What are the questions science cannot answer?

Discussion in 'Science & Society' started by Mind Over Matter, Aug 27, 2010.

  1. IamJoseph Banned Banned

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    'BELIEF' is not my stick - in fact this is an aversion and the most easily exploitable trait. How does belief impact that we have no speech endowed imprints pre-5770 - but only aligning with eerie exactitude with that date!? Even if one claims the lack of writings - this has no impact - the lack of writings also align only with 5770! Belief documents usually have no dates, places, distances, numbers and names which can be tested.
     
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  3. IamJoseph Banned Banned

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    Which part - you conveniently never said.

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  5. dhcracker Registered Senior Member

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    You think there was no language.. when?? forgive me I am not a hebrew I am guessing your saying 6,000 years ago. Well wasn't that about the time they were building stone henge?

    Doesn't your bible tell you about the tower of babel? The flood? How did they get to Britian and start speaking before your logic says its possible? You don't just develope a language overnight that had to be a part of evolution as well if you use any common sense at all.

    I think you are saying you accept evolution, I am sorry I thought you were into 7 literal days. Apparently your saying day 7 ended 6,000 years ago or something like that. However by your logic man was made on the 6th day, or else god is now resting? So if man was made on day 6 and 7 days=13 billion years.... it still doesn't fit what your trying to say. Maybe we have non equal days lol.. and belief is your stick. What you just stated you believe and I am regretting taking up for you about now because I think you are simply being rude and obtuse.

    If you want to logically discuss the evidence, then do so. Your making statements with no evidence of it or very very little, whereas other people are making statements based on years of tests and experiments.

    You should show a little bit of humble respect...
     
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  7. dhcracker Registered Senior Member

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    ever hear of the uncertainty principle? That means you can't say cause and effect apply we don't know for sure even though its kind of .. well it should be anyway lol.


    Science is only a quest for knowledge man, u know latin for knowledge. Its evolved into a method of understanding the world around us through experiments and testing and such. And you keep saying pre determined laws thats not correct factualy. Its just LAWS, they may not have begun at the beginning either we cannot be certain. They may have been stepped and phased in as some kind of cause and effect. And it may be that the big bang happened because a collapse of laws in a previous universe for all we know. And also we do not know for sure if the universe is finite, what if it recycles?

    He means if we discover a better cosmology or part of our cosmology we will adopt it.. nothing more nothing less. And its really not good to use the house analogy as preachers do, as if a preacher is a good source for a cosmology analogy joseph u should know that. How about first something we don't undestand, then what if the materials came.. then the laws.. we have no idea how the laws and matter came or in what order. There is no use making analogies we have to solve the singularity or unify the forces for that answer to start coming I think.


    Maybe water wasn't designed for fish but the fish are just there because the water... all the way back to the bang eh? just as logical to both your arguments.


    Why? You think we cannot discover evidence of a designer? I say we can.. I say in effect science leads to the design thus we become the designers. That is our quest is it not, to control the world and events around us to our benefit and survival? So if there is a designer, then he must know our evolution eventually (if we are not snuffed out) will lead to God like power though science. Everything is subject to proof or disproof, and I think you are saying the laws of the universe is after the fact... again science is just the process of understanding the cosmos some areas of it are specialized some generalized. Actually before intelligence there was no science. And if there was no science before the bang then also there was no designer, a designer would have to have vast superior intelligence or "science".

    I can do that, because at one time there was NO universe period. Had a universe spawned without at least one parent property to lead to the others then we would not be here. So some kind of parent, or some initial mathematics set off the whole thing from a point in space that was about like a dot of nothing or black hole or something. Anyway since you think random math is lesser than intelligent design there is no sense in trying to answer you. You fail here because you do not listen and comprehend that no data backs either equally. That its just as likely other dimensions with other universes do exist and we are a probabiliy of an infinite and in a universe with no God.

