Karma

[wigginhall]

Look, I've found a leprechaun.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cy6j0f3WgAADU7V.jpg:large

[bluehillside Retd.]

Wiggs,

Look, I've found a leprechaun.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cy6j0f3WgAADU7V.jpg:large

Gotta love a man who goes to the trouble of writing a sign but can't be arsed to spell check "fulfil"!

Anyways, he can't be a leprechaun - Vlad/Spoof said he could falsify them (albeit that he left the scene immediately afterwards, presumably to change his trousers).

[SusanDoris]

Wiggs,

Gotta love a man who goes to the trouble of writing a sign but can't be arsed to spell check "fulfil"!

Anyways, he can't be a leprechaun - Vlad/Spoof said he could falsify them (albeit that he left the scene immediately afterwards, presumably to change his trousers).

What does it say on the notice? I can see it is a notice in front of some trees.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Susan,

NIGEL FARAGE
WAS SENT BY
CHRIST
TO GET BRITAIN
OUT OF EUROPE
AND FULFILL
BIBLE PROPHECY

[Jack Knave]

JK,

1) You don’t understand the meaning of ad hominem (there wasn’t one), and the argument from personal incredulity is a bog standard logical fallacy. It’s easy enough to look up if you’re interested.


2) But it’s not an “image” at all in the brain like some sort of internal cinema screen. The brain just processes the inputs from our various senses (essentially they’re all wavelengths) to make them comprehensible. There’s no little picture in there though (or anywhere else for that matter).

3) Good grief!

1) But you don't understand that what you are saying is wrong in both cases. Ad hominem was given on your part by making unfounded comments on what I had said accusing me of entertaining incredulity. I know what it means I just think you are seeing things in what I say, so claiming I'm postulating arguments for invalid reasons, which aren't there. Who are you to say I'm thinking this or that way?

2) The image, in the form of a picture, is there in your minds eye and you are looking at it as an observer would in the material world i.e. a subject and an object - things which are here (you) and which are there (the image). What is the you in this situation? which by definition of a subject-object set up can not be the same thing or item.

"...just processes the inputs..." A phrase that explains nothing but attempts to sweep away the nagging issue of what consciousness is by empty rhetoric, jargon and language.

And there is a picture in your minds eye because you can see it

3) Something wrong?

[SusanDoris]

bluehillside

Thank you. I bet that that has had plenty of internet 'hits'.

[Jack Knave]

When you dream, JK, do you recall this ever involving apparent images?

I don't follow what you are getting at, please explain.

[Gordon]

I don't follow what you are getting at, please explain.

That our biology extends to being able to think in visual terms without an immediate visual stimulus: in your mind s eye, so to speak. I certainly thing I dream visually so that seems like an example of an emergent property, and I'd be interested to know if blind people who were previously sighted are still able to imagine in a visual sense.

I'll need to re-visit the post of yours I was responding to since I can't remember the detail and I'm on a hand-held right now.

[SwordOfTheSpirit]

1) But you don't understand that what you are saying is wrong in both cases. Ad hominem was given on your part by making unfounded comments on what I had said accusing me of entertaining incredulity. I know what it means I just think you are seeing things in what I say, so claiming I'm postulating arguments for invalid reasons, which aren't there. Who are you to say I'm thinking this or that way?

See my #303 to see where I have cited three examples of him doing something similar about the poster Hope.

This is what happens when posters like bluehillside fail to realise that the burden of proof lies with the one making the claim. He cannot defend his position because his defence is not based on properties of truth. He can't defend it (because it is not falsifiable), has to keep hiding behind the misuse of the NPF, therefore misrepresenting the views/intentions of those he is arguing against. As I said, there are three examples in my #303 and there are many more that could be cited!

This is what it has come down to with bluehillside: My conjecture is that there is a giant onion orbiting the sun between the sun and Mars, with the inscription, the fallacy of the negative proof fallacy. Now, according to bluehillside, any arguments used for God can also be used for my conjecture!

[Walt Zingmatilder]

Spoof,


That’s probably true. Now then – about that falsification of leprechauns you claimed to be able to do, but now seem to have resiled from?

You know it doesn't work like that Blue.....We know that the Higgs boson had to be discovered within a range of energies. Leprechauns need to be discovered within a range of factors including being tiny, Irish, at the end of a rainbow and with pots of gold. They never have and just with the same faith that Higgs boson will always be found in that range Leprechauns will never be found in theirs.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

Susan,

NIGEL FARAGE
WAS SENT BY
CHRIST
TO GET BRITAIN
OUT OF EUROPE
AND FULFILL
BIBLE PROPHECY

Farage is a Darwinian.

