The Limits of Science

[skakos]

No matter what you observe, you can define whatever axioms you want!
And no matter what axioms you choose, you will end up with a valid theory!
Do you disagree with that?
Do you believe that either of the three main different geometries for example is "better" or "more valid" than the other two?

That very last question was used by trolls on newsgroups in the 1990s to great effect. skakos's trolling skills are on full display.

A great personal attack instead of answering the questions or discussing the topic.
I would report your post but I like to see my "opponents" emptiness on display...

[Ginkgo]

Can we ever imagine that the basic framework of our scientific thinking will be expanded ?
Mainstream thinking says we exist in 4-d space-time. And although there are theoretical notions of higher (spatial?) dimensions arising from string theory - these may be redundant and arguably don't satisfy a need for plain common-sense interpretation at the fundamental framework level - required to 'stretch a canvas' upon which our scientific ideas can be painted.

On the other hand, are we still missing something far more fundamental from our scientific worldview ?
That being the non-physical, or dare I say 'spiritual' aspects of existence. (e.g. emergent properties that are more than just chemical and electrical signals)

Is it time to recognize a non-physical (/ spiritual) dimension in our scientific worldview?

http://5dview.wix.com/spiritual-dimension

Spot on.

Modern materialistic science has excluded US from the picture.
And then it wanders why it cannot "find" consciousness anywhere in its models...

Science has to exclude "us" from the picture. This is why it has been so successful in the past and continue to be successful.

It would be good for science to include a spiritual dimension, but this is not possible at this stage. You try to include a spiritual dimension to science then you end up doing pseudo-science.

I know I have posed this message numerous time in slightly different ways in numerous threads. There is an important difference between ontological conclusions and non-ontological metaphysical conclusions.

[SpheresOfBalance]

Can we ever imagine that the basic framework of our scientific thinking will be expanded ?
Mainstream thinking says we exist in 4-d space-time. And although there are theoretical notions of higher (spatial?) dimensions arising from string theory - these may be redundant and arguably don't satisfy a need for plain common-sense interpretation at the fundamental framework level - required to 'stretch a canvas' upon which our scientific ideas can be painted.

On the other hand, are we still missing something far more fundamental from our scientific worldview ?
That being the non-physical, or dare I say 'spiritual' aspects of existence. (e.g. emergent properties that are more than just chemical and electrical signals)

Is it time to recognize a non-physical (/ spiritual) dimension in our scientific worldview?

http://5dview.wix.com/spiritual-dimension

Spot on.

Modern materialistic science has excluded US from the picture.
And then it wanders why it cannot "find" consciousness anywhere in its models...

Science has to exclude "us" from the picture. This is why it has been so successful in the past and continue to be successful.

It would be good for science to include a spiritual dimension, but this is not possible at this stage. You try to include a spiritual dimension to science then you end up doing pseudo-science.

I know I have posed this message numerous time in slightly different ways in numerous threads. There is an important difference between ontological conclusions and non-ontological metaphysical conclusions.

I agree, and see that as to mans mind/consciousness, it may only be the results of electrochemical process's. But also see the potential for some sort of force of the universe that accounts for such things. A Spirit?? Not so sure it's not just a figment of mans imagination, the same goes for the so called soul. That they're just so much, man wanting to boost himself to some mystical level, not being satisfied, with just being and electrochemical entity, of chance evolution.

[skakos]

Actually no, because during NDEs the person is brain dead.
You know, DEAD.
Big difference.
Try to have conscious experience with a flat encephalogram.
Or, I will make it easier for you: Try to have a conscious experience while you have fainted.

I can tell you are really naive about this subject, someone who is dead is dead end of story, someone who comes back was not dead, people just thought they were. You can't be dead and come back to life, unless you are Jesus.

Sometimes the medical profession gets it wrong and says someone is dead even though they aren't, it's a tough call but end of the day you are either dead or alive, if a Dr says you were dead and then you wake up later the Dr was wrong. All that says of course is that there is a fine line between being dead and being a live that modern technology sometimes can't work out. It is a major issue in science atm how we pronounce death and it is always more of an art than a science. Dr's do know that sometimes the criteria for death are just wrong, for the most part though they are right. It's a tricky problem that is not aided by arm wavers who like to insert gaps in the subject because well they like to point out the flaws of science. We all know science is utterly and fundamentally flawed, everything it does is flawed, everything it says is wrong, and any good scientist knows that, which is more than can be said for the average religious person who is just right always by default, regardless of reason. Science literally has to be wrong or it is not science, if it is just the truth, it is not science, if it can never be wrong it is not science. Science thrives on being wrong, it doesn't just thrive it has to be to be science. Religious people could learn a thing or two about being wrong...

