Whoa, your fonts are, like, really big, man. Impressive. As far as the rest of that drivel goes, well, like most of your posts, tl;dr

That's too strong. It's true that the senses can be deceived, but mostly they are reliable. Otherwise no one would survive for very long. Your senses are constantly telling you about risks in your immediate environment and usually there is no time to prove that they are telling you the truth. You just have to trust them, and mostly this is good practice. Someone throws a brick at you and you duck. A chasm opens up in front of you and you jump back. You hear and see fire and you evacuate the building. You don't stop to say "Is this an illusion? Are my senses being deceived?" Because by the time you have decided that it's real, it might be too late to save yourself.

It's easy to deceive someone by talking about things he hasn't seen. We call that lying and we can all do it. It's much harder to directly deceive the senses. Stage magicians can do it, but it takes special techniques and equipment, and long training. That is precisely because our senses have been honed by evolution to tell us the truth about our environment.

I think BW-user is also correct when he says that people have an instinctive desire for truth. "I believe" is always short for "I believe this to be true". I don't think it's possible psychologically to believe something and at the same time know that it is not true. A belief that we knew to be false would give us no satisfaction. If it can be proved to us that something we believed is false, we immediately stop believing it, and we feel angry that we ever believed it. Nobody ever says, "OK, I see now that it's not true, but I'm going to go on believing it because I want to."

That is why discussions like this are so inconclusive. Each side is convinced that what they believe is true because if they weren't, they wouldn't believe it. And therefore each side is equally convinced that what the other side believes is false. And because we believe that their beliefs are false, their arguments don't even seem convincing to us. We marvel that they can think that such patent rationalisations can hold water, whereas our own arguments seem like cast iron and absolutely watertight. No matter how long it goes on, no one is going to be convinced.

Truth is there's poison in some koolaid, truth is not a fairy tail.

For survival purposes, it suffices if our senses/brains err on the side of caution.

Right, and if you duck, jump back, or evacuate the building even if none of those things are true, you'll probably survive just fine.

How about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_experiences?

Personally, I've quite a few times percieved a face in a pile of crumpled clothing. Not so different from seeing Jesus on toast I guess...

Rather they've been honed to help us avoid getting killed by our environment, which is not quite the same thing.

removed for a later date/

Kind of jumped out and got your attention didn't it?

It is them little details that you got to watch out for.....

The devil is in the details.

found him

(this rationalization tells him this)

"our senses have been honed by evolution to tell us the truth about our environment."


pick that apart and put logic to it.

in a prior statement from the same mind within the same entire thought. it said this prior to that evolution statement.

(still leaving room for error within the normal healthy senses.That first part is a backwards thought. It is not the senses that are being deceived. That error in thought just leads to more.)

It's true that the senses can be deceived, but mostly they are reliable. Otherwise no one would survive for very long.

as well thought out that this statement sounds. there is an error in thought within it. This error helps to justify a belief. Taking one false belief than adding to it.

(this rationalization gives him a sense of satisfaction because it sounds good to him. therefore he accepts what his mind came up with because it now puts what I said about the senses in alignment with what he put in his belief system. A certain type of satisfaction has now been achieved by his own doing.

Rationalizing it out to where it now makes sense to him, so it has to make sense to others as well. It now sounds good to him. Else he would not have said it.

His rationalization now made the belief about the senses to lineup with the rest of what he believes. he has now reached (self) Enlightenment. etc..)

"our senses have been honed by evolution to tell us the truth about our environment."

that evolution had something to do with 'honing our senses' to get them to where they are at right now.

But part of this original thought in the beginning tells on the later thought. His logical mind tells him, "Otherwise no one would survive for very long."

His rational mind tell him this.
"our senses have been honed by evolution to tell us the truth about our environment."

Then if one goes back and looks at this truth. "Otherwise no one would survive for very long." It then begs the question.

Just how screwed up where the senses before they got to be the way they are today, for how many years now?

