First thing to mention is that I am not in approval of the Crusades. They are a blemish on the churches record and I am willing to admit that.Born2baplacebo said:God exists. That's why a majority of wars have been fought because God instigated them, cos He is a hypocrite.
"Hurt Not Thy Neighbour"
Fuck. Where was that when the Crusades came around?
Well it depends which parts of it we're talking about? The question of why a person loves X instead of Y I'll admit I don't know the answer to and I'll reject any non-scientific theories as to why this is. This doesn't mean love (something I think is just a post-hoc construction by an intelligent species based on more simple urges) doesn't exist though.BradCube said:I've been thinking this and I thought I would take the question back further. How do you know love actually exists youBROKEmyLIFE? If it is as mystical as you make out, why do you believe in love and not God? If it is not mystical, then you must have proof of it being so - in effect showing why your pixie idea's are inaccurate.
Ok so you're saying that there are other ways that this information which we recognize as have an intelligence can arise? I would agree that natural reactions and causes can cause information, but not the same sort of information we see in written works or in DNA. The information in normal causes seems to have a repeating pattern which can usually be shown in some sort of mathematically proof (ie the ripple patterns in water). However, from what I understand of the language in DNA there is no such pattern based on chemical attraction or natural causes.KFunk said:My case really rests on the logic of explanation and, yet again, that ever-handy intellectual tool - Ockham's Razor. The general idea is this:
If information is conceived in terms of meaning ascription then in order for something to be information it is enough that we recognise it as such (i.e. that we ascribe meaning to it). Thus, when we say 'wow, look, a piece of information! How did that get there?' we need only answer 'information is there in virtue of the fact that we recognise it as being there'. Now, it is also possible that god designed aspects of the world to contain information, but the simple fact that information exists is not enough to show this. Why? Because we have a simple, naturalistic explanation based on meaning ascription which has no need to postulate entities with as much ontological significance as god. I am not saying that god is not a possible source of these structures, but rather that the existence of information, as such (given a relational, meaning ascription-based definition), does not entail the existence of god.
Long story short: god is superfluous to our explanation of why we find information in the world (given the definition of information you have used).
How does one find this out?KFunk said:(p.s. it seems I recently broke 200 posts in this thread. Scary? I think so...)
Not-That-Bright 609BradCube said:How does one find this out?
I'm not asking you to show the cause of love, I'm asking you to prove that it exists full stop. Whether this proof relies upon it's causes is up to you.youBROKEmyLIFE said:Well it depends which parts of it we're talking about? The question of why a person loves X instead of Y I'll admit I don't know the answer to and I'll reject any non-scientific theories as to why this is. This doesn't mean love (something I think is just a post-hoc construction by an intelligent species based on more simple urges) doesn't exist though.
It's like if I saw a volcano erupt but didn't know what caused it, that doesn't mean the volcano doesn't exist.
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So essentially, we do not understand why Jane loves Peter instead of Paul (but we know she does), we have absolutely no evidence for this however if we posit that a magical pixie shot Jane and Peter into love... it explains it. It's kind of like how we do not understand why we exist (but we know we do), we have absolutely no evidence for this however if we posit that a magical being did it.... it explains it.
As for your own:So essentially, we do not understand why Jane loves Peter instead of Paul (but we know she does), we have absolutely no evidence for this however if we posit that a magical pixie shot Jane and Peter into love... it explains it. It's kind of like how we do not understand why we exist (but we know we do), we have absolutely no evidence for this however if we posit that a magical being did it.... it explains it.
What practical aspect of it would you like me to explain? Love is a construct like "Marxism".I'm not asking you to show the cause of love, I'm asking you to prove that it exists full stop.
These are human constructs, not actual things. Would you like to claim God as another human construct? Because I can definitely believe in the existence of this concept of "God".Edit: My point is simply that we all believe in things which are not empirically verifiable so I don't see why God is more illogical than any other belief similar in this way.
