
How do you feel about this? Are there any celebrities that you will genuinely mourn when they are gone? I will be devastated when David Attenborough goes.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:47, archived)

( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:50, archived)

I'll be upset when Holly Willoughby carks. I like looking at her.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:49, archived)

( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:01, archived)

( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:09, archived)

need more;
Oh man
Trifle
Fifa
what's for lunch?
on qotw to bring it up to /talk quality
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 13:22, archived)

i doubt yours would speak to you tho on account of you being such an enormous dicklicker
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:09, archived)

( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:10, archived)

but in this family it's never stood out as the time to do it
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:18, archived)

( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:25, archived)

( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:50, archived)

( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:50, archived)

( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:55, archived)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_(wrestler)
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:55, archived)

I have never heard of either of them though.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:54, archived)

Also MGT has just made a massive post that entirely misses your point.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:00, archived)

I KNEW I should have just stuck to TRIFLE!!
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:08, archived)

not in a bad way just in an overly vigorous atheist sort of way
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:09, archived)

because it is precisely this kind of answer that I find inadequate.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:26, archived)

( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:28, archived)

or some shit.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:30, archived)

LALALALALALALALALALALA
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:33, archived)

What do you want me to say?
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:36, archived)

How was Mike being "materlialistic"?
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:29, archived)

not materialism in the sense of striving for material possessions. I.e. the position that phenomena are caused by the movements and interactions of self-existent material substances.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:35, archived)

It still betrays the craving for a static discoverable cause for everything. I think the only defensible position here is to simply say I DON'T KNOW BUT ISN'T ALL THIS LIFE AND STUFF FUN?!?!?11?!1
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:42, archived)

This is the most sensible thing I've read on here in, well, all the time I've been coming here.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:45, archived)

But it won't have any fucking sudokus in because they're shit and pointless, just thought I'd let you know. It also might come with free stickers that may or may not exist if you care about that sort of thing.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:48, archived)

It seems like you can complete every one of them if you just stare at them for long enough.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:52, archived)

and computers can solve them. I don't know why newspaper readers have to come into the equation.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:55, archived)

I think the lolarious puzzles on the back of a paper should just be replaced with a big sign saying
Look out of the window for a change, you never know, it might be pretty*
*apologies to our readers from the midlands
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:56, archived)

I can do sudokus easily enough, I just don't get the same sense of achievement as completing a crossword.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:02, archived)

*shudders*
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:04, archived)

Let's have less bullying of good puzzle.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:54, archived)

It's already given you the answer, you just have to put them in the right place.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:55, archived)

That you had to solve by filling in the right number/symbol in the right place.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:08, archived)

You look at a box, then put the numbers 1 through 9 into and see if any of those numbers meet the criteria. Saying that though, I suppose you could do the same with a crossword and a dictionary, only it might take about a year.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:12, archived)

You could only have 1-9 in the x, that was a bit different.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:16, archived)

even the page without the sudoku on it.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:56, archived)

( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:00, archived)

It's almost like someone said, let's have I spy with the contents of a scrabble bag.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:09, archived)

science works on the assumption of discoverable causes for things, if you like I am extending that concept beyond the physical. You could dismiss science with the same kind of statement. I don't dismiss science at all, I merely recognise its limits.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:47, archived)

i will answer any question
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:09, archived)

I wonder if you have been following it. I come to this conclusion after rejecting other assumptions that I have identified as absurd and it is the only thing that remains. And whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Reality has to exist somehow. I take that to be a truism.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:02, archived)

Isn't there one final, counter assumption which is to simply say 'we don't know?'
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:04, archived)

as long as the how we react to it when we do know is right?
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:08, archived)

Like TFD sort of said, any position other than 'dunno' is absolutist and inherently unprovable.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:05, archived)

Because I do know. I know that if I eliminate everything else that what remains must be the truth, that is what I call deduction. Call this faith in reason or whatever, but I know it and you don't know it and from where I'm sitting this puts me in the better position.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:11, archived)

