Peanut Gallery

RAZD asks: Did you miss the 2nd sentence after the yummy pi sentence?I already shot myself down before anyone else could.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

BTW RAZD, you are not groking the ominous import of the HOWEVER part.Ominous, because I really do agree with bluegenes. Just like I'd go "yep" when shown a picture of a mother rabbit giving birth to a baby rabbit. You were correct to stick the knife in when he faltered in how he phrased his "theory", but, essentially, he has observed that the unclouded daytime sky is blue on planet earth.I'd have to go with Modulous' dissection of the logic arguments. He has a way of drilling down to the bedrock quickly. Straggler even says the same thing, sort of, if you can shoulder off all the chiffarobes and dining tables and other furniture he throws in with his words like babies in bathwater.So...we disagree on this. What else is new?

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

In all fairness, omphalism doesn't necessarily require a supernatural entity and could be postulated with no recourse to it (I've seen an amusing omphalistic argument told from a purely thermodynamic point of view, for instance). I'm in no doubt of that. But bluegenes isn't arguing that supernatural entities do not exist, he's describing a theory that postulates all supernatural concepts are merely concepts. There are many things to discuss there. I submit 'but you can't absolutely rule supernatural entities out' is as absurd as the UFO argument Feynman had.The theory predicts that supernatural entities do not exist. So the only discussion surrounding the existence of supernatural entities should be possible falsifications - ie., by submitting evidence of a scientific nature that a supernatural entity exists. Otherwise the only other discussion should be the evidence (not absolute proof) of the role of imagination in creating, maintaining, and evolving supernatural entities.So by all means, if you can show that in fact supernatural entities exist - that would be pertinent. But saying 'they might' exist, or 'they haven't been ruled out' entirely misses the point. Just saying that 'omphalism' might be true doesn't really impact evolution. The question is, which theory has more supporting evidence to explain the gang of supernatural beings proposed in this world - the known to exist irrational predilections of known to exist terrestrial entities or the unknown actual existence of supernatural entities?If all you have is 'some people have believed these things' then you have failed to provide evidence to distinguish your alternative hypothesis from the hypothesis bluegenes proposed: since this is one of the things bluegenes' theory seeks to (in part) explain in the first place! It would be like saying 'that life on earth appears to be old and appears to have changed is evidence in favour of omphalism (which predicts an appearance of old age) and therefore weakens evolution!' Actually it would be more like someone saying "I have a theory that all swans are white. Produce a non-white swan to falsify my theory", and someone saying 'non-white swans might exist. There was a golden swan in Saxon folk-lore for instance' is not sufficient to falsify the theory. Unless you are suggesting you have provided scientific evidence that demonstrates the existence of supernatural creatures, it doesn't seem that analogy would be apt.

Modulous states: IF i may be so bold, Feynman did NOT rule out extra terrestrial origins of UFOs - he just said they were way less probable than human delusion....I think the best way to describe the relative unlikelihood of things is to ask: Does it affect how you behave in this world?The key Dawkins question could be phrased that way: No. I do not believe in God at the moment, but I allow allow the possibility.HOWEVER - I am not going to go around living my life as if there was a God.So no, a plane wont crash into the towers, or, no, a bomb wont go off over Lockerbee, or, no, a meteorite wont crash through my roof and kill me, or, no, all the O2 molecules in this room I'm in wont suddenly all move to the back ceiling corner.If I live my life under the cloud of all kinds of unlikely things, my life would be so much more of a mess that it is already in!!!Edited by xongsmith, : goof

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Agreed: More likely the known vagaries of the human mind than the unknown existential properties of unknown beings of an unknown realm interacting with our known realm using unknown mechanisms I find it odd that RAZD is very much a champion of pointing out possible psychological biases people have - but he doesn't have much time for the notion that supernatural beings might be borne out of those same (and other) biases. It's usually the best way to determine someone's actual beliefs (versus their stated beliefs): observe if they act as if a proposition were true Especially since many of them are mutually exclusive ("I'll buy a winning lottery ticket tomorrow" versus "I'll be killed by a plane engine in 10 minutes")!

