quote:

---

show EEG patterns that are 4 standard deviations outside the normal curve toward the direction of joy.

---

"Four standard deviations" is a matter of measurement; I'm happy to believe that people with unusual training have unusual EEG patterns. (Modulo selection effects, of course. It's quite possible that people with this 4-SD deviation are the ones who take to meditation.) But "the direction of joy" instantly sets off my bunkum detector. If the current state of the art allows us to measure joy from EEG patterns, that is much more momentous than a mere ability to train your joyfulness through meditation. That would be a minor side effect; you can readily improve anything you can reliably measure. So how come we hear about it from this guy with a clear agenda to advance, rather than the scientists who, presumably, invented this amazing joy-measuring procedure?

Now, if he had said something like "The (size/frequency/third Fourier component) of alpha waves, which is associated with (self-reported happiness/financial success//other measures of health)", then that would be very interesting indeed. But when he resorts to the "direction of joy", sorry, that's propaganda.
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
Actually, did you watch the talk? My one sentence summary wasn't meant to stand alone as a scientific paper. Go watch what he said before you call it bunkum.

And by the way, KoM, please speak to me when you post in reply to my posts, with a more respectful and friendlier tone. If I were Papa you would have been corrected or banned long ago for your disrespectful tone of posting.

I'm interested in speaking to friends, here, not debating with Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. If you want to speak to me, please do it in a way that presupposes I'm a decent and fairly intelligent human being who's trying to share something of value with her friends. Otherwise, I'll just put the internal ignore button on and not see you, is that okay? I hope you don't mind me taking that approach. I respect your intelligence and think you have a lot to offer hatrack as a poster.

Please take this gentle correction as it's meant, in a spirit of friendliness and caring for your well-being and the community here. Picture me as I am, a rather plump and aging mom, aunt, and grandma to many, with my gray hair in a bun, and smiling and speaking to you softly in a voice that others can't overhear. I hoping you can take this gentle nudge in the spirit in which it's intended. I'm probably decades older than you and I'm from the southern U.S. where we all believe in correcting each other's kids on into their 80s or until whenever it is we croak. Thanks. =)

[ February 04, 2010, 11:43 PM: Message edited by: Tatiana ]
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
Mucus, I love the first two of Hans Rosling's talks I saw under the "most favorited all time" sorting of talks. Because of your link, I realized he's done more talks at TED than I knew of. So I'm planning to watch the others tonight. Thanks for the link!

I also haven't watched the militant atheism one by Richard Dawkins, though he's a good scientist and I loved The Selfish Gene. I do get tired of him harping on the single subject of religion, which in my opinion he doesn't really understand, so that's why I've postponed watching that one. But he's a delightful and intelligent guy so I'll surely watch it eventually.
 

---

Posted by Nighthawk (Member # 4176) on :
 
J. J. Abrams talking about his "Mystery Box" and putting things up Tom Cruise's nose
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
Nighthawk, I LOVED that one! So funny and intriguing. I've not seen Lost but a lot of people seem to really enjoy it, and meeting this guy who created it and/or wrote much of it makes me understand why. I almost started crying about his grandfather myself, even though he said that about crying at TED in a jokey tone. I could tell how much he really loved him. I want to be a grandparent like that! I want to introduce my grandkids to ideas and resources that teach them to explore their creativity and find their missions in life, you know? Nothing could be more fun!
 

---

Posted by Strider (Member # 1807) on :
 
If you're interested in a Dawkins talk that has nothing to do with religion, watch this talk on how the universe is queerer than we suppose.

I love that Pilobolus video btw, it's one of my favorites as well. Here's a random sampling of some of my other favorites:

Love and gender from an evolutionary perspective

The paradox of choice

Do schools kill creativity?

Fabulous 14 year old piano player - at one point she improves a completely new piece of music from 5 notes picked at random

Endangered cultures

How are brains think about other people's thoughts and judge their actions

Our buggy moral code

Are we in control of our own decisions?
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
I'll watch all those, thanks! I intend to go looking on the web for more Pilobolus vidz. I've heard the name for many years, but I guess I never thought to do a websearch about them before. The only problem with TED is that too many intriguing possibilities for more learning open up at once, and I can't even keep track of them or remember all of them to follow up on, you know? =)

I did find out more about Sunitha Krishnan who absolutely knocked my socks off with her galvanizing talk about rescuing victims of human trafficking. Her organization Prajwala is doing great work, so I gave them some money. The thing I loved about her is here's this woman who looks like a tiny 12 year old girl to my eyes, but she has a PhD and more courage in her little finger than I have in my whole body. I just loved her instantly! She's faced down organized crime and heads of state in the defense of the most helpless and victimized people there are, been beat up six times or so, is willing to verbally slap us all in the face (in global society) to try to wake us up to the fact that we're all part of the problem. Nothing illustrates to me better the fact that Will, Intelligence, and Love are more powerful than anything else in the universe. I think even Seyfert Galaxies would bow to her superior vision and explode in another direction or something if she took them on, you know? =)
 

---

Posted by Strider (Member # 1807) on :
 
Awesome Tatiana, and btw, I'm totally up for an idea revival! If you wanna discuss any of the talks linked to, I'm up for it. I've seen most of the ones you linked to above so I can talk about those as well.

Do you think we could actually get something like a TED club going(along the lines of a book club), where we pick a different TED talk to talk about every few days?

There have been a handful of TED threads over the years with people linking to various talks and talking about how much they love TED. But never a concerted effort to facilitate real conversation.
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
I would LOVE that! I elect you head of the club. What's our first talk we're going to discuss?
 

---

Posted by Strider (Member # 1807) on :
 
hah, okay.

I nominate the first one I linked above.

Love and gender from an evolutionary perspective
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
Okay, I just watched it. That was really interesting. I think she's on to something with the three drives.

My first objection was to her definitive statement "Men and Women have very different brains" or whatever: that's probably not a direct quote. I think, on the contrary, that for a lot of traits, men and women may have somewhat different average levels of talent or ability, but that the amount of overlap always seem totally to swamp the actual amount of difference between the sexes.

Let me link to a graph that illustrates what I'm saying. The x axis here is the variable, maybe it's spatial ability, or math scores, or any other task that we're saying men's brains do better than women's. What they usually display is some sort of bell-shaped curve for both men and women, and perhaps the average for men is somewhat higher than for women. But if you look at the actual data points, for most any man's point, there are plenty of women with higher scores. Ditto for most any woman's point there are lots of men with higher scores. Indeed, the overlapping region is probably 95% of the area under the two curves, while non-overlapping residual space is pretty tiny.

That's why I think it makes a whole lot more sense to think of humans as individuals than to decide men's brains display quality x and women's brains display quality y. Note that the women's curve is somewhat higher overall because there are fewer living men than women. That means there may even be MORE individual women than men with high performance in a certain area, even though the average woman is lower than the average man. Does that make sense?

I'm also thinking of the book by Stephen Jay Gould called "The Mismeasure of Man". I think all these pat just-so stories about men's and women's traits based on so-called evolutionary reasons are highly prone to scientific bias in the direction that we already believe, just because of our inherent social biases and default-assumptions. In Mismeasure of Man, SJG shows that seemingly rational scientists once had all sorts of science showing that whites are superior genetically to blacks. They even changed through the years in contradictory ways as science changed. (e.g. Blacks are inferior because they retain more juvenile traits into adulthood except then later that quality of neoteny is found to be a big part of what distinguishes humans from non-human sibling species, so then studies showed that blacks were inferior because they retained FEWER juvenile traits into adulthood, lol. Lots of stuff like that.) That's caused me to be extremely skeptical of just-so story science like this. I think Desmond Morris is very unscientific in this exact way, as is Oliver Sacks, for instance. (Not in the sense of racism but in saying things like "as we all know, such and such is true about people and here's the evolutionary reason why" which is just a just-so story and not at all demonstrated by the actual data.)

So that's what I'd say about the first part of her speech. It didn't strike me as something we know like we know gravity, or whatever. I feel like this area of knowledge is quite soft still.

Another thing this sort of thinking does is ignore completely people who are gay of either gender, or who are transsexuals, bisexuals, hermaphrodites or inter-sexual, and so on. They are likely to be something like 30% or more of the species, altogether, though our societal biases often overlook them completely.

I myself, though heterosexual, have always been called a tom-boy, and my areas of expertise and talent lie in regions that our society sees as being typically male. I guess that's why I'm so skeptical about "girls are this way and boys are this other way" scientific thinking, because I'm almost always personally more like the supposed boys' way than the girls'. So what I see it as, is a faulty definition or faulty stereotyping on the part of society or scientists. I think it's a false definition of femininity that's the problem, and not anything about me. I take myself by definition to be a perfectly valid and normal female person, and I challenge anyone who disagrees with me on that.

The second part, though, was far more intriguing to me. I think it's interesting what she says about how society may change based on the modifications and training we do of our different brain systems for lust, romantic love, and long-term attraction. Not just SSRIs but also widespread pornography use, the easy availability of sex-toys, the earlier onset of sexual behavior and stimulation in both genders, the more widespread acceptance of autoeroticism (oh that's right, on hatrack we say onanism), all these things are changing how our brains respond to each other, and so they're going to change society as a whole a lot too in ways that we probably don't forsee.

I read someone (sorry, I forget who) who opined that in the future we will all have sex robots as toys and actual human intercourse will become rare. After all, real women and men with real flaws and normal bodies can't compete with dolls or animated toys built to simulate some idealized unrealistic version of the opposite sex. It's like we'll all have Stepford spouses. I thought that was an interesting idea, though I think it would be very sad if that happened. I stumbled upon a documentary about this company that builds realistic female life-sized dolls, once, and profiling four or five men who have the dolls. They all for whatever reason couldn't really find girlfriends. One of them used to date women, but since he had bought six or eight of the dolls for himself, he just didn't really have any girlfriends anymore. He was the most normal of the men they showed. He was dating a woman briefly during the show but after she met his dolls, and soon after they began having a sexual relationship, she decided to leave him. My guess is that he asked her to lie perfectly still like a doll and not make any noises during sex, and she then got creeped out and decided to leave him to his dolls. Just a guess.

