"the doe-faced homunculus".

>> ^Gallowflak:

>> ^Issykitty:
Actual astounding commentary copied/pasted from YT comments:

"I'm tired of the MUSLIM pResident not taking any action and ruining r reputation by bowing to these TERRORISTS in PAKISTAN.Talk to r congressmen they will find a way to show his BIRTH CERTIFICATE from KENYA.We need this tea party movement grow so that we can go back to the principles of our founding fathers.Allow slavery and segregation in certain states so that we can keep the minorities in line so they don't cause too much trouble because it worked in the past.TEA PARTY '12!"
TeaPartyAryan (<----- Yeah. NO RACISM.)
Somewhere deep inside my brain, a homunculus just hung himself.


A homunculus gets hanged, I on the other hand am hung.

>> ^Issykitty:

Actual astounding commentary copied/pasted from YT comments:

"I'm tired of the MUSLIM pResident not taking any action and ruining r reputation by bowing to these TERRORISTS in PAKISTAN.Talk to r congressmen they will find a way to show his BIRTH CERTIFICATE from KENYA.We need this tea party movement grow so that we can go back to the principles of our founding fathers.Allow slavery and segregation in certain states so that we can keep the minorities in line so they don't cause too much trouble because it worked in the past.TEA PARTY '12!"
TeaPartyAryan (<----- Yeah. NO RACISM.)

Somewhere deep inside my brain, a homunculus just hung himself.

@GeeSussFreeK I'm going to pick and choose from your comment instead of quoting, since it's huge.


There are some major problems with this claim, IMO. I would like to clean up the wording of your second sentence. Something that doesn't interact in anyway with the cosmos, doesn't exist meaningfully. So something that does not, cannot, and will not interact with an object doesn't exist to that object. Indeed, when our own galaxy is racing away from the other galaxies at a speed faster than the speed of light (the space in-between being created at a rate which pushes us away faster than the speed of light) you can say the same thing, that our galaxy is the only object that exists in the universe. Other objects existed, but the no longer do. They might "exist" in some theoretical way, but they don't meaningfully exist. I completely agree with this position. If a being we want to call God doesn't exist here in any way physically, than he doesn't exist.

I'm not sure you can say that something doesn't exist, just because we cannot observe it directly anymore. Galaxies moving away from ours at greater than light speed still have had an effect on things around them and we can see the "traces" of them, which at least suggests that they exist - like black holes, which we cannot see directly either. Futhermore, we can observe on the galaxies moving parallel or at least along side our own, how they move and can thus estimate the position of the big bang and theorize from the given evidence that galaxies moving in the opposite direction should exist even if we cannot see them or in essence EVER interact with them again.

A similar argument can't be made for God.


Which brings us to your first point. How does the universe exist? I assure you we have more question in that than answers. And every answer brings forth new questions. We are no closer today to understand basic ideas than thousands of years ago.

You are being a bit facetious here, I suppose? We are quite a bit, actually a huge leap, closer to the basic ideas than we were thousands of years ago. The problem is that the target keeps moving further back. First cells, then molecules, then atoms, now quantum entanglement (or what its called).

For instance, how to objects move? Force is applied to an object making it move relative to the world. The world moves in the opposite direction, but only relative to the opposite force, which means very, very little.

If space is infinite, how do finite objects transverse infinite space in a finite time?
It isn't and they wouldn't.

What determines gravity attract at the rate it attracts?
I'm not a physicist, so I won't venture too far off ground here. It's understood as far as I know. @Ornthoron could you perhaps confirm for me?

Why are macro objects analog and quantum objects digital?
Macron objects are perceived as analog, because we don't look closely enough and in short enough time spans. Any perceived analog object can be simulated digitally if you use enough data to do it. This is my understanding, anyway.

We can't even show that the sky is blue, only that it exists as a wavelength of light that human preservers sometimes interpret as a mind object of blue, we are no closer to understanding if blue is a real thing or a thing of mind.
This is a distinction between what is and what something is perceived as. Essentially you're touching upon qualia, which some cognitive scientists believe in and others don't. Blue is a real thing in so far as it's a wavelength of light. As for the rest, I don't know. It's a much harder question than you lead on, because a theory of mind is one of the hardest questions there are left.

I think you give to much credence to our understanding for this claim to be sufficient. To my knowledge, we have little understanding of the functional dynamics of the cosmos. We have pretty good predictive models, but that is a far cry for absolute certainty, a necessary for a claim such as this.


There are many metaphysical examples of all powerful beings and absence of their direct physical interactions being detectable as well. One of the more famous is of the "God mind" example. In a dream, you are in control of all the elements. Let's call all the elements of your dream your dream physics. The dreamer is in 100% control of the dream physics. The dream itself is a creation of his dream physics. The dream physics themselves are evidence of the dreamer. In addition, the dream, being wholly created from dream physics is also evidence of the dreamer. Parallel that back to us and you have one of the easiest and elegant explanations of the universe.

I think you are confusing a dream with the idea of a dream. You rarely have any control in dreams and even lucid dreamers don't have 100 % control. How a dream actually is made/dreamed is also a point of discussion in itself. A fundamental problem with this hypothesis is that WE think. Actors in our dreams don't think or do anything that has any effect in the world other than our memory of them. Like our thoughts, dreams don't have wills of their own.

Indeed, it is so comprehensible other views of the metaphysical nature of the cosmos will seem overly complex and lauded with burdensome hyper explanations, making this model satisfy an occam's razor over other possibilities. But complexity is hardly a model for evaluating truth, so I leave that just as an aside.

