For years I have been bemused by the website called The Skeptical Zone. Every few months I go over there and peruse the posts. And I think to myself, if they are so skeptical, why does practically everything they say line up with the received dogmas and conventional wisdom of the early 21st century Western intelligentsia?
Do they not know what the word “skeptical” means? Are they going for ironical?
But in a flash of insight today, I finally figured it out. The key is in the quote from Cromwell at the top of their homepage that serves as the motto for the site:
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.
All of this time I mistakenly thought that they were using the aphorism the way Cromwell intended as in “We should bear in mind that each of us is fallible; it follows that each of us should always allow for the possibility that even his most intensely-held beliefs might possibly be mistaken.”
Yes, Barry, that is precisely what I intended it to mean.
No, that is not it. It all becomes clear when you realize that they mean their motto quite literally and when they think of it they think of it this way:
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that YOU may be mistaken.
The YOU refers to all those who read the words, including the owner of the blog.
There you have it. They are skeptical all right. They are skeptical of everyone’s views but their own, which they hold with a breathtakingly dogmatic tenacity. It all makes sense to me now
Well, we all tend to think that people who seem unable to see our point of view are holding that view “with a breathtaking dogmatic tenacity”. After all, if we thought we were wrong, we’d change our minds, wouldn’t we? It’s intrinsic to the nature of disagreement that we think the other guy is wrong, and greater the clarity with which we think we are seeing the truth, the more dogmatically tenacious the other guy seems to be for not seeing it. Which simply goes to show that one [wo]man’s obvious is another [wo]man’s nonsense.
So: Just to remind everyone: No, the motto is neither ironical, nor addressed to a subset of the world. It is addressed to everyone, unironically, including me. And of course Barry, should he come over, which I hope he will. Please regard it as the Primary Rule of this site.
Thanks 🙂
Edited to, I hope, avoid copyright violation.
That’s interesting. I have. It’s how I define it to my students: your data are what you are given. You fit your model to what you are given. You are stuck with your data – they are “given”.
A classical education can be a handicap I guess 🙂
Well, I’m not going to argue about definitions. What matters is what each of us mean by a given word. If you mean what KN means by the word, that’s fine.
Lizzie:
No carmunculus. 🙂 Just a car whose state represents features of the environment.
The whole point, Liz, in case you missed it, was that under materialism, there is no external passenger getting the representations, the representations are the self, the processing is the self, the interpretation is the self, the brain accessing the data is the self, however the data happens to be stored and represented and then accessed is the self. So is the rest of our physical body and the rest of our physical processes.
So, since our cognitive biases and presumedly faulty beliefs are physical, the point I’m making is that whether you are taking a pill or listening to the argument, they are both categorically the same – physical data is being input into the system in the hopes of changing the physical state of the system, which we would identify as “changing someone’s mind”.
We already give people medication to correct faulty brain states like chronic depression, schizophrenia, etc. Under materialism, and if materialism is true, then theism and spiritualism are faulty brain states. The question is, how is trying to talk other people out of their false beliefs anything other than a less reliable, less scientific method of attempting to physically correct their brain states if you had a pill that was permanent and 100% effective?
What’s that then?
Citation please.
Do you believe there is such a thing as a fair die?
William,
Mark wrote:
Like Mark, I would consider it unethical. Why? Because you are substituting your own fallible judgment for the victim’s.
In this scenario, you have decided that materialism is true and theism is false. You have decided that your victim would benefit from the treatment. You have imposed your will on your victim.
Exactly. “Under materialism” there is no need for an “external passenger” – which is why it makes sense to me. If there was an “external passenger”, how would that passenger read the “representations” made in the brain? And why would it even have to bother – why not get the data direct?
Whereas, if we think, as KN described, of the “representations” as having a “dynamic structure”, it makes a lot more sense, at least to me. Only I’d ditch some of those nouns, and think in verbs!
