Yeah, there's not one universal defintion. That's why I said to use whatever common definition you prefer. My comments didn't hinge on a particular definition. It's just that I don't want to argue about definitions of personhood.

So, your belief as a noumenon rather than your belief as a phenomenon?

I wouldn't be sure how to make sense out of that. But I'm not much of a Kantian in general. I don't buy the phenomena/noumena distinction, really.

I appreciate that you wrote all of that, but you're not understanding the question I asked.

I was asking you a simple question about semantics with respect to sentence structure.

We can make two different queries:

(1) "Explain the nature of your belief that P"

(2) "Explain your belief that P"

The queries have the same sentential structure with the exception that the first one adds "the nature of."

What I'm asking you is what, semantically, does "in the nature of" change about the query? Is (1) really asking anything different than (2) is asking? (Or alternately, is "the nature of" kind of a verbal "engine revving"?)

By the way, my degrees are in philosophy and music theory/composition--so we have those two things in common.

So back to the OP, if nobody knows how does the Atheists account for those mysteries? — 3017amen

Depends on the atheist in question. They have all different sorts of views about this stuff.

Re "explaining the nature of their belief that a God doesn't exist," again, it's not clear to me what, if anything, the word "nature" is adding there. What's the difference between asking someone to "explain the nature of their belief that P" and "explain their belief that P"? (Not that it's clear what either are asking, by the way. But I suppose you're asking more or less for their justification for holding a belief.)

Note, by the way, that atheism isn't necessarily a belief.

When we mention something like that, instead of just functionally ignoring it, if you want people to think that a conversation is worthwhile, you should either make an adjustment for it ("Ah, okay, so it's not always a belief--let me be careful to not say that it is"), or you should argue against it, saying why you think that the idea that it's not always a belief is incorrect. "In my view it IS always a belief because . . . ."--you'd need to argue something like that.

I believe mathematics has an independent existence as apposed to a human invention or an Darwinion evolved trait. (Same with music theory. ) — 3017amen

You believe that music theory is something that we discover rather than invent?

Yes. The universe is orders of magnitude more complex in its order, therefore requiring a designer. Terrapin Station referred to a disanalogy between a watch and the universe but you spoke against that by alluding to complexity. — TheMadFool

Again, it has nothing to do with order or complexity, assuming there are plausible ways to quantify such things in the first place.

So look like each other = have similar genes? — Hallucinogen

The appearance factors in question are matters of genetic expression.

But what it takes to be a "person" is left undefined, and extremely vague. — Metaphysician Undercover

It wasn't left undefined. There are common definitions of personhood. I directed you towards some of them via the articles in question. I didn't forward a definition because I'm not interested in arguing about definitions. I said that you could use any common definition of it that you like.

When you say, "something is present," do you have in mind that it must be a thing in the world, something extended, something finite and measurable? Must it have location? — petrichor

No.

If you think that something can be present that's not in the world, that's not extended, that doesn't have a location, etc., then it's up to you to try to make sense of those notions. Again, simply saying it's not such and such won't cut it. You need to explain properties whatever you're proposing would actually have if we're to make any sense of it.

Can there be actualities, realities, truths, and so on, that aren't things in this sense? — petrichor

I don't want to suggest that I'd be using "thing" in some technical sense. "X exists" is met by you saying that there are whatevers. And then if you want to posit something that doesn't have any location, etc., again, it's up to you to try to make some sense of that and to not just list ontological properties that what you're proposing does not have.

Consider that some physicists are working with new ideas in the pursuit of quantum gravity where time and space and matter all emerge from an even more fundamental level. Would that more fundamental, non-extended, non-temporal reality be something that "exists" in the sense you are talking about? — petrichor

If there is a "more fundamental level" for space and matter to emerge from, sure. Again, it would just be a matter of whether we can really make sense of the idea.

What about that which grounds physical reality? — petrichor

You'd need to explain, for one, why there would (need to) be something that "grounds" physical reality, and then if you're saying it's not physical, you'd need to try to make sense out of what you're saying the whatever would be.

It cannot itself be physical in the sense of being a measurable state of affairs inside the world. — petrichor

I didn't say anything about a measurement requirement, by the way.