Modulous finds the achilles heel in me: Yeah - I cant fly. I have studied Transportation Statistics up the wazoo and kneaux that airplane flight is statistically still the best. BUT...I cannot emotionally get on a plane anymore. Last time was 1967, I think. I have seen nothing since to dissuade me from this affliction. I even was so crass as to comment during the morning of 9/11/01 that I still wasn't seeing any reason to get on a plane. These new TSA pat-downs? Nope. Still not gonna get on a plane.Wait. A helicopter ride? Hmmm.... seems Timothy McVeigh is up for execution. I am scheduled to go up in a small helicopter. He gets his day postponed. I get my day postponed. He gets another day postponed. I get another day. The suspense is killing me. Who will die first? I have a harrowing trip with a video recorder in my hands and live to tell the tale. Timothy gets executed. All is well.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Can anyone explain why RAZD thinks that documents written by human beings constitute an alternative source of such concepts?Or why evidenced human belief in some supernatural beings makes those particular concepts evidentially superior or more worthy of consideration to ones which nobody believes in the existence of?Does RAZD consider belief itself to be a form of evidence?

Straggler asks: Not sure that he does, but lemme just take a tack on this....A Million Flies cannot be wrong: EAT SHIT.A funny taunt of many years.BUT - when we look underneath all the societal abhorrence, we find that fly larvae eat bacteria to survive and particularly the bacteria found in shit. K-ching, no surprise.In other words, there may be something underlying all these misinformed, ill-shaped religions sprung up around the world throughout history - there might be some common underlying thread of something that they all were trying to write down, in their own very imperfect ways. Unlikely, true, but not proven wrong. What it is, we cannot say yet. They have all been demonstrated to have polluted versions of what happened.The tendency of humans to mistake what they see, as in identifying the race of the potential car thief from the same video with different music background or just the myriad of contradictory stories by eye witnesses to the same live event, is a well known phenomenon. In the overwhelming* preponderance of actual examined cases, these all seem to be nothing more than human imagination and world view foisted down upon some event. But there remains, however unlikely, the possibility that something *supernatural* is woven into the explanation of all of these seemingly contradictory stories. It is as if, to use the Ace of Spades analogy, "OK - we still have yet to draw the Ace of Spades, whatever it looks like, and I am certain I will know it if we see it - but there are still cards we haven't seen yet." (Or as I would like to word it, "a card that does not belong in the deck." Because, through the history of scientific work, there have been cards that at first did not look like they belonged in the deck - only to later be recognized as part of the deck as we now understand it.)That mysterious card could be there, however unlikely by now. But as long as there are still some cards in the deck we haven't seen, it could still be there. Well, maybe a few cigars & bottles of Sherry later, we could argue that, in order for this supernatural card to be possible somewhere in the deck, it would have to have Properties X, Y ... Z. And furthermore, on analysis from the other side, that it could NOT have properties A, B ... C. Then, moving on to the Deck of Reality, our deck in question, develop some kind of logical procedure to show that any card in our deck would have to have at least one of the properties A, B ... C and maybe also could not have any of the properties X, Y ... Z. Thus we are able to conclude: Therefore this card aint in the deck. That's a lot of Sherry later, methinks.A could be Repeatability - anybody anywhere should be able to see this card. So a card that can only be seen once by one person cannot be in this deck.B could be something else, and C and so on.X could be a blatant violation of the Laws of Physics......etc.* was going to say 100%, but this would allow for those instances where the investigators in question just gave up and went on to other things or died before they finished the study, leaving the issue FORGOTTEN & unresolved - a truly minuscule portion...

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

So if lots of people believe something it is more likely to be true than if nobody believes in it?

Belief as evidence?OK, here is the scenario:It is discovered that there is a universal energy field with which some folks can communicate. Enough evidence accumulates so that science accepts the existence of this field and learns to communicate with it, although haltingly at first. It develops that all the world's religions are descended from poor efforts on the part of various people over the years to communicate with this field, and that those religions have no particular relationship with this energy field.Now, how many folks change their beliefs on the basis of this new evidence?Do all the world's religions fold overnight while folks change to attempting to communicate with this new energy field?Or do those religions label this as heresy, blasphemy, etc. and things go on as usual?Food for thought when one tries to make belief into evidence. More likely belief is the opposite of evidence and the antithesis of science.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

It seems that part of the problem in the debate with Bluegenes (and all those that have preceded it) is that RAZ doesn't understand the difference between inductive and deductive logic. Although given this stance RAZD's entire position against Bluegenes inductive argument that the only known source of supernatural concepts is human imagination therefore tentatively we can say that all supernatural concepts are imagined, comes down to demonstrating another source of such concepts.Apparently RAZ thinks he has located another source of such concepts in the form of documents written by humans..... Do I really need to point out the problem with this?Edited by Straggler, : Spelling

