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Short answer: Effectronica posted:A whole load of bullshit that is, like, deep, maaaan (please pass me the weed) Long answer: Effectronica posted:Let us begin by setting out the basic situation. Let us assume that evolution by means of natural selection happens and is predominant. Let us assume that our minds are created by the operations of our brain. Let us also assume, for the time being, that what we can perceive through verifiable, repeatable empiricism is all that is real. So in other words, let's assume that biology is true, and that our general theory of scientific knowledge is true, and that only things that can be scientifically analyzed are real. quote:So now let's consider whether we have reason to believe that our beliefs about the universe are generally true. Apparently Paul lives in an area where it is very unusual to ever see tigers and has never talked to other people about tigers. If these things weren't true, he would have either seen a tiger eat people or heard about tigers eating people. He may also know that large animals that eat other animals can eat people, and inferred from knowledge that tigers eat other animals that they could eat him. The probability of him correctly believing that a tiger could eat him is greater than a naive "p=1/(number of things a tiger could do)". Additional case: Beliefs are inherently true or false, and can lead to adaptive behaviour. There are cases where beliefs that are true are more likely to lead to adaptive behaviour due to a higher chance of correctly evaluating and predicting your environment.(Conversely, there may be other cases where beliefs do not need to be true to be sufficiently adaptive). quote:But I am saying "low probability" without really doing any math. So let's make up a simple model, where we have a model human who has 100 beliefs, any of which may be true or false, and which are randomly formed as true or false, independently of one another. What is the probability that she forms her first 50 beliefs as true ones? Remember, these are independent events! So the formula for the probability is (0.5)^50, which amounts to 8.88e-16, or 8.88e-14% chance. Remember, this is for half the beliefs, not all of them. Even forming 10 true beliefs in a row has a 0.098% chance of occurring for her. While on average half of her beliefs will be true, they will be randomly scattered throughout this set of beliefs, generally in small groups. And here you are doing trivial maths, which does not offer additional information unless the reader is unaware of high school level probability. Protip: exercises in trivial maths are not good arguments unless you refer to a specific number later in your argument, or compare your trivial maths argument to empirical data. quote:It is possible to construct more complex methods of evaluating truthfulness of beliefs and so on, but the basic problem right here is that most of our beliefs seem to be true ones. Snakes can be poisonous or otherwise dangerous, we generally are pretty good about determining whether there's a beer in our fridge or not, and so on. Our senses tell us that our beliefs are truer than they must be by probability. So: "biology is true, and that our general theory of scientific knowledge is true, and that only things that can be scientifically analyzed are real". Pick two. Either our senses can't be trusted, or creationism is true but there is no god directing it, or, and this is frankly the most reasonable- the supernatural exists. Something, which is beyond our perceptions and knowledge, is a phenomenon which ensures that our beliefs are more likely to be true than they should be given natural selection. Snakes are often I like beer. Beer tastes best when cool. As a result, I regularly buy beer and put it in my fridge. Right now, there is probably some in my fridge. My buddy Steve also likes beer, so there is probably some in his fridge. ~My Girlfriend~ is weird and doesn't like beer, so there normally isn't beer in her fridge. The people I'm visiting are weird like my girlfriend so their fridge probably doesn't have beer in it. You have completely failed to provide any example of beliefs that do not come from observation and communication with others who have observed, and thus your argument that beliefs being true with higher probability than would be expected from something that evolved and grew up in a vacuum has no substance. quote:This is traditionally associated with Christian or more generally theistic apologetics, but it is not exclusive to them. A Buddhist would probably say that this phenomenon is Buddha-nature, and we can easily conceive of "naturalistic" ways in which this happens, which we will eventually uncover, or stranger things. Or maybe it's Freyja.  I'm bad at reasoning so goddidit.quote:That being said, this is hardly unassailable. quote:I think that many of the ways in which it can be attacked lead to greater problems, though. For example, pragmatic models of consciousness suggest that beliefs are formed from sense-experiences solely, and leaving aside the question of how they interact with behaviors without going into creationism/believing that natural selection suspended itself at some point in our history as a species, that still creates a problem with people who have religious sense-experiences, and we still have the problem of dealing with false beliefs versus true ones from sense-experiences. As pointed out above, beliefs from sense experiences do not need to be true, just sufficiently true. Finding the proportion of true beliefs to be between "omniscient" and " quote:Or we can accept that there is a barrier between noumenal and phenomenological reality (between what is really real, and what we can perceive), but this still accepts that the supernatural exists, it just denies that we can ever know anything about it. quote:But please, chew on this, and think about it, and test it for weaknesses! suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 12:31 on Aug 16, 2015 |
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Aug 16, 2015 12:27
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Regarde Aduck posted:Now you put it that way what Effectonica said seems reasonable. How much did he pay you? a year's worth of tigers and beer
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Aug 16, 2015 13:04
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asdf32 posted:I'm not totally getting this. Effectronica does not know much about evolution and is attempting to ask questions about the relationship between knowledge/belief and behaviour at a high school student level. As you pointed out, it is not strictly necessary to know or understand a situation for an adaptive behavioural response. Effectronica also is also ignorant about as to why belief and knowledge are more accurate than expected by chance in the cases where they exist, which is because evolutionary processes favour building adequate models of the world. From this point, Effectronica furthermore does not understand why knowledge is then not perfect, which is because 1. nothing can be perfect and 2. because evolution only favours good thinking to the point of it being sufficient rather than to perfection. Effectronica also doesn't understand the distinction between simple reflex-like behaviour and more complex behaviour. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 14:43 on Aug 16, 2015 |