Well, again, that falls apart if we think of the “physical state of the system” as being dynamic. To extend the car analogy: putting gas into the tank (pill into the body), or maybe oil into the gearbox, changes the “physical state of the system”. It gives it the potential to DO something it couldn’t do while empty, or was doing badly. But it does nothing to the dynamics. Whereas, if it was a self-driving car, altering the data coming through the GPS would and does. The latter would “change the car’s mind”. The former wouldn’t, at least it wouldn’t unless as well as the oil going in the gearbox, a message went from the gearbox to the controller to say: you are safe for another 1,000 miles, you can get going now”.
Well, you choose an excellent example, which in fact, I was going to bring up but you did it yourself! Interestingly, when you first give a person with florid delusions and hallucinations a dopamine antagonist, you very rapidly achieve blockade of the dopamine receptors – “change the state of the system”. But the patient doesn’t get better – yet. To get better, the patient has to unlearn the faulty beliefs she had, and formed as a result of making erroneous associations between stimuli that were given unwarranted salience by her over-active dopamine system. So the pill doesn’t alter the beliefs; and the extra dopamine she had before didn’t create them. She formed the as a result of a faulty dopamine system which “tinkered with the data” – and only after six or so weeks of better quality data does she start to see the world in the way most of the rest of us do, and cease to hold her delusional beliefs.
William J. Murray
I do think the two processes are categorically different. It is just that the difference is not that one is physical and the other immaterial. One uses the voluntary and reasoning processes which people are capable of performing, the other does not. That it is very important difference. But I believe they are both physical processes.
Having a false belief doesn’t mean your brain is faulty. In fact a certain level of false belief is probably a sign of a brain with health heuristic processes. I don’t even want everyone to believe truth about materialism and atheism just as I have no problem with children believing in Father Christmas.
I suppose so – but this is outweighed by the other considerations.
I take it that WJM wants to know what justifies our practice of treating other people (and ourselves!) as rational agents if we reject mind-body dualism.
But this seems misguided to me. It’s not as if the rational agent were one kind of being, and the animal body were another kind of being, so that rejecting the dualism means that we have no basis for treating each other (and ourselves) simply as organisms. Rather, our rational agency just is the specifically human mode of being an animal, namely a rational animal.
We can inquire into the subpersonal mechanisms that enable us to be rational animals (a main task of cognitive neuroscience), and we can inquire into the historical processes whereby rational animals evolved from non-rational animals (a main task of paleoanthropology and evolutionary theory). Neither cognitive neuroscience nor paleoanthropology entail that we aren’t rational animals; our rational animality is precisely the explanandum of a naturalistic, scientifically informed self-understanding.
Put otherwise, our rationality would be imperiled by a naturalistic self-understanding only if the only available conception of our rationality were itself inseparable from a theistic world-view. It’s quite true that the dominant conception of rationality in the history of Western philosophy is precisely along those lines, but it is not the only one available.
Yes, that’s how I’m reading his question.
And yet there isn’t any reason (heh) to think that clever robots can’t act “rationally” in the sense we are talking about here. Asimo the Honda robot (or some of him anyway) can use information to make navigational decisions. S/he acts apparently in the “belief” that the obstructions s/he has been programmed to avoid are where s/he thinks they are, even when they are moving (s/he is not programmed with their location – s/he is programmed with the capacity to figure out their location from cues, just as we do, and even to anticipate where they, and /she will be).
So a Honda robot can act rationally. S/he can also act irrationally, I suggest in that it would be relatively easy to add noise to her sensory channels so that sometimes s/he acted in the mistaken belief that something was so when it was not.
And AI is certainly at the stage of being able to produce “agents” that “decide” (actually I don’t think those scare quotes are necessary) between two conflicting interprets using essentially Bayesian methods, which, neurocognitive data suggests, is also how the brain does it. Again, the equipment is all there to induce a “robot” to hold an delusional belief.
Of course they could always be p-zombies (if that concept weren’t fundamentally incoherent, as it seems to me it is) but they are perfectly rational – and sometimes irrational – p-zombies.
Rationality is overrated. Computers are “entirely” rational, and therefore very limited in their ability to navigate the biological world.
