I have often thought that knowledge of the religions of other cultures, other societies, presents a challenge of some sort to religious belief. There's a difference between distinguishing only between yourself and others as accepting or not the beliefs that you do, and recognizing that some of those others don't have no beliefs, but a complete set of beliefs that act as a substitute for yours.

I wonder if a similar challenge doesn't arise from the psychology of peak experience, of flow, and so on. If you have an experience that you interpret religiously, does it really not matter that someone else has a similar experience when surfing?

I had a fellow philosophy major tell me once over beers that he was a believer because of a particular experience he had while tripping on acid. He explained that, at the time, he was already an experienced tripper, and so he was able to recognize that this was not the usual experience of using LSD, but something completely different. I took him at his word, but what are you really to do with something like that?

(There's a generic "you" throughout this post, who isn't you, @Mariner. I trust you to point out where they overlap, if you'd like to.)

I reread the Nagel and looked at the Wikipedia article (I am not going to reread Bateson), but I'm not sure where to go from here.

(E) There is experience we can have, and experience we cannot.
(C) There is experience we can conceptualize, and experience we cannot.
(P) There is experience we can express propositionally, and experience we cannot.

(Not putting those forward as principles or endorsing them, just laying out some terms for my own sake.)

If you have an experience that you believe cannot be expressed propositionally, because you believe it cannot be conceptualized, then you might still talk about it. There is poetry, paradox, apophatic language. (Obviously you can also dance about it, make music about it, express it in how you live your life, and so on, but we're focusing on talk.) But even before getting to to questions of what you could say about such an experience, there are some other issues.

One way of taking the map-territory business would be that you might experience the territory if that experience was not representational. But how is the word "experience" being used here? Do you know that you had the experience? Do you have a memory of the experience? A memory of having the experience? If you had the same or a similar experience at another time, would you know it was the same or a similar experience? Did you, in the first place, know that the experience you were having was a "territory" experience? If so, how? By trying to conceptualize it and failing?

I don't know what to do with any of those questions, really, but maybe you have some thoughts.

Obviously then there's the question of how to characterize the experience, and some people object to some characterizations. That may be a claim that there is a kind of experience you cannot have had, or it may a sort of "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Also, the Christian tradition, for instance, isn't exclusively mystical. On what grounds could you connect an unconceptualizable experience to a thoroughly conceptualized theology? There may be apophatic elements within that theology, but what about the rest? (Mystics have also had to face charges not only of heresy, but worse. How do you know what you experienced was not the Deceiver?)

Nagel I think is a mess. I don't remember what I thought of it years ago, but now, oy. I'm hesitant to start talking about that at all. Maybe it would be suitable for one of those read-alongs, since it's widely available on the interwebs. But if you'd like to pull something particular from that essay and talk about it, I'm game.

We probably should have done this at the beginning.

P = "All actual or possible conscious systems must be allowed to develop."
Q = "Unrestricted procreation must be allowed."
R = "Abortion must not be performed."

We have as premises
(1) P ⟶ Q
(2) P ⟶ R
(3) ¬Q

From (1) and (3), we can conclude, by modus tollens:
(4) ¬P

So far, so good.

But then I think you are trying to infer from (2) and (4)
*(5) ¬R

That's no good.(P ⟶ R) & ¬P does not entail ¬R.

Wikipedia calls this Denying the antecedent.

It is perfectly consistent to affirm (1) through (4) and R, as I keep suggesting many people do.

ALSO: You cannot infer from (1) through (3) that R ⟶ P.

Can you elaborate?

Everyone agrees, I assume, that there is nonverbal experience, and nonverbal communication. It is also common for philosophers to claim that we have knowledge that we are not expected to be able to verbalize. (Knowledge-how is an example. Some theories of language attribute such knowledge too.)

The first question would be whether there is experience or knowledge that cannot in principle be verbalized.

Mariner, would you say all these things you describe, are things you experienced as existing, rather than reasoning that they exist?

they are both merely systems on a trajectory towards consciousness. — sackoftrout

This is your claim, but I don't think it is sustainable. There is a distinction, which people clearly do recognize, between actual entities and possible entities, and it is evident that they encode that distinction in their moral intuitions.

0 isn't the null set {}, it's the cardinality of the null set, the number of elements of that set.

(And given that, you can define 1 as the cardinality of the set that contains only the null set as a member, so {{}}; 2 would be the cardinality of the set {{{}},{}}, and so on.)

The null set has no members, so it is identical to all its subsets.

