"evolution" is not an attempt at anything. scientists do not study things and pose theories in an attempt to anger people or disprove things. science is an approach to information that tries to make as few assumptions as possible. it takes data as input (via careful experimentation) and proposes generalised rules based upon the results. if, later on, a better method of measurement is discovered or some other critical piece of information that was not considered during the previous experiment, a new one is conducted and a revised generalised rule determined. such experiments are, nowadays, performed by people all over the globe, and they are free to contribute to one another and draw from one another, resulting in more accurate results. the idea is that nothing can be known for certain, but some things can be known with a greater degree of certainty than others, and that's the best we can get.

the theory of evolution is one such generalised rule that happens to be much better supported than most. that we can see evidence of our own evolution all around us (people originating from different regions of the globe have specialised features, i.e. long, straight hair for holding in warmth in northern regions vs. short, curly hair that lays flat against the head in order to keep off the sun), can see clear evidence of directed evolution in the form of pets (particularly dogs. they are the most outwardly diverse species of mammal that i can think of, at any rate), and can literally watch the process occurring in small, rapidly-reproducing creatures under a microscope (take a species of bacteria, for example, introduce something which is toxic to them, and you might end up with millions of dead bacteria along with one or two that were able to survive due to some mutation or other which made them immune. allow those few to reproduce and suddenly you have a group of bacteria that is immune to that toxin on a wide scale) is evidence enough that, to disprove the theory of evolution, one would need to somehow prove life-long visual and auditory hallucinations on a species-wide scale. furthermore, those hallucinations would all have to be practically identical.

this theory has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not your god exists. it is a generalisation about the way that organisms function.

also, lack of evidence is evidence of lack. when you look down at a table, expecting there to be a pen, and do not see your pen, you do not ignore that and reach for the pen anyways. you take it as an indication that the pen is not there, and start searching elsewhere (in your pockets, on the floor, etc)

Quote from: mdr1 on May 13, 2013, 01:00:46 pm

Are you saying that to convince us that you do exist ? How could we trust in you because you say that you could believe that we don't exist ?

Moreover, how can you be sure that you really exist ? Isn't it an illusion ? As a case in point, AI in computer games have the illusion that they exist, but it is not true.

But AI does not think. It goes by a set of instructions. Even learning AI does not think, and, if it did, how would we know?

Neural networks don't quite "think." Static FFNA's (Feed forward Neural Networks), the standard type in most research, are actually just functions that take inputs and map them to outputs. Only if you accept functionalism and reductive physicalism can you begin to say neural networks can "think" in any capacity. If you also want to say that such a network can be processed by a computer, then you have to drag in the huge overhead of the Church-Turing thesis and throw out all neural networks with irrational edge weights and node states. Unfortunately, with the exception of the Church-Turing thesis, all of these are highly contentious things to present in an argument and it's why neural nets are basically laughed at in most philosophy departments nowadays.

what definition of "think" is being used here? personally, i like to consider any thing which can respond to stimuli, retain information, and modify its responses based upon that information as a "thinking thing", and leave any distinctions beyond that as a matter of degree.

I have five different proofs for why He would have to exist.

please don't bring up aquinas. i had quite enough of him in not-quite-catholic school
understand that the following is about aquinas himself and his so-called "proofs" and not me making any statement about whether or not a god exists.

"proof" number one starts with this statement early on:
"Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion"
he then follows it up with:
"Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other", which is, very obviously, a direct contradiction of his earlier statement. thus, if his logic is to be trusted, what he has actually proven by contradiction is that not all things are put in motion by another, a matter completely unrelated to whether or not a god exists.

number two is a mirror image of his first. he states that "no thing can be the efficient cause of itself", then follows it up with "god is the efficient cause of himself", meaning that, if his logic is to be trusted, some things spontaneously come into existence without any outside influences. again, this is unrelated to whether or not a god exists.

the third begins with the un-backed claim that all things cease to exist (which flies directly in the face of the classical idea of conservation of energy), then an un-backed claim that the default state of any thing which can cease to exist is necessarily nothingness (his first claim that all things must go from existence to non-existence is unrelated to the claim that all things must come *from* non-existence into existence [incidentally, there is some evidence that particles can, in fact, come into existence spontaneously]). his last statement is a repetition of the last line of the previous two, "there must, necessarily, be some thing which has always existed and caused other things to exist", a statement completely unrelated to the rest of this current "proof". he then jumps to the conclusion that, because "something" exists, that "something" must necessarily be his God (by the way, he did this exact same thing in the previous two).

the fourth is even sillier than the others (he makes the statement that fire is the cause of all things that are hot, for one, but that's neither here nor there as it's just an analogy). he begins with the statement that any one thing can either be more or less x than another thing, where x is some quality. he then says that this judgement is always made in relation to some absolute which is "most" x. this assumption is not only un-backed, but counter-intuitive. more and less are used to compare two things to one another. it makes no sense to say that any one thing is "the epitomy" of x. one could say that a single thing is the most "x" in existence (i.e., nothing before has ever reached such a degree of "x". there has never been a material which was as hot as this one is currently, for example). however, for any such thing that has a clearly-defined denotation of "more" or "less", it is possible to continue imagining something which is "more" ad infinitum, just as it is always possible to imagine a number larger or smaller than any given number. there is no ultimately hot, big, small, etc thing or anything else which can be applied to a discernible level of degree in that way. he then goes on to apply his assumption to something completely different: "goodness", a thing which does not exist on a clearly defined plane because it has no clear definition. just like other subjective qualities (beauty, for example, which, as the adage says, is in the eyes of the beholder), there is no one definition of what is "better or worse" in the same way as there is for what is "faster and slower" or "bigger and smaller". lastly, he wraps things up with two baseless claims, firstly jumping from the assertion that "every single category which is related to the concept of 'goodness' has something or other as its uppermost echelon" to "every single category which is related to the concept of 'goodness' has a single thing as its uppermost echelon", and then stating that "that single thing must necessarily be my God".

his fifth argument is a bit incoherent, so i've never been sure if i understood it quite right. it seems like he is trying to say that "any thing which reacts in a predictable manner cannot do so without an intelligent thought directing it to do so", which makes no sense at all.

yay! keep us posted!

dj, if it lets you send arbitrary keypresses, then all you have to do is write a small program that detects a certain button being pressed on the calc and sends the related keybinding for the emulator, right?
this sounds absolutely fantastic, by the way =DD

EDIT: you should really use a loop and a couple of lists in that example program instead of writing
getKey(blah)??bloo->{A++}{over and over

here you go!
(it's rather huge)

this isn't an editor; it's just a tool for converting between file formats. someone could build an editor that uses it as a backend, though.

i added an include preprocessor directive! the format is:
##include path/to/file
and the contents of file will be inserted verbatim into the file at that point.

coolio, i'll take a look at that, then =). the rest of your xml files have already been a big help, by the way.

as for adding in support for xml files, it sounds nice, but i'm still not convinced that it's worth the trouble. at present, all it takes for someone to add in a new token is to write a single line in the form {first_byte, second_byte, "string" }, and then run make. compilation takes less than a second, and the result is a binary that can be dragged and dropped anywhere without the need of additional files, whereas adding in xml support would increase the size considerably and either require me to include some non-standard library or write a lot more code.

EDIT: both the default BASIC and Axe token sets are now complete =D

unfortunately, we cannot support implementing CAS features on a non-CAS model because to do so would be condoning cheating on tests. also, please don't create duplicate topics.

both topics locked