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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!

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15 minutes ago, ijuin said:

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck (demonic or otherwise), then any differences from being an actual duck are merely academic.

Do you mean all of family "Anatidae", or just some subfamilies?  And if the subfamily option, which version do you go with, the three, six or nine subfamilies?   Looks like, however, that the ur-duck or proto-duck was, in fact, a dinosaur, which is cool.

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I mean that humanity has gotten by just fine assuming that things are, to a great degree, what they serm to be, so assuming that True Reality lies deeper is of fairly low utility. Even if we do live in The Matrix, we still 99.x% of the time get the same feedback from our environment as if it were indeed as we perceive it.

Take the concept of Philosophical Zombies, for example. They are stated to have no metacognition--no internal sense of self--and yet any empirical test that we could devise would be unable to distinguish them from people who do possess such aspects, because they are defined a priori as giving identical reactions to non-Zombies. Basically, they pass the Turing Test without actually being conscious. My assertion is that because we can not even detect the difference, then such a difference effectively makes no difference and can be safely disregarded outside of pure mental exercises.

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2 minutes ago, ijuin said:

I mean that humanity has gotten by just fine assuming that things are, to a great degree, what they serm to be, so assuming that True Reality lies deeper is of fairly low utility. Even if we do live in The Matrix, we still 99.x% of the time get the same feedback from our environment as if it were indeed as we perceive it.

Take the concept of Philosophical Zombies, for example. They are stated to have no metacognition--no internal sense of self--and yet any empirical test that we could devise would be unable to distinguish them from people who do possess such aspects, because they are defined a priori as giving identical reactions to non-Zombies. Basically, they pass the Turing Test without actually being conscious. My assertion is that because we can not even detect the difference, then such a difference effectively makes no difference and can be safely disregarded outside of pure mental exercises.

Yeah, but what does that have to do with ducks?

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There is an infamous simplification of the "we should treat things as though they are exactly as they seem" argument known as The Duck Test. It is typically stated as "if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, swims like a duck (etc.), then it probably is a duck". The argument has little to do with ducks per se--they are merely used as a convenient example.

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51 minutes ago, ijuin said:

There is an infamous simplification of the "we should treat things as though they are exactly as they seem" argument known as The Duck Test. It is typically stated as "if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, swims like a duck (etc.), then it probably is a duck". The argument has little to do with ducks per se--they are merely used as a convenient example.

I am aware of that, and, in fact, have used the Duck Test myself from time to time.  I was just pointing out, when I made comments about the Family "Anatidae" that not all ducks pass the duck test.  And some things that do pass the test aren't in fact, ducks.  It's one of those expressions that really don't hold up if looked at too closely.

I suspect that saying "if it walks etc  like a Anas platyrhynchos or a Cairina moschata it's a Anas platyrhynchos or a Cairina moschata" is a bit much to say...

I give two names there, because unlike most other domestic animals, ducks come from two species1.  Most are A. platyrhynchos, aka Mallard ducks2. The C. moschata are Muscovy ducks, which despite the "From Moscow" name, are in fact a new world species.   The great wiki is confused as to why this name has been applied to them.

1I actually knew that before I went wiki diving.  Benefits of coming from a bird watching family.
2No relation to a Dr. Mallard who talks to dead people and says "Jethro" a lot.

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There's a similar saying in medicine, "If you hear hoofbeats, think horses before zebras."  Often phrased as "not zebras" but the fact that horses are far more common does not mean that you'll never encounter a zebra.  In fact, one of my favorite CE lecture titles in recent years was "Horses, Zebras, and Gerenuks."

Another similar 'old saying' which seems to make sense but leads to wrong conclusions is, "Where there's smoke, there's fire."  That makes the assumption that you can tell smoke from steam, dust plumes, evaporating dry ice, and the smoke machine someone set up to try to convince people their opponent's pants are on fire and dustract from their own glowing flames.  ;-)

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As a Redditor, I feel the need to interject with the (in)famous https://np.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/2byyca/reddit_helps_me_focus_on_the_important_things/cjb2z41/

Quote

[–]Unidan 2 years ago 

Here's the thing. You said a "jackdaw is a crow."

