The Watchmaker: my fav argument

[Silver]

I want to make sure you are clear on what falsification means before we go any further.

A proposition is unfalsifiable when it predicts every possibly outcome of an experiment. The proposition that every light is on, will be falsified by a light that is off. This is true regardless of how hard it is for you to search every light or of every light indeed being on.

The only way for this proposition to be unfalsifiable is if it predicts both off-ness and on-ness. Say, if fairies exist then every light will be on; but if a light is not it's because the fairies turned it off. We cannot test whether fairies exist, because every outcome of the test (lights being on or off) is being predicted.

I get the feeling you've misled us.

In the philosophy of science, falsifiability or refutability is the capacity for a statement, theory or hypothesis to be contradicted by evidence. For example, the statement "All swans are white" is falsifiable because one can observe that black swans exist.

[John 6IX Breezy]

Hmm is there something in that quotation that doesn't fit with what I said?

[possibletarian]

deleted.

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I’m late to the party. Someone catch me up. 😁

Being late can be a blessing, clearly the gods favour you

[Belacqua]

I am not making #2 & #3– I am merely pointing out other possible hypotheses people can make. There could be more.

That's true, there could be a lot more.

But I am only responding to #1. If you do agree to #2 & #3 then you should present and predictive model based on which they make sense to you.

And I repeat that your analysis of #1 fails, as far as I'm concerned, because you're judging based on your own ideas of what constitutes successful design. And we have no reason to think that an omniscient God would agree with you. 

I think 2 is theoretically possible, and I haven't seen anyone make a coherent argument against it. I also said that 3 is unproven because we'd have to know what "success" looks like in designing a universe, and human beings aren't equipped to do that. 

So maybe that's as far as the present conversation takes us.

As for the name is concerned, i have seen servers (computers) and conference rooms named after greek and roman gods. I never thought for a minute they signify anything more than just identifying things/places etc, 

It's strange to me that people even use these names if they choose to deracinate them completely. If the name Apollo completely lacks its traditional referents, then you might as well use Mickey Mouse or Diarrhea as your name, and just announce that those words don't refer to their usual meanings either. 

like they used to name planets etc.  I would assume that when someone sees jupiter or apollo they just would have cursory greek reference in mind, not some advanced greek stuff because greek mythology isn’t even taught in many places in the world including where i come from.

When they named the planets after Greek and Roman gods they had good reasons for doing so. It wasn't random. People used to know what the names meant and knew when they were appropriate. It was all integrated into a coherent system. 

There's a serious problem with dumbing down in our culture. Knowing who Apollo is and why he's traditionally contrasted with Dionysus is not "some advanced greek stuff." It's something that anyone with a basic liberal arts education knows. I mean, apologies if you're still in high school or something. 

It's strange, because the famous generation of physicists -- Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, et.al. -- were educated men who knew philosophy. They were clear about how ancient Greek thought had been important to them. All the important German-language thinkers -- Goethe, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche -- and a lot of them who are important but you've probably never heard of -- Schiller, Heine, Rilke, etc. etc. -- had a foundational education in classics. So did British people for a long time. The concepts they got from the Greeks and interpolated into modern culture continue to shape the way people think about the world. 

Somehow modern education has cut that all off at the neck. It makes discourse shallower, and narrowed the imaginations of people. This affects and weakens the limits of what we can think.

[Angrboda]

I’m late to the party. Someone catch me up. 😁

Well, first the dinosaurs came....

[Silver]

Hmm is there something in that quotation that doesn't fit with what I said?

The fairy reference initially threw me off.

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I’m late to the party. Someone catch me up. 😁

Then there were fairies.

[Belacqua]

I get the feeling you've misled us.

No, what he's saying about falsifiability is exactly right.

In the philosophy of science, falsifiability or refutability is the capacity for a statement, theory or hypothesis to be contradicted by evidence. For example, the statement "All swans are white" is falsifiable because one can observe that black swans exist.

That's right.

