Chaos Magic
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Deliberate obfuscation and refusal to answer simple, clearly worded questions noted.
Sorry to have bothered you with my curiosity about your beliefs. Carry on with... whatever it was you were hoping to accomplish posting this stuff.
Respectfully,
Myriad
Lord Emsworth
Je ne suis pas une de vos élèves
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I asked God, and She and Her Hubby ain't got anything to do with it.
annnnoid
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Yeah…obviously Myriad. Those were all sincere questions from someone who honestly wants to understand more about the most important things in my life.
Example: “Did God make the car fly or teleport or drive by itself?”
Deliberate ridicule and condescension noted. Replies in kind.
Next question.
Respectfully
Annnnoid
Carlitos, it’s not proof, it’s argument. As for your quote, what does it mean to ‘grasp the Universe as it truly is’…when we quite obviously neither know what it truly is nor do we know the truth of the means or processes by which we grasp anything at all? Suggesting that it is possible to 'grasp the universe as it truly is' is, itself, nothing more than a blatantly religious statement. IOW...you don't know what it truly is any more than you know what you truly are...you just believe you do.
Nonpareil
The Terrible Trivium
Seriously, though, annnnoid, if you don't want people pointing out the obvious implications of the beliefs you hold, don't post here.
It's a fallacious argument, and can therefore be ignored.
annnnoid
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It’s a fallacious argument (for what, Argent…do you even know…or are you just guessing again) and can thus be ignored. We don’t know why it’s a fallacious argument, because Argent never argues anything (should we wait for a ‘google it’?), nor do we know why it can be ignored, because, once again, Argent seems incapable of presenting a point of view.
Argent says it, so it must be so. Bare assertion anyone?
How about another big picture Argent. They get everyone’s attention and they conveniently hide the fact that you never say anything. Argument by pretty picture. What doctoral program did you learn that in?
Nonpareil
The Terrible Trivium
It's fallacious because it is an argument with no basis. It is nothing more than bare assertion by proxy. Quotes mean nothing, especially without knowing the context. Evidence is everything.
You can quote people who believe in free will all you want. It doesn't even count as evidence, let alone an argument.
Straw man.
I thought you would be capable of spotting the bare assertion fallacy when it appeared. It appears that I overestimated you. For that, I apologize.
catsmate
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Well now, a good skeptic wouldn't want to ignore the possibility of multiple personality disorder........ However to the best of my knowledge we are different persons
PixyMisa
Persnickety Insect
I'm Pixicus!
Robin
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No, I am Pixicus!
Nonpareil
The Terrible Trivium
If they're missing, you should probably get yourself to a hospital.
dafydd
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I see that punshhh is busy in another thread talking about finite infinities.
dafydd
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Buy a dictionary. I am surprised that you do not know the meaning of the word meaningless.
I'd suggest using one of those 9th-Century papal nut-check chairs.
Elizabeth I
Philosopher
Oooh, or what if he woke up in a hotel room and couldn't remember where he was but he was sitting in the bathtub packed in ice and there was a big gash in his side and a letter telling him to call 911?
Nonpareil
The Terrible Trivium
Then that would be proof of idealism, obviously. Haven't you followed punshhh's argument at all?
annnnoid
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Argent…the following evidence proves you are not only wrong, but that you fabricated your entire position.
The current state of neural scanning:
-How accurately and efficiently a mental state can be inferred is unknown.
-Whether a person’s compliance is required is unknown.
-Whether it is possible to decode concealed thoughts or even unconscious mental states is unknown.
-The maximum temporal resolution is unknown.
-The degree to which it is possible to provide a quasi-online estimate of an individual’s current cognitive or perceptual state is unknown.
-The problem of inverse referencing remains, essentially, unresolved.
-Whether decoding methods are sensitive enough to reliably reveal personal information for individual subjects in unknown.
-The conclusions being that brain reading will be restricted to simple cases with a fixed number of alternatives...for all of which training date are available....because of the all but infinite number of cognitive states and necessarily limited training categories.
