One of the reasons "boomers" ignore you is that we have been around the block a few times and find many of you "gender specialists" inordinately self-involved. "Sexual identity" is a new issue for you, but is not a new issue historically. Lots of people have dealt with it more and less productively over the last century. — Bitter Crank

:up:

In fact, most of the PC issues smack of this kind of self-involvement. I think that choosing your own pronoun is like choosing your own name and I fully support anyone's right to do so. Just don't try to enforce a general modification of the language. From the statistics I could find, non-binary individuals comprise approximately one-third of one percent of the population. So tell me if you need to be referred to as they, heck, even remind me, I'll respect that. But expecting 99.7% of everyone else to just jump in line and adopt radical linguistic changes is a tall order. And I could see where it would offend some people. I was educated when even using "they" as an impersonal singular pronoun was incorrect, and I regularly still do use "his or her" when I am training people. And I intend to go on doing so, and maintain that style in my writing. If someone complains, I'll acknowledge it, but it is my language, it is part of who I am, so I would expect that to be respected for the same reason that non-binary folks expect their wishes to be respected.

The features of reality of which we are aware are pragmatically determined. You can play a completely novel tone to a cat such that its brain does not even register receiving the tone. But pair that tone with food, lo and behold, the cat's brain suddenly and thereafter registers the tone, whether or not food accompanies. That is cognized reality. There are, I am sure, many, many dimensions of information of which we have no awareness, simply because we have not developed or discovered practical activities or applications related to the cognition thereof.

Isn't that what faith and religion are about? Irrational, blind, sudden and absurd just like life? — Corvus

This I think says it all. We admire reason and logic and try to live up to them as standards, but they don't capture everything. I would say not just faith and religion, but life is not ultimately reasonable. Which is why I find a lot of contention over fine points of logic to be frustrating, especially when there are clearly extra-logical factors involved.

but I when I am in some kind of crisis I do pray and I feel that it helps, and does lead me forwards positively usually. — Jack Cummins

Yes, I believe that there is some kind of strong underlying motivation which often relates to the consciousness or feeling of being faced with some kind of major problem along with doubts as to our ability to meet the challenge and fear about the outcome if we don't. Some people may even experience the entire modern world in this way.

Sounds like the Kierkegaardian existential situation. A belief that might motivate the believer leaping into the abyss of faith ... — Corvus

If accepting as true what you want so badly to believe is true is the definition of faith it seems a poor accomplishment....almost like signing a false confession under duress.

Pascal's wager comes to mind. — Down The Rabbit Hole

Yes, I had never heard of Pascal's wager until I read it on here a while ago. It figures in my own philosophy as what I call "the ontological gamble"; we stake our very existence on the validity of our beliefs. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the being of consciousness is equivalent to its beliefs. That's why it's so critical to define what it means to truly believe something, versus just saying that you believe it.

My comments are about the ones I personally have interacted with including on here, which I qualified elsewhere. I admitted that the one's who don't proselytize are drowned out (in their silence) by what could well be an overly-vocal minority.

Think about it. When you "actually" understand something, then you establish a link between your mind and whatever minds set the precedent for your thoughts. "Every truth is consonant with every other truth." Truth is the ultimate mechanism for creating continuity of consciousness.

Suppose, just for a second, that what you are, as a cognizant, thinking being, is in some way materially contingent on information transferred forward through the mechanism of material-social artefacts (i.e. the ideas that constitute the essence of your being are what has been handed forward through the generations). If that were the case, I would spend as much time absorbing as much "existentially meaningful" historic material (i.e. books) as I could get my hands on. The more ancient, the better. :mask:

It isn't about what philosophy is "correct," per se, I think; I think it is about what the most sincerely intelligent people have sought to convey to posterity.

:up:

I hear you. But I still think that there should be freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

How do overzealous atheists not see their dawkinsism is just a secular religious substitute!? — Protagoras

The do say "love is blind".....

The whole concept of the devil is another thing altogether. However elsewhere I've discussed how the universe seems to be propelled by the dynamism of the tension of opposites, so it isn't an absurd premise that there could be a counterbalancing.

However I'm not sure how that applies to your question.

Isn't that just an old apologist's canard? I'm sure it is not intended this way by you but it has a patronizing tone to it. Atheism equals disfunction or disruption, rather than a genuine expression of freethought — Tom Storm

I've have never yet encountered an atheist who did not treat atheism like a substitute religion, which is the ultimate irony, as I said. Yes, my comment was tongue in cheek. There may well be philosophically sincere atheists, and, if so, they probably do get drowned out by the noisy and offensive ones. If that's you, then I sincerely apologize. As I mentioned, I do think this tends to be more of a social than a philosophical issue.

Hardly. You are trying to figure out how many angels fit on the head of a pin.

Like I said, if you define god as "the most advanced sentient being in the universe" then god it is an absolute fact that god exists. That's a pragmatic solution. I don't buy into the whole realism/anti-realism argument. Not everyone does. If you are trying to say it's just me then you are the one who is out of touch with reality.

The idea of putting the conflict between realist and antirealist approaches to science aside is also a recurring theme in some accounts of pragmatism, and quietism. Regarding the first, Peirce ([1992] 1998, in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”, for instance, originally published in 1878) holds that the content of a proposition should be understood in terms of (among other things) its “practical consequences” for human experience, such as implications for observation or problem-solving. For James ([1907] 1979), positive utility measured in these terms is the very marker of truth (where truth is whatever will be agreed in the ideal limit of scientific inquiry).Many of the points disputed by realists and antirealists—differences in epistemic commitment to scientific entities based on observability, for example—are effectively non-issues on this view

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/#PragQuieDialPara

This.

So, I am a dyed-in-the-wool pragmatist and the whole realism/anti-realism debate really doesn't apply.