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Aug 16, 2015 14:40
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asdf32 posted:I'm not getting how this is supposed to intersect the supernatural. I do think a lot of people stumble on this subject though because it's actually quite hard to entirely escape a belief in the supernatural. Effectronica posted:You should be able to demonstrate that truthfulness is inherently adaptive, without forming inaccurate beliefs to sustain your psychology. It is not. 1) It happens to be adaptive in many cases, where true beliefs are more likely to be combined into a coherent framework than random guesses. 2) It is not adaptive where searching for ~*~truth~*~ would bring more costs than benefits. 3) For reflex actions, truthfulness from the point of view of the acting organism does not matter at all, as in these cases we are talking about a purely mechanistic chain of events. Religion or superstition may be treated as cases where the costs of searching for truth may be directly or indirectly (through linked traits) outweigh the costs of being wrong. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Aug 16, 2015 |
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Aug 16, 2015 15:35
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Effectronica posted:Okay! How does natural selection act on the phenotype produced by thinking in a certain way, while still forbidding telepathy? That is, how can natural selection distinguish between thinking "Brightly-colored animals are dangerous" and "Brightly-colored animals are cuddly" without any corresponding actions to act on, while still preventing us from reading minds without taking a peek at them?. If "bright coloration = danger" and "bright coloration = cuddly" only existed in a hypothetical organism's mind and had absolutely no behavioural effect whatsoever, there would be no selective pressure towards either. However 1) we don't expect flexible behaviour to be hard-coded beforehand to such a degree of specificity 2) since your terrible example has an organism's oversized brain being engaged in nonstop intellectual masturbation with no real world effect, said oversized brain is wasteful and would most likely be cut down to a dumb reflex machine by natural selection In reality, and in an organism which hard coded decisions "bright coloration = danger" leads to your organism not touching things with gaudy colours while "bright coloration = cuddly" has either no effect because most organisms don't cuddle random things, or in those which do it leads to cuddling. In a world where a large proportion of brightly coloured animals are actually dangerous, natural selection selects for "bright coloration = danger" because not getting injured is adaptive. In organisms which have flexible behaviour, both would exist as a subset of "notice bright coloration" and "learn from experience to avoid injury" and "learn from others' experience", all of which would be selected for.
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Aug 16, 2015 15:50
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Effectronica posted:You said, "Smudgie Buggler", that beliefs are behaviors, that they contribute to the phenotype of an organism. Therefore, it must be possible to distinguish, externally, between the phenotypes produced by different beliefs, in order for natural selection to act on them. However, since telepathy is not real, it must similarly be impossible to peek inside someone's brain without directly observing it. In addition, natural selection must be able to act in the absence of actions corresponding to the belief, in order for this to be true. In other words, even if I never act on my belief that brightly-colored frogs are cuddly by actually touching them, natural selection should still be able to quash this maladaptive belief, no? quote:The vast, vast majority of this has been addressed elsewhere in the post that you eagerly scanned for opportunities to deliver an intellectual smackdown. What's left is, essentially, a misunderstanding of the argument. We are not dealing here with a singular event, such as seeing a particular license plate. We are dealing with a large number of events. If you saw that every license plate in a parking lot was arranged by order of their last digit, you would assume that this was highly unlikely to happen by chance, and that they were deliberately arranged. Since you can see that the vast majority of beliefs people hold about the world are true, and that these true beliefs include ones where empirical testing is unlikely to ever occur, and that largely instinctual beliefs are similarly likely to be true, then it seems entirely likely that there is some unknown force or process which acts to promote the formation of true beliefs about the universe. Now, this has pointed out another possibility, but I'll leave that to other people to root out. 1. the large majority of beliefs people hold are true (you must have a high opinion of yourself) 2. that beliefs that have not been and will not be empirically tested are likely to be true (it is by definition impossible to do this) 3. that beliefs within one person and across a population of persons are independent of each other (this is not the case because brains do not consist of perfectly compartmentalised units and because people communicate) 4. that beliefs are instinctual, rather than that there exists a set of hard-coded instincts selected to be adaptive at some point in the past in addition to a set of beliefs covered by 1-3 quote:By "supernatural", I mean something that exists outside of what is known to exist within philosophical naturalism. This would include natural mechanisms that are yet unknown. 
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Aug 16, 2015 16:04
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Technogeek posted:Perhaps, but I do believe he came up with the specific "Paul likes getting eaten by tigers" example that you used. Effectronica does not understand probability very well. When actually looking for true or false beliefs, the probability of any given belief being true is p=(number of possible true beliefs)/(number of possible true beliefs+number of possible false beliefs). The only case where there's a 50/50 chance of being true or false applies would be a retarded situation where we list someone's beliefs and then flip a coin to guess which are true or not, at which point 50/50 of our guesses being right becomes expected regardless of the proportion of true beliefs of the test subject.
