A scientific investigation could begin with the hypothesis that the purpose of a birds wings is flight, for example, and the scientific method could be applied to this teleological supposition. — praxis

And if it is applied, it will necessarily cancel out the teleological "supposition" and replace it with an explanation based wholly on efficient causes. We certainly use teleological talk in everyday language and in common sense, but that is the explanandum for science, and science talks (or aims to talk) in terms of observable regularities ("laws") and causal chains, nothing else. If it still uses the language of common sense, that is, as I said, a way of explaining the science in a way that people can relate to.

The way you say "real purpose" tells me that what you mean by "real teleology" is having an meaningful ("real") goal as opposed to a meaningless ("as if") goal. — praxis

Yes, and "real" has nothing to do with "authority." Pseudonym thought the same thing - but it's a strawman (historically, for most religions and philosophies, most of the time, though not of course all).

The point isn't to get your meaning from some "external authority," the point is to get your meaning from a story about the Universe that's true, that shows that and how you are knit into the Universe's fabric, so that you feel at home and are justified in feeling at home, not just pretending or putting on a brave face and a brittle smile.

The leading metaphysics of the day doesn't offer that comfort. So all that's left is either accepting the moral nihilism that goes with that metaphysics, or pretending and putting on a brave face and a brittle smile.

Or, as I've been saying, finding an alternative metaphysics that does do the job (tells a true and meaningful story about the Universe) and also accepts scientific method. Maybe there is one, that possibility is not ruled out by scientific method alone, since as I've said, science can be understood either as denying any over-arching metaphysics (as it's come to be understood) or simply as bracketing questions of over-arching metaphysics (as it was originally understood by the early scientists, who were mostly believing Christians).

I really think it's time to knock this on the head, we both seem to have exhausted our quivers.

Idealists do not dispute the existence of objects, they simply give a unique answer to the question of what objects are. Instead of being a collection of mind-independent bits of physical matter, the idealist will say that objects of experience depend upon the mind for their content (an epistemological claim) or that they are ideas in the mind, whether my mind, other people's, or God's (an ontological claim). The idealist, in other words, is not committed to the notion that our knowledge of objects is illusory, i.e. unreal. They are real, but their reality is in some sense dependent on the mental or composed of the mental. — Thorongil

Oh yes, I agree, but the question is whether they can actually do that - whether a) they have good reason to doubt the usual backstory for objects, and/or b) whether it's even possible for them to coherently make the claim they think they're making.

Some of what you say here reminds me of the following recent speech by W.L. Craig I saw, which might be relevant to the thread — Thorongil

Thanks for the heads-up. Yeah, I used to be a strong Atheist in my youth, and I disliked all religions; but now at 58, I've become more of a Spencerian Agnostic, and I'm much more ... tolerant of religion :D

You say teleology in science is a "compressed" explanation. Yet another one of your idiosyncratic terms that makes it difficult to communicate with you. Are you doing this on purpose? Anyway, technically all explanations are compressed as no explanation can account for everything, so it's only a matter of how compressed. — praxis

So do you or do you not understand what I mean by "compressed explanation?" If you do, then it's not so "idiosyncratic" after all, is it? ;)

What distinguishes a teleological explanation is that it explains phenomena by the purpose it serves rather than by assumed causes. — praxis

Yes, so that can't be a scientific explanation; a scientific explanation JUST IS an explanation in terms of causes, NOT purposes.

There are increasingly, as I said to Pseudonym, some philosophers who are prepared to re-think all this, precisely because teleological explanations seem so unavoidable in biology (in particular, but also with non-living systems, like the rock cycle and the water cycle). But the point is, so long as one is strictly following the materialist/mechanistic metaphysical point of view that distinguishes modern science from the older scientific understanding that was based on classical philosophy, there can be no real purpose.

As far as I'm aware, people didn't start thinking Obama is or might be the antichrist until he became President. — Michael

Ah, well that's because nobody had ever heard of him.

I take my departure from the simple fact that, apart from the usual carping and sniping and legal shenanigans that rich guys in the limelight get, the man was in the public eye for decades and nobody thought he was literally Hitler.

Strangely, that only started to happen as soon as he declared his intention to run for president.

People already have the measure of him, they've had ample opportunity to spot if there's a mad, totalitarian gleam peeping out from a crack in the facade for years, and there never was - so they automatically discounted the sudden tidal wave of propaganda that descended on him as soon as he came down that escalator, as the obviously partisan hackery that it was.

Either he's the world's most consummate actor, who's bided his time for decades under public scrutiny waiting for the right time to unleash his genocidal plans, all the while presenting the image of a boorish, bombastic but essentially ok liberal guy, or he really is what it says on the tin: a patriot who's decided to do something about the appalling state of economic and moral decline of America.

At any rate, the choice between him and an evil goblin with a vagina was a no-brainer for many people. And probably the biggest cause of his win was the number of Left-leaning people who just despondently stayed at home or voted for someone else, rather than get up off their arses and vote for the evil goblin with a vagina.

He's not someone I'd invite around for tea and conversation, certainly. I have the same snobbish feel for him as most of his critics do. But I don't let that guide my judgement of his doings.

What I should have realized before was that the spirit of Idealism as it was expressed by W T Stace isn't merely that when I am not literally looking at the paper, there is no way to tell whether it exists. Rather, when I normally suppose that the paper exists when unperceived, I suppose that it exists in such a way that its existence outstrips any mode of observation. Stace's Idealism springs from the claim that there is no way to reliably determine that this supposition is true. — PossibleAaran

Again, I'd go back to the deeper sorts of arguments I put forth in our previous discussions. If you're accepting that what you're doing when you've got object x in view truly is that thing we normally call "perception" or "observation", whether mediate (camera, videocamara) or immediate (MK-1 eyeball), then plumping for calling what you're doing "perceiving object x" in the immediate case carries with it your implicit acceptance of whole backstory about physical objects in causal concatenation, such that they can't just pop into and out of existence.

In that case, the camera/video evidence ought to be good enough to prove the object's existence outside your present eyeballing. If you then want to check the video, that too is subject to doubt and the possibility of error (perhaps a mischievous friend is interjecting a false feed), but then in the same sense, so was your initial eyeballing perception (subject to errors of illusion, etc.).

On the other hand, if you want to strip away all presuppositions and go the non-dual/Ernst Mach route, as above, and you're contemplating present experience as a you-know-not-what, then the thing that's happening right now in and as present experience has no name, and it's not perception or observation either. It's not even experience, the blandest possible thing you could normally call it. The seeming of an "object x" in it, carries no connotation of existence or nonexistence outside of just being part of that "subjective" (again, problematic, because normally working in tandem with "objective") kaleidoscope hanging in the void, it doesn't even carry any connotation of existence outside perception (external existence) while you're perceiving it, far less while it's not in view.

You get out what you put in, GIGO. Strip away all presuppositions, then you can easily get the universal doubt, but at the cost of not being able to call the thing you departed from in your investigations "perception." The stripping away of presuppositions works hand and hand with the degree of universality of doubt, they're just two sides of the same coin.

