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<p>Because I have operationally defined “good” as such.</p>
<p>Mifune, have you had a chance to read any part of Langan’s theory that I posted earlier? I understand if you haven’t; it’s slow-going and incomprehensible in parts (at least for me).</p>
<p>^ Why is it “good” to “operationally define ‘good’ as such”?</p>
<p>Do you realize what I am getting at? Any concept of “good” and “bad” must start with the assumption of an objective standard.</p>
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<p>It is not.</p>
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<p>No one said it is! </p>
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<p>No one’s saying that either.</p>
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<p>Umm. Anyway, even so, how would that make someone religious if they decide they want to consider something to be “good”?</p>
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<p>Then why do you do it?</p>
<p>I do not believe that anyone truly believes that they do the things they do simply because of some arbitrary natural process, or that they truly do not believe that there is any objective “good”. But if anyone does believe this, then there is absolutely no reason for them to attempt to prevent other people from believing creation, or flat earth theory, or anything else.</p>
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<p>They would be contradicting one of their main argument against religion, which is that only mathematical scientific processes exist, and that nothing “supernatural” does.</p>
<p>This is rather hard to explain…</p>
<p>There are basically two lines of objection against religion. The first points to things like war and racism, claims that they are caused by a religion, and then attempts to condemn all religion on that basis. But this is not reasonable if a religion exists which does not endorse those bad things.</p>
<p>The second argument is to claim rationalism, and reject anything “supernatural” from the beginning. However, if this is true, then there is no reason why “people believing in rationalism” is “better” than “people believing in the Great Pasta Thing”.</p>
<p>Yet many of these people continue to campaign agressively for their views and against those of their opponents. Why?</p>
<p>lol, okay, I just jumped into this thread here without caring to read any of the other posts.</p>
<p>Anyway, if you look at religion from a broad sense, it’s basically just a set of beliefs or even rules that are followed by a group of people. Who said that there needs to be any kind of mysticism or supernatural-ness in a religion?</p>
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<p>I’m just going to ask: If being rational is to be able to have a good reason for believing in something/knowing something due to experience, then would it be considered rational to believe in ghosts because you have had a ghostly encounter?</p>
<p>Anyway, back to the mysticism thing. I am a Buddhist and I consider myself to be religious. With regard to Buddhism, I find that the philosophies and whatevers taught make sense. I am confident that some Buddhists will agree that Buddhism is not a religion, but a philosophy. </p>
<p>However, over the years, stories and fairy tales weaved its way into Buddhism. lol, it really bugs me when this happens :</p>
<p>person: “Oh, you’re a Buddhist? Do you really believe that Buddha blossomed out of a lotus flower when he was born?”
me: -___- </p>
<p>Anyway, going back to …</p>
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<p>How? Thinking that something is “good” is natural. It’s not supernatural to believe that something is “good” and that something else is “bad”.</p>
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<p>I’ll take this as a general “it” and say, in keeping with the denotation of “good,” that a good thing is something that is agreeable or virtuous, the former pertaining to the elicitation of a response that makes one want more of whatever “it” is, and the latter pertaining to morality. This valuation requires nothing of the supernatural sort and is not religious.</p>
<p>By the way, did you respond to this comment and I missed it, or have you not yet responded?</p>
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<p>I’ve been absent from this thread from some time, but for now I’ll concern myself with mifune’s responses to direct quotes of mine.</p>
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Well, certainly not mathematical truths, or perhaps even a priori statements. However, once we leave these realms, what “truth” even means in an absolute sense becomes more debatable. One needs only glance at the wiki page for “Truth.”</p>
<p>[Truth</a> - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth]Truth”>Truth - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>in order to realize how debatable and contextualized it is. I think you have more work to do then simply saying “Truth is objective, not relativistic, constructivists and relativists are wrong, etc.”</p>
