…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
cubist,
And that’s harder to swallow than adamantium claws, right?
I’m fairly sure that was Lobo, aka “The Main Man”, a galactic bounty hunter in the DCU.
I’m on vacation, so my contributions to TSZ will be occasional minor factoids like this for the next two weeks.
Then you should have no problem with stating here and now that you accept evolution as being undeniable and that evolutionary theory (which is godless) is well founded.
You should also have no problem with stating here and now that you accept that anthropogenic global warming, aka climate change, has and is undeniably occurring and that the science (which is godless) that supports that conclusion is well founded. That science includes the evidence of the related harm that has already occurred and the predictions, at least in general, of the harm to come.
And don’t forget the “anything else that doesn’t fit your religious beliefs” part of what I said.
What say you, fifthmonarchyman, and how about you, Mung?
Which god? Moneiba, Akna, Zeus, Ra, Odin, The Flying Spaghetti Monster, Apu, Shiva, Allah, Arinna, Baal, Acan, Ajtzak, Korora, Anjea, Numakulla, Make-make, Wākea, the other thousands of imagined gods, or just the one you imagine?
Do I have to break down the differences one at a time here? I certainly hope not.
I’ll just summarize and say that it’s not just the powers, but the proximity to Palestine (one would knock out Baal, even if the other wouldn’t–more on that below). You’re also not considering whether Fifth considers each of these to have authority over him. He hasn’t gone through them for you one by one here, admittedly. But I’m guessing the answer to that is NO for every single one of those guys. Even if they’re gods, they’re not Lords.
Then there is the “Do you trust the story-tellers?” issue. The Bible is a book of Truths (note the capital letter), a lot of these other books aren’t even true (small t). If the Bible is True, then both the guys who wrote it and the guys talked about in it are truth-tellers and the things said actually happened. To give a couple of examples of how we can use this information (which is available in the definition of “truth” in Webster), the Zend-Avesta is NOT true, and neither is the movie about Thor. Again, pretty much everybody gets that Zeus could not have actually come out of Cronos’s head (that’s like such a crazy idea from the get go, I don’t even know why I mentioned it.) Anyhow, we don’t have to trust the stories in those other books. When they can get some people (and not just ANY people, big shots who curate museums), to tell us that they’re also TRUE, come back and we can discuss, e.g., Mothra.
So you’ve got power discrepancy, proximity to Palestine, Fifth-given authority, and the support of curators.
One last thing. When the Jews smashed up the statues of Baal in the name of goodness and the betterness of Judaism, they showed pretty conclusively that Baal wasn’t much of a God. And that religion has really bottomed, if you want my opinion. Meanwhile, there’s a new Christian church popping up in Little Rock like every week, and guys in some of them can speak in tongues that NOBODY can understand.
It’s not even really a contest if you stop to think about this stuff for a few minutes.
Didn’t say anything about “hard to swallow”, just “excessive”.
Nope! While it’s true that Lobo has been known to do the regrow-from-a-drop-of-blood thing, I was specifically referring to an X-Men story involving an über-powerful McGuffin called the M’Kraan Crystal. Wolvie’s blood-drop touched the Crystal, the Crystal (being über-powerful and all) waaay supercharged the innate healing factor of that blood-drop on contact, and bingo! A shiny new Wolverine from a drop of blood.
Hi from sunny Normandy. Seems like we’re all on summer break.
Oh come on, the Thor movie has got to be true and True. Would anybody make up a story like that?
Actually, it would have been more accurate to say that I USED to be good at a couple of other things. But maybe as a sort of cosmic compensation, I’m getting better at babble and bloviation all the time.
But you know what? I know maybe three of the names of each of my kids’ friends, and I go the games of the one who still plays sports. Plus, I’ve never spanked anybody. That means I’d be eligible for some kind of Father of the Year award, if this were, like, 1963.
Back home and checking in. Have I missed anything?
Yes—but none of the things you missed are particularly worth paying attention to, so don’t sweat it.
Oh, you’re missing out!
So I’ve heard, but I REALLY want that award.
