About beliefs and "scientific impotence" - Page 3

Quote:

Originally Posted by jcrawford777 

I must say that you guys are extremely intelligent. I have only a simple fraction of what you seem to know ( and I say seem because I do not know any of you on a personal level). But I can tell you that before I came to the knowledge that God existed, my truth was my truth because I thought it.

You said before that: Love? - a hormonal intoxication to promote the production of offspring.But I see love as being an action (something you do) not a feeling or a chemical reaction. Those things are really just a byproduct of the action, not the definition itself. 

Sorry this is coming in bits and pieces but I'm at work and have to type inbetween projects.

Please do not take my definition of love as exact. It is just how I believe (the word "believe" again) that science would define what we call love. I base that on what I have read and heard on the subject of love in a scientific light.

That involves hormones and stuff like that to get us to form a bond to that special person. Of course I do not see love as that. For me it is an action like you say. But I do not disagree with the scientific explanation. I think that it can co-exist with my personal view that, in my case, I love my wife and want to spend the rest of my life with her because she is my best friend and my lover. The scientific explanation does not contradict what I feel.

Time to sleep here in Japan. But this was really interesting. 

Well have a great sleep. And I hope love continue to find you as an action so your feelings of love may abound

Danneq,

What is eugenicism at its most basic form? It's simply promoting certain traits in humans via selective breeding, and with negative eugenics, discouraging undesirable traits with sterilization or other means. It is a science and it works, the only problem, and it's a big problem, is that people are too bigoted and/or don't know enough to turn eugenics into a practical science. And in anthropology, like most fields, most of the body of knowledge is schizophrenic and self-validating.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Danneq 

Ah! A Scotsman! I like Scottish people. Many philosophers come from Scotland with David Hume and Adam Smith being the most well known.

 

It sounds like you studied theoretical philosophy at University? At least it is called that in Sweden. I studied moral philosophy which is more directed at man as a thinking being.

 

I do agree that those examples you mention are pretty pointless and I agree with your description of light and sound. Those examples are like mind games but do not prove much.

 

However your conclusion is a bit far fetched. Do you mean that everything that cannot be measured and therefore has to be analyzed with logic and reasoning does not exist?

 

Morals? - the egoistic behavior of the animal that man is.

Love? - a hormonal intoxication to promote the production of offspring.

Music and cultural activities? - Well, can science say anything about the purpose of these?

 

And is using logic and reasoning to prove your point really pointless? That would mean that we would not be able to discuss anything at all. Or am I wrong?

 

I am not familiar with the field of pseudoscience, but I suppose that creationism would be included there. A fine example of trying to use the scientific method to justify your belief.

That year it was 'The philosophy of religion' and 'Texts' which were John Locke's 'Second treatise on government' and J.S. Mill's 'On utilitarianism'.

When I say that philosophers are bedfellows with pseudoscientists I mean that the pseudoscientists have stolen logic and reasoning and misused it to try and prove scientific facts. In court you are not allowed to use logic to prove guilt or innocence, it must be evidence based. I say the same is true for science, it should not be provable by use of philosophies. But that is exactly what creationists, homeopathy, faith healers do.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Danneq 

 

 

Please do not take my definition of love as exact. It is just how I believe (the word "believe" again) that science would define what we call love. I base that on what I have read and heard on the subject of love in a scientific light.

That involves hormones and stuff like that to get us to form a bond to that special person. Of course I do not see love as that. For me it is an action like you say. But I do not disagree with the scientific explanation. I think that it can co-exist with my personal view that, in my case, I love my wife and want to spend the rest of my life with her because she is my best friend and my lover. The scientific explanation does not contradict what I feel.

No, I see your point and I honestly feel and think a lot of the same thing you do, ie. love is a verb and a noun. But when I have studied the Biblical knowledge (rather than scientific knowledge) I have found rather interesting things going on inside me. If I love someone as a noun the funny thing is that the noun can't defined without the verb. Does that make any sense. It seems to in my head
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by haloxt 

Danneq,

 

What is eugenicism at its most basic form? It's simply promoting certain traits in humans via selective breeding, and with negative eugenics, discouraging undesirable traits with sterilization or other means. It is a science and it works, the only problem, and it's a big problem, is that people are too bigoted and/or don't know enough to turn eugenics into a practical science. And in anthropology, like most fields, most of the body of knowledge is schizophrenic and self-validating.

I see the same thing, and I truly believe there are some thing that man should not dig his hands into. ie. just because it exists doesn't mean we should touch it. The whole problem like you say is that mans (or womens) feeling get involves in it, and we are selfish creature by nature. So we will do with it what we will do with it rather than being level headed and treating it should be treated. 
 

