Einherjar wrote:Frank Apisa wrote:Einherjar wrote:Einherjar wrote:You have expressed confidence in a guess that one random hypothetical which do not contradict observed evidence, that of invisible incorporeal tails, does not coincidentally happen to be real. Yet with regards to another hypothetical, that of an invisible incorporeal brain of some sort, a soul, you will not make such a guess. It appears you consider a soul more likely than an invisible tail, why?
It appears you missed the word more Frank.
Not at all, Ein.
That, in fact, is why I appended the comment: "Because I consider one thing unlikely...for what I consider good and compelling reasons...does not perforce mean that I consider other things likely. "
If one does not consider a thing "likely"...it certainly cannot be said that he considers it "more likely" than something else...and certainly not "more likely" than something he does not consider likely at all.
I wold not consider it likely that a man randomly picking balls from a bag containing 95 black balls and 5 othervise identical red balls, mixed, should pick two red balls before picking a single black one. I would still consider it to be more likely (identical to less unlikely) than that the same would happen if the man was picking balls from a bag containing 195 black balls and 5 red ones.
So would I...and so would any sane person.
So what?
What does that possibly have to do with this?
Quote:Frank Apisa wrote:But let me get on to the rest of your comments...and maybe this will become clearer to you.
Einherjar wrote:I take it that you consider souls more likely to exist than invisible tails since you express confidence in your guess that invisible tails do not exist, yet refuse to do the same as it pertains to souls.
The notions of invisible tails and souls can both be adequatly explained as products of human imagination. Yet while you express great confidence in your guess that invisible tails do not exist, you refuse to even venture a guess that souls do not exist, let alone exspress confidence in one. So, what makes the concept of souls warrant more consideration than the concept of invisible tails?
You seem to be stuck in the mindset that the only "evidence" one should consider is visual evidence.
Not at all.
Well it sure seems that way.
Quote:Quote:I have already explained several times that the reason I am confident in my guess about the "possible invisible tail which corporealates itself every 90 years" has absolutely nothing whatever to do with the fact that I cannot see the tail...and that I cannot see that the tail is not there.
The evidence upon which I based my guess...is the way I got the information about it from Bin. It seems to me the notion of "the invisible tail" was something made up spontaneously on the spot.
Does this mean that you consider the testimony of those who belive in souls, that somehow somewhere sometime somebody came up with the idea of souls based on evidence, to be credible?
I have no idea of how the notion of souls came into being...and although I, like you, suspect it may have been made up out of whole cloth...the bottom line is that the "soul notion" did not come to me the way the "invisible tail" notion did...and that is all I have to work with.
In my mind, I do not have evidence to guess that souls can be eliminated as a possible component of REALITY...but I do have evidence to guess that "the invisible tail" can be.
Quote:
FrankApisa wrote:In any case...I have absolutely no idea of whether or not "souls" exist (in any of the forms suggested for souls)...and I see absolutely no evidence which would persuade me to make a guess that they exist or that they do not exist. For certain, the concept of souls is not something that came to me during an Internet conversation during the immediacy of debate.
Do you think then that the concept originated with someone who had evidence to back it up?
I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA OF HOW THE NOTION OF SOULS ORIGINATED...but I have a fairly decent idea of how the notion of my having (or not having) an invisible tail did.
WHY CAN YOU NOT UNDERSTAND THAT??????????????????????????????????????????
Quote:I am almost certain that if this concept had not been presented to ancient men, someone would have thought of it, and it would still have spread as a meme. I would predict that that this concept, or one just like it, would have been in play wether evidence supporting it was at some point available to someone or not. Therefore i do not consider that this concept is being distributed compelling evidence in favor of it being real.
I am not proposing there is evidence in favor of it being real.
Quote:FrankApisa wrote:What evidence, Ein, do you (if you do) base your guess that there is no God...are no gods...are no souls?
The same evidence on which you base your guess that there are no invisible tails, namely the lack of credible evidence to support the notion. (as well as the complexity of the notion itself)
Well that is just plain dishonest. At no point have I ever asserted that the reason I am willing to guess I have no invisible tail is because of a lack of credible evidence to support the notion....AND YOU DAMN WELL KNOW THAT.
That was a piece of pure fiction...and a strawman through to its core.
It is obvious to me, Ein, that you have decided there are no gods just as arbitrarily as the theists have decided there is a God...and you are simply not willing to honestly consider alternatives to that arbitrary decision.
The rationalizations that go into your defenses are not, in my mind, especially different from the rationalizations theists bring to debate in defense of theirs.
