Q!Re: Shall We All Leave At Once?


"Phil Bowles" <philipbowles2003@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:b69845fa-ccba-482b-956a-12f22193723c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 19 May, 04:00, "Agamemnon" <agamem...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Phil Bowles" <philipbowles2...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message


>> No. I was talking about the people defending RTD. The reference to PC
>> LOONIES should have given you a clue who I was referring to.

> Um ... everyone other than you? That seems to be the way you usually
> use the term.

No. The PC LOONIES. That is perfectly clear to anyone but a comprehensionaly
challenged fool.

Ah, so these are the people who, like Steve Wilson, don't mention RTD
at all and you slam them for defending him, right?

POPPY***! They are people like Steve Wilson who want RTD to penetrate their back side and to suck his ***.


> appeals to Plato and Aristotle spring to mind). And more often than
> not you just try to pass opinion off as fact, such as your strange
> ideas about religion.

No, that's you who tries to do that. I only cite original texts.

You miss the point - citing original texts doesn't make the argument
you're using them to support correct or factual, even presuming the
texts themselves are correct representations of events.

You don't understand subject. Citing original texts proves that you don't know what you are talking about and are relying on other peoples personal opinions who don't know what they are talking about either and that what I have said is confirmed historically.


For example:

Citing original text: There is a stone Linear A inscription in Crete
with an undeciphered name on it.

The name WAS DECIPHERED! That is why I cited it.


Speculative argument (NOT fact): That name must be Zeus-Pater, and the
individual referred to must be the deity generally regarded as
fictitious.

The name on the inscription is Sa-a-si-te-pi which is identical to Ausstaeb otherwise known as Istaveon from the Bavarian Chroniclas and other records.

Istaveon = Zeus Deon. From linguistics when know that in Minoan times the name Zeus was pronounced Sdeus. Sa-a-si-te-pi was Zeus. Live with it. Zeus is also referred to in Egyptian inscriptions from the same time as Sheshi. Sheshi is identical to Saasi.


> What you post are opinions,
>> mostly unsubstantiated.

> Depends on the topic - I note when I've giving a personal opinion and
> generally provide citations when discussing facts.

Your so called citations are nothing more than personal opinions of other
peoples personal opinions of other peoples opinions who have never actually
read the source texts

Hmm, you mean such as translations of Aristotle or the text of the
Travels of Noah?

You have never cited a single source text ever. Aristotle is a primary eye witness. The Travels of Noe into Europe is based on primary and secondary sources including Berosus' Chaldanean history and is not a personal opinion. It's a historical record and written as such.


or who deliberately ignored the source texts and made
something else up based on somebody else's lack of understanding of the
source texts which they never considered checking against the facts.

Remember the punctuation we just taught you about?

IDIOT!

Get an education and learn to think for your self and do your own research.


>> > As I've told you before, sophistry won't let you get away with >> > sloppy
>> > thinking. If you manifestly (and repeatedly) get things wrong, and

>> Except I haven't got things wrong. You just think I'm wrong because >> you
>> don't understand and have never studied the subject

> You've tried mouthing off about philosophy and science before now,
> both subjects I have indeed studied and demonstrably understand better

Yove not studied real science or philosophy.

Hmm, what was that you were saying about taking the experts at their
word?

You've not studied real science or philosophy. That is perfectly clear. Try starting with the primary texts and stop thinking you can learn a subject based on someone else's personal opinion who hasn't read the primary texts either.

You've never read a primary
text in your life as I demonstrated when I showed you didn't know Plato

You've really got to get a handle on what "demonstrated" means (SP, is
it in the list?) You provided an example of one Platonic text I
happened not to have read (fair enough, he wrote quite a lot and in

It was a text you were refereeing to and pretending to be an expert on and yet you had not even read it. Since I had I knew from the start you were talking bull***.

any case for much of my course I focused on more relevant philosophers
such as Kant). This does not in any way "demonstrate" that "I've never
read a primary text in my life". How does it demonstrate, for example,
that I've never read Leviathan, the Groundwork on the Metaphysics of
Morals, A Treatise of Human Nature, An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, or for that matter On Friendship or The Republic. All
primary philosophy texts.

