justinian said:
1) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1463-6409.2007.00308.x/abstract 2) You said quote: "Chosing your own beliefs seems like you're actually shutting yourself down to what reality is" I am not sure what you mean by this. If a person made some nonsense up like, "I believe my dog can figure out algebra" and actually believed it, then yes. I agree. If you mean that to believe in something with no scientific proof pf existence like a deity, aliens or ghost then billions on this earth must indeed be shutting themselves down to reality. ------------------------------- You said quote: "The word choice implies that you have no information whatsoever on a certain claim which would make it a virtual coin toss wether you believe something or not". I am now totally lost here, please truly forgive me.None the less I will try to respond. I sat on a jury once. We had all available "information on a certain claim" as you said placed before us. The jury was split. No one tossed a coin. Everyone examined the evidence and came to their individual conclusion. The word choice meant in this case each member of the jury got to choose if he or she believed the defendant to be guilty or innocent depending on the evidence. This is same if it is a court case, a scentific theory or simply something a someone told you. You are given the information and you choose to believe it or not. I really cannot lay it out any more simple than that. I believe if I jump of a the roof of a 30 floor building onto the pavement below I would most likely die. I did not believe it when many scientists said with some authority that the largest possible terrestrial planet based on physics can only be 15x earth's mass ( I think it is 15x, either they way they now belive they were wrong), I believed the minority who said "No, you can possibly get such planets much bigger than 15x earth's mass" based on the theory they laid out. - I cannot produce evidence of this debate as it was in an astronomy journal. I get to choose what I believe or do not believe base on how I analyse the evidence. I do not toss a coin. Nothing is going to change that. ------------------------------------------------------------ I have to leave it here for now. I have been writing this (between doing my work) for quite a while now and it is fast approaching home time and I need to carry doing what pays my bills. I will finish my response later tonight, time available or tomorrow. I will post this now so I don't have to start all over again and to let you know I am still "listening". Just before I go let me point out that I do not take this as a win-lost argument. I respect your arguments and most of all appreiciate the tone in which you present them, unlike so many others. Not sure of getting me better informed though.
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Well about writing between workhours i totally understand, I was doing exactly the same. Hard to make very long points when you have to minimize the window all the time lol.
Anyway, back to our small exchange:
1- I started reading the article and so far I just see a discussion on semantics. Apparently to read the full article i need to be registered on this website which I am not. In any case it seemed more like a filosophical discussion than a scientific one that was being put forward on the part of the article i red. In either case I believe what's being fought is a strawman in which a person's view of a specific phenomenon that seems obvious to this person should be considered a fact (the example on the article of the glass of ice water). One important thing to keep in mind is that in science you don't rely on your own observations to determine a fact. You need to put forward what you observed and wait for the rest of the scientific community at large to test your observations and compare if they get the same readings as you. For something to become a 'scientific fact', it requires an enormous ammount of confirmation by independent sources and only after enough time has passed such thing can be considered a fact. Key words ; time and many independent observers agreeing with you.
If you'll have some dispute on this we can get back to it. But again, it seems more like a semantics discussion, not very relevant for our main point.
2- I take your point on the court example and give you credit for that. I should have been more precise.
So I'll rephrase my own point. Given a certain claim, your belief or disbelief for such claim depends (or should depend) on how convincing the evidence provided for it was. Of course different people will have different standards of evidence, but the point is, You don't actively chose to believe X. Rather you believe X because many facts add up that cause X to be a believable claim.
There are indeed people who will claim to 'believe' something for other reasons (makes them feel good, were raised to believe it, etc). I submit to you these are terrible reasons to believe anything. It shows intelectual lazyness and total disregard for the actual truth.
I don't 'believe' the theory of evolution by natural selection because it makes me feel good about myself or because I was raised to believe it. The reason I am convinced it's very true amounts to the gigantic pile of evidence supporting it (fossil record, DNA, observable testing in laboratories, explanatory power, etc). Please be aware that the entire basis for the modern medicine as it is practiced is based on evolution. The reason why you need new vaccines for certain viruses is because they evolve over time. The reason why the flu vaccine of 20 years ago is not used anymore is because this virus mutated and evolved to resist this past vaccine. Only the theory of evolution by natural selection can explain all of these observable facts.
When someone puts up a theory that will have more explanatory power than the current one and proves to be accurate I promise you we'll embrace this new theory. Until then we don't chose to believe evolution. We are forced to accept it as a matter of fact :)
1 more thing before I go. Many times you'll hear stuff on the news about 'some scientists have said (insert bold claim)...'
That's all fine and good, but scientists are people and before you have a generally accepted theory (and I honestly can't think of one mroe bulletproof than the current theory of evolution) you'll have many an enourmous ammount of hypotesis put forward by smaller groups of scientists. These hypotesis are like bullets being shot at whatever currently accepted theory is in the moment. And the more shots the accepted theory takes and resists, the more confidence you should have in it.
I studied physics engineering, so take it for what it's worth, I've never heard of any impossibility of planets being 15x more massive than earth. Case in point, Jupiter. Sounds like you probably red some terrible interpretation made by some publication who probably didn't understand what they were told and put the information to the public in such a terrible way. Sometimes when something sounds ridiculous, it's probably not true :).
time to get back to work, I'll let you take your time and respond to this if you'll feel it's worth something :P
cheers