It's useful to note when a Dr is wrong he can't deny it when a religious person is wrong they can't admit it. That sort of I am right you are wrong thing is what makes religion if not a joke just a pointless waste of logical exercise. Religious people can not be wrong about anything, real people who exist in the real world can be, although they wont often admit it.

The argument "the man was not dead since he came back alive" is tautological in nature.
And do not take me to the "flaws of religion" topic.
This is something very very specific.

Think of a much simpler case: Can you have conscious experience when you have fainted?
I am not talking about the heart stopping for more than 10 minutes.
I am not talking about the brain having no detectable brain activity.

Just a simple... fainting episode.

What do you think?

[Blaggard]

dead
dɛd/
adjective
adjective: dead

1.
no longer alive.
"a dead body"
synonyms: deceased, expired, departed, gone, no more, passed on, passed away; More

No it's not a tautology being dead unless you are Jebus is an irreversible condition. You can't be dead and then come back to life, you were either on the brink of death and hence alive or dead there's no tautology there. If a Dr pronounces someone dead who isn't that's his mistake, it doesn't magically change the condition of the patient any more than any opinion does. You are either alive or dead there is no magic here.

I don't see the relevance of feinting to death tbh, there's no fine line between alive and dead they are two mutually opposite states you can't be kinda dead or slightly dead any more than you can be very very slightly dead you are either dead or you aren't, barring the existence of Vampires and various other mythical undead. It's a 1 or 0 dead or alive deal, not a 1 and/or 0 thing. Patients have been pronounced as brain dead and then woke up this clearly only means that the criteria for pronouncing death are sometimes nowhere near sophisticated enough.

Death special: Vital signs

13 October 2007 by James Hughes

NEXT May, several hundred neurologists and philosophers will gather in the resort of Varadero, Cuba, for the fifth International Symposium on the Definition of Death. At first sight, defining death might not seem like something that requires much scientific or philosophical attention. Look more closely, though, and the line between life and death is rapidly becoming increasingly fuzzy.

The problem started some 40 years ago with the invention of ventilators - machines that keep lungs breathing and hearts pumping even after the brain has suffered extensive damage. This raised for the first time the question of whether people could or should be treated as dead simply because their brain is dead. One set of philosophers argues that the destruction of the frontal lobes, with the memories and personality they encode, is enough to declare someone dead. This definition includes those in a "permanent vegetative state" - permanently unaware, but with enough brain function left to breathe unaided. Others resist the idea of brain death altogether and insist that the heart must stop beating before a body can be treated as dead. The compromise "whole-brain-death" position, which has been written into law in most of the industrialised world, is that a person can only be declared dead if almost all brain function has been irreversibly destroyed.

Whichever definition is adopted, there are many practical and political implications. For instance, physicians are generally obliged to treat the living and to stop treating the dead. Vital organs can only be removed from someone declared dead, and brain-death laws have permitted hearts, livers and other organs to be maintained in the body by ventilators until they are removed for transplantation.

Some bioethicists, such as Robert Veatch of Georgetown University in Washington DC and Linda Emanuel of Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, have proposed that individuals should choose their own definition of death - at some point between permanent vegetative state and the heart stopping. But having different definitions of death from bed to bed presents enormous practical and cultural difficulties. To see people treat the dead as if they were living, or the living as if they were dead, is profoundly disturbing.

As diagnostic technologies have advanced, declaring total and irreversible brain death has become ever more problematic. First, brain damage is far more complicated than the whole-brain-death model supposes. Damage to small parts of the brain can result in permanent unconsciousness, even if the rest remains intact. In the 1990s advances in electroencephalography allowed residual brain activity to be detected in many patients who would previously have been considered brain dead, and we now understand that even parts of the brain that are electrically quiet can still be healthy. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, a team at the University of Cambridge has been able to detect near-normal brain activity in several people who had been in a vegetative state for more than six months (Science, vol 313, p 1402)

A second problem is that the growing ability to compensate for the loss of the brain's regulation of the body means that doctors can maintain some brain-dead bodies indefinitely. One argument for the whole-brain definition of death was that the bodies of those diagnosed as brain dead would soon die, regardless of medical treatment. Now some brain-dead bodies on ventilators have survived for years.

A third problem is that we have discovered more about the brain's self-repair mechanisms and are rapidly developing new ways to repair damaged brains. We now understand that the brain continues to produce neural stem cells throughout life, and drugs and gene therapies have been developed that can stimulate this self-repair capacity. It may soon be possible to engineer new neural tissue from patients' cells and transplant it into damaged areas....

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg1 ... signs.html

[skakos]

[Analysis works only if you know that the whole is just the sum of its parts.
Yes, but the math can sometimes be more complicated than any man is capable of understanding!

But this is almost never the case.
Not at all, from my perspective.

Does water have the properties of oxygene and hydrogen combined?
Yes, as it can have no other! The properties are in fact those of combining hydrogen and oxygen as with the formula H2(subscripted)O.

