Reason And Doubt
How did doubt begin? What are its origins?
Turn the clock back to roughly a hundred thousand years or so ago. Our ancestor hominids are foraging along the river banks. They're thirsty under the hot sun and the river is just a few feet away. They walk towards the river's edge to help themselves to some cool, refreshing water. As they drink they notice a "log" floating on the surface, moving with the current in their direction. They don't bother, it's just a "log" and continue quenching their thirst - the coolness of the water is irresistable.
The "log" is now just inches away from one of them and suddenly, a giant crocodile mouth opens wide and clamps down on a hairy leg. With the full weight of the reptile, one of the group is dragged with brutal force beneath the surface, drowned, and then eaten in a feeding frenzy.
The "log" wasn't a log after all; it was a crocodile.
The beginnings of doubt - next time this particular group of hominids see a floating "log" they'll, for sure, doubt. Log? Crocodile? Something else?
Doubt saves lives. Given evolution is true, we'll all turn out to be images of doubting Thomas.
How will this particular group of hominids fare in their next encounter with a floating "log"?
Encounter 2: the group is again drinking by the riverside and again there's a "log" drifting toward them. Doubt! Log? Crocodile? Some of them grab long branches from the trees growing nearby and begin to poke and prod the "log". The "log" reacts - the crocodile surfaces, exposing itself. This method of dispelling doubt is nothing more than the application of reason/logic.
1. The seed of doubt is inherent in nature - deception, one thing assuming the appearance of another, unintentionally or deliberately, is part of the fabric of life.
2. Reason dispels doubt by helping us develop tests of confirmation/disconfirmation.
Ergo,
3. We should always be rational.
Comments.
Turn the clock back to roughly a hundred thousand years or so ago. Our ancestor hominids are foraging along the river banks. They're thirsty under the hot sun and the river is just a few feet away. They walk towards the river's edge to help themselves to some cool, refreshing water. As they drink they notice a "log" floating on the surface, moving with the current in their direction. They don't bother, it's just a "log" and continue quenching their thirst - the coolness of the water is irresistable.
The "log" is now just inches away from one of them and suddenly, a giant crocodile mouth opens wide and clamps down on a hairy leg. With the full weight of the reptile, one of the group is dragged with brutal force beneath the surface, drowned, and then eaten in a feeding frenzy.
The "log" wasn't a log after all; it was a crocodile.
The beginnings of doubt - next time this particular group of hominids see a floating "log" they'll, for sure, doubt. Log? Crocodile? Something else?
Doubt saves lives. Given evolution is true, we'll all turn out to be images of doubting Thomas.
How will this particular group of hominids fare in their next encounter with a floating "log"?
Encounter 2: the group is again drinking by the riverside and again there's a "log" drifting toward them. Doubt! Log? Crocodile? Some of them grab long branches from the trees growing nearby and begin to poke and prod the "log". The "log" reacts - the crocodile surfaces, exposing itself. This method of dispelling doubt is nothing more than the application of reason/logic.
1. The seed of doubt is inherent in nature - deception, one thing assuming the appearance of another, unintentionally or deliberately, is part of the fabric of life.
2. Reason dispels doubt by helping us develop tests of confirmation/disconfirmation.
Ergo,
3. We should always be rational.
Comments.
Comments (204)
How do you suppose doubt began? To me, it's as basic to the mind as the cough reflex is to the body - it's part of our defense mechanism, dedicated to prevent harm.
Contrast this primeval instinct of doubt to religious faith where doubt is viewed in a bad light, as an obstacle to the truth when, in truth, doubt is an essential step toward knowing the actual truth by means of activating, as it were, reason/logic.
How things began, in a philosophical sense, is what is the origin or ground of something. 'The origin' in a philosophical sense, is nothing like the first in a series of efficient causes.
So, trying to understand 'doubt' in evolutionary terms, is mistaking the latter for the former. Doubt is an aspect of reason. Humans can doubt, because they can question, they can wonder why they thought something, they can envisage things being different. Trying to understand doubt in an evolutionary sense, is missapplication of evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory is a biological theory, seeking the antecedents for physical evolution. Reason is in one sense 'the product of' evolution, in that humans evolved, and are capable of reason. But ascribing reason to being a function of evolution is biological reductionism. That is the basis of the link that I provided, so rather than saying gee thanks for that, see if you can discern why I would post that link in response to your OP.
As regards doubt in religion - I think this is enormously misunderstood. To the Dawkins of the world, religious faith is clinging to a bad hypothesis for no good reason, in the face of all evidence. But it's a shallow caricature of faith. That's why the Dawkins of the world resemble the fundamentalists who provide fodder for their schoolyard atheism.
Here is the definition of "origin" from Merriam-Webster:
Origin: 1 ANCESTRY, PARENTAGE
2 a :rise, beginning, or derivation from a source
b :the point at which something begins or rises or from which it derives
c :something that creates, causes, or gives rise to another
How is this definition different from the philosophical definition?
Quoting Wayfarer
This doesn't follow because you haven't even explained what the philosophical definition of "origin" is. There can't be any mistake if there isn't a distinction between the philosophical version of "origin" and the everyday use of "origin". Without explaining what you mean by "origin", I don't see how you can jump to saying that it is a mistake to think about it in terms of cause and effect.
Quoting Wayfarer
So do newborn infants doubt? Do we doubt from the moment we are conceived? What does it mean to say that humans can doubt?
It seems that you are conflating doubt with imagination. It seems to me that you can only doubt once you have the experience of being wrong. What reason would you have to doubt if you were never wrong in your thinking? Reasons are causes and beliefs are the effects of those causes. The mind is a causal interaction between reasons and beliefs, like being wrong is the reason for believing in doubt.
That out of the way, imagine evolution is bogus. Even if we were created by a god, until and unless there's a very good reason to doubt (the thought, the very idea, of mistrust in the way the world appears to us) doubt would never be part of our mental landscape. Doubt wouldn't exist without a good reason to do so and this reason can be found in this world - two or more distinct things can be identical in appearance.
I admit that I used a reductionist backdrop (evolutionary theory) to get a handle on the origins of doubt but that's inconsequential insofar as the heart of the issue is concerned which is that the world, how it is, forces us to doubt and this revised attitude of skepticism spills over into other domains of human experience, and of critical importance is the fact that the only available tool we have to solve this problem is reason/logic.
My main concern here is this: is reason infallible? Will logic and rationality guarantee a safe passage to truth?
I don't know about guaranteeing, but logic and rationality are the best methods we have in comparison with other methods for "guaranteeing truth", like faith, tradition, authority and revelation.
H. Sapiens evolved, just as science outlines. But this kind of opposition between evolution v religion is itself a product of culture, not science. It's not one or the other. Plainly humans evolved, but when h. sapiens reaches the stage of development where we can think, reason and speak, then many attributes emerge, and horizons of being become visible, which aren't in scope for evolutionary theory. It was never intended for that purpose, but as science has tended to displace religion as the arbiter of truth, then it assumes the mantle of a kind of creation theory. This doesn't mean 'evolution is bogus'. But it may not have anything to say about the question you're posing.
Ever heard the expression the 'four f's' of evolutionary theory?' 'In evolutionary biology, people often speak of the four Fs which are said to be the four basic and most primal drives (motivations or instincts) that animals (including humans) are evolutionarily adapted to have, follow, and achieve: fighting, fleeing, feeding and fornicating).' So, where does 'reason' and 'doubt' fit into the picture? As a subsidiary! Something that helps you perform one of the Fs. If you manage to procreate, then - job done! You've fulfilled everything evolution intended! Great job!
So I'm afraid trying to rationalise 'doubt' in evolutionary terms doesn't really cast any light.
The conditions for answering the question are contained by it, which makes it superfluous.
These other "methods" you mention still leave room for doubt, quite unlike the clout reason has in matters doubtful. Once reason settles a matter, the case is closed as it were. No one challenges logic - it has the final word on everything under the sun. All roads lead to Rome.
Quoting Wayfarer
So, you're saying that a creature that lacks, never developed, the ability to doubt will be as successful, will survive equally well, as another that has a skeptical attitude toward the world? That doesn't sound right? The essence of Critical Thinking, the much needed but least provided lesson for living well, is a healthy dose of skepticism and to clear up matters, recommends being rational/logical :chin:
Quoting Mww
If you don't mind, please elaborate. Thanks
FYI, there's more acceptance of doubt in religious communities than on atheist forums. :-)
Could you give us an example, sounds interesting.
That's one of the things that should keep us up at night. Skepticism is, quite literally, as essential as the air we breathe but then once reason steps in we, suddenly, stop...doubting. It's like always remembering to lock your doors at night but the day you have a cop staying over, you stop caring. Is a person above suspicion just because s/he has a police badge? Are we out of the woods yet? Is reason, even perfectly wielded, beyond doubt?
Doubt is such a misused concept.
Certainty is the default conclusion. Doubt began with greater intelligence and the exploration of alternative possibilities.
Yes, and no. Wittgenstein did try to explain our doubting. Doubting is innate.
I'm saying there are considerations other than survival. Don't you see how rationalising every human capacity in terms of its fit for survival basically amounts to a form of utilitarianism? This is where evolutionary theory, when taken as a philosophy, which it isn't, flattens out the very qualities which delineate the human condition from that of creatures. Aristotle described man as ‘the rational animal’, but reason is much more than just a biological adaptation.
I’m asking you to question your own presupposition, which seems to be that everything about human capacities can be understood as a consequence of evolutionary theory. In other words, asking you to doubt what you are taking for granted.
I think your take is that evolution equates with science, which is scientific, rational, doubting, whereas the alternative, which to you means some form of creationism or religious account of human origins, is irrational because of clinging to dogmatic faith.
I have transcribed a copy of Thomas Nagel’s Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, which is germane to this argument.
Really? So what?
Quoting Caldwell
Really? Prove it!
Ok, here ya go. I've spent 20 years on atheist and philosophy forums (which are mostly atheist). Getting atheists to doubt the qualifications of human reason to address the very largest of questions (scope of god claims) is pretty close to impossible. Getting Catholics to doubt the degree to which the Bible is literally true is child's play in comparison.
I am suggesting you read his writings. And I want to add, read the cartesian doubt.
Quoting A Seagull
I can't -- not to you. Doubting is a first-person account. You can do meditation on what doubt is. But don't lay down step by step proof of doubt.
well then I suggest you come up with your own arguments, rather than arguing by proxy.
Quoting Caldwell
Well then it is probably not true.
Ever run across this quotation?
[quote=St Augustine, 'The Literal Meaning of Genesis']Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.
Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.
The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.
If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?
Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”[/quote]
I think Augustine would have given the Discovery Institute pretty short shrift.
I’ll answer “no.” Reason and logic came to be as a result of our experience of the world. We infer causation due to our observation of how objects interact with each other and the world, for example. What I’m getting at is that reason or rationality depend on the intelligibility of the world. The issue is that there may be features of the world that are not intelligible; that is they cannot be known by us. They may remain hidden from our perception forever. That is at least a possibility. Also, there are times when we discover things that seem irrational (quantum physics for example), and often find certain questions unanswerable due to the inherent irrationality involved in the question. Questions about the creation of the universe would be an example of the latter, as creating something from nothing seems irrational, as does some sort of infinite regress of creators, as does the existence of some deity. But at times, regardless of how irrational the answer may seem, it may be true nonetheless. We have to accept nature as it is. Trying to force nature to conform to reason will not lead to truth.
No, I hadn't, thanks for sharing Wayfarer. Augustine takes those selling false explanations to task in a quite articulate manner. I can admire his rhetorical skill.
