Comments

  • Are there any prophecies in the Bible that are known to have gone fulfilled or unfulfilled? T
    ↪god must be atheist
    What is it supposed to prove to expect something from a prophecy that those who believe in them don't claim?
  • Curry's Paradox
    The step 6 doesn't make sense. I assume you meant to include P1=(P1=(P1>P2)) somewhere, but that's not actually true, because "this sentence" would then refer to two different sentences. Thus you have never shown P1 to hold.
  • Are there any prophecies in the Bible that are known to have gone fulfilled or unfulfilled? T
    The prophecy must be specific enough to only apply to the event prophesied. it must be unambiguous enough that it could not apply to any other event, or eventuality. — BBQueue

    This seems like double standards. In no context except bashing the Bible would anyone expect a prophecy to be unambiguous or clear in any sense. I suppose that's more reasonable in the context of using the prophecy as empirical proof, but isn't it circular reasoning to take this kind of premise of prophesies having to exist for the purpose of proving themselves just because you want to make the prophesies a proof of something?
  • Emphasizing the Connection Perspective
    But you just said that consciousness can be identified in philosophy by presuming the experiences of others are the same as ours, that's how we can talk to each other about the topic. So why can't science presume that when people say they're experiencing something, they are experiencing what we experience, and call the same thing? If science can't make that presumption (and still claim to be investigating 'consciousness'), then how can philosophy claim to be talking about 'consciousness with other philosophers without having the same identification problem? — Isaac

    Firstly, science is always more focused on provably factual information than philosophy due to its nature. Philosophers are allowed to make more speculations than scientists.

    Secondly, is that even the case? Science does make this assumption of consciousness in psychology and sociology, for example, but can't make it in the research of consciousness itself. The same does hold for philosophy - we make the assumption that other living beings are conscious in ethics, but when it comes to discussing the very nature of consciousness, Descartes' cogito, ergo sum is almost universally accepted.

    Yes, but "so far haven't" doesn't even make sense here either. What I'm asking is how can there possibly be coherently a concept which we presume is there but can't properly identify. On what grounds do we presume it's there other than having identified some pattern which we wanted to give a name to? — Isaac

    Sorry if I'm repeating myself or forgetting something's that already been said, but on what grounds are you saying the pattern of consciousness can't be identified? If you by identifying its pattern mean recognizing it and being capable of naming it, that's trivial just by being conscious. However this structure seems not to be one that one can put into words beyond naming it, making it merely ineffable, which is not the same thing as to say that we can't identify the pattern at all.

    I agree, but where I disagree is in saying that if some pattern in reality exists but we can only identify it by it's relation with other patterns, not by its structure, then it's relationship with other patterns is all it is. That is what we've identified and given a name to, so that is what the name refers to and nothing more. It doesn't then go on to refer to some imagined structure which we simply presume is the way we imagine it to be. — Isaac

    Why? Words can be defined to mean anything, they can be symbols that refer to anything. Why couldn't a word refer to a thing that has certain relationships with other things, rather than the relations themselves?
  • Emphasizing the Connection Perspective
    Right. So if all that can be taken as a presumption for further philosophical investigation without even mentioning the caveat, why is it then considered such a massive error when scientific investigation presumes the same starting point? — Isaac

    It doesn't take the same starting point. Science looks at things associated with consciousness, like brain activity, or in psychology for example, behaviour. Until it's possible to cause identical observations with identical qualia in different people and science is done by experiencing those experiences directly, it's not correct to say that any branch of science is dealing with consciousness directly.

    Yes. That is how I see things too. So for there to be a thing in our realm of concepts which we believe to be part of reality, it can only be so on the basis of some such pattern and nothing else. This makes the idea of there being some real phenomena, but one which we can't identify, incoherent. — Isaac

    "Can't identify" as in can't, in practice, so far as we know, identify, and so far haven't, or as in are fundamentally impossible to be identified?

    I'm not talking of existence in our realm of concepts, I'm talking of objective existence in which the patterns exist before we recognize them as such. If such objective reality exists, things in it can be referred to by other means than exact descriptions of structure, such as by their relationships with other, more recognized, patterns.