This is already a bunch of different issues to discuss. I don't want to keep adding to them. We could get back to the rest later.

I don't have an answer for mathematical abstracts. And neither do you or anyone else. — 3017amen

I don't know what you're responding to there.

Why?

First, what does it mean exactly for something to exist? And what does it mean exactly for something to be physical? — petrichor

Re existing, the idea is simply that something is present, it occurs, it obtains, it's instantiated, etc. If we say "There is a such and such" we're saying that the such and such exists.

Re physical, on my view it refers to material/substance (in the matter sense), and (dynamic) relations of that material.--Or we could say matter, relations and processes.

Re why, the idea of them literally makes no sense. No one can ever even relay what nonphysical whatevers are supposed to be--what any properties of them are supposed to be, for example. All anyone does is say what they're not, but the list of things that they're not doesn't leave anything conceivable for them to be.

1.Mathematical abstracts. Why do we have two ways or this dual capacity for knowing the world? Consider falling objects, we avoid them through our cognitive/perceptive abilities. One does not calculate the laws of gravity in order to avoid falling objects to survive in the jungle do they? What survival value does math hold? In Darwinism, there is no reason to believe that the second method springs from a refinement of the first. The former does have a biological need, the latter has no biological significance at all. — 3017amen

So obviously you do not agree that traits can arise evolutionarily if there's no survival advantage to them or need for them. But you never explicitly said that you do not agree with that and you never explained why you disagree.

I've never seen the scientific evidence for this, I hear it often but I'm sure it's a myth. — Hallucinogen

All that you'd need to do is look at people.

The logical dilemma is that you can't forward an idea of "race" that's accurate about what people and their genetic traits are like with the idea being coherent, because people considered the same "race" are at least as varied with respect to each other as people of different "races." So the idea has to rest on inaccurate stereotypes about the traits in question.

You asked what aesthetics is, and then proceeded to talk about the concept of beauty. I was just clarifying, due to the thread title, that aesthetics is conventionally thought of as "philosophy of art" now (and that's been the case for a long time). It's not "philosophy of beauty," even though there was a tradition of seeing beauty as at least being one of the more important questions in aesthetics.

"Beauty" on my view, and being brief for the moment, because I have to run out, is a term for attraction, non-romantic in the aesthetic case, where on the extreme end of a continuum, the beautiful thing is seen as an ideal exemplar of its type. (Like an ideal exemplar of a mountain, or a symphony, or whatever it might be.)

Re "priceless"--it's a term for something that not only has an extraordinary amount of value to someone--including but not limited to monetary value, but that is irreplaceable. It's a one of a kind, usually that couldn't be reasonably replicated for various reasons. (Including provenance and the significance of the same, including practically, etc.)

That's the whole idea. As I wrote to NOS4A2 above:

"Also with the standard 'race' characteristics of skin color, hair type, nose shape, eye color. There's a huge amount of variation within a supposed 'race' on those characteristics. The idea of 'race' relies on ridiculous, caricatured stereotypes when it comes to that stuff."

There are tendencies and trends that a population to have, is accounting for that why you say “mostly” hogwash/nonsense? — DingoJones

Just avoiding objections from a strict literalist reading. For example, obviously women can do things associated with giving birth that men can not do.

And so my existential argument is, you have to define the nature of belief. — 3017amen

Is "defining the nature of belief" asking for something different than "defining belief"? If so, what's the difference?

I even think the idea that different biological sexes have significant dispositional and ability differences is mostly hogwash.

It's indicative of the tendency that people have to categorize and divide, but where it's just a bunch of nonsense. It's like when people make statements about Americans, or the French, or New Yorkers versus San Franciscans, or Yankees fans versus Cardinals fans, or anything like that--as if the fact that someone lives in America rather than France is going to tell you important things about their personality, their views, etc. It's a bunch of nonsense.

We even see it here in threads like that current one about atheism, where there are repeated attempts to paint all atheists with the same brush, merely by virtue of the fact that they're atheists.

The reason we make these gaffes is understandable--it's a relic of the necessity of thinking about things as kinds/types, because otherwise there's just too much information to have to parse on every new occasion, but we should also be able to easily see, on an intellectual level, just how stupid it is to suppose that all Americans, all French, etc. are the same in important respects, and different from each some important respects, where we're claiming that such things are simply correlated to being from America, from France (or being a Yankees fan, etc.)