Self-driving cars are at the (current) limit of our ability to make a rational entity that can move around in real space without causing problems.
What brains do is evolve behavior that maintains homeostasis. I’m pretty sure the smarter robots are also evolving responses. Just not quite as well as — say birds or rats. But as learning algorithms evolve, robots will improve.
Elizabeth,
If you had a pill that could completely cure the schizophrenia, and was 100% effective, without anything else being involved, would you give it to the patient?
I’m not Elizabeth, but I have a schizophrenic nephew, so I have chips in the pot.
Only someone who has lived with a mentally ill person can appreciate how much pain this produces for everyone, including the affected person.
Your question is heavily loaded, because there is no existing definition of what a “complete cure” would look like.
But in my nephew’s case, he was quite “normal” until about age 16. He made it through college with high honors, even though he was experiencing hallucinations and was quite paranoid. He was my son’s roommate. he scared my son, because he slept with knives and guns under the pillow, and saw and heard threatening things that no one else could see or hear.
He does not like medication. He is very intelligent, and medication dulls everything. So current treatments fail as cures.
My own hypothesis is that medications fail because they are not dynamic. Just my opinion, but I think the relevant brain chemicals are an active part of thinking and learning. You can make someone happier, but at the moment we cannot mimic the interactive fluctuation of responding to the world and brain chemistry.
Perhaps Elizabeth is correct that people can re-learn a more accurate view of the world through intensive therapy. But that takes time and money, and what people get is medication.
I wonder if it depends, to some extent, on how impaired someone’s rationality or personhood is by his or her condition. I mean, if someone had severe Alzheimer’s, then beyond a certain point it doesn’t make sense to treat him or her as having intact decision-making abilities. If Alzheimer’s could be cured by a magic drug, and you can give it to them, then you just do it — you treat the disease and hope for the best.
But I take it that this is not what you’re talking about?
On problem, which I think elizabeth alluded to, is that paranoid people develop a view of how the world works, and they do not wan to give that up.
My own unscientific hypothesis is that paranoia exists on a continuum — like most traits — and that some level of paranoia is adaptive. Paranoid people are like mine canaries. they die easily (jump to conclusions) but are sometimes right.
keiths said:
Would you give them the pill if the consensus scientific/medical/psychiatric opinion was on your side – that theism/spiritualism represented a faulty, even delusional brain state and could be cured by the medicine?
Something like this is done all the time. there’s a legal standard for involuntary treatment. danger to one’s self or to others.
All kinds of dreadful things have been done in the name of curing mental illness.
The thing you are avoiding is the definition of cure. are you suggesting a cure with no side effects? What would that even mean?
At UD they are saying quite clearly that the meat-robots are suffering from a number of derangement syndromes (they have even numbered them!) so I think given recent developments the question is better reversed and asked of you and your ilk:
What say you? They are clearing saying it’s a faulty brain state. So it’s far more apt to ask it from that perspective, as they actually seem to want to do it!
I’m not going to give a straight answer, William, because the question is not as straightforward as it might look.
The short answer is “yes” though – if by “cure schizophrenia” we meant: restore to a mental state where s/he is not distressed, able to work, is not cognitively impaired, is able to enjoy doing things, and without adverse side effects, yes.
Of course we would – while modern antipsychotics are quite effective at dealing with delusions and hallucinations, and at least reduce hallucinations to a level where they are less obtrusive and the patient has some insight into their origins, they have serious side effects, and they don’t tackle some of the most impairing symptoms, including negative symptoms and disordered thought. This is probably because schizophrenia is not simply the result of having too much dopamine.
And possibly the best hope for helping people with schizophrenia lies in a combination of possibly new molecules and re-sculpting of the networks that seem to be awry by essentially psychological methods – re-training the brain to function more effectively, to recruit the regions that are needed appropriately.
And yes, if we could do that, that would be great. In the past, some psychoticsdisorders have turned out to be curable with a single molecule. Hypothyridism is one. A needed molecule for a properly functioning brain was missing – supply the molecule and the brain functions.
