Fact vs Faith, How Do You Know
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Fact vs Faith, How Do You Know
George: I dunno! If I can’t see the logic of it—if you can’t even explain it to me, how can I believe it? Am I just supposed to take your word for it?
Fred: Yeah, it is a bit like asking you to trust a snake charmer or used car salesman, huh? But you don’t need to take my word, there are many people who have had the same experience.
George: So they claim. But you must admit that by your own admission you cannot tell me what a mystical awakening experience is like. And neither can any other mystics. I mean, at least a scientist has rigorous methods and can quantify his results in such a way that they are repeatable.
Fred: So it would seem. Let’s see, OK? Let’s take a statement from Wikipedia and test it. Here is something on “gene”: “Colloquially, the term gene is often used to refer to an inheritable trait which is usually accompanied by a phenotype as in ("tall genes" or "bad genes") -- the proper scientific term for this is allele.” It goes on to say, “In cells, genes consist of a long strand of DNA that contains a promoter, which controls the activity of a gene, and coding and non-coding sequence.” So genes exist inside a cell as a strand of DNA, and they determine, what?: the characteristics of the organism in which they occur. Would you agree with that?
George: Sure, that’s basically my understanding of what genes are.
Fred: Why?
George: Why what?
Fred: Why is that your understanding? Because it says so in Wikipedia?
George: Well, it’s pretty well common knowledge. Scientists have sequenced the human genes. They even know for certain cases which genes control which traits.
Fred: How did you come by this information? Have you personally ever seen a gene?
George: No. I think you need an electron microscope to see one. They’re pretty tiny. No, I read articles. You know, Smithsonian, the Discovery Channel. Hey, I try to keep up.
Fred: So you basically accept the word of authority? Sometimes even third hand.
George: Yeah, I suppose I do. But these guys are very careful. They keep an eye on one another. Their opinions or experimental findings are open to peer review before they are ever published. And, as I said, their experiments must be repeatable to be accepted. It can’t be just one guy’s opinion. Besides, the proof is in the pudding. Their discoveries generally have practical application. Genetically engineered medication is a well-established field; so, is DNA identification of criminals.
Fred: Can you verify their findings by repeating their experiments?
George: Lord, no! It takes years of training and practice to be able to understand and perform the science.
Fred: So again you are taking it on the voice of authority that the science is valid. Can you read their papers and journals to directly understand their work in detail?
George: No, Most of it is abstracted into mathematics, and what isn’t is full of jargon and terminology that is only learned through study and working in the field. No, but, fortunately, there are writers who are able to put the concepts—well not all the details, but the basic concepts—into everyday English.
Fred: So, let me see if I understand. There is a small band of highly trained individuals who practice their skills and can only communicate the details to one-another. When they work with the lay public they must—in essence—dumb-down their findings to make them understandable and interesting. Is that about right?
George: Yeah, I suppose so.
Fred: And their discoveries come through a practice that is repeatable—hence verifiable.
George: Verifiability is the key. If the results of an experiment cannot be independently repeated, the results are discounted.
Fred: Good. We wouldn’t want someone claiming cold fusion or some such bull. But only to those who have the training and experience can repeat the experiment.
George: Sure, but there are a lot of them. And besides, each experiment’s results usually lead to new experiments and new results and over the years mother nature exposes herself more and more and we come to understand reality—the things we live with and see every day—more and more. It’s called progress. You wouldn’t even be here today without it. It’s too far from your house to mine to make the journey without a car and still have enough energy to talk. And boy you like to talk.
Fred: I’m sorry, George. I’ve been frustrated with my inability to make a certain point clear, and I’m trying to wrestle through ways to explain myself. Would you like to walk over to Peet’s and get a coffee?
George: No, no, no…I’m good for now. I want to see where you are going with all this. What point is it you are trying to make clear?
Fred: OK. Let’s look again to Wikipedia. Here’s a statement: “In 2012 biotech firm Amgen was able to reproduce just six of 53 important studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, successfully repeated only one fourth of 67 important papers.” So, if there are all these published results that later could not be replicated, how to you know what to believe?
George: Well, I guess you just have to wait until the dust settles…until enough time has passed for other scientists to look into it.