Aside from the fact that if you go back far enough, we all apparently come from the same place, from the same general population (circa eastern (although by some accounts southern) Africa about 3 million years ago), as humankind spread out geographically and had a chance to diverge genetically, folks kept exploring and interacting (whether in a friendly manner or not) and being horndogs, so that any divergent genetics wound up back in a melting pot. The idea that genetics diverged and stayed "pure" in their divergence over time as we continued to spread out geographically is a bunch of hogwash.

Also with the standard "race" characteristics of skin color, hair type, nose shape, eye color. There's a huge amount of variation within a supposed "race" on those characteristics. The idea of "race" relies on ridiculous, caricatured stereotypes when it comes to that stuff.

Why are you attempting to make a definition that ignores Physical distinctions? — DingoJones

So as I explained above, for one, in particular supposed "racial" categories, there's actually a very wide degree of variation among members in the supposed physical characteristics. Those differences are due to genetic differences.

And two, just like there is a far wider range or variety than the idea has it within a particular supposed "racial" group, there's also far more similarity between members of "different racial groups" with respect to those characteristics than the popular notion has it, and often those similarities are due to genetic connections.

The genetic map of humankind is extremely complex and it in no way coherently divides into "races" (even if we buy the idea of natural kinds, which is a necessary ontological idea to buy for the idea to make sense in the first place).

What I'm saying here isn't at all controversial in the biological sciences, by the way. People used to pay attention to it generally, but once the new racial narratives started taking over, which seemed to get launched around the early 1990s, folks started ignoring the fact that the biological sciences say that the idea of race doesn't make sense.

Again, per the definition I gave this is an attempt to categorize things this way where we ignore/are ignorant of a bunch of stuff that makes the attempt not make much sense.

It's not that genetics aren't real or that they don't result in any sort of appearance differences. It's that that doesn't at all map to the nonsense of "races."

My concern is that you haven't provided what your 'system of belief' consists of. — 3017amen

Then frame the discussion that way. If you frame it as a discussion about atheism, and you characterize that as being a "system of belief," you're mostly going to get comments correcting you re the conventional definition of atheism, which has nothing to do with a "system of belief."

I wouldn't say that I have a system of belief, but my disposition tends to be somewhere in between logical positivism (it's just not that too strictly--I disagree with their approach on a number of things--it would take a lot to explain my relationship and resemblance to it, but nevertheless, I have similarities to it) and pragmatism. I'm relativist, and with lots of skepticism and a strong dislike of "over(re)acting" or sensationalism as well as absolutist/universalist-sounding claims. That's maybe the best nutshell version I could give without a lot of work.

All you've said is 'God is incoherent' but could not explain why, — 3017amen

I don't know if this is referring to something other than my comments, but I said that the idea of nonphysical existents is incoherent on my view (nonphysical existents are different than god, but on most conventional accounts of god, required for there to be a god). I didn't explain that further than that. But no one asked me to explain it further than that, either. Generally, my policy is to not type too much unless someone is really interested in it--and is able to have what I consider a good faith, "remaining curious" back and forth discussion about it, because otherwise it just seems like I'm wasting my time.

In my case, I choose to believe in God through logical inference from the science's (cognitive and physical). The gap is the leap of Faith. — 3017amen

I don't know what the inference is that you're making though. It seems like you're simply forwarding the old God of the Gaps argument, which has been pointed out to you by others.

In other words, it seems like you're saying:

(a) Phenomena x occur
(b) I consider phenomena x inexplicable/mysterious
(c) Therefore I'm going to say that "God did it."

I still don't understand the distinction you're looking for. You're obviously not seriously suggesting that there aren't any deontologists, that no one is a utilitarian... That would be absurd. So what is the distinction you're trying to make between people who have read, say, Kant, and try to follow his method, and people who have read, say, the Bible, and try to follow its methods? — Isaac

I missed the first part of this discussion, but in service of some reading comprehension help :blush: he's asking for a philosophical ethics text that has had anywhere near the cultural impact on ethics--the ubiquity, pervasiveness, etc. of the Bible or Quran. (Why he's asking for that I don't know--I didn't read that part.)