All other things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. But all other things aren't really equal here. Some thing are just inherently complex, like gravity or magnets. When you don't think about the details, it's easy to think your hypothesis is correct, but when you dig deeper it falls apart.

Actually, even if you accept the premise, it still means that the dreamer is completely removed from us; he has no control, because not even traces of it has been observed in our reality (the dream). So the complete lack of evidence also points to this hypothesis being false.

When you think it even further, we run into the ever present homunculus argument. Who's dreaming of the dreamer? And so on.

That our reality is actually a real, physical one is a much better explanation, because it neatly explains itself more completely - thereby actually fulfilling Occam's razor better.


Indeed, there are further explanations that would seemingly leave little evidence for God except for things happening just as they "should". One being the Occasionalism model, which interestingly enough, comes from the same mind as the previous example, George Berkeley. There is no proof that causation is the actuality of the universe. Just as if I setup a room full of clocks, and from left to right the clocks would sound off 5 seconds from the previous clock. To the observer, the clocks "caused" the next clock to sound, and on down the line they go. The problem is, there is actually no causal link to bind them, I created it after seeing A then B happen again and again. The fact is, no such link is there, I, the clock creator created it to appear that way, or maybe I didn't and you just jumped to conclusions. It is a classic example that Hume also highlights in his problems on induction.

Correlation does not imply causation. We have much supporting evidence of causation though. Forces are demonstrably interactive. Whether they were secretly set up to seem as if they interact aren't necessarily relevant, because demonstrably they do. There is no evidence to the contrary at all.

In your clock example, it is a physical room, so there are plenty of things to test the hypothesis that the clocks cause each other to ring. Are the clocks identical? Are there cogs inside the clocks? If we break one, will the chain still go on without it? Etc etc.

From observing X number of clocks you cannot strictly speaking extrapolate that to all clocks. That's the essence of the induction problem. Your hypothesis is based on limited data, and on further analysis it falls apart. Causality itself hasn't fallen apart yet. I'd like to see a proper argument against it, for certain.

I will leave it there. I am resolved to say I don't know. I also don't know that can or can't know. I am uber agnostic on all points, I just can't say. And I don't even know if time will tell.

It's a good start to all questions to say "I don't know". I do that too on many, many things. It's a much better starting point than when preachers usually say, "I know".

Your questions are interesting to me, because they deal with a lot of philosophical and physical stuff, I like those.

On a purely pragmatic level though, they are largely not that important. look at it this way, do you live your life as if causality exists? If you do and it works as you expected, then causality probably exist. If you live as if it doesn't exist, then the world is suddenly a very strange place. Do you live as if what you observe as blue is actually blue? Do others see it as blue as well? If they all do, then it's probably just blue. Does it make a difference if some people see it as green? Not really, I'd think.

Do you live your life as if there's a God? Do others? Does it make a difference? That's a very basic test of whether he actually exists. I argue that it doesn't make any difference at all, other than expected behavior of either party - some live as if a God exists and other live as if he doesn't exist. If the only difference in the people themselves, then the God falls out of the equation.

I think I've sufficiently trudged through this now. Sorry for the wall of text, hope it makes sense.

troglodyte homunculus?! I have to say this to someone!!

While Olbermann has been doing this schtick for a long time, at first it was because the US was doing some incredibly fucked-up shit.. like, you know, all that torturing innocent people to death, illegally wiretapping our communications, invading sovereign nations who posed zero threat to anyone, pillaging our treasury, running a pseudo dictatorship and delving into the absolute worst of politics -- so people, even news hosts, had every fucking right to be incredibly pissed off.

Yes, Olberman's "special comment" segment has been an utter trainwreck for a long time and should have retired it long ago. Yes, what once was reserved for the absolute most inhuman acts of our government is now used for petty personality pissing contsts.

Yet I think what WP willfully ignores is that there's a neverending valley of difference between the above, and just some GOP homunculus jackass winning one lousy senate seat.

But you gotta admit, the Limbaugh dig was pretty hilarious.

Her facial ticks are like an imprisoned mime homunculus trying to get out of her brainwashed grey matter, as if every time she spoke of the lord the poor thing got violently crushed against her tiny cranium .

These are the same guys who did the Bill-o tantrum re-dub.

"HOW ARE YOU GONNA WRITE IT !? YOU CANT EVEN READ IT, YOU TROGLODYTE HOMUNCULUS!"

Tags for this video have been changed from 'neil degrasse tyson, rocket, saturn V, boyhood joy' to 'neil degrasse tyson, rocket, saturn V, boyhood joy, homunculus' - edited by jonny

Write it, you can't even read it you troglodyte homunculus!

you troglodyte homunculus! classic

>> ^charliem:
"HOW ARE YOU GONNA WRITE IT ? YOU CANT EVEN READ IT, YOU TROGLYDITE HOMUNCULUS!"


I take issue with comparisons of Bill O'Reilly to us Troglodytes. We banned the entire O'Rielly clan from our troglobitic community eons ago. Please refrain from such abhorent associations in future dialogs or I will rip your throat out.

Sincerely,
CaveBear

"HOW ARE YOU GONNA WRITE IT ? YOU CANT EVEN READ IT, YOU TROGLYDITE HOMUNCULUS!"

rofl!!

Can't wait. Although it's a shame they scrapped the story with Roger the Homunculus.