Hi, Rogue AI.

I'm sorry, but I don't have enough knowledge on this to form a defensible position.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

Hi, Tom.

Yup! That sums it up. On the subject of outside world, I like to think of science as describing our outer reality while art writ large describes our inner reality.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

Hi, frank.

Yup. As a retired scientist, I know that at bottom science rests on an axiom: the outside world is knowable.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

Hi, I like suchi. [Sorry to say, I don't.]

You've touched on another interesting line of thought -- degrees of 'knowing'. We know some things in the absolute sense -- the whole is greater than a part of it, for instance -- but those things we know with absolute certainty don't, as far as I know, lead to any great revelations.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

Hi, Astrophel.

As the quote from Anna and the King of Siam goes, "Is a puzzlement."

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

Hi, Rogue AI

For what it's worth, I assure you that I'll continue to live my life as if I'm in a real world, not a simulation.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

Hi again, 180 Proof.

The sole non-trivial reason for taking time to think about such things is little more than the pleasure of pursuing knowledge.

Regards, best wishes to you and yours.

Hi, 180 Proof. [Love the handle!]

The problem isn't whether it's a probable possibility but, rather, that it cannot be logically ruled out.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

Hi, Vera.

A nice, pragmatic response. I can see Dewey looking over your shoulder. Pragmatism is a great way to cut Gordian knots.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

The very first line in the OP's reasoning defines whatever it was that was responsible for the beginning of the universe as 'god'.

Acceptance of that axiomatic statement sets the probability of the existence of god at 100%.

The first logical question is to question the first statement.

Regards, stay safe and well.

@Gnomen:

There's a nice tie here somewhere. Gnomen -> sundials -> man's philosophy and how it has been affected by being able to tell time. Or extend one's 'day' by artificial means, etc..

As to designing sundials, if one's computer literate it's easy to write a program which will assist in laying out a dial, no matter what the position or slope of the dial plate. There's a nice literature available on the mottoes which have been scribed on sundials, too. "I mark none but sunny hours." is one I rather like.

Desultory because there are so many other interesting things to learn that spending much time on any one thing starts to create an itch in the brain.

Best wishes to you and yours.

@ Gnomon.

First, I like the 'handle'. As a desultory maker of sundials, I'm aware of its function and etymology.

Second, thank you for taking time to type your extensive response. I was afraid that I had gotten myself out onto an intellectual/philosophical limb which would not withstand examination. Your post gives me a nudge to move ahead.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

@bongo fury,

Hi!

Thank you for taking time to read the OP and post a reply.

T/F decisions, truth tables and the like are certainly of value. They lead to a toolkit which includes syllogisms and other means of arriving at truth. I'm starting to look into the possibility of a comparable toolkit for multivariate evaluations. Including percent, r values and such is probably necessary.

Colors, tones and the like are physical perceptions we sense from the outside world. There's little thought attached beyond nomenclature. Even that's not something we all share. A person with perfect pitch can apply the right label to a musical note. This poor old country mouse cannot. [Sigh . . . ]

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

I'm presently reading At The Existentialist Café, by Sarah Bakewell. Her writing style can best be defined by 'chatty'. I've a better idea of what the existentialists were trying to come to grips with than ever before. I've also picked up more information on who was sleeping with whom than I really desired. Has anyone else read her books? This one in particular?

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

Under the rubric of 'Wisdom':

"Don't never buy nothin' what has a handle attached. It means work."

"Good, fast, cheap: pick any two."

"It depends."

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

There's a delightful little tale of a philosopher who said to a friend, "There's no difference between being alive and being dead."

The friend, in a playful mood, asked, "If there's no difference between being alive and being dead, why not just kill yourself?"

The philosopher replied, "Since there's no difference between being alive and being dead, why should I go to the trouble?"

Hi!

That's a point, of course. I suspect that a nit-picker would add anarchy. There are times when extreme simplification can provide insight. There are other times when a finer-grained approach provides more opportunity for a deeper exploration.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

Hi, 180 Proof! [I'm more of a wine man myself.]

I've not yet read the article, so I can't respond directly to your comment. That America is 'controlled' in a number of ways by an oligarchical structure is a good observation.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

Hi, NOS4A2!

It may take me a while to get my head around your post. Thank you for taking time to respond.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

Hi!

Thank you for the link. I'll certainly read it.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

Hi again, Tim.

We agree on the Republicans, especially when they present as Mr. Donald Trump, being a poor ideological match with Christian evangelicals. One might quip that it's not exactly a match made in Heaven.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

Hi again.

You may be right. Thus, my search for the underlying philosophy may be in vain. If I'm not careful, though, we'll get into a discussion over 'proving' a negative! ;-)

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

Hi, Tom. That's part of it, of course, but it's hard to assemble all of those beliefs into a coherent philosophy. The word 'coherent' is carefully chosen.

Regards.

Hi, Tim!

Are you saying that the philosophy of the Republican Party at present is essentially the same as that of the evangelical Christians?

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

Hi, Shawn!

It's a wise parent who knows just how to answer children depending upon the age and sophistication of the child.

Some answers are, in themselves, things of beauty. A friend of mine from years past was asked by his young son, "Daddy, how high is the sky?" His answer; "Exactly 50 feet higher than the top of the rainbow."

