How important is (a)theism to your philosophy?
I notice a lot of topics here that seem to focus on theism or the lack thereof (i.e. atheism). I find that kind of strange a focus because in philosophy I've always focused principally on what seem to be broader questions (like what do we even mean when we ask things like "what is real?" or "what is moral?", what criteria would we use to judge answers to those questions, what methods could we use to apply those criteria, what faculties do we need to employ those methods, who should be in charge of doing so, and why does any of it matter) and answers to questions like "does God exist?" just fall out as a consequence of answers to those questions, rather than as a principal focus.
(For the record, the answer that falls out of my answers to those questions is that there's almost certainly nothing in existence that anybody would want to count as a God, though some things could possibly exist that some people might want to count, but it doesn't really matter to the rest of my philosophy either way).
So I'm just curious, among the theists and atheists here both, how central or important is that to the rest of your philosophy?
EDIT FOR CLARIFICATION: When I ask if you're a "theist" or an "atheist", all I'm asking is "do you think there is at least one god? Yes/no." The "theist" answers mean "yes", you think there's at least one god, whether or not you're certain of that, regardless of what you take "god" to mean, etc. The "atheist" answers just mean "no", you don't think anything that counts as a god exists, without necessarily any implications about anything else like naturalism, materialism, etc.
(For the record, the answer that falls out of my answers to those questions is that there's almost certainly nothing in existence that anybody would want to count as a God, though some things could possibly exist that some people might want to count, but it doesn't really matter to the rest of my philosophy either way).
So I'm just curious, among the theists and atheists here both, how central or important is that to the rest of your philosophy?
EDIT FOR CLARIFICATION: When I ask if you're a "theist" or an "atheist", all I'm asking is "do you think there is at least one god? Yes/no." The "theist" answers mean "yes", you think there's at least one god, whether or not you're certain of that, regardless of what you take "god" to mean, etc. The "atheist" answers just mean "no", you don't think anything that counts as a god exists, without necessarily any implications about anything else like naturalism, materialism, etc.
Comments (402)
Since atheism is the lack of a belief in a deity, I don't see how it could be a core principle to my philosophy. I don't base my view of the human condition anymore on the lack of a god than I base it on the lack of a Santa Claus or a unicorn.
I think it's only an important aspect of any positions I hold insofar as it differentiates them from theist positions. For example, my position on abortion runs counter to the prevailing Christian view thereof, and so therefore the atheistic aspect of it becomes more pronounced.
I am not an atheist in the sense that I object to people believing in God, or whatever they find they need to believe in to make their lives seem livable to them, but I think any such beliefs should be acknowledged as feelings and it should be understood that they can never justify any positive account of God.
I like Spinoza's equation of God with Nature, and his rejection of the idea that human beings (or anything else) could be important to God. This idea that Spinoza rejects, this self-serving anthropomorphic projection is perhaps the single most pernicious idea ever invented by humans.
Normally, I almost never think about religious issues. I don't take them seriously. I don't think they're worth consideration. Unfortunately, message boards like this are a refuge for folks who consider themselves religious apologists and who somehow think that cheeky, smarmy proselytizing is likely to have a positive effect.
In my view, philosophical/scientific materialism developed directly out of Christian philosophical principles. Through Cartesian dualism, the divide between mind and matter was introduced, and then in the course of the next few centuries, the concept of ‘res cogitans’ became increasingly untenable, leading to an outlook in which only matter is real. That was why physics then became paradigmatic for all the sciences, and it was felt that everything in the Universe was in principle reducible to physics.
Not many people will conscientiously argue for physicalism as it’s like a presumption - namely, the presumption of what must be case post ‘death of God’. But I’m sure that a majority or sizeable minority believe that the Universe is ultimately understandable in terms of what Bertrand Russell called ‘the accidental collocation of atoms’.
Now, as I don’t accept, then what are the alternatives? What is ‘the nature of reality’ if you don’t accept the mainstream scientific-secular account? It may not be ‘theism’ per se, but if my experience, if it’s *not* materialism, then it’s going to sound awfully like it.
(BTW, didn’t make a choice as my philosophy is not included in them.)
Please explain in what way, or sense, "philosophical/scientific materialism is fallacious".
Nah, it's already there in the ancient world, for one notable example, Democritus.
You can read about its history here.
It would take a book, although one thing I could say is that it provides no account of meaning. As one theistic philosopher puts it:
[quote=Some Theist]Brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, the motion of water molecules, electrical current, and any other physical phenomenon you can think of, seem clearly devoid of any inherent meaning. By themselves they are simply meaningless patterns of electrochemical activity. Yet our thoughts do have inherent meaning – that’s how they are able to impart it to otherwise meaningless ink marks, sound waves, etc. In that case, though, it seems that our thoughts cannot be identified with any physical processes in the brain. In short: Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes.[/quote]
This also came up in many discussions with Apokrisis - the basis of semiotics is that intentionality and signs (in Peirce’s sense) can’t be derived from, and aren’t reducible to, physical laws.
Furthermore I anticipate that your response won’t reference anything physical at all. The argument will always be about what things mean.
I'm thinking that a theist who thinks their theism incidental will be a rare thing.
Edit: Yep.
That's why we identify meaning with the meaning of material things(including minds-- not brains-- but the existing mental entity caused in the world).
The material world means, it is necessary. Existence is responsible.
No nihilism and its extra worldly imaginings required to account for meaning. Meaning is staring at you, immanent to every material presence.
.....
Were you expecting your dog to speak English and so understand your words?
Speech isn't important here. The point is that the (material world) needs no God to speak it into meaning. Meaning is necessary to it, imbued within the material presence itself. No-one has to speak meaning for it to be. Gods included.
I would have thought atheists basing their philosophy on their atheism would be equally rare.
I wonder how that would work...basing something off of something you do not believe in.
I dont understand that comment. Satre?
My italics. But as he goes on to say, it's not so much that god does not exist, as that he is irrelevant to the human condition.
There's something in that for all of us.
:up: Or the attitude could be like that expressed by Sartre.
Theism denotes a lot of metaphysical certainty and absolutes etc., so of course no theists would vote and feel comfortable with it. Instead, it is best viewed as something distinct from philosophy ... some "personal" thing. Theism is the most restricting and uninteresting thing I've ever encountered. It is important only on the grounds that it is impossible to ignore as we persist as humans.
Atheism is just something I 'fell into' at first by being unmoved (faithfully .. and emotionally) by theism, it does not wow my world in the slightest, and I need to be wowed, not rocked to sleep like a baby..... I then felt needed more unf., when it came to self-reflection and why I felt that way and should be able to explain it, (positive atheism..), unless I am no different than a young theist being led by religious parents.
When you come to acceptance of 'atheism' which just means being tolerant of the fact that X-god does not exist, NOT submitting to it, then the transition into the acceptance of other affairs becomes more smooth (e.g. dismissal of all supernatural etc. etc.). Many philosophies MAKE no sense once you've transitioned, it is only a problem when you submit (... as a core) - NOT learn to accept (consequence of..).
So yeah, atheism JUST HAPPENS... for people like me, and for others atheism comes from more vigilant studies. For me, anyway, it is NOT the core of my 'life philosophy' just something that comes with the package.
At best this would mean that a materialist account is incomplete, not that is is fallacious. Apart from chemistry; it is not possible to give an account of the sciences in terms of physics; but form this it does not follow that physics is fallacious.
If you accept that semiosis is an emergent property of complex physical systems, it is not such an intellectual leap to accept that emergent properties cannot always be reductively understood in terms of the constitutive physical matrix from which they have purportedly emerged.
Ah I see. Im not sure I agree. If god did exist then how could it be irrelevant to the human condition? Its kind of written into the character. Maybe im being too literal.
Right, such a person would be an atheist and an anti-theist but one could also just be one or the other.
The core of the human condition, at least for Sartre, is the choice - what next?
God is irrelevant here because, even if one chooses to follow god, the choice is one's own.
So my atheism is 'core', but not in a way the demands a disproof of 'God' at evey turn (the existence or not of God is an irrelavent question, as I see it - that God does not exist, or better, is entirely senseless, is a starting point, not an end-point), but in a way that demands that thought simply be consistent and thorough. Only atheism does full justice to thought itself. God demeans thought, and with it, humanity.
Ya thats what I had in mind. You could believe in god but hate him, or resent him, or reject his dictatorship.
I like that you have identified what is commonly, and erroneously imputed to Nietzsche: that he promoted nihilism. His point was rather that Christian values are ultimately nihilistic, since they devalue our human nature which is replete with its own value(s).
And don't worry about Wayfarer's rude idiot dawg. :wink:
Ive not read any Satre that I recall. It doesnt seem like an actually existing god could be ignored like that. His presence would be felt and heard, the biblical god at least would stand for nothing less.
Even so, one must choose to follow, or not.
Who is DingoJones? That question is answered by the choices you make, not by what somehting else decides you are.
Well it really would be felt and heard if god actually existed. One good reason to be skeptical of gods existence...alot of us feel and here nothing from the guy.
So choices we make...how would determinism factor in there?
In ethics, two points of view tend to be grounded in god, that of divine command theory and natural law theory, although the latter has atheistic variations.
As for where god comes into philosophy as a whole, answering for yourself “do you believe in god/a creator/creating force?” And “What is a god?” Is extremely important because it helps build a complete worldview. Learning about other interpretations of this is also helpful. I don’t have to be catholic to learn about Catholicism if it gives me an insight into that value structure.
Also, some areas of philosophy deal with studying fictional literature for the sake of gleaming insight about reality and if you’re an atheist the bible can always be read from this view point. An open but critical mind can read the bible cover to cover and find things they agree and disagree with no matter what religious view they take.
If I make the argument that: God doesn’t exist therefore no religion has value. Then I’m ignoring all the parts of a religions structure that don’t relate to god that can be studied. Religions are world views, god tends to be the grounding element to those world views. You can replace the grounding element with something else but the world view can still exist without god. For example: In Islam, charging interest on loans is considered usury and is forbidden. Sharia law, that is to say gods law (Torah translates to gods law too and Christians also have their own Gods law) contains a lot of rules surrounding finances and money. A lot of the negative bias toward Sharia comes from media only focusing on the punitive parts which make up less than 10% of sharia. I can safely say that I don’t agree with a lot of the punishments in sharia, but interest free loans sounds awesome to me.
Ineluctably so. 'Meaning' denotes that which matters - material that's relevant (i.e. significant) to at least one agent (e.g. her own body/life).
[quote=Wayfarer] [p/s-materialism] provides no account of meaning.[/quote]
Even so, in what way or sense is this omission? limitation? ... "fallacious"?
[quote=Wayfarer] ... the basis of semiotics is that intentionality and signs (in Peirce’s sense) can’t be derived from, and aren’t reducible to, physical laws.[/quote]
So why bother assuming reductionism only to argue against it? (Oh, yeah, that's why :roll: ) Can't "reduce" e.g. a cake recipe to QFT with Feynmann diagrams, eigenstates, and whatthefucknot either. Big whup. Like most complex states-of-affairs and their predicates, Wayf, 'meaning' is emergent.
re: Sartre quote :up:
[quote=StreetlightX] In a nutshell I understand theism as a failure of explanation: all (philosophical) theism as I understand it is of the 'God of the gaps' variety - in lieu of providing an immanent, naturalistic account of things, God or Gods are invoked as (non-)explanations.[/quote]
eff yeah :cool:
Quoting Mark Dennis
An atheist is just anyone who's not a theist, so if you're not a theist then you're an atheist. If you're "agnostic" in the sense of "I don't know if there's a god, maybe there is maybe there isn't, not at all sure", then you're not theist, and are therefore a kind of atheist. If you're "agnostic" in the sense of "I'm not completely certain that there's a god, but I think there is", then you're a theist, and therefore not an atheist.
Quoting Mark Dennis
This is a tangent from the topic of this thread but one that interests me: in old Catholic canon law, usury was forbidden too, which is why Jews got a reputation for being bankers in Christian countries (because being of a different religion, they weren't bound by those laws, so they were the only ones allowed to lend at interest in those countries). Catholics back then, and Muslims today, still had what were effectively loans at interest by using a combination of an interest-free loan, an insurance contract, and a rental, which hinged ultimately on the fact that renting is basically a form of lending at interest where the thing you're lending is not money; or conversely, lending at interest is just renting out money. The fact that you could effectively lend at interest even with the prohibitions, plus rising capitalist pressure to do away with the restriction, was a large part of why it was abolished in Christendom. As a kind of libertarian socialist myself, I'm really interested in this bit of history and economics, because I think that the enforcement of contracts of rent and interest is the main driver of the injustices of capitalism, and that by just doing away with that (having the state stop enforcing a kind of contract, not prohibiting anything), the free market would live up to much more of its mythic egalitarian potential. Explaining why should probably be the topic of another thread, though.
As for theist, atheist and agnostic. I feel while atheist and theist are perfectly adequate to describing whether or not someone denies or acknowledges a god is too binary to get into the detail of the different theistic belief systems. For example, where would someone who doesn’t believe in a god but believes in Karma fall, or fate? Theist or Atheist? This is where I feel it is better to look upon these things like a spectrum. Pure Atheism on one side wherein things like fate, Karma, the force or the Tao are all denied, and pure theism on the other where belief in a conscious and wilful god are accepted. You have so much in between though, you have god as a collective conscious, god as a force, god as the universe, god as nature. So much more than just spiritual orphan on one side and do as the sky daddy says on the other. Don’t even get me started on modern Pantheists either.
I used to be a naturalistic pantheist who considered myself neither theist nor atheist, BTW, until I recognized that the sense of “God” I affirmed was no different than anything atheists affirmed, and I was only setting up an unnecessary linguistic difference.
Just a minor item: you will find an irony in philosophy, like I did when studying all the domains ( Ethics, epistemology, metaphysics contemporary philosophy, ontology, etc.) where at some point a deity or God is mentioned in practically each and every one of those domains.
Maybe the question is why does Deity rear it's ugly head in virtually every intellectual/ abstract philosophical discussion (?).
That's not a rhetorical question. ( I didn't vote because I'm a Christian Existentialist.)
So yes, I think that's a good question in your OP
My first answer would be akin to @StreetlightX's: wherever there's an unknown in one's worldview, "God" is a tempting non-answer to insert. It's easy to hang the entirety of reality and morality on "it exists because the guy in charge said so, and you ought to do what he says". But start poking at that answer and things start unraveling fast. IMO, at least; the point of this thread isn't to argue for or against theism. But I expect that God is a central part of most theist philosophies for that reason, and an incidental part of atheist ones for the converse reason; and I started this thread because I was surprised to see so many people (or so it seemed at the time) who started from atheism and then built out from there, instead of the other way around.
From some perspectives I might be considered atheist - I don't believe in the kind of God figure that a lot of atheists doubt and believers pray to. But what that figure is, is far from obvious - as Noam Chomsky said, 'tell me what it is I'm supposed not to believe in, and I'll tell you if I'm atheist.'
I'm more interested in the traditions of enlightenment in any case, but through studying those, I have come to re-interpret and understand better what belief in God means. And what I think it means, is a relationship, or better, a sense of relatedness, to the animating principle of the Universe (whether conceived of as spirit, logos, dharma, or Tao.) So for example, when Christians speak of 'a new life in Christ', I find that intelligible, even if I wouldn't speak in those terms myself.
So to me, it seems that all gods are deities, but not all deities are gods.
If not then I have no answer because the question makes no sense to me in the manner it has been framed. If so, then I would say it is something that certainly comes to the fore of my musings.
I have a particularly open view toward ‘theism’ and view it as representing something innately human. Theism has intrigued me for a long time, but there isn’t anything particularly interesting about atheism, it’s just a perspective that generally prefers to bring reason and empirical facts to bear when looking for an understanding of the cosmos (pragmatic and deflective of of general cosmogonic thought - mostly).
I certainly see ‘religions’ as a very interesting window into something strange and enigmatic embedded in the human psyche. I certainly don’t see rationality in believing in some unproven deity though; make-believe deity? I see the value in that, but I assume that theists don’t consider their deity/deities to be ‘make-believe’ and in saying this be clear that I see great value in uncovering this mysterious inclination.
Note: My position is that religious practices/institutions rose from an innate mnemonic technique that has pushed humanity to extraordinary heights. Somewhere along the way the techniques, being what they were, morphed from emotionally charged technical systems into tools for political force and/or misuse, misconception and the inevitable emotional prompt overcoming the carefully laid out systems. Now we’ve broken cleanly away from oral traditions (and did so a long time ago) we’re mostly blind to understanding the power and might of human memory - pretty much all ‘occultism’ is wrapped up in this. It doesn’t take much scratching to see what lies under the surface (if you’re willing to look).
How is that not just an obvious vote for one of the theist options? I think I would expect the second, if you’re the usual Kierkegaardian “confronting the absurd first, leap of faith in response to that” type.
My life experience says that everything that makes sense is in one way or another structured as a system. So, what would I pick: A religious system or the atheist non-system?
In the end, atheism does not build any system. Atheism only rejects religious systems, without building anything else instead.
You see, I also reject particular systems. I deeply resent Windows. So, I use Linux. I have contempt for the fiat banking system. So, I save my money in bitcoin. An atheist also dislikes particular things, but he does not propose or use any alternative.
In fact, an atheist will eventually, and grudgingly, still try to secretly run programs (=draw moral conclusions), but without using an operating system, but then his system-less bullshit will simply fail to take off. He will never admit that, however, because he has already declared that running programs (=drawing moral questions) is bad; all of that, without actually having a system to determine what is good or bad.
My atheism is a consequence of (a) not being at all indoctrinated with religion as a kid, and then (b) as a mid-teen, hearing some religious views finally and saying, "Wait--you can't be serious!" :lol:
"Inherent meaning" is not the same thing as meaning in the semantic sense, is it? When I assign meaning to a term or to something like a visual artwork by making mental associations, there's nothing inherent about that, is there? Maybe we could say that the ability to think about things meaningfully is inherent in us, ceteris paribus (there can easily be exceptions due to medical conditions, for example), but isn't that different than "Inherent meaning"?
Ditto here.
I am completely convinced that god could exist. Or that he does not exist. Either way.
The problem for me starts when people claim knowledge what god is, wants, wants of us, can do, will do. These are not known to people, whether god exists or not. So why can't the religious see that religions potentially have nothing to do with god, but are social superstructures, that help society to get along?
I don't think society and humans are building a technological god; we are, instead, one-by-one, replacing those institutions and ideals which we used to use to sustain society, by replacing ideals and fantasies with real things that do the same things for us.
That's not at all my disposition, though. To me, it strikes me as a completely absurd, "random," insane-sounding notion.
Again, atheism isn't a claim about anything. It's certainly not something that forwards normatives about anything. It's just a term for a lack of one specific belief.
For the sake of discussion, I could skip over the error that's already been pointed out here (atheism is not a category of system, it is a disposition people have), and presume you mean that atheists don't tend to build other systems instead.
But if so, I still don't understand what you could possibly mean by this. To take morality (the system you alluded to) there's dozens of atheistic moral systems (moral systems which do not involve God), in fact probably more than there are religious ones. So why aren't these counting in your estimations?
Thanks for asking. You pretty much hit the nail on the head. The traditional theist is typically going to default to fundamentalism. Just like the atheist wiil default to positive Atheism in justifying their belief system.
Essentially since I view God as an ineffable experience and a genderless metaphysical being (spiritual), it would not fit within your/that criterion/paradigm.
The reason why I asked that question is different from the answer that you gave ' insert God ' here.
As I alluded to, that old paradigm is part of traditional fundamentalism. Personally I just don't insert God.
In short, I look at physical and nonphysical phenomena, objective and subjective criteria, among other things to arrive at my leap of Faith.
(Otherwise Apophatic or negative theism would be the criteria I would use to put my faith into words.)
And my philosophizing began in the 10th year of a 12 year regimen of mandatory biblical studies & church history in Dominican & Jesuit parochial schools with nearly the same sudden short sharp shock: "Wait--you can't be serious!" :halo:
Is there one example of a documented, atheist system for morality with at least some followers?
Utilitarianism and Kantianism both make no reference to gods and so are entirely practicable by atheists.
Well yes, but we're clearly not talking about the same thing because it's absolutely obvious that there are - several brands of deontology, utilitarianism (negative utilitarianism, motive utilitarianism... ), virtue ethics (in dozensof different forms). I mean the vast majority of ethical systems don't involve God. So what is it you're getting at?
:up:
Maybe, but the poll also has options besides those. It seems clear that you do believe there is a god of some sort, but that you arrive at that after some more general philosophizing, so I don't see why you think the second option doesn't fit you.
(And the atheists, so far, seem to be saying that they generally don't start with positive atheism and build from there, but the other way around).
I find it really curious that no theists have answered the poll so far. Do theist generally think "theism" means something more than it does? Maybe I should have phrased it as just "Do you believe there is a god" (with yes/no answers) instead of "are you theist or atheist", even though those mean the exact same thing.
Your problem, and mine as well, is that our experience is so dualistic. Idealism doesn’t necessarily sound a lot like theism to me though. The materialism vs idealism dichotomy also doesn’t seem necessary.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Doesn’t this disqualify option 3.
So to claim that I’m either one or the other and that the term agnostic no longer means what it is supposed to mean just seems like you’re trying to force everyone to debate and poll with terms they don’t agree with.
I don’t believe in things if I cannot know them. Since I cannot know if gods exist I should not claim they do or don’t. Agnostic, not atheist, not theist, agnostic.
The term “atheist” was, at least historically, a term of abuse used against those that didn’t follow the religious orthodoxy. In other words, a term invented by theists, in relation to theists. The very term assumes there is a god that one can be without.
Yes. I was never a theist. I had basically zero idea about religious ideas until I was in my mid teens, and then when I learned something about religious beliefs I thought that people must have been playing a practical joke on me.
But on the terminology, strictly speaking agnosticism is orthogonal to atheism. You can believe in god or not, and you can hold that belief to be knowledge or not, in any combination. Furthermore those who simply don’t believe in god (weak atheists) can positively believe there is no god (strong atheism), and those who don’t claim to know (weak agnosticism) can claim that knowledgeable is impossible (strong agnosticism).
