Experimental algorithms (i.e. toolkits).
3h — 180 Proof

Tools get their meaning from how they are used , and that requires that they belong to a larger framework of relevance, otherwise known as a belief system.

What kind of situation would be an example of irrationality and social delusion — Joshs

Jonestown comes to mind.

what about it does not make use of social agreement? — Joshs

I didn't express my thoughts well, there was certainly social agreement in Jonestown.

The "framework" (or paradigm) is not what you asked about. Change the goalposts all you like, but the answer remains: it is incorrect to describe scientific theories as "belief systems" just as it is incorrect to describe toolkits (or machine systems) as "belief systems".

Etymology: dyeu- Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to shine."

Make washing the dishes shine, babe! :halo: — praxis

Haha...very well, I surrender.

Change the goalposts all you like, but the answer remains: it is incorrect to describe scientific theories as "belief systems" just as it is incorrect to describe toolkits (or machine systems) as "belief systems". — 180 Proof

It may be correct or incorrect. I won’t know until I get a clear sense of what the distinction is for you between ‘theory’ and ‘belief system’. An algorithm is just syntax. mathematics is syntax. Theory is semantics. That’s why Kuhn used theory and paradigm interchangeably.

The origins of Western religion is interesting and I am sure that Greece was central, but it is probably extremely complex. — Jack Cummins

It is of course more complex than we can ever describe in a scientifically adequate way. One can only offer an abstract, formal approximation of what happened in the development of western religion from what happened in the days of old Greece. But one will always be unfaithful to the actual historical happenings, which are hard to verify these days. Who knows exactly what happened in the ancient world, in intercultural development, or in exchanging ideas in their chaotic world of existence. One hasn't even the knowledge of how one elementary particle that was floating around around the gods of the Olympos. I think the general outline is pretty simple though. The Olympic gods were replaced by the unit-base vector God of Xenophsnes and equally minded. It was assigned objective existence in an extramundane world. The God had superhuman features. It was all-powerfull, all-knowing, omnipresent, and at the same time invisible and never knowable himself. This monster God was singular nevertheless. Omnipresent he might be (personally, I think this omnipipresence was the desire for the ones who invented him), he will remain invisible to all of us. There was something about the Greek gods that Xenophanes didn't like. I don't know what, but it's a fact they disappeared. Maybe it was because of that heavenly domain of Plato, which showed exactly the same features as the divine world of his fellow country man (Xenophanes). The combination of the two forms a powerful combination of the desire to know, which again can never be fully reached, according to both Greek gentlemen.The ways by which this image got a hold on the western scientifically driven world is complex. Via the dark ages it got a hold again in the Enlightenment, freeing people from the tyranny excessive by the church. It was a welcome aid in freeing people from being burned at stakes. The same attitude that made religion kill (this was the attitude of Xenophanes) was taken over by the new orthodoxy (freeing and enlightening as it might have been) of an endlessly explorarable physical world, without gaining ever exact knowledge of it (Popper!), took over though. The world was "discovered", the idea exported, and other cultures exterminated or put in reservetories. The same attitude again. "There is only one true reality and it applies to all!". Now how fundamental can you get? Every culture says it's view has its fundamental in reality. Of course. How else can it be. Proclaiming it to be the standard for everyone is a different matter and reduces humanity.

If a belief system is ‘delusional’ , an existential ‘falsehood’, that implies a correct truth, and the scientistic way of thinking puts scientific method in the privileged role among all the cultural disciplines of arbiter of truth as ‘correctness’. Belief systems, including scientific theories , arent true or false in realism to some fixed standard, they’re useful in relaton to our aims. — Joshs

Yes, so true, and this is why I would never slip into the "antitheist" category of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennet, and others. I do not take the position that anything which has been demonstrated by science disproves the existence of deity in the least. Even so, from a rational, logically positivist perspective, the assertion that "there exists an omni-present/scient/potent God which has caused all things to be, and which may or may not assume a role in human affairs" must not be afforded any semblance of belief in the absence of evidence, either perceptible or verifiably historical, showing this to be true. To do so would seem to expose the individual to various types of danger, primarily psychological, but also financial and perhaps resultantly physical.

