Bertvan
>Free will, consciousness, intelligence, purpose, creativity, spontaneity and
>choice are all characteristics of life.
Chris
So, you're claiming that the simplest possible living thing has free will,
consciousness, intelligence, purpose, creativity, spontaneity and choice?
Is there *any* evidence of this incredibly general claim?
Bertvan
> So far no one has been able to
>define or describe them naturalistically.
Chris
This is bull-crap. There are entire naturalistic books (*hundreds* of
them!) defining and describing each of these phenomena naturalistically.
Defining them naturalistically is the only way they *can* be defined,
objectively, because they are naturally-occurring phenomena in *some* (not
all) forms of life. Non-naturalistic attempts at defining them all fail
because they assume or assert facts not in evidence and that are always
unnecessary or irrelevant. An example is the moronic propensity of some to
*define* mind as some sort of non-material entity or thing, rather than
merely as the states and processes that make it up and that distinguish it
from other things. Blatant category mistakes do not make for good
definitions. Since no non-naturalistic thing has ever been shown to exist
or even to be possible, any attempt to *define* real things or phenomena in
non-naturalistic terms are automatically invalid. This is obvious in fields
like physics, but, until at least *one* non-naturalistic fact is shown to
be real, it's just as true in every other field as well (though perhaps
less obvious).
Bertvan
> If science insists upon limiting
>itself to those things that can be described naturalistically, science should
>limit its attempted explanations to dead systems. With microscopes and
>technology we are able to observe life. We cam detect tiny details of the
>design and deduce their limited purposes. We can manipulate pieces of the
>design.
Chris
And yet, these are *not* dead systems. How is it that science *can* study
life if life is not naturalistic and naturalistically describable? Yes, we
can detect tiny details of their structure, but your assumption that this
is *design* is unjustified without special proof, which neither you nor
anyone else on this list has been able to provide. We cannot deduce their
purposes, except in a metaphorical sense of purpose (i.e., their *function*).
Bertvan
> We can't even observe evolution.
Chris
This is bull-crap to the fourth power, unless you have some bizarrely and
arbitrarily restricted concept of evolution (or of observation). Maybe you
live imprisoned in a cave and can't observe it, but many of the rest of us
most certainly *can* observe it.
Bertvan
>We can only guess what happened and when.
Chris
Really? We can *only* guess? No. There are literally millions of facts that
enable us to do a lot more than merely *guess* at what happened and when.
We may not be certain of many such facts, beyond fairly broad ranges, but
your characterization of them as mere guesses is hardly even *remotely*
accurate.
Bertvan
>Those scientists who deny free will, consciousness, intelligence, purpose,
>creativity, spontaneity and choice as a part of the process, merely because
>science is unable to explain such qualities naturalistically, are entitled to
>make their guesses about evolution.
Chris
If you think you can explain them *non-*naturalistically, please go right
ahead. For *every* such explanation I can make a naturalistic one by simply
changing the terminology so that only naturalistic terms are used.
Non-naturalism provides *absolutely* nothing of scientific value that
cannot be gotten trivially by naturalistic means.
The thing about science that you never seem to grasp, despite apparently
reading *dozens* of expositions of it, is that science *requires* that its
explanations do vastly *more* than mere "Just So" stories that
non-naturalistic pseudo-explanations offer. Science requires testability.
Evolution has been tested literally thousands of times. Non-naturalistic
design theory, as such, *cannot* be tested, so it's explanations are
*purely* of the "Just So" story type of explanation. They are amusing, but
they are, when taken seriously, much worse than non-scientific; they are
*anti-*scientific. They reject the fundamental requirement that scientific
theory be empirically *testable*.
Bertvan
>Those scientists who acknowledge free
>will, consciousness, intelligence, purpose, creativity, spontaneity and
>choice as characteristics of life may or may not achieve a better
>understanding of the process. If science wants to limit itself to phenomena
>that can be explained naturalistically, it should not try to explain life.
Chris
Science limits itself to phenomena that can be dealt with *empirically*.
That that happens to be things that can be explained naturalistically is
mere side-effect. Since all of these phenomena have empirically observable
effects, they *can* be studied empirically and have been for decades (and
much longer in some cases).
Perhaps I should not have heaped such negativity on your remarks, but you
have been pushing this general line of utterly indefensible irrationality
for well over a year now, and I finally lost patience with it. It's utterly
indefensible because you have not been able to provide even *one* fact that
supports it, and because anyone who has not been living in your cave with
you knows from personal experience (or *can* know, with a bit of thought)
that you are just spouting nonsense because you refuse to think, you refuse
to question the incredible mass of *assumptions* that you keep
regurgitating on this list, supported each time with the same incredible
falsehoods and the same incredibly *bad* (grotesquely illogical or
blatantly unfounded) arguments.
Your posts are often a waste of bandwidth on this list because you rarely
if ever get out of the tiny little orbit of circular reasoning that you
live in. You are apparently almost completely unable or unwilling to do
*any* kind of serious analysis of concepts, ideas, or theories, so you just
keep repeating packages of cliches, like college kids who pick up the
latest intellectual fads and go with them, but without bothering to learn
how to understand the concepts involved.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jun 08 2000 - 22:46:57 EDT