Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
Well, that is one of the intriguing questions. My two principle standards of choosing beliefs are (1) being good, and (2) enjoying life, in that order. One might argue that I only want to “be good” because I enjoy it, and thus #1 is subsumed by #2, but I wish to be good to the point where I am willing to sacrifice my life for a good cause, so being good must necessarily trump “enjoying life”.
IOW, I cannot enjoy life unless I can, to my satisfaction, be a good man. If I corrupt my goodness to save my own life, I can’t see myself as good, but rather just as expediently good. That’s not good enough for me.
So, the capacity to “be good”, in the sense that I want to be good, requires a certain framework where such a commodity has the kind of value and meaning I require.
I’ve flatly stated this several times in this forum. However, whether or not they are temporary depends on how well they serve my interests as time goes on. It is more accurate to state that all my beliefs are conditional.
Jolly good. Clearly expressed without being in any way informative.
William J. Murray,
Your claims are self-refuting, dude. This:
Is necessary false if your next statement is true:
The reason you say “right here on this forum”, is because this is where the evidence you relied on crucially for the change in your beliefs. There is no opposition between “because of evidence or argument” and “to better serve my goal…”. They go together — it’s not an either/or proposition.
Moreover, they are connected. Unless there’s evidence to review and judge, there’s no basis for supposing your new belief will have any bearing on your goals, let alone serve them better. I suspect the crew here is trying to somewhat gentle or gracious in responding to you in this, but I’m waiting for you to either own up to the gag this has all been, a bit of eccentric trolling, or to at least confront the conspicuous self-refutation you regularly offer on this subject.
If what you say about your beliefs is true, it’s necessarily false. If you change your belief X to belief Y because of Z, you are evidence-driven and argument-driven as much as anyone else, You are only exceptional in being exceedingly disingenuous about your decision making process.
God, that poor man. Imagine having to live with yourself when your mind is filled with such dreck. I’m sure medication and therapy would help him get his obsessions under control, at least to the point that they no longer make him miserable and angry all the time. But something in him is broken so that he can’t ever notice he needs help, that makes him think he is actually normal and that everyone is supposed to feel so miserable. Sad waste of a human.
William J. Murray,
(my emphasis)
Just piling on a bit, for effect, on this. You cannot asses how those beliefs serve your interests, at any point, or over time, without engaging evidence and arguments available to you. “Well” as you’ve used it, here, cannot be contemplated, if your contention about evidence and arguments is true.
If you read back over your posts, you’ve committed to this same refuting position over and over and over. I think you intend to say that you don’t want to be beholden to scientific or objective evidences and the common inferences people draw from them. That’s your prerogative, but it’s not even a little bit true, then, to say you eschew evidence and arguments as the foundation for your beliefs. You could not if you tried. You are, apparently, just intent on asserting your autonomy to be as capricious and selective as you please in assign weights and goal-seeking value as you like. Knock yourself out, but the way you defend your position paints you as deeply incoherent, rather than just overly concerned about your own mental autonomy.
It’s hard to miss the irony in this, given your adamance about the basic beliefs one must adopt to be rational, and to think coherently (must have some source of absolute, cosmic authority and thus, morality, etc.). That’s problematic on the face of it, but when you combine that with ‘I don’t rely on evidence or arguments to judge my beliefs as to their utility toward my goals’, well… Something is short-circuiting at a low level, here.
OK, that’s interesting. So how does that square with your claim that you don’t “have an altruistic bone in your body”? It sounds to me very much as if you do (as I suspected :))
Also I hadn’t actually realised you’d changed your view on “biological automatons” – I thought you’d just rejected the term. Cool.
They sounded awfully like P-zombies, which I think are incoherent 🙂
William,
You might be surprised to hear that nobody else does either. Given that there is no scientific evidence for Intelligent Design (or is there? Make a specific claim and demonstrate the scientific evidence for it) it’s trivially true that nobody comes to their believe in ID via scientific or mathematical evidence.
The point is, really, that those with a belief in ID will then try to convince others that there is scientific, mathematical evidence for ID. And that is what is being engaged here and elsewhere. You claim that FSCO/I is a metric that can be calculated, I challenge you to do so and you simply ignore that. While your system may be able to edit that out, you don’t get to change the conclusions I and others draw from your inability to support a very clear claim that you made.
