Peanut Gallery

Yeah...it would be nice to think there is some way we havent found yet that would convince him he might be wrong....butit's not gonna happen.INTERCEPTION! the children! can we get in the way of these forlorn broken people to prevent their stupidity from being passed on....ah...the hutzpah to take the attitude that we might know better.how can we show the error of their ways?

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- xongsmith

ARK: an obvious precursor to the TARDISARK =
Ark of
Recursive
KinematicsIt cannot be done without recursion.

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- xongsmith

The original bluegenes text was, as I'm led to believe, this, from Message 167: Now my brother can get on your nerves at times (and he certainly gets on mine at times!), and certainly may have strayed that way a bit in this debate, but, sadly, those of you who are thinking that he is losing are wrong.When someone makes a blanket statement like that and also claims it is a high level of confidence theory, then they have to provide support for their claim - and on EvC the support is usually of the form of scientific objective evidence.RAZD is saying "ok...show me some evidence". bluegenes has has also asserted that he has "plenty of evidence".bluegenes essentially responded with Oni's characterization "You go first".bluegenes says This cannot be a call to provide such an example, but instead is a claim that the theory is falsifiable, so as to comply with the scientific method. Let's not get caught up in climbing down into that rabbit hole - bluegenes is going down the checklist of a well-formulated theory and sees the box "Is it falsifiable?" and he checks it off "Yes".purpledawn writes: But that does NOT mean RAZD has to provide an example - it's a check box for fitting the blanket statement into a well-proposed theory.So RAZD, in an effort to the ball rolling, suggests that bluegenes begin with the IPU, noting that this particular of a supernatural being should be easy to demonstrate as a figment of the human imagination.Yes - name-calling canards & sidebars of the electromagnetic spectrum may have obscured the debate.But please, lets see some scientific evidence that the IPU is a figment - afterall, many of us here in the Peanut Gallery, by and large, agree with bluegenes' premise, and we'd like to see some ammo to bring to bear in these sort of cases in the future. Help us out at the Atheist end of the Dawkins scale......

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Oni writes: "God is a concept by which we measure our pain." - John Lennon
What word would you want to use for the word cloud/salad "supernatural being X", Oni?He continues: ...but that, indeed, is what bluegenes has to do.Contrast with Those are 2 blanket statements may seem to be saying the same thing, but they are different.Edited by xongsmith, : Clarity

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Straggler says: You cant. bluegenes went a step too far in stating the theory. I guess RAZD would be looking for some documentation that the human who first coined the term admits that s/he made it up. It's supposed to be a softball lob to bluegenes - not enough to establish the theory, but an example of what would fall under the theory. Who ever did came up with that? Or Last Thursdayism?Bluegenes: All supernatural beings are figments of human imagination.RAZD: Such as?

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Was it EvC that changed "Invisible Pink Unicorn" into "Immaterial Pink Unicorn"? Or was it descent with modification?Invisible Pink Unicorn from wikipedia: purpledawn says: Well, yeah. So what is the Evidence? wikipedia seems to conclude that the concept was created and caught fire online. What is objection scientific evidence that something is "made up"? A copyright symbol? Testimony on a witness stand is ultimately subjective evidence, as was determined in another thread. Maybe a complete lack of any mention until the moment the author of the fiction creates it?

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Straggler says: No no no. You have already moved past the front door of this debate and read into RAZDs intentions, perhaps accurately. No - this is all about bluegenes stating he had "plenty of evidence".Grok this: What is the scientific objective evidence that I am making this up? Is it the first appearance of this statement above, which is obviously false, but is none the less a post on the internet which has never happened before, where all kinds of strange things happen? Is it the results of measuring the video under spectral analysis? Remember, this is not an invisible, immaterial, inaudible, intangible pink unicorn, oh no - this is a very measurable green elephant outside your window. Furthermore, I can even add the ridiculous (but for the purpose of this tack, COMPLETELY TRUE) claim that we already know all about him and he is in all of the books we have up to date. What is the objective evidence? Help me out, here. Weigh him, you say? Fine - do that.I'm not looking for the obvious "You're wrong" or "nuts".No - we would go to the books and find he's not there. We examine scientifically the video evidence and photographic evidence and so on. While the scientific method never proves anything, we can get a high level of confidence that this green elephant is a figment of my imagination. Of course, right at this moment, we have no video or photographic evidence, so these are not horse chestnuts in my mouth - they're in my hands.Given the tiny bit of research I made on the origin of the Invisible Pink Unicorn, I'm coming around to the notion that RAZD indeed may have cloaked an ulterior motive inside his "softball".How about Turtles? The ancient myth of being on a turtle, and that turtle being on a bigger turtle, and it being turtles all the way down. We can show simple space program pictures of the earth, etc.Straggler continues: Just that it would be some kind of evidence that it was made up. I dont care what "it" is, just whether there was evidence that it was made up. That is all. Should be easy.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