I’m not at all religious, btw, but still feel moved in the midst of religious rituals. — praxis

That's cause it triggers our a priori transcedental need. And the feeling coming from that is indeed overwhelming. Happens to me also.

Philosophy replaces religion inasmuch as you decide it does. If there is a philosophy which has a spiritual or mystical aspect which is appealing, then you could use than instead of religion. — Manuel

Exactly.

"Metaphysical need?" "Existential void?" These are problems to be addressed and endured (like being embodied), not solved or "cure". There simply is no viable escape from existence. — 180 Proof

What you miss to understand is that as to "endure" all these a priori questions we have and "embody" them, as you say, we humans NEED a personal cosmotheory!
Surely not the right one, surely not with all answers included, surely limited, surely "naive". BUT our own one!

Our personal one that will help us endure and embody all these questions we have inside us and follow us till we die!To "use" it as to pacify ourselves at the moments when this Existential Void becomes like a volcano. And we all face that moments in our lives.
We can't escape existence! Exactly as you wrote but we have to learn to handle it!

This personal cosmotheory is in every single one of us. And it's different, unique. Even among religious persons themselves! And much more in atheists!

So people use philosophy and religion to draw that theory! And that's exactly the common ground of both.
Philosophy though has the advantage of evolving following science and that is what makes it better way for getting us closer to the truth.

I’m not at all religious, btw, but still feel moved in the midst of religious rituals.
— praxis

That's cause it triggers our a priori transcendental need. And the feeling coming from that is indeed overwhelming. Happens to me also. — dimosthenis9

:lol: No, lots of things move me, for different reasons and in different ways. You just moved me to laugh internally. If people actually have an "a priori transcendental need" they are generally astonishlingly piss-poor at satisfying it, and that truly is a shame.

You just moved me to laugh internally. If people actually have an "a priori transcendental need" they are generally astonishlingly piss-poor at satisfying it, and that truly is a shame. — praxis

Pfff

Kuhn used theory and paradigm interchangeably. — Joshs

:brow:

In other words, a narrative form of Prozac: just making up self-flattering shit to stupify ourselves into a lifelong stupor. Yeah, that's religious worship, not philosophical practice. :roll:

Kuhn? Really? :roll:

Kuhn used theory and paradigm interchangeably. — Joshs

I just made that up. Don’t tell 180 proof. But I’m
reading through Structure of Scientific Revolutions and found this:

‘a paradigm is used to describe a set of concepts within a scientific discipline at any one time.’

“To be accepted as a paradigm, a theory
must seem better than its competitors…”

“ Acquisition of a paradigm and of the more esoteric type of research it per­mits is a sign of maturity in the development of any given scien­tific field.”

Also found this secondary source.

Paradigms and theories go hand in hand to explain concepts in science and assist academics in their work to define different phenomenon. The theory explains the phenomenon based on certain criteria while the paradigm provides the background or the frame that allows a theory to be tested and measured. A paradigm can have a number of theories within its framework and the paradigm acts as a reference point for the theory

So apparently a paradigm is kind of a metatheory.

I just made that up. — Joshs

Please stop doing that. :grin:

Kuhn? Really? :roll: — 180 Proof

He’s my bud

we humans NEED a personal cosmotheory!
Surely not the right one, surely not with all answers included, surely limited, surely "naive". BUT our own one!

Our personal one that will help us endure and embody all these questions we have inside us and follow us till we die!To "use" it as to pacify ourselves at the moments when this Existential Void becomes like a volcano. — dimosthenis9

:up:

When things are going great, maybe we don't need a grand narrative. But yeah it's nice to have one when the mud gets deep and the wind gets cold. I speculate tho that the 'existential void' you mention is itself a pacifier. An indifferent nature that might destroy you 'accidentally' and at least plays by rules is preferable to a deity who has constructed your life as a confusing torture chamber for His (or Her or Its of Their) amusement. The void is even beautiful in its way, a vast open space. The West is the breast. The wets is the beast. Who raw. I'm in the dark here kid.

