When I say "things gravitate towards a preferable reality," I'm referring to the interpretation of "reality" that makes us feel most comfortable. Such preferences can change, and we can gravitate towards different comfortable realities depending on how our beliefs evolve. — Christoffer
The reality we find most comfortable is one in which we have clear and comfortable interpretations, regardless of their validity. Such bias often arises from the anxiety of the unknown. We tend to eagerly embrace a narrative of reality that offers us the most comfortable existence. — Christoffer
Point being, philosophy has still been about countering biases regardless of which time it was in, it's precisely why people like Thomas Aquinas are well known, due to his careful reasoning and keeping Greek philosophical traditions alive based on Augustines previous work. — Christoffer
Impossible. Can't be done. The term covers such a diverse range of cultural phenomena, that it has no single meaning. There are those who say that the word itself is an impediment. But one thing it's not, is a compendium of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles proposing a testable hypothesis. — Wayfarer
Are you familar with Plato's dialogues? Socrates, as you're well aware, was sentenced to death for atheism, but the Phaedo, the dialogue taking place in the hours leading up to his execution, is one of the main sources for the defense of the immortality of the soul. Is that a religious dialogue, or is it not, by your lights? — Wayfarer
Are you familiar with the early Buddhists texts and the account of the awakening of the Buddha? What 'wild assumptions' do you think are conveyed in those texts? For that matter, what issue are they addressing? — Wayfarer
I'll go with the approach articulated by scholar and historian of philosophy, Pierre Hadot. — Wayfarer
This cultivation required, specifically, that students learn to combat their passions and the illusory evaluative beliefs instilled by their passions, habits, and upbringing. .... — IEP
The philosophical issue with modern science, in particular, is that it leaves no place for man as subject. Science relies on the fundamental techniques of objectification and quantification, and can only ever deal with man as object. It is embedded in a worldview that isn't aware that it's a worldview, but thinks of itself as being 'the way things are'. And there's no self-awareness in that. — Wayfarer
Positivism, again. — Wayfarer
Now the point is that gravitating towards what is comfortable is not necessarily gravitating toward what is good. But people can be trained through good moral education to gravitate toward what is good and this is equally a "bias". In other words, biases can be good too. The issue though is that such training requires effort, and it is a special type of effort. It's the effort of the teacher, which is made for the good of the student, the effort we make to train our children. This effort doesn't bring any good to the one who makes the effort, it brings good to the one who receives the training. — Metaphysician Undercover
I do not see how this is at all possible. Since our biases arise from our training, what we have been taught, they cannot at all be related to the unknown. Our biases are deeply seated in our knowledge, and anxiety toward the unknown is something completely different from bias. — Metaphysician Undercover
And you even describe bias as providing a form of comfort, so how could this possibly arise from anxiety of the unknown? If there is anxiety of the unknown there is no comfort, and vise versa. Bias is related to the known, and if it exists as a sort of comfort, then it is a type of self-confidence in one's own knowledge which excludes one from such anxiety toward the unknown. But just like I explained above, bias does not necessarily direct one toward comfort, biases may direct us toward making an effort, which is clearly not a comfort. If the person is trained to have great respect for the unknown, and this would involve a certain amount of anxiety toward the unknown, then this sort of bias could certainly be good, as motivation toward scientific endeavours and such things which would help us obtain knowledge. — Metaphysician Undercover
So I think you have this completely wrong. Philosophy is not about countering biases. Biases are inevitable as a fundamental aspect of human existence. Philosophy is concerned with distinguishing good biases from bad, such that the good can be cultured. And, it may be argued that other disciplines like science and religion deal with culturing biases. Whether such biases are bad or good is a judgement for philosophy to make. — Metaphysician Undercover
What I use the term "religion" for in this context is primarily in claims about reality, i.e in religious beliefs that have no supported claims either in facts or any logical framework. — Christoffer
Are you familiar with the early Buddhists texts and the account of the awakening of the Buddha? What 'wild assumptions' do you think are conveyed in those texts? For that matter, what issue are they addressing?
