Peanut Gallery

I think it's time we had another drink.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Now I KNOW we need another drink. "You raise up your head
And you ask, "Is this where it is?"
And somebody points to you and says "It's his"
And you say, "What's mine?"
And somebody else says, "Where what is?"
And you say, "Oh my God
Am I here all alone?"

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Not exactly.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Not sure. It's *something* . . . like the wind ripping through a tree, alone, facing the ocean's roar in a hurricane. I can just feel the bark peeling.... That would be a "No".....

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

I know...caught up in a whirlwind.... Other than the known litany of sci-fi stories regarding rodents, maybe there is some method of communication that happens so fast in the twitch of a whisker that you didn't see it? Why would they use english? All of them. Or, to put it more succinctly, "What do you mean by this 'talking'? Speaking the King's English? Ah, you heathen natives are so obviously STuPiDissimo...." OKAY. let's get out of the movies....Hypothesis -> Theory: peer-reviewed confirmation by scientific experiment around the world. See cold fusion's failure.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

LOL fun read. but if you insist on finding a rodent who can speak the King's English, you may be missing the rodent who can speak those african clicking languages like Xhosa. You miss the point - repeatable experiments. repeatable experiments.... Oh, believe me, and check with Cavediver, experiments are waiting to test this. They are working hard to get this kind of stuff. This is a stupid line of argument. Forget your talking rats. This is a splendid illustration of bluegenes' complete misunderstanding of RAZD's challenge.... It was never ever RAZD's problem. It was bluegenes problem.The challenge was not for RAZD to prove that the IPU could falsify his theory, but for bluegenes to provide objective peer-reviewed repeatable evidence that it was a figment of human imagination. The onus was being put on bluegenes, never on RAZD. However, Modulous elegantly showed how the challenger does not get to pick the experiment. bluegenes should have shrugged the challenge off with that argument instead of stupidly asking RAZD to prove it could exist and thus falsify the theory. This was never about falsification. It was about the initial supporting evidence for the theory.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Would you know if the rat was speaking Xhosa? What if, because of the limitations of a rat's mouth, the Xhosa he is speaking is barely audible? What if this rat could not understand english and didn't even recognize it as a human language and thus is choosing to ignore it? In this case the problem isn't the repeatability - it's design of the experiment. A human who can only speak & understand English interviewing a whispering rat who can only speak & understand Xhosa is not a valid experiment. I think there are split camps on that. There certainly some who claim it is untestable, but there are others who would disagree with that. For example we have that strange friend of Roger Penrose who was claiming to see places in the cosmic background data where possible "branes" of other universes had bumped into "branes" of our universe. There are people looking, some perhaps way too hard in this case.But the real reason is probably the mediots, like Discover Magazine, who slapped the label "theory" on it before they could be stopped and it got out into the world at large. I would conjecture that these popular portrayals of String Theory are doing it a great disservice, despite their desire to explain the concept clearly. I think the rat analogy has a limited usefulness here. ...and this is where the analogy usefulness gets dodgy: You have stated this wrong. The flaw is the 8th word "or". There was to be no test that the IPU is real. The test was only to show, to demonstrate that it was a product of human invention. It was not an either-or test. The IPU could still be completely a product of human imagination, but we may never be able to demonstrate it other than from the deep armchair sessions with the snifters of cognac, leaving a glimmer of a shadow of philosophical doubt hanging in the air like a waft of cigar smoke of days gone by. And here is where the mistake of presenting the test as an either-or test traps your progress. The task is NOT to present an IPU to the facility for testing. The task is to demonstrate that it is made up. We have to strike the "real or" part so that the statement above now appears as follows: And you can see that the sentence no longer makes sense.However, this task was out-of-bounds and bluegenes would have just written that he will take his legally correct right to ignore it. I'm sorry it doesn't mean anything to you. For me, it is the very thing that makes science so solid and strong.I would have expected bluegenes to tell the truth: Sorry - I haven't collected anything on the IPU yet, and, anyway, you don't get to ask me which SBs to test for support of the theory. Which is sort of what he did.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Don't be silly. Really? What do you think?

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Very good - you caught on. Somewhere in the world in the central region of some thick piece of Kaya wood:

|  |  |  |  |  |  |
--+-(_)-+--+--+--+--+--
  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
--+--+-(_)(_)-+--+--+--
  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
--+--+--+-[@][@]-+--+--
  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
--+--+--+--+--+--+-[@]-
  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
--+-(_)-+--+--+-[@]-+--
  |  |  |  |  |  |  |

My stance is I am ignorant. From this all knowledge flows.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

To be more exact, "If it appears to be designed, then the odds on there being a designer are better than not, to an agnostic Level 3 Dawkins.""Appears to be designed" may also need some kind of elucidation. If we consider the ratios of the physical constants - things like the Fine Structure Constant and so forth - all to be amazingly interrelated to produce a universe that exhibits all these wonderful things that lead up to DNA molecules folding around and self-awareness and stuff, then we may be looking at an Argument from Incredulity. (I don't think that this is the case for RAZD here, but rather it's something more personal for him.) However, before we get into our particular set of constants and their ratios, perhaps zillions upon zillions of ratios have all been and are still being instantiated in a frothy, bubbling soup of universe creating - some dying off quickly, some not - and we just happen to be in one where the dying off has not occurred before life on Earth got a chance to start. This has been termed "evolutionary cosmology".

