They're Marching Against God - Your .02
07-23-2002, 10:49 AM
#371
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by chroot
[B]
His name is Planck.
Science currently does not have a model for the unification of all four fundamental forces, which is thought to occur before the Planck time.
[B]
His name is Planck.
Science currently does not have a model for the unification of all four fundamental forces, which is thought to occur before the Planck time.
07-23-2002, 10:54 AM
#373
[QUOTE]Originally posted by ltweintz
[B]
Exactly my point.
[B]
Exactly my point.
07-23-2002, 10:58 AM
#374
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Itweintz is clawing at the walls here, trying to demonstrate with his "is the color orange the color orange?" question that there is objective reality...
JonBoy is here, retreating to his "nothing's absolute!" anti-argument. (btw, JonBoy, how can you believe that nothing is absolute and that God exists, simultaneously? You're a shapeshifter.)
Here's something to chew on:
What can you know for CERTAIN? Exactly three things. (1) You exist. (2) You
are conscious, you are aware of something. (3) Whatever may exist, whatever
thing you may be aware of, it is what it is, it has the characteristics that
it has. To be, is to be something in particular; existence is identity. A
thing cannot both have a particular characteristic and not have it at the
same time in the same way.
Why can we be certain of these three things? Because you cannot deny them
without first assuming them true. If you say "I do not exist", who is
speaking? If you say "I am not conscious", how can you speak? (Of anything?)
If you say that a thing is not itself, then what are you speaking of?
Why are these three things important? If things are what they are, then
contradictions cannot exist in reality. Every part of reality is what it is,
and so is the whole Universe at once; the whole cannot contradict itself,
the parts cannot contradict the whole. All the parts necessarily fit together.
If we are conscious, then we are conscious OF something. We receive
sensations from our eyes, ears, fingers, and so forth. We then INTERPRET
those sensations; we use imagination to form a mental model of the world
that we are sensing. Our minds do some of this automatically; we sense areas
of brown, some straight lines and angles, and we "see" a wooden table. Some
interpretations are NOT automatic; we have to work deliberately, think about
what we have seen, to make a mental model that fits all we have seen.
Why can NOT we be certain of anything else, besides those three things?
Because we can make mistakes, and sometimes do; we are not infallible. We
get sensations, from our eyes, ears, fingers, and so forth, but sometimes we
make errors, mistakes, in interpreting what our senses tell us. We make
mistakes in our thinking about what we have seen, and our memory is also
sometimes mistaken.
SCIENCE is the practice of eliminating contradictions between our mental
models and what we observe with our senses. We say what we expect to see, if
our mental model is correct; we make a "testable hypothesis", we predict
what we ought to see, and (by implication) what we would NOT expect to see
(anything strongly different from what we predict.) We then go and look, to
TEST our hypothesis. If we see what we expect, our mental model survives. If
we see something NOT consistent with our model, we have a problem; our
mental model must be adjusted, or perhaps thrown out and replaced with a
different model altogether.
LOGIC is the practice of eliminating contradictions in our thinking; it is
the practice of making all of our mental models, of all parts of the world,
consistent with each other. Since there can be no contradictions in reality,
then we know that if we have contradictions in our mental models, we must
have made some mistakes somewhere. Reality must be consistent with itself,
so if we want our mental models to reflect reality, our mental models must
also be consistent with themselves. (Mathematics is a subset of logic.)
Though we cannot be CERTAIN of anything beyond those three things stated
above, testing our mental models justifiably makes us more confident that
they reflect reality. The more testing our models have survived, the more
confidence we can have in them. We can make mistakes, we can also remove
mistakes by changing our mental models and doing more testing. Models that
have survived a LOT of testing, which reliably predict new observations, can
be regarded as "practically certain".
SO: What do we know, and how do we know it? We are, we are aware, we are
aware of the world. The world is itself; there are no contradictions in
reality. We learn about reality by applying imagination and logic to the
evidence of the senses, and testing to find and remove our mistakes.
- Warren
JonBoy is here, retreating to his "nothing's absolute!" anti-argument. (btw, JonBoy, how can you believe that nothing is absolute and that God exists, simultaneously? You're a shapeshifter.)