Just as some molecules – ethanol, for instance, can at least temporarily cause the brain to behave very oddly, and even induce delusional beliefs.
But in all those cases it isn’t the molecule (or its absence) that causes the beliefs. It’s the effect the molecule has on the brain, and thus on the person’s ability to make coherent or functional interpretations of the world. The content of the delusion is the person’s own. It isn’t intrinsic to the molecule.
No. The trouble with these “thought experiments”, William, is that they bear no relationship (or little) to actual mental illness. A delusional belief is not a “faulty brain state”. What may be faulty is a brain that is prone to delusional beliefs.
But while a belief in God, or gods, or even homeopathy, may have no evidence to support it, they are not delusional states. And we do not attempt to “cure” a person with schizophrenia because they believe something that is false.
Indeed, the definition of a delusion, as a symptom, does not even require that the belief be fault, merely that it is based on impaired reasoning. For instance a man may have the delusional belief that his wife is having an affair, on the grounds that the bananas in the fruit bowl told him. Whether or not she is having an affair makes no difference to the diagnosis of “delusional belief”. And you would not even attempt to “cure” that delusion unless it was seriously impairing – which would probably mean part of a whole syndrom of impaired reasoning that was putting the man and others in danger and/or preventing him functioning as a person.
So no. Absolutely not. There is nothing pathological about believing something that happens to be false, and there is only something pathological about believing something on absurd grounds if it isn’t reasonable in context (i.e is not endorsed by some shared cultural model) and even then only if it is impairing the person’s ability to live a safe and enjoyable and active life.
Absolutely. If someone isn’t ill then they don’t need a cure. Doesn’t matter how batty someone’s beliefs are if they are fine, happy, and no danger to themselves or anyone else.
Many schizophrenics and other mentally ill are extremely intelligent. One hypothesis is that during brain development, they over developed neurons which enable them to be very intelligent, but then its side effect is over reactions or false perceptions which can result in schizophrenia or other maladies.
As Seneca said, “there is no great genius without a tinge of insanity.”
KN said:
Well, it’s close. Under materialism, a belief in gods/spirit/the immaterial is a faulty brain state. I would suggest that many here argue constantly and vociferously that it is an irrational view held in contradiction to the logic, facts and all available evidence. I mean, isn’t that pretty much textbook “delusional”? Don’t many here actually call such believers delusional, and mean it?
If the person is the brain state, so to speak, who what are you appealing to when you attempt to reason with a person who believes things you consider to be unreasonable, irrational or delusional, in contradiction to all fact and evidence? Their “unreasonableness”, or irrational nature, or delusional state is not just a brain-state product of an otherwise perfectly good rational processing system; the whole system may be (and probably is) involved in the delusion via interpreting incoming data into representations that are then processed into thoughts, ideas, views.
When you and others argue with other people, it seems to me that you expect there to exist in them a perfectly operating rational engine that, if just fed the right information in the right way, will spit out correct conclusions and views and is capable of self-correction to some standard of rationality. But, under materialism, the brain, the physical system, wasn’t engineered to be a good logic machine. It’s really just a amalgamation of various subsystems with various emergent properties that produce experiences. Why would we expect any particular individual to even have the physical capacity to reason properly? If their system has already taken incoming data and resulted in an obviously, glaring error for which there is no rational support or factual evidence, why would we expect merely talking to them to somehow change or circumvent the processing that generated the big fat error in the first place?
MF said
Reasoning is just another form of physical treatment, so it offers no categorical relief. Making them sit and listen to your reasoning would be no different than forcing a pill down them – it’s just using physical input to acquire brain state changes. ”
However, the difference between “voluntary” and “involuntary” could be considered a significant categorical distinction between the pill and the reasoning. So, let’s say you have the pill and you tell the believer that the pill will cure him of his theism/spiritualism/superstitious beliefs & worldview and make him a materialist; the believer tells you that according to his beliefs, no pill can do any such thing so he volunteers to take the pill in order to convince you of the foolishness of your beliefs.