purpledawn says: Please excuse my major not-even-a-typo brain glitch when I meant to type "objective" rather than "objection".But, back to the matter at hand: So wikipedia is acceptable objective scientific evidence?Or, are you saying that just the writing of the word pair "invisible pink", or the pair "immaterial pink", is, by fiat, objective scientific evidence of its fictional origin?

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

The original bluegenes text was, as I'm led to believe, this, from Message 167: Bluejay requotes the bluegenes quote as There 6 clauses bluegenes threw up there. Bluejay gets hung up on the 3rd clause.bluegenes sort of presented a table of contents for the proposed debate and everyone seems to be leaping up to Chapter 3.RAZD did not jump to Chapter 3. He could look at the table of contents and notice that Chapter 1 would be making a blanket claim. He notes that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Now we, in our worldviews, may not see the claim as all that extraordinary. But perhaps it is as if, having reached page 2134 of some huge unabridged dictionary and reaching the word "ungulate" and tired and exhausted and out of time for turning these delicate onion-skinned pages of this magnificent tome, the reader concludes than the word "zebra" does not exist in this book. It is an extraordinary claim.He could look at Chapter 2 and note that a high level of confidence would be interesting to see supported.He could look at Chapter 3 and note that that was something that would be dealt with later, but he understand why Chapter 3 is there. This will not be a version of Last Thursdayism, recast in some new form..He could look at Chapter 4 and note that that would probably not be an issue - yes, no problem there.Then he could look at Chapter 5 and there he gets the mother lode - bluegenes is claiming this is a strong theory and - WHAT IS THIS? - he's claiming he has "plenty of evidence"! Wow.He could continue to Chapter 6's listing in the table of contents and accept those terms without argument.So he accepts the challenge and early on in the debate wants to see some of this plentiful evidence ("Bring it on!").Some of you seem to be hung up on Chapter 3, while RAZD is wondering about the whole book (and Chapter 5 in particular). He doesn't even need to argue Chapter 3 yet. Let's get started with the table of contents.It was bluegenes who said he had plenty of evidence....It was bluegenes who said: Bluejay goes on to eventually say: Which is all very well and good, IMHO. I might add, however, that bluegenes would probably be willing to concede that part of the rabbit analogy that doesn't work. Like I would be willing to concede that part of the dictionary page turning analogy that doesn't work.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Straggler asks: Certainly not.For example, there should be such evidence in the case of IPUs. The wikipedia link has a rundown of possible avenues to investigate, but I don't think any of us here would accept wikipedia as scientific evidence all by itself.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Straggler entertains the thought of doing bluegenes homework for him with: I ask how do we know this? Believe it or not, I am not asking for some hereto-before obscure scientific investigation in a peer-reviewed respected journal (although that would be terrific!) - no, just a simple, pedestrian way of phrasing what all of us non-believers in the IPU would say if we could only find it in our heads. It would have to stand up to spirited scrutiny, which I suspect would be forthcoming from RAZD.A story about a bunch of anonymous computer geeks coining the term and having it spread on the internet is NOT what we need. That would NOT be scientific objective evidence.You cant just say "we know the IPU is a made-up entity". Some people in all walks of life everywhere also fervently claim "I know God exists." We have to avoid that sort of explanation completely.Given that in this forum the expertise needed to explain certain complicated things is best left to those who have expertise in that field, I ask - What is the field and who of us is best qualified to answer?How to test the proposition that the IPU is made-up:Cannot use measuring devices of length, mass, electric field strength, and so on, etc....This may be something in Library Science? It may not be a story about some computer geeks, but instead a systematic pattern of stories through the archives from a fairly well narrowed-down point in time, before which there was no mention of an IPU, after which there was plenty of citations. It's like the folks that collect and tabulate neologisms - that kind of in-depth assiduous sticking to careful details.Do you understand? What would evidence that the IPU was made-up look like?

