In my opinion science needs to stop whining about creationists and MTFU and focus on the really cool stuff. Like teleports.
Science isn't about making money, it's about learning and discovery, which both directly and indirectly may help to advance society, or may not feed back in to technology at all but build a base of knowledge which future discoveries necessarily sit upon.
Quote from: psychomansam on September 14, 2013, 01:15:17 pmOf course it would probably be easier to make a (molecular/atomic) scan of someone at location X, destroy them, send the scan data to location Y and reconstruct them.Which also happens to be the basis of myriad philosophical thought experiments, i.e. would it be teleportation, or would it be murder and the creation of a clone? What is personal identity? Does it depend on physical matter, structure, some kind of continuity or something else?Back to essay writing! Actually...(And here the wine might be kicking in).This would surely provide definitive proof of the existence of the "soul".Or not...Should a human be destroyed and reconstructed in this way.And should that resurrected human have all the memories, personality traits, etc, etc, of the original.Then those features would, and could only be, products of the physical state of the body.And therefore.The soul cannot exist...More wine please.
Of course it would probably be easier to make a (molecular/atomic) scan of someone at location X, destroy them, send the scan data to location Y and reconstruct them.Which also happens to be the basis of myriad philosophical thought experiments, i.e. would it be teleportation, or would it be murder and the creation of a clone? What is personal identity? Does it depend on physical matter, structure, some kind of continuity or something else?Back to essay writing!
..or the bullshit that is common in psychologyGreat write-up of a Masters student debunking the bullshit quantification of "positive thinking ratio" in an article cited >350 times with help from Anders Sokal (of post-modern bullshit fame).
Quote from: slackline on October 22, 2013, 09:50:45 am..or the bullshit that is common in psychologyGreat write-up of a Masters student debunking the bullshit quantification of "positive thinking ratio" in an article cited >350 times with help from Anders Sokal (of post-modern bullshit fame).Great stuff, but I hardly think this thread needs the usual bullshit of science Vs science bashing. Your claim 'common in psychology' appears to pejoratively imply that such howlers are more common in this science than others. If only it were so.
But this story ... confirms that psychology is science.
Your claim 'common in psychology' appears to pejoratively imply that such howlers are more common in this science than others. If only it were so.
Lots of of psychology is quant as it goes – psychometrics, cognitive, neuro, evolutionary psychology, artificial inteligence etc etc. It’s a level of understanding. You don’t need to know about how electrons move in silicon or whatever to design an effective first person shooter. Knowing about the molecular structure of the rock, or about tectonic movement is not where you’d start for working out how to get up a hill. Scientific disciplines are just appropriate maps for getting at different aspects of the universe. 'Psychology' is the map for understaning behaviour of inteligent systems - human, animal, AI.