I don't qualify myself as an intellectual, do you qualify yourself?
'Absolute' Knowledge, or the lack thereof
- Thread starter stateofmind
- Start date
I don't qualify myself as an intellectual, do you qualify yourself?
I made that comment mostly as a response to the knee-jerk reaction this thread got because of buzz words like "atheist" and "full of shit". As a result no one seems to have read the OP but rather they decided to regurgitate their stale, rehashed, anti-theist arguments.
I think you are trying to say no one read it the way you wanted them to read.
Do you disagree at all with the graph in the OP?
Dywyddyr:
Stateofmind:
One can turn this as well—ignorance as a function of knowledge.
Deconstruct the notion of 'dog' to where all possible knowledge of canids are spent-- enumerating each cell in its dewclaw, the pathology of parvo, all the medical jargon defining the object as form and still be completely ignorant of what his fur smells like.
One can deconstruct the physics of friendship down to its Avagado's number of "friendship" atoms or hack it into a philosophically dissonant pulp of big words with small meaning (like, ahem, 'ephemeral' or 'noumenal') and still never know the wonderful thrill of complete abandon with someone you trust as yourself.
A likelier probability is still one, and a probable absolute is a silly tautology eating its way back to its unsubstantiated premise, no?
In other words, there is no rational method invalidting the existence or non-existence of a a Polyneasian pink frilly goddess named Poonany.
At any rate, we can turn the thing around again, and the idiot petting fur knows all about petting but is completely ignorant of the molecular structure of keratin.
Who's "smarter"?
The atheist, agnostic or saint? Sinners make the best saints.
Temper, temper-- weren't you the softling that gave me one of those yellow things you call infractions?
Stateofmind:
One can turn this as well—ignorance as a function of knowledge.
Deconstruct the notion of 'dog' to where all possible knowledge of canids are spent-- enumerating each cell in its dewclaw, the pathology of parvo, all the medical jargon defining the object as form and still be completely ignorant of what his fur smells like.
One can deconstruct the physics of friendship down to its Avagado's number of "friendship" atoms or hack it into a philosophically dissonant pulp of big words with small meaning (like, ahem, 'ephemeral' or 'noumenal') and still never know the wonderful thrill of complete abandon with someone you trust as yourself.
A likelier probability is still one, and a probable absolute is a silly tautology eating its way back to its unsubstantiated premise, no?
In other words, there is no rational method invalidting the existence or non-existence of a a Polyneasian pink frilly goddess named Poonany.
At any rate, we can turn the thing around again, and the idiot petting fur knows all about petting but is completely ignorant of the molecular structure of keratin.
Who's "smarter"?
The atheist, agnostic or saint? Sinners make the best saints.
Well it seems to be a desert as far as courtesy, honesty and lack of hypocrisy is concerned.
At least in some cases:
http://www.sciforums.com/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=2586851
http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2586855&postcount=8
http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2586941&postcount=37
http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2586960&postcount=44
http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2586840&postcount=2
http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2586896&postcount=20
Why couldn't the graph be like this:
At the start we know so little about anything that it's easy to get things right (because they're simple), as we learn more we find there are more things we don't know and problems get harder to solve until we reach a break-even point.
Or this:
We don't know much but increasing knowledge allows more connections to be made, thus improving the chances of being correct.
In other words you have to show that your graph has ANY validity whatsoever.
It's all logical premises. What part of my graph do you find erroneous?
Nope. You've made an assumption that the relationship is linear.
So you can't read? The entire thing. You have not shown it to have any validity whatsoever.
Can you refute either of my two alternatives?
What does this graph tell us?
There is an absolute ignorance (on any topic) and absolute knowledge scale alongside horizontal axis. Even if we can assume that there could be an absolute ignorance (not knowing anything at all on any subject), having "absolute knowledge" still creates a problem; maybe that's why you refrained from putting 100% next to it.
You are trying to say something when you name Y axis as "probability of probability", but it's not clear. Because at 0%, we can consider the situation of "improbability of improbability" as well.
And a person can be anywhere on this scale, like having 30% knowledge and hitting 45% on Y axis. Joining these two point tell us what? And since you define Atheists as absolutely ignorant (0% on Horizontal scale), the rest of the graph will not apply them, therefore no need for any graph. Similarly, anyone who can have absolute knowledge on anything (which includes God himself) could hit different results on Probability of Probability scale, including 0%; because your graph allows this "probability". Yet if God scores 0%, his "absolute knowledge" wouldn't make any sense whatsoever; it doesn't even affect the probability scale.
Do you agree with the graph now?
There is an absolute ignorance (on any topic) and absolute knowledge scale alongside horizontal axis. Even if we can assume that there could be an absolute ignorance (not knowing anything at all on any subject), having "absolute knowledge" still creates a problem; maybe that's why you refrained from putting 100% next to it.
You are trying to say something when you name Y axis as "probability of probability", but it's not clear. Because at 0%, we can consider the situation of "improbability of improbability" as well.
And a person can be anywhere on this scale, like having 30% knowledge and hitting 45% on Y axis. Joining these two point tell us what? And since you define Atheists as absolutely ignorant (0% on Horizontal scale), the rest of the graph will not apply them, therefore no need for any graph. Similarly, anyone who can have absolute knowledge on anything (which includes God himself) could hit different results on Probability of Probability scale, including 0%; because your graph allows this "probability". Yet if God scores 0%, his "absolute knowledge" wouldn't make any sense whatsoever; it doesn't even affect the probability scale.
Do you agree with the graph now?
Can we see the raw data used to plot the graph, and the method used to gather the data? Please include the statistical methods, confidence intervals, and error rates.