Anyway, another thought I had along these lines is this. We always read, when researching male and female sexuality, that men are very visual in their sexual responses. They respond mostly to visual cues. I'm wondering if that could possibly be mainly because of the habit of casual pornography use (which is mostly visual, I'm supposing) that most men in our society seem to begin from an early age in adolescence. Could it be that men train their minds and bodies through use of pornography to respond sexually mostly to visual cues? I don't have any anecdotal data either way, but it's a hypothesis that occurred to me. I'm wondering what men themselves might think.

To sum up, an interesting and excellent talk with lots of ideas and implications that spin off from her subject. Great first choice by our president for our new TED club!
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
I don't know what the rules are for our club, but maybe we should leave this talk up for a few days to a week for everyone who's interested to talk about, then maybe we could take turns picking the next talk for discussion, and maybe each member could pick one in turn. To become a member and get in the queue to choose the next talk, maybe you just have to make at least one thoughtful comment on someone else's choice first. Does that sound workable?
 

---

Posted by steven (Member # 8099) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Tatiana:


Anyway, another thought I had along these lines is this. We always read, when researching male and female sexuality, that men are very visual in their sexual responses. They respond mostly to visual cues. I'm wondering if that could possibly be mainly because of the habit of casual pornography use (which is mostly visual, I'm supposing) that most men in our society seem to begin from an early age in adolescence. Could it be that men train their minds and bodies through use of pornography to respond sexually mostly to visual cues? I don't have any anecdotal data either way, but it's a hypothesis that occurred to me. I'm wondering what men themselves might think.

---

I'll give up my porn when your pry my keyboard from my cold, dead hands.

And what's wrong with being visually-oriented? That's part of what picking a viable mate is about. There are also plenty of girls I've dated who I KNOW would not have been nearly as willing to date me if I looked like Quasimodo. Their attraction is based on appearance too, it's just not as focused toward breasts/butt/etc..

I've used pr0n on and off most of the last 15 years, and I am still way more motivated by a woman's intelligence, personality, and general character than by a woman's looks. Do you know why? It's call "life experience", maturing, etc. After dating/knowing beautiful annoying women, homely wonderful girls, and dumb and smart girls (and many other more specific subtypes), and being married and divorced, I KNOW from experience that the women I would want to date/marry/anything are the ones that can

1. Hold an intelligent conversation on many subjects
2. be a lot of fun to be around
3. be trusted with access to my money, etc.

When brains, personality, and character are good enough, a woman can be as ugly as homemade sin, and I don't even notice. In a case like that, I just think she's beautiful, and that's the end of it. I know I'm not the only man like that, either. Younger men are often stupid about pretty girls, but relatively fewer older men are primarily looking for physical beauty only. IMHO, anyway.


IIRC, I've seen a couple of studies that show the incidence of rape goes down in any area after the internet is introduced and becomes widely available there.

That definitely does support the assumption that actual human intercourse will decrease at some point, in favor of sexbots or direct nerve/brain stimulation, or whatever. It does NOT support the assumption that women are worse off as a result of pr0n, IMHO.

LOL your post was hilarious. You actually managed to contradict yourself within the same post. First you complained about assumptions that have no studies to back them up, and then did the same thing at the end.

Faith-based thinking, much? LOL

I'm not trying to hurt your feelings, I just felt that was a little too obvious to go without mention, maybe.
 

---

Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
 
I love this one my Jonathan Haidt
 

---

Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Tatiana:
... I do get tired of him harping on the single subject of religion, which in my opinion he doesn't really understand, so that's why I've postponed watching that one.

---

I disagree, I think he understands it perfectly well

But anyways, I agree that you probably won't appreciate that one. It is very much "written by an atheist, for atheists" and what I think is one of the earlier airings of his public thoughts on the religion issue (as opposed to just reacting to attacks on evolution).
 

---

Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 

quote:

---

They respond mostly to visual cues. I'm wondering if that could possibly be mainly because of the habit of casual pornography use...

---

I doubt it. I was responding sexually to visual cues long before I got interested in porn. Seriously. I think you've actually got it backwards: men like porn better because they respond sexually to visual cues, not the other way around.
 

---

Posted by Strider (Member # 1807) on :
 
Tatiana, you had a lot to say!

I'm also weary when someone makes a statement like, "men's brains are like this, and women's brains are like this," similarly to how i get annoyed when someone goes on about left vs. right brains. But I also think it's a mistake to discount differences in brains of different sexes. Whether the argument is made from evolutionary history, or whether it solely looks at neurophysiology. If neuroscience tells us definitively that there is a measurable difference in the amount or types of neuronal connections across genders we'd be foolish not to study the implications of that for behavior or cognition. Same with data that might tell us about relative levels of neurochemicals.

Now, i'm not an expert and I don't know if the data backs up these claims. But if it does, we're best off paying attention to it. It's worth noting that nothing in this would imply one gender is inferior to another, but ignoring the fact of our physiology would be just as bad as overreaching in the pronouncements we make based on that physiology.

As to the comment that steven jumped on you for, while I disagree with the way in which he responded, I do agree that your statement has problems. Mostly that it seems you're making an assumption about the causal nature of the connection between the visual nature of men's sexuality and pornography. I think it's much more probable that pornography exists, and is more prevalent among males, due to the very fact that males are more visual than females in regards to sexuality.

Before I was ever trained by society and pornography to think about women as sexual objects ( ) I wanted to see naked women. And when I first saw a porno magazine as a kid, I was in awe. I think in this case, our evolutionary history IS a good indicator of why are sexual responses are the way they are! I mean, it's not like porn magazines for women aren't available, or that television doesn't gratuitously show men's rippling muscles and chests as much as they show the correlate with women, or that video porn isn't available to both sexes. I certainly agree that women are objectified more than men in our society, but my point is, the material exists to warp women's minds just as much as men's to respond more to visual cues, and I'd guess that this hasn't happened due more to inherent differences.

Oh, in regards to logistics for conversations. I'd say three days should be good for each talk. I agree we should all take turns nominating a talk. And that someone should make a substantive remark before being allowed to nominate. I'd also add that the remark should at least in part address the talk itself, rather than a criticism of someone else's response. It would hopefully guarantee that the person did in fact watch the talk. Which is to say, if someone hasn't watched the talk and wants to converse, that's fine. But if they want others to watch a talk of their choosing, they should make the effort to watch someone else's.

[ February 05, 2010, 12:22 PM: Message edited by: Strider ]
 

---

Posted by Mike (Member # 55) on :
 
A few points here.

1. It is interesting that what she calls romantic love is mediated by the dopamine circuits, that it is a drive rather than an emotion. This does seem to go along with my intuition this kind of love is characterized by wanting rather than liking. Not long ago I came across an article on a U of Michigan study that indicates that we (or mice, anyway) have separate brain systems for wanting and liking, which explains a lot (to me) and has deep implications for theories of happiness, fun, and morality.

2. On gender differences and mismeasurement. First mismeasurement: yes, many scientists tend to use just-so stories to justify their observations and many metrics of human behavior and ability have turned out to be flawed. That doesn't mean we don't have useful metrics now or won't in the future. Additionally, most just-so stories can be tested to the point where they become much better supported, or thrown away — that this doesn't always (or usually?) happen is the problem, not the just-so stories in the first place. Second, the claim that male and female brains are different is a statistical one, not (at least from Helen Fisher) a categorical one. This lets you make predictions about individuals that will be right more often than not; it does not claim to be 100% effective, nor does it say "all women have this set of traits in these amounts and all men have these other traits in these other amounts." I'm sure you know that even if the genders' histograms for a trait overlap by a large extent, the difference can be highly statistically significant. I could go on in more detail, particularly about your comment on being a "normal female person", but I won't unless you ask.

It's true that gender differences, like all human behavior, are entangled to a large extent in non-linear feedback-reinforcement systems, i.e. culture and upbringing. (See also handedness, sexual orientation, intelligence, etc.) This complicates things. It might be worth pointing out, though, that a claim of differently gendered brains could be an observation of what exists in the current human population; human brains are somewhat plastic, so some of these brain differences come out of cultural "nurture" effects.

3. Pornography, sex toys, onanism, etc. This is a complicated topic that I would love to talk about, but don't have time to address right now. I'll probably have more time over the weekend, though, so I may weigh in.

--

As far as discussion structure goes, I'd actually lean towards a separate thread for each TED talk, or maybe a thread for a related group of talks. Long, monolithic threads can have a way of inhibiting discussion from posters who don't check in as often (due to the overwhelming quantity of reading material just to get in the door), and many times interesting topics that could be further developed get lost by the wayside when something silly or procedural or controversial comes up. There's nothing wrong with discussing multiple topics simultaneously, and I'd say different threads are ideal for that. Just don't start em all at once.
 

---

Posted by Strider (Member # 1807) on :
 
That's a good idea Mike. So how about we discuss a new talk every three days. But each discussion gets its own thread. We can label each one "TED Club discussion - <insert name of TED talk here>".
 

---

Posted by Strider (Member # 1807) on :
 
Rabbit, I love that talk by Jonathan Haidt has well!
 

---

Posted by Alcon (Member # 6645) on :
 
Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

Can't believe it hasn't been mentioned yet. I teared up a bit at the end of it.
 

---

Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
 

quote:

---

If you want to speak to me, please do it in a way that presupposes I'm a decent and fairly intelligent human being who's trying to share something of value with her friends. Otherwise, I'll just put the internal ignore button on and not see you, is that okay?

---

quote:

---

I'm interested in speaking to friends, here, not debating with Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Alcon:
Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

Can't believe it hasn't been mentioned yet. I teared up a bit at the end of it.

---

Didn't even know that was on the site; I didn't think it had anything to do with TED.
 