I feel there is a better alternative to all this ideological battle, both within Christianity, and between believers and non-believers. And that is to shift the focus from explanations to experience.
For Christians, this can be the experience of love. Not the ideology of love, the experience.
For atheists, this can be observation of reality. Not observation as a means to the end of theories and conclusions (ie. explanations) but the experience of observation pursued for it's own value.
In both cases, not the talking of the talk, but the walking of the walk. There's a meeting place for atheists and believers in the walking, but not in the talking.
I'm sure none of this will be new to you, so I'm addressing a larger audience here.
Personally, I spend a lot of time walking the walk, but due to genetic flaws beyond my control :-) I'm also addicted to the talking of the talk. So I have some empathy for my fellow talkers, religious and secular. But if we're going to talk, it seems best to talk about putting talking in to it's rightful place.
Oh! I like that! :-)
Probably.
I'm not arguing. I'm here contributing to the others' responses.
I'm not interested in arguing in favor of something that's innate. If you yourself do not doubt, I mean in an authentic way, then good for you.
But getting an atheist to doubt the usefulness of the endeavor would be impossible.
Quoting Hippyhead
How many of them have you persuaded to leave the church then?
Not many of them actually believe that the bible is literally true, at least not the ones that have a bit of education.
I know a lot of Catholics and while many of them might not know how to defend their faith, I doubt that many would be convinced enough to walk away from the church.
Is doubt innate for humans or did it evolve? To answer the question properly I try to imagine if I was an early human who was without rationality and no a priori Knowledge to draw from.
I'm in existence, but I know nothing about it, One of my senses will create my first thought, most common was hunger, I suspect. Either way, I would act without doubt until the point when what I had experienced to happen before did not happen.
Not yet being able to reason, the memory of the interaction will still be stored in my memory. Before there was a concept of belief and truth, truth was everything I experienced. This is when doubt truly evolved. Before we could rationalize the difference, belief became the concept of "what it is", and truth became the concept of "was supposed to be".
Anyway, my point is, doubt was not innate, it was learned from experience. If you consider the brain/mind duality, the brain is the source of the mind, but the mind has an effect on the brain. The brain uses electrical and biological methods that allow it to create a storage space for experience input.
In the beginning, the mind was just a collection of experienced memories. But each memory changed the structure of the brain as it developed. Through time we evolved a consciousness. If you don't narrow the discussion to Darwinian evolution, then you must accept the fact of evolution as a concept being required because of time.
We will always be subject to the effects of time. Any differences between T1 and T2 can be considered evolutionary since T2 is inherited from T1. Any Social state, from S1 to S2 is evolutionary because S2 inherited the conditions of S1 in order to be able to become S2.
In both cases, time just causes changes everywhere, but it always moves forward, so what ever universe you choose to imagine, was inherited from a previous universe and was therefore evolutionary. The only thing innate in a species is what it has at the start. All else is inherited from there over time.
I hope this informs the conversation in some way, as far as it concerns doubt as innate vs evolutionary.
Ultimately, it's just my view of the situation, conjured from my imagination.
Yes, but suppose the world appears as it really is. Is there cause for doubt? In the transition from stranger to acquaintance to good friend a concomitant reduction in doubt can be seen. This can be chalked up to a parallel progression in how well appearances reflect true reality. Strangers and acquaintances will conceal their true nature, friends won't.
There's also the issue of having to deal with incomplete information. In the example I gave in the OP, what's visible is the greyish, rough, dorsum of the crocodile which closely resembles a floating log. Other animals will only see the crocodile's exposed back - partial/incomplete information. Doubt is inevitable. What is that thing floating toward them? Looks like a log and also like a crocodile's back? I think this is where "exploration of alternative possibilities" comes in.
All in all, the capacity for "exploration of alternative possibilities" is intimately linked to the fact that under most, if not all, circumstances we work with incomplete information, they perfect environment for doubt to thrive in.
Quoting Pinprick
I sympathize with your position but, like it or not, reason has emerged as the final authority on matters of truth. Reason's a time-tested method and has the final say when our goal is to separate fact from fiction. Put differently, we have seem to be under the impression that there's no reason to doubt rationality/logic/reason. My question is, given your position, what does it mean to doubt reason itself?
Quoting Wayfarer
My bad. It was a done as a matter of convenience and I admitted to it in a previous post.
The questiom then is what non-scientific, non-reductionist, explanation for the existence of our doubting nature is there?
If you'll indulge me, doubt arises because of the fact that, most of the time, we deal with incomplete information and being so, the data/information is compatible with more than one hypothesis. For instance, given only a silhouette of canine against the moon, I won't be able to tell if it's a wolf or a dog. Doubt! Is it a dog? Is it a wolf? In essence, the origins of doubt can be found in the world itself - similarities and differences are fundamental to either mistaking one thing for another or thinking the same thing is two different things and that creates the perfect conditions for doubt to establish itself.
As an example of the same thing being mistaken for two different things we can imagine the scenario where you're looking at something you're familiar with, say your friend, from a different angle, for instance from behind; if you've never seen your friend from behind you won't be able to identify your friend in a crowd - you'll think s/he's a different person.
Quoting Edgy Roy
That's a topic for another discussion. Thank you.
All knowledge has an associated probability of being correct. For the knowledge that I exist, I would put it at 100%; for the knowledge that others exist in the way I do, I would put it at 90%; for the knowledge that more than a quarter of the population of Europe died in the great plague, I would put it at maybe 60%; for the knowledge that I will die before I’m 70, I would put it at about 10%; and so on.
All these probabilities are of course subjective and approximate, but they reflect my degree of confidence that the knowledge is correct. The difference between any of the above probabilities and 100% is the doubt associated with that knowledge.
For me, all knowledge other than that I exist and have certain experiences is less than 100% and therefore has some doubt attached. Doubt is a natural and inevitable part of thinking and awareness.
I don’t believe it’s just humans that think and doubt. Watch a wild bird approaching food when there is possible danger present. It isn’t sure whether it’s safe enough to take the risk. The probability that it’s safe enough is less than 100%. Of course, it can’t count to 100, but it makes its decision based on an intuitive assessment of the probability in conjunction with its degree of hunger. Even a fly will exhibit the same sort of behaviour.
Does a fly doubt? I believe so. What’s more, doubt is a form of reason, so a fly reasons – and quite effectively for its purposes.
Thomas knew that Jesus had died. Other disciples told him that they had seen him alive since he died. Thomas’ reaction was to doubt what they told him. To him, the probability that they were right would have been less than 100% (though greater than 0%). To put it at 0% or 100% would have displayed an inability to reason well.
Jesus scorned Thomas for doubting, for not being 100%. But no thinking person would or could be 100%. Christianity, like many religions, requires faith. Hebrews 11:1 defines faith as being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. ‘Certain’ means 100%. The choice is to listen to your reason or to have faith (100% certainty). But most humans can’t completely abandon reason any more than that bird or the fly can. Nor can they voluntarily be 100% certain of something without totally compelling evidence. This implies that faith (and therefore salvation) are impossible for most.
That describes doubt but doesn't explain its existence.
Doubt existed a long time before modern scientific method. Those questions you ask about dogs and wolves were asked in almost exactly the same fashion in ancient India in the form of 'is it a rope or a snake'? That tendency in philosophy was one of the factors that gave rise to scientific method in the first place. Scepticism has been a face of philosophy since it existed, a long time before science sought to explain human nature.
When you say 'our doubting nature', you're treating 'doubt' as a kind of theoretical construct. In realiy 'doubt' is a natural faculty. Seeking 'an explanation of our doubting nature' seems like a contrivance to me. As I said, 'our doubting nature' is a natural collorary of the ability to question. We can envisage things being different, so how can doubt not be possible? We can ask ourselves, 'what if it is not so?' If it's possible to know, then it's possible to doubt. You don't need to rationalise it in terms of evolutionary theory.
Good point. The original question was 'How did doubt begin?'
I do tend to think that the answer to that is implicit in what I said, though. Animals need to make decisions in order to survive. Those that can't just die out. Decision making requires reasoning - like the bird deciding whether it's safe enough to come and get the bread from my hand. Good reasoning, in turn requires an assessment of the probability of the correctness of suppositions - 'How likely is it that I will survive the encounter?'
So doubt evolved right from the beginning of animal life (in the Cambrian or just before) along with other evolved behaviors. Basically it has always been there and animal life would be impossible without it.
The subject is doubt, not conversion.
Agreed.
Doubt comes from the logical understanding that all of your imagined predictions can't be true at once.
There is the way the world is and a way we think, or perceive, it is. If there wasn't this distinction, then there would be no doubt as they would be one and the same - like a solipsist. A solipsist never doubts.
There is the moment in our lives when we learn object permanence. This is when we realize that there is a distinction. This would be the catalyst for learning to doubt.
It's entirely possible that the ability to doubt exists for no rhyme or reason but the way it has persisted in us must mean that it's useful in some way. Generally speaking, we consign to the scrap heap what's not useful and this isn't true of skepticism; in fact it's recommended that skepticism be cultivated and generously applied to all situations. Perhaps we can begin there.
Quoting Neb
Plausible. :up:
Ok then, perhaps someone would like to prove that the rules of human reason are binding upon subjects the scale of gods. You see, the thing is, philosophers like to talk about skepticism, but don't actually like to do it that much. That is, philosophers are human too.
Reason is informed by nature, or more specifically, our observations of nature. Therefore, if we observe something in nature that defies reason, we must concede that our reason is mistaken. We cannot deny the existence of some phenomenon simply because it’s existence defies reason. Such is the case with quantum physics. Reason would lead you to believe that quantum entanglement is impossible, yet it exists. And to answer your question, that is what it means to doubt reason; questioning it when something is observed that defies it, or when reasoning leads to something contradictory or paradoxical.
The religious have more reason to doubt than the atheist. A text that is full of contradictions will necessarily lead to doubt. It’s something all religious followers go through before succumbing to faith. In fact, I would say that the existence of faith is evidence of the existence of doubt. The atheist may not have all the answers, but it isn’t necessary that he believe contradictory claims based on faith. The atheist may doubt due to an inability to resolve certain issues, whereas the religious person doubts due to having the wrong answers.
Your thinking is still muddled. Doubt is not a biological adaptation in the sense that claws and wings are. You’re still treating it like it has to be rationalised biologically in terms of the purpose it serves.
Is the idea of utility so intimately tied to evolutionary biology that we can't think of one without the other?
Quoting Hippyhead
Of course, philosophers are human but they do make a big deal of skepticism and, as you said, being human and yet to do that must mean something.
Quoting Pinprick
I don't think there's anything that contradicts the principles of rationality in quantum entanglement but I get what you mean viz. that there are some observable facts about the world that defy reason, in effect giving us a good reason to doubt reason itself. However, notice that this is still a rational thing to do i.e. we're still using reason when we make this judgement. Also, although I'm not a physicist, this whole idea of quantum physics not conforming to rational principles like the law of non-contradiction is merely a misconception, an unfortunate effect of poor analogies.
What if 'the advantage of doubt' is that it simply leads to a coherent understanding of truth? I mean, if you go back to the Greek philosophers, they were concerned with profound questions of the nature of truth and what prevented our understanding of that. How is that 'useful'? What 'purpose' does that serve? I think the answer is that truth in that sense is sought for its own sake, for the simple reason that it ought to be the aim of every philosopher. It has no 'utility' and indeed philosophy in that has no 'utility' in the sense understood by biology or other science.
There is a passage somewhere in Aristotle about the 'uselessness' of metaphysics. The moral is that it's useless, because it is to be understood for its own sake. If you seek to rationalise it in terms of its utility or usefulness, you're already misunderstanding what it is.
