Why call him a God?

[danydandan]

5 minutes ago, OverSword said:

You argued from authority 

I did indeed. As I have limited knowledge, D.A usually knows his stuff....but he isn't citing his own opinion he is offering the opinion of other people who do the research. 

[+OverSword]

3 minutes ago, danydandan said:

I did indeed. As I have limited knowledge, D.A usually knows his stuff....but he isn't citing his own opinion he is offering the opinion of other people who do the research. 

I know, just messing around a bit.  I enjoy Atenborough much

[danydandan]

4 minutes ago, OverSword said:

I know, just messing around a bit.  I enjoy Atenborough much

Never heard of him?

Edit: Apologies I could not resist. 

Edited December 5, 2019 by danydandan

[Habitat]

5 hours ago, cormac mac airt said:

Well if that’s true then our genus Homo, and therefore considered human, spent the first 1.8 million years of its 2.8 million year existence as nothing more than animals and an argument can be made that anyone who goes into the wild now of days unprepared is ALSO nothing more than an animal. There’s a lot more to our advancement than fire. 
 

cormac

We are still animals, but it is pretty obvious that the domestication of fire was a very significant "technological" development.

[cormac mac airt]

14 minutes ago, Habitat said:

We are still animals, but it is pretty obvious that the domestication of fire was a very significant "technological" development.

"Significant", sure, but "the" turning point then no IMO. There have been several turning points in human history to include not just the use of fire but lithic technology, canoe/boat building, the bow and arrow and atlatl, agriculture, animal husbandry, large scale construction, etc. Most of which not only significantly post-dated the use of fire but also post-dated the cranio-morphological and behavioral modernity of humans. Based on your post #510 it would seem the implication is that earlier humans were nothing more than animals running around using fire. 

cormac

[Habitat]

2 minutes ago, cormac mac airt said:

"Significant", sure, but "the" turning point then no IMO. There have been several turning points in human history to include not just the use of fire but lithic technology, canoe/boat building, the bow and arrow and atlatl, agriculture, animal husbandry, large scale construction, etc. Most of which not only significantly post-dated the use of fire but also post-dated the cranio-morphological and behavioral modernity of humans. Based on your post #510 it would seem the implication is that earlier humans were nothing more than animals running around using fire. 

cormac

That is right, post-dated the use of fire, which indicates it was a necessary pre-cursor.

[cormac mac airt]

2 minutes ago, Habitat said:

That is right, post-dated the use of fire, which indicates it was a necessary pre-cursor.

And you apparently conveniently ignored the part afterwards: 

Quote

post-dated the cranio-morphological and behavioral modernity of humans.

With an origin point in time of some 1,000,000 years BP for the use of fire until the point of cranio-morphological and behavioral modernity some 100,000 BP at the earliest, and subsequent later progress, it took us 900,000 years to be productive. I think that gets us a seat on the stereotypical "Short Bus". 

cormac

[Habitat]

1 minute ago, cormac mac airt said:

And you apparently conveniently ignored the part afterwards: 

With an origin point in time of some 1,000,000 years BP for the use of fire until the point of cranio-morphological and behavioral modernity some 100,000 BP at the earliest, and subsequent later progress, it took us 900,000 years to be productive. I think that gets us a seat on the stereotypical "Short Bus". 

cormac

I don't know the word "productive" is apt, that is just making assumptions based on modern perspectives, but suffice to say, there is no civilization, without fire, or the possibility of what we would call civilization, so yes, fire was a necessary precursor, if not a sufficient condition for civilization.

[cormac mac airt]

5 minutes ago, Habitat said:

I don't know the word "productive" is apt, that is just making assumptions based on modern perspectives, but suffice to say, there is no civilization, without fire, or the possibility of what we would call civilization, so yes, fire was a necessary precursor, if not a sufficient condition for civilization.

Your original reply was not in reference to civilizations, you DO like to move the goalposts don't you? The use of fire predated anything remotely like a civilization by more than 996,000 years and is about as relevant to the current discussion at this point as saying that the existance of water predated humans.   From a morphological and behavioral perspective humans wouldn't have been much more than animals running around with fire back then. They would have had no concept of where it might lead beyond the "here and now". 

cormac

 

[Habitat]

1 minute ago, cormac mac airt said:

Your original reply was not in reference to civilizations, you DO like to move the goalposts don't you? The use of fire predated anything remotely like a civilization by more than 996,000 years and is about as relevant to the current discussion at this point as saying that the existance of water predated humans.   From a morphological and behavioral perspective humans wouldn't have been much more than animals running around with fire back then. They would have had no concept of where it might lead beyond the "here and now". 

cormac

 

I am keeping this simple, the domestication of fire was an absolutely necessary precursor to anything that resembles civilization as we understand it, I did not say it was alone sufficient to produce civilization as we know it. The invention of the wheel was a necessary development along the path to motorized transport, but not enough to guarantee it would happen. Plenty of primitive societies, even into recent times, had very little technology, but all had fire.