Essentially…with currently available technology and processing and interpretive software …if you or anyone were to walk off the street into a lab and be wired into a neural scanner (fMRI for example) the results would NOT be able to show EITHER an explicit or even general representation of:
- what your are seeing
- what you are hearing
- what your are smelling
- what you are touching/feeling
- what you are imagining
- what you are thinking
- what you are feeling
Every case is substantially subjective. Generalized predictive software exists (with limited degrees of resolution), but specific scanning requires subjectively evaluated training categories and even then there are significant limits on what exactly can be achieved (as described in the last point).
This was all confirmed by a number of sources, but primarily by a professor of cognitive neuroscience at an English university with quite a number of published/peer reviewed studies (all of which I can confirm/reference/link to if you really want to drag your humiliation out for another few posts).
What it comes down to Argent, is you simply can’t face the fact that science cannot tell you who, or what, you are. It can’t. Period.
Your contention that science has all these abilities …
…is now established to be complete unmitigated crap.
Googling ‘brain emotion’ does not qualify as evidence of anything except a grade 2 spelling ability. In addition… your ‘proof’ has now been conclusively exposed as proof of nothing except the indisputable fact that you fabricated the whole thing and simply do not know what you’re talking about. In the scientific community if you had made such colossal unsubstantiated claims that were not only false, and were not only the basis for trumped up charges against another member, but turned out to be complete fabrications…. you would be ridiculed, you would be immediately fired from whatever job you hold, you would have every professional qualification you possess revoked, you would be banned from publication for the rest of your life and your membership in every professional organization would be summarily nullified.
….but at JREF you have groupies. What do you suppose that says about the groupies?
What is truly amusing is to watch as this herd of skeptics appears and dutifully makes all the right bleats of support in all the right places. Does anybody actually think for themselves? Only once has the blatant absurdity of Argent’s various positions been contradicted. Integrity is also a word on that list…do you suppose that doesn’t exist either?
So basically Argent…you accused me of being ‘staggeringly ignorant’ based on evidence that turns out to be not just wrong, but a complete fabrication. Unless you can provide actual evidence that contradicts mine (…I’ve got lots more where that comes from…from Caltech to MIT to Cambridge…all the results show your position [if you even have one] to be nothing but complete B.S.) we’ll just have to conclude that you are, in fact, staggeringly ignorant (not to mention willfully fraudulent).
…and from your first point, follows your second point, which turns out to be equally vacant.
(…and what does any of this have to do with ‘chaos magic’?...the practice of ‘chaos magic’ is something that would explicitly appear on that list that Argent disputed above…. and ‘free will’ can quite easily be argued to be a fundamental/pure form of chaos magic, but I’ll leave those issues for later)
You flat out dismiss what is generally accepted as the foundation of human identity. You provide not even two words of an argument. You don’t even define your terms (…at least not until nine posts later…and then with nothing more than fatuous scientific references that merely beg the question: what the hell are you talking about?...a dangerous question to ask because all you ever do is wave your hands about with epileptic grandeur and complain that you’re under no obligation to actually explain anything…or ‘google it’..[and, as is obvious from my first point, even your ‘google it’ positions are a pile of crap]).
If I were a creationist presenting such a position I would be laughed off the page…but when a skeptic does exactly the same thing not only are they NOT called-out, they are actually supported. NEWFLASH dudes…the emperor has no clothes. Doubtless quoting a moderator to support my position is ‘bad-form’ but what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
“If you want to discuss it as philosophy (or, we’ll assume, anything at all:…my edit) it is still up to you to present your workings i.e. how did you get to that conclusion. Otherwise people cannot discuss and perhaps argue against your argument which is what we can argue against.”
So basically Argent, you have claimed ‘x’ does not exist. You have provided not a shred of an argument to support this claim (even more questionable given that the ‘x’ in question is generally recognized as the foundation of human identity….to say it does not exist is an extraordinary claim if ever there was one). You have barely even defined your terms. All you have said is that since annnnoid has no evidence that ‘x’ does exist, your conclusion that ‘x’ does not exist is, by default, correct. Remember the FSM?
