Nine Questions Some Creationists Feel Are Real Stumpers

[mikkel_the_dane]

If I can tell what your subjective state is by looking at a scan of your brain, then, yes, I *can* have an objective description of your subjective experiences. And that is all that is required.

While we cannot do that in a lot of detail *yet*, we can do it for some types of thoughts already. The limit is our resolution for the brain scans, both spatially and in time.

No, because let us say that I look at my wife and feel love. Now I could have that brain scanned and I could look at the scan, but I wouldn't feel love.
That is the limit of your dear science. Subjectivity supervenes on the objective, but it is not the objective. So here it is again - it is non-reductive emergent property, which supervenes on the physical, but can't be reduced to the physical.

Regards
Mikkel

 

[Polymath257]

No, because let us say that I look at my wife and feel love. Now I could have that brain scanned and I could look at the scan, but I wouldn't feel love.

Irrelevant. You can look at the brain scan and know the person scanned was in love. That is what is required for an objective description.

That is the limit of your dear science. Subjectivity supervenes on the objective, but it is not the objective. So here it is again - it is non-reductive emergent property, which supervenes on the physical, but can't be reduced to the physical.

I strongly disagree. It is simply that whatever is happening, happens to one individual and not another. If you know the full physical situation, then you would know the subjective state. The physical determines the subjective.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Irrelevant. You can look at the brain scan and know the person scanned was in love. That is what is required for an objective description.



I strongly disagree. It is simply that whatever is happening, happens to one individual and not another. If you know the full physical situation, then you would know the subjective state. The physical determines the subjective.

That is testable, your claim. Show some brain scans to people, who haven't learned to associate a given brain scan to a corresponding feeling and ask them what the feeling is. They won't know.
We are playing Mary's Room.

Regards
Mikkel

 

[Polymath257]

That is testable, your claim. Show some brain scans to people, who haven't learned to associate a given brain scan to a corresponding feeling and ask them what the feeling is. They won't know.
We are playing Mary's Room.

Irrelevant whether someone untrained can tell. Someone untrained can't tell cancer from a scan either. But the scan is still objective evidence of the cancer.

Mary's room is fun, but ultimately misleading.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Irrelevant whether someone untrained can tell. Someone untrained can't tell cancer from a scan either. But the scan is still objective evidence of the cancer.

Mary's room is fun, but ultimately misleading.

Please explain.

Regards
Mikkel

 

[Dan From Smithville]

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Anyone care to rise to the challenge?

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1. Why are there still monkeys? Hilarious. Can't hear that one enough. Yes I can.

Why are there still English, French, Germans, Italians, Nigerians, Chinese, Japanese, etc, if some of each came to the US and became citizens and ancestors of US citizens.

Besides, the real question is why are there still apes if humans evolved from apes. Apparently, creationists are frightened of a theory that they don't understand well enough to form cogent questions about.

Maybe when you asked your parents were you came from, mommie and daddie told you they were monkeying around and then one day daddie took mommie to hospital. And here you are to ask silly questions. You were just confused by the euphemism.

2. There are the facts that are observed and the theory that explains those facts. We see changes over time and everywhere we look is evidence (facts) of this in geology, fossils, genes, biology, morphology etc. The theory is the best explanation that we have in science. Creationism is a belief that cannot be tested.

3. Got some splainin' to do. There's only on Venus de Milo. One Leaning Tower of Pisa. One Led Zeppelin. Lots of things we only have one of. What is the point of this silly question?

4. Mutation and evolution by natural selection. It was a package deal. We love it and you can get it with matching intellectual curiosity.

5. The laws of thermodynamics do not debunk the theory of evolution. By the myopic reckoning of creationists, the laws of thermodynamics would debunk life. More splain' for them to do Lucy. Why do creationists always throw the Big Bang into discussions about evolution? Did they lose a bet?

6. No soup for you. Clearly this person would be best suited in the watching paint dry industry. Intelligent design is religion and not science. It cannot be tested. A minority of ignorant people cannot force the rest of the world to learn a pseudoscience based on belief.

7. Hey there. How you doin'? Erm, uh. Yes, your question. That's right. A completely irrelevant question that assumes reasonable, educated and intelligent people cannot believe in God and understand and accept the theories of science based on the evidence.

8. The Earth orbits a star we call the sun and the Earth rotates on its axis. The Earth is an oblate spheroid and the sun can only shine on the part facing it as it rotates. Do you think there is something we are missing in that explanation? Puppies?

