Um, the title of the paper is “Estimating the prevalence of protein sequences adopting functional enzyme folds”.
As Axe states, “clusters of ten side-chains within the fold are replaced randomly”, so this is a different area than the core, I understand that much. So different results can result from different changes, that seems obvious.
There, the word you used, “design” again. For sure you don’t just plunk a bunch of molecules in a vat, and say “evolve!”
Nope! But now it’s “intelligently designed”, like you’re advocating ID somehow! Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Sure they would–if you truly had a point, but you don’t and you’re deliberately lying when you claimed that.
But not with any data, just his nonexpert opinion in a crap journal. Isn’t doctrine challenged with evidence in science? We both know that it’s challenged only by rhetoric in apologetics, which is all Tour is doing.
So why were you expecting us to have written to the editor of JMB? Wasn’t that incredibly hypocritical of you?
So what! Then his target audience is ignorant people like you, not scientists, correct?
Which scientific disputes have been decided by a debate? Which by producing new evidence?
Same question. You haven’t responded to a single challenge here to date. Why not? Isn’t that hypocrisy? What did Jesus Christ say about hypocrisy? Was He a fan?
Stop lying–I didn’t ask about every one. I asked about this specific one that you claimed was easy to show to be absurd, yet Tour does nothing!
Does your hypocrisy know any bounds? Does your dishonesty know any bounds?
Don’t need to, because many others have, and I examine the evidence they produce for myself. I’m not afraid like you.
They’re garbage.
They are what?
Yes, that’s literally what it means. Why do you lie so much?
That’s because programming isn’t science. It can be a component of it, though.
That’s quite the goalpost move. The 2004 paper was lab work. Extending it would require more lab work, not simulations.
Apparently the DI disagrees with you, because they claimed to have a lab!
I’ll ask again: I don’t expect a single lab result, because Axe has produced no lab results in the last 21 years. I predict nothing but rhetoric. Why would that change? What about Biola?
If you’re a real programmer, why are you incapable of doing basic web searches?
A lie on top of a lie. We’re talking about your repeated lies about scientific publication practices, not speakers and shows.
You’ve been wrong about virtually everything you’ve claimed here, but you’ve only admitted being wrong once that I remember. Why is that?
Well, no, because the 2004 paper had no work on folding whatsoever. You were lying. It’s boring.
You really have problems distinguishing between general vs specific.
Research already HAS, both before and in the 21 years after. Why don’t you know this? So why hasn’t Axe contributed in 21 years? He knows the 2004 paper was bogus.
And why are you obviously lying by using “can”? How many papers would you guess have addressed the prevalence of function in sequence space with new data since 2004?
Um, yes it is. That’s the first tipoff that it’s really bad.
Again, there is zero investigation of any folding in the 2004 paper. That’s a simple, objective fact.
Obviously you don’t. I do; you’re lying again!
We don’t know that the results are truly different, because enzyme activity was measured in the barnase paper. That not only seems obvious, it is. It’s obvious that Axe knew better. But not to you!
Nope.
Nope. We intelligently designed the mutant based on structural studies–ones that unlike Axe, investigated folds.
It’s far better than yet another one of your many lies!
You have presented the assertion that “reason cannot come out of unreason”.
In purported support of this claim you have made three further assertions (and assertions are not evidence!):
That it is a widely accepted “general principle”. This assertion is false Lee. (i) This “principle” is based upon an Aristotelian framework. (ii) Outside of theology and apologetics, the Aristotelian framework is not widely accepted. (iii) Therefore a principle based upon this framework would not be generally accepted.
The assertion that psychiatrists look for “irrational causes”. (i) You have not presented even a shred of evidence supporting this assertion. (ii) It would mean that most psychiatrists hold to an Aristotelian framework – when we have no evidence of this.
The assertion that people on this thread are “pointing to nonreasoning causes”. This claim is based upon your assumption that those people are applying an Aristotelian framework, which is highly unlikely for the reasons I give above, and outright false in my own case.
