Nah, everyone IS afraid of something (even all you macho guys out there). But, maybe we don't need to be afraid of anything. People only fear what they can't explain, such as death. People fear death, that's what all fear is based on. People are afraid of ghosts, because ghosts are dead, and we don't want the same fate. People fear hights, because the fear of falling and dying. People fear people with power, because you don't want to ge hurt, do you??

Everyone's probably been told this hundreds of times, but face your fears, you have nothing to be afraid of. Live every day like it's your first, enjoy and experience everything with all your senses (if possible). PLEASE EVERYONE HAVE FUN!!!!!!!
Go somewhere with good friends do something ridiculous, and laugh until you hurl, man!

have a great time!!

<3
shana

even though i don't know everyone in the world- I LOVE u ALL!!

*the only thing that makes me happy is seeing everyone else happy, then my life is complete*

That's right. We all need to face our fears.

Now, come... Enter the zero world that you desire.

Ah, to be young and immortal once again.

------------------
It's all very large.

Bowser, feeling your age huh? I'll join you. :D

I do not understand human nature... Why do YOU have the will to live?

Why do YOU want to live?

Necron,

It's simple. The alternative is even less inviting. Moreover, it's inevitable. So why rush it?

------------------
I am; therefore I think.

Well, this is one of those things that's going to vary from person to person, and it's not going to have too terribly much to do even with religion. There are atheists that fear death less than the most devout Christian, and vice-versa.

Death is change, and it represents the unknown. I think it's not the death itself that many fear, it's fear of annihilation.

Myself, I do fear death, yet I embrace it as well. Just like I was afraid to start going to school as a kid, yet couldn't wait to meet all the other kids. I am very curious about what's on "the other side" and if it turns out I'm wrong and there's nothing there...well, what's to fear in that - I'd never know the difference. But fear is an emotion and isn't under logical control.

I was discussing just this thing with my husband and came up with an interesting point of view. I believe my body is mortal, my soul is not. So when I fear death, I can break it down a bit and realize that it's quite possibly my physical body creating that fear in reaction to it's impending doom, and understanding the source seems to ease it. Like if you're in a car accident and every time you go through that intersection afterwards you get weak-kneed or clammy handed, even though your brain knows the chances of another accident in that same spot is unlikely. If you stop to think about it, you will likely calm down.

As for living each day like it's your first, I prefer to 'live each day like you will die tomorrow, and also like you'll live forever'. I find it cuts way down on regrets. :)

Blessings!
~MoonCat

Hiya,

Bowser, Cris ... I sense that we can form some kinda veteran (kinda) association for dudes who came face to face with their own mortality. Just a hunch!

Shana ... I love your attitude!

As Jim Morrison said: "This is the end ... my only friend, the end" Have fun for as long as it lasts, witness your immortality in the smiles of your children. And if I`m gonna go, I`ll have one more beer for the road.

Take care

Fear is an overrated subject. i myself have pondered much on the matter and i have come to the conclusion that...i don't really care enough about anything to fear it...death comes to us all, so what good does worrying have + you don't know if it's all bad anyways.

And hello everyone.

Originally posted by shana:
People only fear what they can't explain, such as death. People fear death, that's what all fear is based on.
That's the one thing not to fear.


The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction.-Proverbs 1:7

Live every day like it's your first,
You mean, like, crapping in your pants?

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction.-Proverbs 1:7

An excellent demonstration of evil propaganda spread by all past terrorists and tyrannical regimes, Christianity is just another.

The technique used is to twist the truth so that it both favors the propagandist and at the same time attempts to ridicule the victims. Watch for the two distinct components in such phrases. This one is very obvious. It is of course a simple unsubstantiated assertion.

There remains no evidence that there is anything beyond physical death. All evidence suggests that when you die then you will cease to exist. I for one do not want that to occur. It is the single most legitimate fear for every human being. To somehow twist this fact and to make death attractive has to be an incredible irresponsible and contemptible action.

Cris

Originally posted by Cris:
An excellent demonstration of evil propaganda spread by all past terrorists and tyrannical regimes, Christianity is just another.
Are you against knowledge, wisdom and instruction?

The technique used is to twist the truth so that it both favors the propagandist and at the same time attempts to ridicule the victims. Watch for the two distinct components in such phrases. This one is very obvious. It is of course a simple unsubstantiated assertion.
That makes two, I guess.

There remains no evidence that there is anything beyond physical death. All evidence suggests that when you die then you will cease to exist.
A surprisingly Christian statement from an antichristian.

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.-Ecclesiastes 9:10

I for one do not want that to occur. It is the single most legitimate fear for every human being. To somehow twist this fact and to make death attractive has to be an incredible irresponsible and contemptible action.

This is getting stranger and stranger.

Death is indeed not a good thing.

Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.-Hebrews 2:14,15

The Jesus you deny is the Jesus who came to destroy death.

This why he came to destroy death...
"to make death attractive has to be an incredible irresponsible and contemptible action"

Tony,

Define death.

Do you believe in some form of immaterial life after your body undergoes a physical death?

Cris


[This message has been edited by Cris (edited February 18, 2001).]

Originally posted by Cris:
Define death.

Do you believe in some form of immaterial life after your body undergoes a physical death?


Sorry, I should have realized from the number of different "religious" definitions of death, that I should have been more specific.

Not a dictionary-type definition, but it works for me...

For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.
All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.
Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?-Ecclesiastes 3:19-21

And to answer the second thing, I don't believe in an immaterial life after physical death.
And to clear up another possible sidetrack, the word "spirit" doesn't mean some immaterial form of the person, like cartoon ghosts, either, i.e. it isn't some clever way to avoid the intent of your question.
In fact, the same Hebrew word "ruwach" is translated into "breath" in one place, and "spirit" in the other two.

Tony,

I'm sorry but I have no idea what any of your last post means. :confused:

I'm now quite confused as to what you believe or don't believe. :confused:

Are you a Christian and if so what sect or cult do you belong?

Do you believe in dualism? I.e. the idea that you have both a physical body and a soul or spirit that inhabits the body. Upon death of the body the soul survives and is usually considered eternal. I understood this was a part of Christian belief.

Cris

Tony1,
Are you against knowledge, wisdom and instruction?

You don’t seem to be able to understand your own quotation.

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction.-Proverbs 1:7

I’ll explain it for you. The quotation implies that those who do not fear the LORD despise wisdom and instruction. Which as I explained before is simple propaganda. You cannot take the two individual components out of context and then accuse me of each in turn.

However, ask yourself the same question. Are you against knowledge, wisdom and instruction?

I must point out that you are at least against knowledge since you have chosen to believe in the supernatural based on faith. Faith is simply belief without evidence or proof, and knowledge cannot be established without evidence or proof.

That makes two, I guess.

No, you simply are unable to recognize your own propaganda.

There remains no evidence that there is anything beyond physical death. All evidence suggests that when you die then you will cease to exist.

A surprisingly Christian statement from an antichristian.

What? Are you nuts? The whole point of following any religion is the promise that you will survive physical death and exist in an afterlife. My statement is the exact opposite of Christian beliefs. Perhaps you simply do not understand the basics of Christianity.

This is getting stranger and stranger.
Death is indeed not a good thing
.
.
.
The Jesus you deny is the Jesus who came to destroy death.
This why he came to destroy death... .

Are you asserting that Jesus came to destroy physical bodily death? I can only assume you believe this since from your statements here and elsewhere you have implied that you do not believe in an afterlife. This is not consistent with any form of Christian beliefs that I have experienced.

Are you confused, or do you follow a very off-beat Christian sect, or have you simply not made yourself clear?

Cris

"Faith is simply belief without evidence or proof, and knowledge cannot be established without evidence or proof."

Haven't we been through this before? You can't define "faith" any way you choose out of convenience. Faith in a Christian context is belief and action based upon established facts. Thats gleaned from the Bible and I can justify it very well using scripture as I think I have done here before!

"Faith is simply belief without evidence or proof, and knowledge cannot be established without evidence or proof."

Atheism is a belief without evidence. I honestly can't help but think the altered definition of "atheism" is just a word game. All I have to do is alter my words a little and tada! Exempli gratia, "or should I say you lack evidence justifying your "lack of belief" in God?"

"The quotation implies that those who do not fear the LORD despise wisdom and instruction."

I think wisdom needs to be defined. I am pretty sure the Bible teaches discernement is a gift or fruit of the spirit.

Peace,
Vinnie

Hi Vinnie,

How can you expect to be able to communicate effectively with others when you base all your standards on the limited view defined by Christianity, especially in a debate such as this when many if not most are not Christian.

Why are you trying to redefine Atheism in a way different from the accepted definitions used by all modern atheist organizations and textbooks? Or are you simply being consistent and trying to use the Christian definition which is based on outdated medieval ignorance.

But no, it is perfectly understandable for you to fight again atheism as it does represent a real threat to your belief system. Because as soon as you accept that atheism is credible then that will suggest that atheism might be right; and that implies that the Christian might be wrong; and if the Christian could be wrong then that suggests that faith may be an unreliable guide to knowledge, and from there you would need to reexamine all your beliefs in the light of reason. And from there all hell breaks lose and you will be forced into a headlong rush to deconversion to atheism.

So I recognize that you are forced to ridicule atheism and insist that it is something other than what it is because your beliefs depend upon maintaining ignorance of reality.

But what the heck, nice to see you back again.

Cris

"How can you expect to be able to communicate effectively with others when you base all your standards on the limited view defined by Christianity, especially in a debate such as this when many if not most are not Christian."

Hypocrite! You yourself are guilty of the exact same thing. Your atheistic philosophy espouses a limited view of "faith" as being blind. Why is the definition your worldview promotes better than mine?

If one wants to attack the Christian worldview then you must use Christian definitions to do so. Arguing against it with definitions valid in other natural theologies but not pertinent to xianity will misrepresent the Christian faith. Ergo, something about that man made of straw from the wizard of oz comes to mind. If you are not arguing against Christian defintions then you are not arguing against Christianity. If you want to ask why God is responsible for all the evil in the world then I suggets you use God's definition of evil. Or at least state the definition of evil you are using. I think Christians and atheists may have different definitions of evil. Unless you want to talk apples and oranges, definitions are always the place to start in a debate.

