Announcer: Everyone got their hot dogs and marshmallows ready? I hope not, cause we haven't light the bonfire yet. But we will soon, here on:
Announcer: Here's your host for the evening... Dumb as Funk?
DaF: Thank you. Thank you. Adrian Barnett couldn't be here tonight, because... Uh, traffic is pretty bad, and... Uh... He's sick.
**DaF ignores the muffled sounds of a gagged yell and someone kicking a wall.**
DaF: We'd like to bring out our contestant for the evening. She's been gunged, decapitated, and who the heck knows what else on other shows, and it seems she's still making the same mistakes. Would you please give a round of applause for Abby Aaron!
**A tied-up Abby is carried in by a gang of thugs consisting of Jan Michael, RayGreaves, Tiny Thinker, Tornolf, OrangeRevel, PokeMutilator, whitesf, Pete the Hamster, and Pot Pie. They hand-cuff Abby to the contestant's seat.**
DaF: Ok Abby, do you know how to play this game? **not allowing enough time for Abby to respond** Whenever you make a strawman statement, the gang will stuff straw into this wicker man. Normally at the end of the show, it just gets set on fire. But in this episode, we're going to go even further, by stuffing YOU into the straw-filled wicker man, and THEN lighting it on fire.
Abby: Wait a minute...!
DaF: Sorry, no can do.
Audience: Huh? What did he say?
DaF: So Abby, what do you have to say for our show tonight?
Abby: From previous conversations with the atheists, I've learned that they don't believe reason and wisdom have anything to do with science. Science, they tell me, exists entirely independent of human thinking.
Audience: Science without thinking? What drug is she on?
DaF: Excuse me but science is a method for discovery and learning. How do you use that kind of method, or any kind of method for that matter, without thinking?
**Audience attempts to perform a CAT-scan without having the first clue what equipment they need, and the "patient" is mauled by a puma.**
Uh gang, it's your cue.
**The group of thugs shove a big pile of straw into the wicker man, and then begin to binge drink together in perfect synchrony.**
Abby: Human thinking? What’s that? Do you mean the physics that takes place in your brain? Do you mean the actions and reactions involving chemicals over which you have no control? Do you mean the energy that must follow the set pattern according to the laws of motion? Heck, funky, you atheists don’t even believe thinking exists!
DaF: Geez, Abby! You can't even keep your strawmen straight? **pulls lever, a giant bee's nest lands on Abby's head, which get's stuck inside**
Abby: Ow! Ow! Ooo-h! They're stinging and biting and...
DaF: It's called the "mind-hive." It's my personally favorite retaliation to those who falsly accuse us atheists of beng in agreement on an issue we DON'T agree upon. I'd also like to point out that the desscription just given of the hive is incorrect. It's actually a WASP'S nest. But that's ok, because it reflects the two errors made by Abby.
**Thugs slowly load the wicker man with a giant ball of straw that's bigger than all of them combined.**
Audience: I'm not from around these here parts. Whacha talkin' 'bout? I'm confused. Where's the porno shop?
DaF: Uh, I guess I need to explain, after-all. You see, there's an argument about free-will around the wasteland: that it doesn't exist, due to cause & effect. Naturally, that's an over-simplified version of it, but that's besides the point. The point is that Abby is confusing free-will with thinking. She's also assuming that all the atheists in the wasteland agree on that issue, which we don't.
**Abby manages to pull nest off her now huge, swollen head.**
DaF: Odd, the repeated stinging in the head usually leaves the victim in a coma or something. At least the show will go on, after all.
Abby: Besides, even if you were to concede that thinking does exist (I won’t hold my breath waiting for that), the Scientific Method restricts it and strangles it by setting ridiculous limits on it. You can think only in terms of what can be controlled, repeated and tested. If something doesn’t make itself available to the Method, it doesn’t exist. ("God, you git yerself down here rite now so's I can apply this here Scientific Method to ya! Otherwise, you ain't fer real!")
DaF: Ah, hell. I feel like stuffing the straw into the wicker man myself after that comment.