    You'll need to be more clear about this, I don't understand the metaphor (obviously you don't mean observation literally - seeing with our eyes) but I'm not sure here what sense or detection it is standing in for. — Isaac

    How do you know you have a mind? When you perceive something about the reality, how do you know you've made that perception? English isn't my first language so I'm sorry if observation isn't the best word for what I mean, but anyway, the feeling/experience/perception/observation by which that knowledge is gained is what I was referring to.
  • Emphasizing the Connection Perspective
    Really? That's your experience of the philosophical debate around consciousness? Form people like Dennet and Hood considering it to be little more than an illusion, through the pan-psychics, to the Berkeleian idealists considering it to be the essence of the whole of reality in the mind of God. You think people are all using the word consistently? — Isaac

    I meant in colloquial usage, but yes, even in philosophical discourse, wildly different theories about something doesn't necessarily imply that it's not the same thing people are talking about.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Anti-Trumpist mental gymnastics on full display. — NOS4A2

    @Relativist thinks they're telling the truth, you blame them of political correctness - it seems pretty straightforward conclusion to draw, from their POV, that you're then calling truthfulness political correctness.
  • We Have to Wait for A.I. (or aliens) for New Philosophy
    As many of the Amazon reviews noted, it seems like he could present his ideas in a 10-page article. — T Clark

    I had the same experience with attempting to read Antifragile. It's as if he assumes that the reader is an idiot that doesn't understand the concept from a simple explanation, so he spends ages on what the word "antifragile" means and why it's different from "robust". However, it seems there are some interesting ideas in the latter half of the book so getting back to it is on my reading list.
  • How Do You Do Science Without Free Will?
    Take 'choose' out of it, and this becomes a tautology: "We are never able to do... other than what we actually do". — StreetlightX

    Does it? To me that's an argument that you need to justify just as much, if not more, than the original one.

    But what would it mean to do otherwise than what we do? Say doing otherwise were 'possible'. And then you did otherwise. But then, you could not have done otherwise than that. — StreetlightX

    That's a circular argument. The correct conclusion is "and then, you could have done otherwise than that", because it was already set as a premise that the non-hypothetical course of action could have been done.

    So, no, obviously, you can't have done otherwise than what you did, or do. — StreetlightX

    A jump from "couldn't have done" to "can't have done". I disagree with at least the first one, maybe with both, but even more I disagree with drawing one as a conclusion from the other.
  • Quod grātīs asseritur, grātīs negātur
    Mathematics does not make any claim as to usefulness or meaningfulness. That is so by design. — alcontali

    And it is not fundamentally useful or meaningful. The mathematics that are, are the ones that start with axioms supported by evidence.
  • Emphasizing the Connection Perspective
    In my opinion it says something of both the way language surpasses its direct meaning in communication and the subjective mind that people manage to use the word "consciousness" among others in a consistent way, as if they were talking of something they had by observation confirmed to be the same thing; the meaning of the word is so heavily implied between the lines that to try and understand or confirm it through an exact definition is often unnecessary.

    Then again, that does hold true for all the words. The difference is merely whether they can be given clear definitions afterwards.

    The topic reminds me of that one quote of Kierkegaard: “The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.”
  • Emphasizing the Connection Perspective
    or it is the name we give to the way we, and only we, feel. Which, being entirely subjective cannot be discussed at all. How would you even know my 'consciousness' was the same as yours when we use the term in an exchange of sentences. — Isaac

    Well that's the thing, we can't, thus the argument that everyone else might not have a consciousness. I suppose people assume the existence of other people's consciousness partly due to Occam's razor, partly due to everything observable about humans having such similarities that it is natural to assume likeness to one another, partly due to that the same parts of our minds that others can't observe are the ones we don't observe in others, and partly due to the fact that without doing so discussing the whole topic is impossible so the assumption is taken as a premise within the framework of which the discussion is had.