Is there anyone here willing to help with creating a website to allow some hypothesis testing with my design detection tool?
I have a working model coded in JavaScript but it has been a challenge to embed it in a shareable page.
I would really appreciate the help
thanks
No real experience with Javascript yet. One of those things on the to-do list.
I bet there are some good tutorials online though.
http://eloquentjavascript.net/
fifthmonarchyman,
Happy to evaluate any models and / or provide test data sets.
Thank you
What I need right now is to get the tool on a webpage. Then we can all test it together. If no help is forthcoming I will countine to plug away. A big reason Ive been posting so much here lately is because I’m avoiding the hard work.
I have zero coding experience it’s all hunt and peck and it can be really frustrating
I would much rather be testing hypothesis with the tool. but I need to make it public before I can do that
It’s will be lot more fun to be talking science than the culture war stuff.
Peace
is there any reason why it has to be in a web-page rather than a stand alone model?
From the ID camp I seem to recall Atom Tha Immortal was a competent coder.
It already is a stand alone model. It was in excell now it is in a JavaScript derivative (processing).
It works well for all the objects I’ve evaluated so far and it is fun to boot. I’d love to send it to anyone who is interested
What I need now is multiple independent observers evaluating the same object and multiple blind tests. To do that the tool needs to be public.
I also need to modify the tool so that it will work with binary strings at some point.
I don’t know Atom but I might post a plea for help at UD at some point. If the frustration becomes overwhelming
However it would be cool if a skeptic would partner with me at this stage. Patrick is already working on one testable prediction of my hypothesis. The more we can spread this around to both sides the better.
It would make our eventual conclusions less controversial for everyone
peace
fifth, Where are you stuck?
Do you have it working in an html file on your local computer?
You know how to embed the javascript into a web page?
http://evoinfo.org/weasel/
Do you know how to use view page source? You can go to the Simulation there and view the page source to see some Javascript code in action.
Fair play to you FMM for actually modeling your ideas / doing the work.
Well, there is a little hiccup in the conversion from processing/java to JavaScript. It has to do with int to float. I think I can handle that but it will take a bit. Then at the same time I’m having difficulty embedding JavaScript onto a page in blogger.
I work on one problem till I get frustrated and then move to the other for a while. It’s been like this since I started on this program. It’s a long tuff slog. Nothing is easy.
I suppose I’m just letting off steam right now. I’m so close I can taste it and it bugs me it’s not done yet.
It’s not like I don’t have work and family responsibilities that I should be focusing on.
peace
fifthmonarchyman,
That’s not my recollection from the last time we discussed it.
By the way, I got pulled into a couple of different projects but I should be able to get back to running some machine learning algorithms on the financial data we talked about.
It probably would be more correct to say it works well on the objects it was designed for. When evaluating binary it still merits an incomplete.
First things first as soon as the original tool is public I’ll get to work on some modifications for your idiosyncratic strings
I do look forward to your work.
Here is another good background article that dances around the difference between human intelligence and algorithmic processing.
check it out
http://nautil.us/issue/27/dark-matter/artificial-intelligence-is-already-weirdly-inhuman
peace
FMM:
Speaking of dancing around:
The current scientific consensus is that there was a species ancestral to Homo sapiens that was also ancestral to Pan on the order of five to ten million years ago.
Do you doubt the correctness of that consensus?
For probably the fourth time.
I type extra slowly so you won’t miss it
1) I have no problem with the consensus as expressed in the scientific literature.
2) I have a problem with the silly inferences that atheists often draw from that consensus
3) I am open to new information if it comes along
Is that unclear in any way?
peace
Do you think that there is anything in the current consensus that makes a supernatural special creation of the first human impossible?
If you do that says more about you than it does about the consensus
peace
fifth,
You claimed that it would work with binary strings:
Also, don’t forget that you failed to detect design in a sonnet, when a sonnet was one of the examples that you yourself introduced.
Not very impressive.
link please
Here.
In binary.