Again, this is the core problem with Idealism and phenomenalism as I see it: they want to keep their cake and eat it. They want to call what's happening in the present moment "experience", "perception", "observation", etc., etc., but they want to retain universal doubt. But if you're universally doubting, then you can't call what's happening right now "perception", "experience", "observation" etc in the first place. But then as soon as you accept those terms, you implicitly accept the physical backstory, so there's no place for universal doubt any more.

Your position is that Trump is all right — tim wood

No, my position is that Trump is our God Emperor and the saviour of the human race.

The Papadopolous thing is just another red herring (and anyway, anything that has anything to do with Stzrok is automatically tainted now and irrelevant to anything Mueller), so is Carter Page being "under suspicion" before (lots of people are investigated by the FBI, it's their job to be suspicious, it's not proof of anything). Neither of those are what clinched the FISA warrant, as McCabe testified.

What did it was fake opposition research paid for by the DNC and the FBI, ginned up by a ex-British intelligence hack with a boner for Trump - an intelligence hack who, funnily enough, literally worked in collusion with the Russians to concoct the "Dossier." IOW, if Putin has had any hand in throwing a spanner in the works of American politics, it's been via the "Dossier." He must be laughing up his sleeve.

This whole thing, even the "ten billion security services suspicious of Trump" thing (remember that?) was backed up by nothing more substantial than this piece of tripe. And the cream of the jest is that an article fed to the Atlantic by Steele himself was used as corroborating evidence.

It is to laugh.

Only for a year? I think the fantasy has been going on for many years. — Agustino

Well yeah, in general, over the past few decades liberalism has gradually mutated into a cross between an infantile zombie cult and the Stasi with a smiley face, but I was just referring specifically to the "muh Russia" mania.

I never professed to be baffled by the suggestion that there was any difference at all. — Pseudonym

But you pouted, for example, that science does too show that things have natures, etc., etc., so why was I making a fuss? I know it was a few posts back, but come on, your mind can't be that much of a drawing on water.

Youve jumped from some epistemological difference (namely that aristolelian 'natures' are necessarily the case whereas scientific descriptions only 'appear' to be the case, to talk about 'meaning' and I've yet to understand how you got from one to the other.

How exactly does a thing 'necessarily' being the way it is rather than merely 'appearing' to be the way it is have a negative impact on the meaning we assign it, and what evidence do you have that this is happening? — Pseudonym

"meaning we assign."

If a thing (up to the Universe as a whole) necessarily is the way it is then WE DON'T ASSIGN THE MEANING. That's the difference - in that case the Universe is FOUND to be meaningful, not ASSIGNED meaning. On the other hand, if the Universe is just a stupendous case of "shit happens" then any meaning we "assign" is just lipstick on a pig.

We're going round in circles now. I give up.

What do you think is going on? — Mongrel

The Clinton campaign was embarrassed by Wikileaks, they (or rather the company they hired to investigate their servers, Crowdstrike) made up the Russian hackers nonsense first as a way to explain away their incompetence (or possibly as a cover-up for the murder of Seth Rich, who was likely the leaker to Assange). Then they repurposed the idea and made up the "Russia Collusion" twaddle via the "Dossier," on the basis of which they got the FISA warrant to spy on Trump, hoping to be able to get something on him that they could use to impeach him.

Since the Mueller investigation is ultimately based on the noise created by the "Dossier", which was bought and paid for by the DNC and FBI in the first place, the whole thing is a hall of mirrors, complete and utter nonsense from top to bottom, and it has been from the beginning.

Democrats and liberals, and their media cheerleaders, have been living in fantasy land for a year. The cognitive dissonance and nervous breakdown incoming is going to be delicious.

Here is the simple reason to doubt the ordinary story which I have stressed already. The ordinary story includes the proposition that some things exist unperceived. There is no reliable method at all, for determining whether the paper in the drawer exists unperceived, and this same problem occurs for the vast majority of objects we perceive. In that way, the belief that things exist unperceived is sheer speculation. This doesn't depend on the argument from illusion. — PossibleAaran

Ah, I remember now, haven't we been through all this before? :D

In that case, IIRC my counter-argument was that while you can't perceive things that are unperceived, you can perceive things that prove beyond reasonable doubt that things presently unperceived exist unperceived by you. Remember my camera arguments? Well - camera in the drawer ;)

Like, if I have "A & B" then I can deduce that "A". — MindForged

Yeah, but only if you're following the rule that in any given conversation, the symbol (or rather, identity, essence) "A" shall always be proposed for some particular object, not other objects, and not all objects.

It's just the form of "A=A" that's misleading, it looks like a truth about the world is being revealed - but as I said, what real relation in the world is "is identical with"? Nothing, there's no relation in the real world that answers to that description.

"Is identical with" only means that the hypothetical identity (essence or nature) symbolized by "A" shall (in any given conversation) be proposed to be the identity of some particular object singled out in experience, and not other objects, and not the whole of experience.

This is how thought (and common sense/experiment) works: we punt identities for things, and see whether things answer to those identities (whether our subsequent experience is what we'd expect if the object actually has that identity or nature). But in order to do so, the most fundamental prerequisite is that we have to track objects with one singular identity in the course of our investigations. This is so that we can match our expectations (set up by that proposed identity) from the past, with what eventuates now or in the future - with what's given by experience, if we've worked with the assumption that the thing has that identity.

In what sense is Idealism less explanatory? In what sense less ad hoc? In what sense less parsimonious? — PossibleAaran

Well Idealism obviously ad hoc because it's inventing a whole different understanding of reality from the ordinary one. That's the less parsimonious bit.

That would take us back to the line of thought about doubt requiring reason to doubt. Is there a reason to doubt the ordinary story? If not, then it's more parsimonious to go with it. Now of course Idealism pretends to have reason to doubt the ordinary story - but most of it's bogus, based on variants of the argument from illusion, etc.

In the field of biology, an example of an intrinsic teleological claim might be that the purpose of a birds wings is for flying. This is "real" or valid teleology. — praxis

Not for science it isn't, there is no real or valid teleology for science at all. I've just explained to you, teleological talk in science as it stands today is just a convenience, a manner of speaking, a compressed explanation, etc. Since I've been through this several times already with you, and more recently with Pseudonym, I'm not going to repeat myself.

An example of invalid or nonsensical teleology — praxis

Invalid or nonsensical is not the opposite of real in this context.

Religious narratives are far from offering a complete account for everything in the universe.They don't need to. They just need to be meaningful. — praxis

They generally do try to, that's the whole point of them. People seek a complete, satisfying sense of reality and their place in it. As you said yourself, fiction is meaningful, but it's not usually held to be a true picture of reality.

You're not explaining why an overarching narrative is necessary to retain values. You're only saying that an individual's values may not jive well with the world around them. That is obvious and unenlightening. — praxis

No that's not it, it's not that the individual's values may not fit with the world around them - obviously the individual is free to hold whatever values they wish. It's that people generally (as evidenced by religious systems and the classical philosophical systems) want the same values to be an integral part of reality AND an integral part of themselves, so that they are bound to, at home in, the world around them. What's wanted is values that are mirrored in the individual and in the external reality surrounding them. That's why subjectivity of value is unsatisfactory - even shared subjective value for a community. That's the difference between values and whims, or shared whims.

