'...enlightenment' or mystical experiences... — Tom Storm

Notice that these are things we do, not statements about the way things are.

The advice is not to talk about such things, but to enact them - whereof one cannot speak, thereof one can do.

Like you, I'm happy to live with uncertainty, with not-knowing. And I agree with you about the existence of a mind-independent actuality. I have no need of a definition of truth either, I feel as though I know what it is wordlessly, so to speak, and no need to attempt any more fine-grained analysis — Janus

:up:

I believe that it is an altered state of consciousness that seems generally to carries with it a sense of elevated experience and understanding
— Janus

That's intriguing. Especially the 'elevated experince and understanding' part of it. What would be an example of this? Are you thinking enlightenment... gurus and such? — Tom Storm

I see the psychologist Jon Haidt's notion of elevation as having a lot of support, and fitting well with my experience:

Elevation is an emotion elicited by witnessing actual or imagined virtuous acts of remarkable moral goodness.[1][2] It is experienced as a distinct feeling of warmth and expansion that is accompanied by appreciation and affection for the individual whose exceptional conduct is being observed.[2] Elevation motivates those who experience it to open up to, affiliate with, and assist others. Elevation makes an individual feel lifted up and optimistic about humanity.[3]

Elevation can also be a deliberate act, characteristic habit, or virtue that is characterized by disdaining the trivial or undignified in favor of more exalted or noble themes. Thoreau recommended, for example that a person "read not the Times [but rather] read the Eternities" so that he "elevates his aim."[4]

I think i'd need to adjust this to "I am certain it is reasonable to think that xxx" about the past. .

That's intriguing. Especially the 'elevated experince and understanding' part of it. What would be an example of this? Are you thinking enlightenment... gurus and such? — Tom Storm

I don't count "elevated experience and understanding' as being demonstrably more than a feeling. In other words I don't think we can know what the implications of such experiences might be. The guru thing might be helpful for some people, personally I dislike the smell of it.

Perhaps the problem is not, not being able to find "absolute certainty", but the framing of these issues in terms of "absolute certainty". Garbage in, garbage out. — Banno

I agree—absolute certainty is not possible except relative to some context or other.

For me an empirical fact is something that can be directly observed. That said, I think we may be talking at cross-purposes. I agree that, in the sense that everyone is aware of things, believes things and knows things that awareness, believing and knowing cannot be completely independent. — Janus

I think you're right here regarding "talking at cross-purposes".

I'm arguing from the standpoint of evolutionary progression. The safest starting point for this conversation may be the moment of conception(fertilization), although any acceptable robust notion of belief must be amenable to the evolutionary progression of the species as well; by my lights anyway.

My point is that we can be aware of a particular thing without believing or knowing anything about that thing, we can believe a particular thing without being aware of or knowing anything about that thing, and we can know how to do something without believing anything or being aware of doing the thing.

Examples may help me to grasp what you're saying here. The above, as written, seems plainly false to me. I would argue that all three candidates/examples/suggestions are false, as they are written.

Of course, we do have to be aware of what we are doing when we are learning to do something. I think it really comes down to how you want to think about it. There is not just one correct way.

The evolutionary progression of human thought and belief is not a matter of personal preference. It evolved however it has, regardless of how one wants to think about it.

Either all knowledge is existentially dependent upon belief or it is not.

I agree—absolute certainty is not possible except relative to some context or other. — Janus

Ok, cheers. But I would go further and suggest that "absolute certainty" is a nonsense formed by concatenating two otherwise innocent words. Trying to make use of such a term leads immediately to misunderstanding.

This infatuation with evolution is new, isn't it? Why should we kowtow to evolutionary "progress"?

My point is that we can be aware of a particular thing without believing or knowing anything about that thing, we can believe a particular thing without being aware of or knowing anything about that thing, and we can know how to do something without believing anything or being aware of doing the thing.

Examples may help me to grasp what you're saying here. The above, as written, seems plainly false to me. I would argue that all three candidates/examples/suggestions are false, as they are written. — creativesoul

I can be aware of whatever it is that is present to me right now without believing or knowing anything about it in any propositional sense. You can believe something, for example that your wife is having an affair, without being aware of (having evidence) or knowing anything about any actual infidelity on her part. I can know how to ride a bike without believing anything about bikes, and I can ride a bike without being aware that I am doing it (automatic pilot). I don't know about you, but when I ride a bike I am on automatic pilot for much of the time.

Either all knowledge is existentially dependent upon belief or it is not. — creativesoul

I don't think there is an empirical matter of fact about that (certainly not a determinable one, in any case), just different ways of looking at it, talking about it. So, you can say it is or it isn't. it comes down to personal preference or intuition

But I would go further and suggest that "absolute certainty" is a nonsense formed by concatenating two otherwise innocent words. Trying to make use of such a term leads immediately to misunderstanding. — Banno

I think you're probably right about 'absolute' being a loaded term. Perhaps 'complete certainty' would be a better fit. I'm completely certain, i.e. have no doubt whatsoever that I am currently typing this response to you.

