Critical Thinking, reductionism, epistemology RI megathread

[Laodicean]

Well, do you have an answer, smart ass?

[barracuda]

What was the question again?

[hanshan]

...


not to be overlooked:

barracuda:

The orthodoxy has a few accomplishments which tend to bolster their feelings of superiority, like computers, space travel, telephones, disease eradication and so on. The paradigmatic nature of their approach to the world leaves little room for philosophising about the uses to which the end results will be put. Bill Joy's essay Why the future doesn't need us outlines some of the hubris associated with this restrictive thinking.

So long as capitalism remains the dominant economic model, technical innovation will continue to be prized above charity, altruism, reverence and respect for the world.

& apparently, will continue to attract, reinforce, & reward the psychopathology that not only results, & in some strange way, seems to be the precursor to create same...



...

[Wombaticus Rex]

ALL ARGUMENTS ABOUT BELIEF SYSTEMS EVER, IN DIAGRAM FORMAT

[Canadian_watcher]

Justdrew,

then please just answer the one question:

What do you think about the censorship of certain lines of inquiry in academia, to the point that the mere mention of ID has seen people fired?

IF they reveal themselves as an agent of the hoax, then they should be fired and blackballed because they are acting in bad faith not as scientists but as agents of a far-right christian political agenda. There is NO line of inquiry that's going to shed light on how ID occurred or proves it, in the absence of a designer showing up and showing how it was done, there can be no such proof. There is no question to answer. There is no science to "do" about it. Which you would know if you'd looked at the article on teleology. This is not some new idea, this shit has been gone over since before the common era. Why in hell do buy this shit?

Ummmm...
in the last how many decades (only decades) have we come up with flight, the telephone, radio, television, space flight, vaccinations, discovered DNA, made progress on mapping the genome, computers, the internet... I could go on, obviously.

You think that we tried this and failed years ago so if we try now we'll fail again? You want to quit? You think Darwin got it all right the first time out on the Beagle?

what is "the hoax" really? what are you afraid of?

what are you afraid of?

I'm afraid that progress will be halted due to fear.

[hanshan]

...

ALL ARGUMENTS ABOUT BELIEF SYSTEMS EVER, IN DIAGRAM FORMAT

...

[Pierre d'Achoppement]

Title: The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945
Author: Richard Steigmann-Gall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521823714
.

here's an excerpt from an interview with the Author, R. Steinmann-Gall.

Richard, if you think of Hitler or Goebbels, both baptised Catholics, or Goering, a pretty active Protestant, none of them is an orthodox Christian, they’ve all got some pretty peculiar ideas.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Right. And it should be noted right off the bat that when I discuss Hitler’s conceptions of Christianity in the book, and contend that in some way or other Hitler regarded himself to be a Christian, that’s not to say that Hitler went by the benchmarks of typical Christian practice, and his religious views were unorthodox, as were those of his immediate associates. As you say, Goering was notable for being a Protestant. He wasn’t particularly an active churchgoer either, but what’s interesting is that the leadership of the Nazi party embraced the idea – at least those who weren’t the Pagans like Himmler and Rosenberg – embraced the idea of what got called “positive Christianity” within the Nazi party. And among other things, positive Christianity attempted to bridge the sectarian divide that had fractured German society between Catholic and Protestant. Hitler talks – in private as well as in public, but more especially in private – about the meanings of positive Christianity for him, and one of the things that became clear to me as I was analysing what the Nazis meant when they kept using this expression “positive Christianity” was that it would be a faith which no-one was ever baptised into, but rather would be a set of ideas and ethics, according to the Nazis, that would among other things emphasise commonalities – and including, in Hitler’s mind of course, anti-Semitism, which he I think (rather successfully, when you look at how people reacted to it), tied in with Christianity.

http://www.pubtheo.com/page.asp?pid=1268

So Hitler had faith, just not in traditional christianity. Not trying to be a bully but does this not exemplify the dangers of the just make up your own kind of faith? I think one good check against the possible dangers of faith is critical thinking, another is respecting tradition.

[tazmic]

I'm afraid that progress will be halted due to fear.

Straw Dogs?

~ In short, for Gray, humanism is nothing more than "a secular religion thrown together from decaying scraps of Christian myth".