Even if these assertions were true (and they bracket the boundary between highly-unlikely and outright falsehood), they would still not support your original assertion. If true, they would only be evidence in support of the claim “people believe this is true”, NOT evidence that the assertion itself is true. To prove this assertion true, you would need to provide evidence WHY it is true. Why cannot reason come out of unreason? Not whether people (allegedly) believe it to be true.
Your following comment attempts (but fails) to address this point, so I will address it next:
No, it is not “because most people are mistaken somehow.” It is perfectly possible to get to a true conclusion based upon fallacious reasoning. It is even possible for some forms of fallacious reasoning to yield a true conclusion most of the time. That was my whole point in the statement you were responding to. The fact that you completely missed that point means you simply do not understand what people say.
No Lee!
Beliefs are NOT evidence.
In earlier times many (most?) people believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth.In earlier times many (most?) psychiatrists accepted a Freudian framework. Their beliefs did not render either claim to be factual.
This is why argumentum ad populum is a fallacy.
You need to show WHY reason cannot come out of unreason, NOT that people (you claim without evidence) believe this.
No Lee. That conclusion ASSUMES an Aristotelian framework, a framework that I "certainly* REJECT!
When you say “an unreasoning cause” I hear “badlerdash that Aristote made up and that that irrelevant old fossil Clive Staples Lewis, and Lee Merrill, unaccountably still believe.”
And as people who engage in motivated reasoning are also capable of less fallacious reasoning, it is unclear how this supports your central assertion.
And thus you undermine your asserted dichotomy.
And I have, by giving examples of imperfect, but still often perfectly adequate, levels of reasoning (that you dismiss as “other fallacies”), that demonstrate that there is not a bright line between perfect reason and perfect unreason, but a continuum between them, with no obvious insurmountable division at any point.
No Lee. My point was that you are your braincells (and all your other cells) in the same way that you are your fists. This does not confirm your BS point.
So you assert, without foundation, based upon your Aristotelian framework. You have provided no evidence that anybody “insists” anything of the sort. I do not accept this assertion.
But then “ultimate source” is simply more Aristotelian balderdash.
There is a mountain of evidence establishing the brain as the proximate source of our decisions, and no credible evidence of any source behind it.
I would point out that “my soul made me do it” would be just as unacceptable in court as “my braincells made me do it”. Whether you consider your braincells or your braincells + your soul to be the source, they are still you.
You are not “presenting” anything Lee!
You are DISTORTING psychiatrists, the courts, and the rest of us on this thread, to ram them into the pigeonholes of your own archaic Aristotelian framework.
No Lee – you may have attempted to address them, but you have failed.
Your whole “discussion” has been nothing but worthless, assertion, distortion and misrepresentation.
@Tim points to the fact that Lee hasn’t presented even a shred of evidence in support of his psychiatrist claim, the fact that all Lee has to support his “court” claim is his own pitiful hand-waving (as opposed to evidence), and his (Tim’s) own analysis of Lee’s “three assertions” at the top of this post.
And he points at Lee and laughs …
…and laughs …
…and laughs.
Because they are examples of why reason is a continuum not a dichotomy – reason does not need to be perfectly valid in order to be useful. It is nearly pervasively rendered imperfect by insufficient information, insufficient understanding or insufficient time. But it is still, to a lesser or greater extent, useful.
That this understanding does not fit into your archaic Aristotelian worldview is NOT MY PROBLEM!
It is a “you problem”.
You certainly are treating it as a dichotomy – you cannot say “reason cannot come out of reason” without it being one. That you were never clear on the boundaries between the two, does not change the fact.
Sorry, but that is far too vague to be useful. For example, how far does somebody have to descend into dementia, before they cross the line from reason into unreason? How old must a baby/child/adolescent have to be to cross the line from unreason into reason? Etc. Etc. Your definitions don’t answer any of these, or similar questions.
So it remains that “reason” and “unreason” are insufficiently rigorously defined for your challenge to be even meaningful.
