I don't think this is right; there may be justified false beliefs, — Janus

Of course. And that will always be the case. That's how we work in science. This is what the evidence suggests. Nothing seems to contradict it. It fits with our models. Other scientists receive the same results. So we add X to our body of scientific knowledge. But there is the chance that later it will turn ou to be false. I am not saying we should not use the word true. But if adding the word true means that it can never ever turn out to be false, who are we to say that?

Another example: the ancient's belief that the Earth is flat could be counted as a justified false belief. There would be countless examples of justified false belief. — Janus

Of course. And any of our current beliefs may turn out to be false. That's why in the JTB formulation, I think it is irrational to use the word true. Not in other contexts, but because the addition of the word true implies that we know, somehow, beyond our justification.

Such as? — creativesoul

I think the statement I exist is true. Even if I could not convince others it is the case. To me knowledge formulations like jtb are about communal beliefs, which ones we all have good reasons to believe in. One example of where I might use true includes things wehre I realize others, lackign my experiences, lack the same justificaiton I have. Despite that; I believe certain things are true. That I saw a mountain lion in the US where there are not supposed to be any - and a number of other explanations were put forward for what I 'really' saw. I have sympathy for what they want to consider knowledge. But I still hold it to be true that at least one mountain lion was where I saw it. If it had flashed past in the shadows, ok, perhaps I made an image more than saw that animal. But I had time. I know my own ability to doubt my perceptions, how and when I can jump to conclusions, my own lack of interest or need to have seen the animal and so on. I know - not to absolute certainty - but I know it is true. I saw one, despite what the relevent biologists would say about one being there. Despite my own use of true in this case, I do understand why they don't just take my word for it. Of course in other situations I consider some things true where it is also considered knowledge. In fact knowledge for me is a set of things we consider true. However if I am describing knowledge I will only describe it as the best justified belief. Because now we are getting into the process of deciding. We are into nuts and bolts. And the nuts and bolts we have access to are justification. We do not have some separate other access to truth....

1.1 The Truth Condition
Most epistemologists have found it overwhelmingly plausible that what is false cannot be known. For example, Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 US Presidential election. Consequently, nobody knows that Hillary Clinton won the election. One can only know things that are true.

Sometimes when people are very confident of something that turns out to be wrong, we use the word “knows” to describe their situation. Many people expected Clinton to win the election. Speaking loosely, one might even say that many people “knew” that Clinton would win the election—until she lost. Hazlett (2010) argues on the basis of data like this that “knows” is not a factive verb.[2] Hazlett’s diagnosis is deeply controversial; most epistemologists will treat sentences like “I knew that Clinton was going to win” as a kind of exaggeration—as not literally true.

Something’s truth does not require that anyone can know or prove that it is true. Not all truths are established truths. If you flip a coin and never check how it landed, it may be true that it landed heads, even if nobody has any way to tell. Truth is a metaphysical, as opposed to epistemological, notion: truth is a matter of how things are, not how they can be shown to be. So when we say that only true things can be known, we’re not (yet) saying anything about how anyone can access the truth. As we’ll see, the other conditions have important roles to play here. Knowledge is a kind of relationship with the truth—to know something is to have a certain kind of access to a fact.[3] — Stanford Philosophy Encyc

Note the part I bolded above.

I don't! No! I am arguing exactly the opposite of these sentiments! I'm appalled that I have expressed myself so badly that you think I'm championing science as the one and only knowledge-gathering tool we have. I apologise for my laxity. — Pattern-chaser

OK, well good. It seems like the options were science or guessing.

↪Coben Our flexibility in making use of cultural tools is what distinguishes us from other animals. They copy, we practice and improve. — Izat So

I hope you understood that I was supporting your position. Animals to improve things they learn, certainly many of the social mammals do. This is cultural. IOW I am supporting the idea that this is a co-evolution between culture and brains, say, but pointing we are not alone in this. Yes, we are vastly more plastic in our learning systems.

What's wrong with discussing justified true belief? — creativesoul

There's nothing wrong with discussing jtb. I am discussing jtb. My problem with jtb I explained
in an earlier post.
If we look at a statement/conclusion/belief we can check to see if it is justified. This would include things like does it fit obervations/experience, is there counterevidence, how has the evidence been gathered (like, say, is there a good sample, was it controlled conditions, if the justications is scientific), are the conclusions arrived at logically, are there other beliefs that better fit the evidence.....