We were not discussing those texts. The texts that were relevant to the discussion were ones it was clear you had not read and I had, otherwise I wouldn't have been making the claims I made based on them.


but
were mouthing off rubbish contrary to the texts themselves based on someone
else's personal opinions who never read or understood the source texts
properly. And as for science. Biology isn't a real science. It's observation
of behaviour and therefore personal opinion.

SP, add "biology" to the list, please. The term you're looking for is

IDIOT!

"ethology", a discipline which was for a long time scorned by
biologists themselves (in much the same way physicists - and many
other scientists - sneer at cosmology these days). Such developments

They do not.

in biology as evolutionary theory and ecological modelling have little
if anything to do with behavioural studies.

They are about as scientific as Anaxagoras theories of the cosmos. Anaxagoras didn't have a mathematical formulation and was speculating, and neither do you.


Having said all that, it is of course absurd to equate "observation of
behaviour" with "personal opinion". Observations are just that -
records of what's actually happening. "Cuttlefish change colour" isn't
a personal opinion, it's an observation. *Why* they change colour may

It's a personal opinion when you start making claims as to why they change colour and why they were thinking when they did so, for examples all the bull*** biologists come up with about why certain animals spray on trees or adopt certain behaviours towards others.

be a matter to hypothesise about, and in the true scientific
tradition, to test - indeed behavioural studies are heavily based on
experiment to develop explanations for behaviours. Now, what's the
word for making observations and conducting experiments in order to
find explanations for those observations?

Speculation is the word you are looking for.


Real sciences are based on
mathematics

Mathematics doesn't predict anything. Nor do statistics. Scientists
use them to make predictions, but in order to do so they need
observations or hypotheses to feed in. Mathematics is just the

Nope. You've never heard of Theoretical Physics then. Einstein predicted gravitational lensing decades before it was observed. The same goes for time dilation, decades before it could be measured. Most of the elementary particles in modern physics were predicted by the mathematics decades before the equipment could be built to detect them. In fact quantum mechanics has now (several decades ago) reached the stage where it's predictions of what should be observed have a smaller margin of error than the experiments measuring them.

computer processing - feed in your data, get your output. Science is
"based on mathematics" in the same way journalism is based on word
processors - it's a tool that makes the process a lot quicker and
simpler, but isn't in any way fundamental to the process. Stats are

You are talking codswallop. Without mathematics modern physics wouldn't exist, Newtonian physics wouldn't exist either nor would radio or television since Maxwell predicted radio waves before they were discovered. Mathematics is fundamental to physics and always has been since the time Archimedes, Aristarchus and Meton.

just a way of organising data and summarising results and trends;
anything the maths can tell you you can work out by staring at the raw
data set long enough if you have the time or inclination.

Staring at the raw data set long enough if you have the time or inclination? You are fucking crazy. Sarting at the raw data isn't going to tell you when the next solar eclipse is going to occur or if an asteroid is going to hit the earth or not. Unless you have a mathematical model you wouldn't even know what data to collect to find out.


And biology uses an awful lot of stats in any case - in my field alone
there are at least two journals devoted entirely to particular aspects
of statistical analysis, and a number of others that routinely carry
papers on stats and modelling as the larger part of their content.

> Um. Buzz - wrong again. With the possible exception of cosmologists,
> who are arguably only regarded as scientists because they're lumped in
> with 'physicists' and have scientific training, rather than because

HOGWASH!

Cosmology was the first ever science and Cosmologists were the first ever
scientists since before the time of Anaxagoras.

You're thinking of astronomers (and way back then they didn't use

No. Anaxagoras was not an astronomer, not even an astrologer. He was a cosmologist and purely theoretical.

mathematics, just observed the behaviour of stars and planets, so
can't have been real scientists...)

What a load of bollocks. Ptolemy's model of the solar system was based on mathematics. It wouldn't have worked otherwise. His model was based on earlier models all of which were mathematically based.

Cosmoslogy is a very recent
science, hence the fact that it's still stuck without the tools to do
anything other than theoretical work.

Nope. Cosmology has existed since Anaxagoras and earlier. It's never had a proper mathematical footing until modern times but Pythagoras had a go at suggesting one in about 536 BC based on the geometry of triangles.


> what they actually do is science. A sizeable number of cosmologists
> are among those who complain about the lack of scientific rigour in
> that field. It's *fundamental* in science that no claim is accepted
> until it's been subjected to and passed tests, even if this ideal
> isn't always followed to the letter in practice. Your struggle to
> understand even this core concept demonstrates just how weak your
> grasp of scientific principles is.

