h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi jank
have good trip and enjoy Valencia:

I had noticed that Trevor had re-appeared. Oddly enough some of his arguments (although weirdly expressed) may be slightly more meritorious that those of say the of epeeist (the quantum physicist) and serendip( the geologist).

Even accepting Popper's hypothetico-deductive method criterion of falsifiability- 'so last year' in the philosophy of science - then their arguments are not really Popperian and demonstrate that they don't quite 'get' Popper.

For example, serendip apparently thouht that one of my post which was orthodox in Popperian terms was a 'fiendishly clever' attempt to disprove Popper.

The epeeist's Popperian empty class of gods post is full of holes and not Popperian . Strange for someone who has 'lectured in the philosophy science'

I wrote a long reply - the usual 'something is WRONG on the Internet' but I am not sure that I will post it. I don't really want to et sucked in 'delusion 2. Steely resolve engaged

He is also prone to assert arguable philosophical positions as if they were universally accepted.

I think the thin that I most dislike is all the 'horse puckey' (Col. Potter) with the symbolic logic.

I hate people who do that. I you have an expertise in an area and you are talking to laymen then you should try explain what you are saying and give them sources which clarify.

If instead surround yourself in a cloud of technical jargon then whatever you are about it's not about communication or honest debate.

What irritates me is that there is nothing in the logic that is being presented that cannot be stated fairly simply without all the tosh. I suspect it's intended to 'frighten the children'.

I don't think it's just me that thinks this. Helvius did a brilliant parody using symbolic 'logic' that 'proved' T=F.


rant over.

Maybe to paraphrase Lee Smolin 'The Trouble is with Physicists'

'Very strange people, physicists - in my experience the ones who aren't dead are in some way very ill"
-Mr Standish "The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul" by Douglas Adams

Trevor may have mellowed the conquest of 'korma girl' seems from some of his other posts to have been achieved.

melodic memes: If they do it may be the first proof that Dawkins is not delusional.;.
I have to say that though I like Diskin I am more partial to D2C.( as is my granddaughter and an apparently growing fan base amongst the post-modern goths (don't ask!)

On critical comment (in the pure not the negative sense) is that your drumming is somewhat more complex than that found in the general run of neo-punk(?) bands

The NF thread seems to be coming to a stuttering end. Spud is engaging but hardly serious.

It occurs to me that serendip as a geologist and might be prevailed upon to respond the uplift thingy.

This weekend, the SO and I, having successfully launched 'Das Boot', are getting it ready to sail so what with boxers and boats I expect my involvement on these boards will continue to decline.

Anyhow have a good trip and do all of the things that I would

At a minimum that should include:( possibly ) and


bis spater

just passing through.

Hope the trip went well

Trevor: An update on Trevor. He is now claiming that he works from home.
I am pretty sure he use to claim that he was a researcher/lecturer at a top 'Russell'

Carroll: Defintely worth a read more holes knocked in creationism. Cloes the gaps.

Excellent chunk on Behe at end. Hadn't realised he was an OEC.

must dash

bis später

just a quicky, had a full on week culiminating in my girl's 6th B-day party just now. 30 guests...........! and all those midgets bring gifts of cheap plastic bobbins that need batteries.

so more detail tomorrow, got to keep going for today.

Trevor; well what a fibber!! indeed he claimed to be a lecturer and of course at a prestigeous gig. seems my "shelf stacking + OU course dream world" could be scarily close to the reality.......?

soon!

Afternoon Jank:

Party: I hope no potentially finger damaging tricks took place.

trevor: according to rg he was claiming to be a 'chartered Engineer' earlier.

Noahs Flood Thread: Disengaged. Had got Spudthecat to half admit that Genesis should not be taken literally when the Children of the Enbrightenment (aka naive Clintists) turned with their usual 'sophisticated' anti-theist arguments.

Sad bunch - would have been roundly minced on Delusion or Faith threads.

Further engagement not worth bother.

Hope D2C went well though the putative new release is assuming the air of Tristram Shandy. I think you need to make your oeuvre downloadable for the ipod generation

Weather here is:

http://www.wunderground.com/webcams/Budgie/1/show.html

So to box or to boat. That is the question.

must

bis später

hi jank
Just passing through.

Trevor is having a brief spell of popularity on Eschaton thread as he rails against the Antichrist. A moment of glory trivialised by the imminent immanentisation.