    I don't see how (insofar as 'real' means something like 'outside of subjective artifice). — Isaac

    It seems you accept that the patterns that we refer to and the concepts refer to exist (because how could we identify a pattern and give it a name if the pattern didn't exist beforehand). I see it as the pattern that defines the existence of a thing. For example, there's a lamp on the table next to me that exists, but also its left half together with 10cm of air to its side is a pattern that's a part of reality and exists, despite not being seen as any coherent thing by an observer.

    Exactly. So how does the concept of a thing called 'consciousness' which we cannot properly identify/do not understand, make any sense at all. If we cannot identify it, it doesn't exist, things only exist because we've identified some pattern in reality which we think deserves a name. If we cannot understand what it is, then what is it we are we giving a name to?

    If we look at empirical knowledge, when we say we don't 'understand' some force, we mean something like that we can see x causes y, but we don't know how. What's being argued here is that there exists some thing 'consciousness', but we cannot identify it such that we can correlate its presence with brain states. That seems to me putting the cart before the horse. If we cannot identify it, how do we know there is even anything there to be named?     — Isaac

    I just disagree on whether consciousness is that hard to define. It's the part of mind that gives it subjective experiences and isn't directly observable by an outside observer. We know its existence, or at least a single instance of it, from a direct observation of it and the observation of the observation itself.
  • Emphasizing the Connection Perspective
    Yes. That is exactly the alternative. The world is seamless sea of atoms (or waves, whatever) along what lines it is carved up into individual things is entirely arbitrary human invention. — Isaac

    Still, the objects that the concepts refer to are real. Their existence comes first, second comes humans making up their concepts, and last humans making up words to refer to those concepts.

    But nevertheless, how is that relevant? We can ask questions about and discuss these things and their reasons for existence even if your way of viewing this is in any way more correct than mine. You don't answer "why does this chair I'm sitting on exist?" with "the question is meaningless because the chair doesn't exist, it's a concept that exists because you named it; the answer is 'because you call the thing you're sitting on right now a chair'."

    But the ability to print the words 'I am conscious' isn't one of the things we ask patients to report, so why would that be indicative. I've already explained, we ask them to report the logging to memory of responses to sensory stimuli. — Isaac

    The actual words don't matter, the point is that patient reports are not trustworthy because a p-zombie would lie and say anything to make it seem like they're a conscious being.

    Besides, is that indicative of consciousness? AIs can response to stimuli and have a memory.
  • Emphasizing the Connection Perspective
    If no such set of phenomena existed we wouldn't have a word for it would we? — Isaac

    Circular reasoning. If all humans are p-zombies with no experiences, we'd indeed have the word for it merely because humans under determinism would have said it.

    That's just not how language works, concepts don't pre-exist language, there isn't a whole set of fully formed real concepts out there which we gradually find and give names to. — Isaac

    What is the alternative? That things pop into existence when words are invented for them? No, what symbols refer to exist before symbols for them are made up.

    Most neuroscientists in the field detect consciousness by patient reports — Isaac

    Behold: a conscious AI.
    print("I am conscious")
  • Emphasizing the Connection Perspective
    But that's not how language and concepts work. We first experience a thing which we determine, entirely subjectively, to be separate enough from other things to have its own name. We then call that thing "self-awareness". So the question "why are we self-aware? " makes no sense at all. We are "self-aware" because 'self-aware' is the word we decided to give to the thing we are. — Isaac

    That's not true. The question isn't "Why does the word 'self-aware' apply to us?" but "Why do we have the property that the word 'self-aware' refers to?", and to question that property isn't any more absurd than to question any other property of us. Neuroscience doesn't have an answer to the hard problem of consciousness and it can't be proven that any people have any more consciousness than a chatbot - in fact, it should first be proven that any living creatures are conscious before any theory of ts emergence can be claimed to have any reputability.
  • We Have to Wait for A.I. (or aliens) for New Philosophy
    ↪T Clark
    Ok, "boring" was a poor choice of a word, I only meant that from the viewpoint of philosophy. Nevertheless, my point stands. Most people don't care about philosophy, and that is not a problem. It's not problematic for philosophy, and it doesn't bother people who don't care about it. So why try to make it interesting for that group of people? Why change it to cater for people that don't care?