    Tell me Joseph do you ever have doubts in your Gods existence? Do you ever question it? Because if you do not have doubts you are not really wanting to question it and you are living in blind faith.
     
  8. IamJoseph Banned Banned

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    All the above are under 6000.

    No, the creation days are not 24 hour periods and are cosmic epochs describing millions of years per day and pre-calendar: I clearly gave reasoning's why. I am saying human speech endowed history is less than 6000 years old, not by belief, but all evidences we have.


    The text says this is metaphoric or outside earth, whereby they were later cast down to earth.

    Again, the text says creation was rested, or God rested from creating. Big dif.




    My statements are the only ones here with evidence. We have no speech or names [the pivotal mark of speech] pre-6000, or better, exactly 5770 years. That is a weird stat, and cannot be disregarded.
     
  9. Skeptical Registered Senior Member

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    Joe

    Your 5770 years is pure hogwash.
    No-one knows when humanity began to talk. However, various lines of evidence suggest that it was a long, long time ago. Human skeletons dated back 100,000 years ago show little or no anatomical difference to modern man. This includes structures associated with the larynx. It appears very probable that those guys were talking to each other.

    In fact, it is possible that our ancient ancestors, perhaps right back to Australopithecus, had some form of speech, albeit primitive compared to Homo sapiens. After all, modern chimps, with no sophisticated larynx like human, can nevertheless communicate vocally with each other over matters like food, and predators, and can even recognise which individual chimp is vocalising without seeing it.
     
  10. IamJoseph Banned Banned

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    Its very easy. Post any proof you have of human speech history one day pre-5770. Then explain why this date is a magic number. You should have 1.76 billion examples in your 100,000 year period, but I will accept just one. And I won't embarrass you with the population indications.

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  11. pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

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    well he claimed it was fiction but it was also supposed to be a look at what lost anglo-saxon mythology would look like
     
  12. pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

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    well logic would dictate that spoken language would have had to arrive sometime before written language and since your your date is based on some numbers taken from the big book of jewish myths and based on some written works going back roughly that far we can logically say that speech occured before your mythical date
     
  13. pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

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    what about the 10,000 year old post holes at stonehenge?



    no it purely by belief. secondly history refers to the time period of the written word


    No they aren't your entire argument is based on the myths of a bunch people living the desert
     
  14. IamJoseph Banned Banned

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    Which planet are you from?

    Stonehenge
    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Stone hedge)


    Archaeologists had believed that the iconic stone monument was erected around 2500 BC, as described in the chronology below. One recent theory, however, has suggested that the first stones were not erected until 2400-2200 BC,[2] whilst another suggests that bluestones may have been erected at the site as early as 3000 BC (see phase 1 below). The surrounding circular earth bank and ditch, which constitute the earliest phase of the monument, have been dated to about 3100 BC. The site and its surroundings were added to the UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites in 1986 in a co-listing with Avebury Henge monument. It is a national legally protected Scheduled Ancient Monument. Stonehenge is owned by the Crown and managed by English Heritage, while the surrounding land is owned by the National Trust.[3][4]



    Yes, the written word, and you failed to account for the responses based on the text!

    If you wish to be head bashed, then pose your religion disputations in a religious thread, not here: I gntee a 10 sec KO. When I challenge someone for a NAME - this is not religiously questioned - any proof will suffice.
     
  15. pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

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    the earth where people read every part of links

    that nice but you left out the part where they talk about what was there before stone henge
    from wikipedia stone henge




    I failed to account for nothing using written word to provide the time frame for the spoken word which you are doing is bull shit


    bullshit you keep repeating the 5770 bc number which is a number based in religious belief
     
  16. dhcracker Registered Senior Member

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    Ok I can respect that, I don't agree but ok.




    OHH so your basing this on writing, well I don't know about you but I learned to speak long before I could write. What makes you think that wasn't an issue of both language evolution, and also technological evolution (as in what to write on or with) and what about cave paintings that are 30-40,000 years old? Its apparent even neanderthol had communication and buried their dead.