[Gordon]

See my #303 to see where I have cited three examples of him doing something similar about the poster Hope.

This is what happens when posters like bluehillside fail to realise that the burden of proof lies with the one making the claim.

You still don't get it: if your claim is fallacious it can be dismissed, and noting that you've use a fallacy is self-evident from the form of (bad) argument you've used.

He cannot defend his position because his defence is not based on properties of truth. He can't defend it (because it is not falsifiable), has to keep hiding behind the misuse of the NPF, therefore misrepresenting the views/intentions of those he is arguing against. As I said, there are three examples in my #303 and there are many more that could be cited!

All you've cited is that you understand neither fallacies nor BHS's posts.

This is what it has come down to with bluehillside: My conjecture is that there is a giant onion orbiting the sun between the sun and Mars, with the inscription, the fallacy of the negative proof fallacy. Now, according to bluehillside, any arguments used for God can also be used for my conjecture!

If they are fallacious then yes: your argument for God works as well as arguments for orbiting giant onions (or ordinary-sized teapots) when using the form of the NPF - this is basic stuff, but you seem impervious to it.

[SusanDoris]

See my #303 to see where I have cited three examples of him doing something similar about the poster Hope.

This is what happens when posters like bluehillside fail to realise that the burden of proof lies with the one making the claim. He cannot defend his position because his defence is not based on properties of truth. He can't defend it (because it is not falsifiable), has to keep hiding behind the misuse of the NPF, therefore misrepresenting the views/intentions of those he is arguing against. As I said, there are three examples in my #303 and there are many more that could be cited!

This is what it has come down to with bluehillside: My conjecture is that there is a giant onion orbiting the sun between the sun and Mars, with the inscription, the fallacy of the negative proof fallacy. Now, according to bluehillside, any arguments used for God can also be used for my conjecture!

The patronising, one could say contemptuous, tone of your posts, especially as you consistently fail to understand the NPF, is making me really appreciate Vlad's posts.

[torridon]

How does it 'fly in the face of evidence'?  What evidence do you have that conflicts with or negates what I have written?

All that science and rational thinking produce are evidence for the working of the physical world. They say nothing about the spiritual world and its purpose.

It is like understanding what a car is made of and how it works. That is what science does.  What I have written about on the other hand,  is that the driver of the car is not a part of the car itself and is an independent entity who leaves the car when it crashes. It is something different and runs parallel to what science investigates, while also blending into it.

There is no conflict between the two.

You are probably confusing with religious mythology and dogma.

Your ideas conflict with those from science.  You claim life to be some manifestation of 'divine spark'; science says no, life is a process of replicating metabolism, a continuation of base principles of biochemistry, no 'spark' necessary.  You claim a 'self' as some internal resident within a living being analogous to a driver within a car; science says no, a self is an emergent property of the car, to run with your analogy.  You claim consciousness as being some ubiquitous fundamental property; science says no, consciousness is a neurological phenomenon that evolved on this planet in vertebrates 520 mya, before that there was no consciousness.  Science says we stop living when we die; you say no, we just hop into some other body and carry on.  You claim NDEs and OBEs are evidence of spirit worlds; the evidence from research suggests such peculiar experience claims are some sort of neurological artefacting.

These contradictions are just the tip of an iceberg of contradictions, the vast majority have yet to be revealed as despite many invitations to do so, you have never sketched out any detail for how these ideas could work - nothing on what spirits are made of, where they come from, by what mechanism do spirits attach to and interact with bodies etc etc.  By steering clear of any meaningful detail you hope to stay clear of falsification by science.

[torridon]

What is the point of a body? What is the meaning of life? What is the point of your life?

Who says a body has to have a point ?  Who says 'life' has to have a meaning ?  Sounds like you're reverting to teleology.

[torridon]

"information theory terms" - what is that suppose to mean?

Complexity emerges from simplicity, not the other way around.  I have seen houses, and they are often made of little bricks; but I have never seen a little brick that was made of houses. The idea of god flouts this fundamental principle, it claims that everything is made ultimately by something more complex still.  Back in reality, complex properties emerge from the combining of simpler underlying constituents; a flavour of which is also expressed by Orgel's Second Rule 'evolution is smarter than you are', in other words apparent design is a product of blind trial and error and selection.

But there is an image which is being observed i.e. there is a subject-object relationship, and the image is not found in the brain, for it only has a mass of neurons nothing else.

