I Believe God Exists

[Mister Agenda]

To begin with, in order to claim that the brain produces mind, you will need to first demonstrate that the brain can exist as an objective external material object independent of mind. We are back to proving Materialism.

Bearing this in mind (heh), why did you ask how much a mind weighs? You seem to be unable to operate outside of the materialist paradigm except in short bursts. When you are operating in the idealist paradigm, no evidence can work on you because you don't believe ANY evidence is valid, but that level of irrationality is hard to maintain, isn't it?

[stromboli]

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mind-brain-and-consciousness/201101/mind-brain-and-consciousness

Jacob Sage,M.D. from "Psychology Today"
Quote:
Ask yourself, is the functioning brain identical to the mind? If your answer is no, you are a closet dualist. You believe that  brain and mind are made of different kinds of stuff. Such a stance will make it hard for you to understand the nature of consciousness. It will make the mental aspects of our lives mysterious and unknowable.

I am a working neurologist who sees brain disease causing mental dysfunction every day. Take the case of Representative Gabrielle Giffords. If she does not recover pretty much full brain function, her mental states will be altered, and she may not be able to function in Congress as she did before the bullet damaged her brain. If the bullet had done more damage than it apparently did, she might not now be fully conscious. Hopefully she will recover. There is the famous case of Phineas Gage, however, in which brain damage to the frontal lobes of the brain by a railfoad spike turned a sober, hard-working man into a lout. His mind was altered because his brain was altered. He was a different person after that spike went through his brain.

The main reason many people remain dualists, however, is because they find it impossible to believe that brain function can entirely explain consciousness. They think that after all the neurotransmitters have hit their receptors and all the neurons have fired, there is still something that has been left out of any explanation of consciousness. The thing that has been left out, they say, is the conscious feeling of what is like to be in a certain state. Furthermore, all the whirling electrons cannot explain why a certain neuronal configuration results in our seeing blue rather than red. Another objection that I have heard is, "What about my soul"? So they conclude than consciousness cannot be fully explained by brain function. But if that is true, where is consciousness and what is it?

As a neurologist, I contend that consciousness is nothing more than the ability of our brain to acquire information (which is the state of being awake)  AND all the content that the information contains AND the ability to get all that information into and out of memory. The key word is "ALL". If you have all that, you are conscious of the blue sky and the red sun. Nothing more is needed to be conscious of that beautiful sky. My contention is that the brain can do all that, and, therefore,  a functioning brain is identical to a conscious mind. That makes me a materialist and not a dualist. In the coming months, I want to explore these ideas. I want to hear what you think, your objections to my position and your arguments for and against these ideas.

If you are looking for an informed opinion that is dead on, this should qualify. Neurologist who works with brain function says Dualists are deluded and he himself is a Materialist. So Casparov, why don't you jump on "Psychology Today" and call the eminent Neurologist a liar. we'll wait. 

[Casparov]

Actually, papers on that particular archive are NOT peer reviewed. The arxiv.org archive is for preprints.

Okay, here are the two exact same papers in presented on their actual peer reviewed journals:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v446/n7138/abs/nature05677.html
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/4/1221.short

I presented them to you via the arXiv.org website because that is the only way you will be able to read them without subscribing to peer reviewed journals.... and now you have attempted to make this a case for dismissing the results of these experiments out of hand. 

You guys seem to be trying very hard to find a way to dismiss the scientific evidence rather than actually address it directly. I have had someone attempt to dismiss it based on "they are old" and now you trying to dismiss it because they are "preprints", neither of the claims being true. The 1999 paper the first person was referring to was conducted by Scurry and was only the first successful run of this "type" of experiment, whereas the one I have presented was done in 2012, and the other in 2007.

It is funny to me. I hear Atheists say all the time, "the beauty of science is that we don't claim to know. We, unlike faith based ideologies, are willing to change our views depending on the evidence." And now that I put that statement to the test, you are making wild attempts to dismiss the evidence before even entertaining the possibility of changing your preconceptions.

"We want facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions." - Jessamyn West

The other thing is that you are falling into the old trap of thinking that when a physicist says "observer" in a physical context, that he means a person. He does not. What he means by an observer is "a physical apparatus that is able to collect sufficient data about a phenomenon."

It is you who are mistaken kind sir. The experiment I provided, and even the one successfully completed in 1999 which is called the Quantum Eraser Experiment was constructed specifically to test this theory of yours.