You sound like someone who doesn’t believe that god exists, but doesn’t positively believe that god doesn’t exist either (a weak atheist), and someone who not only claims not to know, but claims knowledge is impossible (a strong agnostic).
You’re right; my apologies for the irrelevance. I was trying to explain the reasons why I reflect both labels.
I’m the same way, I was never given any religious teaching or training and remained mostly ignorant of it until a later age.
An essential aspect of the problem right there: relating to some attenuated "animating principle" at the expense of relating to the actual living breathing Earth and its myriad inhabitants. This is where the "great Chain of Being", with all the biological "lowlifes" at the bottom, works its magic yet again.
The supernatural fucks over the natural...!
I'm coming more and more to see this attitude really is a huge part of the problem.
Not so, I believe in a creating and balancing force. Couldn’t begin to say whether or not the creating and the balancing forces are the same force. However to call this god to me seems a bit much as I think it goes beyond simple anthropormorphicpersonification.
However, in most religions we not only see god or gods being deified by us, but we see god or gods deifying us back. So to me this implies deification as some kind of contract with a supreme entity that has Will to put us at the focus of its attention, and deify us back.
However, I also choose to believe that a judging god exists or a judgement mechanism exists that we call god. To put it simply, this judging gods only unique characteristic is that it is unborn. The unborn generations of humans and other life which has the capacity to look backward with a critical eye. As we do on those from the past, we are their judges but they cannot be ours, just as we cannot judge those who are not yet born. I call this a judging mechanism because although unborn, these future generations are still mortal, therefore god is in itself an inappropriate phrase to use for this mechanism. The implications of this also suggest a final judgement day will indeed come, when the last generation has nothing to look forward to and it can only look back and have its last say on whether or not what came before had any value or meaning.
I’m sorry but for me your question really doesn’t go deep enough, but it definitely seems like myself and others have perhaps aided you in coming up with other lines of discussion.
Although, thinking about it now, I suppose my overall answer would be that my view on these things has a lot of weight in my application of philosophy.
Oh, this view of deifying the unborn generations is called Generationism and is more an application of Pragmatism in ethics than a spiritual worldview. I myself identify as an agnostic Taoist spiritually but if you called the Tao or the Dao, “God” you’d be grossly misunderstanding the concept really.
This is why I've always preferred Freethought and considered myself a Freethinker - free of sectarian dogma, revelation & superstition, free of appeals to ignorance mystery magic, free of moralizing & demogoguery, free of race sex class prejudices, etc in study, reflection and judgment - rather than "atheism". Also, (sci)Materialist is even more agreeable to me as a nom de guerre ("Écrasez l'infâme!") than the worn-penny "atheist". I'm much more intrigued these day by the persisting failure of philosophical theists deists agnostics or other mysterians / anthropocentrists to coherently & soundly demonstrate their commitments than I am in regurgitating my own arguments to the contrary - there's nothing for me to learn either in repeating myself or blowing down one more house of god-cards. I've long since climbed that ladder and discarded it.
Same here. I was born and raised in an Eastern-block country, where I was never taught religion, never was told there was a god. I first encountered a religious person on the way to school, an old man, who told us, a bunch of seventh-graders walking to school, that god gives us power to breathe, to move, to have children. I got vexed hearing this, I thought, is this guy insane? We breathe because our oxygen levels go down, and our muscles act with our bones to move us and to increase or decrease our lung capacity. The VERY idea that we are some puppets of a big daddy and we are not autonomous things that achieve our successes on our own made me feel angry and hateful.
But I really got a glimpse to religion and how the religious think gradually over twenty or forty years. It is a complex system, belief, or can be; and it can be as complex or as simplex as the believer wants it to be.
I also found that it's easier and more enjoyable to argue against religion and religious tenets with smart people whose beliefs are complex, and who know the scriptures, than to argue with simpleton fools. To argue with simpleton fools, you must make them understand complex issues, or simple issues, which they can't. It is very, very frustrating to debate a topic with someone who is very, very limited intellectually.
I think that's mistaken. Modern scientific atheism, of the kind advocated by popular science commentators, is constructed from the hollowed-out shell of Christian philosophy. It was the European Enlightenment, and atheists philosophers such as Diderot, Holbach, and others, proposed building a 'whole world system' purely on mechanical principles without reference to any higher intelligence or guiding hand. This was the origin of the famous retort of LaPlace to Napoleon 'I have no need of that hypothesis' ('that hypothesis' being the 'guiding hand').
So early modern and modern science sought to replace God with science, and eventually the idea of Heaven with literal 'conquest of the stars' (hence the popular fascination with interstellar conquest.) It is promethean in the sense of 'stealing fire from the Gods', seeking to know 'the mind of God' through mathematical physics so that man, in effect, displaces or becomes God.
This is the attitude that was subject to criticism in Thomas Nagel's 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False ( the title is a spoiler!) It highlights the fundamental irony or tension behind the materialist project, which is that 'mind' is depicted as the outcome of an essentially mindless process by the fortuitous combination of material causes, and at the same time is the faculty by which the whole of science itself is discerned. Nagel himself professes atheism, but this book was pilloried because it was said to provide 'aid and comfort' to intelligent design advocates.
And that in turn betrays the sense in which materialism itself is a quasi-religious system, one in which 'the physical' (whatever that turns out to be!) has been interpolated into the role previously allocated to spirit.
So - 'scientific' atheism is nothing if not systematic, but it embodies numerous contradictions, which you yourself have noted, albeit on rather idiosyncratic grounds IMO.
Concerning Kant's philosophy, he described some meta-ethical principles but did not mean to provide a new system of morality. His work on ethics was certainly not to be understood as a replacement of Christian morality but rather as a rational elucidation.
Kant was religious:
Not only do we find powerful defenses of religious belief in all three Critiques, but a considerable share of Kant's work in the 1790s is devoted to the positive side of his philosophy of religion.
Now, given the fact that Christianity does not particularly have an elaborate system of jurisprudence, i.e. a complete system of religious law, very much unlike Judaism and especially Islam, this approach will by itself not really solve the problem.
It is most likely that followers of Jesus were originally supposed to implement "the Law and the Prophets", i.e. Jewish Law in full, including the Oral Torah. The Ebionite branch of Christianity actually did that. It is by exempting non-Jewish Pauline Christians from the Law, that the jurisprudential conundrum started snowballing. Without Jewish Law, there is no guarantee that the religion is complete and can offer moral guidance in all circumstances. Kant understood the problem of questionable thinking in morality that naturally arises in an incomplete system in which half the scripture gets abrogated, but he only offered some useful meta-ethical guidance without being able to provide a complete system. Kant could not reinstate the missing parts by virtue of meta-ethics alone.
So, no, Kant is not a basis for a complete morality, atheist, Christian, or otherwise.
Where is any of that documented? Where do these communities live, who actually implement it?
A system is described by its basic rules, i.e. its basic beliefs.
Propositional logic itself is a system of 14 basic beliefs.
Every other system is necessarily an extension of a core logic system. You do that by importing a module of extra basic beliefs next to the logical core:
In mathematics, an axiomatic system is any set of axioms from which some or all axioms can be used in conjunction to logically derive theorems. A theory consists of an axiomatic system and all its derived theorems. An axiomatic system that is completely described is a special kind of formal system. A formal theory typically means an axiomatic system, for example formulated within model theory. A formal proof is a complete rendition of a mathematical proof within a formal system.
For example, if you load an additional module with 9 extra beliefs concerning standard arithmetic, you can use the system as a number theory.
The basic logical core cannot do arithmetic. The system will have to load an additional module for that. The basic logical core can also not do morality either. It will again need to load an additional module for that. Someone who thinks that the logical core is enough to doing anything at all, does not understand how a system works.
You could load Moses' 10 commandments as an extension module, and then you would already have some kind of moral system. It is generally considered incomplete, but it would still illustrate the principle of (axiomatic) moral system.
Furthermore, it is not possible to use logic to argue against the idea that you will need to load modules of basic beliefs into the system, because logic itself is just such module.
Where can I find a copy of your extension module of basic moral beliefs?
Well, yeah, with Pauline Christianity having crossed out half of its basic scripture and mostly abrogating the real system, i.e. "The Law and the Prophets", i.e. full Jewish Law, such hollowed-out atheist shell is a hack on something that was already a hack. It is clearly not possible to solve the problems caused by a hollowed-out system by removing even more parts. So, what's left over then?
What a fool I have been! I thought that science developed by observing natural phenomena, and explaining them. Now! NOW you tell me it's a subset of Christian dogma?
Why have I been mislead by my educators, who conducted experiments for me on gravity, on the preservation of momentum and energy, on many other stuff? On chemical equilibrium, on the Lomonosov Table of Elements, on valences, on electron paths and electron-path bonds, on ions, on many, many other stuff?
It seems, now @wayfarer tells us the truth, that all that is knowledge and scientific comes from a hollowed-out shell of Christian philosophy.
Imagine!
No, not a subset of Christian dogma. But many of the fundamental terms of early modern science, which laid the foundations for later science, such as substance, essence, motion, and so on, were all developed in the context of Christian philosophical principles (for which see God's Philosophers, James Hannam).
But the reason I say it formed from the 'hollowed out shell' is based on my earlier post, about the reduction to the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter and its consequences, was summarised pretty well by a Buddhist scholar in a keynote speech:
[quote=Bhikkhu Bodhi]The early founders of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century — such as Galileo, Boyle, Descartes and Newton — were deeply religious men, for whom the belief in the wise and benign Creator was the premise behind their investigations into lawfulness of nature. However, while they remained loyal to the theistic premises of Christian faith, the drift of their thought severely attenuated the organic connection between the divine and the natural order, a connection so central to the pre-modern world view. They retained God only as the remote Creator and law-giver of Nature and sanctioned moral values as the expression of the Divine Will, the laws decreed for man by his Maker. In their thought a sharp dualism emerged between the transcendent sphere and the empirical world. The realm of "hard facts" ultimately consisted of units of senseless matter governed by mechanical laws, while ethics, values and ideals were removed from the realm of facts and assigned to the sphere of an interior subjectivity.
It was only a matter of time until, in the trail of the so-called Enlightenment, a wave of thinkers appeared who overturned the dualistic thesis central to this world view in favor of the straightforward materialism. This development was not a following through of the reductionistic methodology to its final logical consequences. Once sense perception was hailed as the key to knowledge and quantification came to be regarded as the criterion of actuality, the logical next step was to suspend entirely the belief in a supernatural order and all it implied. Hence finally an uncompromising version of mechanistic materialism prevailed, whose axioms became the pillars of the new world view. Matter is now the only ultimate reality, and divine principle of any sort dismissed as sheer imagination.[/quote]
Setting aside an apparent genetic fallacy for the sake of discussion - so what?
Much, if not most, natural philosophy of the Scholastic centuries - medicine, astronomy, mechanics, mathematics - was acquired from Islamic schools of thought, translated into Latin from Arabic (which were translations from Greek, etc), which had preserved Classical & Hellenistic achievements (as much from papyrus-rotting oblivion as Church-sanctioned 'book burnings') - in particular and perhaps most significantly Aristotle's corpus - upon which the European - Christendom's - Renaissance was built. Interesting? Yeah. And gunpowder came from Tang Dynasty China - tell Alfred Nobel about it. Again, so what?
Hey, Inquistor: "E pur si muove" ...
I simply don't buy that modern science has its fundations in the Scriptures.
If you say that early scientists in Christian Europe were all christians (such as alchemists), then I accept that. If a scientiific fact or theory is discovered, it matters absolutely not whether the scientist is Hindu, Christian, Buddhist or Atheist.
I think, @wayfarer, that it is simply Christian propaganda to say what you say, in order to inflate the importance of Christianity, as if it were the basis of science. Your post and your intentions are a partizan propaganda, in my opinion, which helps the self-confidence of Christians, by trying to "own" the genesis of science, and thus, the genesis of scientific thinking.
THERE IS NO OWNERSHIP OF LOGICAL, REASONABLE THOUGHT.
It a fallacy to think that just because someone of some religion or some nationality or some sex or some race thought of the first publishable scientific thought, all science owes everthing to the religion, race, nationality and sex of the first person who came up with something.
I view your post as a tribalistically patriotic statement. From your point of view.
From my point of view, it is a meaningless, biassed, fallacious claim.
I love what you wrote there. :up:
Yes, it’s odd, the extent to which atheists leave one foot in the religious circle, just enough to allow speaking about and thinking upon God. The root word “theist” still holds sway, it seems.
Social psychology, history of ideas, cultural dynamics.
Quoting god must be atheist
I didn't say 'scriptures'. Western culture incorporated Greek philosophy, Muslim philosophy and many other sources. And the emotionalism of your response speaks volumes.
So does your propostition.
It seems that one would have to separate out the philosophical background of Greco-Roman thinking from Christian (or Judeo-Christian-Islamic) thinking. When that is done, what does one have left?
Granted, the Christians who succeeded the Roman Empire (in the West) had other things on their plate: Converting the pagan Europeans (not completed until 1380, the Lithuanians were the last to submit), keeping their scriptoriums from being torched by the Vikings, defending Europe from Moslem armies, plagues, crusades, etc. But it doesn't seem like they really accomplished all that much until the Renaissance, which was stimulated by the new-found texts of the classical period, which were not Christian scripture.
Granted, there were technological innovations every now and then; the medieval period wasn't the Dark Ages. It wasn't as if nobody was thinking about anything but devils behind every bush and angels guarding the faithful. But I'm not sold on the idea that scripture led to the renaissance.
I wouldn't want to brand the Church as the mother of all superstitious nonsense, but it doesn't seem like the opposite extreme is appropriate either.
...Religion’s rational credibility can be rebuked without evoking modern science or nihilism: Democritus and Epicurus did so over two thousand years ago, using arguments that are still valid today, even if theists prefer to ignore them. But of course, the irrationality of religious belief has never impeded its flourishing; indeed, it is precisely what immunizes it against rational refutation, since religion is designed to satisfy psychological needs, not rational requirements. Marx was right: religion will never be eradicated until the need for it evaporates. Obviously, this evaporation will have to be accomplished practically as well as cognitively."
(c)
Actually the Renaissance humanists - Ficino, Pico Della Mirandolla in particular - were mainly Platonist and Neo-platonist. Their emphasis on Plato was a major influence on Galileo, with his 'the book of nature is written in mathematics' being directly derived from Platonist principles. When Copernicus discovered the orbits of the planets he was likewise pursuing Platonist principles. All of them had a very uneasy relationship with the Church, but none of them were materialist; they were in the broader sense products of the Christian west, by no means religiously orthodox in their outlook.
Bear in mind also that Aquinas incorporated a great deal of Aristotelian philosophy: Thomas ...reconciled religion with reason, expanded it towards experimental science, insisted that the senses were the windows of the soul and that the reason had a divine right to feed upon facts, and that it was the business of the Faith to digest the strong meat of the toughest and most practical of pagan philosophies.' (Chesterton on Aquinas).
Quoting Bitter Crank
I didn't say that, did I? The underlying concepts of philosophy - substance, form, purpose, the nature of causation - reached their unique form in Western culture which was primarily Christian in orientation. I didn't say 'founded on Scripture' although it's kind of illuminating that it seems to have been interpreted that way.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Well, the aspects that Christianity incorporated from the Greeks were mainly from Platonism which was atheist so far as the Greek cults were concerned. But the point I'm making is in respect of the historical roots of current culture and specifically the underlying worldview, which is nowadays mainly materialist in orientation. As it has to be - what happens, in Western culture, when you remove the notion of divine creation? What's left to work with?
Though foot prints are not blueprints - Perhaps the Xtian 'Dark Ages' were, after all, dark enough for thinking men (& women) to lucidly see the stars and follow their lumen naturæ rationalis out of the millennium-old, blinkered, catacombs of Infallible ignorance & superstition. Thanks, Mother Church, for motivating our epic flight over your dogmatic cuckoo's nest and into the great wide open wonderous hazards of Freethought & defeasible reasoning. Grazie Signore. :naughty:
Bellissimo! :ok:
The church first destroyed all other cultures that provided education. Naturally, there was no alternative. This is not a merit of the church, it is, instead, its shame.
Agreed. And Jews took most of their mythology from Babilonian tales.
The Babilonians took their tales from Jihodanian legends, and the Jihodanians based their legends on Futriamass folklore. The Futiamass folklore originated in, and took on many elements of the Haddecombi dances, and the Haddecombi dances were mainly offshoots of Dingdongbatty tattoos and other skin arts. ETC.
By no means have I read all or most or even a sizeable amount of the scriptures or of Greek mythology and philosophy, but the readings I've done showed up no connection between the scriptures and Greek stuff.
This is not the first reference that I read to that movement.
I can imagine that there were tiny, microscopic elements of the Greek art of thought in the Christian scriptures, but to me, there were no visible marks of it.
Other than that Mark was one of the evangelists.
The same what? Unreferenced pronoun. No clear antecedent. Actually, no antecedent at all. Please provide. Thanks.
The actual scriptures predate the Christian philosophy I'm talking about, which as other have mentioned adopted a lot of Platonist and Neoplatonist thought. I'm not saying that Christianity really has its roots in Greek polytheism, but making a reductio against the claim that science has its roots in Christianity. Science has its roots in philosophy that was passed down (and added to) by Christians, but those Christians likewise got their philosophy from Greeks. It's absurd to say Christianity is rooted in Greek religion, and it's likewise absurd to say science is rooted in Christianity.
Quoting god must be atheist
The whole post I was replying to:
Quoting god must be atheist
Existing states first destroyed all other systems of governance in their territories, and that's as bad as what the church did to other systems of education, but given that that happened, it's still good that there is some form of governance / education, even if it needs major improvement and got there in a bad way. If I was in medieval Europe I would advocate for reforming the church-centric university system to be more freethinking (as happened in reality), rather than abolishing it for being religious; just like I presently advocate for the reform of governments to be more anarchic, rather than abolishing them because they're statist.
Quoting 180 Proof
Some atheists, at least, have one foot in the Xian circle because before they became atheists, both of their feet were there. I grew up in a Protestant milieu, and like it or not, I can no more erase that large block of experience than I can forget my mother tongue. So I don't believe that God exists, especially the God that I grew up with. Of course, there is more to religion than the godhead. There is the application of preaching, folk ways, social connections, ritual, music, poetry, and so forth as well.
Bertrand Russel noted that religious deserters who become atheists tend to be the kind of non-believer that they were as believers. So, some atheists are screeching doctrinaire bullies, and others are rather more relaxed about their disbelief and other people's beliefs.
The god that I don't believe in is laissez-faire. If you want a cartoon picture, then "god is in heaven, busy with whatever god does up or out there, and we are here, busy with whatever we do here. It's a long, long way between god - up or out there, and us down here. We are on our own."
I wasn't a screeching doctrinaire Christian and I am not a screeching doctrinaire atheist -- and I don't have a lot of patience with Christians or atheists who are.
But it sounds like you’ve now moved the goalposts and want an example of a whole social group who unanimously adhere to one such system, not just of a system that is independent of theism.
That was rather:
preventing the non-Chalcedonian Christians from inviting the Moslims in -- or before that, the Persians -- to get rid of Byzantine-Chalcedonian religious persecutions.
For example, how did the Moslims get into Spain and southern France, if not to assist the Arians in their fight against the Catholics (=Chalcedonians)?
Julian, Count of Ceuta (Spanish: Don Julián, Conde de Ceuta,[nb 1], Arabic: ??????, (?lyan [nb 2]) was, according to some sources a renegade governor, possibly a former comes in Byzantine service in Ceuta and Tangiers who subsequently submitted to the king of Visigothic Spain before joining the Muslims.[3]:256 According to Arab chroniclers, Julian had an important role in the Umayyad conquest of Hispania, a key event in the history of Islam, in which al-Andalus was to play an important part, and in the subsequent history of what were to become Spain and Portugal.
Every Muslim conquest followed the same pattern. The region was inhabited by non-Chalcedonian Christians who were sick and tired of the Byzantine religious persecutions, and who were happy to invite the Muslims with a view on expelling the Byzantines; because the Muslims had promised religious freedom. Furthermore, it is because the Muslims kept their promise of religious freedom that it was so hard for the Chalcedonians to ever come back.
I love this. So fucking beautifully complicated, yet sensible and logical. Except the Byzantines would not get expelled, due to lack of religious persecutions, and they would continue to strive. But without their upper hand of oppressing other religions, of course.
What a screwhole of events.
Well, in the published works of the relevant philosophers, of course.
You're still not being clear here about what you mean. I'm trying to be as charitable as possible and assume that you're not so poorly educated that you don't even know that people have written books about ethics, but I'm really struggling to understand your question outside of that interpretation.
Ok, I went ahead and voted for 'theist'.
With respect to the other question about why no 'theist' were perhaps voting, I can only speculate. To this end, I think it might be because many think of 'Theism' as more of a vocational role in their so-called professional lives. And since we have much more of a social structure relative to religion or religious beliefs more than not, maybe many, including myself, would not want to claim they are something they are not. In other words, what would you call someone who isn't a Priest or Monk?
Otherwise, many Christians or deeply spiritual individuals think of thier 'theism' as a personal relationship, and perhaps are not really interested in being an evangelist, priest, monk, or Evangelical Christian as it were.
I don't know, maybe consider a category that says: Spiritual.
I think that would capture more of a 21st Century movement anyway...
The Bible and the Quran are also books about ethics. These books are really used by entire demographics to determine ethical questions. For example, professing Christianity means that you follow Christian determinations and rulings in ethics. From there on, you have entire communities doing that. What philosophy book has entire communities determining morality according to its text? If such community does not exist, then that book is not being used; which is pretty much the same as saying that it is "useless".
Definitely, but I've always had the impression that the complexity was a factor of smart people who had been indoctrinated with religious beliefs as a kid--so that they couldn't exactly just drop the beliefs on a emotional level--realizing that they need to try to figure out some way to make something that's pretty obviously ridiculous seem not-so-ridiculous instead. That's why you get ideas like, "Yeah, it's not a big boogie man in the sky, it's an 'organizing force'" and so on.
I still don't understand the distinction you're looking for. You're obviously not seriously suggesting that there aren't any deontologists, that no one is a utilitarian... That would be absurd. So what is the distinction you're trying to make between people who have read, say, Kant, and try to follow his method, and people who have read, say, the Bible, and try to follow its methods?
