HappyHippo posted:Here: Okay. There is no way for me to give you a satisfactory answer because your goal is transparently to trap me into either saying nonsense or weaseling a concession out of me, and threading the needle requires a lot of space and time that I have no confidence you will admit. But I feel confidence by saying that aloud, so I will say that, if we accept beliefs produce behavior, accurate beliefs generally produce more effective behavior than inaccurate beliefs, but not overwhelmingly so. Because while accurate beliefs will, in theory, produce effective behavior all of the time, inaccurate beliefs that produce effective behavior for all common situations would still persist, and while inaccurate beliefs that produce effective behavior all of the time are much less likely to emerge than accurate beliefs, when they do emerge they should be as persistent as accurate ones. This is ignoring cases where accurate beliefs produce ineffective behavior, such as waiting to verify if that's a king snake or a coral snake. So in other words, there is still the problem of purging inaccurate beliefs and ensuring that they survive in marginal numbers. This doesn't really resolve the question.
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Aug 17, 2015 02:45
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ShadowCatboy posted:He called me a worm whereas I am obviously a catboy. An atheist catboy who believes there is nyo God. I sincerely hope you're ashamed of yourself over this. 
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Aug 17, 2015 02:48
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Phyzzle posted:There was an Interesting debate in the early analytical philosophy days over whether miracles or the supernatural are contradictory concepts. It really would depend on how you define these terms, specifically. Who What Now posted:I sincerely hope you're ashamed of yourself over this. Mildly.
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Aug 17, 2015 02:51
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Effectronica posted:Actually, people who live in cultures where maps are not used maintain internal maps with high accuracy of the areas with which they are familiar. Tools like the map or writing are ones that allow for easier transmission of knowledge before they allow for higher precision. Pure conjecture. Astonishing, though, that people who can't rely on tools that substitute for proficiency in a particular mental skill get better at those skills. That doesn't mean they've got an accurate model of their environment in their heads. It means they've got a very useful one. Also, whatever accuracy it may have, it pales in comparison to what can be accomplished with some relatively simple surveying tools and a pencil. Which would still, in the grand scheme of things, be only the tiniest of tiny fractions less accurate a depiction of whatever slice of reality it modelled than the most accurate map humans are capable of producing. Accuracy is illusory. Name a belief you have that you think is truly accurate, and why.
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Aug 17, 2015 02:51
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Smudgie Buggler posted:Pure conjecture. Astonishing, though, that people who can't rely on tools that substitute for proficiency in a particular mental skill get better at those skills. That doesn't mean they've got an accurate model of their environment in their heads. It means they've got a very useful one. Also, whatever accuracy it may have, it pales in comparison to what can be accomplished with some relatively simple surveying tools and a pencil. Which would still, in the grand scheme of things, be only the tiniest of tiny fractions less accurate a depiction of whatever slice of reality it modelled than the most accurate map humans are capable of producing. Accuracy is illusory. Well, unfortunately, we only have written records because of the march of history, so I am unable to satisfy your belief in your superiority, no matter how you cloak it by ripping a bong and gasping, "Accuracy is illusory". I can tell you that your post implies that writing and mapping emerged, like Pallas Athena, fully formed from the head of Zeus, which is hilarious, but surely even you wouldn't mean that. In any case, I feel that my belief that the world would be a better place if you were no longer in it, and even better if you had never existed, is an accurate one, and as evidence I submit every post you have ever made. I feel that this falls on deaf ears, or more accurately, blind eyes, but nevertheless I must be true to myself.
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Aug 17, 2015 02:55
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Sorry about your thread OP.
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Aug 17, 2015 03:16
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Effectronica posted:Okay. There is no way for me to give you a satisfactory answer because your goal is transparently to trap me into either saying nonsense or weaseling a concession out of me, and threading the needle requires a lot of space and time that I have no confidence you will admit. But I feel confidence by saying that aloud, so I will say that, if we accept beliefs produce behavior, accurate beliefs generally produce more effective behavior than inaccurate beliefs, but not overwhelmingly so. Because while accurate beliefs will, in theory, produce effective behavior all of the time, inaccurate beliefs that produce effective behavior for all common situations would still persist, and while inaccurate beliefs that produce effective behavior all of the time are much less likely to emerge than accurate beliefs, when they do emerge they should be as persistent as accurate ones. This is ignoring cases where accurate beliefs produce ineffective behavior, such as waiting to verify if that's a king snake or a coral snake. So in other words, there is still the problem of purging inaccurate beliefs and ensuring that they survive in marginal numbers. This doesn't really resolve the question. This same problem generalized to all aspects of evolution. Yes suboptimal solutions sometimes end up sticking around for a long time. I'm still not clear on what the argument is for the idea that we actually have accurate beliefs more than expected.