Basically your position boils down to the fact that the scientific explanation for why things are as they are is insufficient because it cannot (does not even attempt to) demonstrate that they necessarily are that way, just that that is they way they seem to be. I'm with you so far, that's a perfectly sound definition of science. — Pseudonym

Then what's been your problem all through our conversation? You've professed to be baffled by the difference between the two positions, you've furrowed your brow in puzzlement, you don't understand, etc., etc. So now you're telling me you do understand after all? Huh. So what was all that rigmarole about then?

And in this context of your newly revealed understanding, what was all that stuff about seeking "external authority" a few posts back? You do understand there's a difference between a system's attempt to demonstrate logical necessity and give a complete picture grounded in self-evident, necessary truths, on the one hand, and the kind of reliance on "external authority" that you were bloviating about in your bit of junior psychoanalysis back there, right?

But then you go on to say that various metaphysical positions do give reasons why things are the way they are necessarily because of some metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, which you can't quite remember but nonetheless believe profoundly is the case. — Pseudonym

All I was required to do for you was to point out the difference, that's what you were asking for, that's what you professed to be so puzzled about.

I don't "believe profoundly" in the classical philosophy (or any of the other analogues I've offered that form alternatives to the materialist worldview), I simply understand that there is an alternative understanding of the world available, and roughly what the difference consists in. And I also understand that if it's true, if the arguments are sound, then the classical philosophy (and the analogues from other systems) would certainly counter the alienation and nihilism that's been a direct result of the materialist/mechanistic philosophy, and do so on a rational basis. If you're interested, you can pursue the topic yourself instead of second-guessing that it's "metaphysical mumbo-jumbo."

I've only recently started getting into the classical/scholastic philosophy myself, that's why, while I've read some arguments, and I find the difference between the classical philosophy and the modern philosophy fascinating, I'm not confident enough to be sure I understand the classical philosophy well enough to even reproduce it, let alone defend it. It's not as firm in my mind as the general line of modern philosophical arguments - it's actually (for most of us in today) a new topic with its own concepts that you have to learn on its own terms.

This argument sounds like an argument I could make using my own resources, doesn't it? — PossibleAaran

No, the idea that the existence of some unperceived object is a reasonable explanation for present experience's being the way it is depends on a prior acceptance of the world being pretty much as we think it is, with people who give you information, etc. At that level (the level of reliable knowledge) we're not asking about the possibility of objects outside perception in general, but of this or that object that's outside present perception, given that objects exist outside perception in general.

However, that idea (the general idea) isn't something that you could logically derive from present perception without any additional ideas, truths, or auxiliary hypotheses that you've already accepted that you're taking in from a world outside present perception. Even calling present experience "perception" already takes too much for granted if you're strictly going on present experience. Really, the most you can get is the non-dual mystical position, which is somewhat similar to the radical empiricist position of Mach - e.g. consider Mach's "self-portrait." https://binged.it/2nBJUOZ (Obviously we're meant to include the whole panoply of things you can find in present experience in this - ghostly "thoughts" and images, vague bodily sensations, etc.)

Here you have something like "experience" as a thing-in-itself with which we have direct, immediate contact, floating in a palpable void (as it were). There's depth to the thing (it's not 2-d) but the depth is only within the experience itself, there's no necessary connection between that perceived 3-dimensionality and "a world outside the experience." Also, there's no subject "perceiving" this thing - that too is a hypothesis that has no justification - this experience-thing just sheerly exists in its own palapable void (by which I mean the absence-of-it that surrounds and envelops it).

I'm baffled as to what the distinction you're trying to make is here. The fact that things have 'natures' is entirely what science, and therefore by extension materialist philosophy, has confirmed. — Pseudonym

Deary me, no. Or at least not officially - increasingly there are some noises from philosophy of science (e.g. Nancy Cartwright) that a strictly materialistic/mechanistic metaphysics is in fact inadequate and that we do need to go, if not exactly back to Aristotle, at least back to something like Aristotle, in the sense that it's becoming clear that efficient cause on its own is senseless without a deeper metaphysical background involving final cause, or at the very least an understanding of things as having natures, essences and intrinsic powers. But for ever such a long time, since the break with scholasticism, through Hume, through the positivism of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the position has been that things don't have specific natures that make them (of necessity) behave a certain way and not another way, they just observably happen to behave a certain way and not another way, and the observed patterns are called "laws of nature." They are, simply, regularities.

Again, think of the example I used: the difference is between a point of view which thinks there's a prior constraint on logical possibility (as to "what will happen next", for example) coming from the side of the object itself, and a view which doesn't think there's any such prior constraint inherent in the nature of the thing, a view which thinks only in terms of probabilities based on statistical regularities, with (e.g.) the floor turning to jelly as a live option (because it is a logical possibility and involves no contradiction) but just highly, highly improbable based on the other, contextual consistent patterns we've observed up till now. Modern science is all about probability (ostensibly - as I said, things might be changing).

Physical things are bound by the laws of physics to behave the way they do, — Pseudonym

You do realize that "law" is just a metaphor right? There is no "binding." It's simply an observed regularity. There is no form of necessity binding this and that together from the mechanistic point of view, that was the whole point of ditching Aristotle, that was the whole point of Hume's discoveries about induction, and the impossibility of experiencing or observing necessity in nature.

How does a thing's Aristotelian 'nature' not just happen to be the case? Why are you allowing philosophical ideas to just 'be the case' for no reason, but when scientific ideas try to just 'be the case' for no reason, you think they've somehow lost something? — Pseudonym

There is a reason in classical metaphysics for things having natures or essences, it's a necessary outcome of deeper metaphysical principles (actuality vs. potentiality, final cause, things like that - it's a whole number, don't ask me to get into it because I'm not familiar enough with it to generate it for you on the spot, I'd have to dig it up from the literature - and no, that's not an appeal to "authority"). There are analogous ideas in the other systems I mentioned, they all attempt to get down to some basic principles that are SELF-EVIDENT and don't just happen to be the way they are. Again, this goes back to the point about intelligibility. The philosophy that Christianity had inherited from antiquity was an attempt to develop a completely coherent picture of the Universe, with no dangly bits left over, no bits of "shit just happens." Part of that coherent picture was the idea of efficient cause, which was, in terms of the older metaphysics, an aspect of nature, essence and final cause. Science developed by focusing on efficient cause and (at first) setting aside those larger metaphysical ideas. Then it forgot that it had only set them aside, and denied their truth altogether.

The difference is that science goes on to say that this is just our best current theory and if a better theory turns up or if something unexpected happens then the floor might well turn to jelly. It's just that our best current theory is that it won't. — Pseudonym

That is not a difference from earlier science, Aristotle was an empiricist too, he didn't claim his scientific findings were set in stone. Nor did the Schoolmen, the Church, Aquinas. They all understood the idea of "best current theory," it wasn't an idea that some bright spark discovered for the first time ever in the 16th century.

Sorry for the pop-psychology, but it's crucial to understanding where I'm coming from. — Pseudonym

Yes, we can do without it. You're ridiculously off-base in your surmises.