And I say that this “speaking” is inaccurate. In that it lumps a large range of phenomena together. For example:
Firstly, “when a person sees snakes” it is a hallucination, not a delusion.
Mental illness, almost pervasively, present as a spectrum of severity, from almost-indistinguishable-from-normality, to completely dysfunctional. Delusional disorder (sometimes known as Paranoia) is the more severe, psycohsis, form of what in its milder forms would be considered paranoid personality disorder. Likewise schizophrenia is a more severe form of what in a milder form would be considered schizotypal personality disorder. Similarly, hallucinations can have a wide range of causes with a wide range of frequency, severity, etc.
It is not clear what you meant at all Lee, and you appear to be moving the goalposts.
Is the mind of a person suffering from dementia an “unreasoning cause” or a “reasoning cause” in your schema? It is not at all “clear” what you are saying.
Except that your point is a false one – imperfect reasoning (e.g. fallacious reasoning) can quite often reach a true conclusion – though unreliably so.
This Lee is part of why I REJECT your endless ad nauseam blather about “unreasoning causes” – it is quite simply NOT USEFUL in understanding reality. This is why over several centuries philosophers invented frameworks that superseded Aristotle’s.
So, by your own admission a “reasoning” result (awake you) came from an “unreasoning cause” (asleep you). Where is your general principle now?
[Sits back in a beach-chair while Lee moves the goalposts.]
And if you believe that, then I’ve got a wonderful Brooklyn Bridge I’d like you to buy.
This is the same Gospel attributed to Luke that fabricated a census, when the Romans would have no reason whatsoever to care who Joseph’s thousand-year-before ancestor might have been, let alone send him to Bethlehem?
And I have “no reason” to accept a single word you have said on this thread Lee.
Given that I deny the usefulness of categories such as “unreasoning causes” and “reasoning causes”, this is not my problem Lee.
Stupid people occasionally say smart things. Smart people occasionally say stupid things. Therefore, classifying statements according to their “causes” seems … well … stupid.
That’s why I see Aristotle as simply a guy who died over a couple of millennia ago – and not some corpse that needs to be dug up and trotted out at every occasion.
I struggle to understand what it may mean for this to be false. A being that does not exist somewhere (where “somewhere” means one or more possible world) is a being of which it is false that it exists in all possible worlds. Therefore, that is a being that does not meet the definition of a being that exists in all possible worlds. How can a being that does exist in all possible worlds fail to exist in one or more possible worlds? That wounds like a contradiction to me.
And? I still do not understand what reason coming from reason (or non-reason, as the case may be) means. Paranoia, delirium, and dementia are conditions of the brain/mind. They are not reason or non-reason, and they do not produce either. When something isn’t obvious to me like it is to you, giving me examples to illustrate that it is obvious to you does nothing to make me understand the thing in question.
Reasoning is a particular kind of thinking, as far as I am aware, and thinking isn’t some magical goo that the soul is squirting into nature from out in the aether. It is rather an activity, an electro-chemical process happening in brains. It does not “come from” someplace, because it is not a substance that can flow to and fro. Mental conditions, then, as much as they may colloquially “inhibit reason” are not “sources of unreason” to me. They are rather disruptions in the physiological, electrical, or chemical state of one or more brain regions that modulate/affect the process in ways that make them statistically significantly different than in the vast majority of subjects deemed “healthy” by comparison. I still have no clue whatsoever what “reason comes from reason” means, which is why your appeals to the reason-free-ness of atoms is as meaningless to me as an appeal to the wetness-free-ness of water molecules. There are admittedly many levels of complexity separating the mere wetness of water from the reasoning of a healthy human brain, but to me this is a difference in scale, not kind.
Which is also irrelevant, since here we are talking of matters of fact, whereas courts decide matters of law.
feel free to disengage any time you please. Noone will judge you for it, we all understand that this is a lot of communication from many different people with (for the most part) opposing outlooks on many things. It is perfectly acceptable and expected that you would not find the time or the will to engage with all of it fully, and if to progress some conversation someone strongly needs you to respond to some specific point, I’m sure for a while they’ll be patient enough to raise it again for you, should you set it aside or overlook it the first few times.
