You're correct on both counts.

Aggrad08 said:

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Texarkanaag69 said:

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Aggrad08 said:

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Texarkanaag69 said:

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dargscisyhp said:

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Change my mind

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Look to the Book of Genesis for creation and the Creator God. Assuming you do not believe in a Creator, explain to me how the first of your line (male and female) came to be. (Not evolution which doesn't account for the first woman and man.)

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Evolution discredits the notion of an Adam and Eve. Drawing a line at the first generation of homo sapien is arbitrary as it exists on a continuum. And wherever you draw that line you find many more than two.

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So you can't explain it either. Not surprised.

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No I literally explained why your question contains a false premise. It's like asking why I don't know the date that Hitler killed Ghengis Khan.

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Thanks for nothing. But I didn't expect an answer.

I'm not sure Tex was looking for an answer. I think he just wanted to 'own' an atheist.

Texarkanaag69 said:

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Sapper Redux said:

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Texarkanaag69 said:

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Sapper Redux said:

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Texarkanaag69 said:

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dargscisyhp said:

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Change my mind

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Look to the Book of Genesis for creation and the Creator God. Assuming you do not believe in a Creator, explain to me how the first of your line (male and female) came to be. (Not evolution which doesn't account for the first woman and man.)

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Why do you assume there must be 1 of each sex of each species at the exact same time? That's not at al how evolution works. It's a process measured in eons for complex animals such as humans.

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I don't. I'm wanting to know his explanation of the first of his line came to be. But if male and female didn't arrive simultaneously how did succeeding generations come to be.

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They developed over time. There's no hard cutoff where one day you have species A and then *boom!* they give birth to species B. Small changes accumulate over time to that point that if you compare species B to species A as it existed generations ago, you can see the connection but recognize the changes that have happened.

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Developed from what? Except for the Biblical Creation Story. Your "small changes" came originally how and from what?

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I'd like an honest answer: are you looking for an evolutionary explanation or are you trying to "gotcha" on abiogenesis? Because those are separate topics.

Zobel said:

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Under this definition I can't see how things like laws, or states, or corporations or agreements aren't all "things which exist in the imagination." In which case by your definition they're either not real, or as real as God (minimally).

Some of this seems to be arbitrary defensive posturing. A constitution as a document exists both before and after ratification or signing, but what it signifies is only on one side of that.

Do you think there's any significance to two people sharing the same concept? Has something new occurred when a contract is executed?

Hypothetically, what has physically changed when a judge rules a contract is null because of how it is written, regardless of the signatures on it?

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Before I respond, I want to recap how we got here, because this has become pretty convoluted.

I've made three claims that I think are worth recapping. First, at minimum, for something to be said to physically exist it needs to interact with the universe (which I earlier simply called reality) in some way. This is not necessarily a sufficient condition but a minimum condition. When the conversation was about God, what this means is that at minimum it needs to be shown that God has interacted with the universe.

Second, a statement about the physical universe is true if there is a corresponding fact within the physical universe that statement represents. I called this isomorphism -- really, that's probably a bad term, because isomorphism implies the precision of mathematics, which natural language does not have. Correspondence is probably a better term.

Third, I have been stressing that if you really think about it, natural language is chalk full of ambiguity. Context matters. When you talk about an agreement, are you talking about the idea of an agreement and the physical changes in the brain that correspond to that idea? Are you talking about the word agreement? Are you talking about the physical fact that words were spoken or a contract was written and an agreement was made? What we're doing is really confusing because you're being shifty when it comes to context.

I don't think I can do a whole lot more than take those claims and state them differently, or apply them to the new scenarios you've thrown at me, but unless you're willing to specify exactly what you mean by those things it's getting a little repetitious. When we were discussing Texas, you asked me what is physical about Texas. As I've stated above I think what someone means by a word depends a lot on the context. Texas has many aspects which are physical, the most obvious being the land, which is what I stated. You said, well no, Texas is not really the land. I mean, yes it ****ing is, that seems to be a fairly essential property of Texas, and it seems nonsensical to strip it of that, but I asked what you mean, to which you started talking about the entity called Texas. The entity called Texas of course includes its landmass, but it just went off the deep end there. Texas is Texas, it has physical properties, I think that's where the discussion of this should end, but if you want Texas to mean something else, what exactly do you want it to mean?!

And I would ask the same question about what you mean by corporations, agreements, etc. Because we can go through the same exercise with a corporation, and you'll come back and say well that's not what a corporation really is. But from my perspective a corporation encompasses many things, such as its employees. contracts, assets, a structure which occupies physical space, an so forth. An agreement typically consists of sound waves made or paper contracts and corresponding changes to the state of your brain. I'm not sure how you can really disagree with this. I mean, all I'm basically saying here is that a true statement about the universe has a corresponding fact within the universe. This should not be a controversial statement. I'm not going to go through all of your examples up there, I think it's fairly easy to identify the physically real aspects of all of those things.

The reason your examples are different from God is because there are really no physical qualities about him. If it is true that Christendom is the physical manifestation of God, then I would agree that God exists, because he has interacted with the universe in a physical way. But without something connecting God to Christendom, all you've done is establish the existence of Christendom, not an entity with all the properties ascribed to God, namely a transreality intelligence that created the universe and is particularly concerned with human affairs. If you want to prove that God exists, what you have to do is show me that He exists, not establish the existence of some other unrelated object without any real connection between the two.

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This

"the concept of an agreement is an abstraction of that physical change."

Seems pretty handwavy. What's the difference between an abstraction and a metaphysical thing?