— Wayfarer
In light of what I wrote on Phaedo, you can deconstruct that in a similar manner. What are religious conclusions and what are conceptual explorations in pursuit of further perspectives? — Christoffer
So no, it's not positivism, as you can read above, it is acknowledging historical context, and through that, understand what is and what isn't philosophy. — Christoffer
You cannot form rational conclusions in religious arguments since they are bound to a specific pre-existing belief. Philosophy, even in ancient practices, aimed at mentally remove biases, even religious ones, in order to explore everything. This is why real philosophy survives time, while religious claims does not. — Christoffer
According to Hadot, one became an ancient Platonist, Aristotelian, or Stoic in a manner more comparable to the twenty-first century understanding of religious conversion, rather than the way an undergraduate or graduate student chooses to accept and promote, for example, the theoretical perspectives of Nietzsche, Badiou, Davidson, or Quine.... Hadot acknowledges his use of the term “spiritual exercises” may create anxieties, by associating philosophical practices more closely with religious devotion than typically done. Hadot’s use of the adjective “spiritual” (or sometimes “existential”) indeed aims to capture how these practices, like devotional practices in the religious traditions, are aimed at generating and reactivating a constant way of living and perceiving in prokopta, despite the distractions, temptations, and difficulties of life. For this reason, they call upon far more than “reason alone.”
Of course, but then again, what is good? How can you guarantee that the good that your moral education teaches people actually creates a good bias? What if your moral education isn't forming the good that you thought it would and people are now having a bias that is instead morally questionable? — Christoffer
Isn't it then better to have a neutral system of anti-bias so that good is always evaluated by not having a pre-existing belief bias? — Christoffer
Our biases is us favoring certain knowledge over other. We favor those things out of our emotions, our craving for comfort. The comfortable "truth" is the one we defend and form our world-view on. This means we evaluate new knowledge not by their own merits, but by how they relate to the knowledge we favor, that we are comfortable with.
Therefore, detachment from bias makes us better at evaluating the knowledge we have and the knowledge we are confronted with. — Christoffer
Bias is an error in perfect understanding. — Christoffer
You cannot conclude there to be good biases without first concluding an answer to what a good bias really is. And to form such an answer requires you to explore a moral realm without bias, since you would otherwise just apply your own bias of what you believe is good before concluding and applying it as a collective bias that others should follow. — Christoffer
Again, how can you distinguish good biases from bad if you don't form arguments in a mental space where biases do not exist? How can you deconstruct something if it is essential to the human existence? That would imply that all of philosophy is circular reasoning, one bias following the next ad infinitum. — Christoffer
And yes, it is part of the human condition to have biases, it's part of our human psyche, which is why acting against it, understand it and understanding its behavior has been the single greatest method for human advancement. We cannot question the status quo without acting against our biases, without detachment from them. — Christoffer
Where I draw the line, however, is when specifics are boiled down to something similar to factual claims. If someone speaks of "soul" and actually means some ethereal part of the divine that's trapped in our flesh, and uses this as a factual premise in their arguments, that is an unsupported claim. It's this type of claim that I refer to as biased. It is a bias towards the preconceived belief of the soul as something actual, something part of physical reality or supernatural reality that in itself hasn't been supported either. It's arguments that functions on these biases that philosophy consequently dismantled, if not in the time they were formed (due to historically inadequate methods of actually knowing how the world worked), then in historical times after when more factual understandings emerged. — Christoffer
:fire:Much of what Hadot is talking about refers to a meditation for the purpose of dismantling biases, towards habits, passions and... religion. This is the difference between religious arguments, religious beliefs, religious thinking and... philosophy. — Christoffer
:100:If you think about all philosophical topics and arguments, they're all trying to do one thing, remove bias and fallacies from an argument in order to arrive at a conclusion that can be agreed upon. — Christoffer
So do you consider Spinoza with his counter-biased more geometrico, for instance, a "positivist"? The author of the monumental (though suppressed for centuries) Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which had inaugurated modern biblical criticism and strongly suggested that all "revealed faiths" and "transcendent beliefs or ideals" are mere superstitions (i.e. dogmatic fairytales & fables) – by your lights, Wayf, is he just confusing metaphysics with "scientism"?The proposal you're suggesting is really like [ ... ] Spock, the Vulcan, possessed an enormous IQ and encylopedic knowledge, from a terrestrial point of view, but was often caught out by what we would now describe as his lack of EQ ... — Wayfarer
So do you consider Spinoza with his counter-biased more geometrico, for instance, a "positivist"? — 180 Proof
We don't embrace not knowing or non-knowledge as comfortable. — Christoffer
…..how can you distinguish good biases from bad if you don't form arguments in a mental space where biases do not exist? — Christoffer
How can you deconstruct something if it is essential to the human existence? That would imply that all of philosophy is circular reasoning, one bias following the next ad infinitum. — Christoffer
Do you mean not subject to empirical validation, according to the standards of science?
