The religious

secularism is the dominant principle of society which, by design, leaves room for religious practice — Bitter Crank

This is the meat of the issue. Secularism tolerates and makes room for religion which it regards as just another one of the many different human perspectives on life. Religion is, in the eyes of secularism, no different than communism or socialism - it's just one of the many ideologies that are around. In true secular spirit religion is then not just tolerated as I said before but also encouraged to flourish in every sense of that word.

The problem is religions claim to be the sole purveryor/source of truths, infallible truths at that and this invariably puts them at odds with other viewpoints including but not limited to their own mindset. This can't be allowed if only for the reason that religion, despite what their proponents loudly proclaim, isn't without flaws, flaws that are, going by the many atheist channels on youtube, too obvious to miss. This is where secularism comes in - as a safeguard against countries becoming theocracies, theocracies founded on and guided misguided by what is an error-ridden take on life.

Was it Shakespeare or one of the characters in his many plays that said and I quote,

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder — Shakespeare

?

That quote endorses the view that beauty is subjective. Such a standpoint, in my humble opinion, has to contend with the fact that some "objects" - beauty pageant participants, supermodels and the like - have an aesthetic appeal that's near universal i.e. many if not all see eye to eye when it comes to certain women and their beauty. This can only be if beauty is objective at some level for it implies that an "object" has the quality of being beautiful that we then perceive. It's not all in the mind so to speak.

So, two conflicting points of view on the matter of aesthetics. Perhaps it's a bit of both...

My only objection is regarding the title itself, Freedom AND Duty for it's a contradiction. Freedom means we're is at liberty to do whatever we want but duty implies that we're not. An odd couple these two.

I think I get it now. There's nothing and the concept of nothing. That nothing can't be a concept and it can't be according to its definition doesn't contradict the existence of the concept of nothing because for that to happen nothing should be the concept of nothing and that isn't the case just like an apple isn't the concept of an apple. That's your reasoning in a nutshell or as much of it I could decipher.

However...

Let's consider the matter of how we form concepts as according to you and as I've concurred there does exist a concept of nothing. How do we conceive of nothing in our minds? As the definition clearly shows, nothing is defined negatively as not this, not that, not that either, so and so forth. Nothing itself is not actually held in the mind like an apple is. The concept of apple evokes an image of an apple, perhaps even the way it stimulates our taste buds, and the concept of the square root of 2, at least for me, makes me think of the number 1.414... but try a similar thing with nothing and you can't do it. There's nothing a mind can do, try as it might in every way possible, to "hold in the mind" that which is nothing. Doesn't this mean, that nothing isn't, as we believed, a concept? If you disagree and are of the opinion that there's a concept of nothing then what must be acknowledged, at a minimum, is that the concept of nothing is vastly different from the concept of an apple.

Does this difference between nothing and an apple matter to our discussion? When do we define in the negative? When is it that we resort to such a tactic? This particular defining technique is usually employed when we're out of our depths which, unfortunately, happens more often than not if I'm anywhere near the ballpark. For instance I recall skimming through a Wikipedia article titled "Apophatic Theology" which, perhaps after acknowledging our near-complete ignorance of what we mean by "god", attempts to approach the divine by a method of denial, listing out as it were the qualities/properties that are not god. If there's any underlying similarity between nothing and god viewed thus, it must be that we don't know what either of them are.

This brings us back to what I've been trying to say, if not in its entirety at least in part, that nothing can't be a concept or if that doesn't go down well with you the concept of nothing is enormously different from, say, the concept of an apple. The former is approached through negation and the latter through affirmation. One could say though that that's the nature of the beast. Nothing is, at its heart, the negation/denial of everything there is and that's that!

What I'm getting at is, it seems, that nothing is the mother of all negations - not anything. So, the answer to a question that's framed thus, "Is nothing this/that/etc.?", should be "no". Hence, the answer to the question, "Is nothing that which can be conceived of in the mind?" should be "no". If one claims the answer is "yes" then nothing can't be not anything anymore for it's something that can be conceived of in the mind.