Do you give him the pill?
EL,
If it was a shared cultural model that bananas could tell you if your wife was cheating or not, would that still be an example of a delusional belief?
William,
I think you’re confusing a moral question with an empirical one.
The moral question is “If you could bypass someone’s faculty of reason and modify his or her beliefs directly, would it be morally acceptable to do so?”
The empirical question is “When we reason our way to a new belief, is anything non-physical happening?”
Note that the moral question applies regardless of how you answer the empirical one.
Even if it provides a survival advantage from an evolutionary point of view?
William is attempting to cast mental illness as political dissent. Which is slightly understandable. Because totalitarian nations have used psychiatric hospitals as political prisons. And millions of people were lobotomized or harmed by shock treatments.
William might not want to discuss the fact that some of this was done to cure homosexuality.
But rather than discuss totalitarianism, which religions have dipped into up to their necks, william makes a phony thought experiment about cures.
If he is an honorable man — and I’m sure he is an honorable man — he will provide a specific example of a false belief before asking if we would want to apply an involuntary cure. For example, what if the false belief involves commands by god to kill one’s children?
William J. Murray,
Jesus. The list of things one supposedly cannot rationally do ‘under materialism’ grows longer by the day.
I am merely presenting a debating opponent with my perspective, in hope that they may come to agree with me, or at least recognise and respect my position. Only when the entire world does so will I rest! I don’t think that can be supplied in pill form. Immaterial minds can be changed every bit as readily (and not) as material ones, on the evidence to date.
Suppose (since we are in pharmaceutical thought-experiment land) you could remove the fear of death in tablet form. It does not make people reckless, simply accepting of their ultimate fate. But it removes the fear, in much the same way as ‘false belief’ might in those souls capable of adopting a belief irrespective of its truth. Would you supply it?
Literally, under materialism, all you can be doing when you are programming/inputting data into a computer is physically attempting to cause a physical reaction which manifests as a change in computer states.
Yes, that’s about right. Kind of makes a macro difference that we care about.
Humans are much more complex, and far less reliably rational, but it’s still a matter of “higher-order behavior” coming out of development/learning/evolution.
Glen Davidson
Well, it’s not a theory supported by much data. High IQ is not a risk factor for schizophrenia, nor a protective factor.
However, there IS a theory that the human capacity to be intelligent is also the capacity to develop schizophrenia. But that’s a theory that applies on a species-wide scale not a personal scale. All human beings are intelligent enough to get schizophrenia!
And as a theory it’s controversial anyway. And you wouldn’t buy it anyway, Sal, because it’s an evo-psych theory!
EL said:
WJM asked:
EL responds:
EL, I take it from this that you consider proper reasoning/logic to be a matter of cultural models, and thus what is delusional to be really nothing more than a matter of degree of divergence from cultural norms? IOW, “impaired reasoning” = divergence from cultural norms?
GlenDavidson,
You seemed to have missed my point. The point was that attempting to reason a person into a change of mind is categorically no different from giving them a pill that changes their mind. The computer analogy would be the difference between using software to achieve a desired computer state change vs using hardware. One wouldn’t hesitate to change the hardware to get a computer to do what it wanted to do (all things being equal except hardware change more effective); however.
MF came up with the distinction between voluntary and involuntary, but under materialism, I’m not sure what “voluntary” means. Perhaps we can examine this issue with a different hypothetical.
Let’s say someone agrees (implicitly or explicitly) to a debate where the outcome may be that they change their beliefs. Let’s say you know some guy that has a “reprogramming” debate methodology for getting people to change their minds about such things, none of which has to do with the logic, evidence or facts of the matter, but rather rely on, essentially, changing the other person’s mind using specific phrasings, gestures, eye contact, emotion and rhetoric. Let’s say this guy has a 100% success rate. Remember, this is hypothetical, and none of the “mind-reprogrammer’s” debate has anything at all to do with the logic, evidence or facts of the matter at hand.