It had to be for longer then recorded history for any living creature to survive long enough to make it to this point.

If man started out with faulty senses to begin with he'd not have made it this far in the case of evolution. How could he?

it'd be like a bunch of blind deft and dumb people that had no sense of taste either.
feeling too was not there or very faulty in that beginning.

How would they even know they had anything in their hand? they can not feel it. they cannot see it.

if they could then it'd have to be a very faint sensation if any at all.

then they'd have to taste it.

Ever see a baby putting things into its mount to get an idea of what it is?

But still they have no sense of taste either. if faulty then they'd still not know what to believe about what they were tasting.

Still having to apply hope, hope that it'd not kill them. because they cannot even perceive what it might be. they have no idea that they are holding. because their senses are so faulty nothing is working properly.

They didn't even know they'd have to wait millions and millions of years before their senses were in good working order before they could actually be able to trust them enough to use them In order to decide on what to do. Eat, wash, and even how to avoid danger in order for the survival instinct to even be able to be used properly.

without the senses in good working order the only thing that the survival instinct would be able to tell the mind to do. is nothing, don't even move lest you may hurt yourself and die. one would not even know they had hurt themselves. They'd just die.

Do not try eating anything because one cannot know if what they eat will even kill them until it is too late.

So the survival instinct then tells the mind to do absolutely nothing so that the self will not die.

The survival instinct defeats itself as it collapses in on itself while the rest of the humans and every other living being is waiting for this evolution to take place to get there five senses up to where they have to be so they can trust them enough to live while every one dies anyways due to starvation while waiting for something they know nothing about to happen.

too because there senses are still not working properly they wouldn't even know if they were having sex with the right person in order to keep the species alive. Let alone know if they are putting it in the right hole because their sense of sight and feeling are still not working the way they should be.

You know the old saying: "A funny thing happens when you get a new pair of glasses. Sometimes, that girl isn't quite so pretty anymore. And sometimes, she's more so."

I speculate that, as we continue to discover more things about the genome, our present theories of "evolution as the origin of all things" will become less and less satisfactory. Even if we choose to ignore the "genetic bootup-sequence problem," I think that we don't have a sufficient explanation of all of the various kinds of "transcendental genetic activity" which we so-confidently speak of now. We'll continue to discover unanticipated complexities, which will drive us to discover new things.

Incidentally, I'm not alone in thinking this way. Consider, for instance, this article: Is Evolution Sufficient? It isn't "a foregone conclusion" that we already "have all the answers." No, I'm certain that many more surprises await our inquiring eyes and minds.

@ sundialsvcs - I suppose we all have sacred cows and/or blind spots but you still have a poor concept of what Science really is. Despite some instances of hubris like much of The Victorian Era, no person adhering to the Scientific Method ever deludes themselves into thinking "we already have all the answers". However it is not risky in some areas, like Evolution, Cosmology, The Standard Model, motion, inertia, etc etc etc that we have the basics down rather solidly. Unlike the blind men seeking to describe an elephant, in those areas at least we see that it is a large, quadrupedal mammalian herbivore with large ears and a prehensile trunk and that it is most definitely not just a tree, a rope, etc. and definitely not a fish, though it very likely evolved from one. :)

At the moment of birth and for a considerable time after a human will not duck if a brick is in danger of colliding with it. That is a learned response and generqally the more complex the brain and the environment into which it is born, the longer it takes for such learning to become near instantaneous instinctive response or so-called "muscle memory".

Your point about this thread typifying inconclusiveness is largely correct IMHO but the effects in the long term are undeniable as in the example I gave from "Fool On The Hill". With what data we get from our senses, assuming we only consider what is currently before our eyes when watching a Sunrise, it is perfectly reasonable to interpret that as the Sun going around the Earth. What's more, many entire generations, perhaps billions of people, concluded exactly that. I would be surprised if a single rational person alive on Earth today has not adjusted to the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun as do almost all planets everywhere.

