Quote:
Originally posted by Barry the Sprout:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
LOL. Well think about it. If seven thousand focus groups all did result in the same conclusion, that would be emprirically provable wouldn't it.
The simpler the question, the greater the likelihood such a situation would occur.
If "Do you believe you are alive" is answered yes by every focus group, it could be logically concluded through empirical assessment that humans believe they are alive.
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Sorry Yorick, you can't prove something on the basis of probability. You can't prove something by intuition, however many peoples intuition have been taken into account. Its quite strong evidence for the existance of something, but it cannot be proven this way. Just to give you an example - Fermat's Last Theorem. No one could find any numbers that would disprove it, not even in the whole scope of human comphrehension. That did not mean, however, that it had been proven. It meant we were fairly sure, but not certain. We couldn't be certain Fermant's Last Theorem was correct until some really heavy duty maths had been carried on on it, not because it was likely to be false or because we had seen it to be false - but because it was possible for it to be false.
The same applies to empirical evidence of peoples view of religion. A recurrence cannot under any circumstances be considered proof - as long as the possibility of a counter example exists (never mind actually finding it...) nothing can be proven. What you are talking about is something having a high empirical probability of recurrence, not something being empirically proven.[/QUOTE]Barry, I didn't use the words "empirically proven" I said "logically concluded through empirical assessment".
Edit: Actually I did earlier in the post.
THe point I was making is that IF hypothetically a question was found that 100% of every human ever asked was found to be the same answer, then a logical conclusion based on empirical assessment can be drawn.
I mean of course the only thing truly absolutely provable is that one is aware, but outside that there are relative assumptions that can be made. Such as Timbers own unproven conclusion that at least one wacky kook would asnwer "no". That is of course speculation at this point, however logical it may be.
Are we sick of this yet?? [img]tongue.gif[/img] I think we've gone so far up our ar$es we've come out our mouths again.
[ 01-28-2003, 04:15 PM: Message edited by: Yorick ]