You don't know. If we reduce everything down I could claim we don't 'know' anything, cogito ergo sum reduction and all that, but I'm not doing that. I'm saying that empirically, you can conclude that there is a god/God all you like, but there's as much evidence to actually support that theory, over others, as there is for imaginary unicorns fucking a leprechaun and creating the universe by chance.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:14, archived)

and that pure logic can establish truth - not absolute truth, mind you, because of Tarski's undefinability theorem, but if we allow ourselves to take the mathematical definition of "exists" Godel's Diagonal Lemma helps us a great deal.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:23, archived)

But your logic is flawed.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:28, archived)

or do we have to see something with the senses to know it? Because that puts a great deal of mathematics and theoretical physics in the dock.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:32, archived)

You're assuming you had every possible answer to begin with, when clearly you didn't because the answer you've arrived at is incorrect. I could make an equally wild claim that it is impossible to disprove, but that does not make it true.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:17, archived)

I don't know what the point is in continuing if you are going to reject any line of reasoning whatever that proves something you've already decided isn't true. Except for fun.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:25, archived)

I am merely stating that we do not know.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:36, archived)

"clearly you didn't because the answer you've arrived at is incorrect."
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:38, archived)

Not, "it must be God."
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:43, archived)

and you saying you don't know.
Yes. It must be God because I have eliminated all the other possible answers. There's no room for "I don't know" here. I do know. I've told you why because you asked.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:48, archived)

I can't 'know' for certain it's tails on the other side but it is highly likely.
Belief in God is not a coin flip, it is a monumental leap of faith akin to saying, when presented with a coin showing a head, that it is not tails on the other side. It is not an 'answer' it is blind faith and we are only discussing this because I cannot flip over your God coin and ultimately prove you wrong.
There is also a teapot that orbits around a star in our universe. Now that I have said this, it is impossible to disprove, therefore it must be true.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:54, archived)

( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:56, archived)

from experience you might counter, but as far as the thought-experiment goes we know it from the definition of this abstract coin. Obviously the analogy didn't work as intended. Let me not muck about with analogies then. If there are two mutually exclusive claims and we know that one is wrong, we know that the other is right. There is no excuse for fence sitting. I know you are not yet convinced that we are dealing with mutually exclusive claims but can you at least agree with me so far in this?
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 3:00, archived)

What does that have to do with you believing in God?
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 3:07, archived)

I have enumerated them below.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 3:09, archived)

Imagine if only one person believed in God. They'd lock them up in a mental asylum.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 3:11, archived)

this is not a very good line of argument.
You have assumed it is absurd, for some reason.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 3:16, archived)

Stop using terrible analogies.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 3:18, archived)

He didn't make himself known to the Chinese, who could read.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 3:20, archived)

are you saying I'm the first and only person ever to say there is a God? And that my saying so somehow makes it true?
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 3:21, archived)

You did not come to this conclusion on your own.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 3:23, archived)

Good joke though.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:56, archived)

what? I know that a coin is heads on one side and tails on the other, let is take that as a given. What is the problem here? Is logical deduction completely useless in general?
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 3:03, archived)

your complete unflinching arrogance in thinking that you have discovered and considered all the ways in which the reality could have come into being is staggering. You haven't even considered all sides of the coin, let alone the universe.
Secondly, logical deduction might possibly be useless in general, it's just an idea right? Why does it have to correspond with anything absolutely true?
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 3:08, archived)

or maybe only when you don't agree with the conclusion. You'd rather it be vague and open-ended maybe so we can all agree to disagree and get on with living however we want. Well call me arrogant. But tough.
I have considered all the sides of the coin. There are two sides of an ideal coin as used in philosophical thought experiments, heads and tails. And that's it.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 3:14, archived)

Secondly, your reasoning is faulty, as mike said, how can you have eliminated all other possible answers.
Thirdly, you wrongly assume that we categorically refuse to come to a conclusion which involves god. I'm not going to state that believing in god is a particularly illogical conclusion, I'm just saying it's one of many pretty illogical conclusions. I happen to really enjoy the massive variety and interesting features of all sorts of illogical conclusions without fetishising some sort of ultimate answer because, and I will happily admit this, I don't think I've ever going to properly work it out.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:25, archived)

