Date: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 00:39:29 +0100 (MET) From: Eivind Eklund <perhaps@yes.no> To: Nate Williams <nate@mt.sri.com> Cc: perhaps@yes.no, tlambert@primenet.com, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Newest Pentium bug (fatal) Message-ID: <199711112339.AAA23291@bitbox.follo.net> In-Reply-To: Nate Williams's message of Tue, 11 Nov 1997 12:35:00 -0700 (MST) References: <199711110620.XAA15169@rocky.mt.sri.com> <199711110645.XAA02334@usr03.primenet.com> <199711111652.JAA16566@rocky.mt.sri.com> <199711111836.TAA22576@bitbox.follo.net> <199711111935.MAA17390@rocky.mt.sri.com>
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[Terry Lambert] >>>> If you weren't predictive, I might claim you were schitzophernic >>>> until you became predictive... any factually based model is >>>> predictive. [Nate Williams] >>> Hearing from God != foretelling the future. [Eivind Eklund] >> However, if it isn't predictive, it is more-or-less uninteresting. [Nate Williams] > I don't know, lots of people consider it pretty interesting when people > know things about them that can't be ascertained except by 'divine > insight'. (Not that it happens alot, but it does happen.) However, that is predictive. I think we might have a problem with definitions here - more below. [Eivind Eklund] >> It doesn't give you information - information is predictive. [Nate Williams] > It does give information, just not information that is completely > predictable. Asking for 'scientific' provable information from human > beings, let alone God (or gods) is asking for a chaotic system to become > non-chaotic. I disagree that humans are a non-predictable system. There is chaos, sure, but there are clearly predictable properties. Which information people have is one; health is another. (Discussed below) > You simply can't use scientific methods for systems who don't have > predictable or consistant behavior. Claiming that something doesn't > exist because it's not predictable is too simplistic of a model for > the problem at hand. First of all: I'm not claiming it (god(s)) don't exist. I claim there is too little information to determine; that I've not seen anything I consider proof. On to the meat: The fact that something isn't totally predictable doesn't stop us from using the scientific method on it. Atomic splitting isn't predictable on the individual level - we still use statistics on it. Predictive in the sense I'm using it means just that - we can use some form of statistics to let this predict _something_ about the world. Usually just how more statistics will turn out <g>. However, if you can't do this at some level, you don't have anything - you just have a more complex hypothesis not gaining anything. There is a couple of cases where you even can't use statistics: Where your measurement will impact the experiment so much that the result won't be valid, and the case where it is too expensive to create an experiment. However, I'm not buying that "there is a god" is such a hypothesis - I consider it a non-disprovable hypothesis, and as such not a matter for science. However, it might be "provable" - statistically showable - but I also consider this unlikely. > > OTOH, I believe information on India to be predictive - so far, no > > country I've been told about as personal experience by more than 20 > > people have failed to be there when I tried to visit it :-) > > I can give you hundreds of thousands of people who will give you > personal experiences about God and his reality, yet will you choose to > believe them? No :-) Witnesses lie. On this, even more than on anything else. They even lie without knowing it. The (non)-existence God isn't a country - it isn't easily verifiable. I used to have a personal belief in God, and had some of those experiences. With hindsight, I see how these experiences was induced by rituals and early conditioning. I've since had similar experiences with psychoactive drugs, and with other religious rituals. They all seem to boil down to inducing certain moods, certain mind-alterations. > > I don't feel the need for a god to be able to describe the world, this > > I don't introduce one. > > Just because your not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get > you. *grin* > > Aka, just because you don't have a 'felt need' for God/gods doesn't mean > he/she/it doesn't exist. That simple foolishness. I've not said they don't exist - I'm just saying I've never seen any data that I need to resort to a God to be able to explain. Thus I choose what I consider the simpler hypothesis - that there isn't any. This is not something I'm 100% fixed on - it is just my present hypothesis. I'd change my hypothesis come data to the contrary. > > There are obvious changes in brain-chemistry that explain religious > > ecstasy and other verifiable religious effects. > > There are also things that are completely beyond the realm of scientific > understanding as well, that cannot be 'explained away'. For example, a > recent "scientific" study on 'prayer' was given. There were two groups > of 'ill/sick' patients, one the control group, the other group needs > were given to a group of people who had no contact with the group, and > the results were astonishing. The people who were prayed for had a > significant better recovery rate than the control group, yet there was > absolutely no contact between any of the members in the entire > 'experiment'. How do you explain that? Bad testing, not a big enough > experiment group, co-incidence, etc...? This is interesting. I'd need more information about the experiment before I could say anything about it - what immediately pop up as things that would need to be checked is Was this done as a proper double-blind study? Were the groups selected from equal demographic groups? Significant variables include but are not limited to socio-economic background and religious distribution. How large were the groups? How does the result compare statistically to smaller random selections from the groups (ie, how much is edge results, and how statistically significant are the results)? Is there any other similar studies that have been done before? How does the results compare to them? How were the researchers biased (all researchers are biased :-)? What is the chance of the results being fake? If all of those were answered to my satisfaction, and preferably the same results were replicated by researchers with different biases, I'd say the results are significant. However, my first hunch wouldn't be that the results indicate that there is a god - my first hunch would be that they indicate working telepathy and through that, placebo effect. It would still be a significant result. And yeah, I'm extremely sceptical to what I consider improbable results. Too easy to get wrong results in complex science :-( > Not everything can be explained by scientific reasoning, hence the > need for 'FAITH'. I'm not certain I agree with you here. Actually, I'm not quite certain what you're trying to say. Do you mean that not everything fit into our present model of the world, the one we have used science to derive? I certainly agree. If you mean that there are things we can't use science to investigate, but should believe in anyway because we were told about it as kids and people claim non-verifiable 'experiences' - then I don't agree. Close investigation tend to show those experiences wrongly represented, and have so far not shown them to need us to go outside our world view in order to explain :-( Eivind.
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