They run the test with measuring devices that are capable of erasing the information after they have recorded it. So they shoot the electrons at the slits, the measuring devices record the which-path information by "physically interacting" with the particle as you claim, and then the electron arrives at the back slid.

Now before they "observe" the results of the experiment, they erase the information that was recorded by the measuring devices. This means that they no longer have the which-path information because they erased it, but the measuring devices still "physically interacted" with the particle as you rightly say it had to. So the result should be, because the "physical interaction" happened, even though they erased the information it recorded, they should still get a particle patter rather than a wave patter. Right? Well guess what? THEY DONT.

This experiment conclusively proved that the "physical interaction" is not the cause of collapse, but rather what causes the collapse is the ability for an observer to have the which-path information. As soon as the information about which slit the particle went through becomes available to an observer, the wave function collapses and they get a particle pattern.

On the other hand, if they don't have the information of which slit it when through, even if there was a measuring devices that recorded that information by "physically interacting" with the particle and then erased that information, they still get a wave pattern. The conclusion is that wave function collapse is caused by the observers ability to have which-path information, and this has not been a point of debate since 1999.

This confusion is one of the most persistent bugbears of physical science because it gives license to people like you who misunderstand "observer" as a person looking at the expermient and somehow influencing the outcome with the force of his thoughts, and thus materialism is dead. Sorry, but to a physicist, the observer effect does not indicate any such woo. What he understands is that observation itself is a physical interaction with the phenomenon observed. As such, the notion that the fact that you are observing different aspects of a phenomenon changes the outcome of an experiment shouldn't be surprising, because to change the way you observe the experiment is to change the experiment.

The very experiments I presented to you are the one's that disprove the claim you are making. It would be very convenient for you as a materialist if measuring devices themselves caused collapse just by "physical interaction" because this would leave realist Materialism intact, but this has been conclusively proven to not be the case. Therefore, you are wrong sir.

Now I'm sure I can expect you to completely disregard all of the scientific experimentation and the conclusive results that contradict your desired preconception about reality in order to preserve your world view, and that is fine, do what you have to do in order feel secure in your beliefs, but know that what you believe is not consistent with science, nor philosophy.

It's counterintuitive and defies common sense because on the macroscale the probes we use to observe are so puny compared to what we are observing that they do not significantly affect the object in question, and any perturbations are drowned out by thermal noise. But in the quantum realm, using probes that are comparable in energy to the phenomenon you are observing is unavoidable â€" the interaction of observation is as significant as any other interaction in the experiment.

The Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser eviscerates your contention because whether the result is wave or particle is produced by a choice to observe or not observe after the experiment is already run. Thus proving conclusively that this "interaction of observation" you are referring to did not affect the experiment as it was run, because this choice is made AFTER THE FACT.

There is nothing in the abstracts you quoted that that undermine materialism. The only thing you have exposed is your ignorance about the subject. These are physical papers, so the phrase "independent of observation" has to be understood within that physical context, and that phrase differs in significant ways to the layman's understanding of that phrase.

All I can tell you is that experiments made by zeilinger and aspect has disproven local realism. As well as bell's inequality being validated, which means no hidden variables, which in turn means you have to abandon either realism or locality or realism and locality at the same time. Materialism is founded upon realism and requires locality, this whole picture of reality needs to be abandoned according to modern quantum experimentation.

You can deny the evidence. You can dismiss the scientific conclusions. And you can continue believing what you want to believe. I do not have the power to force you to change your mind, I can only hope that a rational person who values logic will be intellectually honest enough to look at the evidence and invest the time required to come to a valid conclusion. I cannot make you do this.

But if all you want to do is just deny all the evidence out right and hold tight to your preconceptual assumption about reality, you have that option available to you.

[Casparov]

Bearing this in mind (heh), why did you ask how much a mind weighs? You seem to be unable to operate outside of the materialist paradigm except in short bursts. When you are operating in the idealist paradigm, no evidence can work on you because you don't believe ANY evidence is valid, but that level of irrationality is hard to maintain, isn't it?

My contention is that information is constitutive of reality rather than objective material objects. I am a Monistic Idealist because I understand that information and consciousness are two sides of the same immaterial coin.

Because I am skeptical of Materialism does not then mean that I believe the reality we are currently perceiving will not continue to operate in the way we have observed in the past. I operate within this reality just as you do, I simply disagree on what constitutes this reality.

