Furthermore, it seems to me that something can only rightly be called unverifiable if an infinite number of tests to verify it have failed. To say something is unverifiable without first trying to verify it a lot is ludicrous. Therefore, verifiability must precede unverifiability, especially since verifiability only rightly means the extent to which something (anything) CAN be proven or disproven.

MISGUIDED RESPONSE #1: Doesn't being "special" mean primacy in the context where it's special, such as theories of existence? M.R. #2: Or take it the other way: 'Unverifiability is what makes religion special' - true, but now 'special' has the sense of the drooling boy who peed every day on the bus. For 'unverifiability' to be what makes religion 'special' in a positive sense, then unverifiability has to be special in a positive sense. Ergo, unverifiability is positive, which leads to all kinds of silliness. It's simply better for verifiability to remain positive and unverifiability to be slightly negative.

What preposterous nonsense. All inanimate objects have haloes of smell, heat, and bacteria; if the device only measured these, it still wouldn't have returned a zero reading on the objects. If Negro farts are composed of something more than heat, bacteria, and smell, what is it? Soul, perhaps? What's more, Dr Carawax has in several other instances been publicly outed as a giant fraud and a gay, his only invention of any merit being the now sorely deficient MEDIOCRITY CHECKLISTE. The idea of a man like Carawax measuring soul is absurd. What's even more, the term "soul" didn't even exist until it was invented by Negroes in the 1960s, before which time everyone thought their physical bodies really were exhumed by Jesu on Judgment Day. This, of course, led to all kinds of supremely misguided attempts to preserve bodies after death, such as wrapping them in tinfoil and baking at a low temperature for an incredibly long time, which only had the effect of turning Walt Disney into a kind of flavorless jerky now marketed in EuroDisney as "American Space Meat." In short, you fail.

Appreciate it, one of my more pondered poems.

Verifiability is what makes science special not what gives science primacy. It is like saying fish have primacy for they have fins or women have primacy for they have breasts.

The notion that negroes have souls is a common misconception that came about after the famous 'soul experiments' conducted by Dr E. Carawax in the early 19th Century. Dr Carawax had developed a series of special boothes that could measure the aura emanating from any object or person placed within. Dr Carawax believed that this 'aura' constituted the object's soul. Clearly inanimate objects had no auras, but after placing himself in the boothe, Dr Carawax found that he had an aura of 2,000! In later experiments, he tested one of his household negroes, locking him in the boothe while the thermo-nuclear Christ blankets accelerated to terminal glockenspiel velocity. To Carawax's horror, his device measured a negro-aura of well over 5,000 morals per square inch! However, it was later discovered that the negro had been breaking wind in his boothe for several hours, and that this had sent the halo-mounted spirit levels tumbling like urchins into a land of cock and bosh.

for the slain line something like "A guy could get killed out here." - inject a bit of personality (or even nothing?) Brain is fine, no?

"The only valid investigations are those conducted by men in white coats, and preferably involving one of those giant pipettes that are about a meter long, and have to be operated by teacher. Moreover, all diagrams must be labelled, and safety glasses should be worn at all times, even in jest." If the notion of 'soul' was defined well enough to be used in some model which could formulate verification conditions, then of course I have no objection to investigations into the soul. And indeed any individual who attempts to model the universe on a fixed, unchangeable assumption that matter is composed of atoms is liable to run into trouble at some point - namely, the point at which the atomic model of matter breaks down. It's obvious that my arguments have nothing to do with what the people formulating the models call themselves.

You are making an argument about the development of a model of the soul because of the people involved in its development. Many believers in the soul may do as you say. However the roles could be reversed. The vagueists could be interested in atoms and hold atoms as fixed and unmovable. And the scientists could be building a model of the soul which may be thrown away. Would you then hold that investigations into the soul are valid and investigations into atoms are buncombe?

There is a point, and that point is verifiability, not current verification, which is what the other -=D_A=- has been saying for days now. Though I do think 113 made a mistake not allowing for the possibility that some kind of machine in the future (like 163's) will be able to detect and measure 'soul'. If that happens, I'm afraid we're all bound to find ourselves terminally humiliated by the Negroes once again, having still not recovered fully from that whole 'donkey cock' debacle.

No. They are 'entirely discrete', for two reasons. 1. Atoms are part of a model. They are not 'literally' taken to exist. They are only talked about as a useful part of a useful explanatory model. Conversely, souls are not part of a model. They are believed to literally exist, independently of, in spite of, their explanatory power. 2. As atom-believers gather more data, they are liable to abandon atoms are part of their physical model. New observations causing a change in model happens all the time in science. The aim is to have a model which accounts for all the observations simply and completely; keeping atoms as part of the model is not a general aim, except inasmuch as the theory of atoms is well-developed and well-understood and therefore possibly practical to keep in some form. Conversely, as soul-believers gather more data, they are not liable to abandon or revise their belief in souls. Instead, they are liable to come up with more and more exceptions and ad hoc reasons as to why souls explain the data. There is no possible observation a soul-believer could make that could cause him to stop believing in souls; he can only tack on special cases to his model, never change it. The one trick he has up his sleeve is to gradually change the definition of 'soul', so that if things get too bad, he can say 'soul' actually means something else, and has done all along. These aren't the differences of two things in a continuum. Especially not a 'continuum of vagueness', which is bosh, if I know bosh.

The conclusion of such an argument being that although conceptions of the soul are vague, there are limitations to science. Therefore it is wrong to hold conceptions of atoms and conceptions of the soul as entirely discrete. Rather they both fit on a continuum of vagueness. With continuums it is absurd to draw a point whereby one side philosophical investigations are valid and the other side they are not.

lol

Read Citizen Soldier... I'm having a brain lapse on the author. Great book, even if you don't like the war genre. Stephen Ambrose, that's the author.

Actually, the rhyme was unintentional; it just kind of happened. I kind of liked it, though I'm not sold... suggestions on a different word for either brain or slain?

You've got to read the book "Flags of Our Fathers" it's written by the son of one of the flag raisers from the battle of Iwo Jima. . .I would bet you'd love it I like it a lot and I don't like war books

Just trying to get across the point that the bands woudn't play because of the rain. Obviously there would be other sounds but....well....y'know.