Thus, nothing can't be that which can be conceived of but that there's a definition of nothing implies that we've conceived of it. That's the paradox!

CONCEPT of the apple — L'Unico

I'll get back to you. Thanks for the help!

No!
Science is not a math, its a style of philosophy , a technique, a way of reasoning. — Trebor

Physics envy? What's that but a general sense of dissatisfaction with how the soft sciences lack the mathematical precision of physics and even chemistry?

Math is one of the ways used to express the working of science, I think that you are several hundred years late coming up with this. — Sir2u

As full of hubris as this may sound it's not correct to draw this conclusion from what I'm about to ask. Can you name a mathematician who's taken this approach to scientific equations before me?

Yes, I was having trouble with that particular aspect of the problem - word and their referents. You mean to say that the word "nothing" refers to nothing but is itself not the thing it refers to. But I never said that the word "nothing" is itself nothing.

You gave an example: an apple and how it's the referent of the word "apple" and you're absolutely correct that the word "apple" ain't itself an apple, it's just a bunch of letters and sounds that point to (refer to) that particular variety of fruit we all know and love, apples.

However, the philosophical nothing is exactly how the definition I provided is understood. Nothing isn't anything and if that's true, it can't be referred to with a word for there's nothing to refer to.

Furthermore, nothing being what it is or rather what it's not, can't be a concept. If so, nothing can't be conceived of with our minds given our minds are concept machines. Yet, we've defined it and that's just another way of saying we've conceived it in the mind. That's a contradiction! A paradox.

What I suppose is going on is that religious folks draw part of their identity from religion whichever among the many thousands that may be. Religion is part of who they are - it defines them so to speak. Naturally criticizing religion would be taken as a personal affront.

Secularism, as per Wikipedia, is a vague concept but one thing is for certain, it demands the separation of church and state. Assuming the religious take an interest in that particular secular stipulation and they might very well do since such can be construed as the first step in the encroachment of the secular front into their lives which they would, predictably, regard as the beginning of the end of their way of life. In a sense the separation of church and state is kinda like the fort that sits right on the disputed border between religious and secular folks and the natural instinct is for one side to capture it and the other side to defend it (to the death I presume).

My concern, as my post shows, is whether there's a necessary link between wisdom and morality.

Let's begin our investigation, if you could call it that, at an obvious locus - the perfection of morality and, as will be relevant, knowledge - God. God is defined as all-knowing (omniscient), all-loving (omnibenevolent) and all-powerful (omnipotent).

That god isn't seen as all-wise is a big hint as to the nature of wisdom and how it differs from knowledge. The former is, as I mentioned earlier, about how does one know? and the latter is what does one know?.

The distinction between the two can be summed up with the quote:

If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” — Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie

The fish stands for knowledge (what does one know?) and the art of fishing is wisdom (how does one know?)

God's omniscience makes wisdom obsolete (for God that is) because being all-knowing, god doesn't need a method of discovering knowledge. God knows everything. Period. End of story. It must be that wisdom exists in an environment of partial or total ignorance for on such occasions it becomes imperative that we have a tried and true method of discovering knowledge and that's to say getting our hands on a method that's the answer to the question, "how does one know?" becomes critical when we're working in domains with some unknowns. In the simplest sense wisdom is the ability to be perfect or, negatively, to be least imperfect, in terms of understanding and responding to situations that involve gaps in our knowledge.

Coming to the issue of morality, why is it that omnibenevolence is mentioned separately as a divine attribute? Doesn't goodness follow naturally from knowledge? Isn't omnibenevolence a necessary consequence of omniscience? If the answers to the questions posed is "yes" then there's no need to mention omnibenevolence as a distinct attribute of god and there's a necessary connection between goodness and knowledge in the sense if one is knowledgeable, one is inevitably also good. Perhaps the answer is "no" - knowledge doesn't always lead to goodness - and thus the need to mention goodness (omnibenevolence) over and above knowledge (omniscience) but this situation could've arisen simply because we ourselves, in our ignorance, fail to see how knowledge and goodness share a deep connection. Given that we don't have this piece of information, the wisest thing to do would be to mention omnibenevolence as divine quality in addition to omniscience. This is wisdom in action - given our ignorance on the matter and given we want a "better future" as you said, this is the wisest of all possible actions.