Of course I understand perfectly well that modern philosophy doesn't see it like that at all, but this is attributable to what the critical theorists have described as the 'instrumentalisation of reason'.
[quote=Antony Gottlieb]Today’s biologists tend to be cautious about labelling any trait an evolutionary adaptation—that is, one that spread through a population because it provided a reproductive advantage. It’s a concept that is easily abused, and often “invoked to resolve problems that do not exist,” the late George Williams, an influential evolutionary biologist, warned. When it comes to studying ourselves, though, such admonitions are hard to heed. So strong is the temptation to explain our minds by evolutionary “Just So Stories,” Stephen Jay Gould argued in 1978, that a lack of hard evidence for them is frequently overlooked (his may well have been the first pejorative use of Kipling’s term). Gould, a Harvard paleontologist and a popular-science writer, who died in 2002, was taking aim mainly at the rising ambitions of sociobiology. He had no argument with its work on bees, wasps, and ants, he said. But linking the behavior of humans to their evolutionary past was fraught with perils, not least because of the difficulty of disentangling culture and biology. Gould saw no prospect that sociobiology would achieve its grandest aim: a “reduction” of the human sciences to Darwinian theory.[/quote]
More here.
I admitted to the fact that a reductionist approach may not be the right way to tackle the issue. However, you said even a non-reductionist perspective is flawed as when I gave instances of how the world fools us, unintentionally of course. You did mention seeking truth for no reason but for itself and I let you know that doubt has a role in discovering truths by forcing us to double check the evidence and arguments for errors. Is there no explanation for why we're skeptical or if not, why we're advised to be so?
I suppose learning to think sceptically is an acquired skill, in fact it's part of the training for a lot of disciplines (including science, law, and many others). So I'm not deprecating the requirement, just questioning the argument that was presented for it in the OP, which I think we have now moved beyond.
Quoting Wayfarer
Right! It serves a critical purpose in the knowledge business and yet, on the matter where it seems it's most needed - god, his existence, religion in general - we're asked to abandon it for it's seen not as a virtue as we were taught but as a vice. What's up with that?
First factor: in Western secular culture, there is an assumed opposition or dichotomy between religion and science (see the Conflict Thesis.) This finds strident expression on both sides, either from religious fundamentalism, on one side (such as young-earth creationism or even some aspects of the anti-fax movement) or militant scientific materialism on the other (for instance, Jerry Coyne’s ‘Faith vs Fact’.)
How to resolve that, or address it, is a big question. I suppose one way would be to bring out the most extreme versions of both sides. Hardcore fundamentalism insists that you believe the articles of the faith, no questioning, no dissent. Hardcore scientific materialism insists that only what can be measured is real. In some ways they’re both caricatures, although there are plenty of examples on both sides.
But there are many other ways of seeing it. Take George Lemaître. He was a Belgian Jesuit priest and astronomer, who first devised the idea of what came to be called (by Fred Hoyle, decades later) the Big Bang, in a paper in an obscure journal in 1927. At first his paper was ignored, but during the 30’s it gained more traction. However it was resisted at least in part because it seemed too much like the ‘creation ex nihilo’ of the Bible.
From the Wikipedia entry on Lemaître
I find that an admirable attitude. My personal view is that if you try and prove that God exists with reference to science, you’re falling into the trap of fundamentalism; if you try and prove that God doesn’t exist with reference to science, you’re falling into the trap of scientific materialism (which in my view is another kind of fundamentalism.)
Another point is that doubt often plays a huge role in religious conversion. But there’s two faces of doubt - one the niggling scepticism which is basically grounded in ego defence and fear of change; the other is the profound sense of questioning everything about yourself. I think that kind of ‘great doubt’ has a religious dimension.
More could be said but I’d better stop there.
One question: If God did exist and he did create the universe and us, do you think he would've considered it a moral priority to bestow on us the [s]power[/s] ability to doubt?
Here’s something you might find interesting about scepticism. One of the originators of Greek scepticism, Pyrrho of Elis, journeyed to the East to converse with the ‘gymnosophists’ (‘naked philosophers’) - the Buddhist and Hindu sages of ancient Gandhara (an ancient centre of civilisation which now straddles Afghanistan and Pakistan; the Bamiyan Buddhas, wantonly destroyed by the Taliban, were of that culture.) On his return, he taught a doctrine of ‘the suspension of judgement of what is not evident.’ This was associated with reaching a state of tranquility, ataraxia, which scholars believe was derived from the Buddhist ‘nirodha’, or cessation of desires. (I think it’s the case that it thereafter degenerated into mere academic scepticism. See Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism )
The interplay of reason, faith, doubt, insight, and wisdom are huge interpretive questions in their own right. Due to the emphasis on right belief - orthodoxy - in mainstream Christianity, the issue tends to be interpreted in a pretty stereotyped way, as ‘rigid dogmatism’ vs ‘scientific enquiry’. There’s some truth in that but it’s by no means the whole story.
Truth can not be contained in any philosophy, because the truth is what's real, and any philosophy any one might come up with is merely a collection of symbols which point very imperfectly to the real. To confuse a philosophy, any philosophy, with the truth is like confusing a highway sign pointing to the next town with the town itself.
Philosophers typically try to find the truth by building a pile of symbols higher and higher. Such a process is travel in exactly the wrong direction. A journey towards truth is not a process of addition, but of subtraction. The philosopher challenges each philosophy until it is destroyed, and when all the symbolic idols have fallen, truth is what's left.
Truth was there all the time, patiently waiting for us to finally exhaust ourselves, shut up, and find it.
The first step towards resolving that perceived conflict would seem to be the hardest, finding people who actually want a resolution. Philosophy forums may be the last place such folks would be found? :-) Anyway, assuming such a resolution was desired...
My take is that the paths of theism and atheism lead to essentially the same place if followed far enough.
A fundamental fact about the human condition is that the emergence of thought has increasingly shifted our focus from the real world to the symbolic realm between our ears. We've steadily lost a primal bond with reality which other creatures and primitive humans enjoyed. The idea of "getting back to God" is one way of expressing the desire to recover what's been lost.
The atheist path back to the primal bond with reality is observation of reality. Not observation as a means to the end of theories and conclusions, because developing such concepts is travel further in to the symbolic realm, thus feeding the ailment we are trying to heal. Instead, observation of reality is pursued for it's own value. When we observe reality closely and patiently enough the symbolic realm recedes and is replaced by the real. The real has always been there the entire time, but it gets covered up by the symbolic noise in our heads.
The theist path back to the primal bond with reality (now renamed god) is to shift the religious focus from explanations to experience. As example, Jesus said "die and be reborn". He didn't say "establish a doctrine about dying to be reborn". Jesus used the word "die", a verb, implying action, not analysis. When we love, we die to the ego, the primary product of the symbolic realm, and are reborn in to a larger realm of family, friends, community, and reality. Only the actual experience of love can accomplish this, not talk about the experience. The talk is for folks who'd like to love, but aren't ready yet, so they pretend the talk is love, which is a lot easier than the surrender involved in love.
Both paths, theist and atheist, lead from the symbolic realm back to the real world, if followed far enough. "Dying to be reborn" and "observation of reality" are two different cultural expressions, meaning essentially the same thing.
But "dying to be reborn" and "observation of reality" is a challenging business, so most folks walk a little ways down their chosen path, and then stop, and build a fort.
Hey nice essay.
That is well understood in many philosophies. Buddhism says not to mistake the finger for the moon. Plato’s dialogues likewise often reflect on the unsayable reality. Certainly there are systematic philosophies that attempt to map everything out. I too read Krishnamurti for quite a few years.
Religion has had to serve all levels of culture including for most of its existence populations who were illiterate and uneducated. Hence the tropes in Christianity about sheep and fields and the like, which reflects the culture in which those analogies were meaningful. They don’t in the least relate to post-modern, post-industrial culture. So 'religion' in the west is kind of like a story book, or a quaint little nativity scene in a shop window, at least on the popular level, but there are many other levels also. Joseph Campbell - 'Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.' That reflects a lot of the confusion.
The issue in Western philosophy is that it really is at a fork in the road, and the roads don’t lead to the same destination. Scientific culture really is intent on re-defining mankind as h. Faber, ‘man who makes’, as distinct from h. Sapiens. Anything with religious connotations is ring-fenced off. You see that in debates about nature of mind. In reality, mind is not something objective, it is the faculty which defines what is objective. So the mind can't be accomodated in the modern scientific picture, because it transcends it. This is why the mind either has to be eliminated, as per Daniel Dennett, or explained in purely neural terms as the product of the meat brain. People feel very strongly about that and react adversely if you criticize it. From their perspective, the scientific outlook has to be all-definining, whatever can't be accomodated within it in principle has to be denied. 'The jealous god dies hard' is how I describe it, because scientific materialism is the progeny of the Western religious tradition.
You're right in saying that the spiritual path is a hard path, something I'm all too aware of.
Agreed. I don't claim to be inventing anything new. You would understand the cultural references better than I do.
Quoting Wayfarer
Imho, a solution to the confusion is to shift the focus from explanations to experience, a shift available within both the religious and atheist perspective. You know, we don't have to get lost in all the confusion about metaphors etc, we can instead leap over the whole thing.
Quoting Wayfarer
My guess is that this world view will collapse under it's own weight, just as religious culture is doing in many places. Science will give us ever more power at an ever faster rate until the inevitable moment when we lose control of the power and blow up science culture. This is another subject, but it is perhaps relevant that this future was basically predicted in the first book in the Bible. But as you correctly point out, the fairy tale story telling style of the Book of Genesis does more to obscure than reveal these days.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, in the spirit of the thread, we might try doubting this too. Will welcome your thoughts if interested.
First, if we shift the focus from explanations to experience, it's no longer "the spiritual path". You know, for example, love and meditation aren't the property of either religious or secular culture, but are experiences available to anyone of any belief. It's the explanations realm that cause us to try to turn experience in to some kind of journey.
We have the choice to consider such activities as acts of routine maintenance. I'm going to eat dinner in an hour and won't conceive of that as some kind of path, but just attending to day to day human need business.
Experiences which shift our focus back towards the real might be compared to food. We can talk about tomatoes and bread all day long, but it's only in the actual eating that we obtain the needed nutrition.
End of day, tired, best I can do at the moment. Take it from there if you wish.
If someone doubts the truth of their church, would they not leave it. Leaving is not the same as being converted.
Why? Shouldn't [s]you[/s] we?Quoting Wayfarer
God is not like a human? Is that what you mean? Yet, given God exists, he seems to have given us some abilities e.g. rationality which he must've thought would be useful to us. Also what's up with the idea of scientists claiming they're in the business of "reading God's mind." Too, asking the question doesn't amount to assuming God is like us or thinks like us; the ability to doubt is of some value to humans and all life in all likelihood. Surely, this ability, since it's "designed" for us, can be understood by us in the sense that we can discover why it exists.
Quoting Wayfarer
I saw a short video on Pyrrhonian Skepticism - if I understood correctly, it's the most radical version of skepticism, basically total and complete suspension of any and all judgements. Quoting Wayfarer
:up:
Thanks
There's an old saying, 'familiarity breeds contempt'. It's applicable here.
Quoting TheMadFool
But it's not the silly parlour game of 'how do you know you know anything?' It's more like meditation: being aware of the content of consciousness without being drawn in by it.
I see. Is there any other way to deal with Pyrrhonian skepticism but to keep "the content of consciousness" at arm's length? Perhaps, philosophy is like wine then - we can indulge in it every now and then but we have to remember to maintain a safe distance if we don't want to get sucked into what is ultimately a confused world.. What's interesting is doubt plays a major role here - we're supposed to avoid making judgements about anything since everything can be doubted and simply cultivate an awareness of the experience of being itself. No judging, Just being. :chin:
I know. :up:
Could you define reason/rationality? Saying that it’s reasonable to doubt reason in certain circumstances is circular, especially so if you’re trying to make the point that the reasonable thing to do is trust reason.