Not sure why an intelligent individual like you would do that...but, you gotta live with your decisions, not me.
Frank Apisa wrote:Einherjar wrote:Frank Apisa wrote:Einherjar wrote:Einherjar wrote:You have expressed confidence in a guess that one random hypothetical which do not contradict observed evidence, that of invisible incorporeal tails, does not coincidentally happen to be real. Yet with regards to another hypothetical, that of an invisible incorporeal brain of some sort, a soul, you will not make such a guess. It appears you consider a soul more likely than an invisible tail, why?
It appears you missed the word more Frank.
Not at all, Ein.
That, in fact, is why I appended the comment: "Because I consider one thing unlikely...for what I consider good and compelling reasons...does not perforce mean that I consider other things likely. "
If one does not consider a thing "likely"...it certainly cannot be said that he considers it "more likely" than something else...and certainly not "more likely" than something he does not consider likely at all.
I wold not consider it likely that a man randomly picking balls from a bag containing 95 black balls and 5 othervise identical red balls, mixed, should pick two red balls before picking a single black one. I would still consider it to be more likely (identical to less unlikely) than that the same would happen if the man was picking balls from a bag containing 195 black balls and 5 red ones.
So would I...and so would any sane person.
So what?
So considering invisible tails unlikely, and without considering souls likely, you can still consider souls more likely (i.e less unlikely) than invisible tails.
I have no idea why you would express great confidence in a guess that invisible tails do not exist, while expressing uncertainty as to wether or not souls exist, if you did not.
Frank wrote:What does that possibly have to do with this?
Quote:Frank Apisa wrote:But let me get on to the rest of your comments...and maybe this will become clearer to you.
Einherjar wrote:I take it that you consider souls more likely to exist than invisible tails since you express confidence in your guess that invisible tails do not exist, yet refuse to do the same as it pertains to souls.
The notions of invisible tails and souls can both be adequatly explained as products of human imagination. Yet while you express great confidence in your guess that invisible tails do not exist, you refuse to even venture a guess that souls do not exist, let alone exspress confidence in one. So, what makes the concept of souls warrant more consideration than the concept of invisible tails?
You seem to be stuck in the mindset that the only "evidence" one should consider is visual evidence.
Not at all.
Well it sure seems that way.
Then apparences are deciving.
Frank Apisa wrote:Quote:Quote:I have already explained several times that the reason I am confident in my guess about the "possible invisible tail which corporealates itself every 90 years" has absolutely nothing whatever to do with the fact that I cannot see the tail...and that I cannot see that the tail is not there.
The evidence upon which I based my guess...is the way I got the information about it from Bin. It seems to me the notion of "the invisible tail" was something made up spontaneously on the spot.
Does this mean that you consider the testimony of those who belive in souls, that somehow somewhere sometime somebody came up with the idea of souls based on evidence, to be credible?
I have no idea of how the notion of souls came into being...and although I, like you, suspect it may have been made up out of whole cloth...the bottom line is that the "soul notion" did not come to me the way the "invisible tail" notion did...and that is all I have to work with.
In my mind, I do not have evidence to guess that souls can be eliminated as a possible component of REALITY...but I do have evidence to guess that "the invisible tail" can be.
What I'm trying to establish here is that the fact that binny made up the notion of invisible tails does not constitute evidence against the notion. Invisible tails are just as likely to exist as they would have been if binny had never thought of them, and we were instead arguing about invisible wings or some other humbug.
Since binny making up the notion of invisible tails does not constitute evidence against the existence of such tails, and since you hold that the way you learned of the notion is the reason you feel confident guessing that the notion does not correspond to reality, I conclude that you instead consider the existence of any notion, unless you know it was made up, evidence in favor of that notion being true.
FrankApisa wrote:Quote:
FrankApisa wrote:In any case...I have absolutely no idea of whether or not "souls" exist (in any of the forms suggested for souls)...and I see absolutely no evidence which would persuade me to make a guess that they exist or that they do not exist. For certain, the concept of souls is not something that came to me during an Internet conversation during the immediacy of debate.
Do you think then that the concept originated with someone who had evidence to back it up?
I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA OF HOW THE NOTION OF SOULS ORIGINATED...but I have a fairly decent idea of how the notion of my having (or not having) an invisible tail did.
WHY CAN YOU NOT UNDERSTAND THAT??????????????????????????????????????????
I have no problem understanding that. Why can you not understand that knoving that someone made a notion up is not a valid reason to consider that notion less likely to match reality than if it had never been brought to your attention?
I want you to admit that you have no evidence against the existence of invisible tails.
