Creation, Evolution, and faith

I think at this point it is safe to assume that he has no idea what he means by it. I would think it would be very simple for him to give us a clear example so that we do not have to sit hear and guess. Since he can not give an example it seems it was just a couple words that he felt sounded could when combined.

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Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

Yes, but only after you had already blown the issue way out of proportion.I made the original comment in Message 383 as a comment on the question of whether mathematics is objective or subjective. Not one of your posts on the issue has related to that question (about mathematics). The demand for an example makes no sense.If I had said "foods are made of atoms" and you demanded an example, what kind of example should I give. Would you be looking for a piece of cheese? Would you be considering that as an example of "foods" or as an example of "made of atoms"?As in the case of foods/atoms, all examples will be mundane and won't reveal anything useful. And that has been what I have tried to point out in telling you how you can come up with zillions of examples. The kind of questioning used by Rahvin in Message 403 at least made some sense at getting to what Rahvin saw as a possible problem.In your case, presumably you think there is a problem. But you have not been clear on what kind of problem concerns you.

So I should be able to come up with examples myself, you can come up with "zillions" of examples but you still cannot give us a single example because the demand for an example makes no sense.Well that clears that up then. Are you going to dig this little hole of yours any deeper?You obviously consider objectivity to be like pornography. You can't explain what it is you just know it when you see it. But that really isn't much of a position is it? My problem is with you creating superficially meaningful sounding word cocktails that you then present as some sort of position.Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

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If so, then this also is a God of the gaps argument. It's only possible to hold this view because we don't know the origin of physical laws. I think it's an open question as to whether we will ever discover understand this scientifically but we cannot rule out the possibility.
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I would maintain that this is impossible in principle, because it is a metaphysical question rather than a scientific question.

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KBertsche,thanks for your reply.I disagree with what you say here.There's no reason in principle why we may not discover the origin of physical laws through science.I can think of a number of ways in which this could happen, and a mixture of these could apply- the laws are necessary mathematically - ie given some very basic constraints on the universe (eg time exists, at least one dimension of space exists), then there is only one form that physical laws can take. This leaves unexplained whatever those basic constraints are, but could deal with many of the laws we now have.- A variant of the above, where some aspects of the laws are determined randomly.- the laws derive from random processes. For example, the statistical mechanical definition of entropy in terms of micro and macro states, and the likelihood of essentially random transitions between these states, leads at a collective level to the thermodynamic concept of entropy and what looks like a 'law'. Now how 'randomness' is encoded as a law is itself interesting, but it might need less explanation than an apparently non-random law.Even if science can't fill these gaps, your argument is still a 'God of the Gaps' argument - it's just that science can't ever fill the gap. You don't have any justification for putting God into it, just a personal preference. The same is true of me of course! I think it's safer to put nothing atall into the gap and simply say 'we don't know' in that case.

That's total bullshit. I shall conclude that

• something troubles you about what I posted in Message 383, and troubled you enough that you posted a stream of off-topic messages;
• you are unable to make a coherent statement about what it is that troubles you.

I shall conclude that:

• You have no idea what you mean when you say "objectivity is just shared subjectivity" as posted in Message 383
• You are unable to admit this.

How do you expect anyone to comment on anything you say regarding objectivity when neither they nor you have any friggin idea what it is you are talking about on the subject?

One would think that after all the inquiries you could write a post that ahs a coherent definition and a simple example.
You keep making bizarre claims about off-topic, but we a re just attempting to get a clarification so we can know what the hell you meant.If we do not understand what you are saying then it is necessary for us to ask for a clarification. It is then incumbent upon you to clarify.Let me give you a hint. Evidently your previous posts did not clarify it for us, so quite referring back to them. We are not stupid.Can you give a definition and an example of "shared subjectivity" ot not?

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Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

I have already explained what I meant in previous posts. Sure, that explanation falls short of a definition - welcome to natural language. If we eliminated all words that had no definition, there would be nothing left.As for an example - I just do not understand what is being requested. I have not expressed any disagreement with what is usually considered to be objective. On the issue of the objectivity of mathematics on which I made that original comment, here's a reference to a book chapter on the objectivity of mathematics.
No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.springerlink.com/content/q5k84725100w0658/
From the page visible on the web, that does not look like pornography to me.If you disagree with what I said, maybe you or Straggler could produce an actual reasoned argument as to why you think I am wrong. That way we could at least sort out whether there is a disagreement, and what that disagreement is (if any).I thought that what I said was not controversial. Now I am getting repeated demands to clear up the controversy, but nobody is telling what the controversy is that I am supposed to clear up.

