This post is to move a discussion from Sandbox(4) at Entropy’s request.
Over on the Sandbox(4) thread, fifthmonarchyman made two statements that I disagree with:
“I’ve argued repeatedly that humans are hardwired to believe in God.”
“Everyone knows that God exists….”
As my handle indicates, I prefer to lurk. The novelty of being told that I don’t exist overcame my good sense, so I joined the conversation.
For the record, I am what is called a weak atheist or negative atheist. The Wikipedia page describes my position reasonably well:
“Negative atheism, also called weak atheism and soft atheism, is any type of atheism where a person does not believe in the existence of any deities but does not explicitly assert that there are none. Positive atheism, also called strong atheism and hard atheism, is the form of atheism that additionally asserts that no deities exist.”
I do exist, so fifthmonarchyman’s claims are disproved. For some reason he doesn’t agree, hence this thread.
Added In Edit by Alan Fox 16.48 CET 11th January, 2018
This thread is designated as an extension of Noyau. This means only basic rules apply. The “good faith” rule, the “accusations of dishonesty” rule do not apply in this thread.
ALurker,
As a new member, you may not be aware we discuss complaints about moderation in the moderation issues thread. I’ll respond there.
I have also raised the issue there (h/t to keiths), with a specific request to you.
This sentence: “Do you think that kind of behavior is honest?”
ALurker,
As a new member, you may not be aware that we discuss moderating decisions only in the moderation issues thread. I’ll answer you there.
Ninja’d by Neil!
I don’t understand what “how truth can be described outside of our senses” means.
For one thing, it could be interpreted as either “how do we know that the world corresponds to what our senses take it to be?” or as “how we do know what is true independent of all sense-perception?”
In the former, it’s about how we get objective purport for empirical judgments; in the second, it’s about how we get objective purport for non-empirical judgments, i.e. for a priori judgments.
I accept something like a correspondence theory of truth: a sentence is true if and only if it corresponds to how things are. “There is milk in the fridge” is true if there is a milk in the fridge, false if there isn’t any. (There are interesting problems with the correspondence theory of truth in its traditional form and it would have to be revised somewhat in order to be acceptable, but that will do for now.)
I don’t find “the senses” to be a useful term, because it’s grounded in faculty psychology. Talking about “the senses” and “the intellect” is to psychology as phlogiston is to chemistry. There are deep ambiguities in the concept of “the senses” that led 17th-century empiricists down one dead-end after another.
What I think we should say is that an animal’s actions in its environment are guided by neurocomputational models of the layout of that environment is, and that sensory receptors convey information to the brain about the degree to which those models are erroneous in ways that matter to the success or failure of some action or other.
So rather than think about “the senses” as a distinct mental capacity, I think of the activation of sensory receptors as functionally integrated into how animals navigate their environments with various degrees of success.
Given all this, the interesting question is how we get from animal cognition to rational discourse: from neurocomputational models that are revisable only based on relevant sensory information to assertions that are contestable and revisable in light of the space of reasons.
Logic is justified on a pragmatic basis.
We organize the world into hierarchies, as you argued in a recent thread. And a hierarchy is something like a binary tree. Logic is the method for traversing a binary tree.
OK, after checking with Neil, this thread henceforth has the same status as Noyau regarding rules. Hope that improves the quality of discussion!
Even more fundamentally, cognition distinguishes between this and that.
Really, the same thing.
We divide the world into two parts (your “this and that”). Then we divide those part into two parts. Repeated, that builds a binary tree structure.
That is not against any rule. I did not accuse fifthmonarchyman of being dishonest. I asked him a question about his comments and how they can be perceived.
You Guano that, yet continue to let him accuse me of dishonesty, stupidity, ignorance, and/or dementia, which is clearly against the rules.
Exactly, your premise is flawed
Not just flawed, absurd.
This sentence makes no sense. for one, Kantian Naturalist’s post is not about truth, but about logic. For another, you have a misconception of “truth.” Truth is a concept, not a feature of reality. We use that concept to qualify statements, proposals. Then, nobody can describe without using their senses, so asking for a method to describe truth outside of our senses is, ahem, nonsensical. How would anybody provide a description without using their senses?
I think that you’re mistaking what’s being described in a statement with the statements about it. The statements can be true or false. The reality can only be what it is. You talk as if truth was a feature of reality, when it can only apply to the statements about it. Think carefully and you’ll understand that its descriptions that can be false. But attempting to qualify what’s described as true or false is nonsensical, since things can only be what they are, regardless of our descriptions about them.