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Aug 17, 2015 03:34
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Effectronica posted:Well, for one thing, I am not using the definition you are using. Uh..a belief's truth value being pegged to observed reality has a lot of problems with it. You either wind up with a contradiction or have to go full tilt and say that truth is subjective. Yes, we are using different definitions. Why do you insist that unknown material explanations count as supernatural? Why bother with raising the possibility of the immaterial? Keep in mind that previous explanations at this, that unknown material explanations are somehow outside of naturalistic thinking, is also your own particular definition of naturalism. That just seems like semantics to me. A way to go "the supernatural exists" without having to also go "the immaterial exists". Material vs. immaterial is why there's so much contention, if you remove that then who cares? Also I'm really not sure how you leapt from "cannot be verified" to "cannot be true or false."
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Aug 17, 2015 03:49
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Effectronica posted:Well, unfortunately, we only have written records because of the march of history, so I am unable to satisfy your belief in your superiority, no matter how you cloak it by ripping a bong and gasping, "Accuracy is illusory". I can tell you that your post implies that writing and mapping emerged, like Pallas Athena, fully formed from the head of Zeus, which is hilarious, but surely even you wouldn't mean that. Whatever happened to you that made you this way, I sincerely wish it hadn't because it must have been pretty horrid.
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Aug 17, 2015 04:31
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This thread by Effectronica must be a month's worth of built up rage deduced from being unable to post on the internet during that time.
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Aug 17, 2015 04:38
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asdf32 posted:I'm still not clear on what the argument is for the idea that we actually have accurate beliefs more than expected. AFAIK She's arguing that beliefs w/r/t how the affect evolutionary fitness are/were far more accurate then what we should have for our weird ape brains and imperfect senses to be the only vectors for beliefs, especially considering how brief human communication has been around compared to the evolutionary time scale. Therefore something else must be influencing beliefs, and since ape brains and imperfect sense are the only currently natural means of sharing beliefs we have confirmed, something seemingly supernatural must be actually something that is actually natural i.e. something akin to telepathy is real life and it's how beliefs got so accurate before the development of communication tools like language and writing. Plate Tectonics basics in 1910s : movement in the mantle discovered in 1960s :: Accuracy of beliefs as it applies to evolution : telepathy. Once again, as far as I can gather, anyway.
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Aug 17, 2015 05:45
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Effectronica posted:It's cool how nobody will ever ask you to define something like "thought-form" or clarify what you mean by "intelligences", because you're obviously not using the standard, colloquial definition of that word. So instead, I will ask you to show how "intelligences" are phenotypically expressed so that natural selection may act upon them. So, you see, the idea that we have many true beliefs, and that this is somehow improbably, doesn't really hold up. But here we're being time-independent - a well-functioning intelligence may come up with many false beliefs based on poor priors or bad information, but given the circumstances, should produce better results on average than any other kind of thinking-thing. Effectronica posted:Well, rudatron, live your life as a vampire's victim, bloodless and undead. SedanChair posted:You scare the poo poo out of me sometimes. rudatron fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 08:07
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Effectronica posted:Okay, well, you could go back to my initial post, and, assuming you can read things, you could engage with the proposition that beliefs are not acted upon by natural selection, and we could move from here, if you were inclined to conversation rather than asininity and whatever "you should consider harder" is meant to mean. The rest of this is basically down to assuming inherent definitions, which is, um, well, not really philosophically materialistic in nature. Congratulations on allowing me to point out yet again that I have already done so, several times. To reiterate: organisms that do not translate beliefs into behaviour will be selected to lose the capacity of forming beliefs. In organisms which translate beliefs to behaviour, more accurate beliefs are more likely to be useful. Which brings us to: Effectronica posted:if we accept beliefs produce behavior, accurate beliefs generally produce more effective behavior than inaccurate beliefs, but not overwhelmingly so. Because while accurate beliefs will, in theory, produce effective behavior all of the time, inaccurate beliefs that produce effective behavior for all common situations