So, what's the general consensus here on evolution?

[bsd777]

bsd777, Ann Coulter is not a good reference on the matter, regardless of her book's content, or how well you received it, or however informed her argument. This much has to be understood. It's like discussing US foreign policy with a guy who insists that the debate cannot proceed until his opponent reads up on the pertinent works of Henry Rollins or Iggy Pop. No one is going to read the Coulter book. Toss us an excerpt or something for God's sake.

Just planting a seed, I hope. Maybe you can look for it the next time you are at the library? But, I can't read from a copy, I'll have to go check it back out first. :-)

My suggestion for you Roo is start with Stein as a warm-up to Coulter. He's a great read and has books on a variety of subjects including Politics, Investment and one on being a father to his adopted son. A truly great conservative mind. I'm up too late. Headed for bed. Later!

[bsd777]

I hate ann coulter as much as I hate allan combs. **** all these stupid ass hat pundits.... real hard;;;;;;

Well that's not very nice. But she is pretty hot.

I think she's brilliant.

night night!

[shikitohno]

bsd777, Ann Coulter is not a good reference on the matter, regardless of her book's content, or how well you received it, or however informed her argument. This much has to be understood. It's like discussing US foreign policy with a guy who insists that the debate cannot proceed until his opponent reads up on the pertinent works of Henry Rollins or Iggy Pop. No one is going to read the Coulter book. Toss us an excerpt or something for God's sake.

Thank you Roo. bsd777, you hardly have to be a tenured professor to get publish in a scholarly journal. Same with publishing an academic book. Providing that they have proper citations to back up their claims, and use sound methods in their research. Peer-review decreases the chances of someone passing off shoddy research or bad methods as sound science. To reiterate what Roo said with a different example, what your doing is akin to me asking you to debate how to interpret the Bible, but insisting that you must first read the Ramayana. While her take on it may be interesting, her work is ultimately irrelevant to the discussion at hand. At the very least, toss us her references for her claims. Asking someone to stay on topic is hardly pissing.

Let's try another tactic though. What is it that intelligent design has to offer that you find so interesting? Also, since it's apparently an error on my part to assume the designer is God from Judeo-Christian religion, how did this intelligent designer come to be as intelligent as he was? If the human body is so incredibly complex, surely a being capable of designing such a thing must be at least as complex, if not more so than humans. How do you solve the potential endless string of designers necessary to sustain this without resorting to either making the designer God, or using evolution, but only in the case of the designer?

Dog, seems like philosophy is in need of a shaking up then. I'd say that I would try and double major (it does interest me), but I've got a friend doing a philosophy major, and it doesn't sound like a work load I could handle. He said his school requires him to learn French, German, Latin and Ancient Greek as part of the degree. Although, I'd only need to learn the last three, since I've already got French down to the point where I can read philosophy texts...Still, what you're saying logically makes sense, but is at odds with what I can see all around me. Maybe when I'm old and retired, I'll devote my time to a futile pursuit of a non-binary form of logic that let's us neatly skirt the issue. Wait, that sounds harder than the philosophy degree. Give me a few years, I'll see what I can do with the philosophy end of things and get back to you. Until then, I'll have to be content to read the odd book and hope they don't lose me by getting too technical with the terms. I think the only reason I can read stuff by Slavoj Žižek is because after he gets through tossing about all sorts of terms I need to look up he gives an example of what he means that I understand.

[sgreger1]

The universe is likely very different than we understand it to be. Things appear to make sense to us now and we think we have it figured out for the most part, but to assume this (considering how young science is relative to our overall time on earth) is kind of arrogant. While we can see a rock and feel it, or know that gravity exists, the root structure that creates this complex system of rule is still somewhat of a mystery.

I believe in god but I don't see that any of it points towards evidence of a god, if he were god, why make so many complex rules etc, why not just snap it into existence without all that extra stuff. And if our purpose was to sit here and worship constantly, than why are the mountains so beautiful, why did god use so many colors in his pallet when painting the universe, and why does the snowflake catch my eye as something beautiful? It is all very odd. Especially with the new research in quantum physics, we are starting to see that the closer and deeper we look, the less solid things seem to be, plus there’s all these exemptions from our rules, like if traveling at the speed of light or around a black hole with immense gravity etc, suddenly everything changes. Why would god create it that way since there are no humans in a black hole, why the need to create these exceptions as they are not necessarily relevant to human existence?