Biological reductionist/post-humanist shrugs at machinic replacement with stawman arguments against enlightenment/transhumanist 'progress'.

It's a fun read though.

[Canadian_watcher]

Title: The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945
Author: Richard Steigmann-Gall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521823714
.

here's an excerpt from an interview with the Author, R. Steinmann-Gall.

Richard, if you think of Hitler or Goebbels, both baptised Catholics, or Goering, a pretty active Protestant, none of them is an orthodox Christian, they’ve all got some pretty peculiar ideas.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Right. And it should be noted right off the bat that when I discuss Hitler’s conceptions of Christianity in the book, and contend that in some way or other Hitler regarded himself to be a Christian, that’s not to say that Hitler went by the benchmarks of typical Christian practice, and his religious views were unorthodox, as were those of his immediate associates. As you say, Goering was notable for being a Protestant. He wasn’t particularly an active churchgoer either, but what’s interesting is that the leadership of the Nazi party embraced the idea – at least those who weren’t the Pagans like Himmler and Rosenberg – embraced the idea of what got called “positive Christianity” within the Nazi party. And among other things, positive Christianity attempted to bridge the sectarian divide that had fractured German society between Catholic and Protestant. Hitler talks – in private as well as in public, but more especially in private – about the meanings of positive Christianity for him, and one of the things that became clear to me as I was analysing what the Nazis meant when they kept using this expression “positive Christianity” was that it would be a faith which no-one was ever baptised into, but rather would be a set of ideas and ethics, according to the Nazis, that would among other things emphasise commonalities – and including, in Hitler’s mind of course, anti-Semitism, which he I think (rather successfully, when you look at how people reacted to it), tied in with Christianity.

http://www.pubtheo.com/page.asp?pid=1268

So Hitler had faith, just not in traditional christianity. Not trying to be a bully but does this not exemplify the dangers of the just make up your own kind of faith? I think one good check against the possible dangers of faith is critical thinking, another is respecting tradition.

I see what you're saying, but I've already copped to the notion that peoples' faith can be transmuted to bad ends. That doesn't mean, for me, that we should do away with our inclinations towards beliefs in higher powers or dismiss the work of people who have faith just because they do have faith.

My point in posting the above was to show that Hitler's "Christianity" was not the same as .. well.. take your pick.

[Canadian_watcher]

I'm afraid that progress will be halted due to fear.

Straw Dogs?

~ In short, for Gray, humanism is nothing more than "a secular religion thrown together from decaying scraps of Christian myth".

Biological reductionist/post-humanist shrugs at machinic replacement with stawman arguments against enlightenment/transhumanist 'progress'.

It's a fun read though.

hmm, sounds interesting. I can imagine myself writing furiously in the margins.

[justdrew]

this is the sort of thing I'm afraid of:

FBI investigating brutal hate crime against Native American family
By Eric W. Dolan
Monday, July 11th, 2011 -- 6:01 pm

The FBI is investigating an alleged hate crime against a Native American family after local law enforcement released the three white assailants without charges in May.

Indian Country Today reported that three men armed with baseball bats, knives and a crowbar confronted Johnny Bonta and his son-in-law while they were traveling along I-80 in Fernley, Nevada with their family. The three men are Neo-Nazis.

The Bontas, members of the Reno Sparks Indian Colony, said they first encountered the men at a gas station and tried to avoid confrontation by quickly driving away. But the three men pursued them in their own car, cutting them off and causing an accident. A vicious fight ensued, in which Johnny was knocked unconscious with a bat and had his nose and sinus cavities broken. His son-in-law suffered a crushed elbow and a broken hand.

"I saw one of them hit my husband in the head with a bat, and the other one was trying to cut off his braid with a knife," Johnny's wife, Lisa Bonta, said. "Johnny was covered in blood and they just kept hitting him with a crow bar. They even tried to slit his throat."

Lisa said that one of the alleged assailants, Jacob Caswell, taunted the family as police officers began arriving at the scene.

"You hear those cops coming?" he said. "They’re not going to help you. My daddy is a cop in this town, and nothing is going to happen to me. You fucking niggers are going to jail."

When police did arrive, they took statements from the three men, but not the Bonta family. Police arrested Johnny for an unpaid $367 fine while three ambulances took the rest of the family to the hospital.