I missed the first part of this discussion, but in service of some reading comprehension help :blush: he's asking for a philosophical ethics text that has had anywhere near the cultural impact on ethics--the ubiquity, pervasiveness, etc. of the Bible or Quran. (Why he's asking for that I don't know--I didn't read that part.)
Ok, let's pick an example: marriage and divorce. Each religion has its own elaborate rules on that matter.
By the way, religious marriage is strongly resurgent. Governments across the world are increasingly losing the power to impose their views in these matters. Governments are simply not the most effective principle at using violence to get their way, as there are clearly much stronger principles at play. In that sense, it is pretty much inevitable that religious marriage will find itself completely reinstated.
What are the deontologist rules on marriage and divorce? Do you know of anybody who has entered into a deontologist marriage? Without rules on marriage and divorce, a system of morality is incomplete, say, even crippled.
A system of morality that doesn't have anything to say about marriage and divorce implicitly considers them morally irrelevant. Just like a system of morality that doesn't impose any dietary restrictions implicitly considers diet morally irrelevant. A "completely system of morality" doesn't have to either oblige or prohibit every single action: it can leave wide swathes of behavior merely permissible, without saying either that you must or must not do such-and-such with regard to so-and-so.
In the interest of some rhetorical comprehension help... I know that's what he was probably after, but he said "Is there one example of a documented, atheist system for morality with at least some followers" and in support of the claim "atheism does not build any system. Atheism only rejects religious systems, without building anything else instead". So, if he meant to qualify what counts as contrary evidence (must be high impact, many followers) then he'll have to similarly qualify the claim (atheism doesn't build anything high impact with many followers).
It's disingenuous to make a broad claim, then later narrow it specifically so that contrary evidence can be discounted.
As I've long since lost any hope of engaging in meaningful discussions here, baiting idiots into making the outlandish claim we all knew lay behind their oh-so-meek initial interjection is all an asshole like me has left to get any pleasure out of from here.
Of course a deontologist has rules on marriage, its the same set of principles which govern all their other interactions, no reason why marriage need be any different. I know they can be frightening to the unititiated, but women are alright once you get to know them...promise, most people really don't need special rules for dealing with them any more.
1) ontological materialism; paying attention to dynamism, becoming and individuation. A summary of this standpoint might be a focus on studying how systems become imposed on or emerge out of assemblages; genesis of structure and structure of genesis.
God only has a holiday home in becoming.
(2) a methodological rejection of idealism, foundationalism and correlationism; refused givens, thought is tailored through conceptual links which aim at and are embedded in a contextually circumscribed real indifferent to its conceptualisation
God's the biggest given to let in, and rarely indifferent to how he (!) is conceptualised.
(3) methodological pluralism - anti-architectonic thought; the phenomena should dictate not just what we think but how we think; ontologies and epistemologies produced are always regional and topic specific respectively.
Having one thing which constraints all adoptable styles of thought is bad.
That's true, but still...some people need special rules for dealing with almost anything! :gasp:
Beautiful! :heart:
:up:
Given the long-term trend in atheist populations of going extinct, as we understand that their currently low birth rates are going to implode even further, the lack of special, i.e. specific rules for marriage and divorce does not look like a particularly good strategy.
Religious people transmit their religion's rules to their children, while atheist people fail to do so because they generally don't have any rules nor any children.
Given the fact that the State seeks to force non-religious rules on marriage and divorce, there is not even a need for extra provocations to fuel the growing hostility that religious demographics have for the atheists.
At the same time, as their numbers shrink and as on average they get older, atheists are understood to find it more difficult to defend themselves, and are therefore turning into increasingly easier targets. In other words, every day that passes by, the likelihood of hostile reprisals keeps increasing. In terms of cost/benefit analysis, the cost of lashing out is shrinking dramatically. It is simply getting cheaper to do that. Furthermore, why do people do what they do? Well, because they can.
Therefore, in my opinion, atheist populations will not just gradually go extinct. They will suddenly do so. In other words, atheism looks like a suicide pact.
I feel like the question is posed incorrectly. Answer the question "How much does being a theist affect your philosophical world view?", and then the atheist can answer "by *not* same that amount".
I haven't read any stats on atheism being a causal factor for reduced birth rates. Maybe it is, but I haven't seen the evidence.
I think one can make an argument (I don't have any stats for it) that it is affluence that leads to atheism. Poor people need to keep their options open, and one of those options is that a god is going to internet on their behalf, at some point. God is an affordable comfort, too.
I believe Zeus turned Quetzalcoatl into a toad. I feel greatly relieved because I never did like mesoamerican religion. Hail Zeus! Hail Jupiter!
I think the "incidental consequence" option is adequate. I would say that being an atheist is highly unlikely to be of no consequence to the way you think about things. In other words if, for example, per improbable, you were to became a theist, it would seem implausible to think that nothing else about your philosophy would change..
The fourth option should cover that. Saying that atheism is an incidental consequence is not saying that it is of consequence. Being of consequence would be more like option 3: the atheism comes first and other things follow from that. Being a consequence means the other way around: the rest of your philosophy just is what it is independent of (a)theism, and then when the question "is there a god?" gets posed your philosophy just says "nope".
That may have been an interesting observation possibly a century ago.
With most people living in an urban setting nowadays, the poor also do. The reason why the urban poor fail to reproduce, is not because of the survival rate of children. It is because they cannot keep their families together for long enough.
Once a woman has a child with one man, it becomes harder for her to find another man to commit to funding a second one. He would be compelled to provide funding for the first one too, and men generally don't like doing that. Hence, rampant family breakup systematically reduces the number of children per woman.
Having a lot of children requires the same nuclear family staying together for all that time. That just does not seem to happen much outside the context of religious communities.
Quoting Bitter Crank
That may be true for the really wealthy ones, but certainly not for the middle class. They depend in their old age on a unilateral transfer of resources mostly from people who may not even have a middle-class level of income. With the younger generations being increasingly of strong religious background -- otherwise they would not even be there -- the government will try to ask them to give up resources to pay to retired, middle-class atheists. It is obviously not in the interest of these younger generations to do that. For reasons of religion, they will each take care of their own parents. Religion does not suggest in any way, however, that they should fund someone else's atheist parents.
Quoting Bitter Crank
In the West, the economic elite may be mostly atheist, but outside the West, this is certainly not the case. Furthermore, the difference in income is shrinking rapidly. These societies are getting much, much wealthier. I can easily see that around me. Therefore, the idea that affluence leads to atheism is probably just one more western ethnocentric view. Neither the ruling elite nor the economic elite here in SE Asia is atheist.
Actually I was wondering which century you were living in. Seems to be something of a perception-distorting time warp going on here.
If you have never lived outside a western country, you do not understand 80% of the world. You will also fail to unlearn the deceptive and manipulative views that you were indoctrinated with from a young age. I do understand why you fail to see that your own views can only be wrong, because you may never have seen something else. In a sense, you will remain ignorant of the truth for the whole of your life.
The population increase would suggest that somehow the urban poor are managing to reproduce.
Quoting alcontali
Whatever happened to fathering several children with one woman?
Quoting alcontali
Hogwash.
Quoting alcontali
The government will not merely TRY to make you give up resources for aged atheists, they will be successful in making you pay for the luxurious assisted living and skilled care homes we shall require. So work hard, earn lots of money, cheerfully pay your taxes, and know that you are a blessing to old atheists everywhere.
And you weren't? Come now... How is it that you and you alone managed to overcome the deception and manipulation that was visited upon you, and that nobody else in the world could overcome?
Well, in that case, these governments will have to improve their game, because they has never managed to make me pay one dollar. You see, taxes are paid by less intelligent people to more intelligent ones. That is why I find it so insulting to pay them, and that is why I have never paid them.
Furthermore, not all governments seek to extract that many taxes.
The local minister of interior affairs has recently clarified that he thinks that foreigners should simply pay their yearly visa fee (a few hundred dollars), and that he does not expect more than that. He obviously knows that he is competing for these few hundred dollars per year with lots of other countries. Hence, the reasonable nature of his views. So, we've got a nice deal going here!
You know, "bring back our jobs" will simply not happen. Either you are reasonable, or else you get nothing.
Because... God did it.
It's really much easier this theist philosophy. I don't know why I didn't convert earlier. I'm reviving Quetzalcoatlism... Zeus be damned!
I think that you purposely misunderstand what I have said. I may have been manipulated too, but I unlearned all of that, or at least most of that, by living in other parts of the world. Furthermore, I think that 80% of the world is not deceived nor manipulated. Therefore, unlike you, I believe that the majority on this planet is not deceived. They clearly think differently from you, but that is because they are right.
That is a popular internet meme, supposed to convey the idea that ‘belief in God is an end to all questioning’. However if you really did come to believe, I think it would provoke enormous questions; it might cause one to question many things that one previously assumed. So the idea that it’s an ‘end to questioning’ can only really be entertained on the basis of the assumption that it really doesn’t mean anything in the first place.
That's an interesting thought. What kind of questions might arise out of a faith in some particular god, do you suppose, that weren't there before?
You got it nailed down well. However, you can still argue with the smarter religious, even if you don't convince them. And the arguments, while clean, are enjoyable. Only about half the time does it devolve to mud-slingings, with the smarter religious. There is respect mostly, on both sides. I respect their learnedness and their politeness, I respect that I can reasont with them to some point. Whereas you can't even get your foot in the door with the less complex believers. They don't disrespect me, they just bounce back from every argument with a joyful smile on their faces, and keep bouncing about like little rabbits in a sun-beat field of daisy chains and blossoming dandelions without a care in the world.
One more thing... on the forums you encounter really smart religionists. But they can't keep out the not so smart ones. Whereas the atheists comprise only really smart people. This is what gives me hope in my efforts to proselyse. Because in the one-time communist countries you find a lot of dumm atheists. I mean, almost everyone is atheist there. This sort of tells me that reason will win, and then the masses will follow.
.... precisely! Thanks for sharing Wayfarer... !
Well, perhaps you can answer the question I put to Wayfarer then. What are these questions which a belief in God causes you to ask that were not there before? How many angels...?
Well, the first one is the ideal of love viz. memes. And through revelation (revealed knowledge) an awareness of same.
For example, say an individual grows-up in a dysfunctional environment that does not validate love. Say that person grew-up in a drug infested high crime area and that's all the person knows to survive. That is what they've been taught to survive.
As a result, that same person may be confused, sad, or otherwise in time, come to develop feelings of so-called existential angst. They may even be subconscious feelings. They do bad things to themselves and others but don't really understand or know why they do what they do. Almost like animal instinct.
Maybe then they come into a situation of prolonged isolation, near death experience, an accident or unhappiness and calamity of some sort. They decide to make an attempt at introspection and/or spiritual guidance. Then by coincidence, happenstance and Revelations occur. A revealed knowledge about a some-thing that was missing. The resulting feelings of that new revealed knowledge has liberated that person. It has made that individual break free from, as Wayfarer implied, another form of meme. Now they want more. More revelation.
From a human condition standpoint, they are now seemingly operating from a new paradigm or meme that is much more heathier. So in this case, now, that person doesn't rely on their old consciousness as a way to survive. Essentially speaking, their quality of life has changed. They have a renewed consciousness about themselves; a new awareness about their condition.
Did God do it or was it a coincidence that that person had a transformation...I do not know. Was that knowledge there the whole time; they just needed to introspect to find it...I don't know.
But that person knows.
Philosophically, in part, is that a Subjective truth? What would someone like SK say?
What part of that is a question?
The religious experience: Subjective Truth's/Soren Kierkegaard...you'll figure it out, I think....
In the meantime, not to drop book titles, but William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience is pretty much a lucid, classic read, if you don't have it already... .
I asked you what questions religious beliefs cause one to ask that were not present before. It's not a complicated request, it doesn't require preliminary research. Just give me an example of an existential question a religious person might ask, as a result of their becoming religious, that they would not have asked otherwise.
I'd recommend you look at the untenable Atheist thread OP. There are ton's of questions over there...
LOL
You described that well and without using the word god.
'God' is a word.
You tacked the word 'god' onto your thought at the end when you began to seek a cause for the experience of revelation. The cause is unknown but may well be simply the unknown interrelation and dynamics of matter, mind and unknown-unknown preceding the moment of revelation. It isn't necessarily an otherworldly or Lordly unknown.
So possibly for you "god" means "that which provides the human mind with the experience of revelation." But why not explore beyond the word 'god'? The word 'god' is old, tired and thoroughly corrupt. At best, it's a synonym for 'the unknown.' Everyone has seen what it is at its worst.
Sure. In what way we you thinking, a philosophical way? For example, a transcendental inquiry of some sort?
Or , more from a cognitive science point of view (?).
But this is like saying that not being a tennis player is of consequence to my activities because if I was to start playing tennis then it would entail some changes. (You've stated my point perfectly).
I do get the perspective you're taking: from it, my absence of belief does appear to have a consequence because of what it would mean for your present beliefs. If you became an atheist, your worldview would change because (presumably) your theism helps you derive things like existential and moral value, and so you would have to derive it elsewhere.
I can remember being accused by both theists and hard-atheists alike that I am " a cowardly fence sitter who must make a choice because the outcome will affect my entire life". I can strain to understand what they meant, but it just doesn't resonate. A popular come back is to ask people whether or not they believe in the flying spaghetti monster (and whether their lack of belief in him has consequences for their philosophy). In a well formulated nut shell: the consequence that atheism has on my philosophy is that my philosophy is not founded or based upon theism/belief in god, which does seem to contrast with the majority of historical human opinion.
But if you look at atheists and think to yourself "oh boy, they're missing out on a whole world of goodness and truth", then you're a kidder of the highest order.
Consider that having specific theistic beliefs precludes you from considering the multitudes of competing theistic hypotheses (whereas myself, as an atheist, am free to entertain and explore it all in earnest). Consider that there may be ideas, perspectives, and facts that your specific theism biases you toward, or against.
For all the niche ideas, moral foundations, etc, that your theism grants you, is there not an infinitely broader world that you're implicitly missing out on through your theistic subscription?
Why must we paint the roses?
'Some particular God' sounds very much like something an ancient Sumerian or Roman might ask.
In any case, what I mean is that the types for whom religious belief is an end to questioning, are dogmatic fundamentalists or maybe wealthy evangelicals. And there are such people, to be sure. But many accounts of religious conversion depict people wracked by doubt, very much aware of how little they know, often really uncertain of their own faith.
And there are religious scientists - George Lemaître, as I'm sure you know, published the first paper on what came to be called 'big bang theory'. When it was published a lot of people thought it sounded too much like 'creation ex nihilo' - so much so that 'By 1951, Pope Pius XII declared that Lemaître's theory provided a scientific validation for Catholicism.[36] However, Lemaître resented the Pope's proclamation, stating that the theory was neutral and there was neither a connection nor a contradiction between his religion and his theory.[37][38][17] Lemaître and Daniel O'Connell, the Pope's scientific advisor, persuaded the Pope not to mention Creationism publicly, and to stop making proclamations about cosmology.[39] Lemaître was a devout Catholic, but opposed mixing science with religion,[40] although he held that the two fields were not in conflict.[41] (Wikipedia).
So I'm protesting the internet meme that believers are kind of swaddled in this sense that 'God provides all the answers'. It's a highly simplistic depiction in my view.
Quoting Wayfarer
'What if, at the point of death, I were to discover that in some sense I am still conscious?' 'What if the way I have lived my life is subjected to judgement, or has consequences in some way that I could never have anticipated?'
Ditto.
Quoting StreetlightX
It seems Bible/Qur'an-thumpers & other pimps of Woo can't help themselves.
Thank you for giving some concise and to-the-point questions, as requested.
However, I disagree that those are questions that would not have been asked without first adopting religious beliefs. They seem, instead, like the kind of question that might (but not necessarily) lead a person into religious belief.
Myself, I find the "what if" format of them makes them not particularly useful questions at all; all answers would just be speculation on something that may or may not be true. More useful to know would be whether those things are true. Is there life after death? Is there some kind of moral judgement then? And even more so, how can we find out the answers to those kinds of things? That last one is where the line of inquiry gets actually philosophical, as I understand the word. Answering questions about how to answer questions is where the bulk of philosophy takes place -- from answering what our questions even mean to answering what our goal is in asking them -- and only once you've got that all worked out, can you then ask and maybe answer questions like "is there a God?", "is there life after death?", etc.
The answers I find after doing all that philosophical ground work are generally "no". But it's conceivable to me that someone might arrive at different answers through a similar process, and I'm curious to hear if that is the case for anyone. So far it looks like most of the people who have answered "theist" have said that they don't get there through a similar process; they start with a belief in God and then use that to answer all the questions that I would ask first in order to be able to answer the question of whether God exists. Even more curious to me though (and what prompted my to start this thread) are the atheists who have said that that's a core principle of their philosophy, in a way similar to theists.
I'm curious to hear from some of those who have picked that answer (#3) how their thought process works in that regard.
Sure. But the point is to illustrate the kinds of existential questions that might provoke a religious sense (as distinct from simply accepting what you've been told by whatever religion you were brought up in, which is what most people assume 'religion' amounts to.)
Quoting Pfhorrest
Well, as I said, my starting point is questioning the view that the Universe, and we ourselves, are physical, or can be understood in primarily physical terms. Scientific naturalism is nowadays the accepted wisdom - that cosmology, evolutionary theory, and other sciences answer the question of who or what humans are. So my religious sense, such as it is, starts with questioning that, because if it's not true - then what?
But notice that to question the secular consensus means being automatically categorised as 'a believer'. But I see this as a product of the historical dynamics of Western culture; that the 'scientific view' has displaced the previous 'religious view' as the kind of attitude that sensible persons ought to cultivate. You're either one or the other.
[quote=Richard Lewontin]Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.[/quote]
The jealous God dies hard.
But I maintain it's a false dichotomy which originated with the authoritarian nature of the Christian religion, that required submission and unquestioning obedience. That is what provoked the secular rejection of anything that sounds religious, and the sense of the inherent conflict between science and religion. That needs to be understood before you can really understand anything much about religion.
Since theism usually involves the idea that there is an afterlife, divine judgement, the possibility of redemption or salvation and a much more robust notion of personal responsibility, it seems obvious that the presence or absence of belief in these theistic ideas would involve significant differences in philosophical attitudes.
And I am not a theist (I have no idea what gave you the idea that I was), but a "soft" atheist, by the way.
I don't think that's necessarily true. Those things make a significant practical difference in life, in the same way that scientific and political questions can make a significant practical difference in life. But as I've already said upthread, once you've build a robust enough philosophy to even have a way of answering questions like "does god exist?", the answer to such questions doesn't make any difference to the rest of that philosophy. Looking at my philosophy again for example, I cover topics about language, art, math, being, mind, knowledge, education, purpose, will, justice, and government, all without having an answer yet as to whether or not god exists; so far as all of that philosophy is concerned, the answer could go either way. Only in the last chapter, on more or less "the meaning of life", do I then investigate whether or not god exists, and find that the answer is no. But if it had then turned out that god did exist, that might make an enormous practical difference in how to live one's life, but it wouldn't change anything about any of that foregoing philosophy.
I guess I'm looking at this the other way around from you. I don't think we usually do, or even ever can, figure out whether God exists. I would say that mostly, once we have reached the point of thinking philosophically, we start from a presumption that God exists or God does not exist, and that our starting theistic or atheistic presumption has a profound effect on how we then go on to think about life and how to live it. I mean just the starting presumption that there is, or that there is not, an afterlife, has huge implications for every area of philosophy.
So we might even explore both ways and start different inquiries from each presumption to see what their different implications for life are. I think this can be seen quite clearly if we think about the questions you posed: " What does it mean to exist" and "What does it mean to be good"; the answers will be very different depending on whether or not a divine creator and lawgiver is presupposed.
I'll just add that because I see atheism and theism as starting suppositions in philosophy (which looking at philosophical texts from different eras confirms quite nicely in showing the differences between theistically and atheistically based philosophies) I see arguments over atheism vs theism, as well as purported proofs or demonstrations of either, as quite pointless.
In any case, I'm content to agree to disagree.
(For what it's worth, just one free thinker's humble though learned observation.)
Yes there are. None of which are questions atheists do not ask, many of which are questions religions claim to answer. So I don't see how they demonstrate you point.
Right, but in those cases belief in God has not caused the questioning, as you claim. It is doubt in God that causes the questioning.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, and there are atheist scientists. Your claim was "if you really did come to believe, I think it would provoke enormous questions; it might cause one to question many things that one previously assumed" So we're looking for questions actually "provoked" by belief, not questions which persist despite it, such as those about the material conditions which existed at the beginning of the universe.
Quoting Wayfarer
Right. Which is not what you claimed, is it? You overreached. Yes, 'God did it' is not wielded as an answer to every question, but it is wielded as an answer to at least some questions, so unless we're talking about technical theological matters, the total level of existential questioning goes down on becoming religious. At least some of the questions everyone has are considered to be answered. Atheism, on the other had, does not in itself provide any answers at all, it simply rejects one possible answer as incoherent or insufficiently convincing. All questions remain open.
Quoting Wayfarer
How is that not a question an atheist might ask? How is it that belief in some God is not an answer to that question, the vast majority of religions are quite clear about what happens after death? Assuaging fear of death is their main selling point.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again, why would an atheist not ask this question? In what way is religion not an answer to this question? Most religions are also pretty clear on things like judgement and punishment, it's something of theme - hell, heaven, re-incarnation...
See what you guys think:
Consider a form of a Kierkegaardian irony. Say one is living an everyday ordinary 'life of striving' (a Maslowian phrase btw) feeling perfectly fine living single. Then that person, by happenstance, meets a girl/guy. That person then realizes things that they wouldn't have otherwise realized. And it could be a profound list of things ( some of which Pfhorrest mentioned)… .
Did feelings or the phenomenon of Love somehow cause that change in that person? I would argue that change can happen regardless through Revelation. Revealed mystical knowledge.
I was tempted at first to pick this option, that is to say that my atheism is a consequence of my philosophical positions. But this suggests a causal history that never took place in my case - and I suspect in the case of many, perhaps most atheists. As a matter of fact, I was raised secular, and I was an atheist long before I had anything that could be meaningfully identified as a "philosophy."