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Aug 16, 2015 16:10
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Effectronica posted:That being said, someone could develop the belief that fire is bad to touch because it's painfully cold, rather than because it's painfully hot, and while this is very, very likely to be destroyed by sense-experience, there are plenty of other experiences that are unlikely to be corrected by further evidence and to allow false beliefs to take hold. But we still tend to have a fairly low percentage of false beliefs, even given rare events. You have failed to account for the fact that humans communicate. Humans hold correct beliefs about things they have not personally experienced because other humans have personally experienced those things and can speak about them with authority. I assume that the office chair I just ordered from amazon will support my weight because I am not morbidly obese and therefore of a weight that chairs are supposed to support. I do not need to personally try out the chair I ordered first to know this belief is true with a high probability. [qutoe]Actually, geocentric models are useful in astronomy, because locating stars under the assumption that the Earth is the center of the universe is more practical than using the Sun, or the center of the Milky Way. Similarly, this model is useful, especially since no one has actually shown that the probability of discerning truthful beliefs is inherently high (never mind that you still only have a 0.5% chance of forming 50 correct independent beliefs with a 90% chance of forming truthful ones) or that despite appearances, induction is essentially foolproof as far as discovering the truth goes. [/quote] very bad mistakes bolded
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Aug 16, 2015 16:18
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Effectronica posted:I assume that you can give a ballpark estimate of how much of our caloric intake is used up in holding memories, then? After all, it's not forming memories, accessing memories, processing sensory data, etc. that are the key reasons why our brain is gigantic, it's the size of memory storage. Just like how my last laptop overheated and died the instant I attached a 1TB hard drive by eSATA cable. In addition, why do only animals that show some degree of flexible behaviours have very large brains relative to their body size? quote:The vast majority of beliefs people hold are true because they are confirmed with our sensory experience. Maybe you believe yourself to be lost in a solipsistic fog, but I reject that. Your second point is nonsense and not related to anything I said. well known idiot effectronica posted:Since you can see that the vast majority of beliefs people hold about the world are true, and that these true beliefs include ones where empirical testing is unlikely to ever occur quote:What I said is that beliefs that are unlikely to be confirmed by a person are still accurate- even though most people who live near tigers are unlikely to ever see someone get attacked or killed by a tiger, nevertheless they have true beliefs that tigers are dangerous because they are likely to attack/hurt you if you come in close proximity to them. quote:The third one is attacking a simplification because you are a hateful blob of arrogance and lard. The fourth point requires justification that there are internal classes of belief. Effectronica posted:This is some nice self-contradiction here. The majority of beliefs must form with sensory experience, but actually, they must form from social interactions! Please, make your argument that this proposition cannot be true because people are generally delusional explicit, rather than this performance art nonsense. Sensory experience of others counts. I have said this before. The first person in a tribe to find out fire is hot can inform all other members of the tribe that fire is hot. quote:So, what I want to know is this. Do you reject this proposition because you recognize that you don't read what people write, or at least don't allow it to affect your preconceived notions, and so have this deep-rooted belief that you are a normal human being and so most people are highly delusional?
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Aug 16, 2015 16:28
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Effectronica posted:Point to where I said/implied this or apologize for lying. haha lol So anyway, your whole idea is based on the idea that beliefs are more likely to be true than expected by random chance. I will give you that intuitively this seems true at least for beliefs that can potentially matter in everyday life. You then go on to produce terrible awkward guesstimates involving abuses of probability a first year undergrad should be ashamed of (I would even say you are intentionally misleading if I didn't think you are not competent enough for that): Effectronica posted:never mind that you still only have a 0.5% chance of forming 50 correct independent beliefs with a 90% chance of forming truthful ones bullshit detector posted:never mind that you still only have a 0.5% chance of forming 50 correct independent beliefs in a row with a 90% chance of forming truthful ones. Given a random selection of 50 beliefs, we would however expect 45 of those to be true given a 90% chance of forming truthful ones. Effectronica posted:But I am saying "low probability" without really doing any math. So let's make up a simple model, where we have a model human who has 100 beliefs, any of which may be true or false, and which are randomly formed as true or false, independently of one another. What is the probability that she forms her first 50 beliefs as true ones? Remember, these are independent events! So the formula for the probability is (0.5)^50, which amounts to 8.88e-16, or 8.88e-14% chance. Remember, this is for half the beliefs, not all of them. Even forming 10 true beliefs in a row has a 0.098% chance of occurring for her. While on average half of her beliefs will be true, they will be randomly scattered throughout this set of beliefs, generally in small groups. bullshit detector posted:But I am saying "low probability" without really doing any math. So let's make up a simple model, where we have a model human who has 100 beliefs, any of which may be true or false, and which are randomly formed as true or false, independently of one another. What is the probability that she forms her first 50 beliefs in a row, which we have no reason to care about if they form independently; with a chance of 50%, which we assume for no good reason as true ones? Remember, these are independent events! So the formula for the probability is (0.5)^50, which amounts to 8.88e-16, or 8.88e-14% chance. Remember, this is for half the beliefs, not all of them. Even forming 10 true beliefs in a row has a 0.098% chance of occurring for her. While on average half of her beliefs will be true, they will be randomly scattered throughout this set of beliefs, generally in small groups, and I have failed to explain why the order of the true beliefs in this set is in anyway relevant to my argument.