The problem I have is that you're casting your net too wide when you denegrate anything that can be described as 'religious' in those terms. If you said 'fundamentalist' or 'dogmatic', then I might agree. — Wayfarer
Suffice to say that the aims of the Buddhist teaching are conceived in terms of liberation from the ongoing cycle of death and rebirth (saṃsāra) and realisation of the state of Nirvāṇa. The account of the Buddha's awakening, based on the oral tradition, preserves the record of this as the Buddha is said to have realised it. The realisation of this state is something that subsequent generations of Buddhists are understood to have re-traced and re-capitulated (which is why, for example, the term 'Buddha' is not limited to one individual, but designates a class of being.)
Buddhist cultures have incorporated traditional cosmological models, which are clearly empirically unsupportable in light of current science. But then, the Dalai Lama has acknowledged that "If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.” However he's also said “What science finds to be nonexistent we should all accept as nonexistent, but what science merely does not find is a completely different matter.” — Wayfarer
There are elements (I won't call them ideas) within religious culture that are indispensable to the human condition even acknowledging that whatever about them has been shown to be false by scientific methods ought to be revised or discarded. — Wayfarer
At back of this debate are conceptions of reality. Does reality comprise physical objects determined by physical laws (that is, scientific materialism/physicalism)? Alternatives include various schools of idealism, dualism, panpsychism, and phenomenology - none of which are necessarily religious in nature. It is possible to argue the case without reference to religion, although rejection of physicalism might often suggest philosophical views that seem close to religion - too close for comfort, for a lot of people. — Wayfarer
Yes, this is exactly the issue, how are we to determine good biases from bad. You were talking as if all biases are bad, but now you appear to accept that some might be good. So, on what bases are we going to distinguish good biases from bad biases? — Metaphysician Undercover
No, like I explained, biases are a natural and essential part of being human. Therefore it is impossible to be bias-free, and any attempt at "not having a pre-existing belief bias" would be a completely unrealistic attempt due to that impossibility. Such an attempt would just turn into a matter of gravitating toward keeping the biases which one is comfortable with, and eliminating the others, because it is impossible to not have any bias. Then we end up still having biases and no principles for distinguishing which biases we ought to have and ought not have. — Metaphysician Undercover
Your proposed "detachment from bias" is unrealistic, impossible for a human being to achieve, analogous to a mind separated from its body. It is not the human condition, nor is it a possible condition for a human being, so forget about it, and move along to something more realistic. — Metaphysician Undercover
Do you accept as true, the proposition that "perfect understanding" is impossible for human beings to obtain. If so, then you ought to recognize that your goal of being bias-free is not a reasonable goal for a human being. This conclusion necessitates a completely different approach to biases. Instead of attempting to reject all biases as fundamentally unwanted, we need to accept that it is impossible to reject all biases, therefore we need some principles by which we can decide which to reject. Do you see that these "principles" cannot themselves be biases, but more of a versatile, or universal method for assessing biases. — Metaphysician Undercover
This is not true. My demonstration that there are good biases came from your assumption that there are bad biases. — Metaphysician Undercover
Furthermore, all that is required to further this process, is a definition of what constitutes "good". Once we have that, we can judge biases as to whether or not they are consistent with, or have that quality. "Good" would be defined in such a way as to be a principle, to serve as a method for judging biases, without itself being a bias. — Metaphysician Undercover
All that is required is to have a process for judging biases which is separate from the biases, a process being an activity, whereas a bias is a static belief. The process therefore cannot itself be a bias. This is why science is based in a method, "method" signifying a process. — Metaphysician Undercover
It appears like you have the idea here, when you talk about a "method". But it is not a matter of acting "against" biases, as you state. Nor is it a detachment from bias, as this is impossible. It is simply a way of acting which recognizes the reality of biases and the need to cope with them. To deny them, or pretend a detachment is self-deception. — Metaphysician Undercover
Let me take what you say here about the "soul" ad make an analogy. The concept of "soul" is a very difficult and complex subject in philosophy. It requires great study to understand the soul, Plato's "Phaedo" is a good start. But then there is Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and many others. So when a learned philosopher makes a claim about "the soul as something actual", I would assume that this philosopher has some understanding about that matter. That philosopher probably even understands that Aristotle defines the soul as actual, and explains the logical reasoning why the soul must be defined as "actual". Therefore we cannot say that such a claim is "unsupported". — Metaphysician Undercover
But you could call that a bias if you like. Then however, when a learned physicist refers to a photon as something actual, we should assume that the definitions produced from observations of the photoelectric effect which incline the physicists to speak of a photon as an actual thing, constitute a bias in the very same way. — Metaphysician Undercover
Perhaps you’re right, but that in itself is a bias, re: embracing a mere comfort, albeit in the negative.
