YOU do not get to tell me what I should or should not do in my responses, Wheatley. — Frank Apisa

It was only advice.

You made an assertion in a philosophical forum thread. YOU do have an obligation to prove it. — Frank Apisa

That’s not true because I didn’t agree to any of this. You asked me a question and I answered it.

Let’s get back to the beginning.

Do you "believe" there is no God...or no gods? — Frank Apisa

I don’t know what to believe.

What do you think of his response that he KNOWS there are no deities? — Frank Apisa

Two possibilities: 1) He knows. And this is the entrance to a rabbit-hole. I, for example, would point out that by most definitions of "deity," he/they/it cannot in principle be known, nor any aspect of them. And where there is not the possibility of knowledge of a something, it's fair to say that something cannot in any ordinary sense exist, or "be." It may have a qualified "existence," but existence in that case would have to be defined.

2) Within the limitations of possible knowledge he may know. This allows for a being outside of all possible knowledge, but what sort of being would that be?

So it seems to devolve to two outcomes: 1) an agreement that a definition of terms is necessary, and the effort to define them, Or 2) Nyah-nyah yer momma wears combat boots.

And oddly enough, while one is what most folks want, two is what usually happens.

Wheatley
1.1k
YOU do not get to tell me what I should or should not do in my responses, Wheatley.
— Frank Apisa
It was only advice. — Wheatley

"Don’t get Wood involved..."...did not sound like advice. It sounded like an order. But I am willing to accept you meant it as advice.

Which I reject.

Wheatley
1.1k
You made an assertion in a philosophical forum thread. YOU do have an obligation to prove it.
— Frank Apisa
That’s not true because I didn’t agree to any of this. You asked me a question and I answered it. — Wheatley

YOU MADE AN ASSERTION. The assertion was that you KNOW there are no deities.

YOU decided to answer the question...and you decided to answer it the way you did.

If you can prove the assertion...do so. If you cannot (and considering this is a philosophical forum) you should withdraw it. That was not an order, it was a suggestion. It would be the honorable, ethical thing to do.

Wheatley
1.1k
Let’s get back to the beginning.

Do you "believe" there is no God...or no gods?
— Frank Apisa
I don’t know what to believe. — Wheatley

Then why say you KNOW there are no deities?

Do as you will.

tim wood
4.6k
What do you think of his response that he KNOWS there are no deities?
— Frank Apisa

Two possibilities: 1) He knows. And this is the entrance to a rabbit-hole. I, for example, would point out that by most definitions of "deity," he/they/it cannot in principle be known, nor any aspect of them. And where there is not the possibility of knowledge of a something, it's fair to say that something cannot in any ordinary sense exist, or "be." It may have a qualified "existence," but existence in that case would have to be defined.

2) Within the limitations of possible knowledge he may know. This allows for a being outside of all possible knowledge, but what sort of being would that be?

So it seems to devolve to two outcomes: 1) an agreement that a definition of terms is necessary, and the effort to define them, Or 2) Nyah-nyah yer momma wears combat boots.

And oddly enough, while one is what most folks want, two is what usually happens. — tim wood

Thank you, Tim.

YOU MADE AN ASSERTION. The assertion was that you KNOW there are no deities. — Frank Apisa

I lied.

Then why say you KNOW there are no deities? — Frank Apisa

Because I'm insane. I don't know.

Nothing in my short time of this forum has changed my views, but my views have changed drastically over the course of my life, although they were more or leas settled by my late 30s, about a decade ago.

I was raised in a religious family, and so in my early childhood held unexamined and innocuous-seeming religious views. I never had a reactionary moment in my life where I strongly rebelled against those. Instead, I slowly grew out of them as I aged and learned more about the world. I was in fact surprised in my adolescence to realize that adults sincerely held those views, and didn't merely teach them as metaphorical stories for children.

The new views that I grew into amid my adolescence were themselves, in retrospect, mere secularizations of views structurally similar to the religious ones I had grown out of: faith placed in learned academics to be the authorities on knowledge and reality, and in responsible politicians to be the authorities on justice and morality; merely replacing faith in some divine authority, which might well not even exist, with faith in the correct human authorities, whoever they should turn out to be. As I approached adulthood, however, my views grew increasingly skeptical.

Focusing on how to determine who the correct human leaders were to guide us to knowledge and justice, the right emphasis increasingly seemed to be on methodology, not authority. The correct academics to trust to lead us to knowledge were the ones dedicated to the correct scientific method; and the correct politicians to trust to lead us to justice were the ones dedicated to the correct system of rights and duties. And with such methodologies identified, it seemed not to matter who employed them, as anyone using them would have as much claim to authority as anyone else using them, effectively undermining all claims to special authority on either knowledge or justice.

