Underlying Philosophy

Then what does it mean to be self-aware, and to love?

I'd use these phrases in the normal sense.

Now as to the brain and the soul... ​ If you are your brain, then why do we refer to your brain as "your brain"?

Would you prefer us to rewrite the English language so that every attempt for you to deny mental materialism is an oxymoron? It seems a bit Orwellian.

We refer to "your brain" as if there was someone or something {the "your") that owns or controls the brain. If you go to a doctor, and he finds a tumor in your brain (there we go again), he doesn't tell you "you have a tumor in you". He would say "you have a tumor in your brain". Likewise, if I say that I have a tick in me, that doesn't mean that its in my brain (there we go again), it means that it is somewhere in my body (there we go again).

Well, that's just the English language for you. In the same way, people talk of "my soul" or "my self" or "my being"; you know, like this ...

Myself, or my being is abstract, because we constantly refer to "your brain", or, "your heart", or "your body". So who is the "your" in those statements? Who is the person that owns the brain, heart, and body? If you come take my brain out of me (or to be proper, we should say "come and take me"), you haven't taken "me" anymore than you would if you took my heart, or my lungs, or my thumb. Even if you destroy my body, you haven't killed "me", because "me" is an abstract concept. ​ This abstract "me" includes my soul, my heart and my mind.

This all seems very muddled.I would refer you once again to the facts of neurology. It would seem that in ordinary language you include such things as your memories, your tastes, your opinions, your mental abilities, and so forth. Apparently, destroying bits of your brain destroys these things. If every bit of your brain is destroyed, what is the "you" who is left? An abstraction without an instantiation seems a very poor thing: in fact, it seems to be nothing at all.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

If God thought that one person could remember one thing, that would not imply that everyone can remember everything. And in point of fact we can't. I have a reason for believing that human memory in general is grossly unreliable; and that at least some people are hopelessly amnesiac. A dictionary would be your friend here. I don't have any special secret definitions of these terms. No, that's something you made up in your head because, apparently, you're incapable of answering my actual arguments.I find that rather pathetic. But it is not a good reason, because you could apply the same unreasoning to the same Scripture passage if in fact you had Korsakov's syndrome.Now an argument that would prove your memory to be reliable even if you were a confabulatory amnesiac is clearly worthless. Leaving you in the same boat as the rest of us. That wasn't my only reason. I explained the more fundamental reason at length in post #430. But since you also have to admit the possibility that you're nuts, this still leaves you with a problem. Because in order to say that this "reason" is a reason, then you have to suppose that you are reasonable enough to know a good reasonable reason from a bad unreasonable reason.Now in point of fact you're not, as I have demonstrated, but that's just ordinary incompetence. However, you could in principle be nuttier yet. This "Scripture" thing you keep talking about, for example. Given that you might be nuts, how do you know that its very existence isn't the product of your (potentially) frothing and fervid brain?Before you can start appealing to some external authority, you first have to assume that you're sane enough to find out about the external world. Like everyone else does, including those people who aren't.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

As some people actually are.You really can't get round that. No, we have reasons. They are just not sufficient to produce the same sort of philosophical certainty that we get when contemplating the cogito of Descartes. This doesn't bother me.Apparently it bothers you, so you try to fix the problem by introducing an unevidenced entity called "God" and a set of unevidenced statements called "Scripture" and trying to reason from these premises to the reliability of your memory.But we can see that even if your premises were true, your reasoning must be fallacious. We can see this because someone whose memory was grossly, pathologically unreliable could use exactly the same reasoning.By analogy, suppose I present a chain of reasoning which begins with the premise that unicorns exist, and which ends with the conclusion that I personally have blue eyes. Now, if the premise is true, then the reasoning must be faulty. Why? Because I could apply the same chain of reasoning if I had brown eyes. And you are wrong. The fact that I do not share your theological beliefs does not mean that I rule out, or have to rule out, the possibility of reliable memory a priori.What I would rule out is the possibility of being (philosophically) certain that my memory is reliable --- and this would be true whether or not God exists, for reasons that I believe I have explained at sufficient length. And this line of reasoning could be produced just as well by a mental patient with access to a Bible. Or with the delusion that he had access to a Bible. Or with the delusion that there is such a thing as a "Bible".The other errors in your reasoning are comparatively trivial and for now I shall let them pass without comment.