“… Here, therefore, is a case where no answer is the only proper answer. For a question regarding the constitution of a something which cannot be cogitated by any determined predicate, being completely beyond the sphere of objects and experience, is perfectly null and void..…”
———— — Mww
Biases are themselves arguments, properly referred to as conclusions of aesthetic judgements, formed nonetheless in a mental space, a non-cognitive mental space. It is thereby self-contradictory to suppose a bias-free mental space, when it is in a mental space where all biases reside. It follows that the determination of good or bad relative to an aesthetic judgement, itself merely a judgement contingent on the first, still presupposes the mental space in which it occurs. — Mww
….. judgement is a peculiar gift, which does not and cannot require instruction but only exercise, biases are often as easily overcome as they are established. — Mww
Christoffer - do you have any views on Spinoza’s philosophy? — Wayfarer
Which, leads to us seeking out the comfortable ideas that can explain it, even when unexplainable. — Christoffer
I have never met a single entity that does not fear the unknown. — Christoffer
Then there is the master, who have trained their mind to function in a detached and distant perspective from their emotional identity. — Christoffer
One way of flipping things around is to notice that the heuristics of philosophy, the cutlery, might be considered as ritual. That seems the thrust of Jamal's critique: that in invoking tools one is reducing philosophy to a religion. — Banno
What I think is this is an excellent, coherent and articulate analysis and summary of the role of philosophy to humanity. It clearly has a rightful place in tying together all human disciplines, and steadying them, moderating their dominance over one another, and thus danger to one another. Philosophy does this by being innately flexible and applicable.
The "art of thought" can approach any field of study.
As nothing can be mastered without thought other than pure ignorance. — Benj96
It doesn't need to be of empirical scientific validation, but at least logical and hold together without unsupported claims as foundational premises. — Christoffer
Then there is the master.... — Christoffer
The mind of him who stands detached is of such nobility that whatever he sees is true and whatever he desires he obtains and whatever he commands must be obeyed. And this you must know for sure: when the free mind is quite detached, it constrains God to itself and if it were able to stand formless and free of all accidentals, it would assume God’s proper nature … The man who stands thus in utter detachment is rapt into eternity in such a way that nothing transient can move him … — Meister Eckhart
It's when religious truth claims and conclusions are made based purely on the belief biased to that religion that it stops being philosophy and becomes biased delusion. — Christoffer
The extraordinary and eccentric emphasis on "belief" in Christianity today is an accident of history that has distorted our understanding of religious truth. We call religious people "believers", as though acceptance of a set of doctrines was their principal activity, and before undertaking the religious life many feel obliged to satisfy themselves about the metaphysical claims of the church, which cannot be proven rationally since they lie beyond the reach of empirical sense data.