If you can couch your dilemma outside of those terms I can comment, but as it stands I can't say anything meaningful about it. :confused:

Not being brainwashed as a child, usually. — Kenosha Kid

I had absolutely zero religious training and I'm not even slightly inclined to atheism. My sense of incredulity at the magnificent complexity of the universe only reduces that further.

Ok, but I won't be able to give this my full attention during work hours. I'll read it more thoroughly and get back to you later in the day.

I think the Atheist has specific reasons for disbelieving in god. Probably some deep psychological trauma where they feel they were let down and abandoned.

From a purely pragmatic perspective of course, you are correct: agnosticism - in the sense of withholding or suspending judgment - is eminently the more sensible position.

For example, man may not be the center of the universe. However man may represent one of the most highly evolved physical systems in the universe. Exactly how high on the overall scale, no one really knows. But depending on whether it is "somewhere in the middle" or "near the top" the whole anthropocentric bias may have more or less validity and merit.

Personally, I think that it has some validity, but that it applies to the entire system to which we belong (i.e. along the lines of the Gaia hypothesis).

It just means the belief is proximally wrong, which for proximal creatures like us is all that matters. Believing Earth is "flat" or "hollow" or "only six millennia old" is not three approximate truths on par with Newton's gravity or Wallace-Darwin's natural selection. The most incorrigible form of ignorance, Pantagruel, is the illusion of knowledge (e.g. beliefs which are, in fact, just wrong – not even approximately true – such as e.g. "Earth (Man) is the center of the universe"). — 180 Proof

I'm not aware of any criterion of 'proximal truth' that would invalidate what I'm saying.

I think I made it quite clear that and how all beliefs are subject to revision based on the advancement of knowledge in general. It seems to me that much criticism of theism is a criticism of theists as people who are holding on to an outmoded conception of the thing that they are actually trying to conceptualize. Clearly, deism is a superior and encompassing category.

Just because someone believes in something under a flawed description doesn't mean the belief is ultimately wrong, only a poor approximation. Scientific beliefs are subject to the same caveat.

People once believed in "phlogiston," which does not exist. However the phenomena in question did have an explanation. So just because the specifically theist conception of "god" may be flawed, doesn't mean that there is not some explanatory correlate.

Can you expand on this? The expression (from the Gospel of Matthew) 'Ye shall know them by their fruits' springs to mind. — Tom Storm

Sure. Here's my take.

Atheism isn't so much a logical argument as it is a social position. If I don't believe in god, there's an end of it. But atheists are notorious for furiously proselytizing (hugely ironic as that is). SO you have to wonder, if everyone who believed in god also happened to believe that god decreed that you should devote yourself to learning everything you can about the universe (i.e. endorsed scientific knowledge), would the atheists still have a problem with theists? Atheism, from what I have seen, is highly correlated with a rather aggressive belief in the value of science, often to the point of scientism.

If you look at it as a purely logical or epistemological problem, the question of god is really one of definition. If you define god as "the most advanced form of sentient being" then there is a god. In which case, god isn't a specific being so much as a role, like "CEO of the universe." It's only when you start to heap a whole bunch of arbitrary qualities onto the concept of god that everything becomes problematic. Omniscient. Omnipresent. Sempiternal. Ex hypothesi, "god" is beyond the limits of our intellect. Can an amoeba conceptualize what it is like to be a man? Truly scientific reasoning suggests that we should be a little more...humble, about dismissing what we know to be beyond our current ken.

It seems to me that the reason people decide to argue against god isn't to contradict the idea of god so much as it is to contradict a whole set of "affiliated beliefs" that go tend to go along with the belief in the idea of god (but are not necessarily logically entailed). If this is so, then atheism is really just one giant red herring.....

The law of excluded middle appears to invalidate (C), but this is superficial. It is true that either god exists, or that god does not. No other possibility is available. It is also true that either one believes that X, or one does not. — Banno

No, this is actually an instance of the fallacy of the excluded middle. While it may be true that either god exists or doesn't it is not true that either one believes something or does not. I have no belief on the existence or the non-existence of god.

I can't get Chomsky out of my head. — Manuel

Quite.

For non-fiction, very often when I look at original sources I find unexpected and surprising information. Examples:

Special relativity - "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" - Einstein does not show or prove that the speed of light is a constant in all reference frames, he assumes it. — T Clark

I have Einstein's Special and General Relativity, I've been meaning to re-read it and your post reinforces that....

Looking at books in shops and libraries seems to me to be part of the research process. — Jack Cummins

Yes, the entire process contributes to the "informational outcome" is the abstract level takeaway I guess... :)

On Individuality and Social Forms by Georg Simmel

Arendt was excellent, albeit a dense read. More concept-driven than thesis-oriented, which suits me well.

We ratify our beliefs constantly because everything that we can perceive and can formulate and plan is ultimately dependent on what we allow ourselves to believe. I call this the "ontological gamble". We bet with our lives that what we believe is valid.

Yes, it definitely resonates with me also. I was referring also to his idea of the "metaphysical research program" which guides and shapes scientific discovery....

And yet do you not find he has a very keen respect for metaphysics?

Exactly. :up:

If you ask what something is, then you are asking how it is actually instantiated in the world (ie. this is a question of empirical ethics). There is no doubt that there are people who treat it as objective, as subjective, and as relative. Now if you had asked, ought morality to be.....

After reading Popper's Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery trilogy two years ago my lifelong "orientation" of idealism changed to scientific realism.

Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais

I don't think wisdom is captured so much by what you say as by what you do, per Apollodorus' reply.

The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt

I think there's tension between the claim that matter can produce consciousness, but not vice-versa — RogueAI

I have always summed it up this way to myself: is it more unlikely that matter gives rise to consciousness, or that consciousness gives rise to matter?