You don't then go and check the truth. Whatever one would do in checking the truth of a statement is already there in the justification. That's how we decide if things are true. In science, for example, we do not decide something is justified and then check to see if it is true. There should not be two adjectives. If it was false, then it would not be well justified.

In the context of discussions of knowledge based on justification, it is silly to add in as a criterion true, especially for empiricists.

True is a perfectly good adjective, but in jtb it is redundant. I use true and truth in other contexts, but to add it to JB is like being the Pope. Beyond all that nice justification I also know directly that it is true. But the reason one would know is in the justification. It's like a weird claim that one can separately judge truth and justification.

An ethical system is typically named after its core value. The core value of humanism is the human being. If they are basing this value on something else, then they shouldn't be called humanists - they should be something else-ists (rationalists perhaps, if they claim to have purely rational foundations for their values). — SophistiCat

I am not sure humanism is an ethical system, but it does certainly value humans. However the main point is you are not taking my comment in context. When I say they can value whatever they want, I meant that Humanists are not bound, for some reason, to value based on evolution, which the other poster seems to think. Nor more than they need to justify or rationalize their values in terms of the theory of relativity or in terms of gravity.

I am not arguing that humanists don't value humans higher than other things. I am saying they are not bound to base their morality on evolution - a process in nature - or evolutionary theory. It's a category error to presume they must do this.

You're attempting to dismiss, discard, and/or discount truth. That will not go unchallenged.
— creativesoul
Nope, I am not.
— Coben

This coming from one who said "Truth is for the Pope"...

Yes, you are. — creativesoul

So you opted to ignore the bulk of my post. Comforting and facile; I suppose, for you.

Is humanism just a form of "speciesism"? — Matias

In most cases it probably is. Though certainly some humanists work to protect other life forms and it is utterly clear that man secular people do.

Do (atheist) humanists prefer and value humans in the same or a similar way that white supremacists prefer and value white people? Just because it is "us"? That would be a strange sort of justification. — Matias

From what i can see, just like most non-humanists they value living things are that most like them. From there, like for example religious people, they come up with was of justifying this. I think humanists tend to think they are special becuase of their intelligence and tend to be more empathic regarding other intelligent social mammals. Religious people, like some humanists, often justify the kiling of or the hatred of people less like them. Whether this difference is in belief for perceived intelligence or whatever. It seems to be a universal bias.

Of course: morality is a feature that is the result of evolutionary processes and mechanisms, but that does not mean that the process and its mechanisms (variation, selection, reproduction, drift) are inherently moral. — Matias

I didn't say that evolutionary processes are moral. You seem to be saying that since humanists believe in evolution they must base their values on evolutionary theory. I don't see that. They can base their values on whatever they like.

Humanists believe in the unique value of the individual human being, in human dignity. These are fictions like other religious fictions, they are "superhuman" as karma or spirits or heaven. — Matias

They often believe that humans are smarter than other animals and capable of more things. I am not sure if 'human dignity' is one of their beliefs. They value human capabilities and nature. Those are values. People have different values.

Yes, humanists value human beings in a way they do not value other animals, but they are unable to justify this special treatment if they base their philosophy / ideology on evolution. — Matias

But why do they need to do that? Why must they base their values on evolution or the theory of relativity or any other scientific theory or process that science has described?

Much of "reality" is unknown and unknowable to us.
— Pattern-chaser

Science would disagree. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Science cannot agree or disagree. People can. Scientists recently discovered that most of the matter and energy in the universe they had been completely unaware of. Noticing this, it would be a logical conclusion that perhaps we will keep discovering more things, but perhaps some things will not be found out. Perhaps most will not be. Perhaps most will be. Pattern chaser's claim above is problematic because how would he know. But your response is eqully problematic since you cannot know whether we will find out most things. Perhaps scientists will find a way to prove there is a multiverse but not be able to learn more about the other universes, which would be most of what is, for example.