As I thought more about this, I realized that my qualms went further than just the facts of my biography. Yes, I could reconstruct my philosophy along the lines that you suggest:
Quoting Pfhorrest
As I already indicated, in my case at least, this reconstruction is not true historically. But is it true in any sense? You argue, it seems, that it is better to ground your God beliefs on more general epistemic, ontological and ethical positions than the other way around. This may be plausible, at least for an atheist, in the sense that such structuring would appear to be more balanced and parsimonious. But whence the grounding for those supposedly more fundamental philosophical positions? The fact that they are held to be fundamental means that they are not grounded in anything more than my temperament, my intellectual development throughout my life and the accumulation of experiences. But isn't this also what made me an atheist in my pre-philosophical years? And doesn't my atheism constitute part of that psychological and intellectual background out of which my philosophical leanings formed?
And so, answering this checken-and-egg conundrum for myself, it seems very plausible that my preexisting atheism influenced the development of my philosophical ideas (that is what you consider to be philosophical ideas, which seems to be mostly limited to basic epistemology, but let's set this aside for the moment). Did the influence go in the other direction as well? Very much so: the more I examined the God question philosophically, the more confident I grew in my atheism. But this is hardly an argument for the primacy of philosophy [epistemology]. We naturally seek to rationalize our preexisting beliefs. And given that my preexisting beliefs were partly responsible for the way I was reasoning, this could have been little more than a self-reinforcing cycle.
Therefore, my atheism could be said to be a consequence of my philosophy in the sense that, after the fact, my beliefs could be categorized and restructured so as to make atheism a consequence of some general philosophical framework that I endorse, but not in any other sense.
I think that's a very important thing to highlight.
A philosopher's worldview has dual aspects: it operates as an association of perspectives and ideas through high effort cognition - a rational-communicative artifice. A robot doing philosophy might envision this as a series of believed propositions and believed logical relationships between them. But it also operates as an association of perspectives and ideas through experience and memory; an emotive-performative practice.
The two aspects of a worldview do not operate independently of each other, visceral experiences, socialisation effects and broader socio-historical context inspire reason, sentiment, reason about sentiments and sentiment about reasons. A philosophy is an embodied practice as much as it is an intellectual body of work.
Only very systematised or extensively articulated worldviews approach the rational-communicative archetype that typifies philosophy, and even with that there is much variation in style. Nietzsche expresses the force of his ideas with rhetorical flare and biting wit; aphoristically and with skilful affectation, Spinoza expresses the force of his ideas through the obsessive portrayal of their logical-conceptual dependence; architectonic and always impossibly precise.
The rest of us consist in fragments, nameless aleatory conceptual personas summoned by our (collective) interpretations. As much mood and spittle as thought and sculpture. When reflection leaves us, we return marginally changed and perhaps change others. Were it our job to systematise our thoughts we might be more like landmarks in the terrain of ideas rather than passing place personalities displaying erudition. All we can do is try to learn and inspire others to learn.
Learning systematic thought is always underpinned by the associative (mechanisms of) transitions we make in a space of reasons. Reasoning is a constrained and hopefully discovery fuelling/revealing mode of association (a robot might see this as truth preservation through syllogism); but what is good for the gander (association in general) is good for the goose (reason). What shifts belief, what orients reflection; are processes both affective and deliberative, and always in response to some exposure; some impetus to act like I will. When a presumption forms or is inculcated by such exposure, it informs the processes of reasoning that can come to attend it. When we have thought for a long time with such a presumption, perhaps when such a presumption has formed before we learn to reason; such a presumption may be embodied as a thought pattern, a tick, or a habit of spending too long in the evenings trying to show someone on the internet that they were wrong.
In terms of the OP; the existence of God is often such a presumption. God might mean your family's love and your inclusion in your community; sin might mean the destruction of many things you care about. Such a presumption is unlikely to be swayed by mere reason; intellectual exercises rarely perturb deep socialisation effects much. "God is all things" and like statements should thus be understood performatively. Doubt in such statements undermines us; a fish out of water drowns.
I think it is true that if you have a mystical experience (or take certrain drugs) you will likely think things which you hadn't previously thought, and perhaps never would have thought had you not had the experience. On the other hand the thoughts elicited by such experiences are probably going to be mostly interpretations of the experience and I think it is well documented that people interpret such experiences through the lenses of their own cultures. So, I would say there is no "revealed mystical knowledge", at least not knowledge in any discursive or propositional sense, to be had from such experiences, or at least to be justified by such experiences.
These experiences are affective and personal, and thus whatever knowledge they might bring is not of the inter-subjectively testable kind. The only justification for any belief that comes out of such experiences is of the personal 'feeling' kind. It is pointless arguing about such beliefs, just because there can be no common ground for inter-subjective justification to come into play.
I wouldn't characterize "what I consider to be philosophical ideas" as "basic epistemology". As I've listed several times here already, it includes a wide variety of topics from philosophy of language, ontology, philosophy of mind, epistemology yes, philosophy of will, various ethical subtopics that I refer to as teleology and deontology, and social implications of epistemology and deontology regarding education and governance.
Quoting SophistiCat
You and I seem to have very different histories of our atheism, and given the religious demographics I suspect most peoples' is more like mine than yours. I was raised in a religious household, with parents who believe in no uncertain terms that there definitely is a God and raised me like that was as obvious and uncontroversial a truth as the world being round, so atheism wasn't a preexisting belief when my philosophizing started.
I got into philosophy because my academic interests in natural sciences and social sciences over my childhood and adolescence lead me in search of the most fundamental parts of those fields, narrowing down to physics for the natural sciences and something in the realm of economics or political science for the social sciences. Trying to get deeper and more fundamental in those, I eventually ended up doing what I later learned were basically metaphysics and ethics, and then when I had an intro philosophy class as part of general ed requirements in college and realized that there's one field that studies the fundamentals of both of those things, found my love for philosophy.
As I learned more through all of that, without really thinking about it I pushed God further and further out of the limelight of my worldview, and by my adulthood had basically become an atheist as far as my beliefs were concerned, without ever claiming the title or really thinking about it. (I expect that this part is very different from most people's experiences, as I get the impression that most atheists who were raised religious had a strong rebellious breakaway from their religion).
I hadn't really decided that "God doesn't exist", it's more that I just "had no need for that hypothesis", relegating God to something beyond the normal world (about which I never really thought); and when I realized that there were adults who thought God was actively intervening in the normal world all the time, that seemed as weird to me as adults believing that Santa Claus delivered presents on Christmas, like the kind of story parents tell little kids but adults wouldn't genuinely believe themselves.
When I was around 17 or 18, I thought I had "proved the existence of God" through a now-laughable argument (more or less: infinity is inconceivable and therefore impossible, everything finite has a boundary, every boundary has things on both sides of it, therefore the universe is finite and bounded and there is something beyond it, and whatever that thing beyond the universe is, that's God). That fit fine with my basically-atheist worldview at the time, and fulfilled my growing desire to rise above all ideological conflicts with a creative middle position (that position being that the universe as we know it is basically materialist, but there's something beyond that universe that can be spiritual).
By the time I was 23ish I was identifying as a naturalistic pantheist, as a further refinement of that "creative middle position", after learning more philosophy and deciding that "thing beyond the universe" was an incoherent idea, and that things within the universe couldn't count as gods, deciding that the universe itself was the closest thing to God that could possibly exist, and deserved that name because reasons. (Edit to add because @Janus replied while I was typing: I was having what I understood as mystical experiences a lot around that time, a deep feeling of revelation and profundity, while thinking about the concept of pantheism.)
It wasn't until I was maybe 28 or 29 that I really realized that my worldview had basically been completely godless for as long as I could remember, and that calling myself a naturalistic pantheist didn't at all distinguish anything about my beliefs from those of atheists, it just emotively expressed a kind of "religious" reverence for the universe. Which I still had, but so did plenty of people who called themselves atheists, so I finally decided to stop being confusing and just call myself what I had already been for a long time.
Quoting fdrake
I find that kind of theological noncognitivism really hard to discuss. That seems to be what my mom believes, and she'll try to talk "philosophy" with me and tell me how to her, God means believing in beauty and a kind of inner light permeating the world and uplifting people, doing good and trying to create good and beauty for other people, and she'll ask me don't I believe in that, and... I don't know how to respond, because it's not a propositionally coherent question. I agree completely with the goals of creating good and beauty, and uplifting people, and generally being positive and optimistic, but I don't know how to translate agreement with that goal into an answer to a question about what exists. It's really frustrating.
(I'm also reminded of a bus driver I talked to one on my way home from a philosophy class in college, who asked what I studied and then wanted to talk "philosophy" with me, offering his opinion that the cause of all of the bad things in the world was "sin", which word I had always taken as equivalent to bad deeds, but which to him seemed to mean some kind of metaphysical essence of evil that caused people to do bad deeds, or something).
It's hard to criticise because it's arational, when noncognitively derived frameworks impinge; as premises, framings, inferences; on cognitively constructed ones, that's idiotic; an incapability imposed upon reason. Rationalisation rather than rationality. Luckily for us, as @Wayfarer pointed out:
Quoting Wayfarer
thinking styles are modular; they can operate independently of each other depending upon the topic and its framing. It seems to me Lemaitre's wisdom was the secular insight to separate religious belief from rational thought.
Yes, lots of baggage. The claim "The Christian God exists" should be treated with the same epistemic standards as "Rocks exist" or "Joy exists", but its interpretation for those who believe often refers to the ineluctable mysticism that fogs their thinking; it permeates as affect and sentiment. Which, of course, are not ever to be discarded, but to be recognised for what they are. It is then no surprise that when looked at soberly, or when extracted from a community that enforces/socialises religious belief, people come to doubt it. Living in absence of or in contradiction to religion is a much more convincing 'argument' against it for those who have to live like that.
(Edit: and before you buggers start going on about hinge propositions, while they do not have reasons to be adopted, they do have tractably analyseable causes, which we can bring to light - argument, therapy, learning).
Mysticism, far from open mindedness, is a circumscription of thought.
I protest. There is a reasoned argument that [the philosophical absolute] is not ‘something that exists’. Certainly not an object, and probably not ‘a being’ at all. I don’t expect that to be understood, but it is an understanding with a long pedigree for which I can present a more detailed argument if there at least a hint of interest about it.
Yes, but you have not reasoned.
Quoting Wayfarer
There aren't domain experts on that which cannot be understood.
That's the reason I quoted this example.
Quoting fdrake
The double negative there has me completely stumped, but I bet that if I asked you for an example of what 'mysticism' is, or a paraphrase of its meaning, you would be unable to oblige.
You can't become an expert; cognizable, articulable understanding; on that which cannot be understood; the mystical; affective, non-articulable understanding. You can become an expert on what people say about it, or what they believe, and how they practice their beliefs.
Quoting Wayfarer
You never define it! And for obvious reasons. You have a gesture of religious pluralism and commonality, which resonates with revelation and satori, you phrase this in terms of your considerable knowledge of comparative religion. You also usually go to Buddhism at some point nearby, with occasional references to mindfulness being incorporated into clinical practice, health benefits of it etc. If not that then quantum mechanics and the observer effect. If not that then neo-Platonism and the concept of transcendence. The point you argue for is always argued for in terms of its consistency with other points; never a demonstration of truth, only a demonstration of consistency. And that will not do.
It's one big cluster you're very devoted to, you've studied a lot, and when challenged on a single part of it you use the rest of it to argue for the challenged part. It's slippery. But apparently it's a taboo to believe in this stuff, so I guess that's ok.
You can, although it's certainly not something I claim to be. But it is a domain of discourse, with recognized luminaries, and wide historical scope. I could provide some references and further argument, but I know what the response would be.
Quoting fdrake
One of the books that got me interested in the subject was Alan Watts The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are. He said, and I agree, there is a real taboo in this matter - I elicit it, and so encounter it, on a regular basis.
'Liberal secularism is itself a violent regulator of ‘private’ belief. You can believe whatever you like, provided you do not believe that your personal beliefs are actually objectively true, or matter in any public way.' ~ Paul Tyson, Defragmenting Modernity.
Quoting fdrake
Very perceptive, and also accurate. Why? Because the kind of truth that it's a demonstration of, is not objective by definition, but existential. It's concerned with the notion of truth in the first person, which is always going to escape third-person, objective description - one of the points coming out of the 'Blind Spot of Science' article a few months back (which again, elicited remarkable hostility.)
Ah, newstime. Got to catch up on Brexit.
L. Ron Hubbard is a recognized luminary of Scientology, a profound expert on the practice of dianetics, and articulated a fully self consistent cosmology. It is a widely practiced religion, with texts and practices, steeped in ritual. But I doubt you care about that, because it's not what you believe.
Quoting Wayfarer
I understand, the reason you argue in this way is because you know you can't demonstrate any of your points. But that's not a deficit of your thinking style, or the thinking style which is consistent with your beliefs, that's a deficiency in truth and understanding.
So, charitably, you argue in a way in which you do not seek to demonstrate the truth of your beliefs to others. You use the trappings of rational argument and evidence, historical precedent, interpretation of science, insofar as it is consistent with your "first person understanding" to invite people to see the world as you do.
This isn't philosophy, this is a soft sell.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
Absolutely priceless @fdrake, you couldn't have elicited a more satirical response if you'd scripted it deliberately.
Secular culture by its very constitution provides no criterion for differentiating Scientology from Catholicism, but I think it's a crock, and Hubbard was a fraud.
Quoting fdrake
My beliefs are generally compatible with Christian Platonism, which I often argue for. But you have to be willing to accept the premisses, and no better thread than this to demonstrate the implications of that, eh?
As it is, I argue that the kind of materialist theory of mind that Dennett and others argue for, adopts the rhetorical and technical vocabulary of philosophy, to argue that wisdom proper, sapience, is an illusory byproducts of the Darwinian algorithm - in other words, it inverts philosophy, or turns it against itself.
Quoting fdrake
Again - this is a thread about (a)theism, right? So the implications of my philosophy are, let's say, spiritual if not religious. So if you're interacting with atheism, then what would it take to 'demonstrate' it? You know the scholastic 'proofs of God' were never intended as rhetorical or apologetic tools to convert the unbeliever; they were exercises of edification for the faithful.
No you don't though. This is a pet peeve of mine and its happened twice in this thread now (I restrained myself the first time). You don't 'argue that...' you just 'say that...'. It annoys me when people try to engross a personal arbitrary opinion by prefacing it with "I'd argue that...". If you have an actual argument, just present it, there's no need to drum up an audience first.
This argument goes back to Aristotle, and I think it's sound. I furthermore believe that the basic premise of modern materialism is that 'mind is what brain does', and that if this is not the case, then the whole structure falls.
Actually yeah it does. Catholicism is an old religion with a storied history, it's worldwide, commonly accepted, has had professional theologians for years, believes in Jesus etc. Scientology is a recently invented cult authored by a terrible science fiction writer structured like a pyramid scheme. You can secularly distinguish them very easily, using stuff that does not commit you to the truth of any account.
Quoting Wayfarer
Exactly! Someone has to buy in partially for a soft sell to work. Also note: as expected, you are saying that your beliefs are consistent with something without arguing for their truth. You give me suggestions that, if I accept, validate your beliefs, but they do not demonstrate them.
This is exactly the structure I spoke about.
Quoting Wayfarer
What's your alternative? I suppose you can't say, because that's "third person".
Quoting Wayfarer
Tell me what you believe, and I'll tell you if I think it's false. Sound good?
I can guess what you believe, but I don't think you'd ever publicly assent to any of it.
(1) Reality is a collective idea, everything in it is an idea.
(2) Reality is continuously created by acts of understanding.
(3) Acts of reason are just a subset of acts of understanding.
(3a) Over emphasising reason blinkers us to the true nature of reality.
(4) Evolution is false.
(4a) Evolution is false because thoughts being derived from or generated by or being causally involved with material substrates goes against (2) and (3).
(4b) Secular understanding of evolution is a particularly pernicious and persuasive ideology that stops us from understanding the true nature of reality as referenced in (2) and (3).
(5) Mystical understanding "resonates" with the true nature of the reality, grasping it in its act of continual creation.
Excellent, thanks. But all the same, if it comes to 'freedom of religion' many jurisdictions are unable to differentiate them. Here in Australia, they're tax exempt, and if you suggested taxing them, you can bet the radio shock jocks would all say 'then tax the Church too'.
Quoting fdrake
You mean, 'what are the alternatives to neo-darwinian materialism?' How much time do you have? So - the three historical schools of philosophy that I most admire, are Christian Platonism, Advaita Vedanta, and Mah?y?na Buddhism. So my personal philosophy is syncretic in some ways. I'm very drawn to Buddhism and have been practicing Buddhist meditation for many decades, but my Christian culture has inculcated me with some archetypes that I just can't shake.
Quoting fdrake
Well, I don't know! I'm agnostic in the sense that I acknowledge that what I sense through intuition is also over my cognitive horizon, so to speak. So I'm a seeker, I'm not claiming to have arrived at any grand understanding.
But one thing I will say is this: that we live in a 'meaning-world' in the sense meant by Husserl, and that physics is a product of that meaning-world, rather than vice versa. I question the notion that mind is a product of evolutionary biology. And I question it, because we evolve to the point of being meaning-seeking and meaning-creating, and thereby transcend the biological. At that point we're no longer comprehensible in strictly Darwinian terms.
Whereas the secular~scientific mainstream view is that we must be that, because if you remove the religious mythology, that's what remains.
Hey, I wrote this before your post above this one appears, but I think it's pretty close, although I think some of it is too 'new age' for my liking. Like, I don't deny *any* of the facts of evolution or cosmology or any of the other sciences - to me, the question is about meaning and interpretation. Whereas in the secular view, meaning *can only be* subjective and personal.
But you do think they're over emphasised in our understanding of the true nature of reality? I do not.
(1) A human mind requires its associated human body to exist for that mind to exist (Y/N)?
(2) Humans were preceded historically by the universe without us (Y/N)?
(3) Human minds are ape minds. (Y/N)?
(4) Ape minds evolved along with ape bodies. (Y/N)?
Quoting Wayfarer
It seems to me you want to have your cake and eat it too. Introducing a distinction between 'third person' and 'first person' knowledge, only to collapse it all down into 'first person'; which is nevertheless the only way the truth of things in general can be revealed.
Subjective opinion. If we accept this is true, we've already accepted that 'meaning' is not physical in any way, which is the crux of the matter.
Re-affirmation.
Subjective opinion. Again, if we accept this, we've simply eliminated, without argument, the eliminative position already.
Subjective opinion. Obviously eliminative materialists think they can be identified with physical processes in the brain. No further explanation is given of why this author thinks they can't beyond the fact that it doesn't match with the previously stated subjective opinion.
"If you believe A then B follows". But the debate is about A, not about whether B follows from it.
This is the issue that @fdrake has already highlighted above. You have to buy into the main crucial beliefs, only then do the utterly trivial conclusions follow from them. The debate - atheism/theism, idealism/physicalism...is about the very premises you present as axiomatic to your 'arguments'. So you're not arguing in favour of one position, you're presuming one position and arguing that trivial truisms follow once you've accepted it.
Modern thought is not over-emphasizing reason. It's over-emphasizing sensate values, what can be weighed, measured, felt and touched. That's what 'empiricism' means, after all - we have to sensorily experience it for it to be real (where 'sensorily experience' includes instruments.)
Platonist philosophy, by contrast, used reason to point at that which is beyond reason - I doubt the modern philosophical lexicon even has a category for that nowadays (because transcendent, which modern mind automatically closes down - danger, does not compute.)
So the modern approach is fundamentally instrumental - it is concerned, not with what is true, but with what works, what produces results. (I have the idea that this was behind the New Left criticism of the 'instrumentalisation of reason', was it not? Also see Sorokin on Sensate Culture.) Not knocking 'what works' - we need plenty of it, tons of it, even to survive. And I have no doubt about the material efficacy of modern science, we see it every day.
Quoting fdrake
Temporally, yes. But humans are the universe coming to understand itself. 'Scientists', said Bohr, 'are just an atom's way of looking at itself'.
Quoting fdrake
No. We are 'sapiens', and it means something, although many people don't seem to realise it.
Not a subjective opinion. A matter of fact. And all the rest of what you write is as much 're-affirmation' of what you think, as you're attributing to me.
Quoting Isaac
To indulge you - 'arguments' are not found anywhere in neurological data or brain science. Arguments are intentional in nature. You will never find, in brain science, anything which accounts for the insight of 'A=A'. On the contrary, you must first be able to grasp that "A=A" before you can even study, let alone devise, brain science, or any other science. Most modern thinking operates on the lazy assumption that science has/can/will understood the causal pathway between neurological data and logic, but it hasn't/can't/won't. You say
Quoting Isaac
That's already a debate about causal relationships between brain and mind. 'A' is not something self-existent, it's a premise that you need to establish by reasoned argument, and that is an operation of thought, you will never find it on a slide.
Quoting Isaac
Right. And from every interaction with you, I come away thinking you don't see them, which is why I generally don't bother. So don't mistake my lack of arguing for indolence, I'm actually a busy person.
This kind of approach suffuces philosophical discussion here "it seems obvious to me, therefore it's a fact of reality"
It seems obvious to you that brain processes are devoid of some 'real' property called 'meaning' - therefore it must be a fact that they are.
It seems obvious to you that being Sapiens 'means something' therefore it must be a fact and others simply haven't realised it.
It seems obvious to you that we must 'grasp' the law of identity before study, therefore it must be a fact.
It's seems morality is categorical, number is real, consciousness is real... And so they must all be facts.
How do you know that what seems to you to be the case has any bearing at all on what actually is the case?
You can't argue with someone who doesn't understand the argument, which you plainly don't. Yes, it's presented in a peremptory form - as I said, I'm busy - but it's a sound argument, which you show no sign of having comprehended, let alone answered.
Ahh. Back to this again. Another common theme here "you don't understand".
Basically half the threads here could be summarised as "I feel like X is the case therefore it is the case, if you don't agree with me it's because you don't understand the argument"
Quoting Wayfarer
Are you sure you're not over emphasising the role of sensate values by basing your worldview off of experiences of revelation? You seem fundamentally contradictory on this point.
