So you're an atheist? Not so fast.

Discuss philosophical questions regarding theism (and atheism), and discuss religion as it relates to philosophy. This includes any philosophical discussions that happen to be about god, gods, or a 'higher power' or the belief of them. This also generally includes philosophical topics about organized or ritualistic mysticism or about organized, common or ritualistic beliefs in the existence of supernatural phenomenon.
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Re: So you're an atheist? Not so fast.

Post by -1- »

Hereandnow wrote:"Actually, in this post you hit the bull right in the nail. "

Mixed metaphors won't help you. You haven't read kafka.
Please, don't, don't, don't ever assume what I have read and what I haven't. It's against the rules, to voice such assumptions, and I would report you, but there is no point, because the moderators piss on enforcing the rules. I don't know why, but they simply don't delete posts that are reported to truly and clearly contravene the rules.

This site needs a bit of tightening at the nuts and oiling and, well, it needs tighter discipline.

Your haughty and condescending remark is not true, Hereandnow. In effect I never read that book, but but I read Kaffka (you might as well learn how to spell his name properly, not just use it to insult other's intelligence with it). You can have an idea what a book is about by studying English literature (or other literature, such as world literature), even without reading it.

Enough said.

-- Updated 2017 July 31st, 4:39 pm to add the following --
Burning ghost wrote:-1-

etymologist ;)

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Hereandnow
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Re: So you're an atheist? Not so fast.

Post by Hereandnow »

Gertie:
What IS the taste of a tomato sandwich? And why does it mean morality is objective?

Sorry but you're all over the place, you don't lay out an argument and you don't respond to mine. Quoting one line, then mentioning Kafka, Kierkegaard, Levinas 'and many others' isn't a serious response, so I'm going to assume you don't have one
True, I am approaching from different perspectives because the original post didn't work with you and others. Explanations shouldn't repeat themselves, hence, I tried Kafka, but all roads lead to the matter at hand: Objectivism in morality.

Morality is really about one thing: value exchange. Of course, in the affairs of real people with all of the creative ways they invent to have and channel value the whole affair gets very messy. You have a tomato sandwich but inherited your wealth to buy it while I had to work hard and, well, the moral issue arises as to who deserves it,on what basis, whether we should remedy the injustice, and so on. But for what has been called phenomenological analysis, this is all very late in the game. In the analysis of a tomato sandwich, the principle and most salient feature is the desire, want, care for it. The taste is yummy. No pertinent argument on this I assume?

Yes, I am asking the question, what is it for a thing to be yummy? Or disgusting, or torturous, or delightful, and forth. You have a hard time dealing with this because you're not used to phenomenological analysis. This latter removes assumptions about the way in our everydayness we invest meanings in things and tells us to examine the thing as it is itself (Husserl), free of presuppositions. When we do this we can give analysis to just the presentation of the present thing before us. A pencil may be used to write, but the particularity drops away and we have utility, presence qua presence, space and time. It is a matter of going to the features that are logically antecedent to everyday meaning, that is, features that are assumed about a thing AS a thing. Husserl thought this method was the ultimate science, the science that is simply foundational for all other knowledge claims. So back to value, the yumminess and so on, at the level of phenomenological analysis, is an integral part of any experience we have. even as I type, there is caring, desiring to make the point; value is ubiquitous for us humans. You could say we are made of it, phenomenologically speaking, which drops assumptions about what we are that issue from psychology, anthropology and so on. Phenomenology is logically prior to all these sciences, for they all rest on assumptions about what is given foundationally and simply don't take them up as a theme of inquiry. This is philosophy's job.

So my point about religion and atheism is perhaps a difficult one. I ask, is there anything in the human condition that is real, concrete and as such not subject ot refutation in itself for it is simply a given?; like the intuitive principles of math, given and unassailable as they are (though assailable later on after the machinery of elaboration kicks in); like reason itself? I want to get at the essence of religion which is logically prior to actual religions in which gods are invented and argued about, but which can give the concept of 'god' a nontrivial meaning. What is it about being a human here that gives rise to religiosity in the first place?

I hope the perspective is now clearer. We can ask about the taste of a tomato sandwich and the scientific community has lots to say about this in various analyses of the the anatomically relevant functions, the way tomatoes have a history in our culture, the way chemicals in the tomato make for taste qualities, etc. But, and THIS is the point: the scientific community can say nothing about why, if you like tomatoes, the tomato sandwich is GOOD in the valuative sense. Nothing can tell you this. It is metaphysics to try. As I have said often, it would be like a physicist trying to explain a force. S/he has no idea.

Religion is founded on the moral/valuative good just discussed. And now the big questions loom large, or should: Why are we born to suffer and die? What is suffering doing here in this world? There is NO answer from scientists, for they don't even make inquiry in this. Evolutionists, and i am on their side, say nothing about his, because it does not give itself to empirical analysis; only in phenomenological analysis does the issue find the light of day. For here we are allowed let the appearance speak with authority, and IN the appearance of that tomato sandwich is that elusive mystery of the universe: yummmmm.

But with regard to religion, it's OMG! No!!!!! Help!!!! as your cancer has metastasized, or the plague is upon you, or whatever. And recourse is not available. Such things are momentous, powerful, the most salient part of Being here. If not taken up in phenomenological accounting then we end of with a trivial atheism, just as silly as that man on a cloud.
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Re: So you're an atheist? Not so fast.

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I am too upset to look up the references and the reasoning, whether the following has been said or not, so I just go ahead and say it.

Morals are reflected in biology inasmuch as all moral sacrifices will ensure the survival of the nearest facsimile and derivatives of the morally sacrificing person's DNA.

A person will save from the fire his child, then his cousin, then his grandmother.

Then he will save his neighbour's child.

Then he will save his dog.

--------

The reasoning behind this is that he will make a list of priorities to save those first, who have the best relative chances to carry on his DNA's derivatives.

Why he saves the dog? Notice, he saves all humans first. He is prioritizing by species; human DNA is closer to his than dog DNA, but dog DNA is closer than no DNA.

--------------

Society's morals (enforced moral codes, not inherited behaviour patterns that can't be contravened) are ensuring the survival of the society, not necessarily (but chances are that is true too,) of the individual. Thus, Smith may steal a loaf of bread (against society's morals) to save his child from hunger (biological morals.)

-- Updated 2017 July 31st, 4:52 pm to add the following --

Yeah, I know Kafka is spelled with one f (I had to look it up) my apologies to Hereandnow for accusing him of not knowing how to spell Kafka's name.
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Re: So you're an atheist? Not so fast.

Post by Fan of Science »

So, a person saving his dog is driven by biology so the person passes on his genes? Even if he ends up dead by trying to save his dog? Doubtful.

First error: You committed the naturalistic fallacy. You assumed that if something is natural, then it must be moral. Since when?