Alright, so you understand that it is not a general principle. Weird that you would bring it up then, when trying to support what you think is a specific instance. We are, at any rate, back to square one, in this case. You say reason must come from a self-existent reason, but there seems to be no argument in support of this assertion.
Yes, I should think that evidence should be what guides verdicts like this. The problem is, we do not have a criterion. We have nothing to go on, no evidence we could gather that would systematically weigh the scales one way or another. The closest you have named are things like NDEs or OBEs, but we have (a) very sparse indication that more than zero of the reports of such things are actually accurate, (b) very strong indication that they are not, considering how nothing remotely like them seems to be happening the moment any sort of controls are installed to study the phenomenon with any more rigor than none at all, and (c) no agreement on candidate explanations for the reports, even if one were to take tham at face value.
The problem with the “soul” hypothesis is that it’s not a hypothesis. It’s magic. There are no expectations one should have in a world where souls pilot bodies that are any different than the expectations one should have in a world where they don’t. Real things there is evidence for – or at least what one might call “useful fictions” – are things we can make better predictions with than without. They actually aid our understanding in this very obvious, very tangible sense. That’s why typically there isn’t first an “explanation” in support of which we then go out to gather evidence. But rather, there is first a mysterious phenomenon, that through a new explanation becomes less uncontrolled and weird. There may remain a debate for centuries whether this new picture is the full story, and there may be some controversy if the cost of understanding one phenomenon is having a weaker grasp on another. But there is no dispute over whether or not there actually is something there in need of an explanation, nor over whether or not the new hypothesis succeeds at being better at it – through accuracy or efficiency – than what preceded it.
That’s a lie. I proposed a perfectly reasonable possible world: One where mankind does not exist. And I proposed a kind of man – the shmachelor – who exists in all possible worlds as a matter of definition. I have therefore constructed a world where there a being that must exist cannot.
People can use words how ever they please, that much is true. All I can say to this is that I do not understand them. To me, a thing that exists by definition is a thing that cannot also not-exist as a matter of circumstance. The only escape I find coherent is to deny altogether that existence is a thing that one gets to assign to things in quite the same we assign them weights or colours. Is that the only way? Maybe not. Is it the best way? I’m not one to decide that. But it is the only way I know to avoid silly paradoxes like being that both do and do not exist which does not need serious reconstructions of all of predicate and most of modal logic.
My apologies to the rest of the participants, if critical points to the discussion I have had part in were overlooked in this message. I have been without connection in a hospital since last Wednesay and only back as of this night, and wouldn’t get through most of a week’s worth of discussion in a reasonable timeframe to catch up and move on. If any concrete point needs my attention, do feel free to direct me to them again.
That was @Mercer’s claim not mine Lee – so I’m not sure why you are addressing your question at me. However, it is trivially easy to answer:
Including, from Axe himself:
He [Axe] says that the lab’s main objective “is to show that the design perspective can lead to better science”, although he allows that the Biologic Institute will “contribute substantially to the scientific case for intelligent design”.
Thete is at least one possible world in which no beings exist. So there cannot be a being that exists in all possible worlds. So no being that exists in all possible worlds exists in any possible world.
That’s one way of resolving the paradox, yes. Saying that we do want to be able to imagine empty worlds, so therefore “necessary existence” is impossible. This of course means existence is not like other predicates, which is what I’ve been arguing all along. Another way is biting the bullet, allowing a being to exist in all possible worlds, but at the cost of being unable to conceptualize a world where such a being does not exist. It remains a contradiction to say that something that exists in all possible worlds also does not exist in some (or any) possible world, but that’s exactly my point. Existence is not like a weight or a colour. We don’t get to treat it the same way: Something has to give, whether it is the semantics of existence, the some/all modality, the worlds that get to be deemed possible, or even the prohibition against contradictions.