We will then discuss wether the existence of the notion of souls, and the way this was brought to your attention, is compelling evidence in favor of the existence of souls.
FrankApisa wrote:Quote:I am almost certain that if this concept had not been presented to ancient men, someone would have thought of it, and it would still have spread as a meme. I would predict that that this concept, or one just like it, would have been in play wether evidence supporting it was at some point available to someone or not. Therefore i do not consider that this concept is being distributed compelling evidence in favor of it being real.
I am not proposing there is evidence in favor of it being real.
No, you are proposing that bin making a concept up is evidence in favor of it not being real. I've been expecting you to admit for a while now that it is not, since bin would have been just as likely to make this notion up to use in his argument if they did exist as he would have been if they did not. I've also been expecting you to stick to the idea that notions known to have been made up are less likely to be real than notions of unknown origin, and so I guess I tried to preempt that argument.
FrankApisa wrote:Quote:FrankApisa wrote:What evidence, Ein, do you (if you do) base your guess that there is no God...are no gods...are no souls?
The same evidence on which you base your guess that there are no invisible tails, namely the lack of credible evidence to support the notion. (as well as the complexity of the notion itself)
Well that is just plain dishonest. At no point have I ever asserted that the reason I am willing to guess I have no invisible tail is because of a lack of credible evidence to support the notion....AND YOU DAMN WELL KNOW THAT.
That was a piece of pure fiction...and a strawman through to its core.
Someone making up a notion of invisible tails does not constitute evidence against their existence. Invisible tails are just a liklely to exist as they would have been if binny had made up the concept of invisible trunks instead. Since you have no evidence against the existence of invisible tails, and yet express confidence in a guess that they do not exist, I can only conclude that you consider them unlikely based on the lack of evidence supporting their existence.
That last post was full of the same point being made over and over again.
I really only have two questions noe that I want answered.
Do you somehow discern between certainty and assesed probability? I really have trouble understanding how you can feel certain that invisible tails do not exist
hardy har har...
I answered every question you asked.
That's more than you can say.
I also answered as clearly as possible considering the complexity of the answers.
I didn't try to narrow my view to only one question, like you did (you always tried to go back to "is there a god" and block out all other relevent concerns).
And I graduated high school from one of the best high schools in the country cum laude. And that was without trying that hard and taking way harder classes than anybody else in the school except one chick, who actually was really smart, but who was not a victim of nihilism. Don't kid yourself, Frankie Poo.
("Relevent" is not spelled relevant it is spelled relevant, Mr. Graduate Cum Laude. You don't have to be bright to spell correctly. You just have to avoid being too lazy to spellcheck.)
my goal is understanding, not perfect sentences.
And if your goal IS perfect sentences, wow! I pity you for not only that goal, but also your failure to achieve it. And I doubt you'll find more than two or three misspelled word I've used in this whole thread. Keep in mind all the times you said something you didn't mean, but I ignored it... like for instance here:Quote:("Relevent" is not spelled relevant it is spelled relevant, Mr. Graduate Cum Laude. You don't have to be bright to spell correctly. You just have to avoid being too lazy to spellcheck.)
That makes you look pretty silly, I hope you know. Bash me for having poor sentence structure when it's clear that I don't care, and have a problem in the sentence you use! Are you even for real? I mean, are you just trying to get a rise out of me by saying outrageous stuff? Because you are really starting to say silly things.
And your cockiness sure seemed to wear off quick when it came to "blowing my doors off" about the tail analogy. You went from about to blow my doors off to calling that line of thought a red herring.
binnyboy wrote:my goal is understanding, not perfect sentences.
And if your goal IS perfect sentences, wow! I pity you for not only that goal, but also your failure to achieve it. And I doubt you'll find more than two or three misspelled word I've used in this whole thread. Keep in mind all the times you said something you didn't mean, but I ignored it... like for instance here:Quote:("Relevent" is not spelled relevant it is spelled relevant, Mr. Graduate Cum Laude. You don't have to be bright to spell correctly. You just have to avoid being too lazy to spellcheck.)
That makes you look pretty silly, I hope you know. Bash me for having poor sentence structure when it's clear that I don't care, and have a problem in the sentence you use! Are you even for real? I mean, are you just trying to get a rise out of me by saying outrageous stuff? Because you are really starting to say silly things.
And your cockiness sure seemed to wear off quick when it came to "blowing my doors off" about the tail analogy. You went from about to blow my doors off to calling that line of thought a red herring.
Sonny...all this phony bravado is getting you nowhere.
You asked for a fight...I gave you one.
Now you are crying like a baby because I accomodated you.