Second error: You forgot all of the conflicting facts. Like the guy who had two young daughters while on a subway platform, and in order to rescue a complete stranger who was on the tracks, dove onto the tracks, on top of the stranger, and managed to survive as the train drove over both of them. The person he saved was not a blood relative, and had he died, it would have lessened the chance of survival for his own daughters. Soldiers go off to war and die leaving no children behind. There are numerous examples of people dying, or risking their lives, to save those who are not related to them. This is inconsistent with biology, but entirely consistent with many of our existing moral beliefs.

Third error: You contradicted yourself by referencing society's morals. This is not biology, since there is no such thing as group selection for organisms that are individuals, as opposed to biological parts of a larger group. Worker ants can't reproduce, but the entire ant colony acts like one big organism. Human beings are far different from ants and exist as individuals. From an evolutionary position, humans do not have group selection, so any reference to morals of a society cannot be explained based upon individual selection. If we assumed that some people were more willing to trade their lives and those of their children for the larger group, then those people would be less likely to pass on their traits. This is basically why the idea of group selection is nonsense for humans. Group morality cannot be reduced to mere biology.
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Re: So you're an atheist? Not so fast.

Post by Eduk »

One of the main points of the book the selfish gene is that an individual human is made from many genes. And those genes are widely shared.
An individual may never reproduce but they could vastly help the reproduction of many of the genes which make them up.
So yes biology can account for morality of helping others. This is even ignoring that working together helps you individually so even from the perspective of a whole human helping others helps yourself.
But I'm not sure really what point you are making fanofscience. I get you have personal credulity. That's fine. Other people don't. Also fine.
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Re: So you're an atheist? Not so fast.

Post by Steve3007 »

Fan of Science. Some simple yes/no questions:

Do you think that morality is a product of human brains?

Do you think that there is anything about the stuff of which human brains are made that makes it different from the stuff which other things are made?

Do you think that in principle, if not in practice, it would be possible to devise a set of rules, or laws, which accurately describe the workings of human brains?

Would you, in any sense, describe yourself as a "Dualist"?

Would you, in any sense, describe yourself as a "Materialist"?

-- Updated Tue Aug 01, 2017 10:34 am to add the following --

F of S:

Sorry, I should have read post #60 first. You've already said you're not a Dualist.
Morality is a subject analogous to math, physics, for which we have various intellectually derived theories that are not reducible to biology.
So I guess you're not a Dualist and therefore you believe that brains are physical objects. But you believe that there are some aspects of the physical world that are fundamentally not reducible to other aspects of the physical world. So morality (for example) is a product of human brains and is therefore part of what we might call the physical world (as opposed to some wholly different second world). But it could never, not even in principle, be described by physical laws in the same way that lots of other things can.

Is that right?

-- Updated Tue Aug 01, 2017 10:36 am to add the following --

By the way, when you say "morality is a subject analagous to math, physics..." I presume, when you refer to physics, you mean the abstract "laws of physics" rather than the empirical observations of physics?
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Re: So you're an atheist? Not so fast.

Post by Gertie »

Hereandnow



So back to value, the yumminess and so on, at the level of phenomenological analysis, is an integral part of any experience we have. even as I type, there is caring, desiring to make the point; value is ubiquitous for us humans. You could say we are made of it, phenomenologically speaking, which drops assumptions about what we are that issue from psychology, anthropology and so on. Phenomenology is logically prior to all these sciences, for they all rest on assumptions about what is given foundationally and simply don't take them up as a theme of inquiry. This is philosophy's job.

So my point about religion and atheism is perhaps a difficult one. I ask, is there anything in the human condition that is real, concrete and as such not subject ot refutation in itself for it is simply a given?; like the intuitive principles of math, given and unassailable as they are (though assailable later on after the machinery of elaboration kicks in); like reason itself? I want to get at the essence of religion which is logically prior to actual religions in which gods are invented and argued about, but which can give the concept of 'god' a nontrivial meaning. What is it about being a human here that gives rise to religiosity in the first place?

Alright, now I know where you're coming from!

I haven't studied phenomenology, but here's my obvious problem with the methodology in this context. While it can perhaps give insight about how we work psychologically, and how consciosness works to create particular types of models of the world, once you accept there is a real world out there which you're observing, modelling, analyzing and comparing your observations and analyses with others, you have testable science. Otherwise you're stuck with saying all you can ever know is your own conscious experiencing, meaning you can never make any claim about reality beyond it.

How do you respond to that? How do you get from this methodology to make objective ontological claims?

Science is a way of modelling the world, rooted in our way of thinking, but it claims objectivity based on shared observations and analyses with other subjects. And it works, within the limits of its paradigm. And it explains to us why tomatoes taste nice and why some experiences are nice and some are unpleasant within that paradigm (tho it can't explain conscious experience itself). If you ignore it, where do you base your claim for the objectivity of your personal moral intuitions? How are you defining 'objectivity'?


So my point about religion and atheism is perhaps a difficult one. I ask, is there anything in the human condition that is real, concrete and as such not subject ot refutation in itself for it is simply a given?; like the intuitive principles of math, given and unassailable as they are (though assailable later on after the machinery of elaboration kicks in); like reason itself? I want to get at the essence of religion which is logically prior to actual religions in which gods are invented and argued about, but which can give the concept of 'god' a nontrivial meaning. What is it about being a human here that gives rise to religiosity in the first place?
Note you've leapt from phenomenology as method of explaining you to yourself, to the exterior world of 'humanity', implying that you can objectively know what other people experience, and so you've crossed the line into shared observation and analysis, where you can know stuff about the world independent of your own personal directly known experience, the world of shared observation and analysis, the foundation for science.

This type of self-reflection can perhaps give us insight into how we think, but it can't tell us why we think that way. Evolution (roughly) can now, it explains why we like the taste of tomatoes, what consciousness itself is for in terms of survival and flourishing. You can ignore that and believe there's some other reason we like tomatoes or have religious feelings, but it's just an interpretative speculation, unfalsifiable. A 'what if...'. Which is fine, and you might be onto something, but it opens the door to a thousand other 'what ifs', with no way to test one against another. It's not objective, unless you have some idiosyncratic definition of objective which you're determined to keep to yourself.
Religion is founded on the moral/valuative good just discussed.
Hang on a minute, you've elided two meanings of the word 'good', so you can make the leap from tomatoes taste nice to the taste of tomatoes is morally righteous. That needs a lot more explanation. But I get where you're going. Unfortunately where you're going means tomatoes themselves are objectively morally good, unless I don't happen to like the taste. How do get around that? It seems like a fundamental problem?

I'd also say that the claim 'religion is founded on the moral/valuative good' needs support. Religions have been founded on many things, for many reasons, you're inserting your own pre-supposition to support your conclusion.

