Underlying Philosophy

I don't base my worldview on 19th century concepts. And atheism isn't a philosophy. Who said I was certain? Nobody is certain, we do however have some ideas that seem to be hitting pretty close to the mark. The fact you are ignorant of them does not mean the rest of the world is too. I didn't say that. But I think Einstein would beg to differ on not understanding what space and time is. What do you mean by "truly represent" anyway, stop talking in mumbo jumbo language.By the way, is all you can do call people names, or are you actually going to act like an adult?

That post was supposed to be understood?

From Message 418Actually, matter didn't coalesce until a significant amount of time after the big bang All we have to go by from you, is the words you present. We ought not assume that you're actually meaning something accurate when you're writing something erroneous. No, that's a little too fluffy. You're equivocating "cause". Or do you think the big bang just caused my pencil to roll off my desk? Just because something happens after something does not mean that that something caused it to happen. You have to zoom out too far to be practicle to see it as the Big Band causing mammals to form.From Message 413: You're seeing something that isn't really there. Yes, an apple is an apple. There is not an "intrinsic truth" to being an apple that suggests an outside intellegence, or wherever you trying to go with this (I didn't look it up). And the way we describe those intrinsic truths with symbols and words doesn't change that.Basically it boils down to: things orderly existing suggests god. We can discuss the weakness of that argument later if you want, but I want to first ask:Is there anything at all that can orderly exists without the need for god?

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Oh, and you must've missed my other post: Message 396

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why do humans have an aesthetic sense, and animals don't

Come on... don't you think Peafowl have an aesthetic sense?

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Hi sac,
I just realized I missed a bit out in my earlier reply. I thought the answer was self evident, but I have reassessed that you would see it that way. What inherent properties murder has, depends on what you mean by murder. If you are defining murder as wrongful killing then murder is inherently wrong.However, if you define murder as unlawful killing, then murder is not inherently wrong. It is, on the other hand, inherently illegal.Whether or not there should be more to it is a value judgement. Is there more to it than the conscious consideration of consequences? Sure - there is the unconscious consideration of consequences...your brain is hardwired to not rampantly kill people in your group. You have been brought up as a Christian that presumably believes all humans are one group and that murdering them is wrong. There are consequences for killing people in your group - not just from other members of your group, but by weakening the strength of the group you risk ruin for yourself. It stands to reason that such a strategy would not outcompete strategies of non-murderous solidarity.And that's an incredibly rough account of some of the reasons you don't want to kill me.

We tend to organize the world into an hierarchical tree structure, and logic is the natural way of systematically searching or traversing a tree. That can only be applied to nature if we first apply the name "a" to something in nature. How we connect our symbols to reality is part of language. That's an example of what I mean by organizing into a hierarchical tree. It is a formal way of saying that "if I put 'q' on the 'p' branch of the tree, then if I go down the 'p' branch of the tree I should find 'q'.

Then have you considered the advantages of being right? No, of space. True, but your phrasing is equivocal. As I said, you might as well say that Vincent Van Gogh's father ejaculating caused a picture of sunflowers. It allows you to describe reality in such a way that it sounds implausible by missing out the chain of events in between. How much time do you spend looking at monkeys? If the answer is "none", then this is a scant concession to reality.In fact, according to a book I read on primatology (I've forgotten the name, but if you're interested it's somewhere in my bedroom, I could probably find it) chimps in the wild have been observed holding hands and watching the sun set. Sweet, eh? Apparently, we inherited it.