….but on the contrary, I have provided massive amounts of direct and indirect evidence that support the existence of ‘x’. I could go on for pages and pages and pages about the philosophical, religious, psychological, social, political, and even scientific implications of ‘free will’ (and I’ve specifically referenced all of these issues). Entire libraries have been written on the subject…literally…and that is not an exaggeration.
I’ll just summarize the evidence here: Nelson Mandela….: “ I am the captain of my soul, the master of my destiny.” ….just try and tell Nelson Mandela that free will does not exist! As for what NM means by that, and whether/how it supports ‘free will’ and all the other arguments, we’ll just wait and see if Argent actually says something for once. Doubtless Argent will somehow try to establish that NM is either irrelevant, or does not know what he’s talking about (five bucks says a one/two word answer….if there even is one).
There are actually well-known metaphysical objections to the existence of free will, but you haven’t even managed to reference any of those. All you have said is that it does not exist because Argent says so (bare assertion anyone?). And Argent is entirely justified in summarily dismissing entre libraries of evidence because….well, Argent hasn’t yet provided two words of an argument to explain that position either.
You have yet to demonstrate you have the ability to present more than two words to support anything Argent.
So….as Darat said, present an argument. If not we’ll just assume you don’t have one and this discussion will be over.
(…just a rather irrelevant point there Argent, but ‘free will’ would be one of the ‘words’ on that list that you insisted have been detected; ….so on the one hand you insist that everything has been detected [we’ll assume, by extension, that ‘detected’ means ‘exists’] but then on the other hand you insist that one of the words [free will] does not exist!...so which is it….we’ve detected everything and free will does exist, or it does not exist, in which case we haven’t detected everything?)
Question: What words would describe someone who completely dismisses the generally accepted foundation of human identity...without ever arguing the point?
Answer: Staggeringly Ignorant
Question: What words would describe someone who slanders/ridicules another’s position based on completely fabricated evidence or none at all?
Answer: Staggeringly Ignorant.
Two strikes Argent….wanna try for three?
The current state of neural scanning:
-How accurately and efficiently a mental state can be inferred is unknown.
-Whether a person’s compliance is required is unknown.
-Whether it is possible to decode concealed thoughts or even unconscious mental states is unknown.
-The maximum temporal resolution is unknown.
-The degree to which it is possible to provide a quasi-online estimate of an individual’s current cognitive or perceptual state is unknown.
-The problem of inverse referencing remains, essentially, unresolved.
-Whether decoding methods are sensitive enough to reliably reveal personal information for individual subjects in unknown.
-The conclusions being that brain reading will be restricted to simple cases with a fixed number of alternatives...for all of which training date are available....because of the all but infinite number of cognitive states and necessarily limited training categories.
Essentially…with currently available technology and processing and interpretive software …if you or anyone were to walk off the street into a lab and be wired into a neural scanner (fMRI for example) the results would NOT be able to show EITHER an explicit or even general representation of:
- what your are seeing
- what you are hearing
- what your are smelling
- what you are touching/feeling
- what you are imagining
- what you are thinking
- what you are feeling
Every case is substantially subjective. Generalized predictive software exists (with limited degrees of resolution), but specific scanning requires subjectively evaluated training categories and even then there are significant limits on what exactly can be achieved (as described in the last point).
This was all confirmed by a number of sources, but primarily by a professor of cognitive neuroscience at an English university with quite a number of published/peer reviewed studies (all of which I can confirm/reference/link to if you really want to drag your humiliation out for another few posts).
What it comes down to Argent, is you simply can’t face the fact that science cannot tell you who, or what, you are. It can’t. Period.
Your contention that science has all these abilities …
…is now established to be complete unmitigated crap.
Googling ‘brain emotion’ does not qualify as evidence of anything except a grade 2 spelling ability. In addition… your ‘proof’ has now been conclusively exposed as proof of nothing except the indisputable fact that you fabricated the whole thing and simply do not know what you’re talking about. In the scientific community if you had made such colossal unsubstantiated claims that were not only false, and were not only the basis for trumped up charges against another member, but turned out to be complete fabrications…. you would be ridiculed, you would be immediately fired from whatever job you hold, you would have every professional qualification you possess revoked, you would be banned from publication for the rest of your life and your membership in every professional organization would be summarily nullified.