So it goes

afternoon Bored

i have been too negligent of this thread for too long. sorry....

i have been trying to keep up with you and psi on the fightin faith thread. i've just done some homework on Euthyphro....fascinating. i feel like Grasshopper when he was told "you are young, but you will learn..." though i'm not young...... but you get the drift

also the use of those little phrases and bits of terminology (i.e. TAFE) makes it quite a challenge, but i'm not giving up.

psi; have you found him yet on the internets? i've got as far as this;
http://psiomniac.blogspot.com/

'tis him??

drumming; not really sure what you meant with the complexity of my drumming (btw i am in no way precious or touchy on the subject). the way i've ended up approaching drums seems similar to that employed in martial arts (bear with me). i was taught from day 1 (aged 10) and sought out specific teachers as i progressed. i stopped taking lessons in my early 20's but continued to develop my technique, practising 5 or so hours/day then playing gigs or rehearsing. i basically lived drums from dawn till.....erm.....well dawn. all the while joining as many bands as possible (including a couple of weeks in the National Youth Jazz Orchestra....?!) and teaching drums for income.

then 1 day i auditioned for a band called Thee Amazing Colossal Men and my life changed for ever. i stopped practising and instead started to create, compose, and hone my skills with these guys. to cut a long story short we sued Virgin, who we were signed to, and they settled out of court after making us wait for 1.5 years for a court date. these were the days of legal aid.....

with the money so obtained we changed to Compulsion and released a couple of records on our own label. to this day i am immensely proud of the music we created. the guitarist was simply the most talented little f**ker i've ever met. he's now one of the biggest music producers around, recent bands being Snowpatrol, The Editors, REM, U2.

erm, not sure why i just wrote all that but there you go.....something about drumming as a martial art.....? nevermind.

anyhoo, time's up for now, kids need their butler...

tot ziens!

Yup, that's me.

Hi jank

Busy. So just passing through. But to clear up one thing.

The drumming: Twas a compliment. I am in no way a (theoretical or practical) timpanist (except for a brief foray with the triangle when very young) nor of the subtleties of the punk or neo-punk (?) genres (though my deal with the PMG means that I have been listening to the latter).

However it seems to me that your drumming on Diskin and DIIC shows a degree of sophistication not wholly typical of the genre. 'But I like it as Dick Emery' was wont to say.

(Mysteriously, the PMG has announced that she will be spending her summer hols with us.)

I'll reply to the rest later. Sinceince I do not get pokied for it here.
bis später

psi
I am impressed by this. I have never met any one who actually does a blog.

However your link gets us no nearer the musical oeuvre'

must go for a

bis später

It is quite sparse since I don't really have the time to tend it.
That's probably a good thing though.

I'll post you and jank a cd if we can find a way to exchange email and hence postal addresses.

laters...

afternoon Bored,

tubthumping; like i said, i'm not precious or defensive about my style. it is nice though to hear some-one else's take on what i just "do" when i play my music. probably the fact that i spent so very long learning my craft, as outlined previously, that i can throw bigger pots of metaphorical paint at the walls when the mood takes me.

i would define my style and my attitude to my music thusly; "i play both kinds of music, punk and rock".

further subdivisions are meaningless as far as i'm concerned. though i accept that to the next generation it will always be a subject for heated debate, and clique behaviour.

PMG; with all the boating, biking and sumptuous weather (if your wunderground webcam is for real) i see the attraction for her to be where you are.....it's a no brainer imho. that and you've obviously shown just what floats your boat with the DIIC and Disking stuff = one cool Daddy-O..

bye for now.

hi psi,

looks promising once we figure out how to hook up.

might be easy with me as i have a few mentions on 't interwebs where my name is plain to see. so; 1st name (3 letter version) then a "." then my surname followed by @ntlword.com


just google Compulsion and happy hunting.....

Hi jank

I'll try and catch up later.

However, the idea that I have hacked into the Wunderground weather network and pointed a webcam at a picture of a cloudless sky for the last month is ......interesting

But sadly, somewhat improbable, unless you also think I have gone to the trouble of creating a whole statistical back story as well.

http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=IISLEOFL2

I know I enjoy wind-ups but......

We do live on the same peninsula but a few Klicks away from the location of the site.

bis später

howdy Bored

webcam hacking; hey i don't ever underestimate the likes of you...

just had proper contact from psi on my email account, so no doubt it's snail mail address next for some good 'ol....erm....what music do you think psi comes up with..?

i'd hazard a guess at finger crippling chord shapes......

hoi!

Hi jank

Hacking Wunderground: where would I find the time.

Until I found the link I thought it was a feed from the airport. Hadn't realised how close to us it was.

Psi's music: I suspect you'll be surprised. He seems to have played with a lot of different guys. One I saw at the Ediburgh Festival (South American guitarist - name escapes me at the moment).

Unfortunately I can't come with a similar ploy to yours. I don't have a profile on t'interweb thingy.

I once shifted a paradigm (a very small one) and impressed a GOM but that's not the same as having played in a band that was featured by John Peel not to mention the 'Dutch' voice over thing.

If its commercially available if he tells me the title I could just but it.

