Emergency Post - Earth's Pole Shifting

[Tigron-X]

This thread is filled with retardation...

Since when is philosophy about being the truth?

It's about understanding the truth.

[Galleleo]

You seriously do not understand the scientific method if you claim that.

Hume does not postulate a theory, it's one of the principles of the scientific theory. Right now we are pretty sure about the polar switching due to lava sediments and what they tell us. And it's very much possible that it is the right explanation. However, maybe 20 years from now some scientists will find that it's the wrong explanation and it's actually different. That's what the scientific method is about, a theory is valid as long as it hasn't been discredited and the scientific method is all about continually challenging existing ideas and theories, testing them. If you corroborate the idea it makes it stronger, but not the absolute truth, because we don't know what we might find in the future.

[Squeezer]

ITT people who need to take an entry level Geology course. That's as far as I got and I could tell you WITH CERTAINTY that the poles do indeed shift. The last time it happened was about 800,000 years ago if I remember correctly. Sorry Summa, but you're wrong on this one.

Ratty summed it up in his first post. The shifts are literally written into stone. You can see the changes reflected in the iron levels of igneous rocks. There are certain waves which are far beyond my technical knowledge, but show how the magnetic current was pushed through the rock. Based on a large collection of these rocks (like say...near a volcano), they can relatively pinpoint which direction the magnetic waves came from.

And Hume's argument wasn't that you can't know something with certainty, it's that we're slaves to our own perceptions. Being imprisoned in a body makes us sensory creatures and thus fallible by the limitations of our understandings. We can be uncertain about how we sense something, but geologic evidence is just that, geologic evidence. It's objective even if we are not.

[Tigron-X]

You seriously do not understand the scientific method if you claim that.

Hume does not postulate a theory, it's one of the principles of the scientific theory. Right now we are pretty sure about the polar switching due to lava sediments and what they tell us. And it's very much possible that it is the right explanation. However, maybe 20 years from now some scientists will find that it's the wrong explanation and it's actually different. That's what the scientific method is about, a theory is valid as long as it hasn't been discredited and the scientific method is all about continually challenging existing ideas and theories, testing them. If you corroborate the idea it makes it stronger, but not the absolute truth, because we don't know what we might find in the future.

I don't know what it is you think I claimed, or if you're even responding to me.

I'm all for skepticism. But, the moment you take the stance, "Nothing can be known for certain," then you've made a philosophical assertion that there is no truth, or that the truth cannot be known.

And it falls flat on its face for the very reason I stated earlier.

I don't know what that has to do with the scientific method, except that in order to apply the scientific method the user has already assumed that there is an objective reality, and it can be understood.

[Galleleo]

I don't know what that has to do with the scientific method, except that in order to apply the scientific method the user has already assumed that there is an objective reality, and it can be understood.

Actually no, the interpretivist, holistic discourse analysis, or narrative research method assumes that there is no objective truth and that each individual researcher has an impact on the research being done and the conclusions drawn. It's only through recognizing this and describing the bias brought in by researchers that you can do accurate research.

Also, it's pretty well established in the academic field that whenever you have an interview, preform an experiment or do an observation, you are actually interfering with the subject and research bias can exist for a whole bunch of reasons. So just because someone works in a scientific way, it doesn't mean that person has assumed that there is an objective reality.

Granted, this has a lot more impact on social sciences than for instance geology and I only used the example of the lava sediments because that's what this thread is about. I think that there are truths, but there are also a lot of subject of which we think we know the truth that could turn out false in the future.

[Tigron-X]

What you're talking about is concepts. Concepts change with information, and they exist only in our minds.

Concepts and Objective Reality are two different things, and you're mixing the two.

The Scientific Method tests one's concepts against objective reality in order to know whether the concept holds true or false.


You cannot touch, see, or smell a forest, but you can do all that with a tree -- forest is a concept.
You cannot interact with a football game, but you can interact with the players and ball -- game is a concept.

[Galleleo]

As I said, it has more impact on the social sciences (my field) than the other ones, but it's still up for debate whether we can actually perceive the objective reality or not, even among scientists. And there is a whole group that claims that we cannot and therefore science is only about what we perceive and not about what truly is.

When it comes down to it, there is not one universal truth, it all comes down to how you look at it. I'm not trying to claim magnetic poles don't switch and that what they found in lava sediments is not the truth. I'm merely saying that claiming that there is one truth and that the academic world assumes scientific results are objective is ignorant.

[Jerome Scuggs]

I'm merely saying that claiming that there is one truth and that the academic world assumes scientific results are objective is ignorant.

i can see why logically your argument has merit but when you look all around you, all you see is the usefulness of that assumption.

[kthx]

In reality science is pretty infantile in terms of what it knows about anything. I mean for as smart as we think we are we still can't really kill viruses yet, we can't stop bacteria from growing immune to our antibiotics faster than we can make antibiotics strong enough to kill the new strain, and when it comes to almost everything else that scientists can't actually reach out and see it is generally always wrong and falls back to common sense in the long run. Every thirty years or so everything we were taught except for some very basic principles are proven completely wrong, and then 30 years later proven to be true again. Remember when eating chemically produced food was better, remember when feeding your kid formula instead of breast milk was better, or the hundreds of thousands of other things scientists have tried telling us was absolute fact when of course in the long run it was proven to not be a fact. So basically nobody here knows, and nobody in the world knows if the caps have shifted ever on this planet or if its an illusion created by like was said before the millions of natural disasters that have taken place since it supposedly happened, and we will never know for that matter. People who take scientific theories and present them as facts in an argument are ignorant honestly. So yes science can prove a forest has trees in it because the forest is already here, and has been there, and they can see the forest and the trees. However science can't prove the poles have ever shifted, and science can't really foretell much of anything in regards to the future. I don't have any faith in science.

[project dragon]

It is also not in the Bible!

Jesus would have known what was going on, He knows everything

[kthx]

True that.

[Tigron-X]

...there is not one universal truth...

Yet, you claim to adhere to one with that very comment. :\

[Tigron-X]

So yes science can prove a forest has trees in it because the forest is already here, and has been there, and they can see the forest and the trees. However science can't prove the poles have ever shifted, and science can't really foretell much of anything in regards to the future. I don't have any faith in science.

That's philosophically incorrect. What one sees is trees. Your mind aggregates the trees and labels it as a "forest" because the aggregate of trees coincide with the definition of forest that you've been taught. However, "forest" is not part of the real world. It is merely an aggregate in your mind. Simply put: try to cut down a forest without cutting down a single tree. You can't do it. Or, go touch a forest. You can't do it. All you can do is touch trees.

So, it's not a matter of science. Trees do not exists in forests. We, instead, label a group of trees as a forest. The term
"forest" asserts a concept. Each time you use the term, I get what you're talking about, but I can't go and physically touch it.

[kthx]

I am saying trees and forests aren't theories, something that supposedly happened 800,000 years ago is.

[Tigron-X]

I am saying trees and forests aren't theories, something that supposedly happened 800,000 years ago is.

Yes, and the theory is far more plausible than the theory you propose which is: The poles are static.