On the one hand, you consider science as reductive to the notion of first person experience; nevertheless you believe that (mystical) first person experiences (of revelation) are a better revealer of truth.
[quote=Isaac]"If you believe A then B follows". But the debate is about A, not about whether B follows from it.
This is the issue that @fdrake has already highlighted above. You have to buy into the main crucial beliefs, only then do the utterly trivial conclusions follow from them. The debate - atheism/theism, idealism/physicalism...is about the very premises you present as axiomatic to your 'arguments'. So you're not arguing in favour of one position, you're presuming one position and arguing that trivial truisms follow once you've accepted it.[/quote]
[quote=Isaac]This kind of approach suffuces philosophical discussion here "it seems obvious to me, therefore it's a fact of reality"[/quote]
[quote=Isaac]How do you know that what seems to you to be the case has any bearing at all on what actually is the case?[/quote]
[quote=Isaac]Basically half the threads here could be summarised as "I feel like X is the case therefore it is the case, if you don't agree with me it's because you don't understand the argument"[/quote]
:clap:
@Wayfarer -
I'm still waiting (since 10/12) for you to explain - demonstrate, and not merely assert - in what way, or sense, "philosophical/scientific materialism is fallacious". :chin:
Interesting...seems contradictory...what is causing your sense of wonder about these things?
Otherwise, in a failed attempt to speculate your situation, I'm left with the following quote from cognitive Science: 'What you are not, you cannot perceive to understand; it cannot communicate itself to you'.
Be well.
Your Interesting thought about drug induced mental phenomena, made me think of this study:
"IFAS researchers had dosed a total of 22 other men for the creativity study, including a theoretical mathematician, an electronics engineer, a furniture designer, and a commercial artist. By including only those whose jobs involved the hard sciences (the lack of a single female participant says much about mid-century career options for women), they sought to examine the effects of LSD on both visionary and analytical thinking. Such a group offered an additional bonus: Anything they produced during the study would be subsequently scrutinized by departmental chairs, zoning boards, review panels, corporate clients, and the like, thus providing a real-world, unbiased yardstick for their results."
"In surveys administered shortly after their LSD-enhanced creativity sessions, the study volunteers, some of the best and brightest in their fields, sounded like tripped-out neopagans at a backwoods gathering. Their minds, they said, had blossomed and contracted with the universe. They’d beheld irregular but clean geometrical patterns glistening into infinity, felt a rightness before solutions manifested, and even shapeshifted into relevant formulas, concepts, and raw materials."
"But here’s the clincher. After their 5HT2A neural receptors simmered down, they remained firm: LSD absolutely had helped them solve their complex, seemingly intractable problems. And the establishment agreed. The 26 men unleashed a slew of widely embraced innovations shortly after their LSD experiences, including a mathematical theorem for NOR gate circuits, a conceptual model of a photon, a linear electron accelerator beam-steering device, a new design for the vibratory microtome, a technical improvement of the magnetic tape recorder, blueprints for a private residency and an arts-and-crafts shopping plaza, and a space probe experiment designed to measure solar properties. Fadiman and his colleagues published these jaw-dropping results and closed shop."
"At a congressional subcommittee hearing that year, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy grilled FDA regulators about their ban on LSD studies: “Why, if they were worthwhile six months ago, why aren’t they worthwhile now?” For him, the ban was personal, too: His wife, Ethel, had received LSD-augmented therapy in Vancouver. “Perhaps to some extent we have lost sight of the fact that it”—Sen. Kennedy was referring specifically to LSD here—“can be very, very helpful in our society if used properly.”
Janus, notwithstanding the legitimate health concerns and/or side effects from foregoing study, my question is:
1. Consider the natural drugs the body produces: dopamine endorphins and serotonin.
2. Consider the aforementioned LSD drug induced experiment… .
Could there me more to the conscious mind than just things like eating, drinking, procreating, sleeping et al.?
Conversely, Is there a mystery at the end of the universe? If not, why not?
How so?
Interesting...seems contradictory...what is causing your sense of wonder about these things?
You've just re-posted. I was asking what it was about my statement which seemed contradictory to you.
You said atheists aren't concerned about asking questions, and I said: Interesting...seems contradictory...what is causing your sense of wonder about these things?
Where did I say atheists aren't concerned with asking questions?
Okay, let's be brutally honest with each other: why do you even care?
Care about what, you're not making any sense.
....care about your Atheism v. Theism concerns?
I don't really care what other people believe unless it justifies actions which I think are immoral (which religious beliefs sometimes does).
I care very much about my beliefs though. It's important to me that they are useful, consistent and not overwhelmed by empirical evidence to the contrary (where such is relevant).
To this latter aim, I'll robustly defend my beliefs as best I can, and try to show inconsistencies and contrary evidence in competing beliefs, just to make sure they are not something I might be advised to adopt myself.
What has any of this got to do with the question of whether theism causes an increase or a decrease in enquiry?
Okay, take a deep breath, you haven't explained why you care about those beliefs?
For example, why would you care about inconsistencies?
You asked me why I cared about the atheim/theism propositions. As has been painstakingly explained to you an infuriating number of times atheism is nothing more than the lack of belief in god(s). It has no bearing whatsoever on the rest of one's beliefs which might take any position at all.
As to your completely unrelated question...
Quoting 3017amen
It's a habit of thinking which I've learned and find useful. I don't believe there are no other equally useful habits, but this is the one I've become used to so it is the one I continue to use.
We are talking past each other. Again, why do you care to take a position on the subject matter?
Another example, once again, you said: Quoting Isaac
Why is that useful, for what purpose?
I've just explained that...
Quoting Isaac
That is why I care to take a position about the subject. If there's something there you don't understand, then ask about that thing, but please don't just act as if I haven't answered, it's insulting.
Quoting 3017amen
It's useful for me to achieve the things I want to achieve. As to why it's useful, my guess is that the brain, being a machine of sorts, only works within certain parameters. Just like I wouldn't try flying in a car,. It doesn't mean flying is impossible, or that travel on the ground is somehow fundamental to the universe. It's just what cars do best. I wouldn't try thinking inconsistently with a brain, it's just not designed to do that.
You said atheism is a lack of belief in a god or gods. Then my question was why do you care to take a position on the subject. Unless I'm mistaken you replied with:
1. you don't care about other's beliefs with some exceptions
2. you very much care about you own beliefs
3. you seemingly enjoy defending those beliefs
But you haven't explained why you care about those things in themselves/to begin with(?) In other words, you're presuming those things are important for some reason, but you haven't explained the reason why, you yourself as a human being, care about those things.
But then, in your attempt to speak to that question you said: " It's useful for me to achieve the things I want to achieve. As to why it's useful, my guess is that the brain, being a machine of sorts, only works within certain parameters."
In making progress then with your guess in reasoning, the two-part question becomes: why do you then feel the need to 'achieve', and what 'parameters' are you referring to in the human brain?
I can't possibly answer that question within the framework you've set up. If I answer "because of X", you'll say "but why is X?", then I answer "because of Y", and you'll say "but why is Y?".
At what point in the infinite ability to ask "but why?" are you going to be satisfied with the explanation?
Quoting 3017amen
I'm not "presuming those things are important for some reason", they are important to me, as far as I can tell. I don't need to provide a reason for it to be an accurate report of my state of mind.
If I say I'm in pain, I don't have to provide a reason why I think that, I just am in pain. If I say I like the colour green, I don't have to provide a reason why, it just is a feeling I have.
I might undertake a general investigation into why people like the colour green, or why people feel pain, but if I do so it will have two important features...
1. It will not in any way have any bearing on the fact that I like green or am in pain. I can't alter that fact by any empirical investigation.
2. It will have parameters as to what would constitute an explanation. Why - in terms of evolutionary selection, why - in terms of cultural influence, why - in terms of neurobiology. "Why?" just in general terms without any context is a nonsensical question, what could possibly constitute an answer other than the entire history of all reality?
The frame work is Existentialism. It started in the Book of Ecclesiastes.
Quoting Isaac
Okay, so what is that feeling? Otherwise, can you describe the color green in an objective way that appeals to reason, or some universal truth?
It will not in any way have any bearing on the fact that I like green or am in pain. I can't alter that fact by any empirical investigation.
Okay, got that. but why wouldn't all humans like green, instead of some other color?
Quoting Isaac
Sure, the 'whys' of existence are very perplexing. You've attempted some form of explanation that's making some progress, yet these very simple questions seem ironically nonsensical.
Does Atheism provide for such reasoning? You don't have to answer right now, but I would be interested in answers to the aforementioned questions, though, hence: "...they are important to me, as far as I can tell."
As far as you can tell, what?
It makes no difference what its name is or where it started it's unworkable.
Quoting 3017amen
It's not that they're perplexing. I'm asking you about where you stop what is clearly an infinite process. You can continue to ask "why?" to every explanation given, for ever. What's the point?
Really, it's just extremely childish of you to answer all of my points with "but why?" we used to do that as kids to annoy the teacher. It's rather boring.
If you're not going to engage with any of the issues here in a grown up manner there's not much point in continuing this discussion.
So, one last time - in what context do you want my answer to your question "why?"? Proximate cause, evolutionary origin, biological function, personal life strategy, physical law... "Why?" on its own doesn't make any sense.
Isaac, it's really really simple. I'm trying to understand how the Atheists account for existential questions.
I completely understand your frustration. They are simple questions, yet ironically not simple at all.
This does not mean that they agree with what is presented. Rather, they will be able to see what is being said from the point of view of the writer.
I'd suggest that this is what you are missing here. You find the answers given unsatisfactory, because you have not seen how they work for an atheist. SO you insist on asking how an atheist will answer the Existential Questions, as if these were of ultimate import; you have not noticed that for an atheist, these questions have no such import.
Hence your frustration with this discussion.
I'm assuming that post was for Isaac (you had my name there...) ?
Otherwise, glad you joined Banno! I'm assuming you won't be able to answer any of those concerns?
I can't possibly speak for all atheists because your questions have nothing whatsoever to do with atheism, but by existential questions, I assume you mean...
Quoting 3017amen
So...
- Does mathematical abstract ability confer any survival advantage?
No, but I suspect the logical thinking habits on which it is based do. I'm a Ramseyan pragmatist when it comes to things like rationality and logic.
- Does music theory have any biological significance at all?
I think it could. Possibly I could see a way in which predicting meaning from voice tone could be advantageous and as the human voice box is about vibrations it's no surprise the system we use for describing vibrations also describes music. But in the large part I think of it like maths, a massive construction built on very small biological foundations.
- Do all events must have a cause?
No. Causation is way of thinking about the world, not necessarily a feature of it.
- True, false or something else?
Doesn't make any sense. Just because you can say something, doesn't make it meaningful.
- Is love a phenomenon or is it all logical?
I reject the dichotomy. A phenomena is a feature of the world, logical describes a method of thinking. Its like asking whether something is green or triangular.
- Do any of those suggest life might be a little mysterious?
Yes.
So now what?
Quoting Banno
There's no helping some people!
It becomes harder to assume sincerity when @3017amen continues to ask questions that have been answered multiple times by various folk, and in much the same way.
Oh okay no worries I understand.
LOL
I'm not seeing the connection between the account of the LSD study and these questions but I'll answer them anyway.
Of course there is more to the conscious mind than just the things you mention; there is logic, study, observation, technology, creativity, philosophy...need I go on?
I'm not sure what you mean by a "mystery at the end of the universe". Are you referencing Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?
Of course the existence of the Universe, of anything at all, is in a sense a mystery. It is a mystery in the sense that we can ask, but cannot answer, the "why" or even the final "how" question. It is a mystery because any and all of our models are not, definitely or comprehensively, what they are modeling.The fact that we can ask a question does not entail that there must be an answer "out there" or even "in here" somewhere.
Does theism provide a satisfying answer for you? If so, do you think everyone would, should or even could, find that answer satisfying? Personally I find the question satisfying; I mean the fact that the question is possible, and that it can lead to all kinds of creative exercises of the imagination, which I value greatly. I think it is a wonderful thing that there can be no definitive answer such as "God". God is not a definite answer at all, but merely a flickering mirage of a definitive answer or, if hypostatized, then a frozen, lifeless dogma.
You must admit that the theistic "answer" can never be definitive or testable; if it were we would all be theists, or we would all be atheists. One needs to have a reason to be a theist, and all such reasons are emotional, or cultural, I would opine.
That's why your theism is a groundless irrational leap of faith, and you should be content with that instead of performing a contradiction in coming on here and asserting that there are grounds for it, even though you have not, and very obviously cannot, say what those grounds are.
Does Atheism provide for such reasoning?[/quote]
Since you question whether of not 'atheism' has (the?) "whys", it's not at all a stretch to assume you believe not-atheism, or theism, "provides" them; and the kind of "whys" this assumption implies, then, is Ultimate - (the?) why of all whys, so to speak. Well, 3017, to my way of free thinking, the only Ultimate Why which does not beg the question ad infinitum is There Is No Ultimate Why ..., and that otherwise proximate "whys" have sense only when either (A) addressed (e.g. as 'existential' aporia) to intentional agents or (B) posed as conjectures about phenomena (i.e. physical transformations) as theoretically generalized How explanations. For me, like many (not-nihilistic) Free thinkers, Atheists/Non-theists, Absurdists et al, proximate whys suffice.
[quote=Banno]It becomes harder to assume sincerity when @3017amen continues to ask questions that have been answered multiple times by various folk, and in much the same way.[/quote]
No doubt. Some members seem to get off posting nothing but flypaper ... :yawn:
I regard science as 'reductionist' insofar as it reduces the scope of discourse exclusively to the objective domain.
Look at it philosophically. The implicit reality of objective knowledge is 'to be a subject situated in relation to a domain of objects and forces'.
[quote=Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos p35-36]Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatio-temporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatio-temporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. [/quote]
That is the assumed framework of modern science, and what we implicitly situate ourselves in, as an evolved species, as a phenomenal being, in a objective sense.
But among the things assigned by this move to the 'subjective domain' is 'the observing intellect', which then forgets its own role in the construction of the scientific worldview (as discussed in The Blind Spot of Science and the Neglect of Lived Experience). Or, as Maritain put it, 'what the Empiricist speaks of and describes as "sense-knowledge" is not exactly sense-knowledge, but sense-knowledge plus unconsciously introduced intellective ingredients -- sense-knowledge in which he has made room for reason without recognizing it'. This of course reaches its most explicit expression in eliminative materialism, which literally claims that the observing mind is altogether unreal, and is the cumulative output of millions of autonomic cellular reactions. (But at least this does us the service of revealing the self-contradictory nature of materialist theory of mind.) And I claim that one of those 'unconsciously introduced ingredients IS physicalism.
But what all of this omits, is the acknowledge of the nature of being, the first-person perspective with all of its struggles and joys. It has no way of dealing with it, so relegates it to the personal (you can trace the consequence of Protestantism in this respect). But the spiritual or philosophical endeavour is situated in that larger canvas of the human condition and its meanings (which is articulated far more clearly in Continental philosophy (e.g. Heidegger, Habermas) than in Anglo-American analytical philosophy dominated as it is by scientism.) And that is where the domain of mysticism is applicable - to the sense of relatedness to the cosmos and to other beings, to find and tap that wellspring of compassion which alone makes life meaningful. That's what I regard as the philosophical quest.
:cool: If you explain it like you want to be understood, then I won't need you to understand it for me, Wayf. Y'know, I'm quite clever ... and I understand (at least suss out the gist of) Kant, Hegel, Laozi, the Qabala, Derrida & Žižek, for examples, just fine. Explain away!
For some reason, these discussions always seem to ignore ignosticism and it's twin sibling theological noncognitivism.
I find this to be the dubious bit. God and Not God are certainly positive and negative positions (which are exhaustive), but it only holds up when we treat 'God" as an abstract symbol (that we may equivocate and rationalize with ad hoc, which reveals that the claim(s) itself approaches meaninglessness).
To a Christian, Jesus is either the lord and savior, or he is not. But is it two alternative worldviews that exhaust possibilities? To a Buddhist, you either believe that Buddha was the most enlightened, or you do not. With all the other gods/religions and accompanying moral/cultural packaging, associating "the other side" with one particular world view means defining "the other side" from an egocentric starting point.
"They" are "what we are not" is simply the backwards description of atheists. Atheists lack positive belief in theism, god, or gods; nothing less, but sometimes more.
Quoting Janus
But how much deviation and cross-over is there within theistic beliefs,and between the worldviews of theists and atheists? And how blurry therefore must the label "atheism" therefore become?
I say we should not attach extra associations to the term that aren't necessarily there.
Quoting Janus
Yea I realized my assumption half way through writing that post, but I figured it would not really impact meat of our discussion, and it helped me to express my position rhetorically (my apologies).
I apologize for the snide remark, I deleted it but alas not fast enough.
On my evening walk tonight I was reflecting on this whole debate about existential questions being provoked by or provoking religious belief and something kind of interesting struck me. This is kind of a long personal narrative, with a relevant moral by the end.
For almost my entire life I've been a natural Absurdist, not in the sense that I'd read and endorsed Camus, but in that by the time I eventually did get around to reading him, his third approach to the Absurd, besides nihilism and existentialism, seemed a big "no duh" to me. Yeah, obviously, you don't just give up, or retreat into a happy fantasy, you do whatever you can with life in the moment and don't stress and worry about things you can't control. Or, in terms of the famous Serenity Prayer, having both the serenity to accept things I can't change and the courage to change things I can came easy to me (and the only point of stress was trying to tell the difference: is this a fight I should fight or something I should just let slide?)
So people fretting about "the meaning of life" always seemed silly to me, almost an anti-philosophical question, or a parody of real philosophy. You need a method of telling true from false and a method of telling good from bad, sure, and there's lots of interesting philosophical questions to investigate to figure out what's the right way of doing either of those, but those are things that can be done, there are solutions (even if not everybody agrees on which is the right one), and what more do you want besides that? What is this "meaning of life" you're looking for? Whats does "meaning" even mean to you!? (That interrobang is to convey past-me's frustration with this topic, not present-me).
But then early last winter something happened to me. I thought I caught some kind of horrible cold or flu at first, but then I feared it might be something worse. I was congested and nauseous, sure, but also short of breath, constipated, hungry and full at the same time, hot and cold at the same time, my limbs started going numb, I was dizzy, my heart was pounding and racing, and eventually I couldn't sleep, at all, for a week straight. I thought I was having some kind of heart problem, I was genuinely afraid I was about to die, so I went to my doctor, and she said... that's anxiety. Those are all symptoms of anxiety, the circulatory and respiratory problems are all from sympathetic nervous system activation, the digestive problems are all from the consequent suppression of the parasympathetic nervous system. I was having a panic attack. One big continuous panic attack that wouldn't stop, but still.
"But doc", I said, "I'm not anxious about anything, other than now I'm anxious about dying from whatever the fuck is happening to my body." I had thought that I had "had anxiety" for at least a decade prior, but it was never anything even remotely like this; I now think I never actually had anxiety at all until this winter, I just had stress about real problems in my life. But my life was going fine at the time this started, there was nothing to feel anxious about, and I didn't feel like I was anxious about anything, I just felt like my body was freaking out for no reason. She gave me some medicines and prescribed some lifestyle changes to help mitigate the problem, and I started sleeping some again, and digesting a little bit, and so being less congested, and most of the severe physical symptoms went away for the most part, but the baseline jitters remained, feelings that I could then recognize as clearly anxiety, now that the flu-like side-effects of that were gone.
So months and months wore on, and though I hadn't started out feeling anxious about anything, I found things to be anxious about. Things I had always known about, nothing new that I learned, just stuff I had always been aware of and prudently not stressed about because there's no point in stressing about it, I suddenly found consuming my every waking thought. Fear of sickness and aging and my own death, fear of the collapse of civilization due to things like climate change or nuclear war, fear of the death of the Earth itself over the natural evolution of the sun, and most of all fear of the "inevitable" heat death of the universe. Even though that's the most remote of those things to worry about, it's the one I fixated on the most.
I tried to turn my mind to unimportant things in the present to distract myself, but all of the media I consumed was full of tragedy and conflict and suffering and death, which I used to find poignant and beautiful, but now it just filled me with horror. Even cute little animals turned dark in my mind, as facts about the food chain and of how death drives evolution, which had just been abstract science facts to me before, suddenly made all of sentient existence open up like a gaping maw of horror, all of reality seeming like a terrifying pointless meat grinder, all beautiful young creatures being born full of hope and blissfully unaware of how they were already falling to their gruesome deaths. I found myself unable to stomach the thought of eating meat in light of that, and became a vegetarian because of it.
So I started searching for "the meaning of life". I didn't even know what I was looking for, just some thought to alleviate that anxiety about the horror of reality. I had always found myself fantasizing about things being better in whatever way was stressing me out before, but now I found myself unable to even think of what "better" could possibly be. I found myself wanting to turn to religion, wishing that I could believe, but I couldn't, not with everything I already knew about philosophy and science, and I couldn't even find comfort in fantasizing about what if religious beliefs were true, because they didn't offer any resolution to the fundamental problems that were really twisting me up inside.
I felt like my whole life I had been somehow ignoring this huge problem that now consumed me; I had known all the facts I knew now, about all of those things I was so worked up and afraid of, but the significance of them hadn't sunk in ever before, and now it was. A part of me wished that I could go back to that ignorant bliss, but then another part of me, the part of me that never turns away from a problem until it's solved, said "No! Keep thinking about this until you think of a way out of it!"
But then, over the course of this past year since that all started, sometimes, the anxiety would subside. I would go back to feeling the way I always used to feel, and look back on earlier that day or earlier that week when I was all worked up about all of that stuff, and feel like I had been silly to feel that way, and that the calm, relaxed attitude I now had toward the same facts, the kind of attitude I had always had my whole life, was a much more prudent way of thinking. I didn't feel like I was hiding in ignorant bliss, I was remembering exactly all of the thoughts that I had been so worked up about, but in my calm state of mind, I could see how pointless it was to worry about them, to worry about the "meaninglessness of life". And then when I went back into an anxious state again, I would try desperately to remember whatever it was that I had thought to clear my mind before, I felt like I had found some solution and then forgotten it and couldn't get it back now. But when I "got it back", and was clear-minded again, there wasn't any solution: rather, it was clear that it was a phantom problem that I was stressing about in my anxious state, a vaguely imagined non-question to which no answer could be satisfactory.