I want to ask you something. Are arithmetic operations (+ × ÷ -) defined over infinity?

Is it correct to say infinity + 1 = infinity?

:up: Fixed the bug!

I did, but I can put it more straight-forward. Yin-Yang are extremes(like absolute black and white). While the union of opposites utilize both of these extremes to create a dynamic, middle zone. Close to the same but different. — Thinking

So, yin-yang = opposites. What exactly do you mean by opposites?

The real is that which has its own independent existence and by independent existence I mean not, in any way, a construct of the mind. So, by this definition, a tree is real because a tree exists even when we don't perceive it with our minds and an imagined object like an unicorn or a hallucination of a dinosaur aren't . Such a conception of the real squares with our intuition of the real and reality.

The problem with such a notion of the real is that it can't be proven. How are we going to prove that, say, x exists despite our mind not perceiving it? To prove that x exists independent of our minds, we would need two conditions to be fulfilled:

1) we're not perceiving x with our minds

AND

2) x continues to exist despite that.

The catch is we can't fulfill condition 2 without failing to satisfy condition 1 because the only way to know x exists is by perceiving it with our minds. We can't meet the conditions necessary to prove the kind of realness I described.

That said, there's an indirect method to prove such realness - realness as existence independent of mind perceptions. There's what's consistent continuity in objects between two temporally separate mind perceptions. I have this Samsung cell phone that I'm typing this post on. It's 3:00 PM now. If I then put it in a drawer where no one, even I, can't perceive it and let it remain there for 3 hours and then retrieve it from the drawer, the cell phone clock will read 6:00 PM. This, if nothing else, shows that the cell phone continued to exist independently of my mental perception of it and kept on recording the passage of time, the 3 hours it sat in the drawer. The cell phone exhibits consistent continuity - it behaves as if it exists independent of mind perceptions, everyone's mind perceptions.

The OP is quite clear on where he wants to take this discussion. The goal is to put rationality itself on trial and the expected/desired verdict is there are times when we're "overly" rational and, as far as I can tell, that's being painted as a downside to the all-time philosophical blue-eyed boy, rationality.

Apart from this being a paradoxical affirmation and negation of critical thinking - it seeks or asks for a good reason why reason is bad - it also relies on an analogy that exposes the OP's got it backwards. Chess imitates life not the other way round.

Too, Inter arma enim silent leges. The only law that people seem to possess a natural instinct to "obey" is the "law" of the jungle. Chess has unbreakable, inflexible rules - do anything whacky with your pieces and you're out of the game, literally and figuratively. In life, rules are changed, bent and broken to suit the needs of the day - this happens most often and as anticipated when the stakes are high and when are stakes not high, right?

Infinite Potential (omnipotence) iherently includes the power to actuate — Gnomon

My thoughts exactly!

polarity would be black and white.
my definition for yin yang would be the absence of black with an excess of white and same way visa versa. Similar but different. One denotes merely only the extremes in energy while mine explains the interplay of the energies going on in the universe.

It is not a complete balance for if it was you would only get a grey, stagnant, middle zone which would put a stop to the pendulum (universe) swinging. Likewise, true extremes can only exist outside of the natural order of things and is out of touch with how the universe works. Because extremes are absent from how life works they are falsehoods. So, since the principle of the unity of opposites is essential to the functioning of the universe as a whole, it contains truthfulness. This is what I consider the Tao.

I identify an energy as that it has an excess and a deficient. Energy is always in constant motion and is always trying to balance/compete with the other(like your two feet walking), but the question is: Who set the pendulum in motion? What is it that could unify these extremes in all the energies of the universe to create one that is alive and full of dances? A universe in which it is most certainly abound with creative potential? I feel like one of those questions should be unanswered and the other self-evident. What is your take? — Thinking

Well, you still haven't told me what the difference between yin-yang and your notion of the interplay of opposites is.

