[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View] [Friends]
Below are 9 journal entries, after skipping by the 20 most recent ones recorded in
Vexen Crabtree's Blurty:
| Thursday, March 15th, 2007 | |
| 9:04 pm | Einstein on the Scientific Method Added the following one-line quote from Einstein, to: "The Scientific Method: New Theories and New Facts" by Vexen Crabtree (2006): “New theories are first of all necessary when we encounter new facts which cannot be "explained" by existing theories.” - Albert Einstein (1950) Taken from "Ideas and Opinions" by Albert Einstein (click to buy the book from Amazon.co.uk). |
| Sunday, February 25th, 2007 | |
| 1:02 am | Unintelligent Design Doing a new page, started it with: Evolution: Unintelligent Design, by Vexen Crabtree (2007): Our evolution, to our present state, is like other animals a path of many misadventures. What was once useful and an advantage, at later times can become a nuisance. These wrong-turns vary from the interesting to the deadly. For example, professors Bear, Connors and Paradiso in their book "Neuroscience" (1996) explain that the hypothalamus evolved to give us goose pimples when we are cold and call it "a futile attempt to fluff up your nonexistent fur - a reflexive remnant from our hairier ancestors"1. Prof. Richard Dawkins, the foremost evolutionary biologist, supples a few more serious examples:
Another symptom of the blindfolded nature of evolution is the presence of masses of unused and out-of-use genes; results of mutations and changes that have rendered them useless and ignored by our bodies. Junk. My favourite phrase to describe all of this waste, inefficiency and bad design is one I picked up from Paul Kurtz in the Skeptical Inquirer: “The existence of vestigal organs in many species, including the human species, is hardly evidence for design; for they have no discernable function. And the extinction of millions of species on the planet is perhaps evidence for unintelligent design.” Current Mood: happy |
| Sunday, January 21st, 2007 | |
| 2:37 pm | Dr Libet and Free Will I've added this quote to "Free Will: An Illusion" by Vexen Crabtree (1999): “That something in the brain really is performing the role of an observing self is suggested by the work of Benjamin Libet at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr Libet used eletroencephalography to look at brain activity during the process of making simple decisions such as when to move a finger. He showed that the process which leads to the act starts about three-tenths of a second before an individual is consciously aware of it. In other words, the observer is just that: an observer, not a decider. This may explain the feeling that most people have experienced at one time or another of having deliberately done something that they had not actually wanted to intended to do.”This is supported by a wealth of neurological evidence that our brain functions and works on strict deterministic, physical principles with no element of 'free will'. What we think is free will, is really the combined results of billions of events, all caused by previous events, that cascade back to long before we were even born. That all our thoughts, feelings and 'choices' are biochemical in nature is the biggest challenge for free will: There is simply no place in the system of human neurology for free will to play a part. My page as quoted above examines many other aspects of free will, including the telling truth that if free will existed, social justice would be undermined and become valueless: Punishment and deterrents such as fines, and good parenting, all rely on the fact that we can train people to behave in a certain way because we know that behaviour has causes external to the individual. The more free will there is, the less we can justify trying to improve other people. |
| Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 | |
| 1:13 pm | Apophenia Added the following text on apophenia to "Human Truth: The Scientific Method Counteracts Human Error" by Vexen Crabtree (2006): “Pattern recognition is the basis of all aesthetic enjoyment, whether it is music, poetry or physics. As we become more sophisticated in what we do, we learn to recognize ever more subtle patterns. Unfortunately, the brain that makes the link between the tides and the phases of the moon may also connect a comet to victory in battle. [...] There's a thin line between recognizing subtle patterns and apophenia, the experience of seeing patterns where non exist. [...] The scientific process, in short, takes account of cracks, shortcomings and changes.”(Proper references on the main article). I love the word 'apophenia', I never knew there was a word just for faulty pattern recognition! I have some references in my psychology books that explain that, in particular, Humans and other animals are prone to recognizing potentially dangerous patterns in random noise. The most popular and frequent occurance of this is surely the feeling-of-being-watched... apophenia in action! |
| Monday, January 1st, 2007 | |