Fred: But you must agree that the findings of science should be stated in terms of probability, rather than certainty.
George: Whoa. If scientists can only probably be correct, who, in God’s name, can ever be certain of anything?
Fred: That’s the point that I am trying to make clear. We cannot prove or know anything for certain. You just mentioned God. Do you believe God created all of us and everything?
George: I’m no creationist. I believe in evolution. But some One or some Thing had to get the big bang started.
Fred: What if I suggested that it was all created just 10 seconds ago?
George: Come on. There’s tons of evidence to disprove that. There’s carbon dating, dinosaur bones, human remains, geological evidence galore.
Fred: Isn’t it possible that an omnipotent entity in creating the universe and everything in it could be clever enough to, simultaneously, provide evidence among the creation sufficient to fool our poor brains into concluding that the reality has been in existence for billions of years. How would we ever know?
George: Damn, you sure know how to jerk the rug from under a guy. How am I supposed to know anything?
Fred: That’s the point that I am trying to make clear. All of your dealings with reality turn out to be a mystical experience if you dig deep enough. You know nothing for certain. You just accept it on faith.
- Pattern-chaser
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Re: Fact vs Faith, How Do You Know
Yes, agreed (although this is not religious 'faith', but only simple, unqualified, faith).
When we get right down, past the axioms and assumptions, to the deepest basics, we find only supposition and speculation. We do what we do because we are unable to do any better. So we accept life as we find it, and do what we must to understand it. That includes an awful lot of faith, as you observe.
What aspect of this philosophy would you like to discuss in this topic?
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Re: Fact vs Faith, How Do You Know
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Re: Fact vs Faith, How Do You Know
Sorry, which concept?
Religious faith, perhaps?
Because we can know so little, we necessarily believe much, much of that on faith. So we are debating what we believe, and in debating it, we come to understand it better. Uncertainty does not mandate chaos or randomness, but only the knowledge that we know very little, so we must rely on belief and faith.
[N.B. I do not refer here (only) to religious belief or faith. I'm being much more general and all-embracing than that.]
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Re: Fact vs Faith, How Do You Know
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Re: Fact vs Faith, How Do You Know
How can you imagine relationships without the things which have the relationships? It looks like an oxymoron.Ket wrote: ↑June 3rd, 2023, 12:19 pm Yes, but. The debate may assist in making quotidian decisions, but rational metaphysics is an oxymoron. It is analogous to believing in a flat earth: anthropocentric and based on limited evidence and invalid assumptions. If the Earth and everything on it ceased to exist nothing would really change except perhaps the orbits of some neighbors. We should be trying to imagine answers beyond human ken. Try this: Reality is not made of Things, but of Relationships.
Maybe, or maybe the third person falsifiability of the scientific method has delivered a model very close to ontological reality. How can we know which is more likely?Things only exist for humans as a result of their finite brains trying to make sense of infinity. Closest I can come to "visualizing" is to "feel" that Reality is as an ocean of currents (relationships). Its the "“A butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean” but on a very Universal scale. The stars, black holes, moons, trees, birds, humans exist for us only because our brains must sample the currents and come up with the best explanation from our perspective. There is "order", not chaos, but an order incomprehensible to us.
The prob with radical scepticism is it leaves us no way of knowing which, if either, might be true. Ultimately it reduces epistemological certainty to solipsism, which is where the primary leap of faith must begin to re-construct an ontological world beyond my own conscious experience. The first reasonable assumption of that re-construction is that my experience represents a real world. Or rather represents/models how I interact with that world - which is your point. Notice Idealists (including Kant) imo should accept they can't reasonably just use scepticism to doubt physical stuff, but also other minds, which are also only known to you as part of your own experiential model. Descartes got the sceptical deconstruction part right, but what we're then left with is the re-construction of the ontological 'not-me' world necessarily based on reasoning from the nature of the content of one's experience.
Comparing notes with others about the nature of the content of our experience (scientific third person falsifiability) is an obvious way to go. From there we've arrived at a shared, empirical and physicalist model of the world (including abstract properties like reason, logic, maths, causation which are rooted in the way the world appears to us to work - the 'order' or structural regularities and patterns you allude to). Moreover a model which is coherent, vast inexplanatory scope and detail, and makes testable predictions. Incredibly impressive. And if we act as if physicalism is true, it works. No other model has that kind of compelling weight behind it, and others look flimsy, speculative and open to bias in comparison.