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Well, let’s rephrase this as “A false statement is false even if everyone believes it and a true statement is true even if no one believes it.” In order for this to have any meaning at all, we have to establish that humans have access to an objective reality and accurately perceive it as it is, that such things as truths and falsehoods have any significance whatsoever outside of the human experience…can we even do this?</p>
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I think that we have such things as useful scientific facts that will be of interest to the scientifically-minded or the pragmatic individual, but not all individuals are scientifically-minded or pragmatic. I am still uncomfortable with “truths in science.” As I understand it, scientific methodology relies largely on inductive reasoning principles, which hardly arrive at what we could honestly deem absolute “truths.”</p>
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This is perhaps true, but the misuse of the word “truth” in religious matters hardly entails that it is correctly used in matters of science.</p>
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Voguish? Really?</p>
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Isn’t this the case, though? I observe something, I personally “believe” (in a loose sense) that I have observed it. Me and 50,000,000 other people observe something and personally belive that we observed it, discuss it amongst ourselves and through inductive reasoning come to our individual conclusions that what we have observed has some objective significance because we all observed it under the same circumstances. At its most basic level, I could argue that knowledge, its acceptance and interpretation, is very personal in nature. </p>
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Perhaps not scientifically valid, but maybe …existentially and circumstantially valid?</p>
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Does it really? I think we criticize faith-based extremism when and because it harms people, i.e. because of its emotional results. I think that most people hardly criticize it because of the “asinine, non-evidenced, or belligerent” motivations such action is based upon and leave it at that. If I was religious and my “asinine, non-evidenced” faith-based extremism demanded that I make myself pancakes for breakfast every Wednesday, I hardly think that many people would concern themselves with it, regardless of how intellectually vapid my beliefs are. </p>
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That’s lovely, pragmatic scientists like that falsifiability works. I believe that the quote itself was describing “good” and “bad” motivations behind a scientific endeavor, however. I would like you to please go into greater detail in the second sentence though.</p>
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<p>I read it but didn’t have anything to say because I agree with it, except for the claim the religion “fails to fill this void”. Many religions do fail to do so, but not all fail so far as to be useless.</p>
<p>I also disagree with the basic assumption you are making that morals are merely subjective, but I addressed that elsewhere.</p>
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<p>Yes, it would. And that is why many perfectly rational people may believe in such things, even though they cannot present any proofs that would convince another perfectly rational person.</p>
<p>But “rationalism” as used by those who argue against religion does not mean “having good reasons to believe things”. It means “accepting only natural, mathematical explanations for things”.</p>
<p>This form of “rationalism” is not rational, in my opinion.</p>
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<p>if nothing supernatural exists, then there is no such thing as a “human”, only matter which we have arbitrarily subdivided into areas and defined some of these areas as “people”.</p>
<p>By why should an arbitraily defined quanity of matter be able to arbitrarily define quanities of matter? It’s absurd.</p>
<p>And even if for some reason it could, why should it consider some of these definitions “better” than others? In a world like this, “better” has no meaning. There is only “different”.</p>
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<p>Ok:</p>
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<p>Agreeable: “a response that makes one want more of whatever ‘it’ is”</p>
<p>What does “want” mean in this context? Please give me a definition that doesn’t involve any value judgements (since value is what we are trying to define here).</p>
<p>Virtuous: “pertaining to morality”</p>
<p>Again, please define morality without using value judgements.</p>
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<p>This does not suprise me, I suspect that a similar percentage of any society with an educational system similar to ours would lack basic knowledge of various subjects.</p>