    It's also one of the reasons people laugh at philosophy. — T Clark

    That is a problem of those people. There will always be people who belittle the interests and passions of other people, and the proper response is to not let them get into your head. People have laughed at me for my interest in mathematics, my taste in music, my sense of humour, and many other things, but I enjoy those things so I don't need others to, and the same goes for analyzing whether the JTB theory models knowledge and how accurately it does so.
  • We Have to Wait for A.I. (or aliens) for New Philosophy
    As Lincoln wrote - of the average Joes, for the average Joes, and by the average Joes. — T Clark

    Besides Lincoln saying so, why? Average Joes are boring people who fail to see the beauty of philosophy, and appealing to them is what is wrong with contemporary philosophy. Asking why Gettier matters is a fundamentally erraneous question - if you want work to be productive or ideas to have practical value, look at sciences. None of that is philosophers' job or purpose. Philosophy is beautiful, it's art, and no more than from a blooming flower do we need to ask from philosophy how it makes itself useful.
  • We Don't Want To Believe - Because, If We Believe, Then...
    I do not do believing.

    I do guessing and estimating and supposing and things like that.

    But I do not do "believing."     — Frank Apisa

    "I won't die, I will just cease living. Thus, I'm immortal."
  • We Don't Want To Believe - Because, If We Believe, Then...
    ↪Frank Apisa

    This I have said so far: you have given and been given examples of things that fall under the umbrella term of belief (blind guess, acceptance of experience, etc.) and you refuse to use the umbrella term (seemingly claiming that apparently words referring to concepts are mutually exclusive, as if calling a guess a belief implies it's not a guess).

    Furthermore, your choice of words does not reflect reality - if the word belief means (among other things) a guess, then guesses are beliefs regardless of whether one chooses to call them beliefs.

    That's where I'm going and where I've gotten, if you claim it requires expanding tell me how so. "No it isn't" isn't a valid rebuttal of that.
  • We Don't Want To Believe - Because, If We Believe, Then...
    ↪Frank Apisa
    I remember what I said, and I replied to your reply with "How so", followed by expanding on my first comment.
  • We Don't Want To Believe - Because, If We Believe, Then...
    No it isn't. — Frank Apisa

    How so? For every X for which belief is an umbrella term that has been offered, you've responded that you call X not a belief but simply X - which you are free to do, but it doesn't change that X is a belief. Just like I can choose to call arms arms instead of limbs, but nevertheless, arms are limbs.
  • We Don't Want To Believe - Because, If We Believe, Then...
    ↪Frank Apisa
    That's similar to stating that I don't have limbs - I have arms and legs, and I don't need to disguise them as anything else by using hypernyms or umbrella terms.
  • Quantum experiment undermines the notion of objective reality
    How is an observer defined in physics? Certainly not in terms of an actual sentient being perceiving the system. With that said, what relevance do the observers have in the experiment? It seems to me a much clearer way of describing the results would be that a photon can behave inconsistently in certain scenarios.
  • Atheism is far older than Christianity
    No, not necessarily. If everyone realised that the answers that science provides are better, then that possible consequence would make sense. But sadly countless people do not realise this. — S

    Are you implying religious people can't accept science? Smells like an ad hominem.

    There's no contradiction between science and the parts of religion that matter.

    It isn't supposed to, is it? I was making a like for like comparison. That's like saying that a hand saw isn't very good at drilling holes into wood. — S

    Which is why hand saws don't replace drills or vice versa, and why religion and science don't replace each other. Science doesn't provide better answers, just different ones.
  • What God Are You Talking About?
    God could not have created time just like God could not have created itself. It is something that is eternal. — Harry Hindu

    That's very debatable. I think that if there's a God external to the universe that created it, then it's also external and superior to time, spatial dimensions and even logic. If you think of ancient, mythological or pagan gods, or most polytheist religions in general, gods are a part of the universe and can't affect any of those things. If the same God in the same context is also subject to change, that'd mean time is multidimensional or that God perceives (our) time as a spatial dimension and some fifth dimension as time.