[psyche101]

11 hours ago, White Crane Feather said:

Many well known physicists take it very seriously because it predicts and explains very fundamental issues in nature. A couple being wave particle duality as well as time dilation. It may even predict dark matter which could actually give us information about the memory and processing power of the simulator that has the potential of being tested in a number of ways to advance (or tear down) the theory. 

 I'm not following.

GR explains time dilation, wave particle duality is still being investigated?

Personally I just find the idea pretty dumb, if anything it just illustrates how easy it  is for creator concepts to arise and take hold. 

[psyche101]

11 hours ago, White Crane Feather said:

Agreed. Yes there is a lot of denial of the process in favor of particular biases. 

Dude.............

 

 

Really?

[psyche101]

8 hours ago, Will Due said:

 

That's why trying to prove the imagination that God doesn't exist and that there isn't an afterlife, isn't really science too.

However fundamental one believes it to be otherwise.

Will, you just really shouldn't comment on subjects like this. You're really not doing yourself any favours. Your logic is about equal to Westboro logic.

[psyche101]

6 hours ago, Hammerclaw said:

As far as I'm concerned, we've been human from at least Homo Erectus and we have Neanderthal DNA, anyway, so he was us, too. 

Our DNA only differs by a couple of percent from our primate cousins. That shows we are cousins, and how we parted evolutionary ways. The only real difference is the last adaptions that encompass that attention schema theory. We are just the 5th ape.

[psyche101]

5 hours ago, OverSword said:

No.  You assume that God is the universe, I assume the universe is a creation, real or simulated. 

Not at all. A simulation requires a designer and operator. Science shows that whole creation idea and is unsupported. Simulation ideas just turn god into a pimply faced basement teen sitting in the dark with a handful of Cheetos. 

5 hours ago, OverSword said:

There are several good scifi books which tackle the computational power issue.  My favorite is a pocket universe style book by Walter Jon Williams titled implied spaces in which the creation of ordered pocket universes results in life because the existence of ordered realities inevitably leads to life developing in them.  At the end of the book the creator of the pocket universes discovers that we ourselves are a pocket universe and he leaves in search of our creator.

Sci fi is called that for a reason. It also misrepresents things like wormholes and dimensions all the time. The requirement for power and complexity is a serious thorn in the side of the simulation idea.

[psyche101]

4 hours ago, Will Due said:

 

And just think, there are still some who refuse to believe in miracles. 

See what I mean?

Seriously will. 

[psyche101]

3 hours ago, OverSword said:

Billions of species arisen and fallen on this planet and only one civilization building species evolves.  Special.

If it wasn't us, it would have been one of many other hominids.

Not special. This was always going to happen. As much as the species crticises itself, we are a result of nature 

[Will Due]

3 minutes ago, psyche101 said:

See what I mean?

Seriously will. 

 

Check your kangaroo. 

I think he bumped his head.

 

 

[psyche101]

7 minutes ago, Will Due said:

Check your kangaroo. 

I think he bumped his head.

Do you know what a kangaroo is Will?

Can you prove they exist?

[Will Due]

2 minutes ago, psyche101 said:

Do you know what a kangaroo is Will?

Can you prove they exist?

 

That isn't nice. 

Now go give your kangaroo a hug.

 

 

[+OverSword]

18 minutes ago, psyche101 said:

If it wasn't us, it would have been one of many other hominids.

Not special. This was always going to happen. As much as the species crticises itself, we are a result of nature 

Not necessarily.  One thing that has been thoroughly demonstrated, imo, is that high intelligence is not a goal of or inevitable outcome of evolution.

[Will Due]

 

Evolution is not accidental. 

It's purposeful and directed.

 

 

Edited December 5, 2019 by Will Due

[+OverSword]

7 hours ago, Hammerclaw said:

As far as I'm concerned, we've been human from at least Homo Erectus and we have Neanderthal DNA, anyway, so he was us, too. 

We don't all have Neanderthal DNA

Quote

"The proportion of Neanderthal-inherited genetic material is about 1 to 4 percent [later refined to 1.5 to 2.1 percent] and is found in all non-African populations.

link

[+OverSword]

33 minutes ago, psyche101 said:

The requirement for power and complexity is a serious thorn in the side of the simulation idea.

In our simulation it is.   It was even more so in Roman times. 

[cormac mac airt]

15 minutes ago, Will Due said:

Evolution is not accidental. 

It's purposeful and directed.

Evolution is essentially trial and error, no specific purpose intended nor directed. 

cormac