Is it in the same family? Yes. No one's arguing that.

As someone who is a scientist who studies crows, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls jackdaws crows. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They're not the same thing.

If you're saying "crow family" you're referring to the taxonomic grouping of Corvidae, which includes things from nutcrackers to blue jays to ravens.

So your reasoning for calling a jackdaw a crow is because random people "call the black ones crows?" Let's get grackles and blackbirds in there, then, too.

Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It's not one or the other, that's not how taxonomy works. They're both. A jackdaw is a jackdaw and a member of the crow family. But that's not what you said. You said a jackdaw is a crow, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all members of the crow family crows, which means you'd call blue jays, ravens, and other birds crows, too. Which you said you don't.

It's okay to just admit you're wrong, you know?

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13 hours ago, mlooney said:

Do you mean all of family "Anatidae", or just some subfamilies?  And if the subfamily option, which version do you go with, the three, six or nine subfamilies?   Looks like, however, that the ur-duck or proto-duck was, in fact, a dinosaur, which is cool.

Ducks are, in fact, dinosaurs, which is cool.

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On ‎12‎/‎10‎/‎2016 at 3:27 PM, JustBecauseICantDraw said:

If I say "I exist" I am not wrong.

Probably not.  The reason this comes up in philosophy classes though isn't so much for whether it means anything about you, but because it's a close cousin to one of the great debates in the history of philosophy - the one about proving the existence of God.  It's a way of coming at "existence is not a predicate" that doesn't require getting tangled up in arguments about religion.

 

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On the other hand, acting as though a seemingly-concrete object (e.g. a wall) doesn't exist for philosophical reasons does nothing to spare you from the perception of pain when you seem to collide with it.

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You know, I always found particularly comical the argument that God is the greatest being conceivable, and a being that exists is greater than one that doesn't, ergo God exists. No offense to all of you, but I prefer fictional beings to real ones. Thus I singlehandedly prove that God cannot exist, as if he did exist he would not be the greatest being conceivable.

I'd actually like to see somebody debunk my logic. I think Anselm was right that the Judeo-Christian concept of an omnipotent, omniscient god does imply that such a god would be the greatest being conceivable, and it's an empirically observed fact that I feel a fictional being is greater than a real one, so you would have to find the flaw within the reasoning itself. However, I can't identify any hole in the core logic other than that one cannot sensibly make conclusions based on the properties of potentially nonexistent objects; however, in this case, either God exists and the argument holds to prove he doesn't, or he doesn't exist and the argument is unnecessary. I know there must be some other flaw, since disproving God is just as absurd as proving God, but I can't find what it is.

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I imagine a god or no god, and each seems equally likely

I imagine 100 gods, and each seems equally likely

But each seems, alone, only 1/100th as likely as no god

I can imagine however many millions of gods I choose, and while it does not prove that there isn't one, it does mean arbitrarily choosing which one to believe in looks a bit silly.

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I believe that there is one God that is beyond the possibility of human comprehension, so we divide that one God into myriad pieces that we can comprehend (about as well as we comprehend each other). No matter which one (or several) you choose to follow, you're partly right but leaving something out. Thus there cannot be "one true faith".

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On 12/11/2016 at 7:55 PM, Wildcat said:

Ducks are, in fact, dinosaurs, which is cool.

Unlike some avian dinosaurs aka birds families, the ur-duck appears to predate the Cretaceous extinction event.

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On 12/12/2016 at 9:09 PM, mlooney said:

Unlike some avian dinosaurs aka birds families, the ur-duck appears to predate the Cretaceous extinction event.

question, do you have a link for info on the ur-duck? I keep looking for information on it but google is uncooperative.

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