And now the big questions loom large, or should: Why are we born to suffer and die? What is suffering doing here in this world? There is NO answer from scientists, for they don't even make inquiry in this. Evolutionists, and i am on their side, say nothing about his, because it does not give itself to empirical analysis; only in phenomenological analysis does the issue find the light of day. For here we are allowed let the appearance speak with authority, and IN the appearance of that tomato sandwich is that elusive mystery of the universe: yummmmm.
As I said way back, science can't explain consciousness itself, but it can explain the foundations for things like suffering - the evolved human reward system makes sense of it, you don't have to intuit your answers. It explains why liking tomatoes doesn't have to mean tomatoes are objectively morally good (unless I don't like them), just useful for survival, it makes sense. Death/experience ceasing correlates with brains ceasing to function, so we can infer a connection there, as all the other evidence shows. But if you want to cast aside all evidence, and make stuff up based on self-reflection, you can really come up with anything, as people have throughout our existence. Now we have evidence, you have to deal with it.
But with regard to religion, it's OMG! No!!!!! Help!!!! as your cancer has metastasized, or the plague is upon you, or whatever. And recourse is not available. Such things are momentous, powerful, the most salient part of Being here. If not taken up in phenomenological accounting then we end of with a trivial atheism, just as silly as that man on a cloud.
But maybe the sun doesn't orbit the earth, and we're not the centre of the universe. The evidence points that way.

Consciousness manifests in such a way that each subject is the centre of their own universe, the entirety of it , but once you accept there is a world 'out there' you can roughly know stuff about (like pencils and other human subjects exist), you have to deal with what you find out about it, while acknowledging your biases and limitations. So another way to look at that, based on human nature, is to see an obvious motivation for faith in something which will save you from existential angst. I'm an atheist who's 'prayed', on the off chance, I understand it, I don't despise it, but I might as well have prayed to a tomato sandwich.
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Re: So you're an atheist? Not so fast.

Post by Hereandnow »

Gertie:
I haven't studied phenomenology, but here's my obvious problem with the methodology in this context. While it can perhaps give insight about how we work psychologically, and how consciosness works to create particular types of models of the world, once you accept there is a real world out there which you're observing, modelling, analyzing and comparing your observations and analyses with others, you have testable science. Otherwise you're stuck with saying all you can ever know is your own conscious experiencing, meaning you can never make any claim about reality beyond it.

How do you respond to that? How do you get from this methodology to make objective ontological claims?
The idea is that before we even get to science, to observation and theorizing, there are serious questions that are simply unacknowledged. In philosophy, we are not drawing inferences from empirical data;rather, we are making more fundamental inquiry as to the nature if inquiry itself, or, the structural features of language itself that makes it possible to even begin thinking at all, much less thinking about physics and biology.

In short, forget about the real "out there" and put your thoughts on the only real you've ever known,which is in language utterances and their pragmatic nature (their instrumentality). I was sold to phenomenology after I read Dewey, Rorty, then Heidegger, Husserl; and Kant before all of them.

The move to idealism is, perhaps, not so intuitive at first, but then, neither is riding a bike. But the key is to remember: Idealism is not to say there is nothing out there; but to say whatever it is, it is utterly transcendental, or ineffable, and you can't talk about it. It's like god: pure ineffability! Meaning is our end of it, as we perceive, think, classify, communicate (even Steven Hawking thinks like this. See his fairly recent rejection of Realism.) Heidegger is very good on this: even as you stare blankly at an object, an apple, with mind bent on understandgin, all you can ever produce are the structures of meaning you bring to bear on it. Out there?? Even to speak it as a reference to something independent of perceptual apparatus is, as Wittgenstein would tell you, nonsense. When you look you see, in you will, a mirror pf yourself (see my moniker, by the way:the snake biting its tail: that is the idea; but then, if you read Rorty, this mirror metaphor is even further rejected!) IN the apple. To imagine you can "see" the apple as an object absolutely independent of experience making systems is absurd.

Claims of "reality beyond" beg the question: beyond what? Then you have make things clear. Beyond experience? Are you referring to so called primary qualities of time a space? Then you have to separate Real space from the "out there" space, and now you are in the thick of it. Good luck with Kant and Fichte. Me, I am an idealist. No one has ever made clear to me how anything out there gets in here.
Science is a way of modelling the world, rooted in our way of thinking, but it claims objectivity based on shared observations and analyses with other subjects. And it works, within the limits of its paradigm. And it explains to us why tomatoes taste nice and why some experiences are nice and some are unpleasant within that paradigm (tho it can't explain conscious experience itself). If you ignore it, where do you base your claim for the objectivity of your personal moral intuitions? How are you defining 'objectivity'?
It is unfortunate that caring and its objective correlate value do not present themselves as an explicit system of moral conduct. Alas, that's just not the way it is. If it were, then it would be something like the divine command theory, which is hogwash.

For me, Mill's harm principle does the trick as best can be done: Try no to hurt anybody. Easier said than done, obviously.

And i do appreciate the idea that science may be able (and there is Sam Harris behind this bit, though I am not much a fan of his) manage our moral affairs one day.

But that is not what is being discussed here. Here, the matter goes deeper, more primordial: the intuitions I speak of are raw and are what underlie Mill's harm principle. Sure, Mill puts the business well, succinctly, regarding WHAT to do (though not very explicitly),but he doesn't go to the giveness of value; doesn't make it an issue. Nor does science. It can tell you, as you say, why tings like tomatoes taste good, but it does not tell you what moral goodness IS. Why the taste is Good. Why the pain is Bad.

Note you've leapt from phenomenology as method of explaining you to yourself, to the exterior world of 'humanity', implying that you can objectively know what other people experience, and so you've crossed the line into shared observation and analysis, where you can know stuff about the world independent of your own personal directly known experience, the world of shared observation and analysis, the foundation for science.

This type of self-reflection can perhaps give us insight into how we think, but it can't tell us why we think that way. Evolution (roughly) can now, it explains why we like the taste of tomatoes, what consciousness itself is for in terms of survival and flourishing. You can ignore that and believe there's some other reason we like tomatoes or have religious feelings, but it's just an interpretative speculation, unfalsifiable. A 'what if...'. Which is fine, and you might be onto something, but it opens the door to a thousand other 'what ifs', with no way to test one against another. It's not objective, unless you have some idiosyncratic definition of objective which you're determined to keep to yourself.
right, I do make knowledge claims about other people being there. I don't want to be mistaken for a solipsist. I think there are other people, but I take my cue from Heidegger: my understanding of what the terms 'other' and 'people' mean is bound up in the body of ideas that present themselves when I think about them,, and thus, I interpret others AS others, and they me. And yes, this interpretation goes beyond the kind of immediacy of a value intimation I am arguing for, but so what? First, I have to yield to the idea that even when I take in the intuited pain, say, I an a interpreting agency, and therefore, I cannot Tell you what pain is absolutely, BUT, and this is a big point of mine, I do believe value as such does *intimate* the wrongness/badness of pain and the rightness/goodness of joy, and these are not contingent intimations. They are absolutes. Not much to actually say about 'ouch' and 'yummy' at this level of analysis, but the badness of ouch issues from the presence of Being itself (odd locutions are not to be avoided), Heidegger's "presence at hand."

