I like this clip from Feynman about the descriptive power of science. What I also like is his statement that a scientific view of the world need not detract from other views. But I suspect he is wrong. It's hard not to feel that there is something lost when the flower is viewed the way he describes. Different perspectives on the world do exist in some degree of tension with one another. Scientific realism can't help but be reductionist.
slimboyfat
JoinedPosts by slimboyfat
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99
The Greatest Intellectual Scam of All-Time: French Postmodernism
by cofty insbf you annoyed me enough to deserve this.. gad saad's comments on the nonsensical gibberish of jacques derrida, michel foucault, and jacques lacan.
charlatanism of the highest order.
.... the first quote from derrida starts as 2:50.
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JW TV, this month about evolution
by bohm inthis month the last segment is about evolution.
one is with a sister with a university education in biochemistry who (presumably) teaches at a highschool or public school.
she says that left handedness of amino acids indicates life was created because "if it was a random process half would be right handed and half left handed" (paraphrased).
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slimboyfat
In Europe rejection of evolution has long been a fringe viewpoint, and the United States seems to be making progress in the same direction. So yes it must be increasingly difficult for JWs to remain committed to JW style creationism in the face of dis confirmation in school and media. -
99
The Greatest Intellectual Scam of All-Time: French Postmodernism
by cofty insbf you annoyed me enough to deserve this.. gad saad's comments on the nonsensical gibberish of jacques derrida, michel foucault, and jacques lacan.
charlatanism of the highest order.
.... the first quote from derrida starts as 2:50.
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slimboyfat
That's right. That's the argument that Gergen makes (better than I can) that science has been so phenomenally successful at predicting and explaining the world that we can fall into the trap of mistaking the usefulness of scientific discourse for a unique language which gives up a perfect picture picture corresponding to the world in itself. But usefulness and predictive power need not equal correspondence to reality.
(This post is about a day late)
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Witness Carts - A Vehicle for Significant Decline
by slimboyfat ini was stalking to a jw today about her recent experience on the carts and with being a jw generally.
until this conversation i considered the carts as just an ineffective preaching method and a harmless waste of time.
but now i wonder if the effect of the carts might be to produce noticeable decline in jw numbers.
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slimboyfat
The funny thing is that the cart witnessing fiasco seems to have weaned JWs off doing regular door to door. Many may never go back. What an unmitigated disaster of Watchtower strategy.
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Witness Carts - A Vehicle for Significant Decline
by slimboyfat ini was stalking to a jw today about her recent experience on the carts and with being a jw generally.
until this conversation i considered the carts as just an ineffective preaching method and a harmless waste of time.
but now i wonder if the effect of the carts might be to produce noticeable decline in jw numbers.
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slimboyfat
Sorry Steve it just occurred my comment above appears pretty random out of context. I was referring to a funny typo in your message on the previous page, following as it does from my typo you pointed out in the first post.
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Is it Okay for a JW to be a Storm Chaser?
by Iamallcool ini am thinking about chasing storms for fun.
i know it is very dangerous.
i just think it will be very cool to have a new exciting hobby.
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slimboyfat
We don't get twisters here. I'm more interested in like gale to hurricane force winds and torrential downpours, flans floods, and floods.
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99
The Greatest Intellectual Scam of All-Time: French Postmodernism
by cofty insbf you annoyed me enough to deserve this.. gad saad's comments on the nonsensical gibberish of jacques derrida, michel foucault, and jacques lacan.
charlatanism of the highest order.
.... the first quote from derrida starts as 2:50.
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slimboyfat
SBF - I suspect you are not even sure that the Watchtower are wrong in any meaningful sense. You simply find their narrative to be less useful to you than you once did. Is this a fair characterisation?
Actually I would argue that I believe JWs are wrong in a more profound way than simply being factually wrong. It's your approach that leaves people theoretically vulnerable to return. The logic of your approach is that if evidence emerges that JW doctrines were in fact "true" then we should all go back and take part again. That's why I think ethical and aesthetic grounds for rejecting JW beliefs are often more compelling and satisfying than merely disagreements over scientific facts.
Since my rejection of JW ideology does not at its heart rely upon a refutation of its truth value, I am not vulnerable to counter-evidence as you are.
There was an excellent thread on the forum many years ago with a subject along the lines: "who else left JWs while still believing it was true?" Many people on the thread described the amazing process of rejecting the prospect of future paradise on earth, while believing it in full to be true, because they found life as a JW unbareable in the here and now.
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99
The Greatest Intellectual Scam of All-Time: French Postmodernism
by cofty insbf you annoyed me enough to deserve this.. gad saad's comments on the nonsensical gibberish of jacques derrida, michel foucault, and jacques lacan.
charlatanism of the highest order.
.... the first quote from derrida starts as 2:50.
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slimboyfat
"Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end."
I love this passage from Foucault. Beautiful and hardly obscurantist.
One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area – European culture since the sixteenth century – one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. It is not around him and his secrets that knowledge prowled for so long in the darkness. In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the knowledge of identities, differences, characters, equivalences, words – in short, in the midst of all the episodes of that profound history of the Same – only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance was not the liberation of an old anxiety, the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and philosophies: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”
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99
The Greatest Intellectual Scam of All-Time: French Postmodernism
by cofty insbf you annoyed me enough to deserve this.. gad saad's comments on the nonsensical gibberish of jacques derrida, michel foucault, and jacques lacan.
charlatanism of the highest order.
.... the first quote from derrida starts as 2:50.
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slimboyfat
The question is only fatuous if you take the assumption that human reason is the ultimate measure of truth to be inviolable and unquestionable.
Society in general once held similar views in relation to God as the arbiter of truth, during which period questioning God as the source of ultimate truth was similarly "utterly fatuous".
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99
The Greatest Intellectual Scam of All-Time: French Postmodernism
by cofty insbf you annoyed me enough to deserve this.. gad saad's comments on the nonsensical gibberish of jacques derrida, michel foucault, and jacques lacan.
charlatanism of the highest order.
.... the first quote from derrida starts as 2:50.
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slimboyfat
How can you be sure the worm's view is ignorant and ours is faithful to reality? Or put it another way. What if there are beings that are as much more intelligent than humans than humans are compared with the worm. They need not be supernatural, they could have evolved. Would they necessarily view and describe the nature of the earth the same as we do? If our view of the earth is to be preferred to the worm's because we are more intelligent, how can you rule out the possibility that a superior intelligence may view it differently still?