"Why are you trying to redefine Atheism in a way different from the accepted definitions used by all modern atheist organizations and textbooks? Or are you simply being consistent and trying to use the Christian definition which is based on outdated medieval ignorance."

Atheism builds a worldview without the presence of God. Its just a word game to me. Your comments also lead me to suspect you did not actually read what I wrote. You may have glanced over it quickly but thats about it. I said "Atheism is a belief without evidence. I honestly can't help but think the altered definition of "atheism" is just a word game. All I have to do is alter my words a little and tada! Exempli gratia, "or should I say you lack evidence justifying your "lack of belief" in God?"

"But no, it is perfectly understandable for you to fight again atheism as it does represent a real threat to your belief system."

Its no threat at all. Atheism is a non-profit organization. As the Bible teaches, the fool says in His/her heart, there is no God.

"Because as soon as you accept that atheism is credible then that will suggest that atheism might be right; and that implies that the Christian might be wrong; and if the Christian could be wrong then that suggests that faith may be an unreliable guide to knowledge, and from there you would need to reexamine all your beliefs in the light of reason. And from there all hell breaks lose and you will be forced into a headlong rush to deconversion to atheism."

Atheism = not credible.

"So I recognize that you are forced to ridicule atheism and insist that it is something other than what it is because your beliefs depend upon maintaining ignorance of reality."

Actually, thats exactly what YOU did.

I mentioned the fact that "I honestly can't help but think." You went all out and decided to make your own dictionary:

"Faith (Tony's faith in God aka the supernatural) is simply belief without proof. I know this to be infinitely true because with my infinite knowledge I posit it to be infinitely so!"

On another level. You object to the supernatural. Gravity is supernatural. From my perspective, everything seems to be a supernatural act!

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

Some supernatural acts just seem to fit into a more likely pattern than others.

Whats your perspective/worldview say about "supernatural acts?"

Btw, Hi Cris.

Originally posted by Cris:
I'm now quite confused as to what you believe or don't believe. :confused:

Are you a Christian
Yes.
and if so what sect or cult do you belong?
Beats me. The ability to state what sect or cult one belongs to, pretty much defines the type of error one believes.

Do you believe in dualism? I.e. the idea that you have both a physical body and a soul or spirit that inhabits the body.
I don't believe in the standard doctrine of dualism, since there is nothing in the Bible that leads one to believe in such undefinable vagueness as the concept of dualism implies.
Upon death of the body the soul survives and is usually considered eternal. I understood this was a part of Christian belief.
Well, there you go.

I hope you can put up with enough scripture quotation to allow me to answer that.

First of all, man is a soul, as opposed to having a soul.

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. -Genesis 2:7

It is apparent from just this one verse that man does not obtain a soul, he IS a soul.
Plus, the breath of life is the spirit you may be referring to, but it doesn't inhabit the body. It is the life in you.

Second, the soul is not eternal.
The soul that sinneth, it shall die. ...-Ezekiel 18:20

The concepts you mentioned may be part of christian-like belief systems, but they are not scriptural.

Faith is simply belief without evidence or proof,
Actually, faith is the evidence.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. -Hebrews 11:1
and knowledge cannot be established without evidence or proof.
So, that means that you don't know that you will die?
By the time you have proof, according to your own definition, you will be dead.
At that time, you will not be able to know anything.
Thus, you can never know that you will die, by your definition of knowledge.

The whole point of following any religion is the promise that you will survive physical death and exist in an afterlife. My statement is the exact opposite of Christian beliefs.
Well, it may be opposite to some beliefs, but it isn't opposite to the Bible.

The whole point of what the Bible says, is that death is a reality, not some wishful thinking of being alive, yet dead, or dead yet alive, as you seem to be thinking "Christian" beliefs are.

You were asking about "immaterial" life after death, and I answered the question you asked.

There is material life after death, and that material life after death is what the Bible is talking about. That idea is quite similar to yours.
Your idea of death is quite accurate, but your timespan is too short.

Real death happens, but surely you can see that a "death," where the person goes somewhere else in another form, isn't really death.

Here is how the afterlife will start...
The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones,
And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry.
And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest.
Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the LORD.
Thus saith the Lord GOD unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live:
And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the LORD.
So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone.
And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.
Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.
So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.
Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts.
Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.
And ye shall know that I am the LORD, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves,
And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land: then shall ye know that I the LORD have spoken it, and performed it, saith the LORD. -Ezekiel 37:1-14.

That was a description of the resurrection, which occurs some time after death.

Perhaps you simply do not understand the basics of Christianity.
Perhaps I do, and you are confusing some other religion with Christianity.

[This message has been edited by tony1 (edited February 24, 2001).]

ilgwamh:
"On another level, you object to the supernatural. Gravity is supernatural. From my perspective, everything seems to be a supernatural act!"

Gravity is a far cry from supernatural. It is measured over and over again with the same results. Its affects and can be predicted and calculated. It isn't supernatural, it's natural.

ilgwamh:
"Atheism is a belief without evidence. "

Atheism IS NOT a belief. It is the lack of a belief in a god.

tony1:
"So, that means that you don't know that you will die?
By the time you have proof, according to your own definition, you will be dead.
At that time, you will not be able to know anything.
Thus, you can never know that you will die, by your definition of knowledge."

Incorrect. You are leaving out a crucial factor. The first man did not know he would die, for he had no evidence that he would. Today we have the cemeteries filled with those who have died as proof that we ourselves will die to. The definition of knowledge did not say you had to experience it directly, but it does say the observations must be made.


tony1:
"Here is how the afterlife will start...
.......................
That was a description of the resurrection, which occurs some time afte death."

No matter how it begins that is still a promise as to living after you die. Same concept that Cris was pointing out. The point of following the bible is to be resurrected, does that fit you better.

ilgwamh:
"Haven't we been through this before? You can't define "faith" any way you choose out of convenience. Faith in a Christian context is belief and action based upon established facts. "

There are no established facts for christians to base there beliefs and actions. The bible IS the disputed facts that christians take on faith, or believe in without any evidence. There is no evidence to support the bible at all. The evidence against it has always been great, evidence which you choose to ignore. Belief without evidence.

ps. sorry about jumping around like that

FA_Q2,

Thanks for that post. I had run out of steam.

Cris

Originally posted by FA_Q2
Incorrect. You are leaving out a crucial factor. The first man did not know he would die, for he had no evidence that he would. Today we have the cemeteries filled with those who have died as proof that we ourselves will die to. The definition of knowledge did not say you had to experience it directly, but it does say the observations must be made.

The question is: Did you observe enough?
The afterlife is something you can't observe by looking at a cemetery.

And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation:
(Luke 17:20, KJV).


No matter how it begins that is still a promise as to living after you die. Same concept that Cris was pointing out. The point of following the bible is to be resurrected, does that fit you better.

Well, he did ask about "immaterial" life.

Nevertheless, your point is taken, the point of being a Christian is to be resurrected.
You are practically quoting the Bible on that.

But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen:
And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.
(1 Corinthians 15:13,14, KJV).

Your point, as well as Cris' and Emerald's, appears to be that, since the resurrection cannot be observed, it isn't real.
Or, failing that, that insufficient evidence exists to believe in it.

Well, given that atheists, antichristians, etc., offer no evidence of anything nor any belief to replace the resurrection, what should a person believe?

There are no established facts for christians to base there beliefs and actions. The bible IS the disputed facts that christians take on faith, or believe in without any evidence. There is no evidence to support the bible at all.

OK, so we are agreed then, that are no facts to base any belief on.
Let us take that one step further.
Let's propose a God who is omniscient, omnipresent, omniwhatever. Such a God would, theoretically, have been able to arrange for a lot of evidence to back up the Bible. Because he didn't, prima facie that must mean that such a God doesn't exist, right?

This way we can avoid a lot of the "omni" discussions. We can also avoid the nit-picky little discussions about whether some shard of pottery proves that So-and-so really lived, etc.

The problem with this is...

But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
(Hebrews 11:6, KJV).

Now, you want a God to exist whose presence is observable, provable and testable. Or not, as you wish.

If his presence were observable, provable and testable, then it wouldn't require any faith to believe in him.
Thus, if he did exist, you still couldn't please him.

The way things are now, you have to believe to please him. Or not, if you wish.

The evidence against it has always been great, evidence which you choose to ignore. Belief without evidence.

It really isn't a case of "choosing to ignore." I studied the evidence against the Bible and realized that identifying a possible problem doesn't come anywhere near providing an alternative solution.

Of course, solutions are what atheism is particularly weak in.

I've been sitting on the sidelines trying to figure out tony1's exact stance. Well, now that we finally have it down somewhat, I figure it's time to come to poor Cris' rescue and touch off the proper tongue-lashing. Tony1, you've been a very, very bad boy (well... assuming you are male, that is).

So let's see. Tony1 is born. As a newborn, tony1 cannot speak nor does tony1 understand speech. Needless to say, tony1 has no religious belief or indeed any concept of religion. Tony1 mostly eats, sleeps, evacuates, and moves about ineptly, trying to gain command of his motor and coordination faculties. Tony1 is assailed by a sensory avalanche, and his poor nascent nervous system is in overdrive trying to make sense of the impinging perceptions. Not that it only started at the moment of birth, but ever since it has all been magnified to painful levels. Often during his waking moments (and he mostly sleeps to cope with the immense stress), tony1 screams in protest and complains about the never-ending frustrations and disturbances.

Slowly, through interaction with the world around it, tony1's body begins to adapt. By trial and error, he gains fine control over his musculature, and acquires the beginnings of coordination. The jumble of sensory information begins to resolve itself into refined streams. The blur, multiplicity and noise of vision gradually coalesce into an increasingly consistent picture, depth-enhanced through correlative stereopsis. The chaos and ringing in the ears subsides, and the incoming sounds begin to resolve into separate sources. The vestibular apparatus learns to perceive orientation correctly, reducing tony1's spontaneous bouts of nausea. And so on.

