(Yesterday at 8:05 pm)Jal Wrote:

(Yesterday at 7:57 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I don't think you can reasonably question natural selection if you didn't know that natural selection has a very well researched and practically applied explanation for hunger.  As for my rambling....it's another one of those things where the simple fact of you saying that is deleterious for your position.  Do you have a theodicy for this too?  A reason that hunger only seems decisive....when its really the hand of god groping his reluctant boybride?

(Sigh). Again, you keep raising a strawman. My main focus isn't to explain hunger but to argue it's useleness in a domino effect. If the dominos are falling rightward, it doesnt' matter if some of them HUNGER to go left. They will still fall rightward.

Yes....Jal..I don't know what else to say but yes?  Even though natural selection does provide a very compelling explanation for why hunger is a robust survival strategy....it still fails.  It's not like there's a competent hand full of agency making it succeed....?

Quote:"When its really the hand of god groping his reluctant boybride?" Are you making some kind of homosexual insinuation here? Surely you're not too small-minded to look beyond sexual gender in a divine-human relationship? Please broaden your horizons a little.

Insinuation requires subtlety.  Despite my prodigious human agency.....I fail to typify that potentiality. Your theodicy is the gayest shit I've ever heard...and also ridiculous.

(Yesterday at 8:08 pm)Jal Wrote:

(Yesterday at 7:57 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I don't think you can reasonably question natural selection if you didn't know that natural selection has a very well researched and practically applied explanation for hunger.  As for my rambling....it's another one of those things where the simple fact of you saying that is deleterious for your position.  Do you have a theodicy for this too?  A reason that hunger only seems decisive....when its really the hand of god groping his reluctant boybride?

I see another explosive mistake.  You think that determinism and predeterminism are the same thing.  Have you considered that it could only be the case that predeterminism were true if a conscious agent worked all day every day everywhere to make it so, fixing little rips and rifts in casaulity?  You;re objecting to fate my man, not atheism, or natural selection.  I don't believe in fate anymore than I believe in gods or that consciousness is a fundamental unit.

Determinism and predeterminism are either the same, or at least of sufficient affinity to be a moot distinction in this debate.

Yikes.........one thing says that outcomes are determined by whatever set of conditions precedes them. The other says that outcomes are determined no matter what set of conditions precede them. Obviously, if I think that reproductive outcomes are determined by the fitness of traits that precede them, I cannot believe that outcomes are determined regardless of the fitness of the traits that that precede them?

I think deeply motivated people outperform people with less motivation at scale. Is that an unreasonable belief in your estimation? Do you think that unmotivated people perform at least as well or better than deeply motivated ones?

(Yesterday at 7:34 pm)Ravenshire Wrote:

(Yesterday at 7:25 pm)Jal Wrote: So you're arguing that science textbooks will reduce a person's ignorance of the sciences.  And you really felt a need to point this out?

In that case you're right - I really did not make a good show of intellectual competence. Seems I will need to do better.

It needed pointing out because you based part of your ideas on shit you simply don't understand, making them self refuting.

Let me put it this way. I know something about coding, mostly in AutoLISP for use in AutoCad and in Python. I know fuck-all about coding in C#. In other words I'm completely ignorant of how to code in C#. You will never find me on a coding forum spouting ideas that require an understanding of C#, but that's exactly what you've done here. If you wan't to base ideas on the sciences, or refute some part of them, you have to understand them first. You clearly don't. It's not an insult, it's an observation based on your own presentations.

Let's consider your C# example. Suppose a C# developer said that he was hardcoding all his settings directly in the code instead of a configuration file.  You could reasonably offer some advice here, I think?  Or suppose that, instead of writing a static method called from 50 different places, he duplicated the method 50 times.  Might you possibly have some helpful suggestions here?  (I'm not saying you're suggestions would be authoritative, but they would be worth listening to). 

I've seen briliiant, doctorate-level coders write code like this:
    var result = processThisID(strID)
I don't have to be a C# expert to tell them it's more clear to write it like this:
   Customer c = processThisID(strCustomerID)
Yes, a newbie can sometimes give excellent correction to an expert.

You have to consider the CONTENT of what the newbie is saying, not simply disregard him for his lack of credentials.

Your suggestions have not, thusfar, been worth listening to - and yet some of us have listened to you, responded to you. We're a generous bunch.

(Yesterday at 8:12 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Insinuation requires subtlety.  Despite my prodigious human agency.....I fail to typify that potentiality.  Your theodicy is the gayest shit I've ever heard...and also ridiculous.

Calling something gay or ridiculous doesn't make it so.  Now if I had argued that God wants to have conventional sexual intercourse with each of us....

Here again I would ask you to broaden your horizons, but I think you are showing yourself too narrow-minded to be capable of it.

Reminds me of those atheists who assume, "We couldn't enjoy heaven forever because it would become too boring."  That's too shortsighted and narrow-minded.

(Yesterday at 6:59 pm)Jal Wrote:

(Yesterday at 6:55 pm)Ravenshire Wrote: Actually, I didn't mention you're beliefs at all. As I said about reading for comprehension...

You're argument from incredulity not withstanding, there are billions of people who find other (or no) religions more compelling than yours. I'm guessing, though I won't speak for them, that they see plenty of unreasonableness or inconsistency in those fundamentals.

