Over at the jokebox, which has descended further into stupidity than I ever thought possible, GilDodgen makes a "refutation of materialism". His premises?
Well...pretty pitiful:
1) Is the existence of the number 2 a refutation of materialism as well, my numbnutted friend? Or have philosophers introduced conceptualism and nominalism and covered this territory long before you were making a public ass of yourself?
2) Really? Show me information with no physical or materialistic properties, ID-iot. Show me what the word itself means, apart from minds, objects and mathematical constructs. Show me how you store or relate information without imprinting it on some medium, then interpreting it through another.
3) This was possibly the winner of the group. What in materialism says that you cannot have identical objects existing in different places at the same time? Are gold atoms not the same? And do they not exist simultaneously in different places? Conversely, I would love to see how this moron would explain how this information exists in the same place at the same time...now that would violate physical laws. But, if you back up your hard disk, you always back it up to i) other sectors of the same HD, ii) a removable storage device, iii) another HD. So you imprint this information on another distinct physical medium (see #2 again). How does his version violate materialism? We are only left to guess.
4) This displays his fundamental stupidity. First, he needs to read a book or two in particle physics, especially on the ability of lasers through Cs crystals to promote photons to 300c, and on Cherenkov Radiation. He clearly admits that nothing without a rest mass of zero can have an average velocity = c. Now, in normal physics, photons (and other particles) are capable of having an instantaneous velocity = c, but not an average of c over distances, and the photon rest mass is thus calculated as ~0. He doesn't clarify this. Next, show me, oh sage of information theory, how one transmits information without particles, and if one is limited by the velocity of the particles, then how can information travel faster than the particles?????? Did you take stupid pills as a kid?
5) What in the hell can I say to such a hubric pile of ignorance? Life is not based on chemistry, but on information??? He is now reifying information, and contradicting himself earlier, when he said that information exists (in #2) without a medium.
6) "...the functional equivalent of free will, which is all that matters in real life." How does GilDodgen support this philosophical value judgment? He doesn't. How does he argue that his opinion on the importance of free will refutes materialism? He doesn't. How does his opinion stack up beside of hundreds of years on the debate between libertarian and compatibilistic versions of free will, and the interplay of either God or physics to determine mental states? It doesn't. How does "freedom", in the sense of uncaused acts of the will, become guaranteed if you have a dualistic ontology? Um, you see the trend here.
7) Here we have another value judgment about the importance of design. And an appeal to emotion/pride. "What are you, just a bunch of matter?" This is truly pathetic. Dembski, why not just put a disclaimer on your site that ID-iocy may cause intellectual suicide?
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Technorati tags: Philosophy, Intelligent Design
- The existence of information is a fundamental refutation of materialism.
- [Information] has no physical or materialistic properties whatsoever.
- Back up your hard disk and that information will exist in two places at the same time.
- You can transmit that information at the speed of light (at which speed nothing with rest mass can travel).
- Life is not fundamentally based on atoms, molecules and chemistry. These represent the media and low-level mechanism in which life’s information is stored and expressed.
- Unless the choices people make can be predicted with certainty, we have the functional equivalent of free will, which is all that matters in real life. Without the supposition of, and existence of functional free will, life would be absurd and unlivable.
- This is why the question of materialism versus design is so important. It impinges upon everything that ultimately matters. Are we fundamentally information-based, non-material free agents, or are we natural-law-based, biochemical automatons?
1) Is the existence of the number 2 a refutation of materialism as well, my numbnutted friend? Or have philosophers introduced conceptualism and nominalism and covered this territory long before you were making a public ass of yourself?
2) Really? Show me information with no physical or materialistic properties, ID-iot. Show me what the word itself means, apart from minds, objects and mathematical constructs. Show me how you store or relate information without imprinting it on some medium, then interpreting it through another.
3) This was possibly the winner of the group. What in materialism says that you cannot have identical objects existing in different places at the same time? Are gold atoms not the same? And do they not exist simultaneously in different places? Conversely, I would love to see how this moron would explain how this information exists in the same place at the same time...now that would violate physical laws. But, if you back up your hard disk, you always back it up to i) other sectors of the same HD, ii) a removable storage device, iii) another HD. So you imprint this information on another distinct physical medium (see #2 again). How does his version violate materialism? We are only left to guess.
4) This displays his fundamental stupidity. First, he needs to read a book or two in particle physics, especially on the ability of lasers through Cs crystals to promote photons to 300c, and on Cherenkov Radiation. He clearly admits that nothing without a rest mass of zero can have an average velocity = c. Now, in normal physics, photons (and other particles) are capable of having an instantaneous velocity = c, but not an average of c over distances, and the photon rest mass is thus calculated as ~0. He doesn't clarify this. Next, show me, oh sage of information theory, how one transmits information without particles, and if one is limited by the velocity of the particles, then how can information travel faster than the particles?????? Did you take stupid pills as a kid?
5) What in the hell can I say to such a hubric pile of ignorance? Life is not based on chemistry, but on information??? He is now reifying information, and contradicting himself earlier, when he said that information exists (in #2) without a medium.
6) "...the functional equivalent of free will, which is all that matters in real life." How does GilDodgen support this philosophical value judgment? He doesn't. How does he argue that his opinion on the importance of free will refutes materialism? He doesn't. How does his opinion stack up beside of hundreds of years on the debate between libertarian and compatibilistic versions of free will, and the interplay of either God or physics to determine mental states? It doesn't. How does "freedom", in the sense of uncaused acts of the will, become guaranteed if you have a dualistic ontology? Um, you see the trend here.
7) Here we have another value judgment about the importance of design. And an appeal to emotion/pride. "What are you, just a bunch of matter?" This is truly pathetic. Dembski, why not just put a disclaimer on your site that ID-iocy may cause intellectual suicide?
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Technorati tags: Philosophy, Intelligent Design