But... physicalism can be epistemologically deconstructed back to solipsism like any other model can. And notably it can't, perhaps in principle, explain non publically testable phenomena - namely conscious experience itself. Our knowing kit, our experience, has no place in the physicalist model which relies on it. And physicalism itself tells us we are flawed and limited knowers of reality, evolved for 'need to know' utility who experientially create what Hoffman calls ''Darwinian fictions'' .
So it seems to me we're stuck in assessing how good our experiential knowledge kit is. We don't have access to a 'god's eye' omniscient perspective to test our individual first person povs or our shared notes third person model against.
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Re: Fact vs Faith, How Do You Know
With that, I must disagree. Metaphysics is just the label we philosophers give to those considerations that science is unable to deal with. This inability is usually caused by a lack of evidence. Without evidence, there can be no analysis, and therefore no justified conclusion. Some would conclude that investigation of such topics is pointless, as we know before we start that no justified conclusions can result from our consideration. But I disagree with that too.
There are questions such as 'does God exist?', or 'are we all brains-in-vats?'. [There are many other such questions too. These are only examples.] None of these can be conclusively examined, in the manner of science, but they can be considered nonetheless. And the point of this consideration? As we consider the matter in hand, and its possible consequences or ramifications, sometimes we learn. Other ideas come to us during our musings, and often we find that those ideas have value too. Value that we would not have discovered without the metaphysical musing. It is the journey that is worthwhile, not reaching the destination (as we cannot do for such issues).
So metaphysics is, or can be, rational. Metaphysics is intrinsically and necessarily speculative; that cannot be escaped. But not "rational"? No, that is a conclusion too far, as we might say.
Believing in a flat earth is believing the evidence of our senses. This is a basic level of reasoning. It can be improved, for sure, in this case by climbing a peak of a decent height and looking at the horizon. It is curved. And so our learning progresses. But is the initial stage (of thinking) worthy of the contempt your comment throws at it? I suspect not.
We proceed here, surely, in the manner of science? We offer tentative explanations, based on the evidence, and then we gradually improve, either with more or better evidence, or with theories that better explain the evidence we have. And so we learn.
But I see no value in demeaning our older theories. They were the best we had, so we used them. When we gained better explanations, we used those instead. Growth and learning are cause for admiration, I feel, not ridicule.
A holistic approach would observe that if the Earth was no longer there, the entire universe has changed. There are no such things as insignificant changes. All are changes; all move the universe from one state to another. But I don't think this is what you're aiming at in this topic. (?)
For that, I think you need the philosophical 'sin-bin' we usually refer to as "metaphysics"?
Using the 'everything is a network' perspective, it looks as though you are saying that the nodes (of the network) don't matter, that only the connections are significant. Looked at in this way, the apparent error becomes clear: a network comprises nodes and connections. Without nodes, or without connections, the network does not, and cannot, exist. Thus I conclude, using your terms, that Reality is made of Things and their Relationships (with each other).Ket wrote: ↑June 3rd, 2023, 12:19 pm Try this: Reality is not made of Things, but of Relationships. Things only exist for humans as a result of their finite brains trying to make sense of infinity. Closest I can come to "visualizing" is to "feel" that Reality is as an ocean of currents (relationships).
That may be so. We'll never know, but we can speculate metaphysically, and who knows?, we may learn something.
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Re: Fact vs Faith, How Do You Know
Yep. Nodes and connections; networks require both.
Hmm. One advantage of "radical scepticism" is that it embraces the common situation where we cannot answer a particular question, and never will be able to. It is one way of dealing with near-universal apparent uncertainty, such as we (seem to) encounter in the real world. And yet I think we may postpone our fall into the chasm of solipsism for a while. Uncertainty is not a synonym for unadulterated chaos, but only describes a situation where rigorous order is not universal. Some things may be known, others may always be uncertain.