Eventually, tony1 is sophisticated enough to visuospatially separate other humans around him from the background, and to identify certain sounds with those other humans. He begins to correlate the observed soundbytes with objects, subjects and events. Meanwhile, he discovers the range of his oral repertoire, and plays with all the different sounds he can produce and reproduce. Quickly, sounds become sequences as coordinative ability continues to develop, and eventually tony1 realises that he can reproduce at least crude copies of some of the speech fragments he hears. Some of his accidental mumblings (such as "ma-ma" for example) produce delightful reinforcement from the listeners, and tony1 swiftly learns to elicit that reinforcement at will. Learned sounds and sequences become reinforced as tony1 accumulates and processes more data, and his phonetic lexicon begins to narrow down to the approximate range of his native language. By this time, tony1 has formed firm associations between certain spoken sound sequences and their objects, subjects or events. The sound sequences separate themselves from the spoken stream as if they had natural borders to them, and tony1 begins to comprehend snippets of speech. Internally, tony1 is able to map those sound sequences to their perceptual or conceptual targets as well (of course, the perceptual is primary and conceptual only comes later as another layer of abstraction over the perceptual), and so tony1 is beginning to acquire the rudimentary capabilities of abstract cognition. Having thus mastered his first words, tony1 soon figures out how to reproduce them at will, to the never-ending delight of his parents. And before long, tony1's continued statistical analysis links word classes into mutual associations and ordering. Tony1 begins to understand the grammatical rules of his native language, and becomes capable of forming rudimentary sentences. He is now entering the realm of structured thought...

Let's fastforward a few years or decades. Tony1 is now a fully capable human, equipped with a complete arsenal of cognitive abilities etched and honed in that long-forgotten early bout of intense perusal of the scientific methods. Of course, tony1 doesn't remember that period of his life, since long-term memory does not begin to function properly until around 4 years of age. Meanwhile, tony1 has come to doubt everything and anything about the world in which he exists. Gone is the necessity-driven physiological compulsion to simply perceive the environment and learn from it. Oh no, tony1 is far beyond such fallacious and fruitless ways. Science, logic, observation -- these things are all meaningless and groundless without a Holy Book to serve as the ultimate source of knowledge and reason. After all, it is the Holy Book that taught tony1 everything that enables him to so much as even take a single step in this world. Science, logic, observation, objectivity... hell, only helpless children trying to learn and master the nature of their reality would engage in such foolish activities. Tony1, on the other hand, is no longer interested in the nature of his reality; instead, tony1 is looking for "solutions".

To wit, tony1 figures that a select group among his race of advanced primates has already acquired, in the immediate past, under mystical circumstances, the solutions he requires. Just what are the real source and nature of that particular cultural tradition is a question that does not concern tony1. Instead, tony1 elects his favorite mythology because it appears to solve his gravest concern -- inevitable death. Granted, tony1 doesn't really believe, at heart, in that mythology (although he will never admit it in public, perhaps not even in private, and maybe not even to himself) -- but his continued efforts to self-generate such belief are driven by the wager that if true, his body, having died and decomposed, recycled into the ecosystem, perhaps partially subducted into the Earth's mantle, partly escaped into space, partly having decayed radioactively, and certainly at least in part recycled into bodies of other humans, and then in all probability reprocessed in the Sun's red giant phase; his body, which continuously and completely renews its material constitution every few months having shed its preceeding chemical makeup, at some remote time in the future, would be reassembled from its original atoms, whatever particular snapshot in its life they may correspond to (and which in all probability had belonged to other bodies prior to his, but never mind) -- reassembled into its premortem form by a Superbeing who is the absolute and primary substrate and origin (having no substrate and origin itself) of the secondary universe, had created it in all its glory specifically to plant some cosmically unique biochemistry on a little ball of dirt on the outskirts of an average galactic speck some 10 billion years after the universe's creation, and having touchingly and devotedly guided the evolution of that life into its indisputably ultimate and finally crowning achievement of the geologically infantile, cognitively primitive and comprehensively ignorant human ape, and then having waited for a few hundred thousand years to finally reveal to a tinsy desert tribe the ultimate truth that would save the little apes' souls -- this Superbeing would reassemble that pathetic little animal, among billions, trillions, quadrillions, googols (?) of such critters that ever existed (depending on how far into the future the promised armageddon is) -- personally and caringly selected from such doomed multitudes because that proto-intelligent little thing had the self-proclaimed moral and spiritual conceit to claim belief in and allegiance to that particular cultural construct of a godhead -- reassemble the long-dead and forgotten vanishingly tiny representative of the primitive precursor to future intelligent life by a bulletin board designation of tony1, into a fully-functional copy of its long-gone self -- so that the little worm can coexist with the infinite glory of its creator forever more. Such a belief tony1 denotes as representative of teaching and wisdom, and, he maintains, even such a nauseatingly moronic concept is superior to having no concept of afterlife whatsoever. The universe is a wondrous place indeed to harbor this warped "wisdom". Of course, in his enlightened state, tony1 probably sees nothing wrong with any of the above other than the parts that hurl demeaning epithets at him (in fact, I can hear him now accusing me of smear tactics and lack of substance; or perhaps he'll resort to the time-honored practice of claiming metaphorical and allegorical and altogether divine and humanly inaccessible meanings to those mentionings of bones arising from graves.) Either that, or the entire wealth of wisdom tony1 has so far inflicted upon the exosci board is an elaborate joke gone way overboard, in which case tony1 must have a pretty twisted sense of humor.

Ah Boris, what can I say? I had considered that bashing my head against a wall would be more productive than trying to comprehend the ‘reasoning’ of t1. Fearing severe damage to my psychological health I chose to retreat to more meaningful pursuits and ignore the strange incomprehensible monologues and scribbles.

But I see you have captured some semblance of the essence of this challenging enigma, I take my hat off to you sir for at least trying, but as you suspect you will probably be frustrated in your effort if there is a response.

Sigh!

Originally posted by Boris
've been sitting on the sidelines trying to figure out tony1's ...twisted sense of humor.

I'll ha ha answer ha ha ha you ha as ha ha soon hahaha as I haha can.

LOLOLOL!

Boris, don't let anyone say you don't have a sense of humor.

Originally posted by Cris
I had considered that bashing my head against a wall would be more productive than ... a response.

Cris, you give up too easily.

BTW, I followed the links you gave me last month.

It looks to me like you're far more religious a man than I first suspected.

Most of the links were very familiar topics indeed, since technological fantasies such as those were what got me into programming back in '77. (That just makes me a piker compared to you)

Haven't you ever had a computer or program crash?
What got me out of believing in the reality of mind uploading, and such, was one question.
What happens to you when the machine "you" are "in" crashes?

Are you sure you believe in the reality of mind uploading by the microtome method?

There seem to be several huge leaps of faith required for that one.
One, the assumption seems to be that a dead brain is exactly the same as a living brain, except dead.
Two, if one rejects that and accepts that the living brain is different from the dead brain, partway through the process a dead brain is all there will be anyway.
Third, upon reconstruction you will have a perfect duplicate of a dead brain.
Is this actually the desired result?

Even the nanoreplacement method seems to be lacking something...
Once the robotic neurons are in place, learning stops for the simple reason that learning means creating new patterns of neuron stimulation. Since they are new patterns, by definition they have not been observed by the nanorobots.

Another big issue seems to be the idea that calculators with a lot of memory and working at high speed are alive, whereas calculators with less memory operating more slowly are not.
A religious idea requiring faith, if I've ever heard one.

How does increasing the volume of purified silicon in a lump of rock make that rock alive?
Even if electronic circuits are scrapped in favor of optical, how does more light shining through a piece of glass make that glass alive?


The real issue appears to be that you are willing to work your life away for the glorification of supermachines (which will still crash), whereas you are totally bummed out when you find out I'm willing to do the same for something eternal.

Do you see something in slices of silicon which I don't see?

tony1,

I agree with one thing: mind uploading presents a tremendous challenge, no matter what route it takes. But as to the rest:


Haven't you ever had a computer or program crash?
What got me out of believing in the reality of mind uploading, and such, was one question.
What happens to you when the machine "you" are "in" crashes?


Do you ride in cars, fly in airplanes, live in a house? Each one of those things could literally "crash" with lethal consequences. Though clearly they are engineered to be far more reliable than the latest operating system from a company that can barely ever get anything right. Obviously, artificial bodies would be engineered to some very high standards. Of course, that still won't prevent them from breaking down every now and then -- but so does the "natural" human body. The big differences will be that 1) the artificial bodies will be much more amenable to repairs and upgrades, and 2) the artificial body will allow you to make periodic distributed and redundant backups of yourself -- so that even if you get vaporized in a nuclear explosion you can still come back and only loose a couple of days, or if you get severely damaged you could be restored with help of data from the archives. Sure beats recovery from brain damage as it happens right now.


One, the assumption seems to be that a dead brain is exactly the same as a living brain, except dead.
Two, if one rejects that and accepts that the living brain is different from the dead brain, partway through the process a dead brain is all there will be anyway.
Third, upon reconstruction you will have a perfect duplicate of a dead brain.


It depends on the stage of degradation. If the brain is preserved even as the patient is exhaling the last breath, then it will be pretty intact. Otherwise, restorative processing would have to be applied, to undo the damage as the brain is scanned in. The degree and complexity of such processing would of course depend on the degree of damage to the brain. Even so, when the scanned-in individual awakens, they should indeed remember their moments of death as if they just happened. Not that it's unheard-of, with all the successful resuscitations enabled by modern technology.


Another big issue seems to be the idea that calculators with a lot of memory and working at high speed are alive, whereas calculators with less memory operating more slowly are not.
A religious idea requiring faith, if I've ever heard one.


Nonsense. The property of intelligence is not defined by rate of processing, but by the quality of processing. If you took a normal human and somehow put him/her in near-suspended animation so that all of their body processes are slowed down, they would still be considered alive and intelligent (if less capable).


How does increasing the volume of purified silicon in a lump of rock make that rock alive?
Even if electronic circuits are scrapped in favor of optical, how does more light shining through a piece of glass make that glass alive?


How does piling on more biochemical matter make something alive? I suggest you work a little on your definition of life.


Do you see something in slices of silicon which I don't see?


Information processing.

Originally posted by Boris
Do you ride in cars, fly in airplanes, live in a house? Each one of those things could literally "crash" with lethal consequences.
Those crashes require a series of physical events combined with a series of poor decisions before they can occur, whereas computer crashes only require a single event.
If one chooses a poor location for a power cord, a single movement of one's foot can erase a day's work.

