Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

Stendhal said the the Book of Etiquette was the most important European book of the 18th century. So I suppose he makes your point about multiple selves although maybe not during the "vinegar stroke".

My question does have two answers. It's a easy piece of logic. In computer programing terms, this is the option between "if" and "else." I define one thing and asked if believed it, all other opinions fall under "else."

This is not as hard as you're making it.

If my question was "what does the soup taste like?" then yes, you'd be correct. However that's not what I asked. I asked if the soup tastes the same with or without the stone.

Again, you are trying to hard to complicate this. All of these factors can be eliminated in a controlled environment Francis. Do I really need to tell you that?

Take one pot and cook soup made with the same ingredients and by the same cook. Take that pot and pour it into two identical pots, and then continue to cook put place a stone in one of them. Will they taste different or the same?

This is a very simple question.

I'm not sure how far you've read back, but to the larger point I've been trying to make about stone soup is that we're all eating soup already and we are trying to figure out why it tastes the way it does. Some people like Spendi give credit to stones at the bottom of the pot that we haven't even found. Others like myself believe that the soup does not require a stone for it to have the flavor it does have. You entered this metaphorical exchange kind of late.

This speaks directly to my point. Spendi is of the mindset that there must be a rock because of beliefs. He's ready to give credit to the stone for the flavor, instead of trying to understand the recipe. Ironic part is that he's given credit to a stone which we haven't even found yet. He might have some ground to stand on if we were to drain the pot and find a stone to even give credit to.

We know there is celery, carrots, cabbage, water, beef, salt, pepper... But for whatever reason, he wants to give credit to what we don't know is there.

I'm looking for honest and humble answers. Either the soup requires a stone, or it does not. I'm not impressed with rhetorical gymnastics.

T
K
O

Spendius,

You'll have to explain that Stendhal reference to me.

Gurdjieff would be the first to admit to some of his "wayward selves", but he certainly made an impact on some of the intelligentsia of the time. (as did Krishnamurti who certainly played the field).

P.D. Ouspensky. (celebrated Gurdjieff associate).

It's a perfectly fine question. I never said an opinion governs the outcome of the flavor of the soup nor the winner of the superbowl. I'm asking you to give an opinion. I'm asking for intellectual honesty. Not answering is simply cowardice of the first order. It's a mental contortion to avoid being held to your words and their implications.

I can say who I think will win the superbowl. I can tell you why I think they'll win. If they lose, I can even tell you retroactively why I thought they would win. The point isn't if I'm right or wrong, but that I can construct an answer.

You either think that the stone adds flavor or it doesn't--yes or no--If or else. Simple.

What makes science acceptable is not the outcome, it is the method. Society may have a hard time accepting what we learn as scientists because of long lasting beliefs, but that doesn't make the science unacceptable. Teaching ID as science would be unacceptable however because it uses no scientific method.

Totally lame excuse. You don't want to answer my question, I won't force you. Just don't pretend to be on the level if you aren't willing to step up to the plate.

What is soup with no stone? I'm so glad you asked Spendi! My opinion is simply that soup with no stone is just soup. Ta-da! It's still soup without the stone, so the stone is irrelevant to what soup is.

Don't ramble about the scientific point of view spendi. Yo know as well as I that the stone is a metaphor. I could have said a marble or a fork. The question is unaffected.

You've illustrated my point very well though. You know that the stone doesn't add flavor, but are willing to try and change the circumstances such that you can pretend you can't answer.

The illusion of conspiracy. Pretend it's a stalemate or that something is in contention, and then you don't have to be right, you just have to try and stop the other guy from announcing they are. It's very immature.

T
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O

Nobody ever is who is no ******* good at them.



No it is not what you asked. You said to kids which I said would need to be under two years old not to laugh in your face. Gourmets with highly refined and delicate taste buds would be able to tell where the stone came from to a few miles.

A lump of West Riding limestone would have them retching and Welsh slate would set their teeth on edge like when you scrape a blackboard with your fingernail.

This is nothing to be proud of Spendi. I'm asking where you're at, and your running around so you don't have to answer. That's mentally vacant.