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Aug 16, 2015 16:47
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Effectronica posted:Okay, so that's nonsense, irrelevancy, gratuitous hatred of autistic people, a possibly interesting aside that, on the basis of inductive reasoning, (which brings truth inerrantly) I must reject, and a misunderstanding of what you wrote, that resolves in "beliefs are primarily transmitted socially". There are some major problems with this given that there's still nowhere near any consensus on the origin of language, but whatever, our instinctual beliefs all formed within the last 20,000 years or so, right? quote:Because we have no naturalistic mechanism to explain this prevalence, as of yet. I suspect that one will be discovered, as opposed to anything conventionally supernatural, but until then, like plate tectonics stood for 50 years, it lies outside the boundaries of naturalism. You operate under the incorrect belief (heh) that natural selection in species with flexible behaviour operates on the level of individual behaviours. There is no gene or base sequence that specifically codes for "be a moron that tries to hug tigers" or "think that fire is wet". At the very most, there are genes that increase things along the lines of a propensity to investigate phenomena further (increasing the likely hood of reaching less incorrect conclusions), curiosity, fear, and possibly the capacity for abstract thinking and believing information from others etc. A person that is very curious, not fearful, and thinks everyone else is full of poo poo may try to hug a tiger and die. In an environment where tigers are common, these traits (and not the belief that tigers are friendly and cuddly) would be selected against. In an environment where tigers are rare, but which is otherwise complex and variable, curiosity, a lack of fear, and independent thinking would be more advantageous. Effectronica posted:Well, blowfish, given the many terrible posts that you have made, inductive reasoning would force me to conclude that this is likely to be terrible as well, and I would only respond to it with a jibe at you. Instead, I am going to point out that your vast argumentation has been, basically, "I loving hate you, you stupid rear end, but I agree with what you say and my only problem is that you are not rigorous enough in using probability." I would say that quote:This is an extremely stupid post. In addition, I would like you to point out where I agree with you. Furthermore, provide evidence for your assertion that beliefs are so likely to be true as to suggest supernatural influence rather than explainable as direct or indirect consequences of evolved characteristics, and that beliefs are seperate from behaviour (which is required for the previous assertion) Indeed.
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Aug 16, 2015 17:03
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Effectronica posted:Consider the subset of beliefs where learning is rare because the events about the beliefs are rare, so direct testing and transmitted knowledge of testing is, in turn, rare. These are still very likely to be truthful, much more likely than by chance. Provide any evidence for this. Provide a single loving example of this.
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Aug 16, 2015 17:04
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CommieGIR posted:At the same time, we've directly observed what happens to animals that have not had an instinctual AND taught fear of predators, we find it in places like New Guinea and the Galapagos, where animals tend not to have natural predators. They show no fear of those who WOULD harm them, and led to the extinction and near extinction of multiple species. But some of them learned and survived. New Zealand is even better: Moas were only used to eagles as predators, so Maori could pretty much walk up to them and take a bite. An estimated population of a few hundred people ate all the Moas on NZ in a few centuries. While we have knocked out the larger examples of such animals, we still have smaller case going on with invasive species on islands, e.g. invasive snakes on Guam or Partula snails which are literally too dumb to crawl away when imported predatory snails start nibbling. CommieGIR posted:His argument would make more sense and have more validity of multiple associated and never contacted tribes had the same beliefs and the same learned/taught survival knowledge. But that isn't so. I am not surprised by the fact that Effectronica fails to consider the one obvious piece of support for his crackpot idea. A great thinker or observer, he is not. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Aug 16, 2015 |
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Aug 16, 2015 17:25
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And even then, one attack in decades would be enough. You only need to know that you kill stuff for a living, tigers kill stuff, and a tiger killed your buddy's uncle's grandpa.
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Aug 16, 2015 17:44
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The fun thing is that social learning is present even in social animals. For example, hand raised crows will suddenly become wary of humans after being around wild crows.
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Aug 16, 2015 17:55
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CommieGIR posted:Not to mention how many socially learned beliefs are wrong, like the guy who things certain colored berries are safe to eat even though they are not because someone passed on the wrong info. In Germany we still have this happen with immigrants from Eastern Europe/Russia who go pick familiar-looking mushrooms and then die from kidney failure.
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Aug 16, 2015 18:13
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CommieGIR posted:Exactly. Effectronica made it pretty clear in his OP that he had already drawn his exact conclusions about his chosen belief by calling his conclusions 'the most reasonable' which implies nothing more than a foregone discussion about why he is right and everyone else is wrong. I like Effectronica threads because they provide an opportunity to laugh at idiocy with no feeling of remorse. In fact, I propose we now discuss the hypothesis that Effectronica threads provide adequate baseline data for the proportion of human beliefs that are correct by random chance.
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Aug 16, 2015 18:19
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CommieGIR posted:I think Effectronica's OP is good evidence as to why its neccessary to keep empiricism as a cornerstone of the scientific method. Because otherwise we get metaphysics-like claims like this. Yeah. But it's not like there aren't scientists who are just as bad at reasoning and providing evidence. See for example the current debate in sustainability circles on solutions to climate change & land use where grown professors are seriously throwing around bullshit about how it's concerning that more and more scientists are looking at climate change as a problem to be solved rather than a case for questioning the human condition (the questioning is supposed to lead to a more interconnected, less divorced-from-nature society, of course) and intentionally fail to distinguish their vision of an ideal society from the science of ecology and conservation.