I think there are people around here with some training, who might have some good advice for you, given your sister's history. I'm just a dad.

I'll just add this, as a sort of commentary on the quote I gave you. I think one of the things people do, not just kids but maybe especially them, is test you. If past relationships--maybe with the parents--have failed somehow, they want to know if you're going to stick, if your love is unconditional. (I don't know if everyone should get to have your unconditional love, but maybe little sister does.) So they test. Can I be bad enough that you'll stop loving me (too)? That doesn't mean you have to just accept everything. Setting boundaries and so on, that's also a way of showing you love her, that you give a damn what she's doing. It does mean that when she crosses a line, the most important message she can get from you is, "Nope. That didn't do it. I still love you," and you can make that "I still love you, you little asshole" if you want.

That's it for me. Hope I have spoken out of turn here.

The only genuinely wise thing I've ever heard anyone say about parenting comes from a humorist from years ago named Erma Bombeck:

Kids need your love most when they deserve it least.

It's come in pretty handy for me. Oh, and keep your sense of humor no matter what. The shit you can get into with kids is ridiculous. You need to be able to take a breath and laugh at it.

He knows more than you do. He has a masters degree -- in PHILOSOPHY! — Bitter Crank

I saw what you did there.

It's my impression that, in the United States at least, scientists feel more unified as a group now than they had for, I don't know, generations, precisely because there is a pattern of attacks on one discipline after another. Biologists got hammered by "cdesign-proponentists". Physicists watched Congress fail to build the SSC, and then watched all their grad students head for Europe and elsewhere, when America basically owned the field of high-energy physics throughout the twentieth century. And now there's climate science. There are a lot of people who most definitely believe the word "science" refers to something in particular, and they're agin it. So now scientists are closing ranks, defending biology as science, climatology as science, physics as science.

@Bitter Crank just got in the philosophy comparison. Mine was going to be "art," which would fall immediately to your criticism.

I wouldn't really care if the terms "art" and "philosophy" went away. But in these times, the word "science" is a fighting word, and you're on the wrong side.

But what if you look at it the other way round?

Suppose we start with the goal of controlling the growth of the human population, and are given two options for achieving this:
1. Reduced procreation through birth control self control.
2. That, plus abortion.
If we assume the goal must be achieved, wouldn't your criteria lead people to choose option 1, because it will achieve the desired effect without terminating an entity that will become conscious and achieve moral standing. Why choose (2) since it has this downside?

I see. Your argument is that if you're against abortion, you should be in favor of unrestricted sex. And that conclusion you do not block because, in your view, no one wants that.

Doesn't it make you wonder, though, why no one wants that? Isn't there some reason to think that might be relevant? I can see how you might think that's beyond the scope of your argument, but this is exactly where lots of people confronted with this argument will land.

I am inclined to believe that (1) Al did possess at least some justification (even if weak) — Arkady

The word "justification" is unfortunate, because in ordinary usage it admits of degrees, the same way you might talk about having a lot or a little evidence. In the JTB theory it's supposed to be binary, I think.

Gettier cases always feel to me like magic tricks or confidence games. You're elaborately given the opportunity to verify things that don't matter, and then forced to draw conclusions you know you shouldn't. Meanwhile there's all sorts of crap going on behind the scenes.

I think this distinction does not really exist and is a fallacy based on failure of intuition. — sackoftrout

I appreciate your response, but I still don't understand the argument.

The Roman Catholic Church has traditionally taken exactly the option you suggest, to be against abortion and contraception. Did you intend to block this response somehow?

On the other hand, there are many people in the world (including many American Catholics) who use birth control but are anti-abortion. Doesn't that count as evidence that many people share the moral intuition you say does not exist?

Now that I think of it, the willingness of people to put the economic wellbeing of the currently living ahead of the environmental wellbeing of future generations, suggests this intuition, or bias, is well entrenched, if not always helpful.

You're close, @Arkady, if readers will tend to have an intuition that this doesn't count as knowledge, but they'll think that because they'll feel the belief isn't really justified.

I don't think you need most of paragraph 3 of you're just trying to build a Gettier case. You just need "Bob in fact stole the money."

Your case seems to turn on whether Al's belief was really justified, whereas Gettier cases usually try to make this airtight. This may be case of epistemic luck, but it feels more like, "I'll bet it was him" than the Gettier type.

Without deliberate intervention in this system, many more children would be born. Conversely you can say that rational human interference has prevented the natural trajectory towards consciousness for many systems. — sackoftrout

I think this is the weakest part of your argument. Surely we make a distinction between an actual, existing entity already on a trajectory toward consciousness, and only possible or potential entities (a fortiori not on any trajectory to anything).