If such an issue, as any of these, is beyond science, is it beyond any way of knowing? I would say 'not necessarily'.
— Coben

Beyond knowing? Yes. Beyond our speculations and guesswork? No. In RL, there are many issues that an individual human cannot solve, so they guess. [Even when the issue has been solved by other humans, but this human doesn't know it.] It's a defining characteristic of humans, this guessing-without-sufficient-evidence, and we're not too bad at it. So we can guess, and we can speculate, but to no avail. Our guesses will remain guesses, unfounded by anything more intellectually substantial. [And a guess remains a guess if we call that guess an axiom or assumption, or even if we call upon Occam's Razor, which is not a logical principle but a simple rule of thumb.] — Pattern-chaser

Before science decided, in the early 70s and over great internal resistence, that animals were conscious experiencers with emotions, it was taboo and professionally dangerous to assert that animals had intentions, emotions, goals, and were experiencers. Do you really want to argue that people who knew that animals were experiencers before that did not know? I think that's silly. If you want to argue that the only possible knowledge comes through science, this backfires also in general, since we require all sorts of trust intuition to even lay a foundation for using scientific knowledge. We wake up in bed and it sure seems like memory indicates that science is a good mode of knowledge creation, so we go with that memory. It's all fruit of a poison tree or it isn't.

You really think you can scientifically demonstrate all the things you know to be true? Must we all wait around for paradigmatically biases subcultures before what we believe is mere guesses?

No? Then how will you obtain (scientifically-acceptable and -useful) evidence? For without evidence, science can do nothing. And there is no evidence. Thus... — Pattern-chaser

I was talking about the future history of science. You are saying it is beyond science, so this includes all future possible scientific theory and research.

But let's not concentrate on this one example. There are others too, e.g. solipsism. The point is that there exist problems that science cannot address, and will never be capable of addressing. — Pattern-chaser

That may well be the case, and the brain in vat/solipsism examples, I think are stronger examples than the God one. I think another stronger one would be the is this a simulation issue, since if the simulators are vastly further advanced then us they might be able to eliminate any possible clue. The three examples share properties since they are going after minds being separated from reality type issues. I think the God one is less easy to predict. It might be beyond science. It might not be. This raises another issue. If such an issue, as any of these, is beyond science, is it beyond any way of knowing? I would say 'not necessarily'.

I quite agree - but this only supports a point made in the Aeon essay - that 'if ‘physical reality’ means reality according to some future and complete physics, then the [current] claim that there is nothing else but physical reality is empty, because we have no idea what such a future physics will look like.' — Wayfarer

Agreed. Further current physics should not be called a physicalism, since the set of what can be considered physical has expanded radically, now encompassing things without mass, fields, particles in superposition and so on. We not only have no idea what will be considered physical in the future - iow how little like matter it would seem to us now and certainly to naturalists in the 19th century or to Medieval theologians, for that matter, but that we already use physicalism as an empty term meaning something like 'the belief in things that are considered real via science'.

So if or when a paradigmatic shift occurred away from physicalism, it will be very interesting to see what emerges in its place. — Wayfarer

One can hope they drop a word with no longer useful metaphysical baggage, but they don't seem to care about that now. I suspect a paradigmatic shift may take place while the term lives on.

In some cases, it is exactly that. Cases such as 'Does God exist?', where there is no (scientifically-acceptable) evidence. Cases such as 'What is Objective Reality?', where there is also no possibility of us gathering evidence. And so on. — Pattern-chaser

Well, first off, I said it is not necessarily that kind of thing

it is not necessarily that science cannot confirm or measure these things/areas/phenomena — Coben

though I could have made my wording clearer. I meant, that just because cannot test something empirically now, does nto mean will not be able to later.

But further we have no idea what questions Science will be able to answer later. I suppose one could argue that if God is purely transcendent answering that question might be ruled out via science- but most Gods have empirical effects and/or break 'rules' and/or reveal themselves. Right now issues in cosmology considered untestable are turning out to have ways to reveal evidence empirically. I don't think we can rule out the future potential of science.

There are some subject areas, or ideas, OR PHENOMENA which are not amenable to the kind of analysis NOW that will yield the kind of empirical evidence that is considered scientific, so questions about those kinds of topics aren't considered legitimate at all by scientific standards. — Wayfarer

I added the bolded, underlined parts. IOW it is not necessarily that science cannot confirm or measure these things/areas/phenomena, but rather than science does not or cannot now. There can be all sorts of reasons for that: necessary technology is not present, interest by that community is not present, paradigmatic shifts need to take place such that energy will be put in those areas...perhaps other reasons also. Science is not finished, it is in the middle, and will continue to be.

