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twodot posted:Ok, but existence is still provable via personal experience of the divine. As far as I'm aware, the "personal experience of the divine," amounts to "I feel the warmth of God in my heart, I swear," and holds as much water as the guy next door who knows for a fact that his "personal experience of gang stalker radio signals messing with my brain" is evidence that a group of dozens of people is coordinating to stalk and intimidate him for no clear reason. Or straight-up Pegged Lamb's ramblings, now that I'm catching up. I'm sad that I missed it. I think it's silly to suppose that 'atheist,' in the standard colloquial sense when you put the label on someone on a TV show for the masses, is anything other than "I've heard about this God concept and I don't buy it." We can talk about more rigid definitions about someone's thresholds in probability terms for calling something "untrue," but you have to make those definitions clear with formatting from the outset. I don't think people are expected to take the "agnostic" stance on whether they're going to win the lottery three times in a row, even though they hold a nonzero probability of that happening. twodot posted:Investigation of a miracle is still a proof performed by humans. God might be the guy making statues of Mary cry blood, but it's humans who investigate the blood crying and come to conclusions about what's going on. So what did the DNA test turn up in that case? Or was there one?
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Mar 22, 2016 18:47
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twodot posted:You can not do this for your definition of knowledge, you can only believe someone was standing behind you. There may be a correlation between your experience of seeing a person behind you and a person actually standing behind you, but people experience untrue things frequently. JW's definition of knowledge so far is simply "subject believes it" and "it is true." If it was true that a person was standing behind me two seconds ago (and still is standing behind me), then I can turn my head, see the person, and correctly believe—thereby knowing, under Juffo-Wup's definition—that somebody was standing behind me two seconds ago.
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Mar 22, 2016 19:50
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twodot posted:They said "discover". Yes, you can coincidentally know a thing, but you can't know whether you know it or not, which is how I would interpret discover (aka this definition is garbage). Under this definition, if you believe that you know something, and that something is true, then you do indeed "know" that you know it. It would be an objectively true fact that cannot be verified with probability equal to one. No fact can be verified with probability equal to one, because there is always the infinitesimal chance that your entire life was a carefully controlled and fabricated trick by superpowerful aliens, or brain-in-a-jar simulation that could be changed by its developers, etc. Regardless, our ability to use induction to obtain probabilities about things very close to one, I think, is a better frame for establishing "knowledge." I prefer to talk about "knowledge" in terms of the expectations it generates. Stinky_Pete fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Mar 22, 2016 |
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Mar 22, 2016 19:59
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twodot posted:If you can't verify the fact how can you claim to know it? You can claim to be reasonably certain about it, but my point this whole time is that know and believe can at best only be distinguished by being different levels of certainty. I'm not supporting the value of the definition, just affirming how its rules work. A person can claim to know something, under that definition—the claim simply has no bearing on whether they do, in fact, know the thing under that definition, because it's in Logic Land. I think the gnostic/agnostic concept frames belief in a false dilemma. I put that we can determine with as much confidence as any other material fact, whether a model of reality invoking a "god" is accurate, and that so far no models invoking a "god" has proven accurate. If an unfalsifiable definition of such "god" is put forth, then Occam's Razor kicks in, and the appropriate level of confidence for the claim is equally infinitesimal to that of invisible intangible dragons who don't breathe, me being about to win the lottery thirty times in a row, leprechauns guarding an iron cauldron full of gold at the "end" of a rainbow (just get to the end of it!), etc. The primary question to be asked of a belief: If I am to believe "X," what observations shall I anticipate because of "X?" Stinky_Pete fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Mar 22, 2016 |
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Mar 22, 2016 21:52
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Commie NedFlanders posted:The last several pages of this thread has seems rather absurd to me Lmk when induction stops working. I don't know who claimed to know anything with logical certainty (i.e. probability equal to 1) but they are wrong because there's always an infinitesimal chance that your memory of your whole life was a special brain fart contrived by aliens or whatever. Stinky_Pete fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Mar 23, 2016 |
