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GhostofJohnMuir
Aug 14, 2014

anime is not good
The fact that they were allowed to make The Undiscovered Country after the sheer dreck that was The Final Frontier is a divine miracle and proof that there is some sort of God. The same applies to the first and second series of TNG.

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GAINING WEIGHT...
Mar 26, 2007

See? Science proves the JewsMuslims are inferior and must be purged! I'm not a racist, honest!

JohnsonsJohnson posted:

I just cant buy any particular religious conception if God other than there being some powerful, good consciousness of the universe. Id like to think my faith is a form of intuition but it may just because I'm terrified of me and my loved ones not existing after death and I want to believe we are all part of some cosmic narrative.

So you're a deist, because you're afraid of death?

You don't have a reason to believe other than "I really really want it to be true"?

You see how that's problematic, don't you?

Amarkov
Jun 21, 2010

bobtheconqueror posted:

Here's my point. You can't really derive knowledge from emotion alone. You can't answer factual questions with feelings. At least not effectively.

I'm not certain this is accurate. I expect that you and I both agree metaphysical solipsism is false; the external world exists independently of our perceptions of it. But I don't have evidence of this, and I'm not sure how I'd even attempt to gather any. Is this not an example of accurate intuitive knowledge?

bobtheconqueror
May 10, 2005

Amarkov posted:

I'm not certain this is accurate. I expect that you and I both agree metaphysical solipsism is false; the external world exists independently of our perceptions of it. But I don't have evidence of this, and I'm not sure how I'd even attempt to gather any. Is this not an example of accurate intuitive knowledge?

Sorry, that's true. Very basic as hell stuff you have to make an assumption on. That comes down to Occam's razor though, and I don't know if there's much more to accept there other than perception itself. Basically everything else follows from that one given. Also, I'd disagree on knowing whether or not solipsism is false. That's unknowable, precisely because of the inability to acquire evidence. Within the context of reality, the physical stuff I perceive, others exist, but outside of it, in a metaphysical context? I simply don't know, in the same sense that I don't know the nature of the self outside of perception.

How about this. You can't derive effective knowledge about reality from emotion alone. That provides some context I was assuming previously. If we're talking about things outside of the context of reality, then what's the point? Sky daddy beyond the real doesn't mean poo poo or do poo poo, and claiming any knowledge about such a thing, like goodness, or consciousness, is absurd, as is letting your belief in something beyond knowing decide your actions in a reality it can't touch by definition.

JawKnee
Mar 24, 2007





You'll take the ride to leave this town along that yellow line

JohnsonsJohnson posted:

I just cant buy any particular religious conception if God other than there being some powerful, good consciousness of the universe. Id like to think my faith is a form of intuition but it may just because I'm terrified of me and my loved ones not existing after death and I want to believe we are all part of some cosmic narrative.

you and I are not even a footnote in the cosmic narrative friend

Berk Berkly
Apr 9, 2009

by zen death robot

JawKnee posted:

you and I are not even a footnote in the cosmic narrative friend

Pretty much this.

Human lives and humans and gently caress the entire Earth itself is barely even a spec in the Universe's vastness and history.

The idea that the universe even gives a whimpy fart about any of us would be the equivalent of Humanity putting on a full year of mourning complete with Operatic musicals and holding hands across the world for the life and times of a single bacterium on some spec of soil that lived for less than an hour in the middle of a swamp in Bumfuck, Nowhere.

Crowsbeak
Oct 9, 2012

by Azathoth
Lipstick Apathy

Zeitgueist posted:

Nah, because leftism is awesome.

Don't hate on the movement of the people that actually care about making a better world, rather than masturbatory self-congratulations and pleasing some sky wizard under thread of violence.


:smugdog:

I'm a Christian leftist. :smugdog:

Wales Grey
Jun 20, 2012

Amarkov posted:

I'm not certain this is accurate. I expect that you and I both agree metaphysical solipsism is false; the external world exists independently of our perceptions of it. But I don't have evidence of this, and I'm not sure how I'd even attempt to gather any. Is this not an example of accurate intuitive knowledge?

Please do not equate idealism with solipsism, and you'll have to make a better argument than "I know this but I don't know how I learned it so it must obviously be a priori knowledge" if you want to prove it exists.

Dahn
Sep 4, 2004
Lets try this one.

Reality without choice is meaningless.

Choice is magic

If reality has meaning there is magic


So..