There are people who claim that the regular people are – or should be – socialists and are being preyed upon by conservative business and military elites.

There are other people who claim that thenregular people are – or should be - conservatives and are being preyed upon by liberal media and academic elites. — Ilya B Shambat

It seems to me like we live in an oligarchy and one's success is either through selling oneself into that power and pretending it is not an oligarchy or being part of the upper echalons of that oligarchy, with both of those categories you mention above doing in the mani the bidding of Wall st., while making different noises, and not letting obvious things like industry control of oversigh, Wall st. veto power over any candidate with a chance, industy control of the military adn foreign policy, courts treating the elite and others in different ways (and not simply via better representation,), industry centralizatoin of media, the vast surveillance of the population via government and surveillance capital, smart products and coming smart cities, and the effective depowering of the public via all the preceding, the militarization of law enforcement and the wars on terror and drugs. Any liberal or conservative wothy or either name would have major objections to most of this (albeit for different reasons on some issues) but they move forward with World Wide Wrestling melodramatic 'arguments' while accepted all of the above. All of it. You may be able to find ways conservatives are being hypocritical in their hatred of liberal elites. But if anyone steps otu of the false dichotomy between dems and repbubs, you can see that its just circuses and with dminishing use of bread.

Few would dispute the view that the theology of the world’s three main monotheistic religions (also known as the Abrahamic religions) are deterministic, — Jacob-B

I think a lot of people would dispute that. Starting in Eden with Adam and Eve's willful disobendience of God. And while there are certainly parts of the Bible/Torah that if taken utterly literally imply that God is omniscient. Lyrical writing need not be literal. In love letters or scripture. To say that God's knowledge is infinite could be taken utterly literally or it could be taken to mean it is so beyond us that it will always seem infinite. Or perhaps it is infinite about what is, but not what is coming (and somehow free will exists). And there are also quotes in the Bible that support free will. So even on the theological level there is much that both leaves room for and even indicates free will. (I am less familiar with the KOran).
One could also argue that the scriptures are a mix of paradigms, and that the writers perhaps did not notice the contradictions and contrary to what I said, meant that God knew everything in some mathematically pure sense. Both theists and atheists seem to get stuck on these mathematically pure ideas about God's omni-nesses. I think that's silly. To take it so literally. That God must be able to lift stones that he creates too heavy for him to lift and stuff like that. So many arguments over statements that were more ode like, expressing, as humans, do, things in emotional terms, with hyperbole and superlatives, for all sorts of reasons.

Teacher: "For your final essay, you can choose any topic that belongs to Category A."
Subject X belongs to category B.
Therefore the student cannot write a paper on subject X — marshill

I would call thIs a fallacy of unwarrent assumption. IOW we have a premise that may or may not be true which is not stated. The above works if we have the additional premise that all topics in category B are not in Category A. So we have a missing premise or a false implicit premise. Now the above might be a valid conclusion if we know the two categories are not the same.

Teacher: you must choose a number that is a positive number.
A student cannot choose -7.

Teacher: you must choose a real number.
A student cannot choose -7.

And since your example is abstract. We don't know what the categories are, we don't know if it is a situation like my first example or like my second example.

It's also a bit like a fallacy of false dichotomy. Where it is as if we have two choices, when in fact there are more options.

- no species is superior to other species — Matias

in terms of evolution. IOW all that are alive are adapted to their environments, sure. But outside of evoutionary theory, using criteria that one developes using the brains evolution has given us, one can decide that we are best or most important (to us) and center on that. In fact evolution would tend to lead to creatures most concerned about themselves, and amongst social mammals, most likely to value highly other members of their own species. But, in any case, there is nothing contradictory about valuing our species over others. It would be contradictory, at this point, to say we are objectively better in evolutionary terms than other species, since there are no values in evolution, there is just survival or not. Evolution is a process, in one sense of the word, or a theory. And it is a theory that has nothing to do with values. It's a category error to say that our values must somehow be based on what evolutionary theory describes. It's a category error to say that our values must be based on a description of a process. One could argue that claiming there are objective values becomes problematic for those who believe in a naturalistic realism. But there is nothing to say that valuing humans most highly and developing values from our natural instincts to care about our species more than others and to value our skills and abilities more than others contradicts evolutionary theory. In fact it is fairly predictable that we would. Wolves care about other wolves most.