This seems a bit confused. Either your epistemology is or isn't derived from your metaphysics. If in reality it isn't, but it is "when you formalize your philosophy", then you're formalizing all wrong. I don't see how you get a workable epistemology from that.When you cross the road, you look to see whether a car is coming, yes? You don't think it just as good to keep your eyes shut and trust in God to give you the appropriate knowledge. So, when you derive your epistemology from your theology, where and how do you derive the proposition that in such cases it is better to rely on your own senses and judgment than to set them aside in favor of faith in an all-knowing God?

I'd expect to get to the other side of the road.Let us know when you plan to use a faith-based method of knowing when it's safe to cross. I'd expect to find out that God existed. Not at all. I can, obviously, learn about the way the world works without knowing, or indeed caring, whether or not it is (for example) the dream of the Red King in Alice.Such questions are doubtless of interest to sophomores who have looked upon the weed when it is green, but they are irrelevant to scientific enquiry. No, for reasons I just explained. And we both end up depending on the same standard --- the observations that we can actually make. Though you have not yet explained your route for arriving at that destination. In the colloquial sense that one "should not" believe something which is wrong, not in the absolute sense of moral philosophers. Suppose someone like you did? Then you would, of course, be explaining to us that cannibalism and human sacrifice and infanticide and widow immolation were the will of God, and you'd be trying to shock moral relativists by asking them "what if you lived in a society that didn't allow you to burn widows?"The idea that there is a God whose will is objectively just is an interesting one, but it's no help to us --- our morality is what we make it. But it isn't. People have widely differing moral opinions. They think that it is right to burn widows. Or Protestants. Or Catholics. They practice infant sacrifice conscientiously, because they think God wants it. They wage holy wars --- in which at most one side can be right. They eat their parents as a funeral rite. They starve themselves to death --- a sin if you're a Catholic, but a virtue if you're a Jain.If the universe was in accordance with God, then people would be in accordance with each other. The fact that we are not shows that whether or not there is a God, everyone is inventing their own moral standard. Perhaps some people devise a moral standard which is nearly in accordance with that of this hypothetical God, but if so, this would just be a matter of luck. So if we saw the regular laws of the universe being violated --- for example a man walking on water or turning water into wine --- this would be a reason to disbelieve in God and the Bible? I could ask you the same questions. The actual laws of nature are by definition constant. But what you think the laws of nature are might be specific to the small patch of time and space you're living in. In this respect you're in just the same boat as an atheist. Again, the same goes for you. Because you have only studied a short period of time, you don't know whether you know the actual laws of nature or a temporarily good approximation to them. And adding a hypothetical invisible man in the sky doesn't help. The immediate cause is that it has a limited number of different types of building blocks. Since you ask. Which is exactly why anyone trying to reify them and account for their "existence" as anything other than useful linguistic conventions is going to make a darn fool out of himself. Yes, and they have.Nowadays, for example, it is considered correct to deduce from the premise "there are no unicorns" the conclusion "all unicorns are pink". In the nineteenth century it was not. Would you like to tell us which side God takes on this one?Other "universals" have also changed. For example, the category "fish" no longer includes whales; the category "mammal" now includes some species that lay eggs; the category "plants" no longer includes fungi ...These things are not written in stone.If you think they are, then please tell us what God thinks. Is a fungus a plant, or not a plant?As with morality, even if he has a very definite opinion on this which we can take to be objective, we still have no way of finding out what it is. Well, you could pray to him to help you stop reifying abstract nominal clauses. Apart from that, he seems to be no use whatsoever. Seriously?Me, I think it would be unhygienic to have a lot of rotting corpses lying about stinking up the place. The public have brains.You have no problem with people whose brains have ceased to work (i.e. dead people) being eaten by worms and other creepy-crawlies, do you? Which is pretty darn gross and atrocious when you think about it. If you made that happen to someone with a functioning brain, you'd be a monster. But you're happy for it to happen to someone without a functioning brain --- you just want this to happen where people with functioning brains don't have to look at it. By virtue of forming a person with a sense of dignity. Ah, yes, the fallacy of composition.Would the chemicals that make up the Mona Lisa, if mixed together in a bowl, still have artistic merit? Would the chemicals that make up a car, if mixed together in a (large) bowl, still be a form of transport?No. But we don't have to imagine that the car has an invisible "transport-soul" that makes it a form of transport, and which wings its way to heaven when we reduce the car to its constituent atoms. Rather, we note that the fact that a car is a form of transport is a consequence of the way that the atoms are put together. It is clear that your worldview (which is no more the Christian worldview than you are the Christian) is muddled and inconsistent; occasionally just plain silly; divorced from the facts; and of no use in solving the philosophical problems for which you offer it as a panacea.Indeed, you don't seem to have thought very hard about these philosophical questions; your interest in them seems not to be so much for their own sake as for the sake of invoking a God to solve them --- a role which, as I have shown, he is not able (or at the very least not willing) to fill.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Would that be Albert Schweitzer the ordained Christian minister? The same Albert Schweitzer who said: Or are we talking about a different Albert Schweitzer and a different hospital?Me, I don't think it is "humanitarian" to put mosquitoes on the same level as humans; and what you think this has to do with evolution I have no idea.