:up:

.

Planing a board cannot be done without a tool. A tool cannot be made without belief. Planing a board cannot be done without belief. Belief is necessary for planing boards in terms of existential dependency as well as practicality. Belief less creatures cannot know how to plane boards.

Robots can plane boards, but they cannot know how. Robots are automated tools. We can learn how to use them to plane boards, and given sufficient time and practice, begin using them without consciously focusing upon the task at hand. We can sing to ourselves while going through the motions. We can carry on complete conversations while using planers.

I think that you're getting at or pointing towards the kind of habitual muscle memory habits that develop given enough time and repetition. With that I'd wholly agree, but as "cross-purposes" implied, that's not what I was talking about.

But I would go further and suggest that "absolute certainty" is a nonsense formed by concatenating two otherwise innocent words. — Banno

Yes, I hinted at this myself earlier.

I don't count "elevated experience and understanding' as being demonstrably more than a feeling. In other words I don't think we can know what the implications of such experiences might be. The guru thing might be helpful for some people, personally I dislike the smell of it. — Janus

Got ya. Fair point.

I see the psychologist Jon Haidt's notion of elevation as having a lot of support, and fitting well with my experience: — wonderer1

Interesting. New one for me but I guess I've felt this intuitively.

The advice is not to talk about such things, but to enact them - whereof one cannot speak, thereof one can do. — Banno

Ha! Yes. Apart from this place, I spend almost no time talking or reading about such matters and am almost entirely a creature of doing.

Why should we kowtow to evolutionary "progress"? — Banno

The same reason we no longer seriously entertain geocentric models.

This infatuation with evolution is new, isn't it? — Banno

It is not. I've just mentioned it more here in recent past.

I think that you're getting at or pointing towards the kind of habitual muscle memory habits that develop given enough time and repetition. With that I'd wholly agree, but as "cross-purposes" implied, that's not what I was talking about. — creativesoul

What I meant about planing boards and riding bikes is that you can watch others doing them, and then have a go, trying different things and improving with practice. I see no need for any particular beliefs in that, just willingness to have a go.

Belief less creatures cannot know how to plane boards. — creativesoul

Creatures without hands cannot plane boards. Look, I agree that you can frame things in terms of belief, and I think they can be framed in terms not including belief. Which is the better framing? That depends on preference and/or intuition.

I can be aware of whatever it is that is present to me right now without believing or knowing anything about it in any propositional sense. — Janus

We may not disagree there, depending on the candidate filling in the blank left by "whatever it is". I'm not fond of the notion of "proposition"...

I'm not fond of the notion of "proposition" — creativesoul

I just mean by that something like "assertion that something or other is the case".

Yes, I hinted at this myself earlier. — Tom Storm

Ok. nice.

Ok. The notion that evolution 'progresses" is somewhat problematic. Take care.

. The notion that evolution 'progresses" is somewhat problematic. Take care. — Banno

Well, in my defense, those words left your keyboard, not mine.

"Evolutionary progression" implies process over time.

But yes, it's complicated.

What I meant about planing boards and riding bikes is that you can watch others doing them, and then have a go, trying different things and improving with practice. — Janus

No doubt.

I see no need for any particular beliefs in that...

"In that" is not how I would put it. It's that mimicry presupposes at the very least, that the mimicker believe they are mimicking.

It's not that I'm 'framing things in terms of belief'. Rather, I'm situating belief in such a way as to revive it's vital importance to being an intentional being/agent. The church has not helped. Truth, knowledge, belief, and certainty were absconded. Many folk are repulsed by the words due to how the church used them. That's really too bad.

"Absconded" is the wrong word, but hopefully you get the point. It's been a long day.

:wink:

"Tainted" would be better.

Well, in my defense, those words left your keyboard, not mine. — creativesoul

I'm arguing from the standpoint of evolutionary progression. — creativesoul

Yup, that's what I'm keeping in mind.

What are the pitfalls you warn of?

"In that" is not how I would put it. It's that mimicry presupposes at the very least, that the mimicker believe they are mimicking. — creativesoul

OK fair enough—I just don't see why one cannot merely mimic. If I am conscious of an intention to mimic then I know that is what I am trying to do. Some say there can be no knowledge where doubt is not a possibility. I don't see it that way; the way is see it is that there is no place for belief where there can be no doubt. If I'm trying to mimic something, I don't see how there can be any doubt about that.