I said nothing of the sort.

This reminds me of the episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit where they put tap water in bottles and ask people in the street if they can pick out their favorite brand of bottled water.

You're made of that brand of Bullshit Spendi.

So I make some soup and take it to one of your super palettes, and ask where the stone is from they'll tell me? If they say it's from a specific hill in Virginia it would be pretty impressive wouldn't it? But if I made the soup, and I know I didn't put a stone in it (from anywhere for that matter) it would be ridiculous for the Gourmet to argue with me. He cold ramble all he wanted about the acidic this or that, but I would still know better.

The test isn't to put a stone in soup and ask where the stone is from.
The test isn't to put a stone in soup and see if they notice.
The test is to make soup without a stone, and see if it's still soup.

T
K
O

It does not require a stone. Nor does it require the carrots. There's no carrots in duck soup for example. Lentils maybe but no carrots. Carrots would be in bad taste in duck soup in my opinion. They would affect the colour as well. I'm not too keen on the cabbage either.

Are you liquidising this soup in a blender? Are you stoned TK?

Have you got an issue with that?



It isn't. With no stone it's distilled water. There's stone in your rectum TK. Stone is a given.

The absence/presence of carrots versus the absence/presence of a stone is a discussion I'm very prepared to have Spendi.

We can take a pot of boiling water and I'll put carrots in. You can put a stone in or leave it out. It will make no difference.

T
K
O

From NPR:
A century and a half after Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, some still doubt its ability to explain the emergence of human beings and other forms of life.

These days, some Darwin skeptics are focusing on the human brain. They say a higher power must be involved; otherwise, how could a bunch of cells produce such complicated mental processes as consciousness or subjective experiences? How could something like free will be the result of evolution?

While Darwin skeptics have homed in on this mind-brain problem, most brain scientists say there's plenty of evidence that mental actions such as consciousness have evolved along with the brain.

Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale University, studies the mind-brain connection. His work points to a mind that depends on the brain.

"If you change the brain, you change the mind. If you damage the brain, you damage the mind. If you turn off the brain, you turn off the mind," he says.

"And now with more sophisticated tools, when we're looking at brain function with functional MRI, for example, we can see that brain activity precedes mental activities " and that makes sense, because causes come before their effects."

The evidence that the brain causes the mind is "overwhelming," says Novella, but science isn't exactly sure how. And there's a real debate about how science needs to further explore that question, he says.

Belief In A Divine Hand

This is where the Darwin doubters come in. One of them is neurosurgeon Michael Egnor from the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

"I'm a neurosurgeon. I realize how closely the mind and the brain are related," Egnor says. "But the question is, is there something else, in addition to the material properties of the brain, that we need to invoke to have an adequate explanation for the mind? And I think there is."

Egnor says that an intelligent designer was involved in producing not only the brain but all living things and certain features of the universe. Without this designer, the brain would be just a meat computer made up of brain cells, he says.

"There is nothing about neurons that scientifically would lead you to infer consciousness from them. They're masses of gelatinous carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen, just like other kinds of flesh. And why would flesh have first-person experience? So, even logically, it doesn't hang together."

Dueling Blogs

Egnor and Novella have been arguing about the mind-brain debate on dueling blogs for months now.

Egnor writes for a blog called Evolution News & Views, hosted by the Discovery Institute, a think tank that's the hub of the intelligent design movement and that rejects Darwinian evolution.

Novella writes for a blog called Neurologica, hosted by the New England Skeptical Society, an organization he co-founded.

Neither has much respect for the other's ideas.

"The brain uses energy, it can hold information, it can communicate, it can receive sensory input. It can even activate itself and create a loop of ongoing activity," Novella says in response to Egnor's contention that brain cells alone can't cause the mind.

The brain "can do things that can plausibly cause consciousness and self-awareness, so the argument really just falls on its face."

Novella also says Egnor is really a creationist who's recycling the religious arguments once used to attack evolution and the idea that natural selection could have produced our genetic code.

Egnor counters, "Whether it's the DNA code or the mind that understands the DNA code, both require an explanation that transcends what we know of matter."