    I can accept the concepts and existence of both lesser gods and those with absolute and unlimited omni-everything, but the specific combination of omniscience and omnipotence but also being limited by the concepts of our universe and the existence within it seems weird to me.

    What use is creating a narrative for an omniscient being? — Harry Hindu

    Three objections:
    1) God isn't necessarily omniscient, especially when written without capital G as in the earlier comments. Furthermore, there can be limitations to omniscience (see below).
    2) Writers know what happens in their stories, yet people enjoy not only reading but also writing, not only for monetary gain, and people read their favourite books and watch their favourite films multiple times.
    3) God exists on a completely different scale from humans - maybe their actions just are as ineffable to us as our actions are to less intelligent animals, or the actions of those animals are to bacteria. The subject of this discussion is God that doesn't consider humans of any specific value more than any other species, and wouldn't feel any need to grant us understanding of such issues.

    Sure it is. An omniscient being can't be indecisive. — Harry Hindu

    Like omnipotence, omniscience doesn't have a singular definition. That is true if the being's omniscience includes knowing everything about itself and everything else within all spatial and temporal dimensions and everything else that may or may not exist. It's also true that if the being is external to our time, it wouldn't appear indecisive to us because even if it was indecisive in its own temporal dimension, its current state of mind and only that would affect the universe at that moment. However, there are definitions between these two. For example, there could be a god that is not external to time and whose omniscience only includes unlimited knowledge of the physical universe external to itself.

    It could just be aliens. — Harry Hindu

    Breaking physical laws, existing outside our physical reality, extradimensionality or existence outside the concept of dimensions, immortality or lifespan long enough to be practically immortal, limited omniscience, being a creator of the universe in some sense, holding certain sets of supernatural elements to qualify classification to a minor god. Those are some things that come to mind are commonly included in different definitions of a god.
  • What God Are You Talking About?
    As Darwin was very clear that this integral component of the natural selection processes was without direction, progression or anything of that flavor, and if that is not true, then Darwinian natural selection is not true. — Jeremiah

    As you're so keen on twisting the meanings of words and bringing up Darwin's personal opinions and beliefs, let's shake this up: is anything in the above quote relevant to the evolution?
  • The world is the totality of facts not things.
    But a metaphysics built on abstract-facts, such as abstract implications, is the unparsimonious metaphiysics, because it doesn't assume or claim the "existence" (whatever that would mean) of anything describable. — Michael Ossipoff

    How would those abstractions be undescribable? And do you mean this system would be the one where the universe is defined as the totality of its things or facts?
  • Some counterarguments against pessimism’s view on moral testimony
    I don't think your rejection of premise two is valid. You're relying on your intuition, showing examples where "clearly" your principles are superior. This is rather dangerous, as you'll always find philosophers that disagree. It seems Hopkins is arguing that no moral system can be chosen by any individual, at least through discourse, so he'd just disagree with you on that children should listen to their parents.
  • What God Are You Talking About?
    ↪Harry Hindu
    What about movies or books? If a god wanted things to stay how they are, they wouldn't create time, but they did, because there's certain beauty in change. God doesn't want either dinosaurs or humans to control the planet - they want the narrative of dinosaurs going extinct, humans rising to the top and then whatever's going to happen.

    Also, a god could, depending on the definitions used, exist outside time and view the universe as a space-time-block with time being the fourth spatial dimension.

    Why should I call an indecisive being a "god"? — Harry Hindu

    Because not being indecisive is not the (usual) definition of a god. Some definitions do include it but it's not a necessary part of the definition.
  • What God Are You Talking About?
    ↪Harry Hindu
    Paintings contain multiple colors. Does that mean the painter was indecisive about what colors to use?

    And why couldn't a god/God be indecisive?
  • What God Are You Talking About?
    You are wrong, Darwin meant without direction, it was a major contributing factor to his loss of faith in God. — Jeremiah

    That was a question of his personal faith and what he believed the God to be. If by direction you mean that evolution should have some end goal, some perfect being, I suppose that is false but I just don't see any point in defining direction like that and don't see what impact it has on any questions about any gods.