Reason is that faculty that discovers, isolates, and prescribes methods/ways of thinking that are either guaranteed to lead you to the truth or, at the very least, take you as close as possible to it.
To tell you the truth, reason seems to be more about steering us away from falsehoods and not exactly lead us to truth as I thought. Reminds me of scientific falsifiability, not sure. Perhaps you can shed some light on it.
Quoting Pinprick
Great point. It must be a paradox then - we placed complete trust in reason and the first thing it does is undermine that trust. You could look at it pessimistically and call it circular or optimistically and applaud reason for its fairness and honesty.
Ok, that would be an idealist conception of reason as a critical faculty. However reason is also the capacity to communicate with other individuals whose orientation may range from antagonistic to co-operative in the pursuit of survival. In that context, truth may very well take a back seat to expediency, propitiation, or any number of other constraints. This is I think a good example of the "ivory tower" criticism often leveled at philosophy.
Not really, but to me reason is about conforming to ways of thinking that have previously proven to be useful or accurate. To illustrate, a chronic liar likely does so because lying has proven useful, and therefore makes sense (is reasonable) to continue the behavior. Lying obviously has little to do with seeking truth. Reason is associated with logic so often because of logic’s usefulness in finding truth, but we aren’t always interested in finding the truth. The point being that the desired outcome matters. If the means achieve the desired end, then the act would be considered reasonable. So, more to the OP, a skeptic may desire to maintain his skepticism, and therefore doubt reason, which would be considered reasonable, but “truth” may not be his aim.
There is a factor that has generally been neglected in modern philosophy - in fact it can't even really be named, because there's no name for it. That is the factor which Buddhism calls 'avidya', meaning 'ignorance'.
Now, as I say, there's no real corresponding term in modern philosophy, because avidya has morally normative connotations. The 'enlightened' (i.e. the Buddha) knows things that the untrained mind doesn't know. But this doesn't refer to a scientifically trained mind, except for perhaps by analogy. But in Buddhism, indeed in the 'perennial philosophies' generally, there is the idea that the enlightened sees things as they truly are, because their insight is no longer tarnished by self-interest, greed, passion, grasping, and so on.
Natural science, of course, tries to bring that same kind of rigour to bear on the analysis of objective matters of fact, and often succeeds in that. But what modern science omits is precisely that sense of moral normativity which is found in Buddhism and other forms of the perennial traditions, because it is solely concerned with objective matters of fact. Whereas the perennial philosophies of whatever school have an ethical dimension that is central to their outlook.
But there are certainly parallels in ancient Greek philosophy as well. In stoicism, 'the sage' was likewise a 'personification of wisdom' - think of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, or the Consolations of Philosophy. The sage 'rises above the passions' and thereby attains to 'true wisdom'. You find analogies for this in virtually all civilised cultures. But where is it in today's culture? What stands for that now? I'm saying that this is now, in our culture, generally associated with science - because science is descended from a philosophical tradition in which that kind of detached understanding was paramount. But science omits something which is fundamental to the pre-modern formulation of wisdom, which is the qualitative aspect of judgement. Modern scientific philosophy omits (for example) the notion of formal and final cause which was intrinsic to Aristotelian philosophy. And that has consequences beyond the scientific.
You can see how this is wildly non-PC, of course. In individualist culture, there is no arbiter of truth other than science, as each man or woman is their own sole judge of moral worth. And it can't be any other way. But still, it has consequences.
I suppose you're right but reason is not so easily made to play second fiddle for the very idea that somethings may assume higher priority than it - for expediency or whatever else - is itself a reasonable course of action.
The "ivory tower" abode of philosophers is a different kettle of fish. I believe it's when philosophers remove themselves from reality and isolate themselves in a world of abstractions and thus absorbed give an air of aloofness to those not similarly occupied.
That said, taking into account the notion of zombies, I don't see how people who thinks zombies make sense (that's all of us I think) can ever accuse anyone of being in an "ivory tower" of abstract thought. Zombies aren't persons, right? What do you have to say about that?
Quoting Pinprick
See above. My description of reason didn't do justice to its full glory.
Quoting Pinprick
Isn't the skeptic's position that nothing can be known, even if paradoxical, the uncomfortable truth?
Quoting Wayfarer
[quote=Socrates]No one knowingly does evil[/quote]
What you say here reminds me of the time when I was contemplating the standard definition of god as omniscient, omnibenevolent and omnipotent. Whatever the origin of this definition, that which has a bearing on our discussion is the fact that omnibenevolence had to be mentioned as a separate quality over and above omniscience. As per the Buddhist, morally-tinged concept of avidya and also according to Socrates, having knowledge i.e. overcoming our ignorance should suffice to make us good people. However, the way god is defined suggests that no amount of knowledge, omniscience even, will suffice to make us good, in divine terms - omnibenevolent. What's up with that?
Quoting Wayfarer
Reality As An Illusion
Quoting Wayfarer
God: Omniscient but not necessarily Omnibenevolent and so the need to mention the latter as a separate divine attribute.
actually I was reading an excerpt from a book recently, about the fact that Plato takes issue with Socrates on this question. 'Acting against your better judgement' is called in the Greek 'akrasia', as I understand it; Socrates held the view that if a rational person knows something is wrong then he or she would never do it. But, we all know what it is to 'act against our better judgement' and I think that was the basis of Plato's criticism. But I haven't really studied that issue in depth. Perhaps Socrates had reached such a stage of intellectual clarity that he literally could not act against reason, but it's fairly plain that almost no-one is like that in reality.
With respect to 'God' - again, in the Indian tradition - more Hindu than Buddhist - the sage knows Brahman - indeed coming to know Brahman, or 'realise Brahman', is the salvific point of the whole religion. But that knowing is much more like 'jnana' than our conception of knowing, it's intimately bound up with renunciation, meditation and illumination - again, practices and modes of understanding that are culturally remote from ours.
I think we tend to anthropomorphise the concept of 'God' - that we see it through the perspective of what is said about it, what it stands for symbollically in social discourse. There is tremendous hostility towards those ideas in 'this secular age'. But the way we see it, I suggest, distorts the issue. Not that there's much that can be done to ameliorate that.
Quoting TheMadFool
I think there is a conception of knowledge, jnana, which again is 'salvific' - that there is something that, if known, is inherently salvific. There are endless realms of practical or technical or scientific knowledge which is not like that, of course. But for those on a 'quest', that 'quest' is for the kind of understanding which changes you.
So you stand by the Buddhist notion of avidya with its moral implications. I don't see the necessary connection between knowledge and morality.
I guess one way to interpret the absence of a link, as implied by the need to mention omnibenevolence separately from omniscience in re God, between knowledge and morality is to ensure free will. There should be no compulsion to do good and there will be one if knowledge is a slippery children's slide with goodness waiting with open arms at the bottom like a loving parent.
Perhaps I've got it backward. Knowledge doesn't lead to morality but morality leads to knowledge. If a person is good, really really good (omnibenevolent) then s/he'll do everything possible to do good and that requires knowledge. The more you know, the more you good you can do. Why not be omniscient? Knowing everything would go a long way in spreading the cheer, right?
Your thoughts?
That’s because in today’s world, the link has been severed. Knowledge is, as the New Left said, mainly instrumental - know-how, knowing how to achieve an outcome, prediction and control. It is techne, not gnosis. We’re excellent at it, but meanwhile the sword of Damocles hangs over our entire world.
You see, the genuine philosophers, of all cultures, tell us that our whole conception of ‘what is real’ is faulty. That’s what you were getting at in the ‘all is illusion’ thread. Consider the allegory of the Cave, which claims that most people - hey, he’s talking about us - are ‘prisoners chained in a cave’. We don’t even know what is real. We think we do, because everyone we know is like us.
Real philosophers actually are prophets, only more subtle.
I rather like the science fiction writing of Philip K Dick. He’s always flirting with the ‘reality as illusion’ idea. Something happens which suddenly pierces the veil - the Truman Show is another example from popular culture - and we realise we’ve been living in an illusory world. It’s like we open a door to a vast world, and realise that we’ve been living in a single room all our lives, telling ourselves there’s nothing outside. Actually philosophy has to do that, otherwise what is it other than chatter?
When Gautama realised supreme enlightenment, his first impulse was not to teach, not to say anything. Legend has it the God Brahma came and implored him to teach ‘for the sake of the many’. Gautama agreed, but only because, he said, there were ‘those with but a little dust in their eyes’. They might understand. But the vast majority never would, because they’re too attached to their misery to want to give it up.
Yes, when philosophers believe that they can abstract reason from it's practical applications, Ivory tower is applicable.
I'm not sure what your zombies comment means? Can you elaborate?
Exactly, knowledge can be used for good and it appears its the most powerful tool that anyone can have at his/her disposal toward that end. Thus, if one is so good to be omnibenevolent one of the first things one wants is omniscience to do the most good.
I believe the illusion is as much self-created as is imposed from outside. Our minds come hardwired with certain inclinations that predispose us to certain worldviews with no regard given to the actual truth.
This I doubt. Perhaps true in spirit - essentially both religion and philosophy arise from a sense of awe and wonder, a compulsion to discover what people call the truth. However, religion and philosophy diverge in method - the majority of religions are revelation-based and all invariably require faith but philosophy is a rational enterprise, there being no room for faith, heck, even reason itself is viewed with great suspicion.
I want to ask: could religion and spiritualism be just another shadow on the walls of Plato's cave?
My interest in skepticism arose from the realization that IF nothing can be known, WHY try at all? However, at a certain point in my experience with Pyrrhonian skepticism, it dawned on me that Pyrrhonian skepticism doesn't mean that there's nothing to know but just that 1. it may be unknowable and 2. we can never be certain that what we know is the actual truth. Even if one knows a shop sells knockoffs and not the actual merchandise, I can still explore the shop and maybe even buy something.
Heard about that. Interesting story. Reminds me of Lao Tze - those who speak don't know, those who know don't speak.
I don't know if people realize this or whether it's being forced down our throats by countless media representations but zombies aren't considered persons - you can, in fact you're supposed to, kill them and there are no consequences for doing that.
What's missing in zombies that make them non-persons? They're mindless. It's odd then to accuse someone, say a philosopher, of living in an ivory tower when he's actually being mindful. :chin:
I do not get it.
If what makes a man is a dick, does having a huge dick make you a non-man?
I think the argument is that the ivory-tower intellectual is not actually being mindful because he or she is neglecting critical components of practical reality. So this form of "heightened rationality" is ipso facto actually irrational.....
Thus spoke Reason.
Firstly, in what sense do you mean inclusive or exclusive?
Secondly, it appears that I'm guilty of loose terminology. There's rationality - a frame of mind - which recommends skepticism/doubt and there's logic - a method to truth which supposedly gets you there without fail. Rationality advises us to be skeptical and logic attempts to reduce error - the difference between what we think is the truth and what the truth actually is.
Well, it was a question.
To me it is clear that "rationality" is a much larger concept than logic, and one which operates at both the individual and the social level. And there are many kinds of truths. Social truths can be factually inaccurate, yet still functional. As the history of humanity testifies.
:up:
I suppose. But if the skeptic arrives at this “truth” by using reason, how can he then cast doubt on reason? Regardless, my point was that we are often biased, and can use reason for purposes other than finding truth. That is, if you define reason as being dependent on the goal.
