http://mashable.com/2016/06/02/elon-musk-simulated-reality/#sdLXHm2_jsqB
2,657 thoughts on “Elon Musk Thinks Evolution is Bullshit.”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
fifth:
Again, you can define God as a necessary being and then claim that he must exist because he’s a necessary being, but that does not accomplish anything of value.
fifth:
“Screaming at the computer screen”? If you would stop screaming at non-presuppositionalists and try to understand their position(s), you might get better results.
I never cease to be amazed at presuppositionalists.
Yes, that’s right. Fuck god.
And likewise unicorns.
Has god not revealed to you how to write your game yet FMM? He revealed it to me after a suitable input of effort. But I’ve held off posting it for lols. And ever since then I’ve been wondering if god would reveal how to do it to you. As yet that’s not happened has it? Tried praying?
OMagain:
I suspect that you’re one of the elect, and fifth isn’t.
It seems to me that in the above “reliable perception” is being used to cover two situations that need to be distinguished.
The first situation is ontology: for example, can we reliably perceive whether the objects of our perception (and we) are part of some simulated universe or whether the objects and we are ordinary objects (as someone who has never been subjected to philosophy would see the world).
The second assumes ontology is held constant: for example, is the perception of beings in a simulated universe reliable for them as a community of perceiving entities interacting with an external (but simulated) world?
I take KN as talking about the second and you pointing out the need to consider the first when talking about reliability as you are using the word.
I think the KN’s reliability has to be relativized to an ontology. Further, there are ontologies where perception is simply not possible as I understand the term, such as BBs who (that?) exist momentarily in a heat dead universe.
FMM,
It should be clear to you that if I was not an atheist then I’d consider it irrational or unwise at best to tell the creator of the universe (and who is then presumably spying on me right now to check I’m behaving in order to decide if to torment me for eternity or not) to fuck itself.
I’m not scared of what does not exist!
I understand Neil as being an internal realist as well. So maybe he is trying to say each linguistic subcommunity has its own conceptual scheme within which it makes claims about reality. Such claims are to be assessed only within that scheme.
Now I understand that we are talking about single beliefs within linguistic subcommunities. So that approach of assigning a conceptual scheme would mean that each belief by a sub-community (which could have 1 member, I suppose) would require its own conceptual scheme.
Now I can see merit for claiming the need to consider different conceptual schemes for different domains of knowledge and arguing that reality is assessable only within such schemes. But not for making internal realism and conceptual schemes apply to individual beliefs by a linguistic sub-community.
Yes, it’s all my fault for asking you to support your claims on a skeptical site.
The issue is that you consider any discussion that does not explicitly assume the existence of your god to be an affront to your religious views and in need of correction (shades of a prolific UD participant here). You are apparently unable to engage in any conversation without repeating your baseless, unsupported assertions. Every thread in which you participate is quickly derailed by your proselytizing.
I made a suggestion of an alternative approach. I sincerely hope you will seriously consider it.
Bruce,
I think he’s talking about the first, because he’s responding to fifth and fifth is arguing here for an ontology, not within an ontology.
Either that or KN is confusing (or failing to distinguish) the two senses.
The flat earth people probably don’t see earth as a planet.
As a mathematician, I see very clearly that roundness and flatness are not “natural” properties. Rather, they are “metric” properties. They are properties that derive from the metrics that we use.
Moreover, I see quite clearly that there is an uncountable infinitude of metrics that we could possibly use. One of those metrics would be to define distance in accordance with a Mercator projection. And, with that metric, the earth is flat (but the North and South poles are infinitely distant).
We choose our metrics on a pragmatic basis. I have no criticism of the standard choice, but I recognize it as a pragmatic choice of metric.
From my perspective, the ideal scientific theory should be analytic (have no descriptive content).
The primary role of a scientific theory is to construct a solution to the intentionality problem. It provides us with a way of using propositions to describe the world. So data is theory laden, because without a theory there would not be any data. The purpose of the theory is to define the data (which is how it solves the intentionality problem).
Thus I see a scientific theory as a set of conventions that define data. I don’t have to believe the theory. But I do have to practice it, if I want to use the data or if I want to gather my own data in a way that I can share with others. However, I can still question a theory, while practicing it.
I don’t see this as at all similar to WJM’s outlook.
I would agree with this. We compare our understanding with God’s infallible understanding and conclude we are not God.
Some of us never quite get that far
Exactly, it’s called common grace God graciously reveals even if we don’t deserve it.
peace
I would agree if I was the one doing the defining.