The point isn't to appeal to "authority", the point is to have a convincing picture of reality that's grounded in self-evident metaphysical principles on the one hand, combined with empirical observation on the other. The thing that's missing from the materialist/mechanist wordview is any attempt at the former - and as I've said now several times, that was by design, that was the essence of the Baconian revolution in science, to set aside discussion of the deeper background metaphysics. At first it was a methodological adventure (let's see how far we can get just by thinking about things in terms of mathematically quantifiable efficient cause), then later the methodological bracketing became a metaphysical ditching (for no good reason, it tuns out - people just believed the older metaphysics had been refuted).

I believe that there are items which exist when neither I nor anyone else is perceiving them. Examples of such items are pieces of paper, seas, mountains and apartment blocks. I believe it, but how could I possibly know it? — PossibleAaran

Well, mostly we take it on trust, on the word of others - friends, family, journalists - or of experts. That's a loose, everyday sense of knowing. Mostly we are confident about this mass of information, but we still retain some caution at the back of our minds, because doubt is always possible, and if we do doubt we can move on to the next stage.

If we're more curious, we'll look into the reasoning and arguments provided by our informants, and such demonstrations will ultimately boil down to there being some causal chain connecting present experience to the unperceived object, such that if the object didn't exist, our present experience wouldn't be the way it is. Or: the hypothesis that the unperceived object exists, is a reasonable explanation for present experience's being the way it is. (This would be so even if you're using your informants' experience as an intermediary step.) That would be your second type of knowledge - reliable inference. Doubt is still possible, but we have an overall picture that we can reasonably be confident in.

As to the general question, "How could we possibly know that things in general exist unperceived?" - that is self-evident if one is seriously using the term "we." (IOW, you're already admitting there's a "we" so you're already admitting that there are at least some objects outside of your present perception.) That's the first type of knowing, although here the demonstration is only possible by virtue of the logical implications of the terms used - or rather, by virtue of what's necessarily implicitly affirmed if the terms are being used seriously, non-frivolously. (There is no option for the question to be "free floating," spoken by no-one to nobody nowhere at no time - gradually take all that context away, and the question itself gradually becomes more and more meaningless.)

On the other hand, if I am asking the question of my own experience (methodological solipsism) - "How can I alone, out of my own resources, know that things exist unperceived?" - then there is no answer, and I am led inevitably to solipsism.

You seem to have some meaning of the word purpose, which you are not making clear, which the apparent goal of DNA does not fit, but which the apparent goal of a God would fit. — Pseudonym

No, no, it's not got anything to do with the traditional Abrahamic conception of God specifically, or even with what might be derived "emotively"; God is just one way of having purpose, function, teleology, goal-directedness, meaning, etc., be intrinsic to the Universe (I pointed out several other options a few posts ago - the classic examples in Western philosophy are Aristotelianism's Final Cause and Stoicism's Logos, both of which are non-supernatural, naturalistic ideas. Spinoza's Conatus is another variant, in a Universe that is conceived of as Deus sive Natura, IOW in a Universe in which God is not conceived in traditional terms, but is synonymous with Nature.)

From any naturalistic or religious point of view that accepts purpose, meaning, etc., as intrinsic to the Universe, things have natures, and their behaviour follows with logical necessity from their nature. Consider: it's "logically possible" that if I walk out the door the floor will turn into jelly. But it's not actually possible - the materials of which the ground is constructed have a limited range of possible things they can do, and turning into jelly isn't one of them.

But the mechanistic view can't allow any of that cluster of ideas to be part of the explanation of the Universe in any real way. From that point of view, it just happens to be the case that the ground doesn't turn into jelly, that's simply a regularity that we observe, and nothing more can be said about it. In terms of materialistic/mechanistic metaphysics, it's forbidden to say that things have specific natures, essences, powers, potentialities, etc. That's precisely what was gotten rid of as science divorced itself from Aristotelian metaphysics, that's precisely what defines science as a distinct modern enterprise. (In fact, at first such talk was merely bracketed, set aside, to see what could be said in terms of efficient causes and quantifiable regularities alone - that's why scientists could still be, and if they look at it this way, still can be, religious believers - but as science developed, people gradually came to accept a metaphysics which didn't just set aside teleological talk as a matter of methodology, rather it said that the Aristotelian view had been "defeated" and that there is no teleology.) From this point of view anything that's logically possible is materially possible, we must simply observe and note whatever causal regularities exist, and talk in terms of probabilities (i.e. the floor turning to jelly cannot be ruled out entirely, it just has a vanishingly small probability of occurring, based on the mass of other observed regularities).

Whenever science (science that takes this metaphysical stance) talks in teleological terms, it's necessarily just a manner of speaking, a way of chunking or compressing the full scientific story for convenience, and casting it in terms with which the layman is familiar. (Or rather, it would be that, except for the suspicious fact that teleological talk seems to be unavoidable in science - which might be a clue as to why the materialist/mechanistic metaphysics is in fact inadequate.)

The goal of successful replication simply derives mechanistically from the chemical properties of DNA. — Pseudonym

There is no goal of successful replication. Just as Free Will must necessarily be illusory in a mechanistic universe, so must goal-directedness necessarily be merely apparent. DNA is simply chemical lego that clicks together in such a way as to produce via deterministic biochemical processes, bodies with characterstics that either fit or don't fit with their environment in a way that gives organisms a chance to replicate. From this point of view, whatever goal-directedness we as humans have in our minds and emotions must necessarily be as illusory as Free Will must necessarily be in terms of the same metaphysics. We just happen to be made in such a way as to have particular kinds of emotions in certain circumstances (e.g. some people have a feeling for their offspring and their future). In terms of this metaphysics there can be no more real goal-directedness in the human mind than there is in the Sphex wasp, or the rock cycle.

From the mechanistic/materialistic point of view, things just happen to behave in the same way that things that were actually goal-directed would behave, it's just that they're not, they're just constructed in such a way that that's how they happen to behave. Again, the "laws of nature" are simply observable regularities.

Now, while this is a hurrah fact to some (to those who are nihilists by nature or temperament, so to speak), it's a boo fact to most people (people who quite like having meaning, purpose and and virtue around), and naturally many reasonable people try to cover the stark brutalism of the materialistic worldview over with the fig-leaf of "emergent properties" or "proximate" causes. But those are flimsy rationalizations for trying to keep one's cake and eat it, as I said - and (so long as the materialistic metaphysics is the reigning idea) eventually the truth will seep out through society and permeate it. Which is what we see happening around us now.

Firstly we need to establish what you mean by meaning. I understood it to mean purpose, but you seemed not to be happy with the proximate purpose evolution gave us (to propagate our DNA). It seems you want there to be some other purpose, but I'm not sure why. — Pseudonym

It's not that, it's that the DNA "purpose" isn't actually a purpose. What work is "proximate" doing in your sentence there? How can there be "proximate purpose" at the level of the DNA mandate, if there's no distal purpose in the Universe as a whole? It seems like the "proximate purpose" is either just the seeming of purpose in something that is actually purposeless (which would be the materialistic/mechanistic idea, pursued to its logical conclusion) or it's the appearance of real purpose for the first time ever in the Universe, just at that biological level (for some reason).