….but at JREF you have groupies. What do you suppose that says about the groupies?
What is truly amusing is to watch as this herd of skeptics appears and dutifully makes all the right bleats of support in all the right places. Does anybody actually think for themselves? Only once has the blatant absurdity of Argent’s various positions been contradicted. Integrity is also a word on that list…do you suppose that doesn’t exist either?
So basically Argent…you accused me of being ‘staggeringly ignorant’ based on evidence that turns out to be not just wrong, but a complete fabrication. Unless you can provide actual evidence that contradicts mine (…I’ve got lots more where that comes from…from Caltech to MIT to Cambridge…all the results show your position [if you even have one] to be nothing but complete B.S.) we’ll just have to conclude that you are, in fact, staggeringly ignorant (not to mention willfully fraudulent).
…and from your first point, follows your second point, which turns out to be equally vacant.
(…and what does any of this have to do with ‘chaos magic’?...the practice of ‘chaos magic’ is something that would explicitly appear on that list that Argent disputed above…. and ‘free will’ can quite easily be argued to be a fundamental/pure form of chaos magic, but I’ll leave those issues for later)
You flat out dismiss what is generally accepted as the foundation of human identity. You provide not even two words of an argument. You don’t even define your terms (…at least not until nine posts later…and then with nothing more than fatuous scientific references that merely beg the question: what the hell are you talking about?...a dangerous question to ask because all you ever do is wave your hands about with epileptic grandeur and complain that you’re under no obligation to actually explain anything…or ‘google it’..[and, as is obvious from my first point, even your ‘google it’ positions are a pile of crap]).
If I were a creationist presenting such a position I would be laughed off the page…but when a skeptic does exactly the same thing not only are they NOT called-out, they are actually supported. NEWFLASH dudes…the emperor has no clothes. Doubtless quoting a moderator to support my position is ‘bad-form’ but what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
“If you want to discuss it as philosophy (or, we’ll assume, anything at all:…my edit) it is still up to you to present your workings i.e. how did you get to that conclusion. Otherwise people cannot discuss and perhaps argue against your argument which is what we can argue against.”
So basically Argent, you have claimed ‘x’ does not exist. You have provided not a shred of an argument to support this claim (even more questionable given that the ‘x’ in question is generally recognized as the foundation of human identity….to say it does not exist is an extraordinary claim if ever there was one). You have barely even defined your terms. All you have said is that since annnnoid has no evidence that ‘x’ does exist, your conclusion that ‘x’ does not exist is, by default, correct. Remember the FSM?
….but on the contrary, I have provided massive amounts of direct and indirect evidence that support the existence of ‘x’. I could go on for pages and pages and pages about the philosophical, religious, psychological, social, political, and even scientific implications of ‘free will’ (and I’ve specifically referenced all of these issues). Entire libraries have been written on the subject…literally…and that is not an exaggeration.
I’ll just summarize the evidence here: Nelson Mandela….: “ I am the captain of my soul, the master of my destiny.” ….just try and tell Nelson Mandela that free will does not exist! As for what NM means by that, and whether/how it supports ‘free will’ and all the other arguments, we’ll just wait and see if Argent actually says something for once. Doubtless Argent will somehow try to establish that NM is either irrelevant, or does not know what he’s talking about (five bucks says a one/two word answer….if there even is one).
There are actually well-known metaphysical objections to the existence of free will, but you haven’t even managed to reference any of those. All you have said is that it does not exist because Argent says so (bare assertion anyone?). And Argent is entirely justified in summarily dismissing entre libraries of evidence because….well, Argent hasn’t yet provided two words of an argument to explain that position either.
You have yet to demonstrate you have the ability to present more than two words to support anything Argent.
So….as Darat said, present an argument. If not we’ll just assume you don’t have one and this discussion will be over.
(…just a rather irrelevant point there Argent, but ‘free will’ would be one of the ‘words’ on that list that you insisted have been detected; ….so on the one hand you insist that everything has been detected [we’ll assume, by extension, that ‘detected’ means ‘exists’] but then on the other hand you insist that one of the words [free will] does not exist!...so which is it….we’ve detected everything and free will does exist, or it does not exist, in which case we haven’t detected everything?)
