(October 2, 2016 at 11:37 pm)Rhythm Wrote: Godammit man, get to the crazy shit already. We're two pages into this and I need my fix!

What's catharsis without the building of tension? I have to stack the wood before I can build a bonfire of inanities!

Well you're just a regular bundle of joy for me, tonight.  Reminding me of the mountains of wood I'll have to bury myself under in the next few months.  You could at least give me my fix before i disappear like the groundhog.

(October 2, 2016 at 11:48 pm)Rhythm Wrote: Well you're just a regular bundle of joy for me, tonight.  Reminding me of the mountains of wood I'll have to bury myself under in the next few months.  You could at least give me my fix before i disappear like the groundhog.

All right all right, lemme have a smoke and I'll cook something up just for you. I don't do requests for just anybody...

So the last part of the op was "what is a tree evidence of?" This no longer has anything to do with the op story.

Diving in existentially, it tells me there is an environment that supports the existence/growth of trees. I would not expect to find one floating in space. But the vast depth through time of accumulative universal formative processes and development/requirement of the stable environments (galaxies) quickly go up a backward chain of causality to requiring the existence of an entire universe to have just one tree.

Carl Sagan — "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

The tree is evidence to me that certain processes of the universe (living things) have centropic properties through time or what I call 5d travel of information. Over populations and time this manifests as evolution towards more complex organisms.

Forward 5d travel of the soul is experienced as maturity and wisdom drawn from experiential memory.



How was that?

Data which supposedly supports a hypothesis.

How well the data supports it is the important thing to determine. This is where peer review is very important to reduce individual bias and errors in methodology.

Life isn't evolving towards more complex organisms.  It's not evolving towards anything in specific at all.  Life -has- evolved into more complex organisms, in specific instances, but complex life has -also- been selected against at least once or twice globally, and constantly on a regional and local scale. Every single time you read about a species going extinct, it was their very complexity, their specificity of environment and necessity of particular conditions....that cause that end.

You started with the spikes not being in the tree...and this is where the raft drifts. Maybe you ought to consider the prospect that you got something wrong much earlier in the process? Whatever method you're applying to your observations (whatever they may be) are leading, in your own estimation, to counter-factual conclusions. That's a giant flashing neon red warning sign.

(October 3, 2016 at 2:18 am)robvalue Wrote: Data which supposedly supports a hypothesis.

How well the data supports it is the important thing to determine. This is where peer review is very important to reduce individual bias and errors in methodology.

You're adding additional conditions to the basic definition. Whole it pains me to say it, rythym was right. Evidence means nothing more that that which is evident. Nice try to push your scientism on everyone else, though.

(October 2, 2016 at 7:01 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: I kinda agree with Arky ... sometimes absence of evidence is evidence of absence. I wonder what other questions to which I might apply this principle?

That aphorism should definitely be qualified by saying that for something which is weakly observable, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If it's the sort of thing that doesn't leave much evidence, like the fossilization of Precambrian organisms, then failing to find an abundance of evidence is not evidence of absence. 

Which I guess is another way of saying that there's no shortcut for busting out Bayes' Theorem and crunching the numbers.

(October 3, 2016 at 6:56 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: Whole it pains me to say it, rythym was right. 

Don't worry, it was probably an accident.

(October 3, 2016 at 6:56 pm)ChadWooters Wrote:

(October 3, 2016 at 2:18 am)robvalue Wrote: Data which supposedly supports a hypothesis.

How well the data supports it is the important thing to determine. This is where peer review is very important to reduce individual bias and errors in methodology.

You're adding additional conditions to the basic definition. Whole it pains me to say it, rythym was right. Evidence means nothing more that that which is evident. Nice try to push your scientism on everyone else, though.

You managed to insult two atheists in one post. Very efficient work.

I would reply, but seeing as you're so rude, I don't think I'll bother. Maybe if you one day start using polite discourse I'll reply to you in earnest.