That would be one world in which God does not exist, true. The question is whether such a world is (metaphysically) possible. My position is that we cannot know one way or the other, and so both forms of the argument remain on the table.
Yet another paper by Sauer and Reidhaar-Olson (1990) reported on “the high level of degeneracy in the information that specifies a particular protein fold,” which it gives as 1 in 10^63.
Of course, being a fundagelical, maybe Axe thinks “degeneracy” means the proteins are gay
… he is just wrong. I say he is wrong, John Mercer says he is wrong, even Ann Gauger (a co-author on many of Axe’s papers in the DI pseudo-journal BioComplexity) says he is wrong too.
Well, if I don’t have a point, you should be able to easily disprove it, so why don’t you do that?
So how is BioCosmos not a respectable journal? And you were the one just proclaiming about evidence, so please give the evidence for this. And as I have read, “The authors employed statistical decay theory and quantitative geometrical thermodynamics to calculate the decay time constants of proteins and RNA, which are directly related to their half-lives…” That would not be lab work, but it also has substance. No scientific journal is going to publish an article that does nothing.
Not at all, here is an article from Tour, in addition to the above paper: “An Open Letter to My Colleagues—Life Should Not Exist,” Inference Internat. Rev. Sci.2017
Why don’t you all do something like this? And point out the problems with Axe, and Tour, for starters?
Actually, no as mentioned in the “Tour Challenge” thread here, and then here in this thread, he called out and challenged a number of OOL scientists by name, in the video mentioned here, he was actually addressing them.
Eh? What challenge have I not responded to here? Apart from some chemistry challenges I have seen, to which I replied “I don’t know”. I’m not a chemist, but I do try and read and learn enough to discuss here.
Well, Tour also debated OOL researcher Lee Cronin! Where both participants had the chance to produce evidence. But yes, scientific debates take some time, but debates, though unusual, can be part of the discussion.
Though it should be clear what I mean, taking the approach of challenging papers individually is a daunting task, writing open letters and writing papers of his own in a journal, doing debates and talking with students at gatherings and producing videos is a more reasonable approach. Tour is not doing nothing.
Ah. Weren’t we just talking about evidence? How is it that you can wave your hands about what others have done, and you need not produce any of it?
Biologists.
Here is what I found (via AI, but they are trained on information, and this was very specific)
Principal Investigator Responsibilities in Clinical Trials: Expert Guide
The Principal Investigator (PI) in a Cambridge lab is the legal, ethical, and operational leader of every clinical trial. Their responsibilities include:
Protocol Validation: The PI must personally review and approve the study protocol, sign off on IRB submissions, and take responsibility for every amendment, deviation, and final report.
Subject Safety: The PI is accountable for ensuring the safety of human participants and must respond decisively to trial complications.
GCP Compliance: The PI holds ultimate responsibility for trial conduct, including protocol validation, regulatory filings, and IRB submissions.
Ethical Oversight: The PI must ensure informed consent clarity, maintain voluntary enrollment, and oversee adverse event management.
Training and Oversight: The PI must ensure that all site personnel are trained to uphold ethical standards and must personally review and approve all study activities.
Nothing about participating in every project, like they work on each project like the participants do, or (as I believe you said) being a coauthor on every paper there.
Which why he worked an a program in 2008 called Stylus here? “Stylus: A System for Evolutionary Experimentation Based on a Protein/Proteome Model with Non-Arbitrary Functional Constraints**”** Which is a model, presumably a program, with no lab work.
Well, where? I keep asking and nobody seems to be able to tell me.
Well, if he says he’s back in the lab, at Biola, I see no reason to doubt him. I’ll wait and see what results, I recommend you do the same.
I think a better way is to examine their web site, which is what I did.
I certainly didn’t mean Axe’s articles were on the cover, or in a news article! I wish you all would be more discerning.
Folding is in the title, you know: “Estimating the prevalence of protein sequences adopting functional enzyme folds”. So he certainly subscribed to the view that his work applied in this area.