I can eliminate answers by mutual exclusivity. There are four possible ways for the universe can exist, and three of them are absurd. Add to this list if you can think of any others, by all means.
1. circularity
2. infinite regression (turtles all the way down)
3. absolutism or "skyhook" i.e. "it just is"
4. self-reference
Thirdly, I'm not addressing you in particular on that one.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:35, archived)

6. someone shat it out of their arse
Both of these possibilities are equally possible.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:39, archived)

6="god made it by accident"=2
or =3 if you prefer to say that "god just is".
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:45, archived)

Just an unwillingness to murder to dissect and admitting the fallibility and limits of the human mind. Or my own mind at least. You may or may not have one, I have received no direct sense data to prove either way.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:51, archived)

( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:52, archived)

for the sake of the prediction of phenomena. It tells us what is, but not why it is. It tells us what we can do, but it doesn't tell us what we should do.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:59, archived)

being told things is actually rather useful.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:06, archived)

if I've got to cut someone's head off I'd like to be able to reassure myself somehow that I'm doing the right thing and not just acting on a whim.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:12, archived)

( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:06, archived)

but the short answer is "yes".
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:08, archived)

If you truly believe you can only gain a sense of morals from religion, then I sort of feel sorry for you.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:10, archived)

all morality is essentially made up, and that IS religion? maybe.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:14, archived)

but moving on. People have their own consciences, and there are social constructs and acceptable codes of behaviour etc.. But how do we evaluate these things? We know that under Hitler (for instance) ordinary people did all sorts of things. We know that in some Islamic countries they cut your head off for being gay, and that in various places female circumcision occurs. These are just a couple of examples of moral problems that even the "new atheists" of today would like some kind of objective answer.
Various religions have got a lot of things wrong at different times, I'll admit, but we can't expect them to change for no reason. If we want to be able to say that such-and-such is right or wrong, we need a reason. Conscience and social custom just doesn't cut it, despite what the subjectivists like to pretend. And science doesn't help us, because it is impartial and makes no value judgments. Utilitarianism as per John Stuart Mill was a good effort but it has loose ends all over the place. The only thing that can tie them up as I see it, is the Will of God. It's only because God made the Universe for a reason and not arbitrarily or by accident that there can be any sense of what anyone "ought" to do.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:20, archived)

Or has he given them me regardless of whether I believe in him or not?
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:23, archived)

I doubt you derived them logically from scientific knowledge, at any rate.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:30, archived)

A base example such as "If I touch fire, it hurts me. It must hurt others too and I would not want to subject someone to the pain I felt."
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:45, archived)

why does what you want decide what ought to be?
where does morality come into it? I'll tell you what does come into it. Empathy and sympathy, or compassion if you will. This is natural, but there's no logic in it.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:50, archived)

Your ABSOLUTE position is a belief in a lack of any tangible reality you percieve and fitting a god into that.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:44, archived)

denial of physical substance does not equate to denial of reality. It is what reality IS that is at issue. Reality IS, according to my understanding, a sort of fiction in the mind of God. It isn't made of "stuff" but of ideas, and ideas look like "stuff" to other ideas that are complex enough to have ideas of their own and come up with this idea of "stuff".
Where it's not absolute is where it gets difficult to explain. It comes back to self-reference again. Without self-reference it's all "skyhooks", as Baldmonkey put it the other week. There are a number of enlightenment "skyhooks" that scientists, and non-scientist atheists, commonly fall back on. But such skyhooks are not satisfactory. Call that an absolute if you will. Perhaps I am making an assumption by trying to use any kind of reasoning at all but I don't know where else to begin.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:53, archived)

Hellfire woman, you questioned my bringing faith into things and you come out with a statement like that?
Kind of like saying my son will stop being ASD if I just sprinkle a little fairy dust on him.
I'm not currently typing on "God's idea". It's a computer. It most certainly IS real. As I said before, things are WAY more mundane than all this pseudo-philosophical ball of wool.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:00, archived)

But only if you can get the child to believe it.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:02, archived)