Well I gotta go for a few minutes, but will return

I love my wife, my child, my headphones, Leeds Utd football club and larger, but all in different ways and for different reasons.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jcrawford777 

And there can only be one truth to anything. That is what truth is. There can be an opposite to that truth but that would be false. If you say green is green we can do an empirical study and find out that green really is green, but the shade of green may change between your eyes and my eyes. So the truth is that green is still green because many people testify that is the same color we are all seeing, and many people also testify that there may be many shades of green which is not false but a piece of the study leading to the truth. false would be someone coming up and saying that the color he sees is really red. And we know its false because of the number of people that say it is green. we can not know what he really sees or why he calls it red (could be any number of reasons) but can we think of green as being red?

Again, what I think is true has nothing to do with what you think is true. You and I are two different reference frames. In the universe, there is your reference frame, my reference frame, and a reference frame that includes both me and you. Actually, there are an infinite amount of reference frames within each catagory I just listed. Truths will be different in each. Why is the color green actually green? Does a dog perceive Green. Truths are just ideas. Ideas are different. Even though What I call Green, you may also call green, green could still look different to both of us. But here is the kicker, what if that person is color blind? So now green is different between colorblind and color receptive. To the colorblind, green is the same as red. To the color blind, blue is the same as yellow. Its differences are only measured by the amplitude of the wave reflecting from the green/red object back to his iris.  Truths are ideas that you personally consider to be correct. If let popular opinion decided our truths, we would still be in the stone age.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Scott_Tarlow 

Again, what I think is true has nothing to do with what you think is true. You and I are two different reference frames. In the universe, there is your reference frame, my reference frame, and a reference frame that includes both me and you. Actually, there are an infinite amount of reference frames within each catagory I just listed. Truths will be different in each. Why is the color green actually green? Does a dog perceive Green. Truths are just ideas. Ideas are different. Even though What I call Green, you may also call green, green could still look different to both of us. But here is the kicker, what if that person is color blind? So now green is different between colorblind and color receptive. To the colorblind, green is the same as red. To the color blind, blue is the same as yellow. Its differences are only measured by the amplitude of the wave reflecting from the green/red object back to his iris.  Truths are ideas that you personally consider to be correct. If let popular opinion decided our truths, we would still be in the stone age.

But the electromagnetic radiation that represents the visible light "green" is always the same, and provided our eyes and brains function in a similar fashion (which presumably they do unless one of us has an abnormal condition like color blindness) then green is one and the same for both of us. In fact, no matter what it's the same for both of us, our brains just interpret it differently if one of us is abnormal. Green is still green, whether we think it's something else or not.

Since when did this turn from "Some people don't believe science" to "I know how to confuse people with The Matrix philosophy stuff"?

Here's a question: Two people, one colorblind and one not, both stare at a green light while holding a tool they can use to measure the wavelength. Obviously the colorblind person sees it however he/she sees it, the normal person sees it as green. But if the colorblind person measures it and gets the same result as the normal person, how can they possibly "believe" it to be anything but green? Surely they're aware of their handicap, and must accept their perception as untrue. They can't possibly claim that it is not green just because they can't see it as green.

Green is green and science proves that easily and irrefutably. Colour blindness is also scientifically and easily provable. Arguments over the perception of the colour green are not scientific they are philosophical. That difference has become more and more blurred by dangerous pseudoscience. 

All  of which is good and well, but I am not making an argument for science, I am making an argument that a truth holds no universal claim. It something that you believe or recognize to be true. You cannot vote truth. You can say someone is wrong, but does that necessarily  change their opinion, do you change their opinion? No they do.  You could say green is green all day, but they could say green is red and they could believe it to be true and if you were to ask them if it were true they would say yes. In their reference frame green is red. In their reference frame, the laws of physics may not even exist. Because a truth is an idea, and all of our ideas are inherently flawed no two frames of references will hold all the same truths. So which frame of reference is true? Both of them to their respective holders.

Science does not prove green to be green. It proves that a certain wavelength of light will be perceived the same way as long as a reference frame has not been changed. For example, in reference frame A the length of a photon could be 1032 nanometers but in another frame of reference it could be 531 nanometeres easily, depending on the physical attributes of that reference frame.

If there is an absolute truth, again I don't think there is a scientific argument for absolute truth, because there is no evidence explicitly saying there is or even suggesting it. In fact, even if it does exist, science definitely suggests that we will never know it, for it could exist in some demension we could not comprehend, as we only live in 3.