CSI and Design

Well, I'm no philosopher, but when there's a repeated exchange of messages, and relevant concepts are repeated and rephrased but not simply mimicked, I tend to come to the conclusion that I'm having a conversation with another mind, not just talking to myself, or to noise, or to ELIZA.

Right. Naturally, since I come to different conclusions than you, I must not be intelligent, but rather, an idiot computer designed to piss you off.Seriously, how can anybody be so egotistic as to assume that the only reason another person might hold a different view is to piss them off? I really hope you're just failing at humor and not an actual asshole.

sometimes i fail to see human beings as intelligent at all!lol.

Did I strike a nerve? Touchy touchy. Here, here's a smile face. All better?

i've said it before and i'll say it again. occam's razor is not a valid test of anything.supposing it says what most people think it says, that the simplest explanation tends to be right, then my explain of "magic" trumps everything. it's short, to the point, and you can't argue it. by occam's razor, creationism is valid. try explaining all the mechanisms of the production of variety of life in simple terms, in a single short sentance. creationists can do it: "and god said..."however, what sir william of ockham, a mathematician, actually wrote in the sidelines of his book was that all variables deemed to small to actually affect the gross outcome of an equation can essentially be discarded. basically that we don't take into account the bird's wings flapping in china in calculating the air resistance of a 747 jetliner.however, throw away such small variabls immediately forbids einstein's theory of relativity. newtonian mechanics accurate predicte most things, who cares about a difference of .3x10^99? certainly not sir william of ockham.and yet, we can now calculate the precession of mercury, and various other things. what occam's razor is about is SIGNIFICANT DIGITS, not any form of mechanisms of creation.

Not particularly, I just start to get a little defensive when I'm insulted twice in one thread without provocation, you know?Use the smileys. They help people distinguish between friendly jibes and thinly-veiled insults.

i thought it was funny.especially since i get random ims all the time asking me if i'm a robot. apparently, my im name (same as here) is also the name of a web robot) something akin to a search engine that traces connectivity paths of the web. i have to explain this to people repeatedly, because everything thinks "robot = chatbot = aim screenname" for some reason.it's taken me whole conversations to get people to realize i'm a human being and to stop bothering me.

No, but it's a guide to choosing which model to use.If there's two models to explain something, and you can't tell the difference between them, but they're mutually exclusive, then the one that makes the most sense is the one with the least number of untestable entities.It's the short way of saying "reasonable people prefer models with only testable mechanisms to models with untestable mechanisms." If you believe that it's more reasonable to propose unknown mechanisms when the known mechanisms can suffice, well, could you defend that reasoning, please?

Too damn funny.Hey, what is your icon supposed to be?

Dude. Chill. It's late night humor. You of all people should be able to take some flak considering how frequently I've seen you berate posters for their lack of intelligence, ignorance, and for simply being (in your own words) an 'asshole.'It's a friggin forum. You were missing the point I was trying to make so I made a crack. Who cares? I swear you're touchier than Rrhain.

I walk a pretty fine line, yes, but I've rarely insulted anyone personally. I've told plenty of people that their behavior was wrong, but I guess I assume reasonable people can tell the difference between their behavior and themselves.Anyway, I felt you crossed the line. Once, I could have written off as a bad joke, but c'mon - twice?Can we just de-escalate the anger levels, here? You seem to take it personally whenever I don't agree with you. Are you sure you're at the right forum?

did you read the rest of the post?that's still not what occam's razor says. no, the point is that you cannot.

it's a picture of the lower vertebrae a few up from the tail bone, laterally, from gray's anatomy.it was a theme i was developing for a website a while back that never went through, but i kept it in the form of icons and banners, etc.

The version I'm familiar with says "one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything."For any event, I can come up with a literally infinite amount of explanations involving any number of untestable entities, and there's no way to prove any of them wrong.Occam's Razor, aka the principle of parsimony, is simply a recognition that the better theory has the least unnecessary entities, preferably none. It's hard to understand what you find objectionable about the principle of parsimony in science. Can you elaborate? I didn't understand what you meant here.

forgive me, but where does that untestable bit come from?and how does one define what is neccessary?