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Aug 16, 2015 18:29
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CommieGIR posted:Not to mention, we've got studies showing 'learning' among even the most basic of living things: Bacteria and Protozoans, Who have the most basic of nervous systems, which means learning is not tied only to a large brain but even the most simple of nervous networks can exhibit the specific ability to learn about their environment. Of course, at that level the information is passed genetically versus taught. They can learn to anticipate future events based on recurrence. You do realise neither bacteria nor protozoans have nerve tissue, what with them being bacteria and protozoans? e: beaten but they could "learn" via epigenetics
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Aug 16, 2015 18:45
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Immortan posted:Its really no different than DeepakChopra.txt. I don't think its moral to use $10 scientific terms to convince the illiterate that science implies the supernatural is real but what do I know. An argument could be made that people who have at some point heard Words on the internet and are insecure about their existence are not able to see the morality of the situation  Jack of Hearts posted:Assume that the standard empirical scientific is true. Reach a conclusion inconsistent with the assumption, i.e., "there exist supernatural phenomena." Why stop there, OP? From inconsistency you can prove anything. I have just devised a marvelous proof that the real numbers* are countable. *defined as a set N [0,my current age in seconds]
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Aug 16, 2015 18:50
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CommieGIR posted:I sincerely doubt that in 50 years, we'll be praising someone for the discovery of the supernatural world that was hidden all this time. Plate tectonics had evidence even before their discovery, as of right now, the supernatural has even less evidence than the evidence of the idea of the atom during the classical Greek era. I would like to come back to this point, as Effectroonica's insistence upon defining the supernatural as "anything we don't currently know" is astonishingly terrible. In practical terms, this means that if a bunch of stupid rednecks were the only people to survive WW3, the supernatural would suddenly encompass anything from evolutionary biology to making digital watches (quantum physics ho). It really only makes sense to use consistent definitions independent of the changing state of knowledge, e.g. the natural world is everything that is in principle empirically observable, or basing the definition on falsifiability of potential understanding. e: CommieGIR posted:Plenty of very intelligent and well read scientists say incredibly stupid and moronic things. They just tend to be on things not related to their immediate field of study. But in this case it's sustainability scientists being unscientific about sustainability things, so they should be doubly ashamed. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Aug 16, 2015 |
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Aug 16, 2015 18:58
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Effectronica posted:disproving one of the fundamental axioms of this thread, that people generally have an accurate picture of the world around them quote:The Jungle Book (1967) did not emerge from the aether. The basic issue here is that people generally respond to tigers and other big cats with fear even with a minimum of cultural context, just like babies respond to snakes and spiders with fear. While we could suggest that there is not conscious belief around this, people still form beliefs that are consistent with the real dangers from such animals as they grow older. Your double take at the fact that people form realistic beliefs around the dangers from animals has two problems. Firstly, it is all but impossible to grow up without hearing or reading or seeing on Secondly, you are wrong about these beliefs being correct. People are loving scared of arbitrary harmless insects and for instance will swear to god that dragonflies have a dangerous sting when there isn't and has never been a dragonfly that could do more than awkwardly pinch you with its tiny mandibles. Same for your example of snakes, by the way: choking snakes are excellent evidence for social learning and against an inherent propensity for human beliefs to be correct: until like two weeks ago, loving everyone "knew" that a Boa constrictor would torturously choke you to death by slowly crushing your airways, even though only a tiny fraction of people have ever observed one eating, because well that's what everyone and their mother knows. Now actual measurements have shown that constrictors actually kill by cutting off blood flow fairly quickly and not by choking. Everyone who talks about this issue and wants to make sure their beliefs are true needs to update them from what they were two weeks ago. People are only approaching any sort of correct beliefs about animals that are culturally significant - i.e. most megafauna and a tiny proportions of all other animals, but as you are biologically illiterate and do not know anything beyond pop culture blurbs about animals you are unable to spot this fatal weakness in your argument. I should console you by telling you you are in the good company of moronic animal rights people in this regard. Effectronica posted:Thank you for making my point. What I said is that the choices are solipsism, creationism-without-God, and the supernatural. I would assume that a functional, knowledgeable human being would realize that the first two are blatantly unreasonable, but I didn't consider the power of hatred and small-mindedness. Your definition of solipsism apparently includes any variation of "our senses are not entirely accurate". As a functional, knowledgeable human being you should realise that positing accurate senses is blatantly unreasonable, as evidenced by literal mountains of evidence ranging from our inability to perceive large ranges of sound and electromagnetic spectra (missing out on many experiences) over the fact that even a camera recording nothing humans are inherently unable to perceive will reveal how eyewitness testimony is often disastrously inaccurate. You are unable to understand that human senses do not need to be entirely or even highly accurate, they only need to correlate with physical reality better than chance (heh) to be useful. It is a small mind that must console itself with the illusion that open eyes are the only requirement to see the world as it truly is and in its entirety.
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Aug 17, 2015 00:16
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Effectronica posted:By "trolling r/atheism types", I meant that this topic would be so offensive to that sort of person that they would produce amusing reactions, like not reading what I write before responding, baldly lying about what I say, etc. I have - despite the low quality of your argument and despite your repulsive incompetence. You have, however, managed to be more annoying and less reasonable than stereotypical r/atheism shitlords, which is an achievement worthy of recognition.