The void is even beautiful in its way, a vast open space — hanaH

Scary but also beautiful indeed.

The question is whether the idea of the 'void ' leads to meaningless or potential sources of finding meaning in life. What is the void, is it an absence of belief, or something else?

The great void is like God - incomprehensible, transcendental, beyond our grasp - and surprise, surprise, God's the last word so far as meaning is our main concern.

What is the void, is it an absence of belief, or something else? — Jack Cummins

For me it is the absence of answers to our existential questions. Most probably death is the ultimate root of it.The inevitable end.

So some try to fill that void with belief (religion), others just try to learn how not to be intimated looking down the abyssus (i find philosophy as a great help for that mission).

This will be long winded. But it's an interesting topic.

What's labeled religion, philosophy, and science, all have common features. They're usually separated, sometimes strictly, but they share very basic human questions.

From a historical point of view, these questions have predated any "religions" we think of today, ancient/modern philosophy and certainly modern science.

Human beings have been around for roughly 200 thousand years. Around this time they developed the capacity for thought and for language. This is what has traditionally been said to separate them from other primates, and from animals in general -- "reason" and "speech" (ratio, logos).

Thinking, language, speech, words -- all this predates writing, and so if we take history to mean written history, it is all "prehistoric."

I think this is all obvious, but sets the stage for a possible answer to your questions.

Taking the 200,000 number as an exact date for behaviorally modern humans' emergence (for the sake of simplicity), and then reminding ourselves that writing wasn't invented until roughly 5,000 years ago (3,200 BC), it leads to a question: what was happening during those 195 thousand years of our existence? What were we thinking?

It's all surmise. But we know these people buried their dead, created cave art, and had complex tools. I would assume they told stories, and shared myths and legends -- perhaps especially about ancestors. They likely all had "gods," but in the sense of animism. They had rites and rituals, danced, chanted, and sang. They had ideas about themselves and about their worlds. They asked questions and gave themselves the best answers they could conjure up -- about the plants and animals, the soil, the stars, the weather, sickness and birth and death.

This all predates anything we usually mean by "religion" or "philosophy." Yet for the majority of our time on earth, as a species, these were the phenomena that occupied our cognitive faculties -- when we weren't wandering, hunting and gathering (which is to say, pretty rarely).

Jump forward to the ancient world of Sumer, and read the Epic of Gilgamesh. Read some of the writings out of Egypt. All deal with death, life, birth. These are human concerns and human questions.

By the time we get to Greece, and the "love of wisdom," a new tradition is laid out. Same humans, similar questions, just formulated in a new way and in a new culture. From there we have the origin and foundations of Western thought.

That's the context I like to think of when trying to answer these questions. To summarize:
(1) We're human beings, and we sometimes think.
(2) Sometimes this thinking is concerned with universal questions.
(3) These questions are called philosophical.

(4) So philosophy is a kind of thinking -- a kind that asks universal questions.

What are these universal questions? What does philosophy ask? The same as many religions'.

In my view, one core question is "Why does anything exists at all?" (or, "What is existence/being?"), and both what we call "philosophy" and what we call "religion" asks (and answers) it, tacitly or explicitly. It's unavoidable.

When asked explicitly, many answers have been given and are well-known. In Plato, being was the Forms, ultimately the "Form of the Good" -- the permanent and eternal as opposed to mere seeming and becoming. In the Christian tradition, being is God. Modern science also has an answer: nature (translated from the Latin natura, from the Greek phusis -- which is also where we get "physics", considered the fundamental science).

But this is all a boring and pointless talk about history, etymology, abstraction, and soaring speculation, which should be as relevant to us and our personal, everyday concerns as a mathematical theorem is -- that is, if it weren't for the following fact: along with answers to the question "What is existence/what is being?" there comes an answer to the question "What is a human being?"