---

Posted by Strider (Member # 1807) on :
 
Yeah, it's a great lecture, but I think it just got added to TED recently through their "best talks from the web" thing they're doing right now.

I think for future "TED club" discussions it might be best to avoid those types of talks since most of them are in the hour length as opposed to the standard TED 20 minutes. But I do highly recommend that lecture, it was very touching.
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
Wow, lots to respond to here! I'm going to take it piecemeal so my poor old brain can focus on one thing at a time.

First, steven: "You actually managed to contradict yourself within the same post. First you complained about assumptions that have no studies to back them up, and then did the same thing at the end."

I actually have not put forth this idea as a theory at all, but merely a hypothesis I'd like to ask for people to chime in on. Obviously as a female I don't have any idea about whether it's true or plausible myself. I'm just asking the question from guys who might actually have an opinion. So far I'm getting good feedback, which is great! Thanks for your viewpoint!
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
Strider: My remark about posting tone was directed as Kom, not steven. steven's tone was fine, I thought. He just mistook what was merely a question being asked for a proposed theory, as I mentioned above. I'm getting good feedback, unanimous so far, so it looks like my hypothesis is incorrect. I'm still interested in more data points if anyone else wants to weigh in.

On your next point, I see what you mean that average differences can still be highly significant. It's just that in most cases people seem to apply that knowledge about averages as though it really meant "almost all" men are better than "almost all" women at such-and-so skill, which of course scientists would be less likely to do. Just knowing something about male and female averages still tells us nearly nothing about individual males and females, is what I'm saying. The gender overlap is the most important feature of the data, not the gender differences.

I think the logistical suggestions are excellent. We should have each talk discussed for three days and start a new thread for each talk. Do you want to make a new thread and try to pull out the discussion about this first talk? Or should we leave this thread as the "favorites and first discussion" thread and have subsequent ones for each additional discussion? I think I'm in favor of the latter as it's less work. And it shouldn't be too confusing to have just one talk discussed in-depth on the favorites thread. What do you think?

I also agree with your stipulation that before proposing a talk for the group to discuss, a new member must make a comment on a talk itself, not just on prior posts. That way everyone must listen to at least one talk proposed by someone else before they get a chance to propose their own talk for the group to watch.
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
Mike: I completely agree with your statistical observations. Again, the thing I'm cautioning people against is mistaking that for categorical statements about men's and women's brains. As for me being a normal valid female, I do insist that I count as female, and am as authentically female as anyone, so how I am should be included in any definition of how females are. I don't claim to be an average female, whatever that might be. Is there anyone who is truly an average anything, I wonder? So that's what I'm saying.

For all the many, many times I've heard in my life statements to the effect of "girls don't do that" or "girls shouldn't be that way" or "girls aren't", I've found very close to 100% of them to be false in my case. Just saying. =) Hence, I learned long ago automatically to ignore such statements.

And I'd love to hear more of what you think about your point 3, when you get time. I find it really interesting to try and project what might be the results of society's changes in all these ways. I'm very interested in gender issues, and I've been a feminist since the 60s. Obviously I think many of the changes in gender politics have been for the good. For one thing, the fact that pictures of scantily clad women are ubiquitous in our culture contributes to me being able to do my job because the sight of me in jeans and a t-shirt, hard hat, safety glasses, and safety boots on the jobsite is not one that men find distracting or sexual, contrary to the situation 60 years ago, say, when Katherine Hepburn caused a scandal by wearing trousers.

I'm just wondering if we're losing the motivations for pair bonding at the same time, which would possibly greatly affect the stability of families for child-rearing purposes, and maybe adversely affect child development as well. The answer to that problem, if it does happen to be true, might be for society to begin to reward the work of parenting commensurate with its value to greater society and the continuity of culture. Or it might be to take other steps to enhance the likelihood of pair bonding. I'm not sure. But questions like that I find to be the most important implications of these societal changes.

I mean, seriously, I love being able to own property, and also not being property myself. I like being able to wear clothes that are comfortable and weather appropriate as well as activity appropriate. (Women engineers working on projects in Kuwait have been attacked on the streets for wearing shorts, for instance.) I like being paid well for the work I do. If the price of all that is also that men are less interested in pair-bonding, then it may well be worth it. But perhaps the two concepts are separable, and we want to choose as a society which effects we value most.

[ February 06, 2010, 12:51 AM: Message edited by: Tatiana ]
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
All: I'm going through and watching all the favorites people have suggested, though it's taking me longer than I thought it would. Please keep the suggestions coming!
 

---

Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
 
I don't think KoM did anything objectionable in this thread yet. My initial interpretation of Tatiatna's statement was for him to keep it that way. Having read more I don't really know.

I'm pretty sure that men's propensity for visual stimulation predates easy access to pornography.
 

---

Posted by Strider (Member # 1807) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Tatiana:
All: I'm going through and watching all the favorites people have suggested, though it's taking me longer than I thought it would. Please keep the suggestions coming!

---

Sorry! I shouldn't have suggested so many! I even cut down my list to try to not overload the thread.

Regarding the logistics conversation...how do we decide who gets to pick each new talk? We have criteria down for qualifying, but if multiple people have suggestions what do we do? Do we have participants make nominations and have everyone vote? Then the winning vote gets watched and that person gets put out of the queue till everyone who wants has had a video of their's watched? Then everyone is free to suggest again and the process repeats. Is there a better way to do this? We can take the voting out of it and just do something like alphabetical order of qualifying participants(by poster name). If the next nominator in the queue isn't around or is unreachable, they get skipped and have to wait till next round. And if a poster joins late they are slotted into the appropriate spot and wait till it comes around to them. This latter method seems a bit smoother of a process.

Whichever way we decide I can keep a little database of participants and the like to manage things smoothly.

[ February 06, 2010, 01:51 AM: Message edited by: Strider ]
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
I think we should just go in order. You were first and I'll be second. I think maybe Mike is third if he wants to consider himself a member. We'll just make a list of each person who qualifies and tell them when it's their turn to pick. When we get to the end of the list, it's your turn again. Does that sound workable?

In addition to the in-depth discussions of the Ted club, I'm still planning to make quick comments about people's other favorites that I'm watching. Tonight so far I've watched the third and fourth most popular Hans Rosling talks, one about HIV prevalence and one about how it makes no sense nowadays to group the world into developing and developed countries. Both were delightful and made a lot of sense. His data is presented is such fantastic ways that show us a lot more about what is really happening than anything else I've read.

Next I watched Richard Dawkins talk about militant atheism. He's brilliant and fun to watch, but I think he misses the boat entirely when he argues against religion as a whole. As a religious person I watched his talk and found nothing specific to disagree with of his points. It's just that my religion doesn't involve anything he's opposed to, really. I understand evolution and natural selection and know that creationists are mistaken. I don't look at God as a theory that explains the complexity of the universe. I don't believe in supernaturalism at all, only lots of natural laws and events that we have yet to elucidate or understand. I'm first of all a scientist, and I know a good bit about physics and cosmology, none of which contradicts my religious views. Indeed there's enormous amounts of things we KNOW that we don't know in science, such as what dark energy is, what dark matter is, what is the quantum nature of gravity, if it has one, what's going on in the other 7 dimensions postulated in string theory, if anything, and whether string theory even fits the observations we make or not, since the calculations of the theory are currently too complicated for us to carry out, etc. etc. Just a bare sketch of all we KNOW we don't know can fill encyclopedias. And besides that, I'm sure there's also a lot that we DON'T yet know we don't know, if you know what I mean. =)

That's why I believe his militant atheism is misguided. I think instead I would just call for better education across the board, so that both religious and non-religious people can have the benefit of all the knowledge about the universe that we've obtained.

My religion specifically incorporates everything true. Science is as much a part of my religion as revelation. We study everything about all subjects. And in my religion the MORE educated a person is, the more devoted to religion they tend to be. This is contrary to the trend Dawkins notes in people overall. So I guess I deplore ignorance every bit as much as Dawkins does, I just don't particularly associate religion with ignorance.

Next I'm watching the next Dawkins talk on our queer universe. He's really good!

Oh Strider, I'm GLAD you posted so many favorites, since I'm blowing through them at many times the rate of 1 every three days. I need more good talks for my input queue, not less. So by all means please expand your list!
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
Dawkins on how truly mind-blowingly weird the universe really is, was fun. I often want to show people cosmic scales. I want us to understand more intuitively how small we are compared to the cosmos. But I don't know how to do it. I also want to show people how completely bizarrely against common intuition our deepest scientific understanding of the underpinnings of physics is. Quantum mechanics is so totally weird that it's something you want to say "no, this can't possibly how things work" about, but it can. They do. lol. I think literature and art have yet to encompass this understanding, which is only a hundred years old or so. And artists rarely study this sort of thing. I want people everywhere to see it, because it's humbling, and character building, and also because it's delightful and quirky and adds to our sense of wonderment. I love the queerness of the universe!

Next I watched Rabbit's favorite from Jonathan Haidt. I found it really good. I've never understood before where conservatives were coming from, and why they believe the way they do. Now I think I see and understand, and that's a great thing! I also understand a bit better the crazy recklessness of the young as regards things like anarchy and revolution. It's all about how we judge the relative importance of the 5 moral default systems. Great stuff!

So what's next? I spent last night exploring Pilobolus on you tube. I guess I'll continue down Strider's list of favorite Ted talks, or else explore more on my own in the realms of choice, creativity, and child development. See you guys tomorrow night!

[ February 06, 2010, 05:04 AM: Message edited by: Tatiana ]
 

---

Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 

quote:

---

That's why I believe his militant atheism is misguided....My religion specifically incorporates everything true. Science is as much a part of my religion as revelation.

---

quote:

---

I await the scientific justifications for your continual disrespect.

---

quote:

---

Tatiana said that science is a part of her religion, not that every single teaching of that religion is based on our current understanding of science.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Tatiana:
Tonight so far I've watched the third and fourth most popular Hans Rosling talks, one about HIV prevalence and one about how it makes no sense nowadays to group the world into developing and developed countries.