I get a bit fed up with using solipsism as a bogeyman. It is one of (very) many possibilities. If we really had that God's-eye-view that we so often adopt in our thought experiments, we could all fall around laughing at the poor humans, who think that the reality that is apparent to them is how reality actually is! Failing that, we have what we have. Solipsism isn't refutable because it is possible. We can't even say how probable it is that solipsism (or any other possible explanation) is the actual truth. We don't have a way to calculate that probability. We can't even compare competing possible explanations, because of this inability to calculate the probabilities when we have no evidence to go on.
I think any explanation that fits all available evidence works if we assume its correctness. Solipsism, for example, works just as well. And the amount of evidence — none!!! — is the same as for physicalism, or any other possible explanation. All explanations that are possible, "work".
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Re: Fact vs Faith, How Do You Know
In fact, my view is quite different. No Thing exists, not me, not you, not my mind, nothing but Currents of Relationships. I suggest my view is at least as rational as any other view of Reality, to me more so. I sit on my chair, which is on the floor, which is in a building, where in my wife is cooking dinner of mostly vegetables which she bought from a farmer who grew the crops which depended on the sun whose orbit is determined by its celestial neighbors and is just right for life on Earth, and so forth. All these Things exist only as currents of relationships, an infinity of currents. As Lao Tsu said, “Names are the mother of things”. Mans brain must take snapshots of reality and freeze them as corporeal to create a reality we can deal with. Morality, epistemology, any-ology, are all anthropocentric; in the Reality of currents of relationships there is no pecking order. No perceived “thing” is more important than any other. What matters to humans is to try, with very limited tools, to come to a sense of the totality of relationships that instantiate them, an d seek harmony in those relationships.
Lao Tsu also said, "The truth that can be spoken is not the truth". Human communication media are very fallible. Terms like "relationship", "network". "node" as dictionary terms cannot communicate what I am trying to. Try this: things are evidence of currents. There is no network and no nodes. Just as an oceanographer can sample water for acidity, temperature, salinity, etc. and draw conclusions about the currents of the ocean. I respect the observations of the replies, but I suggest you need to go beyond relationships, networks, nodes, etc. Those are also Things, created by the brain in order to make sense of the incomprehensible.
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Re: Fact vs Faith, How Do You Know
Relationships between ... what, exactly? If there exists nothing but relationships, then what do these relationships connect or associate? It's like saying that there is only left, but not right. It doesn't make sense to me.
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Re: Fact vs Faith, How Do You Know
"Everything is a network" is a metaphor, and not usually a literal truth. It is a perspective that often helps us to understand things, nothing more, or less.Ket wrote: ↑June 4th, 2023, 5:32 pm Try this: things are evidence of currents. There is no network and no nodes. Just as an oceanographer can sample water for acidity, temperature, salinity, etc. and draw conclusions about the currents of the ocean. I respect the observations of the replies, but I suggest you need to go beyond relationships, networks, nodes, etc.
I suggest *you* need to go beyond networks, and realise that if you have relationships, you have things that are connected by those relationships. The 'network' has connections (relationships) between its nodes. Without the nodes, the relationships become meaningless, not to mention non-existent!
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Re: Fact vs Faith, How Do You Know
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Re: Fact vs Faith, How Do You Know
Moving outside a human perspective could be interesting... But perhaps it could prove difficult ... for a human?
A relationship exists between two (or more) things. If there are no things, there are no relationships. That is not a matter of perspective. You can't have a stick with only one end.
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Re: Fact vs Faith, How Do You Know
From this starting point, we use deductive logic to derive objective logical truths. Nothing can be more true or certainin to us in all of reality. We can also use deductive logic via "logical impossibilities" to weed out the false truths that presently reside in our already contaminated pool of knowledge.
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Re: Fact vs Faith, How Do You Know
But reason and logic themselves can only get us so far. They're great, indeed, indispensable for the the sciences. But think about everything you hold dear. Can reason and logic tell you much about love, moral values etc? I mean, maybe they can tell us something about those, too, but it is not obvious. We start to hit bedrock when we get down to our sentiments, but these don't always seem to obey the rules of mathematics and logic, either. Again, if we dig down to even deeper, really solid bedrock, it might all boil down to physics and the laws of nature, but if we were going to argue for that then we'd need to explain it.
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