The conclusion is logically inevitable: Not only Humanism cannot be deduced from evolution: there is no common ground of "evolution" on the one side and "humanism" on the other side; the two have no "interface", just the way an old mechanic typewriter and a computer are incompatible. Both are based on totally different principles. — Matias

But you don't have to deduce morality from Evolution. You can believe that evolution, some form of it, is the case. That in fact this process or set of processes is what led to the vast arracy of flora and fauna. The you can also have humanistic values. You just don't use evolution to justify them, which I don't see humanists doing. These same humanists could view humans as the most complicated life forms or use some other adjective and therefore value humans in ways they do not value other speciies. But saying you cannot deduce humanism from evolution is a bit like saying you can't deduce humanism form current theories on the life cycle of stars. You simply don't need to. Humanism is not contradicted by evolutionary theory.

"Evolution" means:
- a blind and purposeless process driven by variation plus selection plus reproduction;
- survival of the fittest ;
- the absence of morality (to be a predator or parasite is not reprehensible) ; — Matias

Evolution led to the development of morality, first in protomoralities in many animals, perhaps even fully morality in some of the higher mammals, and then in us.

You're quoting a non-existent sentence. Please take your medication. Bye. — Frotunes

it's a perfectly fair quoting of Matias...

"Evolution" means:
- a blind and purposeless process driven by variation plus selection plus reproduction;
- survival of the fittest ;
- the absence of morality (to be a predator or parasite is not reprehensible) ; — Matias

You're attempting to dismiss, discard, and/or discount truth. That will not go unchallenged. — creativesoul

Nope, I am not. I am looking at the specific model or definition of knowledge, JTB, and given the way it is used being critical of using the two adjectives justified and true. It is in that specfiic context, the way justification is used in contexts with JTB, that I think using true is problematic. There are other contexts where I have no problem with true and truth.

And you haven't challenged me. You have just told me I am wrong.

Who said anything about access to truth? — creativesoul

I did, in the post you responded to, first. Since you were not specific about what parts you disagreed with and that was one of the parts, I asked you about it.

In theater, it is called the suspension of disbelief.
Your comment is interesting from the point of view of how to chart the path of an individual psyche.
The experience of dreams plays a part.
In terms of proving one set of circumstances to be the case over another, dreams are arbitrary in a way that waking life is not. — Valentinus

Sure, it would be similar to dreams, but not the same. Similar in the sense that what seems like something other than us is not. More coherent as you point out, yes. I am not trying to say 'life is a dream', just using what purist non-solipsists might agree happens in dreams, as a potential eplanation for a facet of what might be happening if solipsism is the case. I am not a solipsist, but I still think it is less easily written off, so I hopped in with an argument.

In fact, I actually think that solipsism might be partially true. (not epistemological solipsism which is even tricker to counter) IOW perhaps it is both true that there is but a singel consciousness and that there are separate or partially separate consciousnesses. Though this is not someting I can demonstrate.

Rhetorical drivel based upon a gross misunderstanding of truth and the irrevocable role that it plays in all thought/belief and statements thereof, including your own — creativesoul

It was polemic without much argument, yes. Fine. But you simply asserted

We have some access to what's happened and/or is happening. That's all we need(assuming a meaningful claim) to check if the claim is true(or not). — creativesoul

without explaining what this is, nor did you respond to the argument I made before that. Do you have anything but an assertion that I am wrong? Can you come down out of the clouds of abstraction, and explain what access to truth you mean, that would not be included in the category 'justification'? How do you divide up justification and access to truth? some specifics.

Popular line of thought, but false on several levels.

We have some access to what's happened and/or is happening. That's all we need(assuming a meaningful claim) to check if the claim is true(or not). — creativesoul

And all the stuff under that we have access to category you refer to is justification. It is not some other, different stuff, it is stuff that justifies our position. You are responding as if I am takign some kind of skeptical position or other. I am not. I am just saying that whatever we base our conclusions on is justification.