    He kept seeing imperfections in nature, like beetles with wings trapped under their shell, which made him doubt a divine influence on the process. — Jeremiah

    Genesis 1: and God specifically remembered and wanted it to be pointed out in His holy book, that never was he to create imperfect beetles with their wings trapped under their shells.

    Maybe God just wanted imperfect beetles to exist at this point in time. Why not?

    it was met with much resistance, because humans can't accept the idea that human existence is not special and instead is just the result of aimless mutation. — Jeremiah

    I'm arguing from the POV that god doesn't consider humans special, remember?

    However, without the mutations being aimless — Jeremiah

    Define aimlessness. When I think of that word I think of something that doesn't aim at a specific outcome, which requires a random outcome. Within determinism all events of the physical universe have a specific outcome so in that sense aimlessness doesn't necessarily exist. However, I think you're confusing true metaphysical randomness and practical randomness - things that seem random. Evolution exists under determinism because it creates a chaotic, ever-changing system that seems random and doesn't have clear patterns or a single direction it seems to clearly be going, from human POV.

    Furthermore there are no laws in physics that says these mutations have intent — Jeremiah

    I didn't say there were, I said they were deterministic (under the assumption of determinism, I'm personally not a determinist).

    and there are no laws in physics that shows god is directing evolution — Jeremiah

    I didn't say that either.
  • What God Are You Talking About?
    ↪Jeremiah
    I don't want to drag this metaphysical concept of direction into this, whatever you mean by that. What Darwin referred to with his usage of that word was the seeming randomness of the evolution, in the same way that throwing dice could be said to be random - not that evolution is some mystical concept above the physical universe that doesn't have predictable outcomes at any given moment under determinism.

    and in this instant by random I mean without aim, without direction, without method. — Jeremiah

    I have never said anything to contradict this, but that's not what randomness means in the scale of metaphysics. That's what seems to be random to us humans, arising from the complexity of the physical universe and our lack of computability required to fully simulate such systems.
  • What God Are You Talking About?
    Did you are me make that claim? — Jeremiah

    After I said that evolution works according to the laws of physics, you expressed disagreement. What other conclusion am I to draw?

    In fact it was you who made such a claim. — Jeremiah

    Where?

    Evolution happens according to the laws of physics — BlueBanana
    All of them. — BlueBanana
  • What God Are You Talking About?
    ↪Jeremiah
    I'm having difficulty understanding just what you mean. Are you claiming that evolution defies the laws of physics?
  • What God Are You Talking About?
    ↪Jeremiah
    All of them.
  • What God Are You Talking About?
    Sure it does. It shows that God would be indecisive or inconsistent. — Harry Hindu

    *Nothing about the existence of gods.
  • What God Are You Talking About?
    it is not evolution if it includes some type of design or direction — Jeremiah

    Evolution happens according to the laws of physics and thus could be argued to be deterministic. Therefore a god could change some minor details before the creation of life to start a butterfly effect.
  • What God Are You Talking About?
    I wasn't being satcastic. — Harry Hindu

    I was wondering whether someone would point out that wasn't 100% correct term for the context, but my point was that you don't seem to believe the conclusion that God created the world and the cockroaches as its greatest being.
  • What God Are You Talking About?
    ↪Harry Hindu
    Ah, I misread your comment, not noticing you had misread mine. I said

    So, from the POV of God, there's no reason to NOT compare us to animals. — BlueBanana

    while you seemed to reply to

    So, from the POV of God, there's no reason to compare us to animals. — BlueBanana

    which I didn't notice.
  • Settling down and thirst for life
    Parties, one-night-stands, rented rooms are dull in comparison. — unenlightened

    If you're renting a room, aren't you technically settling down, even if temporarily on large scale? One could also argue that partying doesn't lead anywhere and is symbolically equivalent to staying in one place.

    How about Alexander the Great, now that's a youth I envy.
Home » BlueBanana