I’m afraid this question leads into a swamp of gestalt-level difficulty in comparative concepts. Note how you assume that “being good” has something to do with “altruism”, even though I’ve repeatedly pointed out my perspective of what “being good” entails: fulfilling one’s purpose as created by god.
I wanted a form of “being good” that ultimately mattered, to give “being good” the value and significance necessary to satisfy this desire to be a good man.
Altruism, in and of itself, has nothing to do with being “good” in my framework.
Eigenstate,
If you want to hold “how well I perceive a belief meets my personal purposes” as a form of evidence and argument for something, then I’ll would have to use different terms to explain my position, or qualify them better. I think most people here realize I was drawing a distinction between conditionally believing things because they serve my purpose (and holding the “truth” value as irrelevant), and holding beliefs as reflections of what I think are best explanations of “reality”, or what is “true”, regardless of my personal desires.
There’s a difference between believing as (at least conditionally) true, based on best available evidence and argument, or hold a belief that one doesn’t care if true or not because it serves a purpose at the time.
You got stalled out on the semantics and failed to assess the concept the terms were used to express.
Ah. OK.
As a minor quibble from a psychologist, William – I think you are using the word “gestalt” to mean something more like Piaget’s schema than gestalt as usually used in psychology.
Or am I misunderstanding you [yet] again?
Schema! Yay! You understood and came up with an even better word! Love it!
William J. Murray,
Sure, but that doesn’t diminish my point. Whether you are pursuing “truth” or “serves my purposes”, those distinct success conditions both rely on evaluating evidence and arguments, and crucially so, in both cases. It’s not a different process but a different set of success states you are using the process to pursue.
This may be easier to understand, and to see that my point is not a matter of semantics, with an example. If I suppose, arguendo that my primary purpose is to see the defeat of liberalism in American politics, then I don’t care, in the Machiavellian sense you’re using here, whether the Obama had anything to do with IRS targeting of Tea Party groups. The evidence as to the culpability of Obama, doesn’t matter to me in that case (this is an extremely hypothetical case, for me!), because any exhonerating evidence or fact of the case are useless to me, and would be counter to my interests, seeing Obama politically damaged, and thus the stature of liberal politics in America, to some extent.
So, I would be just as indifferent to the actual disposition of the facts on that matter, the question of what culpability obtains and who it attaches to, in the same way that you have no use for the facts and arguments for the veridicality of evolution as the process of historical biological development and diversity.
BUT, that does not take my ‘hypothetical self’ out of interest with the evidence and arguments on the “politics of scandal”, any more than it does you re theism, supernaturalism, etc. My Machiavellian self does NOT care whether Obama is implicated by the facts in any wrong-doing. But I am interested in the evidence that supports a political assault on Obama, which DOES serve my interests. So, regardless of Obama’s knowledge (or no) of any wrongdoing at the IRS, I am keen on what the evidence and arguments mean in promoting Obama as a corrupt liar, etc. So I both remain quite ambivalent about the “facts of the case” in terms of what Obama really did or did not do, and interested in what evidence and arguments are available that I can make political hay out of.
That’s not semantic quibbling. I’m pointing at the process you deploy as fully “evidence and argument driven”, as much as any scientist with the integrity of the profession to find working models that provide accurate novel predictions. You are just deploying your judgments in a more cynical and self-serving way.
Again, that’s your prerogative. But it’s a non-starter to say you’re not keen on analyzing what’s in front of you, and how that might further your interests. You negate that claim with your own words over and over on this forum. Marshaling evidence and arguments into service for supporting your religious superstitions, or the intuition that some “absolute, objective morality” must obtain at all costs via some supernatural deity certain produces all sorts of frustrations for people that are stuck in the “evidence and arguments are tools for truth-finding” rut, like most people here. But adopting and supporting this argument or that, or focusing on this observation or that doesn’t detach you from your intimate and unavoidable dependence on evidence and argument.
You are just not integrating “truth” into your goals that govern your use of evidence and arguments before you.
William J. Murray,
altruism had some affiliation with “being good”. In view of that strictness (which I am fine with, if it’s consistent), why would you connect “fulflling one’s purpose as created by god” with “being good”? Why would you assume (or conclude) that fulfilling god’s purpose is even related to “being good”, never mind the entailment you assert here?
OnEdit: fixed blockquote
That’s a great post! I think you do have a signifiant point there. I think that characterizing how I come to beliefs and evaluate them as not being reliant upon evidence and argument could very well be misleading – even though it seemed to me that most people here understood the way I had intended it. It was a sloppy way of saying what I meant.
