My dear Panda:
I'm afraid you may not have been looking at the RAZD line correctly. As you know, this whole impetus has had nothing to do with whether or not any imaginable supernatural beings or events are scientifically supported by objective evidence. Not a single off the cuff concoction by Straggler or bluegenes is addressing the issue. They are all arrows lost in the woods while the game is still out afoot in the open fields.
No - it is instead about whether or not you can provide objective scientific evidence that various obvious entities,
which have already been assigned to the category of made-up supernatural entities, have actually *been* made up. How were they made up? Science does not seek to find out Why, but rather How.
We may agree, at the outset, that various
obviously FICTIONAL supernatural beings are made up, such as Mighty Mouse or Superman.
This has something to do with them, tangentially, and they certainly would have been an even easier opening volley to bluegenes. RAZD thought* he was was throwing up a softball of 9 inches in diameter that the IPU was fictional. Suppose, just for a moment that he had instead thrown up the challenge to show evidence that Jesus H. Christ himself was a fictional entity? The problem with immediately going to this step is that a lot of emotional baggage will get in the way of establishing procedures for scientific investigation to be used out in the field. Science is about collecting data. Data is meticulously collected by scientific constantly recalibrated measuring equipment. Data is not collected in a comfortable armchair with a good cigar and glass of cognac, using virtually impeccable logic. What would be the proper measuring equipment here?
* OK - moving on to the IPU...and this is the Asterisk (a French comic character my brother RAZD is fond of)...for RAZD to pick the IPU in the beginning of their Great Debate was a bad trick (note that the use of the word "trick" is not meant to be a LIE or DECEPTION, but is instead here, of course, more like "a facilitating move", and, yes, i am talking about Climategate).
Ah, but see? RAZD could not throw up the 2 foot diameter softball of Superman - no, no - he had to resurrect the infamous IPU. The infamous IPU that this forum has already spent
so much time on.... Still should be easy to show the procedural "how" of it being made up, no? LOL clever. Indeed the other meaning of "trick" comes to mind!
What is RAZD trying to do here? From my vantage point, it is simply this: he is trying to establish a baseline or rubric of the kind of scientific data analysis that you would start with. Measure the How. Can you demonstrate that Superman does not exist? Well, yeah - he is a fictional character, here are the guys that invented him, blah-de-blah. There are some in this group who want to argue from the Other Side - i.e. no one has ever seen Superman....His ability to fly violates all manner of physical rules....Again, none of his numerous superpowers have never been observed by the history of time....And again, the laws of today would make the odds on someone like him to actually exist so minuscule that we are best advised to believe that he does not exist. Compare that approach to these facts: He was made up by the guys who sold their idea the DC Comics. Boom, case closed.
He might have started out with Superman, which is even more of a mickey-mouse (Hey him too) task for Bluegenes. Or The Flying Spaghetti Monster. No - he didn't start out that way - no, he started out only in the kind hopes that bluegenes would quickly realize that he had misstated his "theory". A bad trick of the trade, only because everybody in the world here immediately started talking about something completely else ("You have shown *NOTHING* to falsify his theory yet!!").
RAZD was merely trying to establish the direct way we have of determining whether something is made up or not. It was about determining the methodology we would all agree upon to test bluegenes' theory. Remember, it was bluegenes who proposed the theory, not some RAZD who proposed the anti-theory!
Superman was made up. "objective evidence showing authorship"
The FSM was made up. "objective evidence mentioned many posts before somewhere in this thread".
The point of this approach was to quickly get to the point that - on a philosophical basis, using analysis such as described by Straggler and, obliquely, by Modulous - the problem with some of these very old things that may have been morphed up into phantasmagorical exaggerations is that, in the end, all of these discussions reduce down to the issue of the Ace of Spades being buried in a huge N-sized deck and we have drawn 8 gazillion cards so far and the experts among us are ready to conclude that no Ace of Spades is in the entire deck. Yet it might still be in there. Actually, I believe I later refined that to replace "the Ace of Spades" with the term "
a card that does not belong in the deck". And this would lead to openings for the same kind of arguments. We all would readily accept that the Ace of Spades "
belongs" in the deck. What would a card that "
does not belong" in the deck look like? How would we go about describing it? Onifre has raised this issue many, many times in many threads. What would it look like? What is it? But...this is a distraction from the original point: We have drawn 8 gazillion cards so far and have yet to draw X, where X was originally the Ace of Spades, just to get you familiar with the idea, then became this weird thing, "
a card that does not belong in the deck". 8 gazillion is a huge number and using probability theory akin to the way they use it to calculate Mean Time Between Failure, they can start bracketing the preliminary results with error bars and confidence levels of enormous unlikelyhood.
But unlikely does not equal never. Certainly bluegenes was not asserting "never" at the truth, but he was saying that the unlikelyhood evidence he had seen was sufficient enough to propose his theory.
bluegenes has a theory that has yet to be falsified, but it could be.
Of course. But
RAZD was not looking for a way to falsify the theory yet.
He only wanted to see a specific example of the
SUCCESS of the theory. bluegenes provided some examples, yes, but RAZD wanted bluegenes to address the IPU question specifically. Modulous was very eloquent in explaining why RAZD didn't have the right to pose that question.
However! Yet I am still coming to my brother's defense because it still seems like it would eventually, inexorably, become a valid question, so let's cut to the chase, and also I'm coming to his defense because hardly anyone else understood the question he was asking in its proper context, and that goes quadruple for bluegenes and quintuple for Staggler.
There was instead a lot of text pushed out on these two discussion group threads that had absolutely nothing to do with what he wanted to discuss.
So then he finds himself besieged by these woodland arrows and makes some replies to those, both here and in the Great Debate thread. But, jeez, he would sure like to get back to Square 1 and get an agreement on the initial parameters of this "theory".
A huge amount of progress could have been made had bluegenes just said "...IPU? - naw, no I cannot give you any of the kind of evidence you seek. I can't get any funding for that kind of shit from Washington yet."
What's wrong with admitting that? It would make my brother's opening volley look a tad more foolish as it should be. Instead bluegenes comes up with a
Republican evasion. tsk tsk tsk.
But make no mistake - when RAZD is getting raked over the coals on a difficult misunderstanding of the general forum's part - i stand body & self-awareness entity animal, that shouldn't be "murdered" and "aborted", right next to him . . . as I hope I always have.
Indeed, I feel that most of the EvC members are leaping to conclusions about my brother and are sometimes jumping over themselves to say what they already had pre-formulated in their minds about him before they read the post they were replying to.
And to the EvC members at large, in the words I so dearly wish Gabby Giffords could say some day soon to the horribly mentally mangled Loughner behind bars, eye to eye:
"You missed."
- xongsmith, 5.7d
™ Version 4.2