I agree that science is a continuously expanding domain - gobbling up other disciplines, even art and music, like a hungry shark in the middle of a shoal of fish. Its rational basis and clever use of math has turned it into a formidable tool to understand our world, the universe itself. So, to some degree I'm in agreement with the OP that lack of scientific ''explanation'' does pose a serious problem for theism. — TheMadFool

I think this is a very nice point, but I would say science is a problem only for a certain sort of theism.

Here's a story: I recently had a used copy of Kant's first Critique with the occasional "I hate you Kant!" "Idiot!" etc. written in the margin by a frustrated undergraduate. This commentary was not related to, say, fathoming the transcendental unity of apperception--it wasn't related to Kant being hard. It was where Kant makes fun of the man who claims to know that God exists, and a few other places. (I wondered if these folks would hate Kierkegaard too.)

We all know Kant's deal--to set limits to reason and leave room for faith. But there is a certain sort of young Christian--I can't make claims about anyone else--who claims to know that God exists, that the Bible is His word, that Jesus is our saviour, and so on. I was raised a Roman Catholic and we never talked like this. It was always faith, not knowledge. You could talk intelligibly about a person's faith being tested, and so on.

So I would say that science is only an issue for you if see your religion as a matter of knowledge rather than faith. (Whether that's a recent or regional or denominational phenomenon, I can't speak to.) And not just knowledge by acquaintance--however your religion comes down on whether you can "know God" directly--but propositional knowledge. If you see your religion this way, you see it as on par with science, in competition with it, and these are the people, I believe, who see science--correctly!--as a threat.

On the other hand, @TheMadFool seems to be right about the broader cultural point, that the expansion of science in the last several centuries puts endeavors such as religion and philosophy both back on their heels, but mainly as matter of cultural prestige or something.

It seems odd to me that you'd be so eager to say that "2+2" isn't identical to "4," yet you readily say that Joe's subjective experience is identical to Pete's (or at least some part of it is). — Terrapin Station

You're maybe not "eager," but let's say "comfortable" concluding that if Joe and Pete both assert that 2 + 2 = 4, then there must be something similar about the states of their respective brains.

I'd be happy to try to explain what I understand of Frege's philosophy of mathematics, if you'd really like me to, but honestly Frege's writings are a way better source than I am. Some of this stuff I struggle with.

I had no intention of converting anyone or "winning an argument." I stopped by because you were talking about something there's prior art for. Just offering a way of thinking about this stuff that you might find helpful. If you don't, no harm no foul.

If you find these sorts of questions interesting, then you really ought to read Frege. (If, on the other hand, you find them an annoying waste of time that gets in the way of doing more interesting stuff, then probably not.)

If "4" points at something, then so does "2". Clearly they point at something different. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure, "4" refers to 4, "2" refers to 2.

I think Frege construes 2 + 2 as a function. "2" has a sense, and refers to 2. "+" has a sense, but doesn't refer to an object. You can put them together to make a function you could call "... + 2," which also has a sense, composed of the senses of "+" and "2," but no reference because it's incomplete--there's a gap. By putting an object where the gap was, you can get "2 + 2," which has a complex sense, and now has a reference, which is the value of the function, namely 4.

Frege considers 4 a simple object. "4" is a name for 4 with a simple sense, but 4 also has infinitely many names with complex senses, but still the simple reference 4.

They do not reference the same entity though. — Metaphysician Undercover

"2 + 2" and "4" are, usually, different ways of referring to 4. They have different senses, but the same reference. For mathematics and logic, the reference is what matters, so identity is identity of reference, hence we say "2 + 2 = 4." That they have different senses, explains why an equation can be informative. "2 + 2 = 4" does not express the same thought as "4 = 4." (That's Frege's take, and I don't have a really good reason to disagree with him.)

And "thinking a proposition" is a state of an individual's brain, right? It is not a relation between the individual and an object, the abstract object that the proposition is, because there are no abstract objects.

So you'd rather be like one of those little girls crying about injustices around the world while sitting in their comfortable homes and doing nothing right? That's being a nice person right? Just sit back and say the right words, that will certainly fix the world up. Yeah that's certainly the way of fighting injustice. Condemning the Republicans... they must be rolling on the floor with laughter.

The world doesn't care about cries. The world only changes with actions. You or me or anyone can cry as much as we want about all injustices. The world itself is silent. And God only helps those who dare take action.

