From: fudley (fuddley@fastmail.fm)
Date: Mon Nov 07 2005 - 14:30:24 MST
On Mon, 07 Nov 2005 "Olie Lamb" <olie@vaporate.com>
> Can you imagine a test to show which one of the
> chairs is the black queen's bishop?
To determine that you would have to have a record of the game and know
the way the various chairs (AKA chess pieces) moved on the board.
Lacking that record the scientific method could not tell which chair was
the black queen's bishop, nor could any other method, nor is there much
point in saying the chairs were chess pieces.
> People can make scientificcy statements about
> untestable things, and I will simply shrug
> and wait for the test.
This entire debate started when somebody on this list (not you) said
that even though science can not find the slightest difference between
one electron and another they were nevertheless enormously and
profoundly different because….. well just because. That sort of
stupidly makes me blow a gasket, but now that I think about it maybe the
man was smarter that I thought and was just pushing my buttons. If so it
worked.
> I feel kinda the same about an immortal soul.
Hey, you’re trying to slip in something under the RADAR, there is no
logical necessity that a soul be immortal.
> "OK... you hypothecise that I have an immortal soul?
> Tell me a test, and I'd love to perform it"
Actually there is a simple and rather obvious test for that, but I can
guarantee you would not love to perform it.
>I can see a huge difference between "personal identity"
> being a real thing and it being a mental illusion
There you go again bad mouthing illusions! I like illusions, illusions
are a subjective phenomena just like is consciousness. Subjectivity is
far more important than objectivity, as long as I’m not dead
subjectively I’m happy.
And yes it’s gibberish because whichever is true I will continue to feel
exactly the way I do now, just like adding zero to a number is the same
as subtracting zero from a number. Therefore the statement has zero
content. It’s gibberish.
John K Clark
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