would still persist, and while inaccurate beliefs that produce effective behavior all of the time are much less likely to emerge than accurate beliefs, when they do emerge they should be as persistent as accurate ones. This is ignoring cases where accurate beliefs produce ineffective behavior, such as waiting to verify if that's a king snake or a coral snake. So in other words, there is still the problem of purging inaccurate beliefs and ensuring that they survive in marginal numbers. This doesn't really resolve the question. You are flailing about to maintain your premise that people inherently know stuff correctly. You mention three categories of beliefs: incorrect and useless, incorrect and useful, correct and useful. If you remove the first, then the second and the third will become more common than expected by chance, and therefore people will be right more often than expected by chance. You fail to provide any evidence that inaccurate but useful beliefs will be as useful as accurate beliefs in general. You fail to face the reality that most beliefs a person has about things that are both personally unfamiliar and insignificant or absent in culture are not actually correct. e.g. western cultures don't really give a poo poo about most insects, and thus many people incorrectly and uselessly believe that dragonflies sting (making them panic unnecessarily when one bumps into them), that butterflies become unable to breathe and fly if you touch their wings (there really is no practical relevance of this belief), and that bumblebees cannot sting at all (they can if they are able to lever themselves against your grip, envenomating you - this belief is wrong and harmful. it gets even more fun in warmer climates where even scientifically informed belief from places where all bumblebees are well known saying they are less dangerous than wasps becomes wrong - my worst insect sting ever was an aggressive bumble bee species that could just fly up to me and sting if they got pissed off). Ask a non-biologist anything about an insect or other culturally uninteresting animal that isn't blatantly obvious from looking at a picture of one (i.e. questions harder than "do crickets have legs?") and they'll start spouting complete bullshit. e: correction, people even get things that you could just know from looking at a picture wrong: how many legs do a spider and an insect have? The same is true for many things - people are naturally full of poo poo, as one would expect by chance, except in things where we have made an effort to be less poo poo, and you refuse to admit this presumably because it makes you uncomfortable. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 08:25 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 08:17
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Phyzzle posted:There was an Interesting debate in the early analytical philosophy days over whether miracles or the supernatural are contradictory concepts.
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Aug 17, 2015 08:20
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Phyzzle posted:There was an Interesting debate in the early analytical philosophy days over whether miracles or the supernatural are contradictory concepts. A good place to start would be where identical conditions in a simple experiment (i.e. no chaos mucking up our predictions) unpredictably fail or succeed in bringing about an alleged supernatural event, or a case in which perfect replication of the circumstances (which may or may not be practical) fails to repeat it.
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Aug 17, 2015 08:23
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rudatron posted:It's a difficult question to answer, the easiest being that something is supernatural if it cannot be mechanistic/is arbitrary. If an ESP field existed, then you expand nature to fill that new area, and what was previously miraculous now becomes natural. The only way you couldn't do that is if there wasn't a way to mechanize the new field you're trying to cover. So the end of basic & pure cause and effect (even if this is only done by adding something to causality - such as telos). Yeah, but at that point you're really having a Foucauldian about schematisms and not an argument about the existence of something supernatural as that word is commonly understood (that is to say, by definition not explicable in mechanistic terms) IMO. The things that we think can be interrogated scientifically, and where those things fit in to the structure of our knowledge are constantly shifting. But that is very different from the belief that those things change in their underlying nature when they make that epistemic shift in our minds (something supernatural becomes natural by virtue of that epistemic moment).
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Aug 17, 2015 11:01
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Hey man, I'm not sure it's possible, but if you were to ever convince anyone, that's how you'd have to do it. I only dodge the questions I get the waffle on. Don't take that right from me.
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Aug 17, 2015 12:33
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Could some philosophy degree carrying goon make a quick public statement and distance themselves from this thread? I feel like this thread is a character assassination on every philosophy department in the world.
