|
Post by Hulkamaniac on Dec 29, 2010 14:05:50 GMT -5
One person who can see into the future over the last 100 or more years must have seen September 11 happening. Not one person could predict it. You don't have to ask the question "Will there be a terror attack in America?" Maybe not even September 11, not one person saw Pearl Harbor coming or any of the other major events in history. Over the course of time, one person should have been able to see something happening, but we have no proof anyone did. According to SPN we have no proof that no one didn't either therefore it must be true.
|
|
|
Post by K5 on Dec 29, 2010 14:11:43 GMT -5
We don't fully understand why light sometimes behaves as particles and sometimes behaves as waves. Yet it's something we can and do test. You fail to grasp science apparently. You don't have to understand all the inner workings of something to know that it works or to test it. I confess that I don't understand everything that goes into making my car start . However, I can easily test whether it's going to start or not. All I have to do is turn the key. That's a test. I don't have to fully understand the internal combustion engine to test something. You seem to think that science has to completely and thoroughly understand something before they can do any testing. It speaks to a weak understanding of how science actually works. In science, someone makes a claim. That claim is tested and verified or falsified. Once the claim has been verified, then you work on figuring out why it works if you don't know the answer already. Psychics all make testable claims. They claim they can read minds. Or that they can predict the future. Or whatever. All of these claims are testable. Whether one understands how it works is another question. You can still test all of these claims. These claims have been tested. They've all been falsified. We could easily test if a toad could digest something. You feed the toad the food and kill/dissect the toad a few hours later to see if the food is being broken down. It's an easy test. Even if we don't know exactly how it works, it's still testable. so lack of fundamental knowledge on a subject (if it is indeed true) by no means would affect the quality and success of a test you implemented on it? i thoroughly disagree. i'm not talking about professional psychics. i am talking about if the human mind has the possibility of psychic ability, and none of us (still) know the answer to that. the environment isn't a controlled one, as we have no idea what a controlled environment is for psychic ability. this is non-debatable really. it's supernatural, as you've already stated...so it can not be tested within natural environments. and wow hulk, you rather completely missed my point with the toad metaphor or intentionally revised it. i was speaking as if we had lack of knowledge about the biology of the toad. way to take what i said, spin it in a totally different direction, repackage it, and then somehow argue it. you could say 'within the fields of science psychic abilities cannot be proven' but you cannot say 'science disproves psychic ability'...as psychic ability, as we already said, doesn't fall under science's understanding.
|
|
|
Post by K5 on Dec 29, 2010 14:14:43 GMT -5
One person who can see into the future over the last 100 or more years must have seen September 11 happening. Not one person could predict it. You don't have to ask the question "Will there be a terror attack in America?" Maybe not even September 11, not one person saw Pearl Harbor coming or any of the other major events in history. Over the course of time, one person should have been able to see something happening, but we have no proof anyone did. so now people's claims are considered proof? in that case, there have been endless psychic events that have occurred throughout time that are unexplained phenomena. nevermind that skeptics would just label it an accurate prediction.
|
|
|
Post by Hulkamaniac on Dec 29, 2010 14:29:37 GMT -5
so lack of fundamental knowledge on a subject (if it is indeed true) by no means would affect the quality and success of a test you implemented on it? i thoroughly disagree. You would be completely incorrect. Do you know how a battery works at a fundamental level? I confess I don't. However, if I asked you to test if a particular battery was a good battery and had a charge, I'm sure you could test it. All you'd have to do is plug the battery into a tester and see what charge you got out of it. Here's another example. Let's say I want to test for the presence of a certain chemical in water. I know that if I put the water in a test tube and put 2 drops of reagent A it'll turn blue. You may have no clue what I'm testing for (so you have a completely incomplete knowledge of the subject). If that chemical is there, the water will turn blue whether it's me that puts the reagent in the tube or you. I may have complete knowledge of chemistry and you might know nothing about it at all, but our knowledge doesn't influence the outcome of the experiment in the slightest. No, it's not untestable. Once again, you have someone who claims that they have <<insert ability here>>. Please give me one good reason why we can't test whether they really have <<insert ability here>>. If I told you I could fly would you just take my word for it? My ability to fly would defy all rules of science that we know of. But since it would be a "paranormal" ability, we wouldn't even be able to test it would we? Tell me how we get knowledge of the biology of a toad without doing experiments and tests. I can very accurately say that there is no scientific evidence whatsoever of psychic ability. Science has tested psychics and psychic phenomena. They have been disproven over and over again. Science has the ability to prove psychics and psychic phenomena. It would be completely inaccurate to say "within the fields of science psychic abilities cannot be proven". Science can easily prove psychic abilities. All it takes is one person with said abilities who can replicate them over and over under controlled conditions. That's all it takes. Yet every time someone has tried, they've been proven to not have any abilities at all.