But that in turn raised the question of how to identify the correct methods that would lead us all to knowledge and justice, if only we could get people to follow them; and whether there actually were or even could be such methods at all. I had definite opinions on what the correct methods were, but skeptical infinite regressions that I learned more about as I studied philosophy continued to undermine the very possibility of ever grounding any opinion on anything, leading me eventually far away from my earliest faith in divine authority, far from any trust in human authority or even in individual human ability to pursue knowledge or justice ourselves, into a nigh-nihilistic depression where it seemed any claim about anything must be denounced as just as equally baseless as any other.

That philosophical depression coincided with an actual period of depression about my own life circumstances, around the same time I finished my philosophy degree. The way I eventually found my way out of that real life depression turned out to also be the key to salvaging my philosophical views from abject nihilism, eventually building my way back up to views somewhere around the middle of that wide range I had crossed between early childhood and the end of my philosophical education.

This entire thread has made me depressed. So many people citing losing religion as a profound defining moment.

Nonetheless, Darwin has still probably had the most profound effect on me. I never had the idea of a designer behind it all, but it did make me see the living world as more interconnected, and its present as a result of historical processes. A living thing isn't just a living thing after that: it's a story!

(I also believe that understanding natural selection played a crucial part in my academic career, where algorithms like natural selection rear their pretty heads often. This in turn solidified in my mind the inevitability of natural selection.)

I got into memetics about twenty years ago, which generalises natural selection to broader kinds of information replicators, and I think that had a massive impact on how I see things, largely due to the sheer breadth of its applicability. Structuralism overlaps with this and, together with Darwinism specifically, mostly comprises my philosophy of morality and determined my holistic stance. Post-structuralism put my inherent scepticism on stronger philosophical ground. These three have probably done more to my appraisal of the limits of the rational project as anything.

I found phenomenology via existentialism. I think existentialism is one of those briefly profound things that's difficult to stay excited about (it's not wrong, but there's no an obvious way to take it), but phenomenology put the subjective/objective divide on proper footing. My instinct when I see an abstract philosophical problem is to translate it to experienced phenomena.

t

If you can prove the assertion...do so. If you cannot (and considering this is a philosophical forum) you should withdraw it. That was not an order, it was a suggestion. It would be the honorable, ethical thing to do. — Frank Apisa

You have no moral high ground to be preaching ethics, nor do you have the respect to lecture me about honor. I see you even created a whole thread just to bash people who call themselves "atheists." Let's not have any pretense here; you never really wanted a better understanding of my philosophical position. Your sole intention was to put me down with your condescending posts and score points for yourself. If your goal is to engage in civilized debate, I suggest you work on your manners first. For starters, I wouldn't attack someone's personal beliefs in a thread that was designed by @Risk to be peaceful! I was having an amicable conversation with @tim wood before you decided to butt in! *talk about honor*

I asked you a reasonable question...and got an answer I thought to be questionable. So I asked about it.

In response you have indicated that you lied...and/or that you are insane.

Now, you are giving me a lecture on ethics and honor...in a post that shows neither on your part.

I have no idea of what your problem is, but I suggest we simply refrain from discussing this further.

Okay?

I would say I am very similar in many regards to what you describe, particularly the grounding in phenomenology helping to justify why I seek what I seek.

Opposingly I don't find science profound at all. Science by its very nature is methodic and determinate. It's the unknown aspects of the human mind, the potential substrait indepdence of it, that i find truly profound. Kant I think talks about similar ideas, science is a tool of the human mind, it is entirely possible that science will be an inadequate tool to describe the human mind with.

key to salvaging my philosophical views from abject nihilism, — Pfhorrest

I would be really interested in understanding how, coming out of a nihilistic viewpoint, you didn't land on post modernist thinking? Nihilism to me is where one lands when they realise nothing can be concretely justified and that everything requires some level of belief. Post Modernism takes that and accepts it. Recognising it cannot be an end point in itself, but that it is most likely just that.

I have no idea of what your problem is, but I suggest we simply refrain from discussing this further.

Okay? — Frank Apisa

I'm still feeling a bit like this: :rage: But your suggestion is probably the best thing to do. Peace! :cheer:

I would be really interested in understanding how, coming out of a nihilistic viewpoint, you didn't land on post modernist thinking? Nihilism to me is where one lands when they realise nothing can be concretely justified and that everything requires some level of belief. Post Modernism takes that and accepts it. Recognising it cannot be an end point in itself, but that it is most likely just that. — Risk

The short version is that I realized that if nihilism were true we couldn’t know it to be true, any more than we could know its negation to be true. So all we could do is assume one way or the other.