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Aug 17, 2015 13:01
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Effectronica posted:I am stating that the phenomenological reality we inhabit is one that can be made to correspond very closely to noumenal reality, in the Kantian definitions of those terms. I believe this because I reject Cartesian demonology and other systems as pointless, and because, like Johnson, I have kicked a rock and experienced pain from doing so. Do you even have the slightest clue? You're throwing around words at random here, chump. Phenomenology is not "A Reality". Phenomenology is either a psychological or philosophical method which aims to explain various aspects of reality and/or human experience. In psychology, it aims to describe (certain aspects) of personal, that is, subjective experience. Philopsophically speaking, phenomenology is about studying 'things' as they appear to us, within our limited conciousness. Philosophical phenomonelogy studies the ways how our mind perceives (and by that extent interprets) structures of conciousness and how we experience knowledge of ourselves to be a 'being' and the like. Cartesian demonology? Did Descartes study demons? Awesome. Also, can you explain the meaning of Kants noumenal reality within a totality derived from phenomenological reality? If I get it right. And please post your refutation of Descartes' I Think. You reject it out of hand so easily it must be quite simple for us dimwits to understand. Thank you and have a great day!
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Aug 17, 2015 14:01
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Effectronica posted:Okay. There is no way for me to give you a satisfactory answer because your goal is transparently to trap me into either saying nonsense or weaseling a concession out of me, and threading the needle requires a lot of space and time that I have no confidence you will admit. My goal is demonstrate why I think you're wrong. I think your whole argument is based on an incorrect premise, and that it is precisely the incorrectness of this premise which makes you wrong. If you don't want people pointing out weaknesses in your arguments don't make a thread in the debate and discussion forum about them. quote:But I feel confidence by saying that aloud, so I will say that, if we accept beliefs produce behavior, accurate beliefs generally produce more effective behavior than inaccurate beliefs, but not overwhelmingly so. Because while accurate beliefs will, in theory, produce effective behavior all of the time, inaccurate beliefs that produce effective behavior for all common situations would still persist, and while inaccurate beliefs that produce effective behavior all of the time are much less likely to emerge than accurate beliefs, when they do emerge they should be as persistent as accurate ones. This is ignoring cases where accurate beliefs produce ineffective behavior, such as waiting to verify if that's a king snake or a coral snake. So in other words, there is still the problem of purging inaccurate beliefs and ensuring that they survive in marginal numbers. This doesn't really resolve the question. There's four situations here: 1) Accurate beliefs and effective behaviour, 2) Inaccurate and effective, 3) Accurate and ineffective, 4) Inaccurate and ineffective 1) and 4) are the most common and describe the majority of situations. 2) and 3) happen, but are much more rare. Your argument is to point to examples of 2) and 3) and saying that because they can happen then there's little or no evolutionary pressure to produce accurate beliefs. Evolution doesn't require absolutes though. So long as 1) and 4) are more common than 2) and 3), it's evolutionarily adaptive to be accurate. Also, intentionally or not your language suggests that evolution is operating on the beliefs directly rather than on the apparatus which constructs them, which is the brain. There's a subtle but important distinction between the two. While I do believe that more accurate beliefs produce more effective behaviour, evolution is one step removed from beliefs, and the result is that the brain can be biased in certain ways. For example, I think it's generally less maladaptive to see a pattern where there isn't one than to miss one that's there. This results in a lot of human superstition like good luck charms, trying not to "jinx" it, "knocking on wood" and the like, in the mistaken belief that these actions will have a positive outcome. While these actions aren't accomplishing anything, overall they're fairly harmless. Evolution makes that trade off because missing a pattern (such as the signs of an impending tiger attack, or not realizing certain berries are making you vomit) can be far more maladaptive. So evolution has erred on the side of more aggressive pattern matching than would produce the more accurate beliefs. I don't think it's a coincidence that your example of the king and coral snake falls into this category. But that's an aside, the most important point here is that, to the extent that the brain produces accurate beliefs, that accuracy can be entirely explained by selection pressure, with no need to bring in the supernatural.
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Aug 17, 2015 14:04
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HighClassSwankyTime posted:Do you even have the slightest clue? You're throwing around words at random here, chump.  I think you may be a teeny bit confused here. Scroll down a bit to get to Kant's Phenomenal VS Noumenal reality. HighClassSwankyTime posted:Cartesian demonology? Did Descartes study demons? Awesome. P sure he's referring to the part in Descartes' Meditations where Descartes speculates on the possibility of a malevolent being messing with A Priori reasoning, thereby rendering it potentially unsound. It's part of his deconstructive skeptical method.