Since the word truth is so familiar, and since we use it so much and in so many circumstances, it has become second nature to imagine it as a feature, rather than as a conceptual qualifier, equivocations easily arise, which is what presuppositional bullshitologists are counting on.
For another example. It is nonsense to declare that in the absence of anybody who can make statements and to qualify those statements, a rock is true. A rock would be a rock, but there would be no statements about the rock to qualify. Thus there’s neither truth nor falsity to talk about. The mistake done in the presuppositional bullshit is to say that it would be true that the rock exists. They are mistaking the existence of the rock with the qualification of the statement about the rock. So, what’s true, right now, actually, is the statement that the rock would still exist. See the difference?
By making clear what is being qualified as true, it becomes easy to spot the equivocations. If you’re careful enough and reasonable, that is.
A presuppositionalist will not make the slightest attempt to understand the problem and will keep claiming on the basis of these equivocations.
I don’t know if this helps, but if you care, feel free to ask for clarifications.
Reality? You keep referring to this thing called reality?
If there is no God that knows ultimate truth, what is reality? If no one can sense this reality, does it exist? if you believe your mind is nothing but a bunch of chemicals in a bag, when would you have any hope that it is ever correct? That logic is correct.
Two rocks are sitting on a park bench. One rock says to the other, “Look at you. You are just a dumb rock sitting on a bench.”
The other rock says, “How would you know?”
The first rock says, “Well, I wouldn’t. But still I am right. ”
The second rock says, “Are you sure you are right?”
The first rock, “Don’t be ridiculous, how can anything be right to a rock? See, that just proves how dumb you are!”
phoodoo,
Yeah. I thought you’d be disinclined to read for comprehension. It also looks like you’re buying into the presuppositional bullshit, which is among the most character-destroying doctrines you could fall into. I hope you’ll be able to find your way out, but it’s doubtful. The indoctrination is built so that you live in that fantasy land in a way that you won’t be able to leave.
Good luck with that.
An interesting question is why we naturally organize in hierarchies. I would say it’s because we for the most part think logically.
Yes, It’s one aspect of the triperspectival wonder that is rational thought.
Logic is the method
Reason is the process
Truth is the result
peace
The question is why do we do this and why does reality seem to fit our binary categorization so well?
I’d say that is what happens when Logos/Word touch the physical universe.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God—- separated— the light from the darkness. God —-called— the light Day, and the darkness he —called— Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” And God made the expanse and —separated— the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so.
(Gen 1:3-7)
peace
That much is clearly right, but there’s a further issue here: by virtue of what feature or property are some statements true and others (presumably lacking that property) false?
The traditional answer is, by virtue of corresponding the world. Statements are true if they correspond to the world, false if they do not. In the Thomistic slogan, veritas est adaequatio intellectus et rei, “truth is the adequacy of intellect and reality”. Despite the well-known problems with this way of thinking about truth — how can know when the correspondence criteria has been satisfied? — I don’t see how the alternatives are at all satisfying.
The so-called “coherence theory of truth” is really a theory of justification, not truth, and the various deflationary theories are really more about the semantics of the predicate “is true” than they are about anything epistemological or metaphysical. Even the so-called “pragmatist theory of truth” is really Peirce’s pragmatist theory of conceptual meaning applied to the concept of truth.
What the hell is ultimate truth? What makes you think that reality changes when nobody’s looking or knows it?
What makes you think that things need to be known in oder to exist?
You’d have to ask your nonsensical questions to someone who believes that.
I don’t think so, it’s impossible for “nothing” to exist.
The “thing” that would exist if nothing else existed is a triune complex of Truth,the Reality it described and the Relationship between them.
peace
Entropy,
Phoodoo’s position seems to be that no one is entitled to say that they know anything at all about the world if they don’t believe in the existence of someone who knows everything about it.
Apparently atheists aren’t entitled to say they know that they forgot their keys or that they know that they need to buy milk on the way home.
Why anyone should think that makes any sense is beyond me.
When I heard it it was two shaken bottles of cola fizzing at each other
😉
peace
Because that’s about the only way it could work, and not require magic.
It doesn’t take much for it to work, other than the ability to make distinctions. And if an organism couldn’t make distinctions, then it could not thrive.
Kantian Naturalist,
Truth is a concept. A conceptual label we use for statements or propositions. How we determine that the statements are true depends on what the statements are about, on their contexts and our agreements with each other about how we go about those contexts.
The important thing to remember is that truth is conceptual and it’s a label for propositions. That It’s nonsense to talk about truth as if it’s something magical floating around on its own or attached to some objects.