I'm still struggling with that anxiety condition even now. I haven't figured out what brought it on yet, and I haven't made it go away completely, though it seems to be going away for longer and longer stretches. Just three days ago I was crying inconsolably about nothing. Yesterday I was gripped with horror about how I would spend eternity even if I did get to live forever. This morning I could barely haul myself out of bed. But right now, I don't even know why I felt that way; it seems like such an obvious non-problem. Even writing all of the above didn't make my feel anxious, though I'm afraid re-reading it in the future when I'm not so clear-minded it might.
The moral of this long story is that, having quickly shifted back and forth between those two kinds of mindsets a lot over the past year, I'm coming around to the view that existential angst is literally just a mental health condition, and that "what is the meaning of life?" is not a meaningful question, and just asking it actually creates the unsolvable problem it's in search of a solution for. That the way my mind worked for most of my life, and is graciously working for the moment tonight, is the healthier, saner, more functional way for a mind to work, than the way that it has been working for too much of the past year, which seems to also be the way that many other people's minds have worked for much of their lives. I'm not saying that "all theists are crazy" or anything like that, but rather, with great sympathy for people who have maybe suffered from what's been afflicting me this year for all of their lives, I'm saying that maybe there's not a philosophical solution to that problem, maybe there's only a medical one.
(I've also found myself changing to be much more "like normal people" in other ways over the course of this year of anxiety. I used to be happiest alone with my own thoughts and in the dark of night, but now when I'm anxious the only little bit of respite is the company of other people and sunshine and flowers. I've actually noticed myself becoming more "like normal people" in various other ways slowly over the course of my life too, even before this year, in ways that I recognize as effects of the traumas of life; and things that I used to see as inherent deficiencies of "normal people" I now see more sympathetically as scars of the hard lives they've had to live).
On other notes:
Quoting EricH
I would count ignosticism as a kind of atheism (because holding "God" to be a meaningless term implies you would not agree with the meaningless proposition "God exists"), and theological noncognitivism as a kind of theism (because you still hold that "God exists" is "true", even if that's not in the usual cognitive sense of the word; you would still assent when people say that phrase, agreeing with the emotive import of it).
But I hadn't before considered the dual relationship between those two positions, so thank you for pointing that out. Theological noncognitivism is basically theist ignosticism, or conversely ignoticism is atheist noncognitivism.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
True, but the "something more" is not definitionally relevant. People who don't play tennis may do many other activities, but none of those other activities are either necessary nor sufficient to be a "non-tennis player"; all that phrase means is that you don't play tennis.
And for the purposes of this thread at least, it doesn't matter what "tennis" really means, just whether or not you'd say you "play tennis", whatever that means to you.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is so lazy. I think you're speaking from a place of ignorance about how science studies humanity. I read a paper about traumatic stress yesterday. It contained:
(1) Analysis of self reports; felt intensities, profiles of feeling, social contexts they're in. From a broad spectrum of traumatic stress survivors (Holocaust survivors, Chicago kids who'd been stabbed, women who'd been raped, other instances...). They were aggregated from detailed first person accounts.
(2) Some of these people were also studied with blood tests, brain hormone levels, at different times after the traumatic incident(s), the properties of their neural endocrinology was interpretively but not reductively-causally linked to their first person reports. The paper even provided a lot of evidence for (not direct quote) "psychological symptomatology can be constant within person even when their neural endocrinology changes"; IE, a non-reductive account of the first person affect and the third person brain state. So they analysed how two hormones worked, how they worked in incidents of traumatic stress, the first person feeling dynamics that come along with the hormone dynamics etc etc. Some of this was based in mathematical models of hormone feedback which were then used in tandem with the self reports and the endocrinology to form a integrated complex system account of traumatic stress.
(3) They looked at hyper-vigilance and other traumatic coping mechanisms (avoidance, dissociation etc.) in evolutionary game theory in terms, first person terms, when they're likely to develop into pathology, how they develop into pathology (long term studies of people exposed to trauma), the neurological differences between those who developed pathologically and those who didn't, the symptomatology of both cases...
(4) There's more but I've made my point.
This analysis was phenomenological, historical, experimental, mathematical, sociological, and clinical all at the same time. Scientists reason like this. You're just inventing easily refutable bogeymen.
Sure it's an irrational leap. What's irrational in world..., until there are answer's to Existential questions rationality remains a mystery.
Thanks for your reply by the way!
I'm not really addressing what social scientists do, or how science on that level operates. I studied and greatly enjoyed anthropology, and I've also got a lot out of sociology of religion - Weber and Peter Berger, and so on. I'm talking about a specific claim, which is reductionism in philosophy, the same subject that Nagel has dealt with across his books. You actually don't show a lot of interest in that subject, or knowledge of it. Perhaps you ought to have a read of his Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament. Like many of his writings on this subject, it is especially useful because he's not himself in the least religious, but has a detached understanding of the issue.
Does anyone who disagrees with you?
Just as an possible way of approaching this problem, can you name, and outline the argument of, an author who you think is interested in the subject, does have some knowledge and understanding of it, yet still disagrees with your position?
It's not that I think everyone else is wrong'. There are genuinely very few people on here whose interests converge with mine, and when I try to explain it, the discussion goes off on a tangent.
That point we were discussing earlier about 'meaning and matter' - you dismissed that with 'oh well, that's just subjective, it doesn't mean anything'. There are books about the subject, it's basic to semiotics and biosemiotics, so if someone just breezes in and dismisses it, it's like what's the point of trying to pursue it?
I've read a lot of fdrake's posts, and he's a mod here, always impartial, balanced and fair, but from what he writes, his background and interest is engineering and science, not philosophy per se. That is not a pejorative. I have utmost respect for science and engineering. And I don't consider myself an expert in the subject of philosophy either, but I think I have an insight into some specific topics and ideas which lead into a genuine understanding of transcendental philosophy. But what it takes to understand that is a particular mode or kind of understanding which is vastly different to modern thought, and besides most people are inclined to think that 'the transcendent' is a byword for nonsense. So not only do they not understand it, they're hostile towards it.
So, this style of philosophy I'm pursuing is in some respects 'religious', and that pushes buttons for a lot of people. Often they don't even consciously understand that, it just works that way. Sometimes I refer to Pierre Hadot, a French scholar of philosophy:
IETP
So, it's not as if I'm saying that you're wrong, or fdrake is wrong - I'm trying to get in synch with a way of being that is radically different from modern culture. In some ways it appears reactionary, even. From that perspective, a lot of 'modern thought' is mistaken.
The philosophers I now have most respect for are Thomists. But of course, most of them are Catholic, and even though I'm very drawn to their intellectual principles, I could never convert to Catholicism, or even Christianity, I don't think.
Anyway - the upshot is, I'm naturally sceptical of the mainstream secular-scientific attitude, which is basically the Western intellectual heritage, sans belief in God. But take out belief in God, and then 'things fall apart'; there's literally no reason for anything to exist. If you look at the nonsense that's going in theoretical physics, it's quite feasible that much of it is a complete dead-end. But I don't want to evangalise 'belief in God' - I'm trying to understand what's behind it all, where that belief originates, because I'm sure it originates in something real, but something very difficult to realise and understand.
Sorry for the rant. I'm supposed to be meditating.
Let's not forget that every scientific observation is also someone personal experience. Then entire displine is formed in the aggregate of our personal experiences.
What limit seems meaningless to science and what Wayfarer seems concerned about holding is some notion of consciousness which is beyond experience. A consciousness which is not any instance of first person experience, but some notion of a necessary type which makes our experiences possible.
This does not make sense. If consciousness is a necessary type, it has no counterfactual. In this situation we have no context to claim a juxtaposition of the presence or absence of consciousness. This consciousness would be necessary and couldn't be any sort of account of instances which come in and out of being.
I think this is an interesting kind of... inverse, maybe?... of my view on supernaturalism. The way I would define "natural", everything is necessarily natural, so the very concept of anything supernatural is simply incoherent.
Although, I suppose it's also very similar to my view on phenomenal consciousness, and why I think access consciousness is the more interesting and useful concept. I'm a panpsychist about phenomenal consciousness, and that doesn't mean very much to me -- it just means that whatever metaphysical stuff is going on such that I have a first-person experience, that kind of thing doesn't magically appear at some point in my development, it's also going on in all the stuff I'm made of and the stuff that's made of and so on down to the quarks and such, and then everything else built out of those has that stuff going on too, which makes that kind of stuff-going-on not really of much interest because it doesn't differentiate between me and, say, a rock, or a wisp of cloud. The interesting stuff that can be used to differentiate things is functionality, which is what varies between me and rocks and clouds and so on. A rock may have a "first-person experience", but like its behavior, it's not a very interesting one, because both experience and behavior vary with function, as function is literally the map from one to the other, and rocks have a very uninteresting function.
Yeah, I don't think that makes sense, either. What makes experiences possible, where we're talking about the first-person, phenomenal/subjective flow of data, is simply that it's a way that brains can work. Maybe it's a way some other things can work, too, but at the moment we don't know whether that's the case.
On the one hand I agree with you, but I think that these two distinctions make sense:
(1) Natural/artificial, or natural/made by persons, which is self-explanatory
and
(2) Natural/supernatural, where "supernatural" is simply denoting unusual, perhaps very rare and difficult-to-experience phenomena that we presently have no plausible natural explanation for. So "supernatural" would be relative to common, educated (mostly scientific) epistemological beliefs, and by its nature, it would be more dubious than natural phenomena until better-confirmed.
Fortunately this is a philosophy forum, so this psychological issue will never arise.
I think @Swan's observation pertains to the realm of "human nature", which is indeed very much a topic discussed in philosophy.
Maybe. Human nature, definitely. Human failings as causes of philosophical error seems like an unproductive irrelevance to me.
You are not addressing it, yes, you are bracketing it as if it's irrelevant. I don't believe it is as you emphasise:
Quoting Wayfarer
an importance of non-reduction. Which I do too, inappropriate reductionism is self harm using Occam's Razor; sometimes scientists and philosophers within domains; like physicists and philosophers of physics; take the conceptual grammars they work with as a given and apply them inappropriately. You don't need to care about the movement of atoms in people's bodies to make a good account of political power structures, or the neural representation mechanisms of syllogisms to understand maths. We agree strongly that framing; questioning styles; need to be tailored to and by the studied topic.
Reductionism un-asks, or renders always already unintelligible, important how questions; like "mental states supervene on neural states", or "chemical properties supervene on quantum dynamics"; the how is bracketed, as if it was of no relevance for the domain (just picking on supervenience because it's something I've been thinking about recently).
You seem to state that reductionism un-asks, or renders always already unintelligible questions in general which are relevant fo their studied topics; and with that I agree entirely. But I can agree entirely with you here because you're painting with far too broad a brush.
Quoting Wayfarer
I gave you an example of non-reductionist scientific work, bridging neuroscience, evolution, sociology and clinical psychology (and explaining/gesturing towards why it was non reductionist). It analysed first person reports, states of feeling and their patterns; how patterns between these different ontological registers intermingle (brain hormones + feelings + socialisation); and a clinical upshot of this. Science need not be reductionist, and need not generate reductionist worldviews. You surely agree with this if you:
Quoting Wayfarer
expressly don't deny any of it, and if your worldview is consistent with it, then - what? But your beliefs evidently do impinge upon these domains since:
Quoting Wayfarer
On the one hand you want to reserve an isolated realm for your philosophical speculation; rendering it out of the reach of science. On the other, you want to project the impact of your speculation back into the scientific domains!
I don't trust this.
Quoting Wayfarer
It's not a byword for nonsense; transcendence - when juxtaposed or contrasted with immanence, elevated above it - is a machine for making nonsense. Simultaneously a concept and a trauma of reason.
Human error is part of human nature, you're right. But @Swan was talking about a feature of human nature that we must observe, not imitate.
Errors by humans are part of human nature, and so are subjective human experiences. We can discuss both under the auspices of philosophy. You forcefully expressed that you are opposed to have them as topics of discussion. Twice you expressed that. Why?
You say that some errors lead to unporductive irrelevances to you. To me it appears very much like you only declare them irrelevant because you are uncomfortable with the fear that they may be true. So you attempt to throw them out. But that's not very philosophical of you... it is a psychological effect you are displaying.
So much for human nature at this point.
I've never taken supervenience to be reductive. It's a statement about a relation between two different things which is agnostic about that relation being identity. Reductionism is an identity relation.
I'm not sure if I am a wanker or a cunt.
Quoting fdrake
Not sure if I understand you, I probably don't. Anyway, can you give an example of a non-reductionist explanation of one thing in terms of something else? I mean, all explanations are in terms of something else, otherwise they'd be circular.
EDIT: I guess I'm asking the question, is non-reductive science ever explanatory? Maybe explanation is not science's only role, perhaps it's even a minor role.
Because this is a philosophy forum, and I'm a cunt. And I don't want people to keep pointing out that I'm a cunt when I'm trying to discuss philosophy. I come here to get away from my cuntishness, not have it shitted into my face by a high pressure rectum.
EDIT: I don't mean to suggest you in particular are a high pressure rectum. I mean it in a more generalised way.
I mean that philosophical positions are untrue not by virtue of why they come about (the genetic fallacy) by virtue of their (lack of) coherence or correspondence with reality, or something like that. Therefore going on about why, psychologically, someone believes such and such is not philosophy.
I agree that the first distinction is a useful one to make, but thought it was so self-explanatory as not to be worth mentioning. For the latter distinction, I would instead use the terms "normal"/"paranormal". Calling weird unexplained stuff "supernatural" suggests that it is somehow transcendent of the world that is amenable to having science done to it, but calling it "paranormal" is pretty much just calling it "weird", which is fine, nature is full of weird stuff, and we'll do science to it until it doesn't seem weird anymore.
Look at it like this: that the general acceptance of evolutionary theory carries with it - or may carry with it - philosophical implications that can be drawn, over and above those that are strictly speaking inherent in that discipline. And those are intrinsically reductionist. Specifically, in the realm of philosophical anthropology, what is (hu)man? The accepted wisdom is: a species of hominid. Which immediately locates human life within the horizons of biology; basically treats humans as no different in kind to animals and implicitly endorses a form of utilitarian ethos i.e. everything in service to the goal of propagation of the genome.
The suggestion that humans are different in kind to animals is extremely unpopular - it is allegedly associated with the Christian kind of 'chauvinism' which sees humans as 'lording it' over the animal kingdom. And for modern naturalism 'kinship with nature' and 'naturalness' are kinds of talismans for a dimly-remembered 'state of grace' rather like that enjoyed by Rousseau's 'noble savage'
But what this altogether occludes or conceals, is the possibility that the human really does embody spiritual intelligences or potentialities that are completely out of scope for biology as such. Alfred Russel Wallace certainly thought so:
[quote=Wallace]We thus find that the Darwinian theory, even when carried out to its extreme logical conclusion, not only does not oppose, but lends a decided support to, a belief in the spiritual nature of man. It shows us how man's body may have been developed from that of a lower animal form under the law of natural selection; but it also teaches us that we possess intellectual and moral faculties which could not have been so developed, but must have had another origin; and for this origin we can only find an adequate cause in the unseen universe of Spirit.[/quote]
....but then, he was increasingly dismissed as a Victorian spiritualist crank on exactly these grounds; Darwin's hard-headed materialism, borne of the 'Scottish Enlightenment', is far more in keeping with the zeitgeist.
Earlier in this discussion, I tried to make the point that the origins of humanism (i.e. Renaissance humanism) was dissident from Catholicism, but was not materialist in orientation, drawing on all kinds of philosophies such as neoplatonism, hermeticism and so on. I idly googled 'Mirandola apotheosis' (in reference to Pico Della Mirandola, one of the geniuses of Renaissance humanism.) It pulled up a page on Mirandola's commentary in 'mystical union in the Kabalah'. And I believe that some form of 'unio mystica' is both fundamental and exclusive to human kind and that it's an aspect of what 'sapience' refers to.
Quoting fdrake
So, 'meta-nonsense'? As it happens, the juxtaposition of 'transcendent' and 'immanent' is derived from theology, but then you've already said that theology is nonsense. I think you've made your feelings clear on the matter.
Quoting fdrake
Misunderstood, again. I am not anti-science, I believe in scientific progress and liberal democracy. But I question the secular~scientific Enlightenment worldview that is generally associated with it. I like Steve Pinker - really do! - but he's a crap philosopher.
Quoting bert1
:rofl: :party: :clap:
Whatever. I'm no philosopher, not an abstract thinker as a rule or psychologist. My IQ has been formally clocked at a solid 120 on a good day. Anything else is going over my head, and it's time I fill in shit with nonsense.
Philosophy is about talking out of your ass if you're one of the average bunch. So that's all my post was. Philosophizing me talking out of my ass about psychology was the whole point, so served it's purpose.
This is why people hate folks in intellectual forms. Because they talk of their ass - make stuff up, make things abstract or whatever. That is the beauty of it. Descartes, Kant, etc were some that talked out of his ass for pages straight. Many philosophers are frustrated with themselves, for talking out of their own ass. There is no fun in intellectualizing if you are talking out of your ass. IF you are on a philosophy forum, and NOT talking out of your ass, I question why you are here ...
When I don't feel like talking out of my ass, I go back to my actual area of study. You still have to ass-talk, but it has to be glossed up better.
Some social work student I witnessed get his degree 40 years ago (we co-habited during school year in a rooming house) said the same thing about sociology as what you just said about philosophy.
To me philosophy is solid. People can talk about anything; then it's their job to defend their stances. It's like defending a thesis every day on the forums. It's my entertainment, as much as an ego trip... sometimes I mix the two up. I did not get far in the education system, due to a huge deficit in ability to pay attention on an ongoing basis. It takes too much out of me. That's why philosophy is my cup of tea: it takes very little input to generate a lot of output.
Which is precisely, like you said, talking out of one's ass.
You're speaking like the classification of humans as a hominid is an arbitrary one. As if the grouping of organisms into families is not evidence based.
Homo sapiens < Homo < Hominidae < Primates < Mammals < Animals < Eukaryotes.
(there are other steps involved too)
Eukaryotes - organisms with at least one complex cell (we had to look, then called it a thing).
Animals - organisms with many complex cells with certain structures (different metabolisms, animals move, etc), they consist of eukaryotic cells.
Mammals - animals with a certain temperature regulation mechanism, male/female sex, females do childbearing, have fur or hair, boobs.
Primates - mammals that have hands, feet.
Hominidae - primates with complex cognition.
Humans - hominidae that are us.
(there's more detail)
Life is grouped into these categories by looking for presence/absence of attributes, how cells function etc; demonstrable similarities and differences in form and function; physical and genetic characteristics. The morphology and genetics can be checked; and it is checked.
The same kind of reasoning that makes primates mammals; all primates have mammalian temperature regulation mechanisms, the reproductive stuff works much the same; makes humans hominidae; great anatomical similarity with each other, complex cognition.
You can believe all this without believing in the selfish gene; or placing the genome as the causal nexus of all evolutionary action (the central dogma) - epigenetics is a thing, there are heritable changes that do not involve changes in DNA. Hell, you could believe in the central dogma and the selfish gene and still not instrumentalise reason. These are conceptually independent, but not ideologically-politically independent. So:
None of this has commited anybody, ever, to the worst excesses of dehumanising instrumental rationality. What does make people commit to the worst excesses of instrumental rationality is the ideological climate they live in. I broadly agree with the critique of enlightenment instrumental rationality put forward by Adorno and Horkheimer:
You're targeting a relatively small part of the picture; science; when you should be picking on what makes us instrumentalise the world; education, politics.
The disenchanted life is still worth living.
Do you have a page number on this quote? Thanks.
The Concept of Enlightenment 21
Of course it's evidence-based. That is not at issue, nor why I made a point of it.
Quoting fdrake
I'll see your Adorno and raise you a Horkheimer:
[quote=The Eclipse of Reason]The idea inherent in all idealistic metaphysics–that the world is in some sense a product of the mind–is thus turned into its opposite: the mind is a product of the world, of the processes of nature. Hence, according to popular Darwinism, nature does not need philosophy to speak for her: nature, a powerful and venerable deity, is ruler rather than ruled. Darwinism ultimately comes to the aid of rebellious nature in undermining any doctrine, theological or philosophical, that regards nature itself as expressing a truth that reason must try to recognize. The equating of reason with nature, by which reason is debased and raw nature exalted, is a typical fallacy of the era of rationalization. Instrumentalized subjective reason either eulogizes nature as pure vitality or disparages it as brute force, instead of treating it as a text to be interpreted by philosophy that, if rightly read, will unfold a tale of infinite suffering. Without committing the fallacy of equating nature and reason, mankind must try to reconcile the two.
In traditional theology and metaphysics, the natural was largely conceived as the evil, and the spiritual or supernatural as the good. In popular Darwinism, the good is the well-adapted, and the value of that to which the organism adapts itself is unquestioned or is measured only in terms of further adaptation. However, being well adapted to one’s surroundings is tantamount to being capable of coping successfully with them, of mastering the forces that beset one. Thus the theoretical denial of the spirit’s antagonism to nature–even as implied in the doctrine of interrelation between the various forms of organic life, including man–frequently amounts in practice to subscribing to the principle of man’s continuous and thoroughgoing domination of nature. Regarding reason as a natural organ does not divest it of the trend to domination or invest it with greater potentialities for reconciliation. On the contrary, the abdication of the spirit in popular Darwinism entails the rejection of any elements of the mind that transcend the function of adaptation and consequently are not instruments of self-preservation. Reason disavows its own primacy and professes to be a mere servant of natural selection. On the surface, this new empirical reason seems more humble toward nature than the reason of the metaphysical tradition. Actually, however, it is arrogant, practical mind riding roughshod over the ‘useless spiritual,’ and dismissing any view of nature in which the latter is taken to be more than a stimulus to human activity. The effects of this view are not confined to modern philosophy.[/quote]
My bolds.