Here is a piece of thinking perhaps you would appreciate: consider evolution: A perfectly reasonable theory, but it is a theory constructed out of the basic structure of language and logic, that is, propositions, negations, hypotheticals,and so on. so we can say the scientific theory itself is not primordial and something comes before this, something "originary" as Husserl put it, out of which theories arise. So the issue does not question evolution or psychology; it simply goes to another more foundational inquiry.

Value as such is NOT analyzable. That is my claim. Ad thus any science is mute on the matter of what it is.

Hang on a minute, you've elided two meanings of the word 'good', so you can make the leap from tomatoes taste nice to the taste of tomatoes is morally righteous. That needs a lot more explanation. But I get where you're going. Unfortunately where you're going means tomatoes themselves are objectively morally good, unless I don't happen to like the taste. How do get around that? It seems like a fundamental problem?

I'd also say that the claim 'religion is founded on the moral/valuative good' needs support. Religions have been founded on many things, for many reasons, you're inserting your own pre-supposition to support your conclusion.

Well, look: It's really not a debatable point, is it? If I say General Motors is founded on moral/valuative good, then where is the issue? All things are, in their founding or their purpose, reducible to talk about value. Any example will get you eventually to this point. General Motors make automobiles, but why? People want them, but why? For this reason or that, but why? ANd this leads inevitably to the final end, which is value: It makes them feel good, in some way; it brings about some positive state of mind. In the end all things we do, have any meaning for at all, are reducible to some OOOO, ahhhh or ouch. The I am supposing that value is the ground of religion, and this is simply trivially true. A religion may be founded for this reason or that, but these are reducible, every one, to general claims about value.
Finally, if you don't like tomatoes. then there is no value there, or there is disvalue, if you will Like I said, things get messy in our lived lives.
As I said way back, science can't explain consciousness itself, but it can explain the foundations for things like suffering - the evolved human reward system makes sense of it, you don't have to intuit your answers. It explains why liking tomatoes doesn't have to mean tomatoes are objectively morally good (unless I don't like them), just useful for survival, it makes sense. Death/experience ceasing correlates with brains ceasing to function, so we can infer a connection there, as all the other evidence shows. But if you want to cast aside all evidence, and make stuff up based on self-reflection, you can really come up with anything, as people have throughout our existence. Now we have evidence, you have to deal with it.
Pls see comments above on this. foundations for things like suffering are, as i say, late in the game. Antecedent to anything science has to say is the basic given: Rational intuition, valuative intuition: these are mysteries. The process of their genesis simply assumes them as givens, not unlike Gregor Samsa proceeds to assume he is an insect. The matter here concerns the givens. Why are we born to suffer and die? is the question that is at the heart of religion, all religions; it's the issue of the very presence of suffering itself.
But maybe the sun doesn't orbit the earth, and we're not the centre of the universe. The evidence points that way.

Consciousness manifests in such a way that each subject is the centre of their own universe, the entirety of it , but once you accept there is a world 'out there' you can roughly know stuff about (like pencils and other human subjects exist), you have to deal with what you find out about it, while acknowledging your biases and limitations. So another way to look at that, based on human nature, is to see an obvious motivation for faith in something which will save you from existential angst. I'm an atheist who's 'prayed', on the off chance, I understand it, I don't despise it, but I might as well have prayed to a tomato sandwich.
There is more science here than philosophy, and I am aware that this is the way it goes these days. Keep in mind, I have never recommended prayer or anything like this, so I wonder where you get this. The things I put out there are not reflected in the comments you make. Perhaps a closer reading of the ideas?

And Kant is a good beginning for understanding how the subject can be the center of the universe, as you put it.
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Re: So you're an atheist? Not so fast.

Post by Burning ghost »

hereandnow -
So my point about religion and atheism is perhaps a difficult one. I ask, is there anything in the human condition that is real, concrete and as such not subject ot refutation in itself for it is simply a given?; like the intuitive principles of math, given and unassailable as they are (though assailable later on after the machinery of elaboration kicks in); like reason itself? I want to get at the essence of religion which is logically prior to actual religions in which gods are invented and argued about, but which can give the concept of 'god' a nontrivial meaning. What is it about being a human here that gives rise to religiosity in the first place?
I guess you're familiar with what Husserl says about the "univocal" then? Meaning when I say "the" or "or" or "five", I am using the very same term not some different item, such as when referring to a "dog" I am talking about "this or that dog" not a "universal dog".

So you've answered you're own question already. Math is not subject to refutation. You cannot refute than when I say "one" and you say "one" we mean different one's.

You may try and be a slippery person here and emphasis the "real" and "concrete" in what you say above. I think it is fair enough to say that we claim what is "real" and "concrete" is not open to opinion within its given context. Simple mathematical addition is not something we can argue over or base opinion on, with one person adhering to one answer and another a different answer. Such a thing is simply not possible. If we apply such ideal additions to The World then we may find room for opinion, but like I was careful to mention the mathematical context has then been overextended into the context of The World. All abstractions are true, concrete and real within their contexts.

If I was to say "remember the green of the drop drawn made it on of the and" we can appreciate the words and we know the functions these words can be used in. We should also all recognize that each word has limitations. I have quite clearly stretched the limitations of the words above beyond all common recognition. The context they are set in is a non-context. There is no meaning. That is not to say people will not try to glean something meaningful from the sequence of words I have set out. That is their folly not mine. It may not even be folly for them and perhaps they will stumble on some accidental fragment of understanding they can then share with others.

You want to get to the "essence" of religion. You assume there is "essence" then. This is perhaps precisely what you are looking for? Your seeking out is the very "essence" itself? If you mean this in a historical sense then there are numerous theories we can look to. It is in this sense that I said VERY early in this thread that we certainly are all "religious" in some way. Meaning that ideas of "God" and existence in general are dealt with by humans. In general we can refer to the idea of "God" as being something at the heart of every human existence, meaning we all have something we are about that constitutes our position, place and general meaning. To go prior to is an act of imagination. I cannot simply unlearn language and return to the state of a babe. We, as Husserl points out, carry around the sediments of life around with us.

When people generally refer to "religion" they always return to the idea of "faith" and/or "belief". I have found that the main differences between people who say they are "theist" or "atheist" is their views about, and claim over, "belief" in general. Many suffer from misunderstanding the principles of extending abstract structures into the world and forming scientific understandings form these extensions. Equally many take these extensions to be founded on unquestionable principles rather than abstract principles.

In broader terms I think we can all agree that if we hold something in attention in some way then we can compare it to things that are uncertain. In this sense we can relate all knowledge to some item of inquiry. If we could not hold knowledge up light our ignorance up then it would not be knowledge at all. It would in effect be completely unknown to us.

What is "logically prior to ..." logic? Surely you can figure out the lack of meaning here. You may very well have fooled yourself with your own words and are trying to make sense out of a question that makes literally no sense? That or you've simply not taken the time or dedication with which to frame the question intelligibly for the rest of us to understand fully (of course we can all guess at the intent of your question, but I am not inclined to offer up multiple answers to what appears to be an overtly obtuse question.)