As you say, after beginning with my initial, chosen directive on fundamental perspective to organize my schema of beliefs around (good man, enjoy life), I utilize evidence and argument to vet candidate beliefs according to that perspective before adopting them, and to evaluate their effectiveness afterward.
The pertinent difference is that I don’t base such views on any supposed exterior ontological “reality”; IOW, all the scientific evidence and argument might indicate X, but I can use that same evidence to believe not-X, because I evaluate the evidence and argument according to a different arbiting principle – what I want to personally experience.
That even fits in with my schema perspective – my schema is organized around enjoying life as a good man, while that of many others is organized around believing what is most likely true.
So the phrase “I believe as I wish, not as evidence and argument indicates” would be better phrased as “I believe whatever helps me be a good man and enjoy life, not what is most likely true in an ontological or epistemological sense”.
Thanks for the challenge and the critique.
You and Liz are tossing out some good stuff today.
——————————————–
Edit: perhaps better: “I believe whatever serves my interests, not what is most likely true in an ontological or epistemological sense”.
My choice to organize my schema around being a good man and enjoying life is subject to change, so it’s probably better to make it more general.
I adopted the belief that good is connected to fulfilling a purpose as created by god because I found other concepts of good unfulfilling.
Well, I for one was not aware that this “gestalt” concept you brought up was a belief. I thought – as you indicated above – that it is a model. There’s a difference to me. Further, that you say you did this change “to have a framework that others wouldn’t find insulting” contradicts – or at least questions – your claim that you adopt beliefs regardless of evidence. Clearly you must be operating off of “evidence of insulting others” in order to even consider that a different framework will result in less insult. So, as far as I can tell, you’ve not demonstrated any such change.
Clearly not. Whether anyone understands you or your concepts will have zero overall affect on their life, success, happiness, etc as demonstrated thus far. There is no actual compelling reason why anyone needs to understand you or your concepts. Ergo, no one but you has a problem if you and your claims are not understood.
Now you may well claim otherwise, but yet again, there’s that sticking point of the null hypothesis. Unless and until you can actual make a claim and provide evidence that said claim will indeed impact others’ lives and well-being, such does not really mean much.
In all serious though, it is always much more important for the speaker to ensure understanding than for the listener to. Listeners, except in extreme cases, rarely have as much vested interest in the concept speakers are putting forth.
In which case, I’m betting few here care either. Surely you don’t expect anyone else to care more than you about what goes on in your head?
I don’t care if anyone else cares.
William J. Murray,
Right. That ends up being sociopathological in its trajectory, as the evidence->model->test->refine-model->… heuristic, of which science is just a kind of “hardcore” subtype of, is a means of social connection and empathy. Something like the way language works; words mean whatever we agree to mean, and you can intend any meaning you like, but “off in your own little world” with language ends up disconnecting you from communication and social contracts. Same thing with the Machiavellian-Hedonist groove you’re in, here.
But that’s neither here nor there for this exchange. Your clarification, or embrace of your utilization of evidence and argument toward your own purposes, science be damned (if need be), etc. at least gets you out what appeared to be an embarrassing pose you’ve been striking here, a pose that has you conspicuously refuting your own statements just a sentence or two later.
Right. You’ve upgraded your game from inchoate and self-refuting to just merely anti-social. And I’m sincere in saying that’s a solid upgrade. In reference to this, my questioning of your understanding of “being good” as entailing obedience to some creator god’s purpose for you is problematic in terms of deontology, but my purpose in asking was really just to make it starkly clear by your explanation that you do indeed rely thoroughly and crucially on evidence and argument, even for basic commitments like that. With your comments above, that point doesn’t need to be pursued, as this objection has been resolved.
This is both clear and consistent with many other things you say, and that really is a good baseline, because your comments are marked by a state of apparent confusion more than anything else. This here goes along way to eliminating the confusion that accompanies much of your posts.
As I said, I think that’s not hard to show as a (nascent?) form of sociopathology, but I’m OK with your sociopathic dispositions, as long as you speak in a way that’s intellgible and consistent. Big problems first, for all of us, right?
William J. Murray,
Could you send someone over who isn’t just here to practice their typing?
William@UD
So, William, if ID is so “obviously true” that it’s trivial there must have been a point when you changed your mind as it’s not a belief you’ve had all along. So it could not have been all that obvious then huh?