And if you assume nihilism rather than its negation, then if there is such a thing as the right opinion after all, you will never find it, because you never even attempt to answer what it might be, and you will remain wrong forever.

But likewise if you accept fideism (appeals to faith) rather than its negation, then if your opinions should happen to be the wrong ones, you will never find out, because you never question them, and you will remain wrong forever.

There might not be such a thing as a correct opinion, and if there is, we might not be able to find it. But if we're starting from such a place of complete ignorance that we're not even sure about that — where we don't know what there is to know, or how to know it, or if we can know it at all, or if there is even anything at all to be known — and we want to figure out what the correct opinions are in case such a thing should turn out to be possible, then the safest bet, pragmatically speaking, is to proceed under the assumption that there are such things, and that we can find them, and then try. Maybe ultimately in vain, but that's better than failing just because we never tried in the first place.

And trying means tacitly assuming:

That there is such a thing as a correct opinion, in a sense beyond mere subjective agreement. (A position I call "objectivism", and its negation "nihilism".)

That there is always a question as to which opinion, and whether or to what extent any opinion, is correct. (A position I call "criticism", and its negation "fideism".)

Those together require also assuming:

That the initial state of inquiry is one of several opinions competing as equal candidates, none either winning or losing out by default, but each remaining a live possibility until it is shown to be worse than the others. (A position I call "liberalism", and its negation "cynicism".)

That such a contest of opinion is settled by comparing and measuring the candidates against a common scale, namely that of the experiential phenomena accessible in common by everyone, and opinions that cannot be thus tested are thereby disqualified. (A position I call "phenomenalism", and its negation "transcendentalism").

All of the philosophical positions I am against seem to boil down to failing one of those principles or another, so all of my philosophical positions are conversely entailed by adhering to those principles, and consequently just by a commitment to honestly trying to do philosophy in the first place.

Opposingly I don't find science profound at all. Science by its very nature is methodic and determinate. — Risk

You're talking about the process of doing science. It is a tool, like a pick, but like a pick can unearth gold.

A blend between Pascals wager but for knowledge and Newtons Flaming laser sword (I would apologise about the classification but to classify seems to fit with your structure). Explains why PM doesn't float your boat. Appreciate you explaining.

but like a pick can unearth gold — Kenosha Kid

Gold has never seemed profound to me either!

Gold has never seemed profound to me either! — Risk

Different strokes for different folks, of course. I dare say that anyone who fails to see the profundity of natural selection probably has a qualitatively different idea of what profundity means.

The realization that all knowledge is inescapably human.

A blend between Pascals wager but for knowledge and Newtons Flaming laser sword (I would apologise about the classification but to classify seems to fit with your structure). Explains why PM doesn't float your boat. Appreciate you explaining. — Risk

Any time. :-) And classification is fine by me, you're right it fits my structure well.

I actually explicitly draw an analogy between my take and Pascal's Wager. The important key difference between Pascal's Wager and mine is that Pascal urges us to "bet" on one specific possibility, when there are many different possibilities with similar odds — different religions to choose from, different supposed Gods to worship and ways to worship them — leaving one forced to choose blindly which of those many options to bet on, and necessarily taking the worse option on all the other bets. Whereas I am only urging one to "bet" at all, to try something, anything, many different things, and at least see if any of them pan out, rather than just trying nothing and guaranteeing failure. To analogize the respective "wagers" to literal wagers on a horse race: Pascal is urging us to bet on a specific horse winning, rather than losing, while I am only urging us to bet on there being a bet at all, rather than not. If there is no bet, then we cannot lose the non-existent bet by betting in that non-existent bet that there will be a bet, even though we still might not win either, if there is indeed no bet to win.

But I don't think I quite fit the bill for Newton's Flaming Laser Sword, because while I think the correct way to answer descriptive questions about the world is narrowed down to by said Sword, I acknowledge that there are other things to do besides describe the world. For a major point, we also need to prescribe things, and my principles listed earlier apply equally to prescription as they do to description, not using the exact same process, but a completely analogous one. And more to the point of the original coinage of the Sword, I acknowledge that we need to ask how to do things like that, which is what philosophy is all about.

I wrote an 80,000 word philosophy book, so I'm definitely not against doing philosophy in any way. About a third of that is basically about how and why to do physical sciences (ontology, epistemology, and their implications on philosophy of mind and academics), and that largely fits the bill for the Laser Sword. But another third is about the prescriptive analogues thereof (ethics in two parts, and their implications on freedom of will and politics). And the rest of more abstractly philosophical stuff (metaphilosophy, those general principles I just outlined, what philosophies go against those principles, philosophy of language, art, and math, and then more "meaning of life" type stuff at the end, drawing from all of the preceding).