Most other traditions prize practice above creedal orthodoxy: Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians, Jews and Muslims would say religion is something you do, and that you cannot understand the truths of faith unless you are committed to a transformative way of life that takes you beyond the prism of selfishness. — Karen Armstrong, Metaphysical Mistake
Ghost in the Shell... — Christoffer
So I'd say, that even from a purely scientific perspective, Spinoza's rationalist approach has more practical use and function than positivism. — Christoffer
. Because there's a faulty logic in claiming there to be good biases and bad biases when such claims are values that essentially requires a detachment from bias in the first place in order to reach a claim of what is good or bad. — Christoffer
Which means that the argument fails by its own logic and becomes circular reasoning. You claim there to be good and bad biases, but to reach those values you need to be unbiased and in doing so you are doing what I'm talking about, unbiased reasoning. — Christoffer
Bias is neutral, there are no good or bad values. In human reasoning and cognition it is merely a description of how the we gravitate towards something based on our emotions or paths of least resistance in our thought processes. — Christoffer
es, biases are natural, but they are not good or bad as you claim since such values are arbitrary. And if we are talking about knowledge biases, yes, everyone has biases and therefor it is the purpose of unbiased methods of reasoning to improve our ability to reach conclusions and truths that are objective or broad rather than the subjective truths of our stupid minds. Without methods like this we are simply just spitting out opinions that cannot be foundations for concepts that function in a broader context and society, they just become like any twitter thread: a long line of irrelevant noise biased towards each individual subject's beliefs. — Christoffer
Philosophy focuses on unbiased reasoning in order to sometimes reach a praxis that we use in society. — Christoffer
The goal of philosophy is to reduce bias in reasoning and arguments. — Christoffer
Explain what this universal method of assessing biases is, because so far you are just saying that we need to arrive at good and bad biases, but what exactly is the process you propose? How do we arrive at such conclusions? How do you reach them? If you say that we cannot do anything without bias, then how do we reach an understanding of what are good and bad biases? It's just circular. — Christoffer
No, I'm saying that biases are neutral forms of gravitation towards certain things... — Christoffer
It's the process of arguing with bias that is bad, not that there are bad biases. — Christoffer
Bias is a natural and neutral manipulation of the ability to reason outside of your own beliefs. — Christoffer
How do you arrive at good? You just claim us to arrive at that without explaining how we arrive at that? It's basically like saying, "once we have the concept of good acts, we can then form principles of morality that we can follow", and then argue about some ideals that still requires the "good" to be defined. You still don't seem to see that this argument is faulty, that it is a circular argument in which you describe a system that relies on axioms that needs to be argued for and proven absolute, before you propose how to use them. You are only describing how to use them... whenever we arrive at having such axioms. — Christoffer
Prove the soul's existence. — Christoffer
A photon is a real thing. It is measurable as both a wave and a particle in experiments like the wave function collapse in the double slit experiment. — Christoffer
Wouldn’t that be bias in its conventional sense? Or perhaps, if not conventional, then psychological? — Mww
That may be true, and you would fare none the worse for it. But you’re forced to admit the possibility of those that do not hold such fear. Makes sense, doesn’t it, that if there is no knowledge, empirical knowledge that is, of something, then how can it be known as sufficient to cause fear? With so much being unknown, just seems quite wasteful to fear it all, so why bother deciding which is worth fearing and which isn’t, when all of it is equally unknown?
Besides, if it be granted knowledge is experience, then to fear the unknown is to fear an experience never had. I’ve been both remorseful and quite happy regarding experiences I’ve never had, but I’d categorically deny being afraid of them. — Mww
I get what you’re aiming for, but I submit there is no escape from oneself. There is, not the detachment from, but only the relaxing of, one mental space in order to favor the other, and the space being called upon is determined by the certainty required.
I’ll admit though, that this kind of rationality makes explicit the intrinsic duality of human nature. If one doesn’t accede to such duality, then he’s welcome to philosophize under conditions where it isn’t necessarily the case. — Mww
What are foundational premisses? You will know that foundationalism in physics is a contested issue, due to the many conundrums and imponderables thrown up by quantum mechanics. Foundationalism in mathematics was likewise called into question by Godel. Rudolf Carnap said 'In science there are no 'depths'; there is surface everywhere.' The tendency in 20th century philosophy has been to avoid foundational claims altogether which are typically regarded as the province of metaphysics and idealist philosophy. — Wayfarer
It is commonplace to disregard all religious texts as dogma from the start. But in the Western philosophical tradition, much of what was great in pre-modern philosophy had been absorbed (or appopriated) by theology, and so has been rejected because of this association. And I would contend that these are the sources of foundational insights, at the origin of metaphysics. — Wayfarer
However, scientific objectivity does not do justice to this idea, as within it there is no room for the subject of experience. — Wayfarer
Most other traditions prize practice above creedal orthodoxy: Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians, Jews and Muslims would say religion is something you do — Karen Armstrong, Metaphysical Mistake
The insights of classical philosophy are not accessible to the common man, the hoi polloi, who are offered salvation on the basis of faith alone. That would appear to be in conflict with Christianity except that, a Christian would say, by the practice of charity and selflessness, those same depths can be realised even by the not-particularly-educated. But when belief becomes the defense of creedal orthodoxy in defense of polemic, then it's another matter. Religious practice is, or ought to be, 'a science of the self'. — Wayfarer
And no, don't agree that the insights of the Phaedo are merely superseded or obsolete — Wayfarer
Rationalism and positivism are both scientific tools, they are complimentary imo.