I’m not
God defines himself as necessary and he alone has the authority to do so.
peace
There you go,
The totality and extent of the atheist argument condensed into two words
peace
Fairly retarded god I’d say then.
Are you kidding me? That is exactly what I’d expect you to do. That is because you hate God more than you love yourself.
It’s exactly what I expect you to do for as long as God allows you to do so.
peace
keiths:
fifth:
Man, there’s a lot of circular reasoning going on in this thread.
Ive been waiting on you. 😉
Ive been playing around with putting it directly in HTML. I in-vision that inorder for it to be useful we need some sort of catalog like this.
https://oeis.org/
I need to spend more time on it but coding is boring 😉
peace
any discussion that assumes the Christian God does not exist then argues the Christian God does not exist is simply irrational.
Such tripe needs correcting.
peace
That is not what is happening. You seem incapable of understanding that the lack of an explicit assumption that your god exists is not the same as an explicit assumption that your god does not exist. For the vast majority of the threads into which you insist on injecting your baseless claims, the existence or lack thereof of your god is immaterial. Except to you.
Do you have an objection to preserving your . . . pearls of wisdom in a single thread so as to avoid derailing every other discussion here?
And now you know what is wrong with presuppositionalism. Took you a while but hey, welcome to the club 🙂
Take it seriously and you might get somewhere. In the time you’ve not done the work I’ve learnt another programming language and a couple of frameworks.
Why not ask god to reveal an aspect of it to you that you won’t find boring?
Neil:
keiths:
I haven’t seen a response, Neil. Is this going to be yet another mistake that you refuse to acknowledge?
Please say it was Lisp.
Or just reveal how to build the whole thing.
I’ve done a little but it was ECMAScript 6. I never really did much Javascript due to it’s general awfulness but it’s now a fine language.
No, we don’t.
OMagain:
Patrick:
Or fifth could follow Joseph Smith’s example and put a magic rock in a hat, stick his face into the hat, and “read” the code for his game. From Wikipedia:
FMM, the sequences are on pages that are predictable:
http://oeis.org/A000001
http://oeis.org/A000002
Each page comes as a simple list which can easily be parsed by tools like BS4. https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/
http://oeis.org/A000002/list
It may be that you can download the database or sections of it.
Once you have the sequences you need a system to manage their presentation to the user and a system to store the results.
My prefered general framework for such is Django https://www.djangoproject.com/
You will also need a backend to store the results. I’ve had good results from GAE in the past.
https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/
It has a free tier that will be more than sufficient.
You will need some code on the front end in addition to what Django provides. I managed to write the first version of your app in a couple of dozen lines of standard Javascript using the canvas.
The full flow would look something like this:
The user visits the site, and the site returns a response. That response contains an integer sequence that you embed in the response. Upon receiving the response the browser would execute the javascript which plots the graphs using the embedded data.
The user selects the option, a POST is made to the server containing the option they selected and the result is stored (a SQL database would probably be the simplest option).
Then a ‘results’ page simply runs a query that determines the correct answer for a given sequence and returns it.
That in short is the entire flow. I’ve dropped many details of course. But I’m surprised – you originally proposed that this game would be a significant step forward in the science of ID and presumably would have the effect of convincing people to admit (somehow) your god exists. And now that important mission has failed because you are bored? I’m sure Jesus is proud 😛
keiths:
fifth:
Really? You don’t understand the difference between minds and knowledge? That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about when I say you are unsuited for apologetic work.
You are truly a messenger of the lord.
OMagain,
🙂 🙂 🙂
My comment was about your concept of truth, not about your religion.
Neil,
My characterization was correct. I asked:
And here’s what you wrote:
Why is it so hard for you to admit obvious mistakes?
Other participants seem to have understood that my comment was about your conception of truth.
Why is it so hard for you to see that you are making a mistake?
I love it. Don’t ever change! 🙂
Utter nonsense. We don’t compare our own perceptions or theories with those of God; we compare them with those of other people.
It’s only the solipsist who needs to posit God in order to be assured of objectivity.
keiths:
Alan:
You “love” the fact that I made a claim, and then supported it with evidence? I guess that would be prohibited in The Alan Zone.
You say the goofiest things, Alan.
God is a personal God. humans are made in his image so yes we indirectly compare our perceptions or theories with those of God by comparing them with other people
Is that claim objectively true? If so how would you demonstrate that?
peace
Do you understand that knowledge requires a mind?
quote
For as he thinketh within himself, so is he
(Pro 23:7a) ASV
end quote:
peace
Neil,
So did I. How does that help you?