Obviously, artificial bodies would be engineered to some very high ... brain damage as it happens right now.
Our physical bodies are self-repairing, whereas even fault-tolerant systems operate by ignoring the fault, rather than by repairing it.
I'm presuming this would have to change, as well.

Which one of the backups is the legal entity if two or more are restored by accident or by intent?

What happens if someone decides to edit you a little bit before restoring you?
Are you still you?
What happens if someone decides to edit one backup and someone else decides to edit a different backup in a different way?

It depends on the stage of degradation.
Let's assume no degradation at all.
Let us start with a live brain, cranium already out of the way, ready to slice.
Let's start at the front of the brain.
Slice, slice, slice.
By the time you get to the back of the brain, you've got a dead brain.
Upon reconstruction (assuming ideal circumstances), the simulated brain is alive in the front, dead in the back.
Not what I'd be looking for.

OTOH, you could cryogenically treat the brain prior to microtomy.
Reconstruction would give you an inside view of a quick-frozen brain.
Again, not what I'd be looking for.

Nonsense. The property of intelligence is not defined by rate of processing, but by the quality of processing. If you took a normal human and somehow put him/her in near-suspended animation so that all of their body processes are slowed down, they would still be considered alive and intelligent (if less capable).
My point exactly.
Most of this mind-uploading stuff is based on the assumption that faster machines with more memory are somehow alive.

How does piling on more biochemical matter make something alive? I suggest you work a little on your definition of life.

I've never suggested that a bigger pile of meat is more alive than a smaller pile.
To extend that, neither has anyone else on this forum to my knowledge.

But, mind uploading fans are assuming, implicitly or explicitly, that more, faster silicon or gallium arsenide becomes alive, especially if a particular pattern of information, representing what some person has assumed is the sum total of another person, is encoded on it.

Which brings us to another point...
Which MU fan will be the first to experiment on himself?

A more arcane point...
What if the body uses distributed processing instead of the CPU model implicit in the mind uploading concept?

Information processing.
I assume by "see," you mean "observe the results of."
If that is correct, I see that, too, being a programmer myself.

However, I was asking if you (or Cris?) see more than that.

Well, first of all human bodies self-repair only to a point. Past that point, they also employ fault tolerance through redundancy. For example, if you poke an eye out it will not grow back; neither will a hacked-off hand. The redundancy is not carried through all the way though. For example, severing spinal cord results in permanent paralysis with no backup available. I expect the first artificial bodies will rely on fault-tolerance and will at best include only limited self-repair mechanisms (e.g. through smart materials). My dream vision of an evolved artificial body includes a modular construction (not unlike the human body built out of cells), where the modular blocks are functionally versatile enough to be interchangeable, and capable of constructing replicas of themselves (and by extension, also diagnosing and repairing broken neighbors).


Which one of the backups is the legal entity if two or more are restored by accident or by intent?

What happens if someone decides to edit you a little bit before restoring you?
Are you still you?
What happens if someone decides to edit one backup and someone else decides to edit a different backup in a different way?


All good questions.

With regard to the first one, such an act would be somewhat analogous to cloning. There would be two snapshots of you, but from the point of restoration onward the "clones" diverge and become more like twins.

With regard to editing, there would have to be structures in place to ensure that such infractions do not happen. Perhaps some kind of a system of competing checks and balances armed with encryption keys and watchdogging after each other. Perhaps there could be some kind of a quantum protection mechanism ensuring that the date at which the archive was last accessed cannot be forged. But in case such editing does occur, for whatever reason, it would be equivalent to brain damage. It won't strictly be you anymore, since you may have a different personality, different memories, etc.

The answer to the last question is a combination of the other two.

Of course, the easiest way to avoid such potential difficulties, is to simply keep away from life-threatening situations and get timely maintenance -- so that you won't have to use the archives in the first place.


OTOH, you could cryogenically treat the brain prior to microtomy.
Reconstruction would give you an inside view of a quick-frozen brain.
Again, not what I'd be looking for.


This is a little closer, but still missing the point. The reconstruction will not involve rebuilding the molecular or even cellular structures of the brain. The scan will merely involve an extraction of a mathematical description of the brain's neural networks. The extent of damage to the cells does not matter, as long as it is not severe enough to prevent a readout of each of those cells' function in the brain. Even then, recovery of lost information may be possible by inference from surrounding intact brain tissue (which would constitute a new order of complexity in the analysis) -- unless the lesion is altogether too great, in which case it's a bummer.


Most of this mind-uploading stuff is based on the assumption that faster machines with more memory are somehow alive.


No, that's not at all the assumption. The requirement for memory is fairly obvious, considering an average adult brain has 100 billion neurons, each with complex cellular properties and elaborately shaped dendritic and axonic trees that form an average of 10,000 finely weighted connections, each with multiple parameters. To store this amount of data, you would need some serious memory capacity. Similarly, to base a real-time simulation on this level of detail you would need some serious horsepower.

Actually, these are the least of the problems. Much bigger problems lie in how all that information is gathered in the first place; which information is significant and which isn't; what to do with parts of the brain specifically interfaced to certain parts of the biological (and now deceased) body, including the spinal column (or are we scanning that in as well?) plus the rest of the peripheral nervous system. For example, if such brain-body interfaces are to be removed or altered, or if new interfaces are to be added, we would have to not only obtain a complete description of the brain but also to understand exactly what every single neuron does so that we do not disrupt brain function or personality with our alterations, and so that our alterations indeed turn out to be functional. This would require not only whopping memory and processing capacities, but also vast and multidimensional theoretical knowledge of the nervous system which simply does not exist as of now.


But, mind uploading fans are assuming .. a particular pattern of information, representing what some person has assumed is the sum total of another person, is encoded on it.


Well yes, that's a pretty big assumption. Not entirely unreasonable or unjustified, given current knowledge about the connection between mind and brain (which basically can be summed up like this: brain=mind.) But surely if your cellular configuration can encode the information that consitutes you as a person, then that same information can be represented by any other information-encoding mechanism.


Which MU fan will be the first to experiment on himself?


Of course nobody in their right mind would do that. First you experiment on some little mammal, like the typical lab rat. Then you move up the chain to, say, cats and dogs. Then monkeys, apes. Finally, once the system is ready, you try to resuscitate an already-dead MU volunteer. And sure, you could end up destroying a few cadavers before you get the process straight; no way to escape that possibility. I guess MU candidates would have to sign a waiver (while still alive), authorizing a lottery of some sort to determine who will be the first guinea pig, the second, third, etc.


A more arcane point...
What if the body uses distributed processing instead of the CPU model implicit in the mind uploading concept?


As a programmer, you should know that a Turing machine is a Turing machine, regardless of how serial or parallel its implementation. For the record, there is absolutely no doubt that the brain is the most sophisticated parallel computer known to exist, with at least 100 billion distributed nodes. And also for the record, I do not believe that even with technological refinement there would be a single processor fast enough for the job; the artificial brains would have to be parallel and distributed in architecture as well.

Where's that vaunted response, Tony?

Boris,

Thanks for championing my cause. Wish I knew how to redirect this type of stuff into the MU forum though. I have some critical deadlines at work this week so I'm out of the debates for a few days I expect.

Cris

Originally posted by Boris
Where's that vaunted response, Tony?

Sorry, Boris, I didn't realize I'd been vaunting my response.
I got a little sidetracked by a post you'd made earlier re some Egyptian stuff.

But here it is...

I've been trying to figure out Boris' exact stance. Well, now that we finally have it down somewhat, I figure it's time to touch off the proper tongue-lashing. Boris, you've been a very, very bad boy (well... assuming you are male, that is).

So let's see. Boris is born. As a newborn, Boris cannot speak nor does Boris understand speech. Needless to say, Boris has no religious belief or indeed any concept of religion. Boris mostly eats, sleeps, evacuates, and moves about ineptly, trying to gain command of his motor and coordination faculties. Boris is assailed by a sensory avalanche, and his poor nascent nervous system is in overdrive trying to make sense of the impinging perceptions. Not that it only started at the moment of birth, but ever since it has all been magnified to painful levels. Often during his waking moments (and he mostly sleeps to cope with the immense stress), Boris screams in protest and complains about the never-ending frustrations and disturbances.

Slowly, through interaction with the world around it, Boris' body begins to adapt. By trial and error, he gains fine control over his musculature, and acquires the beginnings of coordination. The jumble of sensory information begins to resolve itself into refined streams. The blur, multiplicity and noise of vision gradually coalesce into an increasingly consistent picture, depth-enhanced through correlative stereopsis. The chaos and ringing in the ears subsides, and the incoming sounds begin to resolve into separate sources. The vestibular apparatus learns to perceive orientation correctly, reducing Boris' spontaneous bouts of nausea. And so on.

Eventually, Boris is sophisticated enough to visuospatially separate other humans around him from the background, and to identify certain sounds with those other humans. He begins to correlate the observed soundbytes with objects, subjects and events. Meanwhile, he discovers the range of his oral repertoire, and plays with all the different sounds he can produce and reproduce. Quickly, sounds become sequences as coordinative ability continues to develop, and eventually Boris realises that he can reproduce at least crude copies of some of the speech fragments he hears. Some of his accidental mumblings (such as "ma-ma" for example) produce delightful reinforcement from the listeners, and Boris swiftly learns to elicit that reinforcement at will. Learned sounds and sequences become reinforced as Boris accumulates and processes more data, and his phonetic lexicon begins to narrow down to the approximate range of his native language. By this time, Boris has formed firm associations between certain spoken sound sequences and their objects, subjects or events. The sound sequences separate themselves from the spoken stream as if they had natural borders to them, and Boris begins to comprehend snippets of speech. Internally, Boris is able to map those sound sequences to their perceptual or conceptual targets as well (of course, the perceptual is primary and conceptual only comes later as another layer of abstraction over the perceptual), and so Boris is beginning to acquire the rudimentary capabilities of abstract cognition. Having thus mastered his first words, Boris soon figures out how to reproduce them at will, to the never-ending delight of his parents. And before long, Boris' continued statistical analysis links word classes into mutual associations and ordering. Boris begins to understand the grammatical rules of his native language, and becomes capable of forming rudimentary sentences. He is now entering the realm of structured thought...