Thugs: Hey, since we're sticking Abby in that thing anyway, wouldn't it be quicker to just shove all this straw right up Abby's...
DaF: **interrupting** No, it would actually be much slower. Besides, the last time we did that, the episode was banned from every channel except the adult pay-per-views.
Thugs: Oh yeah, we remember the big checks we got from THAT, don't we? **nods together in unison**
DaF: Yeah, it was a big check... **shakes it off** No! Just put the straw in the wicker man like you're supposed to!
**Thugs groan from being disappointed on multiple levels.**
DaF: Where were we? Oh, yeah! The basic mechanisms behind thinking is well understood. Here's a list of different references:
web.psych.ualberta.ca/~mike/Pearl_Street/Dictionary/dictionary.html
faculty.washington.edu/chudler/neurok.html
www.brainconnection.com/
thalamus.wustl.edu/course/
www.hhmi.org/senses/
The mistake Abby is making here is assuming the thoughts themselves have to be subjected to the scientific method in order to establish that they exist. The problem is that the scientific method only examines objective evidence. Objective evidence is, as the name suggests, physical objets. We do know that thoughts are an emergent property of the activities of the brain, which are physical. Those activities are well understood, if not totally mapped.
Abby: Before the show, you said "Objects exist independent of the minds of people."
DaF: Uh, huh.
Abby: Ha! How can that be? How do you know an object can exist outside the minds of the people? Tell me, exactly which objects are you talking about? How do you know these objects exist? Do you see them? No, because if you could, they wouldn’t be outside your mind, would they? Tell me, Funky, do you know they exists through “warm and fuzzy” feelings? Or maybe you have a feeling in your heart? Don’t you know that if something can’t be observed and make itself available to the Scientific Method, it doesn’t exist? Ha!
Audience: Hey, we can't see the stage! The wicker man is so over-loaded, the straw's in our faces.
DaF: I think this will be the last comment we'll let our contestant make in this episode. We simply don't have enough room for all the straw.
Audience: Gee, like we didn't already notice.
DaF: Which objects? All objects. To point out something ironic, it's the MIND that can't exist without physical objects, especially something called "brain matter."
**A few audience members try to crack-open each others heads to remove the brain, in a tragically futile attempt to prove DaF wrong.**
DaF: How do we know those objects exist outside of the mind? If you're going to ask that, why don't you say that you're a brain in a jar in a mad scientists lab?
Freak in Audience: I've got MY brain in THIS jar I'm holdin'. Ain't it the purtiest thing you've ever seen rottin' inside of water and glass?
DaF: We can hear things, see things, touch things, smell things, and touch things. Granted, we don't always have all five of these data sources available for the same things, but the various data we do get confirm each other. If something were an illusion, the other forms of data (such as our other senses) wouldn't confirm it's existence.
**Surviving audience members try to poke and lick each other to confirm each other's existence. Naturally, mass fighting breaks out.**
DaF: That, and we can make predictions about these objects, which we proceed to test. For example "if I toss this rock into the air, it'll fall onto this dirt pile and disturb it upon impact." If some of the data received from the experiment is consistant with the predictions, as well as the other data received from said experiment, it becomes reasonable to conclude that the object is real.
**Audience members toss each other into the air, and feel the impact craters on the floor and the smashed skulls prove to be sufficient proof that those people do, or rather did, exist.**
DaF: Also, that whole experimentation bit was an example of the scientific method in action. Uh audience, would you like to direct that anger elsewhere?
Audience (what's left of it): Sure!
DaF: Ok, load Abby into that wicker man.
**Thugs splatter gasoline on one side of the strawman.**
DaF: Is she in the middle of that wad of straw yet?
Audience: Almost... There, she's ready to Bar-Be-Que.
**Thug Tornolf lights a match and tosses it at the gas dripping strawman.**
Audience: Hey, let us get away fir... AAAAUUUUGGGHHH!!! We're burning alive!
DaF: We lose more viewers that way. **shakes head** That's all the time we have for today folks! See you next time... Or not.