|
|
Revvie®
Main Eventer
Somewhere between Reality, and the Absurd
Joined on: Jun 29, 2005 1:04:26 GMT -5
Posts: 4,327
|
Post by Revvie® on Dec 29, 2010 14:59:41 GMT -5
One person who can see into the future over the last 100 or more years must have seen September 11 happening. Not one person could predict it. You don't have to ask the question "Will there be a terror attack in America?" Maybe not even September 11, not one person saw Pearl Harbor coming or any of the other major events in history. Over the course of time, one person should have been able to see something happening, but we have no proof anyone did. According to SPN we have no proof that no one didn't either therefore it must be true. You really dont get it do you....I stated no proof means no facts...not, no proof means psychics....your kind of a tool in the sense that you continue to put out words that I never said and continue to argue points no one made. STRAW MAN ARGUMENT seriously do you have any idea how a debate works or a discussion in that matter. yes you are correct in saying that "when a someone has made a claim to be psychic, (or in your definition of psychic, a non supernatural ability that only pertains to those claiming to be so and they have to be able to read the future and or minds) that science cant replicate what they believe BUT that is not to say that the plausibility of it isnt there. And im still waiting on my link that tellls me completely in all how the human mind works and that science can never be wrong and is always factual...which is what you keep acting like even though you urself have admitted that science isnt always right so the real answer here is, YOU need to be right, not science. well if YOU need to be right then you can count it as an opinion and be right but thats not good enough. Like many megalomaniacs, your truth has to be the truth of everyone and you wont budge off it. I never said that psychics had to have existed, seriously. I have posted dictionary defintions, studies, and blantant things that tell me that scientist believe everything is up for retesting because they are never sure, just as sure as they can be for what we know of the universe at each moment in time. So your telling me today that the human mind will never be able to evolve again or gain a trait it doesnt have. your saying that never in history of ever or ever that there is no doubt that this can never and will never take place. Then you are God.
|
|
|
Post by K5 on Dec 29, 2010 15:00:01 GMT -5
You would be completely incorrect. Do you know how a battery works at a fundamental level? I confess I don't. However, if I asked you to test if a particular battery was a good battery and had a charge, I'm sure you could test it. All you'd have to do is plug the battery into a tester and see what charge you got out of it. i disagree. then the battery tester would be the what understood the battery on a fundamental level...hence how it operates and was designed. now, if you could test that battery by yourself without that tester AND without the fundamental knowledge, then you've put yourself in the position i've described. the flaws in that are apparent. i never myself did the test, so i still would not understand if the chemical was there or not or why it had changed color. and since no one has the base knowledge of psychic ability (since it IS a supernatural concept) the test could never properly be conducted as we have no idea how to. in this case, there is no one that does have the knowledge about how to change the water blue, so the test itself doesn't even exist. if you said 'i can fly all the time' that would obviously be testable. however, if you said 'i once flew', as silly and obviously fictitious to me as that may sound, there is no way i could possibly disprove it. i could use logic to say that it's highly unlikely, that it falls under what is humanly impossible, but like it or not i could never say 'you never flew'. i could only say 'i believe you never flew'. once again, you're completely missing my point or revising it and i refuse to even acknowledge whatever point you're trying to surface there. my point was that proper tests on a toad's biology couldn't occur until we understood the essentials of it and could move on to the complex. perhaps in psychic thinking we have not done this yet. that is fair - within the fields of science, there is no evidence of psychic ability. however, the actual existence of it has never been disproven. once again, this is where we differ. psychic conditions cannot be replicated, you cannot put a fish in a box and expect it to swim without water. that's basically what you're saying..."we know that fish can swim." if it DID exist, we obviously don't understand it near enough to test it's capabilities. it would be like testing the potential of dolphin's frontal lobes...before we knew frontal lobes existed.