The fork and knife together are better for eating most meals, compared to using the fork alone or the knife alone. — universeness
The main problems arise when folks insist that proposals arrived at via such as theology, metaphysics, personal intuition, or personal introspection, are fact or highly probably.
I think that is the basis of philosophical objections to religious claims, yes? — universeness
individualistic, idealist, and ahistorical arguments for unbiased thinking--which is revealed to be quite biased itself (not to say that it's a bad bias, necessarily). — Jamal
As I explained, it was your premise that biases are bad, undesirable, or whatever words you used in your anti-bias rhetoric. From this premise I produce the logic to demonstrate that if some biases are bad, then some must also be good. If the logic was faulty, you'd be able to show why, instead of just repeatedly asserting that it is faulty. In reality, it is only the premise which you insist on, that biases are not desirable, which potentially makes the argument unsound. — Metaphysician Undercover
I already explained why what you propose is impossible. — Metaphysician Undercover
You are being inconsistent. If you take an anti-bias position, as you do, then you imply that biases are bad. If biases were neutral, then there would be no need for an anti-bias position. However, your description of how we "gravitate toward something", along with the premise that the actions produced from such a gravitation may be judged as good or bad, produces the valid conclusion that biases may be judged as good or bad. — Metaphysician Undercover
So, just like some opinions may be judged as good, and some judged as bad, because they influence behaviour in this way, the same can be said for biases. The word "bias" being used to describe how we "gravitate", and such gravitation may be be judged as good or bad. — Metaphysician Undercover
Unbiased reasoning is impossible. I explained that to you already, and I think Mww did too. You are ignoring this very important fact. Premises are biases, and we cannot reason without premises. Notice the prefix, "pre" in the word "premise". The premise is what we enter the reasoning process with, as a preexisting assumption, a "prejudice". A skeptic might subject the premise to analysis, and a reasoning process, to judge for soundness, but that reasoning process would itself require premises, which would need the same skeptical treatment, and this would create the appearance of infinite regress. Since it is impossible to proceed through an infinity of premises for skeptical analysis, we must conclude that all reasoning is biased, due to the biased nature of the premises. — Metaphysician Undercover
This is clearly wrong. Such a goal is logically impossible to obtain, therefore it is irrational to hold it as a goal. Any attempt to obtain what is demonstrably impossible, is an irrational attempt. When a proposed goal is known to be impossible, we need to dismiss it as a goal, and adopt something which is possible, as our goal. — Metaphysician Undercover
The method is logic itself. We use logic to assess biases. You need to allow a separation, in principle between the form (logical process) and the content (beliefs which constitute biases). With this separation we have in principle, i.e. in theory, a pure unbiased process, logic. However, such a pure unbiased process would be absolutely useless because it would not be applied, and application requires content. But inherent within the content is bias. You might talk about some pie-in-the-sky conclusions which are totally free of bias, but those would just be meaningless symbols with no content. If we give meaning to the symbols (content), then we add bias to the system. — Metaphysician Undercover
This is where you show your inconsistency. You are speaking anti-bias, yet claiming biases are neutral. If you really believed that biases are neutral, then you'd need to jump over the fence to my position, and drop your anti-biased approach, because anti-bias would be unfounded. If biases are neutral, then you have no reason to be anti-bias, and your anti-bias attitude is irrational. — Metaphysician Undercover
However, since you describe biases as a form of "gravitation", which implies an inclination to act, it is really the case that biases, according to this description are not neutral at all. These acts of gravitation can be judge as good or bad, and so the inclination toward them, produced by the biases, can also be judged in that way. — Metaphysician Undercover
biases are neutral forms of gravitation towards certain things — Christoffer
This is your inconsistency. You assert "biases are neutral", yet you describe them as something which can be judged for goodness or badness. If they are inclinations toward action, "gravitation", they can be judged in that way, therefore they are not neutral. — Metaphysician Undercover
Philosophy is concerned with distinguishing good biases from bad, such that the good can be cultured. And, it may be argued that other disciplines like science and religion deal with culturing biases. Whether such biases are bad or good is a judgement for philosophy to make. — Metaphysician Undercover
Your misunderstanding is clear here. You do not acknowledge the reality that it is impossible to argue without bias — Metaphysician Undercover
It's the process of arguing with bias that is bad, not that there are bad biases. — Christoffer
This is an expression of your failure to separate the reasoning process (form) from the subject matter (content) being argued. If a person adheres to the proper reasoning process, bias does not manipulate the ability to reason. However, biases will influence the conclusion because the same bias which goes into the content of the premises will be reflected in the conclusions. — Metaphysician Undercover
There is no circular argument here, "good" is definable, and as such, that definition will provide a grounding, a base or foundation. That I have not defined it is irrelevant to my argument. There is no need to define it until you accept the reality that it has a purpose, and needs to be defined. — Metaphysician Undercover
The important point here, is that it is possible to define "good", therefore it is possible to judge biases on the basis of this definition. — Metaphysician Undercover
You need to read some of the material I mentioned, or others. It's a lot of reading. Here's the simple form of the argument though. There's two basic premises. 1) A living body exists as an organized body. 2) When a body comes into existence it necessarily is the thing which it is, and it is not something else. Do you see that the necessity of 2) requires a cause? That a thing is the thing which it is, and not something else, requires a cause of the thing being the thing which it is. Without that cause there is no "thing", which is an ordered structure, only disordered randomness.
