quote:Only if the supernatural doesn't interact with the physical world. If there is a supernatural, and it has an affect on the physical, then my epistmology can handle it. And if there is no affect on the physical world, then its hardly relevant, now is it?
Edit: That is to say, two pages from the post containing your question. Three pages from this post. Or in other words, on page 3, assuming you have 50 posts per page.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Oh, good, KoM posted the quote right there for me to demonstrate that it is different from KoM's criteria.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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Actually, thinking about it, we can handle your hurricane example as well. In this case our control sample is the second-most likely spot for a hurricane to form. We form an estimate of the probability per unit time for hurricanes to form at the most and second-most likely spots. Then we measure the actual occurrences. Clearly, our model takes into account only the directly observable effects. If the cosmic game hypothesis is true, then hurricanes will form in the most likely spot at a rate greater than we would expect from our model; but our model will correctly predict the rate for the second-most-likely spot (and all other places). We can now confirm or deny your cosmic dice theory, using science.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Not if said dice game has been going on for longer than people have been measuring weather patterns, and therefore affects our understanding of what it means to be a "likely spot."
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Take sufficiently accurate measurements of where water and air are going, on and off the ocean. Form two sets of Newton's laws: One using the data that includes hurricane formation, one without. (You can take the second set on the Moon, if oyu like.) If an unknown force shows up in one set, you have your cosmic dice game.
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If only meteorology were that simple, even without cosmic dice! Then I would've known to bring my umbrella and coat TODAY, instead of yesterday.
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The question was what can be attacked with scientific methods, not what can practically be done with today's technology.
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You do know that the current limitations on meteorology are less an issue of technology than they are of the number of details in such complex systems? We can predict the weather with a great deal of accuracy. The problem is, gathering the info and making the calculations necessary for such accuracy take long enough that the weather we are predicting will be almost upon us.
Complexity. Huh. I wonder if that might be relevant . . .
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Not relevant. Sufficiently advanced technology can do that easily. Just make a bunch of little nanobots that broadcast their location and ID, put them in the water, and see where they go. Please do not bring these boring engineering details into it, they are quite extraneous to the issue of what can or cannot in principle be done with scientific epistemology.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Secondly, it's not even a hypothetical, it's an illustration. An analogy, as I have clearly stated in as many words. Apparently though, I'm not worth paying any attention to.
C. you guys are, as Dagonee points out, smarter than this. You are being obtuse, whether it is deliberate or not.
I made a very simple assertion on the third page of this thread: God is not provable or disprovable by scientific method
Paul said any God that matters is.
Dagonee and I have both come up with separate hypothetical examples of things not detectable by science that could make a difference (in my case, I would assert *has* made a difference-- and I mean "mercy", not the cat).
This was to refute Paul's assertion that anything which has an affect on the physical world can be detectable by science... as one counter example is usually considered adequate to disprove a universal-- which Paul is definitely claiming here.
And you guys keep wanting us to simply accept that Paul is right and move on, without addressing the counterexample beyond asserting that it is begging the question.... which we clearly do not consider adequate.
You are like the fundamentalist with his bible... you keep saying "it says right here, 'my epistemology is the only valid one'" and don't do anything to address the reasons why we think your epistemology is flawed-- namely that it leaves out a whole host of likely necessary and certainly essentially human concepts like love, mercy, justice and the like.
Now some here (I'm fairly sure from other conversations that Tom feels this way) would say that this means those things are mere figments of the collective human imagination. I say it means that a purely science-based epistemology is flawed.
Until you show me why this not so, we really can't go any further... do you, Paul, really expect me to just toss aside every Platonic Idea I believe in because *you* say an epistemology based on the scientific method is the only valid one? "Oh, how silly of me! I've been begging the question all along! Freewill, Justice, Love... those are all illusions! it's so obvious now that Paul has explained that I'm begging the question!"
Posts: 3846 | Registered: Apr 2004
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quote: Eventually, this cat will have no affect on the world, as we apply more and more scientific tests and methodologies, and my statement that it either does not exist or has no affect on the world stands.
This is precisely the crux. It's the whole God of the Gaps thing.
As we get better and better at detecting things which might be the cat, the cat -- by refusing to manifest in any way that might be detected -- is actually writing itself out of existence.
If, for example, we were to put all the people of Earth under constant video surveillance, the cat would for all meaningful purposes cease to exist. By consciously acting to prevent the detection of its effects, it has hemmed itself into an environment where it can take no actions that might be regarded as causes.