Is human just a sum of cells and innanimate matter?
Exactly that, and nothing more, though specifically organized in such a way!

Surely no...
Then surely you're god fearing, believing in magic, and other things never seen, only of one's imagination.

Scientists say they believe that Ezekiel was epileptic, I wonder how many bible writers were schizophrenic? Or maybe eating some magic mushrooms.

You seem to be so certain about many things which have baffled philosophers for centuries.
Do you have any proof to back these dogmas up?
Do you understand that you claim you have the solution for problems long unresolved?
That is called dogmatism.

[skakos]

I thought he was just ignorant. Explains a lot that he's a troll, biggest wastes of space on God's Earth, pond scum has more sophistication and intelligence than an internet troll. At least the trolls of real life, aka bullies have the balls to say it to your face, internet trolls are just juvenile cowards, and most of them sadly are not kids, in fact most are between 18 and 30 and in fact some of the worst trolls I have seen are erll into their 60s. In fact the worst troll I ever saw was a 21 year old law student (if you can believe it), he actually gained a persons home phone number by skimming facebook and then phoned the guys wife who was 9 months pregnant in real life and scared the living shit out of her to the point she phoned the police.

Humanity if it got any dumber it would drag the worlds IQ below the level of the shit that drifts down to the bottom of the ocean.

"And ye beneath the murderers and rapist and sodomites in the lowest circle of hell: there resides the most disgusting, and abjectly and profoundly ignoble of all human beings, those who bare false witness. The internet troll whose torment is eternal, at the hands of a circus strong man, whose job it is to pound their head with a lump hammer whilst simultaneously electrocuting their gonads."

Dante's inferno from Dante's Divine Comedy.

Excuse me but what the hell are you talking about?!?
You take for granted the opinion of someone else that I am a troll?
Based on what?
Because you just do not agree with what I say?
Do you really claim that anyone not having the same level of ignorance you have concerning science and its assumptions must be a troll?

Your post has been reported.

Come back to the discussion whenever you feel you have an argument.

[skakos]

"One SINGLE case of someone having a conscious experience with his brain not functiong should normally suffice."

Yep...not seein' how you verify such a thing, though.

One with a "flat encephalogram" (insofar as I'm aware) is no position to experience anything and (later) communicate anything.

Insofar as I know: brain dead folks don't 'come back'.

I welcome any information to the contrary.

Question: folks who communicate NDE, are these folks 'brain dead' (have a "flat encephalogram" during the Near Death Experience)?

##

"skakos is a troll. He is trolling every one of you"

Tell me sumthin' I don't already know, K.

My time to waste...*shrug*

Seek answers in the posts I just made above. They apply to you too.
And please stop personal attacks.
I know it is difficult to keep up with real arguments, but let's not make this an anti-skakos thread.
The only thing you do show when doing that is illustrating your own level of emptiness concerning real arguments.
(and yes, your posts too will be reported if you keep doing this - I am here to discuss about science not to get offended by strangers)

[skakos]

dead
dɛd/
adjective
adjective: dead

1.
no longer alive.
"a dead body"
synonyms: deceased, expired, departed, gone, no more, passed on, passed away; More

No it's not a tautology being dead unless you are Jebus is an irreversible condition. You can't be dead and then come back to life, you were either on the brink of death and hence alive or dead there's no tautology there. If a Dr pronounces someone dead who isn't that's his mistake, it doesn't magically change the condition of the patient any more than any opinion does. You are either alive or dead there is no magic here.

I don't see the relevance of feinting to death tbh, there's no fine line between alive and dead they are two mutually opposite states you can't be kinda dead or slightly dead any more than you can be very very slightly dead you are either dead or you aren't, barring the existence of Vampires and various other mythical undead. It's a 1 or 0 dead or alive deal, not a 1 and/or 0 thing. Patients have been pronounced as brain dead and then woke up this clearly only means that the criteria for pronouncing death are sometimes nowhere near sophisticated enough.

What I asked you before still applies:

Think of a much simpler case: Can you have conscious experience when you have fainted?
I am not talking about the heart stopping for more than 10 minutes.
I am not talking about the brain having no detectable brain activity.

Just a simple... fainting episode.

What do you think?
Please tell me.

[henry quirk]

"Is it time to recognize a non-physical (/ spiritual) dimension in our scientific worldview?"

Sure, as soon as any one can provide evidence for a "spiritual dimension" existing as sumthin' other than hallucination, dream, fantasy, or mental illness.

[henry quirk]

"Can you have conscious experience when you have fainted?"

No. You can't have a conscious experience while unconscious.

You 'might' think you remember phantasmagoria when you regain consciousness...this, however, is not reflective of 'experience' but only you applying a pattern (after the fact) to nonsensical neurological activity.