    Actaully lingustic evidence says the languages could be very very old.. though you could argue that modern man reached some sort of greater intelligence about 6,000 years ago regardless of the language thing.
     
  17. Stryder Keeper of "good" ideas. Valued Senior Member

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    Who?
    How?
    Why?
    What?
    When?
    Where?

    The main reason they can't be answered is because they are "generic" questions where they have to be asked within a previously defined topic otherwise they are not initialised with any particular topic leaving the scope too broad.
     
  18. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    That may be an acceptable definition of "science" in vernacular language, but this is a place of science and scholarship so we must use a more rigorous definition of the word. To qualify as science, an endeavor must follow the scientific method. Two of its most important components, from the standpoint of this discussion, are logical reasoning and peer review. Not every "quest for knowledge or search for answers" enforces these principles.
    There's nothing wrong with calling a speculation a hypothesis, and indeed most hypotheses start out as speculations, mere hunches. But once a hypothesis has been stated and made public, the scientific method requires that it be tested. You can't just continue repeating it; you have to make progress.
    I have often stated that scientists seem to almost deliberately choose language that communicates poorly with laymen. A scientific theory is a hypothesis that has been proven true beyond a reasonable doubt. That's the farthest it can go, since we never know what kind of contrary evidence may be discovered in the future. Only mathematical theories can be proven true, since they operate only in the domain of abstractions. Still, this makes a scientific theory qualitatively different from the "theory" of a police detective, which is not much more than a hunch. We need better scientific language. Still "true beyond a reasonable doubt" means that it is unreasonable to doubt it. Only a scientist is likely to find the one tiny bit of new evidence that will falsify an established theory, and this only happens on rare occasions, so the canon of science never collapses. A canonical scientific theory like relativity is not going to be overturned by a high school student with three semesters of physics.
    We're getting back into the distinction between rational faith, based on evidence and the laws of probability, and irrational faith, based on wishes and hopes.
    Getting back to the definition of a scientific theory: A hypothesis that has been proven true beyond a reasonable doubt. Of the myriad scientific theories, one is overturned so rarely that it's front page news. Even then it's more likely to be revised than overturned, such as Einstein's elaboration of Newton's laws.
    10% probability of falsification may be good enough to get a grant to test out the hypothesis, but it's not good enough to promote it to a theory. For a canonical theory it's more like .0000001%, although I wonder if anyone has ever tried to calculate that figure, based on the number of theories that have in fact been falsified.
    I'm not sure "belief" is a useful word in this discussion. There are many avenues to belief. Some beliefs are instinctive: we are born with them. These beliefs are the ones that feel true more than any other, because we have had them since birth. A good example is the instinctive belief that an animal with both eyes in front of its face is a predator, so if it's larger than you you'd better run. Every animal has this instinct because without it that bloodline would die off very quickly. Watch a newborn giraffe frantically scamper away from a tame wolf, but graze placidly next to a bison.

    But not every instinctive belief represents truth. Some are inherited from our ancestors who lived in a more primitive era when the risks were unimaginably different from those we face today. Others are just accidents of genetic drift and bottlenecks. Our pack-social instinct, for example, served us well in the Paleolithic Era when we lived in small extended-family groups and other clans were competitors for scarce resources. Today it's a handicap as we have expanded our "clan" to include anonymous strangers on the other side of the planet who are nothing more to us than abstractions, and we would be better served by the herd-social instinct of the zebra or wildebeest.

    Other beliefs are acquired through reasoning and learning. Even though these beliefs are more likely to be truths than instinctive beliefs, instinctive belief is stronger. It is more likely to dominate a person's attitudes without considerable retraining.
    Peer review is hierarchical. I have 50 years' experience and training as an amateur linguist, so I have not only encountered the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis, but I can understand the reviews of it by professional linguists. The evidence is straightforward. The only reason it was not discovered earlier is that linguistics is not a discipline that is given high importance so not much of the world's economy is channeled into it. There aren't enough linguists to catalog and preserve the languages that are dying out within the current generation. Comparing Yeniseian to Navajo, Tlingit and the other Na-Dene languages was a project that simply had to wait its turn. Once it was completed, it was one of those forehead-slapping "aha!" revelations.

