For all the none believers

[shanes teeth]

for your info no it wasn't and if you read my post you would have seen what he would call me! so before you post a comment about something i have wrote make sure you read it properly! to me your comment is taking the **** out of what i believe! and i find it really annoying! just because you might not believe in things like this doesn't mean others don't and why would my nan have a radio jingle played at my grandads funeral? seriously that's abit disrespectful to even joke about something like that!

 

You're right,I should have read it more carefully.I've just re-read it,right to the end this time.All I can say in my defense is that I'd lost interest in it by then first time round.

People have all sorts of odd things played at funerals.For all I know he could have been a radio news reader.I don't know.Just as you don't know what I believe.

[EASTWOOD141]

...Are you sure it was a picture of a Spitfire?

 

It could have been an astral plane...

 

It could have been a Phantom.

[E-Man Groovin]

Sure but not so open that my brain falls out. Science moves on advancing our knowledge as we test out ideas and theories and adjust our thinking according to the results of experiments and observations.

 

Basically the opposite of what believers in god, ghost and fairies do.

 

Oh ye of little imagination GrapeApe.

 

To humans only a few hundred years ago any idea of sub-atomic particles, and the transmission of speech and images through the ether (i.e. the electromagnetic basis of radio and television broadcasting) would have been on a par with magic, fairies etc. Or at best unsubstantiated hypotheses, which some folk happily pooh-pooh. I mean one can't see atomic particles, nor electromagnetic radiation!

 

Good old Copernicus, they called him mad for theorising that planets orbited the sun as opposed to the Earth. Maybe you'd have been there with them. Status quo and all that. I guess many folk are too unimaginative and conservative to help the progress that they just love to look back on. It's imaginings about the future that are much harder.

 

I love science myself. I love the infinite possibilities that more bizarre stuff exists out there than we know now. Yes, and of course test the theories and observations using the best falsificationist methods at our disposal. That's progress, not the rubbishing of hypotheses because they're too weird or difficult to test. Big bang was weird once. Took 'em half a century to get round to properly testing it.

 

On the topic of non-materialistic phenomenon, I point you to the large and growing post-resuscitation literature (for example Van Pommel, et al. 2001 - published in The Lancet, no less) or my blog entry about similar stuff.

 

Cheers

[Mr Bloke]

It could have been a Phantom.

We're wasted here...

[EASTWOOD141]

We're wasted here...

 

I agree.

[E-Man Groovin]

It would be wrong to assume that Einstein proved Newton wrong, this is not the case. Einstein merely provided evidence that under certain conditions, Newtonian mechanics break down. Newtonian mechanics are sufficient to put a man on the moon though so I do put a considerable amount of faith in them.

 

I don't really understand where Shakespeare falls into this. Unless I am very much mistaken, Shakespeare was a playwright, not a scientist.

 

I knew this would come up.

 

Depends what you think science is for. If you just want to use science for practical purposes then yes, Newton still works. But if science is the instrument for getting closer to "truth", then Einstein reveals the limits of Newton, and truth cannot be Newtonian.

 

Note that if your conception of science is a purely practical one then it shouldn't be used for answering the big questions such as how did the universe start, what is beyond the universe. Multiverse - yes or no? Or indeed, does the mind exist within or outside the brain?

 

Indeed, for practical, earthbound applications you can still do a lot of stuff with Ptolemaic astronomy (as the pre-Copernican farmers did), but if you really want a proper understanding of the solar system. It too comes up short.

[Goon]

I knew this would come up.

 

Depends what you think science is for. If you just want to use science for practical purposes then yes, Newton still works. But if science is the instrument for getting closer to "truth", then Einstein reveals the limits of Newton, and truth cannot be Newtonian.

 

Note that if your conception of science is a purely practical one. Then it shouldn't be used for answering the big questions such as how did the universe start, what is beyond the universe. Multiverse - yes or no? Or indeed, does the mind exist within or outside the brain?

 

Indeed, for practical, earthbound applications you can still do a lot of stuff with Ptolemaic astronomy (as the pre-Copernican farmers did), but if you really want a proper understanding of the solar system. It too comes up short.

 

So ghosts are real then?

 

And what part does Shakespeare play in this?

 

And what is the 'truth'?

[Chris_Sleeps]

What are we believing in here? Spitfires?

 

*confused*

[E-Man Groovin]

So ghosts are real then?

 

And what part does Shakespeare play in this?

 

And what is the 'truth'?

 

If the first question is than manner in which you conduct scientific and philosophical debate, the let's hope you do something else for a living.

 

But my answer is: I don't know.

 

If you were to have asked me in the early 17th century whether all swans were white, it would have been easy for me to say "yes". But the correct answer would have been, "I don't know, I haven't seen all swans". And that would have been smart because they did subsequently find black swans.

 

Shakespeare is just a bloke whose work I like. So please indulge me when I quote from one of his greatest works, Hamlet. Consider it a spot of decoration on the argument

 

What is truth? Screw me, how many millennia do you have? Are you a relativist? To keep it brief, we're all pondering the question "are ghosts real". And I guess we're doing so because we want to get to the truth behind the question.

 

If we're going to use science to do that, it needs to be a science that's concerned with getting to truth, not one that's only concerned with practicalities, because that ain't really gonna help us.

[Chris_Sleeps]

But my answer is: I don't know.

My answer would be; "to the best of my knowledge, no. I have no reason to believe that ghosts exist."

If we're going to use science to do that, it needs to be a science that's concerned with getting to truth

Is there a science that isn't concerned with getting the truth?