Larian Studios Forums General Chat Chat (Anything) philosophical rambling rants

I agree on the point.

Thing is that humans can reason - maybe, humans like to think so. What is reason? It's a human definition on ways of thinking and communication.
If You see how most humans reason I have my doubts on what is ment by the word reason itself.
They useally don't.
Animal behavior often makes a lot more sence/reason than human behavior.

And as you say that humans can reason it makes them very pitiful couse they useally don't.

Humans aren't the lords of creation they're more a freak of nature. It's the only kind that behaves completely different from every other lifeform on earth. Like they don't belong here.

er Tsel, i really hope that science would not ever be able to answer to the questions of origin of life (and not genesis of life) and origin of process of thought because that day it would say that science would be the unique possible manner of thinking and the most global speech. But i'm rather confident. I think the impossibility to ask these questions is structural and not historic, because those questions are no scientific objects. That's no a limit for exploring new scientific grounds but a way to limit science to its own ground.

I assume it might sound quite weird to your ears, but personally I believe thatr not all "questions" should be "answered".

By the way, I shudder by your use of philosophers names

I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.

-- (Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett)

I don’t know about you but I don’t feel intellectually intimidated by a name of “authority” like physicist Stephen Hawkins, specially cos some statements don’t seem to be naïve or childish but really IMBECIL for a man knowing math as he does in his Brief Story of Time, the example of monkeys hammering in typewriters machines, -the bigger part will be litter but occasionally, by mere CHANCE, they will type one of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Shakespeare’s complete works do have the sonnets pretty much the same size. The initial verse of sonnet 18 is well known: “Shall I compare you to a summer’s day?” which follows the usual 14 lines and ends:
“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee”.
There are 488 letters in the sonnet. Ignoring the spaces between words (like the Bible Code)the chance to type by chance 488 letters and produce this sonnet is 1 in 10 follow by 690 zeros! The enormity of this scale can be notice if we consider after Big Bang there’s 15 billion years, that means only 10 follow by 18 zeros (seconds).
Hence, to write by chance one of Shakespeare’s sonnets it’s required all the monkeys PLUS all the animals of the Earth type in typewriter machines MADE BY ALL IRON OF THE UNIVERSE in a period of time EXCEEDING ENORMOUSLY THE TIME SINCE BIG BANG, even so, the odds are minimum. Trying one chance by second, even a simple sentence with 16 letters demands 2 millions of billion years while the Universe only exists 15 billion years ago…to eliminate all possible combinations.
In XIII Century, Namanides quoted a commentary about Genesis written 600 years before, explaining BEFORE the existence of our universe TIME DIDN’T EXIST. This is due to what is written in Genesis 1:5: “There was an afternoon and morning, day one”. IT WASN’T WRITTEN “FIRST DAY” as stupidly translated in most of the Bibles, because the use of “first” would implied a series already existing of days in a “continuum” of time when truly there was no time before that “DAY ONE”. There was no “before” and not even “after”, there was nothing linked to that day. The subtle difference was not noticed in Jerusalem Bible when we read “first day”, something not happening in Vulgata version translating “Jactunque est vespere et mane, DIES UNUS” in Latin. That day was unique as “day one”. With impeccable logic in all the rest of days of Genesis’ week, are used the ordinal term: second, third, fourth, etc., because from the day two it was already established a series of days, the creation of the universe brought with itself the concomitant creation of time. Hence, commenting about Genesis, both Maimonides and Namanides arrived to the same conclusion and interesting idea: before the creation of the universe, space didn’t exist neither time. The creation of the universe brought not just the time in which it flows but the space in which it expands. I already explained the blackness and vacuum was “ruach elokim” expansive inflation or superhole paying attention to Hebrew words.
In that sense, Hebrew idea wasn’t giving a mythical cow, or “nothingness” opening, or primitive supermaterial linked to a divinity limited to matter existence like Greek gods. Not even in Plato or Aristoteles times their gods could create matter. They were limited by the matter of the Universe and depending on it.
Five hundred years ago, kabalists understood Moses saying God filling eternity, shrank and in that God’s Big Crunch –tsim tsum- there was universal Big Bang expansion. God chose 10 dimensions or aspects to form the universe and included into our universe. 10 times is written “God said” in chapter 1 of Genesis. Kabalists thought only 4 from 10 dimensions are physically measurable while other 6 contracted in submicroscopic dimensions during the 6 days of Creation. So, what Kaku explained in his book HYPERSPACE without saying a word of what I do explain here comes to modern society CENTURIES LATE, I regret to say! The scientists reference to the original space of a “grapefruit” is just a renewed version of kabalists “mustard seed space”. Even in Naimonides times he was aware of Hebrew meaning of the creation STARTING IN THE AFTERNOON AND ENDING IN THE MORNING. Christians ignore the fact, the word “morning” is “boker” in Hebrew and means “distinguished, capable to be distinguish, ORDERED” while “afternoon” is “erev” meaning “confused, mixtured, DISORDERED”. Therefore, what Genesis was saying all the time is creation started in the chaotic entropy of the “afternoon” ending in the quantified order of the “morning”. Usually Christians don’t know either the meaning of the word “yown” translated as “day” and the fact Genesis is talking about simultaneous times using different clocks cos the sequence of events is not the same EVERYWHERE. In Exodus 31:17, Genesis 1:1 and 2:4 we clearly see not only the difference between creative days and THE DAY in which both heaven and Earth WERE MADE from a primordial substance. Then AFTER when energy from photons dropped to 3000 K degrees, the electrons could have stable orbits around helium and hydrogen nucleus and the photons not only liberated from universal matter (SEPARATED IS THE TERM USED IN THE JEWISH TORAH IN GENESIS BOOK) but also became visible. This fire was in the water and there was water in the fire, not separated as we know in our dimension. It was neo-kabalist brothers Wacholsky did in SFX in one of MATRIX movies making the fire have the attributes of water. More than 99% of Universal mass is under the form of hydrogen and helium, two of the slightest elements of the universe. That is known. But how many of you know when Genesis mentions the Earth was empty and vague it’s used the Hebrew words “tohu” and “bohu”? The most important physicist of particles in fact use the initial T and B (from ToHu and BoHu) as the two main blocs of formation of all matter. The pressure of forces of Big Bang literally did a fussion of this T and B into hydrogen and helium. So much of Hawkins’ expertise!

