Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20190617222636/@comment-32182236-20190721175653

I don't even know what Appeal to Emotion is, can you link that for me?

Perhaps you know it as argumentum ad passiones?


 * https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-emotion
 * https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/29/Appeal_to_Emotion
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion

It's very powerful, because emotion is something that convinces us. Appealing to emotion is a great way to convince people... But it's not a great way to actually find the truth. In order to find the truth, we have to remove its influences. When judging morality, we need to look at it from the perspective of an ideal observer. And when judging evidence, we use logic, and logic alone. (Yes, creative solutions do help. But it still has to fit the evidence all the same. A creative solution is simply another possible solution-Just as good as all of the uncreative ones, and must follow the same tests that the others do.)

I do know that Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientists mankind has ever known by any metric you wish to use for comparison, was a steadfast defender of Imagination and right-brained thinking.

Alright, I've decided, I'm going to start calling out fallacies. Here's the first one: Appeal to Authority.

The Right Brain is not about fanfiction. It's about Thinking Outside The Box. Thinking in curved lines rather than straight ones, to try to find rules that explain the observable facts by probing for unknown possiblities.

That's called investigation. The evidence that the theory of Perfect Circular Planetary Motion had problems existed for a long time. And left-brained thinkers tried to account of this, without changing the rules, by creating Epicycles.

Thus violating Occam's Razor.

Making the planets move on perfect circles that were -themselves- also moving on circles.

And as there was no evidence of these circles' existence, this was also ad hoc. It took a daring scientist to throw out the church-favored idea of Perfect Circular Motion and propose Elliptical orbits. Just like it took a daring scientist to propose the crazy idea that the Sun, rather than the Earth, was the center of the solar system.

Yes. It does. This is exactly why argumentum ad populum is a logical fallacy. We shouldn't assume that something is true just because people say it is. These scienstists followed the evidence faithfully, and had to face the fact that their findings contradicted centuries of human belief. Which gave them a lot of pushback from the church, who found such elegantly perfect celestial models to favor their point of view.

Yeah, rejecting evidence is quite bad. But there's a difference between not rejecting evidence and inserting meaning into everything like a numerologist. They believed that circular motion was divine. Because that adds meaning to the universe. But as science advances, we learn more and more that there is no hidden, moral meaning to the universe. It's all just atoms, following the rules of mathematics.

Quantum Mechanics gives a new hope to add meaning to the universe.. Which is why the New Age Movement is a thing. It's quite hard to understand quantum mechanics.. So it gets misinterpreted. It gets interpreted as evidence that we create reality. That our minds are simply god-like in power.

The Scientific Revolution was one of the greatest things that happened. But with the movement of art, postmodernism, and antirationalism, the effects of it are starting to fade away. We're starting to return to the Dark Ages in culture. We're going to need a second Scientific Revolution.

Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity is one of the most epic examples of Out Of The Box Thinking the world has ever seen.

Yes. By disregarding common assumptions, so that he may start anew, without those pesky dogmatic beliefs. Think Cartesian skepticism. Not by inventing new assumptions.

He literally rewrote what we understood to be the laws of space and time, to create a model that better fit the evidence, so that mankind could experience another Eureka moment, and move a step further on its quest for finding the truth of the universe.

He didn't rewrite it, because that was the truth all along. He simply took the fact that there was a speed of causality, and helped form a model to fit the new evidence. It's really just normal science, but better, because it actually involves questioning the assumptions that we commonly make. Just because everyone believes it is true doesn't mean it is. So someone has to go in and test it. Someone needs to try to debunk it. Because if a belief is commonly held.. We need to do everything we can to disprove it. The less false things we believe, the closer we are to the truth. And the theory of general relativity is one of the many testaments to this.

Think of it like this.

Say we find a place with many, many white swans. ...In fact, those are the only colored swans we ever saw. So, it becomes common consensus that all swans are white.

How would you test this claim? By searching for white swans, to confirm it? Or searching for black swans, to prove it wrong? A real scientist would do the latter.

It's easy to find confirmation if you're looking for it. Which is why we should seek to prove our beliefs wrong.

This is why instead of trying to confirm my own theory... I death blow yours. I'm skeptical of my own as well... And if you manage to prove it wrong.. Then good job. It means it was a good choice to discuss this with you, even if I "lost". Because if I hadn't presented the theory for you to prove wrong, I'd still believe a false theory.

...And that reminds me. Your note about Flowey being just the first golden flower in the garden does mean there was a garden before. The golden flowers just took over somehow, which is why we don't see other kinds of flowers.

When Chara fell, in the intro, all we see are very small bits of grass. Perhaps that will help reveal what season it is when they fell?

The statue wasn't of Asriel, or Chara. That theory I held at the start... Is gone. One false belief gone... Closer to the truth I am.

Again, Science was originally created by The Right Brain.

I suppose it'd take the Right Brain to get out of a trap created BY the Right Brain.

Somewhere in time, in a world ruled by titanic dinosaurs, a creature realized that intelligence was also a path to power, as surely as great size and strength was. And by using this power, they changed the evolution of their species to favor being smart, rather than being strong.

That's not how evolution works. First came the Mammal Brain, which is useful in learning more complex maneuvers, and cause and effect. Soon teamwork became a dominant strategy. Then there was more kinds of social functions.. Then there were primates, who learned to use tools. And finally, the humans, who have the most intelligence of them all.

Evolution is a process that happens over time. There was no "spark" of intelligence.

A trait that was slowly cultivated and enchanced generation by generation, until it passed to the primates, and eventually to humans.

Yes... But it wasn't a spark. In order to realize that you need intelligence.. you would need to already have it.

Genetic mutations add up over time.

It was The Right Brain that did this. Realizing that the world could be different, if people tried something different, instead of doing things the same way they always had.

No, it was not the right brain. It was cold, hard, evolution. The right brain at the time only knew how to instintiually fight or flight.

And you'll find that at every key point in our understanding of science, every quantum leap of new knowledge that changed everything in its wake, there was a daring scientist who was willing to think outside of the box, no matter what their peers thought of them.

It always came from questioning something. Never from inserting meaning into things that can easily be explained away without the need for ad hoc. Inserting meaning is the opposite of questioning things.