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Faith is really nice for your mental health. It saves you a lot if money on antidepressants and therapy. Given how impoverished prehistoric humans were this was a huge evolutionary advantage back in the old stone age days.
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Aug 16, 2015 14:45
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 02:18 |
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blowfish posted:Effectronica does not understand probability very well. When actually looking for true or false beliefs, the probability of any given belief being true is p=(number of possible true beliefs)/(number of possible true beliefs+number of possible false beliefs). And the amount of all possible and feasible believes is practically infinite. The idea that random beliefs just materialise in our heads and then there is a 50/50 chance that they are true or false is absolutely hilarious.
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Aug 16, 2015 16:20
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Effectronica posted:Point to where I said/implied this or apologize for lying. quote:He can run because he believes tigers are dangerous, which is a true, adaptive belief. But he can also run because he wants to be eaten but feels that this tiger is an unlikely prospect to do so, which is a false but adaptive belief. Or he can run because he believes tigers are dangerous though not because they will eat him, which is an adaptive belief and still a false one for our purposes, which are about our perception of the universe, though it's partially true. So while the probability that our beliefs are true is higher than in any of the other cases, it's still low.
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Aug 16, 2015 16:41
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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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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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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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All of this poo poo goes completely over my head, I guess I'm too sober for philosophy. All I see is that you have a system (the universe) in a certain state(containing intelligent life). Now, without knowing the probability density of that state, you just say that there must be a god because intelligent life is not the only possible state of the universe. This is complete gibberish. Finding a radioactive uranium atom in a decayed state after only 5 min is extremely unlikely, but it does not imply anything supernatural. A more sensible argument would be to say that finding life after only a couple of billion years in such a small universe is completely implausible and suggests something funky going on. But obviously we don't know that yet for sure. GABA ghoul fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Aug 19, 2015 |
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Aug 19, 2015 23:39
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 02:18 |
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It's funny how people always view themselves as distinct from the rest of the universe. The boundary between life and non-life is extremely blurry and somewhat arbitrary, just as the line between intelligent and non-intelligent life.
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Aug 20, 2015 16:43
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