Rationality imposes many duties on a person and one of them is to be skeptical in a global sense - everything must be doubted - and that includes rationality itself. There are two things to consider here:
1. The doubt itself: What's the actual truth? How certain are we about a particular claim?
and
2. How can we remove this doubt? How can we discover the actual truth? How can we improve our confidence in a claim?
It's interesting that rationality pays homage to doubt - its point of origin as it were (read the OP) - by making skepticism our duty, an obligation we have to fulfill, if we're ever to get to the truth or as close to it as possible.
Carrying out this duty of skepticism as best as we can, we come to a point where we doubt rationality itself. This attitude of doubt toward rationality reveals an important truth, to wit that it's just one method of removing doubt and there may be other, possibly better, methods out there to tackle the problem of doubt.
[s]Interestingly, it seems rationality is the best among all possible methods of ferreting out truths.[/s] Suppose someone claims he discovered another doubt-removing method, call it X. How would we know X is better than rationality? By using rationality, right? We would say things like, "X is better than rationality because..." and that, if nothing else, is being rational. If a court judge finds a better judge, doesn't that mean he himself is the best? :chin: This reminds me of the concept of technological singularity - we kick it off by building the first authentic AI and that AI builds a better AI and that AI builds another AI better than itself, so and so forth. Relate the idea of technological singularity to rationality as a method of discovering truths and it seems possible that a method of arriving at truths different from rationality maybe out there waiting to be discovered. Thus, we must doub rationality/reason.
All the incremental objects of the nature of an AI remain an AI, but the thesis on rationality implies a methodology better than, hence necessarily different from, rationality. The former is a consistent equivalence in itself, the latter is not, therefore they have no equivalence to each other.
“...We are actually in possession of a priori synthetical cognitions, as is proved by the existence of the principles of the understanding, which anticipate experience. If any one cannot comprehend the possibility of these principles, he may have some reason to doubt whether they are really a priori; but he cannot on this account declare them to be impossible, and affirm the nullity of the steps which reason may have taken under their guidance. He can only say: If we perceived their origin and their authenticity, we should be able to determine the extent and limits of reason; but, till we can do this, all propositions regarding the latter are mere random assertions. In this view, the doubt respecting all dogmatical philosophy, which proceeds without the guidance of criticism, is well grounded; but we cannot therefore deny to reason the ability to construct a sound philosophy, when the way has been prepared by a thorough critical investigation.
All the conceptions produced, and all the questions raised, by pure reason, do not lie in the sphere of experience, but in that of reason itself, and hence they must be solved, and shown to be either valid or inadmissible, by that faculty. We have no right to decline the solution of such problems, on the ground that the solution can be discovered only from the nature of things, and under pretence of the limitation of human faculties, for reason is the sole creator of all these ideas, and is therefore bound either to establish their validity or to expose their illusory nature.
The polemic of scepticism is properly directed against the dogmatist, who erects a system of philosophy without having examined the fundamental objective principles on which it is based, for the purpose of evidencing the futility of his designs, and thus bringing him to a knowledge of his own powers. But, in itself, scepticism does not give us any certain information in regard to the bounds of our knowledge. All unsuccessful dogmatical attempts of reason are facia, which it is always useful to submit to the censure of the sceptic. But this cannot help us to any decision regarding the expectations which reason cherishes of better success in future endeavours; the investigations of scepticism cannot, therefore, settle the dispute regarding the rights and powers of human reason....”
(CPR, A763,4/B791,2)
Quoting TheMadFool
It does not follow merely from the skepticism of one rationality, that another replacement methodology for it, is possible. Such methodology may very well be possible, but its possibility is given from a different kind of entity, rather than something so lackadaisical as skeptical analysis of the method already in play, by the possessor of it. Besides, how would a human rationality ever understand a rationality other than the human kind, and because he is necessarily at a complete loss to understand it due to the very limitations of his own, how would he ever claim the betterment of it?
:chin: Initially I was inclined to agree but can't the nth AI be as different from the (n+1)th as humans will be from the first genuine AI (capable of building something better than itself)? Exponential growth in intelligence, which is what the technological singularity is, is something we probably can't put on a scale and make predictions on. As an example, look how evolution has taken us from unicellular, presumably non-sentient, lifeforms to us, humans, capable of, supposedly, monumental feats - attaining the technological singularity for instance.
Quoting Mww
You mean to say that we can be absolutely certain (no doubts) that we have the best possible method of acquiring knowledge - currently rationality - and also have a good reason to look for a better method? :chin: That sounds off somehow. Methinks it's exactly when we doubt our method's capabilities that we look for something else. No?
Too, I'm taken aback by how you called doubt "lackadaisical" when in fact we're repeatedly cautioned to be skeptical when faced with claims people make or when we make observations of the world. Perhaps you're more religious than you think you are. :brow:
Skepticism regarding the contents, or the objects, with which the method may be concerned, is hardly the same as the skepticism directed at the method itself.
———-
Quoting TheMadFool
Not in the view from this armchair, no. It’s not so fine a line between doubting a method’s capabilities, and using the method such that its intrinsic capabilities are misguiding. If it is possible the method doesn’t correspond to its conditions, and if from that it is impossible to tell whether it is the method itself or the agent’s use of it that serves as causality for the discord, there is no proper justification for faulting the method alone.
Besides...how would one, as a human rational agent, ever be able to prove some alternative methodology to rationality, that isn’t itself an exposition given from the very unique and innate human condition it was meant to replace? In other words, what profit can there ever be in looking for that which the means for looking immediately makes the ends looked for, impossible to find? Hence the use of lackadaisical, tacitly indicating the absurdity of looking for impossible ends as opposed to correcting extant means.
Nevertheless.....benefit of the doubt: what form do you think an alternative to the human rational method would take?
Of course they're different in content but not in spirit and in this case it's all about spirit - the questioning spirit.
Quoting Mww
Agreed but the problem is that there is no proper justification to not to fault the method.
Quoting Mww
Demonstrate the impossibility of the absence of another method, different to rationality that can help us discover truths or guide us in making sense of our world and I promise to give your claims a second look.
Quoting Mww
One method exists - faith. It's really just circling back to where we began. Faith led to problems and that led to doubt and that led to reason and to ask us now to have faith is just closing the loop. Do you think there's a good reason to believe on faith and faith alone?
Oh, I would think there is. It is quite justified to not fault the method, when it is at least possible, if not probable, the use of it is the sole and complete fault. If it’s 50/50, it becomes proper NOT to fault the method alone, in disregard of its use, which is what I said. In order to prove the method at fault, it must be shown that irrationality is impossible, which historical precedent determines not to be the case.
————-
Quoting TheMadFool
The impossibility of the absence of another method presupposes the method necessarily, the validity of which has yet to be established with any apodeictic certainty; such method being only an idea, or at best, a mere notion, the conceptual predicates for it being highly arguable.
————-
Quoting TheMadFool
What is faith, but rationality without the ground of experience, or, which is the same thing, empirical knowledge? As such, it is not so much a different methodology, but rather, the same methodology operating under different conditions. It follows that it may be all well and good to have faith in that for which experience is merely possible, but it is not all well and good to have faith in that for which experience contradicts. Otherwise, the Earth would still be the center of the universe.
Now the typical rejoinder is: do you have faith in your perceptions, or, do you have faith that reason isn’t fooling you? Or that the fundamental laws of logic and mathematics are universally and necessarily irrefutable? Then it becomes a question of whether not yet having sufficient reason to doubt is the same as having faith. I suppose semantically it is, but still, that doesn’t magically turn faith into an entirely different methodology distinguishable from rationality. Technically, to have faith alone as a determinant quality is nothing more than using rationality without regard for its intrinsic logical legislation, again, in conformity to, and justified by, experience.
TMF!
Just wondering, were you able to draw any distinctions between (or consider) human intelligence and animal instinct?
One reason I ask is when reading your OP regarding doubt, I thought of another analogy relating to mammals. For example, a shark in the water often mistakenly attacks someone on a surfboard flapping their arms paddling presumably perceiving it as prey (like a seal, etc.). Apparently that is known to happen when the water is murky v. clear (though not all the time). So the shark visually confuses it with prey, seemingly more on an instinctual level (emergence), v. an intellectual level of doubt, wonder, creativity, self-awareness, the will, and other so-called metaphysical features of consciousness and intelligence.
(Since animals have the capacity to sense tsunamis, weather patterns, seasons, and other natural phenomena presumably from emergence), perhaps some other interesting questions there that could follow would be:
Is mankind just a more advanced animal? Is intelligence just a more advanced animal instinct and intelligence? Are mankind’s emotions and feeling just more advanced animal emotions and feelings? Do animals have synthetic a priori knowledge? Do they have a will to survive or an instinct to survive. So on and so forth...
In the case of a shark that attacks a paddling surfer because of resemblance to a seal when viewed from below, I think it displays the absence of the faculty to doubt or if present, total disregard on the shark's part. Just speculating here but predators, specifically apex predators don't need to doubt, at least on the matter of feeding, for the simple reason that everything is, for certain, food [for them]. The same is not true for animals that are lower down in the food chain - they need to be extremely cautious about whether what's in front of them is either prey or predator i.e. they must always doubt.
It appears then that the way we make such a big deal of skepticism in our lives - proof/evidence presented as the foremost of our concerns - suggests that we have a predator-prey relationship with the universe and, unfortunately, with our own fellow humans, and no points will be awarded for knowing to which category we belong.
At the end of the day then doubt is simply the desire not to end up as someone's or something's lunch.
I feel strongly that this is not the case. But - surprisingly - it’s a very controversial claim.
I recognise the biological continuity of h. Sapiens and the other primates, and indeed the broader evolutionary story. But my firm conviction is, that when h. Sapiens suddenly evolved the massive forebrain that distinguishes this species from others, with it come capabilities and ‘horizons of being‘ that are not available to other species.
One consequence of this is the ability to reflect on meaning - which is required, in order to even begin to philosophise, or to create art. You could argue that the ‘myth of the Fall’ symbolically recapitulates the human realisation of being separate or other to nature. Animals never have that realisation. The seal is predated, the other seals will dodge and then regroup and then simply keep going. They don’t stop and ask themselves ‘hey that could have been ME’ That’s the existential plight of humankind. Some ancient worthy said that, but for ‘the consolation of philosophy’, man would be the most miserable of creatures.
That is all gone by the board in modern culture. Modern culture believes we’re basically well-organised animals, and act accordingly! As someone in a project team I used to be in said ‘sets low standards, and consistently fails them.’ That’s part of the Faustian bargain of modernity - you’re relieved of the burden of self-questioning by living in a global entertainment quarter.
Have a read of Jacques Maritain’s Cultural Impact of Empiricism
:chin:
Quoting Mww
:chin:
Quoting Mww
Last I heard, faith is to believe without evidence
Quoting Mww
So, is reason fooling us or not?
and
Faith: requires no evidence
Rationality: requires evidence
Are they not different?
No. That is fideism.
[quote=Bertrand Russell]We may define “faith” as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of “faith.”[/quote]
Doubting Thomas
The other point about this is, only certain kinds of ‘evidence’ are credible in scientific method - reputable, third-party, and so on. You yourself might see a UFO out for a walk one day, but you would never be able to prove that according to scientific method. No matter what you saw, your report would just be ‘anecdotal evidence’.
But the fact remains that he (Thomas), unlike others who accepted the resurrection on faith, wanted and was given evidence.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, I agree that there are different kinds of evidence and scientific evidence is just one subset but by far the kind of evidence that qualifies as scientific is the one we all seem to agree on.
Indeed. Thereby giving the lie to fideism.
Just curious and you're probably the right person to ask this question to but are the religious fideists?