How can we disagree with you or state where you are wrong when we don't know what you mean? You seem to want to avoid having to defend your indefensible inability to explain or exemplify what it is you do mean by instead seeking to attack the position of others. But our only position here is to point out your lack of a coherent argument or even a phrase that has any meaning at all. I assume you are not familiar with the phrase "X is like pornography. It cannot be defined but we all know it when we see it". It is used (usually tongue in cheek and mockingly) by those objecting to others who wish to ban things based on common sense notions of what is right and wrong. Dude it was a joke at your expense. If it hasn't caused controversy in the past I suspect it is because others either assumed you meant something that you apparently don't (as per myself and Rhavin in this thread) or because, like you, they think it intuitively sounds meaningful and reasonable without ever really considering what it does actually mean. Give us one example of something that you consider to be objective based on "shared subjectivity" and explain what the subjective experience in question is and how it is shared. Bearing in mind that you have clearly stated that you don't mean:1) You don't mean "shared subjectivity" in the sense of my Allah example2) You don't mean "shared subjectivity" in the sense of popular agreement as per Rahvin's understanding.3) You don't mean "shared subjectivity" to be the necessarily subjective perception of objective reality.4) You don't mean Berkeley's idealism.Just tell us what you do mean. Or admit that you can't.

Somewhere in the past, I must have posted a message telling everybody to drop what they were doing to decide what is objective, and instead to use my new method Except that I never did. I was not giving anybody advice on how to decide what is objective. I was not defining a method to determine what is objective. According to Wittgenstein, meaning is use, and I was just commenting on how I see people using the term "objective".If you look back at where I used that expression in Message 383, it ought to have been obvious from the context that I was explaining why I (like many others) consider mathematics to be objective.

How long are you going to try and continue this charade that you actually have any idea what it is you mean by "shared subjectivity"? Yet you have demonstrated yourself to have neither an argument nor even an idea of what it is you actually mean by the phrase "shared subjectivity". What method? Nope. You stated that you had an argument and implied that you had some idea what you were talking about. But we have subsequently established that in fact you don't. That is probably a good thing seeing as you have no friggin idea what you mean yourself. That is probably a good thing seeing as you have no friggin idea what you mean yourself. You have been given several examples of the way in which people might use the term "objective" and all you have done is respond "I don't mean....."You have consistently failed to tell us what you do mean. This remains as true now as it did several posts ago. Name dropping Wittegenstein into the conversation doesn't somehow change this fact. All you have demonstrated is that you have absolutely no idea what you mean by the term "objectivity" because you have absolutely no idea what you mean by the phrase "shared subjectivity". So you might as well have said that you consider mathematics to be "wurgle". It would have been just as meaningful as the little word cocktail you have created for yourself. Can you give an example of what you mean by "shared subjectivity" or not?If not why not just admit that you don't know what you meant and move on with your life?

Then perhaps you could provide an example of something you think is "objective" (along these lines of popular use of the word) in mathematics that is not testable by the scientific method?If we're talking about "objective mathematics" as defined by the popular-general-mass-population meanings, I would guess that you mean something like "2 + 3 = 5" being objective.
But, within this context, "2 + 3 = 5" certainly is testable by means of the scientific method.Within mathematics, you can show the proof going back to first principles.
Using the scientific method, you can create a real-world, emprical experiment where you have 2 apples over here, 3 apples over there... and then move them together. You can then test, scientifically, that you have 5 apples.So, if you mean "objective" in a professional manner... others here have already shown the issues.
And, if you mean "objective" in a colloquial manner... then the scientific test can be done anyway.And again, we're left with the original statement:Can kbertsche identify a single idea that is collectively agreed to be a part of objective reality, and yet cannot be tested by science?For clarification... "collectively agreed to be a part of objective reality" is a way to say "is a known part of objective reality as apart from something that may or may not be a part of objective reality, but it's currently unknown either way".

I'm not sure how many of these I can put my finger on: "is a known part of objective reality as apart from something that may or may not be a part of objective reality"Or perhaps you know something I don't...

And suppose that every time we did that experiment, we found that there were 6 apples, rather than 5 apples. That would not tell us anything at all about the mathematics. But it would tell us that something strange was happening with the apples.Like it or not, mathematical questions are not settled by scientific methods.

Where did I state that I have an argument?