Your fantasies about me, while amusing, are irrelevant. Then you will find the phrase "the brain controls the actions of the brain" no more or less paradoxical. No, of course not. Again, could I draw your attention to the advantages of being right? A philosophical materialist would be someone who believes that he has proved a priori that nothing but material things exist. This would be an ontological position with which I would have no truck.A mental materialist such as myself would claim to have a posteriori evidence that mental processes are the result of material processes in the brain. I never said anything about control of the body. I specifically instanced mental processes such as short-term memory, a sense of morality, and the ability to recognize fruit. These, apparently, are things the brain does, not things the soul does.So I'll ask again --- what does the soul do. You say it "controls the brain", but in what way? Some forms of damage to the prefrontal cortex cause abulia, the inability to make a decision or exercise will. Damage to parts of the brain in the same area can deprive people of their moral or social sense. Oliver Sacks recounts a patient dying with a brain tumor who felt perfectly happy and content with everything, including dying --- because the tumor was in exactly the right spot. Here you can hear a neurologist talk about a man with a benign tumor which made him so sexually aroused by safety pins that he achieved orgasm by looking at them or even thinking about them: a condition which disappeared on removal of the tumor.So, I'll ask again: what is the soul doing? Apparently it is my brain that has the decision-making faculty, my brain which knows right from wrong, my brain that determines whether I feel good or bad about things, my brain that preserves my memories ...Even if souls did exist, I should still be more inclined to say that my brain was me, because apparently it instantiates everything about me, whereas the soul ... the soul doesn't seem to have anything to do with our mental states. What exactly is there left over for it to do?Put it this way. Suppose we unhooked our souls from our brains, and swapped them, so that your soul was attached to my brain and vice versa. What differences would we see? Apparently your soul would now be attached to my opinions (instantiated in the brain), my memories (instantiated in the brain), my sense of right and wrong (instantiated in the brain), my sexual preferences (instantiated in the brain) ... and so forth. Is there any meaningful sense, any observable sense, in which the metaphysical chimera produced by this operation would be you rather than me?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Only by a literate English-speaking person of normal mental capacity; not by illiterates, non-English speaking people, children, and fools.It appears that if I want to write something that you are guaranteed to understand, I shall have to confine myself to sentences such as "The cat sat on the mat". But suppose that that is not what I want to say?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

No. So, like you then.Now, if your God hypothesis, as you now admit, does not guarantee your memories, then this leaves you in the same boat as the rest of us as regards the epistemology of memory. All you can say is that you think that your memory is reasonably reliable because when you test it against the facts it often turns out to be correct ... which is of course something that you think you know because you remember it happening. And you would be under the same impression if you were suffering from Korsakov's syndrome and your memories were confabulated.God, even if he exists, does not give us a magical sword to slay the Cartesian demon. It's instantiated in the brain, which is liable to numerous faults, which is finite, and which is the product of a ramshackle process of evolution which has had only a few million years to get us to where we are now from a creature which hardly had to remember anything except where the bananas are. I don't know that, as I had thought I'd made clear. And nor do you, as demonstrated by the existence of people who think it is when it isn't. Even if there is a god, then clearly he allows people to be in that position: so you don't know that you aren't currently in that position.As with the other subjects we've discussed, God gets you nowhere on this issue. Even if we grant you your unproven assumption of a God, then so long as you admit that this is compatible with memory being imperfect, that leaves you in the same epistemological boat as the rest of us --- and rowing in perfect circles like everyone else.

Well, let's think about my options here.To take a specific case, my memory tells me that down the passage and to the left there is a bathroom, and that I should go that way if I want a bathroom. And suppose I do want a bathroom.Now, there are two cases.(a) My memory is reliable. In that case, I should go down the passage and turn left.(b) My memory is unreliable. The room might be the place where I keep my man-eating tiger, and this fact might have slipped my memory. It might contain a pot of fairy gold which will vanish unless I claim it in the next five minutes, only I forgot. It might contain a mermaid taking a bath. And she might be the sort of mermaid who'd welcome the company (if you know what I mean) or she might be the prudish sort of mermaid who'd use her magical powers to strike me blind. I really don't remember. It might be that the room I'm currently in bursts into flames daily at 9 o'clock. I should have made a note of that. It might be that God himself has promised me that if I spend 24 hours without going into the bathroom he'll make me President of the world.In short, if my memory is fundamentally unreliable, then I have no basis for undertaking or abstaining from any given course of action, since I have no idea whether it might have good or bad consequences --- even whether it might be fatal or crucial to my survival.In which case I might as well go down the passage and turn left as not.In case (a) it's a good idea; and in case (b) it's a gamble in which I know neither the odds or the stakes involved in accepting or refusing it.So the payoff matrix looks like this: It is therefore rational to let my behavior be guided by my memory despite the theoretical possibility that it's wrong. (Of course, the case would be different if I had good reason to think that my memory was wrong in some specific way.)Note that I could use the same reasoning if it was not my memory but my rationality that was in question.Of course, I could also apply this same reasoning if, as a matter of fact, I was as crazy as a loon. This is exactly why we keep mad people away from sharp objects.---Now, do you have anything better to go on, if we grant you your unproven hypothesis that there exists a God who permits people to be amnesiac, confabulatory, delusional, psychotic, and just plain stupid? Does such a God grant you any more epistemological certainty than I have? If so, how?

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The fact that our memory is sometimes unreliable is a result of sin (and btw, I would be interested to hear your explanation for the unreliability of our memory). What I am asking is you is what is your reason for depending on your memory (as you do very much). How do you know that your memory is reliable (or at least sometimes) without first assuming that it is reliable?