In my view, faith is in some sense an intuition of realities that are over our cognitive horizon; it’s the sense of an order that seems implicit in nature, which we can’t quite pinpoint. That, I think, is a pretty good minimalist definition.
Strange. Is it not true that you just used a collection of symbols to point to the truth and reality of the relationship between symbols and what is true? Are we suppose to take what you just asserted as the truth about symbols and truth?
You're essentially sayng that it is true that we can't know the truth. Its a contradiction.
Of course they’re different, but their differences have nothing to do with evidence.
Rationality: the use of reason according to principles, the judgements of which are logically consistent necessarily, from which cognitions follow and its objects are given;
Faith: the condition under which judgements are contingent on mere persuasion, the principles be what they may, from which its cognitions do not necessarily follow and the possibility of its objects are not necessarily given.
In the event I don’t know what I’m talking about, or, which is equally the case, in the event what I’m talking about is too systematically evolved to be properly understood by the lesser equipped......
Rationality: the natural inclination for the discovery and use of reason;
Faith: superficial, and possibly but not necessarily unwarranted, confidence in that for which reason is used.
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Quoting TheMadFool
It isn’t so much that reason fools us, but rather, it may be that in which we are not being careful enough in guarding against fooling ourselves, by using reason under conditions where it doesn’t work.
—————
The content of your deleted comment is telling, just as much as is the deletion of it.
Actually, I believe the opposite. Rationality acts as a sort of short cut to “understanding,” and I’m using that term loosely. When we see the same patterns over and over to the point that outcomes are predictable, we lose the need, and desire, to doubt. Gravity is a good example of this. Does anyone sit in suspense, just wondering what will happen if they drop an object? Of course not. Because all of our prior experiences show that objects fall when they are dropped, the rational thing to do is assume the object you’re about to drop will fall too.
Quoting TheMadFool
This much I agree with, but considering the fact that as of now rationality is the best method we have, it stands to reason that we should only doubt it when it seems to fail, or doesn’t fully explain the issue at hand. But even in those circumstances it may not be best to discard rationality entirely. It may only need to be improved upon, or adjusted.
Quoting TheMadFool
Probably because it fills in the gaps in our understanding that rationality misses, or is otherwise entirely incapable of explaining. But also note that if X is truly a method, then it must have some sort of order to it that is reliable. This order will almost certainly have to be rational, would it not? Where that leaves us, I’m not sure...
Which implies a view close to 'verificationism'.
I think Mww's definitions in the post above yours are nearer the mark.
The argument I have with that view could occupy volumes, but the basic premise is from Kant: that reason transcends nature. By this I mean that even in order to begin to appeal to 'nature' or to distinguish 'natural' from 'supernatural', we have to appeal to reason and make judgements. And that faculty is internal to the operation of reason and entirely relies on the relations between ideas.
Another facet of the same argument is that the order of nature is assumed, but not proven, by naturalism. The natural sciences are grounded in the discovery of, and exploitation of, regularities in nature. But science doesn't explain that order, even though many people seem to assume it does; Wittgenstein exclaimed that 'the whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena' (TLP 6.371).
The attempt to 'naturalise reason' is one of the hallmarks of 20th century analytical philosophy. It naturally (pardon the irony) analyses reason in Darwinian terms, i.e. as an adaptation. But to explain reason is to sell it short; and besides, any such 'explanation' must invariably be circular, as explanation relies on reason, on giving reasons why such-and-such is so-and-so. You can't stand outside reason and describe it objectively; you have to employ reason to even define what is objective. Otherwise you're second-guessing reason, trying to give a reason for reason, in terms of adaptation (a point made with pristine clarity in Thomas Nagel's essay Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion.)
But in practice, the upshot is that we defer to science as the 'arbiter of what is real', which is what naturalism amounts to. That is both a result and a cause of the instinctive hostility towards what is deemed 'supernatural' that animates many of these debates. What is 'supernatural' can't really be articulated, but in practice it amounts to categorising a wide range of philosophical ideas as being associated with religion, and so, matters of personal faith; acceptable as articles of private conviction, but fiercely rejected as truth claims in any other sense. And the consequences of this attitude extends well beyond the bounds of academic philosophy.
[quote=Paul Tyson, De-fragmenting Modernity]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. You can have whatever personal loyalties you like, provided you give uncompromising public loyalty to the state in which you are born, to the liberal and secular laws it mandates, . . . in reality, we have a single public cultus, and private cultus pluralism. . . . Because the realm of objectivity is tightly conceptually tied to mere facticity and mere instrumental efficacy, technology has increasingly displaced humanity in the arena of public power. [/quote]
Kant uses many and assorted (distorted?) descriptors for reason, but doesn’t posit or indicate that “reason transcends nature”, so I wonder what he would say to the author who put the notion in so many words. I suppose said author could have derived it on his own, from....
“....cognizing, a priori, by means of the categories, all objects which can possibly be presented to our senses, not, indeed, according to the form of their intuition, but according to the laws of their conjunction or synthesis, and thus, as it were, of prescribing laws to nature and even of rendering nature possible...”
....but that, to me, seems a pretty lopsided interpretation.
On the other hand, Kant never claims to know what reason actually is, and does in fact theoretically prove it is impossible to empirically know anything that transcends natural conditions, so maybe “reason transcends nature” merely indicates the impossibility of knowing what reason actually is. But still, for the language gamer’s benefit, The Good Doctor does say......
“....reason is the faculty which furnishes us with the principles of knowledge a priori.....”
..... in relation to the other participants in speculative transcendental philosophy, but that’s more what its job is, not what it actually is. And of course, ceremoniously grants Freewheelin’ Freddie the liberty of asking....
{...wtf IS a faculty anyway??? A pox on those discovering....no wait, I mean INVENTING.....even MORE of them!!!! Ahhhh...the “piping, singing” “malicious fairy” of German Romanticism, If I do say so myself}
(BG&E, 1.11, 1886, seriously personalized)
(Sigh) Ain’t speculative metaphysics grand???
Well, I do wonder, then, as Kant's philosophy is described as 'transcendental idealism', what it is transcendental in respect of. The passage in the book that I'm reading on Kant puts it this way:
.'...we may be sorrrounded by objects, but even while cognizing them, reason is the origin of something that is neither reducible to nor derives from them in any sense. In other words, reason generates a cognition, and a cognition regarding nature is above nature. In a cognition, reason transcends nature in one of two ways: by rising above our natural cognition and making, for example, universal and necessarily claims in theoretical and practical matters not determined b nature, or by assuming an impersonal objective perspective that remains irreducible to the individual I.'
The Powers of Pure Reason: Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy
Alfredo Ferrarin
Also from the SEP entry on Kant's Transcendental Idealism:
'We have sufficiently proved in the Transcendental Aesthetic that everything intuited in space or in time, hence all objects of an experience possible for us, are nothing but appearances, i.e., mere representations, which, as they are represented, as extended beings or series of alterations, have outside our thoughts no existence grounded in itself. This doctrine I call transcendental idealism. '
Quoting tim wood
Ideas are real. Many fundamental ideas of philosophy have become incorporated with religion, and so are now declared taboo on those grounds, matters of private belief.
Kant never claims to know what anything actually is.
No. Ideas are just as real as the computer you're writing that on. If they weren't, you'd have no computer. So you see, you have a materialist bias that affects the way you see it - no fault of yours, and no pejorative intent on my part. It's just a philosophical observation. You think it's already settled, and it's my argument that it's not.( 'Usually meant' carries a lot of weight here.)
Thomas Nagel - Thoughts are Real.
If you reduce reality to what is material, you've got a big problem. Sez I.
You're just playing with words. It's fun to do. :smile:
So, what, to you, is worthy of faith? :chin:
Nutshell: the Kantian transcendental is that which is purely a priori. Anything purely a priori is an object created by the conscious thinking subject, hence the idealism. That which is purely a priori is that which is thought, without regard for sensibility.
Transcendental in respect of experience.
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Quoting Wayfarer
Anything empirical, yes; all we can ever know of the empirical is its appearance, its representation as phenomenon. Nevertheless, we must be able to know something with absolute certainty, otherwise the concept is empty. Epistemology ultimately reduces to certain knowledge only for that which is thought, because the negation of thought by contradiction is impossible. It is impossible to not know of what objects you think. But that still leaves the objects of which you think, to relate to what is the case or not in physical reality, which is an empirical judgement of truth, from which follows the instantiation and/or extension of meaning in common language.
—————
Quoting Wayfarer
What I said can be reinforced by what you said, certainly, but I personally go further and distinguish the general meaning of the one, re: faith in.... in juxtaposition to the general meaning of its complement, re: knowledge that...... Faith and belief are much too similar in subjective validity to be distinguishable from each other, and practical knowledge literally flushes both right down the figurative existential crapper.
In addition, again personally.....
Quoting Wayfarer
.....is a perfectly subjective condition, standing for that which one cares enough to think about, but for which knowledge is not provided. Something like that. Or not...
Agreed. You can’t blast an idea over the centerfield wall. And you can’t call a thing round without the antecedent idea of what a “round” thing must be.
Aren’t we all?
...no exceptions taken, good stuff guys. I kinda like how this thread evolved into reason and belief… .
:up:
Thanks for your interpretations on Kant. I agree with them, and hold similar views and interpretations.
Also, it's worth parsing (and this is by no means an exhaustive attempt) the concept of synthetic a priori knowledge (that so-called awareness which separates us from lower life forms). It seems that our consciousness allows for certain intrinsic or innate wonders about the causes of things, that exist all around us, including ourselves.
For instance, when we utter the judgement all events must have a cause, we can simply ask ourselves, why do we even have the capacity to ask such a question (why do we ask why), and what is the purpose to the asking of why (?). Some would argue that our intuition plays some sort of role in its existence (synthetic a priori judgements). In that case, it would be something that is innate and/or something that naturally exists from within our consciousness, that seemingly is universal and intrinsic to all homo-sapiens. Something a priori, that just is. I think you alluded to that.
I can't even begin to understand the nature of such human capacity or capabilities or features associated with human consciousness; I can only wonder about such things and use it to my advantage to enhance my existence (the human condition). Ironically, this same sense of wonderment does in fact have pragmatic attributes/benefits involving quality of life issues/concerns (wondering about doing, and making things better for ourselves and others), which also leads to things like the Will to survive (another topic altogether of course).
But back to the OP, I think doubt and belief are different from emergent behavior and instinct. Birds swarming, animals migrating, animals sensing nature as in tsunamis and season changes, so on and so forth seem to all come from instinctual emergent properties, rather than any sort of higher level self-awareness and volitional existence.
https://medium.com/the-explanation/animal-instinct-and-human-intelligence-the-insurmountable-gulf-bfc95ac8e759
Yeah, that’s been done, much to the chagrin of continental philosophy, by Quine** mostly, insofar as the principle of necessity has no business being in conjunction with the concept of truth, and Popper*** somewhat, insofar as the a priori is merely a genetic expectation (gasp!!!), which essentially eviscerates Kantian rational epistemology.
** “Two Dogmas....”, 1953
*** “LofSD”, 1959
Nevertheless, from an Enlightenment continent perspective, the synthetic a priori....what it is, what it does and why it’s a valid predisposition, is very much worth parsing, absolutely.
—————
Quoting 3017amen
I’d be real careful with that notion, for the danger arises of making consciousness a causality in itself. I’d be reluctant to pursue that line of thought, myself. But if you have ideas in support of it, I’d be interested in reading them.
As for the rest, all good.
Mww!
Thanks for your reply. I want to re-state the statement that you have or had concerns about.