Keep in mind: you 'are' the flesh, the bone, the blood, the glands, the brain...you 'are' a cluster of on-going organic/electrical processes...moreover: you're an on-going recursive event (that's why you perceive of yourself as 'I')...not surprising, then, that you can (and do occasionally) pull the wool over your own eyes.

[SpheresOfBalance]

[Analysis works only if you know that the whole is just the sum of its parts.
Yes, but the math can sometimes be more complicated than any man is capable of understanding!

But this is almost never the case.
Not at all, from my perspective.

Does water have the properties of oxygene and hydrogen combined?
Yes, as it can have no other! The properties are in fact those of combining hydrogen and oxygen as with the formula H2(subscripted)O.

Is human just a sum of cells and innanimate matter?
Exactly that, and nothing more, though specifically organized in such a way!

Surely no...
Then surely you're god fearing, believing in magic, and other things never seen, only of one's imagination.

Scientists say they believe that Ezekiel was epileptic, I wonder how many bible writers were schizophrenic? Or maybe eating some magic mushrooms.

You seem to be so certain about many things which have baffled philosophers for centuries.
Do you have any proof to back these dogmas up?
Do you understand that you claim you have the solution for problems long unresolved?
That is called dogmatism.

First, only if I'm wrong is it dogmatism, as surely as your dogmatism is that no one then can know, because neither you, nor anyone you know, does.
Second, in essence, you asked if things are the sum of their parts, and that is exactly true, everyone knows that, I thought. All that anything can be, is the totality of it's constituents, whatever it's constituents may be and thus the electrochemical process's that result, over time!

[Kuznetzova]

Oh! Now the troll is saying he is "reporting our posts"!

How nice of him.

[Blaggard]

I thought he was just ignorant. Explains a lot that he's a troll, biggest wastes of space on God's Earth, pond scum has more sophistication and intelligence than an internet troll. At least the trolls of real life, aka bullies have the balls to say it to your face, internet trolls are just juvenile cowards, and most of them sadly are not kids, in fact most are between 18 and 30 and in fact some of the worst trolls I have seen are erll into their 60s. In fact the worst troll I ever saw was a 21 year old law student (if you can believe it), he actually gained a persons home phone number by skimming facebook and then phoned the guys wife who was 9 months pregnant in real life and scared the living shit out of her to the point she phoned the police.

Humanity if it got any dumber it would drag the worlds IQ below the level of the shit that drifts down to the bottom of the ocean.

"And ye beneath the murderers and rapist and sodomites in the lowest circle of hell: there resides the most disgusting, and abjectly and profoundly ignoble of all human beings, those who bare false witness. The internet troll whose torment is eternal, at the hands of a circus strong man, whose job it is to pound their head with a lump hammer whilst simultaneously electrocuting their gonads."

Dante's inferno from Dante's Divine Comedy.

Excuse me but what the hell are you talking about?!?
You take for granted the opinion of someone else that I am a troll?
Based on what?
Because you just do not agree with what I say?
Do you really claim that anyone not having the same level of ignorance you have concerning science and its assumptions must be a troll?

Your post has been reported.

Come back to the discussion whenever you feel you have an argument.

Actually I didn't I said I don't think you are and I stand by that, in fact I tried to disagree you were.

[Kuznetzova]

A great personal attack instead of answering the questions or discussing the topic.
I would report your post but I like to see my "opponents" emptiness on display...

You know damned well, and you knew damned well before you even typed it, that the validity of mathematics is self-contained. Mathematical validity is not based on whether the formulas describe the real world. You already knew that before you even touched a key on your keyboard. I have seen `non-euclidean geometry troll line` used seventy five thousand times on the internet by trolls such as yourself. You are not doing anything new here. I will repeat this to you, to anyone else on this forum, and to any moderator examining my "reported" posts.

Yes, you can use the discipline of mathematics to bait philosophers and drag them into a troll-baited net and ensnare them. In the innards of math, "truth" is literally , in all ways, equal to the construction of a proof that shows a theorem follows from premises. That's dry and `mechanical` to philosophers, but it is absolutely the case in practice. (philosophers prefer their "truth" to be enigmatic, ephemeral, difficult, and sexy. Within math, truth is none of those things.).

Another topic which can be used to bait and trap philosophers is the topic of Intuitionistic Logic. I saw a troll use it to explosive effect on newsgroups in the 1990s. He even dragged me into a 30-post back-and-forth thread before I realized what he was doing. Just like you have done, he never outwardly announced that he was using arguments from Intuitionistic Logic, because he carefully calculated that he was interacting with people who had never heard of it. Just as you have done with non-euclidean geometry in this very thread. You are using tactics from the first chapter of the Internet Trolling Handbook (I'm speaking metaphorically).

So go ahead, skakos. Report my posts whenever you like, to whomever you like. I will repeat exactly what I have said here to them. Go ahead. Be my guest.