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Aug 17, 2015 00:21
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Effectronica posted:Furthermore, without a binary true/false, we can see that belief that constricting snakes are dangerous because they constrict you is, while incorrect in the particulars, less incorrect than believing that they will kill you with a venomous injection of poisons produced naturally by their body. In other words, you're supporting my argument- that we have beliefs that are closer to reality than you might expect, given that we do have some major beliefs that are notoriously inaccurate. They are exceptions that prove a rule, if I may. lol if you show someone who is not interested in animals a snake and don't tell them it's either a constrictor or a venomous snake and you ask them how it kills stuff the results will be pretty much random. The knowledge that constrictors kill by, well, constricting is cultural and can be entirely divorced from the nowadays-unfamiliar experience of actually facing a snake there is some saying about missing a forest and trees that i can't quite recall here
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Aug 17, 2015 00:29
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also lol i actually think reducing the argument to binary true/false is ok because otherwise we get an even less intelligible shitfest but hey, apparently effectronica has divined my true belief through telepathy or something, though it must at some point include models that more and more closely approach the true state
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Aug 17, 2015 00:34
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Now for another great example of how human senses are imperfect and how the search for ultimate truth is a fool's errand: Colour perception and language see here for a layman's example. Not all cultures differentiate colours equally - for example, until very recently, the Chinese and especially the Japanese (until post-WW2 western style education in this case) did not have a distinction between blue and green - both were called "fresh-coloured", and the ancient Greek poets' wine dark sea was not described as blue most likely because the colour blue had yet to be invented as a distinct colour from that of crappy wine (there nobody talks about things being a beautiful shade of blue in ancient Greek poetry). As you go through different cultures, there is 1) a broad trend for a matching set of colour categories given a particular number of different colour words in the language (it makes sense to start with dark/light, and go on to blood red, and for some reason blue and green are almost always separated late), but 2) many interesting exceptions to that, such as the tribe in the example I linked. You would be hard-pressed to pick out different shades of green that are considered entirely different colours by these people, who are probably weirded out by us lumping grass green and beech tree leaf green together as being basically the same. As evidenced by the Japanese postwar education reform thing, these differences in colour perception are purely cultural - we learn to adjust our idea of the world to that of everyone around us, and that is often useful, rather than towards to the world's ~true~ colours. RBG code 1,1,230 is not meaningfully different from 1,2,229 to us, but if it is the difference between a staple crop and a poisonous plant you better learn to distinguish that poo poo in the blink of an eye and experience it as different colours. "Is your green the same green as my green? Because it is and therefore magic!", says effectronica - "Probably no, because I don't know what 'green' is supposed to be, but I really don't need to care." Immortan posted:Next he's going to say anyone who thinks Deepak Chopra is full of poo poo must be a white supremacist. I think Deepak Chopra is full of poo poo, I am not white, but I am sure I qualify as capital W White Effectronica posted:Wait, hold on... without the context to determine whether a snake constricts or poisons, people guess? This is certainly relevant to the question! I weep for all the people that died of snakebites because they had to empirically test whether that was a king snake or a coral snake in the bushes there. Your entire argument assumes that people are automagically right about things. When shown evidence that people are not, in fact, automagically right but need to learn from others who know more than they do, you pretend it's irrelevant.  quote:Well, no. I am saying, in full, that things which fall outside the bounds of naturalism are supernatural. A material explanation for this is supernatural because there is no naturalistic base for it to exist. A new species of cricket is not supernatural, but if it were an extremophile that lived in active volcanic calderas it would be supernatural under this definition, even though it probably wouldn't actually be magical.
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Aug 17, 2015 01:02
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This reminds me, I just fed a pet gecko and accidentally stepped on one of the crickets I wanted to dump in its terrarium. Maybe we could discuss the armchair-philosophical implications of this event. e: Effectronica posted:The question is relevant but did not seem to be asked in honesty given your posts thus far. No, engaging with that question is one of the few things left to do for you that do not amount to flailing about while pretending you didn't hear us. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 01:03
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HappyHippo posted:Drop the persecution complex already. I'm asking a pointed question and you've done nothing but respond with snark and bad attempts at dodging around it. I've laid out how this is essential to your argument, and you agree it's relevant, so answer already. Now, now, empathise with Effectronica's situation. It's hard to be so completely and utterly wrong about everything, and so completely and utterly hated for being the biggest possible idiot in any situation. Developing a persecution complex is not entirely improbable under those circumstances Effectronica posted:Apart from that, this is ridiculous because it just puts things onto another person, boiling down to some Prime Mover. Lmao. Strong atheism there. The prime mover does not need to be in any way supernatural, magical, superhuman, or what-have-you. If a human (or other thinking organism) at some point perceived that constrictor snakes constrict and that venomous snakes inject venom and talked/wrote about it, that's enough. e: any argument that humans will inherently arrive at the same conclusions without actually observing snakes directly or through communication with others or inference offers no explanatory value and needs strong empirical support to be worth taking seriously quote:Okay, so since materials can survive the heat of an active volcano's lava, animals that can do so are unremarkable. Mhm.  As a biologist, I would think that any animal that can survive volcano heat is really loving cool and needs to be studied further, but that would not qualify it for any reasonable definition of "supernatural". Protip: defining "supernatural" as "unexpected" or "remarkable" results in a dumb and useless term. rudatron posted:Wow, not even responding to me. Okay then. I have bad news for you - the OP might actually be insane
suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 01:19 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 01:14
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Effectronica posted:I don't believe that this sort of linguistic analysis actually concludes that no difference existed between what we call forest green and what we call navy blue, visually, but that they were all considered one category of color. It's basically the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis renascent. The fact that we can't reliably distinguish colours clearly different to others who have the same eye and brain physiology and vice versa certainly suggest that colour perception is calibrated to an arbitrary standard (within physiological limits) rather than approaching a universal ideal.