As far as the fundamentals of the christer cult, I was raised in a christer home and taught christer ideology. I've read the buy-bull, more than once. I found none of it compelling. Much like your silly ideas. (<---- pay attention to that bit, you know, for the comprehension).

Again, I did  not ask anyone here to accept Christianity. What I HAVE done is:
(1) Argued for the insufficiency of reductionistic Natural Selection to explain the present order. 
(2) In passing, I have mentioned my Christian beliefs and challenged observers to identify anything unreasonable there. I haven't seen anyone on this thread convincingly rise to that challenge.

This is the main problem in a nutshell. You have this grand explanation which is predicated on reductionistic explanations being insufficient. You even made a brief stab at why you think so in your OP. However, at the end of the day, you can only demonstrate the insufficiency of known reductionistic explanations. Which means by dismissing reductionistic explanations as a whole, you are also dismissing reductionistic explanations which are currently unknown. This is a textbook appeal to ignorance as you are basing your dismissal on our being ignorant and unaware of good reductionistic explanations for these things, by focusing on a subset of those explanations, namely ones that are known, and more precisely that are known to you. This makes your grand edifice justified as the answer to a non sequitur. Your lack of a sound argument against atheistic explanations, because the argument you've presented is invalid, makes your grand explanation begging for a more substantive answer than, "This would be neat if it were the case."

As to rocks being partially conscious, once you empty out the set of qualities a paradigm case of consciousness possesses, self-awareness, ability to reason, experience, memory, and so forth, it becomes clear that you're just applying the word consciousness to things regardless of whether they display the traits and qualities of consciousness. You want to inherit the larger set of traits where you have evidence, and assume a minimum supposed set where the traits are absent. This is using the word consciousness in different cases within the same argument as if they referred to the same thing, the same qualities, and the same processes when they clearly do not refer to the same phenomenon. This is basic equivocation. Consciousness means one thing when applied to a human, and something else when applied to a rock or a potato, or to undifferentiated matter. This is the fallacy that grounds most panpsychism: the problem that the word and concept of consciousness is being used inconsistently, and therefore much of the claims are simply unsound. Whatever it is that I am doing is definitely not the same thing that the rock is doing. The only way around this is to assert it without evidence, that the rock and I share something even if you have no evidence for the claim that we do.

(Yesterday at 8:28 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Your suggestions have not, thusfar, been worth listening to - and yet some of us have listened to you, responded to you.  We're a generous bunch.

More facade.

(Yesterday at 8:29 pm)Jal Wrote:

(Yesterday at 8:12 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Insinuation requires subtlety.  Despite my prodigious human agency.....I fail to typify that potentiality.  Your theodicy is the gayest shit I've ever heard...and also ridiculous.

Calling something gay or ridiculous doesn't make it so.  Now if I had argued that God wants to have conventional sexual intercourse with each of us....

Here again I would ask you to broaden your horizons, but I think you are showing yourself too narrow-minded to be capable of it.

Reminds me of those atheists who assume, "We couldn't enjoy heaven forever because it would become too boring."  That's too shortsighted and narrow-minded.

If being a christbride isn't supergay, nothing is.  

I actually don't think I could enjoy heaven for a second if it's as the afflicted described.  Narrow minded?  IDK..maybe, but the heart wants..or doesn't...what the hearts wants, or doesn't.  Not alot of control over that.  Come to think of it...that's yet another observation....as I said to you at the very beginning.   I like to think we have agency.  I can't prove it.

(Yesterday at 8:29 pm)Angrboda Wrote:

(Yesterday at 6:59 pm)Jal Wrote: Again, I did  not ask anyone here to accept Christianity. What I HAVE done is:
(1) Argued for the insufficiency of reductionistic Natural Selection to explain the present order. 
(2) In passing, I have mentioned my Christian beliefs and challenged observers to identify anything unreasonable there. I haven't seen anyone on this thread convincingly rise to that challenge.

This is the main problem in a nutshell.  You have this grand explanation which is predicated on reductionistic explanations being insufficient.   You even made a brief stab at why you think so in your OP.  However, at the end of the day, you can only demonstrate the insufficiency of known reductionistic explanations.  Which means by dismissing reductionistic explanations as a whole, you are also dismissing reductionistic explanations which are currently unknown.   This is a textbook appeal to ignorance as you are basing your dismissal on our being ignorant and unaware of good reductionistic explanations for these things, by focusing on a subset of those explanations, namely ones that are known, and more precisely that are known to you.  T

When Christians say, "God has a hidden purpose for creating this kind of dark world," atheists regard this as a copout.

Likewise I regard your post as a copout. You are basically saying, "Reductionism has some hidden tenets that would resolve it's apparent deficiencies."

That's not a reasonable position, because reductionism is what it is. It cannot be more than the deterministic reality that it defines itself as. Once you go beyond that boundary, you've plunged into panpysychism. You cannot have your cake and eat it too.

(Yesterday at 8:30 pm)Jal Wrote:

(Yesterday at 8:28 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Your suggestions have not, thusfar, been worth listening to - and yet some of us have listened to you, responded to you.  We're a generous bunch.

More facade.

Who knows, maybe, but it does seem like your "arguments" were a facade as well, right?  So I guess that makes us both human.  Both pretending at things that are not real. Both believing that our beliefs are reasonable regardless of whether or not they are?