Let's fastforward a few years or decades. Boris is now a fully capable human, equipped with a complete arsenal of cognitive abilities etched and honed in that long-forgotten early bout of intense perusal of the scientific methods. Of course, Boris doesn't remember that period of his life, since long-term memory does not begin to function properly until around 4 years of age. Meanwhile, Boris has come to doubt everything and anything about the world in which he exists. Gone is the necessity-driven physiological compulsion to simply perceive the environment and learn from it. Oh no, Boris is far beyond such fallacious and fruitless ways. Science, logic, observation -- these things are all meaningless and groundless without a textbook to serve as the ultimate source of knowledge and reason. After all, it is the textbook that taught Boris everything that enables him to so much as even take a single step in this world. Science, logic, observation, objectivity... hell, only helpless children trying to learn and master the nature of their reality would engage in such foolish activities. Boris, on the other hand, is no longer interested in the nature of his reality; instead, Boris has the books.

To wit, Boris figures that a select group among his race of advanced primates has already acquired, in the immediate past, under ordinary circumstances, the books he now has. Just what are the real source and nature of that particular cultural tradition is a question that does not concern Boris. Instead, Boris elects his favorite ology because it appears to solve his gravest concern -- more input. Granted, Boris doesn't really believe, at heart, in that ology (although he will never admit it in public, perhaps not even in private, and maybe not even to himself) -- but his continued efforts to self-generate such belief are driven by the idea that if true, his mind, recycling the thoughts of those having died and decomposed; his mind, which continuously and completely regurgitates its philosophical constitution every few weeks having shed its preceding noetic makeup, has finally revealed to Boris the ultimate truth that he was useless for anything other than citing some other person's writings. Such a belief Boris denotes as representative of teaching and wisdom, and, he maintains, even such a nauseatingly moronic concept is superior to having any concept of afterlife whatsoever. The universe is a wondrous place indeed to harbor this warped "wisdom". Of course, in his enlightened state, Boris probably sees nothing wrong with any of the above other than the parts that hurl demeaning epithets at him (in fact, I can hear him now accusing me of smear tactics and lack of substance; or perhaps he'll resort to the time-honored practice of claiming rational and calculable and altogether ordinary and humanly observable meanings to those mentionings of anything non-material and denying the non-material when he can't explain it.) Either that, or the entire wealth of wisdom Boris has so far inflicted upon the exosci board is an elaborate joke gone way overboard, in which case Boris must have a pretty twisted sense of humor.


__________________
Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Nope.

Just cut-and-paste, Boris. I hope you can appreciate the humor.

But to address the point of the post you made, I don't see where the atoms, molecules, etc. need to be the same ones in the same order in a resurrected person.

After all, resurrection is the ultimate mind-upload but without all the nit-picky problems along the way.

You posit a Supermachine, I posit a Superbeing.

You have faith in machines and scientists, engineers, etc. being able to build supermachines.

I have faith in God.

I'm betting he'll be able to follow through on his plans, long before any supermachines actually get built.

You can create a definition of God that can never exist.
I can create a definition of "supermachine" that can never be built.

Don't let this little thing keep you from contemplating the Egyptian stuff; I just thought it was about time this thread returned to its designated theme (or at least to the overall designated forum.)

And now for the application of some of that useless regurgitated method employed by some other dead person. I.e. a little Socratic dialogue, shall we? (Thought I was talking about language? Hah, fooled you! :D)

I begin with a simple enough question: What causes you to believe anything at all?

Originally posted by Boris
I begin with a simple enough question: What causes you to believe anything at all?

In a strictly materialistic sense, some chemicals combining in a certain way.

In reality, the exposure to a concept causes you to believe that concept.
The exposure to another concept causes you to believe that concept, also.
At the point where two different concepts contradict, the cognitive dissonance forces a "fight or flight" reaction.

You choose to fight the dissonance and resolve the contradiction or you choose to flee the dissonance and hold two contradictory thoughts in your mind at the same time.

For example, "God is real" and "God is invisible."

So, God is real and God is invisible. No dissonance so far, since real isn't limited to visible.

Another concept comes along, "every claim must be verified with repeatable, observable facts."

Cognitive dissonance: God isn't repeatable, being one of a kind.
Cognitive dissonance: God isn't observable, being invisible.

Low-level solution: God doesn't exist.

Medium-level solution: Who says every claim etc.?

Higher-level solution: Find out more...
1. Who might wish to deny the existence of God, and why?
2. What are the ramifications of choosing sides?
3. What are the ramifications of not choosing sides?
4. What is the arena of conflict?
5. How does the arena of conflict influence the methodology of conflict?
6. What methodologies have been used in the past?
7. What might be repeatable of the unique?
8. What might be visible of the invisible?
9. How might wrong answers to any one or more questions affect the other questions or answers?
10. How might various answers reached by others affect your own answers?
11. etc.

So, random fluke combinations of chemicals, events and time may cause you to believe some random thing, but at some point or another, you make the choice of what to believe.

In reality, the exposure to a concept causes you to believe that concept.


Does it really? I just saw a flying purple people eater. If you believe that, then I've got a bridge to sell you -- pennies on the dollar!

But not to be sidetracked: what is the origin of the concept?

Originally posted by Boris
Does it really? I just saw a flying purple people eater. If you believe that, then I've got a bridge to sell you -- pennies on the dollar!
Luckily, I've been exposed to other concepts. The cognitive dissonance, minor though it was, caused me to reject your presentation.

what is the origin of the concept?

A concept is something conceived.
Something conceived comes from a seed.

One example...
Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God.
(Luke 8:11, KJV).

Is it not true that a "seed" must first be perceived before it can give rise to a "concept"?
Is it not also true that perception involves inductive generalization coupled to deductive inference so as to determine the source of the percept?

True or false:
1) What you call a "concept" is a logical proposition built from induced predicates
2) What you call "dissonance" is a logical contradiction betwen propositions as defined in (1)

Then is it not true overall, that conceptual thinking in general should be a logical process through and through? Would you not agree that, when conceptual thinking goes against logic it must be considered as faulty, since it is going against its very foundation (i.e. this is what you would call a "flight" response)?

Originally posted by Boris
Is it not true that a "seed" must first be perceived before it can give rise to a "concept"?
True enough. Analogically, a real seed would have to reach the ground to germinate, barring some contrived alternatives.
Is it not also true that perception involves inductive generalization coupled to deductive inference so as to determine the source of the percept?
It might, although I doubt little infants, for example, would do that.

True or false:
1) What you call a "concept" is a logical proposition built from induced predicates
That would depend on your definition of "logical."
2) What you call "dissonance" is a logical contradiction betwen propositions as defined in (1)
It's not called dissonance because it is necessarily a logical contradiction, but because it causes pain.

Then is it not true overall, that conceptual thinking in general should be a logical process through and through? Would you not agree that, when conceptual thinking goes against logic it must be considered as faulty, since it is going against its very foundation (i.e. this is what you would call a "flight" response)?
Your series of questions leans VERY heavily on a particular definition of logic. In addition, it is rather circular.

CT (conceptual thinking) is logical. If CT is not logical, it is not CT.

That is tautologically true, but I'm sure you're not going to all this trouble to prove a tautology.

quote:

Is it not also true that perception involves inductive generalization coupled to deductive inference so as to determine the source of the percept?

It might, although I doubt little infants, for example, would do that.


Take vision as example. When you perceive a particular visual pattern that you had perceived before, do you not recognize such a pattern as an entity onto itself? Therefore, would this not constitute an inductive generalization?

When you have thus acquired command of many different such patterns, when two of them are superimposed so that part of one is hidden behind the other -- do you not use deductive inference to mentally reconstruct the hidden portion, based on the knowledge of the previously-induced intact pattern?

Of course, the above is a little oversimplified since vision does not deal in mere bitmaps, but in bitmaps combined with geometrical abstractions such as lines, points and corners, and spatial relationships between them. But would not the same as above apply to such higher-level visual derivatives, and hence up the hierarchy to any perceptual level? (If so, then you would have to concede that the above applies to even the littlest of infants, or indeed to any perceptually aware organism. Moreover, if you agree I hope you see that the above does not apply specifically to vision, but indeed to any sensory modality.)


quote:

True or false:
1) What you call a "concept" is a logical proposition built from induced predicates


That would depend on your definition of "logical."


Would you not agree that any word is an induced predicate, since you must induce its web of meaning from its context even as you learn it? Is a lexical sentence not a chain that connects words together? Is it not true, then, that such connections betwen words mutually constrain their specific meaning in the sentence, and thus form bidirectional logical implications? Furthermore, is it not true that a sentence in itself expresses a "belief", which is just another way of saying "logical proposition"? (complex sentences can be built from component propositions, but this is splitting hairs without detracting from the main point...)


quote:

2) What you call "dissonance" is a logical contradiction betwen propositions as defined in (1)


It's not called dissonance because it is necessarily a logical contradiction, but because it causes pain.


What is "dissonance" if not a conflict between two beliefs? Which is the same as "logical contradiction".


Your series of questions leans VERY heavily on a particular definition of logic. In addition, it is rather circular.

CT (conceptual thinking) is logical. If CT is not logical, it is not CT.

That is tautologically true, but I'm sure you're not going to all this trouble to prove a tautology.


Well, I actually *am* trying to go somewhere with all this, but I felt it necessary to begin by establishing some facts as well as a common language. If you think that the argument that CT is logical is circular, then you are right to a certain degree. However, I wanted to go a little deeper and look at the very nature of logic -- i.e. where it comes from and what it stands for. Logic is not merely tied to CT, but to every bit of matter in the universe; it is a framework stemming from causality. Memory cannot be defined in an environment that does not obey logic; without memory no thought or comprehension can occur whatsoever, not to mention such things as evolution. Even an infant learning to walk is using logic physiologically, to train its motor cortex, cerebellum, etc. Hopefully, by now it's clear that even such "trivial" things as perception are highly structured and intimately dependent upon a consistent and logical universe. In other words, logic is not just a mathematicians' game; it is implicit in what it means to "exist"; it's a manifestation and the fundamental nature of our reality.