Oscar

There is science involved contrary to what some may believe.

is all knowledge science in the meaning of modern science?

Science is not a new kind of knowledge; it is not created only by a professional elite; and "The Scientific Method" is really many methods, including aspects of basic intelligence found in infants and animals.

Scientists actually use quite a lot of methods: There is no single method that all scientists use, and most of the methods they do use are not all that special -- they're used in a lot of other professions, methods like "trial and error," for example.
Furthermore, the so called "Scientific Method" that students are taught, the "hypothetico-deductive method," can't be followed, because it's not really a method at all -- it's an failed attempt to give a logical analysis of how empirical knowledge depends on evidence. When people take it as a method and try to follow it, it leads to serious problems.
Any theorist who wants to take this project seriously as a way to come up with an explanation of how science works finds herself in a very difficult position: A special method is required, which must be able to account for all of scientific progress. Furthermore, it must be shown that when what scientists do looks like what happens in non-scientific knowledge acquisition, it really isn't.

A scientist approaching the problem of understanding how science works, and why it has been so amazingly productive, might start out quite differently. Since science is one of the ways that human beings use for learning about themselves and their world, our scientist would examine what we know about other types of thinking and learning. She would certainly include the learning skills that the philosophers of science were trying to exclude -- methods of learning that human beings share with other animals, for example, and the development of ordinary "common-sense" knowledge by human beings. She would be very interested in the question of how scientists use these types of learning and thinking in their work.

For example, one of the most basic forms of learning is learning about something by paying attention to it, without manipulating it in any way. Animals learn this way all the time, and so do scientists. Then there are ways that people learn that are available only to human beings, for example learning about something by reading and thinking about descriptions of what other people have learned before. Obviously, scientists do that a lot, too. A great many other many methods for learning and thinking are used by both scientists and non-scientists.

It is possible that scientists may also learn in ways that non-scientists never use, but that remains to be seen. If we ask our scientist of science, she would say that that is an empirical question. Until we have some well developed evidence showing that scientific knowledge acquisition is somehow special, it is certainly inappropriate to assume that it must be different from other ways of acquiring knowledge.

Even if special methods of learning and thinking that are unique to science do exist, they are certainly not what most scientists use, most of the time. What is required for scientific progress is mainly ordinary curiosity, ordinary awareness, ordinary learning, ordinary reasoning, and fairly ordinary communication. Of course scientists work hard to develop and use precise technical terms for many of the things they talk about, but so do lawyers and golfers and cooks. It would be quite surprising to our scientist of science if she discovered that scientists regularly use an entirely unique type of technicality in their professional jargon.

Dr. Terry Halwes

I spent many years trying to distinguish fruitfully between one or more scientific methods, and various methods used by historians, lawyers, medical doctors, people in general, etc. I used to teach courses in history of science, and occasionally philosophy of science for a philosophy department. I was never able to find a convincing set of arguments which showed that the methods of scientists differed in some fundamental way from methods used in other fields. That is, logical reasoning was of the same nature throughout, uses of precedent and past experience were of the same nature, uses of observation, evidence and (when available) experiment were of the same nature, and so on.

Gordon Fisher