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<p>Have I suggested that? While I have great trust in the Bible’s reliability after having studied it, I’m not so naive as to think that everyone shares my view or that I should force them to do so.</p>
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<p>I haven’t lost confidence is him because he disagrees with me. He disagreed with my beliefs before. I respected the fact that he recognised the limitations of science and I respected the reasonableness with which he presented his views (which directly conflicted mine). As far as I know, he may still do so, although that article has made me less sure of it.</p>
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<p>Not the ones which require subscriptions to read. However, I read the abstracts, and the one which was freely available. As far a I can see, they provide an argument for why mutations that cause sexual reproduction would be preserved, which is not what we are talking about.</p>
<p>Let put it in numbered points, so it will be easy for you to say which you disagree with:</p>
<p>1: DNA is the instructions that define an organism’s traits.</p>
<p>2: DNA consists of large numbers of genes in series.</p>
<p>3: Genes are sections of DNA that are essentially blueprints for protein synthesis. By interacting with each other, they produce the complete instructions for creating the organism.</p>
<p>4: The reason why not all organisms in a species are identical is that a gene often has more than one allele which can be in its place in the DNA sequence.</p>
<p>5: After sexual reproduction, each gene in the child’s DNA contains an allele from either the father or the mother.</p>
<p>6: In diploid organisms, each gene in the child DNA has two copies, one of which contains an allele from the father, and one of which contains an allele from the mother.</p>
<p>7: Therefore if a given gene has two alleles, a and A, there are 4 possible types that that gene may have in a diploid organism: aa, AA, aA, and Aa.</p>
<p>8: The child of an aa will receive an “a” allele from that parent.</p>
<p>9: The child of an AA will recieve an “A” from that parent.</p>
<p>10: The child of an aA or Aa will receive either an “a” or an “A”.</p>
<p>11: Therefore, the possible alleles a child can recieve are “a” and “A”.</p>
<p>12: Therefore, the possible types of the child are aa, AA, aA, and Aa.</p>
<p>13: See #7.</p>
<p>14: Conclusion: Sexual reproduction does not produce new alleles.</p>
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<p>If you are going to reject it on the basis of what it “teaches”, even if its followers deny that it teaches those things, then yes.</p>
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<p>Ok, great. In that case you should be able to understand why I do not believe that the Bible advocates racism, violence, flat earth, and other things which you have claimed.</p>
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<p>Scientific and technological development is beneficial for social, economic, and intellectual progress. The world functioned with some degree of efficiency before antibiotics, aircraft, automobiles, computers, electricity, and other comparable innovations, but I would negligibly believe that too many of us would be interested in returning to an era without them. In the more purely scientific realm, explaining cosmogenesis, for example, is ultimately a scientific pursuit rather than one rooted in the methodically arbitrary nature of philosophical or theological matters.</p>
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<p>I have been aware of the basic idea of the theory for quite some time but after your above post I decided to closely read the abstract and proceeded to browse about the remainder. I don’t quite have the time to treat it with a full review, but I will offer my basic thoughts.</p>
<p>The CTMU, quite frankly, has never been something of even marginal interest in the scientific community and that fact certainly doesn’t have any exclusive bearing on his lack of educational credentials or his recluse-intellectual nature. Truth be told, it is yet another work of abstract-fiction that masquerades about as a superficially groundbreaking and scientifically influential treatise. Although it attempts to provide the impression of intellectual rigor, the greater part of elucidates an arcane metaphysical structure that is pure nonsense. There is nothing evidentially convincing or empirically stable about it.</p>
<p>It is first his rhetorical and semantic style that provides the initial misperception of analytical depth, which he attempts to align as prima facie evidence of profundity. After the initial disarming process of its introduction as a proposal for reinventing a rational perspective to the issue, we are then immediately burdened with the brunt of a hefty set of neologisms: supertautological, reality-theoretic, infocognition, unbound telesis, telic recursion, conspansion, conspansive duality, introducing a sort of enigmatic technicality, much of which he doesn’t bother to define at all (and when he does, it’s totally obscured with an unintelligible onslaught of more cryptic blather). An author’s resorting to such inscrutable, garbled, and vague esotericism should always set off one’s personal nonsense detection sensor. </p>