I would add only that who says we "religiosity" rose into existence? Religion is based on community as is language. In a way we could quite easily refer to "religion" as if it was "language", or "language" as if it was "religion". That seems to be kind of what you are pointing towards?
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Fooloso4
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Re: So you're an atheist? Not so fast.

Post by Fooloso4 »

Hereandnow,

Transcendental does not mean ineffible, it means the condition for the possibility of something. Such conditions are something Kant and others talk quite a bit about.
Gertie
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Re: So you're an atheist? Not so fast.

Post by Gertie »

Hereandnow
Claims of "reality beyond" beg the question: beyond what? Then you have make things clear. Beyond experience? Are you referring to so called primary qualities of time a space? Then you have to separate Real space from the "out there" space, and now you are in the thick of it.
What I mean is beyond 'my' experiencing, which is all 'I' can directly know exists. Which involves a sense of a unified self moving through time and space and stuff, seeing, hearing, narrative thinking, reasoning, remembering, emoting, imagining, dreaming, having sensations like pain and pleasure, fears and desires, concepts like right and wrong, and so on. It comes as package and includes all the boring mundane stuff of being conscious which doesn't arouse your curiosity. A unified field from a specific point of view, rather than a god-like objective overview of everything-that-is. This is what I mean by the term Subject. Sorry if I wasn't clearer before.

The fundamental mystery is whether anything but the experiences themselves exist, and if they do relate to something beyond themselves, something 'out there', what is the nature of that relationship (the mind body problem). How accurately we can know things beyond our own experience is secondary. I think you might be muddling the ability to know anything at all 'beyond' your experience with the accuracy of the knowledge, as you seem to slide back and forth between the two.
The idea is that before we even get to science, to observation and theorizing, there are serious questions that are simply unacknowledged. In philosophy, we are not drawing inferences from empirical data;rather, we are making more fundamental inquiry as to the nature if inquiry itself, or, the structural features of language itself that makes it possible to even begin thinking at all, much less thinking about physics and biology.

In short, forget about the real "out there" and put your thoughts on the only real you've ever known,which is in language utterances and their pragmatic nature (their instrumentality). I was sold to phenomenology after I read Dewey, Rorty, then Heidegger, Husserl; and Kant before all of them.

The move to idealism is, perhaps, not so intuitive at first, but then, neither is riding a bike. But the key is to remember: Idealism is not to say there is nothing out there; but to say whatever it is, it is utterly transcendental, or ineffable, and you can't talk about it. It's like god: pure ineffability! Meaning is our end of it, as we perceive, think, classify, communicate (even Steven Hawking thinks like this. See his fairly recent rejection of Realism.) Heidegger is very good on this: even as you stare blankly at an object, an apple, with mind bent on understandgin, all you can ever produce are the structures of meaning you bring to bear on it. Out there?? Even to speak it as a reference to something independent of perceptual apparatus is, as Wittgenstein would tell you, nonsense. When you look you see, in you will, a mirror pf yourself (see my moniker, by the way:the snake biting its tail: that is the idea; but then, if you read Rorty, this mirror metaphor is even further rejected!) IN the apple. To imagine you can "see" the apple as an object absolutely independent of experience making systems is absurd.


If we go with that, the question remains - how does it enable you to make ontological claims about anything but 'your own' mental states/experience?
Remember you kicked off saying morality is objective. Clarify please.
,but he doesn't go to the giveness of value; doesn't make it an issue. Nor does science. It can tell you, as you say, why tings like tomatoes taste good, but it does not tell you what moral goodness IS. Why the taste is Good. Why the pain is Bad.
The thing is, it does. Once you accept the scientific model of the world, it makes sense of why tomatoes taste nice and pain is unpleasant. It's remarkable to have discovered this, and that its findings tally so well with the way we experience life. This makes it good evidence that it has something real to tell us. And if we have any sense, by learning how we work, we'll be able to avoid terrible pitfalls. Once we understand the mechanisms behind how we value things, why we desire things, we can hopefully ameliorate the harmful parts and nurture the helpful. Imo it's irresponsible to ignore this new knowledge, it could practically help us 'redeem ourselves' to use your language.

Now the more difficult point you raise is why should we extrapolate from our own personal, lets call it 'conscious experience', to believe the scientific model of stuff 'out there' and laws and so on is true, real? Well I'd say I can't know for sure, there is no 'bridge of certainty' from my experience to world of stuff 'out there'. Idealism in that sense is irrefutable. But I roughly accept my mental model of the world because it works. And if I ignore it, it doesn't work. That in itself is evidence that my experience is roughly telling me things about the world.

You're spot on that it's flawed and limited - and the the science part of the model itself tells me it will be. That we evolved for utility, to experience tables as solid, because that's a useful way to model them if I want to navigate the world and survive. So when science tells me a table's solidity is my mental construction, it makes sense within the model. It tells me that colour is a mental construction, and so on. That my perceptions are limited and at least partly constructing my model of the world and myself, it makes sense within the model (snake eating its tail time!) and tallies with the nature of my experiences to a point you can't ignore. And as you say, language plays a part too in how I formulate my model, a further abstracted symbolic construction upon a representational construction. I agree with you on all that.

But still, I can perceive something I call a pencil, and ask you if you see it too, and we'll agree. We'll agree something we call 'gravity' makes it fall. We can share observations and analysis of our shared model, and in that sense we can call these things objectively true. And once you accept this shared scientific model of the world, that it has things to say we can agree are real in the limited and constructed way we experience reality, we can agree we know stuff.

For example, we can say we know there was a time no experiencing subjects existed, and why tomatoes taste nice and pain is unpleasant. It's remarkable to have discovered this, and that its findings tally so well with the way we experience existence. This makes it good evidence that it has something real to tell us. And if we have any sense learning why we work the way we do will help us avoid terrible pitfalls we're prone to. Once we understand the mechanisms behind how we value things, why we desire things, we can hopefully ameliorate the harmful parts. Imo it's irresponsible folly to ignore this new knowledge we're beginning to map out, it could practically help us 'redeem ourselves' to use your language.

There is a progression here of what subjects can roughly and limitedly agree is real and true within our shared model, once it's assumed a world beyond us exists. There needs to be a justification for accepting some parts but not other, which you haven't given as far as I can tell.



So to summarise my own own position -


* All I can ever know for certain is my own experiencing. This is an epistemological issue. There is no bridge of certainty to the existence of anything else, only inference, it takes a leap of faith to believe there is a world existing independently of my experience, including my own body/brain, and other experiencing subjects.

* Once that leap of faith is taken, there is good reason to believe that my model of the world is limited, biased and in part my own construction.

