I think that is a reasonable belief considering the evidence.
Perhaps that is logically the best process to optimize. An active search of ALL possible solutions of a fitness landscape with the inevitable emergence of optimal beings … us. It is further argued that the existence of beings more optimal than us are unlikely to exist for our fitness landscape… earth. Whether we have reached a global maximum for our particular fitness landscape is debatable one can argue. Sure, God could make us in 1 second, everyday, for eternity, or not make us, what is wrong with chosing a process that will inevitably result in the emergence of beings of our kind and suitably adapted to their fitness landscape?
Seeing that this is a skeptic site, are there any people on this site skeptical about the claims of naturalism and materialism?
Cyghost… your question has been answered by me…to you. Maybe an incorrect answer at first you might argue, but an answer was given to YOU, this assertion is incorrect:
Finally an answer! It seems you simply didn’t want to answer me? lol
So, for the 7th or 8th time (who cares really), could you perhaps elaborate on your assertions that:
You are not a materialist, not a naturalist and bear no metaphysical biases.
The questions remain:
Lay out what exactly you agree and disagree with naturalism and materialism.
Lay out these “metaphysical biases” you disagree/agree with?
Name them and explain them!
Not at all. I stand by that assertion and back it up with evidence.
So, for the 7th or 8th time (who cares really), could you perhaps elaborate on your assertions that:
You are not a materialist, not a naturalist and bear no metaphysical biases.
The questions remain:
Lay out what exactly you agree and disagree with naturalism and materialism.
Lay out these “metaphysical biases” you disagree/agree with?
Name them and explain them!
Waiting…
Well as you cannot read, you are going to wait a looooong time…
This was my answer when you first asked:
I hold no metaphysical position and prefer to accept only that which can be tested and for which we have evidence. Both materialism and naturalism takes it further than I am prepared to go. My position is grounded in the fact that taking things on faith is not a good thing, so I shy away from any such which can be construed as having a faith based nature. I accept to a small degree that ultimately anything and everything has a certain element of faith attached to it but the testable and the evidence based should be embraced to the exclusion of that which has neither.
You didn’t accept that answer and I qualified it with this and then got tired telling you I won’t answer you further here and then follow it up with this
As it is, I really do not have the time or inclination to go into this with you.
[b] I’d have considered going through some of these with you but now that I know this evasion pisses you off, I may just use the tactic more often.
And of course, the major reason is because I still don’t bow down to what you dictate to me to post and what not to post and never ever ever will[/b]
There, now I have highlighted the pertinent parts for you.
That you fail to get the message from these is no fault of mine. If you told me you won’t answer the age of the earth, I’d have accepted that. Instead I got evasive bullshit.
You are a fucking liar but I find you amusing. Do continue making an arse of yourself.
Still not backing up any assertions? Wonders who is actually making a fool of himself…
Do at least try and elaborate…
Lay out what exactly you agree and disagree with naturalism and materialism.
Lay out these “metaphysical biases” you disagree/agree with?
So the mere existence of intentionality itself makes ID and creationism plausible to you? It’s a good thing then that science demands significantly more rigorous standards of proof than loose and uninformed jumping from ignorance to a conclusion, isn’t it?
As I said before, “Oh, look at all the coincidences! I can’t explain them therefore a greater intelligence must be at work!” And you call that “reasonable.” Oh dear me. How about saying instead, “We don’t exactly know why the universe is as it is, so let’s find out. It looks like it may have come about by pure chance – maybe it’s a special universe among quadrillions – or maybe a more comprehensive cosmogony will shed light on why it is as it is.” That’s a much more honest approach than pretending to know “answers” that actually answer nothing, now isn’t it?
No, nice rhetorical dodge.
See, you’re being thoroughly uncivil again because you’re deliberately setting out to deceive your audience. You know nothing about QM. That just gets clearer every time you fabricate something self-serving about it. The experiments by Salart et al. extend the earliest ones of the 1980s by Alain Aspect et al. about the same phenomenon. It emphatically had nothing to do with any “teleportation” or “transmission of bits of information.” To say this is either to be ignorant of the facts or purposely to misrepresent them. The experiment was a test of Bell’s Theorem, and it showed that non-locality is at work in correlated quantum states. This means only that no gauge theory using local variables alone can adequately model QM reality. All of the rest that you conjure out of the results is unsupported by anything in the paper or by its authors.
