Evidence

Originally posted by telerion
Oh you have me read perfectly, Doctor. BTW wouldn't your post above be a perfect example of sacrificing coherence for verbosity?

No actually it isn't. Take some time to think about it. PM me when you know why.

Originally posted by ryunix
No actually it isn't. Take some time to think about it. PM me when you know why.

If that post had been any more poorly written than your previous posts, I might have taken your errors to be deliberate, made ostensibly to highlight how frustrating sloppy writing can be to read. However, since similar errors in logic and grammar can be found repeatedly in your posts, I can only surmise that you are enjoying a one-man self-pleasure party in honor of your (mis)perceived cleverness.

Originally posted by telerion
If that post had been any more poorly written than your previous posts, I might have taken your errors to be deliberate, made ostensibly to highlight how frustrating sloppy writing can be to read. However, since similar errors in logic and grammar can be found repeatedly in your posts, I can only surmise that you are enjoying a one-man self-pleasure party in honor of your (mis)perceived cleverness.

I would just assume that I have poor grammar 😕

Originally posted by ryunix
I am not sure I’m following point #2

Can it not be a fact that we are unable to understand God? I mean we are unable to prove or Disprove God, everything is speculation. So why should we stop talking about it 😕

To use your example:[b]
I recall people on here who have said that God’s notion of justice or morality is simply not one that we can comprehe an understand. Just like a higher morality. These statements are not useless be required

[/b]Can it not be a fact that we are unable to understand God? I mean we are unable to prove or Disprove God, everything is speculation. So why should we stop talking about it

Talking about it per se is not the problem. The problem is with the kind of talk. The early Christian writer Pseudo-Dionysius, for example, employed paradox of negation to point out that the metaphors and symbols being applied to the divine were just that. Zen masters do the same.

As I noted, I think that symbol, metaphor, allegory, myth, etc. has its place. I think it represents an aesthetic attempt to talk about what cannot be properly be said. As a mundane example, I do not object to e.e. cumming’s metaphor “the moon’s a balloon.” But it says more about the mind-state of the poet at that point (fantastical reverie, perhaps?) than about the moon.

But this does not mean talking about a “higher morality” and relating it to something we do understand (morality) does not help us understand,

Yes, it can mean precisely that. One must first assume that his concept of God is somehow “moral”, then speculate about the possible morality of genocide. What you end up with is naming something as “moral”, even though it violates your own sense of morality, simply because you want your God-concept to be moral. You end up in the position of asserting that immorality is moral if it comes from God, nothing more.

God is a premise. Scriptural inerrancy, for example, is a premise. Once one accepts these premises, the effort is to try to construct an internally consistent system based on those premises. But the internal consistency of that system does not establish the premises.

It is similar to when someone asks what my slerpee tastes like and i say "bananas". Does it actually taste like a banana, what type of banana, how ripe etc, who knows and who cares but it is banana like in taste and they have an idea. Not a specific fact on its exact flavor but they know it tastes like something they can understand.

Suppose the person in your example has never eaten, or even seen a banana? Would it be sufficient, or even fair, to say that your banana slurpee tastes like an orange—simply because the person does know what an orange tastes like?

I think it is more like trying to explain to someone who was born without the capacity to taste, what tasting is. So, you might say that tasting is like hearing music. That is an analogy, trying to relate a known experience to an unknown one. But it does not really convey “taste.” It does not describe the reality, which is pre-conceptual.

In Zen there is a state in which one experiences the pre-conceptual reality in which and of which one is. All language—metaphorical, paradoxical (as in Zen koans)—is aimed at eliciting, through what I would call aesthetic means, that experience in the listener. But there can also be a lot of conceptual groundwork that goes before—and can later be dispensed with. Some Zen teachers eschew even that, in favor of direct practice: intense koan meditation or simple practice at stilling the conceptual running of the mind.

The quote from Foyan is a koan. Koans are not explained: one must work on them oneself. That koan, however, I selected because it is on point regarding this discussion. Therefore, some context is provided. I won’t attempt to contextualize it further. You are free to take it on, or not, according to your own predilection.