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Oni asks: The tribesman can be shown via diagrams and space photos and trips on the shuttle what an eclipse really is in terms that he already knows and can understand.The atheist cannot be shown via diagrams and photos and trips on some vehicle what God really is in terms that he already knows and can understand.All of the historical changes of explanation from once-believed supernatural to now-believed natural have taken place with small understandable increments of the descriptive body of knowledge. When the belief that the Sun was a God changed to it being just the star we orbit around, the explanation did not require anything more than incremental changes to the body of knowledge, including many other ancillary things, even if its implication was profound.A supernatural event/entity would be much different. It could never be understood by the body of knowledge we have.Now, you could argue - "Well, that body of knowledge was ignoramous!" - no, wait just a moment & hear me out. Let's again consider the Sun God to star process: Sun God believers did other things as well: they built fires, they found vegetables they could eat, they bore children, they threw stones through the air - all manner of simple mundane things of everyday life. They also, for a great long passage of generations, had found Confirmation Bias in their sincere Sun God belief. As time went by the simple mundane things grew in number & familiarity. Soon many descriptive explanations of these mundane things came around and eventually we even got to Greek Philosophers wondering about the natural world, while still worshiping Apollo, and you can connect the dots - the point is that at no time was any generational consensus confronted with a change of explanation that they couldn't understand out of the (by now) rich supply of mundane knowledge.Something supernatural would never be understood out of the rich supply of mundane knowledge. NEVER.Now you & Straggler & I might happen to believe that the {Supernatural Subset} of the Set of {"I dont know"} is identical to the {Empty Set}...at least tentatively for now, but just by saying so we have given such a set an existence in our minds, empty or not, that is very different from saying there is no meaning to the term.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Straggler asks: Yes. Yes. Not to my question.You are not following the line of thought I'm trying to make. I am talking about the "made-up-ness" of the IPU, not the actual IPU.What is scientific objective evidence that something - anything at all - is made up?We can collect scientific data on the orbit of the moon's orbit.
We can collect data on foraminifera.
We can collect data on lots of physical things.What is it that we collect when we investigate whether something is made up?Let's take a look at the Piltdown man hoax - what was the scientific evidence that that story was made up? See, I read that it was, I read that established respected scientists concluded that it was by examining the bones more closely. But I don't have the expertise in that field, so I have to take their word with the trust that I have built up all my life about respected scientific peer reviews and repeatability of the experiments. A heckuva lot easier for Piltdown man than for the IPU.I sort of thought it might be a case for linguistic experts to see where that term, the IPU, originated from in the language. Again, I am not talking about the IPU - I'm talking about the made-up-ness of it.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

I think I kinda missed my target: Maybe it would better to imagine an alternate story, say Newcastle man, found in the Newcastle coal beds. A full story of it, but no pictures in the story. Then it happens soon that all scientific evidence collected for Newcastle man is completely and irrevocably destroyed and all we have is the story. Thus experts, such as were brought in to investigate Piltdown man, cannot be of any help here. However, as luck would have it, there is video tape of the conspirators plotting to do this, then there is recorded tape of them burying Newcastle man in the coal beds to be found and tape of them leaking the story. Then the police find the equipment used to make Newcastle man with the correct forensic evidence. This is evidence that Newcastle man is made up. Notice the actual description of Newcastle man is not needed here. This is the kind of evidence I'm talking about regarding the IPU.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

bluegenes visits the peanut gallery with: I'm assuming that a near future genetic institute injecting rabbit DNA into a guinea pig egg and implanting the egg back into the guinea pig and thus having the guinea pig give birth to a rabbit does not count because you really meant say"All rabbit DNA comes from other rabbit DNA." This is a high level of confidence scientific theory. The only known source of rabbit DNA is from rabbit DNA. The theory can be falsified by the demonstration of a source of rabbit DNA other than from other rabbit DNA.bluegenes goes to say: He hasn't gotten to that part of your "theory" yet.You said: Name any one you like. RAZD slyly suggested the IPU. You can pick any supernatural being you like.Then provide evidence that it is a figment of human imagination.Should be a piece of cake.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d