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
9:25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
9:26 And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.
9:27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.