Posted on 10/25/2002 12:14:19 AM PDT by jennyp
Ah...here's the problem. You can't trust your own senses. IOW you have no facility for Reason. If you can't trust your eyes, how can you trust your ears when you hear the answer from the scientist?
Let's say you have cancer. You pray to God and the cancer goes away. The doctors don't know what happened. Let's say I have cancer. I get a new scientific treatment and I pray to God. The cancer goes away. How would "Reason" handle this situation? My guess is that "Reason" would accept the first as a mystery and the second as a result of science because "Reason" has faith in science.
But it did happen. So external proof is not required for an event to occur. Therefore, a person does not need external proof in order to believe an event occurred.
Then why haven't they built a hospital? All animals have some intelligence. Many animals use tools to get food. But man is the only one to build a car or hospital. Out of all the millions of species, why only man?
I didn't say "think". I said "did". If something DID happen but there is not external evidence of it, did it happen?
Sure, something happened. So what? That has no bearing on whether or not anyone should believe you.
That sums it up pretty well; scientists are as fallible as the next guy. "Trust but verify". That's why scientists are ignored unless they can give a methodology that allows you to achieve whatever it is they achieved on your own. In science, you don't even begin to believe an assertion by a scientist until a number of other reasonably qualified people have performed the experiment independently and verified the substance of the assertion. This is among the primary reasons that you can't really prove anything in science in a rigorous sense.
However, we do have faculties for reason inasmuch as we have faculties for mathematics. Unlike science, mathematics is observer independent (both inside AND outside our universe, as it happens). Therefore, we can use mathematics to evaluate science and can know the evaluation is correct even if we can't prove the science itself. You end up with the case where mathematics can tell you whether or not a belief is rational and reasonable, but it can't tell you anything as to whether or not a belief is actually true or based in reality. For better or worse, since we can't trust our senses, the only metric we have to evaluate them in a rigorous sense is a determination of rationality. And even that's not fool proof for most people, as it is possible to construct an internally self-rational world view that does not necessarily have any basis in reality, though this actually results from uneven application of rationality analysis. Most people regularly engage in only limited rationality analysis of their own beliefs, and therefore live inside a superficially consistent, but invalid, world view (see: "liberals").
In other words, how can you presume the physical laws or logic of any other universe or domain outside this universe?
At the end of the day, however, IMHO what all this boils down to are the questions: What is language? What is learning?
The way these terms have come to be understood has had to be drastically "defined down" in order for Koko's vocabulary, the ability of apes to learn American Sign Language, or to teach their young how to use sticks to skewer tasty morsels, etc., to even begin to minimally qualify as meeting the criteria of what language is, or what learning is.
When definitions are this "flexible," we can stretch them to accommodate almost any particular set of facts.
One could say on this basis that a horse weaving in his stall is effectively little different than a ballet dancer; for both can be observed to display regular, patterned motions. Or that there's no real, significant difference between the "output" of a songbird, and what Placido Domingo does.
I think there's been a big fad lately of "anthropomorphizing" the animals. This seems to be PETA's specialty.
But then maybe the point I'm trying to make here is so obvious it's actually difficult to see. To paraphrase an observation of S.I. Hayakawa, if we can see in a given situation only what "everybody else" [e.g., the "experts" and the trendy types] sees, than it can we said that we are so representative of our culture as to be a victim of it.
You misunderstand. Physical laws and science in general is highly context dependent i.e. it only applies to the universe we happen to live in. Mathematics can be applied to all possible universes, and is regularly. There is some application for proving mathematics in spaces that don't exist in our universe, so it isn't purely mental masturbation. Things like logic, which is grounded purely in mathematics, are transferable to all spaces and would work as well outside our universe as inside it. The presumption that most people have that mathematics only extends as far as the boundaries of our universe is wrong, and leads to idle speculation of dubious value.
