I think that Kant is the greatest epistemologist ever to have set foot on this earth. I also consider him to be the first epistemologist to have made real progress after Plato and Aristotle. As far as I am concerned, after him, there are only Karl Popper and Edmund Gettier to have contributed meaningfully. Epistemology is a field with very few names to mention. There have been lots of philosophers but only a handful of them have managed to do something meaningful in epistemology.
5 hours ago — alcontali

This is a very neat description of your admiration for Kant. However, your post did not take anything away from my criticism of his finding that pure reason must be lingual only.

You are a puppet of the traditional dogmatic Kant-cult. You can't come up with a single argument against a simple argument that single-handedly destroys his thesis. Yet you worship him. Typical cultism. No reasonable argument can daunt your devotion to him.

Why?

Things outside of time do not have a temporal start or end, they are not created or destroyed, they just ARE. — Devans99

If they are outside of time, they can't interfere with temporal events. So they can't create anything.

If they can create things in temporal world, then they are not outside of time.

You are self-contradicting. You are really, but really trying to prove something that is not so.

- you tried to deny infinity
- you tried to prove the existence of god
- you tried to prove that creation happened

And all you achieve is an endless argumenting with those fools who deem you worthy of replying to you.

I don't think that we can just assume determinism though. At least not in a "proof." — Terrapin Station

Why not? There is nothing that happens without a cause. Every cause has an effect. Do you doubt either statements?

Show me a cause that has no effect and show me an event that had not been caused. Please. Then I'll abandon determinism.

There are also quite a few other arguments that the universe cannot have existed ‘forever’:
— Devans99

What's the alternative?
9 hours ago — Brett

a system’s initial state determines all subsequent states. 'Forever' has no initial state so is impossible.
— Devans99

So, there is no such thing as forever, because it doesn’t have an initial state. And if it did it wouldn’t be forever. — Brett

You (meaning "god must be atheist" by "you") don’t read very carefully. The above statement I made was confirming to Devans99 what I believed he was saying. I’m not pushing any argument. As I said I’m just exploring ideas. — Brett

Look Brett, you are starting to irritate me. You did not even with one word indicate that you are just affirming what had been said by your alleged alter-ego and indeed there is no agreement by you. So please don't smear on me that I don't understand what I read. I read you very well, and it is your ineptitude if you can't make a difference for your readers between what is your opinion and what is an opinion someone else said and which you only repeat.

Either you are intentionally misleading with your posts, or else you are moving the goalposts, or else you are in ineffectual writer.

Please don't blame me for any of the above.

a system’s initial state determines all subsequent states. — Devans99

Yes, that is true, but initial state does not have to be a start state. It could be any point in a continuing series of states. If today's state is taken, then we could deterministically calculate the state as of tomorrow, AND still have a state preceding today's state, such as yesterday, last year, ten billiion years ago, any time ago.

Your deterministic approach does not exclude and infinite chain of states predicating other states. Initial, that is, starting time is NOT a necessary feature of determinism.

Firstly, Immanuel Kant pointed out in his Critique of Pure Reason that the practice of solving visual puzzles, as in Euclid's Elements, could not possible be considered pure reason, because it rests on fiddling with visual input, while pure reason must be language only, entirely devoid of sensory input. — alcontali

I don't find any reason to accept that pure reason must be ONLY language-based.

After all, language is a symbolic medium, and it could not exist without a basis of visual and other sensory input. Without senses a person could not learn to speak.

Kant was a ninnie. I've been harping that forever, but nobody pays me any attention. Instead, they turn to me and say, "how can you say that? BLASPHERMER!" Whereas all you have to do is read what Kant wrote, think about it for five minutes and you realize that the bloke was full of false views.

I think Brett and Devans99 is the one and the same person. Their dialogue in the beginning was suspciously directed.

Everyone needs a person to support him or her in his or her going agaisnt the flow, otherwise the person loses heart. If no such support can be found, one can manufactue one. On the forums at least. I've seen it happen over and over again.

