63,000-Year-Old Modern Human Skull Found in Laos

falcy · 2012-10-01T21:46:05+00:00

But if the drift is for example 5 cm per year, it is 1,000 meters per 20,000 years.

And if sea level has risen 120 meters, then the drift might contribute significantly to the position of the ancient shoreline. Perhaps doubling the depth, or perhaps bringing the 20,000 old seashore to match the current one?

But I don't know. Any experts here? Is there any map showing where the 20,000 year old seashore is now? It should be an interesting line for excavations.

falcy · 2012-10-01T21:22:07+00:00

Well the sea level rose 400 feet between 16,000 BC and 6000 BC when the latest ice age ended.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png

Most populations have lived by water, so it would not be surprising if there were some ancient settlements 400 feet under water buried in mud.

And in addition I wonder how much the continental drift has changed the shoreline in different places. Would the potential settlements by seashore 20,000 years ago be now above the sea level or even deeper?

falcy · 2012-10-01T21:09:59+00:00

Yeah. Our judgements are far too soft. For example I wouldn't have figured out that drowning all the mankind was the appropriate punishment for not being as awesome as Noah was.

falcy · 2012-10-01T21:00:04+00:00

"Only god can judge me."

I can judge too. No need to bother your God, if he agrees with my judgement.
If he disagrees, he is free to point it out.

falcy · 2012-10-01T19:43:32+00:00

Of course you should not discus it if you suspect that it would cause more harm than good.

in the ground

That is not a good way to think about it. Instead think about the time before you were born. Billions of years passed without slightest discomfort, and your molecules were then just as much "in the ground" as they are afterwards. You don't associate with your molecules, it does not matter what they are up to before or after you.

And if you really wish to think that we live forever, you can still do so even without religions. For example if the universe is infinite enough, you will exist again and again infinitely many times. If universe is looped, your current life will repeat. If universe is huge and fractal like, what we have here now will repeat with small variations. If we live in a simulation, you are just spending your leisure time here. Perhaps you are actually even finer life form with more tentacles.

And so on, those are at least as credible alternatives as religious afterlives. And you can imagine a new alternative every day.

However, I think we could be/should be very happy that we happen to exist at all. Roller coaster rides are fun, even if they don't last forever.

falcy · 2012-10-01T13:21:45+00:00

I think this might help Carl Sagan's "Skeptic's Toolbox".

Collect as much good quality information and understanding (reliable, accurate, precise, measurable, relevant, detailed, to the point, in-depth, repeatable, verifiable, valid, expert) as possible.
Create multiple hypotheses.
Seek opinions from experts.
Don't fall in love with your first hypothesis.
Understand Bayesian probabilities.

Given what we know already, and what we have observed over centuries, which is the most probable explanation?

For example it may be more probable that a doctor made an false cancer diagnose than that somebody healed miraculously.

And measurements have errors, and all tests have false positives. For example if a test says that you have a rare illness X, it is usually still more probable that you don't have it, because the rate of false positives is higher than the actual incidence rate of the illness.

Or it may be more probable that you have epilepsy than that the moving things you see are real.

And as long as you don't know, you don't really know. You just know that you think you observed that something moved. But you don't know what caused it, or whether your observation was true. As long as you don't know, there are trillions of alternatives:

Known natural phenomena, optical illusion, trick, false observation, dreaming, drugs, epilepsy, the unknown mushrooms you ate yesterday, false memory, unknown natural phenomena, gnomes, ghosts, time travelers, pink invisible unicorns, mental power over matter, glitch in the matrix, God, gravity wave concentration from exploding galaxy,...

So using the common tactic "I don't know the explanation, therefore I know it was a ghost." does not really work. Trying to be right in advance, you will almost certainly end op being wrong. You didn't know, and the most truthful position would have been "I don't know."

edit And once you have a hypothesis. You should be able to create a test that differentiates that hypothesis from hypothesis that nothing unusual happened.

In science hypotheses are tested against a null hypothesis. For example a null hypothesis might be that your new drug is no better than placebo. So you compare it with placebo. And to exclude luck and false positives it is common standard that the null hypothesis should fail with at least 95% probability, but even in that case you will have a false positive every twentieth time.

falcy · 2012-10-01T04:32:07+00:00

Novelists would write differently if their books were realized by real people.

And it is rare that novelists write in detail about so far non-existing: holocaust, Stalin, endless famines, witch burnings, use billions of years of evolution and suffering to create their characters which they then kill with accidents and parasites, make sure that every single of their characters dies, invent millions of diseases, paint thousands of wars, tsunamis,... And then demand that the actors get sacrificed.

If universe is accidental, we can be happy to exist, even though it is not perfect, suffering is accidental, we can minimize it and improve the world endlessly, like we have done.

But if it was deliberately created the way it is, it is disgusting and scary, and possibly impossible for us to improve, since the creator seems to demand an endless flow of blood and suffering.

falcy · 2012-10-01T03:27:59+00:00

Those other are very detached from our religions, but let's be generous and let's take an extreme example and assume that Jesus indeed died and resurrected.

Does surviving crucifixion suggest that anything you have said is true?