* That said, my model tallies with other humans' models to a incredible and unimaginably detailed extent, so that we can communicate coherently about our shared 'truths', like pencils and gravity and evolution and time and other experiencing subjects. We say these things have an independent objective existence because our shared observations and analyses of our shared world tally. That's as good as it gets, that's the territory we limited critters can share and analyse and discuss. And that's powerful evidence in itself that our shared world model, while flawed and limited, is identifying something real because we can communicate about pencils and evolution. And that world of shared knowledge tells us the evidence points to conscious subjects like you and I emerging from an unconscious universe, and evolving a reward system, including finding tomatoes yummy and pain ouchy and caring for others, as part of our species survival mechanism. I don't claim this model completely and accurately encompasses reality, but it's a model which works for the way we perceive and construct our ideas about reality in our shared world of things we can agree are true and real. Which is all we have.

* One of our (current) limitations is understanding how conscious Experience, which is inherently private, qualiative and subjective (from one/my pov), relates to our shared world of objective (shared pov), quantifiable Stuff. That's a genuine mystery we might be too limited to model, it certainly has no place in our current scientific models.


This leaves us with a problem tho. If value and notions of right and wrong are simply characteristics of evolved consciousness, based on survival of the species, then there is no objective, independently existing, Right and Wrong. Hence we have to re-think our traditional approaches for grounding Oughts, if we want to maintain them. I believe that consciousness is what brings Value into the universe. That Value is synonymous with qualiative experience, or 'quality of life'. Hence what matters is the welfare of conscious creatures, that is the real grounding for Oughts, what makes some things right and some things wrong. And I think it's something we can all understand and cohere around as a new axiomatic grounding for what we call 'morality', or could perhaps be better called 'mattering'.

I believe I've laid out a reasoned coherent position with a logical, evidence-based structure and practical applications. I don't claim to be able to answer unanswerable questions, or that philosophy or introspection can, because as you say we're limited critters. But we can still construct something real and meaningful for us, within our limitations.

The reason I prefer my position to yours, is it follows a logical structure from acknowledging the epistemological leap from solipsism to accepting we can roughly know stuff about the shared world 'out there', and the logical implications of that, without cherry picking and sliding back and forth about what can be known. I think your position and justifications are slippery and vague there, or perhaps I've misunderstood.

Finally, to go a level deeper as you put it. There are questions like why does anything exist, why does it exist the way it does, why are the laws of nature the way they are, why can I only experience being me and not being an apple, what is value? Maybe introspection can offer clues, maybe observed evidence can offer clues, and we can chew them over, but ultimately 'don't know' might be the best answer. If you believe your ability to know anything about reality beyond your own conscious experience is so severely limited that you can only examine your own experience for answers, and ignore everything else, then you're stuck with guessing. And even if you take evidence presented by the external world into account, you can't always answer such questions. At which point it's fine to say 'I don't know'.

However, we can say Value is an inherent feature of how consciousness evolved in humans, and it makes sense in terms of survival, if we accept evolution is a feature of the real world, which you say you do.
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Hereandnow
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Re: So you're an atheist? Not so fast.

Post by Hereandnow »

Burning Ghost:
I guess you're familiar with what Husserl says about the "univocal" then? Meaning when I say "the" or "or" or "five", I am using the very same term not some different item, such as when referring to a "dog" I am talking about "this or that dog" not a "universal dog".

So you've answered you're own question already. Math is not subject to refutation. You cannot refute than when I say "one" and you say "one" we mean different one's.
I don't follow. I agree that when we talk about doubting mathematical propositions, we run into our own rational intuitions, and there is no way to "get behind" these because you carry them with you into your attempt to find contradictions. See what I mean?: "refuting math"is a refutation that turns on the refuter because it places doubt not just on 1+1, but on the entire machinery of reason itself. Now, n the matter of Other's mathematical experiences and our ability to confirm what they are,ever since I took a course in the philosophy of language, I have been convinced that Quine notion of the indeterminacy of translation was somewhere near the truth, and here it has to do with the social basis of language acquisition: as an infant, we watch and learn sentence constructions and how they mak references to activities, things, other people, and so on. This is not an exercise in pure mathematics, and so my inferences about what others have "in mind" based on an internalized system of gestures, utterances and the rest is just that: a naturalized inference/familiarity. So when you and I agree to a mathematical idea, there is very good evidence that we are having the same thing in mind, but not certain at all; not certain like my own intuitive grasp of math.


Anyway, I am not sure how I answered my own question. Pls explain.
You may try and be a slippery person here and emphasis the "real" and "concrete" in what you say above. I think it is fair enough to say that we claim what is "real" and "concrete" is not open to opinion within its given context. Simple mathematical addition is not something we can argue over or base opinion on, with one person adhering to one answer and another a different answer. Such a thing is simply not possible. If we apply such ideal additions to The World then we may find room for opinion, but like I was careful to mention the mathematical context has then been overextended into the context of The World. All abstractions are true, concrete and real within their contexts.
I think we can argue about anything. But when i talk about what is intuitive, given, I am assuming you see the same kind f world as I see, and what thrusts itself upon me as undeniable is the same for you. It is in the interpretation that things get confusing. I say, along with Husserl, when we drop the tonnage of knowldge claims that are, if you will, always, already there (because that is the way we live and breathe spontaneously "in the world") and attend only to what is given, we find the rudimentary basis for religion: value in the world; and more pointedly, horrible suffering in the world. WHY are we born to suffer and die? That is the question, and it is not intended to be about "essence" talk. I prefer to keep the matter clean of language interferences.

If I was to say "remember the green of the drop drawn made it on of the and" we can appreciate the words and we know the functions these words can be used in. We should also all recognize that each word has limitations. I have quite clearly stretched the limitations of the words above beyond all common recognition. The context they are set in is a non-context. There is no meaning. That is not to say people will not try to glean something meaningful from the sequence of words I have set out. That is their folly not mine. It may not even be folly for them and perhaps they will stumble on some accidental fragment of understanding they can then share with others.

You want to get to the "essence" of religion. You assume there is "essence" then. This is perhaps precisely what you are looking for? Your seeking out is the very "essence" itself? If you mean this in a historical sense then there are numerous theories we can look to. It is in this sense that I said VERY early in this thread that we certainly are all "religious" in some way. Meaning that ideas of "God" and existence in general are dealt with by humans. In general we can refer to the idea of "God" as being something at the heart of every human existence, meaning we all have something we are about that constitutes our position, place and general meaning. To go prior to is an act of imagination. I cannot simply unlearn language and return to the state of a babe. We, as Husserl points out, carry around the sediments of life around with us.
Hmmmm. Not a noncontext in the above, because noncontexts are contextual in order to be determined as nontextual. This is not nonsense. A denial of any kind is a logical statement in the context other things that are in context. It is a matter of specifying. And i want the world 'god' stricken from our vocabulary, simply because it possesses metabulls**t. Start thinking of this kind of thing and you have made a straw person argument against religion as such.
When people generally refer to "religion" they always return to the idea of "faith" and/or "belief". I have found that the main differences between people who say they are "theist" or "atheist" is their views about, and claim over, "belief" in general. Many suffer from misunderstanding the principles of extending abstract structures into the world and forming scientific understandings form these extensions. Equally many take these extensions to be founded on unquestionable principles rather than abstract principles.
I'm with Heidegger on this: I don't give a fetid dingo's kidney about what people think when it comes to philosophy.