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The way I am using abstraction is as a linguistic concept. The real world is precise, human language is imprecise. It conveys some meaning, but not the full picture of what is happening. Abstraction is how we are able to connect natural language with the real world. For example, when I say the ball is going to the ten yard line, it's ultimately an abstraction of Newton's second law with relativistic and quantum corrections. Abstraction is a linguistic concept, not a metaphysical one.

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When you thing of pineapple is that the same as when I do? What is pineapple?

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This is one of the beauties of abstractions. We can use the same abstract concept to describe physically unequal but similar things. Instead of the brain, which is complex and more difficult to understand, consider the same computer program written for two different processors. The physical representation of the program will be different on the different architectures, but we can refer to those programs as the same thing and understand what we mean. The human mind is very good at abstracting. I'm not sure we need to question that all that much.

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Which physical state corresponds to Texas? Is it constantly in flux based on aggregate opinion?

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Yes, Texas the word can be in flux. Texas, the physical thing, is not (at least not beyond how it physically evolves in times).

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Right so in this vein there's no such thing as Texas. There's a category of ideas in as many people who have a thought about something that corresponds to Texas called Texas. And accordingly as many categories as there are ideas, which is to say, no categories, just fractal concepts.

And you can now do this with anything. What makes a pillow a pillow? What makes this pillow a pillow, or this pillow?

Human recognition. Ergo existence is distinct from being and is related to human cognition. It gives meaning and relations to things which are.

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You're still confusing language for the underlying physical reality it refers to. A pillow is a physical thing we use language to describe. The language doesn't describe it perfectly, but it suits our purposes. Nevertheless, it's still a physical thing. It has dimension at the precision of human observation. It has boundaries at the precision of human observation. Below that, it is made up of atoms and covalent bonds and the underlying quantum physics which makes those things work and the underlying field theories which make that work and the underlying TOE which remains to be found. A pillow is a physical thing. The word refers to a physical thing. The word is a construct of human convention. The pillow itself, the physical phenomenon that word refers to, is not.

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I've said it before, it's all turtles models, all the way down.

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At some point we'll have a TOE which will truly be isomorphic to physical facts about the universe (not isomorphic in the natural language sense I used above but in the real mathematical sense), and that will be your last turtle.

Texarkanaag69 said:

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So where did the last universal common ancestor of all life come from. Tell me how the first man came into existence.

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Dargscisyhp said:

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I'm not well-versed enough on abiogenesis to have a meaningful discussion about it, but you're welcome to wiki that word.

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Ok, I'm done with this thread at least for the next 8 or so hours. Need to work.

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First, at minimum, for something to be said to physically exist it needs to interact with the universe (which I earlier simply called reality) in some way. This is not necessarily a sufficient condition but a minimum condition. When the conversation was about God, what this means is that at minimum it needs to be shown that God has interacted with the universe.

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Yeah but this is just tautological. By this definition something which caused the universe to exist and subsequently never touched it again would be excluded from this.

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Second, a statement about the physical universe is true if there is a corresponding fact within the physical universe that statement represents

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In that case no statements are true, or at least not completely true. Every statement will lack something - either be incomplete, or under-descriptive, etc. I think we're ok with this as "all statements are models" right?

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Texas is Texas, it has physical properties, I think that's where the discussion of this should end, but if you want Texas to mean something else, what exactly do you want it to mean?!

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In a discussion about tautology appealing to X is X seems suspect. "Texas" has no physical properties, unless physical properties can be created by humans writing some words on paper or saying them out loud. Nothing changed except recognition and assent to make what wasn't Texas into Texas.

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The way I am using abstraction is as a linguistic concept. The real world is precise, human language is imprecise. It conveys some meaning, but not the full picture of what is happening. Abstraction is how we are able to connect natural language with the real world. For example, when I say the ball is going to the ten yard line, it's ultimately an abstraction of Newton's second law with relativistic and quantum corrections. Abstraction is a linguistic concept, not a metaphysical one.

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Isn't language metaphysical? Isn't a "concept" metaphysical? I agree with this, by the way, except I'd call "abstraction" a model and move on to say that humans only model reality and never interact with it directly.

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Texas, the physical thing, is not (at least not beyond how it physically evolves in times).

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This is why I mentioned Hera****us. When you get into pure materialism things seem safe, until you dig deeper and realizes there is no static thing, period. So even the perfectly defined object "Texas" is completely and fundamentally dynamic, which calls into question how it can be a corresponding "fact".

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The word refers to a physical thing. The word is a construct of human convention. The pillow itself, the physical phenomenon that word refers to, is not....At some point we'll have a TOE...

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This here seems like a big assumption. We have this perception of reality that is mediated through multiple levels of models or abstractions, but you're saying somehow at the bottom there's this thing we're going to assume is reality independent of humans and we'll be able to perfectly and completely describe it.

If that's the case it becomes unclear which is real - TOE, or "reality" that it describes. How do you assign directionality to that relationship?

And really, how is reality different from God in this discussion?

Texarkanaag69 said:

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Aggrad08 said:

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Texarkanaag69 said:

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Aggrad08 said:

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Texarkanaag69 said:

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dargscisyhp said:

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Change my mind

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Look to the Book of Genesis for creation and the Creator God. Assuming you do not believe in a Creator, explain to me how the first of your line (male and female) came to be. (Not evolution which doesn't account for the first woman and man.)

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Evolution discredits the notion of an Adam and Eve. Drawing a line at the first generation of homo sapien is arbitrary as it exists on a continuum. And wherever you draw that line you find many more than two.

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So you can't explain it either. Not surprised.

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No I literally explained why your question contains a false premise. It's like asking why I don't know the date that Hitler killed Ghengis Khan.

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Thanks for nothing. But I didn't expect an answer.

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I think you are doing such hard swing at dunning Kruger that you think you have some sort of gotcha while asking a question that wouldn't make sense with even a high school level of knowledge of the subject