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Oh, he has not and does not ignore it. He is moving on past that issue. That stuff is old.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Modulous says: Wait a minute. Did bluegenes back off of his original challenge? I forget...perhaps he did later. He may have meant "supernatural concepts", but that wasn't the origination of what is now running into thousands of posts in EvC.If he did mean concepts, then indeed it amounts to saying "all human imagination comes from human imagination". Color me unimpressed.Modulous then gets uncharacteristically sloppy in an offhandish way: The first ever watch was the the rising and setting of the sun and measuring how high it was in the sky to determine what part of the day we's at. Human beings did not make that watch.Wait a minute. Maybe this is semantics? What's a watch? Maybe Modulous was thinking of a Sundial? No! - more likely the familiar old device of gears and escapement mechanisms and multiple intricate jeweled movements and then later on by the electronic versions - essentially saying "all watches made by mankind are made by mankind"...wow. The True Scottish Watchmaker smiles.And I can also describe a source of rain that did not come from clouds if anyone should want to go that far. I also dealt with the rabbits and genetics and the human ear on the back of a rat.Come on, Team bluegenes, we can do better than this.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

oh straggs, you're such a tool at times - just like me.....BTW thank you for the requote of bluegenes' True Scotsman (backing off from "beings" to "concepts"). And yes, at times, (and this is one), that you have to be pedantic! What is a Concept? - something created by the mind, which at the moment is confined to the human mind (chimpanzees & porpoises, etc. tabled for the moment, just to facilitate the conversation)? Let me know, dear friend.Straggler says, in the 1st post of the Inductive Atheism thread: That's not what bluesgenes stated in his theory. bluegenes stated that the only source of Supernatural Beings was the figment of human imagination.To say that the only source of human concepts of the supernatural are human concepts of the supernatural IS FUCKING NOTHING. We can do better than this.That is where he made his mistake, along with many detailed items left out sub-topics, like:What are the tools used to do the scientific investigation of this theory?Archeology uses little picks and brushes and shovels and earth-movers and so on - they get right down into it. They use mass-spectrum analyzers for the real nitty gritty... They have repeatable procedures written out in detail.Biology uses chemistry, mass-spectrum analyzers, electron-microscopes and so on. They use proven methods of chemical agents to expose the actual chemistries going on. They have repeatable procedures written out in detail.Astronomy uses telescopes, spectrum analysers, rockets to launch more telescopes, and so on. And the results of Basic Physics. They have repeatable procedures written out in detail.Physics uses calibrated lab equipment to measure to the finest electron microscopic degree and uses Astronomy results as well. They have repeatable procedures written out in detail....and so on.and so on...WHAT do we use here? What are the pieces of equipment we need to bring along?I have asked this before.bluegenes never described the scientific equipment he was using. Instead he showed some logical cigar-smoking arguments...look it up in the literature - a literature that has already been shown to be fraught with opinionated lies throughout history...history that RAZD has also errantly decided to allow to be included in this debate...good as they might have been - but still not the issue. When you propose a scientific theory, you also provide a detailed description of the methods of verifying this theory to the rest of the scientific community. This is why my brother called him out on Step 1. Where are the initial scientific data? Never mind the falsifiability (although i dealt with that little canard later in this thread) - you see - we never even got over the threshold here. We're still waiting on the front porch. bluegenes! answer the doorbell!and if such a description of the experiments bluegenes has done is not forthcoming.........well, it was cute.To repeat my brother,Where's the evidence?i'll add Where's the article in the unnamed as yet journal?Edited by xongsmith, : felt like it

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Stragglers notes that: Literature is not evidence.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

ah - bluegenes.....keep up the fight, man. But - and give me a chance here - the ways we have of studying such things are very well described! You have yet to provide the tools and methodology to bring to bear upon your study. You have yet to give me a procedure to conduct a non-biased neutral experiment to confirm what you wish to advance (as much as I might agree with it, in my own opinionated way). Yeah - guys like Einstein might have just said "go and look." as he sat back in his armchair, smoking no doubt a terrific Cuban Cigar.So - bluegenes - give us the methodology to test this theory out so we can reproduce your results here.Edited by xongsmith, : level up to bluegenes

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- xongsmith, 5.7d