---

quote:

---

The most rigidly atheistic implementation of the scientific method in the social sphere is as "guilty" of being unscientific as your random one-liner internet poster, and is as anthropologically indistinguishable from any other religion as Dawkins is from any other biased evangelical.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zotto!:
... a society built on any "rules" whatsoever is fundamentally a religious society ...

---

Please show your work.
Account for the existence of non-religious societies that nonetheless appear to have rules.
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
The definition you are using to describe them as "non-religious" is flawed. They share a fundamental belief in something, or they would not be a community.
 

---

Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
Here is where I observe that belief != religion, particularly not where you are defining "belief" as "that which is necessary to share to have a community."

I belong, for example, to a club that plays board games. I am certainly part of that community. I would not hesitate to say that I hold many strong beliefs about board games, most of which are shared by members of my club. And yet I would look at you very strangely indeed if you asserted that I belonged to a religion that revolved around board games.
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
Here is where I observe that undefended-one-liner != truth.

Edit: well darn, now this doesn't make any sense. I suppose turnabout is fairplay.
 

---

Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 

quote:

---

You'll notice that the LDS believe in continual revelation in which their previous understanding of reality is modified or thrown out altogether.

---

quote:

---

I really don't care if you would look at me strangely when I assert that the fact that you would look at someone strangely for disagreeing with a scientifically-unsupported premise of yours is a tenet of your faith, since all you're doing is proving my point.

---

quote:

---

If you don't believe in the core tenets of the religion, in what sense are you still a member of that particular community?

---

quote:

---

The people themselves and their individual subjective faiths are the self-correcting model....The FLDS revelation goes against what some people believe, therefore those people reject the truth-claim of that splinter-group.

---

quote:

---

This is the strength of organized religion: that it can make definitive statements.

---

quote:

---

Religions are communities at a fundamental level.

---

No argument here; religions often constitute many different types of community. I object to your attempt to make this reflexive, however, by claiming that all communities (and beliefs) are religious.
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
*shrug* I object to your attempt to claim that communities are not fundamentally religious without giving an argument for why they are not.

Why build a community on a testable hypothesis? What reason is there for building a community at all? Why is it "good", or "beneficial", or whatever vague synonym you use? Can you answer that without using an idiosyncratic, non-reproducible idea?

The point of organized religion is to bridge the subjective divide. The testable hypothesis is living your life according to the pattern laid out by the community. If it doesn't feel right, quit it. The demonstrable evidence is only demonstrable to an individual's subjective interpretation of the data, and science is no different in that regard. The good people I know in my faith community take that evidence into consideration when making decisions.

You can't live your life according to someone else's faith, whether you're a hardcore Christian fundamentalist or a devout atheist. You have to decide for yourself what to believe, and no amount of evidence in any direction is going to be sufficient to make the decision to give your conscious allegiance to a system of living for you. There is no luxurious detached stance in which we can just have our decisions made for us by whatever "science" or "faith" says is "the right thing to believe".

Peril of free will, that. Though of course I realize you consciously choose not to believe in free will, despite the internal contradiction.

There is a presumed objectivity to scientific inquiry that just does not exist. You can, for instance, lose the scare-quotes about what Dawkins believes, because it's obvious he really does subscribe to a religion in which every idea which is not confirmed through supplication to the Great Deus Scientia is blasphemously evil.

By putting the word evil in quotes, you seem to be implying that Dawkins must have some "scientific" rationale for regarding his own system of morality as "better", which he is simplifying for the benefit of us unsophisticated yokels who still accept that overly-simplistic "good" and "evil" stuff.

If you can demonstrate this unconfirmed morality with a falsifiable hypothesis which people can understand without interpretation on a purely objective level, I'll eat my proverbial hat.

Everything is dependent upon fallible interpretation. We build up consensus through storytelling, but so does every community. If a person has built up a network of stories in which calling the moon a lump of cheese does not feel right, make sense, fit with the pattern, then that person rejects such an idea, loses faith in it, refuses to regard it as having any validity.

I believe in evolution because it makes sense to me, it fits the pattern as I understand it today. It's enough to act on, for me, but if some scientist a hundred years from now finds out that there's some underlying aspect of natural selection that we don't even have the tools to look for right now, I'm fine with that. I believe there are a lot of things to both "science" and "religion" that have yet to be wondered about, let alone discovered.

The behavioral patterns we associate with religion are indistinguishable between those of "faith" and those of the "post-religious" society. But one side tends to be a little more honest about which genre their belief-story should be shelved under.

[ February 06, 2010, 05:43 PM: Message edited by: Zotto! ]
 

---

Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
 
You are equivocating on the meaning of 'religion'. Believing that it is good to make other people happy is not a religious belief, it is an ethical or moral belief. "I do X to achieve effect Y, and I want Y just because" is not religion, it is a side effect of not having infinite time to study the working of one's own brain. An infinite series of "Why"s is unanswerable, as any parent will tell you; to go from this to a triumphant statement of "Aha! You're not a real atheist!" is a bit silly. I suggest you stop.
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
You have not demonstrated the existence of the hair you are attempting to split.
 

---

Posted by Strider (Member # 1807) on :
 
Zotto, you seem be basing your entire argument on a definition of religion that no one else agrees with. I don't even think a lot of religious people would agree with you.
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
They are, of course, free to suggest an alternate definition.
 

---

Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
 
'Religion' does not, in ordinary English usage, mean what you are using it to mean. You are merely attempting to troll atheists by accusing us of being religious in some sufficiently vague sense - such hypocrisy! Imagine that, criticising theists for their unsupported beliefs in enormously powerful entities who interfere in human history and respond to muttered entreaties, while ourselves believing - oh, the barefaced lack of shame! - that having a community is quite nice, and that we'd prefer not to be murdered in our beds if it can be avoided!

This equivalence does not exist except in a vastly distorted use of language for purposes of trolling. Kindly give it up.
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
By the way, the reason they would disagree with me is because what I'm saying is going against their religion. Of course there are religious people like King of Men who disagree with what I'm saying, since I'm saying that everyone is religious, and some religions are so circular they don't believe that they are religions.
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
I'm a Hispanic raised in Hawaii. Ordinary english usage is not the only language with which to consider underlying patterns of behavior. Re-legere is to "reread", religare means to "bind". We bind individuals to communities. We hear stories, we read scriptures.

Kindly persist in proving my point that entrenched religious orthodoxies are terrified when someone doesn't subscribe to their dogmas.
 

---

Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
 
Fine; in the sense you are using the word, I'm religious. Happy now? Can we get on with discussing whether there is a powerful entity which created the universe, responds to prayer, and has laid down moral laws which we'd better follow, or else? We will, apparently, need an entirely new word for this concept, the old one having been preempted for your special purposes. Perhaps we could refer to it as 'theism', and discuss whether 'theists' or 'a-theists' have the better evidence for their proposals.
 

---

Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
 

quote:

---

Ordinary english usage is not the only language with which to consider underlying patterns of behavior.

---

No, but it is the only language you are going to communicate effectively in, unless of course you want to try your hand at ordinary Norwegian usage. If you want a special use of a word, it is considered courteous to say "I am defining X for this purpose as Y", and also to stick to words which do not have pre-existing strong connotations.
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
Quite happy.

I think the fact that recorded civilization seems to have arisen out of Hierocentric temple-worshipping ritual complexes and every ancient people have a mythology of interrelated God-stories which contain very similar elements over vast times and distances (see the similarities between Hawaiian, MesoAmerican, and Egyptian sacred architecture) is at least interesting evidence in favor of a diffusion-based theory of religious-rites and ordinances over the traditional Joseph Campbellesque Jungian "collective unconsciousness" or "primeval archetypes" invoked to explain such commonalities.
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
It is also considered courteous not to tell people to give up speaking just because you disagree with their ideas or accuse them of trolling, but I suppose it's against your religion to walk your talk.
 

---

Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zotto!:
The definition you are using to describe them as "non-religious" is flawed. They share a fundamental belief in something, or they would not be a community.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zotto!:
It is also considered courteous not to tell people to give up speaking just because you disagree with their ideas

---

I did not say anything of the sort; I asked you to stop equivocating on the word 'religion'.
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
Well. I don't, really.

In the Venn diagram example, I'd say B is more a subset of various A's interacting with each other. For instance, I don't share the fanatical devotion to sports teams that most people in my geographic vicinity do, but I am part of the group of people who, say, believe in not breaking into houses and stealing things which are not mine. This implies that I am a believer in the doctrine that people can somehow "own" property. Etc etc.

I think the problem is that some people do not allow other religions any truth. So we have creationists who think all science which disagrees with their doctrine is evil, or scientists who think all conceptions of deity are equally flawed, etc.

But I can belong to a very specific set of believers of one religion (the Latter-Day Saints, in my case), while acknowledging that other people have much truth to their religion as well (I believe enough scientific stories to doubt that an incorporeal God is plausible, so I'm part of that unorganized religion as well).

But by building on the commonalities which our religions do share, we can get along without, say, forcing each other into concentration camps, as King of Men so famously suggested as a lovely destination for us open believers.

Who cares if kmboots and Tresopax disagree with me about the exact attributes of their God? What matters is that God seems to be telling them to help out the poor when they are able. In my belief, everyone's conception of God is probably at least a little off, so why not build on what we have in common?

The real question is how to deal with utterly incompatible religions. I disagree with any religion which condones terrorism, because my religion says that killing innocent people is wrong. The problem is when power-hungry people use the rhetoric of whatever belief-system they subscribe to as an excuse to satisfy their desires for dominance.

This is where the real ethical dilemmas arise, not some divide between religion and science, which, if we knew all there was to know about one or the other, would be pretty much the same thing, a shared story of reality.