Thank you for your many responses, this thread was originally just an introduction, I did not intend it to turn into a debate against the entire forum. I am very interested in the debate, however I would prefer a more structured environment.

Mister Agenda, are you willing to engage in a Formal Debate with me in the Debates Section of this forum? If not, I extend this invitation to any and all who read this and are game. I am even open to having multiple debates after the first is complete.

[stromboli]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-stenger/materialism-deconstructed_b_2228362.html

In my last blog I objected to a statement made by physicist David Tong in the December 2012 Scientific American who said it is a "lie" that the building blocks of nature are discrete particles such as the electron or quark. Rather, Tong asserted, the building blocks of our theories are quantum fields.

Here I want to explain why this is not just a pedagogical issue, a trivial dispute between two eggheads. It has real consequences on how scholars outside of physics, as well as the reading public, interpret the dramatic developments in fundamental physics, both experimental and theoretical, that began early in the twentieth century and continue today. Believe it or not, the particle-field debate affects heavy discussions on theology, spirituality and the interaction of religion and science.

Those who read the popular literature on science and religion, such as Tong's article, may receive the impression that modern physics has refuted the picture of atoms and the void proposed by Democritus and other Greek philosophers millennia ago. For example, in The New Sciences of Religion: Exploring Spirituality From the Outside in and Bottom Up, Christian apologist William Grassie says, "The concept of materialism deconstructed itself with the advent of quantum mechanics and particle physics."

To be ecumenical, Grassie quotes the Hindu physicist Varadaraja V. Raman: "Physics has penetrated into the substratum of perceived reality and discovered a whole new realm of entities there, beyond the imagination of the most creative minds of the past."

Now, maybe Democritus did not imagine quarks. But he did imagine material particles, and the quarks, at least in the current model, are material particles. The "new realm of entities" uncovered in modern physics is hardly beyond imagination. They are imagined in the quantum theory of fields, although just imagining something does not make it real -- despite what some theologians claim and what some physicists seem to believe.

The claim that quantum mechanics has revealed a reality beyond matter is based on the notion that two separate realities exist: discrete, particulate matter and a plenum that is reminiscent of the long-discredited aether. However, at least the electromagnetic aether was material. The new aether is more abstract, more in tune with the duality of mind and body that is embedded in all religious thought. Unsurprisingly, theologians and spiritualists delight in this new dualism -- handed to them on a platter by theoretical physicists.

The idea that abstract, holistic quantum fields are the deeper reality while particles are simply the excitations of the fields did not begin with David Tong. Indeed, it has almost become a mantra. For example, in The Atom in the History of Human Thought, historian Bernard Pullman writes,

To the extent that a Democritean influence has shaped our conception of the world, there has been a tendency to stress the corpuscular aspect of the standard model and to introduce a certain formal distinction between particles of matter and intermediary particles associated with force fields. As a result, we may have given the impression that that this corpuscular aspect provides the most exact description of physical reality. Such a view would be unfortunate, as it might obscure what is considered today as the most plausible picture of reality, which not only unifies the concepts of particles and fields, but even considers fields preeminent over particles ... The fundamental and underlying reality of the world is embodied in the existence of a slew of fields and in their interactions.
Pullman is applying the Platonic view of reality, which, as I have discussed previously, is the working assumption of most theoretical physicists and mathematicians. In order to test their models, physicists assume that the elements of these models correspond in some way to reality. But they are compared against the data that flow from our so-called "particle detectors" on the floor of an accelerator lab. It is the data that form the concrete foundation of our knowledge. What is fundamental in our model is not necessarily fundamental to our knowledge. Models are squiggles on the whiteboards in the theory section of the physics building. Those squiggles are easily erased; the data aren't.
Indeed, unpublished results are beginning to trickle in that the whiteboard squiggles of a generation of theorists describing their speculations on a theory called supersymmetry may soon be erased by data from the LHC. Although we need to wait and see, such a result would provide dose of humility to those who think they can infer reality by their thoughts alone, as well as an impetus to explore more unorthodox approaches.

The application of Platonic reality to physics is fraught with problems. First, theories are notoriously temporary. We can never know if quantum field theory will someday be replaced with another more powerful theory that makes no mention of fields (or particles, for that matter). Second, as with all physical theories, quantum field theory is a model -- a human invention. We test our models to find out if they work; but we can never be sure they correspond to "reality." That's metaphysics. If there were an empirical way to determine ultimate reality, it would be physics, not metaphysics. Third, quantum fields all have quanta that we associate with the so-called elementary particles.

