Mod Idea: Simulating surfaces -> Borg Technology -> Twinkie Physics -> Worldviews

[Fyron]

No, they do not. Gravity, magnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force (the 4 fundamental forces of nature, IIRC) did not "come to be" at any point; they were always in effect.

[Suicide Junkie]

The quote wasn't "natural order", but "naturally produces order"...

Which to me says "life does quite a bit of work on its own towards creating an ordered world"

(the 4 fundamental forces of nature, IIRC) did not "come to be" at any point; they were always in effect.

As far as we know, of course. Which is still pretty darn far: on the order of 10 billion years.

[ December 15, 2002, 01:39: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[Krsqk]

"Gravity, magnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force (the 4 fundamental forces of nature, IIRC) did not "come to be" at any point; they were always in effect."

Which, again, is based on your pre-determined worldview. A creationist would say that those forces were created along with everything else. My point was that the "order in nature without outside intervention" argument fits both sides equally well.

[Fyron]

Well... one must always keep an open mind and not allow their pre-determined worldview to prevent any sort of growth. Just accepting something on blind faith is, IMO, kinda dumb. And no, I do not accept evolution and such on blind faith.

[Will]

Originally posted by jimbob:
Well it sounds like your brain has warmed up quite well in this thread. I hope you do well on your exams!! What are you studying anyway?[/QB]

Right now, the little pieces of paper say "Computer Science". I'm going to be changing them to "Computer Engineering/Computer Science", just to have that little extra breadth. I'll probably swap in another major or a minor sometime.

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Here's where I think your use of the principle fails. You have already stated you believe that the exsistnace of God to be unprovable, and by applying the razor you say the lack of proof means that God does not exsist. That seems to me to be very circular logic at best. And it also assumes that everything is "knowable" by us, an assumption which I do not accept, although I cannot refute, and which you cannot support. Only time will tell I suppose on that point.

I can see where you think it fails, since the Razor would tend to support whichever view weilds it right My reasoning behind it falls more on extrapolating from previous beliefs (though I didn't say that... I need to work on this communication stuff). Originally, people didn't understand how the sun and the moon rose every day; so, they said it was gods that did it. Once we found out how the sun and moon actually appear to rise, that was thrown out. It seems that whatever is not understood has the label "GOD" slapped on it, and makes everything all right. So, right now, we don't really understand how this whole universe shebang got started. It seems to me that the reflexive action is to slap on the label, and everything will be all right. I see no reason why this would be any different than wrongly (we think )explaining the rising of sun and moon as divine influence.

As for not all mysteries of the universe being knowable, I think this allows for that. There's always some other intricacy of the interactions throughout the universe that will need to be explained. Especially what 42 is the answer to. Then, once we figure that out, we will all be destroyed, and a new universe even more bizzare than this one will be created. Of course, this has probably already happened...

[Krsqk]

"Well... one must always keep an open mind and not allow their pre-determined worldview to prevent any sort of growth. Just accepting something on blind faith is, IMO, kinda dumb."

Depending on your definition of open mind. It seems nowadays that it means "Accept everybody and everything without any sort of value judgment." As long as it means "Keep your eyes open and your brain engaged," I don't have a problem with that.

Oh, and most people who operate solely on blind faith aren't well informed about much of anything, including their faith.

[Wardad]

My God has a sense of humor. OH BOY, does he ever have a sense of humor!!!

[E. Albright]

Originally posted by Krsqk:
RE: Language as interpretation

E. Albright, you are exactly right. However, if something is written down, it must be interpreted in the context in which it was written.

For example, if I write a book about someone who plays with acid, it makes a major difference if I'm writing it during the 1860s or the 1960s. All language is subject to that change, although not usually in that magnitude.

Ouch. The deconstructionist in me wants to jump on this and scream bloody murder over your apparent favoring of writing over other forms of communication, but I think it'd be irrelevant (and said disconnected deconstructionist Albright parts might be extracting an interpretation from your speech that you never intended to put there, but that's not what I'm driving at...).

On the other hand, if you agree with what I'd earlier stated re: speech as a necessarily interpretive act, you subvert your argument that "it must be interpreted in the context in which it was written." If all communication is interpretive, you cannot judge something in its "real" context, unless you have firsthand experience with it [ and at this point my nascent phenomenological instincts want to scream bloody murder, 'cause your firsthand experience is still interpretive, subjective and intentional (ah, quelle joie to deal with Continental philosophy!) ], because your conception of the context is formed by the accounts of others (i.e., by other communications) and is thus naught but a subjectively interpretation...

The point that your above comment raises doesn't, IMO, go any distance to being able to redeem the notion that one can definatively know the "meaning" of a text, which is to say that it is insufficient to negate the fallacy of intentionality { i.e., the assertion that "one can, by reading a text [ and if we let Derrida have his way (as we probably shouldn't ), all communications are 'texts' ], discern with certainty the message that the author intended to communicate" is ultimately indefensible }.

The gist of the above critical babbling is that, even if one "[ interprets a work ] in the context in which it was written", one cannot hope to state authoritatively that one is interpreting it "literally". The idea of iterpreting something "literally" suggests that there is a single, definate and correct way to interpret any given work, and hélas, there is no way to justify this assertion...

(Yes, it's good to try to take a work's historical context into account. But this doesn't grant the interpreter a magical looking-glass with which to discern the "true" meaning of the work. Rather, it allows the interpretation of the work to be more consistent with the interpretation of other works derived from the same context...)