X is all there is. X = reality.
We assume that reality is driven bay a set of laws that cannot be deviated from.
We assume that a single causal event started reality.
This event started a cascade of events driven by laws that can't be deviated from.
Trying to explain, or interpret reality would be like deriving an overly complex equation that resolves to 11. (4+7, 5+2+4, 5*2+1...) The answer is just 11, reality is just X.
Choice is a variable.
If choice exists in reality, then the laws that define it become important.
Reality is no longer just X, it is a complex equation with variables of choice.
Even if these choices are very small and do not effect the value of X in any significant way. For a very precise (or exact) calculation they must be included.
For example the letter I choose to type on the next line.
R
This has very little effect, but reality must account for it, for very very precise values of reality.
Choices seem to come from outside reality, if they were derived from some causal effect inside reality they wouldn't be choices. Therefore they have a supernatural or magical quality.

Reality without magic is meaningless.

bobtheconqueror
May 10, 2005
That'd be great if choice was actually magic, or if it came from outside reality. It isn't and doesn't, so you're kind of screwed there.

Also worth asking, what is the proposed meaning of reality? What consequence or deprivation of value would a meaningless reality entail?

bobtheconqueror fucked around with this message at 08:19 on Dec 23, 2014

VitalSigns
Sep 3, 2011

bobtheconqueror posted:

What consequence or deprivation of value would a meaningless reality entail?

If P then Q.

Q scares me, so I prefer not-Q. Therefore, not-P.

Post 9-11 User
Apr 14, 2010

GAINING WEIGHT... posted:

So you're a deist, because you're afraid of death?

You don't have a reason to believe other than "I really really want it to be true"?

You see how that's problematic, don't you?

That is one of the cornerstones of why religion exists. Ignore the lovely title of this, it's the Trucker's Chapel scene from Religulous:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6Oei7qM_tA

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

The blue glow is a feature, not a bug


Pillbug

JawKnee posted:

you and I are not even a footnote in the cosmic narrative friend

http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/04/my-dad-and-the-cosmos.html

quote:

My father, the astronomer Carl Sagan, taught space sciences and critical thinking at Cornell. By that time, he had become well known and frequently appeared on television, where he inspired millions with his contagious curiosity about the universe. But inside the Sphinx Head Tomb, he and my mother, Ann Druyan, wrote books, essays, and screenplays together, working to popularize a philosophy of the scientific method in place of the superstition, mysticism, and blind faith that they felt was threatening to dominate the culture. They were deeply in love — and now, as an adult, I can see that their professional collaborations were another expression of their union, another kind of lovemaking. One such project was the 13-part PBS series Cosmos, which my parents co-wrote and my dad hosted in 1980 — a new incarnation of which my mother has just reintroduced on Sunday nights on Fox.

After days at elementary school, I came home to immersive tutorials on skeptical thought and secular history lessons of the universe, one dinner table conversation at a time. My parents would patiently entertain an endless series of "why?" questions, never meeting a single one with a “because I said so” or “that’s just how it is.” Each query was met with a thoughtful, and honest, response — even the ones for which there are no answers.

One day when I was still very young, I asked my father about his parents. I knew my maternal grandparents intimately, but I wanted to know why I had never met his parents.

“Because they died,” he said wistfully.

“Will you ever see them again?” I asked.

He considered his answer carefully. Finally, he said that there was nothing he would like more in the world than to see his mother and father again, but that he had no reason — and no evidence — to support the idea of an afterlife, so he couldn’t give in to the temptation.

“Why?”

Then he told me, very tenderly, that it can be dangerous to believe things just because you want them to be true. You can get tricked if you don’t question yourself and others, especially people in a position of authority. He told me that anything that’s truly real can stand up to scrutiny.

As far as I can remember, this is the first time I began to understand the permanence of death. As I veered into a kind of mini existential crisis, my parents comforted me without deviating from their scientific worldview.

“You are alive right this second. That is an amazing thing,” they told me. When you consider the nearly infinite number of forks in the road that lead to any single person being born, they said, you must be grateful that you’re you at this very second. Think of the enormous number of potential alternate universes where, for example, your great-great-grandparents never meet and you never come to be. Moreover, you have the pleasure of living on a planet where you have evolved to breathe the air, drink the water, and love the warmth of the closest star. You’re connected to the generations through DNA — and, even farther back, to the universe, because every cell in your body was cooked in the hearts of stars. We are star stuff, my dad famously said, and he made me feel that way.

Carl Sagan continues to be an inspiration.