Here's something to chew on:
What can you know for CERTAIN? Exactly three things. (1) You exist. (2) You
are conscious, you are aware of something. (3) Whatever may exist, whatever
thing you may be aware of, it is what it is, it has the characteristics that
it has. To be, is to be something in particular; existence is identity. A
thing cannot both have a particular characteristic and not have it at the
same time in the same way.
Why can we be certain of these three things? Because you cannot deny them
without first assuming them true. If you say "I do not exist", who is
speaking? If you say "I am not conscious", how can you speak? (Of anything?)
If you say that a thing is not itself, then what are you speaking of?
Why are these three things important? If things are what they are, then
contradictions cannot exist in reality. Every part of reality is what it is,
and so is the whole Universe at once; the whole cannot contradict itself,
the parts cannot contradict the whole. All the parts necessarily fit together.
If we are conscious, then we are conscious OF something. We receive
sensations from our eyes, ears, fingers, and so forth. We then INTERPRET
those sensations; we use imagination to form a mental model of the world
that we are sensing. Our minds do some of this automatically; we sense areas
of brown, some straight lines and angles, and we "see" a wooden table. Some
interpretations are NOT automatic; we have to work deliberately, think about
what we have seen, to make a mental model that fits all we have seen.
Why can NOT we be certain of anything else, besides those three things?
Because we can make mistakes, and sometimes do; we are not infallible. We
get sensations, from our eyes, ears, fingers, and so forth, but sometimes we
make errors, mistakes, in interpreting what our senses tell us. We make
mistakes in our thinking about what we have seen, and our memory is also
sometimes mistaken.
SCIENCE is the practice of eliminating contradictions between our mental
models and what we observe with our senses. We say what we expect to see, if
our mental model is correct; we make a "testable hypothesis", we predict
what we ought to see, and (by implication) what we would NOT expect to see
(anything strongly different from what we predict.) We then go and look, to
TEST our hypothesis. If we see what we expect, our mental model survives. If
we see something NOT consistent with our model, we have a problem; our
mental model must be adjusted, or perhaps thrown out and replaced with a
different model altogether.
LOGIC is the practice of eliminating contradictions in our thinking; it is
the practice of making all of our mental models, of all parts of the world,
consistent with each other. Since there can be no contradictions in reality,
then we know that if we have contradictions in our mental models, we must
have made some mistakes somewhere. Reality must be consistent with itself,
so if we want our mental models to reflect reality, our mental models must
also be consistent with themselves. (Mathematics is a subset of logic.)
Though we cannot be CERTAIN of anything beyond those three things stated
above, testing our mental models justifiably makes us more confident that
they reflect reality. The more testing our models have survived, the more
confidence we can have in them. We can make mistakes, we can also remove
mistakes by changing our mental models and doing more testing. Models that
have survived a LOT of testing, which reliably predict new observations, can
be regarded as "practically certain".
SO: What do we know, and how do we know it? We are, we are aware, we are
aware of the world. The world is itself; there are no contradictions in
reality. We learn about reality by applying imagination and logic to the
evidence of the senses, and testing to find and remove our mistakes.
- Warren
07-23-2002, 10:59 AM
#375
Originally posted by ltweintz
So I can't see a crimpled person walk again?
So I can't see a crimpled person walk again?
In all serious, sure, it'll probably happen again. I obviously don't know where all healings happen and can't quite point you to a vantage point but I don't doubt that people will continue to be healed.
07-23-2002, 11:00 AM
#376
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Yeah, I do have short term memory failure. Is that a problem?
- Warren
07-23-2002, 11:06 AM
#380
[QUOTE]Originally posted by chroot
[B]Itweintz is clawing at the walls here, trying to demonstrate with his "is the color orange the color orange?" question that there is objective reality...
JonBoy is here, retreating to his "nothing's absolute!" anti-argument.
[B]Itweintz is clawing at the walls here, trying to demonstrate with his "is the color orange the color orange?" question that there is objective reality...
JonBoy is here, retreating to his "nothing's absolute!" anti-argument.