On the other hand, "conceptual thinking" is not necessarily logical, and indeed quite often it is not. Lots of psychological research has demonstrated that humans in general are quite illogical in certain circumstances when it comes to higher cognitive function. This ought not be a surprise since evolutionarily, complex thought has been selected for hands-on application such as tool use or for simple planning, not for highly abstract processing. This doesn't mean that the components of faulty thinking are illogical, but rather that there is a failure to autodetect logical inconsistencies and contradictions that arise out of inconsistent combinations of such components.

Quoted from another post:


Hence, the uselessness of logic.


I take it, you disagree?

Boris:
Take vision as example. When you perceive a particular visual pattern that you had perceived before, do you not recognize such a pattern as an entity onto itself? Therefore, would this not constitute an inductive generalization?
Your statement appears to be more of an inductive generalization than the process of vision might be.
The process of vision you are describing is more appropriate for programming a robotic vision system than it is for human beings, or even animals.

When you have thus acquired command of many different such patterns, when two of them are superimposed so that part of one is hidden behind the other -- do you not use deductive inference to mentally reconstruct the hidden portion, based on the knowledge of the previously-induced intact pattern?
I might, occasionally, but generally speaking, I am less interested in the hidden portions of things than I am in the visible portions.
Take a hundred dollar bill as an example, once I see one side, I am satisfied. I don't need to "infer" what the other side looks like. If I want to know what the other side looks like, I turn it over.

Of course, the above is a little oversimplified since vision does not deal in mere bitmaps, but in bitmaps combined with geometrical abstractions such as lines, points and corners, and spatial relationships between them. But would not the same as above apply to such higher-level visual derivatives, and hence up the hierarchy to any perceptual level? (If so, then you would have to concede that the above applies to even the littlest of infants, or indeed to any perceptually aware organism. Moreover, if you agree I hope you see that the above does not apply specifically to vision, but indeed to any sensory modality.)
Well, it would, if we were all robots.
Essentially, if I understand you correctly, you are saying that vision (and by extrapolation, other senses) consists of collecting data as mathematical points, such that each datum is defined by an x-value, a y-value and a z-value, where the z-value is not along the z-axis but is itself defined as the HSV (or RGB, or other) value of the point. What follows is a mathematical process which extracts lines, followed by planes, followed by solids.

Of course, this is a good description of the mechanics of vision, but not vision.
Vision actually means understanding what you see, not just seeing.

With a description of vision like that, you would be the perfect patsy for a sleight-of-hand artist.

Would you not agree that any word is an induced predicate, since you must induce its web of meaning from its context even as you learn it? Is a lexical sentence not a chain that connects words together? Is it not true, then, that such connections betwen words mutually constrain their specific meaning in the sentence, and thus form bidirectional logical implications? Furthermore, is it not true that a sentence in itself expresses a "belief", which is just another way of saying "logical proposition"? (complex sentenses can be built from component propositions, but this is splitting hairs without detracting from the main point...)
I might agree with this if I believed in a world where people boot up the same way as computers do.
Keep in mind that computers can "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps" only because we, as intelligent creators of computers, give them a list of detailed instructions to follow, which they cannot deviate from.
We understand lexical constructs because we have the ability, in advance, to do so.
Computers can, by rote, follow a series of instructions based on the intelligence of its programmer(s), to simulate the analysis performed by a live brain.


What is "dissonance" if not a conflict between two beliefs? Which is the same as "logical contradiction".
A conflict between two beliefs is not necessarily a logical contradiction, and logical contradictions do not always produce dissonance.
Literally, "dissonance" means little more than "sounds bad."

For example, person A believes that band A sounds better. Person B believes that band B sounds better. This would be a major conflict with little or nothing to do with logic.

On the other hand, logical inconsistencies such as the following produce little, if any, dissonance...
Atheist A knows that God is described as invisible.
Atheist A says, "I can't see Him, therefore he doesn't exist."
No dissonance obtains from this at all.

However, I wanted to go a little deeper and look at the very nature of logic -- i.e. where it comes from and what it stands for. Logic is not merely tied to CT, but to every bit of matter in the universe; it is a framework stemming from causality. Memory cannot be defined in an environment that does not obey logic; without memory no thought or comprehension can occur whatsoever, not to mention such things as evolution.
Memory-dependent evolution? That's a new one.

Even an infant learning to walk is using logic physiologically, to train its motor cortex, cerebellum, etc.
The infant is acting with a goal in mind, rather than logic. The goal is imitation of what he/she sees.
Goal-oriented behavior is singularly independent of logic in reality, which is why there are so many dysfunctional people around.
In turn, logic is intrinsically absent any possibility of goal-seeking, which is why it is an obscure branch of mathematics.

Hopefully, by now it's clear that even such "trivial" things as perception are highly structured and intimately dependent upon a consistent and logical universe. In other words, logic is not just a mathematicians' game; it is implicit in what it means to "exist"; it's a manifestation and the fundamental nature of our reality.
You seem to be putting forth the idea that logic is the basis for everything, whereas it is actually a relatively obscure branch of mathematics.

On the othe hand, "conceptual thinking" is not necessarily logical, and indeed quite often it is not. Lots of psychological research has demonstrated that humans in general are quite illogical in certain circumstances when it comes to higher cognitive function. This ought not be a surprise since evolutionarily, complex thought has been selected for hands-on application such as tool use or for simple planning, not for highly abstract processing.
Well, which is it, complex thought or simple planning?
This must be an example of the "conceptual thinking" which is illogical.

There is no point in attempting to construct a situation in which you bury the inconsistency "complex=simple" through a process of carefully loaded questions, which I am supposed to agree with, and which themselves have subtle inconsistencies.

This doesn't mean that the components of faulty thinking are illogical, but rather that there is a failure to autodetect logical inconsistencies and contradictions that arise out of inconsistent combinations of such components.
Of course, "failure to autodetect error" I agree with since I made a very similar point in an earlier post, possibly in a different thread.

However, this failure to detect error applies in any circumstance where the same process or mechanism is used both to perform a function and to monitor the performance of said function.
Interestingly, this failure becomes less likely with an external reference, and becomes less likely still when another process or mechanism is used to monitor error in conjunction with this external standard.

Thus, using logic to attempt to prove that logic is all-important, fails because there is no external reference with which to compare your conclusions. Even finding people, who have reached the same conclusions by the same means, fails since all have failed the same way.

For example, we all know that if a=b then b=a. Now if b= "logic" and a="all-important," then we can restructure our original statement as follows...
If all-important is logic then logic is all-important.

Sounds great!
Our "proof" that logic is all-important is in the previously proven idea that all-important is logic!

Of course, if b="your reasoning" and a="stinks" we have "your reasoning=stinks" proven by the previously established "stinks=your reasoning!"

Boris,

I think that you must first establish that an aptitude to reason exists, otherwise all your attempts will be futile. I reached the obvious conclusion some days ago. There simply is no evidence, or rather there is evidence to the contrary.

Originally posted by Cris
... aptitude to reason ...

I suspect that you define "aptitude to reason" as "tendency to agree with you."

Cris,

That's quite allright. Even though I'm a pessimist at times, I do subscribe to a creed that even the deaf can be taught. Don't sweat it; we're starting to get away from abstract and esoteric things and down into the nitty-gritty. The closer you get to the tangible world, the less room there is to maneuver. That's my playground, and the victim has bit the lure. And I'm not even afraid to let him know that, because now it's too late to back out. No doubt though, it's going to be a very long and rocky ride.

Tony,

A response is forthcoming; but I've got to run right now...

Originally posted by Boris
A response is forthcoming; but I've got to run right now...
I'll wait.

Tony1,

Originally posted by tony1
I suspect that you define "aptitude to reason" as "tendency to agree with you."

Only if I present a logical argument with a valid conclusion. If you make any claims to an ability to think logically then you have no choice but to agree to a logically valid argument and conclusion. This is a debate where agreements are acceptable, and expected, if the argument is solid. This is not a contest to see how strongly one can disagree with an opponent. I see no evidence that you understand this distinction, and this oversight on your part is causing some of us frustration and annoyance, although at the same time it is challenging. But your limitations detract significantly from the usual enjoyment most of us experience when debating here. If you find you do agree with a strong opposing point then say so or stay silent, do not go out of your way to find an opposite just because you feel that is what is expected. Debating is often about learning from others no matter how hard those lessons can be at times, especially when your argument is dashed. To lose an argument and accept that loss takes courage but you will gain enormous respect from your peers (us). Unless, of course, you feel that you are never wrong, in which case you would be simply arrogant and not deserving of any respect. Be prepared to learn and in that spirit we might also learn from you. Our common goals in such debates are to find truth, and not to force ones ideas on others regardless. If you want to preach your beliefs then you would do much better elsewhere. I hope, actually that you stay but mellow slightly, and read your opponents words with a more open mind and an acceptance that you might NOT know all the answers to life the universe and everything.

The issue here is not a matter of religious belief or not but strictly about your perception of debating. You remind me of my children when they were very small (they are all teenagers now). There were times when they would rebel and no matter how reasonable my arguments they would always respond with the opposite no matter how foolish the response. The child would simply be determined to say the opposite of anything I might say. You appear to be using the same tactic. The only successful strategy I discovered for dealing with the errant child was to stay silent and allow the child to discover the truth by itself. It was a time consuming and frustrating option.

You said at one point that I had given up on you too early. That isn’t true; I’m patiently waiting for you to learn the ropes of appropriate debating protocols. Most here, I believe, recognize Boris’s abilities to think very clearly. Many will not agree with his beliefs, or lack of beliefs, but that does not detract from his abilities to implement logical arguments. You would be wise to listen to his objective advice.

I noticed at one point that you seemed to be ‘trashing’ logic. I hope that you aren’t serious since that would mean you could never be able to debate successfully. Logic is not a belief system or mystical system of thinking. Logic is the most disciplined and precise method of human thinking devised. It is simply the most exacting form of human communication. It often takes effort to use and to understand. A mastery of logical thinking will enable you to find truth faster than anything else, and at the same time receive respect form others.

I hope you accept this criticism in a spirit of helpfulness and the desire of a fellow debater to see you succeed.