Censored News reported that hours after the attack, Caswell and another alleged assailant, Josh Janiszewski, bragged about the attack on Facebook.

Janiszewski wrote, "Just layed the fists and boots to some 6' 5'' tongan dude. what you got on little guys?" and later added, "sent em to the hospital, they got fucked up man, thats for sure."

Lisa said her husband was denied medical care in the Lyon County jail, where he stayed for six days. She was told he "would have to get his Indian doctor" if he wanted to be treated.

The FBI is now looking into the attacks, but would not comment on its ongoing investigation.

The Bontas have contacted an attorney, as well as the NAACP and ACLU.

Lyon County officials claimed the incident seemed to be a "mutual fight" and said the case was still under investigation.

“We need to put pressure on law enforcement and the judicial system to ensure the Bontas are treated fairly. Our main concern is that these attacks need to be taken very seriously and fully investigated as hate crimes,” Reno Sparks Indian Colony Chairman Arlan Melendez of told the Indian Country Today.

Supporters of the Bontas set up a Facebook page and Change.org petition after reports of the attack began being published at the end of June.

[Canadian_watcher]

That being said, let's have your best question.

Already made that contribution back when the topic of this thread was the topic of this thread. Those were the days, huh?

I'm sorry WR - I must have missed it. And you are wont to post and run so I might not have answered even if I'd seen it, TBH. (that's not an jab at you - posting and running is fine with me - you always add to the discussion as far as I'm concerned.)

Why are humans so predisposed to argue about explanations instead of just evidence?

I don't know, because we have emotions and attachments, I guess. What does the evidence say about it? Besides, it's hard to argue with real evidence. This sentence is being written & my evidence for saying so is that the writing is here before you. Not much to talk about there.

Other kinds of evidence, though, are usually fraught - controls, bias, interference, accident, miscalculation, irreplicability (if that's a word.) So we discuss the fraughtitude by asking for explanations.

Intelligent Design doesn't add anything to the conversation,(what conversation?) it's just another orthodoxy, every bit as arrogant as the Dawkins bible, The Ancestor's Tale/.(I agree completely)
I'm much more curious about actual role, nature and life cycle of Introns than I am in a discussion about what that "means."

You want to just discuss what introns are and how they function instead of what it means that they are what they are and that they function? Is that what you are saying because it's not clear to me.

Complaints about censorship are pretty common with the idiot crowd.

Yes, only idiots want complete freedom to read and write and say and listen to and publish and draw and film what they want to. What if the 'idiot crowd' went about screaming that they loved chocolate? would you have to hate chocolate? And who are these idiots, anyway? What do they have to do with us?

It's unfortunate that We Humble Seekers share so many attributes with the bottom 50% of the IQ curve, innit? Leads to so many un-necessary arguments.

I don't know you well enough to know if the censorship comment and this one, too is really a flipping on its head of what I'm being bashed with or if it's just more bashing.

Why isn't Lee Smolin called a "pseudo-scientist" or "Christian" for his brutal takedown of string theory? You can read what honest scientific criticism looks like here:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.0 ... heory.html

probably because it would take a post-doctoral degree to understand what he's saying, so none of the idiots want to go near it. String theory is fraught. So are all the other ones. FWIW and to answer your question from my own POV, I'd say that he does look like a bit of a pseudo-scientist based purely on the fact that every single thing I looked up was another guess on the part of physicists and even he admits that he isn't an expert. So, basically what I took from it is that he's just tired of going over the same sorts of guesses and wants to move on.

Why doesn't Lee Smolin have to invoke the Holocaust to make his point about physics? Is the Holocaust as relevant to physics as it so to...evolutionary biology?

All of the holocausts have been about physics and biology both - chemistry and math, English and history, religion and art. Killing is the annihilation of all of that. Mostly though they are about the opposite of love: fear. Insofar as all of the pursuits listed above seek to explain THAT, they are doing what they should be doing, IMO.

On a related note, what do you think of Smolin's statement on the Anthropic Principle? I found it to be a fascinating thought experiment, at least:

"Anthropic Principle cannot yield any falsifiable predictions, and therefore cannot be a part of science."

yeah, that's a mind bender. I'd like to just say bullshit but he explains that his motives behind that statement and his attempts at proof for it were to stop endlessly rehashing the same or similar lines of inquiry. At that point I momentarily want to say something other than Bullshit but after two seconds I'm back to bullshit again.