I just wonder why you'd reject that homo sapiens (and our minds) are descended from our homo ancestors (and their minds), when you're so happy to accept all the facts of evolution... one more is hardly a violence against your worldview, no? You're rejecting a framing of the facts, rather than the facts, right?
Humans are great apes. Our cognitive and affective processes and their supporting neural and bodily architectures have great ape homologues. These are facts. They should be as surprising as human digestive tracts behaving in much the same way as chimp ones. Or humans and chimps consisting of complex cells with similar internal structures.
I appreciate the quote; but I want to just put it here that a return to mysticism was never on the table for the committed materialist we're both quoting. He wanted to implode the institutional prejudices associated with reason with better reasoning rather than spiritualist or religious claptrap; the better angels of our nature removed all further need for their namesake.
Did he consider his project a success?
I don't think capitalism ended?
By 'mysticism' Wayfarer seems to refer to (supposing my reading has been at all accurate over the years) a catalog of vivid and unusual experiences best described using the mystical dialect: a dialect historically highly subjective and imprecise in its (unfortunate) referentiality to mythological beings, entities, energies, effluences, and commonly reliant on the atmosphere of paradox.
The language used to describe these experiences - an enormous obstacle to understanding their importance to the human condition - is unfortunately stigmatized and corrupted and generally rings silly and grotesque. Nonetheless, the experiences qua experience (stripped of mysticalized descriptors) are latent in every mind and reflect, by their absence, a gap in self-knowledge.
Quoting bert1
I'm glad you sorted this out.
For a sketch of reductionism, my take on it anyway:
I understand an explanation; of X by Y; as an asymmetric epistemic relationship between X and Y wherein what is known of/about/how/why of (information concerning X) X is at least partially specified by what is known of/about/how/why (information concerning Y) Y. X="Why did he eat the potato chips?" Y="He was hungry" (the potato chips were also available in a nearby shop that was established in the 1980s due to small business promoting loans that an industrious pair of second generation Pakistani Brits made use of due to... and the loans were suggested by a think tank which studied... and the shop had his favourite flavour and...).
I understand a reductive explanation; of X by Y; as an explanation of X by Y wherein the information concerning Y completely specifies the information concerning X.
Complete specification might look like logical/deductive inference or exhausting causal pathways (finding the bacteria which cause the disease - but not the specifics of each symptom in each patient). The germ theory of disease doesn't have to tell you precisely how red your mate Steve's leg got with that infected cut; but it does reduce (some) disease symptom presence to germ presence.
Reductive explanations don't work very well in cases where the studied phenomena are difficult (ontically/ontologically or epistemically) to completely specify. Try to explain why a photon takes a particular path in a double slit experiment in terms of the particular photon and the slits and you get nonsense. Try to explain why one Vietnam vet becomes mentally ill and another does not based upon their shared experiences and background differences and you don't get a complete picture due to the available information (and randomness in life). Try to study whether a butterfly flapping its wings 1 day ago caused a tropical storm now and the system itself pulls apart arbitrarily close causal histories - rendering the question askable but moot.
The stuff you study places constraints on what your modes of inquiry into it can be. So when someone says: "men are more aggressive because they have more testosterone", you shouldn't just point out that it's wrong, you should be highly suspicious that the person knows anything (substantial) about aggression or testosterone or sex differences; since they're not thinking in a way which tracks the relationships between any of the things in question.
Reductive explanations we encounter are usually just so stories.
I've gotten real fucking high a few times, and it has impacted how I think about things, but I would never believe that the intuitions and sensations produced in those states were insights into the true nature of reality. Altered states shatter, reasoning builds anew.
Yes! That's a good way of putting it I think.
Another feature this highlights is that explanations need not tell the 'whole story', whereas reductive explanations, when right, must.
With daily practice, altered states can have a profound lasting influence on brain wave patterns.
I suppose you've seen the studies.
Mysticism and reason should be dual (dueling) handmaidens not frittering in a myopic loggerheads we've come to see as natural and even inevitable. This synthesis will come. (In my opinion.)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/zen-gamma/
"The Wisconsin study took electroencephalograms (EEGs) of 10 longtime Buddhist practitioners and of a control group of eight college students who had been lightly trained in meditation.....Zen Buddhist monks show an extraordinary synchronization of brain waves known as gamma synchrony—a pattern increasingly associated with robust brain function and the synthesis of activity that we call the mind."
18 people for a between groups study? Skeptical. Anyway, the research question is "do well practiced meditators have higher gamma synchrony than controls?", not the auxiliary contextual information in this thread or about the contrast between mysticism and reason.
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
Mysticism is a thinking style completely at odds with reasoning (gnosis vs episteme); rational theory is not generated through affect alone. Meditation is something people can do without the Buddhist religion or mysticism; secular mindfulness practices. They don't come with such ontological commitments, like belief in god, or the falsehood of evolution.
Close your eyes, breath, the ape is a lie...
I've described mysticism as "a catalog of intense and unusual experiences." You've described mysticism as a "thinking style."
"The question of complexity... is truly a product of the analytical spirit. Analysis and reductionism are too often lumped together in the same critique. But ... it is quite possible for the analytical method to directly contradict the generalization of reductionism. Far from entailing the idea of a more simple world, analysis can lead to the conclusion that we do not know what a being is capable of. One way or another, reductionism always ends up "... is only"; the analytical method, on the other hand, may lead to "this...., but in other circumstances that... or yet again that....' "(Power and Invention)
So I'd be even more stringent than you about Wayfarer: it's not that his problem is with education and politics, and he's focusing on the science. He doesn't even get the science right, as far as I'm concerned.
@Wayfarer
Quoting fdrake
So long as the catalogue doesn't necessitate buying anything in it, we can see eye to eye.
No need sign your soul away. The bottom line, to my view: no one sheds the mortal coil without having a mystical experience or two. A scientist-ist (sic) would never call it mysticism. (Moments of psychological abundance, fullness, joyfulness; the obverse of ennui.)
I would believe that mysticism and reason were two sides of the same coin if they were, but they are not.
It's the meaning. Your thinking has a ceiling on it, delimited by empiricism - exactly what a smart ape might think, pardon my impudence. (In fact, I think this is what the Planet of the Apes was a satire of.) When I said before that we only accept what can be weighed, measured, felt, sensed (including by instruments) this is what I mean. Empiricism amounts to the elevation of the senses to the sole criteria for valid knowledge (along with predictive power and replicability, per Jacques Maritain).
If you look at Buddhism, for example, it originally was a criticism of the totality of sensory experience -the 'five skandhas' or sensory aggregates of seeing, taste, touch, thought, etc.) The monk was enjoined to know that this defined the totality of knowledge, and to abandon it. What is 'beyond' that is never explained, put into words, or talked about, because that so easily lends itself to 'conceptual proliferation'. ("That of which we cannot speak.....")
The point about classical philosophy was that it also in some sense took you to the border of what can be empirically known and points to what is beyond it. That's what metaphysics is. (Kant, for instance, with his 'conditions of knowledge'.) I know already that for most of us, this 'beyond' is unintelligible, that it's woo. But that's precisely because of the move made above, to limit what amounts to knowledge to what can be weighed, measured, and the rest of it. Our culture no longer has a lexicon to describe that beyond, hence, 'woo', 'thar be dragons' (although, as we see, metaphysics also has a way of re-imposing itself, or, as Gilson said, 'philosophy buries its undertakers'.)
Anyway -as I said upthread, when h. sapiens becomes a meaning-making and meaning-seeking being, which surely co-developed with language and tool use over the achingly long millenia of pre-history, the we are simply no longer like other animals. I mean, after all, it culminates in the amazing built environment, which is in no way a better class of beehive, is it.
Quoting fdrake
Right. Again it's worth reading Russel's Darwinism Applied to Man (from where my earlier quote was taken.) He obviously fully endorses natural selection to account for the anatomical structure of h. sapiens (being to co-discoverer of it), and compares it in detail with that of the great apes. But then he goes on to argue that natural selection can't account for mathematical skill or musical talent and many other capacities of mankind:
He then goes on to argue for ontological discontinuities between mineral, plant, organism and self-conscious beings:
Which of course anticipates Nagel's 'what is it like to be a bat', not to mention Chalmer's 'hard problem of consciousness. They're all facets of the same issue - and an issue, mind you, which Daniel Dennett must deny the reality of, demonstrating it's possible not to comprehend it at all.
Quoting fdrake
'Better reasoning' culminating in what. What is apotheoses for homo faber? I'll tell you what - it's the (forlorn hope) of the conquest of space in lieu of 'going to heaven'. The cosmos is now interpolated into the conceptual category previously assigned to divinity, and science to religion. 'Cosmos', said Sagan, 'is all there is'. (Pity we now know we can only account for 4% of it.)
Regarding 'mysticism' as 'irrational nonsense' - Meister Eckhardt is impeccably rationalist, ditto most of the platonic mysticism of medieval Christendom. Scotus Eriugena was able to translate ancient Greek works in the 'dark ages' in 7th Century Ireland - these people were not simple enthusiasts or fakirs
What I think you're expressing is what Nagel was talking about when he speaks of 'fear of religion':
Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion.
I get it, but I'm not scared of religion. I've negotiated terms of surrender.
I see what you're saying here, but I think you miss an important role of what is commonly considered under the umbrella of 'reductionism', and that is to act itself as a context, or constraint. To say, for example, "mental activity reduces to neural activity" is not necessarily to say that "by studying neural activity we can derive a complete account of mental activity". It more acts as a re-enforcement of parsimony, to say "don't, in our description of mental activity, develop models which are inconsistent with neural activity because that's the only thing we have any reason to believe mental activity reduces to". Reductionism, at its best, acts as a very long leash to loosely tie models of more complex systems to those beneath them which work well and on which we have good reason to think they supervene.
Exactly. You've prejudiced your own investigation. You've dismissed the possibility that it's not "something real, but something very difficult to realise and understand", and what's worse you extend that prejudice to others on the same path of investigation. Others who might, for now at least, be erring more towards the idea that what's behind a belief in God might just be a biological artifact, a cultural imposition, or any other physicalist explanation. Rather than engage with these people within the joint framework we share (the one prior to your subjective 'feeling' that it originates in something real, but something very difficult to realise and understand.), you presume that framework and insist the fault is ours for not tackling the investigation from the same starting point as you.
It's not about the uniqueness of the criteria, it's about the criteria itself. You say elevation to the 'sole' criteria, but what you really mean is development of any criteria at all. If you want to make an argument that correspondence with the sensate world, along with predictive power and replicability, should not be the sole criteria for valid knowledge, then what other criteria do you suggest?
I have a description in mind which I think explains 'the way things are' . Against what do I now measure it to provide the justification required to class it as knowledge?
Rational thought/logic? - Well we'd first have to demonstrate the soundness of those measures, then we'd have to explain why two people, both invoking such metrics could be completely at odds with each other and remain so despite thousands of years of open discussion.
Intuition? - Suffers from exactly the same problem, my intuition says one thing, yours another, now what?
The canon of previous thought on the matter? - Apart from issues of self-referentiality, how would such a canon ever be expanded if all it could say were things already approved by it?
Shared experience? - This goes back to what @fdrake has already said about the fact that the sciences are perfectly adept at managing shared experience.
It's not that scientists fear religion. It's that mystics fear science. They fear it removing the haze of self-referential, shape-shifting woo that they've made a lifestyle out of claiming to be expert in. At the end of the day, I'm interested in the philosophical positions, but psychologically, it just comes down to a perceived shortcut to the social kudos being an expert draws. Science is hard investigative work and it's possible to be wrong. Mysticism just takes a bit of reading and you can't be wrong.
I'm quite happy to be a smart ape. You don't seem to be. You want more. Luckily what apes as smart as us can do, think; how we are; is very very rich indeed.
Quoting Wayfarer
Now you're making me into a bogeyman. Since you said you've read a lot of my posts, I thought you'd maybe noticed that I really like Heidegger and Spinoza; an arch-critic of instrumental rationality and naive empiricism and a full blown rationalist, both of them do metaphysics. I like philosophy!
The majority of the challenges I have brought against you in this thread have been conceptual. Mysticism vs reason as thinking styles, arguing against the claim that science is reductive, we even quoted from the same author at different points; we even made similar points about instrumental rationality (but we very very disagreed about where it comes from and what to do with it).
So I don't find it likely that I'm so blinkered I can't hope to understand how you see things.
Quoting Wayfarer
Why would it ever need to? Natural selection can't account for why I trim my beard like I do. Therefore evolution is false? It's just (most likely) irrelevant to the theory.
A persuasive story goes that natural selection amplifies the presence of adaptive capabilities in populations of organisms over time (when they remain adaptive, when the ecology and communities within pose the same problems); development of the frontal cortex comes along with greater degrees of abstraction ability and language skills - tool use comes at some point, and we play like lower primates (who also make noises in play, and mock each other...). You put tools and play and high-order language together; whether it comes through a the evolution of a discontinuous presence/absence of a feature that allows recursive grammars or through a more gradual amplification primate abstractive ability doesn't matter; the ingredients are there. The rest? That's history. Literally history.
Quoting Wayfarer
Science is never just about what can be empirically known, it's about what can be conceptually derived from or speculated about given what is known or suspected... Reason always points beyond the boundaries of experience; like memory and imagination do. Reason? A highly abstracted and linguistically mediated cognitive practice implicated with our episodic memory (prefrontal cortex declarative knowledge stuff) and anticipatory mechanisms (mirror neurons/internal state modelling). That it allows us to discover the true nature of existence is a buy one get one free offer from the trait shop.
Quoting Wayfarer
I find it difficult to believe this; our culture has charted different orders of infinity, has understood the universe from the first moments to its eventual death, when people get bored at work they invent entire fictional universes in day dreams. Humans are both inscribed in reality and a fold within it.
What kind of idiot would expect mechanical laws of particle motion to explain the evolution of sensory mechanisms?
[math]F=m\text{OW ME LEG!}[/math]
Well, probably some physicists imagining that the universe's dynamics are as simple as those they can test by manipulating state variables... See previous stuff I wrote about reductionism. That you think this is a limit of reason itself rather than something people who have reasoned poorly (here) believe is baffling to me.
Quoting Isaac
I agree with you broadly; mind depends on brain (in some ways), brain depends on mind (in some ways); but I don't like supervenience very much at all.
What supervenes on what is always the question. So, you can jury rig a concept like "neural correlate" to do anything you like, so much so that it provides no explanatory power or conceptual insights over and above the brute stating of "when things in this register change there is a change in things of that register". That paper I referenced earlier, say, argued that psychological symptoms of PTSD (mind states) can remain unchanged even when neural architecture/hormone chemistry related to them changes. At that point you can say something like "well, the overall brain state still must have changed" or "the symptom is a type of brain state and not a token, and we only want token-token dependence between mind states and brain states" (which afaik is what happens)... It's just a rabbit hole devoid of any how questions (or generalisations from procedural descriptions), it's sitting there like it's waiting for something. Anyway. Rant.
Absolutely. I agree but I think it's far more of a problem invented by philosophers because it 'could be' the case than an actual problem in science that is the case. If one were to examine neural states and say "state X is PTSD", then say "The patient's brain is in state X1, and so despite his reports he cannot be suffering from PTSD", we'd be making a huge mistake, but I don't see anyone really doing that, it's a bit of a bogeyman. Maybe you've read papers I've not, it's quite possible, but in my field (psychology), I haven't really come across any concerning attempts to claim explanatory power from discoveries in neuroscience (which I kind of take to be the science psychology is loosely tied to). The overwhelming majority of neuroscience is medical, focussed on curing diseases, very little explanatory conclusions really come out of it, but that may just be my personal filtering system making that seem the case.
Quoting Isaac
This is an aside, but it's interesting. I agree with you that the token-token stuff doesn't correspond to, or shed light on, any scientific stuff; I also think the scientific stuff rarely sheds light on it (due to how fungible supervenience relations are). I think reductionism can be a big problem in psychology though, especially clinical psychology.
Quoting Isaac
I've read some stuff in clinical psychology that heavily criticises the naive application of the (diagnosis->treatment) paradigm in bodily health to mental health; since it promotes treatment methodology that just doesn't work. The individual level variability of mental health aetiology is so great, and the diagnoses interact so much (depression with anxiety as a comorbidity or anxiety with depression as a comorbidity anyone?), and the medication targets neurochemistry rather than psychological state (by necessity), "you're depressed? take prozac", "you're in chronic pain? try this exercise program!"; it's applying a billiard ball style reductive explanation (like germ theory) to interventions in crazy complicated complex systems, and as is predictable it doesn't work so well. And it's not necessary, since the patient is literally right there with self reports.
At the risk of veering wildly off topic, I think there's a lot of threads to this which are not necessarily to do with reductionism. The one which is - the over-emphasis on neurochemical correlates with metal health - I agree with you about, although I can't speak with authority (I'm social psychology, not clinical), but I think the extent to which it is the result of reductionist thinking is smothered by those 'other threads' to this. Chemical interventions are the only ones which are marketable and so where the research money gets invested. Chemical interventions are easier to control-trial and so make better papers. Reliance on self-reports and what we call 'person-centred therapy', despite their really high success rate, challenge the traditional doctor-patient epistemic dynamic which many practitioners find uncomfortable. There's more, but so very unrelated to the topic...
Basically is reductionism is a problem (and it might be a small one, I don't want to deny it entirely), I think is is going to be impossible to tell beneath all the layers of social structure which favour apparent reductionism regardless of the philosophical commitments of the practitioners themselves.
Yes!
Quoting Isaac
Yes!
We could talk about this elsewhere sometime if either of us can be bothered.
Yeah, good. If only I wasn't kept so busy being forced to write obloquial retorts to all the mystics, fakirs, and hyper-rationalist wisenheimer that seem to fill these threads I might actually spend time discussing something interesting!
Now there’s a term paper in epistemology.
Quoting Isaac
'rather than discussing it in a framework familiar to me', you mean. If it can't be reduced to the kinds of terms that physicalists can comprehend, then you say I'm talking about a 'subjective feeling'. But to try and explain why it's not a subjective feeling, requires you think outside the square that you wish me to step into.
Quoting fdrake
Something other; simian=/=sapien
Quoting fdrake
I have never studied Heidegger and at my stage in life, am not expecting to, but I have read some points that resonate with me:
This seems to me to resemble a lot of what I have argued in the quantum mechanics threads. It's also very similar to Buddhist philosophy.
Quoting fdrake
The general view as I understand it, is that data derived from empirical experience (including instrumentally-enhanced experience), and logical and mathematical treatments of such data, provide the exclusive source of all authentic (scientific) knowledge. Am I wrong in thinking that?
Quoting fdrake
Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness, Steve Talbott.
So - do you think Dennett is an idiot? Lest I'm accused of 'attacking straw men', this is what I have in mind.
No. I mean framework which we share, prior to the conclusions you or I draw. That's the only way discussion can proceed. You say "to try and explain why it's not a subjective feeling, requires you think outside the square that you wish me to step into", but this still begs the question. It wouldn't constitute an explanation, if I already took the step I'm asking you to justify.
The argument against mysticism (here at least) is that it rejects any form of falsification, yet doesn't specify what falsification is to be replaced with as a means of collective maintenance of concepts. And I don't mean falsification in the PhilSci Popperian sense, I mean it in the community-of-language-users sense. It's the very means by which we meaningfully communicate with each other, our joint holding of concepts, our discovery of those community resources by trial and error. The key word there being 'error'.
Without the possibility of error we have Wittgenstein's 'sensation S' - meaningless garbage.
So if you can't explain why I'm using 'subjective' wrongly using words which already have a shared community concept attached to them, if I must first buy in to your alternate language, then all I'm doing is translation, and translation is a two way process. You could as easily do the same.
From the link:
I mean... humans as individual entities are both at once. We're quantum shit interacting to bring atoms interacting to bring molecules interacting to bring chemicals interacting to bring chemical processes interacting to bring intracellular bodies and systems interacting to bring cells interacting to bring cellular systems; like tissues, neurons; interacting to bring organs (and other distinct functional units) interacting to bring bodily systems interacting to bring bodies interacting with themselves and their environment to bring minds.
If you follow that chain backwards, you'll notice that it neatly tracks the temporal order of their emergence in the universe. This is not a coincidence (cosmogenesis->abiogenesis->evolution->"the first eye opening"). Components contingently organise into systems which are components contingently organised into systems which are components...
The more general ontological point about agency? Agency's just one way to get shit done.
If you follow that chain backwards, you'll notice that it neatly tracks the temporal order of their emergence in the universe. This is not a coincidence (cosmogenesis->abiogenesis->evolution). Components contingently organise into systems which are components contingently organised into systems which are components...
The more general ontological point about agency? Agency's just one way to get shit done.[/quote]
:up: :up:
I'm not sure if this is what you were getting at, so either to expand, or to contrast your approach..
Something like The Will is not only unable to effect matter lower down in the heirachy, it is simply incoherent to talk about it doing so. The Will is a component of a model in human activity. Yes, it describes a sensation we have that some action is of our doing (as opposed to external, or instinctual), but it's so much more than that (responsibility, moral culpability, identity... ) which is absolutely fine at the level of human activity because all that stuff is useful at that scale.
Take the basic concept down to the scale of neurons interacting (which can be done, carefully) and all that baggage comes with it, but makes no sense whatsoever at that scale.
There isn't any theory of consciousness that goes beyond explaining functions. That there is a "what it's like" aspect to consciousness is plain. Science hasn't gotten there yet.
Science also doesn't have a picture of what happened at the very beginning of the big bang. So science drops away from the beginning and end of the story you're wanting to tell.
IOW, it's not a scientific story you're telling.
Quoting Isaac
Aye. Intention makes the most sense as a folk psychological concept and part of our social ontology IMO; but I would be extremely surprised if there wasn't an autonomous decision making process that bodies and minds together can do, that corresponds somehow with felt qualities associated with decision making. A "top down" causation of the body's self model on the body.
Quoting frank
Sorry, I don't feel this. Can you explain it to me?
What?
I just don't understand. Felt what is it like-ness? First person? Guess I just don't experience it like that.
