Natural Order and Science

[ignoramus]

Exactly like hitting a golf ball off the tee. 10 billion blades of grass between the tee ad where the ball lands 200 meters away! What are the chances of landing on that exact blade of grass that it did land on? It's a fooking myrakle!

[Neo-Scholastic]

The relationship between choice and commitment is admittedly circular at the start when someone becomes aware of themselves as a personal existent. This start however is not the fullness of a life's journey. While the stance an individual initially selects relies entirely on "blind faith" and is made in the context of limited information,at issue is what follows from the freely made choice. Do some choices hold out the possibility to attain knowledge whereas others preclude it?

Holding out the possibility is only meaningful if knowledge can ultimately be realized. Because we are locked inside our brains/minds, the best we can hope for are models of reality. It's impossible to say whether any given model of reality is the final one. For what it's worth, I don't hold that we know this is the final level of understanding, but I don't invest in purely speculative notions either, whether string theory or final causes. It would seem to me that the principled stance is committed to the idea that the final layer of reality is knowable as the final layer of reality, and this seems unrealistic given our position in the world.

You may be right. The principled stance holds the the promise of a hope that might never by realized. To my mind paradoxical and serendipitous abandon any such hold. Individual temprement seems relevent as to which stance is adpted. Magical may but what gets revealed could also be quite tragic.

In a way, I see my chart as a kind of philosophical Meyers-Briggs. Until I flesh it out with examples people will see what they want. Doing so may also reveal serious flaws. For me its just a fun intellectual exercise.

I tried to be neutral about the labels. Some people love a good paradox and many people I know think of the world as a magical place. But others might interpret those as incoherent and whimsical respectively.

I felt hard pressed to call a reality governed by principles as anything other than principled. I would have preferred something that sounded less pretentious. Everyone wants to think of themselves as principled but the label has nothing to do with a persons character.

[I_am_not_mafia]

The relationship between choice and commitment is admittedly circular at the start when someone becomes aware of themselves as a personal existent. This start however is not the fullness of a life's journey. While the stance an individual initially selects relies entirely on "blind faith" and is made in the context of limited information,at issue is what follows from the freely made choice. Do some choices hold out the possibility to attain knowledge whereas others preclude it?

Word salad.

[Angrboda]

I like your new avatar, Chad. I think, aside from Swedenborg, it's your best one yet.

[Neo-Scholastic]

The relationship between choice and commitment is admittedly circular at the start when someone becomes aware of themselves as a personal existent. This start however is not the fullness of a life's journey. While the stance an individual initially selects relies entirely on "blind faith" and is made in the context of limited information,at issue is what follows from the freely made choice. Do some choices hold out the possibility to attain knowledge whereas others preclude it?

Word salad.

Anti-intellectual.

[I_am_not_mafia]

Word salad.

Anti-intellectual.

I'm a professional scientist with a PhD who has held post-doctoral positions at universities and writes scientific papers in my spare time.

What you wrote wasn't intellectual. It was mental masturbation.

Try again.

[Excited Penguin]

Anti-intellectual.

I'm a professional scientist with a PhD who has held post-doctoral positions at universities and writes scientific papers in my spare time.

What you wrote wasn't intellectual. It was mental masturbation.

Try again.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Then I guess I'll go with ignorant since your familiarity with philosophical concepts is insufficient to understand what you read outside your particular discipline.

[Harris]

The first two paragraphs sound reasonable,  the following bit about chance and nothingness then seems very ad hoc. The following questions are somewhat loaded, but might be answered by a simple appeal to the anthropic principle - a structureless universe cannot ponder itself, to borrow a phrase by Asimov. The last bit about information and probabilities to assemble a cell just betrays a gross misunderstanding of how both information and evolution work. Standard cdesign proponentsists lies as the likes of Dembski and Behe spread them.

If the ratio of the strength of electromagnetism to gravity had varied by as much as one part in 1040, there would be no stars like our sun. It seems doubtful that there is a nontrivial anthropic principle, strictly speaking. Were the physical constants, notably the relative strengths of the four fundamental forces, to be even very slightly different, a long-lived galactic universe containing the heavy elements needed for complex life would not have developed.

According to the interventionist account, causation is a relation between variables. Its fundamental hypothesis is that a variable A causes a variable B if and only if there are circumstances in which it is possible to manipulate B by intervening on A. Whether or not the fine-tuning is taken as evidence for the existence of God, it has important consequences for theology in that some philosophers believe that it argues against an interventionist account of continuing creation and divine action, since the prerequisites for human existence were built into the universe from the very beginning.

[Harris]

How do you know that the laws operate universally?  Have you been to every part of the universe?

We can explain that the hypothesis of order is supported by our daily observations: the rhythm of day and night; the regular ticking of clocks etc. The most powerful expression of this state of affairs is found in the successful application of mathematics to make predictions expressed by means of the laws of physics.

As our direct information refers to finite experiments, it is not out of the question to discover local rules, functioning on large, but finite scales, even if the global behaviour of the process seems to be random. Space scientists can pinpoint and predict planetary locations and velocities well enough to plan missions years in advance. Astronomers can predict solar or lunar eclipses centuries before their occurrence. All such predictions were not possible if the known laws were not working universally.