You have no idea what scientific principles are. All theories are considered
valid unless proven otherwise. That is why they are called THEORIES not
laws!

Two more, SP - theory (scientific) and law (scientific).

A theory is called a theory because it is accepted in science that our
ways of modelling the world are approximations to make things simple
for people to understand, rather than a true description of the world,
and in the knowledge that all theories are replaced in time. And it

HOGWASH!

The aim of Newton's theory of gravitation was to give a true description of the world and the entire solar system and universe. It still remains valid today as a sub-set of Einstein's theory of general relativity and will always remain valid as such.

takes a lot of work before anything in science is accepted as a theory
- nothing is accepted as a theory until it has passed rigorous tests
of all its assumptions repeatedly (again, except in cosmology, where
you can say "oh, I know, let's invent extra dimensions to make the
maths work. We'll call it 'string theory'").

BULL***!

A theory is accepted as a theory from the very moment it is proposed as an explanation for the observed facts. If it did not explain they observed facts it would never have been proposed and would not be a theory of any sort. It is accepted as being valid unless proven otherwise.


Secondly, the term "law" has a very specific meaning in science, so
isn't available to describe theories, hypotheses, or wild speculation
anyway. A scientific law is something which is necessarily true if the
conditions are met

I have already explained all that.

- for example the laws of physics describe the
critical values forces of nature must take in order for them to have
their observed effects.

NO THEY DONT!

The critical values of all the physical constants fundamental to describing the forces of nature have to all be fed into the theories by hand. There is not one theory in existence which will give you the values of all of the physical constants such as the speed of light or the charge of the electron or Plank's constant. Maybe one day someone will come up with such a theory but at present none exist. This is one of the biggest if not the biggest problem faced by theoretical physics.

What's been described as the law of natural
selection describes the set of circumstances in which natural
selection will inevitably occur; in fact in that case it's a logical
impossibility for those conditions to be met and for there to be no
natural selection.

It has always been that way throughout the history of science. If you
didn't think your theory was valid then you would have never devised it to
start with.

Most of the time, the same observations can be explained by multiple
possible hypotheses - a scientist's job is to identify the

Then unless proven otherwise all the possible hypotheses are equally valid.

possibilities and develop tests to discriminate between them. For

Or to unite them. There are five or six different models all of which all predict what is observed in high energy physics. They are all valid even though they predict slightly different results. Fundamentally they are subsets a far greater theory which has been around for over 30 years.


For example if you observed a ball falling and saw that it's
speed increased as a function of time you would devise a theory which
accounted for that and that theory would be considered perfectly valid
unless proven otherwise,

Not until it had been pretty firmly established that not only is this
a common feature of balls, but that the same principle can be applied
to other objects. And you have to go back a few centuries, before the

Nope. Your theory is concerning just that ball under the conditions you made the observations. You wouldn't apply it to balls in general unless you'd tested other balls and other conditions. Testing it on other objects would be one of your tests to try to disprove it.

modern discipline of science had gained a foothold, to find a time
when even this simple observation would gain anything resembling
uncritical acceptance. The questions science deals in these days are
invariably more complex - all the basic observations have been made.


Twaddle. The modern discipline has been around for over 2 millennia. Ptolemy's theory of the motions of the starts and planets was devised to explain the observed data and it took of 1,000 years of tests and observation before it could be show to be deficient, though not invalid.

such as someone noticing that the balls velocity
was also affected by wind resistance and that unless it was dropped inside a
vacuum, it would reach a terminal velocity which could be observed if it
were dropped from a sufficient height. Claims are subjected to tests in
order to test the theory and if the claim passes the test the theory holds,
if not the theory is modified to give the same result as the experiment.

I wish you'd stop phrasing it like this. It makes it sound as though
scientists are in the business of fiddling the figures to make the
world fit.

That's what happens. Look at the Lorentz transformations, later to be known as the Einstein-Lorentz transformation when Einstein found a way of getting them theoretically when he invented special relativity.


If
a claim always gives the same results within the confines of the theory and
the experiment then it is called a law. But you wouldn't understand that
because there are no laws of Biology

See the above example. The truth is, biology is a lot more complex
than chemistry, maths - probably even than advanced physics, since
although it contains systems that are difficult to conceptualise, they
tend to be governed by a fairly small set of simple laws. "Laws of
biology" are often difficult to isolate, the mechanisms aren't
intuitive, and they are often hard to test - why does species richness
increase towards the tropics, for instance? It's been about three
hundred years since this question was first asked, and we still don't
know. But it does qualify as a law, or very nearly so.