    Joseph is no linguist at all; frankly he hardly even qualifies as a dilettante in the field. He approaches the discipline with an agenda to prove, and he dismisses any evidence that contradicts it.

    And this is the way Joseph approaches all science. He's not looking for the truth; he just tracks down evidence that supports his own beliefs. That's not science; it's crackpottery.
    That's a worthy goal, but we don't have the resources for it on SciForums. This isn't a university.
    That's my point. We don't have the resources to do that. People who push their own insidious agenda become very good at it, and many of their assertions just pass under the radar of everyone who is qualified to challenge them.
    Not only reading but participating.
    No, but we have plenty of archeological evidence of other sophisticated constructions that go way back beyond 6,000 years. IIRC, the first house we've found is 11,000 years old. Still, that's not evidence for the existence of language. We have no idea what humans are capable of accomplishing without being able to talk to each other.
    Once again you ignore incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. We have incontrovertible evidence that the Paleoindians migrated from Siberia to North America around 15,000 years ago. We also have incontrovertible evidence that at least one of their languages groups is related to a language that is still spoken in Siberia. Your hypothesis has been falsified irrevocably, yet you continue to assert it without even acknowledging and responding to my peer review.

    This is an obvious case of intellectual dishonesty, and you are hereby banned for it. I can't make it permanent because the Moderators have not reached a consensus on that, but the members will be free of your preposterous notions for a nice long vacation.
    We have languages in North America and Siberia that are obviously related and are obviouslly separated by more than double the timespan you have pulled out of mythology. You could find discussions of the Dene-Yeniseian family in fifteen seconds. You have never responded to this falsification of your assertion.
     
  19. dhcracker Registered Senior Member

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    So since you are highly educated the dictionary doesn't apply to you? What about wikipedia its written by scholars, both are in agreement though I do go into far more detail than that as to what the quest for knowledge involves.



    And testing of course.

    Well by a strict adhersion to the scientific method a hypothesis has testable data and in fact is testable. A multiverse or designer is not a hypothesis, even though as I stated I often stray from this strict definition as well.. though I probably shouldn't.

    I disagree.. from wikepedia scienc article

    "Unlike a mathematical proof, a scientific theory is empirical, and is always open to falsification if new evidence is presented. That is, no theory is ever considered strictly certain as science works under a fallibilistic view. Instead, science is proud to make predictions with great probability, bearing in mind that the most likely event is not always what actually happens. "

    Mathematical proofs are true, I get your point though.

    Even things that are considered certain or factual is open to probabilities. This means that although theory is much much stronger than a hunch it is still open to being wrong. Scientific papers could be considered theory, or hypothesis depending. A theory may exist outside the accepted standard model of any science.. thats because sometimes you can have two solutions and yet one be more favorable for more logical reasons.


    You have a very poor view of people without a solid understanding of realtivity my friend. Again you are not God you cannot judge another persons motivations, you have no clue if they honestly are using logic or common sense or wishes and hopes. Though sometimes people do hunt for holes in theories for hopes and wishes.. anti-gravity for example is a very good one. However that is a valid scientific method just in case they do stumble on anti-gravity lol. So long as they are aware their hypothesis or speculation is just research its not fact or theory.


    I agree with that pretty much we're close to agreement lol. I still think belief is involved in predicting outcomes based on probabilities, as you say relativity is solid but I would guess as more data comes in from the super large and super small we could modify it to a more complete theory. For instance we are using lambda model dark matter which is fine, but one might use a mirror matter model or some other model and still have an accurate model. So one has to have a belief from logic and reason in one or the other am I wrong?