The best I can come up with right now is a place like America, with a "public religion" that says it is wrong for any other religion to have monopoly over any other. This gets into a vast forest of ethical principles, of course, but the gist of it is what I quoted before:

No power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood, only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned. In America, we have a system which, despite its many many insufficiencies and abuses, is at least founded on the idea of rational compromise.
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
KoM: ah, my bad. I misread that slightly. You did say I was trolling, tho.

Edit: and you didn't so much "ask" as "demand", but hey.
 

---

Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zotto!:
...
In the Venn diagram example, I'd say B is more a subset of various A's interacting with each other.

---

Ok, B is more a subset. If B is a proper subset of A, please describe something that belongs to B but not A. For example, is it your contention that your described sports teams fans are community but not a religion?
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
Naw. I think "community" and "religion" are fundamentally trying to describe the same underlying "thing" using different lenses.

A Muslim and a Jew and an LDS Missionary can all have incompatible beliefs about who the right Prophets are, so they join the religion that feels correct to them about that aspect of reality. With further information they might change their minds at a later date, but they commit to certain paths as a premise.

But they can also be fanatically (even, let me note, violently!) devoted to the same football team, and so they all have that religion in common. It's when we're deciding which rhetoric to use to try to exercise a little unrighteous dominion that we pick the one that will be the most powerful and internally convincing, to ourselves, if no one else.

It's a terrible mess, really. I don't like Aztec sacrifices any better than I like KoM's atheist concentration camp just because more people see the former as being "religious" than the later. But that's why it's important to have a free society in which people are free to enter and leave any religion they want to.

(Edited for teh speeling.)
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
Actually, I think OSC has a good article or two on this subject, if anyone here besides me is still taking him seriously. *goes to find*

Edit: Aha. Future on Ice intro: http://tinyurl.com/yfms8yu and a Q & A response: http://www.hatrack.com/research/questions/q0066.shtml
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
Wow, excellent addition to the conversation, Zotto!! (The first exclamation point here, of course, being part of your name and the second being part of my sentence. =)) I completely agree. Thanks so much for contributing all that to the thread. I just wanted to express my agreement for and support of everything you said. Bravo!
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
Thanks much, Tatiana, that's a relief to hear.

(Tho I'm rather sorry I helped to derail the thread so spectacularly, since I was far more interested in your and Strider's discussion on gender than any of this stuff, heh.)
 

---

Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 

quote:

---

Everything is dependent upon fallible interpretation.

---

It seems to me, to make a long story short, that this is the core of your complaint -- but it's a premise I disagree with quite explicitly. Specifically, I disagree with the implication: that because all positions held and observations of reality are subject to fallible interpretation, no meaningful distinctions between positions or epistemologies can be made. But this is clearly untrue. Not all forms of knowledge are created equal; not all epistemologies are equally capable of producing "truth," and not all "truths" are as true as others.

I'm sympathetic to your view, and understand why you hold it so tenaciously; since you're an agnostic Mormon, I can't imagine how you would function without holding that view. But I've seen you have variations of this conversation many times over the years, and it occurs to me that you will never know where the other party is coming from until you grant the possibility that one person's truth is not necessarily as valid as someone else's. After all, even though all observations are subject to fallible interpretation, only certain sorts of observation led to, say, the germ theory of medicine; had we relied on religious epistemology for our cures, we might still be wondering why God wanted so many people to have smallpox.

There are good and bad ways to form opinions. Not all opinions, despite your assertions to the contrary, are formed as a consequence of (or appeal to) group membership.

(For what it's worth, I also have no idea why you'd bother trying to assert that, for example, allegiance of any kind is tantamount to "religion." I understand that you're using the words interchangeably, here, but I don't know what you hope to gain by doing so. Would you be interested in explaining why you are invested in refusing to acknowledge distinctions between the terms?)

[ February 06, 2010, 09:08 PM: Message edited by: TomDavidson ]
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
Threads going off the rails is part of the delight that is hatrack. Like Survivor famously once said, having the group is like having four-wheel drive, the whole point is to go off-road.
 

---

Posted by MightyCow (Member # 9253) on :
 
I'm an atheist, and one of the primary tenets of my "religion" is that it's pointless to argue with people who have already decided that they've won the discussion, and will twist their argument to incomprehensibility to reject any cognitive dissonance that might arise from having a meaningful conversation.
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
Edit: well, this was responding to Tom's original, less detailed post and some of it is now irrelevant, but I'm too sleepy to go change it, alas.

Whereas I have no idea how you could conceivably think one could possibly function as an "agnostic Mormon" at all, dude. *laugh* But it's charming to know how incoherently I'm thought of.

You're reading me inaccurately, actually. I never said that there aren't beliefs that are "more correct" than others. I believe whole-heartedly that it is "more correct" to believe in God than to not believe in Him, just like I believe it's "more correct" to believe in evolution than some of the alternatives.

But we're not supposed to proselytize on this board, so I'm trying to be rigorous and not use my own religion as a "proof" of anything. I'm not quite succeeding, but the attempt is there, I totally get brownie points. *grin*

Obviously I'm criticizing your posts because I absolutely understand that "one person's truth is not necessarily as valid as someone else's. I merely refuse to grant you the scientifically unjustified position that my truth, in this conversation, is the invalid one.

This is all very circular; your post describes your beliefs far more accurately than mine, which makes sense because you're attempting to convert me to your religion without believing you believe in a religion in the first place! Don't worry, I don't begrudge you the attempt. *grin*

Heck, one of my foundational beliefs is that the Book of Mormon is, as Joseph Smith said it was, "the most correct book" so far as religion goes. But I'm not going to lie and say it's not a subjective choice to believe in what he said.

I think there are people who have read both the BoM and other competing scriptures and come away unconvinced by the BoM. That's just a matter of faith, and there are plenty of good people who don't share my beliefs.

The point is that all such choices to believe any authorities are just as subjective and dependent on faith, and so nothing is infallible, a term I'm not even sure has meaning. So when you invoke your "scientific" beliefs and say they disagree with my "scientific" beliefs, which are both different from a Creationist's "scientific" beliefs, it's useless to appeal to authority and say "Well, Science says my belief is more correct."

Obviously we disagree with what the evidence points to in the first place! So we have to go through the laborious and annoying process of trying to persuade each other to believe as we do by creating detailed stories which explain our point of view.

The more stories we're able to reconcile into a single pattern, the more we are able to account for different perspectives, the closer we'll get to "true reality", a concept and means of ordering our understanding of which I have faith but no "scientific proof" even exists at all. I'm in the middle of Hobbes right now, and like he says, I think our memories themselves are stories we imagine. Memento highlighted this aspect of life quite well, I thought. We reveal our character by choosing which faith we believe in.

It's hilarious, for instance, to watch Dawkins and Dennett heap scorn and pity on openly religious folk and then turn around and mourn Douglas Adams or suggest that they print up some collections of cool Carl Sagan quotes into a little "Bible" to help educate the masses.

Why, scientifically speaking, is "death" a "worse" state than life? How can you make any "scientific" statement or judgement about any question of morality at all? Why is a collection of scientific stories which we don't even know enough to know whether or not they are true somehow worth more than the physical records of real people who claim to have had dealings with Gods (the records which must have been written and believed by some people, because they helped to create more or less stable intergenerational cultures which still exist today and must have had some origin!)?

Of course some scientific stories are oftentimes more useful than some religious stories at performing certain tasks, like, say, electrical engineering. I don't want my mechanic believing that he can fix my internal combustion engine by drawing a pentagram on it. Some scientific stories are more useful than other scientific stories too, with each new model hopefully getting a little closer to the truth.

I'm glad that the people who can do calculus without a calculator exist, because when they team up with other folks who can weld large pieces of metal together, they can perform the useful miracle of creating airplanes with which I can visit my folks back west.

But I have seen too much evidence in my own life and the lives of others to dismiss my religion as the product of a frenzied mind. The stories you tell about your faith in a purposeless universe, in the absence of a deity of any kind, as far as I understand them, are incapable of reconciling experiences I have lived through, which are useless to detail because I know my own subjective experience and ordering of stories and networks of information is not the same subjective experience it would take in order to make sense of the countless stories you believe.

Everyone is different, you can't base the testimony of your life-story on what your friends believe, though you can be comforted when you come to a similar conclusion about a shared experience.

So yes, the line between allegiance and faith and organized religion is blurry at best, because every time we form a community, some form of communication is occurring, some form of transmission of a worldview is being shared to at least some degree, and if you agree with a particular worldview, it necessarily means you disagree with others, and therefore you must make a decision, based on absurdly incomplete information, about what the correct course of action to take is.

This is what I believe separates humanity from most other animal life: we have somehow shifted the survival of our species away from an emphasis on the individual and towards the formation of communities based on shared stories with which we manipulate social systems.

(Conveniently enough, I also believe that "in the beginning", was "the Word". *grin*)

No story can be told without editing information and ordering a fundamentally non-linear system into an approximately logical progression. No story can be told without a moral decision about what is or is not important. What matters is which stories you believe enough to act on.

Edit to add: Though I don't think we ever get a "full" understanding of anything in this life, I do believe that any true religion will have replicable results if we put it to the test. I believe in my religion because I've tested it, and it stood up to my tests, just as it has stood up to the testing of many other believers. We're required by our faith to test it ourselves.

The problem is that it's very difficult, despite the ingenious symbolic representation we primates have developed, to transmit the results of such tests to someone who has not had the same experiences.

[ February 06, 2010, 10:47 PM: Message edited by: Zotto! ]
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
MightyCow: Ah, so your rejection of even attempting a meaningful conversation is a result of my cognitive dissonance. Interesting that your seeming inability to articulate an argument more substantive than "well, I've prejudged you to be wrong, therefore I will not engage in attempting a reconciliation with you" is characterized as a plus. Maybe you're intending the irony, but it's actually a quite pious attitude.
 

---

Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by TomDavidson:
... (For what it's worth, I also have no idea why you'd bother trying to assert that, for example, allegiance of any kind is tantamount to "religion." I understand that you're using the words interchangeably, here, but I don't know what you hope to gain by doing so. Would you be interested in explaining why you are invested in refusing to acknowledge distinctions between the terms?)