Question: What words would describe someone who completely dismisses the generally accepted foundation of human identity...without ever arguing the point?
Answer: Staggeringly Ignorant
Question: What words would describe someone who slanders/ridicules another’s position based on completely fabricated evidence or none at all?
Answer: Staggeringly Ignorant.
Two strikes Argent….wanna try for three?
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Nonpareil
The Terrible Trivium
No, it's known quite precisely. We know what the limits of neural scanning are.
No, it's known. People who are actively trying to confuse things like neural scanners and polygraphs often can. Still, this obfuscation only drops the accuracy by a certain percentage (about ten percent) rather than making it entirely unreliable.
No. We know it's possible. We may or may not have the technology to do so at the moment.
The what now?
No, it's entirely known.
And what problem would that be?
No, it's known, and the answer is "yes, it can, with about seventy-five percent accuracy in people trying to fool the machine and up to ninety-five percent in people who are cooperative".
Wrong. Do your research.
No.
By "limited", of course, you mean seventy-five to ninety-five percent accuracy.
Please do.
Actually, it can, but I don't particularly care whether it can or not.
No, it isn't. Try again.
So you still don't get that I wasn't trying to provide you with any evidence? Not surprising, really. You don't seem to be able to process the fact that I simply don't care whether or not you ever figure out the truth.
I don't care about your arguments, annnnoid, because you are unwilling to even take thirty seconds and do a Google search to find facts which are readily available. Hell, you won't even take ten seconds and look at the results of a search that was done for you.
What proof? I haven't tried to prove anything to you (above link excepted), because I don't care. I've simply told you that you're wrong. If anyone else on this forum actually cares enough to want to see me give the proof, I will, but I don't see any reason to do so because you asked.
No. I accused you of being staggeringly ignorant, period. And you are. You still are, despite your above grandstanding. You have offered absolutely no substantiation for the claims which you gave above, and they are all demonstrably false.
If you want to find the proof, Google it.
You haven't given us any evidence. Not a smidgen. Just repeated ignorant assertions.
Whether or not people think it exists is irrelevant. They have no evidence.
There is no argument to be made. "Free will does not exist" is the null hypothesis.
They're your terms. You're the one arguing for free will. You define it.
No. If you were someone presenting a position which has no supporting evidence, as you are, you would be laughed off the page. My position is supported by the evidence. I just don't care enough to bring it to you. Everyone else understands that, which is why I have not been accused of the bare assertion fallacy. You might as well be a flat-Earther accusing me of the bare assertion fallacy for saying "the Earth is round".
Burden of proof fallacy.
Argument ad populum fallacy.
Your terms.
And it is.
Yep. And this is exactly what the FSM is meant to illustrate. Lacking evidence of non-existence does not prove existence.
No, you haven't.
All of which is irrelevant, because it is not evidence. It's argument ad populum on a massive scale.
Not evidence.
You would win that bet. A one- to two-word answer is all it takes to debunk your drivel. What Nelson Mandela believes is irrelevant unless he can present evidence to back it up.
HINT: He can't.
Because there is no need.
Straw man.
There aren't libraries of evidence. There are libraries of people either failing to establish its existence or assuming its existence. Trying to pretend that this is evidence only makes you look foolish.
Isn't it rather sad, then, that I accomplish more with two words than you do in several paragraphs? In two words, I show that your entire position is fallacious. In a mountain of gibberish, you manage only to make yourself look more foolish.
Then that would be an exception. I didn't read your entire list. Of course we didn't detect free will. It doesn't exist.
So do you have any actual argument to present or not?
annnnoid
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Every one of these ‘ignorant assertions’ (as you called them) was either written or reviewed and explicitly confirmed by Professor Geraint Rees, Director… Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London…who is the one of the authors of (among other things) the following paper: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi...field%3A%28decoding+fmri%29&searchHistoryKey=
As for that link you included (whatever happened to 'google it' ?), did you even read it? Do you know what any of it means (inverse referencing is one of the most significant stumbling blocks in neural scanning…if you don’t even know what that means I can only wonder about your understanding of everything else)? It actually does far more to confirm the conclusions I presented than anything you presented.