Other than that — Tobias

The OP doesn't seem to extend the analogy to anything "other than that". In fact, all analogies are limited to similarities and that's that!

:up: :ok:

I should also add that discourse in one domain should not contradict the discourse in another domain. All knowledge must be integrated. — Harry Hindu

But if our domain of discourse is pigs, it doesn't make sense to talk of sonar. Pigs, unlike bats, dolphins, whales and some birds, don't possess that ability. Category mistake?

the question is wrong/illogical — EricH

Why is the question illogical/wrong? Let me rephrase the question using some examples:

1. x + 3 > 5. What is the solution set for the inequality 1? {3, 4, 5,...}

2. x + 1 = 2. What is the solution set for equation 2? {1}

3. x + 1 = x. What is the solution set for equation 3? { } = The empty set = Nothing. This barring infinity of course.

Discourse and ideas are still about something, even when talking and thinking about nothing. Zero is just another concept about the quantity of something. 0 what? 0 is meaningless unless you are talking about the number of something — Harry Hindu

:up:

If you have five pigs in a pen and I steal all of your pigs, you don't have nothing. Air now fills the space where the pigs were — Harry Hindu

Domain of discourse.

you didn't answer the question — L'Unico

Why not?

Something is at least ONE. So, the possibility of 1 thing or the possibility of 2 things...or the possibility of n things are all something

Nothing is just 1 of the possibilities

The probability of something = n/(n+1). As n approaches infinity and it does, n/(n+1) = 100%. It's goes without saying that something must exist.

those accusing science of antipathy toward philosophy — Kenosha Kid

There a whole bunch of scientists who have a dim view of philosophy which I suppose they regard as nothing more than wool-gathering. I can't name them but if you survey the scientific landscape as it were you will come across a few science bigwigs who don' take too kindly to philosophers. That's not to say they're right of course.

I'm probably talking out of my hat when I say this but it's probable that some, not all, scientists aren't aware that science is just one branch of philosophy - empiricism - taken to its natural conclusion and even if they are in the know about it, their grasp is likely to be superficial and unlikely to include the intricacies and subtleties that lie at the heart of objections to empiricism. Thanks :smile:

wisdom — Brett

Perhaps you'll detect a slight change in my position but it's a work in progress. So, view this is an improvement on my earlier conception of wisdom as that which is both true and good. It appears, on further analysis for what it's worth, that wisdom is a state of mind in which a person can handle/tackle anything and everything in the best way possible and what I mean by that a person who has wisdom can, given any circumstance, always make the right/best decision and choose the best course of action as allowed by the constraints and freedoms present therein.

As you can see, I've not put any restrictions on circumstance - it could be one in which the wise person has complete or incomplete or no knowledge of the situation that demands faer attention. Each epistemic state (complete knowledge, incomplete knowledge, or no knowledge) for a given circumstance will, for sure, have a best course of action given these limitations and the wise person will both find it and perform it. I suppose it all boils down to knowing how to think than anything else at all.

As for how morality, for a better world I suppose, relates to wisdom all that seems permissible is to assert is a negative statement viz. a wise person won't make a moral blunder or, if you feel that's hyperbole, a wise person won't commit serious moral offenses.

What say you?

What a nice compliment! I must return a compliment that often enjoy your posts as they are questions very few people ask. I think you bring a life to these boards that it would not have if you were not here.

As for why it is rare to encounter someone with wisdom...I believe that is because there is a difference in being told the road one should take, versus the action of actually walking it.

A curious mind: You've been on these boards enough to know the closed minded individuals. They have found what they wanted, are tired of questioning, or are full of their own ego. How many times in the past have we done this ourselves?

An honest heart: An honest heart will often show your beliefs to be wrong. An honest heart critically examines your own self and does not avoid the flaws it finds. How many of us truly like to admit we are wrong even to ourselves?

An ear to other opinions: How many of us listen to only that which we want to hear? When another opinion repulses you, do we still have an ear open to understand it before judging or dismissing it?