|
|
|
Post by K5 on Dec 29, 2010 15:04:26 GMT -5
bottom line is, you cannot disprove it hulk. nor can science. that is the end of. i am actually done this time as this is starting to annoy me how you circulate logic. first you say the supernatural cannot be tested, then you alter it to suit your own opinion. you cannot have your cake and eat it too.
continue to believe whatever you wish.
|
|
|
Post by Hulkamaniac on Dec 29, 2010 19:29:08 GMT -5
i disagree. then the battery tester would be the what understood the battery on a fundamental level...hence how it operates and was designed. now, if you could test that battery by yourself without that tester AND without the fundamental knowledge, then you've put yourself in the position i've described. I realize I wasn't very clear in my previous post. Assume the battery tester isn't a person. It's simply a device that you plug the battery into and it turns green if the battery is good and red if it isn't. Say it's something like this: You or I or the homeless guy in on the street could stick a battery in there and test it. Perhaps none of us have any knowledge at all of how a battery works. We can still test it. The battery tester has no knowledge obviously as it's just an electronic gizmo and nothing more. No knowledge is needed. Actually, the test is flawless because you didn't understand any of it. That's what would make it a perfect double blind study. You don't know what you are testing for. You don't know what makes the water turn blue. You don't know if the water is supposed to turn blue or green or purple or any other color. The test is a perfect double blind study. It's exactly what science is looking for. If you stood there putting reagents in water and recording what color the samples turned, it would be a perfect test because you lacked understanding. You're right, but psychics don't claim that they once predicted the future or that they once read someone's mind. They claim they have the ability to do it again. That's what makes it testable. They claim that they are currently in possession of the ability to XYZ. That's a completely testable claim. Then please tell me how we get any knowledge of a toad's biology. Let's assume we stumble across a toad. It's a completely unknown creature to the scientific world. How in the world do we understand how it behaves, works, etc.... without testing. Yes we can observe it and that would be valuable to some extent, but only to some extent. Let's say that based on our observations we find that this toad looks to be immune to nerve gas. Now, knowing why it's immune to nerve gas could be extremely valuable information especially to the military. We have no idea why the toad is immune. We have no clue if it's truly immune or if our observations are even completely accurate. How do we determine if this new creature we found really is immune to nerve gas or not if we don't test it? How can we test it if we don't have any idea of the fundamentals of how it could be immune? You cannot prove a negative though. Assuming psychics were real, how is it that in several hundred years they haven't produced any evidence to back up their existence? Once again, you're putting the cart before the horse. We don't have to understand how something works to test it. Men shot bows and arrows long before Newton's 3rd law was tested and defined. The Neandertal had no idea what an inclined plane was, but it didn't stop him from using a spear to hunt and fish. How did Neandertal learn that a spear would work for hunting and fishing? He probably hit a fish or animal with a sharp rock at some point and saw it's effectiveness. I'm sure his caveman brain had no idea about inclined planes or laws of motion, yet his test proved that a spear could indeed kill a fish. Later on men figured out why the spear could kill a fish. They learned how an inclined plane distributes force and they also dissected fish and learned about their anatomy and they studied moving objects and defined the laws of motion. It is now completely understood exactly how a spear kills a fish. Neandertal man did not know this, but it didn't stop him from spearfishing. Science tests testable claims. If the claims have validity, then further tests are done to see why this is so. bottom line is, you cannot disprove it hulk. nor can science. that is the end of. i am actually done this time as this is starting to annoy me how you circulate logic. first you say the supernatural cannot be tested, then you alter it to suit your own opinion. you cannot have your cake and eat it too. continue to believe whatever you wish. There is nothing at all supernatural about it. You may claim over and over and over again that there is, but it does not make it fact. If a guy claims to be able to read minds, that is a completely testable hypothesis. Please explain to me how there is no way to test that. Either the guy can read minds or he can't. It's simple enough to test it.
|
|