Besides all of which, the definitions of “information” you have given fail to meet my request. Nothing in them suggests what experiments I can perform to distinguish information itself from non-information. More than that, by those definitions, you may as well ask whether “symbology” is a “fundamental category of Nature” – a question you can surely answer yourself. Then again, maybe not. Nor are “information” and “meaning” properly separable by those definitions.
Again, your definitions are inadequate (you really should try to read more carefully what I ask for), but it looks like you would attribute matter with consciousness and an ability to abstract, despite no-one knowing what these things really are.
Another cool rhetorical dodge.
Sure it can, but so what? Much the same can be said of any metaphysical starting position – and has been. That’s why philosophy is both humanity’s oldest intellectual endeavour and its most divided one. As for “not even warrant[ing] any consideration,” admit you just made that up because it has warranted consideration, and the rejection of the supernatural as an explanatory force has delivered more and better results than any other approach. Or do you perhaps think all of our modern knowledge and conveniences were “teleologised” before being prayed into existence?
Which conclusion straw man did you just build and burn?
Apply that kind of logic to forensic science…
Sooo, nobody throws the die? Does it throw itself? Do elaborate on your analogy.
Nothing to do with transmission of bits of information? Tell that to the people who uses this non-locality to encrypt sensitive information… eg. MagiQ Technologies Inc.
Nothing to do with transfer of information?
Tell me, if you have two entities A and B that can switch between two states x and y. A(x) and B(y) exist. Upon changing B(y) to B(x), you find that A(x) turns to A(y) and the exact opposite happens if B(y) is changed back to B(x). Can you come to the conclusion that A carries information about B and visa versa, non-local or not?
Are you anything else than matter? Do you have intentionality?
Dodge from what?
You seem to confuse methodological naturalism with metaphysical materialism. The one has yielded wonderful scientific results, the other is not scientific in any way, and merely a philosophical outlook on life.
First off, let it be said that I admire your tenacity and dedication to whatever it is you are trying to bring across. From what I gather from all the posts with a Biochemical flavour you are indeed an ID enthusiast.
To answer your question on wether scepticism also applies to materialism and naturalism, I would think yes. Honest scepticism is not affiliated to any particular philosophy or subject matter. Rather, the methods of science have scepticism at its roots. As do the methods of purchasing a second hand washing machine. Any claim that requires a leap of faith will come under scrutiny of the sceptics, be it from an astrologer or a physicist, a naturalist or a naturist.
But getting back to the answers to my questions on God’s intentions that you kindly provided earlier:
To summarize, you are willing to accept as probable that God had a plan, hatched billions of years ago, to bring the crown of His creation, human beings, onto earth by means of evolution.
The next logical question, which you have no doubt preempted, is how do you know that God intended human beings as his ultimate goal? For example, if God’s plan was to ultimately come up with the chihuahua, then man would be no more than a clever instrument in the Big Plan. So is it not a bit presumptuous to assume that humans are an evolutionary aim?
With regards to your summary, either an original plan, or an ongoing work of art can be argued for I guess. With humans having free will having their way as well… chosing whatever reality they wish to bring upon themselves.
Your question? I can’t know without any doubt that we are God’s ultimate goal. You might argue that it is a bit presumptuous to make such a claim. Perhaps it is. Perhaps chihuahuas are and we are not. Although I have not heard a chihuahua make that belief or argued why it is so… Does that mean they are not and we are. No. Until other beings other than humans come to argue they are the ultimate goal, I think it is not beyond reason to believe we might just well be…part of a plan. Whether the plan is that we have sufficient reason to believe our cognitive faculties are designed reliable enough to freely understand and seek truth, just to have free will, just to have intentionality etc. remain open questions… Who knows, perhaps we have not reached the global optimum on the evolutionary fitness landscape (like sharks and crocodiles) with regards to Reproduction success and Intelligence (Ability to process information - genetics, proteomics, metabolomics) Agency (Ability to manipulate information) and complexity ?