My post here is neither here nor there as far as the argument is concerned. This post of mine is outside of the argument, and does not apply to it. I am fully aware of that.

there is no such thing as forever, because it doesn’t have an initial state. — Brett

You deny the existence of something that has been forever, ONLY on the premise that everything must have an initial state. But something that has been forever, does not have an initial state. To not be able to internalize how that is possible is plain limitation in insight.

We can imagine as a thought experiment an eternal god.. etc — Devans99

Right there is the crux of your fallacious reasoning. For you everthing starts with god. In another attempt you failed to prove god existed. Now you try to prove that creation happened.

You are a very smart arguer, but you have very serious shortcomings (as reflected by your theories) in your qualification as a theorist or philosopher.

How do you imagine an eternal god? BECAUSE WHATEVER YOU DO, YOU CAN'T GO BEYOND IMAGINATION WHEN YOU TALK ABOUT AN ALLEGED GOD. THERE ARE NO REAL OBSERVATIONS TO ESTABLISH WHAT AN ALLEGED GOD IS LIKE.

Has your god eight legs and seventy-seven heads? Or what? You are too small to imagine an eternal god, and I am too biassed against god-beliefs to even start. So how is your proof going to work? What specifications does your eternal god have that you KNOW it has, not what you speculate it has or what you speculate it must have? Please don't answer this, this is a rhetorical question. Meaning, that you can give any attribute to an imaginary figure, and if you believe that's true, then you are not a philosopher, but a religious person. And religion is the single biggest obstacle to philosophical thinking.

In addition to what you said, not to argue; also the US has put its cultural footprint on the world. Hollywood movies everywhere. I go on Hungarian websites, and they speak of Hollywood celebs in the same vein as the American media. I often wonder... who in Hungary cares about Whitney Houston's melanoma, or Carl Cristofferson's third adopted baby?

The distance between the Sphinx and the nearest McDonald's restaurant is 200 yards, in Kiev you'll hear nothing on the radio but American pop songs, and in Bulga-Torogov, Mongolia, people go nuts over Chicklets.

For culure's sake, and I support that for only that very one reason, I applaud the fundamental Muslim countries for sticking to their thousand-year-old traditions and not budging from them. Most other cultures sold out for the almighty Buck.

I think one should live authentically. Whether you are religious, spiritual, or philosophical.
— Corra

What does that mean? — Marchesk

It means, "stay real and keep to the core".

It may also equally mean (since philosophy is free from the gags and binds of science), philosophically speaking, "whatever."

It may also mean, that Corra never heard of secularity or of atheism. Or of Marxism-Leninism.

My posts keep getting deleted, why? I’m not swearing or insulting anyone. — aRealidealist

Perfect definition of philosophy.

But there is a wider American culture, and more narrow ones — Bitter Crank

Absolutely. America is a culturally diverse country. Its culture(s) have been shaped by immigration, landscape/geography/weather, history, tradition, discrimination, technology and a wide diversity of economical lot in life.

The culture that keeps the nation coherent are a dedication to worshipping hard work, the dollar/wealth, Christianity and libertarianism/ ultra right wing internal affairs.

To wit, Americans: your Democrats, considered too liberal and left-wing, run on a platform that in any other country in the world is considered ultra-right wing.

I know what Hindu culture is, what Russian culture is, what Sino-Japanese culture is. I don't know them in depth but I know they exist and are unique.

But you did not say American culture. You said the broad American cultutre.

Everyone around here gets worked up so bitterly, everyone is a bit cranky around here.

How familiar are you with the broad American culture??? — Bitter Crank

I did not know that there existed a woman with the name American Culture. Is she on this website? I searched the membership list, she ain't there. Is she a close relative of Africa, of Asia, and / or of Moon Unit Nine?

Let me introduce a new concept to the problem: it is not only the grains of sand in the heap that makes or breaks a heap, but the shape of the mass of grains. You can have 100,000 grains, all flat, on a flat surface, and they don't form a heap. And you can have 5000 grains in a cone shape, and they will form a heap.

So numbers alone is not the deciding factor in heapness or non-heapness of a quantity of grains; their shape is, too.

Therefore I suggest that we focus our attention on the duality of the relationship between grains of sand a heapness: on one hand, it's the shape, on the other hand, it's the number of grains.