In the example John gave of the lights and the fairies, both types of evidence (the lights being on or the lights being off) point to the same conclusion according to the theory. The empirical evidence as interpreted through the theory is incapable of showing that the fairies don't exist. Therefore, the theory about the lights and the fairies can't be falsified, therefore it isn't science.

The famous example that Popper used was Freud's system. Freud wanted to make his theories scientific, but Popper showed that they weren't because they couldn't be falsified.

It's easy to see if we take a simplified caricature:

Suppose Freud says that all sons want to have sex with their mothers, but they usually resist doing so. What evidence could falsify this theory?

Imagine that one mother has two sons. One son stays in the family home all his life with his parents. The other son moves to China and is never heard from again. Freud would say that the first son, staying home, proves his theory because clearly he stayed home to be close to his mother, because he wants to have sex with her, even though he never did. And clearly the son who moved to China went so far away because he wanted to have sex with his mother, but he had to resist, so he moved far away to make it impossible.

So doing X is proof of the theory, but doing the opposite of X is also proof of the theory. You can't do anything that doesn't prove the theory. Therefore it's not falsifiable. Therefore it's not science.

[Pat Mustard]

More frustrated that things have gone off script.  It's unlikely that John feels that anything important to him has been refuted...and, honestly, I don't think that any of those things really can be.

Things have gone off topic because Breezy finally realised he's got nothing to back his creationist arguments.

[Belacqua]

We can discover what is designable by simply designing it. It is this attempt at replication that constrains designability, just like graspability is constrained by our inability to grasp a wall.

Sorry I'm slow to respond to this. These are new ideas to me and require a certain amount of pondering. 

There's a word I can't remember right now for when people take existing technology and take it apart to find out how it works. (Reverse engineering, maybe?) It's kind of the opposite of designing, in that somebody else has designed it and the engineers are looking at the results. Once they know how it works, then they can re-do the process of manufacture -- designing the steps to manufacture the thing. 

So I'm thinking that if we look at a tree, for example, and we ask "is this designable?" the process is along those lines. We can figure out how the tree got that way, and then recreate that system. Cook up DNA in a lab, maybe, and tweak it so it grows into a viable tree. 

I think it would be stretching things to call what we do there designing. We know that we can recreate what has already happened, but that doesn't necessarily prove that the thing is designable in the first place. Anything will seem designable, once we already know how it's made. 

Then there's the much larger question of the whole shebang together. The tree is never an independent thing, but something integrated into a full ecology and evolutionary process. So more than just the tree, we might need to wonder whether that whole thing is designable. 

2. And specifically, is simulation a valid form of testing? This is important because we cannot create matter, but we can simulate it. Is that enough?

That's an important distinction. I think when most people talk about intelligent design, they are thinking of a new construction out of existing matter. This is more something I can imagine testing and reproducing. 

But obviously, human beings are incapable of creating matter itself. Or space/time, or matter/energy, or whatever they're calling Aristotle's Prime Matter these days. So any simulation that we run would have to begin with the idea that matter is already extant. Or maybe another way to say it is that we'd have to start some small amount of time after the Big Bang. 

I think that given enough computer power it would be possible, theoretically, to simulate extremely primitive conditions that evolve into complicated living things and societies. We could design stuff in this sense. 

I still don't see where falsifiability is possible, though. Because even if we run a zillion simulations and fail to come up with some particular item, that doesn't falsify it in Popper's sense. It might allow us to conclude that it's extremely unlikely, but wouldn't show it's impossible. 

And then there's the assumed gap between human abilities and God's. Just because we can't design a particular thing ever even in theory, doesn't mean that a God couldn't. 

So I think we could make certain things more or less credible, more or less easy to believe given the laws of nature, but I don't see yet how we can falsify designability.

[Pat Mustard]

Shifting the burden of proof. This is a fifteen yard penalty and a loss of down.

I'm a science student not a law student. We falsify things in science not prove them beyond a reasonable doubt.

Based on your nonsense posted in these fora that's a barefaced lie. You know as much about science as I do the Urdu language.