Our main evolutionary driver is our selfish gene. If you do not agree, then tell us what you think is driving us all to try to be the fittest of our species if not that selfish desire. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

There are a number of fairly common misundertandings of evolutionary theory in this. As I like Sushi pointed out you are confusing Dawkins metaphor about DNA and assuming this means we are selfish. But since we are social mammals, you simply cannot summarize us this way or say that selfishness drives us. In fact, if we assume that Dawkins was utterly correct, it means that people will act unselfishly in the extreme if they identify with others - because they will treat others they identify with as having similar genes. And since humans are able to identify over racial and even species boundaries this can lead to all sorts of compassion and selflessness. And that's if Dawkins is accepted as correct for using this metaphor. It is however controversial.

Then you use the phrase 'fittest of our species' and say that we are all driving towards being this. Well, 1) you would need to demonstrate that we are all driven towards this goal. I see a lot of couch potatoes and social media addicts out there who seem to counter this notion of 'all'. 2) fittest is an outdated metaphor and a non-Darwinian one, and more important a non-darwinian one. It is very hard to compare fitness, say between an amoeba and a fox or between a very individualistic A type person and a very family centered supportive type person. Species adapt or fit their environments and since these have all sorts of different kinds of niches using the word fittest is obviously confused. The same is true regarding the vast variety of niches intraspecies with humans.

Note how you glide from selfish gene to self desire, which is a category error. The gene may find, as it obviously did with social mammals, that sometimes what is best for the gene in terms of propagation is less selfishness. And hence social mammals care about their kids in ways reptiles do not. Compared to a wide range of species social mammals also are less selfish in relation to peers, check out komodo dragons, for example.

So you think that because Dawkins used the phrase self gene,this means we are selfish, which is confused on so many levels, it would take a rather long essay to go into.

My experience with you is that you are never wrong and cannot back down and yet also are, according to yourself, enlightened. That all seems very fragile to me.

Well, with the entire field of mathematics not being correspondence-theory "true", the "T" in JTB is simply too much of a problem. If math is knowledge, then JTB is wrong. It must be JB instead. — alcontali

And I think it should be JB. As an adjective 'true' is just silly. Justified we can work with. Best justified is also workable. But to add the adjective 'true' implies that it is both justified and true,w hen in fact all we have access to is the justification. We have no extra process where we can then go and determine whether it is true. OK, we can checked off justified or best justified, now let's see if we can check off true. If, for example, there is some obvious counterevidence, well that would weaken the justification. It would not longer be justied or well justified. Truth is for the Pope. And even he will then justify - well or not is another issue.

Indeed. Personally I have mostly encountered intellectually incurious realists, who believe they are right and everyone else is wrong, who ridicule and dismiss those who believe differently as cranks, adepts of pseudoscience, believers of supernatural bullshit, brain diseased, delusional, too stupid to see why they are wrong — leo

Another way to put this, less sociologically (lol), is to say that people seem to see an excluded middle between full belief and disbelief. There is no 'agnositicism'. Or to put it a different way: it lack of enough evidence is often conflated with disproof. And to come at it a further way there is the assumption. if you have good grounds to believe what you believe then you must be able to, now, convince the majority of scientists it is the case. IOW there can be no instance where your belief is valid where you cannot convince, say, all rational people. The history of rogue waves or animals as experiencers counter this idea, which is unfortunately generally merely assumed not stated.

Objectivity is a distinctively human trait, as only human beings have the capacity for objectivity. It involves the ability to shift perspective, and no one has ever attributed this to animals — Matias

Some of them can be aware of what other minds might be thinking. But setiing that aside, animals seem to me to manage to be objective about a lot of things. They certain manage to deal with the objective world in highly effective ways. They can make mistakes, a shadow is a predator, etc. But they are hardly purely subjective.

Truth and objectivity are not the same thing. — Matias

They are really in the same kind of category of concepts. Objectivity would be a state or an outlook or perhaps even an unfolding of the use of certain tools over time. Truth seems to me as more to do with propositions.

One can arrive at true theories in a non-objective way. Indeed, one can hit upon the truth purely at random. Conversely, objective theories are not necessarily true. — Matias

Yes.