"What is a human being?" What can be more relevant to us? It's often the basis for what's considered a "good" life (i.e., the question "What should I do with my life?"), and so ethics and morality; for proposals about how to organize society -- and so the basis for politics; and for claims about human nature -- and so the basis for humanity's goals and about the future of the species ("Where are we going?").

Answers to these questions have come from both philosophy and religion. Human beings are zoon echon logon, creatures of God, the res cogitans, homo sapien sapien, etc. We're the rational animal, the primate with language, souls with God-given reason, a mind/body, and so on.

How you characterize human beings has considerable impacts on what they do, individually and collectively. These characterizations are based on answers to basic human questions, whether philosophical or religious.

So yes, from a certain point of view they're operating in the same dimension -- and so neither can truly "replace" the other.

Yes, I probably wanted answers to the existential questions and was extremely disappointed when they could not be found. Instead, there may be those who have ideas which are more important than others, as the 'experts' of philosophy, although this is open to questions and interpretations. I guess that the 'void' which I struggle with is that of feeling some kind of 'let down' by a lack in answers and the 'cruelty' of life, as involving some kind of existential despair, even though I am aware that human beings create their own meanings in life.

Your answer offers a good summary of the way in which religious and philosophical approaches have unifying but slightly different angles 'as operating in the same dimension'. They both look at the issues of what is a human being and human nature, morality and aspects that the human condition. It is likely that for some individuals there is an overlap, although it is possible to formulate philosophy without religion coming into the picture at all.

The idea which you refer to of there being one true reality is an approach which many, especially thinkers of religious viewpoints adhere to. I find such an approach extremely restrictive because there are so many different ideas of 'reality' and this can lead to a plurality in understanding. For any philosophical or religious perspective to be seen as the one above all others is questionable, although it is likely that many people seek to find the most accurate one, although many may keep to the one which they have been brought up with even in a multicultural society.

The idea which you refer to of there being one true reality is an approach which many, especially thinkers of religious viewpoints adhere to. — Jack Cummins

And don't forget the admirers of science. Science claims to possess the knowledge of that same kind of reality, though it tries to give an image of unity and uniqueness. That idea is a direct descendent out of ancient Greek, though I have the impression that everybody likes his or her reality to be objective. It would be inhuman and detached from reality if you don't. Communication would even be impossible. A psychotic state of mind would surface. The other side of the psychotic spectrum, call it psychopathic or fundamental, is to claim your reality has to hold for everyone (as is currently the case in the world, where science rules suppreme just as fundamentally as the Taliban in Afghanistan, where science, by the way, still has a firm grip too).

Go to the heart of any religion and you will find philosophy. What we have come to know as religion is simply an exoteric representation of a philosophy, because the nature of philosophy is such that it cannot necessarily understood by everyone. The issue is that religion is thereby also vulnerable to being tainted by the less luminous, being used as a tool of power, etc. Perhaps this is the reason that spiritual teachings have a tendency to split into an eso- and exoteric part.

I've noticed this book online, I don't know if I will read it but it may be of interest to some here:
Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza: Reason, Religion, and Autonomy Carlos Fraenkel

Many pagan, Jewish, Christian and Muslim philosophers from Antiquity to the Enlightenment made no meaningful distinction between philosophy and religion. Instead they advocated a philosophical religion, arguing that God is Reason and that the historical forms of a religious tradition serve as philosophy's handmaid to promote the life of reason among non-philosophers. Carlos Fraenkel provides the first account of this concept and traces its history back to Plato. He shows how Jews and Christians appropriated it in Antiquity, follows it through the Middle Ages in both Islamic and Jewish forms and argues that it underlies Spinoza's interpretation of Christianity. The main challenge to a philosophical religion comes from the modern view that all human beings are equally able to order their lives rationally and hence need no guidance from religion. Fraenkel's wide-ranging book will appeal to anyone interested in how philosophy has interacted with Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious traditions.