The tool was not designed for binary. It was designed for regular numeric strings. The problem with binary is there is no depth of resolution it’s a go or no go.
therefore unmodified the tool will kick out false positives and negatives
I think it will work with binary when I make modifications. Instead of two strings I need to look at five or so at once. That will provide the depth of resolution that comparing two strings will not
We will see. Right now I more interested in getting the original simple tool up and going and public to see if it works.
patience is a virtue
peace
Thanks Keiths,
I suppose you could read that comment that way. I apologize that was not my intent
My intention was never to claim that the tool had already been proven accurate before I offered to try Patrick’s strings my intention was to test the tool.
When I had played around with simple binary strings It worked. however I had not done enough testing for the limited depth to be a problem. Just proof of concept stuff
That is why we test these things
peace
FMM:
Thank you for you answer. But please indulge me:
It is therefore accurate to say that you accept that there was a species ancestral both to Homo sapiens and Pan on the order of five to ten million years ago, as indicated by the current scientific consensus.
All you need indicate is yes or no.
I’m not at all surprised at that. It’s because AI systems are syntactic engines, where they instead need to be semantic engines.
Near the beginning it talks about machine thinking and perceiving. But, of course, machines neither think nor perceive — again because they are syntactic rather than semantic.
No, but it makes it highly implausible.
Neil Rickert,
I’d add, explantorily unnecessary. So I’d like out a supernatural special creation of the first human on grounds of Occam’s razor.
fifth,
It’s trivial to convert from binary to any desired base. Why not do that?
fifth,
Yes, it was:
Because the conversion retains the characteristics of the original string. That is unless I know the method that was used to produce the binary string and reverse engineer it back to the original object. I can’t do that with Patrick’s strings
I stand by my statement that the approach works very well on the practical level of determining if a particular object is designed
I hope to begin to test that hypothesis more widely shortly. Do you know anyone willing to help?
peace
I agree given our current knowelege.
That’s why for now I tentatively hold to something like a supernatural special ensoulment instead of an instantaneous creation from scratch.
As always I’m open to new information as it presents itself
If science ever finds a way to explain the origin of non material features with material forces I’ll reevaluate my position.
peace
FMM:
Do you accept that there was a species ancestral both to Homo sapiens and Pan that existed on the order of five to ten million years ago?
(While remaining open to new information, of course.)
It is your apparent reluctance to actually state that, despite my several requests for that specific clarification, that prompts me to wonder whether you accept that specific, central component of the current scientific consensus on human origins.
keiths:
fifth:
Then the problem lies with those characteristics, and not with the fact that the string is expressed in binary.
To be worth anything, your method needs to work when you don’t know how the string was produced.
Why? You just admitted that it hasn’t been adequately tested.
We already know that your method failed to detect design in a sonnet. What characteristics of a sonnet prevent your method from working?
It looks like we’re heading toward “fifth’s methodology works on everything except the things it doesn’t work on.” If you can’t predict in advance whether your method is likely to work on the string in question, then where’s the value?
Somehow I doubt it. But go on, name a “non material feature” then.
Since neither “material” nor “non-material” or “immaterial” are scientific concepts, and they are pretty fuzzy as philosophical concepts go, I find it very hard to work with them.
One of the real difficulties we often find in philosophy is a hidden debate about what needs to be explained (the explanandum) and what is the explanation (the explanans). (In science it is much easier to distinguish between the two.)
A brief story to illustrate the difference: many years ago I was talking about compatibilism and determinism with a friend of mine, who is an analytic epistemologist and a devout Christian. We were going around until we discovered a problem in our use of terms: he was taking “free will” to be a fact that needed to be explained by any good theory, and I was taking “free will” to be a bad explanation of the facts of emotional regulation and voluntary movement.
Likewise — and this came up recently in one of Arrington’s recent polemics against “materialism” over at Uncommon Descent — what are to make of “the immaterial soul”? Is “the immaterial soul”, as Arrington thinks (here following David Hart) a primordial fact? It depends!