Zeitgueist
Aug 8, 2003

by Ralp

Crowsbeak posted:

I'm a Christian leftist. :smugdog:

You're cool in my book, then.

America Inc.
Nov 22, 2013

I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.
I find it interesting that Sagan still ties our existence into some larger narrative, and one of the main reasons why he inspires people is because he provides an alternate world narrative to religion that nonetheless in many ways still provides the emotional uplift many of us humans seem to desire to ward off the primal fear of our complete self-negation. Sagan to me seems as much a spiritual figure as a scientific one (note: I'm not trying to say "durr science is religion too").

Shbobdb
Dec 16, 2010

by Reene

Dahn posted:

Lets try this one.

Friendship is a kind of magic (1). Friendship exists (2). QED motherfucker. We don't need your god.


1). Conservapedia article on magic, author conservative.
2). Fact

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

The blue glow is a feature, not a bug


Pillbug

LookingGodIntheEye posted:

I find it interesting that Sagan still ties our existence into some larger narrative, and one of the main reasons why he inspires people is because he provides an alternate world narrative to religion that nonetheless in many ways still provides the emotional uplift many of us humans seem to desire to ward off the primal fear of our complete self-negation. Sagan to me seems as much a spiritual figure as a scientific one (note: I'm not trying to say "durr science is religion too").

No, I agree entirely. Things like The Sagan Series and The Feynman Series are proof spirituality can be found in science and humanity.

Dahn
Sep 4, 2004

Shbobdb posted:

Friendship is a kind of magic (1). Friendship exists (2). QED motherfucker. We don't need your god.


1). Conservapedia article on magic, author conservative.
2). Fact

Is this the Brony argument?

Magic = something outside reality = possibility for god that you don't need.

rudatron
May 31, 2011

by Fluffdaddy

CommieGIR posted:

No, I agree entirely. Things like The Sagan Series and The Feynman Series are proof spirituality can be found in science and humanity.
I'm not sure it's accurate to call it 'spirituality', it's a specific emotional response in the same way anger, guilt or fear is. I think it's the satisfaction of 'need to belong' through the placement of the individual into narrative or community context, but I'm not too sure. Whatever it is, it'ss a desire of people that they act to satisfy, but calling it spirituality has some hidden implications about an inherent belief system behind it, which isn't necessary.

woke wedding drone
Jun 1, 2003

by exmarx
Fun Shoe
Spirituality and wonder are different things.

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

The blue glow is a feature, not a bug


Pillbug

rudatron posted:

I'm not sure it's accurate to call it 'spirituality', it's a specific emotional response in the same way anger, guilt or fear is. I think it's the satisfaction of 'need to belong' through the placement of the individual into narrative or community context, but I'm not too sure. Whatever it is, it'ss a desire of people that they act to satisfy, but calling it spirituality has some hidden implications about an inherent belief system behind it, which isn't necessary.

Well, I mean't spirituality as in the feelings you'd get from a religious experience, minus the mysticism.

quote:

"In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative worldwide build-up of knowledge over time converts science into something only a little short of a trans-national, trans-generational meta-mind.

“Spirit” comes from the Latin word “to breathe.” What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the word “spiritual” that we are talking of anything other than matter (including the matter of which the brain is made), or anything outside the realm of science. On occasion, I will feel free to use the word. Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both."

-Carl Sagan

SedanChair posted:

Spirituality and wonder are different things.

Yes, but Wonder can elicit the same emotional responses.

woke wedding drone
Jun 1, 2003

by exmarx
Fun Shoe
For me "spirituality" has a connotation of playing fast and loose with the truth. At a certain point you wave your hands and say "the ineffable mystery!"

Science fetishists will do that, they're the sort who think that technology is going to sort everything out. There's no reason to believe everything will be sorted out; that's faith, and could be a kind of spirituality. If you say "I really like learning things it makes my brain feel neat," it would be cheapening the language to call that spirituality.

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

The blue glow is a feature, not a bug


Pillbug

SedanChair posted:

For me "spirituality" has a connotation of playing fast and loose with the truth. At a certain point you wave your hands and say "the ineffable mystery!"

Science fetishists will do that, they're the sort who think that technology is going to sort everything out. There's no reason to believe everything will be sorted out; that's faith, and could be a kind of spirituality. If you say "I really like learning things it makes my brain feel neat," it would be cheapening the language to call that spirituality.