I don't see any proposals for action in this thread. All I see is crying about this and that. — Agustino

I think this is a false dichotomy. The choice is not between manning the barricades and being a whiny little girl.

One of the main things citizens do is talk to each other. If your government does something you disagree with, it is important to talk about it. That doesn't have to be some big public display. You talk to your family and friends, just like you talk about anything else you care about. There will likely be plenty of other people talking to their family and friends. Over time, public opinion shifts, and that matters.

It is important to keep ideas circulating, to keep talking. If you don't, the idea will be gone. One way you help keep a democracy alive is by being informed and keeping the level of discourse from falling. Some people will engage in more directly political activity, and they have to come from somewhere. You want them to come from an environment of careful thought, healthy debate and respect for the truth. If you were a dictator, you'd worry more about that than about the little armed rebellion your massive security forces easily put down. But imagine that out there, beyond the palace, they're all talking, it's impossible to stop, some of your own staff are probably talking.

Talk is important. Do it often; do it well.

The sky is filled with glowing blue dots.

I had always been a little uncomfortable using conditionals talking about cause and effect. Where the conditional shows up in this "deductive form," is it regular, old material implication?

I googled it -- I had forgotten about "Rayleigh scattering," that the small gas molecules will radiate the same wavelength they absorbed, so that's why the more-often-absorbed blue gets spread all around. (I used to get that backwards--thought it was blue because blue was the least absorbed.)

Anyway, "deductive form" something like what I did?

Oh my, no, not humoring you. I've enjoyed and learned from both sides in this argument. I only pointed out the misreading to give you a chance to reshape your response to Andrew, which I looked forward to reading.

Fair enough.

There are legal challenges currently working their way through the court system. But hey, why bother, amirite?

The explanations I have received, and have given, have been narratives, not mere references. The narrative (which as I have said, has the formal structure of a deduction that starts from premises that the explainee understands and believes, and proceeds by steps that the explainee understands and believes) will usually refer to many different phenomena along the way, with none of them distinguished from the others and having the special label 'cause' affixed to it. — andrewk

I'm nearly convinced but this part throws me a little, so I could use an example.

For the "why is the sky blue" example, you would do something like this?

1. Our atmosphere contains such-and-such gases, water vapor and dust.
2. If light strikes such-and-such objects, it behaves in such-and-such a way.
3. Thus when light from the sun enters our atmosphere, such-and-such happens and we see blue.

Is that the idea?

You misread@andrewk's last post. Those were examples of "here's the cause" explanations, not the sort of explanation he was advocating.

This is a tad hyperbolic and ignores the fact that Democrats attempt to do the same thing — Thorongil

Everybody does it, but it's well known that the GOP has turned gerrymandering into a way of life. It's easy to find sources: here's one.

As for voter suppression, if memory serves turnout was higher this election in every state in the South except one: North Carolina. Want to guess what the Republican legislature has been up to in North Carolina? There was even a memo from NC GOP bragging about how low black turnout was. Real commitment to democracy there.

Isn't the obvious modern correlate of "final cause" "purpose"?

I'm referring to identity in the 2+2 is identical to 4 sense. — Terrapin Station

Very funny.

The degree of widespread agreement about it is typically overstated. — Terrapin Station

Should have addressed this before...

Can you name me one business, government, non-profit, in fact any institution of any kind anywhere in the world today that takes an "alternative view" of basic math. (I say "basic math" because few institutions are concerned with, say, axiomatic set theory.)

For comparison, there are, particularly with the rise of data science, lively and valuable debates within what we could loosely call the "statistics community" over the interpretation of Bayesian and frequentist statistics, and the value of different approaches to different problem domains. There is also the so-called "p-value crisis" in the social sciences. In none of these cases is there debate about the math side of things--everyone agrees on that--but about how it's applied and how the results are interpreted.

Proofs are simply relative to the formal systems we set up. A proof in system x is simply a matter of a conclusion incorrigibly following in system x, per the definitions, inference rules, etc. that we've set up as system x. — Terrapin Station

Would you grant that this is a somewhat different way of establishing the truth of a proposition than obtains in, say, physics, history, politics, bar-room linguistics, etc.?

(Btw, my intention earlier was to be succinct, not "stern." I'm just an average joe, not a member of some cult.)

I'll grant it was poorly worded. Sometimes we are uncertain until we have carried out the calculation.

So I'll say it this way: if you think you can prove that 2 + 2 = 5, and that 2 + 2 ≠ 4, then you don't yet understand the meaning of these symbols. It may be as simple as mixing up "4" and "5."