If by “immaterial soul” one means the same thing as “subjective consciousness,” then yes. Though not easy to explicate, it is (I think) necessary to talk about subjective consciousness as the indispensable starting-point for epistemological reflection. Subjective consciousness is where the ratio cognoscendi begins. (There is a nice line of thought that runs from Descartes through Kant to Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and C. I. Lewis as to why this is the case.)
And I myself think that, in fact, there is something right about “the explanatory gap” between “the material” and “the immaterial” — though I treat it as an epistemological gap between third-personal causal explanations and first-personal subjective consciousness, rather than as a metaphysical gap between two different kinds of reality. (The story from Descartes though Kant to Merleau-Ponty is, in one crucial sense, the transformation from the second way of putting it — the metaphysical story — to the first way of putting it — the epistemological story.)
On the other hand, if “immaterial soul” does not mean the same thing as “subjective consciousness” — if instead talking about the immaterial soul is supposed to explain what subjective consciousness is and how it is possible — then I think there is a much deeper problem, because it is unclear as to how such an explanation is supposed to work.
On these grounds, I don’t think science could ever explain the origin of the immaterial from the material, because those aren’t even the right categories to start off with. It might be better to put the question as, “is there a testable explanation for the emergence of subjective consciousness somewhere in the evolutionary trajectory that runs from primitive vertebrates through mammals to higher primates and hominids?”
And to that question, I think the answer is “no”, because now we have exposed the category mistake: the vocabulary in which we explain the evolutionary trajectory that runs from primitive vertebrates through mammals to higher primates and hominids is a third-personal vocabulary, and as such it is semantically and pragmatically distinct from the first-personal vocabulary in which we explicate subjective consciousness.
However, if we take up the third-personal stance on ourselves, which we do when we engage in psychological and sociological explanations of our own cognitive abilities, then we can construct a plausible and relatively gap-less story about the emergence of uniquely human cognitive and social capacities from the cognitive and social capacities we can empirically measure in nonhuman primates and other mammals.
In short, it’s the epistemological gap between the first-personal and the third-personal that’s doing all the real work; there is no metaphysical gap between humans and other animals. The metaphysical gap is an illusion based on a misunderstanding of the epistemological gap, which is real.
Sorry to have gone on for so long on this, but it’s part of the paper I’m writing now, so I have a lot to say and not much filter.
And that’s what I see as a fundamental mistake of epistemology. For it means that your starting point takes for granted almost everything that requires explanation. And that pretty much guarantees that your explanations will always fall short.
It’s the starting-point of epistemology, though, not the end-point. We progress from the starting-point of self-reflection towards a description of how discursive practices and sensorimotor abilities constitute our embodied being-in-the-world.
From there we come to an understanding of the epistemic authority of empirical science, which turns us back around ourselves when we inquire into subpersonal explanations of the neurological basis of perception, memory, and reflection. When we find out that our cognitive capacities can be faulty and limited in a variety of surprising ways, we then need to revise our initial starting-point.
Pragmatic antifoundationalism is the whole process of going from epistemology to metaphysics and then back from metaphysics to epistemology, and then back to metaphysics again, and then back to epistemology again . . . refining the whole story at every iteration.
Dunno if that’s a mistake of KN’s epistemology, but whether it is or it isn’t, it’s not a mistake ‘of epistemology,’ which is simply the theory or study of knowledge, and which doesn’t require the proposition you oppose (in your own epistemological remark here). I’ve never seen two people complain as much about the worthlessness of philosophy right while engaging in it themselves as you and petrushka.
Yes, but I know I’m bad at philosophy. I’m agnostic as to whether anyone else is good at it.
I’m probably not the one to judge, but I see my badness at philosophy as a consequence of not believing in the efficacy of language.
Yes, we all talk and write, but we communicate only to the extent that we share both connotative and denotative bases for meaning. We can do this in science, because science is instrumental, and we insist on replicability. I don’t think anyone can achieve this common understanding outside the methodologies of science.
If this were not the case, I’d think there would be some unassailable propositions in philosophy.
To be more direct and personal, I complain about philosophy because I lurk on philosophical discussions without seeing anything addressed that I think would be useful or important. And without seeing any openings for anything I might want to say.