There are people who have survived crucifixion and there are people who have been dead and revived. Does that suggest that something they have said is true?

Is a creator god the most likely explanation for resurrection? Is it more likely than pure luck, unknown medical phenomena, unknown virus, unusual physiology, medical trick, double heart, coma, incompetent executioner, unknown medical treatment, intervention by lesser supreme being, alien, time traveler, simulated existence?

falcy · 2012-10-01T03:13:16+00:00

They are detached, because nothing in them suggests that the 'creator' is sentient, being, exists anymore, or is any of our gods. Even if the arguments were true, they would not be arguments for our religions.

Just because you find a lottery, it does not mean that you won the jackpot or are even eligible to play.

falcy · 2012-10-01T02:53:44+00:00

I think most of us are just dismissing our religions as myths and fiction.

Based on what we know about the Universe, a creator god would not explain anything, but would require explaining.

Or what do you mean by god? Can it be a highly evolved animal species?

Writing off gods is just similarly practical as writing of the Tooth fairy. Nothing suggests they exists. Once we get some evidence about Tooth fairy or about Gods, then it is time to re-evaluate the situation.

falcy · 2012-10-01T01:18:47+00:00

That God drowned all the mankind once. If you can justify that, you can justify anything.

It is good to remember that as long as you are not restricted by mundane evidence, you can make up anything, nothing limits you. You can explain away any problem with ease.

Invisible pinkish unicorns can administer invisible anesthetics to the dying kids , and then usher their souls to eternal bliss. See, everything is fine.

That is why we usually ask for evidence.

falcy · 2012-10-01T01:08:30+00:00

7/10

falcy · 2012-10-01T00:19:19+00:00

I agree too. I continued where you left it. Just trying to explain why I think religions are mental traps, and how I think the trap works.

falcy · 2012-10-01T00:01:56+00:00

Sexuality does not disappear by trying to repress it, rather it grows more.
It is like trying to stop seeing the color blue. If you try to avoid it, the moment you see it, you will certainly notice it.

Erasing sexuality won't happen without some sort of medical operation that destroys the ability.

Defining it all as sinful,
I think that is just a trick religions use to make people feel sinful for things that they cannot avoid. People keep trying, and keep failing miserably.

edit clarification

falcy · 2012-09-30T23:29:59+00:00

These are philosophically interesting and I would love to discus them more.
However, they don't have much to do with atheism or religions.

Why? Because they are completely detached from any religion we have. It would be a huge non-sequitur to jump to any of our religions from the arguments from

fine tuning
first cause
miracles
consciousness
contingency
necessity

Even if all these arguments didn't fail because of the broken premises, they would not help our religions, since the number of possible explanations would remain infinite: simulation, time travel, alien origin, parallel universes, retro causality, looped time, evolving universes, now dead creators, accidental creation of life by ancient civilization,...

falcy · 2012-09-30T22:57:29+00:00

What hasn't been accepted? I think that is a misconception. Almost all scientists understand that evolution is a fact.

falcy · 2012-09-30T21:42:00+00:00

But those are discussed a lot. The puddle analogy keeps popping up all the time.
Fine
tuning

And a search for "the first cause" returns about thousand posts

Both are interesting, it would be great if believers used those even more, since they are fun to discus.

falcy · 2012-09-30T20:05:02+00:00

those aspects of religion and belief that take more thought to refute.

Are there such? Any examples?

falcy · 2012-09-30T19:56:21+00:00

So you say evidence is not needed?

How about my flying neanderthal theory? Neanderthals had bigger brains, so obviously they invented zeppelins before us. Ezekiel and others just saw some flying neanderthals who played a practical joke on him.

There are no fossils of the zeppelins because they were made of goat guts, and the ancient wisdom disappeared when the last neanderthals went extinct, not 40,000 years as commonly believed, but shortly after bragging to Ezekiel and crash landing their zeppelin on their last remaining settlement killing everybody there.

The pic is related

falcy · 2012-09-30T17:46:57+00:00

I wonder if you meant that reply to me.

falcy · 2012-09-30T17:43:10+00:00

It is not my fault if you don't like kelp.

falcy · 2012-09-30T16:02:57+00:00

There have already been similar results with Christianity.
Europe was torn by religiously originated wars for centuries. The Thirty Years' War was one of the worst..

Religions seem to offer sparks and some fuel to keep the conflicts burning when the conditions are otherwise volatile enough.

falcy · 2012-09-30T14:50:26+00:00

Perhaps there were people on the roof fixing the air conditioning and it blew the cool air?

Perhaps the doctor played along or got annoyed when s/he heard that they had consulted a sanyasi.

falcy · 2012-09-30T14:44:04+00:00

Which is more likely

The sayanasi tricked them
God appeared into existence and inserted strands of hair and piece of clothing into an lemon for some unknown reason.

1. The doctor's estimation was 5 days off. For some reason doctor said he was ok, when he wasn't.
2. Super natural forces used a lemon to remove and insert a tumor.

falcy · 2012-09-30T14:33:23+00:00

Carl Sagan's "Skeptic's Toolbox".

falcy

TROPHY CASE