The purpose of our lives, according to materialism is to secure the survival of our DNA. — Pseudonym

No, from a strictly materialistic perspective there's no purpose at the level of DNA, it's just a bunch of things that happen to be the way they are. Proteins fold and click together like lego or not, organisms "fit" with their environment or not. The purpose is only apparent, there only seems to be purpose, and the appearance of it is explainable in terms of the lower-level sciences.

There isn't even any function at that level, far less purpose. Recall Conway's "Game of Life." A few simple rules about contiguous squares flashing on and off create a vast ecosystem of complex patterns that do things like appearing to "eat" other patterns, that appear to move purposefully in particular directions, etc. But that's illusion, or rather just a manner of speaking that makes it easy to talk about the patterns.

We all have to stop asking "why?" at some point, even the religious. — Pseudonym

Yeah but the question is, do you stop because you've finally gotten a satisfactory answer, or just because you've given up, or are too tired to go on? You say:-

If God made the world, then why? — Pseudonym

That's a common misunderstanding of the classical argument for God. "God" closes the series of "why" questions because (speaking crudely, to get the point across quickly) it divides reality into two parts, creator and created (or at a more sophisticated level, necessary and contingent, act and potential, etc.). About the created part you can ask "why" questions, right up to the question of "why the whole thing?" The God part is the answer to that and the classical arguments explain why God must necessarily be something about which any "why?" question is unintelligible, IOW the God part is self-evident. That's a perfectly reasonable argument that gives full closure (if it's sound - of course the devil is in the details :) ).

I guess what I'm saying in a nutshell is that I think rationalists fool themselves into thinking that we can keep our cake and eat it, but the logic of materialism/mechanism is un-get-overable, and will eventually permeate society, if unchecked. The habits from DNA's mandate alone are not enough to create civilization, they only lead to a tribal society. It's only the classical philosophical views, or religious views, that trained us into being more than tribal beings, into building the vast, crystalline empires of thought and matter that we inhabit. But if there's no longer any reason to believe in the classical philosophical or religious views, and all we have as our basic metaphysics is materialism/mechanism, then we will inevitably return to a tribal way of life - only with nuclear toys.

This is all the case regardless of whether the over-arching philosophical/religious worldviews are true or false. If materialism is false and the grand, over-arching philosophical/religious meanings of old are true, then we're on a hiding to nothing for no good reason. If materialism is true, and the philosophical/religious meanings of old are false, then, ironically, we've rendered ourselves unfit by destroying our illusions.

Maybe it will clarify if you can explain why your apparent view that Aristotelian teleology is "real" rather than "as if." — praxis

That sentence doesn't make sense as it stands. I'll presume you're asking me to explain why I think Aristotelian teleology (if true) would be a form of real teleology rather than an "as if" teleology?

The reason would be that Aristotelian teleology understands final cause, purpose, function, as intrinsic to nature, whereas when teleological concepts are used in biology, for example, it's just a manner of speaking (that's what I mean by "as if"). The true story according to science would be the full explanation of the biological concept in question in terms of chemistry, and ultimately physics; the use of "function" or "purpose" in biology is therefore just shorthand for that bigger explanation - or another way of looking at it might be that the ordinary teleological concepts we use are the explanandum of science, which tries to explain what's really going on under the hood that gives the appearance of function and purpose, when actually there is no function or purpose to anything.

Right, the metaphysical form of naturalism is synonymous with scientific materialism. — praxis

No, scientific materialism is one form of metaphysical naturalism, it's not "synonymous" with it, it's a subset or sub-type of it, one form of it.

But the whole isn't intelligible through and through, in any narrative. This is anthropomorphism. Meaning can't be intrinsic to the universe without an intelligence or subjective experience. — praxis

Intelligence yes, subjective experience not necessarily (that's what would distinguish these alternative forms of naturalism from supernaturalistic religion, the idea that this ... thing ... has an inner life of its own). So the idea would be (for all these non-nihilistic variants) that our own intelligence is a miniature, somewhat degraded version of the intelligence that infuses and structures the Universe, analogously to the way a broken piece of a hologram has the same image as the whole hologram, just slightly degraded. At any rate, that's not what I was talking about: I meant that a fully satisfactory story about the Universe has to be complete, and ultimately grounded in self-evidence. (i.e. as I said earlier, it should have the self-evident, unarguable quality of something like the cogito).

Why is an overarching narrative necessary to ground our values? — praxis

Because values partly pertain to the world around you that's not-you, yet values you merely create for yourself have no necessary connection to the world that's not-you. For all you know, you might be imposing values on the world that are alien to it. IOW values, to be truly values as distinct from whims or preferences, have to be grounded in the way the world is, not just the way you are, or the way you feel. (It makes no difference if we shift up to "our values", they would still be at risk of being subjective.)

I agree with your separation of the different types of happiness, but I'm still not getting the connection with materialism. You mention raising kids as an example of just that kind of long term selfless sense of deeper fulfillment and I'd agree entirely, but you can't get much more materialistically hard-wired into our DNA, than the desire to raise kids. It's a direct result of a chemicals pre-priming neurons to fire in a particular way, but it creates on hell of a powerful meaning to life. — Pseudonym

And yet as we see, people are less interested in having families in the "advanced" countries. And this is because DNA has no sense of time-binding, it's "blind," mechanistic. Consider tendencies towards r selection or K selection. Some people (both male and female) are interested in sexual pleasure, certainly, but aren't all that interested in investing in kids. Or again consider the prevalence of infanticide in times past, or abortion now.

The natural drives alone can be quite heartless and cruel; nature is impartial, if it fits the environment there will be parental investment, if not, not.

The evolutionary biology/psychology explanations explain why some things have come to be the way they are, but they don't give any rationale for continuing them - I'd remind you of how, notoriously, Darwinians, Racialists and Eugenicists and the like in the past were twitted by rationalists for mixing up theirs "oughts" and their "ises." ;)

As per my conversation with Praxis above, it's not that people don't currently find meaning, it's that in terms of the mechanistic worldview, there's no reason for them to do so. We're still fairly close to a time when people had over-arching meaningful contexts, so there's still the habit of it in society. But eventually, over time, that habit will fade (so long as that worldview is believed to be true). Already, one has the sense that talk about meaning is fading into pious nostrums that glide off one's mind, commodified in books, chatted about by Oprah for 5 minutes, and forgotten.

What would be an example of a meaning or significance to the fact that anything exists at all? — Pseudonym

One is obviously the religious one we're familiar with (there's a purpose to things, even if we don't understand it fully, we can trust that God's on the case), but there are other possibilities (e.g. non-dual mystical, Aristotelian final cause, Daoist "grain," or "Way of things," Hermetic microcosm/macrocosm, etc.) Generally speaking, there are outside-in positions, inside-out positions, or both - either the meaningful element is something that expresses itself from within, or it's something that impinges on the individual from without, or both (either in parallel or in a mutually-shaping interaction).

These possibilities are all foreclosed by materialism/mechanism - which boils down to sequences of quantifiable efficient causes without any sort of over-arching context (i.e. stuff just happens to happen the way it happens, the Universe is a stupendous accident, destined for an ignominious end).