And therefore I say unto you, my dear fellow travellers, that the minimum-four-grain heap opinion I offered early in this discussion is the right one: it is not any number (greater than three) that is the only plug-in variable, but the shape as well.

"You have to draw the line somewhere" is itself the problem. When you don't have a common measure, just how are you going to draw the line somewhere? You simply need that common measure to draw the line somewhere. This is similar to ↪god must be atheist where just assumes Calculus, but forgets what it means not having a common measure — ssu

Actually, the fallacy is created by you, SSU, when you declare there is no common measure. The grains are the common measure. You just very conveniently lean on this concept, and keep hammering it in, but it is not applicable to this problem.

The issue won't transmit so easily, because notice the definition of incommensurability: two or more quantities having no common measure. — ssu

This actually does not apply to this problem. Having no common measure does not apply. Because both the heap and the non-heap comprise grains of sand(, or grains of grain, whatever).

Grains are the common measure to both. One grain, two grains,... n grains, n+1 grains, etc.

Both the heap and the non heap have an n, lets call them nn for no-heap n and hn, for heap-n.

It's as wrong as to try to put infinity, as a number, or an infinitesimal, as a number, on the number line. You simply cannot do it. And thus people don't regard either as numbers. Yet both are extremely useful in mathematics, so there isn't anything wrong with them. — ssu

If it's wrong, it's wrong. It's as wrong as any other wrong. You are giving me another example of wrong, which you think my solution was, without your touching my solution and saying what's wrong with it.

You said two things about my solution:
1. I don't understand incomm... whatever. That is true. Maybe I understand the concept, but not the word you used to name it.
2. My solution is as wrong as something else that is also wrong.

How do these two claims prove that my solution was wrong? They do not. At all.

This again is a fallacy here, because you simply deny the existence of incommensurability. Think about it: if you have a heap of sand and a mountain of sand, what then is the middle, really? It would be something like "an amount more than a heap and less than a mountain". Is that useful? Likely not, and still you don't have any idea when a heap turns into 'more than a heap and less than a mountain'. The laws you refer to don't really solve the issue at all. — ssu

This is not the actual problem. You re-worded them to suit your model. That is not fair.

This again is a fallacy here, because you simply deny the existence of incommensurability. — ssu

This is true. I deny the existence of any word that I can't pronounce. And "incommensurability" is one of them.

Also God might have morally justified reasons for these actions that your limited, fallible, finite mind doesn't have access to. — GodlessGirl

The "God might have a reason you don't understand" fallacy. Good to use when god is self-contradictory. There is no argument against it; but it itself is a nonsequiteur. It means nothing, it has no punch, no reasoning, no logic behind it. This fallacious argument has only a goodwill toward a faith which can't be supported by other means but the same faith.

In order to talk about mathematical functions, you do need the number system and arithmetic to calculate functions. With heaps it isn't so! — ssu

That's the beauty in Calculus. You can describe incredibly complex relationships without using numbers, or many numbers.

In fact, the first fundamental law of Calculus only uses 2 to find the midpoint between two values. But it does not go beyond that in any more ways of using numbers.

And it applies to ALL continuous functions! You know how many of those there are between two points? Quite a few. An infinite number of them, actually.

So to interpret it to the common man's world: Between a heap and a non-heap there are many gradations, and at one point a gradation will be a step between a heap and a non-heap.

If you insist it's a perceptual (by human perception by the observer person) decision, then the heapness is regulated by perception, yielding possibly many different results, when you take a large number of humans each to say "WAIT! Taking away this grain of sand made the heap into a non-heap."

IN this case, the fundamental law of Calculus applies, but it yields a (possibly) different value of number of sand from human to human.

That's how you just get to the paradox: you are insisting that an exact number of sand grains determines what a heap of sand is. — ssu

Well, to insist we must. Because this follows from the first fundamental law of Calculus (sorta). If there are two points on a function, f(A) and f(B), such that f(A) < f(B), and f is a continuous function between A and B, then there must be such a point x where x is between A and B, and f(x) is between f(A) and f(B) and f(x) = (f(A) + f(b))/2.

Therefore if we call f(A) a heap, and f(B) a non-heap, both a function of number of grains of sand, then there must be a x which falls between A and B, and f(x) is between f(A) and f(B).