In relativistic quantum field theory, which is the fundamental mathematical theory of particle physics and the basis of the standard model, each quantum field has an associated particle called the quantum of the field. These are the elementary particles of the highly successful standard model developed in the 1970s. The recent confirmation of the Higgs boson was a great triumph of the theory. The photon is the quantum of the electromagnetic field. The electron is the quantum of the Dirac field. The Higgs boson is the quantum of the Higgs field. I know of no empirically verified example where a quantum field exists without its quantum. Particles are just as much building blocks of our theories as fields. In fact, they are the same building blocks.

There are no exceptions. For every field, we have a particle; for every particle, we have a field. So, it is incorrect to think that field and particle exist as separate realities. We do not have a field-particle duality. We have, as Pullman says, a field-particle unity.

Please note that the elementary particles of the standard model are not to be thought of as classical objects like billiard balls; they obey all the rules of quantum mechanics. For example, as Feynman showed back in 1948, electrons can zigzag back and forth in space-time and thereby appear many places at the same time. This is usually called "nonlocality" but a better term is "multilocality." Note that, in this picture, the electron never moves faster than the speed of light. No superluminal connections of any kind are required when you recognize that time is reversible in physics. I'll expand on that at another time.

How does all this relate to the so-called wave-particle duality that you read about in books on quantum mechanics (textbooks as well as popular books)? The authors often write, "An object is either a particle or a wave, depending on what you decide to measure." This is very misleading and has led to the widespread misconception that quantum mechanics shows that human consciousness has the ability to control reality, namely, to decide whether an object is a particle or a wave. That object could be a pulse of light from galaxy 13 billion light-years away. So, the implication is that if we can control the nature of reality with our minds, this must occur not just here and now but throughout the universe and for every moment in time, past and future. Do you believe this? This is exactly what the quantum spiritualists, who hear that particles (which cannot travel faster than light) are a lie, are saying.

For those who have not moved beyond non-relativistic Schrödinger wave mechanics, the wave picture provides a perfectly good model to compute quantum effects, without having to think about what mysterious aether is doing the waving. To nuclear and particle physicists who must deal with higher energy phenomena, relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum field theory provide the tools for their calculations, without having to think about which is more real--fields or particles. Both theories are fully materialistic and constitute triumphs for Democritean atomism.

In short, quantum physics has not done away with matter. Matter can be defined as stuff that kicks back when you kick it. When you kick a rock, it kicks back. And when you kick an electron, it kicks back. And that's no lie.


This is what happens when you look at multiple sources and not just the ones that back your claim.

Oh, and did you notice? He said go kick a rock. I love it when people quote me.

[Casparov]

If you are looking for an informed opinion that is dead on, this should qualify. Neurologist who works with brain function says Dualists are deluded and he himself is a Materialist. So Casparov, why don't you jump on "Psychology Today" and call the eminent Neurologist a liar. we'll wait. 

Firstly, I'm not a Dualist. Secondly, this is the opinion of a Neurologist, not evidence. All of my arguments still stand and he has not addressed them. I am well aware that the majority of working Neurologists are Materialists, the fact that you quoted one does not change my opinion.

If this Neurologist would like to debate with me I'm all for it, but he's not here to defend himself. So make your own arguments.

[Casparov]

In short, quantum physics has not done away with matter. Matter can be defined as stuff that kicks back when you kick it. When you kick a rock, it kicks back. And when you kick an electron, it kicks back. And that's no lie.


This is what happens when you look at multiple sources and not just the ones that back your claim.

Oh, and did you notice? He said go kick a rock. I love it when people quote me.

This is the opinion of some man that wrote an article, not evidence. I have presented you peer reviewed scientific experiments with abstracts that specifically state that realism should be abandoned, and you counter with the opinion of someone who shares your assumptions that appear in a fancy NewsPaper.

If that man would like to debate with me I'm all for it, but he's not here to defend himself. So make your own arguments.

[stromboli]

The "opinions" are that of a Neurologist that publishes in Psychology Today, and Victor Stenger, who is a respected Particle Theorist. Those are what we call credentials. Haven't seen yours. In any case, I'll listen to them way ahead of anything you have. So read all of those "peer reviewed" articles you like, the fact is that I looked- none of the people who wrote those articles have in any way declared themselves as Monistic whatever, and none of them have expressed any religious viewpoint whatsoever. Copy pasting doesn't prove your case any more than cherry picking the Bible for scriptures.