What is "logically prior to ..." logic? Surely you can figure out the lack of meaning here. You may very well have fooled yourself with your own words and are trying to make sense out of a question that makes literally no sense? That or you've simply not taken the time or dedication with which to frame the question intelligibly for the rest of us to understand fully (of course we can all guess at the intent of your question, but I am not inclined to offer up multiple answers to what appears to be an overtly obtuse question.)

I would add only that who says we "religiosity" rose into existence? Religion is based on community as is language. In a way we could quite easily refer to "religion" as if it was "language", or "language" as if it was "religion". That seems to be kind of what you are pointing towards?
No, 'logically prior' is a standardized way to point to what lies beneath an assertion and is freighted along without knowing or caring. Science rests on assumptions about the relation between math and the universe that tell them when they are using math to, say, describe and trajectory or measure mass, they're actually talking "about" the a world beyond us; you know, "out there". But in the logical analysis of a scientist's claim, what comes first is the assumption, and for philosophy, these assumptions are called to inquiry; they are logically prior, because they come prior to the doing of science. If you will, all science is question begging.

-- Updated August 7th, 2017, 10:16 pm to add the following --

Gertie:
If we go with that, the question remains - how does it enable you to make ontological claims about anything but 'your own' mental states/experience?
Remember you kicked off saying morality is objective. Clarify please.
I think when we observe the world, we are bound to the dynamic of our own understanding, and this dynamic is essentially temporal and pragmatic. So when I say, "pass the salt" or "what a lovely day it is" my references to the world have their analyses in time structures, and this brings the matter of what something is to what occurs in time that makes the meaning of the utterance meaningful? The meaning of meaning rests with pragmatism, for an analysis of any occurent thing is actually an event-in-time. I can't even imagine something out of time or out of space, and this seems to say not that we are *in* these, but rather that we are these, that they are a dimension of our being; part of the analysis of a self is time. And where does this come from? The past, and the familiarity repeated pragmatic engagement brings. So "pass the salt" issues from a long enculturating process of watching and internalizing language, gestures, idiomatic behavior and so on as these are engaging in and defining the world. Pass the salt has a long and complicated personal history, as well as a history of social genesis we all participate in.

So, as to things other than my own mental states, the question goes to how a pragmatic epistemology can get beyond itself. This is a question that is pretty important, that is, how knowledge of other things and people is possible. Pragmatism as i see it does not allow for this; there is no getting out. This is tricky, and takes perhaps someone more clever than me to defend it, for I've read Heidegger, and have more to read, but i do get the problem and he really helped me see this: When I see salt, say, one way to give a thumbnail philosophical analysis of this is to follow Kant: there are sensory intuitions and concepts, and the former without the latter are blind, but the latter without the former are empty. Meaning lies between the two, or in the combination of the two.

My thoughts are simple but far fetched, you might say: When I acknowledge a thing before me, the pragmatic meaning is always there and it makes knowing, believing, doubting and so on possible. But there is that ineffable presence that is NOT pragmatic at all. How is it that we can even acknowledge this as it is as presence? As presence, I say twice, because this is what my thoughts on religion swing on. The most salient feature in this world of ours is value; it is the valuative dimension of "pass the salt," the wanting salt, the propriety of the language to fit into a pattern of normalcy because you *care*. This caring, and this desire and gratification is "in" presence, not in the concept. Concepts shape desires but these are not concepts. They are intuited, and the gratification is intuited. And the suffering is the same.

.....but he doesn't go to the giveness of value; doesn't make it an issue. Nor does science. It can tell you, as you say, why tings like tomatoes taste good, but it does not tell you what moral goodness IS. Why the taste is Good. Why the pain is Bad.

The thing is, it does. Once you accept the scientific model of the world, it makes sense of why tomatoes taste nice and pain is unpleasant. It's remarkable to have discovered this, and that its findings tally so well with the way we experience life. This makes it good evidence that it has something real to tell us. And if we have any sense, by learning how we work, we'll be able to avoid terrible pitfalls. Once we understand the mechanisms behind how we value things, why we desire things, we can hopefully ameliorate the harmful parts and nurture the helpful. Imo it's irresponsible to ignore this new knowledge, it could practically help us 'redeem ourselves' to use your language.
Hard to make this point, but see the above. I know what pain is. This is not at issue. The issue is what it means that pain is part of the original human condition? Consider two universes: One is identical to the other save for one thing, namely, there is no moral badness and goodness. There are still people coming and going, laughing and crying, but the badness of all of this is absent. Now, this is entirely logically possible, and the point of posting such a world is to bring to mind the primordiality of suffering and delight, and getting to the heart of the thing i am trying to explain. Scientists in both worlds would have identical theories, or theory possibilities: for observables are equal! The only difference is the *mattering* of things. In one, things, of course, matter, but the mattering is only in gesture and language. In the other, the mattering is very different, and suffering has this clear and ineffable quality: it is bad, in the moral sense.

You no doubt notice that drawing such a distinction is very odd. That is because badness is invisible to "observation." One cannot put moral badness under a microscope.

It is odd, I know, but this kind of thing is drastically and, to borrow term from Quine (though not to play off his thinking), radically under-determined. Most treat our world as if it were the other kind of world, the one in which there is no badness (I am painfully aware of the awkwardness of this locution); they apply standards of theorizing, paradigms, to use Kuhn, that are produced by empirical science and completely ignore moral badness (and goodness, of course). Evolution does not begin to broach this matter because it is simply not about the badness of suffering. It only wants to explain the genesis of pain; you know, it is the familiar: pain made its entrance at some point, when a gene sequence underwent accidental mutation in some stage of an organism's development, and this was conducive to survival and reproduction, etc. ,etc. But it does not ever inquire about the badness of it because this is simply not its business. This belongs to philosophy and religion.

And there are certainly those who think moral badness is a fiction. They are wrong on this point. See John Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.

Now the more difficult point you raise is why should we extrapolate from our own personal, lets call it 'conscious experience', to believe the scientific model of stuff 'out there' and laws and so on is true, real? Well I'd say I can't know for sure, there is no 'bridge of certainty' from my experience to world of stuff 'out there'. Idealism in that sense is irrefutable. But I roughly accept my mental model of the world because it works. And if I ignore it, it doesn't work. That in itself is evidence that my experience is roughly telling me things about the world.
No bridge of certainty, but bridges nonetheless. For me, it comes down to the manner in which the world appears to us, and the big quesion is, how is it that we can "think" ontologically at all? For me, this goes to the presence of things. i think that IN the presence of perceptual objects, recollections, mathematical and so on, there is Being that is not part of the dynamics of pragmatic thought, and my it is what Being is. There is only one way we can step beyond the hermeneutical clutch of pragmatism, and that is to affirm transcendental Ego. When i behold an object it is infused with existence, so to speak. Like the brief analysis above of badness and goodness, Being-as-such is not observable, and yet, it is not reducible, as Heidegger would have it, to an ontology of language and culture (ready to hand). Being as such is Our contribution to the perceptual object, adn we can acknowledge Being in things not because they are, but because we are. We project our being onto the world in perceptual acts. And that is how we "get out" of interpretative fixity.