In science, many such paradices are resolved by what they call in scientific writing "working definition".

Where a useful, real-life definition is impossible to find, the scientist creates a working definition, WD. In the case of the heap, the WD may say: "We shall consider any haphazardly thrown together comparatively identical objects a HEAP if hit has 100 or more elements, and a NON-HEAP if it has fewer than 100 elements."

Similar WDs exist all over the place. You want to, say, gather a bunch of people and test their behaviour on hunger. How do you define a hungry person? A person who feels hungry? A lean person? A scientists will have to come up with a WD, since common language and thought is fuzzy or unclear on what constitutes a hungry person. So the WD may say "a person is hungry if he hasn't eaten in four hours or mre; and a person is not hungry if he has eaten within the past hour hours." This definition may not even cover the ultimate truth, that is, picking people who feel hungry; but it is a working definition inasmuch it is qualtitative enough to select people without hesitation or doubt.

I can’t help think the negative reaction today towards Christianity is a reaction of logic towards a threat to its hegemony. — Brett

This is very true. Reasonable people don't like stupidity. Christian dogma, like every religion's dogma, is so contrary to reason, logic, and common sense, that reasonable people are scratching their heads on the doggone stubbornness of the religious to stick with their dogma in this day and age.

It's hard to say whether logical, reasonable, smart people of common sense are threatened by Christianity (and by other religions) or are just vexed by it, due to religion's irritating dogma, and due to the irritating religious who won't budge from their erroneous thoughts.

At any rate, reason, logic, common sense is no weapon against the dogmatic religious. They simply ignore it.

How does your wariness of logic (and of common sense, reason, intelligence) fit into this picture?

For me? Frankly, I value intelligent people, and it follows without any effort to believe the non-religious scientific viewpoints and opinions much more readily than religious dogma for me. To me logic is not seductive, but a matter of fact, it is the only thing to decide debate with. If you appeal to emotions, in philosophical debates, you are committing the fallacy of Ad Hominem. I like all this, I think it's neat and great.

Not to misconstrue that I don't feel and live the power of emotion. It is a great source of feeling life itself; it is a thing that can make you feel happy, and also sad, along with all the other myriads of feelings, which enrich human life.

But on philosophy forums, and in intelligent debate, I only value logic.

"Ask not what America can do for Russia; ask, instead, what Russia can do for America."

We’re impressed by the logic and convinced how right we are by our mastery of logic. — Brett

I don't want to put words in your mouth. You said you distrust logic, because it flatters you; so you distrust things that make you feel good? Or is it only logic, the one thing of many that makes you feel good, that you distrust? for instance, you trust your chocolate cheese cake, you trust your lover, you trust your children, they all make you feel good, (I'm assuming that... substitute anything else that makes you feel good) but some, including logic, you are distrustful of.

What is it between logic and something you enjoy and trust, that makes you distrust logic? If you enjoy both of them, like you would enjoy a remark about yourself that makes you feel good, what is the inherent thing in logic that makes you distrust it?

And you said you don't ALWAYS distrust it, but sometimes.

Hm?

So perhaps you don't like flattery? You don't like to hear good things about yourself, said by others?

"1. Is revenge a hopeless path to follow, and if so, 2. what will become of someone who is unable to carry out the act?" — Etzsche

Thanks for clarifying this.

1. Revenge is not a hopeless path to follow if you are willing to put up with the consequences.
2. S/he will for all the rest of his / her life be doomed with sometimes debilitatingly strong feelings of anger, frustration and heavy guilt.

Good luck in your future endeavours.

↪god must be atheist
This is a shift that logic and reason can't bridge.
— god must be atheist

In that case, maybe logic and reason is sometimes looked too highly upon. — Etzsche

If you want something to rule over reason and logic, then let it. I encourage you to do that.

I tend to agree. Sometimes I feel a nagging distrust of logic. — Brett

What is the reason for you to feel this nagging?