What caused that change then?
I don’t see how my schema is necessarily anti-social. Certainly, “enjoying life” could (and does, for me) entail fulfilling social and personal responsibilities and obligations.
I read about ID after I decided to stop being an atheist/materialist. The main reason I stopped being an atheist/materialist was via an epiphany that I didn’t have to believe what I thought was true; that I was free to believe whatever I wished.
I thought about what I wanted to believe, and realized that I wanted there to be a God – just not the kind of god I was, up to that point, familiar with. ID, and the proponents thereof, provided a great set of perspectives I had never been aware of.
As far as ID being obviously true, it’s pretty much tautologically apparent – humans use ID, ID exists. The only question is if non-human design is a discoverable commodity. I don’t see any reason it cannot be discoverable.
Why not believe something even more fun, like you *are* god, or you are have super powers?
If reality isn’t informing your perception – why not be able to fly?
I guess that all depends on what you call “reality”. I choose not to believe anything that directly contradicts my experience. I’ve found that to be a more productive system than believing things that directly contradict my experience, although I leave that option open. My experience is that I cannot fly. I do, however, believe I am an aspect of god cloaked in individual characteristics and limitations.
Your belief system doesn’t seem coherent to me. Lots of facts that are part of your experience you elect to not believe.
You may be surprised to know that I don’t have a problem with this.
Of course. And ID is detectable by scientific methodology as well.
Nor me.
Calculate much FSCO/I lately? Ever seen anybody else do it? Yet you still believe it’s a useful metric. It’s not. Therefore that is not true as you have no experience of such things.
Inasmuch as I still have a god, I would agree.
My Quaker roots run deep 🙂
A rather snide request from Timaeus:
He probably has a point that those who spend time writing about science do less of it, simply because the day is only 24 hours long, but some people manage to be very productive anyway.
For what it’s worth, my publication list isn’t terribly starry, but I only started in science just over a decade ago, and I haven’t done too badly. At least my annual publication rate is going up. My list currently stands at about 20, and according to Google citations, my citations since 2008 is 142.
So in my case, Timaeus’ guess is out by a factor of 2. And that’s for a late-starter who didn’t even have a science degree when she embarked on her PhD at age 50.
I’m tempted to extrapolate to the others on Timaeus’ list, but being a well-trained scientist, I won’t 🙂
It occurs to me that I could be one of Timaeus “[all but] two cases” but I doubt it 🙂
But, if so, I’m flattered.
I’ve just noticed Barry Arrington has picked up on an aside of mine (and made an OP of it, no less!). I am, of course, banned, so if anyone cares to paste this …
In response to this:
Barry abstracts this:
.
BA takes exception to what he terms my “neener, neener, neener” response (!)
Here is my response in full:
I was more interested in the concept of ‘obligation’ – having one’s opinions thrust upon one, so to speak – than the specifics of BA’s train of thought, but to address that:
BA defines “determined” as “selected for by evolutionary processes”. So this is not an argument about Cartesian free will, but adaptive genetic determinism: that anything and everything a person does, they do because Natural Selection led to it – because the behaviour increased reproductive success in historic populations. Which are not conclusions to which anyone should be forced, for these reasons:
1) We are not instinctive automata. Though we have a layer of instinct, our species has acquired a great deal of behavioural flexibility which means that, unlike the humble ant, we do not shuffle about under the influence of hard-wired programming. Instead, we have substantial decision-making capability. We integrate experience, peer pressure, learning and some basic (and necessary) hard-wiring to come up with decisions over which, for all intents and purposes, we make an executive choice.
2) Nobody seriously espouses a view of evolutionary theory that insists that every genetic change was fixed by Natural Selection, nor that every trait’s existence can be explained by the causal link of the trait with reproductive success. This is a strong theme in the writings of, for example, Stephen Jay Gould. A whole field, Evolutionary Psychology, is routinely criticised by other evolutionists for lack of rigour in backing up the assumption of Natural Selection – a causal link of a trait’s genetic basis with reproductive success. There are two particular alternative hypotheses, genetic drift and what are termed ‘spandrels’ – side-effects of the real causal link – to consider. Many behaviours could be adaptive, but deciding which is no simple task. Adaptive benefit is something specific, with a diagnostic character, and cannot just be assumed. According to many authors, it is of secondary or even tertiary importance as the driver of evolutionary change.