9. Get a job. There is no evidence of a creator that can be objectively reviewed by all. I believe in God and ultimately, I am a creationist too, of a sort. Just not one that tries inject my belief into science as an explanation for nature, since I have no evidence to do so. The story of Genesis must be read as an allegory, since the evidence does not reveal anything supporting the idea that living things were created as they exist now 6,000 years ago. The order of creation is bungled in that story. It is mans attempt to understand God. There is no need to turn it into a science text.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Irrelevant whether someone untrained can tell. Someone untrained can't tell cancer from a scan either. But the scan is still objective evidence of the cancer.

Mary's room is fun, but ultimately misleading.

Take 2:

So the objective representation of the subjective means that the subjective is objective. That is what we are playing.

So here are 3 ways of understanding this:

• Reality is ultimately physical.
• Reality is ultimately mental.
• Reality is a combination of the 2 and you can't reduce reality down to being the one or the other.

The representation of something is never not the something as such. It is a representation. And now here we are playing the following game:
You in effect: The model captures the landscape perfectly and there is nothing left out in the model, because the model is in effect equal to the landscape.

So let me explain what it is that you don't get. This rule of yours is not in the landscape. You can't see it as a part of the landscape. It is as a rule itself, which is not able to be represented in the landscape. The rule has no objective referent. In practice you know something, which is not objective and it can't be understood by representing the landscape.

In other words you use a mental rule and don't get that it is a mental rule. But that is the point, because it is possible to use another mental rule about how the physical and mental relate to each other. But I know what will happen now. You will claim it is not useful. But the joke is that "useful" is again mental and not physical. When you say "useful", you say something, which has no objective referent.

So here it is in all its absurdity. You use a subjective model of how to represented the physical and mental without acknowledging that your model is subjective. And I won't present you with other way of doing it, before you realize what you are doing. You are using a subjective standard for useful and as long as you don't full accept that it is subjective, there is no need to continue. How is that? Because you will continue in effect to be subjective without acknowledging that you are subjective.

That is the game we are playing. You as a member of STEM have been subjectively trained to use your brain in a certain way. You can for some aspects of reality use objectivity, but you are functionally unable to understand the limit of that, because you are conditioned to think in objective terms, that you don't realize the limit of your training.
In short - you have a subjective rule that it has to be objective to make sense, but that is subjective. That is the joke, you can't relevant for this catch, hold, examine and understand your own cognition for when it is subjective and not objective.

I can relevant for these kind of debates do that, because I was trained differently. So it doesn't mean. that you are wrong or right nor the same for me. There is no kind of "the truth" in these debates, because we are playing limited cognitive relativism.
That is where it always ends. You want to reduce all of reality down to being objective and you don't get, that the fact that you want that, is subjective.
You in effect don't get that there is a variant of truth, which is subjective and all you do, is to subjectively demand that truth has to be objective in all cases for you to subjectively accept that, because the subjective definition of truth is that it is objective. And in circles we then go. And as long as it doesn't in effect clicks in your brain and you understand the limitations in practice of science in regards to the subjective, we will go on.

That is it. Nobody in the recorded history of accumulated attempts of doing what you are also trying to do have succeed in the following: To make a model of all of the landscape where there is only one kind of truth, the truth. You are in the end doing philosophy and you don't realize that, because you think that you can turn STEM into philosophy, because you know STEM works. You just don't get the limitation.

In other words, in practice philosophy can only give a negative answer: You can't make a model of the landscape with only one kind of truth, the truth. As long as you don't get that, we can't proceed to debating what we do instead.

Regards and love
Mikkel

 

[Polymath257]

Please explain.

Regards
Mikkel

About Mary's room:

Let's try a different scenario. Suppose that Sally knows everything there is to know about meteors. She knows how happens when they collide, she knows their composition, etc.

Then, one day, she sees a meteorite hit.

Does she learn anything?

Yes, of course she does: she learned that one particular meteorite hit just now. She did not know this before and now knows it.

When Mary, who knows everything there is to know about vision, leave the room and sees red, she learns that one particular person, herself, has seen red.

It has nothing at all to do with consciousness.

Similarly, Jim, who knows everything there is to know about Mary, *also* learns something: that Mary was exposed to and saw the color red.

Even someone who 'knows everything there is about a subject' learns something when another example of that subject occurs.

 

[Polymath257]

Take 2:

Always liked this one. It isn't a pipe. It is a picture of a pipe. Knowing the difference is important. The representation and the object are different things.

That is it. Nobody in the recorded history of accumulated attempts of doingwhat you are also trying to do have succeed in the following: To make a model of all of the landscape where there is only one kind of truth, the truth.

What 'landscape'?