Have fun if and whenever you can.
Cris

Tony,

I am going to postpone dealing with actual nitty-gritty, as promised, until after I had a chance to express the following. It is only my personal, and very widely scoped, assessment of the situation and a philosophical background. However, perhaps it may help you to connect better to what I say (and we've already encountered our share of impedance mismatch.) In any case, it will give you an insight into the cornerstones that support my worldview and framework; whether you agree or not I hope by the time you're done reading this post (and I apologize if it takes a while) that you would no longer assume that I am reflexively regurgitating the thoughts of dead people rather than trying to offer original content with some deep roots into reality and some hefty thinking behind it. Moreover, I hope you glimpse here at least some of the motivation and reasoning behind those books and methodologies you profess to dislike or at least distrust -- because I'm certainly not inventing all of this from scratch.

*putting on philosophical hat*

We stand now at the threshold of grounds whose relief is unknown. And that in itself could speak volumes, since these grounds harbor roots of existence, humanity and everything in between as well as beyond far as the eye could see, so to say. This is not to claim that we're hitting upon the ultimate substrate of reality, but we are beginning to discern the building blocks that form the observable. And those building blocks, in turn, imply certain things about the invisible vastness that gives them definition. So it is that the observable is not some limited or crippled shadow of what truly exists but a gateway into existence; indeed it enables us to even perceive those very building blocks, and thus it is sufficiently powerful to reveal its fundamentals. Of course the observable is simply mandatory, once it is so much as allowed that an observer can even in principle exist.

The presence of the observer in itself is an incontrovertible and sufficient enough foundation to conclude that everything that is observed has an underlying reality in terms of that very same reality which gives rise to the observer (since the act and results of observation become part of the observer and its existence.) In fact, the notion of existence and the process of perception are inseparable; for example we only realize we exist once we are able to perceive our own existence (no matter what shape or route that perception takes.) Note how both of those concepts -- "notion" and "process" -- are also inseparably linked to time. A process is an ordered sequence of events; a notion is something that did not always exist, and must at some point come into existence. Pondering these issues, we arrive at, and refine, our set of absolutely undeniable axyoms.

The first fundamental piece of the intertwined puzzle is memory. Note how the notion of even a linear ordered sequence implies that a given event in the sequence must follow a well-defined preceeding event. The universe must "remember" what that last event was in the previous instant, to be able to produce the correct event in the current instant. Moreover, in order for anything to "exist", it must have definition over some extended (nonzero) interval of time. Memory is this very property of persistence. Memory is inertia. Memory is that which dictates that once an object is put into a state it will remain in that state unless disturbed, at least over some extended interval of time. If such were not true, then memory could not exist. The universe would not, as a rule, closely resemble itself between any two instants. There could be no continuation of anything, no sequences, no cause and effect, no history, no objects, subjects, processes, observation, or indeed observers. The universe would be a seething nothingness of pure chaos, absolutely uniform and perfectly unmethodical in its unpredictability. But any persistent structure (even such as dimensionality), any sequence, any dependency, relative property or observation or indeed observer automatically reveals something about the encompassing reality: it has memory (at least over the extent of persistence.) And so it is that by observing our very existence, we impose (and imperatively so!) structure upon the universe. The moment the universe ceases to have memory, is the moment it ceases to exist. Of course such an event is paradoxical, since the very persistence of a universe represents a type of memory -- so existence at any level implies memory at a more fundamental level and so on, possibly ad infinitum. Hence, our very existence, however momentary, testifies to an ultimately inviolable persistence of the ultimate universe. Having nailed down the concept of memory (or, interchangeably, persistence), it becomes possible to define the process of "observation" more precisely. Namely, the process involves a transfer of intermittently persistent information (essentially more entities) between two intermittently persistent entities -- source and the observer -- arranged as a linear sequence in time. Physically, such a transfer is called "interaction". The set of interactions defined over an extant object has to be persistent as well (i.e. there cannot be chaos in the object's behavior) because the modes of interaction are an integral part of the object's state, and as such the object would not be a persistent one if its fundamental characteristics were chaotic. So persistence is defined in terms of interaction and time, while interaction is defined in terms of persistence and time. Time, in turn, is meaningless without persistence and interaction -- since time is an ordered progression of configurations that are identifiable only through a persistent context coupled to interaction. <u>Thus 1 - persistence (memory), 2 - interaction (observation) and 3 - time are interdependent and equally incontrovertible (I am, thus I persist, thus I perceive; perceiving, I evolve) -- the three fundamental attributes of any existence, revealed through observation</u>. Nobody could possibly challenge the reality of either one of these three mutually recursive concepts, because that very act of challenge implies all three. And these three are the complete and self-contained foundation of my philosophy; they are the diamond tip on which the entire inverted pyramid stands. The foundation is as true as is the immediate and inescapable tautology of existence. [As a sidenote, given such a three-fold definition of the abstract notion of existence, it immediately follows that no existence can be conceived without any one of the three attributes, even because without it the other two cannot be conceived either.]

Now, given existence as defined above, it is possible to define an outrageously complex set of interactions so that even the most fundamental persistent entities are alive, sentient and can act as observers. Moving away from such an extreme, there can exist more limited and streamlined sets of fundamental interactions that would allow the fundamental components to conglomerate into composite entities which are in turn also persistent (i.e. the conglomerate state is preferred to scattered state.) If the interactions extend over such composite scales (or are indeed at least partially proportional to the complexity of the composite entities), then ever-larger agglomerations of the fundamental components can form. Depending on the available kinds of interaction, the composite entities can exhibit emergent behavior across the aggregate that has no equivalent among the aggregate's individual constituents. Such emergent behavior would give rise to what might be called composite (or complex, or derived, or emergent) interactions. These in turn could lead to aggregates and emergent interactions at ever higher layers of complexity. Such a description fits our universe, where the largest known agglomerations occur on the scale of galactic superclusters. Finally at the other extreme of the spectrum, you could have primitive constituent entities with only a single mode of interaction that does not allow them to congregate or exhibit group emergent behavior; such a universe would be a bland and boring place indeed. So as you can see, the fundamental tenets of existence as defined above are in agreement with the observable universe -- although they could also give rise to universes vastly different from it; in fact they are as generative as the infinite set of all possible interactions that could ever be imagined.

Moreover, such a fundamental description of the observable universe says nothing about any entities that are in principle unobservable (i.e. they don't interact with anything at all, including their own kind); indeed, given the definition of existence such entities do not exist. On the other hand, one could imagine two sets of entities that only interact with other entities in their respective set and never with the entities from the other set. In such a case, the two sets of entities indeed exist, but they can never, in principle, learn of each other's existence. As far as each of them is concerned, the other set is merely a fantasy among an infinity of other possible fantasies. Note, then, that so far the philosophy does not contradict a hypothetical god that is "invisible"; indeed it allows for such an entity -- provided this entity exhibits the features of persistence, interaction and time within its own reality. Just as easily, however, the framework accomodates existence of two such gods, or any number of them whatsoever, including gods that cannot in principle know of each other, gods that cannot in principle know about our universe, and so on down the fantasy lane. Moreover, the core framework places no restrictions or requirements upon the origin of any existence. It is only concerned with existence as it is; it contains nothing that could provide an explanation for how the existence came about in the first place. Indeed, it practically forbids an absolute beginning, because prior to such a beginning no existence can be defined, and therefore there would be nothing to give definition to newborn entities or interactions; a "nothing" cannot contain a flow of time, and hence cannot accomodate the notions of before and after (the notion of "beginning" has an inherent implication of "before".) Therefore, under this framework, existence at its ultimate level has no beginning. As it contains a flow of time, however, it always has a notion of "before" -- and therefore it stretches infinitely into the past. Similarly, and as briefly argued above based on memory, existence cannot be terminated in an ultimate sense. Thus, one arrives at a conclusion that existence always was, and always will be. This is not to imply that the visible universe is ageless and timeless. For example, the known universe could exist within some super-universe as a bubble that appeared, inflated, and is destined to burst. However, even if our narrow existence as defined within the context of the visible universe ends, the super-universe would continue to exist -- and so on.

So much is provided with relatively simple derivations from the basic Cartesian observation of "I am". But more can be gleaned. For example, it is not too hard to see that logic is the language of existence. Logic deals with entities whose definition and meaning remain fixed over time (i.e. they persist). The entities interact according to a fixed set of rules. The simple entities can conglomerate and form ever-more complex entities, which can in turn interact under their emergent rules. The progression of sentences in a logical argument mirrors a flow of time. The actual entities and rules of interaction derive directly from experience at our (human) level of complexity. For example, we observe that an entity either exists or does not exist, is at point A or point B, is me or is you, and can only be in one of those states at a time. Such observations give rise to the fundamental logical constructs of assertion and negation, as well as their mutual exclusivity. Conglomerate entities consist of a number of assertions and negations connected via simple rules. Those rules are again derivatives of experience. We know that composite entities are conjoined unions of elemental entities -- and hence we have the rule of conjunction (AND). We also know that certain entities are mutually exclusive, and when a conjunction must include one of them it must exclude the other (and vice versa) -- so we obtain the exclusive disjunction (XOR). With NOT, AND and XOR we can derive OR, and any other complex logical interactions. Clearly, our logic is initially based upon the emergent behavior at our level of complexity, and therefore would not necessarily be adequate to describe the universe at more complex or more elemental levels (for example, quantum objects can apparently be in two places simultaneously, or simultaneously exist and not exist.) This forms a formidable barrier against understanding anything that is beyond our immediate scale and range of experience. Yet, there are saving graces. Because complex objects are formed through interactions between simpler objects (via information flowing up the complexity axis), detailed study of the complex interactions enables us to deduce the simple entities and interactions behind the scenes (essentially establishing such conditions that the flow of information is reversed.) Such bidirectional information flow is possible because existence at any level involves persistence, interaction and time; interaction is biased toward conglomeration of simple entities but such bias can always be overcome via carefully arranged counteraction from top down. Reducing reality to ever-more elemental entitites, we construct new logical frameworks that agree with the observed behaviors of said entities. There is, further, the added bonus of verification when we apply the newly-derived frameworks to obtain the expected conglomeration and emergent behavior at the higher level of complexity that has previously been observed. And so, our very method of reasoning is a function of interaction (or in other words observation) -- nothing more, but nothing less. Thus, the aggregate capability of understanding and mastering the universe is not a fixed quantity, but a direct function of exploration. Of course, all of this can only be possible if we are general-purpose information processors. That is, our only fundamental assumptions are those of persistence, interaction and time -- with no further restrictions on the modes of interaction or mechanisms of persistence that we are capable of considering. This is provided since we can indeed fix (persist) entities as concepts, and establish arbitrary rules of interaction between such concepts (by simply stating and fixing such rules.)

