[Do you have any evidence at all that organisms without brains can believe anything at all?]
See above for my comments on the definition of belief and its simplicity.
54 comments
I have seen insects believe. Insects that believe are markedly less erratic in their flight paths, etc.
Proof please, or STFU you lying idiot.
What an assbite. You, of course, have not proof that "markedly less erratic" insects believe in anything, do you? Yeah, I didn't think so.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
(CRASH - the sound of me falling on the floor) GASP! GASP! GASP!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Omg-- Believer persecution alert!!
Everytime you kill a mosquito, you could be killing a BELIEVER!!!
Fly-spray companies are trying to opress this religious minority!!
How can you tell if an insect is saved? Simple, it briefly flies in a straight line.
I suppose that's not enough proof for you atheists. :-P
Excuse me, what the fuck are you smoking?
1) You can't "see" belief.
@Laurel
"I've seen moths "believe the light will save them," I guess. Who does that remind us of?"
More importantly, look where it gets them.
So ... if an insect is observed to fly in a straight-and-level flight path, that means it's a Believer?
What about an insect that flies in a straight path for a while, but then begins to fly erratically? Is the insect having a crisis of faith?
Wait, how do you SEE something believe? Belief is a train of thought, which is not visible, unless you have ESP or something, and, judging from this, you don't, so how do you explain your logic?
Certain insects, like the housefly, have such tiny, simple brains that they can get completely stuck in an infinite loop under certain conditions - on a number of occasions, I've noticed a fly follow the exact same route around a room many times, with surprising consistency - if disturbed from their looping path, they can even drift back into it again if the disturbance is not sufficiently strong. Evidently the geometry of the room and the extremely limited, time-invariant responses of the fly are such that the system has one definite, quite stable equilibrium that the fly tends to get funnelled into. If the fly's brain were more complex, the system would be far more likely to become unstable and the fly might escape. If the fly were in any way intelligent, it would be capable of some kind of adaptation and abandon its identical, instinctive response to the same stimulus over and over that leaves it trapped in an endless cycle.
This is an excellent example of just one of the dangers of unthinkingly restricting one's stimulus response to a tiny, simplistic set of behavioural rules, without room for modifying those rules or deriving new ones based on new information (or rather, in the case of the example above, the observation that there suddenly is no new information, just the same thing over and over again). I don't know whether this indicates faith on the part of the fly, as the poster implies, but its mindless, repetitive nature, pathetic inability to learn, adapt and respond better to new stimuli and total, pitiful obliviousness to the crippling nature of its own inflexibility certainly reminds me of fundies.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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