Posts by BenWilson
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Really appreciating radio at the moment. I've got an inflamed eye, so even choosing shit from a playlist is a pain. This post is being written with my eyes closed. One of the good things about being a touch-typist.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Kracklite,
Eclectic genius. Love it.
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Hard News: Music: Radio is still relevant, in reply to bob daktari,
I hope thats not code for I still live at home Ben
I do live at home. But it's not my parents' home. We just have dinner regularly.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Kracklite,
so the hypothesis that they might exist is unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific
According to Popper, anyway. It's a pretty harsh criterion. But as regards God and other imaginary friends, it's a useful one. Popper doesn't go so far as to say things that are unscientific are false. I doubt he'd say that, for example, that infinity does not exist because it can't be truly found in nature, if the universe is finite. It's a theoretical construct that is extremely useful. Complex numbers, similarly. They're called "imaginary numbers" for a reason, because they're not "Real". But "Real" has a strict definition in maths, and the "not Real" does exist.
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I'm quite the fan of BaseFM in the morning, have to use the internet to get it, tho. Chip's tweets make it almost a multimedia experience. 3410 put me onto them, unfortunately I've never yet managed to hear one of his sets live, I've been having dinner with my folks every single time.
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No, I'm explaining what some of the implications of Pascal's Wager are
Yes, it's a curious and ingenious argument. The disproof of it is that it can be applied to it's own opposite, causing a contradiction. Presumably there is an assumption in there that is thus disproved, but I don't care to tease it out. It'll be something to do with the infinitesimal chance of the God-given outcomes, and the fact that believing doesn't come at no cost at all.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Lilith __,
The rational thing is to believe what is most probably true, not to pick something at random to believe in. Rational belief is justified by evidence .
Generally so, if there is any evidence. If there is none, and the choice is arbitrary, it's not always irrational to make a choice - it could be the right choice. Or to abstain from making a choice*.
To me, it seems strange to insist on being “agnostic” on the existence of Mr Mxyzptlk.
I guess I'm strange, because I have no idea what that is, so I won't choose whether I think it exists.
*Would like to reiterate that I'm basically an atheist, to intents and purposes. Like you, I think God unlikely. But I stop short of saying unlikely is the same as impossible. Indeed, by unlikely I personally think it's at the level of a barest possibility.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Lilith __,
Faith isn't.
I've heard of people having their faith rocked, many a time. Faith is something that's only irrational once there's actually evidence against. Until then, it's just one choice amongst unknowns. It can be a useful attitude, giving you determination to follow a course that seems hopeless.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Lilith __,
That's not at all the same as a blind guess
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It's the best we know at this time.
Which can be almost nothing. The two ideas are not incompatible. Even if we have searched a lot, if the space left to search is still much bigger (in the case of algorithms, it's practically infinite), we don't really have any way of quantifying how far into the search we've got. We can't put put any rigorous level of certainty on it at all.
How can science rule on god any more than it rules on fairies at the bottom of the garden, or giant spaghetti monsters in space? If there were any evidence for any of these things, scientists could examine and test it. But there isn't.
This, I agree with.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Lilith __,
In the absence of any evidence and given that positing a god has no explanatory power, we think it's more rational to think there is no god.
I know. But "it's more rational to think x" is not the same as "x is true". It might not be true. If you're predisposed to conflate the two, and I suggest that scientists usually are (they believe that the truth is the ultimate aim of science, rather than just a good story), then you'll consider atheism a no-brainer. But that's not the only possible attitude that's consistent with the rational pursuit of science. And "scientific" is certainly not the only way to interpret the term "rational".
Perhaps I could give an example of another disputed truth, just to make it clear what I mean. In my own science, it's currently not know if P=NP. Probably, it isn't, because no one has found a poly time solution to one of the NP problems, ever, and a hell of a lot of people have been working on it for a long time, including a lot of computers. But absent an actual proof, the status of the question is "unknown". That's the rational position, even though current sentiment is that the likelihood is that P is not equal to NP. That's what most computer scientists think. But they don't go so far as to claim that it's known to be not equal. Maybe it is, and if it is, it would be frikken awesome. Maybe the algorithm is just really cunning and complex, lying just beyond our current abilities to discover.
However, in solving real problems, it's rational to treat them as not equal, simply to avoid the misery of trying to solve an NP complete problem and tying up your computer forever.
So in this example, it's rational to believe something that is not known to be true, just seems likely. I suggest believing in God is akin to thinking P=NP, and being an atheist is akin to believing that is false. Agnostics simply say "we don't know". Can you see that even though the likelihood is that P=NP is false, it's still a stab in the dark?
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