Well, next time you stop, look, and listen before crossing the road I guess you can make it up to God with a really prickly hairshirt and extra flagellation.And your blasphemies don't stop there. For example, like me you believe in the existence of giraffes and eggplants and unicycles, and for exactly the same reason --- data acquired through the senses.And what else is there to go on? Even if God turned up and told me what to think, that would also be a personal experience. When you read the Bible, that is a personal experience, not an a priori deduction. Everything we know about the external world is a posteriori, since there would be no logical inconsistency in the world being quite different.If you had not relied on personal experience you would have had no reason to think that the Bible exists, let alone that you know what it says. It's no use now for you to try (or, in your case, to assume that you have succeeded in) reversing the dependence, because as a matter of biographical fact, you adhered to my epistemology of look-and-see before acquiring your theology.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, in the sense that those are assumptions (i.e. the ontological sense) it is not necessary to make them. I could be a solipsist and still practice science.In another sense they are not assumptions --- they are discoveries made by observation.

I wasn't advocating Instrumentalism as such.My point is just that ontology is irrelevant to epistemology. What I call "reality" might exist only in my mind; or it might be the Red King's dream; or it might be an idea in the mind of God, like dear dotty old Bishop Berkley said; or it might be the maya that separates me from Brahma, as in Hindu philosophy; or it might be a computer simulation, as some have speculated; or it might be an illusion foisted on me by a "Cartesian demon" ...... and I can still investigate what happens when I drop a piece of zinc into a beaker of sulfuric acid. To find this out I don't need to answer a single ontological question, I just need to be able to answer more commonplace questions such as: "Which drawer do I keep the zinc in?"---Note that, conversely, studying the facts can never help me in deciding between ontologies. There is no reason why the Red King's dream of "reality" should have observable properties different from a computer simulation of "reality".---This is why I regard ontology as such a non-subject. Not only can we find out nothing at all about it, but also it wouldn't matter if we did.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

There actually are! --- and it's not an assumption, I can show 'em to you!And this retort demonstrates one of the problems with trying to discuss ontology at all. Was sich berhaupt sagen lt, lt sich klar sagen; und wovon man nicht reden kann, darber mu man schweigen. So there.

Yeah, I've noticed that you're remarkably coy on that subject.Why? If your theology is, as you claim, such a great foundation for epistemology, surely you should by now have figured out some sort of opinion on whether the scientific method is valid or invalid.I should be interested to hear your conclusion ... and how you derive it from the scriptural texts you've been quoting at us.

