Zhukov said:
Once again I find mysellf confronted by what appears to be intentional obtuseness.
Testy are we?
And I again find myself running into obvious inflexible and intransigent views relating to the professor and the students apposing positions. There are obviously no other interpretations than what appears to be exchanged between the two.
The student is showing how the professors thinking is flawed, and that is all, but his final example is crap.
This statement of yours is a perfect example of one who wears blinders and seeing neither to the right nor the left in this interchanage.
And what did I say? That's not 'speaking metaphorically'. I'm really not sure why you think that it is.
Why should I be surprised? The student's analogy was the following:
The Christian points towards his elderly, crumbling tutor. "Is there anyone here who has ever heard the professor's brain...felt the professor's brain, touched or smelled the professor's brain?" No one appears to have done so.
The Christian shakes his head sadly. "It appears no-one here has had any sensory perception of the professor's brain whatsoever. Well, according to the rules of empirical, testable, demonstrable protocol, science says the professor has no brain."
The student did not say the professor had no brain, but that allegorically speaking no one had 'heard, felt, touched or smelled' the professor's brain. Ergo no scientific proof of the professor's brain being present just as there is no proof of an invisible and unable watchmaker. But that the only way to verify the brain is by exposing it to our 'senses' of reality in order to validate its presence. The same goes for the obvious fact that nothing can be proved to have occurred by pure chance or out of chaos in any length of time without taking reality down to its more basic constituents. This is what I tried to do but you have out-of-hand dismissed as irrelevant. Both the professor's brain and faith in a Creator have to be taken as pure beliefs until they are both proven to our satisfaction as to what we assume exists.
The point was to prove how we shouldn't rely on classifying only things we can physically sense as 'real'. Well, unfortunately for the student's argument, a brain is something we can physically sense.
Concrete thinking again? To take your agruement a little further and out of the realm of rigid thinking, we can physically sense this question as to what EXACTLY is the brain's ability to see, hear, feel or touch? Do you think that physical senses as we know them can't be fooled? Have you ever seen a magician place an object in one of your hands which you close and mysteriously appear to switch to the other closed hand? Until you know how this trick is done, your senses of touch, feeling, hearing are put at odds with your fixed reality of the order of things.
See that? Let me show you again: I'm not interested in your position. I commented on the orginal post, and I get your position? Your position is irrelevant. I didn't respond to the original post to get your position, and I'm not interested in arguing with you about what you think reality is.
You say my position is irrelevant but you want to respond to the original statements by the two fictionalized professor and student. You are interested in only what you consider to be an obvious flaw in the student's statement.
Well I could respond that your obstinate fixed rigid view of the conversation is irrelevant as you do not care what the actual intent of the student's statement which, like the magicians trick, is neither a flawed nor a fixed reality view of what appears to be evident.
Your typical of the observer who sees a large tree but misses not only the individual leaves but also the life functions in the tree that allows it to continue as a growing living entity.
Loosen up and try to understand more than what you can hold in your visible hand....