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Mar 23, 2016 01:57
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Commie NedFlanders posted:How can you estimate such a probability enough to even suggest it is small? So far I have zero observations of your memory of your whole life having been a special brain fart contrived by aliens or whatever, and while I'm not an expert on the circumstances necessary for a special brain fart contrived by aliens or whatever, I'm fairly confident given what I've learned so far that they are exceedingly rare, and if it is the case then the aliens or whatever are clearly not inclined to change my experience from one that is consistent with scientific findings, so I don't gain any new predictive power by believing that it is the case. So it is an unfalsifiable hypothesis that gets to share the kids' table with the infinity of other conceivable unfalsifiable hypotheses, each no more likely than the next, giving a nearly uniform probability distribution across an infinite space, hence "infinitesimal." Commie NedFlanders posted:Sorry I didn't recognize induction and pragmatism was cool in here, that's really good though I'm not sure what your point is, with this "All you need to believe in God is to believe in God" slop. We generally understand the psychological mechanisms that make people believe by wanting to, the short explanation being that the brain's reward system is promiscuous, especially if the subject is motivated to notice doubt and suppress it. No, I don't think that authoritarianism is a necessary aspect of reasoning with induction. Were you trying to poke a hole in what you thought was me saying "well if you feel something that supports it then you know it's more true" I think you thought I meant "induction" in some naive way that ends up really being confirmation bias, but I was using the word in order to reference and diminish the "problem of induction" in philosophy, which basically says "induction is incomplete because the physical laws that govern our relationship with our environment have only been consistent so far  "
Stinky_Pete fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Mar 23, 2016 |
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Mar 23, 2016 16:33
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J.A.B.C. posted:So, here is a question: IIRC Commie NedFlanders put it forth as a proof of supernatural divinity
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Mar 29, 2016 20:53
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Crowsbeak posted:Look the fact you cannot read Cheterton isn't Chesterton's problem. "Oh, you simply don't understand how smart he is" No, he's pretty clearly just using equivocation in the excerpt given. The "faith" that there exist consistent rules that drive our continuous experience is necessary in order for us to communicate or seek to understand anything, period, and that includes reading a book. The same cannot be said of faith in a supernatural divinity, the notion of which being received from parents and community, rather than by simply having a continuous experience. Further, he's not even criticizing reason, he's criticizing the notion of Truth via syllogistic logic, which is different, but he clearly can't tell.
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Mar 29, 2016 21:30
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Dinosaurmageddon posted:I did? The 'believe with your heart' camp espouses a degree of hope with daily living, wouldn't you agree? I believe Bertrand Russell has something to say about that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihaB8AFOhZo There is more than one narrative of life which leads to hope, and some of them are based in scientific reasoning. The notion of belief on insufficient evidence as a psychological means of bringing forth a desired truth, I think is better elaborated in metaphor by Miyamoto Musashi in The Book of Five Rings. Stinky_Pete fucked around with this message at 15:53 on Apr 15, 2016 |
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Apr 15, 2016 15:43
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Keep Autism Wired posted:I tend to be skeptical of things without firm empirical evidence but idk how to explain this without invoking something about spirit That's because techniques of the mind are hard to explain and study in general. You can watch that guy do his stuff and figure that the discipline he's been studying full-time for at least a decade, is what enabled him to do it, but you can't put him in an fMRI machine while he's pulling a car. 'Spirit' is an acceptable shortcut for the process by which this man has strengthened the connection between his brain and every little nerve and muscle in his body so that it can apply some kind of oobleck-like effect to e.g. the drill, after having given his body countless beatings leading up to then. A more common version of the body's adaptation to physical stresses would be the fact that I still have bruises from grappling and/or sparring that I did several days ago, whereas my kung fu instructor stopped getting bruises (or they disappear overnight) from regular sparring/grappling years ago. If you're using the word 'spirit' in this context to describe a force which is not applied via the practiced mind-body alignment, then I'll start wondering what prompted you to do so.