Otherwise I may have to resort to some devious ploy involving anonymous letter drops.

On your own musical history. I did google 'Compulsion' at the same time as you told me about Drum and DIIC but I got misled originally by Andrew Hill's album and latterly by a reference to Compulsion as an Irish *folk* band

On music more generally as far as rock is concerned the further it is from the 60s and early 70s the more eclectic my listening becomes.

So as for your ex-band member producer I had only come across REM (like) and U2 (fairly indifferent).

I even had to look up Courtney Love and discovered that Nirvana had completely passed me by though oddly I have albums by Pearl Jam and and Soundgarden


(Strangely there is another Dutch bloke with the same name as yours who invented a self steering gear for yachts.)

Well I have to confess that I'm small beer compared to jank. I've never had a deal and i doubt that it is me who has played with the south american. I have been on Radio 4 though playing my music! And british TV, but these are very minor things. You are both welcome to have a cd, just mail me your postal addresses. In the meantime I will email jank my url. I assume he's in contact with you Bx4, so..

Morning psi

small beer: Indeed he has a degree of fame not available to the rest of us.

If you know his name you may discover a second string to his fame as a Dutch (accent) voice over artist.

South American: I was having a 'senior moment'. It was an Italian called Antonio Forcione and I assumed 'with' meant not necessarily in the same band but on the same programme.

Contact. No we're not. I found out who jank was because he mentioned Drum (who my daughter knew) and DIIC whose 'unusual' web site and Youtube videos I turned up.

I bought Diskin on t'interweb. Getting hold of DIIC's oeuvre is more problematic. If yours is available just tell me the title.

I am a bit wary about giving out my e-mail because I had a very bad experience once. Not because of anyone I gave it to, I hasten to add, but because of someone who hijacked their contacts list.

If not available commercially, I have an 'anonymous' university mail address.

Jank and psi.

Don't know if you have noticed this announcement from TET on the BBC POV Board

'We're sorry to have to announce that the opening of the new Today website has been delayed, due to technical reasons.

We know this is going to disappoint users but at the moment, we can't give an exact date for the launch. For now, you can post comments here and on Have Your Say, where debates are running about today's news topics.'

You couldn't make it up.

Morning Jank

The fake wunderground 'sunny day' photo is no more

TAFE: I You will have difficulty this. I think he made it up.

.'Theists versus Atheists on the Foundation of Ethics (TAFE)'
FF (msg 664)

Euthyphro: I have a link to the original Dialogue if you want but it's really about the 'modern' Euthyphro. Psi and I both like the Bertrand Russell version in 'Why I am not a Christian'.

http://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html

See the section 'The Moral Arguments for Deity' which presents it very well.

giving up: I think psi and I in our debates tend to get into 'fine tuning' which may obscure the 'big picture' somewhat.

So my attempt to summarise:

Psi and I agree that Euthyphro is not a killer argument. The reason it works as a gambit is that Christians (though perhaps not Muslims who might not see the second 'horn' as problematic) are unwilling to give up the fiat argument.

The problem is that if they do and adopt the most common alternative 'God's intellect' as opposed to 'God's will' then they are faced with a new problem. The reasoning of god must, in principle, be no different from any other reasoning.

Hence, the Christian cannot claim that because his ethics come from God's reasoning that this gives them any more worth that any other rationally arrived at ethics.

There are other positions open to the theist but essentially they are equally problematic.

If they stick to the 'fiat' model they *are* defeated by Euthyphro.

We also agree that an 'extended' naturalistic fallacy means that proponents of naturalist ethics have a problem. I cited so called 'evolutionary ethics' as an example.

The main area where we differ is in the nature of the assumptions of the meta-system that contains the ethical system.

Psi thinks that the assumptions of theist metasystem makes it uniquely susceptible to Euthyphro. I disagree.

If you are having difficulty checking out references you might try:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/
http://plato.stanford.edu/

Or you could punt for a copy of the excellent Oxford Companion to Philosophy (available fairly cheaply second hand on Amazon)

Must

bis später

I agree with your summary, apart from that I think we managed to tweak our position so that it ended up being closer than you describe.

You say you disagree that the theist meta assumptions make it uniquely susceptible to Euthyphro but I think our positions converged to the following:

There are atheist and theist positions that are vulnerable to Euthyphro and also examples of each that are not.

In particular, the atheist is only vulnerable to Euthyphro during the TAFE if a position that commits the naturalistic fallacy, or violates is/ought*, is adopted by them. Since I do not defend that stance, I conclude we agree.

* The naturalistic fallacy and is/ought* are related in my view.

The clips jank can now access on my site are home recordings but my cd was recorded in a proper studio with good people. So if you let me know your anonymous address I'll send you one, as unfortunately it is no longer available to buy online.