Well I didn't say these had to be assertions about reality. These can be understood purely formally and syntactically. — MindForged

Then why talk of "axioms" and "truth?" Purely formally/syntactically you can make up any old rules for moving symbols around in patterned ways, neither truth nor the assumption of truth have anything to do with it surely?

you said something about "real" teleology. — praxis

Yes, as contrasted with the "as if" teleology I was talking about several posts back when we were talking about teleology.

Metaphysical naturalism is synonymous with scientific materialism. — praxis

No it's not, and I just explained how it's not. Scientific materialism is one form of naturalistic thinking. Other forms are e.g. Daoism, Stoicism, Aristotelianism, Spinozism, some forms of Idealism, Peirce's Pragmatism, Robert Pirsig's metaphysics of "Quality" - where there's no supernatural entity or designer in charge, but there is an intelligible quality to the Universe as a whole that's also external the individual (as well as internal). For non-mechanistic forms of naturalism, meaning and value are intrinsic to the Universe, such that nature doesn't just happen to be the way it is, it's the way it is for a reason (a reason that's ultimately self-explanatory or self-evident in a deep way, thus making the whole intelligible through and through). Another way of putting this might be to say that, for these kinds of systems, the big "why" questions can have rational answers without having to invoke a supernatural being - at most, they might invoke a "God of the Philosophers" or a "Deus sive Natura" type of concept, but that's conceived of as integral to nature, or immanent, not necessarily transcendent (not having to be transcendent to do its job of making the Universe intelligible).

Religious or metaphysical beliefs don't need to be true to be meaningful. — praxis

They have to be believed to be true for people to think of them as meaningful (in the sense of profound, not just in the sense of linguistic meaning). Obviously religious people don't believe their religions are works of fiction.

For some strange reason, he doesn't seem to believe that values exist once a materialist/mechanistic worldview is adopted. They just magically disappear. — praxis

They don't magically disappear, rather it's that they don't have any roots in the way reality is. For a religious worldview, or a non-mechanistic type of naturalism, "is" and "ought" are very much linked, you ought to precisely because the world is a certain way. But a mechanistic worldview necessarily divorces the two.

So if you take the mechanistic picture seriously, you can still have values - for a while. But as I said when we started this conversation, beyond a certain point they're running on fumes, there's no way to generate them out of the "is" of the mechanistic worldview, so eventually they'll fade out of use because there's no reason to hold to them.

So how does doing what makes you happy because we seem to like being happy miss that criteria? Are you specifically looking for meaning outside of the human experience? — Pseudonym

Are people made happy by modern life? Reports and statistics seem to give a mixed impression. It's often remarked that poor people seem happier than people in rich countries - they suffer more from the kinds of things that rich people don't suffer from (disease, accident, etc.), but there's often the impression that they're psychologically happier, or that their happiness is independent of circumstances. Or maybe it's just a case of "hunger being the best sauce," type thing. Or maybe it's the more intimate forms of social life they have, as contrasted to our atomized alienation from each other, our life as mere individuals.

Of course happiness has several possible meanings. There's the momentary happiness of consumption (in all its forms), and we certainly have lots of that, but that's different from what one might call happiness as satisfaction, or fulfillment - the deep, profound satisfaction of a life well-lived, a life of creativity, of goals fulfilled; which is different again from the happiness of _ataraxia_ or a Buddhist sort of desireless state. All these latter kinds of happiness might even require momentary unhappiness in the former sense, or perhaps better to say discomfort, but they seem to be worth it. Generally, the satisfaction of long-term goals seems to give that deeper sense of fulfillment - perhaps even long-term goals beyond one's individual span, the happiness of raising kids, or of contributing to society, planting trees, etc.

But the further you go from the kind of happiness that depends on the satisfaction of range-of-the-moment whim, the less there seems to be any point, unless there's a point to the over-arching context of existence. It's almost as if a life of whim-satisfaction serves as a distraction from the emptiness and meaninglessness of a mechanistic universe - if you skip from one act of consumption to next fast enough, maybe you don't have to think about it, maybe you don't have to notice it. But the biggest problem with happiness as whim satisfaction, as de Sade told us long ago, is that it escalates - more and more extreme forms of stimulation have to be found.

I wouldn't say that meaning has to be found exclusively outside human experience - discovering one's own meaning does seem to be part of a fulfilled life - but I'd say that there does have to ALSO be meaning outside the human experience, some meaning or significance to the fact that anything exists at all, some over-arching context that gives our individual stories a meaningful place, to get the full spectrum of the best possible life.

What properties would a 'meaning' have that you're finding absent in materialism? — Pseudonym

Purpose, teleology, intelligibility (in the classical sense): something that doesn't ultimately terminate at "shit happens." After all, "shit happens" is hardly an explanation, is it?

So Wittgenstein isn't that injurious to philosophy as I supposed. One member, I think it was Banno, said that everything is a game. I wonder if philosophical truths are more about the game rather than anything substantive. The question itself is part of the game I suppose? — TheMadFool

Yeah I think that's the idea - philosophical truths "limn grammar", it's like we're reminding ourselves of the rules of the game, the criteria for language use and thought, but it seems like we're making substantive claims. That's the main cause of the confusion in philosophy, as Wittgenstein sees it.

(Stepping backwards a bit, I'm still not absolutely totally convinced of that - I still think it's possible that there may be such a thing as philosophical discoveries about the world - but I do tend to argue for the Wittgensteinian position at the moment, to see how it stands up, as I've been exploring it for the past few years after a long period of hostility to W., and latterly being convinced by him - this is in the context of a 40 year obsession with philosophy :) - and I do think he's right about the cause of a lot of the apparently fruitless to and fro in philosophy.

(I'm actually coming round to the idea that modern philosophy was a mistake, and that the few philosophical discoveries that there are to be made were already made by the classical philosophers, that modern philosophy broke philosophy, and we're only just starting to rectify that. Going back to Aristotle is increasingly fashionable - and I actually think that Wittgenstein was starting to reinvent the Aristotelian wheel in On Certainty, which is particularly ironic in view of the fact that he lamented he hadn't read any Aristotle. Perhaps it's good that he didn't - so at least we know that those ideas can be dug up by alternative routes! Like a triangulation or something.)

It's an axiom — MindForged

No it's not, that's the thing. An axiom would be something presupposed as true, or assumed as true, or necessarily implied as true. But the LNC is not a presupposition or assumption or a necessary implication of anything, it just has the form of such, which is what's misleading. But because it's not a truth claim, it's not for refuting.

For example "A = A" (which is the root of the others, which are just "corollaries" IMHO, although even saying that could be misleading) looks like you're making a truth claim about reality, like this is an assumed fact, or a discovery about reality or the world. But it's actually just setting out the rules of the game: "We will use "A" consistently."

What on earth would it mean to say that "a thing is identical with itself"? Is that an informative statement?

Where does 'science' say that? I've scanned through my Encyclopaedia of Science, can't find any pronouncements to that effect. Is it in a paper I've missed? — Pseudonym

That the Universe is intrinsically meaningless is a logically necessary implication of the materialist/mechanistic worldview, i.e. the view that the Universe is comprised exclusively of observable regularities, sequences of efficient causation ("laws of nature") with no necessary connection. It's true that not all scientists believe that idea, and simply use it as a heuristic (some are religious, for example); it's also true that most scientists don't think about it all that much and just get on with doing science. But it is, so to speak, the elephant in the room for a materialist/mechanistic metaphysical position, and it comes out particularly when philosophers try to consistently follow the implications of the mechanistic worldview - e.g. in debates about Free Will, Philosophy of Mind, etc.

