Posts by Kracklite
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to BenWilson,
Well, eclectic anyway.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Lilith __,
It's always a good moment.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to BenWilson,
Popper doesn’t go so far as to say things that are unscientific are false.
No, I agree, indeed. Having qualifications and personal income from both sides of the engineering/humanities epistemological fence* I'm aware that there's more than one way to skin a cat, or a right way to skin a cat and a right way to stuff a badger... or whatever. I think I need a better idiom.
*Monday mornings, I'm saying "So Orwell's use of a dog in "A Hanging" allows him to indicate the repressed emotions of the policemen, emotions barely repressed and threatening to break out, so they cling desperately to procedure, hence the superintendent's noting the lateness of the time", Monday afternoon it's, "Last year a student designed a building cantilevered forty metres, which was manageable if the structure was thought of as a box beam, but that put the far end too far from the fire escapes, so we thought that the inflatable slides used in airliners could do the trick... " Then on Monday evening it's "Yes, you see, if you're looking at gender, fashion and movement, the concept of the gaze is significant, first look at Tschumi's Manhattan Transcripts, but also have a look at Beatriz Colomina's writing on Adolf Loos and Josephine Baker - and a bit of Foucault won't go amiss. Discipline and Punish would be your best bet there." Mix that up, add a rich seasoning of ums, ahs and Monty Python references and half-bake it and you have my portfolio of jobs.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Lilith __,
And my reference to dice wasn’t meant to be about physics, particularly, just the whole idea of gambling.
I don't have absolute confidence in my own arguments here, so sometimes I'm just being obtuse... damn, did I just say that out loud? Ahem, I mean those were examples where physicists dabbled in, if not metaphysics, epistemology anyway.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Kracklite,
No (no). As I implied by my ridicule, I feel that Pascal’s Wager is foolish.
To elaborate, from those I know who practice faith, the compulsion of belief or the compulsion of avowal of belief is the very antithesis of faith.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Steve Parks,
Same thing, I suppose – there’s no positive evidence for either fairies in my garden or Mr Mxyzptlk nor is there an experiment that could prove their existence or nonexistent, so the hypothesis that they might exist is unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific. Therefore I don’t keep myself awake at night worrying about them.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Lilith __,
Those who think science is just another religion
Is anyone actually saying that?
OK, creationists are fools and nasty people, but one should not be morally compelled into accepting or rejecting a position because it might give aid and comfort to the enemy. Whether or not a creationist can use - or rather appropriate and distort - an argument should not be a reason for putting forward an argument or opinion. I could say that I have lint in my navel and they'd use that as "proof" of divine creation.
you think God plays dice, Kracklite?
Einstein didn't, but it appears that Niels Bohr did and Stephen Hawking quipped that not only does he play dice, he throws them where they can't be seen. As for me, I'm not a quantum physicist, but I'm siding with the most recent.
morally acceptable (or even possible) to believe in something because you’re being threatened?
No (no). As I implied by my ridicule, I feel that Pascal's Wager is foolish.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Steve Parks,
To me, it seems strange to insist on being “agnostic” on the existence of Mr Mxyzptlk.
Hmmm, maybe a sliding scale of probabilities, with a threshold perhaps? (Semi-joke). You know of Pascal's Wager? Essentially it's "There are two variables - I believe in God or not and there is a God or not, but, but the risk of not believing in God when God actually exists and therefore facing eternal damnation (trapped forever in a burning lake of sulphur while Rebecca Black and Justin Bieber perform duets at me and Keanu Reeves reads from Hamlet ), any sensible risk analysis makes belief in God preferable, no matter how silly it may seem."
That's simplistic, of course. "Sorry, the Jews were right" as Rowan Atkinson put it in his Satan sketch rather complicates the calculation. How can I be sure, after reading Pascal, that I'm believing in the right God? Hopefully this hypothetical entity is willing to acknowledge that it's the thought that counts.
Still, Mr Mxyzptlk, I think falls below the threshold of reasonable belief. There is a probability that he might exist, but it's so vanishingly small that Pascal would probably say, Soprano-style, fuggedaboutit.
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Just to add to the confusion, we're looking at proof and believe as if they were all of the same kind and operated at the same level.
Dante, in a letter to his patron on the Divine Comedy , explained that it should be read as having (as he called it) a ‘polysemous’ layering of meaning: ‘for we obtain one meaning from the letter of it, and another from that which the letter signifies’. In the case of the Divine Comedy one reads first the literal narrative and then interprets the allegorical meaning of the text, its moral instruction and then its anagogic or transcendent mystical meaning.
Empirical versus spiritual knowledge, FWIW and all that.
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To hold an atheist view does not require faith in the same sense that believing in a deity does. I think you’re confusing atheists in general with particular atheists who consider that God has been proven to not exist. At an educated guess, I’d say this is a small subset of atheists. (And even there, I’m not sure that their position is ‘illogical’, just wrong.)
I think that agnosticism, if one looks at the etymology is faithless - it means "without knowledge", knowledge in this case being a comprehension, feeling, a sense of... um... knowing, not "proof" or certainty.
The 'event horizon' I referred to was the limit of falsifiability. There may or may not be fairies at the bottom of my garden and if I don't find them, then they may be very good at hiding... but really their existence would be inconsistent with everything else I can prove, I have no reason to believe that there are and so I don't believe in them despite having no proof of their nonexistence - that kind of thing.
This is versus "There are no fairies!"
Some may see this as hair-splitting, but I see it as holding a prism up to light and splitting it into its constituent colours.
(That Karl Popper has a lot to answer for...)
like saying abstinence is a sexual position.
Well, using a sufficiently broad definition, it is. :)