The 'image' in the brain is an biochemical analogue which we take to be the real thing.  How come this analogue seems to have visual property ? Good question, I think we have to think in terms of information flow and not obsess about the wet organic substrates that host the information in a brain.

[Sriram]

Your ideas conflict with those from science.  You claim life to be some manifestation of 'divine spark'; science says no, life is a process of replicating metabolism, a continuation of base principles of biochemistry, no 'spark' necessary.  You claim a 'self' as some internal resident within a living being analogous to a driver within a car; science says no, a self is an emergent property of the car, to run with your analogy.  You claim consciousness as being some ubiquitous fundamental property; science says no, consciousness is a neurological phenomenon that evolved on this planet in vertebrates 520 mya, before that there was no consciousness.  Science says we stop living when we die; you say no, we just hop into some other body and carry on.  You claim NDEs and OBEs are evidence of spirit worlds; the evidence from research suggests such peculiar experience claims are some sort of neurological artefacting.

These contradictions are just the tip of an iceberg of contradictions, the vast majority have yet to be revealed as despite many invitations to do so, you have never sketched out any detail for how these ideas could work - nothing on what spirits are made of, where they come from, by what mechanism do spirits attach to and interact with bodies etc etc.  By steering clear of any meaningful detail you hope to stay clear of falsification by science.

Where does science say all this? LOL!  These are assumptions made by science!

Science merely finds that organisms evolve over time, consciousness exists to various levels in different organisms, the brain and neurological system aid consciousness....and so on. Which is fine.

Nothing discovered by science disproves or conflicts with the idea of a spirit or God or spiritual development. 

As long as the idea of spiritual development can coexist with the discoveries made by science...there is no problem. We need to find how all these mesh in together, of course...which is a different issue altogether.

[SusanDoris]

Sriram

torridon has set out what is known; and you try to handwave it away with guesswork.

This morning I have listened to a long article on another forum. The topic and the article might well appeal to you:
https://grahamhancock.com/gonzalob2/
As far as I'm concerned, it's mostly psycho-babble, but I did quite like the abstract paintings.

[Gordon]

Nothing discovered by science disproves or conflicts with the idea of a spirit or God or spiritual development. 

'Ideas' covers a multitude of sins though: some ideas could be science-apt even when first developed, say into a theory that then leads to a method for investigation etc. Other ideas may be profound in some ways but more abstract, such as dealt with by some philosophers, but some ideas may be no more than the capacity of the human brain to imagine stuff.

'God' and 'spirituality' seem to belong to the latter class since they aren't investigation-apt nor are they uniquely profound in comparison with, say, some philosophy. That 'God' and 'spirituality' appeal to some, and may be cloaked in centuries of cultural tradition, doesn't make them credible however personally important they are to their proponents. That the arguments advanced for them tend to be fallacious, as we see in this small corner of the internet, suggests that neither is a serious proposition.     

As long as the idea of spiritual development can coexist with the discoveries made by science...there is no problem. We need to find how all these mesh in together, of course...which is a different issue altogether.

To 'mesh' you need more than one thing: we have the continuing science but, as yet, no good reasons to think that 'the idea of spiritual development' is anything other that how some people describe how they feel about life, the universe and everything. Science can't 'mesh' with any ideas that aren't in some way science-apt beyond, of course, studying the biology within which these ideas occur.

[SwordOfTheSpirit]

#313

How’s that “homework” of yours feeling now?

Pretty good, thanks for asking!  Here's some more ...

I would suggest that the charge is erroneous and bluehillside, Gordon, SusanDoris, ...,  need to stop making it. The (partial) results of my homework

Which relates to your accusation against Hope...an accusation you did not (to that point) provide any evidence for. Not that this will be clear from your post!

And then, just two posts later, Sriram gave us a doozy of an NPF with:

How does it 'fly in the face of evidence'?  What evidence do you have that conflicts with or negates what I have written?

Which again ignores the context of Sriram's response, in order to misrepresent the point he is making. Here is Torridon's post that you left out!

That's all very nice, but I think it creates more unanswered questions than it solves.  It says nothing about what a spirit is, about where they came from, what their properties are, how many are there, are these spirits discreet and unique or are they all part of a greater whole, is the number of spirits constant over time, does each e-coli bacterium have a spirit of its own, do spirits exist in spacetime or do they transcend it in some way, would we expect there to be spirits on Mars and Europa ?