This is where so many different versions and types of one religion must come from, but at some point, they have to have something in common. — Lone Wolf

Yeah, I think with most religions there are core tenets and peripheral tenets, so you can still be "of that religion" while disagreeing on peripherals. The core tenets would be what distinguish that religion as a whole from other religions.

Somebody will just have to wait and see. — Bitter Crank

Just a suggestive addendum to our conversation. From https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-screwed-millennial-generation-gets-smart?ref=home?ref=home

"Despite endless talk about millennials as the group triggering a “back to the city” movement, census data shows that their populations in many core cities are stagnating or declining. In April 2016, the real estate website Trulia found that millennials were rushing out of expensive cities, with the group making up roughly a quarter of the population in New York and Washington, D.C., but accounting for half of all departures from them."

That we wish to remain consistent does not entail that we can remain consistent. It's not [merely] a commitment. — MindForged

You can refute an example of inconsistency, but how do you "refute" the very commitment to remain consistent that defines reason?

(Not trying to be flip here, this is really how I see it. The LNC is on a different level from things that use the LNC. The form of it makes it look like an object-language statement - which could be consistent or inconsistent - but I think it's really a statement of intent.)

You seem to distinguish 'real' teleology from 'as if' teleology by whether or not there exists an intelligent designer, yes? — praxis

No, I just said no in the very passage you quote. But perhaps the "phrasing" was too "unique" for you ;) (I'm beginning to wonder if you think I'm a religious believer? It seems like you're arguing as one might argue against a religious believer. Just because I have some kind, positive things to say about religion, and I don't think the standard rationalist counter-arguments to the classical arguments for God are as slam-dunk as rationalists tend to think they are, doesn't mean that I am myself a believer :) )

Naturalistic and mechanistic/materialistic are pretty much synonymous in this context, are they not? — praxis

No, as implied by the word "alternative."

It doesn't need to be true. It only needs to be meaningful. — praxis

Well that's just where we disagree. People trust that science is true. Science says the universe is intrinsically meaningless. No amount of ginned-up "meaningfulness" is going to override that, it's just whistling in the dark.

You mentioned yourself that some sort of naturalistic understanding of the world could replace a "specifically religious stance" and avert a drift into nihilism. — praxis

Yes I think that's possible, but it couldn't be the current mechanistic/materialistic version of naturalism. It would have to be something like the Aristotelian/Stoic naturalistic understanding (which gives context and meaning to material/efficient causes as something like "phases" or "moments" of final cause, which could be something intrinsic to the universe whether it's intelligently designed or not). That would put science in a broader context, so the intrinsic meaninglessness of the universe from science's point of view would be understood simply as an artifact of its self-imposed methodological limitations (sc. its specific focus on quantity and measurability).

Another possibility is some kind of "non-duality" as in Advaita Vedanta, some forms of Buddhism, Daoism, etc. I've toyed with that a lot from time to time over the years and I think it's a live option, particularly in the context of some kind of Externalism re. mind. It might even be possible to blend aspects of the Aristotelian understanding with it.

BUT, again, these kinds of alternatives would only be a viable counterweight to nihilism if they were true.

You call it a magnificent miracle but the idea that there was once nothing and then there was something would be the true miracle. It would make more sense to say there had always been something. — Xav

Surely that would be just as miraculous? The queer thing about the Universe is that anything exists at all, the question of whether it always existed or had a temporal beginning, is entirely secondary.

The main classical arguments for God don't depend on time or creation (although a few outliers like the Kalam cosmological argument do). For example, "[Aquinas argues that] even if the world had always existed, God would still have to exist here and now, otherwise certain features that it exhibits here and now would be inexplicable." (Edward Feser)

Your train of thought is interesting, but I don't quite see how contextuality gets you out of trouble. Could you expand on that?

The meanings of words are what the dictionary gives us - and that's based on how words are in fact generally used by people in the culture. Those usages are given, they're what we're inducted into when we learn language. In this sense language is a form of spontaneous social order, the product of human effort, but not of human design (although of course languages can be constructed - like Dothraki in Game of Thrones - it's just that the common languages aren't). And while it's true that language changes over time, it's very gradual, and for years at a time in the lifespan of a given human being, word use remains relatively fixed, a fixed point against which we measure other things. (One great analogy used for language-change is hair - there's always hair being lost and new hair imperceptibly growing, but one's "head of hair" remains the same "thing.")

That being the case, we describe our own behaviour partly by ourselves describing our own behaviour in the terms given to us by society around us, partly also by accepting how others describe us using the same language (and in this latter case what we're accepting from others isn't the meanings of the terms - those we already imbibed from society when we learnt the language - but rather the knowledge of how our behaviour looks from their point of view, described using those terms).

There's no fixed interpretation of what counts as (e.g.) a Buddhist outside of specific Buddhist traditions. I suppose if you accept some of the core teachings but reject other things, you can still call yourself a Buddhist - and if enough people have the same interpretation, then that's a new form of Buddhism. But no extant Buddhist tradition is obliged to accept your self-definition, or (should your group grow) your group's definition.

Whether they do so depends, e.g. on what they think of your teacher, on how you behave, or adhere to what they think of as the core teachings, etc. (That's actually how Buddhism developed - it changed somewhat in its passage East to China and Japan, for example, even though it retained some core elements that stayed the same, like acceptance of the Four Noble Truths.)

I don't fully understand you. However, your thoughts on ''interpretation'' make sense but doesn't really refute the LNC. If A and B both interpret ''dead'' identically then the statement ''the cat is both dead and not dead'' is a contradiction. — TheMadFool

I don't think you can refute the LNC, because it's not a "law," it's not a thing for refuting; it's a reflection of our commitment to speak consistently (e.g. to interpret "dead" identically for A and B). What would be the sense in refuting our own commitment? How do you refute a commitment? It doesn't make sense.

Can you explain what Wittgenstein means by ''language game''? — TheMadFool

It's an analogy between language and games, which usually have rules. He's saying that in many cases (not all, but most) we use words in a way that's analogous to the way we play games, which involve patterned interactions with the world, and sometimes the use of objects in patterned ways. Chess, for example, has rules about how to move the pieces, and moving the pieces in a different way simply isn't playing Chess. Similarly, with language, we have rules about "moving words around," and shuffling the words around in a different way makes us unintelligible. (Note that it's possible to invent a new game by moving the pieces differently; similarly it's possible for language to branch out by using words differently. Note also that it's not just words we shuffle around - some language-games involve physical interactions with the world in patterned ways as well, alongside the word use, even if only implicitly.)

So usually, the meaning of a word is its use, or its place in the language game (which is defined more or less by the "grammar", the pattern of use, the rules and criteria of proper usage). Now reference (or interpretation, as discussed above) is one kind of use. We do use language in the "game" of referring to things - a lot. But (Wittgenstein thinks) a lot of philosophical trouble and misunderstanding has been caused by philosophers trying to make all language seem like it's fundamentally about referring to things (which is what Wittgenstein did in the Tractatus). But it's more accurate, and gives a bigger, better picture, to see reference as a (large) sub-game in the welter of language games, for which the more general understanding is meaning-as-use.

