On Hell and Forgiveness

[Amarok]

The problem continues to be that you can't really talk about anything outside of math or science and concepts such as objective are difficult to grasp. Your examples illustrate this clearly. There is not a person in the world that would agree that the number 4 is subjective. This is why RR asked your age. It's like discussing things with a college student who has had a couple of classes and all the sudden thinks they have a grasp on knowledge and if it wasn't covered in class, it is not worth knowing.

On the contrary, I have studied these things most of my adult life (and i am 55 years old). You are simply wrong in claiming that no rational person sees the number 4 as subjective.

Let's ask this: are language constructs 'objective' under your definition? It seems that they are, which in turn says that your definition is faulty. Language constructs certainly *shouldn't* be objective, even if they are independent of any particular person.

Nope. The "I" in "I will do such and such" or "I wish that..." is not understood AT ALL by scientist. Of course there is no clean separation between mental events and physical events because the mental relies on physical. The problem is that consciousness CLEARLY appears to be more than the sum of its parts. Therefore we have something that is not just physical (a cause) having a physical effect. So your claim that anything that affects the physical must be physical is in fact wrong. According the the rules, you have the burden of proof. There is no proof to produce. You lost this point as well. It is definitely coherent that the nonphysical can have an effect on the physical. 

The problem comes when you attempt to define what it means to be 'physical'. Are photons physical? Are neutrinos? How about dark matter? Dark energy? In all cases, I would say definitely yes, they are physical. But why? The only separating property is that they interact with things we previously accepted as physical. This is what allows them to be measured and analyzed. And that is what makes them physical.

The mind being physical just goes along with this realization. But, we can go much, much farther. No new physics is required to explain the workings of the mind. EVERYTHING is based on patterns of neural firing. That much is quite clear from what we have learned about the brain and the mind. In the exact same way that a running compute rprogram is a physical process, the mind is a physical process of the brain.

Semantics. Contingency is a metaphysical principle. Scientist don't use the word 'contingency' but they rely on the principle.  Correlation is the description of the relationship of actual data/observations. 

Exactly. All we need to observe is the correlation between phenomena. We don't have to assume causality. We don't have to base our philosophy on 'contingency'. That is all badly irrelevant.

Not at all. Causality is a metaphysical concept and CERTAINLY not a scientific one. Science PRESUPPOSES that causality is an objective feature of reality. Read more here.  You really really should have taken that philosophy class in college. 

Sorry, but htis is simply wrong. Science is quite possible without a notion of causality. All that is required is correlation and observation of such as patterns.

What effect can be measured at the macroscopic level?

You are drinking someone's coolaid. Cause/effect are not scientific concepts (as established in the above link). As such, any sub atomic particle theories that have no effect above that level really have no bearing on it. Classical causality lives on!

Classical causality is the averaging of the underlying randomness. When you have Avagadro's number of molecules adding their randomness together, it tends to average out.

The whole field of quantum computing is based on making quantum level phenomena affect the macroscopic world. But the subject of macroscopic quantum effects has a long history: look up Josephson junctions some time.

You really don't know what any of those things I mentioned are, do you? No one has a clue how an eye was formed--only theories inferred from, well, the eye. No organism has a half an eye. The steps from a light spot to my eye is entirely inferred. You don't even know what a biological network is (I even gave a link in my response). You have made zero progress showing the grand theory of evolution isn't one gigantic inference--a cornerstone of science. So, my original point was that inferential arguments are used all the time--even in science is definitely true.

What you seem to fail to understand is that the 'inference' is very testable. The difference between an evolved eye and a created one *can* be tested. And the tests have been done and the eye was evolved, not designed. The steps from the eyespot to a fully functioning eye are observed in organisms today. It isn't theoretical that the stages are possible and even exist. We can also investigate the genetics and biochemistry as *tests* of our ideas.

Science works by making observations, formulating *hypotheses*, making predictions based on those hypotheses (here is where inference legitimately operates), and then testing those predictions based on further observation. We cannot and do not 'infer' the truth of a general idea, but rather conclude that the hypothesis has not been negated.

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LOL, so in a debate about the existence of non-physical objects, of which the number 4 is an example, you'll only be satisfied if someone produces the number 4 as a physical object. Yeah...that sounds reasonable.

The number 4 is NOT an object. That is the whole point here. It is a language construct.

So, unless you accept language constructs as 'objects'.....which would be, well, strange.

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Cool... can you lend me a thousand dollars. When I pay you back one dollar and call it the same, it’s good to know you won’t dispute it?  

Actually I suspect that this is just another case of an atheist not understanding what is meant by objective in the ontological sense.  However I don’t see how a number in the other sense can be subjective either.

Edit: or in other words, we’re not talking about the same thing.

But if you paid me back in a thousand euros, I would be happy.

Context matters.

My friend your trying to explain reality to cavemen who think magic spirits cause 4 to exist

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I think that jorg gets that you do believe that.  Describing your beliefs is to describe the contents of your mind.  That's ontological subjectivity even if it were epistemic objectivity (and even if there really were parts and wholes outside of your mind).

It may not seem like it, but an invocation of your beliefs is a straight "no" to jorgs question.

Good luck getting him to admit that