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Aug 17, 2015 14:16
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Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:AFAIK She's arguing that beliefs w/r/t how the affect evolutionary fitness are/were far more accurate then what we should have for our weird ape brains and imperfect senses to be the only vectors for beliefs, especially considering how brief human communication has been around compared to the evolutionary time scale. Therefore something else must be influencing beliefs, and since ape brains and imperfect sense are the only currently natural means of sharing beliefs we have confirmed, something seemingly supernatural must be actually something that is actually natural i.e. something akin to telepathy is real life and it's how beliefs got so accurate before the development of communication tools like language and writing. I get that in general. But the whole argument is based on the idea that correct beliefs are more common than expected. That requires quantifying both what we expect to see and what we do see. That's what's lacking as far as I can tell. Also, since from evolution's perspective beliefs are identical to any other selectable attribute, I want to see those same two metrics compared against say anatomy. Because when I evaluate the shape of a fish in terms of its hydrodynamic efficiency I see a remarkable number of things that are "correct" and inevitably some things that arn't. In general, it seems roughly identical to my understanding of intelligence (remarkable in some ways, flawed in many others).
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Aug 17, 2015 14:23
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ShadowCatboy posted:
Ah, thank you for the informative post. Did Descartes imply with 'malevolent being' the devil or demons? I don't mean to play down the huge importance of his philosophy, just asking. (Most of my understanding of Descartes comes from John Cottingham's Cartesian Reflections.)
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Aug 17, 2015 14:39
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HighClassSwankyTime posted:Ah, thank you for the informative post. Did Descartes imply with 'malevolent being' the devil or demons? I don't mean to play down the huge importance of his philosophy, just asking. (Most of my understanding of Descartes comes from John Cottingham's Cartesian Reflections.) Not that I recall, no. In truth that doesn't really matter. Descartes just generally speculates several possible ways his faculties of reason could be compromised, and hence not perfectly reliable. Up until Kant philosophy was all about getting to absolute or ultimate truths, or finding ways to root human understanding in more absolute terms. Kant forced philosophers to face up to the fact that human knowledge by its very nature conceptualizes reality in certain terms (a class of which would be known as the "synthetic a priori"), and so questions that extend beyond the phenomenal are kinda meaningless. Post-Kantian philosophers therefore were more about clarifying basic concepts of language and meaning rather than making grandiose claims about existence.
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Aug 17, 2015 15:04
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HappyHippo posted:My goal is demonstrate why I think you're wrong. I think your whole argument is based on an incorrect premise, and that it is precisely the incorrectness of this premise which makes you wrong. If you don't want people pointing out weaknesses in your arguments don't make a thread in the debate and discussion forum about them. quote:There's four situations here: quote:Also, intentionally or not your language suggests that evolution is operating on the beliefs directly rather than on the apparatus which constructs them, which is the brain. There's a subtle but important distinction between the two. While I do believe that more accurate beliefs produce more effective behaviour, evolution is one step removed from beliefs, and the result is that the brain can be biased in certain ways. quote:For example, I think it's generally less maladaptive to see a pattern where there isn't one than to miss one that's there. This results in a lot of human superstition like good luck charms, trying not to "jinx" it, "knocking on wood" and the like, in the mistaken belief that these actions will have a positive outcome. While these actions aren't accomplishing anything, overall they're fairly harmless. Evolution makes that trade off because missing a pattern (such as the signs of an impending tiger attack, or not realizing certain berries are making you vomit) can be far more maladaptive. So evolution has erred on the side of more aggressive pattern matching than would produce the more accurate beliefs. I don't think it's a coincidence that your example of the king and coral snake falls into this category.
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Aug 17, 2015 15:12
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blowfish posted:Effectronica also does not understand that selection for a "good enough" in this case would be expected to produce a result between "random number generator" and "perfection". I'm pretty sure he understands this. His main qualm is that "good enough" just isn't good enough. For him, a proper theory of knowledge would produce models that have the assurance of lining up with "perfection." Because such a system is highly unlikely to be produced by evolution alone, Effectronica feels that you need to include something else (he refers to it as an "X-Factor," while I just settle for the more traditional term "God") to explain it. Me, I think it's bullshit on both a high level and a low level. On the high level, this idea of "an entity guided the evolution of human cognition towards sound rational processes" is pretty unsound if you take into account the existence of heuristics, which show what a poo poo job that this entity did. It's about as sound a statement as "an entity guided the evolution of the human body to be so complex and well-designed." When you take into account vestigial structures and the design flaws of the human eye, this entity sounds a lot less impressive and the human body seems much more to be the result of natural processes. On a low level, I simply outright reject the root premise that a theory of knowledge must produce models that line up with a perfect understanding of the world. (P.S. I am not a postmodernist)
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Aug 17, 2015 15:27
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Evolution didn't produce thought. It produced and influenced the biological system in which thought occurs. At best we can talk about predilection towards certain kinds of thought. That collection of predilections is at best a heuristic of truth. The entire premise of this thread is stupid.
