Text 4365, 179 rader
Skriven 2006-07-19 14:43:00 av Robert E Starr JR (4838.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Atheists: America's m
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* * * This message was from Josh Hill to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.m * * *
         * * * and has been forwarded to you by Lord Time * * *         
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On Tue, 18 Jul 2006 17:01:03 -0700, "Vorlonagent"
<nojtspam@otfresno.com> wrote:

>
>"Josh Hill" <usereplyto@gmail.com> wrote in message 
>news:tqkob2p4eu6r3nd329ucn7uthob8q3qh4d@4ax.com...
>
>>>> I submit that science can, in principle if not in practice, find the
>>>> good band. It's been some fifty years, for example, since Meyer
>>>> noticed the relationship between good music and information theory.
>>>> And if you're talking about the "heart," well, science can understand
>>>> that too, and could in principle use it to developing the criteria
>>>> that allow it identify a good band.
>>>
>>>No.  it can give you a good probability *estimate*.  There's a difference
>>>and it's not small.
>>>
>>>Science is at best 20-20 hindsight.  It can tell you to some degree of
>>>resolution what worked yesterday or when the last measurments were taken.
>>>Insofar as those measurements are valid today it can make a 
>>>corresponsingly
>>>good approximation.
>>
>> I'm not sure why you refer to hindsight. Science is about predicting
>> the future on the basis of the past. So I think is thought in general.
>
>Science is about making sense of the world and predicting the future based 
>on the past is a part of that.  Newtonian physics is the crown jewel of that 
>kind of scinece because it assumes we can all be reduced to systems that 
>function deterministically.  All we have to is plug in the right values to 
>the the variables and turn the crank.  A wonderful clockwork universe spins 
>and dances for our amusement.
>
>Relativity warped the clockwork universe and Quantum Physics destroyed it. 
>The familiar predictability of Newtonian physics was a pratial illusion 
>brough on by the scale by which we perceived the universe.  One a difference 
>scale, very different rules apply.  Newtonian Physics reamins as a 
>large-scale approximation of what's actually happening.

There's nothing acausal about relativity: it's as clockwork as
Newtonian physics, albeit it may in some cases limit our knowledge of
initial conditions, e.g., of events that occur outside a light cone.
Neither excepts us from the philosophical constraint that all
predictions made by theory are matters of probability. Quantum
mechanics, of course, places new constraints on our ability to predict
the future from initial conditions. But I wasn't arguing against the
reality of any of these limitations, or of more practical ones.

>Now to the question of hindsight.
>
>One of the faith-tenets on which science (especially hard science) rests in 
>the idea that the universe is not arbitrary.  If functions according to the 
>same rules yesterday, today, tomorrow.  That's why there are gunnery tables 
>for artillarymen.  Plugging in the energy invested in a shell its angle of 
>flight and the Earth's gravity, you can calculate about where it will land 
>because measurments of the earth's gravity and the mass of the shell made 
>yesterday are still valid today, yeielding valid results.  You're still 
>using hindsight and making assuptions, albeit very safe ones.

Sure, though I don't think I would describe that as "at best 20-20
hindsight." It's the ability to predict the future on the basis of a
knowledge of initial conditions and inferences drawn from experience,
which naturally enough belongs to the past. I'm not sure what
alternatives there are. Time travel? Divine revelation? Knowledge a
priori? I'd consider the last inherited, and therefore based on the
past.

>>>> BTW, I'm not so sure that the band and the computer are so different,
>>>> except insofar as bands are more sophisticated than today's computers,
>>>> which have the cognitive sophistication of insects (no snide remarks
>>>> about rap, please). And I don't see any reason why the computer
>>>> couldn't be given the same emotional drives as we have.
>>>
>>>At the moment, that's a statement far more composed of faith than fact.
>>
>> I very much disagree. It's composed of thought and observation. A
>> toaster has emotions. Ask yourself what emotions are, and you'll reach
>> the same conclusion I did.
>
>Don't I get a say in this?
>
>Toasters may have emotions but it'd take a technological shaman to find 
>them.

Not if you look at emotions analytically and ask what they are, rather
than approaching them from a subjective level -- I /feel/ this way,
I'm flesh and blood, the toaster isn't, so I have something magical
that the toaster doesn't.

One way of looking at it is the Turing approach. Two teletypes, one
with a man behind it, one a computer. If the computer reacts the same
way as the man when you ask it whether it loves its daughter or insult
its mother, you can't distinguish them.

When you press its lever, a toaster wants to toast bread, then pop it
up when it reaches a certain temperature and turn off. It's just a
different kind of machine.

>>>>>> I do agree that for most there's an intermediate step, one in which
>>>>>> the scientific findings are dramatized, placed in an emotional context
>>>>>> within the imagination to which you refer above.
>>>>>
>>>>>That "intemediate step" goes by another name.
>>>>>
>>>>>Life.
>>>>
>>>> But the same thing can be done in silicon.
>>>
>>>It can?  Prove it.
>>
>> No prediction about empirical phenomena can be proved. I am merely
>> following Occam here.
>
>Then you are expressing an article of faith. Occam's Razor is not wed to a 
>factual result.  Quantum Physics is proof of that.

I am expressing no article of faith, but rather the simplest
hypothesis consistent with observation. And that hypothesis is that
there is, on a fundamental level, nothing "special" that distinguishes
human thought from the thought of machines. Because there's lots of
observation that says that mind is the product of physical and
chemical processes, while there's no evidence of the contrary, no
observed phenomenon that requires one.

To suppose that there is such a special quality is to violate Occam's
Razor by introducing an unnecessary element.

>>>> Conversely, doesn't science occur in the living?
>>>
>>>Sure.  But science isn't alive.
>>
>> No, but I'm not sure why that matters; it's still the converse.
>
>Because science is a tool.  It's not a viewpoint. People have viewpoints.

>>>> Not that I want to minimize the difference. Science represents one
>>>> part of the psyche -- the part that forms an accurate model of the
>>>> world around us. It isn't generally placed within the context of
>>>> motivation or emotion, although it can analyze motivation, and it
>>>> tends towards theory rather than concrete manifestation, e.g., it
>>>> "lends to airy nothings a local habitation and a name," whereas
>>>> science is concerned with reducing a multitude of local habitations
>>>> into airy nothings.
>>>
>>>Science does not represent any part of our psyche.  It is a tool used by a
>>>part of our psyche to make sense of the world.
>>
>> Sure, and being such, it represents the part of our psyche that makes
>> sense of the world, does it not?
>
>No.  Science represents nothing.  It is a tool.
>
>Science is a tool used by the pure-intellectual part of our psyches to make 
>pure-intellectual sense of the world.  Other tools exist, and other parts of 
>ourselves are reaching out to make sense of the world.

Sure,  but how does that differ from what I said?

-- 
Josh

"I love it when I'm around the country club, and I hear people talking about
the debilitating
effects of a welfare society. At the same time, they leave their kids a
lifetime and beyond
of food stamps. Instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust officer.
And instead
of food stamps, they have stocks and bonds."

- Warren Buffett
                                     
--- SBBSecho 2.11-Win32
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