Perhaps the next step is to separate these two completely. For the child, God just is the supernatural. For the adult he cannot be. Yet not natural either. In fact he cannot be, in any ordinary sense. The sense that leaves is best explored in Kant's thinking, who finds God in reason. — tim wood

"And consciousness, however small, is an illegitimate birth in
any philosophy that starts without it and yet professes to explain all facts by continuous evolution._______________________________________________________________________ If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some
shape must have been present at the very origins of things.

Are you sure about that?

Some ideas that stick with me from various places, all of them have changed how I've thought about stuff.

Statistics: data generating process, model uncertainty, Box's quote: "All models are wrong but some are useful", causal probabilistic models. interaction effects, population, model. indicator. generative model. network theory.

Mathematics+Logic: formal language, flow, trajectory. pushfoward and pullback. necessary and sufficient conditions. invariant. parameter.

Psychology+sociology: nomological network, construct, operationalisation, dimensional emotion models. self concept, two systems theory, framing effect (and other cognitive biases). active inference, Ramachandran's experiments.

Philosophy; self model, assemblage, population thinking, , thetic/pre-thetic intentionality distinction, ampliative inference, the distinction between a statement of fact and the role it plays in a discourse, embodied cognition, transduction, individuation. condition of possibility, extended mind thesis, semantic externalism. simulacra. the idea that a difference can look different (or not even exist) depending upon what side of it you're on, regional ontology.

Ecology+biology+systems theory: umwelt (Uexkull), developmental landscape, ring species, zonation (related to (de)territorialisation), feedback (and feed forward), good regulator principle, metastability. ecocline. preferential attachment.

Quotes:

Whitehead: "Every philosophy is tinged with some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of thinking"

Debord: "Everything that was once directly lived has receded into representation"

Marx: "What chiefly distinguishes a commodity from its owner is the fact, that it looks upon every other commodity as but the form of appearance of its own value. A born leveller and a cynic, it is always ready to exchange not only soul, but body, with any and every other commodity, be the same more repulsive than Maritornes herself."

Marx: "Since gold does not disclose what has been transformed into it, everything, commodity or not, is convertible into gold. Everything becomes saleable and buyable. The circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as a gold-crystal. Not even are the bones of saints, and still less are more delicate res sacrosanctae, extra commercium hominum able to withstand this alchemy. "

Ted Hughes (Crow on the Beach):

"He grasped he was on earth.
He knew he grasped
Something fleeting
Of the sea’s ogreish outcry and convulsion.
He knew he was the wrong listener unwanted
To understand or help –

His utmost gaping of his brain in his tiny skull
Was just enough to wonder, about the sea,

What could be hurting so much?"

what key ideas have you been exposed to that have completely changed your viewpoint on a belief you previously held? — Risk

None whatsoever, alas. And I so hoped to be convinced, somehow, that I alone exist, that there are no material things, that nobody should be born, that monads exist, that artists should be banned, that everything is composed of water, and so much else. Most of all, of course, I hoped to encounter The Nothing. But no. Sigh.

So many people citing losing religion as a profound defining moment. — Kenosha Kid

Don't be depressed. What those people lose is a failed understanding of religion, or if you will misunderstanding or non-understanding. Generally they invent a God in their own personal image - and that just plain does not work. It's a little like ending a relationship with an addict, having finally understood that what you thought or hoped it was, it never was and never could be. And in the case of an exploded personal faith, the addict is not another person, but rather a part of themselves. A time perhaps of pain, but also the possibility of growth. In any case a necessary step for that growth to happen.

Religion itself is perhaps best understood looking through the word "theology." Theology, as everyone thinks they know, simply means knowledge of God. A perfectly good definition, but one that happens to be both wrong and terribly misleading (except within the scope of (a) religion that first claims to have knowledge of God).

(What follows freely adapted from A Brief History of Thought, Luc Ferry, 2010, pp. 19-22.) Originally the word was I-see-the-divine, theoria. What was divine was the kosmos. And kosmos means not the "out-there," but rather and instead, order. Your ducks are in a row? They're kosmos. Running around quacking in a disorderly way? a-kosmos. For the Greek nature (not being made by God) was not altogether an orderly place; one's job, then, was to be able to discern the order, the kosmos, that in a sense lay behind the natural world, which nature, being itself disorderly, could not itself manifest.

It's not difficult to imagine the meaning mutating from discerning a quality of something, the order latent in nature, to a reification of that order and its personification as God, to a claim of knowledge, above the "I-see," about God, and the organization of that "knowledge" into organized religion - concealing at every step its roots.

Theology at the same time means first wisdom. That is, knowledge of the order in what I see in the I-see.

In sum, the roots of the religions most of us live within are about knowing who and what we are in terms of the world we see about us, and trying to make it and ourselves orderly within it.