To put my point a bit differently I think your argument would disappear if you tried to define imagine/reason more precisely.
Humans certainly aren't perfect at imagining. In fact if you ask most people to imagine a heavy object and a much heavier object falling they will predict the much heavier object hits first and I can give a host of other examples of the same thing. So certainly we can't require perfection to count as imagining or reasoning.
Neither do we want to define reasoning in terms of speaking english sentences or anything similar. I mean we ...
Actually there is an (almost explicit) contradiction in the way most religions talk about morality and god.
I'm most familiar with christianity (specifically catholicism) but I believe the same goes for most major monotheistic religions.
1) They claim that morality arises from god, i.e., they wish to define morality as obeying god's commands.
2) "God is good," is an explicit part of their doctrines.
The tension here is obvious. Clearly the members of the religion take themselves to be saying something substantive and meaningful when they all intone ...
I just want to remark that it is far from obvious on apriori grounds that there is no elegant general AI algorithm that will solve all the other problems quite nicely. We've only learned this by the continued failure to find such an algorithm or anything like it by the AI community and the continued small successes of more specific less elegant approaches.
But in this era of neurology, one ought to be aware that thoughts are existent in the universe; they are identical to the operation of brains.
Really? I'm aware that physical outputs are totally determined by physical inputs. Neurology can tell us what sorts of physical causes give rise to what sorts of physical effects. We even have reason to believe that thoughts can be infered from the physical state of the brain in a lawlike fashion but this surely doesn't let us infer that thoughts are IDENTICAL to the operation of brains. Merely that they alwa...
I think the issue is that science tells us that there is a certain kind of explanation, not just that there is some explanation.
Most people (at some level) want to believe in something bigger than themselves that cares about human concerns. The reason that magic is exciting so long as it doesn't have a scientific explanation is that it holds out the possibility that is responds to human concerns.
Think for a moment about the differences between a science fiction book and fantasy book. Both of them endow their major characthers to accomplish astounding fea...
To quibble just a bit I think that it is occasionally (tho probably not in the terminator examples the paper briefly mentioned) reasonable to use a very throughly fleshed out fictional account as evidence of plausibility. I mean by giving a detailed narrative you rule out the possibility the idea is internally incoherent or requires some really really implausible things to be true.
Still, I don't think this is a very strong effect and is overestimated all the time by people who think that literature gives more than entertainment/enjoyment but actually gives insight.
You need to do a lot more to demonstrate irrationality than this. Obviously, as other commenters have pointed out, there are an infinite number of rules that agree with any given finite sequence of experimental results so obviously you can never conclusively demonstrate that your rule is indeed the correct one. Moreover, you can't even be 'bias free' in the sense of assigning all possible rules the same probability unless you want to assign each rule probability 0.
Now you might be tempted to just give up at this point but this is exactly the same problem...
Speaking as a mathematician (well a grad student) I can positively say I frequently see 'by definition' used in arguments and use it myself in a substantive valid fashion. Sure, definitions don't support inductive inference but that doesn't mean they are always trivial. Fermat's last theorem follow by definition from the definition of the integers but it's certainly not a trivial fact that it does so. While rarely quite so complex arguments about philosophy, politics and other things can sometimes benefit from the nonobvious manipulation of definitions... (read more)