What is the force?

Uzima Moto Thanks for your input. I really liked your opinion. Man, this temple could really use more people like you. Simple and straight to the point

if not one will ever have the same force then one of them is false because in order for it to be legit it has to be consistent.

VixenVengeance exactly. very well said thanks for that

Deimos No problem. I was just seeing if people actually had a basic belief for the force but apparently not. Which is what is making their "church" fall apart. Even the front page says that the people here truly believe in the force but apparently, the force is like SJW's saying you can be whatever gender you want

Gisteron wrote:

Rex wrote: the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence

If I may briefly address this very common point - may it be up to moderation whether this had better be a separate thread or not - this is a very pretty saying that barely ever works in practice.

If there are any platonists around here, we may read some disagreement with this, but I would assert that propositions don't "just exist out there" in isolation. They are instead things people believe or believe not. And likewise, beliefs, too, aren't just idle items in peopls's minds, they inform their actions. So a statement that may sound like "Frank is cheating at poker" is really saying "If we were to perform a thorough search of Frank's body and seat we are likely to find hidden cards on at least one of the two.". If we do perform that search and find no evidence of Frank's cheating, it doesn't of course mean necessarily that he didn't, but it is evidence that he didn't in the sense that the prediction made from the proposition failed to at least within the thoroughness with which we had conducted the search. Likewise, if Frank were to claim clairvoyant or telekinetic powers, hardly any other means to judge those claims' accuracy is available to us than to interpret them as meaning that Frank could predict the future at a better rate than chance guesses or manipulate objects beyond what is accounted for through other physical forces. If then Frank consistently fails to demonstrate such abilities under even mildly controlled conditions, we are justified in rejecting his claims. We have evidence of their falsity because evidence of their accuracy failed to manifest when we had reason to expect that it would. The absence of evidence is in plenty a case just as well evidence of absence.

You say this a lot, that there's ample evidence to disprove certain "non-physical" phenomena.. but I have yet to see such evidence or testing..

Gisteron wrote:

Rex wrote: the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence

If I may briefly address this very common point - may it be up to moderation whether this had better be a separate thread or not - this is a very pretty saying that barely ever works in practice.

Just gonna throw out there that the complete sentence was "This doesn't necessarily preclude magic, but practically it does." Arguing from an absence of evidence against something is an incredibly weak position, yes. Yeah, propositions don't just exist out there (I addressed that with the "there's not the number five hanging out in my back yard"). Arguments in a civil vs criminal law have wildly different standards, and arguing for the existence of something with no evidence is a pointless endeavor because there's nothing to argue about: it's essentially non-existent until it does exist.

@Kazat0 believing in the force doesn't mean we have to believe in some pseudoscience. The doctrine never say "mmm yes, a true Jedi has a high midichlorian count" and the flexibility of this community is part of its richness. To assume this place is falling apart and comparing the force to "SJW's saying you can be whatever gender you want" shows a horribly shallow understanding of this place and belies your personal biases.

What is the Force not?

Rex wrote:

Gisteron wrote:

Rex wrote: the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence

If I may briefly address this very common point - may it be up to moderation whether this had better be a separate thread or not - this is a very pretty saying that barely ever works in practice.

Just gonna throw out there that the complete sentence was "This doesn't necessarily preclude magic, but practically it does." Arguing from an absence of evidence against something is an incredibly weak position, yes. Yeah, propositions don't just exist out there (I addressed that with the "there's not the number five hanging out in my back yard"). Arguments in a civil vs criminal law have wildly different standards, and arguing for the existence of something with no evidence is a pointless endeavor because there's nothing to argue about: it's essentially non-existent until it does exist.

@Kazat0 believing in the force doesn't mean we have to believe in some pseudoscience. The doctrine never say "mmm yes, a true Jedi has a high midichlorian count" and the flexibility of this community is part of its richness. To assume this place is falling apart and comparing the force to "SJW's saying you can be whatever gender you want" shows a horribly shallow understanding of this place and belies your personal biases.

Psychic Phenomena isn't the same as pseudoscience.. Flat Earth is pseudoscience.. People may falsely claim they have a working theory that is verifiable through scientific testing.. but the phenomena itself hasn't been completely debunked to be called pseudoscience.. partly because there isn't one unified theory of why it happens..

@VV:
Usually people don't sit down on the defendant's bench if there is a literal absence of evidence against them. There may not be enough to clear reasonable doubt of their guilt, and in that case the verdict is in dubio pro reo, not guilty as per the doubt that had remained. Technically, even if someone else has been proven to the standards of a court of law to be guilty of the crime in question, that doesn't exonorate the original defendant. Nevertheless, they are not treated as a suspect for the rest of their life, and that's even given that there was some - albeit weak - evidence of their guilt. This I suppose comes down to what we mean by "evidence" anyway. To make a sloppy, off the top definition, I'm speaking of some circumstance that may contribute to swaying a verdict one way or the other. Evidence is what makes a proposition more believable when opposed to its contrary, than it would otherwise be. When you board a plane, no amount of searching, even including literal slicing the person open and irradiating them with any and all sorts of intrusive radiation can "prove" in a strict logical sense that they have no weaponry on or in their body. No amount of blood tests can determine that someone definitely does not carry a disease that would show up on a blood test. Nevertheless we treat the negative result of even the first or second blood test as (strong) evidence that they do not, and we do not actually slice passengers open in search of firearms or explosives. The absence of evidence is not proof of absence, but it makes the absence (obviously) more believable than it would be if there was not an absence of evidence.

Uzima Moto wrote: Psychic Phenomena isn't the same as pseudoscience..

Really depends who you ask. There is surely no shortage of people and organizations that will pretend that it has scientific merit, make up nonsensical models of it, construct something pretty much exactly as in any other pseudoscience.

Flat Earth is pseudoscience.. People may falsely claim they have a working theory that is verifiable through scientific testing.. but the phenomena itself hasn't been completely debunked to be called pseudoscience.. partly because there isn't one unified theory of why it happens..

Are you saying Flat Earth has been "completely debunked", then? Convenient how this can happen so easily with pseudoscientific nonsense you have no investment in but suddenly gets strictly impossible once your very own woo is under consideration...

As for there being no unified theory of why "it happens"... That may well change sometime after the day a credible recording of "it happening" is made. Normally, if the claim comes with a prediction that warrants a realizable test, and the test is performed, it returns negative. James Randi literally made half a career out of performing those tests by doing little more than promising a grand reward to anyone whose test wouldn't fail like the rest of them do.

Gisteron, evidence never goes to the "null hypothesis" though. It only goes to the assertion. You can never prove unicorns dont exist. All you could ever prove is that they do exist. If you present an actual living unicorn you would prove they exist. The simple assertion they exist does not prove anything. The most we can stand on, absent that evidence, is the rejection of the positive. To take the position of the negative (they absolutely dont exist) would require the accumulation of all knowledge that exists. Short of that it becomes an argument from ignorance to state they dont exist. You cant apply a lack of evidence of the positive and claim it is evidence of the negative. That is disingenuous and shifting the burden of proof.