<p>His work, he has much too over-convincingly ensured us, is not to be taken as a metaphysical system, but something of a mathematically and physically grounded scientific dissertation. (“Inasmuch as science is observational or perceptual in nature, the goal of providing a scientific model and mechanism for the evolution of complex systems ultimately requires a supporting theory of reality of which perception itself is the model (or theory-to-universe mapping.”)) However, scientists have no reason to treat it with the slightest bit of seriousness, and based on its pseudo-intellectual foundations, it emphatically has nothing to furnish to the enduring depository of human thought. </p>
<p>Notwithstanding the semantic barriers that Langan – all too wisely – puts in the way of comprehension, it is conceivable to identify and follow a line or reasoning regarding his theory. The underlying current of his proposed “theory of everything” is his valiant undertaking to syncretize the mythologies of Christianity with a metaphysical pedantry of humanity’s place inside of the universe. It is primarily founded upon the speculative conviction that the fundamental process or guiding purpose in the universe is intelligent design, as supposedly evidenced within the framework of the “reflexive read-write functionality.” But he doesn’t go so far as to adopt the literalist, creationist position of a static (non-macroevolution) biological existence. (He believes the Genesis account of creation to be divinely ordained and therefore true, but metaphorical in context.) Rather, he prefers the approach that life was intelligently designed to some extent, then guided through the process of evolution and adopts the speciesist perspective that humanity is the ultimate goal – and hence the terminating link – of divine creation. In an inherently pious assertion he informs us, “By distributing the design phase of reality over the actualization phase, conspansive spacetime also provides a distributed mechanism for Intelligent Design, adjoining to the restrictive principle of natural selection a basic means of generating information and complexity.” Langan somehow feels that human consciousness is integrated into the universe itself and that the evolution into modern-day Homo Sapiens somehow marks a loop and subsequent completeness to the “divine plan.” (“Where information is the abstract currency of perception, such a theory must incorporate the theory of information while extending the information concept to incorporate reflexive self-processing in order to achieve an intrinsic (self-contained) description of reality.”) In another deliberate attempt to emanate the illusion of unparalleled perceptive wit, Langan asserts that his theory “addresses the most evident deficiencies and paradoxes associated with conventional discrete and continuum models of reality, including temporal directionality and accelerating cosmic expansion” while assuring us that it “preserv[es] virtually all of the major benefits of current scientific and mathematical paradigms.”</p>
<p>The CTMU is pseudoscientific in intention (despite his absence of authority and lack of tertiary educational attainment, he has the temerity to promote his non-empirical, anti-scientific approach as superior to the systematic approach, which tests theoretical hypotheses). But it certainly isn’t possible to minimize the effect of the interest derived from – and pot-stirring ambitions of – these works of metaphysical obscurantism. Langan performs an intellectually unexacting form of scientific thinking in which he only attains a substandard dexterity due to the polluted nature of his thought from inherent transcendental biases. He, similar to other authors who attempt to rock the boat with these purportedly “revolutionary” works of confused seat-of-the-pants abstractions, has no concept of what makes a logical, scientifically testable argument or of what accounts for empirical proof. He doesn’t provide the slightest interest to the ordinary taste of academic writing, though his work is professedly an exposition that is supposed to be significantly influential in the scientific realm. </p>
<p>Moreover, it is written in an all but entirely muddled, inarticulate style that perfectly balances with how profound and revolutionary he wishes it to be. The greater part of his objective is to make it sound as if one would apprehend the percipience of his writing if only the technical jargon was readily comprehensible to “those below him.” His paper even possesses the capacity to deceive those who are professedly well-educated. It only seems a masterly accomplishment to those who are as illiterate in the true theoretical nature of the subject matter inasmuch the author, yet Langan attempts to present it in opposite fashion. In all honesty, the CTMU is a sham and to expose it as such shouldn’t come as a surprise. Although, I must admit, I am quite astonished by the dearth of critical response to the theory (more realistically deemed as a baseless conjecture) – whether that be acclaim, neutrality, or disparagement. </p>