Could go on but you get the picture - I see this sort of top down rationale as creating more unexplained things than it explains, and for evidential support in the modern sense you end up having to rely on fragmentary and anecdotal claims of exotic aberrant phenomena like out of body experiences whilst ignoring the overwhelming bulk of insights accrued through mainstream research into the nature of life.

It's an interesting contrast to western traditional ways of thinking, but at the end of the day it seems to me to fly in the face of evidence more than it explains the evidence, and furthermore, like western judeochristian traditions, it is anthropocentric at heart, it starts from our human experience and extrapolates a universe from that.  In contrast, modern research shows us a cosmos in which we are very much an exotic extreme rarity rather than the centre of things; and it is telling that your philosophy depends much on introspection paralleling the western traditions of meditation and prayer - by focussing on what is inside us we end up seeing the cosmos through a highly personalised human-centric lens rather than an objective view.  These ways of thinking appeal to our narcissism, so they become popular.  They also act to support our denial of mortality, again, an immensely seductive power.

To which Sriram responded

How does it 'fly in the face of evidence'?  What evidence do you have that conflicts with or negates what I have written?

One has to go a long way from a request to back up a statement, to what you are claiming is actually happening.

Now: If you can point out where specifically Sriram is claiming that any failure to disprove his beliefs on Karma means that they are therefore true, you will have a point. Otherwise I'll have to add his name to the growing list of people (that hold to a belief of some kind) that you are misrepresenting and accusing incorrectly.

[torridon]

Where does science say all this? LOL!  These are assumptions made by science!

Science merely finds that organisms evolve over time, consciousness exists to various levels in different organisms, the brain and neurological system aid consciousness....and so on. Which is fine.

Nothing discovered by science disproves or conflicts with the idea of a spirit or God or spiritual development. 

As long as the idea of spiritual development can coexist with the discoveries made by science...there is no problem. We need to find how all these mesh in together, of course...which is a different issue altogether.

Science also assumes that the universe was not created last Thursday with the false impression of great age by Kevin the magic pixie. Any Tom, Dick or Harry can postulate a layer of magic over what has been determined by empirical methods but what reason is there to take such musings seriously ?  This is all your ideas boil down to, unfalsifiable add-ons.

[bluehillside Retd.]

SOTS,

1) But you don't understand that what you are saying is wrong in both cases. Ad hominem was given on your part by making unfounded comments on what I had said accusing me of entertaining incredulity. I know what it means I just think you are seeing things in what I say, so claiming I'm postulating arguments for invalid reasons, which aren't there. Who are you to say I'm thinking this or that way?

OK, so it seems I do need to explain “ad hominem” here then. An ad hom is a logical fallacy in which the protagonist attempts to rebut an argument by attacking the character, motive etc of the person making it rather than by addressing the argument itself. In this case I pointed out (rightly by the way) an attempt to argue from personal incredulity (yet another logical fallacy). That’s not an ad hom at all - it's just identifying bad reasoning, a standard rhetorical approach. If on the other hand I’d said something like, “SOTS smells of weasels”, or “SOTS has an unnatural interest in baked beans” that would been an ad hom.

Hope that clears it up for you.
 

See my #303 to see where I have cited three examples of him doing something similar about the poster Hope.

See the posts that follow it that rebut it.

This is what happens when posters like bluehillside fail to realise that the burden of proof lies with the one making the claim....

You of all people are talking about the burden of proof? Good grief!

He cannot defend his position because his defence is not based on properties of truth. He can't defend it (because it is not falsifiable), has to keep hiding behind the misuse of the NPF, therefore misrepresenting the views/intentions of those he is arguing against. As I said, there are three examples in my #303 and there are many more that could be cited!

At what point I wonder should we conclude not only that you’re wrong but, having ignored the corrections, you’re also flat out lying?

Yet again:

1. Many here have attempted and continue to attempt the NPF, Hope being just one of them. Just two posts after yours for example, Sriram did it too. Anyone who’s spent any time here will have seen it many times. It’s a commonplace.

2. Whether some, none, or lots of people attempt it here is however entirely irrelevant to the argument. You can keep using its un/popularity as a diversionary tactic if you wish but it’s not reflecting well on you when you do. The fact remains that it’s a false argument regardless of how often it’s tried.

3. Your point of attack (on which you have now gone silent in favour of a diversion) was that the rebuttal of the NPF failed when leprechauns, celestial teapots etc are used as alternative outcomes to “God” because the former are obviously made up. For reasons that have been explained to you several times now, this line only betrays your failure to grasp the force of the rebuttal. It doesn’t mater a jot what the unfalsifiable conjecture happens to be – the point in logic remains that non-falsification is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a truth proposition. That the NPF produces leprechauns and celestial teapots with the same facility that it produces “God” just serves to highlight the ludicrousness of attempting it.   
     