Second, any attempt to assimilate objectivity and truth faces the difficulty that they behave in different ways. Note in particular that objectivity comes in degrees. One theory can be more objective than another, but a theory cannot be truer than another. — Matias

I don't think this is correct. Newtonians models were less true, ultimately, than Einstein's but they are still also quite true and are used for many things, given scale issues. They now know that ganglia are involved in intelligence and cognition also, not just neurons, but theories that put that all in terms of neurons are not completely false, they just were incomplete compared to current ones.

If you were correct then one could never improve a theory.

Yeah, basically "If solipsism is true, then only I exist or at least I can only know that I exist. But I don't believe this. So either solipsism isn't true or no one believes it, no one believes there's any good reason to entertain it, and so there's no reason to worry about it/waste any time on it." — Terrapin Station

Or the only person there is decided to forget for a while that he/she/it is all there is. And now parts of itself - like figures in a dream - are starting to remind him/her/it of the true ontology. A forgetting as play, or perhaps simply as a facet of this self's process. A neo-hinduism, say.

It is culture through which infants are socialized. — Izat So

And once the word social is applicable to an animal, there is culture. I don't know if bees are social. But the social mammals are. And if they are not raised in a way to learn what being a member of social group is, they will fail at it. They will lack the knowledge of cultural cues and tools.

If I was to follow that kind of logic I’d end up saying rocks are more natural than animals and plants. — I like sushi

Well, if you uncharitably took the line out of context. I meant as opposed to nurture. In the how much they behave in certain ways due to nature vs. nurture, they are more determined by nature, as it is distinguished from nurture in such discussions.

I pretty much agree with what you say. But there is an idea of the supernatural which posits or presupposes a transcendent reality, something ontologically more, and even more real, than what can be known via the senses. In the Western tradition this idea seems to begin with Pythagoras and Plato. — Janus

Sure, and ironically this includes mathematicians and physicists - not all of course, but some. I suppose it's not ironic about the mathematicians given Pythagorus, but that a significant minority of physicists are neo-platonists, in the hardest science (according to some), is .

I think it's in a way ironical that this idea of a transcendent reality is actually a kind of objective realism, although it is not an object for Plato it was the most real, beyond the "doxa" or ordinary opinions which impute reality to the shadows on the wall of the cave. — Janus

Yes, it is an objective realism, oddly reached as a conclusion deductively, at least by Plato.

Naturalism is focused on finding natural explanations for natural phenomena, Can you provide even one example of a supernatural explanation for any natural phenomenon that stand up to reasonable scrutiny, that we would have any reason at all to accept as true? Can anyone else on here think of any? — Janus

If you would consider a supernatural explanatoin had stood up to reasonable scrutiny then you would consider it a natural explanation. What I mean is that we stand here at this particular point in history where certain phenomena are considered natural and validated and others are not. If we go back in time a ways, one could have said that elephants were psychic. Natives and finally one Western scientists noticed patterns in the way they moved, even when separated, as if they could communicate over long, long distances. This was considered not real by most scientists and that the people in question were seeing patterns that were not there. Later it was discovered that they communicated via infrasound.

The word supernatural is misleading and a poor term, I think.

There are phenomena, which perhaps people are correct about or perhaps not. Should they be confirmed within science, then they are natural phenomena. If they remain undemonstrated, then they often get the label supernatural (by both sides) but they are simply undemonstrated, and obviously someone with no experience of the phenomenon or good reasons to think it is likely something other than what the beleive thinks, has no good reason to believe it is real. However this does not mean that others may not have excellent reasons for believing in the phenomenon and their interpretation of it.

What the causes are of this phenomenon are something that might come much later than confirmation that it is real.

If there are ghosts or psychic phenomena or deities or things that continue beyond death or whatever, then these are natural phenomena. Not something beyond nature - unless one means by nature some subset of the real, for some reason.

I think this word 'supernatural' just leads to more confusion.

Lions and wolves hunt the way they do, and porpoises herd fish the way they do, because it's encoded. — Bitter Crank

Without being socialized by adults animals like these would lack all sorts of social and even skill tools (behavioral patterns). They are not hardwired for everything. Much more than us, but not at all completely.