My thoughts is that the universe does not seem at all tailored to humans, but is rather a very complex system that I think has likely brought life to more places than just here on earth.


What if it's all like a videogame? Think about it, in a videogame, there is physics, if you jump from a mountain you will die, if you shoot an enemy in the leg they will fall to their knees. Everything looks solid and feels solid, but if you look at the actual engine running the thing, the picture is very different from what the player in the game observes. While everything around him seems to exist, just outside of his view everything only exists as potential, there is a code set in place to render it as soon as it comes into view, but for the sake of saving processor space, the whole game world is not rendered all at once, but rather only the part you are currently observing. While I may be in one area doing something, sure the math is still running, deciding the probability that an enemy will spawn in my area, and the math is also running for the areas i'm not currently observing, yet they exist only as numbers and are not rendered until I am actually in the area observing them. What if this is what the universe is like? What if this is nothing more than some kind of simulation, what if we are all in a computer?

And what if it's a dream? Think about it, when i dream everything feels real, objects are solid, I have the ability to think and the ability to think about the fact I am thinking, it's just like real life; I see people I know and interact with them with full dialog, thinking they made up the words and are saying them to me, but in reality the whole thing only exists in my head. Since I know I dream like this, I know my brain is capable of (in theory) creating a completely independent universe that is only relevant to me. It can insert other people that seem real, follow the day night cycles, appear to enforce the laws of gravity and physics, I can feel pain etc etc, yet in reality it's all in my head and not actually real even though it seems real to me, the observer. Given that the brain has this power and utilizes it every night when I sleep, what is to say that that's not what my awake (real) world is? What's not to say that my brain isn't just creating the whole thing; the people around me, the breeze in my hair, even though it seems real it may only be a product of my imagination and the universe may only exist (like in a dream) to serve me, though at the time there is no evidence that this is what is occurring?




My point is that we have a long way to go. For now we have to stick with science and the facts at hand because it's all we've got to go on, but I think someday our understanding of the universe, how it operates, and what laws govern it will be very different than today.

[shikitohno]

I've come across that second idea more than a couple times, sgreger1. My biggest issue with it is how do you figure out who's the real person creating it all? Are the other people on SnusOn and I products of your mind, or are you all a product of my mind. I couldn't really accept such an idea because of how consist the world is. Everyone has their quirks, but you don't see them expressed too much in the real world. By quirks, I mean I might find it funny to have you wake up tomorrow and have all your family have preying mantis heads, just to see how you'd react. I don't see that off the wall oddness that sort of defines people in the world. Of course, this could just be a product of Bill Gates mind where he didn't get in trouble for stealing most of his OS from another company, and it was successful. That would explain why everything's so serious...I'm probably overthinking things, though.

[NonServiam]

What if it's all like a videogame? Think about it, in a videogame, there is physics, if you jump from a mountain you will die, if you shoot an enemy in the leg they will fall to their knees. Everything looks solid and feels solid, but if you look at the actual engine running the thing, the picture is very different from what the player in the game observes. While everything around him seems to exist, just outside of his view everything only exists as potential, there is a code set in place to render it as soon as it comes into view, but for the sake of saving processor space, the whole game world is not rendered all at once, but rather only the part you are currently observing. While I may be in one area doing something, sure the math is still running, deciding the probability that an enemy will spawn in my area, and the math is also running for the areas i'm not currently observing, yet they exist only as numbers and are not rendered until I am actually in the area observing them. What if this is what the universe is like? What if this is nothing more than some kind of simulation, what if we are all in a computer?

Yes, that sounds very similar to a philosophical thought called the Allegory of the Cave by Plato.

[sgreger1]

I've come across that second idea more than a couple times, sgreger1. My biggest issue with it is how do you figure out who's the real person creating it all? Are the other people on SnusOn and I products of your mind, or are you all a product of my mind. I couldn't really accept such an idea because of how consist the world is. Everyone has their quirks, but you don't see them expressed too much in the real world. By quirks, I mean I might find it funny to have you wake up tomorrow and have all your family have preying mantis heads, just to see how you'd react. I don't see that off the wall oddness that sort of defines people in the world. Of course, this could just be a product of Bill Gates mind where he didn't get in trouble for stealing most of his OS from another company, and it was successful. That would explain why everything's so serious...I'm probably overthinking things, though.