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, right? -(edison or so it is attributed)

[Canadian_watcher]

this is the sort of thing I'm afraid of:

FBI investigating brutal hate crime against Native American family
By Eric W. Dolan
Monday, July 11th, 2011 -- 6:01 pm

The FBI is investigating an alleged hate crime against a Native American family after local law enforcement released the three white assailants without charges in May.

Indian Country Today reported that three men armed with baseball bats, knives and a crowbar confronted Johnny Bonta and his son-in-law while they were traveling along I-80 in Fernley, Nevada with their family. The three men are Neo-Nazis.

The Bontas, members of the Reno Sparks Indian Colony, said they first encountered the men at a gas station and tried to avoid confrontation by quickly driving away. But the three men pursued them in their own car, cutting them off and causing an accident. A vicious fight ensued, in which Johnny was knocked unconscious with a bat and had his nose and sinus cavities broken. His son-in-law suffered a crushed elbow and a broken hand.

"I saw one of them hit my husband in the head with a bat, and the other one was trying to cut off his braid with a knife," Johnny's wife, Lisa Bonta, said. "Johnny was covered in blood and they just kept hitting him with a crow bar. They even tried to slit his throat."

Lisa said that one of the alleged assailants, Jacob Caswell, taunted the family as police officers began arriving at the scene.

"You hear those cops coming?" he said. "They’re not going to help you. My daddy is a cop in this town, and nothing is going to happen to me. You fucking niggers are going to jail."

When police did arrive, they took statements from the three men, but not the Bonta family. Police arrested Johnny for an unpaid $367 fine while three ambulances took the rest of the family to the hospital.

Censored News reported that hours after the attack, Caswell and another alleged assailant, Josh Janiszewski, bragged about the attack on Facebook.

Janiszewski wrote, "Just layed the fists and boots to some 6' 5'' tongan dude. what you got on little guys?" and later added, "sent em to the hospital, they got fucked up man, thats for sure."

Lisa said her husband was denied medical care in the Lyon County jail, where he stayed for six days. She was told he "would have to get his Indian doctor" if he wanted to be treated.

The FBI is now looking into the attacks, but would not comment on its ongoing investigation.

The Bontas have contacted an attorney, as well as the NAACP and ACLU.

Lyon County officials claimed the incident seemed to be a "mutual fight" and said the case was still under investigation.

“We need to put pressure on law enforcement and the judicial system to ensure the Bontas are treated fairly. Our main concern is that these attacks need to be taken very seriously and fully investigated as hate crimes,” Reno Sparks Indian Colony Chairman Arlan Melendez of told the Indian Country Today.

Supporters of the Bontas set up a Facebook page and Change.org petition after reports of the attack began being published at the end of June.

So is it the faith system of the Nazis that you have a problem with or the faith system of the Native Americans? They have clearly come in to conflict so we should abolish both?

Are you able to accept that some groups are bad and some are good but these things do not depend whether or not they have faith?

[justdrew]

it's not about "faith" which if you recall I said a long long time ago was non-determinative, in and of itself neutral. I really don't know why you think it's an issue. Anyway, EVEN IF I WERE somehow "frightened" of faith, it is most assuredly NOT up to you to sit here and pretend to conduct some kind of fucked up intervention. All on account of your fears for "progress" - all worried about those poor guys who loose their jobs for teaching bullshit in a science class. As if that were censorship, it isn't.

[Canadian_watcher]

it's not about "faith" which if you recall I said a long long time ago was non-determinative, in and of itself neutral. I really don't know why you think it's an issue. Anyway, EVEN IF I WERE somehow "frightened" of faith, it is most assuredly NOT up to you to sit here and pretend to conduct some kind of fucked up intervention. All on account of your fears for "progress" - all worried about those poor guys who loose their jobs for teaching bullshit in a science class. As if that were censorship, it isn't.

well I don't see what the point of that article was then... I assumed it wasn't just to say "look, Neo-Nazis are bad people" because you won't get any argument from me about that.

why did you post it?