"It seems that our consciousness allows for certain intrinsic or innate wonder's about the causes of things, that exist all around us, including ourselves."
That's a generic statement about having a sense of wonderment (wondering) about what things causes other things to happen. What is it about that, that cause such consternation?
Yeah but I'd like to know in what sense do we play with words?
These are two distinct propositions. The second is given; the first, because it is qualified by consciousness, is not. At least not so much.
If you’d said being conscious allows...., I’d have agreed. But being conscious is not the same as consciousness. Being conscious is a state, consciousness is the quality of that state.
A sense of wonderment is a feeling; wondering is thinking; consciousness is an idea.
Philosophy is the science of nit-picking. (Grin)
Why.....in whatever sense assuages the ego, of course.
Perhaps I'm at fault here but you took simple concepts such as faith and rationality, the clear distinction between them and turned them into something unrecognizable. All of course if you don't agree that they are distinguished solely on the basis of the requirement of evidence.
There is no fault, there is only dialectical disagreement.
Faith and rationality are certainly not simple concepts; there is a clear distinction between them; I don’t agree the distinction is based on evidence. And unrecognizable is relative.
'Experience' being the sine qua non in empiricism and arguably in naturalism also.
Quoting tim wood
What is real, and what exists, are not necessarily synonymous. Mathematical Platonists (which include such luminaries as Penrose and Godel) believe that mathematical objects are real. But the sense in which they're 'existent' remains moot. Nevertheless, much of the success of modern science relies on the 'unreasonable efficacy of mathematics in the natural sciences'.
I understand the current orthodoxy - : that ideas exist in minds, that minds are dependent on brains, that brains are an evolved organ, and that this provides a way that the mind can be understood through the perspective of naturalism. Many people take that for granted, but I question it, on the basis that once the mind has evolved to the point of being able to reason mathematically, then has escaped the bounds of biology. (This is *not* a creationist argument.)
Quoting TheMadFool
Here's quite a good summary of key elements of the scientific method:
[quote=Edward Dougherty]Modern science emerged in the seventeenth century with two fundamental ideas: planned experiments (Francis Bacon) and the mathematical representation of relations among phenomena (Galileo). This basic experimental-mathematical epistemology evolved until, in the first half of the twentieth century, it took a stringent form involving (1) a mathematical theory constituting scientific knowledge, (2) a formal operational correspondence between the theory and quantitative empirical measurements, and (3) predictions of future measurements based on the theory. The “truth” (validity) of the theory is judged based on the concordance between the predictions and the observations. While the epistemological details are subtle and require expertise relating to experimental protocol, mathematical modeling, and statistical analysis, the general notion of scientific knowledge is expressed in these three requirements.
Science is neither rationalism nor empiricism. It includes both in a particular way. In demanding quantitative predictions of future experience, science requires formulation of mathematical models whose relations can be tested against future observations. Prediction is a product of reason, but reason grounded in the empirical. Hans Reichenbach summarizes the connection: “Observation informs us about the past and the present, reason foretells the future.”[/quote]
'Evidence' has to fall within the scope of that methodology to be considered scientific. But scientific method itself operates within conditions, and those conditions by their very constitution limit what is considered 'evidence' to what is measurable according to this method. To say that is not to criticize science, but simply to draw something out that is often left unstated.
What do all of them have in common?
Oh hell...I dunno. Humanity? Intellect? Rationality? All of the above?
All that is "each in itself"? What the heck does that mean?
Quoting tim wood
OK, so "real things" names a bigger category than "things in reality". If therefore, there are real things, which are not part of reality, what are they a part of? Where do they exist, and by what premise do you say that they are real things?
Quoting tim wood
Let's take a look at some of these things then, to see where they exist if they're not part of reality. It appears like you are talking about things which are in minds. If these things exist within minds, yet they are not in reality, am I correct to conclude that you believe that minds are not part of reality? What is a mind a part of, if it is not a part of reality? Do you think it is some sort of falsity, or fiction to say that people have minds, and minds have ideas, because all these things are not in reality?
I don't see how this follows from what I've said. I think, if it helps, that progress in mathematics and logic comprises at least in part in the discovery of ideas. (What's that saying? 'God created the integers, all else is the work of Man' ~ some dude.)
There is a saying of a certain class of facts that they must be 'true in all possible worlds'. It's a very broad principle. So take for example, the law of identity, or of the excluded middle, or primitive arithmetical truths, like the Pythagorean theorem. These are, I say, discovered, not invented by the mind; were another species to evolve on another world, then they too would discover such principles.
This is part of a larger argument: is mathematics discovered or invented? Modern opinion generally supports the latter. Mathematical Platonism suggests the former. So, platonism (small p) argues that such rational principles are real, but they can only be grasped by a mind. Ergo, that they're real ideas; not dependent on your or my mind, but only graspable by a mind.
Whereas most people nowadays - I've seen it stated here many times recently - assume that ideas can be understood in terms of being 'correlated' with neural activity or in some sense as an output of the physical brain. So the mainstream view, which I'm questioning, is that the mind is a product of the brain, that mind depends on or supervenes on the brain, and the brain is the product of evolution. The efficacy of ideas can be judged by their usefulness for survival; we know when ideas are valid, because they correspond with what is 'out there'. That in a nutshell is what philosopher Thomas Nagel describes as 'neo-Darwinian materialism'.
So, regarding the real 'ideas' - they don't 'come from' anywhere, and they don't 'live' anywhere. They're not situated in 'some place'. They're real in the sense that the domain of real numbers is real. It's only figuratively 'a domain' - but it's nevertheless real, as 2 is part of it, but the square root of 2 is not.
I don't expect that to be understood, but it's the best I've got at this moment.
I don't think most folks would agree with you. I think that most folks believe that what other people are thinking, their intentions and such, are part of reality. Are you solipsist? How do you defend yourself against deception and abuse from others, if the intentions of others are not part of reality in your belief?
Quoting tim wood
No, I didn't miss it, but as I said, I didn't understand what you meant by "all that is each in itself". A brick is in the world, an image of a brick is in a mind. A mind is in the world. Nothing is "in itself". A molecule is in a brick. Do you think that a molecule is not part of reality because it is in something which is in the world, like an idea is in something which is in the world?
What grounds your notion of materiality? Is a wavefunction material? Is it in reality? If not then where is the material particle when its position is not being measured? I don't think you have a very practical division between what is in reality and not in reality
Quoting tim wood
This is what I question. Why does reality call for materiality in your belief? Are intentions not part of reality? Surely they have a real affect in the world, and many are external to you. But clearly intentions are not material. How can you not see that defining "reality" with "materiality" is a big mistake?
Self-awareness.
Tim's not correct Wayfarer. Gravity consists of particles called Gravitons (the hypothetical graviton, is a massless particle traveling at the speed of light, just like photons in the electromagnetic theory/we don't actually know for sure), which have no mass. Neither do photons. But gravity seems to be more complicated. Gravity is a force, which can exist in the form of Gravitational Waves, which are ripples in the spacetime. Hence gravitational waves are massless too. All in all, we can say that gravity/photons don't have a mass.
In the real world of everydayness, there are many things from consciousness (thoughts and feelings themselves) that don't have 'mass'. And that's a no-brainer!
Does the will to survive have mass :snicker:
Quoting Mww
Quoting 3017amen
Oh. Ok. I was going for the irreducible, in order to not affirm the consequent, that is to say, that which is both necessary and sufficient, rather than one or the other. But true enough, self-awareness is common to feeling, thinking, and consciousness, without being the primary condition for them.
LOL, there are few real answers in philosophy, but at least we know self-awareness exists! Or at least it's true that philosophy itself requires having self-awareness in order to practice it!!
Does the will to survive have mass :snicker:[/quote]
Does 'Doubt' have mass? Or how about 'Reason'?
Great! So you stand corrected. Those things have no mass, yet are real.
As far as something existing outside the mind (phenomenology), and/or mathematics having an independent existence (as examples), I tend to side-in with Wayfarer. But that's just my Kantian intuition :gasp: I think when you think of infinity/speed of light; something existing outside of time (eternity) that creates temporal time, (mathematics being a so-called timeless eternal truth) so on and s forth you can't help but wonder for a deeper explanation. Or at least wondering about the causes of something existing independent of temporal time itself (like relativity/the speed of light).
But only theories exist there. It could be that some other possible world has yet another language altogether that in-turn explains itself (existence). Or, maybe there are other worlds like ours with limited explanation, just a different set of rationality. I think we're back to multiverse theories...the notion of possible worlds is intriguing. But we're kind of off topic there... .
Reason and Doubt apparently don't have mass.
Useless for whom?
I agree, particularly when you mistakenly conflated mass with reality :joke:
What the hell are you talking about? You distinguish between reality and not reality, on the basis of materiality, because that makes it easy for you? Does being easy mean your distinction is correct?
Sorry I didn't reply to your quip about "fruit salad", I thought you were making a joke.
Quoting tim wood
What kind of a distinction is that? I really don't see how reality can be anything other than the complete collection of what is real. Isn't that what reality means to you? That's what the dictionary says, so it must be what it means to most people. What sense does it make to say that there are some real things, which for some obscure reason, are not part of reality? As I pointed out, with my example of wavefunctions and particles, it really doesn't make the distinction any easier for you. All it does is defer the question of whether a thing is a part of reality or not, to a question of whether the thing is material or not. And if this is the wrong question in the first place you are just making a mistake.
Quoting tim wood
I don't understand why you believe that a thing must be capable of being pointed at in order to be part of reality. The fact that we cannot point to it might only indicate that our knowledge of it is deficient. But why should we exclude things from reality just because our knowledge of these things is deficient. Something makes an unfamiliar sound in the night. We cannot exclude this from reality just because we can't point to it. We cannot exclude wavefunctions from reality just because we cannot point to the particle. Nor can we exclude ideas from reality just because we cannot point to them. All these things, we cannot point to them merely because we are deficient in knowledge about them. This does not mean that they are not part of reality.
Quoting tim wood
Sez you, but "wavefunction" describes something real, just like "brick" describes something real. And, just like you can point to a particular place where "brick" is applicable (an object called a brick), you can also point to a particular place where "wavefunction" is applicable. (in a field of electromagnetic radiation). I'm afraid your distinction is really not getting you anywhere. Use of the word "brick" is supported by ideas, so that we can use "brick" to refer to something in the world, but so is "wavefunction" supported by ideas so that it can be used to refer to something in the world.
Why, tell me please, are the ideas which are employed in the use of words, any less a part of reality than the things which are referred to by the words. If using words is part of reality, then we must include both of these essential aspects of word usage as part of reality as well.
Quoting tim wood
Suppose someone takes a brick, and slaps you upside the head with it. Are you going to turn around and tell me that intentions are not a part of reality, because they are not material like the brick is? Do you think it's the brick that gets up and slaps you in the head? Do you think a brick could even exist in the first place, without intentions to create it? Tim, get your shit together, and face reality! Otherwise it will slap you in the face while you're standing there thinking, ideas can't do that, they're not part of reality.
,
Ya know.....there is a standing argument where existence cannot be the predicate of a proposition. The logical error, in this case at least, is that just because it seems I am aware of myself and therefore my mental activities, I cannot infer from that alone, that self-awareness is something that exists. The very best that can be claimed, is that self-awareness is a subjectively valid representation.
There’s no real harm in positing the existence of self-awareness, but a philosophical problem will arise when it is claimed that ping pong tables and self-awareness exist equally.
That's the materialist view. I don't agree with it, and you're giving me no reason to accept it. The fact that it seems obvious to you is not an argument for it. But, I've answered your questions as well as I'm able, so I'll leave it there.