If we leave out all of the detail, yes, but it's where there's supposed to be a significant genetic connection, and it's where we're brushing over differences among members in group A, brushing over similarities between members of group B and member of group A (re skin color, etc.), and ignoring the complex genetic interconnections there actually are between group B and A.

But I really got a glimpse to religion and how the religious think gradually over twenty or forty years. It is a complex system, belief, or can be; and it can be as complex or as simplex as the believer wants it to be. — god must be atheist

Definitely, but I've always had the impression that the complexity was a factor of smart people who had been indoctrinated with religious beliefs as a kid--so that they couldn't exactly just drop the beliefs on a emotional level--realizing that they need to try to figure out some way to make something that's pretty obviously ridiculous seem not-so-ridiculous instead. That's why you get ideas like, "Yeah, it's not a big boogie man in the sky, it's an 'organizing force'" and so on.

How do you define race? — DingoJones

I never constructed a definition of it before, and I'd have to search for one I agree with, but I'd say that it's something like, "An attempt to categorize humans by genetic connections where:
(a) there's a focus on extremely superficial characteristics,
(b) there's a lot of brushing aside of the many variations of those superficial characteristics among members of the same gerrymandered categories in question,
(c) there's a lot of brushing aside of similar superficial characteristics among members of different gerrymandered categories, and
(d) there's a lot of ignorance about the actual complex genetic connections between people all around the world (where the facts that we apparently all initially stem from a relatively small population in a single geographical area and the subsequently scattered offshoot populations have regularly, complexly interbred with each other are more or less ignored, in the context of a lot of genetic ignorance in general)."

Forgive me again but this is how I see your logic: — 3017amen

We're all over the map here. Re this:

"No. This is such a basic and simple thing to understand. Atheism isn't anything like an ideology, a body of theory, a school of thought. It's only a term for one simple thing: the absence of a belief in gods."

That's not a matter of logic, or an argument for anything. It's reporting a conventional definition to you, because you seem to not understand the conventional definition.

Are you sure? — 3017amen

Am I sure that this was already corrected for you many times? Yes.

Atheism has nothing to do with that issue.

OK, what defines "a person"? Is a beaver a person, or a bird a person? Is a rock a person? — Metaphysician Undercover

As someone interested in philosophy, this is a good thing for you to think about, as it has long been seen as an important ontological issue that's often very contentious. It's as important as asking, say, "What is/what is to count as justification?" in epistemology.

My comments above do not hinge on a particular definition of personhood, so I don't want to sidetrack things by arguing about that. Any commonly proposed definition you like (with an emphasis on "commonly proposed") would be fine to use. But of course, we have to be familiar with the personhood issue in philosophy to be familiar with commonly proposed definitions.

Here's a bit of background courtesy of two of the most commonly cited sources. It's worth reading the two articles in full (SEP: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/ ) (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personhood)

==========================================================================
SEP: "What is it to be a person, as opposed to a nonperson? What have we people got that nonpeople haven’t got? More specifically, we can ask at what point in our development from a fertilized egg there comes to be a person, or what it would take for a chimpanzee or a Martian or an electronic computer to be a person, if they could ever be. An ideal account of personhood would be a definition of the word person, taking the form ‘Necessarily, x is a person at time t if and only if … x … t …’, with the blanks appropriately filled in. The most common answer is that to be a person at a time is to have certain special mental properties then (e.g. Baker 2000: ch. 3). Others propose a less direct connection between personhood and mental properties: for example that to be a person is be capable of acquiring those properties (Chisholm 1976: 136f.), or to belong to a kind whose members typically have them when healthy and mature (Wiggins 1980: ch. 6)."

Wikipedia: "Personhood is the status of being a person. Defining personhood is a controversial topic in philosophy and law and is closely tied with legal and political concepts of citizenship, equality, and liberty. According to law, only a natural person or legal personality has rights, protections, privileges, responsibilities, and legal liability.[1]

Personhood continues to be a topic of international debate and has been questioned critically during the abolition of human and nonhuman slavery, in theology, in debates about abortion and in fetal rights and/or reproductive rights, in animal rights activism, in theology and ontology, in ethical theory, and in debates about corporate personhood and the beginning of human personhood.[2]
==========================================================================

I hate to do this when you're being friendly (which I'm grateful for--seriously), but I wouldn't say that really understood what I wrote (so even though I was hesitant to point this out, I think it's important because you think the comments are sourced in the mere fact of disagreement).

