Skepticon One pt. 3 Richard Carrier and PZ Myers

Richard Carrier and PZ Myers speaking in Springfield Missouri on October 11th 2008

The event was hosted by The MSU branch of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

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[seban678]

I just discovered Richard Carrier today and looked at a few of his talks, and I like what he says very much (thanks for the uploads btw). He seems to understand the mind of his "opponents" better than Dawkins and the like.

There's just one point I'd like to make about his argument on "natural units": Planck's units were defined using the gravitational constant, the speed of light etc... That is why G=c=1 with this units system, not the other way around.

[RottingintheMidwest]

Talking to a liberal Christian friend about his beliefs, I eventually got him to admit that deep down he was essentially an agnostic. Its a step in the best direction.

[MiserereMe]

lepordius. It's a logical fallacy. We must be here because we are here, worst kind of "anthropic principle." If chosen from infinite numbers of infinite natural laws, infinite number of universes would have evolved life comparable to humans. Just because we are here and asking questions like these doesn't mean we are meant to be here. I think Spinal Tap got it right, for once.

[leporidus]

Richard Carrier's notion of the function of human units and natural units (9:28) is intriguing, and there are indeed proposed systems of "natural units" besides the SI units:

Stoney, Heaviside-Lorentz, so-called "Schrödinger", Atomic units base on Hartree energy, so-called "Dirac units", QCD, geometrized and n-body units.

(Wikipedia, "Natural_units").