The reason as I see it that this particular Truth is now so widely understood and accepted is that at some point subsequent to Galileo, religions concluded it was a minor point as well as undeniable but most importantly no longer a major threat to what was then current dogma. It seems to me that slowly, as religions come to the same conclusion about Evolution, that it too will become just as widely accepted. However they will not likely come to that conclusion until so many have seen the evidence that it becomes more of a threat to keep telling a comfortable, sacred untruth.

So I disagree with you entirely that No matter how long it goes on, no one is going to be convinced". The historical record seems to say otherwise. Burning at the stake, wiping out entire villages, stoning and beheading may delay this process but isn't that exactly why they did it then and some still do?

so this guy 10,00,0000,0,0,0,0,0000,00,0,0,0 yrs ago who had no sense at all so he keep getting hit with a "brick" that he could not see almost on an hourly event.

Unfortunately it eventually killed him.

he had no time to even learn how to duck because his senses had never developed until 100,00,000,0,0,0,0,,0 yrs later because evolution will still too busy trying to figure out how to make it walk.

but it has no intelligence behind it to even try to figure out how to do either of them things.

you're blurring lines.

"god" is just a step in evolution, that's why it moves to the "savages" then fades to education.

Oh, I really think that I do. In the case at bar, many people seem quite solidly convinced that "evolution, and evolution alone," is a Sufficient Theory for Everything. My dissenting speculation is that I don't think so. My further speculation is that, as we continue to explore the utter mystery that is the genome, and the reproductive processes that occur on a micro- as well as a macro-scopic scale, we will come to realize more and more that "it isn't."

(Neither am I willing to say that the elephant "evolved from" the fish. This does not mean that I think that a deity 'created' both of them.) To me, this explanation falls far short – and a mystery still stands in the gap.

Since biology is fundamentally a chemical process, it is endlessly filled with the possibility – the inevitability – of errors, any one of which could be fatal to the organism and therefore also to life itself. We know that there are many error-correction mechanisms, up to and including miscarriage, although we don't know of all of them nor do we yet completely understand them. And yet, we boldly aver that just such errors, spread over "billions of years" through much hand-waving, produced an endless bounty of viable life forms, "male and female," all of which are thereafter faithfully self-replicating. All explained by "evolution." No, I speculate that one day this widely-held (today ...) theory will be proved to be wrong. And, some new person or team of persons will have a justly-deserved Nobel Prize. I have no idea what they will have found.

I also think that we should always be wide-open to this, because "this, too, is science." How shortchanged we would all be had Albert Einstein been content with the findings of Isaac Newton, which, so everybody at the time then thought, "obviously" provided a clear and sufficient explanation of the phenomenon, thus "why waste more time with it?" Fortunately, he did. We should never close our "scientific eyes."

@ sundialsvcs - Speaking of "scientific eyes" you might like to take note of the historical fact that over time all beginning to gel mid 19th century, everything that could be explored by direct sensing had been concluded. Progressively from around 1860 onward, the only exploration left for humans came from (and progressively comes from) extensions of our senses through technology.

The very beginning of that, starting hundreds of years before, can be exemplified by the invention of lenses which evolved into optical microscopes and telescopes for the respective micro and macro worlds that we cannot view directly with unaided eyesight.

Once electricity was harnessed mere optical enhancement was eclipsed and it became possible to explore events, items, and arenas that have no relation to our very limited bandwidths of sensitivity. While this has greatly expanded the possibilities of what the human race can experience and think about, it also isolates many individual humans since the required technology isn't exactly available at Cheap Marts.