And the cause of a thing necessarily pre-exists, temporally, the material being of the thing. In the case of 1), the organized living body, the cause of it being the thing which it is, is the soul. Notice that the soul is necessarily non-bodily, or non-material, as necessarily prior to the being of the body. You can rebut by saying that there is no need to label that cause as "soul", but what's the point? We still need to recognize the reality of that cause, so taking its name away is not going to be helpful.
That is an extremely simplified rendition of an understanding of the soul, but if you show an attempt to understand, I will expound for you, if you have questions. — Metaphysician Undercover
1) A living body exists as an organized body. 2) When a body comes into existence it necessarily is the thing which it is, and it is not something else. Do you see that the necessity of 2) requires a cause? That a thing is the thing which it is, and not something else, requires a cause of the thing being the thing which it is. Without that cause there is no "thing", which is an ordered structure, only disordered randomness. — Metaphysician Undercover
And the cause of a thing necessarily pre-exists, temporally, the material being of the thing. In the case of 1), the organized living body, the cause of it being the thing which it is, is the soul. Notice that the soul is necessarily non-bodily, or non-material, as necessarily prior to the being of the body. You can rebut by saying that there is no need to label that cause as "soul", but what's the point? We still need to recognize the reality of that cause, so taking its name away is not going to be helpful.
That is an extremely simplified rendition of an understanding of the soul, but if you show an attempt to understand, I will expound for you, if you have questions. — Metaphysician Undercover
This is wrong. A photon is not measurable as a wave. Hence the so-called wave function collapse whenever a measurement is attempted. This is analogous to the argument for the soul above. The particle, photon, or electron, is the ordered "thing", the body with material existence. Its existence, through wave function collapse, requires a cause. Without that cause there is no thing, and without the soul there is no living body. — Metaphysician Undercover
Rationalism and Positivism are two approaches in which positivism requires only that which can be observed and measured in such ways, which excludes things like theoretical physics. The problem with positivism is that science is just as much about precise prediction as it is about verifying through tests. Positivism is actually quite bad at science in that regard since almost all scientific methods rely on predictions that are later tested if possible. A positivist would have a hard time accepting Einstein's equations before anything was verified and they would likely oppose quantum mechanics, even when we have invented technology that relies on observations that haven't been verified as theories yet. — Christoffer
…..this kind of rationality makes explicit the intrinsic duality of human nature.
— Mww
Yes, we cannot split our brain in physical two, the duality cannot be real, only simulated. — Christoffer
We can speak of "soul" as exploratory concepts, but if anyone claims the soul to be a real thing, they have a burden of proof to such a claim and if that proof is simply a religious belief, it is not philosophy anymore, but evangelism. — Christoffer
We can't ignore that the claims about the physical world are false by what we know today in physics. — Christoffer
Perhaps an aside but, IME as a born, raised and educated ex-Catholic, the distinction between orthodoxy and Ms. Armstrong's emphasis on orthopraxy lacks much of a difference in so far as in the main, ceteris paribus, religious practices and religious beliefs are strongly correlated.Most other traditions prize practice above creedal orthodoxy: Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians, Jews and Muslims would say religion is something you do
— Karen Armstrong, Metaphysical Mistake — Christoffer
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