A rational viewpoint: Some are blessed with this as a potential, but this also takes years of dedication to cultivate. I believe our default is to rationalize, not be rational. It is difficult to break yourself of this and approach discussions with rationality.

To become a master of these four traits, you must be tested. And if you are tested, you will fail many times. There might be people who laugh at you when you fall. That want you to stay down. That hate you for walking it. You may get help from others, but in the end, you must make the decision to follow such a path yourself. — Philosophim

Excellent! :up: :ok:

That’s right. There’s no way of knowing. Nothing to do with either subjectivity or objectivity. It’s not as if there’s an unknown cause, but that events on this level are truly unpredictable. That is the basis of Einstein’s objection about ‘God playing dice’. But unfortunately for Einstein, and Harry, there’s no way in which ‘things truly are’ — Wayfarer

:ok:

Then not something isn't necessarily nothing. — Harry Hindu

Something is at least ONE. Mathematically Something >= 1. If that's true not something < 1 and that's ZERO and ZERO's nothing. It appears that something has a quantitative definition and so, I suppose, should everything and nothing.

"nothing" is just an idea — Harry Hindu

Nothing is not an idea. Nothing is not a thing, it can't be an idea because an idea is a thing. As I mentioned above, the concepts in question seem to be quantitative and so, nothing is the { }, the empty set, and numerically, nothing = n({ }) = 0 where n({ }) means the number of things in the empty set { }.

That out of the way, it needs to be pointed out that nothing in the metaphysical sense refers to the absence of physical stuff, the absence of particles, the 31 fundamental particles that, in various combinations, constitute all matter. The fundamental question of metaphysics seeks an explanation for the existence of matter and the nothing is meant here is the absence of matter, not necessarily the absence of space and time even thought both space and time are something in some sense.

To say that there is no way of knowing indicates that we are definitely talking about ourselves and not some objective feature of reality. I guess the question is, how do we determine if probabilities are objective or subjective? — Harry Hindu

Poor choice of words on my part. We know that some natural phenomena are probabilistic like radioactivity and quantum physics is what I should've said. My bad.

All I can say is that the following things you said form are at odds with each other:

1. "everything has to have a cause to exist"

and

2. "it has to defy the mathematical standpoint we can see which is that "things" cannot be on their way to go to, or to be traced backwards to, infinity"

because 1 implies backwards infinity - a cause for a cause...ad infinitum. So, if you object to something, anything because there's infinity in it (like you do in 2), you have to object to 1. "everything has to have a cause". :chin: Maybe I'm not reading this right. Anyway, my two cents.

For another thing, chess pieces are named after things that we encounter in life: King, Queen, Bishops, Rooks, Knights and pawns are treated as foot soldiers. The nomenclature suggests some parallel between life and chess - it's a simulation of an actual battle on a board. So, chess imitates life and not the other way round. If life imitates chess, there should be a similarity between the two that has origins in chess and we don't see that (to be fair, I don't).

Is not a bachelor a married man or nothing? — Harry Hindu

Not a bachelor is not nothing because a bachelor is something. So, yes, not a bachelor is a married man. And...?

Seems like a silly question to me — Harry Hindu

Explain yourself. Why "silly"?

Probabilities are just ideas stemming from our ignorance — Harry Hindu

I recall you making this assertion before and I'm interested in putting it under the philosophical microscope for closer examination. Are you saying probability has more to do with us, specifically our ignorance rather than being a real feature of reality itself?

I remember reading a book that talks of subjective probability which loosely translated comes close to your claim that probability is about ignorance - probability is about us, our ignorance, rather than about reality. As per the book, there's objective probability too which, as far as I can tell, is an acknowledgement that certain phenomena in the natural world are themselves probabilistic. An example the book gives is radioactivity - there's no way of knowing, says the book, which particle will decay and when and that's just another way of saying chance is a feature of reality itself and not necessarily a matter of human ignorance as you seem to be suggesting. Then there's quantum physics which too, to my knowledge, exhibits probabilistic behavior and according to some sources this isn't because we're lacking the information that would make quantum physics non-probabilistic but because quantum physics is inherently probabilistic.