---

Actually, reading through the OSC article he/she links several things about OSC's rants that I;ve noticed. By defining pretty much anything (global warming, university elitism, socialism, or even liking/disliking specific businesses) as religions, Card allows himself to use explicitly religious rhetoric to criticize pretty much anything.
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
I think his point is actually that the seemingly-differentiated superficial styles of rhetoric employed by all of those various communities are, at root, a form of religious expression themselves, used to bind believers together to a shared understanding of reality.

(I'm a "he". )
 

---

Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 

quote:

---

So when you invoke your "scientific" beliefs and say they disagree with my "scientific" beliefs, which are both different from a Creationist's "scientific" beliefs, it's useless to appeal to authority and say "Well, Science says my belief is more correct."

---

quote:

---

It's hilarious, for instance, to watch Dawkins and Dennett heap scorn and pity on openly religious folk and then turn around and mourn Douglas Adams or suggest that they print up some collections of cool Carl Sagan quotes into a little "Bible" to help educate the masses.

Why, scientifically speaking, is "death" a "worse" state than life?

---

quote:

---

Why is a collection of scientific stories which we don't even know enough to know whether or not they are true somehow worth more than the physical records of real people who claim to have had dealings with Gods (the records which must have been written and believed by some people, because they helped to create more or less stable intergenerational cultures which still exist today and must have had some origin!)?

---

quote:

---

I believe in my religion because I've tested it, and it stood up to my tests, just as it has stood up to the testing of many other believers.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zotto!:
... all of those various communities are, at root, a form of religious expression themselves, used to bind believers together to a shared understanding of reality.

---

Yes, I believe that is indeed a restatement of the idea that by whitewashing the differences between religious and non-religious groupings, Card can simultaneously saddle non-religious groups with the worst rhetoric that religion has to offer (dogma, inquisition, persecution, etc.), while removing from his frame of reference the advantages that non-religious groupings can have.

(For something completely unrelated, I am also pondering the undefined word 'hierocentric' which at a quick glance appears to be absent in online dictionaries)
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
I joined the LDS church this past September. 2005 was a looong lifetime ago.

I "submit" that you're the one having difficulties with this conversation, by the way. Your first sentence was, in fact, an unsubstantiated appeal to the authority of that community of people who "have better reasons" for believing in the scientific method's reliability in producing (conveniently undefined) "optimal" results. I'm supposed to have faith and take your word for it? What in the world is an "optimal" scientific outcome? This is the crux of the issue.

Heck, in what way is this dissimilar from a Creationist insisting that "Well, them folks at the Council of Nicea believed in an incorporeal God, and by golly that's good enough for me!"

What experiment did Dawkins do to falsify the hypothesis that Adams brought some sort of nebulous "value" to his life? Can he transfer this understanding to me? You keep asserting you can form values without some form of unscientific belief in "goodness" as opposed to "badness".

I have no doubt that Dawkins misses his friend. I miss Adams too! I'd rather he was still with us. When Dawkins goes, I'll be sad he's gone as well, since some of his insights into evolution are fascinating.

But I don't claim, as he does, that this subjective experience of grief is somehow "provable" to someone outside my head, outside my heart.

Nevertheless, I somehow manage to still believe and trust in the scientific method!

For what it's worth, I'd be happy to hear your answers any questions I ask you; that's why I ask them! You keep asserting that my comprehension of your arguments is flawed and then neglecting to actually tell me why. What other recourse do I have but to continue to believe what I believe, since no better alternative has been offered?

Edit: Wow, the grammar in that last paragraph is amusingly awful. I shall leave it standing for the amusement of all.

[ February 07, 2010, 12:17 AM: Message edited by: Zotto! ]
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
Mucus: well, if you want to interpret him that cynically, ain't no one gonna stop you, heh.

I do apologize, however, for using that rather eccentric term earlier. It's a technical word used (and, if I'm not mistaken, coined) by Professor Hugh Nibley back in the 1930's to describe, essentially, the Temple and/or Megalithic -centered communities of the ancient world.

(He beat out guys like Mircea Eliade, so I'm inclined to give his terms a little preference, but that was careless of me to use it in a context where it'd most likely be unfamiliar to those I'm speaking to.)

If you can stomach reading some of his work, I'd recommend two articles that help give a general background to the comparative history/theology he did:
http://tinyurl.com/yfuey2a
http://tinyurl.com/y969xhv

Or, heck, you could peruse a sampling of his ridiculously enormous corpus of writings here: http://tinyurl.com/yem4pkj (I'd especially emphasize the chapters from 'The World and the Prophets', but I am merely a drooling fanboy. >_>

Some of his conclusions were a little hasty, and some of his work is now dated (heck, he was publishing almost a century ago!), but the gist is still pretty darn good.

[ February 07, 2010, 12:33 AM: Message edited by: Zotto! ]
 

---

Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
 
Zotto, the atheists here are not taking you seriously because the only "argument" you're offering is to redefine a word in such a way as to make it useless. Are there similarities between the catholic church and a football team and nation-state? Yes. There's also similarities between oranges/bananas and chicken/lamp chops. Just because they're both food doesn't mean that there aren't radical differences between them and doesn't mean we should get rid of the different words we use to refer to them.
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
I don't think the distinction between the two words is useless, and I never said it was. In a sociology class, it makes sense to speak of "communities". In a theology class, it makes sense to speak of "religions".

At a restaurant, I can ask for a glass of water. In a lab, I can ask for a vial of H2O. Different contexts, different names. Same underlying referent.

Edit: Look, I'm only here because Tom claimed that Tatiana was incorrect to state that she believes in a system in which she could include the findings revealed by the scientific method without basing every single tenet of that faith on such findings.

His contention is simply incorrect, since he, and you, and I, and everyone obviously manage to get through life without having every aspect of reality "proved" by such a method. It is incorporated into our respective worldviews, but it is not the authority by which we undertake most of our actions. I just think it's silly and unscientific to pretend it is.
 

---

Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
 
Except that you still need a word to distinguish "a set of beliefs concerned with supernatural phenomena, morality and the nature of the universe" from "a group of people living together in a valley who've agreed on some rules so they can get along" and "a group of people who enjoy a particular pastime."

In a restaurant, you do not ask for wine when you mean grape juice because they are "sort of the same thing." There is a difference between a religion, a game, a society, and the application of the scientific method. There is also a difference between the supposed "faith" that when you jump up you will come back down versus the faith that there is an omnipotent God watching over you.
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
Well, I think the idea of "supernatural phenomena" is a contradiction in terms, if that helps ease the confusion. How can anything exist "above" or "outside" of nature?
 

---

Posted by MightyCow (Member # 9253) on :
 
Zotto! You can read anything you like into my religion, but you're wrong, because my religion is founded upon the tenet that I am always right.

Argue all you like, you'll never win.
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
And really, there is nothing that proves that gravity won't switch off tomorrow. We believe it doesn't because it hasn't yet, so far as we know. I'm fine with this, and I do indeed trust that when I jump I will fall back to earth, and basing scientific measurements off this understanding of our place in space-time has given us many benefits, which I can measure by using the moral precepts taught by my religion such as "life is sacred" and whatnot. But it's not scientifically "proven". And why pretend it is?

I'm fine with using different terms to describe different aspects of the same idea. You have offered nothing but an assertion to the contrary, without demonstrating any such thing.

Many games began as religious rituals. Many societies were founded on religious tenets. The scientific method takes many unsupported claims (like the fact that we have a hope of understanding reality through the teensy little network of stories collated from a few replications of a few experiments) as givens. It's not the end of the world.

... dude, I think I just morphed into Tresopax. *grin*
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
MC: well, have fun with that.
 

---

Posted by MightyCow (Member # 9253) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zotto!:
MC: well, have fun with that.

---

I'm not sure I'll have as much fun as you are, but at least I'm being honest about my argument.
 

---

Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zotto!:
Mucus: well, if you want to interpret him that cynically, ain't no one gonna stop you, heh.

---

Well, I don't necessarily know if hes doing it on purpose. I've gone back and forth on that one

quote:

---

... coined) by Professor Hugh Nibley back in the 1930's to describe, essentially, the Temple and/or Megalithic -centered communities of the ancient world.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zotto!:


... dude, I think I just morphed into Tresopax. *grin*

---

Are you proud of that?

And I have to say I think it's a little disingenuous to speak of gravity and Christian/Mormon religious beliefs as being somehow equivalent. Billions of people have lived their whole lives without ever hearing the Gospel. Not a single one has ever been unaffected by gravity, even for one microsecond. Even if there are people who can levitate, they are still indirectly affected by gravity, by virtue of the Earth's atmosphere continuing to stick around. But whatever. There's no talking logic to a believer.
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
Edit: this was to MightyCow & Mucus.

Ah, so now an unsubstantiated assertion that I'm not honest. Heh. Isn't there the tiniest lil' possibility that I'm honestly doing the best I can to communicate with y'all? I'm sorry I'm not better at it; I am but a young lad, unversed in the subtle arts of rhetoric!

... and of course Nibley's arguments haven't gained much traction in non-Mormon circles. *laugh* A fair number of the people who actually possess the intellectual honesty to read his arguments before condemning them for a lack of popular acceptance are the same people who are open-minded enough to read the Book of Mormon, and we all know where that kind of nonsense leads.

Disagree with him all you like, dude/tte. Heaven knows I disagree with the zany writers people shove on me all the time. But do so with a knowledge of what he writes, y'know?
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
Steven: Well, I'm not ashamed of it. *laugh* But of course Tres is the dude people associate with that particular argument, so of course I am incapable of not bringing him up.

Now, of course, I realize that your post contained the highest caliber of ratiocination - truly the epitome of the white-burning light of Wisdom, shining graciously upon our ignorance to guide our way through in these dark times - but I still disagree, in my ignorant country-boy manner.