    Well I'm not sure about motivation, I think we are all products of our environment. I honestly believe had me or you been raised in that mans shoes we may be crackpots as well lol. I think he rejected it because he is not a linguist, therefor he would have to believe you and not some omnipetent being. Its hard to compete with God, though I do see a punishment warranted I wish he wasn't banned queit yet. Maybe I'm just a fool and believing I can change peoples opinion with persistent evidence and logic and respect is wrong....

    Joseph don't leave, you should acknowledge evidence posted against your idea and either refute it with logic or state your lack of faith in the evidence, nothing wrong with admiting you don't understand something so you can't back it. However I wouldn't pretend to understand it and refute it, just because you lack understanding of something doesn't mean its correct I might add.. though in this case I think the evidence is far more in favor of language has been around longer, even though all here admit we can not really know for certain but you... might change that too btw.
     
  20. quantumdarkness19 Registered Member

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    On the contrary not ALL of my questions deal with origin. Out of the 28 questions that I asked, at least 19 of them, roughly 68%, aren't geared toward origins at all. If I may point out again:

    What’s at Earth’s Core?
    We know that at the center of the planet, about 4,000 miles down, sits a solid ball of iron the size of the moon. We also know that we’re standing on about 1,800 miles of rock, which forms Earth’s crust and mantle. But what’s in between the mantle and the iron ball? A churning ocean of liquid of some sort, but scientists aren’t certain what it’s made of or how it reacts to the stuff around it.

    Now, I will admit that knowing this information would give scientists clues about how Earth formed, but it would also help with learing how heat and convection affect plate tectonics. More information could help solve another mystery, too: whether, as many researchers suspect, the inner core is growing. If so, it could eventually overtake the molten metal surrounding it, throwing off Earth’s magnetic field.

    Why do placebos work?
    The idea that an innocuous lotion could ease the agony of an electric shock seems remarkable. Yet placebos can be as powerful as the best modern medicine. As far as I know, the placebo effect has never raised the dead, but the vast majority of medical conditions respond to placebo at least to some degree. One day, this sort of research could point toward new treatments that harness the mind to help the body....but not a wiff of origin in this one anywhere.

    I can do this with each of the questions that I asked and if you'd like me to, I can accomodate.

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  21. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Joseph is taking a well-earned one-month vacation. Don't leave the porch light on.

    Correction: The vacation is permanent. This was not my individual action, but a consensus of the Moderators.

    I apologize to those of you who rose to his defense, albeit tepidly. It boiled down to, "Everyone provides value, even if only by serving as a bad example." The problem is that we don't have the bandwidth to follow people like Joseph around with a hose and a hoover. So we had to reach for the Raid.
     
    Last edited: Oct 29, 2010
  22. dhcracker Registered Senior Member

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    I can understand, I believe had he been a little more respectful and also addressed why he didn't accept evidence posted against his idea that you wouldn't have had to do that.

    Thats the whole point I was trying to get across, Joseph should have been a little more tolerant and respectful as well, and was definitely less tolerant than the academics.. which is almost always true actually. However I hold academics to a little higher standard.
     
  23. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    This is a place of science and scholarship. At least the marching orders of the Moderator staff are to maintain it as such a place--a daunting assignment but one we all believe in. So all members are expected to at least sincerely try to behave in an academic manner.

    I have no problem at all with people taking off their lab coats and throwing erasers at each other, or simply socializing when they're off duty and getting downright silly and stoopid. But when we're on duty and participating in scholarly discussions, with tolerance for the occasional wisecrack from the back of the room, we're obliged to do our best to behave like scholars.

    Of course we have varying levels of education, wisdom, and plain old maturity. Everyone makes mistakes, exercises bad judgment and does things they wish they hadn't. We all have a bad day every now and then. This is part of life. But a pattern of intellectual dishonesty is not within that spectrum of forgivable behavior. It's an attempt to subvert the mission of this website and deliberately misinform people.

    That simply cannot be tolerated.
     

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