You're spot on that it's flawed and limited - and the the science part of the model itself tells me it will be. That we evolved for utility, to experience tables as solid, because that's a useful way to model them if I want to navigate the world and survive. So when science tells me a table's solidity is my mental construction, it makes sense within the model. It tells me that colour is a mental construction, and so on. That my perceptions are limited and at least partly constructing my model of the world and myself, it makes sense within the model (snake eating its tail time!) and tallies with the nature of my experiences to a point you can't ignore. And as you say, language plays a part too in how I formulate my model, a further abstracted symbolic construction upon a representational construction. I agree with you on all that.

But still, I can perceive something I call a pencil, and ask you if you see it too, and we'll agree. We'll agree something we call 'gravity' makes it fall. We can share observations and analysis of our shared model, and in that sense we can call these things objectively true. And once you accept this shared scientific model of the world, that it has things to say we can agree are real in the limited and constructed way we experience reality, we can agree we know stuff.

For example, we can say we know there was a time no experiencing subjects existed, and why tomatoes taste nice and pain is unpleasant. It's remarkable to have discovered this, and that its findings tally so well with the way we experience existence. This makes it good evidence that it has something real to tell us. And if we have any sense learning why we work the way we do will help us avoid terrible pitfalls we're prone to. Once we understand the mechanisms behind how we value things, why we desire things, we can hopefully ameliorate the harmful parts. Imo it's irresponsible folly to ignore this new knowledge we're beginning to map out, it could practically help us 'redeem ourselves' to use your language.

There is a progression here of what subjects can roughly and limitedly agree is real and true within our shared model, once it's assumed a world beyond us exists. There needs to be a justification for accepting some parts but not other, which you haven't given as far as I can tell.
But I don't disagree with most of this. See the above for my response. I do argue that we do not know things that are independent of experiencing agents. Tree falls int he forest, no one around: no tree, no forest, no sound, no falling, and so on. I do not argue that there is nothing out there, but when I say this, I don't know what i am talking about, not really. I do acknowledge Being-in-things, in this cup on the table, and this is the one way out: as I said, it is in the Being-as-such that I project Being onto the world, and in this projection, there is noting that even comes close to Value-in-Being, i.e., joy and suffering. Not only are these Real, they are more Real than anything else; by far more Real than the clunking materialist's (think Hobbes and others) fiction of the world.
However, we can say Value is an inherent feature of how consciousness evolved in humans, and it makes sense in terms of survival, if we accept evolution is a feature of the real world, which you say you do.
I say evolution is a theory, as respectable as theories about plate tectonics and star composition. But they are reams of inference away from the immediacy of the "badness" of this flame scorching my flesh.

-- Updated August 7th, 2017, 11:47 pm to add the following --

Fooloso4:
Transcendental does not mean ineffible, it means the condition for the possibility of something. Such conditions are something Kant and others talk quite a bit about.
I'll read about it. But as I see it, I said "utterly transcendental, or ineffable, and you can't talk about it. It's like god: pure ineffability!" and I don't think I conflated the two. But you do raise the mother of all interesting issues in epistemolgy: If the world is in some way a presentation of some unknown X, and if in our experiences there is an intimation of what x is (as there must be given the premise of "presentation") then where does presentation end and intimation begin?
Gertie
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Re: So you're an atheist? Not so fast.

Post by Gertie »

Hereandnow

It seems to me that we accept the epistemological limitations of being a human Subject, where we differ is on the method and justification for making objective ontological claims for anything outside of our own individual direct experiencing.

I've made a case for what I believe is a reasoned argument for 'following the evidence' in order to arrive at ontological claims we limited subjects can agree are true for us in our shared world of limited understanding, and that is as close to 'objective' as we can get. While you appeal to intuition and what feels important to you, as a guide to something more fundamental and objectively true for us all. My argument actually explains why some things seem important to you (evolutionary adaptive utility) and even why we are creatures whose perceptions and cognitive abilities are flawed - again because they're based on evolutionary utility.

So it strikes me that we have an excellent explanatory model in evolution, which even explains our epistemological dilemma, and why we're apt to look for particular types of answers, such as yours. Which should give us pause for thought.

However, as you say it's only a model, rooted in our limited abilities and biases. At which point I take the view that it's the best we can do, for now at least, as a useful shared model which we can agree upon and call 'objective' in that sense. Beyond that, we can come up with any number of speculations based on this or that, any one of which might be pointing towards a more fundamental understanding of reality, but are unfalsifiable in our shared-objective world. So my position is that it's s better to simply say - I don't know.
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Kinyonga
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Re: So you're an atheist? Not so fast.

Post by Kinyonga »

Fan of Science wrote:There is no relationship between theism and morality. Far from it. Plato addressed this issue thousands of years ago. If God's act is moral because God is adhering to a moral standard, then we merely need to look at the standard to determine morality, and not to God. On the other hand, if one claims that regardless of what God does, it is simply moral because he does it, then morality becomes arbitrary.
A tentative reply...
Perhaps God is, in a sense, the moral standard. [I had an attempt at trying to explain that, and sadly failed. :| Perhaps an attack on my suggestion would spur me on to greater lucidity.]
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Hereandnow
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Re: So you're an atheist? Not so fast.

Post by Hereandnow »

Gertie:
useful shared model
It's only useful if it addresses the issue at hand, and evolution doesn't, and the reason it doesn't is that evolution is not ontology. This term is not being used in the expanded sense so popular nowadays, when, e.g., people talk about what their program for sales increase structure IS. This is philosophical ontology, and it has to do with the structure of Being as such. It is not an empirical matter, as evolution is. It is apriori: what conditions are necessary in order for us to have experiences the way we do? Like Kant's transcendental deduction: apriori.

Why do this kind of thinking? Because it is clear that those limitations you mention have necessary grounding beyond themselves (or, in an analysis "beneath" them). Kant makes this point for human reason, I make it for ethics (though there is a discussion there on Kant and ethics; not for here though).

Just to remind you, I am arguing about atheism and I call my argument a kind of error theory (a term lifted from John Mackie): this world is, in all of its observational presence, morally wrong, and because it is morally wrong, there must be something, without clouding the matter with religious metaphysics, that redeems this. This is the basis of all religion: We are born to suffer and die and our observations and theories cannot explain the originary given of this. See this term 'originary'; I picked it up from Husserl and it denotes what is logically embedded in experiencing the world and the idea here is that before empirical theory even takes place there is required an examination of the parts and utilities that make theorizing even possible (which is what Kant does.)

I certainly understand the reluctance to go with this if you have never encountered phenomenology or existential thinking before. It does take time, and for me, it begins with Kant. But if a person is truly interested, it is essential for a philosophical understanding.
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