I never said that the same number of people affected by gravity were affected by the Gospel. Your post is an argument in favor of missionary work, you realize.
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
... and with that, I've been told by sources I trust that I really need to go to bed. 'Night, fair denizens of the 'rack.
 

---

Posted by MightyCow (Member # 9253) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zotto!:
Edit: this was to MightyCow & Mucus.

Ah, so now an unsubstantiated assertion that I'm not honest.

---

You misunderstand. If you want to insist that Atheism is a religion, then you have to treat it as one.

That means that I get to have unassailable articles of faith, which have been revealed to me by a perfect source of knowledge, and it is insensitive of you to attack my beliefs by expecting me to defend things that I hold on faith.

One of the things that I hold on faith is that I am always right. So it isn't that I making an unsubstantiated assertion that you are not honest, it is simply that my faith tells me that I am right, and so by default when you disagree with me you are wrong.

I'm simply using your own religious argument, but speaking plainly.
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
Zotto!, congratulations on your Baptism! I was scratching my head thinking "Zotto! is LDS? When did this happen?" and wondering if I could have somehow forgotten that you were. Anyway, Bravo! and Bravo again! You're giving excellent descriptions of my worldview, and great additions to the post.

"Of course some scientific stories are oftentimes more useful than some religious stories at performing certain tasks, like, say, electrical engineering. I don't want my mechanic believing that he can fix my internal combustion engine by drawing a pentagram on it."

I wanted to add an odd aside to this from my experience as both a mechanic and an electrical engineer, that the "aha" insights that often allow us to fix machines that are not working right in our daily interactions with them (designing, building, inspecting, and commissioning them, as well as repairing them) come from outside science.

The scientific method is extremely powerful as a means of understanding nature and fixing machines. However, smack in the middle of the hardest-core science there is (use of the scientific method) there is a step, let's call it step 2, which says "come up with various hypotheses about what's going on." It's interesting to observe that science itself, even Science itself, has nothing at all to say about where those hypotheses come from. There's no method for generating them except "play around with ideas that underlie the system", "try weird inputs and see if something unexpected happens that gives you a clue", "look at smaller subsystems and see if you can isolate them to be sure you understand how they're behaving" and so on.

The answer often (not always) comes in an "aha" moment, in which it just jumps out of your head fully formed. Science has absolutely nothing to say about how to come up with the right answer. The place from whence right answers arise is a total mystery. It's irrational. It has to do with dreams and sausages and lunch breaks, and snakes swallowing their tails. As a lifelong practicing scientist, engineer, programmer, designer, builder, etc. I can say that it's a great joy when the "aha" moment comes. The whole job is fun mainly because of those "aha" moments, which are delightful in direct proportion to how much time, energy, effort, confusion, and hair-pulling preceded them. Anyway, Science and the Scientific Method have this mystery built into their very core which is by definition outside of Science.

So science doesn't work well as a complete explanation of all observable phenomena, since its own self depends for its very existence on a mechanism or process or function for which it has no explanation or instructions. Thought I'd toss that idea out for your delectation.

[ February 07, 2010, 03:28 AM: Message edited by: Tatiana ]
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
The next one I watched was Strider's fabulous 14 year old piano player. She was amazing. The coolest part was when she improvised on a theme from five random notes picked out by Goldie Hawn. She came up in just a short minute or two with a piece I really liked. I thought her chord sequence was quite nice. The theme itself was lovely, as well.

Tonight I watched again the one about infecting kids with the "I can" bug. I love that idea, and wanted to understand more about how it works. The main idea seems to be blurring the lines between school and real life, and also letting the kids take charge themselves of what they want to do. Looking on the aProCh website I couldn't find much more in the way of instructions on how to carry it out. I'd like to see the contents of the workbook or packet they sent to other schools to try to infect those children as well. It was something like 1. pick one idea 2. take one week to work on it. And then a list of a bunch of stuff different kids did. I want to know more because I'd love to do something like that myself around here.

In fact, why couldn't we infect hatrackers with the "i can" bug and see what happens here? I think that could work. What should we try first?
 

---

Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 

quote:

---

What experiment did Dawkins do to falsify the hypothesis that Adams brought some sort of nebulous "value" to his life? Can he transfer this understanding to me? You keep asserting you can form values without some form of unscientific belief in "goodness" as opposed to "badness".

---

quote:

---

Heck, in what way is this dissimilar from a Creationist insisting that "Well, them folks at the Council of Nicea believed in an incorporeal God, and by golly that's good enough for me!"

---

quote:

---

Look, I'm only here because Tom claimed that Tatiana was incorrect to state that she believes in a system in which she could include the findings revealed by the scientific method without basing every single tenet of that faith on such findings.

---

quote:

---

A fair number of the people who actually possess the intellectual honesty to read his arguments before condemning them for a lack of popular acceptance are the same people who are open-minded enough to read the Book of Mormon, and we all know where that kind of nonsense leads.

---

quote:

---

The answer often (not always) comes in an "aha" moment, in which it just jumps out of your head fully formed. Science has absolutely nothing to say about how to come up with the right answer. The place from whence right answers arise is a total mystery. It's irrational.

---

quote:

---

I have no doubt that Dawkins misses his friend. I miss Adams too! I'd rather he was still with us. When Dawkins goes, I'll be sad he's gone as well, since some of his insights into evolution are fascinating.

But I don't claim, as he does, that this subjective experience of grief is somehow "provable" to someone outside my head, outside my heart.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zotto!:
... and of course Nibley's arguments haven't gained much traction in non-Mormon circles.

---

Technically, I was referring to the actual word 'hierocentric.'
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
While the neural apparatus for "aha" insights is certainly interesting, the more important feature I'm referring to is "the place where true hypotheses come from".

If science understands that, and how to replicate it, then we would be able to solve immediately all the unsolved scientific puzzles by merely following the cookbook, the instructions, for obtaining true hypotheses. That cookbook is what I'm referring to that is totally outside science.

Strider, you're a fan of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, aren't you? Do you remember when the protagonist realized that about science and it sent him into a sort of metaphysical tailspin?

[ February 07, 2010, 08:52 PM: Message edited by: Tatiana ]
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
Continuing on through Strider's list, I just watched the talk on endangered cultures. It sure is sad. That's how I always feel about the loss of species, too, and why I've mostly sort of avoided thinking about it too much. It's too big a problem for me, and I have too little hope that we can really slow down or reverse the process. You know? I know that's not a reason not to care. And it's not a reason not to at least try to make a beginning at fixing things. But so far I've felt called to other endeavors.

I find it interesting to try to think how people must have thought in our own culture before Newtonian physics was known, for instance. How could they have thought heavy things fall faster? Why didn't they realize it was worth checking to see if things like that were true?

I remember when I was little, probably around 4, I was jumping on my mom's bed and at the height of each jump I would release my stuffed dog Poocheepoo, and then I'd watch him fall at the same rate as me. At the bottom of the jump I'd catch him again and release him at the top. After doing this over and over for 10 minutes or so, I understood intuitively that it was really true that everything falls at the same rate (neglecting air resistance).

My mom was pretty progressive, I guess, in allowing us to jump on beds and play with water in the sink and do all that experimentation. But when I got to first quarter physics in college and my fellow students were objecting to the idea, I was thinking "didn't you guys jump on the bed when you were little?" I guess many moms don't allow that sort of thing, or maybe I'm just specially geeky and thought all that stuff was fascinating from as early as I can remember. Our family also must have been talking about it, because I was like "yeah, that IS right", so I had heard of the concept.

Anyway, how could people ever have thought those pre-Newtonian things about how nature works? To me it seems inconceivable, and that's in our own culture, just an earlier time.

I think it's incredibly important that we preserve all these different worldviews of the various human cultures for the exact reason this guy says, that we will likely need diverse concepts in our ideasphere in order to solve the problems of the future. Also, it's just fascinating and endlessly fruitful to study other cultures. We can't really understand our own until we can see it from the outside looking in.

Great talk! I love TED!
 

---

Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
 
My, my, Tom, you get impatiently testy when someone questions your faith. I guess some things are too sacred to joke about, huh? Next time someone recommends that you pray about something to "answer this one for yourself" because you asked "not only an answerable question but an answered one", don't come crying to me about how unreasonable religious people are.

Yeah, I take your premises as minimal too. I don't distrust the scientific method. I agree that some axioms are better than others. I have made this abundantly clear.

Apparently I'm to be thought of as heretical if I refuse to acknowledge your implied (but ostensibly and incoherently disavowed) fiction that any of these axioms have been scientifically proven to be any "better" than the other.

You are positing a value even though the concept of "value" has never been "proven" by science. I don't see any benefit in doing this. I don't see the harm in taking the basic propositions necessary for reproducible experimentation to function on faith.

You are the one having comprehension difficulties, brother, not me.

Strider: I was aware of all the information you included in your post, and took it into account when making my earlier statements.

My point is not the physical causes of the feeling of grief. Of course every feeling and thought has a neural correlate. How else could we feel or think them? *laugh*

The ability to comprehend the complex network of causal interactions between different elements which forms reality in no way implies that there is some form of "value" attached to that reality. We need stories to impose such things as "killing bad", "sex good". We obviously do these things without language, but the ability to assign a judgement of their morality to them is only possible through stories.

Regardless of whether or not we will ever be able to simulate identical subjective responses in the brains of people who did not live through the event which produced such experience, why does Dawkins think that the experience and emotion he feels - which he labels "grief" - are "bad", "unpleasant", "wrong", or whatever synonym you can come up with?

Because he believes in a scientifically unproven and unprovable story in which the death of a friend is "bad".

This, however, was a beautiful gem of an admission: "We can take advantage of our ability to be empathetic and understand the mental states of others by using our own experiences and memories to find similar ground. And we don't even need science for this!"

... since that's what I've been saying this entire time.

Also, at this point, I officially give up my part in this conversation, since I have a terrible week of school ahead of me. Yeek.