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

"No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee."

John Donne.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

Oh, my! Here we go again.

'Good' is the stumbling block here. If we define it carefully, chances are that a moral/ethical structure can be established without reference to a supreme entity. There's quite a literature extant.

Regards, stay safe 'n well. Remember the Big 3: masks. hand washing and social distancing.

Hi, telex!

The quirk in that little story, and it is a quirk, is that the responder sees a normal deck up until the third remaining card is turned up. Up to that point, the responder is logically correct in saying that he/she is increasingly certain, at the various stages, in accepting greater and greater probability that the remaining cards do not include a blue jack.

The response to the final question is also correct, based upon that assumption -- that the deck is a a normal deck. The green queen, though, destroys that assumption. One can no longer be certain to any reasonable degree about a blue jack popping up, even in the last two cards.

Regards, stay safe 'n well..

One of the characteristics of most religions is attention to the meaning of human existence and concern over the end of life. It takes a bit of a stretch to see that in the current interest in technology. Regards, stay safe 'n well.

I admit, thanks to a comment above, to there being more than three possible responses. 'god' was assumed to represent a supreme entity.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

There's always the Flying Spaghetti Monster to consider. ;-)

I skipped a step in the OP. It was that once a god is accepted, there are a number of religions to choose from. Of course, one could always adopt the position that structured religions are unnecessary to believe in the existence of a god, but then such a position would lead to having to define a set of moral/ethical axioms, nu?

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

Hi!

An interesting question. My first stop was to check on human cell longevity. If brain cells had a short enough life span, the question would be moot. As luck would have it, they can last our entire lifetime.

The next thought was that our 'self', including personality, is defined by interactions between brain cells, and not by the cells themselves. Changing a cell may not be of consequence if it does not change how the cell interacts with others.

I at least got this far.

Regards to all.

More than one noted philosopher in the past has dealt with the concept of nothing. One, if I recall correctly, considered it of great importance in mathematics, where the concept of nothing, zero, as the start of natural numbers resides. You might find the book, A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy by Mr. Stephen Schwartz of interest. — Torus34

Oops!

I suggested the wrong book. The suggested 'starter' book is Analytic Philosophy: A very short introduction, by Michael Beaney.

Sorry for the error.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

Ok I think I see what you're saying.

Based on the argument I presented, that would depend on our definition of nothing. — telex

More than one noted philosopher in the past has dealt with the concept of nothing. One, if I recall correctly, considered it of great importance in mathematics, where the concept of nothing, zero, as the start of natural numbers resides. You might find the book, A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy by Mr. Stephen Schwartz of interest.

Regards.

Null set - would that mean that the state of nothingness has a measure of zero? Or absolute zero?

What would that imply about ad infinitum? In this case, zero is not infinity. So nothingness can't be infinite, if it's a null set or a zero. In that case, the argument may fall apart :)

Could we say negative infinity?

Or perhaps could we say that while we can toss a null set into the pot ... when we conceive nothingness, there appears to be an ad infinitum to it nonetheless. Or we can say that maybe zero is zero, however, does nothing = zero and zero = nothing. Maybe there's more here?

Or maybe I misunderstood your comment. — telex

Hi.

The set of horses would contain all horses. The set of ice cream cones would contain all ice cream cones. A null set would be an empty set, containing nothing. It's just a concept. The set of all null sets, though, could be argued to be a real concept. Thus, nothing becoming something, even if it is nothing* more than a concept.

If, however, you are talking about nothing becoming something -- specifically an object as opposed to a concept, that's a horse of another color.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

* Play on words intended.

Let's toss the set of null sets into the pot, shall we?

God is understood to be changeless, and therefore timeless, but God is also understood to be the creator of time.

If God creates the physical world along with time, then God experiences a change - from existing alone to existing along with time.

Can anyone explain how God is the creator of time and remains changeless? — Walter Pound

The concept of an all-powerful god leaves itself open to all manner of paradoxes.

"Can god create a physical place that god cannot enter?" will serve as an example.

Supreme beings are best left out of philosophical discussions where definitive conclusions -- that is, truth -- is sought.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

There are, for us h sapiens, two 'realities'. There is the inner reality, our mental 'map' of that which lies outside our bodies. Then there's the outer 'reality' which we perceive through our senses and which informs our mental 'map'. That there is an outer reality which impacts us can be demonstrated by dropping a brick on our toe.

As an aside, I've liked the statement that science seeks to describe outer reality while the arts seek to describe our inner reality.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

Getting back to the original question, a quick check of such groups as, say, the major political party federal legislators, the Fortune 500(r) CEO's and the US prison population should show, within reasonable statistical limits, a distribution of racial and ethnic people as we find in the US in toto.

To the extent that the distribution is skewed, causality requires reasons.

One reason is systemic racism or anti-ethnic bias.

Regards, stay safe 'n well. Remember the Big 3: masks, hand washing and physical distancing.

Two quick comments.

Many of the arguments for and against map nicely upon those which arise when the question of the existence of a god is considered.

There is much to be said for the pragmatic approach alluded to in the OP. If a belief, one way or another, makes your own life richer and you can accept that belief, do so ... and don't look back.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.