E. Albright
(An obviously less-than-completely reformed former deconstructionist)

[ Edit: typing errors ]

[ December 16, 2002, 13:53: Message edited by: E. Albright ]

[Krsqk]

That's fine and all, coming from a deconstructionist, but some of us ordinary people believe that once upon a time, words had meanings. Furthermore, in the past, there were books called dictionaries which sought to solidify the meaning of words, instead of aid in the progression (or digression) of their meanings, as seems to be popular today. It is reasonable to assume that the Bible translators in particular, and authors in general, used words that directly communicated their intent, in keeping with the established meanings of those words. In short (Short? Do I know what short means? }, I think that lack of 100% certainty (where rounding up to 100% is not permitted) is not reason for discounting the probability of successfully interpreting a text.

I'm not sure if I even know what I just wrote--time for a snack break.

[edit] Oh, and I don't necessarily favor writing over other forms of communication; my original point was just that written text retains the meanings from its time of writing, allowing one to interpret it with reasonable certainty.

[ December 16, 2002, 14:38: Message edited by: Krsqk ]

[E. Albright]

Originally posted by Krsqk:
That's fine and all, coming from a deconstructionist, but some of us ordinary people believe that once upon a time, words had meanings. Furthermore, in the past, there were books called dictionaries which sought to solidify the meaning of words, instead of aid in the progression (or digression) of their meanings, as seems to be popular today.

Do you really believe that Last line? It is now extremely popular (and I'm speaking as a Yank here) to view dictionaries as Bibles (if you'll pardon the expression) and meanings as fixed and certain. 'Tis my experience that Americans in particular have this lovely idea that Languages are fixed, static and standardized, when the bloody things are living, dynamic and diverse. For example, how many times have you heard the phrase "standard English"? How often do you hear people in the States talking about dialects of English? Maybe it's just me, maybe it's just Ohio, but I've found that Americans tend to view dialects as funny accents + bad grammer ("They'uns talk funny o'er yonder!"). Dictionaries are an attempt to standardize language and to clarify meaning, but they ultimately can, will and must fail. There are as many idiolects of English as there are speakers of English; so tell me, which of these hundreds of millions of ideolects represents the real, correct English? Speaking as a teacher of English as a second language, I constently find myself wondering if I use words "right", or if I'm misleading my students as to what connotations and denotations are generally attatched to this or that word. Given that my students have been learning British English, and I come from the other side of the pond, I find that I often don't. I had a lot less sympathy for the idea that language is neither unambiguous nor fixed before learning to speak another language, let alone before I started trying to teach my own.

But I rant digressively. My point are this: a claim that, because langauge is precise enough for ordinary usage, the fact that it's vague and underspecified is irrelevant, essentially sidesteps the question of whether it is too vague and/or sufficently specified for extraordinary use. And I dare say that claiming that one knows exactly what God means because one read what some person transcribed for Him qualifies as rather extraordinary. This would suggest that one can obtain objective meaning after two subjective interpretations (assuming that God, at least, doesn't have these same problems that we'uns do). Um, ouch. And if you want to argue that I've made a double standard, that I'm being less rigourous with ordinary language, I assure you I'm not. I personally hope quite sincerly that this statement communicates the "message" that I intend to communicate, but I freely admit that I've no assurance that it shall...

Oh, and re: dictionaries, and our having of them in the past... Don't forget that dictionaries are a relatively newfangled invention; English dictionaries have been around for less than 400 years, and have been used as standardizing agents a goodly sight less than that. IIRC, 'twas in the 1800's with 'ole Noah Webster that the notion of dictionary as repository of standardized truth came into force, deplacing the idea of dictionary as reference of current linguistic usage...

It is reasonable to assume that the Bible translators in particular, and authors in general, used words that directly communicated their intent, in keeping with the established meanings of those words. In short (Short? Do I know what short means? }, I think that lack of 100% certainty (where rounding up to 100% is not permitted) is not reason for discounting the probability of successfully interpreting a text.

So tell me, what level of confidence is necessary for successfully interpreting the meaning of life, the universe and everything (aside from the ability to multiply nine and six)? You wanna round this up, yes? Okay, then if we're rounding up, you need, what, at least 50% percent comprehension, right? And on this level of precision you want to assert that you know the Nature of All Things?

All's I'm saying is that, given your claims of literal Biblical interpretation I feel justified in demanding a bit more rigor in terms of textual interpretation. And this is leaving the issue of translation entirely to one side. Ye gods! That's two more layers of interpretation between you and the author's intent; are you really willing to blithly assert said words "directly [ communicate ] their intent, in keeping with [ their ] established meanings"?

Oh, and the "established" meanings of words, these would be what? Are we going to assert that it's the dictionaries? Can we be sure that the translators agreed with the dictionaries, especially early ones (KJV comes to mind, published, what, seven years after the first English dictionary)? Did they look all the words up, to make sure they "agreed"? Did they "properly" understand the meaning of the definition?

And pray tell, what exactly is it to directly communicate a word's intent, hmm?

E. Albright
(Slightly testy after spending a day trying to approximately communicate meaning to a bunch of French high school students...)

[ Edit: typos; I apparently can't even unambiguously communicate with my keyboard... ]

[ December 16, 2002, 17:22: Message edited by: E. Albright ]