And he says he's not a creationist: "My personal view is that we have souls and that they're created by God. But you don't have to hold that view to recognize what I think is the evidence that the mind is not entirely material."

Beliefs In Action

Not surprisingly, Egnor and Novella have very different views on the Terri Schiavo case. Schiavo was the woman in Florida who had severe brain damage and was taken off life support after a legal battle that lasted seven years.

Novella says the court was right to assume that Schiavo's mind was determined by her physical brain.

"She had significant enough brain damage that it was incompatible with somebody being conscious in any significant way. And it's reasonable to base medical decisions on that scientific evidence," says Novella.

"If you also want to bring moral or ethical things into the picture, that's slightly different. You know, science doesn't make moral decisions for us. It just informs our moral decisions."

Egnor says the court was wrong because there's no scientific test that can detect the presence of a mind.

Also, anecdotal evidence suggests even when the brain stops working, the mind can persist, he says. These anecdotes usually involve a person who has nearly died.

"The person was able to have mental processes during a time when they were in cardiac arrest, in cardiac standstill, and sometimes even absent EEG waves," Egnor says. "So I think there is very real scientific evidence that the mind in some circumstances can exist without a functioning brain."

Darwinist brain scientists say in these cases the brain is still functioning, even if its electrical signals are hard to detect.

For the record, Egnor and Novella do agree about one thing: The outcome of the mind-brain debate will have a profound impact on everything from what students learn in high school to how decisions are made at the end of life.

It's funny how they try to identify why god had to make homo sapiens, and now say the brain is too complicated for evolution. That goes to show none of them understand the complexities of biology and nature. It was the eyes, now it's the brains. I wonder what they're going to "attack" next? LOL

Well, it must have had a purpose in creating penus envy.

My recent posts have been tangential to the main debate except for one point.
ID rests on the single proposition that "complexity" implies "intelligence". But both of these concepts are human projections relative to our own perceived "abilities". Above, I mentioned Prigogine's work on the occurrence of spontaneous "dissipative structures" in chemical systems "far from equilibrium". The modelling of such occurrences by "catastophe theory" may effectively separates "complexity" from an "intelligence" requirement.

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/dissipative-structures.html

That makes me think of the Valladolid debate: did Indians had a soul?

One thing history teaches us, we learn nothing from history..

In matters of rethorics, I think you can do better than this.

Choosing the part of my answer that is convenient to you is the beginning of art.

Later on, you'll (maybe) develop your own concepts..

Francis - I replied to your entire post. You take out one reply to one of your statements, and then lecture me about choosing to address what is convenient is a little ironic don't you think?

Is it too inconvenient to address what I wrote to you?

How about you reply to all the things I wrote back to you, before soapboxing about my apparent absence of my own concepts. Provide something original or a metaphor of your own. I don't know what about my concepts aren't my own. I certainly am not familiar with the stone soup story being used as an analogy for this issue.

Art? What are you referring to here? I didn't begin with this statement, it was in the middle of my post.

In matters of rhetorics, I don't think I need to put in as much effort if others aren't wiling to meet me in the middle. If you don't like or agree with my idea, that's fine. I thought you were contributing very well by asking about the nature of my question, and allowing me to defend it. However, don't insult me by saying that I'm being "convenient."

T
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O

Well, I do not intend to argue with you as, as I said before, it seems that "die-hard physicists" have little or no propensity to ponder on matters that are alien to them.

Which is strange, as some of these matters have scientific foundations.

Interesting concept. Ive always been a fan of rapid equilibria reactions in colloidal systems as a function of the surface chemistry (collapsing double layers, zeta potential etc). These colloidal silicates and carbon compounds can vary in structure and attraction/repulsin as a rapid accomodation to an entirely new "syrup matrix". (Most of the chemistry had been worked outin the pharma and paint industries).

Why not as the foundation of life as well? The mechanisms are well understood and arent
"(f)gods"

Ed--have you got the ads which preceeded and followed that mush.

I would imagine ci. that it will be connected to the mental processes which accompany erectile function in men after the youthful reflexes have become jaded at about 22.