The reason I didn't address it was because you ignored what I was saying in my last post and went back to the other argument again. To me we can substitute any reason in for something happening that we do not understand and none of them will hold a significant value over another. ie pixie vs unicorns vs "it just is mentality".youBROKEmyLIFE said:Well first I think it's interesting that you haven't addressed this point:
The parts which you thought were mystical in your previous posts.youBROKEmyLIFE said:What practical aspect of it would you like me to explain? Love is a construct like "Marxism".
It doesn't matter if they are human constructs or not. We have no way of proving our own logic or reasoning yet we don't seem to regard that as a human construct.youBROKEmyLIFE said:These are human constructs, not actual things. Would you like to claim God as another human construct? Because I can definitely believe in the existence of this concept of "God".
I agree, that's why I said:To me we can substitute any reason in for something happening that we do not understand and none of them will hold a significant value over another. ie pixie vs unicorns vs "it just is mentality".
In this manner, I see no reason to think that God is any more illogical than any other reason we don't have proof for. So certainly this is an agnostic proof and not an atheistic one.
---What I say is that I don't know why X is true (Jane loves Peter / We exist), but I'm going to reject supernatural explanations. This is no more logical necessarily than saying "and I'm going to accept supernatural explanations", except that if you do not accept them all you are being logically inconsistent.
I already said.The parts which you thought were mystical in your previous posts.
----The question of why a person loves X instead of Y I'll admit I don't know the answer to and I'll reject any non-scientific theories as to why this is. This doesn't mean love (something I think is just a post-hoc construction by an intelligent species based on more simple urges) doesn't exist though.
I agree there are problems there, but please understand I'm not trying to duck the question in that way... To me love is a human construct, but we apply it to things such as when one person is willing to sacrifice for another, right? So that would be a physical application of the construct.It's problematic because once you start saying things like "It's a human construct" that can be applied to absolutely everything which we regard as reality since it originates from a human mind.
You just change the persons name of who you are quoting. For exampleadvanced sam said:now i know im gonna sound stupid,
but how do you quote two different peoples replies at the same time
I still don't think we're on the same page here. Patterns exist in nature, of course. More abstractly, structures exist in nature. Whether information supervenes on these structures depends (using your definition) on meaning ascription. Thus information only exists relative to a population of meaning-ascribers --> in a sense one could say information comes into existence when we reocognise it or, instead, that it always existed relative to a standard of meaning-ascription that we were eventually to create.BradCube said:Ok so you're saying that there are other ways that this information which we recognize as have an intelligence can arise? I would agree that natural reactions and causes can cause information, but not the same sort of information we see in written works or in DNA. The information in normal causes seems to have a repeating pattern which can usually be shown in some sort of mathematically proof (ie the ripple patterns in water). However, from what I understand of the language in DNA there is no such pattern based on chemical attraction or natural causes.
advanced sam said:NNNNOOOOOOO! its not working.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!BradCube said:You just change the persons name of who you are quoting. For example
{QUOTE=ThePersonYouWantToQuote}text text text {/QUOTE}
(And of course make sure they are the square brackets and not the ones I just used in the example. The square ones look like this [ ]
So just copy and paste the text you want from the people you want to quote into the replies and make sure you have the correct names.
Haha, to be honest I don't know Nietzsche well enough to say much that is constructive. Sure I have a few of his works on my shelf (as most people who got into philosophy in their teens will) - namely The Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and Kauffman's companion - but every time I tried reading his material I felt that I lacked the requisite background of greek literature and religious texts needed to fully penetrate his meaning. Certainly, many of his aphorisms are fairly accessible but his more complex ideas regarding god, truth and the will to power seem to involve a lot of complex (and, I suspect, very ironic) interplay with various texts (he was, after all, a philologist by training).Iron said:Hey KFunk,
Interested in what you think about Nietzsche, both on God and in general (truth, will, etc etc)
I feel he must be fought.
Save us from this teutonic fiend!