To sum up, an analysis of existence (beginning with the fundamental empirical observation of self-existence) reveals that the language of structured thought (logic) is a direct derivative of experience, and therefore co-evolves via mutual feedback with observation. The acts of cognition are acts of information processing, where fundamental persistent concepts emerge from direct interaction with the universe, and are subsequently recombined into derivative concepts via rules of interaction that are in turn also derived from direct observation of the universe. Indeed, subsequent consideration of all the knowledge (persistent memory content) gleaned so far, reveals among other things that even humans are only a result of a type of information processing that has been ongoing since the emergence of the observable universe: the simplest structures conglomerated to form more complex structures, eventually giving rise to our solar system and primitive life on Earth which proceeded to interact with the environment and encode its properties through chance recombination of biochemical logic (as it were) and subsequent natural selection (adjusting the logical framework against observation) and biochemical memory across generations (e.g. DNA), agglomerating information and gaining in complexity, until the present day. In a curious recursion, we are now using the information processing faculties evolved via biochemical information processing over billions of years -- beginning with understanding of our immediate environment and then expanding beyond the range of existence that was accessible to our precursors. In other words, the human intellectual quest is only a continuation of the grand quest of all life -- that is, unraveling the universe's complete functional specification (to use software terminology). Of course, due to our sentience we can also construct and follow other quests, as we are no longer confined to the sheer requirements of survival.

*philosophical hat off*

As a highly speculative yet fascinating aside, I would note how interesting it is that the universe should, through sentient life, encode its own structure. This resembles a living organism, where the information on how to construct the organism is inherent in the organism's design (in this case, the set of elemental entities and interactions that ultimately give rise to everything we know.) An intriguing possibility for an overarching "reason" for life, may be that we are to serve, at some point in the future, as the universe's means of reproduction; indeed our very emergence may be a point in an ongoing reproductive cycle. Under such a conjecture, there can be any number of various universes existing inside some super-universe, the vast majority of which are not conducive to life and thus end up being born, aging and dying without ever reproducing. The "living" universes, on the other hand, reproduce and proliferate -- and possibly mutate in the process -- which results in a sort of universal evolution within the super-universe. Depending on whether the component universes are capable of encoding information about the super-universe and agglomerating, the super-universe may itself be a reproducing living organism, and so on. It's unlikely to be true, as it is little more than a flight of fancy -- but it makes for an appetizing sci-fi scenario, which is why I mentioned it here (as well as to lighten up the overall mood somewhat.)

The last things I wanted to briefly touch on, are the foundations of what now resides under the umbrella of science -- such as hypothesis-forming and testing (as pertains to evolution of logical frameworks), empirical experimentation (interaction) and observation (also interaction, but in addition a source of fundamental concepts), as well as education (memory), peer-review (interaction and memory), and rational approach (in general very like and related to the outlined philosophy.)

Observation is the most fundamental aspect of science, which in view of this philosophy should not be surprising -- since the function of science is to establish the facts of existence. Since the only method of <u>gaining</u> information is through interaction, then it is interaction that is chosen (out of the three constituents of existence) as the core methodology. Sentient observation always begins under an already extant logical framework, initially supplied by the evolved physiology of the human body (i.e. an infant's sensory organs and cognitive reflexes, plus accompanying "junk" information akin to uninitialized memory contents on a modern computer). Subsequently, observation either reinforces certain aspects of the primordial framework or contradicts them, which forces them to be suppressed and alternatives to be generated. Additionally, observation injects new concepts into the system which were not present before, thereby expanding the repertoire of cognition and further adapting the framework to the encompassing reality. This physiological process is carried into deliberate application under the Scientific Principle. A priori assumptions are made and subsequently subjected to empirical interaction, which either upholds or invalidates them. Clearly, under such a framework any hypothesis which is not testable is spurious -- since not being testable it fails to represent an interactive entity and therefore cannot reflect an entity that exists within the reality of the observer. Regardless of the possibility that such hypotheses might accidentally reflect existence of subjects or objects in parallel or super-universes, they do not aid understanding of the relevant universe and as such constitute noise.

This does not mean that science only investigates readily repeatable or reproducible phenomena; the relevant quality for a phenomenon to become a candidate for scientific inquiry, is that the phenomenon be observed (and therefore manifest the quality of interaction, which directly implies its existence.) However, any observation must rise above noise in order to be considered significant rather than a coincidental fluke. This means that oral accounts form a very poor conveyor of empirical observation, because they have been known to habitually introduce spurious data or even completely invent the entire story, further exacerbating and proliferating such corrupt or invented accounts as they circulate. Moreover, some oral accounts (such as any religious account -- pick your favorite) convey conflicting information purportedly about the same subjects; in such situations it becomes pointless trying to determine whether any one of such accounts is anywhere close to the truth. Indeed, when you confront a phenomenon like that it becomes likely that the very existence of the related accounts is a characteristic of a more fundamental interaction (e.g. cognitive and social dynamics, in case of religions). Vastly preferred to stories of the mouth are measurements carried out through impartial and deterministic sensory apparatus; at least in such a case the noise thresholds are calibrated and known, and the presence of a signal can be ascertained with a well-defined confidence. Partly for such reasons scientists tend to prefer experiments which remove from the data as much as possible any human bias -- thus the preference for "double-blind" studies, for example. In any case, the differential weighting of data based on its significance against noise is not of interest only to scientific theories -- but to any knowledge whatsoever. That is why science-minded people (e.g. like me) tend to sneer at those who prefer folklore as a data source to the collective observational experience of humanity to date, including their own.

The entire issue of noise is quite significant, as it pervades any real-world interaction. There is almost never a situation when the only interacting entities are the source and the target of an information exchange under scrutiny; invariably both the source and the target are subject to further interactions with other entities in the environment, and the effects of such spurious interactions must be ameliorated or filtered out as much as possible, in order to provide a clearer picture of the particular interaction in question. This is why statistics has developed along with applied science, as a means of modelling the noise and the hypothesized experimental outcomes, and distinguishing significant effects from the noise. According to statistical theory, repetition of experiments provides for better precision and confidence when attempting to separate any signal out of the noise in the experimental data. Thus, repeatability and repetition are staples of empirical investigation. An important insurance mechanism that guards against fraudulent scientific claims (and of course those do occur, just as fraudulent cultural myths occur, and probably via similar mechanisms) consists in a general expectation that any experiment allegedly producing momentous outcomes be independently repeated by several often competing and certifiably independent groups. Of course, once any significant changes are introduced into theories following revolutionary experiments, these theories are subsequently used to construct other experiments and even practical devices -- and so the verification and repetition of the original earth-shattering discoveries continues, somewhat indirectly, from the point of origin and onward.

Over time science produces copious amounts of knowledge, so much so that it becomes impossible even for the brightest individual to be aware of even a significant fraction of it. Thus, people specialize in increasingly narrow slices of the scientific spectrum, depending on their peers to provide a bridging expertise between one slice and another. So, it becomes increasingly important to subject theories and interpretations of experimental outcomes to peer review. This is not because of an assumption that when larger numbers of people examine a chain of reasoning there is a greater probability of discovering a fault in that reasoning. While that is certainly true to a degree, the prime motivation for peer review is to expose the findings to people who specialize in other areas of science. Such cross-examination of results often results in theories being shot down or modified, because they turn out to come into conflict with knowledge established elsewhere on the scientific spectrum. It is important to remember that the ultimate foundation and the overriding motif in science is always observation -- scientific theories are not imaginary castles in the air; they are firmly rooted in undeniable reality. As an added bonus, peer review cross-pollinates different areas of science, providing a useful infusion of fresh concepts and ideas that aid innovation, and helping spark cross-disciplinary dialogues and collaborations.

Of course, humans being mortal, the vast body of scientific knowledge cannot progress unless it is passed on to new generations. In connection to this process, many protest that the new generations cannot be certain of the integrity or veracity of the knowledge bestowed upon them by their ancestors. However, this is not true on several levels. First of all, the very acts of conveying the knowledge are performed by those who had at least in part contributed to it, and who in turn obtained it from similarly qualified individuals -- so there is a smooth continuum in the transfer of memory. Secondly, as already briefly mentioned above, the latest theories are built from past knowledge and hence that entire body of knowledge is empirically tested every time an experiment is made or a new device is invented. Thirdly, unlike other cultural traditions, scientific knowledge is carefully and redundantly documented centuries into the past all over the world -- so anyone interested in the origin of a particular fact or idea can trace it down to the original experiment, and if it is so desired, repeat that experiment in particular for the purposes of confirmation. And finally, at any point in time there is a sufficient cadre of experts in the world who are well-versed in the facts and theories of their particular area of specialization -- and who act as watchdogs against any who attempt to introduce pseudoscience into the general circles. The art of distinguishing real science from pseudoscience can be complex, but in general it consists of a challenge to produce supporting experiments and data (which after all must exist if some "theory" is to be advanced as anything more than a hypothesis), as well as critical examination of the chains of reasoning employed in deriving the theory from the data (oftentimes, pseudoscience consists of merely ignorant or inconsistent interpretations of limited data sets.)

All right, if you've managed to get through all of the above, my hat, any hat, goes off to you. Well if so; you ought to have somewhat of a better concept of my mentality and perspective, as well as some of my terminology.

Originally posted by Cris
If you make any claims to an ability to think logically then you have no choice but to agree to a logically valid argument and conclusion.
This is where we differ ever so slightly.
On the surface, your statement is logically valid. However, the acceptance of the conclusion of an argument is not based on the logical validity of the argument, but on the logic of the argument combined with the validity of the premises.

This is the reason for the frustration experienced by some posters.

The poster presents an argument with impeccable logic and expects me to accept his argument for that reason.
I, on the other hand, am looking at the logic and the reasonability of the premises and accept or reject the argument based on what I find there.
Thus, frustration arises in the poster because of his a priori assumptions vis-a-vis his own premises.

This is a debate where agreements are acceptable, and expected, if the argument is solid.
One would hope so, although, again, the premises also should be solid.
This is not a contest to see how strongly one can disagree with an opponent. I see