Fair enough, and yes, a lot of people get caught up in the excitement of science and leave behind the skepticism necessary to understand and remain humble in the face of reality, especially with world altering issues such as Global Warming and Climate Change.

GAINING WEIGHT...
Mar 26, 2007

See? Science proves the JewsMuslims are inferior and must be purged! I'm not a racist, honest!
I think calling it spirituality is a way to equate it to what the religious people experience. That is, it is suggesting that the two feelings are really the same, and come from the same place: there is no God in reality, but when you feel a connectedness with it, you feel the same emotion as one who feels a connectedness to the cosmos without the religious element. "We are made of star stuff" and "we are God's children" produce the same feelings, so if we call the latter "spirituality" it can make sense to call the former that too.

The Belgian
Oct 28, 2008

JawKnee posted:

There is a finite amount of matter in the universe

Matter cannot be destroyed, but merely change in form

Therefore the universe will exist forever in some form

Further, the universe has always existed in some form

and thus no creator is necessary

matter can certainly be created/destroyed

Who What Now
Sep 10, 2006

by Azathoth

The Belgian posted:

matter can certainly be created/destroyed

When have we demonstrated this?

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

The blue glow is a feature, not a bug


Pillbug

The Belgian posted:

matter can certainly be created/destroyed

Citation needed. Because if you demonstrate that, you will be up for a Nobel prize for disproving Conservation of Mass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_mass

CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Jan 5, 2015

The Belgian
Oct 28, 2008

CommieGIR posted:

Citation needed. Because if you demonstrate that, you will be up for a Nobel prize for disproving Conservation of Mass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_mass

from you wikipedia link:

quote:

Exceptions or caveats to mass/matter conservation
Matter is not perfectly conserved

The principle of matter conservation may be considered as an approximate physical law that is true only in the classical sense, without consideration of special relativity and quantum mechanics. It is approximately true except in certain high energy applications.

A particular difficulty with the idea of conservation of "matter" is that "matter" is not a well-defined word scientifically, and when particles that are considered to be "matter" (such as electrons and positrons) are annihilated to make photons (which are often not considered matter) then conservation of matter does not take place over time, even within isolated systems. However, matter is conserved to such an extent that matter conservation may be safely assumed in chemical reactions and all situations in which radioactivity and nuclear reactions are not involved.

Even when matter is not conserved, the mass and energy associated with matter are conserved.
Open systems and thermodynamically closed systems

...

General relativity

In general relativity, the total invariant mass of photons in an expanding volume of space will decrease, due to the red shift of such an expansion (see Mass in general relativity). The conservation of both mass and energy therefore depends on various corrections made to energy in the theory, due to the changing gravitational potential energy of such systems.

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

The blue glow is a feature, not a bug


Pillbug

The Belgian posted:

from you wikipedia link:

Yes, true, but the nitpicky word being PERFECTLY conserved. Its still conserved, and even in nuclear reactions the mass is reflected in the loss of sub atomic particles.

Conservation of mass has caveats, but matter is still conserved, just sometimes the balancing of the books occurs at a lower level than the atomic level.

The Belgian
Oct 28, 2008

CommieGIR posted:

Conservation of mass has caveats, but matter is still conserved, just sometimes the balancing of the books occurs at a lower level than the atomic level.

What? In for example electron / positron pair anihilations I have a mass of 2 m_e going in and a bunch of photons with 0 mass going out. It's not conserved.

Fried Chicken
Jan 9, 2011

Don't fry me, I'm no chicken!
thread is 9 pages have we figured out if god exists yet y/n?

JawKnee
Mar 24, 2007





You'll take the ride to leave this town along that yellow line
^^^I am god^^^

The Belgian posted:

What? In for example electron / positron pair anihilations I have a mass of 2 m_e going in and a bunch of photons with 0 mass going out. It's not conserved.

do you not consider a change to energy as a change in form?

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

The blue glow is a feature, not a bug


Pillbug

The Belgian posted:

What? In for example electron / positron pair anihilations I have a mass of 2 m_e going in and a bunch of photons with 0 mass going out. It's not conserved.

The Gamma rays given off match the mass -> energy conversion.

Muscle Tracer
Feb 23, 2007

Medals only weigh one down.

The Belgian posted:

What? In for example electron / positron pair anihilations I have a mass of 2 m_e going in and a bunch of photons with 0 mass going out. It's not conserved.

Did you know that when things move faster, their mass increases? Einstein's discovery disproves science, QUED statists

:smugdog:

SedanChair posted:

Spirituality and wonder are different things.