The point you keep missing was Wayfarer's platonic ideals from the simple standpoint of physical v. metaphysical. Like mathematical abstracts, they can describe a circle or a structural beam, through using calculations (ideas), but never come into existence. In themselves they hold no mass or weight yet they are used in physics to effectively describe physical things as found in nature, or in engineering to describe and design a structure, etc. etc..
[quote=Wikipedia] Materialism is a form of philosophical monism that holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. According to philosophical materialism, mind and consciousness are by-products or epiphenomena of material processes (such as the biochemistry of the human brain and nervous system), without which they cannot exist.[/quote]
You ‘suppose ideas to be non-material’ but you say
Quoting tim wood
They’re ‘real’, then, in the same sense as opinions or convictions are real - because they’re held by subjects. They’re real for them. Which at once subjectivises and relativises.
But I’m arguing that ideas are real in a more profound sense than that. They are constituents of reality, no less than are atoms and electric fields, but that they manifest as elements of judgement, not as objects. Whenever we declare what is or what isn’t real, whether matter is real or mind is, we’re relying on judgement. Even the belief that ‘everything is ultimately material’ is a judgement. But modern thought tends not to see that, because it attributes reality to ‘what exists independently of any mind’. What is real, we think, is what is ‘out there’, what is real independently of any perspective or viewpoint, the vast universe in which h.sapiens are ‘mere blips’.
[quote=Stephen Hawking] The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.[/quote]
What this doesn’t see, is that this is only clear to us, because we’re capable of judgement. In a sense, h.sapiens is the means by which the Universe is able to arrive at such an understanding. ‘A physicist’, said Neils Bohr, ‘is just an atom’s way of looking at itself’. So that ‘looking at’ is as fundamental to reality as ‘what is looked at’ - an elemental truth which has only barged its way into modern philosophy by way of the ‘observer problem’ in physics. (Which is why post-modernism in philosophy coincides with the advent of relativity.)
gets it right. The ‘standard model’ of particle physics IS a mathematical model. Now, certainly, and as I already said, modern science demands that the mathematics is validated against observation, and a lot of that subject matter will never be understood by me or anyone without a degree in mathematical physics, although that is also beside the point.
We rely on judgement whenever we say ‘is’, ‘is not’, ‘because’, ‘is equal to’. Reason itself is reliant on these elements - they are like the ‘ligatures’ of thinking, based on the ability to abstract. You won’t find those elements ‘out there somewhere’, there not amongst the objects of scientific analysis, but science couldn’t even get started without them.
Mww!
LOL yep I remember that in my studies of Existentialism. Sort of a huge topic that deserves a separate thread. The particular distinction of predication (whether existence is a true predicate) reminds me of a similar one where some argue that a subjective truth is not a truth that I have, but a truth that I am. :smile:
Remember, man tends to forget existence. It happens, however, that he must first exist in order to have self-awareness and use reason.
I'm still not sure on why you're asking me that, but I'm inclined to say, as I said, that primitive arithmetical truths will be the case for any mind capable of grasping them, but they're only graspable by a mind. There's a paper I read - I don't read a lot of philosophy papers - called 'Frege on Knowing the Third Realm' by Tyler Burge who shows that Frege has the same view. And that most modern philosophers will find this 'perplexing'. Why will they find it 'perplexing'? Because, again, it suggests that 'mental objects' - i.e. primitive arithmetical truths - are real, 'in the same way', says Frege 'as are stars and planets'. But - they're mental! So how can they be real? Only what's 'out there' in time and space is real, right? That's what you say, isn't it?
I've also found some insights in an Encylopedia of Philosophy article, the Indispensability Argument in the Philosophy of Mathematics. It begins:
So, what are 'out best epistemic theories'? Why, naturalist ones, of course!
It's almost comical in its earnestness, this article. Further down, it says:
To me, the answer is just staring us in the face: that mathematical reasoning relies on and reveals non-physical reals. But this article, and many of the books and papers it refers to, goes to tortuous lengths to argue against this. Ask yourself why.
Anyway - I'm at the work-desk for 8 hours, really must log out altogether and show some discipline.
Obviously I'm not ignoring your distinction, that's why I'm in this discussion. I just think it's not consistent with reality, and therefore it's wrong.
Quoting tim wood
I have no reason to say that ideas are not matters of mind. The issue is with your assumption that matters of mind are not part of reality.
Quoting tim wood
The problem is that mass, and materiality, are concepts, what we say about things, descriptions, and therefore not mind independent. Likewise, subjective/objective has the same problem, these are just concepts, proposed for division. But on what basis can you divide two categories and say that the things in the one category are not part of reality? The simple act of dividing, and designating this part as a part of a larger whole, denies that the part could be outside reality. What could that even mean, to have identified two distinct types of things, and then say that this one type is not part of reality?
I think that this 'of the mind', and 'not of the mind' distinction is not a good one to base an understanding of reality on. And to make a distinction like that and remove one side from the realm of reality, yet try to say that this side is somehow "real", is just contradiction. There are other distinctions which are much more productive, like passive/active, and past/future, which allow both sides to be part of reality, and also allow that both mind and matter partake of both sides. Then we bypass this bias which makes you want to contradict yourself by saying that there are real things which are not part of reality. If you'd open your mind to other possibilities you might see that if it's real, it's got to be part of reality. Then, when we except the reality of immaterial things, we can get to work on understanding them. But denying the reality of them doesn't give us any headway toward understanding them.
Quoting tim wood
Wow, a person who defines "reality" with "materiality" and doesn't consider that to be a case of materialism. I'm dumbfounded.
But, you don't.
Quoting tim wood
Discovered logic.
You haven't made it clear. Saying that there are real things which are not part of reality is contradiction, rather than making things clear. And you think I need to get my terms straight.
Dr. Samuel Johnson claimed to disprove Bishop Berkeley's immaterialist philosophy - that there are no material objects, only minds and ideas in those minds - by kicking a large stone and asserting, "I refute it thus." This is called ‘argumentum ad lapidem’, ‘appeal to the stone’.
Yeah, no material objects, except.....
.....just guessing about your regret.
Oh. Well.......I always was a lousy guesser.
You can give "reality" whatever definition you want, and proceed to talk in very strange ways, claiming not to contradict yourself, but then your definition contradicts what the rest of us know as "reality". That is how your claims are contradictory. The claim that there are real things which are not part of reality contradicts the conventional use of "reality", which we know as the collection of all real things. And you've given no supportive reasons for your exclusive definition, demonstrating that your definition is merely the product of a materialist bias.
Quoting tim wood
You did not address at all what I've shown as support for what you call my "unsupported claim".
That was the matter of how intention, which is immaterial and not part of reality in your book, can move, and even create, material things like bricks, which are part of reality in your scheme. I used this as evidence that the division, or distinction you have made is not a true division, it is not consistent, or correspondent with observed reality.
How do you propose to maintain this distinction when things like intention cross the boundary. Intention appears to exist as an immaterial thing in the mind, but causes effects on, and creates material things. Where does intention exist relative to your division? Is it part of material reality or not? You have yet to address this, but I suppose it is not, being a thing of the mind. But if it is not, then how does it have such a massive effect on material things if it is not a part of that material reality?
I read as much as the preview would allow, from your “reason transcends nature” link. Overall, the guy does a very good job of highlighting modernity’s miscalculations, I think, even if I, myself, have trouble with reason transcending anything. I understand what he’s trying to say; I just don’t think that’s what Kant would say, and it’s his [s]book[/s ] treatise, so......
On the other hand, and something I meant to add last time, Ferrarin says:
“Reason is the subject of thought and rules, and “I” is the way it (reason) operates. Both transcend the individual “I” who is the consciousness of rules it finds and has not made”
So we have reason transcending both empirical nature and the transcendental “I”, which seems to put reason completely out of reach of anything with which a human might find himself concerned. And if that’s the case, reason can hardly be thought as a speculative faculty, or a theoretical methodology, which Kant specifically nominates reason as being.
But, Ferrarin has letters after his name and I don’t, which I must admit, makes him the boss.
This view of science limits it to physics - the fundamental science. Not wrong for everything builds off of it, even biology but I don't recall limiting evidence to physical quantities. Come to think of it, the need for quantification is only a secondary characteristic of the sciences - it only exists to increase the precision/accuracy of predictions. I have a hunch that the earliest laws in physics have non-quantitative versions that make perfect sense e.g. the law of gravity can be phrased as "all things fall toward the center of the Earth".
Thanks for the informative post.
[quote=Gospel of John, Chapter 20]27 Then saith he to [Doubting] Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand[ wounds on Jesus' side as evidence for the crucifxion and resurrection], and thrust [it] into my side: and be not [u]faithless[u], but believing.[/quote]
Glad I’m not Thomas.
I already told you. A person gets angry at you, sees a brick, and gets the idea to hit you with the brick, picks up the brick and hits you on the side of the head. Obviously the person's intention to hit you with the brick causes the person to pick up the brick and hit you with it. What more do you want? In philosophy we call this "final cause". In case you are unfamiliar with it, it is a recognized form of causation, and intention plays an important role in law.
You can play dumb, and pretend that it was not the person's immaterial intent and immaterial ideas which causes the brick to get up and hit you, but then why be two-faced, trying to deny your materialism as you have been? If you do not agree that it's the person's idea to hit you with the brick (intention), which causes you to be hit with the brick, then just admit that you're a determinist materialist, and argue what you believe, .instead of pretending. If it is not the intent of the person which causes you to be hit with the brick (final causation), then is the person not morally or legally responsible for this act?
Quoting tim wood
If you had read the posts I made addressed to you, you would know that I do not make the same distinction as you. And, I gave the reasons, I think that there are more accurate and productive distinctions to be made.
Furthermore, I think that yours is a false distinction because what you call material things, like bricks, have what must be according to your distinction, an immaterial aspect, as demonstrated by quantum mechanics. And what you call immaterial things, human ideas, have what must be according to your distinction, a material aspect, as demonstrated by the involvement of the human brain in these ideas. So if we wanted to distinguish between material and immaterial we would have to make the division in a different way from what you suggest.
From what I understand, quantum mechanics is observable, and therefore material. Not arguing for or against your point, I just haven’t seen this claim before, so I fail to see the connection. Care to explain?
Huh? How is Greek relevant? I was speaking about what English speaking philosophers refer to as "final cause". Don't change the subject, address the issue. Do you accept that the will, and therefore intention is a cause of human action, or do you believe in a determinist materialism?
Quoting Pinprick
We were talking about the wavefunction, which describes the existence of the particle when its not being observed. The particle only has material existence when it is being observed because when it's not being observed it cannot be said to have a determinate spatial-temporal existence. How could there be a material thing which has no determinable spatial-temporal location?
Well, it's a much deeper issue. The turning point was the discovery of 'the uncertainty principle' - that you could know the position or the momentum of a quantum object, but not both at the same time. This later became the basis of the 'measurement problem' in quantum mechanics, whereby the act of measurement determines the state of the entity being measured. The whereabouts of the object prior to its being measured is described by the Schrodinger wave equation, but it only ever describes the probability that the object will be in a particular location. When the measurement is taken then all of those possibilities vanish, which is the 'collapse of the wave function'. It is still a hugely contested issue in physics and philosophy precisely because of the impossibility of finding a precise demarcation between observer and observed. (The current favorite amongst mainstream commentators seems to be Everett's Many Worlds, about which see this essay.)
This is the subject of a couple of good books I have read, one being Uncertainty: The Battle for the Soul of Science, David LIndley, and another being Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality Manji Kumar. Note well the title of that second book: this is what is at stake. Science was hoping to find some physical ultimate, perhaps even an indivisible point-particle, but instead found a mystery.
Thank you both for this.