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Aug 17, 2015 15:45
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waitwhatno posted:Could some philosophy degree carrying goon make a quick public statement and distance themselves from this thread? I feel like this thread is a character assassination on every philosophy department in the world. Saying what, exactly? Nobody can speak for the whole of academia on things like this. The best you can do is try to explain why it's stupid. Which is what is already happening, with varying degrees of earnestness and thought. Someone scanning and uploading their testamur isn't going the improve this generally lovely experience.
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Aug 17, 2015 16:11
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ikanreed posted:The entire premise of this thread is stupid. This statement is true, and the OP needs to understand it.
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Aug 17, 2015 17:18
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Truth is just a measure of the usefulness of a belief. Given new experiences, any truth can be revised, there is no need for Truth with a capital T. It is no wonder that evolution would select for creatures with more useful beliefs.
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Aug 17, 2015 22:35
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furiouskoala posted:there is no need for Truth with a capital T But this makes me feel insecure, and is therefore not True.
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Aug 17, 2015 23:55
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waitwhatno posted:Could some philosophy degree carrying goon make a quick public statement and distance themselves from this thread? I feel like this thread is a character assassination on every philosophy department in the world. Already touched on, but this thread is not so bad, philosophically. I mean, OP is being a big jerk and not really replying to valid criticism, but many of the other posters in the thread are doing a good job of fleshing out the ideas and clarifying the issue to any readers. There have been several bullshit comments about philosophy, to be sure, but on the whole the thread is a decent example in how not to behave as the backer of a proposal, and how to methodically rebut baseless or vague claims.
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Aug 18, 2015 15:01
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Trent posted:Already touched on, but this thread is not so bad, philosophically. I mean, OP is being a big jerk and not really replying to valid criticism, but many of the other posters in the thread are doing a good job of fleshing out the ideas and clarifying the issue to any readers. There have been several bullshit comments about philosophy, to be sure, but on the whole the thread is a decent example in how not to behave as the backer of a proposal, and how to methodically rebut baseless or vague claims. I guess I'm just shocked by how completely ridiculous the main premise is. It's based on nothing but a misunderstanding of the evolutionary process and a lack of high-school-level probability theory knowledge. But I guess it's not unique to philosophy, for every thread like this there is probably some biology professor somewhere denying quantum mechanics and a physics professor denying epigenetics.
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Aug 18, 2015 15:24
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Effectronica do you really think you're experiencing the full experience of real reality? Because if so, lol.
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Aug 18, 2015 15:33
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waitwhatno posted:I guess I'm just shocked by how completely ridiculous the main premise is. It's based on nothing but a misunderstanding of the evolutionary process and a lack of high-school-level probability theory knowledge. But I guess it's not unique to philosophy, for every thread like this there is probably some biology professor somewhere denying quantum mechanics and a physics professor denying epigenetics. I think you might be looking for flaws in the wrong places. Philosophy doesn't operate at the "high level" of reasoning (if you're a programmer, think coding language). It operates at the "low level" of trying to delve into more fundamental truths about knowledge and reality (think machine code). In truth, talking about things like the in-depth details of evolution and probability theory can only ever scrape the surface of Plantinga's/Effectronica's arguments. If you really want to address it you gotta dig deep and address either the premises or format of their argument. For example, consider a standard First Cause Argument: 1. Everything that exists has a cause. 2. The universe exists. 3. Therefore, the universe had a cause (which we shall call "God*") 4. Therefore, God* exists. *This does not necessarily mean "The Judeo-Christian God." The term is just a Medieval/Modernist convention for describing ultimate entities or substances. Now a scientist would argue from high-level research. They'd talk about the big bang, background radiation, redshifting, etc. All of this would indeed posit a natural explanation for the origins of the universe. And all of this is perfectly consistent with the First Cause Argument and would do nothing to debunk it, since the natural sciences would reach a point where an answer was unknown or even outright impossible. You can't address anything before the Planck epoch, for example. This is where there's room for the First Cause Argument to squeeze in. A philosopher on the other hand would point out more fundamental flaws in this argument: *The argument is internally contradictory (the conclusion of an "uncaused God" contradicts the premise that "everything that exists has a cause") *You didn't support premise 1. Where did that come from? *Suppose you make "God" consistent with 1, something would have created God (God-2), and something would've created that entity (God-3). You'd have an infinite series of Gods. Are you ok with this conclusion? *What's wrong with having an infinite chain of natural causes? Or a self-caused universe? *God of Gaps, bro. *etc. Fact is, philosophers and scientists use the same techniques of rational thinking. It's just that philosophers take it a step further and will seek to explain more fundamental phenomena that scientists take for granted.