I agree with you that belief plays a major role in all our lives. I just think we will disagree as to just where it has its roles, or to put it another way, about where it is appropriate to speak about belief being a factor..

My point is that we can be aware of a particular thing without believing or knowing anything about that thing, we can believe a particular thing without being aware of or knowing anything about that thing, and we can know how to do something without believing anything or being aware of doing the thing.

Examples may help me to grasp what you're saying here. The above, as written, seems plainly false to me. I would argue that all three candidates/examples/suggestions are false, as they are written.

You might consider here Aristotle's two types of truth, which gets at this distinction.

Aristotle, in Metaphysics, IX 10, distinguishes between two kinds of truth: truth as the correctness of speech and thought, and truth as the grasping of indivisibles (asyntheta, adiaireta).2

The first kind of truth involves complex articulation: it requires that the things in question be “combined and divided.” If in our thinking and speaking we combine and divide things as they are themselves combined and divided, our thinking and speaking will be true; if we combine and separate things in ways different from the ways they themselves are com-posed and divided, our thinking and speaking will be false (Metaphysics, IX
10, 1051b2–9). It is important to note that this form of truth has falsity as its opposite. If I say, “Snow is white,” I have composed a statement. I have put thoughts together. If snow indeed is white, my statement and my opinion will be true; if snow is brown, my statement and my opinion will be false. It is the statement and the opinion that are true or false. In De Anima, III 8 (432a11), Aristotle says that being true or false belongs to an "intertwining of things thought, a symploke¯ noe¯mato¯n.” In this passage, the term we have translated as “things thought,” noe¯mata, needs to be clarified, and we will have more to say about it later. The intertwining of things thought is a syntactic achievement.


The second kind of truth involves not complexity but a simple grasp of simple things (Metaphysics, IX 10, 1051b17–33). This kind of truth has ignorance, not falsity, as its opposite. Suppose I am engaged inconversation and someone begins using the word eisteddfods. If I have never heard that word before, I do not take in anything when I hear it now; and since I do not take anything in, I cannot be mistaken. I do not get anything wrong; I simply do not know. My deficiency consists not in falsity but in ignorance. Or suppose something is happening before me and I am completely bewildered by it. Again, I fail to take anything in, and my thinking is not false; it is simply uninformed, which is different from being misinformed. To be exact, I should say not that my thinking is uninformed, but that I simply am not thinking. I have not gotten there yet. I may be trying to think, but I have not succeeded in having a thought, either simple or complex. In the first kind of truth, by contrast, I do have a thought (that snow is white), but it might be false. In the second kind, my mind does not rise to the level at which falsity is even possible.

I would add that our limited cognitive bandwidth requires that we make frequent use of this second type of truth. In statements, predication, etc. we say things about things, or we evaluate such statements in thought. However, when we do this, we cannot "unpack" all this detail. I can say something about, say "Russia," without either of us having to unpack all our propositional knowledge about Russia. There is both a subconscious and pre-concious element to this. Subconscious because we use terms as shorthand for a huge network of connections, pre-concious because the objects and processes we perceive are organized into discrete "things," automatically. It is this automatic demarcation that allows for the phenomenology that gives rise to predication and syntax in the first place (Husserl's argument).

It's probably worth saying that one need not be aware of their own beliefs. Beliefs come first, then awareness of them. That is to draw a distinction between mimicry and mimicking for the sake of mimicking.

Sometimes, very young children are acting like others around them... in times of mimicry, that is. They are trying to do what they've seen done. Their attention is not towards the fact that they're mimicking, they're attention is on what they're doing(that counts - to us - as mimicry).

I just think we will disagree as to just where it has its roles, or to put it another way, about where it is appropriate to speak about belief being a factor... — Janus

Perhaps, but that is the interesting part of all this. How it is a factor, and in what way, as well as to what extent, etc.

:wink:

That is exactly the issue, and what I was trying to convey to @Janus.

Either all knowledge is existentially dependent upon belief or it is not.
— creativesoul

I don't think there is an empirical matter of fact about that (certainly not a determinable one, in any case), — Janus

Oh, I completely agree. There are an abundance of them.

Knowing and believing are language games, ↪creativesoul. — Banno

Sure, that's one way of using the terms. It's odd though, in that some language less creatures are capable of both; believing and knowing that a mouse ran behind the tree.

If that was the case prior to language use, and I see no reason to deny that, then knowing and believing are not just language games, because language less creatures do not play such things.

That is exactly the issue, and what I was trying to convey to Janus. — Bob Ross

I'm not so sure that we are in agreement. Take:

It is not that we have no knowledge, it is that we only have probabilistic reasons to support the truth of things. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this: the alternative is absolute truth....