So only in BA’s mind are ‘materialists’ ‘obliged’ to follow his logic regarding ‘belief’ (so many scare-quotes!) in either behavioural determinism or the adaptive benefit of every trait.
Many materialists observe the behavior of twins and note that despite sharing a single genotype, two different people who make individually unique choices throughout their lives are the result. Thus materialism does not obligate a belief in biological determinism.
Anybody who has raised a set of identical twins can tell you they do not turn out identical.
“Biological Perspectives” the “new” ID book is available as a set of free pdfs.
http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/8818#t=toc
It’s a bit of a pain to download each chapter, but I don’t think many people will want to buy it. I didn’t see any way to download all the chapters with one click.
No, there isn’t. You can use one click to download all the abstracts to a reference manager though.
I actually downloaded them all.
I’m reading one now, while I wait for my son to come out of his poetry group! Gitt, Compton and Fernandez (is that the guy on TWEB?) on Biological Information.
I do wish ID proponents would stop whingeing about censorship. Nobody minds anyone reading the papers. It’s having them published with the imprimatur of proper peer-review that anyone minds.
Chapter 2:
A General Theory of Information Cost Incurred by Successful Search
William A. Dembski, Winston Ewert, Robert J. Marks II
aka Gross Abuse of the No Free Lunch Theorems
Chapter 7:
Entropy, Evolution and Open Systems
Granville Sewell
X-entropy!
At least Tierra gets its own chapter. They must be recognizing that evolutionary mechanisms can, in fact, create information. Right?
Sewell is just rehashing his old, rejected paper.
And McIntosh says this under the picture in Figure 7 on page 13:
Sheesh! Children playing with loaded guns.
I have downloaded:
“A General Theory of Information Cost Incurred by Successful Search”, Dembski, Ewert, Marks.
“Pragmatic Information”, Oller
“Tierra: The Character of Adaptation”, Ewert, Dembski, Marks.
My expectations are low, but I’ll at least take a look at those.
Over time we should do a thread on each article.
That sounds interesting. I did a quick read through the Tierra paper. At first glance, the analysis of the code for each type of organism looks reasonably thorough. Based on the previous work of the authors, I suspect that Winston Ewert is responsible for a lot of that.
The discussion of the Cambrian explosion and the conclusions they draw from Tierra, again at first reading, seem far less rigorous and well supported.
Feel free to start a thread when you have read enough of that paper (this applies to anyone).
I’ll participate for the three that I have downloaded. But I’m not ready to start thread right now. I have more reading to do first.
Yup.
Ugh, that “Failure to Educate” thread at UD is horrible. RDFish patiently explaining over and over and over but failing to um “persuade”, because StephenB, KF, and WJM want to argue philosophy but do not know the difference between necessary and sufficient.
RDFish: “The ‘rules of right reason’ are necessary but not sufficient for most of our judgements.”
SB/KF/WJM: “But the rules of right reason are necessary, therefore you are wrong.”
RDFish: “Again, the rules of right reason are indeed necessary, but not sufficient.”
SB/KF/WJM: “The rules of right reason are necessary!”
I thought I’d read over one of these papers during lunch today. While I was considering the list, it occurred to me that I’d seen something similar before. Maybe the rest of you twigged to this immediately, but I realized that this is the content from the book almost published by Springer, discussed here and here at The Panda’s Thumb. Publication was put on (evidently permanent) hold pending peer review.
Allen MacNeill, who teaches at Cornell, noted that insinuating that this conference was sponsored by Cornell is deceptive:
And yet, right at the top of the World Scientific page:
Biological Information
New Perspectives
Proceedings of the Symposium
Cornell University, USA, 31 May – 3 June 2011
What’s even more interesting is that several contributors are YECs.
Patrick,
Wasn’t there some suggestion that Springer were initially under the impression that the shebang was about Design Theory? – which AFAIK is a rather more respectable subject than Intelligent Design.
I see Jorge “Clucky” Fernandez is listed – that should be good for a laugh, him being an unusually obnoxious YEC, with the usual shaky grasp of basic science
This isn’t the first time the Discotoot has pulled this stunt. The previous time I’m aware of was a “SMU conference”, again having nothing but a rented hall to connect them with SMU.
In that instance, as I vaguely recall, not only did they imply SMU was sponsoring it, but they listed some big names among the “invitees” – without mentioning that none of those people even bothered to reply.
They may be dishonest, but one almost has to admire the sheer brass balls.