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Apr 15, 2016 18:29
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Dinosaurmageddon posted:Hope requires a faith in something greater than the self. That's the whole point - everything and nothing distilled into a third, somehow greater thing. You mean like a community or nation or team? Yeah, part of the relative success of humanity so far is predicated on the fact that our brains are biased toward cooperating with others, especially members of our in-group. Hierarchical religion as we know it began partly as an early means of cohering many groups of people who can't all know each other, into one mega-in-group, which is why you see polytheism in early conquer-oriented empires, and syncretism later on with the Catholic church's pantheon of Saints and La Virgen de Guadalupe. Keep Autism Wired posted:I've been starting to wonder if there's something about this thing we call mind or spirit which is easy for scientists to write off as "we just don't know it's very complex" , but like maybe these guys who've been practicing spiritual practices or meditation were onto something before the science guys started looking. Yes, where before I used to be more elitist about the best quantified fields, but my firsthand experience with the noisiness of e.g. brains scans has helped me understand that there are serious practical limits to the scientific method when applied to the brain and body. That's not to say our knowledge has not improved in the last 60 years, but it improves very slowly. In the meantime, we have philosophies of life that can be studied and assessed anecdotally. Zen, in particular, is looking good to me, and has its own ways of describing a state that psychologists call "flow." That state where you're not thinking about what you're doing because you don't need any unnecessary meta processes going on, you just have a direct neural pathway, which minimizes noise, between intention and action. I've been reading books on it and practicing skills (kung fu, chosen because the school is near me) that involve expanding the "void" between stimulus and response, and I feel like my personal health and direction has benefited from it. Which, duh, exercise in general is healthy, but my sense of inner peace and goal-oriented behavior has also improved. Western styles of exercise tend to have an isolationist bent, where you "work on cardio" or "work on strength," which do bring the results they promise, but the desired results themselves are a product of the isolationist view—long distance runners with bad joints/flexibility, for example. Athletic training geared toward certain sports tends to be better for you, I think, but e.g. strength training simply to "get huge" seems like a goal driven by technique, rather than the other way around. Stinky_Pete fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Apr 15, 2016 |
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Apr 15, 2016 19:43
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Ytlaya posted:I haven't ever seen something like that which couldn't be explained with simple physics or realistic, easily understandable changes to the human body (for example developing scar tissue or something). Yeah, the other thing to note is that when he's doing the sword on the neck, it wouldn't cut most of us if we did the same thing as him anyway, we just wouldn't be able to also move the truck without choking ourselves. If you cut him the way he cut the lettuce, with a swift arc that would slide along the skin, he'd still bleed. I wouldn't recommend trying though, lol
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Apr 15, 2016 21:13
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IAMKOREA posted:Which zen masters talk about flow? Dunno, I've just been reading Zen and the Art of Archery, which I heard about while reading Zen in the Martial Arts, and they both refer to the state of mind that is achieved when fully in tune with one's art. Dinosaurmageddon posted:There is just as much need for us to discern the world rationally through skepticism as there is for us to engage with the abstract, surreal and supernatural realms of thought that exist within our minds. I think the word you're looking for is superliminal. The mind is a part of nature.
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Apr 17, 2016 02:56
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grate deceiver posted:What you're talking about is called psychotherapy, and there's no need to invoke any spirits or other bullshit, because we have methods that work without woo baggage. Also, don't see what that has to do with 'discerning the world'. Sounds like you have trouble telling apart things that happen inside your head, from those that happen outside.  Or, if not psychotherapy, it is pretty much anything under the "literary" or "arts" category.
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Apr 27, 2016 16:20
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McDowell posted:Money's value exists primarily in people's heads. And the fact that it's hard to fake
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Apr 27, 2016 16:37
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