You are in the end doing philosophy and you don't realize that, because you think that you can turn STEM into philosophy, because you know STEM works. You just don't get the limitation.

Oh, I get that science has limitations in how we live our lives. because it is devoted to truth, it cannot resolve issues of opinion. So, it cannot determine morality or aesthetics. It cannot give goals.

It may be able to *explain* why we choose the goals we do, or why we have the opinions we do, but that is a very different thing (the representation as opposed to the thing).

Science clearly has limitations. But that doesn't mean that it cannot deal, eventually, with all truth. It simply cannot deal with opinions.

In other words, in practice philosophy can only give a negative answer: You can't make a model of the landscape with only one kind of truth, the truth. As long as you don't get that, we can't proceed to debating what we do instead.

Any different notion of 'truth' isn't truth: it is a different notion. For example, mathematical truth is a different thing. Math is more of a language than true.

Now, there are things that are important that are not 'truth'. I'd even say that some of the most important things in human life are not 'truth'. Ethics, for example.

But you seem to be confused by the fact that science cannot deal with goals and opinions when I go on and say that those goals and opinions are, ultimately, a matter of the physics of our brains. I suspect that this is because you are making the mistake Magritte was pointing out in your picture: the representation is not the same as the object.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

About Mary's room:

Let's try a different scenario. Suppose that Sally knows everything there is to know about meteors. She knows how happens when they collide, she knows their composition, etc.

Then, one day, she sees a meteorite hit.

Does she learn anything?

Yes, of course she does: she learned that one particular meteorite hit just now. She did not know this before and now knows it.

When Mary, who knows everything there is to know about vision, leave the room and sees red, she learns that one particular person, herself, has seen red.

It has nothing at all to do with consciousness.

Similarly, Jim, who knows everything there is to know about Mary, *also* learns something: that Mary was exposed to and saw the color red.

Even someone who 'knows everything there is about a subject' learns something when another example of that subject occurs.

Always liked this one. It isn't a pipe. It is a picture of a pipe. Knowing the difference is important. The representation and the object are different things.


What 'landscape'?



Oh, I get that science has limitations in how we live our lives. because it is devoted to truth, it cannot resolve issues of opinion. So, it cannot determine morality or aesthetics. It cannot give goals.

It may be able to *explain* why we choose the goals we do, or why we have the opinions we do, but that is a very different thing (the representation as opposed to the thing).

Science clearly has limitations. But that doesn't mean that it cannot deal, eventually, with all truth. It simply cannot deal with opinions.



Any different notion of 'truth' isn't truth: it is a different notion. For example, mathematical truth is a different thing. Math is more of a language than true.

Now, there are things that are important that are not 'truth'. I'd even say that some of the most important things in human life are not 'truth'. Ethics, for example.

But you seem to be confused by the fact that science cannot deal with goals and opinions when I go on and say that those goals and opinions are, ultimately, a matter of the physics of our brains. I suspect that this is because you are making the mistake Magritte was pointing out in your picture: the representation is not the same as the object.

I only want you to do one thing: Explain, what truth is, without using language. Good luck with that.

Regards
Mikkel

 

[Polymath257]

I only want you to do one thing: Explain, what truth is, without using language. Good luck with that.

Why the artificial constraint of not using language? To explain implies the use of language, so your request isn't reasonable.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Why the artificial constraint of not using language? To explain implies the use of language, so your request isn't reasonable.

Yeah, so next try: Point to truth and since this is the Internet I will let you explain, where you point. If I remember right truth is out there as in there would be truth even without humans. So point to truth or something similar.

Regards
Mikkel

 

[Agnostic Christian]

So dictionaries are true? I mean I know of one, which says that atheism is amoral. Now what?

Regards
Mikkel

Atheism IS amoral. It's merely the lack of belief in a god or gods. There is no moral prescription attached, good or bad.

Dictionaries define words as we use them. They are true as long as we use the words contained in that way. Subjectivity is the word we use to describe "the quality of being based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions". Subjectivity can be and is proven constantly, when two or more people have a disagreement on an abstract concept like taste or their perception of color or music.

Science can tell you the objective components of those things, like the chemicals in seasoning or frequencies and harmonic relationship between notes or the frequency of light that creates specific colors, but it can't tell you why you enjoy a flavor or how Beethoven makes you feel or what color you personally perceive, because that is subjective. (Maybe it could, if we had a supercomputer capable of quantifying every internal and external influence on your brain and body's development, but that's a different topic)

Subjective perception has more to do with psychology, which is sort of a science - it's not as concrete as the "hard" sciences. I'd still call it science but there's definitely a distinction between it and physics or geology and the like.