So, some theistic believer agrees to enter the debate/argument. Do you send your proxy agent in to debate the believer and change his mind? Or do you think that would be immoral/unethical? Would it be immoral/unethical for this guy to “reprogram” others with his technique, even though they at least implicitly agreed to having debates with him about beliefs by engaging in them?
I repeat:
Keith said:
The pertinent question is if one’s “faculty of reason” is anything other than “modifying his or her beliefs directly”. You may be drawing a semantic distinction where materialism offers no substantive distinction. Is employing reason to change their beliefs not a “direct” means of changing their beliefs? Is it more ‘indirect” than using a pill or debating using mind-reprogramming techniques? It is still a physical commodity being inserted into their physical commodities intended to transform the brain state into something else. Even if one is more direct than the other, what ethical or moral difference does the “directness” of the route make?
William,
Again, the moral question you are raising is not peculiar to materialism.
Suppose the pill and the “mind-reprogramming techniques” act directly on the beliefs of the immaterial soul (or whatever immaterial thing you are invoking). The moral question remains the same:
You conceded this yourself earlier in the thread:
The moral question is distinct from the empirical one.
No. I’m saying that whether or not a belief is “delusional” depends not on whether it is correct, but on the means by which it was reached. If it is evidence-based and based on sound logic, it is not delusional. If it is based on a reasonable assumption, e.g. well, most people seem to think this, so it’s got a good chance of being true, then it’s not delusional (even though it, and most people, might be wrong).
It IS (or would count as) delusional if it is based on none of those things.
Delusional beliefs are not schizophrenia. How did we get from mental illness to delusions?
Perhaps a big problem with the angle William is pushing is that a pill that destroys the “illusions of religion” or what-not would necessarily be highly destructive to personality, social relations, and to continuity and integrity of the person. How could one destroy a personal mental aspect into which are integrally tied the person’s very identity, relationships, and “personal theory” of how the world and the universe operate, without basically demolishing the person as a functional human?
Basically, the question is, would you administer some “brainwashing pill”? Well, of course not, even if I had any actual desire to rid the world of religion. The person would necessarily be broken in order to rip out a central aspect of their mentation.
For myself, I’m not out to persuade anyone out of religion. At most I’d prefer to increase understanding and let any change–should there be any–to flow from that. If that’s increased understanding plus increased religiosity, so be it. But if I were out to destroy religion, I certainly would want to increase the person’s understanding of their psyches and understanding of the world, so that they could make sense of the past and the present. The religion-destroying pill or re-education camp is designed to destroy what constitutes the person that is considered to be anathema, leaving that person needy and dependent for basic understanding upon the ones administering “treatment.”
Mental integrity isn’t compatible with anything that more or less instantly destroys major aspects of a person’s understanding of and relations to the world.
Glen Davidson
They are one of the diagnostic symptoms. They are not sufficient for a diagnosis.
Dawkins aside ( and I admire the man) Religion is not a delusion in the sense of mental illness. It is just a set of beliefs for which there is little or no evidence.
False or wrong beliefs are a bit like alcohol. You can be wrong without being deluded, as you can drink without being an alcoholic. I would argue (perhaps in partial sympathy to William) that religious delusions are defined by the culture and civilization you happen to live in.
From standing outside religion, Mormonism Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Christian science, Scientology, all look the same. There have been (and still are) places where I would be severely punished or killed for saying that out loud. What makes a false belief a delusion are circumstances.
As you say, a false belief can be the result of a mental illness. I may think I can fly, and try to act on the belief.
But William is doing a bait and switch. He is asking about mental illness, but what he wants us to say is that religion is a mental illness that needs to be cured. With all due respect to the site rules, that is a dishonest debate strategy..
It is true that religion has been outlawed in some countries (and in far more countries, all but the one true religion has been outlawed).
But William needs to back off from his obsession with the war of truth against truth.
I agree, Petrushka. By any psychiatric definition of a delusion, religion is not a delusion.