And you were the one talking about graduating cum laude from "one of the finest high schools in the country" (which remains as unsubstatiated as your assertion that it is a fact that there are no gods)...so I called your attention to the fact that your posts are gammatical abominations.
In any case, I am the one who has stuck to the discussion...and you are the one who tried to weasel your way out of acknowledging that your assertion is unsubstantiated by introducing the invisible tail red herring.
But...I guess I gotta offer you a bit of slack. You are a kid...and you did bite off much more than you can chew.
So when you grow up...if you want to actually debate your unsubstantiated assertions about the non-existence of gods...just get in touch. I'll be right here.
pls dont mind me to get into the action, i think you were no longer talking about the issue on the existence of gods, moreover i think it is a shame to let a brilliant conversation be led away by some corrections.
regarding the issue i think i would agree that gods don't exist, since the only proof for their existence are written words of pass "spiritual" people. i think god himself would agree if he/she exist, that it is just not enough to prove his/her existence from mere papers or books only...
(pardon me i haven't read the previous statements about the issue on god...)
to cut it sort, how can you prove god's (any god for that matter) existence without any historical text available?
binnyboy wrote:
But now it's your turn to make a fool of yourself and answer your own question... HOW DO YOU KNOW SOME OF THE THINGS YOU ASSERT AS FACTS?
I appreciate that you have just attempted to make a fool of yourself, Bin...and it is my opinion that you have succeeded marvelously. But then again, you had a built-in head-start.
In any case, the "explanation" you just offered isn't, in my opinion, sound enough to qualify as gibberish. But I thank you for taking the time to attempt to rationalize the unrationalizable. It was fun reading.
Now since you were working with a specific "something you asserted as a fact" please give me that same opportunity.
What specifically have I asserted as "a fact" that you are challenging me to explain how I know it to be a fact?
Quote:To me it seems quite obvious that the religions currently trumpeted on this planet, as well as ones trumpeted in the past, are mere collections of memes.
Amen! We are one on this, Ein. In fact, some seem more like jokes than gods.
I honestly do not know what you are getting at here, Ein. I have studied religion...and atheism for over 40 years now...and had discussions and debates with theists and atheists both on the Internet and in newspapers.
You know very well that the entire point behind this is that facts are very rarely pinned down. You assert the fact that I am dealing with adults here. But we could all be young teenagers for all you know, with you the only adult. You asserted something as a fact of which you were not sure.
You cannot be sure that there is more than one adult (you). But you asserted it as fact. What you claimed is analogous to,
It is a fact that you are dealing with adults. I am not sure that there is more than one adult. But it is a fact that you are dealing with adults.
You asserted this opinion as a fact, and you were right to do so, because it is a fact. So don't bust my chops for doing the same.
binnyboy wrote:
Take your pick:
a)Frank Apisa wrote:Quote:To me it seems quite obvious that the religions currently trumpeted on this planet, as well as ones trumpeted in the past, are mere collections of memes.
Amen! We are one on this, Ein. In fact, some seem more like jokes than gods.
You have guessed that you are one on this, and that Ein is not lying. You have furthermore asserted as fact that you are one on this (meaning your opinions are the same).
I am indeed making an assumption that Ein is not lying...and I am very definitely stating a fact: I agree with his opinion. That is to say, my opinion coincides with what he tells me his opinion is.
Are you saying that bears a resemblance to your statment "So I say that there is no god. I say it as a fact"?
In that statement, Bin, you asserted that you were asserting a fact. You then went on to acknowledge that you do not know it to be a fact...which is strange, to say the least.
I challenged you on that.
I still do.
I say you cannot logically state that as a fact...anymore than I could state as a fact that Ein definitely feels the way he says he feels. Best I can do on that score, is to make an assumption...which I acknowledge I did in the cited instance.
By the way...I certainly do not say that same thing about many of the other things you asserted as facts....because there is no way one could have any kind of conversation with that kind of thing going on.
In any case...you are asserting that when you say "There is no God"...you are asserting a fact.
If I am wrong on that...and if you are instead saying that you are assuming there is no god...or that you are guessing there is no god...
...you will, by the definition you seem to be using in your question to me, be stating a fact.
I will not challenge that fact...because it will be a fact acknowledged as an assumption.
In effect, you would be stating a fact...but so what.
I am not concerned with people stating facts...or with people making assumptions...and I cannot imagine that I ever gave you the impression that I was.
As long as they keep them distinct.
Let's discuss this until you see my point...or until you show me the lack of logic in my point.
(Personal note: This is much, much more fun doing things this way!)
(Another personal note: Ein, if you are still around...join in.)