The common elements are euphoria and soul-nourishment. When I think (or Carl Sagan thinks) about the incredible unlikelihood of my existence, the wonder that fills me is just the same as I felt about God when I believed that he was a thing. Although, I agree that this scientific wonder doesn't have the same ethical implications as religious wonder / spirituality.

Fried Chicken
Jan 9, 2011

Don't fry me, I'm no chicken!
this last page is basically why physicists have stopped using the phrase "conservation of mass" rather than "conservation of energy" or "conservation of mass-energy". Because mass isn't really conserved but given mass-energy equivalence it isn't really destroyed either.

so basically popular discourse of physics is 110 years behind the knowledge of physics, which is frankly pretty drat good compared to how far behind it is for other scientific fields.

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

The blue glow is a feature, not a bug


Pillbug

Fried Chicken posted:

this last page is basically why physicists have stopped using the phrase "conservation of mass" rather than "conservation of energy" or "conservation of mass-energy". Because mass isn't conserved but given mass-energy equivalence it isn't really destroyed either.

so basically popular discourse of physics is 110 years behind the knowledge of physics, which is frankly pretty drat good compared to how far behind it is for other scientific fields.

Well people tend to forget that mass can be transformed into energy, and that Conservation of Mass tends to be before the discovery of such principles. Still applies, just not updated for new discoveries.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

The Belgian posted:

What? In for example electron / positron pair anihilations I have a mass of 2 m_e going in and a bunch of photons with 0 mass going out. It's not conserved.

Traditionally I believe that matter and energy are considered interchangeable for the purposes of conservation of mass.

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

The blue glow is a feature, not a bug


Pillbug

OwlFancier posted:

Traditionally I believe that matter and energy are considered interchangeable for the purposes of conservation of mass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence

Yup.

Skex
Feb 22, 2012

The great thing about the thousands of slaughtered Palestinian children is that they can't pull away when you fondle them or sniff their hair.

That's a Biden success story.
The first problem with the question of the existence lack of existence of god is a lack of a consistent definition. What I've found is that the definitions people offer are either so specific that they can be falsified or they are so vague as to be meaningless. If you define god as some long haired dude hanging out on the top of a mountain it's pretty easy to go to that mountain and see whether he does infact exist or not, however "god is the Universe", Spinoza Deist type definitions are either so uselessly abstract or irrelevant.

Personally I just go with Occam's Razor, Two scenario's one is that some super powerful eternal being got bored one day and willed the universe into existence, The other is that through some unknown process all of existence simply started. Occam's Razor states that when two competing theories both explain the situation then the odds are that the simpler is more likely to be true. Since a mindless universe spawning out of nothingness is by definition a simpler explanation than an all super-powerful and intelligent being spawning out of nothingness and then creating said universe the existence of such a creator being can be dismissed baring the availability of some new information.

Yeah yeah I know watch-maker blah blah blah, but the simple fact is that we don't have another universe to reference in order to determine the differences that might exist between a created one and a spontaneous one. A creator god comes up against the same problem that any magical concept does when examining from a rational perspective. You have to be able to test it, There has to be some circumstance that one can imagine that would demonstrate that the assertion is false. Religion and the religious have expended tremendous energies defining their god(s) in a way that defies falsification. The reason is that every single testable version that has been asserted has in fact been falsified, this leaves the believers in a position where the only way to protect their belief is to describe it in a way that can not be falsified. So rather than being vengeful and sending angel's down or floods to wipe out entire continents when displeased god "works in mysterious ways" rather than healing every faithful that prays those who pray and aren't helped well it was just their time or god wanted to what ever.

I always liked this quote from Marcus in Babylon 5.

Marcus Cole: "I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, 'wouldn't it be much worse if life *were* fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them?' So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe. "

A godless universe makes sense, it provides and explanation for the problem of "evil" is explains why a 10 year old girl will die of cancer before she even gets to live but utter monsters like Dick Cheney achieve success and long life. Because the alternative is that God is a viscous hateful creature that lives off hate fear and suffering.

Funny thought I had when watching Supernatural one time. What if all the spiritualists got it backwards, that evil doesn't exist so that we may better appreciate the good but that good only exists so that our suffering will be so much more bitter. Would definitely explain why most of existence is dull or miserable and why joy and happiness are so rare.

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Shbobdb
Dec 16, 2010

by Reene

We/he/she/I/it watch you. Andy will ban you soon for low content posting.

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