Some religious beliefs are falsifiable, and indeed falsfied (like YEC). Most aren’t even falsifiable – it’s no coincidence that religious belief is called “faith” (and in some religions “mystery”).
So our normal methods of evaluating their truth or falsehood are not available. That means that they are either categorically different, or cannot, by definition, be delusions.
I concur; religious beliefs are not, by themselves, delusional or even for that matter false.
It’s not even clear to me that religions are primarily about beliefs, in the sense of holding some assertion or proposition to be true. I tend to think that religion is primarily about one’s existential orientation — how one understands one’s own experience in the world, how one expresses one’s self-understanding and one’s relations with others, and so on. Religion is much more like poetry than it is like science — and it is important for human life for much the same reasons that poetry, art, dance, and ritual are important for human life. Even if I thought that truth is limited to science and mathematics alone, it would only show that truth is but one value among many.
In some rare cases, religious beliefs can become irrational. I have in mind here a case where someone holds a proposition to be true, where the affirmation or endorsement of that proposition is central to the expression of his or her existential orientation, and there is sufficiently compelling evidence against the truth of that belief. In those terms, young-earth creationism is irrational, but the vast majority of religious beliefs aren’t like that at all.
Even then, of course I acknowledge that people have the right to be irrational. It’s only when they publicly demand to have their beliefs recognized as rational (whether in education, in politics, or elsewhere) that I get angry at them.
KN, people don’t kill each other or imprison or torture each other over existential propositions.
When I refer to religion, i am referring to political and social institutions that wield power.
If I think about a belief or a delusion being dangerous, it is because it is being cited as a reason for hurting someone. The idea itself may be irrelevant, just an arbitrary and interchangeable rationale for exercising power.
I think the United States has a fairly healthy (and evolving) legal approach to the difference between ideas and actions. Basically it is that your freedom to hold silly ideas ends where my nose begins. With extensions.
Yes indeed. Karen Armstrong has called religion an “art form” and I think it is – which is not to knock it at all – quite the reverse.
I think religion can tell us a form of truth that is orthogonal to the kind of truth we get from empirical science, which, as some of us have agreed, is not truth at all, but predictive utility, and, in some sense, always false.
As can art. There is a truth to, say, Schubert’s C major quintet, which is far closer to religious truth than scientific truth, and as valuable to me.
And there can also be a truth to a Buddhist koan that can be deeply informative, in that it can open your eyes to seeing things in a new way.
But not demonstrably true.
I love you, but this is gibberish. 😉
You’re conflating truth, beauty and utility.
No, I’m separating them out.
I’m saying that the kind of “truth” we call “truth” in science (and we don’t usually use that term, certainly not in technical papers) boils down to “predictive utility” – but it is as close to what people mean by “truth” as in “just the facts, ma’am” or “The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth”.
But there are other kinds of insights that people also call “Truth” which is quite different – I have called them in the past “normative models” as opposed to “predictive models” – adages that are not so much predictive, as designed to bring out some outcome”. “Love your neighbour as yourself” for instance. Or “God is Love” even.
Then there is truth in art, which is a kind of integrity.
And there’s truth in sayings that bring about some insight.
All of these are often called “truth” and what the “gibberish” above is about was designed to separate them out, not conflate them, because I think they are being conflated in this thread.
“God exists” or even “God is love” are not empirical propositions with predictive utility. They are not “true” in the first sense of the word, because they cannot be evaluated for their fit to data.
But they may be “true” on one of the other senses.
If we mistake “God exists” for an empirically verifiable proposition, such as “The butler did it in the library with a revolver”, then we are making category error.
Which was what I was, apparently ineptly, trying to say.
I can live with religion being like art and having truth in the same sense as art or music.
But I refer back to my rant on religion as a political institution. In fact, I tend to agree with some religious people who say political ideologies share with religion the quality of being both delusional and dangerous.
Although i don’t think they would like what I just said. I don’t know many people who do like what I just said.
Yes. What unites both is certainty. What I like about science is that estimating uncertainty is intrinsic to the methodology.