MG wrote:Again, you’re over simplifying what I’ve said earlier in this thread. Creating your own context and then placing me in it. Misrepresenting the points I made.
The context (of the flat earth) was set by my statement, as that's what I'm certain you were responding to with your "metaphor" of "both round and flat". I had written:
Gad wrote:what you're trying to say is that you win by default, since there is no feasible way to debunk any topic that is represented by a "heap" a grain at a time. If the flat earth is a heap, then it's impossible to disprove. If evolution is a heap, then it's possible to disprove. Wouldn't you agree that this is pretty disingenuous of you, or should we say, fraudulent?
Going back to read the context, as you urged me to do (I searched the thread for all instances of the word 'flat'), I'm dismayed that your intellectual crimes are actually worse than I originally portrayed them. I only brought up the "flat earth" as an example of your absurd invention of "heap logic", which justifies believing in whatever you want to believe. You can replace "flat earth" with 13th century medicine, or with quantum mechanics, or the doctrines of ISIS, and the problem is the same: take one grain of sand -- one idea -- from an assumed large body of interrelated ideas that establish (ISIS for instance), and shoot it down with analysis, and the heap remains. Given finite time and resources, it would be impossible to ever disprove anything that's assumed to be represented by a heap by carefully analyzing one grain at a time.
So I think we need to pause a moment and laugh at your efforts to make your own ideas invincible.
Okay, let's move on.
First of all, you pull my flat earth statement out of its context of your own invention of "heap logic", effectively derailing yourself in terms of what we were discussing, but then, you put a metaphorical spin on "flat earth", equivocating the sense of what I obviously meant as in, the absolute denial that the earth is round, which is a well-known example of, if not the poster child of pseudoscience as it exists today; with a sense in which "round" is not prohibited, in order to argue that my thinking is narrow. But it's worse, because your new vehicle of "koan and paradox" could be used to derail your now abandoned vehicle of the "the unassailable heap".
Rather than answer your "heap logic" straightforwardly, I could have said, "why MG, can we not say the heap is but a grain of sand, and the grain of sand the heap? For a grain is made up of even tinier particles, and from a distance, is not a heap mere spec of something much greater?"
And wouldn't that have been frustrating! A derail from nowhere, that actually doesn't contradict the point you were making. Likewise, waxing metaphorical about the earth being both round and flat says nothing about the sense of "flat earth" as is known in common parlance, the pseudoscientific movement that explicitly rejects the earth as round. When I reject the "flat earth", I'm obviously rejecting the view that explicitly insists the earth is flat, importantly, because it most definitely is NOT round.
BUT I COULD BE WRONG:
Perhaps you have a chance to escape condemnation, because when I searched the thread for "flat" I saw that it was Physic's Guy, not Chap, who introduced the idea of flatness to the earth to this thread.
PG wrote:Science has taught us well so far that we should expect new circumstances to expand our concepts. Within a few miles of home, the world is effectively flat, but over larger distances you have to extend your concepts of geometry to include curvature.
And you replied:
Excellent thoughts.
So here is your out. You didn't quote me, and so perhaps you hadn't even read my post directed to you that referred to "flat earth" and were continuing with flat earth ideas introduced by physics guy?
If so, then you should have pointed that out as your response.
But anyway, PG's thoughts of an earth both flat and round, which you considered "excellent", aren't really in line with your observations about appreciating contradiction and complexity, believing that you are "both flat and round" depending on perspective. PG was talking about accepting scientific advancement. I will have to respond to his post separately now that I've discovered it.
PG isn't arguing for perspectivism and relativism, he's arguing for intensionalism, and that will have to be another post.
Anyway, if you choose to use this as your out, note that you still derailed yourself, abruptly moving away from the "unassailable heap", and toward "koan and complexity".