The "how"s and "why"s are serious esoterica, so I won't go there. The only thing to remember is that physical laws only apply to our universe, but mathematics apply everywhere. Trying to get around inconvenient mathematics is a fool's errand in any universe/space. This means, among other things, that there can exist no universe where "liberal logic" is actually valid in any kind of mathematical sense.
I agree with your position in this debate (no surprise.) But I would like to extend it beyond intelligence and language.
IMHO, there is also a huge ego difference between man and animal. Man is exceedingly more willful ranging from greed, rebellion, murder, jealousy - to generosity, obedience, self sacrifice and altruism.
Certainly we see very rudimentary forms of this among the animals - mothers protecting their young, fighting over food, killing infants to breed again. But it would be astonishing indeed to see a hungry grizzly offer his kill to an injured wolf.
In my view, animals fulfill their environmental niche in this universe while man rebels against it. They aren't in the same league.
Special tools are not required for abstraction, just more neurons. The takeoff as a function of computational resources (measured in memory, not processor) is relatively sharp, hence why even small differences in mental resources in humans lead to large differences in ability. The mathematics is actually pretty startling; a resource delta of only a few percentage points is the difference between a retard and a genius. Add a few more percentage points to the smartest person you know, and you end up with somebody who is unimaginably intelligent. Relatively minor improvements in resources have a profound impact on intelligence, particularly when you are near the bottom end of the curve.
I see no requirement that pi would be the same in an alternate universe, much less Schwarzchild, Riemannian or Euclidean Geometry and so forth.
I say this because space/time itself is a quality of the extension of field - physical laws - and may not be the same, or may be dimensionally skewed or not exist at all - in an alternate universe or domain.
Likewise, any logic conditioned on the arrow of time could be invalid in an alternate universe - even the concept of numbers (e.g. "three") requires a material existence, i.e. physical law.
For lurkers: What is Mathematics?
Mathematics can work in an arbitrary number of dimensions imagined or not, and does so regularly. The fact that an alternate universe may not have any dimensions that we recognize certainly doesn't invalidate the fact that the mathematics is perfectly capable of operating in the dimensions that it does have. Space and time are arbitrary labels that we give dimensions in our universe, but mathematics only makes the distinction when applied to our universe and universes like it, mostly for our own convenience. Note that theoretical physicists regularly work on models of the universe with vastly more dimensions than four even though that is the only dimensions we can perceive, and often work in spaces that are entirely constructs of the imagination. Everything is still correctly derivable in those spaces if you take those spaces as axioms for deriving applied mathematics.
Logic in mathematics has no concept of time or any other property of our universe, hence why it is easily applied to all. You have confused applied logic, which takes our universe as an axiomatic environment and derives the consequences of mathematical logic in that environment, with pure logic from which the applied logic you are referring to was actually derived. If you look up first-order logic, it is essentially set theory type mathematics and spaceless. Rhetorical or applied logic is first-order logic applied to our universe (and sometimes not even that). You could just as easily re-derive "applied logic" for any other universe as well. If you stick with strict mathematical logic in arguments and avoid derivative applied logic, your logic is portable to other universes.
Numbers definitely do exist in mathematics independent of a physical existence. We take them to mean something slightly different in practice (i.e. there are some subtle differences based on the axiomatic existence of our universe), but a material existence is immaterial (no pun intended). You can count things that don't physically exist.
A lot of people understand first-order logic as it is applied to our universe, but few understand the sense in which it exists and works when we are talking about universes that aren't strictly like ours.
Well now ... I'm no expert here, and you do seem quite certain of what you're saying. Perhaps what I'm about to say is wrong; it's certainly simplistic. But to me, if there's no universe there are no numbers. I think of numbers as nothing but abstractions. They are imposed upon us by the nature of the universe, but that imperative, if gone, would obviate the numbers too. Or so it seems to me. (I'm pinging some folks who know more than I do about this. I'm always willing to learn.)
The discussion was never over whether someone believed me or not. It was whether a personal experience is enough to prove something. It is enough to prove something to the person with the experience.
I can prove God to myself. That is proof enough for me.
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