The only way this negates my position, is if you could validly claim to it is absolutely true; and you can’t. The things you know, are based off of probability: all you are noting is a high probability. — Bob Ross

Follow your own argument and apply this to itself. Are you going to say that we only know that, say, P(A) = n(A)/n(S) is probably true? How could one find the probability of such a thing? But there is a step further here: the whole framework of a probabilistic theory of truth must be taken as true in order to function as an account of truth... that is, the sentence "n(S) is the total number of events in the sample space" must also be assigned a probability, but this cannot be done without our having already assigning a probability to that very statement.

The only way out of this is to suppose that there are statements that are true outside of this game of assigning probabilities.

And this does not just apply to the supposed "analytic" statements. What is the probability that you are now reading this sentence? How can we even make sense of such a thing?

Pragmatism, probabilism, correspondence, coherence... Whatever substantive theory of truth is chosen, something will be left out, something must remain ungrounded. We are left with T-sentences, and descriptions of how sentences about truth function rather than theories about what is true and what isn't. And that should not be a surprise.

You continue to think of belief as a discreet "thing in the head", as mental furniture. We each have innumerable beliefs that we have never articulated, indeed which we never will articulate, but which nevertheless we do hold to be true. There are unstated beliefs. Each and every one of these can be set out as a proposition that is held to be the case.

Perhaps you believe that you have more than 28 eyelashes, but until now that belief has never been articulated. The belief is not a thing in your head.

It would be absurd to suppose that each of one's innumerable beliefs exists somewhere in your mind.

That a belief can be put into a proposition is a grammatical point about the way the word "belief" is used. If you can't put it into a statement, then you can't be said to believe it.

"The cat believes the mouse ran behind the tree" shows exactly that - "the mouse ran behind the tree" being the content of the cat's belief. What is not claimed is that there a thing in the head of the cat that somehow is named by "the mouse ran behind the tree". Rather there is the cat's capacity to recognise, chase, anticipate, and so on. It is humans, you and I, who benefit from setting this game out in terms of belief and intent.

It also shows that the cat and the mouse are participants in our language games, which are never confined just to language, but show how language is part of our interaction with the world

I think folk have had enough of this dead horse.

You continue to think of belief as a discreet "thing in the head", as mental furniture. — Banno

That's just not true, despite the fact that you've been charging me with it for years now. You've a clever little quip about first misunderstanding a position prior to disagreeing with it. It fits here.

We each have innumerable beliefs that we have never articulated, indeed which we never will articulate, but which nevertheless we do hold to be true. There are unstated beliefs. Each and every one of these can be set out as a proposition that is held to be the case.

Perhaps you believe that you have more than 28 eyelashes, but until now that belief has never been articulated. The belief is not a thing in your head.

I agree with most all of that. I used to reject the bit about articulation in a broad sense of rejection. I no longer reject it out of hand. I still question the truth aptness of unarticulated belief, as well as whether or not it makes sense to say one holds an unarticulated belief true - prior to articulation. Nonetheless, there's nothing here aside from that that causes me pause.

It would be absurd to suppose that each of one's innumerable beliefs exists somewhere in your mind.

Agreed.

That a belief can be put into a proposition is a grammatical point about the way the word "belief" is used. If you can't put it into a statement, then you can't be said to believe it.

Again. Agreed.

"The cat believes the mouse ran behind the tree" shows exactly that - "the mouse ran behind the tree" being the content of the cat's belief. What is not claimed is that there a thing in the head of the cat that somehow is named by "the mouse ran behind the tree". Rather there is the cat's capacity to recognise, chase, anticipate, and so on. It is humans, you and I, who benefit from setting this game out in terms of belief and intent.

Two sticking points directly above. The first is the same one hinted at earlier at the top of this reply; that you're arguing against an opponent of your own imagination, because I do not argue for spatiotemporal location of beliefs, let alone 'in the head'. I reject and vehemently argue against that sort of mischaracterization.

The second involves the content of the cat's belief. If the content of the cat's belief is the proposition "the mouse ran behind the tree", and the proposition consists of the mouse, the tree, the spatiotemporal relationship between the mouse and tree, in addition to the mouse's behaviour, then I agree. If the proposition consists of words, then I disagree. The content of the cat's belief is meaningful to the cat. Those words are not.

That's the contentious part.

I'm currently watching/studying Searle's lectures on philosophy of mind. I also recently purchased several of his books including "Mind". At least I think that's the name of it. I understand that on Searle's view, the content of the intentional state of belief is the proposition, but I do not yet agree with that. I may never.

The content of the cat's belief is meaningful to the cat. Words are not. Of that much, I'm certain. We've not even bridled that horse yet, let alone ridden it to death and flogged it afterwards. It's germane to "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs", and 'meaning is use' cannot apply.

:wink:

I appreciate ya, bruddah.

Aloha! A hui ho.