_______________________________________

I often sacrifice simplicity for precision, and that can, I admit, lead to overly recursive sentence structure. Your synopsis was more efficient; it was also less precise. I am not going make a point-by-point clarification of it in order to accommodate you. I am trying to address your specific questions.

Hemingway probably spent as much time polishing his “simple” prose, as Joyce did his complex prose; he just wrote more books. I don’t spend much time polishing my posts on here. If you need to complain—instead of simply questioning—you’re probably not part of my intended audience.

Then again, I could simply offer koans, and assume that anyone who needs contextualization is not part of my intended audience. I have lately been thinking that may be the better course.

I do have a Thesaurus somewhere; but I don’t use it enough to know where it is.

Originally posted by telerion
Oh you have me read perfectly, Doctor. BTW wouldn't your post above be a perfect example of sacrificing coherence for verbosity?

Yeah, I think you're right. His post was ok at first but did get too verbose at the end.

Originally posted by ryunix
The fact that you said that shows your ignorance.

You know nothing of my education or my background and it is not an assumption that the majority of the people in the States, Canada or any other country you pick; have a lower level of education then myself.

I can deduce this because I know my level of education. You cannot, and make a fools allegation. ...[text shortened]... order to validate yourself.
Congrats fanboy, talk about something you know next time.
enjoy

I also found the post in question rather easy to understand, particularly given the complexity of the subject matter.

So that's 2:1 now, a majority. 🙂

Originally posted by Palynka
[


The difference is in the likelihood of each scenario. It's very easy to see why, given the known facts (gun power, gun, etc.), the likelihood of each scenario is different. Let B be the event of finding the evidence mentioned above and A be event of you being the murderer. For obvious reasons: Prob(A|B)>P(A)>P(A|~B).

There is a clearcut case that evid ...[text shortened]... less likely). Why? Both because the P(B|A) is high and P(B|~A) is extremely low, relative to P(B).

Something else to consider:
Here is the base result. There is no proposition X such that p(X) =p(B [where] A) in all probability distributions in which these are defined. (A probability distribution is an assignment of non-negative numbers to the members of a partition which sum to 1.)

Suppose there is such an X. We first show something of the logical relationships between X and A: X is (a) compatible with A, and (b) compatible with ??A, but (c) not entailed by ??A, i.e., X may or may not be true if ??A is true.

Proofs, in reverse order: (c) There are probability distributions in which p(??A) is high and p(B [where] A) low. (e.g., let p(??A) = 0.9; p(A & B) = 0.01; p(A & ??B) = 0.09. p(B [where] A) = 0.1.) So there are probability distributions in which p(??A) is high and p(X) [=p(B [where] A)] low. So ??A cannot entail X: if it did, X would be true throughout the ??A-worlds, and could not be less probable than p(??A). So, in some ??A-worlds, X is not true.

Similarly: (b) there are probability distributions in which p(B [where] A) is high and p(A) is low; hence in which p(X) is high and p(A) is low. So X cannot entail A: X must be true in some ??A-worlds. And a parallel argument will show that (a) X cannot entail ??A: X must be true in some A-worlds. There is nothing surprising in these facts. Now to the main part of the proof:

(i) p(B [where] A) depends only on how probabilities are distributed in the A-worlds (the part of the partition in which A is true). Fix p(A) and p(A & B), and p(B [where] A) is fixed.

So we can see pretty clearly that there could be a God. 😉

Originally posted by Coach Pre
(i) p(B [where] A) depends only on how probabilities are distributed in the A-worlds (the part of the partition in which A is true). Fix p(A) and p(A & B), and p(B [where] A) is fixed.

So we can see pretty clearly that there could be a God. 😉

Unless I'm reading it wrong (or have not express myself correctly), this is very close to what I was trying to say. When I was talking about the lack of frame of reference is exactly that we only find evidence in what, somewhat in your terms, we call the X-worlds.

Since we can only see that part of the distribution, we can't even determine whether X is A or ~A, nor which one is more likely. There could certainly be a God, but existence (by itself) cannot be then evidence neither for, nor against God.