And like Stenger said, what you are quoting is from observations of as yet theoretical data from laboratory experiments and in no way "carved in stone" as we like to say.

Oh, but keep it going. we got to hit 31 pages or JosephPalazzo will be sad.

[Casparov]

The "opinions" are that of a Neurologist that publishes in Psychology Today, and Victor Stenger, who is a respected Particle Theorist. Those are what we call credentials.

What you are doing is called an Appeal To Authority, which is a logical fallacy:

A is an expert on a particular topic
A says says something about that topic
A is probably correct

If you want to debate the evidence that's one thing, but if you want to just Appeal to Authority instead then you're debating the wrong person. Go find a Fundy Xtian to debate so you can feel smart. Go make fun of Creationists or whatever it is you do, just take that trash elsewhere.

[stromboli]

Oh, horseshit. I have been looking at everything I can find on quantum physics since the topic came up, and what it boils down to is "he said, she said" between a bunch of theoretical physicians. I can already tell you the debate will be an interminable  jumble of what we have already witnessed, so have at it. Quote your brains out. there is just as much con as there is pro.

And the two people mentioned were quoted directly, not referred to. If you want an appeal to authority argument, you'll have to have it with them.

[Hakurei Reimu]

Okay, here are the two exact same papers in presented on their actual peer reviewed journals:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v446/n7138/abs/nature05677.html
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/4/1221.short

I presented them to you via the arXiv.org website because that is the only way you will be able to read them without subscribing to peer reviewed journals.... and now you have attempted to make this a case for dismissing the results of these experiments out of hand. 

I was pointing out, Tweedledum, that just because they appeared on the arXiv.org, that doesn't mean that they are peer-reviewed, or that just because it appears on the archive and then later appears in the peer review literature, that the paper appearing on the archive is the paper that is eventually accepted for publication.

You guys seem to be trying very hard to find a way to dismiss the scientific evidence rather than actually address it directly. I have had someone attempt to dismiss it based on "they are old" and now you trying to dismiss it because they are "preprints", neither of the claims being true. The 1999 paper the first person was referring to was conducted by Scurry and was only the first successful run of this "type" of experiment, whereas the one I have presented was done in 2012, and the other in 2007.

What I, in partucular, am dismissing is your ability to understand what has been written. No result consistent with quantum mechanics can dismiss materialism because it is a theory about how material behaves. The bleeding fucking obvious. I'll put this in big letters since that's the only way this thing is going to get through to you:

Quantum mechanics is a theory about the material in the universe. It is a materialistic theory. No result consistent with quantum mechanics can undermine materialism.

This is why no blabbering along the lines of "quantum mechanics disproves materalism" will ever be taken seriously by us, and that every woo pusher using QM as a bludgeon will only get a response of rolling eyes.

"We want facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions." - Jessamyn West

That quote applies more to you than to us, I'm afraid. You have taken no time to familiarize yourself with the background of what quantum mechanics is all about, and why it works the way it does. As such, you are ill equipped to talk about anything happening on the bleeding edge of the field, and instead of taking away the real, exciting discoveries (reality is wierder than we imagined) and instead reading into it what you want to believe (that quantum mechanics disproves materialism).

It is you who are mistaken kind sir. The experiment I provided, and even the one successfully completed in 1999 which is called the Quantum Eraser Experiment was constructed specifically to test this theory of yours.

Again, only because you are reading woo into quantum mechanics. The results are consistent with quantum mechanics, but it won't undermine materialism, because quantum mechanics is a materialistic theory.

In truth, the Quantum Eraser Experiment is nothing more than a dressed-up Bell's Paradox apparatus. While informative, if you can accept that you can influence the correlation between two widely separated beams, what happens in the Quantum Eraser Experiment isn't so strange. I say 'correlation' quite deliberately, and I'll explain later why this is significant later.

They run the test with measuring devices that are capable of erasing the information after they have recorded it.

The "measuring devices" used are atoms, themselves quantum systems. Let's keep that in mind for later.

So they shoot the electrons at the slits, the measuring devices record the which-path information by "physically interacting" with the particle as you claim, and then the electron arrives at the back slid.

I have very little doubt at this point that you don't have the slightest clue to what I "claim."