This is what it has come down to with bluehillside: My conjecture is that there is a giant onion orbiting the sun between the sun and Mars, with the inscription, the fallacy of the negative proof fallacy. Now, according to bluehillside, any arguments used for God can also be used for my conjecture!

Stop lying – it’s just boorish. “According to bluehillside”, only the argument “you can’t disprove my giant onion conjecture, therefore it’s true” (ie the NPF) is under discussion here. You may or may not have different arguments you think demonstrate “God”, but the only one we’re discussing here is a crock regardless of how much you fail to grasp its rebuttal and regardless oh how much you attempt to divert our eyes from it with irrelevancies. 

[ekim]

Complexity emerges from simplicity, not the other way around.  I have seen houses, and they are often made of little bricks; but I have never seen a little brick that was made of houses. The idea of god flouts this fundamental principle, it claims that everything is made ultimately by something more complex still.  Back in reality, complex properties emerge from the combining of simpler underlying constituents; a flavour of which is also expressed by Orgel's Second Rule 'evolution is smarter than you are', in other words apparent design is a product of blind trial and error and selection.

That may be true, but the ways of (let's call it) spirituality is to consciously realise the 'simplicity' within the 'complexity'.  I think you should also be careful of the expression 'the idea of god' because your idea of god may be based upon how the Biblical God comes across rather than the Brahman of Hindu thought or the Tao of Taoism and where 'smartness' in any degree is not the goal.

[Sriram]

Science also assumes that the universe was not created last Thursday with the false impression of great age by Kevin the magic pixie. Any Tom, Dick or Harry can postulate a layer of magic over what has been determined by empirical methods but what reason is there to take such musings seriously ?  This is all your ideas boil down to, unfalsifiable add-ons.

torridon,

You are missing the point. You can argue all you want about spirit, karma, reincarnation and the evidence for such ideas. No problem. Whatever argument I have, I will present.  You can disagree with it all you want.

But you claimed that these ideas 'fly in the face of evidence'....which means that you actually have some evidence (through science presumably)   that conflicts with these ideas.  I merely asked you what this evidence is.

You then presented a host of scientific assumptions as though they were discoveries. This is what I am questioning. Science has not discovered anything that conflicts with the idea of spirit or after-life or God or any such thing.

Science does have evidence against certain religious mythology, which I do concede. But this is not the same as evidence against spiritual philosophies that I am talking about.

[bluehillside Retd.]

SOTS,

Pretty good, thanks for asking!    Here's some more ...

Really? So having tried a diversionary tactic of suggesting that people don’t use the NPF rather than address its rebuttal, and having then had someone attempt the NPF just two posts after you did it you still feel pretty good about things do you?

Really really?

Which relates to your accusation against Hope...an accusation you did not (to that point) provide any evidence for. Not that this will be clear from your post!

Which relates to your continued diversionary tactic of focusing on an irrelevance about how often a bad argument is made rather to the fact that it’s a bad argument at all. As Sriram did me the service of trying an NPF just two posts after yours though, your irrelevant “no-one uses the NPF anyway” lies at your feet now in any case.   

Which again ignores the context of Sriram's response, in order to misrepresent the point he is making. Here is Torridon's post that you left out!

No it doesn’t. When Sriram said, “How does it 'fly in the face of evidence'?  What evidence do you have that conflicts with or negates what I have written?” he was asking for evidence to negate his unfalsifiable conjecture; that’s what the NPF means!

Torri’s post doesn’t for one moment mean that Sriram wasn’t subsequently attempting an NPF, so why bother implying otherwise?

One has to go a long way from a request to back up a statement, to what you are claiming is actually happening.

No one doesn’t. He asked for evidence to negate his unfalsifiable conjecture: QED.

Now: If you can point out where specifically Sriram is claiming that any failure to disprove his beliefs on Karma means that they are therefore true, you will have a point. Otherwise I'll have to add his name to the growing list of people (that hold to a belief of some kind) that you are misrepresenting and accusing incorrectly.

Now: If you cannot now respond to the fact that Sriram precisely attempted an NPF, that the incidence of its use is in any case entirely irrelevant to the force of its rebuttal, and that the point of attack from which you now seem to have resiled regarding leprechauns/teapots being made up was wrong then it seems to me that your dishonesty will exit you from this discussion come what may.