Yes, he doesn’t simulate folds, he doesn’t count folds, but the obvious point here is that without folds, you don’t get function in most proteins. In particular in beta-lactimase. So function requires proper folding in Axe’s work, so his work applies to folding.
I’m not sure how the distinction between general and specific applies to saying “cores only have to be hydrophobic, basically”.
Lots of questions! That’s fine if others do research in this area, it’s not some area I feel a need to keep up with. Especially in this thread, which was about defending Axe’s 2004 paper. And I mentioned he has contributed in the interim, but apparently was hampered without a (purported) lab. And again I must ask, where in the long long thread has anyone given a refutation that has gone unaddressed, or that has proved unanswerable? Let’s have just one point like this. Just one.
I’m not sure how saying something “can” happen is lying, if you don’t have a count? And I have no idea how many papers have appeared in this area, my purpose here being (as I said) to defend Axe’s 2004 paper.
So are side-chains part of the core? A yes or no will do.
I’m sure though that you don’t think the results are the same, if so, no one would bring the barnase paper up.
Alright, so careful and deliberate work go into this, as in experimental design.
Sure, you can get more specific in investigating folds, but as above, other work can require them, and therefore study the prevalence of working folds.
I did haul up and present a summary of a Principal Investigator’s work. At Cambridge Lab! Just now, to John Mercer, thus his claim, if this summary is true, is actually false.
Again, oh dear. (Lee: if that was at all unclear, I’m expressing concern at the level of ignorance you display in that short exchange, while apparently thinking you can discuss this subject reasonably.)
Sir, you have never darkened the door of a research lab, are profoundly and obtusely ignorant of the routine work-a-day involvements of research, yet have no qualms informing career scientists they are mistaken as to how they do their jobs. That is reprehensible.
To waste some more bandwidth, there are differences between a primary research lab and a clinical trial, given ethical concerns surrounding risks to human health, so your AI response is neither comprehensive nor on target. You should have figured this out on your own.
But calling Aristotle “outdated”, and so he can therefore be rejected? and also because C.S. studied him? That somehow invalidates my reasoning? What kind of refutation is that?!
Look, you haven’t addressed what I said in reply to your objections to Aristotle, I’m not going to repeat myself, if you want to have a discussion, please respond to what I said about this.
I agree that this is possible, but taking refuge in a mere possibility is not a good idea, let’s look for what is most likely.
They’re evidence if they’re rational, defensible beliefs. Can I dismiss your statement that “Beliefs are not evidence” because that’s just your belief, and I therefore can dismiss it?
But people do have good reason to believe this, if you know that a person is telling you not to cross the street, because there’s a dog over there, and he’s afraid of dogs, it’s quite reasonable to discount what he says. If a psychiatrist deduces that a patient has paranoid schizophrenia, he will seek to help him, not affirm his belief, because he sees it’s founded on, and caused by unreasoning cause, his mental illness. And so on, I have given many examples which demonstrate this principle.
Again, please address what I said about this objection, and not simply repeat your conclusion.
I have agreed again and again, not every thought we have is reasoning, not every thought we have is unreasoning.
But I never claimed I had a dichotomy! I only asked you to defend you claim that I had one.
But you’re off track here, I agree that reasoning can be partially imperfect, my challenge is to defend your claim that my view involves a dichotomy, and therefore can be rejected.
But that’s the point that needs defending! And not just stating.
Um, it’s pretty self-evident that sane people do insist they are agents, that they don’t ascribe their behavior to some part of their body, no need to bring Aristotle into it. Like when people say “I’m proud of myself.” They mean there were a real agent who did something. Not that part of their body did something. Even when they do something like a good piano recital. They bow. They don’t wave their hands.
So I need to see some of this “mountain of evidence”, otherwise I’m going to just call it “more materialistic balderdash.”
But that’s not the claim, nobody believes there is a soul somehow distinct from them, that is the real agent, that causes them to do stuff. The way my view is sometimes stated is, “I am a soul, I have a body.” So the soul is me, the body can come and go.
