Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

yes

6 (50%)

no

6 (50%)

Total Members Voted: 11

Voting closed: November 26, 2005, 04:21:30 pm

[arkabee]

I do.

That might be the difference between us.

cool.  i am envious of other's faith, faiths, and Faith.

not _everybody's_, but most.

from what i know, i most certainly am envious and respective of yours.

[Doc]

a stance on the realism/anti-realism debate in the philosophy of science?

I'm not familiar with this myself but from your description I think I'd say anti-realism. As V already said theories by their very nature can be proven wrong, so saying they have some existance or worth of their own is kind of silly. The way I would represent it is that theories are our best understanding of the way or reason why something works the way it does, but just because the theory we have today explains most (or even all) of what we observe doesn't mean we won't come up with a new observation tomorrow that will need further explanation and therefore modification (or even abandonment) of said theory.

Reading over my post you are totally right, I did kind of go philosophy == religion. To clarify when I spoke about philosophy and science it probably would have been more correct to say that there are two sets of knowledge : one that comes from philosophy (which I am defining here as understanding about the universe or people primarily through thought experiments or similar, basically stuff you can't actually test, including religion) and one that comes from science (which I'm defining as stuff you can test).
My idea was that both are valuable but you shouldn't expect science to be able to tell you about philosophical matters which can't be tested or philosophy to convincingly contradict something that can be tested empirically.
That doesn't mean there isn't overlap, you mentioned philosophers doing emperical research, without knowing for certain what sort of things you mean I  would guess that I could classify this as application of a scientific method in service to philosophy. Similarly many scientific endeavours involve things that are ethically questionable, we don't use science to make decisions of what is appropriate in this situation, we use ethics derived from philosophy.

This is why I don't think religion and science are incompatible, though I'm not religious myself (anymore, I still dig catholic mass on special events and have cultural guilt to spare), I think that if we can show that something works in a particular way that contradicts your religious code of choice then it is fair to say that that part of the religion was wrong. That doesn't invalidate the whole religion or even most of it, I think the fundamentals of religion are things that cannot or never will be proven, all it really does it toss out a lot of the dogma that is irrelevant to true belief which seems a beneficial effect to me.

Choop: I'm not going to go into whether I agree with you or not, since this thread has really stayed away from trying to challenge others beliefs so far, but you should get a copy of the Salmon of Doubt, a collection of Douglas Adam's writing published after he died and read 'Is there an Artificial God?'. Douglas agreed with you on where religion came from (note quite actually but close enough), but made some interesting points in that even if you consider religion to be based on incorrect beliefs it has created some social structures that have undeniable benefit. Not in all cases of course and to understand his point fully you'd have to read it but it is well worth. You can probably pick up the book in a bargain bin these days too.

You think this is bad, you should have seen me in the Doom movie when they said the last 10% of DNA contains the human soul.
I thought it would be a funny-bad movie, not a prison-rape-bad movie! May God have mercy on my DNA.

[Choop]

I've read The Salmon of Doubt - good read. In fact, there's only one by Adams I haven't read (the Kilimanjaro one). Though he likely wouldn't have admitted it, he was a Great Philosopher.  I believe, like Adams, that organized religion has had some good effect and has helped many people in worldly matters, but I believe that it is bad for the spirituality of the individual. Jesus was probably an awesome dude, but so were Luther and John Paul II. This current Benedict, that Borgia pope, or Koresh? Not such awesome dudes; yet they still each headed a Church for a time.

Personally, I don't believe in a god. I believe, in fact, that there is no god; rather, that there is a spiritual connection between people, and that in place of any "Higher Being" is the interconnecting construct made of singular connections.

I also don't believe in Good or Evil. I believe in Knowledge, which is good, and Ignorance, which is not good. (Don't ask me to expound on this, as that post will enchant the entire readership into a coma.)

Of course, this is all still quite malleable, as like I said upthread I consider myself a *lifelong* student of religion and the spirit, and everything I learn effects me. I have hopes, and faiths, and beliefs, but no singular Hope, Faith, nor Belief.

[pmcd9]

Tonight I got hit on by a dude.

~Paul

[Ben-San]

Tonight I got hit on by a dude.

Got to be the 'stache. None can resist it.

[miles]

I started drinking early "tonight" (1:45 PM) and this (really creepy) dude was hitting on my friend the entire time, until we left to hit up the next bar.