You wrote this…
…which I correctly characterized this way:
Meanwhile, you finally realized this…
…which shows that your claim below is incorrect by your own reasoning:
Why oh why do you (and Alan) have such trouble admitting obvious mistakes? It’s really annoying, though fascinating at the same time.
Apparently you presumed wrongly. It will not convince people that God exists. They already know God exists.
My hypothesis is only that humans can generally distinguish between sequences from “designed” processes and those from a random or algorithmic sources. That is all.
the game should help us test that
peace
I’ll check it out
thanks
I really have no interest in an OP like you describe
How about a counter proposal?
Don’t post arguments based on and unwarranted assumptions and don’t mock God and you won’t have to hear me “correct” you.
That’s not so hard is it?
peace
fifth:
Do you understand that knowledge is not a mind?
Your problem, again, is this (from an earlier comment):
You are really stepping in it (and flirting with heresy again). According to orthodox Christian belief, it was the Son who incarnated, not the Father or the Holy Spirit. That means that Jesus’s body was the Son’s body, and Jesus’s brain was the Son’s brain. Don’t forget Jesus praying to the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane, or crying out on the cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Besides that, you now have the same problem with Jesus’s brain that you have with Jesus’s butt. You’ve told us that it was Jesus’s butt that Moses saw in Exodus 33, yet the incarnation hadn’t yet occurred. Now you’re telling us that God’s every conscious thought as he interacted with the people of the Old Testament depended on the operation of a physical brain that, like Jesus’s butt, would not exist until hundreds of years later.
OMagain:
fifth:
…and then set it aside and get back to his regularly-scheduled godbotting.
The sum total of everything you know plus your abilities and your proclivities is probably a good part of what folks are thinking about when they think of you
repetition is not demonstration,
That you a anti-Christian rabble rouser are apparently unable to follow a simple Theological speculation is not evidence that I have a problem.
perhaps you should try and articulate what you think I believe and I’ll let you know where you are mistaken.
peace
No, I didn’t “finally” realize that. I’ve known that since forever. That was part of the background context of the statement that you didn’t like.
My statement was correct, and properly understood by others. You see it as incorrect because you implicitly hold to an absurdly theistic conception of truth and of meaning. That sticks out like a sore thumb. Nobody else at TSZ is so obvious about it — not even fifth (except when he is preaching).
That is possible. It looks a little confusing at first glance This really needs to be transparent and user friendly in order to be of value.
Ive already “set aside” two different attempts because I could not make it so that a fifth grader could quickly get the gist of what is going on
We shall see
peace
Neil,
No, because if you had known it, you wouldn’t have made your silly claim:
You would have realized that I could speak of a “God’s-eye view” without invoking an actual God, just as you later said:
Your mistake couldn’t be more obvious, yet you’re still denying it. It’s annoying as hell, Neil, but absolutely fascinating.
Come on, fifth.
Even you — no matter how addled your brain is by religion — understand that knowledge is not a mind. They’re separate concepts. A mind can contain knowledge, but it isn’t identical with knowledge. This is very basic stuff.
You’ve said that Jesus had to enter into time in order to interact with people, because the Father and the Holy Spirit, being timeless, could not. You latched onto the BCP paper to support your notion, writing:
Your mistake was not to realize the implications of what you were saying. BCP think minds must be “in time” because minds depend on brains, and brains depend on the flow of time.
The Father and the Holy Spirit do not have brains or bodies. They are timeless, and according to you, they cannot interact with the physical. Jesus’s brain is a physical object. Therefore, by your reasoning, the Father and the Holy Spirit cannot interact with it.
If they don’t have brains, and they can’t interact with Jesus’s brain, then they don’t have minds — by your own logic.
And even Jesus can’t catch a break in your screwed-up theology. He eventually gets a brain (and a butt), but not until Mary becomes pregnant. In the meantime he has to conduct all of his interactions with the people of the OT — including the mooning of Moses — with a brain and a butt that do not yet exist.
And please, no more crap about how God is timeless. Your whole point was that Jesus had to incarnate in order to be within time, so that he could actually interact with people.
So you’ve left Jesus in a position where he’s thinking, interacting with people, and mooning Moses, within time — all with a brain and butt that do not yet exist, within time.
Please, please, find someone competent to replace you as the spokesperson for Christianity at TSZ. Someone who knows the Bible, understands theology, and can do elementary logic.
Your daily faceplants are not bringing glory to God, fifth.