But you have yet to address the problem that the courts do insist “you” did the crime, you as an agent, not your brain, not your fist. Again, “saying my brain cells made me do it” won’t fly.
Another point, Kim Peek (aka Rain Man) had his parents tell them he would be profoundly disabled, lacking a main part of his brain, and other brain abnormalities, yet he was a savant, able to memorize entire books upon reading them, each eye reading a different page, and so on. Our brain is not apparently such a strict requirement! People with microcephaly, could also be mentioned, where “Some children with microcephaly are both with normal intelligence and have normal developmental milestones”.
More evidence, and again, no need to bring in Aristotle.
But where did I give up? That was the point I made, and you gave an assertion, followed by another assertion, and so on.
Alas, more assertions. Please address the points I make, and stop this flailing.
No, quit this! Please. You entirely miss what I am saying, I’m challenging you to defend your claim that I am making a dichotomy in the first place!
Well, I agree, you’re now off on another tangent.
And now that I’ve agreed with your point, does that now make it a part of some archaic Aristotelian worldview?
But I agreed as well that there can be a spectrum in our reasoning, as to how it is valid. And I’ve tried to be clear on my view throughout. I think I have been, and the problem is that you are not understanding what I say, in surprising ways.
Again, our thoughts and reasoning can be only partially valid. How many times do I have to say this? I do say that some of our reasoning can have unreasoning causes.
Not so, the dictionary definition is perfectly clear, how is it not unclear? I think by “rigorous” you I need to come up with this line you insist on, between reason and unreason in various scenarios, as if all such thoughts you point to must be either unreasoning or reasoning completely. That is not my view.
Please point me to a definition that says that a hallucination cannot be spoken of as a delusion, that there is no possible overlap.
But none of this addresses my point, when someone sees snakes due to delirium, they are definitely being seen, there is no spectrum. So again, no one says that delirium is partly reasonable, when a person sees snakes, I mean delusions. Or “unreasoning causes for conclusions”, if you like.
It’s an unreasoning cause.
But my point here was different, unreasoning causes when in operation, are false, meaning they are not real. Certainly people with a phobia of dogs may conclude they should run from a dog, correctly, if the dog turns out to be rabid. That is irrelevant, though. Unreasoning causes therefore, are not partly reasoning. Though they nay cause reasonable actions! But that doesn’t address my point.
You have yet to tell me how progress is being made, if many (most?) philosophers are driving off in different directions!
I don’t place my reasoning solely in my brain, as you do!
Or unborn babies do get to recognize their parents’ voices. Or Mozart! Your turn to buy the bridge.
Actually, there’s reason I’ve heard of that there were two censuses, and Luke is now considered by many scholars to be a first-class historian. And the claim is that Jesus’ birth was a prophecy that was notable for its fulfilment, not that it was a conspiracy by Caesar to get this done.
There, you just did it! Dismissing some conclusion, by pointing to the cause. Just my point, when people reject my arguments and reasoning, while not examining them, and instead pointing to stupidity, or “wanting to be important”, or being fearful. And so on.
But you’re the one trotting out Aristotle, not me. Your claim is that his ideas have been discredited, and you don’t tell me how, except that his ideas are old. I’m not very familiar with Aristotle, actually, but I don’t discount ideas because someone had them long ago. I think they are more likely to be valuable, in fact, as Lewis pointed out, “read old books, we can fairly easily now see where they were mistaken, their errors cannot infect us as easily as thoughts in our own age, and their insights will stand out all the more for that reason. Our own age has characteristic blindnesses, as all ages do, and those we need to be vigilant about. People in later ages will look back at some of our beliefs, and be astonished.” Or words to that effect, I’m quoting a summary from memory.
You forget. Here is a reminder. That has been addressed. If you are deemed competent to stand trial, the courts consider you culpable if found guilty. Philosophy of mind is not pertinent and so is not a problem as you maintain.
You forgot. Here is a reminder. An actual psychiatrist explained how that is not an proper description of clinical practice.
has been nothing but worthless, assertion, distortion and misrepresentation.