But, you see, when I say that sulfuric acid and zinc and aardvarks and tulips and beachballs are real, that they are actual physical things, that they are part of external reality (and that unicorns and Atlantis and the philosopher's stone are not) I am not making an ontological stand. I am in effect making a set of predictions: that we can observe evidence of things in the former but not the latter category. Which is the meaning of the word "real" (as determined by its usage) unless one is discussing ontology.If we abandoned the natural use of language, and adopted that employed by ontologists instead, then words such as "real" and "external reality" would become useless for all purposes except discussing ontology (i.e. completely useless) and we would have to find another word to express the distinction that we wish to make between aardvarks and unicorns. And at the point at which we'd sorted out the English language again, presumably the ontologists would be all over the new word like flies on honey.And this is the trouble with trying to talk about ontology. What ontologists want to discuss they are forced to discuss using words which actually mean something else. If they developed their own specialized vocabulary and sat around talking about whether elephants were snepific, no-one, including themselves, would know what they were saying; nor could they define it, since what they want to talk about has no operational meaning. On the other hand, if they sit around talking about whether elephants are real, then the correct answer is: "Yes, of course. I've seen one. Big gray thing, trunk at one end, tail at the other. Are you suggesting that they might fall into the same category as unicorns? Let me take you to a zoo."Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Quite possibly. If that's Instrumentalism then I guess I'm for it.My point is that even if we are Instrumentalists, or, it seems, especially if we are Instrumentalists, we don't have to stop using phrases like "physical substance" and "external reality" to satisfy the quibbles of philosophers. On the contrary, once we've taken the stance I've described we can and should use them freely without ever giving a moment's thought to ontological questions. (Just like non-philosophers do all the time.)So I can say that "there actually is a physical substance that we call zinc and another that we call sulphuric acid" without making any metaphysical assumptions.To quote one of Wittgenstein's slightly less well-known dicta: "Ordinary language is all right".Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

But almost nobody will consider the question in the first place, which means that I shall hardly ever have to proffer such an explanation.Now, if I was to adopt a more philosophical style of language, just in order to avoid ever having to explain this point, I should have way too many conversations like this:Me: I predict that under certain circumstances it is possible for me to experience sense-data which would be consistent with the theory that I am in the vicinity of an elephant, and I also predict that the same will not hold (mutatis mutandis) for unicorns.Him: What?Me (more slowly): I predict ... that under certain circumstances ... it is possible for me to experience sense-data ... which would be consistent with the theory ... that I am in the vicinity of an elephant ...Him: Wait, are you trying to say that elephants exist?Me: No.Him: You don't think they exist?Me: No.Him: You think elephants don't exist?Me: That's not what I said. I said I don't think they exist, not that I think they don't exist.Him: Look, do you think they exist or not?Me: Of course I think they exist or not --- that's just the law of the excluded middle. But I don't think they exist and I don't think they don't.Him: Surely you believe one or the other?Me: Nope. I'm agnostic.Him: You're agnostic ... about the existence of elephants?Me: Apparently.Him: So you think in principle that they might be nonexistent in the same way that unicorns are non-existent?Me: No, not in the same way. Because I predict that there are no circumstances under which it would be possible for me to experience sense-data which would be consistent with the theory that I am in the vicinity of an unicorn.Him: WILL YOU STOP TALKING LIKE THAT?Me: Not until PaulK says it's OK. At that point I shall tell you that I think elephants exist and unicorns don't. What am I, an idiot?Him: Good question.---Now it seems to me that I shall waste slightly less of my life if instead I use ordinary language to express myself; and, should the need arise, I can explain to any passing philosophers that I am using words such as "real" and "exist" in their natural sense, and am not making any ontological claims --- just like everyone else does, including philosophers when they're on their tea break.

Your statements about morals rely on man's reasoning and decision-making. The man in question is you. If this is "inherently anti-God", then you'll just have to learn to live with being "inherently anti-God". But this would seem a strange way to describe such an ardent theist.