(October 28, 2016 at 11:50 am)RoadRunner79 Wrote: There are a lot of discussions, such as evolution, which become much easier, if I follow those rules. I don't think it is useful, but that is why I wanted to discuss.I'm with you, to a degree, on evolution. It's a much more subtle and philosophical position than it is normally taken for. I find it particularly annoying that it is often couched in narratives based on what we assume were environmental pressures for a given species-- "Oh, well there must have been a shortage of leaves, so the longer necks were obviously the species' response to increased competition for food" or whatever. There literally is no physical trait or behavior that someone can't make up a story for, and these narratives get passed on as science.
That being said, evolution as adaptation of existing species is done in labs with flies and so on, and I believe it is reproducible given a simple enough species and very highly controlled environmental "pressures."
Something similar happens in complex ANN's (artificial neural networks), in which you can get some very interesting results, but you cannot actually observe all the many changes and processes which lead to them. You just know that given x number of "trials," you can achieve y results. Or, for that matter, in the human mind, in which you can know a lot about how brain chemistry works, but not too much about how it results in the ability to subjectively experience.