What say you?

The word on that is science straying into philosophy is that it's reciprocal - philosophy too has strayed into science - and what I expect to emerge out of this exchange of views, opinions, criticisms, is an interference pattern that's mutually beneficial. Science can, if all goes well, find a good foundation to build its theoretical/experimental structures on and philosophy will become more empirically oriented and thus giving itself the much-needed boost to its credibility.

Probabilities are just ideas stemming from our ignorance. Reality just is a certain way. It's not more probable to be a certain way than another. It already is a certain way. How it is, is what we are ignorant of, therfore how it is is probabilistic in our eyes.

Your probabilistic answer doesn't provide anything that we didn't already know - that something exists. — Harry Hindu

The probabilistic answer to the fundamental question of metaphysics I provided doesn't have as its conclusion that "something exists". As you rightly pointed out, we already know that. What it does or what I want it to do is provide an explanation as to why "something exists".

And nothing is an idea, therefore nothing is something. — Harry Hindu

:smile: I'm not in a position to comment.

Maybe 'process' is just an anthropomorphic conception. — Wayfarer

Thereby hangs a tale :up: That's anthropomorphism. We really need to take a long, hard look at our assumptions.

'The Creation is the original acte gratuit. — Wayfarer

God as an artist in the grips of a creative impulse rather than as an engineer, methodically working with a carefully drawn up blueprint. I like that idea. It explains a lot or, more accurately, does away with the need to explain anything. :chin:

NOT some thing isnt necessarily nothing either — Harry Hindu

Something is at least ONE thing.

Not everything is not necessarily something. It could possibly be nothing as well. — Harry Hindu

Not everything can't be nothing because not nothing isn't necessarily everything. Not nothing and not everything can both be in something.

All I'm saying is that whether god exists or not, there has to be a way the universe came into existence. There's got to be a process to creation whether or not god initiated it.

I just realized that my probabilisitic answer doesn't actually do the job of providing a mechanistic explanation for why there's something rather than nothing? It's, unfortunately, not a scientific theory like Lawrence Krauss' . However, it does prove that the probability of something existing is greater than the probability of nothing.

Yeah but everything is also not something. — 180 Proof

:up:

Something is at least ONE but not ALL

To those who care

What exactly do we mean by "something"? Its logical definition is "at least ONE thing" but the question then is what's a "thing"? Do people, cats, pancakes, oil, air, fire, etc. - those to which the word "thing" is usually applied to -count as things in the metaphysical sense relevant to the fundamental question of metaphysics?

The answer is no. Objects that we encounter in everyday life like those I mentioned above aren't the something in the question, why is there something rather than nothing? The something in the question, if that something is claimed to be more than ONE in number, has to be made up of distinct individuals.

The everyday objects that I mentioned above do appear distinct from each other but it only takes a little digging to realize that they're all composed of particles (atoms). There's a sameness at the particle level that precludes treating objects we come across in our daily lives as distinct from each other and if that can't be done, there's only ONE kind of something - the particles themselves.

However, thankfully, particles come in many stripes - according to Google, there are 31 known fundamental particles and they're all distinct from each other in the sense they can't be reduced to another subparticle as a common denominator like everyday objects could be [to particles]. At this level - the level of the 31 particles - each particle is a something - distinct and independent

Suppose that the total number of configurations possible with these 31 particles is N [it's a very tedious process to calculate the exact number].

The P(Life given Something) = 1/N as only 1 of the configurations of the N possible support life, the configuration that has ALL 31 particles (this universe)

1. P(Nothing) = 1(N+1)

2. P(Something) = N/(N+1)

3. P(Something AND Life) = P(Something) * P(Life given Something) = N/(N+1) * 1/N = 1/(N+1)

4. P(Something) > P(Nothing) as N > 1.

This answers the fundamental question of metaphysics.

5. P(Something AND Life) = 1/(N+1) = P(Nothing)

This is where the anthropic principle enters the stage. The universe will appear to be such that it permits carbon-based life.