I'll bring this back to God, to simplify: if God cannot be detected by science, God will be forced out of all human endeavor as science expands. In a very real way, this has already happened and continues to happen.
For this reason, I believe the claim that there are supernatural phenomena whose effects can neither be measured nor predicted to be untenable. This is not to say that there are not phenomena whose causes are enormously complex and may well not be understood in our lifetime; of course such things exist. But restricting the realm of God to the unobservable will be more and more obviously a losing strategy as we become better and better at observation; the only room left for observations of "God" will be in one's own mind -- and I believe that we'll solve the mysteries of the brain within the next two hundred years. Once every inch of our thoughts are mapped, where else could "God" possibly hide?
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:Dagonee and I have both come up with separate hypothetical examples of things not detectable by science that could make a difference (in my case, I would assert *has* made a difference-- and I mean "mercy", not the cat).
Um, no. I think I showed that the cat is detectable by science; as for mercy, if you can come up with a definition other than "A pattern of behaviour involving the use of less than maximal force on defeated enemies", you are welcome to do so, but such a pattern is certainly readily detectable and understandable. So, your 'counterexamples' aren't actually anything of the sort, and therefore Paul's universal has not been refuted.
Also, I do not see where anyone is just waving these examples aside, as you assert; we've been putting considerable effort into showing that they are open for science to study. Tone down the indignation.
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And, by the way, in listing your three points, you went "Firstly, Secondly, C". Therefore your arguments are clearly irrational and not worth listening to.
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And, as has already been pointed out (I think by the principals here involved) "Jim-Me" is both irrational and complex (that is to say, has an imaginary component).
The Cat wasn't an example, KoM. This is the third time I have said that in as many words. Do you yet begin to understand my frustration? You are the first person who has addressed "Mercy" since I first brought it up 2 or 3 pages back. So yeah, I'm feeling a bit ignored and waved aside right now.
And I would answer your definition by saying I am talking about "Mercy" the concept, not "mercy" the action... but I'm going to be a lot busier today and don't really have the time to stick around and slug it out, especially in light of how effective I wasn't yesterday.
Posts: 3846 | Registered: Apr 2004
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"You are like the fundamentalist with his bible... you keep saying "it says right here, 'my epistemology is the only valid one'" and don't do anything to address the reasons why we think your epistemology is flawed-- namely that it leaves out a whole host of likely necessary and certainly essentially human concepts like love, mercy, justice and the like."
I don't think it does. A scientific epistomology is perfectly capable of dealing with mental states, and in fact is already starting to do so. There's quite a bit of fascinating research on love, for example, if you care to look around at it.
An epistomology is developed after figuring out what types of things are worth knowing. I would say anything that affects the world is worth knowing, and anything that doesn't affect the world hardly matters... its not worth knowing, because it doesn't mean anything. There can be know meaning to something without an affect, because affects are what make meaning.
And things that affect the world are measurable, at some level. Quantifiable. "What WAS the affect? The affect is that the cat ate the treat." There is a physically observable phenomenom, or affect of a phenomenom associated with anything that alters the world in any way.
If I want to know about things that alter the world in any way, then, I need an epistomology that can handle those alterations. And so I develop one. The scientific method. It can handle any alteration, any change, any affect, on the world that is observable.
As has been demonstrated on this thread, we can certainly handle dagonee's dice game or the invisible cat. You may not LIKE that we can handle those situations, or may not like the way in which we handle those situations...but at the very least, as tom says, science makes the cat irrelevant. You limit god to a god of the gaps. And every year, we figure out more and more ways, develop more and more technologies, to understand the world around us.
If the supernatural really is something that science can't comprehend, then at some point, the supernatural is going to have zero affect on the world. And at that point, who cares? And if the supernatural does have an affect on the world, at some point we'll be able to understand it scientifically. Maybe not in my lifetime, but timeline isn't what we're arguing about.
Posts: 4112 | Registered: May 2001
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quote:The Cat wasn't an example, KoM. This is the third time I have said that in as many words. Do you yet begin to understand my frustration?
Then I must say that I do not understand what the purpose of the cat was.
Touching your 'mercy the concept': If you speak of the way humans hold mercy in their brains as a possibility, as a way that people can in principle act, then that is neuroscience. If you're talking about some kind of Platonic Ideal, then it doesn't actually affect the physical world at all except in the two ways I've mentioned, which can indeed be studied by science. Who cares whether there exists some 'Perfect Mercy' somewhere off in the clouds of conceptual space? We can certainly study the effects of mercy, and that's all we care about.
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