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Aug 18, 2015 15:59
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ShadowCatboy posted:Fact is, philosophers and scientists use the same techniques of rational thinking. It's just that philosophers take it a step further and will seek to explain more fundamental phenomena that scientists take for granted.  watch your tone, sonny.
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Aug 18, 2015 16:02
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ShadowCatboy posted:In truth, talking about things like the in-depth details of evolution and probability theory can only ever scrape the surface of Plantinga's/Effectronica's arguments. If you really want to address it you gotta dig deep and address either the premises or format of their argument. That's kinda missing my whole point. Like with effictrobica, there is just no real first cause "problem", only the problem of bad education. - Cause and effect are interchangeable in physics, depending on the chosen system of observation. This alone makes this whole discussion pointless. - Further, spontaneous events do happen in nature. There is no strict need for a cause in modern physics. - You only need the entire concept of cause and effect if you define some concept like "time", which might or might not have existed before the universe. All of this is 100 years old physics stuff. Effoxtrobics argument could have been solved by reading 200 years old biology.
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Aug 18, 2015 16:42
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ShadowCatboy posted:I think you might be looking for flaws in the wrong places. Philosophy doesn't operate at the "high level" of reasoning (if you're a programmer, think coding language). It operates at the "low level" of trying to delve into more fundamental truths about knowledge and reality (think machine code). In truth, talking about things like the in-depth details of evolution and probability theory can only ever scrape the surface of Plantinga's/Effectronica's arguments. If you really want to address it you gotta dig deep and address either the premises or format of their argument. While I understand what you're saying, pointing out Effectronica's fundamental misunderstanding of how evolution works actually does attack one of his core premises directly (the thing about beliefs being passed down and also the assumption"simplification"that they're passed down independently). It's not quite the same as the example you gave regarding the First Cause argument, since the hypothetical scientist in that example wasn't addressing/debunking any of the core points of the logic.
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Aug 18, 2015 16:49
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Well technically it's solved from pure metaphysics, you don't actually need any biology. I kind of wanted to take that tack anyway because the main argument of 'having many true beliefs must necessarily be improbable' is worth tackling. But the main issue is the jump from improbable event -> supernatural. So suppose I pick up a rock with 'EAT poo poo ATHEISTS' written on it. I can somehow confirm that, yes, it is an absolutely natural growth, and the probability of that happening naturally is ~10e-40. What is the probability that there exists a supernatural cause with means, ability, and inclination to do something like that? Think of every possible supernatural permutation, and you'll get a lot that just won't fit. Well, what proportion? Can you prove it? Because unless you can, you can't use probability arguments at all. Maybe the probability is 10e-60, then the natural cause ain't looking so poo poo now. What is the cutoff point, how are you justifying that? rudatron fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Aug 18, 2015 |
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Aug 18, 2015 17:06
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ShadowCatboy posted:Philosophy doesn't operate at the "high level" of reasoning (if you're a programmer, think coding language). It operates at the "low level" of trying to delve into more fundamental truths about knowledge and reality (think machine code). You really mean this? There's an assertion about how philosophy is done, another about what it is, and an exceptionally flawed analogy tying them together, all in one neat little package. If someone said they'd pay me to come up with the quickest the way to send a room full of philosophers into frenzied outrage in 40 words of less, I'd come back with something pretty similar to those two quoted sentences. Smudgie Buggler fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Aug 18, 2015 |
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Aug 18, 2015 18:05
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