Yeah. Again, off topic, but some interesting work has been done on possibly connecting the parts of the brain responsible for distinguishing self from other to the experience of willing something. It's mostly looking at it from the point of view of understanding some types of psychosis, but it's a promising line of enquiry with regards to both where the sense of willing comes from and what it's evolutionary origin might be. It's possible that all the hugely complex structure of human identity derives from a simple mechanism to distinguish actions precipitated by the frontal cortex from actions precipitated from the amygdala. Too reductionist...?
Energy or information as ontic simples seem incoherent to me.
Do you see a difference between "is related to" and "reduces to"?
That is a very good way of describing the “mystical experiences” that I have had, and just as I earlier in this thread described how I’ve observed such ennui to negatively impact my ability to think clearly and rationally, so too these “mystical experiences” seem to have a strong positive impact on the same.
Having experience with bipolar disorder, there are also strong similarities between those two states and depressive and manic states, respectively.
During “mystical” or manic states I’ve had some of my most profound philosophical insights, some of which of course did not later stand up to more sober scrutiny but some of which did.
Friends who have done LSD tell me that I sometimes sound like someone who just came back from a really good trip, the “mind-opening” kind.
I don’t attach any epistemic or ontological significance to any of this, these are all just emotional states of mind to me that are ultimately explainable in neurological terms, but I can’t deny that such states of mind can make a significant difference, in either direction, on my ability to reason clearly and insightfully.
ADDENDUM: It strikes me now that just as I earlier described ennui/angst as arationally generating a false need for “meaning” where there is no rational question, so too “mystical experiences” as I have had are most notably characterized by a profound but not necessarily rationally grounded feeling of meaningfulness.
Yeah, but only in that being merely related to involves some other component, whereas being reducible to means one thing entirely consists of the other.
In the case of consciousness though, I'm just using the term colloquially. Why would we theorise some additional factor which might go toward constituting consciousness?
We make a presumption in predicting the weather that it's entirely reducible to the motion of particles, we can't demonstrate that it is because it's too complicated, but we don't then invoke some mystic woo, just because we can. So I can't think of any reason not to say that ontologically, consciousness is simply something that brains do.
Do you have some reason for wanting to add some additional constituent (other than brains), that wouldn't also apply to every physical system too complex to describe reductively?
Let's review: drake presented a scenario that seemed to span from cosmology to neuroscience. I pointed out that he doesnt have bookends for that stack (which I thought might lead him to back off of the forthrightness and own it as more opinion than science).
You advised me that at least one side of his story is solid: that we do have a robust theory of consciousness that explains phenomenal experience satisfactorily.
But then you seemed to back away from that, and you argue that though we lack a robust theory, we need not expect a scientific revolution to cover phenomenal experience.
You may be right, but we don't know that because, as I said originally to troll boy, we don't have a complete theory of consciousness.
We don't do science by eliminating any path that might turn the world upside down for us. We follow crazy ideas because we're courageous and flexible.
Thanks for your thoughts.
If it's true that a mind at every moment locates itself along an ennui-to-meaningfulness continuum it would seem rational to distance the mind as far as possible from ennui - ennui is a kind of human suffering - without, of course, drifting toward a non-rational metaphysical commitment. Possibly, the human mind is under fundamental pressure to extract meaningfulness from its world.
Which makes it incomplete. Not fallacious.
I like that line of thought so much I’m planning on majorly expanding the last chapter of my philosophy book to address it, this relationship between ennui or the feeling of meaninglessness or the Absurd, and its polar opposite, the feeling of profound meaningfulness, cosmic love, like a noncognitively religious or mystical experience. I’m thinking of calling them ontophobia (existential fear) and ontophilia (existential love).
I'm agnostic about the origens of the universe. Atheism and Theism are both crucial to that as well.
Yep. That's the fun. If we aren't talking out of asses, we are burrowing/examining someone else's shit, are we not?
The more salient point is that having my philosophical opinions didn’t send me spiraling into desperate search of meaning. I philosophized for decades holding broadly similar opinions all the while before this kind of angst started to afflict me. Philosophy is neither the cause of nor solution to existential angst. It’s just a mental health condition.
Yes, of course! .. but some things need to be said.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, that is true, but I am saying that your philosophy is a conduit for the attack. Philosophy is instrumental in mental health: the way that we think is, in fact, the manifestation of the spirit.
Quoting Pfhorrest
That really doesn't work as an argument though (I just have to say).
Quoting Pfhorrest
But, it is precisely your philosophy that lends you to believe (and follow) the thinking that keeps you from knowing the real cause of the mental health condition, is a spiritual attack.
Yes it would. Truth is stranger than fiction.
While things aren't always what they appear to be, they usually are.
I dont even know what means. :rofl:
You can have another koan then!
We should learn to be more surprised by falsehoods than by truths.
You're like somebody's grandpa, "Stop your wild speculations and simmer down! Goddammit. Wheres my pipe?"
I miss my pipe.
The same is true of Marxism btw, and that's not a coincidence. The word "robot" comes from an author's lament about what capitalism tries to turn people into. And from there it became a rich vein of sci-fi speculation.
But I share your concern about grand ontological projects gliding past large gaps in our understanding. That is exactly what I was warning you about with your hierarchy theory.
Quoting frank
Jesus H Christ on a bendy bus you're being snide.
But yes. Edit: there's always problems in everything.
The religious demographics are such that most atheists don't live in the US and don't have backgrounds similar to yours. But more to the point, I believe that even among those who were raised in a religious environment, most people don't become atheists through systematic, bottom-up construction of a comprehensive philosophical system, while setting aside their background beliefs for later reevaluation.
Allow me to go on a little digression. Textbook presentation of science is sometimes faulted for being sanitized and divorced of its historical context. Ideas are presented not in the order and the form in which they were originally introduced; justifications and relationships between ideas have been restructured in light of a more modern understanding. The end result is a "rational-communicative artifice" () that is thought to be - and most likely is - more pedagogically appropriate. But science has the advantage of having a fairly objective external standard of empirical evidence, of which we can avail ourselves at all times. (You can, of course, attack that standard in various ways, but you can't deny that there is a standard.) We are not constrained, once and for all, to reproduce the same historical approach: we can restructure our ideas and proceed to test them against empirical observations without any loss of legitimacy.
Philosophy doesn't have such a standard. You can judge parts of a system (and I am using the word "system" loosely here) against the background of the rest of the system, but the system as a whole is without anything like an objective foundation. (Any standard that you might propose, such as absence of contradictions, empirical soundness, etc. would itself be philosophical, and thus internal to the system.) Thus lacking an objective foundation, philosophy is something that just grows out of the soil of your temperament, life experiences, socialization, intellectual exploration. Having or not having religious experiences and an attitude or a position on the God question, which for most people predates having articulated philosophical ideas, is not an insignificant constituent of that soil. Nor is it something that you can easily shut off or compartmentalize while you cogitate on your philosophy. It will bleed through one way or another into the way you think and the choices you make.
I don't understand. Do you mean you want me to stop arguing as in...
...in which case you'd need to point me in the direction of the part of my comment which seemed angry, or...
...in which case I'm not sure how else you imagine disagreements being discussed here.
Are you making a distinction between reducible in principle and reducible in practice?
I try not to think about explanations that are merely possible or might exist?
When I come across and organized system/structure, it is easier to accept the system was constructed under and intelligent process than to believe it to be the result of random and disorderly interactions. So naturally I extend that line of thought over any processes that appear organized in some way, such as the universe I live in and the environment that I evolved from.
It is not a belief that makes me go to church or join a cult, but I admit that believing in a "creator of the order" is not something I can get away from when trying to wrap my mind around the meaning of existence.
OK
Yeah, that'd be great, thanks.
New thread on 'what it is like' is here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6895/what-it-is-like-to-experience-x/p3
But why set up such a dichotomy: either chaos or human-like agency (aka "intelligent design")? Aren't you missing the simplest, most obvious alternative: structure? "Structure" not as a house or a bridge, but in a more general sense, as a closed system subject to fixed constraints - what is conventionally called "laws of nature."
By Intelligence I don't imply human-like in any way or form, even though this natural order, or laws of nature, curiously parallel human reasoning to a degree that it allows the use of logic and mathematics to formulate its workings, to an approximate degree anyway. I can't help but wonder whether such properties as beginnings, endings, causality, etc. which apply to cosmological components may also apply to the whole.
And "a closed system subject to fixed constraints" like you refer to, does not preclude the possibility that the universe was formulated through a conscious, deliberate process.
The only intelligence that we know is human-like (or animal-like, if you want to broaden the notion a bit). This is where the word gets its meaning. If you are talking about an intelligence that is not human-like "in any way or form," then either you are talking about something else entirely and "intelligence" is a misnomer, or you don't even know what you are talking about and are using "intelligence" as a wildcard. But I suspect that the picture in your mind is nothing more than the bog-standard anthropomorphic deity, only slightly updated for modern secular sensibilities from its traditional archetype.
Quoting staticphoton
Well, nothing can preclude that possibility, seeing as it is left completely unspecified, so this isn't saying much. But wouldn't it be more parsimonious to say that the world just happens to be orderly, rather than that our universe just happens to have been made orderly by some Intelligence, which just happened to be there? If I am to take seriously the attempt at distancing from the traditional divine creation narrative, then I just can't see any attraction in this overcomplicated account.
If your primary goal is to distance yourself from the possibility of a creative process as the origin of the universe, then absolutely, no need to bark at this tree. But if you were sincere about understanding what really is, you would remain open to possibilities.
Understood. I as well work towards that which makes sense to me.
As an egoist, atheism is a core principle because having something or someone above yourself putting laws or tenets that could rule your most precious property - yourself - is an agression against your individual. "The only god that exists is yourself"
Yes, you precisely took the point.
I agree. There are concepts more fundamental than the existence of God. What does "existence" mean? What does "definition" mean? What principles do we use to prove/disprove existence? What does "proof" mean? How crucial is logic to all of this? Etc. etc.
However, people seem to consider such questions as already answered when person X claims "god(s) exist(s)". X means that there is a being who created this universe and intervenes in its affairs on occasion. Then it becomes necessary, if we're to be convinced of such a being, to ask for evidence or proof. We needn't delve too deep into the meaning of "proof" or "evidence" to make sense of the atheist who's making the request. Simply remind X of how he forms beliefs on other matters. Surely he doesn't believe everything he hears or sees. Hasn't he ever been lied to? This basic proof-requirement is all atheists need appeal to when conversing with a theist.
If the whole question right from the start is about belief, why on Earth the juxtaposition between existence and non-existence of a Deity that isn't and never has been about proof and logic?
edit: didn't even check the end of the thread, I see ssu has similar ideas.
It’s like those students in first year college who say they are there to “disprove religion” at which point the professor inevitably just asks “so religions don’t exist is your claim?”
For those of us with a high standard for the criteria of what knowledge is, neither camp really deserves faith which seems to be central to both.
Agnosticism does this too, it however is just faith in the truth of the statement “I don’t know anything.”
Take for example; The current Popes attempts to reframe Catholicism into something a bit more neo, tolerant and accepting. Mostly due to an enhancement in the interpretation of Forgiveness by the Pope.
Institutions invariably seem to drift tragically away from the criteria of their own foundations, don't they?
??? Positive atheism is simply the belief that something--namely a god--doesn't exist. So it's no different than you saying "If something doesn't exist" there.
On each of these two orthogonal axes there are three positions.
One axis is:
“I believe (God exists)”, theism
“not-(I believe (God exists))”, weak or broad or negative atheism
“I believe not-(God exists)”, strong or narrow or positive atheism
On an orthogonal axis, regardless to those answers:
“I do know”, gnosticism
“I don’t know”, weak agnosticism
“It can’t be known”, strong agnosticism
For this poll, your position on the second axis isn’t important; I’m only interested in whether or not you occupy the first position on the first axis.
Well, there would be no need of it without theism, sure. But when someone says, "Blah blah blah is the case" and you're aware of that, and you think that it's a stupid claim, then you don't respond by saying, "Well, I don't know" or "it can't be known whether blah blah blah is the case."
Atheism is about one thing and one thing only, though: whether a god exists.
So when someone claims that one does, and you think it doesn't--and especially if you think the very idea of it is absurd, incoherent, etc., why would you respond with, "Well, I don't know . . ."?
It's nothing about ethics or any other things surrounding the notion of a god.
We are?
I was addressing your comment that "agnosticism is far more sensible than atheism. If something doesn't exist why bother taking a philosophical stance on it?"
Actually, it does not. Again, atheism is ONLY the lack of a belief in any god, either passively ("weak" or "negative" atheism, where one might simply lack the belief due to having never even had an idea about it) or actively ("strong" or "positive" atheism, where one has a belief a la "There are no gods").
Atheism isn't anything about whether there's evidence for gods.
Of course, positive atheists are likely to think that there isn't anything that they'd consider evidence of gods, but that's not required for them to be atheists, and it's not implied by the term.
Unless by weak atheism you mean agnosticism....
Yes, of course.
You do not?
Yes, of course.
More than that, I not only don't believe that unicorns or Santa Claus exist, I believe that they don't exist.
(Where "believe X" simply means "think X is true", nothing about justification or lack thereof or anything like that).
Of course there would be no reason to assert such disbelief if there weren't anybody asserting belief. I also don't believe that snarfboggles exist (and believe that snarfboggles don't exist), where a snarfboggle is a small, flying, ugly, hairy creature, like a troll crossed with a fairy, most notable for their incessantly running noses, which I just made up right now to use an an example here. I'll probably never have reason to mention my disbelief in snafboggles outside of this thread, but I have it nevertheless. Belief in unicorns, Santa Claus, or especially God is different though, because those are things that other people actually believe in, that I might have reason to state my disagreement with.
Depending on how you choose to parse it, agnosticism can be seen as a kind of atheism.
By that I mean, if you phrase it as "not believing in the existence of god" versus "believing in the non-existence of god."
Strictly speaking, if you're unsure, or choosing not to think you know either way or most other permutations of agnosticism, the former definition of atheism applies to you.
I suppose it would be different if you were calling yourself an agnostic because you sometimes believe and sometimes not, but I'm not sure that really counts. That might be more of a theist who has occasional doubts.
Okay, but what does that matter? Picking agnosticism rather than atheism is like saying, "I don't know if I believe in Santa or not" or "It can't be known whether there is a Santa."
It's just that "lack of belief in a God" has another conventional name, too, whereas "lack of belief in Santa Claus" does not.
"Adult"
Nevertheless, it's still the case that you don't believe in them, and it's not the case that you don't know if you believe in them.
Quoting Pantagruel
Sure. It just doesn't have anything to do with atheism versus agnosticism, etc.
No, it has to do with what constitutes evidence for the existence of God, which is the more fundamental question, certainly to the position of atheism (a la Dan Dennett's argument, for example).
I've elaborated the same argument 3 times now, that's all I can muster for this thread....cheers! :)
I don't know what Dennett argument we'd be talking about, but again, atheism just doesn't have anything to do with claims about evidence. If Dennett said otherwise, he's off base in that.
Re your argument, too, I hadn't read most of the thread, so I'd have to search for what you might be referring to.
How about you actually read Dennett instead of assuming you know what the argument is or what any of the nuance, logic, premises and evidence might be given by Dennett.
https://www.learnreligions.com/atheist-vs-agnostic-whats-the-difference-248040
This is basically your argument correct?
While it states that it is common for people to be agnostic in knowledge but atheist or theist in regards to belief. However, I’d argue that this comes from a complicated misunderstanding of the word “Self” to only interpret a belief in a single self as opposed to a belief in the dialogical self.
I can tell you honestly that a part of me believes in a god, another part of me doesn’t and there is a part in the middle that doesn’t know what to believe.
Depending on who I am talking to I can hypothesise and theorise from either of the two views but my belief is for lack of a better term; in a quantum superposition between the two. Both and neither until the god box is opened and the life box is closed. When the life box closes, I don’t know if I’ll be able to have knowledge of the answer.
and you responded with
Quoting Mark Dennis
Consider your argument voided by the belief in superposition argument. Really can’t be bothered debating you anymore.
I wasn't really arguing anything. Rather, I keep pointing out that the word "atheist" conventionally refers to one simple thing and ONLY that one simple thing.
First, how about we don't debate and we try to talk in a friendly manner instead of like antagonistic assholes?
So, again, I wasn't really arguing anything. I was pointing out that the term "atheist" doesn't conventionally refer to views about evidence, or evolution, or anything like that. It only refers to one simple thing--a lack of a belief in gods.
Probably specifically the defining autistic cognitive difficulty with (as you've put it) cognitive empathy making it difficult to accurately tell what another person is thinking and meaning when they say something, which in turn makes it difficult to properly extend the principle of charity to other people. That's what that other friend has suggested is his difficulty that prompts such arguments so frequently; and one of the first conversations I had on these forums was encouraging someone to employ that principle more, and them countering that their autism made that very difficult. I don't think that was you, but please remind me if it was.
In any case I just wanted to share my observation on this conversation and hopefully help you be more aware of some of your own blind spots that might be making it more difficult for you.
I’m not the one being needlessly antagonistic here. TS being purposely obtuse is the antagonising factor. I answered your question here and I stand by my argument that this poll should have had an option for agnostic.
Typical though, moment I tell or trust anyone with the diagnosis the genetic fallacies come out and standing up for myself is taken as a meltdown and people read whatever tone they want in my writing to paint me the way they want to see me.
You can’t even begin to imagine what autism is and I’m in no mind to correct you, but if you believe any deficit in myself isn’t something I can overcome by myself and I’m going to be deflecting a genetic fallacy every day on here then I don’t know if we should continue our conversations.
At least Pfhorrest cleared his thinking when leaving out agnosticism:
Quoting Pfhorrest
Well, you did ask "So I'm just curious, among the theists and atheists here both, how central or important is that to the rest of your philosophy?", so basically as you note this question does reflect on the whole philosophy of a person. But I guess you are only interested in the dogmatic people here.
You see, Bertrand Russell doesn't eviscerate agnosticism with his famous 'Teapot in space' argument. The exist-not exist question is in my view far more subtle and complex as it typically is represented. It pops up in questions like "Do numbers exist?" Unicorns surely don't exist, yet at least for my seven year old daughter unicorns are very important.
I actually extend the principle of charity. How about you take it up with the people that aren’t, instead of targeting me specifically for some paternalistic scolding because you think my diagnosis makes it easy to declare that you have any authority over me.
It just looked to me like there was misunderstanding happening in the conversation, a misunderstanding related to dialectical charity, and I was just going to comment on that, but as I said, I've had at least two other autistic people (one of them here) tell me that their autism makes specifically that difficult for them, so since you had just mentioned your autism before I could even comment on the charity thing, rather than just suggesting you could stand to be more charitable, I thought perhaps that difficulty might be the case with you too, so I mentioned those other friends.
I'm sorry I upset you, I really didn't mean to.
No, I'm interested to hear from "weak" or "negative" atheists too; people who simply don't hold a belief in God, rather than holding positive disbelief in God.
I expected the results to be mostly weak atheists mostly saying that it's just an incidental consequence of their philosophy, and mostly theists saying that it's a core principle of their philosophy, and the results have borne that expectation out. (Though I guess I can't tell how many of the atheists are weak or strong, but the incidentality of their non-belief suggests probable weakness to me, even though I'm my own counterexample being a strong atheist to whom that's an incidental belief).
There's nothing obtuse about simply pointing out that "atheism" doesn't refer to views about evidence, evolution, or sundry other things.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I more or less agree with this (and the taxonomic axes laid out with respect to the poll). My understanding, though similiar, is more restrictive on the 'g/G question' and more expansive on the cognitivity of a/theism. I think the cognitive space schemes-out like this:
g/G agnostic
• I do not know whether or not g/G.
•• I cannot know whether or not g/G.^
g/G gnostic
• I know whether or not g/G.
•• I cannot not know whether or not g/G.^
^Yeah, but how do you know you cannot know ... in the first instance? :roll:
[1st order] object statements
theism (T)
• I do not believe ~g/G.
•• I believe g/G.
[2nd order] meta-statements
atheism (A)
• I do not believe 'T is a true belief'.
•• I claim ~'T is a true belief'.
[3rd order] meta-meta-statements
ignosticism (I)a
• I do not believe ~'T is incoherent'.
•• I claim 'T is incoherent'.
ignosticism (I)b
• I do not believe ~'T or g/G agnosticism or g/G gnosticism are incoherent'.
•• I claim 'Both g/G agnosticism & g/G gnosticism are incoherent; therefore T is incoherent'.
••• I claim 'Both g/G agnosticism & g/G gnosticism are incoherent; therefore T is incoherent; and therefore A is incoherent'.
doxic modalities:
(1) g/G agnostic T• ... "spiritual"
(2) g/G agnostic T•• ... fideist
(3) g/G gnostic T• ... mystic
(4) g/G gnostic T•• ... fundamentalist
(5) A• ... weak/negative atheist
(6) Ia• ... apatheist
(7) Ib• ... noncognitivist
My positions [A•• & Ib•••] bolded above fall within this cognitive space of possible ways to be or not to be an atheist, though I prefer to describe myself as "a secular free thinker who claims '1. theism is false, 2. theology is unsound (& theodicy incoherent), and therefore 3. religion is, at minimum, immoral for selling demonstrable falsity & nonsense 'as truths' (i.e. medicating false fears with false hopes)" rather than just using bumpersticker labels like "positive atheist" & "atheological noncognitivist" which suffice as apt shorthand but otherwise are not very informative or nuanced.
Another reason for excluding agnosticism from the poll is, other than it being, at best, orthogonal to the topic question, it's inherently incoherent: given that g/G is so underdetermined as to be objectively indistinguishable from a fantasy or hallucination or rorschach blob, how can the question of finding explaining or justifying - modes of knowledge - even be raised without begging the question? To say "I don't know whether or not g/G exists" says nothing but "I don't know whether or not z$&p@ exists" - just an evasively articulate grunt, or babytalk.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yeah, not surprising at all. Mine was once "an incidental consequence" which has only grown stronger over decades of positively feedbacking into my philosophical studies and practice. I wonder: have other 'atheists' here undergone a similiar process or development?
Ah, the haughty atheist.
Makes always me feel even better about agnosticism.
Looks like it’s almost exactly 3/4 atheists here, 3/4 of whom are only incidentally so; while about 5/8 of the 1/4 of people here who are theists take it as a core part of their philosophy.