Coyote chips in with: Nice scenario. And only some humans, not all, can use this energy field. A good chance for some serious carnage! A number > 0. Perhaps >> 0. Yes. And even more. Is a "world religion" definable as a religion that has at least one person who believes it in the sunlight at all times of the earth's rotation?No "world religion" folds, nothing there goes on as usual. Many people die from vigilante stupidity. The Founders of the New Telepathic Religion eventually pass into history and their ashes are strewn in orbit around the moon. An underground movement springs up advancing the blasphemous agenda of buying nothing on Telepath Day. Secret underground bootlegs of missing Star Trek episodes describing the New Telepathic Oracles are exchanged in parking lots at night. "Who is Gary Lockwood?" is scrawled on nearly every graffiti wall. Meanwhile, in New York, the Fortune 500 CEOs, who have long since undergone a gradual, peaceful transformation to be completely comprised of Telepathic Ones by now, continue to run the established machinery as usual at the expense of the rest of the world.Or not. I don't think the gist of that "Hindu Hypothesis" angle has been properly cast in scientific light. Perhaps it cannot be.Think of the 4 blind guys reporting on what an elephant is. One has only touched the trunk, one the ear, one the leg and the last the tail. They have 4 different beliefs of what the evidence for an elephant is. And these 4 beliefs are contradictory with each other, like a bluegenes-type referee would be arguing. A bluegenes-type referee might make the claim that the elephant probably doesn't exist at all because of these contradictions. This is a 2-dimensional analog of a 3-dimensional world. Flatlanders cannot understand how a 3-d alien picks up an object in a room and puts it back down outside the room. Note that NONE of the 4 beliefs of the evidence for an elephant is correct. None of the beliefs themselves can be used by themselves as evidence of the elephant. They have to be understood taken all together. The truth turns out to be nothing at all similar to what they thought.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Interesting response!Thanks!

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Straggler asks: No. Existing documents indeed are hardly distinguishable from figments of human imagination. They are written down.But I think there is a misunderstanding of how these existing documents are to be used for gathering evidence. They are as the 4 reports from the blind men on what an elephant is. What if the 4 blind guys return to their same exact stations beside the elephant and each takes a biopsy of the organic material and does a DNA test. Imagine their surprise to find that it is the exact same DNA!In the elephant story, DNA analysis is not available as a technology yet. This might be the case for the "whatever it is that most religions around the world have each made a description of". In fact it is the case. By definition almost directly. The equivalent of DNA analysis on these various supernatural entities will NEVER be available. As an old college buddy, John McMeans, said, "Analogies never work."It all gets back to what you do in your life with all these different unlikelihoods. The bluegenes-type referee (see reply to Coyote) might proceed to walk through the African svelte as if their were no elephants. A RAZD-type referee might be still trying to figure out what an elephant is from the 4 stories, but hold out for something weird and marvelous that no one in the North American continent has seen yet, since this would obviously be before elephants became known to the western world.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

bluegenes has now posted at the end of Message 53: I think the problem in this Debate is that RAZD will not accept (2) without additional evidence. First, his current line of "existing documents" of supernatural-being-concepts being useful in some as yet unknown future explanation, like the elephant's blind men, is potentially evidence of something that would fall outside of the realm of things purely concocted by human imagination. The problem with that is that it is not a known source yet. Second, even certain humanly imagined entities that we all agree are fictional are still not known to science in a rigorous way that would be upheld by the scientific community in peer-reviewed journals.Now, for me, it is True that every thorough scientific investigation brought to bear upon a possible supernatural-being-concept that has been performed to date has resulted in the inescapable conclusion that the issue was a figment of human imagination.And it would be silly to waste government money investigation every single such entity. HOWEVER:I am STILL thinking, that for any theory to be a truly strong theory, it must provide something new in its field of endeavor. I am thinking the above box of bluegenes statements still adds nothing new to the existing body of knowledge.Again, bluegenes may be on to something when he compares his theory with rabbits. No zoologist today would seriously publish a paper claiming that baby rabbit DNA only comes from parent rabbit DNA and claim it is a strong theory.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d