I don't think you've got even a basic grasp of the idea I'm trying to convey, here.
You don't experience "the computer" directly but only through sense data, and data is information is ideas. There is no evidence at all for this thing you call "the computer". It is a mental construct. It is "simples arranged computerwise" as Trenton Merricks might put it.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:05, archived)

( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:08, archived)

everything I think is an idea. One can hardly think in anything other than ideas. So how can one suppose that there IS anything other than ideas? Anything other than an idea can only be an idea I just had, anyway, that I use to explain the other ideas that I had.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:14, archived)

We get it.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:20, archived)

I'm saying everything I think is an idea, and I think about senses, which are therefore ideas, and thus the idea of something that is not an idea is self-contradictory. Ergo everything is ideas ergo everything exists in a mind. Or "there is no mind independent reality". Google that phrase if you like.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:28, archived)

how can you think about it and communicate it to me if it isn't? There can't be a word without an idea for it to correspond to. Or a thought.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:37, archived)

An idea is an abstract concept based on preception and is a fucntion of self-aware sentience.
Senseing is a base brian function interpreting stimulus.
You can have ideas and no senses and have senses and no ideas.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:43, archived)

Ideas aren't always abstract. They can be concrete. In fact they are typically concrete.
The idea of sensing is an idea (truism). To connect it to things other than ideas is an assumption.
One can hardly have senses without ideas. One might have what could be called a "nerve impulse" and a corresponding reflex. I wouldn't call it a sense unless there was some awareness of it. But this is going off on a bit of a tangent.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:54, archived)

A sense IS merely the interpretation of a stimulus via an organ in the body. Again, you can sense but not form any ideas.
Why are you arguing for any sort of idea being concrete if you don't think there IS any form of reality?
I'm going to bed. I'm glad you had a good holiday and all. If you wan't to discuss any further gaz me.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 3:11, archived)

One does not follow from the other.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:37, archived)

in which case what exactly do you mean by "materially real"? If the relationship between ideas is valid without any of them being "materially real" then what is the use of this concept, and how can we distinguish ideas that are materially real from those that aren't? I am putting it to you that "materially real" is only a label that we mentally apply to certain of our ideas; it is an artificial, abstract category of ideas that we have made up.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:43, archived)

What you are saying is indeed possible, but no more so than the possibility that empirical sense data has objectively real material causes independently from our ideas.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:52, archived)

( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:56, archived)

About as absurd as that celestial teapot. There is no reason to suggest it, and no evidence for it. Given what we know of teapots, there is no way one could be in distant space. And given what we know of ideas, there is no way that some of them could materialise somewhere independently of the mind that thought them up. Although if you really do want to admit the possibility of the latter, it opens up all kinds of religious possibilities that I won't go into.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 3:06, archived)

that's what I'm driving at. Some muppet invented the blueprints for this laptop. Someone mined the resources, some cunt shipped it to a factory (probaly in China) where low paid grunts assembled it. Another chump drove it to the docks for another bunch of folks to put it on a ship for it to be ploughed through the seas (are they just an idea too?) for it to be unshipped, moved to a PC World where some spotty young prick sold it to me for a LOLDICROUS mark-up.
It's made of STUFFS. It is not just an idea.
I get all your points doll but your tying yourself into knots. Slighlty patronising, considering where your coming from, to dismiss me quite to lightly.
YES IDEAS ARE IMPORTANT. ARE WE ALL JUST AN IDEA IN GOD'S 'MIND'? I DON'T THINK SO.
In all honesty I'm not sure if you're taking the piss or not.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:13, archived)

I actually don't even know if this is a relevant question as I'm still trying to make sense of the whole ideas/stuff argument.
Just another point entirely, right. Lets say humanity is about 200,000 years old. Why did God wait about 194,000 years to make himself known and then only do so in the undeveloped and largely illiterate middle-east? What was he doing all those years?
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 2:01, archived)

is some kind of god, like, not a god in the religious sense as such just that everything is everything and we dunno it and when we do, what it is, is a god, not god in the religious sense, but in terms of a name for what it is that is everything that we don't know. maybe.
( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:07, archived)

( , Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:59, archived)