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JaxAg
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Joined: December 16th, 2018, 10:17 am

HiFolks.

Post by JaxAg »

Hello. I am seventy next week. I have no formal education, but have always been interested in ideas. I call myself a skeptic, and my founding truth, (the only truth I casn claim to be Absolute) is that I am fallible. This is not as useless as it sounds. :) For one thing, it throws solipsism straight into the trashcan. For another, it relieves me of any requirement to claim any other truth as Absolute, or to demand that others do so. The best we can do is assign degrees of confidence to our claims. I look forward to some delightful, vigorous debate.
Gertie
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Joined: January 7th, 2015, 7:09 am

Re: HiFolks.

Post by Gertie »

Happy Nearly Birthday JaxAg the Fallible!

And welcome :). Get stuck in.
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JaxAg
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Re: HiFolks.

Post by JaxAg »

Thanks Gertie! I'll look up your recent posts now, to see if there's anything can dispute.
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h_k_s
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Favorite Philosopher: Aristotle
Location: Rocky Mountains

Re: HiFolks.

Post by h_k_s »

JaxAg wrote: December 16th, 2018, 1:26 pm Hello. I am seventy next week. I have no formal education, but have always been interested in ideas. I call myself a skeptic, and my founding truth, (the only truth I casn claim to be Absolute) is that I am fallible. This is not as useless as it sounds. :) For one thing, it throws solipsism straight into the trashcan. For another, it relieves me of any requirement to claim any other truth as Absolute, or to demand that others do so. The best we can do is assign degrees of confidence to our claims. I look forward to some delightful, vigorous debate.
When you say "I am fallible" you are saying "I am" and also "I am" equals "fallible".

So those are at least 3 statements:

1 - you exist

2 - fallible exists

3 - you and fallible are the same.

So those are your 3 basic fundamental assumptions or definitions, whichever you wish to call them.

I suspect the "I am" part is fairly empirical. Most people and other animals sense (this is the key to empiricism) that they exist and also that others exist. Only an extreme Skeptic would get stuck on this.

Descartes derived "Cogito ergo sum" from two basic fundamental assumptions, that thinking exists and that cause-and-effect exists. When he combined his own thinking process with the cause-and-effect for thinking he concluded that someone must exist who is doing the thinking.

You yourself seem to have done something similar with "fallible" and "I am". However Descartes requires one less assumption than you do. You assumed existence. Descartes proved it from thinking combined with cause-and-effect alone.
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JaxAg
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Re: HiFolks.

Post by JaxAg »

Here are some thoughts that I might believe are memories of real events.

1. At some time, t, I believed that proposition p was true.
2. At some later time,t + n, I believed that, at time t, proposition p was false.

I now claim that least one of the following statements must be true.

a. At time t, I believed something that was untrue.
b. At time t + n, I believed something that was untrue.
c. The impression that there exists an 'I' who recollects these 'events', and is having these thoughts, is fallacious.
d. This argument is wrong.

Whatever the case, I am clearly capable of error.
Further, I believe this argument is more fundamental than the Cogito, as it contains no assumptions at all. My argument itself allows for the possibility that it might well be wrong, in which case I am capable of error. QED

I know this might be regarded as either facetious game-playing, or completely useless, but in fact it is neither. Its first usefulness lies in the fact that it practically destroys extreme solipsism, which the Cogito cannot. It works like this. Since I know I am capable of error, there must be some kind of a 'world' that can at least sometimes differ from my beliefs about it. In other words, my thoughts cannot be all that there is.

Nor is it an example of extreme scepticism.
On the contrary. Since the undeniable fact of my fallibility proves that there must be some sort of a reality outside my mind, I feel an urgent drive to engage with that reality. And I feel obliged to challenge, examine, and test, my ideas about the world as I engage with it. I assign degrees of confidence to the beliefs as they form, seting aside the ones that seem most improbable and, when I sometimes assign a very high degree of confidence to a belief, I feel free to regard that belief as true, for all practical and impractical purposes. I act in the world on the moment to moment assumption that my understanding is good enough to trust. I feel free to label this degree of confidence 'knowledge'.
Similarly, now that I have reached a firm conclusion that God doesn't exist, I take the label 'atheist' rather than 'agnostic'.
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