Although it is possible now for humans with the desire and a few hundred or thousand dollars to own say a Scanning Tunneling Microscope capable of atomic resolution

the simple fact is very few people have the desire or the discretionary dollars or both to pursue such experience. Most people alive today have grown used to the idea that Science requires very high levels of Mathematics (it largely does) and millions or billions of dollars, all far beyond the reach of Average Joe or Jill. Because so much of it it is in fact beyond individual means, most people become like Back Seat Drivers, feeling free to doubt and criticize simply because they are not in the driver's seat, have little to lose, and perhaps an image to self and others that somehow they might be capable of a better job. The difference is that most of us know how to drive and have some experience at it, while only a few measly percent of the whole human race would feel at home at MIT or CalTech, let alone LHC, an Intel chip foundry, Cape Canaveral, or even Mt Sinai Hospital.

Perhaps a more meaningful reference point is closer to "home" for example in the physical realm of sports. We have the phrase "Armchair Quarterbacks" which describes the hubris of people who have no frame of reference that applies, imagining that they know better, that they could probably compete on such a level, when all of them would be unlikely to survive the first hit, could not throw a pass sufficiently and accurately fast and far, nor kick a field goal even 20 yards under such pressure but who nevertheless imagine they could even without years of training. I doubt we need to discuss Boxing, MMA, or even Golf and Cycling to add to the concept that the expertise required is far beyond those content to view from an armchair and incidentally not born with the supporting DNA. This may be difficult emotionally to accept but few are actually willing to put it to the test for example by actually stepping into the cage with say Conor McGregor. Regarding actual test data, the development of muscle and technique has gone so far that impacts consistent with high speed auto accidents are routine in MMA. It takes a massive training regime just to survive even one, quite literally. The distance from the norm is similar, though arguably even greater, in the skill set of modern science.

This is what I mean when I say that you are ignorant of real science. I mean no disrespect nor aspersion and am only stating the (obvious to those few of us here who have sought training and understanding, such as the relevant math) fact that while you are well-read and likely trained in many areas, you do lack the skills and training to grasp modern Science outside of a specific area of software development and are thus in the "Armchair" category of that arena, at best. I sincerely apologize for being a "wicked messenger" but it is what it is.

As this applies to Evolution, there can be no doubt that there is still much to learn. It has only been a few decades since "Junk Genes" were discovered to have important functions, for example BUT (and this is a very big But) that is a perfect example of refinement, that the fundamentals are indeed very solid and not likely to be altered any more than Newton has been altered. Neither Relativity nor Quantum Mechanics has or will ever disprove that on the appropriate scale, his Science is and will always be under such conditions, absolutely valid. Such is the case for Evolution as well.

So in such cases, the choice we all face is whether we find it more important to appear learned or to be learned, and among what crowd.

enorbet, ever since I was a little kid, both in school classes and when watching otherwise-great programs like Dr. Carl Sagan's (RIP) Cosmos, I only "had serious problems" with one small thing: Now, if they were talking about geologic time, I had absolutely no problems with it.

But, when they were talking about biology, I felt like they were just like ancient cartographers who had "holes to fill." The cartographers filled those holes with dragons. The biologists / evolutionists, I felt, were filling their holes with: "time, itself." (And considerable hand-waving.)

I felt that they were glossing-over something, because their theory – good as it seemed to be – was nonetheless imperfect. I felt that there was something else. Something that, even to this day, remains undiscovered.

And, I still do.

Even though today, of course, we (think that we) know much more about biology, genetics, "the genome" and so forth, than we ever could have hoped for back when I was a kid, I still speculate that there is a vacuum in our knowledge. Yes, even today, when these people seem willing to content themselves with their theory that "evolution as we know it today" explains everything, I remain suspicious that Nature has yet another surprise(!) in store for present or for future researchers.

And, hey, wouldn't it be fantastic(!) if that turned out to be the case?! Entire new worlds of biological possibilities to discover ... things that we had not yet dreamed of "dream of?!?!" Isn't that the sort of breakthrough that science (or "scientists," at least ...) lives for? :)

C'mon. Let's never stop thinking, or dreaming, or speculating, "outside the box."

And "may we never be content with a falling apple." May we never entirely believe that "evolution is sufficient." May we never stop turning over rocks, even though we are "certain" that there is nothing to be found underneath them.