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If unreliable memories are due to sin, than those with the most unreliable memories should be the biggest sinners via your reasoning, but this is not what we observe.Actually memories are recorded in the hippocampus, an organ of the brain. If this organ is damaged, one cannot form new memories. And for a glimpse of what it's like to live without the ability to make any new memories, google "Clive Wearing and Youtube". There have been two documentaries on this poor man (who doesn't appear to have been a big sinner), and he constantly feels like he is waking up from a coma. He cries when he sees his kids because he missed seeing them grow up-- only he didn't. He just can't remember anything that happened more than 7 seconds ago. It's horrific. (And nobody can tell him about it, because he won't remember!)Clive wearing made it very clear to me what an unlikely notion souls are. Why doesn't Clive's soul step in to do what his brain can't? If a person is so damaged and so untethered due to a non-functioning hippocampus, then what could he possibly be without any brain at all? How much of you would be left if you couldn't remember anything new ever again. You couldn't remember what you ate or read a paragraph or anything... you could witness a murder and have no knowledge of having done so.Where did you get the nutty notion that memory problems are due to "sin"?

Let me expand on my previous comment, which was the one word: "No".The fact is that it is impossible to really think about your argument, because your presuppositionalist method of apologetics prevents you from ever saying what your argument is.As you yourself have admitted, your method of witnessing for Jesus Christ does not consist of arguing for Jesus Christ, but rather of arguing against everything else ... presumably in the hope that if every other world-view fails, we'll adopt yours by default.Now, apart from the other problems that I have pointed out, there is also this:I have to try to guess what it is that you actually think about any philosophical question based only on your criticism of other people's philosophical positions.I don't know what your reasoning is, because your presuppositionalist doctrine says that you should never try to explain what your reasoning is. I can only guess what you think by observing which views you criticize in others.You won't explain your own reasoning, but you also wish to establish that it is superior to mine. So I have to guess at the ways in which it might be different from mine.Can you really blame me if I don't yet grasp your philosophy? Apparently, your philosophy tells you that you shouldn't tell me what your philosophy is.And yet you complain that I am misunderstanding your argument --- when you are apparently committed to never telling anyone what your argument actually is.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Okay i'll play - That would only be true if I were the smartest person on the planet, you the second and your grandma the third. Can you guess who is most likely the 4th smartest person? Edited by MatterWave, : No reason given.Edited by MatterWave, : No reason given.

Many of the arguments of sac seem to come down to just one thing.That epistemology is based on circular reasoning.This, I admit, fully, freely, and quite possibly a decade before he became a presuppositionalist.Let me give some examples:* The proposition that my memory is somewhat reliable is based on my memory.* The proposition that I am capable of logical thought is based on me thinking about my thoughts and finding them to be logical.* The proposition that the scientific method is a good way of discovering facts is based on the fact that if we apply the scientific method to our methods of finding out about facts, that turns out to be a fact supported by the scientific method.* The reason that I think that my experiences reflect reality is that I judge what is real according to my experiences.All of this depends on what we might loosely describe as "circular reasoning".Now, sac wants to show us a way out. There is a God, and he is right about what we should remember and what our memories should tell us and the scientific method and what is and isn't logical and so forth. This, sac thinks, gives us a way out of this darn epistemological circle.But it doesn't. Because whether or not God exists, people suffer from strange perversions of memory, such as Alzheimer's disease and Korsakov's syndrome. Whether or not God exists, a majority of people make strange mistakes in logic. Whether or not God exists, people make a total mess of the scientific method and use it to draw utterly false conclusions. Whether or not God exists, people suffer from psychotic hallucinations.Whether or not God exists, people can be psychotic, stupid, illogical, delusional, hallucinatory, confabulatory ...So if sac offers us the existence of God as a means of solving epistemological questions, then this is completely worthless. Because even if God exists, that doesn't solve the problem, because if there is a God then he permits people to be insane. Which might include me And it might include you. And it might include sac.No appeal to the existence of God will evade these possibilities, since even if there is a God, he evidently permits some people to be insane.Sac has never even tried to answer this point, and I should like to see him or her try.

So, to summarize.I posted a fact so clear, simple, and obvious that the only person on this thread who can't understand it is you.You reply by posting a paragraph so utterly stupid, insane, and illogical that even you can see that there's something wrong with it.And somehow you think that that makes us quits.That is so sweet. But unfortunately there is no way that I can pat you on the head and ruffle your boyish hair using standard TCP/IP. I can only point out that the grown-ups are trying to have a serious discussion --- and appeal to a emotional and intellectual maturity that you do not yet possess.