The "it's all a dream" theory has it's paradoxes just like our currently accepted model does. In our model we too must ask where is the starting point, did god create it and it exists all in his mind, or did random math and probability create it. But where did the math come from? Where did the big bang come from? Why was it there and how did such a complex thing get put there? In all theories the same questions remain.


I just think about this often, in my dreams are often times people i've never met, each with their own personality and seeming as real as anyone else I come across. Sometimes I talk to them about subjects I might not talk about in the real world, they may respond in ways which I would not have responded, so in my dream what is it that gives them this unique personality and way of thinking that is contrary to how I normally would think or act. How am I creating a whole reality with such diversity, and when I wake up this intrigues me because I know it was all just made up in MY head. Same with the real world, the illusion of "other" people could be a creation of your own mind.

Or perhaps we are all individuals who exist independant of one another, but we exist inside of a collective dream?

Who knows, i'm just saying that while we must go with what we know for now, what we know and how we see things may change in the future. If you are using a certain instrument, say a microscope, to investigate a sample of something to find out what makes it tick, you are bound by the inherent limits of the microscopes lens. If it only zooms to 10x, than you may percieve that that is all that exists, but in the future it may zoom 1 million x and a whole new world may unfold, that existed there all along but in the super sub atomic universe, a place so small that none of the normal rules apply. This is what we see with quantum physics, we see entangled particles seemingly communicating between each other at 10,000 times the speed of light, but how is that possible? Because it obviousely plays by a different set of rules, and if there exists multiple sets of rules that have to somehow all work together without becoming chaos, we must then create some unifying theory to bring them together into one understandable system, but so far we have not done that.


I just think there is more to this outrageousely complex universe than modern day science is able to detect.

[shikitohno]

Now that you mention it, that does sound right, NonServiam. The only question would be, how do we get out of the cave to see the light when that cave is a closed system? If we are in a virtual reality then there is no exit as long as it has the same limitations as VR in this world does. There's no way for Sonic or Mario to get outside your console, so how could we do that? I suppose the best we could hope for was that the simulation was being run on a network, and we could find an open port to enter other simulations to try and prove that it's all fake. Of course, those other simulations could be interpreted as dimensions, so there's an issue there...

[shikitohno]

Maths is derived from tautologies (formulæ true in every situation) that could be derived from nature. People first create numbers to count things, say pieces of food. Then they notice that when you combine two quantities of food items, you can add the number of each every time. One rib plus one rib is always equal to two ribs. Likewise, if you remove one rib from a set of two ribs, you will always have one rib left. The rest of maths is just logical expansion on these concepts.

[sgreger1]

Yes, that sounds very similar to a philosophical thought called the Allegory of the Cave by Plato.

OH, MY, GOD, thank your for making me aware of this. He put it in better words than I ever could have. It is so true, and this is what we see here, this is what we find ourselves in today. To the people living amongst the shadows, they have decided what constitutes "reality" and what is "real" or not, and (through observation) they even develope a science to describe what they observe in their reality, they even use this science accurately guess which shadow will come next. Yet it is all irrelevant, because literally feet away from their percieved reality is a whole other reality which, even if they saw it, would not consider it reality to them. And those who ascend to the next reality, once returned to the shadows, may be seen as corrupt or somehow "crazy".

I often times wonder if this is what is going on when I see crazy people talking to themselves on the street, in a pleasant bliss completely lost in another world.

To the occupants of the cave, regardless of what else exists, and even if they saw the other world, they would not readily identify it as "reality" at all. In a world of shadows, where one has created a science by which you understand and can determine beforehand how the shadows will move, you can never even comprehend that there is much more in the grand scheme of the things than the shadows in this cave, yet despite refining your shadow science more and more, it will never allow you to see, observe, or transcenda into the other reality that lies just beyond.

Fascinating NonServiam, you have made my day!