On to the next TEDTalk!
 

---

Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 

quote:

---

My, my, Tom, you get impatiently testy when someone questions your faith. I guess some things are too sacred to joke about, huh?

---

quote:

---

Apparently I'm to be thought of as heretical if I refuse to acknowledge your implied (but ostensibly and incoherently disavowed) fiction that any of these axioms have been scientifically proven to be any "better" than the other.

---

quote:

---

You are the one having comprehension difficulties, brother, not me.

---

quote:

---

We need stories to impose such things as "killing bad", "sex good".

---

quote:

---

why does Dawkins think that the experience and emotion he feels - which he labels "grief" - are "bad", "unpleasant", "wrong", or whatever synonym you can come up with?

Because he believes in a scientifically unproven and unprovable story in which the death of a friend is "bad".

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Tatiana:
While the neural apparatus for "aha" insights is certainly interesting, the more important feature I'm referring to is "the place where true hypotheses come from".

If science understands that, and how to replicate it, then we would be able to solve immediately all the unsolved scientific puzzles by merely following the cookbook, the instructions, for obtaining true hypotheses.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Tatiana:
It might be that my brief comments on the talks I'm watching are serving to derail this thread and undermining the very good system Mike and Strider proposed for splitting the threads into discussions of individual talks. I'm sorry about that!

---

quote:

---

I fear that the very intriguing talk we're discussing now about human sexuality, love, and pair bonding may be getting short shrift.

---

Perhaps we've said all that needs to be said on that topic. Again, it's not controversial enough. Maybe interesting lively discussion of TED talks is impossible, since the most common reactions are "that's interesting / amazing / though-provoking" and "I totally agree!" Which leaves the discussion open to anyone willing to post a ridiculous unrelated claim and those who are willing to indulge such claims (cheap shots, sorry (sort of), but I think justified in this case).

Anyway, if you think a particular topic is interesting enough that it can stand on its own, I'd say go ahead and start a new thread on it.
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
Thanks! I appreciate that. I think you're right about the RoC. Still, I'm kind of sad that nobody wants to talk more about sex robots and society. Maybe I should try to spawn a thread about that talk, because it's got some pretty controversial implications.

I'm coming close to the end of the posted favorites, so I guess when I'm done I'll just wander off on topics like "the creative spark" which is a good one, and see what else I find.
 

---

Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
 
I'd love to have a meaty discussion on most of these TED talks but I think that we will need to start a new thread for each topic to make it work.

Otherwise, the discussion is going to devolve into an argument between theists and atheists everytime and I'm just not interested in having that discussion yet again. Its a horse that's been beaten to death.
 

---

Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 

quote:

---

Science has almost nothing to say about how to go about coming up with correct hypotheses to test.

---

quote:

---

Still, I'm kind of sad that nobody wants to talk more about sex robots and society.

---

quote:

---

Science has almost nothing to say about how to go about coming up with correct hypotheses to test.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Tatiana:
Still, I'm kind of sad that nobody wants to talk more about sex robots and society. Maybe I should try to spawn a thread about that talk, because it's got some pretty controversial implications.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Tatiana:
Mighty Cow, this is a famous question of metaphysics. I think I must not have communicated it to you very well because you seem to be missing the point.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Tatiana:
Mighty Cow, this is a famous question of metaphysics. I think I must not have communicated it to you very well because you seem to be missing the point.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Juxtapose:
Why couldn't those things become part of the scientific method?

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by MightyCow:
My arguement is that these "creative" methods are entirely scientific, just behind the scenes. Ones mind makes the various guesses and checks and tests, without us consciously observing the process.

Where would any sort of supernatural or mystical methodology come into the picture?

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by MightyCow:
My arguement is that these "creative" methods are entirely scientific, just behind the scenes. Ones mind makes the various guesses and checks and tests, without us consciously observing the process.

Where would any sort of supernatural or mystical methodology come into the picture?

---

quote:

---

the scientific method itself, the very bastion of rationality, depends for its functioning on this fundamentally irrational, non-reproducible, and quirky process of inventing new correct hypotheses.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by MightyCow:
Call me foolish if you will, but you KNOW how to generate correct hypotheses. You can't do it every time, but knowing how to hit a baseball doesn't let someone hit a home run every time either.

I don't see what is so hard to understand about that. Can you or can you not make correct hypotheses?

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by swbarnes2:
A robot scientist named Adam was able to generate correct hypotheses about gene functions in yeast, and experimentally confirmed many of them. Another computer was able to work out Newton's laws of motion by observing the motions of systems like double pendulums. When NASA wanted a new antenna design, they had an evolutionary algorithm design it. Its design was better than any "a-ha" moment thought up by a person. Does that make the behavior of the algorithm, or the computer running it beyond science?

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by The Rabbit:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Juxtapose:
Why couldn't those things become part of the scientific method?

---

Well first of, I suppose they could. We could change the scientific method so it includes anything we want from crystal gazing to foofoo dust, but it would be something fundamentally different from what it is now.

But second, and much more fundamentally, the scientific method requires objectivity. Coming up with hypotheses and ways to test them are creative processes that are fundamentally subjective. The process is no different than writing poetry or composing music. The difference comes in after the creative process where we try objectively to determine the validity of a scientific idea. Coming up with the idea in the first place is not something that can be objectified.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by The Rabbit:
QUOTE]Give me a reference please. To what extent this is even interesting depends a great deal on what information these robots were given and how they made their deductions.

---

quote:

---

High school students can come up with Newton's Laws of motion given properly designed experiments and proper guidance.

---

quote:

---

My aside (and it was just an aside) was to point out to anyone foolish enough to think that science provides any sort of complete system of understanding of the nature of reality, that the scientific method itself, the very bastion of rationality, depends for its functioning on this fundamentally irrational, non-reproducible, and quirky process of inventing new correct hypotheses. Science doesn't understand how to generate new correct hypotheses, and the problem "how to generate new correct hypotheses" isn't the sort of problem science can solve.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Juxtapose:
I grant certainly that the creative process is something that is currently difficult to deal with objectively. I don't grant that it is necessarily so.

By analogy, at some point in the past the "test your hypoythesis" portion of the method was also pretty vague. There weren't established standards for conducting experiments. Then someone invented the double-blimd concept, and someone else the control group. Why is it so impossible that, as our knowledge of the human brain improves, we will one day be able to reliably reproduce creativity?

---

quote:

---

1. a. Proceeding from or taking place in a person's mind rather than the external world.
b. Particular to a given person; personal:

---

quote:

---

3. a. Relating to the thinking subject, proceeding from or taking place within the subject; having its source in the mind; (in the widest sense) belonging to the conscious life.

4. a. Pertaining or peculiar to an individual subject or his mental operations; depending upon one's individuality or idiosyncrasy; personal, individual.

---

quote:

---

In those to senses of the word, the creative processes is fundamentally and inherently subjective. It isn't simply an artifact of current limitations. Just like a poem or painting, a scientific hypothesis arises from the working of the conscious mind of an individual. It is inherently subjective, it can't be objectified without making it something all together different from what it is.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Juxtapose:
By analogy, at some point in the past the "test your hypoythesis" portion of the method was also pretty vague. There weren't established standards for conducting experiments. Then someone invented the double-blimd concept, and someone else the control group. Why is it so impossible that, as our knowledge of the human brain improves, we will one day be able to reliably reproduce creativity?

---

quote:

---

[2] Not quite true: counting on fingers, abacuses, and similar techniques have been around for a long time.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by The Rabbit:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Juxtapose:
By analogy, at some point in the past the "test your hypoythesis" portion of the method was also pretty vague. There weren't established standards for conducting experiments. Then someone invented the double-blimd concept, and someone else the control group. Why is it so impossible that, as our knowledge of the human brain improves, we will one day be able to reliably reproduce creativity?

---

That isn't historically accurate. The concept of a control has been around pretty much as long as the scientific method. Double blind tests are a not something fundamentally new either, they are a technique for ensuring objectivity, which has always been part of the scientific method.

What you are proposing is different from the scientific method employed today in a very revolutionary way. Its is in many ways more revolutionary than Newton's overthrowing of Aristotelian physics.

---

quote:

---

In those to senses of the word, the creative processes is fundamentally and inherently subjective. It isn't simply an artifact of current limitations. Just like a poem or painting, a scientific hypothesis arises from the working of the conscious mind of an individual. It is inherently subjective, it can't be objectified without making it something all together different from what it is.

---

Or we realize, at some point, that the definition of subjective that we've been using is largely a fiction - a fiction that's roughly analogous to me talking about the documents folder in my computer. There are certainly neither documents nor folders (in the traditional sense) in my computer. I suspect that, over time, "subjective" will grow ever closely more synonymous with "perspective".
 

---

Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
 
I thought this new XKCD comic was entirely apropos to the discussion we're having here. I think the XKCD guy must read hatrack, or something.
 

---

Posted by steven (Member # 8099) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Tatiana:
I think the XKCD guy must read hatrack, or something.

---

quote:

---

To me those type thought experiments are so contrived that I don't feel their applicability to real life very strongly. They become an exercise in meaninglessness to me after a while, because they claim to know with absolute certainty what will happen in each case, and I think our tough life decisions are always made in a state of uncertainty as to outcome in all directions.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by King of Men:
"There is a difference between choosing to minimise the casualties in a group where everyone is already under threat; and minimising the casualties by adding someone to the threatened group", remains the same whether or not your thought experiment includes uncertainty.

---

quote:

---

Actually, I like your formulation of the problem, but in the first scenario, the one person would in fact have been safe if we took no action at all and let the train car careen into the five people at the end of the track. So he wasn't under threat at first either.

---

quote:

---

because it just feels mostly meaningless and unreal to me.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Parkour:
Wow. This whole thread was amazing to read.

And now I will finish posting on my hatrack religion and then go play some of my call of duty religion, get paid for my employment religion, then go drink at a fundamentally religious party with my friend-religions.

---