(This is why Wittgenstein didn't actually repudiate the Tractatus, but thought of it as a less comprehensive explanation of logic and philosophy than he'd originally believed it was - it's more like a study in a particular narrow area. It's like an extended, elaborate version of the ultra-simple "moving blocks around on command" language-games he used in the Philosophical Investigations. But this is also why Wittgenstein didn't entirely repudiate philosophical theory either; it's just that he thought that whereas philosophers previously had believed they were making discoveries about a deep, hidden structure to language, what they were actually doing was creating artificial, simplified language games that give insight into use, just as he does with the simple language game examples in the PI.)

I'm interested in what you're trying to say and your language is getting in the way of that. Perhaps you obfuscate by design? — praxis

Perhaps you're just deliberately being a dick? The possibilities are endless. That's why civilized discourse normally proceeds under the assumption of charity of interpretation.

No one can currently disprove the existence of an intelligent designer or whatever. — praxis

That wouldn't be necessary to disprove teleology, it's independent of the idea of an intelligent designer. Aristotelian teleology is naturalistic - or to put it another way, you don't have to subscribe to intelligent design in order to understand examples of what must necessarily be construed as "as if" teleology on the basis of a materialistic/mechanistic understanding of nature, as examples of real teleology.

As far as I can tell we haven't had any movement in this discussion, which to my mind centers around your claim that once religious belief erodes, due to scientific discoveries that contradict religious doctrine, like evolution, for example, there's no possible over-arching narrative that makes any sense of a material universe.

My position is that the ONLY difference is that we are free, or freer, in modernity to find/construct our own narratives because there is no longer a reliance on an external authority. And to be clear, any such narratives don't need to be based on a "material universe." — praxis

What I'm saying is that if you are thoroughly consistent in following a mechanistic/materialistic understanding of the world, then nihilism is the logically necessary conclusion. There's no other option. That doesn't mean a specifically religious stance is the only counter, it just means that as the religious basis for viewing the world fades, and so long as nothing else (e.g. no other religious type, or no alternative naturalistic understanding of the world) replaces it, then we're going to drift into nihilism.

And then, as I said, I don't think you can "freely construct" any old alternative over-arching narrative and have it take hold. Of course you can "freely construct" any old story about the universe, but the fact that you've constructed it doesn't make it true. People want to believe an over-arching story that they think is true - in fact, people thinking the materialistic/mechanistic view of the universe is true is precisely what's driving the drift to nihilism.

I agree with you on the positive aspect of not relying on external authority, if by that you mean unquestioning reliance on authority. That's definitely a gain, but it's not really relevant to the main point. Certainly people in the past believed authority - but again, they believed authority because they trusted the authority was telling them the truth. (It was just a form of reliance on expertise.) Now that science is the authority that's replaced religion, science is telling us the world is intrinsically meaningless. But perhaps the new authority is just as mistaken as the old.

Cities often wreck themselves by trying "urban renewal" where high-value buildings replace low value buildings (the kind that house restaurants, art galleries, porn shops, bars--all the stuff that leads to an interesting street. — Bitter Crank

Yeah I agree with that. But I stand by my prediction, although neither of us will probably be alive to see whether it comes true or not! :)

Does this "middle-world" you speak of violate the LNC? — TheMadFool

It would depend on what is meant by "contradiction." You can make up any number of systems of rule-governed symbol-shuffling in which something called "contradiction" is possible. But what we normally call "contradiction" in the middle-world isn't possible, because things have natures, i.e. they behave consistently within a narrow range of "logical possibilities" (horrible phrase, but what the hey, it's what people use).

A struck match doesn't turn into a gerbil or sprout wings and sing the Hallelujah Chorus, it has a delimited range of possible behaviours under given circumstances. We define "match" as just that sort of thing that has that limited range of behaviours, i.e. we will refuse to call "match" a thing that doesn't behave in that sort of way. If we struck a match and it did turn into a gerbil, or grace us with a rendition of Händel's magnificent oeuvre, we'd no longer consistently call it a match, but given it another name/concept. But that just means it wasn't a match after all, like we thought it was, but this other new, peculiar thing that looks like a match at first, but behaves differently from the things we normally call "matches."

However we could if we wished continue to call it a "match" and expand our definition of "match" to include things that behave like normal matches (i.e. they look like little sticks with black blobs on the end that burst into flame when struck) and things that don't behave like normal matches (i.e. things that look like sticks with black blobs on the end but they turn into gerbils when struck, take a dump in your hand and scamper off). It's really a matter of convenience which path we choose. All that would have happened would be that the world turned out to be a lot weirder than we thought it was, and we'd have to revise huge chunks of what we thought was settled knowledge. :)

(We could go even further and call anything in the universe, or even the entire universe a "match" if we wanted to, but then our system of categorization would be unwieldy and impossible to retain in the mind, because we'd have to constantly qualify the type of match we're talking about. But the job the symbols are doing would be the same - simply tracking changes in experience and nature (and in fact, we'd just cancel the symbol "match" out and use the sub-categories). It's just easier to think of the "ultimate match" as "God/the Absolute/Everything/Existence", etc., and subdivide everything with whatever mixture of symbols and sub-categories and cleanly separate symbols we find convenient.)

Now, in this context, a contradiction would be like using "match" (ordinary) and "match" (expanded ordinary+gerbil) in the same context; but it's not really a law of any sort that we'd be breaking if we did that, and we wouldn't be saying anything informative about the world (the world is just moseying along doing whatever the hell it does, and we can consistently use concise or clumsy symbol systems to get a handle on it - or not).

Another way of putting the above: it's related to what they call "interpretation" in maths. When we say "1+1=2" whether that's true or false depends on what "+" means, what "=" means and what the natures of the objects we're talking about are. Does "+" mean roughly "laying contiguously side-by-side, or side-by-side near each other up to a range of, say, a few inches apart"? Normally we think of the units as smallish solid objects. But what if we're talking about one blob of mercury dropped next to another blob of mercury in a bowl? On opposite sides of a ceramic trench across America?

Similarly, paradoxes and similar mental Chinese finger puzzles depend on semantics ("interpretation"), on the natures of the things we're talking about - you can keep the contradiction or remove it, at will. But the things still behave as they do. In the middle-world, in the real world: either all Cretans are liars or at least one Cretan isn't a liar, either Epimenides is a Cretan or he isn't, either he's lying or he isn't. The symbols alone don't, or rather the sheer syntax of the apparently paradoxical statement laid out before you doesn't, say anything on its own, and can be made to say whatever you want depending on interpretation; the content of the paradox, and whether there's a contradiction or not, depends on the semantics. Without the interpretation, without the semantics - or in Wittgenstein's terms, without a "grammar" or "language game" - there's simply no intrinsic there there, no fact of the matter, no puzzle and therefore no resolution to a puzzle to be found or discovered, all we're dealing with is patterned scribbles on a page, patterned noises from a mouth.