The allegory of the Cave:


Inside the cave

Socrates begins by describing a scenario in which what people take to be real would in fact be an illusion. He asks Glaucon to imagine a cave inhabited by prisoners who have been chained and held immobile since childhood: not only are their arms and legs held in place, but their heads are also fixed, compelled to gaze at a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which people walk carrying things on their heads "including figures of men and animals made of wood, stone and other materials". The prisoners watch the shadows cast by the men, not knowing they are shadows. There are also echoes off the wall from the noise produced from the walkway.
Socrates asks if it is not reasonable that the prisoners would take the shadows to be real things and the echoes to be real sounds, not just reflections of reality, since they are all they had ever seen or heard. Wouldn't they praise as clever whoever could best guess which shadow would come next, as someone who understood the nature of the world? And wouldn't the whole of their society depend on the shadows on the wall?
Release from the cave

Socrates next introduces something new to this scenario. Suppose that a prisoner is freed and permitted to stand up. If someone were to show him the things that had cast the shadows, he would not recognize them for what they were and could not name them; he would believe the shadows on the wall to be more real than what he sees.
"Suppose further," Socrates says, "that the man was compelled to look at the fire: wouldn't he be struck blind and try to turn his gaze back toward the shadows, as toward what he can see clearly and hold to be real? What if someone forcibly dragged such a man upward, out of the cave: wouldn't the man be angry at the one doing this to him? And if dragged all the way out into the sunlight, wouldn't he be distressed and unable to see "even one of the things now said to be true," viz. the shadows on the wall (516a)?
After some time on the surface, however, Socrates suggests that the freed prisoner would acclimate. He would see more and more things around him, until he could look upon the Sun. He would understand that the Sun is the "source of the seasons and the years, and is the steward of all things in the visible place, and is in a certain way the cause of all those things he and his companions had been seeing" (516b–c). (See also Plato's metaphor of the Sun, which occurs near the end of The Republic, Book VI)[3]
Return to the cave

Socrates next asks Glaucon to consider the condition of this man. "Wouldn't he remember his first home, what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow prisoners, and consider himself happy and them pitiable? And wouldn't he disdain whatever honors, praises, and prizes were awarded there to the ones who guessed best which shadows followed which? Moreover, were he to return there, wouldn't he be rather bad at their game, no longer being accustomed to the darkness? "Wouldn't it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and that it's not even worth trying to go up? And if they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead up, wouldn't they kill him?" (517a)

[NonServiam]

This may be straying from the topic, but a certain quote keeps running through my head "...all matter is really energy condensed to a slow vibration. We are all of one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, and we are just the imagination of ourselves...." I think it was another Bill Hicks statement, but I actually found it first on Tool's album Aenima.

[tom502]

It's all maya(that which is not, sometimes called illusion), because it's all impermanant. Only the eternal real, and that's the seer, the spirit.

[sgreger1]

Maths is derived from tautologies (formulæ true in every situation) that could be derived from nature. People first create numbers to count things, say pieces of food. Then they notice that when you combine two quantities of food items, you can add the number of each every time. One rib plus one rib is always equal to two ribs. Likewise, if you remove one rib from a set of two ribs, you will always have one rib left. The rest of maths is just logical expansion on these concepts.

Yes while math is created by humans, it is used to account for things that exist. For example, E=mc^2, yet that is just a way of us to write something we observe on paper. WHY does E=mc2? Why does the universe follow sucha rigid structure. In a place where seeming chaos and randomness has somehow evolved and bread life, why doesn't it all collapse, what is the epoxy that holds it all together. Why is 2+2 always 4? Why is it not just complete randomness, which seems more logical to me than something starting as random but somehow finding a balance at some point and turning into a highly regulated system?


But alas, it was not randomness that turned into a regulated system. Things like quantum physics or the speed of light always existed. For the big bang to have happened and played out, these conditions must have already been present for it to turn out the way they did, it didn't develope along the way. So I ask, what is it that created these rules and why? Why did the big bang just so happen to take place in a system that was preprogrammed to have certain rules and restrictions?

[NonServiam]

Fascinating NonServiam, you have made my day!

That is what is great about this forum. The enlightening of one another....sometimes

[sgreger1]

This may be straying from the topic, but a certain quote keeps running through my head "...all matter is really energy condensed to a slow vibration. We are all of one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, and we are just the imagination of ourselves...." I think it was another Bill Hicks statement, but I actually found it first on Tool's album Aenima.

"Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively........ There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we're the imagination of ourselves.....
Here's Tom with the weather."


-Bill Hicks