It's a load of subjective speculations and which can be rendered totally invalid by climate change. It's as scientific in the grand scheme of things as Anaxagoras cosmological theory and Pythagoras triangles.


Has anyone ever managed to categorically prove classical physics? It can't
be done.

This is why science isn't about categorical proof. Who ever said it
was? As I've said before, proof is the preserve of mathematicians and
philosophers, not scientists.

Philosophy can't prove anything. That's why its Philosophy.


Classical physics is chaotic and you can never construct an
isolated system to test it out on. So what scientists do is state that
within such and such limits and margins of error Newton's laws are valid and
within such and such limits and margins of error Einstein's laws are valid
and so on. If you claim they are not, then you must prove otherwise.

Once again you miss the point - you're talking about theories that
have been subjected to and passed numerous tests. Yet your claim was
that any claim a scientist makes is treated as a valid theory until
disproven, which is simply false.

Wrong. It is a fact.


> One does
>> not have to substantiate anything unless you are claiming that >> something
>> someone else has said is wrong,

> Yes one does, but even if we were to grant this, your entire set of
> arguments of nearly any topic is predicated on the premise that the
> rest of the world is wrong about the subject, hence your need to
> substantiate it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,
> and all that - yet you struggle with evidence of the ordinary kind.

FOOL!

Ah, I was waiting for one of your trademark witty comebacks.

> Aggy, when you learned words as a kid, where did you get the meanings
> from?

Context and breakdown of the component parts.

Where does the context come from? Breakdown of the component parts has

Conversation.

nothing to do with it, as I explained. You can't describe the concept
of a car by reference to the concepts "wheel", "axle", "engine" etc.

Twaddle.


>Where do you suppose other people get the meanings from? The

Context and breakdown of the component parts.

> whole point of a dictionary is that it reflects standard usage of

The whole point of a dictionary is that it's a glorified spellchecker.

As is often said, you can't use a dictionary in the first place if you
don't know how the word you're looking for is spelled. It's true that
the most common way people use dictionaries probably is to check minor
details of spelling when they already have a broad idea of how the
word they're looking for is spelled, but that is not the whole point
of a dictionary, or even any part of its point.

And you can't use a dictionary as a science book or a history book.


You
don't go to a dictionary to find out a scientific definition. You consult a
science book.

A scientific dictionary, no less... Have you ever wondered why they

A scientific dictionary won't teach you science.

have legal dictionaries, biology dictionaries etc. full of the jargon
in those fields? Why do we call books with English/foreign language
translations "dictionaries"? Do we want to use them to find out what a
word like "mahasiswa" means in our language, or do we just want to
find out how "mahasiswa" is spelled?

> words, and in a world which has had dictionaries for about three
> centuries, ultimately people learn how to use the words from the
> dictionary in the first place. Now, *every* dictionary in the English

The *** they do. They didn't need dictionaries 2,000 years ago or even when
Shakespeare was alive.

You really never have got the hang of the idea that society changes,
have you? Journalists didn't need computers three hundred years ago
either, but you try finding any today who don't rely on computers to
do their job.

Oh, so the computers write their articles for them now do they, all by themselves?


> language defines "homosexual" as "sexual attraction towards one's own
> sex". This is what the word *means* - i.e. the concept this particular

That's what you have been deceived into thinking it means.

It's what it means in the English language.

No it doesn't.


>> > explaining in detail to you that the logic you were using to define
>> > the word - that it was defined as the meanings of each of the
>> > individual words it was derived from - is flawed. Someone even gave >> > an

>> And you never managed to convincingly do that. All that you did was to
>> express a personal opinion.

> Not so; it was substantiated through reference to the way the word is

No it was not. You can't substantiate anything through ignorant usage.

The usage was entirely gnorant. See? I can make up words too!

That's like believing that the world is flat because everyone else who is
ignorant of science says it looks flat.

Ah, but the difference is that here the people saying what homosexual
means are not ignorant of the English language - to the contrary
they're experts, so by your own logic shouldn't their word be taken as
gospel truth?

They are completely ignorant because they don't know what it really means.


Phil

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