Identity (Identity)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Thursday, August 27, 2009, 04:30 (5350 days ago) @ David Turell

I guess I'm not sure about the contingency unless you mean scientific models at large? 
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> No, I'm using Gould's terminology. If everything is a chance occurance in evolution, then each step is contingent upon the last one. 
> - I guess I don't see a problem with that. But don't you think statistically you might also be committing a similar error to... I don't remember who argued this, but say you take a random rock in your backyard. What are the chances that rock is in your backyard? For that answer, you take it's surface area--to make the math simple we'll say its 1m x 1m--and do a combination by the total surface area on earth, 510,072,000km2. - The odds of that rock being in your backyard are incredibly awful, but it doesn't change the fact that it's there. And that rock being in your backyard had to have a same contingency of events to make it to your backyard as well. We could make the number even smaller by taking into consideration the type of rock, its distance from your home, whether or not it was brought there by another person, you name it. - To me it seems you do exactly the same thing with your argument about evolution. You ask a series of probability questions--when (no offense) the questions might be irrelevant. There is no special meaning behind the rock in your backyard, and similarly I can fathom nothing from life. (Mayhaps I'm just too jaded?) - > 
> > Don't stop. I'm at this website because I continue searching, 
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> I'm not stopping. This is fun and I have a point of view I can defend.
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> > and when asked why he even cared he said "I think that each view has a small portion of the truth." I recognize that as true wisdom in my "ripe age" at present. Sucks being a late-bloomer, lol. 
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> It is a matter of age. At your age I was definitely agnostic. The more I practiced medicine, the more I decided I had to do some outside reading and make up my mind. Medicine demonstrates too many miracles. I've never been moderate. Sitting on the picket fence is too hard on the butt! - I probably won't develop similarly... computer science has no miracles, lol. - My time in medicine has been dismal, though working in a trauma center will give you few if any miracles. Once, and only once I was present for a 26yr old female who they rolled straight to the OR, bad enough that they had her chest cracked and were massaging it on route. She got a pulse back... - Every person cheered, the one of the doctors breathed a huge sigh of relief. - ...for approximately thirty seconds. - This year was the first year I got angry about it. I've worked 250+ trauma nights. Not once have I seen a miracle. It's bad enough that I can tell you in about one or two minutes whether or not I'm going to be working. This is the kind of life experience thing I'm talking about--no more can I really say anything about yours, there isn't really much you can say about mine, it's luck of the draw in medicine.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"