| 5:14 pm | Battles Between Religion and Science I've added the following quotes and text to "Science: It's Methods and Character" by Vexen Crabtree 2006: “The historical battles between religious institutions and science, such as those in physics, astronomy and biology, indicate there is something wrong with the religious approach to the study of reality. The underlying problem extends to individual intelligence and education, and is not just limited to the actions of religious bodies. Hardly any of the several-hundred Nobel Prize winning scientists have been Christians. Only 3.3% of the Members of the Royal Society in the UK and 7% the National Academy of Sciences in the USA, believe in a personal God. The more senior and learnéd the scientist, the less likely they are to believe in God. This effect is not limited to scientists. The children of highly religious parents suffer diminished IQs - averaging 7 to 10 points lower compared to their non-religious counterparts in similar socio-economic groups. As you would expect from these results, multiple studies have also shown that IQ is opposed to the strength of religious belief. 39 studies since 1927 (out of 43) have found that the more educated a person is, and the higher one's intelligence, the less likely someone is to hold religious beliefs.” I report on one such battle on my page "Christianity Versus Astronomy" by Vexen Crabtree (2006). The conclusion reads: “Scientists had to suffer torture, silencing, imprisonment and death at the hands of Christians who didn't agree with newly discovered facts about the world. Christianity lost the first battle with astronomers who realized that, contrary to what Christians asserted, the Sun did not orbit the Earth, and that the Universe doesn't seem to be designed specifically for humankind. Copernicus (1473-1543), Kepler (1571-1630), Galileo (1564-1642), Newton (1643-1727) and Laplace (1749-1827) all fought battles against the Church when they published scientific papers challenging religious orthodoxy. Bible verses were all the theories Christians needed; and Joshua 10:12-13, 2 Kings 20:11, Isaiah 38:8 and Isaiah 30:26 all contradicted astronomers. But through intelligence and clever politics, truth gradually won out over dogma, and the Church retreated... only to go on to fight similar ignorant battles, and violently impose dogmatic errors, in the arenas of physics, biology and philosophy. Thankfully for the study of truth, the process of secularisation has diminished the strength of religion across the West, and since the Enlightenment, when religious institutions started to lose control of public life, education continues to act as an anti-religion force in the world: the more educated a person is, the less likely they are to be religious. Education is the key to leading successful, happy and above all, a meaningful life devoid of nonsense. |
| Sunday, December 17th, 2006 | |
| 8:51 am | Life on a billion planets? The formost evolutionary biologist, Prof. Richard Dawkins, makes some comments on the likelihood of life evolving on alien planets: “It has been estimated that there are between 1 billion and 30 billion planets in our galaxy, and about 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Knocking a few noughts off for reasons of ordinary prudence, a billion billion is a conservative estimate of the number of available planets in the universe. Now, suppose the origin of life, the spontaneous arising of something equivalent to DNA, really was a staggeringly improbable event. Suppose it was so improbable as to occur on only one in a billion planets. [...] Even with such absurdly looking odds, life will still have arisen on a billion planets - of which Earth, of course, is one.”Text from "The God Delusion" by Prof. Richard Dawkins, p137-8. I have added this text to my index page: "Alien Life: Evolution, Similarities to Earth, War and Paranoia" by Vexen Crabtree |
| Friday, December 1st, 2006 | |
| 8:03 pm | Hypothesis and Theory, according to Bertrand Russell I have added the following neat little description from Bertrand Russell, to my page on how scientific hypothesis become theories, driven by observation and experiment: “Science starts, not from large assumptions but from particular facts discovered by observation or experiment. From a number of such facts a general rule is arrived at, of which, if it is true, the facts in questions are instances. This rule is not positively asserted, but is accepted, to begin with, as a working hypothesis. If it is correct, certain hitherto unobserved phenomenon will take place in certain circumstances. If it is found that they do take place, that so far confirms the hypothesis; if they do not, the hypothesis must be discarded and a new one must be invented. However many facts are found to fit the hypothesis, that does not make it certain, although in the end it may come to be thought of in a high degree probable; in that case, it is called a theory rather than a hypothesis.” Taken from: "Religion and Science" by Bertrand Russell, p13-14 Current Mood: happy |
| Monday, September 18th, 2006 | |
| 10:58 am | Vexenism: Hard Science Vexenism embodies science. Hard science is the acceptance of science that seems inhuman such as: The fact that we evolved in the same way as the other animals, that we have only existed for a tiny fraction of the lifespan of the Earth, that we are utterly insignificant in the grand universe, that our thoughts and feelings are biochemical and our existence is a series of determined states over which we have no genuine control (i.e., there is no free will). It is a trend in Human psychology that our ego compells us to make ourselves feel important in the universe and in our lives. This has effected science. The solution is to actively embrace sciences that seem to belittle us. This is a humble approach, requiring humility. Such approaches are more accurate. |
| Thursday, September 14th, 2006 | |
| 10:34 pm | Offline... Strange, as a first post, but know that I am mostly offline due to work. When I get back to civilisation, I may well be around more. Not really sure what I'm going to use this journal for, though. |