If you elevate your own emotions to be supreme, which you just did, you had better obey them. But you don't obey them because you are afraid of the law. So what do you want us to do? Change the law for you? Or what? You ask this impossible, whining, unanswerable question, and when you get a reply that makes sense, you dismiss it because you prefer to wallow in your own self-pity of being impotent (not sexually, I presume) in getting justice.

Well, either pee, or get off the pot. If you ask us to find a solution for you, without the specifics of the problem, you are asking us a favour we can't fulfill. We gave our best shots to explain to you why you could do this but could not do that, but ultimately it is a course of action that you have to take, so you have to decide whether to take a course of action, and which one of the many available.

We can't do it for you. We can give you emotional and moral support, we can give you legal advice (such as it is), we can give you reasoned opinions, but you prefer to whine about the fact that you are too much of a coward to carry out justice. Because this is essentially what you do.

So, like I said, pee or get off the pot. Enough has been said to enable you now to make a decision. So make it, please. Do not wait. Do not procrastinate. Do not try to hang an imaginary and unreasonable guilt for your own grief on society.

As a human being are we supposed to just let this one slide under the rug? — Etzsche

Without specifics even God could not answer your question. You made a legal problem into an ethics question. This is a shift that logic and reason can't bridge.

Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap, and brain power is at its most expensive.

Most maths that drain brain-cells can cost up to $302,595 per hour. This figure involves not only the pay to the actuary / mathematician, but the cost of training and the cost to society as well.

This figure goes up and down, depending on the current demand on math knowledge, and computer program sophistication.

While revenge is a form of justice, most of the time the average person isn't at liberty to carry out justice as they please. {edited for logical correctness.} — Etzsche

There is a reason for that, a deep and satisfying reason. A lot of the time (not most o the time; in a tiny fraction of instances, but it is grave and horrible when it happens) the courts find a person guilty who had not commit the crime he or she is charged with. In other words, the police investigation and the court proceedings produce the wrong result. But it is a very small percentage of guilty verdicts.

On the other hand, personal revenge is often misdirected. If we, as a society, allowed personal revenge to take place, much more not guilty people would suffer unjust punishment than now.

You see, the private person who carries out revenge does not always reliably know who the guilty party is. He or she may have strong suspicions, but they will still be wrong in selecting the person as guilty.

The courts have a more reliable and fool-proof way of selecting the treu perpetrator than any single human being. Except for Detective Inspector Hector Poirot, of course.

While justice is a form of revenge, most of the time the average person isn't at liberty to carry out justice as they please. It still leaves you waiting and hoping for justice to be served. Are people just supposed to sit by and hope that one day justice will be carried out? That leads to such an unpleasant way of living. — Etzsche

Revenge is a form of justice, not justice is a form of revenge. You get revenge in our western democratic societies by the law finding the guilty party and punishing him.

This has several connotations. The law, as it is structured these days, or ever, is not about justice. It's about applying the law. Many people come to court and seek justice and find none, since the law does not meddle with justice.

The law, instead, finds someone guilty of a crime when there is no reasonable doubt that he or she committed a crime. The guilty verdict has nothing, absolutely nothing, with the perpetrator of the crime. The guilty verdict is applied when there is no reasonable doubt that the person is guilty.

It is just luck and reasonable expectation, that most people who get a guilty verdict ARE indeed the persons who had committed the criminal act for which the court finds them guilty.

What’s the difference between dignity and self respect? — TheHedoMinimalist

Dignity is the response by the community when the community senses you have high self-respect AND they feel it justified for you to have it.

"If you have to ask, you don't have it." -- Ogden Nussbaum, the discoverer of the condition "carpal tunnel syndrome".

Therefore there is private language existing in solipsism. Thank you for disproving and/or proving your own thesis. (I forgot whose side you are on... I can't go back and look when I compose a reply. Sorry.)

Yeah, they leave a lot and it hurts even more when they leave and are reminded of how their love is not present with them physically. — empathy

Well, actually,it's not true. Their love (the love THEY feel, not what we feel for them) stays with them. They can't take it with them, and they can't leave them behind. Love stays in a limbo, somewhere around the coffin in which the dearly beloved lie six feet under, and also at or about midnight on Friday, the thirteenth, at fool moon, when Love and other parts of the remains of the dearly beloved do their rounds of visitation.