This was actually said:

Dude:  "So, how big are you?"
Friend  "Well, uh, um..."
Dude:  "I mean, are you just a mouthful, or am I gonna choke?"

Apparently, this guy's a regular, and has commented before that my friend has perfect dick-sucking lips.  My friend's not gay, but I think he enjoys the attention.

But the guy is soooo creepy.

[Doc]

Tonight I got hit on by a dude.

Were you wearing a lot of leather? Just what with the moustache if you added a leather vest and some classy chaps I could see you being YMCA material. Y'know, if you felt like it, the Dragonfire could even be part of the act.

I wonder what perfect dick sucking lips look like? How do you tell? That seems like something I'd want to know, just in case it was a life and death situation.

[CortJstr]

I wonder what perfect dick sucking lips look like? How do you tell? That seems like something I'd want to know, just in case it was a life and death situation.

Remeber back in like '97 when searching the web for "dsl" gave you way different results than it does today? Stupid Verizon.

[jough]

I wonder what perfect dick sucking lips look like? How do you tell? That seems like something I'd want to know, just in case it was a life and death situation.

[Bozack]

Those are not lips. That is a pu$$y hastily pasted onto a face.

[andalucia]

(On the other hand, to go back into an argument I had at dinner tonight -- a lot of the questions that non-scientists think are stupid are actually just necessary parts of creating a basic foundation of knowledge in a field. I have a prof here who has spent his entire career studying two specific cells in the zebragiraffe brain, for instance; this is stultifyingly retarded-sounding and exceptionally difficult to explain, but in fact, working on those two cells in the zebragiraffe brain is yielding incredible results related to spinal cord regeneration. Weird questions are not necessarily stupid question.)

I'm going to throw in a fairly unrelated anecdote here, because it's going to end up with a picture of psychedelic monkey experimentation and so I figure it is justifiable offtopicness.  My boyfriend is majoring in cognitive science, which as far as I understand, is some recently invented interdisciplinary thing that is like neuroscience + psychology + philosophy + computer programming, and one of his professors, apparently a world-famous cognitive science guy, doesn't make it to lectures often, because he is working on covering up monkeys' eyes and attatching videocameras to them and attatching the video cameras to the monkeys' brains.  Thanks, science!

Anyways, yes, on the topic of how the questions that Science asks are frequently incomprensible to Arts types like myself, here is a diagram that SO sent me.



But, I mean, the things I learn about as a philosophy major/cultural studies minor must seem beyond useless to most other people in the world.

Oh, and as for the corpse-thingy, I'm seeing it in Toronto with boyfriend and family as a heartwarming pre-Christmas event.

[Doc]

That image is confusing me too since just looking at a brain with a regular video camera you aren't going to get funky patterns. At least I don't think so, I don't have a lot of physiology.
Just in case someone actually does know I want to get my guess in first as the colours representing the concentration of a particular chemical or isotope in the brain that correlates to brain activity. I believe PET scans look something like that but from memory those are done using isotopes and a big stinkin' 360 degrees detector around the head, not a video camera.
Damnit someone explain that image.

Does anyone else love how totally haggard yet serene the monkey is looking. Like he has a really hard job but he knows he is doing it for the greater good and so it fills him with peace. Either that or 'ahhh I love the alternating coloured stripe show'.

EDIT: I just noted the wavelength on the illumination light, I guess they are looking for a compound that reflects light at this wavelength and using intensity of reflection as a measure of concentration?

[misterqueue]

Those are not lips. That is a pu$$y hastily pasted onto a face.

If I ever see a pu$$y like that I'm running.. I postulate it's some sort of fleshy bat.

[theinevitable]

Doc-- the expression on the monkey's face makes him the animal jesus. he is not averse to suffering for the good of... the... the videocamera-brain-cool-colors machine.

They will be selling this next holiday season. A monkey with a video camera and a tv, and the TV shows calming patterns-- just like in the monkey's brain!
people will watch it to fall asleep to.


Or, try to learn how to poke the monkey so that the patterns change.

[Doc]

It would be cooler if the monkey were looking at patterns from it's own brain and it created some kind of feedback loop of pure terror. Or serene acceptance, but terror would be more entertaining and could probably get it a Fox special and when you're a lab monkey it's all about knowing how to sell yourself.

Also Misterque is right on the fleshy bat hypothesis methinks. It has nested on her face and sucks the blood of her co-stars.