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Aug 17, 2015 01:23
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Effectronica posted:Well, blowfish, I think you've missed the point by quite a long way, in your eager to castigate. You've just displaced the real argument for some insane reason, and then made a hilarious argument that I will internally rewrite to make some more sense. So with that in mind, the argument is that there is a distinction between belief and behavior, and beliefs that are false but promote safe behaviors nevertheless don't exist. There is hardly a sign of their existence, save through extended academic reasoning, and in terms of everyday belief, they have been so quashed as to be invisible. Which is somewhat remarkable, this ability to see truth outing. quote:Well, I feel for the biology journals in your country of residence, knowing that they have to deal with you. The issue, here, is that animals are, by all that we know, physically unable to survive in such an environment, lacking the means extremophile microbes use. So such an animal would need to have something that is not known to exist within the natural world, nor is there any reason to believe that it exists currently. It is outside nature, though the discovery of such an animal would quickly bring it within the bounds of nature. Extremophiles exist. Centralised multi-celled heterotrophs exist. There is no reason why the two categories should be mutually exclusive. Even though we do not currently know of any extremophile centralised multi-celled heterotroph, any such organism that exists would only be outside the parts of nature we have already discovered and not outside the parts of nature. If none actually exists right now, it is still possible for it to evolve given how suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 01:40
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Effectronica posted:Kant's noumenal world is not knowable by physical experience. Then it is a world we need not concern ourselves with at all (as I said before), because by its very definition we are blindly guessing.
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Aug 17, 2015 01:41
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Effectronica posted:Sure, for our purposes here, not for all time. A true belief is one that is consistent with observable reality, while a known belief is one that the believer is consciously aware of. For example, I may believe that spiders are dangerous without being consciously aware of this, only experiencing unease around them. Within this context, beliefs about noumenal reality cannot be considered to be true or false, since they cannot be verified. e: an alternative, and more interesting, explanation would be that through observing others' wariness about spiders you have started to act wary around them yourself - however, while you may have never been explicitly told that spiders are dangerous, at this point you most likely have an actual if weak belief that they are because most things people are wary around are dangerous. quote:My belief that the phenomenal world is very similar to the noumenal world is an axiomatic statement. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 01:49
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Effectronica posted:Are they, universally? How does knowledge that sperm are not homunculi produce more adaptive sexual behavior? In the context of human thought and free will (even if you believe we technically have no free will because determinism it is useful to assume its existence to model human behaviour), natural selection on the organism or gene can become entirely irrelevant and the patterns of thought we have become able to use can run wild. There is even a field called memetic evolution which deals with this issue, and in particular also with how untrue or irrelevant beliefs propagate across many human minds. quote:I am using extremophiles, specifically thermophiles, as an example. So while I am wrong about this, I can still recast it without it actually affecting the argument. So, to continue it, if thermophilic archaea had been discovered before discovery of the enzymes that allow them to survive at high temperatures, they would have been part of the supernatural in my definition, until such a time as the discovery of their enzymes allowed them to become part of the naturalistic world. Another, better example, is plate tectonics, which was proposed in the 1910s but not adopted until the 1960s, because the means by which continental drift could occur were not discovered until that time. While plate tectonics was true, it was also outside the bounds of naturalism because there was no natural mechanism by which it could happen. You will recall that I brought up the very plate tectonics example to illustrate that your definition of the supernatural as anything not currently described by a theory is useless and asinine. Thanks for proving me right, I guess .Effectronica posted:So in other words, you define beliefs differently than I do, which is fine, but it renders the argument not really a meaningful one because it's just semantics. Or you're arguing that unconscious beliefs do exist but not in this case, which is unlikely to be fruitful. quote:That explanation is unlikely because infants are predisposed to associate spiders and snakes with fearful voices. http://www.psychologicalscience.org...ng-infancy.html quote:Sure, I have considered that life is a lie and truth is unknowable, for about ten seconds. Effectronica posted:All you can do is snipe and cheerlead, it seems. 
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Aug 17, 2015 02:10
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Effectronica posted:This is what I think is most likely to be the case, but I am willing to accept that there are alternative explanations. So essentially you are saying biologists studying the evolution of behaviour will probably make interesting discoveries. Yay for stating the obvious, I guess. CommieGIR posted:Let's be honest Blowfish, he ignores any post that he can't just dance around as part of his troll with pseudointellectual bullshit Poe's law is in effect here.