<p>Clearly, it is not because of any observational, experimental, or rigorously theoretical approach to the matter that somehow makes this insensible metaphysical system credible. It is more of an attempt to stroke his personal perception of intellectual superiority by writing something so purposely impenetrable as to remain beyond anyone else’s comprehension. If anything, this factually lame scholarship is evidential proof that success at certain standardized examinations doesn’t necessarily offer a perfect translation to a natural, elegant capacity for the production of revolutionary and objectively anchored academic work. And, of course, it shows that labeling intelligence with a simple scalar designation – an IQ or something similar – does not render any sort of intellectual infallibility.</p>
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<p>First of all, we seem to be speaking on two completely separate fronts. Understand that I am not disputing your point, per se, just attending to the indication that we are not having a common exchange. To be sure, an allele certainly is not somehow mingled within itself during the process of sexual reproduction, which should be quite obvious to anyone with a very rudimentary understanding of the cellular underpinnings of the process. It is that you are focusing on allelic change due to mutation, while I am personally focusing on the extent of sexual reproduction’s role in the evolutionary process. </p>
<p>Genetic recombination (the process by which an elemental portion of DNA (usually) is fractured and united with another) and reassortment (which predominantly refers to the process of chromosomal crossover) alter which alleles are genetically linked with each other, which fashions offspring with new allele composites. Sexual reproduction increases genetic variation and catalyzes the pace of evolution. If we were to speak of asexuality, on the other hand, it allows the two sets of alleles present in the genome to separate and assume dissimilar genetic functions. </p>
<p>While genes that are present within close intervals on a chromosome are not always dispersed because of the tendency for common inheritance, due to gene linkage, recombination allows proximate alleles to be inherited independently. In sexually reproducing organisms, the process of natural selection favors the concomitant inheritance of particular haplotypes (sets of alleles commonly inherited in a group), which profoundly affects allelic frequencies in a population. Sexual reproduction accounts for the dissociation of certain allele combinations by permitting the preservation of beneficial mutations while facilitating the removal of harmful mutations (hence no need for the erroneous apocalyptic assertion that mutation will inevitably guide an organism or lineage onto a ceaseless path of self-destruction). Therefore, recombination and reassortment may yield progeny with new and, indeed, favorable gene varieties.</p>
<p>[The</a> advantages of segregation and the evolution of sex.](<a href=“The advantages of segregation and the evolution of sex. - PMC”>The advantages of segregation and the evolution of sex. - PMC)</p>
<p>[Current</a> Biology - Evolution of Sex: Why Do Organisms Shuffle Their Genotypes?](<a href=“http://www.cell.com/current-biology/retrieve/pii/S096098220601918X]Current”>http://www.cell.com/current-biology/retrieve/pii/S096098220601918X)</p>
<p>[Liberating</a> genetic variance through sex - Peters - 2003 - BioEssays - Wiley Online Library](<a href=“http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.10291/abstract;jsessionid=FA4A685CE130C5C10BC6DCCB5A9978D1.d02t02]Liberating”>http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.10291/abstract;jsessionid=FA4A685CE130C5C10BC6DCCB5A9978D1.d02t02)</p>
<p>[Access</a> : Sex increases the efficacy of natural selection in experimental yeast populations : Nature](<a href=“http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7033/full/nature03405.html]Access”>Sex increases the efficacy of natural selection in experimental yeast populations | Nature)</p>
<p>[Functional</a> Divergence of Former Alleles in an Ancient Asexual Invertebrate – Pouchkina-Stantcheva et al. 318 (5848): 268 – Science](<a href=“http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/318/5848/268]Functional”>http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/318/5848/268)</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1692896/pdf/11127900.pdf[/url]”>http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1692896/pdf/11127900.pdf</a></p>
<p>[Recombination</a> and the evolution of mutational robu… [J Theor Biol. 2006] - PubMed result](<a href=“Recombination and the evolution of mutational robustness - PubMed”>Recombination and the evolution of mutational robustness - PubMed)</p>
<p>(Many of these have already been referenced, but for the sake of citation, I have included them once more.)</p>