I answered your question loudly and clearly and explained why I’ll be vague on this one. In so many words. Only a complete moron wouldn’t get it the first time.
Where have you answered these questions? Point it out please.
Lay out what exactly you agree and disagree with naturalism and materialism.
Lay out these “metaphysical biases” you disagree/agree with?
You maintain that you are not a materialist, not a naturalist and bear no metaphysical biases. How about pointing out where you have answered the above questions…
Haven’t said anything about what exactly you agree and disagree with naturalism and materialism or any of the “metaphysical biases” you disagree/agree with now have you…
Mind answering them please? Really interested now ;D.
If you think it’s a straw man then maybe you should try being a lot clearer about how “Intentionality for one… Mine, yours, other minds…” (the sum total of your answer in this context thus far) adds up to a defence of ID and/or creationism – that is, right after you clear up exactly what intentionality it is you’re hand-waving all around.
Sure – just as soon as it has been properly established (a) that a crime has in fact been committed, and (b) that there is a preponderance of evidence indicating a probable scenario beyond a reasonable doubt.
More rhetorical dodging, and not very artful either. It doesn’t matter whether the die was thrown by someone or it got bumped by the cat or fell off the table because of an earth tremor or it is a virtual die that is part of a computer’s screensaver that shows spontaneously-rolled dice. What matters is that the possible outcomes form a limited set of six, and that over many, many throws the die’s behaviour is exactly in line with that of a discrete random variable, irrespective by what means the die is tossed.
No, and you’re continuing to make an ever-bigger ass of yourself with such comprehensive ignorance of QM and these hollow pretences to the contrary. It’s true enough that secure code transmissions can make use of correlated quantum states to detect eavesdropping, but correlated quantum states themselves cannot be used to transmit information because measurements, e.g. of spin, are neither deterministic nor pre-settable. What you’re saying here is very similar to claiming that a proper message can be transmitted by transmitting a live movie of face-down Scrabble tiles that are randomly turned over one at a time.
Now, I won’t be wasting any more of my time dissecting such ignorant QM distortions, nonsense and impostures (except to the extent of merely labelling them thus) until you decide to show the subject the proper “civility” it deserves, okay?
I have no reason to suppose otherwise, and it certainly seems that way, respectively. Your next question will surely be something like, “How do you get from matter alone to intentionality?” My answer is that I don’t know because I don’t know exactly what life, consciousness and mind are to begin with, and all of these seem to me to be prior to “intentionality,” whether one adopts the colloquial or philosophical usage of that term.
From delivering any cogent defence for why an assumption of teleology should benefit science. The observation that scientists are teleological agents (in the sense that they aim for something) rather misses the point. It does not follow from the existence of teleological agents in one sphere that everything else is teleologically driven.
And, lest we lose sight of the self-evident here, an obvious question to ask is, if the world is teleologically determined at a fundamental level, why is it that the basic assumption of ateleology has been vastly more fruitful in revealing the workings of the world than has its contrary? Could it be that the ateleological assumption encourages us to dig deeper and to keep digging? Why should that be? Further, one should ask about the eminent success of the ateleological assumption in science. One should ask if that success itself is an outcome of the teleology that the world is allegedly imbued with.
Are you challenging the definitions I provided earlier – the ones you yourself asked me for? If not, the above is untainted nonsense. If yes, how does your conception of metaphysical materialism make it “not scientific in any way”?
Um, at the risk of adding fuel to the fire, I thought I’d add my two cents worth, so here it goes…
Mechanist, could you please address the questions put to you in this thread, plus this one, and this one, and this one, with straightforward, simple answers ( for dumbasses like me). Your continuous evasion of questions and changing of the topic in the middle of debates is beoming very frustrating. Not to mention the flood of links that pepper your posts; I think I have developed carpal tunnel syndrome just reading through some of your posts - which; frankly, I have started skipping because they’re TL;DR.
There’s a phrase that keeps running through my head when I see your posts…
“If you can’t dazzle 'em with your brilliance, baffle 'em with bullsh1t.”