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Aug 17, 2015 02:11
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Effectronica posted:Okay, well, you could go back to my initial post, and, assuming you can read things, you could engage with the proposition that beliefs are not acted upon by natural selection, and we could move from here, if you were inclined to conversation rather than asininity and whatever "you should consider harder" is meant to mean. The rest of this is basically down to assuming inherent definitions, which is, um, well, not really philosophically materialistic in nature. Congratulations on allowing me to point out yet again that I have already done so, several times. To reiterate: organisms that do not translate beliefs into behaviour will be selected to lose the capacity of forming beliefs. In organisms which translate beliefs to behaviour, more accurate beliefs are more likely to be useful. Which brings us to: Effectronica posted:if we accept beliefs produce behavior, accurate beliefs generally produce more effective behavior than inaccurate beliefs, but not overwhelmingly so. Because while accurate beliefs will, in theory, produce effective behavior all of the time, inaccurate beliefs that produce effective behavior for all common situations would still persist, and while inaccurate beliefs that produce effective behavior all of the time are much less likely to emerge than accurate beliefs, when they do emerge they should be as persistent as accurate ones. This is ignoring cases where accurate beliefs produce ineffective behavior, such as waiting to verify if that's a king snake or a coral snake. So in other words, there is still the problem of purging inaccurate beliefs and ensuring that they survive in marginal numbers. This doesn't really resolve the question. You are flailing about to maintain your premise that people inherently know stuff correctly. You mention three categories of beliefs: incorrect and useless, incorrect and useful, correct and useful. If you remove the first, then the second and the third will become more common than expected by chance, and therefore people will be right more often than expected by chance. You fail to provide any evidence that inaccurate but useful beliefs will be as useful as accurate beliefs in general. You fail to face the reality that most beliefs a person has about things that are both personally unfamiliar and insignificant or absent in culture are not actually correct. e.g. western cultures don't really give a poo poo about most insects, and thus many people incorrectly and uselessly believe that dragonflies sting (making them panic unnecessarily when one bumps into them), that butterflies become unable to breathe and fly if you touch their wings (there really is no practical relevance of this belief), and that bumblebees cannot sting at all (they can if they are able to lever themselves against your grip, envenomating you - this belief is wrong and harmful. it gets even more fun in warmer climates where even scientifically informed belief from places where all bumblebees are well known saying they are less dangerous than wasps becomes wrong - my worst insect sting ever was an aggressive bumble bee species that could just fly up to me and sting if they got pissed off). Ask a non-biologist anything about an insect or other culturally uninteresting animal that isn't blatantly obvious from looking at a picture of one (i.e. questions harder than "do crickets have legs?") and they'll start spouting complete bullshit. e: correction, people even get things that you could just know from looking at a picture wrong: how many legs do a spider and an insect have? The same is true for many things - people are naturally full of poo poo, as one would expect by chance, except in things where we have made an effort to be less poo poo, and you refuse to admit this presumably because it makes you uncomfortable. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 08:25 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 08:17
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Phyzzle posted:There was an Interesting debate in the early analytical philosophy days over whether miracles or the supernatural are contradictory concepts. A good place to start would be where identical conditions in a simple experiment (i.e. no chaos mucking up our predictions) unpredictably fail or succeed in bringing about an alleged supernatural event, or a case in which perfect replication of the circumstances (which may or may not be practical) fails to repeat it.
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Aug 17, 2015 08:23
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HappyHippo posted:My goal is demonstrate why I think you're wrong. I think your whole argument is based on an incorrect premise, and that it is precisely the incorrectness of this premise which makes you wrong. If you don't want people pointing out weaknesses in your arguments don't make a thread in the debate and discussion forum about them. quote:There's four situations here: quote:Also, intentionally or not your language suggests that evolution is operating on the beliefs directly rather than on the apparatus which constructs them, which is the brain. There's a subtle but important distinction between the two. While I do believe that more accurate beliefs produce more effective behaviour, evolution is one step removed from beliefs, and the result is that the brain can be biased in certain ways. quote:For example, I think it's generally less maladaptive to see a pattern where there isn't one than to miss one that's there. This results in a lot of human superstition like good luck charms, trying not to "jinx" it, "knocking on wood" and the like, in the mistaken belief that these actions will have a positive outcome. While these actions aren't accomplishing anything, overall they're fairly harmless. Evolution makes that trade off because missing a pattern (such as the signs of an impending tiger attack, or not realizing certain berries are making you vomit) can be far more maladaptive. So evolution has erred on the side of more aggressive pattern matching than would produce the more accurate beliefs. I don't think it's a coincidence that your example of the king and coral snake falls into this category.
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Aug 17, 2015 15:12
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ikanreed posted:The entire premise of this thread is stupid. This statement is true, and the OP needs to understand it.
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Aug 17, 2015 17:18
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furiouskoala posted:there is no need for Truth with a capital T But this makes me feel insecure, and is therefore not True.
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Aug 17, 2015 23:55
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ShadowCatboy posted:Well, it is true that there have been a couple instances where theological arguments have been obviated by scientific research. Another prime example would be how the Teleological Argument (God as a designer to explain the complexity of life) being obviated by evolutionary biology. However, theology is quite robust, and these arguments have been reformulated to account for scientific discoveries by expanding to more abstract levels. This is mostly done by expanding the argument to more broad, abstract levels. For example, the First Cause Argument is the most basic of a class of what's called the Cosmological Arguments which seek to prove God by examining the origin of existence. The broadest and most abstract form would be the Contingency Argument (and I'm reciting this from memory so I could be getting the details wrong): now this argument at least has enough thought behind it to not immediately point and laugh Seriously though, given that thek (e: weak) anthropic principle is a thing, how does the contingency argument deal with the counterargument that existence might be a random result of poo poo happening but we are only around to witness the instances where existence turned out to be the result? suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 08:26 on Aug 19, 2015 |
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Aug 19, 2015 07:44
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