I wasn't saying that atheism implies no interest in gods or deities. So "If you are atheist you have no interest in gods or deities" isn't necessarily the case, and that's not what I wrote, it's not what I was saying.

Particular atheists might have no interest in gods or deities, but plenty do. The ones who do have an interest have just reached the conclusion that there are no such things as gods, or they at least lack a belief in gods.

Aesthetics is actually largely seen as philosophy of art. "What is beauty" is a traditional question under aesthetics, but a shit-ton of aesthetics has nothing at all to do with that question, and one can easily work one's entire career as a philosopher with aesthetics as one's area of concentration without ever addressing the idea of beauty.

If you look at some recent articles in aesthetics journals, you'll find things such as:

• "Authenticity, Misunderstanding, and Institutional Responsibility in Contemporary Art"
• "Metaphor-Proof Expressions: A Dimensional Account of the Metaphorical Uninterpretability of Aesthetic Terms"
• "Choose Your Own Adventure: Examining the Fictional Content of Video Games as Interactive Fictions"
• "Sad Songs Say So Much: The Paradoxical Pleasures of Sad Music"

Saying that aesthetics is "philosophy of beauty" is a lot like saying that philosophy is "love of wisdom." There are perspectives from which it makes sense to say both, but they're pretty specific, limited perspectives that don't tell you very much about the activities we actually do as philosophy or aesthetics.

Feel free to check out Ibram X. Kendi's excellent book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, if you doubt the historicity of racism — Maw

I thought we might be able to discuss some of this stuff on this discussion board. Does that book define racial "constructionism" and explain the epistemological aspects of asserting it? That's what I was interested in.

I just checked on Amazon, by the way, using the "Look Inside" feature, and I searched in the book for the word "constructionism." Zero hits. So how would that answer the questions I asked?

This I find rather odd. To have pride because someone roots for a particular set of complete strangers to him to win a game. — god must be atheist

With sports, it's similar to, though not exactly the same as, national pride. People often have pride in their country where, with respect to what their pride is focused on, they didn't do any of that stuff personally. National pride might be about the country's history, its accomplishments in terms of what various citizens have done, its laws, it might be about what's considered to be the country's "attitude" where the person with pride in it doesn't really have that attitude themselves, etc.

With sports, fans tend to identify with the teams they support. They say, "We won!" "We just signed Jones!" "We've got a long road trip starting next week," etc. Fans see themselves as part of the team's organization (and to some extent, the team would probably agree, because without the fans, especially the ones who go to games, the teams wouldn't exist).

How could you ever get info that you're wrong though? If, being created by design required , by definition, that the thing be created by a human being, — Metaphysician Undercover

Not by a human being. What I wrote is "I'm using the sense of 'natural' where it's distinct from 'made by a person.'" I chose those words carefully. "Person" is broader than "human." There can be persons of different species, or even "supernatural" types of persons, if there were to be such things.

We learn that we're wrong, when we are, via an investigation into the object in question. Again, we're not simply in the dark when it comes to scientific, forensic, etc. investigations. We can formulate hypotheses and then discover that our assumptions were wrong. The butler didn't kill Mr. Jones, the cook did, for example. We can discover such things via systematic investigations.

Traditionally, agnosticism is a positive belief that knowledge about the existence of gods isn't possible, or at least isn't practically attainable for some reason.

Colloquially, agnosticism often is parsed as the "shrugging one's shoulders"/"I dunno" option.

, I dont understand why they still try to engage you and participate in this thread. Oh well, I guess people are that bored. — Harry Hindu

I consider myself an "irrational optimist." I keep, irrationally, having hope that he'll suddenly start having a worthwhile good faith conversation about this stuff.

2. Terrapin Station, although certainly not an expert in atheism, said that his atheism is, and I quote " belief". — 3017amen

There is "positive" and "negative" atheism.

Negative atheists simply lack a belief in gods.

Positive atheists have a belief that there are no gods (and therefore also lack a belief in gods).