Now before they "observe" the results of the experiment, they erase the information that was recorded by the measuring devices. This means that they no longer have the which-path information because they erased it, but the measuring devices still "physically interacted" with the particle as you rightly say it had to. So the result should be, because the "physical interaction" happened, even though they erased the information it recorded, they should still get a particle patter rather than a wave patter. Right? Well guess what? THEY DONT.

As predicted by quantum mechanics. Yet your discription rams right up against a core principle of quantum mechanics. You said, they "erased the information [the detector atoms] recorded", but in quantum mechanics, you can't erase information. If you could, the universe would instantly become a broth of superheated particles in a fraction of a second. So, no erasure of information for you.

So what was erased? The influence of the atoms. But the only way to erase their influence is to arrange things such that the probability amplitudes of the experiment on the other side looks just like the atoms weren't there at all. This is possible to do in a quantum system because atoms are quantum in nature, and as such, they were ensnarled in this entanglement malarky that affects all quantum mechanical objects. Nothing had actually been measured yet. The so-called welcher-weg information of those atoms had not yet been observed, and so the correlation on the other side reflected that.

Now, why am I saying 'correlation,' and not 'information?' Because while quantum mechanics will allow you to say very precise things about the statistics of what two widely separated ends of a coherent system will do, it will not tell you what any individual particle will do. You only find these cases of "spooky action at a distance" when you bring all the parts of the observation together, using ordinary lightspeed means, and look at all the data as a whole. These effects cannot be used to send information backward in time or to create an ansible â€" you only know something interesting has happened when you swap notes, when the other fellow's light cone has reached you.

Sorry, while the Quantum Eraser Experiment does show us that reality is stranger than we thought, it's still there, kicking us in the shins and laughing at us.

This experiment conclusively proved that the "physical interaction" is not the cause of collapse,

Funny, I didn't mengion anything about physical interaction causing a "collapse" of anything. I said that all observation is physical interaction, and as such expecting an observation of a quantum event to not influence that event is silly. I wasn't specific on the influence. That it would be a "collapse" is your sorry attemt to stuff words in my mouth.

The very experiments I presented to you are the one's that disprove the claim you are making. It would be very convenient for you as a materialist if measuring devices themselves caused collapse just by "physical interaction" because this would leave realist Materialism intact, but this has been conclusively proven to not be the case. Therefore, you are wrong sir.

Funny that an event happening according to quantum mechanics, a materialist theory, would undermine materialism.

Oh wait. That's just you reading into the paper what you want it to say.

Now I'm sure I can expect you to completely disregard all of the scientific experimentation and the conclusive results that contradict your desired preconception about reality in order to preserve your world view, and that is fine, do what you have to do in order feel secure in your beliefs, but know that what you believe is not consistent with science, nor philosophy.

Look chum, the only thing I'm disregarding is your interpretation of what these quantum experiments mean for materialism. I actually understand the paper as written, and I see that it does no such thing, and the only thing I reject is your interpretation.

[aitm]

It would be rather hypocritical of some to ask me to put an end to this when so many are obviously enjoying the argument. Until that time, this may well head into the 50.

[Hakurei Reimu]

What you are doing is called an Appeal To Authority, which is a logical fallacy:

A is an expert on a particular topic
A says says something about that topic
A is probably correct

If it weren't for the underlined word, you would be correct in that this was a fallacy. But an appeal to authority in and of itself is not. If misused, it can lead to a fallacy, but in and of itself the appeal to authority is not.

The key word there is "probably" â€" the sylogism is statistical in nature. It's not meant to be taken as correct in all cases. As such, it should be taken with a grain of salt to what it implies.

So boo to you for misidentifying a fallacy. In the way strom uses the argument from authority, it is not. The appeal to authority, correctly used, is a powerful argument. After all, that he's probably right when an expert speaks about his field is the reason he is considered an expert, for fuck's sake.

[Hakurei Reimu]

It would be rather hypocritical of some to ask me to put an end to this when so many are obviously enjoying the argument. Until that time, this may well head into the 50.

Everyone needs a chewtoy once in a while. As a dog lover, you should realize this. 

[stromboli]

It would be rather hypocritical of some to ask me to put an end to this when so many are obviously enjoying the argument. Until that time, this may well head into the 50.

Lol aitm. far be it from me to ever call you a hypocrite. But I gotta admit, this is the equivalent of bouncing a tennis ball off a brick wall.