Quotations responded to replaced by suitable, concise summaries in brackets. Original post at link provided, accessible by Britpoly members and cronies.
http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/Britpoly/message/13912
[Confusion]
The seeming is false.
[Fluff]
You’re making the false assumption that I am new to these ideas.
[Crap metaphor]
Then how could you possibly have decided upon one particular belief?
[Parochial]
This may be the case for you but the overwhelming mass of humanity appears not to have a problem with this.
[Nonsense]
I assume, then, that you do not have a profession.
[Horrible idea]
He thinks he does. I disagree.
[Bollocks]
What are you talking about?
[Confusion]
For divination to be true then its foretellings must be of random events else they are of events of which the foreteller has previous knowledge and about which they may make a probabilistic judgement.
[Crap metaphor]
We can imagine possible variations but these do not exist. Only one shape forms, that’s why it’s called a pattern, and of course it will not be triangular - a daft idea which nobody would suggest and a cheap point to argue - and waves do not happen when the pond in question is frozen.
[Dull Douglas Adams reference]
I really have no idea of what it is you’re trying to convey here. You seem to have relatively big thoughts in your head - like a little frog making big farts in a small pond - but no means of working out if they make sense or not and so you just push them together and assume that one follows necessarily from another, a result, I think, of too many popular science magazines and too many low-grade science fiction paperbacks.
[Fluff]
You haven’t yet described in any detail what it is exactly that it is which you feel you can do. A good sign that something may not be possible is that there is no possible formal description for it.
[Fluff]
I assume you’re talking about me, but remember that I have only said this about travel between two points. I say this because I’m pretty familiar with geometry and I’m confident that travel between any two points is not possible without first traversing the points on the curve inbetween. If you know that this is not the case then explain it here. Vague waving of sub-aphoristic maxims isn’t going to overturn geometry.
[Science fiction gobbledegook]
You’re not making sense. You’re just stringing words together. Too much Star Trek. Too much Doctor Who. I can hear Wittgenstein now, spinning in his grave.
[Illogic]
You can travel from York to London without traversing the points on the curve in between? It doesn’t matter whether Doncaster is on that curve or not, there are many other directions you may take but all of them involve travel through space.
[Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bomb Mysticism]
I’m sure you believe that this is true, otherwise you would not say it. Personally, I live in a much bigger world in which we have explanations for things which do not resort to gobbledegook.
[Fluff]
When I want to read science fiction I read Iain M. Banks.
[Challenge]
A tradition of intuitively coherent ideas about the world and man’s place within it.
[Doctor Who, again]
You should get yourself to hospital because you’ve just shot yourself in the foot. Earlier you said that events were not random yet now you take pains to claim that they are that you may pretend that there are no means of comparative study which may be applied to divination when of course there are such. All we have to do ism for example, have a random number generator select a number from between 1 and 1,000,000,000,000, grab some people who claim to be able to fortell the future and see how many predict the generator’s selection. Piece of cake.
[Fluff]
Whether people use dice for divination into particular issues is neither here nor there. They should still be able to foresee the results of, say, 100 sequential dice rolls.
[Non sequitur]
Language, horticulture, plumbing, medicine, cookery, and swimming all have appreciable benefits which we may observe in people and in society. Divination doesn’t. Perhaps you would like to go away for twenty years, read some books that don‘t have sonic screwdrivers in them, and then rephrase your argument.
2 comments:
*quote* ..remember that I have only said this about travel between two points. I say this because I’m pretty familiar with geometry and I’m confident that travel between any two points is not possible without first traversing the points on the curve inbetween. If you know that this is not the case then explain it here. Vague waving of sub-aphoristic maxims isn’t going to overturn geometry.*/quote*
But, of course, that applies only if the traveller restricts his/her viewpoint to the 'ground', as it were. Imagine - time as a multidimension, not as a single dimension. An observer/traveller walking happily along the one-way path (and because s/he is a traveller in only that single dimension, seeing only the path) finds a being appearing in front of him/her. From the single dimension perspective, the being has appeared from nowhere, but from the multidimension perspective, the being has simply travelled along a different route.
This in no way precludes that being having traversed enough points in between, but those points are not ones which the siingle dimension traveller can appreciate, or even visualise except in spatial metaphors such as this one.
--
Jez
Yes, any movement between any two points may be described as a curve and any curve may be described by the points along it and it is these points which must be traversed, still I’m not surprised to see The Flatland Defence here. I wondered how long it would be until someone came up with this old canard. Now, wait a moment. I have a counter around here somewhere. Where did I put the thing?
There it is:
There isn't really a dimension of time in the same way as we have dimensions of space. Time is just a useful idea, so useful that it seems concrete and it helps to work in the world if we think of time as though it were a dimension. We shouldn’t take this strategy beyond its useful context, however, or things seem confusing. Time is not a thing but the extension of space in the same way that a line is an extension of a point and an area is an extension of a line and a volume is an extension of an area.
Now, we’re talking about Gods here, I think. Were Gods dimensionally free-roaming then they would not have any kind of a relationship to our world at all, anymore than you or I have any free relationship with the deeps of the North Sea. If Gods touch space at any point for any reason then they become subject to its rules. They may not be stuck within it, of course, but they certainly have fewer degrees of freedom than might be suspected. There's too much of this Flatland thinking going around, I'm afraid, and not enough North Sea.
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