He might believe that, which is also nonsense, but the nonsense he wrote shows that he mistakes truth and knowledge for the things those concepts and knowledge might be about. He imagines that somebody has to know everything before everything could even exist.
How about them being incompetent?
Yeah. I’ve heard some incompetent idiots bringing that ignorance about chemistry to debates. The stupidity that can be displayed by presuppositionalists is astounding. The funnier thing is their arrogance when they display their ignorance.
If anybody could be stupid enough to think that those large books about chemistry only have the word “fizzing,” written over and over again, it had to be a presuppositionalist.
That is just a rephrasing of what I said.
Why in our universe is “making distinctions” almost synonymous with thriving?
I can easily invision a world where the best way to thrive would would be to remove all distinctions and become more at one with the whole.
Entire religions are based on the idea of abandoning distinctions and and embracing oneness
Peace
LOL
Of course there is more going on in a shaken coke bottle than fizzing, none of it is much use when it comes to reason and logic
peace
The empty set exists.
Well, okay, I’m not a mathematical platonist, so I can’t really assert that.
and therefore it’s True that the empty set exists.
peace
Who would be stupid enough, if not a presuppositionalist, to think that all of chemistry reduces to what happens in a shaken bottle of coke?
Thanks for making my point.
You say you can, but is that really true? Can you imagine a world in which living things can “thrive” without acting at all? Can you imagine something that can act without making any distinctions at all?
There is a Buddhist teaching that ultimate reality is devoid of all conceptual distinctions, but the Buddhists also recognize the indispensability of conceptual distinctions for conventional reality. This is what is called the “two truths doctrine“.
If an organism cannot distinguish between food and poison, it isn’t going to thrive.
Do you honestly think reason and logic can be reduced to chemistry?
If so, how do you know that is the case?
I’ll wait for the fizzing (or other chemical reactions) to stop
😉
peace
Entropy:
The President, possibly.
Some would say “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
I can easily conceive of a universe where a little poison admixed with the food would be a good thing
peace
No. First, I wouldn’t use the word “reduced.” Then, there’s also physics, and their combination into biology.
Do you honestly think that chemistry is just about shaken bottles of coke? If not, maybe you can tell your fellow presuppositionalists to stop embarrassing themselves. After all, they claim to have “revelations” from an omniscient being. They’d pretend so a tad better if they didn’t make such glaring mistakes. An omniscient being who thinks that chemistry is just about shaken bottles of coke is a contradiction of terms.
I certainly don’t. I don’t even think they can be “reduced to” biology.
The bags of chemicals that sense and respond to reality better tend to leave more offspring than the bags of chemicals that ignore it. There’s a whole scientific discipline around this idea. You should learn something about it.
Wow, this is the position of someone who calls themselves a philosopher? Wow.
I think you just proved FMM and William Murray correct, nobody actually believes in atheism.
Heck, why not just say EVERYTHING is true, just because you believe it KN. Isn’t that the same thing as knowing you forgot your keys? Maybe your dreams are all real too, you believe it while you are dreaming right?
And hallucinations, no such thing, until you believe they are false. They they are. Premonitions? All true, because you believe it is true, so it is. William believes he has experienced UFO abductions. Therefore it is real.
You can’t fool KN, because he just ruled it out!
One can have a belief in a dream, but I don’t think that everything that we experience in dreaming is a belief. Likewise with hallucinations. I don’t think that having a hallucination of X is the same as having a belief about X.
In any event, there’s nothing in what I said that indicates that there aren’t false beliefs. Of course there are.
If you know there are false beliefs that people are certain are true, how can you know if anything is true?
Furthermore, how can you know if truth can even be a thing? If intelligence didn’t exist, can there be such a thing as true or false? Correct or incorrect? Logic? Reality?
You don’t know any people who have had hallucinations and describe how they believed someone to be Satan, or that trees communicated with them, or that they discovered something else about the world that no one else knows? And they fully believed it?
That depends on what you mean by “be a thing”?
“True” and “false” are properties of statements. If there are no statements, then there is nothing to have those properties.
KN:
phoodoo:
phoodoo,
For one thing, you seem to be confusing delusions with hallucinations.
Second, KN isn’t saying that hallucinations can’t lead to false beliefs. He’s saying…
…which is quite different.
So without intelligence nothing is true, right?
But what is hallucinating a belief? Is it real or not? How do we differentiate? If KN believes he just drove to the store to buy milk, is it true just by the virtue of him believing it? Is the truth whatever is in your head?
If that is the case, nothing can be said to be wrong, as long as you believe it.
If a tree falls in the forest…