And once again…you throw out a mass of claims without a shred of supporting evidence what-so-ever. I’m not going to waste any more time waiting for ‘google-it’.
We’ll just conclude that, once again…you don’t know what you’re talking about. That discussion is now over.
As for ‘free will’….I have presented massive amounts of evidence to support the existence of the phenomenon. The explicitly stated positions of some of the most brilliant philosophers who have ever lived: Descartes, Hegel, Plato, Kant…to name a few. Just about every major religious tradition that has ever existed. The constitutions and founding documents of every liberal democracy in the world. Only a complete and utter fool would insist that ‘free will’ does not figure fundamentally and prominently in the metaphysics of these individuals and social phenomenon.
Where ever it is that even you live Argent, you can be 100% guaranteed that ‘free will’ is a basic component of the philosophy upon which the legal realities of your society function. It may have escaped your notice there Sherlock, but that’s what societies (and lives) are based on…philosophical concepts created out of human truths (which, I’m sure, you’re also going to insist don’t exist). If you want some really convincing evidence of ‘free will’…try going to a place where they don’t believe in it, like North Korea. I’m sure you’d find lots of folks who would just love you, and then they’d show you to the nearest rice paddy…. which is where you’d spend the rest of your short life in blissful misery.
…and yet, somehow all of these are ‘ignorant assertions’…and there is ‘no supporting evidence’ ?!?!?!?!?!? A huge chunk of the world’s history is predicated on the metaphysics/behavior interpreted as ‘free will’ (using the exact same varieties of considered inductive and deductive reasoning from which every variety of science and philosophy of science is achieved). ‘Something’ exists that all of this evidence is the result of. We call that something ‘free will’. We could call it ‘dog poop’ or ‘dingbat’…obviously what we call it doesn’t matter. It is generally regarded as a fundamental human truth and colossal social and psychological structures are indisputably built on its foundation. The indisputable existence of these structures implicitly and explicitly implicates the existence of the foundation. As Robin quite clearly and explicitly pointed out in an earlier post, the epistemology of science is incapable of adjudicating these realities. Sam Harris is only the most recent to try…and fail [utterly] to alter this implacable fact. Apparently you think you can succeed where Harris so spectacularly failed. The floor is open.
As for your argument (if it can be so generously called one), all you have done is make excuse after excuse after excuse after excuse after excuse after excuse.
You say your position is supported by the evidence…
…yet once again…
ARGENT DOES NOT SHOW US THE EVIDENCE!!
Argent goes on for post after post after post after post after post insisting that Argent is right…and insisting that Argent has the evidence to prove this fact. But for some mysterious reason Argent is constrained from submitting this evidence. Apparently, you “don’t care enough to bring it to me” (why ever not?....just show it….it sure sounds conclusive…. and then we can put this whole argument to rest).
…but you seem to care enough to go on for post after post after post making endless excuses and reminding everyone just how little you care about explaining how little you care.
Y’know what that’s called Argent?......B*******Z******P!
So please Argent…present this startling evidence that rids the human landscape so conclusively of this petty triviality. I mean…just about everyone…including the idiot Nelson Mandela… is convinced that they are responsible for their own actions. You have evidence to the contrary.
SHOW US THE DAMN EVIDENCE THEN….if, that is, you have any.
Or perhaps one of your fellow skeptics has this magical information available (you claim this is the reason no one has been critical…let’s see if you’re right). I’d sure like to know what it is…and if they don’t (present it), I’ll just assume they don’t know what it is either (which will establish your claim to be wrong) …so maybe they’re all just as eager to learn about it as I am. Being fellow skeptics of course, they can’t actually admit that because that would make your position look rather silly….wouldn’t it.
Of course, I could be wrong. It could be a conspiracy. Perhaps all the skeptics have access to this miraculous evidence and no one cares enough to prove that I am wrong. Wow, that would be a first. Skeptics withholding evidence so as to avoid establishing that an opponent is a fool. A truly novel debating tactic as well. Your compassion is truly touching but please, go ahead and prove I’m a fool…I insist.
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